[This is a ‘sticky’ post and so will remain at the the top of the news listings]
In July 2013 I took my Dad to Kerry to attend the Clan Brosnan Gathering. This included the appointment of the first Ceann Fine (clan chieftain) of the Brosnans. To my surprise and great honour, I was appointed to the role. This website is one way for me fulfil a leadership role by making available Brosnan/Brosnahan history as well as my wider body of historical work. I hope that this will be useful to anyone interested in Irish diasporic history, especially in relation to New Zealand.
Fr Dan Riordan and Senator Mark Daly who presented me with the plaque and the piece of ash I am holding, which is my symbol of office as Ceann Fine of the Brosnans.
This 4-minute YouTube clip was made by local television in Kerry about the 2013 East Kerry Roots Festival which incorporated the Clan Brosnan Gathering.
Well after a lot of talk in previous posts about my work on a documentary, I am delighted to now be able to share it with the extended clan. The documentary is called Journey to New Edinburgh and is about the idea and reality of southern New Zealand’s Scottish settlement – Dunedin and Otago – from 1843 to 1861 or so. There are eight episodes in the series, one of which (Episode 7) focuses on the coming of Irish settlers in the mid-1850s.
It just so happens that South Canterbury’s early Irish settlement also connects to the Otago migrant flow, since the anchor point to the East Kerry chain migration that led to the establishment of Kerrytown was one of those Irishmen who came to Dunedin. His name was Richard Hoare and he subsequently moved north from Otago and secured work on the Levels Estate in South Canterbury. He approved a good worker and was encouraged by his English employers to send home for friends and family to come out as well and thus provide more good workers for their huge agricultural and pastoral operations.
Richard duly did so and when his Hoare relations signed up for assisted passages to Canterbury on the Echunga in 1862, they were accompanied by a number of other Kerry people, including the first Brosnahans to come to our part of the world. One was my great grandfather’s older brother, Patrick Brosnahan, and also aboard the ship were John Brosnahan and his sister Margaret from Aghadoe. That was the toehold that saw a substantial movement of Kerry people migrate to South Canterbury over succeeding years, making use for the most part of subsidised migration. I think it’s a great story and so did my colleagues so we folded it into the Otago story and this episode of Journey to New Edinburgh.
If you’re only interested in seeing the Kerrytown part of the story, it starts at 12.45 …
The first two episodes of our documentary are released
I’ve made a number of posts about the Journey to New Edinburgh documentary that I have been working on with a team from Toitū Otago Settlers Museum over the past couple of years. The first two episodes were released last Thursday 23 March 2023 to coincide with the 175th anniversary of the founding of Otago province with the arrival of the first immigrant ship on that date in 1848. It was great to have my 92-year-old father and three of my sons at the launch to provide a solid Brosnahan presence at the event at Dunedin’s Rialto theatre where we saw it on the big screen. It was quite the experience.
Ray Brosnahan, Seán Brosnahan, Helena Bailey, Jack Brosnahan, Acacia Weekley, Joseph Brosnahan, and Hugh Brosnahanat the Rialto cinema in Dunedinfor the launch of Journey to New Edinburgh
There are episodes in total including one called “The Greening of Otago” which tells the story of the coming of Irish settlers to this region as part of that pioneer period. Now you might think that has nothing to do with Brosnahan history but you’d be wrong. As explained in previous posts, the first link in the migration chain from East Kerry that saw Brosnahans and others from that area arrive in South Canterbury in the early 1860s actually came in through Otago first. That’s why we made a diversion to Kerry on our expedition to Britain and Ireland last year when we were filming its overseas component.
The Brosnahan/South Canterbury section won’t be included in the “Greening of Otago” episode that goes out from the Toitū website but will feature in a special ‘extended edition’ that will see its way clear somehow thereafter. I’m not quite sure how exactly that’s going to work but you can be sure that I’ll put a link up to it on here as soon as I can. Meantime, here are those first two episodes as a taste of what we have put together. I hope you will find it engaging and entertaining.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam(May his holy soul be at God’s right hand)
When I first visited Kerry in early 1988, in search of information about my Brosnahan forbears, I was given some great assistance by the parish priest at Currans. After getting out the old parish baptism registers, he let me look through the faded entries from the 19th century and helped me identify those records that applied to my family. He then suggested that the best follow up would be to go and visit a local Brosnan family and directed me to the Brosnans at Dromultan. I describe that fateful encounter, and my fascinating afternoon touring the parish in company with Tom Brosnan, in my The Kerrytown Brosnahans book. Grateful for their assistance I subsequently posted a copy of the published book to Dromultan and received a lovely reply from Tom’s mother. I never expected to meet any of the family again but was delighted on my return to Kerry for The Gathering in 2013 to meet Tom Brosnan as part of the organising committee.
