Irish Officers in the Great War

Sweeney, Loughlin

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-19307-2_7

Loughlin Sweeney²

195 Accesses

Abstract

With the outbreak of the First World War, the threat of insurrection in Ireland subsided—at least initially. The country was gripped by war fever, and men from all walks of life and political traditions rushed to the colours. Among them were thousands of candidates for wartime commissions, so-called temporary gentlemen. In the midst of increasing tensions in the officer corps (including allegations of political interference, declining moral authority, and controversies over the question of ‘professionalisation’), there was a brief widening of its class base, as an unprecedented number of middle-class officers (and former enlisted men) entered the officers’ mess. On the home front, another body blow to Irish officers’ social position was struck with the outbreak of the Easter Rising. The reactions of officers who fought against the insurrectionists in Dublin, and how they subsequently remembered their experiences of that conflict, are a major component in understanding the decline in military officers’ moral authority in Ireland.

There is a shortage of Irish. You idlers are deserting your country … You think to get your rights by refusing to do your duty. That is not the way. Do your duty and claim your rights.

—4th Earl of Dunraven, 1917

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Notes

1.
Windham Wyndham-Quin, ‘“Ireland Awake”, An Open Letter to his Fellow Countrymen’, Dublin, June 1917 (Dublin, 1917), p. 15.
2.
Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution, 1910–1922 (London, 2013), p. 176; ‘Recruiting in Ireland. Sir E. Carson’s Analysis of the Figures’, The Times, 13 October 1916; ‘Recruiting in Ireland’, The Times, 11 May 1916; ‘Recruiting in Ireland’, The Times, 14 April 1917.
3.
Letter from Capt. W. B. Rennie, HQ 16th Division, Mallow, n.d. (1914). Moore papers, NLI.
4.
Tom Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki: The Story of the Irish Regiments in the Great War, 1914–18 (Dublin, 1992), p. 195.
5.
Doherty and Truesdale, Irish Winners of the Victoria Cross, p. 102.
6.
Australia also claims credit for the first engagement of the war, when a shore battery at Melbourne harbour fired a warning shot at a departing German freighter shortly after receiving notification of the declaration of war in the early hours of 5th August (it was still the evening of the 4th in Europe), forcing it to return to port for impounding.
7.
Edward Spiers, The Army and Society 1815–1914 (London, 1980), p. 288.
8.
Tom Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki: The Story of the Irish Regiments in the Great War, 1914–18 (Dublin, 1992) passim.; Steven O’Connor, Irish Officers in the British Forces, 1922–1945 (London, 2014), p. 76; Jill Bender, ‘Ireland and Empire’ in Bourke and McBride, The Princeton History of Modern Ireland (Princeton, 2016), p. 348.
9.
Shane Leslie, The Irish Tangle for English Readers (London, 1946), p. 159.
10.
‘Not to be Turned into a Militia’, Irish Independent, 19 August 1914.
11.
Peter Martin, ‘Dulce et Decorum: Irish Nobles in the Great War, 1914–19’, in Gregory, Adrian, and Senia Pašeta, eds., Ireland and the Great War: ‘A War to Unite Us All’? (Manchester. 2002), p. 32.
12.
Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma (London, 1985), p. 272.
13.
Diary of Shane Leslie, 17 November 1915. Leslie papers, NLI.
14.
Lord Meath to Kitchener, 14 August 1914. Kitchener papers, TNA; Percy Illingsworth to Kitchener, 7 August 1914. Kitchener papers, TNA.
