Scoláíre Staire - Irish History Scholar

The Free Online Irish History Magazine

Volume 2, Issue 2. April 2012

Articles - Reviews - Opinion - Diary - News

Savagely Brilliant: The Cartoons of Ernest Kavanagh

Victorian Tourism: The Picturesque Giant s CAPRIL auseway Scoláire’Staire 2012

Diaspora Politics: Review: A Stroll Irish Nationalism in Around the West Yorkshire Graveyards of Dublin 1

Available Autumn 2012 See www.fourcourtspress.com for more details 2

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Contents Volume 2, Issue 1, January 2012

4 Editorial 5 News 31 PhD Diary

13 Video: History

& Tech 39 Reviews

Castlereagh, Dublin Graveyards.

REGULARS f

IN THIS ISSUE i Labour : The Artist of the Revolution

James Curry analyses the cartoons of Ernest Kavanagh. The cartoonist for Larkin’s Irish Worker and other newspapers.

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Tourism : Visitors to the Giant’s Causeway

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Catherine Gartland examines the motivation behind visits to the Giant’s Causeway in the nineteenth century.

Politics: Irish Nationalism in the West Riding Andrew Maguire shows how Irish Nationalism was a different kind of beast

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in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

War: British Army Veterans in the Free State

Michael Robinson outlines the difficulties faced by Irish veterans of the

Great War on their return home to a very different Ireland.

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Editorial

W

e’re now on our third issue here at Scoláire Staire. The support and enthusiasm for the project has kept us going and spurred us on to come up with more ideas for history teaching, learning and research. The headspinning rate at which technology is advancing is only matched by the speed at which barriers to access are falling away. You no longer need to be wealthy and/or technically minded to access some of the great software and products that will be the future. Granted, some of the newer, mind-blowing products, that will come on the market soon will be out of reach for a lot of people, but it is now so simple and affordable to create an ebook or ejournal and market that product to a targeted group.

We held a discussion event in Galway last month (you can watch the video on p. 13) where some great points were made about history and its relationship with technology. Some of the issues raised included the academic community’s need to embrace technology (lest it end up like the music industry), the need to combat the use of the internet to propogate ‘bad’ history, and the need for some kind of accreditation system where online historical research could be verified. The debate was lively and very constructive. I know I came away with a lot of ideas for the future of Scoláire Staire and some other potential projects that have been floating around in my head.

In the last issue, I wrote an article entitled ‘Stuck in Limbo’ about the difficulties of being a professionally trained historian without a university affiliation, and therefore no access to the resources needed to conduct proper research. My argument was that perhaps universities could open these resources to their alumni with the result being that much more research will be carried out. Where my argument, perhaps, falls down is in the fact that universities pay huge sums for access to electronic resources and it is unlikely that the copyright owners will allow a renegotiation to allow alumni access. Even if 4

they did, universities would probably not be able to afford the extra costs.

So what is the solution to this problem. A colleague alerted me to an editorial in the Guardian recently, which asked why are electronic resources so expensive for universities to access? Consider this for a moment. Production costs are now very inexpensive. The academics who produce the articles do not get paid. The editors usually work for free too. What is going on here, and why is no one trying to stop it? The Guardian hit the nail on the head in its editorial. Academics have to publish their research in these kinds of journals in order to progress in their careers. Therefore, the journals continue to hold sway in the market and charge exorbitant prices for subscriptions. According to the Guardian, the solution is for academics to boycott these journals and publish only in open access publications. Too simple? Maybe not. There might be uproar that top academics would refuse to publish in the top journals, but it is they who really run the show. Why not withdraw our free labour from the journals with high subscription fees and give it to the journals that are free for all to peruse.

Would an open access, peer-reviewed, Irish history journal attract high quality research? With the right people on board and a willingness to give it a go among Irish historians, there is no reason why it wouldn’t, and there’s only one way to find out.

We’ll be seeking out opinions on this idea over the next few months so get in touch if you have anything to contribute.

Back to this edition of Scoláire Staire. We have another great line up of articles covering cartoonist Ernest Kavanagh, Ireland’s Great War veterans, Irish Nationalism in Yorkshire and nineteenth century tourism at the Giant’s Causeway. We also have all our usual features. I hope you enjoy reading it, and as always, we welcome articles, reviews and other features so get in touch with us if you have anything you would like to contribute.

Dr Adrian Grant Editor

11 Oakfield Court Buncrana Donegal scolairestaire@gmail.com Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

News

Interdisciplinary Conference, NUI Galway, 20-21 April This is an interdisciplinary conference that will bring together scholars from History, English, Law and Political Science to discuss the merits and limitations of transnational and global studies. More information can be found at http://www.nuigalway.ie/mooreinstitute/site/ view/1129/ and a conference programme is available from the organisers.

"Exploring transnational approaches to key themes of Irish scholarship - diaspora, nationalism, political violence, religious networks, human rights. International speakers, experts on transnational methodologies, will engage with non-Irish topics. The conference aims to cover a wide scope, with panels from late-medieval/early modern history to contemporary Ireland. It will be interdisciplinary in a very real sense and includes colleagues and graduate students from NUI Galway from different disciplines like History, English, French, and from the schools of Law, Political Science and Sociology, and the Huston Film School."

The Restoration Man is Coming to Ireland Presented by the architect George Clarke, Restoration Man follows owners who breathe new life into historic and vulnerable buildings in the UK and Ireland by converting them into their dream homes. As well as practical advice, George looks into the history of each building, why they were built and how they have evolved over the years within the local community.

Channel 4’s Restoration Man is set to return for another series and is looking for owners of unusual or historic buildings to take part!

They are looking for a variety of properties such as follies, former public toilets, dovecotes, old military and railway buildings and towers. Properties can be listed or unlisted and owners should ideally have full planning permission and finance in place.

If you would like to take part, or are aware of any projects that might be suitable contact the production team on (0044) 0333 577 7772 or email restorationman@tigeraspect.co.uk.

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The History Festival of Ireland - 9-10 June 2012 The inaugural History Festival of Ireland is curated by author and historian Turtle Bunbury and is part of Eigse 2012. It aspires to educate and to be a bit of fun, to resolve and to confound, to question and to explore. Ireland boasts dozens of literary festivals and spoken word events – but none of them give themselves over to the discussion of History and the things that we have and haven’t learnt from it.

Featuring some of the most learned minds of our generation, the two-day festival will be a veritable feast of high-octane historical banter, embracing topics from the impact of Brian Boru’s victory at Clontarf a thousand years ago to the treatment of Irish soldiers who served in the British Army after the Second World War. We will look at the heroes and villains of our past, and muse upon ways in which we can make history relevant in the future. We will explore the historical legacies of Catholicism and Empire, of Slavery and Sport, of War and Peace. And we hope to send you home again feeling a little wiser for your visit.

Admission to the Festival Marquee is €10 per day, and the Library Talks are an additional €10 per event.

Speakers include Patrick Geoghegan, Diarmaid Ferriter, Ruth Dudley Edwards, David Norris and many more.

For more information go to www.thehistoryfestivalofireland.com

Call For Papers: The 8th Annual Sports History IrelandConference - University College Cork, 15 September 2012 The conference is being staged in the Department of History, University College Cork. This will be the first time Sports History Ireland has held an event in Cork City.

Papers are invited for the conference which aims to provide a discussion forum for all those interested in the history of sport. Anyone who wishes to deliver a twenty minute paper – on any aspect of sports history – should submit a 200 word proposal to Dr Richard McElligott by 1 June 2012 at sportshistoryireland@hotmail.com Dr Richard McElligott (UCD) Conor Curran (De Montfort University Leicester) Dr Paul Rouse (UCD) Dr William Murphy (Mater Dei Institute, DCU).

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News

Call For Papers: Political Studies Association of Ireland Annual Conference 2012 This year’s PSAI conference will be hosted by the University of Ulster at Magee, Derry on the weekend of 1921 October 2012. The call for papers is outlined below: Politics, Culture and Society in a Changing Ireland The University of Ulster’s Magee Campus last hosted the PSAI Annual Conference over twenty-five years ago; as Derry/Londonderry prepares to become the first UK City of Culture in 2013, it is appropriate that this year’s conference returns to the city and considers the theme of politics, culture and society. We therefore particularly welcome paper and panel proposals which address topics related to this theme including the politics of culture, the political uses and abuses of culture, developments in political culture etc.

However, as is the tradition of the PSAI Annual Conference, paper and panel proposals are welcome in all areas of politics and international relations, not just on the conference’s headline theme and not just those with an Irish dimension. This can include (though is not confined to): political theory and philosophy political parties and elections government and policy making peace and conflict studies international relations local government and administration political communication political history Procedures for Submitting a Proposal Please forward an abstract of no more than 300 words to the conference convenors, Dr Emmet O’Connor and Dr Sandra Buchanan at psai2012@ulster.ac.uk The abstract should be submitted as a word attachment, together with a covering email stating the (1) title of your paper, (2) your institutional affiliation and (3) your contact details. Before submitting your proposal, you might want to consider assembling a panel. You can do this by bringing together other potential panellists yourself, or by contacting the appropriate PSAI specialist study group (see www.psai.ie). Panel proposals must include abstracts and contact details for each paper. The deadline for the receipt of proposals is Friday 25 May 2012. It is hoped a draft conference programme will be issued by the end of June.

New “Comments” Feature on scolairestaire.com Our website, www.scolairestaire.com, now features the ability for our users to comment on certain articles and other features. The aim of this is to make the website more interactive, allowing our readers to interect with our contributors on some of the more opinionated pieces that appear our pages. For example, you can click to comment at the bottom of the PhD Diary in this issue or click here to comment of the video of our discussion event on History and Technology. Your opinions are most welcome and we hope to create some discussion on issues affecting history in the next few months.

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Kavanagh’s “The Redmond-O’Brien Press Gang” depicts a reluctant Irish Volunteer being led ‘to the European Shambles’ in August 1914

by Irish politicians John Redmond and William O’Brien. (National Library of Ireland).

SAVAGELY BRILLIANT: THE CARTOONS OF ERNEST KAVANAGH Ernest Kavanagh was shot dead outside Liberty Hall on 25 April 1916, (most likely by a British sniper stationed at the nearby Custom House). His death brought an end the career of an important yet relatively unknown Dublin cartoonist who was one of the many civilians caught in the crossfire of the Easter Rising. James Curry reflects on Kavanagh’s artistic legacy and discusses the newspaper illustrations which ‘E.K.’ left behind.

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I

n the four years prior to his death on the front steps of Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) where he was employed as an insurance clerk, Ernest Kavanagh successfully established himself as a noted political cartoonist. During this time he voluntarily contributed dozens of hard-hitting illustrations to Irish labour, nationalist and suffrage newspapers under the monogram ‘E.K.’, several of which went on to be reproduced in England and America. While his work occasionally appeared in publications such as Fianna, Irish Freedom and The Irish Citizen, it was undoubtedly Kavanagh’s prolific series of cartoons for the ITGWU’s official newspaper, the Irish Worker, which earned him the most recognition.