We were both showing the wear and tear of the intervening 25 years; no longer young men on the cusp of making our way in the world. Instead we were balding, middle-aged men with lots of miles on the clock. But it was a joyful reunion nonetheless and was followed by a return to the Dromultan farm but accompanied this time by the whole contingent of New Zealand Brosnahans who were in attendance at the big event, and especially my elderly father. What a lovely fuss was made of us, especially by Tom’s sister Rose. It was a magic moment. Thereafter I kept in contact with Tom and Rose and traded condolences with subsequent deaths in our families and passed on news of my Dad’s continuing good health and vibrancy as he reached his 90s. He still loves hearing about Tom and Rose.
Tom Brosnan (centre back) with a host of New Zealand Brosnahans in the cowshed at Dromultan, 2013.
So you might imagine that I have a special affection for the Dromultan Brosnans even though we have never been able to pin down any direct familial connection. A few years ago therefore, when I was trying to track down the Kerry origins of New Zealand’s WWI conscientious objector and Sinn Fein resister Dan Brosnan, it was naturally Tom that I contacted for help in Kerry. Amazingly, Dan Brosnan turned out to be Tom and Rose’s great uncle – a Dromultan Brosnan no less. A step-brother of their uncle, Tom ‘Peats’ Brosnan, Dan had emigrated to New Zealand in the early 1900s. He’d been working as a farm labourer near Taumarunui in 1917 when he received his call-up papers under the conscription regulations. Rather than going on the run and disappearing ‘underground’ as so many objectors did, Dan stood his ground and just refused. “This man states that he is a conscientious objector” it says on his service record. That was simply unacceptable and Dan spent two years doing hard labour in a New Zealand prison during the war for his refusal to serve the English King as a soldier.
Dan Brosnan of Dromultan
After his release from jail, Dan and the other conscientious objectors who had done their time were hit with a second punishment; ten years of the loss of all their civil rights, including being able to vote or gain employment from the government. That was a harsher response to such principled resistance to war service than was applied anywhere else in the British Empire, including in Britain itself. Who knows what sort of informal social opprobrium might have gone with it. In any case, Dan stayed the course in New Zealand, never returning to Ireland. His principled stand as a Sinn Fein supporter was never recognised as far as I know by the Irish state that emerged from the Anglo-Irish war and the Irish civil war that followed. No doubt they had other concerns and plenty of local heroes to esteem back home. And Dan gradually lost touch with his family as well. They knew that he had ended up with a farm in the Rotorua district but that was it.
I was able to track Dan down in New Zealand records. He had died as an elderly single man in Rotorua in 1970 aged 84. There he ended up in a grave in the Rotorua cemetery unmarked by any memorial or headstone. If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you might recall me telling Dan’s story a couple of years ago and expressing an intention to visit that grave if ever I got a chance. Well late last year I made it my business to finally make that trip to Rotorua. I was in Auckland visiting one of my sons and decided to take him on a road trip out of town. Rotorua seemed the obvious destination, a place where we could relax and enjoy the tourist town’s attractions while also discharging my sense of obligation to Dan and the Dromultan Brosnans.
The Rotorua cemetery is in Sala Street not far from the famous Maori village at Whakarewarewa and the nearby Whakarewarewa Redwood Forest. It is a nice spot and a fine example of a classic New Zealand lawn cemetery. The local authority keeps it well tended and information on who is buried there is easily found online on the local district council website. Dan’s grave is in Block 8, Section F, Plot 32. Walking along the neat concrete berm of that row, there were no indicative numbers to help me find Dan’s unmarked plot but checking the headstones that were there against the online database I eventually figure out which one it was. My pilgrimage was over: a Brosnan had finally made it to Dan’s final resting place to say a prayer over his remains.
But maybe there’s more to be done. Dan was in his own way a hero of the Irish independence struggle. He stood fast to his Republican principles despite all the pressure the New Zealand state applied on behalf of its Imperial masters for him to bow before it. Should his grave not be marked in an appropriate way recognising this staunch son of Éire?
Yours truly at Dan Brosnan’s unmarked grave in Rotorua, 2022.
It’s been a while since my last post on this blog, especially since that last one announced my impending departure for Scotland as part of our Journey to New Edinburgh filming expedition which included a brief but extensive diversion across to Ireland. I’ve been meaning to write a post about the visit ever since my return home in July. I came back to a heavy schedule of work, however, including a stint teaching a course on Irish and Scottish migration at the University of Otago which has taken up pretty much all my spare time until now. Apologies to the wonderful people who we met with during our trip, especially in Galway and Kerry, that they’ve pretty much heard nothing from me since. It certainly wasn’t for lack of appreciation of our time together and your great hospitality. So here goes, some thoughts on my first return to Ireland since The Gathering in 2013.
