The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence

by Charles Townshend

  ‘STAMPING OUT TERRORISM BY SECRET MURDER’

  On the morning of his arrival in Dublin on 22 May 1920, Sir John Anderson had a sobering interview with the Inspector General of the RIC, who told him that ‘he was in daily fear either of wholesale resignations or of his men running amok.’ Either would mean ‘the end of the RIC’. The implications were stark. If there were not to be outright military rule, the police must be completely reconstructed. Macready, who judged them ‘hopelessly out of date’, said that ‘as regards the RIC we are sitting on a volcano’. He had no doubt what needed to be done: ‘if they were turned into an ordinary unarmed police force,’ he told Anderson, ‘they would fulfil their functions in time of peace a good deal better than at present.’105

  The problem was that it was a time neither of peace nor of war – as conventionally understood. On 1 June the newly appointed RIC Divisional Commissioner for Munster submitted a lucid assessment of the state of the country. The people were ‘completely terrorised’, and ‘the situation with the police themselves has been very ticklish.’ The police felt ‘let down’ and ‘unsupported’, and their complaints were ‘hard to find answers to’. He protested that nobody should ‘suppose they are frightened – they are not’; but they were hard to hold together. The support that he had been promised would be crucial – if that failed, the situation would be ‘beyond retrieving’. At national level the Inspector General reiterated his warning that, as the boycott of the police was still growing, it was ‘questionable how much longer the force will stand the strain’ without vastly more support.106

  The kind of support that the police might receive raised some delicate questions. Ministers were clearly looking to provide moral back-up at least. On 22 July Lord Balfour (who had – or believed he had – suppressed the Land War agitation of the 1880s) expressed ‘surprise that the military had on all occasions been defeated and that they shot nobody’. Some of his senior colleagues had already, they thought, found a way of overcoming this problem. Earlier that month Henry Wilson was surprised to find the Prime Minister nursing a ‘ridiculous belief that Tudor has organised a counter-murder society’; a week later he repeated the same ‘amazing theory that Tudor, or someone, was murdering 2 S.F.s to every loyalist the S.F.s murdered’. To Wilson’s dismay, Lloyd George ‘seemed to be satisfied that a counter-murder Association was the best answer to the S.F.’s murders’.107 The Munster Divisional Commissioner was evidently already aware of this idea: ‘when the support we are promised arrives, we shall know how to employ it in carrying out the policy outlined to me.’ The ‘main particular’ of that policy, he noted with startling candour, was ‘the stamping out of terrorism by secret murder’. (Significantly, though, he doubted if this would work: he was ‘still of opinion that instant retaliation is the only course’.)108

  Was a ‘counter-murder association’ set up? Some such killings had certainly happened, though it is still hard to say how organized they were. A prime example was the assassination of Tomás Mac Curtain, commandant of the Cork No. 1 Brigade and Lord Mayor of Cork, on 19 March 1920. The government claimed that the killers were dissident republicans – a suggestion that may have looked plausible in the light of Mac Curtain’s dispute over tactics with the aggressive ‘active squad’ in his brigade (also known as ‘Hegarty’s crowd’) led by Seán O’Hegarty. Since the local RIC inspector, Oswald Swanzy, was well aware of this split, and saw Mac Curtain as the lesser of the republican evils he faced, killing him was not logical; but there would be plenty of even more illogical police actions in the months to come. The police never troubled to investigate the murder, a fact that is suggestive in itself.109 Though there was no direct evidence, the coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of murder against not only DI Swanzy and ‘unknown members of the RIC’, but also the Prime Minister, Viceroy, Chief Secretary and Inspector General of the RIC. It may have been somewhat wide of the mark at that point, but the gap would soon close. If Mac Curtain was indeed killed by disguised police (who apparently failed to disguise their ‘English accents’ – unless these were part of the disguise), the killers were leading the way to the counter-murder policy soon to be approved by General Tudor. A series of night-time assassinations by ‘death squads’, as they have been called, followed in Cork, Tipperary and Limerick.110