Edited by charismatic labour leader James Larkin, this popular weekly paper was founded on 27 May 1911 and quickly helped consolidate Larkin’s popularity in Irish working class circles. Certainly, the importance of the newspaper was abundantly clear to the leaders of the Dublin Employers’ Federation, an organisation formed in response to the spread of ‘Larkinism’ across the city. When meeting to discuss ways in which to destroy the ITGWU prior to the 1913 Dublin Lockout they laid particular stress ‘upon the malign influence’ exercised by the Irish Worker which, they argued, ‘spared neither man, woman or child in pursuance of the official policy which aimed to making Mr. James Larkin Dictator of the City of Dublin’.

One of the features of the paper most likely to have infuriated the Federation over the comScoláire Staire APRIL 2012

Labour ing months would have been the ferocious cartoons of ‘E.K.’.

Negative portrayal of DMP The earliest that Ernest Kavanagh could have been employed as an insurance clerk at Liberty Hall is 1912, the year that the National Insurance Act came into force in Ireland and an Approved Society was set up by the ITGWU at their headquarters. Indeed, this was the year that he first started to draw cartoons for the Irish Worker. In his opening few months as the paper’s new cartoonist, Kavanagh tended to merely provide visual representations of comic poems written by other contributors. Yet upon the outbreak of the Dublin Lockout in August 1913 his role immediately increased, and Kavanagh emerged as a more independent voice whose cartoons were now very much valued on their own merits. During this period he viciously attacked William Martin Murphy and the Dublin police on a regular basis. Regarding his depiction of the latter, the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) were frequently portrayed as brutish, bloodthirsty, drunken tyrants who were controlled by politicians and employers and all too ready to administer a beating to the city’s working class population with their batons.

answer as to why Kavanagh used such provocative imagery with regards the DMP is that he was simply responding to the brutality they displayed towards the workers during the opening days of the Lockout. To take his own words from a letter written to the Irish Worker, during this time the Dublin police ‘butchered two of our citizens and maimed hundreds of others, and spared neither woman nor child’. The key event referred to here by Kavanagh was Ireland’s first ‘Bloody Sunday’, an infamous riot which saw a huge gathering of police officers indiscriminately baton hundreds of trade unionists and civilians on Sackville Street (modern day O’Connell Street) in late August 1913. Handel Booth, an MP who witnessed the carnage, later recalled the scene as follows: “His Majesty in Blue” sees Kavanagh savagely criticise the Dublin police for their heavy-handed treatment of the city’s working class population during the opening days of the 1913 Lockout. (NLI).

The most obvious 9

William Martin Murphy. (National Archives of Ireland).

The police had drawn their batons... It was an ordinary Sunday crowd. They were certainly bewildered, and did not know which way to turn... silence ensued save for pattering feet and sickening thuds. The noble street was in the hands of the most brutal constabulary ever let loose on a peaceful assembly... batches of the Government’s minions wildly striking with truncheons at every one within reach.

The riot left Dublin’s main thoroughfare resembling a battlefield in a matter of minutes. The fact that the Dublin police also carried out a series of violent raids on nearby working class neighbourhoods merely compounded the damage to their reputation.

The Irish Worker consistently maintained that the ‘hired ruffians in uniform with a lust for blood’, were instruments of Dublin Castle and rich capitalists such as William Martin Murphy. Yet a study of Kavanagh’s cartoons for the paper makes it obvious that resentment towards the Dublin police was far more deep-rooted than a simple reaction to “Bloody Sun10

day”. As far back as the summer of 1912, in one of his first illustrations for the paper, ‘E.K.’ had depicted the police as bullies who were determined to keep the working class population socially suppressed by acting in cahoots with tyrannical Irish employers. Studying his antipolice cartoons, what stands out is not simply Kavanagh’s hatred of the DMP but also the manner in which he chose to endow them with hideous apelike features, with their huge mouths and bristling teeth clearly recalling the manner in which the London cartoonists of the 1860s had earlier represented the Fenian’s of their day.

William ‘Murder’ Murphy William Martin Murphy was the recipient of equally ferocious treatment at the hands of Kavanagh’s pen as the Dublin police. At various times Ireland’s most eminent businessman was portrayed as a tyrant, thief and murderer in a series of notorious illustrations that became synonymous with the Irish Worker and its journalistic style.

Emmet O’Connor has observed that Murphy’s enormous wealth and influence served James Larkin’s ‘compulsion to put a face on the enemy’. The same is equally applicable with regards Kavanagh, with Murphy replacing the stereotypically overweight and smug capitalist of his early labour cartoons as the Dublin Lockout became more and more bitter and personalised. Although Kavanagh had depicted Murphy as a murderous scoundrel a full year before the outbreak of the Lockout, it was his cartoons attacking the leader of the Dublin Employers’ Federation in the opening

months of the great dispute that gained him real notoriety. As Dermot Keogh has noted, Kavanagh’s ‘savagely brilliant cartoons’ soon had many Dubliners referring to their city’s foremost entrepreneur as William ‘Murder’ Murphy.

Nonetheless, save for Robert Lowery’s one-sentence dismissal that, although ‘satirically clever’ they ‘lacked sophistication and were crudely drawn’, existing studies of the Irish Worker have completely ignored Ernest Kavanagh’s contribution to the paper. It is clear from the context in which his statement was made that Lowery saw ‘E.K.’s’ cartoons as one of The Irish Worker’s ‘defects’. Since Kavanagh’s cartoons were likely one of its most widely appreciated strengths, this view Kavanagh’s infamous depiction of William Martin Murphy as a murderous vulture, published on the front page of The Irish Worker in September 1913. (NLI).

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Right: Kavanagh’s “The Angel of Freedom”, one of his best known cartoons, attacks John Redmond for his stance on women’s suffrage. (NLI).

is unfair. In an era when many workers had poor literacy levels and the Irish Worker faced fierce competition every week, the importance of his cartoons should not be underestimated. Considering that the ITGWU’s publication faced a never-ending battle against space restrictions and was dependent on advertising revenue for its very existence, the size and prominence of Kavanagh’s illustrations clearly reflects the level of importance in which they were held by Larkin.

With two-thirds appearing on the Irish Worker’s front-page, they were an important tool in getting people talking and attracting a new readership. And when one considers the editorial style of the paper, it is clear that the lack of technical sophistication in many of ‘E.K.’s’ cartoons

should not be viewed negatively.

After all, even if Kavanagh had produced more carefully drawn and “sophisticated” cartoons, the truth is that they would have looked peculiarly out of place in the Irish Worker, which essentially specialised in conveying messages of blunt immediacy to its readers.

This is not to discount their quality. Although always forcefully simple in their message, ‘E.K.’s’ illustrations could sometimes be imbued with a range of subtleties in terms of their characterisation and attention to detail.

Unlike the Irish Worker’s previous artistic contributor, Kavanagh recognised quite clearly that more could be achieved by satirising villains than glorifying heroes, a realisation that gave his work greater vitality and power. Furthermore, it should be noted that Kavanagh’s harsh and almost childlike strokes could imply an imbecility in his targets that essentially captured the Irish Worker’s spirit by rendering them as utter objects of ridicule.

Two-pronged attack on John Redmond A handful of powerful ‘E.K.’ cartoons were published in the Irish Citizen, a weekly Dublinbased newspaper of the women’s suffrage movement that had been set up by Francis SheehySkeffington and James Cousins on 25 May 1912. The paper’s masthead motto – ‘For Men and Women Equally The Rights of Citizenship; From Men and Women Equally the Duties of Citizenship’ – demonstrated the editorial policy of The Irish Citizen, with the issue of “Votes for Women” invariably dominat-

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ing the paper’s pages during its opening years. Throughout this time the Irish Citizen supported the introduction of Home Rule on principle, although repeatedly emphasised that it would amount to little more than “Male Rule” unless women were enfranchised prior to a bill of Irish self-determination being passed. This was a view supported by Kavanagh, whose cartoons for the paper attacked the unjustness and hypocrisy of Irish men in their attitudes towards women. Although the editors of the Irish Citizen viewed Will Dyson, the wellknown pro-suffrage cartoonist of the Daily Herald, as ‘easily the greatest cartoonist now working in these islands’, upon publication of Kavanagh’s first cartoon for the paper, “The Angel of Freedom”, they praised him as a young artist with the ‘promise of a brilliant future’. This cartoon would go on to become a powerful propaganda image for the women’s suffrage movement in Ireland, causing John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party, whom it negatively depicted, considerable embarrassment.

Redmond would also come in for scathing treatment from Ka11

The only surviving photo of Ernest Kavanagh, taken just four days before his death in the 1916 Easter Rising. (NLI).

eager for Connolly to launch a rising against England in 1916, leading to the cruel irony of his cartoons striving to pave the way for a conflict that would subsequently claim his life.

The Irish Worker’s ideal cartoonist

vanagh in his anti-recruitment cartoons for the Irish Worker (see page 8) during the paper’s final months. The majority of the cartoons appeared alongside equally savage poems from his sister Maeve, who was also a frequent contributor to the Irish Worker and other newspapers from the period. As Ben Novick has pointed out, the Irish Worker ‘detested the war and wished for Ireland to remain neutral, in alliance with working men around the world’. This saw Kavanagh’s artistic talents become a key weapon for the paper during the opening months of the war, especially during James Connolly’s short-lived editorship of the Irish Worker, when his cartoons presented ‘a caricatured chronology of Redmond’s recruiting efforts’. These ‘biting cartoons’, as later described by playwright Seán O’Casey, were fiercely critical of the notion of Irish Volunteers fighting for Britain in the First World War. As the conflict progressed it became clear that Kavanagh was 12

Although some ‘E.K.’ illustrations showed definite glimpses of humour, it must be noted that, by and large, Kavanagh’s work was characterised by anger and indignation.

In other words, it was his habit to vilify targets in seeking to rouse the conscience of the Irish public rather than simply trying to raise laughs at their expense.

Yet James Larkin would not have wanted it any other way. In its first year of circulation The Irish Worker published over a dozen cartoons by an unknown artist called ‘C.B.’, although this series varied in power and tended to merely take jabs at targets rather than landing any knockout blows. Kavanagh’s illustrations would prove to be far more impactful and this no doubt played an important role in ensuring why he became the Irish Worker’s new cartoonist in 1912. It may have taken him over a year to discover the artistic talent of Ernest Kavanagh but, when he did, Larkin had found an artist that could perfectly compliment the potent written word of his paper: ‘E.K.’ was undoubtedly the Irish Worker’s ideal cartoonist. And while it may be true to

say that his work possesses more historical importance than artistic merit, his talent was unquestionable. Kavanagh may not have been as technically accomplished or politically incisive as other more celebrated cartoonists from his era, such as Thomas Fitzpatrick and John Fergus O’Hea, yet his illustrations could almost always be relied upon to serve their purpose and provoke a reaction. He possessed the classic cartoonist ability of being able to exaggerate the facial and bodily features of his targets without disguising their identity, and the best of his distorted depictions of Redmond, Murphy and the Dublin police have left us with defining images of the multi-faceted protests in Ireland during the years leading up to the 1916 Rising.

Further Reading J. Curry, Artist of the Revolution: The Cartoons of Ernest Kavanagh, 1884-1916 (Cork, 2012).

