The Lost History of 1914

by Jack Beatty

  The government had some hard thinking to do. With no deal in prospect, why should Carson wait until May? Why not act sooner? Why not declare himself uncrowned king of Ulster now? Struggling with such questions, the government could not flinch from one more. What will we do when they act? Nothing? Fight? But whom? And with what? The prime minister would not have long to wait for events to settle the last question.

  Ulster would be right. A few ultras signed the Covenant in blood. The British Empire was on trial in Ulster. If Nationalist Ireland got its way, what was to stop Nationalist India from trying? No wonder Kipling signed.

  In early March the government received troubling reports from the Ulster security services. County Down police had discovered a “confidential circular” requesting information from the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a sectarian militia mustered to defy home rule, about the strength of the government forces defending police barracks, coast guard stations, and the like. County Tyrone police found a UVF typescript outlining the seizure of “all arms at military barracks … and it is said that wax impressions of keys of military stores and magazines are in possession of the Volunteers.” More ominously, “the number of soldiers at each military depot willing to assist the Volunteers are given.”27

  A UVF document titled “The Coup” called for a “sudden, complete, and paralyzing blow” to be struck at the “right moment.”

  Simultaneously:

  1) Cut rail lines so that no police or Army could be sent to Ulster.

  2) Cut telegraph and cable lines.

  3) Seize all depots containing arms, ammunition, etc.

  4) All avenues of approach by road for troops or police into Ulster should be closed by isolated detachments.

  5) Guns of field artillery [caliber] should be captured either by direct attack—or else by previous arrangement with the gunners.

  6) All depots for supply of troops or police should be captured.

  “The Coup” displayed tactical acumen; possibly it was the work of a staff officer who had resigned his commission in 1910 to train Ulstermen to resist home rule. Retired officers had gone over to Carson by the handful. Serving officers would follow at his call: “We have pledges and promises from some of the greatest generals in the army that when the time comes and if necessary they will come over to help us keep the old flag flying and so defy those who dare to invade our liberties.”28

  Asquith appointed a five-man committee to think through the government’s response to imminent rebellion. The three key members of the Army Council were Attorney General John Simon, Secretary of War John Seely, and Churchill. But, as Lord Esher noted, “Winston is running the whole show!”29

  What did Winston do and when did he do it? To Unionists, the answer was clear. Churchill, one wrote, was “the author of [a] ‘Plot’ or ‘Pogrom’ ” against Ulster. At a Unionist rally in Hyde Park, Carson branded him “Lord Randolph’s renegade son who wanted to be handed down to posterity as the Belfast butcher who threatened to shoot down those who took his father’s advice.” Churchill’s scheme was to provoke violence in Ulster and then, under cover of restoring order there, to crush the UVF. Churchill called that “a hellish insinuation.” The “plot” charge, which appealed to those motivated to see contingency planning as conspiracy, damaged Churchill’s reputation.30

  “Most historians,” Patricia Jalland notes in her invaluable The Liberals and Ireland, believe Churchill “planned a large-scale military and naval coup against Ulster.” He devised “an operation … for the coercion of Ulster,” asserts one of these historians; the operation was “designed for the sudden and complete paralyzing of the Ulster Volunteer Force,” states another.31

  Was Churchill eager to play the Belfast butcher? He was undoubtedly “a war man,” in the words of Admiral Sir John Fisher, who served with him turbulently at the Admiralty. At thirty-nine, a veteran of campaigns against the Dervish in the Sudan, the Pathans in Afghanistan, and the Boers in South Africa, Churchill was full of fight. When, under Tory pressure, Asquith removed him as first lord of the Admiralty in May 1915, Clementine Churchill protested, defending her husband’s belligerent spirit in prophetic terms: “Winston may in your eyes & in those with whom he has to work have faults but he has the supreme quality which I venture to say very few of your present or future Cabinet possess, the imagination, the deadliness to fight Germany.”32

