A City in Wartime Read online

  If lack of suitable employment led skilled Protestant workers to emigrate on a large scale, unlike their departing Catholic counterparts there was no steady stream of rural co-religionists to make good the numbers. Contrary to the popular image, Protestants were a predominantly urban phenomenon in early twentieth-century Ireland. The Anglo-Irish gentry and Protestant farmers accounted for no more than a third of the total, but their high social and political status tended to dominate the image of Protestants in the South.

  The dwindling population of Dublin co-religionists led to increasing numbers of Protestants marrying Catholics. The existence of the mainly Protestant British garrison did not help maintain numbers either. A third of the grooms at Protestant weddings in the years before the First World War were soldiers, who took their brides with them when they were posted back to Britain, or overseas. This meant that increasing numbers of male Dublin Protestants had to seek a wife from among the Catholic community. After the Papal Ne Temere decree in 1908 children in a mixed marriage were usually reared as Catholics, adding further to the erosion of the Protestant working-class community. One famous example was the marriage of the Catholic socialist James Connolly of the King’s Liverpool Regiment to the Protestant domestic servant Lillie Reynolds. Their children were reared as Catholics, and Lillie converted at her husband’s request while he was awaiting execution in 1916.

  Not that marriage between Protestants guaranteed prosperity or security. When Seán O’Casey’s sister Bella married Nicholas Beaver, a Protestant member of the same regiment as Connolly, she had to give up her job as a teacher in St Mary’s Church of Ireland Primary School. It proved the first step on the road to destitution.

  While some oases of privilege survived, there is little in the history of Dublin working-class Protestantism in early twentieth-century Dublin to sustain the image of a labour aristocracy. Their main vehicle of organised cultural and political expression, the Conservative Working Men’s Club, was given over to billiards and ‘prodigious drinking.’ More uplifting activities, such as lectures on ‘The life and times of Lord Beaconsfield’ or ‘The difficulties, disadvantages and dangers of home rule,’ had to be abandoned for lack of interest.

  Middle-class Protestantism proved more robust. As late as 1900 the richest of the Dublin city constituencies, St Stephen’s Green, was represented by a Unionist MP, James Campbell. He lost the seat partly because middle-class Protestants, like their Catholic counterparts, were involved in a widespread flight to the suburbs, where the air was cleaner and the rates lower. The mere fact that Protestants were over-represented in the higher strata of society meant that they had a strong presence in the new townships of Pembroke and Rathmines, as well as in Kingstown. They had no difficulty retaining political control of Rathmines and Kingstown right up to 1914, and they lost Pembroke to the nationalists in large part because of ratepayers’ discontent with the inefficiency of local services and the presence of a substantial settled population of skilled workers in the area that preferred to vote for Labour and nationalist candidates. The Unionists were displaced by Labour as the second-largest party on Dublin Corporation only in 1913.

  South County Dublin was represented in the House of Commons by Unionists as late as 1910. The incumbent was no less a figure than Walter Long, a former Tory Chief Secretary for Ireland and the leader of the Unionists in the House of Commons between 1906 and 1910. Long was succeeded as Unionist leader by Edward Carson, another Dublin MP, who held one of the two safe seats for the University of Dublin (Trinity College).

  The unionists had held on to the South County Dublin seat with the help of loyal upper and middle-class Catholics. When the seat eventually fell to the nationalists in the second election of 1910 the successful candidate was William Cotton, a leading figure in the business community whose patriotism was broad enough to allow him to support motions for loyal addresses to the monarch at Dublin Corporation meetings. He owed his membership of the corporation not alone to the middle-class voters of the city’s South-East ward but to a strong working-class vote in Ringsend supplied by loyal employees of the Alliance and Dublin Consumers’ Gas Company, of which he was chairman.

  If many nationalists were suspicious of Cotton’s conservative views, unionists were often equally suspicious of their own candidates when they expressed moderate views. Long’s predecessor in South Dublin, Sir Horace Plunkett, lost the seat in 1900 when militant Protestants put up an independent unionist candidate, so splitting the vote, alienating loyal middle-class Catholics and letting a nationalist candidate in.

  In 1904 a by-election in the St Stephen’s Green division (constituency) of Dublin caused by the death of the incumbent nationalist MP revealed how deep the divisions in unionist ranks ran, but it was also a harbinger of the future. Senior figures within the Unionist Party were not inclined to contest the seat, especially as the new nationalist-backed ‘independent’ candidate, Laurence Waldron, was a stockbroker and former unionist who would be a moderating influence in the House of Commons. Several leading business figures, including Sir William Goulding,26 chairman of the Great Southern and Western Railway, and Lord Iveagh, head of the Guinness dynasty, resigned from the Unionist Representative Association in protest at a grass-roots revolt that led to the association supporting the candidacy of Norris Godard, a Crown solicitor. It was a foolish nomination, as Godard could stand only by relinquishing his lucrative government post, which he declined to do. The former Unionist MP for the constituency, James Campbell KC, was available to stand and had the added advantage of being wealthy enough to finance his own campaign, but the Unionist Representative Association would not have him.

