Churchill’s Man in Dublin

Giants leave footsteps in the sands of time. Many of the people whose lives intersected with Major General Sir Henry Hugh Tudor are well known: Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Eamon de Valera, even Herbert Louis Samuel — all subjects of multiple biographies. Not so Tudor, himself a giant in the history of Ireland, the byways of India, and the battlefields of the Boer War and the First World War. To adapt a dance-hall tune that was revived by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem four years before Tudor’s death in 1965: Hugh, we hardly know ye.

Now, thanks to Linden MacIntyre, we do. In more than 300 pages of bristling combat, fierce police action, random violence, indiscriminate shootings, and metastasizing mayhem and madness, Tudor emerges as both perpetrator (of bedlam) and victim (of the precepts of empire that prevailed, and flourished, during the early decades of the last century). In the name of God and of the dead generations — if you permit the employment of the opening line of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic in this context — MacIntyre fills out the historical file of a man who, having once commanded the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, eventually retreated to quiet exile in St. John’s.

Much of Tudor’s life, and thus parts of the life of both Ireland and Palestine, grew out of a friendship with Churchill, based on their shared experiences in Bangalore (the Indian city now known as Bengaluru), the Boer War, and the First World War. This Churchill was a determined and possessive curator of the British Empire, not yet a saviour of democracy. In those early years — his role less heroic but equally high-sounding if not high-minded — Churchill called on Tudor for duty in embattled Ireland, then in the throes of the rebellion and upheaval that would produce, ultimately, the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921. “What he would experience in Ireland would bear little resemblance to the wars he had studied, the wars he’d fought,” MacIntyre writes in the prologue to An Accidental Villain. “This would be a conflict that foreshadowed a future in which citizens demanding self-determination, freedom from colonial authority and institutions, would make armies of their own, deploying their own propaganda and any form of violence that might advance their cause.”

Arriving in May 1920, Churchill’s man on the ground had previously developed an innovative approach to warfare marked by surprise attacks shrouded in smoke, though at the 1917 Battle of Cambrai, where Tudor was a prominent strategist, the British had suffered 75,000 casualties, with 115 Newfoundlanders dead. He was an odd choice for the Ireland command, never having been to the country, not schooled in its history, not conscious of how it was both an ethnicity and a nation, not aware that it was a tangled skein of warring nuances, combatting religions, and geographical rivalries. “He was good at war and he had once been good at boxing,” MacIntyre explains, “but he was destined to find out how competent he was in a dirty street fight where there were no rules, no courtesies.”

The Ireland where Tudor was essentially chief of police for Dublin Castle was defined in part by the violence of the Easter Rising (even today a romantic memory in the island’s southern counties), in part by the treachery of Sir Roger Casement (the nationalist who tried to enlist German aid for the Irish rebels), and in part by the widespread resistance to First World War conscription (opposed by priests and union leaders and never implemented). His remit was to undermine Irish independence rather than to understand Irish nationalism. In the end, he failed at both.

Not that the Irish greeted him with warmth or equanimity. In the five months before Tudor’s arrival in the country, forty members of the Royal Irish Constabulary had been slain. That was but the appetizer to a feast of violence. Resentment was rife, stoked by the excesses of the rogue RIC reinforcements known as the Black and Tans, by the widespread and widely resented presence of English accents on city streets, and by what MacIntyre characterizes as “the unmistakeable swagger of an occupying military force.”

For Tudor and his fellow Brits — some of them police officers, some First World War veterans, some both — the conflict was a hostile away game, with engagements occurring at the initiative of the home team and almost always with an element of surprise. The clashing characterizations of this pattern of warfare, with brutal tactics employed by both sides, have become familiar in our time, in such places as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: the portrayal of the insurgents as freedom fighters collides with the regime’s depiction of them as terrorists.

In this instance, however, Tudor was spurred on by Churchill and the sort of gladiatorial rhetoric that, in 1920, inspired Great Britain to maintain a fight that at times seemed hopeless:

Churchill’s speech anticipated one by Richard Nixon, on his country’s incursion into Cambodia: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” In Ireland, as in Vietnam, the insurgents were more determined, more inspired, more implacable, and ultimately more powerful on the field of battle than the dominant military of the time. Indeed, after the death of Terence MacSwiney, the Sinn Féin lord mayor of Cork, following a hunger strike, the Paris restaurant worker Nguyen Ai Quoc said of the Irish rebels, “Such a people will never be defeated.” Nixon would know him as Ho Chi Minh, whose own people were not defeated.

