Henry Cassidy Midgley, PC (NI), known as Harry Midgley (1893 – 29 April 1957) was a prominent trade-unionist and politician in Northern Ireland. Born to a working-class Protestant family in Tiger's Bay, north Belfast, he followed his father into the shipyard. After serving on the Western Front in the Great War, he became an official in a textile workers union and a leading light in the Belfast Labour Party (BLP). He represented the party's efforts in the early 1920s to provide a left opposition to the Unionist government of the new Northern Ireland while remaining non-committal on the divisive question of Irish partition.
From 1932 as secretary of the BLP's successor, the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), he urged a closer relationship to British labour movement. Midgley's support for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, and more broadly his criticism of Irish neutrality in the Second World War, antagonised Catholic voters and precipitated a split with party colleagues. At the end of 1942 Midgley formed the Commonwealth Labour Party and entered the Northern Ireland government first as Minister for Public Security and then as Minister for Labour. After the war, and as an Ulster Unionist, he served as Minister for Education overseeing the raising of the school leaving age to 15 and an expanded programme of school construction.
Early political engagement Midgley was third child and eldest son among two daughters and three sons of Alexander Midgley (1860–99), shipyard labourer, originally of Lurgan, Co. Armagh, and Elizabeth Midgley (née Cassidy; c.1862–1929), also of Lurgan. He left school at age twelve, and worked two years as a grocer's helper before following his father (who died when Midgley was just six) into the Workman & Clark shipyard apprenticing as a joiner.
He attended the Socialist Sunday School of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and in 1907, aged fourteen, he debuted as a speaker at ILP Sunday meetings at Belfast's Custom House steps. That same year he canvassed for William Walker in his third unsuccessful parliamentary campaign in North Belfast. In the debates between Walker and James Connelly in 1911–12, Midgley had supported Connolly's separatist socialist republicanism.
Midgely also had the opportunity to meet and listen to the ILP leader Keir Hardie. In 1907, Hardie, who had been election agent for Walker in 1905, convened in Belfast the first conference of his new parliamentary-based Labour Party.Aaron Edwards (2015), "The British Labour Party and the tragedy of Northern Ireland Labour" in The British Labour Party and twentieth-century Ireland: The cause of Ireland, the cause of Labour, Lawrence Marley ed.. Manchester University Press, . pp. 119-134
In 1912 Midgley emigrated to the USA where, working as a labourer, he joined the moderate American Federation of Labor.
Wartime service and reflections At home in Belfast on a visit at the outbreak of the First World War, Midgley enlisted and served in the 36th (Ulster) Division. Wounded and gassed, he believed that the revulsion throughout Europe to the horrors of the war would hasten the socialist revolution.
In "the heartfelt hope that out of the night of pain and sorrow, we shall emerge into the full light of a perfect day; a world set free from war", Midgely reflected on his wartime experience in a collection of poems, Thoughts from Flanders (1924). A testament to a shell-shocked comrade executed for desertion, these include "Shot at Dawn": "He was only a boy with golden hair / Scarce out of his teens, and yet / I know the men who served out there / 'His Murder' will not forget".
In 1919, Midgely returned to Belfast and got a job as an organiser with the Linenlappers' and Warehouse Workers Union, a position he was to hold until 1942. However, he baulked at the choice now presented by Hardie's party. In 1913, at the height of the Home Rule Crisis, British Labour had decided on a policy of deference to the Irish Labour Party, and of not standing their own candidates in Ireland . As the Irish party had emerged from the war aligned with Sinn Féin, this implied support for complete Irish secession and, Midgely believed, acceptance of the partition that must follow.
Belfast, and Northern Ireland, Labour parties
In 1919, Midgley joined the Belfast Labour Party, and in 1920 he was elected with eleven other party candidates to Belfast City Council. Midgley highlighted the plight of unemployed ex-servicemen, hailed the revolutionary workers' uprisings in Russia and Germany, and urged municipalisation of distribution of essential commodities. At the same time, determined to avoid a partition that would sunder the labour movement in Ireland, Midgley and the BLP supported the policy that the new Sinn Féin majority in the south and west of Ireland had repudiated: all-Ireland home rule. When the expulsion of catholic workers from the shipyards by loyalist mobs was followed by similar attacks on leftist Protestants in July 1920, Midgley was among the trade-union leaders targeted for abuse.
At the time of the 1921 Northern Ireland general election, the first ever election to Northern Ireland's embryonic parliament, the "principal anxiety" of the Unionist Prime Minister James Craig was that the appeal of the BLP to working class Loyalists would split the unionist vote. When Midgely and three other anti-partitionist socialist candidates (their deposits paid by the British Labour Party, but also with covert funding from Sinn Féin) booked the Ulster Hall for a final rally, it was disrupted by 4000 loyalist shipyard workers accompanied by Orange bands.Collins, Peter (1994), "Irish Labour Politics in the Late Nineteenth and Early twentieth Centuries", in Peter Collins ed. Nationalism & Unionism: Conflict in Ireland, 1885-1921, The Institute of Irish Studies, Queens University Belfast, pp. (124-153) 150-151. The protesters telegraphed Craig to inform him that they had "captured the Ulster Hall from Bolsheviks [James] Baird, Midgley and [John] Hanna". Craig responded: "...Well done big and wee yards". Midgley lost his bid to take the Belfast East seat.
