The Great Coup of 1916: 7 The End Of Democracy

Lloyd George immediately accepted the King’s invitation to form a government on 7 December 1916. His own version of events dripped insincerity, giving the impression that the onerous task of leading the government was thrust upon him suddenly, as if by magic. ‘As soon as the King entrusted me with the task of forming an Administration in succession to the Ministry that had disappeared, I had to survey the tasks awaiting me …’ [1] What arrant nonsense. ‘The ministry that had disappeared.’ This was not a Harry Potter. Perhaps he was thinking more in terms of a mafia ‘disappearance’. He would have been at home with the Mafiosa.

One of Lloyd George’s first moves was to summon Maurice Hankey to the War Office to ‘have a long talk about the personnel of the new Govt., the procedure of the select War Ctee., and the future of the war.’ [2] He asked Hankey to write a memo giving his view on the state of the war and as early as 9 December, Hankey spent the whole day with the new War Cabinet. [3] How more central could he have been to all of the discussions which finally approved Lloyd George’s decisions? [4] Unlike many of his contemporaries, Maurice Hankey was not surprised to find that Milner had been appointed directly to the inner-sanctum of Britain’s war planning. Unelected, unknown to many ordinary men and women, Lord Milner appeared as if out of the ether to take his place among the political elite charged with managing the war to ultimate victory. [5] Lloyd George claimed, laughably, that ‘I neither sought nor desired the Premiership’ and explained Milner’s inclusion as representing the ‘Tory intelligentsia and Die-Hards.’ [6] What lies. Lloyd George had always exuded unbridled ambition and had been plotting the coup against Asquith with Milner’s cabal for months. [7] His premiership was conditional on their support. Lord Milner was to have a place by his side.

The myth of Lloyd George’s ‘lightening rapidity’ in assembling around him ‘all that is best in British Life’ was coined by Lord Northcliffe in an article printed by the international press on 10 December. [8] Northcliffe had been highly influential in supporting Lloyd George, largely, but not exclusively through his editor at the Times, Geoffrey Dawson.

Although he thought nothing of telephoning the new prime minister in person, [9] the owner of the Times could not stop other influences obligating Lloyd George to retain what Northcliffe called ‘has-beens’ in cabinet posts. [10] His Daily Mail and Evening News called for the removal of Arthur Balfour and his cousin, Lord Robert Cecil to no avail. Did Northcliffe not know that both men were deeply entrenched inside the Secret Elite?

Let there be no doubt, the coup was devised and executed by members and agents of the Secret Elite. Once Asquith had been replaced, they permeated the new administration with Milner’s acolytes and associates from top to bottom, and on all sides as well. [11] Let Lloyd George be the figurehead, but the Monday Night Cabal and their Secret Elite supporters were absolutely determined to place themselves and their trusted allies in all of the major offices of state. Furthermore, Lloyd George was subtly but securely scrutinised at every turn. He would not be given free rein. Thus their chosen men were placed in key positions, with a smattering of useful Conservative and Labour MPs given office in order to guarantee that the government could survive any parliamentary vote. On his return to London on 10 December, Hankey ‘had to see Lord Milner by appointment’. He noted in his diary ‘I have always hated his [Lord Milner’s] politics but found the man very attractive and possessed of personality and [we] got own like a house on fire’. [12] Of course they did. Hankey would not have survived otherwise. He was well aware of Milner’s power and influence.

Another myth still widely accepted is that Lloyd George’s very special cabinet, which literally took control of every strand in the prosecution of the war, was assembled at break-neck speed by the Welsh genius. It had taken months of deliberation and consultation before appointments and tactics were finally agreed inside the closed ranks of the Monday Night Cabal. The final selection which bore Lloyd George’s alleged stamp reflected the Secret Elite’s approval of men in whom they had faith. The War Committee initially comprised prime minister Lloyd George, who had been in the Secret Elite’s pocket since 1910, [13] Viscount Alfred Milner, the most important influence inside that secret movement [14] George Curzon of All Souls and twice Viceroy of India, [15] Andrew Bonar Law, still the formal leader of the Tories and the Labour MP Arthur Henderson, an outspoken champion of the war effort. [16] This central core took charge. They held daily meetings to better manage the war. Sometimes two and three meetings took place in a single day. These five men alone were supposedly the supreme governors of the State. [17] But they were not in any sense, equals.

The old order of senior Liberal politicians was mercilessly purged. Out went Asquith despite his years of loyal service. Sir Edward Grey had forfeited his right to office when he began to consider possibilities of peace with the Americans. He was put out to pasture. Reginald McKenna, long a thorn in Lloyd George’s side was dismissed. Lord Crewe remained loyal to Asquith and was not considered. To his great disappointment, Winston Churchill was not deemed suitable.  He had many enemies in the Tory  party. One Liberal Party stalwart, Samuel Montagu, who took over at the Ministry of Munitions when Lloyd George moved to the War Office in July 1916, had to go in order to find room for other appointees, but his patience was to be rewarded some short months later when he was made Viceroy of India. [18] This is precisely how the Secret Elite adjusts its favours and looks after its own. It still does.

The Secret Elite stamped their authority over every important level of government. With Sir Edward Carson at the Admiralty and Arthur Balfour at the Foreign Office, Lord Derby became Secretary of State for War and Lord Robert Cecil continued in his position as Minister of Blockade. Home Secretary, Sir George Cave took office barely months after he and FE Smith had successfully prosecuted Sir Roger Casement and refused his right to appeal to the House of Lords. [19] Secret Elite agents, every one.

Milner ensured that his close friends were given positions of influence and authority. Take for example the meteoric rise of Rowland Prothero. He claimed to know only two men ‘prominent in public life’. [20] It transpired that these were Lords Milner and Curzon. In 1914 Prothero was first elected to parliament as one of Oxford University’s MPs. In late 1915 he served on a Committee on Home Production of Food with Alfred Milner. In 1916, Milner’s friend was given the cabinet post of President of the Board of Agriculture. [21] It took him a mere two and a half years to move from new recruit to cabinet minister. In addition, Arthur Lee, who had accommodated many of the secret meetings which foreshadowed the coup, was appointed Director-General of food production. Other known members and supporters of the Secret Elite who shamelessly benefitted from the coup included H.A.L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education, [22] Walter Long as Colonial Secretary and Sir Henry Birchenough at the Board of Trade. [23] They were everywhere … and not just politicians.

Lloyd George had risen to high office through the unseen patronage of the Secret Elite. His performance at the Board of Trade [24] guaranteed him the benevolent approbation of leading figures in shipping and ship-building. As Chancellor he laid claim to saving the City [25], took advice from Lord Rothschild, financiers and insurance brokers, linked the British economy to America through Morgan-Grenfell and met and socialised with the great mine-owners and manufacturers of the time. In December 1916 he revolutionised government control of production by bringing businessmen into political office. Unfortunately the appointment of interested parties to posts from which their companies could reap great profit was not a success.

Sir Joseph Maclay was appointed in charge of shipping. As a Scottish ship-owner and manager, Maclay had been critical of the government’s concessions to trade unions and he opposed the nationalization of shipping. The Admiralty treated Maclay with deep hostility, and opposed his idea of convoys after the onset of Germany’s unrestricted submarine offensive in February 1917. Maclay was proved right [26] though shipowners still reaped unconscionable fortunes.

The new prime minister made Lord Devonport food controller. Chairman of the Port of London Authority (1909-25), he broke the dockers’ strike in 1912, causing great distress and hardship in East London. Imagining that his hard-man image equated to strength of character, Lloyd George appointed Minister of Food Control. [27] Not so. Devonport protected his own grocery interests and resisted the introduction of rationing until May 1917. 

Lord Rhondda, the Welsh coal magnate and industrialist was entrusted with the Local Government Board and his popularity grew when he was asked to take over the role of the incompetent Devonport as minister of food control. He grasped the nettle, by fixing food prices and ensuring government purchases of basic supplies. [28] Compared to the others, he was a shining light.

Westman Pearson, later Viscount Cowdrey, was placed in charge of the Air Board. Pearson had acquired oil concessions in Mexico through his questionable relationship with the Mexican dictator, Diaz. [29] His ownership of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company (which became part of Royal Dutch Shell in 1919) guaranteed Pearson vast profits throughout the war.

Sir Alfred Mond, elevated by Lloyd George in 1916 to Commissioner of Works was the managing director of the Mond Nickel Company and a director of the International Nickel Company of Canada. Nickel hardens armour and special steels. Basically it is a strategic material which came to the fore in the so-called naval race prior to 1914. [30]

The Mond companies made great profits during the prolonged war. In 1915 Britain sent twelve times the amount of nickel to Sweden that it had in 1913. [31] There, it was either manufactured into war materials and sold to Germany, or re-exported in its raw state. Incredibly, the Chairman of one of the Empire’s most important metal processing and exporting businesses, which was directly and indirectly supplying Germany, was created Commissioner of Works. Questionable deals were subsequently negotiated between the British government and the British-American Nickel Corporation which were strongly criticised in parliament [32] but Alfred Mond ended his career as Lord Melchett of Landforth. You couldn’t make this up.

In addition, Milner and his Secret Elite associates literally took over Lloyd George’s private office. As early as 10 December Hankey realised that he was not to be the only member of the new prime minister’s secretariat. At Milner’s request, Leo Amery, his loyal lieutenant in South Africa, was unaccountably placed on the staff of the War Cabinet, but not as joint Secretary. Hankey remained secure in Lloyd George’s trust in charge of the War Cabinet organisation. [33]

A curious new chapter in Downing Street’s history was created outside the prime minister’s residence. Literally. Temporary offices were constructed in the Downing Street garden to accommodate a select group of trusted administrators who monitored and directed all contact between Lloyd George and departments of government. [34] The man in charge throughout its existence was Professor W.G. S. Adams, an Oxford Professor and member of Milner’s entourage [35] who later became editor of War Cabinet Reports and Warden of All Souls in Oxford. [36] This appointment was swiftly followed by that of two former members of Milner’s famous Kindergarten; [37] Philip Kerr became Lloyd George’s private secretary and Lionel Curtis, another of Milner’s loyal acolytes, was also drafted into service. It did not stop there. Waldorf Astor and Lord Northcliffe’s younger brother, Cecil Harmsworth followed shortly afterwards.

To complete the pack, Milner insisted that Lloyd George reconsider appointing John Buchan to his staff after Haig’s apologist had been turned down for a post. In a private letter which has survived because it comes from the Lloyd George archives, rather than Milner’s much culled and carefully shredded papers, he wrote:
‘My Dear Prime Minister, Don’t think me too insistent! I wish you would not turn down John Buchan, without seeing him yourself…. I am not satisfied to have him rejected on hear-say, & ill informed hear-say at that.’ [38]
Buchan was appointed to the prime minister’s staff as Director of Information. And historians would have us believe that these were Lloyd George’s appointments.

It was as if the Monday Night Cabal had kidnapped the prime minister. Just as Alfred Milner had captured, then captivated, the nascent talent of young imperialists from Oxford University at the turn of the century and taken them to South Africa to help him govern and renovate the post Boer-War Transvaal and Cape colonies, so now, the very same men ‘guided’ Lloyd George and filtered the information which flowed to Downing Street. They were not Lloyd Georg’s men … they were Lord Milner’s. He was in charge.

To the anguish of Asquith’s political allies, this new bureaucracy had metamorphosed into an undemocratic monster fashioned by Alfred Milner. They could see it and railed against it. What we need to know is, why has this wholesale coup d’etat been studiously ignored by mainstream historians? Why do they continually write about Lloyd George’s government and Lloyd George’s secretariat when his very position was bound and controlled by Milner and his Garden Suburb minders? The radical journalist, H W Massingham published a vitriolic attack on Milner’s organisation in early 1917:

‘… A new double screen of bureaucrats is interposed between the War Directorate and the heads of [government] Departments, whose responsibility to Parliament has hitherto been direct … The first is the Cabinet Secretariat … the second is a little body of illuminati, whose residence is in the Prime Minister’s garden …These gentlemen stand in no sense for a Civil Service Cabinet. They are rather a class of travelling empirics in Empire, who came in with Lord Milner … The governing ideas are not those of Mr. Lloyd George … but of Lord Milner … Mr George has used Toryism to destroy Liberal ideas; but he has created a Monster which, for the moment, dominates both. This is the New Bureaucracy which threatens to master England …’ [39]

It was indeed. This was the Secret Elite’s most successful coup so far, accomplished by the critical silence and complicity of a compliant press. Elected parliamentary government had been purged. The Secret Elite spurned democracy because they ordained that democracy did not work. Their dictatorship was masked by Lloyd George, happy to pose and strut as the man who would win the war. Perhaps you were taught that he did? It is a self-serving myth. He operated inside a political straitjacket and fronted an undemocratic government.

And the sacrifice of youth continued.  And the profits of war grew ever larger.

