580. The Irish Civil War: The Assassination of Sir Henry Wilson (Part 1)

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Speaker 1 Many as are the great public servants of this nation who have been buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, illustrious as are the soldiers whose remains lie there.

Speaker 1 Today's funeral of Sir Henry Wilson will evoke emotions far stronger and more burning than those which are customary at the graveside even of the most eminent and venerated.

Speaker 1 The thought uppermost in men's minds will be, not the distinction of his military services, but the foul crime, the revolting mischance, which has cut off so noble a character and so fine an intelligence while they were still at the height of their powers.

Speaker 1 The assassination has horrified the whole civilized world.

Speaker 1 Whatever measures the government may see fit to take, the responsibility for those measures must rest solely with the Irish nation.

Speaker 1 For months past, that unhappy island has lain under the curse of Cain.

Speaker 1 Morally, she is an outlaw, and there can be no hope for her regeneration unless she can brace herself to cast off the infection which at present threatens to drag her down into complete social anarchy.

Speaker 1 No amount of good will, good faith, and good intentions on the part of Great Britain can be of any avail to her. as long as murder is her ultimate political argument.

Speaker 1 So So Dominic, that was the Times on the 26th of June, 1922, with a very punchy editorial on the day of the funeral of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson.

Speaker 1 And I guess you would describe that as perhaps pungent, but the circumstances are extraordinary. So

Speaker 1 who is Sir Henry Wilson? Well, he had been chief of staff of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914. He'd been the chief military advisor to David Lloyd George in the First World World War.

Speaker 1 He had been British military representative at the Versailles Conference. He has just stepped down as chief of the Imperial General Staff.

Speaker 1 He has been the MP for North Down in Northern Ireland since February 1922.

Speaker 1 He is reputedly the ugliest man in the British Army and he has just been shot down in cold blood outside his own front door in Eton Place, Belgravia in the heart of the West End of London.

Speaker 1 But Dominic, adding to the drama of this assassination is the identity of his murderers, of which there are two. You're not wrong, Tom.
So first of all, that editorial,

Speaker 1 I would have loved to have written an editorial like that.

Speaker 1 That is pungent stuff. Anyway, he has been killed in broad daylight, in cold blood, in the centre of London by two veterans of his own army, who have since joined the Irish Republican Army.

Speaker 1 And this just months after the Anglo-Irish treaty that had supposedly ended the conflict in Ireland. So it's not just one of the most shocking assassinations in British history.

Speaker 1 Beyond that, it is the trigger for a new and deadlier conflict on the island of Ireland, the Irish Civil War, which is an incredible melodramatic story.

Speaker 1 And it's described by Ronan McGreevy in his fantastic book on this, Great Hatred, the Assassination of Field Marshals, the Henry Wilson MP, as Ireland's Sarajevo.

Speaker 1 So that's why it is more than worthy focusing in on it. A great an incredible story full of melodramatic details and brilliantly handled by Ronan in his wonderfully gripping book.

Speaker 1 I've got good news for you, Tom. What? So we are in Dublin.
We're in the Four Courts, which played such a massive part in the outbreak of the Irish Civil War.

Speaker 1 And the man sitting next to us is none other than Ronan McGreevy himself. Oh, my God.
So that's who he is. Ronan McGill here.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 Oh, Ronan, it's brilliant to have you.

Speaker 1 So we're going to explore Samry Wilson, who you've written about so fantastically, the murder, who killed him, why you regard this as Ireland's Sarajevo and why it is the trigger for the civil war.

Speaker 1 So why don't we kick off with Sir Henry Wilson? So tell us a bit about him. Who is he?

Speaker 2 Well, Domic, Henry Wilson was an Irishman. That's a really important point to state.
He was born in Dublin in 1864, but brought up in the Irish Midlands in Curry-Green in County Longford.

Speaker 2 He was an Irish Unionist at a time when that wasn't regarded as a contradiction in terms.

Speaker 2 And his family had come come over during the plantations of the 17th century one of his ancestors was with king william at the battle of the boy the family would have spent most of their time in ireland in ulster but his grandfather bought a number of farms in ireland including curry grain in county longford and that's where henry wilson grew up in the south right and he's had this incredibly distinguished military career hasn't he i mean lots of people would say he's one of the two or three men who won the war yes

Speaker 2 is that you think that's yes well he was the chief of the imperial general staff and he was one of the people who put together the joint strategy that brought the war to an end in 100 days in the autumn of 1918 when a lot of people thought it would drag on at least until 1919.

Speaker 1 So in June 1919 he's appointed Field Marshal and he's the youngest to hold that rank in the British Army.

Speaker 2 Since another Irishman, the Duke of Wellington and

Speaker 1 so he can absolutely be situated in that long tradition of Anglo-Irish military men who serve Britain. and the Empire more generally.

Speaker 1 And there's so much about his career that makes him seem kind of almost archetypal. So a bit like, actually a bit like Custer, but also a bit like Churchill.

Speaker 1 He's not a tremendous student, but he kind of graduates and then he goes off to Burma and he gets slashed across the face by a dacoit, doesn't he? He's a Burmese bandit.

Speaker 2 I'm glad you can pronounce that word better than me.

Speaker 1 He fights in the Bur War and he, before entering the First World War, in other words, he has seen the expanse of the British Empire and served it.

