Ireland Since 1939 Page 7
Although persuaded by Chamberlain not to press the issue in the broader interest of the war effort,40 Craigavon and his ministers resented the exclusion of Northern Ireland from conscription, particularly as they saw in the decision an indication of British desire to conciliate de Valera in the interests of possible Irish participation in the war. They were also concerned that, without conscription, the unionist community's commitment to the war effort might be shown to be less than enthusiastic. In the opening phase of the war recruits came forward at a rate of 2,500 per month, but this had fallen to fewer than 1,000 by the spring of 1940. There was a brief upsurge in the aftermath of Dunkirk, but by December 1940 monthly recruitment levels had fallen to 600 and the long-term trend was downward.41
Memories of the terrible losses of the Ulster Division at the Somme in 1916 may have kept recruitment figures down. The local sectarian dynamics of the northern state also played a part. Basil Brooke had appealed early in the war for people to ‘set aside the Orange and Green dispute and co-operate fully with the government. If this war goes against us the only flag that will fly over Belfast or Dublin will be the swastika.’42 But, just as for many nationalists the ending of partition ranked higher than resisting fascism, for a large number of unionists the world conflict could not distract their attention from the possible threat to the local balance of power that wartime mobilization might bring. The sectarian violence that had devastated Belfast between 1920 and 1922 had been fuelled in part by loyalist resentment at what was perceived to be the ‘peaceful penetration’ of Ulster by Catholics from the South, who took the jobs of Protestants who had volunteered for military service. The bitter legacy of economic competition in the 1930s helped to encourage a recrudescence of such fears during the early years of the war when unemployment remained a problem. A direct appeal by the government to those northern Catholics who were sympathetic to the Allied cause might well have served to lessen Protestant reluctance to volunteer. Tommy Henderson, the Independent Unionist MP for Shankill, an often strident voice for the interests of this heartland of the Protestant working class, became so frustrated with the low recruitment figures that he demanded that Craigavon actively campaign in nationalist areas: ‘tell them what the Roman Catholic countries had suffered at the hands of Hitler… he would be surprised at the good response’.43 The government's answer was to put Basil Brooke in charge of a recruiting campaign. The Unionist politician most associated with the demand that Protestant employers take on only co-religionists was a less than inspired choice, and this was compounded by Brooke's decision to use the Unionist Party machine to organize the campaign.
With the end of the ‘phoney war’ and the formation of a new and more dynamic government in Britain, the contrast with what the official historian of the North's war effort called ‘a sense of inertia… of fumbling uncertainty’44 was stark. In May 1940 Edmond Warnock, a junior minister at Home Affairs, resigned from the government, denouncing its failure to mobilize the province for any of the demands of the war and accusing it of being ‘in a state of lethargy, almost a coma’.45 In June he was followed by another junior minister who echoed the views of those unionists who were sympathetic to the idea of an understanding with de Valera to ensure access to southern ports and airfields. Up until Dunkirk, support for the idea of North and South uniting within the empire as the only way of guaranteeing Britain's survival had been articulated only at the liberal fringe of the Unionist Party. Now it got the support of junior members of the government and at least one Westminster Unionist MP, Dr James Little, who declared he was prepared to stand by the side of ‘any man, however much in other matters he might differ from me, who was willing to unite with me in defending the land of my birth against Nazi domination… we are all proud to be Irishmen and no land on the face of the earth do we love so well as this land.’46
Even that stalwart defender of the interests of border unionists, Basil Brooke, was racked by the conflicting pulls of parochial dominance and the call of an empire in peril. He had carried on his family's long tradition of military service, and of his three sons who enlisted, two were killed. A nephew of Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, he was an enthusiastic proponent of the North's total mobilization and of the priority of the world conflict over local considerations. Sounded out by an Independent member of the Dáil on his opinion of the sort of deal being broached with Dublin – to join the war in return for post-war unification – he claimed that such a proposal would split the cabinet but that he would vote in favour.47
Brooke, recognized even by the government's critics to be an energetic and effective Minister of Agriculture,48 might have hoped to succeed Craigavon. However, when the Prime Minister died in November 1940, the province's semidetached relation to the war effort was apparent in Andrews's unchallenged succession. Spender saw Andrews as totally incapable of rising to the challenge of war, mired as he was in the worst aspects of Craigavon's legacy: the obsessive concern to placate every parochial loyalist and Orange pressure group. The composition of his new cabinet did not reflect growing backbench pressure for radical change. Brooke was moved to Commerce, which he struggled to turn from a small and ineffective ministry, the butt of much criticism from those who held it responsible for the continuing high levels of unemployment, to the central directing core of wartime economic policy. The rest of the changes were an ineffective interchange of patently superannuated figures. The epitome of Andrews's leadership style was the promotion of Milne Barbour, the much criticized former Commerce minister, to Finance – the first example Spender could think of where a minister was promoted for incompetence. Brooke was replaced at Agriculture by Herbert Dixon, Lord Glentoran, the Chief Whip, whose hold on Andrews stemmed from his reputation as a fixer or, as one critic uncharitably put it, ‘a notorious “twister”’.49
The first major indication that the change of leadership had done nothing to quell a rising tide of criticism of the regime's lack of energy and direction was the by-election caused by Craigavon's death. The Unionist Party lost North Down by a wide margin in a high poll to an Independent. A month later, in April 1941, the Belfast Blitz provided devastating evidence for its critics of the complacency and incompetence of the government. In the worst of the attacks, on the night of 15–16 April, over 800 were killed, the highest casualty rate in one night's bombing of any city in the UK. The total number of deaths from the four raids was 1,100, while over 56,000 of the city's houses, about half of its stock, were damaged, leaving 100,000 people temporarily homeless.50 Although the origins of Belfast being the British city least physically and psychologically prepared for the Blitz lay in part in the advice from London in the early months of the war that Northern Ireland was unlikely to be attacked,51 subsequent more pessimistic analysis had not produced any substantial improvement in the city's defences.
