Despatch from the West Midlands: the centre can not hold?

As so often over the past year I see the project slowed down as a consequence of finding myself stuck in Coventry fulfilling filial duties as my nonagenarian mother recovers from yet another avoidable stay in hospital.  Thus my intention to commence writing last week was thwarted by an urgent summons to Coventry, although at least I completed digesting a couple of memoirs and biographies pertinent to the 1920s.  Awaiting perusal at home is General ‘Hap’  Arnold’s 1949 autobiography, Global Mission, courtesy of inter-library loan (a rare exception to my working rule that somewhere in the county  a branch or store of Hampshire Libraries holds a copy of whichever esoteric work of literature I need to consult – charging just 50p for online reservation and speedy delivery to Lymington Library confirms that this is an amazing service, which for me has over the years drastically reduced my ILL requests via the University Library).   Arnold was a founding father (the founding father?) of the USAAC/F, and eventual USAF, and worked closely with Fairey when he was deputy and then director of the British Air Commission.  There is a signed photograph bearing Arnold’s best wishes to CRF on the mantelpiece at Bossington, but a quick glance at the index of Global Mission suggests no mention of my man in the former chief of staff’s memoirs; more will be revealed once I get home and read the relevant chapters.  To fill my time fruitfully in Coventry I have  been doing my homework ahead of serving as internal examiner for a doctoral thesis on the Liberal Party and Home Rule.  Thus I plucked off the office shelves my long ignored copy of Patricia Jalland’s The Liberals and the Ulster Crisis, based on research undertaken nearly half a century ago and, while still illuminating, showing its age, e.g. although there is the odd quote from the PM’s correspondence with Venetia Stanley, courtesy of Roy Jenkins’ biography of Asquith, there is no apparent knowledget of just how revealing the letters are (as confirmed by the volume Michael Brock edited for OUP some time after Jalland’s book was published).  Jalland lets Asquith off lightly, even if she does draw a direct parallel between his inertia and fatalism as a wartime premier and his earlier handling of the crisis that intensified as the 1911 Parliament Act rendered Home Rule more and more a reality – on the statute book if not in practice.  Thus there is  no mention of indolent country house weekends, and no reference to an incipient drink problem.  Her argument is that the Liberal Government should have accepted a minimalist partition of four NE counties at the start of the legislative process in order not ultimately to surrender control of events to the Unionist opposition, especially Carson’s political and quasi-military power base in Belfast.  This was an administration which, courtesy of Labour’s 42 [?] MPs, enjoyed a working majority in the Commons, and could survive without the active support of the Irish Parliamentary Party – but what if Redmond, Dillon et al felt that they had to vote against an amendment in order not to sustain withering criticism from advocates of outright separatism at home?  Even if the IPP had opposed such an amendment the party’s credibility would have been seriously undermined, and the fact that the Government would be dependent upon Unionist support to secure  such a critical change in the original bill would have provided further ammunition for advocates of total separation.  Would Bonar Law and his Tory MPs have supported such an amendment, but rather smelt blood once Asquith and Augustine Birrell had agreed to such a dramatic reversal of their previously uncompromising position, i.e., with the help of an IPP with nothing to lose secured a successful vote of no confidence in the Commons and defeated a heavily battered (suffragettes, strikes, etc.) Liberal Government in the subsequent election?  This surely was the fear of more astute ministers like Lloyd George and Churchill (and Haldane?), with both men increasingly  sympathetic to the argument that their party’s survival in power demanded accommodation with the Unionists, thereby revealing coalitionist tendencies and an acceptance of six-counties partition long before events in Ulster and on the Dardanelles forced the end of the Liberals’ decade in office.   From an aged and creaking text to a state of the art commentary: my companion volume was Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923, a masterly study of individual and collective disillusion.  In reading such a lively evocation of Edwardian Dublin and the separatist community I was keenly aware of a strong authorial voice, in both the astute and sensitive commentary and the adopted style – anyone who has ever heard Roy Foster speak would have his mellifluous tones lodged firmly in their brain as they progress through the book.  There is thus a characteristic voice, and a characteristic light touch (re Ella Young’s unique journey from ultramontane Dublin to freethinking California: ‘her papers are now divided between Ballymena Library and the Centre for Lesbian, Gay and Transgender History in San Francisco.’)  So my sojourn in Coventry has been rendered more tolerable courtesy of an illuminating and highly enjoyable contribution to a discourse revived in its intensity by the imminence of 2016; with for this particular reader one unexpected consequence, namely the possibility that my wife Mary is a very distant relative of Clonakilty’s Sean Hurley, Michael Collins’ brother-in-law and a ‘martyr’ of the 1916 Easter Rising.  Republican royalty indeed!