There are in the pages that follow reflections of the views of such opposite parties whose sympathies are represented by the motto, ‘Help to win the war’, and those whose doctrine is ‘Ireland above all’. These views are only reflected indirectly, and so far as they have some personal interest for ‘Belvederians’. We feel confident that our readers, in consideration of the common ground on which they stand as school-fellows, will try to realise the standpoint of their adversaries, and sympathise with the feeling which dictated its expression.Footnote 1
Irish secondary schools, such as the Jesuit Belvedere College for boys in Dublin, faced multifaceted expectations and pressures during the final phase of the First World War. The conflict sat within twentieth-century Ireland's most transformative decade, with the years between 1913 and 1923 having witnessed ‘a polarisation and realignment of national and political identities that has lasted to the present’.Footnote 2 The country's constitutional relationship with Britain was constantly re-evaluated by multiple interested parties who had different goals throughout the period. Transnational tensions compounded more local ones between (Ulster) unionists, constitutional nationalists and separatist radicals. As the conflict progressed, war weariness became an increasingly common phenomenon, generally being associated with depleted civilian and/or military morale. It encapsulated a plethora of emotional reactions ranging from frustration with current circumstances to ‘doubt [regarding] the likelihood of victory’.Footnote 3 By 1917, Irish school magazine editors were well aware that support for hostilities was by no means guaranteed, with conflicting views increasingly evident within their own institutions.
Historians, most notably John Horne, have explored official attempts to ‘remobilise’ popular support for the war through a mixture of coercive and suggestive measures such as punishment and propaganda in states across the globe.Footnote 4 Ireland has attracted some attention from scholars such as Catriona Pennell, reflecting a flurry of historiographical activity, that started in the late 1980s, on the First World War.Footnote 5 Yet, despite the fact that soldiers and civilians alike have been studied in a number of works, a comprehensive history of Ireland's relationship to the war has not yet been achieved.Footnote 6 While David Fitzpatrick sought to redress partially ‘the absence of systematic, statistical analysis of the social and economic impact of the war in Ireland’ in his 2015 article, remarkably little is known about how different sectors within Irish society navigated this development.Footnote 7 The late-war period is particularly under-explored, with broad assumptions regarding the scope and scale of support for hostilities during 1917 and 1918 not yet fully tested. Irish historians often contend that Catholic nationalist feeling turned against the British state and its military pursuits, especially following the 1918 conscription crisis.Footnote 8 At the same time, however, there is evidence of concurrent volunteer work and fundraising activity for war-related causes within Catholic circles.Footnote 9 People within the same demographic groups appear to have held divergent views amongst themselves, which aligns with recent assertions that there was no ‘hegemony of experience’ for Irish women during the First World War.Footnote 10 There was also no uniform experience of ‘war weariness’; while this has been distinguished from overt anti-war sentiment, the former could be ‘radicalised’ by politicised minorities such as pacifists and labour activists.Footnote 11
Focused investigations of individual demographic and experiential sectors within late-war Ireland are thus needed to decode the intricate relationship between war-related acquiescence and revolt. This article concentrates on elite Catholic and Protestant boys’ secondary colleges, illuminating the role they played in reinvigorating and/or undercutting pro-war feeling within their own communities. While educational establishments throughout the world became ‘distribution point[s] par excellence’ for messages intended to integrate youth into national processes of cultural and economic mobilisation, prestigious boys’ schools were seen as particularly important.Footnote 12 Much has been made of the contributions made by British public schools to the war effort. These institutions had a ‘self-declared responsibility for producing national leaders’, inculcating imperial and patriotic loyalties while also providing the training deemed necessary to teach boys how to command others.Footnote 13 As Peter Parker and others have argued, this was a ‘hidden curriculum’ with a distinctly martial nature, and was a direct cause of the production of volunteers and officers in large numbers.Footnote 14 Similar historiographical claims have been made about elite colleges in Canada, southern Africa, Ireland and the Antipodes, all of which had been influenced by the nineteenth-century ‘imperial diffusion’ of public school ethos and associated teaching practices.Footnote 15 As recognised by Martin Crotty, the value awarded to athleticism and militarism ultimately had devastating consequences for First World War Australia, having shaped masculine ideals at a national level.Footnote 16
Recent investigations, however, have questioned the degree to which even the most patriotic schools orientated themselves to the war. Joachim Scholz and Kathrin Berdelmann argued for a ‘quotidianisation’ in German schools prior to their late-war collapse from deprivation. While at first schools advocated war-positive content and introduced new teaching methods, this was short-lived; after 1914 schools quickly returned to their ‘typical pedagogical mode’.Footnote 17 Student reactions proved similarly nuanced, with one overview analysis pointing towards ‘the progressive emergence of signs of lassitude, indifference and even rejection of the conflict’ amongst children more generally.Footnote 18 Sarah Glassford recently emphasised the sheer scale of unpaid labour associated with organisations such as the Canadian Red Cross, observing that the ‘top-down’ implementation of branches at Saskatchewan schools in 1918 meant that child members may have been told to join up just as much as they volunteered.Footnote 19 Visibly compliant behaviour could actually be subversive; some German children assisted with agricultural activities and collection drives but then stole products for themselves and/or the black market.Footnote 20
The following research elucidates the conflict-related interpretations circulated within renowned Irish boys’ colleges in 1917 and 1918, considering the extent to which changing views on the war effort and service in Britain's military forces reflected unique institutional positions and circumstances. While secondary schooling more generally was a select activity – only 6 per cent of the Irish school-going population attended secondary or ‘superior’ schools in 1911 – gradations existed within the system.Footnote 21 C. S. Andrews observed links between class status and the type of school Irish Catholic children frequented during the early twentieth century, noting that boys from ‘Castle Catholic’ families were either sent overseas or educated at Clongowes Wood College, and that those from the Catholic ‘middle class’ went to Belvedere, the Holy Ghost St Mary's College and the Catholic University School.Footnote 22 Boarding schools were understandably more expensive than their day equivalents; in 1918, fees at Mungret College totalled 50 guineas each year, whereas tuition at Belvedere was 12 guineas per annum for boys over the age of twelve.Footnote 23 Protestant education was also subject to stratification, with St Columba's College identified as the only ‘recognizably elite’ secondary school for boys. Up to three times as many Protestants as Catholics went overseas to be educated in the nineteenth century, resulting in the comparative underdevelopment of elite Irish Protestant schooling.Footnote 24 That said, additional local options did exist – largely in the north-east of Ireland – that were deemed ‘suitable in respect of their buildings, character, and traditions, for supplying education of the First Grade to pupils desiring it’.Footnote 25 Campbell College was one such school, charging 60 guineas for boarders and 15 guineas for day boys per annum in 1916.Footnote 26
