The Pleasure Culture of War in Independent Ireland,1922–1945

I

In focusing on the establishment of the Irish Free State and its own defence forces, historians have paid little attention to the fact that recruitment to the British forces continued well after Irish independence. In recent years, however, this situation has begun to be addressed by a small but growing number of scholars. Keith Jeffery has demonstrated that partition and de facto independence did not stop southern Irishmen from joining the British army. He has found that a substantial proportion of the manpower of the regiments based in Northern Ireland was from the Free State and that the army was keen to maintain its all-Ireland recruiting area. ⁸

Indeed, during the 1930s there was a noticeable upward trend in recruitment to the British forces, caused mainly by the effects of the depression and the ‘Economic War’ with Britain. ⁹ In 1936 the Admiralty reported that in 1931 only 33 of the Royal Navy’s recruits came from the Irish Free State, but that by 1935 this had increased to 287. ¹⁰ Although the British army’s general annual reports did not record the number of recruits from the Free State, it stated the proportion of non-commissioned officers and men born in Ireland (both north and south). This rose from 4.9 per cent, or 8,843 soldiers, in 1930 to 5.7 per cent, or 10,482, in 1938. This increased Irish proportion in the army understated the actual growth in recruitment, as it did not take into account the number of Irish being discharged each year after completion of service. Nonetheless it indicates that at least several thousand Irish people enlisted during the 1930s. During the same period the proportion of English soldiers in the army fell from 80.6 per cent to 75.7 per cent. However, Scotland performed better than Ireland with 8 per cent of the army’s strength in 1930 rising to 9.8 per cent by 1938, which was proportionate to its share of the population of the British Isles (9.9 per cent). ¹¹ With 8.6 per cent of the population Ireland was under-represented in the British army, yet considering that most of the island had recently separated from Britain after a war against the same army, it is impressive that the Irish proportion increased at all. Moreover, in 1936 the British chiefs of staff reported to the cabinet that 530 southern Irishmen enlisted in the British army during the financial year 1935/36, and that:

At the present time the Army could ill afford to lose this annual number of recruits and if additional battalions are to be added to the Royal Ulster Rifles and the Royal Irish Fusiliers we shall rely upon an increased number of recruits from the Irish Free State. ¹²

It is not known exactly how many Irish volunteers served in the British forces from 1939 to 1945 because of the unreliability of figures collated by the War Office, Admiralty, and Air Ministry, which were not always based on place of birth but sometimes on address previous to enlistment. ¹³ However, this unsatisfactory situation has recently been addressed. Since it was known that within the British army the ratio of dead to serving soldiers was 1 in 22, ascertaining the figure for Irish war dead could lead to an overall figure for the Irish contribution. Rigorous research by Yvonne McEwen has enabled her to establish that 2,241 volunteers from the north had died, while the figure for the south was 2,302. When multiplied by 22 this gave an estimated total of 49,302 army recruits from the north and 50,644 from the south. ¹⁴ There are no similarly researched figures for Irish volunteers in the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, but on the basis of British and Irish records Brian Girvin estimates that in total 60,000–70,000 southern Irish people joined the wartime British forces. ¹⁵

In investigating their motives most historians agree that, as in previous periods, there was no single decisive factor; rather, there was a combination of reasons for Irish enlistment, ranging from loyalty, peer pressure, family tradition, and idealism to the need for employment, a sense of adventure, and the appeal of travel. ¹⁶ This consensus on the multiplicity of motives has been reinforced by studies of other groups of transnational volunteers. For example, in studying American recruits to the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, Michael Jackson has looked beyond the common explanation that they were convinced leftists motivated purely by ideological reasons. He has detected ‘a common restlessness, a loneliness’. In a time of economic dislocation and social mobilization some young men were looking for a cause: as Jackson puts it, they were ‘available for recruitment’. ¹⁷ The Spanish Civil War represented an opportunity to act on their anger at dislocation and a hatred of capitalism and fascism. Other volunteers’ reasons revealed that the pull factor of adventure was often accompanied by the push factor of boredom with life at home; thus some went to Spain ‘so as not to be left out’ and to ‘participate’ in history. ¹⁸ The same pattern could be observed among Irish volunteers in Spain. Robert Stradling has shown that it was not only a strong sense of loyalty to Catholicism which mobilized the members of Eoin O’Duffy’s brigade to fight for General Franco; many also had a yearning for adventure. O’Duffy was aware of the popularity of Foreign Legion adventure films such as Beau Geste: he appeared in a cinema newsreel in which he appealed to the sense of adventure and martial reputation of the Irish by reminding young cinema audiences of the ‘Wild Geese’ soldiers who had served in the Irish regiments of the Spanish army in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ¹⁹

Irish volunteers in the Second World War mirrored this multiplicity of motives. In describing his and others’ motives, Sean Deegan asserted ‘we were just in it for the adventure, in it for the training, it was a wonderful opportunity to get away from Ireland at that time because it was so restrictive then and money was scarce’. ²⁰ Here again we see the pull of adventure and the push of unemployment and a restrictive atmosphere at home. Nevertheless, it is important to note the supremacy of the adventure motive, for if it were simply a question of acquiring ‘money’ and ‘training’, Deegan could have joined the thousands of other economic migrants who were finding work in the British war industries. Ultimately, it was his desire for adventure which led him to the RAF. Recent studies of Irish veterans of the 1939–45 war have similarly stressed the importance of the adventure motive. Having analysed a sample of 57 oral history interviews with veterans, Jeremy Jenkins has found that ‘the common factor with numerous volunteers was an over-arching desire for adventure’. ²¹ In the same vein, Bernard Kelly’s extensive use of interviews and other primary sources has led him to conclude that ‘One of the dominant reasons’ was ‘the wish to see some action’. ²² But in spite of highlighting the prominence of this desire for adventure, no research has examined how and why young Irish people growing up in the aftermath of the Great War and the War of Independence continued to see service with the British forces in such a positive light.

