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Articles
Rapscallions? What Churchill Actually Said and Thought about the Irish
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | December 9, 2021
- Category: Churchill and Europe Churchill Between the Wars Truths and Heresies
On cancelling Winston
Mary Ellen Synon is a feisty Irish journalist who doesn’t mind taking a contrarian’s position on popular orthodoxies. Writing to oppose the latest uproar over Winston Churchill, she first explains that she’s entitled to be offended by him: “If you think Churchill was heavy on Indians, Muslims and Africans, brace yourself for what he said about the Irish.” In a scrappy polemic, she alleges that he called them “savages, rascals and rapscallions.” But then she writes all that off as irrelevant:
I am an Irish patriot. Yet if you want to know what I think about all that, I think: “So what?”….I know what Churchill did besides being insulting about Muslims and the rest of us. If I put him in the scales of virtue against the German and Japanese war machines, Churchill wins, always, and in such an overwhelming way that I must forgive his earlier sins. I say that because the Irish still have a lot of sins that need forgiveness, so I am in no position to say Churchill must be cancelled.1
Earlier Synon articles labelled Ireland poverty-stricken and bureaucratic, its Romany travelers living “worse than beasts.” She also tackled the athletes at the Paralympics. Whew. When it comes to defending Churchill, I’m glad Ms. Synon is on our side.
Those “Irish” Rapscallions
An Irish professor colleague observes that Synon “has balance—not always an Irish asset.” Fair enough, but if you want balance, both sides of the scale need to be accurate. What interests us here is not the cancel-Churchill movement. What matters is that some Churchill defenders still manage to get so much about him wrong.
When Churchill spoke about rascals and rapscallions (“savages” isn’t there but he might have used it elsewhere), he was not talking about the Irish people. He was citing the Bolsheviks and the movements they were supporting, including the Sinn Fein campaign of murder and destruction.
As so often happens, his words are plucked from surrounding verbiage. I respectfully supply the complete passage, from 24 November 1921 when Churchill was asking why Lenin in Russia was bankrolling rebellions in Egypt, India and Ireland:
We will not allow ourselves to be pulled down and have our Empire disrupted by a malevolent and subversive force, the rascals and rapscallions of mankind who are now on the move against us. [Britain] was strong enough to break the Hindenburg Line, it will be strong enough to defend the main interests of the British people, to carry us through these stormy times into calmer and brighter days.2
“Human leopards”
Synon continues: “As Ireland struggled for its independence 100 years ago, Churchill told the Commons that allowing a nation across the Irish Sea to become a republic was akin to offering a country up to a miserable gang of human leopards in West Africa.”
Actually Churchill (1920) was opposing making all of Ireland a republic under Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army, which it has never been to this day:
Because a murder campaign has been started we cannot allow a starting point for attacking our safety on this island to be created on the other side of the St. George’s Channel, desert hopelessly to their fate the Protestants of Ulster, and withdraw in shame and failure from all responsibility for Ireland. We cannot adopt a policy of scuttling in regard to Ireland. It is absurd to suppose that we will escape from the Irish problem and Irish difficulties by mere flight. Those difficulties would pursue us in an aggravated form.
My study of British history convinces me that a surrender of that kind would never be accepted by the British people. If, in a moment of weakness or of exhaustion on the part of those to whom we should look for guidance, a British Parliament was found to agree to the setting up of an independent Republic in Ireland, I am certain that after a few years that independent Republic would be flattened out by open war, and that the British people would never rest till they had rid themselves of so fearful a danger. Surrender to a miserable gang of cowardly assassins like the human leopards of West Africa would undoubtedly be followed by a passionate repentance and a fearful atonement.3
Judge for yourself: whom did he mean by “human leopards”?
“Quit murdering and start talking”
All his life in civil disturbances, Churchill consistently favored negotiations over violence. Two weeks before his speech above, he made this clear in a letter to his pro-Irish cousin, Shane Leslie:
You asked me what advice I would give to the Sinn Feiners, and I replied, “Quit murdering and start arguing.” This is in no sense an offer of negotiation and could not be represented as such; but I am quite sure that the moment the murders cease the Irish question will enter upon a new phase, and I shall not be behindhand in doing my utmost to secure a good settlement. (Emphasis mine.)4
Could there be clearer evidence of prudent statesmanship?
It is true that Churchill too long supported the Black and Tans constabulary, as Synon writes: “They butchered at will, committing atrocities.” Here he was definitely wrong. He didn’t create the Black and Tans, but he stubbornly defended them. As historian Paul Addison wrote, he was “less than candid” in his defense of their murders of innocents: Too late, “Churchill swung round to the view that it would be better to pursue a policy of official reprisals in order to avoid ‘excesses.’”5
Addison adds something we should always bear in mind about Churchill: “his lifelong tendency to seek victory as the prelude to a magnanimous settlement with the defeated party…. He was quite prepared to go much further with concessions…but he was not prepared to make these concessions at a time when they would be claimed as a victory for the Sinn Feiners.”6
Perhaps the cancel movement should turn to Prime Minister Lloyd George, much more censorious about the Irish than Churchill: “This time it is the Sinn Feiners. Last week it was the Ulsterites. They are both the sons of Belial!”7 And LG was a fellow Celt.
