Ireland, Wales and the First World War: History, Myth, and Cultural Memory An Interdisciplinary Conference

Booklet of Abstracts

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Abstracts/Crynodebau

‘War and Peace in The Welsh Outlook (1914-33)’ Malcolm Ballin

The Welsh Outlook was the only English-language periodical in existence in Wales throughout the First World War. It covered issues such as profiteering and conscription, and the interplay between industrial policy and the war effort. The Outlook discussed pacifist opinion in Wales and the part of women in the war effort. It was opposed to jingoism, and favoured the nascent League of Nations. Other themes included the special relationship imagined between Wales and Belgium, the differences between British and German approaches to philosophy and the importance of post-War planning. Differences in emphasis appear between the Outlook and Welsh-language magazines such as O.M. Edwards’s Cymru. The Outlook gave scant attention to Irish affairs, despite the historic 1916 rebellion and its aftermath.

The paper will consider the roles of particular individuals, including Thomas Jones, its first editor (who later served as deputy secretary to the War Cabinet under Lloyd George and became deeply involved in negotiations about Irish independence). Others include the mine-owner David Davies (the Outlook’s proprietor) and the ‘Cardiff/Barry Circle’ who were involved together in the journal’s creation. Their masthead bore the message ‘Where there is no vision the people perish.’ The Outlook treated the War and Ireland as matters of relatively peripheral interest, compared to the social and political issues in Wales that constituted its main agenda.

‘The Flying Corps and the Flying Column: Irish Revolutionaries and First World War Culture’ John Borgonovo

While revolutionary Ireland (1916-1923) is often placed in the context of the First World War, the conflict’s cultural impacts seldom factor into studies of the period. Yet, Ireland’s 1916 Generation were also part of Europe’s 1914 Generation. This paper will examine the Irish independence movement’s engagement with British First World War culture, focusing on republican paramilitarism, propaganda, and memorialisation. Though it pioneered modern guerrilla warfare, the Irish Republican Army was influenced by British Army traditions and structures. IRA leaders also applied contemporary First World War terminology to their own thread-bare guerrilla operation, often with considerable irony. (For example, fugitives who went underground were described as having, ‘joined the Flying Corps’). Republican propagandists studied the British government’s Crewe House information techniques, echoing British atrocity propaganda by swapping Ireland for Belgium and Britain with Germany. Black and Tans replaced rampaging Prussian Huns. Amid state criminalisation of the republican campaign, fallen IRA fighters received elaborate paramilitary spectacle funerals that mirrored British military processions. This struggle 2

for legitimacy could also be seen in post-war republican monuments that often resembled British memorials to the Great War dead. While Anglo-Irish cultural transmission is evident in some cases, in others republicans harnessed British war culture for their own cause. As they mobilised support for the independence movement in Ireland, Britain, and abroad, republican activists often deliberately communicated in the language and practices of the First World War. In this way they could make themselves better understood in societies that had recently emerged from the 1914- 1918 conflict.

‘“Waiting had killed every yearning”: Rationing, Thrift and Self-Denial in Welsh women’s interwar short fiction’ Michelle Deininger

Welsh Women’s short fiction in the years after World War One often points to the impact of rationing and the necessity for thrift in the domestic sphere. When rationing became a feature of everyday life in 1918, it fundamentally changed how women could provide for themselves and their families. Self-denial, as a means of ensuring that more vulnerable family members did not go without, became a common part of women’s existence. This paper seeks to illuminate the extent to which the legacy of government policies and social expectations shaped the way Welsh life is imagined in short fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. This paper will discuss the social and economic implications of rationing and thrift by exploring the way in which these issues were depicted and discussed in newspapers and literary journals towards the end of the war. It will then examine how these issues seep into the stories of writers such as Kate Roberts, Ellen Lloyd-Williams and Kathleen Freeman, focusing on the ways in which a mentality of thrift curbs not only spending, but imagination and even sexual relationships. At the same time, frugality is counterbalanced by a recurring focus on the material – from the inexpensive cawl bowls with huge sentimental value in Lloyd-Williams’ ‘“When Thou Shalt Be Old”’, to the luxurious but unaffordable fabrics in the shop windows of Roberts’ ‘Red-Letter Day’. These stories are all, in some way, concerned with the way identity is formed through material objects (or a lack of them) and the sense of inadequacy that ensues when these objects are lost or are unattainable.

‘Conscientious Objection to the Great War: the Welsh Story’ Aled Eirug

One of the most obvious aspects of opposition to the War were the conscientious objectors (COs) who refused to join the military after conscription was introduced in January 1916. This presentation will provide an analysis of the conscientious objectors in Wales and assess their significance to the anti-war movement generally in Britain. It will analyse those COs who opposed on religious grounds and those who opposed on political grounds. It will consider the 'absolutist' view amongst COs that opposed any 3

compromise with the state, and the 'alternativist' view that allowed for some compromise. It will consider the geographical distribution and political or religious allegiance of the conscientious objectors, and will consider the response of the State to the growth of the anti-war movement in Wales from January 1916 onwards.

