On my return from Moscow I was sent to Ireland to work. At that time, in 1924, there was no Communist Party in Ireland, although since its inception the British Communist Party had given direct assistance to the Irish revolutionaries. After the Easter Rising of April 1916, there had followed turbulent years of working-class struggle. The Government of Ireland Bill was piloted through Parliament in the autumn of 1920. It provided for the partition of Ireland, with both North and South having a Parliament with restricted powers, subordinate to Westminster. There was a state of war until the summer of 1921, followed by six months of bargaining and intrigue, which ended in the offer of fiscal independence for the twenty-six counties of the South. The handing over of power to the provisional government was accompanied by brutal economic oppression and wage reductions, often amounting to one-third. There was a deep economic crisis and strikes were widespread.
It was clear that the political and economic conditions in Ireland necessitated a Marxist party with a solid basis in the Irish trade union movement. My work was to see how this necessity could be achieved. I was glad of this opportunity because I had met Jim Connolly in 1913 and I was also well known among the Irish for my work in Dundee.
Big Jim Larkin was then the best known trade union leader in Ireland and headed the biggest and most militant trade union, the Transport and General Workers Union; and naturally any hope of success in my task rested on my ability to interest Larkin in the formation of a Marxist party.
Jim Larkin will always be revered as one of the great line of Irish rebels whose names will never be forgotten in the history of the Irish working class. As a very young man he was already in the leadership of many industrial struggles in both Northern and Southern Ireland and in 1909 at the age of thirty-two he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. He said at the time that the total assets were two chairs, a table, a candle and an empty bottle to hold the candle, and a potential membership drawn from the Dublin carters who had just concluded a strike. By hard, patient and militant work he built the union into a real fighting organisation. In 1911 he launched a newspaper called the Irish Worker which sold 95,000 copies weekly and which was in itself a great trade union organiser and a splendid forum for left political opinion.
In 1914 Larkin went to the United States, as he said to interest the American Irish in the Irish at home, but he was soon at work in the United States trade union movement. His militant trade union principles and his left political opinions got him into trouble with the authorities. He was arrested and charged with “criminal anarchy” under a law which proscribed “the advocacy of force and violence”. He was tried in New York and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He did four years in the prisons of the United States and in 1923 he was released from Sing Sing by governor Al Smith, who at the time said: “Larkin has suffered enough for his beliefs.”
On his release he came back to Britain, where he had a great welcome when he arrived at Southampton. Many people, including Bill Gallacher, were at the docks to welcome him back home.
I spent months working with Larkin in the attempt to found a Marxist party in Ireland. He was, like myself, a total abstainer and one of his hates he had many-was strong drink. One of his first acts when he became a trade union official was to stop the then prevalent practice of paying the dockers their wages in public houses. He was a professed Marxist and fully supported the Soviet Union.
Working with Larkin and the other Marxists, both in Dublin and in the country districts, I soon found that one of my greatest difficulties was to keep the peace among our own people. Larkin was the biggest problem because he always personalised his politics. He would denounce this scoundrel, that scoundrel, in fact almost everyone in Ireland was a scoundrel. I think his experiences in the gaols in the United States may have had something to do with this attitude, but it certainly was anything but helpful in the political position we were in at that time in Ireland.
All the time I was in Dublin I lived with Larkin and his sister Delia and his brother Peter, who were political personalities in their own right. Peter had been a leader in the trade union movement in Australia and had done time in the Australian jails for fighting for the workers’ right to organise. But despite their similarity of political beliefs there were family squabbles. Jim did not speak to Delia and Delia did not speak to Jim, so they had to talk to each other through Peter. When Peter was missing I was used as the go-between. It was a dreadful position for grown-up people to create, particularly when to make any political headway friendship and comradely tolerance were an absolute necessity.
The house we lived in at Gardiner Street had a very large living-room. During the day and in the evening all kinds of people kept coming and going. It was a clearing house for all problems political and economic or even purely domestic. As people came and went there were no introductions so that you had not the faintest idea whom you were speaking to, or anything about them, and yet you were expected to engage in serious discussion and to give your opinion on the subject.
