The Nineteen Twenties
The Nineteen Twenties
Mike Waldren QPM
The events in Ireland during the 1920s have been well documented but there have been few accounts of their impact on police forces on the mainland. This is unfortunate because it was during this period that the first definite fatal shooting by police since the start of ‘modern’ policing in Great Britain took place and, with the exception of during World War II, there were probably more police officers carrying guns then than at any time before or since.
From 1919 until July 1921 a terrorist organisation, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), mounted attacks on the British army and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in Ireland with the intention of forcing the British out and forming an Irish Republic. The British declared martial law in some parts of Ireland and, in addition to deploying more soldiers, advertised on the mainland for men who were willing to ‘face a rough and dangerous task’ in support of the RIC. Most of those who volunteered were World War I veterans and there were so many of them that there were not enough uniforms to go around. Officially they were the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force but initially they wore army uniform trousers and police tunics resulting in the name by which they have became known – the ‘Black and Tans’. A second group to be recruited, the Royal Irish Constabulary Auxiliary Division, was known as the ‘Auxies’.
It has been estimated that almost 5,000 members of the IRA were either imprisoned or interned and over 500 were killed, as were 261 British soldiers and 363 police personnel. The end result of this bloodshed was the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty which saw the creation of the Irish Free State as an autonomous dominion within the British Commonwealth, with Northern Ireland exercising its option (in December 1922) to opt out and remain within the United Kingdom. However, some IRA militants refused to accept the treaty. In June 1922 fighting broke out between opposing IRA factions starting what has become known as the ‘Irish Civil War’ which lasted until May 1923.
On the mainland, small groups of young men started calling themselves ‘IRA Volunteers’. Michael Collins, the ‘Director of Intelligence’ for the IRA in Ireland, believed that they could easily become a loose cannon unless brought under the control of the central leadership and the first IRA Volunteer ‘companies’ were formed in London in October 1919. Others soon followed in Liverpool, Manchester, Tyneside and Glasgow although Collins reportedly said of them that: ‘In a manner of speaking, our people in England [sic] are only auxiliaries of our attacking forces’.
The public face of Republicanism was the Irish Self-Determination League (ISDL) which was also formed in 1919 and at first its main activities were centred on London, Glasgow and Liverpool. The organisation held rallies to whip up support and collected money for the ‘Irish Republican Loan’ – intended as a means of financing the new ‘Republic’ – although inevitably the majority of the fundraising was done in the US.
Initially there were no serious indications of terrorist attacks on the mainland. The more militant Volunteers were kept in check by being told to go to Ireland and join the fight for independence if they wanted to do more than just provide safe-houses for IRA members who were on the run or acquire arms and explosives for shipment across the Irish Sea. However, on 12 August 1920 Terence MacSwiney, a member of Sinn Fein and the Lord Mayor of Cork, was arrested in Dublin for being in possession of seditious articles and documents. He was tried by a court-martial, sentenced to two years imprisonment and transferred to Brixton Prison in London where he went on hunger strike in protest at his being tried by a military court. His case became a cause celebre with pleas for his release coming from around the world, not least from amongst the influential expatriate Irish communities in America and Australia where there were threats of a boycott of British goods.
A secret report (No. 70) to the British Cabinet dated 2 September 1920 noted that: ‘During the week interest has centred in the case of the Lord Mayor of Cork. ... Labour and the general public, which [until now has shown] extraordinary apathy towards events in Ireland, have inclined towards sympathy with the prisoner. This fact is attributable in part to the attitude of the Press. Demonstrations have been held outside Brixton prison and on August 24th and 25th the numbers were estimated at between fifteen and twenty thousand. The temper of many of the demonstrators ... was ugly and reprisals against members of the Government were freely threatened’. On 20 October MacSwiney fell into a coma having been on hunger strike for 69 days and he died five days later.
