Introduction
For those of a certain generation, Caledon will forever be associated with the launch of Irish Civil Rights movement. The scene of the famous 1968 squat that led to the first Civil Rights march from Coalisland to Dungannon, for some the village's very topography gave physical expression to the gulf between Planter and Gael.Footnote 1 An anthropological study conducted during the Troubles described how the neat terraces and clean streets aroused local unionist pride in Ulster's industrial past and the virtues of an open bible, particularly in contrast to Catholic sloth and backwardness. Indeed, local nationalists advised the American author of the study to avoid the village, warning him that it was a “black hole” full of “bitter” people where “No Catholic would ever be allowed to live.”Footnote 2 Sic semper erat, et sic semper erit among Churchill's notoriously dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone. Indeed, a century ago, the nationalist Freeman's Journal dismissively reported that, in Caledon, “no dog barks unless to the tune of Dolly's Brae.”Footnote 3 Yet for ten weeks in 1919, Catholic and Protestant workers in the local woollen mill marched the village's well-kept streets to a very different tune. Peadar O'Donnell vividly described how
[i]n South Tyrone, in a town where the majority of workers are Protestant, we have a mighty Red Flag procession—“No Surrender” emblazoned on one side of the flag, “Up the Irish Transport” on the other. The flag that thus can unite our Irish workers is the flag we want.Footnote 4
The 1919 Caledon Lockout ended in defeat for the workers, but the incident shed new light on three critical aspects of the Irish revolution. Most fundamentally, it challenges the deeply entrenched consensus on the immutability of sectarian antagonism in Ulster. Secondly, it calls into question the accuracy of the widely held assumption that “there was no socially revolutionary situation in Ireland even in prospect.”Footnote 5 And, thirdly, it directly contradicts the dominant narrative regarding the defeat of non-sectarian labor politics in Ulster, namely, that while “the local bourgeoisie were happy to see trade unions weakened and the left attacked [this] occurred because of developments over which they had little or no influence.”Footnote 6
Caledon
Nestling on the edge of the Blackwater Valley, Caledon lies at the center of a triangle with Armagh, Dungannon, and Monaghan towns at its eastern, northern and southern points. Glasslough and the current border with the Republic of Ireland sit only five miles to the south. The second Earl of Caledon, Du Pre Alexander, commissioned most of the town's neat limestone terraces during the third decade of the nineteenth century. The six-story flourmill operated from 1823–879, before Sherrand Smith & Co re-opened the building as a woolen mill in 1882. John Fulton owned the mill from 1902 until its liquidation in 1930.Footnote 7 Six hundred and fourteen people lived in Caledon in 1910,Footnote 8 and a year later the census recorded that 164 residents of the Caledon District Electoral Division worked in some branch of woolen manufacture, the majority residing in two terraced rows adjacent to the mill itself. By the time of the Lockout in early 1919, and as result of significant orders for army blankets, the mill actually employed 220 people.Footnote 9 The Caledon Mill had a religiously mixed workforce prior to the war. It is necessary to clarify at this point that subsequent allegations by loyalist employers and some workers that Catholics or nationalists had usurped Protestants’ pre-war positions in the local mill do not stand up to scrutiny. In fact, many of the Catholic workers enlisted during the conflict and the most prominent victimized Catholic families had worked in Fultons and resided in Caledon before the war. Indeed, prior to the First World War, this sleepy village hardly appeared a likely setting for violent confrontation between capital and labor or, indeed, between Orange and Green.
Nevertheless, in 1919 this normally quiet part of rural Tyrone witnessed significant labor militancy. Firstly, a year of impressive and mostly successful local working-class struggles culminated in major confrontation in the Caledon Lockout.Footnote 10 The social peace that marked local labor relations during wartime apparently masked deep and accumulating resentment amongst workers.Footnote 11 The pent-up frustration seems to have exploded in the context of economic upturn by the war's end, while grievances both fed into and drew strength from a revolutionary mood that swept not only Ireland and Britain but much of postwar Europe. With equal measures of self-pity, envy, and class condescension, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) County Inspector (CI) for Tyrone, lamented that “the labouring class” had an “abundance of money. The people who are really suffering are the respectable middle class who have small fixed incomes derived from investments or who are in government employ.”Footnote 12 Caledon constituted the peak in a wave of local trade union militancy, though the leading role played by the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) marked it as distinctive.