B. Novick, Conceiving Revolution: Irish Nationalist Propaganda during the First World War (Dublin, 2001).

R. Lowery, ‘Sean O’Casey and the Irish Worker’ in R. Lowery (ed.), O’Casey Annual 3 (London, 1984).

James Curry is a native of Dublin who has graduated with B.A. and M. Phil history degrees from Trinity College Dublin. His first book, Artist of the Revolution: The Cartoons of Ernest Kavanagh, 1884-1916, which was recently released by Mercier Press, will be reviewed in the next issue of Scoláire Staire.

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Conference

Irish History Students’ Association Annual Conference 2012 The IHSA Conference, which was held in NUI Galway from 2-4 March was a great success. Congratulations to Cumann Staire at NUIG for organising such a great event. Proceedings kicked off with a wine reception on the Friday night before a very busy Saturday of papers on diverse topics such as the landed elite in Ireland, and the media and labour unrest. The conference dinner was a late one but there was still a good turnout for Scoláire Staire’s roundtable discussion on history and technology in the King’s Head the morning after.

You can watch the video of the discussion below. A fantastic walking tour, guided

by John Cunningham, Jackie Uí Chionna and Dara Folan brought the weekend to a close. Thanks to Cumann Staire and The King’s Head for their help in putting on the roundtable discussion. There were some great points raised and I think we all left with a lot to think about. Anyone who did not manage to make it to The King’s Head, click the iamge below to watch the video on Youtube.

Below: A section of the attendees at the conference dinner in the Meryick Hotel.

History & Technology: Challenges and Opportunities for Historians in the Digital Age. Chair: Adrian Grant

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Main Speakers: John O’Callaghan, Kieran Fitzpatrick

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Nicholl’s Giant’s Cause West (Ulster Museum

The Picturesque Causeway The number of British visitors to Ireland rose steadily following the Act of Union between the two islands. Catherine Gartland investigates ninteenth century tourism to the Giant’s Causeway.

T

he early nineteenth century saw the birth of a new kind of tourism in Ireland.

War and political instability in Europe had put an end to the British elites’ traditional Grand Tour, which had involved an instructive visit to the great urban and cultural centres of Europe.

After the passing of the Act of Union, the ‘sister Isle’ offered a safer destination, also brought closer by regular steam travel after 1820. Moreover, the new tourists were often members of the emerging middle classes, who travelled mainly for pleasure. In England, the Lake District had become a fashionable destination while in Ireland, the lakes at Killarney and Giant’s Causeway were popular spots, often regarded as ‘the Southern and Northern wonders of Ireland’.

From philosophical landscape

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to Romantic scenery Many tourists were already familiar with the Causeway landscape through prints of Susanna Drury’s Prospects, painted c.

1739 and which were still celebrated as the most accurate representations of the site. Drury’s contemporaries had first and foremost been interested in the Giant’s Causeway as a scientific curiosity. Like the protagonists of the Prospects, they surveyed, measured and took samples from the columns. They marvelled at the regularity of the natural geometrical shapes, which, they thought, revealed the existence of a ‘Great Architect’. The Causeway represented a significant page of what they called the ‘Book of Nature’, which confirmed their conception of the physical world as an ordered universe created for humanity by a benevolent deity.

Early visitors often speculated on the origin of the structure, which was debated by natural philosophers - as early scientists called themselves - until 1816. (See sidebar, p. 18). In that year, it was finally proved that the columns were the result of the sudden cooling down of volcanic rock in contact with water, confirming the active role of volcanoes in the formation of the Earth. This also implied a new notion of geological time, which did not involve a succession of pre-ordained biblical epochs, but continuous change over an immeasurable stretch of time. Man was now propelled into a changing world on a scale beyond human comprehension.

Later visitors were awed at the forces of nature. John Christian Curwen recalled how he was overcome by his senses at Pleaskin, on the Causeway coast: Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

Tourism

eway from the BELUM U1256)

‘the sight here confounds, and leaves the mind unable to comprehend what it has in its contemplation.’

Man was no longer a privileged being endowed with Reason presiding over the Creation but a mere creature subjected to its senses.

The Giant’s Causeway from the West (above), painted by Belfast artist Andrew Nicholl c. 1830, depicts the same area as Drury’s West Prospect, yet illustrates how the perception of the landscape had altered by the early nineteenth century.

Whereas Drury offered a sweeping view of a tranquil and ordered landscape, Nicholl’s point of view is at sea level. The spectator feels truly enveloped by the landscape and the focus is on mood, expressed by the elements: the sea and the sky. It is a subjective representation, in which the spectator has moved into the picture and become a participant, experiencing a particular moment in a transient world. Nature had come to be perceived first of all as a source of emotion, and for tourists, the Causeway was now an aesthetic object, to be experienced rather than understood: the ‘philosophical’ (scientific) landscape had become Romantic scenery.

Picturesque tourism: the aesthetic experience In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke had challenged the Enlightenment view of Man as a rational being, who had a duty to tame the natural world.

He argued that Man’s response to nature was not rational, but a result of emotions, themselves a consequence of instinct. William Gilpin, the first theorist of Picturesque tourism (see below), subsequently drew on Burke and insisted that the pleasure derived from the contemplation of scenery was emotional: ‘We are most delighted, when some grand scene ... strikes us beyond the power of thought ... every mental operation is suspended ... We rather feel than survey it.’

Picturesque taste was anti-utilitarian; aesthetic pleasure was now to be the chief purpose of the traveller.

From the early 1800s, there was a noticeable change in the type of information contained in travellers’ accounts and guidebooks to the Causeway. Technical geological information was frequently omitted altogether or relegated to footnotes. Instead, there was a marked increased interest in what Burke had defined as ‘the Sublime’.

Sublime was what was capable of provoking awe, a sensation of pleasure mixed with terror, an emotion which reminded Man of mortality. Conversely, what he called ‘the Beautiful’ was defined by order and regularity and associated with the emotion of love. Magnitude in sight and sound, darkness, ruggedness and irregularity were some of the elements now sought for in the landscape. Early Nineteenth Century tourists were in search of a natural beauty defined by these new aesthetic criteria.

It was not just the Sublime, but contrast and variety, which visitors were seeking, as they actively composed aesthetically pleasing views. The following description of Pleaskin in The Scientific Tourist (1818) includes all the characteristic elements of a ‘picturesque’ scenery: In the sixteen different strata of which it is composed, beauty and sublimity are wonderfully blended and harmonized. Over a dark and rugged base fringed with incessant foam it lifts its sides adorned with various tints of green gray lichen, and vermillion rock … like a theatre of Nature harmoniously arranged.

Irregularity and dark tones in the foreground only bring out the vivid colours and harmony Picturesque Tourism

The ‘Picturesque’ referred to the appreciation of the scenery as a picture. Towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, the fashion was for tourists to observe sceneries through ‘Claude glasses’ (above) - named after classical landscape painter Claude Lorrain (1600-1682).

These were portable coloured mirrors which enabled the traveller to compose aesthetically pleasing views, reminiscent of Claudean landscapes – ‘picturesque’ sceneries.

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of the main scene; the Sublime is combined with other elements, and subdued into a pleasing - if staged, composition.

Written descriptions frequently compared the scenery to painted landscapes, but from the 1820s, as prints were getting cheaper to produce, illustrations also played an increasingly prominent role in travel books.

The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland (1840), illustrated by W.H. Bartlett, included numerous images in the picturesque style (see p. 19). At first glance, they seem similar in character to Nicholl’s view. Bartlett’s Giant’s Causeway is about mood, expressed through the violence of the elements and the rugged shapes of the rocks; the human characters, dwarfed by the exaggerated size of the cliffs, appear dominated by nature. The perspective, however, is different; as in Drury’s image, the view is captured from above. Moreover, the dark foreground, which frames the picture, helps to further distance the scene from the spectator. The Sublime, far from being experienced at first hand, as in Nicholl’s painting, is instead contained and controlled.

It is not a Romantic image, but a carefully constructed scene, as was pointed out by the reviewer of the Scenery and Antiquities in the Irish Penny Journal, when he observed that ‘the ingenious artist had represented the sun setting in the North’!

Susanna Drury’s Prospects The East Prospect and West Prospect of the Giant’s Causeway, now in the custody of the Ulster Museum, were painted c.1739.

Entered anonymously in a competition ran by the Royal Society of Dublin in 1740, they were awarded first prize and were widely reproduced thereafter in print form. The Society was chiefly concerned with promoting agriculture and commerce and the competition recompensed the best entries in various branches of ‘improvement’, drawing then being considered a technical skill rather than an ‘art’ in the modern sense. The images were utilitarian in purpose and understood as topographical views of a ‘philosophical’ (scientific) landscape. The dominating point of view, tranquil mood and focus on the regular shapes evoke an orderly, balanced and permanent universe within the grasp of human Reason, while the sections of broken basaltic columns in the foreground of the East Prospect are reminiscent of more modern scientific illustrations. They would eventually be used as the basis for mineralogical plates in the celebrated Encyclopédie of French philosophers Diderot and d’Alembert, which suggested that basalts were of volcanic origin.

East Prospect of the Giant’s Causeway (Ulster Museum, BELUM U1652)

West Prospect of the Giant’s Causeway (Ulster Musuem, BELUM U1653)

Andrews compares the picturesque tourist to a ‘big-game hunter ... “capturing” wild scenes and “fixing” them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up’; like the Romantic, the tourist is in search of the Sublime, the wild 16

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and the unimproved, but his or her quest is ultimately about taming and controlling nature, and, as Andrews’s metaphor suggests, about consuming it in novel ways. Indeed, as tourism was developing at the Causeway, the scenery was becoming a commodity, a product for the tourist to consume.

Nature as commodity: the tourist experience Commercial tourism at the Causeway was already well organised by the early nineteenth century. As early as 1813, Curwen was directed to the site by a ‘guide-post’. Accommodation was then available at the nearby village of Bushmills and a little public house near the Causeway offered refreshments. In 1835, the officers of the Ordnance Survey found in Bushmills two small inns and a hotel which could accommodate 18 persons and, by 1843, when Mr and Mrs Hall toured the coast, a hotel had been built ‘immediately above the footway that leads to the Causeway.’

Visitors could avail of a number of organised activities, at a cost.

By 1807, one of the caves had been closed off, so that tourists could be charged an admittance fee. Boat tours were also on offer. By the 1830s, there was already a price structure in place, with the expense of a boat and its crew fixed at 12 s., the guide generally receiving 5 s.

These organised activities enabled the visitors to fulfil their aesthetic quest and to experience the emotions they sought in a non-threatening, controlled environment. Burke had argued that the feelings we experienced Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

in nature could also be artificially induced. This was exactly what the tourist experience at the Causeway set out to do: to enhance and manipulate the sensations caused by the natural scenery. The visitors were, for instance, taken to specific points of view, a favourite being ‘Hamilton’s Chair’, from which visitors, even though they were on the edge of a precipice, could safely admire the picturesque scenery of Pleaskin. Guides frequently told anecdotes about falls down cliffs, which added to the thrill. They also made sure to mention the danger involved when guiding people down the pathway to the Causeway, even though this was recognised by the locals as a reasonably safe path. Another favourite activity was the visit of Port Coon cave, where the impressive waves created an impression of claustrophobia, further enhanced by the roar of the sea. To heighten the experience, a gun was usually shot in the cave, where the reverberating echo combined loudness, suddenness and infinity - three sources of the Sublime, according to Burke. It was, of course, an artificial experience but was all part of the ‘effect’ the tourists were seeking.

