Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘What?’

Thought-provoking novel set on an island off the west of Ireland in the summer of 1979. An English painter and a French linguist come to stay, one to capture the landscapes and peoplescapes, and the other to record the decline of the Irish language, which is helpfully translated diegetically every time it is used. The main narrative is interspersed with the real-time events of the Troubles, culminating in the Mountbatten and Narrow Water bombings, which are geographically not all that close to the setting of the story, but have a big psychological impact on the people who live there. It’s a vivid depiction of an isolated community whose engagement with the outside world is limited, but also a book that looks at what is effectively raiding of its cultural resources by artist and linguist (who naturally dislike each other). A good read.

You can get The Colony here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was a step which could only have been taken by a Minister exercising Peel’s authority. With the single exception of Corn Law repeal, his ‘mastery’ over his Cabinet was said to be complete; he had ‘got them as obedient and well trained as the crew of a man of war’.¹ His purchase of Indian corn proved the decisive factor in relieving the distress of 1845-46, but the subsequent value to Ireland of Peel’s boldness, independence and strength of mind was unfortunately outweighed by his belief in an economic theory which almost every politician of the day, Whig or Tory, held with religious fervour.
¹ Peel Memoirs, II, p. 173.
Parker, Life and Letters of Sir James Graham, 2nd baronet of Netherby, PC., GCB (1907), Vol. I, p. 26.
Treasury Minute, December 9, 1845. Correspondence explanatory of the Measures adopted by H.M. Government for the Relief of Distress arising from the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, H.C., 1846 (735), Vol. XXXVII, p. 2. (Corr. Explan.).
Greville, [Memoirs,] Vol. V, p. 16.

Like most schoolchildren in Ireland, I was taught about the famine in history classes as one of the fundamental facts of Irish history. The 1841 census found that the population of Ireland was 8.5 million; today, combining both parts, it is just over seven million. The populations of counties Clare, Fermanagh, Longford, Sligo, Tipperary, Mayo and Cavan today are less than half what they were in 1841. The populations of counties Monaghan and Roscommon are less than a third of their 1841 numbers. Leitrim’s population today is 22% of the 1841 figure. It’s a catastrophe whose impact is still very visible. The immediate impact in the 1840s is vividly shown in this map:

Cecil Woodham-Smith’s 1962 book was the first popular history book of the twentieth century to cover the whole period in detail. It came after successful books on the Charge of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale, and she later wrote a biography of Queen Victoria. She was from an Irish military family; she claimed to be descended from the Dukes of Leinster, but I have to say that my research does not support this. She was clearly a good story-teller, and Alan Bennet has a couple of funny anecdotes about her.

We were taught at school that the Famine came about as a combination of the natural disaster of a fungal infection, the potato blight, killing the crop on which most Irish people survived, and the unwillingness of the British government to provide relief for the starving population; meanwhile corn which could have fed the hungry was exported and thousands of impoverished tenants were evicted, driving the great wave of Irish emigration to the USA (and to an extent Canada and Australia) which still shapes Irish-American relations today.

A lot of this is rooted in The Great Hunger. But there’s a huge difference between reading the awful, but sanitised, version of history in my schoolbooks forty-five years ago, and reading the primary documentation that Woodham-Smith assembled. The direct accounts of the misery and squalor endured by the population are really tough reading. One cannot defend the authorities in Dublin Castle or in London on the grounds of ignorance. Indeed, the British Prime Minister wrote: “we have made it the most degraded and most miserable country in the world…all the world is crying shame upon us.”

Woodham-Smith is also very enlightening on the second prong of the received historical account, the ideological opposition of the London government to effective aid. Like most governments, of course, Sir Robert Peel and then Lord John Russell were particularly motivated by their need to keep a parliamentary majority, and Russell’s attempts to take a more proactive stance were blocked by others within his coalition. In the end, the buck stops at the top, and also with Charles Trevelyan, who as Assistant Secretary to the Treasury was the single most influential voice on maintaining laissez-faire (what we would today call libertarian) policies, which killed a million people.

I was less familiar with other parts of the story. I had vaguely clocked the fact that more people died of disease than malnutrition; but Woodham-Smith fleshes this out with details of the epidemics that swept through the devastated population, based to a certain extent on the advance of medical knowledge between 1845 and 1962. The worst of all was the effect on emigrants crammed together in unhealthy conditions on the ships going to North America, and then quarantined together when they arrived. On Grosse Isle, just off Quebec, at least 3,000 Irish immigrants are known to have died of various diseases and at least 5,000 are known to be buried. The true figures are obscure, but those numbers are bad enough.

Although the English politicians were more culpable because they were in power, Irish politicians did not cover themselves in glory either, and Woodham-Smith spends a couple of chapters looking at the failure of the Young Ireland movement and the pathetic 1848 rebellion. I admit that it’s difficult to prescribe what politicians could do as society disintegrates around them, but calling on the starving masses to seize arms against the entrenched forces of the largest army in the world probably isn’t it.

Having said all that, the book ends on a weird high note describing the visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Ireland in 1849, as a kind of coda to the whole story. The royals had a great time, cruising along the coast from Cork to Dublin and then doing official engagements in Dublin and Belfast. Woodham-Smith presents this as a huge success. I guess it was cathartic, but the direct effects of the famine continued until 1852, so the royal visit wasn’t really the end of the story as it is presented here.