This article focuses on eleven institutions generally viewed as more prestigious than most of their contemporaries and that also produced comparable source material in the form of school magazines during the period under investigation: Belvedere College (Catholic, Jesuit); Castleknock College (Catholic, Vincentian); Clongowes Wood College (Catholic, Jesuit); Mungret College (Catholic, Jesuit); Campbell College (Protestant); Coleraine Academical Institution (Protestant); Foyle College (Protestant, Church of Ireland); Royal Belfast Academical Institution (Protestant, strong Presbyterian ties); Royal School Armagh (Protestant, Church of Ireland); St Columba's College (Protestant, Church of Ireland); and The High School, Dublin (Protestant, Church of Ireland). These establishments ‘imitated the trends and mores’ of English counterparts, drawing on core elements of the public school system such as a classical curriculum, compulsory team sports, prefect systems and cadet corps.Footnote 27 Uniforms, colours, and mottos were used to establish unique institutional identities. Imperial pursuits were encouraged by Catholic and Protestant teachers alike, building on longstanding Gaelic and settler military traditions.Footnote 28 While Campbell was the only Irish school represented on the 1914 Headmasters’ Conference List, many others, including Clongowes, considered themselves ‘public schools’.Footnote 29
Elite institutional aspirations and commonalities, however, did not arise from straightforward mimicry nor a wish to align with overseas standards. Irish Protestant schools drew on the public school model for their own reasons. Cork Grammar School, for example, increasingly did so to defend against wider threats to southern Irish Protestant economic privileges and standing in the years leading up to the First World War.Footnote 30 Unionist institutions further north also sought to provide students with the education necessary to achieve successful careers in both Ireland and the wider British Empire; boys at Campbell were ‘prepared for the Universities, Woolwich, Sandhurst, Indian Police, etc., as well as for Professional, and Business life’.Footnote 31 Work on elite Catholic education likewise stresses the import of local agendas and concerns, most notably the desire to consolidate a growing Catholic middle class and produce leaders who would ultimately govern a home rule Ireland.Footnote 32 Juxtaposing late-war experiences within Protestant unionist and Catholic constitutional nationalist schools brings regionalised religious and political identities to the fore, testing their significance as determinants of late-war behaviour.
College magazines have been scrutinised alongside newspaper coverage of formal school events to provide greater insight into the range of discursive responses that characterised elite establishments. Containing a mixture of staff and pupil contributions, school periodicals were often edited by older boys, albeit within highly supervised environments. Teacher control over magazine content and structure varied between establishments, tending to be tighter at Catholic schools where senior staff members acted as editors themselves. Despite their selective and gatekept nature, these collective sources not only capture authorial stances on key contemporary events but also provide unrivalled detail about day-to-day activities within renowned establishments; boys worked, learned, debated, played and ate in these all-encompassing environments. As Jeff Dann rightly recognised in his own work on elite periodicals, ‘it would seem highly unlikely that the magazines would portray life in a way that varied too widely from the experiences, interests and beliefs of the majority of the magazines’ primary target audience, the past and present pupils of the school and their parents’.Footnote 33 Drawing on these documents, this article assesses civilian reactions to the ongoing war effort, food shortages and the 1918 conscription crisis within specific institutional communities. In so doing, it pursues deeper understandings of the interplay between conflict, educational socialisation, and politicisation in revolutionary Ireland.
I
Although often considered a ‘totalising’ event due to the sheer volume of resources and commitment it required, historians have cautioned against identifying the First World War as such. Belligerents may have exhibited ‘a number of significant tendencies toward total warfare’, but a fully-actualised state of total war was never achieved.Footnote 34 Large-scale contributions required popular consensus, with states forced to take civilian perceptions of ‘acceptable’ levels of sacrifice into account to maintain government stability. In a definitive piece on ‘total war’ and ‘mobilisation’, Horne convincingly argued that these interrelated concepts were best understood on a spectrum. Mobilisation – representing imaginative and structural engagement with the war effort within a society – constituted a key element within ‘total war’, which itself was a process rather than a result.Footnote 35 Many European societies favoured national involvement by the end of 1914 and Ireland partook in this wider tendency towards ‘self-mobilisation’, characterised by popular engagement with localised ‘war cultures’ or sets of representations which invested the conflict with meaning and motivated countries to keep fighting.Footnote 36 Internally-driven public participation proved crucial, with Jay Winter having identified how the power of top-down propaganda resided in ‘its synergistic relationship with opinion from below’.Footnote 37
Early mobilisation aside, civilian populations responded to the war on very different terms during its final years. Scholars have attributed late-war increases in ‘war weariness’ to several factors, namely rising death tolls without discernible movement towards victory, industrial mobilisation, and difficulty balancing military and civilian needs.Footnote 38 These disruptive elements affected most combatant countries, although some to a greater extent than others. Nation states had to convince their populations that the war was worth fighting until the very end, giving rise to concomitant ‘remobilisation’ efforts. Propaganda and repressive measures proved useful tools, although the latter could undercut state legitimacy in the process. Ultimately, ‘public opinion mattered more, not less, in the last half of the war’.Footnote 39
The social history of late-war Ireland is still at a nascent stage, although it is clear that cumulative pressures were felt there too. Between 27,000 and 35,000 Irish soldiers were killed during hostilities out of a total population of 4.4 million.Footnote 40 This proportion of loss was lower than that for the United Kingdom as a whole, being about 7 for every 1,000 people as opposed to 16 per 1,000.Footnote 41 Even relatively few losses, however, could have wider social import, especially when the scale of death itself had no precedent in modern memory; Ireland's death toll from the Second Anglo-Boer War had amounted to just over 1,800 men.Footnote 42 Personal bereavement often resulted in profound disillusionment. The fact that several Irish families pursued further information about how loved ones died and where they were laid to rest suggests that not all were satisfied with generic consolatory messages addressing their loss.Footnote 43 Family finances were also affected, albeit in an uneven manner that varied by geographic location, employment type and class.Footnote 44
The exact interplay between political affiliation and war sentiment merits greater scrutiny. Recent work by Fionnuala Walsh and Niamh Gallagher has found that anti-conscription agitation stood alongside continued Catholic involvement in war charities such as the Red Cross;Footnote 45 it appears that Irish communities did not necessarily turn against the conflict in all its guises. Officials also sought to manage local difficulties arising from an imperial effort, such as increased separatist discontent. Horne, in an endnote in his piece on the British and French home fronts between 1917 and 1918, suggested that Ireland was ‘a case apart’; whereas both states generally did not increase their use of repressive practices beyond that required to address industrial and pacifist unrest, Britain's efforts to carry out Irish conscription constituted ‘the exception which proves the rule’.Footnote 46 This brief reference aside, coercive interventions into late-war Ireland have rarely been considered via the lens of ‘remobilisation’. As such, questions remain concerning their precise impact on civilian views of the conflict itself.
