One of the minority of Catholic officers in the regular RIC, who was on the staff of the Munster Divisional Commissioner, Cyril Prescott Decie, wrote later that ‘those police quickest to avenge the death of a comrade were Irishmen … Black and Tans, having drink taken, might fire out of lorries indiscriminately, loot public houses, or terrorise a village, but the Irishman would avenge his comrade when absolutely stone cold sober and on the right person.’ ‘When men were on duty after the murder of a comrade feeling hatred in their hearts for the murderers and dissatisfaction at the conditions under which they were compelled to fight, they started shooting on the slightest provocation, if not indeed from a spirit of bravado, and once it started it was infectious.’126 Of course some Black and Tans certainly did live up, or down, to what would become the standard picture of them – as one old RIC man put it, ‘rough, very rough, f-ing and blinding and drinking and all. They’d have shot their mother, oh desperate altogether.’ How far they were encouraged in roughness became a big issue. Even before the end of August, Macready was telling Wilson that he was becoming ‘more anxious’ every day about ‘the action of these “Black and Tans” of Tudor’s’. If the military were ‘brought face to face with some of the wild acts of retaliation which these men are carrying out’, they would have to intervene.
At the beginning of September Sturgis reported a rumour (from Belfast) ‘that Police reprisals are due entirely to the known approval of such by General Tudor!!’ But he twinned it with a second rumour, that ‘Jonathan [John Anderson] is the man responsible for the policy of arming the Ulster Volunteers!!’ Since he knew this was quite wrong, he seems – as his double exclamation marks indicate – to have disbelieved the Tudor story too. He saw Tudor almost every day, so could claim some authority here. Immediately after the Balbriggan reprisal, Tudor had ‘quite agreed … to my view that had they confined themselves to the dignified shooting of the two prominent Sinns, notorious bad men, the reprisal would have been not so bad’. The notion of ‘dignified shooting’ is significant here, as is his comment that in any case ‘worse things can happen than the firing up of a sink like Balbriggan.’ He also invoked the logic of collective punishment: ‘surely the people who say “Stop the murders before all our homes go up in smoke” must increase.’ But he could not ‘see any middle course between punishing someone and admitting that such a job is our war policy’. This would mean martial law, in effect: such things could be done by soldiers as ‘part of a war policy’, but he demanded plaintively, ‘what in the name of Goodness are we doing as a Civil Authority in such a business!’127 Two days later he dismissed the possibility of ‘punishing someone’, asking ‘how the devil can we round up and try 50 policemen when we know that they know that the bulk of their officers up to the top agree in principle with their action’ (even if, as he added, ‘they prefer shooting to burning’). Maybe the rumour from Belfast was not so wrong.
Another suggestive rumour appeared after the Chief Secretary had visited the RIC Depot in Phoenix Park to hand out medals – as well as a stern injunction against reprisals. As a result, the RIC ‘settled to chuck down their guns’, only changing their minds when ‘their officers explained to them that it was a Show for the benefit of the press.’ Sturgis once again dismissed this rumour; but at the same time he heard from Andy Cope, who had just visited Gormanstown and Balbriggan, that ‘the RIC are not out of hand but are systematically led to reprise by their officers.’ This led Sturgis back to a familiar argument – ‘it’s tragic that these men cannot see that indiscriminate burning is idiotic,’ whereas ‘a little quiet shooting’ would be just as effective; and shooting ‘a known bad man who, if he hasn’t just shot your comrade, has no doubt shot somebody else’ was ‘morally much more defensible than this stupid blind work’. A few days later it became clear that the same view was taken by the Prime Minister. Tudor ‘says L.G. is all against burning but not gunning, and told him as much himself’.128
Against the traditional view that the Black and Tans led the way in retaliation, it can be argued that when British police and Auxiliaries took reprisals, they were merely following the bad example set by their Irish comrades.129 But they might just as well have been following the example of the British troops. Their comrades-once-removed in the army had been striking out in revenge attacks on the civil population since late 1919 – at Fermoy – and though the C-in-C later claimed that there had been only one unofficial military reprisal during the whole conflict, he was certainly wrong. There were at least four in the first six months of 1920. General Macready’s defensive line reflected the extreme unease, even alarm, that the military authorities felt in face of this phenomenon. It would lead him eventually to institute a policy of ‘official reprisals’ to channel the retaliatory instincts of his troops – because, as he said, a unit that was not infuriated by the killing of any of its members would be so lacking in spirit as to be militarily useless. An example of this approach came in September when, as he told Wilson, ‘down at Ennistymon the Royal Scots carried out certain retaliations “by numbers” under order of their CO.’ He believed that ‘the men were so maddened by the sight of the bodies of the Police who were killed and mutilated by expanding bullets’ that ‘if the CO had not done what he did, he would probably not have held his men.’ ‘As the regiment is a good one, I shall merely tell him not to do it again.’ But Macready was coming to the conclusion that ‘retaliation by numbers’ was the only way. And as was becoming clear, reprisals (even, perhaps especially, indiscriminate ones) worked.