  Concluding that democratic governance was about to be overturned in Ulster, Churchill ordered eight battleships based in Gibraltar and eight destroyers of the Fourth Flotilla in England to sail to the waters between Scotland and Ulster, “where they would be in proximity to the coasts of Ireland in case of serious disorders occurring.” In addition, he dispatched HMS Pathfinder and HMS Attentive to Belfast Louch with orders to defend “by every means” the eighty-five tons of ammunition at Carrickfergus Castle, held by only twenty soldiers. Indulging his penchant for verbal melodrama, Churchill told Sir John French, chief of the General Staff, that “if there were opposition to the movement of the troops, he would pour enough shot and shell into Belfast to reduce it to ruins in 24 hours.” That is evidence for the “Churchill pogrom” thesis; it is also how he talked when his blood was up.33

  It was thumping in his ears on March 14 when he journeyed to Bradford in Yorkshire to loose an oratorical pogrom. Lloyd George put him up to it, making the argument from fame. “This is your opportunity,” George said, according to the diary of Lord Riddell. “Providence has arranged it for you. You can make a speech that will ring down the corridors of history … You are known to be in favor of conciliation for Ulster. Now you will have to say that having secured a compromise Ulstermen will have to accept it or take the consequences.”34

  Churchill arrived at Bradford station that afternoon “accompanied by two oxygen cylinders, as well as no doubt by a suitable retinue, the task of one member of which was to pump the oxygen into him before the meeting so as to secure an adequate level of exuberance.”35

  Churchill required every ounce of breath to shout out, so the three to four thousand Liberals in the audience could hear it, his final sentence:

  If Ulstermen extend the hand of friendship, it will be clasped by Liberals and by their Nationalist countrymen in all good faith and in all good will; but if there is no wish for peace; if every concession that is made is spurned and exploited; if every effort to meet their views is only to be used as a means of breaking down Home Rule and of barring the way to the rest of Ireland; if the Government and Parliament of this great country and greater Empire are to be exposed to menace and brutality; if all the loose, wanton, and reckless chatter we have been forced to listen to these many months is in the end to disclose a sinister and revolutionary purpose; then I can only say to you, “Let us go forward together and put these grave matters to the proof.”36

  In his memoirs, Asquith hailed this un-Liberal call to arms “as proof that the Twentieth Century can hold its own in an oratorical competition.” At the time he approved it in advance, though telling Lloyd George (as if one could not have guessed), “My game is more the olive-branch.” Asquith must especially have liked this shameless bit: “Those who think that these events can be adjusted by the use of threats of violence against the Government do not know British democracy. They do not know England. They do not know Yorkshire and they do not know Asquith.”37

  Churchill delivered his speech on Saturday, March 14; by Saturday, March 21, everything had changed. Besides the second week of May 1940, when Hitler invaded France, Neville Chamberlain stepped down as prime minister, and Churchill realized his destiny, few weeks in modern British political history have been as decisive as the one that began on the Monday after Bradford, when, to “tumultuous cheers” from the Liberals, Churchill strode into the House of Commons and took his seat near Asquith on the Treasury Bench.

  Asquith had raised the frailest hope of a settlement by introducing a new principle—temporary Ulster exclusion from home rule. On Thursday the opposition would respond.

>   Thursday afternoon in the House, Bonar Law asked Asquith whether the government would agree to hold a referendum on home rule. If home rule passed, Asquith retorted, would the Unionists agree that the government “would be justified in coercing Ulster”? Law nodded his agreement. Asquith stared across the dispatch box at Sir Edward Carson and asked if Ulster would agree. Carson replied, “Let the Prime Minister give me a fair offer and then I will answer him.” But the government, Asquith indicated, had made its final offer—Ulster exclusion for six years.

  Declaring that Churchill’s Bradford threat made him “feel I ought not to be here but in Belfast,” Carson dramatically announced that he was leaving the House to catch the night boat to Belfast, there to lead his forces against Churchill’s battleships, at which a heckler shouted, “With your sword drawn?” Slamming the brass-bound boxes in front of him, Carson echoed Churchill’s menacing last line: “Let the Government come and try conclusions with them in Ulster.” When he exited the chamber, the opposition rose and cheered.

