by Dermot Keogh
Part of de Valera’s projection of Ireland as an independent state was his use of the League of Nations, a stage handily provided for him by the Cosgrave government decision to seek election to the League Council in 1930. Paradoxically, Geneva also provided de Valera with an environment where he could temporarily be free from the overwhelming baggage of Irish nationalism. Gunther reported that although a teetotaller at home, ‘an odd point, he drinks wine or beer when he is on the continent. He likes nothing better than to sit in a café … sipping a glass of beer and watching people.’63It was partly through the League of Nations that de Valera established an extraordinary but unfortunately short-lived measure of understanding with Baldwin’s successor, Neville Chamberlain.
This rapprochement certainly helped to bring about the wide-ranging settlement of differences between the two countries in 1938. British civil servants regarded de Valera as ‘stubborn, almost fanatical’,64but the Dominions Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, was anxious to establish a personal relationship. Unofficial talks were held on several occasions in 1936 at a London hotel while de Valera was on his way to visit an eye specialist in Switzerland. MacDonald was ‘taken by surprise’ at their first meeting: he had expected the ‘tall, austere figure’ of press photographs, but instead of the ‘prim, stern countenance’ that he had expected, there was a ‘friendly smile which lit his face as he greeted me’. Indeed, de Valera occasionally ‘revealed a pleasant sense of humour which was inconsistent with the grim image of him portrayed in the British press.’ The Irish leader was ‘courteous and considerate’, ‘a quietly charming man’ who ‘never stood on ceremony … no doubt because of his absolute confidence in himself and the rightness of his cause’.65More formal discussions followed from the autumn of 1937. At one point, MacDonald appealed to de Valera ‘as a realist’ to recognise that Britain as well as Ireland faced political difficulties in reaching a settlement. To J. J. Lee, those three words ‘spoke volumes’: ‘adult’ politicians in Britain were beginning to recognise de Valera as ‘a practical politician of uncommon capacity’.66This may make more of the phrase than is fully warranted: the British in 1921 had consistently demanded that de Valera prove his realism by endorsing their view of their own internal difficulties. In 1937–8, the British government was prepared to make extensive concessions, but de Valera was prepared to concede little in return, beyond explicit acceptance of membership of the commonwealth now that he had effectively emasculated the crown. MacDonald himself complained that de Valera was ‘unyielding’ and expected ‘us British to do almost all the giving; and to hope only for the gift of Irish goodwill.’ The Irish leader was ‘a transparently honest and sincere man’ who ‘repeatedly and fervently’ urged an end to partition. When arguing his case, his face became ‘unchangeably solemn’, while his ‘quietly reasonable voice’ was ‘sometimes vibrant with intense emotion’.67
The prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, backed MacDonald in taking a chance on the goodwill of de Valera. ‘I am satisfied,’ Chamberlain wrote in January 1938 ‘that, queer creature as he is in many ways, he is sincere, and that he is no enemy of this country.’68When the agreement was finally signed at 10 Downing Street three months later, it was in a far more relaxed atmosphere than that of December 1921. Chamberlain announced that he wished to return an item of lost property; twenty-two years earlier, de Valera’s field glasses had been impounded following his surrender at Boland’s Mills. ‘The recipient examined them carefully when they were handed across the table and agreed that they were his.’ It was a gesture that could succeed only within an atmosphere of goodwill: de Valera had told Smuts in 1921 that he was reluctant to go to London and be placed in the position of an errant schoolboy.69Yet if the act of restitution suggested a new chapter in British-Irish relations, it also carried with it final overtones of the belief that de Valera, like Smuts, might tread the path of Smuts from defeated foe to loyal ally. In this, the British were to be disappointed.
