At 3am on 3 December 1921, the mail steamer Cambria, on her maiden voyage between Holyhead and Kingstown, now Dún Laoghaire, struck a small boat off the coast of north Wales. The Cambria was slightly damaged, but the smaller boat was sliced almost in two, and three of her seven seamen lost. The Manchester Guardian reported that there was “great excitement among the passengers” when they were instructed to put on their life jackets, but the Irish Peace Conference delegation, who were also travelling on the Cambria, helped to reassure them. Michael Collins, the famous IRA director of intelligence and minister for finance in the Irish republican government, quipped to a crewman: “I have been in a tighter corner than this.” He was, the sailor told the Guardian, “the coolest man on board”.
This is just a glimpse of the rich detail contained in Gretchen Friemann’s The Treaty, which takes the reader through every twist and turn of the negotiations a century ago that led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on the night of 6 December 1921. The agreement brought an end to the Irish war of independence, but provoked in its place a civil war.
The Irish delegation had arrived at Euston station at the start of October to extraordinary scenes, with thousands of supporters thronging the platforms, singing republican songs and waving tricolours. When the king and queen reached Euston on the royal train half an hour before the Irish delegation, the crowd good-naturedly cheered them as well. It all began, on the surface at least, with joy and hope.
But, as Friemann shows in a pacy and controlled narrative, there were shadows from the outset. The delegations were enormously mismatched: the British one was packed with “big beasts”, men with long political careers behind them, and with the experience of major international conferences to boot. The prime minister, David Lloyd George, was staking his political career on getting a deal done. By contrast, the relatively inexperienced Irish delegation were further disadvantaged by being on away turf, and making regular exhausting journeys back to Dublin to confer with the rest of the Irish cabinet.
For all they were comrades in revolution, the Irish plenipotentiaries – Collins, Arthur Griffith, Robert Barton, George Gavan Duffy and Eamon Duggan – were not exactly united. Collins, a skilled bureaucrat who had effortlessly combined his military and political roles during the war of independence, set up his own household at Cadogan Gardens, west London, with his circle of trusted IRA bodyguards. The rest of the delegation, along with the secretaries, typists and clerks who accompanied them, were based at nearby Hans Place.
Personality clashes simmered throughout, particularly focused on Erskine Childers, the Trinity College Cambridge-educated IRA director of propaganda, whose penchant for meticulously documenting every meeting the delegation had, however brief, has been a boon for historians. It irritated Collins and Griffith beyond measure.Moreover, the precise role of the Irish delegation was not clear even at the outset. Did they have full plenipotentiary powers, or was this all mere positioning for a later, more substantive negotiation to follow? Although Friemann does not shed any new light on the vexed question of why President Éamon de Valera did not join the delegation himself, she does present a plausible, if by now well-rehearsed explanation: De Valera expected these negotiations to fail, and planned to ride to the rescue at the last minute to secure better terms.
The anticipation of failure is perhaps what is most distinctive about Friemann’s analysis: she emphasises throughout the fragility of the negotiations that came close to breaking down on many occasions. And, as she makes clear, a lot ran on how that breakdown might occur. Would it come, as the Irish strategy suggested, on the question of national unity and the reversal of partition? Or would the break come, as the British hoped, on the question of sovereignty – allegiance to the crown and the place of Ireland with the empire? Both sides were anxious to secure the break on their chosen issue, positioning themselves for the war of words (and perhaps the real war) that would follow.
Friemann weaves a complex narrative, deftly jumping back and forward in time to set the scene or to fill in the picture. With such a strong focus on the political strategies adopted by each side, and the cut and thrust of each negotiating round, there is little space left for the story of what happened outside the negotiating rooms as the Irish delegation enjoyed the delights of interwar London. In the event, the break did not come on Ulster. The Irish delegation, faced with a threat of war within three days, signed the treaty. When news came back to Dublin, the press responded with jubilation, but IRA members couldn’t believe what they were reading.
Even before the delegation returned, sides were being taken in the conflict that would follow. Three of the main characters in the book would be dead within a year: Griffith from a brain aneurysm, Collins shot in an ambush and Childers executed by the new Free State government for the capital crime of possession of a weapon. It was an ornamental pistol, given as a gift by Collins months before. “Step forward lads,” he told his firing squad, “it will make it easier.” Friemann’s book helps to explain the roots of those three deaths; with an admirably light touch, she charts the road to the political division that engulfed Ireland.
• The Treaty is published by Merrion (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
