Introductory Overview

The political background, outlined below, in the Tyrone of the 1900s must have influenced the political thinking of the family. The family background focuses on my grandfather John Johnston (1834-1909) and my grandmother Mary Geddes, whom he married in 1873 he being 39 and she being 20. The family moved house on 2 occasions, subsequent to my grandfather's retirement in 1897. During JJ's undergraduate years in Dublin University (Trinity College) he concentrated on his studies but found time to participate in the College Historical Society (Hist) debates. Early influences included the writings of Alice Stopford Green, CH Oldham, Rutherford Mayne, Standish O'Grady and others associated with the Home Rule movement.

Towards the end of the decade JJ encountered my mother, then in the Church of Ireland Teacher Training College.

Political Background

Russell was close to Lindsay Crawford, editor of the Irish Protestant, then based in Dublin, and appealing to a working-class readership, with an evangelical and sometimes radical anti-establishment message. Crawford, originally from Lisburn, had been associated with a breakaway Independent Orange Order, which was critical of the landlord domination of the traditional lodges.

Another Liberal Unionist MP was WH Dodd, who became a judge in 1907. The seat remained Liberal, despite a Sinn Fein boycott. The nationalist vote at this time was mostly Redmondite, with supporters of William O'Brien and the All for Ireland League promoting an inclusivist Protestant-friendly policy, with Sinn Fein on the flanks promoting separatist policies, in some respects (eg on tariffs) taking a basically Tory line.

The All for Ireland League was supportive of an inclusive Home Rule political environment(2). It had attracted support from Lord Dunraven and significant numbers of Protestant improving landlords and business interests who saw Home Rule as an opportunity rather than a problem. Canon Sheehan of Doneraile was also associated with this movement.

In contrast, the pathologies of the Irish Ireland movement, and 'Catholic Nationalism' were beginning to emerge and to dominate the scene, with writers such as DP Moran, who edited the Leader (3). The separatist vision, insofar as it embodied exclusivist and restrictive principles, and rejected the inclusive mainstream of Enlightenment secular republicanism, was basically flawed. JJ was a critic of this flawed separatist vision, and I was also in my time, both of us in our own ways, during the whole of our working careers, perhaps on occasion with some modest success.

The current political perceptions within Trinity College, as picked up by JJ during his undergraduate career there, were basically Unionist and imperial, but there were critical voices, which JJ encountered in the College Historical Society debates.

Family Background

As a consequence of this background, those of JJ's elder brothers who are accessibly on record, primarily James and John, show a spirited intellectual independence(5).

The Year 1901

I recollect JJ reminiscing about the sheer misery of work in the fields in winter, on tasks such as snagging turnips for cattle-feed, or picking potatoes, which occur in November. The context was my complaints about my own participation in such tasks, while helping to work the farm at St Columba's College, in the 1940s, during the war.

This period however must have given him a hands-on feel for the role of the primary producer, which he never forgot, and focused his interest in his later career. His initial orientation would however have been to get out of it, as his elder brothers had done, via a classics degree and the Indian Civil Service. There is perhaps an echo here of the thinking attributed by Thomas Hardy to Jude the Obscure.

In his latter years he was crippled with arthritis, which he himself attributed to his early exposure to field-work in winter, though my sister from her medical experience questions this.

Dungannon Royal School

As well as details of the many prizes and bursaries won by the Johnston boys(6) the school archive contains newspaper cutting relating to the speeches of the Headmaster RF 'Boss' Dill on prize days, and to the winning of awards and prizes by DRS pupils. In this context JJ gets mentions in the Northern Whig on 14/09/06 and 2/12/07. The latter entry relates to his first-year results in TCD, where he got honours and first prize in classics, a term prize in French and a French composition prize, as well as term prizes for Latin and Greek composition.