First of all, it was absolutely epic to be able to travel internationally again, especially after the two-year delay to our project occasioned by the corona virus pandemic. I love travelling and it’s been quite dispiriting to see the amazing international travel system brought to its knees by the extraordinary circumstances of the past couple of years. I was really looking forward to seeing how it all worked as we became some of the first New Zealand cohort of air travellers who weren’t travelling abroad for essential family or core business reasons. The first surprise was the dearth of facilities up and running at Auckland International Airport; clearly we were still in the early stages of its revival when we set off in mid-May. The second surprise was the general lack of Covid-inspired restrictions evident in Scotland when we arrived in Glasgow. At a time when mask use was universally mandated in New Zealand, no-one in Scotland seemed to be wearing them. Within days, we weren’t either.
It was a hectic schedule which took us from one corner of Scotland to the other, with detours over the border to Northumberland, and ferry trips north to Shetland and Orkney. Then, finally, on 13 June we took the ferry from Stranraer to Larne and it was time for the short Irish part of our expedition. That took us through Antrim to Carrickfergus, then to Lisburn and County Down, a stopover at Loughinisland, and a ten-minute diversion in Dublin, before ending the first day at Maynooth in County Kildare. Next day we crossed the island, filming a story at Faulmore in County Mayo and spending our second night at Belmullet. Day three took us to Galway and a night in a very flash hotel in Claregalway. That was a bit ironic in view of our filming focus, which was focussed on the ramifications of the Great Famine in Galway as the backdrop to the emigration to New Zealand of so many people from Annaghdown parish to Otago and Southland a decade or so later.
Stranraer to Larne on the ferry with my colleague ChrisAt Faulmore, County Mayo, with my colleague Will
We had a great meet-up in Galway with long distance friends we had not met in person before, especially Irene McGoldrick from the Annaghdown Heritage Society. Members of the society have been super helpful to us with background on the emigrants over the past couple of years as we researched this story. By a great coincidence Irene is the caretaker of the old Cavanagh family cottage at Conteenty from which William Cavanagh, the very first link in the Galway-Otago migration chain, made his way to Dunedin (via Australia) in the mid-1850s. So many other people followed him but this provided the perfect story-telling location to chart the development of that link, which was so important to Scottish and Presbyterian Otago getting an emerald green tinge from 1856 onwards. Later that evening I joined parishioners at an annual mid-summer Mass of Remembrance in the Annaghdown cemetery and was shown Scully and Ford graves that were connected to my family by another local connection, Paddy Scully.
The Ancestors’ Mass at Annaghdown cemetery
With Irene McGoldrick at the Cavanagh cottage in Conteenty
Then, on Thursday 16 June it was finally time to return to Kerry. It was strange to be back almost nine years after the great experience of The Gathering in 2013 when I came here with my Dad. He seemed venerable then at 82 so it is a real blessing to have him still alive and well now at 91 and able to share this return visit vicariously by following my daily Journey to New Edinburgh blog posts. It was a lovely sunny day when we reached Castleisland in time for lunch. Sitting outside Mrs Nelligan’s cafe on the main street (directly opposite Brosnan’s store) we chanced to strike up a conversation with a woman at the neighbouring table who was intrigued by our accents. Amazingly she turned out to be a best friend and old college flatmate of Joan Holland, a key figure in the Brosnan Gathering in 2013 and who we were due to meet that evening. Before then however we shot some footage up in the hills at Brosna and checked into our hotel in Tralee.
We had arranged to meet with as many of the Brosnan committee from 2013 who were available and it was great to catch up with them all. I took my colleague Will McKee along as well, a Southlander with impeccable Ulster Protestant roots and he was made most welcome. Bart Brosnan, who was in attendance, has been to New Zealand twice and has connections with Riversdale in Southland, which is practically on Will’s family turf so they got on like a house on fire. Ned Brosnan was there too and he had relations in Dunedin. Then there was Tom Brosnan who I met by chance on my first visit to Kerry in 1988 and have kept in contact since the Gathering, and finally Joan Holland, who was thrilled to hear about our chance encounter with her friend earlier in the day. They were all pleased to hear about my Dad’s good health and vitality, remembering him fondly from 2013.