The idea that war was attractive to young people seeking excitement and adventure was not a new one, but its preponderance in the modern era was down to more than just youthful inexperience and naivety. Since the emergence of children as a distinctive commercial market in Britain in the 1870s, imperial adventure literature that romanticized and glorified war had flourished, and there was a market not only for books and comics but also for toys and the paraphernalia of war play, to such an extent that many boys became immersed in what Graham Dawson has called a ‘pleasure culture of war’. ²³ Dawson has argued that this culture was essential in fostering ‘the militaristic spirit without which wars for national or imperial motives would not receive popular support’. ²⁴ Thus, it seems that the pleasure culture of war advanced the process of mobilizing belligerent societies in 1914: John Horne has noted that ‘Popular support for the war, initially at least, stemmed from persuasion, and self persuasion, much more than from coercion.’ ²⁵ The massive losses subsequently suffered on both sides during the Great War led to public disillusionment with the incompetence of military and political leaders, and to disgust with the apparent waste and futility of war – views that were given expression to by the post-war pacifist movements and the publication of anti-war poetry and novels. Such feelings could only have been stronger in post-1922 Irish society, where the prevalent nationalist view regarded the tens of thousands of Irish war fatalities as a tragic waste of Ireland’s manhood, duped into fighting for a foreign imperial cause while a small band of their compatriots won Irish freedom by successfully resisting that same empire. ²⁶

In reality, however, pacifism and bitter disillusionment were only two of many responses to the war in interwar Britain. Cultural historians have focused disproportionately on sources from high culture, such as the writings of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, but their work had a limited circulation between the wars. ²⁷ On the other hand, the interwar period saw the mass market for juvenile literature and cinema increase dramatically. Throughout the 1930s the most successful films and novels were imperial adventures in which ‘war was always portrayed as righteous, justified and, in most cases, heroic, exciting and romantic’, while boys’ weeklies such as Chums and Champion continued to encourage the martial spirit through their rousing battle narratives and recruiting propaganda for the British armed forces. ²⁸

And in contrast with the views of the Free State nationalist elite, these products of Anglo-American popular culture were enthusiastically received by many sections of the Irish juvenile market. It has been possible to identify and analyse this trend by referring to several rarely used sources on Irish popular culture, such as Eason’s Monthly Bulletin of Trade News, cinema financial records at the Irish Film Archive, and the duration of film runs as recorded in the national and regional press. ²⁹ Thus it seems that Irish boys, in their hunger for ‘thrilling adventure stories on land, sea and air’, were no different from their British counterparts. ³⁰ Of course, such explicitly British cultural influences on Irish children were counterbalanced by cultural organizations such as the Gaelic Athletics Association (GAA), which recovered its popularity as a mass movement after the divisions of the Civil War. The entanglement of sports with the politics of national identity had led the GAA to ban members from playing or watching ‘garrison games’, such as soccer, hockey, cricket, and rugby. ³¹ However, it is worth noting that there was no ban forbidding members from enjoying British war films, boys’ weeklies, or Biggles books. This article will not argue that all Irish recruits to the British forces were influenced by such cultural output, nor that all or even a majority of the young Irish people who watched British war films wanted to join the British forces. Rather, for a significant number of the Irish people who did decide to enlist, their willingness to do so and their expectations of what it would bring were conditioned by their exposure to the ‘pleasure culture of war’ imported directly from Britain and America.

II

In the second half of the nineteenth century Britain was on the defensive strategically, being challenged by Germany, France, and Russia. Moreover, the events of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny highlighted the need for military preparedness – and this need enhanced the role of war and the military in popular culture. The ballads and stories of Rudyard Kipling, Henry Newbolt, and G.A. Henty, among others, transformed the experience of war into romantic and chivalric stories for the entertainment of the young, but they were more than just escapist adventures. They promoted patriotism, manliness, and a simplistic imperial worldview that emphasized duty and the need for sacrifice if the British Empire was to endure. ³²

These heroic and patriotic themes in children’s literature continued throughout the Great War and beyond. Serving officers who used their experiences to glorify duty and sacrifice in their wartime novels, such as Lieutenant Colonel F.S. Brereton, provided, as Jeffrey Richards remarks, ‘instant “Hentyfication” of the Great War’. ³³ Similarly, the editorial stance of the Boy’s Own Paper was robustly pro-war: readers were urged to support the Boy Scouts, join the rifle clubs, and practise drill. From January 1915 it carried a serialized story, For England and the Right! A Tale of the War in Belgium. This imperial adventure literature had also penetrated the youth market in Ireland. For example, the short-story writer Frank O’Connor (born 1903) recalled that during his childhood in Cork he was immersed in imperial fictions. He read boys’ weeklies such as The Gem, The Magnet, and the Boy’s Own Paper, and he was enthralled by the ‘imperial motherland’ that they depicted. ³⁴ In his memoirs Sean O’Faoláin (born 1900) also recognized the prevalence of such weeklies in providing a frame of reference for Irish boys. He remembered his schoolmates’ attachment to the leading characters in the weeklies, such as Tom Brown, Bob Cherry, Tom Merry: ‘those heroes who were always leading Greyfriars School or Blackfriars School to victory on the cricket field amid the cap tossing huzzas of the juniors and admiring smiles of the visiting parents’. ³⁵