Parenthesis: Victoria’s 1849 visit was the first by a British monarch since her uncle, George IV, had turned up in 1821; and only the second since the War of the Three Kingdoms in 1689-90 had seen James II and William III in direct combat at the Battle of the Boyne. Before that, only three English monarchs had set foot in Ireland during their reigns: Richard II in 1394, King john in 1210 and Henry II in 1171.

I was fortunate enough to acquire my father’s first edition copy from 1962, but you can get The Great Hunger here.

This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is The Enigma Score, by Sherri S. Tepper.

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In Gweedore the crisis was exceptionally severe. A total collapse in the demand for seasonal laborers—the “tattie-hokers” who went en masse to harvest potatoes on Scottish estates—had left most families without a supplementary income, forcing them to buy goods on credit from local shopkeepers. Some of these acted as the district’s bankers—the hated “gombeen men,” who were regarded by the community as money-grabbing usurers. They, too, were refusing further loans. From Dublin a certain amount of aid was being organized by two influential private charities; in London a group of Quakers who had provided relief during the Great Famine stepped in again. One was led by a gentle, white-whiskered philanthropist named James Hack Tuke, who set off for Donegal at the beginning of March.

On 6 May 1882, the newly appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, arrived in Dublin for his first day in the job. In the evening, as he was walking from Dublin Castle to his official residence in Phoenix Park, Thomas Henry Burke, the Permanent Under Secretary who also had an official residence in the Park, spotted him from his own carriage and dismounted so that the two could have a chat as they covered the last few hundred metres to their homes on foot.

They never made it. Seven members of The Invincibles, an extremist Irish nationalist group, surrounded them and stabbed them to death with surgical knives. They had been planning to attack Burke for weeks, and did not even know who Cavendish was, but did not want to leave the red-bearded chap alive as a witness. The attackers were driven away in a cab whose driver rejoiced in the nickname “Skin-the-Goat”; he pops up in person in Chapter 16 of Ulysses as the keeper of the cabmen’s shelter at Butt Bridge where Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom get their heads together before going back to Bloom’s house for cocoa. (That’s not the only reference to the 1882 murders in Ulysses; James Joyce would have been three months old at the time, but they cast a long dark shadow.)

With all due respect to Lord Mountbatten and Kevin O’Higgins, the Phoenix Park murders were the most dramatic political assassinations ever to take place in Ireland – the victims were the British government minister responsible for Irish affairs, and the most senior civil servant in the Irish administration. On top of that, Cavendish and his wife Lucy were very close to her aunt and her aunt’s husband, who happened to be the prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone; Cavendish, whose father was the Duke of Devonshire, had been Gladstone’s private secretary for several years, and more or less ran the Treasury between the Liberals winning the election in 1880 and his appointment to Ireland in 1882. As for Burke, he was the most visible and most senior Catholic in the Irish government, and it was not until twenty years after his death that another Catholic got the job of Permanent Under Secretary.

The timing of the murders could not have been more disastrous in the delicate dance of British policy and Irish nationalism. The dominant Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell had been released from prison only a couple of days before, and Cavendish had been sent to Dublin by Gladstone with a mandate to try and find reconciliation with the Nationalist Party and the Irish Land League, which had mounted a highly successful civil disobedience campaign against the (often absentee) landlords and against the British state, bringing attention to the dire economic situation of Irish tenant farmers. They had introduced a new word to the English language, after a land agent in County Mayo who was ostracised by the local community, to the extent that local shopkeepers refused to sell anything to him or his household: the unfortunate Captain Boycott.

The immediate effect of the murders was cataclysmic. Parnell’s reaction to the news was that he must resign from politics entirely, though he was dissuaded by Gladstone among others. Nationalist politicians condemned the murders, but of course for the English (and Scottish and Welsh) public, there was a seamless connection between Nationalist parliamentary activism and the assassinations. And in fact it turned out that several of the Invincibles were also senior officials in the Irish Land League. Several years later, The Times published letters apparently from Parnell which seemed to endorse the murders, though these were dramatically proved to be forgeries.

Superintendent John Mallon of the Dublin Metropolitan Police narrowly missed being on the scene of the murders himself, and pursued a dogged investigation of the crime. From good old human intelligence, he already had a good idea who the leading members of the Invincibles were, and interrogated them all until two of them confessed, one of them James Carey, the leader of the gang. The other five Invincibles were all hanged, including the two who had actually carried out the stabbing. The getaway driver, Skin-the-Goat, was imprisoned for sixteen years but emerged in time to make his appearance in Ulysses.

There was a grim postscript to the grim story. Carey, the informer, was given a new identity by the British government and sent off to make a new life with his family in South Africa. On the boat he made friends with one Patrick O’Donnell, a Donegal man from Gweedore. When they arrived in South Africa, O’Donnell saw an account of the Invincibles trial in an English newspaper which included a recognisable portrait of Carey, even though he had subsequently shaved his beard off. O’Donnell, who was politically motivated but seems not to have had any direct connection with the Invincibles, realised that his new friend on board was in fact the notorious informer, went back to the boat and shot Carey dead. (Most of the passengers seem to have brought their own guns with them.) He was convicted of murder and hanged. Carey’s fate was then used by Arthur Conan Doyle in the fourth, and worst, of the Sherlock Holmes novels, The Valley of Fear.

