Irishness and Empire in the Twentieth Century

Gannon, Seán William

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96394-5_7

Seán William Gannon⁴

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

This chapter assesses the extent to which the Irish identities of twentieth-century Irish imperial servants shaped their personal/professional experience. It evaluates the impact of colonial Irish stereotypes on recruitment, with particular focus on the idea of the ‘Irish subversive’, which influenced Colonial Office attitudes towards Southern Irish recruitment well into the imperial endgame. It assesses the extent to which Irishness impacted on the careers of Irish British Colonial Service officers and examines its influence on the racial attitudes displayed by Irish officers towards those amongst whom they worked, and on their views of the anticolonial campaigns which, for many, came to define the mid-twentieth-century imperial experience. The implications of the findings for the idea of an Irish colonial-diasporic identity are examined and popular Irish attitudes towards British imperial service explored.

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Notes

1.
Irish Times, 7 September 1920, 5.
2.
Mason, Men who Ruled India, 285.
3.
Although born in India, Dyer had himself an association with Ireland, having received seven years’ secondary education at Middleton College, county Cork. His British-Indian parents’ choice of this school was described as ‘inexplicable’ by his biographer in light of the family’s apparent lack of relatives, friends, or other connections in Ireland. Nigel Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginal Dyer (London: Hambledon & London, 2005), 16.
4.
The celebrated Indian historian, V. N. Datta, described him in identical terms. Edwin S. Montagu, An Indian Diary (London: Heinemann, 1930), 14 November 1917, 32; V. N. Datta, Jallianwalla Bagh (Ludhiana: Lyall Book Depot, 1969), 19.
5.
O’Dwyer himself subscribed to the idea of a distinct Irish character, with positive and negative attributes which ‘differ[ed] so radically’ from that of the English. T. G. Fraser, ‘Ireland and India’ in Jeffery, An Irish Empire, 77–93, at 93 n. 32; O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 3, 8, 415.
6.
Bubb, ‘Irish Soldier’, 770.
7.
Irish Times, 22 August 1870, 4. See also Evening Post, 30 December 1858, quoted in Flanagan, ‘Celtic Ineligible’, 393.
8.
J. M. Compton, ‘Open Competition and the Indian Civil Service, 1854–1876’, English Historical Review, 83 (1968): 265–284, 271.
9.
The Times, 26 May 1862.
10.
Flanagan, ‘Celtic Ineligible’, 394.
11.
Irish entrants achieved the highest marks in Sanskrit in 1860 and in both Arabic and Sanskrit in 1862. Ibid., 457.
12.
Cook, ‘Irish Raj’, 517–518.
13.
O’Leary, Servants, 144, 195.
14.
As late as 1920, the Duke of Northumberland was warning that ‘behind the anti-British conspiracy in all parts of the [empire] is the influence of the Roman Catholic Church’, and some 50 years later in Northern Ireland, the Paisleyite Protestant Telegraph was maintaining that ‘Romanists’ in Southern Rhodesia were taking advantage of the ‘cunning black revolution to liquidate God-fearing evangelicals’. Belfast Newsletter, 25 May 1920; Lowry, ‘Ulster Resistance’, 206.
15.
Oliver P. Rafferty, ‘The Catholic Church, Ireland and the British Empire, 1800–1921’, Historical Research, 84 (2011): 288–309, 296; Cook, ‘Irish Raj’, 518. See also John Wolffe, ‘Anti-Catholicism and the British Empire, 1815–1914’ in Carey (ed.), Empires of Religion, 43–63.
16.
James Pope-Hennessy, Verandah: Some Episodes in the Crown Colonies, 1867–1889 (London: Century, 1964), 231.
17.
Robert O. Tilman, Bureaucratic Transition in Malaya (Durham N.C.: Duke UP, 1964), 106; Furse, Aucuparius, 206–207.
18.
Robert Heussler, Yesterday’s Rulers: the Making of the British Colonial Service (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1963), 66.
19.
Bodleian Library, Oxford (BLO), Commonwealth and African Studies (CAS), MSS.Brit.Emp.r.21, Colonial Office desk diaries 1899–1915, 10 March 1889, 7 August 1902.
20.
O’Grady applied for a colonial administrative appointment in 1919. TNA, CO/429/122, ‘Application of William Michael O’Grady’, February 1919.
21.
Heussler, Yesterday’s Rulers, 41.
22.
