Northern Odyssey: John Montague's "The Cry" (1964) in Its Political Contexts

As Roy Foster has pointed out, the civil conflict in Northern Ireland, which broke out in 1969, was the product both of "the crisis in Unionism" and "the radicalisation of Catholic politics; though the latter process captured the headlines at the time." ¹ In accounts of Northern Irish literary history, the period prior to the outbreak of civil conflict has been relatively neglected, so much so that it is commonly assumed that, before the emergence of the Heaney-Mahon-Longley generation, Northern Ireland was a cultural Siberia. As a result, a number of significant authors and interesting texts have yet to receive sufficient critical attention. One such text that sheds considerable light on the instability and transitional nature of Northern Ireland in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and reflects the reconfigurations beginning to take place within nationalist communities is John Montague's short story "The Cry." Its young protagonist, a beneficiary of the 1947 Education Act, is desperate to liberate himself from the oppression of his class origins, yet in the course of his narrative he discovers how deeply attached he remains to his originary culture. Although "The Cry" can be read as a small-scale bildungsroman or private odyssey, since familial and generational tensions provide much of its dynamic, Montague's fiction is engaged with larger cultural questions—in particular, the matter of political authority.

However, before considering "The Cry" in detail, it may be useful to begin by establishing the political, economic and cultural contexts that framed its production. Montague's work on this and other stories in Death of a Chieftain (1964) coincided with the closing stages of a six-year-long IRA campaign, which left six policemen and twelve republicans dead, and consisted of approximately six hundred separate incidents. Though "Operation Harvest," as it was inappositely named, conspicuously failed to ignite revolutionary ardour in northern nationalist enclaves, it did serve to put the Unionist community on its guard and reinforce illusions about its homogeneity. ² "Even in relatively quiet areas," the narrator in "The Cry" notes, police numbers were being increased to address the IRA threat. ³

What had a greater impact on the majority community—and thus on attitudes towards the nationalist minority—was undoubtedly the deterioration in Northern Ireland's economy. The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed "persistent high unemployment," largely as a result of the gradual decline in traditional, staple industries such as textiles, linen-making and shipbuilding. ⁴ Growing international competition took its toll on shipbuilding and marine engineering, much of which was centered on Belfast's Harland & Wolff. A downturn in production during the late 1950s accelerated dramatically between 1961 and 1964. During July, 1961—a particularly black month—8,000 employees from a total workforce of 21,000 were made redundant, and a further 2,000 lost their jobs in the following twelve months. Even in agriculture, where expansion did occur as a result of mechanization, the workforce was reduced by almost a third. Statistics show that unemployment in Northern Ireland between 1956 and 1964 was far worse than anything experienced in Britain's other disadvantaged regions, and four times higher than the national average. ⁵

Presiding over the government in Northern Ireland throughout this period was Sir Basil Brooke. Born in 1888, schooled at Winchester and Sandhurst, Brooke possessed impeccable Unionist credentials and twenty years of political service when he became prime minister in 1943, and in 1952 was awarded the title Lord Brookeborough. ⁶ A landowner in County Fermanagh, Brooke spoke to the populist prejudices within unionism, and had no sense of the state as a potentially inclusive or collective enterprise. Given his own record of anti-Catholic rhetoric, he would not have demurred from the view expressed by his Minister of Education Harry Midgley, in Portadown in 1957, that "All the minority are traitors and have always been traitors to the government of Northern Ireland." ⁷ When...