‘National Armies in the Field: National Identity and Recruitment in Ireland and Wales, 1914-16’ John S. Ellis

The national identities of Ireland and Wales are often set in juxtaposition to the expansion of British patriotism during the First World War. The war is thought to have cultivated an Anglicized Britishness largely at the expense of Welshness and Irishness, the latter saved by the revitalizing uprising of its republican minority. Such interpretations rely on mutually exclusive definitions of national identity that ignore the essentially multi-national context of British patriotism in 1914. Under the unprecedented pressures of total war, the state asserted that Britain would fight as a multinational brotherhood in arms and explicitly recognized the distinct national existence, identities and patriotism of the Irish and Welsh nations. Produced by devolved organizations, war propaganda melded Irish and Welsh nationalist icons with the imagery of a wider but essentially pluralistic British patriotism. War devolution was perhaps carried to its furthest length in the organization of Kitchener's new armies, where distinctively national military divisions were successfully recruited from patriotic Irish and Welshmen. Ostensibly led by nationalist officers, ministered by Irish Catholic and Welsh nonconformist chaplains, and fighting in distinctive uniforms under national flags and symbols, the 16th Irish Division and the 38th Welsh Division were meant to be veritable "national armies in the field". Nationalist leaders hailed the units as a reflection of national worth and international standing and believed that their service would accelerate the movement toward further national recognition and freedom for Ireland and Wales. Rather than dissolving diverse national identities into a single Britishness, early war propaganda and recruitment reinforced and encouraged the national sentiments and aspirations of the Irish and Welsh. The national character and ethos of these divisions was a casualty of the tragic decimation at the battle of the Somme in 1916. Reeling from the devastation, the national composition of the units was diluted by available conscripts and the demands of military exigency. A more unitary sense of British patriotism becomes increasingly evident as the war moved into its more regimented phase following conscription and the collapse of the Liberal government.

‘Over by Christmas? Wales in the Early Months of the First World War’ Neil Evans

When war broke out in August 1914, Wales was an area with a notoriously low level of recruiting to the army and often seen as a centre of pacifist and anti-war opinion. This 4

paper examines the response to the war in recruiting, attitudes to the conflict and in social mobilisation in the transition from peace to total war. Hew Strachan has emphasised how quickly perceptions changed with the outbreak of war as the conflict provided a new framework for discussion. The paper examines the particular Welsh expression of this. Much of the focus is on military recruiting, set in the context of the resistance to the army evident in nineteenth-century Wales. Enthusiastic recruiting meetings often failed to produce many volunteers and many expressed concerns about the fate of their dependants if they enlisted. As such it adds to the literature which questions the extent of enthusiasm for war in 1914. It raises questions about how well the army was organised to respond to the challenge of recruiting in Wales.

There will also be a discussion of attitudes to the war and to Germany as expressed in the press, based on the comments made by people with recent experience of visiting Germany. The paper will attempt to deal with all parts of Wales and to highlight both internal differences within the nation and ask to what extent there were regional differences in the UK in late 1914 in the face of the homogenising rhetoric of social cohesion. The paper is an early presentation of work being undertaken for a joint project with Dr. Mike Benbough-Jackson of Liverpool John Moores University.

‘Death of the “Soldier Hero”: altered masculinities in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and Kate Roberts’s Feet in Chains’ Steve Hendon

In the United Kingdom of 1914, the strong and resolute figure of the ‘Soldier Hero’ was a potent masculine cultural symbol that was deployed to inspire and coerce men to enlist. The figure endures today, in images of Great War combatants, and those of later conflicts. However, the fixed nature of such a gendered ideal was dislocated by the events of 1914-1918, a change that was reflected in the way in which masculine discourses were constructed in literature, such as in the texts of Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), and Kate Roberts (1891-1985).

The writings of Bowen and Roberts are constitutionally affected by memories of the Great War. In How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War (1992), Heather Bryant Jordan comments that Bowen searched for ‘the buried link between memory and experience [which] led her to write fictions that perpetually created and recreated the connections she saw among war, loss, and words.’ Katie Gramich, in her critical biography Kate Roberts (2011), notes that ‘it was the devastating loss of her younger brother, David […], during the war in 1917 that first drove her to write’. For both women, the notion of ‘loss’ and a sense of ending brings them to a ‘threshold’, as Gramich puts it, to consider their own lives, and the effects of war on the nations in which they were born, respectively, Ireland and Wales.

My two subject texts are not centred on masculinity. Set in 1920 in Co. Cork during ‘The Troubles’, Bowen’s The Last September (1929) revolves around Lois Farquar, the niece 5

of the owners of one of Ireland’s ‘Big Houses’. Contrastingly, Roberts’s Feet in Chains (1936) spans the historical period from 1880–1916; set in the slate-quarrying area of Snowdonia, it focuses on the harsh working-class life of the Welsh ‘Mam’, Jane Gruffydd. However, in both novels men, including soldiers, take on increasingly significant roles in political and national contexts, as the narratives progress to what might be called apocalyptic conclusions. In the post-Great War world in which the texts were written, masculinity is questioned and revealed to be an index of a liminal gender discourse.

My paper will engage with modern gender theory – for instance, that of Judith Butler, R. W. Connell, and Joan Wallach Scott - to examine issues of altered masculinity in both texts, considering their authors’ feminine perspectives, and contrasting class and national positions.

