From Socialism to Liberal Unionism: J. L. Mahon in Edwardian Dublin

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He had not been speaking ten minutes when a hubbub arose, and presently through a lane in the swaying, shouting crowd a posse of policemen marched into the ring … [The Superintendent] … pointing with his stick at Mahon, shouted dramatically, ‘Officers, do your duty!’

 Mahon’s arrest in Aberdeen, October 1887, for lecturing on a Sunday.²

The room was about half filled, and from the outset it was plain that nearly all present were hostile to Mr. Mahon … Some of the audience diverted themselves, and the crowd by step-dancing, while others sang; cat-calls were frequent, and cries for Home Rule numerous … The noise continuing, Mr. Mahon ordered the police to be sent for …

     Mahon election campaign meeting, Dublin, January 1906.³

During the early twentieth century Mahon in fact remained politically active, although he did not continue his former mission of forging an independent working-class political force in the coalfields and industrial districts of Great Britain. Rather, he spent the majority of the Edwardian period in Ireland’s capital operating as a Unionist in opposition to Irish nationalism. Beginning by battling for the city’s ratepayers in municipal politics, from 1904 he played a leading role in the Dublin Liberal Unionist Association (DLUA): a new political grouping dedicated to adding a distinctively Liberal voice to Dublin Unionism, and particularly to promoting Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff-reform project. How did a prominent socialist agitator of Irish Catholic stock, a correspondent of Eleanor Marx and Frederick Engels who had co-founded a ‘Republican Club’ with fellow Edinburgh socialists and whose own 1888 programme for labour politics included Home Rule for Ireland, evolve into a Chamberlainite defender of the Union allied (albeit uneasily) with Irish Conservatives?⁵

It is argued here that Mahon’s journey from independent labour politics in the 1890s to Irish Unionism in the following decade, whilst unusual, is neither surprising nor inexplicable. His adoption of Chamberlainite ‘constructive Unionism’ exuded a characteristic ideological flexibility, but also a high degree of intellectual consistency. Mahon’s emotional attachment to Irish Home Rule in the 1880s was weak, and his major socialist influences were ambivalent about Irish nationalism. As Mahon sought in the early 1890s to forge an independent labour-based party with elected representation and social legislation as its aims, he developed an intense prejudice against the Liberal party and Irish nationalism, and a corresponding admiration for, and political relationship with, Joseph Chamberlain. Once disillusioned with socialism and resituated within Dublin’s suburban lower middle class, Mahon aligned himself with the Unionists. Remaining devoted to working-class interests and with an independent political disposition, he turned to Chamberlain’s reformed Liberal Unionist party, regarding constructive Unionism as an ideology of social improvement and a means of reviving and modernizing popular Unionism in Dublin. This article first summarizes Mahon’s socialist career up to his move to Ireland in 1898, before looking more closely at his pre-Dublin political life and the roots of his later Liberal Unionism. Finally, Mahon’s Unionist activities in the Irish capital are examined, including his strong support for tariff reform and his parliamentary candidacy in 1906.

On a basic level, a study of Mahon after his exit from British labour politics in the mid 1890s closes a substantial gap in the biography of a notable, if neglected, player on the early British Left. E. P. Thompson’s rich work on William Morris introduced Mahon as a central, if disruptive, figure in late Victorian socialism.⁶ Historians of the Scottish labour movement, of Leeds working-class politics, and of the Independent Labour Party proceeded to address his contributions in those areas.⁷ Mahon has, furthermore, enjoyed cameo roles in histories of leading figures in early British socialism such as H. M. Hyndman and Keir Hardie.⁸ His entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals draws on all this literature and recognizes him as a pioneer of labour politics, although his Irish experience, and even his connections to Chamberlain in the 1890s, escaped recognition, hidden as they were in the pages of British and Irish newspapers.⁹

It is the relationship between Mahon’s British and Irish and socialist and Unionist phases that constitutes his deeper historiographical significance, however. His more complete life story neatly complements Eugenio Biagini’s British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, which not only demonstrated the connectedness of British and Irish politics, and the Irish and social questions – as Mahon’s expanded political biography does – but also recognized the presence of Unionism on the Radical political spectrum: the ‘Radical Unionism’ of Chamberlain, Bright, and Birmingham.¹⁰ Mahon made an opposite shift to the similarly ‘strange trajectory’ of the London newspaper the Weekly Times & Echo, which altered its position over the 1886–95 period from Liberal Unionism to socialism and ultimately to the New Liberalism (embracing ‘Home Rule All Round’ along the way).¹¹ Like the minds behind that newspaper, Mahon reinforces the broad ideological church of Unionism and the distinctiveness of its Liberal component, but also in more general terms the traversable boundaries between reformist ideologies, and the scope of political possibility in this period.¹²

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John Lincoln Mahon (originally McMahon or MacMahon) was born in 1865 to Irish Catholic parents living in Edinburgh’s Cowgate district, or ‘Little Ireland’.¹³ His middle name, suggestive of the American president assassinated earlier that year, seems to testify to a politically interested, and radically inclined, household.¹⁴ Following his father into the engine-fitting trade, Mahon quickly swapped the shop floor for socialist agitation. He launched the short-lived Social Reform Publishing Company in 1884, before co-founding the Scottish Land and Labour League as an arm of the SDF, and promoting the latter in Leeds. Alongside William Morris and others, at the end of that year he walked out of the SDF in protest at H. M. Hyndman’s unfraternal intrigues, perceived Napoleonism and acceptance of ‘Tory gold’.¹⁵ The seceders immediately established the Socialist League, but the new organization was itself deeply divided between two visions of socialism: Hyndman’s own ‘palliative’ parliamentary approach, which sought the election of labour representatives to public office, and Morris’s purist anti-parliamentarism, which rejected involvement in a bourgeois political system in favour of the worker’s education in socialist thought. Mahon at that point held to the latter as he poached SDF members for the Socialist League and organized League-affiliated groups across Scotland.

