As mentioned here, my review of An Accidental Villain: Sir Hugh Tudor, Churchill’s Enforcer in Revolutionary Ireland, by Linden MacIntyre, appeared in the Review of Irish Studies in Europe, vol. 9 (1) in April 2026.
Here’s the link: https://doi.org/10.32803/rise.v9i1.3448.
The terms of the open access publishing agreement allow me to publish here the version I originally wrote but had to shorten.
Review
The recent series of hundred-year anniversaries in Ireland (the so-called ‘Decade of Commemoration’, 2012-2023) brought forth a tidal wave of publications on almost every aspect of the Revolutionary Decade. One might have expected the tide to start ebbing by 2025 (the centenary of the suppression of the Boundary Commission’s report, a decision which fixed the border in its current position). In fact, the books keep coming, including this one on Major General Sir Hugh Tudor, the British military officer put in charge of the newly formed Black and Tans.
Although I recognised the name, I couldn’t have given you any information about the man himself. For that reason, I was curious to see whether my own relative lack of knowledge was representative of the historiography of the period and so consulted a few of the general histories I recommend to undergraduates. There is only a single entry for ‘Tudor’ in the index of Diarmaid Ferriter’s A Nation and Not a Rabble, and the same is true for both John Dorney’s ‘Peace After the Final Battle’: The Story of the Irish Revolution 1912–1924 and Maurice Walsh’s Bitter Freedom. He features more in Charles Townshend’s The Republic, which is perhaps not surprising given Townshend’s interest in British military history. (Townshend’s first book, published 1975, was The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–1921: The Development of Political and Military Policies. Incidentally, the omission of some interesting information and quotations about Tudor makes me think that this book was not consulted by MacIntyre.) Despite the relative frequency of Tudor’s appearances in The Republic, he is not considered important enough to warrant an entry in the ‘Biographical Glossary’ at the back. Nor is he in my Chambers Biographical Dictionary (1993) or the Encyclopaedia of Ireland (Gill & Macmillan, 2003). All of which makes one ask: is there anything particularly special or interesting about Tudor or was he just another in a procession of English military commanders who proved incapable of getting to grips with the insubordinate Irish?
Tudor had had a stellar military career before coming to Ireland. Born in Devon in 1871, he joined the army aged seventeen, beginning in the ranks. He served in South Africa, India and Egypt, before returning to Europe when war broke out in 1914. He was wounded in the Second Boer War and nearly killed in the First World War. In that conflict he rose to become the youngest divisional commander in the British Army, pioneering the use of smoke to conceal infantry advances.
At the end of the war, he was made a major general. He could already look back with satisfaction on thirty-five years of active service in the British Army, during which his actions had earned him ten mentions in dispatches for gallantry in combat. He also had a family – a wife and four children – though his job had often forced him to spend long periods of time away from them. His position in the upper echelons of British society seemed solid and he probably could have faced the future with optimism.
One of his friends outside the military was a man who had also risen to near the top of his chosen profession (in this case politics) while still comparatively young. Winston Churchill had first made Tudor’s acquaintance in India when they were both young men and their paths continued to cross in the following decades. They kept in touch after the former’s political ambitions took him away from the military and reconnected when Churchill – in disgrace after the Dardanelles fiasco – returned temporarily to active service on the Western Front.
I had tea with General Tudor yesterday. He commands all the artillery of the division and is quite young – my age about. He and I were friends in Bangalore as lieutenants – and much good Polo did we play together. (Churchill in a letter to his wife Clementine, February 1916, quoted 13.)
Neither knew it at the time but Churchill was to alter the course of Tudor’s life drastically not once but twice. By the end of the war Churchill was back in government. In his role as Secretary of State for War and Air he reached out to his old friend to ask if he would take on the task of running a new, militarised police force in Ireland, where the Royal Irish Constabulary was being put under severe pressure by armed Republican attacks.
A couple of other – probably wiser, or better informed – candidates had already turned down the job. Tudor was hardly an ideal candidate: he was used to the far-flung colonies of the British Empire and had no real interest in or knowledge of Ireland. Nor did he have any policing experience, and as a career soldier he had never held a position that required him to weigh up the possible political repercussions of his actions. It therefore seems most likely that he accepted the job as a favour to Churchill.