[1] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 620.
[2] Hankey, Diary 10 December 1916.
[3] War Cabinet 1, CAB 23/1/1 discussed the cost of loans from America which were running at $60 million per week. Messrs. Morgan, Grenfell and Co. continued as the conduit for all American payments. Hankey also recorded in these minutes that the Press had been informed that the War cabinet would meet every weekday.
[4] Lord Vansittart recorded that Hankey ‘progressively became secretary of everything that mattered. He grew into a repository of secrets, a chief Inspector of Mines of information.’ Robert Gilbert Vansittart, The Mist Procession, p. 164.
[5] While Lloyd George spends many pages expressing his opinion on most of his colleagues, he curiously omits a pen-picture on Lord Milner. Possibly the Censor removed it. Either way it is interesting to note how carefully Milner’s contribution to Lloyd George’s ascent to the premiership has been airbrushed.
[6] Lloyd George, Memoirs, p. 596.
[7] See blog, The Great Coup of 1916: 4 The Monday Night Cabal, 3 August 2016.
[8] The Times estimated that Lord Northcliffe’s lengthy article in praise of Lloyd George had been carried in one thousand American, Australian, Canadian, South African, French, Italian and other journals. [Times 11 December, 1916]
[9] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 329.
[10] The Times, 11 December 1916, p. 4.
[11] Gollin, Proconsul, p. 376.
[12] Ibid., p. 329.
[13] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp 164-5.
[14] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 6-9 and pp.140- 47.
[15] The place of All Souls college at Oxford as the centre of the Secret Elite intelligentsia in Britain was identified by Professor Quigley. See The Anglo-American Establishment pp. 20-26.
[16] In August 1914 Arthur Henderson had been outspoken in his objection to war, but he changed his position absolutely within weeks.
[17] Gollin, Proconsul, p. 391.
[18] E.S. Montagu was both a friend of Asquith’s and respected colleague of Lloyd George. To most observers his omission from Asquith’s cabinet in 1916 spelled the end of his political career. But this is not how the Secret Elite work. In stepping down temporarily, Montagu earned the right to be promoted to the prestigious position of Viceroy of India in 1917.
[19] Thomas S. Legg, Marie-Louise Legg, ‘Cave, George, Viscount Cave (1856–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[20] Lord Ernle, Whippingham to Westminster, p. 248.
[21] Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. 27.
[22] Ibid., p. 312.
[23] Ibid.
[24] President of the Board of Trade was Lloyd George’s first cabinet post in 1906. During his tenure there he became popular with the business class whose interests he often championed.
[25] Lloyd George, Memoirs, p. 61.
[26] Ibid., pp. 688-95.
[27] Richard Davenport-Hines, ‘Kearley, Hudson Ewbanke, first Viscount Devonport (1856–1934)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[28] John Williams, ‘Thomas, David Alfred, first Viscount Rhondda (1856–1918)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[29] Geoffrey Jones, Westman Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdrey, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[30] Gordon H Boyce, Co-operative Structures in Global Business, pp. 84-5.
[31] Rear Admiral MWWC Consett, The Triumph of Unarmed Forces, p. 201.
[32] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 14 January 1918 vol. 101 cc5-6.
[33] Maurice Hankey, Supreme Command, vol. II, p. 590.
[34] John Turner, Lloyd George’s Secretariat, p.1.
[35] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[36] Ibid., pp. 91-93. All Souls College in Oxford has been closely associated with the Rhodes / Milner group so integral to the Secret Elite in England.
[37] The title Milner’s Kindergarten was given to the group of young Oxford University graduates whom Milner attracted to help him rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. They subsequently enjoyed stellar careers in journalism, politics, banking and finance every area of Secret Elite influence. Further reading – Walter Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men.
[38] Milner to Lloyd George 17 January 1917, in the Lloyd George Papers.
[39] H.W. Massingham, The Nation 24 February, 1917.

Ireland 1916, 10: The Legacy Of Easter 1916

 

With the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising fast approaching (24-29 April 2016), the events of that awesome week will be celebrated throughout Ireland with parades, bunting and speeches with an emphasis on those who gave their lives in the cause of liberty. Politicians will, as ever, line up to be photographed and, by association, linked to the men who fell. 1916 was a year of atrocious bloodletting across the battlefields of Europe, but there is an essential difference between those millions sacrificed to an Empire’s war in a determined drive to crush Germany and those who took part in the uprising in the expectation that they would sacrifice their lives for Ireland. Indeed the Proclamation which Patrick Pearse read out in front of the General Post Office in Dublin invoked the readiness of Ireland’s children ‘to sacrifice themselves for the common good’. [1] It was an overt choice, a clear decision pledged to Ireland’s freedom from the British imperialist yoke. The consequent loss of life in Ireland cannot be compared to the horrendous carnage in the battles of attrition over the Somme from July 1916, [2] but its significance was to prove far greater than contemporary British historians and commentators have recorded.

The Secret Elite and their imperial guard in the press, the foreign and the colonial offices, the war office and the great money houses in London and New York, made every effort to downplay the actions taken by James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Sean Mac Diarmada, Eamonn Ceannt, Joseph Plunkett and the men and women who fought by their side. Because he represented an intellectual and dangerous challenge to the Empire, they promoted a devastating tirade against Roger Casement based on allegedly sexually explicit diaries which were circulated secretly to influence pro-Irish Americans.

Whatever the early success the anti-rebellion propaganda enjoyed, the rising was not a naive proposition to be dismissed by ‘Empire Loyalists’ as folly. [3] Nor was it simply the sixth in line in a series of rebellions against British domination over the previous three hundred years. It was not an aberration or a theatrically staged protest. It was a statement of intent from a small minority group which refused to follow Redmond and Dillon blindly into a war they knew was wrong and which they deeply resented. And their numbers grew, slowly at first, as men and women who initially acted in good faith to support the Empire came to terms with the unpalatable fact that yet again the British government was using them as dupes.

Though derided for their refusal to join the British army and labelled ‘cowards’, they were not. They saw the reality of the evil Empire ranged against Germany and refused to bend the knee. They were not to be fooled by false promises of Home Rule once the war was over. From an unforgiving courtroom Roger Casement caught the moment: ‘we are told that if Irishmen go by the thousands to die not for Ireland, but for Flanders, for Belgium, for a patch of sand in Mesopotamia, or a rocky trench on the heights of Gallipoli, they were winning self-government for Ireland. But if they dare to lay down their lives on their native soil, if they dare to dream even that freedom can be won only at home by men resolved to fight for it there, then they are traitors to their country.’ [4] Casement analysed it perfectly. The sacrifice of these men who joined up in 1914 did not win self-government for Ireland once the war had ended.

Just before he was executed, an unrepentant James Connolly wrote to his sister, ‘We went out to break the connection between this Country and the British Empire and to establish an Irish Republic. We believe that the call we thus issued to the people of Ireland was a nobler call in a holier cause than any call issued to them during this war…’ [5] Both men, and those who shared their conviction, acted not from narrow self-serving considerations but from a revulsion against Britain’s declaration of war on Germany. They sought no association with the barbaric war. Theirs was an act of faith whose realisation they never saw. From it came a political reawakening, fuelled by the intransigence and arrogance of the Secret Elite. Casement, Connolly, Pearce and all who sacrificed themselves for Irish independence, were the spark that lit the flame.
It need not have come to that.

Had there been a genuine will to accommodate the aspirations of the Irish people, it would have been so different. Had the Secret Elite addressed the issue of Home Rule in Ireland with a more enlightened touch, the rebellion might never have had any impact at all. In stirring Ulster for their own purposes, the Secret Elite promoted an absolute determination in the Northern Province to detach itself from any Dublin-centred national government. As we have seen in previous blogs, their parliamentary agents in the Conservative party derided the advocates of Home Rule, wallowed in the overt injustices and inequalities between the different communities and armed and trained a private army to defend Ulster. Had the Secret Elite ordained that Asquith’s coalition government, formed in December 1915, should acknowledge the great value of Ireland as part of the Empire’s war effort, Irish citizens might have felt valued. Had the War Office listened to John Redmond and his pleas for the establishment of an Irish Army Corps, which Asquith endorsed in a speech in Dublin in September 1915, but failed to deliver, there would have been a greater sense of identity with the Empire’s struggle. [6] Such pious advocacy is empty talk for the men of real power, the money power, the financiers and policy makers who acted behind the democratic front, the Secret Elite, had no intention of placating Ireland.

For the Secret Elite had caused the war, deliberately. Their purpose was to crush Germany and take control of the civilised world. They cared not a jot for the working people and the impoverished underclasses. They had no time to concern themselves about injustice in Ireland. And that is why the British establishment stuck to the mantra that Ireland could not be trusted. The irony was, it was they who could not be trusted.

Instead, the War Office engaged in ‘a systematic suppression of recognition of the gallantry of the Irish troops at the front.’ Redmond stated in parliament that: ‘I do not think that there was any single incident that did more harm to our efforts [to encourage enlistment] at that time than the suppression in the official dispatches of all recognition, even of the names being mentioned, of the gallantry of the Dublin Fusiliers and the Munster Fusiliers in the landing at V Beach at Gallipoli.’ [7] Such blatant discrimination by those in real power was indefensibly racist and counter-productive, but it represented their mind-set. Ordinary people did not matter and ordinary Irish men and women did not matter absolutely.

This suppression of national identity, this deliberate disassociation of a people with the valour and sacrifice of its fighting men because of their ethnicity and religion was a repression which rebounded and destroyed trust in Britain. How many historic prejudices were wrapped around the fact that ‘up to the time that the 16th went to the front, with the exception of two or three subalterns, there was not a Catholic officer in the Division’. [8] The final blow for many Irishmen in the South – and the biggest threat – came with the announcement of the coalition cabinet in December 1915. From that moment, recruitment to the British Army plummeted and support for the Irish Volunteers and independence, grew steadily. Home Rule was dead and buried, and a reborn Protestant ascendancy within the British government destroyed any lingering confidence in the impartiality of British rule.

Distrust and suspicion spread all over the South with the spectacle of Edward Carson taking a seat in the Cabinet as chief Law Officer. In the minds of large masses of the people, this meant that in the end, they would be betrayed. [9] The offer that was extended to John Redmond to join the Cabinet deceived nobody. While representatives of the small Unionist party in Ireland were given high office in the Coalition Government and in the Executive of Ireland, Redmond, who represented the majority of the Irish people, was offered minor post of no particular importance. It was a calculated insult.

The Secret Elite and their political agents believed that Ireland in 1916 was still a backward, ill-educated society, unable to comprehend what was happening all around its shores. Not so. People could clearly see that a Unionist executive had been installed in Dublin Castle, with a Unionist Chief-Secretary and a Unionist Attorney General. These bitter opponents of Home Rule imposed a system of universal martial law encompassing hundreds of untried prisoners, many of whom did not even know the charges of which they were accused. The political system which had apparently agreed a great measure of home rule for Ireland in 1914, was transformed into a military dictatorship. The unelected minority were in charge. Again.

Everything the London government did was unjust. Everything the War Office ordered, threatened the identity of the Irish soldier. Whether it was meant as a punishment or determined through fear, injured and recuperating Irishmen at Boulogne were sent back to the front to serve in English divisions. It was estimated that there were twenty times more Irishmen in English, Scottish and Welsh battalions than there were Englishmen, Scots or Welshmen in Irish regiments. There was no justice. There was no equality. Redmond told parliament that he had received ‘scores and scores of letters’ from Irishmen seeking transfer from their appointed regiment into the Connaught Rangers, but ‘never succeeded in a single case.’ [10]

The malignant aggression of Secret Elite imperialist ambitions used every obstacle to prevent Irishmen from being credited for the successful prosecution of the war. After 1916, young Irishmen, suppressed by a Dublin executive severely out of touch with its own populace, preached a new gospel; one in which Home Rule representatives were no longer entitled to their support. Redmond, Dillon, ‘wee’ Joe Devlin and the Irish Parliamentary Party had failed. They had failed because they stood by a government which patently failed the people. Unable to grasp the truth that stared them down, the old order in Irish politics blamed ‘prejudiced stupidity’ inside the British government for the return to pre-1910 attitudes. No, it ran much deeper than mere prejudice. The guiding force behind both Asquith’s and later in 1916, Lloyd George’s governments, unelected and full of place-men, was the Secret Elite, for whom Ireland was a mere side-show; an inconvenience which would be ironed-out in their good time. For the men and women of the Rising, an Irish Rubicon had been crossed.

The burning question is why John Redmond and virtually all of the Home Rule (Irish Parliamentary) Party, continued to stay loyal to the Empire? Was it, as Shakespeare put it, that they were stepped in blood so far, that ‘returning was as tedious as go’er.’ [11] They had never belonged to the political class of the Oxford Elite from whose staunchest ranks many in the Secret Elite were drawn. Redmond had been duped by the Asquiths into believing that loyalty to the Empire would be reflected in loyalty from the Imperial Parliament in London. He appeared to hold to the belief that in the end, even although time and again the Unionist-dominated cabinet thwarted his every good intention, he would be able to guide Ireland through the political turmoil. But his time had passed.