It was this very experience of agitating among workers in the north of England and Scotland, however, that in 1887 forced Mahon to embrace parliamentary socialism as the more promising and practical route to social improvement for the working classes. Operating chiefly amongst the miners of Northumberland, and alert to the gathering force of trade unionism, Mahon realized that the League’s purism could not outcompete the SDF for the allegiance of organized labour. He therefore attempted to push the League towards acting as an independent labour party incorporating trade unions, and in the latter half of 1887 established his own independent North of England Socialist Federation. Yet by the beginning of 1888, Mahon had abandoned the League for the SDF once more, recognizing the need to forge a parliamentarist labour coalition with like-minded agitators such as the SDF’s Tom Mann.

Mahon was not ultimately to find the SDF any more responsive to his vision for an independent working-class political party, however. He was, as Thompson observed, ‘one of the first of the pioneers to write and think in a creative way about the “labour movement” as a whole, rather than the propaganda within it of strict Socialist theory’. Now something of a freelancer, Mahon assisted fellow SDF dissenter H. H. Champion in the formation of the Scottish Labour Party in 1888, and the same year penned A Labour Programme. Envisioning a socialist economy built on state co-operatives (a halfway house between Morrisonian and Fabian socialism), the Programme was also, in essence, a blueprint for the ILP.¹⁶ The Labour Union he subsequently formed in 1889 promised the ‘Emancipation of Labour’ through enactment of what essentially amounted to a Radical constitutional and social agenda. It included key labourist policies such as the eight-hour day, as well as more strident progressive measures such as land nationalization. But given his later Dublin career, it is the Programme’s advocacy of Home Rule and abolition of indirect tax that stand out in the Labour Union’s objects. The organization amounted to little more than a name, however. After only a year in existence, it ended with Mahon’s disastrous involvement in the London postal strike of 1890, in which he and several other ex-Socialist Leaguers attempted to organize the capital’s postmen. The strike failed, ruining Mahon’s reputation in the South.

The first half of the 1890s saw Mahon acting as a close ally of Champion. Immersed in the Leeds working-class political scene, he ran as a Championite Labour candidate against both a Liberal and a Conservative in the 1892 South Leeds by-election. Earning the wrath of faithfully Liberal trade unionists there, and subjected to brutal physical violence on the campaign trail, Mahon was in the end denied a place on the ballot paper by an administrative error (his opponents suggested through his own design). With Tom Maguire, Mahon established the Leeds Independent Labour Party, and was amongst the city’s delegates to the ILP’s founding conference in 1893 that defined the party’s purpose. Rejecting the socialist commitment to nationalization of the means of production and exchange, Mahon unsuccessfully proposed that the ILP should instead aim at labour representation on public bodies. He also opposed the new party’s restrictions on individual donations: a position that reflected Champion’s openness to ‘Tory gold’.¹⁷ He was, however, an active member of the new party in 1894 and contested North Aberdeen at the general election in 1895, but lost by a considerable margin to the Liberal incumbent. Mahon resigned from the ILP in April the following year, in protest at what he regarded as the party’s drift from being an independent workers’ party prepared to ally where necessary with either Liberals or Conservatives to achieve practical reforms.¹⁸

Following further failure in the Leeds municipal elections later in 1896, Mahon’s active days in British labour politics came to an end. Blacklisted and unable to find work, he moved to Dublin in late 1898, taking up a position as a commercial salesman in the chemical trade.¹⁹ There he sided with Unionism, and ultimately with the constructive Unionism of Joseph Chamberlain and the Liberal Unionist party.

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How can Mahon’s apparently bizarre trajectory from socialism and support for Home Rule to membership of a mainstream, Unionist, and determinedly anti-socialist party be explained? Within the mythology of the Left, his erratic ideological shifts are attributed to cynical opportunism rather than sincere philosophical re-evaluation. Morris’s impassioned biographer, E. P. Thompson, viewed Mahon as a vain and arrogant – though certainly talented – organizer, lost to his own personal intrigues, and awarded little credibility to his ideological fluidity.²⁰ His tempestuous relationship with his fellow socialists, and his ignominious exit from the ILP, may also give the impression that Mahon’s political affiliations in Ireland were merely a petulant reaction against the labour movement from which he had become detached.

Although an ambitious disposition and accumulated political prejudices played not unimportant roles in determining Mahon’s ideological direction in Ireland, examination of his political influences and experiences prior to Dublin renders his eventual embrace of Liberal Unionism in Dublin quite explicable, and even logical. The roots of Mahon’s opposition to Home Rule and his support for Chamberlain’s imperially minded fiscal policy lay in the weakness of Mahon’s own Irishness, and in his most important socialist influences. But it was through the peculiar political experiences of the 1890s that Mahon came to view Chamberlain and the Liberal Unionist party as the most reliable source of social improvement. He developed an intense dislike of the Liberal-Nationalist axis, as well as a personal acquaintance with Chamberlain himself, which were to decisively shape his involvement in Dublin politics.