Data extracted from The Colonial Office List for 1862–1925; or General Register of the Colonial Dependencies of Great Britain (London: British Library, 1992); Colonial Office List, 1925 (London: Harrison, 1925); The Dominions Office and Colonial Office List (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1926–1940); Colonial Administrative Service List (London: HMSO, 1933–1939); Kirk-Greene: Biographical Dictionary.
23.
Campbell College, for instance, sought to become, in the words of one of its governors, ‘a centre of education which should stand on a level with the great English schools’, while St Columba’s was intended by its founder to be Ireland’s ‘Eton of its own’. Haines, ‘Days So Good’, 134; Justyna Pyz, ‘St Columba’s College: an Irish School in the Age of Empire’ in Dickson et al., Irish Classrooms, 124–133, 125.
24.
J. R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe: the Development of the Public School in the Nineteenth Century (Blandford: Millington, 1977), 270, 275. See also O’Neill, Catholics of Consequence, 25.
25.
J. de Vere Allen, ‘Malayan Civil Service, 1874–1941: Colonial Bureaucracy/Malayan Elite’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 12 (1970): 149–178, 165. See also, BLO, CAS, Colonial Office desk diaries, 7 November 1899; Heussler, Yesterday’s Men, 67.
26.
Robert Collins, ‘The Sudan Political Service: a Portrait of the Imperialists’, African Affairs, 71 (1972): 293–303, 296, n. 7.
27.
Sources: The Sudan Political Service, 1899–1929 (Khartoum: Sudan Government, 1930); A. H. M. Kirk-Greene & G. W. Bell, The Sudan Political Service, 1920–1952: a Preliminary Register of Second Careers (Oxford: 1989).
28.
For details of SPS recruitment see J. A. Mangan, ‘The Education of an Elite Imperial Administration: the Sudan Political Service and the British Public School System’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 15 (1982): 671–699, 673–674.
29.
A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, ‘The Sudan Political Service: a Profile in the Sociology of Imperialism’, International Journal of African Studies, 15 (1982): 21–48, 21.
30.
Ibid., 39; Mangan, ‘Education of an Elite’, 683.
31.
Heussler was not permitted to identify the year in his book. Heussler, Yesterday’s Men, 76.
32.
TNA, CO/733/359/8, MacMichael to McDonald, 15 November 1938.
33.
Glynn, Tidings, 153.
34.
BLO, CAS, MSS.Brit.Emp.r.4, P. A. Clearkin, ‘Ramblings and recollections of a colonial doctor, 1913–1958’, 150.
35.
BLO, CAS, MSS.Brit.Emp.s.415, Ralph Furse collection (Furse Collection), 5/1 Diary of ‘Journey to Africa 1935–1936’, 7 February 1936; ibid., Kauntze to Furse, 6 March 1936.
36.
O’Halpin, ‘Warren Fisher and the Coalition’, 918, n. 63.
37.
Figures abstracted from Colonial Office List, 1925 (London: Harrison, 1925); The Dominions Office and Colonial Office List (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1926–1940); Colonial Office List (London: HMSO, 1946–1966); Colonial Medical Service List (London: HMSO, 1936–1939); Colonial Legal Service List (London: HMSO, 1935–1939); Kirk-Greene: Biographical Dictionary.
38.
On the hierarchy of imperial postings, see Christopher Prior, Exporting Empire: Africa, Colonial Officials and the Construction of the British Imperial State, c. 1900–39 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013), 26–28, 67–68.
39.
The Times, 27 November 1930, 15.
40.
Sources: see n. 22.
41.
Allen, ‘Malayan Civil Service’, 164–165.
42.
McMahon, British spies, 168.
43.
Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the British Empire’, 518.
44.
Critics denounced Madden’s work as ‘a blind and bigoted earnestness in the cause of sedition’ and a ‘heap of printed poison …. more of the same inflammatory material that is being circulated amongst the masses … an attempt to pave the way for a seismic social change which could turn the kingdom completely upside down’. He had to explicitly disclaim that his work was ‘intended or calculated to lead to violence, insurrection or rebellion’ to secure a position at home. Thomas More Madden (ed.), The Memoirs (Chiefly Autobiographical) from 1798 to 1886 of Richard Robert Madden (London: Ward & Downey, 1891), 170–171; Leon Ó Broin, The Irish Abolitionist: Richard Madden and the Subversion of Empire (Dublin: Sáirséal & Dill, 1971), 212–213, 329.
45.
