The Thin Green Line

The History of the Royal Ulster Constabulary GC, 1922–2001

Richard Doherty

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781781594469
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Formed out of the Royal Irish Constabulary at the time of Partition, the RUC's history is predictably a turbulent one right through to its replacement in 2001 by the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Few police forces in the world have suffered so grievously as the RUC and this book is a fitting memorial to the sacrifices made in the interests of the civil population it was determined to protect. Throughout its history, it has not only had to perform normal police duties but contain the ever present IRA threat. In 1969, the climate changed and ushered in a new and even more violent era of sectarian strife. The emergence of extreme nationalist organizations posed grave problems and, with the RUC in a prime role, the position of the Chief Constable was hugely important. This book tells the story of a remarkable police force without fear or favor. Ironically its reward for containing a hugely challenging internal security situation and at the same time policing the community traditionally was its disbandment.

Chapter One

The Force is Born

Most accounts of policing in Ireland credit the development of the Irish police forces to Robert Peel in his time as Ireland’s Chief Secretary. What is often overlooked is that the word ‘police’ was first used in legislation in its modern sense anywhere in these islands in an act passed by the Irish parliament in 1786. The Dublin Metropolitan Police Act created the Dublin Metropolitan Police District; the Dublin Police, established in 1787, was the first modern police force in the British Isles. From that Act, and the creation of the Dublin Police, the word ‘police’ takes its accepted modern definition of regulating public order and enforcing good government. Before that the word, which comes from the Greek ‘polis’, meaning city, through French, implied the protection of society from the disaffected; the two meanings are, therefore, complementary. Today, many, including police officers, would regard protecting society as the primary role of any police force. Interestingly, either interpretation implies that policing is a service to society, and that police officers are civil servants, in the true sense. In that light, the decision to rename the Royal Ulster Constabulary GC as the Police Service of Northern Ireland shows a lack of understanding of clear English on the part of the decision makers, since the new title uses two words to say the same thing: ‘police’ and ‘service’. This modern infatuation with convoluted language is not peculiar to Northern Ireland; London’s force has been rebranded the Metropolitan Police Service in the interests of political correctness.

Peel’s creation was not the national police force he had wanted but the Peace Preservation Force (PPF), which came into being in 1814, as the Napoleonic Wars drew to an end. Among the reasons for the formation of the Force was the shortage of military personnel to assist parish constables.¹ Peel objected to using the Army in a civilian situation and said so in Parliament; this rationale later led him to form the London Metropolitan Police. In between, the killing of eleven demonstrators and wounding of about 400 during a political reformers’ gathering of some 50 – 60,000 people at St Peter’s Field, Manchester on 16 August 1819 seemed to support Peel’s argument. Although there was no disorder, magistrates lost their nerve and ordered the arrest of the demonstration’s organizer. When yeomanry troopers tried to arrest him, they were surrounded and forced to draw their sabres. At that point a troop of regular cavalry intervened; at this time Manchester was notorious for rioting and the soldiers may have feared that a major riot was imminent. As the hussars moved forward panic ensued in which the eleven, including two women, died. The incident became immortalized as the ‘Peterloo Massacre’.

Although the Peace Preservation Force was a national organization it did not have permanent stations throughout the country but was a form of emergency reserve that could be sent anywhere in Ireland ‘proclaimed’ to be in need by the Lord Lieutenant. To save money, members were not permanent, being liable to call up when decreed. The PPF first deployed to the barony of Castlethird in Tipperary in September 1814. Almost immediately members were nicknamed ‘Peelers’, a soubriquet applied to police officers in Ireland ever since. Many were former cavalry NCOs and the use of horses lent mobility. It appears that these men also created a tradition that survived into the Royal Ulster Constabulary, by wearing their rank chevrons on the right forearm with the points upwards. Army NCOs wore, and still wear, their chevrons on the right upper arm; chevrons in the RUC manner are worn in the Army but only by certain ‘appointments’ rather than ranks, e.g., pipe majors.

