The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (124 page)

In his biography of Curzon, Harold Nicolson writes: “To Mr Lloyd George; and above all to Mr Churchill, is due our gratitude for having at this juncture defied not the whole world merely, but the full hysterical force of British public opinion.” Yet they paid a price, George deservedly, Winston less so. No one outside the cabinet knew of Churchill’s wise counsel during the months before the highly charged name of Chanak suddenly reappeared on front pages, reminding readers of his earlier misfortune there. The
Daily Mail
then screamed “
STOP THIS NEW WAR
!” and cried that not a single British soldier should fall “in order that Mr Winston Churchill may make a new Gallipoli.” To some extent, however, he was responsible for his loss in stature. He had been genuinely affronted by what he regarded as Kemal’s insolence in defying a British demand. And then he learned of the destruction of Smyrna, described in a belated report to Curzon from Sir Harry Lamb, the British consul general in the ruined city. The sack of the city outraged Winston even as Bolshevik savagery had. It was an account of “pillage, rape and massacre,” he wrote. “Sir Harry Lamb counted 20 corpses in 50 yards during the infernal orgy” which found “few parallels in the history of crime.” His reaction to barbarism would always be unrestrained, and often misunderstood. Mrs. Keppel wrote that Winston was “longing to drop the paint brush for the sword,” and Hankey noted in his diary: “I walked across the Park with Churchill one evening towards the end of the crisis and he quite frankly regretted that the Turks had not attacked us at Chanak, as he felt that the surrender of Eastern Thrace to them was humiliating, and that the return of the Turks to Europe meant an infinity of troubles.”
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T
he British, alternately baffled and amused by the incompatibility of Arabs and Jews, never saw the parallel between the running canker in the Middle East and their own ancient quarrel with the Irish. Yet the two were not unlike, and the second, among people presumed to be more civilized, is the more perplexing. It is a source of endless wonder that these two islands, lying side by side off the coast of Europe, should have been the fount of so much anguish, each for the other. One spawned the mightiest empire in history, and its arrogant overlords were loathed by their repressed neighbors across the Irish Sea. The other, small, poor, with virtually no valuable natural resources, supported a people conspicuously lacking in political gifts and afflicted with an extraordinary incidence of alcoholism (“It is a very moist climate,” Churchill once observed), yet endowed with immense charm, romantic vision, and remarkable genius—it was the homeland of Swift, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Millington Synge, O’Casey, O’Faolain, and Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.
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Ireland’s impact on British public life ought to have been slight. In fact, it had been enormous. The Irish question had been a primordial parliamentary issue for generations. It had driven Pitt from office, defeated Gladstone at the height of his powers, toppled the Tories in 1885, and held the balance in the House between 1910 and 1914. When the issue of Home Rule made its periodic appearances, London newspaper accounts of it were so dense you could hardly find the non sequiturs; Churchill told his Dundee constituents: “
The Times
is speechless, and takes three columns to express its speechlessness.”
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On the eve of the Great War, the British cabinet had been absorbed in drawing a temporary border between Ulster and Eire, narrowing it down first to the counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone, next to parishes and groups of parishes inside Fermanagh and Tyrone—and even then was unable to reach a solution which would satisfy either side. Irish hearts and English hearts beat to a different rhythm. The Irish hated the English, and Englishmen who did not return the hatred were fascinated by the Irish. Nietzsche had warned against staring too long into an abyss because eventually, he said, it would stare back. Ireland was England’s abyss and it never blinked.

Like many British politicians, Winston had personal ties to Ireland. Dublin’s Sackville Street, since renamed O’Connell Street, had been familiar to his grandfather, his father, and, in his childhood, to Winston himself. Yet although he could never conceive of its secession from the United Kingdom, he had never been, and never would be, accused of publicly taking sides in its draining religious feud. To him it was “the Empire’s ailing child,” which he also compared to a forest in which friends were indistinguishable from foes. “My views,” he said once, when asked how he stood on the question, “are a harmonious process, which keeps them in relation to the current movement of events.” He never broke completely with North or South. History’s verdict, he then believed, would be clear: “Ireland will be revealed to have been strong only in her grievance, and England weak only in the assertion of her power in interior Irish affairs.” Since Ireland, unlike the Dominions, lacked self-government, its problems had become part of his responsibilities when he entered the Colonial Office. In the opinion of the British public it was, indeed, the largest part. As Alan Moorehead observes, “in the early 1920s it seemed at times that this issue eclipsed every other and that there could be no solution of it.” Churchill himself saw “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again.”
