1916 in Global Context

An anti-Imperial moment

Enrico Dal Lago, Róisín Healy, Gearóid Barry, Enrico Dal Lago, Róisín Healy, Gearóid Barry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351718240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The year 1916 has recently been identified as "a tipping point for the intensification of protests, riots, uprisings and even revolutions." Many of these constituted a challenge to the international pre-war order of empires, and thus collectively represent a global anti-imperial moment, which was the revolutionary counterpart to the later diplomatic attempt to construct a new world order in the so-called Wilsonian moment. Chief among such events was the Easter Rising in Ireland, an occurrence that took on worldwide significance as a challenge to the established order. This is the first collection of specialist studies that aims at interpreting the global significance of the year 1916 in the decline of empires.

Section IV
European Responses and Parallels

12 British Labour and Irish Rebels

“Try and Understand”

Geoffrey Bell

In a plea written in response to the Easter Rising the English socialist intellectual Harold Laski, asked, “Surely, for the first time England can try and understand”.¹ This chapter explores the extent to which Laski’s words were heeded in his own British labour movement. It examines the reactions to and explanations of the Rising and its immediate aftermath offered by the Labour Party and other left-wing parties in Britain. These include the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Fabians, the British Socialist Party (BSP) and the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), of which James Connolly had been the first national secretary. These reactions will be located in the context of the British labour movement’s ideological traditions with respect to Ireland, contemporary British politics, the British socialist world, the Irish in Britain and the wider world of international socialism.

A useful event with which to commence, as with other narratives of the 1916 Easter Rising, is the Dublin Lockout of 1913; that “desperate, anguished and brutal affair”, as the eloquent George Dangerfield described it.² The Lockout was preceded by a transport-workers’ strike against the Dublin Tramway Company, owned by William Martin Murphy, Dublin’s leading capitalist who was also owner of the Irish Independent daily newspaper. The strike was organised by the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), led by James Larkin and James Connolly. A week after it began, in August 1913, Murphy organised Dublin employers to exclude the ITGWU and its members from their work places across the city. The “Lockout” lasted until February 1914 and ended in defeat for the union. That defeat had been signalled on 9 December 1913 when the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) withdrew its support for the Irish workers. Many of the leaders of the TUC had never forgiven Larkin and Connolly for breaking away from the British-based union movement. This in itself has an important relevance, indicating, among other things that the British labour movement had something of a proprietorial attitude towards their Irish counterparts. Similarly, the political organisations of the British working class, notably the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the ILP, had, during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, opposed the Irish forming parties separate from them.³

Different attitudes were suggested at a rally in support of the Dublin Lockout workers, held on 1 November 1913 in London’s Albert Hall. Four of 13 speakers at the rally have significance. The first was Connolly himself. “You cannot build a free nation built on slavery”, he was reported as saying. He went on to declare he was “against the domination of nation over nation, of class over class and of sex over sex”. He insisted, “You cannot have freedom or self-respect whilst you have starvation, whether it is the green flag or the Union Jack that is flying over our head”.⁴ The speech, said the British labour movement’s newspaper, the Daily Herald was, “A masterpiece… Here was a man with more statesmanship in his little finger than in the whole Cabinet heaped together”.

Following Connolly, the Daily’s Herald’s George Lansbury spoke. In his autobiography Lansbury was to remember how as a child in East London he had joined his London-Irish school friends in singing “God Save Ireland” in the playground, defying teachers who had dared to criticise the Fenians.⁵ He showed similar belligerence decades later when he told the Albert Hall, “We are out for a fight. In Dublin as in London, property must take second place”.

Even more militant was George Bernard Shaw, the Dublin-born playwright and member of the socialist inclined Fabian Society, which in the opening decades of the twentieth century played a significant role in shaping the ideology of the Labour Party. On this occasion, Shaw was some distance from the usual Fabian moderation. His speech was a call to arms, literally. Criticising the role of the Dublin police in the Lockout, he observed,

It has been the practice, ever since the modern police were established, in difficulties with the working class, to let loose the police and tell them to do their worst with the people. Now if you put the policeman on the footing of a mad dog it can only end in one way – that all respectable men will have to arm themselves. I suggest you arm yourselves with some something that would put a decisive stop to the police.

This indeed was fighting talk: the headline in The Times was, “Mr Shaw on Arming Against the Police”.⁶ Interestingly, it was just two weeks later that James Connolly played a leading role in forming the Irish Citizen Army. No biographer of either Connolly or Shaw has argued this was all Shaw’s big idea, but perhaps, it can be suggested, he did give it a nod of encouragement.

