Between comrades: James Connolly, letters and correspondence, 1889–1916
Published in 18th-19th Century Social Perspectives, 18th–19th - Century History, 20th Century Social Perspectives, 20th-century / Contemporary History, Issue 3 (May/Jun 2008), Reviews, Revolutionary Period 1912-23, Volume 16
Between comrades: James Connolly, letters and correspondence, 1889–1916
Donal Nevin (ed.)
(Gill & Macmillan, €29.99)
ISBN 9780717142231
At last! After decades of calls to action, a beginning has been made. In this volume nearly all of James Connolly’s letters are collected. In addition, the first pages contain much correspondence unconnected with him save insofar as they concern his Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP). Though each of these is, in itself, a bore, in total they reveal very well the stresses involved in building a small socialist organisation, in some ways a bigger task in the 1890s than today.
Inevitably some of Connolly’s writings are banal, too. Nonetheless their totality gives a far clearer picture of the man than any of the biographies, or even the loyal memoir of his daughter Nora. He reveals his development from the hot-tempered organiser of the ISRP, throwing away his initiative in the struggle with that party’s opportunists, to the long-suffering organiser of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), protesting against but not breaking from Larkin. A poignant passage (p. 231) reports how he could not keep his promise to his eldest daughter, Mona, to bring her to America; she would die in Dublin after his departure. We get some idea, too, of his contemporaries—Larkin, Carstairs Matheson, young William O’Brien and, through the appendix, his most formidable opponent, Daniel de Leon, and how their clash was enhanced by personal incompatibility.
What interests in Connolly’s career, however, is not his personality but his politics. Here, too, there are revelations. It is clear that in the ISRP split, and despite his tactical error in resigning, he was correct, as against those who saw the party paper as ‘a drag’ (p. 411). His change from allegiance to a sectarian party to belief in the industrial union as the motor of working-class power is made clear. The claim that he abandoned the aim of such power after August 1914 is challenged in his letter to O’Brien of 6 June 1910 (p. 424), where his position on Irish indepencence is asserted in the same terms as his statement at his court martial in 1916 (p. 547). It is clear, too, that, unlike some of his self-styled followers, he understood the difference between full Irish self-determination and the provincial self-government represented by Home Rule.
The letters reclaim Connolly’s friend Matheson, too. On page 141 he makes the connection, made clear since by history, that reformism leads to the abandonment of internationalism. He is far more scathing than Connolly concerning the ‘crypto-fisherman type . . . essentially and congenitally individualistic’ (p. 439). This latter attitude, with Connolly’s criticism of his ‘comparing the actual with the conceivable’ (p. 458), shows an ultra-leftism that would rebound to cause Matheson to enlist in the British Army and then, in 1919, to renounce socialism altogether, allowing John Maclean to surpass him as Scotland’s greatest Marxist.
Collecting this material was a tremendous achievement; the weakness is in the editing. The 74-page introduction is too long, essentially a précis of Nevin’s Connolly biography that adds little to the main texts. There are some strange omissions. The letter to Edward (Eamon) Lynch on 23 May 1911 (pp 460–1) is one of the most political pieces but it is incomplete, part of it being ‘missing from the National Library of Ireland file’. Actually, the full text is in the ITGWU’s Watchword of Labour of 30 October 1920. Larkin’s directive appointing Connolly as his full replacement does not appear. The actual texts of Connolly’s first dispute with de Leon on the basic issues of economics, religion and family are excluded, leaving the reader to get what can be got from tantalising hints mainly in Matheson’s correspondence.
The editing is weakest precisely in this book’s biographical notes. Robert Dorman did not lose his northern Irish senate seat because proportional representation (PR) was introduced but because its abolition reduced the numbers of MPs supporting him. James McCarron did not serve on the ITUC parliamentary committee until 1918; when the Larkinites got a majority on it from 1910, he refused to stand. William Walker did not end his political activity in ‘Northern Ireland’ after 1907 (p. 661); he ran later for Belfast Corporation as a ‘People’s Candidate’. There are other examples. Such errors can and should be corrected in the next edition. Meanwhile, despite them, it’s well worth reading.