  There followed an unseemly row about the rival candidacies of another lawyer, C. L. Matheson, and Michael McCarthy, a colourful renegade nationalist from Cork who was popular with militant unionists because of his books denouncing the evils of Catholicism. Matheson secured the nomination but, as expected, was defeated by Waldron.

  This was the last significant revolt by militant lower-class unionists against their social superiors in Dublin. From then on Dublin Unionist electoral strategy sought to maximise potential support by promoting a number of front organisations in local elections, such as the Business Party, the Unionist Municipal Reform Party and the Dublin Citizens’ Association. Their main platform was securing for ratepayers better value for money from local authorities. This oblique attempt to woo middle-class Catholic voters enjoyed little success, but it was an indication that behind the increasingly hysterical southern unionist rhetoric towards the Home Rule Crisis of 1912–14 Dublin’s middle-class unionist community was tentatively searching for an accommodation with the middle-class nationalist majority. When Carson transferred the seat of unionist power in Ireland to Belfast there was relatively little resistance in the capital.27

  1913 witnessed the last hurrah for southern unionism with a rally at the Theatre Royal in November. The stage was ‘a cave of Union Jacks,’ including the largest one ever made; but the speeches of Carson, Campbell and the Conservative Party leader Bonar Law were overshadowed by the events of the lock-out. In 1914 the reality of partition was accepted by many Dublin unionists, particularly by business leaders such as Goulding and Sir Robert Gardner of the city’s leading accountancy firm, Craig Gardner.28 Both men had been close allies of William Martin Murphy during the lock-out, and that struggle had shown Dublin’s business leaders, Protestant and Catholic alike, that far more united than divided them. It was Gardner who moved the vote of thanks to Murphy on his victory over the workers at the annual general meeting of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce in January 1914.

  Besides, many of the unionist old guard were dying out and the younger generation sometimes took a more sanguine view of the future. At the annual general meeting of the Dublin Unionist Association in March 1914 it was necessary to elect a new president as the incumbent, the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, had recently died. His son and heir, Captain Sidney Herbert of the Royal Horse Guards, was elected in his pl
ace. Captain Herbert had been the unsuccessful Unionist candidate for the St Stephen’s Green division in 1910. While he took comfort from the fact that the government faced ‘an Ulster which is organised, which is prepared, and which is determined to resist Home Rule to its very utmost,’ he declined to comment on how far Dublin unionists should be prepared to go in meeting the crisis. As a serving officer he did not think it appropriate to comment either on ‘certain events which have taken place in the Army during the last ten to twelve days.’ This was a clear reference to the Curragh Mutiny, when some Anglo-Irish officers at the main British army base in Ireland threatened to resign rather than take part in manoeuvres meant to overawe unionist opposition to home rule in Ulster.29 He probably saw his own future as secure, whatever arrangements were made for devolved government in Ireland. Other participants were similarly muted in their contributions, while some leading figures, including Goulding and Gardner, did not bother to attend, sending their apologies instead.

  There was no mention at the meeting of the four hundred men who had joined a surreptitious Dublin Volunteer Corps, also known as the Loyal Dublin Volunteers, who drilled weekly in the Fowler Memorial Hall in Rutland Square (now Parnell Square). Their commander was a retired colonel, Henry Master, who was also grand master of the Orange Order in the city, which comprised eleven Orange lodges, including one in Trinity College.30 The corps had about a hundred rifles and planned to defend the middle-class townships against rampaging Catholic mobs if home rule was introduced. Some members had registered as reservists with the Ulster Volunteer Force, which promised to provide guns and ammunition for Dublin if hostilities broke out.31

  Meanwhile the president of the Dublin Women’s Unionist Club, Lady Arnott, welcomed an offer from the Women’s Unionist Associations of Wales to provide temporary accommodation for the women and children of southern unionist families in the event of civil war. Almost simultaneously, Mrs Dudley Edwards told a meeting of the Women’s Volunteer Corps, set up to ‘advance the cause of Irish liberty,’ that she hoped members ‘would offer the Nationalist women and children of Belfast and Ulster the shelter of their homes in cases of dire necessity.’ To a mixture of applause and cries of alarm from her audience she suggested that it might be best for the police and military to withdraw in order to allow ‘the two sections of Irishmen to fight it out amongst themselves.’

  Ironically, these Boudicas were probably inspired by the ‘Dublin Kiddies Scheme’ of Dora Montefiore during the lock-out of the previous year, whereby temporary homes for strikers’ children had been offered by trade unionists in Britain. On that occasion Mrs Dudley Edwards had been one of the most vehement critics of the scheme.32

  The reaction of the Catholic Church to the Montefiore scheme in 1913 showed how much the balance of social forces had changed in Dublin. Although there had been no outbreaks of sectarian rioting in the city since the 1880s, low-intensity warfare had continued through other means. The main vehicles of conflict were charitable organisations such as the Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics and the Society of St Vincent de Paul. Their main weapons were child proselytism and soup kitchens for the homeless and migrant workers. The former was by far the most emotive.

