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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Epigraphs

James Connolly

Preface by Des Geraghty

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Part I: Edinburgh 1868–1882

Chapter 1: Child of the Cowgate

Part II: Ireland 1882–1889: Soldier

Chapter 2: In the Service of the Queen

Part III: Edinburgh 1889–1896: Social Democrat

Chapter 3: Capitalism and Class Struggle

Chapter 4: The Making of a Socialist

Part IV: Dublin 1896–1903: Revolutionist

Chapter 5: Forerunners

Chapter 6: Irish Socialist Republican Party

Chapter 7: The End and the Means

Chapter 8: Agitate Educate Organise

Chapter 9: The Workers’ Republic

Chapter 10: The Politics of Labour

Chapter 11: Agitator

Chapter 12: Split

Part V: America 1903–1910: Syndicalist

Chapter 13: Socialist Labor Party of America

Chapter 14: Industrial Workers of the World

Chapter 15: Irish Socialist Federation

Chapter 16: Socialist Party of America

Chapter 17: Call of Erin

Part VI: Writings

Chapter 18: Labour, Nationality and Religion

Chapter 19: Labour in Irish History

Chapter 20: Songs of Freedom

Part VII: Ireland 1910–1916, The Red and the Green: Revolutionary Socialist – Insurrectionist

Chapter 21: Socialist Party of Ireland

Chapter 22: Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union

Chapter 23: Industrial Unionism

Chapter 24: Political Action

Chapter 25: Connolly–Walker Controversy

Chapter 26: Uprising

Chapter 27: Home Rule

Chapter 28: War

Chapter 29: Successor to Larkin

Chapter 30: The Re-Conquest of Ireland

Chapter 31: Irish Citizen Army

Chapter 32: The Time is Ripe

Chapter 33: Banners of Revolt

Chapter 34: Signposts to the Revolution

Chapter 35: Preparations for Insurrection

Chapter 36: Easter Week

Chapter 37: Aftermath

Part VIII: Revolutionary Thinker

Chapter 38: Connolly and Catholicism

Chapter 39: Recollections

Chapter 40: Assessment

Appendices

I. Letters to Lillie Reynolds

II. Writings of James Connolly

III. Irish Citizen Army and the Easter Rising

IV. Connolly and the British Army

V. Connolly in Fiction and Drama

Notes and References

Sources

Bibliography

Abbreviations

Tributes

By the same author

About the Author

About Gill & Macmillan

PREFACE

James Connolly has a special place in the hearts and minds of the Irish people. Though physically small, Connolly remains a titanic figure in the history of modern Ireland. As an effective labour leader, he helped to shape the modern Irish trade union movement. In a lifetime of struggle he managed to combine a visionary socialism with a hard-headed and practical realism about what it was possible to achieve in any engagement. His insightful understanding of Irish history in Labour in Irish History helped to dispel much of the mythology surrounding the prevailing concerns for kings, lords and ladies and replaced it with the assertion that the ‘Irish Question’ was fundamentally a social question.

During a life of virtually unrelenting hardship and struggle he demonstrated remarkable ability to analyse and debate the major issues of the day with all-comers. His controversial views regularly evoked responses from friend and foe alike but Connolly continued to use public discourse to raise the consciousness of workers about the issues of the day. Many of his views on Labour, Nationality and Religion, on the Workers’ Republic, on the Co-operative Commonwealth, or War and Peace have echoes in today’s world and continue to be debated vigorously across the globe.

Although best remembered as an Irish patriot and martyr for the cause, after his execution by a British firing squad on 12 May 1916, Connolly deserves to be remembered more for his life than for his death. At different stages in his development he demonstrated a commitment to a variety of tendencies, for example socialist agitator, militant syndicalist, radical republican or anti-war activist, yet he displayed a remarkable consistency in favour of the poor and oppressed of all nations.

His views cannot be readily transposed into today’s world or used as an unerring guide to modern struggles but his vision and his values remain remarkably relevant to our society. They are particularly important for the labour movement. I hope the availability of his writings now will stimulate even greater debate about Connolly’s vision and assist a thoroughly informed, critical and constructive appraisal of the present ‘Republic’ and the people who inhabit it.

In Connolly’s words:

Ireland without its people is nothing to me, and the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for ‘Ireland’ and can pass unmoved through our streets and witness all the wrong and suffering, the shame and degradation wrought upon the people of Ireland, aye wrought by Irishmen upon Irish men and women without burning to end it, is in my opinion a fraud and a liar in his heart.

That is the challenge for our generation.

