A century on, the anti-war movement remains part of the peripheral and hidden history of the war. Those who took a stand against the conflict are still patronisingly dismissed as cranks. Some of the personal histories of how the war divided both Britain and Ireland have been well told by Adam Hochschild in his recent … Read more
E.D. Morel was imprisoned in 1917 for a technical breach of the Defence of the Realm Act. His crime was to have sent a copy of his pamphlet Tsardom’s part in the war to Romain Rolland in Switzerland. Many of Morel’s allies rallied to his defence. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian of 19 … Read more
A memorial committee was set up in Dublin in July 1919 with the purpose of creating an all-Ireland national war memorial to commemorate Irish soldiers who died in the First World War. It raised close to £50,000 by public appeal and considered many proposals, including a monument in Merrion Square and a memorial arch at … Read more
Tracing the responses of Irish visual artists to the First World War usually takes us out of Ireland and to painters whose ‘Irishness’ is sometimes debated. Conventionally, the two most significant were William Orpen, a Dublin-born Protestant, and John Lavery, a Belfast-born Catholic, both of whom were appointed official war artists in 1917 by the … Read more
William Conor was born into a working-class North Belfast Protestant family in 1881. His father was a sheet-metal worker and later a gas fitter. At national school his artistic ability was noticed and he won a place at the government school of design in Belfast, where he trained as a commercial artist, later being employed … Read more