Author and journalist Linden MacIntyre explores the life of fallen hero Hugh Tudor in his latest book. [Tom Zsolt/Courtesy Penguin Random House Canada]
History will forever judge the judgeable, no matter where they’re laid to rest.
Such was the case of British Major-General Hugh Tudor, a once-hero of the Great War turned co-architect of some of the worst atrocities in the struggle for Irish Independence. While his enemies never exacted revenge upon him after he sought sanctuary in Newfoundland, the enigmatic former officer—who could have prevented much of 1920’s Bloody Sunday—failed to escape his tarnished reputation.
Where did it go so wrong for Tudor, a man mentioned in dispatches 10 times on the Western Front only for his name—and that of the infamous Black and Tans he commanded—to be reviled? This is one of many questions that renowned Canadian journalist and author Linden MacIntyre endeavours to answer in his latest book An Accidental Villain: A Soldier’s Tale of War, Deceit and Exile.
The biographer offered his insights in a Legion Magazine exclusive.
[Penguin Random House Canada]
On Tudor’s Great War reputation
At the beginning of the war, Tudor was a major of the [British] Royal Horse Artillery, but he was eventually promoted in the field to major-general commanding 9th (Scottish) Division. He had personal commendations from Lloyd George, the [British] prime minister, and from [Field Marshal Douglas] Haig, who was in charge of the whole British Expeditionary Force.
Notably, he was very close to Winston Churchill. They had become friends in India in the 1890s, and they had stayed in touch when Tudor served in the Boer War. Most significantly, however, when Churchill briefly took a step away from parliament after the [1915] Dardanelles scandal that he took the rap for, he became a battalion commander at the rank of lieutenant-colonel [in 1916]. At this time, Tudor outranked him.
They were together a lot—I counted about 30 different encounters. Churchill was an extraordinary figure, a gregarious exhibitionist who loved fighting. Meanwhile, his buddy, Tudor, was a very quiet soldier’s soldier who did not draw attention to himself. It makes me wonder what they had in common.
On Tudor’s selection for service in Ireland
After the war, [Tudor and Churchill] stayed in touch. Churchill became minister of war, and one of his first assignments was to suppress the rebellion brewing in Ireland. This was a separation war where the IRA [Irish Republican Army] and Sinn Féin politicians were becoming so strong that they were perceived as a threat to the survival of the British Empire.
[The British] held the Irish and Ireland in place by a mix of brutality and politics, but they worried about the impact this would have in the United States, where there was a very large and politically significant Irish diaspora.
So, they had to keep this at the level of a police action in which they’d treat it as a crime wave, where they’d treat Irish rebels as criminals, and they would put the responsibility for bringing the situation under control in the hands of the Royal Irish Constabulary. However, they also armed them with military equipment and a mandate to do whatever they had to do.
And they put a British military general in charge of the constabulary, and that was General Tudor.
On Tudor’s actions in Ireland
Tudor knew nothing about Ireland. He had no feelings one way or another. At most, like many British people—and, in particular, the English people—he would have felt like the Irish had behaved very badly during the First World War.
He was well briefed, presumably by Churchill, before he was hired in May 1920. He commanded [formerly] unemployed British army veterans, most of whom were English or Scottish, who were recruited to serve in a police role. They had had rough experiences in the First World War. They also didn’t have enough uniforms to go around, so they cobbled together their own uniforms out of black tunics and khaki pants, whereby they became known as the Black and Tans.
The Black and Tans were wild and undisciplined for the most part. Tudor, on the other hand, had been a stickler for discipline and military tradition. But something happened to him in Ireland.
A factor was the cold-blooded murder of people that he liked a lot and respected, one of whom was Colonel [Gerald] Smyth. He was brought to Ireland to run the police operation in the Cork region, which was a hotbed [of unrest]. Smyth was not the most politically sensitive. He went in and made a gung-ho speech to a bunch of police officers; it reached the media, and he was shortly thereafter assassinated.