‘History and Myth: Remembering the First World War in Wales’ Deian Hopkin

The centenary of the First World War has given us an opportunity to reflect on what happened between 1914 and 1918/19 and to consider the different ways those events have been presented. We now have a plethora of material, much of it digitised and highly accessible but how nearer are we to understanding the war, its origins and consequences? This talk will examine how the commemorations of the war in Wales have been planned and are being delivered and what kind of legacy we can leave when the centenary is long past.

‘“Ar orwel pell” / “Things fall apart”: the symbolism and resonance of Hedd Wyn’s “Rhyfel” and W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”’ Llŷr G. Lewis

It is perhaps a curious result of the circumstances of their creation that some war poems seem to embed their words in collective national memories. Two particular examples in Ireland and Wales’s cases are W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (though not in a narrow sense a ‘war poem’), and Hedd Wyn’s ‘Rhyfel’. One way of illustrating this ‘resonance’ is the way in which lines and phrases from both poems have often been taken as titles for other literary works. While the various uses of Yeatsian phrases such as ‘things fall apart’ are well catalogued, less usually remembered is that, as Gerwyn Wiliams observes, at least five Welsh-language books draw their titles from lines in ‘Rhyfel’.

My paper attempts to analyse why these two poems, composed during or immediately following the First World War, seem to ‘resonate’ so clearly with later audiences. By adopting a comparative viewpoint, it highlights some of the surprising similarities between the two works, in terms of their symbolism and particularly in their use of Biblical imagery. In this regard the paper also considers some of the poets’ 6

other works, particularly Hedd Wyn’s ‘Yr Arwr’. It also argues that a certain self- awareness or self-regard can be detected in the narrative voice of both works.

I wish to suggest that these are two highly symbolic poems which are simultaneously aware of their own symbolic potential and significance. This can then be drawn out in order to suggest that even in times of disorder, upheaval and adversity, and perhaps taking advantage of these conditions, certain Welsh and Irish poetry engaged with the work of creating new national symbols and narratives.

‘“Yr Ynys Anffodus” ynteu “Iwerddon y Dadeni”’/ ‘The “Unfortunate Isle” or “Ireland Reborn”’ Gethin Matthews

[English translation follows]Pan gododd rhai o genedlaetholwyr Iwerddon mewn gwrthryfel yn erbyn rheolaeth Brydeinig ym 1916, roedd llu o adroddiadau yn y wasg Gymreig. Mae’r disgrifiadau o’r digwyddiadau hyn yn dibynnu’n helaeth ar ffynonellau Prydeinig, ond ceir rhai sylwadau diddorol gan y golygyddion sy’n dadansoddi’r digwyddiadau trwy lygaid Cymreig. Nid yw pob dehongliad gan y papurau enwadol (Anghydffurfiol) o weithredoedd y cenedlaetholwyr (Pabyddol) mor unochrog ag y byddai rhywun efallai yn ei ddisgwyl. Dadleuodd Seren Cymru (wythnosolyn y Bedyddwyr) os oedd y Rhyfel yn cael ei ymladd dros hawliau’r cenhedloedd bychain, yna roedd ‘hawl i’r Iwerddon ei chais am fyw ei bywyd arbennig ei hun’ – a bod y rhesymeg hon hefyd yn berthnasol i Gymru a’r Alban. Eto, ‘yr Ynys Anffodus’ oedd Iwerddon i’r sylwebyddion yn aml, a drwgweithredwyr yn aflonyddu’r sefyllfa i’w dibenion eu hunain. Yn y cyd-destun hwn roedd llawer o sôn am ‘fradwriaeth’ Roger Casement, a’r llwyth o arfau Almaenig a oedd i gynorthwyo’r gwrthryfelwyr.

Mae’r un agwedd – bod trafferthion Iwerddon yn bla ac yn faich – i’w gweld yn atgofion cyfoes llawer o filwyr Cymreig. Fodd bynnag, gydag amser fe ddaeth nifer o’r milwyr hyn a oedd wedi gwasanaethu yn yr Iwerddon i weld cyfiawnder achos y rhai a oedd ar yr ochr arall. Yr enghraifft ryfeddaf o hwn, mae’n siŵr, oedd atgofion Griffith Williams o Lithfaen, a adroddai stori (na all fod yn ffeithiol gywir) iddo gael ei efynnu ag Éamon de Valera pan gafodd yntau ei arestio. Y ffordd orau i ddarllen yr atgof hwn yw ei fod wedi’i ddylanwadu gan y cyflwyniad ffafriol o weriniaeth Iwerddon a roddwyd gan genedlaetholwyr Cymreig yn y degawdau ar ôl annibyniaeth (‘Iwerddon y Dadeni’, ys dywed Alan Llwyd).

When some Irish nationalists rose in rebellion against British rule in 1916, there were numerous reports of it in the Welsh press. The descriptions of events found therein depended largely on British sources, but some interesting editorial remarks can be found which analyse events through Welsh eyes. Not every interpretation by the (Nonconformist) denominational press of the actions of the (Roman Catholic) nationalists were as one-sided as one might expect. Seren Cymru [The Star of Wales] (the weekly paper of the Baptists) argued that if the war was being waged over the rights of small nations, then ‘Ireland had 7

the right to attempt to live her own distinctive life’ – and that this rationale was also relevant to Wales and Scotland. Yet, Ireland was often seen by commentators as ‘the Unfortunate Isle’, and troublemakers were regarded as agitating the situation in order to serve their own ends. In this context there was much comment on the ‘treason’ of Roger Casement, and the load of German armaments which were destined to help the rebels.

