Civilian Mrs Frances Sydney Haynes

Civilian Mrs Frances Sydney Haynes (aged 73) of 12 Morrison’s Island, Cork (Morrison’s Island, Cork city)

Date of incident: 18 Sept. 1922

Sources: CE, 19, 20, 21 Sept. 1922; SS, 23 Sept. 1922; II, 23 Sept. 1922; Keane (2017), 307, 417.

Note: An elderly widowed woman of 73 and a paying guest at the residence of Dr Richard Dalton on Morrison’s Island, Haynes received seven bullet wounds ‘while sitting at a top window facing the river [Lee], across which the [IRA] machine gun fire was directed’. She was the unintended victim of an anti-Treaty IRA attack on National Army soldiers on 18 September 1922: ‘The attackers, who numbered about eight men, drove down Union Quay in their car and, near the corner of Copley Square, commenced to open fire on the [Free State] troops in Moore’s Hotel across the river.’ See CE, 19 Sept. 1922. A doctor at the coroner’s inquest testified that all her wounds were superficial, and that she had died at the Mercy Hospital on 19 September as a result of ‘very severe shock’. She was described as ‘connected with a well-known Cork family’; her brother was George Harvey of Inniscarrig on the Western Road in Cork city. See CE, 21 Sept. 1922.

Sergeant J. Browne of the National Army, who was stationed at the Ancient Order of Hibernians Hall on Morrison’s Island in Cork at the time of the attack, testified at the inquest that had seen ‘a Ford car coming up on the opposite side. After going down about 50 yards, it stopped and a crowd came round the corner of Buckingham Pl[ace]. The car backed towards the crowd, and then he heard a Lewis gun played on the quay between the A.O.H. Hall and Moore’s Hotel. He put his men in positions at each window at once. An armoured car went in pursuit of the Ford car. [The] medical evidence was that [the] deceased died of shock following receiving 7 bullet wounds.’ See II, 23 Sept. 1922. 

Frances Sydney Haynes was in 1911 the married mother of six living children (eight born) and the household head at house 7.3 on George’s Quay in Cork city. She had been married for forty-one years, but her husband was not listed in the 1911 census. Born in Wexford, she was an adherent of the Church of Ireland and then aged 62.