Censors and sensibility – An Irishman’s Diary about ‘The Irish Times’ in wartime

In this column, back in 1939, there appeared an item with the intriguing headline “Belfast’s Nudist Colony”. The Irishman’s Diary was then a miscellany of short pieces, from various unnamed contributors (Samuel Beckett’s mother once nagged him to submit material). So, under the tag “A Correspondent Writes”, the item began: “Belfast has a nudist colony, and even on these chill December days men eager to enter are turned away in scores. Mere striplings and men well matured come from all parts of Ulster, and from many points in Éire, to seek it out.”

The correspondent continued: “I would never have known of its existence save that a man prominent in European politics turned my thoughts towards finding it. I inquired from the police. ‘72 Clifton Street,’ they said. I was there bright and early next morning, and stated my name and my desire to enter. [...] Many questions were asked, and many forms were completed before I received the secret pass-word, ‘Straight through and up the stairs’.”

Gosh. A men-only nudist club, to which police happily give directions? Where (apart from “upstairs”) can this be going?

The anonymous correspondent again: “I went as directed and joined a group undressing in a too-small ante-room. Then we, nudists, filed out and along the cocoanut matting to the stairs. At the top, five doctors set to work to test our fitness for His Majesty’s forces! We were recruits.”

Aha. So the whole thing was just a ruse by The Irish Times, still loyal then to the ancien régime, to sneak a British army recruitment ad past the Free State censor.

If Éamon de Valera and Archbishop McQuaid had read that far down, they were probably relieved it wasn't something worse. But as I know from a new book called Ireland – the Autobiography – an anthology of writings from the century since 1916, edited by John Bowman – the item was filed by the Department of Justice. It joined a running correspondence with The Irish Times over what the wartime censor said was the tendency of the paper's then editor, Bertie Smyllie, "to sail very close to the line and occasionally cross it". The visit to the Belfast nudist colony, clearly, involved a border-crossing in more ways than one.

Nautical lines

One person who definitely didn’t write the piece was Patrick Campbell, although he was the best-known Irishman’s Diarist of that era, and later a BBC TV personality. As a lifelong yachtsman, he also knew how to sail close to nautical lines. But frontlines were another matter. According to his autobiography, he stayed well away from army recruitment offices.

This might have been considered disloyal of him, because he was very much a son of the old ascendancy. His father was Lord Glenavy, who had sent the boy to English public school in England, and then (briefly) Oxford.

Glenavy had also pulled career strings for him, first with Smyllie and later Lord Beaverbrook, for whose Fleet Street empire Campbell jnr was working by 1939. You might think he would have been happy to join Britain’s war effort, in gratitude for his inherited advantages.

But no. Not only did he flee back to neutral Ireland. Faced with a long queue of refugees for the Holyhead mail boat, he shamelessly name-dropped his father to attendants, accompanied by “a number of pound notes”, and boarded first.

Back home, he instead volunteered for service with Dublin Port Control, the most interesting part of which was his instruction to ignore certain B&I boats pulling into North Wall late at night with “special cargo” (“Bren gun carriers, anti-aircraft guns and similar items, provided by the hard-pressed British government”).

But by 1945, when Smyllie was sneaking another message past the censor – a V-shaped arrangement of photographs to mark Victory in Europe Day – Campbell had summoned the courage to ask for his old Times job back.

Still stung by his earlier desertion of the paper, Smyllie first told him to “go back to England, where [you] came from”. Then he assigned him to this column. And it gives me great pleasure to note that, during the two years for which Campbell wrote the Irishman’s Diary daily, he found it “very hard work indeed”.

He had a recurring nightmare, he claimed, in which the newspaper appeared “with a blank space where the diary should have been”. Luckily for him, London beckoned again. He took the boat once more, this time out of Dublin, and for employment purposes at least, never returned.