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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 August 2020
When the British government declared war against Germany in August 1914, a great drive to gain popular support by presenting the conflict to the public as a morally righteous endeavour began in earnest. Stories of German violence against French and Belgian civilians, largely based in fact, were central to this process of ‘cultural mobilisation’. The German serviceman thus came to be widely regarded in Britain as inherently cruel and malevolent while his British counterpart was revered as the embodiment of honour, chivalry and courage. Yet by the autumn of 1920, less than two years after the Armistice, the conduct of members of the crown forces in Ireland was being publicly drawn into question by British commentators in a manner that would have been unthinkable during the war against Germany. Drawing on contemporary press reports, parliamentary debates and personal narrative sources, this article explores and analyses the moral climate in Britain in 1920 and 1921 and comments on the degree to which memories of atrocities committed by German servicemen during the Great War informed popular and official responses to events in Ireland.
1 Yorkshire Post, 12 Nov. 1920, cited in Hanson, Neil, The Unknown Soldier: the story of the missing of the Great War (London, 2005), p. 368Google Scholar.
2 On the symbolism of the Cenotaph, see especially King, Alex, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: the symbolism and politics of remembrance (Oxford, 1998), pp 141–9Google Scholar.
3 Gregory, Adrian, The silence of memory: Armistice Day, 1919–1946 (London, 1994), p. 23Google Scholar.
4 Ibid., p. 26.
5 For newspaper reports of the processions of the British dead of Bloody Sunday, see Manchester Guardian, 26 Nov. 1920; Daily Mail, 26 Nov. 1920.
6 For a detailed account of the killings and the men that were killed, see Leonard, Jane, ‘“English dogs” or “Poor devils”? The dead of Bloody Sunday morning’ in Fitzpatrick, David (ed.), Terror in Ireland, 1916–1923 (Dublin, 2012), pp 102–40Google Scholar.
7 A striking pictorial tribute to the dead men was printed in the Illustrated London News on 4 December 1920 under the heading ‘Victims of “the murder gang” – officers killed in Dublin’.
8 Daily Mail, 24 Nov. 1920.
9 See, for example, Charles Townshend, The British campaign in Ireland, 1919–1921: the development of political and military policies (London, 1975); Ronan Fanning, Fatal path: British government and the Irish Revolution (London, 2013), pp 188–246.
10 Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Dublin, 2002), pp 47–66; D. M. Leeson, The Black and Tans: British police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence (Oxford, 2011); Anne Dolan, ‘The British culture of paramilitary violence in Ireland’ in Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (eds), War in peace: paramilitary violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford, 2012), pp 200–15.
11 D. G. Boyce, Englishmen and Irish troubles: British public opinion and the making of Irish policy, 1918–1921 (London, 1972), pp 43–60.
12 Maurice Walsh, The news from Ireland: foreign correspondents and the Irish Revolution (London, 2008), pp 57–82.
13 Although his classic 1935 study of the acute challenges these groups presented to the Liberal government from 1910 to 1914 has been criticised in recent decades as overly impressionistic, George Dangerfield's The strange death of Liberal England still offers an indispensable portrait of British society in the years before the war. For an account of the move toward more extreme measures on the part of the Women's Social and Political Union from 1912, see C. J. Bearman, ‘An examination of suffragette violence’ in E.H.R., cxx, no. 486 (Apr. 2005), pp 365–97. For a case study that highlights the significant levels of industrial unrest in Edwardian Britain, see Matt Vaughan Wilson, ‘The 1911 waterfront strikes in Glasgow: trade unions and rank-and-file militancy in the labour unrest of 1910–1914’ in International Review of Social History, liii, no. 2 (Aug. 2008), pp 261–92. On the home rule crisis and its impact, see Alvin Jackson, Home rule: an Irish history, 1800–2000 (Oxford, 2003), pp 106–40.
14 Gerard J. DeGroot, Blighty: British society in the era of the Great War (London, 1996), pp 164–70.
15 Jay Winter, The Great War and the British people (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 28.
16 Douglas Newton, The darkest days: the truth behind Britain's rush to war, 1914 (London, 2014), pp 290–3.
17 Edward Madigan, Faith under fire: Anglican army chaplains and the Great War (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 35.
18 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German atrocities, 1914: a history of denial (New Haven, 2001), p. 13.
19 Ibid., p. 419.
20 Catriona Pennell, A kingdom united: popular responses to the outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2012), pp 62, 127, 179.
21 Alan Kramer, Dynamic of destruction: culture and mass killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007), pp 6–13.
22 Ibid., pp 13–15.
23 Pennell, A kingdom united, p. 59; Adrian Gregory, The last Great War: British society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008), pp 40–69.
24 On British suffragette responses to the war, see Jacqueline de Vries, ‘Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and World War One’ in Sybil Oldfield (ed.), This working-day world: women's lives and cultures in Britain, 1914–1945 (London, 1994), pp 76–89.
25 Madigan, Faith under fire, p. 33.
26 The Times, 20 Sept. 1914.
27 F. X. Martin (ed.), The Irish Volunteers, 1913–1915: recollections and documents (Dublin, 2013), p. 159.
28 Heather Jones and Edward Madigan, ‘The isle of saints and soldiers: the evolving image of the Irish combatant, 1914–1918’ in Catriona Pennell and Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses (eds), A world at war, 1911–1949 (Leiden, 2019), pp 108–32.
