LATER THAT day, after I had finished my conversation with the Commissioner, I scanned his historical record into my computer (with Paperport) and wrote an introductory note:LATER THAT day, after I had finished my conversation with the Commissioner, I scanned his historical record into my computer (with Paperport) and wrote an introductory note:
The first port of this report is easy, Nuala. I didn’t hove to write a word. It’s a document compiled by historians of the Irish Guards that your man the Commissioner gave me. I’ve edited some of it out so as not to bore you, which heaven forbid.
Hugh Tudor was the youngest man ever to become a major general in the British Army till that time. He had fought in India during the war and then in France. His division held the line during Passchendaele and thus prevented an even worse bloodbath. The name, by the way, was authentic. In fact, he was christened Henry Hugh Tudor as if he were King Henry IX. He was a descendent of the winning family in the War of the Roses. Probably he had a better claim on the English throne than the bourgeois Germans who have occupied it the last couple of centuries. It doesn’t seem that he cared much for that distinction.
He was the last Inspector General of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The son of a sub-dean of Exeter Cathedral, Henry Hugh Tudor was born at Newton Abbey, Devonshire, England, in 1870. On July 25, 1893, he became a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery. When the Boer War started in 1899 he was serving with M Battery Royal Field Artillery at Woolwich. He was involved in the advance on Kimberley and was wounded at Magersfontein. While recovering in hospital, he received a message in December 1899 from Winston Spencer Churchill (who was then a war correspondent) wishing him a quick recovery and “all the luck of war.” Churchill later sent him autographed first edition copies of each book that he wrote. Tudor spent the remainder of the War serving on the Staff and by the end of the War he had reached the rank of Captain.
He married his wife, Eve Edwards, in 1908. She was eighteen years old at the time, an exquisitely lovely young woman to judge by her pictures, and twenty years younger than Tudor. Like him she was the child of an impecunious Anglican clergyman. They had three children in the next twelve years, two daughters and a son.
It’s hard to get a fix on what kind of a man he was. He seems to have been a typical British officer, spit and polish, ramrod stiff, devilishly handsome. He must have been more than that, however. He was brave but not foolishly so and very bright. Moreover, he made many friends, even among his own troops, and when he fled into exile it was to the land of one regiment of his division. On the basis of his service in Ireland, he was not overly troubled by conscience. Perhaps like many men who had fought in the trenches, the Great War twisted him.
During that war, he served in both Egypt and India, but it was as commanding officer of the Ninth Scottish Division in France that he became renowned as a fine military leader. Tudor developed the creeping barrage and the box barrage to isolate fields of battle. The box barrage was smoke and heavy artillery bombardment on both sides and in front of the attacking area to isolate, thus preventing enfilade fire and reinforcements. The creeping and box barrages were used everywhere in the later stages of the war. He also became renowned in the British War Office for his use of smoke screens to cloak his troop movements, and in the process saved the lives of thousands of his men. In March of 1917 when there were massive Allied retreats throughout the western front, Tudor’s men stood fast. Churchill said that “Tudor was like an iron peg in the frozen ground.”
Following the executions of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1918 threat of conscription there was widespread civil unrest and resistance (both armed and passive) to British rule in Ireland. The Sinn Fein MPs refused to go to Westminster and set up their own parliament and government. The Irish Volunteers were waging an intensive guerrilla war against the British establishment which many claim was sparked off by the ambush of two RIC officers at Soloheadbeg, Co. Tipperary, on January 21, 1919.
The Royal Irish Constabulary, which had earned the title of “Royal” from Queen Victoria for their part in quashing the Fenian Rising of 1867, were unable to contain the latest insurrection. Policemen (many of whom were Irish-born Catholics) were being killed and injured either in their barracks or while on patrol. One source reports that by the end of May 1920, 351 evacuated barracks were destroyed, 105 damaged, 15 occupied barracks were destroyed and 25 damaged, 19 Coastguard stations and lighthouses were raided for explosives and signaling equipment, 66 policemen and 5 soldiers were killed with 79 policemen and 2 soldiers wounded.
