The Englishman Who Cried ‘Let Ireland Go’

‘Let Ireland go, with God’s blessing and a shake of the hand’, wrote Jerome K. Jerome in May 1920. This was a crucial year in Anglo-Irish relations, when Irish men and women were taking up arms against British rule in Ireland.

The English author Jerome Klapka Jerome (1859-1927) was not known for writing on politics but for his plays, books, and magazine articles. He is best remembered today for Three Men in a Boat (1889), a humorous tale in which three friends take a boating holiday on the River Thames. This, combined with how rare it was for such opinions to be published in the English press, particularly by such a famous author, makes his article on British policy towards Ireland all the more interesting.

‘Idle Thoughts on Ireland’ was published in the weekly magazine Common Sense on 22 May 1920. Jerome’s article was a plea to his compatriots to sort out the ‘Irish Question’ peacefully once and for all. It appeared at the height of the Irish War of Independence (also known as the Anglo-Irish War), a guerrilla war that lasted from January 1919 until a truce was declared in July 1921 and the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in December 1921.

With his tongue firmly in his cheek, Jerome addressed a couple of solutions that were being put forward by the British political class and others to resolve the problem. He began by taking a potshot at the English upper classes, who, he alleged, had until recently had a plan for the solution of the ‘Irish problem’. The first of these was to tow ‘Ireland into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and there sink her’. That scheme seems to have fallen out of favour, he remarked, due to the spread of education; the only people still advocating such a plan were ‘very old gentlemen who ... clinch the argument by fiercely waving their umbrellas’.

The next solution Jerome outlined was the proposal to remove all the Irish ‘irreconcilables’, together with their wives and families, from Ireland and replace them with English settlers. However, while Oliver Cromwell came up with a similar plan ‘under conditions much more favourable to success’, Jerome doubted if anyone today was thanking Cromwell for his ‘contribution’. Cromwell was sent to Ireland by the English Parliament in 1649 with 12,000 troops to quell resistance to the new English Commonwealth. His New Model Army crushed all military opposition and his scorched earth policy left a devastated land and people, which led to famine and disease. It resulted in the death of almost one quarter of the population.

For 300 years, wrote Jerome, ‘all the resources of the British Empire have been strained to the subjection of Ireland’. And yet the little nation of four million ‘is in more defiant mood than ever’. ‘Why should it frighten us?’, he wondered. England was the only country that ‘dare not live side by side with a free people’. How would the French feel if England ruled France in the same way that it ruled Ireland? The ‘English Castle in Paris shall rule them justly, as is our good English way’, he wrote. This was a reference to Dublin Castle, the seat of British administration in Ireland. French peasants would be paid high salaries for working for the ‘(English) Royal French Constabulary’ and would help England to maintain order over Frenchmen. Here Jerome referred to the Royal Irish Constabulary that kept British rule in Ireland. Recruited from the local population, it gained a reputation for brutality during the Land War (1879-82). However, while the French might be permitted to take charge of their tramways and electric lighting and have a National County Council in Paris, the idea that they could have their own government would be ‘unthinkable’. Taking his analogy further, Jerome suggested that if America followed the same line of argument as Britain in relation to its policy on Ireland, America would conquer and annex Canada because it could not risk a British possession existing beside it through which an enemy could attack. In a similar vein, Spain would conquer and annex Portugal for fear of attack and Russia would do likewise with Finland and Poland. He posited that if Russia took such action, a ‘howl of virtuous indignation’ would go up in the Imperial press. It would be seen as the ‘bully of the smaller nations merely because they happen to be her neighbours’.

Irish republicans seized on Jerome’s words and used them in their propaganda war. The Irish Bulletin, an underground newspaper set up by the revolutionary government of Dáil Éireann, used it to show how Irish independence was not a threat to British sovereignty or security. The article also gained international attention and references to it appeared in the American, Australian, Irish, and French press. Philadelphia’s Catholic Standard praised Jerome’s ‘courage and good sense to rise to the defense of Ireland’s independence’. Freeman’s Journal in Sydney said Jerome’s article showed that ‘thinking men in England are breaking away from the idea that an enslaved Ireland is essential to British safety’. In Ireland it was reprinted either in full or in part in local and national newspapers from Cork in the south to Donegal and Fermanagh in the north. Very little commentary was added; the message was transmitted through Jerome’s words. In the US in July 1920, a group called the Friends of Irish Freedom published a pamphlet entitled ‘Irish Independence Advocated by Jerome K. Jerome, British Writer Calls England Cowardly’. There was no reaction to Jerome’s article in England.

As for the northern unionists who did not want to be part of an independent Ireland, Jerome concluded that ‘Ulster could take care of herself as well within the Irish Parliament as outside it’. By ‘letting Ireland go’, Jerome argued that the ‘hate and evil of a thousand years will be drowned’ and from the sea ‘will arise a friendly nation that we can live with side by side’. But of course Ireland was not let go. The War of Independence would continue for more than a year after the article was published, with more than 1,400 lives lost. Jerome did not comment at the conclusion of the war.

Oliver O’Hanlon has a PhD from University College Cork on Franco-Irish relations and Irish history.