Nicholas Canny, ‘Forward’ to Kenny, Ireland and the British Empire, vii-xvi, ix.
46.
Edinburgh Review, 139 (1874): 357.
47.
Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks, 228–246.
48.
Pope-Hennessy, Verandah, 22.
49.
University College Dublin Archives, L. S. Gógan papers, LA27/205, Crean to Gógan, 20 January 1922; Kerryman, 2 October 1954, 12. The centrality of Irish political nationalism to the Connaught Ranger Mutiny is, however, moot. Silvestri, Ireland and India, 176–207.
50.
An old boy of Portora Royal and TCD graduate, Flood was recruited into the Home Civil Service through competitive examination in 1910. Colonial Office List, 1925 (London: Harrison, 1925), 638.
51.
TNA, CO/877/3, Flood, Departmental minute, 19 November 1925. On the potential disloyalty of Irish Free State army personnel, see TNA, Admiralty files (ADM), Walton, Departmental minute, 13 October 1936.
52.
Ibid., Whiskard, Departmental minute, 27 October 1925. See also Ibid., Furse, Departmental minute, 7 November 1925.
53.
Ibid., Flood, Departmental minute, 19 November 1925.
54.
TNA, CO/877/20/4, ‘Wartime recruitment: candidates from Trinity College Dublin’, Shuckburgh, Departmental minute, 5 February 1940.
55.
Ibid., Newbolt, Departmental minute, 26 January 1940.
56.
Ibid., Jeffries, Departmental minute, 23 August 1940.
57.
Ibid., Furse, Departmental minute, 8 April 1941.
58.
Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks, 228.
59.
O’Connor, Irish Officers, 109–110.
60.
Ibid., 117; TNA, ADM/178/144, Troup, Departmental minute, 30 April 1936.
61.
TNA, CO/877/20/4, Newbolt, Departmental minute, 26 January 1940; ibid., Furse, Departmental minute, 24 January 1940.
62.
Ibid., Newbolt, Departmental minute, 26 January 1940.
63.
Ibid., Newbolt, Departmental minute, 19 August 1940.
64.
Ibid., Shuckburgh, Departmental minute, 20 August 1940.
65.
Ibid., Maffey to Jeffries, 12 September 1940.
66.
Ibid., Newbolt, Departmental minute, 1 April 1941.
67.
Ibid., Furse to Leventhal, 25 July 1941.
68.
Ibid., Moult, Departmental minute, 4 April 1940.
69.
Ibid., Newbolt, Departmental minute, 17 May 1950.
70.
W. F. Stirling, Safety Last (London: Hollis & Carter, 1953), 117; Colin Baker, State of Emergency: Crisis in Central Africa, Nyasaland 1959–1960 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 80; BLO, CAS, MSS.Afr.s.2456, Manus Nunan memoir, 20. Nunan served as a crown counsel in Nigeria from 1953–1964.
71.
Kate O’Malley, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919–64 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008).
72.
TNA, CO/733/313/1, Ormsby-Gore, Departmental minute, 20 June 1936.
73.
Detailed accounts of these cases are provided in Maurice Collis, Trials in Burma (London: Faber, 1937).
74.
Louise Collis (ed.), Maurice Collis Diaries, 1949–1969 (London: W & J Mackay, 1977), 26–27.
75.
Although born in England, Foley strongly self-identified as Irish and was viewed as Irish in Cyprus. Peter Evans, Law and Disorder, or Scenes of Life in Kenya (London: Secker & Warburg, 1956), 259; O’Shea, Ireland and the End of Empire, 166–167. See also Ibid., 187.
76.
Kathryn Tidrick, Empire and the English Character: the Illusion of Authority (London: Tauris Parke, 2009), 131.
77.
BLO, CAS, MSS.Afr.1872/75, R. S. F. Hennessey, ‘Learning about disease in Uganda: 1929–44 and 1949–55’, 9; BLO, CAS, MSS.Ind.Ocn.s.270, Roy Bingham collection, Bingham to father, 10 July 1942; BLO, CAS, MSS.Afr.s.1850, William Browne collection (Browne collection), ‘Recollections of Government College, Ibadan, 1936–1955’, 1–3; Sarsfield-Hall, From Cork to Khartoum, Appendix 2, iii.
78.
