Imperial Violence and the Path to Independence: India, Ireland and the Crisis of Empire 9781350986794, 9780857727060

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Shereen Ilahi is Associate Professor of History at North Central College, Illinois. She holds a PhD from The University of Texas at Austin.

‘The theme is a very interesting one and I do not recall any other book that has dealt with the subject matter in the same way and in so much depth. The collaboration, and the making of a common cause, between Irish and Indian nationalism, is a fascinating and fruitful topic in both Imperial history and politics. It is very well written and with great authority, easily drawing the reader into the unfolding of the history.’ Denis Judd, Professor Emeritus of Imperial and Commonwealth History, London Metropolitan University and author of Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present (I.B.Tauris, 2012)

Imperial Violence a n d t h e Pat h t o

Independence In d i a, Ireland and the Crisis of Empire

Shereen I la h i

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2015 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd Paperback edition first published 2020 by Bloomsbury Academic Copyright © Shereen Ilahi, 2016 Shereen Ilahi has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3130-0 PB: 978-1-3501-5306-6 ePDF: 978-0-8577-2706-0 eBook: 978-0-8577-2911-8 Series: International Library of Colonial History, volume 21 Typeset in Garamond Three by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

Maps List of Plates Selected Chronology Introduction 1. Punjab ‘Disturbances’ 2. Inquiry, Reactions and the Principle of Minimum Force 3. The Anglo-Irish War

v viii x 1 29 71 105

Conclusion

139

Notes Bibliography Index

174 233 245

LIST OF PLATES

Plate 1. The cover image of a British soldier in India q The British Library Board. Plate 2. The entrance to Jallianwalah Bagh, Amritsar q The British Library Board. Plate 3. The location of Dyer’s firing line inside Jallianwalah Bagh, Amritsar q The British Library Board. Plate 4. An Indian being made to crawl in Amritsar q The British Library Board. Plate 5. View of Croke Park, Dublin, 22 November, 1920. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Plate 6. Black and Tan soldier with Lewis machine gun, Dublin. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Plate 7. Michael Collins and Sean MacKeon in Croke Park at the Leinster hurling final game. Croke Park, 11 September 1921. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Plate 8. Interested parties outside Jervis Street hospital (Dublin) during military enquiry into the Croke Park shooting, 24 November 1920. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Plate 9. Black and Tans about to search civilians, Dublin. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Plate 10. Conducting an official reprisal. Meelin, Co. Cork, 1 February 1921. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Plate 11. Post-reprisal. Cork, 1921. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

LIST OF PLATES

ix

Plate 12. Post-reprisal. Meelin, Co. Cork, 1921. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Plate 13. Post-reprisal. Templemore, Co. Tipperary. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Plate 14. Post-raid celebration by Crown Forces at London and North Western Hotel, Dublin, 11 April 1921. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

SELECTED CHRONOLOGY

August, 1917 Montagu declares move towards responsible government. May– June, 1918 Cabinet deliberates Montford Reforms. 1919 21 January 26 Februrary 10 March 30 March 6 April 7 April 9 April 10 April

11 April

Sinn Fein declares Irish Republic. IRA kills two RIC constables at Soloheadbeg, Co. Tipperary. Indian National Congress leaders announce satyagraha civil disobedience pledge in anticipation of/protest to Rowlatt Act. Rowlatt Act passed. First hartal (strike). Shooting in Delhi during Dyer’s family vacation. Second hartal, but first one in Lahore and Gujranwalla. RIC constable killed and one IRA killed during IRA rescue attempt. Irving sees ‘unprecedencted fratnerization’ between Hindus and Muslims at Ram Naumi. Gandhi prevented from entering Punjab. Groups in Lahore dispersed by rifle fire, killing at least four Indians. In Amritsar, Satyapal and Kitchlew arrested. Riots. Five whites and at least 40 Indians killed. Kitchin, Donald and Coode come from Lahore to assess situation. Major MacDonald arrives by nighttime with over 300 troops. Morgan ordered to take over from MacDonald. Dyer and Morgan both arrive in Amritsar by nightfall. Lahore holds another hartal and mass meetings at Badshahi Mosque. Kasur holds its first hartal.

SELECTED CHRONOLOGY

12 April 13 April 14 April 15 April 15– 17 April 8 May 13 May 22 May 12 June 23 June 7 September

14 October 19 December 23 December 30 December

xi

Dyer disperses funerary crowd in Amritsar without violence. Lahore fires on crowd leaving Badshahi Mosque. Riots in Kasur, two whites killed. Dyer bans assemblies. Shooting at Jalianwalla Bagh. 379 Indians killed. Gujranwalla riots dispersed by rifle fire. Public gatherings experience aerial bombing. More aerial bombing of Gunjranwalla. Martial law declared in various cities in Punjab and backdated to 30 March. Total official numbers dead: 412 Indians, 7 British. Afghan War begins. IRA kills two RIC men (Sean Hogan’s rescue attempt), Co. Limerick. Montagu agrees to create Disorders Inquiry (Hunter) Committee. Martial Law lifted by now in most Punjabi cities, after 581 Indians convicted of waging war against the King and another 833 for lesser crimes. IRA kills RIC District Inspector in Co. Tipperary. Riots steadily increasing, especially in Cork. IRA ambush at Fermoy, Co. Cork kills one soldier and wounds others. Military engages in reprisal against nearby businesses. Government of India passes Indemnity Bill to protect authorities during martial law in the same month. Hunter Committee appointed. IRA attempts to kill Sir John French (Lord Lt.) At roughly the same time, Hunter Committee finishes proceedings and the British press begins hearing details of Indian disorders. Government of India Act (Montford) receives royal assent. INC members released from prison.

1920 2 January 20 March 3 – 4 April 7 April 21 April

Black and Tans start joining RIC. IRA begins targeting RIC barracks. Mayor of Cork, Toma´s MacCurtain, killed by RIC in disguise. At roughly the same time, INC publishes Congress Report. IRA destroys roughly 350 government buildings. Hunter Report completed (released to public in May). Indian Disorders Cabinet Committee begins meeting.

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IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

25 April 28 April 20 May 29 June 8 July 9 July 19 July 23 July 24 July 9 August 13 August 17 August 20 September 21 September 23 September 6 October 25 October 3 November 21 November

28 November 12 December 15 December 29 December 30 December

Soldiers attack civilians in Arklow, Co. Wicklow. RIC reprisal in Limerick. Irish dock and railworkers begin munitions strike. IRA captures officers of 16th Brigade in Cork. Military sacks Fermoy again in reprisal. House of Commons debates whether to support Dyer’s censure/removal. Morning Post begins fundraising in support of Dyer. House of Lords debates Dyer’s censure. Auxiliary Division of RIC begins recruiting. Government amends DORA to allow courts-martial for capital cases. Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (ROIA). Tudor begins Weekly Summary. Macready issues Special General Order against reprisals. Major reprisal at Balbriggan, Co. Dublin. RIC in Clare engage in major reprisal for IRA ambush in Rineen. Radcliffe suggests a system of ‘official’ reprisals. RIC reprisal in Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo. Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, dies after 75 days on hunger strike. RIC in Galway accidentally kill woman. ‘Bloody Sunday’. IRA kill intelligence officers. RIC reprisal at Croke Park. Two IRA leaders killed while in custody at Dublin Castle. At least 40 people from both sides were killed in total. IRA ambush Auxiliaries at Kilmichael, Co. Cork. Auxiliaries burn Cork in reprisal. Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary put under martial law. Auxiliary cadet kills two civilians in Dunmanway, Co. Cork. First ‘official reprisal’ in Midleton, near Cork. Martial law extended to Clare, Kilkenny, Waterford and Wexford.

1921 2 February 3 February 9 February

IRA ambush at Clonfin, Co. Longford kills four Auxiliaries. IRA ambush at Dromkeen, Co. Limerick. Auxiliaries ‘loot’ Trim, Co. Meath. Auxiliaires remove two prisoners from Dublin Castle and kill them in a field.

SELECTED CHRONOLOGY

19 February 20 February 25 February 19 March 25 May 15 April 17 April 30 April 3 – 12 June 11 July 6 December

xiii

General Crozier resigns as head of Auxiliary Division. Police kill 12 IRA men at Clonmult. Lloyd George starts to think RIC and Auxiliary a problem. IRA ambush kills ten at Crossbarry. IRA burns Custom House in Dublin. About 100 IRA arrested. Auxiliaries who killed two prisoners found not guilty. Accidental reprisal at Shannon Hotel, Co. Limerick. Sir John French resigns. Courts-martial for ‘looting of Trim’. All found not guilty. Anglo-Irish cease-fire. Treaty ending the Irish War of Independence.

INTRODUCTION

Irish history remains an ‘ethnically ghettoized’ subject. The scholarship of things Irish appeals ‘primarily to those of Irish birth or descent’, and the highly politicized nature of Irish history, whether ‘nationalist’ or ‘revisionist’, tends to insulate it from transnational comparisons.1 Studies of Ireland’s past are therefore received with an eye toward the present conflict over Northern Ireland, leaving little propensity to break the island out of its insularity, either by comparative work or by more broadly defined studies of imperialism or globalization. This book contributes to a burgeoning effort among recent scholars to create a new direction. In a recent attempt to map the future of Irish studies, Liam Harte argued: To have effective force, an Irish Studies heuristic should upset the order of things, should destabilize canons and disturb established categories of knowledge . . . in directing students’ attention to the historical specificities that make Ireland an instructive model for the formation and reconfiguration of cultural identities within the overlapping force fields of empire and emigration, decolonization and globalization, modernity and tradition.2 My work participates in this potentially ‘upsetting’ endeavour by comparing aspects of the Anglo-Irish War for Independence with the British imposition of martial law in the Indian province of Punjab just after the Great War. Few think to compare India with Ireland, and fewer still with regard to British violence in each place after World War I.3 Yet there are important reasons for drawing those comparisons. The two countries shared important dynamics in national development, including identities based on religion and vernacular language. In India it was an issue between Hindi and Urdu, while in Ireland, (mostly) Catholics fought to revive Irish Gaelic from the brink of extinction.4 Both places experienced militant forms of

2

IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

nationalism, in addition to constitutional forms, and both found independence at the cost of partition.5 Of course, they had their differences in size, culture, economics, linguistics and, most obviously, proximity to England. And although India was not host to a settler society as Ireland had been, it did experience its own parallel to the Anglo-Irish: a specific sort of colonial presence called the Anglo-Indian.6 More importantly, British officials often equated the fate of Ireland with India’s, partly because what was allowed to happen in one part of the empire could have direct consequences for the remainder.7 Ireland’s fate as England’s ‘first colony’ could influence what might be possible for India’s future as England’s largest and most prized possession. Referring to Ireland as a ‘colony’ and comparing it to another part of the empire can be problematic because, constitutionally, Ireland formed part of the United Kingdom and was, in significant ways, different from other parts of the empire.8 The issue of race further complicates Ireland’s usefulness for colonial comparisons. Whereas today the Irish across the world appear ostensibly ‘white’, the Irish originally found themselves scattered across a wide spectrum of a complicated system of British racial hierarchies, with the vast majority of Catholic, Gaelic Irish at the very bottom of the social ladder, only a rung above the ‘Hottentots’ of South Africa.9 There was no one-to-one correlation between Irish and Indian, but rather in each part of the empire, some negative racial stereotypes accompanied the justification for imperial rule.10 Race is, after all, a socially constructed idea based on real or imagined genotypical and phenotypical characteristics of a group of people, often labelled by other groups, and thus an expression of power relations in a particular context.11 It, along with notions of class and gender, is conflated within systems of power. As a result, racial attitudes are not necessarily about colour, but about relations of power.12 As these contexts changed, so did racial assumptions. Negative racial assumptions about simian-like, non-human Irishmen constituted a vibrant part of nineteenth-century British imagination, and those ideas had not disappeared completely by the end of World War I.13 The early twentieth century’s leading ‘imperial spokesman and organizer’ and advisor to the government on Irish affairs, Lionel Curtis, believed the British race was the best in the world, but also that ‘non-Britons could become members of the British race if properly “educated”’. He conflated race and culture, but only to an extent because, when it came to Indians, Curtis cautiously supported the idea of eventual responsible government in India. He coined the term ‘dyarchy’, and greatly influenced India’s Secretary of State Edwin Montagu as he developed his power-sharing reforms. Curtis hoped the raj would ‘foster political aspirations in India instead of repressing them’, and he desired the eventual establishment of an imperial federation that would

INTRODUCTION

3

include the non-white empire.14 Non-whites would, of course, be prevented from overwhelming the priorities of the white empire in his vision, just as Indian immigration throughout the Commonwealth would have to be controlled. Curtis embodied the new, liberal impulses of the postwar world, including ‘a welcome challenge to the assumption that the white man could claim to dominate the world’, for, as Curtis noted, ‘Our dominant position has made us unloveable’, in India and elsewhere.15 Regarding Ireland, Curtis’s negotiations and redefinitions of Dominion Status were key to the establishment of the Free State Treaty at the end of 1921.16 He, too, deplored the use of repression, describing the display of imperial power and armoured cars on the main streets of Dublin ‘as if monsters of the Pleistocene age had revisited the earth to dominate mortals’, while the general Irish ‘demeanour was one of contempt rather than fear’.17 By 1931, General Frank Crozier, who had commanded the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) during the Anglo-Irish War, also came around to a more liberal conception of race. He noted that ‘English “gentlemen” who beat and kick coloured men in the country of those coloured men . . . are becoming fewer in number every day’. He continued, ‘the “white” outlook against “colour” is one of snobbery, and that snobbery is therefore affecting the Peace of India and the world’.18 Negative racial attitudes towards the Irish persisted during the AngloIrish War. A staff officer in Cork, Major Bernard Montgomery, ‘regarded all [Irish] civilians as “Shinners” [Sinn Feiners]’.19 In making this statement, he exemplified the tendency of much of the RIC to view the IRA as enemies indistinguishable from civilians, which was further complicated by the racial distinction between the new recruits and the host population. Not only were the Black and Tans not Irish, but also they brought with them attitudes that they shared with higher-ranking military and political officials. For example, in one of a myriad of attempts by Sir Henry Wilson to persuade Churchill to crack down on the IRA, he wrote that Dublin Castle must ‘declare martial law in Ireland and stamp the vermin out’.20 Depicting the insurgents as an undesirable, subhuman infestation, he warned, ‘We must stamp out these murderous pests or we shall be ruined’.21 Wilson was not alone in his negative perceptions of Irish nationalists. Upon his appointment as Divisional Commander of the RIC, the retired brigadier general, Cyril Prescott-Decie, characterized the Irish in general as ‘wanting in moral and physical courage and easily coerced’.22 In 1920, the newly appointed Commander-In-Chief of Ireland, General Sir Nevil Macready, admitted how unhappy he was at his new position, stating, ‘I loathe the country [. . .] and its people with a depth deeper than the sea’.23 And Bonar Law freely admitted his belief that ‘the Irish were an inferior race’.24 The Black and Tans often referred

4

IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

to the Irish as ‘natives’, and one officer in particular explained, ‘I don’t like the Irish. I don’t like their soft Irish accent, their soft Irish faces, their soft Irish habits or anything soft or Irish about them’.25 Thus, historian Charles Townshend argued that ‘the problem of Anglo-Irish understanding has always been much more of a racial one than most people are prepared to admit’.26 The British contempt for Ireland included a view of them as ‘a quaint, childlike race, often incompetent, and easily terrorized or led by extremists into violent behaviour’.27 However, race is ‘a notoriously slippery term’, with varied and contradictory meanings, and is often conflated with culture.28 Although race remained a central component of British imperial discourse, it is not clear where exactly the Irish fell in the racial hierarchy vis-a`-vis India by the end of the Great War.29 One might presume that in most Liberal minds, they were closer to European whites than were Indians, not necessarily because of their objective skin colour, but rather because through a complicated history they had already won the right to Home Rule (in principle, although it remained unclear in the early war years how Britain would implement it against Ulster resistance). Thus, the Irish had, by the first third of the twentieth century if not sooner, relatively less English racism to counter than Indians. But that is not to say that racial assumptions were not made against them.30 Victorian fears, whether real or imagined, of an imperial ‘domino’ effect beginning with Ireland and ending with India also make comparative case studies worthwhile.31 Irish republicanism was international in its outlook, with facets seeking support from or contributing to nationalist movements in other parts of the globe.32 British intelligence officers worried constantly about Indian and Irish radicals working together since World War I.33 Moreover, a disproportionate number of Catholic Irish and Anglo-Irish participated in the imperial project, especially in India, as administrators, military officers, soldiers, missionaries, doctors and the like.34 The dominant themes of nationalist Irish Catholic freedom fighters make it uncommon for lay readers to think of Irishmen as imperialists as well, whether as migrants, merchants, missionaries, soldiers, or administrators. Yet, ‘For the Irish, the Empire was both an agent of liberation and of oppression: it provided both the path to social advancement and the shackles of incarceration’.35 Lastly, Ireland was routinely discussed by British officials in terms of the empire rather than as part of the metropole, and by the same token, most Irish thought of themselves as colonial subjects.36

Imperial Crisis This book tells a story of British imperial violence in India and in Ireland just after World War I. The experience and immediate aftermath of the