Ned Brosnan, Joan Holland, myself, Bart Brosnan, Tom Brosnan, Will McKee
At the end of the dinner, Bart made a lovely speech welcoming me back to Kerry and made a fuss of Will’s County Down heritage as well. I responded in kind and then Will and I sang Po Karekare Ana segueing into its Irish version Mo Mhuire Mhathair, just as our New Zealand whanau group had done with the Kerry choir at the Brosnan Gathering Mass in 2013. They appreciated it, as did all the other diners in the restaurant who didn’t get any option but to listen. It was a nice way to inflect the evening with a New Zealand Irish dimension. It was a fabulous evening all around and I thought I’d act the part of Clan Chieftain by looking after the bill. No chance. It turned out the Ned had beaten me to it and no amount of cajoling the restaurant owner would let me overturn his generous gesture. Such lovely hospitality and a memorable reconnection with a great bunch of people.
We got off to a great start next day, meeting up with Joan Holland at Currans church and also rendezvousing there with John O’Connor, a local farmer who was to be our guide to a ruined cottage high up a rough old boreen that has special significance to my family. It is the only specific location that we can authoritatively link to my great great grandparents Hugh and Gobnait (Deborah) Brosnahan who lived there in the late 1830s when their first child was born. It was Deborah’s parents’ place, and this was the custom at the time apparently. Because her family name was Butler – an unusual name in Kerry – rather the extremely common Brosnan, it had been possible to pinpoint this location.
Sara Daly, Tom Brosnan, Dad and Terry O’Connor on the old Butler land at Garraundarragh in 2013.
I came here with my Dad, Sarah Daly (a cousin from Christchurch), Tom Brosnan from Dromulton, and John O’Connor’s late father, Terry, during the Brosnan Gathering in 2013. We returned the time because it offered a lot as a film location for our story about how and why Kerry people started coming to New Zealand in the 1860s in a migration chain from this area that accounted for about a third of all Irish Catholic immigrants in South Canterbury in the late 19th century. An Otago link to the very beginning of that process was our excuse for including it in our Otago story. It’s a very out-of-the-way place so having local guides was pretty essential to getting there. I sat in the front of the Ute with John and Joan as we bumped our way up the overgrown track, while my colleagues Will and Chris sat in the tray on the back. It was a “soft” morning with mist below and a hint of moisture around us.
With John O’Connor, 2022
Will and Chris riding on the back of the ute
Of course, I thought a lot of that previous visit with Dad, and of the two old Kerrymen that we spent time with that day in 2013, Terry O’Connor and Mick Daly. Both turned out to be exactly my father’s age at the time – 82 – and I remember what a thrill it was for me to be in their company as we walked down the Main Street of Scartaglin, where my great great grandfather Hugh Brosnahan was born in 1793. It was like a group of ageing Kerry gunslingers in a western town, and the young pup walking in their shadow. Sad to say, both Terry and Mick have passed away since then, which made it all the more poignant to be sharing time today with Terry’s son John, in his place. And he was just the loveliest man, exactly like his father, with that beguiling Kerry accent and turn of phrase. Magic.
With the Kerry ‘gunslingers’ in 2013: Dad, Terry O’Connor and Michael Daley at Scartaglin.
The old cottage was much more overgrown than last time I was here but this location atop a hill is a peculiar relic of olden times. The mini fields adjacent to it are just as they would have been in the 1830s, whereas most old fields in Kerry have been rationalised into larger units for modern farming. It sits between a number of farms with various farmers having access rights across it so John reckoned it was in no danger of disappearing any time soon. As a place for the Clan Chieftain (me) to return to, however, it leaves a lot to be desired as a potential residence. A wonderful privilege to make another visit, nonetheless, and especially with John and Joan whose chat was so informative about the place, as well as its plants etc.
The small field atop the hill
The old cottage ruin at Garraundarragh
I was pretty sad to say goodbye, our Kerry friends have really gone above and beyond to make our flying visit here work and been just so hospitable. But we had some long driving ahead and more locations to track down as we made our way eastwards to the coast and a ferry ride to Wales from Rosslare. So it was go raibh maith agaibh (thank you) and slán (goodbye) and we hit the road. Our other locations in that day’s filming took us to County Waterford, County Kilkenny and finally County Wexford. You can see what a whistle-stop tour it was. Will calculated that we passed through 21 of the 32 Irish counties over our five-day visit and we drove hundreds of kilometres. All too fast, of course, and no time to really relax and enjoy being back in Ireland but it was a real bonus to make this detour from our Scottish travels and I was very grateful to have the opportunity. I just hope it’s not another nine years before I come back again.
Back in July 2019 I posted on here about a big filming expedition we were planning that would take me to Kerry, Galway and a host of other places around Ireland in July 2020. Well, Covid intervened and our work for the documentary Journey to New Edinburgh was put on hold indefinitely. We continued working on the research and gradually filming bits and pieces in New Zealand locations (including Kerrytown) but our patience was sorely tried as travel restrictions pre-empted any thought of going to Scotland and Ireland. Until now.
