Hugh Trenchard, head of the Royal Air Force, and Admiral David Beatty, head of the Royal Navy. He tried to convince them that controlling Ireland in a naval war was not very important. Security cooperation with Ireland, he argued, would be best achieved on the basis of Irish neutrality, rather than as a subordinate country within the British empire.18 Dalton attended his first meeting on defence on 13 October. He accompanied Collins to a meeting at the Colonial Office with the formidable and very abrasive Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill. Erskine Childers also attended this informal meeting of the Air and Naval Defence Committee. Churchill was accompanied by the Royal Navy’s Admiral Beatty and Captain B.E. Domville.19 Dalton took advantage of the opportunity to break the ice with Churchill and to make a personal assessment of the man.
A further meeting of the committee was held on 17 October at the Offices of the Cabinet, 2 Whitehall Gardens. On this occasion Collins brought his full defence team – Dalton, O’Connell, O’Duffy and Childers, with Diarmuid O’Hegarty as secretary. Churchill was accompanied by Sir Laming Worthington Evans, Secretary of State for War. The two had a formidable array of advisers – Sir Hugh Trenchard, Vice-Admiral Sir Osmond de Beauvoir Brock, Captain F. E. Grant and Captain Domville, with Tom Jones and Lionel Curtis acting as secretaries. The two sides met again the following morning at the Colonial Office.20 In later years Dalton reflected that on facing Churchill’s team across the conference table, he reckoned his own side could have done with some reserves. Nevertheless he believed that what they lacked in numbers they made up with Collins’s ‘dominant courage and determination’.21 Dalton indicated in a letter how busy he had been in recent days, ‘looking after Mick’, and arguing with Winston Churchill and Admiral Beatty.22
In pursuing talks with the British on defence, Collins decided that he needed support from the West Cork guerrilla leader Tom Barry. Dalton recalled how one night, on the way home from a fiery encounter with the British delegation, Collins told him, ‘I wish I had Tom Barry over here.’ Dalton told the writer Meda Ryan that on his next visit to Dublin, Collins sent word to Barry to go to London, which he did. In the evenings, at Hans Place, Collins and the negotiators listened to Barry’s opinion on military aspects of the negotiations.23 Despite Collins’s reluctance to go to London for the negotiations, Dalton gained the impression that the British were more than happy to have him there, because they saw him as the militant force controlling what happened in Ireland.24 It made sense for the British to try to do a deal with the senior figure perceived to be the hardliner who wielded the real power back home.
Dalton was present when Collins had a confrontation with Churchill, who had challenged the Irish side over what he described as breaches of the Truce. Collins became increasingly irritated as Churchill outlined a seemingly endless list of incidents in which, he said, the Truce had been broken. Collins scribbled a note to Dalton, asking if they had ‘any answer’ to Churchill’s points. Dalton, never one for subterfuge or evasion, scribbled, ‘No answer’. Collins remained quiet for a while as Churchill pressed on with his tirade. Suddenly Collins thumped the table, surprising all present, including Churchill, who was stunned into silence. Collins had the ability to take the sting out of a remark or gesture by a mischievous grin and he used the technique on this occasion. Churchill looked at Collins, saw the Big Fellow grinning, and began to grin as well.25 The tension had been defused. Churchill had been tricked into ceasing his verbal tirade, even though it was clear that Collins had no answer to the accusations being made.