Visitors were not so much aesthetes, looking for raw nature, as improvers of a kind. They wanted a product - the scenery - tailored and packaged to their requirements. They were consumers in search of what travel writers already termed ‘attractions’. By the late 1830s, these had multiplied to such an extent that a travel writer commented that the Causeway was ‘rather an expensive exhibition.’

To conclude the visit, tourists were usually offered small box-

es of mineralogical specimens.

Earlier visitors had often collected samples. However, the specimens now offered had a different function; they were mementoes, objects which acted as physical reminders of the whole tourist experience. They provided a physical proof of the achievement of the tourist’s quest: they were indeed ‘trophies’ of a kind. Tellingly, the anonymous author of Notes on a Journey to the North (1827) described the specimens as ‘desirable’. This confirms the commodification of the whole aesthetic experience for the tourist, now an avid consumer. Furthermore, once informed that ‘no ladies or gentlemen came to the Causeway without purchasing similar specimens,’ she found ‘the argument … too cogent to be resistible.’ This further illuminates the nature of the picturesque tourist’s quest, which was powered by a compulsion to fulfil an insatiable desire for the ultimate experience. This experience, though, was not the culmination of a personal search, but was validated by what previous visitors had themselves consumed - and deemed worth having. The value of the experience could even be quantified.

Henry Inglis, a professional travel writer, assessed the degree of sublimity of the landscape according to the height of the cliffs: Bengore, he complained, was, at three-hundred and thirty feet high, ‘certainly not sufficiently elevated to awaken the faintest impression of sublimity’.

The tourist, therefore, had to go through all the obligatory stops, and follow the itineraries recommended by guidebooks, in order to optimise a sensory experience validated by oth17

The dispute on the nature of basalts The dispute on the nature of basalts, in which the Causeway – and Drury’s Prospects - played a prominent part, was a significant episode in the development of geology and the discovery of geological time. From the late 1770s to 1816, the Causeway was the locus of a debate between ‘Neptunists’ and ‘Plutonists’, who disagreed on the causes and date of its formation. Whereas the former believed that it was shaped by the action of water at the time of the Deluge, the latter thought that the formation was of volcanic origin and antedated the Flood. It seemed that the volcanic theory questioned biblical chronology and cast doubt on the very story of Creation.

It implied a new notion of geological time, no longer involving a succession of revealed pre-ordained biblical epochs, but continuous change over an immeasurable stretch of time. The volcanic theory, and therefore the role of volcanoes in the formation of the earth, was demonstrated by a series of experiments in 1816. Formerly seen by philosophers of the Enlightenment as a rational being meant to rule nature, Man was now propelled into a changing world on a scale beyond human comprehension. ers. The tone of travel writers was often prescriptive; even the Ordnance Survey Memoirs suggested that the first time visitor, ‘instead of creeping down the Causeway by degrees ... and losing all the imposing effect of its grandeur,’ should approach it by boat to experience its ‘sublimity’.

The tourist followed the trail of others, thereby further confirming the value of what he or she had visited.

William Thackeray, writing in the guise of Titmarsh the cockney, parodied the behaviour of the picturesque tourist, who takes little enjoyment in his pleasure tour. His anti-hero is kidnapped onto a boat tour by guides he mistakes for outlaws, only being released once he has completed the visit and money has been extracted from his pocket. ‘Why go see (the Causeway)?’ he wonders. The answer is simple: ‘to be able to say that I have seen it.’ He is consuming the scenery as he would ‘a leg of mutton and turnips’, which, he comments, ‘(he could) describe 18

... better’.

The Causeway as an economic resource It is interesting that Thackeray showed the guides as playing the active part. It would certainly be simplistic to picture them solely as victims, themselves consumed by the tourists.

There was undoubtedly an element of exploitation. The local inhabitants seemed to be part of the whole package, one more constituent in a landscape consumed by the tourist. It is revealing that the Halls described them as part of the scenery: ‘The guides at the Causeway do not injure the effect of the scene ... they look so diminutive when contrasted with the huge and mighty columns of the Causeway, as to seem pigmies, rather than human beings... They are of earth-earthy; of the stonestoney’. Even though the Halls appreciated the locals’ knowledge of geology, the latter were depicted as savages, who belonged in nature. They were part

of the whole tourist experience, the ‘stage Irish’, whose task was to entertain the visitor in the ‘theatre of Nature’. The dialogue between two guides acting out the ‘superstitious Irish’ for the entertainment of the Halls is a fine performance: “I’m thinking” said one to another, “that the giant who made that organ for his diversion had a grand idea of music.” ... “it must have been ... a fine sight to see the giants, and their wives and children, listening ... to the beautiful verses that your mother and mine used to sing to their spinning wheels” The ‘naivety’ of the locals – good savages of sorts – and their traditional connection to the local scenery added value to the improved landscape, by conferring it a touch of authenticity, which reconnected the induced experience with ‘real’ nature.

Nevertheless, as the above dialogue testifies, the guides were not merely passive victims, but also important actors in the tourist experience. If the Causeway had now become a commodity to be consumed, the locals were the producers, who packaged and ‘improved’ the natural scenery to satisfy demand. The Causeway was undoubtedly an important local economic resource. The Ordnance Survey officer noted how business and dealing were increasing in Bushmills, as tourism contributed not only to the support of the hotel keepers, but also to that of the dealers and guides. It was further suggested that working as a guide could be quite a profitable summer activScoláire Staire APRIL 2012

ity, generating an income sufficient to support people through the winter. This may have been slightly exaggerated, as it was also noted that locals often supplemented their earnings by fishing and gathering sea-weed.

The active role of the guides in manipulating the tourist and actually creating demand was also hinted at in the Memoirs. It was ‘to suit their own purpose and enhance their importance’, it was suggested, that the guides had assigned names to every feature of the Causeway.

The recommendations of the Reverend Richardson, a Church of Ireland rector with a keen interest in geology, to his protégé, the guide Alick McMullan, further illustrate the relationship between guide, tourist and the local natural environment. In a letter penned c. 1810, Richardson advises the guide on

‘exhibiting and explaining the beauties and wonders of the Giant’s Causeway’. This is clearly described as an economic activity, a ‘business’, involving ‘competitors’. The visit is evidently tailored to the demands of visitors, as the guide is instructed to apportion the amount of information to the time his visitors are prepared to indulge him with, and to be ready for what they ‘expect (him) to say’. There is nevertheless a certain amount of manipulation involved, as it is suggested that the guide imposes his own limits, avoiding certain areas, so he can maximise his income. Nature is here plainly considered a marketable commodity, which the guide aims at selling at the best possible price. This is a perception of the natural environment which does not seem that far removed from that of the tourist.

Conclusion In the early nineteenth century, the Giant’s Causeway, once an object of scientific investigation for visitors of the Enlightenment Age, came to be regarded primarily as a source of emotions by the new tourists of the Romantic era. On the surface, it seems that the relationship to nature had totally altered.

The evidence, however, reveals some continuity. The elites of the previous century believed that they had been endowed with reason so that they could improve a physical environment which had been created for Man to partake of. Picturesque tourists, aesthetically motivated as they were, were also consumers of the natural world, albeit in a novel way. They sought a very specific emotional experience, defined in terms of the aesthet-

Bartlett’s Giant’s Causeway.

From Willis, N.P. and J. Stirling Coyne. Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland. Vol.2

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19

ic rules of the age. To satisfy their expectations, the natural landscape had to be ‘improved’, tailored and packaged to their requirements, by the locals, for whom the scenery constituted an important economic resource. Arguably, the latter became a commodity themselves, as their ‘character’ and sto- Thackeray’s boat tour ries were consumed by the tourists. Nevertheless, they soon learnt to add value to the scenery and exploit it to their own material advantage.

This ambiguous relationship can be read in the context of colonialism, where the Irish environment was merely a commodity for the consumption of the British tourist. Equally, it could be examined in terms of the emergence of the middleclasses, who were also on the ascent in Ireland. Investigating the relationship of these Irish middle-classes to their own natural environment may well reveal a conception of nature not that far removed from that of the ‘colonial’ tourist.

Further Reading ‘The curious traveller, who shall visit the Giant’s Causeway’. Coleraine: Canning Printer, 1811, BL, RB23a 20398.

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Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of

Gilpin, William. Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape: with a Poem on Landscape Painting. 3rd ed.

London: Cadell and Davies, 1808.

Hall, Mr and Mrs S.C. Ireland, its Scenery, Character & c. Vol.3 (3 vols). London: Jeremiah How, 1843.

Inglis, Henry D. A Journey Throughout Ireland During the Spring, Summer and Autumn of 1834. 5th ed. London: Whittaker, 1838.

Notes on a Journey in the North of Ireland in the Summer of 1827. London: Baldwin & Cradock, 1828.

Thackeray, William Makepeace.

The Irish Sketch Book. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1985.

our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 2nd ed. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759.

Curwen, John Christian. Observations on the State of Ireland.

Vol.1 (2 vols). London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1818.

Day, Angélique and Patrick McWilliams (eds). Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland: Parishes of County Antrim V, 18305, 1837-8, Giant’s Causeway and Ballymoney. Vol.16. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies and Royal Irish Academy, 1992.

The Scientific Tourist Through Ireland. London: J. Booth, 1818.

Willis, N.P. and J. Stirling Coyne. Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland. Vol.2 (2 vols). Ill. W.H. Bartlett. London: George Virtue, n.d.

Catherine Gartland studied languages (English) at the University of Nantes in France and has an MA in Irish Cultural Heritages from the University of Ulster. She currently works at the Irish & Local Studies Library in Armagh. This article is based on a chapter from her MA thesis, which looked at representations of the Giants’ Causeway - and the relationship of man to nature in the Irish context - in the period 1740-1840.

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Department of History Roinn na Staire

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21

“We’ll Wreathe the Shamrock with the Rose”: Irish Nationalism in the West Riding, 1870-1922

The Irish Nationalist movement’s influence in the major cities of Britain is well documented. Here, Andrew Maguire investigates the workings of the movement in the more regional setting of the West Riding in Yorkshire, illuminating the distinctive nature of Irish Nationalism in the area.

Yorkshire Rose & Shamrocks – by Donnie Brown

22

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Politics

T

he theme of Irish diaspora nationalism in its multifarious forms has received ample scholarly attention in certain parts of the world, most notably the United States, and although certain works have addressed the British context, some regions remain neglected. In borrowing an apt title, the purpose of this article seeks to draw attention to what is the ‘Yorkshire Face of Irish Nationalism’, through focusing on the regional dimension of Irish migrant political participation and activity within the confines of the West Riding, or ‘Western Third’, of Yorkshire.

Over a period of some fifty years, the pursuit of legislative independence via constitutional means under Irish home rule exercised the political minds of certain sections of the exiles of Erin resident in the industrial belt of Yorkshire – succinctly described by Thomas Power O’Connor as occupying a ‘curious middle place between the nationality to which he belongs and the race among which he lives.’ It was precisely the occupying of this ‘curious middle place’, in tandem with developments at home that shaped the general responsiveness and direction of this British-based expatriate movement.

