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Augustine Birrell

Wavertree, England, 1850 - 1933, London

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n50011226

Birrell, Augustine (1850–1933), politician and author, was born at Wavertree, near Liverpool, on 19 January 1850, the younger son of Charles Morton Birrell, a Baptist minister, and Harriet Jane Grey, daughter of Henry Grey, Free Church of Scotland minister. Though he later became an agnostic, he always retained a deep respect for the Liberal nonconformist tradition of his Liverpool upbringing. He left Amersham Hall School, Caversham, in 1866 to become an articled clerk in a Liverpool solicitor's office, when a lucky legacy allowed him to study law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he earned a good second-class degree in 1872. He was called to the bar by the Inner Temple at twenty-five, earning a solid living which enabled him in 1878 to marry Margaret, daughter of Archibald Mirrielees [see under Muir, Andrew (1817–1899)]. She died after only ‘a twelve-month's bliss’, as Birrell sadly remarked. His younger sister looked after him for the next nine years while he developed both his law practice and his literary skills.

Birrell's legal career was by no means undistinguished—he took silk in 1895, and for three years from 1896 was professor of law at University College, London. He also acquired a considerable reputation as an essayist and literary critic, especially with his two small volumes of Obiter dicta (1884, 1887), which aimed to remind his readers ‘of books they once had by heart, and of authors they must ever love’ (Obiter dicta, 2nd ser., 1896, vi). His witty and elegant essays on writers he admired, such as Milton, Pope, Carlyle, and Dr Johnson, revealed his passion for literature and his intellectual versatility. He had collected more than 10,000 books for his library by the time he was fifty, observing in his essay ‘Book-buying’ that ‘the man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively’ (Obiter dicta, 2nd ser., 1896, 264).
Liberal politician
Birrell was a charming, intelligent, and tolerant man, whose genial cynicism concealed an unexpected shyness and vastly more ability than his critics allowed. Lytton Strachey later observed: ‘He was decidedly a Victorian product. Large and tall and oddly like Thackeray to look at—with spectacles and sharp big nose’ (M. Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, 2.230). In 1888 he married Eleanor Bertha Mary (1854–1915), widow of Lionel Tennyson (younger son of the poet laureate), and daughter of the poet Frederick Locker-Lampson. They were happily married for twenty-seven years, bringing up two sons and sharing keen interests in literature and politics. Domestic contentment provided a secure base from which to launch Birrell's political career. After unsuccessful attempts to enter parliament in 1885 and 1886, he won a by-election as Liberal member for West Fife in 1889, and established himself in the 1890s as a devoted follower of Gladstone's last Liberal government. At the 1900 general election he unsuccessfully stood for the North-East division of Manchester, and was out of parliament until his return for North Bristol at the 1906 election, which resulted in a landslide Liberal victory.

For the next ten years Birrell was a minister in the cabinets of Campbell-Bannerman and H. H. Asquith, where he contributed significantly to the reforming achievements of Britain's last Liberal governments before war transformed the political scene and the Labour Party replaced the Liberals as the party of the left. Sir Charles Mallet observed in The Times (22 November 1933) that Birrell was a master of debate who delighted audiences by his eloquence and moved them deeply by his strong conviction: ‘few men at the end of 1906 enjoyed a greater reputation in the House of Commons’. His challenge as president of the Board of Education in 1906 was to amend the controversial 1902 Education Act, which was deemed by nonconformists and Liberals to favour Church of England elementary schools. His Education Bill of 1906 was intended to restore equal educational treatment but could satisfy neither the English Anglicans and Irish Catholics in the House of Commons nor the permanent Conservative majority in the House of Lords. It was withdrawn after its inevitable mutilation in the upper house, but the delicate negotiations between rival religious denominations demonstrated his superb skills as an adept diplomat and sensitive conciliator, reinforced by his tolerance and humour.
Chief secretary for Ireland
Birrell's political reputation rests primarily on his substantial achievements as chief secretary for Ireland in the first six years of his tenure, from 1907 to 1912. He reluctantly succeeded James Bryce, with no idea that he was ‘doomed to last nine long years, two years being the average’ in that peculiarly difficult post (A. Birrell, Things Past Redress, 1937, 194). Sir Henry Robinson, the vice-president of the Local Government Board, considered Birrell's term in office ‘infinitely more momentous and prolific in legislative reforms’ than that of any of his predecessors, with fifty-six measures passed through parliament, in areas such as working-class housing, public health, and conditions in schools (Robinson, 189). He was conscientious and energetic in dealing with the routine problems of the Irish government within Ireland and he also frequently attended the House of Commons, where he made an impressive number of effective speeches on Irish business. He rapidly won and retained the confidence and respect of the Irish nationalist leaders John Redmond and John Dillon; this was absolutely crucial in 1907–11, when Irish home rule was low on the list of Liberal priorities. The Liberal government needed to abolish the veto power of the House of Lords before it could pass a third home rule Bill for Ireland, and from 1906 to 1910 it was fully occupied with a radical programme of social reform for Britain. He was notably successful in his holding operation on home rule, which meant walking the uneasy tightrope between Irish nationalist aspirations and Liberal intentions.