INTRODUCTION

5

Great War broke sharply with long-held nineteenth-century assumptions about the nature of war, the nature of humankind, and the nature of international politics. For Britain and its empire, the war produced an ideological and political watershed. New technologies of warfare increased the destructive power of weapons, which produced unprecedented loss of human life and material resources. Britain’s empire supported the war effort with manpower and material from New Zealand to Egypt and India, and upon war’s end, the empire found itself, like Britain and the rest of Europe, emotionally scarred and economically drained. At the same time that Britain looked to its empire as a vital source for postwar economic recovery through trade and foreign investment, the imperial idea itself came under attack. Europeans fought side-by-side with Indians, Arabs and Africans, with a radicalizing effect on populations under European control. India contributed more than £146 million to the war effort, suffered severe inflation, and sent at least half a million men to fight in the Great War, including 400,000 from the Punjab province. Indians became well versed in President Wilson’s ideological picture of a future world of selfdetermining nation-states. Wilson’s rhetoric gave no indication that his vision applied only to the European world, and Indians expected that their wartime loyalty and sacrifices would be rewarded with a significant shift toward self-government.37 In a desperate attempt to keep India’s loyalty during the war, Montagu announced in 1917 that Britain would, at the conclusion of the war, move toward ‘the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’.38 Despite the vague language, independence appeared a real possibility within the near future. Britain honored the concept of self-determination yet again in 1921 when the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom was reconceptualized to accommodate the departure of the Irish Free State. Ten years later, nationalist pressure forced relations with Ireland, along with the self-governing Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to be defined by the new concept of a British Commonwealth of independent nations freely associating with each other. Ostensibly, it seemed that the Great War succeeded in pushing Britain slowly away from the imperial idea. An historian of the British in India, Clive Dewey, has argued that the carnage in the trenches alone sufficed to radically alter ‘the world-view’ of those British serving in the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Dewey claimed, ‘muscular Christianity and Tory imperialism were implicated in the slaughter [. . .] A whole generation wanted something better’.39 But the post-World War I world was far from post-colonial. Britain’s will to empire was very much alive even as the imperial idea was under attack by Wilsonian notions of

6

IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

self-determination and radicalized nationalists. British statesmen sought to enlarge the empire to its greatest extent with the inclusion of former German and Ottoman territories, while placating moderate nationalist sentiments with gradual moves toward power sharing. Indian nationalists, revolutionized by the rhetoric and the trauma of war, expected ‘something better’ than what Dewey’s reformed generation of civil service officers and Montagu, felt prepared to offer. So whereas Indian expectations about their post-war status had been high, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 came as a grave disappointment. Instead of a major shift toward Indian self-government, Montagu and the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, offered India dyarchy: a system of power-sharing in which Indians could be elected to hold office at the provincial level only in particularly innocuous sectors such as education, agriculture and public works. The more important areas of revenue, finance, law and order were reserved for British officials responsible not to an Indian electorate, but rather to the British governor of the province. The assumptions behind dyarchy, evident to contemporary Indian nationalists, included the notion that India must be introduced to self-government gradually, perhaps even over hundreds of years. While the British were willing to train Indians in the art of governing their own affairs, the pace of that training would be remarkably slow.40 Whereas Indian elites felt their high hopes crushed, this modest, albeit unprecedented, move towards eventual Indian self-government horrified diehard imperialists who were not yet ready to contemplate the eventual dissolution of the empire, even if it were a hundred years in the future. Meanwhile, Irish nationalists who had been waiting since 1912 for the implementation of Home Rule, a constitutional arrangement in ‘devolution’ whereby an Irish parliament would govern a majority of its domestic affairs, found their aspirations frustrated by the Great War. Westminster had agreed to implement Home Rule by September of 1914, but as hostilities commenced in August, Britain tabled Home Rule until the end of the war. A small group of radical Irish nationalists attempted an uprising on Easter 1916, declaring the island an independent republic. Britain’s forceful response to the rebellion alienated the majority of Irish public opinion, which had until this time loyally supported the war effort. By war’s end, Home Rule became disappointingly too little to satisfy the burgeoning numbers of Irish Republicans who also expected the right to Wilsonian self-determination.41 Ironically, while working out the details of the Government of Ireland Act to grant Home Rule at the conclusion of the Great War, the British Cabinet Committee contemplated implementing a form of dyarchy in Ireland (similar to what they implemented in India shortly thereafter). This involved reserving a number of powers to Britain, such as defence, foreign policy,

INTRODUCTION

7

transportation, agriculture, health and postal services.42 These deliberations took place in the wake of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, but whereas in India the raj was prepared to allow self-government at the provincial level in matters such as health and agriculture, the cabinet was not prepared to offer the same to Ireland, initially. Strikingly, the British seemed, at one point, willing to give India more local self-government than Ireland in 1919.43 Thus, Britain, India and Ireland were caught in a nexus of competing visions of the new world that the Great War had created. This clash of expectations, combined with the economic and psychological shock of World War I, resulted in what historians have termed a ‘crisis of empire’ that would force British imperialists to change their methods, though not their ultimate aims, in maintaining influence over imperial subjects.44 The ensuing predicament resulted in a violent British attempt to roll back the clock. Spearheading this reaction were the remnants of ‘muscular [. . .] Tory Imperialism’, refusing to accept any loss of relevance in the postwar world. World War I managed, for some sections of the British public, to discredit the world view of pre-war imperialism, characterized by brute force and a dogged determination to maintain the territorial integrity of the British Empire. But for others, the war painfully presaged the eclipse of British global power, however distant in the future. To committed Conservative imperialists, postwar Indian and Irish demands for independence appeared nearly as dangerous as the Liberal British government’s cautious gestures in that direction. Somebody had to stand up for the empire, before it all was lost. The conflict between humanitarians and the more unapologetic proponents of imperial force occurred in debates about violence, constitutionalism and law that transpired in response to a global wave of protests against British rule erupting from Amritsar to Dublin. Egyptians angry at their exclusion from the Paris Peace Conference (among other reasons) began rioting, sabotaging and assassinating British Army officials in March 1919. The following month, serious clashes between Arabs and Jews in Palestine began to drain British resources, and shortly thereafter, Britain found itself embroiled in a war with Afghanistan. Just over a year later, Iraq exploded in rebellion. Meanwhile, Gandhi’s rise to leadership in India resulted in mass demonstrations and strikes, mostly (but not always) in the vein of non-violent civil disobedience, and this coincided with a remarkably successful Irish guerilla war for independence culminating in the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 (although the six counties in the North remained part of the United Kingdom). Colonial nationalists, radicalized by the war and notions of selfdetermination, comprised only the tip of the iceberg of this imperial crisis. Britain also faced the three-headed Cerberus of fiscal insolvency, Bolshevism

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and Pan-Islamism. After all, British troops remained committed to the White forces of the Russian crown until 1921, and maintained a presence in Mesopotamia. Moreover, domestic unrest accompanied the ailing economy, as did the demand to demobilize soldiers after the Great War. The world had changed considerably since 1914, but Europe’s commitment to keep its empire had not. During the years between the two great World Wars, Britain replaced formal control with informal influence where necessary in order to appease moderate nationalists and to reduce both the political and economic costs of maintaining a formal empire in the face of marked nationalist resistance. International pressure from America, the ostensible champion of self-determination, also played a role in this imperial transformation. Thus, it became less desirable to use coercion as Britain hoped to avoid overextending itself and drawing international criticism. Liberal imperialists hoped also to reform the excesses of empire in this context, believing strongly in Britain’s rule of law and justice. From 1919 to 1921, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) waged a war for independence and won Dominion Status for three-quarters of the island. Britain’s use of ‘Black and Tan’ paramilitary units and exemplary punishment against the civilian population, most of whom appeared indistinguishable from IRA guerrilla warriors, garnered a mixed reaction among notable politicians. British figures drew parallels between reprisals in Ireland and the use of force against Indians in the Punjab, in some cases to argue for the legitimacy of imperial violence and, in other cases, to question the very nature of the imperial enterprise.

The Amritsar Massacre At what point does killing become a massacre? The term itself is problematic, and suggests not only that those killed were murdered on a large scale, but also that the number of dead is high. But how is one to judge how many deaths amount to a massacre? On 13 April 1919, when General Dyer opened fire and killed roughly 400 or more peacefully assembled, unarmed Indians in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, the event was labelled a massacre. One-and-a-half years later, on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 21 November 1920, members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) fired upon an unarmed crowd attending a Gaelic football game at Croke Park, Dublin. Here, the death of 12 civilians received the same classification in public discourse. Of course, a ‘massacre’ could even be used to describe the unlawful killing of one person, and here is the crucial point: the use of the word ‘massacre’ indicates one’s personal relationship to the event and its’ injustice. However, when historians have used this term, usually as part of a catchy title of their book or article, it has not necessarily

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meant that they were unsympathetic to Dyer’s position or to those who supported him. Rather, the word seems to suggest that what occurred in the Punjab and, by extension, in Ireland, was both tragic and violent. It is the nature of this tragedy that is up for debate. It will be useful to discuss first how scholars have written about the shooting at Amritsar before turning to a consideration of the ways in which this event has been compared to Ireland. The main issues of contention have to do with Dyer’s reasons for opening fire and how justified he was in doing this, thereby making an argument about the extent to which Dyer represented the violence inherent in the imperial system. As early as 1920, Benjamin Guy Horniman, a rare Anglo-Indian who both criticized the raj and witnessed events in Amritsar, blamed the entire British administration in India for relying on a policy of ‘terror’ to keep India subdued.45 He argued that Dyer’s actions were that of a brute, done for brutality’s sake, and he was joined in this opinion by an Indian nationalist contemporary, Pearay Mohan.46 The British government launched an investigation into the violence in India comprised of five British members and three Indians, commonly known as the Hunter Committee. The committee released its findings to the public, along with seven volumes of testimony and reports, and so others quickly took up the discussion.47 Sir Charles Gwynn explained Dyer’s actions as the result of his mistaken sense of duty: he violated the principle of using only the ‘minimum force’ necessary to maintain law and order, and for this only his personal judgement was to blame.48 Had he implemented the ‘rule of law’ according to the principles of ‘good government’ in the way that a ‘good’ British imperialist should, this tragedy could have been averted. The Conservative British journalist Ian Colvin’s 1929 biography of Dyer vindicated him completely. According to him, Dyer wanted badly to punish those who had engaged in a riot on 10 April that resulted in some British deaths, but had to wait for the opportunity. This ‘unexpected gift of fortune’ presented itself three days later when Punjabis (mostly Sikhs) gathered in Jallianwala Bagh in defiance of his order against public assembly. Paradoxically, Colvin also suggested Dyer’s shooting as an act of self-defence because his force was small and the crowd was ‘so big that had it rushed [Dyer’s] little force it could have destroyed it’. All this, Colvin asserted, saved India from further bloodshed because India was on the verge of another mutiny. General Dyer, therefore, emerged as ‘a humane man’ whose motive for shooting ‘was a motive of humanity’. 49 A little over three decades later, while the British Empire was quickly unraveling across Africa in the 1960s, scholarly interest in the ‘Amritsar Massacre’ returned with apologies for Dyer’s ‘mistake’. Rupert Furneaux’s

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monograph offered a physiological explanation for Dyer’s action: Dyer’s arteriosclerosis. Blood literally rushed to Dyer’s head, impairing his judgement while he was under severe mental stress at the Bagh. Therefore, he incorrectly perceived that the crowd was about to rush him and fired for self-defence.50 British historian Brian Bond’s 1963 article emphasized Colvin’s view that Dyer averted a mass rising and acted dutifully, and that the loss of his command was a ‘disaster’ for him. His censure also showed the world that Britain would hesitate to use force to keep the empire, which was, in his view, the reason that this event signalled the end of British India.51 In 1964, a former British Army officer who had also served in the Indian Army just before independence, Arthur Swinson, took issue with Furneaux’s assessment. Swinson interviewed Dyer’s personal bodyguard, Sergeant W. J. Anderson of the 25th City of London Cyclist Battalion, who was with Dyer at the Bagh. Anderson reported that during the shooting, ‘Dyer seemed quite calm and rational. Personally, I wasn’t afraid. I saw nothing to be afraid about. I’d no fear that the crowd would come at us’. This testimony, Swinson believed, ‘destroys the theory [. . .] that Dyer was subject to a mental disorder at this time [. . .] [H]e was calm, lucid, and in control of himself. Rightly or wrongly, he knew just what he intended to do, and did it’.52 Swinson focused on the argument that Dyer ended a rebellion that was spreading throughout the Punjab. The very presence of Indians assembled despite Dyer’s ban on assemblies proved that the crowd was in a state of rebellion and this justified the shooting. If Dyer had not opened fire, he argued, the crowd would have begun rioting after the political speeches it was listening to had sufficiently fired it up. Swinson wrote, ‘If Dyer had simply said: “I fired because I wanted to put down the uprising in Amritsar, thereby stabilizing the situation in my area”, it is difficult to see how anyone could have condemned him’. And Swinson further explained that Dyer ‘was steeped in the Punjab tradition: the belief in immediate and decisive action. There was also his attitude towards women which was gallant in the extreme [. . .] women represented something infinitely precious; their safety was an absolute charge’.53 In other words, Swinson sympathized with Dyer for acting to protect whites in India, especially white women, while in the difficult position of aiding the civil power in putting down a rebellion.54 In 2005, Nigel Collet, also a retired British Army officer, wrote a new biography of Dyer that returned to the idea that he alone made a mistake, but explained it as the result of Dyer’s peculiar personality. ‘In his deeds, as in the circumstances of his life, Dyer was unique’, as Collet portrayed him as a shy boy afraid of being laughed at who grew into an insecure man with a quick temper who mishandled the situation at the Bagh.55 Historian Nick Lloyd’s recent reappraisal suggests that, due to rumour and bad information, Dyer

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panicked when he found a crowd larger than he had expected, opened fire out of fear that the crowd might overrun his force, and thereafter lied about it as if he had always intended to shoot without warning.56 The second major theme surrounding past scholarship about the Amritsar affair has to do with a debate about the British Empire as a relatively benign, non-violent regime. Focusing on the personality and judgements of General Dyer typically results in a narrative that depicts the Amritsar massacre as anomalous rather than as a salient example of an inherently violent system.57 Collet perpetuated the myth of the singularity of the violence in the Punjab by stating, ‘Nowhere in the world since the Indian Mutiny of 1857 have the British turned such violence upon a civilian population. Not since 1919 has anything approaching what he did been repeated’.58 The idea that the shooting at Amritsar was a singular event is rooted in mid-Victorian conceptions of the raj as ‘a moral, “civilized”, and “civilizing” regime’.59 But others have considered the ways in which Dyer’s use of force was endemic to the imperial system. Raja Ram took this idea to an extreme, arguing that Punjab Lieutenant Governor Michael O’Dwyer ‘thought out a strategem’ of ‘two successive stages: first to provoke the innocent masses to commit violence somehow, and then make that a pretext to pounce upon them and crush them through force’.60 In this scenario, Ram argued, ‘General Dyer had not acted on his own, but had just played the part assigned to him by the British bureaucracy which had plotted the design’.61 But this is unconvincing, partly because Ram uses little evidence to substantiate his contentions. It is not clear why the Punjab government would feel compelled to act in this manner or why it would be willing to risk British lives in order to have an excuse to crack down on the Punjabi population. Also, if the violence had been as premeditated as Ram suggests, then the Punjab would have had a number of soldiers readily available for deployment, which indeed it did not have on 10 April.62 In analysing Dyer’s testimony to the Hunter Committee, Ram made the more persuasive point that he shot at the crowd ‘to strike terror in the whole of Punjab’ in order to ‘crush the nationalist spirit of the people’.63 In an article, military historian D. George Boyce argued that the Raj was based on force and any ‘act of rebellion’, no matter how small was tantamount to ‘an act against the whole authority of the Raj’. This, he argued, was especially dangerous if the masses believed ‘that the Raj would not hit back’. Boyce contended that ‘Authority alone could not cure defiance of authority. Authority must therefore be backed up by the most drastic use of force’. To this extent, his argument is that Dyer believed ‘that physical force was needed to support and inform moral force, that power was necessary to uphold authority, and that the soldier who flinched from the challenge inevitably

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placed the state in jeopardy, with anarchy the inevitable consequence’.64 Similarly, Judith Brown described Dyer’s actions as meant ‘more to display power than actually to control disorder’, although Boyce pointed out that Dyer would not have seen a difference between the two.65 The arguments about the empire’s need to use force help explain British reprisals for acts of disobedience and violence on the part of subject peoples. Colonel Stead, who was a 24-year-old junior officer near Amritsar in 1919, depicted Dyer as an ideal commander. Dyer had ordered him to patrol the countryside of Amritsar, dispersing illegal assemblies by force. Stead recalled telling an unarmed assembly of villagers that ‘if they burnt Government property, then it would be quite fair if the nearest town or village was burnt in return’.66 Such a harsh response makes more sense given the importance of violence in maintaining the authority of the raj, and connects to British strategies used in Ireland at roughly the same time (which I discuss later). The sociologist Helen Fein took this argument further with her 1977 monograph.67 She built upon social theories of collective violence by arguing that Dyer’s shooting was both a crime and a punishment: ‘It is objectively a crime against the victims but it is understood by its perpetrators as a punishment’.68 In her perspective, the imperial power feels no sense of guilt or moral obligation to its subject, and this is why it can commit crimes against Indians that would be severely punished if committed against fellow Britons. But in a 1991 article, sociologist Derek Sayer challenged this ‘oversimplification’, suggesting instead that the British felt a deep sense of paternalism towards their Indian subjects. Dyer fired because the childlike Indians misbehaved and needed firm punishment. After all, Dyer told the Hunter Committee, ‘I wanted to punish the naughty boy’.69 The colonial structure rendered ‘Indians as children: children who once abandoned to their own devices would revert to savagery, like the boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies’.70 The punitive nature of martial law made more sense, Sayer argued, given this paternalism. Although the government behaved as though the shooting was an isolated incident, it was part of larger ‘Mutiny mindset’.71 British officers were so ‘haunted by the spectre of [the Mutiny’s] recurrence’ that if their subjects were ever to misbehave, it necessitated ‘fatherly chastisement’.72 Another aspect of scholarship related to this question of how emblematic Dyer’s actions were of British rule in India is representing the shooting as the beginning of the end of British rule in India. Indian historian V.N. Datta suggested, ‘Jallianwala Bagh was the parting of the ways between the British and the Indians [. . .] It gave impetus to the struggle for India’s freedom because people could no longer afford to be complacent’.73 But Indians had already shown their lack of complacency through previous protests as well as several