However, the regional setting, with its individual and peculiar characteristics, is of prime importance here, as it was this facet that eventually came to dominate the social and political outlook of a grouping that can be suitably described as the ‘Yorkshire-Irish’. As was the case throughout much of Britain, it was a movement caught between sentimentalism and pragmatism – the pull of ethnicScoláire Staire APRIL 2012

ity, faith and fatherland on one hand, and the more immediate concerns of minority status and social progress on the other. To date, much of the work conducted on the Irish in Britain has tended to focus on the likes of Lancashire, London and Scotland – primarily due to the sheer number of the Irish that made their way to these locations. This eastern and largest of England’s counties, and in this case the West Riding, lacked the all-important entrepôt city that Liverpool or Glasgow provided to their respective regions, resulting in significantly smaller population to the ‘Broad Acres of Yorkshire’ – though no less important. The region under consideration is one defined by both cultural and geographical separation from the administrative centre of the south-east. It is a distinctive region renowned for its ‘separatism’ – and at times ‘republican’ tendencies – which is characterized by the ‘Tyke’ dialect and reinforced by a quasi-nationalist self-identification. Historic precedents in the shape of successive waves of immigration from Britain, Ireland and Europe; the Harrying of the North to the Wars of the Roses, and a strong Nonconformity have all added to what is

Yorkshire.

By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the west Riding was an industrial giant centred on woollen textiles – and this was the setting in which the Irish found themselves. There was in essence a certain element of acceptability and political manoeuvrability where the Irish, with their political baggage, found succour. But far from commencing in the nineteenth century, and dominated by migrants from Connacht, the arrival of the Gael in Yorkshire has been traced as far back the twelfth century through Hiberno-Norse connections. Overall, Yorkshire lacked the pervasive sectarian antagonisms that became a defining feature of the Irish experience elsewhere and was in many ways ‘a place apart’.

Above: The Irish Question: Home Rule by Leodiensis-Hibernicus, c.1895 – courtesy of Bradford University, JB Priestley Collection – Home Rule archive.

23

Emergence and Development Contemporaneous accounts of the political potential of the Yorkshire-Irish can be found in two illuminating, albeit biased and propagating, sources written during period under consideration. Visiting the region in 1872, Hugh Heinrick stated that: ‘In nearly all of these towns the power of political parties is so nearly balanced that, with proper organisation and preparation, the issue of an electoral contest would depend on the Irish vote.’ Writing some twenty years later, John Denvir describes the Irish of Yorkshire in the following way:

that: The Home Rule movement has been sustained, strengthened, and intensified by the exiles of Erin. The dwellers in the Emerald Isle have no [sic] worked with a keener zest for the cause that have their fellow country-men throughout Great Britain.

The first Home Rule Association outside the shores of Ireland was founded in this town of Leeds in 1870 . . .

political organisation in Britain over the ensuing decades. Eventually becoming the ‘Irish National League of Great Britain’ (INLGB) by 1882, following the brief interlude of the ‘Irish Land League of Great Britain’ (ILLGB) during the latter stages of the Land War, it eventually became the ‘United Irish league of Great Britain’ (UILGB) in 1900, reflecting the reunification and reconciliation of the Irish Par-

As a consequence of the more favourable condition of our people in Yorkshire they are better able to help the cause financially. Fortunately they are not only able but willing, so that, with the exception, perhaps, of south Wales, there is no place where, in proportion to the Irish population, more substantial aid is given to the Irish national organisation than in Yorkshire, as might be expected, too, they are well organised.

As early as 1870, the Irish population in the region responded with immediate patriotic fidelity to Isaac Butt’s legislative scheme for a parliament in College Green by establishing their own ‘Home Rule Associations’ in order that they might contribute as best they could to the new constitutional initiative. In fact, the Leeds-Irish lay claim to being the first of any such association to form in Britain, with the author of Leodiensis Hibernicus (‘Leeds Irish’, see p. 23) asserting 24

Beginning life as isolated pockets of organised Irish nationalism throughout the principle towns of the Riding, they were subsequently drawn together as a formal collective of branches under the banner of the ‘Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain’ (HRCGB) at the behest of John Barry at Birmingham in February 1873. As might be expected, the ebb and flow of political developments at home initially dictated the subsequent evolution of Irish nationalist

liamentary Party under the auspices of the William O’Brien’s United Irish League.

In all, the raison d’être of this British wing, or ‘fifth column’ of the moral force philosophy (though attracting many adherents of the physical force tradition) can be reduced to four main functions. Firstly, electoral registration of eligible members of the migrant community was a central component in its strategy for mobilising the migrant populace – and in the words of Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

one contemporary, ‘its most potent weapon’. Secondly, this was designed to create a bloc-vote whose strategy was based on the premise of voting en masse for the sanctioned candidate, Irish or otherwise, primarily at parliamentary and municipal level, who were deemed worthy recipients of the Irish vote

‘hub’ for social and ethnic cohesion, sometimes based on the more convivial atmosphere of the pub. Yet tied to this, the local branch also offered a means of moving up the social ladder within the Irish community, or ‘ethnic-sphere’, but it also offered alternative mobility by connecting with wider Yorkshire society in the political, business and social arenas.

Under these various labels, the Irish nationalist movement in

given their stance on Irish issues – particularly home rule. Thirdly, the nation-wide network of branches and the harnessing of an Irish electoral force contributed to the all-important financial aspect of the League and its parliamentary body – the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster. And finally, in addition to the ‘official’ dimension, the League ‘unofficially’ acted as a Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

Britain originally set out to promote and maintain ethnic cohesion and solidarity by channelling the amor patriæ of the migrant into political mobilisation.Purporting to resist all forms of assimilation and integration into the host society, it inadvertently developed into a vehicle for assimilation, at least in a political sense, through its unavoidable engagement and eventual fully-fledged participation within the framework of indigenous party politics through the Tories, Liberals and in time Labour. The dichotomy of ‘suc-

cess’ or ‘failure’ of the League has tended to dominate much of the existent literature on the subject, but irrespective of this, the mere existence of these special interest groups provides a unique ‘entry-point’ into the wider migrant experience.

Far from deferential, and much to the chagrin of the Londonbased central Executive of the League, the Yorkshire contingent adopted quite independent modes of action from such top-down directives regarding electoral strategy – with local branches pushing for autonomy according to the their political environ. An indication of this can be seen in the prominence of the region as being essentially problematic in T.P. O’Connor’s correspondence with John Dillon regarding the dual candidacy in Leeds and Halifax of supporters of home rule during the 1900 general election – one Liberal and the other Labour.

O’Connor’s frustrations can be seen in his comments to Dillon regarding the Yorkshire constituencies ‘that we may command but our people won’t obey’. The lure and attractiveness of indigenous labour politics was a constant thorn in the side of the League, inevitably leading to internal dissent and a divided vote. The curious admixture of demands placed upon the loyalties of the migrant torn between that of the homeland and their new home, presented this ethno-political network with what has been aptly labelled a ‘diaspora dilemma’ comprised of competing allegiances.

‘Servicing’ the Political Community Sustaining the Yorkshire-Irish 25

political community relied heavily on a constant stream of visitations from the elite of the Irish nationalist establishment through a form of ‘servicing’.

It was essentially a ‘tripartite’ political engagement between Irish, migrant and indigenous political elites. Such esteemed visits from the likes of Isaac Butt, Charles Stewart Parnell, and William O’Brien, to name but a few, invariably formed part of the popular ‘speaking tour’ and were invariably connected with a political high-point of the day.

The tour of some of Ireland’s leading political lights throughout the ‘Broad Acres’ points to the viability in cultivating a substantial migrant population and its political powerbase. What these visits reveal is the con-

stantly changing context and relationship between homeland and diasporic nationalism. The speeches and exhortations at these so-called Irish ‘demonstrations’ and ‘meetings’ in the Riding in many instances failed to grasp the needs and wants of what might be termed the ‘Britannic-Irish’.

One such gathering covered by the Freeman’s Journal (November 1879) is illustrative of the situation. Described as a ‘meeting to which Irishmen and Irishwomen in Leeds were especially invited’, it attracted great attention and generated much excitement among the local Irish populace due to the principle speaker being Charles Stewart Parnell. His speech sought to

outline the role of the Irish in Leeds, and Britain more generally, in assisting the national cause from their new home in the industrial heartlands of Britain. Parnell stated that ‘they had in Leeds a peculiar position’ and advocated to the congregation that they were duty-bound to answer the call of the homeland by ‘holding themselves entirely aloof from every political party in the town’ until clear directives had been established as to which party they should support in order they might ‘help the cause of Ireland.’ He stressed that the Leeds-Irish were in possession of a ‘very important power’ – the power to decide which parliamentary candidate should be returned for their constituency, which would result in ‘either two Liberals or two Tories’ representing them at Westminster:

HJ Wilson Collection (Sheffield Archives MD2563)

The power was clearly theirs, and he hoped that they would exercise it calmly and judiciously for the good of their country, regardless of any other necessity, local or otherwise. Until Ireland had obtained her rights it was their duty, as Irish exiles in England, to stand by their countrymen at home, and assist them in their struggle for freedom.

In stark contrast to the policy advocated by Parnell of remaining ‘aloof ’ from British party politics, the migrant populace was inexorably drawn into the fray of local politics as a distinguishable Irish body as early as 1868 in Leeds – a trend that continued unabated for the life of the League. William O’Brien’s speech of October 1888 exemplifies such activity at ‘A Great Liberal Demonstration at Bradford’ 26

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– (Leeds Mercury). Speaking at the behest of the local Liberal Association, O’Brien’s position on an indigenous platform provides ample evidence of the inherent complexity associated with the ‘Union of Hearts’ and its consequences for diasporic nationalism. The purpose and content of O’Brien’s appearance is illustrative of the political integration of local INLGB branches within the Liberal movement.

With many prominent local INL members present, O’Brien shared a platform with Alfred Illingworth, MP for Bradford, (noted by O’Connor as ‘a typical, drying and self-contained Bradford man’), who was by this time closely associated with the Bradford-Irish through the wider cause of home rule. His close connections with the Irish vote became a constant feature for the remainder of his political career.

Best described as a friend of Ireland, his position came to resemble what Eugenio Biagini has denoted as ‘surrogate political leadership’ in the absence of wholly Irish parliamentary representatives. In fact, the wider appeal of Irish home rule found widespread support among Yorkshire’s political establishment, resulting in several early converts to the principle. It was, as Biagini rightly asserts, a situation where the ‘plight of the Irish reminded nonconformists and trade unionists of their own past history of suffering persecution for the sake of conscience and the right of association’. It was the southern Yorkshire city of Sheffield that furnishes us with this example through the activities the local HRC and local politicians in the form of H.J. Wilson, A.J. Mundella and Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

Joseph Chamberlain who were converted to home rule as early as 1874 – only for the latter to become a vehement opponent of the proposal and champion of Unionism. (see election poster opposite). It was precisely the ambiguity and malleable nature of home rule that appealed to Yorkshire’s political establishment, prompting one notable Yorkshire politician to declare – ‘what was really wanted in England was Home Rule; Home Rule for Yorkshire’.

