Orders, Decorations and Medals

The Original Great War Diploma for The French Legion of Honour Awarded to The Famous Irish Nationalist Major W.H.K. ‘Willie’ Redmond, Royal Irish Regiment
Vellum award certificate for the Legion of Honour, inscribed ‘Temporary Major W. H. K. Redmond, 6th Royal Irish Regiment, 16th Irish Division’, dated 21 June 1917, 46cm by 39cm; together with French Legion of Honour, 5th class breast Badge, in silver, gilt and enamels, both items contained in a glazed display frame, good condition £1200-1500

The death in battle of the Irish nationalist and ‘folk hero’ Major ‘Willie’ Redmond, M.P., had an international impact in 1917 second only to Lord Kitchener’s. In 1914 after a lifetime’s struggle for a united self-governing Ireland, which cost him his liberty three times, he volunteered for active service in the British Army, despite being fifty-six years of age, and saw service as a company commander on the Western Front. In the field in France he saw political and religious differences between Irishmen from North and South put aside in the face of common danger and privation, and developed his near mystical belief that a new Ireland might be forged in the trenches.

The ‘engaging renegade’ and onetime enfant terrible of Irish politics was born William Hoey Kearney Redmond in April 1861. He was a scion of the old Catholic gentry and a son of William Archer Redmond, a Home Rule Party M.P. for Wexford. He was educated with by Jesuits in Kildare, and afterwards in the harsh school of a merchant sailing ship. In 1879 he took a Second Lieutenant’s commission in the Wexford Militia battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment with a view to British Army career. There was an established family tradition here, both in the service of the Crown and hitherto in the Catholic armies of continental Europe.

In 1880 Redmond senior died, and Willie’s elder brother John was elected M.P. for New Ross, thus becoming the youngest member of Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish group striving constitutional change at Westminster. On a more pragmatic level the Parnellites, with the spectre of another Irish famine looming, entered into an alliance with extremists adherents of the Fenian tradition and initiated a campaign of land agitation. Willie, the aspiring British officer, was at once appalled and in a telegram sent from Wexford Barracks, implored his brother, ‘for God’s sake don’t disgrace the family by joining the Land League and Parnell’. But confronted by the stark evidence of the countryside and having long been subjected to talk of English injustices committed upon Ireland he began to drink in the opinions, teachings and doctrines of the arch-nationalists who were to become his political heroes.

Within two years Willie Redmond’s conversion was complete. He resigned his militia commission and became a committed member of the Irish National Land League, a crony of Parnell, and an outspoken opponent of ‘landlordism’. The political temperature rose rapidly, and in October 1881 Parnell was arrested and the League outlawed. In February 1882 Redmond himself was apprehended putting up ‘no rent’ placards and sentenced to three months imprisonment, passing his 21st birthday in Kilmainham gaol and sharing a cell for a time with Parnell. He was released in May 1882, when Gladstone’s goverment agreed to land and rent concessions at ‘the Kilmainham treaty’. Parnell now wished to return to constitutional tactics but to continue the struggle in this way required finance and Willie Redmond was despatched on the first of many successful fund raising visits to Irish emigrant communities in America and the Empire. The British Empire was ‘as much Irish as it was English’, making Willie an ‘Imperial Nationalist’.

In 1884 at Parnell’s invitation he was elected MP for his father’s old constituency and at the age of twenty-three became one of the most vociferous Irish nationalists at Westminster, and one who soon stood ‘high in the list of those ejected by imperious speakers’. The following year when every householder was given the vote, Willie contested the Ulster seat of North Fermanagh, which hitherto with the rest of the province had been considered hostile territory. Fortunately the rival Tory candidate, a magistrate and landlord, had evicted even his Protestant tenants, and Redmond after a tough campaign attracted sufficient numbers of unionist voters to be returned as the contituency’s first Catholic MP in two hundred years. He promised to be the ‘faithful servant to Protestants and Catholics alike’, and, at the July election of 1886, won North Fermanagh again, this time defeating a scion of a powerful landowning family which had held the seat continuously for 150 years.