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failed attempts at violent overthrows and attempted assassinations of British officials in Bengal since the turn of the century. Sher Muhammad Garewal’s article on the shooting provided a Pakistani perspective.74 Writing against authors such as Ram Gopal who, according to Garewal, have ‘painted the tragedy as a Hindu national tragedy’, he argued that Muslims, including M.A. Jinnah, were just as ‘deeply perturbed’ over the massacre as were Hindus.75 The key contribution here is about the effect the shooting had on Indian nationalism, particularly in the ways in which this launched Gandhi onto the national political scene.76 The Rowlatt Acts gave Gandhi the opportunity to introduce all of India to his ideas about non-violent resistance. The shooting at the Bagh and subsequent imposition of martial law acted as the catalyst for the Indian National Congress to investigate what happened, and it was during the Congress Committee’s evidentiary hearings that Gandhi developed strong links with the elites of the Congress Party. As such, historians such as Ravinder Kumar have argued, ‘The structure of nationalist politics generated in 1919, provided the basis for collective political behaviour not only for the next three decades, but also for the four decades and more which have lapsed since India became an independent polity’.77 However, Indian political behaviour changed substantially both before and after partition, dissolving into multiple factions despite moments of unity.78 Such arguments, then, perpetuate the idea that something special happened in the Jallianwala Bagh that led inexorably to a consistently united front for Indian independence. But Indian opinion was not united in its condemnation of the ways in which the Punjab government dealt with the province. Some Indian notables supported O’Dwyer’s regime, including Sir Umar Hayat Khan and Syed Mehdi Shah, Raja Narendra Nath, and the Sikh, Sardar Sunder Singh Majithia.79 Yet, these depictions of 1919 as the beginning of the end of the raj often characterize the sentiments of the crowd at Jallianwala Bagh as openly defiant and rebellious. Both V.N. Datta and K. Tuteja suggest, without sufficient evidence, that the crowd in the Bagh gathered ‘with enthusiasm [. . .] in active defiance of the proclamation’.80 This makes sense if one attempts to draw a straight line from 1919 to 1947, but it also unwittingly lends credence to the arguments of British apologists (and defenders, for that matter) that Dyer was responding to a rebellious crowd that was poised to become a mob, had he not fired. Yet others, including Satya Rai and Arthur Swinson, have pointed out that many attendees at the Bagh were ‘in a picnic mood’, and that some were there with their children, while others fell ‘asleep in the sun’.81 Regardless, the vast majority of Indian historians blame the shooting at the Bagh on the imperial system. In this sense, they are decidedly unlike the vast majority of British scholars of the subject.82 Despite their differences on how

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they depict certain aspects of the crowd, most Indian scholars agree that Dyer’s order to shoot was ‘perfectly in tune with the real spirit of the imperial system by which India was governed’.83

On Violence The study of British imperial violence is a relatively understudied field among historians (much less so for sociologists and other social scientists). In a book targeting Americans as the heirs to British global power, historian Niall Ferguson described the British Empire as a ‘Good Thing’ because it brought progress to the world: globalization, the free market, the ‘rule of law’, and Western culture and institutions. These benefits of empire, according to him, outweighed the costs of obtaining and maintaining it, including the use of force.84 Anti-Ferguson scholars have focused either on the problems that imperialism created and left behind or on the extent to which the empire depended on the use of violence to sustain itself in order to question (implicitly, if not explicitly) Ferguson’s cost-benefit analysis.85 Historian Caroline Elkins argued that violence was endemic to the British Empire, at least in Kenya if not elsewhere, but that this fact remains hidden because of official British insistence upon and rhetorical use of notions of civility, democracy and justice.86 As a result, depicting the British Empire as inherently violent or predicated on violence is, far from a no-brainer, rather tricky business. The tradition of focusing on the British respect for the ‘rule of law’ stretched back to the ideological foundations that justified the liberal democracy’s despotic domination of others.87 Powerful figures such as Winston Churchill portrayed the empire as consistent with liberalism, and explained away violent episodes as an aberration. Not only did this allow British imperialists to convince themselves, and perhaps sometimes those they conquered, of the goodwill they brought to the places they came to order and control, but also that narrative has maintained a privileged position even among academic historians, until recently.88 Therefore, violent episodes either get forgotten or, more often, get treated by scholars as atypical.89 But this is starting to change. Historian Taylor Sherman’s excellent monograph on state violence in India devoted a chapter to analysing both the shooting at Jallianwala Bagh and also the martial law regime instituted across the Punjab.90 She skillfully argued that Dyer’s behaviour was quite typical of the colonial state, and that it was only the sheer number of deaths that resulted which forced the government to censure him. Although the present work is also a study of violence, my book focuses on the ways in which British administrators, politicians and the press made sense of it. Therefore, this book connects British policy regarding the use of force in Ireland with imperial

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policy concerning similar issues in India (called the ‘official mind’ of imperialism when considering imperial policy more broadly). Ireland’s liminal status or ‘hybrid position [. . .] made it an important hinge between debates on domestic politics and those on the future of the Empire’.91 Ireland’s ‘hinge’ status became a particularly salient feature of British politics from 1919 to 1921 during the Irish war for independence and the beginning of Gandhi’s mass nationalist movement. This book reinterprets two key events and the context within which they transpired in the process of analysing the use of imperial force to maintain ‘law and order’ in two otherwise highly dissimilar parts of the world. Historically, these events have been called, rather sensationally, the ‘Amritsar Massacre’ in India and ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Ireland. Britain made analogies between India and Ireland for several important reasons, each of which comprise a major theme in this book. First, the situations were to some extent analogous. Both Ireland and India were part of the British Empire and both suffered collective punishment, meted out at roughly the same time in similar fashion because, in both places, British imperialists determined that the indigenous populations were collectively responsible for certain ‘outrages’. Here is where the similarity ends. Ireland was in open rebellion – India was not. Ironically, British administrators in India claimed the Punjab was in open rebellion, deserving of the imposition of martial law, while the British government refused to apply the same designation to Ireland despite the desperate pleas of military commanders aiding the civil power in the restoration of order. Why be so quick to suppress Punjabis but be so slow to do the same in Ireland? Second, and to make sense of this conundrum, this book looks past the obvious differences between Ireland and India, and considers the wider framework of imperial crisis. Britain was desperately trying to develop new strategies to help keep its empire now that it reached its greatest territorial extent and, paradoxically, while it was aflame with rebellions and revolutions. This crisis came swiftly on the heels of the Great War, from which Britain was still reeling, and was largely the result of Wilsonian rhetoric that promised self-determination to all peoples, but in practice denied that right to Britain’s empire. It was no easy task to put down these rebellions. They were expensive, especially for Britain’s depleted post-war coffers and war-weary soldiers, and they ran the risk of drawing international and domestic criticism: how could Britain use force against nationalists after suffering the trauma of the trenches for the sake of self-determination? This economic, political and international context heavily shaped how Britain reacted to situations in Ireland and India – two otherwise very different places.

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Third, Britain analogized India to Ireland and, at times, even to Egypt, because these were the parts of the empire where indigenous nationalism was most developed and agitating for self-rule. In their attempts to create new strategies of rule in the postwar context of imperial crisis, debt and selfdetermination, the comparisons that struck contemporaries as most apt included those situations where there was a propensity for or an incidence of violence, such as a major rebellion or attack. The ways in which the imperial administration responded to these circumstances held implications for how the empire might manage similar situations in the other troublesome parts. Fourth, much of how imperialists responded to rebellions, attacks or other ‘outrages’ in Ireland and in India had to do with Britain’s use of punishment, both collective and exemplary. Britain’s conviction that the civilians of a particular area collectively held responsibility for a specific ‘outrage’ meant that due process, a fair hearing, the evaluation of evidence and other basic rights were not necessary for punishing those who were ‘guilty’ of acts against the regime, whether in Ireland or India. Furthermore, punishments (whether indiscriminate or not) meant to serve as an example because ‘outrages’ were perceived as ‘crimes’, not as the acts of rebels or freedom fighters. Therefore, the empire engaged in an assault against ordinary civilians making questions about violence and state power part of contemporary debates. 92 In analysing these themes, this book engages partly in a study of the violence in colonialism. There is, to be sure, an older tradition of sensationalizing violence, but that is not the approach of this book. There is also a Foucaultian analysis, now quite current in colonial and subaltern studies, that insists on the violence of everyday encounters and the microoperations of power.93 Rather, this book considers how power works by exploring how a wide range of actors, from administrators to military leaders to the press, understood and talked about violence and state power. Was colonial violence premeditated or spasmodic – a first line of defence or a last resort? Did contemporaries believe that the use of force magnified their own power or diminished it, making it unworkable? Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this book analyses how episodes in the Punjab were read against and through confrontations in Ireland. As discussed earlier, the myth of a benevolent British Empire was constructed since the very early days of expansion. This narrative has been attacked by the voices of radical anti-imperialists and Liberal reformers of empire at moments of crisis, when the empire’s violent characteristics became more salient, however briefly. Scholars have attempted to revive the voices of the conscience of imperialism, especially with regard to the British in Africa.94 D.G. Boyce’s study of British policy during the Anglo-Irish War focused on British public opinion against reprisals. He argued that the press

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voiced the ‘conscience of empire’ which is what ultimately won Dominion Status for Southern Ireland.95 Another widespread trend in scholarship involves studying the ways in which the metropole was affected by empire.96 The Australian historian Geoffrey Oddie argued that Conservatives in Parliament felt frustrated at their inability to stop the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, and so used the Dyer debate as another opportunity to combat the government’s Indian policy.97 Their resistance was based on fears that Montagu was jeapardizing the raj by weakening British rule in India. Oddie added that these Conservatives were put off by Montagu’s Jewish background, which was one of the motivating factors for contributing to the Dyer Fund.98 Therefore, my work adds to these strands of scholarship by looking at the ways in which public discussion over events in Ireland and India served as the arena in which different British political traditions competed.99 This book argues that the battle between Liberalism and Conservatism also illustrated contemporary anxieties about state power in the context of imperial crisis and the fear of Bolshevism. Violence as a concept is, of course, highly problematic: How shall we define the term? What is the difference between violence and the use of force? What is the role of the government in these definitions: if the actions are sanctioned by the state, can they ever be called violent? Is there a quantitative component to the definition: a minimum number of casualties before an act can be called ‘violent’? It would be useful, therefore, to define how I am using the notions of ‘violence’ and ‘force’. At its least complicated, the distinction between these two terms is legal. Violence, in that case, involves the illegal use of physical force or the threat of physical force to intimidate and/or coerce a subject. If the actions are lawful, one typically does not call it violent, but forceful. However, in an imperial context, these distinctions become rather meaningless. The empire’s presence is not particularly legitimate, certainly not when a nationalist movement calling for self-government has developed. From the nationalists’ perspective all use of state force is violent. Obviously, from the imperial government’s standpoint, much of what their anti-colonial subjects engage in is unlawful and therefore potentially, if not outrightly, violent. In neither perspective does the quantity of those harmed affect the definition of violence, although as we shall see, there certainly existed an imbalance between the reaction to the number of English persons harmed versus subject populations. Contemporaries, in their debates over Punjab and Ireland, recognized that the distinction between violence and force was blurred in an imperial context. Thus, this book will use both terms interchangeably. Nonetheless, it would be useful to lay out the three main categories of violence/force that will be analysed. The first is extreme and outright violence

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producing casualties, such as shooting and bombing. The second category is less focused on producing casualties, and more punitive in nature, designed to attack morale. This includes physical beatings, whippings and what the British termed ‘fancy punishments’ employed during the administration of martial law in the Punjab, as well as the range of reprisals in Ireland, such as setting fire to cities or to homes, farms and creameries. Whereas the first category of violence may also affect morale and function as an extremely harsh punishment, it is distinct from the second category in method more so than in aim. The third category is implicit violence. This is the psychological threat that at any moment a subject of the empire might be targeted in order to make an impression on fellow subjects. This feature was particularly salient during the martial law regime in Punjab and the Anglo-Irish War. In fact, the key function of British imperial violence was not to inflict a maximum number of fatalities. Rather, it was the constant threat that the empire could at will, and however arbitrarily, inflict pain, suffering and death upon a recalcitrant population. The man on the spot could, according to his judgement, inflict punishment on whomever and in whatever fashion he chose, for whatever reason he deemed appropriate. For example, an Indian who should fail to show proper respect to a British officer while passing could be flogged publicly, arrested or simply ignored. One never knew if one were going to be made example of to scare one’s fellow countrymen, but the threat that one could be was constant. The fear this system inspired is obvious, and it was an effective means of controlling a population that vastly outnumbered British officers. Thus, the actual number of casualties is not the most important aspect that suggests this was not a peaceful empire, but rather the ways in which they used force to buttress the imperial system and to remind the inhabitants it controlled of the consequences of rebellion. Focusing on the quantitative aspect of violence in the British Empire tends to emphasize the relatively benign nature of the British imperial system compared to some outrageously violent regimes. That is not altogether a ‘bad’ thing. After all, Gandhi’s methods of non-violence would not have succeeded in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or even French Indo-China. No doubt, in British India and in Ireland, extraordinary circumstances allowed nationalists to assemble, protest and make non-violent resistance effective. Newspapers maintained significant freedom in Ireland and, to a lesser extent, in India. Such freedoms, however limited, should be borne in mind, even if they provided cold comfort to the Irish civilian or Indian nationalist who watched her house set ablaze by Crown Forces or her husband stripped half-naked and publicly flogged for failing to salute a British officer appropriately. Life in the British Empire may have been a better alternative to living in the French or

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German Empires, but a relatively less violent empire is not the same thing as a non-violent or legitimate one. Therefore, this book adds to recent scholarship analysing the British moral universe vis-a`-vis violence. Historian Eric Stokes argued that the government of India had a mission ‘to beat down wrongdoers, to extort respect and to enforce obedience’.100 The Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 was suppressed fiercely and historian Thomas Metcalf suggested that the ‘intensity of the punishment meted out reflected the vulnerability of the British in India’.101 By General Dyer’s time, this sense of vulnerability was significantly less pronounced, and so the violence of the early twentieth century can be thought of more as an expression of imperial authority in the face of recent outrageous resistance. However, both Dyer and the British suppressors of the mutiny shared a common conception of their opponents as dishonorable and subhuman: ‘The rebel leaders, above all, were never conceived of simply as honourable opponents. To the contrary [. . .] [they] were made into fiends and monsters’.102 This was not least because of the murders of English women during the mutiny. British womanhood remained sacrosanct throughout the empire’s history, so much so that General Dyer issued a ‘crawling’ order requiring Indian men to crawl at the spot where a British woman had been beaten during the riots of 10 April. A related trend in the scholarship portrays Dyer’s shooting as peculiar to the men ruling the Punjab. This ‘Punjab School ideology’ was characterized by: firm, paternal rule by an elite of self-confident administrators, who conceived their duty as that of bringing order and prosperity to a contented peasant society . . . Unlike their colleagues elsewhere in India, [the men of the Punjab School] had had to confront few challenges to their authority before 1919. Hence they were perhaps more likely to break under stress . . . and resort to a forceful assertion of their authority.103 This separated the ‘official mind’ in the Punjab not just from the rest of India, but from the rest of the empire as well. But representing Punjab’s administrators in this way ignores the fact that they had endured several important challenges to their rule since the turn of the century, embodied, for example, by the Ghadr Party and the Silk Letter Conspiracy. Moreover, the Punjab was perilously close to the North-West Frontier and so administrators of the region were constantly under pressure to uncover sedition and foreign attempts to persuade a fifth column to launch an internal attack. These men were well-schooled in the art of handling challenges to authority. If indeed Dyer had broken under stress (or panic, as Nick Lloyd argues) he would not have gotten the flood of support that he did.104 Therefore, it is the argument

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of this book that the Punjab’s administrators provide the best expressions of the relationship between imperial power and violence across the empire, from India to Ireland. Firing on Jallianwala Bagh expressed ‘enduring assumptions about the nature of the Raj, and of Indian society’, and it is my contention that a similar argument can be made regarding the shooting in Ireland.105

The Irish Connection No monograph currently exists that analyses the martial law regime in Punjab with the Irish War for Independence, which makes this book the first of its kind. Scholars have, to be sure, made connections between Dyer’s shooting and some aspects of Irish studies. Literary scholar Purnima Bose’s 2003 monograph, Organizing Empire, focused on four personalities in India who had connections to Ireland, thus ‘demonstrating how certain colonial sites, like Ireland, functioned as schools in repression and training for colonial administrators and military officials eventually posted in other sites, such as India’.106 She began with General Dyer, arguing that his ‘massacre becomes a way of asserting colonial masculinity over the natives’.107 Previously, Bose and fellow literary scholar Laura Lyons co-authored an article comparing the shooting at Amritsar with a much later incident in West Belfast in September 1990 when a British paratrooper, Private Lee Clegg, shot and killed teenager Karen Reilly while she was joyriding with friends.108 Ireland was important to them because, ‘within the imperial grid, Ireland was often the first stop in many colonial careers, where military and administrative personnel gained practical training in colonial repression’.109 After all, the British regularly transferred personnel from one part of the empire to another. In fact, Dyer’s commander in the Burmese War, Frederick Sleigh Roberts, served in both India and Ireland, as did Sir John Anderson, and General Charles Monro.110 Many soldiers and officers in the Indian Army were Irish as well. So many, in fact, that they were out of proportion to their numbers in the population of the UK.111 Membership in the army was not necessarily incompatible with Irish nationalism, as Sinn Fein regularly employed British and Indian Army veterans.112 So, like Fein, Bose and Lyons argued, ‘brutality [. . .] far from being an anomaly, is a constitutive part of colonialism. To disavow all responsibility for its violence, the British colonial regime relies on the rhetorical strategy of scapegoating particular colonial officials for its excesses’. This explained why the British government and the Hunter Committee singled out Dyer rather than indicting the entire martial law administration. Bose and Lyons added that laws have a dual function: ‘to legitimate the use of force and, when necessary, to contain and criminalize instances of state violence in order to defend and naturalize the colonial

