The English Daily Provincial Press Coverage Of the Anglo-Irish War 1919-1922

The ground-breaking digitisation of the British Library’s vast newspaper archive over the past ten years has been a crucial component in driving this thesis’s examination of how two English provincial daily newspapers reported and editorialised the Anglo-Irish War (1919-21) and the ensuing long-running London Peace Conference (1922). This forensic research fills a gap in the historiography of this crisis by revealing the intense interest shown in the emergency by English provincial dailies, an area which has received little scholarly attention. This new examination therefore makes a significant contribution to the establishment of a more complex and complete picture of what the English public were being told about the War through the narrative in the privately owned Liberal Derby Daily Telegraph and Sheffield Independent. This argument has been reached through examining individually every copy of each newspaper from 1 January 1919 to 15 July 1922 for reports from the emergency. Also evaluated are editorial comments on developments, as well as observations, on the progress of the subsequent peace negotiations in London which received a noteworthy amount of detailed reportage. The chapters in the proposal make-up a kaleidoscope of how significant facets of the crisis were relayed to the English, such as reportage predominantly criticising the Crown forces as opposed to the rebels, particularly in relation to reprisals. All coupled with the impression of an evolving picture of a gradual descent into both chaos and lawlessness as well as an assessment of the Coalition government’s self-inflicted loss of control of the crucial and influential news agenda from Ireland. Reportage of the most notorious incidents are also investigated. This builds a picture of the significance of news from Ireland to these English daily provincials which would have been the primary sources of up-to-date coverage of the War. This proposition argues for the importance of the provincial daily press in an era when news coverage was limited largely to print media. Coincidentally, this thesis also highlights a significant, undervalued contribution to academic debates over the Anglo-Irish War by underlining an influence which has been ignored by academics, possibly due to the difficulties in accessing provincial newspaper prior to the mass digitisation of newspaper archives by the British Library which has now created new opportunities in the field of digital humanities.