23 SEPTEMBER

BRITISH ARMY’S MURDEROUS RAMPAGE THROUGH THREE IRISH TOWNS

[ 23 September 1920 ]

In the early hours of 23 September 1920, British auxiliary troops, known as the ‘Black and Tans,’ descended on three small coastal towns in County Clare in Ireland.  A report in the British press noted that ‘large parties of uniformed men attacked… Miltown, Lahinch and Ennistymon, and by burning and looting did enormous damage. In the three places 19 houses were destroyed, and shops and other buildings were gutted, including the town halls of Lahinch and Ennistymon.’¹

BRITISH KILL HUNDREDS OF VIETNAMESE AND BURN LARGE AREAS OF SAIGON.

[ 23 September 1945 ]

On 23 September 1945, the British army in Vietnam backed a French coup in Saigon, the former capital of French Indo-China, with the aim of restoring colonial rule. 

LONDON GIVES SENIOR KENYAN POLICE OFFICERS POWER TO ATTEST TO A PRISONER’S CONFESSION

[ 23 September 1952 ]

By the autumn of 1952, as the British resorted to mass detentions to crush the anti-colonial Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, there was an escalating back log of hundreds of cases against suspect insurgents. On 23 September, London instructed Kenya’s colonial government to pass an ordinance giving senior police officers the power to attest to a prisoner’s confession.  This deprived defendants of the ability to effectively challenge the validity of their confessions in court against the word of a senior police officer, and thereby allowed the trials of hundreds of Mau Mau suspects to proceed more quickly.  By December 1954, there were 71,000 Kenyans in prison for crimes related to the insurgency,  and by the end of the decade 1090 had been hung, more than double the number of executions by the French in Algeria.²

FOOTNOTES

1. ‘Murders of Six Policemen Terribly Avenged,’ The Nottingham Journal and Express, 24 September 1920, p. 1.
2. David Anderson,  Histories of the Hanged, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2005 p. 7, p. 53 and p. 356.

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