[Kilsally]

May 29, 2005

Biography: Carson by Geoffrey Lewis
REVIEWED BY RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS

CARSON: The Man Who Divided Ireland
by Geoffrey Lewis

Hambledon and London £19.99 pp277

There is a timelessness about Northern Ireland. The Rev Ian Paisley, who has just succeeded David Trimble as the leading voice of Ulster unionism, epitomises a centuries-old tradition of roaring clergy who repel the British government as much as the southern Irish. A century ago, Arthur Balfour, the great Conservative statesman and Edward Carson’s mentor, could no more abide Ulster Protestants than these days can the majority of new Labour. Peter Hain, the new secretary of state for Ulster, already looks like a chap who wishes he had stayed safely in his Tardis instead of straying into what sounds like the 17th century.

Yet there have always been outsiders who saw the merits of these flinty, disciplined, straight-talking people, not least those Americans who recognise what they owe to the work ethic and raw courage of innumerable immigrant Presbyterian Ulster-Scots who fought valiantly on the frontiers and in the war of independence. Among those admirers closer to home were two romantics: Rudyard Kipling (who wrote elegiacally at the time of the home-rule controversy of the betrayal of loyal Ulster) and Carson.

It is one of the many paradoxes of Carson’s life that he was born and brought up in Dublin of Scottish and southern Anglo-Irish stock, made his career in the south and in London, yet became the greatest of all the heroes in the Ulster Protestant pantheon. An Irish patriot, he was passionately devoted to the Union. And although he hated the very idea of partition, he became indeed (as the book’s subtitle emphasises) the driving force behind the division of Ireland. He is venerated by bigots such as Paisley, yet there was nothing sectarian about him.

This is retired solicitor Geoffrey Lewis’s third legal biography, and unsurprisingly he is particularly illuminating about Carson as a barrister. In Ireland, where flamboyance and entertainment value were held in higher esteem than the absolute mastery of a brief, that was Carson’s strength. He won his cases but no popular reputation. He was in his mid-thirties when a stint as crown p rosecutor during a period of land agitation won him the regard of the establishment, and he was only 38 when, in 1892, he became Liberal Unionist MP for his alma mater, Trinity College, and solicitor-general for Ireland.

He moved to London, where he became enormously successful. His eloquent attack on the second home rule bill in 1893 made his reputation as a parliamentarian and his cross-examination of Oscar Wilde in the Queensberry libel case in 1895 made him a national figure. He took no pleasure in the destruction of Wilde, but much in his triumph in 1908 in a case that was later dramatised by Terence Rattigan in The Winslow Boy. The issue was whether a 13-year-old cadet had been wrongly accused of having stolen a five-shilling postal order, which had led to his dismissal from the Royal Naval College. Convinced of the boy’s innocence, Carson took on the Admiralty and won what proved to be an exhausting and sensational case. His qualities as a fighter, never in doubt, now achieved legendary status.

Carson was solicitor-general for England from 1900 to 1905. There were many who believed he could go to the top of British politics, but, because he believed Irish home rule would destroy the Empire, he accepted, in 1910, the leadership of first the Irish Unionist parliamentary party and then the Ulster Unionists. He couldn’t block home rule for Ireland, but, by his gifted and ruthless leadership and through the power of the words he delivered in his soft Dublin accent, he fashioned the spiky Ulster Unionist people into a resistance movement that would bring about partition. “We used to say that we could not trust an Irish parliament in Dublin to do justice to the Protestant minority,” he told his followers in 1921. “Let us take care that that reproach can no longer be made against your parliament, and from the outset let them see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from a Protestant majority.”

But timid Unionist politicians, who had watched with alarm the exodus of frightened and alienated Protestants from southern Ireland and who saw nationalists as the enemy within, built what Trimble memorably described as “a cold house for Catholics”.

In Belfast, before he died in 1935 and in his presence, a huge statue of Carson was unveiled in front of the parliament building. “There he stands,” writes Lewis, “bare-headed in a rumpled suit, his arm raised in a gesture of sombre defiance against the grey Belfast sky. He appeared to his friends as a saviour, and to his enemies as the grim icon of Protestant Ulster intransigence.”

Misunderstood by friends and foes alike, Carson is a towering figure in British history who sacrificed his health and his reputation for a people who were as unfashionable then as they are now. Lewis’s book is well researched and fair-minded, but it is modest in scope and competent rather than inspiring. The great modern biography of Carson and assessment of his legacy remains to be written.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £15.99 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585