The Met Special Branch was made responsible for providing all the extra personal protection considered necessary and as well as recruiting more officers it asked for additional weapons. The force issue weapon at the time was the .32 calibre Webley & Scott ‘M.P.’ model self-loading pistol (see The Siege of Sidney Street – 1911) and thirty-eight extra pistols were issued from central stores. On 17 November the Receiver of the Met (responsible for finance and related matters), John Moylan, wrote to the Commissioner, Sir William Horwood, to inform him that ‘the present stock of .32 automatic pistols has been reduced to two in hand and 38 on loan to the Criminal Investigation Department’ and to ask ‘[should] more pistols be ordered to increase the stock in hand?’
In the early hours of 28 October 1920 a small group of Volunteers were caught by the police trying to break into a drill hall near Bothwell in Scotland to steal weapons. Officers were fired at (according to press reports shots were ‘exchanged’) and one officer was seriously wounded. It was the first sign of thing to come.
During the night of 27/28 November there were at least 18 fires in Liverpool and Bootle, all within an area of four miles along the docks. The buildings were warehouses and timber yards and the fires were started almost simultaneously. Five men were arrested and the police were fired at twice while making the arrests. At about 11 o’clock the same night six men were seen by police in London loitering in the neighbourhood of a timber warehouse in Red Lion Market, Finsbury. They made off but one was eventually caught and when a search was made of the vicinity a considerable quantity of cotton wool was found saturated with petrol. Eight bottles of an inflammable fluid were also found together with two revolvers and a ‘life preserver’ – a weighted cosh about eight inches long that had proved very effective in dealing silently with enemy sentries during World War I.
A return, dated 29 November 1920, shows that at the time the Met had 1,006 pistols of which 878 were in police stations with another 121 at Scotland Yard and even with the extra thirty-eight pistols Special Branch still only had sixty-two. Horwood’s response to the question of whether more pistols should be bought was short and to the point:
Between December 1920 and March 1921 a total of 291 of these were issued to the divisions that requested additional weapons in London but the fact that it was not prominent buildings that were being attacked created considerable difficulty. Just about anywhere could be a target as was demonstrated on 2 January 1921 when Constable Henry Bowden was shot and wounded when he disturbed a group of men near a large grain warehouse in Ordsall Lane in Manchester. On 15 January, London Volunteers tried to set fire to the Vacuum Oil Works in York Road, Wandsworth and the next day there was an attempt made to burn down a railway signal box at Barnes.
Although the royal palaces in London had been given protection by the Met since 1839 and government and other public buildings since the 1880s, a list of possible targets in the suburbs was drawn up. All were visited regularly by armed officers either on foot or as part of a motor patrol at night in a vehicle such as the 11.9 horsepower Bean – the earliest form of what today would be called an ‘Armed Response Vehicle’.
In Liverpool, a similar exercise resulted in armed officers being posted to power stations and to all important bridges. To make matters worse, a number of IRA documents were seized in Dublin and police on the mainland were warned that a systematic campaign of arson, principally in agricultural districts, was being planned. ‘The Kings Peace’, a history of policing in Cheshire by Peter Wroe, records that at about this time: ‘In Cheshire the police were supplied with alarm rockets to be set off on the discovery of a fire. Six automatic pistols were also issued to each division’ and many other forces undoubtedly did the same.
In February 1921 Sean McGrath, the general-secretary of the ISDL, made the mistake of openly declaring that ‘outrages which will get publicity in the newspapers must be carried out in England’ and this was followed by three major fires in the London area. There was also an outbreak of arson in Manchester with all the attacks taking place in the early evening. Damage estimated at about £25,000 was caused at eight farms. Six shots were fired at a farmer at Ivy Bank Farm in Sale and shots were also fired at a watchman, John Duffy, who was held at gunpoint for half an hour before managing to escape. On 21 February the Home Secretary, Edward Shortt, made an order for McGrath to be arrested and escorted to Ireland to be interned. When Shortt was asked in the House of Commons on 13 April ‘whether the same has been done in the case of other Irishmen resident in England; and, if so, how many cases and under what statute such arrests and deportations are made?’ he replied: ‘Mr. McGrath was arrested in London and has been interned in Ireland in pursuance of Regulation 14B of the Regulations made under the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act [1920]. He is interned as a person who is suspected of acting, having acted, [or] being about to act in a manner prejudicial to the restoration and maintenance of order in Ireland. I have made orders for the internment of a total of 13 other persons on the same grounds’.
