transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:03] Hello and welcome to the Irish History Podcast. My name is Fin Dwyer. This is part five of Brothers in Pain, presented by Dr. Brian Hanley. This series explores the global dimensions to the Irish War of Independence and so far we have looked at the conflict largely from the Republican side. This episode turns to the often overlooked aspect of the story, the considerable numbers of Irish people who served in the Crown Forces. Brian begins by explaining the reasons behind the long history of Irish service in the British forces, because these motives were often far from straightforward. Some Irish people did believe in the Empire, others served because it was a family tradition, while more still enlisted purely because of poverty. This sets the stage for a deeper look at the War of Independence itself and how Irish people could be found on both sides. Brian also explores the Black and Tans, the most notorious force deployed by London during the war. Often portrayed simply as the dregs of British cities, Brian reveals how that force was in fact far more complex as well. It reflected the wider British Empire, with recruits coming from as far afield as Australia, but crucially it also included large numbers of Irishmen. Now Brian, as you know by this stage, is a historian at Trinity College Dublin. Among his numerous publications are several important works on the Irish Revolution and the Irish Republican movement in the 20th century. You can find a full list of his works in the show notes below. Sound on today's episode is by Kate Dunlea.

Speaker 2:
[01:43] The British Empire was at its apex in 1920. Britain emerged from the Great War, not only victorious, but also in possession of more territory than it possessed in 1914. But there was a problem. Sir Henry Wilson, the chief of the British military in 1920, worried that our small army is too scattered. In no single theatre are we strong enough. Wilson worried that the British military was simply not large enough to control these vast new territories. Wilson also was politically astute. And he worried very much that problems within the empire would lead to problems in Britain itself. Indeed, that is the way he saw the emerging Irish question. And again during 1920, he reflected that. The Irish men who are clever enough are gradually looping into their toils labour in England. In the very near future, the Irish question would be so complicated with the labour question in England that it would become insoluble. And this would mean the loss of Ireland to begin with, the loss of the Empire in the second place, and the loss of England itself to finish up with. Now Wilson was speaking in a time in which the British Army had been used not only in Ireland, but also in Britain in 1919 and 1920. And when Wilson talked about the British military being too small to handle the Empire, it must be remembered that from a high point in 1918, at the end of the Great War, when 3.5 million British men were part of the armed services, this number had been drastically reduced by 1920 to just under 400,000 men. So there's a huge demobilization after the war. The British military returns to peacetime standards, which is simply not enough Wilson and others felt to control a vast empire and an empire that is now beginning to experience demands for independence. What is significant for us is that in 1920, of these almost 400,000 men, around 20,000 were Irish born. There was a very long tradition of Irish men serving in the British military, particularly in the British Army. In 1830, over 40% of the British Army was Irish born, which is a remarkable statistic. Now by the 1890s, that percentage had dropped. So by 1898, around 13% of the British Army was made up of Irish men, which was relatively close to the proportion of the Irish population in the United Kingdom itself. That's around 25,000 Irish men in the British Army at that point. But the Irish were actually overrepresented in two areas of the British military. In the lower ranks, where they made up between 20 to 25% of men, and also among the officer corps, where they made up almost 20%. Now, in Britain's last major conflict, before the Great War, the Boer War, around 50,000 Irish men had fought, and around 3,000 were killed. Perhaps remarkably, between 1919 and 1921, around 8,000 Irish men joined the British Army. So in a period in which Ireland was fighting for independence, you still had Irish men joining the British military, as we have seen they had done for centuries. But this continued right up through the period of the War of Independence. And not alone did Irish men join the British Army, but the British Army made up a distinctive part of Irish society, even in normal times. They were usually around 30,000 British military personnel based in Ireland. Most large Irish towns possessed a British Army barracks. The headquarters of the British garrison in Ireland was the Curragh in Kildare. They were also major naval bases in Cork, Belfast and Donegal. The British Army employed civilians and made a major social and economic difference to the prosperity of a locality. In some senses, having a barracks in your town was like having a multinational. Pubs, shops, butchers, tradesmen and so on, all benefited in many ways from the British presence. You also had in the Curragh and elsewhere, sex workers who depended on the British military for their livelihoods. This was another factor of the British presence that enraged many Irish nationalists. But the British Army were part of Irish daily life. Most of the time, they didn't carry