580. The Irish Civil War: The Assassination of Sir Henry Wilson (Part 1)

0:10Many as are the great public servants of this nation who have been buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. illustrious as are the soldiers whose remains lie there. Today's funeral of Sir Henry Wilson will evoke emotions far stronger and more burning than those which are customary at the graveside, even of the most eminent and venerated. The thought uppermost in men's minds will be not the distinction of his military services, but the foul crime, the revolting mischance, which has cut off so noble a character and so fine an intelligence while they were still at the height of their powers. The assassination has horrified the whole civilized world.

1:03Whatever measures the government may see fit to take, the responsibility for those measures must rest solely with the Irish nation. For months past, that unhappy island has lain under the curse of Cain. Morally, she is an outlaw, and there can be no hope for her regeneration unless she can brace herself to cast off the infection which at present threatens to drag her down into complete social anarchy. No amount of goodwill, good faith, and good intentions on the part of Great Britain can be of any avail to her as long as murder is her ultimate political argument. So Dominic, that was the Times on the 26th of June 1922, with a very punchy editorial, on the day of the funeral of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson.

2:13And I guess you would describe that as perhaps pungent, but the circumstances are extraordinary. So who is Sir Henry Wilson? Well, he had been Chief of Staff of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914. He'd been the chief military advisor to David Lloyd George in the First World War. He had been British military representative at the Versailles Conference. He has just stepped down as chief of the Imperial General Staff. He has been the MP for North Down in Northern Ireland since February 1922. He is reputedly the ugliest man in the British Army, and he has just been shot down in cold blood outside his own front door in Eton Place, Belgravia, in the heart of the West End of London.

2:58But Dominic, adding to the drama of this assassination is the identity of his murderers, of which there are two. You're not wrong, Tom. So first of all, that editorial, I would have loved to have written an editorial like that. That is pungent stuff. Anyway, he has been killed in broad daylight, in cold blood, in the centre of London, by two veterans of his own army who have since joined the Irish Republican Army. and this just months after the Anglo-Irish Treaty that had supposedly ended the conflict in Ireland. So it's not just one of the most shocking assassinations in British history. Beyond that, it is the trigger for a new and deadlier conflict on the island of Ireland, the Irish Civil War, which is an incredible, melodramatic story.

3:44And it's described by Ronan McGreevy in his fantastic book on this, Great Hatred, the Assassination of Field Marshal's Henry Wilson MP, as Ireland's Sarajevo. So that's why it is more than worthy focusing in on it. Agreed. An incredible story full of melodramatic details and brilliantly handled by Ronan in his wonderfully gripping book. I've got good news for you, Tom. What? So we are in Dublin. We're in the Four Courts, which plays such a massive part in the outbreak of the Irish Civil War. And the man sitting next to us is none other than Ronan McGreevy himself. Oh, my God. So that's who he is.

4:19You can see him in the Russian here. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Oh, Ronan, it's brilliant to have you. So we're going to explore Sir Henry Wilson, who you've written about so fantastically, the murder, who killed him, why you regard this as Ireland's Sarajevo, and why it is the trigger for the Civil War. So why don't we kick off with Sir Henry Wilson? So tell us a bit about him. Who is he? Well, Dominic, Henry Wilson was an Irishman. That's a really important point to state. He was born in Dublin in 1864, but brought up in the Irish Midlands in Currie-Grain and County Longford.

4:53He was an Irish Unionist at a time when that wasn't regarded as a contradiction in terms. And his family had come over during the plantations of the 17th century. One of his ancestors was with King William at the Battle of the Boy. The family would have spent most of their time in Ireland and Ulster, but his grandfather bought a number of farms in Ireland, including Currie-Grain and County Longford. And that's where Henry Wilson grew up in the south. Right, and he's had this incredibly distinguished military career, hasn't he? I mean, lots of people would say he's one of the two or three men who won the war.

5:23Yes, that's correct, yeah. Is that, you think that's... Yes, well, he was the chief of the Imperial General Staff, and he was one of the people who put together the joint strategy that brought the war to an end in 100 days in the autumn of 1918, when a lot of people thought it would drag on at least until 1919. So in June 1919, he's appointed field marshal, and he's the youngest to hold that rank in the British Army. He's another Irishman, the Duke of Wellington. And so he can absolutely be situated in that long tradition of Anglo-Irish military men who serve Britain and the empire more generally.