Birrell achieved a significant programme of vital reforms for Ireland as a prelude to ultimate self-government. His solution to the Irish university question resolved a problem which had bedevilled Anglo-Irish politics for decades. The Catholic majority in Ireland had long been deprived of a Catholic teaching university, but the Presbyterians and Anglicans were opposed to a non-sectarian national university. Birrell's tolerance and negotiating skills helped to construct a careful compromise in the 1908 Irish Universities Act, which created two independent teaching universities in addition to the historic Trinity College; the new National University of Ireland for Catholics amalgamated the constituent colleges of Dublin, Galway, and Cork, while the Presbyterian Queen's College became Queen's University, Belfast. Dillon acclaimed the act as one of the greatest services ever rendered to the Irish nation by an English statesman.

Birrell's second major achievement was the 1909 Land Act, all the more notable in a period when the Lords were deliberately wrecking key Liberal measures as this one attacked wealthy Irish landlords. The new legislation introduced the principle of compulsory purchase in congested areas, and increased Treasury support for land purchase, though not so far as Birrell had hoped. It had to be another compromise because of the bill's inevitable transformation in the Lords, but as he claimed in parliament, ‘I got the most I could’ (Hansard 5C, 16 Aug 1911). The new Land Act was crucial for two reasons. The financial machinery of the 1903 Land Purchase Act, which transferred estates from landlords to tenants, was collapsing from lack of funds, causing a campaign of agrarian violence between 1907 and 1909. His solution to agrarian violence was not the coercion and repression of poverty-stricken peasants and political agitators, but reform of the defective land purchase scheme. The Conservative Party clamoured for the re-imposition of repressive measures, but coercion violated his fundamental Liberal principles and he rode the storm of abuse in press and parliament with courage. Even in its amended form the 1909 Land Act was a considerable achievement in the circumstances, since it accelerated land purchase and reduced agrarian violence.

Third, Birrell ensured that an Irish home rule bill was finally introduced into parliament in April 1912 and that it had the support of the Irish nationalists. H. W. Massingham paid warm tribute in The Nation (6 April 1912) to Birrell's impressive feat in holding the fort ‘stoutly and warily’ until the 1911 Parliament Act ended the Lords' veto: ‘without a wise, tactful, forbearing, and sympathetic Irish Secretary, the links [with Irish Nationalism] would have snapped’. Had Birrell's resignation been accepted in 1912, as he wished, this would have been his enduring political epitaph. Instead, his political career ended tragically when he accepted the blame for the 1916 Easter rising, which has haunted his reputation ever since. There was a watershed in Birrell's career about 1912, when his public career and private life suffered an agonizing decline, for reasons largely beyond his own control. From 1911 he was increasingly eager to leave the Irish Office because his beloved wife had an inoperable brain tumour which finally caused insanity. The result was for him a profound private agony, known only to his family, which affected his capacity for effective work from 1913 until her death in March 1915. This severe personal strain undoubtedly contributed to the uncharacteristic combination of excessive zeal and indecision which marked his response to the Dublin industrial agitation of 1913. When the militant trade union leader James Larkin reduced the city to chaos, Birrell was condemned by both Labour and Liberal critics for an acrimonious prosecution of Larkin and an excessive sentence of imprisonment.