Des Geraghty
General President SIPTU 1999–2003

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Coming to this biography of James Connolly the reader may well ask why another biography, given that there have been eight over the past eighty years: Desmond Ryan (1924), R.M. Fox (1946), C. Desmond Greaves (1961), Proinsias Mac An Bheatha (1963), Samuel Levenson (1978), Carl Reeve and Ann Barton Reeve (1978), Seán Cronin (1978) and Austen Morgan (1988). There have also been a number of monographs notably by Owen Dudley Edwards (1971), Ruth Dudley Edwards (1981) and J.C. Hyland (1997) not to mention numerous political commentaries.

This biography has been constructed on three pillars – the first being Connolly’s letters, the second, his writings and the third, Greaves’s masterly work, The Life and Times of James Connolly, one of the great Irish biographies of the second half of the twentieth century.

In using Connolly’s writings and the more than 200 letters of his that survive, in the writing of this biography, it is hoped that the work might be seen to resemble an autobiography. Connolly’s letters throw much light on aspects of his personality and temperament. In them he is frank about his relationships with his colleagues, caustically critical of their shortcomings and inactivity and ever ready to dispute opinions contrary to his own.

Connolly’s unshakeable faith in the ability of the working class to rise up, shake off the shackles of capitalist oppression and build a new society based on co-operation and community action emerges vividly from the letters. Likewise his firm belief that the international solidarity of the workers would prevail and that the workers of the world would indeed unite under the banner of socialism. These convictions, manifest in his letters, Connolly maintained throughout his life.

The second pillar of this biography, Connolly’s writings, have led to him being described by Professor John A. Murphy as ‘a brilliant polemicist’, by Professor R.F. Foster as ‘a gifted writer’ and by George Dangerfield as ‘a master of polemical prose’.

Throughout an active political life spanning a quarter of a century, Connolly was a prolific writer and journalist contributing an editorial and other articles to almost every one of the more than one hundred issues of the Workers’ Republic which he edited between 1898 and 1903. It was the same with The Harp, published in America between 1908 and 1910, and the second series of the Workers’ Republic in 1915–16. He also contributed to some twenty-four other journals in Ireland, Scotland, England, France and America. These extensive writings are a major resource, demonstrating the evolution of his industrial and political ideas over two decades. Extracts from them constitute a major part of this biography and help to establish that Connolly was, in Professor J.J. Lee’s words, ‘probably the most remarkable thinker produced in twentieth-century Ireland’.

Greaves’s pioneering research over ten years, his tracking down and recording the recollections of so many of Connolly’s colleagues from Scotland, England, Ireland and America, and his unearthing of an abundance of valuable material from contemporary papers and journals, puts in his debt anyone who writes of Connolly and his life’s work. This writer freely acknowledges his debt to Greaves’s work. The Life and Times of James Connolly was described in 1961 by Roy Jenkins (later the President of the European Commission, and himself a notable biographer of political figures) as ‘a generously proportioned life’ whose general note was one of ‘careful scholarship’ with few facts about Connolly and the events in which he participated which were not sifted and considered.

James Connolly wrote in Forward, 9 May 1914, that ‘human nature is a wonderful thing, that the soul of man knows what powers or possibilities for good or evil lie in humanity,’ adding that he tried to preserve his receptivity towards all new ideas, tolerance towards all manifestations of social activity. His writings and his letters establish the honesty and integrity of Connolly’s thinking and his actions in a world that was changing so radically and so rapidly over the twenty-five years of intense activity dedicated to the pursuit – even to the death – of his vision of a socialist future for humanity.

As Professor Thomas Duddy has noted in his recent A History of Irish Thought, Connolly’s thought was nearly always a response to developing circumstances rather than to theoretically dogmatic or discursive concern. Connolly’s originality, Professor Duddy wrote, consisted precisely in his preparedness to be eclectic and adaptable in his response to local events and conditions, particularly in his avoidance of dogmatic or schematic thought.

The writer trusts that this volume does justice to James Connolly – social democrat – revolutionist – syndicalist – revolutionary socialist – insurrectionist: James Connolly, labourer, soldier, agitator, propagandist, organiser, orator, editor, pamphleteer, writer, historian, trade union official, insurrectionist.

I am greatly indebted to many people for the help, guidance, information and, not least, the valued advice given so generously. Shirley Cosgrave had the unenviable task of deciphering hand-written drafts and revisions while contributing valuable editorial advice to the author. Theresa Moriarty, Carol Murphy and Anne Nevin gave considerable research and archival assistance over an extended period. Francis Devine and Manus O’Riordan were ever-ready to give any help sought and provide information and advice. Des Geraghty, then General President of SIPTU and Tom Dunne, facilitator extraordinary, were unstinting in their encouragement and support.