Peter Clearkin maintained that ‘only one who has lived and worked in Africa can understand the pleasure excited in ancient Romans by the suffering of victims in the arena’. BLO, CAS, Clearkin, ‘Ramblings and recollections’, 59. See also ibid., 144; BLO, CAS, MSS. Ind.Ocn.r.6, G. J. O’Grady, ‘“If you sling enough mud”: being an unbiased account of the life and work of a civil engineer in Malaya’ (unpublished memoir, 1945), 52; O’Shea, Ireland and the end of empire, 172.
79.
Similarly, the ‘appeasement’ of Indian nationalists by a British government and press ignorant of the real situation was not uncommon a complaint amongst Irish ICS personnel in interwar years. See, for example, Kilkenny Archives (KA), Maidenhall-Laviston collection (MLC), Loftus Clarke correspondence (Clarke correspondence), Clarke to mother: Box 54, 25 November 1921; Box 107, Clarke to ‘Charlie’, 24 March 1922.
80.
Irish Chief secretary from 1907 to 1916, Augustine Birrell, was strongly criticized for failing to act against Irish militant nationalists in the months prior to the Easter Rising. KA, MLC, Clarke correspondence, Box 51 Clarke to mother, 8 October 1917; Eunan O’Halpin, ‘Augustine Birrell’ in James McGuire & James Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography from the Earliest Times to 2002 (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 555–557.
81.
Clarke also deplored Montagu, ‘a rather conceited young Jew … why on earth can they not find an Englishman for the job?’. Ibid., Box 51 Clarke to mother, 7 August 1917; Box 54 Clarke to mother, 18 July, 4 August 1920.
82.
BLO, CAS, MSS.Brit.Emp.s.447, Henry Blackall collection (Blackall collection), Blackall, ‘Aide memoire for delegates of the British Residents’ Association’ and notes, undated c. March 1960.
83.
Ibid., Blackall, Introduction to collection, 10 July 1968. See also O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 10.
84.
See Chap. 1, p. 20.
85.
British Library, Asia, Pacific and Africa collections, MSS.EUR/C235 Kathleen Tegart, ‘Charles Tegart and the Indian Police’, vol. 2, 297; Silvestri, ‘Sir Charles Tegart’, 42.
86.
See Chap. 1, p. 20.
87.
BLO, CAS, MSS.Afr.s.1995, Maurice de Courcy Dodd correspondence (Dodd correspondence), Dodd to mother, 17 October 1898 & Dodd to ‘John’, 17 October 1898. For an example of such compartmentalization in a contemporary Indian context, see Irish ICS officer Charles McMinn’s anonymously published ‘The Home Rule Movement in India and Ireland: a Contrast’, Contemporary Review, 57 (1890): 78–96.
88.
For examples of such analogies, see Kenneth L. Shonk, ‘The Shadow Metropole: the Varieties of Anticolonialism in Ireland, 1937–1968’, in McMahon et al., Ireland in an Imperial World, 265–282, 267–272.
89.
Irish Times, 13 March 1954, 7.
90.
Peter Paris, The Impartial Knife: a Doctor in Cyprus (London: Hutchinson, 1961), 197.
91.
Ibid., 42. The pseudonymous Paris was born to Irish parents in England and identified as Irish.
92.
BLO, CAS, Browne collection, ‘Nigeria, 1936–1957’, 4.
93.
Irish Times, 3 August 1963, 8.
94.
However, as in Hennessey’s case, the primary evidence for enlightened racial attitudes amongst Irish officers are personal testimonies written in more enlightened times. Assaf Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 2006), 67; BLO, CAS, Hennessey, ‘Disease in Uganda’, 8. See also Hadara Lazar, Out of Palestine: the Making of Modern Israel (New York: Atlas, 2011), 69–73.
95.
For example, Clarke dismissed concerns about the plight of ‘down-trodden [Indian] tea coolies’, maintaining that they were ‘about as down-trodden as Irish tenants, though I am glad to say, very much better behaved’. KA, MLC, Clarke correspondence, Box 43 Clarke to mother, 22 September 1902.
96.
Howe, Ireland and Empire, 45; Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the British Empire’, 499. For examples of Irish-African comparisons, see Paul A. Townend, The Road to Home Rule: Anti-Imperialism and the Irish National Movement (Madison: Wisconsin UP, 2016), 70–82; Patrick Maume, ‘The Irish Independent and Empire, 1891–1919’ in Simon J. Potter (ed.), Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c.1857–1921 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 124–142, 131.
97.
Fraser, ‘Ireland and India’, 85–86.
98.
Angus Mitchell, ‘Roger Casement: the Evolution of an Enemy of Empire’ in Eoin Flannery & Angus Mitchell (eds), Enemies of Empire: New Perspectives on Imperialism, Literature and Historiography (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), 40–57, 41.