Students of Scottish socialism locate Mahon alongside other offspring of Irish Catholic immigrants who played a crucial formative role in the movement, such as R. Chisolm Robertson, John Leslie, and James Connolly. Irish identity and socialism interacted differently for these individuals, however. Robertson and Connolly reconciled socialism and nationalism, while Leslie (who converted Connolly to socialism) placed his Marxism first.²¹ Mahon was eventually to take deprioritization of Irish self-government to the extreme. Social reform and working-class political organization were dearer to him than a politics based on his Irish ethnicity, and his Irish Catholic heritage never led him to actively engage with the Irish question during his Scottish career.²² Indeed, his Catholicism apparently meant little to him: his 1901 Irish census entry records no religious affiliation, while his Swiss wife, Marie, is listed as ‘Calvinist’.²³ In Dublin, Mahon was to adopt the anti-clerical posture of his fellow Liberal Unionists, particularly in regard to the Catholic university question (although anti-clericalism could of course be found amongst Catholic laymen and Nationalists).²⁴ With no strong ethno-religious sympathies for Irish nationalism, Mahon was easily able to jettison Home Rule from his politics after the late 1880s once hefound it politically unconducive, even threatening, to the progress of labour.

Indeed, socialist support for Home Rule carried inherent ambiguity. Although motivated by a sense of justice and anti-imperial sentiment, English and Scottish socialists at the same time recognized that Irish self-government was a distraction from, even antithetical to, genuine social revolution. The conservative agrarian component of Irish nationalism, and the anti-socialism of the Catholic Church, made it seem unlikely that Home Rule would deliver root-and-branch economic change. Mahon’s Unionism had some roots in this tension, which is evident in Morris’s thought. During his days alongside the romantic socialist, Mahon shared his detestation for coercion in Ireland. Yet while Morris strongly supported Home Rule, he did not think it would actually aid the Irish working classes.²⁵

Far more important in forming Mahon’s susceptibility to Edwardian Liberal Unionism were Hyndman and particularly Champion. Crucially, both men anticipated Chamberlain’s tariff-reform scheme in regarding the British Empire as a progressive force requiring consolidation through fiscal policy. Champion, the ‘Tory socialist’, was a particularly strident critic of free trade, who sought to unite the causes of trade unionism and protection, most notably in Mahon’s territory, Aberdeen.²⁶ Both Hyndman and Champion were also deeply ambivalent about Irish nationalism. Hyndman supported Home Rule into the Edwardian period, but vehemently opposed Irish independence, denouncing Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party and unsuccessfully opposing its recognition at the Second International’s Paris congress in 1900. Although Hyndman acknowledged that an alliance between socialism and nationalism might be the ‘wisest course’ in Ireland, where Anglophobia prejudiced people against a socialism of (what he considered) English origin, he ultimately denounced Connolly’s project in the belief that Union and Empire embodied the spirit of socialist internationalism.²⁷ ‘Socialism teaches the interdependence of nations as well as individuals’, Hyndman wrote, ‘and therefore to talk of winning complete separation from all connection with the British Empire seems a bit out of place in a socialist manifesto.’²⁸ Champion was certainly the strongest direct anti-nationalist influence upon Mahon, however. He gave only begrudging support to the 1893 Home Rule Bill, and unusually among socialist publications his Labour Elector defended the rights of Ulster Protestants, even (presciently) to the point of partition and provincial self-government.²⁹

Mahon and Champion had in fact already been at the centre of an experience that persuaded the latter, and most certainly also Mahon, of the dangers of Home Rule. The events of 17 September 1892, when a public meeting to support Mahon’s by-election candidacy in Leeds descended into violence and chaos, may account for a prejudice against Irish nationalism and the Liberal party that would underpin Mahon’s Liberal Unionist philosophy later on. Champion (who was bankrolling Mahon’s candidacy) described a situation in which the ‘Gladstonian’ (Home Rule) candidate had purposely ‘inflame[d] the minds of his partisans’ against Mahon. Echoing Lord Salisbury’s infamous comment, Champion wondered if comparing the ‘half-drunken Irishmen’ to ‘Hottentots’ would not do the latter injustice: they had drowned out the Labour speakers, attacked Mahon with chairs, and almost ‘succeeded in maltreating Mrs. Mahon’. For Champion, this was an ‘object-lesson in the probable fate of minorities under an Irish Parliament’.³⁰ The reasons for Mahon’s later attraction to Chamberlainite Liberal Unionism, with its immovable devotion to law and order in Ireland and its racialized suspicions of the Irish character, are clearly visible in the Leeds debacle.³¹

Ironically, Champion – whom Parnell had once snubbed when approached about an alliance – regarded the Irish party as a model for an effective labour political strategy.³² Historians have noted Mahon’s role as a ‘Championite’ lieutenant in the ILP’s formation, pushing the Leeds formula of labour representation and legislative achievement over dogmatic socialist economic programmes.³³ Both men held to the idea that a labour party ought to be free to make the most legislatively productive political alliances, even with Conservatives. Political developments were soon to confirm for Mahon that such a party, seeking the social progress of the working classes, could not depend on an axis of Liberalism and Irish nationalism, but rather only on Joseph Chamberlain and Unionist government. Mahon, holding a secretaryship in the ILP, reportedly had an hour-long meeting with Chamberlain in May 1894 in which they discussed the possibility of the ILP and the Unionists allying for a concerted anti-Radical campaign in marginal Liberal seats.³⁴ With the Radical press ridiculing the new labour party’s apparent willingness to stoop to a ‘Tory’ alliance, Keir Hardie – for whom Mahon had campaigned – not only denied that the meeting had taken place, but denied also, quite absurdly, that Mahon was even a member of the ILP.³⁵

