During one of the most consequential political negotiations of the 20th century, in August 1941 the British prime minister Winston Churchill asked for a recess so he could reconnect with an old army friend.
The old friend was Major Gen Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, a name, by then, that hardly anyone in Churchill’s circle would have recognised.
In any case, it would have been a startling suggestion.
Churchill was busy with the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, on a British battleship, HMS Prince of Wales, half way between London and Washington at Placentia Bay, on the south coast of Newfoundland. Tudor lived in Newfoundland.
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It would be hard to overstate the urgency of the conversations on the Prince of Wales. The second World War was going badly for Britain and her allies. The war was at the top of the agenda, along with how to secure a postwar future through diplomacy.
The secret meeting venue was secured by 24 American and British warships. The US was still sitting on the sidelines. Pearl Harbor was still months away.
Busy political advisers might have seen the gesture as nostalgic whimsy by the boss. Any Irishman on board the Prince of Wales would have understood Churchill’s relationship with Tudor with more distressing clarity.
The Tudor-Churchill friendship dated back to the 1890s, when they served together as junior British army officers in India. They renewed it periodically, usually in times of conflict – the Boer War, the first World War, and, most significantly for both, in the Irish War of Independence.
In early 1920, Tudor’s life and fortunes seemed secure when his old friend called him for assistance in quelling an expanding revolution in Ireland, an assignment that would set the stage for Anglo-Irish politics for generations, if not forever.
Tudor had been regarded as a hero after four years fighting German soldiers on the Western Front. In two years fighting Irish rebels, his heroism soured to notoriety.
By 1925, faced with the prospect of assassination wherever he was recognised, Tudor withdrew to a corner of the world where his infamy, if not forgiven, would be overlooked. One battalion in his infantry division on the Western Front had consisted of courageous Newfoundlanders, one of whom had won the Victoria Cross for gallantry at the age of 17.
Newfoundland would offer safety for the remaining years of a long lifetime mostly spent in silence while his dramatic role in Irish history gradually shrank to academic footnotes and speculative myth.
Silence was a strategy that kept Major Gen Tudor safe in Newfoundland for 40 years, respectfully acknowledged for a knighthood acquired as a reward for two years terrorising much of Ireland.
The extensive Irish-Catholic diaspora in Newfoundland displayed a generally polite indifference to his presence and his private life, which included an estranged wife and family in England and a live-in nurse-companion (of Irish heritage) in St John’s.
He kept no diaries in Ireland or in Newfoundland though he had prodigiously recorded his experience in the Boer War and on the Western Front.
But he maintained a lifetime correspondence with Churchill, the “brains” behind almost everything he would be blamed for while in Ireland. Late in life, he raised the possibility of writing an Irish memoir if Churchill would agree to be his editor. Churchill expressed interest in what he might have to say but declined to be involved.
The Irish independence movement had been, for Churchill, a virus that could infect the already shaky British Empire and probably lead to its demise. He personally chose Tudor to “neutralise” the Irish menace.
Tudor knew little and cared less about Irish politics but he learned quickly on the ground and within weeks of his arrival was privately advising the British prime minister on how to win the fight in Ireland, essentially a policy that sanctioned torture, assassination and destruction of rural economic infrastructure.
Lloyd George promised him the weapons, manpower and political support he’d need to defeat the Irish freedom fighters. The IRA and leading politicians in Sinn Féin were to be considered criminals, not heroes, their rebellion was to be treated as a crime wave.
Tudor, who had no experience in policework or military intelligence, would command the Royal Irish Constabulary as a paramilitary force with close ties to an expanding British spy network run by the antiterrorism cpecial branch of the London Metropolitan Police. The fighting core of the RIC would include aggressive British army veterans of the Great War.
The new recruits would become notorious collectively, if not always accurately, as Black and Tans for outfits improvised from “black and tan” police and military uniforms.
A team of half a dozen hard-nosed former comrades from the Western Front would enforce Tudor’s tactics, enthused by what at least one future writer would call “ethnic hostility”.
It is unlikely that Tudor fully understood the political significance of his assignment. His instinct would have been to settle for nothing less than victory. It would become apparent to almost everyone but him that this outcome was never the one expected by Churchill or Lloyd George.
They foresaw a more rewarding victory through treaty talks in which they, with their imperial experience on a world stage, would overwhelm the efforts of an Irish negotiating team of idealists and dreamers who were often barely civil to each other. Which was essentially what happened, with the bonus for the British of an Irish Civil War, which haunted Irish politics for generations.
Even when he understood the nature of the assignment in Ireland and its consequences for his life – exile, unemployment, estrangement from his English family, which included four young children, and the deadly rage of angry Irishmen – Tudor had no regrets.
In a letter to Churchill in 1923, he was grateful for what had turned into a personal ordeal. “I have done my best,” he wrote. His time in Ireland was, he assured his old friend, “extremely interesting”.
But, whether or not he realised it, his life became a cautionary parable for people who chose to blindly implement the strategies of ruthless leaders; a warning to public servants that blind loyalty and thoughtless duty can create a one-way road to infamy and personal oblivion.
A footnote: Tudor, because of failing health in 1941, was unable to accept the luncheon invitation from his busy friend.
But they stayed in contact until 1965 when Churchill died a hero of the century. Tudor died nine months after Churchill, mourned by half a dozen friends, largely forgotten even by his enemies.
Linden MacIntyre’s book, An Accidental Villain – Sir Hugh Tudor, Churchill’s Enforcer in Revolutionary Ireland is published by Merrion Press