As Emmett O'Connor has rightly pointed out, by the time ITGWU headquarters in Dublin “was ready to push northwards, British unions like the National Amalgamated Union of Labour (NAUL) and the WU (Workers’ Union) had already cornered the market.”Footnote 13 Nevertheless, the organizers for these British-based unions tended to emerge from a group shaped by James Connolly's anti-partitionism rather than William Walker's support for the union with Britain.Footnote 14 In terms of the NAUL, “the ITGWU saw it as having the same spirit and goals and frequently gave it friendly reports in the Voice of Labour,” while the provincial leaders of the WU were all closely associated with the Irish Trade Union Congress/Labour Party.Footnote 15 Indeed, John Hanna, the leading Belfast Labour Party member and future leader of expelled workers in Belfast, appeared on the ITGWU platform at Caledon.Footnote 16 Across rural Ulster, the WU and NAUL had secured a series of victories in 1918, but met considerable resistance in the spring of 1919.Footnote 17 The ITGWU's foray into Tyrone emerged in the context of growing resistance among employers to the demands of unskilled workers. Three leading Belfast socialists—Dawson Gordon, Robert (Bob) McClung, and Sam Kyle—were prominent in this campaign of union militancy, initially amongst textile workers in 1918, but spreading then to local manufacturing and by 1919 encompassing agricultural laborers.Footnote 18
The Caledon strike took place at a crucial juncture in Ulster politics, in the immediate aftermath of a general strike in Belfast, which involved “about 60,000 hands and [was] seriously affecting the citizens.”Footnote 19 The Tyrone CI remarked presciently that he had “no doubt that if the present strike in Belfast succeeds, strikes for a similar object will follow in this county.”Footnote 20 The national Orange leader (Grand Master) and local landlord James Stronge, who helped facilitate the defeat of the workers at Caledon admitted in early February that “no one has time to consider the Irish question being fully occupied with labour questions.”Footnote 21 Events in Belfast over the next two years significantly influenced labor relations in Caledon. In 1919, ninety thousand gained employment in the linen industry, with a figure of thirty thousand in ship-building, a ten thousand increase on the pre-war number.Footnote 22 Under such favorable conditions, trade union militancy flourished and within it a distinctly socialist political current. While strike activity and economic demands appeared general, socialism resonated most powerfully among the unskilled—particularly female textile workers, who voted consistently for the Belfast Labour Party (BLP).Footnote 23 The social reality for thousands of northern workers undermined a “myth” of Protestant prosperity and progress that “concealed many lags in social development; the exploited underclass of linen lasses, the marginalised Catholic workforce, or the subsistence waged labourers in agriculture, which remained the north's chief industry.”Footnote 24 In the 1918 General Election, the BLP secured an average of 22 percent of the vote in four predominantly Protestant constituencies in Belfast, and while their opposition to Carsonism “did not make them nationalists … it certainly made them anti-unionist.”Footnote 25
In response to the threat from independent labor the official Unionist leadership promoted the Ulster Unionist Labour Association (UULA), which would contribute to the defeat of the Caledon strike and spearhead the reactionary clampdown on labor that followed in Belfast. As early as October 1918, Dawson Bates, Ulster Unionist fixer and future Northern Minister of Home Affairs, wrote to Carson warning of the threat from independent labor.Footnote 26 At Carson's insistence four UULA members stood as official Unionist candidates in the khaki election.Footnote 27 This much-vaunted “new unionism” represented, in part, a response to the Representation of the People Act, which the South Tyrone Unionist MP William Coote described privately as “a most dangerous franchise bill.”Footnote 28 Carson, the UULA's first president, told members that “revolutions go on whether you like it or not. It is idle for anyone to suggest that the war has not brought about a great revolution.” The UULA would act as a bulwark against those “trying to set labour against capital and capital against labour.”Footnote 29
To understand the nature of the employer's response, it is necessary to examine the developing Unionist attitude to labor in the immediate aftermath of the Belfast general strike and the role of the UULA. In response to this threat, the Unionist leadership promoted the UULA, which derived “its origin in the brain of the greatest patriot and one of the greatest men this country ever saw—Lord Carson.”Footnote 30 The UULA sent delegates to the Ulster Unionist Council (UUC). The UUC represented the web-like network that crisscrossed Unionist Ulster ,and at its heart lay its secretary Richard Dawson Bates, the “master mechanic” of the political “machine” located in Belfast's Old Town Hall, who “had all the threads of a complex network of organisation in his hands” … “[Bates] always knew what was going on in out-of-the-way corners, and where to turn for the right man for any particular piece of work.”Footnote 31 James A. Turkington, vice-chairman of the UULA and secretary of the Ulster Workers’ Union (UWU) represented the “right man” in the Caledon case. The employer, Fulton, sought assistance through the Orange Order and Ulster Unionist Council (UUC). Turkington represented the UUC's cat's paw within the UULA and he sent the UWU, a yellow union employed to break working-class solidarity and provide scabs for unionist employers across rural Ulster, to successfully break the Caledon strike.Footnote 32
The Lockout
In his annual report for 1918, the CI Tyrone labelled the Caledon dispute a “Sinn Féin” strike.Footnote 33 The following year, he reported that the employer defeated the six-week dispute after a “strenuous fight.”Footnote 34 However, the Sinn Féin label “tended to reveal almost as much about the writer as about the subject.”Footnote 35 The strike actually emerged from advice given to the workers by the prominent socialist republican Peadar O'Donnell, who had recently led the successful campaign of the Monaghan Asylum “soviet.” Indeed, success there represented “the deciding factor” in the local community “opting for the ITGWU” over the more established WU.Footnote 36
By the time O'Donnell left Liberty Hall as the provincial ITGWU organizer in October 1918, the NAUL or WU had already organized thousands of rural unskilled workers. Undaunted, O'Donnell “blazed a trail of glory clean across Ulster” and, by February 1919, had been involved in forty-eight wage movements and three strikes.Footnote 37 In Monaghan, the strikers constituted the “first of many groups of workers to self-consciously adopt the name of ‘soviet’ during their strike.” O'Donnell intervened there after employers reneged on a pay rise won in March 1918. Having seized the asylum, barricaded all entrances, and elected O'Donnell governor, a hundred workers hoisted the red flag in defiance of the police deployed to surround the asylum.Footnote 38
The strike succeeded in reducing the workweek from ninety-three to fifty-six hours, permitting married workers to reside at home and securing pay parity for women. The ITGWU—with O'Donnell at its head—supplanted the WU in Monaghan town, and the WU secretary and membership joined the ITGWU. Impressed with these results, local Orangeman Willie Hare encouraged O'Donnell to intervene in a wage dispute at Caledon Mill.Footnote 39 The 1911 census records Hare's father, Robert (a woolen cloth finisher), living on the main street.Footnote 40 O'Donnell's ability to attract workers rested on successful activism. The demand for organization did not emerge from outside agitators or union officials but from local workers themselves. Central organizers—whether BLP socialists through the WU or republican socialists like O'Donnell in the ITGWU—reaped a bountiful harvest across Ulster, where thousands of workers sensed the opportunity for genuine advancement, rupturing the thin veneer of rural class harmony.