5:56And there's so much about his career that makes him seem kind of almost archetypal. So a bit like, actually a bit like Custer, but also a bit like Churchill. He's not a tremendous student, but he kind of graduates. And then he goes off to Burma and he gets slashed across the face by a dacoit, doesn't he? Yes. A Burmese bandit. I'm glad you can pronounce that word better than me. He fights in the Burr War. And he, before entering the First World War, in other words, he has seen the expanse of the British Empire and served it. That's right. By 1910, he's the director of military operations. And he is looking at preparing the British army for possible war on the continent of Europe, which most people in Britain hope will never come.

6:37Wilson is, at that stage of his life, he's convinced there's going to be a European war. It's not a popular viewpoint to have in the UK. And he's preparing what will become the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914 for deployment beside the French army in the event of a German invasion. And this is exactly what happens. And also we're making him perhaps sound a rather uptight, humorless man. He's not at all. He's actually very funny. He's uproariously funny. And there was a painting of John during the Paris Peace Talks. And he said, you know, I'd either end up in Madame Tussauds or in jail.

7:11You know, he looked like, as he said to himself, he looked like a blackguard. He was quite a vivacious character. On the topic of him being the ugliest man in the army, you have this brilliant detail that that is what is addressed to him on a letter that was sent to him in 1891. And it reaches him. Yes, it reaches him personally. So let's move through the 1910s because we want to get him involved in Ireland. So his Irishness is really important to him. Yes, it is. But it's a very particular kind of Irishness. He feels passionately attached to the union of Ireland and Great Britain. And obviously by the 1910s, as we've discussed in our previous episodes, it is an incendiary political issue.

7:46And his position on this, certainly in public, could barely be more extreme. Is that fair? The Home Rule Bill is due to become a law in 1914. And you have this very serious incident called the Curra Mutiny or Curra Incident. It's not an actual mutiny, but it's a putative mutiny in which Anglo-Irish officers like themselves say they will not obey lawful commands of the government if home rule is imposed on Ulster. And this is a very serious development, which threatens not only civil war in Ireland, but possibly in Britain too, if the majority of the British army does not implement the government's stance on Ulster.

8:24But Wilson, even though he's supposed to be, as a soldier, he's supposed to do the government's bidding. He's actually conspiring against the government in all of this. and he earns the undying enmity of the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and it really retards his career until the very end of the war. And then when we get to the end of the war, so once he's stopped being involved with the war, you know, when the war is won, obviously, as we've discussed in our last few episodes with Paul Rouse, Ireland looms very large in the political consciousness because, of course, the War of Independence has broken out.

8:56And through this time, his position, which you describe so well in your book, His position is consistently that Britain should go harder, send in more troops, that they're facing an organised murder gang who are possibly part of a Bolshevik conspiracy, and that basically we're being far too livid and we should just crack down much harder. And he says this publicly. He does, yeah. And when the British government is confronted with the IRA in 1919 and 1920, they regard it as a security problem and they don't deign to call it a war. They send in the black and tans and the auxiliaries to aid the Royal Irish Constabulary to put down this rebellion by the IRA.

9:35But Wilson, as the head of the British Army, wants this to be declared a military operation. He wants to see hundreds of thousands of British soldiers in Ireland routing the IRA. and he says himself, if there are men to be murdered, we ought to be doing the murdering. So he's absolutely adamant that this is a military problem that needs to be resolved. Whereas it's obvious from a very early stage to the British government, particularly to David Lloyd George, that this is a political problem, that even if the British were to win a putative victory, it would be a perfect victory because the Irish people don't want them anymore.

10:14the British in Ireland, most of Ireland anyway, they don't want them anymore. And David Lloyd George sees this problem from the middle of 1920, that there's going to have to be a political solution here. And Wilson doesn't want that. And does the potential of Wilson to create mischief, is this enhanced when he steps down from the military and becomes an MP for the strongly unionist constituency in Northern Ireland and Northdown? Exactly. So he's made a field marshal in July 1919. 19, he is showered with praise, left, right and centre. He's part of the delegation of the Paris peace talks. He's at the height of his powers and of the regard for him in Britain.

