How a WWI Prisoner of War Was Issued an Irish Free State Passport

Here is a scan of the Free State passport issued in October 1927 to Heinrich Joebges, born 1879. 

My mother’s name is Sheila Cleary, née Joebges. After her sister Mamie’s funeral in 2011, Sheila said that she would love to see her two sisters’ offsprings’ meet up for a big party with her own offsprings’ offspring. That was to be quite a challenge but we got together and made it happen in May 2013. This was one hundred years to the month that Sheila’s parents Heinrich Joebges of Rheydt, Germany, and Molly O’Brien of Kilcummin, Co Kerry, got married.

Heinrich and Molly worked in the hotel industry and they met in the Great Southern Hotels in Kerry. Heinrich’s family also had a hotel in Rheydt. They married in Dublin and in 1914 they were working in St Ermin’s Hotel in London. Their first daughter, Doreen, was born in April. When the Great War broke out Heinrich was arrested as an enemy alien. Molly and Doreen returned to Kerry after the arrest.

Heinrich was interned for the duration of the war, firstly in Oldcastle, Co Meath, and then during the summer of 1918 was moved, with all the other prisoners, to a more remote POW Camp on the Isle of Man.

Molly got a job in the Hermitage Golf Club in Lucan and Heinrich joined her there after his release in 1919. In 1922 they bought the Grand Hotel in Skerries, Co Dublin, and settled down there. Sheila was born there in 1924. She remembers buying bread at the Skerries Windmill when it was a working bakery.

We updated an old family tree and found that there were 153 living people that we could relate back to Heinrich’s father, Tilmann Otto Joebges. The Joebges name is unusual and we were able to find Dieter and his son Andreas Joebges after an internet search for the name. The three Joebges sisters met Dieter and his family in 1978 but we had lost their contact details.

For our gathering, we planned three events over the weekend of May 11 and 12, 2013. The first was a bus trip to Oldcastle to see where the internment camp was and to find out more about it. The second was a party that evening and the third was a day out in Skerries to visit Heinrich and Molly’s graves and remember their lives in Skerries – Sheila took us to the site of the Grand Hotel and told stories of bygone days. We had 85 of the possible 153 individuals attend the various events. They came from India, Germany, UK, Florida, Oregon and Ireland.

We got a great reception from local historians in Oldcastle and they told us the story of the camp during a presentation facilitated by the local library. There was a fantastic moment when, in the year 2013, after talking of events that happened nearly 100 years ago, Sheila, 89, stood up and said, “My father was in that camp….”.

Here are two photos of the day and also a scan of Heinrich’s first Irish passport. The first is of Sheila presenting Heinrich’s first Irish passport to Ciaran Mangan of Meath Co Co Libraries. It is to be an exhibit in a future museum and shows that there was at least one happy ending to the tale of the Oldcastle POW Camp.

The second is of the group that went to Oldcastle, when we stopped off at the Battle of the Boyne site.