General Election '24: Northern Ireland (4)
Stepping away from the hurly burly of the campaign for a moment, today is the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, resonant in Unionist history
As I scrolled through Twitter this morning, greeting the beginning of general election week, I noticed a post from Jim Shannon, the Democratic Unionist Party’s candidate in Strangford which he has represented for the past 14 years. At first glance, and I freely admit this, it seems a mad, parochial, blinkered slant on an extraordinarily minor administrative matter of—I’m not making this up—an offer of breakfasts in Tesco.
I have contacted Tesco for clarification as to why the veterans’ breakfast offer was not extended to Northern Ireland. On this day when we commemorate the sacrifices and courage of the 36th Ulster Division at the Battle of the Somme, this exclusion of our veterans is inexcusable.
For context, Tesco had announced last month that armed forces veterans could claim a free hot breakfast at any Tesco café on production of their Veteran Card in honour of Armed Forces Day, which was marked on Saturday, 29 June. Critically, however, the offer was only available in Great Britain, not the whole of the United Kingdom. There are 56 Tesco stores in Northern Ireland, and an estimated 40-60,000 armed forces veterans.
At time of writing I have not seen an explanation from Tesco for what is almost certainly a bureaucratic oversight, but it is a clumsy and unnecessary mistake and the company’s leadership would be well advised to apologise. But most people outside Northern Ireland will be bemused by the fierceness of the reaction, and by the connection to today’s anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. I wanted to say a few words about why in this specific context it matters.
First, the Somme: the four-month offensive by French and British forces which began on 1 July 1916 has become a by-word for mass casualties and an avatar of the unthinking brutality of the First World War. The scale was so large as to be almost unimaginable: at the outset, 13 divisions of the British Expeditionary Force and 11 divisions of the French Armée de terre faced 10½ divisions of the Imperial German Army at the River Somme in Picardy. This would balloon over the course of the offensive, drawing in 50 British divisions, 48 French divisions and 50 German divisions, and the butcher’s bill by November was hideous: British and Empire casualties were 420,000, with 95,675 killed or missing; French losses were 200,000, with 50,729 killed or missing; and the German forces suffered around 440,000 casualties.
The first day of the battle was particularly bloody, and for the British Army remains its most costly single day in history. By the end of Saturday 1 July 1916, the BEF had suffered 57,470 casualties. 19,240 soldiers had been killed in less than 24 hours. There is no truly effective way of contextualising that loss, but for quick comparison, the UK’s military deployment in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, 179 service personnel died. The 20-year operation in Afghanistan (2001-21) cost the lives of 457 armed forces personnel. 255 British soldiers died in the Falklands campaign. On the Somme, 20,000 were killed on a single Saturday.
In specific areas the losses were even more nightmarish. The 1st Battalion, The Newfoundland Regiment, raised from volunteers in the sparsely populated rural Dominion of Newfoundland (not part of Canada until 1949) in 1914, had fought gallantly in Gallipoli in 1915 and spent a brief period of recuperation before taking up a position at Beaumont-Hamel towards the north end of the British lines on the Somme. By 1 July, its strength was nearly 800, with 22 officers and 758 non-commissioned officers and other ranks. The unit was stationed in a support trench at St John’s Road, 250 yards behind the front line, when at 8.45 am the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Lovell Hadow, received the order to advance. That was easier said than done: the communication trenches which led to the front line were congested to the point of being impassable with dead and wounded soldiers, so Hadow took the decision to lead his men over the top of the support trench and advance across open ground towards the enemy.
It was brave and had some logic, but when the Newfoundlanders clambered out of their trenches and breasted the skyline, they were effectively the only troops visible and moving, in clear sight of the German trenches. They advanced no further than the Danger Tree, a shattered trunk in No Man’s Land, and the unit was effectively wiped out. Of the 780 men who started out, 670 were killed, most of them within the first 15 minutes. When the battalion took a roll call the next morning, 68 soldiers were there to respond. Think about that: on that first day, a battalion had been destroyed by 9.00 am.
