The Lockout 1913
Padraig Yeates
SIPTU, 1913 Committee
RM Gwynn Commemoration and Seminar
Whitechurch Parish, Rathfarnham
19 September 2013
The Lockout is unique in the great events of the decade from 19121923 in that it saw conflict align itself along class lines, rather than
the traditional divides of religion and contested political allegiances.
Catholic and Protestant employers united under the leadership of
William Martin Murphy, the first Catholic President of the Dublin
Chamber of Commerce while Jim Larkin and the Dublin Trades
Council received the bulk of their support from British workers of all
religious persuasions and none.
Institutional relations between the Church of Ireland and the Roman
Catholic Church in Dublin were fragile in 1913. There was underlying
tension over the low intensity proselytising war in the city, which had
been aggravated by the prospect of Home Rule and mounting fears
that conflict in the North could spill over into the South. There were
over 92,000 Protestants in Dublin City and County, who were
overwhelmingly Unionist in their politics. This was the largest
concentration on this island outside of Belfast.
The 1913 Lockout actually eased tensions between the two churches
initially as both archbishops supported attempts at mediation. At a
meeting of the Dublin Industrial Peace Committee in the Mansion
House on October 27th, Dr Joseph Ferguson Peacocke spoke strongly
in favour of a peace initiative his Catholic counterpart, Dr William
Walsh had undertaken. So did the Dean of St Patrick’s, the Rev C
Ovenden, who proposed a resolution calling for "a private and
unconditional" conference, where the two sides could avail of Dr
Walsh's good offices to reach a settlement . Dr Ovenden said that,
"living in the slums - and delighting in the slums - it breaks my heart
at what I have seen."
The Reverend Denham Osbourne managed to refocus the meeting
on the business in hand. A leading shipping firm had told him that
goods worth £1 million had been left lying on the docks and £30,000
worth might have rotted already. Equally pressing was the plight of
the unemployed. Even workers "outside the fighting line" wanted
housing and he felt wages for the thousands of unskilled workers
should be raised to a level that would make life bearable for them
and their families. Edward Lee, a leading employer in the city
avoided apportioning blame for the dispute, but said that once it was
out of the way he was convinced that the question of the slums
should be tackled. "Men of capital ought to be ashamed to have it go
out to the ends of the earth that so many families were living each in
one room. (Hear, hear.)"
However most of his fellow employers and co-religionists were in a
more belligerent mood. Within two weeks the ss 'Ella' would arrive in
the Alexandra Basin with 160 "free labourers" on board and moored
well out from the wharf in anticipation of trouble. Only one entrance
to the basin was open and that was guarded by 100 DMP and RIC
men. Extra troops had been drafted in after hasty consultations
between the Irish GOC, General Sir Arthur Paget and Sir James
Dougherty over a cup of tea at Parkgate. Senior military officers
called to the harbour master's office and soldiers, including a troop
of lancers, provided larger than usual escorts for coal deliveries to
barracks.
The 'Irish Times' carried an unusual letter that day. It was written
jointly by the Reverend Thomas C Hammond, rector of St Kevin's and
Henry O'Connor. The Rev Hammond was secretary of the Dublin by
Lamplight Institution; O'Connor was general secretary of the City of
Dublin Young Men's Christian Association. They were protesting at
the summary dismissal of G H Walton from the firm of Gill and Son.
Gill's was the leading catholic publishing house in the city and a
supplier of religious requisites such as chalices and vestments.
Walton, a protestant, had worked with the firm for 39 years. He was
sacked on October 28th and given a month's pay in lieu of notice. His
offence, claimed Hammond and O'Connor, was that he had been
helping distribute free breakfasts to the poor at the Christian Union
in Abbey Street. They also alleged that an unnamed catholic
organisation had brought the matter to the firm's attention and
effectively forced the dismissal. The 'Irish Times' published a
response from the secretary of M H Gill and Son, Patrick Keoghane,
on November 8th, 1913, which only aggravated the situation.
Keoghane said that Walton had admitted "that he was actively
engaged in certain objectionable practices at the Metropolitan
Christian Union Buildings".