MacIntyre says that ‘the speed with which General Tudor accepted the assignment might suggest that he already knew exactly what the new job would entail’ (23). This does not seem so likely given some of the other episodes and events recounted later in the story. And here we also see one of the main weaknesses of the book. Although Tudor recorded his experiences in both the Boer War and the First World War, he left no written record of his time in Ireland. Nor did he ever speak publicly about his role in the war against the IRA. As a result, MacIntyre is forced to resort to speculation about what Tudor’s reasons for his actions were or how much he knew about certain things. The book is full of phrases like ‘It is not unreasonable to speculate that…’ (21), ‘it is impossible to know what Tudor thought…’ (100), ‘General Tudor would have been aware…’ (102), ‘General Tudor might have answered…’, ‘Perhaps… Or perhaps…’, (184), ‘Tudor might have been shocked to find…’ (196), ‘It had probably occurred to Tudor more than once…’ (252).
Similarly, MacIntyre is unable to reach a definite conclusion on whether the policies of reprisals and extra-judicial murder were Tudor’s plan or idea, had his approval – or his tacit toleration – or were even known to him. Admittedly, even those who knew Tudor personally were unclear on this. It was the view of General Nevil Macready (Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Ireland) that ‘he [Tudor] had either been corrupted by his job in Ireland or was dutifully following corrupt instructions from his political superiors’ (141). Friends, especially in the military, were dismayed and incredulous at the actions Tudor seemed willing to support in Ireland. To them, his conduct was out of character. In the army, he had had a reputation for fairness and concern for men serving under him (34). Mark Sturgis (Assistant Under-Secretary in Dublin Castle) referred to a widespread perception that Tudor was incapable of believing anything but good of his soldiers, which was attributed to the ‘almost childlike simplicity of Tudor’ (155). Certainly, a comment such as the one made by Tudor in 1920 to the effect that ‘discipline has been maintained at a very high level’ (123) suggests astonishing naivety or wilful blindness. Sturgis believed Tudor had been led astray by following the Prime Minister’s instructions too enthusiastically (172). On the other hand, it was the opinion of Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet Tom Jones that Tudor publicly told the men under his command to do one thing while tacitly encouraging them to do another (174-175).
At first, MacIntyre takes the position that the purpose of the harsher policing methods was agreed on very early (27), but later he suggests that Tudor’s attitudes hardened only after he had been in the job for some time (see for example 45 and 62). The uncertainty is encapsulated in the following sentence: ‘Unlike the random brutality earlier in 1920, this new remorselessness appeared to be deliberate, a change that seemed to coincide with the arrival of the Tudor team in May and June…’ (84). That word ‘coincide’ is an indication of the impossibility of saying for certain whether Tudor decided on the policy or was sent to implement one decided on by others.
In fairness, nowhere does MacIntyre suggest that ignorance would excuse Tudor. After all, he was the man in charge. The truth may be somewhere in between. The British cabinet wanted a dirty but deniable war. Tudor may have wanted to repay the backing he received from Churchill and PM David Lloyd George, or simply not let his friend down. That backing was certainly a great advantage to him: ‘Tudor’s personal relationship with Churchill gave him an undefined authority that overshadowed almost everyone around him’ (92).
Since a lack of evidence makes it impossible to lay the blame for the Black and Tans’ murders and indiscriminate violence squarely at Tudor’s feet, he seems to fade into the background and this part of the narrative becomes a history of the Black and Tans and the ‘Tan War’, with all the usual stops along the way: the murder of Tomás MacCurtain, the sack of Balbriggan, Terence MacSwiney’s hunger strike, the reprisal attacks in Killorglin and Tralee, Bloody Sunday, Kilmichael, the burning of Cork, the IRA attack on the Customs House, truce, Treaty etc. All of this is well told but represents a definite shifting of focus away from the book’s main subject.
It seems, too, that Tudor was ‘radicalised’ by the IRA assassination of his friend Colonel Gerald Smyth, whom he had recruited to help him in Ireland. The alienation from Ireland and the Irish he must have felt was exacerbated by the fact he was operating under intolerable pressure. He had to be constantly on his guard and mostly stayed holed up in Dublin Castle. Because of the risks involved, he undertook no recreational activities apart from the occasional game of golf (and even then he was accompanied by bodyguards). He was also socially isolated. His family could not visit him in Ireland and he only rarely managed to return to England to see them. As MacIntyre notes ‘[e]ven if he longed for companionship, everyone knew it could be suicidal to go anywhere in public with the man who ran the Black and Tans’ (81).