15.
Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 273.
16.
Berkeley to Moore, 2 September 1914. Berkeley papers, CCA.
17.
Cf. Peter Martin, ‘Dulce et Decorum’, p. 35.
18.
John Redmond to Lord Meath, 19 August 1914. Kitchener papers, TNA; Bryan Mahon, fwd. to Cooper, The Tenth (Irish) Division in Gallipoli (Dublin, 1993), pp. 11–14; ‘Confidential’, G Coy., Royal Engineers to George Berkeley, 31 July 1914. Berkeley papers, CCA.
19.
John Redmond, foreword to Bryan Cooper, The Tenth (Irish) Division in Gallipoli (Dublin, 1993), p. 6.
20.
See Jane McGaughey, Ulster’s Men: Protestant Unionist Masculinities and Militarization in the North of Ireland, 1912–1923 (Montreal, 2012), p. 63.
21.
Earl Dunraven, No Army, No Empire (n.d.), p. 6; Colonel R. Pope Hennessy, ‘A Letter to a Fellow Countryman’, 1920. Berkeley papers, CCA; Vane, On Certain Fundamentals, p. 8; Basil Brooke to Rev. Macanway, 6 November 1915. Bernard papers, British Library.
22.
Myers, The Great War and Memory, p. 176.
23.
Philip Orr, ‘The Somme Legacy’, The Linen Hall Review 4 (1987), pp. 5–7.
24.
Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–16 (Manchester, 1988), pp. 70–71; Hughes, Fighting Irish, p. 26.
25.
Godley in McGaughey, Ulster’s Men, p. 115.
26.
Ibid. p. 274.
27.
Nora Robertson, Crowned Harp: Memories of the Last Days of the Crown in Ireland (Dublin, 1960), p. 129.
28.
Maurice Moore, typescript of article, 1914. Moore papers, NLI.
29.
Tomás Irish, Trinity in War and Revolution (Dublin, 2015), p. 87.
30.
Roger Willoughby, A Military History of the University of Dublin and its Officers Training Corps, 1910–1922 (Dublin, 1983), p. 12.
31.
Toby Moore to Col. Maurice Moore, London, 30 May 1915. Moore papers, NLI.
32.
Edward M. Spiers, The Army and Society 1815–1914 (New York, 1980), p. 297.
33.
Lord Roberts to Kitchener, 10 August 1914. Kitchener papers, TNA; Capt. Kemmis to his father, 17 December 1915. Kemmis papers, LUL.
34.
Letter from Capt. W. B. Rennie, ADC, HQ 16th Division, Mallow, n.d. (1914), Moore papers, NLI. Emphasis mine.
35.
Gavin Hughes, Fighting Irish: The Irish Regiments in the First World War (Sallins, 2015), p. 29. Parsons was not himself a nationalist, and he appears, like many of his fellow officers, to have tolerated nationalist influence in the army so long as there was no detrimental effect on discipline.
36.
Spiers, Army and Society, pp. 7–8; P. E. Razzell, ‘Social Origins of Officers in the Indian and British Home Army: 1958–1962’, British Journal of Sociology 14 (1963), p. 258.
37.
Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, pp. 217–221.
38.
War Office, ‘Description of Recruiting Since Mobilisation’, 1915. Kitchener papers, TNA.
39.
Nicholas Perry, ‘The Irish Landed Class and the British Army, 1850–1950’, War in History 18 (2011), pp. 324–326.
40.
David Fitzpatrick, ‘The Logic of Collective Sacrifice: Ireland and the British Army, 1914–1918’, Historical Journal 38 (1995), p. 1017.
41.
Anthony Morton, ‘Sandhurst and the First World War: The Royal Military College 1902–1918’, Sandhurst Occasional Paper No. 17 (2014), p. 4.
42.
Paul Usherwood, ‘Elizabeth Thompson Butler: The Consequences of Marriage’, Women’s Art Journal 9 (1988), pp. 30–34.
43.
Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–16, (Manchester, 1988), p. 221.
44.
Irish, Trinity in War and Revolution, p. 94; Edward Littleton Vaughan, List of Etonians Who Fought in the Great War, 1914–1919 (London, 1921).
45.
RHMS officers constituted only a small proportion of the total number of RHMS students who served in the First World War.
46.
