Richard Bennett - The Black and Tans

THE BLACK AND TANS

THE BLACK
AND TANS

by

Richard Bennett

First published in 1959.
Reprinted in 2001 by Spellmount Limited

Reprinted in this format in 2010 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire S70 2AS

Copyright Richard Bennett, 1959, 2001, 2010

ISBN 978 1 84884 384 4

The right of Richard Bennett to be identified as
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library

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The extracts from Sir Henry Wilsons diaries have been taken, with the permission of the owner of the copyright, from Major-General C. E. Calwells Sir Henry Wilson: His Life and Diaries, published by Cassells; and those from General Macreadys Annals of an Active Life by permission of the publishers, Hutchinson. I am greatly indebted to Mr. Paddy Malley who allowed me to study his brother Ernie OMalleys papers, and to Mr. Cathal OShannon who gave me invaluable advice about sources and also lent me contemporary material. Neither can be held responsible for my opinions. Nor can the many participants on both sides who have kindly spared me their time and given me the benefit of their advice. I have been unable to trace the writer of the manuscript quoted on pages 1613 and must make an anonymous acknowledgement to the author who is, I hope, still with us. I would also like to thank Mr. S. G. Pryor of the News Chronicle Library for the help he gave me with my researches.

Grateful Acknowledgements for the illustrations should be made as follows:

Mr. J. Cashman, Dublin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 34, 40, 47, 48.

Central News, 29.

Central Press, 36.

The Cork Examiner, 38, 39.

Mr. Paddy Malley, 32, 35.

National Museum of Ireland, 21, 30.

Radio Times Hulton Picture Library, 8, 9, 10, 16, 19, 31, 33, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46.

O N NEW YEARS DAY, 1919, an English sentry surveyed the Irish scene, no doubt with soldierly indifference, from the top of the old Castle keep in Dublin. He could follow the line of the Liffey below him on its way to the sea, and look over the roofs of the city to the damp green fields climbing into the Dublin hills. For six hundred years his military predecessors had stood at this point, armed with crossbow, hackbut and musket, scrutinising this dismal prospect. Today machine guns were mounted behind the parapet under the fluttering Union Jack. An infantry guard in steel helmets was stationed in the courtyard below, where two armoured cars and a tank were manned and ready for action and two Sappers were down a manhole, testing the wire entanglements across the subterranean River Poddle.

There was trouble in the land, as so often before. On the 28th December, 1918, the post-war General Election results had brought an overwhelming victory in Ireland for the Sinn Fein party, which won seventy-three out of a hundred and five seats. Sinn Fein had declared that it would not send its elected representatives to Westminster to join the members who had been returned to hang the Kaiser. It had resolved, instead, to sever Irelands connection with the United Kingdom and to set up its own independent Republican Government. Commenting on the results, Mr. Shortt, the Secretary for Ireland, said on New Years Eve that the Irish question would be settled Peaceably or bloodily within the next six months.

He was wrong. Nor was there any doubt of the way in which the issue would be settled. On the 17th January, 1919 Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, noted in his diary: We are sitting on top of a mine which may go up at any minute. Ireland tonight has telegraphed for some more tanks and machine guns, and are evidently anxious about the state of the country! The Dil Eireann met four days later to declare its independence and to pledge itself and the Irish people to make this declaration effective by every means at our command. De Valera, the President, and Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, were two of the thirty-six elected members who were in gaol. Had they been at liberty, they might have avoided this intransigent declaration of a Republic which allowed no possibility of manuvre or retreat and could only lead to more unnecessary bloodshed. On the same day, the 21st January, Dan Breen, San Treacy and several other Irish Volunteers ambushed and killed two policemen of the Royal Irish Constabulary who were escorting a cart with a load of gelignite for Soloheadbeg quarry. The ambushers had fired the first shots in a guerilla war against the Crown Forces.

How had Anglo-Irish relations come to this sad impasse? There are Irishmen who trace the story back to 1172, the days of Strongbow, and the outlawing of the Irish by the Normans. Others, with less retentive historical memories, start at the dispossession of the natives and the planting of colonists under the Tudors and Stuarts. Many are content to remember Cromwells massacres at Drogheda and Wexford as the beginning of English iniquity. Nearly all know of the penal laws of the seventeenth century, the rebellions of 1798 and 1803, the depopulation of the island, and its economic spoliation after the union of the Parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800, when the cross of St. Patrick joined the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew to make the flag which came to be known as the Union Jack. Every Englishman was horrified by the famine of 184647, and many spoke against the colonial rule by Coercion Acts and Crime Acts in the nineteenth century. But they were never numerous or powerful enough, either inside or outside the House of Commons, to help steer Irish Home Rule through the cross currents of party politics at Westminster. The catalogue of Irish distress is long and no credit to England. Anglo-Irish history, it has been said, is for Englishmen to remember, for Irishmen to forget!

But at the turn of the century Ireland was peaceful, if not free. It was agreed that the country had never been so quiet for six hundred years. The penal laws were a memory, though an abiding one, and the Land Purchase Act had once more given Irish tenants a stake in their own country. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society, which had been founded in 1858 to establish an Irish Republic by force, was only a handful of zealots who could make no headway, although they were later to leaven the lump. Ireland, greatly over-represented with the one hundred and five members and the majority for Home Rule, had weight to throw about in Westminster, and it seemed that Home Rule could not long be delayed.