John Redmond continued to front parliamentary opposition to the British cabinet’s designs on Ulster though his political mandate became a thing of the past. His brother, 52 year old Major Willie Redmond, MP for East Clare, was killed in action at Messines in June 1917, a hard blow for a parliamentarian who knew he stood on shifting sands. Major Redmond’s parliamentary seat  was taken by Eamonn de Valera, whose death sentence in 1916 had been remitted solely because he was an American citizen. De Valera was adopted as the Sinn Fein candidate in East Clare and won with an enormous 70 per cent share of the vote. [12] John Redmond died broken hearted in London on 6 March 1918. [13]

The tectonic plates of political confidence in Irish politics in the South clashed absolutely. The old order shook and fell. Like an avalanche, Sinn Fein, which had been but a doctrinaire idea held by a very small number in the community, developed a giant’s strength. In the aftermath of the Easter Rising, Sinn Fein reaped a reward that many later claimed was undeserved. Be clear, Sinn Fein did not make the rising, but the rising made Sinn Fein. [14] They held no association with Britain. They had consistently rejected war. The British press repeatedly accused ‘Sinn Feiners’ of plotting the Easter Rising as if it was a mark of infamy. This badge of dishonour in British eyes became the standard for the honourable rebel. Their ranks were swollen both by participants in the rising and wrongfully deported sympathisers, freed from internment and prison in England. To paraphrase Yeats, in the aftermath of Easter 1916, ‘a terrible beauty was born.’ [15]

By 1918 Ireland was no longer the ‘one bright spot’ which had lit up Sir Edward Grey’s statement in 1914. [16] It had been transformed into one of the most doubtful and difficult spots that ever coloured the Empire. [17] Attempts by the British parliament to introduce conscription to Ireland later in the war only made matters worse. With 47% of the votes cast in the December 1918 General Election, Sinn Fein rose like a political colossus towering over Ireland. In 1910 they had no representatives; in 1918, they held 73 seats. The Irish Parliamentary (Home Rule) Party was destroyed. In 1910 it held 67 seats; in 1918, only six of their representatives were elected to Parliament. [18]

It was a disaster for the Secret Elite determination to bind Ireland to the Empire. In truth, their obduracy had blinded them to the consequences of democratic accountability.  Much like the Scottish Labour Party in 2015, an inability to divest itself from association with an English party opened the way to a nationalist revival and cast the Irish Parliamentary Party into the political abyss. And this was the legacy of Patrick Pearse and the men who signed the Proclamation of 1916; a legacy predicated upon the Secret Elite’s inability to accept that in a changing world – republicanism in Ireland had replaced the softer notion of Home Rule under the British flag. They had tried, and continued to try, to repress an idea which had found its time.

Yet questions remain unanswered about the tumultuous events of Easter 1916. Given that the evidence we have previously presented proves without doubt that key members of the British establishment’s most powerful political, naval and military decision-makers knew in advance that the uprising was scheduled, why was no action taken to forewarn Dublin Castle and the Irish Executive?

Given the fact that many documents pertaining to Easter 1916 remain classified, probably hidden amongst the thousands condemned to the government’s secret repository at the high security communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, [19] has the time not come for outright honesty? What better gesture to continue the process of truth and reconciliation than the release of every single remaining document covering Easter 1916? The memory of all Irishmen who were sacrificed for the Empire and those killed during the uprising, and afterwards, deserves that truth.

Perhaps we are being overly idealistic. Sad to say, the old lies persist; old propaganda continues to populate the pages of contemporary newspapers in Ireland. Incredibly, an article in the Irish Times of 2014 [20] began with this ridiculous statement: ‘The war began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914 and ended on Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918.’ Still the myth-peddlers stick to pro-war propaganda without a blush of shame. The First World War began on 4 August 1914 when the British Empire declared war on Germany. Prior to that, it was a European war involving France and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The conflict officially ended only after the Versailles Peace settlement was signed in 1919. Between November 1918 and June 1919, hundreds of thousands of Germany citizens were starved to death as the miserable food blockade continued unchecked. They apparently didn’t matter then, so they won’t matter now.

Bad though that is, we wonder why Ireland’s leaders today stand literally shoulder to shoulder with their British counterparts at war centenary commemorations in solemn unquestioning agreement which perpetuates the great lie that tens of millions died for freedom and civilization. In doing so they tarnish not only the memory of all Irishmen killed or wounded in Europe and on Gallipoli, but the Irishmen who were branded cowards because they refused to take part.

The memorable words of David Starret from the 9th Royal Irish Rifles have been carved in stone at the Irish Peace Park near Messines. He wrote home lamenting ‘the innocent slaughtered for the guilty, the poor man for the sake of the greed of the already rich, the man of no authority made victim of the man who gathered importance and wishes to keep it.’

His poignant observation describes the Secret Elite in all of their conceit.

The Irish government has to take more care lest its message infers that war was popular in Ireland and that those who stood against it acted dishonourably. They did not. Pearse, Connolly, Casement and all whom they urged into action, chose to sacrifice themselves for their country. As John Dorney pointed out ‘It is entirely appropriate for families and localities to remember their dead. But to suggest that the war for the Empire was popular in Ireland and only discredited by a malevolent plan by nationalists to ‘airbrush it from history’ is simply to twist the facts. [21]

How much more honourable to recognise that Ireland was committed to a war by politicians who believed that in the end Britain would reward the nation with Home Rule. In that, they were mightily deceived. Freedom is not a reward to be bestowed; it is a right that has to be fought for and defended. Thanks to those who sacrificed themselves for Ireland in 1916, Ireland in the 21st Century is an independent nation.

They were the few.

Do not forget those who were sacrificed and those who sacrificed themselves.

[1] Patrick Pearse’s proclamation can be viewed at goireland.about.com/od/…/Proclamation-of-the-Irish-Republic-1916.htm
[2] W Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century, pp. 81-86.
[3] Liam O Ruaire, The Global-Historical Significance of the 1916 Rising https://theirishrevolution.wordpress.com/?s=the+global-historical
[4] Sir Roger Casement, Speech From The Dock, from The Crime Against Europe with The Crime Against Ireland, introduced by Brendan Clifford p. 167.
[5] Michael Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising,  p. 355.
[6] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 18 October 1916 vol 86 cc581-696.
[7] Ibid., cc586-7.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., cc587-8.
[10] Ibid., cc593-4.
[11] William Shakespeare, Macbeth, III. iv. 1136.
[12] Fidelma McDonnell, Riches of Clare: 1917 Rising of an Irish Political Colossus http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/claremuseum/news_events/1917_rising.htm
[13] Michael MacDonagh, The Life of William O’Brien, the Irish Nationalist, p.232.
[14] Warrre B Wells, John Redmond; A Biography, p. 185.
[15] W B Yeats, Easter 1916.
[16] hansard.millbanksystems.com/…/1914/aug/03/statement-by-sir-edward-g…HC Debate, 3 August 1914 vol 65 cc1809-32.
[17] Matthew Keating, House of Commons Debate, 9 April 1918 vol 104 cc1412-13.
[18] http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/h1918.htm
[19] Ian Cobain, The Guardian, 18 October 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/18/foreign-office-historic-files-secret-archive
[20] Ronan McGreevy, The Irish Times, 2 January 2014.
[21] http://www.theirishstory.com/2012/11/12/opinion-remembering-world-war-i-in-ireland/#.VrjGn4R8Gi4

Ireland 1916, 9: A Scandalous Report

Let’s cut to the chase. When the powers that oversee and direct government set up a Royal Commission or Board of Enquiry, they do so under terms that normally come to the conclusion they seek. To ensure this, they place one or more of their trusted agents as chairman or prosecutor and then set the parameters within which the so-called enquiry must operate. That done, the findings will be exactly as they require. For example, they chose Viscount Bryce, the former (and popular) Ambassador to America, to chair the report on Alleged German Outrages [1] in December 1914, and set a remit which barred the members of the committee from interviewing witnesses. They had access only to the depositions taken by barristers and despite protests, second-hand accounts were as close as the committee members came to hard fact. [2] In like vein for the Enquiry into the sinking of the Lusitania, (issued July 1915) they chose Sir Edward Carson and his associate, F E Smith, both trusted agents of the Secret Elite, as the prosecutors of Commander William Turner in order to blacken his name and divert attention away from the lies the Admiralty had concocted to explain the sinking of the Titanic. [3] So it was with the Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland.

Given the outrage expressed in Unionist quarters, Asquith had no option but to announce a Royal Commission [4] to ‘enquire into the causes’ of the ‘recent outbreak of rebellion in Ireland.’ There was a second part to the remit entrusted to the King’s chosen Commissioners, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, Sir Montague Shearman and Sir Mackenzie Chalmers. [5] These men were charged to examine the conduct and degree of responsibility of the civil and military executive for the events over Easter Weekend. In other words the focus was centred on the presumed failure of British officials to take action which would have stopped the uprising, rather than the causes of the rising itself.

Typical of a Secret Elite-led pre-determined investigation, these men represented the British Establishment with Hardinge, a career diplomat and close personal friend and advisor to King Edward VII. He had accompanied the king on all of his foreign tours and was very influential in the creation of the 1904 Entente Cordiale and the secret convention with Russia in 1907. [6] Be assured, Hardinge was a central figure in preparing the war against Germany. Later Hardinge was appointed Viceroy of India. Shearman was a King’s Bench judge who had long-standing interest in Amateur Athletics. He was also the ‘unofficial standing counsel to leading moneylender’s firms’ and according to his biographer, was ‘not a profound jurist’. [7] His colleague, Mackenzie Chalmers, was a legal civil servant with a life-long love of cricket. Both were former Oxford men with no previous experience of Ireland, and their appointments were uncontroversial. That was just was well since the terms of the Royal Commission limited their investigation to the acts of omission for which the Ulster Unionists, including their Secret Elite associates, blamed everyone except themselves.

Poor Birrell. Though he had resigned his position as Chief Secretary for Ireland on 1 May 1916, the knives had been drawn by his Unionist critics immediately word of the uprising reached London. Lord Midleton leaped into the fray on 26 April blaming the Chief Secretary and his administration for refusing to act quickly and decisively against the enemies of the Crown in Ireland. ‘Nothing has been left undone by interview or memoranda, or the giving of evidence so far as it was necessary, to induce the Irish Government to act.

Yet they allowed parades of the Sinn Feiners to continue Sunday after Sunday; they allowed these [Republican] newspapers to circulate; they allowed posters of the most seditious character, especially directed against recruiting, to be broadcast in a number of districts in Ireland. As recently as last week all these matters were brought before the Irish Government, with an intimation that if they did not deal with them quickly the opportunity might come too late.’ [8] With only minor variations, these words could have been lifted from Hansard and inserted into Hardinge’s eventual Report. What transpired was an exercise in providing a pre-determined conclusion.

The Report duly followed Midleton’s litany of liberal blame, though it acknowledged that in Ireland, ’there is always a section of opinion bitterly opposed to the British connection’ and ‘in times of excitement this section can impose its sentiments on largely increased numbers of the people’ [9] Birrell himself commented on the ‘old hatred and distrust of the British connection, always noticeable in all classes, and in all places, varying in degree, and finding different ways of expression, but always there as the background of Irish politics and character.’ [10] No attempt was made to explain why this might be. The Report stated that the creation of a Citizen Army in 1913 during the industrial unrest in Dublin, and the criticism voiced by organisers like James Connolly should, like other examples of lawlessness and disorder, have been nipped in the bud

It was the old story. Inherent racism and disparagement of the Irish was never far from the English pen. They accepted the view that ‘Irish people are easily led’ [11] and argued that the government’s failure to take prompt action meant that ‘strong repressive measures became necessary, and much hardship is imposed on the misled, but perhaps comparatively inoffensive people’. These words could have been mouthed by a nineteenth-century slave-owner. Note the implied difference between the King’s subjects in different parts of Great Britain and Ireland. Irish people were easily led. Not quite up to the mark of the stout Englishman or the trusty Scot.

While the landing of arms and ammunition at Howth in July 1914 was examined in a twenty-line paragraph, the only reference to gun-running in Ulster was reduced to a ten-word aside. [12] Great attention was given to the alliance between the Irish Volunteers and the Citizen Army and their practice of drilling and ‘seditious’ practices. Without any concrete evidence it was asserted that ‘a considerable number of the younger members of the priesthood in certain districts joined in the movement and schoolmasters who were followers of the Sinn Fein movement disseminated treason amongst younger people through the medium of the Irish language’. And there you have it; the fault could be traced to young educated catholics, teachers, clergymen and Gaels.

Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party was also blamed for its negative attitude towards suppression and the deportation of agitators. [13] Examine, please, the following statement: ‘Irishmen no doubt appreciate the maintenance of order, but they appear to have an inveterate prejudice against punishment of disorder’. Was the Scotsman, the Welshman or the Englishman, for that matter, any different? Apparently so.

The Commission was given sight of letters confiscated by the Censor, confidential reports from the Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and notes on speeches recorded by police spies at the first Annual Convention of the Irish Volunteers in October 1914. These had been duly submitted to the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, ‘but he wrote no comment on their content and no proceedings were taken.’ Here lay the principal accusation filed against Asquith’s representative in Ireland.

His enemies unearthed evidence of reports from Tyrone, from County Wexford, letters from Clan-na-Gael in America [14] and more indicating ‘disloyal and anti-British’ sedition in various parts of the country… and in their eyes, he did nothing. It was as if Birrell’s chief fault was that he tried to retain a balance in his approach to both sides in Ireland, a heinous crime to those of unionist persuasion.

Lord Midleton had attended an interview with Chief Secretary Birrell in November 1915 in which he strongly urged the disarming of the Irish Volunteers (but not the remaining Ulster Volunteers) and the prosecution of those responsible for seditious talk. Just how that would have been achieved or the impact it would have had on the Irishmen who had enlisted in their thousands, is not considered. However, ‘his warnings were entirely neglected.’ Indeed Lord Midleton, active at the very heart of the Secret Elite, sent regular warnings of dire consequences if the prime minister and his cabinet continued to adopt a cautious approach to dissent in Ireland.

