19 January 1922: Dedication of the John Nicholson Statue, Lisburn
Ireland and Empire
By Michael Silvestri
On 19 January 1922 the town of Lisburn in Northern Ireland unveiled a statue to an imperial icon and one of its famous sons, the East India Company officer John Nicholson. Having been promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General during the Indian Rebellion, Nicholson was mortally wounded while leading the British assault on Delhi in September 1857. He was revered as one of the great ‘Mutiny’ heroes of late Victorian Britain, an ‘Irish Paladin’ and devout evangelical who brought order to the northwest frontier of India, where he was worshipped as a god dubbed ‘Nikal Seyn’.
Viewed from the twenty-first century, Nicholson, who advocated summary executions and corporal punishment for Indian rebels, stands as an example of the pervasive violence of colonialism. Yet for the predominantly Protestant and unionist residents of Lisburn on that day, the unveiling of Nicholson’s statue represented a day of civic, Ulster and imperial pride. The town came to a halt as shops and schools closed, and most factories and mills suspended business. As Northern Ireland prime minister James Craig looked on, the statue was unveiled by another prominent Irish military officer, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson.
The field marshal’s tales of Nicholson vanquishing ‘the most savage, the most warlike and the most terrible tribes’ of India received cheers from the crowd, as did his admiration for how ‘this little corner of Ireland, this Ulster’ had produced some of the greatest heroes of 1857.¹ The ceremony reflected not only Ireland’s imperial past but its tumultuous imperial present. James Craig honoured Wilson, who in the following month would be elected as MP for North Down, with the honorary title of ‘gallant Ulsterman’.² A member of Lisburn’s Urban District Council contrasted the achievements of imperial Irishmen such as Nicholson and Wilson with nationalists’ efforts ‘to tear down and dismember’ the British empire ‘that men like Nicholson, Rhodes and others had died to build up’.
The unveiling of the John Nicholson statue thus took place not only in the midst of revolutionary upheaval in Ireland, but also at a time in which Irish men and women engaged deeply with the British empire in various ways. As the foundation of the Irish Free State ended some imperial relationships, others were transformed and new linkages between Ireland and the British empire developed.
Shortly before the ceremony in Lisburn, empire had occupied a prominent place in the Dáil debates on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which accorded the Free State the status of a dominion of the British empire. The continuing connection to the empire, highlighting the failure of separatists to achieve an independent republic, drew fierce criticism from anti-Treaty members of Sinn Féin. At the same time, many viewed Ireland’s independence struggle as anomalous, spurning comparisons with either African or Asian colonies or the colonies of white settlement such as Canada or Australia.
Since the end of the First World War, Irish republican representatives overseas had built strong relationships with anti-imperialist activists from the colonial world. Some members of the Dáil did express solidarity with global anti-colonial movements during the Treaty debates. Liam Mellows lamented that ‘we are going into the British Empire now to participate in the Empire’s shame…to participate in the shame and the crucifixion of India and the degradation of Egypt. Is that what the Irish people fought for freedom for?’³
While supporters of the Treaty displayed little imperial enthusiasm, they nonetheless argued that dominion status offered protection from British interference in Ireland’s internal politics.⁴ Members of the Cumann na nGaedheal government subsequently extended this argument, contending that Ireland’s history and status within the British empire offered the possibility of anti-imperial action in the League of Nations. In September 1922 P.S. O’Hegarty contended that
Ireland’s position is unique. By virtue of our special history, our special position, we can not only lead the British Dominions in an anti-Imperial policy against the British Empire, but we can, through the League, organise the small Nations in a Small Nations League against the Empires.⁵
In spite of these anti-imperial sentiments, partition, the civil war and the continuing ties of the Irish Free State to the empire also presented a negative example for anti-colonial activists. The August 1922 issue of the Indian communist publication Vanguard featured an article on the ‘Irish tragedy, conveying a lesson for India from the Free State fiasco and the tragic betrayal of the principle of Republicanism by its sponsors Collins and Griffith’.⁶