The French prize indicates that he must have had an early mastery of the language, thanks to the employment in DRS pre-war of a native-speaking French teacher of some ability, and the practice of organising school visits to France, though my sister doubts whether JJ would have been able to participate in these. The quality of the teaching however made feasible his subsequent strong French connection, which began to assume some depth in 1916 when he reported on French agricultural organisation under wartime conditions, and was maintained in the 20s and 30s with his contact with the Albert Kahn Foundation.

There are no school records for James or Sam, the archive being incomplete. According to my sister, my grandmother Mary Geddes had coached James for entrance to Queens College Galway (according to my sister, at a very young age), whence he went on to Oxford. Sam she thinks went to College of Surgeons in Dublin. There are DRS records however for John, Harry and William (6). Harry went on to medical school in Edinburgh; John went to Oxford, as did William. There are no records for Ann, as the girls' school, then associated with DRS, was a separate entity; regrettably it no longer exists. According to my sister she went to Alexandra College in Dublin, and then on to Trinity, which she entered in or about 1915; she is on record as an active supporter of the Co-op, if which JJ was then Secretary.

Moving House

The family then moved to a more comfortable house, at Dunamoney Wood, closer to Castlecaulfield, where the Presbyterian parish church was located. By this time John was on the way to joining James in the Indian Civil Service, and Sam had established himself in medical practice in Newcastle-on-Tyne. Harry was in medical school, on the way to joining with Sam, and William was in Oxford. The move took place some time after the end of 1906, when JJ would no longer have had to make the daily trip to Dungannon from Tomagh, with the aid of the Great Northern Railway, from Kilnaslee Halt.

This photo of old John Johnston was probably taken towards the end of his days, near the rented house at Dunamoney Wood.

Old John Johnston died while JJ was in college, towards the end of 1909. This left my grandmother and Ann, then aged 12, in the house in Dunamoney Wood, a relatively isolated spot, though in reach of Castlecaulfield. Ann by then was ready to go to secondary school, and to get from Dunamoney Wood into Dungannon would have been a problem. So they moved to Bessmount, in the townland of Ranaghan, near Dungannon, to the northwest, on the Cookstown road; this was in walking distance of the girls school associated with Dungannon Royal School, which Ann attended, probably from 1910, until she went to board at Alexandra College, probably in 1911. She is on record, perhaps as part of a school group from Alexandra, in the company of Douglas Hyde and others, in the group photograph of the 1912 Ard Fheis of Connradh na Ghaeilge, which is on display in the Hyde museum in Frenchpark.

The house at Bessmount, now a ruin, was substantial, with what looks like associated yard and mews. Local lore associates the house with family names Reid and Wiggins. My grandmother would probably have had a caretaking tenancy of a mews flat, with enough space to enable Ann and JJ to spend vacations there. She remained there until she moved to Dublin, first to JJ's place in Ranelagh, increasing the pressure for the move to Stillorgan, then eventually to Ann's place in Frescati Park Blackrock where she survived until 1939.

JJ's TCD Undergraduate Years

He probably attended some of the meetings in his first year, picking up from its debate motions an impression of 'support for the Irish language', 'separation of church and state', and preference for 'small-nation independence' rather than 'embedding in a large empire'. On the strength of these early positive impressions he joined in November 1907(8).

One should hesitate to read too much into student debating attitudes, but it is tempting to use them as indicators of JJ's probable political position during his undergraduate years. The session 1907-1908 was dominated by a Tory backlash, and JJ was not moved to speak on any of the debates, which were mostly jingoistic. He stuck with it however, though he did not get around to making his first contribution to the debates until 1909-1910, his final year, the Tory jingoistic domination having continued during 1908-1909.

In JJ's final year he participated in at least one Hist debate; he led the opposition to the motion that 'the outcome of the Battle of the Boyne was beneficial to Ireland', the motion being defeated. Though JJ did not participate in subsequent debates, by analysing the attitudes of some of the active speakers who sided with JJ on the Boyne, it is possible to infer tentatively how JJ probably voted: he would probably have been 'critical of the current Irish fiscal position', 'sceptical about Irish literature', 'against labour exchanges', 'for municipal trading', 'against Westminster control of Irish finance', 'open-minded towards socialism', supportive of the 'soundness of modern society', and supportive of the 'reality of current Irish political issues'.