Next Monday, 16 May 2022, the expedition finally gets back on track. We’re flying to Glasgow for a journey that will take us across to Ireland in the middle of June. It will be a flying visit unfortunately but I am hoping to link up with some of the Kerry Brosnans while I am there. For anyone interested in following our progress, I will be doing a blog during my travels. Here’s the link. Follow that site to get regular updates when I post on it.
I’ve just added this article to my downloadable work on the Articles tab of this site. It is the text of a talk I gave last December to the Annaghdown Heritage Society on migration from that part of Galway to southern New Zealand in the 19th-century. There was quite a bit of interest at the time from New Zealand and a lot of descendants of Galway pioneers joined the Zoom call via which I presented the talk. It was also recorded and is on the Annaghdown Heritage Society’s Youtube channel I hope it proves useful.
Some months ago I had a surprise encounter with Marion Hughes, visiting Dunedin from Wellington. She very kindly presented me with a copy of a recently published novel by her husband Pat Higgins as well as a CD of this talented musician and writer’s songs. I enjoyed the music straight away, however, it’s taken much longer for me to get around to reading the book – my bedside book pile is always quite large – until I finally did so last month. And what a delight it was. It’s hard to believe this is Pat Higgins’ first novel, it is so assured in its storytelling and so compelling in its treatment of the different characters’ perspectives and voices. But the most appealing aspect of the story for me, as a diasporic Irish person generations removed from the old country, is the way it opens up for the reader an intimate feel for place and community in the homeland in a way that I have not found elsewhere.
The story is set in Annaghdown in East Galway in the area around Corrandulla. Four of my great great-grandparents came from this parish and so did many, many other pioneer settlers in Otago and Southland. My great great grandparents William Scully and Annie Feenarghty (Finnerty) were from the townland of Clonboo, just a hop, skip and jump away from the neighbouring townlands of Aughclogeen and Ardgaineen where the novel is mainly set. And quite part from the engaging story it tells of the contrasting fates of two sisters and their respective ‘romances’, it was this aspect that I really appreciated. It’s so hard for us, with the distance of both time and geography as a barrier to understanding, to get a sense of the world that our Irish forbears came out of when they journeyed to New Zealand. Pat Higgins has skilfully reconstructed that world in a really engaging way. We hear the Galway speech and accent, get a sense of the smallness of a world framed by parish boundaries and with so little interest or comprehension of anything beyond that; even the neighbouring parish for many being beyond what they could imagine.
Annaghdown parish: Clonboo at lower left and Aughclogeen at upper right
The story begins in the 1920s during the Anglo-Irish war as the Black and Tans terrorise the Irish countryside and IRA guerrillas strike back, and plays out over succeeding decades in Galway and Dublin. So it’s from a generation or two after most New Zealand Irish descendants’ forbears would have left the area – though there is a nod toward the New Zealand connection in one of the central characters, Mick Fox, who has returned from a stint labouring in New Zealand (where exactly isn’t made clear). But for the locals, as they listen to Mick’s stories they just can’t imagine New Zealand, typically confusing it with Australia and just having no sense of such a faraway place, or much interest in it. No wonder the disaporic Galway people were so easily forgotten after they left. It seems to have been the same for the Brosnahans and all the others who left Kerry too. Once gone, soon forgotten. And as the story develops and you see what a tight and limited focus the farmers of Annaghdown have on their own locality, the very definition of “parochialism” I guess, you can see why that would have been the case. Likewise why so many of our Irish forbears married the neighbour’s daughter or son.
It’s nice to see an acknowledgment in the front of the book to the Annaghdown Historical Society who I have also found super helpful in my recent work preparing for our now-delayed filming expedition to Galway. I’d repeat here the usefulness of the Ireland Reaching Out website for anyone doing genealogical research for the way it can connect you with people on the ground in the parishes your ancestors might have hailed from. It’s hit and miss as to how active the local historians and genealogists might be inane particular parish but in the case of Annaghdown, they’re a great bunch of people and very knowledgeable. Definitely get in touch if your people come from there.
Here in New Zealand, the Irish dimension of our history does not get too much attention, except on the odd occasion. One of those was a conference back in 2016 organised by Professor Peter Kuch, at that time the Professor of Irish Studies (the Eamonn Cleary Chair) at the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Otago. It was to mark the centennial of the Easter Rising, that watershed event leading to Irish independence. Unlike most such conferences at that time, this one was focussed on the New Zealand angle – how did reactions to the Rising play out in New Zealand that was then mid-way through a devastating war. Professor Kuch ensured that the conference catered to a wide public audience by making attendance free and we had a full house on both of its two days. I was privileged to work with Peter in a modest way on the conference, which was held at Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, my place of work.