  The identity of these squads has so far eluded the most careful historical investigation.111 Republicans certainly believed in their existence as ‘associations’, and some linked them to Freemasonry, which they saw as a specially diabolical force. Immediately after Mac Curtain’s death a Daily Mail journalist reported ‘a theory gaining ground’ that he had fallen ‘victim to a new secret Anti Sinn Fein organization modelled and run upon the exact same lines as the famous Ku-Klux-Klan’. The similarity was allegedly ‘startling’, and ‘men best fitted to judge’ were predicting ‘an ugly triangular duel between the forces of the Crown, Sinn Féin, and private bands of avengers’. Not until July, though, did a grouping calling itself ‘the Anti-Sinn Féin organization’ carry out an attack (on a schoolteacher in West Cork), and another month elapsed before four Roscommon Volunteer officers received death threats from ‘The All Ireland Anti-Sinn Féin Society’. Another two months on, the Mayor of Wexford received a threatening note from the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin Society, Wexford Branch’. After that there was a spate of warning notices from either the Anti-Sinn Féin League or the Anti-Sinn Féin Society.112

  The Cork Volunteers took the Anti-Sinn Féin Society to be, as had been rumoured in April, a vigilante group consisting of prominent local businessmen. Connie Neenan, OC 2nd Battalion, later insisted that ‘the Anti-Sinn Féin Society was mostly composed of Protestants who were running businesses in the City’. Whether or not these pillars of the community had really started killing ‘Sinn Feiners’ by night, the Volunteers set about killing some of them (albeit an odd selection). It seems more likely, though, that the ‘Society’ was no more than a front for the sub rosa action of the new police recruits, some of whom certainly did aim to terrorize those they saw as enemies of the state. Whoever they were, though, their choice of language was significant: it showed that they saw Sinn Féin as the animating spirit of the republican campaign. Of the dynamics of the republican movement they apparently knew, and probably cared, little.

  The first British recruits to the RIC went out to stations, after a few weeks’ training, in late March. They would rapidly become etched in the popular memory – maybe more deeply than accurately. As stocks of the RIC’s bottle-green and black uniform quickly ran out with the sudden expansion, the makeshift use of some khaki military kit led to the new recruits immediately being christened ‘Black and Tans’. They were marked out in other ways as well, not only by their speech – their accents surely grated – but also by their stature. The RIC’s old 5 foot 9 inch height requirement was dropped by 4 inches, and even if only a small proportion of the new men scraped in at the lower end, they looked different to those accustomed over generations to guardsman-sized police. They were, too, non-Catholics, and – in equally sharp contrast to most of the old RIC – mainly men of the urban working class.

  They were enlisted as regular constabulary, but the addition of khaki undoubtedly hinted (even if accidentally) at a quasi-military role. Even after the regular RIC’s uniform shortage was cleared up, at the end of 1920, the soubriquet ‘Black and Tans’ stuck to the British recruits – and maybe to Ulstermen as well. It was extended also to the new temporary force which Tudor began to assemble in August. The RIC Auxiliary Division, recruited from ex-officers, did not mix police and military uniform, though: it sported purely military battledress and greatcoats, topped off rather oddly with Kilmarnock bonnets (popularly called ‘tam-o’-shanters’), in the style of the British army’s Scottish regiments. The reason for this particular symbolic choice remains obscure. The harp badge they wore was the only item that identified the ‘Auxies’ as having any connection at all with the RIC. The second generation of Black and Tans neither looked like polic
e nor behaved like them.

