Friend or foe?
Confused patriotism
The House of Windsor came into being in 1917. Closely related
to the Kaiser, King George perhaps thought it wise to replace the historic
name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha with something a little more anglicised
Mary Evans Picture Library
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Much of the patriotic fervour in Britain was itself based on a sham, of course, bearing in mind the royal family's rather awkward German background. The British royal family's House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha name and associated German titles were distinctly uncomfortable, when anti-German feeling was rife during the war. The family adopted the solution favoured by immigrants keen to fit in throughout the ages: they changed their names, altering all of their German titles and surnames for English-sounding versions, in 1917. The Royal House and Family was renamed Windsor by an Order-in-Council of King George V.
Against this background of confused patriotism in Britain, tension was also building in communities outside the country but ruled by Britain. Just as many immigrants brought an outsider's eye to the butchery of the First World War, many residents of countries dominated by the declining British Empire felt outside the passionate hate for Germans. It was difficult to feel the same patriotism for a country that was cruel to their own people, as can be seen in the opening lines of the WB Yeats' poem 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death':
'Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltarten's poor'
From Collected Poems (Picador, 1990)
The English establishment had considered the Irish a degenerate race in the 19th Century and much of this feeling still polluted the debates of the early 20th century. (See also Irish Stew – an article about anti-Irish racism and the fundamental injustice of British 'field general courts martial' during the First World War.)
British troops take possession of a strategic Nationalist barricade during the Easter Uprising in Dublin, 1916
LP Pictures
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Legislation giving Ireland Home Rule had been suspended in 1914 after Protestants threatened to take up arms against any such move, and on Easter Monday in 1916 Irish Nationalist radicals rebelled against British rule. Security forces arrested an estimated 3,430 men and 79 women. About 2,700 of these were released later in the same year, but 1,841 were interned in England, and 90 of the organisers were sentenced to be shot by firing squad. Eventually, 15 were executed, causing an outpouring of sympathy for the rebels. English ill feeling towards the rising was exacerbated by news that it had been supported with arms from Germany.