Irish nationalists resented this literature, along with other examples of British popular culture such as the popular press, the music hall, and cinema. Particularly objectionable was the imperial frame of reference in British boys’ weeklies, and consequently there were efforts to create an alternative example of manliness for Irish youths. In 1914 the Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order, founded Our Boys to spread their nationalist mantra of ‘faith and fatherland’. Their adventure stories painted a different picture of the national experience, where Irish heroes fought English injustices during the Elizabethan and Cromwellian conquests, and the 1798 rebellion. ³⁶ Our Boys was successful in competing with the British weeklies, establishing a market for itself among the sons of Catholic nationalists, and according to C.S. Andrews, a veteran of the independence struggle, the Christian Brothers were a central influence on many of those who later joined the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and other nationalist organizations. ³⁷ Some Irish writers were also successful in publishing popular home-grown adventure stories, such as Daniel Corkery’s The Hounds of Banba (1920) and Maurice Walsh’s Blackcock’s Feathers (1932), while exciting autobiographical accounts of the War of Independence and Civil War, such as Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom (1924) and Ernie O’Malley’s On Another Man’s Wound (1936), became massive bestsellers. ³⁸ Yet in spite of these indigenous efforts, interest in British popular culture did not decline after Irish independence but increased.

III

In 1926 the circulation of the News of the World in the Irish Free State was estimated to be 132,444, ³⁹ and D.P. Moran, proponent of the Irish Ireland philosophy, warned in The Leader that ‘the disorganisation and disillusionment of very recent years has not only weakened the feeling against filthy papers, but like the fashion for objectionable dancing, the appetite for dirty papers, we fear, has grown’. ⁴⁰ Similarly, the prestige of British, and increasingly American, adventure fiction continued to rise during the 1920s and 1930s. Elizabeth Russell’s survey of popular reading material found that many Irish families combined a ‘soft nationalist diet’ of weekly magazines, such as Ireland’s Own, Green and Gold, and The Irish Catholic, with an insatiable appetite for western and romance novels. ⁴¹ Significantly, when the campaign by Moran and the Catholic Truth Society eventually led the government to set up a literary censorship board, it focused exclusively on the morally corrupting and obscene influences of foreign newspapers and novels. ⁴² In spite of its professed desire to protect national identity, the Irish Ireland movement took no interest in the foreign adventures of Texan cowboys or English schoolboys and their potential to influence the formation of young adults.

In ‘A Catholic Reader of the Thirties’, Isabel Quigly, who grew up in Britain but is of Irish descent, emphasized that:

Books mattered, when I was a child. They were central to our lives: they created our culture, our interests, our outlook, our cult figures, our jokes. They influenced our talk and our feelings about the world, they were pervasive, sought for, discussed. Roughly, I suppose they held the sort of place that pop music and television hold in the lives of today’s young. ⁴³

Her father had her reading Henty at the age of 7, and at 12, along with her schoolmates, she was following the adventures of Horatio Hornblower in the Napoleonic Wars: ‘For a whole term, at mealtimes, we discussed in minutest detail the Hornblower stories: motives, minor characters, turns of the plots.’ ⁴⁴ Quigly’s childhood reading reminds one not only of the prevalence of adventure fiction, but also that girls were as susceptible as boys to such excitement. George Orwell would have agreed with Quigly’s view about the importance of books: in his 1940 essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ he complained that the continued glorification of war was ‘sodden in the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no impression behind.’ ⁴⁵ Significantly, not only were Brereton’s Great War novels still in print until the Second World War, but among the regular contributors to Chums during the interwar years were officers who turned their experiences from the Boer War and the Great War into heroic fiction, such as Captain Oswald Dallas, Major Charles Gilson, and Major Lionel Metford. All of these authors had been immersed, as youngsters, in the literature of popular imperialism during the 1880s and 1890s, and through their writings these concepts survived to influence the generation that would fight the next world war. ⁴⁶

A valuable source for understanding popular print culture in the Free State is Eason’s Monthly Bulletin of Trade News. This trade bulletin was started by Eason’s in 1925 in its capacity as Ireland’s largest wholesaler and distributor of newspapers, books, and stationery. The bulletin sought to advise Eason’s 1,500 bookshop and newsagent clients on current market trends, forthcoming titles, and display techniques. A survey from 1925 to 1939 indicates some clear favourites of the Irish juvenile market. Competing successfully with Zane Grey’s wild westerns for Irish boys’ attention were Captain P.C. Wren’s French Foreign Legion adventures, the most successful of which, Beau Geste (1924), went through 18 printings in its first 18 months and was made into a film twice in the interwar period. The Irish Times described it as ‘That remarkable tale of life in the French Foreign Legion – of dark mysteries of desert forts and of the splendid courage and comradeship of English brothers.’ ⁴⁷

Percival Christopher Wren was an Oxford graduate who had served as a headmaster in various Indian schools and was briefly a member of the Indian Army reserve of officers during the Great War. ⁴⁸ Reading his stories one could forget that the First World War had happened. He believed in Newbolt’s credo ‘to love the game beyond the prize’, and in his books war is portrayed as a glorious imperial adventure where the best compliment is to be a ‘soldier of the finest type, keen as mustard, hard as nails, a thorough sportsman, and a gentleman according to the exacting English standard’. ⁴⁹ In July 1925 Eason’s informed booksellers that ‘The complete success of Beau Geste has further stimulated the demand for Capt. P. C. Wren’s previous novel, The Wages of Virtue’. ⁵⁰ The release of a cheap edition of Beau Geste led Eason’s to comment that the book ‘had a wonderful sale at 7/6 and we anticipate a great demand for the 3/6 edition’. ⁵¹ This spawned imitators, such as Legion of Hell by ‘ex-legionnaire’ J.M. Armstrong and March or Die by Michael Donovan, advertised in the bulletin as ‘The true story of the experiences of a man who joined the Foreign Legion and escaped at the risk of death.’ ⁵²

