The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (62 page)

The government thought that it would stop Irishmen killing each other and British soldiers by giving them a little of what they wanted. In December 1919, the cabinet approved the draft of an Irish Home Rule bill which was laid before the Commons the following spring and passed. It was a recipe designed to satisfy Gaelic nationalism, calm Ulster Protestants, and keep Ireland within the empire. First, Ireland was to be partitioned, since it was clear that the Protestant majority in Ulster, which had threatened to fight over the issue in 1886 and 1912, would never accept a government elected by all Irishmen. Ulster was still as defiant as ever. Ulstermen would never bend their knees to a Dublin government in which the levers of power would be operated by ‘the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church’, proclaimed the Unionist leader Carson. His listeners, all Orangemen assembled in Belfast on 12 July 1920 to celebrate the Protestant victory at the Boyne in 1690, cheered. They would, he claimed, only join hands with their Catholic countrymen if the latter chose to stay within ‘the Empire [which has] spread civilisation … throughout vast regions’.

As it was, Irishmen would remain in the empire, at least if the British government got its way. Those in the south would have a parliament in Dublin and those in the north one in Belfast. Both assemblies would collect and spend taxes, but Ireland’s foreign and defence affairs would remain Westminster’s responsibility. Under the terms of the new Home Rule act, elections were scheduled for May 1921, by which time, it was hoped, the British army and the reinforced RIC would have beaten the IRA.

Sinn Fein rejected all that Lloyd George had to offer. Its supporters wished to part company with Britain and its empire for ever, and the concept of a divided Ireland was anathema to nationalists with a mystical belief in the essential oneness of their land. The republicans could afford to take an unbending line for they were gaining the upper hand in the war in which their adversaries were at a permanent disadvantage. The IRA fighting man wore no uniform and could not be identified; he slipped out of and into the crowd; and he moved among a people which, either through fear or out of sympathy, were prepared to harbour him or cover his tracks. He was also supported by another unseen army of men, women and youngsters who were his eyes and ears. They warned him of his enemy’s movements and lied about his own, activities which sometimes cost them their homes, possessions and even lives.

Urban and rural guerrilla warfare was still a novelty in 1919. Its rules perplexed soldiers used to being able to recognise their opponents and led to a widespread feeling of impotent rage. This was expressed by General Sir Nevill Macready in his memoirs. ‘The British Government never recognised the term ‘guerrilla warfare,’ he wrote. ‘Had they done so the task of the soldier would have been infinitely easier.’ He could, for instance, have shot every man found armed but not in uniform.
17
Macready had been appointed commander-in-chief in Ireland in April 1920. He was not a conventional imperial soldier, used to demonstrating the iron fist to rebellious natives, but an expert in civil-military relations whose experiences had been confined to industrial disputes and, during 1919, as, chief commissioner of police.

When Macready took up his duties it was obvious that the depleted and demoralised RIC could no longer withstand the IRA’s guerrilla campaign without large-scale army assistance. Moreover, IRA terror tactics had reduced police recruitment so that the authorities had to look to the mainland for reinforcements and create what was, in effect, an alien
gendarmerie.
The result was the notorious Black and Tans of Irish nationalist mythology, ex-servicemen recruited in London, Glasgow and Birmingham, who appeared in Ireland in January 1920. Their improvised uniforms, a mixture of RIC dark green and army khaki, reminded somebody of a celebrated pack of Limerick foxhounds and got them their nickname. They were followed by the RIC Auxiliary Divisions (‘Auxis’), also recruited outside Ireland. Both bodies quickly gained a reputation for hard drinking, promiscuous brutality and savage reprisals against a population which sheltered and sympathised with their enemies. The appearance of the Black and Tans and the Auxis marked the end of civilian policing over large areas of Ireland, where they were seen as a particularly undisciplined wing of an army of occupation.