  It has usually been assumed that it was the arrival of these new, battle-hardened reinforcements that triggered the upsurge of counter-terror in late 1920. In Leitrim, the RIC ‘had become remarkably quiet and were practically doing no duty’ up to that time, but then many of them ‘became just as aggressive as the Tans or Auxies’.113 Indeed as the summer crisis of authority deepened, the constabulary had shown signs of wanting to opt out of the repressive campaign altogether. One of them, Timothy Brennan, the member for Leinster on the RIC Representative Body, circulated 2,000 pamphlets urging his comrades to support Dominion Home Rule and refuse to carry arms on duty. He was brought to Dublin Castle to face Anderson’s deputy Andy Cope (‘assisted’ by the Inspector General, according to Mark Sturgis, who was also there). When he refused to repudiate his circular, or even agree to ‘take a good responsible position in another country’, they remonstrated with him, the Inspector General protesting, ‘You will destroy the Force and leave the men with families with nothing to live on.’114

  Significantly, though, they did no more than remonstrate. Sturgis noted that the seriousness of the problem was ‘slightly lessened’ by the fact that Leinster was the quietest part of the country, but as he wryly added, ‘if it spreads, a bonny job to start Coercion by having to coerce the RIC …’115 The crisis of authority in the country was echoed within the RIC itself, once ruled with an iron hand. The most startling manifestation of this unravelling was the mutiny launched in Listowel, Co. Kerry by Constable Jeremiah Mee and a few of his comrades. After forcing the abandonment of a small post by refusing to garrison it (in protest against the behaviour of the Black and Tan reinforcements there), in mid-June the group went on to refuse to obey orders transferring them to other stations. On his own account, Mee put the issue to his comrades in terms of deciding ‘whether we are going to be on the British side or the Irish side, since neutrality will be out of the question’. (Somewhat inconsistently, but in line with the pessimism by now ingrained in the force, he added that since the RIC would suffer whichever side won, they should make ‘a stand against being involved in the conflict’ at all.) The garrison agreed to refuse to hand over their barrack to the army as ordered.

  This mutiny duly brought a visit from first the County Inspector (CI) and then, on 19 June, no less than the Police Adviser himself, accompanied by two of his new divisional commissioners. Their approach to the mutineers spoke volumes. On Mee’s account, at least, instead of berating them – much less threatening them with punishment – the Munster Commissioner, Gerald Smyth, tried to ginger them up by promising them much greater freedom of action against the republicans. Martial law would soon be declared, and the police would be able to shoot suspicious characters on sight; ‘the more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you that no policeman will get into trouble for shooting any man.’ (For this he was assassinated the following month.) Failing to persuade the men to agree to their transfers, the posse of commanders eventually retired, leaving the mutineers in possession of the barrack.116 The reaction of the RIC chiefs to defiance was unprecedented, but – presumably not for this reason – the Listowel mutiny failed to spread.117 Mee himself may have gone too far, in his comrades’ eyes, in pushing them towards absolute disengagement. He even tried (without telling most of them) to make contact with the republican leadership in Dublin, to secure some support for the mutiny – without result. He was aware that most would still have regarded this as ‘treachery’, and it is clear that whatever the pressures on it the force’s esprit de corps remained stronger than the British authorities feared. RIC men generally wanted to keep their heads down, and do their best to get on with the job of being policemen. A few, though, certainly reacted much more positively to Commissioner Smyth’s exhortation.

  ‘THE NIGHT CAN SWEAT WITH TERROR’

  The stresses on the force had become barely tolerable by this time. They stemmed partly from the threat of violence, partly from social pressure. Overall police casualty figures were not excessively heavy by military standards – deaths and injuries ran at around 10 per cent. But policemen actually caught up in fighting suffered much higher casualties – 24 per cent were killed and 42 per cent wounded – and even the lower figure was of course quite dramatic for a civil police force, which is what the majority of the RIC perceived it to be.118 Moreover, before the casualty list began to lengthen in 1920 the boycott had set adrift most of the normal bearings of life for rural policemen. Where the boycott was applied systematically, it actually threatened them with starvation and left them no option but to take supplies by force. Shopkeepers would not serve them, but would watch while policemen took goods and left money on the counter; in pubs they would pull themselves pints and sit and drink them in silence. Whether goods were taken actually or metaphorically at gunpoint, the experience was utterly destructive of the traditional role of the policeman.

