Tear Gas and Empire
Tear Gas and Empire
Mike Waldren QPM
The British Empire in the 1920s consisted of about a quarter of the world’s population and almost a quarter of the Earth’s land mass. Although the dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa were by now virtually self-governing, in the aftermath of World War I the Empire actually expanded with Britain acquiring some of the colonies of the defeated nations (United Nations ‘mandated territories’) which included Palestine, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Transjordan, Tanganyika, parts of the Cameroons and Togoland. In recognition of their growing sense of national self-awareness, Australia gained the German islands in the South Pacific, New Zealand received Western Samoa and the Union of South Africa was given German Southwest Africa to administer.
It was a vast area containing innumerable religious, racial, national, tribal or local conflicts over which a handful of successive government ministers had to exercise control and sometimes this could only be achieved by force. The gun was the foundation upon which the Empire had been built and it was still used to keep order but as the world changed, so did the attitude towards the use of firearms and thoughts turned to ‘less-lethal’ measures. Although for many years there would still be almost total opposition to the idea, the gun would gradually be replaced by a lachrymatory agent (tear gas) for some police and military purposes. After first being used by the British colonial police it would be adopted by the army followed by the police within the UK until finally, by the end of the century, authority would be given for individual police officers at home to carry it as part of their routine equipment.
To understand the unwillingness on the part of the British Government in the 1920s to agree to the use of tear gas as an alternative to the gun it is necessary to go back to World War I. The release of chlorine from cylinders as a killing agent on the battlefield by Germany in April 1915 provided propagandists with a golden opportunity to heap even more vilification on ‘The Bestial Hun’. He could now be depicted, not with just a baby on the end of his bayonet, a reference to rumours of atrocities committed in Belgium, but also treading on the (daringly naked) back of a helpless woman who had been overcome by ‘Poisonous Gas’. In the background was the Kaiser, making it clear that everything was being done with his approval, and behind him was a crucified soldier, a reference to a story about the fate of a Canadian soldier near Ypres the same month, while overhead a Zeppelin dropped bombs, a reference to attacks made on civilians on the east coast of England which had started earlier in the year.
The Treaty of Versailles in June 1919 was supposed to prevent Germany from ever again being in a position to threaten the peace of Europe and Article 171 specifically made the point that: ‘The use of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and all analogous liquids, materials or devices being prohibited, their manufacture and importation are strictly forbidden in Germany’. The ‘prohibition’ already in existence was the declaration made on 29 July 1899 at The Hague that: ‘The contracting Powers agree to abstain from the use of projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases’. There was also Article 23 of the Regulations respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, annexed to The Hague Convention of 1907, which reads: ‘In addition to the prohibitions provided by special conventions, it is especially forbidden (a) to employ poison or poisoned weapons; (b) to employ arms, projectiles or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering’.
In the post-war era the British Government did not treat the use of gas by Germany with anything like the kind of seriousness with which it viewed the deaths of non-combatants and the attacks on merchant shipping. It was probably thought best to concentrate on ‘offences’ which the British had not committed in retaliation but the unremitting propaganda, ruthlessly turned out for public consumption to offset the news of the appalling battlefield losses, together with the distressing photographs of soldiers suffering from horrific mustard-gas burns, or blinded by gas and reduced to pathetically holding onto each other to avoid getting lost, resulted in it becoming firmly embedded in the common British psyche that the use of any gas under any circumstances was barbaric or at the very least not the action of a ‘civilised’ nation.
Almost a lone voice at the time was that of Winston Churchill who recorded his opinion in May 1919 while he was the War Secretary that: ‘I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. ... It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected’.
The Washington Treaty was drawn up in February 1922 to ‘make more effective the rules adopted by civilised nations for the protection of the lives of neutrals and non-combatants at sea in time of war, and to prevent the use in war of noxious gases and chemicals’. The treaty would never be finally ratified by the British Government but almost immediately there was disagreement about what it meant. In December 1921 the Anglo-Irish Treaty had seen the creation of the Irish Free State with it joining Australia et al as an autonomous dominion within the Empire. However, some IRA militants believed that the treaty did not go far enough and in June 1922 fighting broke out between pro- and anti-treaty IRA factions starting what has become known as the ‘Irish Civil War’.
Churchill was now the Colonial Secretary and he was keen to give the Provisional Government in Ireland all the help he could in defeating the militants. In July 1922 he agreed to the supply of tear gas grenades to the Free State forces. At the time the device used by the British army was the ‘Grenade, Hand, No.28, Chemical’ which usually (but not exclusively) contained either a mixture of Ethyl Iodoacetate and alcohol, known as SK for short, or Ethyl Iodoacetate on its own, known as KSK. It had been identified as a suitable lachrymatory agent for military use by Professors Herbert Baker and Jocelyn Thorpe and tested in a simulated ‘trench’ dug at the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College in London. There is a tale, probably apocryphal, that when the effects proved to be inconclusive on a tall War Office official, a small boy was offered a shilling to enter the trench and this settled the matter. The substance was named SK after the location of the trials (South Kensington).
The Admiralty despatched the grenades by torpedo boat from Holyhead to Dublin on 5 July but when the War Office got to hear of it General Sir Nevil Macready, a former Commissioner of the Met and at the time the General Officer Commanding (GOC) British troops in Ireland, was ordered to personally take charge of the consignment. He was told that, under the terms of the Washington Treaty, the grenades were not to be issued to anyone and that no one was to be told of their presence in Dublin.
Representations were made by the Colonial Office to the War Secretary, now Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, for the release of the grenades on the grounds that ‘in the opinion of the Foreign Office, who were consulted semi-officially, the Washington Treaty does not affect in any way the use of the gas grenades which have been sent to Dublin. The Foreign Office point out that the Washington Treaty is not yet in force because it has not been ratified. ... [and] further make the point that the Washington Treaty refers only to the use of poisonous gases in war and that what has been going on in Dublin is not war’.