De Valera and other members of the Sinn Fein government urged the shunning of the RIC and their families by their neighbors and friends and that the RIC should be treated as agents of a foreign power. As a result of the violence and shunning there were widespread resignations from the RIC.
Lloyd George’s Westminster Government created a temporary police force to supplement and assist the RIC in their duties in the alarming situation which was developing in Ireland. The members of the new force were appointed as temporary constables. The Auxiliaries, as they were later called, were recruited from England, Scotland and Wales, with possibly a third of the new recruits from Ireland. They were rank and file World War One enlisted veterans who were then unemployed. They were employed on a contract basis and arrived in Ireland in March 1920.
It was due to a shortage of the dark bottle green RIC uniforms that the “Auxies” were fitted out in a uniform which was half black (the dark bottle green police) and half khaki (army). Hence the name “Black and Tans.”
A second temporary police force was created on July 27, 1920. This time the recruits were unemployed World War One veterans who had been officers during the war. They were given the rank of Cadets. They wore either the RIC uniform or army officers’ uniforms with dark Glengarry caps. Together these new forces became known as “Tudor’s Toughs” after their commanding officer. Sometimes he was called “Bloody Tudor.”
In May 1920, at the recommendation of Churchill, who admired him enormously, the government appointed Tudor as the Inspector General of Ireland, the police advisor to the Viceroy and commanding officer of both the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP). It was widely believed that he was ordered to bring order back to Ireland by whatever means necessary, no matter how ruthless.
Like the German soldiers of World War One who invaded Belgium, Tudor’s troops were not trained in guerrilla warfare. Every civilian was a potential sniper and reprisals were widespread.
The IRA’s Flying Columns were active in nearly every part of the country. Perhaps it was due to the frustration that they encountered in trying to capture and fight the hidden enemy that they ended up as looters, arsonists and murderers. Both sides engaged in bloody reprisals, the most notable was perhaps “Bloody Sunday,” November 1920. After 11 English intelligence agents were assassinated, the Black and Tans fired upon unarmed spectators and players who were playing Gaelic football.
Many towns and villages were burned and looted by Tudor’s men. Two famous incidents which later involved Tudor occurred on February 9, 1921. On that date a contingent of Auxiliaries went on the rampage in Trim, County Meath, while in County Dublin near Drumcondra two young Irish prisoners were shot dead in a field by an Auxiliary commander named King. General Crozier went to investigate the Trim incident and dismissed 21 Auxiliary cadets and held 5 more to be tried for their part in the raid (two of whom later broke out and robbed a publican). He returned to investigate the Drumcondra shootings but later claimed the evidence was rigged. His power to dismiss Auxiliaries was taken away by Tudor in November 1920. Five of the Trim Cadets were later convicted and nineteen reinstated. Crozier resigned on February 25, 1921, and the London press filled with accounts of Tudor’s treatment of him and Black and Tans atrocities. Later, Mrs. Asquith, wife of the former British Prime Minister, commented to Crozier: “They tell me that you are as much a murderer as any of them, only you like things done in an orderly manner, and at Trim they were disorderly.”
Peace eventually came with the Truce of July 1921 and Tudor’s Royal Irish Constabulary was disbanded following the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922 and a new police force, (“The Civic Guard” later renamed the “Garda Siochana”), was created by the Irish Government. Many of the barracks once occupied by the RIC were handed over to the new police force. Dublin Castle was formerly handed over on August 17, 1922, when Commissioner Michael Staines led his new police force through the castle gates. The Dublin Metropolitan Police (the last of Tudor’s police forces) was finally amalgamated into the Garda Siochana in 1925.
In 1922, Tudor like many other British veterans of the Anglo-Irish War (and the remnants of the Black and Tans) went to Palestine, where he was appointed General Officer Commanding and Inspector General of Police and Prisons. Three years later, at the age of 55, Tudor, who had been the youngest Major General to ever attain that rank in the British Army, retired. He emigrated to Newfoundland and began working for Ryan & Company, a fish merchant in Bonavista. He later moved to St. John’s and worked for George M. Barr’s fishing industry and resided with Barr’s family.