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Actually, they had been there all the time. Though he and the rest of England had been looking eastward toward the Continent between 1914 and 1918, the abyss had continued to stare at their backs. Frustrated by the prewar failures of John Redmond’s Irish Nationalists, the people of southern Ireland, or Eire, as we now know it, turned increasingly, during the war years, to the leaders of the Sinn Féin. The Sinn Féiners were unwilling to settle for a parliament in Dublin. They wanted a republic like the United States, independent of England. The Easter rebellion of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1916, planned in conjunction with German agents, was doomed before the first shot was fired, but the British execution of Patrick Pearse and several other rebel leaders—Eamon de Valera was spared because he had been born in America—invested them with martyrdom, an attribute highly valued in a country which cherishes the maxim that “grass soon grows over a battlefield but never over a scaffold.” In the summer of the following year most of the survivors were belatedly amnestied, De Valera being released on July 11. Early in 1918 Redmond died, and the British then delivered two further blows to Anglo-Irish friendship. They rearrested De Valera and the rest of the Sinn Féin leadership for subversion. And then they attempted to induct Eire’s men into the British army. This was a fiasco. Inducted, the men immediately deserted en masse. “Irish conscription,” Churchill said, “was handled in such a fashion… that we had the worst of both worlds, all the resentment against compulsion and in the end no law and no men.”
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Meanwhile, Orangemen had been fighting gallantly on the western front—Kitchener had asked them for a brigade of volunteers, and they had given him a complete division—assuring Ulster status as a privileged Protestant sanctuary when Home Rule came.

Ulster excepted, Sinn Féin candidates swept Ireland in the parliamentary elections of 1918. Like Churchill in the Boer War, they had successfully exploited imprisonment as a political asset. But instead of crossing to London and taking the House of Commons oath to a King they scorned, they met in Dublin, adopted the Easter rebellion program, formed a Dáil Eireann (“Irish Assembly”), and elected De Valera president of it. The Dáil (pronounced “Doyle”) was suppressed by the British. De Valera went back behind bars, but in February 1919 he was rescued from Lincoln Jail—and smuggled, disguised, into New York—by the daring Michael Collins, a veteran of the Easter Rising, adjutant general of the Irish Republican Army, and leader of the IRA guerrilla warfare which now began. The British put a price of £5,000 on Collins’s head, but like the rest of the desperate measures adopted that year it accomplished nothing. Except in the northeastern Protestant counties civil order was disintegrating. The IRA held Eire in a thralldom of loyalty or, where that was lacking, of terror. The British authorities in Dublin Castle were under virtual siege.

In August 1919, when the Dáil was proclaimed an illegal organization, Churchill, then still minister of war, told the cabinet that the time was not propitious for an Irish solution. Yet something had to be done. Violence had become the official policy of Eire’s real leaders. The relationship between their “Irish Republic” and Great Britain amounted to a state of war. In the United States—where he had raised over five million dollars from Irish Americans—De Valera, describing negotiations between Dublin and London, said that “the hand of Irishmen held out in good faith was spurned and spat upon.” Eire’s hands now held grenades or revolvers. That year the IRA was responsible for eighteen murders of Englishmen, seventy-seven armed attacks, and an attempt to ambush the viceroy. In 1920 it grew worse. On March 26 the resident magistrate in Dublin was dragged from a streetcar and slain on the spot. Clementine wrote Winston: “This new Irish murder is very terrible.” He replied that Irish terrorism was “really getting very serious…. What a diabolical streak they have in their character! I expect it is that treacherous, assassinating, conspiring trait which has done them in in bygone ages of history and prevented them from being a great responsible nation with stability and prosperity. It is shocking that we have not been able to bring the murderers to justice.” By April, British constables were being shot down daily, five of them in one burst of gunfire in county Galway. Four British staff officers were killed in broad daylight aboard a train between Cork and Bandon. Sir Henry Wilson, now chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote in his diary: “Tonight Winston insinuated that the murdered officers were careless, useless fellows & ought to have taken precautions. This fairly roused me & I let fly about the Cabinet being cowards and not governing Ireland.” Winston felt the torment of frustration. So did the cabinet. Exasperated during a parliamentary inquiry, Churchill asked the attorney general for Ireland: “Why not make life intolerable in a particular area?” This had already been tried, he was told: “We made ten thousand raids in six months. We did not get hold of the revolvers. They bury them in bogs.”