Prestigious Catholic and Protestant colleges may well have helped determine popular opinion at this time. The success of remobilisation efforts elsewhere, after all, rested upon the voluntary support of regional elites ‘down to a very local level’.Footnote 47 A ‘vigorous propaganda campaign’ had operated in Ireland following the establishment of the Irish Recruiting Council in April 1918, comprising posters, leaflets, visiting speakers and a ‘cinemotor’ tour backed by the National War Aims Committee (N.W.A.C.), which itself had been launched in London in August 1917. While recognising other motivators such as skills acquisition and the threat of conscription, Pennell has tied this campaign to increased recruiting rates between August and November 1918.Footnote 48 Other organisations also sought to reinvigorate the home front. In 1918 the Irish War Aims Committee was created, though David Monger has argued that it was a ‘much less elaborate organisation’ than its English and Welsh counterparts.Footnote 49 Clongowes, St Columba's and others of that ilk seem likely advocates of state attempts to contain war-weariness and dissent, being closely tied to the ‘Establishment’ through their main objective – the production of future leaders of Ireland. The following discussion illuminates the role played by elite Irish schools in facilitating broader support for ongoing contributions to the war effort, comparing institutional positions with those adopted earlier in the conflict.
II
The First World War prompted a universally strong reaction among elite Irish educators from the outset. At Coleraine Academical Institution's (C.A.I.) annual prizegiving in early September 1914, Principal T. J. Houston chose to speak ‘on a subject which comes closer to our hearts than any other – the mighty contest that is now raging over the greater part of Europe, and the bearing of that contest on our own and all other schools’.Footnote 50 Staff editors of Catholic periodicals also construed the conflict as an event that ‘has influenced us all’ due to the number of people involved.Footnote 51 The first wartime issue of Castleknock's College Chronicle created a special section on ‘Pastmen and the war’ to recognise those participating in ‘the great struggle’.Footnote 52 The Clongownian and The Belvederian followed suit, publishing further articles on a range of war topics deemed of interest to their own communities.Footnote 53
Institutional engagement reflected the war's immediate impact on Irish society. As recognised by contemporaries and historians, Britain's declaration of war against Germany helped to prevent the outbreak of a civil war in Ireland between nationalists and unionists. The Government of Ireland Act 1914 may have reached the statute books that September, but its implementation was deferred ‘for the duration’.Footnote 54 At first, Irish participation in the British war effort was supported by both political camps. Unionist ideology and an ‘imperial’ war effort were easily linked, while nationalist support was stoked via sympathy for the plight of small (Catholic) nations like Belgium.Footnote 55 The conflict also had serious implications for elite school communities more specifically. Old boys enlisted en masse with combatant alumni regularly dwarfing current school populations, even at larger institutes. Campbell, for example, had 155 students enrolled in 1914, whereas 594 former students ultimately served overseas. Equivalent numbers for Clongowes were 268 and 604 respectively.Footnote 56
Common interests aside, school discourses nevertheless diverged in ways one might not necessarily expect. Heavy war coverage in elite Catholic magazines seems to suggest that these colleges were especially dedicated to the conflict, with scholars arguing elsewhere that this support was given ‘in expectation of self-government after the successful defence of the Empire’.Footnote 57 Hundreds of old boys from Castleknock volunteered for the forces following John Redmond's decision to back Irish involvement in the war.Footnote 58 Jesuit schools such as Clongowes and Belvedere were similarly ‘imbued with the Home Rule tradition’, contributing ‘a goodly share’ of men whose names were recorded ‘in the rolls of honour published in the school annuals’.Footnote 59 Yet, while elite Catholic schools did produce a great many constitutional nationalists willing to serve overseas, the exact reasons alumni enlisted, or even why the conflict was significant, were rarely elaborated on in their periodicals. Published commentary on the war was particularly restricted at Mungret, a state of affairs likely driven by Rev. Edward Cahill – rector between 1913 and 1916 – who apparently held views ‘closer to Sinn Féin than to the Irish Party’.Footnote 60 This event received only the most cursory of mentions in staff contributions to the school's magazine, such as to explain teacher absences and low attendance numbers at the school reunion.Footnote 61 Military activities and deaths of former students were part of the ‘Our past’ and ‘Obituary’ sections, but they were not differentiated as a separate category.