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presence’.113 In this way, the Dyer debate was a melodramatic attempt to defend and naturalize the British Empire as benevolent and non-violent.114 Sociologist Derek Sayer’s article noted the uncanny connection between the British who supported General Dyer and Ulster Unionism. He pointed out that Edward Carson was Dyer’s chief supporter, as was Sir Henry Wilson, both of whom staunchly opposed Home Rule for Ireland. As mentioned earlier, Sayer’s primary explanation for Dyer’s behaviour rested on paternalism, and here he missed an opportunity to explore the Irish subtext more fully.115 Sayer has not been the only scholar to notice Carson’s devotion to Dyer.116 R.P. Davis described (also in an article) how a ‘Dyer cult’ developed as men like Carson rushed to his defence, and Conservative newspapers supported this cult, including the Morning Post, Calcutta Statesman and The Irish Times. He noted the comparisons made in the Irish press between the Rowlatt Acts in India and the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) designed to root out sedition in Ireland. Davis argued that the details of the shooting at Amritsar ‘distracted public attention in many countries from the IRA assassination policy and provided a paradigm for castigating British repression in Ireland’.117 He also pointed out that the numbers are quite different in each place: in Amritsar, about 400 died in ten minutes. In Ireland, about 1,400 died over two-and-a-half years. Davis’s main focus, however, was not on the Punjab’s or Dyer’s connection to Ireland, but on how propaganda distorted the historical realities of Muslim and Protestant politics in both countries because they were the artificial creations of imperialism.118 Jon Lawrence’s 2003 article provided an excellent comparison between India and Ireland in the postwar years. He discussed the urban riots of 1919, the debate over Dyer’s punishment in 1920, the violence in Ireland from 1920– 21, and the industrial unrest from 1919 to 1921. He argued that public perception ‘was shaped by fears about “brutalizations” – fears that the barbarism of the war had left an indelible mark on British society’.119 This, according to him, explains the frequency of public comments on the relatively non-violent nature of British culture. Britons ‘reassured themselves that they were a peaceable people not given to extremism’, or political violence. In doing so, they ‘enshrine[d] these stories about national character in British political and social discourse of the 1920s and 1930s’.120 His focus on ‘brutalization’, however needs the greater imperial context regarding the narrative of a benevolent empire and imperial crisis, as this book aims to provide. Few have offered a detailed comparison between the Amritsar and Croke Park shootings. David Leeson’s excellent article analysing ‘Bloody Sunday’ included only one mention of the Amritsar Massacre.121 His monograph on the conditions in which Crown Forces engaged in reprisals was, like much

22

IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

scholarship of Irish history, focused just on Ireland.122 Other scholarship about the Anglo-Irish War has, at times, made reference to Amritsar or General Dyer, but only one historian, Susan Kingsley Kent, has produced a sustained analysis of the connections between the Punjab regime and Crown Forces in Ireland.123 Although her study was not confined to these two regions (she connected them to several other post-World War I moments of violence in Britain), she argued that these violent episodes resulted from the trauma of the Great War that brutalized British culture. Her groundbreaking work in British cultural history is highly instructive for thinking about the empire more broadly, as the current work seeks to do. Scholars of British counter-insurgency have also laid important groundwork for my book. Historian Charles Townshend’s 1986 study of British counter-insurgency in the twentieth century focused on the ways in which British intelligence and military operations changed over time based on experiences in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War to the Malayan Emergency and the Kenyan Mau-Mau Rebellion. He included a brief discussion of the Amritsar affair, depicting it as a moment that ‘emphasized the inherent contradiction in the self-image of the British as beneficent rulers [. . .] it was obvious the government still rested on naked force to an extent wholly alien to the “British way”’.124 This is in stark contrast to his description of the empire as reluctantly violent as a result of its ‘natural antipathy to military rule’ in an earlier work.125 Thomas Mockaitis’s history of British counter-insurgency focused on the ‘principles’ used by the British government when dealing with insurgents.126 He argued that revolutionary violence was meant to ‘provoke the government into overreacting’, and exacting reprisals against the local population, and that Britain’s first experience with counter-insurgency was in Ireland, 1919– 21, against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its political wing, Sinn Fein.127 Mockaitis identified three ‘principles’ upon which British counter-insurgency was based: using the minimum force necessary to control a situation, intelligence gathering and cooperation between civil and military forces, and the use of decentralized, small units to combat guerrilla warriors.128 He traced the transmission of knowledge in counter-insurgency tactics from the early twentieth century to 1960, arguing that throughout this period, the British continued to cling to certain ‘bad habits’. Among these was the use of auxiliary, paramilitary forces and collective punishment in which the ‘enemy’ was not distinguished from innocent civilians.129 Mockaitis did not, however extend this argument to Dyer and the Punjab. Thus, this book explores the conscience of empire as it looks at a particular moment: the immediate aftermath of the Great War. It emphasizes the ways in which violence underpinned the imperial system and how that deeply divided public opinion in Britain. By connecting the violence in Ireland and

INTRODUCTION

23

India just after World War I, it makes a new contribution to the history of the British Empire. In the chapters that follow, this book compares contemporary analogies made between the ‘Amritsar Massacre’ and ‘Bloody Sunday’ as rhetorical tools (used in different ways by both the critics of empire and diehard supporters of it) in order to challenge the narrative of a peaceful empire. Some major figures representing the latter, such as Henry Wilson, embraced the notion that the empire was based fundamentally on the use of force and he therefore argued that the violence used in India ought to be used in Ireland to hold it to the empire. The result was a deep tension between those who recognized the danger this unabashed use of force presented to the empire’s long-term sustainability in the new global context created in the aftermath of the Great War and those who were responsible for the violence, and, at times, proponents of it. After all, the excesses during the Boer War, typified by the British use of concentration camps to suppress the Afrikaner revolt, upset a number of British thinkers and reformers who were inspired by contemporary events to write scathing histories of the imperial expansion into Africa, calling for humanitarian reform of the system.130 Such reformers expressed outrage over Dyer’s behaviour and some even wrote about the inherent problems of the civil government in India that made the shooting possible.131 These were the words of the conscience of imperialism, which was as much a reality as the empire’s tendency toward violence. They attempted to counter the narrative that presented the empire in benign terms. Yet these voices are all too often lost on scholars who analyse the Amritsar shooting in terms of Dyer’s personality and his judgements, rather than as part of an imperial system that relied on violence and intimidation as well as on impressions about justice and moral superiority. This book offers a new interpretation by setting the discussion of Amritsar in a broader imperial framework that takes adequate consideration of three things: first, how the system of imperial rule was changing in the aftermath of World War I so that coercion was much less desirable in a time of imperial crisis (for political, international, economic and logistical reasons). Wilsonian notions of self-determination made burly imperialists bound to draw severe criticism, both foreign and domestic. A gentler, apologetic, reformed and humane imperialism seemed far more important for Britain’s public image now that militarism seemed, at least temporarily, invalidated in the trenches of Europe. Thus, the public relations aspect of empire became exceptionally important at a time when much of the empire was in crisis, in revolt and in debt. Second, in the tradition of Sayer’s and Bose’s groundbreaking works, this book focuses on the Irish component: both in terms of the Irishness or, in most cases Anglo-Irishness, of the administrators in India, and, more importantly,

24

IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

on the reciprocal impact that violence in India and Ireland had in the minds of British officials and public opinion. In other words, government leaders and voices in the press drew connections between the violence in both places, so that events in Amritsar were read through and against events in Ireland. Third, the book’s focus on the use of collective punishment beyond the ‘Amritsar Massacre’ and ‘Bloody Sunday’ challenges the narrative of the peaceful empire, popular among historians and contemporaries alike.132 As mentioned earlier, one of the most interesting proponents of this vision, Winston Churchill, serving as Secretary of State for War, described Dyer’s shootings as an event ‘without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire [. . .] which stands in singular and sinister isolation’, while Herbert Asquith insisted, ‘there has never been such an incident in the whole annals of Anglo-Indian history’.133 To the extent that so many died in Jallianwala Bagh, these statements have an element of truth to them. But focusing on the singularity of the event perpetuates the myth that this was the beginning of the end of the British in India, and that the British Empire was one of benevolent mercy and justice rather than terror or physical force. Historians of the British Empire who treat the events at Amritsar as an aberration have done even more to sustain this myth. Britain, they would argue, did not bring cruelty to its empire, as did the French to theirs, but rather brought reason, justice and the rule of law, among other principles of the Enlightenment that were depicted by imperialists as traditional English values.134 In fact, many Liberal imperialists truly believed that Indians wanted Britain in India.135 In the views of such contemporaries and historians who have argued that this incident was an aberration, the key to understanding what happened at Amritsar was the man on the spot: the personality and judgements of General Dyer.136 If he made a mistake, then he alone bore responsibility for it – not the entire imperial administration. However, contemporary critics of the empire blamed Dyer’s actions on the imperial system itself and argued that the British Empire was inherently violent and cruel. By doing so, they hoped either to reform the system or to put an end to it altogether, depending on how far to the left each particular critic leaned. To be sure, English values of justice and the rule of law, both rhetorical and real, were important to the daily maintenance and functioning of the raj, partly because these values helped to secure collaborators without which the empire could not have existed and partly because they helped to hide the nastier side of violent imperial business.137 Contemporary critics were well aware of the empire’s propensity for violence and wanted desperately to check the extent to which the system could get out of hand.138 These humanitarians were outdone by left-wing radical anti-imperialists who called for an end to

INTRODUCTION

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empire altogether, declaring that unconditional self-determination was both a moral and practical imperative because only natives could decide their own future.139 The tension between these voices and those who defended the unreformed system is all the more remarkable given the fact that Dyer’s defenders supported him not solely on the basis of judicial or procedural reasons, but because they believed he was making an ethical stand. Thus, this book seeks to explain how British men and women could describe the deaths of hundreds of unarmed civilians as ethical behaviour. The British response to Dyer’s actions varied. The following chapters consider who Dyer’s supporters were and why they felt he should be elevated to this status of ‘Saviour’ or, as was also common, why he should be depicted as the ‘victim’ of the committee hearings on the subject. The reasons have partly to do with commonly held notions about race and empire, which made violence normative, and partly because judgements about his actions had serious implications for the future of Ireland. Dyer was publicly and politically, although not legally, ‘on trial’, and he had a great many supporters who drew connections between events in India and Ireland. The Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, was also Irish, and he wholeheartedly supported Dyer’s actions but was less sympathetic to Irish rebels. The Irishman and Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, was another key figure in Dyer’s defence, and he was among the most outspoken opponents of the Irish revolution. In fact, the IRA assassinated him just years after the shootings at Amritsar and Dublin. Carson, the politician who did most to fight Irish Home Rule and to retain Northern Ireland in the union with England, defended Dyer in Parliament and many Ulster Unionists voted with him in Dyer’s favour. Editorials in the press were often explicit about the implications that the ruling on Dyer’s actions would have for Ireland. ‘In one way’, as Derek Sayer has suggested, ‘crystal clear at the time, the whole Dyer controversy was a thinly coded discussion of Ireland’.140 The following chapters will emphasize this Irish component to the public reaction to Amritsar and connect it to larger questions of state-sanctioned violence during the Anglo-Irish War. Dyer’s critics, especially in the Labour Party, worried about his actions in India vis-a`-vis state-sanctioned violence in Ireland, but they also pointed to the potential threat such coercion posed to the working class at home. After all, Britain was intensely worried about Bolshevism.141 This was compounded by severe domestic labour unrest, punctuated by strikes just before and after the war.142 Conservatives, frightened by the prospect of such radical behaviour, succeeded in urging the government to implement tough methods to break national strikes by coal miners, railway men and others from 1919– 1921, including using soldiers as strikebreakers. Obviously, there was a fear

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IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

among the Labour Party and the working class that ‘Dyerism’, which was a convenient term used by contemporaries to refer to the authoritarian nature of imperial rule (at the same time that it singularized the events in Amritsar), was coming home to England. They certainly did not want a strike to be put down a` la Jallianwala Bagh, nor would they welcome the harsh repression of the Irish variety.143 This helps explain Labour’s criticism of the British Empire, but this does not mean that the attitudes of different parties on repressive violence were deeply affected by Bolshevism.144 They were related, but not quite causal factors. Socialist groups were anti-colonial for the obvious reason that independent nations would be one step closer to the transition to world socialism. Liberal thought clamoured for reform of the authoritarian empire, but by no means did this demonstrate a support for socialism. Conservatives were most fearful of Communism and perfectly comfortable with the autocratic ethos of empire. No doubt, fears of Bolshevism played a role in the repressions around the empire. The fear that the empire was falling prey to Bolshevik-inspired conspiracies did not come to dominate British thought until the Cold War, when American fears of the same allowed it to aid Britain, financially propping up the empire while it put down communist or nationalist rebellions with repressive force.145 But during the inter-war period, fears of Bolshevik-inspired conspiracy were as strong as fears of an Afghan invasion of India’s northwest frontier or of a Pan-Islamic revolutionary movement bent on using the Muslims of India as a fifth column against the British Empire. Resistance to the empire had to be put down by force whether the motivation behind it was Bolshevik or not. The book is organized as follows: Chapter One focuses on the riots across the Punjab and the immediate British responses to them, including the imposition of martial law. It analyses the major characters involved and provides the immediate historical context along with the details of Dyer’s shooting. It considers how martial law was administered and the ways in which its administrators shared a mindset that was emblematic of the violence of the British imperial system. It explores multiple attempts to punish civilians and the constant psychological and implicit threat of violence that played a crucial role (equal to if not greater than the actual assaults) in British imperialism. Chapter Two focuses on the Hunter Committee’s investigation into the administration of martial law in Punjab as well as Indian and British public reactions to Dyer’s censure, especially with respect to those who rose to his defence. It analyses who his defenders were and argues that they were painfully concerned about the implication his fate had for Ireland. Chapter Three provides the background for the Irish War of Independence and gives insight to the more abstruse concerns about how the British should wage a war against insurgents on their neighbouring island. It focuses on the use of

INTRODUCTION

27

reprisals against Irish civilians as examples of retaliatory violence similar to those used in the Punjab and describes the difficulty in extending martial law to Ireland, as well as the ‘official’ reprisals that accompanied it. The Conclusion focuses on the shooting at Croke Park, Dublin, termed ‘Bloody Sunday’, and the book’s main argument is recapitulated. Other instances of British violence are briefly discussed. The picture that emerges is of an empire that has a long history of violence and an equally long history of soul-searching to either justify it or condemn it, but in both cases, presumably, to save it.

CHAPTER 1 `

PUNJAB DISTURBANCES'

On 20 August 1917, Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, declared that the government would, upon war’s end, unveil a plan for ‘increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’. British despotism seemed near its end with, ‘the most momentous utterance ever made in India’s chequered history’ that ‘marks the end of one epoch and the beginning of a new one’.1 This declaration, combined with Wilsonian rhetoric about the right of all peoples to selfdetermination, raised the expectations of Indian nationalists for selfgovernment when the war ended. However, while Europe celebrated the end of the Great War and began peace deliberations in Paris, the British governing India worried about the expiration of their wartime emergency powers of surveillance and arrest.2 In March 1919, the raj passed the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Acts, more commonly referred to as the Rowlatt Acts (named after their architect, Justice Sir Sidney Rowlatt), to continue those extraordinary powers into peacetime. British administrators feared, among other things, that PanIslamism might infect Indian Muslims who felt sore over the Ottoman Empire’s defeat. The Rowlatt Acts intended to combat enemy forces, whether within India or outside of it, planning a violent overthrow of British rule. Some British newspapers condemned the passage of the Acts as counter to Montagu’s wartime promise. One equated these laws to ‘giving scorpions to hungry children who were promised food’.3 India sacrificed a lot for the war effort and expected greater self-government in return, so the government’s behaviour appeared hypocritical, ‘talking reforms but practicing coercion’.4 A left-leaning paper hoped for the repeal of ‘all this pernicious legislation’ and for India to receive ‘the very fullest right of Free Speech, Free Press, and – greatest of all – the right of self-determination, on behalf of which so many

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IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

sons of India fought and died in Europe and Asia’.5 The Westminster Gazette presciently warned that the Rowlatt Acts repeated in India the mistakes made in Ireland during the war: ‘coupling the promise of Home Rule with the threat of Conscription’.6 But incidents both before and during the war heightened British fears of a revolt, which made the Rowlatt Acts feel necessary to some. In 1912, a Bengali revolutionary attempted to assassinate the viceroy, Lord Charles Hardinge, in Delhi on the day the city formally replaced Calcutta as the capital.7 Since the 1905 partition of Bengal during Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty, many young, male, urban-elite revolutionaries from the three dominant Hindu castes in Bengal, the bhadralok (‘respectable people’), became antiBritish bomb-throwers and assassins. Their efforts to win independence resulted in some 14 ‘terrorist’ acts in 1914 Bengal, and 36 the following year before declining steadily over the next three years.8 This partly inspired the Ghadr Party, a revolutionary association founded in 1913 by Lala Har Dayal, comprised mostly of Punjabi Sikhs living in San Francisco and committed to the violent overthrow of the British raj.9 When the Great War started, many of them returned to Punjab and attempted a rising in February 1915, unsuccessfully. The party encouraged disaffection among Sikh soldiers in the Indian Army and planned to mutiny until its demise in August 1915. The raj uncovered other plots such as the Silk Letter conspiracy in the summer of 1916. The British caught a messenger in the Punjab with letters written in Persian on silk sewn inside his clothes. He intended to deliver these letters from a former teacher at the Muslim Deobandi School, Obeidullah Sindhi, who now called himself the Home Minister for a provisional, independent Indian government in exile in Kabul, Afghanistan. Obeidullah wanted to attack the raj with Afghani and Indian troops, buttressed by a fifth column of Indian Muslims.10 Although these half-baked conspiracies represented only a fraction of Indian Muslim opinion, they fuelled British paranoia and provided justification for the Rowlatt Acts. The government not only contended with the threat of violent revolutionaries, but also worried about Hindu-Muslim unity developing into a mass movement against the empire. Just after the war, the Khilafat Movement, which called for the retention of the Turkish Sultan as Caliph of the Muslim world, witnessed an unprecedented coalition of Hindus and Muslims. Indian Muslims united against the postwar treatment of the Ottoman Empire, and, by 1920, joined with Gandhi and other leaders of the Indian National Congress Party as part of the Non-cooperation Movement of peaceful, civil disobedience meant to resist British rule.11 British authorities felt scared by these developments, along with new calls for self-determination by some ‘extreme’ Indian nationalists who invoked Wilsonian rhetoric after

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PUNJAB DISTURBANCES '

31

the war.12 Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s speech in December 1916 to the All-India Muslim League summed up the situation well: We have a powerful and efficient Bureaucracy of British officers responsible only to the British Parliament, governing, with methods known as benevolent despotism, a people that have grown fully conscious of their destiny and are peacefully struggling for political freedom.13 But even peaceful nationalism worried British officials who proved willing to resort to harsh, punitive methods rather than end their ostensibly ‘benevolent despotism’. The inhabitants of Punjab ran the gamut from moderate nationalists to violent extremists, and recent developments convinced British officials of the necessity of the Rowlatt Acts. Like the rest of India, Punjab suffered hardships during the Great War which continued unrelieved in the war’s aftermath. Not only were some 60,000 Indian soldiers killed while fighting for Britain, but also the war resulted in unprecedented inflation in the province, during which time the price of wheat jumped by 47 per cent, the price of cotton more than tripled, sugar cost 68 per cent more and the price of food grains nearly doubled.14 Punjab’s population of 20 million, over half of whom were Muslim, a third Hindu and the rest Sikhs, endured these difficulties.15 Although the government interceded by seizing wheat from merchants and selling it at a lower price, the poor still suffered.16 Meanwhile, India exported tonnes of food to the military. The economic impact of the war certainly created more disaffected Punjabis. Indian defence spending jumped by 300 per cent, thereby resulting in taxation hikes and mass printing of currency. From 1918 to 1919, taxes increased 30 per cent in Lahore alone, the capital city of Punjab, and by 55 per cent in Amritsar.17 Wages remained stagnant as the cost of living rose. Rural Punjabis suffered from high debt as well as the international flu epidemic of 1918 that killed 5 million Indians across the subcontinent and which, in the Punjab, was made worse by a malaria epidemic the same year. This was aggravated by particularly bad harvests just after the war.18 Unsurprisingly, in 1918 and 1919, Punjab witnessed frequent looting and food robberies which frightened British officials. Their fears were compounded by the constant threat of Bolshevism and severe labour unrest at home, as well as by the beginning of an all-out guerilla war in Ireland.19 They therefore failed to take adequate note that the vast majority of Indians remained loyal during the war. After all, even Gandhi had recruited Indian soldiers to fight in Europe. The Indian elections of January 1919, the same month and year as the beginning of the Anglo-Irish War, also heightened tensions in Punjab.

