Alexander George Wilson, lieutenant, motor reserve

[charlie962]

Just now, Sinabhfuil said:

LNU

click in that link above 'this short article'- = League of Nations Union.

[Sinabhfuil]

Ah, thank you!

[charlie962]

13 hours ago, corisande said:

Of course Northern Ireland did not exist in 1915, so it is under Irish GRO

oops. But you knew what I meant.

 

Can you throw relevant light on his connection with 'Young Citizen Volunteers noted' in my post 15 above ?

 

Charlie

[Sinabhfuil]

I really can't. The PDF about them is interesting, but a little jaggy and missing bits - it seems only to have the odd-numbered pages. From what I can gather from it, the group seems to have comprised the kind of young forward-thinking industrialists that were Alec Wilson's cohort. 

I'm getting the feeling that he - as a friend and associate of PH Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh, probably via the horticultural lecturer David Houston - may have essentially been driven from his homeland as so many were during those years. (Farmers on the losing side of the Civil War, in some places, were forced out by land-greedy neighbours, their cattle maimed, their fields driven through, their crops and beasts unbought; eventually they gave up and emigrated.) 

If his work after the war and before the succeeding war was writing in his calm, liberal and informative way, and working for the predecessor of the United Nations, he lived a good life.

[charlie962]

Writing and lecturing in England (maybe abroad as well ??) seemed to occupy him between the wars. Despite being a popular speaker would he have been consigned to obscurity as a misguided appeaser in the late 30s ? Are you planning to write this all up ? I would be interested to see your conclusions.

 

I dont have access to The Times or the Irish Times so I don't know what they say.

 

My comment on YCV was as much adressed to @corisande who I think has read widely on some of these movements ?

 

Charlie

[Sinabhfuil]

I might… but really Alec is an incidental character in the book I'm interminably writing - I just got interested in him because he was so important to Sgoil Éanna in the 1908-14 period, and so generous, and yet he was invariably described just as "a Belfast accountant", at the most. So at least in my book (whose culmination is faintly in sight at this stage) he'll get a decent description. I might write further about him; would like to get hold of a couple of his books, though. But not at £60 the crack!

Thank you so much for all your help, Charlie962.

[corisande]

3 hours ago, charlie962 said:

Can you throw relevant light on his connection with 'Young Citizen Volunteers noted' in my post 15 above ?

 

There is a reasonable write up in Wikipedia - click

 

Like most things Irish, it is quite political, which I will not go into, but add this quote from that article

 

The Ulster Volunteers were most closely associated with the 36th (Ulster) Division during the First World War and the YCV as a unit formed the 14th Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles, which was part of the 36th.^[14] The Battalion was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Chichester, who addressed the soldiers as "young citizens", and wore the grey uniform of the YCV, although the group's 750 members were augmented by troops from mainland Britain (who made up 25% of the 14th) and the rest of Ireland (17%).^[15] A large group of English conscripts in the Battalion were nicknamed the "Gawd Blimey Brigade" by the original Belfast members, many of whom came from middle and upper-class families and looked down on the more rough and ready English soldiers.^[16] The more well off origins of the YCV members saw the Battalion itself acquire the nickname "Young Chocolate Soldiers".

 

Suffice to say that both the north and the South of Ireland had armed groups at that time, and they splintered different ways to join the British Army or the IRA. It would not help your thread to get involved in this !

 

There was also the Irish Volunteers - click

 

And the Ulster Volunteers - click

 

You can see that it gets complicated. Even today in referring to Northern Ireland you can use, according to your persuasion the words Northern Ireland (neutral), Ulster (Protestant, Unionist) or the 6 Counties (Catholic, Nationalist)

 

Best not get too involved in that route !

 

 

 

 

[charlie962]

Thank you corisande for that detail. I appreciate the political sensitivity even today.  Would Wilson be involved just as one of the local great and good? Would it be compatible with ( or perhaps an influence on)  his later clear leanings towards the peace movement, do you think ?

 

9 minutes ago, corisande said:

"Young Chocolate Soldiers".

not good on emoticons but made me smile

 

Charlie

[corisande]

2 minutes ago, charlie962 said:

Would Wilson be involved just as one of the local great and good? Would it be compatible with ( or perhaps an influence on)  his later clear leanings towards the peace movement, do you think ?