Chamberlain in the early 1890s was approaching the climax of his efforts (which the inherent contradictions of Tory and Liberal Unionist coalition would thwart) to bind Unionism and social reform together. Motivated by radicalism and electoral calculation in equal measure, he took aim at ‘the Labour problem’ and attempted to build a politics pitting a ‘constructive’ Unionism, promising practical measures of social improvement for the working class, against a ‘negative’ Liberalism focused on disruptive constitutional changes.³⁶ Speaking at Bradford (where the founding ILP conference had taken place the previous year) in early June 1894, alongside the architect of Tory Democracy, Lord Randolph Churchill, Chamberlain expressed support for employers’ liability legislation, housing for the poor, and old-age pensions. With the Liberal government failing to realize the Newcastle Programme’s social agenda, and a competing labour party now a reality, Chamberlain wished to persuade working-class voters that his brand of Liberal Unionism, and Unionist government, supplied the best route to social reform. The existing Gladstonian, trade unionist ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs, far from being reliable working-class representatives, he argued, were mere Liberal stooges, ‘fetchers and carriers for the Gladstonian party’.³⁷

Mahon was already hostile to the Liberal party and its trade-union allies prior to his involvement in Leeds politics in the 1890s, the Labour Programme having schemed to challenge the Lib-Lab MPs and to attract working-class voters to an independent labour party.³⁸ After Chamberlain’s June 1894 Bradford speech, however, Mahon publicly touted his fondness for ‘Radical Joe’ and the Liberal Unionists. Indeed, there is noticeably little difference between the two men’s attacks on the Liberals, for Mahon shared with the Radical Unionists the conviction that Gladstone and his party had neglected the vital question of social reform in favour of constitutional fetishes.³⁹ This was compounded when the National Liberal Federation, meeting in Mahon’s own battleground of Leeds later that month, adopted a resolution calling for an end to the House of Lords’ power of veto.⁴⁰ Mahon followed with two explosive essays in July in which he sought to explain why the ILP had to oppose, rather than work with, the Liberal party at the forthcoming election. The Liberals had prioritized constitutional over social reform, he argued, meaning that the workingman’s best hope lay in a Unionist government. In the Pall Mall Gazette Mahon emphasized that the ILP’s purpose was to unite the labour vote and to use it to extract from the two main parties legislation in the interest of the working class. But while Labour’s aim was ‘to create not a perfect political system, but a less imperfect social one’, the Liberals were more concerned with curbing the Lords’ power than passing a Miners’ Eight Hours Bill.⁴¹ Similarly, in the Unionist National Review he bemoaned how the Liberals had dropped the Employers’ Liability Bill for the sake of their ‘squalid wrangle with the House of Lords’. Crucially, he distinguished between the two parties in the Unionist alliance. The Conservatives were unsympathetic to Labour; Chamberlain and the Liberal Unionists were more promising.⁴²

Mahon also saw a connection between the Liberal party’s friendship with Irish nationalism and the government’s preference for constitutional tinkering over social reform. The Pall Mall Gazette essay listed Home Rule alongside other Radical hobby-horses – disestablishment, local veto on the sale of liquor, Lords reform – that had taken priority over social policies, and thus prevented the ILP from relying upon Liberalism to advance working-class interests. He dismissed the idea that the ILP had some ‘special malice’ for the government; it was simply that ‘the conduct of the Liberal and Irish parties for years past has been such as to arouse very bitter feelings against them in the Labour party ranks’.⁴³ Mahon probably came to feel in consequence that Unionist rhetoric about the Liberal party’s Irish wirepullers was grounded in truth. As Chamberlain himself put it the following month, when speculation about his meeting with Mahon and the possibility of a Tory-Labour alliance was still in the air, through the Liberal government’s failure to pass the Eight Hours Bill the Irish had proven themselves ‘masters of the situation’.⁴⁴ Mahon could later contrast his dire showing in the Leeds municipal election in 1896 with the assistance his victorious Liberal opponent received from the ward’s large Irish vote.⁴⁵ It therefore increasingly seemed to him that Irish nationalism was incompatible with, and even hostile to, the furtherance of social reform.

The effect of Mahon’s dalliances with Liberal Unionism in person and print was electric. Irish Nationalists looked with obvious interest on the possibility of a Unionist-Labour alliance at the forthcoming 1895 election.⁴⁶ Mahon’s July essays were also meat and drink to English Radicals competing against the working-class party. Reynold’s News berated Mahon for writing in a ‘Tory journal’ (the National Review), and for suggesting that Labour should ally with ‘that section of the Tories represented by the millionaire Joseph Chamberlain’, with whom Mahon had participated in ‘nocturnal conferences’. The ILP apparently represented mere ‘Tory Democracy’, or more damningly, ‘Tory Socialism’.⁴⁷ The angriest response came from within the ILP itself, however. The Chamberlain meeting gave sufficient cause for the party’s Marylebone branch to expel Mahon and his long-time political companion, A. K. Donald, in September.⁴⁸ But an unrepentant Mahon continued to regard the Liberal Unionist leader in the Commons as an authentic figurehead for social reform, and distinguished between Chamberlain’s support for the eight-hour day (Champion’s condition for backing a parliamentary candidate of any party) and the weaker commitment shown by leading Conservatives such as Arthur and Gerald Balfour.⁴⁹