Every Unionist prejudice was aired. The government was accused of knowing that various parts of the country were lawless; that the Irish volunteers had stolen arms and high explosives; that trial by jury was a failure and magistrates could not be entrusted to enforce the law. The Army Intelligence Department sought to close down and impound newspapers and suppress ‘seditious’ books but the civil authorities would not listen. [15] Sir Matthew Nathan submitted a list of ‘seditious newspapers’ in circulation in February 1916 to the Royal Commission, The aggregate circulation was at best around 24,000 copies (averaging 2,400 copies per paper) and these were not all daily publications. [16]

Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in March 1916 was watched very carefully by the intelligence services and the consequent report from the Inspector-General of the RIC stated that; ‘there can be no doubt that the Irish Volunteer leaders are a pack of rebels who would declare their independence in the event of any favourable opportunity, but with their present resources and without substantial reinforcements it is difficult to imagine that they will make even a brief stand against a small body of troops.’ [17] On the morning of 24 April 1916, the authorities in Dublin Castle, concerned that some action needed to be taken, proposed to intern and deport to England all known ‘hostile leaders’, but, before any further steps could be taken, the ‘insurrection’ broke out. [18]

Had they been in possession of the secret information divulged by Roger Casement to his interrogators in London [See Ireland 1916, Blog 7] even as late as Easter Sunday, everything would have been different. But it clearly did not suit the hidden powers to stop the planned insurrection. Their’s was a different agenda.

The report’s conclusion was exactly as Lord Midleton had pronounced. It determined that the main cause of the Uprising was the ‘lawlessness’ which was allowed to grow unchecked in a country which had been administered for the past several years ‘on the principle that it was safer and more expedient to leave law in abeyance if collision with any faction of the Irish people could thereby be avoided.’ [19] No mention was made of injustices; of one law for the south and another in the north. It was the fault of the Irish Government (by that they specifically meant Augustine Birrell) in not suppressing and prosecuting those flagrantly breaking the law … though no reference was made in any part of the report to activities like drilling and bearing arms in public in Ulster. ‘We are of the opinion that the Chief Secretary as the administrative head of Your Majesty’s Government in Ireland is primarily responsible for the situation that was allowed to arise and the outbreak that occurred. [20] Just as Midleton had pronounced in Parliament in April 1916.

But there was more. It was, they also determined, the fault of the Irish Home Rule Party which was accused of promoting the belief that the government would take no action against sedition. According to the report, ‘this led to a rapid increase of preparations for insurrection and was the immediate cause of the recent outbreak.’

What? The Home Rule Party was to blame for the uprising? What balanced examination of evidence elicited that conclusion? Not one member of the Home Rule Party had been invited to contribute to the Royal Commission. Such arrogant, politically motivated invention was completely out of order. But there it stood in black and white. Tellingly, the Report was not debated in parliament, but an outraged John Dillon condemned its findings in a later speech on Irish matters: ‘It is in my opinion a scandalous Report; it is one-sided, full of misrepresentations, but our main objection is as regards the personal character of its evidence and the method of its procedure, … what sense of justice or fair play is there in a body of men who hold up myself and the hon. and learned Member for Waterford (Mr. J. Redmond) as responsible for the government of Ireland and never give us an opportunity of appearing before the Commission?’ [21]

Poor Dillon; all of his hopes and expectations for Ireland crumbled before his eyes. Asquith’s promises, the very will of parliament itself, took a different shape after the introduction of the Coalition Government in 1915. Ulster’s men were in the ascendency once more. The Home Rule Party was undermined at every turn and as the months progressed, the Irish people felt increasingly betrayed by those who had promised, and apparently guaranteed, a Dublin government. The Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland was part of the charade in which Ireland’s future had become embroiled.

[1] Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, published, 12 May, 1915, https://archive.org/details/reportofcommitte00grea
[2] See our blog of 10 September 2014, The Bryce Report, Whatever Happened to the Evidence?
[3 See our blog, Lusitania 6: Lord Mersey’s Whitewash.
[4] Although announced beforehand by the prime minister, the formal notice of the Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland was issued on 10 May, 1916.
[5] Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland, p. 2. see http://www.garda.ie/Documents/User/Royal%20Commission%20on%20the%20Rebellion%20in%20Ireland%201916.pdf
[6] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 24-5.
[7] Theobald Mathew, revised by G R Rubin, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Lord Hardinge.
[8] Hansard, House of Lords Debate 26 April 1916 vol 21 cc819-22.
[9] Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland, p.5.
[10] Ibid., Causes of the Outbreak.
[11] Ibid., evidence of Sir David Harrel, p.5.
[12] Ibid., p. 6.
[13] Ibid., p. 7.
[14] Set up by Irish emigrants in America, Clan na Gael supported an independent Ireland. The Clan was prepared to enter into alliances with any nation ranged against the British which meant Germany on the outbreak of war. It was the largest single financier for the Easter Rising.
[15] Specific mention was made of the series of pamphlets, ‘Tracts for Our Times’, produced by Irish Volunteer Supporters, Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland, p. 10.
16] These included the Irish Volunteer, Nationality, The Irishman, The Hibernian, The Spark, The Gael, New Ireland and The Worker’s Republic, – Sir Matthew Nathan’s list of newspaper circulation, Royal Commission Report, Minutes of Evidence, p. 118.
[17] Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland, p. 10-11.
[18] Ibid., p. 12.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., p. 13.
[21] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 31 July 1916 vol 84 cc2127.

Ireland 1916, 7: Who Knew What … and When?

The Rising of 1916 did not take everyone by surprise. According to The Times, ‘those who knew how to read the signs’ believed that it was imminent. [1] Within the Unionist minority in Dublin, voices had complained that for months the rebels were flaunting their ‘arms and accoutrements’ in the streets and proclaimed to the world their disregard for law and order. [2] At a localised level such post-hoc observations might be expected in most situations of serious disorder. In this instance foreknowledge appears sufficiently extensive to obligate a deeper analysis. Other than the insurgents, who knew the Easter Rising was about to happen? What, if anything did they do about it?

The British Secret Services knew. Naval Intelligence had been in possession of German secret codes from mid-October 1914 [3] to the extent that virtually any wireless signal made by the German Navy could be intercepted by a select and very secretive group. [4] It was established at the Admiralty in London, in Room 40, under Captain (later Rear-Admiral) Reginald Hall. Possession of these priceless codes was a strategic coup of the highest order and proved invaluable in guiding the Lusitania towards U-20’s location in 1915. [5] The story of how these codes fell into the Admiralty’s hands stretches credibility [6] but further ‘good fortune’ also delivered the German diplomatic codes to the same people in March 1915. [7] Whether or not the codes originated from the sources stated in official histories is immaterial to the fact that in 1916, British Intelligence monitored Roger Casement’s activities while he was in America and Germany and knew of his intentions to return to Ireland. Room 40 decrypted at least thirty-two cables from the German Embassy in Washington to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin dealing with German support for Irish nationalism. [8] Count Bernstorff, the German Ambassador at Washington, cabled Berlin that an armed uprising was planned for 23 April, Easter Sunday, and requested that rifles, machine-guns and field artillery be provided to support it. Naval Intelligence knew that arms were to be sent in the small steamer Aud, knew the codewords to be broadcast and had more than enough information to closely follow its progress. [9]

Casements’ activities in America and Germany were also betrayed by his manservant and alleged lover, Adler Christensen, to the British minister in Oslo, who passed this to the Foreign Office in London. Sir Edward Grey forwarded the report to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, the chief secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, and to Lord Kitchener at the War Office. [10] Casement’s letters to the Irish Volunteer’s chief of staff Eoin MacNeill were intercepted en route to Ireland [11] and when he eventually stepped on to Irish soil in Tralee Bay, he was arrested within hours. From the moment he landed back, Roger Casement repeatedly stated that his sole purpose was to stop the rising which he knew to be a ‘fatal mistake’ [12] He had not returned to lead the rebellion but to stop it.

Roger Casement was promptly whisked off to London to be jointly interrogated by Sir Basil Thomson, head of the Criminal Investigation Department, Reginald Hall from the Admiralty and Major, later Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hall (no relation), MI5’s resident Irish Expert. All three were pro-Empire loyalist who followed the Secret Elite agenda with ruthless determination.

What Casement did not know was that Frank Hall had been military secretary to the UVF in Ulster, served on the 12-man committee on gun-running and was a signatory to the Solemn League and Covenant.  It was Frank Hall who, as secretary of the Unionist Clubs of Ireland [13] and senior staff officer in the UVF, had forwarded Sir Edward Carson’s letter asking all Ulster Clubs and Orange Lodges to help in the ‘immediate organisation of the UVF’, in August 1913. [14] The British Intelligence Service, and even Churchill himself, relied on Frank Hall’s assumed ‘expertise’ on matters pertaining to Ireland. And he despised Casement. Indeed all of his interrogators treated Roger Casement with contempt.

Was this why Casement’s request to be allowed to appeal publicly to the Irish Volunteers to call off the proposed Easter Rising and stop the useless bloodshed, was refused? Records in the National Archives at Kew confirm Casement’s requests. [15] Sir Ernley Blackwell, legal adviser to the Home Office cited an internal document [16] which recorded that Casement ‘begged to be allowed to communicate with the leaders to try and stop the rising but he was not allowed.’ This request was made before his interrogation at Scotland Yard. Blackwell’s appeal for more information about Casement’s interrogation added ‘On Easter Sunday at Scotland Yard, he implored again to be allowed to communicate or send a message , but they (Thomson and both Halls) refused, saying ‘ It’s a festering sore, it’s much better it should come to a head.’ [17] Sir Ernley Blackwell specifically asked Inspector Edward Parker of Special Branch if this claim was true because he had ‘several similar statements from different sources’ which he was anxious to answer. Pertinently, the Home Office legal adviser had to hand ‘several similar’ claims that the interrogators wanted the rebellion to go ahead. [18] And it did.

Consider the awful implications of this admission. The most senior men in British Intelligence knew that the uprising was about to erupt, but refused  to make any effort to prevent it. Indeed, the inference is that they welcomed it. Basil Thomson replied by letter that same day, quoting first from Special Branch shorthand notes. Here Casement stated that: ‘The rising would take place on 23 April whether arms came or not…’ [19] At this point, the Assistant Chief Commissioner wrote that ‘after the shorthand writer left on Easter Sunday, Casement said, ‘I hope you will announce my arrest. I said Why? He said, because if they know that I am taken, nothing will happen, they will know that the game is up. I am positive that he did not ask to send a message, nor did anyone say, ‘It is a festering sore…’ Thomson ended his reply by stating that Casement said he felt it his duty to come and warn the rebels when he learned that the Germans had refused to send men. [20]

Thus according the Home Office records, Roger Casement made at least two requests to be allowed to communicate with Dublin to stop the Rising, the last on Easter Sunday. We know that Sir Ernley Blackwell had knowledge of ‘several similar’ statements that the Scotland Yard interrogators had expressed a comment about the need to let the festering sore come to a head. Who else was party to such a momentous decision? To have permitted an uprising against the Crown was treason itself. Yet the colouration of what did and did not constitute treason against the Crown changed hue dependent on whether one’s loyalties were to Ulster or not. Was Frank Hall under instruction? He had nailed his convictions to the union flag in August 1913, when he wrote that [Clubs] ‘must be kept going and encouraged by them in view of the possibility of a general election before the actual passage of the Home Rule Bill, and the consequent outbreak of hostilities.’ [21] Carson’s man had no love for the anti-war rebels in the South. What cannot be denied is that before a shot had been fired,  a covert decision been taken to let the Easter Rising go ahead.

Other key members of the Secret Elite had foreknowledge of the outbreak in Dublin. Arthur Balfour, then in charge at the Admiralty, ‘knew beforehand that the rebellion in Ireland would start on Easter Monday 1916 and made naval preparations in advance.’ [22] Furthermore it was Admiralty staff who informed Downing Street about the outbreak of hostilities in Dublin. Balfour had instructed the Duty Officer at the Admiralty to stay constantly in touch with the Post Office in London to monitor the flow of telegrams to and from  Dublin. Immediately the line was blocked, Downing Street was told that that the rebellion had started. [23]

Herbert Asquith and his secretary, Maurice Hankey, another inner-core Secret Elite member [24]  were ‘out of town’ and, according to Hankey’s diaries, arrived back in London late that Monday evening (12.30 am.) to be told that the Easter Rebellion had begun. Asquith’s reaction does not appear to include any surprise at all. According to Hankey, ‘Asquith merely said ‘well, that’s really something, and went to bed.’ [25]  Out of town? Merely went to bed? In the midst of a vicious war the prime minister could not be contacted about a rebellion in Ireland? How odd. Why did he not react immediately or ask why he had not been informed earlier or send for up-to-the-moment information, or contact Birrell or react with more concern? Why indeed?

On the morning of Holy Saturday, 1916, the British authorities in Dublin confidently believed that there was no danger of disruption in the city. They had been deliberately kept in the dark. With the capture and sinking of the Aud and consequent loss of arms and ammunition, the military commander in Ireland, Major-General Sir Lovick Friend retired to London for the Easter weekend. Similarly, Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary for Ireland, was in London to attend a cabinet meeting on the impending and contentious conscription bill. Kept in ignorance of Casement’s statements or requests, Birrell decided to stay there for Easter. His under-secretary in Dublin, Sir Matthew Nathan was so confident that any danger of a rising had passed that he wrote an upbeat assessment for Birrell, though hard liners like Lord Wimborne still pressed for the arrest and internment of the Volunteer leaders. [26] Why had no-one told them what Casement had said? What Casement had offered? Regretfully, we can only surmise that for reasons that were never openly expressed, no warnings were issued through British Intelligence. The given excuse is that intelligence was in its infancy and not properly co-ordinated. How convenient.

