FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS & THE IRISH REVOLUTION 1918- 1923 By MAURICE WALSH GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE A Thesis submitted to the University of London In fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy ob 1 ...... ..-'" ABSTRACT The Irish revolution of 1918-1923 not only led to the establishment of an independent Irish state; it is also recalled for the notoriety of the Black and Tans, the gendarmerie of war veterans recruited by the British government to fight a war of reprisals against the IRA. Historians have held that public perceptions of the war in Ireland were crucial to its outcome. In particular they cite critical press coverage as instrumental in turning the British public against the government's policy in Ireland. But there has been no study which thoroughly examines the work of journalists and writers who went to Ireland at this time. This thesis uses the published work of journalists and writers, evidence from archives in Britain, Ireland and the United States, journalists' memoirs and contemporary press criticism to explain the role journalists played in the conflict. It shows how British and American newspaper correspondents were able to report from Ireland with far greater freedom than they enjoyed during the First World War. Aided by their sympathy for the Irish cause and splits among the political elite in London, British correspondents set out to restore their reputation as crusading truth tellers by making visible practices of colonial warfare that would usually have remained hidden. American correspondents were enlisted by British officials as mediators. The war occurred in an age when the press and public opinion were thought to have a crucial influence on politics. Both the British government and the Irish revolutionaries tried to define the news. While examining the professional assumptions and rituals of the correspondents, the thesis examines the impact of wider political ideas on journalism. And it looks at how famous literary journalists used Ireland as a site for debates about their own societies. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 4 Chapter 1: The Impact of War 36 Chapter 2: Correspondents versus Black and Tans 69 Chapter 3: The Crusading Press Restored 107 Chapter 4: The Propaganda War 140 Chapter 5: American Correspondents in Ireland 171 Chapter 6: Literary Travellers: G.K. Chesterton, Wilfred Ewart and V.S. Pritchett as reporters 210 Conclusion 245 Bibliography 268 3 INTRODUCTION The Anglo-Irish war of 1919-1921 finally ruptured the constitution of the United Kingdom, drawing a line under one hundred and twenty years of turbulent history since the Act of Union. In the Republic of Ireland it is referred to as the War of Independence, celebrated as the heroic struggle which forged a new sovereign state. In Britain it is retrospectively regarded as the first loosened brick that presaged the crumbling of the whole edifice of Imperial rule, vindicating Lord Salisbury's prediction in 1883 that if Irish separatism succeeded the Empire would disintegrate step by step.l Corelli Barnett has described the treaty which ended the war and established the Irish Free State as "of the utmost significance for the future of British power,,2 and in her history of the Empire Jan Morris writes that "it was in Ireland that the prototype of imperial revolution was launched, the precursor of all the coups, rebellions and civil wars which were to harass the British empire from now until the end.,,3 The new state was not established by defeating the British forces on the battlefield; the IRA guerrillas and the panoply of civic organisations allied to them were merely able to endure long enough to force the British government to negotiate a new settlement. It was a moral victory, not a military triumph. In the view of the Irish historian Michael Laffan, 1 H.V. Brasted: 'Irish Nationalism and the British Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century' in Oliver MacDonagh, W.F. MandIe and Pauric Travers (eds): Irish Culture and Nationalism 1750-1950 (Macmillan, London, 1983) p 84 2 Corelli Barnett: The Collapse of British Power (Eyre Methuen, London, 1972) p 184 3 Jan Morris: Farewell the Trumpets (Faber, London, 1978) p 219 4 "Lloyd George's government changed its policy more in response to international hostility and to the shame and revulsion felt by British public opinion, than as a consequence of military weakness or defeat.,,4 Corelli Barnett makes the same point from a different angle: "[The] British decided the question of Ireland not in the light of whether or not, on drawing a balance of political and strategic factors, Ireland was worth holding, but out of humanitarian qualms as yet rare in a barbarous world. [This] was a demonstration that the British ruling classes and British public opinion after the Great War were ill-suited to the preservation of their imperial inheritance."s The common