By the summer of 1920, the pattern of the war had become established. IRA units, sometimes substantial flying columns, assembled, went into action, and then melted into the streets and countryside. They killed at random members of the security forces and anyone remotely associated with them, sometimes mistaking their targets. The IRA volunteer was a patriot, convinced that the moral rightness of his cause, a united republican Ireland, released him from obedience to normal codes of human behaviour. His enemies saw him as a cold- blooded murderer. Particularly horrific killings were answered by reprisals against a civilian population which was tainted with guilt by association. Most notorious of these spontaneous acts of revenge was after the IRA shot dead twelve British officers in their billets on 21 November 1920, alleging they were intelligence agents. That afternoon a detachment of Auxis fired into a crowd at a Dublin football ground, claiming they were answering IRA fire; twelve spectators were shot or crushed in the panic.

However regrettable, reprisals of all kinds were the unavoidable consequence of an army having to contain a guerrilla campaign without the intelligence sources to detect their enemy. As the number of reprisals increased, so did criticism of the government by the left-wing and liberal press, which compared the behaviour of British forces in Ireland with that of the Germans in occupied Belgium during the war. A gap was also opening up between politicians and army commanders, who began to argue that the imposition of martial law was the only way in which the IRA could be beaten.

Sir Henry Wilson took a hard line. He wanted reprisals to be given full official sanction, and the execution of all republican leaders.
18
In May 1920 he feared that Lloyd George had fallen victim to ‘funk’ because he had temporised in his dealings with Irish trade unionists, who were then hampering the movement of men and supplies. The circumstances demanded ruthlessness, for what was at stake was the future of the empire, which Wilson believed could be lost through a lack of prime ministerial willpower.
19
Churchill was in broad agreement, equating concessions in Ireland with those already made in Egypt, and believing that both would contribute to a weakening of the empire.
20

During the second half of 1920 ministers agonised over how far they should go in the war against the IRA. Those in favour of a tough line argued that it would signal the determination of Britain to hold on to its empire. And yet, if the generals were given the free hand they sought, then the politicians would loose control over events. Milner, the Colonial Secretary, recalling his South African experience, saw no practical difficulties in enforcing martial law in Ireland, but he warned the cabinet that it would place enormous power in the hands of junior officers.
21
Everyone present knew that he had in mind not the conduct of subalterns, but that of a relatively senior officer, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer. In April 1919, Dyer had used martial law as the justification for opening fire on a crowd of demonstrators in Amritsar, killing nearly 400. The shooting and Dyer’s subsequent régime of summary and condign punishments had provoked a political rumpus which had concluded with an acrimonious Commons debate in July 1920. Nonetheless, Curzon saw no reason why Ireland should be spared the traditional Indian methods such as inducing of obedience, communal fines and the punitive disruption of everyday business life.
22

The politicians gave ground, gradually. Macready was allowed to impose martial law on four counties in December 1920 and a further four the following month. Reinforcements, and additional motor transport for mobile patrols, encouraged him to predict victory by mid-1922. His optimism was dented by an upsurge in IRA activity during the spring of 1921, which ruled out elections in the south, still set for May. By early June, Macready’s faith in coercion was waning.
23
And yet the internment by courts martial of 4,400 IRA suspects in six months, coordinated urban and rural sweeps and searches for arms and ammunition, were paying dividends. Looking back on this period, Michael Collins, the most brilliant and daring of the IRA’s commanders, confessed, ‘You had us dead beat. We could not have lasted another three weeks.’ He was mistaken in his estimate of his adversary’s strength; the British army had still not overcome many of its operational problems, not least the lack of a competent intelligence-gathering service. In fact, by early June, the two sides were facing deadlock.
24
It was broken by an appeal for negotiations made, at the cabinet’s request, by George V when he opened the Belfast parliament on 23 June. A truce was agreed between Sinn Fein and the government on 12 July and Irish representatives arrived in London for talks three months later.

During the height of the fighting, Colonel Lawrence, who had commanded Arab nationalist guerrillas against the Turks, observed of Ireland, ‘You can’t make war upon rebellion.’ On another occasion, he warned the government that the ‘ordinary Englishman’ did not desire and could not afford an empire which rested solely on armed force.
25
By June 1921, the cabinet had come to agree with him, grudgingly in the case of some ministers. Once it was clear that the IRA would do all in its considerable power to wreck the elections in the south, the only alternative was to declare the twenty-six counties a colony and administer them through a system of martial law. Macready doubted whether this policy would yield anything beyond a continuation of the war into the indefinite future.

