27 February 1937 – Charles Donnelly killed in Spanish Civil War
The 22-year-old poet and UCD alumnus fought in the Connolly Column.
On 27 February 1937, Charles Donnelly was killed in the Battle of Jarama during the Spanish Civil War. He was 22 years old. His last words were reported to have been, “Even the olives are bleeding”, a phrase which has become synonymous with the conflict in Spain, and which inspired a documentary by Cathal O’Shannon in 1976, as well as a biography of Donnelly by Joseph O’Connor, published in 1993.
Charles Donnelly was born into a middle-class Catholic family in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, in 1914. When Charles was still young, the Donnellys moved to Dundalk, Co Louth. The socialist leanings that would, in part, inspire him to take up arms against Franco’s Nationalists were evident from an early age. When he was seven, he was puzzled by the act of cattle-dealing which he witnessed at a mart, asking his father, “How can they be worth more over here than over there?”. In 1927, when Donnelly was 12, his mother died. Two years later, the family relocated to Dublin’s Mountjoy Square.
Donnelly enrolled in O’Connell’s Christian Brothers School on North Richmond Street, and was an avid writer of stories and poetry. The family later moved to 3 North Great George’s Street, and in October 1931, Donnelly began studying in University College Dublin. According to one of his contemporaries, the poet Niall Sheridan, Donnelly was “Small and frail-looking in physique, [but] he was a person of astonishing moral and physical courage.” He failed his first-year exams in 1933, but passed the repeats – in English and logic – with honours.
At UCD, he joined a republican-socialist group known as the Republican Congress, throwing himself into left-wing politics. Donnelly’s nickname in college was ‘Shelley’, after the poet, of whom he was a fan. He also greatly admired John Keats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud. By spring of 1934, Donnelly had founded an anti-fascist group known as Vanguard. He had abandoned his studies by July of that year, and was sentenced to two weeks’ imprisonment for picketing a Dublin bakery. In September, he was arrested again for picketing a police station.
Donnelly entered into a romantic relationship with Cora Hughes, the goddaughter of Éamon de Valera, then President of the Executive Council (the office later succeeded by that of Taoiseach). Hughes herself would die at a tragically young age in 1940, after contracting tuberculosis while working among the poor in the slums of Dublin. In January 1935, 21 men and two women from the Congress were arrested for picketing a chain of grocery shops over the employer’s attempt to set up a company union. They were sentenced to one month in jail.
While in Mountjoy Prison, Donnelly wrote the poem The Flowering Bars, which opens with the stanza:
“After sharp words from the fine mind,
protest in court,
the intimate high head constrained,
strait lines of prison, empty walls,
a subtle beauty in a simple place.”
The young poet decided to leave Dublin altogether in early 1935, moving to Kilburn, London, working menial jobs during the day and writing at night. He founded a London chapter of the Republican Congress, with its own newspaper, the Irish Front, and in September of that year, warned that the “germs of fascism are present in Ireland” in the form of Eoin O’Duffy. O’Duffy was a former IRA chief-of-staff and Sinn Féin TD for Monaghan who had briefly become leader of Fine Gael, before forming his own minor party, the National Corporate Party. Donnelly wrote, “General O’Duffy may seem a joke at present. The joke is merely that he is without a paymaster… If the General can create a movement worth taking over, his unemployment may only be temporary.”
In July 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out. General Francisco Franco, who was allied with Spanish fascists, led a military uprising against the leftist government, and was assisted both by Mussolini and Hitler. O’Duffy led 600 people to Spain to fight on the side of Franco. Donnelly returned to Dublin, and tried to convince what was left of the Republican Congress that they should declare their opposition to Franco, but was largely unsuccessful. Finally, on 23 December 1936, Donnelly left Victoria Station in London for Spain, via Paris to Perpignan, crossing the Spanish border on Christmas Day.
He was part of the Connolly Column of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigade. This was formed by 80 or so republican volunteers who accompanied anti-Treaty IRA veteran Frank Ryan to Spain. The January 1937 edition of the Irish Front carried an editorial from Donnelly, in which he wrote the following:
“Owen O’Duffy and his Irish Fascist Brigade have joined the insurgent forces… But if Franco receives support from O’Duffy and his gang, so on the other hand the Spanish people are receiving the support of world anti-fascists in an International Brigade… The disgrace, the stain upon Ireland caused by O’Duffy must be wiped out.”
Donnelly was felled by a bullet on 27 February, during the Battle of Jarama. This battle began with the attempt of Franco’s Nationalists to cut off Madrid from Valencia, by launching a major offensive in the valley of the Jarama River. The Nationalists took the Republicans by surprise, advancing across the river, and taking control of the Pingarrón hills. The International Brigades were located in Pajares Heights, and it was here that they clashed with Nationalist forces.
A pamphlet titled ‘Hello Canada’, published by the Friends of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion 1937 (a battalion which also fought as part of the International Brigade), described Donnelly’s last moments:
“We run for cover. Charlie Donnelly, Commander of the Irish Company, is crouched behind an olive tree. He has picked up a bunch of olives from the ground and is squeezing them. I hear him say quietly between a lull of machine-gun fire, ‘Even the olives are bleeding’. A bullet got him square in the temple a few minutes later. He is buried there now beneath the olives.”
In total, 161 Irish republicans would serve in the International Brigade, of whom 61 were killed. Among Donnelly’s papers were two works, titled Poem and The Tolerance of Crows, written months earlier. Donnelly is perhaps best remembered for these two compositions.
Poem begins,
“Between rebellion as a private study and the public
Defiance, is simple action only on which will flickers
Catlike, for spring. Whether at nerve-roots is secret
Iron, there's no diviner can tell, only the moment can show.
Simple and unclear moment, on a morning utterly different
And under circumstances different from what you'd expected.”
The Tolerance of Crows starts
“Death comes in quantity from solved
Problems on maps, well-ordered dispositions,
Angles of elevation and direction”
Donnelly was immortalised by his contemporary, Donagh MacDonagh, in the poem He is Dead and Gone, Lady…
“Of what a quality is courage made
That he who gently walked our city streets
Talking of poetry or philosophy,
Spinoza, Keats,
Should lie like any martyred soldier
His brave and fertile brain dried quite away
And the limbs that carried him from cradle to death’s
outpost
Growing down into foreign clay.”
Sources
Boylan, Henry, A Dictionary of Irish Biography, 3rd edn. (Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1998).
Clifton, Harry, ‘The man who saw olives bleed’, Irish Times, 24 March 2012, p. 12.
Dawe, Gerald, Of War and War’s Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing (Cork: Cork University Press, 2015).
Hickey, D.J., A Dictionary of Irish History Since 1800 (Totowa, New Jersey: Barns & Noble Books, 1980).
Hoar, Adrian, In Green and Red: The Lives of Frank Ryan (Dingle: Brandon, 2004).
Klaus, Gustav H. (ed.), Strong Words, Brave Deeds: The Poetry, Life and Times of Thomas O’Brien (Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 1994).
O’Loughlin, Michael, ‘All of Charlie’, The Sunday Tribune, 21 February 1988, p. 21.
O’Riordan, Michael, Connolly Column (Dublin: New Books, 1979).