Worthington-Evans argued right back on 25 July that ‘if the use of poison gas is condemned in war, its use is all the more to be condemned in peace between people who are not at war with each other’ and that ‘though we may not be legally bound because the Washington Treaty has not been ratified, yet we were signatories to the [Hague] Declaration endorsing the general opinion of the civilised world, which condemns the use in war of poisonous or other gases. ... These grenades are at present in Dublin, under the charge of General Macready, and I think that they should be thrown into the sea’. Whether that is what happened to them or not is not recorded but Worthington-Evans won the argument.
The Geneva Gas Protocol, or to give it its full title the ‘Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare’, was drawn up in Geneva in June 1925. It prohibited the first use of chemical and biological weapons but, as had been the case with the Washington Treaty, the British were cautious about entering into an agreement that had the potential to restrict research into gas weapons for defensive or retaliation purposes. It was pointed out that international agreements had not stopped the use of gas in the ‘Great War’ and so on 18 October 1926 the British Government decided ‘to adopt a neutral attitude until other Powers have signified their intention, and to ratify only if other Powers do so’.
In the interim, in February 1926 the Secretary to the India Office, General Sir Alexander Cobbe, asked the War Office semi-officially for the views of the Imperial General Staff on the use of tear gas against the North-West Frontier tribes and was told that its use was not recommended, partly on political grounds and partly owing to the unsuitability of the terrain. The subject came up again on 25 June when the acting Governor of Southern Rhodesia (renamed as Rhodesia in 1965 and Zimbabwe in 1980), Sir Murray Bisset, wrote to the Colonial Secretary, now Leo Amery, to ‘enquire if, having regard to the international agreements concerning the use of gas in war, the use of gas in native rebellions would be permissible’. This time the problem was handed to the Committee of Imperial Defence (on which Amery sat) where it was soon joined by another.
The Shanghai International Settlement was created by the British in 1842 for the purposes of trade and as other countries made trade deals with China the settlement grew. It had its own police force (the British-led Shanghai Municipal Police) and its own military force (the Shanghai Volunteer Corps) but, unlike Hong Kong which was British sovereign territory, the settlement had been established on Chinese soil and when a civil war erupted between the Nationalist Kuomintang, assorted warlords and the Chinese Communist Party it felt under threat. On 12 January 1927 the British Naval Commander-in-Chief China Station, Commodore Sir Reginald Yorke Tyrwhitt, sent an urgent telegram in code to the Admiralty saying that ‘a fully-equipped division, repeat division, is urgently required for the defence of Shanghai’. The Chiefs of Staff met in London on 17 January and made a number of recommendations for the supply of troops (to become known as the Shanghai Defence Force) but they then went one stage further by suggesting that: ‘The question for more immediate consideration, however, is whether the use of tear gas should be permitted against mobs. ... In the Washington Agreement and the recent Geneva Protocol on the subject of gas it is laid down that gas is not to be used in war; tear gas is included in this prohibition. That this prohibition does not apply in peace time is, however, apparently the view of certain nations’.
Tyrwhitt had not included such a request in his telegram but the Chiefs of Staff may have had in mind an event that had taken place nearly two years earlier in May 1925 after the ringleaders of a student protest had been arrested by the Shanghai Municipal Police. A hostile mob gathered outside the police station where they were being held and a British inspector (Edward Everson) ordered them to disperse or he would open fire. He then drew his revolver and after a few moments he fired into the crowd. Other officers followed suit and nine people were killed. The incident led to the creation of the anti-imperialist (more specifically the anti-British) ‘May Thirtieth Movement’ and there were protest riots and strikes in Chinese cities where there was a strong foreign influence including Hong Kong. Conditions were so bad that the inspector and the chief of police (Kenneth McEuen) were forced to resign and leave the country.
Two items on the agenda for discussion by the Committee of Imperial Defence were the ‘Use of Gas in Native Rebellions’ and the ‘Use of Tear Gas in China’. Amery believed that ‘the case in favour of the use of innocuous gases in Southern Rhodesia was overwhelming. In the past, wars with natives in South Africa had been marked by unpleasant incidents, where native men and women, who had taken shelter in caves, had been subjected to starvation and been expelled by means of smoke and dynamite. In comparison with this treatment the use of tear gas was humane’. However, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, argued that ‘if we were prepared to accept that our publicly declared policy in regard to gas warfare was wrongly conceived; that by adhering to that policy we would be in fact refusing to use a more humane weapon of warfare; and that the use of gas would result in less loss of life, it might be possible for us to approach the world with a considered statement explaining the reasons for the change in policy which was now suggested. But in the absence of such a public explanation he strongly deprecated the use of gas in any circumstances’.
In the end the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, decided that: ‘He did not ... welcome the suggestion of advocating the use of gas at the present time’ and that ‘it would be wiser to refrain from using gas until it had been used by some other Power first’. Nevertheless, it was agreed that the Worthington-Evans could send a ‘gas unit’ to China but only under conditions of utmost secrecy and gas was not to be employed ‘without express authority from home’. Amery was to write privately to Southern Rhodesia explaining that ‘His Majesty's Government were anxiously considering the whole problem of Chemical Warfare, but that, having regard to existing pledges on the subject, the time had not yet come when they could openly countenance the use of gas in native rebellions’.
