The Black and Tans

Richard Bennett

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781473812420
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

A history of the infamous British temporary policemen sent to Ireland during the Irish War of Independence in the early 1920s. They could arrest and imprison anyone at any time. They murdered civilians. They wore a strange mixture of dark green tunics, khaki trousers, black belts, and odd headgear, including civilian felt hats. The Irish named them after a famous pack of wild dogs on County Limerick—The Black and Tans. Although they were only a small proportion of British forces in Ireland, they were the toughest, the wildest and the most feared. They knew nothing and they cared nothing about Ireland. They were sent there in March 1920 by Lloyd George's coalition cabinet to make Ireland "a hell for rebels to live in." Richard Bennett's book is an accurate and authoritative account of an ugly and harrowing period in Anglo-Irish history—a period that the English have struggled to forget, and that the Irish cannot help but remember.

CONTENTS

1 The Beginning of the End

2 Patriots v. Peelers

3 New Tools for an Old Job

4 The Gunman’s Republic

5 The Gathering Storm

6 Restoration of Order?

7 Reprisals and Protests

8 ‘Bloody Sunday’

9 Peace Moves and Arson

10 Die-Hards on the Defensive

11 Mailed Fist and Olive Branch

12 The Truce at Last

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. The Vanquished 1916. Prisoners of the Easter Rebellion

2. Conquering Heroes 1917. The triumphant return

3. Michael Collins in 1917 with Arthur Griffith

4. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic 1916

5. Arthur Griffith, de Valera, Michael Collins at a Sports meeting

6. A military round-up in O’Connell Street, Dublin

7. A soldier searches a bicyclist for arms and papers

8. Soldiers with fixed bayonets hold back sightseers

9. A check point for motorists in Dublin

10. Sir Hamar Greenwood and Sir John Anderson in Downing Street

11. The Viceroy Lord French, and Commander-in-Chief General Macready

12. Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy, I.R.A. Chief of Staff

13. Soldiers give a demonstration of vigilance against ambush

14. Tanks guard the entrance to Mountjoy Gaol

15. Countess Constance Markievicz and Cathal O’Shannon

16. Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson the C.I.G.S.

17. Before: A military guard at Kingsbridge Station, Dublin

18. After: A neat job of demolition by the I.R.A.

19. The Auxiliary Cadets arrive at the Curragh

20. Sir Hamar Greenwood inspects the Royal Irish Constabulary

21. Templemore, Tipperary. The scene of a reprisal

22. A strange interlude. The Templemore miracle

23. Cumann na m’Ban members wave to Mountjoy prisoners

24. ‘A pretty tough lot.’ Three Auxiliaries on guard

25. The sack of Balbriggan. A scene of desolation

26. The arrest of Kevin Barry. Dubliners in Upper Church Street

27. An I.R.A. Coup. The destruction of Trim barracks

28. The funeral of Lord Mayor MacSwiney of Cork

29. Four Auxiliaries guard the Dublin Mansion House

30. Crown Forces: A representative group in Dublin

31. Lloyd George, Sir Hamar Greenwood and Bonar Law

32. Intelligence Officers of the Dublin Castle ‘murder gang’

33. Barbed wire entanglements at the approach to the Castle

34. Lord French and General Tudor, commander of the police

35. A famous I.R.A. Flying Column in Mayo

36. The arrest of two suspects after ‘Bloody Sunday’

37. An issue of An t-Oglach, the Volunteers’ Journal

38. The Burning of Cork nth December 1920

39. Cork citizens inspect the damage in Patrick Street

40. An appeal to Dubliners. Tray for Ireland’s prisoners.’

41. Mourners pray for men about to be executed

42. Outside Mountjoy: Three republican ladies

43. Behind the wire: Suspected republicans in internment

44. The Burning of the Custom House 25 th May 1921

45. The State Visit to Belfast 22nd June 1921

46. After the Truce: Auxiliaries mingle with the crowds

47. After the Treaty: President Cosgrave hoists the City Colours

48. At Dublin Castle: The Free State Army takes over

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The extracts from Sir Henry Wilson’s diaries have been taken, with the permission of the owner of the copyright, from Major-General C. E. Calwell’s Sir Henry Wilson: His Life and Diaries, published by Cassell’s; and those from General Macready’s Annals of an Active Life by permission of the publishers, Hutchinson. I am greatly indebted to Mr. Paddy Malley who allowed me to study his brother Ernie O’Malley’s papers, and to Mr. Cathal O’Shannon who gave me invaluable advice about sources and also lent me contemporary material. Neither can be held responsible for my opinions. Nor can the many participants on both sides who have kindly spared me their time and given me the benefit of their advice. I have been unable to trace the writer of the manuscript quoted on pages 161–3 and must make an anonymous acknowledgement to the author who is, I hope, still with us. I would also like to thank Mr. S. G. Pryor of the News Chronicle Library for the help he gave me with my researches.