The premises was a veritable bastion of protestant evangelism in the
city. Amongst the organisations it housed were the Evangelical
Alliance, Dublin Free Breakfasts for the Poor, the Hibernian Band of
Hope, Dublin Protestant Deaf and Dumb Association, the Army
Scripture Readers' and Soldiers' Friends Society, the Lord's Day
Observance Society and the Open Air Mission for Ireland. The
"objectionable practice" that Walton had engaged in was of course
proselytism, and proselytism "in its most insidious forms", according
to Keoghane. "Under these circumstances, my board did not
conceive it consistent with their obligations as recognised Catholic
publishers that a gentleman engaged in such practices should
continue in their service." Walton had been given an opportunity to
resign and had availed of it. Keoghane pointed out that the company
had "no quarrel whatever with Protestantism" and had in its employ
other protestants "who enjoy its full confidence and respect".
However the directors would not tolerate those "endeavouring to
wean little children from the faith of their fathers".
Keoghane's letter might have carried more conviction if Walton had
only recently entered the proselytising fray, but he had been helping
at the Christian Union for 34 years. The 'Irish Times', the voice of
Southern Liberal Unionism, made the case the subject of its first
leader on Saturday, November 8th, and accused the company of
treating Walton "not merely harshly, but brutally". The newspaper
said it disliked proselytism from any source. "Proselytism and the
suspicion of proselytism have done an immense amount of harm in
Dublin by preventing the hearty co-operation of Protestants and
Roman Catholics in works of social reform." But even if Walton had
"by means of tea and bread and butter... tempted little children to
swallow his theological opinions" he had at worst behaved "foolishly
and with a want of what we may call Christian delicacy. ... He has
committed no crime. Probably he believed, as most citizens of the
Empire believe, that his spare time was his own. .... In part of his free
time Mr Walton, exercising the civil and religious liberties of his
citizenship did certain things of which his conscience approved.
Messrs Gill objected to these things, and so they have turned an old
and faithful servant into the street. Their legal right is
unquestionable, but their action can be defended on no other
ground. It sets up a claim which, if many employers were to assert it,
would justify the hardest things that Mr Larkin has said against
employers as a class."
It was not only employers the 'Irish Times' placed in the dock, but
nationalists as well. Two weeks earlier Dr Peacocke had been
criticised by P J Brady, the MP for the city's St Stephen's Green
division, for daring to suggest that Home Rule posed a threat to the
civil and religious liberties of Irish protestants. Brady had challenged
Dr Peacocke "to give a single instance ... in which the civil and
religious liberties of Protestants had been menaced by their Catholic
fellow-countrymen". The 'Irish Times' now replied. "We present Mr
Brady with the case of Mr G H Walton. We invite him to justify it if he
can." Walton was "a test case". If Brady "by speech or silence
endorses the conduct of Messrs Gill ... all Mr Redmond's and Mr
Brady's assurances on the subject, while they may be quite honest,
have been, and will continue to be, worthless." It was a call echoed
by the Rev J O Gage Dougherty, rector of Walton's church, St Mary's.
He described his parishioner as "a quiet, inoffensive, respectable
citizen" who had led an "exemplary life. ... This is surely a case where
Mr John Redmond could step in, as he promised to do if a case of
intolerance was brought under his notice in Ireland."
Redmond and Brady remained silent. Redmond could, no doubt,
plead pressure of more important business and Brady may not have
had much choice. The organisation which had "outed" Walton was
almost certainly the Society of St Vincent de Paul, of which Brady
was a prominent member. It had been maintaining a close
surveillance of protestant proselytising organisations in the city for
some time and had reported its findings to Dr Walsh in July. Normally
such low intensity sectarian warfare did not have such dramatic
consequences. However circumstances were anything but normal in
Dublin. The synchronicity of the lockout and the Home Rule crisis
made normally tolerable sectarian tensions suddenly intolerable.
