The Lockout 1913
PadraigYeates
SIPTU, 1913 Committee
RM Gwynn Commemoration and Seminar
Whitechurch Parish, Rathfarnham
19 September 2013
The Lockout is unique in the great events of the decade from 1912-1923 in that it saw conflict align itself along class lines, rather than the traditional divides of religion and contested political allegiances. Catholic and Protestant employers united under the leadership of William Martin Murphy, the first Catholic President of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce while Jim Larkin and the Dublin Trades Council received the bulk of their support from British workers of all religious persuasions and none.
Institutional relations between the Church of Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church in Dublin were fragile in 1913. There was underlying tension over the low intensity proselytising war in the city, which had been aggravated by the prospect of Home Rule and mounting fears that conflict in the North could spill over into the South. There were over 92,000 Protestants in Dublin City and County, who were overwhelmingly Unionist in their politics. This was the largest concentration on this island outside of Belfast.
The 1913 Lockout actually eased tensions between the two churches initially as both archbishops supported attempts at mediation. At a meeting of the Dublin Industrial Peace Committee in the Mansion House on October 27th, Dr Joseph Ferguson Peacocke spoke strongly in favour of a peace initiative his Catholic counterpart, Dr William Walsh had undertaken. So did the Dean of St Patrick’s, the Rev C Ovenden, who proposed a resolution calling for "a private and unconditional" conference, where the two sides could avail of Dr Walsh's good offices to reach a settlement . Dr Ovenden said that, "living in the slums - and delighting in the slums - it breaks my heart at what I have seen."
The Reverend Denham Osbourne managed to refocus the meeting on the business in hand. A leading shipping firm had told him that goods worth £1 million had been left lying on the docks and £30,000 worth might have rotted already. Equally pressing was the plight of the unemployed. Even workers "outside the fighting line" wanted housing and he felt wages for the thousands of unskilled workers should be raised to a level that would make life bearable for them and their families. Edward Lee, a leading employer in the city avoided apportioning blame for the dispute, but said that once it was out of the way he was convinced that the question of the slums should be tackled. "Men of capital ought to be ashamed to have it go out to the ends of the earth that so many families were living each in one room. (Hear, hear.)"
However most of his fellow employers and co-religionists were in a more belligerent mood. Within two weeks the ss'Ella' would arrive in the Alexandra Basin with 160 "free labourers" on board and moored well out from the wharf in anticipation of trouble. Only one entrance to the basin was open and that was guarded by 100 DMP and RIC men. Extra troops had been drafted in after hasty consultations between the Irish GOC, General Sir Arthur Paget and Sir James Dougherty over a cup of tea at Parkgate. Senior military officers called to the harbour master's office and soldiers, including a troop of lancers, provided larger than usual escorts for coal deliveries to barracks.
The 'Irish Times' carried an unusual letter that day. It was written jointly by the Reverend Thomas C Hammond, rector of St Kevin's and Henry O'Connor. The Rev Hammond was secretary of the Dublin by Lamplight Institution; O'Connor was general secretary of the City of Dublin Young Men's Christian Association. They were protesting at the summary dismissal of G H Walton from the firm of Gill and Son. Gill's was the leading catholic publishing house in the city and a supplier of religious requisites such as chalices and vestments. Walton, a protestant, had worked with the firm for 39 years. He was sacked on October 28th and given a month's pay in lieu of notice. His offence, claimed Hammond and O'Connor, was that he had been helping distribute free breakfasts to the poor at the Christian Union in Abbey Street. They also alleged that an unnamed catholic organisation had brought the matter to the firm's attention and effectively forced the dismissal. The 'Irish Times' published a response from the secretary of M H Gill and Son, Patrick Keoghane, on November 8th, 1913, which only aggravated the situation. Keoghane said that Walton had admitted "that he was actively engaged in certain objectionable practices at the Metropolitan Christian Union Buildings".
The premises was a veritable bastion of protestant evangelism in the city. Amongst the organisations it housed were the Evangelical Alliance, Dublin Free Breakfasts for the Poor, the Hibernian Band of Hope, Dublin Protestant Deaf and Dumb Association, the Army Scripture Readers' and Soldiers' Friends Society, the Lord's Day Observance Society and the Open Air Mission for Ireland. The "objectionable practice" that Walton had engaged in was of course proselytism, and proselytism "in its most insidious forms", according to Keoghane. "Under these circumstances, my board did not conceive it consistent with their obligations as recognised Catholic publishers that a gentleman engaged in such practices should continue in their service." Walton had been given an opportunity to resign and had availed of it. Keoghane pointed out that the company had "no quarrel whatever with Protestantism" and had in its employ other protestants "who enjoy its full confidence and respect". However the directors would not tolerate those "endeavouring to wean little children from the faith of their fathers".