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IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

In particular, the introduction of a reserved seating system for minorities (for example, reserving three seats for Sikhs in municipal elections) upset many Hindus who, as a group, would have performed better without such a reservation. Anxieties worsened as candidates for office hired ‘hooligans to intimidate the voters’.20 British residents felt unsafe among the upheaval, especially with the increasing number of demobilized soldiers.21 So, the authorities turned to coercion, as embodied in the Rowlatt Acts.22 The experience of unrest during the war years taught many British officials the importance of dealing quickly and harshly with any outbreak of rebellion. The Rowlatt Acts allowed Indians to be tried without a lawyer, without the right of appeal and without a jury. Courts could sit in camera and use evidence that would otherwise be inadmissible under normal circumstances. Not only did suspects have to put up a bond for good behaviour and keep their home address on file with the police, but they also could be arrested and searched without a warrant, and confined without trial for up to a year, renewably.23 Although defended by Punjab’s Lt. Gov. Michael O’Dwyer as ‘a reasonable and practical measure intended to take the place of the Defence of India Act, but much less drastic in its provisions’, the harshness of the Rowlatt Acts made little sense to most Indian nationalists and to some British Liberals.24 Surely, Indian loyalty and sacrifices during the war deserved better. More importantly, these acts betrayed the regime’s intentions toward eventual Indian selfgovernment and they directly inspired Gandhi to start the satyagraha (soul force) peaceful resistance movement. Montagu privately expressed his disapproval of the Rowlatt Acts. He felt implementing them was ‘moving in a vicious circle’ rather than preventing crime. The repressive legislation would ‘bring recruits to the revolutionary party’. After all, he explained, ‘If you are humiliating, irritating, antagonising, law-abiding citizens, they or their friends or their admirers are very likely to join the ranks of those people whom you have got to watch, and that this goes on seems to me to be indisputable’.25 Ironically, the martial law regime that would take the place of the Rowlatt Acts engaged in this kind of behaviour far more than Montagu could have imagined. To make matters worse for tough-minded administrators in India, it remained unclear how the Montagu-Chelmsford (Montford) reforms might affect Britain’s control over its subjects, especially since most Indians appeared rather ungrateful for them. Montagu thought he offered India a great deal given Britain’s imperial interests, and expected disappointment only from extremists: Being both convinced that the main defect in the existing system was the fact that it denied responsibility to Indians, and being equally convinced that the time was not ripe for complete self-government, we speedily realized that the problem was to find some way of giving responsibility in

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certain matters while reserving it in others, and to provide some means of periodically and deliberately enlarging the sphere made over to responsible control [. . .] the provinces were the right areas in which to begin progressive realization of responsible government. Anything smaller was too small [. . .] I am hopeful of receiving considerable support from sober and moderate [Indian] men. No scheme which the British Government could bring before Parliament could satisfy those who are radically opposed to British rule, whose hostility must therefore in any case be expected. 26 ‘Sober and moderate’ Indians should understand, he thought, the impossibility of giving India anything more than dyarchy, a system of power-sharing. But the majority of Indian nationalists found the Montford reforms of 1919 wanting.27 Britain limited Indian power sharing to the provincial level. The more important areas of revenue, finance, law and order were reserved for British officials responsible only to the provincial lieutenant governor. Even so, hardline imperialists, including O’Dwyer, felt disgusted by the reforms, as if the government gave too much power away. Viceroy Chelmsford, on the other hand, defended the reforms he and Montagu hoped to implement. Strikingly, when explaining the logic behind Montford, he compared the situation to Ireland: Now let me briefly put what has been the governing motive with me. I have had constantly before my mind the precedent of Ireland. I suppose that one of our chief difficulties in Ireland has been the hostility of the Roman Catholic priesthood. In the days when we might have won their sympathy and cooperation we neglected and estranged them. Is not something of the same sort possible in India with the educated Indian? They are both a small minority in the midst of the population, but they both possess unlimited power of influencing an ignorant people for harm.28 Clearly, both Chelmsford and Montagu underestimated Indian disappointment with dyarchy, but both believed in the necessity of not further alienating middle-class Indian opinion. They learned from Ireland what could happen if concessions were not made before the entire population became disaffected.

Michael O’Dwyer Sir Michael O’Dwyer was born 28 April 1864, the sixth son of John O’Dwyer, a Catholic landowner in Barronstown, County Tipperary, in Southern Ireland.

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IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

He attended St. Stanislaus College in Tullamore (central Ireland) until 1882 when he won admission to Balliol College, Oxford, with the aim of joining the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Sir Michael was proud of his Irish lineage, which he traced back 400 years. He was prouder still of his ancestors’ dogged resistance to British imperial expansion into their lands, however futile. He regretted ‘the tragic course of events’ that transpired between Britain and Ireland, preferring the constitutional opportunity for Home Rule in the 1880s and in the early years of the Great War to the violent war for Irish independence which took place only a few years later.29 O’Dwyer’s formative years in Ireland coincided with a turbulent period in Irish history. The 1870– 80s witnessed the Home Rule movement, steep economic decline and a fierce land war in which the demand for fixity of land tenure and reduction of rents connected with revolutionary leaders. Soaring evictions of tenant farmers too poor to pay exorbitant rents resulted in violent retaliation against landlords.30 O’Dwyer’s family estate experienced some of this rural agitation and, in 1882, his father’s house was set on fire. Although John O’Dwyer escaped, the destruction left Michael with little empathy for the landless poor.31 So, O’Dwyer learned to despise revolutionaries as ‘unscrupulous men who exploited [the Land League] for seditious and even revolutionary purposes’.32 Sir Michael also became particularly angry over the Phoenix Park Murders in Dublin of May 1882, in which Irish nationalist extremists assassinated high-ranking British officials including the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish. The event made O’Dwyer feel ‘ashamed of being an Irishman’. In fact, part of his ICS training required attendance at the assassins’ court proceedings.33 This impacted him deeply, and the repressive policies Britain enacted as a result of the assassinations taught the future governor of Punjab, at an impressionable age, of the importance of reacting swiftly and severely to put down resistance. Sir Michael O’Dwyer joined the ICS in 1885 and was posted to the Punjab where he eventually became lieutenant governor in 1912 until his retirement in May 1919. Staying true to his agricultural background (and to post-1857 British values), he favoured the zamindar landowners of rural India (preferring also peasants to urbanites) and behaved like a paternalist who believed Britain brought security and economic prosperity to India.34 He hated the urban educated classes and democratic movements in India as fomenters of rebellion.35 However, although he supported Home Rule for Ireland, he did not for India. He explained that in the case of the former, it was a matter of restoring the status ‘which Ireland had enjoyed for centuries down to the Union of 1800’. But since a small, ‘fairly enlightened and homogenous’ country like Ireland devolved into violence over Home Rule, he predicted even great violence for heterogeneous India: ‘In this vast continent of 315

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35

million, with its infinite variety of races, creeds, and traditions, and its appalling inequalities in social and political development [. . .] I fear the case of Ireland, in so far as it is analogous at all, conveys to us a lesson and a warning’.36 The Irish analogy with India was a dangerous one. O’Dwyer’s administration in the Punjab developed a reputation for harshness. He played a key role in the passage of the Defence of India Act, which he also used liberally during the Great War to arrest suspected revolutionaries, to suppress seditious literature and to prevent entry of highranking, ‘extremist’ members of the Indian National Congress, Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal, into the province.37 An Indian contemporary explained, ‘Sir Michael is known to swear by the notorious maxim – India was won by the sword and must forever be preserved by the sword’.38 O’Dwyer deeply opposed liberal reforms in India, especially Montford, and believed strongly in the moral legitimacy of using force and coercion to hold India to the British Empire.39 He would find a kindred spirit in the man responsible for opening fire on a crowd of unarmed Punjabis, many of whom were Sikhs, on 13 April 1919.

General Dyer On 30 March 1919, the day of the first hartal (strike) proclaimed by Gandhi protesting the Rowlatt Acts, 54-year-old Brigadier General Reginald E.H. Dyer took his family for a vacation. They left his station in Jullundur (a few hours from Amritsar), and travelled by car to Delhi. Upon arrival, Dyer and his family found vast crowds gathered near the railway station, and Dyer assumed, incorrectly, that he stumbled upon a religious festival. Actually, the crowds were trying to force some vendors to close in observance of the hartal. The situation got heated and, at one point, two Indian men tried to jump onto Dyer’s car but a policeman pulled them off. Despite this and the fact that soldiers later fired upon this crowd, the Dyer family kept sightseeing. On 6 April, the day of the second hartal, the Dyers drove back to Jullundur, but found Indians on the Grand Trunk Road randomly throwing stones at their car and, at one point, some pushed a log in front of them. The general, both startled by this overt hostility and unsympathetic to its multiple causes, took offence.40 General Dyer was six months younger than O’Dwyer, born on 9 October 1864, in Murree, a hill station in Punjab. His family moved shortly after his birth, so Dyer spent his youth at the hill station at Simla, the summer capital of the raj. Like O’Dwyer, he, too, was the sixth child born. Dyer’s Anglican family also shared a long history of service in India, beginning with his grandfather, John Dyer, who served in the East India Company’s navy. General

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Dyer’s father, Edward Dyer, initially pursued a career as an engineer in India until he and his brother, who also served in India, could no longer withstand the unavailability of a good British beer. And so it was that the family began brewing beer near Simla, providing a greatly appreciated product to the many British residents who lived in or visited the nearby hill station.41 The British of Simla gained notoriety for their harsh attitudes towards Indians, whom they routinely looked down upon and from whom they kept much social distance.42 This level of insulation bred a sort of contempt for Indians, so much so that Europeans frequently brutalized their subjects physically as often as they abused them verbally.43 General Dyer’s earliest memories of childhood developed in this context.44 At the age of 11, Dyer and his older brother attended boarding school at Midleton College in Southern Ireland near the city of Cork.45 Technically a non-sectarian school, Midleton College possessed roots as an Anglican school and the majority of its school-children and teachers identified as Protestant. There, Dyer won fame among his schoolmates for fighting with ‘Baminines’, groups of Irish children from the town who snuck onto the school campus.46 In Ireland, Dyer also learned to overcome a stammer that embarrassed him for much of his young life. Dyer witnessed the same turbulence in Ireland as O’Dwyer during the same years. Within a year of Dyer’s arrival, Ireland experienced a drop in agricultural prices followed by a bad potato harvest, both of which resulted in famine and evictions. By 1880, some 2,000 families suffered eviction yearly, and radical members of the Land League retaliated violently.47 Simultaneously, the Irish Home Rule party in Westminster, led by Charles Stewart Parnell, waged a campaign for responsible selfgovernment in Ireland that ruffled more than a few Protestant feathers.48 After Midleton College, Dyer lived in Dublin briefly before joining the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in 1884.49 As chance would have it, Dyer received his first military posting in Ireland during the unrest over Gladstone’s first Irish Home Rule Bill.50 The bill reintroduced a self-governing parliament in Ireland (like the one that existed until 1801), but without the oppressive ‘penal laws’ that banned Catholics from holding office. Protestant communities feared a Catholic-dominated Irish government might break the imperial link to England, without which their interests as a minority would not be protected.51 Riots broke out in Belfast in 1886 and the military intervened to help the struggling police. Here, Dyer learned his first lessons in aiding the civilian power. When the government attempted to prosecute the rioters, Protestant juries refused to convict their co-religionists, fuelling sectarian violence. Meanwhile, Gladstone’s government fell, and Conservatives replaced the Irish Chief Secretary John Morley with Sir Michael Hicks Beach, who increased both the

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number and the power of the military to control the situation.52 The unrest in Ireland, both during his teenage years in Cork and now in his early twenties in Belfast, taught Dyer of the absolute necessity for coercion.53 Shortly after the Belfast riots, Dyer found himself stationed in Burma near the end of the Third Burmese War (1886–7). Here he learned one of the most important lessons of imperial warfare: to use collective and exemplary punishments to terrorize subjects into submission. Like later government policy during the Anglo-Irish War where the mere suspicion that Irish civilians possessed either weapons or sympathy for insurgents justified extreme action against them, any Burmese individual found with a weapon could be shot on sight and entire Burmese villages suffered severe punishments. In one village, the military decapitated 12 Burmese men and displayed their heads on spikes.54 Under India’s Commander in Chief, General Frederick Roberts, Dyer received formal instructions for good conduct in Burma: When there is an enemy in arms against British rule, all arrangements must be made not only to drive him from his position, but also to surround the position so as to inflict the heaviest loss possible. Resistance overcome without inflicting punishment on the enemy only emboldens him to repeat the game, and thus, by protracting operations, costs more lives than a severe lesson promptly administered.55 Dyer took these lessons to heart and applied them in other venues for years to come (including 1919 Punjab). By 1887, Dyer transferred to the Indian Army and was stationed in the Punjab within a year.

Riots in Amritsar Whereas the 30 March hartal in Delhi to protest the coercive Rowlatt Acts turned violent during Dyer’s family vacation, the hartal in Amritsar took place on the same day without any bloodshed. O’Dwyer might have attributed this to his foresight, for on the previous day the governor placed a gag order on a locally prominent Hindu member of the Congress party, Dr. Satyapal, who was ordered not to give public speeches, even though he advocated non-violence and had served Britain as a lieutenant in the Army Medical Services in Aden during the Great War. Nevertheless, tensions worsened. Europeans stopped going into the city as they felt hostility towards them by all manner of locals. Like most major cities in India, Amritsar was divided into Indian and European quarters.56 Most of the city’s population of roughly 160,000 lived within the ancient walled part of town full of narrow, congested streets. At its heart was the Sikh Golden Temple, the

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most venerated site in Sikhism, located close to the Jallianwala Bagh. The other part of the city consisted of the British cantonment, with wide, wellmaintained streets, outside the old city walls.57 Obviously, European residents chose to stay outside the city walls for fear that some Punjabis might turn violently against them. To pre-empt violence again before the next hartal on 6 April (when Dyer’s family drove back to Jullundur), O’Dwyer forbade a few more prominent locals in Amritsar from speaking in public, including Dr. Saifuddin Kitchlew, a Muslim barrister and chairman of the Punjab satyagraha sabha.58 Like many others, Kitchlew connected with the still inchoate Khilafat Movement. As an active member of Congress, he and Satyapal worked to ensure the hartal took place peacefully.59 In another pre-emptive action, the local garrison set up small groups of soldiers armed with rifles along the streets that led from the British cantonment to the local church. After all, the hartal was taking place on a Sunday, and the British were afraid of an attack. Troops continued to escort Europeans to church in this way every Sunday thereafter until tensions relaxed.60 British fears were not completely unfounded. Anti-British feeling in the city steadily increased to the point where tonga drivers refused to take European passengers to or from the railway station. The local regime decided to act. Miles Irving, the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar since February 1919, reported to his direct superior, Commissioner of Lahore Division, A.J.W. Kitchin: We cannot go on indefinitely with the policy of keeping out of the way, and congratulating ourselves that the mob has not forced us to interfere. Every time we do this the confidence of the mob increases; yet with our present force we have no alternative. I think we shall have to stand up for our authority sooner or later by prohibiting some strike or procession which endangers the public peace. But for this a really strong force will have to be brought in and we shall have to be ready to try conclusions to the end to see who governs Amritsar. 61 Irving’s depiction of peaceful strikers as a ‘mob’ revealed his impetuous mindset, which was emblematic of the Punjab administration in general and the extent to which its authority was based on violence or the threat of it. In his imagination, peaceful protest and a reluctance to transport British passengers became tantamount to a battle over ‘who governs’ the city. Irving also felt unsettled by recent displays of Hindu-Muslim unity. On 9 April, during the Hindu festival Ram Naumi celebrating the birth of Rama, Irving witnessed ‘unprecedented fraternization’ between Hindus and