The debate which followed Walton's dismissal was similar to that in
the North two years earlier during the infamous McCann divorce
controversy. The McCanns had been a mixed couple in Belfast whose
marriage broke up. The father, a catholic, had subsequently
emigrated and taken the children with him. Outraged unionists had
accused the catholic church of helping him "spirit away" the
youngsters in pursuance of the 1908 papal decree, ne Temere. The
decree required catholic parents in a mixed marriage to ensure that
any children were reared in the catholic faith and had proved deeply
divisive in Ireland. The McCann incident had been revived by unionist
propagandists in the Home Rule crisis to demonstrate that Home
Rule would lead to Rome Rule. Dublin unionists were quick to draw
comparisons between the Walton dismissal and the McCann case.
Catholics and nationalists were equally quick to defend M H Gill and
Son. They argued that the company had acted with great
forebearance and tolerance towards Walton, which he had seen fit
to abuse. Robert Gibson, a protestant Home Ruler and businessman
in Limerick said that, if he found a catholic employee engaged in
proselytising protestant children he would also feel entitled to sack
him. "The Roman Catholic, or the Protestant, who tries to pervert
little children is neither a good Catholic nor a good Protestant, and
utterly unworthy of the name of Christian", he said in a letter to the
'Irish Times'. However his attitude was not typical of southern
protestants. They saw Walton's dismissal as a crude assault on their
civil liberties and the Irish Party's silence as evidence of the supine
attitude nationalists adopted when confronted with the prerogatives
of the catholic church.
Walton's dismissal was indeed a worse example of religious
intolerance than the McCann case. It had been argued with some
justification by nationalist MPs such as Joe Devlin that in the McCann
case religion had been no more than a weapon used by warring
parents in the closing stages of an unhappy marriage. Why then did
unionist politicians not make more of it? The probable explanation is
that if they had done so they would have risked drawing attention to
widespread discriminatory employment practices amongst
protestant employers.
The charge of attempting to proselytise children also served to
isolate Walton from public sympathy, although there was no
concrete evidence produced that he had done anything at the
Metropolitan Hall other than help feed the hungry. Where social
work ended and proselytism began was of course a sensitive point in
the Dublin of 1913. But, as one 'Irish Times' correspondent pointed
out, the city was too small a place for any seriously objectionable
behaviour by Walton to have gone unnoticed by his employer for 34
years.
Keoghane's own condemnation of proselytism was undermined
when a caller to the Gill shop in Upper Sackville Street found it
distributed material from the Society of the Holy Childhood. This
organisation was appealing for funds to "buy" the children of
"pagans" so that they could be reared as catholics. Another
publication carried by the company was the 'Annals of the
Propagation of the Faith'. This reported that "the nuns of a convent
in Peking had... bought nearly 900 Buddhist infants at five pence
ha'penny a head" and could save more souls if given the funds.
Nor was the company's case helped when it emerged that 11 days
after his dismissal, Walton had been given a testimonial which
described him as "a most experienced man in matters connected
with the book business", regular in attendance at work, "strictly
sober and honest". The testimonial concluded by saying the he left
the company's employment "with our good wishes for his future
prosperity".
It was read to much laughter at a public meeting in the Metropolitan
Hall on November 19th. The Rev Hammond told the audience that
"an upright man" had been victimised and "thrust friendless and
forsaken in his old age to become, for aught his persecutors cared, a
burden on the rates". The rector warned that, "If every alleged case
of proselytism is to be followed with relentless and material damage,
then let them look for a reign of anarchy ... of ... which no parallel
can be found." There were plenty of instances of proselytism by
catholics and other "well meant interference. Such incidents warned
them that peace could only be preserved in a community divided on
religious questions by a frank recognition that a wide liberty must be
permitted." When he asked if there were any "brethren of the
Reformed Faith" in the audience prepared to "serve under Roman
Catholic directors or managers" who compelled them "to submit to a
censorship of their religious activities", there were angry cries of
"Never".
Another speaker was the rector of St Mary's, the Rev J O Gage
Dougherty. "Mr Walton's case does not stand alone in Ireland. There
are many Protestants suffering in just the same way." Organisations
such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul did not exist "only for the
relief of the poor, but to win over heretics", he said. "The meeting
passed a resolution condemning M H Gill for their "intolerant
attitude" and this received prominent coverage in the 'Irish Times'.
