The Second World War was exceptionally important in defining the second generation of unionist rule in Northern Ireland. It was the usual practice for any aspiring unionist politician to style themselves by their given military ranks: in 1963 Captain Terence O’Neill became prime minister and he was succeeded in 1969 by Major James Chichester-Clark. Both times Brian Faulkner, though recognised as ambitious and highly capable, was overlooked. His reputation suffered because he had remained in Northern Ireland during the war years to run his father’s textile factory. It was important to have had a ‘good war’.
Philip Ollerenshaw’s excellent book shows clearly that, domestically, unionist Northern Ireland did not have such a good war. It entered the conflict fully committed to defence of empire. (Imperialism seems to have been a stronger identity than Britishness; Viscount Bledisloe, president of the Empire Day Movement, wrote to Prime Minister Craig in May 1939 to say that ‘I always regard you as the Prince of Imperialists.’) But conscription was not applied to Northern Ireland for fear of the likely nationalist reaction and embarrassment that unionists were disproportionately immune by being overrepresented in ‘reserved occupations’. Economic mobilisation was also unimpressive. Ulster’s peripheral position in the United Kingdom economy had been exacerbated by nearly twenty years of devolution, and the province found it difficult to pull its weight in U.K.-wide economic mobilisation. No Royal Ordinance factories were located in the province and full employment was never achieved.
Ollerenshaw cites a memorandum penned at the time by a British socialist, G. D. H. Cole, pointing out that smaller firms were often more efficient and more agreeable for workers than industrial giants. Ollerenshaw’s regional study of the province bears this out. The engineering firm of Mackies stepped up impressively, but Harland and Wolff shipyard failed to control costs while Shorts Brothers, wracked by poor industrial relations, had to be nationalised in 1943. Linen production struggled as continental suppliers of flax were cut off. Specialising in luxury goods, Ulster’s linen industry was ill-suited to war time priorities or, indeed, emerging markets: ‘Linen is the aristocrat of textiles, but these are democratic days’, as a representative sadly noted. Agriculture, based on typically quite small farms, did rather better than industry.
The reputation of the unionist government suffered due to their apparent inability to step up to the challenge of war. Lord Craigavon died in post in November 1940 but his replacement, John Andrews, failed to renew the ‘old guard’ cabinet or generally take a grip. Unionists seemed locked into narrow local concerns. Repression of Irish republicanism was justifiable on grounds of security, but Ollerenshaw believes that it went further than the war emergency required. In contrast, Belfast was poorly protected from air attack, which wreaked heavy casualties in 1941. The ruling party began to suffer reversals to labour and independent unionist candidates in by-elections, and rumblings of dissent grew in the Unionist Party itself. Andrews was ousted in 1943 and replaced by Sir Basil Brooke who was widely seen as much more proactive. By now victory was in sight, and Northern Ireland after all could not fail to be at least partly stimulated by war production towards some convergence with the British economy. In 1938, per capita income in the province was only fifty five per cent of the British level, but by 1945 it stood at sixty seven per cent. The Beveridge Report caused political consternation, amongst unionists for its perceived socialism, amongst nationalists for further separating the north from southern Ireland’s voluntarist model of welfare. Still, it undoubtedly helped to concentrate minds on Northern Ireland’s dismal health and social service provision. After the war, with the British government grateful for the province’s war service, at least in contrast to Irish neutrality, Treasury funds flowed to support the welfare state. The cherry on the cake was the 1949 Ireland Act, a British response to Ireland becoming a republic which granted Stormont a veto on the ending of partition. This, unfortunately, only made uninterrupted unionist control of Northern Ireland’s parliament all the more important, perpetuating one-party majoritarianism that was to provoke the rebellion of 1968.
Ollerenshaw’s book is based upon close study of a great a mass of rather dry official documentation on social and economic issues. This would daunt most researchers. He has distilled from this a tightly organised, dryly funny and genuinely eye-opening panorama liberally sprinkled with gasp-out-loud vignettes illustrating the statelet’s peculiar political culture. It contributes substantially to the wider project of recalibrating study of the war to a regional scale.
