MILITARY GENERAL HISTORY IRELAND
They could arrest and imprison anyone at any time. They murdered civilians. They wore a strange mixture of dark green tunics, khaki rousers, black belts and odd headgear, including civilian felt hats. The Irish named them after a famous pack of wild dogs on County Limerick – The Black and Tans.
Although they were only a small proportion of British forces in Ireland, they were the toughest, the wildest and the most feared. They knew nothing and they cared nothing about Ireland. They were sent there in March 1920 by Lloyd George’s coalition cabinet to make Ireland ‘a hell for rebels to live in’.
Richard Bennett’s book is an accurate and authoritative account of an ugly and harrowing period in Anglo-Irish history – a period that the English have struggled to forget and the Irish cannot help but remember.
This is a reasonable and fairminded account of a melancholy episode in recent Irish history in which both Crown and rebels share in the follies and brutalities of a turbulent era. The General Election of 1918 brought an overwhelming victory in Ireland for the Sein Fein party which orginally had the aim of reducing the British administration by passive resistance. But in keeping with Lloyd George’s policies of attrition a new force was incorporated, in 1920, into the Royal Irish Constabulary and came to be known, by the uniforms they wore, as the Black and Tans. They were not the sweepings of English goals as Irish propagandists claimed but their appearances hardly suggested that they had been selected, as Winston Churchill said, “”from a great press of applicants on account of their intelligence, their characters and their records in the war””. The author describes, with clarity, the military, political and economic events of the year 1920 which came to resemble “”a counter-murder association”” until the Truce declared in July of 1921 put an end to the “”Tan”” war. A dismal record from which few heroes emerge.
First published in 1959; Reprinted by Pen & Sword Military 2010
#060923 pp. 228 illusts