Shipping McGrath and a few others off to Ireland did not solve the problem. There were attacks on a bonded warehouse and an oil refinery in Newcastle and on a timber yard in Tyne Dock on 5 March. Four days later there were thirteen fires, all started in the early evening, on the outskirts of Liverpool. Armed officers arrested five men, three of whom were in possession of loaded firearms and one had a ‘life preserver’. On 22 March Constable Carr disturbed three men in a doorway while he was patrolling outside Manchester United’s football ground. He challenged them and in reply they fired at him but he was not hit. Although the officer was armed he had no time to fire back. Four days later there were thirty-eight fires at farms in Northumberland, Durham and North Yorkshire.
In the early morning of 2 April 1921 there were fires in Manchester at the Albion Hotel, the Victoria Hotel and the Blackfriars Hotel. Those responsible had taken rooms in the hotels the day before and had started the fires before leaving. Fires were also started in Lyons’ State Cafe in Piccadilly and at warehouses in Whitworth Street, Portland Street and George Street. In the cafe, employees had guns pointed at them and a shot was fired, probably to warn off any pursuit. At Bridgewater House in Whiteworth Street four men armed with revolvers held up the cleaner and the watchman. The cleaner managed to escape and ran into Constable Boucher who challenged the men (it is not clear whether he was armed or not) and was shot and seriously wounded.
The Chief Constable of Manchester City police, Sir Robert Peacock, decided that it was time to take decisive action and later the same day he ordered an armed raid on the Irish Club in Erskine Street in Hulme. Constable Bailey and Detective (Constable?) Bolas were the first in through the door to be confronted by two Manchester Volunteers, Sean Wickham and Sean Morgan. Both were armed, in Morgan’s case with a revolver in each hand. Wickham fired at the officers and Bailey was wounded. Bolas fired at Wickham, who was wounded, and also at Morgan, who was shot dead. A search of the club revealed a revolver that had been hastily discarded by another Volunteer into a bucket of water at the top of the first flight of stairs after its owner had seen the fate of his two associates. Between the small entertaining room and the concert room two steps were removed and twelve pistols and revolvers (mostly loaded), a Mill’s bomb and a rifle grenade were found packed away in a recess, together with a large quantity of ammunition for revolvers. In the large concert room several floorboards were removed and a considerable quantity of ammunition was found packed between the floor joints. Nineteen men were arrested either at the club or in armed raids shortly afterwards and charged with a variety of offences including attempting to murder police officers and ‘making war against the King’.
Their trial started on 4 July amid tight security at Manchester Assizes before Mr. Justice Rigby Scott who was given an armed escort to and from the court. There were also armed officers in and around the court building. During the hearing (which received massive newspaper coverage and was referred to as ‘The Sinn Fein Trial’) the accused claimed that they should be treated as prisoners of war but, although two of them were acquitted, the rest were convicted and sentenced to between three and fifteen years penal servitude.
The death of Sean Morgan represents a landmark in British armed policing history because he was arguably the first person to be shot and killed by any police force in Great Britain since the start of ‘modern’ policing with the formation of the Met in 1829. It would make for historical neatness if there were no doubts about it but unfortunately there are two other possible claimants to the title. After one of the bodies, believed to be that of William Sokoloff, was recovered from the burned-out house in Sidney Street following the siege in London in 1911, a post-mortem revealed a bullet wound to the head but this could have been caused by a shot fired either by the police or, as is more likely, by the army.