Mahon’s personal relations with Chamberlain went beyond mere clandestine discussions of electoral co-operation. Their involvement in the temperance debate not only brought them into further direct contact, but more importantly accentuated the commonalities and potential for partnership between Labour and Liberal Unionist politics, as well as the two men’s antagonism towards the Liberal party. Representing the ILP and its policy of municipalizing the drink trade, Mahon attended the Duke of Westminster’s conference on licensing reform in July 1894 (at the height of his public admiration for Chamberlain). There, Mahon rubbed shoulders with aristocracy, bishops, and Unionist politicians, including Chamberlain, as they discussed the ‘Gothenberg system’ of a regulated drink trade as an alternative to the Liberal policy of local veto.⁵⁰

Ideology and acquaintance strongly correlated in the case of Mahon and Chamberlain. Indeed, the former’s socialism was remarkably consanguineous with the latter’s baronial style. Mahon’s Labour Programme of 1888 had drifted from the Marxist and Morrisonian notion of struggling humanity as the only valid agent of social change: workers needed to be organized and led into socialism, rather than educated as the Socialist League purists desired.⁵¹ In thus applying the perspective of the agitator and organizer to his analysis of labour’s political needs, Mahon left himself amenable to the idea of a popular Radical ‘charismatic leader’ in the mould of Bright and Gladstone: a Liberal tradition within which Chamberlain arguably resides.⁵² Like Chamberlain, Mahon despised the Gladstonian Liberal prioritization of democratic process over tangible results, and expected progress from centralization under able men.⁵³ It was to Chamberlain’s cause and leadership that Mahon and other dissentient Dublin Unionists would rally in 1904.

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Isolated within the British socialist and labour movements, Mahon relocated to Dublin to take up a position as a commercial chemicals salesman. It is unclear if he gravitated to the Irish capital for reasons other than opportunity. His own Irishness should not automatically be assumed a motivating factor, although it doubtless aided his adjustment. Significantly, he had prior experience with political organization in Ireland, having been involved in establishing the Socialist League’s Dublin branch.⁵⁴ James Connolly’s 1896 move from Edinburgh to Dublin and a post with the Dublin Socialist Club also quite possibly planted or nourished the idea in Mahon’s mind. The two men had previously been ideological allies in Edinburgh; indeed one biographer lists ‘John Lincoln MacMahon’ amongst Connolly’s socialist ‘mentors’.⁵⁵

While Connolly went to Dublin as a socialist agitator, however, Mahon had soured on his old cause altogether. Even if he had harboured ambitions to engage with socialism or labour in Dublin, Irish organized labour was either bewitched by the Nationalist party Mahon despised, or averse to political action altogether.⁵⁶ In the field of municipal politics, where he was to begin his new political life, Mahon would have witnessed the Dublin Labour Electoral Association evaporate at the turn of the century in the face of an Irish nationalism recovering from its splits in the 1890s. He would also have seen the Irish Socialist Republican Party fall apart and then re-form as the electorally averse Socialist Party of Ireland following Connolly’s departure for the United States in 1903.⁵⁷ Mahon was to remain an active trade unionist of sorts, sitting on the executive committee of the Dublin branch of the United Kingdom Commercial Travellers’ Association.⁵⁸ But he apparently sought sanctuary from left-wing politics in a new lower-middle-class career in less industrialized Ireland. His embrace of Liberal Unionism there was antithetical to, and perhaps even a conscious reaction against, Connollyite socialist nationalism. More broadly, his Chamberlainism was a response to nationalism’s perceived sabotage of independent working-class representation in Ireland. Irish labour’s interests, Mahon came to believe, could only lie in constructive Unionism.

Connolly left Ireland the same year that Mahon came to prominence in the Dublin Unionist scene.⁵⁹ The 1901 Irish census records Mahon and his wife Marie as living in Ushers Quay on Dublin’s south side, but they soon moved to Drumcondra, a lower middle-class district on the north side predominantly Catholic and moderately Nationalist in hue.⁶⁰ There Mahon recovered his political enthusiasm. The early years of the new century were a time of internal tension and self-reflection for Dublin Unionists. Disgruntlement with the Unionist government’s conciliatory Irish policy had led to rival Unionist candidates and the loss of two Dublin seats to the Nationalists in the 1900 general election.⁶¹ Indeed, the victory of the ‘Nat-Lab poseur’, J. P. Nannetti, at College Green may have alerted the new arrival to the danger of Unionism forever losing the Dublin worker to nationalism, as he believed British trade unionists had been lost to Gladstonianism.⁶² As the future of Dublin Unionism subsequently came under debate, Mahon became one of the most vocal critics of the city’s Unionist establishment. A Catholic Scot with a socialist past was hardly an easy fit in the predominantly Tory Anglican world of Dublin Unionism, and on its own would more than explain the direction of Mahon’s Edwardian politics (he reflected a considerable Scottish element amongst Dublin Liberals, both Unionist and otherwise).⁶³ But the same habit of free thought, restless rebelliousness, and passion for political organizing that had characterized Mahon’s socialist years followed him to Ireland.

