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I Signed My Death Warrant

Page 8

by Ryle T. Dwyer


  Next day Harry sent Kitty a further letter. ‘Mick and I spent the last night together. He saw me home at 2 am, as I had to catch the 7.35 am. I bade him goodbye – only to find him at Kingsbridge as fresh as a daisy to see me off. I need not say to you how much I love him, and I know he has a warm spot in his heart for me, and I feel sure in no matter what manner our Triangle may work out, he and I shall always be friends.’

  Before the plenipotentiaries left for London they were furnished with credentials on 7 October 1921. President de Valera signed those credentials authorising each of the plenipotentiaries ‘to negotiate and conclude on behalf of Ireland with the representatives of his Britannic Majesty, George V, a Treaty or Treaties of settlement, Association between Ireland and the community of nations known as the British commonwealth.’ The cabinet also issued them with the fol­lowing secret instructions:

  (1) The Plenipotentiaries have full powers as defined in their credentials.

  (2) It is understood however that before decisions are finally reached on the main questions that a dispatch notifying the intention of making these decisions will be sent to the Members of the Cabinet in Dublin and that a reply will be awaited by the Plenipotentiaries before the final decision is made.

  (3) It is also understood that the complete text of the draft treaty about to be signed will be similarly submitted to Dub­­lin and reply awaited.

  (4) In case of break the text of final proposals from our side will be similarly submitted.

  (5) It is understood that the Cabinet in Dublin will be kept regularly informed of the progress of the negotiations.

  Since the Dáil had already conferred full plenipotentiary powers, the instructions from the cabinet, an inferior body, were not legally binding in any instance in which they limited the powers of the delegation. Indeed, from the instructions themselves, it would seem that they were not intended to limit those powers, because the first of the instructions basically reaffirmed that the delegation had the full authority ‘to negotiate and conclude’ a treaty. The word ‘understood,’ which was used in each of the three clauses that seemed to limit the delegation’s authority, indicated that the instructions were really an informal understanding that the plenipotentiaries were morally obliged to try to uphold.

  The instructions were designed by de Valera to ensure that he would ultimately have a kind of control over the delegation. ‘I expected to be in the closest touch with it,’ he wrote. ‘In fact, it was my intention to be as close almost as if I were in London.’ In short, de Valera wanted ultimate control of the negotiations, while he was putting all of the responsibility for whatever happened on the members of the delegation.

  Erskine Childers was named principal secretary to the delegation, and there were three other secretaries – John Chartres, Diarmuid O’Hegarty and Fionán Lynch. Chartres had included as a kind of constitutional adviser, while O’Hegarty took charge of the typing staff, and Lynch was included to fulfil de Valera’s desire for a fluent Irish speaker on the staff. “We never saw anything of Lynch and I do not know what became of him,’ Barton noted.

  Childers was expected to have a strong influence over Barton, who was like a younger brother. They were double first cousins. Childer’s father and Barton’s mother were brother and sister, as were Barton’s father and Childer’s mother. Childer’s parents died when he was quite young and the Bartons assumed responsibility for rearing him and he spent his holidays with them. As a result Barton and Childers were as close to brothers as any two cousins could be. They even shared two names each, as their full names were Robert Erskine Childers and Robert Childers Barton.

  The president believed that Childers and Barton ‘would be strong and stubborn enough as a retarding force to any pre­cipitate giving away by the delegation.’ If de Valera really suspected that Griffith and Collins were weak, why did he not include Childers in the delegation proper? It was naive to think that a secretary would be able to control the delegation through his influence with Barton, especially when de Valera had questions about Barton’s ability to cope with pressure. In April 1921 he actually wrote to Collins that he thought that Barton was ‘on the verge of a breakdown’. Yet a few months later he was relying on him to restrain Griffith and Collins.

  Childers was to keep de Valera informed on the activities of Griffith and Collins. Now in his early fifties, he was born and educated in Britain, but of course, he spend his holidays with the Bartons in Glendalough, County Wicklow. Having graduated from Cambridge University, he joined the staff at West­minster and served for fifteen years (1895–1910) as a clerk in the House of Commons. He was a distant relative to Hugh Childers, who had served over thirty years in parliament and had been a member of various Gladstone administrations and had served as chairman of the royal commission which famously found in 1895 that Ireland had been grossly overtaxed throughout most of the nineteenth century.

  Erskine Childers took leave of absence to serve in the Boer War, and afterwards returned to work as a parliamentary clerk. In his spare time he wrote the bestseller Riddle of the Sands. Published in 1905, it has been generally considered the first of the modern spy novels. It was widely credited with alerting the British of their naval weakness to a possible German attack. Erskine became deeply committed to Home Rule and resigned as a parliamentary clerk in 1910. Two years later he published The Framework of Home Rule, which was a detailed, ex­haustively researched study of home rule and the involvement of Irish people in the various colonies. Childers landed the arms at the Howth from his yacht, the Asgard, in 1914, but he then joined up and served with distinction in the royal navy during the First World War, and he served in the secretariat of the Irish Convention of 1917–1918. He was therefore particularly well qualified to serve as chief secretary of the delegation sent to London in 1921. Indeed, one might even suggest over-qualified and should have been a member of the delegation proper, but there was always a strain between Griffith and him. Both had spent time in South Africa, where Griffith sided with the Boers. There was a deep unbridgeable gulf between them, for which Griffith was largely responsible.

  Childers, whose recreational passion was sailing, was a dedi­­cated individual who tended to become fanatical about his interests. He was a tireless secretary who would work deep into the night without taking time off to relax.

  De Valera assumed he could control the delegation himself, even though he had saddled the plenipotentiaries with the full responsibility of negotiating a settlement by insisting that the Dáil give them unfettered negotiating powers. He met Gavan Duffy, Childers and Chartres at 11 o’clock on the night of 7 Octo­ber and gave them partially completed copies of a couple of draft treaties.

  Draft Treaty A was an incomplete document in which Ex­ter­­nal Association was outlined in treaty form. It envisaged Britain recognising Ireland as ‘a sovereign independent state’ and renouncing ‘all claims to govern or to legislate’ for the island. In return, Ireland would become externally associated with the British commonwealth, enjoying equal status with the dominions and being separately represented at imperial conferences. Instead of the common citizenship of the dominions, External Association would substitute reciprocal citizenship – the subtle difference being that Irish people would be Irish citizens rather than British subjects, but they would enjoy the same rights and privileges as British subjects while residing within the British commonwealth, and British subjects would enjoy reciprocal rights with Irish citizens while resident in Ireland.

  The president had thought it necessary to seek reciprocal rights, because he was afraid of losing the sympathy of Irish people throughout the British empire, if the Dáil looked for a settlement that would make Irish immigrants aliens within the commonwealth. In many respects the distinction between reciprocal and common citizenship represented on a personal level the distinction between External Association and dominion status at the national level. External Association was designed to ensure that Ireland would legally have ‘a guarantee of the same constitu
tional rights that Canada and Australia claimed,’ according to de Valera.

  His controversial Westminster Gazette interview was the inspiration for another aspect of Draft Treaty A, which called for the British commonwealth to guarantee ‘the perpetual neutrality of Ireland and the integrity and inviolability of Irish territory.’ In return Ireland would commit ‘itself to enter into no pact, and take no action, nor permit any action to be taken, inconsistent with the obligation of preserving its own neutrality and inviolability and to repel with force any attempt to violate its territory or to use its territorial waters for warlike purposes.’ Once ratified by the respective parliaments the Treaty would be registered with the League of Nations at Geneva and the dominions would try to get ‘the formal recognition of Ireland’s neutrality, integrity and inviolability by the League of Nations in conformity with the similar guarantee in favour of Switzerland.’

  In spite of its title, Draft Treaty A was not a serious effort to draw up a draft treaty, as has often been suggested. It was strictly a negotiating document, which the Irish delegation would present in response to the British proposals of 20 July. De Valera proposed a series of contingency documents be drafted. Draft Treaty B would be the document the delegation would publish as the Irish alternative in the event the negotiations collapsed, while Draft Treaty S would be the document the pleni­­potentiaries would sign as a treaty. The president made no effort to draw up Draft Treaty S. In fact, he actually suggested a series of ancillary treaties on the constitution, finance, trade and joint commission. His suggestion sounded liked some kind of complicated mathematical formula, as he proposed that these should be called Draft Treaty C, Draft Treaty F, Draft Treaty T, and Draft Treaty J respectively. As those were being updated from day to day they should be called, Draft Treaty Aa, Ab, Ac, or the Break Treaty should be Draft Treaty Ba, Bb, Bc, etc., consecutively and dated.

  ‘We must depend on your side for the initiative after this,’ he wrote to Griffith. The choice of the term ‘your side’ was pos­sibly an unconscious reflection of the division within the cabinet even at that early stage. As far as negotiating tactics went, de Valera’s advice was that the most difficult issue, the question of the crown, should be left until last.

  ‘Supposing they refuse to do this?’ Griffith asked.

  ‘Well, you can put it to them that we ought first of all discuss the things there will be no great dispute about.’

  ‘But supposing they insist on considering the question of the Crown first?’

  ‘You can only use your powers of persuasion. After all, they cannot want to have a break on the first day.’

  Griffith pressed for further advice. ‘Well,’ said de Valera, ‘there you have the situation. You’ll have to make the best of it.’

  ‘Oh, wait now,’ cried Griffith. ‘That won’t do!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s not enough to say, “make the best of it”.’

  ‘I’m not talking about a settlement,’ de Valera explained. ‘I’m talking about the method of handling the negotiations. You see, if we get them to concede this and this and this and this, and then come to a stumbling-block, like the question of the Crown, which they say is a formula, then we can put the question before the world and point out that they want to renew the war on us for a formula.’

  ‘We all realised that to secure the position of an isolated Republic was now impossible unless we drove England’s military forces out of the country,’ Barton wrote. ‘In the Dáil members understood that our objective was External Association. The definition of that term was vague and even the delegates had but a hazy conception of what was to be its final form. This however was clear to us, External Association meant that no vestige of British authority was to remain within Ireland. The compromise was to be as regarded our foreign relations.’

  Joe McGrath and Dan McCarthy were sent ahead to obtain two houses for the delegation and a fleet of Rolls Royce cars for their use. The headquarters were at 22 Hans Place and the other house was at 15 Cadogan Gardens about ten minutes’ walk away. They employed a head cook, assistant cooks, cleaners and house maids, some from the Irish community in London, but Collins selected three waiters and six house maids as a kind of reward for their past services, and the delegation brought its own typists and clerks, as well some waiters.

  Emmet Dalton was detailed to arrange for the purchase of an aeroplane to be on stand-by to whisk Collins back to Ireland if the negotiations collapsed precipitately. Contact was made with two Irishmen who had served as pilots in the royal air force. One of them, Charlie Russell, had spent some time in Canada, so he purchased the Martinsyde aircraft posing as a Canadian requiring it for a Canadian project. The aircraft was reportedly capable of carrying at least five passengers with a range of five hundred miles and at a speed of one hundred miles per hour. Both pilots had a number of practice flights to familiarise themselves with the plane, which was maintained in readiness at Croyden aerodrome.

  The two pilots were on standby to fly Collins home. The plan was to cross the Bristol Channel to the Wexford coast and then fly north to Dublin. They would land on Leopardstown Racecourse, where a landing strip would be marked out while the aircraft was in flight. None of this became necessary, so the aircraft later became part of the nucleus of the Irish Army Air Corps and was named “the Big Fella”.’

