Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.

by Gerry Docherty

  The Curragh ‘incident’ was carefully staged proof that ‘the arm raised against Ulster’ could be paralysed. As usual, Milner’s will prevailed. There was ‘unparalleled fury’ in Parliament that, according to Winston Churchill, ‘shook the state to its foundations’.51 In an ugly Westminster puppet-show controlled by the Secret Elite, their agents railed against one another and kept Ulster in the headlines. Between mid March and the end of July 1914, more than 700 parliamentary questions were raised over this action, blocking serious debate and causing such a backlog that Asquith was eventually forced to refuse to accept any more. But all eyes stayed fixed on Ulster.

  And what of Churchill and Lloyd George, who had stirred alarm in provocative speeches at the height of the ‘crisis’? Churchill’s declaration at Bradford that ‘there are worse things than bloodshed’ was widely reported, and Lloyd George deliberately raised the hackles of Protestant Ulster in a tirade at Huddersfield on 21 March: ‘Orangemen professed to be shocked that force should be used for setting up a great free self-governing Parliament in Ireland, but when did Ulster acquire detestation of coercion?’52 Together, Churchill and Lloyd George created an atmosphere in which it was widely believed that the Liberal government was on the point of bullying Ulster into accepting Home Rule.53 One half of the Secret Elite’s political team was inciting bitterness and anger in Ulster while the other half was declaring its complete support and loyalty. The Curragh incident was brushed aside, excused as a ‘misunderstanding’, but the tensions in Ireland continued to rise towards boiling point.

  Throughout the weeks of outrage and posturing, a more dangerous conspiracy unfolded, a conspiracy that could never have been successful without the knowledge and permission of several governments across Europe. Events were so coincidental that it is possible to wonder if the one did not deliberately conceal the other. In a story more cliff-hanging than any John Buchan adventure, the legend was that Major Fred Crawford, director of ordnance of the UVF,54 procured twenty-four thousand modern rifles and over three million rounds of ammunition55 under the noses of the German, Norwegian, Danish and British authorities, and landed them in a ‘brilliant’ operation the like of which Ulster had never seen.

  The narrative of the gun-running episode was truly amazing. Crawford, another officer who had served and gained promotion under Lord Roberts’ command in South Africa, spoke no German but ‘found’ an armaments supplier in Hamburg willing to sell him a vast quantity of rifles, bayonets and bullets. He was commissioned to buy these on behalf of the UVF. Four days before the Curragh ‘incident’, the UVF secured the services of a Norwegian collier, the SS Fanny. That accomplished, Crawford met with two members of the Secret Elite, Walter Long and Bonar Law, in London on 27 March, and delivered a secret letter from Sir Edward Carson. Long had access to the funds raised by Milner and the Secret Elite, and arranged for him to take ownership ‘of a very large cheque’.56 They shook his hand and wished him ‘God speed and a successful issue’.57 Crawford’s evidence tied Bonar Law and Walter Long to the gun-running plot. The leader of His Majesty’s opposition was directly involved in providing guns and ammunition for use against His Majesty’s army in Ulster. Was that not treason? Had not others been summarily executed in past times for raising arms against the Crown? Indeed, yet this was part of the grand conspiracy that they dared not call treason. This time it was called ‘Loyalty’. Crawford needed cash to buy ships at short notice and deal with unforeseen contingencies, of which there were several. The Secret Elite provided.

  Once he had purchased the rifles in Germany, Crawford steered them through the Kiel Canal in a barge to rendezvous with the SS Fanny in the Baltic. Does anyone imagine that such a cargo could have passed unnoticed through the Kiel Canal in March 1914? During the transfer of weapons from the barge, Danish customs officers came on board and confiscated their papers, believing that their destination was Iceland, where, coincidentally, home-rulers sought independence from Denmark. Yet they managed to slip away into the night, thanks, according to Crawford, to the intervention of Psalm 90.58 Reports of their arrest were printed in the daily papers, with The Times correctly stating that the destination of the guns was Belfast, not Iceland.59 The UVF assumed that the plot had been a disastrous failure. Not so. Miraculously, Psalm 90 prevailed and the Fanny negotiated the English Channel, avoided any intervention from the Royal Navy and sailed round the Welsh coast to Tenby. Crawford was authorised to buy a second collier, the Clyde Valley, in Glasgow, to which the arms were transferred. After a further name change, the collier headed for Belfast Lough as the Mountjoy II.

