A Prewar Education, 1888–1914

Abstract

Six miles west of Cork, Ballincollig today is a satellite town, with the barracks on one side of the road and the `village' on the other, the latter largely comprising breezeblock estates and small, cheap, rather tacky but well-intentioned – shopping malls. Ballincollig's past can be resurrected courtesy of two cardboard boxes tucked away in a corner of the community centre's crowded library, and a visit to the gunpowder mills' heritage centre. Gunpowder brought employment to nineteenth-century Ballincollig, and it also brought soldiers. In 1867 fears of Fenian sabotage saw the garrison reinforced, and the British Army remained in strength until its withdrawal in May 1922: intent on wiping out all vestiges of foreign rule before Free State forces could move in, Anti-Treaty irregulars then proceeded to burn down the barracks.¹ Life in Victorian Ballincollig revolved around the needs of the soldiers and the 500 or so workers and their families housed in the mills' tied cottages. By the end of the century the inability of black gunpowder to compete with dynamite had led to a significant decline in the workforce. However, train and tram links with Cork, and a cavalry regiment permanently garrisoned there, had seen the local population rise to well over 2000, enough to support eight pubs and a large Roman Catholic church dating from the 1860s.² It was in this imposing neo-Gothic church – today surrounded by council houses and a carpet factory, but a century ago high on a hill above the village – that on 4 February 1883 Julia Sullivan married Corporal Edward Corringham. A cavalryman from England on a two-year posting to Ballincollig with the Royal Scots Greys, Corringham had taken an assumed name.³ In an era when peacetime soldiering was viewed by respectable society as an occupation fit only for scoundrels, shirkers and soaks, a comfortable Victorian household would be loath to find the family name resonating across the parade ground at Aldershot or Chelsea. A decade later, when Corringham left the regiment, he reverted to his real surname – Mannock.⁴