northern ireland and the somme

'If hell is any worse..?

The concentrated impact of the battle on Northern Ireland's tight-knit Prodestant communties ensured it would become a symbol of Unionist solidarity despite the participation of many Northern Catholics, writes Jonathan Bardon

In June 1966 I was struck down by appendicitis in front of a class of 12-year-olds in east Belfast. I was frantic: I had just been commissioned to write five features on Ulster and the battle of the Somme for the (now defunct) Sunday News. After the operation, the nurse urged me to walk about.

There were no fewer than six Somme veterans in a ward of 12 male patients. Having collected an invaluable fund of memories, I got to the sixth man. He told me he was Charles Currie, a Catholic who had joined what had been a temperance battalion of the Ulster Volunteer Force. When about to go over the top on July 1st, 1916, each man was given a tot of rum. Since his fellow-soldiers had sworn off the strong drink, he drank as many tots as he could. The result was that he couldn't remember a thing about the first day at the Somme.

Until then I had assumed that all men in the 36th (Ulster) Division were Protestants, members of the UVF. Indeed, there can have been very few Catholics in that division. Nevertheless, 75,000 enlisted in Ulster during the first World War, of which 30,000 were in the Ulster Division, and that in a province where generally as many Catholics as Protestants took the king's shilling.

Ireland in the summer of 1914 was on the brink of civil war. Divided by the issue of Home Rule, nearly 100,000 Ulster Volunteers, equipped with modern German, Italian and Austrian rifles, were confronted by Irish Volunteers, less well-armed but numbering close on 180,000. On July 24th, the Ulster Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, gloomily observed: "I see no hopes of peace; I see nothing at present but darkness and shadows . . . we shall have once more to assert the manhood of our race."

But it was in a more terrible European civil war that the manhood of Protestants would be asserted.

"The one bright spot in the very dreadful situation is Ireland," Sir Edward Gray, the foreign secretary, said with evident emotion in the Commons on the night of August 3rd 1914. John Redmond, leader of the Irish Party, had just risen to his feet to pledge the support of the Irish Volunteers.

Carson quickly sent a wire from Belfast also committing the Ulster Volunteers to fight for King and Empire. Men who had been drilling in opposition to one another (in Belfast separated by only a few streets between the Falls and the Shankill) now rushed to enlist to fight for the same cause.

At the war office, Lord Kitchener agreed to keep the UVF together in one Ulster Division. The result was that almost complete battalions of the UVF were swept intact into this 36th Division, very often with their UVF officers, drawn to a very considerable extent from the northern Protestant gentry. Kitchener refused to make similar arrangements for nationalist volunteers, though the 16th and 10th Divisions were subsequently described as "Irish".

How, then, did the Somme become seared into the psyche of northern Protestants? The main reason, surely, is that the blood sacrifice of more than 5,000 was on a terrible scale and largely concentrated into just one day: July 1st, 1916.

The manner in which UVF battalions had been brought intact into the division meant that, as German machine-gunners emerged from their dug-outs to mow down line after line of advancing Ulstermen, they were killing men who had grown up together, who had been close neighbours. "There was not a dry eye on the street," many recalled after the telegrams had been delivered.

One Orangeman in Lurgan wrote to a friend: "There is hardly a house in Hill Street in which at least one member of the family has not been killed or wounded. It is terrible, terrible hard news to bear with equanimity."

The concentrated impact on a tight-knit community was so profound that it could not be forgotten. Of course, on other parts of the battlefield more Irishmen had died, southern and northern, Catholic and Protestant. And the battle raged on for months.

AT THE CLOSE OF the war men returned from the Front to find that the political situation in Ireland had undergone a seismic change. Catholic ex-servicemen discovered that the Irish freedom for which they had fought had not come to pass. Sinn Féin, the umbrella separatist party which consigned the Irish Party to history in the December 1918 election, at best ignored their sacrifice and, more usually, regarded them as traitors.

In the south, tens of thousands of veterans were to be the victims of a collective amnesia which lasted almost to the end of the century. In Ulster, the numerous Catholic ex-servicemen were also marginalised.

Uncertain what their political future might be, Unionist politicians did not hesitate to use the sacrifice at the Somme to press their claims. The Peace Day celebrations in Ulster on August 9th, 1919 were turned into a Protestant triumph. The day became a massive display of unionist solidarity: 36,000 men and women who had seen war service (twice as many as took part in London) formed a procession 11 miles long and took three hours to pass the new Cenotaph at Belfast City Hall. The occasion was essentially a non-inclusive celebration of the role of the Ulster Division.

In November 1921 Unionist politicians and war veterans were at the Somme to mark the completion of the first battlefield memorial on the Western Front, the 70ft-high Thiepval Tower. Again it was an act of solidarity used to remind the government and the British public of Northern Ireland's insistence on remaining intact within the United Kingdom.

The sacrifice at the Somme continued to be deployed to underline Ulster Protestant loyalty. Despite Captain O'Neill's genuine gestures of reconciliation to the minority, he failed to ensure that the 50th anniversary in 1966 was anything but a loyalist commemoration.

The same year was the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising and surviving northern Catholic ex-servicemen remained unacknowledged not only by unionists but also in their own community. Not until the 1990s were attempts made to rectify this situation, not least by the Somme Heritage Centre outside Newtownards, where due recognition is given to all.

A letter home to Belfast scrawled in pencil by Private Herbert Beattie, aged 17, brought to me by a student in 1968, is a fitting reminder that the Somme should be remembered above all as a place of horror.

"Dear Mother. Just to let you know and I am safe and thank God for it for had a ruf time of it in the charge we made Mother don't let on to V. Quinn mother or Archers mother that they must be killed . . . tell Hugh that the fellow that youst to run along with E, Ferguson called Eddie Mallon he youst to have Pigens if Hugh dus not no him McKeown nows him tell them he was killed tell them that ther is not another grosvenor Rd fellow left but myself. Mother wee were tramping over the dead . . . i will have something ufal to tell you if hell is any wores i would not like to go to it Mother let me here from you as soon as you can . . ."

Jonathan Bardon OBE is the author of A History of Ulster, and served as chairman of Northern Ireland's Community Relations Council.