 

Afraid that is virtually impossible to say. It was (still is) very difficult to be apolitical in NI

 

Without delving a lot more about his per-war, wartime and post-war experiences I cannot say if his views were always the same , or if he experienced a conversion at some point.

 

In 1912 some 500,000 signed the Ulster Covenant against the Home Rule Bill. The total population of Ulster (including children) was around 1.5 million, so you can see that feelings were running high at that time

 

Whether the imposition of the Irish border changed Wilson's views, I have no idea. But there was so much going on at that time in Ireland with the War of Independence, followed by the Irish Civil War

 

Clearly different people reacted to all this in different ways, but my feeling is that it hardened both views away from the centre. Where they have by and large remained up to today

 

End of my political lesson on Irish history for today

[charlie962]

1 minute ago, corisande said:

End of my political lesson on Irish history for today

Thanks for that

 

charlie

[Sinabhfuil]

Thanks, that's a nice link, corisande. And yes, people could have split off to join the IRA or the UVF - the second more likely in this group, I suspect.

From what little I know of Alec Wilson, he seems to have been a unionist, but a thinking man who wrote, for instance, about the advantages Home Rule could hold for Protestants in Ireland.

[Sinabhfuil]

Looking for a National Library of Ireland reference to an article on industrial development he had in the Gaelic League publication Craobh-Ruadh - which I found the other day but don't seem to have noted - idiot! - idiot! - I didn't find it, but did find a load of other references:

http://catalogue.nli.ie/Search/Results?lookfor="alec+wilson"&type=AllFields&submit=FIND

 

The Horace Plunkett referred to was the main man in the Co-Operative Movement in Ireland in the 1900s; his plan was to get farmers banded together into cooperatives to sell their milk, so they wouldn't be screwed over by the big dairies. To an extent this happened, with two sadly unexpected (by him and his buddies, anyway) effects: today, the dairies control the co-operatives, and the farmers; and the "butter-and-eggs money" that was always the personal earnings of the farmwife was subsumed into the family (ie husband's) income.

 

After independence, this Plunkett went to England, and a lot of his cohort of sound agricultural and industrial thinkers went at the same time.

 

There's a reference here http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/poibleacha/daoine_eile.txt to an Irish News announcement on 03/06/1914 1: Birth of son to Alec T Wilson, 10 Kensington Park Gardens. Maybe or maybe not my Alec Wilson - the T says not, but the address says maybe. Does anyone have access to the Irish News archives?

 

Particularly interesting in the National Library results is this: "Letter from Alec Wilson to Alice Stopford Green regarding the Irish Volunteers and the Ulster Volunteer Force who will both be drilling on his land, 1914 June 22. Wilson writes that the U.V.F. have agreed to share a range with the Irish Volunteers if they pay for half of the construction and also describes an incident in Cavan where both forces marched home together after attending an illegal cockfight."

Edited 23 May , 2020 by Sinabhfuil

[Sinabhfuil]

Having made a better PDF of that piece on the Young Citizen Volunteers, I came to the fact that the YCV was amalgamated into the UVF, becoming a battalion of the Belfast Regiment of the UVF on 17 May 1914, to the dismay of Leon McVicker, manage director of Cantrell & Cochrane, and others. "Although a member of the UVF, McVicker wanted the YCV to remain 'non-political' and 'non-sectarian'," according to that history of the YCV.

He failed and as the poet Thomas Carnduff writes (quoted from the same document): "Some eight hundred volunteers paraded in St George's Market where Colonel Chichester proposed we join forces with the UVF, threatening to resign on the spot if the majority refused. The vote was practically unanimous and the Young Citizens ceased to be an independent force."

 

[Kimberley John Lindsay]

Dear All and Charlie,

Brilliant Research. Well done!

Kindest regards,

Kim.

[Sinabhfuil]

Many thanks to Charlie and Corisande.

[Wexflyer]

On 23/05/2020 at 07:32, corisande said:

 

You can see that it gets complicated. Even today in referring to Northern Ireland you can use, according to your persuasion the words Northern Ireland (neutral), Ulster (Protestant, Unionist) or the 6 Counties (Catholic, Nationalist)

 

Surely this is incorrect. The "Six Counties" terminology was that used by George V in person! Was he a Catholic, Nationalist?

See transcript of his speech at (among other places) https://alphahistory.com/northernireland/george-v-northern-ireland-parliament-1921/

 

Edited 4 June , 2020 by Wexflyer