His name rarely appears in any Irish history of those troubled times. He was completely forgotten in Ireland, but clearly remembered in England. In 1938, Tudor was invited to a royal reception held in honour of King George Vl’s visit to Newfoundland. According to Paul O’Neill in his book, Tudor attended, hoping that his Irish service would be unknown to the monarch, but when his name was announced, the King looked up and said in a loud voice, “Are you the man who commanded in Ireland?”
There is no information available which would explain why the Irish forgot him and the English did not.
He grew to love his adopted homeland and her people and became renowned for his equestrian skill. Illness and failing sight forced him to live his final years as a recluse. Tudor’s wife remained in London and was in Newfoundland only briefly. So be remained in his self-imposed exile without his wife, two daughters and son until his death in the Veterans Pavilion of the General Hospital, St. John’s, on September 25, 1965, at the age of 95.
He was given a full military funeral with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment (which was a component of the Ninth Scottish Division that he’d commanded during World War One) acting as his pall-bearers. His wife, two daughters, and son did not attend the funeral, but instead were represented at the funeral by J. D. Q’Driscoll, one of his friends and former army colleagues.
After I had glanced over the first part of the document I looked up at Keenan.
“Interesting,” I said cautiously
“You wonder why the Deputy Commissioner of the Gardai would know so much about Tudor?”
“I figure you’re a history buff.”
“That I am, but there’s more to it. … You’ve noticed, I trust, that many English officers, the English newspapers, and some members of the English upper class like Lady Asquith disapproved of the tactics of Tudor’s toughs?”
“More sensitive than I would have expected.”
“Perhaps … but he also gained a reputation as a monster who was an embarrassment to England. Given their past history in this country, that must have meant that he was a pretty horrible person, did it not?”
“I suppose so.”
“Moreover, by the time he retired in Palestine the IRA was no longer settling scores against English officers. So why go into exile in such an inhospitable place as Newfoundland—which, by the way, was independent of Canada till 1949? Also, why was he never promoted to Lieutenant General? Certainly his distinguished service merited such a rank, and a little brutality in Ireland never prevented promotion of a decorated British officer. Why was he so eager to keep his service in Ireland a secret? Why was he so upset by King George’s unfortunate comment? What did King George know besides the story of the Black and Tans? Why did his wife and family refuse to join him in Newfoundland? Why didn’t they come for his funeral? Granted that Eve was in her seventies in 1965, the children were certainly young enough to travel across the Atlantic and there was an international airport at St. John’s.”
“Good questions.… Maybe the family didn’t like the Newfoundland weather.”
“Not enough to break up a family in that social class at that time.”
In the absence of herself, I was Holmes again, not Watson.
“Probably he was in disgrace, pretty serious disgrace at that, if it affected even his family. He chose Newfoundland because there were men who had served under him during the war and liked and respected him. So his disgrace had to come in Ireland. Something happened there, something more than just shooting a couple of rebels, which separated the first half of his life from the second half. In Newfoundland he was able to block out what had happened in Ireland.”
“Bravo!” The Commissioner poured me another cup of tea and helped himself to one of the two remaining raisin rolls. “For many years he had a discreet and apparendy affectionate liason with a woman there, a widow of an officer in the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, most of whose members had been members of the RIC and perhaps protected him from possible IRA gunmen.”
“She apparently formed a relationship with a retired officer whose own wife was hopelessly insane.”
I paused to consider the data, again wishing that my wife, Ms. Holmes, were present.
“Well,” I began, “I would have to assume that he became involved with a woman in Ireland and that involvement somehow ended tragically in some way because of the Tans.”
He pondered me with half-closed eyelids. “Should you ever want a job with the Gardai, Dermot, me lad, I think we could get you on board as a Chief Superintendent.”
“I’m a fiction writer, not a detective, though it may come to the same thing. … So I have to assume that the woman was someone very important, a member of the British elite? Hazel?”
He smiled grimly. “No, not Hazel. Her tastes ran to Irish revolutionaries and English politicians. Someone much more important.”
“And this is somehow linked to the death of Kevin O’Higgins?”
“Yes indeed. Indirectly perhaps but ineluctably. Otherwise I wouldn’t be bothering you with this obscure corner of early twentieth-century Irish history.”