Elite Catholic journals were also silent on other matters, giving very little voice to the anti-German or pro-Belgian narrative propagated by many of those who sympathised with ‘little Catholic Belgium’.Footnote 62 While Germany's invasion of Belgium was criticised, particularly in accounts reflecting on the ‘grim reality’ behind atrocity stories, it was not used to justify Irish military involvement or ‘war effort’ activity.Footnote 63 Such discursive omissions appear odd considering hierarchal support given to those displaced by war; the Jesuit provincial – Fr. T. V. Nolan S.J. – was a member of the voluntary Belgian Refugees Committee (Ireland), and several major secondary institutions taught Belgian boys free of charge, including Clongowes, Belvedere and Mungret.Footnote 64 Indeed, this tangible assistance was glossed over in school magazines, with publicised volunteer work continuing to be directed towards charities for the poor rather than patriotic collections.Footnote 65
Protestant colleges, by contrast, nailed their colours to the mast. Staff and older boys sanctified British intervention in the conflict and roundly condemned the Central Powers. Students at Royal Belfast Academical Institution (R.B.A.I.), for example, were told that his majesty's forces were doing ‘the great task of defending the honour and the interests of their country and in the liberation of Europe from the threatened tyranny of naked force’.Footnote 66 Wartime discourses were underpinned by a long-standing commitment to the United Kingdom and shared ‘British’ identity in southern and Ulster unionist circles alike. Proclamations of loyalty to the British crown proved incessant with headmasters, school authorities, and student editors all pointing to the vast number of alumni who enlisted as evidence of their allegiance; in ‘serving their King and country … the sons of the High School had proved true to their training’ and shown that ‘the courage and vitality of the Empire was as fresh and virile as ever’.Footnote 67 By infusing themselves within an imperial war narrative, Protestant schools interpreted Irish support for Britain's declaration of war as being entirely self-evident.
Current Protestant students were also encouraged to back Britain in her martial endeavours. Money usually spent on academic prizes was donated to projects such as the Public Schools’ Base Hospital, while proceeds from sports events went to the Prince of Wales's National Relief Fund.Footnote 68 Voluntary efforts were particularly applauded, with Headmaster Robert Dill commending boys from Foyle and C.A.I. ‘for their effort on behalf of the Relief Fund, and the spirit which had prompted the sacrifice’ at their 1914 inter-schools swimming races.Footnote 69 These activities stood alongside the increased militarisation of physical education. Headmaster R. A. MacFarland acknowledged that the main purpose of establishing an Officer Training Corps (O.T.C.) at Campbell in 1909 was ‘not to train the boys for war, of which there was at that time no immediate prospect’. Nevertheless, while MacFarland and others may have originally valued drill exercises and cadet groups more for their ability to teach ‘discipline, obedience, and the art of ruling’ than military skills, these perceptions changed by late 1914.Footnote 70 More overt preparation for future careers in the armed forces was now deemed necessary, with R.B.A.I. and Foyle both establishing cadet corps to assist ‘the Government of the country’ by the end of the year.Footnote 71
Elite Protestant schools continued to take pride in their ‘indissoluble attachment to the Empire’, but saw the need for remobilisation efforts in the war's later years.Footnote 72 An article, ‘The war and schoolboys’, likely written by an adult, was included in The Erasmian in October 1917. Students were exhorted to keep caring about the war because ‘England’ and her allies ‘feel that morality, justice, truth, law, civilisation – all the fundamental things in life – are threatened by German arms’.Footnote 73 This submission mirrored British N.W.A.C. themes to a substantial extent; Monger has identified a key message of civilian duty contextualised by ideas of ‘adversarial patriotism’ (notions of the enemy), ‘supranational patriotism’ (positively-construed similarities and differences with British allies), ‘proprietorial patriotism’ (core ‘British’ values), and ‘aspirational patriotism’ (post-war outcomes).Footnote 74 Considering its publication date and Irish-centric content, the piece in The Erasmian was unlikely to have been a N.W.A.C. product.Footnote 75 However, these commonalities hint that Irish Protestant teachers shared wider concerns about declining civilian morale and how to address this.
In addition to reiterating and extrapolating pro-British war narratives, Protestant establishments sought to ensure that the state had sufficient resources to win the war. New fundraising activities joined those already established, with boys starting a War Savings Committee at The High School, Dublin in early 1918. Students who withheld ‘their weekly mites’ were chastised by their peers and told to ‘begin [contributing] at once’.Footnote 76 Protestant military training intensified further, with St Columba's rearranging its schedule to provide additional O.T.C. work on Wednesdays.Footnote 77 Rev. W. Blackburn provided insight into this decision in a June 1917 address. After conscription was introduced in Britain, British O.T.C.s became incorporated into a mandatory system of national service while ‘Irish schools possessing O.T.C.'s technically stood on the old footing’.Footnote 78 Instead of accepting this ‘unworthy privilege’ and thus a comparatively-diminished role, Irish Protestant schools preferred to stand alongside their loyal ‘English and Scotch’ counterparts.Footnote 79
Teaching religious took a different stance, approaching late-war developments rather unenthusiastically. While Catholic magazine editors like Rev. Thomas Ryan – responsible for this article's opening quote – were aware of a broader movement advocating continued support to ‘Help to win the war’, they refused to endorse it themselves.Footnote 80 Remobilisation messages do not feature at all in late-war volumes of The Clongownian, The Belvederian, the College Chronicle, or the Mungret Annual. War-oriented activities likewise received short shrift. While Castleknock had started a Cadet Corps with 120 students in September 1914 and Clongowes requested permission from the British government to form a junior O.T.C. in late 1915, these initiatives lasted until 1916 at most.Footnote 81 Having received minimal editorial attention with no mention made about how these cadet groups could possibly contribute to future wartime roles, it seems likely that their brief existence reflected institutional awareness of increased career opportunities for students as opposed to also indicating loyalist or pro-war sentiment. O.T.C.s, after all, had constituted the ‘principal route’ to a temporary commission until February 1916 when massive demand required large numbers to be commissioned from the ranks.Footnote 82 Such an interpretation is substantiated by the fact that serving in the British military became a less credible means of employment for alumni by the late war, with the College Chronicle relegating combatant information to the very end of its old boys section in 1918.Footnote 83
This muted – if not entirely silent – position on the war effort challenges recent assertions that most Irish Catholics backed the Allies until victory was achieved. According to Gallagher, support for an ‘international moral cause’ endured particularly among the middle classes.Footnote 84 Anti-German sentiment bolstered fundraising efforts, with Catholic women involved in war-relief work throughout hostilities.Footnote 85 Gallagher's argument holds some merit, and accords with Walsh's research on the importance of Irish women's contributions across the denominational divide.Footnote 86 However, there is no indication that elite Catholic boys’ schools explicitly supported these undertakings, consolidating a longer trend of relative disengagement from the war effort as compared to their Protestant counterparts.