The fear of assassination persisted even after the conclusion of the War of Independence. His daughter Elizabeth recalled an incident in 1922 after her father’s return from Ireland. The two of them were playing a game of golf together when a head suddenly appeared above a hedge to their right. Her father instantly pulled a revolver from his pocket and would have shot the man (an employee of the golf course) if his daughter had not prevented it. The IRA killing of Unionist MP Sir Henry Wilson (a family friend) on his doorstep in London later the same year demonstrated that Tudor’s fear was not just paranoia. He always carried a revolver and often a knuckleduster; his wife also kept a gun in the house.
Perhaps this anxiety was a motivating factor in Tudor accepting a new job that would get him far away from the British Isles – once again at the request of his friend Churchill (now Colonial Secretary in the post-war coalition government). The British mandate in Palestine after the First World War required replacing an occupying army with a civilian police force. The security situation, though, with regular confrontations between Arab Palestinians and Zionist settlers, meant that something more like a paramilitary force was needed. The parallels with Ireland were obvious and so a similar policy was adopted. Lloyd George was in no doubt that Tudor’s ‘courageous fight for the Empire in Ireland’ (letter to Tudor, quoted 202-203) had contributed to bringing the Sinn Féin leaders to the negotiating table in 1921 and therefore Tudor was again put in charge. (The Prime Minister’s gratitude would also be expressed in the form of a knighthood for Tudor in 1923.)
Nor was Tudor the only man with experience of policing in Ireland who now headed to Palestine. Many ex-Black and Tans and Auxiliaries were recruited to this new ‘gendarmerie’, though these organisations’ poor reputations mean that this fact was not publicised. I found this part of the book more interesting, perhaps because it was new to me. (It may not be to someone with more knowledge of Middle Eastern history.)
A further attraction of the job in Palestine was that – unlike in Ireland – Tudor would be in charge of both the military and civil policing. One of the things this book brought home to me was the inherent rivalry between the British military in Ireland and the RIC. The problem was that they had almost equal status, leading to friction between Tudor and Macready (154). It seems that the British had drawn the lesson from Ireland of the importance of a clear and unified chain of command in such situations.
It was in Palestine that Tudor’s growing estrangement from his wife led him to write to her requesting a divorce. MacIntyre says that ‘the reason for his abrupt decision to leave the marriage remains a mystery to this day’ (230) and speculates – not implausibly, I think – that the strain of the two years in Ireland on Tudor’s psyche may have been to blame (81). Friends at his club (the Army & Navy Club in London) noted he had ‘become rather peculiar’ (235). Whatever the reason, the decision came as a complete shock to his family. His wife attempted unsuccessfully to get him to change his mind but he was adamant. The scandal became more public when she refused to facilitate a low-profile separation. (She was never to consent to a divorce and the marriage only ended with her death in 1958.) Tudor’s conduct was a further black mark against him in London society.
The scandal cannot have helped his prospects of employment in Britain either when the job in Palestine ended in 1923. Once again it was not the law-enforcement side of the job that did for Tudor, but politics, especially after the collapse of the coalition government in Britain led to his protector Churchill losing his cabinet post. It is here that the extent to which Churchill was Tudor’s defender in Cabinet becomes clear. The new government was less prepared to overlook Tudor’s shortcomings. By all accounts he was a poor administrator who preferred to make decisions off the cuff and disregarded regulations when they did not suit him (222).
Following Palestine came his final move – across the Atlantic to Newfoundland, which at that time was not yet a province of Canada but a self-governing dominion. (Herein lies the genesis of the book, for MacIntyre is a native of the area himself.) This destination may have first been put in Tudor’s mind by a club acquaintance, Captain Victor Campbell, also a military man but more famous as a member of Scott’s ill-fated Antarctica expedition. Campbell had property in Newfoundland and some other Great War veterans had also moved there, so Tudor had the reassurance of a like-minded social circle in this otherwise unfamiliar place.
Nevertheless, MacIntyre suggests that Tudor was swayed by the positive impression created five years earlier by the men of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, which he had been put in command of in September 1918. In the book, there follows a flashback to the First World War which is mostly an encomium to the Newfoundlanders who enlisted and fought, and especially to local boy Tommy Ricketts, who won the Victoria Cross aged only seventeen. I found this part rather out of place; thematically and chronologically, it would have fitted better near the start of the book. MacIntyre is clearly enamoured of his fellow countrymen, but the examples of bravery and self-sacrifice he recounts were hardly unique: they brought to mind similar accounts I have read of the actions of the Thirty-Sixth (Ulster) Division in the same conflict. I do not mean to denigrate the memory of any of those involved, but simply to indicate that for me this section represents another unnecessary detour away from the book’s actual subject.
