The Squad (18 page)

‘We were next taken into the office and our first job was to go through every letter from wherever it came, that went to the castle. Apart from that we got in every morning a complete pile of letters from all over the country, from England, from everywhere, whether to the castle authorities, to GHQ or to the RIC depot. All these letters varied and we got quite an amount of information from them. Especially from people anxious to give crown forces information. Inter-department, official and unofficial also came through our hands. Then I discovered we had a complete organisation within the post office itself.’ Soon he became the main contact keeping in frequent touch with Dave Neligan.

With so many Irishmen resigning from the police forces and with the effectiveness of the IRA’s counter-intelligence methods, the British were looking for good intelligence about what was happening in Ireland. In September 1920 Ormonde Winter came up with a plan, enrolling the assistance of Scotland Yard to obtain information by correspondence. ‘Anyone desirous of giving information was invited to do so by sending an anonymous letter to an address in London,’ Winter explained. ‘This resulted in a quantity of letters being received, but they were practically all written by irresponsible jesters or active rebels, and led to no satisfactory results, being for the majority, merely accusations against well known loyalists. The experiment was, however, well worth the attempt, as, indeed, is any experiment when faced with so many outstanding difficulties. Many of the anonymous communications were received through various sources, but the vast majority contained false information, intended only to mislead.’

The IRA had been able to use the whole thing to send the British on wild goose chases. When the IRA intercepted such mail, which was often, the intelligence people had no problem recognising their own spoof letters but the genuine letters gave them a real insight into their need for more effective counterintelligence measures, and they frequently learned who was secretly providing the British with information. Many of these people were subsequently killed and left with the note: ‘Spies Beware. IRA’.

Crown loyalists were under intense pressure. ‘That terrible weapon, the boycott, immensely cruel, was used against them,’ David Neligan noted. ‘No one would speak to them or to their wives or children, shopkeepers would not serve them, nor undertakers bury them.’ Winston Churchill thought ‘the prolonged strain’ on the crown officials was leading to ‘breaking down the officials in Ireland. It was necessary to raise the temperature of the conflict,’ Churchill argued according to Assistant Cabinet Sec retary Tom Jones. In short, Churchill was arguing that they should turn up the heat in Ireland to make the republicans more amen able to a settlement that would be acceptable to the crown.

In August 1920 the
Irish Bulletin
gave details of nine civilians killed in the previous thirty days by the crown and of various towns being shot up such as Bantry, Kilcommon, Thurles, Limerick, Swords, Templemore, Fermoy, Enniscorthy, Lismore, Tuam, Newcastle West, Newtownmountkennedy and Carrick-on-Shan-non. The Black and Tans were trying to beat the republicans with their own tactics by waging a counter terror. Faced with terrorists on either side, the Irish naturally chose their own as they had little to fear from them personally. The republicans were striking at specific targets, while the Black and Tans and auxiliaries were just lashing out blindly, often at anyone who happened to be around.

‘I told Lloyd George that the authorities were gravely miscalculating the situation but he reverted to his amazing theory that someone was murdering two Sinn Féiners to every loyalist the Sinn Féiners murdered,’ Field Marshall Wilson noted in his diary. ‘I told him that this was not so, but he seemed to be satisfied that a counter murder association was the best answer to Sinn Féin murders.’

‘Macready issued a proclamation to his soldiers denouncing reprisals in August. Tudor was also to issue a similar statement. Both he and Macready recognised that permitting reprisals would be fatal to discipline, but privately each of them was saying something different,’ according to Mark Sturgis. ‘If a policeman put on a mackintosh and a false beard and “reprised” on his own book,’ Macready admitted, ‘he was damn glad of it.’ Tudor expressed a similar sentiment. ‘If they sometimes give a man, caught red handed in some minor outrage, a damn good hiding instead of arresting all the minnows, it’s all to the good,’ he remarked, according to Sturgis, who personally had ‘no doubt reprisals do a good of a sort’.

