A Question of Duty: The Curragh Incident 1914

A QUESTION OF DUTY

A Question Of Duty

The Curragh Incident 1914

Paul O’Brien

A QUESTION OF DUTY

First published 2014

by New Island

2 Brookside

Dundrum Road

Dublin 14

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Paul O’Brien, 2014

Paul O’Brien has asserted his moral rights.

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-84840-314-7

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84840-315-4

MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84840-316-1

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.

Pericles, 430 BC

Contents

Prologue

Introduction

Chapter 1. Beware the Ides of March

Chapter 2. Decisions, Decisions

Chapter 3. Backs Against the Wall

Chapter 4. A Soldier’s Duty

Chapter 5. Standoff

Chapter 6. Blood Oath

Chapter 7. Enigma

Chapter 8. On The Carpet

Chapter 9. A Lifetime Guarantee

Chapter 10. Fallout

Chapter 11. Dismissed

Chapter 12. The Guns of Ulster

Chapter 13. The Calm Before The Storm

Chapter 14. Trial By Fire

Chapter 15. The Final Curtain

Chapter 16. A Death In London

Chapter 17. A Victory For The Military

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Index

Prologue

On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Serbian nationalist, waited patiently for the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to arrive on an official visit to Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia. The Archduke’s car drove through the narrow streets until, after taking a wrong turn, it stalled. As the driver attempted to restart the vehicle, Princip stepped forward from the crowd, produced a 9mm Browning semi automatic pistol and fired three shots. Franz Ferdinand was struck in the neck. His wife Sophie, who was pregnant with their fourth child, took a bullet to the stomach. Both were soon declared dead.

While the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand by an extreme Serbian organisation known as the Black Hand was not the sole or principal cause of the events that followed, it was seen by many as the lighting of the fuse that set Europe ablaze. As the sabre-rattling of the world’s politicians increased, the world’s armies mobilised and made ready for war. World War I or the Great War, as it was to become known, had commenced.

England expects that every man will do his duty.¹

Britain, like many other European countries at that time, relied on the fact that every civilian was in fact a citizen soldier. Motivated by feelings of patriotism, they were fighting for the society to which they belonged. Like soldiers, they had a moral and legal obligation to obey the lawful orders of their officers and leaders.

As the armies of the world prepared for war, British and Irish politicians heaved a sigh of relief. Unknown to many people, a major civil war in Britain and Ireland had just been averted. The Protestant population of Ireland, which constituted a local majority in the province of Ulster in the north-east, believed that their economic prosperity arose from Ireland’s union with Britain. Fearing domination by an Irish Catholic parliament, they prepared to oppose Home Rule. Ulster Unionists had armed themselves in preparation to defend the union with Britain.

The threat of armed conflict in Ireland once again came to the fore as British troops were put on alert for a possible march on Ulster. In response, Brigadier General Hubert Gough and officers of the 3rd Cavalry Brigade stationed at the Curragh Army Camp threatened to resign rather than deploy their forces in any attempt to coerce Ulster into accepting Home Rule.

This was the so called Curragh Mutiny, which precipitated the most serious crisis of civil-military relations in modern British history. It is historically significant as it was one of the few times in modern history that the British army rebelled against a government. The history of Ireland has many ‘what ifs’ and the Curragh Incident, as it was to become known, is one of those.

This complicated affair poses a number of questions for those interested in British and Irish military history. What were the events that led a government to issue a declaration of military mobilisation against its own subjects? The British government’s reaction to the escalating situation and the divisions within the ranks of the military must also be examined. The press lambasted the Liberal government and the military by referring to events at the Curragh as a mutiny. What constitutes a mutiny, and can the incident at the Curragh be deemed such? Officers and men that refuse an order given by a superior may face charges of insubordination, a very serious charge that can result in a court martial and imprisonment. In a war situation it can also result in execution.

The events at the Curragh greatly weakened the relationship between the British government and its army, an army that in 1914 was undersized and under-resourced. A question that is often overlooked is did the events at the Curragh Camp have any effect on the army’s morale and its ability to fight in the Great War?

In Ireland, many in the Nationalist community had lost all confidence in parliamentary procedure. They concluded that if an armed force could be used to oppose Home Rule, a similar force could be used to secure it. The deteriorating political and military situation was causing more and more Nationalists to seek an alternative way to achieve Home Rule. As Patrick Pearse, a founding member of the Irish Volunteers, stated: ‘I think the Orangeman with a rifle a much less ridiculous figure than the Nationalist without a rifle.’²

An armed Nationalist insurrection in Ireland was seen by many at the time as unavoidable. As in Europe, the fuse had also been lit in Ireland.

Introduction

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ireland formed part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, a connection that shaped the politics and administration of the island.