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Muslims who drank water from the same vessels (a highly symbolic gesture). He also saw a parade in which Muslims dressed as Turkish soldiers made ‘a somewhat offensive demonstration’ by clapping their hands at the deputy commissioner.62 Most of the procession saluted Irving as it passed and, at one point, even played ‘God Save the King’. Nonetheless, he remained unsure of how to interpret the display of intercommunal unity because Ram Naumi typically coincided with Hindu-Muslin tensions, if not outright violence.63 The government also expressed concern over the influx of Indians from out of town coming to Amritsar for the Baisakhi celebrations, which coincided with a horse and cattle fair scheduled for 10– 13 April.64 Rumours of a plot to kill all the British in town on 16 April, the day of Gandhi’s expected arrival, compounded British fears.65 In yet another effort to prevent trouble, O’Dwyer banned Gandhi from entering the Punjab and ordered the arrest of the two most prominent nationalists in Amritsar even though they had not broken the gag rules. Gandhi was forced off a train at the Punjab border town of Palwal on 9 April and escorted back to Bombay.66 The next morning, Irving invited Satyapal and Kitchlew to his bungalow where he had them arrested and deported to another district in the Punjab, Dharamsala. Amritsar’s Superintendent of Police, Mr Rehill, drove the car deporting the two Indians, leaving only the police deputy, Mr Plomer, in charge should there be any fallout. The Indians who had accompanied Satyapal and Kitchlew to Irving’s house returned to the city to spread the news of their arrest and deportation.67 Neither Irving nor O’Dwyer anticipated Indian unrest due to these arrests. In fact, they expected no trouble at all until the next Sunday, 13 April, when Europeans would venture into the city for church. So on 10 April, the same day as Kitchlew’s and Satyapal’s arrest, Major-General Sir W.G.L. Beynon, Commander of the 16th Division (Lahore), ordered 100 troops to reinforce Amritsar by that Sunday. Only Captain Massey, the commander of the small garrison at Amritsar, suspected that news of the arrests might incite violence. He therefore telegraphed Lahore for reinforcements right away, but Beynon wrote Massey off as ‘somewhat alarmist’.68 As it turned out, Massey was right. Upon hearing of the arrests, some 50,000 Indians headed towards the British lines demanding to see the deputy commissioner to petition for the release of their leaders.69 Their sheer numbers made Irving nervous, so he ordered Massey to ensure no Punjabi crossed the railway that divided the British side of the city from the Indian side. Massey held his troops on the bridges across the railways, frustrating the would-be petitioners. Some began throwing stones, to which the troops responded by firing 73 rounds into the crowd without warning, killing ten and wounding many more.70

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In response to the shooting, the petitioners dissolved, some into small groups of rioters who attacked the symbols of British power and Europeans wherever found. One group destroyed the Telegraph Exchange and rushed upon the nearby rail station where they found the Station Master, Mr Bennett, and began beating him until soldiers intervened. Another cluster of angry Indians caught the Telegraph Master, Mr Pinto, by surprise, but he escaped them mostly unharmed thanks to the intervention of a Sikh officer. A British railway guard, Mr Robinson, was less fortunate. An assortment of Punjabis found him all alone and beat him to death.71 Upon hearing news of soldiers opening fire upon their unarmed countrymen, two local leaders, Drs Bashir and Meer Makhbul Hassain, led their compatriots in an attack on a branch of the National Bank. They killed the bank Manager, Mr Steward, and his Assistant Manager, Mr Scott, and set the bank on fire.72 They attacked another nearby bank, but some Indian clerks hid the British managers there and got them to safety. Another company of locals attacked the Alliance Bank and killed its manager, Mr G.M. Thomson, who used a revolver to defend himself.73 Indians set fire to the Religious Book Society’s Depot along with the town hall and sub-post office attached to it. Some looted the other sub-post offices around town, and one group targeted the Zenana Hospital looking for the most prominent European there, Mrs Easdon, a lady doctor (i.e. gynaecologist), who escaped with the help of a loyal servant. Mrs Easdon daringly dressed as an Indian woman (unpalatable under normal circumstances) so that she could reach the house of the sub-inspector of police. Another British woman, Marcella Sherwood, Superintendent of the Mission Day School for Girls, encountered an irate assembly of Punjabis while riding her bicycle. They beat her badly and left her for dead until some nearby Hindus took her to refuge. Yet another company of angry civilians encountered Sergeant Rowlands, the electrician to the military works, and killed him. Shortly thereafter, another large group of Indians attempted to break into the British side of the city again, but this time they received warning from Irving and Plomer before soldiers opened fire, killing 20 to 30 more. Frustrated inhabitants of the city spent much of the remaining day and night cutting telegraph wires and destroying railway lines.74 In response to these episodes, Dyer ordered over 300 reinforcements for Amritsar including 100 British and 200 Indians.75 Meanwhile, General Beynon in Lahore sent over 300 soldiers under the command of Major MacDonald, who arrived in Amritsar by 9.30pm on 10 April.76 Lahore also sent Commissioner Kitchin to Amritsar by road, accompanied by Dyer’s longtime friend and Deputy Inspector General of Police for the Punjab, Mr Donald, and the Superintendent of Telegraphs, Mr Coode. Upon their arrival, close to 4pm, they found that temporary headquarters had been set up

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at the railway station. When Major MacDonald arrived, Kitchin turned control over to him because ‘the situation was beyond civil control, and that he, as senior military officer, was to take such steps as the military situation demanded’.77 The city fell, de facto, under martial law. The next day, 11 April, Beynon ordered Lieutenant Colonel Morgan to take command of Amritsar away from Major MacDonald, claiming that he thought it prudent to have a more senior officer in charge.78 However, Morgan blamed the change in command on MacDonald’s failure to satisfy Kitchin’s punitive disposition. Morgan explained, ‘I was shown a letter from Kitchin, the commissioner, to General Beynon, saying “Major MacDonald had done nothing to quell the rebellion. Please send an officer who is not afraid to act”. General Beynon decided that I was the officer’.79 But the city was no longer in ‘rebellion’ by the time MacDonald arrived. He ‘immediately proceeded to patrol city with my detachment from Lahore and brought in the remains of the three bank officials murdered during the day and also released four other civilians held up in the City [. . .] Found all quiet in City. Night remained quiet’. He certainly would not be able to take platoons into the city to retrieve these people if the city were in open rebellion. Clearly, Kitchin was eager for a military officer to punish Amritsar in some significant way, but MacDonald represented a new generation of British officers much less inclined to take punitive action.80 He did what he had to do to get British civilians to safety, but as there was no disorder, there was no need for him to do anything to restore order. By the time of his arrival, the city’s inhabitants had calmed down. MacDonald even gave permission to some Indians to bury their dead outside the city walls, but he warned them to finish mourning by 2pm because airplanes would be ready to drop bombs on any civilian crowds gathered after that time.81 The civilians complied and no violence erupted either during or after the funerals. Annoyed with MacDonald’s relatively gentle disposition, Kitchin and Dyer’s good friend Donald drove back to Lahore on 11 April. That same day, upon Kitchin’s insistence, General Beynon sent Morgan to Amritsar with the expectation that he would ‘quell’ the rebellion that MacDonald was ostensibly allowing to continue.

Dyer and the Shooting at Jallianwala Bagh By 9pm on 11 April, only 30 minutes before Morgan’s arrival in the city, General Dyer reached Amritsar. He drove there in his car, accompanied by his Brigade Major, Captain Briggs, Captain Southey, and his personal bodyguard, Sergeant Anderson. Dyer claimed that Beynon ordered him to take command of Amritsar, but Beynon ordered Morgan to do that. Dyer took it upon himself to teach the civilians a lesson.82 First, Dyer went to the police station

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and took Ashraf Khan, the Police Superintendent, to the temporary headquarters at the railway station so that he could identify the ringleaders of the riots. The next morning, Dyer moved headquarters to the Ram Bagh, a spacious garden with shady trees and a nice building (built by the Sikh Maharajah Ranjit Singh). Then Dyer marched his soldiers through the city ‘to impress the inhabitants that he had sufficient force to enforce law and order. A dozen important arrests were made without opposition’.83 No one resisted the regime anymore, but Dyer remained unsatisfied. He resented that ‘the bearing of the inhabitants was most insolent and many spat on the ground as we passed’. Shortly thereafter, Dyer discovered an unauthorized funeral procession was taking place at Sultanwind Gate, so he took 125 British troops, 310 Indian troops, two armored cars, Mr Irving, Captain Massey and his good friend Mr Donald to deal with the situation. Dyer reported that the mourners ‘dispersed with difficulty, and I considered the advisability of opening fire. I came to the conclusion that a proclamation should be issued by me personally before taking such drastic measures’.84 Whereas MacDonald gave permission to civilians to bury their dead peacefully when he was in command, Dyer contemplated shooting them. Irving shared Dyer’s desire to open fire on the funeral, even though it presented no threat. The mourners defied British orders by their slowness to disperse and therefore, legally, deserved to be shot: A small crowd was repeatedly warned by me and Mr Donald to disperse but did not do so, and an unassailable legal ground for firing was given, but no one thought of doing so as no danger was threatened. And on the same day large crowds were streaming back from the mosques outside the city in defiance of orders but were not fired on for the same reason.85 Irving’s and Dyer’s view regarding this ‘unassailable legal ground’ bore remarkable resemblance to later official justifications for reprisals by the authorities in Ireland and revealed the extent to which the law undergirded the harshness of the Punjab regime (as well as the Anglo-Irish War). Irving believed opening fire on civilians was legally justified even though there was no danger of an attack, and he seemed quite proud of Dyer’s restraint. Surely, only a monster would shoot at a peacefully assembled crowd that posed no danger. Although Amritsar’s inhabitants stayed quiet, Dyer’s insecurities continued. That night, he learned of some British female missionaries hiding in the city at Ashrapur Mission Hospital. He immediately sent troops to bring them to the safety of the Ram Bagh.86 Meanwhile, Irving and Dyer felt distressed by the destruction of more telegraph and railway lines, and by

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rumours that groups of armed villagers outside Amritsar were waiting to storm the city to loot it.87 Dyer explained, ‘I was constantly hearing rumours and messages all throughout the 12th and the morning of the 13th that the situation was growing more serious every moment’. He heard of riots in Lahore, in Kasur (just south of Lahore), and in Gurdaspur (just north of Amritsar).88 Dyer therefore issued an unusually harsh proclamation against assemblies on the morning of 13 April, ‘by beat of drums’. He prohibited Indians from entering or leaving the city, induced an 8pm curfew, after which any Indian found on the street could be shot, and ordered that ‘any gathering of four men [or more at any time] would be looked upon and treated as an unlawful assembly and dispersed by force of arms if necessary’.89 The experience of proclaiming his order ‘at all important streets and corners in the city’ left Dyer with a bad taste in his mouth. He encountered Indians who, upon hearing the proclamation, began ‘clapping their hands and laughingly proclaimed, “This is only bluff and no firing will take place”’. By the early afternoon, the oppressive heat of Amritsar’s April sun exhausted Dyer, so he headed back to headquarters believing that enough Punjabis had heard the proclamation to spread the word sufficiently to the rest of the city. He reported, ‘On my way to the Ram Bagh, I was informed that in spite of my stern proclamations a big meeting would be held at the Jallianwala Bagh at 4-30pm that afternoon when messages from Dr Kitchlew would be read out’.90 He took no action to prevent the meeting. He explained: I went there as soon as I could. I had to think the matter out, I had to organise my forces and make up my mind as to where I would put my pickets. I thought I had done enough to make the crowd not meet. If they were going to meet I had to consider it a military situation and make up my mind what to do, which took me a certain amount of time.91 Dyer had already decided to fire on the crowd and needed time to figure out exactly how to execute that decision. At about 4pm, the Superintendent of Police, Mr Rehill, confirmed that the meeting was indeed taking place. Dyer headed for the Bagh, taking with him 25 Gurkhas from Nepal and 25 Frontier Force riflemen, some from Baluchistan and some Pathans from the North-West Frontier, along with 40 more Gurkhas armed with their traditional kukri short swords, and two armored cars with mounted machine guns. Morgan, the man who would have controlled Amritsar had Dyer not taken the job upon himself, accompanied Dyer along with Captain Briggs, Mr Rehill, Deputy Superintendent of Police Mr Plomer, and Dyer’s two bodyguards, Sergeant Anderson and Sergeant

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Pizzey.92 Upon reaching the main gate to the Bagh, Dyer left his armoured cars because the entrance was too tight for them to pass.93 Once inside, he split the riflemen in half, assembling them on either side of the Bagh’s narrow entrance. The illegal meeting was taking place roughly 100 yards away. Dyer originally estimated the number of people in attendance at 5,000, but later discovered there were 25,000– 30,000 civilians present.94 Although the meeting at the Bagh was political, it did not incite violence. Ironically, the speakers condemned the recent rioting but noted that the British played a role in engendering them through their ‘despotic conduct’. The meeting mostly protested the ‘despotic attitude’ with which the government passed the Rowlatt Acts ‘in disregard of the united voice of the [Indian] public’. Speakers expressed ‘sympathy with the families of the philanthropic and patriotic personages, Dr Saif ud Din Kitchlew and Dr Satya Pal’, and protested their deportation.95 Lala Jowahar Lal, a Lahore Police Inspector in the Criminal Investigations Department of the Punjab, surveyed the meeting, estimated the crowd at 20,000 and reported hearing only praises for non-violence.96 Dyer plotted to open fire regardless of the character of the meeting. ‘I personally had ample time to consider the nature of the painful duty I might be faced with’, he claimed.97 ‘It did not take me more than 30 seconds to make up my mind as to what my duty was [. . .] My mind was made up as I came along in my motor car’.98 His duty, as he learned it in Burma and in Ireland, involved shooting not only to make the assembly disperse, but also to punish all Indians for their recent defiance of British power. He justified this in terms remarkably similar to those later used by British Conservatives to demand martial law in Ireland: If I fired I must fire with good effect, [because] a small amount of firing would be a criminal act of folly . . . I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed and I consider this the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral, and widespread effect it was my duty to produce, if I was to justify my action. If more troops had been at hand the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd; but one of producing sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were present but more specially throughout the Punjab. There could be no question of undue severity. Terrorizing the province with brute force justified shooting civilians indiscriminately and without warning. Rather candidly, he admitted, ‘I sometimes ceased fire and redirected my fire where the crowd was collecting

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more thickly’.99 These were the places where piles of Indians frantically tried to escape the bullets through narrow exits (most of which were locked).100 Dyer shot at the unarmed people for about 10 minutes and left without surveying the damage done and without making provisions for medical assistance for the wounded. Initially, Dyer described the ‘the military situation’ as too dangerous to render medical aid because ‘the crowd was so dense that if a determined rush had been made, arms or no arms, my small force must instantly have been overpowered’. So he left quickly, adding, ‘the crowd was free now to ask for medical aid’.101 But later Dyer changed his story, claiming that aiding the wounded ‘was not my job. But the hospitals were open and the medical officers were there. The wounded need only apply for help. But they did not do this because they themselves would be taken in custody for being in the assembly’.102 He felt no remorse, confident in the righteousness of his actions. Upon reaching headquarters, Dyer made a rough estimate of Indian casualties. The empty brass casings that the riflemen brought back with them indicated that 1,650 bullets had been fired. Not every rifleman could pick up each empty case from every bullet fired, so the number of shots fired were (possibly much) higher. Regardless, Dyer calculated, by the conservative standards at the time, that one Indian died for every five or six bullets fired.103 Dyer’s certainty in the justness of this shooting was consistent with the perspective of other diehard imperialists and the code of British military justice in which he was well-schooled. Like Irving, Beynon and O’Dwyer, Dyer typified a mindset that looked back to the days of the 1857 Mutiny and remained convinced that the subject peoples were not only incapable of governing themselves, but also dangerous. Chelmsford revealed a similar sentiment in a letter to Montagu: ‘Amritsar had a very severe lesson the other day at the hands of the Military, but it remains to be seen how far it will have been efficacious’.104 Nearly a month later, the viceroy revealed his perfect comfort with and confidence in martial law. ‘I am afraid you must be disturbed by these occurrences, for you are far from the scene of action, but to us they are like a tonic’, he reassured Montagu.105 To those who shared this mutiny mindset, Indian pretensions towards independence and resistance signalled that British rule was under siege, especially given the postwar context of imperial crisis that gave rise to the Rowlatt Acts in the first place. Those gathered at the Bagh were not innocent civilians, but Dyer’s military enemies. They had forgotten to fear their rulers and required punishment, just as Irish insolence would later need the same. But according to Indian witnesses, Dyer slaughtered at least 1,000 innocent people. Maulvi Gholam Jilani recounted how he survived the shooting:

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I ran towards a wall and fell on a mass of dead and wounded persons. Many others fell on me. Many of those who fell on me were hit and died. There was a heap of the dead and wounded over me, under and all around me. I thought I was going to die.106 Madan Mohan, a 13-year-old boy playing in the Bagh that day, died of a gunshot wound to the head.107 Mohammed Ismail, a local butcher, rushed to the Bagh after the shooting to find his cousin. He reported: Corpses were lying all over. There were some wounded also. My estimate of the persons I saw lying was 1,500. There were [e]specially large heaps of corpses at the corners on both the sides of Riazul Hasan’s house near the well, as also at the corner near Meva Singh’s Burj and along the well facing the platform from where the troops had fired. At several places, the corpses were 10 or 12 thick. I saw some children lying dead. Khair Din Teli of Mandi had his child, six or seven months old, in his arm . . . There were, in all, about 16 to 20 thousand people in the gardan [sic], including, I think, about four or five hundred children.108 Sardar Partap Singh similarly went to the Bagh to find a family member. He was searching for his son, but instead found: Dead bodies were lying on all sides near the enclosure walls. When I entered, a dying man asked for water. There is a drain that carries water from the canal to Darbar Sahib [the Golden Temple]. It is called Hansli. The drain is covered, but there is a pit connected with it which is about four feet square. When I tried to take water from that pit, I saw many dead bodies floating in it. Some living men had also hid themselves in it, and the asked me, ‘Are they (i.e. soldiers) gone?’ When I told them they had gone, they came out of it and ran away. Then I went into the middle of the Bagh to find out my son. There were about 800 or 1000 wounded and dead lying near the walls of the Bagh, besides others who ran away wounded and died either in their own houses or in the surrounding lanes. I remained there from fifteen to twenty minutes, but could not find my son. I heard the wailing of those shot and who were crying for water . . . I did not hear any proclamation on the 13th, forbidding people to attend public meetings; nor did I hear that any such proclamation had been made in the bazaar.109 To these and many other Indian witnesses, Dyer committed murder.