The September reprisals evoked the uneasy confession from Macready that ‘the whole atmosphere’ of the districts where reprisals had occurred had ‘changed from one of hostility to one of cringing submission’. People were reported to be touching their caps to military officers in Galway, and, more importantly, to be starting to provide information. Some police officers were openly jubilant – one western county inspector reported that ‘the dread of reprisals’ had played a major part in ‘crippling Sinn Féin prestige and power’. If ‘quietly and systematically continued’, the process would ‘knock the bottom out of the Sinn Féin movement in a short time’.130 Even the least hawkish ministers, such as the Chancellor, Austen Chamberlain, were impressed by such assertions; Chamberlain told his sister that it was ‘a fact that the reprisals have secured the safety of the police in places where previously they were shot down like vermin’, and had led the people to give information about ambushes. His Cabinet colleagues even credited them with ‘driving a wedge between the moderates and the extremists in the Sinn Féin camp’.131
Troops and police lashed out, spontaneously or otherwise, for many reasons; but underlying them all was the paralysis of the judicial system. By the summer of 1920 it had become effectively impossible to punish those the police believed guilty of murder and ‘outrage’. Sometimes they simply could not be found or identified, thanks to the failure of witnesses to speak up; but even if they could, the prospect of securing a court conviction was remote. When those who attacked the Crown forces could not be brought to justice, direct action against them or the communities assumed to shelter them became likely, especially if such violence appeared to make people more co-operative. The likelihood was strengthened by the governing British official belief that (as Mark Sturgis put it) ‘the entire population of this God-forsaken island is terrorised by a small band of gun men.’ Without the terror of ‘Sinn Fein on one end of the stick and Orange on the other’, the people would embrace a political settlement. Now, terror would be countered and perhaps neutralized by terror.
The perilously seductive arguments for reprisals were not borne out by their actual effect on republican activity. It would be found, in the end, that in the competition of terror the rebels could easily outbid the authorities. As early as July 1920, Volunteer GHQ raised the question of ‘counter-destruction of houses’. Making clear that such a policy was merely being ‘considered’, it asked some brigades to draw up lists of ‘20 possible houses that would n
ot injure our own people’, if retaliation was agreed to.132 When the British military finally initiated ‘official reprisals’ on the first day of 1921 the policy of systematic republican retaliation took off, and ensured that official reprisals weighed at least as heavily on loyalists as on republicans. Thereafter the policy’s attraction would inexorably wane.
