Winston Churchill and Ireland

Winston Churchill is such a universal brand today that I notice it is more and more common usage to refer to the great man simply as “Winston” – so if I do so sometimes that does not denote rude familiarity but resort to the common usage designating a “world brand” – like “Madonna”, or “Elvis”.

Indeed, Sir Winston’s name as a world brand was illuminated by a story that Clement Freud MP told a few years ago about a trip he took to China with his fellow-parliamentarian, Winston Churchill. When the pair got to Shanghai, Freud was rather cross to observe that while he had been given rather a pokey little hotel room, his Tory colleague, Young Winston, was allocated a very fine suite overlooking a view of the Yangtze. When Clement Freud remonstrated with the hotel manager, he was told: “Ah but you see, Mr Winston had a very famous grandfather.”

Obviously, in China, Winston is a better-known brand than Sigmund…

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And there are so many different kinds of approaches to Churchilliania, now, exploring many different facets to his character.

It is fascinating to see that a current aspect of Winston Churchill much in vogue is that of Churchill as a victim of depression. From the saucey septuagenarian Joan Rivers to the ageing rocker Sir Paul McCartney, Winston Churchill now reappears as the secular saint of those subject to depression and mental illness – cheering on his followers with such encouraging phrases as “if you’re going through hell, go faster”. Just this year there’s been another book out drawing on Churchill’s experience of “the black dog” – Sally Brompton’s account of her depression entitled “Shoot the Damned Dog”. 

However, when I was growing up in Dublin in the years after the Second World War – which we called “The Emergency” - I imbibed the general idea from those around me that Winston Churchill was the enemy of Ireland, and that he “hated” the Irish. This was an accepted wisdom that was evident in a range of material, from cartoons to satirical radio jokes.

This proceeded, obviously, directly from the Second World War experience when Winston had apparently said, in a wounding phrase, that Eire was “neutral – but skulking”. (In fact, he believed that Ireland, being still part of the Commonwealth, was legally “at war – but skulking”.) 

That hurt Irish national pride immensely – as it was designed to do: Winston was certainly incandescent about our neutrality because he believed it cost British lives and exposed British coasts. But it hurt national pride, I think, because if there is one collective vice that the Irish have seldom been accused of, it is physical cowardice in the face of battle.  Every British commander in the field has always maintained that “your Irishman is a fine fighting fellow”.

Churchill knew this, and indeed he touched upon that point in a characteristically incisive speech in May 1945, when he said:

“Owing to the action of Mr De Valera, so much at variance with the temper and instinct of thousands of Southern Irishmen who hastened to the battlefront to prove their ancient valour, the approaches which the Southern Irish ports and airfields could so easily have guarded were closed by the hostile aircraft and U-boats. This was indeed a deadly moment in our life, and if it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera or perish for ever from this earth.

“However, with a restraint and poise to which I say history will find few parallels, His Majesty’s Government never laid a violent hand upon them, though at times it would have been quite easy and quite natural, and we left the De Valera Government to frolic with the Germans and later the Japanese representatives to their heart’s content.”

This, too, met with a wounded reaction in Dublin, where it was interpreted as a classical example of English mis-understanding of Ireland’s position: that it challenged the abiding belief which Irish nationalists had held dear, as even did moderate Irish Home Rulers – that Ireland was a sovereign nation, and that every sovereign nation had the right not to be invaded by a neighbouring nation, even if that neighbour were mightier.

On the other hand, Irish reaction was, arguably, a traditional Irish mis-understanding of Britain’s defence position, and particularly, during the Second World War itself, how perilously close the British nation could have come to extinction: and how very alone Britain was in 1940. There had been very strict political censorship during the war and the full facts were not by any means known.

The barb about “frolicking with the Germans and later the Japanese” was a Churchillian stiletto thrust against De Valera’s public relations disaster of visiting the German Ambassador in Dublin after the death of Adolf Hitler.