The Admiralty Statement to the press that weekend made reference only to the German naval activity around the south coast of Ireland, linked to arms and ammunition. [27] Casement’s arrest and plea to be allowed to stop the Easter Rising was suppressed. Instead the events that transpired were predicated by news of German activity in and around Ireland. This is the context within which the general public learned about the rising.

On the following day, the first man into the breach in parliament was Lord Midleton, otherwise known as William St John Brodrick, an intimate member of the Secret Elite [28] and previously Secretary of State for War during the Boer War. As leader of the Unionist Association and Irish landowner, Midleton was primed for battle. He opened the attack with a simple question in the House of Lords, seeking information on the grave disturbances in Dublin [29] before anyone else had grasped the extent of the ‘disturbances’. Next day he was scathing in his attack on Asquith’s government. He dubbed the rebels ‘an organised body of Sinn Feiners’ and this label was stamped across the uprising by the British propagandists, even though Sinn Fein as a political movement had no place in the revolt. His typically partisan analysis criticised the regular Sunday ‘Sinn Feiner’ parades ( no mention was made of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or Connolly’s Citizen Army ) which, in his view, should have been put down months, if not years before. Similar restrictions were not envisaged in Ulster. Of course, the Gaelic name Sinn Fein sounded foreign to the English ear – why – it looked like German on the printed page.

Midleton’s account of unheeded warnings obligated Lord Lansdowne, at this point a member of the Cabinet, to admit that ‘my noble friend has access to information to which I have not access.’ [30] We should ponder this; these men were pro-unionist allies and friends; both were Secret Elite insiders. Allegedly, Midleton was better informed than the cabinet minister. It was a charade. Asquith’s coalition Cabinet was replete with Unionists in 1916, and since Cabinet Ministers could not offer public criticism of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, the old-fashioned Liberal, Augustine Birrell, the attack was spearheaded by Midleton in the House of Lords. At this juncture, Parliament was first made aware of the arrest of Sir Roger Casement, [31] though the association between Germany and the uprising had been repeated in the press for days.

What can be fairly deduced is that those to whom the leading officers in British Intelligence were responsible, who knew that the Easter Rising was about to happen did not alert the appropriate government officials in Ireland. Was a decision taken at the highest level to ‘let the festering sore come to a head’? Such a vital decision could never had been taken by Thomson or the Halls. Naval command at Queenstown, led by Admiral Lewis Bayly, had been given explicit instructions to prevent German weapons reaching the Irish mainland, and they did. Knowledge about this and the German connection was shared with Lord Kitchener, Field Marshal French, Commander of the British Home Forces and Major-General Friend in command of the armed forces in Ireland. Yet the army was not put on high alert. Indeed no action was taken which might have forewarned the leaders of the rebellion that the authorities had wind of their intentions. [32]

Usually, the given excuse for not sharing critical information was that military sources were too sensitive or valuable to risk exposure. In this instance the burning question must be, who decided that it was in the best interest of Britain or Ireland or Ulster to let the rebellion take place? There is a worrying conflict between the belief that the rebel Military Council gained an outstanding success in concealing its intentions and the fact that the British military and naval commanders knew about the impending uprising, knew that Casement wanted to call it off, knew that without the guns, ammunition  and men from Germany  it could never succeed.

Consider for a moment the benefits of permitting the rising to go ahead. The damage to the Cabinet Liberals was bound to be extensive, and many within the Secret Elite wanted Asquith out of government. [33] The Ulster Unionists had predicted that the Irish Volunteers could not be trusted. Here was the ultimate vindication of their case. Furthermore, Redmond and Dillon, indeed, everyone inside the Home Rule Party was compromised. What future the Home Rule Act which Unionists wanted to kill in its suspended state? Additionally, it allowed the British government to ruthlessly crush anyone who opposed war in Ireland and sought independence from the Crown; the socialists, the Irish Volunteers, the Citizen Army, trades-unionists and republicans, those who advocated neutrality or were conscientious objectors, the writers and orators, the organisers and sympathisers, all fell victims to suppression.

Whatever else, there were serious winners and losers.

[1] The Times 1 May 1916, p. 10.
[2] Ibid.
[3] see Blog, Lusitania 1: The Tale Of The Secret Miracles.
[4] Patrick Beesley, Room 40, British Naval Intelligence 1914-1918, p. 7.
[5] Colin Simpson, Lusitania, p. 115.
[6] see Blog, Lusitania 1: The Tale Of The Secret Miracles.
[7] Beesley, Room 40, pp. 129-132.
[8] Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, The Authorized History of M15, p. 87.
[9] Beesley, Room 40, pp. 186-7.
[10] These documents still remain classified one hundred years later.
[11] Roger Sawyer, Casement: The Flawed Hero, p. 119.
[12] National Archives, Home Office Records, HO 311643/51.
[13] Timothy Bowman, Carson’s Army, The Ulster Volunteer Force, 1910-22, pp. 22-3.
[14] PRONI D.1518/3/8, Circular Letter from Captain Frank Hall to Unionist Clubs.
[15] National Archives, Papers of the Metropolitan police, 2/10664.
[16] National Archives, Home Office Records HO 311643/51.
[17] National Archives Home Office / MEPO 21/10664.
[18]Letter from Inspector Edward Parker to the Assistant Chief Commissioner, 18/ 07/ 1916. NA file MEPO21/ 10664 / C/701389.
[19] Confidential reply, Thomson to Blackwell, 18 July, 1916, page 1. MEPO 21/ 10664.
[20] Ibid., p. 2.
[21] Bowman, Carson’s Army, pp. 22-3.
[22] Recollections, Vols 1,2, Memoirs of Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Henry Oliver, (unpublished), National Maritime Museum, OLV 12 , p. 165. Cited in G. Sloan, (2013) The British state and the Irish rebellion of 1916: an intelligence failure or an failure of response. Intelligence and National Security, 28 (4). pp. 453-494. ISSN 1743-9019 doi: 10.1080/02684527.2012.735079  http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/25318/
[23] Ibid.
[24] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[25] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Man of Secrets, Vol 1, 1877-1918, p. 265.
[26]  Michael Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 79.
[27] The Times, 25 April, 1916, p. 4.
[28] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 9 et seu.
[29] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 25 April 1916 vol 21 c810.
[30] Hansard, House of Lords Debate 26 April 1916 vol 21 cc827-8.
[31] Ibid., cc826-7.
[32] Foy and Barton,The Easter Rising, p. 65.
[33] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 324.

Ireland 1916, 6: Framing The Story

The whole ‘miserable business’ (this dismissive phrase was first used by The Times on 26 April, 1916 ) that was the uprising in Dublin, could hardly have broken at a worst moment for prime minister Asquith’s Cabinet. With increased German naval activity around the east coast of England causing outrage in that area, it was the proposed introduction of compulsory conscription which was proving disturbingly contentious. Ironically perhaps, with their attention focused elsewhere, the disruption in Ireland caught them unaware. Parliament met in secret session on the night of 25 April to give vent to its anger at government proposals on conscription which many MPs thought unfair. [1] Important though it was, that anger hardly registered on the scale of incandescence which exploded from the Conservative and Unionist ranks over the following weeks on the subject dear to their hearts… Ireland.

The government was adept at managing the news through censorship. The British propaganda machine (which had been established at Wellington House in London from August 1914) ensured that journalists and newspapers across the world had strictly controlled access to the uprising in Ireland. News of the initial attacks in central Dublin at noon on Monday 24 April did not reach the London press in time for the morning editions on Tuesday 25th. But a war of words had already been declared. With a prescience which may even suggest pre-planning, The Times carried an Admiralty announcement about a German attempt to land guns and ammunition on the south coast of Ireland sometime between 20-21 April. Events in Ireland were also being monitored by other interested parties. Lord Midleton, a friend and close associate of Alfred Milner [2] and nominal leader of the Irish Unionist Party, was always one step ahead of the government. He was the first to question Lord Crewe in the House of Lords about ‘the grave disturbances in Dublin yesterday’ and was assured that the situation was ‘now well in hand’ [3] It was not. Midleton’s sources were far more reliable than the government’s and he, and those he represented, had their own deep-rooted agenda. They were passionately determined to have the Home Rule Act of 1914 permanently scrapped. [4]

One day later, on 26 April, newspaper headlines screamed ‘Rebel Irish Rising’ and ‘Serious Disturbances’ linked to a ‘concentrated German plan’. [5] Reporters, removed as they were from first hand accounts, so dependent on government propaganda, stated that the Germans had always counted on insurrection in Ireland and events in Dublin followed a carefully concealed plot between ‘Irish traitors and their German confederates.’ [6] Reference was made to Sir Roger Casement’s involvement as ‘mere opera bouffe’, an insult, likening his involvement to a farcical French comic-opera. It was a theme soon picked up by an embarrassed John Redmond who alleged that ‘Germany plotted it, Germany paid for it … it is a German invasion of Ireland.’ [7]

The second British tactic to manipulate the truth behind the events in Dublin, was to ignore the various political alliances which had coalesced in the rebellion, and dub the fighting as ‘The Sinn Fein Rising.’ [8] There was an immediate and determined effort to deny the integrity of those who had masterminded and executed the rebellion. Lord Wimborne, Lord Lieutenant for Ireland, gave a typically patronising account to The Times on 1 May. He declared that he had seen the prisoners, ‘ all of whom seemed to belong to the so-called labouring classes.’ Of course. It would never have suited had the rebels been portrayed as educated men of some standing. His Lordship continued his condescending view, claiming that ‘the Proclamation indicates by its text that they rely on foreign aid and is signed by Jim Connolly, Jim Larkin’s lieutenant, J.T. Clarke, and old Fenian and ticket-of-leave man [ex-convict] who kept a tobacconist’s shop, a schoolmaster named Pearse, another man named McDermott and three others.’ [9] Wimborne was unlikely to approve of James Connolly as General Secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union or Patrick Pearce as a University educated lawyer who established an independent Irish-speaking school in Dublin or admit that Thomas Clarke was a naturalised American…though he was a dedicated and wily old Fenian. It was all part of the dismissive put-down with which the authorities wanted to minimise the impact of the rebel effrontery in daring to attack the authority of the Empire.

Managing how these events were translated to America was one of the triumphs of the British propaganda machine. John Masefield, the English poet, had been sent on a lecture tour of America in 1915 sponsored by Wellington House [10] He recommended that ‘some authoritative loyal Irish member [of Parliament], preferably a Catholic, should go over as soon as may be possible… to silence the Irish-American party, who exude poison from every pore.’ [11] Consequently, John Redmond and ‘ other Loyal Irishmen’ were persuaded to give interviews and write articles in defence of British reaction to the rebellion in the hope of tempering the virulence of the opposition from Irish-Americans. [12]

Redmond’s subsequent statement to the Associated Press, which was carried in full by the New York Times, was an unqualified condemnation of the uprising. He talked about his horror, discouragement, almost despair at the ‘insane movement’ and asked ‘whether Ireland, as so often before in her tragic history, was to dash the cup of liberty from her lips’ at the behest of an anti-patriotic cabal. He lambasted those responsible for trying to make Ireland a cats-paw of Germany. What’s more he took it very personally: ‘In all our long and successful struggle to obtain home rule, we have been thwarted and opposed by that same section. We have won home rule not through them, but in spite of them. This wicked move of theirs was their last blow at home rule. It was not held as much treason to the cause of the Allies as treason to the cause of home rule.’ [13] So desperate was he to achieve his life-time ambition, that Redmond was blind to the fact that Home Rule was thwarted not by the men who took part in the Easter Rising, but the men in London to whom he was pandering. It was their criminal war and they were playing him for a fool at every turn.

 

Redmond’s sentiments were reproduced in the Irish Independent. Under the banner ‘Criminal Madness’ the newspaper denounced ‘the insane and criminal rising’ and lamented that it would take ‘us many years to recover’. But the Irish Independent hailed as a shining light ‘the outpouring of Irish blood …. as expiation for the acts of unfilial ingrates who have besmirched the honour of their native land.’ With no sense of irony or reflection on the purpose of the Easter Rising, the article continued: ‘Were it not for the glory which has irradiated the Irish arms win the fields where the battle for human freedom is being fought, our heads might now hang low in shame for the misdeed of those who have been the willing dupes of Prussian intrigue.’ [14] In fairness, the article went on to allocate indirect responsibility for all that took place to Sir Edward Carson’s Ulster movement and the Chief Secretary to Ireland, Augustine Birrell, whom they blamed ‘for the state of affairs which led up to the events of last week.’ [15]

This new found acknowledgement of the glories of the fighting Irishmen might have come as a surprise to those who previously noted the singular absence of such expression. Indeed on 1 May under the title ‘The Gallant Irish Division’ The Times applauded the bravery of the Inniskillings and the Dublin Fusiliers at a point on the western Front ‘near Hulluch’, commenting that the Germans, believing that their ‘treasonable medicine’ was working in Ireland, probably thought it a good time to teach the loyal Irish a lesson. ‘If so, they are probably sorry now.’ The propaganda assault was not particularly subtle. Within days of the uprising, the British press suddenly became fulsome in their praise of Irish soldiers at the Front, while the ‘treasonable medicine’, a clearly pointed barb suggesting German intrigue, aimed to deflect attention away from the internal dissatisfaction with Britain’s treatment of Irish citizens. Around the same time, the Chicago Herald noted that it had received a book on ‘The Irish At The Front’ with an introduction by Mr John Redmond, forwarded from Wellington House. [16]

Once the rebellion had been put down in Dublin, journalists had greater scope to write their version of the truth. And it was a sombre story. The battle between British troops and British subjects was reported as ragged, intermittent, unequal but always deadly. ‘The Traitors’ had paid dearly for their ‘mad enterprise’ but behind the pejorative phrases lay a description which must have chilled the Empire. There was an implied warning that rebellion would be dealt with severely no matter where it took place. ‘ Yesterday, a gun boat lying in the river … poured shell after shell into a large building a thousand yards away, over which flew the green flag of the rebels. Field guns hurled death and destruction into the broadest and proudest street in the city.’ [17] Three months later, the observation made at Westminster was that the ‘best part of Dublin looked like Liege or Ypres.’ [18] For those of us old enough to remember Hungary in 1956, it is particularly chilling to remember the feeling of helplessness when a city-centre is blown apart by a brutal military force.

