Michael Collins and the Women Who Spied For Ireland
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‘What is this letter?’ Barton whispered to Collins.
‘I don’t know what the hell it is,’ Collins growled.
‘Do you mean to tell me, Mr Collins, that you never learnt of this document from Mr Griffith?’ A perplexed Collins looked on as the memorandum outlining the Boundary Commission proposal was passed to Barton and himself. Lloyd George said he had fulfilled his part of the bargain. ‘Now it is for you to show that Irishmen know how to keep faith.’19
‘I said I would not let you down on that, and I won’t,’ Griffith declared.20
Other items were agreed, including the oath which Collins had introduced in the morning – an oath the bones of which the IRB had agreed to when last he met them. Finally Arthur Griffith said he would sign the agreement, but added that it would be unfair to expect his colleagues to do so prior to Craig’s response.
‘Do I understand, Mr Griffith, that though everyone else refuses, you will nevertheless agree to sign?’ asked Lloyd George.
‘Yes, that is so, Mr Prime Minister.’21
Lloyd George replied: ‘Every delegate must sign the document and undertake to recommend it, or there can be no agreement ...’ He then produced two envelopes. ‘I have to communicate with Sir James Craig tonight. Here are the alternative letters which I have prepared ... If I send this letter it is war, and war within three days. Which letter am I to send? Whichever letter you choose travels by special train to Holyhead, and by destroyer to Belfast. The train is waiting with steam up at Euston ... we must have your answer by ten tonight. You can have until then, but no longer to decide whether you will give peace or war to your country.’22
As the Irish delegation prepared to leave, Churchill noted that ‘Michael Collins rose looking as though he was going to shoot someone, preferably himself. In all my life I have never seen so much pain and suffering in restraint’.
Back in Hans Place, Collins, Childers and the other four delegates fought over whether they would sign for ‘Ireland being a dominion and certain peace versus a Republic in some form and apparently certain war’.
They were a divided, overtired, overstrained group of men, although all ready to do what was best for Ireland. Collins had some time previously agreed with Griffith that they were in it together so he was not now likely to desert his colleague; he had indicated as much to Barton as they returned from Downing Street. They talked, argued, shouted, stopped, shouted again and again.
Finally Collins, Griffith and Duggan put on their hats and coats and prepared to go, but Barton and Duffy held them back. Again the argument raged. Mick’s mind was made up. He had pointed out to the Irish delegation the difficulty the IRA would have in achieving any success should the war be reactivated. As it stood, the physical force element lacked arms and had lost the coordination and harmony that had taken so many years to achieve. Furthermore it would not have the backing of his own intelligence department as this was now without a cover.
‘Do you want to send them out to be slaughtered?’ he asked.
This stung Duggan. ‘Barton,’ said Duggan, ‘you will be hanged from a lamp post in Dublin if your refusal to sign causes a new war in Ireland.’ He then broke down as he recalled colleagues who had been killed.23
Collins headed for Cadogan Gardens. He wanted to let the others tease it out. Later he returned to Hans Place. After a long wait the men came down the stairs. ‘All were silent, taut and serious as if walking in a funeral procession.’24
Barton had caved in, and Duffy, not prepared for the responsibility of war, consented.
Through a thick fog the men with heavy hearts headed back to Downing Street. There they tried to squeeze some more concessions. After much discussion a few changes were agreed. It was half past two in the morning of 6 December when they consented and signed the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty.
Collins rose. ‘I may have signed my political death-warrant tonight,’ said Birkenhead, turning to Collins.
‘I may have signed my actual death-warrant,’ was Collins’ prophetic utterance.25
Notes
1 Richard Mulcahy, Studies LXVII No. 267 (Autumn 1978), p. 190.
2 Michael to Kitty (Wicklow Hotel), 25/11/1921.
3 Michael to Kitty, 28/11/1921.
4 Ibid., 30/11/1921.
5 Collins to O’Kane, 29/11/1921.
6 Michael to Kitty, 1/12/1921.
7 Kitty to Michael, 30/11/1921.
8 Ibid., 1/12/1921.
9 Childers’ Diary, Trinity College Dublin Archives.
10 Dáil, Private Sessions, p. 104.
11 Frank O’Connor, op. cit., p. 168.
12 Michael to Kitty, 4/12/1921.
13 Tom Jones, Whitehall Diary, pp. 178–180.
14 Sir John Lavery, op. cit., p. 214.
15 Collins to O’Kane, 30/11/21.
16 For a fuller account of the Treaty Negotiations, see Thomas Pakenham, Peace by Ordeal, also T. Ryle Dwyer, Michael Collins and the Treaty.