There was a distinct lull in the activities of Collins and the Squad in early September. This was largely in response to the hunger strike of the lord mayor of Cork. He had been arrested on 12 August for possession of a police cipher that Collins had given to him during a visit to Cork a few days earlier. ‘He had it on him at City Hall that night,’ Collins wrote to Art O’Brien. ‘Not wishing to destroy it if possible, he hid it outside at the back behind a partition. One of the soldiers saw him hide it and drew the attention of an officer in charge.’ A military court sentenced MacSwiney to two years in jail for possession of the cipher. He promptly went on hunger strike demanding to be treated as a political prisoner. Ten others were also on hunger strike, but Mac Swiney received most publicity, because he was an elected member of the Westminster parliament as well as lord mayor of Cork.

From August the media took an intense interest in MacSwiney and he was depicted as near to death. ‘The lord mayor of Cork isn’t dead yet’, Mark Sturgis wrote in his diary on 22 August. The following week he was complaining about rumours. ‘Another this morning that MacSwiney is dead – he isn’t’, Sturgis wrote on 26 August. MacSwiney did not die until the last week of October. During September Collins managed to arrange a bloodless propaganda coup when he provided Arthur Griffith, the acting president of Dáil Éireann with the information to expose a criminal working for the British secret service in sensational circumstances.

J. L. Gooding, who was going under the alias of F. Digby Hardy, had written to Lord French on 12 August 1920 offering his services. He had been sentenced to five years in jail for fraud but was released after six months to work for the secret service. He told French he had information about arms and equipment stored in Ireland, but Scotland Yard was not interested in his information. He contacted the IRA intelligence headquarters ‘and told them all the nice things he could do for Ireland if they would only take him into their confidence’, according to Frank Thornton who was assigned to tail the man for a day.

‘I picked up one of our intelligence officers who pointed him out to me,’ he recalled. ‘My orders were just to watch him and follow him, to find out with whom he made contact and also the places he visited. I can tell you I was footsore and weary walking around the city after him. I remember we walked to Westland Row station, turned back, waited outside the Queen’s Theatre for a considerable time, then up to Grafton Street, dilly-dallying all the way, and back across town. He went into the Hamman hotel in Sackville Street and, as I was about to enter the hotel, he came out again and started walking aimlessly about the town. I was not sorry when I was relieved early that evening.’

Collins managed to get a copy of Gooding’s letter offering his services to French, so he knew the man was an impostor. Gooding met Griffith and offered to set up the British spymaster, Sir Basil Thomson, on Dun Laoghaire pier, so that the IRA could kill him. This, of course, was probably just a trap to catch republican gunmen. Griffith invited reporters, including foreign correspondents, to a secret meeting on 16 September 1920. ‘This man admits he is in the English secret service, and offered to arrange for the presence of the secret service chief at a lonely point on Dun Laoghaire Pier,’ Griffith told the reporters. ‘He asked me to let him meet leaders of the movement, especially on the military side, and he is coming here this evening imagining that he is to meet some inner council of the Sinn Féin movement.

‘I will let him tell you his own story,’ Griffith continued, ‘but I will ask the foreign gentlemen present not to speak much lest the man’s suspicion be aroused.’

Hardy duly arrived about five minutes later, thinking the journalists present were IRA leaders. He told the gathering that he was a secret service agent and that upon his arrival in Ireland he had been met by Basil Thomson of Scotland Yard at Dun Laog haire pier and given instructions to find Michael Collins. He said that Thomson ‘was the man responsible for all the dirty work in Ireland and held the strings of all secret service operating against the Sinn Féin movement.’ He offered to arrange another meeting with Thomson on the pier so the IRA could kill him. He also said that he could arrange to lead the auxiliaries into an ambush and he could locate arsenals of the Ulster Volunteer Force. If the IRA could give him information about Collins’ whereabouts, he said he would withhold the information for a couple of days and could then impress his secret service superiors by giving them the information.

‘And, of course,’ he added, ‘no harm would come to Mick.’

‘Well, gentlemen, you have heard this man’s proposal and can judge for yourselves,’ Griffith intervened. He then proceeded to expose Hardy as a convicted criminal. ‘You are a scoundrel, Hardy,’ he said, ‘but the people who employ you are greater scoundrels. A boat will leave Dublin tonight at 9 o’clock. My advice to you is – catch that boat and never return to Ireland.’