Julie Kavanagh is best known as a historian of ballet, but she has turned in a great piece of work here, not only going to the well-plumbed depths of British official sources, but also delving deep into the Invincibles and their structure, as far as one can trace it given the relative lack of written records and the mutability of some of the protagonists’ names. One unusual source that she uses extensively is the correspondence of Queen Victoria, who was deeply interested in the Irish situation, and of course hostile to the Nationalist agenda. There is one odd glitch where she starts to explore why O’Donnell was tried in London rather than South Africa, but fails to put in the actual reason why it happened that way. Otherwise this is a very readable account of a very dramatic (but nowadays overlooked) historical event. You can get The Irish Assassins here.

One last note relating to my Cambridge days. The unfortunate Lord Frederick Cavendish and his wife Lucy had no children. She dedicated the rest of her life (another four decades) to the promotion of girls’ and women’s education. Forty years after she died, her great-niece, Margaret Braithwaite, was one of the founders of a new Cambridge college for postgraduate women students, especially those from under-represented and non-traditional backgrounds; and the new college was named after Braithwaite’s great-aunt. During my not very successful tenure as Deputy President of Cambridge University Students Union, I was assigned Lucy Cavendish College as one of my liaison responsibilities. I always vaguely wondered who it was named after, and now I know.

This was my top unread book in the rapidly dwindling pile of those acquired in 2021. Next up is The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend.

Second paragraph of third story (“The Age of Science”, by Frances Power Cobbe):

For obvious reasons the particulars of this most marvellous invention, and the name of its author, must be withheld from the public till the patents (and the enormous profits) be secured to the Company which is invited to undertake to work it (with limited liability). We are only permitted by special favour to hint that the natural Force relied on to set the machinery in action is neither Electric, Magnetic, nor Galvanic; nor yet any combination of these; but that other great correlated imponderable agency, whose existence has been for some time suspected by many intelligent inquirers, called the Psychic Force. That no scepticism may linger in the minds of our readers, we desire to add that we have at this moment in our hands a complete transcript of a newspaper bearing date January 1st, 1977. As the printed matter of this gigantic periodical equals at least in bulk the whole of Gibbon’s History, or Mr. Jowett’s edition of Plato, we cannot attempt to do more than offer our readers a few brief extracts.

Jack Fennell has been fighting the good fight to uncover the historical traditions of Irish science fiction for many years, and this is quite an extraordinary collection of stories from various writers, many of them women and radicals, from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and all of the stories are firmly on the science fiction rather than fantasy side of the divide.

The potted biographies of the authors frequently spurred me to seek more information from Wikipedia, and I realised the depth of my own ignorance of the science fictional side of the cultural revival – which is ironic, because in my PhD thesis I made the closely related argument that the pro-science agenda of revolutionary Irish nationalism had been ignored.

I was particularly intrigued by Clotilde Graves (1863-1932), a distant cousin of Robert Graves, who wrote plays as “Clo Graves” and novels as “Richard Dehan”, cropped her hair short, wore men’s clothes and smoked cigars in public. One of her plays compared marriage to prostitution and her work is generally feminist. I don’t think I had heard of her before.

Not all of these stories are top-notch, but I’m glad that Jack Fennell has revived them. The other authors represented are William Maginn, Fitz-James O’Brien, Frances Power Cobbe, George William Russell / Æ, Amelia Garland Mears, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, Jane Barlow, Robert Eustace and L. T. Meade, L. McManus, Dorothy Macardle, Art Ó Riain, Tarlach Ó hUid and Cathal Ó Sándair. You can get it here.

This was both my top unread book acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations by Terri Hooley and Richard Sullivan and Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

There is, however, much to learn yet if Paddy Mac is to succeed in the tricky task of acquiring the sort of profile that can help carry him to the Taoiseach’s office. One critical thing our Aspirant Prince must embrace is the role of art in high politics. Before Paddy Machiavelli gets nervous, we are referring to art as in the learning of a profession, rather than writing poetry or painting or suchlike. He can, of course, go a long way in Irish politics without treating it as a form of art. Talent (rarely), hard work (occasionally), or the sort of hard neck more common in a timeshare salesman may bring Paddy Mac as far as the cabinet table. But, unless he brings some form of artistry to his public discourse, when it comes to the great prize, he will be like a pony trying to jump an eight-foot fence and win the Puissance.

Some kind person, I know not who, sent me this just before Christmas, correctly guessing that I would enjoy it a lot. (Edited to add: the gift-giver eventually revealed himself to be Alyn Smith, former MEP and MP. Thank you, Alyn!) I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t familiar with Drennan as a journalist; he came to prominence only after I had left Irish politics, and he mostly wrote for the Sunday Independent which I rarely read. I think I have been missing out; his witty takedown of the entire Irish political system and its leaders over the years is also passionate and well-observed. It’s easy to be cynical, and to accuse others of being cynical; but I don’t think that is the point of this book, which is holding up a mirror to the Irish political process and describing it in painful detail. Here, for instance, near the end, Drennan reflects on the preference of Irish voters for older leaders in typical style:

…in Irish politics, with rare exceptions, youth will not have its fling. The U.K. and America may have a tradition of youthful leaders, such as Thatcher, Blair, Obama, Clinton and Cameron. We, however, prefer our leaders to resemble the elderly habitues of a bishops conference. That FG soberside, Liam Cosgrave, even when he was young, was not youthful: Garret was a national grand-uncle; Jack Lynch came draped in the sepia of de Valera’s Ireland; whilst Albert, though lively, was a child of the showband era ruling a country nudging the envelope of the Celtic Tiger. Lemass might have been in a hurry, but he was an old man. Haughey too was past his best by the time he secured power, though that might have been a good thing. Mr Bruton, though youngish in years, was a figure who gave the impression of a man who would have been more at home within the Irish Parliamentary Party. Bertie Ahern was seen to be a man who belonged to a youthful age, but he too was a creature who resided intellectually in the age of putting posters of de Valera up by gaslight. As for Enda, he is a child of flaming turf sods and Liam Cosgrave.