He displayed that habit first in municipal politics, at a time when both labour and middle class sought greater representation on Dublin Corporation in order to reform a deeply unsatisfactory local authority.⁶⁴ The Dublin Boundaries Act of 1900 had annexed to Dublin two of the city’s surrounding townships, Kilmainham and Drumcondra. Despite the concessions made to the districts’ ratepayers in negotiations on amalgamation, from the perspective of Drumcondra’s Unionist constituents they had been rendered subject to the Nationalist-run Dublin municipal council and its questionable financial regime.⁶⁵ This provided the context for Mahon’s entry into Unionist politics. By the beginning of 1903 he was already involved in the Drumcondra Unionist Association, which was intent on achieving greater Unionist representation on the Corporation.⁶⁶ Unionist voters were a minority in the northern township, and with municipal elections approaching, Mahon lamented in January 1903 that the ward’s two Nationalist candidates – one of them standing, he gratefully acknowledged, for labour – were unpromising representatives for local interests.⁶⁷ Support from the Irish Times and from within the Drumcondra Unionist Association for a Unionist alternative saw the Association select their own candidate, J. R. Stritch, although Mahon, displaying characteristic flexibility and pragmatism, remained open to tactical Unionist voting so as to elect a ‘better class’ of Nationalist candidate.⁶⁸

From 1903 to 1905 Mahon and other Unionist reformers vigorously campaigned for the protection of Corporation ratepayers, demanding elimination of wasteful expenditure, improved accounting and greater scrutiny of municipal infrastructure loans.⁶⁹ In these endeavours, Mahon was willing to directly challenge the Dublin Unionist establishment, running as a ‘Unionist Reform’ candidate in the South City ward in January 1904. Although he came third behind the Nationalist victor and the official Unionist candidate, the Drumcondra Unionists did score a victory in their own ward, and Mahon was to come much closer to defeating the Nationalists when he contested Trinity ward the following year.⁷⁰

By that point, Mahon and his fellow disgruntled, suburban middle-class Unionists had formed the Dublin Liberal Unionist Association (DLUA) as a Chamberlainite alternative to the existing, Conservative-dominated Dublin Unionist organizations. Following upon Chamberlain’s reorganization of the Liberal Unionist Council, and amidst a general fragmentation of Irish Unionism in 1904, in early August of that year they announced their intention to give a voice to Liberal Unionist opinion in southern Ireland.⁷¹ The Dubliners now laying claim to this name were strong opponents of ‘conciliation’ in Ireland, and firm champions of constructive Unionism, which as they understood it meant giving to Ireland the full economic and social benefits of Union. Over 1904–5 they elaborated a programme of a declericalized education system, social reform, and above all else, Chamberlain’s policy of tariff reform, with the intention of turning Unionism into a dynamic democratic force capable of combating working-class Unionist voter apathy. The DLUA thus repeated the old Radical Unionist assumption that democracy necessitated a politics of social reform.⁷²

The DLUA also distinguished itself from its fellow Dublin Unionist associations at this time by unhesitatingly opposing Lord Dunraven’s proposals for ‘devolution’ in Ireland: the idea of delegating responsibility for Irish financial administration and legislative drafting to representative councils in Dublin smacked of surrender to Home Rule.⁷³ The controversy revealed the depths of Mahon’s Unionism, as he participated in a serious rebellion within the City of Dublin Unionist Registration Association (URA) in 1905 over a dinner for Walter Long, the new Chief Secretary. To the chagrin of many Unionists, Long had retained the services of Anthony MacDonnell, the Catholic civil servant demonized as the backroom architect of devolution.⁷⁴

The common threads running from Mahon’s socialist days to his Dublin Unionist stage are plain. In both cases, the unresponsiveness of the leaders of his political cause troubled him. Just as he desired an independent labour party to surpass doctrinal socialism and achieve the meaningful social reform the workingmen desired, so Mahon regarded the DLUA as an answer to the Dublin Unionist organizations’ deaf ear to Unionist public opinion. Unlike the Irish Unionist Alliance and the City of Dublin URA, he explained, the DLUA promoted Chamberlain’s tariff policy, which had ‘the almost unanimous support of Irish Unionists’. Mahon, ever unwilling to be bound down in his views, praised the DLUA’s forum for ‘independent thought amongst Unionists’, and his antipathy towards ‘doctrinaire free traders’ may be compared to his repudiation of Morris and the purists. He took up the cause of tariff reform with considerable enthusiasm, and given that he admired Chamberlain and the Liberal Unionist party in the 1890s, his relish for a political force devoted to Chamberlain and his latest proposals for social rejuvenation also seems natural. For Mahon, Chamberlain’s politics still held the same promise as in the previous decade: the Liberal Unionist party combined ‘unwavering Unionism with a sympathetic attitude towards really progressive measures of constructive reform’.⁷⁵ He continued to share the Birmingham Radical’s ‘materialist’ prioritization of social reform through Parliament that had characterized Chamberlain’s Unionism in the 1892–5 period. But while Chamberlain had chosen Radical imperialism, with social progress centred around the nation, as an antidote to socialism and class struggle, Mahon did so after direct experience in both and his consequent disillusionment with independent labour politics.⁷⁶

The Irish Liberal Unionist tradition was able to accommodate Mahon’s background remarkably well. His long-time fervour for ‘free’ education, for instance, fitted perfectly with the DLUA’s modernizing stance on the schools question.⁷⁷ But at a much deeper level, Liberal Unionism was the logical culmination of Mahon’s political journey since the 1880s. Already enamoured with Chamberlainism in the late 1890s, Dublin insulated him from British left-wing politics, leaving Mahon to reach the conclusion that constructive Unionism – unhampered by constitutional radicalism and Irish nationalism – was the only viable means of achieving meaningful reform. Although the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), a coalition of socialists and trade unionists formed in 1900, followed Mahon’s own ideas in prioritizing election to office over class struggle and nationalization, Mahon retained his suspicion of the Liberals, and would have looked with dismay upon the LRC’s closeness to the Liberal party, cemented, of course, by the covert electoral pact of September 1903. Indeed, his enthusiasm for tariff reform may in part have been a reaction against Labour’s willingness to assist the Liberals in their defence of free trade.⁷⁸

