From Socialism to Liberal Unionism: J. L. Mahon in Edwardian Dublin

He had not been speaking ten minutes when a hubbub arose, and presently through a lane in the swaying, shouting crowd a posse of policemen marched into the ring . . . [The Superintendent] . . . pointing with his stick at Mahon, shouted dramatically, ‘Officers, do your duty!’

Mahon’s arrest in Aberdeen, October 1887, for lecturing on a Sunday.²

The room was about half filled, and from the outset it was plain that nearly all present were hostile to Mr. Mahon . . . Some of the audience diverted themselves, and the crowd by step-dancing, while others sang; cat-calls were frequent, and cries for Home Rule numerous . . . The noise continuing, Mr. Mahon ordered the police to be sent for . . .

Mahon election campaign meeting, Dublin, January 1906.³

John Lincoln Mahon (1865–1933) was a ubiquitous, if controversial, figure in the British socialist movement during its formative years in the 1880s and 1890s. An agitator and organizer in Scotland and the north of England, his name graces the histories of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the Socialist League, and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Historians have traced his career up to the mid 1890s when he ‘quietly dropped out’ of left-wing politics, before resurfacing as an anti-Bolshevik in the interwar socialist scene.⁴ No scholar of British political history has seen fit to examine the intervening years, however.

During the early twentieth century Mahon in fact remained politically active, although he did not continue his former mission of forging an independent working-class political force in the coalfields and industrial districts of Great Britain. Rather, he spent the majority of the Edwardian period in Ireland’s capital operating as a Unionist in opposition to Irish nationalism. Beginning by battling for the city’s ratepayers in municipal politics, from 1904 he played a leading role in the Dublin Liberal Unionist Association (DLUA): a new political grouping dedicated to adding a distinctively

Fig. 1.

Portrait of John Lincoln Mahon by G. & W. Morgan, 5 Market Street, Aberdeen, late 1880s.

‘Mahon . . . sported a small Swinburnian beard of sanguine hue, his fine head of red-gold hair was topped by a broad-brimmed soft black hat, and he carried, besides his satchel, two large bundles of pamphlets. . .an experienced outdoor speaker – robust but leisurely. . .he gripped his audience at once with simple, pungent sentences. . .’

J. L. Mahon in 1887, recalled by James Leatham in 1941¹

Reproduced by permission of the People’s Museum, Manchester (CPGB Photography Collection Box 40)

Liberal voice to Dublin Unionism, and particularly to promoting Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff-reform project. How did a prominent socialist agitator of Irish Catholic stock, a correspondent of Eleanor Marx and Frederick Engels who had co-founded a ‘Republican Club’ with fellow Edinburgh socialists and whose own 1888 programme for labour politics included Home Rule for Ireland, evolve into a Chamberlainite defender of the Union allied (albeit uneasily) with Irish Conservatives?⁵

It is argued here that Mahon’s journey from independent labour politics in the 1890s to Irish Unionism in the following decade, whilst unusual, is neither surprising nor inexplicable. His adoption of Chamberlainite ‘constructive Unionism’ exuded a characteristic ideological flexibility, but also a high degree of intellectual consistency. Mahon’s emotional attachment to Irish Home Rule in the 1880s was weak, and his major socialist influences were ambivalent about Irish nationalism. As Mahon sought in the early 1890s to forge an independent labour-based party with elected representation and social legislation as its aims, he developed an intense prejudice against the Liberal party and Irish nationalism, and a corresponding admiration for, and political relationship with, Joseph Chamberlain. Once disillusioned with socialism and resituated within Dublin’s suburban lower middle class, Mahon aligned himself with the Unionists. Remaining devoted to working-class interests and with an independent political disposition, he turned to Chamberlain’s reformed Liberal Unionist party, regarding constructive Unionism as an ideology of social improvement and a means of reviving and modernizing popular Unionism in Dublin. This article first summarizes Mahon’s socialist career up to his...