The government shared responsibility for the protection of the city with its Corporation, which demonstrated on a smaller scale the deadening and corrupting effects of untrammelled one-party rule, in this case extending back before partition. The abolition of proportional representation for local government elections, the main objective of which had been to reduce the number of councils controlled by Nationalists, severely damaged the electoral prospects of the NILP in Belfast. Here Labour's widely spread but thin support was under-represented in a simple majority system, unlike the Nationalists, whose support was heavily concentrated in a few largely Catholic wards.52 In the last election for the Corporation before the war, eighteen of the Unionist Party's nineteen seats were obtained without a contest, as were the Nationalist Party's three, while the NILP, which had not contested any seats since 1937, had no councillors. The local Unionist political machine, the ‘City Hall party’, was largely oblivious to the possible effects of its conservative and complacent stewardship on an increasingly embattled government. Belfast's citizens had virtually no air-raid shelters and a fire brigade of only 230 full-time men, which the Corporation refused to expand even after the L
uftwaffe had attacked cities in the north of England and Scotland. The indifference and neglect of the Corporation, particularly towards the poor and vulnerable, was further highlighted in June 1940 when a Home Affairs inquiry revealed extensive corruption and incompetence in the management of Whiteabbey Sanatorium, and another inquiry concluded that ‘In respect of personal medical services, Belfast falls far short of what might be expected in a city of its size and importance.’53
The government's fear of conflict with the Belfast Unionist machine made it resist demands for the dissolution of the Corporation, but it did bring in commissioners to run the city for the duration of the war. Harry Midgley of the NILP had been prominent in the campaign that forced the inquiry into Whiteabbey, and he shook Andrews's government when he won a by-election in Willowfield, a largely Protestant constituency in East Belfast, in December 1941. Regarded as a safe Unionist seat, which the NILP had not contested before, Midgley s large margin of victory showed that Northern Ireland was not immune to the UK-wide shift to the left in public opinion that occurred during the early years of the war as a reaction to what was seen as the establishment's appeasement of fascism and consequent lack of an effective strategy for winning the war.54 With the USSR an ally from June 1941, attacks on socialism disappeared from the speeches of Conservative and Unionist politicians, and as the state's role in economic and social life expanded massively, Andrews was warned by some of his brighter and frustrated junior ministers of the wide belief that ‘the present socialistic policy of the (UK) government must continue if not be intensified when peace comes.’55
Much of the dissatisfaction with Andrews's government stemmed from the continuing existence of unemployment at a time when there was a labour shortage in the rest of the UK. When the war started there were 63,112 unemployed in Northern Ireland, 19.3 per cent of the insured population. The British unemployment figure was 8.3 per cent. By November 1940, while the British rate was 5.2 per cent, unemployment in the North had risen to 71,633, a rate of 21.3 per cent. The most important single factor in explaining this situation was one outside the government's control: the decline of the linen industry because of the loss of its major sources of flax in Russia, the Baltic states and Belgium as a result of the war. Unemployment in the industry, which employed 57,000 workers, one sixth of the insured population, increased from 11,261 at the outbreak of the war to 20,450 in November 1940.56
It was also the case that the lack of war contracts, about which the Belfast government complained, reflected a perception in the main supply departments that Northern Ireland suffered from higher production costs as a result of shortages of some types of skilled labour and from the extra transport costs involved for raw materials and finished products. Devolution itself had created major institutional impediments to an effective mobilization of the North's capital and labour resources. These were reflected in the administrative problems caused by the necessity of integrating the North's devolved structures with the new UK-wide system of regional Area Boards created by the Ministry of Supply. There was no direct liaison between the Ministries of Labour in Belfast and London. As Harold Wilson, a young Board of Trade civil servant, noted, ‘So far as can be seen there is little or no economic co-ordination between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Ulster is not represented on the Production Council, the Labour Supply Board, the Economic Policy Committee or Industrial Capacity Committee.’ Although Wilson criticized the failure of Whitehall departments and the UK government to do more to integrate Northern Ireland into the war effort, his main strictures were aimed at the conservatism of local management, the uncooperative attitude of trade unions and the ineffectiveness of the Stormont administration. The result was, as he noted dispiritedly, that ‘At the end of 15 months of war Ulster, so far from becoming an important centre of munitions production, has become a depressed area.’57
