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5

‘Mr and Mrs Fred’

Kerry’s Original Political Power Couple

Their social, class, family and political backgrounds could hardly have been more different. One was an IRA gun-runner who was born on a farm in rural north Cork and who fought British forces at some of the seminal engagements of the War of Independence in Kerry. The other was the daughter of a Westminster parliamentarian and a member of one of Dublin’s best-known and wealthiest merchant families who grew up in one of London’s most affluent suburbs. They came from opposite ends of the social and political divide. But between them the couple represented the constituency of Kerry South in Dáil Éireann for just shy of forty years without a breach. Frederick Hugh Crowley and Honor Mary Boland also set a political record when, on his death in 1945, Honor Mary became the first woman in Irish political history to succeed her husband at a by-election to the Dáil. Honor also holds the distinction of being the first female TD ever elected in Kerry.

Honor Mary Boland was born on 19 October 1903 in Dublin, the eldest of six children of John Mary Pius Boland and his wife, Eileen (Eily) Quirk Moloney, a native of Melbourne, Australia, and of Irish ancestry. Moloney was from a wealthy family who lived in various hotels around Europe, having left Australia after a lengthy drought in Victoria in 1892. John Pius Boland was a member of the famous – and equally wealthy – baking and flour-milling family which owned Boland’s Mills in Dublin, the largest bakery in Ireland, coincidentally one of the buildings occupied by rebels during the 1916 Rising. Boland’s own life story is of interest. He was born on Capel Street in Dublin on 16 September 1870 and both his parents died when he was a child. He was raised, along with six siblings, by his mother’s half-brother, the auxiliary bishop of Dublin, Dr Nicholas Donnelly. As a child, he and his siblings often holidayed on Rossdohan Island near Sneem, where he is said to have first developed his love of Kerry.1 He was educated in Dublin, Birmingham and Bonn before graduating with a BA from London University in 1892 and a MA from Oxford. He was called to the Bar in 1897.

A keen sportsman who played rugby and tennis at college, Boland excelled at tennis and was invited to attend the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. He won the singles and doubles finals – with Friedrich Traun of Germany in the latter competition. He ranks as both Britain’s and Ireland’s first Olympic champion. At the Games, Boland objected when the Union Jack was hoisted alongside the German flag in Athens when he won the doubles, demanding a green flag with a harp; it was still not available when he won the singles. The presentations were of silver rather than gold, silver and bronze at this time. During holidays in the south-west of Ireland as he grew older, Boland was moved by the high levels of illiteracy and poverty in the area and also developed a love for the Irish language.2 Though he had been called to the Bar, instead of a legal career, he chose politics. His daughter, Bridget, later explained part of his motivation:

My father discovered to his horror that practically no-one [in the south-west of Ireland] could read and write. In such schools as there were, only English was allowed to be taught, and, particularly in mountain country where they might be six or eight miles from a school and with no transport of course, if the children attended at all the lessons were in a language they didn’t speak, and the teachers were even forbidden to answer questions in Irish … So largely from a desire to secure better education, particularly in the South and West, my father became actively nationalist.3

Aged just thirty, Boland was elected the Irish Parliamentary Party MP for South Kerry in 1900 – he was the only candidate – and became party whip in Westminster in 1906. In parliament, he championed issues like trade, education and the Irish language and was instrumental in the patenting of the Irish Trade Mark and the setting-up of the National University of Ireland. Among his constituency initiatives were the development of a carpet factory in Glenbeigh, as well as an Irish summer school in the area and the introduction of New Zealand flax as a crop in south Kerry. In 1918, Boland became acting Chief Whip of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, but he stood down at the December 1918 general election in which Sinn Féin’s Fionán Lynch won the South Kerry seat as that party surged to win seats across the country. So embittered was he at the loss of his seat and the rise of a party which he abhorred that Boland did not return to Kerry for over thirty years – and then only returned to visit his daughter, Honor, who resided in Killarney. Boland later published a memoir, Irishman’s Day: A Day in the Life of an Irish MP (1944), which drew on his experiences of parliamentary life and describes his constituency. He received an honorary doctorate in law from the National University and he died in London on St Patrick’s Day, 1958.

Honor Boland had something of an idyllic childhood. While her father was an MP, the family lived at 40 St George’s Square, a five-storey terraced house in Pimlico in London a short distance from Westminster, which was replete with gardeners, a cook and numerous other servants. When parliament wasn’t sitting, the Boland family lived in Dublin. Honor holidayed in south Kerry with her family as a child; they rented the home of the Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, in Derrynane. Honor, her brother and four sisters ‘lived barefoot and ran wild, seals basked on the foreshore, everyone caught enormous fish, and the bats were chased out of the bedrooms every night with tennis racquets’.4 Honor attended school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton in Surrey, where her mother was Head of School. Mrs Boland was a prominent Catholic during her time in London, serving as general secretary of the Catholic Truth Society of England for many years. The college was also attended by Honor’s sister, Bridget Boland, who became a well-known playwright, novelist and screen-writer; she later documented her childhood and that of her siblings in an autobiographical work, At My Mother’s Knee (1978). Honor began her career as a social worker in London. Her work ‘was among the blind in the cathedral parish of Westminster bringing them to Mass on Sundays and looking after their needs generally. She also belonged to the committee which provides holidays for children from the slums’.5

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Frederick (Fred) Hugh Crowley was born in Gurteen, near Banteer, County Cork, to Michael and Honor Crowley (née Cronin) on New Year’s Eve 1880. His father operated the Rathmore Mills and was one of the founder members of the Land and Labour Association, with Michael Davitt. Fred attended the North Monastery School in Cork City and received a diploma in textile manufacturing from the University of Leeds in 1912. Shortly after his return to Ireland, his family moved to Rathmore, close to the Cork–Kerry border, where they farmed. Fred joined the Irish Volunteers in Rathmore and was a member of the local company at the time of the Easter Rising. He was also an enthusiastic member of the Gaelic League. A veteran of the War of Independence, he was a key figure in the IRA in Kerry in the early 1920s and was involved in many important incidents, such as the Headford Junction Ambush in 1921 alongside fellow future Kerry TDs like Johnny Connor and Thomas McEllistrim.

Fred Crowley and Honor Mary Boland met in the late 1930s. He had been the Fianna Fáil TD for Kerry South since 1927. When Honor introduced her prospective husband – now a member of the independent national parliament representing the constituency her father once had at Westminster – to her father, John Pius, the encounter was fraught with the usual awkwardness between a man and his future son-in-law at their first introduction. However, they soon found something of common interest to discuss, as Honor’s sister, Bridget, recalls: