The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  The ‘Red Menace’ fitted neatly with the conspiracy theories which began to circulate in 1919 and provided a satisfying explanation for the plague of restlessness which was spreading through Britain and the empire. A coherent and terrifying pattern was imposed on this global phenomenon by the publication in 1919 of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which were given much prominence by the right-wing press, most notably the Morning Post. Fabricated by Russian anti-semites during the twilight of Czarist rule, this document outlined a plot hatched by Jews to secure world domination through subversion. The Russian Revolution and Communist agitation throughout the world were part of this plan, which had as one of its goals the overthrow of the British empire. Among the converts to this cock-eyed theory was Rear-Admiral Barry Domville, whose work for naval intelligence supported his conviction that the empire was endangered by a Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy masterminded by Moscow. The exposure of the Protocols as a forgery in 1920 did nothing to shake his faith nor that of other fantasistes who, from the mid-1920s onwards, joined various British fascist movements. All were pledged to defend the empire from its shadowy adversaries, who were invariably Jews or Communists or both.

  The search for a common source for all the problems facing Britain and the empire was reflected in the thrillers of John Buchan and ‘Sapper’. Both relied on their audience’s willingness to accept a world in which secret intrigues flourished and a handful of determined men could seriously devise schemes to overthrow governments or destabilise whole societies. The villains were creatures of immense resource, utter amorality and were, almost to a man, aliens. Their machinations were always frustrated and the civilised order of things was preserved. That the readers of such fiction believed that the basic structure of their country and empire was so brittle suggests a flagging confidence in both.

  It was arguable that the war had left the established order weakened and therefore vulnerable to the epidemic of protest and disorder that appeared in 1919. It was also politically convenient for defenders of that order to dismiss all assaults upon it as the products of a gigantic but ill-defined conspiracy. Doing so ruled out any suggestion that the assailants’ grievances might be real or even justifiable.

  Such attitudes, usually combined with an intense fear of Communism and its capacity to create mayhem everywhere, were prevalent among Britain’s ruling class at this time. There was, therefore, a tendency, most common among soldiers, to classify dissidents of whatever complexion as either dupes or cunning men who manipulated the ingenuous and fundamentally decent masses to further their own ends. Such an explanation of the causes and manifestations of discontent often made it difficult for politicians and commanders to examine their sources dispassionately.

  At the same time, conventional political wisdom made it very hard for Britain’s rulers to comprehend the emotions which impelled their adversaries to extremes of stubbornness and, at times, violence. For most of the nineteenth century, and certainly during the lifetimes of the men who governed Britain in 1919, their countrymen had been learning to put their faith in reasoned debate between rational men as the best method of settling political differences. Given goodwill and flexibility, a solution could always be found to any problem. Contemplating the unquiet state of Ireland in May 1918, Walter Long, a Wiltshire squire and Unionist MP, expressed the faith of his generation and class in the processes of political dialectics. ‘I feel’, he wrote, ‘that it cannot, must not, be beyond the power of statesmanship to avert the awful disasters with which we appear to be threatened.’14

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  Disaster had, in fact, already overtaken Ireland. Its Gaelic, Catholic majority no longer had any confidence in those essentially British ways of bringing about political accord. The failure of two Home Rule bills to be passed, and of a third to be implemented, convinced them that they could no longer rely upon the British parliament to provide them with what they wanted. Their salvation now lay in their own hands, and after 1914 many disappointed nationalists turned towards the Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone) party, which called upon Irishmen and women to seize freedom for themselves even at the price of their own lives. Drawing heavily on the idealism of the Italian nationalist, Mazzini, Sinn Fein encouraged the Irish to discover their own sense of national identity which would give them the fixity of purpose and inner strength necessary for the inevitable struggle against Britain.

  Sinn Fein gave an inspiring example of the sort of self-sacrifice that would be needed if Ireland was to free itself on Easter Day 1916, when its members attempted an armed coup in Dublin. It failed, and the leading insurgents were court-martialled and shot at the orders of the local commander, General Maxwell, who had learned how to treat the empire’s enemies in the Sudan, and who justified his actions on the grounds that traitors could expect no mercy in wartime.

  The Easter Rising had been greeted with indifference by most Irishmen, but the courage of the ‘martyrs’, and exasperation with an alien government which showed scant interest in Irish opinion drove more and more towards Sinn Fein. British influence over southern Ireland dissolved slowly, unnoticed by a government whose attention was focussed on winning the war against Germany. Bit by bit, the administration in Dublin Castle lost its grip over the remoter parts of the country and, when conscription was introduced in April 1918, it was thought prudent not to enforce it, given the present humour of the Irish.

  The test, both of public support for Sinn Fein and the authority of the British government, was the general election of December 1918. Seventy-six Sinn Fein MPs were returned (forty-seven were in gaol), together with twenty-six Unionists, and six old-style Home Rule nationalists. The Sinn Fein MPs gathered in Dublin in January 1919, formed the Dáil Eireann and proclaimed Ireland a republic. There were now two governments in Ireland, each claiming legality and denouncing its rival. One, under the Viceroy, Field-Marshal Lord French, occupied Dublin Castle, and the other, headed by President Eamon de Valera, was busy creating its own administrative apparatus and a defence force, the IRA. With the confidence provided by this force, believed to number 100,000 volunteers, the Dáil outlawed the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and demanded the immediate evacuation of all British troops.

  The chief objective of Sinn Fein was to prove to the British government that the authority of Dublin Castle had been superseded by that of the Dáil, which was soon running a shadow administration. The first phase of what soon came to be known as the ‘Troubles’ began during the early summer of 1919, when the IRA launched a systematic campaign against the RIC. The murder of policemen, lightning raids against police stations and burning of police barracks were designed to intimidate and finally destroy the principal instrument of Dublin Castle’s control over Ireland. By the end of the year, the police were in disarray and, most importantly, their intelligence-gathering apparatus had fallen apart.

  The British government had faced and overcome terrorist campaigns in Ireland during the 1880s, and had coped with massive civilian unrest and rebellion in 1798, the late 1820s, the 1840s and 1860s. There was, at least from the perspective of Whitehall, no reason why the methods which had worked in the past, a mixture of political concession and coercion, would not prove successful again. Until midsummer 1919, the minds and energies of ministers were concentrated on the negotiations that preceded the signing of the Versailles Treaty. This accomplished, the cabinet turned to Ireland and the concoction of a political panacea which would cure its sickness, and keep it within Britain’s orbit. While the remedy was being applied, every effort would be made to isolate and destroy Sinn Fein by force and resume the everyday government of Ireland.

  For the next two years, the cabinet more or less accepted Lloyd George’s comparison of the situation to that in the United States in 1861, when the southern states had seceded from the Union. Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and the empire and could never be detached. Nevertheless, the events there during the first half of 1919 indicated a degree of popular dissatisfaction that had to be remedied. It was taken
for granted that Sinn Fein were a small group of fanatics whose power rested on terror alone, and that most Irishmen would welcome a compromise.

  The cabinet had, in fact, mistaken the temper of the great majority of southern Irishmen. A further obstacle to a settlement was the widespread contempt for the Gaelic, Catholic Irish, which was the legacy of two hundred years of religious and political propaganda. The Irish were, in English eyes, a fickle, childlike race, unable to subdue their wilder passions. For generations, Punch cartoons had portrayed ‘Paddy’ as a wide-eyed, simian-featured clown brandishing his shillelagh and looking for a fight. This stereotype and all that it implied clouded ministerial judgements. Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, considered the Irish ‘an inferior race’ and Lloyd George once quipped, ‘The Irish have no sense of humour, and that is why they make us laugh so much.’15 As the terrorist campaign intensified in Ireland, British anger found an outlet in racial abuse. A letter which reminded readers of the Saturday Review how Britain had held Ireland in what was tantamount to slavery, provoked this outburst from a furious correspondent: ‘Slaves have been made to work, and no one – not even Mr Ford, the great maker of motor-cars – has ever been able to make an Irishman work. The only thing the Irish have done consistently well throughout their history is murder; murder is the national pastime of the Irish.’16

  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 di
fficulties 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.