Stories set in the British Empire also featured, and another novel expected to sell well in a cheap edition was Captain Desmond, V.C. (1914) by Maud Diver. ⁵³ This story intermingled images of romance between Captain Theo Desmond and a tough Anglo-Indian woman with the action of ‘punitive expeditions’ by his regiment, as it attempted to subdue ‘rebel natives’ in a troublesome hill region. ⁵⁴ The novel displayed the classic tenets of the British colonial mindset, such as a belief in the superiority of the British race, contempt for all Indians except Sikhs and Gurkhas (who were regarded as ‘martial races’ because of their courage and loyalty in the service of empire ⁵⁵ ), and the sense that Indians were incapable of ruling themselves as a result of their possessing the traditional Asian vices of dishonesty, lethargy, and inefficiency. Randal Sadleir, who was commissioned into the King’s African Rifles in 1943, remembered the influence of such imperial adventures. Living in Kildare as a child he had ‘a burning curiosity about the outside world’, and his imagination was fired by a book called Heroic Deeds of Great Men, which described the adventures of Lawrence of Arabia, Gordon, Drake, Nelson, Wellington, and Roberts. He especially admired Gordon: ‘He was the pasha who knew no fear, in his blue and gold uniform and scarlet fez superbly mounted on his racing camel in the Sudan desert.’ ⁵⁶

British imperial adventures featuring heroic regimental officers seem to have appealed to a wide audience, unaffected by recent memories of the British army’s role in the Easter Rising and the ‘Tan War’, and such fiction could be found in the most unlikely of places. In the winter of 1933–4 The Kerryman, a nationalist newspaper, serialized The Tiger of Tibet (1924) by Gerald Burrard. The story followed the adventures of Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Barraclough on his ‘highly dangerous journey into Tibet to investigate the torture and murder of a British officer and discover the sources of virulent propaganda directed against the British in India’. ⁵⁷ Another favourite among Irish boys was the Boy’s Own Paper published by the Religious Tract Society. As seen earlier, this weekly had no shortage of blood-and-guts historical romances, and these continued to feature in the interwar years. In 1930 Eason’s clients were advised to display and distribute the advertising material marking the launch of the new volume of the Boy’s Own Paper, in order ‘to secure full benefit of extra sales’. ⁵⁸ In the Christmas season of 1931 Eason’s reported that the ‘R. T. S. annuals’, including the Boy’s Own and Girl’s Own annuals, ‘remain firm favourites’ and ‘are selling better than ever this year’. ⁵⁹ In October 1935 Eason’s welcomed the price reduction from one shilling to sixpence, believing that ‘There should be many new readers for the B.O.P. at this reduced price.’ ⁶⁰

In March 1941 a bookshop owner in the Irish countryside pointed out that boys ‘frequently ask for tales of the newest dimension of adventure – the air’. ⁶¹ Indeed the previous decade had seen an explosion in air adventures: the school stories in The Gem and The Magnet began to be accompanied by air adventures, Percy Westerman’s and George Rochester’s air detective novels were regularly serialized in Modern Boy, and in April 1932 a new 64-page monthly called Popular Flying was released onto the market. This first issue carried as its story feature ‘The White Fokker’, which introduced boys to the character that would become the most celebrated hero in interwar children’s literature – Bigglesworth, popularly known as Biggles. His creator, Flying Officer W.E. Johns, declared that Biggles ‘is a fictitious character, yet …  he represents the spirit of the R.F.C. [Royal Flying Corps] – daring and deadly when in the air, devil-may-care and debonair when on the ground’. ⁶² This story and others around the same character were published in August 1932 as The Camels Are Coming, the first in a series of 102 Biggles novels to be published. Johns also edited Popular Flying, whose readership expanded to 32,000 by 1938, thus reflecting the high public profile and elite image built up by the RAF through the Hendon air shows, record-breaking flights, and international air races. ⁶³

What gave Biggles the edge over competitors was the realism of the characters and the technology based on Johns’s own experience. He had seen active service in the war, first in the trenches at Gallipoli, then as a pilot in the RFC. Yet in his Biggles stories Johns portrayed a romantic image of air fighting over the Western Front, and although he did not hide the cruelty and trauma of modern war, there was never any suggestion that the war had been unjust or futile. ⁶⁴ The author was clear about the value of his writing: ‘I teach a boy to be a man, for without that essential qualification he will never be anything … I teach the spirit of team-work, loyalty to the Crown, the Empire, and to rightful authority.’ ⁶⁵ Mirroring the British market, there was certainly a demand in the Free State for Biggles novels, and from 1935 onwards Eason’s bulletins carried generous half-page advertisements from Oxford University Press informing booksellers of new releases and reissues in cheap editions. ⁶⁶ In 1938 Eason’s commented that Oxford’s new omnibus books, which included three Biggles stories in one volume, were ‘magnificent value and will sell on sight’, ⁶⁷ while the Mellifont Press saw strong demand for its cheap three-penny series: between March 1938 and April 1939 it released 20 ‘air romances’ in Ireland. ⁶⁸