The PPF gave way to the Constabulary of Ireland, or County Constabulary, in 1822, established under the Constabulary Act. Peel, now Home Secretary, was again the driving force. Ireland was suffering yet another spasm of unrest, which allowed him to reintroduce his national police force concept. But, as with the PPF, there were objections from local magistrates, who feared erosion of their power, and from Irish MPs at Westminster and so the new force was constituted on a provincial basis. Continuing local objections delayed its introduction in some counties. In each barony there was to be a permanent complement of sixteen constables commanded by a chief constable with each province commanded by an inspector general. Before long there was an extensive reorganization that unified the forces under a single inspector general, based in Dublin Castle. The force structure did not include Dublin, Belfast or Londonderry, each of which had its own police. The Dublin Police had been disbanded in 1795 to be replaced by an unarmed civic guard controlled by the lord mayor and corporation which, in 1836, was superseded by the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP). Londonderry city had its own Borough Police as had the town of Belfast.² The latter pair would be absorbed by the national force but the DMP survived until April 1925 when it became part of the Garda Síochána. It is interesting to note that the word police was used for urban forces with constabulary being reserved for the national force, in much the same way as France has a national police for urban areas while the gendarmerie covers rural areas. This was also the case in Britain.

The PPF wore a blue uniform with scarlet facings, similar to that of many cavalry regiments but the Constabulary took its uniform colour from another branch of the Army, the rifle regiments, a relatively recent innovation, regarded as elite soldiers and which wore green uniforms. The shade of green, so dark as to appear almost black, was known as rifle-green; it was introduced as a form of camouflage, making the fast moving riflemen more difficult to spot than if they had been garbed in traditional scarlet. Thus was born another tradition that would be carried forward into the RUC. Although the RIC/RUC uniform has been described as unique this is not so; at least two other forces used dark green. Lancashire Constabulary’s first uniform was a dark-green frock coat with dark-green trousers, black buttons and black leather belt. This may have been modelled on the Irish uniform since the Lancashire force was not formed until 1840; in Lancashire the rank of sergeant was shown by a single chevron on the left forearm. The London, Birmingham and Liverpool Railway Police also adopted a green tunic.³

The new constabulary created in 1822 recruited many senior ranks from the Army. Military men would also provide most of the inspectors general over the next century while the RUC’s first and second Inspectors General, Sir Charles Wickham and Sir Richard Pim, had armed service backgrounds. One of the new force’s main duties was suppressing faction fights, an unfortunate tradition of men gathering in ‘factions’ at fairs throughout the country to fight over grievances, real or imagined. These resulted in many deaths and injuries and were a curse on Irish rural life.⁴ In 1825 Sir Walter Scott wrote that the public peace in Ireland seemed to be ‘secured chiefly’ by armed police who were like soldiers, either mounted or on foot, and dressed in the manner of yeomen in Britain. But he also noted that the constabulary behaved well and operated under strict discipline. Nonetheless, the Constabulary’s provincial structure came to be considered a weakness, which led to the amalgamation of the provincial forces under the Irish Constabulary Act (1836). Also known as the Drummond Act, this created the Irish Constabulary to cover the entire country except the cities of Dublin and Londonderry and the town of Belfast. Both the Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police had their headquarters in Dublin Castle; the latter was unarmed whereas the Constabulary carried weapons. The mind behind the new force was the Under Secretary, Thomas Drummond, who had learned much about Ireland during his time with Colonel Colby’s Ordnance Survey. Command of the Constabulary was to rest with an Inspector General with two deputies; all three were required to live in Dublin. Each province had an Inspector and each county a County Inspector with eighteen chief constables, now called sub-inspectors. These were the officer ranks, below which were head constables, constables and sub-constables; the rank of constable was the equivalent of the modern sergeant while the sub-constable equated to the modern constable.

The appointment of the Irish Constabulary’s first Inspector General was inspired; the choice fell on James Shaw-Kennedy, an Army officer who, in 1829, had rejected Peel’s offer of a commissionership in the newly formed London force. Shaw-Kennedy had also served in northern England and had experience of the problems of using soldiers as police. He thus became a firm advocate of the need for an effective civilian police force. However, Shaw-Kennedy did not long remain with the Irish Constabulary, resigning after less than two years in post; his political overlords in Dublin Castle would not allow him to appoint and dismiss officers and nor was he allowed to organize the force as he wished. But he left a legacy that would influence and affect generations of Irish police officers in the form of his 1837 regulations. Those regulations emphasized to those joining the force that they were in an ‘entirely new situation’ as ‘officers of peace’, words that seem to have been aimed particularly at erstwhile soldiers. Policemen were to act ‘with the utmost forbearance, mildness, urbanity and perfect civility towards all classes’ and were never to allow their feelings to get the better of them and certainly never to express opinions of a sectarian or political nature. To ensure their political neutrality, policemen were not permitted to vote. The regulations also governed the day-to-day life of the policeman in a fashion that would remain familiar to RUC officers as late as the 1960s. Policemen were dispersed around the country in small numbers and based in posts known as barracks. Within those barracks, nothing was ‘ever to be without its place appointed’; there were to be no pictures on the walls and the building was to be whitewashed on, at least, a six-monthly cycle.