Instant decision-making on fast-moving events on the other side of the globe would have been impossible given the level of technology available in 1927. Despite several attempts at incursion through the barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements surrounding the International Settlement, one of which resulted (according to The Times) in sixty Chinese being shot and killed by British soldiers, tear gas was not used in China and the subject lay dormant for nearly eighteen months before the GOC British troops in Egypt suggested in July 1928 that it could be used ‘for dispersal of large hostile gatherings’. This time Worthington-Evans agreed with the proposal adding that ‘I have consistently maintained the view that the use of gas is a humane and efficient method of warfare, and should be permitted’. It seems that, as far as Worthington-Evans was concerned, the use of tear gas in faraway Egypt was not bound by the moral constraints he had applied six years earlier closer to home in connection with the Irish Free State. It was left to the Lord Privy Seal and leader of the House of Lords, Lord Salisbury, to strike a discordant note by arguing that: ‘The position that lachrymatory gas may properly be used in the case of civil disturbance but not in the case of war is impossible to maintain. ... Not only are we committed to the Geneva Gas Protocol, but ... public opinion would be outraged by any tampering with the use of gas’. It was decided that ‘the moment was inopportune for opening the question in any form, although it was a matter which might well be taken up by the Government in office after the next General Election’.
This was held in May 1929 but initially it made little difference to policy. Ramsey MacDonald became Prime Minister and in April 1930 Sir John Chancellor, the High Commissioner for the British Mandate for Palestine, raised the question of ‘the use of non-lethal gas to quell riots’. At the time the Palestine Police Force was divided into two sections with a British Section consisting of five supervising officers and 195 sergeants and constables. Rioting in 1928 between Arabs and Jews had resulted in over 200 deaths and, with doubts expressed over the loyalty of the Palestinian Section when it came to dealing with their own countrymen under such circumstances, it was largely the British Section that had prevented the country from descending into anarchy. In the wake of the riots, 100 ex-members of the Brigade of Guards were recruited directly into the British Section but Chancellor was told that ‘under existing pledges and as the result of public pronouncements, His Majesty's Government were precluded from openly countenancing the use of gas for either military or civil purposes’.
The same month the British finally ratified the Geneva Gas Protocol but in May 1930 it was the India Secretary, William Wedgwood Benn, who found himself under pressure to allow the use of tear gas for the dispersal of mobs. In January 1929 there had been serious sectarian rioting between Muslim Pathans and local Hindus in Bombay (renamed as Mumbai in 1995). A British police officer, Deputy-Inspector Priestley, was killed and on the 6 February there were more riots. That night a battalion of British troops and additional armed police arrived. Over the next two days there was rioting in various parts of the city and on 9 February attacks were made by Hindus on mosques and by Muslims on temples. An Indian infantry battalion was brought in and the Chief Presidency Magistrate published orders imposing a night-time curfew and prohibiting the assembly of more than five persons in public places. Military and police opened fire on fourteen occasions to disperse the mobs and three people were reported killed with many more injured.
However the rioting itself had resulted in more than 140 deaths and Time magazine gave its readers a shocking account of events which included the anecdote that: ‘One savage interlude, typical of at least a score, will be described. A British sentry, Private Hopkins, was standing rigid and immobile at his post of duty, when a Pathan mob suddenly appeared, whooping in full cry after a Hindu. To have interfered would have been suicide. Private Hopkins stood as quiet as a lamp post. Before his eyes the Hindu was caught, pinioned, kicked, slashed horribly, and finally disembowelled. This fiendish atrocity was too much for a Soldier of the King to bear. Private Hopkins, according to English correspondents, fainted’. A report on the riots by a Committee of Enquiry noted that several witnesses had advocated the use of tear gas for dispersing rioters. However, the committee ‘were not able to endorse this proposal until there was reliable evidence that [tear gas] ... had been successfully used in other countries’.
Benn recorded his personal view that: ‘Whereas it is true that rifle fire is frequently fatal and destroys innocent parties, the number of casualties is limited, whereas by the use of tear gas the whole crowd is affected whether concerned in the disorder or not. ... The use of such a weapon as tear gas would produce a strength of moral disapprobation, which, whether justified on technical grounds or not, appears to me to be a final argument against its employment’. When, on 26 May 1930, Major-General Sir Alfred Knox (he had achieved his rank while serving in India before becoming an MP) asked the India Secretary in the House of Commons ‘whether he will authorise the use of tear gas as a humane method of controlling riots in India?’ Benn replied simply that: ‘The Government have considered this proposal, but decline to make use of this weapon’. The gun was still considered to be the best (or the most politically defensible) means of keeping order in the Empire.
It would be two and a half years before the matter was raised again and this time it came from an unexpected direction. In December 1931 in the Punjab in India a party of the Ferozepore police surrounded five armed dacoits in a house but they refused to surrender and opened fire. The engagement lasted for two hours during which one of the dacoits was shot dead and two police constables injured. In July 1932 Rattan Singh, the leader of a band of ten convicts who had escaped from a train, was surrounded in a house in a village in the Hoshiarpur district which was also in the Punjab. It took four hours to force him into the open and during that time he shot a head constable, two constables and a civilian.
On 6 December 1932 the local government of the Punjab wrote a secret letter to the Viceroy and Governor-General of India, the Earl of Willingdon, ‘regarding a proposal to train a picked body of Punjab police in the use of tear gas as an experimental measure’. The refusal to give authority in 1930 had been taken into account and it was made clear that: ‘There is no intention of using the gas, even experimentally, for the dispersal of crowds either in streets or in the open, but experienced police officers consider that it could be used effectively in situations such as arise when armed criminals are brought to bay in a house or other place of refuge where the police armed in the ordinary way cannot come to close quarters and finish off the encounter without incurring or risking casualties disproportionate to the object in view. ... The Inspector-General of Police, Punjab, has obtained literature from the Lake Erie Chemical Gas Company ... regarding tear gas equipment. He considers the most suitable weapon to be the Long Range Field Gun ("Shoulder Gun"), and the Governor in Council desires that an experimental consignment ... be ordered’.
This was passed on to the India Secretary, now Sir Samuel Hoare, who noted that: ‘While I am aware of the objections that have been urged against the adoption of this weapon against mobs, I do not consider that they can be applied to the limited experiment now proposed, the target of which will be desperate armed men and the possible result a saving of valuable lives’. The Cabinet decided that there was ‘no objection to the experimental use of tear gas for police purposes in India on the limited lines suggested in the memorandum by the Secretary of State for India’.
