ARMING THE U.V.F.
If the "evil-disposed persons" who so excited the fancy of Colonel Seely
were supposed to be Ulster Loyalists, the whole story was an absurdity
that did no credit to the Government's Intelligence in Ireland; and if
there ever was any "information," such as the War Office alleged, it
must have come from a source totally ignorant of Ulster psychology.
Raids on Government stores were never part of the Ulster programme. The
excitement of the Curragh Incident passed off without causing any sort
of disturbance, and, as we have seen, the troops who were sent North
received everywhere in Ulster a loyal welcome. This was a fine tribute
to the discipline and restraint of the people, and was a further proof
of their confidence in their leaders.
Those leaders, it happened, were at that very moment taking measures to
place arms in the hands of the U.V.F. without robbing Government depots
or any one else. That method was left to their opponents in Ireland at a
later date, who adopted it on an extensive scale accompanied by
systematic terrorism. The Ulster plan was quite different. All the arms
they obtained were paid for, and their only crime was that they
successfully hoodwinked Mr. Asquith's colleagues and agents.
Every movement has its Fabius, and also its Hotspur. Both are
needed--the men of prudence and caution, anxious to avoid extreme
courses, slow to commit themselves too far or to burn their boats with
the river behind them; and the impetuous spirits, who chafe at
half-measures, cannot endure temporising, and are impatient for the
order to advance against any odds. Major F.H. Crawford had more of the
temperament of a Hotspur than of a Fabius, but he nevertheless possessed
qualities of patience, reticence, discretion, and coolness which
enabled him to render invaluable service to the Ulster cause in an
enterprise that would certainly have miscarried in the hands of a man
endowed only with impetuosity and reckless courage. If the story of his
adventures in procuring arms for the U.V.F. be ever told in minute
detail, it will present all the features of an exciting novel by Mr.
John Buchan.
Fred Crawford, the man who followed a family tradition when he signed
the Covenant with his own blood,[84] began life as a premium apprentice
in Harland and Wolf's great ship-building yard, after which he served
for a year as an engineer in the White Star Line, before settling down
to his father's manufacturing business in Belfast. Like so many ardent
Loyalists in Ulster, he came of Liberal stock. He was for years honorary
Secretary of the Reform Club in Belfast. The more staid members of this
highly respectable establishment were not a little startled and
perplexed when it was brought to their attention in 1907 that
advertisements in the name of one "Hugh Matthews," giving the Belfast
Reform Club as his address, had appeared in a number of foreign
newspapers--French, Belgian, Italian, German, and Austrian--inquiring
for "10,000 rifles and one million rounds of small-arm ammunition." The
membership of the Club included no Hugh Matthews; but inquiry showed
that the name covered the identity of the Hon. Secretary; and Crawford,
who sought no concealment in the matter, justified the advertisements by
pointing out that the Liberal Government which had lately come into
power had begun its rule in Ireland by repealing the Act prohibiting the
importation of arms, and that there was therefore nothing illegal in
what he was doing. But he resigned his secretaryship, which he felt
might hamper future transactions of the same kind. The advertisement was
no doubt half bravado and half practical joke; he wanted to see whether
it would attract notice, and if anything would come of it. But it had
also an element of serious purpose.
Crawford regarded the advent to power of the Liberal Party as ominous,
as indeed all Ulster did, for the Liberal Party was a Home Rule Party;
and he had from his youth been convinced that the day would come when
Ulster would have to carry out Lord Randolph Churchill's injunction.
That being so, he was not the man to tarry till solemn assemblies of
merchants, lawyers, and divines should propound a policy; if there was
to be fighting, Crawford was going to be ready for it, and thought that
preparation for such a contingency could not begin too soon. And the
advertisements were not barren of practical result. There was an
astonishing number of replies; Crawford purchased a few rifles, and
obtained samples of others; and, what was more important, he gained
knowledge of the Continental trade in second-hand firearms, which had
its centre in the free port of Hamburg, and of the men engaged in that
trade. This knowledge he turned to account in 1912 and the two following
years.
He had been for nearly twenty years an officer of Artillery Militia, and
when the U.V.F. was organised in 1912 he became its Director of Ordnance
on the headquarters staff. He was also a member of the Standing
Committee of the Ulster Unionist Council, where he persistently
advocated preparation for armed resistance long before most of his
colleagues thought such a policy necessary. But early in 1912 he
obtained leave to get samples of procurable firearms, and his
promptitude in acting on it, and in presenting before certain members of
the Committee a collection of gleaming rifles with bayonets fixed, took
away the breath of the more cautious of his colleagues.