“And with the attempted kidnapping last night?”
He rubbed his jaw again. “Candidly, I don’t see how it could, but I’m not ruling out any possibility. … May I show you another document?”
“Please do,” I said, quite unnecessarily.
“It was written by another man as a confidential memo for me—one of the brightest and most literate men in the force. I wouldn’t be surprised that someday he ended up in your trade, Dermot.”
“I don’t have a trade,” I said. “I’m a retired commodity broker.”
“Oh,” I said as I began to read the second Garda’s analysis.
Later I scanned that document into my computer and added it to my first report to herself.
Tudor was present in Listowel when the whole barracks of RIC men refused to take orders from their Inspector General. The confrontation ended peacefully enough. Tudor did not play a major role in the mutiny, at least according to the story which appeared in the papers. He always seemed to be able to lurk in the background. His name became generally known only when his colleague General Crozier denounced him in London. Moreover, he shook hands with the police who had mutinied. He had arrived in Ireland only a couple of weeks before. This was the first hint of what he might be fighting. The police force he was commanding was falling apart. He needed new police, first the Tans and then the Cadets, who were worse even than the Tans. The country, he must have perceived, was on the edge of anarchy. He did not learn the obvious lesson of the encounter at Listowel: if the IRA was strong enough to cause the police in that town to mutiny, they would not be suppressed by counter-terror—or anything else.
The events at Listowel and Tudor’s restrained reaction are on the public record if not well known. What follows is not public knowledge and is based in part on stories that still circulate in the rural country west of Limerick Town. The author of this document urges that the attempt to reconstruct the story be read with caution.
Apparently two nights later something happened that changed Tudor’s mind completely and turned him into a killer. It also sent him down the path which would make him a lonely horseman riding the stony hills of Newfoundland.
He motored north from Listowel towards the Shannon Estuary. His plan was to visit Lady Augusta Downs, the widow of Colonel Sir Arthur Downs V.C., a young officer on his staff who had died when the Ninth had held the line at Cambrai. Maybe he had come to Listowel as a pretext to visit her. More likely, he felt he had to face down the mutineers. When he discovered that Castle Garry was only twenty miles away from Listowel, he decided that it would be appropriate to make a call on her even though it was late and a fierce storm was blowing in off the Atlantic. He had greatly admired Down’s courage and recommended him for his Victoria Cross. It does not appear that he had ever met Lady Augusta, though probably he had seen her picture. Since he was an upright British officer and Lady Augusta was nobility, he probably had more or less honorable intentions. Or told himself that.
Lady Downs was a McGarry, the last of a great Munster landowning family which had converted to the Church of Ireland during penal times, as many others had, so as not to lose their land. Their Big House, Castle Garry, a late-eighteenth-century manor, was out on the Shannon Estuary south of Limerick. The family, which by intermarriage and education had become more AngloIrish than Irish, was nonetheless popular with their tenants who did not hold a religious change two hundred years old against them. Sir Arthur was petty English nobility from Cornwall, a likeable young man, by all accounts, who endeared himself to the local Irish by learning how to play Irish football. When they brought his body home from Flanders, the Catholics in the area mourned as much as the few Protestants. The parish priest, rather in violation of the Church’s rules at the time, said a Mass for the repose of his soul. Naturally, Lady Downs attended in the front row. All in all, the situation in the McGarry lands was quiet, peaceful. The lads were not active that far out in West Limerick. There was no animosity between the Land Lady and her people. Castle Garry was a long way off everyone’s beaten path.
One can imagine what was on the mind of Major General Henry Hugh Tudor as his car, followed by a lorry of soldiers, picked its way down a muddy country road in the rain and the fading light of a long spring day.
It is fair to assume that he did not want to be in Ireland. At that time no English general in his right mind would want to risk his career in that sinkhole. Even less did he want to fight a guerrilla war for which he had no experience. Why had he accepted the assignment? Perhaps because his good friend Winston asked him to. Perhaps because, like many officers who had fought in the trenches, war was the only reality in which he felt comfortable. Perhaps because he wanted to get away from a marriage that had turned unhappy. That his wife did not stand by him later suggests that relationship was probably in trouble even in 1920, as were so many of the other marriages of men returning from the war.