The door had finally been opened slightly but it was kept secret and on 13 October 1933 an increase in Jewish immigration led to riots in Jerusalem followed by further rioting in Jaffa on 27 October.
More disturbances took place in Haifa and Nablus and finally, once more in Jerusalem. In November, Sir Arthur Wauchope, now the High Commissioner for the British Mandate for Palestine, wrote to the Colonial Secretary, now Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, ‘on the subject of the use of lachrymatory gas in police work in Palestine’. Wauchope was obviously aware that a similar request had been rejected three and a half years earlier and so he may have been subtly suggesting that it was the fault of the British Government that more deaths had occurred when he added that ‘... If its use had been permitted during the clashes which took place recently between Arab demonstrators and the Police ... it is probable that the Police would have been able to break up the crowds without the use of firearms and that no lives would have been lost. Of the casualties, all 26 deaths of civilians and 73 of the wounds were caused by bullets’.
In a meeting of the Cabinet, Cunliffe-Lister argued that: ‘As regards our international obligations, I do not think that our adherence to the Washington Convention and the Geneva Gas Protocol can reasonably be held to debar us from the use of non-lethal gas for the suppression of civil disturbances, and I infer from the decision reached ... in the case of the Government of the Punjab, that this view is now accepted by the Cabinet’. This was not an inference that could be drawn in all fairness from the Punjab decision. It had only been agreed that tear gas could be used in a ‘limited experiment’ against ‘desperate armed men’ with ‘no intention of using the gas, even experimentally, for the dispersal of crowds’. Nevertheless, the Cabinet agreed: ‘That the Secretary of State for the Colonies should authorise the High Commissioner for Palestine to use tear gas in dealing with mobs and riots in cases where it would otherwise be necessary to shoot’.
With authority now given from the India Office for the use tear gas only against desperate armed men in the Punjab, and from the Colonial Office only against mobs and riots in Palestine, there was bound to be confusion over exactly what the official policy of His Majesty’s Government actually was. Sure enough, on 24 November 1934 Wauchope sent a secret despatch to Cunliffe-Lister thanking him for ‘forwarding papers relating to an experiment in the use of tear gas undertaken by the Government of the Punjab. I am grateful to you for placing this information at my disposal, and take this opportunity of informing you that I have authorised the Inspector-General, Police and Prisons, to employ tear gas in similar circumstances in Palestine’.
That the use of tear gas was still a highly sensitive subject is clear from Cunliffe-Lister’s urgent and secret telegram which he sent back on 7 December saying: ‘Your despatch ... of 24th November: Tear gas. Pending receipt of despatch from me, please suspend action on lines indicated’. This was followed by a despatch on 13 December in which he said that: ‘In the case of India, authority was given to use gas against dangerous entrenched criminals who were certain or likely to inflict casualties. I shall be glad to learn whether it is your intention that the use of gas against entrenched criminals in Palestine should be subject to a similar condition. ... I shall await your reply to this despatch before any reference is made to the Cabinet; and I have to request that, pending reference to the Cabinet, action on the lines contemplated in your despatch under acknowledgment should not be taken’.
Waucope wrote back to say that he had withdrawn the authority given to the Inspector-General, Police and Prisons, but that he would like permission to restore it. Cunliffe-Lister noted on 8 February 1935 that: ‘It is a fact that from time to time the Palestine Police Force have suffered casualties in rounding up armed bandits, and I consider that the authority which the High Commissioner now seeks for the use of tear gas in dealing with banditry might reasonably be granted’. The rest of the Cabinet agreed and because the British Section of the Palestine Police would prove to be a major source of personnel for senior colonial police posts in other parts of the Empire word began to spread.
Meanwhile Sir Reginald Stubbs, the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the British Crown Colony of Ceylon (renamed as Sri Lanka in 1978), wrote to Cunliffe-Lister on 4 May 1935 to let him know that: ‘He has made enquiries from the Punjab Police and learnt that the Punjab Government has, with the sanction of the Secretary of State for India, approved the use of “Tear Gas" for arresting armed offenders. ... Though the number of occasions has fortunately been few, the Ceylon Police have been called upon, in the past, to deal with armed criminals and armed lunatics, and it is very desirable that modern scientific methods, adopted in other countries on such occasions, should be made available in Ceylon’. Cunliffe-Lister noted on 3 June that: ‘The Police Force of Ceylon is a highly disciplined and efficient body, under the command at present of probably the best police officer in the Colonial Service’. Once again the rest of the Cabinet agreed to the proposal and Cunliffe-Lister also recorded that ‘I have, with the approval of the Prime Minister [MacDonald], recently authorised in Northern Rhodesia the use of tear gas rather than rifle fire if the responsible officer in charge is satisfied that a situation has arisen in which it would otherwise be necessary to shoot’.
Northern Rhodesia (renamed as Zambia in 1964) was formed by the British South Africa Company in 1911 and from 1924 it was administered by the British as an official protectorate. In 1932 the Northern Rhodesia Police was divided into two parts, Military and Civil, with the military side becoming the Northern Rhodesia Regiment. The remaining police consisted of seven British supervising officers, 35 members of the inspectorate, 40 British constables, 494 uniformed African police and 42 African detectives. In March 1940 a strike was called at the Mufulira and Nkana copper mines in Northern Rhodesia by African workers who were demanding an increase in pay. There was so much violence and intimidation that the Governor approved the despatch of two companies of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment to supplement the local police but on the 3 April a crowd of about 3,000 strikers attacked the mine compound office at Nkana, where some 150 Africans who had remained at work were drawing pay. The Northern Rhodesian police used tear gas to try to break up the mob but after it had reassembled it charged and the officer in command ordered the military to open fire. Two British officers and eighteen African privates of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, and four British and seven African members of the Northern Rhodesian police were injured. Thirteen strikers were killed and seventy-one were wounded, four of whom subsequently died. It was the first use of a lachrymatory agent for crowd control in a British dependency anywhere in the Empire.