Peter also attracted a very high calibre of presenters, with contributors traveling from England, Ireland and Australia to deliver papers. This made for a fascinating couple of days for those of us lucky enough to attend. Then, in reflecting on what had been on offer, Peter decided to draw some of the papers from the conference together and publish them as an academic book. This would ensure that the valuable new insights delivered at the conference weren’t lost to time but would be available to scholars and interested readers around the world ever after. But, what a job to take on! Organising a bunch of academics – getting them to deliver their finished chapters on time for instance – is apparently worse than herding cats. And finding an academic publisher to take on the project was also a real challenge. But Peter persevered, and now (four years later!), the book from the Cork University Press is out and available.*
One of the chapters is by me, a reworking of my work on New Zealand’s ‘fenian’ families and how they reacted to the Rising and especially their resistance to war service on behalf of the British Crown as a reflection of their Irish, and usually Republican, identities. I undertook the research for this over many years and was lucky to have the opportunity to speak to many elderly people who have since passed on, who were the children of some of those WWI New Zealand Irish resisters. Some of those men went to jail for their principles, others fled overseas by clandestine means, or hid out in isolated spots around New Zealand. It’s pretty interesting stuff, even if I say so myself, and I am quite proud to have had the chance to add these stories to the published history of Irishness in New Zealand.
The 1916 Proclamation that began the Easter Rising
One of the individual stories I touch on just briefly in my chapter in the book is that of Tim Brosnan, a very defiant objector to war service because of his Sinn Fein affiliation, who went to jail after being caught on the run in Southland in August 1917. Tim (Timothy Michael) was from Knockeenagowan, Co Kerry, born in 1882 to Timothy and Mary Brosnan, with five older siblings. He came to New Zealand somewhere around 1910 and married Mary Corbett from Co Clare in March 1916. He was thus a relatively recent arrival from Co Kerry compared to most of the Brosnans/Brosnahans then living in New Zealand, and that meant that he had absorbed the political changes that had taken place in Ireland in the intervening years since the immigrants of the 1860s and 1870s had left.
Tim and Mary Brosnan, resolute Sinn Feiners
He had been working as a navvy, a roading contractor at Utiku just south of Taihape, when his name came up in the ballot after conscription was introduced for New Zealand men at the end of 1916. Tim’s political beliefs would not permit him to serve the English King so, like many similarly inclined New Zealand Irishmen, he went underground instead. He was caught five months later, working as a labourer at Limehills in far away Southland. After stints in detention in Dunedin and Wellington, and defiantly refusing to go into uniform, he went on trial at Trentham and had a chance to proclaim his beliefs: “I said I was an Irishman, a Sinn Feiner and refused to fight for a country that had prosecuted and murdered my country and my people for hundreds of years.”
Found guilty, Tim got the standard punishment for “defiant objectors”; two years in jail with hard labour. But time in jail did nothing to cool his Republican ardour. Supported by his wife, Mary, “also a Sinn Feiner”, his letters to family members in Queensland from prison were subsequently intercepted by military censors in Australia who were shocked by their contents. Because of those letters, Tim gets a whole chapter to himself in another book on New Zealand’s WWI history published last year, Dead Letters: censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920 by Jared Davidson.* Jared is an archivist at National Archives in Wellington and uncovered a series of censored letters from the war that had been preserved there, including those by Tim Brosnan. These form the basis of his excellent book.
Here’s an excerpt from one of them, written to Tim’s sister Maggie in Brisbane, Australia (one of a number of his siblings who were in Queensland):
“Dear sister Maggie … you know how long ago I was sentenced to two years hard labor in a New Zealand prison, because I would not shame my good parents name or become a traitor to my country, by donning a uniform and taking an oath of allegiance to fight and die for my greatest enemy and oppressor and tyrant of my native land …”
The Brisbane military censor wrote to his New Zealand counterparts that Tim’s correspondence was of a type that “would inflame the disloyalty rampant in North Queensland”. He pointedly suggested that “there should be some supervision of the writings of men of this type.”
Another jailed Irish resister that I didn’t have room to include in my account is one who turned out to have a very personal connection. His name was Dan Brosnan and once I began doing some research on his Irish origins I discovered that he was one of the Dromulton Brosnans, the very same family that I met on my first trip to Kerry in 1986. Tom Brosnan and his sister Rose McAuliffe were able to tell me his background and supply this photograph.
Dan Brosnan of Dromulton and Rotorua
Dan was a step-brother of their grandfather Tom ‘Peats’ Thade Brosnan. The family knew that he had left for New Zealand, sometime between the 1901 and 1911 censuses of Ireland, and that he had a farm in Rotorua but that is all the information they had. Dan maintained correspondence with the family for some time as they have a couple of photos of him, including one of the house he lived in in Dromulton and another of his mother.