The warm relationship between Eamon de Valera and Neville Chamberlain was unlikely but genuine. The British prime minister was the son of Joseph Chamberlain, the radical whose defection to unionism had helped kill Home Rule in Parnell’s day, and the half-brother of Austen, one of the signatories of the Treaty of 1921. Lee suggests that the two were drawn together by the features that they shared, including ‘their headmasterish temperaments … and their intimations of personal infallibility’.70One can only comment that such personalities rarely manage to co-exist, as de Valera had shown in his dealings with Smuts. Rather, they were drawn together by another quality identified by Lee, their commitment to peace in Europe. When news broke during the Munich crisis of September 1938 that Neville Chamberlain was to fly to see Hitler in person, de Valera was attending an official dinner in Geneva, in the remarkably unlikely company of the socialite, Diana Duff Cooper. She recalled that it was de Valera who broke the solemn silence with the words: ‘This is the greatest thing that has ever been done’.71Sadly, the Munich settlement unravelled within a matter of months, but the beleaguered Chamberlain continued to draw encouragement from the support of his Irish counterpart. They held a two-hour meeting at Downing Street in March 1939, and Chamberlain reported in a family letter: ‘He is strongly of opinion that I have been right all through & am right now.’72When Chamberlain fell from power in May 1940, one of the most glowing tributes that he received came from Eamon de Valera.73So ended the brief period when Dublin Opinion believed that ‘Nev and Dev understood one another’.74
John Gunther provides a sketch of de Valera as head of government in the 1930s. In the summer of 1937, the American journalist was permitted ‘a brief chat’ on the understanding that nothing would be quoted on Irish affairs. Gunther outlined a conventional profile – American birth, Boland’s Mills, de Valera’s family, his enthusiasm for mathematics, his indifference to money: ‘rigid self-control; fanatic faith in his duty to Ireland; extreme seriousness of mind; complete unworldliness; a certain didacticism; stubbornness, humanity.’ His ‘single-track mind’ made him work hard: ‘one may see lights in the President’s quarters till after midnight. He has bread and butter for supper. He has never, except for reasons of illness, taken a holiday.’ At weekends, followed by an official car and a private detective, he walked energetically for exercise in the hills near Dublin, to preserve ‘the spare but rugged frame that fanatics need’. To lighten the picture, Gunther added that ‘when he laughs, he laughs very heartily.’ While de Valera was ‘extremely religious … his Catholicism is neither ostentatious nor bigoted; several of his friends are Protestant’. One member of his staff commented that de Valera’s ‘whole life is a prayer’.75
Despite himself, Gunther was impressed. He had come to Dublin intending to fit de Valera into a pattern of fanatical leaders who were keeping the margins of Europe aflame with petty nationalisms: ‘In Jugoslavia, in Bulgaria, in Syria and Egypt and Palestine, I have met young de Valeras of various breeds.’ Given his preconceptions, he found it difficult to accommodate the fact that he had encountered ‘an alert, interested and extremely courteous’ man, eager to quiz his visitor on his impressions of continental politics and quick to pounce good-humouredly on an unguarded allusion to ‘the British Isles’. ‘De Valera looks less severe than his pictures. The long nose and the deep lines to the mouth are his most characteristic features.’ When, however, his host turned to Irish issues, Gunther’s doubts returned. ‘He was patient, explicit, and formidably, sombrely reasonable. But in that gaunt face I saw the eyes of a fanatic.’76
Gunther was especially struck by the distance that de Valera maintained between himself and his people. Everyone in Ireland referred to this ‘tall, gaunt man’ as ‘Dev’, but few dared to address him so to his face. At public events, ‘he does not smile or nod to the crowd. He walks straight ahead, very reserved, and seems to pretend that the crowd is not there.’ Perhaps only an American obser
ver would have commented that de Valera was ‘very attractive to women … They follow him about at functions; he is smiling and reserved, and, without ever being rude or pompous, manages to create a sense of distance between himself and them.’77Another visitor, the Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, noted a less attractive aspect of the isolation of ‘the Chief’. ‘The very clerks in the offices stood promptly and rigidly to attention as he strode past. His ministers … spoke with freedom – but with no disloyalty – in his absence, but were restrained and obedient in his presence.’78Malcolm MacDonald once asked what happened if the Executive Council disagreed with the Taoiseach. A laughing Seán Lemass replied that a decision would be taken ‘by a minority of one’.79