Not all late-war developments, however, could be easily ignored, especially by younger members of school communities. Intensified German submarine attacks from 1917 strained supplies, contributing to a ‘food crisis’ in Britain during the winter of 1917-1918 wherein queuing and shortages became common.Footnote 87 Ireland faced similar challenges during this period, with poor urban families having the greatest difficulty sourcing basic foodstuffs due to price increases.Footnote 88 Elite pupils across the United Kingdom were shielded from significant deprivation due to their privileged social-economic positioning, but even limited material constraints could prove contentious. As well as violating individual food preferences, restricted availability of desirable items disrupted established practices like trading at the dinner table and sharing parcels from home with chosen friends. Boys often addressed reductions in the amount of bread, meat and sugar available at school in a humorous manner, but the sheer level of commentary on this development indicates that food had become something of an obsession. Diarists recorded the absence of goose on Michaelmas Day, the first appearance of brown bread in the refectory and special occasions when additional food was ‘allowed by the Food Controller’.Footnote 89
State interventions into food production and distribution processes also drew student attention. The Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland (D.A.T.I.) was in charge of managing food supplies in wartime Ireland and attained ever-increasing powers as hostilities progressed. Following the establishment of a Food Department backed by Defence of the Realm (DORA) regulations in 1916, the D.A.T.I. became responsible for implementing compulsory tillage requirements which were extended in 1917 and 1918. The Corn Production Act 1917 resulted in further regulations including minimum wage rates, guaranteed prices for wheat and oats, and export controls.Footnote 90 Teachers at national schools may have been loath to let their students help with farm work on urban allotments, but several elite headmasters had no such qualms. Boys at both Castleknock and Foyle were involved in potato planting and harvesting during this period.Footnote 91
Similar impacts aside, appraisements of food-related activities once again diverged with religious affiliation. Protestant boys like W. H. Thrift at Campbell asserted that they could help win the war by avoiding waste and exercising ‘the most rigid economy’.Footnote 92 E. A. Healy encouraged his peers at St Columba's to participate in a D.A.T.I. harvest assistance scheme circulated to ‘Irish public schools’ in April 1917. He deemed it ‘a splendid opportunity for those who are anxious to serve their country’, standing alongside other outlets for ‘patriotic zeal’ such as making medical splints for Voluntary Aid Detachment supply depots.Footnote 93 This characterisation of food conservation practices and agricultural endeavours as war work echoed state-backed propaganda efforts elsewhere. Children faced particular pressure in Canada where the very young were presented with pledge cards encouraging them to forgo sugar and adolescent boys were told to join the ‘Soldiers of the Soil’ programme established in 1917.Footnote 94
Catholic institutions viewed matters differently. There, agricultural activities were discussed with reference to wartime conditions but little attention was paid to military objectives or how increased outputs contributed to the war effort itself. Fr Stephen Brown, for instance, considered tillage regulations at length in 1917, telling boys at Clongowes that landowners’ ‘duty and their interest imperatively require them to subordinate every consideration to the necessity for providing food for the nation in the present crisis’.Footnote 95 While condoning these measures, however, Brown focused on the longer-term social and economic benefits of intensified agricultural production for Ireland and the United Kingdom.Footnote 96 Commentary on efforts to relieve labour shortages at Castleknock also evaded more international objectives; a 1918 image capturing boys working on the potato farm was captioned ‘National Defence. Everyone lends a hand’.Footnote 97
This distinction between ‘war work’ and ‘national defence’ reflected competing interpretive frameworks on the home front. David Fitzpatrick's work on County Clare showed that farmers ‘of all creeds’ resented government attempts to influence Ireland's agricultural industry in aid of British consumers.Footnote 98 Nevertheless, Fitzpatrick's research indicates that some Protestants still saw state interventions as justifiable because they assisted the higher cause of allied victory. This opinion was not universal. Food production and exports intersected with longstanding debates involving Irish agriculture and political autonomy. The Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (I.A.O.S.), which led the country's co-operative movement, backed some D.A.T.I. efforts to encourage ‘patriotic’ activity but this support was conditional.Footnote 99 Leaders Horace Plunkett and George Russell (Æ) resented the lack of recognition given to the I.A.O.S. by the D.A.T.I., and viewed increased government intervention with wariness.Footnote 100 Patrick Doyle has suggested that Sinn Féin drew upon Æ's co-operative vision of Irish self-sufficiency to provide an alternative economic model to that of the state, with Ben Novick arguing that advanced nationalists sought to capitalise upon fears of a ‘Second Famine’ for political gain.Footnote 101 Sinn Féin challenged apparent British mismanagement by creating its own food committee, campaigning against food exports from late 1917 and supporting local distribution efforts which had ‘patchy success’.Footnote 102 While school magazines evaded the overt criticism seen in revolutionist propaganda, a degree of synergy is evident. The extent to which advanced nationalist thought informed elite Catholic opinion appears to have only increased as conflict-related pressures mounted.