their weapons openly. Most of the time, they were not in conflict with local people, except obviously in times of trouble like the Land War of the 1880s, when they would be called in to back up the Royal Irish Constabulary. But for many Irish people, seeing British soldiers in uniform was a normal part of daily life. And in these towns, which are often referred to as garrison towns, a section of the population were attracted to British military service themselves. Now, as I've said, that tended to be two quite distinct types of people. One was the ordinary Irish recruits to the British Army, who were often derided in Ireland as corner boys. The typical ordinary recruit was from an urban area or a small town. Most were what were considered unskilled working class men. In Dublin, for example, they often came from the tenements, or they came again from it if they were from small towns, from what were called the lanes of those towns, the poorest part of the local area. Soldiers and their families then often made up a distinct section of Irish life. If a man was serving in the British Army and had a wife and children, it would be known locally that they were a soldier's family. One of the attractions of serving in the military, for poor men in particular, was money. Irish recruits to the British Army generally served abroad in other parts of the Empire. The money they sent home was extremely significant, not just for their families, but for local communities and the general economy. On leaving the British Military, these men continued to receive pay if they agreed to become reservists, which many did. Of course, many Irish men who served in the British Military didn't join in Ireland itself. They joined in Britain as immigrants. So they joined the Army in Liverpool, Glasgow or in London. This again was a factor during the Great War too. In coastal towns, recruitment to the Royal Navy was a tradition in places such as Cove and County Cork, the Cladda area of Galway City and Rings End in Dublin. Irish recruitment patterns changed in 1914. Just as in Britain, there was a huge expansion in recruitment and different types of people attracted to the Army. Around a quarter of a million Irish men served in the British military during the First World War. The Republican writer Ernie O'Malley remembered that, before the war, scapegoats, those in debt or in trouble over a girl joined the ranks. Now all trades, professions and classes are found there. So during the war, for example, Trinity students and staff, entire rugby teams, employees in the Guinness Brewery, bank clerks, railway workers, a wide variety of men are attracted to the British military. Again, for a variety of reasons. And this changes the nature of recruitment in Ireland. Nevertheless, class remained an important factor. And indeed, British Army recruiters complained that the prevalence of class distinction in Ireland actually impacted on their ability to recruit. In 1915, one British recruitment report stated that a much larger numbers of recruits could be obtained from the farming and commercial classes. If it were not for their reluctance to enter upon their training with recruits from the labouring classes, this class prejudice is probably much more pronounced in Ireland than elsewhere in the United Kingdom. So there were middle-class recruits, for example, who didn't like the idea of serving alongside working class Dubliners, or men from the lanes of Ireland's small towns. How did Irish Republicans, those who sought independence, react to this? Well, throughout the war years, there were numerous clashes between Republicans and the families of British soldiers. In Limerick, in Tullamore, in Waterford, in Dublin, in Galway and elsewhere. From 1914 onwards, Sinn Féin meetings and Republican meetings feature clashes with women and children and sometimes men. Republicans tended to dismiss soldiers and their families as the rabble, as people who were attracted to British military for financial reasons and who therefore were in effect mercenaries. But right across Ireland, you see these tensions between those who want to seek Irish freedom and those who, for a variety of reasons, are connected to the British military. And these are not people who would be, in the traditional sense, unionists, in that they wanted to maintain the United Kingdom between Britain and Ireland. These were often ordinary people who have a relative in the British Army, a husband or a son in the British Army, for example, and who feel defensive because of that and, as a result, enter into conflict with local Republicans. This is a feature of life in Ireland during the war years, and indeed during the revolutionary period to some extent as well. It was also the case that events like the Easter Rising and growing conflict afterwards tended to harden opinions among Republicans about those who served in the British military. Ernie O'Malley, who had a brother in the British Army, remembered that in 1917 in Dublin, many of his comrades in the Irish Volunteers tended to be dismissive of news of British casualties, and to at least pretend that they didn't care about the numbers of Irishmen who were dying at the front. He said, We dismissed the agony, blood and misery of the trenches as we dismiss another's sorrow. There is an Irish proverb, it's easy to sleep on another man's wound. When I read the casualty list for news of my brother, I found friends and acquaintances amongst the killed and wounded. I could see mother's face when she read the morning paper and a hand involuntary going to her throat if there was a knock on the door. It might be a telegram. We regret from the war office. Ó Malley's brother was indeed killed while fighting in the Great War. And there he offers a degree of nuance, which is probably missing at the time as the debate in Ireland about independence becomes increasingly bitter and heads towards confrontation. But if large numbers of poor Irishmen had traditionally joined the British military, we should not forget that those at the other end of the spectrum, particularly those from wealthy Anglo-Irish backgrounds, were also very likely to join. The writer Elizabeth Bowen reflected of the Anglo-Irish, that not a family had not put out its generations of military brothers. Tablets in Protestant churches recorded deaths in remote battles. Swords hung in the big hall. The Anglo-Irish were in many ways the nearest thing the United Kingdom had to the Prussian Junker class. Anglo-Irish men were heavily overrepresented in the higher echelons of the British military. In one area of Ulster, Leinster and Connacht, with Longford at its centre, about 90 miles long and 40 miles wide, just 200 families, each owning lands of a thousand acres or more, produced in the years between the First and Second World Wars, six field marshals, four of whom became chief of British imperial staff. Four generals, three lieutenant generals, seven major generals, eleven brigadiers, five admirals, two vice admirals, an air marshal of the Royal Air Force, an air vice marshal, and through his father, Sir Thomas Chapman of Westmead, the legendary leader of the Arab Revolt, Lawrence of Arabia. Sir Henry Wilson, who I quoted at the beginning of this episode, was in fact a native of Longford in the Irish Midlands. The most imperialist of the British military was in fact an Irishman, and that was replicated across the highest ranks of the British military in those years. Being from Ireland did not make these men necessarily sympathetic at all to Irish grievances. Bernard Montgomery came from Inishone in County Donegal. Though Anglo-Irish, he was not really from a landed background. He was a major in the Great War, served in Cork during the War of Independence, and during the Second World War became the famous Montgomery of El Aliman, one of the most famous British generals of that conflict. But about his service in Cork, Montgomery said, It never bothered me a bit how many houses we burnt. I think I regarded all civilians as shinners and never had any dealings with any of them. My own view is that to win a war of this sort, you must be ruthless. In the years after the Great War, many war veterans, particularly from Ulster, joined the police, the Ulster Special Constabulary, or loyalist paramilitary bodies such as the Imperial Guards. During the vicious fighting in Belfast between 1920 and 1922, they were ex-soldiers on all sides. The thousands of Irish Unionists who'd served in the Great War very often then took up arms again, as either part of the British military, the police or paramilitary organisations between 1919 to 1922. A minority of veterans of the Great War actually became active Republicans. Robert Barton and Erskine Childers were among the few Anglo-Irish veterans, both from landed backgrounds in County Wicklow, who joined the Republican movement. Tom Barry, Emmett Dalton, Maurice Mead, James Tormey and George Adamson were among ex-soldiers who became significant IRA officers. In Belfast, as I've mentioned, ex-servicemen were a very important part of the IRA. And veterans were especially important as IRA training officers. What you often found in 1918 and 1919 was that a local IRA unit depended very heavily on one or two men who had come back from the war and were able to provide the necessary skills, not only in terms of showing people how to handle weapons, but even in the basics of drill. But if a minority of British Army veterans actually joined the IRA, there were also others who remained under suspicion. A significant number of the over 200 spies killed by the IRA during the War of Independence were ex-servicemen. And there are recurring debates about whether ex-soldiers were more likely to be targeted by the IRA as spies or more likely to be pro-British. Veterans of the Great War from nationalist backgrounds had diverse experiences in the years after 1918. Some were active in trade unions and protest movements. Some remained loyal to the Home Rule Party. Others probably tried to avoid trouble and politics altogether. But we should also remember that until the First World War, the Irish-born soldier in the British military was very often in the front line of policing Britain's colonies. The Irish-born soldier usually served in India or some other part of the empire. Several of the major Irish regiments had been first raised from the East India Company. The Dublin and Munster Fusiliers, for example, were rewarded the Royal Prefects for their role in crushing the 1857 Indian Mutiny, or the First Indian War of Independence, as it's now referred to. Irish soldiers in the British Army in India possessed a reputation for brutality towards natives. Any white soldier in India was a member of a racial elite, whatever his rank. And again, it was probably sometimes the case that a man who was the lowest of the low in a rural Irish town suddenly became part of an elite through his uniform and his service in parts of the British Empire. Between 1919 and 1921, several Irish regiments, including the Lensters, the Inneskilling Fusiliers, the Connacht Rangers and the Dublin Fusiliers were all stationed in India. And India at this point is also experiencing upheavals. In 1921, in southwest India, a peasant uprising called at the time the Mupla Revolt, now the Malabar Rebellion took place. The Lenster Regiment were based at Madras and they played a key role in putting down this revolt. Perhaps 4,000 rebels were killed or wounded, while the rebels themselves only inflicted about 130 casualties on the Indian police. Therefore, Irish soldiers in the British Army played a key role in putting down a rebellion by Indians in this period. Irish soldiers were also posted to other parts of the Empire. From November 1919 onwards, the Munster Fusiliers were based in Egypt, where they were often deployed against protesters or during riots, and Egypt at the time was experiencing an upsurge in nationalist sentiment. Another section of the Dublin Fusiliers was sent to Constantinople, where they were part of an Allied occupation force following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. By early 1920, they were engaged in conflict with Turkish nationalist forces, and a number of their men were killed. In Mesopotamia, now Iraq, the British faced tribal insurgency, a political revolution, and intervention from Bolshevik forces from Russia. The Royal Irish Rifles and the Royal Irish Fusiliers were both sent there, fighting what the Bolsheviks went on until the spring of 1920, while they were major campaigns against rebels, involving both Irish and Indian and Gorka forces. Between 6,000 to 10,000 Iraqis were killed in this fighting, along with about 1,000 British and Indian troops, a number of them Irish. The Royal Irish Regiment had a more peaceful posting in Poland during 1920, when it was tasked with overseeing a plebiscite in the province of Alenstein, about whether that region should stay part of Germany or not. In March 1921, the Royal Irish Regiment, the Lentsters and the Connacht Rangers were sent to Silesia, where a brutal civil war had erupted between German and Polish irregular forces over control of this oil rich region. So in the years after the war, Irish troops were again engaged in their traditional role, either in putting down colonial uprisings, policing the empire, or in the new role of policing the new post-war order. So while a fight for independence was taking place in Ireland itself, Irish men in British uniform continued to play the role that they had done for centuries within the empire. The Anglo-Irish Treaty and the withdrawal of regular British forces from most of the 26 counties signaled the disbandment of the regiments from southern Ireland. The Royal, once the Fusiliers, the Dublin Fusiliers, the Connacht Rangers and so on were disbanded in June 1922 in a ceremony at Windsor Castle. The majority of men serving in these regiments then applied to transfer to other British regiments. Regiments from what became northern Ireland were maintained as were the Irish Guards. But there was a new factor in Ireland's relationship with the British military by 1920. For a variety of reasons, mostly political, some tactical, the British government were loathe to deploy large numbers of regular soldiers in Ireland. Firstly, they denied that the struggle for independence was in fact a war. They regarded it as a campaign by a murder gang against the legitimate state forces. Therefore, it was the police which were reinforced throughout 1920, with the army in theory only being their backup. Now, it still meant by 1921 there were around 50,000 British troops in Ireland. But the Royal Irish Constabulary was supposed to maintain the bulk of counterinsurgency work. By early 1920, new recruits were being sought for the RIC. These famously became the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. There were around 9,000 men who could be considered Black and Tans, that is recruits to the Irish police from early 1920 onwards, and perhaps 2,200 men who became part of the Auxiliary Division of the RIC. The Auxiliaries were former officers, the Black and Tans enlisted men are NCOs. Now, the majority of Black and Tans and Auxiliaries came from Britain. Most were English, Scottish or Welsh. In religious terms, most of them were members of the Church of England. There were also Presbyterians, Metzivists and Catholics too. All of these men had served in the Great War, in every branch of the British military. Many in fact had been in the New Royal Air Force. A significant number had been decorated for bravery. Very few had criminal records because in order to become a policeman, you could not have a criminal record. Even though at the time and since many Irish people believe that these men were the scrapings of England's jailers, that was not in fact the case. What was attractive to these men was high rates of pay and potential for combat and excitement. This is a phenomenon that exists right across Europe. Even though the continent is exhausted by war, even though the war has had a horrific effect on the populations who fought it, there were still men who missed the comradeship of the trenches. You see in Italy, you see in Germany, ex-soldiers becoming involved in paramilitary organizations, in fascist organizations and so on. And in many ways, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries were a similar phenomenon. We also had the attraction of pay. Auxiliaries were paid a pound a day, seven pounds a week. That made them the highest paid policemen in the world in 1920. So the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries are all veterans of the Great War. And while the majority of them are British, as you might expect, not all of them were. In fact, the Empire and beyond was represented in their ranks. Harold Thompson, a Black and Tan who was killed in