"The inborn hate of things English": Ernie O'Malley and the Irish Revolution 1916-1923

Past & Present, May, 1996 by Richard English

Close examination of these two authors' influences and connections helps to contextualize these undoubted resonances. Both were romantic -- indeed over-romantic -- story-telling patriots.(44) And if O'Malley's adventures resembled Richard Hannay's, this was partly because Buchan and O'Malley shared similar tastes in reading. Both men revelled in Robert Louis Stevenson. According to Janet Adam Smith, Buchan's "view of what constituted a `romance'" derived largely from Stevenson; O'Malley declared "I love Robert Louis Stevenson", and frequently praised his work. O'Malley and Buchan shared other enthusiasms too. Both men enjoyed Scott, Dickens, Thackeray and Arnold. Both adored Shakespeare: "I like Shakespeare best" (O'Malley); "the greatest of all poets" (Buchan). Both admired the work of Arthur Quiller Couch. O'Malley liked A. S. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy; Buchan had been taught by Bradley at Glasgow University. O'Malley expressed his "love" for Walter Pater in 1923; Buchan chose Brasenose as his Oxford college partly because Pater had been a fellow there.(45)

Other similarities complement these bookish connections. Both O'Malley and Buchan wrote patriotic accounts of conflict which assumed that their respective nations fought in defence of a righteous cause. Again, both men believed that patriotic sacrifice would produce a fruitful harvest: "The country has not had, as yet, sufficient voluntary sacrifice and suffering and not until suffering fluctuates will she get back her real soul" (O'Malley); "there is ground for humble confidence that that sowing in unimaginable sacrifice and pain will yet quicken and bear fruit to the bettering of the world" (Buchan). Each man stressed that patriotic commitment dissolved class boundaries, and each suggested the possibility that some new social pattern might emerge from military struggle. Speaking of his Volunteer company, O'Malley asserted: "We . . . were mixed: professions, unskilled labour, students, Government clerks, skilled labour, business men, and out-of-works . . . There were no class distinctions. One judged a man by his previous training, courage, efficiency, and ability; results by zeal and willingness to learn". Similarly (this time with reference to republican prisoners in 1924): "It was hard to distinguish, as one walked around the camp, the professions or occupations of the men . . . We were prisoners, it did not matter about one's position or education, here all ranked equally . . . There was a recasting, a new shaping of values". For his part, Buchan stressed the classless nature of the First World War British Army: public school boys were joined by "miners from north England, factory hands from the industrial centres, clerks and shop boys, ploughmen and shepherds, Saxon and Celt, college graduates and dock labourers"; and he suggested that "[i]f we can carry that great brotherhood of the trenches into the years of peace, and make a better and a juster England, where class hatred will abate because class selfishness has gone, then, by the grace of God, this war may yet rank as one of the happiest events in our history".(46)