At that time in Ireland I knew it was much safer to keep certain discussions and opinions to the circle of people whom you knew and understood. In all this welter of coming and going, discussion and argument, Big Jim would sit in his easy chair talking to everyone, butting in the conversation and lighting match after match trying to get his pipe going, so that after a while he was entirely surrounded by burnt matches. It certainly was an odd scene looking round the circle. It was in this room that I had my first discussion with Sean O’Casey, the Irish poet and playwright, but I did not know who he was then. O’Casey used to say of Jim that it was his ideal to see workers with a loaf of bread under their arms and a bunch of flowers in their hands.
However, these were but small difficulties, easily got over in a day’s work.
I got on well with Larkin and I was one of the few men he really trusted politically. Lenin said of Larkin, “His remarkable oratorical gifts and seething Irish energy performed miracles among the Irish workers.” That was justified. He was a powerful and popular speaker, and every weekend we were out in the country or in a Dublin hall speaking at meetings and selling the Irish Worker. The paper had a big sale because there was usually something sensational in its pages. Larkin was continually in trouble defending himself against libel actions in the Courts. The Court verdicts were always against him and his debts piled up. But, of course, it brought huge crowds to the meetings and sold the paper.
The aim of the group I was working with was to plan a political campaign leading to and culminating in the formation of an Irish Marxist party. In Ireland at that time politics took a wide sweep. Poverty in some places was desperate, and it was necessary not only to recognise this politically but to do something about it. So we were constantly engaged in relief work. But a special more urgent relief became necessary. Flooding took place in Donegal and we placed part of our organisation on this relief work. I got together a three-woman team to take charge of the work: Mother Despard, Countess Markievicz and Helen Crawfurd from Scotland.
These were three remarkable women. Countess Markievicz was one of the famous Booth sisters, daughter of Sir Henry William Gore-Booth, a family of the Sligo aristocracy. In 1900 she married a Polish count, Casimir de Markievicz, but despite her background and marriage she was a revolutionary in politics. She took part in the Dublin rebellion in 1916, and was sentenced to death, which was subsequently commuted to penal servitude for life. She was released from prison in 1917. She was M.P. for St. Patrick’s, Dublin, 1918-21; M.P. for Dublin City, 1921-22; and re-elected for the Irish Free State in 1923, being the first woman elected to the Dail. Mother (Charlotte) Despard was one of the leaders of the British suffragette movement and without doubt one of the ablest women politicians of this century. Her work in the Women’s Labour League, the suffragette movement in defence of women’s rights, and her work in the care and needs of children, was outstanding by any standard. She was highly intelligent and an able organiser. Helen Crawfurd was a foundation member of the British Communist Party, a Scotswoman who was always in the thick of political struggle and one of the finest women politicians I ever worked with.
These three women formed a wonderful trio. With entirely different backgrounds they had worked miracles in the struggles for women’s rights, yet it took the flood relief in Ireland to bring them together. They organised relief in the form of food, clothes and household goods from Britain and the continent, and even made trips to America to get relief from there. I remember making a trip to Donegal myself during this period, and in doing so I learned a valuable political lesson about working in the Irish countryside. In Ireland at that period you couldn’t give anything away without a priest. In these small towns, even though the people were in really desperate straits, you needed a priest with you before they would accept relief goods. The people, of course, showed their gratitude and goodwill to all who did the relief work, but if the priest was not there it was very difficult indeed.
Very likely because of such lessons I have a healthy regard for priests.
During this relief campaign I met Father Flannigan. He was a hard worker and spoke at many meetings with Larkin and myself. He used to say to me, “Bob, your Lenin was a great Christian and should have spent his life preaching the Christian doctrine.” Naturally I tried to refute this and convince Father Flannigan that he was a Marxist and should join the Communist Party. He never did, but he worked miracles on the relief work and gave great assistance in building relief and welfare organisation.