The book was published in 2014, in the middle of Enda Kenny’s unexpected / long-awaited (delete as applicable) term as Taoiseach, so Drennan failed to take into account the ascension of Leo Varadkar (Taoiseach at 38) or Simon Harris (Taoiseach at 37). But despite that, it’s a good summary of the popular wisdom about each of the leaders of the last fifty years, based on anecdote and experience. I have encountered a small number of the many people who he talks about (only briefly in most cases, though I was friendly with John Bruton), and felt in every case that he is writing about the people who I met.

I fear this is not a book for people who don’t know or care much about Irish politics, and it also won’t satisfy anyone who is hungering for political change; it’s about the internal workings of the old parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, and to a lesser extent how they manage their coalition partners in office. But personally I tend to feel that a swing back to the default state of dominance by the older parties is more likely than not; so this may turn out to be as useful a guidebook to the future as to the past. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third document (a letter from Pope Alexander III to Irish bishops):

I was rather glad to find that this book was given by my grandmother to my grandfather, as a present for his 64th birthday. (It’s his handwriting, I think, not hers.)

Published by Methuen in 1943, the previous year, it’s exactly what it says on the cover, an assemblage of important Irish historical documents from Laudabiliter to the 1921 Treaty and its immediate aftermath. It includes some classic texts that I would had never thought of seeking out for myself – the Statutes of Kilkenny and Poynings’ Law, for instance.

Inevitably the Anglo-Irish relationship is covered much more closely than any other topic, and it is hardly surprising that the well-documented Dublin Castle / London perspective provides a lot of material. But there are a couple of moments where the Irish nationalist voice is heard too – we get Hugh O’Neill’s declared war aims from 1599, and less than half a century later the agenda of the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1642.

This book was printed in 1943, and I see a copy of the 1977 reprint going for £46 on Amazon right now; otherwise I don’t think you’ll get it easily anywhere. This was my top unread book acquired in 2018; next (and last) on that list is The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald.

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There were a number of factors leading each side to consider a truce in the summer of 1921. For the British, the behavior of the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans was generating substantial negative publicity, made worse by the government’s apparent sanction of such actions by the end of 1920. In addition, the British had been unwilling to unleash a full-scale war in Ireland and were leery of doing so without exploring alternative solutions. The British had been fighting the Anglo-Irish “war” with police and local security forces rather than with full-strength divisions of the British Army. With difficulties in Egypt and India, among other places, Britain could not afford to station too many regular troops in Ireland. Given that Britain was deeply in debt from the Great War, and Lloyd George’s coalition government was already having difficulty redeeming its promise to build “homes fit for heroes” after the war, Britain also did not have the financial wherewithal to launch a full military campaign in Ireland. The political will was lacking, too. Despite the presence of Tories in the cabinet – Lloyd George was the Liberal prime minister of a largely Tory cabinet, a holdover from the wartime coalition – there was a sense that the British public, as well as the Liberal and Labour parties, would not keep quiet about a full military campaign in Ireland, given that the relatively small-scale hostilities undertaken by the security forces were already causing unease.² In addition, Lloyd George correctly surmised that a settlement could be reached that was closer in practical terms to the offer of Home Rule already on the table than it was to the self-proclaimed Irish Republic.
² Arthur Mitchell, Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann 1919-21 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1993), 225.

This is a short and detailed book about the debates in Dáil Eireann in December 1921 and January 1922 about the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and about the political situation which led to it. Having fairly recently read Charles Townshend’s The Republic, which covers much of the same ground, I felt that Knirck’s general political account of the events of the War of Independence, which forms the first third or so of the book, isn’t as good as Townshend’s; but when he gets into the detail, first of the Treaty negotiations and then of the Dáil debates, he is much more solid (Townshend is running out of steam at that point).

On the Treaty, Knirck devotes considerable space to trying to work out what de Valera was actually up to, and comes to the conclusion that he wanted the negotiations in London to fail so that he could leap in with an improved proposal and save the day. Given the relative inexperience and weaker position of the Irish delegation, this would have been such a bold assumption by de Valera that I found it difficult to believe, but Knick marshals his evidence convincingly.

On the Dáil debates, the heart of the book, Knirck goes through the whole thing in fascinated detail, looking at the backgrounds of the members of the Second Dáil (who were all elected unopposed in May 1920), tracking those who moved from hard-liner to pro-Treaty and from dove to anti-Treaty, and tracing the procedural issues and the rhetorical style of the debates, which did become personalised at several points. I found this a much more attractive way of approaching the concept of the Republic than Townshend’s ideological analysis; looking at what people actually did and said is, after all, a fundamentally sound approach.