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Singh was not the only Indian unaware of the ban on assemblies. A lawyer and member of the Indian National Congress, Lala Duni Chand, reported that in his quarter of the city, ‘no proclamation of Martial Law, nor announcement prohibiting meetings was made [. . .] It was a shock to me to see in the evening dead bodies and wounded persons being brought from the Jallianwala Bagh’.110 Many Indians visiting Amritsar for the festival and cattle fair found the Bagh a logical place in which to spend the afternoon. Moreover, Dyer’s proclamation was not read anywhere close to the Bagh or the nearby Sikh Golden Temple. Dyer claimed he did not know the city well enough to ensure that the proclamation had been read in enough places: I thought we had gone a long way. We went to many places. I do not know Amritsar very well. We did a great deal in the way of reading out the Proclamation, and I understood that, after I had finished, perhaps a little more was going to be done in that way. I thought I had done quite enough. I confess I do not know how far we had penetrated into the city. I do not know the city very well.111 But Dyer had been to the city before and seen its popular sites.112 At the very least, Dyer knew of the landmark Golden Temple and logic would dictate that he have the proclamation read out near there. But it simply got too hot for Dyer to continue reading out the proclamation. Mr Plomer, the Deputy Superintendent of Police, recalled that ‘when it was too hot to walk in the city I took the nearest route out [. . .] the General remarked that it was getting too hot for the troops so I took the route to Lohgar Gate’, to get out of the city, and the proclamation ceased to be read out at that point.113 So, most people in the Bagh were probably unaware of the ban. Even Dyer admitted that, ‘there may have been a good many [in the Bagh] who had not heard the Proclamation’, but he chose not to warn the crowd before opening fire because, ‘I merely felt that my orders had not been obeyed, that martial law was flouted’.114 But martial law had not yet been declared. Enforcing the ban itself was less important in Dyer’s mind than the need to remind Indians of the power of the raj. Only in this context does it make sense that a British officer could perceive a peaceful assembly as an outright insurrection. After all, Dyer believed that ‘open rebellion reigned in Amritsar and it was my duty to suppress it’.115 Whether the civilians in the Bagh possessed an awareness of the ban on assemblies seemed irrelevant to Dyer because dispersing the gathering was not his primary goal. He admitted, ‘Yes; I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed them perhaps even without firing’. Yet he chose not to disperse them without shooting because ‘they would all come back and laugh at me,

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and I considered I would be making myself a fool’.116 Perhaps like George Orwell’s fictional character in ‘Shooting an Elephant’, Dyer felt that a painful bloodbath was the only way to maintain his authority. These Indians, in his mind, became emboldened by recent experiences and the hope for selfgovernment, thereby forgetting that Britain could, if it so chose, hold its empire by violence – a threat which always existed, however implicitly, but which needed to be made explicit from time to time, if only to remind the subject peoples of this basic fact. Dyer felt obliged to re-instill that fear. Statistically, little information exists for us to analyse the composition of the crowd because most victims and victim’s relatives were too afraid to report their connection to the illegal meeting in case the raj should use that as an excuse to make arrests. Some reported deaths but refused to give the name of the deceased to the government. Officially, Dyer killed a minimum of 379 Indians, 87 of whom were visitors from outside the city.117 At least three times as many Indians were wounded, easily totaling 1,200, and it remains unknown how many of those later died from their injuries.118 Of the 291 names of the dead submitted to and recognized by the government, 186 were Hindus, most of whom were Khatris, followed by Aroras, Rajputs, Kashmiris and Brahmins. Twenty-two were Jat Sikhs, many of whom were probably in Amritsar for Baisakhi celebrations and the horse fair (which the police had closed at 2pm that day). Thirty-nine were Muslim and 44 unknown. This heterogeneous group of civilians included professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, as well as ‘barbers, masons, washer men, cobblers, carpenters, sweepers and even fakirs [beggars]’, along with some women and children.119 Dyer’s choice of riflemen was telling. He picked soldiers who were not connected to the Punjab so that there would be no question of their loyalty when ordered to shoot unarmed, peaceably assembled Punjabis. Nepalese Gurkhas, Baluchis and Pathans from the North-West Frontier would not have felt loyalties to Punjabi civilians and so could be counted on to open fire upon them. It was also significant that he led the troops himself rather than ordering one of his subordinates to do so. Dyer’s biographer, Nigel Collet, has suggested this proves, ‘the deliberate nature of what was to follow’.120 Dyer’s action was commended by Michael O’Dwyer and General Beynon. This was due in no small part to Dyer’s original report on the shooting in which he stated, ‘I realized that my force was small and to hesitate might induce attack’.121 He omitted the fact that he failed to give warning before firing or that he continued to fire after the crowd began dispersing, nor did he mention that he left the wounded there to die. Beynon responded to Dyer’s initial report with a telegram stating, ‘Your action correct and Lieutenant Governor [O’Dwyer] approves’.122

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But Dyer’s initial justification for shooting (that he was scared of being overwhelmed by the crowd) was rather disingenuous because his later explanations for shooting clearly indicated that fear of the crowd was not the motivating factor.123 One of Dyer’s bodyguards, Sergeant Anderson, recounted the shooting from the military’s perspective: When firing was opened, the whole crowd seemed to sink to the ground, a flutter of white garments, with however a spreading out towards the main gateway, and some individuals could be seen climbing the high wall. There was little movement except for the climbers. The gateway would soon be jammed. I saw no sign of a rush towards the troops . . . After a bit, I noticed that Captain Briggs was drawing up his face as in pain, and was plucking at the General’s elbow . . . The fire control and discipline of the native troops was first class. The officer in charge kept his eye on the General, gave his fire and cease fire orders to his men, and they obeyed him implicitly: there was no wild sporadic firing . . . Dyer seemed quite calm and rational. Personally, I wasn’t afraid. I saw nothing to be afraid about. I’d no fear that the crowd would come at us.124 According to him, Dyer remained in complete control of his faculties. He shot at the crowd deliberately, not out of panic. Moreover, Dyer admitted he felt angry because by assembling at Jallianwala Bagh despite the ban, those Punjabis had ‘defied me, and I was going to give them a lesson [. . .] I was going to punish them. My idea from a military point of view was to make a wide impression’. When he was asked if his goal was ‘to strike terror not only in the city of Amritsar but throughout the Punjab?’, Dyer responded unequivocally, ‘Yes, throughout the Punjab. I wanted to reduce their moral [e], the moral[e] of the rebels’.125

Interpreting Riot as Rebellion Whereas MacDonald described Amritsar as ‘all quiet’ after the riots of 10 April, Dyer believed the place was in open rebellion. He reported, ‘Complete lawlessness prevailed and indeed continued to prevail till the firing took place on the evening of the 13th [at Jallianwala Bagh]’.126 Beynon and O’Dwyer believed him.127 They clung to his original claim that he would otherwise have been overwhelmed by the crowd, and that he was putting down a ‘rebellion’.128 These men shared a similar mindset about the use of force to keep the empire intact and, especially in the case of India, on the importance of making a show of military strength. This point of view resulted, in part, from a heightened fear of Bolshevism projected onto India. Afer all, it was

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only two years since the overthrow of the Russian tsar and the threat of a Red victory during the civil war scared the British in India as well. O’Dwyer equated the spread of Indian civil disobedience with: Absolute Anarchy – If I may say so, Mr Gandhi’s doctrine, to my mind, is almost exactly on a parallel with Tolstoy’s doctrine. Tolstoy’s doctrine led in the long run to Bolshevism, and Mr Gandhi’s doctrine, if taken up in the same way will lead to the same results as in Russia.129 The Punjab government’s official statement on the turbulent events of early 1919 revealed a similar obsession with protecting India from Bolsheviks. Remarkably, the Punjab administration took the communist threat so seriously that proof of it was not required: ‘The avowed designs of the Bolsheviks on India are too well known to require proof’. Nonetheless, they claimed, ‘We have had plenty of proof of the alliance between the Bolsheviks and the Committee of Union and Progress and Pan-Islamists, in which alliance the Indian revolutionaries have been from the first deeply concerned’.130 This paranoia infected high-ranking officials in the regime and coloured their interpretation of the riots. Commissioner Irving betrayed a similar fear. He described Amritsar as engaged in a communist revolution, despite the riots’ cessation: We had all the Police posts round the walls [of the Indian quarter]. But outside those limits the mob was in possession. It was freely said that it might be the Raj [rule] of the Sarkar [government] outside, but inside it was Hindu-Mussalmanon ki hakumat [Hindu-Muslim rule]. It means that the Government might be governing outside, [but] the local soviet were ruling within.131 The word hakumat possessed no connotations that lent it to an analogy with Russian style soviets. Irving made the connection between self-rule and Bolshevism on his own. On one hand, Bolshevism was a convenient label with which imperialists tried to discredit nationalist movements. But on the other hand, British officials actively feared Bolshevism because of its revolutionary implications and the threat that it might spread across the empire. Even some Liberals worried that ‘Bolshevism threatens India, threatens Egypt, menaces us in Ireland too’.132 The ‘Great Game’ in Asia, which referred to the historic threat that the Russians presented on the northwest frontier of the raj, was further compounded by potential Afghani conspiracies to foment rebellion in the Punjab.133 O’Dwyer, forever wary of German or Turkish designs on the

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frontier felt convinced that Afghan invaders were receiving encouragement from emissaries in Delhi and Amritsar.134 This is somewhat understandable given the conspiracies the raj had uncovered during the war, such as the Silk Letter Conspiracy. And in fact, a war with Afghanistan broke out in May 1919, although it had little to do with an attempted rising in the Punjab.135 Clearly, then, the Punjab administration felt under siege from multiple threats which compelled the authorities to punish any Indian defiance with vigor, and defend that harshness by depicting the region as openly in rebellion. After all, the regime resorted to declaring martial law in the province for months in response to only a handful of riots. Although Montagu disapproved privately of the martial law regime, even he felt alarmed that ‘The Bolsheviks, in their animosity to all settled government, are using grievances of the Mahomedans, and what frightens me is the way in which Pan-Islamism which, as I think foolishly, we have made hostile to the British Empire, is taking charge of the extremist movement’.136 Not insignificantly, the under-secretary of state for India blamed the riots on the harshness of the entire British raj. Lord Sinha, the first Indian to hold this high position and the first to become a member of the House of Lords (both in the same year) believed the riots resulted from British repression as embodied in the Rowlatt Acts: ‘I am strongly suspicious that our old friend, firm government, the idol of the Club smoking-room, has produced its invariable and inevitable harvest’.137 Furthermore, he connected the martial law administration in India with Ireland: ‘It gives me furiously to think that the reasons which lead one to resort to this method in India, intimidation of witnesses, partial justices, exist in Ireland, where not only are judges sometimes partial but juries may be partial and intimidated too’. Sinha added that the Rowlatt Acts wouldn’t work any better in Ireland than in India: ‘You may say that Ireland is not in a happy condition to suggest an analogy with. Granted. But many a man has tried comparable action to Rowlatt action and many an Irishman will tell you that the condition of Ireland today is partly due to these efforts’. Sinha also made a racial analogy saying the general view of English as ‘cold and collected and Irishmen as warm-hearted, quixotic and hysterical is wholly false’. He added, rather pessimistically, ‘Perhaps people judge nations as they judge individuals on prejudice’.138

Riots in Lahore, Kasur and Gujranwalla On the night of Dyer’s shooting, he, Irving and Morgan ventured into the city. They found all quiet, not one person in violation of the curfew.139 Perhaps that might have been the case ayway, but Dyer felt convinced that opening fire at the Bagh had a salutary effect on the population. Earlier that

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day, O’Dwyer and Beynon petitioned Lord Chelmsford for permission to declare martial law in the capital city and in Amritsar. On midnight between 15 and 16 April, ordinary criminal courts were replaced by ‘direct trial of offenders’ by tribunals of three men with the power of courts-martial.140 For the first time since 1857, martial law was declared in India. The viceroy empowered martial law administrators with freedom to impose a range of sentences upon Indians convicted of rebellion, which resulted in overly severe punishments that the government later converted into more appropriate ones. They could sentence convicts to ‘transportation’ (typically meaning deportation to prison in the Andaman Islands) for any period between ten years and life, or to rigorous imprisonment for seven to 14 years. The martial law commissions often gave harsh sentences out of proportion to the crimes for which Punjabis were convicted – so much so, that most sentences were either not carried out or reduced significantly by the government. Four commissions tried 853 Indians of whom 581 were convicted, mostly for ‘waging war against the King Emperor’. Of these, 108 were sentenced to death, 265 to transportation for life and 191 to imprisonment: five for ten years, 85 for seven years, 104 for shorter periods, and two for transportation for a period shorter than life. Many of these sentences, however were transmuted. Of the 108 death sentences, 23 were carried out.141 Two Indians were actually transported for life, five were released immediately and the rest served varying years in prison. Of those originally sentenced to prison, only 53 penalties were carried out, while two convicts were immediately released, and the remainder had their sentences reduced to shorter periods. These figures showed ‘a great disproportion between the original sentences and those to which they were commuted’, thus revealing the ‘initial severity’ of the regime.142 As if the sentences were not harsh enough, martial law was also made retroactive to 30 March, the day of the first anti-Rowlatt hartal (strike) and violence in Delhi (during Dyer’s family vacation).143 British officials justified the imposition of martial law by claiming that the province was in open rebellion against the raj. Ironically, as was the case in Amritsar, violence subsided by the time martial law was declared. Much like Dyer’s actions in Jallianwala Bagh, the administration of martial law was marked by the desire to punish (and in many instances, to humiliate) Indians for earlier outbreaks of violence. In fact, it was during martial law that General Dyer imposed his infamous ‘crawling’ order. The capital city of the Punjab experienced the same protest to the Rowlatt Bills as Amritsar, but unlike Amritsar and Delhi, there was no hartal in Lahore on 30 March. Rather, the first strike in that city was scheduled for Sunday, 6 April. Lahore’s government banned processions and public

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assemblies as of 2 April in order to prevent any violent outbreak. The hartal on the sixth succeeded without incident.144 A few days later, on the same day that riot erupted in Amritsar because of the arrest of their local leaders, city dwellers in Lahore heard the rumours about Gandhi’s arrest for trying to enter the Punjab.145 The locals gathered and headed for O’Dwyer’s headquarters to petition for Gandhi’s release (although in actuality, Gandhi was not in jail). On the way they passed a number of European-owned shops, buildings and individuals ‘without showing the smallest sign of any desire to hurt anybody’.146 Lahore’s administrators reacted with more restraint than Amritsar’s. Like Amritsar, police set up blockades to prevent the assembly from reaching the government house and other places occupied by Europeans, but unlike Amritsar, Lahore’s District Magistrate, Mr Fyson, warned them before opening fire. They fired 12 to 20 shots, killing one, injuring seven.147 That group dispersed but another formed at the Lohari Gate, this time feeling angry and with numbers swelling to near 20,000. The authorities slowly pushed them back through the streets of Anarkali without shooting. Some civilians began to throw bricks and mud at the Superintendent of Police, Mr Broadway, and his men for roughly 45 minutes. Broadway eventually responded by ordering his men to fire a few rounds above their heads. When this failed to make everyone disperse, Fyson warned the crowd that they would be fired upon, and then ordered his men to open fire. Another six rounds were shot, but this time it was enough to make the civilians scatter. A total of 18 men were wounded, of whom three died from their injuries.148 The next day the people of Lahore engaged in another hartal without incident.149 British administrators refused to return the bodies of those shot dead on 10 April to their relatives for fear of more violence, so jail officials carried out burials on the eleventh (but allowed relatives to attend).150 By that day, news reached Lahore of the riot in Amritsar the previous day. Some 25,000 Hindus and Muslims met at the Badshahi Mosque to discuss what had happened. There hung a banner that read, ‘The king who practices tyranny cuts his own roots underneath’, and local leaders, such as Pandit Rambhaj Dutt, who was later deported for his speeches, alleged that the police fired upon the crowds in Lahore even after they had begun to disperse.151 Upon leaving the mosque, ‘hooligans carrying sticks’ spearheaded a congregation shouting in the streets that King George was dead and that he was not their king. Others gathered outside the Lahore Fort on the same morning, angrily spit at British soldiers there and yelled, ‘Let us kill the white pigs’. Meanwhile, smaller groups attempted to pressure Indian railway employees into observing the strike.

