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The Swastika and the Shamrock: British Fascism and the Irish Question, 1918–1940*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

R. M. Douglas
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Extract

The last fifteen years have seen an efflorescence of scholarly studies of British fascism between the wars. Once identified exclusively with the figure of Sir Oswald Mosley and dismissed as a wholly derivative imitation of its Italian and German counterparts, fascism in Britain is now understood as a complex and variegated phenomenon whose roots run no less extensively in British political culture than in external influences. As historians have probed more deeply into the ideological underpinnings of the British ultra-right, they have made increasingly apparent the numerous connections between this new form of political mobilization and long-standing tensions within British politics and society. While scholars continue to acknowledge the many important ways in which British fascism was indebted to its Continental equivalents, they can no longer maintain—as did Robert Benewick in 1969 in his groundbreaking survey of the radical right—that fascist policy was developed “with a callous disregard for principles” or that the distinctively fascist elements of British ultra-right ideology were imported en bloc from overseas.

It is all the more surprising that existing histories should have overlooked so completely one of the most important “indigenous” components of British fascist ideology - its preoccupation with the Irish question. In the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Irish sentiment became a principal theme of several leading fascist groups, exceeded in prominence only by anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, to which it was often explicitly linked. For these small, politically marginal societies, the formulation and dissemination of hibernophobic ideas held obvious attractions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 57 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1997

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1995 Northeast Conference on British Studies and the Irish Cultural Association of Rhode Island. I am grateful to participants at both meetings for their comments and observations.

References

1 See Pelling, H., Modern Britain 1885–1955 (Edinburgh, 1960), p. 132Google Scholar.

2 For analyses of these continuities, see Lunn, K., “Political Anti-Semitism before 1914: Fascism's Heritage?” in British Fascism: Essays on the Radical Right in Inter-War Britain, ed. Lunn, K. & Thurlow, R. C. (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Thurlow, R. C., Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918–1985 (Oxford, 1987), ch. 1Google Scholar; Webber, G. C., The Ideology of the British Right 1918–1939 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

3 Benewick, R. J., Political Violence and Public Order (London, 1969), pp. 51, 131Google Scholar.

4 On fascist groups' attempts to organize in Northern Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s, see Loughlin, J., “Northern Ireland and British Fascism in the Inter-War Years,” Irish Historical Studies 29 (November 1995): 537–52Google Scholar.

5 Curtis, L. P. Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, Conn., 1968), pp. 17–27Google Scholar.

6 Hugh MacDougall argues that the heyday of the “national myth” coincided with “England's” imperial epoch and that the first years of the twentieth century witnessed the eclipse of British racial theories, whose “disintegration was simultaneous with England's decline as a great power.” This optimistic conclusion, for which no evidence is offered, is rendered more questionable because the empire did not reach its farthest geographical extent until 1933. In a critique of Curtis's work, Sheridan Gilley has suggested that British attitudes toward the Irish in the nineteenth century were free of racialism, an argument that hinges largely upon his definition of what is connoted by the term “race.” See MacDougall, H. A., Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, N.H., 1982)Google Scholar; Gilley, S., “English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780–1900,” in Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, ed. Holmes, C. (London, 1978), pp. 81–110Google Scholar.

7 They were not confined exclusively to the right. In 1913 Sidney Webb published an essay that apprehended “this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews” as a consequence of the British middle classes' failure to reproduce themselves in sufficient numbers. Quoted in Semmel, B., Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 51Google Scholar.

8 In an evocation of the dolchstoss legend that was gaining currency in Germany at much the same time, a category of consolatory literature appeared in the aftermath of the War of Independence portraying the Crown forces as having virtually eliminated the IRA—whose members were depicted invariably as savage and inhuman—only to be deprived of the fruits of victory by venal, cowardly politicians. Typical of this fictional genre is S. C. Mason's novel “Bloody Murder”: A Story of Ireland (London, 1937)Google Scholar, which relates the exploits against superhuman odds of a British officer in the “Auxies,” the paramilitary division of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Fifty years later, strikingly similar motifs featured in the popular “Rambo” and “Braddock” movies, in reference to the United States's experience in Southeast Asia.

9 Glover, Richard H., “Resurgam,” The Patriot, November 5, 1925Google Scholar.

10 “The ‘Reunion’ of the Conservative Party,” English Review 37 (July 1923): 9Google Scholar; Phillips, , “The ‘Settlement’ of Ireland,” Edinburgh Review 235 (April 1922): 221Google Scholar. For a brief overview of British media reactions to the War of Independence and Civil War, see Norling, B., “The Irish Disorders, 1919–1925, and the English Press,” Cithara 3 (May 1964)Google Scholar.

11 Pollard, H. B. C., The Secret Societies of Ireland: Their Rise and Progress (London, 1922), p. 256Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., pp. 245, 248.