Spiers, Army and Society, p. 8.
47.
Martin, ‘Dulce et Decorum’, p. 29.
48.
Ibid. p. 39.
49.
Razzell, ‘Social Origins’, pp. 254, 259.
50.
Times of India, 26 January 1893.
51.
O’Connor, Irish Officers, pp. 84–86; Cook, ‘The Irish Raj’, pp. 509, 520.
52.
Frank P. Crozier, Five Years Hard (London, 1932), p. 217. Crozier was a typical frontier colonial officer who regarded the advance of ‘civilisation’ as detrimental to the perceived benefits of the natural, sporting, outdoor life of the African coloniser. Such individuals regarded colonial life as a liberation from the strictures and responsibilities of army discipline and Edwardian society. See Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of British Africa.
53.
Anthony Kirk-Greene, Symbol of Authority: The British District Officer in Africa (London, 2006), p. 20; Gann and Duignan, British Africa, p. 208.
54.
Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race, and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester, 2004), p. 158.
55.
Frank Younghusband to Lord Castletown, The Residency, Kashmir, 15 July 1907. Castletown papers, NLI.
56.
Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire: Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb (London, 2009), p. 74; Maurice Collis, The Journey Outward (London, 1952).
57.
Captain William Kemmis to his father, Muttra, 30 October 1913. Kemmis papers, LUL.
58.
Bubb, ‘The Life of an Irish Soldier in India’, p. 804; Cf. Grimshaw, Indian Cavalry Officer, p. 28.
59.
Times of India, 19 February 1917; Times of India, 21 August 1917.
60.
Confidential Reports on Indian Officers granted King’s Commissions, 13 September 1918. India Office records, British Library.
61.
Streets, Martial Races, pp. 98–101.
62.
The Times, 20 August 1917. Repington had been chastised while in the officer corps by Henry Wilson for carrying on an affair with Lady Garstin, the wife of an Indian civil servant. After breaking his parole to Wilson and continuing the affair, he was forced to resign his commission.
63.
Ibid.
64.
Ibid.
65.
Cf. Robertson, Crowned Harp, p. 26.
66.
The Times, 29 September 1915.
67.
Sir Michael O’Dwyer, ‘India’s Man-Power in the War’, Army Quarterly 2 (1921), p. 359; Letter to Viscount Cross, Secretary of State for India, from Dufferin, Roberts, Hope, Chesney, Scobie, Peile and Westland, Simla, 12 August 1887. India Office Records, British Library; The Times, 18 November 1914; Times of India, 19 February 1917.
68.
Streets, Martial Races, p. 158.
69.
That is, the use of the .303 British Army cartridge to put down dissent. This was famously the answer of Lieutenant Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant during his court martial for murdering prisoners and civilians in the South African War, when asked by the prosecutor under which rule he had carried out the executions.
70.
William Kemmis to his father, Hera, 8 January 1914. Kemmis papers, LUL.
71.
William Kemmis to his father, France, 24 May 1916. Kemmis papers, LUL.
72.
Roly Grimshaw, Indian Cavalry Officer 1914–15 (Tunbridge Wells, 1986), p. 28.
73.
Maj. Gen. Partap Narain, Subedar to Field Marshal (Delhi, 1999), p. 42.
74.
Kitchener papers, August–December 1914. TNA.
75.
Hibernia: Quarterly Magazine of the Royal Hibernian Military School, vols. 4–5. British Library.
76.
Letter from Sapper J. Wright, 15th Co. Royal Engineers, BEF, France, Hibernia, October 1916, p. 29. British Library.
77.
Based on a death rate for Irish soldiers of between 13% and 26%. Cf. Martin, ‘Dulce et Decorum’, p. 40.
78.
Michael Duffy, ‘Tom Hazell’, firstworldwar.com, 2009.
79.
Peter Martin, ‘Dulce et decorum’, pp. 39–40.