For help in locating books, papers and documents I wish to thank the staff of the National Library of Ireland and in particular Dónall Ó Luanaigh, Keeper of Collections and Kevin Browne, Library Administration; Dr Jack McGinley and Dr Jane Maxwell (TCD Library), Gerard Whelan (RDS Library), Theresa Moriarty (Irish Labour History Museum and Archives), Comdt Victor Laing and Comdt Dermot O’Connor (Military Archives, Dublin). I thank the Indian Embassy in Dublin for their efforts to locate material relating to Connolly’s service in the British Army.

I thank the following who provided information and facilitated research: David Begg (Irish Congress of Trade Unions), Audrey Canning (University of Strathclyde), Mary Clarke (City Archivist, Dublin City Library and Archives), Helen Clarke (Keeper of Social History, City of Edinburgh Council), Mairéad Delany (Abbey Theatre Archives), Joseph J. Dolan (Board Chairman) and Rebecca Palmer (Irish American Heritage Museum, Albany, New York), Edith Philip (Librarian, Scottish United Services Museum, Edinburgh), Ann Rix (Central City Library, Edinburgh), Dr Isolde Victory (Senior Library Clerk, House of Lords Library, London).

As regards the illustrations in the print book, I am particularly grateful to Seamus Shiels (SIPTU) and Kevin Browne (National Library of Ireland) for their invaluable assistance and advice, to Deirdre Price (SIPTU) and photographers Tommy Clancy, David Monaghan and Kevin Cooper.

Many colleagues and friends helped in various ways, giving advice and encouragement, providing information. I mention particularly William J. Blease (Lord Blease of Cromac), John Brady, SJ, Eddie Bray, Hilda Larkin Breslin, Charlie Callan, Joe Deasy, Barry Desmond, Hugh Geraghty, Jean Kennedy, Fr Leonard, OFM Cap., the late Professor Patrick Lynch, Rev. Terence McCaughey, Jack McGinley, Tom Morrissey, SJ, Tom Murphy, Shivaun O’Casey, Ulick O’Connor, Michael O’Halloran, Deirdre Price, Seamus Sheils, T.K. Whitaker, Gerry Whyte. I am also grateful to Fergal Tobin, Publishing Director, Deirdre Rennison Kunz, Managing Editor, and their colleagues at Gill & Macmillan.

I thank my wife, Maura, for her forbearance and patience over the long gestation period of this work.

I am grateful and proud that this work has been sponsored by SIPTU and for this I thank the general officers of the union: Jack O’Connor (General President), Brendan Hayes (Vice-President) and Joe O’Flynn (General Secretary). SIPTU has contributed generously to the cost of publishing this substantial volume.

SIPTU is also sponsoring the publication of James Connolly’s collected writings including his letters. These are being edited and annotated by myself with the assistance of SIPTU colleagues, Francis Devine, Theresa Moriarty, Carol Murphy and Manus O’Riordan. The first volume will include letters of James Connolly from 1888 to 1916 in the National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Library and the Irish Labour History Museum as well as letters in a number of private collections. Some 234 letters written by James Connolly will be included together with the full correspondence between James Connolly (in America) and John Carstairs Matheson (in Scotland) between 1906 and 1909.

Subsequent volumes will include Connolly’s writings in some twenty-six journals in England, Scotland, Ireland, France and America between 1893 and 1916. Connolly’s major works, Socialism Made Easy (1909), Labour in Irish History (1910) and Labour, Nationality and Religion (1910) will be published in a separate volume.

While researching this biography, the author discovered that James Connolly, a soldier in the King’s Liverpool Regiment, was almost certainly stationed for a time in the 1880s in Ship Street Barracks, in the Lower Castle Yard, Dublin Castle, later the offices of the Statistics Branch of the Department of Industry and Commerce (now the Central Statistics Office) where the author worked in the 1940s.

Donal Nevin

PART I

Edinburgh 1868–1882

For a’that and a’that
It’s coming yet for a’that
That man to man the world o’er
Shall brithers be for a’that.

ROBERT BURNS

C’est la lutte finale,
Groupons-nous et demain
L’Internationale sera le genre humain.

Is í an troid scoir í a bhráithre
Éirimís chun gniomh an tInternationale
Snaidhm comhair an cine daonna.

EUGENE POTTIER
(TRANSLATION BY MÁIRTÍN Ó CADHAIN)

What is this the sound and rumour? What is

this that all men hear,

Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm

is drawing near.

Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear?

’Tis the people marching on.

