While it is not as unusual as you might think for Irishmen to have served in both the British army and the Old IRA – Emmet Dalton, Tom Barry and Erskine Childers are but a few high-profile examples – only one could boast both a Victoria Cross and a War of Independence medal, Martin Doyle.
I am not related to my namesake but am intrigued by him and wonder why he is not better known. Surely no other story so crystallises the complexities and conflicting yet sometimes overlapping loyalties of that period. Perhaps the apparent contradictions of his military career, which literally followed him to his grave, made him too awkward to fit comfortably into our national narrative.
Doyle was born in New Ross, Co Wexford, on October 25th, 1894, and lied about his age to join the British army on St Stephen's Day, 1909, when he was barely 15. His father Larry is said to have sold a cow to buy him out but Martin re-enlisted. He was a company sergeant-major in the Royal Munster Fusiliers when his bravery earned him the Military Medal on March 24th, 1918. He successfully led a bayonet charge on a German machine-gun post in a derelict barn in no-man's-land.
‘Conspicuous bravery’
On September 2nd, 1918, at Riencourt in France, Doyle demonstrated the “conspicuous bravery” for which he would be awarded the Victoria Cross. All senior officers being wounded, command had fallen to Doyle, who extricated a party of his men who were surrounded by the enemy, and carried back, under heavy fire, a wounded officer. Later he went forward under intense fire to the assistance of a tank and when an enemy machine-gun opened fire, he captured it single-handedly and took three prisoners. He repelled a counter-attack, taking many more prisoners.
The official announcement concluded: “Throughout the whole of these operations, Doyle set the very highest example to all ranks by his courage and total disregard of danger.”
When the awarding of his VC was confirmed, he wrote to his parents: “I am all in a whirl of joy.”
Doyle was welcomed home to New Ross in March 1919 by a large crowd. The local newspaper reported: “The meeting between the young hero and his aged parents was very touching: going straight to his mother and father he embraced them. He was escorted to his home in Mary Street amidst a scene of great enthusiasm. As they approached the Royal Hotel a trumpeter standing on the steps sounded a stirring bugle call which evoked ringing cheers. There was a profusion of decorations in the town along with scrolls bearing words of welcome to the New Ross hero.”
He went to Buckingham Palace to receive his VC from the king but left the army that July. In 1920 he joined the IRA and became an intelligence officer for the mid-Clare brigade in Ennis in the War of Independence. During the Civil War he served with the Free State Army in Waterford, Kilkenny and south Tipperary and was wounded in the left arm in Limerick in early 1923.
He served in the Irish Army until 1937. His Army record described him as "an excellent NCO, a very good Vickers machine gun and rifle instructor, and someone who could not be replaced without serious inconvenience to the service". He spent a further year and a half in the Army Reserve. Having spent nine years and five months in the British army, two years in the Old IRA and 15 years and five months in the regular Irish Army, he hung up his uniform on January 25th, 1939. Now married with three daughters, he had joined Guinness as a security guard but on November 20th, 1940, he died of polio in Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital, aged only 46.
Even though Doyle had fought against the British and spent most of his career in the Irish Army, at his death he chose to be buried in his British first World War uniform and his gravestone, erected by former comrades in Grangegorman military cemetery, Dublin, records only his British military rank and honours.
Honour guard
The
Times
of London reported that Doyle was part of an honour guard of Victoria Cross holders at the interment of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey on November 11th, 1920, by which stage he had already joined the IRA. He also attended a VC reunion dinner in 1929 in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords. (Bear in mind that another former Royal Munster Fusilier, Joseph O’Sullivan, was one of Gen Sir Henry Wilson’s two assassins in 1922.) Doyle’s
Times
obituary, however, ignored his role in the War of Independence. It was not just the Irish who edited history to suit themselves.
Doyle is one of 24 Irish holders of the Victoria Cross profiled in Victoria Cross Heroes of World War One by Robert Hamilton (Atlantic Publishing).