80.
Patrick Maume, ‘O’Gowan, Eric Edward Dorman (Eric Edward Dorman-Smith), (“Chink”)’, DIB.
81.
Tom Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki: The Story of the Irish Regiments in the Great War, 1914–18 (Dublin, 1992), p. 14.
82.
Anthony Seldon and David Walsh, Public Schools and the Great War: The Generation Lost (Barnsley, 2013), p. 67.
83.
For the many other professional institutions that evinced a continuity in pre- and post-independence Ireland, see Campbell, The Irish Establishment, p. 27; McBride, Greening, p. 11.
84.
Military Secretary, 1892; ‘Irish Officers for Irish Regiments’, Kerry Sentinel, 21 August 1915.
85.
Anthony P. Quinn, Wigs and Guns: Irish Barristers in the Great War (Dublin, 2006), p. 48.
86.
John Clarke MacDermott, typescript account of the Easter Rising, 1979, p. 57. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, KCL.
87.
Ibid. p. 66.
88.
Ibid. p. 62.
89.
Liam Hogan, register of Limerick’s First World War graves, Limerick City Library.
90.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (London, 2013), p. 6.
91.
Martin, ‘Dulce et decorum’, p. 43.
92.
Jeffery, Henry Wilson, p. 198; Niamh Puirseil, ‘War, Work and Labour’, in Horne, Our War p. 193.
93.
Hughes, Fighting Irish, p. 102; Richardson, According to Their Lights, p. 393–394; Richard S. Grayson and Fearghal McGarry, eds., Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising, the Somme, and the Politics of Memory in Ireland (Cambridge, 2016).
94.
Maurice Moore, quoted in Ó Corraín, p. 106.
95.
Chelmsford to Martineau, Simla, 30 April 1916. Seely correspondence, British Library.
96.
Captain E. Gerrard, ADC 5th Division, ‘Defence of Beggars Bush Barracks by British, Easter Week, 1916’, BMH witness statement WS348.
97.
Ibid.
98.
Brian Inglis, West Briton (London, 1962), p. 14.
99.
MacDermott, typescript account of the Easter Rising, p. 54.
100.
Ibid. p. 55.
101.
A. A. Luce, ‘Recollections of Easter Monday 1916’, 1965. Luce Papers, TCD.
102.
Neil Richardson, According to Their Lights: Stories of Irishmen in the British Army, Easter 1916 (Dublin, 2015), pp. 12–20; Hughes, Fighting Irish, pp. 101–103; Paul Taylor, Heroes or Traitors? Experiences of Southern Irish Soldiers Returning from the Great War 1919–1939 (Manchester, 2015), pp. 10–11.
103.
Hughes, Fighting Irish, p. 104.
104.
The Volunteer Training Corps was an official militia formation constituted of men who were too old to enlist, or proscribed from doing so due to occupation—not to be confused with the National- or Ulster Volunteers.
105.
Major G. A. Harris, Report on the Defence of Trinity College, May 1916, p. 19; Irish, Trinity in War and Revolution, pp. 131–134.
106.
Ibid. p. 20.
107.
Luce, Recollections of Easter 1916, TCD.
108.
Eileen Irwin to her sister-in-law, Dorothy Evans-Price, Burma, about the Easter Rising in Dublin, April, 1916. Sir Alfred Irwin papers, NLI; R. B. McDowell, Land and Learning: Two Irish Clubs (Dublin, 1993), p. 142.
109.
Fergus Campbell, ‘The Easter Rising in Galway’, History Ireland 14:2 (2006), pp. 24–25.
110.
MacDermott, typescript account of the Easter Rising, p. 57.
111.
Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution, 1910–1922 (London, 2013), pp. 222–227.
112.
Asquith to Kitchener, 26 April 1916. Kitchener papers, TNA.
113.
General Friend to Kitchener, 16 November 1914. Kitchener papers, TNA.
114.
Kitchener to Robertson, 26 April 1916. Kitchener papers, TNA.
115.
Robertson to Murray, 26 January 1916; Murray to Robertson, 15 February 1916. General Murray correspondence, British Library.
116.
Fanning, Fatal Path, pp. 141–142.
