Napper Tandy, The Irish Patriot

By Brian Igoe

It was the 10th September, 1798. Napper Tandy was afloat, which he hated. She was a corvette. Her name was the Anacréon. What a name for a bloody ship-of-war, he thought. Whether she was named after a Greek composer of drinking and love songs or a French composer of operas, it was not a name for a war-ship.
She was fast, though, that he admitted. And well armed, this 100 ton corvette, with her fourteen four pounders and a pair of swivels, but her main protection was her speed. The fastest vessel in the Navy of France, they said, and with her yellow hull and new top masts she was any young officer’s dream command. But God, how she pitched. He clutched his hand to his mouth and made once more for the scuppers. What it was to be so old. He felt all of his 61 years today. After a while he felt sufficiently recovered to return to the ward-room, where he found Rey. General Rey. A real General this Rey, not a paper general like himself. Brigadier General Tandy! The thought amused him unreasonably, even though he understood the necessity. If he was caught he could claim to be a prisoner of war, and exchanged. Otherwise he could be condemned as a traitor, and hanged.

So opens the Story of Napper Tandy. He was born in Dublin around 1740, the son of an ironmonger. He was Secretary of the Dublin branch of the United Irishmen which with Wolfe Tone he helped found and whom he then went on to represent in America for five years after they were proscribed in 1792. He played a central part in the mismanaged French ‘invasion’ of Ireland in 1798. He was the lynchpin in the events which led to the Peace of Amiens between England and France in October, 1801. He was sentenced to death by the English, but never executed, a fact which may well have denied him the martyrdom and fame which came to others like Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmett. He was a Brigadier General in the French Republican Army, and received both salary and pension as such until the day he died, August 24th.,1803, in Bordeaux. His name was Napper Tandy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Igoe
• Release date: Oct 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301102402

Brian Igoe

You don’t need to know much about me because I never even considered writing BOOKS until I was in my sixties. I am a retired businessman and have written more business related documents than I care to remember, so the trick for me is to try and avoid writing like that in these books…. Relevant, I suppose, is that I am Irish by birth but left Ireland when I was 35 after ten years working in Waterford. We settled in Zimbabwe and stayed there until I retired, and that gave me loads of material for books which I will try and use sometime. So far I have only written one book on Africa, “The Road to Zimbabwe”, a light hearted look at the country’s history. And there’s also a small book about adventures flying light aircraft in Africa. And now I am starting on ancient Rome, the first book being about Julius Caesar, Marcus Cato, the Conquest of Gaul, (Caesar and Cato, the Road to Empire) and the Civil War. But for most of my books so far I have gone back to my roots and written about Irish history, trying to do so as a lively, living subject rather than a recitation of battles, wars and dates. My book on O’Connell, for example, looks more at his love affair with his lovely wife Mary, for it was a most successful marriage and he never really recovered from her death; and at the part he played in the British Great Reform Bill of 1832, which more than anyone he, an Irish icon, Out of Ireland, my book on Zimbabwe starts with a 13th century Chief fighting slavers and follows a 15th century Portuguese scribe from Lisbon to Harare, going on to travel with the Pioneer Column to Fort Salisbury, and to dine with me and Mugabe and Muzenda. And nearer our own day my Flying book tells of lesser known aspects of World War 2 in which my father was Senior Controller at RAF Biggin Hill, like the story of the break out of the Scharnhorst and Gneisau, or capturing three Focke Wulfs with a searchlight. And now for my latest effort I have gone back to my education (historical and legal, with a major Roman element) and that has involved going back in more ways than one, for the research included a great deal of reading, from Caesar to Plutarch and from Adrian Goldsworthy to Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni.