Tudor of the Tans
QUESTION When the British Government sent the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans to Ireland to assist the security forces during the War of Independence, they were not regarded as a military unit. So who commanded them, day to day? AT A conference of Ministers in May 1920, ‘the Secretary of State for War (Winston Churchill) undertook to submit to the Cabinet a scheme for raising a Special Emergency gendarmerie which would become a branch of the Royal Irish Constabulary’.
The conference also concluded that ‘a special officer, with suitable qualifications and experience, should be appointed to supervise the entire organisation of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police’.
Four days later, on Churchill’s recommendation, Major General Henry Hugh Tudor (1871-1965) was appointed ‘police advisor’ to the Irish government.
Tudor was an artilleryman, a hardened veteran of the South African War and World War I, having served on the Western Front from 1914 through to the Armistice. He was on good terms with Churchill, having first met him in Bangalore in 1895.
Tudor assumed control of Ireland’s police forces, styling himself Chief of Police, and militarising the police forces.
Like Churchill, Tudor handed out police posts to military friends and colleagues: Brigadier- General Ormonde Winter who he knew in India, for example, became Deputy Police Adviser and Head of Intelligence.
The beleaguered RIC was reinforced with British ex-soldiers and sailors, the notorious ‘Black and Tans’.
With the hindsight of almost a century, these men, traumatised and desensitised by years in the trenches and embittered by returning to a jobless existence in Britain, were unsuitable for hunting down the IRA.
Famously, the nickname Black and Tans arose from the colours of the improvised uniforms they initially wore, British Army khaki and rifleman’s green with RIC uniform parts.
The Auxiliary Division was commanded by experienced colonial warriors Brigadiers General FP Crozier and EA Wood.
Tudor helped rebuild the RIC’s numbers and morale but failed to maintain discipline. When police and auxiliaries were killed in ambushes or attacks, their comrades often carried out reprisals on Irish communities.
His attitude was summed up in a 1920 memorandum in which he advised his men to maintain ‘the highest discipline’ while reassuring them they would have ‘the fullest support in the most drastic action against that band of assassins, the so-called IRA.’
Tudor remained Chief of Police until his forces were demobilised and the RIC was disbanded. By May 1922, Churchill was Secretary of State for Air and found him a new post in the troubled Palestine Mandate, where he became director of public safety, with a temporary rank of air vice marshal.
In 1924, he retired from his position as Palestine’s Director of Public Safety and from the Army and emigrated to Newfoundland, where he lived till his death in 1965. Peter James Lewis, Abergavenny,
Mons. QUESTION If the Japanese had not surrendered, was a third bomb considered after Hiroshima and Nagasaki? AFTER dropping the second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, President Harry S Truman fervently hoped the Japanese would surrender unconditionally. He said ‘the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people is too horrible and I don’t like the idea of killing all those kids’.
A third bomb was ready but would not have been available to deploy from Tinian Island until two weeks later. A list of possible targets, including Sapporo, Hakodate, Oyabu, Yokosuka, Osaka and Nagoya, had already been drawn up.
My father was languishing in a Japanese PoW camp in Thailand when the bombs were dropped and they probably saved his life – and, subsequently, mine.
Cecil Lowry, author: No Mercy From The Japanese (Pen and Sword Books),
Stockport, Cheshire. QUESTION Why did the Vikings on the east coast go to England to fight the Anglo- Saxons? Did they have allegiances to Vikings there? THE Vikings who raided, then settled, in parts of Ireland, were closely affiliated to the Vikings who occupied substantial areas of England. They were almost brothers-in-war.
Rathlin Island, off the north coast of Co. Antrim, was the first place in Ireland to be raided by Vikings, in AD 795. Over the following half century, they settled in Annagassan, Co. Louth (841); Dubhlinn, where they set up a fortified camp in 841; Clonmacnoise ( 842); Cork ( 846) and Waterford (850). Places like Wexford and Limerick came later, in 921 and 922 respectively.
At almost exactly the same time that the Vikings started raiding Ireland, they also began attacking Britain, starting in AD 793. Their raids on Britain, which began in the northeast of England, started just two years before they turned their attentions to Ireland.
There was one crucial difference, however, between the Vikings who came to Ireland and those who occupied large parts of England. The Irish Vikings were Norwegians, while the English Vikings were Danish, though they were closely related, with the same ultimate aims of conquest and the exploitation of native people and assets.
After the Viking defeat in Dublin in AD 902, they started turning their attention to Britain. They turned the Isle of Man into a major base and set about consolidating their hold on England. Before long, the Vikings from Ireland had helped their near neighbours extend their conquests to include most of the north of England, East Anglia and large parts of Mercia, now the eastern midlands of England.
The area controlled by the Vikings in England became known as the Danelaw and while initially, the Danelaw also embraced the Viking-controlled areas of Ireland, in 952, Dublin, the Vikings’ Irish capital, split from the Danelaw and thereafter, the Irish Vikings had their own dynasty of kings.
In England the Vikings continued their raids for 300 years after their first foray in 793. But in 886, King Alfred captured London from the Vikings and that same year, a treaty was signed that divided up England between the Vikings and the English.
The Vikings in England, helped by their fellow warriors from Ireland, managed to last longer in England than they did in Ireland.
England had four Viking kings between 1013 and 1042.
The final Viking invasion of England came in 1066, 52 years after the Vikings’ defeat at Clontarf.
In that last Viking invasion of 1066, Harald Hardrada sailed his fleet up the Humber estuary on the east coast of England. That same year, the invasion of England from Normandy spelled the end of the Viking hegemony in England.
The co- operation of the Irish Vikings with the Vikings who occupied so much of England, was ultimately unsuccessful, just as Viking rule in Ireland lasted for little more than 200 years.