Captain George Berkeley Descriptive List (Ref. PR12)

PR12/

have seen their best companies ‘depleted by enlistment…to the credit of England not Ireland…’. He does not want to appear ‘an alarmist’, but has been ‘fighting an anti- enlistment attempt in this town…part of a general scheme all over Ireland…’

4pp

viii From R.E. Longfield, Cork

19 August 1914

Letter from R.E. Longfield, Longueville, Mallow, Co . Cork, to ‘Dear George’ (George Berkeley). Longfield has read in a newspaper that Berkeley was commanding Belfast nationalist volunteers. He requests to know their ‘raison d’etre’ and hears that some of the Northern corps are very good but in the South many are merely ‘ nominus numbra ’. Asks what Mr. Redmond’s offer meant. Longfield believes that the Germans have some intention of landing in the South and West of Ireland, Cork Harbour being a ‘very valuable base’ and they may think Ireland would be divided by civil war. Since war was declared he briefly hoped all Volunteers North and South might help in defence of the country.

3pp

100 25 August 1914

Letter, from R.E. Longfield, Mallow, to ‘Dear George’. He has been told that the Irish Volunteers were started by the physical force party in America.. Notes the religious bigotry and intolerance in the North is most deplorable, ‘…the ignorant orange man is for more bigoted than the Catholic of the same class down here…’. He has ‘always got on well’ with his Catholic neighbours, but he is ‘very much afraid of the Roman Catholic church “ne temere” decree and clericalism’. Remarks that the Irish Volunteers have no intention of undertaking the arduous preparation necessary to prove an effective fighting force. As irregulars they would ‘bring only death’ to the locality they attempted to defend, unless officered by competent soldiers under the authority of the Crown. The Ulster Volunteers are ‘an effective fighting force’. The safety of the country should come before Home Rule. He has heard that the Germans sold rifles to the National Volunteers.

6pp

101 2 September 1914

Letter from R.E. Longfield, Cashel, Connemara , to ‘Dear George’. Concerns meeting with Colonel Moore in Dublin, who was ‘ver y complimentary about you, very civil to me’. Mentions offer made to government, the need to put the Irish Volunteers under the War Office and the danger of German invasion.

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