6 September 1920 General Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, despised Irish republicans. In 1919, he observed in a letter to his predecessor, General Sir William Robertson, that ‘Ireland goes from bad to worse’, recommending that ‘a little blood shedding is needed.’ On 1 September, the following year, he was still deriding…
11 December 1920 On the evening of Saturday 11 December 1920, during a few hours of indiscriminate arson and looting, British ‘Black and Tans’ auxiliary police burned down three hundred homes and forty business premises in the city of Cork. The vast majority of residents were Catholics, most of them sympathetic or supportive of the…
5 December 1920 On 5 December 1920, three boys discovered the mutilated bodies of two brothers, Pat and Harry Loughnane, 29 and 22 years old. They had been tortured and killed by British auxiliary forces known as the Black and Tans, who had been deployed to crush a widespread Irish rebellion against British rule. The…
21 November 1920 On the afternoon of Sunday 21 November 1920, armed police officers under British command surrounded Croke Park Football Ground in Dublin. They rushed in from either end of the stadium and fired directly into the stampeding crowd, killing eleven civilians and seriously injuring at least sixty, of whom three died the following…
25 October 1920 Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, died at 5.40 am on Monday 25 October 1920 on the seventy fourth day of his hunger strike at Brixton prison. His biographer, Francis Costello, remarked that the MacSwiney’s ‘solitary protest would be seen, in the context of the Irish struggle, as personifying the triumph…
24 September 1920 On 24 September 1920, Secretary of State for Air Winston Churchill urged the Chiefs of Staff to seriously consider the use of fighter aircraft against gatherings suspected of protesting or plotting against British rule. In Churchill’s view, strafing attacks would be ‘a great deterrent to illegal drilling and rebel gatherings.’1 General Sir…
23 September 1920 In the early hours of 23 September 1920, heavily armed British auxiliary police, 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…
20 September 1920 On 20 September 1920, Head Constable Peter Burke, a Royal Irish Constabulary officer, was brutally gunned down outside a public house in the small Irish town of Balbriggan. He was the commander of a British ‘Black and Tan’ auxiliary police force unit which was stationed nearby. There was no evidence as to…
20 August 1920 On 20 August 1920, Major General George A.J. Leslie, commanding the 17th Indian Division in Iraq, wrote to his wife Edith in India, informing her that Brigadier General H.A. Walker’s column, comprising two British and six Indian battalions was ‘slowly working its way back here ravaging the country on its way,’ while…
19 June 1921 In the early hours of 19 June 1921, British ‘Black and Tans,’ a paramilitary force comprised mainly of former soldiers, set fire to the village of Knockcroghery in Country Roscommon in central Ireland. It was a calculated act of collective punishment, as British intelligence wrongly believed that some of the villagers were…