The same attitude – that Ireland’s troubles were an affliction and a burden – can be seen in the memoirs of many Welsh soldiers of the period. However, with the passage of time a number of these soldiers who had served in Ireland came to see the justice of the cause of their opponents. The most striking example of this, certainly, were the memoirs of Griffith Williams from Llithfaen, who told the story (which cannot be factually accurate) of his being handcuffed to Éamon de Valera when he was arrested. Perhaps the best way to interpret this ‘memory’ is to conclude that Williams was influenced by the favourable presentation of the Irish republic adopted by Welsh nationalists in the decades after independence (‘Ireland Reborn’, in Alan Llwyd’s words).

‘David Jones and Welsh Identity in In Parenthesis’ Nathan Munday

This paper engages with David Jones and the Welsh soldier in In Parenthesis. By using Welsh literary sources I will trace the re-creation of the de-humanised individual through poetry. This is possible by Jones’s engagement with the Welsh bardic tradition. Wales is ‘an historical and a mythological entity’ in Jones’s work, and so too are the Welshmen. They are flickering characters whose roles are often misunderstood and are constantly changing in the narrative. They are sometimes portrayed as creativity’s combatants, sometimes like rugby fanatics and sometimes as the poet himself whose own identity is scattered among the various individuals of the poem. Understanding the poet’s use of the Welsh is crucial in understanding In Parenthesis as a whole.

‘Airmen and Bowmen: Chivalry and its Discontents in the Wartime Works of Arthur Machen and W.B. Yeats’ Tomos Owen

For Arthur Machen and W.B. Yeats, two surviving Celtic mystics of the 1890s, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 in all its modern, technological materialism brought with it its own particular challenges, and demanded new kinds of response personally, politically and artistically. This paper argues that for Yeats, that response was an initial silence which spawned a deepening ambiguity in his later poetry; Machen, by contrast, is both more direct and more fantastic in his treatment of the Great War.

For his part Yeats wrote little that addressed the war directly, and his response overall is characterised by what Terence Brown describes as a sense of ‘emotional detachment’. Dividing his time mainly between London and Stone Cottage in Sussex 8

(which he shared with Ezra Pound) Yeats found himself caught in a bind between a sense of broad, though muted, support for the Allied cause and an antipathy towards the same British Empire which drove that Allied campaign. The poet’s ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ and ‘A Meditation in Time of War’ offer, respectively, silence and a metaphysical contrast between permanence and flux. The death of Major Robert Gregory, and the requirement to commemorate him in verse, elicited poems including ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ and ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, and saw Yeats distance the airman from obligations to state, empire or comrades. Moving beyond its immediate materiality, its patriots and politicians, Yeats’s response to the Great War speculates on wider, transcendent concerns of this life, this death: in the elegies to Robert Gregory in particular, Yeats grapples with the tensions between the local and the universal, the present and the past, and the individual’s confrontation of a realm beyond the material.

Machen, by contrast, enlists the mystical-metaphysical, putting it at the service of the Allied cause. In ‘The Soldier’s Rest’ and, most famously, ‘The Bowmen’, Machen summons medieval soldiers and chivalric orders to the battlefields of twentieth-century Europe. The combination of chivalric history, divine intervention and wartime propaganda proved potent in the case of ‘The Bowmen’, giving rise to the legend of the Angels of Mons, when Machen’s fictional narrative was taken by his readers at face value as a truthful account of fighting. This paper argues that while Yeats reaches for the transcendent in order to soar above the banality of the slaughter below, the hoax of the Angels of Mons, spawned from Machen’s work, succeeded bizarrely in summoning the numinous and inserting it into contemporary accounts of the front line.

‘“Steady on to the foot of the Cross and rip the swine out of their trenches”: Religious influences on First World War Writing’ Terry Phillips

This paper will focus on the influence of religion on representations of the war in the work of three writers, two from Ireland and one from Wales. It will examine the mainly but not exclusively literary writings of three First World War soldiers: the Irish Nationalist politician and poet, Thomas Kettle who died at Givenchy in 1916, his fellow- countryman, ‘the navvy poet’ Patrick MacGill, a soldier with the London Irish Rifles, and the Welsh artist and writer David Jones. All three were influenced by Christian ideas, but their application of such ideas represents a significant difference in the approaches of those who sought to find a religious meaning in the apparently meaningless conflict. The comparison of the saving act of Christ to the saving act of the soldier is a commonplace of World War One writing, but it did depend on a political conviction that the war was right and necessary, rather than any sectarian differences in religious understanding. Such a view was held by Kettle, a lifelong Catholic who did not swerve from this conviction even after the British response to the Easter Rising. In his poetry, published in Poems and Parodies and Battle Songs for the Irish Brigades, he makes 9

explicit connections between the saving act of Christ and the war. Both MacGill and Jones, while they served in the war and were by no means pacifists, were much more ambivalent about its cost in human terms and this is reflected in their very different treatment of the crucifixion. MacGill, a boyhood Catholic who had abandoned belief in a personal God before the outbreak of the war, nevertheless, in his autobiographical war fiction, reflects on the human suffering of the crucified Christ. Jones, who became a Catholic in 1921, in his remarkable and somewhat undervalued prose poem In Parenthesis, which draws strongly on liturgical language, reflects a similar empathy with the crucified Christ.

