Transforming Anglo-Ireland: R. M. Smyllie and the Irish Times
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For many of the Anglo-Irish, Ireland in the newly independent Free State seemed to offer only alienation. Some chose literal exile, leaving the country for Britain, America, Europe, or the Empire. Some remained, but retreated into a kind of Pale of the mind. Others who stayed began to search for a way to integrate themselves into the new nation. Among the most eloquent voices in this last group was Robert Maire Smyllie, the editor of the Irish Times from 1934 until 1954.
As an editor, writer, and political commentator, Smyllie helped to transform the principal organ of "West Britonism" into one of Ireland's most progressive newspapers. By treating the roots of Anglo-Irish isolation—its British connections, its Protestantism, even its upper middle-class status—as not merely aspects of Irishness, but as invaluable critical tools in their own right, he helped to integrate the Anglo-Irish into Ireland. Smyllie wrote with the critical distance that characterized Anglo-Ireland, but with none of its disaffection. From his perspective, the Anglo-Irish had not only the right, but also the duty, to engage with what was, after all, their country too.
Like any imaginary country, "Anglo-Ireland" has its landmarks. In his 1962 memoir West Briton, the journalist Brian Inglis list those markers as Punch, the Shelbourne Hotel, the Irish Mail train at Euston, Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, Punchestown, Horse Show Week, the Kildare Street Club, the Island Golf Club, the Tatler and the Irish Times.1 In a similar vein, Terence de Vere White names
Trinity College; several clubs; Sir Patrick Dun's and Baggot Street Hospitals; a few schools; the Irish Times, the Evening Mail; Guinness's brewery, Jameson's distillery; all save two banks; Jacob's Biscuits; some of the larger stores, and professional offices (local knowledge could identify them by looking at the name.)"2
The Irish Times plays a prominent role in most of these topographies. Since its foundation, the paper represented the journalistic voice of Anglo-Ireland, [End Page 17] particularly in the minds of its critics. A 1937 history of Irish journalism observed that
The Irish Times was from the start and has consistently remained the organ of the Protestant interest in Ireland, its politics being Conservative and Unionist. It steadily opposed all the national movements. It afforded a platform and a rallying cry for all those, Catholics as well as Protestants, whose first allegiance was to England or whose principal preoccupation was the maintenance of the existing order.3
Even the most Anglophile in Ireland—those who would rarely read an Irish newspaper as long as a British one was available—accepted the Irish Times as an important landmark of Anglo-Ireland. Inglis remembers that, "for all that it might be damned as mealy-mouthed on some subjects," the Irish Times "was the only Dublin morning paper that any of our set would have been seen carrying"—and carry it they did, into the Shelbourne and the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, across the links of the Island Golf Club and Trinity's quad.4
The paper had been run by solidly respectable gentlemen from the beginning. It was founded in 1859 by a retired British Army major, Laurence E. Knox, who sold it in 1873 to Sir John Arnott, the department store owner and MP for Kinsale. The paper's editor for the first quarter of the twentieth century was John Healy, a disappointed clergyman and Redmond supporter. Although a diligent and, for his time, a progressive editor, Healy was hardly the man to deal with a rapidly changing country. A staffer later recalled him as "a man of remarkable inflexibility of mind," famous for insisting that stories should continue "in" rather than "on" back pages, and for outlining precise mathematical requirements for leading articles.5
Healy's staff reflected the paper's Protestant and upper...
