James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon

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For other uses, see James Craig (disambiguation).

Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party
In office
7 June 1921 – 24 November 1940
Preceded bySir Edward Carson
Succeeded byJ. M. Andrews
Ministerial positions
Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Pensions
In office
10 January 1919 – 2 April 1920
Prime MinisterDavid Lloyd George
Preceded byArthur Griffith-Boscawen
Succeeded byGeorge Tryon
Treasurer of the Household
In office
14 December 1916 – 22 January 1918
Prime MinisterDavid Lloyd George
Preceded byJames Hope
Succeeded byRobert Sanders
Northern Ireland Parliament
Member of the Northern Ireland Parliament
for Down
In office
24 May 1921 – 22 May 1929
Preceded byConstituency established
Succeeded byConstituency abolished
British Parliament
Hereditary Peerage
Succeeded byThe 2nd Viscount Craigavon
Member of Parliament
for Mid Down
In office
14 December 1918 – 2 July 1921
Preceded byConstituency established
Succeeded byRobert Sharman-Crawford
Member of Parliament
for East Down
In office
8 February 1906 – 14 December 1918
Preceded byJames Wood
Succeeded bySir David Reid
Personal details
Born(1871-01-08)8 January 1871
3rd (Militia) Royal Irish Rifles
Battles/warsSecond Boer War

James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon

Irish unionist and a key architect of Northern Ireland as a devolved region within the United Kingdom. During the Home Rule Crisis of 1912–14, he defied the British government in preparing an armed resistance in Ulster to an all-Ireland parliament. He accepted partition as a final settlement, securing the opt out of six Ulster counties from the dominion statehood accorded Ireland under the terms of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. From then until his death in 1940, he led the Ulster Unionist Party and served Northern Ireland as its first Prime Minister. He publicly characterised his administration as a "Protestant" counterpart to the "Catholic state" nationalists had established in the south. Craig was created a baronet
in 1918 and raised to the Peerage in 1927.

Early life

Craig was born at

whiskey distiller who had entered the firm of Dunville & Co as a clerk: by age 40 he was a millionaire and a partner in the firm. James Craig Snr. owned a large house called Craigavon, overlooking Belfast Lough. His mother, Eleanor Gilmore Browne, was the daughter of Robert Browne, a prosperous man who owned property in Belfast and a farm outside Lisburn. Craig was the seventh child and sixth son in the family; there were eight sons and one daughter in all.[1]

He was educated at Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, Scotland; his father had taken a conscious decision not to send his sons to any of the more fashionable public schools. After school he began work as a stockbroker, eventually opening his own firm in Belfast.

Military career

Craig enlisted in the 3rd (

captain in the 3rd Royal Irish Rifles on 20 September 1902,[5]
while still seconded to South Africa.

Service in South Africa is said to have made Craig far more politically aware and "had given him a heightened awareness of the Empire and a pride in Ulster's place in it".[6]

Politics

Craig caricatured by WHO for Vanity Fair, 1911

Leader of Ulster opposition to Irish Home Rule

On his return to Ireland, having received a £100,000 legacy from his father's will, he turned to politics. Following his brother Charles who had successfully stood as an Irish Unionist in a by-election in South Antrim the previous month, in March 1903 by-election Craig attempted to secure the unionist seat of North Fermanagh. Unlike his brother, he narrowly failed to defeat his Russellite rival (Edward Mitchell). He had to wait until the 1906 General Election to win his first seat, East Down (the constituency he represented until returned from Mid Down in 1918).[6] Already he was playing a leading organisational role for Irish Unionism in Ulster.

In 1905, he had co-founded the

Home Rule in northern province. In this task he regarded the coontribution of the parading Orange Order (that commanded 50 of 200 seats on the council) as key. Opening an Orange Hall in after the 1906 election he declared that he was "an Orangeman first and a Member of Parliament afterwards" and called for "the Protestant community to rally around the [Orange] lodges, strengthen and support them".[7]

In 1912, Craig helped orchestrate

conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland".[8][9]