17 Collins to O’Kane, n. d.
18 Robert Barton, Report on sub-conference, 5/12/1921 and 6/ 12/1921.
19 Scott, Political Diaries, p. 412.
20 Thomas Pakenham, op. cit., p. 237.
21 Sir Austen Chamberlain, Down the Years, p. 236.
22 Ibid.
23 Childers’ Diary, TCD.
24 Kathleen Napoli MacKenna to Leon Ó Broin, q. Ó Broin, Michael Collins, p. 111.
25 Frederick Birkenhead, The Life of F. E. Smith, p. 163.
Lady Lavery Spies on British Cabinet
Outside Number 10 Downing Street journalists who had waited in the darkness and in the thick fog saw the delegates emerge. One approached Michael Collins as he swept past. ‘Have you anything to say?’ he asked.
‘Not a word!’ growled Collins. He looked tired and upset. Though it was approaching 3 o’clock he headed for Cromwell Place. He wanted to let the Laverys know the distress he felt.
Hazel Lavery saw the torment of the previous few days on his face as she opened the door. He looked ‘white and haggard’.1In her home he talked very little, Sir John noted. He had acted correctly, he felt; he had weighed it up but now he pondered the consequences.
He knew that back in Ireland there would be those who would welcome the relief, but he knew also that the Treaty fell short of the Republic which he and his comrades had fought so hard for and that this could bring dissent. The confusion which had permeated the recent Dublin cabinet meeting and the ire of Cathal Brugha haunted him.
Hazel Lavery drove him back to Cadogan Gardens. Though tired, he sat and poured his turmoil out on paper to his friend, John O’Kane:
Think – what have I got for Ireland? Something which she has wanted these past seven hundred years. Will anyone be satisfied at the bargain? Will anyone? I tell you this – early this morning I signed my death warrant. I thought at the time how odd, how ridiculous – a bullet might just as well have done the job five years ago ... These signatures are the first real step for Ireland. If people will only remember that, the first real step.
It was past 5 pm when he flopped on the bed. Two hours later he got out for early Mass. ‘Didn’t forget your candle’ – ‘Need I say it!’ he told Kitty, picking up the letter he had begun the previous morning – ‘what a day I had afterwards!’ She was on his mind at this hour. He responded to her concern about their future together.’ ... ‘Remember that if you ever express doubts I always have that in the back of my mind or indeed very much in the front of my mind. And that’s that. When you know I think of it in this way don’t you feel it gets rid of any necessity to answer your questions in detail?’ Her ‘lifelong happiness’ was important to him, just as his was to her, he argued. But at this remove, he wrote, sadly, ‘... my plans in regard to home are as yet uncertain.’
‘Dearest Kit’, he continued. ‘I don’t know how things will go now but with God’s help we have brought peace to this land of ours – a peace which will end this old strife of ours for ever.’2
When Tom Culle
n met Collins and Griffith at the North Wall, Dublin, on 8 December, Mick seized him by the shoulder, ‘Tom, what are our own fellows saying?’
‘They’re saying what is good enough for Mick, is good enough for me!’ he answered. Soon enough Mick would know the truth!
At the Dublin cabinet meeting on 8 December, it became clear that Dev’s views had become hardened. Collins was dismayed at ‘the open hostility’ the delegates faced in the cabinet drawing-room of the Mansion House. De Valera sat gaunt and depressed, Stack was in ‘a blazing mood’ and Brugha was ‘the personification of venom’.
Collins and Griffith had thought that de Valera would support their views, as the Treaty went some way towards satisfying them. They had expected opposition from Brugha and Stack, but not the torrents of accusations which these men hurled at them during the meeting which recessed three times.