I well remember another Irish Catholic priest in the same mould. In the late nineteen-twenties I was again in Ireland trying to organise a peasant delegation to visit a Congress in Berlin. To do this I sought the assistance of Peador O’Donnell. I knew Peador O’Donnell well: he was a member of the IRA and a staunch republican. He was also a famous author and wrote many novels, including The Gates Flew Open, being his experiences in the Irish prisons. I managed to interest Peador O’Donnell in the sending of the peasant delegation and we went to Galway to see what could be done. He was well known to the local councillors and prominent citizens, so we organised a meeting on a Saturday evening, which was very successful, in fact too successful, the drinking and discussion going on well into the Sunday morning. I remember the hotel keeper coming into the meeting with an emphatic protest that we must finish, because he said: “Never in my hotel have people been awake at two o’clock on a Sunday morning.” Before we retired Peador O’Donnell said to me, “Bob, I am going to Mass in the morning and if you come along I will introduce you to a rebellious priest if ever there was one.” Well, that coming from what I considered was a real rebel was something that intrigued me, so I inquired: “Who is this fellow?” “His name is Father Fahy and he has been expelled to the country for battering a bailiff who took an old woman’s cow to pay for her debts.” “I think I will come to the Mass,” I replied. Next morning we drove in a jaunting car to a very small village where we met Father Fahy. As we entered the room he was putting on his robes and his back was to us. “Father Fahy,” said Peador O’Donnell, “I have brought a man who has no soul to save.” “Ah well,” was the reply, “it will save him a great deal of trouble.” Then turning round he said, “But I know this man. I saw him often in Dundee when I was there. He is a great speaker.” “Ah,” I said, “you are Father Fahy of St. Andrew’s Cathedral.”
There was a famous Dundee story of Father Fahy. During the 1914-18 war (I was in jail at the time, but the story was well known) a number of soldiers from the Black Watch, Irishmen by birth, came to St. Andrew’s Cathedral for Mass from Father Fahy. However, along with the Mass he gave them a severe lecture, telling them they should be ashamed of themselves serving in the British imperial army, adding they should be patriotic Irishmen and go home to fight for Ireland. One of the soldiers reported the incident and Father Fahy was carpeted.
Not having a soul to save we did not waste time on Mass, but we got to talking over old times in Dundee. Politics and elections were discussed. “Well,” said Father Fahy, “Scrymgeour can thank the Catholic Church for his becoming an M.P.” Then he went on to tell me that in the 1922 election the organised Catholics came to the conclusion that Churchill did not stand a chance of retaining the Dundee seat. With two votes to be cast the three most likely to get them were Scrymgeour, prohibitionist, Morel, Labour, and Gallacher, Communist. “Morel as the official Labour candidate was certain to win,” said Father Fahy, “so we Catholics decided to give our second vote to Scrymgeour instead of Gallacher.” The Catholic voters then in Dundee were nearly 50 per cent of the total electorate. A glance at the election result of 1920 will show Father Fahy was right. Prohibitionism and Catholicism have little in common, if anything. But the Catholic vote, although be it said some Catholics did vote for Gallacher, certainly made Scrymgeour the Member of Parliament.
But to return to the position in Ireland in 1924. With the tremendous political campaigning and the prodigious relief and welfare work we got a good political footing in many Irish counties, but most important and best of all in Dublin. We decided the time was opportune to launch the call for the formation of a mass Irish Marxist party.
After much deliberation and argument we drew up a manifesto and organised a mass demonstration in the Mansion House. It was essential to get Larkin to sign the manifesto and I discussed this with him many times, always with the same result. “All right, Bob,” he would say, “I am thinking about it. What are you worrying about? I will likely sign it.” And he went about with the manifesto in his pocket for days but it was never signed.
The demonstration in the Mansion House was one of the best ever held in Dublin. The hall was packed to capacity, with hundreds standing in the aisles and the corners. Over two hundred people applied to join the new party. All we needed for a successful launching of the party was Larkin’s acceptance of the manifesto. But this he refused. My own opinion is that Big Jim would never accept the democracy of a disciplined Marxist party. He always had to be in the centre of the stage all the time, and so to join a party where the emphasis is put on collective work was not for him. Shortly after this I left Ireland with the feeling that a great political opportunity had been lost. In 1924 the political situation in Ireland was ripe for the formation of a Marxist party based on the Irish workers’ organisations, principally the trade unions. Larkin’s refusal to play his part in the creation of such a party greatly weakened the fight. The result was that much of the good work done over the years preceding 1924 ran into sand and failed to bear fruit.
Breaking the Fetters 