Neither King nor Kaiser
A few hundred yards to the south of Edinburgh Castle lies the
Cowgate district of Edinburgh. Today it is a mixed area of modern flats, older
buildings, bars and a smattering of restaurants. 150 years ago the area was
very different indeed. Doctor Stark, a medical Officer, visited the area in
1847 and described it in the following terms…
‘The
inhabitants of the Cowgate consist of labourers, porters, carters, scavengers
and paupers. The families were each housed in a single room and instances were
not rare of two or more families occupying one apartment. The low Irish formed a large proportion of this
section of the community. Among this class the ordinary comforts of life were
sadly lacking. A heap of straw served for a bed; there was but the barest
minimum of furniture and domestic utensils and that of a primitive kind,
consisting of bits of wood, pieces of tin and course pottery; water could be
obtained only by the laborious method of drawing it from the public well; and
the people lived in a pitiable state of filth and vermin.’
Around 14,000 Irish people lived in those conditions and struggled
to get by. They also had to deal with the prejudice which some Scots held for them.
It was into this community that a boy was born in the summer of 1868. John and
Mary Connolly, natives of County Monaghan, named their son James and did their
best to keep him fed and healthy in very trying circumstances. He was a
supporter of the local football team Hibernian, itself a product of the
Edinburgh Irish community and it is recorded that young James would carry their
hamper on match days. James had little formal education after the age of ten
when he left St Patrick’s Primary School to enter the workforce. By the age of
14 he had lied about his age and joined the army under the name of ‘James Reid’
to escape the grinding poverty of his surroundings.
His time in the Royal Scots Regiment coincided with the so called
land wars’ in Ireland when the rural population struggled to free themselves
from virtual serfdom at the hands of Landlords. Connolly was aghast at what he
witnessed in Ireland; soldiers and Police in trying to halt the spread of rural
agitation used very rough methods indeed. Evictions saw family homes demolished
and people put onto the road with no shelter and little hope. Connolly viewed
with distaste the idea of working class soldiers and policemen being used, as
he saw it, to oppress their own people. His political beliefs were forming and
he fed them by reading avidly and talking to others. In the end he deserted
before his Regiment was posted to India and returned to Edinburgh where he
married Lillie Reynolds. They had six children together and it would not have
been easy as James spent much of his time involved in the business of the
Socialist movement. His brother John spoke at a socialist meeting and argued
for an 8 hour working day. His employers at Edinburgh Corporation got wind of
this and fired him.
James travelled all over the UK, Ireland and the USA organising,
agitating and supporting the right of workers to unionise and collectively
fight for better conditions. The living conditions he found in the slums of Dublin
were as bad as any he had seen in the Cowgate. One description of Dublin at the
time Connolly returned to Ireland in 1910 stated…
'Irish workers lived in terrible conditions in tenements. An astonishing 835 people lived in 15 houses in Henrietta Street's Georgian tenements. At number 10 the Sisters of Charity ran a laundry inhabited by more than 50 single women. Infant mortality among the poor was 142 per 1000 births, high for a European city. The situation was made worse by the high rates of disease in the slums which was a result of a lack of health care and cramped living conditions.'
The great Dublin Lock out of 1913 when hundreds of employers,
large and small, locked their gates to workers who were unionised saw Connolly
active with Jim Larkin in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. Together,
with Jack White they formed the Irish Citizens Army to help defend
demonstrating workers from the more brutal elements of the Dublin Police.
Connolly had learned from the Tonypandy riots in Wales in 1910 and the
Liverpool Transport strike of 1911 when workers fighting for better pay and
conditions had been suppressed by Home Secretary Winston Churchill’s brutal use
of the Police and army. The Citizens Army would be organised and ready to
protect the workers. Its volunteers were mostly young, working class men who
were trained by more experienced men with military backgrounds. Its role in
defending the workers was to grow into a political outlook which sought a
complete change in not just the way Ireland was governed but by who actually
governed it.