Birrell became increasingly ineffective as Irish secretary after the introduction of the Home Rule Bill in April 1912, but Asquith refused to accept his resignation on several occasions. His position became almost intolerable after the Ulster protestants threatened civil war rather than accept a home rule bill for a united Ireland. In November 1913 Lloyd George persuaded the cabinet to accept temporary exclusion from the bill of the predominantly protestant Ulster counties to meet these threats. Though Birrell accepted that such a decision was politically expedient, it conflicted with his own preference for a united Ireland and with his long-standing commitment to the Irish nationalists. But the prime minister persuaded him to remain at his unwelcome post out of a deep sense of public duty and a dual loyalty to Asquith and the Irish nationalists. From November 1913 supreme control of home rule policy passed almost entirely into the hands of Asquith, Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill, while Birrell played little more than a reluctant, passive role and was available as the scapegoat when policies misfired. The blame for weaknesses in the wider home rule policy from 1913, for the vacillation over the treatment of Ulster, for the Curragh fiasco, and for the disaster of 1916, should be shared with Asquith, Lloyd George, the Liberal cabinet, and the Unionist opposition.

Birrell accepted public responsibility for the Liberal government's inadequate and belated responses to the escalating crises from 1913. He failed to prevent the formation of rival private armies in the north and the south in defiance of the government, and refused to prosecute the Ulster protestant leaders who were threatening civil war. His problems were vastly increased by the unreliability of the Royal Irish Constabulary reports and the espionage networks, while he feared that coercion would inflame popular passions, with no certain deterrent effect. He was also condemned for taking harsher steps against the national volunteers in the south of Ireland than the Ulster Volunteer Force in the north. He did not prosecute the protestant ringleaders of the gun-running operation at Larne in April 1914 because arrests might have accelerated Ulster's plans for civil war. But when the nationalists attempted their own large-scale gun-running coup at Howth in July 1914, troops killed three civilians in an unarmed crowd.
The Easter rising
In the terrible years between 1914 and 1916 Birrell's hopes for Irish home rule seemed doomed because the bill became non-operational in wartime, and the Ulster protestant obstacle was shelved rather than solved. While his wife was slowly dying, he remained in a thankless and impossible position, as several letters of resignation bore witness. He attracted the most damning criticism of all in his final year at the Irish Office because he did not anticipate and prevent the Dublin Easter rising in 1916, which changed the course of Irish history. He was almost universally condemned for the government's failure either to counter the growth of Irish militant separatism or to recognize the shift in nationalist sympathies away from Redmond's Home Rule Party after it supported the First World War. He certainly underestimated the potential danger from the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers because their numbers seemed small, the Irish intelligence system was woefully inadequate, and he feared government repression would itself provoke violence. Moreover, he did not take seriously the possibility that Irish rebels might welcome martyrdom in a rising doomed to defeat, nor could he anticipate that British executions of the leaders would help create those martyrs. Immediately after the rising Asquith finally accepted his resignation, two years too late, having refused all earlier offers. In his resignation speech in the House of Commons (Hansard 5C, 82.31–5, 3 May 1916), Birrell publicly accepted full blame for the rising, consoled only by the thought that his wife's death in 1915 had spared her this humiliation. The subsequent report (26 June 1916) of the royal commission on the rebellion in Ireland placed primary responsibility on him as the administrative head of the government in Ireland.

Birrell spent his retirement from politics from 1916 to 1933 at 70 Elm Park Road, Chelsea, surrounded by his family including his two sons, Tony and Frankie. He wrote two more volumes of collected essays, a sketch of his father-in-law, Frederick Locker-Lampson, and his own memoir, Things Past Redress (1937). In dictionaries of quotations some of his witty epigrams achieved fame as ‘Birrellisms’—such as ‘That great dust-heap called history’ (Ó Broin, The Chief Secretary, 205). At the age of eighty-one he was still, according to Tom Clarke, ‘a very sprightly luncheoneer ... a snappy 81’ (T. Clarke, My Lloyd George Diary, 1939, 120). In old age he was saddened by the dramatic decline of the Liberal Party as well as by the collapse of his hopes for a home rule Ireland. He died at his home in Chelsea on 20 November 1933, followed a year later by his son Frankie. Birrell would not have been surprised that after his death he was generally condemned by the English, who blamed him for the Easter rising but cared little about his achievements in Ireland from 1907 to 1912. Irish historians and writers have generally taken a more balanced view of his career; Piaras Beaslai's judgement of Birrell as ‘one of the best and most successful of Irish Chief Secretaries’ is justified at least up to 1912 (P. Beaslai, Michael Collins, 1937, 42).