Middleton, County Cork in May 1921, was one of several Australians who served with the RIC. In February 1921, a Black and Tan named Charles Binion died as a result of an accident in County Cork. Binion, who was a Catholic, was a native of Montreal. There were a significant number of Canadian policemen, including men from Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and British Columbia. And awfully, Rick Pepperfuss, a former medical student and army officer from South Africa was among the local auxiliaries. And there were also a significant number of New Zealanders like Edward Petrie, a Catholic and former army officer, who was also an auxiliary. So Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, all served in the ranks of the Black and Tans and the auxiliaries. They were also men born in British India and others from Malta, Gibraltar, Bermuda, Jamaica, the East Indies, at least five from Barbados. Men born in China, in Burma, in Rhodesia, in St. Helena, the Straits settlements, and Turkey, Spain, Germany, France and Norway as well. There were also several who had been born in the United States. Walter Jaricca from Russia, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, was a Black and Tan based in Roscommon. David Vermont, who had been born in Odessa in Ukraine, was an ex-sailor who was stationed in Derry during 1921. Now, Vermont was one of the over 30 Jewish tans or auxiliaries, mostly men who had been born in Britain to parents who had emigrated from the Russian Empire. So the tans and auxiliaries to a great extent reflected the entire empire rather than just Britain itself and were to some extent a multi-ethnic force. Indeed, Thomas Huckerby, a Black and Tan from St Vincent in the West Indies, was according to his service records of mixed-race background. Huckerby was notorious in Limerick for killing three people during 1920. And if there were tans and auxiliaries from across the globe, there were also at least a thousand men recruited in Ireland itself. Again many Irish veterans of the Great War found themselves joining the police force during 1920. There were at least 60 men from County Clare, mostly but not all ex-soldiers, a mix of Protestant and Catholic as well. Thomas Hanley from Newcastle West County, Limerick, was an ex-soldier and officer who joined the auxiliaries and served with them until July 1921. There had been several clashes in Newcastle West between ex-soldiers and local Republicans and this may have influenced Hanley's decision to join. So when people talk about tans and auxiliaries, certainly when they're portrayed in popular film or culture, they usually have English accents. But actually they could have had Canadian, Australian or indeed Irish accents as well. And these two were a phenomenon of post-war military service. There are other notable examples of men attracted for various reasons to the military. William Joyce from Galway was a teenage sympathizer with the auxiliaries. He traveled with them and identified local Republicans for them. He came from a Catholic loyalist family who were forced to flee Ireland in 1921. Joyce later became a fascist organizer in Britain and then later notorious during the Second World War as the collaborator Lord Haw Haw. George Nathan, on the other hand, was a former guards officer who serving with the auxiliaries in Limerick was involved in the murder of the Sinn Fein mayor of the town and his predecessor during March 1921. Nathan later became a Communist and died fighting on the Republican side in Spain during 1937. During 1922, almost 800 former RIC officers, including tans and auxiliaries, joined the Palestine jandamery. Controversy about what was called black and tannery followed them there. There was a suspicion that these men would be especially brutal given what they'd done in Ireland. In fact, their posting in Palestine until 1926 was largely peaceful. But Irish men also served in the later Palestine police forces until 1948. Indeed, some of these men served with the original Royal Irish Constabulary, then with the Palestine police, and then returned to Northern Ireland and became part of the new Royal Ulster Constabulary. After the Anglo-Irish Treaty, British die-hard conservatives and the British far-right campaigned on behalf of ex-Irish police officers. But many people in Britain were embarrassed by or hostile to the black and tans and the auxiliaries. In Britain itself, local police forces were very reluctant to employ former black and tans or auxiliaries. They didn't regard them as real policemen. Black and tan in fact became a term of abuse in political debate in Britain. And it has to be said, despite the financial inducements, the vast majority of British war veterans had no interest in fighting any more wars after 1918, and certainly not in coming to Ireland to fight there. So the story then is a complex one. Some Irish war veterans become part of the fight for independence. Others probably hope for a quiet life and that the trouble will come to an end soon. And others continue to serve the Crown in various ways. And it again reflects Ireland's special position within the British Empire. Conquered as a colony certainly, but by the 20th century, part of the United Kingdom and an integral part of the United Kingdom's armed forces.

Speaker 1:
[29:02] I want to thank Brian for the time he put into researching and recording this series. Now, Brothers in Pain continues next Friday. Meanwhile, I will be back on Wednesday with a fascinating episode looking at German plans to invade Ireland during the Second World War and how we might have defended ourselves. Until then, slán.