Tom and Rose’s grandfather, Tom ‘Peats’ Thade Brosnan was born in 1879 the son of Patrick ‘Peats’ Brosnan and Nora Galvin. Nora died shortly after childbirth and Peats remarried Elly Lawlor of Ballinahalla, Castleisland parish, and they had Dan in 1885. The family don’t know why Dan left Ireland (some of his sisters had gone to America). It may have been for straightforward economic reasons, or it may have been that he’d gotten into some trouble at home. The Dromulton Brosnans were involved with nationalist activity in this period, including Tom Peats Thade Brosnan drilling the Irish Volunteers in Killeentierna parish in the early 1900s, prior to the 1916 Rising. Likewise Humphrey Murphy of Ballybeg, near Dromulton, who was the leader of the IRA in Kerry in the 1920s, was a connection – his mother was a Brosnan from Ballybeg, the same Brosnans as the Dromulton family – so as Tom reported to me “there was quite a rebellious streak in the family.”
Daniel was working as a farm labourer at Manunui, near Taumaranui, in 1917 when he was called up for war service. He had also worked at Matata, on the coast east of Rotorua. His service record notes that he had a cousin, Michael Lawlor in Gore, so that may be what drew him to New Zealand, as well no doubt as the residual knowledge in Kerry of all those emigrants from the earlier period who had come here. It also records that he had been in New Zealand for six years at the time of his conscription in July 1917. Unlike Tim Brosnan, Dan never went on the run, he simply refused to serve when called upon to do so. He was arrested and the record says “will not fight for England”, as the basis of his objection. The result was the same: two years jail with hard labour after a court martial at Trentham military camp in January 1918. After the war, an additional punishment was added for all those who had stood firm in their resistance to military service, ten years loss of civil rights, such as being able to vote, or to seek employment with the government.
Tim Brosnan had two children with Mary after his release form prison but didn’t have a long life. My information on his wartime experience and what came after owes a lot to his descendant, Veronica O’Grady, who made contact a few years ago. Dan Brosnan, on the other hand, never married and has no descendants. Family in Kerry lost track of him as the years passed and it was good to be able to inform them that Dan in buried in Rotorua, having died there in 1970 aged 84. I don’t think he has a headstone and few people have probably visited his grave. I certainly intend to should I find myself in Rotorua but if anyone reading this blog is from that area here are the details of his plot in the cemetery. It would be nice to hear of a visit to remember this long-forgotten member of the Brosnan clan who was obviously a man of principle with the courage to stand up for what he believed in.
*Unfortunately books by academic publishers seem to be very expensive. New Zealand’s Responses to the Easter Risingis selling for €39.00 in Ireland and NZ$75 on Book Depository with free shipping to New Zealand. Dead Letters can be purchased in New Zealand for NZ$31-$35.
Today, Anzac Day in New Zealand, has been a day of commemoration like no other. Rather than gather together en masse at the cenotaph for the Dawn Service, we had to stand alone in our ‘bubble’ groups at the letterbox at 6am and make what we could of the occasion. These peculiar circumstances were, of course, caused by the global coronavirus pandemic and the extreme lockdown measures the New Zealand government has taken to wipe out the infection before it can cause even more illness and death than it has. That situation put me of a mind to remember in a special way this morning my grandfather, Daniel Brosnahan, who in October 1918 returned from his war service in Palestine, recuperating from the bullet wound to his ankle suffered during the second battle of Amman that had put paid to his active service. Along the way, like many of our soldiers overseas, he had apparently been struck down with the influenza contagion that was to follow the troops home and wreak a deadly toll on New Zealand at the end of 1918.
Three cousins off to war: Daniel Brosnahan, Michael Scannell and Charles Scannell.
That meant that, having recovered, he had immunity from the deadly disease, so when his sister Mary (Molly) and her husband John Joseph Long were infected, the family story is that grandad nursed them. To be honest, that is a little hard to imagine, but I hope he was able to provide some real comfort to them in what was an even more terrifying situation than the one we face in 2020. The Spanish ‘flu swept the world over a 36-month cycle, infecting something like a third of the global population or 500 million people. Estimates of the death toll vary from 17 to 50 million, and could even be higher, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history. In New Zealand it claimed over 9,000 lives in just two months – a horrible postscript to the death toll of war that had cost the country 18,000 over the previous four years. And unlike coronavirus, which seems to be most dangerous for older people and those with pre-existing health conditions, the Spanish flu’ seems to have struck hardest at young and healthy people in 1918. It must have been absolutely terrifying to live through.
