Anti-Treaty Soldier John (Jack) Howell

Anti-Treaty Soldier John (Jack) Howell (aged about 31) of Brough and Kilvickanease near Doneraile and later of Clonakilty (Enniskeane)

Date of incident: 4 Nov. 1922

Sources: Death Certificate (Murragh District, Union of Bandon), 4 Nov. 1922; CE, 6, 7, 10, 11 Nov. 1922, 5 Nov. 1923; II, 7 Nov. 1922; Belfast Newsletter, 7 Nov. 1922; SS, 11 Nov. 1922; Meath Chronicle, 11 Nov. 122; Anglo-Celt, 11 Nov. 1922; MSPC/DP4550 (Military Archives); CW/OPS/04/13 (Military Archives); Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, 208; Last Post (1976 ed.), 99; Keane (2017), 320-21, 419.  

Note: A member of the Second Battalion of the Cork No. 3 Brigade, John Howell was killed while fighting with the anti-Treaty IRA at Enniskeane during a major engagement lasting about five hours on Saturday, 4 November 1922, and involving two parties of Free State troops, one with two officers and thirty-eight men based at Ballineen and the other with one officer and twenty-five men at Enniskeane. They came under attack from a substantial and determined body of Irregulars, estimated to number ‘two hundred at the least’. There were significant casualties on both sides. See CE, 6 Nov. 1922. Howell was shot through the heart and died instantly. See Death Certificate (Murragh District, Union of Bandon), 4 Nov. 1922. His death certificate was not registered until 16 March 1923.

He was not interred at Castletown-Kinneigh, as stated incorrectly in the Last Post (1976 ed.), 99. Instead he was buried in Old Court Cemetery in Doneraile on 6 November 1922. He was the second son of Edmond and Ellen Howell of Brough (An Brú) near Doneraile. He died ‘deeply regretted by his sorrowing parents, sisters, and brothers and a large circle of friends’. His death notice specified that he had been ‘killed in action at Enniskean’ on 4 November 1922. See CE, 11 Nov. 1922.

In 1901 John Howell (then aged 10) was one of the five co-resident children of the farmer Edmond Howell and his wife Ellen. These five children (three daughters and two sons), then ranging in age from 4 to 16, lived in house 3 in the townland of Kilvickanease near Doneraile. By the time of the 1911 census, second son John Howell was no longer resident at Kilvickanease, but his young brother Eugene (aged 9), a third son, had joined his older sisters Margaret and Mary and his oldest brother Edmond Jr.

John Howell co-resided with the butcher William Magner of 2 Pearse Street in Clonakilty in the period immediately before his death on 4 November 1922. In civilian life he was employed as a butcher or butcher’s assistant and had pursued this occupation in Dundalk, Co. Louth, and in Midleton, Co. Cork. During the War of Independence, when working in Dundalk, he had been served with the IRA in the Dundalk district of Louth. During that conflict he had been captured and imprisoned by the British authorities. His mother Ellen Howell stated that British forces had arrested her son John in October 1920. According to her account, he had subsequently been imprisoned until January 1922 in Ballykinlar Internment Camp and Belfast Prison before his transfer to Walton and Preston prisons in England. At some point thereafter he joined the Cork No. 3 Brigade under the leadership of Tom Barry and Liam Deasy. Howell’s death certificate gave his age as 30, but he had been born in 1891 and was probably 31 years old when killed. See MSPC/DP4550 (Military Archives).

His mother Ellen Howell was eventually awarded a gratuity of £50 in 1936 under the Army Pension Act of 1932. She and her husband Edmond Howell were then living in the Palatine village of Glenosheen near Kilmallock on the border with north-east Cork. The Army Pensions Board reconsidered the case in December 1938 and decided to grant a so-called special partial-dependants’ allowance of £13 10s. per annum (payable from 2 June 1937), subject to a further review of the grantees’ circumstances at the end of two years. In March 1941 the allowance was reduced again to £12 7s. 6d. No cuts appear to have been made thereafter. See MSPC/DP4550 (Military Archives).