Mahon’s involvement in Dublin Unionism thus reflected a powerful conviction of the failure and futility of independent working-class political representation. As he argued in a lecture to the DLUA in 1905, the record of trade unionism, Liberalism, socialism and the various labour parties only demonstrated that ‘separate political organisations’ had failed to adequately serve working-class interests. Labour MPs were simply ‘subservient’ to the Liberal party, while the Irish labour movement bowed to the Nationalists. By contrast, the Unionist government had produced concrete results: the 1905 Unemployed Workmen’s Act, which established local committees authorized to dispense relief and fund public works, ‘constituted a revolution in ideas of legislation in reference to labour’.⁷⁹ For Mahon, real hope for the working class – Irish and British – lay in constructive Unionism: constitutional continuity, progressive social policies, and tariff reform.

The latter was high on the agenda when Mahon, already sporting a luckless record as a parliamentary candidate, threw his hat into the ring for the DLUA at the January 1906 election. Apart from the two safe Dublin University seats, only St Stephen’s Green and South Dublin were remotely contestable constituencies for the Unionists. With the same belligerently interventionist attitude to elections he had shown in the ILP, Mahon wished to see Liberal Unionist candidates running in all the city’s divisions, and accepted the DLUA’s invitation to stand for Dublin Harbour against the immovable Nationalist incumbent, T. C. Harrington.⁸⁰ The Unionist establishment disavowed this hopeless campaign, and the Dublin Evening Mail reported that the City of Dublin URA had declined to support Mahon’s Harbour run, ‘undertaken entirely on his own responsibility’.⁸¹ A disruptive, rowdy Nationalist presence dogged Mahon’s campaign from the first, his attacks on the idea of a Catholic university provoking a heated reaction that required police intervention.⁸² At a meeting at the Ancients Concert Rooms ‘cries for Home Rule were numerous’, and the candidate ‘persever[ed] for nearly an hour’ in the face of ‘step-dancing’, ‘cat-calls’, and impromptu singing of ‘The Wearin’ o’ the Green’ and ‘God Save Ireland’. The Liberal Unionists were several times forced to call in the police to remove the chief architects of disorder, which only served to undermine the former’s case that they represented the masses. It demonstrated the depth of Mahon’s political transformation: famously arrested in Aberdeen in 1887 for public speaking on a Sunday, he was now relying on the authorities of the bourgeois state to protect him. When his fellow Drumcondrian, Henry Forbes, boasted that those meeting were ‘all workingmen, and had no Earls, Lords, or D.L.’s among them’, a voice replied that ‘[y]ou have the police’.⁸³

For Mahon, of course, the event echoed his experiences of more than thirteen years before. His aim – when he could be heard above the heckling – was to paint the Irish party, like the Liberals previously, as preoccupied by constitutional meddling, and therefore incapable of representing workers’ true interests, their ‘livelihood and the welfare of their homes’. He offered tariff reform as the best guarantor of the Irish workers’ material interests and attacked Nationalist inconsistency in supporting protection against British goods on the one hand and backing the party of free trade on the other. The strategy backfired, however, as Mahon endured taunts about his election literature being printed on British paper.⁸⁴ In the final vote the Liberal Unionist gained only 872 votes to Harrington’s 3,638.

The vision for a reformed Irish Unionism espoused by Mahon and his fellow Dublin Liberal Unionists was to come closer to realization after the election, however, when the Irish Unionist Alliance followed Ulster Unionists in adopting a more decentralized, representative structure. Mahon praised these changes as a step towards the consolidation of a rather fragmented Irish Unionism, although he emphasized the continued importance of tariff reform as the ‘constructive aspect of Unionism’.⁸⁵ For Mahon, tariff reform would not only improve social conditions, but also reconcile Irishmen to the Union and bring together the Unionists of the North and South. His particular passion for its imperial aspects after the 1906 election seems to have reflected both a Hyndmanite appreciation for imperial consolidation and a colonial perspective shaped by Champion’s move to Australia, but most particularly it served an urgent political need to unite all Irish Unionists behind tariff reform.⁸⁶ One of his last acts in Dublin politics was to attend the major tariff-reform demonstration in November 1908, at which the DLUA and the Earl of Mayo’s Irish Fiscal Reform League – the latter tainted from inception by its devolutionist links – presented a united Unionist front against free trade.⁸⁷

Mahon disappears from the Dublin Unionist scene after 1908. His move back across the Irish Sea almost certainly took place at this time, although what prompted it is unclear. His attendance at the Liberal Unionist Council’s 1906 meeting in Nottingham possibly revived his appetite for life in Britain.⁸⁸ By the time of the 1911 census in England and Wales, he and his family were ensconced in Lambeth, where Mahon’s Dublin-born son, John Augustus (1901–75) received an Anglican grammar-school education at St Olave’s: the prelude to a career that progressed from engineering to a leading position in the Communist Party of Great Britain.⁸⁹

* * *

J. L. Mahon’s career as a Dublin Unionist had much in common with his previous life as a socialist. He was an inveterate political rebel, restless in philosophy and loyalty, and unwilling to suppress changes of political heart. His Unionist Reform candidacies at municipal level, his involvement in the DLUA, and his bucking against the City of Dublin URA continued the pattern of secession and reformation from his preceding decades. Mahon has been neglected and even vilified on the left for his characteristic state of ideological flux, and earlier revelation of his political life in Dublin would no doubt have invited more such treatment. However, whilst Mahon collected his fair share of personal animosities to the very political forces – liberalism, nationalism, and socialism – that he intellectually opposed as a Unionist, he may justly be regarded as a pragmatic thinker responsive to perceived political realities. The thread running from his change of mind in the late 1880s, through his Edwardian Liberal Unionism, to his anti-Bolshevik socialism in the interwar years, was the prioritization of meeting labour’s material needs over theoretical dogmatism.