Yet within months of Wilson's reports there was evidence that the unemployment problem was well on the way to being resolved. By the time of the Belfast Blitz the unemployed total was reduced to 43,600, with a drop of over 40 per cent in male unemployment in the two previous months. Harland and Wolff, which had received less than its fair share of Admiralty contracts in the late 1930s,58 was to make a major contribution to wartime output, building not only naval and merchant ships but also landing craft, tanks, anti-aircraft guns and searchlights. Employment in the yard, which stood at 10,500 at the outbreak of war, had risen to 23,500 by March 194159 and reached a wartime peak of 30,800 in December 1944.60 Short and Harland's aircraft factories, whose workforce stood at 6,000 in 1939, employed 11,319 by 1941,61 producing Stirling bombers and Sunderland flying boats. The engineering industry was increasingly employed on a range of work from aircraft fuselage production to shells, bombs and radar equipment. Linen's problems were lessened by contracts for parachutes, tents and uniforms. As the military authorities embarked on the building of army and navy bases and aerodromes across the province, much of the surplus labour in agriculture and the building trades was quickly absorbed. Added to this were the 23,000 men who enlisted and the 28,000 workers who went to Britain in the first two years of the war.62
The decrease in the unemployment figures did little to help the government's popularity. This was in part because much of the new employment was the product of the broader British mobilization, and critics claimed that things would have been even better but for the incompetent response of the local administration. Added to this was the increasingly hopeful if fractious atmosphere encouraged by the UK-wide shift to the left. Robert Greacen, one of the editors of the Northman, a new literary journal based in Belfast's Queen's University, described the ‘thorough-going shake-up’ that the war gave to such a conservative and inward-looking region: ‘Go into our cafes and pubs, workshops and recreation centres and hear them speak of social conditions, of plans for post-war economic and physical reconstruction, talk knowingly of the Beveridge Report, of Britain's relations with the Soviet Union… and of the clean, decent world we are all hoping and working for.’63 Long accustomed to seeing itself as a delicate flower wilting in an environment parched by the flames of bourgeois philistinism, sectarian division and provincial narrow-mindedness, the North's small literary intelligentsia was temporarily buoyed up with new, contrasting and ultimately chimerical visions of the future. These ranged from the poet John Hewitt's idea of Ulster regionalism as a common source of pride for Catholics and Protestants to socialisms with conflicting republican and Commonwealth loyalties.64
Whatever the limitations of this intellectual revival, its energy and optimism derived from the temporary dulling of the sectarian passions of the 1930s brought about by the material improvements and widening of horizons associated with the war. Even the Prime Minister was affected. Andrews, as President of the Ulster Unionist Labour Association, was critical of what he saw as Treasury sabotage of Northern Ireland's right to parity of public services with the rest of the UK. Although social conditions in housing, health and education had improved during the inter-war period, they still lagged behind those of Britain as a whole.65 As Andrews pointed out to his cabinet, in areas such as mortality rates for expectant mothers and infants the gap had widened, something the NILP was concentrating on in its criticism of the government. To the dismay of Spender and the Treasury, the Prime Minister committed his government to an ambitious programme of post-war reconstruction. Responding to Treasury criticism that such a commitment went beyond Stormont's limited financial powers, Andrews explained to the Chancellor of the Exchequer that Northern Ireland could not be insulated from the British debate about the nature of post-war economic and social policy: ‘In numerous public utterances of responsible people the minds of our people have been directed more than ever before towards what is called a “new order” or a “fair deal”, the “scandal that poverty should exist” and the “horrors associated with the slums”.’66 Despite the horror that Andrews's approach provoked amongst some of his colleagues and a substantial sector of the Protestant middle class
, he was successful in extracting a grudging acceptance from the Chancellor of the Exchequer that the North could incur extra expenditure to make up for ‘leeway’: its backwardness in infrastructure and social provision.67 A Post-War Planning Committee was created in July 1942, and, although it was chaired by Brooke, who shared Spender's scepticism about Andrews's public commitments, it did mark the first faltering step in the government's initially reluctant acceptance of the welfare state. However, although the embrace of welfarism would be a crucial long-term factor in the strengthening of Unionist Party hegemony, it did little to shore up Andrews's decrepit administration. In January 1943 Jack Beattie of the NILP won the West Belfast seat at Westminster in a by-election with a 30 per cent slump in the Unionist vote,68 and in April 1943, despite the fact that almost half the Unionist MPs at Stormont had government posts, a rebellion of backbenchers and junior ministers forced Andrews's resignation.