The way the IRA fought was absolutely horrifying to General Tudor, and equally awkward for him was the fact that he was more or less under instructions from his political masters to fight fire with fire. At the same time, he did little to bring [his forces] under control, such as when they carried out communal punishment by, say, sacking an entire village because a police officer was assassinated there. He equally did hardly anything when his men pulled random Sinn Féin and IRA members—known or only suspected to be—out of their beds and killed them. And it only got worse.
Major-General Hugh Tudor. [Wikimedia]
On Bloody Sunday and the Burning of Cork
On Nov. 21, 1920, the IRA executed 15 people they thought were British spies [including those who later succumbed to wounds]—some of them were, some of them weren’t.
That afternoon, Tudor’s people disrupted an Irish football match in Croke Park, Dublin, where everybody was bound to be a patriotic Irish republican. It had been planned several days earlier that Tudor’s men would search these people as they came out, confiscate guns, and arrest suspects.
The fairly outrageous murders by the IRA that morning, however, should have certainly given Tudor and his officers sound reason to reconsider going to the football match. But no, Tudor decided they were going to go.
When his policemen pushed into the football grounds, they just started to shoot. And when the shooting had stopped, at least 14 people were, or were soon to be, dead. Three of them were children. One of them was a woman who was engaged to be married the following weekend. And one of them was a football player.
Whatever propaganda value they had gotten out of the massacre of British servicemen in the morning was wiped out with this atrocity in public within hours.
Tudor was never called to explain why he didn’t change the plan to search people at the park. He was never held accountable for the behaviour of the police officers under his command. Nor was he held accountable for the murder of three arrested people by his men in Dublin Castle that night.
When Cork city was torched [by British forces in December 1920] a few weeks after Bloody Sunday, the army began to protest. Tudor defended his men and argued that they had been provoked.
On Tudor’s self-imposed exile in Newfoundland
The Newfoundland connection is quite interesting, and goes back to the First World War, when Tudor was the commander of 9th (Scottish) Infantry Division and had a battalion of Newfoundlanders [of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment].
After Tudor’s Irish experience, and after being stashed away in Palestine to keep him and a lot of his Black and Tans out of trouble, politics changed in Britain. He found himself unemployed and stranded, with no safe place to go. His family had broken down, and he was presumably on a hit list with the IRA.
Somewhere along the way, somebody suggested that the one place in the world where he still had a good reputation as an honourable soldier was Newfoundland. It’s arguably hard to get to if someone is coming after you, and certainly harder to get away from if you’re a fugitive.
His friends in Britain and Newfoundland created a little business for him in which he was supposed to be marketing salt fish in Europe. He knew nothing about fish, but he made enough money to survive.
I don’t know if he planned to stay there for the rest of his life, but he did. He wanted to erase himself from the historical record, the curiosity of journalists, and the curiosity of historians.
He never kept diaries in Ireland nor wrote a memoir in Newfoundland. He wasn’t going to make speeches about Ireland. He wasn’t going to give interviews about Ireland. The only newspaper interview that I could find that he actually gave in that period of 40 years, when he was 92 years old, was to a reporter who was obviously told not to ask questions about Ireland.
He always carried a gun. He always carried brass knuckles. He was very careful with his own personal security, but his principal tactic to protect himself was to keep his mouth shut.
On his hopes for readers of The Accidental Villain
My hope is that readers will understand the peril of using military force and military tactics for political civil challenges, the peril of putting soldiers on the streets of cities in combat uniforms to intimidate and frighten people, because sooner or later, there’s a possibility that it escalates.
My message to soldiers and police officers would be, look back over history. To this day, the Black and Tans are synonymous with terror, and the British were condemned by that connection to be the bad guys in Irish history and to anyone sympathetic to Ireland.
People really should not put themselves in a position, for purposes of shallow patriotism or misguided loyalty to a politician, where they are going to become a disgrace to their families.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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