Local conditions, in particular, decisively shaped his wider politics. His shift away from anti-parliamentarism in the 1880s resulted from his realization that Morrisonian ideological purity threatened socialism’s prospects amongst the Northumberland miners.⁹⁰ As Tom Woodhouse has explained, Mahon’s later rejection of a ‘socialist’ identity for the ILP ‘was not an opportunistic quirk but a reflection of policy in Leeds since 1891’, where nationalization chafed with the Liberalism dominant amongst the city’s trade unionists.⁹¹ Similarly, in Dublin, once fully exposed to the Nationalist-Unionist dichotomy and its intersection with the Irish labour question, Mahon achieved full certainty that Liberal Unionism remained the only reliable vehicle for social reform.

Location having played a considerable role in the evolution of his political thought, Mahon suggests the value of a ‘three kingdoms’ (or, to include Wales, ‘four nations’) approach to political biography.⁹² How did his migrations between the different constituent countries of the United Kingdom, with their differing political cultures, affect or interact with ideological positions and partisan allegiances? With the United Kingdom’s decline and survival a matter of enduring historical and topical interest, the addition of an Irish dimension to Mahon’s story renders him a peculiarly important example: a true citizen of the Union, whose ethnic background, birth and sphere of operations ignored the Union state’s internal national boundaries.⁹³ He was a Scottish-born child of Irish Catholic immigrants, who engaged in politics in Scotland, England and Ireland and whose Irish-born son rose to adulthood as an Englishman. Mahon thus demonstrates the cultural interconnectivity of the commercial-industrial Isles, and the possibilities for a genuine sense of United Kingdom citizenship that Home Rule, Irish independence and devolution have persuaded students of history was impossible.⁹⁴

Conversely, there was something apt about Mahon ultimately settling in London. Wherever he had sat on the political spectrum, England had exerted its pull. The Scottish socialist historian, James D. Young, in addressing the element of English nationalism and cultural imperialism within socialism, noted how Mahon’s own Scottish Land and Labour League bemoaned the Anglo-centrism of its London-based superiors in the Socialist League.⁹⁵ The imperialism of Hyndman and Champion was confidently English, and the Liberal Unionism Mahon later adopted also laid claim to an Anglo-Saxon historical narrative in defence of the Union, Ulster’s distinctiveness, and imperial unity. Liberal Unionism also upheld England as the central, defining feature of the Union state itself.⁹⁶ Mahon and his political evolution thus demonstrate the central predicament of the United Kingdom as a political and national entity: the cultural vitality of the ‘Celtic’ fringe, and the inexorable pull of the English centre.

The historian of so relatively marginal a figure as Mahon must necessarily avoid the temptation to extract overly ambitious, sweeping observations from their subject. Nevertheless, such underappreciated individuals are undoubtedly capable of enhancing scholarly understanding of their place and period. Mahon was one of many actors who negotiated a new political culture emerging in the 1880s with the third Reform Act’s widening of the electoral franchise, the Home Rule controversy and the decade’s alarming industrial unrest, all against the backdrop of an intensifying process of globalization that invited a debate on free trade. The great ‘questions’ of the late Victorian and Edwardian democracy – Ireland, labour, social reform, tariffs, imperialism – intersected and produced myriad possibilities for intellectual and political alignment and realignment; one question could act as a pivot upon which someone could switch positions on the others.

Mahon’s adventures on the political spectrum may therefore be compared to those of Chamberlain himself, whose devotion to Radicalism, the Union and the Empire underpinned his fiscal shift, or of arguably the most famous defector of the period, Winston Churchill. In leaving the Unionist fold for the Liberals over the tariff issue in 1904, Churchill (who had longstanding Liberal sympathies) acted upon a genuine attachment to free trade as the engine of his country’s economic and imperial supremacy. He would prove willing to embrace the ‘New Liberal’ social programme, and to soften, and then abandon, his opposition to Home Rule, at least publicly justifying the change in terms of imperial interest.⁹⁷ For all three men, both contemporaries and historians have pondered whether opportunism or principle was the motivating factor in their political shifts. It is therefore instructive to compare the low-stakes world of a peripheral activist on the British Left and the more consequential actions of two highly ambitious figures of great wealth and influence who vied for high office and as a result were suspected of self-serving political pragmatism. In his progression from anti-parliamentary socialism, to independent labour politics, to Chamberlainite Liberal Unionism, Mahon clearly illustrates the independent-minded individual’s capacity for sincere ideological and partisan fluidity in the late Victorian and Edwardian era.

The author would like to thank Tom Woodhouse and Ciarán Wallace for corresponding on the subject of Mahon, and the editors and readers at History Workshop Journal for their helpful input. This article arose from postdoctoral research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

NOTES AND REFERENCES