The Conventions Arguably the most illuminating activity of the League was the annual ‘Convention’, deemed the high-point in the calendar

of the INLGB, which was hosted by the region on three occasions during the 1890s – ’92, ‘95 & ’99 (Bradford, Leeds, Bradford). The meaning and scope of the annual INL Convention was to assemble Ireland’s political voice in Britain in one place, the culmination of meticulous planning, which can be seen in the vast and varied attendance of delegates from as far away as London and Edinburgh, and constituted the ‘sovereign body’ of the wider movement. The basic purpose of these annual assemblies was to guide the general policies and direction of the overall organisation. Secondly, it provided a means by which the leadership could keep tight reins on the movement. Cru27

cially, this entailed attempts at eradicating of all forms of dissent and division amongst the rank and file through a constant emphasis on unity. In fact, the topic of ‘Unity’ came to dominate virtually all such Conventions during the decade, yet the issues surrounding voting behaviour and electoral registration were an ever-controversial topic.

Such events were a transparent, outward and very public expression of Irishness and political strength – both for those at home, and those among whom they resided. Usually held over a two-day period and comprised of the convention proper, a banquet and concluding with a mass demonstration on the final day. What these events reveal is the extent to which the Britishbased movement, with particular emphasis on Yorkshire, had become so enmeshed and inextricably linked to the Liberal movement. Against the back-

28

United Irish League of Great Britain emblem - courtesy of Trinity College Dublin Manuscripts (Dillon Collection MS6740).

drop of political fratricide and division in Ireland following the fall and subsequent death of Parnell, all three conventions were dominated by frustration aimed at those at home. Far from being a decade of political

St George’s Hall in Bradford was used for a number of the conventions. (Bradford Libraries)

stagnation for the League, the decade arguably represents the point at which politically-minded Irishmen in Britain sought to find an alternative outlet to one dictated by a homeland agenda.

As president of the INLGB, T.P. O’Connor sought to emphasise that the Irishmen had little or nothing to gain from the emancipation of their native land.

Industrial unrest, severe winters and division had not deterred the Irish of Britain and O’Connor sought to reiterate their plight and what they hoped to gain from any lasting political solution for the homeland.

The migrant’s political concerns were not solely dominated by agrarian issues, Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

seeing as their environs were predominantly urban. Speaking at Bradford in 1899 he stated that: He was of the opinion that they in Great Britain had a right to ask the people at home to pay some regard to their requests and actions (Hear, hear.) The Irishmen in Great Britain would be better, morally and socially, by the emancipation of their country, but otherwise they would not be better-off by one brass farthing; and that being so, they had a right to make that request to those at home.

Assertions such as these from the de facto leader of the Britannic-Irish raises the question: what did the migrant hope to gain from involvement in such a movement? Was it simply a case of moral obligation, fidelity to their natal land, or did it simply equate to self-improvement and upward social mobility, coupled Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

with a sense of respectability from the host population? Active involvement within the League by the 1890s offered all this and more. What this position suggests, is that the home rule movement in Britain was not a strictly Irish movement per se. Biagini adds weight to this argument by emphasising the manner in which Irish nationalism eventually came to attach greater significance to Liberalism, particularly William Ewart Gladstone, in indicating that the Irish in Britain were ‘contaminated by Liberalism’; with the ‘Grand Old Man’ eventually replacing Parnell ‘as the main object of Irish loyalty and affection after 1891’.

If we take the example of two notable Irish activists in the Riding who rose to prominence both within and without the Irish movement we can see the position that many such individuals found themselves in.

For instance, Michael Howley residing in the small town of

Keighley, and Michael O’Flynn of Bradford, were both elected to their respective town councils on what can only be described as a ‘Nationalist-Liberal’ (NatLib) platform through a cultivation of both migrant and indigenous Yorkshire votes. This reveals the extent to which the INL had become so inextricably linked to the indigenous political system. What the conventions also reveal is the nascent power of organised labour which sought to cultivate the Irish vote by purporting to be the only truly representative party in favour of home rule and the working classes to which the Irish predominantly belonged.

In fact, it was Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield that attracted the greatest attention on this issue, stemming from the sanctioning of candidates who should receive the Irish vote. During the 1892 Convention at Bradford, T.P. O’Connor sought to allay the concerns of certain delegates who pointed to the case of Bradford, where two candidates, one Liberal and the other Labour, sought to attract the Irish vote in the coming general election.

This was an especially acute problem given that Bradford was a hotbed for labour politics and would soon become the home of the Independent Labour Party in 1892.

It was argued at the Convention that a means of selection between candidates who were sympathetic to the Irish cause was required in order to prevent a Tory being returned to parliament. O’Connor was quick to point out that the Irish did in fact belong to the labouring classes of the country – ‘Our organisation is drawn essentially and almost exclusively from la29

bouring men, and therefore I have to say to our labour friends that when they appeal to us as Irishmen in the name of labour they are preaching to the already converted. Our party is a labour party, and therefore must be in favour of a labour policy (applause)’. But he reminded the delegates that their vote should only be given to the designated Liberal candidate. It was issues such as these that dominated the political landscape for League activists, which prompted the League to introduce ‘Rule 14’ which gave strict guidance on the sanctioning of electoral candidates in various locales – a rule that came in to existence as a result of similar difficulties that arose in Leeds in previous years.

Conclusion In conclusion, the Yorkshire contingent of the various Leagues faced many of the same issues encountered by branches right across Britain. The Yorkshire experience however sheds light on some of the more intricate aspects of political engagement of an organised, though not entirely successful, Irish organisation. The Yorkshire experience reveals the extent to which the Irish found a particular niche for themselves within the wider indigenous society and looking at political engagement helps to reveal just one aspect of the processes involved in migration and settlement.

The Irish in the region found their own political Sonderweg in spite of central directives, which sought to address their more immediate concerns in the diasporic context. It was a process of ‘turning the face’ from homeland to place of settlement that 30

similarly involved a ‘blurring of lines’ between Irish and indigenous politics. This process was one of political assimilation into the host society, whilst simultaneous segregation tendencies remained in other areas of migrant life. This is very much a story of the two most dominant themes within nineteenth century Irish history, that of migration and nationalism. As inherently complex and fluid as both phenomena are, they nevertheless become significantly more complex and fluid when occupying the same space – an intertwining of the two. Thus, Irish nationalism, this specific strand of nationalism in its external or diasporic context is one quite distinct from that which evolved in Ireland. As E.P.M Wollaston succinctly wrote: ‘The efforts of the succeeding organisations’ of Irish nationalism in Britain, ‘are part of the history of the Irish Parliamentary Party, part of British electoral history and part of the story of Britain’s absorption of her largest nineteenth century minority.’

Further Reading E.F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 18761906 (Cambridge, 2007).

M. Busteed, ‘Resistance and Respectability: Dilemmas of Irish Migrant Politics in Victorian Britain’, Immigrants & Minorities 27, no. 2 (2009), pp. 178-93.

J. Denvir, The Irish in Britain: From the Earliest Times to the Fall and Death of Parnell (2nd ed., London, 1894).

T.P. O’Connor, ‘The Irish in Great Britain’, in F. Lavery (ed.), Irish Heroes in the War (London,

1917), pp. 13-34.

A. O’Day, The English Face of Irish Nationalism: Parnellite Involvement in British Politics 1880-86 (Dublin, 1977).

A. O’Day, ‘Irish Diaspora Politics in Perspective: The United Irish Leagues of Great Britain and America, 1900-14’, in Donald M. MacRaild (ed.), The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,(Dublin, 2000), pp.

214-39.

A. O’Day, ‘Irish Influence on Parliamentary Elections in London, 1885-1914’, in R. Swift & S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985) pp.

98-105.

A. O’Day (ed.), A Survey of the Irish in England (1872) by Hugh Heinrick(London, 1990).

J. Hutchinson, ‘Diaspora Dilemmas and Shifting Allegiances: The Irish in London between Nationalism, Catholicism and Labourism (1900-22)’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 10, no. 1 (2010), pp. 107-25.

Andrew Maguire completed his undergraduate studies in Irish History & Politics at the University of Ulster, Magee College in 2005 and then proceeded to complete a PG Diploma and Research Masters in history at the same institution. His research interests fall within Irish migration or diaspora studies generally, with the Irish in Britain being his specialism. He is currently in the final year of his PhD research in this field at Magee College.

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PhD Diary

AUSTERITY IN THE ARCHIVES Shay Kinsella

I began with chapter two. I took my supervisor’s advice and began to write, but jumped to the place where I felt most comfortable. I realise working backwards at a later date may prove a challenge, but I’m relieved to have made a start and am glad to see the woods again, and not just the trees on this particular trek.

But that in itself has been a major task. In trying to be authoritative in my writing, general statements, of even apparent insignificance, are hugely problematical. The ‘facts’ I write fill me with unnerving doubts: what right have I to present this as a fact? How many references do I need to support what might seem like an incontrovertible truth? When I feel I have locked a detail into my narrative, a critical second reading is haunted by a voice that shouts: How can you say this?

‘Alexander roots in Ireland can be traced back to a Scots Presbyterian who arrived as part of the Ulster plantation in 1610.’ Is this sufficient in a paragraph attempting to succinctly outline the family’s origins, or do I need to trace a broader sociological, religious, emotional and political profile in the light of Gaelic opposition, the Flight of the Earls, the confidence of Presbyterianism? Or is this where word counts ultimately forge a narrative, and where space demands that I edit my account of origins of the species?

It will certainly take time to find a balance in this regard but the offshoot is a chapter skeleton which can at least be worked on, and which allows for a certain feeling of progress, however transient.

Research in national repositories has become second nature, and after I got my head around the new – and initially annoying – ordering system in the National Library, I began to thank it for necessitating a daily research plan, as opposed to hopping randomly between topics as they occurred to me. The National Archives is a more demanding creature altogether, where time is swallowed mercilessly by an often torturous range of catalogues, long waiting periods and a withering array of impediments for the querist. Is it just me who feels pathetically sorry for the first-time researcher who approaches the supply counter only to have their enthusiasm well and truly grounded by assertions that the document reference number will have to be ascertained independently, that it may not be available until tomorrow or later, that it might have been blown up in the Four Courts explosion, Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

that it’s almost lunchtime and they’ll have to wait until 3 o’ clock...? I watch the querist leave the counter deflated, uncertain where to proceed, and after a daunting walk around the shelves of Chief Secretary’s Papers registers, I cringe as I witness their attempt to summon enough courage to approach the desk a second time for help. Facetious, probably, but truthful nonetheless.

As an educator, I know only too well the damage done by austerity budgets, and I can appreciate how public services suffer when funding is curtailed. Staffing cuts and reduced opening hours have affected the services offered by both of the two major national repositories, and I sympathise with their plight. However, my frustration surely deserves an airing. Or should I just get on board the current system and make do. However, this is extremely difficult when one experiences an alternative.

The standard, in my opinion, for public archive services, must be that offered by the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland where the entire catalogue is available for perusal and ordering online, where a friendly staff appreciate your needs and interests, and where the atmosphere welcomes and rewards your presence. In its attractive new home in the Titanic Quarter, this facility is to be greatly admired, and should be imitated.

With this in mind, I am perpetually grateful that the core archive for my thesis is constantly available to me in the quiet basement of an Irish country house.

There is no computer catalogue, no databases or typed transcriptions of wayward handwriting, but there I am librarian and sole reader, and am free to construct a narrative of national significance without interruption or delay.

And it never closes for lunch.

Shay Kinsella is a primary school teacher, currently engaged in research for a PhD thesis on the Alexander family of Carlow. You can comment on this article by clicking HERE. 31

‘Nobody’s Children’?