Many years later, O'Donnell reflected on the strike as a great mistake because of the vociferous response by the unionist establishment and the workers’ eventual defeat. Indeed, his introduction to the village did not augur well, for in the enthusiasm at his arrival, a throng of workers knocked O'Donnell unconscious as he disembarked from the Clogher Valley Railway. While he came to his senses in the Charlemont Arms Hotel, Armagh, O'Donnell reluctantly agreed to return to Caledon: under the same tree that Wesley had preached on three occasions in the eighteenth century, O'Donnell proselytized in the cause of socialism. The class distinctions in the village gave grounds for initial optimism:
There was a tree with a big veranda of cement around it. (They couldn't take a hall) … There were men in that town that sold tea and bread and butter and sugar and tobacco, flour and whiskey, and men who sold cloth, who all lived on a fairly decent level. There were other fellows who only had their sweat to sell, and they did not seem to sell it as well as the others. They were the ones that I wanted to organise and make demands on. When I felt I had a good grip of my audience, I said “I'm going to tell you a good one. I'm the man you knocked the devil out of last night!” … Then I stepped down from the tree, somebody produced a table and a couple of chairs, and we began taking down names[.] We formed a big branch of the Transport Union.Footnote 41
O'Donnell addressed the meeting on January 14 at the big tree, the proceedings illuminated only by bicycle lamps.Footnote 42 The CI reported that two hundred members joined the ITGWU in the days following this meeting, adding that the “workmen believe and apparently on good grounds that they can get any terms they demand by going on strike and naturally they do so.”Footnote 43 The local ITGWU secretary, James McMenemy, described the low pay “until the Union was being felt, when an increase of 14s was given. The winders then also got an increase of 6d in every shilling earned, and the weavers received about 3s increase, the former's average wage prior to that being about 16s to 18s and the latter's, including war bonuses, about 25s a week.”Footnote 44 Similarly, management moved the starting time from half past six to eight o'clock in the morning “without demand.” “The organiser's work of showing the benefits of the union … thus made easy,” the workers “did not thank the employers for the better terms then, they thanked the union,” which the workers “looked upon as deliverers of the people.”Footnote 45 To this point, the workers had nearly doubled their pay without strike action, but the employer appeared intent on breaking the union.
Management then dismissed two Catholic brothers—prominent union men—the Goans, allegedly “to make room for two discharged soldiers who had fought in the war.”Footnote 46 The Voice of Labour claimed that Fulton had “scrapped union live wires and … dared the organiser to make the other men follow him.”Footnote 47 On 20 February, O'Donnell held “an open air meeting”Footnote 48 in which he “put the matter before them from the workers’ point of view”: after foremen had used “threats of dismissal” to persuade workmen to desert the ITGWU, O'Donnell urged the workers to “demand that all … in the mill be compelled to join the union [or] refuse to work with non-union members.”Footnote 49
The following day, workers struck and picketed the mill, which generated “frequent clashes with the police and scabs” in which O'Donnell was “twice the victim of beatings.”Footnote 50 The RIC did not discriminate with their batons, the Voice of Labour reported: “whether its owners be orange, green or tri-colour, a skull must be cracked if it impede the capitalists’ progress.” Despite the repression, “prospects” appeared “bright for a clean win through by the strikers.”Footnote 51 The unionist Belfast N ewsletter recorded how extra police billeted the town to guard non-striking workers:
During the past few weeks several open air meetings have been addressed by officials of the union, and feelings have been much embittered amongst the employees. Matters reached a climax at breakfast hour on Friday, when about one hundred and fifty of the hands ceased work. The mills continued to work with about fifty hands, and on Friday evening the attitude … towards these became so hostile that a number of police, under District-Inspector Bain, Aughnacloy, were drafted into the town to preserve order and protect the employees who remained at work. The strikers paraded the town on Friday and Saturday nights, headed by a band and torchlights.Footnote 52
After the RIC openly sided with the employer, “O'Donnell enrolled a citizen police force to protect his pickets, and then astonished the mill owner by hiring the Orange band for his demonstration.”Footnote 53 The RIC inaccurately reported that, by the first week of March “about 220 [sic. This represented the total staff, fifty-three of whom remained at work] workers in the Woollen Mill there went out while about 60 remained,” while DI Bain “and 60 additional men are there on duty and their presence is still required.” Fulton then shut the mill—the Caledon Lockout had begun.Footnote 54
The following week, “the local band greeted Peadar O'Donnell with a red flag emblazoned, ‘Up the Transport!’ Besides leading the strike of 156 textile operatives, O'Donnell figures in incidental roles such as fire-fighting captain, chief of police etc. Workers of all political hues stand solidly together. Orange and Green will carry the day.”Footnote 55 O'Donnell recounted how he “paraded the streets of that town, Caledon, for six weeks.” Authorities soon learned, to their consternation,
that we had the lambeg drum on our side. We had a man called Willy Harlock [sic. Hurlock], and I remember him making a speech. He said, “I am an Orangeman, and I'm a Black Man” (We cheered him like a parish priest), “and an Apprentice Boy from Derry!” (and that was almost as good as a vision). I [O’Donnell] paraded behind the Union Jack to the tune of the Boyne Water and Derry's Walls. Gradually the Union Jacks gave way and the red flags took their place.Footnote 56
The contemporary record suggests that O'Donnell mobilized genuine enthusiasm for the strike, and that working-class Orangemen clearly identified with the cause:
In South Tyrone, in a town where the majority of workers are Protestant, we have a mighty Red Flag procession—“No Surrender” emblazoned on one side of the flag, “Up the Irish Transport” on the other. The flag that thus can unite our Irish workers is the flag we want … and don't let the hoisting of it in strikes be left so much to me.Footnote 57
The torchlight processions of Caledon made the Dublin press.Footnote 58 Nevertheless, news of the strike would also soon echo in the palace at Westminster, marking the signal for an Orange counter-attack. O'Donnell retrospectively recounted that after “the Ulster Unionist [Labour] Association got the big drums and the full forces of reaction out against me … [q]uite a number of the workers seceded from the Union.”Footnote 59
Loyalist backlash
In Westminster on St. Patrick's Day, the local South Tyrone Unionist MP William Coote portrayed the Caledon strike as an attempt to oust Protestant workers. Ironically, Coote employed an exclusively Protestant workforce at his own woolen mill at Lisdoart, twelve miles west of Caledon.Footnote 60 He asked Ian Macpherson (the British Government's Chief Secretary of Ireland, January 1919–April 1920) about how the ITGWU, “a Sinn Fein organisation” recruited “the majority of workers … who are of the same political faith,” who then commenced “to beat with hurleys and sticks and otherwise abuse the fifty-three workers who remained.” Shockingly, Coote asserted, the police refused to intervene when “women workers were beaten” and “local shopkeepers … threatened if they should supply food to these fifty-three workers.” The Chief Secretary replied that strikers did not have “hurleys”; the strike resulted from the dismissal of union members and the approach to shopkeepers had involved no intimidation.Footnote 61