What has all of this to do with Northern Ireland? It need not be said but I will say anyway that the hand of history, to borrow from Sir Tony Blair, weighs more heavily in Northern Ireland than in most places, and that is particularly true of the Battle of the Somme. One of the few BEF units to make more progress than anticipated on 1 July was the 36th (Ulster) Division. It had been raised in 1914 after Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had appealed for volunteers at a meeting in Belfast, addressing in particular the Ulster Volunteer Force: this paramilitary organisation had been created in 1912 to defend against the possibility of Irish Home Rule and numbered at least 100,000. Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war, had hoped for a brigade of soldiers for the BEF, but found himself with enough volunteers for three brigades, the equivalent of a division, and it spent the summer of 1915 in training and drill before being deployed to France in September.
The Ulster Division consisted of three infantry brigades, the 107th, 108th and 109th. The 107th Brigade comprised four battalions of the Royal Irish Rifles recruited mainly in Belfast; the 108th was made up of another three battalions of the Royal Irish Rifles, two from Antrim and one from Down, and a battalion of the Royal Irish Fusiliers from Armagh; and the 109th consisted of three battalions of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers from Tyrone, Londonderry, Fermanagh and Donegal and a Belfast battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles. As a whole, the 36th Division numbered around 15,000 men at the beginning of the battle.
The division was commanded by Major-General Oliver Nugent, a 55-year-old veteran who had served with distinction in India and South Africa. He was from a Protestant Anglo-Ascendancy family in Cavan, which gave him a different outlook from Unionists from Belfast and the north-eastern counties of Ulster; he would write slightingly of “these narrow, intolerant Ulster Presbyterians”. He thought that the militant reaction of Ulster Unionists to the prospect of Home Rule, and the formation of the UVF in 1912, had been a miscalculation, and feared that the outcome of the “Irish question” would be the exclusion from a Dublin administration of the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster—Antrim, Down, Armagh, Londonderry, Fermanagh and Tyrone—but not the other three counties of the historic province, Donegal, Monaghan and his own Cavan. He was, of course, wholly correct.
Given its roots in the Ulster Volunteer Force, it is hardly surprising that the 36th Division was a largely (though not wholly) Protestant force. The Orange Order had played a part in its recruitment, and Orange lodges in Scotland and northern England had supplied volunteers. For many in the division, and indeed in the wider Unionist movement, there was an element of continuity between the readiness to resist Home Rule and the resistance of German aggression on the continent (notwithstanding the fact that the UVF had smuggled 25,000 rifles from Germany into the ports of Larne, Bangor and Donaghadee as recently as April 1914).
The continuity went further back, however. 1 July in the Julian calendar, which Great Britain and Ireland had used until 1752, was the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the defeat of James VII and II by William III at Oldbridge in County Meath. Although in the Gregorian calendar it was and is commemorated on 12 July, it had been since the late 18th century the central celebration of Irish Protestantism, with enormous parades by the Orange Order and other Loyalist organisations like the Apprentice Boys of Derry and the Royal Black Institution. This made the first day of the Somme even more emotionally charged.
The objective of the Ulster Division on that day was to advance between the River Ancre and Thiepval against a German position known as the Schwaben Redoubt, a network of fortifications, trenches and strongpoints nearly 600 yards long. At 7.15 am, the division formed up along the sunken Thiepval-Hamel road under cover of smoke, already in No Man’s Land and only 150 yards from the first line of German trenches. A fierce artillery bombardment had prevented any German response, and when the guns moved their firing forward at 7.30 am the Ulstermen rushed the first German trench with ease. They pushed on and by 10.00 am had seized the second line of German positions, but co-ordination with the artillery was virtually non-existent, and their very success, the fact that they were ahead of schedule, meant that the forward units of the Ulster Division were falling under their own bombardment, which did not end until 10.10 am. Nevertheless their advance was dramatic, and so swift that some German soldiers did not even have time to emerge from their dugouts 30 or 40 feet below ground before their positions were overrun.