Having left government service, Tudor needed to earn a living, as his army pension was being paid to his wife and children. In a complete change from his previous career, he entered business, specifically selling one of Newfoundland’s main exports: salted codfish. This enterprise did not prosper, although given the economic conditions of the time Tudor cannot be blamed entirely for its failure. MacIntyre proposes that Tudor may have at least initially viewed his commercial activities more as a ‘cover story’ than as a real commercial endeavour (266, 269).
Although he did, at least at first, regularly return to his home country on visits, Tudor’s permanent home remained Newfoundland. There, he led an intensely private existence, never speaking about his time in Ireland. He contemplated writing a memoir but either destroyed it or abandoned the plan before he began.
The general seemed to understand that he would become notorious in Irish history and that he should therefore strive to be, at most, a footnote in the records of ‘outrage and reprisal’ in which he had played a central role (277).
Displaying a similar longevity to that of his old friend, he died eight months after Churchill, on 25 September 1965. He was ninety-four. No family attended his funeral. His name is even incorrect on his small, unobtrusive gravestone (295). It is almost as though his wish for obscurity in later life was fulfilled after death.
Did he regret his actions in Ireland and wish to disassociate himself from them? Probably not, says MacIntyre. In 1960, a letter to Churchill contained complaints about Richard Bennett’s book The Black and Tans (‘full of inaccuracies’, quoted 288). There is also an anecdote about an elderly, bed-ridden Tudor being roused to anger when a visitor ventured to entertain him by singing an old Irish ballad: ‘Don’t dare sing about that little bastard in my presence’ (292). The ballad was the famous one about Kevin Barry, hanged by the British authorities in Dublin in 1920.
As is probably already clear, Tudor was successful in his attempt to make himself as invisible as possible, and this is the main problem with this book. We learn certain facts about the soldier, but it is hard to form a picture of the individual. His inner life remains inaccessible and there is not even much sense of his personality.
The exact reason for his friendship with Churchill is equally puzzling. The fact that they held many of the same values and attitudes particularly as related to the British Empire can hardly have been enough. In many respects, ‘they were polar opposites’ (13). Even MacIntyre refers to the ‘enduring mystery of the bond’ (149). What made it so strong and so long-lasting that even in 1941, when Churchill came to Canada to hold secret negotiations with President Roosevelt, he tried his best to arrange a meeting with Tudor? To both men’s disappointment, ill health prevented Tudor from coming (278). Although they both lived for more than another twenty years, they were never to get another chance to meet in person. Eventually, too, their correspondence petered out when ‘both lost interest in the diminished empire they had served and a society that, overtime, had disappointed them’ (xi).
Perhaps their friendship was rooted in memories of the exciting times they had together as young men just starting to make their way in the world. MacIntyre suggests that the adventurous risk-taker Churchill, who had stints as a soldier and a war correspondent, envied Tudor’s military career (13).
One cannot help feeling that more quotations from their letters might have helped flesh out Tudor’s personality a little. MacIntyre does not say how many of these survive (I found thirty-six listed on https://www.churchillarchive.com), nor precisely when they stopped writing to each other. At times like this I regretted a lack of specificness in some endnotes, but this is perhaps a specialist’s complaint. In his Acknowledgements MacIntyre describes the book as ‘essentially a work of historical journalism’ (297). As far as I can find out, this is the only time the Canadian has dealt with Irish history and he succeeds admirably in conveying a complicated period in a clear and even-handed way. There are some very small factual slips: members of the RIC were not ‘local people’ (29) but in fact were always stationed away from their native area; placing the Battle of the Boyne in ‘northern Ireland’ (58) is inaccurate, even with the lower-case ‘n’; the Cairo Gang and Igoe Gang are mistakenly conflated (72); David Lloyd George’s first language is inaccurately labelled ‘Welsh Gaelic’ (89), though later MacIntyre comes closer when he describes it as a ‘Brythonic Celtic language’ (174).
Tudor’s story is a sobering lesson on how a whole long life can be defined by a single short period. As MacIntyre writes near the end:
General Tudor must have realised at some point near the end of 1920 that he was destined to go down in history as a villain in the Irish drama. With that fate in mind he prudently decided to leave historians scant material to illustrate that villainy’ (299).
Therein we have both the strength and weakness of this biography. All in all, I would say it is an interesting but not essential book.