In January 1913, unable to prevent passage of the

Home Rule Bill at Westminster, the UUC called the exclusion of Ulster from its provisions, a demand backed with a call for up to 100,000 Covenanters to be drilled and armed as Ulster Volunteers. On 23 September, Craig persuaded Carson to accept Chairmanship of a Provisional Government which he had planned and primed to assume the administration of Ulster should the Government move to enforce the authority of a new Dublin parliament.[10]

In April 1914, Craig supported

Imperial Germany.[11] Years later (1934) in a speech in the House of Commons of Northern Ireland the political leader of the Northern Ireland Nationalists Cahir Healy spoke of Craig's support in the arming of Loyalists and the potential for armed resistance to the Government of Ireland Act 1914:

"Did not the Irish Republican Army march in the footsteps of the gentleman who is now the King's Prime Minister in Northern Ireland? I shall be told your treason was of the conditional type. You knew and Sir Edward Carson knew you would never be obliged to make good in the flesh your promises to the mob. And you were right in that. For you and the ringleaders in rebellion, there was to be the Government Bench and the profitable post of a law lord. For Casement, Pearse, Connolly and the rest there was a bullet at dawn and a grave of quick lime. That is how justice is administered...When treason prospers men do not call it treason. Treason has prospered with you. You have achieved place and power by treason."[12]

On women's suffrage

In 1912, Craig broke with other Irish MPs, both unionist and

nationalist, in voting for the Conciliation bill that would have extended the parliamentary vote (albeit on a restrictive property basis) for the first time to women. Consistent with the prominent role in mobilising opposition to home rule played by the Ulster Women's Unionist Council (UWUC), and the invitation to women to sign their own declaration in support of the Ulster Covenant,[8] in September 1913 Craig's UUC informed the Women's Council that the draft articles for the Provisional Government included provisions for female suffrage.[13]

When in the spring of 1914, Carson, seeming to overrule Craig, made it clear that a potentially divisive endorsement of votes for women was not a political option for unionism, Dorothy Evans, organiser in Belfast for Women's Social and Political Union declared an end to "the truce" that the organisation had "held in Ulster".[14] In the months that followed WSPU militants were implicated in a series of outrages against property that, in addition to arson attacks on Unionist-owned buildings and on male recreational and sports facilities,[15] included forced entry into Craig's home.[16]

On 3 April 1913 police raided the flat in Belfast Evans was sharing with local activist Midge Muir, and found explosives. In court, five days later, the pair created uproar when they demanded to know why the gun-runner Craig was not appearing on the same charges.[14]

Wartime government service

Following the

Lord Kitchener to remould the UVF into the 36th Ulster Division. He was given the rank of lieutenant-colonel, but unift for front line service he resigned his commission at the end of 1916 and took up a junior post, Treasurer of the Household, in the wartime coalition government of Lloyd George. He spoke in favour of conscripting Irishmen into the army in 1918 as the Government looked to extend the Military Services Act.[6]

After the

Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty (1920–21). In February 1921, with the war of independence underway in the south, Craig succeeded Edward Carson as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party
.

Proponent of a devolved Belfast administration

Craig persuaded his fellow Unionists and the British Government that if exclusion, and thus partition, was to be the solution to the challenge posed by the Catholic-majority desire for Irish self government, it should apply to only six of the nine Ulster counties. In three, Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, he argued Sinn Féiners would make government "absolutely impossible for us".[17] He also led Ulster Unionists in accepting that the six counties—Northern Ireland as they were to become—should have their own home-rule parliament in Belfast.

Writing to Prime Minister

Government of Ireland Bill 1920, Craig noted that having "all the paraphernalia of Government" might make it more difficult for future Liberal and/or Labour government to push Northern Ireland against the will of its majority into all-Ireland arrangements[19] Once Unionists had their own parliament, Craig felt able to assure his followers "no power on earth would ever be able to touch them".[20]

To make such assurance against British pressure for Irish unity doubly sure, in November 1921 Craig suggested to Lloyd George that Northern Ireland's status be changed to that of a Crown dominion outside of the United Kingdom. Although in signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty, only weeks later the Prime Minister conceded Southern Ireland precisely this Canada-style form of statehood, to Craig he replied that he was not willing to give "the character of an international boundary" to "a frontier based neither upon natural features nor broad geographical considerations".[21]