‘Some corner of a foreign field that is forever Ireland: Reconstructing Ireland and the Great War at the ‘Island of Ireland Peace Park’’ John Poulter

War memorials are one of the key texts that work toward the discursive construction of the nation. Whilst Billig is right to highlight the role of much of the banal stuff of everyday life in constantly reproducing the nation in the lives of the population, the war memorial is a statement of that ‘sacrifice’ that Renan argues works to legitimate the nation. At the same time as demonstrating its legitimacy through the willingness of this sacrifice, it also demands that we maintain the nation in order that such sacrifice not prove to have been in vain. In particular it warns us that this task requires us to be ready to make such a sacrifice ourselves. Thus can be read on most of the many thousands of memorials to the First World War.

The ‘Island of Ireland Peace Park’, at Messines in Belgium, is not so easily able to carry out this role. The history of the remembrance of the Irish dead of the war has been a turbulent one. The two polities created on the island shortly after the war made use of the texts and practices of Remembrance in very different ways if both with the same aim – the construction of a national identity. In the North these two identities contributed to the conflict in which this new memorial intervened in 1998.

This paper explores the ways in which this fascinating memorial text works to use the past to try to shape the future. In the process it will also address how, parallel to this, it necessarily works to challenge the dominant ‘British’ ‘memory’ of the war.

‘T. H. Parry-Williams, Ireland and the First World War’ Angharad Price

This paper will examine T. H. Parry-Williams’ links with Ireland and Irish literature before and during the First World War.

Parry-Williams’ links with Ireland were first established in 1909 and 1910, when he spent two consecutive summers at the School of Irish Learning in Dublin, improving his knowledge of early and modern Irish. He subscribed to An Claidheamh Soluis as a 10

student at Freiburg University (1911-1913), where his interest in Irish culture and politics was deepened by his friendship with Edward Lucius Gwynn, son of Stephen Gwynn, and Maura Power, daughter of Jennie Wyse Power.

Before and during the First World War, Ireland becomes a constant reference point for Parry-Williams’ writings on the Welsh literary revival. Though scathing about the concept of an Irish national literature in English, Irish poets are frequently named as literary models for contemporary Welsh writers. Parry-Williams’ involvement with Irish literature reaches its climax in early 1916 with the publication of a two-part essay on W.B. Yeats whom he condemns for his otherworldliness.

Traumatised by the events of 1914-18 and by the consequences of his own pacifism, a different and apparently apolitical Parry-Williams emerges after the First World War. At this point, all references to Irish literature and culture cease, and his involvement with Ireland ‘forgotten’.

The paper will examine this trajectory in more detail and will attempt to illuminate Parry-Williams’ ambiguous relationship with Irish culture and literature, its place in the development of his own work and in the formation of Welsh literary Modernism.

‘W.B. Yeats and National Elegy: Evaluating Sacrifice in an English War and an Irish Rebellion’ Austin Riede

This paper examines how W.B. Yeats works through a specific ethnic conundrum posed by the Great War and by the Irish 1916 Easter Rebellion. As an Anglo-Irish protestant, indebted almost entirely to the English poetic tradition in his career, and also as an Irish nationalist working fervently toward Irish political independence, Yeats is clearly torn in the struggles of 1914-18 and beyond, and his ambivalence is evident in two of his greatest poems from this period, “Easter, 1916,” and “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.” My paper argues that Yeats ultimately reconciles his conflicting political ties through an allegiance to the value of total bodily sacrifice for any cause.

Yeats’ elegies for Robert Gregory, the Anglo-Irish and aristocratic son of his benefactor, Lady August Gregory, represent him as an embodiment of perfection, whose sacrifice in the Great War is all the greater because, as the poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” makes clear, it accomplishes nothing. Gregory’s sacrifice is thus above material exchange. He gives his life, happily, because it pleases him at the moment to do so, not because of any benefit it will have. Yeats’s Gregory is not concerned with trading in his life for anything; such an exchange would be essentially bourgeois, and so beneath the aristocratic airman. Yeats is more ambivalent in his descriptions of the sacrifices made by the Easter Rebels. Ultimately, I argue, he is hesitant to portray them as sacrificial heroes, not just because of his class allegiance to 11

the aristocracy (though he was not an aristocrat), but because he disdains any kind of use-value exchange, and, unlike his version of Gregory, the Easter Rebels did gain something from their sacrifice. In his poeticization of the Easter Rebels, however, Yeats concludes that their physical sacrifice, though grounded in an exchange economy he condemns, raises them above that economy, and he canonizes them, though ambivalently, for having broken out of that material system of exchange through the sacrifice of their invaluable lives.