Not a daughter but a parent
Synon says Churchill called Ireland “a small poor, sparsely populated island, lapped about by British sea power.” That is true. But he said this in support of the Irish Free State Constitution Act—a document he had helped to draft. Taken in context, his words form a powerful plea to end centuries of violence through magnanimity and reconciliation:
Whence did Ireland derive its power to drive Mr. Pitt from office, to drag down Mr. Gladstone in the summit of his career, and to draw us who sit here almost to the verge of civil war, from which we were only rescued by the outbreak of the Great War? Whence does this mysterious power of Ireland come? It is a small, poor, sparsely populated island, lapped about by British sea power… How is it that she sways our councils, shakes our parties, and infects us with her bitterness, convulses our passions, and deranges our action? How is it she has forced generation after generation to stop the whole traffic of the British Empire, in order to debate her domestic affairs? Ireland is not a daughter State. She is a parent nation….
How much have we suffered in all these generations from this continued hostility? If we can free ourselves from it, if we can to some extent reconcile the spirit of the Irish nation to the British Empire in the same way as Scotland and Wales have been reconciled, then indeed we shall have secured advantages which may well repay the trouble and the uncertainties of the present time.8
The gift of Britain
Churchill then recalled an earlier attempt peace-making, the 1906 Transvaal Constitution. He spoke of Boer rifle dumps on lonely farms, the grave threat of strife, the “disquietude” over renewed war:
But we persevered. We grasped the larger hope, and in the end, when our need was greatest, we gained a reward far beyond our hopes. I appealed to the Opposition of that time to join with the Government in this matter. I said: “With all our great majority we can only make this the gift of a party, but you can make it the gift of Britain as a whole.”9
Turning to the Irish Act he concluded:
Today in this enterprise, which also is full of uncertainty, but full of hope, we can undoubtedly count upon the active and energetic support of all the three great parties in the State, who are resolved to take what steps are necessary to bring, if possible, this Irish peace to its consummation, to carry it out in the spirit and in the letter, and to stand firmly against all efforts to overthrow it. whether they be in Parliament or out of doors.10
“An adult who has read history”
A sidelight of interest: In her youth, Mary Ellen Synon applied for a Churchill Fellowship, reviewed by a panel including Sir Winston’s daughter. In full disclosure, she felt obliged to admit she was Irish, not British, thus possibly ineligible:
Lady Soames smiled sweetly. “We count them as British,” she said. I paused. I felt my County Cork rebel heart skip a beat. I could have stood up and walked out, saying I was insulted by such a neo-colonialist outlook. I could have told Lady Soames that Ireland had spilled blood for centuries to obtain its independence from the British Empire. We did not remain some branch of Britain. That is what race-hunters, searching across history for reasons to be “offended,” would have done. But I didn’t. I just smiled back at Lady Soames. I won my fellowship. Because I am an adult who has read history.
That revives many splendid memories of Mary Soames. One hopes that Ms. Synon, Irish patriot, runs across Mary’s father’s words in their full context. She will then feel less burdened in her defense of him. For on the larger matters, she is exactly right: “The woke-warriors need to park their adolescent outrage and understand that. Otherwise, in 100 years’ time, they themselves will be considered nothing better than a 21st century version of the witch-hunters of Salem.”
Endnotes
1 Mary Ellen Synon, “Winston Churchill called Irish patriots like me savages—and his daughter risked offending me to my face, but who cares when he was also the hero who beat Adolf Hitler?” in the Daily Mail, 11 September 2021, accessed 18 September 2021.
2 Winston S. Churchill, “Bolshevism and Imperial Sedition,” United Wards Club Luncheon, London, 4 November 1920, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), III: 3026. The word “rascals” was not used. His last line echoes of his great speech after the Atlantic Charter meeting in 1940: “Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”
3 WSC, “Russia and Ireland,” King’s Theatre, Dundee, 16 October 1920, Complete Speeches III: 3023.
4 WSC to Shane Leslie, 2 October 1920, in The Churchill Documents, vol. 9 Disruption and Chaos, July 1919-March 1921 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2008), 1217.
5 Paul Addison, “The Search for Peace in Ireland,” in James W. Muller, ed., Churchill as Peacemaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 199-200.
6 Ibid. Paul Addison’s complete remarks are in Richard M. Langworth, Winston Churchill, Myth and Reality, (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2017), ch. 9, passim.
7 David Lloyd George to his daughter Meghan, in Kenneth O. Morgan, ed., Lloyd George Family Letters 1885-1936 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, 194-95.
8 WSC, “Irish Free State Bill,” House of Commons, 15 December 1921, Complete Speeches III: 3146.
9 Ibid., 3155-56.
10 Ibid.
Further reading on this site
Charles Lysaght, “Eamon de Valera: A Long, Fraught Relationship” (2021)
William J. Shepherd, “1921: A Watershed Year Brilliantly Recounted by David Stafford” (2020)
Richard M. Langworth, “Irish Matters: Churchill’s Final View” (2016)