WILLIAM MORRIS

Chapter 1

CHILD OF THE COWGATE

In W.P. Ryan’s The Irish Labour Movement from the ’Twenties to our own Day, published in 1919, it is stated that Connolly was born near Clones in Co. Monaghan on 5 June 1870 and that his family emigrated to Edinburgh in 1880. Ryan knew Connolly well as a friend and colleague and as a contributor to his paper, The Peasant. When Ryan’s son, Desmond, came to write the first biography of Connolly in 1924 he repeated that he had been born in Clones in 1870 and that he had passed ten years of his childhood in the north of Ireland. Desmond, who was in his early twenties when he wrote James Connolly: His Life, Work and Writings, knew Connolly and was with him in the GPO in Easter Week 1916 when he acted as secretary to Patrick Pearse. In 1951 he told Desmond Greaves that his father had collected much of the material for the book and that it was given to him when he fell ill and had to relinquish his job as a journalist with the Freeman’s Journal.

So it was that the myth of Connolly’s birth in Monaghan in 1870 came to be accepted as fact despite many fruitless searches of birth records. The details of the actual birth place and birth date of James Connolly were ultimately discovered by Desmond Greaves and published, along with a facsimile of Connolly’s birth entry, in the Irish Democrat in March 1951. In an article in the same journal in 1968, Greaves recalled his search.¹ In 1951, he had gone to Edinburgh to try and trace Connolly’s early connections with that city. The then secretary of the Trades Council showed him the minutes for the years 1891–6 which contained many references to a J. Connolly. The City Treasurer showed him the City Council’s minutes for the same period. Here it was indicated that a John Connolly had been dismissed for political reasons from his job as a carter. There was nothing about James. He next visited Len Cotton, secretary of the Socialist Labour Party, a man then in his early seventies who had preserved all the records of the SLP. A search of the files of The Socialist (the organ of the SLP, first issued in 1902) revealed nothing about Connolly’s early life. Cotton sent Greaves to Charles Geddes, a leading figure in the setting up of the SLP, who introduced him to an old man, John Conlon, a once close friend of John Connolly. Conlon lived at the top of a spiral staircase lit by dim gaslights which he said had been installed as a result of one of James Connolly’s campaigns. He spoke about John Connolly (James’ brother), who had enlisted and gone to India under the name of John Reid, and about the Scottish Land and Labour League ‘that we all came from’. He asked Greaves, ‘with a bright twinkle in his eye: Did you ever hear where James Connolly was born?’ Turning to Geddes he said, ‘He was born in the Cowgate.’ A search of the birth entries revealed that Connolly was born on 5 June 1868, in the Cowgate, Edinburgh. Afterwards, an old friend of John Leslie who had introduced Connolly to socialist politics in Edinburgh in 1890, H.A. Scott, searched the census records and established that the birth entry referred to the right man. Greaves later discovered that H.W. Lee had given Edinburgh as Connolly’s birthplace in his History of the Social Democratic Federation.

According to Greaves, John Connolly and Mary McGinn, both twenty-three years old, were married by Fr Alexander O’Donnell of St Patrick’s Church in the Cowgate, Edinburgh, in the priest’s house at 17 Brown Square on 20 October 1856.² The two witnesses, Myles Clarke and Mary Carthy, being illiterate, each signed the register with a cross. Little is known of the newly-married couple’s parents. John Connolly described himself as an agricultural labourer and Mary McGinn, a domestic servant. The surviving parents were Mary Connolly (born Markie) and James McGinn, a labourer. The deceased parents were John Connolly, a farm labourer and Maria McGinn (maiden name Burns). John Connolly was born in Ireland and James McGinn and his wife, Bridget Boyle, in Co. Monaghan. By 1858, John Connolly was living at 6 Kingstable, Edinburgh and was employed by the Corporation as a manure carter. Three years later he was involved in a scavengers’ strike which secured for the workers a wage of fifteen shillings a week. His first son, also named John, was born on 31 January 1862. A second son, Thomas, was born in Campbell’s Close, Cowgate on 27 April 1866. The youngest son, James, was born in lodgings at 107 Cowgate on 5 June 1868. Later the family went to live at No. 2A Kingstable, Edinburgh. The Cowgate, a continuation of the Grassmarket, was in the Old Town, close to Edinburgh University. St Patrick’s parish, Little Ireland, as it was called, was a densely-packed parish in which 14,000 Irish immigrants lived in poverty in slum tenements where disease was rampant. (The site of the tenement in which Connolly was born is now the Herriot Watt University.)

The three sons went to school at St Patrick’s on the Cowgate. John spent some years in various employments and at about 14 years of age enlisted in the army. Thomas Connolly worked for a time in Edinburgh as a compositor’s labourer. Nothing is known about his subsequent employment. It is likely that he emigrated.