Notice how the story was framed. Initially the Easter Rising was depicted as a German plot, an ingenious interpretation which placed the rebel Irishmen as traitors to the cause of civilisation and freedom and friends and allies of ‘Prussianism’. Not only did this relegate the rebellion from its national cause to an alien-inspired act of treachery, but it deflected attention away from more worrying sympathies like socialism, neutrality and the political machinations of the die-hard Unionists. In other words, the instigators who wanted to serve neither King nor Kaiser were mad, insane, wicked and selfish while the slaughter of Irishmen on the European field of battle for the freedom of small nations was deemed to have saved  Ireland’s reputation.

[1] House of Lords Debate, 25 April 1916 vol 21 cc811-8. On occasion during the war, parliament could use its procedure to dismiss all observers and have a debate that could not be reported to the enemy. The general public were served up an account of what transpired by the government itself. While the Secret Debate in the house of Lords is currently available online, there is no equivalent report from the House of Commons. However a communique was issued by the government and printed in The Times, April 26 1916, p. 7.
[2] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 8, 12, 24
[3] Hansard House of Lords Debate 25 April 1916 vol 21 c810.
[4] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 433.
[5] The Times 26 April, 1916, p. 6.
[6] Ibid., p. 7.
[7] New York Times, 29 April, 1916.
[8] The Times 28 April, 1916, p. 7.
[9] The Times 1 May, 1916, p. 10.
[10] George Robb, British Culture and the First World War, p. 121.
[11] H.C. Peterson, Propaganda For War, p. 241.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Redmond Assails Rebels; New York Times, 29 April 1916.
[14] Irish Independent, 4 May 1916 can be viewed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/newspapers/na02a.shtml
[15] Ibid, p. 3.
[16] Peterson, Propaganda For War, p. 242.
[17] The Times 1 May, 1916, p. 10.
[18] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 31 July 1916,vol. 84 cc2116-231.

Ireland 1916, 5: The Uprising – But Who To Blame?

Encapsulated in a bubble from which the air of democracy had been systematically sucked, the voice of protest in Ireland held little sway. Even the Catholic Church remained muted in its objection to war and recruitment. Redmond included an appeal to religion in his Woodenbridge address [1] and the Nationalist press made much of the burning of Louvain and the allegations of German atrocities in the rape of ‘Catholic’ Belgium. [2] The conference of Catholic Bishops at Maynooth in October 1914 gave great consideration to the need for Catholic chaplains, [3] but they had no power to appoint them to the British Army. There was no sense of episcopal unanimity. Though most Bishops approved of Redmond’s actions, neither Cardinal Logue in Armagh or Archbishop Walsh in Dublin were wholeheartedly supportive. [4] Indeed, the Archbishop objected to Redmond’s recruitment campaign citing it as the inevitable product of his subservience to the Liberal Party. [5] That said, no religious objection was expressed against Catholics in Ireland taking arms against Catholics in Germany. The Church offered little solace to the voice of protest.

Yet it was there in small pockets. Amongst socialist and trade unionists, some Gaelic League branch members, the leadership of the secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Irish Citizen Army, created by the radical socialist, James Connolly and some nationalists, dismayed by Redmond’s capitulation to an imperial war, common ground was found, based on complete mistrust of ‘England’s’ intentions. [6] The Irish Neutrality League, which was active between September and early December 1914, tried to gather together influential opponents to the war at an open public meeting in Dublin on 12 October. Its purpose was to ‘define Ireland’s present attitude towards the Anglo-German War as one of neutrality’ in order to protect Irish interests and prevent employers from coercing men to enlist. The Neutrality League sought to promote the view that true patriotism required Irishmen to stay at home, taking steps to preserve the food supplies for the people of Ireland. [7] By any measure of optimism, success in opposing recruitment was limited. Redmond’s colleague, John Dillon had pontificated that ‘ the man who calls himself a neutral is either an enemy or a coward’. [8] The great danger of such sophistry is that it can backfire. Ultimately, many from this disparate collection of idealists mutated into a hard core of revolutionaries determined to make a stance against British rule in Ireland.

The event itself, the rising, was dramatic and bloody, and appeared to take the British State completely by surprise. That convenient assertion will be considered more fully later.

Briefly.

During the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913, a Citizen Army had been formed by the Trades Unionists under James Connolly to defend and protect strikers from the police. [9] The 130 men, boys and a handful of women were allowed to parade in public as were the Ulster Volunteers in the North. At the outbreak of war, a second different group, the Irish Volunteers, split into two unequal sections, the majority of whom stayed true to John Redmond and over 30,000 joined the British Army. The remaining 13,000 Irish volunteers, remained committed to the vow that they would stand firm until Home Rule was fully enacted. The Citizen Army and National Volunteers together represented a minimal armed militia compared with the forces of the Empire, and no action was taken to stop their ‘activities’.

The rising was planned in secret by a coterie of senior members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) who formed a Military Council to plan and oversee the rebellion. Their names, now legends in Ireland, were, Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, Eamon Ceannt and James Connolly from the Citizen Army. The details were kept secret for fear of disclosure by a loose tongue or well-placed police spies. Even high-ranking members of the Volunteers, including its leader, Eoin MacNeill, did not know what they planned to achieve that weekend. [10]

Through negotiations led by Sir Roger Casement, [11] a large cache of weapons was to have been landed from Germany on Good Friday April 21st, to arm the rebels. Thanks to the British Admiralty Intelligence, the ship was tracked by the Royal Navy, arrested off the coast of Kerry and was scuttled off Queenstown. Some say it was deliberately sunk. There would be no arms to support a sizeable rising. At the last minute, the plans were revealed to Eoin MacNeill who issued a ‘countermanding order’, to call off the ‘manoeuvres’ for Easter 1916. Though he approved an armed insurrection, he withdrew his agreement when he heard that the weapons had been captured and Casement arrested. ‘I’ll stop this damned nonsense’ he vowed and posted an instruction to all Irish Volunteers in the Sunday Independent, rescinding parades, marches and movements planned for Easter Sunday. [12]

Too late. The organisers had gone too far to contemplate a stand-down, and on Easter Monday, the assault on Dublin began in earnest. The Rebels marched through the streets into the centre of Dublin and occupied the General Post Office (GPO), the Four Courts, the South Dublin Union, Boland’s Mill, Stephen’s Green and Jacobs’ biscuit factory. Their targets then  strategic are now iconic; their message proclaimed a Republic with Patrick Pearse as President and Commander in Chief. [13]

Over the following week, mayhem ensued in central Dublin. The British state eventually deployed over 16,000 troops, artillery and a naval gunboat on the River Liffey to suppress the rising. In that week of bitter fighting, around 450 people were killed and over 2,000 wounded. Bare in mind, we are talking about insurrection in one of the great capital cities of Great Britain and Ireland  at the heart of the Empire.

The fiercest battles took place around Mount Street Bridge. Early on Wednesday April 26th 1916, the newly arrived British troops assembled on the quayside in Kingstown. Some of these regiments comprised young men from Nottingham and Derbyshire, known as the Sherwood Foresters. They were inexperienced soldiers who had only had six weeks of basic training. Many had never fired a rifle. Official British casualties amounted to four officers and 216 other ranks killed or wounded during the Mount Street engagement. Around twenty civilians were killed or wounded as they attempted to assist the stricken Foresters on the bridge. In truth, there were more civilian casualties in the 1916 Rising than there were military casualties. [14]

The rebels’ headquarters at the GPO was bombarded into eventual surrender on 28 April on the instructions of Patrick Pearse. The Rebellion of Easter 1916 came to an inglorious end in Dublin, but the consequences extended beyond all expectations.

Who was most at fault for this exceptional rejection of the Empire’s war, apart, that is, from the rebels who planned and executed the uprising? Looker deeper and further than the named participants.

You may want to accuse Sir Edward Carson for the eventual Rising in Dublin over Easter Week 1916. He after all epitomised the virtues of illegality over the democratic process, though as we have shown, he was more of a figure-head-agent of the Secret Elite than independent leader. He is quoted at the end of his days as realising too late that he had been used, as Ireland had been used, to protect the imperialist dream; ‘I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster and so was Ireland, in the political game to get the Conservative Party into power.’ [15]

Their ambition extended well beyond the limitations of one political party, but the Secret Elite most certainly viewed Ireland as a second-class colony to be exploited as required. How had Lord Milner expressed his disdain in 1913? He saw it as their mission to protect a ‘white settler colony of superior British stock [Ulster] from submersion in a sea of inferior Celts [by which he meant nationalist Ireland.’ [16] Inside that kernel of arrogance the British establishment assumed that Ireland was still their colonial property. Their careful manipulation of the parliamentary process had succeeded. By May 1915 an internal coup of enormous historical significance had effectively replaced the elected majority government of 1910, supported by Liberal – Home Rule MPs. Asquith’s new Coalition cabinet was an entirely different administration, deeply hostile to an all-Ireland government. [17]

You might blame John Redmond and his puppy-dog roll-over to support the British Imperial ambitions in their war against Germany and blame his naivety. By urging the Irish Volunteers to enlist in the British Army and throw themselves against Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Turks, he committed the Irish nation to a course of action against which there could be no democratic protest. [18] But Redmond probably acted in good faith, encouraged by the Asquiths and the promises of a Home Rule Act that lay in a coma on the Statute Book. If Redmond thought himself prime minister of Ireland-in-waiting he had taken several steps beyond a presumption of authority. He was, more than Carson, a puppet. That neither saw themselves as such at the time, underlines the secrecy and deception of those who controlled the direction of British foreign policy during the war.

What of Sir Rodger Casement? He was the Dublin-born Anglo-Irish diplomat who exposed the atrocities in the Congo, where he clashed with Emile Francqui, later the head of the Society Generale, the immensely powerful bank in Belgium. [19] His reports on the inhumane treatment of the native population of Putumayo Indians in Peru [20] earned him international recognition as a human-rights activist long before the term had been coined. Casement’s disillusion with British imperialism grew from 1904 onwards, and he withdrew from the British consular service in 1913. He was a moving spirit in the founding of the Volunteers, and helped organise gun-running for them in July 1914. [21]

Roger Casement had tried to use his international standing to influence American opinion, but like his effort to recruit Irish prisoners in Germany to fight for the liberation of Ireland in 1915, he met with little success. [22] He tried to persuade the Germans that an Irish uprising backed by their support in terms of men and munitions would successfully destabilise the Empire, [23] but in 1916, Casement was arrested after he landed from a German U-boat in County Kerry.   How convenient for the British State.

You might argue that without Casement’s  promise that a large shipment of German arms would be landed at Limerick, later changed to Fenit, greater caution might have been taken. The expectation was that a provincial Rising spurred on by success in Dublin would create a national reaction against British rule. [24] Even when defeat stared the Rebel leaders in the face towards the end of Easter Week, the hope that the Germans would send help, lingered. What they did not know was that Casement’s relations with the Germans had deteriorated to the extent that he ‘was filled with almost paranoid suspicion’ that he and Ireland was being used to his host’s selfish ends. He knew that a rebellion without military assistance would be hopeless. [25] He was essentially correct on both counts and, as we will later show, that was the very reason he returned to Ireland.

It is not our purpose to give great detail on the events of Easter Week 1916 or expand on the backgrounds and qualities of the men who defied the British Army and led what has become known as the Easter Rising. [26] Their actions speak for themselves. They defied the Empire and paid with their lives. What else could the British Imperialists have allowed? These men were traitors to the crown, friends of Germany, from whom they were supplied with weapons, military protagonists and anti-democratic interventionists. So far that might describe Ulster from 1912-1914; an irony that was never acknowledged. In 1916, the difference was that the Empire was at war, as were hundreds of thousands of fellow Irishmen, and the State they sought to overthrow had already begun to back-track on Home Rule.

In the muddied waters of imperialist history, official blame for the Easter Rising in 1916 has been pinned on the Dublin executive which had been considerably relaxed about armed volunteers, on Sir Edward Carson and his Unionist cabal for giving leadership to a private armed force in Ulster, on John Redmond for his blind acceptance of Asquith’s promises on Home Rule, on Sir Roger Casement for his agitation against the Crown by attempting to involve Germany directly in an armed uprising, and on the treasonous rebels who attempted to overthrown the rightful government. Officially, the Secrete Elite found it convenient to centre blame on The Chief Secretary for Ireland, and by association, prime minister Asquith.

