As regular readers may have guessed, I have collected and kept loads of written material over a long(ish) life, some of which I have read and memorised for as much as seventy years, some of which I have barely put my nose into, and others, perhaps the most worthy, which I had resolved to read, but had not.
Included is a universally acclaimed biography of an intriguing scoundrel, Winston Churchill, by an accomplished politician and writer, Roy Jenkins.
Including notes it is over 1,000 pages long, so I have only dipped in it occasionally rather than swum all the miles.
The book comes in six parts under one cover. And Part 4 starts on page 346 with Chapter 9 covering the years 1919-1922 where Churchill’s roles are described as “Anti-Bolshevik Crusader and Irish Peacemaker.”
Churchill was from 1917 until his death in 1965 a devout anti- Communist. I believe that anti-Communism has always been the first refuge of a scoundrel and that Churchill was the first of a line followed by Mussolini,Hitler, Franco, Eoin O’Duffy, Senator Joe McCarthy, Ronald Reagan and others. When the Soviet Union had suffered nearly thirty million deaths and inflicted 80% of Germany’s military deaths, Churchill intended, if returned to office in 1945, to employ the surviving German military in an onslaught on the devastated Soviet Union. God knows that the original Crusades disgraced humanity often enough, but Churchill’s obsession beggars belief.
I don’t know if Jenkins has dealt with that obsession.
But Churchill made war on Ireland which had, uniquely established a State in a democratic election “accepted on all sides as a Plebiscite” according to THE TIMES within weeks of the Armistice in the Great War in which
the winners professed themselves champions of self-determination of nations. Churchill was responsible for the terrorism unleashed on civilians, murders, tortures, whipping, burning of houses, farms, creameries, schools, town and city halls, libraries, and looting. And then threatened more intense warfare, on the scale that had defeated the South Africans 20 years earlier.
I understand that Churchill’s cabinet planned in October 1940 to drop chemical weapons on Ireland if German troops got a foothold there. At the time the Germans held Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France but the British had not used or intended to use such weapons there.
Jenkins mentions Cork and mentions the Lord Mayor (though not by name) McSwiney who, in November 1920 died “in a London gaol, after a 74 day hunger-strike.”
He described the Cork Lord Mayor “not a Tammany-type Alderman but a sensitive poet-intellectual.” There’s no mention of Lord Mayor Tomas MacCurtain, MacSwiney’s immediate predecessor, murdered
by the RIC in March 1920, nor of the Mayor of Limerick, George Clancy and his predecessor Michael O’Callaghan, murdered by the Auxiliaries on March 6 1921.
All those elected men were at least as well-born as Roy Jenkins and at least two probably as cultured. During those years the County- Cork born Tammany Boss Croker was living in style in Dublin, having left New York in a hurry. He lived in some style and his horse won the Epsom Derby.
His Dublin residence has long housed British Ambassadors, one at least had an interesting history.
I’ll come to that presently and further comments on Roy Jenkins.
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