  The Society of St Vincent de Paul reported rescuing between 240 and 250 children ‘from proselytising day schools’ in the first half of 1913, as well as 19 children from other Protestant institutions, mainly orphanages. The secretary of the Society, T. J. Fallon, reported to Archbishop Walsh that the religion of some of the rescued children had been seriously subverted by exposure to the activities of the Irish Church Mission. One eleven-year-old boy ‘was so perverted that he would not repeat the words of the Hail Mary,’ while a six-year-old told his parents, ‘We must never pray to the Virgin Mary.’ A girl kept returning to her former Protestant school because, the report said, she was ‘hopelessly demoralised from bribes and feasts.’

  The endemic poverty of the Dublin working class left mothers susceptible to bribes from the Irish Church Mission. They would be offered weekly cash payments, groceries or bags of coal to allow their children to attend Protestant schools, and there were self-improvement classes for the mothers themselves. Often a poverty-stricken mother would give up one child to a residential school, such as the Bird’s Nest Institution in Kingstown, in return for help with rearing her other children at home.

  Catholic charities, such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul, could not compete, for the simple reason that their poor were so numerous. In the first half of 1913 the society was able to raise only £130 for its anti-proselytism campaign, of which £50 came from the Jesuits and £30 from Archbishop Walsh. In contrast, the Bird’s Nest Institution had an annual income of more than £4,400 and the Protestant ragged schools had a collective income of £14,000. In these circumstances the Society of St Vincent de Paul sometimes resorted to drastic measures, such as having children attending Protestant schools committed to industrial schools run by Catholic religious orders for minor infractions of the law. There were also Protestant industrial schools.

  In one case the society investigated the placing of five Catholic children in a Protestant industrial school. It found the mother dying of cancer in a cellar in Chancery Street. The society’s visitors promised ‘to save the children from the worthless father’ if the mother would grant them custody. She was provided with a bed in St Vincent’s Hospital after signing over the care of her children to the society. When she died, the society immediately transferred four of the children to a Catholic industrial school. The youngest, a nine-month-old baby, died in unspecified circumstances shortly afterwards.

  The Irish Church Mission did not endure such activities passively. The Rev. Michael Goff organised pickets to escort proselytised children from their homes to school to make sure they were not approached by St Vincent de Paul counter-proselytisers.

  In October 1913 matters came to a head because of the lock-out. By then most of the workers involved in the dispute had been unemployed for more than six weeks, and extreme hardship was widespread. The churches had been slow to respond, and most middle-class Dubliners showed their hostility to the strikers and their charismatic leader, Jim Larkin, by refusing to contribute to relief funds. It was into this sectarian minefield that the British socialist and suffragist Dora Montefiore stepped with her innocent proposal for a ‘Dublin Kiddies Scheme’ that would provide workers’ children with foster homes in England for the duration of the dispute.

  Nationalists such as Mrs Dudley Edwards were outraged and were quick to point out that most of the foster-parents would inevitably be Protestants, socialists, or even atheists. (It was not clear which of these categories would constitute the greatest threat to the children’s spiritual welfare.) Archbishop Walsh condemned the scheme unequivocally and said that strikers’ wives who availed of the offer ‘can be no longer held worthy of the name of Catholic mothers.’ Mobs led by priests marched to the railway stations and docks to forcibly prevent the ‘deportation’ of children. Once the Irish Independent and Evening Herald—both owned by the employers’ leader, William Martin Murphy—began publishing the names and addresses of the families prepared to avail of the scheme, it collapsed.

  The Dublin Kiddies project was the only occasion in the five-month lock-out when the authority of Larkin was seriously challenged among his followers.33 It was also the first great confrontation between the clergy and the champions of civil society in modern Ireland over who should determine a child’s welfare, the parents or the Catholic Church. It proved an unqualified victory for the church.

  The Protestant churches remained largely quiet during the controversy, but it gave many individual Protestants pause for thought. As T. D. Rudmose-Brown, professor of Romance languages at Trinity College, put it, they had been provided ‘with an interesting foretaste of the joys of unfettered Home Rule to which we are hastening.’ And James Campbell, one of the two Unionist MPs for the University of Dublin, told the anti-home-rule rally in the Theatre Royal
, ‘I honestly believe that I would have a greater chance of liberty, of personal judgement and of conscience under Jim Larkin and the Irish Transport Union, than I would under Joe Devlin.’34

  ‘The fantastic policy … of spending money in taking the children away for what I heard is called a holiday, can do no real good,’ Archbishop Walsh told the Society of St Vincent de Paul shortly after the Dublin Kiddies Scheme collapsed.

  It can have but one permanent result, and that, surely, the very reverse of a beneficent one. It will make them discontented with the poor homes to which they will sooner or later return, that is to say, those who will return at all. That surely is a result by no means to be viewed with anything but abhorrence by anyone sincerely anxious for the welfare and happiness of the poor.35

  Dr Walsh was a humane and in many ways an enlightened church leader. He was also a friend of organised labour, at least in its more respectable guise, as represented by an older generation of leaders from the more moderate craft unions. His belief that the poor could be reconciled with their lot represented the views of many middle-class Dubliners of all religious persuasions. However, middle-class Catholics were by no means as resigned to their fate and to remaining second-class citizens in their own city.