theme of both these explanations is the power of public opinion to determine the strategic decisions of the British government. What 'public opinion' means at any given moment is often an elusive concept; pursuing it and nailing it down in this or any specific historical context would be material for an entire thesis by itself. What is certain is that any consideration of public opinion in Ireland, Britain or the rest of the world during the Irish revolution would have to deal with news, analysis and opinion that appeared in the daily press, political journals and contemporary books of commentary. This thesis will examine a range of this material with a heavy and consistent emphasis on the accounts and views of those who actually visited Ireland, whether as reporters tied to daily deadlines, essayists enjoying more literary licence and leisure or novelists bending their talents to the capture of contemporary history. All of this work is journalism of one form or 4 Michael Laffan: The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Fein Party 1916-1923 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) p 295 5 Barnett op. cit. p 185 5 another, although as will become clear, the specific form employed has as much significance for how we should read these observations as the content. This journalism is regularly acknowledged by historians of the period as having had an influence on the outcome of the war. In the first comprehensive nationalist account of the War of Independence (published in 1937 and endorsed by Eamon De Valera) Dorothy McArdle writes of how "great English newspapers ... were tirelessly exposing the brutal terrorist regime" in Ireland.6 But this was a reference to April 1921, within a few months of the truce and after several of the worst incidents of the war. In fact, she gives credit for the original exposure of British tactics in Ireland to committees of activists both Irish and English, implying that the press correspondents joined a bandwagon near the end of its journey.7 Sometimes she refers to British journalists collectively as "the English Press"; other times they are labelled 'sympathetic' or representatives of 'conservative opinion.'s In the latest history of the war Michael Hopkinson goes much further than McArdle in giving the journalists credit for undermining the British campaign; in his estimate journalists from the Fleet Street papers did more for the cause of the Irish rebels than their own formidable publicity effort. "For all the volume of propaganda, the greatest effect was almost certainly achieved by visiting Britishjournalists ... The eyewitness reports by muckraking correspondents were much more readable, 6 Dorothy McArdle: The Irish Republic (Corgi edition, London, 1968) p 407 7 Ibid P 330 8 Passim but see for example p 278 and p 302 6 colourful and entertaining than the propaganda sheets and came with dramatic photographs of burning buildings and the suffering and terrified populace ... While it was important that a free press exposed British atrocities to world attention, events actually spoke fOF themselves. It is doubtful that Britain could have hidden the harsh truth from the rest of the world.,,9 Given how much attention these historians devote to the influence of the press, it's surprising how little attention they pay to journalistic practice. Hopkinson's conclusions raise more questions than they answer: Why should the writings of British journalists produce such an "effect"? What are "muckraking correspondents"? Was the fact that they worked for a free press the only reason they exposed British authorities? And if "events actually spoke for themselves" why did it need a special breed of correspondent ('muckraking') to communicate what was going on in Ireland? There is also a contrary view to McArdle and Hopkinson, an assumption that far from being relentlessly critical of coercion in Ireland the British press had connived to demonise the IRA through constant repetition of the worst assaults carried out by the Volunteers. In a book on the origins of the troubles in Northern Ireland during the last three decades of the twentieth century, Richard Bourke argues that during the Irish revolution "the British press had teemed with reports of unconscionable extremities ... perpetrated by the Republican forces" and that this contributed to "an air of profound suspicion" during the peace negotiations which began in London in the autumn of 1921. 10 This 9 Michael Hopkinson: The Irish War of Independence (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 2002) p 45 10 Richard Bourke: Peace in Ireland: The War ofIdeas (Pimlico, London, 2003) p 121 7 assertion led to him being accused of believing "that IRA atrocities existed primarily in the pages of the British press"ll but the real question is which version of history is right? Granted, for all of these authors the work of journalists during the Irish revolution was but one part of a much bigger mosaic.