We present an extract from An Accidental Villain - Sir Hugh Tudor, Churchill's Enforcer in Revolutionary Ireland, the new book by Linden MacIntyre.
A gripping deep-dive into the legacy of Sir Hugh Tudor, Winston Churchill's trusted military man who oversaw the violent repression of Irish revolutionaries through the notorious Black and Tans.
It is unclear exactly when General Hugh Tudor first became a part of the Irish war. Though he had kept a diary during the Boer War and diligently recorded his experience on the Western Front, he left no record of his time in Ireland, even though the twenty-three months he spent there redefined his life, his career and, arguably, his personality.
Tudor and Churchill were frequently in touch on the Western Front during critical moments in an evolving Irish crisis in April 1916. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the two old friends, both die-hard imperialists, would have exchanged tactical ideas about Ireland during long discussions about politics and war. Irish independence had been a cause of violent conflict for centuries and had dominated British politics for decades. Easter week that year became a historic flashpoint.
Churchill was still a member of parliament while in uniform and had returned to London on April 19 for a debate on conscription that would inevitably focus on Ireland's contribution to the Great War. While in London he had dinner on April 24 with Edward Carson, a hard-line Protestant leader of Irish unionists in the British parliament and vehemently opposed to any form of Irish independence. It isn’t hard to imagine what they spoke about. April 24 was Easter Monday, the first day of the rebellion that would define Anglo-Irish politics for all time.
indifferent to the long Irish fight for self-determination.'
On April 26, two days into the Easter week uprising in Dublin, Tudor commented in his diary that "the papers are full of the Irish rebellion. We all hope that [Sir Roger] Casement will be hanged." (And he surely was, in August, after a controversial trial for treason.)
Churchill saw Tudor shortly after he returned from London to the front lines the next day, April 27. The timing of the Irish crisis would be difficult for two high-ranking British soldiers, one of them an ambitious politician, to ignore.
As they socialized in the final days of Churchill’s service at the front, brutal British military justice was polarizing Ireland, where fourteen accused rebels were shot by army firing squads in Dublin between the third and twelfth of May. It would soon be obvious to both Churchill and his friend that Ireland’s long campaign for self-determination wasn’t going to lose momentum, as many British politicians had hoped it would during the distraction of the First World War.
After Easter week, 1916, Irish nationalists made ever more provocative demands for a republic, once and for all divorced from Britain, her Empire and her Crown.
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Before the Great War, the demand for Irish independence might have been satisfied by some form of Home Rule, perhaps the status of a self-governing dominion, like Canada or Newfoundland. But by 1920, Irish politics were dominated by radical nationalists. The most aggressive independence party, Sinn Féin, even had a military wing: the Irish Volunteers, more widely known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
The Lloyd George coalition government was unimpressed by the popular support for Sinn Féin politicians. Unlike earlier Irish nationalists, they refused to sit in the British House of Commons. Their power, to the pragmatic Lloyd George, was therefore largely symbolic. The violent tactics of the IRA were becoming a problem, however. The government was determined to keep Ireland in a United Kingdom no matter the cost, and it had formulated an aggressive new strategy for defeating the republicans.
A key part of the strategy was a militarized Irish police force, with manpower recruited among English veterans of the Great War, and new leadership, also to be found in the senior ranks of the British army. The objective was to achieve the practical advantages of military force without the messy political implications of declaring martial law so close to home. The answer was to launch a hybrid campaign in which military rules would be enforced by the police, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC)—rearmed and repurposed under new military leadership. It was a plan that met immediate resistance among senior British military ranks.
The general officer commanding (GOC) in Ireland, General Nevil Macready, refused to consider taking on command responsibility for a civilian police force with an unconventional paramilitary mandate. The chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS), Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, was hostile from the outset and would become a persistent critic of the militarized police force and its leadership. The first army officer General Macready approached to take the job, euphemistically titled "police adviser" to the Anglo-Irish government, flatly turned it down.
After a few days of dithering by the military brass, Winston Churchill, now the British minister for war, stepped in—he knew just the man for the position, an old friend, Major General Hugh Tudor. The speed with which General Tudor accepted the assignment might suggest that he already knew exactly what the new job would entail. The position was approved by cabinet on May 11, 1920. Winston Churchill made the call and by May 15 the job was filled. Tudor arrived in Ireland on May 16.
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The admiration in the Churchill-Tudor friendship was mutual from the outset. Churchill was from an aristocracy that was not quite royal, but prominent in British history. He had a magnetic personality, boundless energy and brains. Tudor was a dedicated military man. He was also an all-round athlete, a skilled horseman, an avid polo player and a dedicated golfer. He had been a British army boxing champion, winner in his lightweight class twice in the 1890s. Near middle age, Tudor still exuded an aggressive masculinity, a quality much admired and maybe envied by both Churchill and Lloyd George.
The sights and sounds of Dublin in 1920 could have made an Englishman like Tudor feel at home. Ireland’s peril for an imperial bureaucrat or soldier might have been obscured by her physical familiarity, the Irish charm and the deference of friendly, witty people. Tudor was clearly warned before he took up his post not to be deceived by first impressions.
He had never been to Ireland and was indifferent to the long Irish fight for self-determination. As he later told a friend, he didn’t care "a whoop in Hell" about it. He was more familiar with the intrigues of Asia, Africa and continental Europe. He was fluent in, along with the proper English of an officer and gentleman, French and Arabic and was competent in Urdu. Tudor’s interest in Irish history and politics extended only to recent episodes of what he viewed as Irish treachery: the Easter Rising, at a time when Britain and her allies had their backs against the wall fighting the Germans in France; Roger Casement’s effort to recruit Irish rebels among British prisoners of war in Germany; Irish resistance to conscription when Britain desperately needed fresh blood for the war in Europe.
An Accidental Villain - Sir Hugh Tudor, Churchill’s Enforcer in Revolutionary Ireland is published by Merrion Press