Griffith furnished the press with detailed information supplied by Collins about Hardy’s criminal record. He had been freed from jail to work for the secret service, and it made for good propaganda to show that the British were using criminal elements to do their dirty work in Ireland. Indeed, the Sinn Féin propaganda people would do such an effective job that many Irish people believed the British had virtually opened their jails for any criminals prepared to serve the crown in Ireland. This was absurd but incidents like the Hardy affair lent it credence.

On the morning of 20 September 1920 a small IRA force tried to emulate the raid on the King’s Inns for arms, by seizing the weapons of soldiers escorting men collecting bread supplies from Monk’s Bakery in Church Street. Between the raiding party and covering parties, more then twenty men were involved with the aim of seizing about a half-a-dozen rifles. One of the British soldiers managed to fire a shot and the raid developed into a fire-fight in which three of the British soldiers were killed.

Kevin Barry had a pistol that jammed repeatedly and in the course of trying to free it did not realise that his colleagues were withdrawing, so he hid under an army lorry but was spotted and arrested. Later that day British soldiers twisted his arms in an un successful effort to force him to divulge the names of his colleagues. In terms of the way others had been treated by the Black and Tans, his mistreatment was mild, but it would later be categorised as torture in song and story.

Later that evening at around eight o’clock the RIC head constable, Peter Burke, was travelling from the force headquarters in Phoenix Park to Gormanstown Camp, where some 1,000 auxiliaries were based. Burke and his companions stopped off at Mary Smith’s bar in Balbriggan, about three miles from Gormanstown. Another party arrived about an hour later. It became raucous in the bar, and the local police were called. Quiet was restored but after the local police departed it became noisy again, and the IRA police came to clear the bar. There were conflicting stories about what happened outside but the end result was that Head Con stable Burke was shot dead and his brother, William Patrick, a sergeant in the RIC who had been stationed in Trim for some time before joining the Irish Guards during the Great War, was seriously wounded in the chest. They were natives of Glenamaddy, County Galway. Later that night at around 11 o’clock five lorry loads of auxiliaries who had only recently been transferred from Phoenix Park to Gormanstown, arrived and began terrorising the Balbriggan community.

The
Irish Times
, a unionist newspaper, described the scene witnessed the following day. ‘When our reporter visited the town yesterday it presented a most extraordinary spectacle. The spacious hosiery factory, adjoining the railroad station, of Messrs Deeds, Temple, and Co., in which some 400 workers have been employed, was a mass of smoking ruins; while in the principal streets of the town several of the leading business premises chiefly those of grocers and licensed traders – were also smouldering ruins, and one street, containing some thirty small houses – Clonard Street – had been virtually reduced to ashes. People of both sexes and all ages were leaving the town, as though it was stricken with plague.’

The troops went to the home and business of James Lawless, a barber with nine children. They smashed the windows and doors. The children were taken to a neighbour’s house and their father was taken to an outhouse in the back and killed. The Tans went to the house of John Gibbons, a local dairy proprietor. They arrested him and told his sister that he would ‘be all right’. But his body was later found near the RIC station.

From the outset they were aware at Dublin Castle of what happened. ‘Balbriggan was sacked yesterday by the Black and Tans from Gormanstown – reprisal for two officers shot’, the assistant undersecretary of state, Mark Sturgis, noted in his diary. He added that the two men killed by the Tans had been ‘two prominent bad men’ and that General Tudor agreed with him that if the Tans had just been satisfied with killing them, there would have been little problem.

‘The burning spoilt the whole thing,’ Sturgis added. ‘Since worse things can happen than the firing up of a sink like Bal briggan and surely people who say “stop the murders before all our homes go up in smoke” must increase.’

James MacMahon, one of the joint under-secretaries of state, was ‘desperately pessimistic about the way things are going’ after Balbriggan, Sturgis noted. He was seen as little more than a token Dublin Castle Catholic, a protégé of Michael Cardinal Logue, without any real power. Sir John Anderson and Sir Alfred (Andy) Cope wielded the real power in the Dublin Castle administration.