Remember that he had shaken hands with each of the mutinous constables back in Listowel, a very soldierly thing to do by British standards. He was still at that moment a decent man who could respect his enemies.
When his little convoy turned east at Trabert—where the car ferry across the Shannon is now—he had the Estuary on his left as they plowed down the dirt road. They left the rain behind for a few moments and saw the waves seething on the Estuary in the lightning which cut across the sky. I know that because I looked up the Limerick weather for that night.
When they finally turned up the road through the park to Castle Garry, he saw a scene which would change his life forever. The outbuildings around the manor house were on fire. The fire had spread to one wing of the castle itself. The sea was roaring behind the castle, its huge waves illumined by the flames. A mob was smashing windows and throwing furniture out of the house. Several men, servants presumably, were lying dead on the ground. Lady Augusta, in her nightdress, was tied to a tree. Women were pelting her with mud.
Something must have snapped inside of General Tudor. He could have subdued the rabble, led by a handful of rag-tag Irish volunteers—mostly local thugs—by a few shots over their heads. However, the young woman was the wife of an English officer, a hero, and a friend of Tudor’s. The men and women who were destroying her home and threatening her life were less than human. He ordered his men to fire into the crowd.
Six men died, three of the rebels, who were from below in Kerry, and three local youths, all of whom it would later develop had far too much of the creature taken. The rest of the crowd fled into the night and the oncoming rain storm. His soldiers rounded up five prisoners, all of them men. Tudor gave the order for their summary execution.
It is not unreasonable to assume that Tudor and Lady Augusta became lovers that night as the storm which had put out the fires raged above them in the battered manor house. Surely they were lovers soon after.
Garrytown, the local village, was a long way from Dublin and a long psychological distance from Limerick. A report was issued that the British Army had won a major pitched battle in West Limerick, a victory which would mark the beginning of the end for the IRA. A British Army patrol had come upon an IRA mob assaulting Castle Garry. The soldiers had driven off the mob and saved the castle. Three servants at the castle had been killed, as had ten armed IRA men. None of the local people disputed this account, not very loudly at any rate. The McGarrys were, as I have said, a popular family, indeed one which had for many years been sympathetic to Irish freedom. The Garrytown version was that a group of criminals from Kerry had stirred up trouble in a local pub, accusing the local men of being cowards.
“Good enough for the lot of them,” Garrytown said with something like relief. Arson and murder, assassination and reprisals, were now commonplace in the Irish countryside. Later on, everyone had good reason to want to forget the horror.
Somehow a story developed about his love affair with Lady Augusta in which he was depicted as a rapist. The events at the end are obscure. Just before Dev and Lloyd George agreed on a cease-fire in the autumn of 1921, an IRA flying squad from Kerry returned to Garrytown looking for revenge. They encountered a detachment of Cadets at Castle Garry, protecting Tudor’s whore as they claimed.
We will probably never know what happened that night. According to the folk story, which may not be accurate in all its details, the castle was set afire again, the Cadets, who knew that the lads were coming, had no trouble routing them. Somehow, during the battle Lady Augusta was shot and killed, perhaps by accident, perhaps not. Her charred body was found in the ruins several days later, the very day, in fact, that the truce was announced. According to legend, Hugh Tudor had ordered her death. There never was any proof, but by that time the English were willing to believe anything about him.
It was two Kerrymen who tried to kill him in Palestine in 1925. Depending on who you believe, the British government informed him that they could no longer guarantee his safety. So he left the army and went to Newfoundland, where some of his old mates from the Royal Irish Constabulary would protect him. It’s hard to believe that the British Army really forced him out, whatever his reputation. Churchill was out of power and would remain out of power till the next War, but he certainly had enough influence to protect Tudor. Perhaps he wanted to escape to a place where he could forget and be forgotten. The attempt on his life in Palestine may not have been an official IRA hit but a personal grudge. Anyway, for forty years he was a forgotten man—by everyone, family, old friends, and old enemies. Clearly he liked it that way.