Fifty years ago, virtually to the day, a schoolmate remarked to me that we were witnessing history in the making. There were two stories making the headlines: the uprising in Hungary and the Suez crisis. We all had to get on with living our own lives, but from the perspective of today the events in the late autumn of 1956 were indeed historic, and more significant than we could have appreciated at the time.
The Suez affair had been simmering all through the summer and had started when the Egyptian president Gamal Nasser nationalised the Suez canal, much to the chagrin of the British and French interests which had owned the canal, since the 100 miles of waterway had been cut out in 1869. The British and French concocted a shabby and transparent scheme with the Israelis whereby the latter would go to war with Egypt, in a re-run of the 1948 conflict and the British and French would intervene to separate the belligerents and to get the canal back into their own hands while they were at it.
Hungary had become under the control of Communist Russia, as agreed at the Yalta Conference towards the end of World War II. There had been previous uprisings in Poland and in East Germany in the early 1950s and, although they were ruthlessly suppressed by Moscow, the dissidents showed to the world that the East European monolith was not as stable and as acceptable as the Soviets like to imagine. The Hungarians had enough of Moscow's interference and the entire apparatus of the police state. The leaders of the uprising had been buoyed by promises of help from the West and from the United States, in particular. When they made their ill-fated bid to shake off their shackles they soon discovered that they were on their own. The tanks rolled in, and the uprising was put down.
The British, under the leadership of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, attacked Egypt by land, sea and air. the Egyptians put up a stiff resistance but were, militarily, far from being as powerful as their adversaries. The invasion was not met with universal approval in Britain and there were many demonstrations in London and in other British cities. There was also widespread disapproval from the international community of nations, many of whom viewed the Suez invasion as the last throw of the dice by a former Imperial power, which still had the illusion that it could throw its weight about on the world stage. There was a run on sterling, and Washington refused to shore up the pound, and President Dwight Eisenhower publicly told the British to declare a ceasefire, and to disengage from Egypt. All this came as a great shock and humiliation to the British, and they have never quite recovered from it. John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State was to comment that Britain had lost its old role in the world, and had yet to find a new one. A French diplomat commented that Britain was like a doddering old man who had lost all his possessions but had not realised it.
There was no television to speak of for most people in Ireland at the time. The people relied upon radio, newspapers, and newsreels which were three weeks old before they got as far as Omagh. The Suez crisis overshadowed the events in Hungary, as far as the British media were concerned. Some historians would have it that the Suez business provided a distraction for the Russian intervention in Hungary, but their invasion would have happened anyway, as it was to happen in Prague in 1968. Many in Ireland were gratified to hear that Cardinal Mindzenty, jailed afater a show trial in 1949, had been sprung from prison and had been given sanctuary in the US embassy in Budapest. Several hundred refugees came to Ireland and many were to remain. Local charitable funds were set up for Hungarian relief; there was a midnight matinee in the County Cinema where a James Stewart western was shown to raise funds to the effort. The hardline imposed in Hungary was to soften in the 1960s and 70s.
Eisenhower was elected to serve his second term in that first week of November 1956. He had no intention of upsetting the International Order over Hungary, or anywhere else. The Iron Curtain would come down by the end of the 1980s, the British Empire was visibly a thing of the past after Suez. My old schoolmate, now a priest, never spoke a truer word than he did on that dark November evening fifty winters ago, when he realised that we were living through historic events.
In evidence the court heard that the action before them had been taken by a professional musician against the proprietors of a fashionable restaurant in the locality. He explained that he had been engaged to entertain the patrons in a new dining room which had been added to the premises, and was to have been paid a percentage as well as a flat fee. When the time came for his percentage to be paid he felt that he was being short changed, because from his reckoning of the numbers attending he should have been paid much more. He alleged that the enterprise would not have been so successful as it was without his contribution. "In other words" said the presiding Judge, "This man was instrumental in the success of the business."
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