117.
Gerrard, BMH witness statement, p. 8; ‘MP Rescued by Sinn Féiners—Strong Escort Disarmed in a Dublin Street’, Daily Sketch, 13 February 1920.
118.
‘The Belfast Inquiry: Colthurst’s Statements’, Irish Independent, 26 August 1916.
119.
Leah Levenson and Jerry Natterstad, Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington: Irish Feminist (Syracuse, 1986), p. 97; Francis Vane, Agin the Governments: Memories and Adventures of Sir Francis Fletcher Vane, Bt. (London, 1929), p. 257. Fletcher-Vane had a fractious relationship with his commander, Lawrence Parsons, throughout his war service which led him to be removed from front-line service and stationed in Dublin. Parsons regarded Vane as too ‘political’, particularly in the delicate context of the 16th Division.
120.
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London, 1988), pp. 488–489; Miller, Queen’s Rebels, p. 107.
121.
Lord Wimborne to Maxwell, 8 May 1916. British Library.
122.
‘Irish Convention’, Irish Examiner, 14 December 1917.
123.
Richardson, According to Their Lights, p. 90.
124.
Daithí Ó Corraín, ‘“A Most Public-spirited and Unselfish Man”: The Career and Contribution of Colonel Maurice Moore, 1854–1939’, Studia Hibernica 40 (2015), p. 109.
125.
Earl Dunraven, ‘Ireland Awake! An Open Letter to his Fellow Countrymen’, 1917, Dunraven papers, LUL, p. 15.
126.
Vane-Tempest to mother, 27 November 1917. Vane-Tempest papers, PRONI; See also Lord Roberts to H. H. Asquith, 20 March 1914, in Ian F. Beckett, The Army and the Curragh Incident 1914 (London, 1986), p. 55.
127.
Powerscourt to Spring Rice, 1917. Monteagle papers, NLI.
128.
Vane, On Certain Fundamentals, p. 12; Leo Keohane, Captain Jack White: Imperialism, Anarchy & the Irish Citizen Army (Sallins, 2014), p. 191.
129.
Maxwell to Bernard, 11 July 1916. Bernard papers, British Library.
130.
Irish Examiner, 14 February 1917.
131.
Dunraven, ‘Ireland Awake’.
132.
The Spectator, 28 July 1916; ‘Irish Officer Court-Martialled’, Irish Examiner, 24 November 1917; Murray to Robertson, Egypt, 26 May 1916. Murray-Robertson correspondence, British Library; Denman, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers, p. 148.
133.
The Times, 1 August 1916. Nathan’s figures are higher than those collected by the Ministry of Pensions, which showed Irish recruitment to 1916 numbering 90,505, and still being under 100,000 by April. See Taylor, Heroes or Traitors, p. 8.
134.
Wigram to Godley, 18 May 1916. Godley papers, KCL.
135.
Chaplain McRory diary, 1917. PRONI.
136.
Ibid.
137.
Niamh A. Gallagher, ‘Irish Civil Society and the Great War, 1914–1918’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (2014), pp. 239–240.
138.
Sarah Benton, ‘Women Disarmed: The Militarisation of Politics in Ireland, 1913–23’, Feminist Review 50 (1995), pp. 151–152.
139.
Fitzpatrick, ‘Militarism’, p. 383.
140.
Bartlett and Jeffery, ‘An Irish Military Tradition?’, pp. 22–25.
141.
Fitzpatrick, ‘Militarism’, p. 379; Silvestri, Ireland and India, p. 126; Karsten, ‘Suborned’, pp. 32–34; Verney, The Micks, p. 4.
142.
Shane Leslie diary, 17 November 1916. Leslie papers, NLI.
143.
Draft of a letter from Maurice Moore, 9 December 1916. Moore papers, NLI.
144.
Illustrated London News, 21 November 1914.

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Sweeney, L. (2019). Irish Officers in the Great War. In: Irish Military Elites, Nation and Empire, 1870–1925. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19307-2_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19307-2_7
Published: 06 August 2019
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