Lloyd George was nonetheless persuaded in October 1920 to secure that still unsettled frontier by endorsing Craig's proposal for a new "volunteer constabulary ... raised from the loyal population" and "armed for duty within the six county area only".[22] Into this Ulster Special Constabulary former UVF units were "incorporated en masse".[23]

Prime Minister of Northern Ireland

Craig (third from left) with his first cabinet, in 1921

In the 1921 Northern Ireland general election, the first ever, Craig was elected to the newly created Northern Ireland House of Commons as one of the members for County Down. On 7 June 1921, Craig was appointed the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.[24] The House of Commons of Northern Ireland assembled for the first time later that day.[25] By 1932 opposition to some of Craig’s policies became more direct. Opposition leader Cahir Healy pointed out the sectarian nature of the Prime Minister's rule:

We know how it began. He began by interning 500 Nationalists, many of them from the most peaceful parts of the Six Counties, but not a single man of his own gunmen in Belfast were interned. He began by gerrymandering local government areas, even in places where the Nationalists in relation to the Protestants were as two and a quarter to one. They were left without any control of the local councils. He drove the Nationalists out of every public position where it was possible to do so, and he made, and continues to make, public appointments on sectarian and political grounds, totally ignoring merit. That is how he began and that is how he continues.[26]

In April 1934, in response to George Leeke's question regarding the Protestant nature of the Unionist dominated parliament, Craig famously replied:

The hon. Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State. It would be rather interesting for historians of the future to compare a Catholic State launched in the South with a Protestant State launched in the North and to see which gets on the better and prospers the more. It is most interesting for me at the moment to watch how they are progressing. I am doing my best always to top the bill and to be ahead of the South.[27]

Time cover, 26 May 1924

This speech is often misquoted, intentionally or otherwise, as: "

Craigavon after Craig. A noted nationalist, Joseph Connellan, interrupted the announcement with the comment, "A Protestant city for a Protestant people".[28]

Later that year, speaking in the House of Commons at Stormont on 21 November 1934 in response to an accusation that all government appointments in Northern Ireland were carried out on a religious basis, he replied: "... it is undoubtedly our duty and our privilege, and always will be, to see that those appointed by us possess the most unimpeachable loyalty to the King and Constitution. That is my whole object in carrying on a Protestant Government for a Protestant people. I repeat it in this House".[29]

He was made a

Oxford University (1926).[citation needed
]

Lord Craigavon's tomb, Stormont Parliament grounds
Close-up of the tomb carving

Craig had made his career in British as well as Northern Irish politics; but his premiership showed little sign of his earlier close acquaintance with the British political world. He became intensely parochial, and suffered from his loss of intimacy with British politicians in 1938, when the British government concluded agreements with Dublin to end the

Second World War, he called for conscription to be introduced in Northern Ireland (which the British government, fearing a backlash from nationalists, refused).[30] He also called for Churchill to invade Ireland, alternatively known as Éire, using Scottish and Welsh troops in order to seize the valuable ports and install a Governor-General at Dublin.[31] Lady Londonderry confided to Sir Samuel Hoare, the Home Secretary until the outbreak of the war, that Craigavon had become "ga-ga"[32] but Craigavon was still prime minister when he died peacefully at his home at Glencraig, County Down, at the age of 69. He was buried on the Stormont Estate on 5 December 1940, and was succeeded as the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland by the Minister of Finance, J. M. Andrews
.

Craig had a dual Irish-British self-identity, saying in a 1929 parliamentary debate that "We are Irishmen ... always hold that Ulstermen are Irishmen and the best of Irishmen – much the best".[33]

Personal life

His wife,

Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1941.[34]

Craigavon was succeeded as second viscount by his elder son, James (1906–1974). His estate was valued at £3,228, 2s., 6d. effects in England: probate, 20 March 1941, CGPLA NIre., £24, 138 9s. 9d.: probate, 3 March 1941, CGPLA NIre.[citation needed]

Craig had a keen interest in Ulster Agriculture and was vice-president of Listooder and District Ploughing Society (the oldest in Ireland) from November 1906 until November 1921 and continued to present the all-Ireland cup class until 1926.[35]

