The origins of the Mellows family are unclear and it is probable they were descended from Protestant English stock. The Mellows name originates in Nottinghamshire and at the turn of the twentieth century there were just two families with the surname in Ireland.8 In 1901, William, Sarah and their four children, Jane, Liam, Frederick and Herbert, were living in Cork City where William was stationed.9 Their eldest daughter Jane, aged fourteen, was considerably older than Liam, aged eight; with younger brothers, Herbert and Frederick, aged five and six respectively. Over the preceding years, the family had lived a transient existence as their father was transferred from Fermoy to Manchester and Glasgow. A sickly child, Liam was sent to stay for long periods with his maternal grandparents in North Wexford. His schooling was interrupted by the family’s constant uprooting and his formative education was gained at British military schools attached to Wellington Barracks, Cork, Portobello Barracks, Dublin, and the Royal Hibernian Military School, Dublin. By 1911, the family had moved again, this time to Fairview, a respectable northern suburb of Dublin.10 Aged eighteen, Liam had already turned his back on his father’s military aspirations, however, and rather than apply for a commission, he found work as a book-keeper, with his brother Fred, then aged sixteen, employed as a clerical worker.11
The two Mellows brothers, William and Herbert, reinvented themselves as Liam and Barney, republican revolutionaries, in adolescence through their involvement in the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fianna Éireann boy scouts. Despite the boys’ political conversion, there is no evidence of rancour within the family and the walls of their final family home on Mount Shannon Road in the south of the city were bedecked in photographs of their father’s and grandfather’s military adventures. Wexford republican Robert Brennan recalled a place of warmth, ‘we often stayed at the Mellows home in Dublin and, I must say, if ever there was ever a happy family, it was the Mellows in those days’.12
Tragedy struck the family in 1906 with the death of eldest daughter Jane from tuberculosis, compounded by the subsequent death of younger brother Frederick. The family had previously lost a third child, Patrick, as an infant, while living in England. The loss of his siblings had a profound effect on Liam and throughout his life, friends observed his sense of fatalism. Mellows’ close comrade Alfred White noted the contrast between Liam and his younger sibling, ‘his brother Barney, volatile, nimble-minded, was in sharp contrast to Liam, on whom the responsibilities of life as the elder brother were thrust at an early age’.13 Cumann na mBan member Annie Fanning, who helped Mellows escape to the United States, was warned by Liam that ‘people who helped him always got into trouble or died’.14 A comrade from the War of Independence concluded that Mellows ‘felt it was his duty to give himself for Ireland’15 and following the Truce with Crown Forces in July 1921, Mellows told senior IRA commander Sean Moylan, ‘many more of us will die before an Irish Republic is recognised’.16
‘The sword and its allies’: Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Volunteers
Fenian leader Tom Clarke became an influential early mentor for the young Mellows, who instinctively shared the older man’s admiration for physical force and contempt for politics. Clarke was revered by younger militants in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) for having spent fifteen years between 1883 and 1898 in English prisons for his role in the Fenian dynamite campaign.17 Clarke and Mellows shared a family heritage in the British army that consolidated an instinctive bond. Like the much younger Mellows, Clarke grew up in a British military garrison in South Africa where his father, who like William Mellows was also a sergeant, was stationed. Following his release from jail, Clarke spent almost ten years in New York where he purchased a small farm before returning to Ireland with his family in 1907 and establishing a tobacco shop on Parnell Street, which was to become a hub of activity for younger members of the IRB eager to earn his approval.
Under Clarke’s influence, Mellows joined the circle of young militants under his guidance who established the republican boy scouts, Na Fianna Éireann, in 1909, and began publishing the IRB newspaper Irish Freedom in November 1910. With Con Colbert, Pádraig Ó Riain and Eamon Martin, Mellows entered the company of like-minded, serious young men who had for several years, along with Denis McCullough, Patrick McCartan and Bulmer Hobson, been in the process of transforming the IRB from a drinking club for old Fenians to a conspiratorial anti-imperialist sect. The group shared an energy and commitment to direct action that shocked the romantic nationalists of older generations and in Patrick Pearse, Seán MacDiarmada and Clarke, they found leaders for whom abstract notions of Ireland’s destiny were to be distilled into a commitment to violent insurrection.
Mellows’ military background and education saw him take on a series of time-consuming roles within the emerging movement, first as a travelling organiser for Na Fianna in April 1913, and, subsequently, as regional organiser for the Irish Volunteers in 1914. His military bearing and sincere approach won him plaudits among sceptical activists, but it was his personality that won him the enduring friendship of republicans around the country. Athlone organiser Tomás Ó Maoileoin recalled, ‘I have rarely met anyone with such an attractive personality.’18 Mellows’ lifelong friend Fr Henry Feeney recalled, ‘Mellows was well below average height, frail looking with fair, almost white hair. He wore rimless glasses of the pince-nez type and did not, at first sight, inspire great respect or confidence. But the thin, frail body was tough and sinewy, immune to cold and hardship.’19 A compulsive worker, Mellows’ fondness for practical jokes and his penchant for rebel songs was the highlight of many evenings among comrades. Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Leary sought out his company after his release from jail in New York, as ‘Mellows was an accomplished bard with a repertoire of Irish folk songs, war and love songs which was inexhaustible which made me forget the shadow which the Tombs’ bars and the poison which its bad ventilation had cast upon my mind.’20 Mellows’ first taste of prison life came at the end of July 1915 when he served three months’ imprisonment in Mountjoy, under the Defence of the Realm Act, after speaking at a Volunteer meeting in Tuam, Co. Galway.
‘The desert of exile’: New York
Mellows, along with Ernest Blythe, was deported from Ireland under the Defence of the Realm Act at the beginning of April 1916 and forced to lodge in the town of Leek in Staffordshire, only to be smuggled back into Ireland, via Belfast, disguised as a priest by his brother Barney and Nora Connolly in the days before the Rising. In Galway, he was to lead a force of over five hundred rebels, without sufficient arms or ammunition, for one week in the Galway countryside attacking the police at Clainbridge, Oranmore and Carnmore. Following the rebellion, Mellows spent several months hiding out in the remote countryside on the Galway–Clare border before making his way to Cork and on to Liverpool from where, under Volunteer orders, he crossed the Atlantic for New York City. Upon arrival in America, he made an immediate impact on John Devoy, the leader of the American Fenian network, Clan na Gael, who regarded him as ‘the most capable man who had so far arrived in America’.21 His four years in New York were to be the unhappiest of his life, however, and he became a victim of perpetual intrigue between rival factions within Clan na Gael. Exasperated to the point of despair, the experience was to test his commitment and emotional limits. In his role as representative of the Volunteers, Mellows initially worked closely with Devoy and his close circle centred around the Gaelic American newspaper where he was initially employed. Following a succession of clashes with the American-born leadership of the Clan, however, Mellows was politically marginalised and personally shunned, and he subsequently defected to the Irish Progressive League.22 The personal abuse directed towards him was such, however, that he dropped out of revolutionary politics altogether for a time and sought work as a labourer; however, as a comrade explained, ‘the Clan hounded Liam systematically, procuring his dismissal from one job after another, even from labourers’ work on the docks’.23
Mellows’ time in the United States started badly and went rapidly downhill. As the leading ‘Commandant of the Rising’, as he styled himself, he was in high public demand, making his first of many public appearances in January 1917 at a meeting organised by Cumann na mBan, where he spoke alongside Hanna Sheehy Skeffington.24 Mellows was one of a coterie of high profile ‘1916 Exiles’ in the city, including James Connolly’s daughter, Nora, and Margaret Skinnider,