The Press and the Bar

Recruiting Sergeants for John Bull? Irish Nationalist MPs and Enlistment during the Early Months of the Great War

“…As the Conservative MP Sir Ellis Hume-Williams recalled, the problem for him at the beginning of the war was 'the problem with which every other middle-aged man in the country was at once faced, namely, "How to get a job of some sort at the front"'. 64 However, despite its formal support for the government's war policy, the Irish party (with perhaps the sole exception of T.P. O'Connor) continued to observe its long-standing rule prohibiting its members from accepting government appointments.…”