The Ulster Division advanced perhaps 1,000 yards that day, but its success was not matched by the units on either flank, leaving it exposed. By the evening the Ulstermen were running short of ammunition and supplies, and when the Germans mounted a counter-attack at 10.00 pm, they were forced to retreat to their starting positions, ceding all the ground they had captured. That was a bitter pill to swallow, but bitterer still was the cost at which it had come. Starting the day at a strength of 15,000, the 36th (Ulster) Division had suffered 5,104 casualties, including 2,069 dead.
These losses had come alongside astonishing bravery. Philip Gibbs, one of five official British war reporters during the conflict, wrote “their attack was one of the finest displays of human courage in the world”. Nine Victoria Crosses were awarded for the fighting on 1 July 1916, and four went to soldiers from the Ulster Division: Rifleman William McFadzean (Lurgan), 14th Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles; Lieutenant Geoffrey Cather (London), 9th Battalion, Royal Irish Fusiliers; Rifleman Robert Quigg (Ardihannon), 12th Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles; and Captain Eric Bell (Enniskillen), 9th Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. McFadzean and Bell had been killed that day, and Cather died the following day.
Captain Wilfred Spender, an Englishman who had been assistant quartermaster general of the UVF before the war and was a staff officer at the division’s headquarters, was quoted in The Times the following week.
I am not an Ulsterman, but yesterday as I followed their amazing attack I felt that I would rather be an Ulsterman than anything else in the world… my pen cannot describe adequately the hundreds of heroic acts that I witnessed… the Ulster Division has lost more than half the men who attacked.
This mixture of heroism and sacrifice became politically and religiously charged. One historian reported:
There was many who went over the top at the Somme who were Ulstermen, at least one, Sergeant Samuel Kelly of 9th Inniskillings wearing his Ulster Sash, while others wore orange ribbons.
Martin Middlebrook, who wrote a landmark history of the first day of the Somme in 1971, related the story of Major George Gaffikin, a company commander in the 9th Royal Irish Rifles, who saw his men wavering, took off the sash he had been wearing and held it high for them all to see, shouting “Come on, boys! No surrender!” A more recent history of the battle, citing the late Northern Irish historian Keith Jeffrey, dismisses these stories as myths, though frustratingly gives no more information. In any event, the fact that the stories were told and believed is indicative of the way in which the achievements of the division were framed.
The 36th (Ulster) Division, and soldiers from the province who served throughout the British Army in the First World War, are commemorated by the Ulster Memorial Tower at Thiepval, close to where the division fought during the Battle of the Somme. It was inaugurated on 19 November 1921 and is a close copy of Helen’s Tower, a 19th-century folly on the Clandeboye Estate near Bangor in County Down, where many of the soldiers of the Ulster Division had trained before being deployed to France. Its dedication reads as follows:
This Tower is Dedicated to the Glory of God in grateful memory of the Officers, Non-Commissioned Officers and Men of the 36th (Ulster) Division and of the Sons of Ulster in other forces who laid down their lives in the Great War, and of all their Comrades-In-Arms who, by Divine Grace, were spared to testify to their glorious deeds.
The inauguration ceremony was overseen by Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, a Longford Protestant with roots in Ulster who had originally been commissioned into the Royal Irish Regiment and was by then chief of the Imperial General Staff. He retired from the army at the beginning of 1922, was swiftly elected unopposed as Ulster Unionist MP for North Down at a by-election and became security adviser to the new government of Northern Ireland led by prime minister Sir James Craig. On 22 June Wilson was shot to death by two IRA gunmen outside his house in London.
