TEN YEARS OF SOVIET RULE

John Pinkman was born of Irish parents in Liverpool in 1902. In this dramatic and passionate memoir, he tells of his childhood and youth in a close-knit, strongly nationalistic Irish Catholic community in Liverpool. Gifted with a remarkable memory, he provides a vivid depiction of his schooling and his subsequent apprenticeship in Liverpool's dockland. He joined a Sinn Fein club at the age of sixteen and the Liverpool Company of the Irish Volunteers (IRA) two years later. Pinkman gives a gripping account of the activities of the Liverpool Company prior to the Truce. Arrested and sentenced to five years' penal servitude in Dartmoor Prison for 'Sinn Fein activities', he describes the life he (Dartmoor's youngest prisoner) and others endured in England's most dreaded prison.
On his release from Dartmoor (following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921) Pinkman joined the elite Dublin Guards Brigade of the Irish National Army under Michael Collins on its formation early in 1922. He presents an eyewitness account of the fighting during the Civil War in Kilkenny, Dublin and Munster, supplying new and controversial information on the death of Cathal Brugha, the assassination of Michael Collins, and the role of Erskine Childers, challenging the received version of these and other events of the Civil War.