This is not particularly the place to diverge into the enigmatic personality of Eamon de Valera, but that episode does stand out as one of the more obstinate gestures that Dev made – against the advice of his own civil servants – because he had the abstract mathematician’s attitude to protocols. And also, it is worth adding that he personally liked Eduourd Hempel, the German envoy. My parents knew Hempel and he was regarded as a decent career diplomat and not a Nazi. His three children did not return to Germany, but migrated to Britain and his son became an eminent eye specialist in London

However, the matter of access to the Irish naval ports during the Second World War is still, I think, debated by the historians.

In 1938, Neville Chamberlain was persuaded by Eamon de Valera to return the Irish naval ports of Cobh (formerly Queenstown), Berehaven in West Cork and Lough Swilly in Donegal to the Irish Free State. De Valera believed these naval ports were part of our sovereignty. Churchill thought that a great wickedness and a folly on Chamberlain’s part: having been First Lord of the Admiralty, and obsessively interested in submarine warfare, he believed that Britain would need access to these ports in time of war.

Churchill was convinced that not having access to these ports because of Irish neutrality could have put the outcome of the war in jeopardy. Irish historians are more inclined to emphasise the behind-the-scenes help that De Valera’s administration gave to the Allies surreptitiously. And recent research is indicating that Eire was not, in practical terms, as rigidly neutral as had sometimes been claimed.

Actually, Churchill himself liked to tell the joke of the two Co Cork farmers discussing the war situation, and one saying to the other: “I know we’re neutral – but who are we neutral against?”

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Sir Winston Churchill made no claim to be a consistent man – indeed he famously said that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.  So, over his long life, he waxed and waned about the subject of Ireland – as he did over the subject of Ulster and Ulster Unionists, to whom he expressed gratitude in wartime, and yet, could blow cooler at other moments: remembering his celebrated castigation of “the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone” which rise inexorably after every conflagration.

Again, as a girl in Dublin I heard it said – erroneously, of course – that Winston Churchill had been born in Ireland, and when charged with this fact, had replied: “One may be born in a stable without being a horse.” The same myth attaches to the Duke of Wellington, also erroneously. And to Lord Kitchener, born in Ballylongford, Co Kerry, though it is easier to believe of him. 

Winston Churchill was not of course born in Ireland – but at Blenheim -  but he did go to Ireland when he was just two years old,: his grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough was appointed Lord Lieutenant of in 1876. His father, Lord Randolph was Marlborough’s secretary.

And Winston writes affectionately about his very early memories of Ireland: and amusingly about how he nearly died from concussion when he was thrown by an Irish donkey, only nursed back to health by his ever-devoted nanny, Mrs Everest. He also picked up, in that childhood, the perhaps justifiable fears felt about the Fenians.

Lord Randolph, is also associated, in the Irish Republic anyway, with the Ulster Unionists at their fiercest. When visiting Belfast in 1886, during Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill, Lord Randolph famously reiterated the historic Orange cry of “No Surrender!” and declared: “Ulster will fight – and Ulster will be right.” (To resist Home Rule).  He is also remembered for coining the phrase, that when in doubt Tories should “Play the Orange card.”

Later on, Winston sought to defend and explain his father’s position, suggesting that “playing the Orange card” was more by way of a politician’s gambit than a maturely developed policy. And Winston underlined some of Lord Randolph’s positive attitudes to Ireland – he had been very encouraging about Catholic education, and he believed in extending the franchise to men of modest means. Yet popular history doesn’t always do nuance very effectively, and it seems to me that Lord Randolph Churchill is still associated in Ireland, north and south, with the advancement of the Orange card. And although quixotic in some ways – he got along personally very well with Michael Davitt, the founder of the Land League – Randolph did believe, as a British Unionist, that “if we lose Ireland, we are lost”.