10:50But he's already falling out with the British government because of Ireland. He doesn't want anything to do. He doesn't believe that there should be any negotiations. At one stage, he's with Lloyd George. Lloyd George says, your fellow Irishmen who I'm negotiating with are next door. And he says, I don't talk to murder gangs, to which Lloyd George responds, nonsense. We have to do these things. So that's his attitude. So his four-year stint as the Chief of the Imperial General Staff comes to an end in February 1922. There's no chance of it being renewed. He's not even talking to the Cabinet at this stage.

11:23And within three or four days, there's a by-election and he is elected unopposed as an Ulster Unionist MP. So he goes straight from being the head of the British Army to being an MP. And he's already somebody who is a senior figure in British history. This is two months after the Anglo-Irish Treaty is signed as far as the British government. Most of the British politic are concerned. Ireland is done with now, but Wilson doesn't see it that way. And he becomes a sort of focal point for the, as you know, the diehards in the Conservative Party who don't want to accept the settlement. And so what impact does this have on the Irish nationalists, revolutionaries?

12:01Well, at this stage, whereas the treaty is very popular in Britain and passes very quickly through the House of Commons. So that's how he's viewed in Britain. But what about in Ireland? What's his reputation there? So his reputation in Ireland, after he steps down as chief of the imperial general staff, is that he's a sort of paragon of British imperialism, who's going around making incendiary speeches in Britain saying that the Irish can't rule themselves and that there is anarchy in Ireland and that the British should go back in and solve the problem once and for all. And of course, this makes him an enemy both of the provisional Irish government that's established under the treaty, but also the British government.

12:38They don't want to hear this. And so he's already a marked man in Irish nationalist circles at that stage. All right, so let's move forward to the crucial day. He's become the MP for North Down. He's been the MP for only a few months. On the 22nd of June, 1922, in his capacity as a war hero, he is invited to Liverpool Street Station for, It's a war memorial commemoration, isn't it? Yes, for the men of the Eastern Railway Company in Liverpool Street. And that memorial is still there. Right. So he doesn't know this, but this day, which is already freighted with great emotion, is going to be the last day of his life.

13:13And Ronan, why don't you take us through the story of the day and the final hours of Samri Wilson? So there's a meeting. The treaty has split nationalists, Ireland and two, including Irish nationalists in London. and there is a meeting on the 21st of June in Mooney's pub in Holborn to try and clear the air and somebody walks in with a copy of the evening paper and there on page six among the single paragraph news and briefs as we call it in journalism is a notice that Henry Wilson the following day is going to unveil a memorial in Liverpool Street Station to railway workers who have been killed in the First World War.

13:46So there is a motivation among Irish nationalism to have him killed, but now there's the opportunity. And two men volunteer, three men in fact, volunteer to kill Wilson the following day, Reggie Donne, Joe Sullivan and Dennis Kelleher. And that evening they go to Reconouter Liverpool Street Station. They realise that they have no chance of killing him there and getting away. So they decide instead that they're going to go and wait for him outside his house at number 36, Eaton Place, after he's unveiled the memorial. Right. So he unveils the memorial and then he's gone home. Two of the men, so they are done and O'Sullivan, are waiting for him there.

14:31And to give people a sense, this is in Belgravia. It is in one of the most expensive, prestigious parts of London, these white stucco townhouses. A lot of columns. Yeah. It's a very, very desirable part of the capital's living, in which people don't tend to get shot on their own doorstep. No, they don't. So you talked about a happenstance there. Wilson thought about going straight to the House of Commons after the Liverpool Street Station, but changed his mind. He was going to give a speech, so he decided he would go home and get changed because he was wearing his field marshal uniform. He's got his sword, hasn't he?

15:03Yes. And he comes back, and at 2.30, the cab pulls up outside 36, Eden Place and Donal O'Sullivan are waiting for him. They take two steps forward and they shoot him six times on the doorstep of his own home. Story goes around very quickly afterwards that the old warrior draws his sword at these brigands but in fact he never gets that far. There's actually only one reliable eyewitness and he never gets as far as actually being able to draw a sword but a sword falls out of his scabbard so hence the myth. They shoot him six times on the doorstep and then these two men run off. One of them kind of hops off, doesn't he?

