The November issue of HISTORY TODAY has landed on my carpet. It has a review of “Citizen Clem” by a peer of the realm, Professor Lord Bew. It says that Clem,who studied modern history at Oxford, “became deeply involved in socialism through the influence of his brother Tom, who was very pro-socialist and anti-war, and was Clem’s life-long confidante.”
As it happens, Tom Attlee was one of a number of prisoners in Wandsworth Prison suffering appalling treatment as a conscientious objector in 1916 when Irish Republican prisoners, who had fought in the Insurrection, were in the same prison in reasonable conditions. One of the latter, removed to
the prison hospital, had his sleep interrupted frequently by screams, and eventually was told by a warder that they were giving the “Conchies” their desserts.
The republican got word out to George Gavan Duffy, a Solicitor in London and a republican sympathiser, and following questions in Parliament the plight of the “Conchies” was improved.
Some years later Clement Attlee was Prime Minister and on a visit to Dublin met up with the former Republican prisoner, whom I quote in his very own words :
“Blianta ina dhiadh sin, nuair a bhi me i m’Uactaran ar Eirinn , thug Clement Attlee, Priomh-Aire na Breataine, cuairt orm in Aras an Uachtarain. Trid an gcomhra, rinneadh tagairt don treimse seo i Wandsworth agus fuair me amach gur dhearthair f’Attlee duine de na priosunaigh choinsiais a bhi ann an uair ud.”
One Conscientious Objector in prison at the time went on to found the Campaign for Colonial Freedom , became an MP and later sat in the Lords. He was a lifelong friend of Ireland and a witness, in January 1972, of the events of Derry’s Bloody Sunday. (Fenner Brockway, later Lord Brockway.)
Clement Attlee himself published a short memoir. It included a photograph of him in his Municipal Regalia, when, as Mayor of Stepney, he walked behind uniformed members of Cork No.1 Brigade IRA accompanying the body of Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in Brixton
Prison in October 1920.
Bertrand Russell, a distinguished scholar and member of the Liberal Party at the outbreak of the Great War, was silenced, imprisoned, and stripped of his Cambridge University position. His memoirs make, for me, a convincing case for the criminality of Asquith, Grey, Balfour and others who had intended for
years to crush their commercial rival, Germany.
At least one “distinguished historian” would have us believe that following the 1916 Rising there was a century of bloodshed in Ireland. But the late John Cole of the BBC, THE GUARDIAN and THE OBSERVER recalled meeting Clement Attlee at the British border in Ireland in 1949. Attlee had no police escort or bodyguard, but he was in peril. For he was being driven round Ireland, in a low powered car by his wife, an atrocious driver. And of course meeting such old firebrands as Sean MacBride and Sean T. O Ceallaigh
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