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By 1904, of course, Winston Churchill had joined the Liberal Party ostensibly over the matter of Free Trade, but it seems that his time in South Africa during the Boer War had also had a certain radicalising effect. Despite – or perhaps because of – being captured and imprisoned by the Boers, he esteemed this feisty people.

Indeed, one of the more entertaining moments that Winston shared with Michael Collins in 1921 was when Michael said to Winston that “you put a price on my head! You hunted me day and night!”  Winston then fumbled in a bureau and extracted a portrait of himself, with a “Wanted” sign in English and Afrikaans. “You see, Mr Collins,” Churchill said, “I too had a price on my head. But whereas the reward for finding me was a mere £25, the price we put on your head was £5000! How much more valuable you were than I!”

Ah, well, said Mick: you’d have to take inflation into consideration!

 By the Ulster crisis of 1912 – King George V was convinced that both Britain and Ireland were heading for a serious civil war – Winston Churchill was a fully-fledged Asquithian Home Ruler. He said in a Manchester speech that “the flame of Irish nationality is inextinguishable”. And in the same Belfast which had celebrated his father, Winston was pelted with rotten fish. In 1912, Edward Carson was threatening an Ulster Unionist rebellion against the Crown, by enlisting the assistance of the German Emperor. As James Joyce was said to have had “the Jesuit strain injected backwards”, so, I think, the Dublin Unionist Carson had the rebel strain paradoxically applied to the Loyalist cause.

Churchill was generally consistent all of his life in this: he did believe in self-government for Ireland – but self-government subject to the Imperial parliament. He was, after all, a British Imperialist, and proudly so: he believed in the Empire long after most other British statesmen had given it up. He also believed that Britain – indeed England’s – security required that Ireland should not be a weak link in the western defences. But as a student of history, Winston knew perfectly well the long Irish rebel tradition that “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity”.

We know how Home Rule was put on the back burner by the declaration of war in 1914. And in the middle of that First World War, came the Easter Rising in Dublin of 1916 which has become the founding legend of the Irish state. I think, rightly, the events of 1916 are now seen as not something apart from the Great War, but very much part of the same zeitgeist - of the nationalism of small nations breaking up from great empires – the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, the Czarist empire…..

At the end of that war, Winston became Colonial Secretary in Lloyd George’s Coalition, so he was to play a key role in the turbulent years that followed. And here, again, his reputation remains controversial. Tim Pat Coogan, biographer of De Valera and Collins, still refers to Winston Churchill as “the man who sent the Black and Tans to Ireland.” When I suggested to Tim Pat that that these forces – who had such a reputation for drunken atrocities - were despatched by Sir Hamer Greenwood, the Canadian-born Chief Secretary for Ireland, he insisted it was Churchill who was behind the idea. Though I feel sure the effect would not have been Winston’s intention. 

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On the other hand, there is little doubt that Winston’s crucial support of the fledgling Irish Free State – and his continuing trust of Michael Collins personally after they had signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty together – made him, to a very considerable degree the midwife to an independent Ireland, initially a Dominion with the same status as Canada and Australia.

Winston could never accept the idea of an Irish Republic because he felt it would be in essence hostile to Britain – and Irish Republicans certainly were good at giving that impression. But the more moderate Free State, drawn up in 1922, which accepted the Crown and had an Oath of Allegiance to the King was, to Winston Churchill, a legitimate state worth supporting, and in the civil war that ensued between Irish Free Staters and Irish Republicans, Winston did everything in his power to back the Free State.

That, in itself, again made him the villain in the eyes of the out-and-out Republicans, as may be gathered from the dialogue in Ken Loach’s propaganda movie The Wind that Shakes the Barley.  It grieves me that films like this one receive world-wide acclaim not just as movies – a film is a work of fiction, perhaps of art, and can say anything it likes – but as if it were the gospel truth about history. The truth is that the majority of the Irish people were not out-and-out Republicans: the majority supported the Treaty and the Irish Free State, and the Catholic Church was particularly firm in recognising the Free State as the legitimate authority, a fine point of moral theology derived from St Paul – that Christians must respect the “legitimate authority”.