The authorities for such use given to Palestine and Northern Rhodesia were still officially a secret back in 1936 and Sir Reginald Clarke, who from 1916 until 1923 had been Commissioner of Police in Calcutta (renamed as Kolkata in 2001), passionately believed that if the police in India had tear gas available to break up mobs then lives would be saved. His reasons were entirely personal. He had been in command on 10 September 1918 when a mob of 2,000 striking mill-hands attempted to march into central Calcutta to hold a meeting at a time when such assemblies were prohibited by the local government. They were stopped on the road by the police and a military detachment but a riot followed and it was necessary to open fire to disperse them. Twenty-four of the rioters were killed and many more were wounded. After he retired he went on record (in a letter to The Times in March 1931) as saying of the police in India that ‘its British officers are experts to an extent unknown in any other country’ and he travelled widely lecturing on crowd control during which he argued that tear gas grenades should be tried for the dispersal of unlawful gatherings.
He was particularly well received at the Punjab Police Training School and the local government of the Punjab was convinced, as was the Viceroy and Governor-General of India, now the Earl of Linlithgow. On 14 October 1936 the Cabinet, now led once again by Baldwin as Prime Minister, approved a proposal from the India Secretary, now the Marquess of Zetland, Lawrence Dundas, that ‘tear gas would be a valuable weapon supplementary to the existing weapons possessed by the police in dealing with riotous mobs and other forms of civil disturbance in the Punjab’. After the previous government had agreed to its use in Palestine and Northern Rhodesia it could hardly do otherwise but it went further by also authorising any other local government in India, which might wish to follow the example of the Punjab, to use tear gas if certain conditions were met. These were ‘that the authorities should satisfy themselves that the occasion really demanded such measures, that the use of tear gas could be fully justified on grounds of humanity, and that it stood a good chance of being used successfully’.
On 14 February 1938 a strike at a tobacco company at Chirala in the Madras province (renamed as Chennai in 1996) led to picketing and a disturbance during which the police opened fire killing three people and wounding another. Mr. Justice Horwill of the Madras High Court was appointed to enquire into this incident and although his finding was that the firing was justified, he drew the conclusion that ‘less lethal measures such as the employment of tear gas was required in such cases’. This was all the more damning because he had been made aware that the Madras Government had declined to send a detachment of police to the Punjab for training. The Punjab Government was by now considered the pioneer in experiments in the use of tear gas in India, although it had still only been used effectively ‘to put out of action desperate criminals who have taken refuge in buildings’. After being told that any local government in India could follow the example of the Punjab the Bombay Government had sent a detachment for training at the Punjab Police Training School but the Madras Government had not accepted the offer, the reason given being that ‘the stringent conditions laid down for the use of tear gas made its use impracticable’.
The Indian independence movement was heading toward its peak at the start of World War II and on 6 November 1939 a meeting of the War Cabinet at 10 Downing Street chaired by the Prime Minister, now Neville Chamberlain, considered what could be done in the event of disturbances. The India Secretary (still Dundas) said that ‘there were supplies of tear gas in India, but that in a large part of the country the police were untrained and the equipment was short’. It was agreed that Dundas ‘would impress on the Government of India the advantages, from a humane point of view, of tear gas in dealing with riots’, thereby removing one of the three conditions imposed in 1936. It was no longer necessary to show that the use ‘could be justified on the grounds of humanity’. That could now be taken as read.
A session of the All India Congress Committee, which began on the 7 August 1942 in Bombay, passed what has become known as the 'Quit India Resolution'. During the early hours of 9 August all the top leaders including Gandhi were arrested and Congress was declared an unlawful organisation. The local government issued an order banning public meetings and assemblies but a huge crowd gathered at Gowalia Tank Maidan, a park in central Bombay. There were lathi charges on foot and on horseback and when these failed, Bombay police officers who had been trained in the Punjab used tear gas to break up the mob.
So far tear gas had only been used by the colonial police but in April 1944 a joint memorandum was presented to the War Cabinet by the War Secretary, now Sir Percy Grigg, and the Colonial Secretary, now Oliver Stanley, in which it was explained that the GOC Middle East, General (later Sir) Bernard Paget, had asked ‘that he might be informed of the policy of His Majesty's Government on the use of tear gas by the ... Military in the event of civil disturbances, with special reference to Palestine’. Although authority for police use had already been given to Palestine in 1933 ‘the General Officer Commanding and the High Commissioner then felt that in war time, possible repercussions made it advisable to prohibit its use. Since the existing Cabinet authority is now somewhat stale, it is felt that a fresh ruling should be given’.
There was considerable nervousness over the suggestion. A decision was deferred on the grounds that the use of any form of gas by military personnel might be misrepresented but on 13 November the War Cabinet was asked to reconsider the matter. It seems that ‘the opportunity of the Prime Minister’s [now Winston Churchill’s] presence in the Mediterranean Theatre was taken last August to put the matter before him: and in reply to a minute from General Paget stating the case for using "tear smoke" both in Palestine and in Egypt, as a means of dispersing mobs, the Prime Minister expressed himself as personally in favour of the proposal, but that the matter would be considered by the War Cabinet’. It was explained that ‘The Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, has now at his disposal a stock of lachrymatory grenades (K.S.K.), which is a liquid tear gas giving off vapour. The drawback to its use is that if by mischance the actual liquid gets splashed in the eyes, it may lead to loss of sight. The equipment used by the police in India and elsewhere, on the other hand, is of private United States manufacture and leads to no permanent injury. A supply of this type of equipment is about to be shipped by the War Office direct to the Middle East and should arrive in that theatre within the next few weeks. We now strongly recommend to the War Cabinet that the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, should be given authority to use tear smoke in the suppression of civil disturbances in Palestine’.
