The Life and Times of James Connolly

chronology Connolly would reach the age of eighteen in 1888 and would thus rove and
peddle for some eighteen months before marrying and settling down. But on the same
basis there is a gap between 1884 and 1888, in addition to which there are the additional
two years due to the error in the year of birth.
That Connolly did work as a pedlar is known. William O’Brien refers to it in an article
in The Irishman, but Carolan who peddled with him gave the date as 1900-01. Nora
Connolly also relates it to the Dublin period, long after he was married.
As to navvying, R.M. Fox, basing himself on Quinlan’s reminiscences written in
1931, develops a picture of the itinerant labourer which owes more to Patrick McGill
than to Connolly. Quinlan, incidentally, could not have clearly distinguished the different
periods of Connolly’s life, for he refers to Connolly living in Newcastle, “labouring in
the vineyard” contemporaneously with the residence there of the two Healy brothers.
These were there from 1871 to 1878 when, according to Quinlan, Connolly was in
Monaghan. Apart from one poem, “The Legacy”, no more autobiographical than the
“Night in the Mendicity”, there is nothing further adducible in support of the “trampnavvy-pedlar”
theory, and Connolly’s old associates in Edinburgh derided it. They spoke
of deliberately misleading visitors from Dublin out of concern to protect Connolly’s
reputation. They believed that to admit that he had served in the British forces would
discredit him, oblivious of the fact that were this so almost every family in Ireland would
be discredited.
The fact of Connolly’s army service is attested in several ways. His adoption of a
pseudonym rules out direct documentary proof. But there is ample evidence from the
statements of contemporaries in Edinburgh, oblique references in his correspondence,
his own statements to such friends as Mullery, the authority of Larkin, the surprising
knowledge of Cobh he showed in an emergency in 1911, and finally his military
proficiency. The evidence is part personal testimony, part inferential, but provides an
intelligible coherent picture leaving little of importance to be explained. Connolly spent
seven years in America. If he was right in saying that he spent twenty years among the
exiles in Britain, then he must have spent twenty-one years in Ireland. These are known
to have included 1896-1903, and 1911-16. It has been shown that the missing seven
years cannot be placed between 1870 and 1880, so they must fall between 1882 and
1889. If Connolly was in Ireland then, as he must have been on his own statement, what
was he doing? There is no alternative to set against the fact that the first battalion of the
King’s Liverpool Regiment was in Ireland from precisely July 1882 to February 1889.
Those who reject this must tell us what else he was doing.
10 | The Life and Times of James Connolly