The cabinet shrank from delivering the whole of southern Ireland into the hands of the generals. The past two years had seen a steady increase in protests by senior churchmen, Liberal and Labour MPs, the Trades Union Congress (which had demanded the evacuation of British troops during a special conference in June 1920) and journalists against what Asquith had described as the ‘hellish policy’ of repression and random revenge. It was alienating more and more Irish men and women and tarnishing Britain’s moral reputation throughout the world.

There was much disquiet abroad about the turn of events in Ireland. De Valera had toured the United States during 1919 and early 1920, where he was treated as a nationalist hero on a level with Gandhi and Sun Yat-Sen. He was most warmly received by Irish-American groups. These contributed $5 million in cash to help victims of the war, supplies of food and, clandestinely, arms, and they exerted political pressure on senators and representatives. This secured some anti-British resolutions, but nothing more. The new president, Warren G. Harding’s isolationist credentials ruled out official intervention in what he regarded as a British problem and none of America’s business.
26
Ireland was, however, the concern of the dominions, particularly Australia with its large Irish community. General Smuts foresaw that the methods being employed in Ireland would ‘poison’ relations between Britain and the dominions. In June 1921, he took time off from the Imperial Conference to visit Dublin, where, as a former enemy of Britain, he persuaded the Sinn Fein leaders to seek a compromise.
27
Britain, he told them, would never tolerate a republic, but would now accept a self-governing Ireland with dominion status.

Negotiations between Sinn Fein and the British government began in October and lasted for just under two months. What passed across the conference table and the treaty which was signed at the beginning of December have since been the source of considerable recrimination. Both sides regarded the truce as a breathing space and were ready to reopen hostilities. The IRA recruited 45,000 much-needed extra volunteers between July and December, and Lloyd George made it plain that he would restart and intensify the war if no agreement was forthcoming.
28
On 2 December, Churchill was reportedly ‘full of threats of John Bull laying about with a big stick’. Four days later, when the treaty was about to be signed, he warned Collins, one of the Irish delegates, that the army was ready to resume operations in three days’ time.
29
Bluster of this kind convinced many Irishmen then and later that the treaty had been squeezed out of their representatives by threats. It is more likely that Collins and his colleagues were the victims of a bluff; the principal reason why they had been invited to the negotiations was to forestall the extension of a war which was embarrassing the government, and which Macready believed was unwinnable.

Arguments about the circumstances in which the Anglo-Irish treaty was agreed were inevitable given its contents. Southern Ireland became a self-governing ‘Free State’ and a dominion. The treaty also recognised the detachment of Ulster and its Catholic minority from the Free State, and its status as a part of the United Kingdom, but with its own peculiar parliament. For those for whom the dream of Irish nationhood encompassed a single land, a hallowed historic entity, the border between the south and the north was a wound. It was an incision made for the sake of expediency, and its existence symbolised the ancient domination of Ireland by England. The nationalist movement, like Ireland, was split by the Treaty; although it was ratified in the Dáil by just seven votes, its opponents continued to fight it. The pragmatists fought and beat the idealists in a civil war that dragged on into 1923 and in which Collins was killed in a skirmish. The fighting spilled over the Ulster frontier, which anti-treaty forces attempted to redraw by force, provoking a vicious anti-Catholic backlash in Belfast.

The final victory went to de Valera and his followers. In 1937 he reframed the Irish constitution, making Eire a republic. This was not strikingly significant, although it mattered considerably to those whose nationalism had remained unsullied by the 1921 compromise. Ever since the 1931 Statute of Westminster, Ireland, like the other dominions, had enjoyed complete freedom in the management of all its external and internal affairs. This independence was asserted in September 1939 when de Valera declared Ireland neutral in Britain’s war against Germany.