  Introducing a motion to censure the government for coercing Ulster, Law, too, focused on Bradford, saying that he had hoped that “a catastrophe” could still be avoided: “I had that hope, but in view of the speech given at a critical time by the First Lord of the Admiralty—a speech the spirit of which was understood quite as clearly [in Ulster] as it was by the hon. gentlemen on the benches opposite when he came into the House on Monday … I really believe that the situation today is far more dangerous than it has ever been; and if a way of escape is to be found it will come from some cause which I am quite unable to foresee.”

  In fact Law had arranged an escape. He had planned to instruct his fellow Tories in the House of Lords to attach an amendment to the Army Annual Act forbidding the army from being used to suppress resistance in Ulster (shades of the Social Democrats in Germany). But intelligence from his spy in the War Office, the director of Military Operations, Sir Henry Wilson, persuaded Law that taking such a politically risky step at a time of rising international tensions was unnecessary. “If [the army] were ordered to coerce Ulster there would be wholesale defections,” Wilson assured Law.

  This was in Law’s mind as he asked Asquith how the government meant to impose its will on Ulster: “What about the Army? If it is only a question of dealing with civil disorder, the Army, I’m sure, will obey you. But if it is really a question of civil war, soldiers are citizens like the rest of us. The Army will be divided and you will have destroyed the force … upon which we depend for the defense of this country.”

  Asquith was having none of that: “Who is to judge whether a particular contest in which the armed forces of the Crown are called upon to intervene does or does not fall into the category of civil war?” To leave it to the judgment of individual officers would be “to make the Government subject to the Army.”38

  Forty-eight hours later that occurred. For the first time in over two hundred years, high army officers would dictate to the government in what has come to be known as the Curragh Mutiny.*

  To stop the UVF from seizing government stores as contemplated in “The Coup,” on Monday, March 16, Seely sent the commander of the British army in Dublin a list of four depots needing enhanced protection. When the commander refused to move troops to those places because it would “create intense excitement in Ulster,” the Army Council—Seely and Churchill—summoned him to the War Office for a stiff bracing.

  The commander was Sir Arthur Paget, sixty-two, of whom his 1928 Times obituary observed, “Had he only devoted to military study a fraction of the time which he gave up to the observation of trees and shrubs, he might have ranked as a learned soldier.” The two ministers later maintained that they instructed Sir Arthur to move only two battalions of infantry to secure undermanned depots across Ulster. But they also committed to dispatch “large reinforcements” from England if, as seemed unlikely to them, Paget’s troops should encounter resistance. “You can have as many more men as are necessary … even to the last man,” Seely averred. At this, picturing himself at the head of a massive host, Paget remarked, “I shall lead my army to the Boyne.” “Don’t be a bloody fool!” Sir John French cut in.39

  Returned to Dublin, Paget convened a meeting of his senior officers on Friday morning. As discussed with the Army Council, he informed those with homes in Ulster that they could “quietly disappear.” He gave the others an ultimatum: Obey orders or resign their commissions. They had two hours to make up their minds. The troop must be moved that night.

  Presenting that option to the officers was Paget’s inspiration. His civilian chiefs had not authorized giving them the choice to do their duty. They had stipulated, according to Churchill, that in “grave emergencies” officers refusing to obey orders should be dismissed from the army discreetly, not put as “a test or trial to the whole body of officers in the Irish command.” That nuance eluded Paget. Nor, Churchill later claimed, did the Army Council say anything warranting Paget to tell the startled officers that “the whole place would be ablaze by tomorrow.” The officers left the Dublin meeting shaken, believing that large-scale “active operations” in Ulster were beginning. Many had relatives there; nearly all were sympathetic to Carson and the Ulster “Loyalists,” as they styled themselves to emphasize that they asked only to be allowed to remain loyal citizens of the United Kingdom. The officers recoiled from the prospect of being ordered to fire on people who marched under the same flag.40

  On Friday afternoon, Seely received a telegram from Paget: “Regret to report Brigadier and fifty-seven officers, 3rd Cavalry Brigade, prefer to accept dismissal if ordered north.” The officers were stationed just outside Dublin at the Curragh military camp, the main British base in Ireland. The brigadier who chose to resign rather than go north was Herbert Gough, a contumacious cavalry commander who disobeyed orders during the war in South Africa and would do so again in August during the BEF’s retreat from Mons.* Brigadier Gough contacted his brother, a highly decorated colonel stationed at Aldershot. Soon the news spread through the military grapevine, with officers taking sides in the controversy—some affirming their duty to follow lawful orders, more standing with Gough. “There are two camps in the army both very bitter against each other,” reported a naval officer with friends in each.