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Not all Eire patriots were killers. Terence McSwiney, lord mayor of Cork, went on a hunger strike and died two months later. And some terrorists favored abduction. Scotland Yard reported: “At a Sinn Féin meeting in a private house in Glasgow last Saturday night it was decided that the best form of reprisals against the British Government would be the kidnapping of any of the following Ministers:—the Prime Minister, Mr Bonar Law, Lord French, Mr Winston Churchill, Sir Hamar Greenwood.” Six members of the Sinn Féin executive had been appointed to this mission and provided with £250 to carry it out. The Yard warned cabinet members to avoid Scotland “for the next few days or weeks.” Detective Sergeant W. H. Thompson was assigned to Churchill as a bodyguard; he would be at Churchill’s side, off and on, for the rest of Winston’s political life. Churchill, characteristically, overreacted to challenge. His early responses to the Irish crisis were unrealistic. He proposed rewards for the capture of Sinn Féiners, blind to the bloody fate which would await any Irish informer. In Dundee he opposed consideration of Home Rule while “the murder gang in Ireland” went unpunished. No settlement could be reached by “surrender to treacherous murder, but only on the basis of justice and generosity,” he said, unaware that it was the lack of justice and generosity which had sown the seeds of terrorism. In the
Illustrated Sunday Herald
he wrote inaccurately: “No nation has ever established its title-deeds by a campaign of assassination. The British nation, having come grimly through the slaughter of Armageddon, are certainly not going to be scared by the squalid scenes of sporadic warfare which are being enacted across the Irish Channel.” Clementine, troubled, cautioned him: “Do my darling use your influence now for some sort of moderation or at any rate justice in Ireland. Put yourself in the place of the Irish. If you were ever leader you would not be cowed by severity & certainly not by reprisals which fall like rain from Heaven upon the Just & upon the Unjust…. It always makes me unhappy & disappointed when I see you inclined to take for granted that the rough, iron-fisted, ‘Hunnish’ way will prevail.”
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But he was determined that the ironfisted way should be tried first. The impulse to fight fire with fire, always plausible and always barren, was too strong to be suppressed. From the outset it raised problems, however, among them the question of who should provide the retaliatory fire. Greenwood, the new chief secretary for Ireland, told a committee of ministers: “The Dublin police cannot be relied upon, nor the Post Office, nor the Civil Service.” Churchill observed: “It is monstrous that we have some two hundred murders and no one hung.” Turning to the prime minister, he reminded him that “you agreed six or seven months ago that there should be hanging.” Lloyd George confirmed it and asked Denis Henry, the attorney general: “I feel certain you must hang. Can you get convictions from Catholics?” Henry replied: “Substantially, no.” The possibility of martial law was raised. Churchill wrote Sir Henry Wilson, as chief of the general staff, asking him how many men he could spare. The answer was discouraging. Of England’s forty-six peacetime battalions, ten were of the guards needed for defense of the homeland and eight more were unsuitable because they were Irish. That left only twenty-eight. “If 8 were sent to Ireland,” Wilson wrote, “we should have very little for our own internal troubles & nothing for India, Egypt, C-ople, etc.” Sir Nevil Macready, chief commissioner of Scotland Yard, had crossed to embattled Dublin Castle with broad powers and reported that the Royal Irish Constabulary was inadequate for the job. Churchill felt it imperative to snuff out the uprising before “flames of orange and green flashed out of the Irish furnace.” Unfortunately the extinguisher he chose contained gasoline. He proposed the establishment of a temporary RIC branch, to be called the “Special Emergency Gendarmerie.” The cabinet approved it on May 11, stipulating that the force be raised, paid, and “administered” by Churchill’s ministry. Eight thousand recruits were to be sought in England, chiefly among former soldiers. In addition, another thousand ex-officers would serve in an “Auxiliary Division” of the RIC. The “Auxis,” as they came to be known, received a pound a day. Members of the Gendarmerie, who were paid ten shillings a day, were issued army surplus khaki uniforms and the black belts of the RIC. They became infamous as the “Black and Tans,” or, more simply, the “Tans.”
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