{"id":86,"date":"2014-11-03T13:53:07","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T13:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/srfb\/?p=86"},"modified":"2014-11-03T13:53:07","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T13:53:07","slug":"despatch-from-the-west-midlands-the-centre-can-not-hold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2014\/11\/03\/despatch-from-the-west-midlands-the-centre-can-not-hold\/","title":{"rendered":"Despatch from the West Midlands: the centre can not hold?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As so often over the past year I\u00a0see 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Awaiting perusal at home is General ‘Hap’\u00a0 Arnold’s 1949 autobiography, Global Mission<\/em>, courtesy of inter-library loan (a rare exception to my working rule that somewhere in the county\u00a0 a branch or store of Hampshire Libraries holds a copy of\u00a0whichever esoteric work of literature I\u00a0need to consult – charging just 50p for online reservation and\u00a0speedy delivery to Lymington Library\u00a0confirms that this is an amazing service, which for me has over the years drastically reduced my ILL requests\u00a0via the\u00a0University Library).\u00a0\u00a0 Arnold was a founding father (the<\/em> founding father?) of the USAAC\/F, and eventual USAF, and worked closely with Fairey\u00a0when he was deputy and then director of the British Air Commission.\u00a0 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<\/em> 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.\u00a0 To fill my time fruitfully in Coventry I have\u00a0 been doing my homework ahead of serving as internal examiner for a doctoral thesis on the Liberal Party and Home Rule.\u00a0 Thus I plucked off the office shelves my long ignored copy of Patricia Jalland’s The Liberals and the Ulster Crisis<\/em>, based on research undertaken nearly half a century ago and, while still illuminating, showing its age, e.g.\u00a0although 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).\u00a0 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\u00a0that intensified as the 1911 Parliament Act rendered\u00a0Home Rule more and more a reality – on the statute book if not in practice.\u00a0 Thus there is\u00a0 no mention of indolent country house weekends, and no reference to an incipient drink problem.\u00a0 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\u00a0to surrender control of events to the Unionist opposition,\u00a0especially Carson’s political and quasi-military\u00a0power base\u00a0in Belfast.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 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\u00a0dependent upon Unionist support to secure\u00a0 such a critical change in the original bill would have provided further ammunition for advocates of total separation.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 This surely was the fear of more astute ministers like Lloyd George and Churchill (and Haldane?), with both men increasingly\u00a0 sympathetic to the argument that\u00a0their party’s\u00a0survival 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.\u00a0\u00a0 From an aged and creaking text to a state of the art commentary:\u00a0my companion volume was Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923<\/em>, a masterly study of individual and collective disillusion.\u00a0 In reading such a lively evocation of\u00a0Edwardian Dublin and the separatist community\u00a0I 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.\u00a0 There is thus a characteristic voice, and<\/em> a characteristic light touch (re Ella Young’s unique journey from\u00a0ultramontane Dublin to\u00a0freethinking California: ‘her papers are now divided between Ballymena Library and the Centre for Lesbian, Gay and Transgender History in San Francisco.’)\u00a0\u00a0So my sojourn in Coventry has been rendered more tolerable courtesy of an\u00a0illuminating and highly enjoyable contribution to a discourse revived in its intensity by the imminence of 2016; with for this particular reader one unexpected consequence,\u00a0namely the\u00a0possibility 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.\u00a0 Republican royalty indeed!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As so often over the past year I\u00a0see 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.\u00a0 Thus my intention to commence writing last week was thwarted by an urgent summons to Coventry, although at least … <\/p>\n

Continue reading »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53565,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53565"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/88"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}