19 December 1937 On 19 December 1937, Constable Sydney Burr, based at Haifa in the British mandate of Palestine, wrote home to his parents describing the extrajudicial executions of Arabs suspected of participating in an insurgency against British rule. After expressing his disappointment at the ‘military courts’ which were ‘being so lenient and want too…
12 December 1948 On 12 December 1948, British troops executed 24 unarmed labourers, after separating them from the women and children at a Malayan rubber plantation at Sungai Rimoh, near the small town of Batang Kali. The men were subjected to mock executions before being herded into a hut where they were shot down with automatic…
10 December 1953 On 10 December 1953, in a letter to the War Office, General George Erskine, commanding British forces in Kenya, admitted that he was aware that the police and army in the colony frequently resorted to summary executions and torture against suspect Mau Mau insurgents. ‘There is no doubt’, he confessed to Whitehall…
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…
25 September 1965 On 25 September 1965, the British government suspended the constitution in its colony of Aden, officially known as the South Arabian Federation. All governing powers were placed in the hands of Sir Richard Turnbull, the high commissioner. The state legislature was dismissed and a dusk to dawn curfew imposed.1 A Downing Street…
2 June 1915 On 2 June 1915, Sir Robert Chalmers, the governor of Ceylon, on the pretext that ethnic rioting between Muslims and Sinhalese Buddhists had been provoked by German agents, declared martial law. There was, however, no evidence to suggest any German involvement. Bonar Law, Secretary of State for the Colonies, admitted a month…
14 April 1816 On Easter Sunday, 14 April 1816, the slaves of Barbados rose up against their British masters.  It took four days for soldiers to suppress the insurrection, which had been caused, according to one Barbados resident, because  ‘the poor deluded negroes took it into their heads that they were so far emancipated by…
26 February 1900 On 26 February 1900, the Irish nationalist MP, John Dillon, read out a letter in parliament that he had received from a British officer who was engaged in a campaign of virtual genocide against the Boer population of South Africa. ‘The orders in this district from Lord Kitchener ( commanding British forces…
21 February 1849 On 21 February 1849, during the Second Anglo-Sikh War, British troops under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Hugh Gough gave no quarter to Sikh soldiers fleeing the battlefield of Gujrat. An officer of the Ninth Lancers recalled: ‘We overtook numbers of their infantry who were running for their lives – every…
18 January 1921 Following an ambush of auxiliary police on a country road in County Galway by the IRA, injuring six cadets, several lorry loads of British soldiers disembarked in the nearby village of Headford shortly after 10.30 pm on 18 January 1921. They immediately began to fire eight buildings in a reprisal operation, including the…