Coincidently, the following day, after four weeks and with 130 workers still on strike, Fulton introduced Ulster Workers’ Union “blacklegs” and began readmitting strikers on a sectarian basis.Footnote 62 This initiative was directed by UULA vice-chairman James Turkington, who in 1920 would be denounced as the “emancipator of the Caledon blacklegs” when he had the “audacity” to stand as a Labour candidate in the municipal elections.Footnote 63 Denis Houston of the WU told the Belfast Trades Council that the UULA under Turkington had organized blacklegs, and that “the names of men desiring employment at the mill must first be submitted to the local Orange Lodge before the men got work.”Footnote 64 The UULA repudiated Houston's allegation, concluding “that they have no connection, either direct or indirect, with any trade union or labour organisation,”Footnote 65 but the claim appears unsustainable. Turkington operated as Bates’ man within the UULA and the distinction drawn between the UULA and UWU held little water considering the two organizations parallel leadership and membership and joint involvement in Belfast's mass expulsions in the summer of 1920.Footnote 66
O'Donnell detailed UWU tactics in the Voice of Labour: “fibs for the Ministry of Labour, free beer for the scabs, and five pounds for each striker who reneges on the Union, are amongst the dope handed out by the mill management, but with as little success as previously had the bobbie's batons.”Footnote 67 Nevertheless, by early April, the CI reported that while “the strike at Caledon Mills continue[d]” there were “signs that it is approaching an end.”Footnote 68 Indeed, by the end of the month, the ITGWU issued “an urgent appeal … to weigh in with red gold … for Caledon's strikers dependants,” ominously concluding that “The need is urgent —that should be enough!”Footnote 69 By the first week of May, the ITGWU called off the strike and attempted to paint a more positive version of events than the reality suggested
The strike at the woollen mills has come to an end after ten weeks of heroic struggle. The spirit of the workers is beyond all praise. The employers’ utmost efforts to employ prejudice and religious bigotry against the Union were unsuccessful. Proprietor Fulton would not even discuss the issue with the “Papish” organisers, so the workers have sought and secured work elsewhere, leaving Fulton with his damaged trade and an incomplete staff to re-build it. The best of his operatives have refused to work for Fulton at any price.Footnote 70
Coote, after having consistently alleged Catholic mistreatment of Protestants in the local press, gloated at the strikers’ defeat. When O'Donnell challenged Coote's allegation, pointing out that “the local secretary of this union was an Orangeman,” the South Tyrone MP provided an enlightening explanation immediately in the wake of the strike's collapse.
This fact does not disprove my statement, but quite the contrary. I said “Sinn Fein was attempting through Ulster, by rear-guard subtle action, to do what it could not do by frontal attack viz, destroy Protestant industries and drive out Protestant workers from Ulster.” If in this enterprise they can detach a Protestant, or, better still, an Orangemen to their side, they are delighted. They use him for the time as a decoy, and they at once make him an official, to do their dirty work and then leave him as they left our Orange friend at Caledon, and as they left, after an eight weeks fight in which all the most abominable and savage practices were performed, their own Roman Catholic co-religionists, to starve in the streets or clear out, having withdrawn all funds for their support… . May I also put right a sentence in my speech which, as reported, seemed to imply that the management of Caledon mills did not keep the places for returned soldiers which they held prior to enlistment for them on return. This is somewhat misleading—they not only kept these places, but are offering positions to other demobilised men.Footnote 71
At the same time, the Orange Order under Grand Master Sir James Stronge of Tynan ostracized striking members. A meeting of the three local lodges “stoutly repudiate[d] having any connection with the said Irish Transport Union … nor have we at any time or in any way, supported, either by our sympathy, or by subscriptions from our funds, those amongst the strikers who are, or have been, members of the Loyal Institution.”Footnote 72 From the perspective of the ITGWU, the imposition of yellow unionism and the Orange drum loomed large:
The mill still continues to work. Those who refused to go on strike, those who left the strikers and returned to work, and those who went in as “scab” workers, have formed a “union” among themselves—a branch of the Ulster Workers’ Union—and taken into their hands the power of employing workers in the mill. It is said that a vote is taken on each applicant in the Orange Lodge. Some Protestant families have applied for re-admission to work and been admitted; other who remained on strike all through the trouble prefer to leave the town and the country rather than abandon their Catholic fellow strikers. Some Catholics have applied, but have not been admitted, so that the only Catholic remaining in the mill is one who clung to the firm all through the strike.Footnote 73
That summer Fulton organized a social in the village for returning ex-servicemen: “Caledon's double celebration: Overthrow of the Hun and Irish Bolshevists.” He thanked “the local people who had come forward to take the place of the strikers [and] the outside sympathisers who gave their moral support.”Footnote 74 Fulton acknowledged the key role played by the local Ulster Unionist MP, the Orange Order, and the UWU. Indeed, this yellow union repeated the Caledon tactics in “linen centres like Banbridge and Lurgan, where it seemed to have aimed at stopping the recruitment of unorganised workers, not only to the ITGWU but to the British-based general unions like the NAUL and WU.”Footnote 75
The Caledon controversy continued throughout May, when the ITGWU took both the Devlinite Irish News and the Unionist Belfast Telegraph to task for claiming that they “betrayed the Caledon workers.”Footnote 76 It also challenged Coote for his manipulation of the strike in the East Antrim by-election on May 28, 1919, in which he repeated that the ITGWU “drove Protestant non-union workers out of Caledon mills, and displaced them by Papishes from Dublin and Donegal.” After calling Coote out as a “liar,” the Voice of Labour pointed to exemplary class consciousness and solidarity amongst Protestant workers in particular: the “best and most militant trade unionists in Caledon were amongst the Orangemen,” the Voice observed, and “a master of an Orange Lodge presided” at ITGWU meetings.Footnote 77 Coote attacked independent Unionist George Boyle Hanna, asking
Who were the fellows behind the Hannanites? (A Voice: Sinn Feiners!) Well they would not see any Sinn Feiners about him if they came to South Tyrone[.] The Sinn Feiners were coming down to Ulster in ones and twos and threes and burrowing in among the Protestants [to] cause discontent and strikes … having done that they would soon see that every man who wore an Orange sash had to leave the country as part of the English garrison.Footnote 78
While the victory of an independent Unionist in the East Antrim by-election hardly constituted a fatal blow to Unionist hegemony, the East Antrim Unionist Association claimed that defeat resulted from “a combination between the Roman Catholics and extreme members of the Labour Party together with a considerable number of relatively moderate Protestants.”Footnote 79 At the same time, Bates warned that the “Labour question is becoming acute in Belfast and the North of Ireland … there is a general desire to kick against all authority and all discipline all over the three kingdoms, and this found vent in the East Antrim Election. We have got to face this sooner or later.”Footnote 80
Caledon served as an early precedent for the sectarian tendency that found full expression in the Belfast mass expulsions of 1920. That September, Fred Crawford, UVF gunrunner and James Craig's paramilitary linkman, wrote in his diary that John Fulton had showed him a letter addressed to the mill manager threatening him with death. Crawford recounted how
The manager is going to take it to the R.C. Curate and tell him that if he is shot every R.C. in the village of Caledon … will be shot, and that the first man will be the Curate himself, who is the leader of the Sinn Feiners in the district.
