I will try and print some of the main facts so that you can all read it as to buy it in its entireity will cost you about £11.50...
For a community who have been commonly viewed in terms of their ‘otherness’ in Scottish Society, this appears a striking demonstration of‘conformity’. According to official UILGB figures, Irish Catholics contributed up to 16.4% of Scotland’s recruiting total of 82,957 for the first three months of the war. The Irish, it would appear, were not immune to the practical imperatives, shared values and collective enthusiasm which fuelled voluntary recruitment in the wider population.
However, there is an immediate caveat. If this constitutes a significant commitment of a community’s manpower, it is also a largely forgotten one. The manner in which it has become marginalised in popular memory and in historiography itself tells us something of the awkward and shifting conceptual territory which the Catholic Irish in Scotland have inhabited - somewhere between their country of origin and place of settlement.
For decades, nationalist involvement in the GreatWar was the subject of a ‘national amnesia’ among the Irish themselves. Out of the stirring material of the Easter Rising and the violent conflicts that grew out of the war, a triumphalist narrative of advanced nationalism was constructed which left little space for an alternative military tradition. From the 1980s, however, academic historians such as David Fitzpatrick and Keith Jeffery have consciously undertaken the recovery of the varied facets of Ireland’s war experience. However, the response of the Irishin Great Britain and the Empire has not yet been systematically addressed. Patrick Casey’s attempt to estimate Irish casualties, for example, encounters not only politically weighted statistics but the most basic definitional conundrum of ‘Irishness’: whether to include those of Irish birth, Irish descent or serving Irish regiments?
In Scotland too an equally complex process has prevented explicit acknowledgment of the service of Catholic Irishmen in the Crown forces. For many Scots during the 1920s the bitterWar of Independence in Ireland and the fragile relationship between Dublin and London eclipsed Great War memories of shared service. Indeed, in a climate of economic and political dislocation and growing denominational insecurities fears over the ‘end of Scotland’ served to build rather than lower communal barriers. In one element of the Scottish historical record, the Catholic Irish have been almost actively erased. Regimental histories are by definition concerned with the ties of continuity and tradition. Amid the uncertainties of the post-war decade the need became pressing to restore the ‘purity’ of the Scottish regiments, diluted by wartime drafts, and to restate the integrity of the Scottish martial tradition. John Buchan in his history of the Royal Scots Fusiliers typically voiced his belief that the recruit of autumn 1914 was ‘Fusilier Jock’, the essential ‘regimental type’, who had served the regiment for two hundred years since its origins in Covenanting times. Similarly, the historians of the 7th Battalion Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders were proud to boast that at their Glasgow recruiting office, ‘it was the rule that no man was admitted unless he was a Scotsman’. Not surprisingly, evidence of the Irish presence in Scottish regiments is to be found rather in raw wartime fiction than in these manufactured volumes – not only the writings of the immigrant Patrick Macgill, but in those doggedly cheerful products of other ‘authors in uniform’ like ‘’Ian Hay’, Thomas Lyons and Captain R.W.Campbell. Standing in the firing line with the Scots Guards, one of Macgill’s characters in The Red Horizon found that he had, ‘…dropped into Ireland; heaps of it. There was the brogue that could be cut with a knife, and the humour that survived Mons and the Marne’.
In a field of study where ‘patriotism’ is often employed as a generalised analytical category, the commitment of Irish in Scotland to ‘the British community’ was mediated by a set of overlapping identities - ethnic, politicaland religious. The complex nature of this commitment is also a corrective to some recent revisionist accounts which suggest that while ‘love of country’ seems a permissible motivation for those who studied at English public schools, it is less comprehensible for those of a lower ‘social milieu’ for whom the less sophisticated explanations of propaganda, female insistence or economic necessity will suffice.
The question of why men volunteered at any stage is itself a supremely difficult one. We are confronted first of all by a mass of individual motivations. We can never recapture the personal loyalties and ambitions which prompted a young man like John Milcairns of Calton to join the 10th Cameronians in September 1914. Killed in action at the battle of Loos a year later, aged eighteen, his voice is one of thousands that remain silenced. The phasing of enlistment is also significant. The ‘rush to the colours’ concept has been subjected to considerable scrutiny and we must consider not only the initial surge in the opening weeks of the war, but also how this commitment was sustained at crucial stages during the pre-conscription period. Against this background, it becomes important above all to grasp the environmental influences and ideological mechanisms which encouraged receptiveness to the recruitment call.
The enlistment of the Catholic Irish offers a snapshot of a community in transition. The steep decline in Irish immigration by the end of the nineteenth century, both Catholic and Protestant, is well documented. The 1911 census indicated 174,715 people of Irish birth in Scotland, representing 3.7% of the total population compared with 6.2% forty years before. With an increasing proportion of the community now born in Scotland, and sharing the workplace and residential areas with Scots, the Catholic Irish in the early twentieth century had nevertheless retained a strong collective identity which drew on a web of political and parish-based organisations. The sense of distinctiveness was further shaped by a vociferous Redmondite press under the control of the Nationalist entrepreneur, Charles Diamond. This was a well established population, still subordinate in many respects, yet struggling determinedly for participation and respect in Scottish society. The interplay of these internal communal factors with the external dynamics of Irish nationalist politics as fortunes of war rapidly unfolded, provided the material from which a ‘commonsense’ of duty, honour and service and could be forged. The present paper focuses on this process of construction,concentrating on the period of voluntary enlistment from1914 to 1915. Its starting point, however, is the ideological backgroundto enlistment and imperial identity, rooted in the constitutional nationalism of the late nineteenth century.