The other dramatic intervention came from Sylvia Pankhurst, the daughter of Emmeline and sister of Christabel. Sylvia had always been on the socialist wing of the suffragette movement. As she told the Albert Hall rally she had already been arrested five times and expected to be so again that evening. She declared, “Women had no votes … the only thing they could do was fight”. Sylvia soon had a different sort of fight on her hands when she was thrown out of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) by her mother and sister because of her appearance at the Albert Hall rally; this they argued had compromised the independence of the WSPU.⁷ Pankhurst, Lansbury and Shaw were to have significant and important reactions to the Easter Rising, but, before we come to these, a more general context about the 1916 British labour movement, including its policies on Ireland, can be noted.

That movement was headed by the Labour Party which had been founded in 1906, evolving from the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) founded in 1900. The early motivation of the LRC was to increase the number of working class individuals in the House of Commons, to which the Labour Party added the reversal of anti-union legislation. Many of the early protagonists of the party came from trade unions. Others had served their political apprenticeships in the Liberal Party, which had encouraged working class representation in parliament and in pursuit of this, had formed an early pact with Labour. Consequently, Labour won 42 seats in the 1910 general election. The party had no individual membership until 1918; the 2,220,000 membership in 1916 were all affiliates from the unions or political organisations. In 1916 there were 4,644,000 trade unionists in Britain, of whom just over three million were affiliated to the TUC. Of the political organisations affiliated to the Labour Party, the most prominent was the ILP, founded in 1891, which had also played a role in forming the Labour Party but whose membership was much more overtly political. In 1914 the ILP had between 20,000 and 30,000 members. To the left of the ILP was the BSP, established in 1912. It had evolved from the Marxist-oriented SDF. In 1914 the BSP had a membership of just fewer than 14,000. Definitely non-Marxist was the Fabian Society, founded in 1884, which, in today’s language, was a think-tank, whose influence over the Labour Party was greater than suggested by its total membership, which never exceeded several thousand. To the left of these was the SLP, which was largely confined to Scotland, and the Workers (previously Women’s) Suffrage (later Socialist) Federation (WSF) led by Sylvia Pankhurst and based in East London. Neither the WSF nor the SLP ever had a membership which reached four figures, but again they had an influence beyond their numbers.

For the purpose of this essay, an ideological audit of the British Labour movement is also required specifically in respect to Ireland and to the Great War which had commenced in 1914. Neither the TUC, which had been established in 1868, nor the LRC, nor the Labour Party, nor the ILP, nor the BSP had ever discussed Ireland at their conferences, despite the significant part Ireland played in British politics in the latter half of the nineteenth century and, more specifically the “Ulster Crisis”, of 1912–1914, which brought Ireland and Britain to the verge of civil war, prevented, at least in part, by British participation in the Great War. This was supported by the Labour Party and the TUC. It was opposed by the ILP, the WSF and the SLP; but much of this opposition was on pacifist grounds, especially in respect of the ILP. The BSP also supported the British war effort until its conference held, coincidently, in Easter 1916. The Fabians had no official position on the conflict, although a majority of its membership approved of British participation. Ramsay MacDonald who resigned as Labour Party leader because of his opposition to the war, summed all this up by saying, “When the war broke out organised Labour in this country lost the initiative. It became a mere echo of the old governing classes’ opinion”.⁸

In assessing whether the British working-class movement echoed its rulers on the Easter Rising, or whether the spirit of the Albert Hall in 1913 prevailed, three features of its 1916 politics briefly just described had pessimistic implications for the Irish rebels: the lack of discussion of Ireland, the support for the war, or, if not, pacifism. These were also likely to prove barriers to sympathy.

So it certainly seemed in the House of Commons on May 1916 when Will Thorne rose to ask a question of Prime Minister Asquith. Thorne was in many ways an embodiment of British Labour. He was born into a working-class family in Birmingham in 1857, moved to London where he became a member of the SDF, and was an active trade unionist who in 1889 helped to form the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers, one of the first unions in Britain for unskilled workers. He was elected to the leadership body (Parliamentary Committee) of the TUC, was a Labour local councillor and became a Labour MP for West Ham in 1906. On the outbreak of the Great War he signed up and became a lieutenant colonel in the Essex Regiment. He was the first Labour MP to raise the issue of the Easter Rising in the House of Commons. The day he did so saw the first three executions of the leaders of the Rising. Thorne asked, “Can the Prime Minister state when the man Sir Roger Casement is going to be tried. He was the forerunner of this movement?”⁹ During the following three days nine more of the Rising’s leaders were executed. Two days later Thorne asked, this time the Attorney General, when Casement’s trial would proceed.¹⁰ By this time Casement had been in prison for a mere two weeks, so T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• SECTION I Transnational and Comparative Approaches to 1916
• SECTION II The Atlantic World
• SECTION III North Africa, Asia and the Pacific
• SECTION IV European Responses and Parallels
• Index