But the Republican version of history is the romantic one: whereas the Free State version is the pragmatic one – it is about building a state under the rule of law, with stable institutions, a civil society, an independent judiciary and a correctly ordered civil service.

As we know, Michael Collins, defending the Free State, was shot dead in August 1922. Shortly before he died, he sent what turned out to be a valedictory message to Churchill: “Tell Winston we could never have done it without him.” And that was the truth. The Free State could have been a failed state without Winston Churchill’s active support – sometimes in the face of parliamentary hostility at Westminster, where there were calls for Britain to re-occupy the country. Piquantly, one of the few M.P.s audibly to back Winston in the House of Commons in the debates over the Free State was one Oswald Mosley.

During the Second World War, when Churchill felt at his most aggrieved with De Valera’s leadership of Saorstat Eireann, he said pointedly: “Of course, Michael Collins was a man of his word.” Collins would have permitted Britain the naval ports in time of war: or at least he made that pledge in 1921.

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Would Winston Churchill have invaded neutral Eire if he thought it necessary? He was capable of taking ruthless decisions if he felt that it was do or die – as in the decision to shell the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. But he was, apparently, given advice by intelligence sources that invading Eire would have been more trouble than it was worth, since 80 per cent of the populace supported neutrality: and that even many of the pro-British element would have resented British coercion.

Churchill was, it seems, ready to do a deal with De Valera over Ulster: a united Ireland in return for a pro-Allied Ireland. But that was rebuffed too.

After the Second World War, the paths of Britain and Ireland diverged once again when Ireland was declared a Republic in 1948 – though quixotically, De Valera disapproved of the Fine Gael-led coalition administration doing so. Winston at this point was more focused on the new menace arising from the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain, and in a very strange way the spectre of Soviet Russia effected a certain limited reconciliation between Churchill and De Valera, and they had a cordial meeting as in Downing Street in 1953: by then, perhaps, a question of all passion spent.

For, although Winston had always opposed an Irish Republic, there was one aspect of post-war Ireland that he approved of: the Catholic Church ensured that Ireland was firmly anti-Communist and opposed to “godless Bolshevism”. If Ireland had posed a security threat to Britain’s western and southern approaches during the Hitler war, it would surely stand firm against any onslaughts by Godless Bolshevism from the east.

In Roy Foster’s engaging “Paddy and Mr Punch” he recounts an unusually occult experience of Winston’s, when he fancies that he has a of a sort of spiritualist visitation from the ghost of his father. Lord Randolph asks Winston how Ireland is faring in the later 1940s, and Winston replies: “They are much more friendly to us than they used to be. They have built up a cultured Roman Catholic system in the South. There has been no anarchy or confusion. They are getting more happy and prosperous. The bitter past is fading.”

In fact, it hadn’t altogether faded. Papers recently deposited in the Irish National Archives show that there remained some sharply critical views of Winston Churchill among Irish officials. But these archives also show a conciliatory approach from Winston.

In November 1948, Churchill met the Irish High Commissioner, subsequently Ambassador, John Dulanty in London: Winston said to him - “I still hope for a United Ireland. You must get those fellows from the North in, though you can’t do it by force. There is not, and never was, any bitterness in my heart towards your country.”

Winston Churchill believed in magnanimity after the battles of history. And he was also prophetic, in two measures. Firstly, he always said that when Ireland became more prosperous that would heal the wounds of history and make Anglo-Irish relations harmonious. And that, I think, has come to pass. And in his desire to see an Ireland moving towards a form of peaceful unity, was certainly boosted, I believe, by the Belfast Peace Agreement of Good Friday 1998, and the subsequent Referenda in both parts of Ireland endorsing it by large majorities: and in the Republic of Ireland, by democratic vote to remove those articles from the Irish Constitution which lay claim to Northern Ireland’s territory.