One important point that he makes is that both wings of the Sinn Fein leadership, and indeed the rank and file, were desperate to maintain a united movement until well past the moment when this was no longer feasible (which was probably when the plenipotentiaries signed in London). This led both sides into tactical and strategic mistakes. For us, looking back on over a century of division along lines established by the Treaty, it can be difficult to appreciate that serious leaders thought they could still avoid it as late as early January 1922. Hindsight gives you 20/20 vision.

Knirck’s most fundamental point is that most of the Irish political leadership in 1921 were politically inexperienced, and the debates reveal a new style of politics coming into being, but not quite there yet. They got outplayed by Lloyd George in London, and then by themselves in Dublin. Having seen other revolutionary situations elsewhere, I must say that it rings true. Whether or not you agree, his analysis of the primary sources – the Treaty debates themselves – is compelling. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Memoirs of Mrs Margaret Leeson:

For some time after I came to Dublin, my body was weak, my health very precarious, and my spirits heavily oppressed. Pleasures seemed to have lost their exhilarating effect, and I experienced a kind of lethargy of the mind. In short, I fell into a state, the most destructive to virtue that possibly can be. It is when the heart is replete with sorrow and languor, that is most susceptible of love. In the midst of a round of amusements, each equally engaging, and a train of admirers the giddy female gives neither a preference, and has not leisure to attach herself to either. But when softened, and inactive, the tender passions find easy admission, and the comforter, and consoler soon becomes the favoured lover—such was my case.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore:

While Dardis continued to visit Peg when he could, she was lonely and missed her family. She confessed, ‘I was oppressed with anxiety, and could neither look back with remorse, nor forward without apprehension of what might follow.’ Her biggest concern was what her sisters and father might be making of her disappearance. She had fled he sister’s house telling no one where she was going and had left behind all her clothes. Anxious about the distress she was causing her family, she pleaded with Dardis to try and find out what they knew of her situation.

I picked up Julie Peakman’s book about Peg Plunkett, 18th century Dublin courtesan, off a remainder pile a few years ago, and thought I should prepare myself for it by reading the original memoirs, published in 1795-97 and available for free here, among other places.

Peg’s memoir is a tremendously interesting account of what it was like to make your living from sex in the Dublin of 250 years ago. She pulled herself up from a series of failed relationships and set up a brothel on what is now O’Connell Street with her friend Sally Hayes in about 1775; she would have been in her thirties (if we accept the 1742 birthdate proposed by Peakman) and Hayes a bit younger.

She faced a lot of violence from men who felt they should take it into their own hands to punish sex workers just for being sex workers, but interestingly (by her account at least) she managed to get the forces of law and order on her side, and usually won her day in subsequent court cases. She tells these stories with great humour, but it must have been very traumatic.

She does a lot of name-dropping of names that mean nothing to us now, but clearly she was accepted in the highest social circles. She had affairs with at least two of the English governors of Ireland, Charles Manners, the Duke of Rutland, and John Fane, the Earl of Westmorland. She has a hilarious story about being challenged while at the theatre about her affair with the Duke; when hecklers yelled, “Peg, who lay you with last?”,

I with the greatest nonchalance, replied, “MANNERS you black-guards;” this repartee was received with universal plaudits, as the bon mot was astonishingly great, the Duke himself being in the royal box with his divine Duchess, who was observed to laugh immoderately at the whimsical occurrence, for ’tis a known fact, that this most beautiful of woman kind that ever I beheld, never troubled herself about her husband’s intrigues.

Still, it must have been pretty uncomfortable to have her sex life dissected in public like that, and it is impressive that she turns it into a joke. (The unfortunate duke died of alcoholism while still governing Ireland, aged only 33; his ‘divine duchess’ outlived him by more than forty years.)

I picked up Julie Peakman’s book hoping that it would fill in some of the gaps in Peg’s first person account. To what extent can her stories be independently verified by other records? Who is behind the various pseudonyms, such as “Mr. B——r, of Kilkenny [who] shortly after came to be Lord T——s, by his father’s obtaining a very ancient earldom”? How does her narrative fit into the overall analysis public discussions of sexuality and sex work in the English-speaking world in the 18th century?

I’m afraid that I was disappointed. Peakman’s book does resolve some of the pseudonyms, but otherwise doesn’t do much more than reheat and repeat Peg’s narrative for a modern audience; and frankly, Peg’s style is much more entertaining and engaging. I guess that for readers who don’t have access to the original documents, Peakman will do; but as I have found with that other great self-describer of a century later, Fanny Kemble, the original text is far more interesting than any modern re-hashing.

What I’d like to see is an edition of Peg’s memoirs where the blanks are filled in and where we get a decent best-guess timeline and maps showing the geography of the places where she was active. I think that it would sell rather well. Meanwhile you can get Julie Peakman’s book here.

Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Wealth and comfort were assured from the moment Jennens was born in 1700 at Gopsall in Leicestershire. At that stage his father was overseeing the production of over 2,000 tons of cast iron a year. The Darbys of Coalbrookdale had discovered the art of smelting ore with coke, but they kept this knowledge to themselves: until the middle of the eighteenth century charcoal was the only fuel that could then produce metal of a quality acceptable to all other ironmasters. Prodigious quantities of wood for charcoal burning were needed to feed the industry now burgeoning in the English west midlands. For a time timber felled in the broadleaved forests of Ireland, shipped across the Irish Sea, had met the requirements of a great many English smelters. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, these forests were no more – heedless exploitation had left Ireland, apart from Iceland, the most treeless country in Europe. Jennens’s father, also called Charles, had been assiduously buying up suitably wooded land still remaining in England and Wales to ensure a steady supply for his business: when he died in 1747, his son inherited 736 acres at Gopsall and no fewer than 33 other properties in 6 different counties.^1
1 McCracken, 1971, pp29 and 83-84; Smith, 2012, p.3

Jonathan Bardon (who died of COVID in 2020) was one of the great Irish historians, and this was his last monograph, published in 2015. It is a lovely micro-study of the before, during and after of the evening of 13 April 1742, when Handel’s Messiah was first performed in Dublin at the long-vanished music hall on Fishamble Street

He carefully unpicks the cultural background to the performance, with Dublin, feeling that it was not punching its cultural weight as a city, eager to find openings where it could score over London. He also looks at the stories of the other people involved with the show – librettist Charles Jennens (who submitted it to Handel unsolicited); leading soprano Susannah Cibber, sister of Thomas “Rule Britannia” Arne; and Jonathan Swift, whose grumpy authority over the choristers of St Patrick’s Cathedral almost derailed the entire performance at the last minute.

And he goes into the subsequent history of Messiah, which was actually rather slow to catch on in the English-speaking world. Interestingly it was the Methodists who first picked up on it, and then it became a staple for large-scale musical spectacle starting with a performance in Westminster Abbey in 1784 to commemorate the centenary of Handel’s birth. (He was actually born in 1685, but never mind.)

So, it’s a nice study of a particular cultural event which will tell people who know about Irish history some interesting things about music, and will tell people who know about music history some interesting things about Ireland. Recommended. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next is Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore, by Julie Peakman.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Balfour’s Irish experience was rooted in his years as chief secretary for Ireland from 1887 to 1891 when his repressive policies had earned him the nickname of ‘Bloody Balfour’ among Irish nationalists. His deep-seated Unionism was the rock on which the efforts to establish a bipartisan policy on the Irish problem had foundered in 191o. In 1920 Balfour was the cabinet minister arguing most forcefully for Ulster’s right to remain a fully integrated part of the United Kingdom. In November 1921 he remained so sceptical of negotiating with Irish republicans in the aftermath of the truce that ended the Irish war of independence that Lloyd George sent him to head the British delegation at the Washington Naval Conference lest his presence in London disrupt the negotiations that led to the establishment of the Irish Free State. Arthur Balfour was at once the most cultivated, the most cynical and the most cerebral of prime ministers. The trouble with Arthur, a colleague observed, is that he knows there has been one Ice Age and he thinks there’s going to be another. Who better, then, to share Balfour’s enjoyment at Shaw’s lampooning of the conduct of well-meaning English liberals in Ireland than the two Liberal leaders who were to follow him into 10 Downing Street?

I did not know Ronan Fanning well; we met a few times and I certainly admired his work. Although this book came late in his life, published in 2013, four years before he died, big chunks are apparently taken from his PhD thesis of 1968. I guess history doesn’t necessarily change that much.

The subject is Westminster attitudes to Ireland at the time of independence, focussing especially on the two Prime Ministers, Asquith and Lloyd George, and also on the leading Conservative politicians and the other Liberals, Winston Churchill in particular. My own PhD thesis concentrated on almost exactly the same period, and I thought I had done a pretty exhaustive dive into the last two decades of British administration in Ireland. So I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I learned from this book. Fanning concentrates on policy rather than administration, and on the debate in London rather than what was happening on the ground in Ireland – the Easter Rising, for instance, gets barely a page, but the British response gets most of a chapter. This is not a criticism – Fanning was entitled to write the book he wanted to write, and he was entirely correct to see a huge gap in the historiography of the period.

Things that I learned, roughly in order:

The Liberals from 1905 until the House of Lords crisis in 1909-10 were not just apathetic to Irish Home Rule, the leadership were actively hostile to the concept, and would not have ever legislated for it if they had not been backed into a corner by John Redmond and the Irish Nationalists (one of the latter’s few strategic successes).

At the same time, the Liberal government in 1912-14 knew that Home Rule could not be implemented in large parts of Ulster. Lloyd George and Churchill proposed excluding Ulster from home rule as early as February 1912. This was copper-fastened by the disloyal and treacherous actions of senior army officers, in particular Sir Henry Wilson and the brothers Hubert and Johnnie Gough, who undermined the elected government by conspiring with the opposition and with the military garrison in Ireland to provoke the Curragh mutiny in March 1914.

Therefore the counterfactual idea that, if there had been no 1916 Rising or War of Independence, a Home Rule Ireland would have eventually evolved into a Dominion-like status, is wrong. The only decisive factor affecting British policy, apart from the personal prejudices of political leaders, was violence or the threat of violence. The British folded on Ulster in 1914, and on independence for the rest of the island in 1921, purely because of the balance of coercive force. The British government’s own use of coercive force was poorly planned and disastrously implemented.

