We Were Brothers

When Elizabeth Mooney met her future husband, Thomas Young, in Rosemount at the beginning of the last century, nothing could have prepared her for what lay ahead. For Thomas was a career soldier and Elizabeth was to become one of the many war widows bringing up a young family. Blamed by her own people for the death of the young men who had followed Thomas to war, she fought prejudice all her life. Then, on the most cruel January day in Derry’s history, soldiers from the army he loved would shoot dead one of Thomas’s grandsons, on Bloody Sunday.

Elizabeth’s granddaughter Lily O’Hagan is writing the family history. It is the story of three generations of strong and determined women left to cope with the legacy of a war not of their making. Felicity McCall met Lily at her home in Rosemount to hear the story of one Derry woman’s war.

Lily O'Hagan's grandparents were born just streets from each other in Rosemount, but Elizabeth Mooney was in her late twenties when she first met Lance Sergeant Thomas Young, 2674, 6th Battalion RIR. He was a few years older. Already a serving soldier for more than half his life, he had returned to the Rosemount area to try trace any surviving members of his family. Born in Cross Street in 1873, he had been orphaned young and brought up in a Protestant children’s home in Culmore. On his fourteenth birthday, and with no family to take him in, Thomas did what the home recommended and joined the British army. He believed he had one brother, David, who may also have enlisted.

He never did find any relatives, in Rosemount, or anywhere else, but he and Elizabeth began courting and were married, although Lily is unsure when and where. Family history records that Thomas never converted to Catholicism and that it was not a church wedding. So the new Mrs Young was defying convention from the start of her married life at their home in Donegal Street. ‘These are the things I remember that might be said by different ones in the family, when people had a few drinks,’ Lily smiles ruefully. The couple had six children in quick succession. Lily’s mother Sarah was the eldest, followed by Tom, John, Lizzie, Nellie and Maisie, who was born in January 1914.

‘My grandfather loved the army,’ Lily explains, ‘my granny always told us that. It had been good to him. It wasn’t a political thing. He was a career soldier. The army had given him a life. He’d done well out of it.’
Small wonder, then, that Thomas Young acted as an unofficial recruiting officer even before the outbreak of World War 1.

‘My granny used to tell my mother how he would gather up young lads from around the Glen and over Rosemount, Catholics and Protestants,’ Lily explains. ‘He used to hold drilling and training sessions for them, down the fields at the back of Rosemount. When the war broke out and there was the big recruitment drive, he really thought the young lads would benefit from it. He got them to join up- but he never put a gun to their head, as my granny was fond of reminding people. They signed up willingly.’

No one, not even the experienced Lance Sergeant, could have foreseen the horror ahead.

He served at the Somme and died two months later, on September 3rd, 1916. He is buried in the military cemetery at Thiepval.

And of the young Derry men who followed him?

‘None of them returned,’ Lily says quietly. ‘Not a one. That’s what made it so hard for my grandmother. Thomas was dead, and the families blamed her. Her own neighbourhood turned against her.’
A small box of his personal effects was returned to Donegal Street. There’s a greetings card and an empty cigarette folder from Christmas 1914, a ‘gift from Princess Mary.’ There’s also another Christmas card that was never posted. From Thomas, to Lily’s mother, Sarah, his first-born and the child, she says, ‘he doted on. Everyone said that. ‘ The cards shows a soldier in uniform and, as if in his mind’s eye, a fair-haired moppet of a child wrapped up in furs.

The verse:
‘Just this little card
As we’ve no chance of meeting
To bear my love to you
And the old, old Christmas greeting’
The reverse bears the loving message, ‘To Sara (sp) from Daddy xx. 1914.’

That, and his medals, is all that was returned to Elizabeth who was left to raise six children aged between eight, and eighteen months. There were no welfare payments then, Lily reminds me, and if there was a pension it was clearly not enough for the family’s basic survival.

So, for Lily’s mother, that was the end of her formal education. The authorities gave her permission, aged eight, to leave to look after her siblings while her mother went out to work long hours in James and Lowther’s laundry in Bishop Street. Lily recalls her mother having a little stool that someone in the family had made so she could reach the sink to wash the dishes. The young Sarah was also entrusted with the responsibility of seeing that the younger children went to school. The boys, who, Lily realises, can have been no more than six and seven, used to sell the Belfast Telegraph, ‘up the town in the evenings, to bring in a few extra pence.
Such was the strength of feeling in the community that Elizabeth had to walk into the town every day to buy her messages. The local shops would not serve her. As the ‘recruiting officer’s’ widow, she was ostracised.
‘It was very, very hard for her,’ Lily muses. ‘She was left on her own with the wee ones. It wasn’t Thomas’ fault the young men were killed, but their families were heartbroken and she got the blame for it. We grandchildren always remember her as very stern, even cross, always dressed in this wrap over pinafore and black stockings. ‘

She shows me a photograph of a diminutive, feisty, white haired woman. Her fine features are prematurely aged, but her eyes flash with determination.

‘She had to be like that,’ Lily concedes. ‘She had a choice-survive, or go under. And she was determined to survive- if only to show people that she could. That she could raise her family in her own. She didn’t need them. She was strong, and she raised her daughters to be strong. ‘

The prejudice didn’t go away.

‘It caused its problems when my mother and father were courting. My father’s family weren’t that happy, to start with. The O’Hagans had lost a son in the first World War. James. He would have been one of the young men that my grandfather recruited. They never forgave him for that. And now his nephew wanted to marry Thomas Young’s daughter….’

‘But my mother a determined woman, too. I remember her telling me that she had gone to Elizabeth, in desperation, for help, one Christmas when we were small – there were nine of us. My father was out of work. Mammy didn’t know what to do. So she went to her own mother. And she said her mother told her that every family in Rosemount had its own grief and bothers. And that if you walked up and knocked on every door and asked the people living there to pick up their worries and troubles and leave them out in the street, and she did the same, well, she’d soon pick up her own bundle and take it home again. There was always somebody worse off. That always stuck with my mother and it’s stuck with me. We all have our troubles. We get on with them.’

‘That was my grandmother’s philosophy,’ Lily explains. ‘Everybody suffered. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel for the people who had lost their sons…but she used to tell her own children, ‘Tom didn’t put a gun to their head to get them to enlist. They went willingly. No one could have seen what would happen.’

The same determination was to show itself in Sarah’s later years. Mindful of their mother’s unfinished schooling, Lily says, ‘we all used to write her letters for her. Then the time came when we said, come on, Mammy, you’re going to have to do it for yourself. And we bought her a dictionary. It took her two weeks to write that first letter, but she did it. Perfectly.’

Lily shows me her grandfather’s medals. They’d been left to his son and namesake, her uncle, Tom Young. But he wrapped them up and put them away, forever, on the dreadful day in January 1972 when soldiers from the army his father had loved shot dead his son, John, on Bloody Sunday.

‘The life went out of him and his wife after that,’ Lily tells me, quietly.

‘We held on to them for him in case he wanted them back, in the house, one day.’ She shakes her head. ‘He never did. He was never the same, after.’

How does she come to terms with this?

‘It’s so ironic, so cruel…so sad. I often think of the two of them, the grandfather, the grandson. There’s the war memorial up in the Diamond with my grandfather’s name on it, and I’m standing there, and I’m looking down towards the Bogside and down there, there’s a memorial with John Young’s name on it. ‘
‘They’re facing each other. I often think of the two of them. Life lost. Young life. For nothing. At the end of the day,’ she muses, ‘it’s about the people, isn’t it? Our own people. That’s why I’m writing it all down. All the family stories. Maybe the next generations will be able to make sense of it all.’