Pat Jalland
Sources

P. Jalland, ‘A liberal chief secretary and the Irish question: Augustine Birrell, 1907–1914’, HJ, 19 (1976), 421–51 · L. Ó Broin, The chief secretary: Augustine Birrell in Ireland (1969) · P. Jalland, The liberals and Ireland: the Ulster question in British politics to 1914 (1980) · A. Birrell, Things past redress (1937) · DNB · L. Ó Broin, Dublin Castle and the 1916 rising: the story of Sir Matthew Nathan (1966) · H. Robinson, Memories: wise and otherwise (1923) · A. Birrell, Obiter dicta, 2nd ser. (1896) · D. Gwynn, The life of John Redmond (1932) · C. Mallet, The Times (22 Nov 1933) · H. W. Massingham, The Nation (6 April 1912)
Archives

Bodl. Oxf., corresp. and papers as chief secretary for Ireland · U. Lpool L., family corresp. and papers :: BL, letters to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Add. MSS 41235–41240 · BL, corresp. with Lord Herbert Gladstone, Add. MSS 46056–46081 · BL, letters, mainly to H. G. Hutchinson, Add. MS 49382 · BL, corresp. with Lord Ripon, Add. MS 43542 · Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with Herbert Asquith · Bodl. Oxf., letters to Bertram Dobell · Bodl. Oxf., letters to J. L. L. Hammond · Bodl. Oxf., letters to Lewis Harcourt · Bodl. Oxf., letters to members of the Lewis family · Bodl. Oxf., letters to Andrew Philip Magill · Bodl. Oxf., letters to Sir Matthew Nathan · Ches. & Chester ALSS, letters to Rhoda Broughton · King's AC Cam., letters to Oscar Browning · LPL, corresp. with Randall Thomas Davidson · NL Ire., letters to A. S. Green · NL Ire., letters to John Redmond · NL Scot., letters to A. C. Cunningham · NL Scot., corresp. mainly with Lord Rosebery · NRA Scotland, priv. coll., letters to Lord Aberdeen · NRA Scotland, priv. coll., corresp. with John Ewart · Parl. Arch., corresp. with David Lloyd George, etc. · Parl. Arch., letters to Herbert Samuel · Queen Mary College, London, letters to Katherine Lyttelton · TCD, corresp. with John Dillon · TCD, corresp. with William Starkie · U. Leeds, Brotherton L., letters to Edmund Gosse · U. Leeds, Brotherton L., letters to Clement Shorter · U. Newcastle, Robinson L., corresp. with Walter Runciman · U. Newcastle, Robinson L., letters to C. P. Trevelyan

Likenesses

Elliott & Fry, photograph, 1880–89, NPG · B. Stone, photographs, 1899, NPG · W. Orpen, chalk drawing, 1909, NPG · W. Orpen, oils, 1909, Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin [see illus.] · E. Kapp, drawing, 1913, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham · A. McEvoy, oils, 1918, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa · O. Edis, autochrome, c.1925, NPG · R. Schwabe, chalk drawing, 1927, NPG · R. Fry, oils, 1928, Trinity Hall, Cambridge · H. Coster, photograph, 1930–39, NPG · O. Edis, photograph, NPG · H. Furniss, ink drawings, NPG · R. G. Jenning, print, BM, NPG · D. Low, pencil drawing, NPG · W. Orpen, oils, NG Ire. · Spy [L. Ward], watercolour cartoon, NPG; repro. in VF (18 Jan 1906) · H. J. Whitlock & Sons, photograph, NPG
Wealth at death

£25,499 7s. 9d.: probate, 29 Jan 1934, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
© Oxford University Press 2004–16
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

Pat Jalland, ‘Birrell, Augustine (1850–1933)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2012 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/31901, accessed 5 Oct 2017]

Augustine Birrell (1850–1933): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31901

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