The Trials and Tribulations of Great War Veterans in the Irish Free State.

32

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War

A huge number of Irish Great War veterans returned to a very different Ireland in 1918. Those who resided in the Free State after 1922 found themselves in a situation few could have imagained in 1914. Michael Robinson outlines some of the difficulties faced by veterans in the new state.

D

espite the recent surge of analysis into Ireland’s involvement in the Great War, very little has been written on the postwar experiences of Irishmen who returned to a post-Easter Rising southern Ireland to discover that Irish society, and the subsequent Irish Free State government, placed very little value on the men’s war service.

This article will demonstrate the discrimination and segregation that these forgotten men experienced on their return home.

Employment Firstly, with regards to employment, it was estimated that fifty per cent of ex-servicemen were unemployed in the 1920s. In Dublin alone there were around 30,000 unemployed British exservicemen. Jasper Wolfe TD described these unemployed men as being ‘in a very bad

state.’ At the Cork branch of the British Legion, one employee stated: Fifty per cent of the cases which we have to handle are those of families from three to five in number who are absolutely destitute and how they manage to exist at all is an absolute mystery.

A massive forty-six per cent of ex-servicemen, in comparison to only ten per cent in Britain, were surviving on out of work donations of just 29 shillings per week in 1919. In Fermoy, Cork, there were 274 veterans living on these donations in comparison to just thirty-five local residents.

This demonstrates how much the unemployed ex-servicemen relied on these handouts to survive.

Ex-servicemen unemployment

figures were much higher in southern Ireland than elsewhere in the United Kingdom. One explanation for this trend is that many employers took note of Sinn Féin’s warnings not to employ British ex-servicemen. After the establishment of the First Dáil in 1919, Sinn Féin controlled many local authorities.

In republican society, Great War veterans threatened to compromise the revolution by refusing to join Sinn Féin, but by also maintaining economic and social ties with the British government and administrative system. Sinn Féin had been elected in 1918 on the back of a strong anti-British, and anti-British Army, election campaign. Consequently, its legislature reflected the party’s anti-British sentiments, and Irish veterans of the British Army were refused employment in colleges, hospitals and asylums. In Munster, laws

The Ireland that Great War veterans returned to was massively different to that which they left.

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33

were passed to prevent local councils and poor law boards from employing ex-servicemen, and it was an unwritten rule that post offices and railway companies were to follow suit.

Discrimination Ireland’s National Archives contains a lengthy report that was published in 1927 entitled: ‘The Report of the Committee on the Claims of British Ex-Servicemen’. The report contains numerous individual letters that were submitted to the Committee which reveal the discrimination that these men experienced because of their association with the British Army. These claims of discrimination in employment are shown to have foundation when reading the conclusion of the report: ‘In choosing

34

men for Labour locally, there was often discrimination by the foreman of works against the British Ex-Servicemen.’ Even when an ex-serviceman was able to attain employment, the individual letters reveal several examples of the men resigning from their posts due to intimidation and threats of violence from ardent republicans.

To explain why many ex-servicemen struggled to find employment after the Great War; Neil Richardson writes: ‘Employers with nationalist leanings would not hire ex-British army men, while neutral employers refused to employ former trench soldiers because they did not want to upset republicans on their staff.’ Another way in which the change in government hampered the Irish Great

War veteran’s chances of employment is demonstrated by the fact that schemes to assist Great War veterans that were available to ex-servicemen in Britain were not accessible in the Irish Free State. One example being the King’s National Roll which was an employment program that assisted disabled veterans in finding employment.

The absence of such schemes, in addition to the limited opportunities for employment, and with the lack of recommendations made by the ‘Report of the Committee on the Claims of British Ex-Servicemen’ to address the situation, ensured that ex-servicemen struggled to find employment following their demobilization.

The Irish Free State Government was unwilling to provide the

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housing benefits that the British Government had previously promised. In February 1922, the Irish Local Government Board released a statement to explain why many British ex-servicemen were not allotted housing: ‘There is grave danger of serious trouble in rural areas over this matter. A most undesirable class of ex-soldiers are getting those lands, while I.R.A. soldiers are walking about unemployed.’ Unlike in most other combatant nations, Irish Great War veterans had the unfortunate distinction of returning to a society where another group of veterans were lauded as heroes and given preferential treatment with regards to housing. In a society that not only ignored a Great War veteran’s sacrifice but derided it, it is unsurprising that British ex-servicemen were denied any form of preferential treatment with regards to housing.

The Free State government provided no funding for the building of houses, and the British Government only invested a paltry sum of £2 million into the scheme. As a result, only 3,600 homes were built within fifteen years. Such a number reflects only a tiny fraction of the estimated 100,000 returning veterans. Even the tiny minority of ex-servicemen who benefited from the negligible funding from Britain were far from satisfied with their houses. Many believed the rents to be too high and, in the words of William Redmond TD, ‘considerably higher than those charged for ex-servicemen’s houses across Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

the border in the Six Counties.’

In addition, many ex-servicemen were not satisfied with the standard of houses allocated to them. A similar situation existed with regard to employment.

‘The Report of the Committee on the Claims of British ExServicemen’ contains numerous individual letters from exservicemen who, despite being allocated one of the few houses that were built, lament the appalling conditions of the houses.

Even the development of estates, such as the 300 houses built for veterans in Killester, north Dublin, made concentrated communities of ex-servicemen highly visible to violent republicans.

Because of the political context in the country there were many examples of Great War veterans being intimidated in or around their homes. In addition, their allotments were attacked and their produce was boycotted. Such circumstances, when coupled with the difficulty ex-servicemen had in attaining employment only serves to highlight the desperate situation they faced in the Irish Free State.

British ex-servicemen struggled financially after they returned from the Great War. They were, however, able to attempt to address this shortfall through charities and fundraising such as through the selling of poppies. In the words of Niall Barr: ‘By purchasing a poppy, the public was not only remembering the war dead but also helping the living.’ As studies into the post-war treatment of British veterans have demonstrated, the British public’s reaction to fundraising for ex-servicemen represented society’s gratitude for their service. Consequently, the Great War veteran community never became a marginalized faction within the general public.

Poppy selling in Dublin The situation in Ireland was distinctly different. Dublin was a dangerous and hostile place to wear a poppy during the inter-war years, and this simple gesture of commemorating the Irish war dead, and raising 35

The Irish National War Memorial Gardens dedicated in 1988.

money for surviving veterans, proved problematic. In the precarious political period of the 1920s, poppy sellers and depots were subjected to republican anger. The precariousness of selling poppies in Ireland is highlighted by the fact that access to poppy depots was protected by heavy security and only accessible through passwords. Such a protective measure’s necessity is demonstrated by the fact that one veteran’s house was broken into and his store of poppies was destroyed by arsonists. It was only thanks to police intelligence that more of these poppy raiding reprisals did not occur throughout the Irish Free State.

Even disabled veterans were deemed unsafe to sell poppies without fears of violent republican reprisals. As a result, poppies were often sold by women because the British Legion 36

deemed them to be less likely to be targeted by republican violence. Despite this precaution, however, there were still incidents of female poppy sellers having to defend themselves against attackers. Veterans would resort to placing razorblades inside their poppies on Armistice Day to incur painful injuries to agitators who would try and snatch them off the observer’s clothing.

On 11 November 1928, it was estimated that 20,000 ex-servicemen took part in a remembrance ceremony which was observed by 10,000 people. As with poppy wearing, Armistice Day was observed by a section of the population. However, again, behind these examples of respectful observers there was a sinister confrontation between ex-servicemen and ardent re-

publicans.

There is evidence of parading ex-servicemen being heckled and beaten up at these ceremonies.

Other forms of civil disobedience c ons i s t e nt l y occurred during the week of Armistice Day. There were also bomb and arson attacks on British memorials and buildings throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Comm e m or at i on in the Irish Free State was marred by hostility, demonstrations, and violence. As such, the Irish example is an anomaly in the broader subject of Great War memory.

The troubled history of the National War Memorial in Phoenix Park also serves to highlight the complex issue of commemoration in the Irish Free State. Initially, plans to erect a national Great War memorial outside the Dáil in Merrion Square were withdrawn. Kevin O’Higgins TD explained the Executive Council’s decision to reject the plans: I do not want to see the little park in front of this State’s seat of Government dedicated to the memory of those who fell in the Great War…. it is not on their sacrifice Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

that this State is based and I have no desire to see it suggested that it is.

A memorial was not established until 1932 in Phoenix Park despite claims from some politicians that its location was a ‘distant backwater’. Andrew Jameson TD, refused to support its implementation on the grounds that ‘only few people would see it’ because of its obscure location. Even upon its establishment, the park was left in a dilapidated condition and was not officially opened until as recently as 1988.

Targets In addition to employment, housing and commemoration, ex-servicemen also became prominent civilian targets by the IRA in the early 1920s. This intimidation and violence contrasted from threatening letters to beatings, the burning of houses, expulsion from local dances and hospitals, and, ultimately, murder. At least eighty-two ex-servicemen were murdered prior to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and between January and April 1921, almost a third of all civilian casualties at the hands of the IRA were ex-soldiers. Citing newspaper reports of the killings, Peter Hart and Jane Leonard demonstrate that many exservicemen were killed because they were suspected of being informers who had passed on information to the British Army.

For example, there were several examples of the murdered men’s bodies having informant signs attached to them. Despite this suspected affiliation, however, the R.I.C. vehemently denied that some of the men had partaken in such activities. After Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

the killing of a one-armed veteran in Limerick in 1921, one policeman reported that ‘it would seem that the ex-soldier must be with the I.R.A. or be regarded as the enemy.’

Conclusion Ultimately, the relationship between the community of British ex-servicemen and the newly established Irish Free State was always likely to be strained. The new government found it difficult to cater for the ex-servicemen who had fought for the state’s former imperial ruler. In addition to this, the state’s former imperial ruler had since proved themselves to be an oppressive invading force during the Anglo-Irish War. Great War veterans, because of their lengthy military service and the transformation of cultural and political identities during their service and in the immediate aftermath of their return, ensured that they no longer belonged to the society that they had left at the beginning of the Great War. The events following the Easter Rising produced another batch of war veterans whose service and sacrifice had ensured that semi-independence could be achieved. In the words of Kevin O’Higgins, it was their sacrifice that the state was built upon and, as a consequence, preference for their needs was always going to valued higher than for those who had fought for Britain.

‘The Report of the Committee on the Claims of British ExServicemen’, which was not set up until almost a decade after the end of the First World War, offered no words of advice or comfort for the long-suffering

ex-servicemen. As a result, the men’s complaints were left unresolved. The report’s conclusion was both formal and dismissive, and it failed to reflect the tragic condition that these ex-servicemen found themselves living in.

It is also worth remembering that the report only dealt with complaints from those who were members of the British Legion. As this membership only reflected a tiny minority of the ex-servicemen community, it is highly probable that more men suffered from the same fate as those who were contained with-

in the report. These men had returned from years of fighting in appalling conditions, and when they returned they found themselves unable to attain employment, receive adequate pensions or be granted land and housing. Even the veteran’s wish of peacefully remembering and commemorating their worthless war was denied them.

