Session 2: Volunteering
Chair: Prof Richard Grayson (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Dr Catriona Pennell (University of Exeter)
More than a ‘curious footnote’: Irish Responses to Britain’s Call for Volunteers, 1914-1916
In 2009, the British Radio 1 DJ and television presenter, Chris Moyles, took part in the popular BBC genealogy series, Who Do You Think You Are?, to trace his Irish heritage. His journey ended in western Belgium, at the site of the First Battle of Ypres. Here, on 2 November 1914, his great-grandfather, James ‘Jimmy’ Moyles, aged 40-years-old, was shot dead whilst serving with the Connaught Rangers.
A familiar story, perhaps. Less known, however, is the fact that Jimmy was an Irish nationalist, raised in rural west of Ireland, who had trained Irish National Volunteers in the summer of 1914 in preparation for armed conflict with their paramilitary opposites, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), at the height of Anglo-Irish antagonism over the issue of Home Rule. Following the programme’s broadcast, a British journalist described this discovery as ‘another curious footnote’ in British history – the eager readiness with which Irish nationalists signed up to fight in the British army in the First World War.
This paper took this ‘curious footnote’ as its start and end point. First, it saught to explore Irish responses to the outbreak of war and call for volunteers during the first sixteen months of the conflict. Noting the specificities of Irish society in the 1914 period, it will highlight the similarities in the British and Irish responses to the call for volunteers. Irish nationalists, on the whole, supported Britain’s war effort, albeit for a variety of reasons and with an understanding of the political leverage participation could bring. The paper then moves to a broader interpretation of ‘volunteerism’ to demonstrate the level of voluntary self-mobilization there was across the United Kingdom in 1914. The majority of Irish men and women, regardless of religion or political loyalty, answered the call of duty and actively participated in the war in a number of ways (whether supporting soldiers and Belgian refugees or defending themselves against a perceived ‘enemy within’) and with similar vigour as their comrades across the Irish Sea.
Finally, the paper returned to this notion of ‘curious footnote’. Despite significant inroads in the British and Irish historiography on this topic, to what degree has this idea of voluntary self-mobilization in Ireland penetrated popular understandings of the outbreak of war? This question applies equally to both British and Irish audiences; with the 1914 political context in mind, the participation of over 200,000 Irish men in the British army during the First World War is far more than a ‘curious footnote’! Yet British broadcasters seem blinkered to the fact that there were multiple nationalities fighting voluntarily under the Union Jack in 1914-1918. More significantly, how can the experiences of Irishmen and women – from north and south – who actively supported and participated in the war be made relevant to Irish people, today, and salvaged from the grasp of modern political expediency and the doldrums of history’s footnotes.
Prof Stuart Ward (University of Copenhagen)
The Threshold of Nationhood: Irish and Australian recruitment narratives at the outbreak of war
This paper examined the notion of expectant nationhood as a rallying cry in early Irish and Australian responses to the outbreak of the Great War. Despite the Federal constitution of 1901, the Australian colonies in 1914 were widely regarded as a nation-in-waiting, ripe for the proving ground of war. In Ireland, John Redmond’s appeal to the Irish Volunteers to enlist drew on a similar logic. This gave rise to a number of interesting parallels in Irish and Australian recruitment narratives in the early stages of the war – parallels that would be obscured by the stark divergence in Irish and Australian public memory of the Great War in the post-war era. Recent years, however, have witnessed a greater willingness to consider Irish and Australian volunteering within a similar frame. It is worth considering the reasons for this on the threshold of major centenaries for both countries.
To be continued