Collins took time off from pressing duties to write letters to his sweetheart, Kitty Kiernan back in Ireland. She seemed to like Dalton, and in one of her letters to Collins in London, dated 17 October, she inquired after Emmet and the others in Collins’s entourage.26 Even though Collins worked extremely hard, once he was ensconced with his friends at Grosvenor House there was bound to be horseplay and practical jokes, as Dalton himself would discover. Some of the beds in the house had legs that were hinged, and Collins liked to bend them back during the night so that the occupants would find themselves sleeping at an angle to the floor. In his practical way, Dalton decided on a way of dealing with the situation. Ned Broy looked into Dalton’s room one night and saw him sleeping at an angle to the floor. Dalton explained that Collins would come in and bend the legs later, so he decided to bend them himself.27
Through Collins, Dalton became friendly with Lady Lavery, the glamorous American-born high society hostess and wife of the prestigious painter Sir John Lavery. She became a great admirer of the Big Fellow, and introduced him to some members of her influential social circle. Hazel Lavery also liked to entertain Cabinet ministers such as Winston Churchill and Prime Minister Lloyd George, and other important figures at her palatial Kensington home, 5 Cromwell Place. In Dalton’s view, she was a very useful contact for Collins in his role as Director of Intelligence. Through her, he was able to get useful inside information, and also feed her items to ensure they got back to the right people.28 There has been much speculation as to whether Collins and Lady Lavery had an affair. In an interview in 1974 with the writer Meda Ryan, Dalton said that Collins ‘liked Hazel, everybody did’, but that was all there was to it. Dalton claimed Collins would never put himself in the position where he could be blackmailed, either by people from his own side or by the British.29 However, as will be explained, the actual situation may have been much more complicated.
In a draft article written in 1946 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty, and apparently unpublished, Dalton said that he had listened over the years to ‘scurrilous and malign statements’ concerning the private lives of the delegates in London during the negotiations.30 He may have been referring to rumours about the Collins/Lady Lavery relationship. He said he always felt that such absurd remarks were unworthy of rebuttal. He went on to present a picture of Collins that contradicted any ‘scurrilous’ statements that might have been made. He referred to a particular aspect of the Big Fellow’s routine in London – the ‘daily visits by Michael Collins to a place of worship where he humbly prayed for guidance and divine inspiration…’ During the Treaty talks, Collins would often attend early morning Mass at the Church of St. Mary, Cadogan Place, or Brompton Oratory. Dalton, a religious man himself, was clearly impressed by Collins’s piety while immersed in talks on the future of Ireland.
As the negotiations dragged on, Dalton observed how the stress took its toll on Collins. He recalled that one morning Collins was in an ‘impossible’ mood and had snapped at the ever-faithful Diarmuid O’Hegarty. Dalton described O’Hegarty as a brilliant and indefatigable worker, like Collins himself, and believed there was none closer to Collins.31 The fact that Collins could turn on his friend in a moment of exasperation was an indication of the strain under which he was operating.
Sometimes the stress was relieved by horseplay. Kathleen Napoli McKenna has described how, during a banquet at Hans Place, Collins arrived with his entourage, including Dalton, Tobin, Cullen, Guilfoyle and Dolan. She recalled that they were a ‘happy, boisterous crowd’, and that they began throwing cushions at each other, then oranges, apples and nuts from the table. As a former British Army officer with a belief in military discipline, Dalton’s enthusiasm for such activities was perhaps more restrained. On another night, Collins was involved in horseplay on the top floor at the house on Cadogan Gardens in which some furniture was broken. Joe McGrath, accountant to the delegation, was not amused when he came from Hans Place to inspect the damage. 32
Part of Dalton’s role as IRA Director of Training was to contribute training material to the Volunteer publication, An t-Óglach, edited by Piaras Béaslaí. At one stage, Béaslaí was unhappy with the level of cooperation he was getting from Dalton, and in his forthright way made his displeasure known. Dalton, as a member of Collins’s entourage in London, obviously had more pressing concerns at the time. In November 1921 Béaslaí wrote to Dalton complaining he was getting ‘no help’ from the Training Department with regard to training matter for An t-Óglach. Béaslaí said he had to publish material on his own responsibility ‘with the danger of publishing unsuitable matter’. He suggested that Dalton send him some books with relevant material marked that he could use for producing training material for the newspaper. It appears that to mollify the prickly editor, Dalton immediately arranged for an article to be sent to him but this only served to further agitate Béaslaí. Dalton was normally highly efficient, but it emerged that the article he had submitted had been published a few weeks previously. Béaslaí returned the article to