The newspaper also launched a fund for Walton, which had raised
over £130 by late November. Most of the contributors, to judge from
the names were Protestant. One donation, for 10s, was from "A
Catholic working in a Protestant Bookshop".
Few people can have doubted that M H Gill and Son sacked Walton
because the company was dependant on the goodwill of the catholic
church for survival. Defending Walton's right to a job could have
jeopardised the employment of all its other employees.
In his post mortem on the affair 'Vigilans', who had written the
detailed reports on the Irish Church Mission's activities in the city for
the 'Leader', suggested to the 'Irish Times' that Walton's
employment was "as great an anomaly as would be the employment
of a Catholic in the book depot of the Irish Church Mission's Society".
He took the view that, "When Mr Walton was taken on 39 years ago
it must have been on the distinct, though, perhaps, tacit,
understanding that, though free to practise his religion ... he would
not take part in any shape or form of proselytism, which is
recognised by everybody to be a contrary propaganda to that out of
which, through the tolerance of Messrs Gill, the man was making his
living."
The truth was that Walton was not so much an anomaly as an
anachronism. Another 'Irish Times' letter writer, S A Quam-Smith of
Bullock Harbour, Dalkey, said that commentators such as 'Vigilans'
were mistaken in assuming that M H Gill had always been in "the
business of ... religious propaganda". When Walton joined the
company 39 years previously it had been called McGlashan and Gill.
The Gills had themselves been printers to that bastion of the
protestant ascendancy Trinity College and, although McGlashan had
long departed the scene when Walton was appointed, the company's
ethos had not been overtly catholic. "It is the firm that has changed,
not Mr Walton", Quam-Smith concluded. He enclosed a guinea for
the Walton fund with his letter. The Walton affair was yet another
episode marking the eclipse of protestant Dublin. In a few short
years similar protest meetings would be unthinkable.
Fear of what the future held was further inflamed by the Dora
Montefiore controversy. A wealthy philanthropist, socialist and
female suffrage campaigner, she embodied everything that the
catholic hierarchy found most challenging in the ‘modern woman’.
That she was a member of a Jewish financial dynasty did not help.
Her scheme to bring strikers’ children to foster homes in Britain, as
had happened in the London docks strike of the previous year drew
the fire of Dr Walsh, who had remained scrupulously neutral in the
labour dispute until then, unlike many of his clergy.
He condemned unequivocally Dora Montefiore’s plans to take
strikers’ children to foster homes in England to be looked after in the
homes of socialists, atheists, Protestants and God forbid,
suffragettes. The women who placed their children in her hands
would be unworthy of the title of Irish mothers and, worst of all, this
‘fantastic scheme’ would make children sent to England
‘discontented with the poor homes to which they will sooner
or later return. … That surely is by no means to be viewed
with anything but abhorrence by anyone sincerely anxious
for the welfare and happiness of the poor’.
Dr Walsh seemed to accept that the poor would always be with us:
the important thing was that they be contented with their lot. Mobs
led by young curates and members of the Ancient Order of
Hibernians literally manhandled Montefiore and her helpers, seizing
the children and brow beating parents into withdrawing their
consent to the foster scheme. Murphy’s newspapers published the
names and addresses of the families.
Of course this demonstration of clerical power was not lost on
Protestants. T D Rudmose-Brown, Professor of Romance Languages
at Trinity College, witnessed the success of mob rule at Amiens
Street (now Connolly) station in preventing children from being
taken to foster homes in Belfast. He wrote that the scenes provided
‘an interesting foretaste of the joys of unfettered Home Rule to
which we are hastening’.
