Hearts and minds: how a Westmeath MP’s Irish signature landed him in jail

Paul Hughes looks at how, in June 1916, the maverick MP for North Westmeath, Laurence Ginnell, signed his name as Gaeilge in the visitors’ book of a British prison, and in doing so, opened up a new front in the propaganda war that followed the Easter rising

WHEN the Easter rising of 1916 was suppressed, its leaders executed and a sizeable proportion of Irish Volunteers and activists deported to British jails, for a number of months, the Irish independence movement relied on a small number of voices to keep its message alive in the court of world opinion.

Among them was Kathleen Clarke, wife of the old Fenian Tom Clarke, who was shot for his leading role in the insurrection. Kathleen co-founded the Irish National Aid Association and Volunteers’ Dependents’ Fund, which endeavoured to raise monies and other resources to look after the welfare of families of those killed during or imprisoned after the rising.

Its cross-channel counterpart was the Irish National Relief Fund, operated by the London Irishman Art O’Brien who had, among his fellow committee members, Alice Ginnell (née King), the Kilbride, Gaybrook native and wife of the sitting MP for North Westmeath, Laurence Ginnell.

The mission of the INRF was much the same as its Dublin equivalent, although given its location in Britain, it was best positioned to agitate on behalf of those locked up in British jails and internment camps. From the start, it was driven not just by the need to raise funds, but to collect information for propaganda purposes.

When this information was collated, the ideal conduit through which to bring it to the world was Laurence Ginnell, whose combination of eccentricity and moral courage earned him the respect and fascination even of people he regarded as mortal enemies. For this reason, the House of Commons – particularly the Speaker, James Lowther – gave him plenty of rope, and pressmen from around the world, intrigued by his lonely crusade, covered his activities in detail.

The Delvin native, sitting as an independent nationalist MP, was since 1914 the only dissenting voice in the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ against Irish involvement in World War I. A friend of some of the main movers behind the Easter rising, naturally his sympathies came down on their side, and he became adept at using his platform to promote their cause. He began to question even the most minor aspects of British policy towards Ireland in the wake of the rebellion. Notably, he did it in such a way as to reflect poorly on his former colleagues in John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party. In early May 1916, he claimed that members of the constitutional nationalist party cheered when the British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, announced the executions of three of the rising’s leaders (Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh). The party robustly denied this, but in the absence of audiovisual evidence, Ginnell’s mudslinging proved difficult to wash away.

In the weeks and months after the suppression of the rising, Ginnell invoked his privileges as an MP to visit prisons and camps holding Irish deportees. His objective was not only to gather facts to supplement the INRF campaign and inform his parliamentary questions, but also to see to the welfare of the internees. He brought them cigarettes, letters and other items hidden in the pockets of his dress coat, earning him the nickname ‘the GPO’.

On one occasion, he visited Stafford Detention Barracks, where the future mastermind of the Irish War of Independence, Michael Collins, was among those interned. After making what prison officers regarded as a seditious speech to the internees, Ginnell was held aloft on their shoulders and paraded around the prison grounds.

Such activities were reported back to Britain’s Home Office as abuses of an MP’s visiting privileges, and in mid-June, the British authorities moved to stop Ginnell from making further visits. On June 24, he attempted to enter Wakefield prison in Yorkshire and was refused admission.

The following day, he travelled to Knutsford, Cheshire, and tried his luck at the gates. Here, he partially obscured his identity by signing his name in Irish on the visitors’ roll, Labhrás Mag Fhionnghail. The ruse worked; the attendant failed to recognise both the visitor and his name, and did not question it further; and so, Ginnell was permitted to meet with the Irish prisoners.

The prison governor at Knutsford later realised what happened and reported the incident to his superiors. As a consequence, Ginnell was arrested three weeks later (July 15) and charged under the wartime Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) for using a “false name”.

The arrest was a press sensation; Ginnell, since early 1915 the bête noire of the architects of DORA regulations and the lopsided enforcement of them in Ireland, was now to be prosecuted under the act. The Gaelic League, under the sway of revolutionaries, immediately copped on to the propaganda potential, and Art O’Brien – one of the League’s most active members in London – fronted Ginnell’s bail. The League then agreed to pay his legal fees if he contested the case, and appointed the veteran MP and barrister, Timothy Healy, to represent him.