Shaw-Kennedy’s regulations specified the qualities of the various ranks, with the constable able to earn respect from his sub-constables but remaining detached from them while officers were to be friendly with both seniors and juniors while winning the respect of their men. Over the following decades the force would earn praise from many visitors to Ireland and its men became an essential part of Irish society. Dispersed in some 1,400 police posts, they carried out many tasks beyond the normal call of duty and could be found reading or writing letters for local people, completing forms and even doing accounts for shopkeepers. In villages and rural communities the constable, later sergeant, was one of the most important personages, ranking alongside the priest, rector and schoolmaster. Most important gatherings would see the man with the gold chevrons present. Their families were also important, although policemen were forbidden to marry until they had seven years’ service, by which time they ought to have accumulated enough money to allow a reasonable standard of living as a married couple. Even then the bride had to be approved by the police authorities and the newly-weds could not live in the same county as the bride’s family; this meant a transfer for a man who was already not allowed to serve in his own county.

By 1840 the Irish Constabulary numbered 8,500 men and rose to 12,358 ten years later before dropping to around 10,000. A Reserve Force was formed in 1839 and a depot established in Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1842. In that year also, a cadet training scheme was introduced, allowing suitable candidates to be appointed directly as sub-inspectors, the first such scheme in the United Kingdom. Before long the Irish Constabulary’s organization provided the pattern for new forces throughout the Empire. Among those based on the Irish model were the British Columbia Provincial Police, in 1858, the New Zealand Constabulary, remodelled in 1871 – 73 and Canada’s North West Mounted Police, later Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The first uniforms of the last-named force were also based on their Irish counterparts. Many Irish officers were appointed to senior positions in these and other forces across the Empire and in Britain itself. The London Metropolitan Police’s first two commissioners were Irishmen, although neither had served in the police at home but were an Army officer and a barrister. In East Suffolk the local constabulary, established in 1839, had an Irish chief constable, John Haynes Hatton from County Wicklow, a former Irish policeman; Hatton later became Staffordshire’s chief constable. In 1829 one of the London Metropolitan Police’s first commissioners, Sir Richard Mayne, wrote an early definition of what today would be termed a mission statement for a police force.

The primary object of an efficient police is the prevention of crime: the next that of detection and punishment of offenders if crime is committed. To these ends all the efforts of police must be directed. The protection of life and property, the preservation of public tranquillity, and the absence of crime, will alone prove whether those efforts have been successful and whether the objects for which the police were appointed have been attained.

Ireland was never free from tension much of which, in the Constabulary’s early years, arose from the movement to repeal the Act of Union, led by Daniel O’Connell. Then came the Young Ireland movement and the 1848 rebellion, in which the sole action occurred between a group of rebels and Constabulary at Boolagh Commons near Ballingarry in County Tipperary. A few rebels were killed or wounded and the remainder captured. The leaders were dealt with leniently, their death sentences being commuted to transportation under a new Treason Felony Act introduced to prevent martyrs being created. One of the leaders, William Smith O’Brien, asked to be hanged, drawn and quartered but the judge refused his request. Instead the rebellion became known popularly as ‘the battle of the Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch’ although it was to have far-reaching influences in later years.

The Young Ireland rebellion occurred in the aftermath of the famine as a result of which many Irish emigrated to the United States. There a hatred of England festered and Irish exiles created an organization styled the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), better known as the Fenians. The Brotherhood was formed in 1858 and many Irishmen who fought in the American Civil War – 1861 – 65 – did so to learn the profession of arms so that they could fight for Ireland’s freedom. Thus the aftermath of the war saw a two-pronged Fenian campaign with an attack into Canada involving the army of the IRB, which used the name Irish Republican Army (IRA), and a rebellion in Ireland.

However, the Irish Constabulary garnered excellent information on the Fenians and their plans and infiltrated the organization to such an extent that the 1867 rebellion was short lived, those outbreaks of violence that did occur being suppressed easily by police and military action. Many arrests were made, habeas corpus was suspended and the rebellion fizzled out, although there was an outbreak of violence in England in which a Manchester policeman was murdered. Three Fenians were executed to become instant martyrs, ‘the noble hearted three’ of popular myth in contrast to ‘the vengeful tyrant’ that took their lives. Although there was a revival of Irish political activity thereafter, the folk memories of 1867 would also play a malevolent part in future developments.