The foregoing would suggest a basically Liberal free-trade utilitarian type of outlook, with a positive attitude to the then-emerging politics of Home Rule for all-Ireland within the Empire. We will see later how this mixture evolves under the stress of the War, the national movement, the civil war and the Free State.

Books probably possessed by JJ in this period

In the box of JJ memorabilia relating to this period I have two issues, for 1892 and 1893, of a 'Diary of an Irish Cabinet Minister', which is a spoof Unionist anti-Home Rule polemic, outlining how the workings of the projected Home Rule cabinet were perceived in some Ulster quarters.

I have also a pamphlet dated 1898, published in Dublin, entitled "How Ireland is treated by her 'friends'" by one Wm Pentland, who claims to be a Westmeath tenant evicted in 1866, and who argues on behalf of the tenants evicted during the 'plan of campaign' and claims that the Land League is fraudulent.

This suggests an early critical questioning of the value of the 'peasant proprietorship' road taken by the Land League agitation.

There is a copy of 'Lombard Street' by Walter Bagehot, first published in 1873, in a new edition dated 1904 (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London), edited by E Johnstone.

This analysis of the London money market seems to have been an early influence on JJ in the direction of economics.

He also possessed the Routledge 1905 edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, edited by Dugald Stuart. This and the Bagehot are underlined and have marginal notes by JJ.

'The Facts and Principles of Irish Nationality', or 'The Fundamental Constitutions of this Realm', published in 1907 by Browne and Nolan, and authored by 'Éireannaigh Éigin', was also in JJ's possession. This is a well-written and scholarly analysis of the concepts of State and Nation, and of the course of Irish history, in 85 pages, price sixpence. It was '..not published by, or in the interests of, any league, association or society. It has been compiled mainly by one writer who however has received valuable suggestions from several quarters. To the assistance and exertions of some students of a well-known Dublin college its publication now is entirely due...'.

This book presents a critical view of Irish history which is a long way from the then current 'Irish Ireland' or Catholic Nationalist positions. The analysis of 1798 and the Union is very close to the contemporary detached 1998 bicentennial paradigm, and a long way from the Catholic-nationalist hijacking which took place in 1898.

Alice Stopford Green (ASG) was an important formative influence on JJ's approach to Irish history, though he fails to reference her in his 1913 Civil War in Ulster, preferring in this case to use impeccable Unionist sources on which to base his arguments for all-Ireland Home Rule and against Tory armed subversion of the UK democratic process. ASG's vision was of a united Ireland with its own Government, within the British Empire, conceived in terms later to be labelled 'Commonwealth'(10). According to Maire Comerford '...she was a nineteenth century Liberal who thought that British democracy would, given time, evolve to a perfect form of government by consent. Secondly her study of the decentralised old Gaelic State had led to a fanciful parallel between this and a decentalised British Commonwealth...'.

There was a drama dimension in JJ's formation(11); he was aware of the Belfast initiatives in the context of the national theatre movement, as embodied in the work of Rutherford Mayne and other Ulster playwrights such as St John Ervine and Lynn Doyle, who were associated culturally with the all-Ireland Home Rule politics of Bulmer Hobson, Alice Milligan and the Alice Stopford Greene network. This had Dungannon echoes, with local dramatists J and JM Muldoon writing romantic-nationalist plays with regional flavour, consciously attempting to portray '...the heroic virtues and lofty patriotism of Emmet, Fitzgerald and Tone..' (I quote from the preface of For Ireland's Sake published in 1910). Mayne tried to do for the Ulster Presbyterian peasantry what Synge had done for the Aran islands. JJ remained friendly with Mayne up to the 1940s, when the latter, like Bulmer Hobson, had become a Dublin civil servant, both being in effect refugee Protestant all-Irelanders.

