Bachelor's Walk: In Memory

A Machine Readable Version

Christopher Baran

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The situation represented in Jack B. Yeats' famous painting, Bachelor's Walk: In Memory — as in virtually all his works — is one personally witnessed by the artist. The painting shows an anonymous flower girl leaving her offering in token memorial along the street in Dublin known as Bachelor's Walk, which runs along the Liffey River near O'Connell Bridge. Irish art critic and historian Thomas MacGreevy considered this one of Yeats' seminal works of 'historical painting,' and briefly sketches the circumstances behind the event represented in the painting in an article from 1942, ' Three Historical Paintings by Jack B. Yeats ', published in The Capuchin Annual. MacGreevy describes the encounter on 26 July 1914 in Dublin between the King's Own Scottish Borderers and city residents that left three dead and thirty-two wounded. The flower girl in Yeats' painting leaves her offering to these victims. ( MacGreevy 248-49)MacGreevy's article emphasizes the tragic loss of life in this encounter, but makes no reference to the surrounding circumstances, omitting, for instance, the destination and mission of the British soldiers, . MacGreevy's article is intriguing to the historian of modern Ireland as much for what it leaves out as what it does say and, in the process, sheds light on the cultural identity forming in the still-fledgling Irish Republic at the time. MacGreevy would have his readers remember the losses inflicted by the British without knowing the underlying reasons. He presents an image of the Irish Republic as victim, the innocent recipient of British transgressions.

The roots of the movement for complete Irish independence from Britain lie in the failure of the movement for constitutional change in the relationship between the two countries in the eighteenth and first part of the nineteenth centuries. The terms of the Act of Union of 1800 that first formally joined the two islands under the British crown also consolidated the legislative bodies of the two nations, depriving Ireland of its independent parliament. In its place, one hundred Irish members were added to the British House of Commons and thirty-two Irish members to the House of Lords, both in Westminster, across the Irish Sea. These representatives formed only a narrow segment of the membership of the imperial parliament rarely concerned with Irish matters except when they impacted the larger concerns of Britain. British indifference to Irish concerns can perhaps be seen in the nearly thirty years taken to remove Roman Catholics, in both countries, from the oppression of the penal laws, although. Catholic emancipation had been immediately promised following passage of the Act of Union. ( Hoppen 16-17) The Act of Union effectively deprived Ireland of her means for effective self-government.

Repeated attempts were made in subsequent years to effect constitutional change between Ireland and Britain. These range from the unsuccessful drive to repeal the Act of Union outright, led by Irish statesman Daniel O'Connell in the 1840s, ( Hoppen 30-35) to the equally unsuccessful attempts of British prime minister William Gladstone to usher through the Westminster Parliament the First or Second Home Rule Bills, introduced in 1886 and 1893, ( Hoppen 128-29, 136-37) respectively. In the twentieth century, the issue of home rule, or the reinstatement of a separate Irish parliament, returned to the foreground of British politics after 1910. The ruling coalition government of British Prime Minister William Asquith relied on the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the seventy-six seats it held in Westminster. Asquith introduced the Third Home Rule Bill into the House of Commons in the spring of 1912. ( Lawlor1-2)

This legislative initiative was met by organized resistance on the part of the Irish Protestant population, particularly that in and around Belfast in the northeast. In January 1913, politicians Sir Edward Carson and James Craig founded the paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force, to 'defend the Union,' or resist home rule by force of arms, if necessary. It quickly enlisted nearly a hundred thousand members. Ireland stood on the brink of civil insurrection. Though somewhat questioned by more recent historical studies, the apparent refusal of the British military in Ireland to obey orders to intervene against Protestants in Ireland led the British government in London to leave the situation as it stood. Successful arms smuggling by the Ulster Volunteers soon brought them almost twenty-five thousand rifles and three million rounds of ammunition. This threat to public order was only made worse by the formation by Irish historian Eoin MacNé ill of the paramilitary Irish Volunteers in November 1913. ( Lee 17-9) The lack of British intervention made the Irish Volunteers the sole protection for the Irish Catholic community against Protestant aggression.

The clash between the Irish Volunteers and British soldiers came to a head at Bachelor's Walk. The Irish Volunteers landed a much smaller arms shipment at Howth in July 1914, perhaps nine hundred rifles or so. The British administration dispatched a detachment of soldiers from Dublin to confiscate this cache, a mission that went uncompleted. The soldiers found themselves faced by an unfriendly crowd on the return march to their barracks. Faced with jeers and thrown rocks, they responded with their own weapons, ( Lee 22) killing three, a man and a woman, and a boy of eighteen, and wounding thirty-two, as MacGreevy tells. Such is the danger always in having soldiers to enforce civil order, as the Boston 'massacre' and Kent State incidents from American history illustrate. More important than these deaths, tragic as they are, is the failure of the British administration to act impartially in enforcing the law. This is the most immediate significance of the events along Bachelor's Walk.

It is a perception of British infidelity that is repeated most often in nationalist literature as a motive for the militant republican drive for complete independence. In his monograph on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that partitioned Ireland and created the Irish Free State, Frank Pakenham ponders rhetorically, commenting on the failure of the constitutional movement: If Ireland could have been satisfied by lesser concessions than were afterwards demanded [that is, full independence], why was not prompt and generous action taken earlier? Why did not England make the lesser concession while there was still time? ( Pakenham, Frank 18) Pakenham's questions have no answers. The more militant elements of MacNé ill's group split from the constitutionalists in the fall of 1914, in time evolving into the Irish Republican Army responsible for fighting the agents of British authority in the years after 1918.

Nearly thirty years later, Thomas MacGreevy simplified the circumstances behind the events that inspired Jack Yeats' painting. In 1942, MacGreevy himself was just returned from London, where he had lectured at the British National Gallery for several years. He had also served in the British army himself during the First World War, and saw action at the Somme. ( MacGreevy xv-xvii) In 1942, Europe found itself still in the midst of the Second World War. Ireland claimed to be a neutral island, though the practical implications of this are debatable. The Irish government shared intelligence with the western allies, returned allied, particularly British, airmen and other personnel that fell into its hands, and allowed allied aircraft to over fly Irish airspace. Hoppen 201-205 One sees in this characterization of the Irish historical experience signs of conflict, in MacGreevy himself, perhaps reflective of a larger conflict in the Irish Republic, over the cultural and political identity of Ireland, as the new nation sought to chart its own course in the international arena. It is this status of Ireland as representing the 'third way,' outside, but not apart from, the politics of the great powers of the western world, that makes its story particularly relevant to the student of modern history, as much for those within Ireland as without.