Crawford then repeated the false assertion that Catholics filled Protestant servicemen's jobs during the war, and that the Catholics, under the priest's direction enacted a boycott on the Protestant foremen and struck against them. At this point, Fulton closed the mill:
As soon as there was enough Protestants to run any department of it they opened that department, but none of the strikers were taken back. When the Parish Priest saw that the game was up he came whining for lenient treatment. He was told that he had come too late. So long as he thought there was a fair chance of persecuting a Protestant out of the village he said nothing, but now when he saw his parishioners leaving and going to Scotland or elsewhere (naturally it was hitting him very hard) he came to ask for these men to be taken back again. If he had come when the strike began and told his people that their claims were unjust and unreasonable, and had insisted on them going back to their work, then at some lenient treatment or concession, but he did not do so. This was put plainly to him, and when asked why he did not take that course, which he could have done—his people would have taken his advice, or, to put it more correctly, his commands—and pressed on the point he had nothing to say.Footnote 81
The priest in question, Fr. Booth of Aughnacloy, unsuccessfully petitioned the management for the return of Catholic workers after the strike's defeat but played no part in proceedings before this.Footnote 82 In his own private account, Crawford conflated trade unionists and Sinn Féiners. Similarly, the claim that Catholics stole ex-servicemen's jobs and then intended to expel unionists from the village mirrored Coote's base attempts to sow division at the time of the strike. Interestingly, these very same ingredients—labor as Sinn Féin subterfuge; Catholics coveting the jobs of returning servicemen; and apocalyptic warnings about the expulsion of Protestants—all featured prominently in the counter-revolution in Belfast the following year.
The claim that Catholics stole Protestant servicemen's jobs deserves further attention, because it justified subsequent loyalist actions across Ulster and loomed large in the subsequent Belfast expulsions. Indeed, the wholly sectarian Ulster Ex-servicemen's Association (UESA) played a vital role in loyalist direct action. Nowadays, great store is placed on the commemoration of Irish Catholics’ and Protestants’ shared sacrifice in the First World War. The reality of the postwar experience indicates that only loyalist enlistment counted. The Ulster example mirrored the experience of the European far Right, particularly in fascist Italy, where “these Rambos of their time” represented “natural recruits for the radical Right.”Footnote 83 In the context of opposition to an emergent working-class consciousness, these war veterans were “irretrievably lost to organised socialism and ill-disposed towards the commonplaces of the traditional parties.”Footnote 84 A similar outlook prevailed among Belfast's loyalist pogromists, who would join the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) en masse in the autumn and winter of 1920.
The fact is that at Caledon—as in much of industrial Belfast—the size of the workforce had increased significantly during wartime to meet insatiable demand for war material.Footnote 85 After the strike's defeat, the ITGWU papers described how the “Fulton-Stronge clique” dominated “this sacred spot of injustice and sweating” for those who profited from “miles of cloth and thousands of blankets.”Footnote 86 An analysis of the 1911 census identified 164 woolen mill workers in the Caledon District Electoral Division: seventy-two Catholics, twenty Presbyterians, three Methodists from the same family, and sixty-seven Anglicans. Although comprising a minority of the workforce, Catholics constituted the largest individual denomination in the mill. Within the village proper, 136 people worked in the mill, including fifty Catholics. Catholics did not steal Protestant jobs; they had always worked in the mill, which hired additional hands having “obtained khaki orders.”Footnote 87
Coote's attempt to correct his earlier comments from May indicate that the issue of ex-servicemen's jobs operated as camouflage for sectarian expulsion. Indeed, the Catholic Goan brothers—expelled for supporting the ITGWU—had both served in the military, while a third brother, James, died in September 1918 of wounds received while serving in 2nd Battalion Inniskilling Fusiliers.Footnote 88 While economic necessity dictated that many Protestant workers returned to the new regime in Fulton's, there were others—“Orangemen also, who because of their loyalty to their class and the Transport Union were forced to leave the country.”Footnote 89 One aged Protestant worker reportedly claimed that she would “rather lick limewash off the walls and live on it than go back to work for Fulton.”Footnote 90 O'Donnell claimed that forty-seven Protestant workers took the train and went across to Yorkshire; later, while being held as an anti-Treaty IRA prisoner in Curragh Camp, he received “greeting[s] from a group that met in a public house in Yorkshire of these people that went off.”Footnote 91
At the beginning of June 1919, the RIC clearly identified a rump of around sixty strikers who were allegedly “loafing about Caledon in idleness.” Their “temper towards the mill” was reported to be “most dangerous,” with the result that “a police guard has had to be maintained on it night and day.”Footnote 92 At this point, Fulton again intervened and expelled strikers and their families from houses rented from the company. The Watchword of Labour reported on the “dirty game” in which Fulton evicted “some of his strongest opponents.” “Failing to drive them out of the country as the others were driven has led to even dirtier tricks,” all part of “the modern machinery used in the crushing of human beings who had dared to seek their rights.”Footnote 93
These included seventy-year-old Catholic Margaret Downey, whose son and son-in-law fought in the war, and who lived five doors up Mill Street from her sixty-year-old Protestant neighbor Ellen McMenemy, the mother of James the ITGWU secretary. Bernard Harvey, a Catholic member of the ITGWU, lived on the same street and all are recorded in the 1911 census.Footnote 94 They took and won a case against Fulton for unfair eviction.Footnote 95 Nevertheless, three families who had lived and worked in the mill before the war suffered eviction in retaliation for their links to the union. Indeed, the Land Valuation Books for Mill Street indicate new tenants occupying the majority of Mill Street in the years after the strike.Footnote 96 The case of the McMenemy's in particular made a rubbish of Unionist accounts of the strike, for James’ brother Thomas, who described conditions in the mill as “scandalous,” was a decorated soldier who had served two-and-half-years in France and suffered gas attack
Here was a Protestant who served in the war with such distinction that he won the Military Medal and because he objected to work for 6s a week he is evicted, together with his mother. One does not wonder that McMenamy [sic.] should tell the court he was sorry he threw himself in the way of some of the Germans getting over.Footnote 97
