Michael O'Reilly (1911–1963)

My father was born in Cork in the summer of 1911. He was the youngest son in a family of seven children: four girls (May, Kitty, Lil, Ann) and three boys (Tom, John, Michael). The family home was a small farm in North Cork, at Ballyhest, Castlecor, in the parish of Kilbrin. When he was five his parents (William and Catherine) sent him to the primary school near the farm. The year was 1916. A century later, on the anniversary of the Easter Rising, his name was included on a plaque in the old school building with those of the other pupils who had entered in that memorable year.

He later recalled how during the Civil War the family heard of the death of Michael Collins in August 1922. A boy ran along the road from Kanturk, five miles away, shouting out the news to the houses and farms as he passed. It was long before the advent of radios and phones.

One day at school his class was visited by a member of the De La Salle Brothers, a teaching order founded in France in the seventeenth century by St Jean-Baptiste de La Salle (1651–1719). He spoke to them about the vocation to be a brother and asked if any of them felt they might have such acalling. My father and one other boy put up their hands. He was later offered a place in the De La Salle school in Waterford.

The De La Salle Brothers

During his time in Waterford he resolved to try his vocation. In August 1927 he was ‘admitted to the Habit’ with the name ‘Bonaventure Enda’. The ceremony took place in the De La Salle community in Castletown, a small village in County Laois. He was sixteen years old, and one of twenty-three ‘aspirants’ admitted on that day.

The period of probation and formation that followed was professional as well as religious.

In 1930 he was sent to St Mary’s University College in London to be trained as a teacher. The college (now St Mary’s University) is in the south-west part of the city, in Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham. At the end of his course, in 1933, he received two qualifications, awarded by the University of London: the Teacher’s Certificate and a B.A. Degree in History, French and Latin.

Early on in his studies, in March 1931, he was in France (no doubt perfecting his French) when he learned that his sister Kitty, a nurse, had died of T.B. in Marymount in Cork. They were close in age (she was two years older), and close in spirit too. On returning home he told the family she had appeared to him after her death, and had told him that she had left something for him in a particular place. And when he went to that place he found it, just as she had said.

Once he was fully qualified, he was given a full-time teaching post in St Illtyd’s College in Cardiff, which the De La Salle Brothers had founded ten years earlier. The pupils were all boys, most of them of Irish descent and from families of limited means. In September 1933 he assumed his duties as ‘Master of History’. They included running The Historical Society, of which he was elected president. At its first meeting under his direction, in the Spring of 1934, it was decided to hold debates twice a month, ‘on subjects of interest to all, with special relation to the period which the senior forms were at the time studying’. The first debates were on ‘the Inquisition’ and ‘the execution of Mary Queen of Scots’, subjects the senior boys were considering in class, but in subsequent years topics connected with current affairs came increasingly to the fore. In 1935 the Society heard a talk by one of the sixth formers on ‘the life of Mussolini, Fascism in Italy, and British Fascism’. In 1936 the motions debated included ‘that the League of Nations is a necessary and successful institution’ (judged ‘probably the most successful debate we have had up to date’), and ‘that the Air Force is more advantageous to the Empire than the Navy’. In 1937 it was formally decided to debate and discuss ‘topics of interest in world affairs’. Minds were becoming focused on the approach of war.

When the war broke out, in September 1939, Cardiff was a target for German bombers, and he took his turn as an Air Raid Warden on the roof of the school. Between 1940 and 1944 about 2,000 bombs fell on the city, and 355 people died. Early in 1941 a high explosive hit the College, badly damaging the main building, where fourteen classrooms were destroyed.

By then he was struggling with an agonising decision. After fourteen years in the order, he was thinking of leaving. The matter had been on his mind for some time. In a letter of June 1941 to Brother Philip Healy, his Provincial Superior in Ireland, he traced it back to a ‘crisis I went through five years ago’, before adding, ‘my reasons now are different and after months of deliberation and expert advice I’ve had no alternative’. His reasons are not recorded, but it is reasonable to suppose they included the war itself, for when he was granted dispensation from his vows, in the summer vacation of 1941, he applied to join the Royal Air Force.

First though he went to stay with his brother John and his wife Edith, who were living in Somerset. Edith told me that when he reached them he was utterly exhausted. The ordeal had taken its toll. Meanwhile the news of his departure from the order and the school was being received in bothwith a sense of loss. Brother Gilbert Fitzsimmons, the superior of the Brothers in England, wrote, ‘This is a big disappointment’. He worried about its effect on vocations. And the editor of the St Illtyd’s College magazine observed:

In summer we were sorry to lose one of our most popular and distinguished masters, Bro. Bonaventure, who was called to duties elsewhere. After eight laborious and fruitful years here, he had become almost an essential part of the School. Old Boys will look back with gratitude upon the fine and zealous work he did with them, and more than one will have him to thank for subsequent scholastic success. His results were always exceptionally good, but his effects on those he taught were even better. The School loses a good man, but his work will not be undone. It lives on behind him in the numerous boys and Old boys whom he taught, and from whom it will be passed on.

The War

My father sometimes spoke about the war – not to me (I was too young), but to family and friends, who later told me things he had said. He mentioned for instance the fear of invasion at the time he enlisted. With other recruits he was sent to the South Coast of England to fight the Germans if they came. Weapons, however, were scarce, and they were issued with sticks, not guns… He mentioned also that during his training as an airman it was discovered he was colour-blind, and that as a result he became a navigator, not a pilot. Later, when he was posted to India, he instructed navigators in Bangalore. But his duties in the East extended beyond this, as his brother-in-law Eric Schmidt explained to me when we met in September 2001: ‘Michael was an expert on Japanese planes. Knew all about them. That was his job. Especially their fighters, equivalent to our Spitfires. And when a plane crashed, he would be taken to the site to examine the wreckage and see if the design had been changed in any way’.