D. R. O’Connor Lysaght is the author of The story of the Limerick Soviet (3rd edn, 2003).
Personal Histories
On this Day
April 24
- 1951 Enda Kenny, TD for Mayo West (1975–97) and Mayo (1997–2020), leader of Fine Gael (2002–17) and taoiseach (2011–17), born in Derrycoosh, Islandeady, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
- 1945
Above: The steamship Monmouth Coast—torpedoed by a German U-boat near Tory Island on 24 April 1945. (Paul Johnson Collection)
During the last week of the Second World War, the Monmouth Coast, an unescorted steamship en route from Sligo to Liverpool with a cargo of barytes ore from the mines of Ben Bulben, was torpedoed by a German U-boat some seven miles north-east of Tory Island. The captain and fifteen crewmen (including two Irishmen) lost their lives, but one managed to survive, thanks to two locals from Arranmore. Two days later, whilst beachcombing on the north-eastern coast of the island, they spotted a life-raft floating in a remote sandy inlet; they rowed out to it and lifted the tarpaulin, to discover a wide-eyed teenager, Derek Cragg (17) from Liverpool, the mess-room boy from the Monmouth Coast. He explained that the ship had gone down very quickly and that those of the crew who managed to leap clear were sucked down after it. He, too, was dragged down but somehow managed to make it back to the surface, where he spotted the life-raft and clambered on board. He was given every assistance by the islanders and safely repatriated, but had the north-easterly wind that drove him 25 miles blown him into the adjoining inlet, his raft would have been smashed to pieces. Over 30,000 Allied merchant seamen, of every nationality, lost their lives during the war. Despite our neutrality, Irish Shipping lost two ships. The Irish Pine was torpedoed off Greenland in November 1942 with the loss of all 33 on board, and the Irish Oak was sunk in the North Atlantic in May 1943, though her entire crew was rescued by a sister-ship, the Irish Plane.
- 1912 Justin McCarthy (82), Home Rule politician, leader of the anti-Parnellite faction (1891–6), historian and novelist, died.
- 1916 The Easter Rising began.Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew set out on their epic 720-nautical-mile rescue mission in the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
- 1974 The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) announced that Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford, would be the site of its planned nuclear power station.
May 19
- 1935
Above: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—his father was in fact Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath.
T.E.—Thomas Edward—Lawrence (46), the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, died as a result of a motorcycle accident in Dorset. For much of his adult life Lawrence was a troubled man. Though his key role in the British-inspired Arab revolt (1916) against Ottoman Turkish rule earned him international celebrity, he was torn by guilt over Britain’s post-war betrayal of the Arabs with the implementation at Versailles of the notorious Sykes–Picot Agreement. Then there was the issue of identity. At the tender age of ten he discovered that his parents were not married, meaning that he and his four brothers were illegitimate. Later he was to learn that ‘Mr Lawrence’, his father, was, in fact, Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, who, though married with four daughters, had fled with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, first to Wales—where ‘Ned’ was born—and finally to London. He was eventually to find himself increasingly drawn to his father’s homeland. A close friend of George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte—GBS had helped him to edit his major work, Seven pillars of wisdom (1926)—he mentioned his desire in his surviving letters to visit Ireland and often referred to the works of Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and J.M. Synge. Indeed, he hoped to write a biography of Sir Roger Casement. It seems that he never did try to make contact with his half-sisters. In 1954, almost twenty years after his death, some of his old friends visited the two surviving ones, who were living at 39 Northumberland Road, Dublin. They told them that they had followed their half-brother’s career with great interest but likewise had made no attempt to contact him.
- 1870 The Home Government Association of Ireland was founded by Isaac Butt with the aim of establishing a federal system for the United Kingdom, which would grant Ireland a parliament responsible for national affairs. Succeeded by the Home Rule League (1873).
- 1868 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness (1725–1803), brewer and writer who restored St Patrick’s Cathedral (1860), died.