Speaker 2 That's right.

Speaker 2 By 1910, he's the director of military operations and he is looking at preparing preparing the British Army for possible war on the continent of Europe, which most people in Britain hope will never come.

Speaker 2 Wilson is at that stage of his life. He's convinced there's going to be a European war.
It's not a popular viewpoint to have in the UK.

Speaker 2 And he's preparing what will become the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914 for deployment beside the French army in the event of a German invasion. And this is exactly what happens.

Speaker 1 And also, we're making him perhaps sound a rather uptight, humourless man. He's not at all.
all. He's actually very funny.

Speaker 2 He's uproariously funny. And there was a painting of Don during the Paris Peace talks and he said, you know what, either end up in Madame Two Swords or in jail.

Speaker 2 You know, he looked like, as he said himself, he looked like a blackguard. He was quite a vivacious character.

Speaker 1 On the topic of him being the ugliest man in the army, you have this brilliant detail that that is what is addressed to him on a letter that was sent to him in 1891. And it reaches him.

Speaker 1 Yes, which reaches him very funny. Yes.
So let's move through the 1910s because we want to get him involved in Ireland. So his Irishness is really important to him.
Yes, it is.

Speaker 1 But it's a very particular kind of Irishness. He feels passionately attached to the union of Ireland and Great Britain.

Speaker 1 And obviously by the 1910s, as we've discussed in the previous episodes, it is an incendiary political issue.

Speaker 1 And his position on this, certainly in public, could barely be more extreme. Is that fair? The Home Rule...

Speaker 2 bill is is due to become a law in 1914. And you have this very serious incident called the Currah Mutiny or Curra Incident.

Speaker 2 It's not an actual mutiny, but it's a putative mutiny in which Anglo-Irish officers like themselves say they will not obey lawful commands of the government if home rule is imposed on Ulster.

Speaker 2 And this is a very serious development which threatens not only civil war in Ireland, but possibly in Britain too, if the majority of the British Army does not implement the government's stance on Ulster.

Speaker 2 But Wilson, even though he's supposed to be as a soldier, he's supposed to do the government's bidding. He's actually conspiring against the government and all of this.

Speaker 2 And he earns the undying enmity of the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. And it really retards his career until the very end of the war.

Speaker 1 And then when we get to the end of the war, so once he's stopped being involved with the war, you know, when the war is won, obviously, as we've discussed in our last few episodes with Paul Rouse, Ireland looms very large in the political consciousness because, of course, the War of Independence has broken out.

Speaker 1 And through this time, his position, which you describe so well in your book, his position is consistently that

Speaker 1 Britain should go harder, send in more troops, that they're facing an organized murder gang who are possibly part of a Bolshevik conspiracy, and that basically we're being far too delivered and we should just crack down much harder.

Speaker 1 And he says this publicly.

Speaker 2 He does, yeah. And when the British government is confronted with the IRA in 1919 and 1920, they regard it as a security problem and they don't deign to call it a war.

Speaker 2 They send in the Black and Tans and the auxiliaries to aid the Royal Irish Constabulary to put down this rebellion by the IRA.

Speaker 2 But Wilson, as the head of the British Army,

Speaker 2 wants this to be declared a military operation. He wants to see hundreds of thousands of British soldiers in Ireland routing the IRA.

Speaker 2 And he says himself, if there are men to be murdered, we ought to be doing the murdering. So he's he's absolutely adamant that this is a military problem that needs to be resolved.

Speaker 2 Whereas it's obvious from a very early stage to the British government, particularly to David Lloyd George, that this is a political problem.

Speaker 2 That even if the British were to win a putative victory, it would be a periodic victory because the Irish people don't want them anymore.

Speaker 2 The British in Ireland, most of Ireland anyway, they don't want them anymore.

Speaker 2 And David Lloyd George sees this problem from the middle of 1920, that there's going to have to be a political solution here, and Wilson doesn't want that.

Speaker 1 And does the potential of Wilson to create mischief, is this enhanced enhanced when he steps down from the military and becomes an MP for the strongly unionist constituency in Northern Ireland or North Down?

Speaker 2 Exactly. So he's made a field marshal in July 1919.
He is showered with praise with left, fighting centre. He's part of the delegation of the Paris peace talks.

Speaker 2 He's at the height of his powers and of the regard for him in Britain. But he's already falling out with the British government because of Ireland.
He doesn't want anything to do.

Speaker 2 He doesn't believe that there should be any negotiations. At one stage, he's with Lloyd George.
Lloyd George says, your fellow Irishmen who I'm negotiating with are next door.

Speaker 2 And he says, I don't talk to murder gangs, to which Lloyd George responds, nonsense. We have to do these things.
So that's his attitude.

Speaker 2 So his four-year stint as the chief of the Imperial General Staff comes to an end in February 1922. There's no chance of it being renewed.
He's not even talking to the cabinet at this stage.

Speaker 2 And within three or four days, there's a by-election and he is elected unopposed as an Ulster Unionist MP. So he goes straight from being the head of the British Army to being an MP.

Speaker 2 And he's already somebody who is a senior figure in British history. This is two months after the Anglo-Irish Treaty is signed.

Speaker 2 As far as the British government, most of the British politicians are concerned, Ireland is done with now. But Wilson doesn't see it that way.