From this time forward Crawford was frequently engaged in this business.
He got into communication with the dealers in arms whose acquaintance he
had made six years before. He went himself to Hamburg, and, after
learning something of the chicanery prevalent in the trade, which it
took all his resourcefulness to overcome, he fell in with an honest Jew
by whose help he succeeded in sending a thousand rifles safely to
Belfast. Other consignments followed from time to time in larger or
smaller quantities, in the transport of which all the devices of
old-time smuggling were put to the test. Crawford bought a schooner,
which for a year or more proved very useful, and, while employing her in
bringing arms to Ulster, he made acquaintance with a skipper of one of
the Antrim Iron Ore Company's coasting steamers, whose name was Agnew, a
fine seaman of the best type produced by the British Mercantile Marine,
who afterwards proved an invaluable ally, to whose loyalty and ability
Crawford and Ulster owed a deep debt of gratitude, as they also did to
Mr. Robert Browne, Managing Director of the Antrim Iron Ore Company, for
placing at their disposal both vessels and seamen from time to time.
Now and then the goods fell a victim to Custom House vigilance; for
although there was at this time nothing illegal in importing firearms,
it was not considered prudent to carry on the trade openly, which would
certainly have led to prohibition being introduced and enforced; and,
consequently, infringements of shipping regulations had to be risked,
which gave the authorities the right to interfere if they discovered
rifles where zinc plates or musical instruments ought to have been.
On one occasion a case of arms was shipped on a small steamer from
Glasgow to Portrush, but was not entered in the manifest, so that the
skipper (being a worthy man) knew nothing--officially--of this box which
lay on deck instead of descending into the hold. But two Customs
officials, who noticed it with unsatisfied curiosity, decided, just as
the boat cast off, to make the trip to Portrush. Happily it was a dirty
night, and they, being bad sailors, were constrained to take refuge from
the elements in the Captain's cabin. But when Portrush was reached
search and research proved unavailing to find the mysterious box; the
skipper could find no mention of it in the manifest and thought the
Customs House gentlemen must have been dreaming; they, on the other
hand, threatened to seize the ship if the box did not materialise, and
were told to do so at their peril. But exactly off Ballycastle, which
had been passed while the officials were poorly, there was a float in
the sea attached to a line, which in due course led to the recovery of a
case of valuable property that was none the worse for a few hours' rest
on the bottom of the Moyle.
Qualities of a different sort were called into play in negotiating the
purchase of machine-guns from Messrs. Vickers & Co., at Woolwich. Here a
strong American accent, combined with the providential circumstance that
Mexico happened to be in the grip of revolutionary civil war, overcame
all difficulties, and Mr. John Washington Graham, U.S.A. (otherwise Fred
H. Crawford of Belfast) played his part so effectively that he did not
fail to finish the deal by extracting a handsome commission for himself,
which found its way subsequently to the coffers of the Ulster Unionist
Council. But he compensated the Company by making a suggestion for
improving the mechanism of the Maxim-gun which the great ordnance
manufacturers permanently adopted without having to pay for any patent
rights.
Major Crawford was, however, by no means the only person who was at this
time bringing arms and ammunition into Ulster, which, as already
explained, although not illegal, could not be safely done openly on a
large scale. Ammunition in small quantities dribbled into Belfast pretty
constantly, many amateur importers deriving pleasurable excitement from
feeling themselves conspirators, and affording amusement to others by
the tales told of the ingenious expedients resorted to by the smugglers.
There was a dock porter at Belfast, an intense admirer of Sir Edward
Carson, who was the retailer of one of the best of these stories. He was
always on the look-out for the leader arriving by the Liverpool steamer,
and would allow no one else, if he could help it, to handle the great
man's hand-baggage; and when Carson was not a passenger, any of his
satellites who happened to be travelling came in for vicarious
attention. Thus, it happened on one occasion that the writer, arriving
alone from Liverpool, was hailed from the shore before the boat was made
fast. "Is Sir Edward on board?" A shake of the head brought a look of
pathetic disappointment to the face of the hero-worshipper; but he was
on board before the gangway was down and busy collecting the belongings
of the leader's unworthy substitute. When laden with these and half-way
down the gangway he stopped, and, entirely careless of the fact that he
was obstructing a number of passengers impatient to land, he turned and
whispered--a whisper that might be heard thirty yards off--with a
knowing wink of the eye:
"We're getting in plenty of stuff now."
"Yes, yes," was the reply. "Never mind about that now; put those things
on a car."
But he continued, without budging from the gangway, "Och aye, we're
getting in plenty; but my God, didn't Mrs. Blank o' Dungannon bate all?