Although never renowned as a great parliamentary orator, Willie was considered a sensational speaker on Irish platforms, and gained the reputation of an ‘effective mob orator’. Throughout this period he continued to participate in direct action, becoming, in 1886, with the rejection of Parnell’s Tenants’ Relief Bill, a prime mover in the contentious ‘Plan of Campaign’. In 1888 he was arrested for resisting an eviction in Wexford, which involved a police baton charge, ‘rotten eggs, hot and cold water, showers of stones’, and a three hour fight. Head shaved and in prison clothes, he was committed for three months to Wexford gaol where the first person he met was his brother John in the same garb. At the bitter division of the ‘Parnell Split’ of 1890, brought about by the leader’s involvement with the wife Captain O’Shea, Redmond remained loyal to his chief, but most painfully found himself under attack from the Catholic Church. A couple of years later he won the volatile seat of East Clare, which he was to hold until his death, for the now marginalised Parnellites.

During the South African War Redmond’s speeches in favour of the Boers made him ‘probably the most unpopular man in England’, but ‘with his instinctive love of soldiering he was unable to alienate himself from the Irish soldier in British uniform. At the same time he renewed his war on ‘landlordism’ by involving himself with the United Irish League, the growing strength of which encouraged the reunification of the Irish Party under his brother’s leadership in 1900. In 1902 Willie was cast into prison for a third time, for UIL agitation activities.

In 1914 when the Irish Home Rule Bill was finally introduced, Willie Redmond reflected that his thirty years as an MP had seen the grievances of Ireland removed. He envisaged a self-governing and united Ireland but seemingly could not fathom the depth of fiercely loyalist feeling in Ulster. The Ulster Volunteer Force was raised in January 1913 and ten months later the rival nationalist militia, the Irish National Volunteers, came into being. Willie with his love of soldiering joined the controlling committee of the INV and even went over to Belgium to buy the arms and ammunition, although these were held up at Hamburg on the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.

The Home Rule Bill received royal assent on 18 September 1914 but was immediately suspended for the duration of the war. And now that home rule was as good as achieved, John Redmond, after much consideration, encouraged the Nationalist Volunteers to join the British Army. The decision split the Volunteers and it fell to Willie and his powers as an orator to persuade waverers that Ireland should bare its share in the war in the same way as the self-governing countries of the Empire. They responded in droves, some for adventure, some for pure deviliment of it, and others for the reasons he expounded. He now considered it his duty and that of every eligible Irishman to join up - ‘The battle of Ireland’, he told a meeting of Volunteers at Cork,‘is to be fought where many Irishmen now are - in Flanders and France - old as I am, and grey as are my hairs, I will say “Don’t go, but come with me.”’

Gazetted temporary Captain in the 6th Royal Irish Regiment on 22 February 1915, Willie was ‘soon working as enthusiastically as a boy of twenty’, and in spite of his politics was the most popular officer in his brigade (the 47th ‘Irish Volunteer’). After training at Fermoy he was relieved when his division (the 16th (Irish)) was moved to England as pressure was mounting to detain him in Ireland for recruiting purposes. He reached France in December 1915 and in January 1916 went into the line in command of the nationalist volunteers who comprised 6th R.I.R.’s ‘B’ Company. In the spring of 1916, and with his health in jeopardy, he took leave to London, but there received a blow more injurious than the winter months in the trenches - news of the Easter Rising. He at once returned to firing line in France to demonstrate his position, and denounced those in Dublin who on Ireland’s behalf had appealed to ‘gallant German allies’ as having no mandate to do so. Promoted Major in July 1916, he was relieved of regimental duties on medical grounds and took up a vague position on the 16th Division’s staff. In December 1916 he noted with pride that the 16th Division was now fighting alongside 36th (Ulster) Division.

In London in March 1917 he made his famous and widely reported Commons speech in the wake of the Rising ‘as an Irish soldier pleading with parliament for Ireland in the name of Irish soldiers’, and, after a premonition of his death in action, returned to France in late May fully prepared to make the personal blood sacrifice which he now saw as the best way of serving Ireland. On 7 June 1917 he gained special permission to rejoin his old battalion and was mortally wounded in a successful attack against the outskirts of Wytschaete, finally dying in an over-crowded Field Ambulance of the Ulster Division. Undoubtedly one of the most famous of the 35,000 Irish Great War dead, he was buried with military honours at the then 16th Division’s headquarters at Loker, Belgium. Sold with a copy of Redmond’s biography A Lonely Grave, by Terence Denman and a quantity of other research.