99.
Prior, Exporting Empire, 155. See also ibid., 77; Furse, Aucuparius, 142.
100.
BLO, CAS, Dodd correspondence, Dodd to mother, 18 March 1898. See also ibid., Dodd to mother, 26 April, 8 May, 25 July 1898; Dodd to ‘John’, 17 October 1898; Dodd to ‘Bertie’, 19 October 1898.
101.
BLO, CAS, Clearkin, ‘Ramblings and recollections’, 143.
102.
BLO, CAS, Blackall collection, ‘Foreword’ to Gold Coast papers, undated, c. 1968.
103.
These included beatings, whippings, and other physical humiliations such as forcing a headman to strip naked and walk home. BLO, CAS, MSS.Afr.s.785, E. K. Lumley, ‘My African journey’, 17, 12 February, 21–22 March, 13 July 1934.
104.
BLO, CAS, O’Grady, ‘If you sling enough mud’, 50–52. See also O’Connor, More Fool I, 43–46.
105.
See, for example, Ibid., 29; BLO, CAS, Browne collection, ‘Nigeria’, 3; Evans, Last Colonial Judge, 17; Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks, 242.
106.
KA, MLC, Clarke correspondence, Clarke to mother, 2 February 1922; O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 12; E. J. O’Meara, I’d Live It Again (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1935), 318. See also Irish Times, 20 February 1930, 7.
107.
KA, MLC, Clarke correspondence, Box 47 Clarke to mother-in-law, 28 October 1907.
108.
See, for example, TNA, CO/877/5/1, MacDonnell to Newbolt, 13 July 1928; ibid., Newbolt to MacDonnell, 4 August 1928; BLO, CAS, Colonial Office desk diaries, 4, 6, 9 February, 28 April 1899, 22 January 1911; O’Leary, Servants, 176.
109.
That he included Caribbean islanders of African descent in this assessment underscores the biologized basis for Clearkin’s conclusions. BLO, CAS, Clearkin, ‘Ramblings and recollections’, 59.
110.
Victor Purcell, The Memoirs of a Malayan Official (London: Cassell, 1965), 296.
111.
BLO, CAS, O’Grady, ‘If you sling enough mud’, 76–77, 257.
112.
BLO, CAS, Blackall collection, ‘Foreword’ to Gold Coast papers, undated, c. 1968; BLO, CAS, Clearkin, ‘Ramblings and recollections’, 166.
113.
O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 1.
114.
Ibid., 9, 13.
115.
Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks, 226.
116.
For a detailed study of the influence of Irish Civilians on the act, see Cook, Imperial Affinities, 81–107.
117.
Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks, 226, 243–245.
118.
Jeffery, ‘Introduction’ to An Irish Empire, 9.
119.
O’Leary, Servants, 169.
120.
BLO, CAS, Blackall, ‘Foreword’ to Gold Coast papers, undated, c. 1968.
121.
Ibid., ‘Foreword’ to Cyprus collection, undated, c. 1968.
122.
Michael Bloch, The Duke of Windsor’s War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1982), 133–134.
123.
Ibid., 144, 331.
124.
See, for example, Irish Press, 17 May 1957, 7. As in the case of Avshalom Haviv, comparisons were made between Karaolis and Kevin Barry. Irish Times, 2 November 1956, 3.
125.
John Stewart Collis, Bound Upon a Course: an Autobiography (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1971), 17.
126.
Maurice Collis, The Journey Outward: an Autobiography (London: Faber, 1952), 118.
127.
Maurice Collis, Into Hidden Burma: an Autobiography (London: Faber, 1953), 18.
128.
Saya San, a Burmese monarchist and former Buddhist monk, led an unsuccessful rebellion against British rule in 1930–1932.
129.
Barry Crosbie, ‘Irish Religious Networks in Colonial South Asia, ca. 1788–1858’ in Colin Barr & Hilary M. Carey (eds), Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015), 209–28, 210.
130.
O’Neill, ‘Empire, Education’, 106.
131.
Canny, ‘Foreword’ to Kenny, Ireland and the British Empire, viii.
132.
Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire, 56.
133.
BLO, CAS, ‘Nunan memoir’, 8, 24.
134.
For example, visiting colonial Kenya in 1928, Peter Evans noted its ‘caricature of English “county” life, at once tragic and ridiculous’. Evans, Law and Disorder, 5.