III
The most overt threat to Irish boys’ colleges was the possibility of forced enlistment. Ireland had originally been excluded from Britain's 1916 conscription bill due to political concerns, but by 1918 the empire's manpower shortage was severe enough to risk the repercussions; the German spring offensives began on 21 March 1918 and the British Expeditionary Force incurred 38,000 casualties on the first day alone.Footnote 103 Extending compulsory service throughout the United Kingdom would affect all men aged between 18 and 51 years, this upper limit having been raised from 41 years.Footnote 104 David Lloyd George attempted to mitigate the damage by linking provisions for Irish conscription to promises of home rule, encouraged by an ‘excessively naïve interpretation’ of the Irish Convention report received on 4 April.Footnote 105 This tactic was unsuccessful, with the introduction of the new military service bill five days later infuriating Irish nationalist M.P.s into walking out of the House of Commons. Broader public opinion was also outraged. While Ulster unionist Edward Carson did vote for conscription – considering it a separate issue from home ruleFootnote 106 – he warned parliament that unionists in Ireland would feel betrayed if home rule was enacted.Footnote 107
While there have been relatively few in-depth explorations of this event, the 1918 conscription crisis has nevertheless been identified as a key juncture which solidified support for Sinn Féin by ‘eliminating constitutional nationalism as a practical alternative’.Footnote 108 People from various political backgrounds came together to oppose the bill, unionists being one major exception. Nationalist leaders assembled at an anti-conscription conference on 18 April, resulting in a widely-disseminated pledge endorsed by the Catholic hierarchy.Footnote 109 The movement was supported by a general strike on 23 April, observed everywhere except for north-east Ulster.Footnote 110 Various connections have been made between perceptions of British authority, anti-war feeling and anti-conscription agitation. In his history of Castleknock College, James Murphy speculated that it was the conscription threat, not the Easter Rising, which decisively estranged the Catholic upper middle class from Britain. As evidence, Murphy highlighted reduced war-related references in the school's 1918 magazine.Footnote 111 The following analysis tests this intriguing suggestion, exploring the responses of school communities on a larger scale.
After ‘sinister rumours’ that Irishmen would be compelled to fight came to a head in 1918, Catholic pupils at Belvedere, Mungret and Castleknock made clear their opinion on the new military service bill;Footnote 112 on 11 April one boy wearing a ‘Death before Conscription!’ badge was cheered by his peers as a ‘Brave little man!’Footnote 113 The bill receiving royal assent on 18 April prompted widespread agitation. According to Hugh Garland and Charlie Horan, boys at Castleknock did their part in the ensuing crisis, noting that all signed the anti-conscription pledge ‘amidst great scenes of enthusiasm’ and that a collection for the National Defence Fund – for those who opposed military service – ‘realised a big sum’.Footnote 114 E. Hanrahan and R. Burke appended their own commentary on these activities with the line ‘Let England quake!’Footnote 115 A few weeks later, Kevin Barry wrote approvingly of Ireland's rejection of conscription in a school essay: ‘The Irish people did not begin to weep and wail, nor did they … get panicky and rush off in millions to the recruiting offices and join up. No. They just said “We wont [sic] have it.” and carried on.’Footnote 116
Staff members at two of the aforementioned establishments explicitly condoned this unrest. Castleknock's fundraising efforts followed a high mass of intercession on 21 April.Footnote 117 Boys at Mungret as well as Castleknock were ‘solemnly administered’ the anti-conscription pledge, which seems to have been taken by most, if not all, members of the school community.Footnote 118 In both cases, these activities were orchestrated by the college rector, mirroring broader Catholic responses.Footnote 119 The Irish hierarchy decreed masses of intercession to take place throughout the country, instructing clergy to advertise anti-conscription meetings and endorse financial collections outside of church gates.Footnote 120 Religious support, however, had limits. Jérôme aan de Wiel has posited that the Catholic church ‘embraced, almost to a man, the radicalisation of nationalism during the crisis’, but Pauric Travers has warned against viewing priests and the hierarchy as a ‘monolithic body’.Footnote 121 Reasons for rejecting conscription could be apolitical, including the fear that ‘chaos and disorder would result’ if the church did not intervene.Footnote 122
It is striking that these bastions of privilege – known for their conservative views and cautious positions on provocative mattersFootnote 123 – chose to support an illegal venture. Comparison can be made with rebellious activity elsewhere; teachers in German-occupied France, for example, were imprisoned for promoting acts of resistance, such as speaking in French and singing the Marseillaise.Footnote 124 Ireland did not have the same legal status as the Nord region, but advanced nationalists generally saw British control as illegitimate and the conscription crisis touched on similar anxieties about statehood articulated in more orthodox circles. Constitutional nationalists rejected the very premise of Lloyd George's decision, stating that an Irish parliament was the only entity that had the authority to conscript Irish men.Footnote 125
Travers's warning aside, staff political leanings most probably drove institutional endorsement of anti-conscription agitation. Although further biographical research is necessary, support for radical nationalist thought appears to have increased in elite Catholic educational circles after 1916. On 7 October 1917, for example, Castleknock exhibited a picture film of Thomas Ashe's funeral.Footnote 126 Ashe – a prominent survivor of the Easter Rising – had died after being forcibly fed while on hunger strike following a 1917 conviction under DORA.Footnote 127 Orchestrated as ‘a triumphant piece of separatist street theatre’, his funeral helped push conservative opinion into a more radical direction.Footnote 128 Although the Irish Parliamentary Party (I.P.P.) won three by-elections in 1918, Sinn Féin's popularity continued to grow at the expense of constitutional nationalism. This concurrent decline has been attributed to multiple factors, including the ultimate failure of Irish Convention negotiations which ‘stripped the [Irish Parliamentary] party of any credible strategy’.Footnote 129 A 1918 commemorative article for John Redmond published in The Clongownian was a reflection of broader uncertainty about the fate of home rule. While the death of this alumnus on 6 March received recognition, his career attracted little discussion: ‘we regard as beyond our ken the discussion of the wisdom of his political act … it is too soon to judge him now’.Footnote 130
Britain's response to the conscription crisis accelerated this trend further. The plan to implement mandatory military service was suspended but never fully abandoned, providing Sinn Féin with a steady cause through which to draw support.Footnote 131 The new lord lieutenant, Lord French, also began his administration in May with sweeping powers, including a cabinet-approved proclamation permitting the arrest of anyone suspected of ‘intriguing’.Footnote 132 The resulting German plot, in which more than seventy-three Sinn Féin members were interned for supposedly conspiring with Germany, ‘further bruised the government's fragile credibility’.Footnote 133 Coercive measures intensified in June and July – all organisations linked to Sinn Féin were banned, assemblies and processions became illegal, and special arrest laws were enforced for certain regions. Instead of destroying the movement, these measures propelled Sinn Féin ‘underground’ and expanded their influence.Footnote 134 As acknowledged by Patrick Maume, ‘In the last months of the war … constitutional politics seemed increasingly irrelevant’.Footnote 135
Gallagher was correct to seek clearer distinctions between anti-British, anti-conscription and anti-war attitudes during this period.Footnote 136 These stances, after all, were not entirely synonymous in Australia and Canada.Footnote 137 But sentiments could – and did – bleed into each other. As Ben Novick asserted, it was the conscription crisis and subsequent Sinn Féin electoral campaigns that allowed advanced nationalist propagandists to successfully ‘tie together’ anti-war feeling and opposition to Irish domestic policy.Footnote 138 Redmondite involvement in the 1918 conscription crisis was considered insufficient, with the I.P.P.'s prior support for hostilities used to condemn both the party and the war. Voting against Sinn Féin was seen as a vote for conscription and was thus considered ‘an act of murder’.Footnote 139 In circles where the war had only ever been publicly addressed in terms of military service – as opposed to a broader humanitarian war effort – feelings would have likely been even more intertwined.