Did ye hear about her?"
"No, I never heard of Mrs. Blank of Dungannon. But do hurry along, my
good man; you're keeping back all the passengers."
"What! ye never heard o' Mrs. Blank o' Dungannon? Wait now till I tell
ye. Mrs. Blank came off this boat not a fortnight ago, an' as she came
down this gangway I declare to God you'd ha' swore she was within a week
of her time--and divil a ha'porth the matter with her, only cartridges.
An' the fun was that the Custom House boys knowed rightly what it was,
but they dursn't lay a hand on her nor search her, for fear they were
wrong."
This admiring tribute to the heroic matron of Dungannon--whose real name
was not concealed by the porter--was heard by a number of people, and
probably most of them thought themselves compensated by the story for
the delay it caused them in leaving the steamer.
By the summer of 1913 several thousands of rifles had been brought into
Ulster; but in May of that year the mishap occurred to which Lord
Roberts referred in his letter to Colonel Hickman on the 4th of June,
when he wrote: "I am sorry to read about the capture of rifles."[85]
Crawford had been obliged to find some place in London for storing the
arms which he was procuring from his friends in Hamburg, and with the
help of Sir William Bull, M.P. for Hammersmith, the yard of an
old-fashioned inn in that district was found where it was believed they
would be safe until means of transporting them to the North of Ireland
could be devised. The inn was taken by a firm calling itself John
Ferguson & Co., the active member of which was Sir William Bull's
brother-in-law, Captain Budden; and the business appeared to consist of
dealing in second-hand scientific instruments and machinery,
curiosities, antique armour and weapons, old furniture, and so forth,
which were brought in very heavy cases and deposited in the yard. For a
time it proved useful, and the Maxims from Woolwich passed safely
through the Hammersmith store. But the London police got wind of the
Hammersmith Armoury, and seized a consignment of between six and seven
thousand excellent Italian rifles. A rusty and little-known Act of
Parliament had to be dug up to provide legal authority for the seizure.
Many sportsmen and others then learnt for the first time that, under the
Gun-barrel Proof Act, 1868, every gun-barrel in England must bear the
Gun-makers' Company's proof-mark showing that its strength has been
tested and approved. As the penalty for being in possession of guns not
so marked was a fine of £2 per barrel, to have put in a claim for the
Italian rifles seized at Hammersmith would have involved a payment of
more than £12,000, and would have given the Government information as to
the channel through which they had been imported. No move was made,
therefore, so far as the firearms were concerned, but the bayonets
attached to them, for the seizure of which there was no legal
justification, were claimed by Crawford's agent in Hamburg, and
eventually reached Ulster safely by another route. About the same time a
consignment of half a million rounds of small-arm ammunition, which was
discovered by the authorities through faulty packing in cement-bags, was
also confiscated in another part of the country.
These losses convinced Crawford that a complete change of method must be
adopted if faith was to be kept with the Ulster Volunteers, who were
implicitly trusting their leaders to provide them with weapons to enable
them to make good the Covenant. More than a year before this time he had
told the special Committee dealing with arms, to which he was
immediately responsible, that, in his judgment, the only way of dealing
effectively with the problem was not by getting small quantities
smuggled from time to time by various devices and through disguised
ordinary trade channels, but by bringing off a grand _coup_, as if
running a blockade in time of war. He had crossed the Channel on purpose
to submit this view to Sir Edward Carson and Captain Craig early in
1912, but at that time nothing was done to give effect to it.