Speaker 2 And he becomes a sort of focal point for the, as you know, the diehards in the Conservative Party who don't want to accept the settlement.

Speaker 1 And so what impact does this have on the Irish nationalists, revolutionaries?

Speaker 2 Well, at this stage, whereas the treaty is very popular in Britain and passes very quickly through the House of Commons.

Speaker 1 So that's how he's viewed in Britain. But what about in Ireland? What's his reputation there?

Speaker 2 So his reputation in Ireland after he steps down as Chief of the Imperial General Staff is that he's a sort of paragon of British imperialism who's going around making incendiary speeches in Britain saying that the Irish can't rule themselves and that there is anarchy in Ireland and that the British should should go back in and solve the problem once and for all.

Speaker 2 And of course, this makes him an enemy both of the provisional Irish government that's established under the treaty, but also the British government. They don't want to hear this.

Speaker 2 And so he's already a marked man in Irish nationalist circles at that stage.

Speaker 1 All right, so let's move forward to the crucial day. He's become the MP for North Down, he's been the MP for only a few months.

Speaker 1 And on the 22nd of June, 1922, in his capacity as a war hero, he is invited to Liverpool Street Station for it's a war memorial commemoration, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Yes, for the men of the Eastern Railway Company in Liverpool Street and the that memorial is still there.

Speaker 1 Right. So he doesn't know this, but this day which was already freighted with great emotion is going to be the last day of his life.

Speaker 1 And Ronan, why don't you take us through the story of the day and the final hours of Sir Henry Wilson?

Speaker 2 So there's a meeting, the treaty has split nationalist Ireland in two, including Irish nationalists in London.

Speaker 2 And there is a meeting on the 21st of June in Mooney's pub in Holborn to try and clear the air. And somebody walks in with a copy of the evening paper.

Speaker 2 And there, on page six, among the single paragraph news and briefs, as we call it in journalism, is a notice that Henry Wilson, the following day, is going to unveil a memorial in Liverpool Street Station to railway workers who have been killed in the First World War.

Speaker 2 So there is a motivation among Irish nationalism to have him killed, but now there's the opportunity. And two men volunteer,

Speaker 2 three men, in fact, volunteer to kill Wilson the following day. Reggie Donne, Joe O'Sullivan, and Dennis Callagher.

Speaker 2 And that evening, they go to reconnoitre Liverpool Street station. They realize that they have no chance of killing him there and getting away.

Speaker 2 So they decide instead that they are going to go and wait for him outside his house at number 36 Eaton Place after he's unveiled the memorial.

Speaker 1 Right. So he unveils the memorial and then he's gone home.
Two of the men, so they are Donne and O'Sullivan, are are waiting for him there. And to give people a sense, this is in Belgravia.

Speaker 1 It is in one of the most expensive, prestigious parts of London, these white stucco townhouses. A lot of columns.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a very, very desirable part of the capital to live in which people don't tend to get shot on their own doors.

Speaker 2 No, they don't.

Speaker 2 So you talked about a happenstance there. Wilson thought about going straight to the House of Commons after the Liverpool Street station, but changed his mind.
He was going to give a speech.

Speaker 2 So he decided he would go home and get changed because he was was wearing his field marshal uniform.

Speaker 1 He saw his sword, hasn't he?

Speaker 2 Yes. And he comes back, and at 2.30, the cab pulls up outside 36 Eaton Place, and Dunan O'Sullivan are waiting for him.

Speaker 2 They take two steps forward and they shoot him six times on the doorstep of his own home.

Speaker 2 Story goes around very quickly afterwards that the old warrior draws his sword at these brigands, but in fact, he never gets that far.

Speaker 2 There's actually only one reliable eyewitness and he never gets as far as actually being able to draw a sword, But his sword falls out of his scabbard, so hence the myth.

Speaker 2 They shoot him six times on the doorstep, and then these two men run off.

Speaker 1 One of them kind of hops off, doesn't he? Because he.

Speaker 2 This is the most extraordinary of the many extraordinary things about the assassination of Henry Wilson is that the two men who shoot him are disabled veterans of the First World War.

Speaker 2 And one of them, Joe Sullivan, has lost his right leg at Passchendae in 1917. And they basically hobble off.
As they hobble off, they shoot two policemen. And

Speaker 2 suddenly there's a mob, an angry mob that are following them.

Speaker 2 They hijack a taxi and they make the driver drive in the direction of Marble Arch, but they suddenly alight from the taxi and they're hit on the head with a number of truncheons, and then they're surrounded by the angry mob and taken to George Street Police Station, where they're roughed up and then brought to court.

Speaker 1 So we've looked at Sir Henry Wilson. Could we just look now at the character of of these two men who are Londoners but of Irish stock

Speaker 1 and British veterans, veterans of the British Army? Why

Speaker 1 and how do they end up murdering their own senior officer?

Speaker 2 Well, one of the great paradoxes of this assassination that Henry Wilson is an Irish-born British imperialist killed by two British-born Irish nationalists and Reggie Dawn, he's 24, Joseph O'Sullivan's 25, Reggie Dawn is son of a British Army bandmaster, his mother has, both of his sides of his family have roots in Ireland.

Speaker 2 He's Jesuit educated at St. Ignatius' College.

Speaker 2 Yes, with Alfred Hitchcock, is right. And

Speaker 2 this is very important when he's facing the hangman's rope. He's constantly evoking his Jesuit background to justify what he's doing.
He joins the Irish Guards in 1916.