‘“A Definitive Neurasthenic Temperament?”: Treatment of Shell-Shock in post- war Ireland and the United Kingdom’ Michael Robinson

This paper addresses the subject of my doctoral thesis on Irish soldiers in the First World War and the issue of shell-shock and post-war medical treatment. My paper will start with a discussion of how Irishmen within the British Army were perceived to be a ‘martial race’ during the First World War. As such, they were deemed to be ideally suited to attack but vulnerable to defence whilst also being child-like and displaying fragile emotional capacity. The belief that Irish soldiers were susceptible to nervous injuries was repeated in reports by the Ministry of Pensions, the War Office and the Report of The Committee into Shell-Shock which was published in 1922. With only one piece of data (the proportion of all patients awaiting either in-patient or out-patient treatment in the United Kingdom, 1921) being found as evidence to corroborate with this perception of mental weakness amongst Irish ex-servicemen, this paper will utilise primary research to counter the evidence that suggests that more Irish soldiers required post-war psychiatric care in what was at the time described as ‘South Ireland’ than any other region in the United Kingdom. With a keen focus on a Welsh comparison, explanations such as the lack of employment, the subjective interpretation of Ministry of Pension regulations, and the insufficient medical facilities available in ‘South Ireland’ helps to explain why the waiting list figures of in-patient and out-patient care was considerably higher in the latter region.

‘“[S]o many times before”: remembering the First World War in the poetry of John Hewitt and Patrick Maybin’ Amy Smith

This paper will examine some aspects of the cultural construction and inscription of the ‘Myth of the War’, in Samuel Hynes’ words, in Northern Ireland between 1936 and 1945. Experiential, historical and literary memories of the Great War haunted the poetry of the Second World War, and are prevalent in the work of John Hewitt and Patrick Maybin, a minor poet and member of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Drawing on a series of unpublished letters between these poets, I will explain how they employ the First World War as a lens through which to interpret the disorienting events they experienced. 12

In his pacifist pre-war poems, Maybin alludes to poets such as Rupert Brooke, John McCrae, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon in order to discredit the concepts of military heroism and glorious death which endured in Northern Ireland despite the widespread disillusionment which followed the First World War. These poems also demonstrate how the war was commemorated in a unionist culture which continued to perceive participation in the First World War as a sign of loyalty to the British Empire. After the declaration of the Second World War, both Hewitt and Maybin turned to the pastoral lyrics of Edward Thomas in their search for a model on which to base their poetic response to the conflict. Although Maybin spent the war in North Africa and Italy whilst Hewitt remained in Belfast, their wartime letters and poems share a commitment to the Ulster landscape. In their poetry, the region becomes a spiritual and cultural anchor during a time of upheaval.

‘Lady Butler: Soldiers, Sons and the Irish at War’ Catherine Wynne

Patrick Butler, a captain in the Royal Irish Regiment, recalls how his mother travelled from Ireland to Lyndhurst to see him before he was deployed to Belgium on 5 October 1914. ‘She had,’ he notes, 'ample opportunities for studying a war division coming into being’ (A Galloper at Ypres, 3) but ‘[l]ittle did those sunburnt men know, as they swung past, that the lady in black, who never seemed tired of watching them, was the artist whose pictures had brought home to thousands the pathos and glory of the soldier’s calling’ (20-21). Elizabeth Butler rose to fame as artist in 1874 when her sympathetic treatment of suffering soldiers in her Crimean War canvas, The Roll Call (1874), became the sensational painting of the year at the Royal Academy’s exhibition. Her marriage to William Butler, an Irish officer with Irish nationalist allegiances, brought her into close contact with Ireland’s social grievances. She painted two of her most powerful works, Listed for the Connaught Rangers (1878) and Evicted (1890), in Ireland. However, her paintings of the First World War, including those of Irish soldiers, largely eschew the disturbing realities of conflict, focusing instead on moments of patriotism or healing. This paper focuses on Butler’s paintings of Irish soldiers, reading them in conjunction with her earlier Irish works. It further examines the unpublished correspondence of Butler’s second son, Richard, a Catholic army chaplain who provided his mother with detailed accounts of his pastoral duties amidst the carnage of war. Richard’s letters, this paper contends, influence Butler’s religious, and deeply Catholic, representations of the sacrifice of war. The paper concludes by exploring, via Butler’s work, Patrick’s memoir and Richard’s letters, what an Irish, and particularly Catholic identity, might mean on the battlefields of Europe. 13

Participants/Cyfranwyr

Malcolm Ballin is an independent researcher, based in Cardiff University. He specialises in literary journalism in Wales, Ireland and Scotland. His book Irish Periodical Culture was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008 and his Welsh Periodicals in English: 1882-2012 was published by University of Wales Press in 2013, as part of their ‘Writers of Wales’ series.

John Borgonovo lectures in the School of History at University College Cork. He has published extensively on the Irish Revolution of 1916-1923 and Ireland’s First World War experience. His books include Spies, Informers, and the Anti-Sinn Féin Society: The Intelligence War in Cork City, 1920-1921, and The Battle for Cork, July – August 1922. His 2013 research monograph, The Dynamics of War and Revolution: Cork city 1916-1918, studied the war’s impact on Irish political opinion.

