General refused Churchill’s order to lead fight in Ireland
An Irish general defied his superiors’ instruction to command police and a spy network against rebels, writes
AN Irish general in the British Army refused to take command of police and spying operations in Ireland during the War of Independence.
Lt-General Sir Edward Bulfin twice defied an order from British authorities to help lead the fight against forces seeking Irish independence.
As the nation continues to plan centenary commemorations of events of the War of Independence, Bulfin remains “Ireland’s forgotten general”, said military historian and author John Powell.
The WWI actions of the Dublin-born general will be recounted by Powell in a lecture organised by the Military History Society of Ireland at Griffith College in Dublin this Friday evening.
“He was a fascinating individual. He was an Irish Catholic and, given the times at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, the British Establishment treated Irish Catholics with a degree of suspicion,” said Powell (72), who is a retired British Army brigadier.
“He was a man not only of physical courage but of moral courage,” said the author, adding Bulfin “has pretty much been forgotten” both in Britain and Ireland.
“Bulfin became the most senior Irish Catholic general of the First World War… His first cousin, William Bulfin, was a fervent nationalist whose son, Eamon Bulfin, raised one of the Irish Volunteer flags on the GPO at Easter 1916,” he said.
Bulfin was born in Woodtown Park in Rathfarnham in 1862. His father, Patrick, later became Lord Mayor of Dublin. His grandfather was Edward Bulfin, from Derrinlough, Co Offaly. Bulfin was sent to school in England and returned to study at Trinity College in Dublin. He joined the army without graduating and in 1890 was dispatched to India and saw active service in Burma in 1892.
He was sent to South Africa in 1898 and travelled there with Tipperary-born General Sir William Butler as assistant military secretary. Butler was known to have a sympathy for underdogs, and was reputed to have said he preferred the Zulus to the English, said Powell.
Before embarking, Bulfin married his Irish girlfriend, Mary Frances ‘Fanny’ Lonergan. The couple went on to have three children: Eddie, Eileen, and a daughter Kathleen, who died at one month old.
When the Second Boer War broke out the following year, he was promoted to brigade major and was present in several battles.
At the outbreak of WWI, he was a senior army officer and was sent to the Western Front. In the first battle of Ypres, he led two critical counter-attacks which saved the Allied lines. His actions won him praise from First Corps commander General Douglas Haig who described Bulfin as “a tower of strength”.
He was promoted again and led the 28th Division through heavy German gas attacks at the Second Battle of Ypres and at the Battle of Loos.
He was badly wounded at Ypres when he was forward with his troops. His tactical headquarters was a dugout just 200 yards from the front line. He was injured by an exploding shell that killed a soldier beside him and injured a junior officer.
Bulfin wrote in his diary about surgery he received in hospital: “They took out a lot of metal from my head.”
A soldier in an English regiment wrote about the wounding of the Irish brigadier, stating: “Every man in the brigade felt very keenly the loss of the brigadier… Not a better general or a braver or cooler soldier under fire ever stepped on a field of battle.”
At the end of 1916, Bulfin was transferred to Salonika. He was moved to Palestine in 1917 and promoted to lieutenant-general and given command of XXI Corps under General Edmund Allenby. He led his formation through Ottoman defences in the Third Battle of Gaza and commanded the corps in the victory at the Battle of Megiddo, the site of the Biblical Armageddon. He was knighted while in the Middle East.
After the war, he was sent back into action to put down unrest during a revolution in Egypt in 1919.
At a British Cabinet meeting in May 1920, Lt General Sir Nevil Macready, in command of the British army’s campaign to subdue armed resistance in Ireland, asked Prime Minister Lloyd George and his ministers for extra troops and vehicles.
He also requested that Bulfin be sent to Ireland as chief of police and head of secret intelligence. At that period in time, the War of Independence had become a bloody conflict with tit-for-tat killings on both sides.
But Bulfin refused outright to go to Ireland, turning down the instructions of both Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Winston Churchill, who was Secretary of State for War. Wilson, a member of the Church of Ireland who was born in Co Longford, was assassinated in London two years later.
Powell told the Sunday Independent: “Macready wanted a senior army officer to draw together all the activities of the various police forces — the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police — and also a number of ‘Specials’.
“Macready put forward the name of Bulfin because he thought he would be an ideal choice, not only because of his military experience and his experience of civil powers, but the fact that he was an Irishman and a Catholic and therefore impartial,” he said.
Winston Churchill explained what happened later in a letter to the King’s private secretary. Churchill wrote: “Macready wanted to take General Bulfin as head of the police, of both the RIC and the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and to build up a composite Secret Service from uncoordinated and departmental branches which are at present dealing with Irish matters.
“This is an appointment of great importance. So obviously the Cabinet was determined to find the right chap for this job.
“What then happened was Sir Henry Wilson called for Bulfin to tell him that was the job he was going to get.”
Wilson stated later that Bulfin flatly refused to take on the job.
Churchill, who was civilian head of the army, stated: “I thereupon sent for General Bulfin and he flatly refused that, on the grounds that as a Catholic and an Irishman, it would be distasteful for him to do any work of this kind.”
Powell told this newspaper he believed that Bulfin was always a loyal soldier in doing his duty for the empire but he nonetheless then defied orders from the very top of the establishment.
Said Powell: “As he left no papers concerning this period, all we can deduce from that is that Bulfin, with his customary stubbornness and moral courage, obviously made it clear that he was not prepared to order policemen to fire on his own countrymen.”
He was never known to downplay his Irish origins and some colleagues said he “played on his Irishness”.
Bulfin’s refusal put a stop to any further advancement in his career. He ended up being sent to Iraq and to India. In Iraq, he was given the “very unglamorous job” of disposing of surplus stores.
He retired in 1926. He suffered heartbreak three years later when his only son, Eddie, a captain in the Green Howards, died of suspected food poisoning while stationed in Palestine.
Bulfin lived in Bournemouth where he died in 1939 at the age of 76. He was buried in a local cemetery. His headstone bears the inscription ‘Here sleepeth until the great reveille sounds’.
John Powell’s book ‘Haig’s Tower of Strength: General Sir Edward Bulfin — Ireland’s Forgotten General’ (Pen and Sword Books). His lecture is at 8pm this Friday in Griffith College
‘Not a braver or cooler soldier stepped on a field of battle’