Ireland was one of the few countries where this conflicted sense 37

Former Taoiseach: Sean Lemass

in the cause of human liberty everywhere, not excluding Ireland.

By 1966 it was too late to reverse the exclusion that British ex-servicemen experienced with regards to the republican national identity which was brought about by the events following the Easter Rising. Disowned by their former employers, and unappreciated by their fellow countrymen, these men were, as Michael Heffernen TD described them in a Dáil debate in 1927, ‘nobody’s children’.

Further Reading.

P. Hart, The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916- 1923 (Oxford, 1999).

of national identity occurred.

Veterans were unable to integrate into the post-Easter Rising brand of republicanism. In the newly independent Irish Free State, the revolution’s legacy was compromised by the Irish Great War veterans whose presence, and reliance on British financial assistance, portrayed them as unwanted reminders of British imperial rule. Similarly, the oppressive response of the British Army, and the appalling conduct of the Black and Tans during the Anglo-Irish War, made it difficult for Irish men to simply align themselves with Britain. Great War veteran Eugene Sheehy perfectly sums up this predicament: A source of heartbreak to me and to the many thousands of Irish nationalists who had 38

joined the British Army…As the tide of Irish public opinion gradually changed and hostility to England grew we did not quite know where we stood, or where our duty lay.

In 1966, Irish President, Sean Lemass conceded: In later years it was common – and I was guilty in this respect – to question the motives of those who joined the British armies formed at the outbreak of the war, but it must, in their honor and in fairness to their memories, be said that they were motivated by the highest purpose, and died in their tens of thousands in Flanders and Gallipoli, believing they were giving their lives

N. Richardson, A Coward if I Return, A Hero if I Fall: Stories of Irish Soldiers in World War I (Dublin, 2010).

J. Leonard, ‘Getting them at last: the IRA and ex-servicemen’, in D. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Revolution?

Ireland 1917-1923 (Dublin, 1990), pp. 118-29.

J. Leonard, ‘Survivors’, in J. Horne (ed.), Our War: Ireland and the Great War (Dublin, 2008), pp. 209-223.

Committee on Claims of British former Servicemen, 1928: appointment and report available in the National Archives, Dublin, TSCH/3/S5560 A. Michael Robinson is a postgraduate student at the University of Northumbria. He will begin his PhD research on Irish Great War veterans in September 2012.

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Review

John Bew Castlereagh: From Enlightenment to Tryanny (Quercus, 2011, 582 pps, £25.99 HB)

Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, had a career and international political influence far surpassing the expectations of his Presbyterian Ulster origins. As John Bew argues in the first major academic study of his life and career in decades, he was ‘the dominant political personality’ in Regency Britain, yet opinions of him have long remained polarised by contested perceptions of his life and ideas. As Irish Chief Secretary during the 1798 rebellion he was instrumental in organising its suppression, and then in passing the Act of Union, making him a ‘tyrant and reactionary’ to some and a hugely accomplished young politician of ‘unostentatious sagacity’ to others. After 1807, as Secretary of War and leader of the House of Commons, he led a dedicated campaign against Napoleonic France’s domination of Europe, and then as Foreign Secretary he was central to what some modern scholars see as a proto-United Nations where national disagreements could be diplomatically resolved and measured reforms agreed to conciliate popular internal disaffection; and by others as a Congress designed to destroy nationalist aspirations and proto-democracy.

Bew’s widely researched six hundred pages seeks the best qualified answers to these enduring disputes: ‘To consider Castlereagh on his own terms, in the times in which he lived … predicated on the belief that neither [his] admirers nor detractors Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

have fully understood this enigmatic man’. (p.xii).

In this he largely succeeds within a very fluent and balanced, if perhaps slightly overlong, narrative. It is of necessity a substantially revisionist work, given that the popular view of Castlereagh has been monopolised by the often amusing but absurdly vilifying verses of romantic radicals, with Byron calling him ‘the vulgarest tool that tyranny could want’, having ‘dabbled his hands in Erin’s gore … transferred to gorge upon the sister shore’, and Shelley: ‘I met murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh … Seven bloodhounds followed him … He tossed them human hearts to chew’. Thomas Moore portrayed him in newspaper squibs as a bloodthirsty, bigoted ‘arch enemy’ of Ireland and all liberality: evil and stupid ‘half way twixt the goose and vulture’.(pp. 438-60). All of this was of course in service to a rival political agenda - Moore’s pen was more active ‘spin doctoring’ for his aristocratic Whig patrons than composing melodies - and Bew’s research implicitly indicts the enduring ‘whiggery’ of Irish and British literary studies which continues to reiterate such stuff rather than examine the evidence.

Castlereagh’s early life was in fact characterised by an enthusiastic engagement with the ideals of the Enlightenment until like many others his personal experiences of the ‘reign of terror’ in France and the atrocities committed by both sides in Ireland made him a dedicated opponent of violent and radical politics. Where he differed with his more idealistic critics was in believing that the ‘greatest enemy of progress was in fact religious or political fanaticism’ and ‘in his reluctance to believe that the Enlightenment had triumphed over bigotry, fanaticism and naked self-interest’. In this his mind was both ‘conservative and enlightened at the same time – and no less the one for being the other’. (p. xxx) This did not make him the reactionary Tory of car39

icatures: most Whigs, O’Connellites and ‘Liberal Tories’ (later Conservatives) shared the same views, and they are essentially the same conciliatory and prudent reforming via media promoted by Swift, Molyneaux, Goldsmith, Burke and Croker. This is almost certainly the most significant contribution Ireland has made to political philosophy, and given that it remains little acknowledged today, Bew could perhaps have made more of this, but he does astutely draw attention to the contributions of Alexander Knox, and even Edmund Spenser.

Castlereagh did advocate a ‘vigorous and expeditious’ suppression of United Irishmen in 1798, but the evidence of enemies and allies such as John Philpott Curran, William Drennan and Cornwallis illustrates that he believed it the best way to limit the bloodshed and advocated an amnesty even for armed rebels. Few would see that debacle of bribery and corruption of a highly corruptible Protestant ascendancy, the Act of Union, in a positive light; yet few would disagree that Castlereagh and Pitt were supporters of Catholic Emancipation and hoped to achieve a mutually inclusive Irish policy in line with the successful Scottish example.

This same resolve to repress violent extremes and conciliate popular disaffection made him an unremitting enemy of Napoleon but also an advocate for post-war allied policy to be as non-interventionist and generous as possible despite the death and destruction the French armies had wreaked all over Europe. “The only safe Principle is a Law of Nations” he argued at the Congress of Vienna, “nothing could be more immoral or prejudicial to the idea of government generally than the idea that their force was to be prostituted to the support of established power”. This lasted for roughly five years, until the genuinely reactionary Holy Alliance he deemed ‘nonsense and mysticism’ became dominant. (p. 580).

Probably from a combination of the failure of his ambitions for the Congress, exhausted by the pressure of work and worn down by the barrage of personal abuse, in August 1822, under threat from blackmailers to ‘out’ him as a homosexual, he slit his own throat.

As this very welcome and accomplished study argues, by his own standards and of his own time - and even to some extent our own - he was certainly not the ‘reactionary and ‘cruel tyrant’ he has 40

long been portrayed. But as Castlereagh himself told the Common’s in 1817, “With respect to Ireland, I know I shall never be forgiven … My conduct towards her has been the constant theme of invective”. (p.1) And despite the efforts of diligent scholars like Bew, this popular image will almost certainly continue to apply.

Dr Robert Portsmouth lectures in history at NUI Galway. His book John Wilson Croker; Irish Ideas and the Invention of Modern Conservatism is available from Irish Academic Press.

Shane MacThomáis Dead Interesting: Stories From the Graveyards of Dublin (Mercier Press, 2012, 160 pps, €12.99 PB) Shane Mac Thomáis’s Dead Interesting: Stories from the Graveyards of Dublin takes on an approach that rises above class, denominations, political view and gender bias in his telling of the tales about the cemeteries of Dublin and those that are buried there. Using Glasnevin Cemetery as his focal location for these stories the book begins with a handy map of the graveyard, with a key provided to highlight the whereabouts of the graves discussed in the book. Automatically Mac Thomáis gives the reader an impression of accessibility and entices them to imagine from the offset the burial grounds in question.

The most appealing aspect of the book is that the Scoláire Staire APRIL 2012

Review stories involve famous Irish people as well as the unknown men, women and children buried in the unmarked graves that make up the cemeteries. This is a fresh variation on tour guide books, making it unnecessary for the reader to hold an in depth knowledge on figures in Irish history. In fact some of the most intriguing stories involve those that are lesser known such as ‘The Seapoint Tragedy’. Mac Thomáis here tells the tale of a mother and her four daughters who tragically fell victim to a fatal case of food poisoning. These human interest stories should attract a wider readership than could otherwise have been the case.

Along with the stories of everyday people the book allows space for the tales of local heroes and their heroic deaths. Most notably is the story of the three Dublin firemen who died in action whilst trying to extinguish a burning building on Pearse Street. This is a touching story that obviously holds some personal importance to the author, whose grandfather was a fire fighter.

The book does not just pay tribute to the ordinary folk of Dublin however; Mac Thomáis covers the lives and deaths of Ireland’s most famous historical characters. In doing so he avoids any political bias from coming across in his writing. His telling of the Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera stories steers clear of any post Civil War opinions that may come hand in hand with the mentioning of these names.

He continues this unbiased approach and shares the stories of both nationalists and unionists alike without any inclination of any personal agenda.

The author’s supply of photographs for the book is visually stimulating for the reader. Photographs of the cemeteries discussed, important documents such as the register for the graves and the deceased individuals whilst they were alive are all part of the photographic collection. Strikingly Mac Thomáis provides images of funeral cortèges of many of the more famous funerals. Particularly striking is the image of the funeral procession of Charles Stewart

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Parnell. Parnell’s funeral saw some 60,000 people walk with the remains to Glasnevin cemetery. Such a spectacular display of respect for the politician is brought to life in the photographs that Mac Thomáis exhibits in the book.

Side by side with historical fact the author tells his reader of the myths and legends that come with graveyard tales. Mac Thomáis deconstructs old superstitions and pays homage to the pagan rituals whence they come. He tells of the importance of the deceased’s spirit and how protecting it from returning was of utmost importance for those who survived it. People were in such fear of returning spirits that they developed simple rituals and customs to prevent this from happening. These customs, passed from generation to generation, to this day influence the way we treat our recently deceased.

Regarding the syntax of the book the comments become less impressive. With a few grammatical errors and a number of many convoluted sentences the writing sometimes lacks a natural flow. A distinct lack of the appropriate punctuation in some cases further highlights these syntactical errors.

Getting past this, however, the book would make an ideal gift for an Irish person or visitor to Dublin alike. On reading this book you cannot help but want to take a walk around the graveyards of the capital city and experience the different cemeteries and their stories. Using this book as a tour guide would be a useful way to begin one’s journey in discovering the long forgotten residents of Dublin. It is natural to be inclined to visit the more popular graves such as Daniel O’Connell’s, but as this book highlights, it is the ordinary people of the city that make up the graveyards and their stories are more in danger of being forgotten.

Aoife Deeney has a BA (Hons) in English & History from Queen’s University, Belfast and an MA in Irish History & Politics from the University of Ulster.

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Scolรกire Staire APRIL 2012