13 Ibid., p. 247.

14 De Burgh's observation also extended, libellously, to Welshmen—“Mr Lloyd George is a specimen of the breed”—and followed immediately upon a declaration that the difference between Britons and Irish was not a racial one (de Burgh, D. H., Western Thugs, or, Ireland and the English Speaking World [London, 1925], p. 9)Google Scholar.

15 Plain Speech, November 12, December 3, 1921.

16 The Patriot, October 5, 1922, July 3, 1924.

17 Bretherton, C. H., The Real Ireland (London, 1925), pp. 43–44Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., pp. 42, 180. Bretherton seemed untroubled by the glaring contradictions in this passage, which assigned as invariable characteristics to the Irish “thriftlessness,” “frugality,” absence of “moral courage,” and “cheerfulness in adversity.”

19 Renamed The Hidden Hand the following September and British Guardian in July 1924.

20 “Ireland, the ‘Western Front’ of Bolshevism,” The Hidden Hand, December 1920. Emphasis in original.

21 “Archbishop Mannix,” ibid., September 1920; “Kabalism, The Missing Thread?” ibid., November 1920. The other three centers were “the Grand Orient Freemasonry of France…the Theosophist Besant Gandhi [sic] group in India, and the Elders of Zion in Switzerland…”

22 The Patriot February 23, April 6, 1922. The language in question was probably Gaelic.

23 Free Press, July 1939. Additional particulars of this supposed alliance were provided by Banister in The John Bulletin, June 19, 1929.

24 Banister, J., Our Judaeo-Irish Labour Party (London, 1923), p. 7Google Scholar. The Britons issued a second edition in 1931.

25 Ibid., p. 19.

26 Ibid., p. 44.

27 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

28 Lane, A. H., The Alien Menace (4th ed.; London, 1933), p. 128Google Scholar. Bretherton already had made the same suggestion (The Real Ireland, p. 71). Lord Alfred Douglas quoted the American right-winger, Rear-Admiral W. S. Sims, in support of the proposition that Jews, too, were repelled by the Catholic Irish and were associating with them only for the purpose of bringing about England's destruction; “Under no other circumstances would they stoop to an alliance with the Emerald islanders” (Plain English, July 9, 1921).

29 Thurlow, , Fascism in Britain, p. 86Google Scholar. A partial exception was the Nazi race theorist Hans Günther, who had a formative influence on the ideas of the IFL leader, Arnold Leese. Günther's views on the criminal and conspiratorial predisposition of the Irish race were drawn from Anglo-Saxon sources, notably the works of Theodore Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant. See Günther, H. F. K., Racial Elements of European History (London, 1927)Google Scholar.

30 Ripley, W. Z., The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (New York, 1899)Google Scholar; Keane, A. H., The World's Peoples: A Popular Account of their Bodily and Mental Characters, Beliefs, Traditions, Political and Social Institutions (London, 1908)Google Scholar; Grant, M., The Passing of the Great Race, or, the Racial Basis of European History (New York, 1916)Google Scholar; Stoddard, T. L., Racial Realities in Europe (London, 1924)Google Scholar.

31 For a discussion of the work of Beddoe and his contemporaries, see Curtis, , Anglo-Saxons and Celts, pp. 71–72, 74, 136–37Google Scholar.

32 Imperial Fascist League, Race and Politics: A Counter-blast to the Masonic Teaching of Universal Brotherhood (London, n.d. [c. 1934]), p. 2Google Scholar.

33 This was a background they supposedly shared with the Jews: “the Jew is devoid of any Nordic component, and is chiefly Mediterranean and Alpine” (“Cobbett” [Ludovici, A. M.], Jews, and the Jews in England [London, 1938], p. 22)Google Scholar. In a similar interpretation derived from ludicrously naive philological evidence, R. N. Bradley argued that the Mediterranean race to which the Irish belonged possessed “Hamitic,” i.e., negroid roots: “The steppe-folk who as the Gaels introduced Indo-European speech to these islands were ultimately of African origin and brought an African language.” As befitted true Mediterraneans, the latter-day Irish were lazy, “never distinguished for truth, morality or altruism,” at once individualistic and possessed of a strong herd-instinct “such as is found among savages and animals,” witty but not truly humorous (lacking the ability to laugh at themselves), “feminine” in tone, and deficient in intellect (Bradley, R. N., Racial Origins of English Character [London, 1926], pp. 6, 55, 104–05Google Scholar).

34 Race and Politics, p. 5; The Nordics, “Some Questions and Answers. What is the Race Question?” The Fascist, March 1933. The British mainland was also home to a small population of Alpines, “of a colour generally intermediate between the Aryan and the mediterranean; stolid, unimaginative, without initiative, sticking to the soil and amenable to discipline” (Race and Politics, p. 4). Alpines, however, featured only marginally in fascist racial discourse.