When it came to the Treaty negotiations on 1921, the British got entirely what they expected (apart from a late concession on tariffs). The Irish delegation were thoroughly unprepared, particularly on the issue of partition. Michael Collins then planned to destabilise and attempt to take control of Northern Ireland, but was distracted by the Civil War, and after that he was dead. London did nothing to protect Catholics in the North in the 1922-25 period (or for that matter Protestants in the South, though they were in less danger). The Boundary Commission, to which Fanning devotes an interesting epilogue, was designed to achieve nothing, and did so.

In general, both Asquith and Lloyd George were motivated (on Ireland at least) not by ideology but by the need to stay in power by satisfying their coalition partners, successively the Irish Nationalists and then the Conservatives. (Also Asquith was fundamentally a procrastinator who did not want to actually do anything.) The Conservatives were more ideologically Unionist than the Liberals; so too was the fledgling Labour party. Andrew Bonar Law, who actually became Prime Minister briefly in 1922-3, was Canadian by birth but an Ulster Presbyterian by background; however, once he came to power his first decision was to get the last stages of the Treaty enacted, just to get it over with.

There’s not a lot about women here, but a key figure is Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s secretary and lover. The smartest officials, notably General Macready who was the person who advised the British in 1921 that the military campaign in Ireland was lost, knew that Lloyd George never read his own paperwork and wrote to Stevenson instead. Not everyone knew this trick. Lloyd George and his key male adviser, Tom Jones, often had crucial conversations in Welsh, which nobody else in Downing Street understood.

The whole thing is eloquently written. It’s not short (361 pages) and it’s not for beginners (knowledge of the broad thrust of events is assumed) but it’s really interesting.

I found the account of the bitterly divided 1912-14 government, publicly committed to a policy goal that had been wished on it from outside, and that few of its leaders really believed in, very reminiscent of the Brexit period. But the wider lesson, that most British prime ministers spend most of their political energy on simple day-to-day survival, has much broader relevance, and not just in the UK.

Anyway, this was a tremendously good read. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The major engagements of the medieval period are. however, those of defenders against invaders. Most of them were fought in an attempt to prevent further Norman penetration of the country. The fact that the Irish succeeded in preventing the Normans from completely overrunning the country was due not only to their stout resistance, but also to the isolation of the invaders from their homeland and the impossibility of gaining sufficient reinforcements to maintain and consolidate their position. Additionally, the importation by the Irish of Scots mercenary soldiers called gallowglas (from gall óglach – foreign warrior) from the thirteenth century onwards, was to strengthen their resistance considerably. At first confined to Ulster, galloglas later spread throughout Ireland in the service of the great families. These mercenaries prolonged the life of the independent Gaelic kingdoms for more than two centuries after the defeat of Edward Bruce (14). Four centuries after the conquest the O’Neills and O’Donnells were still ruling most of Ulster according to the customs of their ancestors. It was not until their defeat in the Nine Years War (15) in 1603, that all of Gaelic Ireland finally fell to the invaders.

Here are the two maps, by W.H. Bromage, referred to above. I will have a lot more to say about the artist below.

I have known Ruth Dudley Edwards since 1989 or so; she was at school with one of my aunts, as it turns out, and her father was the historian Robin Dudley Edwards. I regret to say that I have stopped following her on social media; she is entitled to express her hardline conservative views, but I do not feel compelled to read them.

This book dates from half a century ago, when the world was a different place and Irish history was a different discipline. It’s a breezy summary of the main points of Irish history to date, concentrating on the medieval and early modern periods, and the maps, even though they would have been a bit old-fashioned even in 1973, illustrate the narrative.

But there are some odd omissions. After independence, Northern Ireland largely disappears from the narrative. (It gets seven pages in the second last chapter, and the Troubles get one line.) From my political perspective, it would have been interesting to see more mapping of election results across the whole period. The chapter on social change completely misses the elephant in the room, the role of the Catholic church in society.

There is a much newer edition, published in 2005 with contributions from Bridget Hourican, where I believe that these issues have all been addressed. I see reviewers complaining, however, that Bromage’s maps were retained despite not really being with the Zeitgeist; as I said, they look old-fashioned for 1973, let alone 2005 (or 2024). But you can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Bee Quest, by Dave Goulson.

W.H. Bromage, who drew the maps, is credited with the illustrations for a number of similar books of the period, mostly published by Methuen, some by pretty big names: The Archaeology of Crete: an Introduction, by John D. Pendlebury (1939); The War in Burma, by Roy McKelvie (1948); Introducing Spain, by Cedric Salter (1954); In Search of London, by H.V. Morton (1956); An Atlas of World Affairs, by Andrew Boyd (1957); Frontiers and Wars, by Winston S. Churchill (1962); Pan-Africanism, by Colin Legum (1962); Survey of the Moon, by Patrick Moore (1963); The Sword-Bearers: Supreme Command in the First World War, by Corelli Barnett (1963); The American West, by John A. Hawgood (1967); An Atlas of African Affairs, by Andrew Boyd and Patrick van Rensburg (1970); and The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers, by George MacDonald Fraser (1971). An Atlas of Irish History (1973) is the last book that I have found which credits him.

Roy McKelvie, writing in 1948, describes him as “Mr W.H. Bromage of the News Chronicle“. I’ve found a number of maps of the changing front lines of WW2 published by the News Chronicle and credited to “William Bromage”…

…and also a rather nice illustrated text of the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child, signed by Eisenhower, Montgomery and Churchill and dated 1945.