135.
Alan Bairner, ‘Ireland, Sport and Empire’ in Jeffery, An Irish Empire, 57–76, 71. The Gaelic Athletic Association’s injunction against the playing of, or even attendance at ‘foreign games’, instituted in 1887, was not rescinded until 1971.
136.
Crozier, Practising Colonial Medicine, 116. Jeffries noted the ‘undoubted’ existence of a ‘corporate spirit in the [Colonial] Office’ as well, its staff possessing what he termed a sense of ‘vocation’ based on shared ideals of imperial service. Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Office (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 8.
137.
Brian Stoddart, ‘Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and Colonial Response in the British Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30 (1988): 649–673, 666.
138.
The intriguing idea of assertions of national identity in the colonies as ‘performances’ was proposed by MacKenzie in a Scottish context. Richard J. Finlay, ‘National Identity, Union, and Empire, c.1850–c.1970’ in John M. MacKenzie & T. M. Devine, Scotland and the British Empire: Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 280–316, 290.
139.
The Irish Society of East Africa, for example, ‘embraced both the Northern and Southern Irish, and politics back home never entered the organisation’. Irish Independent, 25 September 1967, 8.
140.
Irish Times, 17 March 1923, 9. See also Sarsfield-Hall, From Cork to Khartoum, 113–114.
141.
Kaori Nagai, Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (Cork: Cork UP, 2006), 83.
142.
Martin Moore, Dublin, Author interview, 8 September 2009.
143.
See, for example, Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair, The Wearing of the Green: a History of St Patrick’s Day (London: Routledge, 2002), 117–124; Silvestri, Ireland and India, 13–15.
144.
Nagai, Empire of Analogies, 83. The marrying of Roberts’ Irish and British imperial identities was emblematized one year later in his grant of the title ‘Earl Roberts of Kandahar in Afghanistan, Pretoria in the Transvaal Colony and the City of Waterford’.
145.
Cook, ‘Irish Raj’, 522.
146.
Heffernan, Irish Doctor’s Memories, 3.
147.
Irish Examiner, 17 April 1985, 4.
148.
New York Review of Books, 6 March 1975.
149.
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 17 March 1945, 5; Richard Murphy, The Kick (London: Granta, 2002), 107, 247.
150.
BLO, CAS, Henry Blackall papers, ‘British nationality: correspondence with Home Office re. my claim to retain it’, undated handwritten note, c. 1968; Blackall to Abrahams, 4 January 1949.
151.
O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 2–3, 11.
152.
Townend, Road to Home Rule, 3. On the variety of Irish constitutional-nationalist approaches to empire, see Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Cosmopolitan Nationalism in the Victorian Empire: Ireland, India and the Politics of Alfred Webb (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 132–136.
153.
O’Shea, Ireland and the End of Empire, 36.
154.
Cook, ‘Irish Raj’, 522.
155.
BLO, CAS, ‘Nunan memoir’, 8–9.
156.
TNA, CO/323/895, Flood, Departmental minute, 2 September 1922.
157.
Wolfe Tone Weekly, 8 October 1938, 1.
158.
United Irishman, November 1956.
159.
Ibid., October 1958. See also Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin, ‘“The Mosquito Press”: Anti-Imperialist Rhetoric in Republican Journals, 1926–1939’, Éire-Ireland: an Inter-Disciplinary Journal of Irish Studies, 42 (2007): 256–289.
160.
For examples of well-wishes, see Connacht Telegraph, 8 November 1947, 5; Kilkenny People, 5 December 1953, 8. For reports on career progress, see Cork Examiner, 10 May 1932, 8; Kerryman, 18 August 1934, 15; Limerick Leader, 25 August 1948, 3; Kilkenny People, 10 June 1950, 5; Southern Star, 28 February 1953, 4; Sligo Champion, 18 April 1953, 1; Connacht Tribune, 30 October 1954, 18; Meath Chronicle, 1 December 1962, 5. For obituaries, see Connacht Tribune, 10 May 1958, 25; Anglo-Celt, 16 May 1959, 5;
161.
Kilkenny People, 2 June 1956, 5.
162.
Public servants such as teachers and police provided testimonials so routinely that the Anti-Partition Association adopted a resolution in 1953 calling on the minister for justice to instruct them to cease. Irish Press, 30 November 1953, 7.

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Gannon, S.W. (2019). Irishness and Empire in the Twentieth Century. In: The Irish Imperial Service. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96394-5_7

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