  The boycott seems to have intensified in the summer, pressed more directly by the Volunteers. Early in June a GHQ general order instructed Volunteers to ‘stimulate and support’ the boycott, and compile lists of people in their area who associated with the police.119 Republican enforcement became tougher. When a Cork undertaker allowed his hearse to be used at the funeral of an RIC man in July, the vehicle was set alight on its way back from the cemetery. In Kerry, two sisters had their hair cropped at Portmagee for being too friendly to the police, and an RIC man’s sister at Annagh was assaulted in the same way. That month the Roscommon RIC picked up notices from the North Roscommon Brigade’s ‘Competent Military Authority’ announcing that as of 14 July ‘all intercourse of any kind’ between ‘citizens of the Irish Republic’ and ‘that portion of the Army of Occupation known as the RIC’ was ‘strictly forbidden’; ‘all persons infringing this order will be included in the said boycott.’ Shortly after this, a woman accused of supplying the police in Frenchpark, Roscommon, had three pig rings clamped to her buttocks.120 Such heavy intimidation might be seen as an indication that public opinion was not solid against the police, but at this stage they were too disoriented to take comfort from that. As one county inspector in the west lamented in midsummer 1920, ‘they are shunned and boycotted … held up and shot at on every opportunity … intimidation broods everywhere and the dark hours are dreaded in many places.’ The conditions in many areas were imposing ‘a strain which very few bodies of men, however highly disciplined, could be expected to bear’, the Inspector General warned in August. They were ‘boycotted, ostracised, forced to commandeer their food, crowded into cramped quarters without light or air, every man’s hand against them, in danger of their lives, and subjected to the appeals of their families to induce them to leave the force’.121

  The boycott perhaps came closer to a general popular action on the ‘defensive warfare’ model than any other republican policy. Even so, it was never complete. In some places traders went on supplying the police, while claiming that the supplies had been commandeered. The cost of refusing trade mounted as time passed, and by the summer of 1920 some chambers of commerce were openly resisting the boycott. It may well have been in general decline by the end of the year. It never produced the ‘wholesale resignations’ feared by the Inspector General, if only because of the lack of alternative employment. But it made policemen ‘sullen and arrogant towards the people’.122 As the psychological assault was followed by a mounting physical threat in 1920, the withdrawal of local police into bigger depots shifted the issue from individual psychology to group ethos. Nothing in the police tradition was designed to cope with the kind of provocation they now faced. (That, indeed, had been the argument of both Byrne and Macready that military rather than police forces were needed.) It is clear that many turned to drink. For those who did not try to opt out, the almost inevitable outcome was retaliation. This was at least indirectly encouraged by the Weekly Summary, a news-sheet distributed by Tudor’s headquarters from August onwards in an attempt to sustain morale and contradict republican propaganda. To on
e of its readers, Douglas Duff, it was the most ‘fatuous, childish and lying … Government publication’ he ever saw; its ways of trying to ‘rouse our blood’ would have been ‘laughable had they not been so dangerous’.123 But Duff (who would go on, after serving in the Palestine police, to become a successful writer of action stories) was an unusually thoughtful kind of Black and Tan. And even he – who some think inspired the phrase ‘duffing up’ – was a firm believer in physical force.

  The most notorious ‘police reprisals’ were to take place in September and October 1920, but even as late as September did not necessarily involve the new British recruits. When the Manchester Guardian investigated a serious incident in Tullamore at the end of October, it concluded that the outbreak could ‘stand as a type of reprisal by the old RIC’. That ‘type’ was clearly quite well established by then. No Black and Tans had been involved when police rioted in Tuam on 20 July, or in Galway on 8 September – that riot followed the killing of the lone British recruit posted there.124 The most notorious outbreak, the ‘sack of Balbriggan’ on 20 September, when some fifty houses were burned down and two ‘suspected Sinn Feiners’ killed, certainly involved Black and Tans. But these men did not, as the received version has it, get out of control and break out of their barrack at Gormanstown. They were led by their officers and sergeants – ‘Irishmen all’.125