Grateful Acknowledgements for the illustrations should be made as follows:

Mr. J. Cashman, Dublin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 34, 40, 47, 48.

Central News, 29.

Central Press, 36.

The Cork Examiner, 38, 39.

Mr. Paddy Malley, 32, 35.

National Museum of Ireland, 21, 30.

Radio Times Hulton Picture Library, 8, 9, 10, 16, 19, 31, 33, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46.

CHAPTER ONE

The Beginning of the End

ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1919, an English sentry surveyed the Irish scene, no doubt with soldierly indifference, from the top of the old Castle keep in Dublin. He could follow the line of the Liffey below him on its way to the sea, and look over the roofs of the city to the damp green fields climbing into the Dublin hills. For six hundred years his military predecessors had stood at this point, armed with crossbow, hackbut and musket, scrutinising this dismal prospect. Today machine guns were mounted behind the parapet under the fluttering Union Jack. An infantry guard in steel helmets was stationed in the courtyard below, where two armoured cars and a tank were manned and ready for action and two Sappers were down a manhole, testing the wire entanglements across the subterranean River Poddle.

There was trouble in the land, as so often before. On the 28th December, 1918, the post-war General Election results had brought an overwhelming victory in Ireland for the Sinn Fein party, which won seventy-three out of a hundred and five seats. Sinn Fein had declared that it would not send its elected representatives to Westminster to join the members who had been returned ‘to hang the Kaiser’. It had resolved, instead, to sever Ireland’s connection with the United Kingdom and to set up its own independent Republican Government. Commenting on the results, Mr. Shortt, the Secretary for Ireland, said on New Year’s Eve that the Irish question would be settled ‘Peaceably or bloodily within the next six months’.

He was wrong. Nor was there any doubt of the way in which the issue would be settled. On the 17th January, 1919 Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, noted in his diary: ‘We are sitting on top of a mine which may go up at any minute. Ireland tonight has telegraphed for some more tanks and machine guns, and are evidently anxious about the state of the country’! The Dáil Eireann met four days later to declare its independence and to pledge itself and the Irish people ‘to make this declaration effective by every means at our command’. De Valera, the President, and Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, were two of the thirty-six elected members who were in gaol. Had they been at liberty, they might have avoided this intransigent declaration of a Republic which allowed no possibility of manœuvre or retreat and could only lead to more unnecessary bloodshed. On the same day, the 21st January, Dan Breen, Séan Treacy and several other Irish Volunteers ambushed and killed two policemen of the Royal Irish Constabulary who were escorting a cart with a load of gelignite for Soloheadbeg quarry. The ambushers had fired the first shots in a guerilla war against the Crown Forces.

How had Anglo-Irish relations come to this sad impasse? There are Irishmen who trace the story back to 1172, the days of Strongbow, and the outlawing of the Irish by the Normans. Others, with less retentive historical memories, start at the dispossession of the natives and the planting of colonists under the Tudors and Stuarts. Many are content to remember Cromwell’s massacres at Drogheda and Wexford as the beginning of English iniquity. Nearly all know of the penal laws of the seventeenth century, the rebellions of 1798 and 1803, the depopulation of the island, and its economic spoliation after the union of the Parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800, when the cross of St. Patrick joined the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew to make the flag which came to be known as the Union Jack. Every Englishman was horrified by the famine of 1846–47, and many spoke against the colonial rule by Coercion Acts and Crime Acts in the nineteenth century. But they were never numerous or powerful enough, either inside or outside the House of Commons, to help steer Irish Home Rule through the cross currents of party politics at Westminster. The catalogue of Irish distress is long and no credit to England. ‘Anglo-Irish history,’ it has been said, ‘is for Englishmen to remember, for Irishmen to forget’!

