George Motley, British Soldier shot 1920, body found 1927

[corisande]

Readers of Rootschat may recall that I have an unnatural curiosity about bodies found in bogs following the War of Independence

This query is about one of these. A Private George Motley of the East Lancashire regiment disappeared

The nub of the story is

1. 1921 Apr 10. Went missing. It is believed that George Motley was taken out of a pub in Headford, County Kerry, and shot. His body was dumped in a local bog

2. 1927 Jan 27. His body has been found - nobody knows how - and is re-buried in Shipley, England

I cannot find anything about his disappearance in Irish papers at the time, nor can I find anything in Irish papers in late 1926 or early 1927 about the recovery of a body in the area.

I am using the Irish Newspaper Archives web site to search which does not include Kerryman or Cork Examiner

It was certainly near suicidal for an English soldier to be drinking alone in Headford, as it was only 3 weeks after the Headford Train Ambush.

Can anyone add anything.

[CaroleW]

Should the surname be Mottley?

George's birth and his parents marriage are both with 2 T's

[corisande]

There are both renderings, but if you read the death/obituary in his local paper on his re-burial in 1927 it does use the one "t" version for all the family ie Motley

There only appears to be one branch of the family today using "tt", I have been corresponding with a John Mottley, but George's branch use just the one.

It is not really relevant as I have searched using both names and no name but combinations of soldier, body, found, Kerry, etc both with and without surnames.

I have found in researching other cases of exhumed bodies, that the IRA usually had little idea of the name of the man they were shooting, or if they did it was a phonetic (or close phonetic) rendering of the man's name. So I do tend to do fairly wide searches

[jom6]

Hi,

This is John Mottley, George's nephew. I really appreciate the interest in George's fate.

There are 2 versions of the surname in the family, resulting mainly from clerical errors. The correct version is actually 1 't' from the father William Thomas Motley's birth cert. However, family members seem to have been fairly liberal in the spelling of even their own family names.

There are 2't's in George's birth cert and on most of the documents I have relating to his funeral. My father John (his half brother) was born with 1 't' but he always asserted that the correct version had 2, for whatever reason. I was unluckily born with my father's step-father's surname and well as with the irregular 2 't's and always had to correct officials, who naturally wanted to economise and pass on as many 't's as possible to the next generation!

Searching this name should always use both variations.