But the seizure of so large a number as six thousand rifles at a time
when the political situation looked like moving towards a crisis in the
near future, made necessary a bolder attempt to procure the necessary
arms. When General Sir George Richardson took command of the U.V.F. in
July 1913 he placed Captain (afterwards Lieut.-Colonel) Wilfrid Bliss
Spender on his staff, and soon afterwards appointed him A.Q.M.G. of the
Forces. Captain Spender's duties comprised the supply of equipment,
arms, and ammunition, the organisation of transport, and the supervision
of communications. He was now requested to confer with Major Fred
Crawford with a view to preparing a scheme for procuring arms and
ammunition, to be submitted to a special sub-committee appointed to deal
with this matter, of which Captain James Craig was chairman. Spender
gave his attention mainly to the difficulties that would attend the
landing and distribution of arms if they reached Ulster in safety;
Crawford said he could undertake to purchase and bring them from a
foreign port. Crawford's proposed _modus operandi_ may be given in his
own words:
"I would immediately go to Hamburg and see B.S. [the Hebrew dealer
in firearms with whom he had been in communication for some six or
seven years, and whom he had found perfectly honest, and not at all
grasping], and consult him as to what he had to offer. I would
purchase 25,000 to 30,000 rifles, modern weapons if possible, and
not the Italian Vetteli rifles we had been getting, all to take the
same ammunition and fitted with bayonets. I would purchase a
suitable steamer of 600 tons in some foreign port and load her up
with the arms, and either bring her in direct or transfer the cargo
to a local steamer in some estuary or bay on the Scottish coast. I
felt confident, though I knew the difficulties in front of me,
that I could carry it through all right."[86]
The sub-committee accepted Crawford's proposal, and, when it had been
confirmed by Headquarters Council, he was commissioned to go to Hamburg
to see how the land lay. On arriving there he found that B.S. had still
in store ten thousand Vetteli rifles and a million rounds of ammunition
for them, which he had been holding for Crawford for two years. After a
day or two the dealer laid three alternative proposals before his Ulster
customer: (a) Twenty thousand Vetteli rifles, with bayonets (ammunition
would have to be specially manufactured).(6) Thirty thousand Russian
rifles with bayonets (lacking scabbards) and ammunition, (c) Fifteen
thousand new Austrian, and five thousand German army rifles with
bayonets, both to take standard Mannlicher cartridges.
The last mentioned of these alternatives was much the most costly, being
double the price of the first and nearly treble that of the second; but
it had great advantages over the other two. Ammunition for the Italian
weapons was only manufactured in Italy, and, if further supplies should
be required, could only be got from that country. The Russian rifles
were perfectly new and unused, but were of an obsolete pattern; they
were single-loaders, and fresh supplies of cartridges would be nearly as
difficult to procure for them as for the Italian. The Austrian and
German patterns were both first-rate; the rifles were up-to-date
clip-loaders, and, what was the most important consideration, ammunition
for them would be easily procurable in the United Kingdom or from
America or Canada.
But the difference in cost was so great that Crawford returned to
Belfast to explain matters to his Committee, calling in London on his
way to inform Carson and Craig. He strongly urged the acceptance of the
third alternative offer, laying stress, among other considerations, on
the moral effect on men who knew they had in their hands the most modern
weapon with all latest improvements. Carson was content to be guided on
a technical matter of this sort by the judgment of a man whom he knew
to be an expert, and as James Craig, who was in control of the fund
ear-marked for the purchase of arms, also agreed, Crawford had not much
difficulty in persuading the Committee when he reached Belfast, although
at first they were rather staggered by the difference in cost between
the various proposals.
It was not until the beginning of February 1914 that Crawford returned
to Hamburg to accept this offer, and to make arrangements with B.S. for
carrying out the rest of his scheme for transporting his precious but
dangerous cargo to Ulster. On his way through London he called again on
Carson.
"I pointed out to Sir Edward, my dear old Chief," says Crawford in
a written account of the interview, "that some of my Committee had
no idea of the seriousness of the undertaking, and, when they did
realise what they were in for, might want to back out of it. I
said, 'Once I cross this time to Hamburg there is no turning back
with me, no matter what the circumstances are so far as my personal
safety is concerned; and no contrary orders from the Committee to
cancel what they have agreed to with me will I obey. I shall carry
out the _coup_ if I lose my life in the attempt. Now, Sir Edward,
you know what I am about to undertake, and the risks those who back
me up must run. Are you willing to back me to the finish in this
undertaking? If you are not, I don't go. But, if you are, I would
go even if I knew I should not return; it is for Ulster and her
freedom I am working, and this alone.' I so well remember that
scene. We were alone; Sir Edward was sitting opposite to me. When I
had finished, his face was stern and grim, and there was a glint in
his eye. He rose to his full height, looking me in the eye; he
advanced to where I was sitting and stared down at me, and shook
his clenched fist in my face, and said in a steady, determined
voice, which thrilled me and which I shall never forget: 'Crawford,
I'll see you through this business, if I should have to go to
prison for it.' I rose from my chair; I held out my hand and said,
'Sir Edward, that is all I want. I leave to-night; good-bye.'"
Next day Crawford was in Hamburg. He immediately concluded his
agreement with B.S., and began making arrangements for carrying out the
plan he had outlined to the Committee in Belfast. As will be seen in the
next chapter, he was actually in the middle of this adventure at the
very time when Seely and Churchill were worrying lest "evil-disposed
persons" should raid and rob the scantily stocked Government Stores at
Omagh and Enniskillen.
FOOTNOTES:
[84] _Ante_, p. 123.
[85] _Ante_, p. 161.
[86] From a manuscript narrative by Colonel F.H. Crawford.