A William Bromage is also credited with the maps in Small Boat Through France (1964) and Small Boat on the Thames (1966), both by Roger Pilkington. This must be the same person. That’s literally the only other certain information I have about him. Illustrating fourteen books in 34 years would hardly make you a living, so he must have been full-time with the News Chronicle until it was absorbed by the Daily Mail in 1960, and maybe stayed on after that.

Ancestry.com gives me half a dozen people called W.H. Bromage, with the W.H. short for “William Henry” in all cases, born in England in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The surname is concentrated in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire. He could, of course, easily have been born somewhere else entirely. I find a Detroit journalist of that name in the 1920s and 1930s, who could conceivably be the same person though it’s a bit of a shift. I also find a San Francisco journalist of the same name in the 1890s, and a reference in 1919 to “the renowned Anglo-Catholic artist, W.H. Bromage”, but neither of these can have been illustrating An Atlas of Irish History in 1973.

It is frustrating that I know almost nothing else about Bromage: he was clearly a man of talent, who captured the market in drawing maps for books about history and current affairs. It could be that this is a problem of Internet research, and that if I had access to a decent reference library in the UK I would find his biographical details really quickly. Or not; you never know what will survive.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

This ceaseless mixing of the population makes nonsense of all the familiar assumptions of ‘Gaelic origins’ or ‘the Irish race’. The distinctive nature of Irishness arises specifically from the interaction of newcomers with natives (the perennial cliché of Irish historical writing). Strictly speaking, there are no natives; or, to put it the other way round, all the Irish are natives. ‘Irish’, if it means anything, simply means being born in Ireland, even if, like Swift or the Duke of Wellington, you did not want to be. Many of the characteristics which are regarded as ‘typically Irish’, for instance, are demonstrably the legacy of the Old English, or the Anglo-Irish or the Lowland Scots just as much as they are of the Celts, whom we now call the Gaels. Interest in the Gaels, in their language which Irish people still spoke, in their literature and culture generally, revived in the eighteenth century. More specifically, both Protestants and Catholics, though divided from each other politically by the penal laws and structures based on them, tried to establish a connection with the Gaelic Irish culture, which was still extraordinarily healthy. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was in decline, and speaking Irish was regarded as a mark of social inferiority, something associated only with backward rural communities. Then, by the end of the century, a revival was under way, and Gaelic culture was being presented to the Irish population as the indigenous culture.

A.T.Q. Stewart was a colleague of my father’s in Belfast, and his sons were friends of ours – indeed I shared a house in Cambridge with one of them for a year. His perspective was a bit different, as one of the few prominent Irish historians of our parents’ generation who came from the Unionist tradition. I found a 1977 review in Fortnight of Stewart’s award-winning The Narrow Ground, written by my father, which began:

This is one of the most depressing books yet published on Ulster.

and concluded:

His book is beautifully written, as readers of Dr Stewart’s previous books will expect. Again and again, one pauses with pleasure at some felicitous phrase. ‘Ireland, like Dracula’s Transylvania, is much troubled by the undead’. (p.15) ‘The factor which. distinguishes the siege of Derry from all other historical sieges in the British Isles is that it is still going on’ (p.53) ‘What the Catholics have been saying for fifty years about the Ulster government springs from a well that was made bitter long before Stormont was built’. (p.179) I wish I could write like that. But I wish also that Dr Stewart had used his literary gifts to write a more constructive work.

My father also criticised Stewart in 1977 for not reading in other scholarly disciplines beyond history, including anthropology in particular. It’s interesting that in the opening chapter of The Shape of Irish History, published in 2001, eleven years after my father died (and nine years before Stewart’s own death) he too appeals to historians to read beyond their own discipline, particularly anthropology (E. Estyn Evans was a key figure in the history of the history of Ireland). There is probably not a direct connection with my father’s review.

The Shape of Irish History is a quirky book, probably written knowing that it would be the author’s last substantial work. I find the basic thesis very attractive: that we should not regard Irish history as a train on a direct journey (“The 10.14 from Clontarf”) with an inevitable destination; if we analyse people and events in the context of their own times, rather than trying to fit them into a story of national destiny, we will learn more. Subsequent chapters look at interesting diversions off the course of the train, especially in the eighteenth century, where I recently read a very interesting microstudy of one particularly vicious cultural practice of the time (duelling). I also learned a lot from the very brief dissection of what actually happened in 1798. There are lots of fun facts here, including the ballooning career of Richard Crosbie.

At the same time, my father’s observation from 1977 about style and tone still stands. It’s beautifully written, but the conclusion is thoroughly depressing:

There is no misunderstanding between Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, none whatsoever. Nor do they need to get to know each other better. They know each other only too well, having lived alongside each other for four centuries, part of the same society yet divided by politics and history. This is not just a clash of cultures; it is a culture in itself.

This embrace of the inevitability of perpetual conflict is as unjustifiable as the narrative of the inevitable ‘10.14 from Clontarf’ train to Irish national destiny, which Stewart rightly criticises. There’s very little reference to other countries, and none to other conflicts, beyond the British Isles here. Stewart had clearly integrated the findings of other scholarly disciplines about Ireland into his worldview between 1977 and 2002; it’s a shame that he didn’t also look further afield.

Anyway, it’s not a book for beginners in Irish history, but it will be of interest to anyone who is already familiar with the basics. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book acquired in 2016 still on my shelves. Next on that pile is Comparing Electoral Systems, edited by David Farrell.