The Caledon example suggests that the bourgeoisie, in concert with political Unionism (South Tyrone MP William Coote owned his own woolen mill), employed the UWU as a weapon to fracture working-class solidarity. This rested on economic coercion and blatant lies. The issue of servicemen's jobs furnished the loyalist backlash with ideological camouflage, but held little or no basis in fact. Indeed, the ex-servicemen who operated as scabs displaced their former comrades from employment at the behest of a local employer and Unionist establishment intent on smashing the trade union and pan-sectarian unity in one fell swoop. Rather than lions led by donkeys, donkeys led by liars might represent a better description. Furthermore, loyalist direct action in Belfast the following year aped this very modus operandi. Ironically, this counter-revolution would then further pollute the social atmosphere in Caledon, leading to the subsequent expulsion of Catholics from the village.
Counter-revolution and the Orange State
By 1922, the implications of the expulsion of ten thousand Catholics and rotten Prods from Belfast's industries and the pogromists’ formation into the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) spilled onto Caledon's well-kept streets, where only three years earlier Catholic and Protestant workers had marched in solidarity under a red flag to the beat of a Lambeg drum.Footnote 98 In the period between the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the outbreak of the southern civil war, loyalist violence laid the foundations of the discriminatory Orange State.
While Michael Collins negotiated his first pact with James Craig at the end of January 1922, he simultaneously acquiesced to a joint IRA northern offensive if it failed.Footnote 99 On February 8, 1922, less than a week after the pact broke down, the pro-Treaty IRA, crossing from the south, kidnapped over forty unionists in Tyrone and Fermanagh to act as hostages against the campaign of sectarian assassination directed against Belfast's Catholics.Footnote 100 On January 30, Eoin O'Duffy, now Free State Chief of Staff, told Collins that he had “arranged the kidnapping of one hundred prominent Orangemen.” Alluding to local pressure over partition, he explained that “there are 54 affiliated [Sinn Féin] clubs in Co Monaghan,” which, if the necessary action were taken, should translate into “108 votes … for the Treaty.”Footnote 101 Events took a further twist after the shooting of A Specials in Clones on February 11, which provoked an “inevitable sequel” in Belfast, where “twenty-four persons, including six children” were killed and seventy wounded.Footnote 102 Two days later, two Special Constables from Caledon encountered heavy machine gun fire near the Monaghan border.Footnote 103 The Monaghan IRA continued to snipe into Tyrone until June 1922. These incidents caused the death of Robert Scott, a Protestant civilian, and provoked the clearance of nationalist families from Caledon.Footnote 104
On the day of the kidnappings, John Fulton wrote to Dawson Bates on the “possibly there will be serious reprisals in” Caledon and “district tonight, as, naturally, our people cannot, and will not, put up with actions of this kind from the other side … have extra police drafted into this town without further delay, as those in responsible positions here cannot guarantee that the peace will be kept.”Footnote 105 The setting-up of the border commission (a three-way liaison between British, Free State, and Unionist forces) appeared to temporarily dampen loyalist ardor. Nevertheless, by March, continued sniping at a border bridge and incidents in the loyalist village of Glasslough, Co. Monaghan provoked a severe reaction.
On March 10, 1922, the Irish Independent reported that even “Col. Bates of the Northern Commission, [admitted] that the Unionist population were not being interfered within the Free State and that the Irish Army had actually protected them.”Footnote 106 Nevertheless, James McKenna of the Free State Army remembered “the pleasure it gave me to take over the police station” and Orange Hall in “a Protestant stronghold” like Glasslough as a barracks for twenty soldiers.Footnote 107 McKenna's men also allegedly harassed local UVF members and sniped at USC attempting to dismantle Ballagh Bridge. On March 12, two “northern sympathisers” from Glasslough fired into the house of Mr. [Henry] McGuire [sic. Maguire] of Tynan, “probably [in] reprisal for certain treatment by IRA Police.”Footnote 108 Two days later, in Caledon village, a bomb seriously injured three young Catholic men “standing at a street corner after leaving Chapel.”Footnote 109 The next day, B Specials shot a prominent local IRA volunteer, John Garvey, and his friend, Patrick McPhillips, as they returned home to Benburb.Footnote 110
However, events further escalated on March 18, when armed B Specials forcibly evicted five Catholic families from their homes in Caledon: “At 5 p.m. lorries filled with armed men arrived, placed pickets outside, and proceeded to load the furniture onto the lorries. All five families are identified with Sinn Féin in some way and their eviction is thought to be a reprisal for the eviction of five Protestant families from their houses in Glasslough.” Without a hint of irony, the RUC claimed that “if proceedings were instituted at present it would have the effect of increasing party bitterness.”Footnote 111 The border commission's British representative reported that “in order to provide accommodation in Caledon for these refugees” from Glasslough, “the civilian population there have compulsorily evicted … southern sympathisers.”Footnote 112 The RUC IG Charles Wickham identified Johnston and Elliott from Glasslough as two prominent southern “refugees,” who used Free State soldiers attendance at mass on 19 March as cover for their “escape.” Wickham claimed that Caledon unionist were
prepared to be reasonable and to do nothing to embarrass the Government but they point out that the firing has been from the Free State side until it became intolerable and that the evictions of Unionists and the seizure of the Orange Hall at Glasslough, which practically is a Unionist village, are direct acts of provocation on the part of Sinn Féiners. They demand that action be taken to protect their co-religionists in Co. Monaghan or else that such treatment as is given to them should be given to the S.F. sympathisers on their side of the Border.Footnote 113
In fact, on March 27, the British border commissioner revealed that “Elliot and Johnston who originally stated that they were evicted from Glasslough … now state they left Glasslough voluntarily through fear of remaining there.”Footnote 114 These men attacked Maguire's on March 12. In May, Free State troops arrested Elliot at his job in Glasslough, the northern border commission noting that they “appear to have good cause,” as Elliot was “the leader of a gang which caused considerable trouble in Caledon about two months ago, in connection with the attempted eviction of Roman Catholic families.”Footnote 115 This did not represent the opinion of nationalist partisans, but rather that of British army officers stationed in the area at the time.
