Poem by Tom Kettle ‘To My Daughter Betty’ 4 September 1916
Thomas Michael Kettle was born in 1880, at Artane in North County Dublin. His father, Andrew J. Kettle, was a farmer, and unsuccessful parliamentary candidate, closely associated with the Parnellite wing of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
Tom Kettle was educated at Clongowes Wood College and later at University College Dublin, where he took a degree in Philosophy. At this time, he played an active part in the Young Ireland branch of the United Irish League. He also founded and edited The Nationist, a short lived ‘review of Irish thought and affairs’, aided by Francis Sheehy-Skeffington.
In 1906, Kettle was elected as Nationalist MP for East Tyrone and went on an American tour of the United Irish League. In the House of Commons, Kettle was the chief financial spokesman for the Irish Parliamentary Party and was a consistent critic of the cost of the British administrative establishment in Ireland. Kettle was also favourably disposed towards the Suffragettes, with whom his wife, Mary Sheehy, was associated.
Outside parliament, he was concerned to achieve a broad consensus of Nationalist pressure-groups, and to deflect Sinn Féin from the path of unconstitutional development. Although he was returned again for East Tyrone in the 1910 Election, internal feuding in the party forced Kettle to resign his seat.
In 1910 Kettle was appointed Professor of National Economics at University College Dublin. At UCD he sat on the Dublin Industrial Peace Committee, which acted as a conciliation service during the 1913 Lock-Out.
Tom Kettle was a member of the National Volunteers, and in 1914 went to Belgium to buy arms for them. Whilst there, war broke out, and he became convinced of the justice of the Allied cause. He returned to Ireland, and made a series of recruiting speeches, which effectively alienated him from the Nationalist movement. Kettle then joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. After the Easter Rising and the death of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington he asked to be sent to the Front, and was killed on the eve of the Battle of Ginchy, 9 September 1916. His body was never recovered.
Kettle’s writings include The Open Secret of Ireland (1912), Poems and Parodies (1916) and two posthumous publications, The Ways of War (1917) and The Days Burden (1918).
UCDA LA34/404-405 shows the development of one of Kettle’s final poems ‘To my daughter Betty’ from a short manuscript draft to a copy of the complete text.
UCDA LA34/404 Manuscript draft by Kettle of poem ‘To my daughter Betty’, 4 September 1916
UCDA LA34/ 405 Copy of complete text of ‘To my daughter Betty’, 4 September 1916
