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‘An Irish Louvain’: memories of 1914 and the moral climate in Britain during the Irish War of Independence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2020

Edward Madigan
Edward Madigan*
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
*
*Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, edward.madigan@rhul.ac.uk
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 165 , May 2020 , pp. 91 - 105
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Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2020

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References

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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.

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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.

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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

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44 Jones and Madigan, ‘The isle of saints and soldiers’, pp 121–4.

45 Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence, p. 25.

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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).

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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.