The Inevitability of Neil Goold
Casey's Law in action
Forgive me if it is too early in my career to suggest this, but I would like to coin a general rule of European history.
Let’s call it Casey’s Law:
Casey’s Law posits that almost every 20th-century European revolutionary organisation, no matter how small or obscure, had at least one member from Ireland.
I am accustomed to tracing groups with names like “World Revolutionary Socialist Front” that, despite their grand titles, generally consisted of about six guys, all of whom lived in the same postcode and at least a quarter of whom were police informants.
Whether they were active in Berlin, London, Paris or elsewhere, such groups usually managed to attract at least one Irish person.
Allow me to prove this with a case study: Neil Goold.
Back in April, I visited a friend in Bonn, Germany. While I was in the city I took some time to visit the archive of German social democracy located in the city.
For some time I have been nursing a fascination with the ISK, a little known militant sect active from the early 1920s until the end of the Second World War. The acronym originates from both the German and Esperanto name for the group, which translates in English as the International Socialist Combat Group. Because of the heavy prominence of German members, many of whom ended up in the German SPD after the war, the group’s archives are held in Bonn.
The ISK attempted to live out an anti-Marxist but still socialist form of Leninism. If that sounds like a strange idea, that’s because it is a strange idea. But it’s not even the movement’s weirdest idea. I am not going to detail these unusual theories right now, however. Instead, I will tell you about the remarkable fact that the ISK had one member from Donegal.
As I read through correspondence that the British section of the ISK sent to Germany, I came across a 1929 report describing how a promising young recruit had joined the group. His name was Goold and he was an Irish philosophy student studying in London.
I am quite sure I know who this is, I thought to myself. I then turned over the page to see his full name listed: Neil Goold.
Aha, I thought, we meet again.
I have been encountering Neil Goold in archives since my undergraduate degree. In 2015, as an eager student in a module about Ireland during WW2, I visited the National Archives in Dublin to read through wartime surveillance of Irish communists. This was how I first came across reports of a nuisance-making radical by the name of Neil Goold.
Neil constituted a threat to Ireland’s wartime neutrality in the eyes of the state because of his fiercely pro-Soviet views and revolutionary republican convictions. De Valera’s government duly interned him in the Curragh camp.
In 2018, I came across Neil once more - this time in an archive in Moscow. I did not encounter him in a Communist Party of Ireland report, however, but through something even stranger I found in the archive: a resolutely Stalinist fellow researcher. When I told this researcher that I was Irish, he immediately told me he was an admirer of Neil Goold.
Neil Goold, I thought, what an oddly specific person to know about. The researcher directed me to a 1956 pamphlet by Neil in which the Irish radical defended Stalin against Khruschev’s (partial) revelation of the extent of Stalin’s terror.
The subtitle of this pamphlet reveals how far Neil Goold had travelled away from his membership in the anti-Soviet ISK decades previously: ‘A Vindication of J. V. Stalin and His Policy’.
Irish readers might read this as just a Stalinist variant of Donegal contrarianism (Donegal SAYS NO to de-Stalinization). However, it was unusually extreme. Then again, Neil came from an unusual family.
Neil was born into the wealthy Anglo-Irish Goold-Verschoyle family in 1904. He was raised at the Manor House in Dunkineely, Co. Donegal. All of the Goold-Verschoyle siblings led interesting lives. One, Neil’s younger brother Brian, fatefully followed Neil into the Communist Party.
Brian soon became embroiled in Soviet espionage. This entanglement would have tragic consequences. As Barry McLoughlin details in his work on Irish victims of Stalin’s terror, Brian was lured onto a Soviet ship during the Spanish Civil War and taken captive. A prisoner for the state he once served, he was shipped back to the USSR and disappeared into the vortex of the Soviet labour camp system. Brian’s fate acts as a strange and unsettling counterpoint to his older brother Neil’s virulent Stalinism.
My most recent encounter with Neil’s story was perhaps the most surprising of all. It took place just over a week ago in my home town, Cahir, Co Tipperary, at a launch event for my book Hotel Lux (available in all good bookstores now).
After signing books, I was told that an older woman, Esther, wanted to meet me. I sat beside her at a table in Cahir House Hotel as she told me how her own family history was similar to the tale told in my book.
Her uncle Neil, she said, was a communist who had lived in Soviet Russia. Her other uncle Brian had died there in a gulag. Esther, it turned out, was a direct descendant of the Goold Verschoyles, the daughter of Neil’s sister Eileen. She lives in a town not far from Cahir.
Those of you who follow my research or read my book will know that this is just one of many remarkable encounters and coincidences that tend to charm my research adventures.
I sense I have not seen the last of Neil Goold.
A great story -- but isn't Brian's story a counterpoint rather than coda to Neil's? Not least because Neil out live him?
A great story - shades of the cohen sisters