Nonetheless, the solidarity forged between Irish separatists and anti-colonial activists endured. Shapurji Saklatvala, the Bombay-born, communist member of parliament for Battersea, devoted his maiden speech on 20 November 1922 to a critique of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, condemning it as ‘a forced freedom’ that was ‘the only alternative to a new invasion of Ireland by British troops’.⁷ Estimating that ninety per cent of his Irish constituents in London opposed the Treaty, Saklatvala proposed an amendment to alter the Treaty four days later. ‘The Constitutions for Ireland and India and Egypt and Mesopotamia’, he contended, ‘should be Constitutions written by the men of those countries…without interference from outside.’⁸
Irish separatists, particularly republican socialists and communists, continued to pursue these anti-colonial alliances. Roddy Connolly travelled to Hamburg in 1922 to liaise with M.N. Roy, the former revolutionary nationalist and founder of the Communist Party of India. British intelligence described Connolly as an important recruit to Roy’s cause, and possibly a source of arms for Indian insurgents. Perhaps in an effort to deceive British agents, Roy advertised that his journal, Advance Guard, was published by the ‘Emerald Press’ of Dublin, when it was in reality printed in Germany.⁹
Many intelligence reports on Indian communism in 1922 were authored by a Protestant Irishman, Charles Tegart, the flamboyant police commissioner of Calcutta who at the time served in the office of Indian Political Intelligence in London. Tegart’s role in the surveillance of both Indian and Irish revolutionaries demonstrates another way in which Irish imperial connections continued beyond 1922.
As with Irish anti-imperialism, the contours of Irish imperial engagement took various forms. The disbandment of most Irish regiments of the British army in July 1922 had a marked imperial dimension. Regiments such as the Royal Irish Fusiliers and Munster Fusiliers were frequently deployed for imperial garrison duty in locales such as Egypt and India in the post-war period. In June 1920 members of the Connaught Rangers in India had staged a protest against the actions of the British army in Ireland. Negotiations for the release of Rangers imprisoned for their role in the ‘mutiny’ continued through 1922; in December William Cosgrave wrote to Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law that the question of the prisoners’ release was still ‘occupying the public mind very considerably and also the minds of many members of our Parliament’.¹⁰ Irish troops stationed in India at the time of disbandment were given the option of transferring to other regiments. In battalions such as the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers, virtually all officers and over one-fifth of other ranks chose to continue their imperial service.¹¹
The disbandment of the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1922 similarly did not mark an end of Irish imperial relationships. A significant percentage of the more than 1,400 members of the RIC who emigrated overseas between 1919 and 1923 relocated to imperial locales.¹² The year 1922 also witnessed perhaps the largest single contribution of the RIC to imperial policing, as close to 700 former members of the force entered the initial draft of the British Palestine Gendarmerie.¹³ Former Royal Irish Constabulary members, chiefly Black and Tans and auxiliaries, dominated the ranks of the gendarmerie, and close to forty per cent of the force was Irish-born.
At the close of the year, another ceremony was held at the Nicholson statue in Lisburn. This memorialised not only the centenary of Nicholson’s birth but also the aforementioned Sir Henry Wilson, who had been shot dead in London on 22 June by two members of the Irish Republican Army. Wilson’s assassins, who had both served in Irish regiments during the Great War, had targeted not only a staunch defender of the Union, but the most prominent Irish imperial officer of his generation.
Wilson’s assassination by two former Irish soldiers illustrates in dramatic form the reconfiguration of Irish imperial relationships in 1922. While Irish engagement with empire was never as straightforward as Protestant, unionist loyalism versus Catholic, nationalist anti-imperialism, these binary divisions were given increased force by independence and partition. In terms of Irish identity, a commitment to empire was increasingly seen to reside in the ‘imperial province’ of Ulster. In southern Ireland, in spite of the Free State’s dominion status, anti-imperial sentiments assumed a more central role, while traditions of Irish imperial service came to be increasingly remote to public debate and the process of nation-building.
Extracted from Ireland 1922 edited by Darragh Gannon and Fearghal McGarry and published by the Royal Irish Academy with support from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 programme. Click here to view more articles in this series, or click the image below to visit the RIA website for more information.