Their arrival in Caledon, with falsified rumors, sparked the clearance of numerous Catholic families. Some clearly represented Sinn Féin sympathizers and in one a case an IRA volunteer, James Doran.Footnote 116 On March 29, loyalists forcibly evicted James McGrann, “a Sinn Féin sympathiser.”Footnote 117 However, Patrick Campbell also received a letter to “get out, signed Red Hand of Ulster,” although the RUC admitted that “he is not an IRA man.” On the same date, an armed gang visited Joseph Kerr's home in Benburb, inquired for his sons and left, firing a number of shots.Footnote 118
On March 27, the Unionist border commission reported that B men fired into the South, noting that “some of them are hot headed and determined to take the law into their own hands. In the opinion of the commission the leadership of the ‘B’ Class Special Constabulary in Caledon has got into the wrong hands.”Footnote 119 On March 22, John Fulton wrote to Bates that “a great number of the residents in Caledon district … have approached me, with a view to requesting the Northern Parliament to take immediate steps to put an end to the state of terrorism prevailing at present. A number of loyalist farmers are unable to get on with the putting in of their crop, and attending to their daily duties, owing to the intense fire, which is kept up on them as soon as they appear anywhere in the open.” Fulton then provided the normal provison that “unless something is done without further delay, a very serious state of affairs may arise, as the people cannot stand this long, and will not be responsible for their actions to local Sinn Feiners or Roman Catholics. I assure you we, who are responsible, are using our best endeavour to have the peace kept, but things have got now to almost breaking point … they may blaze up at any moment.”Footnote 120 In fact, intense loyalist violence had gripped Caledon for the previous fortnight, while even the Ulster Special Constabulary Commandant J. K. McClintock admitted that the “only place where Unionists can't work is Ballagh Bridge.”Footnote 121 Dr. Con Ward of the southern border commission confirmed that the sniping would cease “provided the Northern Authorities would guarantee not to demolish the bridge.”Footnote 122
At the beginning of April, “a ‘B’ Special in Caledon whose name cannot be obtained,” expelled the Catholic station master at Tynan. On April 4, loyalists “fired” a number of “nationalist houses” while they also “set on fire” the home of Henry Sherry, who was “forced to leave for the Free State some time ago.”Footnote 123 On April 18, B Specials killed Frank Riley of Rahoney, “when returning with others from cockfight at Glasslough Co Monaghan.”
Although the driver, Patrick Maguire, had links to Sinn Féin, the other two passengers William Moore and William Irvine were Protestant laborers.Footnote 124 Wickham told the Ministry of Home Affairs that it “is most important that Mr Fulton and other leading residents in the Clogher Valley should use their influence to restrain the B men from premature or inadvised [sic] action.”Footnote 125 As a result, the Earl of Caledon held a conciliation meeting in the village to encourage restraint.Footnote 126 This apparently fits Bew's thesis that a liberal unionist leadership became prisoners to their grassroots’ extremism.Footnote 127 Nevertheless, the example of Caledon's most “responsible” citizen, John Fulton, presents a somewhat different picture, for rather than a prisoner to recalcitrant loyalists, he unleashed animosity to secure his own interests. Indeed, his authority and position relied on sectarianism.
Conclusion
The examination of revolution and counter-revolution in Caledon arguably sheds light on events in Ulster as a whole. Patterson has argued, in the case of Belfast, “that the local bourgeoisie were happy to see trade unions weakened and the left attacked is quite probable, but this had occurred because of developments over which they had little or no influence.”Footnote 128 The Caledon Lockout fundamentally undermines this conclusion.
In effect, Patterson argues that “Orangeism did function both as an integrative mechanism and as a source of conflict.”Footnote 129 The fundamental question here is: Where did the weight of emphasis lie? No serious observer disputes the presence of a reactionary Orange ideology within sections of the Protestant working class, but this study contests the dominant consensus around the immutability of sectarian antagonism in Ulster. To clarify, an autonomous plebeian Orange ideology clearly existed, which was not simply whipped up by the Unionist establishment. Nevertheless, for a brief period, the majority of working people in a small Tyrone village, many of them Orangemen, embraced an egalitarian ideology and many maintained solidarity with their class despite economic and physical coercion. Orange ideology did not operate on some intangible level of the superstructure, it required material sustenance and depended on determined agency. Its triumph in Caledon relied on its deliberate manipulation by the employer in the first instance and its consolidation operated against the foundation of a discriminatory statelet, whose birth pangs reverberated to the beat of Lambeg drums.Footnote 130
An analysis of the ideology propounded by Coote in South Tyrone or by the UULA representatives in Belfast and across Ulster points to a fusion of inherent concepts of Protestant supremacy linked to the colonial past fused with wider derived imperial racist ideology—a current already identified in Edwardian Unionism in Tyrone.Footnote 131 Similarly, the notion that the Unionist leadership espoused a liberal, democratic and secular ideology bears little or no relation to reality.Footnote 132 In the same year workers struck in Caledon, Edward Carson praised the exploits of General Dyer in Amritsar. The liberalism of British imperialists essentially excluded what George Orwell described as “unpeople” or those “unfit to enter history.”Footnote 133 Well into the nineteenth and, indeed, early twentieth-centuries, for many among the metropolitan elite, Irish Catholics ranked with other subject nations—those sullen peoples, half-devil, half-child. During the home rule crisis, for instance, Lord Milner and Walter Long formed the Ulster Union Defence League to rescue “the white settler colony of Ulster from submersion in a sea of inferior Celts.”Footnote 134 Irish Catholics could not enjoy liberty as they occupied a “profane space.” The most challenging aspect of lower-class Protestant involvement in trade unionism, as became apparent in Caledon, revolved around working-class Orangemen's willingness to open the “sacred space” of freedom to their Catholic neighbors.Footnote 135 The Unionist leadership employed a violent supremacist ideology to breach this gap.