Speaker 2 He's wounded during the German Spring Offensive 1918 and he's invalided out. And he joins the IRA through a circuitous route.

Speaker 2 So he joins the Gaelic League, which is one of these many Irish cultural organisations in London. He goes to a traditional Irish music session in Stamford Hill and by and by

Speaker 2 the route from cultural Irishness to political Irishness is very quick.

Speaker 2 He joins the IRA in September 1919 and crucially when we talk about the assassination of Henry Wilson he's also sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

Speaker 1 Because you say that in many ways it wasn't Ireland that he loved, but the ideal of Ireland as represented by the Gaelic revival. Yes.

Speaker 2 There isn't much evidence that they ever spent much time in Ireland, which is very, very interesting in its own right. Then we come on to Joe O'Sullivan.
He's more a typical second generation Irish.

Speaker 2 He's one of 12 children from a Fenium family in West Cork. His father is a master tailor in London.
And he's very well educated too.

Speaker 2 He goes to St Edmund's College in Ware, which is one of the oldest Catholic schools in Britain. And he's one of seven brothers, six of whom whom who served in the war.

Speaker 2 And this becomes critically important because when they're looking for information about the killers, they say the Home Secretary Edward Short goes into the House of Commons and says, how could these guys be anything to do with Ireland?

Speaker 2 They served king and country in the First World War.

Speaker 1 And he's the one who's lost his leg, isn't he?

Speaker 2 Yes, he loses his leg in Passchendale in 1970.

Speaker 1 And he hides bullets.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's right. So later when he joins the IRA, he goes over to Ireland and his leg is hollow.
So he hides three or three ammunition cartridges in the legs.

Speaker 2 And in fact, when he gets off the ferry, they see this wounded veteran, and some of the British troops that are there give him a lift to his and he has an unexpected resemblance to David Beckham in that he has a girlfriend called Posh.

Speaker 2 Posh, that's right. Yeah, and she's asking him, where are you? I haven't seen you since you got out of the rebiolitician hospital.
What are you at?

Speaker 2 And it's one of the few letters that survive from her.

Speaker 1 So there's a whole story here, obviously, about the Irish in London and the Irish diaspora and their role in nationalism, which you talk about in your book.

Speaker 1 But maybe we should take this back to Ireland and think about why this ends up having such colossal repercussions in Ireland.

Speaker 1 Because, of course, this is just days before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Speaker 1 To answer that question, let's start by asking: why does this happen? Who orders it?

Speaker 1 And this is a sort of mystery that's hung over this assassination, which effectively, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you think you've solved it.

Speaker 1 You think you know who ordered it? Yes.

Speaker 2 Well, to go back to why this happened, there are separate political divides going on in the south and the north. So Ireland is partitioned in 1921.

Speaker 2 You have Northern Ireland which still exists and then you have the Irish Free State which is set up in provisional form.

Speaker 2 So it's going to become the Free State in a year's time provided that there's an election and there's a constitution and that the government is elected.

Speaker 2 None of these things are a given but in any case the treaty has split Ireland in two, split nationalist Ireland in two between those who support the Anglo-Irish Treaty and those who don't.

Speaker 2 And at the same time, in the north, there is a civil war of its own going on, which is known as the Original Troubles. It goes on from July 1920 to 1922, where there's a lot of sectarian violence.

Speaker 2 And there's also a lot of violence between the IRA and the British state forces there, like the RIC and the Ulster Special Constabulary. So all of this is going on at that time.

Speaker 2 And we have in the Free State an election on the 16th of June in which the pro-treaty, those who are either actively support the treaty or are neutral in the treaty, win almost 80% of the vote. So

Speaker 2 the Irish people have accepted the treaty at this election, but six days later, this shooting happens.

Speaker 2 And at that stage, the anti-treaty side had, in defiance of the provisional government, had occupied these buildings here, the four courts, from April.

Speaker 2 And the provisional government at that stage didn't feel that it had the moral or military authority to remove them from the four courts.

Speaker 2 And when the assassination of Wilson happens, David Lloyd George immediately blames the anti-treaty garrison who are based here in the four courts for the assassination.

Speaker 2 He writes to Michael Collins that evening saying, basically, if you do not remove the garrison from the four courts, we will do it for you. So here we have the possibility.

Speaker 2 This is the ultimatum that the British have given. to the Irish.

Speaker 2 So when I talk about it being Ireland and Sarajevo, you have an assassination and then you have a British ultimatum, same as Austria had an ultimatum to to Serbia.

Speaker 2 The Irish government is now faced with a dilemma. Do we deal with the garrison in the four courts or do we risk the British coming back in and a resumption of the war of independence?

Speaker 1 So can we dig into some of those sort of nuances? So first of all, the split.

Speaker 1 One of the great complexities of the split is that when the negotiators come back to Dublin, the man who has sent them, Eamon de Valera, ends up becoming the leader, effectively, the spokesman, for those people who reject the deal that they've come back with.

Speaker 1 And do you think he'd always set them up that way?

Speaker 2 It's a perennial question that's asked as to why he did not attend the talks himself.

Speaker 2 The most cynical explanation is that he knew he wasn't going to get the Republic and that he wanted to blame it on others. But they had promised to come back to him once before they signed anything.