John Buchan, the pioneering espionage writer, Unionist MP and governor general of Canada, wrote a history of the First World War in 1922. Describing the Battle of the Somme, he encapsulated the already-established legend of the 36th (Ulster) Division.
North of Thiepval the Ulster Division broke through the enemy trenches, passed the crest of the ridge, and reached the point called The Crucifix, in rear of the first German position. For a little they held the strong Schwaben Redoubt, which we were not to enter again till after three months of battle, and some even got into the outskirts of Grandcourt. It was the anniversary day of the Battle of the Boyne, and that charge when the men shouted “Remember the Boyne”, will be for ever a glorious page in the annals of Ulster. The splendid troops, drawn from those volunteers who had banded themselves together to defend their own freedom, now shed their blood like water for the liberty of the world.
Remember that the Battle of the Somme began nine weeks after the Easter Rising in Dublin, in which 1,250 rebels had defied the authority of the government and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The rising had been defeated after six days and its leaders were tried by courts martial in May: 16 were executed. It provided a stark contrast to events on the Somme for those who wanted to draw such a comparison.
All of this still matters today. The Ulster Division was instrumental in forging a Northern Irish Unionist identity, and is still a touchstone of Unionist history and iconography. Critically, the events of the Somme allowed Unionism to raise its cause above a sectarian struggle in Ireland towards which many in Britain were indifferent and connect it to the wider sacrifice of the United Kingdom and the British Empire during the First World War. It allowed the creation of a continuous narrative from the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 to the 1910s and 1920s, and that narrative was “British” and Protestant, and it was one of sober, unflinching sacrifice.
Certainly, the price paid by Ulster soldiers during the First World War made any idea of coercing Northern Ireland into a devolved or independent Irish state politically impossible. The result was the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which provided for the creation of two self-governing territories, Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, each with devolved parliaments and administrations subject to the nominal authority of the lord lieutenant of Ireland and remaining within the United Kingdom. Indeed, Wilfred Spender, writing on 3 July 1916, had made this case early on. He argued that the division:
has sacrificed itself for the Empire which has treated them none too well. The much derided Ulster Volunteer Force has won a name which equals any in History. Their devotion, which no doubt has helped the advance elsewhere, deserves the gratitude of the British Empire. It is due to the memory of these brave heroes that their beloved Province shall be fairly treated.
Lord Caine, under-secretary of state for Northern Ireland, today laid a wreath at Thiepval to commemorate the sacrifice of Ulster’s soldiers. There have been commemorations across Northern Ireland, including at Belfast City Hall, and parades by members of the Orange Order. Wilfred Spender’s tribute has been widely repeated on social media. But it remains politically controversial: some Nationalists and Republicans feel that it is a commemoration which excludes their community, and the roots of the Ulster Division in the UVF is often linked unflatteringly with the later loyalist paramilitary group also called the Ulster Volunteer Force formed in 1965: the (modern) UVF was the most murderous loyalist group, responsible for an estimated 569 deaths and some of the most grotesque atrocities of the Troubles. It is widely believed still to be involved in extensive criminality including drug dealing.
We started with a breakfast offer in Tesco cafés. But Jim Shannon’s allusion to the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme was not random, improbable or without resonance. The past is never past in Northern Ireland, and 1 July still matters.
The UVF certainly were prepared to prevent implementation of an Act of Parliament but they were formed before the Government of Ireland Act 1914 was passed. As for the 50,000 Nationalist Irishmen who died, I absolutely salute their sacrifice but this essay was not about them, it was about the symbolism of the Somme and the 36th (Ulster) Division for Unionism.
" ... this paramilitary organisation had been created in 1912 to defend against the possibility of Irish Home Rule ...". Would it be more accurate to say "to prevent the implementation of a lawful Act of Parliament"?
In the context of writing about the undoubted enormous sacrifice of the Ulster Division, would it not have been appropriate to mention that at least 50,000 Irishmen of the nationalist persuasion also died fighting for the rights of small nations in World Was I?