Arms

Coat of arms of James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon
Notes
Coat of arms of the Craig family
Crest
A demi-lion rampant per fess Gules and Sable holding in the dexter paw a mullet Or.
Escutcheon
Gules a fess Ermine between three bridges of as many arches Proper.
Supporters
Dexter a Constable of the Ulster Special Constabulary his hand resting on a rifle Proper sinister a Private of the Royal Ulster Rifles armed and accoutred also Proper.[36]
Motto
Charity Provokes Charity

See also

Notes

  1. ISBN 9780717110780
    .
  2. ^ "No. 27168". The London Gazette. 23 February 1900. p. 1256.
  3. ^ "No. 27171". The London Gazette. 6 March 1900. p. 1528.
  4. ^ "The War – Embarcation of Troops". The Times. No. 36078. London. 1 March 1900. p. 7.
  5. ^ "No. 27475". The London Gazette. 19 September 1902. p. 6024.
  6. ^ a b c UK Parliament (2022). "James Craig (1871-1940)". UK Parliament. Retrieved 13 September 2022.
  7. S2CID 155598026
    .
  8. ^ a b Gordon, Lucy (1989). The Ulster Covenant. Belfast: Ulster society.
  9. PRONI. "The Ulster Covenant: Ulster Day". Archived
    from the original on 29 August 2012. Retrieved 29 September 2012.
  10. ^ Biggs-Davidson (1973). p. 79.
  11. ^ Stewart, A.T.Q. (1967). The Ulster Crisis. London: Faber and Faber. pp. 119, 177.
  12. ^ Reid, Gerard (1999), Great Irish Voices, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, pp. 260, ISBN 0-7165-2674-3
  13. JSTOR 1394778
    .
  14. ^ a b Kelly, Vivien (1996). "Irish Suffragettes at the time of the Home Rule Crisis". 20th Century, Contemporary History. 4 (1). Archived from the original on 18 February 2020. Retrieved 8 March 2020 – via History Ireland.
  15. ISBN 9781909556065
    .
  16. S2CID 145344160
    .
  17. ^ Hansard (Vol 127, cc 925-1036 925), House of Commons, 29 March 1920
  18. ^ Sir James Craig in a letter to Lloyd George, quoted in F.S.L Lyons (1971), Ireland since the Famine. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London. p. 696
  19. ^ Hansard, 29 March 1920, Government of Ireland Bill, p. 980
  20. ^ "Despair in Ireland", The Times, 7 October 1920
  21. ^ Follis, Bryan A. (1995), A State Under Siege: The Establishment of Northern Ireland 1920- 1925, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp65-66.
  22. ISBN 1-85182-792-7
    .
  23. ISBN 978-0-7171-1202-9
    .
  24. ^ "Belfast Gazette" (1). 7 June 1921. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  25. ^ "NI Hansard HC vol.1 cc.1–10". Stormont Papers. 7 June 1921. Archived from the original on 21 August 2017. Retrieved 23 April 2019.
  26. ^ Reid, pg 253.
  27. A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People
    ", or "A Protestant State for a Protestant People".
  28. ^ Mulholland, Marc. "Why Did Unionists Discriminate?, academia.edu; accessed 4 September 2017.
  29. ^ Northern Ireland Parliamentary Debates; Vol. 17, columns 73 & 74 Archived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine; accessed 4 September 2017.
  30. ISBN 978-0-233-97514-6
    .
  31. ^ "Churchill was asked to invade 'Nazi' Ireland during Second World War". 21 March 2010. Archived from the original on 30 August 2017. Retrieved 8 July 2017.
  32. ^ Jonathan Bardon. "Extracts from an article, "The Belfast Blitz, 1941"". BELFAST BLITZ. Archived from the original on 3 February 2015. Retrieved 19 January 2015.
  33. ^ Walker, Brian (2012). A Political History of Two Islands: From Partition to Peace. Palgrave MacMillan. p. 26.
  34. ^ "Clarence 10". william1.co.uk. Archived from the original on 8 April 2017. Retrieved 2 February 2017.
  35. ^ Callum Bowsie (31 January 2021). "History of the oldest ploughing society in Ireland – Listooder & Dist". No. Farming Life. Newsletter. pp. 47–49.
  36. ^ "Grants and Confirmations of Arms Volume M". National Library of Ireland. p. 202. Retrieved 24 August 2022.

References

External links

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