Mary-Ann Constantine is a Senior Fellow at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. She led the centre’s ‘Wales and the French Revolution’ project and co-edited with Paul Frame Travels in Revolutionary France & A Journey Across America by George Cadogan Morgan and Richard Price Morgan (UWP, 2012). Following a successful grant application to the AHRC for a major four-year project, her work on ‘Curious Trevellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour 1760-1815’ is due to begin in September 2014. Mary-Ann is also a creative writer and has published two collections of short stories: The Breathing (Planet, 2008) and All the Souls (Seren, 2013).

Michelle Deininger is a University Teacher with Cardiff University’s Centre for Lifelong Learning and Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She completed her AHRC-funded doctoral thesis in the field of Welsh writing in English, entitled ‘Short Fiction by Women from Wales: A Neglected Tradition’, at Cardiff University. She has published articles ranging from taboo in the fiction of Bernice Rubens to nineteenth- century newspaper depictions of rural Welsh life.

Aled Eirug is a part-time PhD student in History at Cardiff University, studying 'Opposition to the First World War in Wales'. He is a former of Head of News and Current Affairs at BBC Wales (1991-2006), and was constitutional adviser to the Presiding Officer of the National Assembly for Wales (2006-2011). He is a member of the S4C Authority and chair of the British Council in Wales.

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John S. Ellis is an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, Flint. His research interests include imperialism, militarism and national identity in Ireland and Wales.

Neil Evans is an honorary research fellow in the School of History and Archaeology at Cardiff University. He was joint-editor of Llafur: The Journal of Welsh People's History from 1994 to 2010 and has published on a wide variety of topics in modern Welsh and British history. Recent work includes: Writing a Small Nation's Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, 1850-1950 (ed. with Huw Pryce, Ashgate, 2013) and A Tolerant Nation? Revisiting Ethnic Diversity in a Devolved Wales (ed. with Charlotte Williams and Paul O'Leary, University of Wales Press, 2015). He is currently working on a survey article: 'War, Society and Wales, 1899-1914' as well as on the early stages of World War One.

Steve Hendon completed a PhD in 2010 at Cardiff University. His thesis compared the writings of Alun Lewis with those of Joseph Conrad in the context of postcolonial and gender theory. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at Cardiff University, and is currently exploring issues of masculinity in the texts of Welsh writers in English during the inter war years.

Professor Sir Deian Hopkin is President of the National Library of Wales and Expert Adviser to the First Minister on the First World War centenary. Born and educated in Wales, he spent 44 years in higher education in six universities including 24 years at Aberystwyth, retiring in 2009 as Vice Chancellor and Chief Executive of London South Bank University. Founding editor of Llafur, Journal of Welsh People's History, his main academic interests have been the history of the Labour movement, the press and the use of new technologies in history. He was substantially involved in the UK Skills agenda over the past 20 years, and currently serves on a number of educational and commercial boards including the Editorial Board of Times Higher Education.

Angela John has been an Honorary Professor at Aberystwyth University since 2004 and now holds that position in the College of Arts and Humanities at Swansea University. An historian with interests in gender and history and Welsh history, she has written and (co-)edited numerous volumes, collections and biographies including Our Mothers’ Land: Chapters in Welsh Women’s History, 1830-1939 (UWP, 1991; 2011), Lady Charlotte: a Biography of the Nineteenth Century (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989; Tempus, 2007), and most recently Turning the Tide: the Life of Lady Rhondda (Parthian 2013). She is a vice-president (and former Chair) of Llafur, the Welsh People’s History Society and a former member of the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales. She has also sat on the Advisory Council of the Institute of Historical Research and been a 15

member of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Council on National Records and Archives. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Learned Society of Wales, a member of Literature Wales and the Society of Authors, and a founder member of the editorial board of the international journal Gender & History.

Llŷr G. Lewis returned to Cardiff University in September 2014 to take up a post as Lecturer in Welsh, having spent a year lecturing at Swansea University. He recently completed his AHRC-funded doctoral thesis at Cardiff, where he examined aspects of celticity in the works of W. B. Yeats and his Welsh contemporary, T. Gwynn Jones. He is currently working on turning this research into a monograph.

Ers 2011 mae Gethin Matthews wedi bod yn Ddarlithydd y Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol yn Adran Hanes a Chlasuron Prifysgol Abertawe. Mae’n darlithio ar hanesyddiaeth, Cymru a’r Rhyfel Mawr, hanes yr Ymerodraeth Brydeinig a phynciau eraill sy’n ymwneud â hanes Cymru, i fyfyrwyr yn Abertawe, Bangor ac Aberystwyth. Testun ei ddoethuriaeth oedd hanes y Cymry yn y Rhuthr Aur i Golumbia Brydeinig, ond ers iddo redeg prosiect ‘Cymru’r Rhyfel Mawr Ar-lein’ ym Mhrifysgol Caerdydd yn 2010- 11, mae wedi canolbwyntio ei ymchwil ar effaith y Rhyfel Mawr ar ddiwylliant a chymdeithas ym Mhrydain. Ar hyn o bryd mae’n golygu cyfrol o’r enw Creithiau am ddylanwad y Rhyfel ar Gymru, a gyhoeddir gan Wasg Prifysgol Cymru yn 2015.