This air-adventure literature fuelled the curiosity and excitement of youngsters such as future RAF pilot Brendan Finucane. His brother remembered: ‘We read a lot about all the aces in the First World War. They were our heroes. We read all about Mick Mannock and Billy Bishop. Every book that we could possibly get our hands on.’ ⁶⁹ Similarly, Mark Downey recalled his naive expectation on joining the RAF: ‘I had this concept that I was going to be a bloody ace pilot, you know, we all thought that.’ ⁷⁰ Arthur Dennison joined the RAF in 1936. He attributed his interest in the air force to the fact that ‘I had been reading W. E. Johns, Biggles and what not.’ ⁷¹ Timothy Vigors entered the RAF cadet college at Cranwell immediately after leaving school in January 1939. In spite of the increasing likelihood of war, Vigors rejected the idea of joining the Irish Army Air Corps as it ‘had only three aircraft so we would have little chance of learning to fly with them’. ⁷² His schoolboy hero was Biggles, and it is clear that his perception of flying was informed by those adventures; for him air combat was just another thrill similar to ‘the excitement of the chase’ in fox hunting. ⁷³

For flying enthusiasts, the importance of youthful inspiration cannot be overstated, as many Irish RAF pilots linked their desire to fly to adventure fiction and early encounters with aircraft. ⁷⁴ For example, future air marshal Dermot Boyle traced his interest in the RAF to the day when, as a child, his father had brought him to ‘an early aviation meeting on the Leopardstown racecourse’. ⁷⁵ The detail of the planes and the pilots with their helmets and goggles gave him great excitement. In the same way, Flight Lieutenant John Kelly-Rogers must have been an inspiration to those at his old school seeking adventure; he wrote letters to the school annual describing his career from the Royal Navy to the RAF to Imperial Airways, and his consequent globetrotting left no continent untouched. In April 1939 he paid ‘a flying visit’ to Clongowes Wood College ‘in the Connemara, one of the flying boats destined for the Atlantic service’. ⁷⁶ Coincidentally or not, it was the visit of a biplane to Clongowes in 1916 and its demonstration of aerobatics that had ignited his interest in flying as a schoolboy. ⁷⁷

To understand the final influence in Irish children’s literature, it is necessary to return to Our Boys. By the early 1930s the magazine was in decline, its circulation having halved from the 40,000 of the early days. This was due partly to the onset of the Depression and partly to the content of penal era stories becoming antiquated. However, under a new editor from 1937 onwards, Our Boys was significantly revamped and reached a circulation of 50,000 by the Second World War. Following the example of the Boy’s Own Paper, articles on aviation and science became more prominent. But unlike its competitors Our Boys also developed extensive international coverage, something which was at odds with the Christian Brothers’ reputation as ‘ultra-nationalist, ultra-Catholic and Anglophobic’. ⁷⁸ As Daire Keogh remarks, while Ireland’s Own

celebrated the 140th anniversary of the Rebellion of 1798 to the point of obsession, the focus of Our Boys was firmly on the mighty wave of communism in Europe and Stalin’s purges in Russia, which it likened to the worst days of the French Revolution. ⁷⁹

Although it praised Franco and was ambivalent about Mussolini, Our Boys was consistently critical of Hitler. It characterized his persecution of the German Catholic Church as a struggle between ‘Christ and the anti-Christ’. The persecution of the Jews and the annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia increased this antagonism. ⁸⁰

For a children’s magazine, Our Boys offered a surprisingly sophisticated analysis of international politics that was grounded on ethics and morality. This distinguished Our Boys from its British competitors, such as Chums or the Boy’s Own Paper, whose content never strayed from the boundaries of the pleasure culture of war. Significantly, by early 1939 Our Boys shifted from its long-held anti-war stance and began to include material that endorsed a just war against the excesses of Nazi Germany. It published Gandhi’s assertion that ‘a war against Germany to prevent the inhuman persecution of a whole race would be justified’. Later, it included the Polish bishops’ condemnation of ‘the Nazi violation of moral law’. ⁸¹ The outbreak of war and introduction of political censorship in neutral Ireland silenced this independent moral voice that had been devoid of inward-looking nationalism. In spite of promoting patriotic ideals and opposing partition, Our Boys was not insular. Its unqualified condemnations of the Nazi regime during the 1930s chimed well with the Archbishop of Westminster’s wartime appeal for a ‘crusade’ against ‘the creed of Nazism’, ⁸² and at the very least Our Boys suggested a moral framework for understanding the war which was conducive to supporting the Allied cause and even provided justification for those Irish Catholics considering enlistment in the British forces. Certainly, devout Irish Catholic officers, such as Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, VC, shared the magazine’s moral outrage against Hitler’s regime; in a letter to his family he wrote: ‘I can think of no greater honour, nor a better way of passing into Eternity than in the cause for which the Allies are fighting this war.’ ⁸³

IV

At the same time as southern Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom, a new technology was emerging as the dominant medium for mass entertainment. Cinema proved to be extremely popular with Irish people, and as the Irish film industry was non-existent, the country was even more dependent on British and American films than it was on their juvenile literature. Significantly, the decade preceding the Second World War saw a series of big-budget British and American epics that paid tribute to the heroes of the British Empire. These films were remarkably popular in the Free State and, harnessing sight and sound, they provided an even more seductive image than juvenile literature ever could of British military history as all glamour and excitement. This does not mean that all Irish youths who were exposed to film representations of the pleasure culture of war joined up, rather that those films helped create the context in which many individuals took the decision to enlist. Politicians and interest groups in the Free State were aware of the popularity of foreign films and concerned by their potential to influence Irish perceptions and attitudes, but, as with literary censorship, their concern focused on public morality rather than political and militaristic themes. ⁸⁴