Keoghane's letter might have carried more conviction if Walton had only recently entered the proselytising fray, but he had been helping at the Christian Union for 34 years. The 'Irish Times', the voice of Southern Liberal Unionism, made the case the subject of its first leader on Saturday, November 8th, and accused the company of treating Walton "not merely harshly, but brutally". The newspaper said it disliked proselytism from any source. "Proselytism and the suspicion of proselytism have done an immense amount of harm in Dublin by preventing the hearty co-operation of Protestants and Roman Catholics in works of social reform." But even if Walton had "by means of tea and bread and butter... tempted little children to swallow his theological opinions" he had at worst behaved "foolishly and with a want of what we may call Christian delicacy. ... He has committed no crime. Probably he believed, as most citizens of the Empire believe, that his spare time was his own. .... In part of his free time Mr Walton, exercising the civil and religious liberties of his citizenship did certain things of which his conscience approved. Messrs Gill objected to these things, and so they have turned an old and faithful servant into the street. Their legal right is unquestionable, but their action can be defended on no other ground. It sets up a claim which, if many employers were to assert it, would justify the hardest things that Mr Larkin has said against employers as a class."
It was not only employers the 'Irish Times' placed in the dock, but nationalists as well. Two weeks earlier Dr Peacocke had been criticised by P J Brady, the MP for the city's St Stephen's Green division, for daring to suggest that Home Rule posed a threat to the civil and religious liberties of Irish protestants. Brady had challenged Dr Peacocke "to give a single instance ... in which the civil and religious liberties of Protestants had been menaced by their Catholic fellow-countrymen". The 'Irish Times' now replied. "We present Mr Brady with the case of Mr G H Walton. We invite him to justify it if he can." Walton was "a test case". If Brady "by speech or silence endorses the conduct of Messrs Gill ... all Mr Redmond's and Mr Brady's assurances on the subject, while they may be quite honest, have been, and will continue to be, worthless." It was a call echoed by the Rev J O Gage Dougherty, rector of Walton's church, St Mary's. He described his parishioner as "a quiet, inoffensive, respectable citizen" who had led an "exemplary life. ... This is surely a case where Mr John Redmond could step in, as he promised to do if a case of intolerance was brought under his notice in Ireland."
Redmond and Brady remained silent. Redmond could, no doubt, plead pressure of more important business and Brady may not have had much choice. The organisation which had "outed" Walton was almost certainly the Society of St Vincent de Paul, of which Brady was a prominent member. It had been maintaining a close surveillance of protestant proselytising organisations in the city for some time and had reported its findings to Dr Walsh in July. Normally such low intensity sectarian warfare did not have such dramatic consequences. However circumstances were anything but normal in Dublin. The synchronicity of the lockout and the Home Rule crisis made normally tolerable sectarian tensions suddenly intolerable.
The debate which followed Walton's dismissal was similar to that in the North two years earlier during the infamous McCann divorce controversy. The McCanns had been a mixed couple in Belfast whose marriage broke up. The father, a catholic, had subsequently emigrated and taken the children with him. Outraged unionists had accused the catholic church of helping him "spirit away" the youngsters in pursuance of the 1908 papal decree, ne Temere. The decree required catholic parents in a mixed marriage to ensure that any children were reared in the catholic faith and had proved deeply divisive in Ireland. The McCann incident had been revived by unionist propagandists in the Home Rule crisis to demonstrate that Home Rule would lead to Rome Rule. Dublin unionists were quick to draw comparisons between the Walton dismissal and the McCann case.
Catholics and nationalists were equally quick to defend M H Gill and Son. They argued that the company had acted with great forebearance and tolerance towards Walton, which he had seen fit to abuse. Robert Gibson, a protestant Home Ruler and businessman in Limerick said that, if he found a catholic employee engaged in proselytising protestant children he would also feel entitled to sack him. "The Roman Catholic, or the Protestant, who tries to pervert little children is neither a good Catholic nor a good Protestant, and utterly unworthy of the name of Christian", he said in a letter to the 'Irish Times'. However his attitude was not typical of southern protestants. They saw Walton's dismissal as a crude assault on their civil liberties and the Irish Party's silence as evidence of the supine attitude nationalists adopted when confronted with the prerogatives of the catholic church.
Walton's dismissal was indeed a worse example of religious intolerance than the McCann case. It had been argued with some justification by nationalist MPs such as Joe Devlin that in the McCann case religion had been no more than a weapon used by warring parents in the closing stages of an unhappy marriage. Why then did unionist politicians not make more of it? The probable explanation is that if they had done so they would have risked drawing attention to widespread discriminatory employment practices amongst protestant employers.
