James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon

Early life

Craig was born at Sydenham, Belfast, the son of James Craig (1828–1900), a wealthy whiskey distiller who had entered the firm of Dunville & Co as a clerk: by age 40 he was a millionaire and a partner in the firm. James Craig Snr. owned a large house called Craigavon, overlooking Belfast Lough. His mother, Eleanor Gilmore Browne, was the daughter of Robert Browne, a prosperous man who owned property in Belfast and a farm outside Lisburn. Craig was the seventh child and sixth son in the family; there were eight sons and one daughter in all.

He was educated at Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, Scotland; his father had taken a conscious decision not to send his sons to any of the more fashionable public schools. After school he began work as a stockbroker, eventually opening his own firm in Belfast.

Military career

Craig enlisted in the 3rd (Militia) battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles on 17 January 1900 to serve in the Second Boer War. He was seconded to the Imperial Yeomanry, a cavalry force created for service during the war, as a lieutenant in the 13th battalion on 24 February 1900, and left Liverpool for South Africa on the SS Cymric in March 1900. After arrival he was soon sent to the front, and was taken prisoner in May 1900, but released by the Boers because of a perforated colon. On his recovery he became deputy assistant director of the Imperial Military Railways, showing the qualities of organisation that were to mark his involvement in both British and Ulster politics. In June 1901 he was sent home suffering from dysentery, and by the time he was fit for service again the war was over. He was promoted to captain in the 3rd Royal Irish Rifles on 20 September 1902, while still seconded to South Africa.

Service in South Africa is said to have made Craig far more politically aware and "had given him a heightened awareness of the Empire and a pride in Ulster's place in it".

Politics

Leader of Ulster opposition to Irish Home Rule

On his return to Ireland, having received a £100,000 legacy from his father's will, he turned to politics. Following his brother Charles who had successfully stood as an Irish Unionist in a by-election in South Antrim the previous month, in the March 1903 by-election Craig attempted to secure the unionist seat of North Fermanagh. Unlike his brother, he narrowly failed to defeat his Russellite rival (Edward Mitchell). He had to wait until the 1906 General Election to win his first seat, East Down (the constituency he represented until returned from Mid Down in 1918). Already he was playing a leading organisational role for Irish Unionism in Ulster.

In 1905, he had co-founded the Ulster Unionist Council to coalesce loyalist opposition to Irish Home Rule in the northern Ulster province. In this task he regarded the contribution of the parading Orange Order (that commanded 50 of 200 seats on the council) as key. Opening an Orange Hall in after the 1906 election he declared that he was "an Orangeman first and a Member of Parliament afterwards" and called for "the Protestant community to rally around the [Orange] lodges, strengthen and support them".

In 1912, Craig helped orchestrate "Ulster Day". In a massed demonstration in Belfast, Edward Carson, the Dublin barrister he had nominated for the leadership of the UUC, led in signing the Ulster Covenant. The signatories pledged "to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom", and to use "all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland".

In January 1913, unable to prevent passage of the Liberal government's Home Rule Bill at Westminster, the UUC called for the exclusion of Ulster from its provisions, a demand backed with a call for up to 100,000 Covenanters to be drilled and armed as Ulster Volunteers. On 23 September, Craig persuaded Carson to accept Chairmanship of a Provisional Government which he had planned and primed to assume the administration of Ulster should the Government move to enforce the authority of a new Dublin parliament.

In April 1914, Craig supported Major Frederick Crawford in arming the Ulster Volunteers (UVF) with rifles and ammunition purchased, and smuggled, from Imperial Germany. Years later (1934) in a speech in the House of Commons of Northern Ireland the political leader of the Northern Ireland Nationalists Cahir Healy spoke of Craig's support in the arming of Loyalists and the potential for armed resistance to the Government of Ireland Act 1914: "Did not the Irish Republican Army march in the footsteps of the gentleman who is now the King's Prime Minister in Northern Ireland? I shall be told your treason was of the conditional type. You knew and Sir Edward Carson knew you would never be obliged to make good in the flesh your promises to the mob. And you were right in that. For you and the ringleaders in rebellion, there was to be the Government Bench and the profitable post of a law lord. For Casement, Pearse, Connolly and the rest there was a bullet at dawn and a grave of quick lime. That is how justice is administered...When treason prospers men do not call it treason. Treason has prospered with you. You have achieved place and power by treason."

On women's suffrage

In 1912, Craig broke with other Irish MPs, both unionist and nationalist, in voting for the Conciliation bill that would have extended the parliamentary vote (albeit on a restrictive property basis) for the first time to women. Consistent with the prominent role in mobilising opposition to home rule played by the Ulster Women's Unionist Council (UWUC), and the invitation to women to sign their own declaration in support of the Ulster Covenant, in September 1913 Craig's UUC informed the Women's Council that the draft articles for the Provisional Government included provisions for female suffrage.

When in the spring of 1914, Carson, seeming to overrule Craig, made it clear that a potentially divisive endorsement of votes for women was not a political option for unionism, Dorothy Evans, organiser in Belfast for Women's Social and Political Union declared an end to "the truce" that the organisation had "held in Ulster". In the months that followed WSPU militants were implicated in a series of outrages against property that, in addition to arson attacks on Unionist-owned buildings and on male recreational and sports facilities, included forced entry into Craig's home.