A stronger candidate is Percy Toplis who was shot dead on 6 June 1920 in Cumberland. The inquest verdict returned two days after the event (the incident happened on a Sunday and the one-day inquest was held the following Tuesday) was that Toplis had been ‘justifiably killed by a revolver-bullet fired by a police officer in the execution of his duty’. At face value this seems to be fairly conclusive but the apparent haste with which the jury was formed, the evidence heard and the official outcome announced has allowed room for an alternative version to gain credence. Inspector William Ritchie and Sergeant Robert Bertram of Cumberland and Westmorland Constabulary had each been issued with a .455 calibre Webley Mark VI revolver and six rounds of ammunition from the force headquarters in Penrith after being told that Toplis had been seen in the neighbourhood. Toplis was AWOL from the army and the country’s ‘most wanted man’ at the time after the murder of a taxicab driver, Sidney Spicer, near Andover in Hampshire in April and the shooting and wounding of Constable George Greig and a farmer after they had discovered his hiding place in a bothy at Tomintoul in Scotland on 1 June. As Ritchie and Bertram set off to find him in a car driven by Constable Alfred Fulton they were joined by Norman de Courcy-Parry, the civilian son of the Chief Constable, who was riding a motorcycle and carrying a pistol that he had kept as a war souvenir. Both armed officers had returned fire after being shot at by Toplis. However, there has been speculation, which is unlikely to ever be resolved one way or the other although it is often presented as fact, that the fatal shot was actually fired by de Courcy-Parry.
There is no such doubt surrounding the death of Sean Morgan but the possible significance of the event went unnoticed. It may be of interest to officers who have been involved in more recent incidents that the investigation into the shooting and the returning of a verdict of ‘justifiable homicide’ at the subsequent inquest into Morgan’s death took just twelve days.
Meanwhile there had been further outbreaks of arson in Northumberland and Durham during the night of 8 April. At Gosforth a large wooden shed, which had formerly been used as an aircraft assembly works, was razed to the ground and the damage was estimated at about £15,000. The watchman was bound and gagged by masked and armed men and he was only released when the building was well alight after being told that he need not try to telephone for help as the wires had been cut. The flames could be seen for miles and a huge crowd of spectators soon gathered to watch the blaze. Corn and haystacks were also destroyed at three farms in the neighbourhood. In the triangular area formed by South Shields, Sunderland and Newcastle, telephone poles were sawn through about a yard from the ground on the same evening. Many of the poles were brought down and this brought the wires down with them.
Two weeks later Durham and Northumberland were hit again although this time seven people were arrested. Fires also occurred in the north of Yorkshire at about the same time. In Northumberland, a constable was hit with what was probably a ‘life preserver’ and knocked unconscious when on his rounds of farm premises but he was lucky and fully recovered. Several fires also occurred in Kent, including one at Chilsfield where sixteen large ricks were destroyed. At Port Talbot in Wales farm buildings in which horses and cows were housed were burnt down and threshing and other machinery was destroyed.
On 4 May 1921 Inspector Robert Johnson of Glasgow City police was in charge of the escort of a prisoner, Frank Carty, from Glasgow’s police court to Duke Street prison. Carty was a senior member of the IRA who had already been rescued from prison twice in Ireland, once during a daring and well executed armed raid on Sligo jail and once from a maximum security jail in Derry. After his second escape Carty fled to Glasgow and he was staying in what he was assured was a safe-house in the Gorbals where he was recaptured. In a chilling echo of the fatal shooting of Sergeant Brett in Manchester just over half a century earlier (see Early Police Firearms – 1860s), the police van was ambushed by Glasgow Volunteers who were no doubt anxious to prove to Collins that they were more than just ‘auxiliaries of our attacking forces’. Detective Sergeant George Stirton and Detective Constable Murdoch MacDonald were in the front seats armed with Colt Model 1911 .45 calibre self-loading pistols. Johnson, who was also in the front on the side nearest the pavement, was shot and killed immediately and Stirton was wounded after only being able to fire one shot through the windscreen at some of the gunmen in the road in front of the vehicle. MacDonald also fired through the windscreen and the attackers ran away when they found that they could not shoot open the lock on the van’s rear doors.
Carty was later collected from prison by armed RIC officers and taken back to Ireland where he was convicted by a military court of the two prison escapes and firearms offences. He was sentenced to ten years penal servitude but released after a couple of months under the terms of a ‘truce’ in Ireland, much to the disgust of officers in Glasgow City. Although a number of arrests were made, no-one was convicted of Johnson’s murder.
In England, Volunteers had been given the addresses of some of the families of men who were serving in the RIC and during the night of 14/15 May these were attacked and set on fire by armed and, in some cases, masked men in London, St. Albans and Liverpool. Five people were shot and wounded and one of the victims subsequently died. In response there were armed police raids on the offices of the ISDL and the Gaelic League in London but the lessons learned by the Volunteers after the raids in Manchester meant that no weapons were found. When the Home Secretary was asked about the raids in the House of Commons on 31 May he replied that: ‘Fifteen men and five women were detained by the Metropolitan Police as persons who were believed to be concerned in the outrages on 15th May. Eight of the men and the five women have been released, and seven men have been interned under the Restoration of Order in Ireland Regulations, because it was found that they were closely concerned with the persons and the organisation responsible for outrages’.
The family addresses of RIC officers were added to the list of potential targets and Horwood ordered that another 300 pistols be bought so that there could be an increase in the number of armed patrols.
On Tyneside and Teesside there were more attacks on 21 May with over thirty haystacks and a timber yard set on fire; a water main at Long Newton in Durham was blown up as was a gas main at East Jarrow. Three men, one of whom was the local president of the ISDL, were arrested. The same day a boat-house at Wallsend was set on fire and two men were arrested, each in possession of a loaded revolver although neither made use of them to avoid arrest. Two days later several haystacks were set on fire at a farm near Liverpool and a police officer, whose attention was drawn to the farm by the blazing hay, was fired at several times by three men but he was not hit. In Manchester, armed police raided an outbuilding in Whalley Range on 25 May and discovered 618 detonators, 1,719 rounds of ammunition, 2,583 high explosive charges, 28 rifles, 4 pistols and 8 bayonets. Five men were arrested.
On 9 June 1921 there was information from an informant that ‘a project is planned for next Saturday night’ and in response, static armed road-checks were introduced on the main roads leading into and out of London. In fact there was so much armed activity going on that the Met was running out of weapons despite the increases since the previous December.
The Police Federation of England and Wales had been set up by the Police Act 1919 as a representative body for police officers up to the rank of Chief Inspector and on 9 December 1921 the Metropolitan Police Branch Board (Sergeants) passed resolution No. 3 which read: ‘That the Commissioner be respectfully asked to increase, where necessary, the number of pistols kept at stations, as information has reached this Committee that on occasions all the pistols have been issued, leaving none available for use in an emergency’.
A confidential memorandum was circulated to all divisional superintendents asking for information on the name and number of stations where all pistols had been issued. The resulting reports show that in the Met’s twenty-two land divisions (i.e. excluding Thames Division), 93 of the Met’s 199 police stations had run out of weapons at one time or another. For example, on ‘P’ Division, which at the time covered the 47.37 square miles from Camberwell in inner London to Farnborough in north-east Hampshire: ‘For about one month [June], owing to the number of motor patrols arranged and barriers erected in the exterior parts of this division, no more pistols were available at stations after P.C.s operating on the motor patrols and barrier duty had been armed’.
‘N’ Division (60.44 square miles – Islington to Goffs Oak in Hertfordshire) reported that it had managed to borrow revolvers from the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield when it found itself short, a revelation that must have raised a few eyebrows at Scotland Yard. On ‘R’ Division (58.46 square miles – East Greenwich to St. Mary Cray): ‘During times of emergency such as the Sinn Fein troubles 60 extra pistols are required. A large number of revolvers were borrowed from 1st Division to meet the requirements of the Division in June last’. The ‘1st Division’ was a Met dockyard division that had been responsible for providing security at the Royal Woolwich Arsenal since 1841 and the revolvers would have belonged to the Admiralty (see The Met’s Dockyard Divisions 1860 – 1934).
There were a number of attacks carried out in June 1921 to disrupt the railway transport system. In Bromborough on Merseyside four men were arrested after damaging railway signalling and communications equipment. Three were in possession of revolvers and a search of their lodgings revealed documents, including a letter which had not been posted, describing the plan for night’s activities.