If there was a representative reprisal, it happened perhaps at Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo, on the last night of September. It was not the first or the most violent: reprisals had struck Thurles, Upperchurch and Limerick in July, Templemore in August, and there had been a destructive series of them in late September – Balbriggan on the 21st, Ennistymon, Lahinch and Miltown Malbay next day, Trim and Listowel on the 27th and 28th. Others would follow, climaxing in the ‘burning of Cork’ in December. (The list has been said to ‘read like a sombre catalogue of small towns throughout the length and breadth of the south and west’.)133 But Tubbercurry showed what came to be thought of as key characteristics of a reprisal. Following the ambushing of a police inspector at Chaffpool on the Sligo–Tubbercurry road on 30 September, military and police reinforcements arrived (from Sligo) late in the evening – the telegraph wire had been cut, and men had to drive from Tubbercurry to Sligo to get help. They found DI Brady had died of gruesome wounds inflicted (allegedly) by dum-dum bullets. ‘His naked body was lying on the kitchen floor [of Tubbercurry RIC barrack], being washed by one of his comrades. The three ghastly wounds made by the shots were in full evidence.’ His head constable had ‘the calf of his right leg practically blown away’, and another badly wounded constable was wandering about in distress. The troops and police stormed off, firing rifles, hurling grenades and shouting ‘Come out, Sinn Fein! Where are the murderers?’ They burned down three shops on the town square and wrecked several others – eleven according to the veteran Irish correspondent of the Daily News, Hugh Martin, who arrived two days afterwards. Finally the officers got the men under control and back in their vehicles, but the police then drove off to the nearby co-operative creamery and burned it down, as well as the creamery at Achonry.134
By late September the liberal press in Britain was on the alert, and reports in the Daily News and Manchester Guardian mean that the Tubbercurry outbreak was particularly well investigated. The papers reported (contrary to the official story) that as soon as they had arrived in the town, the troops and police broke into a pub, drank what they could and destroyed the rest, before torching it. They replied to their commanding officer’s orders with defiant verbal abuse, and the CI was reduced to begging his men to spare the town’s biggest business. Locals testified that, rather than careering from one creamery to the next, as the CI reported, the troops and police had headed out in two groups in different directions, seemingly going to both creameries at the same time. This had an air of deliberation. The destruction of shops had been common, but the targeting of creameries – on which hundreds of small farmers depended – was a far-reaching development.135
Tubbercurry was (unusually) the subject of an official communiqué, admitting that Crown forces had ‘broken out of hand’ and that ‘reprisals continued till early in the morning’. It added that ‘a creamery in the neighbourhood was burned,’ though without actually admitting that the police had done it. Greenwood, though, with more nerve than honesty, not only refused to admit that the Tubbercurry creamery had been burned down in reprisal, but told the House of Commons he had ‘never seen a tittle of evidence’ that any creamery had been destroyed by Crown forces. He accepted that ‘there was a reprisal,’ but set it in an almost heroic frame: the men ‘saw red’ when they found Brady lying on the floor: ‘They knew him. They loved him. Soldiers and policemen trained under the British flag love their officers. They so love them that they go to their death for them.’136 The Chief Secretary’s invocation of Britishness, whether instinctual or aimed to evoke the patriotism of MPs, pointed up the impossibility of appealing to both British and Irish opinion.
Reprisals were coming to worry many beyond the liberal press. At the end of September, Mark Sturgis would note that other big issues like hunger striking had ‘faded into insignificance’ beside them. His diary logs the evolution – if that is not too progressive a term – of official thinking around them. With his ‘nebulous position’ as assistant to the civil servant most closely involved with the police, Andy Cope (he was never formally appointed assistant under secretary, for fear of seeming a rival to the neurotic deputy under secretary), he heard every opinion on the question. The most consistent view, as he noted after Macready had issued a general order forbidding reprisals in August, was that ‘reprisals do good of a sort.’ Tudor was ‘sure of it’. Sturgis then thought that to countenance them was ‘death to a disciplined force’, but ‘if they sometimes give a man, caught red handed in some minor outrage, a damn good hiding instead of arresting all the minnows, it’s all to the good.’ There was also the argument that whatever their effect on the ‘enemy’, they were unavoidable. In private, Macready himself made the point that ‘a regiment that did not try to break out’ when they heard a story – even if untrue – that one of their comrades had, say, been thrown into the Liffey and shot at ‘was not worth a damn’. He ‘had to be careful not to make them sullen and take the heart out of them’. He agreed that ‘if a policeman put on a mackintosh and a false beard and “reprised” on his own hook he was damn glad of it.’