35 Leese, A. S., The Destruction of India: Its Causes and Prevention (London, n.d. [c. 1934]), pp. 9–10Google Scholar. Professor George Mudge of the Britons was another who complained that the combative qualities of the Irish had been greatly exaggerated during the Great War. “Many of the Irish regiments were largely recruited from English counties, but it was Irish deeds which were portrayed to us, not English, as they were in the main” (Mudge, G. P., “Pride of Race,” British Guardian, May 1924)Google Scholar.

36 “Shall We Lose Ulster? No Surrender,” British Fascist 23 (February 1933)Google Scholar.

37 “The Horse-Shoe Nail,” ibid. (Autumn 1933). For earlier attempts to establish racial distinctions between Ulster Unionists and the remainder of the island's inhabitants, see Loughlin, J., Ulster Unionism and British National Identity Since 1885 (London, 1995), pp. 28–29, 38Google Scholar.

38 “At the bottom of his heart the most fervid Republican knows he was better off under British rule. If the British troops were to march into Dublin tomorrow, they would be welcomed with open arms and prayers of thanksgiving would be offered up in every church and chapel, that the rule of the place-seeker and terrorist was over” (“Shall We Lose Ulster? No Surrender”).

39 British Lion, September 25, 1926. According to an Irish police report, the promoters of the BF in Dublin were “chiefly ex-officers of the British Army…” National Archives, Dublin. Garda Síochàna (Detective Branch) report, April 12, 1933, Dept. of Justice file S152/33, C.S. 209/33. Although few details concerning membership of the Irish Command are available, the predominance of British-born adherents can be inferred from the names of its recruits, which include such Anglo-Saxon appellations as Attwood, Burland, Crawley, Higginbotham, Hinchcliff, Leadbeater, and Robson.

40 Ibid., February 19, 1927. One of the meetings of the Kilkeel branch in November 1933 sparked “a mini-pogrom against the Catholic population of the town which lasted over a week” (Loughlin, , “Northern Ireland and British Fascism,” p. 542Google Scholar).

41 British Lion, December 4, 1926.

42 In summer 1928 the BF journal warned that large numbers of Irishmen were being recruited into the Soviet Red Army, supplementing this intelligence the following year with a report that “Down South, the Germans are busily erecting workmen's cottages on solid concrete bases, and forming a small Vaterland among their ‘Irish Brothers.’” Other articles maintained that the majority of Irish immigrants to Britain were spies for the IRA, that “disloyal Southerners” were “being drafted north for the purpose of eventually voting Ulster into the Free State,” and that the “pentecostal crew” of “English, Russian, French, [and] German” agitators supposedly flooding into Ireland were agents of a larger world conspiracy. The extent of the BF's familiarity with Irish affairs may be inferred from its apparent belief that a “captured” letter revealing the subversive intentions of republican agents had been signed by an IRA leader named “Mise le Meas Mór” (the phrase is Gaelic for “Yours very sincerely”). See the following British Lion articles: “The Peril in Ulster,” no. 24, December 1927; “Moscow Plot in Ireland,” no. 27, n.d. (c. Summer 1928); “Irish Republicans in London,” no. 28, n.d.; “The Achilles Heel; The Truth about Ireland,” March 1929. Also see “Ireland is the Achilles Heel of England,” British Fascist 20 (Spring 1932)Google Scholar.

43 For the same reason none of the British fascist societies manifested any enthusiasm for their closest Irish equivalent, General Eoin O'Duffy's quasi-fascist Blueshirt movement. As Dorothy Harriett insisted, no common ground could exist between any British patriotic society and an organization that would “not fly the Union Jack, nor sing the [British] National Anthem.”

44 Lane, A. H., “If De Valera Declares a Republic,” The Fascist, February 1934Google Scholar.

45 Ibid., October, 1933.

46 Leese, “The Division of Ireland: The Part of the Jews,” ibid., October 1937; “Our Policy in Ireland— Realism,” ibid., December 1938; “The Necessity for Re-occupying Ireland,” ibid., June 1939.

47 Ibid., May 1939.

48 Fisk, R., In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster, and the Price of Neutrality 1939–45 (London, 1983), pp. 116–17; 125–27; 236–44Google Scholar.

49 A recent example of the British ultra-right's renewed focus on Ireland is the riot perpetrated in Dublin by a group of English supporters at an Ireland-England football match in February 1995. Hurling missiles, bottles, and far-right tracts, chanting anti-Irish and anti-Catholic slogans, and giving the fascist salute, the rioters injured more than fifty people in and around the stadium. An official inquiry found that the disturbance had been planned and orchestrated by two London based neo-Nazi groups, the British National Party and Combat 18. As one participant explained, “The general feeling was that the government have let us down as far as Northern Ireland goes. [The riot] was us saying bollocks to the government and bollocks to the IRA” (Sunday Times, February 19, 1995).