As World War One loomed, the Home Rule faction in Ireland was
being opposed by Unionists who signed the famous covenant and formed the Ulster
Volunteers to resist militarily if necessary. The Irish Volunteers led by John
Redmond grew to be a force over 200,000 strong. Civil war was a possibility but
as conflict with Germany led to open warfare in the summer of 1914 the country
was for the most part distracted from domestic politics. For Connolly and the
socialist movement, the war was another capitalist struggle which would be paid
for by the blood of the workers of Europe. His slogan of ‘Neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland’ was soon adorning the walls of
the Transport Workers Building in Dublin where Connolly’s Citizens Army
drilled. The British persuaded Redmond to commit the bulk of the Irish
Volunteers to the fight against Germany. Most went on the understanding that
Britain would honour its promise to allow home rule for Ireland at the war’s
conclusion.
They died in their thousands in Britain’s battles from the Somme
to Gallipoli. Many of them fought in the 10th and 16th
Irish Divisions alongside the 36th Ulster Division in that fateful
summer of 1916. Their casualties were horrendous as Britain’s big push on the
Somme sought to break the bloody stalemate of trench warfare. However a
minority of the Irish volunteers refused to fight in the British Army and
stayed in Ireland. Many were active in the Irish Republican Brotherhood who,
like Connolly’s Citizen’s Army, were committed to using force to gain Irish
independence.
On Good Friday 1916 Connolly and Thomas McDonagh helped Padraig
Pearse write the Proclamation upon which modern Ireland was founded. His
socialism can be discerned in passages alluding to equality for women and
the openness to all the people of
Ireland. It states in part…
‘The Irish Republic is entitled to,
and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The
Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal
opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the
happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing
all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully
fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the
majority in the past.’
Connolly had been in Belfast
many times and saw the toxic results of sectarianism on working class
communities. It divided people who lived in equally poor conditions and
weakened the trade union movement which sought to help them. He had felt its
insidious effects as a boy in Edinburgh and despised how it created false
divisions among people who had far more in common than they liked to admit.
The society the seven signatories
of the proclamation sought to create would no longer be based on the privilege
of a minority or the divisions or ordinary people. Within a few weeks all of
the signatories would be dead. The Easter Rising provoked a predictable brutal
and vindictive response from the British who in their rage failed to comprehend
that shooting the leaders of 1916 would rouse many of the Irish people to anger
than had previously been the case. Connolly’s execution was particularly
callous. He has wounded in the fighting, his ankle shattered by a bullet and
tied to a chair to be shot. He accepted death as the price he would pay to
strike for freedom as he saw it. His last meeting with his family was
particularly poignant (see below) and he told them that it had been a good
life.
James Connolly was shot in
the stone breakers yard of Kilmainham Jail on a May morning in 1916. He had
spent most of his life fighting the social injustices he saw around him every
day. The land of his birth barely marks his passing and that is a tragedy. He
should be remembered as part of that generation who fought for the common man.
People like john MacLean, Mary Barbour and Willie Gallagher were part of the ‘Red
Clydeside’ of the early twentieth century and are remembered still by ordinary
Scots. There remains a blindness to the contribution Connolly made to working
class advancement and this stems in part from his Irishness and his actions in
1916. His memory is kept alive by ordinary people who recognise that his life was spent trying to better the lot of the common people of these islands.
His final testimony given to
his daughter before they took him to Kilmainham to be shot contains the words
he would want to be remembered…
‘Believing that the British Government has no right in Ireland,
never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the
presence, in any one generation of Irishmen, of even a respectable minority,
ready to die to affirm that truth, makes that Government for ever a usurpation
and a crime against human progress. I personally thank God that I have lived to
see the day when thousands of Irish men and boys, and hundreds of Irish women
and girls, were ready to affirm that truth, and to attest it with their lives
if need be.’
James Connolly (1868-1916)
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