This time the War Cabinet, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, agreed and as far as Egypt was concerned, authority was granted on 18 December. Interestingly, on that occasion it was suggested that it would be preferable to use the term ‘tear smoke’, as used by General Paget, rather than ‘tear gas’. Not only was it technically more accurate but more importantly it did not sound quite so menacing, a stratagem that would be employed again just over two decades later when the time came to tell the British public that its police would also be allowed to hold ‘tear smoke’.
In January 1953 the Colonial Secretary, now Oliver Lyttleton, authorised the army to use a ‘new tear gas’, known as BBC, in Malaya. ‘This gas’, he said, ‘the only effect of which was lachrymatory, would be used in the jungle to divert bandits into other routes or to deny portions of the jungle to them. It was possible that, when it became known that this gas was being used in Malaya, there would be criticism from some quarters’. The Cabinet, chaired by the Foreign Secretary, now Anthony Eden, gave its approval but Lyttleton had been misinformed about BBC (also known as CA for short), or to give it its proper name, Bromobenzyl-cyanide. It was not a ‘new tear gas’ because it had been used by the French as Camite during World War I. Under the terms of the Geneva Gas Protocol the use of BBC was permissible because the British army was engaged in fighting ‘bandits’ who were members of the Malayan National Liberation Army, the military wing of the Malayan Communist Party. It was a therefore a ‘police action’ and not a ‘war’ (to remove any doubts it would come to be called the ‘Malayan Emergency’) but it still represented a major change in attitude for the army to be allowed to go beyond the use of a lachrymatory agent for crowd control and to employ it as a stand-alone ‘area denial’ weapon.
At the time there were two main lachrymatory agents employed by police forces and their exploitation illustrates the difference in attitudes to tear gas on the other side of the Atlantic. The first, and the one most probably used in Northern Rhodesia, Bombay and shipped to Palestine by the War Office to replace the obsolete KSK grenades, was Chloroacetophenone, known as CN for short. It was discovered by German scientists in the 1870s and further developed by the US after World War I. It caused severe irritation to the eyes, nasal passages and throat. It also induced involuntarily closure of the eyes and a feeling of helplessness and panic and during the 1920s CN became virtually standard equipment in US urban police departments.
The second was Diphenylaminechlorarsine, known as Adamsite or DM for short. Although this was also first discovered in Germany, it was developed independently in the US by Dr. Roger Adams (after whom it was named) in 1918. In small doses its effects were similar to CN but in higher concentrations it caused nausea and uncontrollable vomiting. Its effects could last for up to twenty-four hours and one of its earliest uses was after President Hoover ordered the removal of the so-called ‘Bonus Army’ from Washington, D.C. on 28 July 1932. An infantry regiment and a cavalry regiment commanded by Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur (with Major Dwight D. Eisenhower as one of his aides), supported by tanks commanded by Major George Patton, used DM and rifles fitted with bayonets to break up a huge protest camp created by World War I veterans (accompanied by their wives and children) who were demanding payment of a war bonus they believed they had been promised.
After World War II another lachrymatory agent, 0-chlorobenzylidene Malononitrile, known as CS for short, gradually replaced most of the others. It had first been synthesized in 1928 by two US chemists, Ben Corson and Roger Stroughton, whose initials identify the compound. It was developed further by the Chemical Defence Establishment (CDE) at Porton Down in England where it was found that CS reacted with moisture on the skin and in the eyes causing effects similar to CN, but that the dose of CS which might lead to subsequent death was at least twelve hundred times greater than that which produced symptoms so intolerable as to force a person to leave an exposed area. SK, KSK, BBC (CA), DM and CN all had a much lower safety factor and the first use of CS by the British army in the Empire was in 1958 in the Crown Colony of Cyprus.
Establishing exactly when tear gas was approved for police use within the very heart of the Empire itself is complicated by the existence of arrangements for ‘Military Aid to the Civil Power’ (MACP). Military assistance could be sought if it was thought necessary to use manpower, specialist capabilities or equipment in situations beyond the capability of the police. A Home Secretary could authorise the calling of the army and such an understanding had resulted in the military aid at the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911.
The earliest record found to date is of tear gas grenades (probably CN) being borrowed from the army and used by the police at a siege involving a mentally disturbed man with a shogun in Barry Road in East Dulwich in London in August 1943 (see Wartime – 1939 – 1945). It was used again in June 1951 at a siege in Symons Avenue in Chatham by Kent Constabulary after an army deserter, Alan Derek Poole, had shot and killed Constable Alan Baxter using a stolen Sten sub-machinegun. During the siege Poole fired at the police and shots were returned. He was found dead from a gunshot wound which could not have been self-inflicted when police eventually entered the house.
It was brought by the army to a siege involving a man armed with a knife in Shrewsbury Road in Notting Hill in London in March 1957 and although this time it was not needed, the absence of any documented agreement between the police and the army setting out when a lachrymatory agent could be used was highlighted by senior police officers afterwards. There must have been some high level discussions over this because in October 1958 the War Office made in known that in future a ‘trained NCO’ would be responsible for actually using tear gas grenades (by now probably CS) but that it was for a police officer of at least superintendent rank to give directions on where and when.
However, in February 1959 the military authorities started to have second thoughts and expressed their uneasiness over the legal position if a soldier used ‘military equipment’ on the orders of the police and something went wrong. As a temporary stop-gap, police officers in a few of the larger forces were given training in the use of tear gas grenades by the Royal Military Police and a working party consisting of Home Office officials and senior police officers from around the country was formed to find a more permanent solution. A demonstration of CS was organised by the CDE at Porton Down in April 1962 and one particular weapon caught the working party’s collective eye. It was a Webley 1.5 inch flare pistol which was used to fire 2 oz of CS in a millboard container for use (theoretically at least) against armed besieged criminals.