Such blurring occurred in Catholic schools where the conflict itself became an inappropriate topic of conversation. Only Clongowes published war-specific articles in its magazine for the entire duration of hostilities;Footnote 140 by June 1918, Castleknock and Belvedere had adopted the exclusionary stance taken earlier by Mungret. Clongowes's exceptionalism was likely due to its ongoing position as Ireland's most elite – and perhaps conservative – Catholic secondary college. The school wished to acknowledge sacrifices made by well-known alumni such as Tom Kettle and John Redmond's brother, Major William Redmond, choosing to publish a book review praising works written by both men in mid-1918. This piece, however, still expressed resentment at current circumstances: ‘War has so terribly forced itself upon us during the past four years that we are prone to seek distraction from it, and few of us are inclined still more to plunge ourselves in it by undertaking any further reading beyond the daily paper.’Footnote 141 Staff attitudes had clearly moved to complete indifference at best, and outright antagonism at worst.
Ambivalent feelings extended to the armistice itself, though initial reactions are obscured by the fact that Catholic magazines were only published once a year, during the summer. Ceasefires also coincided with a global influenza pandemic, which closed schools at several points during late 1918 and early 1919.Footnote 142 Yet, once Irish colleges reopened properly, teaching religious often skimmed over the end of hostilities. The religious community at Castleknock stated that ‘All other events in the broken school-year of 1918–19 are forgotten in the presence of the great loss we sustained in the death of our beloved President, Father Meehan’.Footnote 143 Similar sentiments were apparent at Clongowes, where Rev. Stephen Brown noted that ‘The only outstanding incident of the year was the influenza pandemic last October’.Footnote 144 There is indeed truth to these statements – both institutions were seriously affected by the catastrophes described. However, political shifts also contribute an explanation for the war's comparative marginalisation. Republican sentiments had gained more ground, culminating in Sinn Féin's capture of seventy-three seats in the December 1918 general election.Footnote 145 Catholic schools now looked to a new future, one in which prior contributions to an imperial war effort would be given little attention. Perceptions that the war was quickly forgotten in Ireland have justifiably been challenged.Footnote 146 Nevertheless, it does seem that Catholic schools preferred to distance themselves from this event in its immediate aftermath.
Protestant colleges engaged with late-war military drives on different terms. In late November 1917, John Thompson – headmaster of The High School, Dublin – declared that his ‘School, like all Protestant Schools in Ireland, has taken its part in the war just as much as any English public school. Although there is no conscription here, it is for our boys hardly necessary. As they reach the age for service they are nearly all only too anxious to serve.’Footnote 147 Thompson's statement suggests that Protestant establishments would be relatively unperturbed by Irish conscription, and that this prospect may have even been viewed favourably in some quarters. Indeed, overt enthusiasm for conscription had been expressed in prior years at Ulster unionist strongholds. Henry Hirsch – headmaster of the Royal School Armagh – queried why conscription had not yet been implemented in his July 1915 prize-giving address. He argued that it would be a ‘blessing’ for the country, teaching men ‘that they owe some duty to their country, whether it is in danger or not, and that the word patriotism is not merely an empty word’.Footnote 148 Student debates held at both Foyle and Campbell in late 1916 also favoured extending compulsory service to Ireland.Footnote 149 While Protestant magazines published in both Dublin and Ulster contain little commentary on the 1918 conscription crisis itself, these positions seem to have held firm; there is no evidence indicating institutional agitation. The introduction of conscription appears to have been deemed acceptable rather than being seen as problematically ‘coercive’. This interpretation aligns with current understandings of the anti-conscription movement, including its predominantly Catholic nationalist nature.Footnote 150
Protestant institutions were still committed to the conflict, circulating well-established pro-war themes and expectations until the very end. R.B.A.I. boys were told that combatants ‘had fought and sacrificed themselves to ensure the continued existence of the British Empire’ at their annual prize-giving event on 1 November 1918, and students at The High School, Dublin were later praised for contributing almost £50 to the Red Cross appeal that same month.Footnote 151 This ongoing dedication to the war effort occurred elsewhere; Protestants in County Clare continued war activities until at least late summer in 1918. Fitzpatrick has commented that this behaviour appears almost unbelievable in light of wider changes including ‘mounting hostility towards the war effort, the Empire and the gentry themselves’.Footnote 152 Yet, while this support defied wider trends, such responses were logical given Protestant dislike of nationalist developments. A comical song printed in The Campbellian, likely penned by house master R. F. Davis, asserted that those who ‘sing, while all Europe is blazing / … And crave, with a faith most amazing / A Parliament run by Sinn Fein’ have ‘brains … in inverse proportion / To the volume of sound they make’.Footnote 153 Irish Protestants were cognisant that they faced potential crisis in the form of political separation from Britain. In such a case, they would need allies willing to back their position.