Speaker 2 And they didn't do that because they were supposed to have had plenipotentiary powers. In other words, they had powers to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty without recourse to him.

Speaker 2 So it's all a very confusing situation. But anyway, they signed the treaty in the early hours of December 6th.
And then they're back in Dublin.

Speaker 2 And Devilair is absolutely furious that they had gone and done this without him. And he's furious at the actual treaty itself, the contents of the treaty.

Speaker 2 But there's immediately a cabinet split in favor of the treaty. It's 4-3.

Speaker 2 And then it's debated in Dahlerin, the parliament, and it's narrowly passed by 64 votes to 57. So there's immediately there's a public support, there's democratic support for the treaty.

Speaker 2 The anti-treaty side do not accept the vote of Dahl Airin.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the critical issue here is the oath of allegiance.

Speaker 1 Right. So this is an interesting thing that I think a lot of people in Britain assume that the critical issue is partition, is the separation of Northern Ireland from the rest of Ireland.

Speaker 1 Partition is not really

Speaker 1 a factor in these arguments. It's not even because not even the British ministers are kind of thinking that Ireland is going to be permanently partitioned.
That's not what's on the table.

Speaker 1 A lot of people, I guess, think the partition is temporary, but the big issue is the oath. Yes.
And the oath has a sort of toxic quality.

Speaker 1 To some nationalists, De Valera, for example, he famously says, Well, if people want to accept this treaty and swear the oath, the people have no right to do wrong. That's right.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 You would think the oath, why would you start a civil war over a formula of words? But that's not really what it was about. It was about the measure of independence that the Irish state would have.

Speaker 2 Remember, those in the IRA had sworn to bring into being an Irish Republic. You can't have a republic if you have an oath of allegiance to a foreign monarch.
And this was the critical issue.

Speaker 2 And this was inserted into the Anglo-Irish Treaty by the British. And they insisted on it staying in the draft constitution because Collins had drawn up a draft constitution which left the oath out.

Speaker 2 And Lloyd George went mad and said, this can't happen. And why are the British insisting on this oath of allegiance?

Speaker 2 Because they didn't want Ireland to set a precedent for the rest of the British Empire.

Speaker 2 It really wasn't as much about Ireland as it was what's going to happen in India if we allow Ireland to be a republic. What's going to happen in Egypt?

Speaker 2 What's going to happen happen in the other countries? So it's really a matter of the British did not want Ireland to be a republic for that reason. And then the old is abolished in 1933.

Speaker 2 The British don't care at that stage. They don't care when Ireland becomes a republic in 1948, but they cared about it in 1922.

Speaker 1 And let's just, as we're coming towards the break, the split. The split is not just within the politicians, but it's within the army itself, the Irish Republican Army.

Speaker 2 And in fact, important thing for people to think about when we get into the civil war, a majority of the IRA are opposed to the treaty is that right so they are very confident that they will get even more recruits yes right to fight the treaty in march 1922 they say they're not going to obey the provisional government they don't regard the provisional government as legitimate we have declared for a republic and we will live under no other law that was what the anti-treaty uh general liam lynch said so that was their attitude and they said that they had 80 percent of the ira but it was a very difficult situation for the provisional government remember this is a government that is is effectively on probation.

Speaker 2 And the people who had won independence for Ireland, a lot of them, do not accept the provisional government as being legitimate.

Speaker 1 A lot of the kind of senior officers in the IRA do actually back the treaty, don't they? Yes. And they do that on the basis.
So to quote Sean McCohen, who is one of the most famous farmers.

Speaker 1 One of Henry Wilson's neighbours, yeah.

Speaker 1 And he said, to me, symbols, recognitions, shadows have very little meaning because for him, what the treaty would give him would be the legal right to command his own soldiers and Collins himself has kind of alluded to this in a similar way by saying that the oath of allegiance which people in Ireland are kind of tearing themselves up over he's saying that this likewise is just a form of words and it matters to the English and it's the sugar coating to enable the English people to swallow the pill so there are kind of people who are casting themselves as realists both in the government form of Collins in the IRA the senior commanders who are saying come on let's not argue over this it's just a form of words that's right And what's interesting about the Civil War is that the measure of freedom that Ireland got under the Anglo-Irish Treaty meant that within 25 years it was a completely independent country.

Speaker 2 I mean, it joined the League of Nations in 1923. It had its own army.
This is the 100th anniversary of the first Irish passport being issued.

Speaker 2 So the substance of the freedom that was wrought was complete, really.

Speaker 1 And that's what Collins famously says, isn't it? That it's the freedom to achieve freedom

Speaker 2 in that sense.

Speaker 1 So the split happens, as you've already described, on the 14th of April 1922, 1922, a group of the anti-treaty IRA men occupy this building that we're sitting in right now, and they are still here when the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson happens.

Speaker 1 So, maybe we should take a break, and when we come back after the break, we can get back to this question of who ordered the death of Sir Henry Wilson and why that matters, and then we'll get into the repercussions for the Irish Civil War.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back to The Rest is History. We're with Ronan McGreevy and we're talking about the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson and the outbreak of the Irish Civil War.

Speaker 1 So, Ronan, let's just look for a second north of the border, to what's now Northern Ireland. This is obviously a huge factor in this.
I mean, it's actually...