50 In 1934 Joyce “protested strongly against the action of the British Government in surrendering Southern Ireland [sic] to a gang of gunmen” and, in an obituary of Edward Carson, claimed the UVF as “a precursor of Fascism in Europe” (Fascist Week, June 29, 1934); Fascist Quarterly 2 (January 1936): 28Google Scholar.

51 Rothermere to Sir Charles Blackmore, April 23, 1934, quoted in Loughlin, , “Northern Ireland and British Fascism,” p. 550Google Scholar.

52 See, e.g., “Fascist Drive in Ulster,” Fascist Week, March 23, 1934. Occasionally, the BUF deviated from this line, as when a member whose name suggests Irish ancestry taxed the Stormont government for persecuting northern Catholics, thereby leaving “Britain's flank in the west…unprotected by a discontented Ireland” (O'Brien, John, “More Ulster Nonsense,” Action, February 4, 1939)Google ScholarPubMed.

53 Ibid., May 4, 1934.

54 “Archbishop Mannix,”. Not all members of the radical right were prepared to acquit Catholicism of its “anti-British” associations. Whereas Lord Alfred Douglas, himself a Catholic convert, maintained that Ireland and crime went hand in hand “because its people are Irish, not because they are Catholics,” Hugh Stutfield attributed the Irishman's “enormous cruelty and his inordinate lust of blood, English blood in particular,” to the influence of the Church, calculating with mathematical exactitude that “Roman Catholics are, on a rough average, about four times as wicked as other people” (Plain English, December 11, 1920; Stutfield, , “The Ethics of Assassination,” National Review 474 [August 1922], emphasis in original)Google Scholar.

55 An exception was Alexander Raven Thomson's argument that the British “Left” had forced “specifically Anglo-Saxon democratic methods of parliamentary government” upon the Irish, to whom these institutions were “entirely foreign and thoroughly distasteful.” The union of Ireland North and South, he predicted, would come about under fascism, a system he apparently considered less alien to “the native Celtic culture” (“India and Ireland—Why Democracy Distorts Both,” Action, July 3, 1937).

56 The more extreme anti-Irish agenda of other fascist organizations may have damaged Mosley by association. Chris Husbands notes that the BUF had little success in winning converts among the Irish laboring population of the East End (Husbands, C. T., Racial Exclusionistn and the City [London, 1983], pp. 51–56Google Scholar).

57 To some extreme Conservatives a strong anti-Irish policy stood out as one of fascism's most positive attributes. A lengthy doggerel in the Saturday Review, listing the benefits that fascist government would bring to Britain, noted that under such a regime “Hibernians and Hindus/Will find they cannot flout us as they choose” (“Featuring Fascism,” Saturday Review, May 5, 1934).

58 Holmes, C., John Bull's Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (Basingstoke, 1988), p. 149CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Hence the observation of one Captain Coates at a Glasgow BF meeting that “Glasgow with its low Irish undesirables…could well do with a dose of sound Scottish Fascism” (British Lion 29 [March 1929]). See also Gallagher, T., “Protestant Extremism in Urban Scotland 1930–1939: Its Growth and Contraction,” Scottish Historical Review 64 (1985): 150Google Scholar.

60 Quoted in Handley, J. E., The Irish in Modern Scotland (Cork, 1947), pp. 322–23Google Scholar. See also Glasgow Herald, May 30, 1923.

61 Thomson, G. M., Caledonia, or The Future of the Scots (London, 1927)Google ScholarPubMed. Thomson referred to the “Irish invasion” of Scotland as “the gravest race problem confronting any nation in Europe to-day” (p. 16).

62 Torrence, J., Scotland's Dilemma: Province or Nation? (Edinburgh, 1938), p. 36Google Scholar.

63 See, e.g., Ratcliffe, A., Roman Catholics and Crime (Edinburgh, 1929), pp. 2–3, 12–13Google Scholar.

64 Gibb, A. Dewar, Scotland In Eclipse (London, 1930), pp. 56–57, 61Google Scholar. With disarming frankness, Gibb observed that anti-Catholicism might nonetheless be employed as a valuable weapon: “The Irish question admits of Machiavellian handling. It has two main aspects, the social-political and the religious. The [Established] Church may press its case under the cover of concern for the welfare of the State. The statesman may affect [sic] a hostility to Roman Catholicism, as to which in effect he cares not a row of pins, in order to get rid of a congeries of social pests. Both have happened. It is a case in which one combatant may be forgiven for borrowing the weapons of the other, since on every score the need is great” (Ibid., p. 60).

65 Barnes, J. & Nicholson, D., eds., The Leo Amery Diaries, 2 vols. (London, 1980), 1: 515 (entry of July 10, 1927)Google Scholar.

66 Roberts, R., The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1987), p. 22Google Scholar.