In late July, Ginnell appeared at Bow Street court in London, with Sir John Dickinson presiding, and the seasoned Crown prosecutor, Archibald Bodkin, outlining the case. Bodkin argued that Ginnell had used the Gaelic translation of his name not out of habit, but as a device by which to circumvent the law.

In response, Ginnell engaged expert witnesses for his hearing, including the Irish-born journalist, W P Ryan, and Fr W H Kent, a London-based Crozier priest and pacifist with expertise in Gaelic philology. Post office workers familiar with Ginnell’s mail also testified. All argued the case that the Irish translation of his name – comically misspelled by British journalists and officials as ‘Lebries Mac Fingail’, among other variants – was correct, and its use on this occasion legitimate.

But the magistrate, Dickinson, was unmoved by what he saw as sophistry. He was convinced that Ginnell signed his name in Irish at Knutsford purely “for the purpose of misleading the officer in charge”, and was now indulging in political grandstanding.

Dickinson and Bodkin were not the only ones of this mind. When the Gaelic League opened its defence fund for Ginnell’s subsequent appeal, one delegate at a meeting of its coiste gnótha protested that he never heard that Ginnell “signed his name habitually in Irish, or indeed that he ever wrote it in Irish except on this occasion”. Ginnell’s correspondence prior to 1916 seems to bear this out (additionally, despite being a League supporter, he was not even remotely fluent in Irish). However, that the delegate’s concerns fell on deaf ears is evidence of the extent to which the League had become subsumed by radical politics.

Unwilling to throw the book at the defendant, Dickinson imposed a £100 fine in lieu of six months’ imprisonment. Ginnell appealed, and an intervention by Healy later reduced the fine to £50 and the term of imprisonment to three weeks, but Ginnell still refused to pay.

Eager to avoid giving him any further avenues for publicity, the metropolitan police called to Ginnell’s home in Richmond, Surrey in late October, making an unsuccessful attempt to seize furniture as a payment for the fine. Alice Ginnell resisted this, and the officers withdrew. “When the police apologised for ‘troubling’,” she later told the Bureau of Military History, “Mrs. G. said ‘Oh, these things have to be done in the interest of law and order and civilisation’. ‘Particularly civilisation’ said one of the police.”

On November 1, Ginnell was picked up by police and taken to Brixton prison via Pentonville. He served his three-week sentence, fulfilling, perhaps, his own ambition to share in the experiences of the interned activists and soldiers he had visited for much of May and June, and to whose cause he was now committed.

On November 29, he returned to the House of Commons – from which he had been suspended since July – with a list of parliamentary questions in hand, re-admitted to debate after what his bitterest enemies in the Irish Party (including Westmeath Examiner proprietor, John P Hayden) later described as a “grovelling apology”.

However, this was but a means to an end for Ginnell. What’s more, it was not he, but the Irish Party who were on the back foot in the propaganda war. Irish public opinion was turning not only on the hinge of British reaction to the rising and the lingering threat of conscription, but of petty injustices like those dished out to the MP for North Westmeath – who, for months, was frequently referred to as ‘the Member for Ireland’.

On his return to Westminster, Ginnell had the last say. “I wrote in the language used throughout this country before the arrival of the Romans… and the language of a considerable number of Irishmen and Scotsmen whose help you have been very glad to get in the War,” he told the Asquith ministry. “England is the only one of the Allied countries that has imprisoned a member of its Legislature for having written his name in the language of his country.”

London’s Daily News regarded his statement as “perfect”; one which, grounded in Ginnell’s academic knowledge of the laws and customs of Gaelic Ireland, received its fair share of approval in the House.

For the next eight months, Ginnell continued to fight his multi-faceted propaganda war in Westminster and in a series of by-elections across Ireland, before abandoning the parliamentary route in July 1917 and pursuing the revolutionary programme of Sinn Féin.