War and Propaganda
Secret History: Lloyd George Backed Terror in Ireland
Abstract
Can we Trust Our Leaders? Shameful History
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.George Santayana
Original article withdrawn by the author. Rewritten Contents Updated: Friday, 20 January 2012
When Lloyd George Backed Terror
Towards the end of January 1919 was the first meeting of the Irish Parliament, the Dáil Éireann. Eamon de Valera, President of the Dáil, escaped from Lincoln Gaol in February and headed to the USA trying to get the support of Congress for Irish independence. The Dáil appointed its own ministers to replace British ministers. Dáil courts, assisted by republican police, kept good order, but the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, a Liberal, but leading a Tory government, sought to remain in power by placating his hard line cabinet and their Parliamentary majority.
Throughout 1919, the Royal Irish Constabulary, an armed force, were the main instrument of the British government’s authority in Ireland and the Detective (G) Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police was the government’s main intelligence service. The government used them ferociously to stamp out rebellion. Shootings, burnings, and other reprisals by police, and even troops, filled newspaper headlines. In the face of all this, the Dáil Minister of Finance, Michael Collins, lost patience with fellow Sinn Féin deputies who were opposed to further violence. He had decided independence would have to be fought for, writing, in May 1919:
The policy now seems to be to squeeze out anyone who is tainted by strong fighting ideas…It seems to me that official Sinn Féin is inclined to be ever less militant and ever more political and theoretical…It is rather pitiful…
He and Cathal Brugha, the Defence Minister, encouraged local groups of Irish Volunteers who called themselves the Irish Republican Army to wage war on the Royal Irish Constabulary. The government imposed military rule. By the end of August 1919, 7,000 imperial troops were on active service, imposing martial law. On 12th September 1919, the same day that Collins’s squad shot dead a detective in Dublin, Lloyd George declared the Dáil illegal. By suppressing an elected body representing a majority of the Irish people, the Prime Minister unwittingly handed the initiative to Collins, Brugha and the militants within Sinn Féin.
Yet Lloyd George’s ruling party of blimps did not think it had used the Army as vigorously as it could have to smash the rebels. The British public were sick of war by 1919, and the press, concerned about the economy, wanted austerity, but government ministers and officials were strongly resisting suggestions of reducting the military in Ireland. The compromise was an increase in the militarized police force.
The year 1920 witnessed an alarming upsurge in violence. Michael Collins supervised volunteer brigades throughout the country, and had formed a band of skilled assassins in Dublin called “the Squad”. By January 1920, the IRA—acting independently of the Dáil Éireann—had killed five important policemen of “G” Division. Historian, Cameron Hazlehurst, writes (The Observer supplement, 1972) that a secret report on Michael Collins reached the Chief Secretary for Ireland, from the Director of Intelligence at Scotland Yard, saying:
There is definite and trustworthy information that Michael Collins is directing the murders of policemen, that he has attained such a position that his friends say that the police do not dare to touch him, and that if any attempt was made to arrest him it would precipitate a rising in Ireland.
Instead, some police retaliated with illegal reprisals. On 20 March, RIC men in plain clothes and blackened faces murdered Tomás MacCurtain, Lord Mayor of Cork and Commandant of 1st Cork Brigade of the IRA. Policemen resigned, so temporary constables were admitted to reinforce the RIC, at ten shillings a day, allegedly scrapings from English gaols. Most were simply unemployed former British soldiers. They had been “carefully selected”, Churchill claimed, from a throng of applicants for their intelligence, their characters and their records in the war. Among their officers was a certain Montgomery. Many wore khaki trousers as there were not enough dark green RIC uniforms to go round. In uniforms of khaki and green, with black belts, they were dubbed the “Black and Tans” after a famous pack of foxhounds in Co Tipperary. A Protestant gentleman landowner familiar with the English foxhunting gentlemanly tradition remarked:
Those blackguards should never have been let loose in this country. They are not gentlemen.
By unleashing the Black and Tans on the Irish people, Lloyd George signalled the bankruptcy of his Irish policy. The army command suggested the enrolment of unemployed soldiers in Great Britain. In July it added an Auxiliary Division of demobilised army officers with no police training and free from normal military discipline, who now brought further terror to Ireland.
Michael Collins’s assassination squads continued to liquidate detectives, spies, government agents and public servants. The IRA formed “flying columns”, mobile units each composed of around 35 men, serving for up to a week at a time. Tom Barry, a Great War veteran and Commandant of the West Cork Brigade, led one.
In April 1920, General Sir Neville Macready was appointed Chief General Officer Commanding British Forces, and prepared for Easter week anniversary celebrations in Dublin and other Irish cities. Macready described the police forces as “rotten” and hoped that Major General Tudor, the new Police Adviser, would improve the situation. They set British troops patrolling the streets, and searching trains. On Easter Sunday night, the IRA burned down the Income Tax offices in Dublin and twenty two counties, burned around 400 abandoned RIC stations throughout the country, and attacked police barracks. The auxiliaries and Black and Tans increasingly saw their comrades being brought back dead and maimed to barracks.
But the police took vengeance on ordinary Irish people. The authorities increasingly initiated repressive measures—raids, searches, swoops, shootings and arbitrary arrests. When Volunteers shot an RIC Head Constable in Balbriggan, Co Dublin, lorries of Black and Tans set fire to shops and houses, and bayoneted two innocent onlookers to death in their nightshirts. In Co Clare, a man was shot to death and incinerated in his own burning house. Another was killed when he tried to help a neighbour whose house had been set on fire. Soon after, Black and Tans wrecked and burned houses in Trim, Co Meath, and Mallow, Co Cork. The military set up road blocks, cordoned off streets and carried out widespread searches. Between January 1919 and March 1920 there were some twenty thousand raids on houses by Crown Forces.