In the 1923 UK general election, Midgely stood in Belfast West. In the absence of the nationalist Joseph Devlin, who was boycotting the northern parliament, Midgley won 47% of the vote, narrowly losing to the incumbent Unionist. His vote dropped to 40% in the 1924 UK general election as he tried to bridge the constituency's unionist-nationalist divide. In the constituency's Protestant ward of Shankhill Midgley emphasised his loyal wartime military service, while in the Catholic Falls area he attacked the policy of internment directed at Irish republicans. In 1925 he was returned to the Belfast City Council for Dock Ward on a platform that called for new housing and rent restrictions, and for free education. Midgley held his council seat until 1943, becoming an Alderman in 1929.Midgley Papers, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
In September 1932, on the eve of demonstrations (and of running battles with the police) that saw Catholics and Protestants joining in protest against the government's Outdoor Relief policies of bare-subsistance rates and hard outdoor labour, Midgely challenged his fellow Docks councillor, Joseph Cunningham to an open electoral contest. Cunningham, a Unionist, whose claim that he was helping those on Outdoor Relief by supporting the employers' drive for a reduction in wages Midgely dismissed as "laughable", demurred. The invitation was the product, Cunningham suggested, of Midgely's "overweening vanity".
In the 1933 Northern Ireland parliamentary election, Midgley was elected for Belfast Dock, now representing the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) formed by the BLP following the 1924 UK election. Like Midgley, the new party sought to bridge the unionist-nationalist divide, and embrace both Walkerite labour unionists and republican labour admirers of James Connolly.Collins (1994), p. 153 After taking his seat in the Stormont Parliament, Midgely was elected party secretary.
Anti-Fascist During the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, Midgley was outspoken in his support for the beleaguered Spanish Republic and described Franco as a "monstrosity" and a "killer of babies". In turn, Midgley became involved in a public controversy regarding The Irish News attitude to the Spanish Civil War. The newspaper supported Francisco Franco's Nationalists, partly because of Spanish Republican anti-clericalism, while Midgley saw the Spanish Republican side as fighting a war against fascism and in defence of democracy.
Contesting the Dock constituency in the 1938 Northern Ireland election Midgley saw nationalist protest against his support for the Spanish Republic reduce his vote share to 24%. Night after night during the campaign there had been were violent clashes as Midgley faced hostile crowds shouting 'Up Franco', 'Remember Spain', and 'We want Franco'".
At the outbreak of war in 1939, as Midgley called for an all out effort to defeat Nazism. He not only antagonised the republican/nationalist wing of the party who, with the communist left, characterised the conflict as a conflagration between rival imperialisms. He also alarmed pro-war colleagues unwilling to join Unionists in waving the Union Jack.Walker (1984), p. 70
Commonwealth Labour Party In 1941 Midgley made "a full blooded labour-unionist appeal" in a by-election for the Belfast Willowfield constituency. His victory in this strongly loyalist seat left J. M. Andrews, then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, severely shaken. The Prime Minister later confided to Wilfrid Spender that "if there was a general election now the government would cease to have a majority". But for many within his own party, Midgley's willingness to "evangelise about the Union ran the risk of appearing to steal Unionists' clothes and was difficult to square with the oppositional role Labour occupied".
At the NILP annual conference in October 1942, Midgley used his address as chairman to assert that the NILP "is proud to associate with the labour movements of the British Commonwealth and, indeed, the United Nations, in their resolve to free the world from the barbarities, bestialities and injustices of Nazi-Fascist totalitarianism". He went to suggest that among those who continue to subscribe to "outworn nationalism" there were "quislings, if not actual agents of Nazism". The British Commonwealth", he added, "built up the finest system of social services in the world"Walker (1984), p. 72-73 (Midgley touted the social security system of New Zealand as second to none).Walker (1984), p. 77
Jack Beattie (who been campaigning against the extension of conscription to Northern Ireland) disassociated himself from Midgley's views on the floor of the Northern Ireland House of Commons. When in December, the parliamentary NILP chose Beattie as their leader over Midgley, Midgley resigned the party whip, a departure followed by two party branches, Derry and North Belfast.
Midgley was later to attack Beattie in the Northern Ireland House of Commons. On 30 October 1945, he was excluded from the sitting for punching Beattie in what appeared to be a dispute over parliamentary procedure.Hansard, House of Commons of Northern Ireland, Vol. 29, Cols. 910-11, via Stormont Papers .