There were also on our shelves at home during my youth three volumes of the Cuchulainn saga by Standish O'Grady. According to my sister, JJ gave them to her as a present. I used to read them for fun. They were also in the possession of Cyril and Cerise Parker, who ran Avoca School in Blackrock, where I boarded in the early war years. Cerise, who was a daughter of William Orpen the painter, used to read the Cuchulainn saga to us in bed in the junior dormitory. So the Standish O'Grady books were part of the cultural canon of the Irish Protestant community.

I did not recognise this as relevant to the present work, as an influence on JJ analogous to Alice Stopford Green, until I encountered Hubert Butler's(12) 1978 essay on Standish O'Grady, 'Anglo-Irish Twilight'. In this it is evident that O'Grady's vision was of a national-minded improving entrepreneurial landlord class, in the tradition of Charlemont and the 1782 Volunteers. He had tried to repeat this episode in Kilkenny during the Boer War, recruiting boy scouts to defend Ireland, and presenting an alternative to the Kilkenny Militia and the Irish Brigade who were then training to confront each other in the Transvaal.

As we have seen, the family farm at Tomagh was on the Charlemont Estate; JJ would have early been exposed to 1780s Volunteer lore. To my knowledge he always had respect for the type of landlord whom he regarded as 'improving', and who ran a productive estate generating employment. This all fits with the O'Grady model. The latter never came to anything, but JJ sought to transform it via his approach to co-operative estate ownership, as will emerge when we consider his work in the 40s as recounted in his 'Irish Agriculture in Transition'(13).

Other Possible Early Influences

I mention the BAAS event to indicate the existence of a culture-gap between the science world, dominated then in Ireland by the 'gentleman-amateurism' of the 'big-house' culture, and the emerging national identity(14). The co-operative movement as it had begun to evolve was beginning to bridge this gap, and JJ was increasingly part of this process. This gap could also have been bridged by people like Houston, had the co-operative movement been allowed to develop as it did in Denmark, demonstrating a clear link between scientific competence and the development of a quality food export market, in a domain where science and practice were inseparable. Instead the co-operative movement was crippled by Partition, and the 'irregulars' in the civil war burned Sir Horace Plunkett's house into the bargain. I reference these events further in the 1920s decade.

The culture-link between science and the emerging national elite via de Valera was also flawed for different reasons; I go into this in the 30s and 40s, when de Valera set up the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, displaying a somewhat limited understanding of the nature of the process of transformation of scientific research into social utility. JJ however understood the need, and encouraged the present writer towards the scientific cultural direction, and perhaps also my sister, who started off doing Natural Science before switching to medicine.

The Protestant Liberal Home Rule movement during JJ's undergraduate period would have included people like CH Oldham(15) the economist who headed the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society.

The influence of Horace Plunkett, George Russell (AE) and the co-operative movement(16) must have been significant, because JJ early picked up on the discrepancy between farm gate prices and retail shop prices, deciding to act practically on the issue by forming the Dublin University Co-operative Society as a retail outlet to feed the students. This he did eventually, in 1913, but he must have picked up the motivation and the ideas through undergraduate interaction with the thinking of people like AE. Bulmer Hobson's paper Irish Freedom recorded an outcry from the Dublin retailers against it.

There is no doubt that in the lead-up to the expected Home Rule there was a sense of positive expectation in Irish industry. The annual Sinn Fein exhibitions of Irish manufactures were a focus for this. There was an innovative entrepreneurial spirit abroad, exemplified by the early flight pioneers, one such being Harry Ferguson, who subsequently became famous for the tractor with hydraulic lift. Sydney Gifford Czira, in her memoirs(17) describes the 1910 Sinn Fein Aonach na Nodlaig in the Rotunda which highlighted the Ferguson aircraft, with the promotion being done by The O'Rahilly. It is quite probable that JJ attended this, as it was a major public event, and from it he would have picked up a sense of vibrant national opportunity, with extensive participation by Northern industry, Ferguson being the star innovator.