By contrast, de Valera seemed indifferent to the trappings of power. ‘His office is a simple small room, with “President” printed in black on the frosted window,’ Gunther noted, likening it to ‘the kind of room which a modest executive official of a very modest business might use. No particular decoration; no covey of secretaries; no swank.’80Harold Nicolson thought the Taoiseach’s office ‘ill-designed, with cold, high windows’ and ‘a clock that strikes the quarter-hours with a loud noise’. However, even the Irish government had adopted modern technology. ‘On his desk he has a telephone box which buzzes occasionally and to which he talks in Gaelic.’81One of the few decorations was a facsimile copy of the American Declaration of Independence, which de Valera described to the British socialist Aneurin Bevan as ‘my political bible’.82
In the dark years of the war, the British found Irish neutrality incomprehensible, and negative perceptions of de Valera easily reasserted themselves. Churchill, whose ideas on dominion status had evidently not fully caught up with the evolution of the commonwealth, was convinced that legally Ireland was ‘at war but skulking’.83De Valera justified neutrality to Menzies, by explaining that his country was ‘virtually defenceless’, an objection that the Australian leader thought might be overcome by the supply of anti-aircraft guns. ‘He would step across to the window, and gaze out, and say, ‘My beautiful Dublin could be destroyed.’84The Anglophile American statesman, Wendell Willkie, ‘did not conceal his contempt’ when de Valera told him that he feared that if he allowed the British base facilities in Ireland, Dublin would be bombed.85Cardinal Hinsley, leader of the English Catholics, dismissed the argument as hypocrisy, pointing to the fact that de Valera had ignored German threats of retaliation when he had sent the Dublin fire brigades into the Belfast blitz. De Valera dismissed that argument. ‘When an Irish city’s on fire,’ he told Grattan O’Leary, ‘no matter in what part of Ireland, it’s our duty to help put it out.’ If the German ambassador chose to complain, ‘I’ll kick him out of my office.’86
While Churchill privately denounced de Valera as ‘that wicked man’,87he jovially advised Archbishop Spellman of New York that a dressing-down that he planned to administer to de Valera would ‘give the poor man a fit’. Spellman grimly replied that ‘if Almighty God should wish that De Valera should lose his life on hearing the truth, I shall say many masses for his soul.’88Grattan O’Leary found himself cast in the role of emissary from an angry Cardinal Hinsley, demanding an explanation for the suppression of one of his sermons in Catholic Ireland.89For once, princes of the Church found themselves in agreement with Russian communists. Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s ambassador in London, dismissed de Valera as ‘very narrow’ and ‘rather stupid’.90
In reality, there was another side to Irish neutrality and de Valera’s dilemma. For all his later denunciation of an Irish government determined ‘to frolic’ with Axis diplomats,91even Churchill recognised in 1940 that ‘the implacable, malignant minority can make so much trouble that de Valera dare not do anything to offend them.’92When de Valera argued that it was in Britain’s interests to have a neutral neighbour rather than a weak ally, Malcolm MacDonald felt that there was ‘quite a lot of sense in what he said.’93In Dublin in 1942 Professor Daniel Binchy of UCD counselled Harold Nicolson that ‘a visiting Englishman is apt to be taken in by blarney and to imagine that the feelings of this country towards us are really friendly.’ Neutrality was seen as a positive assertion, something that few had believed would be possible at the outbreak of war, an achievement which many ‘attributed to the genius of de Valera, who has thereby gained enormous prestige’. Others regarded neutrality as an example of divine providence, so that it had ‘taken on an almost religious flavour … something which Ireland is not ashamed of, but tremendously proud’.94De Valera himself assured Menzies that his fellow citizens had a ‘passion for neutrality’, an emotion that the Australian prime minister had failed to detect among those of Irish descent in his own country.95The arguments were complex but none the less neutrality added a new layer of negative incomprehension to outsiders’ perceptions of Eamon de Valera.