The debate around the introduction of government-controlled film censorship in 1923 provides a useful starting point for understanding contemporary views on cinema and its influence in Irish society. A deputation representing the Irish Vigilance Association, the Catholic hierarchy, and the Protestant denominations informed the government of their concern about cinema’s effects on the predominantly young audiences:

It is obvious that the mental and moral outlook of those who frequent such picture houses must be largely formed by what they see in them … It is evidently undesirable that our people should be accustomed to see and applaud scenes of murder, robbery, violence of every kind, offensive suggestiveness [and] sexual immorality. ⁸⁵

This emphasis on the morally corrupting influence of films, as opposed to the potential ‘anti-national’ influence, was reflected by the Censorship Bill’s key enabling passage in which the censor was instructed to withhold a certificate from any film that he believed ‘is unfit for general exhibition in public by reason of its being indecent, obscene or blasphemous or because the exhibition thereof in public would tend to inculcate principles contrary to public morality’. ⁸⁶ While this satisfied the majority of film censorship campaigners, some politicians touched on wider issues. Cumann na nGaedheal TD (Teachta Dála, member of parliament) William Magennis identified the main problem of cinema as the power of the image, which could give distasteful subject matter the ‘seductiveness of artistic treatment’. As cinema historian Kevin Rockett points out, ‘Magennis was forced to concede that the censors could suppress plot elements which infringed Catholic morality, but they were helpless against the seductiveness of the image itself (with meanings hidden from official culture), irrespective of its content.’ ⁸⁷ Hence, unless the government was willing to ban the import of all foreign films and make its own films to propagate a Catholic, nationalist culture, it could never control cinema’s ability to influence the audience’s perceptions and offer alternative values.

In a similar vein, Senator James McKean recognized cinema’s growing importance in shaping the imagination and values of the children who ‘will be the people of Ireland in the next generation’. And he did not like what he saw: he compared cinema to the explicit violence and end-justifies-the-means mentality that could be found in cheap boys’ weeklies when he characterized film entertainment as ‘the “penny dreadful” … in a realistic form’. He asserted that ‘the cinema house is a sort of propaganda for materialism … It is an appeal to the senses and not an appeal at all to the judgment,’ and he ascribed much of the anti-Treatyite IRA’s activities during the Civil War to the imitation of ‘the realistic productions put before the youth of the country’. ⁸⁸ Interestingly, the logical conclusion of his thinking, a proposed amendment that young people under the age of 16 be forbidden from entering cinemas unless they were in a school group supervised by their teachers, was defeated. Thus it seems that the government was unconcerned about how, for example, children might interpret the values conveyed by a jingoistic war film. On the contrary, in passing this legislation the government seems to have been sensitive to the film trade’s largest demographic, and sought a compromise between the demands of censorship campaigners and the proprietors’ need for a profitable business.

Therefore, in spite of their patriotic rhetoric neither the government nor the pro-censorship lobby grasped the significance of the silver screen for political and militaristic representations. This was an important point, as almost all the newsreels shown in Ireland were produced in Britain and rarely included Irish news content. Irish audiences were subjected to a diet of British current affairs and world news as interpreted by British editors. For example, a report of Eamon de Valera’s visit to London in 1932 to resolve the issues of the oath and land annuities included the most superficial commentary devoid of analysis; the report was sandwiched between items on the Royal Horse Show and the RAF’s air pageant at Hendon, while the previous week’s newsreel featured ‘the Little Royal Lady’, Princess Elizabeth, with military bands and cannons at the Aldershot Tattoo. ⁸⁹ Such items offended republicans as they were regarded as celebrations of British imperialism at a time when Ireland’s relationship to that empire was hotly contested. In this light, they worried that cinema was being used as a political weapon to undermine efforts to build an Irish national identity that was distinct and separate from Britain. ⁹⁰

The republican view that the Free State’s film censorship policy did not go far enough was made clear soon after the passage of the Censorship of Films Act, 1923. At the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis (party conference) in 1925 a resolution was passed instructing members to take direct action against British ‘propaganda’ in cinemas. One supporter of the motion, Seán Lemass, stated that ‘the principles of Irish nationalism were in danger of extinction among a large section of people as a result of this propaganda’. ⁹¹ However, the campaign dissipated after two attacks on cinemas showing British film documentaries of crucial First World War battles. Significantly, Fianna Fáil’s election to power in 1932 brought an end to draconian legislation, and during the IRA’s short-lived accommodation with the government it took the opportunity to vent its anger against what it considered to be enemies of ‘the Republic’. In 1933 IRA members stole the war film Gallipoli in Galway. In 1934 a mob shouting ‘Up the Republic’ and ‘Stop British Propaganda’ damaged a Dublin cinema that was showing a film of Princess Marina’s wedding to the Duke of Kent. The newspaper of the left-wing Republican Congress provided the rationale for the attack:

There is no film industry in Ireland. Our cinemas are just branch shops of English companies which control our supplies of films. Hence it is natural that Imperialist news reels dominate Irish screens. And it is natural, too, that cinemas are occasionally smashed up, as was the Savoy … If cinema managers will insist on showing news reels to which the majority of the audience object, they must be prepared to take the consequences. ⁹²