  Most of the Irish delegation arrived in London on the evening of 8 October. The first party consisted of all of the plenipotentiaries with the exception of Collins. There were also the four secretaries, and four typists – Lily O’Brennan, who was a confidential typist for Childers, and the other three were Kathleen McKenna, and the sisters Ellie and Alice Lyons. In addition, there was propaganda minister Desmond Fitzgerald, journalist Mike Knightley, and David Robinson whose duties were never quite clear, along with the wives of Eamonn Duggan and Fionán Lynch, who acted as chaperons. The women stayed at Hans Place, though some of them worked in the house in Cadogan Gardens.

  Collins was behind the selection of a Miss O’Donoghue as housekeeper along with Tom as headwaiter in Hans Place, and Eddie the headwaiter at Cadogan Gardens. All three were from the Gresham Hotel. It was his way of replaying their loyalty. He also brought along a veritable entourage of bodyguards, whose functions were never quite clear. But it was obvious that some British people were deeply resentful of the Irish republicans. On the Sunday night the word ‘MURDERERS’ was painted on the footpath outside 22 Hans Place in large one-foot-square letters in red.

  Collins set out the following day. ‘Goodness knows I have a heavy heart this moment,’ he wrote to Kitty Kiernan, but there is work to be done and I must not complain.’ His entourage – which included Liam Tobin, Emmet Dalton, Tom Cullen, Joe Guilfoyle, Joe Dolan, Ned Broy and Seán MacBride – left Dun Laoghaire quietly on the Sunday. They ‘were there really in order to supervise safety and intelligence arrangements for Collins,’ according to MacBride. He was particularly critical of the amount of drinking by those in Cadogan Gardens, including Collins. Although he liked to depict himself as some kind of confidant of Collins, there was a big age gap between him and the seventeen-year-old MacBride, who was brought essentially as a messenger boy. He did not know what they were actually doing. ‘They may have been drinking when they went out,’ he admitted, ‘but I didn’t go out with them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say there was much justification for the charge that members of the staff of the Irish Delegation were having too good a time,’ Robert Barton said. ‘We worked very hard. There were occasional evenings of relaxation when we went to the theatre, but I don’t think there was anything to give rise to any suggestion that we were in any way dissipated.’

  Collins did contribute to the rumours by going to Wormwood Scrubs prison with two colleagues to visit Neil Kerr, who had been his agent in Liverpool for spiriting people across the Atlantic and across the Irish Sea. ‘He had evidently been drink­ing heavily,’ the prison Governor wrote to Lloyd George. ‘He said his two companions would also
be present. I replied that I had only instructions to admit him, Michael Collins. He then assumed a bullying demeanour.’

  ‘Mr Lloyd George won’t thank you for being discourteous to me.’ Collins said. ‘He had become truculent and announced his intention of seeing all the prisoners.’ When he met Kerr he was caught trying to slip him some tobacco.

  ‘You go sit down, you did not ought to be here at all,’ Collins told the warder.

  ‘I consider Mr Michael Collins was not in a fit condition to visit prisoners, as in my opinion he appeared to be under the influence of drink,’ the warder reported.

  The Big Fellow reportedly spent over three hours in the prison, making himself thoroughly obnoxious in the eyes of the prison authorities by ‘boasting about all the loyal people he has shot.’ Eventually he was persuaded to go.

  ‘There might have been a certain amount of reason for criticism in some ways but, on the whole, I should say it was a very quiet and respectable and well-behaved delegation,’ Barton continued. ‘There was a lot of visiting by people who had not seen the leaders and wanted to see them.’ An important American banker invited them to dinner at the Savoy Hotel. ‘We could not accept as we had little spare time but, since he was an influential USA citizen and sympathetic, we did not like to refuse,’ Barton said. ‘We all went to breakfast with him.’

  ‘Most of my time was taken up running dispatches from Lon­don to Dublin,’ MacBride recalled. ‘Many of these I de­livered directly to de Valera or Kathleen O’Connell,’ he added. ‘I knew that a lot of the dispatches were written by Erskine Childers who was secretary of the delegation. Collins wrote private letters to people such as Seán Ó Muirthile who was the IRB man. My function was to bring all letters backwards and forward.’

 

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