Assertions of loyalty continued to be expressed in the war's aftermath. Despite also being affected by the 1918 influenza pandemic, Protestant schools recognised the armistice where possible; St Columba's granted a half-holiday to its students even while Belvedere did not.Footnote 154 War memorial plans were also drawn up in Dublin and Ulster alike.Footnote 155 Students at C.A.I. were keen to ensure that their roll of honour was as complete as possible, proudly proclaiming that ‘In this war all the public schools have played a fine part, and Coleraine has been among the best’.Footnote 156 Protestant colleges throughout the country leveraged this event to orient themselves towards a particular vision. In February 1919, the Church of Ireland bishop of Meath told boys at The High School, Dublin that alumni who had died for king and country provided ‘a noble example to follow’, decrying Sinn Féin and its titular belief in ‘Ourselves alone’. Receiving cheers from the crowd, he asserted that ‘I do not think it is in the heart of the nation to follow such a low and contemptible motto. We cannot stand alone, and if proof of that were needed it would be found in the late war.’Footnote 157 Unfortunately for those institutions south of Ulster, such a future ultimately did not eventuate.
IV
This article challenges longstanding assumptions about elite schooling in the United Kingdom during the First World War. Shared ‘public school’ ethos and aspirations for alumni aside, prestigious boys’ colleges in Ireland adopted starkly different positions on the imperial war effort. Protestant establishments eschewed nationalist trends and the accompanying rise of anti-war sentiment. Having created a clear interpretive framework for the war almost as soon as it began, colleges in Ulster and Dublin reactivated these messages in the face of broader disengagement. They continued to revere men serving in the British forces, with additional military training encouraged at school in spite of – and perhaps even spurred on by – the prospect of local conscription. Headmasters and students clung to fundraising activities seen to support continued union with Britain, transforming school communities into centres of remobilisation in their own right. Catholic institutions, by contrast, chose to keep themselves at arm's length from the state. Despite an apparent rise in pro-war propaganda in Ireland more generally, discussions of the war disappeared from Catholic school publications by 1918. The government's preference for coercive, as opposed to persuasive, measures seems to have alienated key authorities, prompting some schools to turn against constitutional nationalism in favour of more extreme positions and to take illegal action by opposing conscription.
These deep divisions in Ireland's secondary school sector nuance understandings of the varied success that late-war remobilisation efforts had across Europe more broadly. While French primary school authorities contributed to the campaigns of the Union des grandes associations françaises contre la propagande ennemie outside the classroom, war content in actual school lessons tapered off from 1916.Footnote 158 Discrepancies also occurred within educational systems themselves; late-war mobilisation in Germany was more successful in secondary schools than in elementary ones.Footnote 159 The situation in Ireland provides new perspectives on these seemingly inconsistent patterns, confirming that institutional support for government-backed remobilisation measures was by no means guaranteed, even within more conservative circles.
Specific institutional affiliations furthermore help explain why the Irish home front experienced ‘both responses’ to late-war pressures identified in overseas contexts, these being intensified engagement and disengagement with the war effort.Footnote 160 Paul Corner and Giovanna Procacci have identified four variables which determined whether governments could survive the pressures associated with mass mobilisation. These included the existence of long-established institutions which retained authority that could continue to be imposed, a shared motivating purpose which mitigated dissent, extant social tensions not being overstrained by ‘governmental conduct of the war itself’, and the reception of benefits linked to winning the war.Footnote 161 In Italy, such conditions apparently did not exist, prompting its turn towards fascism.Footnote 162 Ireland underwent a revolution of sorts which ultimately resulted in independence, at least for part of the country. Yet the fact that post-war goals and outcomes differed across the island reflected significant internal variation during the war years themselves. While Protestant schools had a strong set of reasons fuelling their investment in the conflict, this was not the case for Catholic establishments. Underlying social divisions were strained through repressive government action, but opinion differed on whether the state invalidated its own legitimacy in the process. Lloyd George's announcement in November 1918 that home rule would be withheld ‘until the condition of Ireland makes it possible’ far from satisfied unionists or an ever-growing separatist movement.Footnote 163 Alternative visions of statehood effectively underpinned divergent reactions to the conflict in 1917 and 1918.
In addition to affirming the importance of political affiliation in determining civilian reactions to hostilities, this research casts new light on the relationship between education, dissent and revolution. Despite their reputation as Redmondite strongholds, elite Catholic schools did not devote themselves to the war effort. Initial mobilisation had been conditional at best, the war having only ever been construed as an ‘influential’ event which provided valuable military opportunities for alumni. The threat of conscription and growing resentment regarding Britain's treatment of Ireland made it impossible to reinvigorate support up to even this limited level – teaching religious were no longer interested in recognising an event aligned with a discredited political position. Senia Pašeta's excellent analysis of the Irish Catholic middle class argued that the ‘aspirations [of this group] were shattered by the revolutionary events of 1916–22’.Footnote 164 While this conclusion may still hold in some respects, prestigious Catholic colleges were perhaps more prepared for the transition from home rule to Free State politics than previously supposed.
Elite Protestant schools also responded to late-war developments as they best saw fit, contributing to a divergent strand of revolutionary Irish politics. Recent research by James McConnel has found that children of I.P.P. M.P.s elected to Westminster between 1910 and 1918 ‘re-oriented themselves relatively quickly, regrouped, and experienced considerable success under the new regime’, but this is unlikely to have been the case for those who anticipated, even banked on, a unionist post-war world.Footnote 165 Andrew Donson has dated the ‘political awakenings’ of a great many German youths who later became fascists to October and November 1918, arguing that these ‘Fervid nationalists’ were devastated by military defeat and the ensuing revolution.Footnote 166 Aligned as they were with the allied forces, Irish Protestant boys did not experience the same degree of disillusionment as their continental counterparts but neither were their hopes for the future entirely met. Jane McGaughey has explored some of the ideological and political ramifications of this mismatch between expectations and reality for the Ulster unionist community more generally, and Protestant unionist communities further south ultimately faced an even greater disjuncture.Footnote 167 This article's case studies clearly demonstrate that prestigious colleges across the denominational spectrum navigated external pressures on their own terms throughout the most contentious years of international hostilities. In all probability, these institutions – and the affiliations they cultivated – continued to shape Ireland's socio-political landscape well into the 1920s and beyond.