In his memoirs, Robert Menzies was disingenuous about his motives for visiting Dublin in April 1941. In many respects, the Menzies visit was a pastiche of the Smuts mission two decades earlier. The Australian prime minister was on an extended visit to Britain, which with poetic justice weakened his hold on Canberra politics and brought about his own downfall at the end of the year. In London, however, Menzies connived with Churchill’s critics, and may even have seen himself as an alternative consensus prime minister. At one level, a visit to Dublin would generate photo-opportunities likely to please Irish-Australia. At another, it might just enable Menzies to pull off a coup for the allied cause by talking de Valera out of his neutral stance.96
Menzies flew to Belfast, where he encountered the suspicion that Churchill was ‘going to sell us out to the south’, and travelled onto Dublin by train. De Valera met him at the station. ‘He was a striking figure, tall and spare and ascetic.’ Wearing a dark overcoat and broad-brimmed hat, ‘he looked positively saturnine’. In the talks that followed, Menzies found de Valera ‘vastly interesting’, ‘a scholar, and in a quiet way, passionately sincere’. There were ‘blind spots occasioned by prejudice’ and ‘a failure to realise the facts of life’ of a world at war, but ‘he grew on me’. Given the failure of his machinations in London, and his post-war identification with Churchill as a fellow elder-statesman of the commonwealth, it suited Menzies to portray himself as naïve tourist. He was allocated a senior Irish civil servant to show him around Dublin, a man who could scarcely disguise his irritation with a colonial monarchist who innocently enquired if he might visit Sackville Street. In similar vein, he portrayed an exchange with de Valera over his own discussions in Belfast. When the Taoiseach spoke ‘pleasantly’ of the Stormont premier, J. M. Andrews, Menzies asked ‘whether he saw him frequently’, and was astonished to be told that the two had never met. Menzies subsequently argued that a senior minister should be sent on a mission to Dublin, a step which Churchill resisted.97In fact, Churchill had already despatched Malcolm MacDonald to Dublin for secret and fruitless talks in June 1940.98When the United States entered the war in December 1941, another cabinet minister was despatched to de Valera. Lord Cranborne reported ‘a long, friendly, but fruitless talk’, mainly about partition.99Personal diplomacy might modify negative preconceptions of the Irish leader, but it was not going to change Irish policy.
Harold Nicolson was a writer and shrewd diarist, who moved in the inmost circles of power and had briefly held minor government office under Churchill. As with so many visitors, his preconceptions were shattered when he met de Valera in March 1942. He had expected ‘a thin sallow man’ with ‘lank black Spanish hair’. De Valera was neither thin nor sallow, although there was an unhealthy puffiness about his smooth face, while his hair was ‘soft and almost brown’. In place of the ‘huge round black spectacles’ of photographs, there were ‘benevolent cold eyes behind steel-framed glasses’. It was not de Valera’s ‘soft Irish accent’ that intrigued Nicolson but his ‘admirable smile … lighting up the eyes and face very quickly, like an electric light bulb that
doesn’t fit and flashes on and off’. Nicolson saw happiness and sincerity in de Valera’s smile. ‘He is a very simple man, like all great men … Deep spiritual certainty underneath it all, giving his features a mark of repose.’ The two men talked about the war, with de Valera, fully aware that his remarks would be reported back, speaking sympathetically of the challenges facing Churchill. He criticised the British press for hostility to Ireland. Nicolson deflected the complaint by saying that since his recent appointment as a governor of the BBC, he had become equally convinced that every newspaper devoted columns of unfair criticism to the organisation. ‘He is amused by this, and the faint flash of his smile lights up his porridge-coloured face.’100
As the tide of war turned in favour of the Allies, Ireland and its mysterious leader could once again be left alone. Britain’s post-war Labour government had problems enough, and did not turn its attention seriously to Ireland until 1949, when it was necessary to respond to the final secession from the commonwealth, carried out by a coalition of de Valera’s opponents who had unexpectedly ousted him from power in 1948.101As a result, there remained one notable figure who had not succumbed to de Valera’s charm. Churchill’s victory broadcast of 13 May 1945 had contained an ‘envenomed attack’102 on de Valera’s policy of neutrality, so much so that when the two men first encountered each other at a Council of Europe meeting four years later, de Valera took care to avoid a formal introduction to avoid the risk of being snubbed.103Yet one of Churchill’s more intriguing characteristics was a desire to reach out to former enemies, as he had shown in South Africa after 1906 and with less benign consequences in his eager endorsement of the Free State in 1922. By fortunate coincidence, the two veterans returned to office in 1951, neither in good health and each mellowed by the ravages of time. The British prime minister was touched by de Valera’s message of sympathy on the death of George VI in February 1952, even if the gesture was perhaps of no more significance than the notorious offer of condolence to the German ambassador on the death of Hitler. Churchill’s response, of ‘sincere goodwill’ to Ireland through all its many difficulties, can be read as a reply to the appeal that de Valera had made for British generosity in the battle of the broadcasts in 1945. The two men finally met over lunch at 10 Downing Street in September 1953. De Valera noted that his host ‘went out of his way to be courteous’. In private talks, de Valera as always raised the issue of partition, and then suggested the return to Ireland of the body of Sir Roger Casement. Churchill seemed sympathetic, although Whitehall second thoughts ensured that Casement’s remains stayed in Pentonville for another decade.104‘A very agreeable occasion,’ was Churchill’s verdict. ‘I like the man.’105
