Smyllie’s Ireland: The Irish Times editor and the Protestant experience

Smyllie’s Ireland: Protestants, Independence and the man who ran the Irish Times

Author: Caleb Wood Richardson

ISBN-13: 978-0253041241

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Guideline Price: £27.99

The author of this book tells a good story about explaining his work to a tweedy “county” lady on the train to Cork, who responded with the sobering clincher: “No ‘twilight’ please. Every book I’ve read about us has too much ‘twilight’”.

Others clearly feel the same. The sociology of the Irish Protestant world in the decades after independence has come under renewed examination: not only Ian D’Alton and Ida Milne’s recent Protestant and Irish, but also studies by Heather Crawford, Robin Bury, Colin Murphy and Lynne Adair.

Strikingly, most of these studies have deliberately addressed different aspects of the “southern Protestant” experience from what D’Alton terms the “grand tragedy” view, or the process which an earlier study defined as “Ascendancy to Oblivion”.

Instead, attention is being paid to small farms, business networks, inter-faith marriages, and involvement in local and national politics, rather than time-warped derelicts mouldering away in crumbling mansions. UCD’s Protestant Folk Memory project is likely to provide a rich source of material for further explorations of Protestant life outside demesne walls, Trinity College, or the Kildare Street Club.

Sometimes The Irish Times is listed alongside such fortresses of Anglo-Irish attitudes a few generations ago, but this new study of its most famous editor powerfully contests that case. The D’Alton-Milne collection contained an elegant and perceptive essay on the humorist Patrick Campbell, legendary contributor to the Irishman’s Diary, by Caleb Wood Richardson. He has now written an assured and original study of Campbell’s equally legendary editor, RM Smyllie.

Richardson insists it is not a biography as such, though there is plenty about Smyllie’s interesting life (which included a period as an internee at Ruhleben camp in Germany during first World War, scene of Roger Casement’s unsuccessful attempt to recruit a freedom-fighting Irish Brigade from the Irish POW’s). Rather, he describes his book as a “series of microhistories”, looking at aspects of Protestant experience in the first half of the 20th century as refracted through the life and attitudes of one larger-than-life figure.

Local experience

Richardson consistently stresses the varieties of local experience (Protestants in Wicklow, for instance, occupied a very different position to their co-religionists in Donegal) and Smyllie’s Sligo background is made much of: a powerful journalist father, closely involved in urban politics and local societies at the turn of the century, conservative and unionist in politics, occupying a social level much closer to Pollexfens than Coopers or Gore-Booths. (Smyllie in later life had a slightly ambivalent attitude to WB Yeats, considering his brother Jack a more genuine Sligoman). The profile of a robust contrarian, unashamedly integrated into local life and unselfconsciously Irish, was equally true of his son.

A chapter called Gaels is largely devoted to Smyllie's greatest recruit, Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien, whose columns as Myles na gCopaleen exercised his subversive genius at full stretch.

During his Ruhleben incarceration, Richardson shows Smyllie to have been an indefatigable organiser of Irish plays and other cultural enterprises, including Irish-language classes; taken with Casement’s walk-on part, the atmosphere suggests something like Tom Stoppard’s Travesties.

Smyllie’s graduation to The Irish Times supplied an equally idiosyncratic field of endeavour, and Richardson brilliantly evokes its peculiarities in this era: epitomised by the eccentric figure its editor, with his enormous bulk, spectacularly shabby clothes, and habit of theatrical declamation. But he also stresses the immense range of social contacts and the imaginative European perspective which Smyllie brought to this Irish institution, in particular through his close links to Czechoslovakia, with its many historical analogies to Irish experience. The connection to Smyllie’s feelings about the onset of another European war in 1939 (he had covered the Paris Peace Conference for the paper), and his complex attitude to Irish neutrality, is not made here but it is clearly implicit.

Flann O’Brien

Closer to home, Richardson entertainingly evokes the squalor and racketiness of The Irish Times in these years, the semi-official position of the Palace Bar as an auxiliary office, and the “tribal rituals” of Smyllie’s court recorded by Patrick Campbell, Tony Gray, Brian Inglis and other intimates. Compulsory Irish was another subject where Smyllie’s attitudes were less predictable than one might expect. A chapter called Gaels is largely devoted to Smyllie’s greatest recruit, Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien, whose columns as Myles na gCopaleen exercised his subversive genius at full stretch. Myles’s magnificently contemptuous dialogues between “The Editor” and “Myself” (second only to his jousts with “The Plain People of Ireland”) may or may not have reflected the realities of their relationship, but helped cement the cult of Smyllie as well as of na gCopaleen. Myles claimed airily that he rote all the editorials (“It is the same old stuff all the time. You just change it round a bit.”). But it is also tempting to wonder how much Smyllie’s own style of orotundity, bizarre word-plays and self-parodying pomposity owed to his immortal columnist’s puncturing of every kind of Irish pretension.

One of Richardson’s most interesting chapters is called Liberals and closely analyses censorship and public morality in the 1940s. It concentrates on the banning of Eric Cross’s The Tailor and Ansty, and The Irish Times’s robust opposition to the Censorship Board and the animadversions of Senator William Magennis, professor of metaphysics at UCD and lambaster of all kinds of immorality and “filth”, inevitably imported from “England”. These and other debates read oddly now, like echoes from a medieval past – especially at present, when Irish opinion appears so much more outward-looking, tolerant and European than the governing ethos in England. Richardson’s subtle, penetrating and widely-researched study reminds us how much the Ireland of today owes to what Lionel Fleming called the “Protestant-nationalist” ethos of the paper, and its characteristic ideology. His book bears out the judgement of Tod Andrews that Smyllie, for all his eccentricity, through his own unequivocal Irishness integrated The Irish Times with the new Ireland.