De Valera, Brugha and Stack were not prepared to recommend the Articles of Agreement to the Dáil. Finally, after hours of acrimonious dispute, the cabinet endorsed the agreement. A narrow margin separated them – Collins, Griffith, Cosgrave and a reluctant Barton voted in favour, with de Valera, Brugha and Stack against.
Collins left the meeting in extreme distress. He made for Batt O’Connor’s, knocked on the door, but remained on the doorstep when Batt opened it. There was a ‘strange expression’ on his face. ‘Come in. What are you waiting for?’ asked Batt.
While he still stood there, silent, Batt said, ‘Ah, Mick! This is a day I never thought I would live to see’.
‘I thought perhaps you would have no welcome for me, Batt,’ said Mick.
Agitated he strode up and down the room. ‘I will leave Dublin at once,’ he said, in extreme bitterness and distress. ‘I will go down to Cork. If the fighting is going to be resumed, I will fight in the open, beside my own people down there. I am not going to be chivvied and hunted through Dublin as I have been for the last two years.’
‘If we go back to fight, how long could we stick it?’ asked Batt.
‘A fortnight and it would be over.’
It took some time for Batt to calm him down but eventually he sat down.
The two men talked, had tea and talked and talked until 3 o’clock. Before they parted Mick had assured Batt that he would not leave Dublin. He would see that the Treaty was fully discussed in the Dáil, and put clearly before the people.
‘I will accept their verdict,’ he said as they parted.3
Next morning a letter from de Valera appeared in the public press saying he could not ‘recommend the acceptance of this Treaty, either to Dáil Éireann or the country. In this attitude I am supported by the Ministers of Home Affairs and Defence ... ’ (Brugha and Stack)4
Kathleen O’Connell, de Valera’s secretary, had written in her diary on the morning of 8 December: ‘P [President] in a awful state. What a fiasco.’5
The ‘fiasco’ took on monstrous proportions as the days passed. To the separatists it became ‘a sellout’ but to others anxious to get on with daily life, the Treaty was seen as a victory. Soon it was regarded not as the Treaty versus Document Number 2 (de Valera’s alternative) but as Michael Collins against de Valera with his two stalwarts, Brugha and Stack.
Mick knew he would face many a friend of old who might no longer be a friend. ‘My own brother will probably stand against me in Cork,’ he said on that first tortured day. He had not been in touch with Johnny since Johnny’s recent release from Spike Island. However, when Johnny came by train to Dublin to meet him, his handshake and smile told all. ‘Next time you’re shaving, don’t overlook that thing,’ he said, referring to Mick’s moustache. Next morning it was gone.
Collins needed to know what was going on across the water. He was well aware of Hazel Lavery’s willingness to convey information. From his years at intelligence gathering he knew what to tell her and what to leave out. She, on the other hand ‘was besotted by him and he knew it, he knew he could feed her with the right information and it would get to where he wanted that information to go,’ according to Emmet Dalton.6
She wrote a letter to Michael which was apparently misdirected and was eventually returned. In a follow-up she wrote that there were so many things more important to him at present than the ‘Lost letter of a Lady’ and suggested that that would ‘make a good title for a romantic novel?’:
The letter is lost I fear and I picture the poor thing wandering desolately about like a pigeon in a storm looking for its owner Mr Michael Collins! and finally bruised and broken, pathetically rejected by man and Post Office, forced to struggle back to Hazel – admittedly a failure, and all its burden of news about perfectly unimportant personal matters having been read by indifferent eyes, alas!7
Hazel now became the conduit for information from the House of Commons and inside information on the British government. On 9 December she had gone to hear Winston Churchill. His speech ‘was very long but excellent,’ she wrote, ‘and generally well received, excepting of course by the Tories who still rage, albeit more and more powerlessly’.
