A blast from the past

Mention of Tom Penhaligon's 1935 diatribe The Impossible Irish (September 27th) has led me, via a reader's recommendation, to another literary broadside of that era, The Real Irish, by CH Bretherton.

If not quite amounting to a sub-genre, the two books certainly have much in common. Both were early verdicts on Irish independence, ostensibly by outsiders. Both were damning. But there, perhaps, similarities end.

Bretherton was a better and funnier writer than Penhaligon. A column he contributed to this newspaper circa 1919 has been described as “probably the most brilliant thing of its kind” in any English-language publication of the period. Also, he was entirely real and identifiable, unlike Penhaligon, whose name I suspect to have been pseudonymous. Indeed, Bretherton’s safety was a subject of worry to his employers.

The then Irish Times editor RM Smyllie was reportedly astonished that his columnist was never shot by the IRA. And the concern was more than empathetic. Smyllie played golf with Bretherton, which put him within missing distance.

A Liverpool Catholic, Bretherton had worked in California, as lawyer and journalist, before the first World War brought him to Dublin. According to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, he "was assigned to the Royal Ordnance Corps" here, and "involved in procuring wool".

His survived this perilous mission to become a full-time journalist in a country on the eve of the Troubles, and was one of the first to use a typewriter, which he carried everywhere, like an umbrella.

The DIB records that Smyllie was in awe of Bretherton, finding him "remarkable, irritating, whimsical, brilliant, and lovable". The Morning Post (a London-based conservative newspaper) and the Philadelphia Public Ledger both hired the Liverpudlian as Dublin correspondent.

It’s said that Michael Collins, who had a sense of humour, also enjoyed Bretherton, which may have aided the latter’s preservation. Even so, on one occasion, Collins asked an intermediary to have “friendly” words with the columnist.

In any case, Bretherton survived the Troubles, and left Dublin in 1924 to become a Post staffer. The Real Irish (1925) was therefore a retrospective on his years in Ireland, although it looked forward (bleakly) as well as back.

Perhaps its keynote passage was one in which he declared the Irish to be the happiest people in Europe. Typically, this was accompanied by withering explanation. “With the possible exception of the Mexican,” Bretherton wrote, “the Irishman does more of the things that he likes doing and less of the things that he dislikes doing than any other human being”. The four things the Irish liked, he added, were “horse-racing, religion, politics, and porter”. Devotion to these pastimes explained not just the happiness, but the “dreadful frugality” of Irish life – a frugality “not born of poverty but of ignorance”.

There are some funnier passages, especially on what the author acknowledges is the local genius for propaganda.

He cites the case of French journalist, circa 1921, who thinks himself on a fact-finding mission to Ireland, but whose every step is directed by his apparently casual hosts, who pass him from one red-roaring republican to the next, while never disturbing his impression of being a free agent.

Unfortunately, Bretherton’s wit and occasional insights are swamped beneath a world view that found it impossible, even in 1925, to understand why any rational people would not want to be part of the empire.

He still clung to the possibility that the “pro-civilisation” (ie loyalist) faction might triumph. If it didn’t, he predicted, southern Ireland would break up “into two or three – probably three – small kingdoms”. These would not be able to agree a common head, he believed, so would either readopt the British monarch, or import one from Germany.

He foresaw the Irish language (or “Erse”) triumphing at the expense of English, which would soon sound as foreign as “Russian”.

The author’s big mistake was in a passage on the brutal 1923 torture and assassination of Noel Lemass, brother of the future taoiseach. It was well known, he wrote, that the killing could be traced to the Free State’s police intelligence chief, Joe McGrath.

Thus was Bretherton finally silenced, by a lawsuit rather than a bullet. McGrath took a libel case and won, to the tune of £3,700 in damages. The book was sunk in the process, almost with trace.

@FrankmcnallyIT