15:39This is the most extraordinary of the many extraordinary things about the assassination of Henry Wilson is that the two men who shoot him are disabled veterans of the First World War. And one of them, Joe Sullivan, has lost his right leg at Passchendaele in 1917. And they basically hobble off. As they hobble off, they shoot two policemen. And suddenly there's a mob, an angry mob that are following them. They hijack a taxi and they make the driver drive in the direction of Marble Arch. But they suddenly alight from the taxi and they're hit on the head with a number of truncheons. And then they're surrounded by the angry mob and taken to George Street Police Station where they're roughed up and then brought to court.

16:25So we've looked at Sir Henry Wilson. Could we just look now at the character of these two men who are Londoners, but of Irish stock and British veterans, veterans of the British Army. Why and how do they end up murdering their own senior officer? Well, one of the great paradoxes of this assassination that Henry Wilson is an Irish born British imperialist killed by two British born Irish nationalists. And Reggie Dawn, he's 24, Joseph O'Sullivan's 25. Reggie Dawn is son of a British Army bandmaster. His mother has, both sides of his family have roots in Ireland. He's Jesuit educated at St. Ignatius College.

17:10With Alfred Hitchcock, right? Yes, with Alfred Hitchcock is right. And this is very important when he's facing the hangman's rope. He's constantly evoking his Jesuit background to justify what he's doing. He joins the Irish Guards in 1916. He's wounded during the German Spring Offensive 1918 and he's invalided out. And he joins the IRA through a circuitous route. So he joins the Gaelic League, which is one of these many Irish cultural organisations in London. He goes to a traditional Irish music session in Stamford Hill And by and by the route from cultural Irishness to political Irishness is very quick He joins the IRA in September 1919 And crucially when we talk about the assassination of Henry Wilson He's also sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood Because you say that in many ways it wasn't Ireland that he loved But the ideal of Ireland as represented by the Gaelic Revival Yes, there isn't much evidence that they ever spent much time in Ireland which is very, very interesting in its own right.

18:12Then we come on to Joe Sullivan. He's more a typical second generation Irish. He's one of 12 children from a Fenian family in West Cork. His father is a master tailor in London and he's very well educated too. He goes to St. Edmund's College in Ware, which is one of the oldest Catholic schools in Britain. And he's one of seven brothers, six of whom who served in the war. And this becomes critically important because when they're looking for information about the killers. They say the Home Secretary, Edward Short, goes into the House of Commons and says, how could these guys be anything to do with Ireland?

18:43They serve king and country in the First World War. And he's the one who's lost his leg, isn't he? Yes, he loses his leg in Passchendaele in 1970. And he hides bullets. Yes, that's right. So later when he joins the IRA, he goes over to Ireland and his leg is hollow. So he hides three or three ammunition cartridges in the legs. And in fact, when he gets off the ferry, they see this wounded veteran and some of the British troops that are there give him a lift to his... And he has an unexpected resemblance to David Beckham in that he has a girlfriend called Posh. Posh, that's right, yeah. And she's asking him, where are you?

19:15I haven't seen you since you got out of the rehabilitation hospital. What are you at? And it's one of the few letters that survived from her. So there's a whole story here, obviously, about the Irish in London and the Irish diaspora and their role in nationalism, which you talk about in your book. But maybe we should take this back to Ireland and think about why this ends up having such colossal repercussions in Ireland. because, of course, this is just days before the outbreak of the Civil War. To answer that question, let's start by asking, why does this happen? Who orders it? And this is a sort of mystery that's hung over this assassination, which effectively, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you think you've solved.

19:52You think you know who was it. Yes, yes. Well, to go back to why this happened, there are separate political divides going on in the South and the North. So Ireland is partitioned in 1921. you have Northern Ireland, which still exists, and then you have the Irish Free State, which is set up in provisional form. So it's going to become the Free State in a year's time, provided that there's an election and there's a constitution and that the government is elected. None of these things are a given, but in any case, the treaty has split Ireland in two, split Nationalist Ireland in two, between those who support the Anglo-Irish Treaty and those who don't.

20:28And at the same time, In the North, there is a civil war of its own going on, which is known as the Original Troubles. It goes on from July 1922 to 1922, where there's a lot of sectarian violence. And there's also a lot of violence between the IRA and the British state forces there, like the RIC and the Ulster Special Constabulary. So all of this is going on at that time. And we have in the free state an election on the 16th of June in which the pro-treaty, those who are either actively support the treaty or are neutral in the treaty, win almost 80 % of the vote. So the Irish people have accepted the treaty at this election, but six days later, this shooting happens.