In addition to a localized strain of British imperialism, Ulster unionism appeared “authoritarian and hostile to liberal political institutions,” while it “tended to favour the military and foster the police, or other bodies of men capable of exercising physical coercion.”Footnote 136 In 1924, England and Wales had one police officer for 699 people, Scotland one for 751, while, under Unionist rule, the ratio sat at one for every 160 inhabitants.Footnote 137 In fact, the establishment of a paramilitary police force served to consolidate the Orange economy and the temporary, and eventually permanent, suppression of British civil liberties under the 1922 Special Powers Act constituted perhaps the defining peculiarity of the one-party Unionist administration.
On the last day of May 1922. Lloyd George claimed that Mussolini's Fascisti served as an “exact analogy” for the Ulster Specials that the initial attack and brunt of subsequent violence involved the “murder of member of the [Catholic] minority,” while Britain had armed 48,000 Protestants. In June 1922, the British civil servant, Stephen Tallents, arrived in Ulster to enquire into outrages against northern nationalists. The erstwhile leader of the Tyrone UVF, Ambroise Ricardo, admitted that the full-time “A” Specials “contained a large leaven of a bad type” had serious problems with “drink and consequent indiscipline” and represented a “distinctly partisan force.” The part-time “B” Specials were “drawn from the Protestant section of the population and mainly from the more extreme side.” In Catholic areas, Ricardo claimed commandants approached the leading nationalist with a list with “his name at the top and he is told that if any ‘B’ man is touched the list will be attended from the top.” Ricardo then stated that the “N. Govt. is a very strict party machine which is influenced at the present time entirely by Belfast views of extreme type,” concluding that “the 26 counties [govt.] are not the only one that would benefit by a return to the Union and to impartial govt by the Imperial Govt.”Footnote 138
In spite of his contemptible opinion of Bates, Tallents whitewashed the Unionist regime. The British government would fully resource the USC for a subsequent two years to the tune of over £6 million, a period of little or no violence in the North.Footnote 139 Ricardo hinted that the Specials partially solved the problem of chronic unemployment: “every man in N.I. who has lost his job or who is at a loose end has endeavoured to get into the “A”s and in many cases has succeeded.”Footnote 140 Ricardo also reported that “today the feeling against the Specials … is more bitter than against the Black & Tans—with this great difference—on the removal of the Black & Tans one side of the contending parties was removed.” In Tyrone, many killers had known their victims since childhood, establishing what Ricardo termed “a group of personal blood feuds which will last for generations to come.”Footnote 141
Recent intelligent analysis has argued that the Unionist government operated “a moral economy of loyalty” wherein Catholics and trade unionists became “liable to political discrimination, while those loyal were to be rewarded through patronage.”Footnote 142 Certainly, Craig himself claimed the Stormont government's main function was “to distribute the bones.”Footnote 143 Indeed, a torrent of correspondence petitioning financial favors poured into the prime minister's office from provincial loyalists. For instance, in 1925, Albert McClelland of Caledon, who was “out of work and unable to secure employment,” but also a B Special, petitioned Craig for compensation as part of the disbandment of the A Specials due to his “great service” during the “time of trouble on the border” since he was “as entitled to compensation as any of the men about to be disbanded” and that he was “willing to accept whatever your ministry of home affairs would think sufficient.”Footnote 144 Yet, a far more straight-forward approach would be to locate the Orange State within the contemporaneous British extreme right.
The payoff for preferential treatment in employment, whether a position in the “As,” a job in a linen mill or a local government post was that working-class Protestantism was “stripped of” its “progressive elements.”Footnote 145 Yet, the Unionist establishment and bourgeoisie constituted the net beneficiaries of the new loyalist economic order. Belfast went from the most militant center of trade union activity in Ireland in 1919 to the quietest by 1922.Footnote 146
Certainly, the evidence suggests that the Unionist elite deliberately manipulated a form of reactionary Orange populism, akin to contemporary authoritarian and fascist trends in postwar Europe and Britain, in order to subvert far more progressive, and developing, currents amongst working-class Protestants, which employed the liberal aspects of Orange ideology in a universal fashion to include non-Protestants. Indeed, this Faustian bargain formed the very basis of the new Orange State, but cui bono? The argument that militant Orange populism somehow held a liberal Unionist elite to ransom does not hold water. The agency of the Unionist political elite, backed by the British state and the emergence of socially conservative Catholic Free State far better explains the subsequent withering of working-class solidarity than abstract and reified theories about the autonomy of plebeian loyalism.
In 1919, Catholic and Protestant neighbors, who had lived and worked together since well before the war, marched in solidarity for better pay and conditions and the fulfilment of war-time promises many had paid for through service or the death of family members. By 1922, the same village witnessed bombing, shooting, killing, and the premeditated expulsion of Catholic families. This metamorphosis did not mysteriously materialize but rather relied on the considered agency of political Unionism, which willfully employed “the modern machinery used in the crushing of human beings who had dared to seek their rights.”Footnote 147 As the centenary of Northern Ireland approaches, a challenge to the historiographical consensus on state formation and the nature of Ulster Unionism appears overdue. The Caledon example demonstrates that the majority of workers eschewed sectarianism, strove for social change, and challenged the dominant discourse of two immutably hostile communities. Finally, the bourgeoisie smashed this initiative through the auspices of political unionism and rather than an exception to the rule, Caledon resembles a case study in a more general process that underpinned the creation of an Orange economy and state.