With its own parliament in Dublin since the thirteenth century, Ireland was once considered a separate kingdom. However, with the implementation of the Act of Union in 1801, Ireland’s legal independence changed dramatically. Britain’s involvement in the Napoleonic Wars against France between 1792 and 1815 had a detrimental effect on political and social affairs in Ireland.

The rebellion that erupted in Ireland in 1798 meant the British government considered the country a serious security threat. With its main army away fighting in Europe and the total military garrison in Ireland numbering just 12,000 troops, the British administration in Ireland employed the use of local militias to put down the rebellion, which they did with considerable force and brutality.

The British government decided that, to end instability in Ireland, direct rule from the Houses of Parliament in London had to be applied. In 1799, Undersecretary Edward Cooke wrote to Prime Minister William Pitt that, ‘The Union is the only means of preventing Ireland from becoming too great and too powerful.’³

In 1801, Ireland’s legal independence was removed by Westminster with the implementation of the Act of Union. The Irish Parliament passed the Act by 158 votes to 115. For the next hundred years Irish politics would be dominated by attempts to change or destroy that Act of Union.

In the decades that followed the Act, the country was to undergo great social, political, economic and religious changes. Though the majority of the people were Catholic, Protestantism was the established religion of the state. As in the Irish Parliament, Irish Catholics did not have representation in the parliament in London. In 1829, after his success in relation to the granting of Catholic Emancipation, Daniel O’Connell began to call for a repeal of the Act of Union. However, mass meetings and political agitation were not enough to bring about new legislation and O’Connell’s campaign soon collapsed.

While the Famine of the 1840s devastated the country, it did not lessen the campaign against the Act of Union. A failed rising in 1848 reminded the establishment that a strong militancy still existed in the country and that elements within Irish society sought an independent parliament.

However it was the rise of the Fenian movement in the 1850s and its subsequent campaigns in Ireland and on the English mainland that proved conclusively that Irish violence was the product of Irish grievance.

The police in Ireland and Britain sought to curtail and stamp out any form of insurgency. Many Fenians were tried publicly and faced lengthy prison sentences or transportation. In Ireland, the constabulary were an armed semi-military organisation operating from posts scattered at strategic points throughout the country. While the police in England were housed in ‘stations’, in Ireland they were housed in ‘barracks’, a fact that reflected the besieged position of the law in Ireland.

The Fenian violence and heavy-handed policing turned many Irishmen back to the tradition of parliamentary agitation. It also caused English statesmen to reconsider the Irish Question. While the latter part of the nineteenth century would be dominated by colonial affairs, the Irish Question would keep its place in parliamentary discussion. However, while some politicians discussed the matter, others wanted action.

Even though the Irish Question was a dominant topic of discussion in the Houses of Parliament since the implementation of the Act of Union, the Irish were severely disadvantaged in their pursuit of Home Rule. The reason for this was the way in which the political structure of the House of Commons functioned.

The British Parliament consisted, as it still does, of an upper house, the House of Lords, and a lower house, the House of Commons. While the population elected the members of the House of Commons, the members of the House of Lords, the Lords Spiritual and the Lords Temporal, were appointed and had the power to reject and thus defeat bills approved and passed by the Commons. The membership consisted of senior bishops of the Church of England and members of the peerage appointed by the sovereign on the advice of the Prime Minister. Many of those sitting in the House of Lords were the aristocratic and the wealthy; for the most part they supported the Conservatives against the Liberals.

From 1870, a strong Irish nationalist party appeared in Westminster demanding an Irish parliament. By the beginning of 1885, the Irish Parliamentary Party, or the Irish Party as it was often called, led by Charles Stuart Parnell, had managed to convince the Liberal and the Conservative parties that in the coming election either party might need to depend on Irish support if they wanted to stay in government. The subsequent general election in November 1885 resulted in Parnell securing eighty-six seats, which was enough to hold the balance of power between the two main British parties. While Parnell toyed with both sides, William Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal Party, decided to lend his support to Home Rule. In reference to the Act of Union, Gladstone stated:

There is no blacker or fouler transaction in the history of man. We used the whole civil government of Ireland as an engine of wholesale corruption … we obtained that union against the sense of every class of the community by wholesale bribery and unblushing intimidation.⁴

The year 1885 also saw the emergence in Dublin of Irish unionism. Many people had become concerned by the activities of the Irish Party and believed that the union between Britain and Ireland was under serious threat. Unionism received huge support from the Protestant population in Ulster. The Unionists planned to establish a strong and disciplined opposition movement in the province against Home Rule.

By February 1886, with the support of the Irish Party, Gladstone was back in Parliament as Prime Minister. The Liberals, anxious to retain Irish support, prompted them to introduce a Home Rule Bill in Parliament on 8 April 1886. This action split the Liberal Party, with the dissenting Liberals, including Joseph Chamberlain, joining the Conservatives in defeating the Bill. Many opposed to Home Rule believed that the establishment of a separate Irish Parliament would destroy the