In the immediate aftermath of the Fenian rebellion tribute was paid to the Irish Constabulary for its part in quelling the rebellion. Now with some 1,600 stations throughout Ireland and 11,000 men, three-quarters of whom were Roman Catholic, the loyalty of the police was impressive. This was rewarded when Queen Victoria bestowed the prefix ‘Royal’ on the Constabulary, who were henceforth to be the Royal Irish Constabulary and to wear as their badge the harp and crown of the Order of Saint Patrick.

Although the Royal Irish Constabulary was now part of the fabric of Ireland it had been taken for granted by the authorities who starved it of funds and kept its men poorly paid. In addition, there were other grievances, including the long hours that policemen worked. There were no official off-duty hours, no rest days, no annual leave and no right to a pension while a constable was confined to barracks at night. Support for the RIC came from the press who pointed out the force’s reliability and effectiveness; newspapers called for better pay and conditions. Many officers had already resigned to join forces in England, where pay and conditions were better, or even farther afield. With threats of mass resignations – there were 1,388 vacancies in 1870 – government relented and appointed a commission in 1872 to enquire into pay and conditions for all ranks. Eventually improved pay and conditions were granted, together with a pension scheme. For all the grievances about pay and conditions, the Irish peeler was regarded as an honest man and corruption in the force was almost unknown; many officers were granted special testimonials from the areas they policed.

In the years since its formation many additional duties were given to the police. These included enforcing fishery laws, collating agricultural statistics, escorting explosives, acting as census enumerators, making enquiries on behalf of government departments, and enforcing both weights and measures and food and drug rules. The Constabulary also absorbed the Revenue Police in 1857; this body enforced the Illicit Distillation (Ireland) Act of 1831, and attempted to reduce the incidence of illicit distillation of poteen throughout Ireland. Both Belfast and Londonderry Borough Police forces were absorbed into the RIC, the former in 1864 and the latter in 1871. The rank structure changed in 1883 with sub-inspectors, constables, acting-constables and sub-constables becoming district inspectors, sergeants, acting-sergeants, and constables respectively. In spite of comments that the RIC was a military force this was the first time that a military rank, that of sergeant, was used. In 1883 the strength was 14,115, an increase of more than 2,000 in twelve years. However, force numbers dropped to 10,662 by 1900. Irish policemen in their distinctive rifle-green uniforms were also to be seen in London where a RIC detachment was deployed in 1883 to protect Whitehall following bomb attacks in London. This Republican activity also caused the creation of a Special Irish Branch in the London Metropolitan Police; in time this became Special Branch and was not confined to the capital’s force. In 1884 Fenians struck at the Special Irish Branch and the Criminal Investigation Department in a bomb attack that damaged Scotland Yard and the nearby Rising Sun public house.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century the RIC was involved in the task of escorting and protecting bailiffs carrying out evictions, a particularly unpleasant duty for a force the majority of whose members came from rural areas. Although they performed their duties as required there were many instances of policemen sending money to their own families to ensure that they would not suffer eviction. As sectarian passions cooled in the latter years of the century and land reform made it possible for many tenant farmers to buy land, the lot of the policeman became easier. Already part of the community, the rural constable was able to patrol effectively and to learn all that there was to know about his area.

As the nineteenth century came to an end, however, opposition to the South African, or Boer, War indicated that all was not well in Ireland. Government had already attempted to introduce legislation granting Home Rule to Ireland but there had been considerable political opposition to this. Home rule remained the objective of the Irish Party at Westminster but was opposed by Irish Unionists, especially in Ulster. The ensuing political tension brought about the birth of yet an...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One - The Force is Born
• Chapter Two - Riots, Air Raids and the First Policewomen
• Chapter Three - A New Era – with Shades of the Past
• Chapter Four - The Sixties
• Chapter Five - Bombs and Bullets; Death and Destruction
• Chapter Six - The ‘Wee Man’ – the Newman years
• Chapter Seven - Hermon takes Control
• Chapter Eight - The Hermon Era Continues
• Chapter Nine - Enter Annesley
• Chapter Ten - The End of an Epoch
• Chapter Eleven - Reflections
• Appendix One - Gallantry Awards to individual members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary GC
• Appendix Two - Roll of Honour
• Appendix Three - The Royal Ulster Constabulary GC Benevolent Fund
• Appendix Four - The Royal Ulster Constabulary GC Foundation
• Bibliography
• Index