Peter Tyrrell (1916 - 1967)

 A little over a week ago, I researched the life of a man named Peter Tyrrell so that I could overhaul his Wikipedia page, which was a measly 524 words of readable prose when I first found it. I expanded it to almost 1500 words, and most of the information in this post comes from the Wikipedia article. It is a shame that he is as obscure a figure as he is, so for my first post on this blog I want to share his life story. I had been so harrowed by the facts of his childhood that this was partly why I improved the page. I felt an obligation to honour him and to not let him be forgotten: for all that he suffered, and for all that he did to expose how he and many other boys suffered.

He was born some day in 1916 in County Galway, to a mother whose name I could not locate and a man named James Tyrrell. Because James was lazy and refused to work, the family was indigent and Peter's mother had to go out begging to support them. The parents, Peter, and his nine siblings lived in a one-room barn with a cobblestone floor and no windows, as James neglected to make renovations to the place. 

When Peter was eight, the authorities removed him and his brothers from his parents' custody because of their poverty. He and his older brothers were sent to St Joseph's Industrial School in Letterfrack, and his younger brothers were sent to live with, in his words, "nuns in Kilkenny" as they were too young to attend Letterfrack.

At Letterfrack Peter, his brothers and every other boy at the school experienced horrific abuse. The Christian Brothers who ran the industrial school beat them severely, not as discipline but as routine, and on incidents sexually abused them. One of them even broke Peter's arm once during a thrashing.

Peter returned home in 1932, at the age of sixteen, but his time at Letterfrack left him traumatised for the rest of his life.

He learnt tailoring at Letterfrack and became a tailor by trade, working in Ballinasloe till 1935, when he emigrated to the UK. In the same year he enlisted in the British Army.

He was assigned to the King's Own Scottish Borderers regiment, which he misspelt as "King's Own Scottish Borders", and during his military career saw many countries, including India, Malta, Palestine and Egypt. While in India he had a brief romantic relationship with a woman named Angela Dennison, but self-sabotaged it as he did not think himself worthy.

In 1944, while at the German border, he and other Allied soldiers were captured by the Germans and interned at Stalag XI-B, a prisoner-of-war camp. The Western prisoners were treated humanely and with civility, though the Soviet prisoners were starved, and Tyrrell contrasted his experience there very favourably to Letterfrack. The camp was liberated in April of 1945. Tyrrell returned to civilian life in December of 1945 but was not officially discharged from the military until June of 1946.

His time in the military gave him a great deal of self-confidence and helped him get past much of his trauma. He obtained a job inspecting clothing for the Ministry of Supply, which he held until it was made redundant in 1947. He returned to tailoring and travelled extensively around the UK. An encounter with one of his old friends from Letterfrack reminded Tyrrell of the school and brought upon him an enduring preoccupation with it. 

Throughout the 1950s he wrote letters and met several times with government officials, faculty of Letterfrack and staff of the Christian Brothers in a bid to make them take action against the child abuse that still took place in industrial schools, but his words fell on deaf ears.

In 1958 he wrote to an Irish Senator named Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, whom he had heard opposed corporal punishment. Sheehy-Skeffington was moved by his story and, believing it would make for a perfect denunciation of child abuse, convinced Tyrrell to write a memoir. It was completed five months later but revised throughout the 1960s. Through Sheehy-Skeffington he met Joy Rudd, editor of Hibernia magazine and member of a political and literary group called Tuairim, the latter of which she introduced him into. Unfortunately Tyrrell's memoir was never published within either his or Sheehy-Skeffington's lifetimes, as no mainstream publishers would take it.

In 1967, feeling his campaign to expose and end institutional child abuse a failure, Tyrrell, fifty-one, went to Hampstead Heath in London, poured gasoline over his head and lit himself on fire. A park groundskeeper found the body, which was charred beyond recognition. Next to it was a postcard addressed to Sheehy-Skeffington. It took a year for Scotland Yard to contact Sheehy-Skeffington and positively identify the remains as Tyrrell's. Sheehy-Skeffington died three years later, aged sixty-one.

In 2005, historian Diarmuid Whelan found Tyrrell's manuscript within Sheehy-Skeffington's papers. He edited it to fix Tyrrell's odd spelling and grammar, and had it published by the Irish Academic Press as Founded on Fear in 2006. He himself died, of cancer, in 2011 at a tender thirty-nine.

Another of my motives for writing this post is that researching Tyrrell's life has given me (and, I hope, you) reason to admire him. Despite the suffering he endured in his youth he made a better life for himself as an adult, and, instead of keeping it to himself like victims are usually inclined to do, he channelled into activism his knowledge of what went on in industrial schools.