For a time this reign of terror seemed to work. The BBC, in “Northern Ireland, a Short History”, explained that Winston Churchill exulted in the successes in a speech he gave at Dundee:
We are going to break up this murder gang. That it will be broken up utterly and absolutely is as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning… Assassination has never changed the history of the world and the Government are going to take care it does not change the history of the British Empire.
Late in July 1920, Thomas Jones, the Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, wrote that the government had only two policies open to it—to apply martial law firmly, or to seek a negotiated settlement. Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff had a stronger view—recorded in the diary of Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary, 23 May, 1920. Wilson wanted to collect the names of Sinn Féiners by districts, proclaim them on church doors all over the country, and whenever a policeman was murdered, pick five by lot and shoot them!
Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, relied until November 1920 on countering the determined terrorism of the IRA with ruthless counter terror. In short, by 1920, he had in Ireland a full war on, though it was not officially policy, and remained undeclared and unknown to many. Of course, unequivocal evidence of terror as official government policy is hard to find having been destroyed or successfully hidden away—or was never committed to paper—but Cameron Hazlehurst carefully studied the Cabinet Papers of the time, and said in his 1972 Observer article that the diaries of Sir Henry Wilson and of Mark Sturgis, a senior official of the Irish Administration, point to Lloyd George privately encouraging and sympathizing with General Tudor’s giving free rein to the police and the 1500 strong Auxiliary Division. According to Hazlehurst, as late as February 1921, Sir John Anderson, the Joint Under Secretary at Dublin Castle, told Thomas Jones:
Whenever Tudor came over to see the PM he returned very much strengthened in his policy that, even if not in words yet by atmosphere and suggestion, the PM conveyed his encouragement.
The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, he who wanted to shoot captive IRA as reprisals, in July 1920, recorded that the Prime Minister thought just the sort of arrangement he had recommended was operating under Tudor’s authority. Lloyd George believed that “Tudor, or someone, was murdering two Sinn Féiners to every loyalist the Sinn Féin murdered”. Hazlehurst also found that Macready had told Mark Sturgis:
[Lloyd George] is against burning, but not gunning, and told me so himself.
He adds that Sir Maurice Hankey minuted a discussion on 5 October 1920 between Lloyd George and the liberal Lord Grey of Fallodon, in which the Prime Minister “strongly defended the murder reprisals”. According to the account of who was present at the interview, Lloyd George…
…showed that these had from time immemorial been resorted to in difficult times in Ireland. He gave numerous instances where they had been effective in checking crimes, he quoted two eminent nationalists who had told him in confidence that the Irish quite understood such reprisals, and that they ought not to be stopped.
Hankey concluded that “the truth is that these reprisals are more or less winked at by the government”, and contemporary orders and memoranda emanating from Dublin Castle are consistent with this judgment. Winston Churchill, as Secretary of State for War, demanded in November 1920:
The substitution of regular, authorized and legalized reprisals for the unauthorized reprisals.
On 9 November 1920, Lloyd George declared, “We have murder by the throat!” Then on sunday morning, 21 November, Collins sent out some of the Squad to the Gresham hotel and other lodging houses in Dublin where they shot dead twelve British officers, members of the “Cairo Gang” (as they were later known) of intelligence officers brought in from the Middle East to nail Collins himself. Four were wounded. That afternoon, Auxiliaries and RIC men indiscriminately fired on a crowd watching a Gaelic football match at Croke Park between Dublin and Tipperary, killing twelve civilians including a woman, a child and a Tipperary player. Sixty people were wounded. That “Bloody Sunday” ended with three men held by Auxiliaries being beaten to death in the guard room of Dublin Castle “attempting to escape”.
Following the ambush and killing of 18 Auxiliaries at Kilmichael near Macroom in Co Cork at the end of November in retaliation against the Bloody Sunday massacre, Lloyd George decided that the rebels had moved into full scale military operations rather than assassinations. He proclaimed martial law in the South on 10 December. A detachment of Auxiliaries and Black and Tans retaliated with one of the most notorious of all unauthorized reprisals, the sacking and burning of Cork City, destroying a large part of the shopping area, the City Hall, the Corn Exchange, the Carnegie Free Library, and most of Patrick Street by pouring petrol into the buildings and igniting it. The hoses of the Cork fire brigades were severed by the police when they tried to extinguish the fires. Lloyd George’s Cabinet agreed to a military inquiry the outcome of which was to be published, but a later Cabinet meeting had second thoughts, if the proposal was ever serious, announcing:
The effect of publishing the report would be disastrous to the government’s whole policy in Ireland.
Britain remained committed to terror in Ireland. At the end of the year, a policy of carrying civilians and suspected IRA men as hostages in military lorries was inaugurated. Fighting continued with undiminished ferocity for another six months, but the burning of Cork had shocked ordinary Britons. The Cabinet hoped that a new political formula—the granting of separate Parliaments to the North and South—might satisfy some, if not all, of the IRA and Sinn Féin leaders but Lloyd George was not willing to make concessions to men who were in arms against the Crown. He had to create a situation in which some responsible and representative Irish spokesmen would negotiate terms which he could grant. It was not until December 1921 that he signed the peace treaty with the Republican leaders.
Sources
- The prime source is an article in The Observer supplement, 1972, which was originally here, but has been removed at the request, on 18 January 2012, of the author, Dr Cameron Hazlehurst, FRSL FRHistS, Adjunct Professor, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, then a fellow of Queen’s College Oxford.
- The BBC online, “Northern Ireland, a Short History”
- Michael Collins His Life And Times online.
