Once the Irish Free State was established, a number of former unionists, who had been active in that cause and had opposed political independence for Ireland, chose to become engaged in the public life of the new State. One of these was John Bagwell, who was born 150 years ago on August 11th.
John Philip (known as “Jack”) Bagwell was the only son of Richard Bagwell, of Marlfield, Clonmel, Co Tipperary. The Bagwells could trace their arrival in Ireland back to an officer in Cromwell’s New Model Army. His grandfather, also John, was a Liberal MP for Clonmel from 1857 to 1874. His father, Richard, was a noted historian of 16th and 17th-century Ireland and wrote two highly regarded works: Ireland Under the Tudors and Ireland Under the Stuarts. His mother was Harriet Newton, of Bagenalstown, Co Carlow. She was an active philanthropist and set up a very successful embroidery cottage industry in her local area in Tipperary.
He was educated at Harrow School, London, and at Trinity College, Oxford, after which he joined the English Midland Railway and was assistant superintendent of line from 1905 to 1909. Following that, he returned to Ireland, where he was superintendent of passenger services (1910-1911) and then general manager of the Great Northern Railway, a position he held from 1911 to 1926. He had married Louise Shaw, youngest daughter of Major-General George Shaw, CB, in 1901; they had two sons and a daughter.
During the Easter Rising, while he and his wife were driving up Harcourt Street in Dublin, away from the fighting at St Stephen’s Green, they sustained bullet wounds but survived the ordeal. Politically a staunch unionist, he was elected to the executive committee of the Irish Unionist Alliance in 1920, and served on its standing committee and its finance and general-purposes committee. Following the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and its passage through the Dáil, in late 1922 WT Cosgrave, president of the executive council, nominated him to the new Seanad Éireann, where, as Pauric J Dempsey, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, remarked, “he courageously served till its abolition in 1936”. Having been nominated for six years in 1922, he was re-elected in November 1928 and November 1934.
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Because of his membership of the Seanad, his ancestral home at Marlfield, “containing one of the finest libraries in the country as well as many valuable artefacts”, according to Dempsey, was burned down by anti-Treaty forces on January 9th, 1923. On January 30th, while out walking with his wife near their home in Howth, Co Dublin, he was kidnapped by anti-Treatyites and held in the Dublin Mountains. The government issued a warning to the kidnappers that unless he was released within 24 hours, anti-Treaty prisoners would be shot in reprisal. He escaped on February 1st, “not unhindered by the proclamation”, according to Dempsey, but he himself claimed that he escaped through his own efforts. (His own account of his kidnapping and subsequent escape is in the National Library of Ireland, at call number Ms 49,808.)
In the Free State Seanad, he was an active member of the mainly ex-Unionist Independent group. One shortsighted position he adopted was to oppose the government’s Shannon electrification scheme; he advised his friends not to invest any money in it. When divorce was debated in 1925, his position was similar to that of WB Yeats and other Anglo-Irish Protestant members, who argued that the religious views of the Catholic majority should not be imposed on the minority.
The Wearing of Uniform (Restrictions) Bill was brought in by Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government in 1934 to outlaw the wearing of the blue shirt by Eoin O’Duffy’s movement. Bagwell opposed the Bill, arguing that the government had never proclaimed the IRA. Immediately following the Seanad rejection of the Bill, de Valera introduced legislation in the Dáil to abolish the upper house, which came about in 1936 and brought Bagwell’s political career to an end.
He had served as deputy lieutenant and a justice of the peace for Co Tipperary before Independence, as his father had done before him, and was very active as chairman of the Clonmel Agricultural Society for many years and in the Clonmel Horse Show. He loved horses and riding to hounds and was a keen long-distance walker. Marlfield House had been rebuilt in 1925, as a replica of the Georgian original, and he died there on August 22nd, 1946, at the age of 72.
The former unionist quickly reconciled himself to the new political dispensation of the country to which his ancestors had come almost 300 years before and it may be said of him that he did it some service.