In London during the night 16/17 June at a little after 11 p.m. two men went to the signal box on Walthamstow Marshes and when the signalman, a man named Beatley, opened the door he was shot and wounded. At Bounds Green the signalman was bound, gagged and taken out of his signal box by three armed men and the box set on fire. Fires were also started at Barnes where the signalman was turned out of his box for the second time in six months, at Barking Station where Frederick Staff was bound and gagged by six armed men, at Southall where James Culley was held up and gagged by three armed men and at Northolt where five masked and armed men cut the telegraph wires, fired at the signalman and at a man who came to his assistance. There was also an attack made on a watchman on the northern outfall sewer, near Plaistow railway station. At the Northolt Junction station a porter was fired at but was not hit. The assailants bound and gagged him and took him to the booking office which they attempted to set on fire.
At about the same time in Bromley in south London a taxicab containing four men was stopped by an armed motor patrol consisting of Constables Charles Hall and Jack Lewis. The men immediately opened fire on the police and tried to escape on foot. The two officers returned fire and one of the men, William Robinson, was shot and wounded. Left behind in the cab were three pairs of wire cutters, a Webley service revolver and a bottle containing paraffin. Hall and Lewis were later awarded the Kings Police Medal.
On 19 June there were attacks on railway signal boxes in Manchester. Two boxes were set on fire and at a third the signalman, Edward Axon, was shot and wounded. It looked as though the situation was on the verge of getting out of control and in the Met an order was placed for another 500 pistols.
Then, on 11 July 1921, there was a ‘truce’ in Ireland and the effect on the mainland was a sudden cessation of attacks. That did not mean that all activity ceased and Volunteers, more often than not in concert with members of the ISDL, continued to collect arms, ammunition and explosives. J.P. Connolly, the South Wales organiser of the ISDL, was particularly suspected and the Home Secretary made an order (one of many) allowing his correspondence to be intercepted. On 13 October Cardiff City and Merthyr Tydfil police forces organised armed raids and arrested Connolly and two of his chief agents. Three others were arrested later and an examination of documents revealed a wide network spreading from South Wales to Tyneside and engineered by local organisers of the ISDL through the secretaries of some of their branches. Raids on military stores, territorial drill halls and mine magazines had been carried out and the explosives and arms obtained had been shipped by trawlers to Ireland from Liverpool and Cardiff. Within two weeks a total of eight men and two women had been arrested, all of them officials of the ISDL, and considerable quantities of arms, ammunition, and other kinds of ‘war material’ were discovered. In Newcastle alone the police seized five sacks full of explosives, while in Liverpool parts of German machine guns were included in a seizure.
The following month two machine guns and two rifles were stolen from the Guards Barracks at Chelsea as were four machine guns and eighteen rifles from the Guards Barracks at Windsor. Armed officers from the Met arrested Sergeant Michael Roche of the Irish Guards and three other men, two of whom, John Cooley and Thomas Lynch, were ex-Met police officers who had been dismissed at the time of the 1919 police strike. The third man was Thomas Kennedy, secretary of the Marylebone Branch of the ISDL. All the weapons were recovered as were two other military rifles and two sporting rifles, together with a revolver and ammunition. On the 29 November the customs in Liverpool seized ten Thompson sub-machine guns and eleven pistols on board the S.S. Baltic.
The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed 6 December 1921 and, although its provisions did not come into force until a royal proclamation a year later, it effectively created the Irish Free State. IRA members who supported the treaty formed the nucleus of the new Irish National Army which was founded by Collins. Nevertheless, thefts of arms and explosives on the mainland for use in Ireland continued. At Holyhead customs found three rifles and sixteen rolls of Sansonite explosive in the false bottom of a trunk and a rifle was stolen from the drill hall of the 5th Royal Scots in Edinburgh. In January 1922 there were seizures of arms, ammunition and explosives in Glasgow and arms, which included eight Thompson sub-machine guns, spare magazines and ammunition, were found concealed aboard the S.S. Celtic by customs in Liverpool.
Even so, ISDL meetings were reported as becoming irregular after the signing of the treaty and many of the branches were showing signs of collapse. There was infighting over control of the organisation and there was also dissatisfaction amongst the members, many of whom had given up their ‘positions’ to work for the cause on a promise of ‘good jobs’ when it was all over. In April 1922 a deputation visited the ISDL headquarters in Shaftesbury Avenue in London and demanded money, saying they ‘would blow the place up’ if they did not get it.