Sturgis went on trying to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable reprisals. On 24 August he noted that ‘we are being urged quietly and persistently that Reprisals are the only thing to put down the Gun men,’ and he was ‘begin[ning] to believe it’. But ‘the sort of reprisal that burns half the town of Lisburn because the DI was murdered’ was ‘the wrong sort’. He had just interviewed a ‘professional reprisaler’, a DI from Thurles, who explained that his district was quiet because they ‘have the local blackguards marked – and they know it and know that they personally will pay the price if a policeman is shot’. The view that shooting was good, burning bad, turned into a sort of orthodoxy. Sturgis wavered on the issue of whether reprisals should be open or concealed: at the end of August he judged it ‘a tragedy … that we blame SF for fighting underground when we ourselves have driven them to it and now our undoubtedly useful card “reprisals” is used underground by us instead of being an act of war’.
It seems beyond question that, while reprisals were officially condemned, the condemnation was limited to indiscriminate ‘bad’ reprisals. ‘Good’ reprisals, targeted assassinations, were encouraged. The Cabinet tacitly accepted this when it failed to come up with any substitute action. Where Sturgis and the Prime Minister diverged was over the policy implications of this. For Sturgis, reprisals were ‘not really possible without Martial Law to regularise them’. It seemed incontrovertible to him that if they did not stop after Greenwood’s speech at the RIC Depot the surviving credit of the civil administration would be ‘done’, and ‘we must give place to a military régime.’ That, just as clearly, was the last thing that Lloyd George wanted.
Though Sturgis made a kind of moral judgment on reprisals, his primary criticism of bad reprisals was that they were idiotic, stupid. Even he seems not to have suspected how disastrous their impact on Britain’s reputation outside Ireland would be. Yet as he wrestled with the issue, the tide of public outrage was welling up. In late September the New Statesman drew attention to the difference between spontaneous outbursts by ordinary troops and policemen in an intolerable situation – ‘provocation … difficult to resist, no matter how good their discipline’ – and the actions of the Auxiliaries. With them, ‘there is clear evidence that methods of terrorism are adopted less from passion than from policy.’ The Observer editorialized about the ‘immense weakening of Britain’s moral position’, and even the Daily Mail protested at the beginning of October that ‘half the world is coming to feel that our Government is condoning vendetta and … lawless reprisals’: the ‘slur on our nation’s good name’ was becoming ‘ins
ufferable’. On Armistice Day Hugh Martin of the Daily News, who had been a particularly tenacious investigator of police retaliation, penned an agonized lament for his country’s reputation. ‘Three months ago, the word “reprisals” merely recalled the later stages of the Great War. Today, to the whole of the English-speaking world it means one thing and one thing only – the method by which Great Britain is waging war upon Ireland.’137
Reprisals made headlines, and nobody could doubt their republican propaganda value. But pervasive casual brutality may have played a bigger part in constructing the popular image of the ‘Tans’. Their body language was consciously aggressive, and they exercised to the full the freedom to intimidate an uncooperative public. ‘Those Black and Tans can do what they like, and no check on them,’ as Lady Gregory heard a friend say after a particularly ghastly incident near her home at Kiltartan, Co. Galway, in October. Ellen Quinn and her child were shot by the roadside as a police patrol drove by firing at random, and ‘the Head Constable [an old RIC regular] was afraid to take a deposition from Mrs Quinn before she died,’ even though he was in her house.138 Sturgis lamented, ‘I wish these lorry loads of police could be restrained from this idiotic blazing about as they drive along.’ Once again he called it idiotic rather than unacceptable; he merely observed that ‘it can do no conceivable good.’ The army, though, did see ‘promiscuous firing’ as something more dangerous: a sign of the failure to impose discipline on the police. Even where it did not produce such deadly results as at Kiltartan, the practice seriously undermined any claim the force had to the status of ‘guardians of the law’.
Auxiliaries in particular, who might be called the ‘real’ Tans (they remained separate from the regular RIC, and were clad in khaki), often appear to have assumed that brutality was capable of converting people to the government cause. Hugh Martin wrote sardonically of their habitual ‘whipping, kicking and otherwise instructing [young men] in the elements of British citizenship’.139 On occasion, brutality could be choreographed around the central symbols of the conflict. In Ballina, Co. Mayo the chemist watched as ADRIC assembled:
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 23