Since 2011, Gethin Matthews has been a Lecturer at Swansea University’s Department of History and Classics, funded by Y Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol. He lectures on historiography, Wales and the Great War, the history of the British Empire and other topics related to Welsh history, to students in Swansea, Bangor and Aberystwyth. His doctoral thesis examined the history of the Welsh and the Gold Rush in British Columbia, but since leading the ‘Wales and the Great War Online’ project at Cardiff University in 2010-11, his research has focused on the Great War’s effect on British culture and society. He is currently editing a volume entitled Creithiau [Scars] about the influence of the First World War on Wales, which will be published by the University of Wales Press in 2015.

Daniel Mulhall is the 14th Irish Ambassador to Britain. He studied at University College Cork and entered the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1978. As well as serving as First Secretary to the Embassy of Ireland in Vienna and as Ireland’s permanent representation to the European Union in Brussels, he has worked as Ireland’s Ambassador to Malaysia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Germany.

Nathan Munday is originally from Carmarthenshire. He received his undergraduate degree from Cardiff University where he read both History and English Literature. He is currently a ‘Pathway to PhD’ scholar studying for his Masters in English Literature at 16

Cardiff. Nathan is interested in comparative, Welsh and modernist studies with a particular focus on poetry.

Paul O’Leary is a specialist in the history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Wales, especially its social and cultural histories. Among other topics, he has written on Irish migration, the history of minority ethnic groups, urban history, and the history of sport. He is currently interested in the international dimensions to the history of Wales by exploring relationships with Ireland, analyzing the impact of imperialism on Welsh life, and by studying French-language interpretations of nineteenth century Wales. He was co-manager of the AHRC-funded Ireland-Wales International Research Network and is co-editor (post-1700) of the Welsh History Review. He is a member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College. He is also Director of Welsh Language and Culture in the Institute of Geography, History and Politics.

Tomos Owen is Lecturer in English Literature at Bangor University. He has previously worked at Cardiff University as a Postdoctoral Fellow and later as a lecturer. He has also previously taught at Swansea University, Cardiff Metropolitan University (UWIC) and the University of Glamorgan (now the University of South Wales). He has teaching and research interests in the following areas: the literatures of Britain and Ireland, with a specific focus on Welsh writing (in both Welsh and English); modernism; contemporary writing; the literature and culture of the city, with a particular focus on the London Welsh.

Terry Phillips is an Honorary Research Fellow at Liverpool Hope University. He retired as Dean of Arts and Humanities at Liverpool Hope in 2010 and is engaged in a research project on Irish Literature and the First World War. He has published a number of chapters and journal articles on First World War Writing and on Irish Literature.

John Poulter is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Analysis at Leeds Trinity University, Leeds, UK. His research interests centre around the construction of identity and in particular national identity. Most of the examples he examines are related to the island of Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular.

Recently his work has focused on the role that Remembrance of the First World War plays in such discursive construction. One outcome of this has been the chapter ‘ReMembering the Nation: Remembrance days and the Nation in Ireland’ in D. McCrone and G. McPherson (eds) National Days: Constructing and Mobilising National Identity, published in November 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan.

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Angharad Price is Senior Lecturer in Welsh at Bangor University. Her study of the early career of T.H. Parry-Williams, Ffarwel i Freiburg, was published by Gomer in 2013.

Austin Riede is an Assistant Professor in the department of English at the University of North Georgia. He has published articles on Ford Madox Ford, W.B. Yeats, and Vera Brittain. His primary area of research is British literature and history of the interwar period.

Michael Robinson graduated from the University of Newcastle in 2010, and completed a Master’s of Research degree in 2012 after being granted a fee-waiver studentship to undertake his research into Ireland’s involvement in the Great War. He was then granted generous funding from the University of Liverpool to continue at doctoral level at the Institute of Irish Studies where he has just begun his second year.

Amy Smith completed a Bachelor's degree in English Literature at Durham University in 2009, then a Master's degree in English Literature (1900-present) at the University of Oxford in 2010. She is now a third year PhD candidate at Durham University. Her research focuses on Northern Irish poetry and the Second World War. She is interested in the themes of revival and regionalism which were central to Northern Irish poetry during this period. Amy is funded by the Friedrich von Huegel Fellowship and is supervised by Professor Stephen Regan and Dr Helen O’Connell.

Mari Strachan was born in Harlech, on the north-west coast of Wales, and was brought up there with Welsh as her first language. After graduating from Cardiff University she qualified as a chartered librarian, and worked in a variety of libraries, from academic through public and prison to school libraries, with occasional forays into other occupations. In 2007 she acquired an MA (with distinction) in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University. As well as writing and reading, Mari’s interests include the past and its people, and the future, in the form of sustainable living. She and her husband now live on a tiny smallholding in Ceredigion.

Catherine Wynne is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. She is currently completing the first biography of the war artist and traveller, Elizabeth Butler (Lady Butler: Painting, Travel and War) for Four Courts Press. She has published on Butler in Prose Studies and Journal of European Studies and an article is forthcoming on Butler's family and Dickens in Notes and Queries. She is author of Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Palgrave, 2013) and The Colonial Conan Doyle (Greenwood, 2002), and is editor of two volumes of Stoker's theatrical writings, Bram Stoker and the Stage (Pickering, 2012).