Michael Collins, "one of the most extraordinary men ever to have been born in Ireland", is to this day little known in England or indeed outside the Irish diaspora.(1) In 1973 Kenneth Griffith the Welsh actor and documentary film maker extraordinaire, sought to rectify this by creating Hang up your Brightest Colours: The Life and Death of Michael Collins. The title came from George Bernard Shaw's letter after Collins’s death to his sister Johanna
Don’t let them make you miserable about it... how could a born soldier die better than at the victorious end of a good fight?... So tear up your mourning and hang up your brightest colours in his honour, and let us all praise God that he did not die in a snuffy bed of a trumpery cough, weakened by age, and saddened by the disappointments that would have attended his work had he lived.”
Griffith explained that he wished to make a film “which would communicate to the British viewer the truth about our terrible role in Ireland,” and he chose to do this "by relating the life of perhaps the greatest – and certainly the most successful – Irish patriot: Michael Collins”.
I believed that if I told the story of [Collins’s] life from birth to his early death, I would be necessarily explaining to the British viewer the reasons, the facts that had compelled this good, hard-working boy to become the most brilliant, unshiftable activist leader that Ireland has ever produced. Britain opposed certain truths being spoken on British television, particularly about Ireland...I believed that the centuries-old trouble would only cease when the British people looked fearlessly at their history on that island of Ireland and honestly judged themselves.
Griffith was to be disappointed. The film was effectively banned from being broadcast until the 1990's. He took legal action and received an out of court settlement which he used to buy a house in Islington which he called "Michael Collins House".
His film about the 1916 Easter Rising, Curious Journey, was also banned until the 1990's. Such was the sensitivity about Irish matters that Griffith's 90-minute film about Napoleon Bonaparte had only one line cut from it - that in which he quoted Napoleon as saying: “If I had achieved sufficient power, I would have separated Ireland from England.” (2)
So who was Michael Collins?
Born in Cork in 1890, Collins moved to London at the age of 15 where he worked for the Post Office. In London he became involved in the Irish nationalist movement, became a member of Sinn Féin, was sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and in April 1914 he was enrolled into the London Volunteers. He moved back to Ireland in 1916, took part in the Easter Rising, was briefly imprisoned, and on his release quickly became influential in the nationalist movement, becoming Director of Intelligence of the IRA, and overseeing a small group that targeted high profile British officials and ineliigence officers.
Elected in the 1919 General Election on Sinn Féin's independence manifesto, he took his seat in the revolutionary Dáil Éireann. As the Minister for Finance in the self proclaimed Irish Republic, he oversaw the Dáil Loans of 1919 and 1921.
After the truce with Britain in 1921 Collins was sent to London by Sinn Féin leader Eamon de Valera to negotiate with the British Government. Although headed by the last Liberal Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, this was a pro-Unionist, Conservative dominated coalition which had already sanctioned a separate Government in the six counties of Northern Ireland.
In London Collins found himself in a situation in which he realistically had no choice but to sign a treaty that failed to secure a Republic, accepted Dominion status within the British Empire and de facto accepted the partition of Ireland. Winston Churchill was very aware of Collins's impossible situation and wrote: “Michael Collins rose looking as if he was going to shoot someone, preferably himself. In all my life, I have never seen so much passion and suffering in restraint.”
In the inexorable civil war that followed the founding of the Irish Free State, Collins, the commander of the pro-treaty army was killed in an ambush in his home county of Cork. An estimated one fifth of the population of Ireland turned up at his funeral.
Eamon De Valera's refusal to partcipate in the treaty negotiations which he had set up with the British Government, and then his leadership of the anti-Treaty Sinn Féin has been described as being among the most cowardly political acts in history. (3) A decade later De Valera was to resume a long political career as a leader of the Irish Free State and then at last the Irish Republic, and to set Ireland on a very conservative, Catholic course which accentuated the division with the Unionist North.
So who was Kenneth Griffith?: "A Welsh Puritan Preacher - I preach sermons about history through my documentaries."
Born in Tenby in Wales in 1921, just as Michael Collins was to play out the last few months of his life, Kenneth Griffiths as he was known then was brought up by his strongly Non-Conformist grandparents. He left school at 16 and became a jobbing actor in the years before the second world war.
Invalided out of the RAF he began a career which saw him appear in over 100 films, including Lucky Jim (1957), I’m Alright Jack (1959), Only Two Can Play (1962), The Lion In Winter (1968), Revenge (1971) and The Wild Geese (1978). In later years he made a cameo appearance in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). He was a friend of Peter Sellers and Michael O'Toole.
In his documentary about Tom Paine,The most valuable Englishman ever, Griffith spoke of an England under "reactionary German kings" controlling the "vassal nations" of Wales, Scotland and "ever fighting Ireland."
So what can we make of him? Clearly he was a remarkably talented film maker and performer, very intelligent, exceptionally well-read and totally self-educated. It is hard to make complete sense of his seemingly contradictory political views, particularly in his later years when whilst continuing to support the IRA he appeared to be moving to the right: praising Margaret Thatcher for pulling Britain back from the "edge of destruction" and dealing with the "tyranny of the unions" and praising right wing Conservatives Enoch Powell and Norman Tebbit for telling what he considered the truth about the perils of immigration. At the same time he remained sympathetic towards the Afrikaners and was scathing about the "lying hypocrisy" of the consensus that supported the ANC whom he regarded as mass murderers. (4)
Mrs Thatcher like Griffith came from a relatively humble Methodist background, but there the resemblance seems to end. Although she could be seen as an outsider challenging the establishment, her hero was the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill. Above all Griffith remained a passionate anti-imperialist. To him there was a huge gulf between the dominant, Germanic English and the downtrodden Celts, and Mrs Thatcher clearly belonged in the former camp.
Griffith died in in 2006. His coffin was covered with the Welsh Flag, the Israeli flag and the Irish Tricolour, and he was buried beside his grandparents in Wales.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1/ Tim Pat Coogan The Twelve Apostles (Head of Zeus 2017) p. 5.
2. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irish-diary/2022/08/15/hang-up-your-brightest-colours-ray-burke-on-kenneth-griffiths-suppressed-film-about-michael-collins/
3. J.B.E. Hittle as quoted in Twelve Apostles p. 241
4. Kenneth Griffith Part 1, The British Entertainment History Project. See also The Tenby Poisoner.
