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Cooke and Vincent, that ‘Churchill’s Irish policy, if he had one, was not very evident before July 1885.17 As will be shown, Churchill’s Irish policy was certainly evident before 1885.
By the turn of the twentieth century, both the sons, Winston Churchill and Austen Chamberlain, were members of parliament. Initially, their approaches to Irish affairs were based entirely on those of their fathers, but the whole political scene, both in Britain and in Ireland, began to change. Slowly but steadily, they both moved with the political tide and embraced an entirely different approach until eventually in 1921, both signed the Treaty which finally granted Southern Ireland limited independence.
In the past ten years, a number of important biographies and two books of essays by leading historians have been published covering almost every facet of Winston Churchill’s career.18 One collection of essays, edited by Robert Blake and William Roger Louis, contains contributions by twenty-nine contemporary experts on different aspects of Churchill’s career including ‘Churchill and Germany’, ‘Churchill and France’, ‘Churchill and India’, and ‘Churchill and Egypt’, but there is no mention of Churchill and Ireland. A recent collection of essays, edited by R.A.C. Parker, contains articles covering ‘Churchill and Italy’, ‘Churchill and Poland’ and ‘Churchill and France’, but again omitting Churchill and Ireland.19
Relatively little attention has been given to Churchill’s involvement with Ireland. The official biography by his son, Randolph, covers the 1911–1914 Home Rule Bill in some detail, but suffers from its stated theme, ‘He shall be his own biographer’.20 Foster’s description of Lord Randolph’s biography by his son, Winston Churchill, could equally apply to the official biography of Winston himself: ‘His political ghost only fitfully inhabits the immense, whitewashed shrine erected by his son Winston out of carefully selected materials’.21
Out of the vast number of essays, journal articles, and books written about Churchill, there is only one book which purports to treat his whole involvement with the Irish question. Churchill and Ireland was written in 1964 by Mary Bromage of the University of Michigan.22 Her book suffers from a paucity of sources and depends heavily on