Speaker 1 oddly absent from a lot of the story of the Civil War and indeed the Irish War of Independence, or it seems like a separate story, but obviously it means a lot to Wilson and it also plays an important part in why he's killed doesn't it?

Speaker 1 So tell us a little bit about the context of what's going on in the north.

Speaker 2 The civil war wasn't first of all about the status of the north because in the Anglo-Irish Treaty Article 12 was going to set up a boundary commission which would examine the boundary and redraw the borders between north and south according to the wishes of the people.

Speaker 2 So the assumption was made that this would include Fermanagh and Tyrone, Derry, South Armagh, etc.

Speaker 2 So there was an assumption on the part of both pro- and anti-treaty that Northern Ireland would by and by be rendered unviable.

Speaker 2 So it wasn't about the civil war, it wasn't about that. But in the north, a substantial minority, the nationalist minority, find themselves in a state that they feel is inimical to their interests.

Speaker 2 Northern Ireland is set up in June 1921.

Speaker 2 So it's very important to understand that by the time the Anglo-Irish Treaty is drawn up, partition is already a reality.

Speaker 2 And Lloyd George is telling, Devaleri is telling the Irish delegations this is not up for discussion, but they keep pushing back on it so they get their boundary commission, right?

Speaker 2 But there is a huge amount of sectarian strife in the north between July 1920 and July 1922.

Speaker 2 We have the expulsion of Catholics from the shipyards, you have the burning out of homes, you have a lot of sectarian incidents on both sides.

Speaker 2 And the northern government of James Craig is struggling to retain control of the situation. So in March 1922, they appoint Henry Wilson as the military advisor to the northern government.

Speaker 2 And at the same time, the northern government brings in the Special Powers Act, which is known as the Flogging Act, and where they basically can take away the civil rights of anybody they suspect of being disloyal.

Speaker 2 The violence reaches a new crescendo in March 1922. The McMahon family are killed.
These are six members of the same Catholic family. There is a massacre in Iron and Street.

Speaker 2 There's a massacre of Catholic children. And all of this stuff is blamed on the Northern government.

Speaker 2 And for a lot of Irish nationalists, including Michael Collins at the time, Henry Wilson becomes the public face of this crackdown on the nationalists and the New York Times.

Speaker 1 Yes, it's odd, isn't it? Because it's slightly unfair, because in private, Henry Wilson is more nuanced. I mean, he's impossible to be less nuanced than Henry Wilson was in public.
Yes.

Speaker 1 But in private, he's a little bit more nuanced. But in public, he's seen by nationalists as the absolute embodiment of what they regard.
I mean, they use the expression of Belfast pogrom, don't they?

Speaker 1 That's right. And there's a sort of sense that he is the hard-faced incarnation of sectarian cruelty.
Yeah. But I mean, it is odd, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Because he's very opposed to the Black and Tans, for instance.

Speaker 1 And he's opposed to religious sectarianism, whether it's from Protestants. or Catholics.

Speaker 2 Yes, and he always thought that as an Irishman, he was acting in his patriotic interest in keeping Ireland within the United Kingdom.

Speaker 2 He didn't believe that Ireland would thrive outside the United Kingdom. And he was anti-the black and tans, but not for any humanitarian instincts.
He believed in military discipline.

Speaker 2 He felt that the regular army should have been in Ireland. And also he despaired of the sectarian violence.

Speaker 2 And he really felt that the Ulster Special Constabulary, the best or most notorious version of that, the B Specials, should have been not a sectarian force, but drawn from both sides of the community.

Speaker 2 But that wasn't realistic at that time. And Collins said of Wilson before the assassination, he said, we all know only too well the hopes and aims of the Orange North East Ulster.

Speaker 2 They are well expressed to the world with a likely veiled brutality in the language of Sir Henry Wilson.

Speaker 2 They want their ascendancy restored, they want the British back, British diehards and the mischief makers of the Sir Henry Wilson breed are leaving no stone unturned to restore British domination in Ireland.

Speaker 2 And that, in a nutshell, is the problem Collins had with Wilson.

Speaker 1 Here's an interesting thing, that Michael Collins is of course championing the treaty, but at the same time he is sanctioning a new IRA offensive in the north that basically is a complete failure, May and June 1922.

Speaker 1 And the fact that Collins, he's a corkman, he's not a northerner, but he's so invested in the idea of the north is really important for you in explaining who killed Henry Wilson and why.

Speaker 1 Well, before we come to that, should we just look at who the various candidates for the person who ordered the killing are before we name the person that you think is the chief suspect?

Speaker 2 Okay, so I have four different, there's five really, but one is that the British government did it some people think that i don't believe that i don't think they would have carried it out that way had they done so the one theory is that dun and o'sullivan took upon themselves to do this i i don't believe this to be true these were men subject to military discipline and their friends and their family have always pushed back against this idea that they would do something as momentous as this without authorization.

Speaker 2 The anti-treaty IRA, who was blamed by the British government, there's no evidence that they did it.

Speaker 2 They said themselves after Wilson was shot that if we had done it, we'd have admitted to it, but we didn't do it. So it's not them.

Speaker 2 The pro-treaty IRA or the National Army, I don't think the pro-treaty IRA would have done it. I'm certain they didn't do it because the pro-treaty, the IRA at that stage was the National Army.