By May it was becoming clear that a minority in Ireland were not going to accept the treaty and were going to resume the fight. ‘Purchase agents’ for the anti-treaty militants became active in the north of England trying to get weapons and there were arrests by armed police officers in Birmingham, Liverpool, Jarrow, Dewsbury and Manchester.
On 22 June the security adviser to Northern Ireland, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, was assassinated by two gunmen in London.
The killers, Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, were both London Volunteers (Dunne was their ‘commanding officer’) and they were caught after a running chase through the streets which bore a remarkable resemblance to the pursuit of two murderers in Tottenham thirteen years earlier (see The Tottenham Outrage - 1909). Some officers were armed while others had been relaxing off-duty in a section house (residential accommodation for unmarried officers) which was nearby and, after hearing the sound of gunshots, had taken up the pursuit in shirtsleeves. Dunne had a wooden leg and was unable to run in the accepted sense. This gave time for stout-hearted members of the public to join in and the pair even commandeered a one-horse open brougham in their attempt to escape. A member of the public and several officers were wounded before the two were overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers.
They were hanged on 10 August 1922 although the place of execution was kept secret over fears of a rescue attempt. Armed officers were on duty at both Pentonville and Wandsworth prisons where large crowds gathered, some singing Irish Republican songs, and it was at Wandsworth that the death notices were posted at 8.30 in the morning.
The Irish Free State created by the treaty came into official being on 6 December 1922 by royal proclamation and another secret report (No. 184) to the British Cabinet dated 7 December noted that: ‘It may safely be said that more than 90% of the Irish in Great Britain are in favour of the Free State, and the remaining small minority are not among those who count socially, politically or in the commercial world. They are mainly young men and women led by fanatics and intriguers. A few may be dangerous but the majority have neither pluck nor intelligence. The potential danger here lies in desperadoes brought over from Ireland, who have been trained to commit outrages, and who see no danger owing to the practical immunity hitherto enjoyed in their own country’.
Two days later armed police in Liverpool arrested three men and seized 7,500 rounds of .45 revolver ammunition, six revolvers, the fuse cap of a shell, two galvanometers and component parts for rifles and machine guns. In February, also in Liverpool, another man was arrested by armed officers when he was found in possession of five revolvers, 500 rounds of ammunition, 19 detonators and 11 canvas ammunition carriers. The armed motor patrols continued with particular attention being paid to gunsmith shops and anywhere else where explosives or weapons were likely to be found. Even so, they could not be everywhere at once and during the night of 16/17 February the rifle store of the Essex Territorial Association at Stratford in London was broken into and six Enfield rifles, together with spare parts, were stolen.
On 10 March there were co-ordinated raids (not easy to accomplish in 1923) by armed police to round up the known ‘desperadoes’ and the ‘fanatics and intriguers’. Twenty-three men and ten women were arrested in London, nineteen men and five women in Liverpool, eight men in Manchester, three men in Birmingham and four men in the Newcastle area. Thirty-four men and four women were arrested in Scotland. In many cases revolvers and ammunition in small quantities were found but no incidents were reported by any of the chief constables involved and no firearms were used. The ninety-one men and nineteen women were transported to Dublin in a Royal Navy warship for internment which must have given the police intense satisfaction.
Despite the arrests, on 3 April three masked men with revolvers held up and bound two night watchmen at the Glasgow Corporation Housing Works, Anniesland, and stole a quantity of gelignite. Practically all of it was recovered by the local police who also arrested three men in connection with the robbery. One of them had been included on the list for deportation but had avoided arrest at the time.
By 12 April 1923 intelligence reports from Ireland were suggesting that: ‘Things are going from bad to worse with the Republicans: all reports go to show that in Ireland the rebel army is rapidly breaking up and cannot last many more months. Peace rumours are numerous and persistent and well informed Irishmen think the trouble is nearly over’. In a final throw of the dice one of the ISDL leaders who had been interned in March, Art O’Brien, challenged the lawfulness of his deportation in a test case through the courts in London on the grounds that, after the creation of the Irish Free State, a British Home Secretary had no power to order that someone be arrested and deported for internment to a country over which the British government now had no direct control (R v Secretary of State for Home Affairs ex parte O’Brien).
