Extensive checks to back up Creek document on British gunners action in Four Courts attack

With reference to Dr T. Ryle Dwyer’s article (Irish Examiner, Nov 1) concerning the (Percy) Creek memoir, as the advising historian on the BBC Radio 4 show, I can confirm that the Creek document was not used in isolation: to the contrary, his army records and his unit records were checked, and British Cabinet documents were employed extensively in the making of the programme.

Dr Dwyer states that Collins “insisted the only help he would accept was arms and artillery.”

However, this position is flatly contradicted in British cabinet minutes in which Collins is clearly noted as telling them that he is “willing to employ British gunners and to utilise 60 pdr guns” (CAB/23/39). In fact, prior to the arrival of Creek’s battery, a British artillery officer was already present at the Battle of the Four Courts with the four 18-pounder field guns, to assist in their use.

British records also show that Collins was considering the use of British infantry in co-operation with the National Army.

Why all this is important is that it shows that Collins was pragmatic enough to understand he was choiceless in 1922, and that the full realisation of the terms of the Treaty was the only option the British government was prepared to tolerate, and that Collins understood he needed the assistance of the British army to deliver these terms.

Dr Dwyer notes that the British handed over “a considerable quantity of arms and ammunition”. However, this did not include a large number of artillery shells, and the British cabinet noted that on the end of the opening day of the Battle of the Four Courts the National Army had been reduced to five artillery rounds.

Frantic efforts were made to rush extra supplies to the National Army, but as the records show that took more than a day to do.

It is not, as Dr Dwyer suggests, absurd to highlight these two shots, (and, indeed, more may have been fired).

It is my view that they were critical, allowing the National Army to storm sections of the Four Courts.

The simple reason for this is that the howitzers in Creek’s unit were a far more devastating weapon than the 18-pounder field guns, and unlike field guns, howitzers are designed to open up fortified positions, such as the Four Courts.

They require far more extensive training in their use, hence the need to use British gunners like Creek.

I do accept, however, that a non-military historian might not note or understand the significance of the distinction between the capabilities of the two weapon systems.

I realise that Dr Dwyer has to defend what he has written in the past, including in his latest book, however history cannot and should not, remain static.

Accounts of the past that do not accept the intrusion of new and potentially problematic evidence run the risk of becoming orthodoxies; it is vitally important to explore new material, compelling us to revisit, rethink, and even at times revise our traditional accounts of our national history.

Dr William Sheehan

The Open University

Nottingham