The well-researched information about James Connolly’s early years given by Greaves in The Life and Times of James Connolly indicates that the first verifiable job held by him was in a bakery at the age of ten but it has been suggested that before that he had spent a year or so in the office of the Edinburgh Evening News where his older brother worked. W.P. Ryan tells the story that when the Factory Inspector visited the works, James was put sitting on a high stool behind a case of type. The stratagem was discovered and he was dismissed as he was not yet of the age at which boys could legally be employed.³ His work in the bakery seems to have lasted about two years. W.P. Ryan, who appears to have got his information from John Leslie, an associate of James’ brother, John, states that as a result of the rigours of his work in the bakery, his health failed. He then got a job in a mosaic tiles depot, working there for about a year.

James Connolly’s boyhood in Edinburgh was one of deprivation, harsh poverty, grim housing conditions and hard toil. He had little schooling and from the age of nine earned paltry wages to help keep the family above the bread-line. Such conditions were the common lot of the children of casual labourers in the cities of Britain, as in Dublin and Belfast, in the 1870s.

Little is known about Connolly’s uncles or aunts. W.P. Ryan refers to an uncle, an old Fenian, influencing him on Irish affairs. There seems to be little foundation for this family tradition. Ina Connolly, a daughter of James Connolly, refers to her grandfather’s brother being obliged to flee to Scotland where he found work with Edinburgh Corporation and that it was through him that John Connolly obtained employment with the Corporation. She remembered her uncle, Peter Connolly, visiting the family in Belfast in 1912 when he sought to persuade her father to go with him to Co. Monaghan in order to sign over the small family holding to him as the lease had run out. Her father refused to go as he was then involved in a strike in Larne.⁴

Little imagination is required to conjure up an image of the brutally hard times endured by the Connolly family in their various lodgings and tenements in Edinburgh in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Mary Connolly, chronically bronchial, died at the age of 58 in 1891. John survived a further nine years, dying of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1900. He had suffered a serious accident in 1889 and subsequently worked as a caretaker of a public convenience in the Haymarket. His last years were spent in great poverty. There are no records to indicate James Connolly’s relationship with his mother who had died little more than a year after her son’s return to Edinburgh after an absence of some seven years. Nora Connolly, James Connolly’s second eldest daughter, remembered her grandfather as ‘a tall man with a red curly beard’ when she visited him in 1898 with her father. She remembered too her father rushing from Dublin when his father became terminally ill, and staying until after the funeral.⁵

In The Harp (June 1908), Connolly described how as a boy ‘his father would set him to do ten minutes work and find him an hour after, sitting dreaming, with the job not yet commenced.’ He told his daughter, Nora, how ‘the light of the fire served as illumination and when the fire was going out, I couldn’t read.’ Nora also recalled her father speaking of his experience while working in the bakery where the work lasted from six in the morning till late at night: ‘the few shillings I could get were needed at home. Often I would pray fervently that I would find the place burnt down when I got there.’ At night he suffered nightmares. It was the conditions he endured as a boy that probably caused his squint and poor eyesight; his short stature and his slimness into his thirties, and stoutness in middle age, may have been caused by a glandular disorder, according to Connolly’s biographer, Austen Morgan, who added that he bore signs too of having had rickets as a result of vitamin deficiency in his early years.⁶ Sean O’Casey, in Drums Under the Window, described Connolly as having ‘a rather awkward carriage’ with bow legs adding to the waddle in his walk.⁷

The 1881 British census return from 2A King’s Stables, Edinburgh where the Connolly family resided, shows four persons in the household: John (a 47-year-old carter born in Ireland), Mary (his wife, aged 44 and also born in Ireland), Thomas (a son, printer-compositor apprentice, aged 15), and James (a son, baker’s apprentice, aged 13). Both Thomas and James were registered as born in Edinburgh. (The third son, John, had by this time enlisted in the British army.)

Source: Fintan Lane, Saothar 28, 2003.

PART II

Ireland 1882–1889
Soldier

The standing army in any country is a tool in the hands of the oppressor of the people and is a generator of prostitution: the British army is in this particular the most odious on the face of the earth.

JAMES CONNOLLY, THE WORKERS’ REPUBLIC, 15 JULY 1899

The Army is, in plain matter-of-fact language, what the Socialists so blatantly describe it to be, viz. a body of hired assassins.

The army is a veritable moral cesspool of corruption all within its bounds, and exuding forth a miasma of pestilence upon every spot so unfortunate as to be cursed by its presence.

JAMES CONNOLLY, THE WORKERS’ REPUBLIC, 21 OCTOBER 1899