Major-General Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, KCB, CMG (14 March 1871 – 25 September 1965) was a British Army officer who fought as a junior officer in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), and as a senior officer in the First World War (1914–18), but is now remembered chiefly for his roles in the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) as Inspector General and Chief of the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Palestine Police.
Early life and education
Tudor was born in Newton Abbot, Devon, in 1871, the only surviving son of Rev. Harry Tudor (1832–1907), rector of Wolborough with Newton Abbot (1865–88), rector and patron of Lustleigh, Newton Abbot (1888–1904), and sub-dean (1903–7) and prebendary (1885–1907) of Exeter Cathedral, and his wife, Charlotte Aurora, younger daughter of Rev. Frederic Ensor, rector and patron of Lustleigh, Newton Abbot. The Ensors were a minor landed gentry family, of Rollesby Hall, near Norwich, Norfolk.A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, sixth edition, vol. I, Sir Bernard Burke, Harrison (Pall Mall), 1879, p. 515Alumni Cantabrigienses, volume 2: From 1752 to 1900, part 6: Square-Zupitza, ed. John Venn, J. A. Venn, Cambridge University Press, 1954, p. 242
Tudor enrolled in the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in 1888.
Early career: India and South Africa
Tudor was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Royal Horse Artillery on 25 July 1890. He was stationed in India from 1890 until 1897, when he returned to England, having been promoted to lieutenant on 25 July 1893.Hart′s Army list, 1901
Tudor was sent to South Africa during the Second Boer War, where he was badly wounded at the Battle of Magersfontein (11 December 1899), but recovered and returned to duty, and was promoted to captain on 7 February 1900. He served as divisional adjutant and was mentioned in despatches (including the final despatch by Lord Kitchener dated 23 June 1902). After the end of the war, Tudor stayed in South Africa for another six months, returning to Southampton on the SS Orcana in January 1903. His extensive service was reflected by his campaign medals: the Queen's South Africa Medal with four clasps, and the King's South Africa Medal with two.
In the following years, Tudor went back to India for another five years (1905–10), and then was posted to Egypt, where he stayed until the start of the First World War.
First World War Tudor served during the Great War on the Western Front from December 1914 to the armistice of 11 November 1918, rising from the rank of captain in charge of an artillery battery, to temporary brigadier general in February 1916 and being a brigadier general, Royal Artillery, to the rank of temporary major general and the command of the 9th (Scottish) Division. He continued to command this formation after the armistice, as part of the British Army of the Rhine, until the 9th Division was disbanded in March 1919.
Tudor was a professional and forward-looking artilleryman: historian Paddy Griffith has described him as an "expert tactician." He was a fighting general who spent a lot of time on the front lines: he was almost killed at the Third Battle of Ypres in October 1917, when a shell fragment hit him in the head and smashed his helmet. He was the first British general to use smoke shells to create screens and one of the first advocates of predicted artillery fire. He suggested an attack in the Cambrai sector in July 1917, and his artillery ideas helped lay the foundation for the British breakthrough in the battle there in November. In addition, he was almost captured by the Germans during Operation Michael, the first German offensive in the spring of 1918.
Ireland After the 9th Division was disbanded, Tudor, promoted in June 1919 to substantive major general, was posted once again to Egypt and India. In May 1920, however, he was appointed 'Police Adviser' to the Dublin Castle administration in Ireland and promoted to Lieutenant-General. His chief qualification for this post was his friendship with the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill. Tudor had met Churchill in Bangalore in 1895, and the two men became lifelong friends. During the brief period when Churchill had served as an infantry officer on the Western Front in early 1916, he was posted to the same sector as Tudor, near Ploegsteert Wood.Joy Cave, "A Gallant Gunner General," esp. pp. 92, 97, and 102.
Situation in Ireland
When Tudor took up his new post, the Irish War of Independence was approaching a crisis: indeed, within a couple of months, the British administration in Ireland was on the verge of collapse. The Royal Irish Constabulary's morale and effective strength were both declining: Irish Republican Army guerrillas were ambushing police patrols, burning police barracks and organising boycotts of police and their families. Railway workers went on strike, refusing to move trains that carried armed police or troops. Merchants refused to serve police customers. Police recruits and servants were being attacked and intimidated, and women who were friendly with the police had their hair cut off. Police property was wrecked and stolen: in some cases, police bicycles were taken away while their owners were in church. Hundreds of police officers resigned both as a result of intimidation and in protest at the government's repeated mass releases of IRA prisoners, which continued up until the spring of 1920.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin was building an alternative state — the Irish Republic proclaimed during the Easter Rising of 1916. Local governments were acknowledging the authority of the First Dáil. IRA Volunteers were acting as Republican police. Republican courts were adjudicating both civil and criminal cases. In some parts of Ireland, the Republic was becoming a reality.