  The virus of “mutinous disaffection” spread to Churchill’s navy in which a “significant number” of high officers had strong Ulster connections. They included the commanders in chief of the Home Fleet and the Second Battle Squadron, who both threatened to resign if “ordered to go against Ulster.” The wife of a commodore testified that “the feeling is universal in the Navy of sympathy with the Army … and especially with the younger officers with whom Gough is a hero.” The captain of HMS Pathfinder, so confidently dispatched to Belfast Lough by Churchill, informed the admiral in charge of his division that “I have no intention of going against Ulster should the occasion arise.” Ordered to guard Carrickfergus Castle from a UVF assault, he met socially with the UVF commander and allowed his sailors to be “entertained” by Sir Edward Carson. When Churchill heard of this he was furious. “We might have had something like a general mutiny,” Sir Spencer Ewart, the adjutant general at the War Office, noted in his diary.41

  Asquith learned of the Curragh, a Jena for his government, only on Saturday. King George V wrote to him that he was “grieved beyond words at this disastrous and irreparable catastrophe which has befallen my Army.”

  Brigadier Gough was called to the War Office forthwith to explain himself. There had been a “misunderstanding,” so Asquith couched it in a letter he dashed off that Saturday to the twenty-seven-year-old Venetia Stanley, the “girl” with whom he was then holding hands. (“There is nothing (as you know) that I would not shew you: so great and deep is my trust,” he had written her in February.) Paget had misspoken. The officers got the wrong idea about the mission. No large-scale operations against the UVF were planned. “There was no plot,” Lloyd George commented, “but no doubt Winston and Seel
y talked to Paget about hypothetical situations, and led him to think active operations were intended.”42

  The government requested General Gough and the other officers to withdraw their resignations. Negotiating the terms of his return to service with the War Office, Gough, counseled by Sir Henry Wilson, rightly regarded as a “tireless intrigue” by Asquith, laid down conditions. The government agreed to these, using talking points prepared by the ambidextrous Wilson. Gough demanded more concessions. Seely on his own agreed. (“If he had a little more brains,” a War Office wit remarked, “he’d be half-witted.”) Gough left London with a letter promising that the army would not be used to “enforce the present Home Rule Bill on Ulster.” Waiting for his train at Euston Station, Gough told the military correspondent for the Morning Post, “I have got the assurances I asked for … I dictated the terms, and wrote them in my own hand.”43

  Probably tipped off by Wilson, the press broke the Curragh story on Saturday the twenty-first. Finding Seely at his desk at the War Office “long after midnight,” a Times reporter confirmed the “rumors emanating from the Curragh.” He witnessed “Mr. Churchill pay[ing] a visit to Col. Seely at a very early hour this morning.” The First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary of State for War had a lot to talk about. Someone had blundered.44

  Seely would be fired within a week. The Tories clamored for the archplotter against Ulster to follow him. “From the beginning to end of this sorry business,” the MP Leo Amery charged in the Times, “the Secretary of State for War has been a mere tool in the hands of his masterful and sinister colleague of the Admiralty.” But, Bradford having made him a Liberal hero, and Asquith valuing him as a lightning rod, Churchill rode out the storm.45

  Sounding like the Berliner Tagenblatt and Frankfurter Zeitung on saber rule in Zabern, the Liberal press arraigned the army for intervening in politics. “For the first time in modern British history a military cabal seeks to dictate to Government the Bills it should carry or not carry into law,” the Daily Chronicle editorialized. “We are confronted with a desperate rally of reactionaries to defeat the democratic movement and repeal the Parliament Act. This move by a few aristocratic officers is the last throw in the game.” The Daily Express captured the significance of the Curragh Mutiny in a headline: THE HOME RULE BILL IS DEAD.46