But as we will reveal in the weeks to come, there were darker forces close to the heart of the Secret Elite who knew what was about to happen, and chose not to stop it.

[1] K Jeffries, Ireland and the Great War, p.13.
[2] Church of Ireland Gazette, 18 September 1914. Cited in John Martin Brennan’s thesis, Irish Chaplains in the First World War, p. 11. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/3413/1/Brennan12MPhil.pdf
[3] Liam Kenny, Maynooth Goes to War, http://www.kildare.ie/ehistory/index.php/maynooth-goes-to-war/
[4] John Martin Brennan’s thesis, Irish Chaplains in the First World War, p.11.
[5] Ibid., pp 11-12.
[6] Michael Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 1.
[7] Roger Cole et al, The Irish Neutrality League and the Imperialist War 1914-1918, p. 7.
[8] Stephen Lucius Gwynn, John Redmond’s Last Years, p.165. http://www.forgottenbooks.com/readbook_text/John_Redmonds_Last_Years_1000438731/171
[9] Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes, p. 444.
[10] John Dorney, The Easter Rising – A Brief Overview, http://www.theirishstory.com/2011/04/22/the-easter-rising-–-a-brief-overview/#.Vn-9RITPyi4
[11] Sir Roger Casement played a pivotal role before and during the war in outspoken attacks against British Imperialism. He had first hand experience of the vulgarity and inhumanity of European imperialism in his roles with the diplomatic and colonial service before disavowing it all in his books The Crime against Europe and The Crime Against Ireland. Casement worked to promote Irish independence in America and travelled to Germany in an attempt to garner German support in the form of men and arms for an uprising in Ireland. His role will be explained more fully in future blogs.
[12] Bardon, A History, p. 444.
[13] Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 195.
[14] Paul O’Brien, The Battle of Mount Street Bridge. http://www.paulobrienauthor.ie/the-battle-of-mount-street-bridge-1916/
[15] Brian P Murphy, Patrick Pearse and the Lost Republican Ideal, p. 61.
[16] Milner letter to Carson, 9 December 1913, Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 183.
[17] Pat Walsh, The Great Fraud of 1914-1918, p. 27.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Fintan O’Toole, The Multiple Hero, in New Republic, 2 August 2012.
[20] HMSO, Cmnd. 6266, July 1912.
[21] Brendan Clifford, Roger Casement: The Crime Against Europe with The Crime Against Ireland and other writings, p. 5.
[22] Foy and Barton,The Easter Rising, p. 21.
[23] The Ireland Report by Casement and Plunkett was a 32 page document NLI MS5244.
[24] Foy and Barton,The Easter Rising, p. 39.
[25] Ibid., p. 64.
[26] There are several current books covering the Easter Rising, but the one which we would recommend for its combination of clear analysis, good writing and thorough research is Michael Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising. (first published 1999.)

Ireland 1916, 2: The Context For War – More Than a Smokescreen.

In order to set the outbreak of the war in context of our thesis on Ireland, this blog gives a resume of the chapter on Ireland from our book Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War

The official British histories of the First World War record that in early August 1914, Great Britain suddenly and unexpectedly found itself at war with Germany. While that was true of the ordinary man and woman on the streets of a nation relaxing in the mid-summer heat of a Bank-holiday weekend, it most certainly wasn’t for the Secret Elite who had engineered the steps to war. [1] In an era where historians who have reflected on the causes of that terrible war cautiously part company with the insistent propaganda which blamed the Kaiser, [2] there is still a reluctance to accept the fact that a small coterie of powerful men planned and executed the war to crush Germany. The major protagonists were not ‘sleepwalkers’. [3] The system of alliances were not tectonic plates which would inevitably clash. But the people in Britain were duped – ambushed into war and their attention was deliberately drawn from the build up in Europe by the strong possibility of civil war in Ireland.

Following the assassination of Archduke Frans Ferdinand and his wife on 28 June 1914, the deepening European crisis was deliberately played down by the mainstream press in Britain. To all intents and purposes the dispute between Austria and Serbia in July 1914, as Truth remarked, was one in which ‘we had no more concern than in a quarrel between the inhabitants of Saturn.’ [4]

In sharp contrast, the crisis in Ireland had been carefully nurtured over the previous two years by the wilful promotion of fear and distrust between the Protestant Unionist majority in the north and the Catholic Nationalist south. It was at boiling point in July 1914 when the outbreak of civil war appeared to be only a matter of time. Tensions ran high, not just in Ireland but across the whole of mainland Britain. This was what pre-occupied the populous. When the Fifth Battalion, the Black Watch was mustered on 31 July 1914 the men assumed they were on their way to Ireland, but were thoroughly disappointed to be tasked with protecting the Tay Bridge from an unnamed invasion force. ‘We thought we were going to Ulster when we got orders last night …there would have been some excitement there’. [5] Look carefully at how the orders of the day were received. These Scottish soldiers were so far removed from any understanding of european politics that they could not name the enemy against whom the Tay Bridge had to be guarded.

Why, with the Franco-Russian war against Germany imminent, a war aimed to crush their greatest rivals, was the Secret Elite so intrinsically involved in denying home rule to Ireland by forcing the issue of the separation of Ulster? What possible reason could they have for fomenting the spectre of a bloody civil war in Ireland at that exact point in time when they knew every member of the British forces would be needed to face the German army in Belgium?

The Secret Elite and the Committee for Imperial Defence had been preparing for war against Germany for ten years, but when Armageddon arrived it had to come as a complete surprise to the British people and, above all, it had to appear that Germany was to blame. Otherwise, the British public would never have countenanced war. With public attention focused on the tension in Ireland, the Secret Elite provided a very convenient smokescreen behind which they prepared for action on the continent.

Germany’s defensive plan (the Schlieffen Plan) which anticipated a simultaneous attack from Russia in the East and France in the West, had long been known. The majority of her forces would have to deal first with the French assault before doubling back to confront the Russians. The well-advertised plan entailed German troops rapidly traversing Belgium to capture Paris. This assault on ‘neutral’ Belgium, for Belgium was never neutral, [6] was to be the British government’s casus belli, the event that would be used to win over opposition in the House of Commons, rouse the support of the general public and justify Britain’s declaration of war.

The Secret Elite were aware that even the best of strategies do not always go according to plan. What if Germany responded by throwing all her forces against France on the Franco-German border, and not through Belgium? What possible excuse would they have for joining the war? As always, the Secret Elite had a back-up plan, and an outbreak of civil war in Ireland would have served that purpose. Full-blown civil war in Ireland was never the intention, but the appearance of one had to be real. Here the Secret Elite wielded sufficient power and influence to take matters as far as they deemed necessary.

Consider the following. German arms suppliers, in the full knowledge and acquiescence of the British government, sold weapons to both sides of the Irish divide. Major Fred Crawford, director of ordnance for the Ulster Volunteer Force, a man who had served in the British army under the Secret Elite’s Lord Roberts, procured twenty-four thousand modern rifles and three million rounds of ammunition in Germany with funds provided by Secret Elite members. [7] Throughout the night of 24–25 April 1914 the armaments were landed in Ulster with no opposition whatsoever from the customs or the army. The carefully engineered ‘crisis’ in Ireland presented coincidental bonuses. A large paramilitary force in the north, the UVF, marched, drilled and trained with rifles for months before the outbreak of war under the instruction of former senior British Army officers. [8]

Arming of the South was conducted by Erskine Childers, yet another who was closely associated with the Secret Elite. [9] Childers used his yacht, Asgard, to carry weapons  from Germany to the south, despite the presence of the entire British Grand Fleet in the Channel.  Guns and ammunition for both sides were therefore provided from  the same source in Hamburg, surely a remarkable co-incidence. Imagine the outcry if a cowardly explosion in a Belfast orange lodge or a Dublin pub had slain dozens of innocents in early August 1914, or a rogue gunman had slaughtered unarmed civilians in the name of either cause? That is all it would have taken for Civil War to erupt. The Secret Elite and their agents in government would have immediately focused international attention on the fall guy who had allegedly allowed the illicit weapons to be sold to both parties in Ireland: Kaiser Wilhelm. At a stroke, Germany would have been blamed for providing the armaments that enabled the civil war. This was their back-up casus belli, their plan B, their excuse for taking Britain to war against Germany if the invasion of Belgium failed to materialise. [10]

Lest the reader think that such a tactic is fanciful, we would draw attention to the advice given to Alfred Milner as he sought to find reason for a war against the Boers in South Africa. In the run-up to that disastrous war, Milner’s Balliol College friend and member of the Secret Elite’s inner core, Philip Lyttelton Gell, wrote to him advising that if the British public realised that the arms and ammunition sold to the Boers came from Germany ‘to be used against British citizens’, the cause for war ‘would be popular and obvious’.  [11] The ploy was identical in August 1914.

As events unfolded it was not required. Immediately German troops entered Belgium the Secret Elite had their excuse. The tension in Ireland was de-escalated. A secret telegram was sent to Sir Edward Carson to stand down his private army of 100,000 men, which was not much smaller than the British Expeditionary Force.

Professor Carroll Quigley revealed that the Ulster Unionist leader, and agent of the Secret Elite, prepared a coded telegram to be dispatched to the Ulster Volunteer Force to seize control of Belfast at his given signal, and thus begin the civil war. He was on his way to the telegraph station when he received a message from the prime minister that war was about to be declared on Germany. ‘Accordingly, the Ulster revolt was cancelled and the Home Rule Act suspended until six months after the peace with Germany.’ [12] Consider Quigley’s astounding words: ‘Accordingly, the Ulster revolt was cancelled.’ Germany had invaded Belgium, the Secret Elite had their cases belli. The arrangement concocted  with Carson to set Ulster alight was not required. Plan B was abandoned.

In the South, Erskine Childers was immediately recalled from his involvement with the Irish Volunteer movement to his post in Intelligence at the Admiralty in London. [13]

The Times newspaper provided an acceptable solution to the problem of Ulster; acceptable, that is, to the Secret Elite and the English ruling class.:’Our suggestion is that the government should at once exclude Tyrone and Fermanagh from the operation of the Home Rule Bill on the distinct understanding that such an arrangement is devised to meet temporary exigencies. Thus the six counties of Ulster would be left outside the scope of the Home Rule Bill.’  [14] Here was the solution that would defuse the situation, at least for the duration of the war, and keep Ulster safely inside the Empire. Protestants formed a majority in the province, but only a small majority, accounting for 56.33 per cent of the whole population in 1911. [15] The Times made no reference to the majority of the Irish people and their elected representatives who supported a united Ireland. The population of Ireland in mid-1914 stood at 4,381,398, of whom roughly 74 per cent were Roman Catholics. [16 ]

Ulster was indeed to be rescued from The Home Rule Act which was indeed postponed by a Suspensory Act of Parliament until 18 September 1915; if the war was still under way at that time, the Government was empowered to push the suspension further back. [17]  The very fact that the Act failed to come into being despite having passed every democratic and legal stage in parliament was  a bad omen. At a stroke, a horse and cart was driven sideways through the Irish Home Rule Act  as agreed in Parliament.  Powerful establishment voices were in the ascendency. Rather than create a united entity, their Ireland was to be partitioned into a predominantly Protestant North and Catholic South. To those who intrinsically feared British duplicity, the ‘temporary’ nature of this suspension was instantly suspicious.

[1] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, p. 12.

[2] Peace Treaty of Versailles, Part VIII, Reparation, Section 1, Article 231.

[3] Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, How Europe Went To War in 1914.

[4] Irene Cooper Willis, England’s Holy War, p. 10.

[5] Dundee Courier, 31 July 1914, p. 5.

[6] Albert J Knock, The Myth of a Guilty Nation, p. 37.

[7] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 188 and footnote.

[8] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp. 307-8.

[9] We believe that all the evidence points to Childers’ playing a role of British double agent.

[10] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp 301-319

[11] Milner Papers, Gell to Milner, 12  Jiuly 1899, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. Hist. c686.

[12] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope, p. 174.

[13] Andrew Boyle, The Riddle of Erskine Childers, p.196.

[14] The Times, Wednesday 29 August 1914, p. 9.

[15] L P Curtis, Ireland in 1914. Oxford Scholarship Online http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199583744.001.0001/acprof-9780199583744-chapter-7

[16] Statistical abstract for the United Kingdom … 1900 to 1914, p. 381 [Cd 8128], House of Commons. 1914–16, lxxvi, 855. The percentage of Roman Catholics is based on the census of 1911.

[17] On 14 September 1915 an Order in Council made under the Suspensory Act suspended the Government of Ireland Act for a further six months (i.e. until 18 March 1916).  A subsequent series of Orders in Council, dated 29 February 1916, 7 September 1916, 13 March 1917, 22 August 1917, 27 February 1918, 4 September 1918, 12 March 1919, 18 August 1919, 2 March 1920, and 13 August 1920 suspended the Irish Act in further blocks of six months until the Government of Ireland Act 1920 (passed 23 December 1920) repealed the 1914 Home Rule Act.