In spite of this attempt by the republican press to portray the vandalism as the spontaneous reaction of Irish cinemagoers, it is clear that it was a planned action by organized republicans, and there was no evidence that paying Irish audiences objected to representations of British royalty on the silver screen, that is, when they were given a chance to see such images. Yet the IRA persisted with a campaign of intimidation. It made efforts to stop the same film being shown in Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Sligo, and Mayo. ⁹³ The Fianna Fáil Cumann in Summerhill, Dublin, saw sinister motives behind the royal film, declaring that:

in view of the Imperial campaign to prepare the mentality required for the threatened European war and the extent in which the cinema is being utilized for this purpose, we call on the government to set up a National Censorship Board to protect the anti-Imperial spirit reborn in 1916. ⁹⁴

These protests had the intended effect on the film renters, and in 1935 they decided not to distribute the George V jubilee film, Royal Cavalcade, in the Free State. In May 1937, under the implied threat of action, a group of republicans succeeded in convincing the Dublin film distributors not to show a feature-length film of George VI’s coronation. ⁹⁵ However, it is worth noting that, in spite of these cinema protests, Eason’s was selling vast quantities of The Story of the King and Queen, the book commemorating George V’s silver jubilee. ⁹⁶ Similarly, the Irish Times believed that the Dublin film renters had missed a lucrative opportunity. They reported hundreds of Free State citizens heading to Belfast to see George VI’s coronation film, which had a three-week run. ⁹⁷

Interestingly, from the mid-1930s a whole series of lavish historical romances set against the background of British military and imperial history were popularly received in Ireland and failed to provoke republican hostility. ⁹⁸ In April 1935 The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was released in the Free State without any objections by the censor. As Michael Paris surmises, in this story the British army ‘is the agent of civilisation protecting millions of Indians from the wild frontier tribes’. ⁹⁹ During the film an Afghan tribe attacks a British regiment and a massacre is only prevented by the heroism of three young officers led by Alan McGregor (Gary Cooper), who sacrifices his own life in blowing up the rebels’ ammunition dump. For his devotion to duty he is awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. The film was well received, being shown for two weeks in Dublin’s Capitol Cinema and one week in the Capitol, Wexford (according to this cinema’s screenings diaries for the 1930s, it was a rare occurrence for a film to be shown for an entire week). ¹⁰⁰ Paramount had made two cuts to the film for the Irish market in order to avoid offending political sensitivities: a recital of the poem ‘England, My England’ by an officer was removed, and in the final scene the band was not playing ‘God Save the King’, as in the original, but ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. ¹⁰¹

The success of Bengal Lancer was followed up later in 1935 with two more films from the ‘romantic-historical school’, as the Irish Times called them. Clive of India traced the life of Robert Clive, the English adventurer who defeated the French for control of India in the eighteenth century. According to the Connacht Sentinel, it depicted how he ‘won the Battle of Plassy with his infuriated armoured battle elephants’ and ‘scorned the dangers of the dreaded monsoon to lead his men to victory!’ ¹⁰² The Irish Press approved of the film as it followed closely the life of Clive himself, ‘Thus objectionable display of imperialist triumph is kept out,’ presumably the same reason why the Irish Times found it disappointing. ¹⁰³ It was shown for two weeks in Dublin and four days in the Savoy, Galway. The Iron Duke told the story of the Irish-born general the Duke of Wellington, and devoted much screen-time to the battle of Waterloo. The only cut made by the distributor was the ‘tactful deletion’ of ‘God Save the King’ and the film was evidently very popular, as the Irish Times reviewer noted it had an ‘unusual’ three-week run at the Grafton Cinema, Dublin. ¹⁰⁴

The release of these films should be judged within the context of the growing popularity of cinema: the number of cinemas in the Free State grew from 150 in 1923 to 240 in 1943; over the same period the number of admissions tripled from 7.3 million in 1923 to 22 million in 1943. Moreover, for the year 1934–5 it was estimated that there had been over 18 million admissions to the Free State’s 190 cinemas. In Dublin alone admissions added up to 11 million (23 for each Dubliner) and the city’s seating capacity matched London’s, with 14 people for each cinema seat. ¹⁰⁵ In parallel to this growth was increased concern over the effects of a regular cinema-going habit on the population, particularly children. Gabriel Fallon, writing in the Capuchin Annual, noted that a study of 1,310 boys in Edinburgh found that 70 per cent attended cinema once a week and that they overwhelmingly preferred war films to any other genre. ¹⁰⁶ He wondered, ‘If the cinema is international in its worst sense, if it is anti-national in that it militates against our language, traditions and culture, is not the burden ours to use the cinema to good national ends?’ Fallon wanted to see special cinemas for children and, to counter the danger of anglicization, the production of indigenous films that would strengthen Irish national feeling like The Dawn (1936), a tribute to the IRA’s bravery and determination during the Anglo-Irish War. ¹⁰⁷ The wide appeal of this film indicated that there was also an appetite for Irish adventure films: it had a two-week run in the Capitol, Dublin, and was also popular with rural audiences, being by far the highest-grossing film shown in Horgan’s Picture Theatre, Youghal, in 1936. ¹⁰⁸