21:10And at that stage, the anti-treaty side had, in defiance of the provisional government, had occupied these buildings here, the forecourts, from April. And the provisional government at that stage didn't feel that it had the moral or military authority to remove them from the forecourts. And when the assassination of Wilson happens, David Lloyd George immediately blames the anti-treaty garrison who are based here in the forecourts for the assassination. He writes to Michael Collins that evening saying, basically, if you do not remove the garrison from the forecourts, we will do it for you. So here we have the possibility, this is the ultimatum that the British have given to the Irish.

21:53So when I talk about it being Ireland-Sarajevo, you have an assassination, and then you have a British ultimatum, same as Austria had an ultimatum to Serbia. The Irish government is now faced with a dilemma. Do we deal with the garrison in the forecourts, or do we risk the British coming back in and a resumption of the war of independence? So can we dig into some of those sort of nuances? So first of all, the split. One of the great complexities of the split is that when the negotiators come back to Dublin, the man who has sent them, Eamon de Valera, ends up becoming the leader, effectively, the spokesman for those people who reject the deal that they've come back with.

22:25And do you think he'd always set them up that way? It's a perennial question that's asked as to why he did not attend the talks himself. The most cynical explanation is that he knew he wasn't going to get the Republic and that he wanted to blame it on others. But they had promised to come back to him once before they signed anything. and they didn't do that because they were supposed to have had plenty of potentiary powers. In other words, they had powers to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty without recourse to him. So it's all a very confusing situation. But anyway, they signed the treaty in the early hours of December 6th and then they're back in Dublin and de Valera is absolutely furious that they had gone and done this without him and he's furious at the actual treaty itself, the contents of the treaty.

23:07But there's immediately a cabinet split in favour of the treaty. It's 4-3. And then it's debated in Dahl-Aeran, the parliament, and it's narrowly passed by 64 votes to 57. So there's immediately, there's a public support. There's democratic support for the treaty. The anti-treaty side do not accept the vote of Dahl-Aeran. And the critical issue here is the oath of allegiance. Right. So this is an interesting thing that I think a lot of people in Britain assume that the critical issue is partition, is the separation of Northern Ireland from the rest of Ireland. Partition is not really a factor in these arguments, is it?

23:46Well, it's not even, because not even the British ministers are kind of thinking that Ireland is going to be permanently partitioned. That's not what's on the table. A lot of people, I guess, think the partition is temporary, but the big issue is the oath. Yes. And the oath has a sort of toxic quality. To some nationalists, to De Valera, for example, he famously says, well, if people want to accept this treaty and swear the oath, the people have no right to do wrong, basically. That's right. You would think the oath, why would you start a civil war over a formula of words? But that's not really what it was about.

24:14It was about the measure of independence that the Irish state would have. Remember, those in the IRA had sworn to bring into being an Irish Republic. You can't have a republic if you have an oath of allegiance to a foreign monarch. And this was the critical issue. And this was inserted into the Anglo-Irish Treaty by the British. and they insisted on it staying in the draft constitution because Collins had drawn up a draft constitution which left the oath out and Lloyd George went mad and said this can't happen. And why are the British insisting on this oath of allegiance? Because they didn't want Ireland to set a precedent for the rest of the British Empire.

24:53It really wasn't as much about Ireland as it was. What's going to happen in India if we allow Ireland to be a republic? What's going to happen in Egypt? What's going to happen in the other countries? So it's really a matter of the British did not want Ireland to be a republic for that reason. And then the alt is abolished in 1933. The British don't care at that stage. They don't care when Ireland becomes a republic in 1948, but they cared about it in 1922. And that's just, as we're coming towards the break, the split. The split is not just within the politicians, but it's within the army itself, the Irish Republican army.

25:24And in fact, important thing for people to think about when we get into the civil war, a majority of the IRA are opposed to the treaty. Is that right? And they are very confident that they will get even more recruits to fight the treaty. In March 1922, they say they're not going to obey the provisional government. They don't regard the provisional government as legitimate. We have declared for a republic and we will live under no other law. That was what the anti-treaty general, Liam Lynch, said. So that was their attitude. And they said that they had 80 percent of the IRA. But it was a very difficult situation for the provisional government.