But at the turn of the century Ireland was peaceful, if not free. It was agreed that the country had never been so quiet for six hundred years. The penal laws were a memory, though an abiding one, and the Land Purchase Act had once more given Irish tenants a stake in their own country. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society, which had been founded in 1858 to establish an Irish Republic by force, was only a handful of zealots who could make no headway, although they were later to leaven the lump. Ireland, greatly over-represented with the one hundred and five members and the majority for Home Rule, had weight to throw about in Westminster, and it seemed that Home Rule could not long be delayed.

As so often, the movement for revolt came not when things were at their worst but when they were getting better. The Gaelic League, founded in 1893, had inspired a renaissance of Irish culture, awakened a civilised nationalist pride and prepared the ground for Arthur Griffith who founded Sinn Fein in 1905. The words mean ‘Ourselves’, or ‘We are it’, and have denoted both a sturdy independence and a narrow parochialism. The aim of the movement was to reduce the British Administration by passive resistance, and to establish an Irish Government in its place. Griffith, who proposed a ‘dual crown’ and not a republic, claimed to have borrowed his ideas from the Hungarian patriot, Déak. He was an able journalist and a man of moderate views.

At the same time, the Socialist, James Connolly, was organising Irish labour, both industrially and politically, with the openly declared aim of establishing an Irish Socialist Republic. He also drew his inspiration from sources outside Ireland. ‘Only the Irish working class remains as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland,’ he wrote. Such words, which enlarged the vocabulary of independence to the dismay of prosperous Sinn Feiners, were to win Socialist allies for Irish independence across the seas.

Something had to be done about Ireland. No one disputed it. Asquith’s Liberal Government accordingly passed an Irish Home Rule Bill in 1912, for which no Irish member voted. It conferred only limited powers on a Dublin Parliament, but even so the Lords rejected it decisively, and the Bill could not, therefore, become law until 1914. By that time Sir Edward Carson had organised armed resistance to the British Government’s proposals in Protestant Ulster. This Irishman was, perhaps, best known to the public as the formidable advocate, who counted among his successes the conviction of his compatriot, Oscar Wilde. Armed Ulster Volunteers drilled openly, prepared to face death rather than submit to any form of government from Dublin. In April a cargo of German arms was run into Northern Irish ports. The South naturally retaliated by forming the National Volunteers. In July, Erskine Childers ran a consignment of German arms into Howth, near Dublin, The Ulster Volunteers and the National Volunteers were facing one another, ready at any moment, it seemed, to fly at one another’s throats, when the Great War intervened to avert the threat of the smaller one.

Irishmen, both Catholic and Protestant, flocked to the Colours. Redmond, the Irish Parliamentary leader, offered the National Volunteers for the defence of Ireland, and pledged them to ‘join arms with the armed Protestant Ulstermen’ against the common enemy, but he was rebuffed. The Ulster Volunteers were given every aid and encouragement, and the promise that they would not be forced to accept Home Rule. The National Volunteers, in the South were denied arms and equipment and were shown, very clearly, that they were not considered reliable. As Lloyd George said, wise after the event two years later: ‘Some of the—I want to get the right word—some of the stupidities which sometimes look almost like malignance, which were perpetrated at the beginning of recruiting in Ireland are beyond belief.’ One of the unhappier recruiting slogans was: The trenches are safer than the Dublin slums.’

Parliament put Irish Home Rule into cold storage until a year after the end of the war, and turned its thoughts to the fight for little Belgium and the rights of small nationalities. In Ireland the Trade Union Congress and Labour Party denounced the war and discouraged recruiting. Behind it stood the autonomous Labour Force, the Irish Citizen Army which had been formed in the industrial troubles of 1913. It was, as Lenin said, the first Red Army in Europe, and it claimed that it served ‘neither King George nor the Kaiser, but Ireland’. A minority broke away from the National Volunteers to form the Sinn Fein Irish Volunteers. They came under the control of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, for whom England’s difficulty was traditionally Ireland’s opportunity. Sir Roger Casement went to Germany in November, 1914, to secure support and arms for the cause of Irish independence. He was caught on landing in Ireland from a German submarine, and was tried and executed in England in 1916. The small but determined forces of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers drilled and trained for purposes other than National Defence and on Easter Monday, 1916, they struck.

The Easter Rebellion was a sadly mismanaged enterprise. The rebels proclaimed the Republic, occupied a number of buildings in Dublin and held out bravely f...

Table of contents

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• Half Title
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• Copyright
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