29 Nottingham Journal, 8 Feb. 1915.
30 Gregory, The last Great War, p. 46.
31 On the impact of air raids on the British home front from 1914 to 1916, see Susan Grayzel, At home and under fire: air raids and culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge, 2012), pp 20–63.
32 On the degree to which the execution of Edith Cavell was used in British and Allied propaganda, see especially Katie Pickles, Transnational outrage: the death and commemoration of Edith Cavell (Basingstoke, 2007), pp 60–85.
33 Peter Simkins, Kitchener's army: the raising of the new armies, 1914–1916 (Manchester, 1988), pp 98–9.
34 A. F. Winnington Ingram, The church in time of war (London, 1915), p. 55.
35 Edward Madigan, ‘“Sticking to a hateful task”: resilience, humour and British understandings of combatant courage, 1914–1918’ in War in History, xx, no. 1 (2013), pp 80–1.
36 Midland Daily Telegraph, 14 Dec. 1914.
37 Most of the sixty-four British soldiers executed for murder during the war had killed other soldiers, but some of the victims were civilians. See Gerard Oram, Military executions during World War I (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 47.
38 K. Craig Gibson, ‘Sex and soldiering in France and Flanders: the British Expeditionary Force along the Western Front, 1914–1919’ in International History Review, xxiii, no. 3 (Sept. 2001), pp 563–4.
39 Jay Winter, ‘British national identity in the First World War’ in S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting (eds), The boundaries of the state in modern Britain (Cambridge, 2002), pp 266–8.
40 For examples of press responses to the Armistice that highlight the redemption of the sacrifices made by the dead, see ‘At last’ in The Times, 12 Nov. 1918; ‘A glorious end’ in Daily Mail, 12 Nov. 1918.
41 Gregory, The silence of memory, pp 34–40.
42 The War Memorials Register, compiled and updated by the Imperial War Museum, offers details relating to the architecture and epigraphy of over 80,000 war memorials located across the United Kingdom. Of the 54,000 that commemorate men killed in the First World War, more than 1,700 bear the word ‘freedom’. See https://www.iwm.org.uk/memorials
43 Mandy Link, Remembrance of the Great War in the Irish Free State, 1914–1937 (Basingstoke, 2019); Jason R. Myers, The Great War and memory in Irish culture (Palo Alto, 2013); Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000), pp 109–31; Jane Leonard, ‘The twinge of memory: Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday in Dublin since 1919’ in Richard English and Graham Walker (eds), Unionism in modern Ireland: new perspectives on politics and culture (Basingstoke, 1996), pp 99–114.
44 Jones and Madigan, ‘The isle of saints and soldiers’, pp 121–4.
45 Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence, p. 25.
46 Boyce, Englishmen and Irish troubles, pp 50–51.
47 For a detailed and insightful account of the sack of Balbriggan, see Ross O'Mahony, ‘The sack of Balbriggan and tit-for-tat terror’ in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Terror in Ireland, 1916–1923, pp 58–74.
48 Ibid., p. 64.
49 Walsh, The news from Ireland, pp 58–78.
50 Ibid., pp 67–8.
51 Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a peaceable kingdom: war, violence, and fear of brutalization in post–First World War Britain’ in Journal of Modern History, lxxv, no. 3 (Sept. 2003), p. 577.
52 Manchester Guardian, 22 Sept. 1920.
53 For an account of the raid on Mallow and an analysis of the complicity of regular troops in reprisals, see James S. Donnelly Jr, ‘“Unofficial” British reprisals and I.R.A. provocations, 1919–20: the cases of three Cork towns’ in Éire-Ireland, xlv, nos 1 & 2 (spring/summer 2010), pp 152–97.
54 Daily Chronicle, 29 Sept. 1920.
55 Manchester Guardian, 30 Sept. 1920.
56 Walsh, The news from Ireland, pp 77–8.
57 The Times, 30 Sept. 1920.
58 Hansard 5 (Commons), cxxxiii, 926 (20 Oct. 1920).
59 Party, Labour, Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland (London, 1921)Google Scholar.
60 Hamilton, Mary Agnes, Arthur Henderson: a biography (London, 1938), p. 112Google Scholar.
61 Lancaster, V. Markham, H. H. Asquith: last of the Romans (London, 2019), pp 236–7Google Scholar.
62 On responses of the Catholic clergy, see especially Heffernan, Brian, Freedom and the fifth commandment: Catholic priests and political violence in Ireland, 1919–21 (Manchester, 2014), pp 208–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
63 Wilkinson, Alan, The Church of England and the First World War (London, 1996), p. 132Google Scholar.
64 Madigan, Faith under fire, p. 36.
65 Ibid., p. 37.
66 Hansard 5 (Lords), xlii, 143 (2 Nov. 1920).
67 Hansard 5 (Commons), cxxxiv, 350–8 (3 Nov. 1920).
68 The Times, 21 Feb. 1921.
69 Shane Leslie, Mark Sykes: his life and letters (London, 1923), pp 206, 265–8.
70 Hansard 5 (Lords), cxxxv, 90 (22 Feb. 1921).
71 The Times, 6 Apr. 1921.
