Book extract: A British officer killed and an Irish city destroyed in a act of vengeance

Hugh Tudor was appointed by Churchill to lead the Royal Irish Constabulary, including the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries, but he met civil strife and rebellion with indiscriminate state-sanctioned murder, changing the course of Irish history
Book extract: A British officer killed and an Irish city destroyed in a act of vengeance

The burning of Cork on December 11, 1920: An IRA ambush of an Auxillary patrol just outside their barracks in Cork City led to the death of an officer. That same night, British forces went on a rampage, setting fire to businesses in the city centre. Some 57 buildings were ‘destroyed’ and many others damaged.

  • An Accidental Villain: Sir Hugh Tudor, Churchill’s Enforcer in Revolutionary Ireland 
  • Linden MacIntyre 
  • Merrion Press, €19.99

On December 11, 1920, the day after the official declaration of martial law, the IRA ambushed another Auxiliary patrol, this one just outside their barracks in Cork City. 

An officer was killed and several were wounded. So soon after Kilmichael, it was a provocation that was guaranteed to generate reprisals. 

Just hours after the attack on the patrol, Auxiliary police and Black and Tans swarmed through downtown Cork, and soon the commercial centre of the city was ablaze.

An inventory for General Tudor, prepared on December 15, listed 57 destroyed buildings, 20 badly damaged, and 12 houses “wrecked and looted”. The British army launched its own inquiry. The cabinet discussed the army’s findings on December 29.

While blaming a specific unit of the Auxiliary police for starting the fires, General Strickland, senior army officer in Cork, singled out “the higher authority who ordered a unit in so raw a state” to move into Cork so soon after the massacre at Kilmichael. 

Tudor, who, along with General Macready, was at the meeting, bristled at the accusation — in his opinion, Strickland’s focus on discipline reflected on him personally. 

He had a manpower problem after the Kilmichael massacre and had done his best to cope. Strickland replied that he should have asked the military for assistance.

Gen Macready raised the heat: Police discipline was always challenging, because policemen “had no code to work under” and the RIC leadership was not “the standard of men who could enforce discipline”. 

Linden MacIntyre is a multi award-winning author who also has worked as a journalist and documentary maker.
Linden MacIntyre is a multi award-winning author who also has worked as a journalist and documentary maker.

Tudor shot back that, according to former military officers now serving in the RIC, discipline on the police force was “stricter than the army”. 

Lloyd George weighed in diplomatically. He simply wanted an assurance that Tudor would “deal strongly” with indiscipline. 

He appreciated “the fine work” that Tudor and his men had done. He only hoped the police chief could “prevent further incidents of the kind” that generated scandals — like torching major cities.

The government, under pressure, had promised that Gen Strickland’s arson investigation would spare no effort in the search for truth, and that the findings would be published.

By the end of 1920, public attitudes about the struggle for Irish independence, in Ireland and in Britain, were unsettled and politically unsettling. 

The Archbishop of Canterbury, one of England’s leading moral voices, was privately describing Ireland as “the worst sore on our body politic”. 

In a November speech in the House of Lords, he specifically denounced reprisals. On April 6, 1921, 20 British Protestant prelates would denounce the government’s reprisals policy in a letter to The Times.

A commission of inquiry created by the British Labour Party to investigate the government’s handling of the Irish conflict was preparing a report, to be released in January 1921, that would describe reprisals as “a cruel and inhuman policy”.

Black and Tans and the Auxiliary police were out of control

The Black and Tans and the Auxiliary police, according to the Labour Party, were out of control. They had become “a weapon which [the government] cannot wield ... undisciplined and virtually uncontrolled”. 

The report concluded: “Things are being done in the name of Britain which must make her name stink in the nostrils of the whole world.” 

Photographs of Cork’s commercial and administrative centre, after the inferno of December 11–12, brought back scenes from the Great War. 

That British officers had turned the core of a major Irish city in to a smouldering ruin was shocking, even for hard-liners, and was another serious public relations setback for British policy in Ireland.

Questions screamed for answers and critics screamed for accountability, and the government had made a reckless promise to investigate the Cork fires and to make the findings public. 

The cabinet was now dithering, because the army officer handling the inquiry had been bluntly critical of police leadership. He didn’t name the name — but he didn’t really have to. 

Even though Gen Tudor didn’t light the match in Cork, he was the man in charge of the Auxiliaries who did. 

And, to make matters potentially more serious, Tudor was, as usual, standing firm behind his officers.

In his own “supplementary report” on Cork, Tudor pointed out that no one claimed to have seen Auxiliary officers actually setting fires; or maybe some unknown person set a small fire that just spread and grew because of gas explosions; or maybe Sinn Féiners set the fires themselves, confident that ‘Crown forces’ would be blamed. 

But the official finding, based on an investigation by an army general, Peter Strickland, was unambiguous. 

Policemen set the fires. Police leaders were ultimately responsible.

Lloyd George and Churchill cringed. The reckless promise to make the findings public now had to be reconsidered. 

Even more politically sensitive was the murder of a 73-year-old priest by a drunk Auxiliary on a roadside in Dunmanway. 

The image of an old priest bleeding on a roadside, a victim of a rogue policeman, had universal resonance that could shift political opinions. Especially in the United States.

British policy in Ireland was now threatened by a hovering American reality — the agitated interest of a large and influential Irish migrant population.

It is unlikely that Tudor considered the influence of the American diaspora to be significant, but the politicians, Churchill and Lloyd George, saw it as a major threat to the British strategy. 

Churchill even contemplated the possibility that the Irish war could escalate in to a major international confrontation. 

A recurring nightmare for Lloyd George was that by continuing with reprisals like Cork and Dunmanway, the Irish conflict would eventually “create unpleasantness with the United States, where feeling was dangerous”.

As he reminded members of the cabinet and his military and police commanders on December 29, “these were the kinds of incidents that drove a country like the United States to do something beyond discretion”. 

And he wondered, hypothetically, if it was time to throttle back the violence. What about a truce? In a rare show of unanimity, the generals and the police told him a truce was a bad idea. 

The reprisal strategy, controversial though it was to many, was delivering results. In the most likely scenario, the IRA — considered by the generals to be stumbling — would use a pause in the war to recover and reload, which was a bad idea when a clear-cut victory could be just around the corner.

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