Given the difficulty of a mission that lacked the emotional if not moral high ground, Tudor had few easy tasks. “Declaring martial law, though tempting to some hard-liners in the British government,” MacIntyre writes, “would be playing into the hands of Sinn Féin and the IRA, not only increasing their already rich reserve of grievances but also adding to their self-importance by dignifying their criminal campaign with the status of a war.” But that is what the British eventually did, though at first they attempted to take a muddled middle path and imposed the less incendiary policy of using soldiers as police officers. Tudor also launched a full-court press on the countryside and trials in military courts: what MacIntyre describes as a “suspension of democracy without a formal declaration of martial law” that in essence was the imposition of “a police state.”

Later Tudor was dispatched to another venue of violence — Palestine — where he headed up the British Gendarmerie, filled with veterans of Ireland combat; he was also in charge of the Palestinian Gendarmerie and a conventional police force. That tenure was less eventful, less significant. But in 1925, he was sent into forced exile in Newfoundland, then still a British colony, living, as Churchill lyrically put it, “amid the northern mists.” In retreat but not quite in retirement, he worked in the dried salt cod export business and eventually died at ninety-four.

MacIntyre is well remembered for his work on the CBC’s The Fifth Estate, but this book is an entirely different sort of enterprise. Like the Tudor experience in Ireland, it is marked by spasms of violence followed by reprisals followed by fresh re-evaluations of the situation followed by even starker responses and executions by firing squad. The result back then was a hopeless cycle of pain and mourning, ambushes and beatings; of promiscuous killings of political figures, governmental leaders, and clergymen; of the destruction of libraries, shops, houses, and factories; and of the transformation of Ireland into a charnel house. “By late summer 1920, the political discussions had evolved to analyzing such gritty details as whether ‘gunning’ was more productive and/or less offensive to British sensibilities than ‘burning,’ ” MacIntyre writes.

Politics may be, as Otto von Bismarck put it, the art of the possible, but MacIntyre shows that Tudor was in an impossible situation:

Idealism — and romanticism. For decades, the rebels were saluted lustily in Irish enclaves throughout North America. In my own lifetime, they were celebrated in Boston, where Irish bars were filled with what my Boston Globe friend Martin F. Nolan called “stage Irishmen,” who sang and drank at places like Doyle’s Cafe on Washington Street. A copy of the provisional government’s manifesto (speaking of Ireland’s “old tradition of nationhood” that “summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom”) hung on the wall at Doyle’s, along with a giant portrait of Daniel O’Connell, the great nineteenth-century nationalist known for saying, “Gentlemen, you may soon have the alternative to live as slaves or die as free men.”

MacIntyre has written a comprehensive account of the period in Ireland leading to the intervention of King George V and the South African prime minister Jan Smuts, which, along with a meeting between Lloyd George and de Valera, produced a ceasefire in July 1921. By the nature of its subject, the book is dreary and depressing, with nary a page lacking some violent act, the effect being to dull the reader’s sensitivities in what is not a dull story. Consider these phrases, plucked at random: “dragged a local Sinn Féin supporter from his bed, escorted him outside and killed him,” “in one of the houses they were torching,” “a body tangled in debris on the riverbank,” “war by ambush,” “shot and killed ten soldiers and eight policemen in various, largely spontaneous, encounters,” and “hostility as the Irish had not seen it since Cromwell. Or since the Viking raiders.”

Despite the title An Accidental Villain, there really was nothing accidental about Tudor’s villainy, save for the likelihood that he never set out to be a bad guy. Everything about his life and background — his experience of war, his attitude toward imperial rule, his military instinct to serve the orders of his superiors — combined to make this outcome nearly inevitable. “Even in the absence of deep introspection, General Tudor would have been aware that Ireland was a small vessel riding on a rising tide of history and that his effort to suppress the inevitable outcome would be futile,” MacIntyre suggests. “But his loyalty to the past and to his friend Churchill was, like the rising tide, irreversible.”

That he retreated in 1922 to a tucked-away corner of the empire is a footnote to his legacy, but a telling one. “General Tudor must have realized at some point near the end of 1920 that he was destined to go down in history as a villain in the Irish drama,” MacIntyre writes. “With that fate in mind, he prudently decided to leave historians scant material to illustrate that villainy.” In that effort, he has been thwarted by a determined researcher, as he was, more than a century ago, by a determined opponent.