What an unexpected pleasure to discover that the 1913 Lockout is now the subject of a major study. The struggle for trade union recognition inspired the writing of the outstanding novel Strumpet City. Based largely on that work of fiction, the titanic battle between the labour and employers' leaders, James Larkin and William Martin Murphy respectively, has already been converted in the late 1970s and early 1980s into a television mini-series. The Lockout was also the theme of a fine Radio Eireann play. But how historically accurate were those treatments of events?
Larkin, of course, continues to harangue the masses as a bronze statue in O'Connell Street - once the scene of the infamous baton-charge that followed the labour leader's appearance on the balcony of a hotel almost facing the General Post Office on "Bloody Sunday" 1913. Disguised as an old man, Larkin slipped past the waiting police, climbed to the first floor and, throwing off his disguise, addressed the scattered groups of workers below. His appearance must have bemused Sunday strollers who found themselves caught up in the ensuing drama. The Dublin Metropolitan Police did not discriminate when they drew their batons and went into action following an order to clear the street.
The early years of Larkin's Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) were incident-filled and, under his leadership, it could not have been any other way. There are those who will correctly take issue with my shorthand description "James Larkin's ITGWU". Many others, such as William O'Brien, were involved in the setting up of this Irish-based general workers union. Perhaps the author is a little unkind in his treatment of the latter. He, too, played an important role in 1913 and was responsible for reducing the level of bloodshed on the streets of the capital on that fateful Sunday.
The strength of the ITGWU lay in its determination to assert itself in areas of the labour force untouched by other unions, be they Irish or British based. Larkin targeted dockers, railway workers, tramway men, carters and even those working in Guinnesses. Within a few years of its foundation, the ITGWU was involved in strikes in many of the country's major cities. This struck panic into the many chambers of commerce around the country. The employers faced a new kind of industrial action.
Larkin had perfected the art of the sympathetic strike - a weapon outlawed in modern industrial relations - where workers not directly involved in a dispute come out in sympathy with their union brothers and sisters. An injury to one became the concern of all. This was a technique that caused considerable disquiet to employers and to the more conventional leaders of the craft unions alike. It was a tactic that the emerging leader of the employers, Murphy, would not tolerate. He organised the Dublin employers and set out in 1913 to smash the union by locking out those who had joined the ITGWU in the Dublin United Tramway Company and in the Independent - both of which he owned. His draconian tactics won out in 1913. But, according to Padraig Yeates, he did not stop the march of the ITGWU and the onward march of labour. That is the conclusion of Yeates's new volume of over 600 pages in length. Written out of an obvious personal sympathy for Larkin and the trade union movement, the author nevertheless is too good an historian to allow his work to become a propaganda tract on the rise of the Irish working class. There are occasions when he trails his coat a little. But the task the author set himself was to reconstruct objectively the complex events leading up to the Lockout, describe the events around "Bloody Sunday" and analyse in detail the aftermath of the crisis.
Divided into three parts, the book is broken down into 43 chapters. It is written in a lively, accessible and fluent style. Its size ought not to intimidate any reader. They will find the narrative quite absorbing. His reconstruction of the events of what has come to be known as "Bloody Sunday" - one of three in the canon of Irish history - deviates significantly from the manner in which it has been constructed in drama and in fiction. The author is careful to point out the divisions in the trade union leadership, and he follows the material in the O'Brien papers, which shows that the overwhelming majority of trade unionists were at Croydon Park (Fairview Park) when the infamous baton charge took place on Sackville Street (O'Connell Street) on "Bloody Sunday" 1913. This fact calls into question the accuracy of the fictional reconstruction of that terrible event.
Yeates is generally very fair in his treatment of the leading personalities in the struggle. More time might have been taken to explore the personality of O'Brien, who has left a rich personal archive to the National Library. The author does not like Murphy, and perhaps he is least successful in attempting to come to terms with this west Cork man who was the nearest to an international entrepreneur the south produced in those days. There is more to Murphy than the description "rabid Catholic nationalist businessman". In fairness, the author does struggle to understand what motivated him to take such a hard and unyielding line against Larkin. But this book does not take us very much further in our understanding of Murphy than many other works treating the rise of Irish labour. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in Irish labour, the history of industrial relations and the study of Dublin society in the early 20th century. Building on the work of others such as Donal Nevin, Lockout Dublin 1913 is a significant personal research achievement and a major addition to the growing corpus of historical research on Larkin and Irish trade unionism.
Dr Dermot Keogh is Professor of History at University College Cork and the author of The Rise of the Irish Working Class - The Dublin Trade Union Movement and Labour Leadership