Eric then recalled a conversation in London, soon after the war ended:

He told me about how he had gone to Lhasa in Tibet on his own. He had leave (having been sick),19 and volunteered to go to Tibet to find out more about the
R.A.F. pilots who had died there in the China-India border area. He told me that he stayed in a lamasery (monastery). It was 1943, and they told him of a great Allied victory in North Africa. They were correct, he later found out, but how did they know? He was convinced it was by telepathic means.
While there he expressed a desire to go on retreat. So they gave him some water and rations, and he went upto a hermitage. When he came down, he felt completely refreshed, and expressed astonishment at how much he had benefitted in just twenty-four hours. They smiled and said, ‘You were there for two weeks’. He checked his diary and the date. It was true.
He spoke to me of what a power for good Buddhism was. He said all this to me in his own words.

His interest in Eastern religion is reflected in another anecdote I heard (I can’t remember from whom): that in India he met a holy man who taught him to meditate.

His sister Lil told me a further tale. She and her husband Jack, with whom he usually stayed when he came home during the 1950s, had a bar in their farmhouse in Newcastle, near Blarney, where he sometimes helped by pulling pints. On one occasion at least he regaled the locals with the story of how one night, flying over the Gobi Desert, his plane ran into trouble, and he had to bale out. He landed in a cemetery, and crawled over to the nearest grave to read in the moonlight the name of the person buried there. It was a man from Macroom in County Cork…

After the War

Michael and Betty’s wedding. St Patrick’s Cathedral, Bangalore, 29 May, 1945. L–R: Unknown; R.W. (Reg) Bigg (best man); Michael O’ Reilly; Elizabeth O’Reilly; Alice Donlea; Colonel J.D de Wilton; Fr L. Van Peene.

During his time in Bangalore he met my mother, and they were married there in 1945. A year later he was decommissioned with the rank of Flight-Lieutenant, and they returned by boat to Britain. There they settled in Cheam, a suburb of London, not far from the area he had known in the early 1930s and close to a Jesuit grammar School, Wimbledon College, where he was appointed to teach French. His colleagues included a fellow Irishman, John Meaney, with whom he became a close and lifelong friend.

In 1948 he was appointed headmaster of The Holy Family School in nearby Morden. The building, he later wrote, ‘was quite a good one’, with ‘exceptionally fine practical rooms’, and ‘there was a good staff’’, but, despite these resources, he found himself faced with a problem. The Education Act of 1944 required existing schools to conform to one of the three types of secondary school it had established, namely Grammar, Technical and Secondary Modern. The Morden school was designated a Secondary Modern, but it had not adjusted to the new setup, and many of the pupils were transferring to other schools at the age of 13:

All the brighter boys and girls, the entire ‘A’ stream in fact, worked with might and main to get into a ‘real’ Secondary school or course as soon as possible […]. And very successful they were too, most of them achieving their ambition to get into a Grammar, technical or commercial school, or even into grammar, technical or commercial courses, which were being set up in neighbouring County Secondary schools.

The situation filled him with dismay:

From the beginning I was very uneasy about all this, but the Governors and staff were quite content. This I felt was no way to set about the task of creating a new Catholic Secondary School under the 1944 Act […]. My disillusionment was complete when one year the Governors passed a resolution congratulating the Headmaster and staff on the wonderful examination successes obtained, namely, the departure of practically the entire ‘A’ stream of 36 boys and girls at the age of 13 […]. This Catholic Secondary School was certainly getting nowhere.

But from it he drew a lesson:

My experience in the school convinced me that there simply was no future for the new Catholic Secondary Schools unless all those concerned with their development were alive to their potentialities for providing secondary education according to age, aptitude and ability.

Saint Wilfrid’s School, Crawley. The original school building ‘Oakwood’, since demolished, lies alongside Goffs Park. The O’Reilly family lived in the former servants’ quarters within the attic, and the children had the run of the grounds.

The frustration in Morden helps to explain his decision after five years there to apply for the headshipof St Wilfrid’s, a new Secondary Modern School planned for the town of Crawley in West Sussex. When he was selected for the hotly competed post, he rejoiced to have at last a free hand. The new school, he wrote in retrospect, ‘had from the beginning many of the ingredients for success: among the chief I would put complete lack of traditions and a governing body and staff who regarded it as a secondary school’.

Over the next ten years he worked hard to design and run it as he wished, and it developed fast: in September 1953, when it opened, there were five members of staff and under 100 pupils; by 1963 the staff had grown to 40 and the pupils to 800. There was no need for pupils to leave at 13, forthey were offered courses leading to technical and commercial qualifications and to G.S.E. ‘O’ level, and he envisaged that one day there would be a sixth form, with an opportunity to study for ‘A’ level too.

It was, therefore, with gratitude for things achieved that he celebrated Christmas in December 1963. He spent the day itself peaceably at home, surrounded by us children, but that evening he began to feel unwell, and about midnight he had a heart attack and died. The funeral Mass was attended by the parish, the school, local dignitaries, and his family (brother Tom from Kilbrin, sisters May and Anne, Anne’s husband Eric, nephew Alan, and Lil’s husband Jack). Afterwards the parish priest paid him tribute:

He did everything he could to make a contact between families and between people, everything he could to help in the life of the school, of the parish, and of the town. He gave all that he could give.

Full references and notes included in the printed book.

Tom O'Reilly17 November 2024