Speaker 2 It was the first army of the Irish state that was established. The IRA chief of staff, Richard Mulcahy, was horrified by the killing of Wilson.

Speaker 2 It was the last thing that this sort of embattled government needed.

Speaker 2 So we can rule them out as well, which leaves one organisation, which is the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the IRB, not to be confused with the IRA, founded in 1858.

Speaker 2 It's an organisation, a secret, oath-bound organisation sworn to uphold an independent republic.

Speaker 2 So if we come back to Reggie Donne, Reggie Dunne was sworn into the IRB by a man named Sam Maguire, who was the OC in Britain at the time.

Speaker 2 Sam Maguire is very famous in Ireland, but not for any revolutionary activities.

Speaker 2 For sport, the most famous trophy in Irish history, or in the Irish sporting calendar the all-Ireland senior championship cup is named after him in london he had played with michael collins hadn't he that's right he was a much older than michael collins he was a mentor to michael collins so if you look at this sam maguire has um sworn reggie donne and joe o'sullivan into the irb and the head of the irb the one man who could sanction this attack to kill Henry Wilson is the president of the IRB and that man is Michael Collins.

Speaker 1 Collins orders it, you think. And can I just ask before we actually move on to the repercussions, what do people in Ireland think of your theory? What's the reaction been like to your argument?

Speaker 2 Nobody has been able to contradict me because I think I have provided a huge amount of evidence.

Speaker 2 Even in the paperback edition of the book, I had further evidence from a Martin Wallace who was a good friend of Reggie Dunn's, which corroborates the evidence that Collins ordered the shooting.

Speaker 2 I mean, I go into it in great depth, but I do believe it was him.

Speaker 1 But Ren, can I ask you, let's suppose suppose Michael Collins has ordered the assassination. When had he ordered it? Had he ordered it before the treaty is signed or subsequent?

Speaker 2 No, he had ordered the assassination, we believe in June 1922 after an incident called Pettigo and Balik, which again was blamed on Wilson, but had nothing to do with Wilson, where the IRA occupied two border villages and the British Army used howitzers and first world war artillery to get them out.

Speaker 2 So I believe that it happened after that. There is a woman who told a biographer of Collins that she delivered the letter on the mailboat from Euston Station to a guy called Liam Tobin.

Speaker 2 Liam Tobin delivered the letter to Sam Maguire, who delivers the letter to Reggie Doan.

Speaker 2 And then it was just a question of when is the opportunity going to present itself for us to assassinate him. And that's why the notice in the paper is really important on the 21st of June.

Speaker 1 Before we get into the Civil War, let's just spend a couple of minutes on the aftermath of the crime itself. The funeral is a huge public occasion.

Speaker 1 I mean, Tom did that reading at the beginning from The Times. It's a massive story.
Politicians are horrified.

Speaker 1 When the news reaches the House of Commons, you know, they're all standing up and giving these speeches, often about a man who they really disliked, but they're still, you know, Asquith, who despised Wilson, is very shaken and kind of tearful.

Speaker 1 There's a sense in Britain, I think, that something must happen. That's right.
There can be, there must be some form of repercussion.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, he was the first British MP to be assassinated in Britain since the Prime Minister Spencer Percival, I think in 1812. So assassination was not the British way of doing things.

Speaker 2 But as we know from the First World War and from so many other events, that assassination was an occupational hazard for a lot of politicians, three U.S. presidents, etc.

Speaker 2 So it's a huge shock in Britain. And of course, the British government has to be seen to do something, hence the ultimatum to Collins to get rid of the anti-treaty garrison out of the four courts.

Speaker 2 And the only evidence that he presented was a copy of a newspaper that Lloyd George had that could be bought on the streets of Dublin.

Speaker 2 This was the only evidence that he had to link the assassination with

Speaker 2 Reggie Dunn. But it didn't really matter who was responsible.
They had unfinished business in Ireland.

Speaker 2 The British Iron British government was getting tired of this standoff that was happening in the Four Courts. They felt it was undermining the treaty and this was their cue to do something about it.

Speaker 1 And the Four Courts, which is obviously where we are sitting right now, it's a court complex. I mean, it was a court complex back then.

Speaker 1 And a huge sort of, I mean, it's a big hulking building and especially would have been, loomed even larger at the time. So a symbol of power.
Yes. And the fact that it's been occupied for months.

Speaker 2 Yes, from April.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for over two months. Yes.
It's seen by the British and I guess by the provisional government in Ireland as a...

Speaker 2 standing provocation. Yes, it's a standing provocation and that's what it was supposed to be.
But the provisional government would not take the bait and go in to remove them.

Speaker 2 So they were walking in and out of the four courts and so on.

Speaker 2 It was coming to a head when the anti-treaty side also played into the hands of the provisional government by two days after the kidding of Henry Wilson, the kidnap Ginger O'Connell, who's a Free State general.

Speaker 2 And that's the causes Bell I or the that's your trigger to say, you know, to tell the Irish people we're going to get these people out of the four courts.

Speaker 2 But they don't mention the Wilson shooting because

Speaker 2 it's not politic to do so.

Speaker 1 But of course, standing behind this is the shadow of 1916 and the revolutionaries, including Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, who had been in the GPO, where similarly a major kind of architectural symbol of the state in Dublin is occupied.