In the end the working party recommended that in future it should be the police and not the army that kept CS for police use. On 20 May 1965 the Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, announced in the House of Commons that: ‘Arrangements are being made to supply police forces in case of need with limited amounts of non-toxic tear smoke, which causes temporary incapacity but has no permanent harmful effects, for use in dealing with armed criminals or violently insane persons in buildings from which they cannot be dislodged without danger of loss of life. The tear smoke would not be used in any other circumstances’. As far as can be determined this was the first official acknowledgement of the availability of tear gas to the British police and the first recorded use of CS after the statement was made was by Surrey Constabulary using the (hopelessly inaccurate as the officers discovered four times when they tried to use it) Webley flare pistol during a siege involving a mentally disturbed man with a shotgun at Tranquil Dale in Betchworth on 28 July 1966.
The lessons of Betchworth were learned and in 1968 the Met was asked to make a film as part of a national training program sponsored by the Home Office to show senior police officers how CS could be used at an armed siege. This time the equipment demonstrated was similar to that ordered for use in the Punjab in 1932 and was made by Federal Laboratories Inc., of Saltsburg, Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile the first meeting of another police working party, the ‘Working Party on Arming the Police in Time of Emergency’, a sub-group of the ‘Police War Duties Committee’, had been held at the Home Office in London on 24 January 1965. The subject of ‘the control of mobs’ had come up in connection with the role of the police if this country was subjected to ‘nuclear rocket warfare’ but it was decided that more information was needed. By good fortune Eric Glaisher, a former Commissioner of Police for the Western Region of the Federation of Nigeria (formerly the British Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria), had recently been appointed Director of Overseas Studies at the Police College at Bramshill. In an unwitting illustration of just how far the use of tear gas had spread throughout the Empire since World War II he was able to advise the committee that: ‘The circumstances in which tear gas was used ... were strikes, unruly football crowds, riots by market women and other crowd situations in which feeling ran high. ... The population of Nigeria were accustomed to the use of tear gas in such situations and did not take it unduly amiss. ... Simple basic training in the use of tear gas is given at recruit level and thereafter riot drill is given at stations perhaps twice a month’. This was all too much for the Home Office officials on the working party, particularly after the announcement in the House of Commons in May. It was decided that ‘it would be politically very embarrassing if large quantities of grenades [for the control of mobs] were issued to the police to store in peacetime and this became known’ and the subject was not to be brought up again.
By 1969 there were growing levels of conflict in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants. During a meeting of the Cabinet on 31 July the Home Secretary, now James Callaghan, said that ‘when the Apprentice Boys of Londonderry held their annual parade on 12th August, there was a prospect of more severe disorders than since the recent unrest began in Northern Ireland. ... The situation was placing a severe strain on the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), on whose efficiency we depended if British troops were not to be involved in maintaining law and order. He was concerned therefore that the RUC should have every reasonable means to carry out their duties unaided. For this purpose tear gas could be vital; and its use by the RUC would be preferable to the intervention of British troops. On Sunday, 13th July, the Northern Ireland Government [led by James Chichester-Clark] had renewed more urgently an earlier request for supplies of the CS type of tear gas which was less harmful than the CN type which the RUC already held. He had agreed, in the light of the situation at that time, and with the concurrence of the Prime Minister [now Harold Wilson] and the Defence Secretary [renamed from War Secretary – now Denis Healey], that CS gas should be supplied from Service stocks, on the condition that its use would be subject on each occasion to the specific and prior approval of the Northern Ireland Minister of Home Affairs, and that it would be used only if the RUC had exhausted all other means of controlling a disorderly crowd and would otherwise have to open fire or call for assistance from British troops’. The methods of crowd control first tried out by the colonial police and then by the army in the Empire could now be used within the United Kingdom.
During 12–17 August there was sectarian rioting in Northern Ireland with the flashpoint, as anticipated by Callaghan’s advisers and identified by Mr. Justice Scarman in his report on the disturbances, occurring on 12 August when ‘the traditional [Protestant] Apprentice Boys' Parade was due to take place in Londonderry. ... The parade itself was well controlled and orderly but, as it passed through Waterloo Place [at the edge of the mainly Catholic Bogside], some stones were thrown ... in the direction of the police and the parade. The stone-throwers were young hooligans, but their actions released the strong feeling of the Bogside to an extent that the few stewards available were quite unable to control. From this small beginning developed not only three days of disturbance in Londonderry, but the many disturbances elsewhere, including in particular the very serious disorders in Belfast’.
CS was used by the RUC for the first time on 12 August 1969 in the Bogside to disperse the mob but despite its use it was soon clear that the situation was beyond the ability of the police to control and under arrangements for MACP the British army entered Londonderry in support of the police at five o’clock in the afternoon on 14 August. It was the start of what has become known euphemistically and totally inadequately as ‘The Troubles’.
There is one further lachrymatory agent that should be mentioned. Didenoxazepine, known as CR for short, was only ever manufactured in the UK at the Chemical Defence Establishment at Nancekuke in Cornwall between 1962 and 1977. On the closure of Nancekuke the remaining stocks of CR were transferred to Porton Down and in response to a question asked in the House of Commons in December 1994 it was disclosed by the Chief Executive of Porton Down, Graham Pearson, that: ‘The studies on CR gas in relation to the skin and eye sensitivity tests ... concluded that CR was found to have certain advantages over CS in specific situations. Its potency was found to be approximately ten times greater than that of CS and its toxicity is low in comparison with the other irritants’. In response to another question in December 1998 the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Defence, John Spellar, said that: ‘We have no records of CR having been used operationally by the Armed Forces. ... CR was authorised to be held in readiness for use in Northern Ireland in October 1973. Its possible use has also been authorised on a small number of occasions where the armed forces have responded to a request for assistance for law enforcement purposes from the civil power’. It is still reserved for use by military Special Forces and is not available to the police.