Fallon had reason to be concerned, but the ‘denationalising influence’ was not always from Britain. In 1937 Hollywood released The Charge of the Light Brigade which the censor derisively described as an ‘American version of English history’. ¹⁰⁹ It retold the story of the doomed British cavalry attack at Balaclava during the Crimean War, and owing to demand it was shown for two weeks in both the Savoy’s Dublin and Cork cinemas. In this film, the Irish Times remarked, ‘there may be little of Kingslake’s historical accuracy, but there is all Tennyson’s heroic spirit. The charge itself makes a thrilling climax to a story that is captivating from beginning to end.’ ¹¹⁰ The Irish Press agreed, but noted the film’s failure to go deeper than simple mythologizing: ‘tribute is gloriously paid to the men who galloped in the charge. One might shudder to think of the real feelings of those who galloped into certain death to spike the Russian guns on the orders of higher authority.’ ¹¹¹ Yet such qualms, as the Irish Times reported, did not bother the undiscerning cinema-going public: ‘Owing to its brilliant success and the hundreds of requests received, the management of the Savoy Cinema have decided to hold a series of special children’s matinées of the “Charge of the Light Brigade”’. ¹¹² It was precisely because of the film’s portrayal of war in an exciting, death-or-glory style that made it so popular with children.

In 1939 the Hollywood treatment was given to one of Rudyard Kipling’s imperial adventures – Gunga Din. This followed three sergeants in the British army and their faithful Indian water carrier, Gunga Din, on a quest for hidden treasure, and in the finale Gunga sacrifices his life to save his comrades. The content of ‘colour, romance, heroism and sacrifice’ was extremely popular, and Gunga Din was shown for three weeks in Dublin and two weeks in Cork. ¹¹³ A similar British Empire epic in Technicolor, The Four Feathers, was produced by Alexander Korda’s London Films and was shown in Ireland just as the war began. Perhaps this explains why it was so popular with Irish audiences that in Dublin it had a run of two weeks in the Savoy in September and another two in the Theatre de Luxe in October, followed by a week in both Cork and Limerick. These films provided examples of manliness that were occasionally chivalric but frequently violent and encouraged the mentality of the end justifies the means.

One could argue that these films of empire and military heroism from the interwar period were appreciated purely for their entertainment value and provided harmless fun for Irish youths. After all, their school education and religious instruction should have inoculated them against the fortune-and-glory lure of imperial adventure films, and for the large majority of Irish youngsters this was the case. Yet the Irish writer and journalist Aodh de Blacam feared that some Catholic commentators were underestimating the influence of cinema: he believed that it ‘has more to say in the moulding of the imagination and the ideals of the race than the schools have’. ¹¹⁴ When children went to the cinema they viewed civilization through Anglo-American eyes, an exposure that was rarely counterbalanced by on-screen representations of their own country or history. It would be unusual if some of them, frustrated by the boredom of everyday life, did not grow up to believe that the real world was ‘over there’ and that by staying in Ireland they were ‘missing out’.

Indeed, the extent to which cinema had imparted a pleasure culture of war in independent Ireland and shaped perceptions of war fighting is evident from Captain Andy Parsons’s reminiscence of his regiment’s first encounter with enemy aircraft:

One plane brought down out of about thirty did not seem very good shooting to us, who thought of air battles in terms of ‘The Dawn Patrol’ or ‘Hell’s Angels’, with Jack Holt shooting down half a dozen of Richthofen’s squadron with a Lewis gun before breakfast every morning. ¹¹⁵

The above films of the Great War were both released in 1930 and remade in the late 1930s, and proved very popular in Ireland. Their constant emphasis on heroic aerial duels and the simple, stoical nobility of the aviators left the audience with an overriding impression of a romantic and exciting war. ¹¹⁶

V

The outbreak of the Second World War brought new considerations to film censorship in a neutral state. Article 52 of the Emergency Powers Order, 1939, supplemented the public morality role with that of political watchdog: the censor was to withhold a certificate if he believed a film’s public screening ‘would be prejudicial to the maintenance of law and order or to the preservation of the State or would be likely to lead to a breach of the peace or to cause offence to the people of a friendly foreign nation’. ¹¹⁷ The government demonstrated an awareness of the imperial message that had permeated much of anglophone cinema in the previous decade when it identified one key area for film censorship: ‘All films dealing with Imperial, Colonial, or Dominion activities which tend to glorify the empire or British rule – White man’s burden – spreading the benefits of white (British) civilisation – Kiplingesque – Gunga Din – Bengal Lancer – Four Feathers type of stuff.’ ¹¹⁸ This stringent attitude ensured that, unlike during the 1930s, Irish audiences in the ‘Emergency’ period saw few representations of war, and those neutralized products that did reach their screens were unlikely to have a strong influence on their perceptions of war and soldiering.

VI

The attachment to British cultural outputs, such as the Boy’s Own Paper, Biggles, and British war films, demonstrates that the pleasure culture of war had a substantial following in Ireland. While the Irish revolutionary period may have caused disenchantment with the lure of adventure fiction, this had minimal effect on the Second World War generation of Irish recruits. During their childhoods in the 1930s the characters and events of the War of Independence rarely intruded into their imaginary worlds, picked up from a children’s literature and a cinema industry that were still dominated by British publishers, writers, and themes. Thus, British and Irish popular culture in the interwar period did not portray war as futile and unjust. On the contrary, the overwhelming message from war films, boys’ weeklies, and adventure novels was that war was exciting, that it provided opportunities for travel, comradeship, heroism, and glory. This message was received loud and clear by Irish youths, with no interference from state literary or film censorship until after the outbreak of war. Therefore, just as a young Frank O’Connor felt his spiritual homeland to be at Greyfriars among his favourite characters, so an Irish youngster of the 1930s, immersed in the exciting adventures of dashing military officers in faraway colonial outposts, could maintain a positive perception of the British army, or navy, or air force and the opportunities they might offer in wartime.