Speaker 1 And presumably part of the strategy of the anti-treatyites, if we can call them that, is to force those who are upholding the treaty to play the part of the British.

Speaker 2 That's right. That was part of the propaganda at that time as well.

Speaker 2 And there was also another school of thought that the anti-treaty garrison kind of half hoped that the British would try and remove them and that that would unite the pro- and anti-treaty side against the British.

Speaker 2 And remember, the British still had a substantial garrison in Ireland. They still had about 8,000 troops.
So they could have gone in and removed the anti-treaty garrison themselves.

Speaker 2 And that's what they were going to do. But the officer commanding in Ireland, Neville McGready, said, you really don't want to start the War of Independence again, you know.

Speaker 1 And so instead, they encouraged Michael Collins, who, according to your theory, is actually...

Speaker 1 the person behind the murder of Henry Wilson, to go in and attack these people who the British government are blaming for that assassination.

Speaker 2 So basically, they borrowed two 18 pounder field guns from Marlborough Barracks here and they positioned them on the quays outside here.

Speaker 1 So just to reiterate, these are British guns.

Speaker 2 These are British guns and British shells.

Speaker 2 In fact, one of the reasons that the Pro Treaty side wins a civil war is because of the amount of armaments that they get from a country that they were only fighting a year previously.

Speaker 2 So they get the 18 pounder guns.

Speaker 2 and they position them at both sides of the bridges here and they give the garrison until 3.30 in the morning to get out garrison don't get out and then they start shelling this is the beginning of the civil war we know that now but even at that time the provisional government was hoping that the anti-treaty side would come to their senses that they would say all right okay it's all over now they even let Liam Lynch the anti-treaty general go and he thought he would go back to his his men in Munster and say listen let's there's no point in fighting over this but actually that's the start of the civil war So we will be telling the story of the Civil War in the next episode and we'll also be talking about what happens to Michael Collins, one of the most famous moments in all Irish history.

Speaker 1 But just before we get to the end of this episode, why don't we tie up the story of these two men,

Speaker 1 Dunn and O'Sullivan? So, what happens to them? They have been overpowered by the mob. They've been taken off to prison.
They're clearly going to be put on trial.

Speaker 1 There is talk among Irish nationalists of a rescue because there's a long history of springing people from prison. Well, Michael Collins had himself personally sprung America in 1990.

Speaker 2 There was a long history, including in 1921, Strangers Prison.

Speaker 2 There was a long history of jailbreaks, breaks, but these were the most wanted men in Britain, and they weren't going to make the same mistake again.

Speaker 2 So, Michael Collins, one of the reasons I believe in the culpability of Michael Collins, he sends a huge number of men over to try and rescue the two guys, but they realize that it's a forlorn hope.

Speaker 2 So, instead, three of them set upon the idea of kidnapping the Prince of Wales at the Cows Regatta.

Speaker 2 They go to the Cows Regatta, but they're rumbled because of their Irish accents, and also because they had faulty intelligence. The Prince of Wales wasn't there.
So the men's situation is doomed.

Speaker 2 The trial only takes one day. It's on the 18th of July, 1922.
The reason that that date is significant is because down the road from the old bailey, Earl Montbatten is getting married to Edwina.

Speaker 2 And this is really interesting because in 1979, the IRA, the provisional IRA, the new incarnation of the provisional IRA, kill Earl Montbatten.

Speaker 2 And I think the assassination of Montbaten is the nearest thing in our lifetime to what happened to Wilson.

Speaker 1 But there are all kinds of weird echoes and reverberations around this case, aren't there?

Speaker 1 So Dunn and O'Sullivan are prosecuted by a barrister called Travis Humphreys, who I learned from your book had previously acted for Oscar Wilde in his libel action against the Marquis of Queensbury, but had prosecuted Sir Roger Casement, who we did a bonus with John Banville a few months back, this Irish Anglo-Irishman who had served as a consul for Britain in the Congo, but then had become an Irish nationalist and had ended up being killed just before the Easter Rising.

Speaker 1 Because unsurprisingly, they get convicted and they get hanged. And the hangman is the same person who had hanged John Ellis.

Speaker 1 Yeah, John Ellis, he'd hanged Roger Casement and also had famously hanged a young medical student, 18-year-old medical student in Dublin called Kevin Barry, who'd been caught up in a kind of IRA attack.

Speaker 1 And he's also a very famous figure in Irish Republican mythology, isn't he?

Speaker 2 So Kevin Barry is, as the song goes, a lad of 18 Summers, he was convicted of killing three British soldiers.

Speaker 2 One actually was only 15 years of age, and there was a lot of calls for reprieve for Kevin Barry, given his age, but they hanged him in Mount Joy jail, and he became a sort of marthor in Irish history.

Speaker 1 So Paul Robeson, Lynn, Cohen, Dubliners have all sung about him. So he's another.
And then he ends up hanging Reginald Dunn and Joseph O'Sullivan. Right.

Speaker 1 So next time we will be coming to the story of the Civil War and what happens to Michael Collins.

Speaker 1 And obviously, if you're a member of our own brotherhood, the Rest is History Club, you can hear that episode right now.

Speaker 1 If you're not, you can sign up, you can swear your oath at the restishistory.com. But, Ronan, thank you so much.
That was absolutely brilliant. And we will see you on Thursday for the next leg.

Speaker 1 Bye-bye.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Goodbye.