I don't know to what extent JJ was aware of the Barrington Lectures(18) situation in his undergraduate period. They were then under the influence of the Liberal Home Rule elite (Oldham and co) who dominated the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society(19), and their focus tended to be on the UK as a whole, with emphasis on Liberal Free Trade. Arthur Griffith fulminated against them, from the German-inspired protectionist angle adopted by the early Sinn Fein.

JJ during this period was under the influence of his eldest brother James in India, who was a firm believer in Free Trade, and also in ensuring that the primary producers got their inputs as cheaply as possible, and added value to their outputs. After retiring from the Service he wrote polemical books criticising British policy in India, which he compared to the pre-Reform situation in Britain a century earlier(20).

The alternative to protection (which in British politics was a Tory demand, resulting from long-term British neglect of scientific technology as the basis for industry, relative to the Germans) was organisation of primary producers for maximum local added value, and maximum availability of technical competence, through technical education.

Industry developed on this basis would have strong local roots and would not need protection; the latter principle was at the root of all government corruption, with politicians bought by protected capitalists, as exemplified in the Indian Congress process, and repeated in Fianna Fail. This was James's view expressed in his book Can the Hindus Rule India. I suspect that it would by 1910 have begun to rub off on JJ in his undergraduate days, surfacing in his Civil War in Ulster(2) and emerging in its mature form in his critical analysis of de Valera's protectionism in the 1930s(21).

My Mother

My mother's father's second wife was Jenny Dunphy, from Windsor. My mother had two sisters, Florrie who married Jack Young, who came from a landed family in Queen's County (now Co Laois). The estate declined while Jack was serving in the 1914-18 war (he was at Gallipoli) and he ended up buying barley for the Perry brewery in Rathdowney. The other sister Isabel (Isa) married Bob Nesbitt, a Great Northern Railway clerk from Belfast. There were two brothers, one of whom died in the war.(22).

My mother trained in the Kildare Place Church of Ireland Training College as a national school teacher, and she taught for a time in Ballivor, Co Meath. She picked up some Irish via the Gaelic League, and made attempts to get the right to teach it in the school, but was blocked by the school manager, who was the Church of Ireland Minister.

When JJ went to Oxford in 1910 he was engaged to my mother, and he married her in 1914, before commencing the Albert Kahn Travelling Fellowship. Prior to the marriage he had, to please his prospective father-in-law, joined the Masonic Lodge in Longford, in which Robert Wilson was influential. He is on record in the Dublin headquarters as having resigned in good standing soon afterwards, rather than transferring to the TCD Lodge. I have scanned the names of the TCD Lodge members of the time, and they are mostly unmemorable.

JJ before he went to Oxford in 1910 I suspect must have had a vision which was perhaps analogous to, but somewhat less simplistic than, that of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. The Classics had taken three of the elder brothers into the imperial machine as administrators, but he must have been beginning to pick up their experiences, to the extent of making him question that channel, and look for alternatives.

Notes and References

2. I have touched on Dunraven and the AFIL in my 1999 introduction to JJ's Civil War in Ulster (Sealy, Bryant and Walker, Dublin 1913, also UCD Press, 1999). In the additional support documentation, given in the context of this hypertext version of the 1999 UCD Press edition, there is an extract from the Asquith papers touching on AFIL.

3. Conor Cruise O'Brien, in his Ancestral Voices (Poolbeg, Dublin 1994), is an important source of insight into the pathologies of emergent Catholic nationalism.

4. Appendix 1 gives an overview of the family history during the century; where appropriate it references decade modules where detail is expanded.

5. I have found traces of the thinking of John in the Oxford records, as well as the school records of John, Harry and William, and have outlined these in the 1900s family module of the hypertext; this is also referenced from Appendix 1.

6. Norman Cardwell, 16 Trewmount Road, Killymahon, Dungannon BT71_6RL, phone 01868-722-510, is currently working on a history of the School, target publication date 2002. I have included some details of bursaries won by the Johnston boys in the 1900s family module.