O’Brien won his case but the court decision coincided with the ending of the Irish Civil War. All those interned in Ireland were released in May but McGrath, O’Brien and a few others were arrested on their return to the mainland. They were convicted of sedition and sentenced to between one and two years in prison. An Indemnity Bill was hurried through parliament limiting the amount of compensation payable to those deported in March and giving the Home Secretary and the Lord Chief Justice retrospective legal protection for exceeding their authority. The pay-outs only served to increase the disenchantment of members of the ISDL lower down the hierarchy who were still without ‘good jobs’ while many of their former leaders appeared to them to just ‘take the money and run’. Although there were still rumours of planned attacks on prominent officials and the destruction of property they came to nothing.
It seemed that the crisis was over and the additional armed patrols were stood down. On 28 October 1926 Sir Borlase Wyndham Childs, who had been the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Met Special Branch since December 1921, was asked for his views on the number of weapons being held by the Met, in the expectation that he would provide a summary of the current state of Irish republican terrorism and an indication of whether so many guns were still necessary. Instead, what the Commissioner actually got was a minute saying: ‘I think that divisions ought always to have in their possession a supply of pistols or revolvers. One never knows what may happen. There are plenty of Irish gunmen still knocking about London. I notice in today’s paper an Irishman has been arrested with a revolver in his possession’.
Horwood could reasonably have expected his Assistant Commissioner to be a little more precise about the ‘Irish gunmen still knocking about London’ and to already know all about ‘an Irishman arrested with a revolver’ but he kept his opinion to himself and asked: ‘What numbers do you consider necessary?’ Childs replied that: ‘I cannot discover that there has been any method under which pistols have been issued. My own opinion is that every Division in the Metropolitan Police District should have a supply of pistols. ... It appears that only A, C, Z, V and Y Divisions have pistols. I cannot understand why’. Despite having been at the forefront of events for the last five years, Childs believed that the extra pistols issued between December 1920 and March 1921 were all that the force had!
Horwood and Childs had been Deputy Assistant Adjutant-Generals at the War Office together and it was probably this association that got him appointed to the Met in the first place. Horwood was notorious for preferring the company of other soldiers to that of career police officers but he was forced to give up on Childs and instead he had a meeting with some of his divisional superintendents on 10 November 1926. It was agreed that it was time for another survey with the superintendents giving their opinion on the number of weapons they wanted to retain. The return, dated 22 November, shows that at the time the Met had 1,684 Webley & Scott pistols in various divisions and at Scotland Yard (although this included a pistol that should have been at Lee Road Police Station but had been lost). In addition, because this survey was more comprehensive than that conducted in 1920, it showed up 111 single-shot .22 calibre training pistols and 270 old 1884 issue .450 Webley gate-load revolvers that had been withdrawn in 1912 as being obsolete. They had been reissued as a ‘temporary measure’ on 7 August 1914, three days after Great Britain declared war on Germany after the Kaiser’s forces had marched into Belgium, and had been in police stations ever since.
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The superintendents recommended that a handful of .22 pistols, 209 of the .32 calibre pistols and all of the .450 revolvers be returned to central stores as no longer being needed. Horwood agreed to the new allocations and suggested that the .450 revolvers should be sold.
The eventual fate of the Webley gate-load revolvers is not recorded. They may have been scrapped but if any still survive in private collections they will have, in addition to any other markings, an identification number between 1 and 931 inclusive stamped on the frame.
Note:
Reference to the pistols issued in Cheshire and the arrest of suspects can also be found in ‘To the Best of Our Skill and Knowledge. A Short History of the Cheshire Constabulary 1857 - 1957’ compiled by R.W. James.
According to ‘The British Police’ by Martin Stallion and David Wall published by The Police History Society (1999) there were 170 forces in England, 19 in Wales and 59 in Scotland in 1922. Were there any developments to do with police firearms in your force/area or its predecessors during this period of history? If so please contact mike.policehistory@yahoo.com.
© Mike Waldren