The Toxteth Riots in July 1981 were a series of public disturbances which occurred in Merseyside, particularly in the Toxteth area of Liverpool. They resulted in major damage to property, arson, looting, extensive injuries to police officers, injuries to civilians and the death of a civilian as a result of being struck by a police vehicle.
In the early hours of 6 July the Chief Constable of Merseyside, (later Sir) Kenneth Oxford, gave authority for CS to be used to regain control of the streets but Merseyside only had CS equipment for use against ‘armed criminals or violently insane persons’, although this had improved considerably in terms of accuracy since the days of the flare pistol. Eighteen rounds of 1½ inch Type L3A1 cartridges, seven rounds of 1½ inch barricade-penetrating ‘Ferret’ cartridges (centre of photo), thirty-four rounds of 12 Bore barricade-penetrating ‘Ferret’ cartridges (bottom right) and fifteen hand-thrown grenades (centre right) were used during the night. Five men were treated in hospital for injuries believed to have been caused by CS projectiles. One gave a false name and address and so his injury could not be verified but in the case of the other four it was established that the injuries were probably caused by some of the 12 bore ‘Ferret’ cartridges fired from a shotgun.
There were also riots in other cities and on 15 July the Home Secretary, now William Whitelaw, announced in the House of Commons that: ‘Different types of water cannon are being looked at by police forces to see which might suit their needs. Additional protection is being provided for normal police vehicles, and the need for specially protected vehicles will be urgently examined. This brings me to CS gas and plastic bullets. Neither I nor chief officers wish to see these used except in the very last resort and under strict control, but they should be available’. When it was pointed out that by now the use of water cannon and CS had been rejected as operationally unpredictable and unsatisfactory in Northern Ireland he explained that: ‘I think that I am correct in saying that in Northern Ireland it was not so much a question that the authorities decided not to use CS gas and water cannon but that rubber bullets would be more satisfactory. It is my apprehension about rubber bullets — an apprehension that is shared by many hon. Members — that leads me to the belief that it is right to provide a wide variety of equipment such as I am proposing’.
On 28 July the Home Office sent a telex to all chief constables in England and Wales to let them know that: ‘Limited supplies of CS equipment and of baton rounds together with appropriate launchers are likely to be available from MoD sources [renamed from War Office in 1964] within the next few days’. Included was a CS anti-riot grenade (designated type L11A1) which was fired from a 66mm battery-operated launcher. It had a range of about 100 metres and burst in the air spreading CS over an area about 15 metres in diameter.
The grenade launchers were not provided by the MoD out of any sense of altruism – far from it. They had been designed and developed for use by the army during riots but by the time they were ready for operational use there was no place for them in Northern Ireland anymore. They were unlikely to be needed anywhere else because by now there was hardly any British Empire left after the decolonisation programme which had started in the 1950s and the MoD therefore jumped at the chance to shift them. In this it was given invaluable help by the Home Office which made it clear that only ‘approved’ equipment could be used by the police. The MoD therefore had the market to itself and 120 launchers were made available for hire at a rate of £24 each (the equivalent of about £70 in today’s money) for the first month, reduced by a third for each monthly hire period thereafter – a nice little earner from equipment that would otherwise have had no useful purpose. The grenades themselves cost £49 each (equivalent to about £140 today), all with a limited shelf-life, and the MoD had 3,600 of them for sale.
Despite the assistance of the MoD, Toxteth remains the only case of CS being used on a large scale on the mainland of the United Kingdom during public disorder. It is still one of the options available to the UK police and a project now is underway to develop a ‘Discriminating Irritant Projectile’ (DIP), the objective of which will be ‘to deliver a discrete localised cloud or burst of sensory irritant in the immediate proximity of an individual aggressor’.
However, that is not quite the end of the story. From the turn of the century until 1975 only ten police officers had been stabbed to death in Great Britain. It was a comparatively rare event but in the twenty-year period between 1975 and 1995 there were thirteen police deaths caused by knives and there were growing concerns over officer safety within the police service itself, some of which inevitably led to suggestions that it was time to arm the police. Tests of various commercially available chemical ‘incapacitants’ including CS and OC (Oleoresin Capsicum – pepper spray) were conducted by the Police Scientific Development Branch (PSDB) of the Home Office using volunteers (one of whom was the author) and in March 1996 a six-month period of operational trials started with officers carrying CS aerosol as a personal defence spray.
Nearly 4,000 officers in sixteen forces took part and CS was used at 726 incidents. In another 381, just the sight of an officer preparing to use it was enough to restore order. In public attitude surveys sixty-seven percent or more said that they were in favour of the idea and a report on the trials noted that ‘Officers interviewed generally spoke very highly of the CS incapacitant. They commented that it had boosted their confidence even more than when batons had been issued as a replacement for truncheons. They ascribed this greater boost in confidence to a number of factors: CS was seen as offering a lower degree of force than the baton; CS was seen as easy for even the slightest officer to use, and was particularly welcomed by female officers for this reason’. In August the Home Secretary, now Michael Howard, announced his support for any chief officer wishing to issue CS to officers on the beat. Some forces have since elected to use Pelargonic Acid Vanillylamide, known as PAVA for short, but the difference in attitude to the use of lachrymatory agents since that expressed in the aftermath of World War I could not be more striking.
It had taken a long time for politicians to overcome their fear of an adverse public reaction to the use of tear gas in the Empire and even longer for the lessons learned by the colonial police to reach home but the shade of Winston Churchill was probably looking on and giving an approving nod.
Note
I am grateful to Colin Burrows, another PSDB test volunteer (several times) and a retired A/ACC in the PSNI, for additional information on the use of CS by the RUC and on the latest developments relating to CS.
If you have any information on developments to do with police firearms in your force/area please contact mike.policehistory@yahoo.com.
© Mike Waldren