The story of Danny Ellis

Beatings occurred regularly after that. Danny had often played truant from school and was behind the other boys in his schoolwork. “I’d be beaten for not knowing my spellings or my tables,” he remembers. “I was so frightened of the next beating that I couldn’t enjoy anything.”

There was one moment in those early days that allowed Danny a release from his fear. This moment is captured in one of the most moving songs on his album, “Tommy Bonner.”

“Tommy sang at mass that first Sunday and his voice was full of emotion,” says Danny. “It was as though he was crying into his voice, as though he was singing for every one of us. I broke down and cried in a way that I hadn’t allowed myself to do until then.”

Meanwhile, he was counting down the days to Christmas, when he expected to be reunited with his family. However, apart from one 30-minute visit his mother paid him a few weeks after he arrived at Artane, he never saw her again.

“Nobody has seen her since,” he says. “I think she must have been broken by the shame of it. She went to England and got lost.”

Danny was eventually forced to admit he had been abandoned. There was to be no escape from Artane but there was some respite from the violence – in the unexpected form of the Artane Boys’ Band.

Following its first public performance for the Prince of Wales in 1874, this band went on to become a regular fixture at events in Dublin. They played at all the big matches in Croke Park.

Danny had resisted auditioning for the band, believing there was little point as he’d be returning home at Christmas. Once he realized this was a false hope, he auditioned and became a trombone player. 

“It was my saving grace,” he realizes now. “Things started to change after I joined the band. Practicing kept me off the playground. I could avoid trouble and not be beaten. I also discovered that I loved music, that I could pour myself into it.”

At one stage, Danny was excluded from the band for fighting. He would not have been allowed to return were it not for the intervention of the kindly Brother O’Driscoll.

“Some of the Brothers were good, almost saintly,” Danny admits. “But others had no control over their emotions. Corporal punishment was their release. They all carried a leather strap and had full permission to use it.”

The abuse wasn’t just physical (or in some cases, sexual). There were quieter acts of cruelty.

When Danny was leaving the school at age 16, he discovered that his twin brothers had been in Artane for the previous two years. 

“Nobody had told me and I hadn’t recognized them because I’d last seen them as babies,” he says. “It was too late by then because all I wanted to do was leave. I didn’t want to have contact with family or depend on anyone.”

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