  Throughout the night of 24–25 April 1914, the UVF unloaded 216 tons of weapons and ammunition at Larne, Bangor and Donaghadee. At Larne, telephone lines were cut, roads blocked and railway lines closed. The town was locked down and, just to make sure that the guns were landed safely, a decoy ship sailed into Belfast Lough so that the Customs and Excise men had an excuse for their inaction in Larne. The weapons were dispersed around Ulster under the command of UVF assistant quartermaster General Wilfrid Spender.60 Seen as a rising star in the British Army, Spender had been through the staff college at Camberley, assisted Sir Henry Wilson at the War Office, and served on the Committee of Imperial Defence. With no ties whatsoever to Ulster, he inexplicably gave up his glittering military career in 1913 to become a renegade with the UVF.

  Were it not an act of treason in itself, the landing of the UVF guns would have warranted a special award for exemplary planning. The police were physically blocked from the docks and Customs officers boldly refused permission to examine the cargo. It was a tremendous coup for the Ulster Volunteers. Carson in London received a coded one-word telegram: ‘Lion’, which signalled that Ulster was now armed. Lord Roberts read about the success in special editions of the morning newspapers and rushed round to congratulate Carson in person.61 More pertinently, the whole process was completed under the knowing eyes of the authorities in Germany, Denmark, Dublin and London. Reduced to a single headline, Germany had armed Ulster.

  Every action causes a reaction, and the sight of an armed Ulster precipitated a military response from the south. A new, young generation of Irish nationalists regarded the Irish parliamentary party of John Redmond with ill-disguised contempt. Redmond was an Empire loyalist who seemed to have more in common with Sir Edward Carson than he did with the mass of Irishmen he presumed to represent. Sinn Fein, the Republican nationalist movement formed in 1905 to seek an end to British rule in Ireland, accused him and his party of being subservient to English political party considerations and actively detrimental to the best interests of Ireland.62 He maintained great faith in the British Empire and steadfastly refused to recognise its capacity for brutality.63 Happy to play the parliamentary game, constrain radicalism and acknowledge the king emperor, Redmond danced to a Secret Elite air.

  In November 1913, totally disenchanted with Redmond, a disparate group of nationalists set up the Irish Volunteer movement of some 170,000 men.64 But, significantly, they lacked weapons, military experience and united leadership. Two opposing forces are needed for a civil war, and in that aspect the Irish Volunteers were useful to the Secret Elite, but they had to move quickly to take control of the movement. In a late, desperate move, John Redmond forced its provisional committee to accept his nomination of 25 new members.65 Civil War could hardly break out if only one side had weapons, so the Secret Elite moved to arm the nationalist volunteers.

  Ponder, please, the main protagonist, the man who was chosen by them to provide guns for the south: Erskine Childers. Author of The Riddle of the Sands and arch advocate of Britain’s so-called ‘military unpreparedness’ turned into a gun-runner? The man whose 1903 book concluded that Germany was ‘pre-eminently fitted to undertake an invasion of Great Britain’ and that Britain was ill prepared to prevent it66 emerged in 1914 as an enemy of the state. How likely was that?

  The unqualified success of his spy thriller brought the Cambridge-educated Childers into contact with the like-mi
nded defender of the Empire Lord Roberts. The novel provided Roberts and his National Service League with a valuable tool to excite fear and anti-German sentiment. Childers insisted his story was true, the names of the characters having merely been altered, and advocated that every man in Britain should be trained for service in either the army or navy. The book ran to three print runs in 1903, two in 1904 and 1905, and was reprinted again in 1907, 1908, 1910 and 1911.67 Winston Churchill praised The Riddle of the Sands, admitting that it influenced the Admiralty’s decision to establish three completely new naval bases to deal with the so-called German naval threat. Erskine Childers was a champion of the British Establishment. In his earlier book, In the Ranks of the C.I.V., about his active service in the Boer War with the City Imperial Volunteers, Childers sang the praises of Lord Roberts and extolled his bravery and his popularity among the rank-and-file soldiers.68 Later, in writing the preface for Childers’ book War and the Arme Blanche, Roberts reciprocated the compliment:

  … no one has dealt so exhaustively and so logically with this aspect of cavalry in war as Mr Childers. He has gone thoroughly into the achievements of our cavalry in South Africa … In conclusion I would ask you, my brother officers, in whatever part of the Empire you are serving, and whatever branch, to read this book.69

  It was a ringing endorsement from Britain’s ‘greatest living soldier’.

  Childers’ background was elitist and refined. He went to a private boarding school with Lionel Curtis and Basil Williams of Milner’s famed Kindergarten. Williams, a member of the Secret Elite,70 was his lifelong friend, as was Churchill’s personal assistant and close friend Eddie Marsh. Childers’ cousin and mentor, Hugh Childers, had, in recent years, been home secretary and chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative government. Thomas Erskine, the lord chancellor, was his ancestor. Childers was held in such high esteem by the Secret Elite that he was invited to write volume three of the Times History of the South African War in conjunction with Basil Williams and Leo Amery. He visited America in 1903 and wrote ‘there were no limits to the possibilities of an alliance of the English-speaking races’.71 It was the vocabulary of the Pilgrims. Childers was steeped in the traditions of upper-middle-class England, loyalty to the king and defence of the Empire. Although not named by Carroll Quigley as a member of the Secret Elite, he was exceedingly close to many at its heart. For Childers, the growth, development and expansion of the British Empire represented the best possible solution for all the economic and social problems facing the nation. Childers abhorred egalitarianism,72 and his philosophy was close to that of Milner and the Round Table. His friendships, background, philosophy and writings marked him out as a man who was highly regarded by the Secret Elite.

  Childers believed that Ireland’s peace and prosperity was intrinsically linked to, and best assured by, remaining part of the United Kingdom. Yet according to his biographer, Andrew Boyle, this staunch British patriot became involved in gun-running for Republican rebels because, ‘suddenly, as if dazzled by a blinding vision, the views of Childers changed almost overnight’.73 Astonishing.

  He disappeared to Ireland in the spring of 1911 to hold discussions with leading industrialists, government officials, Unionists and Home-Rulers. Subsequently, Childers wrote a treatise in favour of a Home-Rule structure in Ireland, more Liberal, more understanding of the Catholic position and openly critical of Empire loyalists with whom he suddenly appeared to be completely at odds. Taken at face value, his Framework of Home Rule demonstrated his conversion from an anti-German, British Empire loyalist, to a rebel Empire-breaker, yet he retained his important associations with individuals close to the Secret Elite. It was as if he had rebranded his philosophy to appeal to a new audience. Crucially, it proved to be a passport into the trust of the Irish Volunteers.

  Early in May 1914, Childers and a group of friends met at the plush Mayfair home of Alice Stopford Green, a house that had echoed with the conversation of many of the most distinguished political and literary figures of the age, including Winston Churchill, James Bryce and Lord Morley.74 Alice, the widow of an Oxford University history professor, was in close contact with influential men within the British Establishment and Secret Elite. Others at the meeting included Sir Roger Casement, Captain George Fitzhardinge Berkeley, Lord Ashbourne, Sir Alexander Lawrence, Mary Spring Rice and Conor O’Brien. Like Stopford Green and Childers, they all belonged to a privileged class. They conspired to raise £1,523 (a not inconsiderable sum worth over £120,000 today) to buy weapons for the Irish Volunteers.75 While generous, it paled in comparison to the £100,000 raised effortlessly by Milner for the UVF in the north.