As Dillon’s estimate of reservists indicated, military service was far from a novelty for the Irish. In the early part of the nineteenth century, Ireland had provided as many as 42.2% of non commissioned officers in the British army. From the 1840s, rural depopulation and emigration had ensured a growing decline in the proportion of Irish-born soldiers, but also gave a new emphasis to the Irish communities in British cities as potential manpower reserves. By mid century, it had become a common assertion that Scottish regiments were in fact ‘composed of Irishmen’, a prospect which appalled guardians of Scotland’s ‘martial spirit’. In anattempt to prove the contrary, P. H. Mackenzie demonstrated a strong but uneven pattern of Irish enlistment up to 1861. In some Highland regiments, notably the 73rd and 75th, the growing proportion of Catholic Irish was sufficient to raise fears of political reliability if troops were insensitively deployed. Un-kilted Lowland regiments, like the Royal Scots Fusiliers, were perceived as particularly vulnerable to national dilution by Irish – and English – enlistments and with this in mind took advantage of uniform changes in the early 1880s to equip themselves with Highland accessories, such as trews and basket-hilted claymores to underline their ‘Scottishness’.
By the early twentieth century, the regular army retained practical attractions for the heavily urbanised Irish population in Scotland. As the 1911 Census data suggests for Glasgow, this group was heavily over-represented in the unskilled, or at best semi-skilled, sectors of the labour market where casual work predominated, Labouring work indeed accounted for just under 20% of the Irish-born male population, compared with 6.4% of the total male workforce. Poverty, unemployment and desperate domestic circumstances had long proved the best recruiting sergeants, with most British army enlistments coming from the least skilled sections of the working class. Yet the army promised more than immediate escape from hardship. Recruits were also offered the opportunity to better their prospects prospects through promotion and long service pensions. Even short service men leaving the colours were required to enter the reserves for a six-year period. The pervasive quality of army service was further illustrated in the development of family traditions of enlistment among Irish Catholics in Scotland.
Striking examples are the Denistoun soldier, Harry McCartney of the 1st Cameronians, killed in action in 1915, whose father had served in the same battalion in the Zulu War, or the Loanhead family who had seven sons already at the colours at the outbreak of war, all in Scottish regiments. As these examples suggest, enlistment simply did not carry the stigma in Irish as in British popular culture - despite the abhorrence of advanced nationalists like Bulmer Hobson.28 The sartorial glamour of the Scottish regiments may also have exerted its own pull. Yet there was a vital ambivalence here. Servants of the British Crown, ‘the gallant sons of Erin’, were nevertheless encouraged in folklore and popular literature to identify with an alternative martial tradition stretching back to the ‘Wild Geese’ of Ramillies and beyond –or as the poet Stephen Gwynn expressed it in December 1914, ‘…our splendid heritage in the old fighting race’.
Ambivalence rather than alienation also marked the attitudes of the wider Irish community towards the Empire that their soldiers defended. Essentially, as Jeffery notes, this reflected the paradox that Ireland’s status was both ‘”imperial’ and ‘colonial’”. While opposing aggressive ‘British imperialism’ in general terms and condemning it specifically when directed against Ireland, nationalist parliamentarians, personally assimilated into British political life, argued that Home Rule would allow Ireland to assume her ‘proper position’ in Empire, raising her standing among the nations of the world. These themes had particular resonance for the Irish in Scotland, themselves dependent on an export-orientated industrial economy and settled in a society where empire loyalty had widespread popular currency. The dynamics of local nationalist politics before the Great War ensured that while imperialist doctrines were increasingly contested, they were far from displaced in community consciousness.
Traditionally, Irish communal politics had been strongly personality centred. For almost forty years, it was the redoubtable John Ferguson who had stamped nationalist organisation in the west with his own progressive hallmark. As a radical liberal, Ferguson’s lifework had been to link the cause of Irish Home Rule with the broader currents of land reform and democratic politics in his country of adoption. In the years before his death in 1906, he was one of a growing number of Irishmen who longed for the constitutional position of Ireland to be ‘settled’ in order that the community could wholeheartedly align itself with the cause of labour. A complex and contradictory figure, Ferguson also,belonged to the generation of nationalists who embraced ‘aspirational imperialism’. In Three Centuries of English Rule…, a polemic against the colonisation of Ireland, he nevertheless repudiated ‘absolute separation’,placing Ireland’s future firmly within the Empire, which he champione as a community of nations held together by the uniquely British blessings of political freedom and free trade. In a strangely prophetic passage he wrote of a new partnership to face a changing world order:
Let the despots of Europe combine if they will…reduced though our nation is, I doubt not that 200,000 recruits will muster rapidly under the green flag to sustain the honour of their nation and ratify its compact…Irish bayonets will redden in the front of another decisive battle of the world, by which baptism of blood ancient wrongs shall be forgotten, and a future of unity and peace between England and Ireland shall date from that day of common triumph.