Ireland 1916, 1: Towards the Easter Rising

In his address to the Ulster loyalists at the Balmoral show-ground near Belfast on Easter Tuesday, 1912,  Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative Party at Westminster, roused the attendant crowds with the rallying cry, ‘You have saved yourselves by your exertions and you will save the Empire by your example. [1]  He was perfectly serious, and his words reflected the innermost fears of the Secret Elite.  If Ireland was allowed to cede from Great Britain the consequences for the Empire would be staggering, if not altogether fatal. To defend Ulster was to defend the Empire. The deadlocked second election of December, 1910 had resulted in a Liberal government dependent on the support of the Irish Home Rule Party, and the cost of that support was a promise of Home Rule with an Irish Parliament and Irish Executive in Dublin.

This was an issue which divided both Ireland and the political classes in Britain on the rigid lines of religion and  heritage with a prejudice so deep that those with vested interests were blinded to fair judgement. By 1912, John Redmond, the Home Rule leader in the House of Commons knew that the Tories (Conservatives) were helpless in the face of democratic decision-making. The Liberal-Irish Home Rule majority was overwhelming. ( 346 – 272) [2] Thus, in accordance with Parliamentary democracy, the Government of Ireland Bill was introduced to the House of Commons by the Prime Minister himself on 11 April, 1912 ‘with power to make laws for the peace, order and good government of Ireland.’ [3] In what foreboded things to come, Asquith was interrupted several times by Sir Edward Carson and Captain James Craig, (later Viscount Craigavon) anxious as they were to interfere with the democratic procedure as soon as possible.

Though it was essentially a modest Bill, the like of which determined the government in several of the Empire’s colonies, [4]  the opposition to Home Rule in Ulster was resolute. Initially, the choice opponents faced was either to accept the inevitable or protest vehemently and galvanise public opinion against the Bill. That, of course, could not alter the parliamentary arithmetic. They chose the latter, but when that was stymied by parliamentary procedure more radical action was taken. Of all the domestic issues between 1910-1914, the future of Home Rule for Ireland consumed the English upper classes, related and connected as they were to the Protestant landowners in the South of Ireland. For the upper echelons of the Secret Elite, led as it was by Lord Alfred Milner, [5] Irish Home Rule was tantamount to the first step towards the disintegration of the British Empire and the end of the great Imperial vision to which he had dedicated his life. [6]

To the ruling elites, Ireland, especially Southern Ireland was a disloyal colony peopled by a lesser species. Take a minute to examine the cartoons in Punch magazine in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The images frequently represent Irish men and women as pigs, monkeys, apes and, on at least one occasion, a gorilla. Frankenstein is a popular caricature.

Drunken country bumpkins abound, in sharp contrast to Noble Britannia or the regal Empire lion. De-humanising the common folk is a tactic of oppression, [ 7] and Catholic Ireland was oppressed. Rebellions in 1798, 1803, 1848 and 1867 were put down with great severity. [8] Yet a whole generation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the ‘bold Fenian men’ celebrated in ballads, preceded the explosive events of 1916. The British establishment could not grasp the fact that in demeaning the culture of independence in Ireland, its language and literature, they were playing a dangerous game, much resented by ordinary Irishmen.

Contrary to the rabid anti-Irish propaganda which was sustained for so long in the British press, the problem facing Ireland in the years before the war was not of its own making. The problem was the British presence in Ireland. [9] Writing in 1911, Roger Casement almost caught the true nature of the Secret Elite [10] by declaring that  ‘British interests assume that the future of the world shall be an English-speaking future’. He described the designs of ‘British interests’  in terms of England being the ‘landlord of civilisation, mankind her tenantry and the earth her estate.’ [11] Almost, but not quite. The Secret Elite were already ahead of the game.  Well before1911, assumptions had crystallised into a plan to wipe out Germany and take control of the civilised world. [12] The ultimate success of this ambition could not be left to the expediency of any political party and behind the scenes, protected by the British establishment, Lord Alfred Milner, the self-styled and unapologetic British ‘race patriot’ took control. [13] You may never have heard of Alfred Milner for the simple reason that his immense contribution to ‘British interests’ in the first quarter of the twentieth century has been carefully airbrushed. His direct involvement in Ireland’s history between 1912-1914 proved decisive.

There were already two Irelands. Ulster, in the more industrialised north, was predominantly Presbyterian Protestant and working class. The men of Ulster had taken no part in anti-British uprisings since the debacle of 1789, and loyalty to the union flag was their mantra. In the other three provinces, Munster, Leinster and Connacht, rural agricultural Ireland was comparatively impoverished … and Catholic … a religion whose loyalty was assumed to the Papacy in Rome. Two tribes  had emerged by the first decade of the twentieth century, unequal and mutually suspicious. The expectation raised by the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in 1912 polarised inbred attitudes; fear and loathing in the North and hope for a more independent future in the South. This was an impasse which could not be solved through democratic means without good-will on all sides. Fear and loathing, propaganda and vested interest was all that was on offer.

Alfred Milner found a cause which wrenched him from his covert preparations for war with Germany. During the seven years between 1905-1912 he had busied himself with Imperial conferences involving Heads of State or the Empire’s press [14]; in associating himself closely with the retired Army Chief of Staff, Lord Roberts, and the cause of national service; in supporting the Navy League and visiting Canada and Egypt [15]  to extol the virtues of the British Empire. Though always an influential voice in the conservative ranks and a member of the House of Lords, it was support for Ulster which propelled him back into direct action. His purpose was to rescue a ‘white settler colony of superior British stock from submersion in a sea of inferior Celts’. [16] Do not for a moment let that insult to the Celtic majority in Ireland pass without considering its depth of feeling. For Milner and his loyal Secret Elite associates, this was a struggle between the superior and the inferior, for the right to keep Ireland lashed to the Empire or break away from all that they valued.

With Asquith’s Home Rule Bill progressing inexorably through Parliament, it became apparent that it would become law before the end of 1914 unless something truly extraordinary happened. Sir Edward Carson, a lawyer and Unionist MP for Trinity College in Dublin, was chosen by the Secret Elite to stir Ulster. He owed his political fortune to Arthur Balfour, the former prime minister and member of the cabal’s inner-circle, [17] who was ever proud to boast that ‘he had made Carson’. [18] Though Edward Carson fronted a Solemn League and Covenant in 1912 to defeat by all means necessary ‘the present conspiracy to set up a Home rule parliament in Dublin’ [19] which was signed by hundreds of thousands in Ulster, it was Milner and his Secret Elite acolyte, Leo Amery, [20] who devised a United Kingdom pledge to extend the support into mainland Britain. Before this agitation lost its urgency in the weeks preceding the war, nearly two million people had signed the British Covenant. [21] Milner was determined to galvanise support and create a diversion which would make it impossible  for the government  ‘to concentrate its attention on the suppression of Ulster’. [22] In January 1913 an illegal private army, the Ulster Volunteer Force was recruited exclusively from signatories from the Covenant.

Action descended from dissent to interference bordering on treason. Alfred Milner raised massive funds to support Carson’s provisional government from his innermost circle of friends including £30,000 ( around £2,500,000 at current prices)  from Lord Astor and sums of £10,000 each from Lord Rothschild, the Duke of Bedford and Lord Iveagh of the Guinness family. Many other contributions touched £1,000. [23] This secret slush fund was exclusively created to defend Ulster from the imposition of Home Rule by every means possible. It helped pay for the gun-running which armed the UVF with German weapons in April 1914.  [24]

Milner nullified the Government’s military authority in Ireland by promising Sir Henry Wilson, the Director of Military Operations that if any officers resigned rather than take arms against a protestant revolt in Ulster against Home Rule, ‘they would be reinstated when the conservatives came to power.’ [25]  Thus he paralysed the government’s arm in Ulster and abetted the army mutiny at the Curragh. [26] He tried to convince Bonar Law that the Army Annual Bill, the constitutional basis for raising an army, could be revoked and thus create a dangerous parliamentary crisis. In the end Lord Alfred Milner overstepped the bounds of legal propriety in a manner which, had an Irishman taken such action, an arrest for sedition or treason would have followed. Indubitably, the Secret Elite’s most senior members were determined to wreck the Home Rule Bill.

Every action causes a reaction, and the sight of Ulster bristling with arms which pointed in the direction of Dublin and the south, galvanised the Irish Volunteers, a movement of some 170,000 men. Though resolute in their cause, they significantly lacked weapons, military experience and a united leadership. They too attempted to arm themselves but had little funds or rich and ennobled backers. The narrative of Erskine Childers’ attempt to help the Volunteers redress the imbalance has been written and commented upon by many sources. In our book Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, we dedicate a chapter to explain how, had the Germans failed to attack France through Belgium, the arming of both sides in Ulster could have become a casus belli for the war-makers in Britain. [27]

The inequitable reaction from English conservative politicians and newspapers to what transpired in Ireland was often ridiculous. While their view was that the raising of a private army in Ulster was a necessary consequence of the imposition Home Rule, they regarded the Irish National Volunteers in a completely different light. On 17 June 1914, Milner’s great friend, Leo Amery, asked the Secretary of State for Ireland why an aide de camp to the Lord Lieutenant had inspected and addressed a meeting of Volunteers, exhorting them to ensure the triumph of Home Rule. (Bear in mind the fact that Home Rule was official government policy.) Despite which, faced with the orchestrated outrage of his detractors, the perpetrator, a Captain Bellingham, was obliged to confess an error of judgement on his part. Shame on him! When Irish MP John Dillon  asked why no such action was taken against the Marquis of Londonderry and Lord Lord Kilmorey, the King’s aide de camps, when they inspected the Ulster Volunteers, the question was greeted with laughter. The Belfast Nationalist MP Joe Devlin responded by asking if there was one law for the rich and one for the poor? Opposition Conservatives jeered at him. Prime Minister Asquith intervened to state that there ought to be absolute equality. [28] Ah yes, there “ought to have been” absolute equality, but in a myriad of different ways, there was no equality in Ireland.

The manner in which gun-running was permitted to operate demonstrated the partiality of the British Elite and the British army. The events at Larne in April took place without the intervention of the police, customs or the military. Ulster was thus fully armed with not a harsh word exchanged. Guns to arm the Irish Volunteers in July 1914 were an altogether different matter. Though the cargo of older weapons and ammunition landed at Howth near Dublin was but a fraction of that already in the North, the army directly confronted the Volunteers marching back to the capital, [29] and a bayonet charge left several wounded. Later that day, goaded by Dubliners on Batchelor’s Walk, the soldiers fired on the crowd, leaving four dead and thirty-eight wounded. [30] Ordinary citizens were gunned down on the streets of Dublin. Imagine had that happened in Belfast, Glasgow or Liverpool? On mainland Britain, it would have caused a political furore… but this was in Ireland … and there was other business in Europe.

Addressing the House of Commons on 27 July, John Redmond stated that the troops had marched through the streets of Dublin with loaded guns… an unheard of situation. He demanded that the regiment be withdrawn immediately from Ireland and a full judicial and military inquiry set up. [31] War intervened. The dead were buried, as was the need for an enquiry. The impact of these events frayed hope in the minds of ordinary Irishmen and women. The legacy of the army’s clear partiality in the Curragh ‘revolt’ and the open relaxation of the law in the North compared with the harassment in the South, exasperated those waiting patiently for Home Rule. Citizens in the South lost faith in the British army. Who would defend them if Ulster exploded? John Redmond ended his speech with the words: ‘Let the House clearly understand that four fifths of the Irish people will not submit any longer to be bullied, or punished or penalised or shot for conduct which is permitted to go scot-free in the open light of day in every county in Ulster by other sections of their fellow countrymen ‘. [32] Bold words indeed. Yet eight days later he committed Ireland to an imperialist war. Strange.

What the Secret Elite had sown in well-fertilised fields of bitterness was soon to reap its own whirlwind.

[1] The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) INF/7A/2/8.
[2] General Election, 3rd-10th December 1910. http://www.election.demon.co.uk/geresults.html
[3] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 11 April 1912 vol 36 cc1408-10.
[4] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p.181.
[5] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 32.
[6] Gollin, Proconsul, p. 179.
[7] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/01/28/irish-apes-tactics-of-de-humanization/
[8] Micheal Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 2.
[9] A J P Taylor, Essays in English History, p. 217.
[10] Quigley refers to them as the Milner Group, but they were more powerful and more expansive than just that. Milner was the most influential leader, but the Elite extended into many other powerful areas including banking and finance. All were elites in their own field.
[11] Roger Casement, The Crime Against Europe, p. 79.
[12] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 58-60.
[13] Lord Milner’s Credo, The Times, 27 July 1925.
[14] J Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p.169.
[15] Ibid., p. 292.
[16] Milner letter to Carson, 9 December 1913, Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 183.
[17] Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. 312.
[18] Ibid., p. 176.
[19] PRONI INF/7/A/2/51.
[20] Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 296.
[21] Walter Long, Memories, p. 203.
[22] Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 296.
[23] Gollin, Proconsul pp. 187-8.
[24] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp. 310-311.
[25] Sir Henry Wilson, Diaries, p. 132.
[26] Gollin, Proconsul, p. 188.
[27] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp. 301-318.
[28] The Times, 18 June 1914, page 12.
[29] In contrast to the open-door approach taken by the authorities in Belfast to the illegal landings at Larne, between160 and 180 troops, from the Scottish Borderers were rushed by tram cars from their barracks to confront the Volunteers marching back from Howth.
[30] Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes, p. 438.
[31] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 27 July, 1914, Vol. 65 cc1022-66.
[32] Ibid.