  Born into a prosperous Irish Protestant family, Alice Stopford Green was the daughter of the rector of Kells and granddaughter of the Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath. Professor Quigley identified her nephew, Robert J. Stopford, as a member of the Secret Elite.76 She was a close friend of Viscount Bryce, former British ambassador at Washington and a president of the Pilgrims Society. Dublin-born Sir Roger Casement was at that time a distinguished British Foreign Office diplomat,77 though his later involvement in Irish politics cost him his life. Lord Ashbourne came from a line of wealthy Protestant, Anglo-Irish landed gentry. Mary Spring Rice was the daughter of Lord Monteagle. Her great-grandfather had been chancellor of the Exchequer and secretary of state for war. She was the niece of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the British ambassador to the United States and a Pilgrim. Conor O’Brien, cousin of Mary Spring Rice, was the son of Sir Edward O’Brien, a wealthy Irish Protestant landowner. Sir Alexander Lawrence was the son of Brigadier General Sir Henry Montgomery Lawrence. His late uncle had been viceroy of India. Captain George Fitzhardinge Berkeley, the son of Major George Sackville Berkeley, attended the prestigious Wellington College then Oxford University, where he was awarded a Blue for cricket. This was not a typical terrorist cell.

  Childers and an accomplice, Darrell Figgis, son of an Irish-born tea merchant in Ceylon, went to Hamburg, where, despite a German ban on the export of weapons to Ireland, they purchased a quantity of virtually obsolete rifles. It was no coincidence that the arms deal was conducted through the same agent who supplied the Ulster Volunteers months earlier. Several weeks later, in July 1914, Childers and his wife Molly sailed their yacht, Asgard, to pick up the armaments. Captain Gordon Shephard, a close friend, helped crew. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, Captain Shephard was an experienced sailor and a member of the prestigious Royal Cruising Club. Immediately after the gun-running mission, he returned to his post with the Royal Flying Corps. By the time of his death in action in 1918, he was a much-decorated brigadier general in the British Army and the highest-ranking officer in the Flying Corps to die in action.78 Such profiles did not match known terrorists.

  A second yacht, the Kelpie, owned and crewed by Conor O’Brien, assisted Asgard with the gun-running. They rendezvoused with a German ship off the Belgian coast and transferred the weapons at sea. Asgard sailed back to Ireland through the assembled ranks of the British fleet at Portsmouth. A destroyer allegedly bore down on them at full speed, but they were not ordered to heave-to. No one appeared to consider it suspicious that the yacht was stacked at every point with rifles and lay extremely low in the water. They endured dense fog and were hit by the ‘worst storm seen in the Irish Sea for 30 years’.79 Childers had to lash himself to the wheel to hold course, so the story goes, but, like Churchill’s adventures in South Africa, these gallant deeds lacked independent corroboration. To heroic acclaim from the nationalists, Childers landed his tranche of the consignment at Howth near Dublin on Sunday, 26 July 1914. At the same time, far to the east, the Russians began their secret mobilisations against Germany. Only the Foreign Office and their Secret Elite minders knew of both events.

  Under the guise of an organised Sunday ‘drill’, the volunteers marched in broad daylight from Dublin to Howth to collect the weapons. Police and coastguards were warned off. It looked like a re-run of the UVF experience at Larne until soldiers of the King�
�s Own Scottish Borderers, having failed to apprehend the gun runners or seize their weapons, clashed with a jeering, taunting crowd on Bachelor’s Walk by the Liffey. Stones and insults were thrown, and the troops fired into the crowd, killing three and injuring thirty-eight.80 Asquith was shocked by the news, not of the landing of the arms but of the civilian deaths, which he realised would be deeply resented in Dublin.81 They were.

  When the Kelpie returned to Irish waters with her tranche of weapons, Conor O’Brien was reluctant to land them directly at Kilcoole because ‘he and his yacht were well known to the authorities there’. The weapons were transferred at sea to another yacht, Chotah, which was owned by Sir Thomas Myles, president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Myles became honorary surgeon to King George V and was awarded the prestigious Order of the Bath. Assisting him in the gun-running was the Hon. James Creed Meredith, KC, the son of Sir James Creed Meredith, a wealthy Protestant Anglo-Irish landowner and deputy grand master and treasurer of the Grand Lodge of the Freemasons of Ireland. Trust us, please. It is beyond our capabilities to make this up. The roll call of honour for gun-runners against the Crown was completed when Colonel Fred Crawford of the UVF was awarded the CBE.