Tudor's assignment, as he saw it, was to raise police morale, punish crime and restore law and order: "I had nothing to do with politics," he wrote years later, "and don't care a hoop of hell what measure of Home Rule they got." In June 1920, Tudor did feel the stress of the violence in Ireland. He stated that when he travelled around Ireland, he had to keep a revolver across his knees and never knew when he might be shot at.Riddell, George (1934), Lord Riddell's Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and After, Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, pg 202. At a Cabinet conference on 23 July 1920, his Dublin Castle colleagues were calling for an offer of "Dominion Home Rule" (i.e. Canadian-style self-government, within the Empire, as opposed to the devolved Parliament within the UK which was due to have become law in 1914 and was eventually elected in May 1921). However, Tudor was confident that "given the proper support, it would be possible to crush the present campaign of outrage. The whole country was intimidated," he said, "and would thank God for strong measures."David Leeson, "The Black and Tans: British Police in the First Irish War, 1920–21," p. 47
The government chose the hard line: on 9 August 1920, Parliament passed the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act, which gave Dublin Castle the power to govern by regulation; to replace the criminal courts with courts martial; to replace coroners' inquests with military courts of inquiry; and to punish disaffected local governments by withholding grants of money.
Tudor's leadership
As Police Adviser, Tudor assumed control of Ireland's police forces, and eventually styled himself "Chief of Police". Under his administration, the police were militarised: indeed, at the Cabinet conference of 23 July 1920, Tudor had conceded that the RIC would soon become ineffective as a police force; "but as a military body he thought they might have great effect." Like his patron, Churchill, Tudor gave police posts to his military friends and colleagues: Brigadier-General Ormonde Winter, for example, became Deputy Police Adviser and Head of Intelligence; "He had once been my Captain in a battery at Rawalpindi," said Tudor, "and we had done a lot of racing together at various meetings in India."
The beleaguered RIC was reinforced with British ex-soldiers and sailors—the notorious 'Black and Tans'.'This is the story of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, the most notorious police forces in the history of the British Isles.' D. M. Leeson, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), cover. Ronan Fanning describes how a proposal to recruit ex-soldiers as police forehadowed 'the transformation of the RIC (already ostracised by Sinn Féin) into the notorious Black and Tans.' Ronan Fanning, Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution, 1910–1922, Kindle edition (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), location 3873. Michael Hopkinson describes the decision to recruit British ex-soldiers to serve as police as the British government's 'most notorious decision': Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Montreal and Kingston: McGill -Queen's University Press, 2002). W. H Kautt goes even further, and says the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries are 'infamous,' but argues that only the Auxiliaries 'actually earned this infamy.' W. H. Kautt, Ambushes and Armour: The Irish Rebellion, 1919–1921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011) p. 80. With the army stretched very thin by the deployment of 2 extra divisions to Iraq, and the threatened British coal strike in September 1920, Tudor created the Auxiliary Division, a temporary gendarmerie composed of ex-officers and commanded by a pair of experienced colonial warriors: Brigadier-General Frank Percy Crozier and Brigadier-General E. A. Wood; its numbers peaked at 1,500 in July 1921.Leeson, "Black and Tans," pp. 47–48.Jeffery 2006 p264-5 General Crozier resigned on 25 February 1921 after Tudor countermanded his actions against twenty-six Auxiliaries who were accused of ransacking a store in County Meath on the night of 9 February 1921. Crozier claimed that Tudor knew of and condoned those types of activities.
Reprisals and indiscipline
While working hard to rebuild the RIC's numbers and morale, Tudor did comparatively little to restore its discipline. When police and auxiliaries were killed in ambushes and attacks, their comrades often responded with reprisals against Irish Republicans and their communities: some of these reprisals were spontaneous "police riots," but others were organised and led by local police officials. Tudor's own response to these outbreaks of arson and murder was weak and ambiguous: in a memorandum on discipline dated 12 November 1920, Tudor admonished his men to maintain "the highest discipline", while reassuring them that they would have "the fullest support in the most drastic action against that band of assassins, the so-called IRA."
Sir Nevil Macready (Commander-in-Chief, Ireland) had been initially impressed by Tudor (June 1920) and thought he was getting rid of "incompetent idiots" from senior police positions. Macready and the CIGS Sir Henry Wilson became increasingly concerned that Tudor, with the connivance of Lloyd George, who loved to drop hints to that effect, was operating an unofficial policy of killing IRA men in reprisal for the deaths of pro-Crown forces. However Macready also told Wilson that the Army was arranging "accidents" for suspected IRA men, but not telling the politicians as he did not want them "talked and joked about after dinner by Cabinet Ministers".Jeffery 2006 p265-6 Tudor's complicity in the reprisals was implied by Macready when he wrote that "assassination is rife and the G.S. [General Staff] have now adopted it à la Tudor and Co."