On 3 April 1913 police raided the flat in Belfast Evans was sharing with local activist Midge Muir, and found explosives. In court, five days later, the pair created uproar when they demanded to know why the gun-runner Craig was not appearing on the same charges.

Wartime government service

Following the United Kingdom declaration of war upon Germany in August 1914, Craig persuaded Lord Kitchener to remould the UVF into the 36th Ulster Division. He was given the rank of lieutenant-colonel, but unift for front line service he resigned his commission at the end of 1916 and took up a junior post, Treasurer of the Household, in the wartime coalition government of Lloyd George. He spoke in favour of conscripting Irishmen into the army in 1918 as the Government looked to extend the Military Services Act.

After the World War, Craig continued in the service of the coalition government first as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Pensions (1919–1920) and then Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty (1920–21). In February 1921, with the war of independence underway in the south, Craig succeeded Edward Carson as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party.

Proponent of a devolved Belfast administration

Craig persuaded his fellow Unionists and the British Government that if exclusion, and thus partition, was to be the solution to the challenge posed by the Catholic-majority desire for Irish self government, it should apply to only six of the nine Ulster counties. In three, Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, he argued Sinn Féiners would make government "absolutely impossible for us". He also led Ulster Unionists in accepting that the six counties—Northern Ireland as they were to become—should have their own home-rule parliament in Belfast.

Writing to Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Craig had declared that it was only as a "sacrifice in the interest of peace" that unionists would accept a Northern Ireland parliament they had not asked for. But in debating the Government of Ireland Bill 1920, Craig noted that having "all the paraphernalia of Government" might make it more difficult for future Liberal and/or Labour government to push Northern Ireland against the will of its majority into all-Ireland arrangements Once Unionists had their own parliament, Craig felt able to assure his followers "no power on earth would ever be able to touch them".

In an early 1922 meeting with Michael Collins (the Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State), Craig made it clear that some Nationalist majority locations (such as Derry City and Enniskillen, County Fermanagh) would never be transferred to the Irish Free State due to their historic and sentimental importance to Protestants. To make such assurance against British pressure for Irish unity doubly sure, in November 1921 Craig suggested to Lloyd George that Northern Ireland's status be changed to that of a Crown dominion outside of the United Kingdom. Although in signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty, only weeks later the Prime Minister conceded Southern Ireland precisely this Canada-style form of statehood, to Craig he replied that he was not willing to give "the character of an international boundary" to "a frontier based neither upon natural features nor broad geographical considerations".

Lloyd George was nonetheless persuaded in October 1920 to secure that still unsettled frontier by endorsing Craig's proposal for a new "volunteer constabulary ... raised from the loyal population" and "armed for duty within the six county area only". Into this Ulster Special Constabulary former UVF units were "incorporated en masse".

Prime Minister of Northern Ireland

In the 1921 Northern Ireland general election, the first ever, Craig was elected to the newly created Northern Ireland House of Commons as one of the members for County Down. On 7 June 1921, Craig was appointed the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The House of Commons of Northern Ireland assembled for the first time later that day. By 1932 opposition to some of Craig's policies became more direct. Opposition leader Cahir Healy pointed out the sectarian nature of the Prime Minister's rule: We know how it began. He began by interning 500 Nationalists, many of them from the most peaceful parts of the Six Counties, but not a single man of his own gunmen in Belfast were interned. He began by gerrymandering local government areas, even in places where the Nationalists in relation to the Protestants were as two and a quarter to one. They were left without any control of the local councils. He drove the Nationalists out of every public position where it was possible to do so, and he made, and continues to make, public appointments on sectarian and political grounds, totally ignoring merit. That is how he began and that is how he continues.

In April 1934, in response to George Leeke's question regarding the Protestant nature of the Unionist dominated parliament, Craig famously replied: The hon. Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State. It would be rather interesting for historians of the future to compare a Catholic State launched in the South with a Protestant State launched in the North and to see which gets on the better and prospers the more. It is most interesting for me at the moment to watch how they are progressing. I am doing my best always to top the bill and to be ahead of the South.

This speech is often misquoted, intentionally or otherwise, as: "A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People", and conflated with an incident which occurred respective to the naming of the New City of Craigavon. Knockmena (a corruption of the townland name, Knockmenagh) was the preferred name nationalists hoped would be used, and which might have attracted broad acceptance on both sides. On 6 July 1965, it was announced that the new city would be named Craigavon after Craig. A noted nationalist, Joseph Connellan, interrupted the announcement with the comment, "A Protestant city for a Protestant people".

Personal life

His wife, Cecil Mary Nowell Dering Tupper (Viscountess Craigavon), whom he married on 22 March 1905 after a very brief courtship, was English, the daughter of Sir Daniel Tupper, assistant comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain's department of the king's household, and a fourth cousin of the future Queen Mother, Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon. They had twin sons and a daughter. A president of the Ulster Women's Unionist Council, she was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1941.

Craigavon was succeeded as second viscount by his elder son, James (1906–1974). His estate was valued at £3,228, 2s., 6d. effects in England: probate, 20 March 1941, CGPLA NIre., £24, 138 9s. 9d.: probate, 3 March 1941, CGPLA NIre.

Craig had a keen interest in Ulster Agriculture and was vice-president of Listooder and District Ploughing Society (the oldest in Ireland) from November 1906 until November 1921 and continued to present the all-Ireland cup class until 1926.