7. I am indebted to William O'Kane of Dungannon Heritage World (now moved to Donaghmore) for this information.

8. I have chronicled the details of JJ's Hist participation in the 1900s module of the 'political' theme. This is overviewed for the century in Appendix 10.

9. See also the 'JJ sources' section where I have listed them in full. It is also worth recording that my sister Dr Maureen Carmody had many books from the library of her father-in-law, Rev WP Carmody, Dean of Down, who was of a somewhat similar political persuasion, ie a Liberal Protestant supporter of all-Ireland Home Rule. The Carmody books remain with her family; they represent an important collection relevant to this tradition in the pre-independence period.

10. I have added some notes on Alice Stopford Green based on RB McDowell's biography (Allen Figgis, Dublin, 1967) in the hypertext. I give also some notes on her 'Making of Ireland and her Undoing', (Macmillan1909), and later her 'Old Irish World' (Gill & Macmillan 1912). Her quasi-imperial 'Commonwealth' vision was made explicitly in a comment to her secretary during the war of independence; she was visibly upset by news of IRA ambushings of British troops. This was recorded by CD Greaves in his journal on March 12 1967 after an interview with Maire Comerford, who had been ASG's secretary at the time, and his notes are accessible in the hypertext.

11. I am indebted to my daughter Nessa Johnston for drawing to my attention Sam Thompson and Modern Drama in Ulster by Hagal Mengel (Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 1986), in which the 1900s background in Belfast to the Dublin national theatre movement is analysed critically. This enabled me to pick up the significance of Rutherford Mayne, whose name had occurred among JJ's papers. I have expanded on this in the political stream of the hypertext. Mengel published a pre-view of his thesis in two articles in Theatre Ireland #1 (Sept-Dec 1982) and #2 (Jan-May 1983)

12. This Butler/O'Grady essay is reprinted in his book 'Escape from the Anthill' (Lilliput 1985). For O'Grady's subsequent association with Jim Larkin and The Irish Worker see Edward A Hagan's edited version of his writings To the Leaders of Our Working People, UCD Press, 2002; my review of this for the December 2002 Irish Democrat is accessible in the hypertext.

13. Irish Agriculture in Transition, Blackwell (Oxford) and Hodges Figgis (Dublin), 1951. Some attempts were made by Munster co-operatives to resurrect this principle, and JJ describes one in the 'Dovea' chapter, and also elsewhere in the book.

14. I have treated this question in a paper published in the Crane Bag; it is is to be found in the 'Forum Issue', Vol 7, No 2, 1983. As published it is full of dreadful misprints; in the hypertext version given here however I have corrected it.

15. The Statistical and Social Inquiry Society was a focus of 19th century Liberal economic thinking; I go into its history in Appendix 6, which overviews JJ's long association with it. CH Oldham would have been an early influence on the development of JJ's economic thinking.

16. The Plunkett House theme is overviewed in Appendex 4.

17. The Years Flew By, Sydney Gifford Czira, Gifford and Craven, Dublin 1974. The Ferguson reference is on p60. The author was a sister of Grace Gifford, who married Joseph Mary Plunket in 1916 on the eve of his execution.

18. The Barrington Lectures at this time had a decidedly West-British flavour; I go into the background to these in Appendix 7. JJ did not begin to associate with them until after the war, when they had been abandoned by the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society; he resurrected them, and gave them a co-operative flavour.

19. JJ had a long-standing relationship with the Society, becoming President in the 1950s. He did not join until the mid 1920s. I overview this theme in Appendix 6.

20. James Johnston, Can the Hindus Rule India? (PS King, London 1935) (incidentally the same publisher who had taken Nemesis of Economic Nationalism for JJ).

21. Joseph Johnston, The Nemesis of Economic Nationalism (PS King, London 1934).

22. I go into the details of this via Appendix 1 which is dedicated to the family; this gives some insight into the impact on the Protestant community of the 2 world wars.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999