She wrote:
Today I lunch with Lady Fitzalan [wife of Unionist Chief Whip, Catholic, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland] and on Tuesday with the Chamberlains’ [Austen Chamberlain, leader of the Conservative Party and House of Commons, and member of British Treaty negotiating team].8
This had to be interesting news for Collins. On 4 November Collins in a letter to O’Kane had written: ‘Don’t know why exactly but I don’t like Chamberlain ...’9
Lady Lavery wrote:
I have not seen L. [the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, a leading Northern Unionist politician] – the other Lord we discussed the other day – as after dinner that night I went home I was so very tired, but I had a talk with Philip [Snowden, Socialist MP] about the matter. He is a clever creature, with imagination and warm towards you (you must get him that dog) also. Thanks to his oriental blood he delights in a secret and he undoubtedly has a certain influence over his illustrious Master’ [J. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour leader].
It is obvious that Collins was using Hazel to get information. This letter contained a great deal of substance for Collins. ‘That dog’ was that code, not a canine he would bring from Ireland. (A code, a key or a cypher was often referred to as a ‘dog’). ‘I shall not expect an answer,’ she wrote, ‘unless you tell a secretary to say simply that you have received this letter so that I shall know that it has not gone a-missing.’ She adds, ‘I really mean this sure. Irish sure. I understand you know. Bless you Michael always. Yours, H’. There appears to be more to this cryptic remark than a surface reading; the Irish word for sure is cinnte.
Hazel added a PS. She had found ‘a portion of a wonderful book in an old shop’. She would try to get ‘an intact copy ... all the facts about the French Revolution’ and would send it to him.10
A few days later she wrote again to Michael Collins. She had come from the House of Lords where the lord chancellor [the Earl of Birkenhead, Conservative and Treaty negotiator] had been speaking. He had ‘replied with his usual devastating urbanity to the bitter but rather futile sarcasm of Carson,’ she wrote [Sir Edward Carson, Unionist leader, opponent of Home Rule]. ‘All the same the division was a very very close thing for the Gov: only a majority of one!’
Concern by the British cabinet that members of the crown forces were being shot in Ireland was expressed by Winston Churchill who later asked Lady Lavery to ‘please write to you [Michael Collins] and say how difficult the incident has made matters here. The old Die Hards have taken a vigorous new lease of life on it. Of course he knows you are doing everything you possibly can, and I hate to write to you and add a further weight of anxiety to your many cares. Please please forgive me’.11
Collins had previously asked Hazel to arrange a meeting with the northern Unionist, Lord Londonderry, whom he felt would be in a position to sway Carson towards better north-south relations in Ireland.
She wrote:
In the matter of Lord Londonderry I find rather dissatisfa
ction. Winston saw him at luncheon and had a long talk but I imagine from what I have been able to gather not an altogether successful one. Lord L. has intimated that ‘he would like to see me on the subject’ and I don’t know exactly what that may mean. Almost anything I should think.12
It would be March before Michael Collins and Lord Londonderry would have a face-to-face meeting. (It has been claimed that Hazel later had a romantic liaison with Lord Londonderry).13
Hazel would often have her letters to Michael Collins sent via Sir Edward Marsh, one of Churchill’s secretaries. Sam Maguire, Ned Broy and Moya Llewelyn Davies were emissaries of letters, dispatches and snippets of information from Hazel to Collins and vice versa.14
Collins’ letters, according to Shane Leslie’s account were ‘full of half-educated half-romantic stuff but ending up with vital messages to the English Cabinet’.15
The ‘vital messages’ were the essential part, the rest a ploy. The ‘vital messages’ Hazel would later destroy, the romantic passages she would keep. An undated fragment believed to be in Collins’ handwriting with certain letters underlined reads:
Hazel, My Dear Dear Hazel,I too wish it was ‘tomorrow’ –With all my love, Yours M.
The ‘Yours’ is written in a different pen.16
‘Mick would sometimes lay it on,’ according to Emmet Dalton, especially if letters were posted. ‘In fact, as she was on first name terms with cabinet ministers and entertained all – what we would call – “the useful people”. Mick used the situation ... We have to remember that intelligence gathering was part of his make-up, important in his work, but he would never put himself in a situation where he could be blackmailed either by members of his own cabinet, his friends or enemies here [in Ireland] or by the British ... Mick was always yards ahead in his planning ... He liked Hazel, everybody did, you couldn’t but! That was all there was to it! As I told you she was different, upper-class, very dramatic. Mick told me she liked to feel accepted by the Irish, and was glad to be useful.’17