On Tuesday, 16 January 1912, the official opening of Crawford Municipal Technical Institute took place with an official address by Thomas Wallace Russell, Vice –President, Department of Agricultural and Technical Instruction. Covering the event, the Cork Examiner outlines that Russell opened his speech praising the Cork initiative and the splendid educational building.

Thomas Wallace Russell referred to the principal Dr. John Grindley as a capable and ‘supremely’ able headmaster, and the youth of Cork as a ‘constituency’ upon which he and his staff could operate without difficulty and with ‘inestimable advantage’. Speaking generally, he spoke about the progress of technical education in Ireland noting that: “ten years ago there were probably no more than a dozen technical schools. Today there are many. What is really a new profession has sprung up in the country”.

Russell continued that technical education had not only progressed in great cities such as Dublin, Belfast and Cork but also in the many villages where there were classes in which valuable technical instruction was being imparted. Russell argued that: “This is comparatively unexciting work. It does not always bulk largely in public estimation. Sometimes it is even challenged but I rejoice to know that it is going forward everyday and it is limited only by the money we are enabled to spend on it”.

Russell went on to remark that Cork occupied a great position with regard to technical education. He noted that the new building was erected without aid from any building grant supplied by the Treasury. He debates that he did his best to press its urgency on the Chancellor of the Exchequer some time previously, when there was a chance of something been done. Indeed he argued that there was merit in the importance of making such grants but that the financial questions between England and Ireland were being considered at the moment by a Committee advisory of the Cabinet. They sought to create grant schemes between the two countries but this depended on a settlement of the question of Irish Home Rule.

Indeed in Russell’s speech, there are many references to a changing political climate. By January 1912, moves were afoot by Irish parliamentary party members to press again for Irish Home Rule and the repeal of the Act of Union of 1800 by a demand for self-government within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. For almost half a century – from the early 1870s to the end of World War I – Home Rule was both the single most dominant feature of Irish political life and a major influence within British politics. After the second 1910 general election when the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party under its leader John Redmond held the balance of power in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith came to an understanding with Redmond, that if he supported his move to break the power of the Lords in order to have the finance bill passed, Asquith would then in return introduce a new Home Rule Bill. Plans by early 1912 were in operation to present that bill to the Home Rule movement in Northern Ireland. On 8 February 1912, the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill addressed a pro Home Rule meeting in Belfast despite Ulster Unionist attempts to prevent him speaking. Churchill shared the platform with John Redmond.

Even the character and career of Thomas Wallace Russell, in a sense, represented the political changes and perhaps strategies and compromises that had occurred in Ireland in the sixty years prior to 1912. His career is outlined in various obituaries in Irish newspapers in early May 1920 such as the Anglo Celt. Born at Fife, Scotland, by the age of 10 he was apprenticed to the grocery trade and was largely a self educated and self made individual. At the age of eighteen Thomas he secured employment as an assistant in the soap works of David Brown and Son and moved to Donaghmore County Tyrone. Taking an interest in local affairs, he helped start a Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association there. By 1869, he had moved to Dublin as secretary and parliamentary agent of the Irish temperance movement and became well-known as an anti-alcohol campaigner and proprietor of a Temperance Hotel in Dublin.

Russell unsuccessfully contested a seat for Preston, England in 1885 as a Liberal. However, he opposed William Ewart Gladstone’s Home Rule policy and was elected to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as a Liberal Unionist in 1886. He served between 1895 and 1900 as Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board in the Unionist administration of Lord Salisbury. However, by the turn of the century Russell became more critical of Unionist policies in Ireland. His views on Home Rule underwent a change. From 1900 he was head of the Farmers and Labourers Union, an Ulster tenant-farmer protest movement demanding compulsory land purchase, similar to the land and labour movement in the south. His 1901 book Ireland and the Empire was an attack on the Irish agrarian system. In 1907, he became vice-president of the Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.

To be continued…

Caption:

635a. Caricature portrait of Thomas Wallace Russell (source: Vanity Fair, 24 March 1888)