The charge of attempting to proselytise children also served to isolate Walton from public sympathy, although there was no concrete evidence produced that he had done anything at the Metropolitan Hall other than help feed the hungry. Where social work ended and proselytism began was of course a sensitive point in the Dublin of 1913. But, as one 'Irish Times' correspondent pointed out, the city was too small a place for any seriously objectionable behaviour by Walton to have gone unnoticed by his employer for 34 years.
Keoghane's own condemnation of proselytism was undermined when a caller to the Gill shop in Upper Sackville Street found it distributed material from the Society of the Holy Childhood. This organisation was appealing for funds to "buy" the children of "pagans" so that they could be reared as catholics. Another publication carried by the company was the 'Annals of the Propagation of the Faith'. This reported that "the nuns of a convent in Peking had... bought nearly 900 Buddhist infants at five pence ha'penny a head" and could save more souls if given the funds.
Nor was the company's case helped when it emerged that 11 days after his dismissal, Walton had been given a testimonial which described him as "a most experienced man in matters connected with the book business", regular in attendance at work, "strictly sober and honest". The testimonial concluded by saying the he left the company's employment "with our good wishes for his future prosperity".
It was read to much laughter at a public meeting in the Metropolitan Hall on November 19th. The Rev Hammond told the audience that "an upright man" had been victimised and "thrust friendless and forsaken in his old age to become, for aught his persecutors cared, a burden on the rates". The rector warned that, "If every alleged case of proselytism is to be followed with relentless and material damage, then let them look for a reign of anarchy ... of ... which no parallel can be found." There were plenty of instances of proselytism by catholics and other "wellmeant interference. Such incidents warned them that peace could only be preserved in a community divided on religious questions by a frank recognition that a wide liberty must be permitted." When he asked if there were any "brethren of the Reformed Faith" in the audience prepared to "serve under Roman Catholic directors or managers" who compelled them "to submit to a censorship of their religious activities", there were angry cries of "Never".
Another speaker was the rector of St Mary's, the Rev J O Gage Dougherty. "Mr Walton's case does not stand alone in Ireland. There are many Protestants suffering in just the same way." Organisations such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul did not exist "only for the relief of the poor, but to win over heretics", he said. "The meeting passed a resolution condemning M H Gill for their "intolerant attitude" and this received prominent coverage in the 'Irish Times'. The newspaper also launched a fund for Walton, which had raised over £130 by late November. Most of the contributors, to judge from the names were Protestant. One donation, for 10s, was from "A Catholic working in a Protestant Bookshop".
Few people can have doubted that M H Gill and Son sacked Walton because the company was dependant on the goodwill of the catholic church for survival. Defending Walton's right to a job could have jeopardised the employment of all its other employees.
In his post mortem on the affair 'Vigilans', who had written the detailed reports on the Irish Church Mission's activities in the city for the 'Leader', suggested to the 'Irish Times' that Walton's employment was "as great an anomaly as would be the employment of a Catholic in the book depot of the Irish Church Mission's Society". He took the view that, "When Mr Walton was taken on 39 years ago it must have been on the distinct, though, perhaps, tacit, understanding that, though free to practise his religion ... he would not take part in any shape or form of proselytism, which is recognised by everybody to be a contrary propaganda to that out of which, through the tolerance of Messrs Gill, the man was making his living."
The truth was that Walton was not so much an anomaly as an anachronism. Another 'Irish Times' letter writer, S A Quam-Smith of Bullock Harbour, Dalkey, said that commentators such as 'Vigilans' were mistaken in assuming that M H Gill had always been in "the business of ... religious propaganda". When Walton joined the company 39 years previously it had been called McGlashan and Gill. The Gills had themselves been printers to that bastion of the protestant ascendancy Trinity College and, although McGlashan had long departed the scene when Walton was appointed, the company's ethos had not been overtly catholic. "It is the firm that has changed, not Mr Walton", Quam-Smith concluded. He enclosed a guinea for the Walton fund with his letter. The Walton affair was yet another episode marking the eclipse of protestant Dublin. In a few short years similar protest meetings would be unthinkable.
Fear of what the future held was further inflamed by the Dora Montefiore controversy. A wealthy philanthropist, socialist and female suffrage campaigner, she embodied everything that the catholic hierarchy found most challenging in the ‘modern woman’. That she was a member of a Jewish financial dynasty did not help. Her scheme to bring strikers’ children to foster homes in Britain, as had happened in the London docks strike of the previous year drew the fire of Dr Walsh, who had remained scrupulously neutral in the labour dispute until then, unlike many of his clergy.
He condemned unequivocally Dora Montefiore’s plans to take strikers’ children to foster homes in England to be looked after in the homes of socialists, atheists, Protestants and God forbid, suffragettes. The women who placed their children in her hands would be unworthy of the title of Irish mothers and, worst of all, this ‘fantastic scheme’ would make children sent to England