It was against the background of the Montefiore and Walton
controversies that the last great rally of southern unionists took
place in the Theatre Royal on Friday, November 29th, 1913. The
stage was "a cave of Union Jacks". The largest union flag ever made
filled the back of the stage. "The closely packed parterre, platform,
and galleries, were filled largely with businessmen, heads of great
and small businesses, strong in the determination contained in the
great motto over the stage, plain and uncompromising: 'We will not
have Home Rule'," reported the 'Irish Times'. "The ladies, who had
the dress circle to themselves, were no less enthusiastic than the
menfolk." An orchestra entertained the crowd while it awaited the
arrival of Sir Edward Carson and the leader of the Opposition,
Andrew Bonar Law. The musicians could hardly be heard over the
lusty voices singing 'Rule Britania' and the 'British Grenadiers'. When
the vocal chords of the audience were finally exhausted, the
orchestra switched to a ragtime selection. It was a remarkable
demonstration of strength, and weakness. Some counties were only
represented by declarations of loyalty, or in the titles of the 21 peers
present. Even some of these, such as Lord Cloncurry, had children
who had deserted the defence of the Union for more radical causes.
Several of the speakers, including Bonar Law, did not hesitate to
make capital out of Dublin's labour troubles. While conflicts between
labour and capital were "only too common" and "always deplorable",
Law told the audience he could not remember a dispute "more
deplorable" than the lockout. "To me, ladies and gentlemen, the
amazing thing ... is that no attempt to influence it has been made by
the political leaders of Irish Nationalism. (Cheers.)" Carson's fellow
MP for Trinity College, John H Campbell, made the most sustained
attack on the nationalists over the strike. He asked where John
Redmond, "the leader of the Irish race at home and abroad" had
been during the dispute. A voice from the audience answered
"aboard", to loud laughter.
"Where have been the Dublin Six [nationalist MPS]? They
were either in sympathy with the workers or with the
employers. If they were in sympathy with the workers, why
had they not the courage to come out and say so? If, on the
other hand, their sympathies were with the employers, duty
again required and demanded that they should come boldly
and publicly forward and state their views."
Instead they had remained silent while the dispute was "paralysing
and crippling the industries of your country. I have no sympathy with
Larkin and his methods. (Hisses.)" Campbell said he had "denounced
him from the platform in Dublin and from my seat in the House of
Commons", but the Irish Executive had
"feted him in Dublin Castle. ... Jim Larkin would have been
allowed ... to pursue his methods only he fell foul of Mr John
Redmond and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. (Hisses.) It
was they who issued the order for his prosecution and
arrest, and it is the knowledge of that which makes me so
bitter. The English Radical papers, writing on this subject,
say: After all, is it not a great opportunity for Dublin
Unionists, now that in a Home Rule Parliament Redmond
and Devlin will not have it all their own way, that they will
have to deal with Jim Larkin and men like him?' A nice
prospect, ladies and gentlemen, for us, and a nice choice we
have got between the devil and the deep sea. (Laughter.)
"Though speaking for myself, I would rather suffer under
the whips of Larkin than under the scorpions of Joe Devlin. I
honestly believe that I would have a greater chance of
liberty, of personal judgement and of conscience under Jim
Larkin and the Irish Transport Union, than I would have
under Joe Devlin and the Molly Maguires. (Cheers.)"
Campbell's choice of "devils" was an interesting one, as was his
characterisation of the Joe Devlin school of industrial relations
with the discredited methods of the Irish-American secret
society.
Two leading Dublin employers also addressed the rally, Lord Iveagh
and Sir Maurice Dockrell. Both stressed the threats to individual
liberty, freedom of expression and the influence protestants played
in the "commercial and professional life of the three provinces",
posed by Home Rule. Neither of them mentioned the lockout.
Certainly some Unionists in the city were concerned enough to form
a Loyalist militia, meeting for drill purposes every week at the
Orange Order’s national headquarters in the Fowler’s Hall, Rutland
Square. It was reported to have 400 members and 100 rifles. Its main
objective was to defend the southern townships in the event of civil
war, or Home Rule, or both.
Simultaneously the Irish Citizen Army was being conceived at a
meeting in the Rev R M Gwynn’s rooms in Trinity College as a means
of providing the Locked Out workers with a sense of self-discipline
and self-esteem during the dispute. It quickly became a defence
force that protected trade union pickets and demonstrations from
the DMP. Under the command of James Connolly from October 1914
it would assume a distinctly paramilitary character. The rest, as they
say, is history.
© Padraig Yeates