Mary Brosnahan has married John Joseph Long at Pleasant Point Catholic Church just three months earlier. Jack Kelliher, one of my elderly relations who was a valuable informant in writing The Kerrytown Brosnahans, and who held my great-aunt Molly in great esteem told me that he had been an altar server for the ceremony. He remembered that it had snowed as the bridal couple came out of the church even though it was a Spring wedding. We can only hope that the newly weds enjoyed some brief spell of marital bliss for, although Molly surveyed the ‘flu, her husband did not. John Joseph Long, a 33-year-old labourer from Pareora East, died at Timaru hospital on 27 November 1918. There doesn’t appear to have been a Requiem Mass but there was some sort of public ceremony (unlike for us in 2020’s pandemic) as his friends were invited to join the body on its journey from the hospital to the nearby cemetery next day.
Poor old Aunty Molly, a widow at 31. It was to be a long widowhood too – she never remarried and didn’t join John in their plot in Timaru cemetery until 54 years later, in 1972 aged 85. I was ten at that time and remember Molly with some fondness. She had spent some of her last months living at our home in Rhodes Street Timaru, looked after by my parents during part of her final illness. She was a real delight to have in the house and it was a distinct sadness to our family that her elderly sister insisted on taking her into her home just before Molly died. I can remember an anecdote shared by my school teacher of the time, Mrs McGrath, who happened to live out on the Levels and had been a long-time neighbour to the Brosnahan siblings – Hugh, Molly, Deborah and Hannah – who lived together in the old family property there. Coming to the countryside as a young woman she had been terrified by herds of huge cows on the road but she remembered how Molly, a tiny woman in physique, had marched blithely among them slapping rumps and driving them on.
Hannah and Molly Brosnahan at John Hugh Brosnahan’s house at Levels, near Kerrytown.
I share another link with Jack Kelliher in relation to Molly Long – I was an altar server at her Requiem Mass in 1972. It was my first time acting in that role too and I remember making a significant error that annoyed my grandfather greatly. At the end of the ceremony, I had the job of standing at the foot of the coffin holding the cross as the asperges and incense ceremonies were performed. Unfortunately I stood facing the wrong way – towards the exit rather than the coffin – and grandad Dan hissed at me repeatedly sotto voce “Turn around” with that peculiar slightly Irish-accented voice of his. Alas, I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about and stood frozen in place and completely confused. I’m sure Aunty Molly wouldn’t have minded but it was a mistake I never repeated in the hundreds of funerals I served at subsequently.
This post is an experiment. I have always wanted to use this blog as a forum to share my research, particularly on New Zealand Brosnahans and others who came here from County Kerry. Unfortunately quite a bit of my old research material has been lost over the years with software upgrades that left old documents unable to be accessed. In this case, however, I have recently been able to convert an old Clarisworks spreadsheet to Excel and so I thought I would see if the information it contains would be of any use to researchers. It relates to 19th-century immigrants from County Kerry who took advantage of assisted passages provided by the Canterbury Province in the first instance, and then subsequently by the colonial government. I had access to microfilms of the original passenger lists for a time in the early 1990s and took the opportunity to extract data on all those listed who had County Kerry as their place of origin.
The passenger lists generally contain names, ages, occupations, county of origin, the part of the ship the immigrant was housed (family quarters, or single men’s and single women’s quarters respectively). In some cases there are additional notations for “nominated” passengers on who already in Canterbury had put their name forward for assisted passage. I also indicate in my “Group” column where passengers were grouped together, usually with other family members but also groups of friends. These bits of information can be useful in making connections between people that have long been forgotten by their descendants. It also happens reconstitute family groups when the teenage members were moved from the daily quarters to the single men or single women’s areas as was standard practice on immigrant ships. I hope the details are accurate but no guarantees. Incorrect data, such as the spelling of names, is as per the lists. Thus my great great grandparents and their family are listed as “Brosman” rather than Brosnahan.
I did find on checking the lists that the date of arrival column had become corrupted somehow so I re-entered this data against the original entries on the passenger lists and hopefully have got each one correct. The good thing is that anyone can now access this material online via the Mormon Church’s genealogical site Family Search. You need to sign up to do this but there is no cost and it does not lead to any further harassment by way of emails like most such sites do. Once registered, there are lots of useful resources you can access, including New Zealand immigration information from National Archives 1839-1973. This source is searchable by name and takes you to online facsimiles of the original passenger lists (the same source that I used to make up my spreadsheet). If you find someone on my list therefore, I’d recommend going back to the original source to double-check my data entry.
I have a few other sources like this that I will also share if this works. So here goes:
The PDFs will appear on screen with quite fine print but should still be legible if you blow them up a bit. Almost all of the ships docked in Lyttelton but the Echunga also called at Timaru. The abbreviations should mostly be obvious but just ask if you can’t understand something, and remember you can access the original source to check it for yourself.
The Brosnan 