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The government decided to get tougher the next day, 12 April. The city dwellers met again at Badshahi Mosque, but this time upon leaving they found 800 police and soldiers under the command of Colonel Frank Johnson posted along the streets waiting for them.152 Deputy Commissioner Fyson warned them to disperse, but they refused, so eight rounds were fired, killing one and wounding 28.153 The city quickly became all quiet and martial law was declared a few days later (backdated to 30 March). The Punjab government cited the events in Kasur as one of the best reasons for imposing martial law because, the government claimed, its inhabitants attacked Europeans without any provocation.154 The small town located less than 40 miles outside of Lahore (but still within Lahore District) experienced little to no anti-Rowlatt protests. In fact, no hartal took place there on 30 March or 6 April. Their first strike was held on 11 April, and a crowd led by a local Muslim shopkeeper, Nadir Ali Shah, forced a number of shopkeepers to observe it. That evening, Kasur’s inhabitants heard about Gandhi’s arrest and the shootings in Amritsar and Lahore.155 The hartal continued in Kasur the next day, 12 April, and Nadir Ali Shah led another group, this time toward the railway station. He carried with him a black flag to signify that they were bemoaning the loss of liberty, and this they did with an intensity rivaling the mourning rituals of the Muslim month of Muharram.156 Eventually, sorrow turned to violence as mourners felt anger and frustration with recent events in Lahore and Amritsar. They attacked the railway station and telegraph office. Eventually, they turned toward a nearby train from Ferozepore upon which were European passengers including Captain Limbey of the Royal Engineers, Lieutenant Munro, Mr and Mrs Sherbourne, their three children, Corporal Battson, Lance-Corporal Gringhan, and two warrant officers armed with revolvers.157 Captain Limbey and Lt. Munro were both unarmed. They stepped off the train first, saw the imminent attack and ran to safety. The Sherbourne family, assisted by the two corporals and an Indian named Khair Din, also escaped to a nearby hut. A group of angry Indians followed them, surrounded the hut and eventually succeeded in pushing the door open. However, a local Muslim pleader, Ghulam Mohiuddin, calmed the situation and the villagers returned to the railway station. Meanwhile, another frustrated assembly stayed focused on the train and threw stones at the two European warrant officers still on it. When they began shooting, Indians stormed the train and beat the warrant officers to death.158 Thereafter, riots erupted across Kasur. Some burned down the post office before attacking the tahsil (revenue office), at which point police opened fire, sending 57 bullets into a group of 1,500 to 2,000 men, killing four and wounding many. This put an end to the unrest. Troops arrived in Kasur the

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next day, but by then the city had fallen quiet. Even upon hearing news of General Dyer’s shooting in Amritsar, Kasur did not engage in another violent spectacle. Days later, martial law was imposed.159 Roughly 36 miles from Lahore, Gujranwalla’s population of 30,000 held a hartal on 6 April peacefully, but news of Gandhi’s arrest and the violence in Lahore, Amritsar, and surrounding areas reached the town by 12 April and created tension. When British and American missionaries heard about Dyer’s shooting, they feared, irrationally, that Gujranwalla’s inhabitants would retaliate against them for Dyer’s misdeed. So they quickly left the town, ‘being satisfied that in the event of trouble the Indian Christians would be quite safe without them’.160 A hartal was scheduled for 14 April, the day of Baisakhi celebrations, which were to be held in Wazirabad, a town roughly 20 miles away. 161Some of Gujranwalla’s population gathered at the train station to make the trip, but to their dismay, there were not enough trains to carry all of them, so the station stopped issuing tickets.162 That morning, a dead calf was found hanging from Katchi bridge near the railway station. As it posed a religious offence to Hindus, the authorities removed and buried it promptly, but rumours spread that the police were responsible for the slaughter, hoping to create divisions within the Hindu-Muslim unity movement.163 These rumours and the inability to travel, combined with the stories of shootings and riots in nearby places, compelled frustrated would-be travellers at the railway station to throw stones at the trains carrying passengers who bought tickets before the station sold out. Some angry groups set fire to the Katchi bridge, thereby making it impossible for anyone else to travel by train, while others began cutting telegraph wires. Further down the railway line, some 400 to 500 villagers armed with ‘crowbars, hammers and lathis [sticks]’, were busily destroying the rail when Mr Heron, the Superintendent of Police, appeared and ordered them to disperse. They responded by throwing stones at him, so he ordered his men to open fire. Two or three Indians were wounded, at least. The villagers withdrew to a safe distance, but continued to throw stones.164 Meanwhile, others set fire to the post office, the local revenue office, the church and the district courts. Another bunch attempted to attack the local jail, but they were dispersed by gunfire. Hours later, another group looted and burned the railway station. The police eventually started to shoot groups of Indians ‘whenever sighted’, but because they did so from a distance, there were relatively few casualties. Each time an assembly was fired upon, it would dissolve quickly.165 By 3.10pm, airplanes began flying over Gujranwalla. Major (then Captain) D.H.M. Carberry’s plane arrived first and dropped three bombs on a crowd of 150. One bomb did not explode, but the other two managed to kill one woman and one boy, and wounded many men. Major Carberry also fired

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50 rounds from his machine gun to make the villagers scatter. He dropped two more bombs on 50 others gathered about a mile away from the first bombsite. Carberry’s third bombsite involved a gathering of 200 Indians near Khalsa High School and Boarding House, where 160 boys lived.166 The following day, another pilot, Lieutenant Dodkins, while flying to inspect the damage done to the railway lines leading to Lahore, opened fire on a group of 20 gathered in a field outside Gujranwalla. He found another 30 to 50 men standing outside a house listening to someone give a speech, but upon seeing Dodkin’s plane they ran inside before he could fire his machine gun upon them. In response, Dodkins dropped a bomb on the neighbouring house, presumably because he missed the intended target. Bombing Gujranwalla quelled the disturbances. Airplanes proved more cost-effective than police gunfire and required minimal manpower to deploy, yet could survey the land with the added bonus of striking terror into the heart of Punjabi villagers. Any gathering spotted from the sky was vulnerable to bombing, regardless of the reason for which they gathered. A funeral procession was just as likely to be bombed as a group of Punjabis listening to a speech. Moreover, the bombs might not hit their intended targets, yet the administrators judged it a job well done. So, airplanes meted out punishment most indiscriminately. Like the other Punjabi cities, Gujranwalla fell silent but martial law was imposed nonetheless at midnight, 17 April.

Martial Law and ‘Fancy’ Punishments The Punjab government interpreted the disorders in Delhi, Amritsar, Lahore, Kasur and Gujranwalla as evidence of a conspiracy to overthrow the British raj. Initially, the viceroy did not share this fear. On the day Dyer opened fire on the Bagh, he reassured Montagu: I see no cause for grave alarm. The movement on its militant side shows no signs of central organisation, though it has led to grievous isolated outbreaks . . . We have acted so far with great restraint, but we shall be in a position to hit hard if there is any further collision in any of the main centres of disturbance.167 But he quickly changed his tune after hearing what Dyer had done. Moreover, O’Dwyer and others felt that firing upon the crowds in each instance was a far cry from stamping out open rebellion. It therefore simply did not matter that each town fell quiet for days afterward. In O’Dwyer’s opinion, they must crush their ‘rebellious spirit’ with the expedient of martial law.168 It was time for reprisals. In total, 1,142 Punjabis were tried for offences whose punishments

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could not exceed two years imprisonment. Of these, 73 per cent were convicted of which 92 per cent were sentenced to prison, most of whom received the maximum sentence. Fifty-seven lucky Indians escaped prison by suffering a whipping instead.169 Another 62 Punjabis were tried for crimes punishable by more severe sentences, of whom 21 were convicted. Eight of these were sentenced to transportation for life, and 13 received one to ten years in prison.170 In Lahore alone, 277 Indians were tried, and 75 per cent were convicted of whom 32 per cent were flogged an average of 12 stripes.171 These punishments were in addition to that meted out by the administration during the days of unrest discussed earlier. The official number of Indians dead at the time in Lahore (including Kasur) was 14, in Amritsar 379, in Gujranwalla 17, and in Gujrat two, for a total of 412. In sharp contrast, seven Europeans were killed in total in the Punjab, of whom five were slain at Amritsar and two at Kasur.172 The martial law regime punished the Punjab harshly. Seven European deaths resulted, directly or indirectly, in more than 400 Indian deaths and over 1,000 Indians convictions. In Gujranwalla, even ‘respectable citizens’ were not immune. There, roughly 20 middle-class men were arrested and marched through the city, ‘two and two, headed by a Hindu and Mahomedan, to ridicule Hindu and Mahomedan unity’.173 They marched to the railway station where authorities forced them onto a coal truck destined for Lahore. While on the truck, these men were ‘not allowed to leave their place even for the purposes of attending the calls of nature and some of these gentlemen had to relieve themselves when they were huddled together and to suffer all the disgusting trouble and inconvenience thereof’.174 British sensitivities to class status seemed conspicuously absent.175 Moreover, many ‘respectable residents’ of Kasur reported being ‘arrested and kept in gaol for absolutely no reason that they knew of. Some of them had to be released after several weeks when nothing incriminating could be found against them’.176 Another middle-class Indian experienced harassment in Gujranwalla. Officers placed a martial law notice on the gate to his house and warned that he would be arrested if any harm came to the poster. He asked for extra copies in case the rain or passers-by destroyed it, but was refused. Subsequently, they made him responsible for even more posters put around his house. He commented, ‘This was a source of great annoyance to me, particularly because of the dejection that already hung over me, due to the fear of being arrested sooner or later’. Eventually, he was called to the police office to give a statement about his attendance at ‘secret’ political meetings. Although he insisted he was telling the truth, the police challenged his veracity and ‘a different version [of his statement] was taken down, it being neither in my power to control their record, nor my wish or inclination to put my head into

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the noose, by resisting them’.177 This 30-year-old pleader felt both powerless and humiliated. Perhaps most offensive to Gujranwalla’s inhabitants was General Campbell’s ‘salaaming’ order. The order and Campbell’s logic for it exemplified the punitive nature of martial law and its obsession with punishing insolence: Whereas it has come to my notice that certain inhabitants of the Gujranwalla District are habitually exhibiting a lack of respect for gazetted or commissioned European Civil and Military Officers of his Majesty’s Service thereby failing to maintain the dignity of that Government, I hereby order that the inhabitants of the Gujranwalla District shall accord to all such officers, whenever met the salutation usually accorded to Indian gentlemen of high social position in accordance with the customs of India. That is to say persons riding on animals or on or in wheeled conveyances will alight, persons carrying open and raised umbrellas shall lower them, and all persons shall salute or ‘salaam’ with the hand.178 The description of this Muslim greeting of respect (in which one bows while touching the forehead with the hand or fingers) as an Indian custom both exoticized it and legitimated British officials as ‘natural’ rulers of the land. Campbell eventually extended this order to Lyallpur District and to Gujrat, weeks after the riots ended. The order was obviously implemented as a reprisal in order to humiliate local residents, and Indians were understandably outraged.179 But Lieutenant Colonel O’Brien, Deputy Commissioner for Gujranwalla, defended the order as a tool to teach respect. He explained in paternalistic terms, ‘the tendency of the present day is to abolish respectfulness. The Indian father will tell you that sons are not respectful even to their parents’. O’Brien callously added that so much bitter feeling existed among Indians against the British that this order could not have added to it much.180 Clearly, then, his claim that the ‘salaaming’ order intended to educate Indians in how they ought to behave was rather disingenuous. The order served to further alienate and terrorize Punjabis. In Kasur, the police were so eager to arrest those responsible for the violence committed a few days prior that they rounded up almost every male resident and ‘paraded’ them in front of witnesses.181 At the railway station, these men ‘were kept for several hours in the sun’, and made ‘to dance about a small round arena in which certain Europeans were seated who inspected the faces of those who danced round them’.182 Apparently, British witnesses needed to see the men flailing about wildly in order to identify those involved

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in the riots. The remarkably racist implication here was that their faces under normal, sober conditions all looked the same. Unsatisfied with humiliating Kasur’s inhabitants in this way, the commanding officer, Captain Doveton, invented ‘fancy punishments’ for minor crimes that did not legally warrant courts-martial. Most commonly, he would sentence convicts to work on the railway, but one Indian was offered the choice between skipping and working. He chose to skip and from that point on, several others were sentenced to skipping. One Indian who happened to be a poet was sentenced to write and read in public a poem in praise of martial law. Doveton also ordered all convicts to salaam British officers by touching their foreheads to the ground.183 The captain explained, ‘to the people of that place there was no such thing as authority and everybody was his own master. The main object was to impress on the people that everybody was not his own master and they had got to conform to order’.184 Like Dyer, he meant to remind them that the British were their masters. Floggings became commonplace during martial law. In Kasur, martial law administrators inflicted a total of 605 stripes upon the small town of 25,000 residents, and caned six schoolboys. Moreover, two Indian men were shot dead by sentries, one while running away and the other ‘while resisting’.185 Excessive floggings took place in other towns under martial law as well, many in public.186 Martial law administrators seemed too eager to whip Indians for minor infractions, such as ‘contravention of the curfew order, for failure to salaam a commissioned officer, for disrespect to a European, for taking a commandeered car without leave, for refusal to sell milk, and for other similar contraventions’.187 This would obviously breed contempt, but to British officials, it was an expedient way to put Indians in their place, thereby restoring order.188 In Lahore, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Johnson administered a highly punitive martial law regime which his superiors championed. He requisitioned motorcycles, bicycles and firearms ‘whether held under license or otherwise’, but he enforced this only if they were Indian-owned.189 Johnson believed strongly in the usefulness of floggings. He explained that, ‘when the civil population runs amuck [. . .] [flogging] is the only method by which you can deal with it’.190 General Beynon celebrated Johnson’s administration as ‘most effective; the justness of his orders and the personal touch which he established with Indians of all classes caused the administration of the Martial Law to become a blessing which the poorer classes especially appreciated’.191 Ironically, these poorer classes were the most likely to be flogged. Not content with floggings, Johnson also targeted college students in Lahore for collective punishment. In addition to an 8pm curfew for the district, he instituted a roll call for students of the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic

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(DAV) College to report at Bradlaugh Hall (some distance away) at four different times of day. Forcing the students to spend their time travelling back and forth between school, home and the location for roll call would, he argued, keep them so busy and exhausted that they could not spread seditious propaganda across town.192 Within ten days, the students of King Edward Medical College were similarly required to report for roll call four times a day at Patiala House, some miles away. Most college students rode bicycles to help them make the commute for roll calls, but upon reporting, their bicycles were requisitioned by the military and possession of them became illegal. Consequently, the students had to walk roughly 16 miles a day in the Lahore heat. Colonel Johnson felt this amount of walking was, ‘no hardship at all for able-bodied young men’.193 When asked if he was ‘longing for an opportunity to show them [the Punjabi students and their professors] the power of martial law’, Colonel Johnson responded, ‘quite’, and added, ‘I would do it again tomorrow in similar circumstances’.194 Johnson clearly shared Dyer’s confidence in the rightness of his efforts to impress upon Indians the regime’s willingness to subjugate. The roll calls were harsh punishments that did little to restore order in a city that was already back to carrying out business as usual. A Punjabi witness recalled that students ‘were made to stand in the sun guarded by the military with fixed bayonets and this process was continued for three weeks immediately preceding their University examinations [. . .] Some students actually fainted while going to, attending, or returning from such roll call parades’. Even middle-class Indians suffered harassment at these colleges. Some principals ‘were coerced by the Martial Law administrator to inflict severe punishments on a certain percentage of their students irrespective of any evidence of their guilt. Some of them were expelled, some were rusticated, some were sent down one year’.195 Expelling or suspending med-students by quota hardly relates to the state’s ability to maintain law and order. A professor of English at Dyal Singh College attested to the ways in which Johnson coerced the principal of his school into punishing students. First, he demanded that the principal deliver the students responsible for attaching a seditious poster to a martial law notice on one of the school buildings. When the principal proved unable to identify the culprits, Johnson levied a hefty fine upon him. A few days later, he again ordered the principal to find ‘the ring leaders, no explanation being given as to ring leaders of what movement were meant. We took it that some students had to be punished’. The principal complied but the number of students he selected for random punishment was, to Johnson, inadequate. So Johnson told the principal to add more students to the list. The principal complied and the following day received, to his surprise, a cheque returning the money Johnson previously fined him.196

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Most city-dwellers were arrested on mere suspicion and held without trial for several days.197 A lawyer and former professor of economics at the University of Calcutta, Manohar Lal, was arrested because he was a Trustee of the Tribune newspaper.198 But Trustees did not write the paper, nor did they ‘control the daily writing by the Editorial staff . . . I had, personally, never written a line to the paper on any subject whatever for several years. Of the Trustees, I was the junior most, being only of a few month’s standing’.199 His wife, an invalid, was forced out of their home the same day of his arrest while the authorities searched the house for two days. They refused to allow her to take clothes, bedding or anything else while she was forced to live in the nearby ‘outhouses’.200 Manohar Lal was held for roughly one month, during which time he spent one week in solitary confinement. Dr. Gokal Chand Narang, a barrister, was arrested and placed in a solitary cell usually reserved for those sentenced to death or transportation for life. He spent 26 days in that cell without knowledge of the charges against him, ‘when temperature in the shade probably ranged from 110 degrees to 118 degrees’. At his trial, he was charged with multiple counts of inflammatory public speaking, but he was actually one of the men who, on 6 April, dispersed a large crowd verbally, thus preventing the police from having to open fire. During the trial he applied for bail because of bad health due to the filth of his prison cell, but was denied. He was eventually found not guilty.201 A 35-year-old shopkeeper and basket maker who lived in Anarkali was shot in four places when the police opened fire on the Lahore crowd on 10 April. About a month later, still on bed rest, he was ordered to testify in a case about which he had no knowledge. His refusal resulted in arrest, after which he stood trial for participating with the mob. Of the 20 witnesses he named in his defence, only two were called to attest that the only reason he was near the scene of violence on the day he was shot was because he was getting food from his cousin’s bakery. Nonetheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison, ‘on the ground that I could not say I was not in the crowd, for my wound proved the contrary’.202

The Mindset of Martial Law The Lahore regime relaxed the curfew by the end of May. Motorcycles and bicycles were returned on 6 and 9 June, respectively and martial law lifted by 12 June. Sir Michael O’Dwyer claimed that it would have been lifted sooner, by 25 May, if the Afghan War had not broken out on 8 May. The war, he explained, ‘altered the whole internal and especially the military and railway

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situation and made it essential to take no risk’.203 More to the point, the Punjab government admitted that ‘disorder’ in the city ceased by 17 April, yet martial law continued for almost two months after ‘order’ had been restored. The reason was ‘to establish a morale which would afford a guarantee against the recrudescence of disorder’ and ‘to restore the position of Government as the guarantor of peace and good order which had been sacrificed during the disorders of the 10th to the 17th of April’.204 That is to say that martial law was continued to ensure that Punjabis learned that their rebelliousness, for whatever reason, would be chastised severely. The administration of martial law in Lahore and Kasur revealed the military’s penchant for retribution. Beynon supported Johnson’s actions because they obviously shared the same mindset, which they probably developed during their years of training and military service. For these men, the purpose of martial law involved instilling fear into emboldened Punjabis. These were enemies of the state and although their crimes certainly did not warrant the punishments meted out, to military men like Beynon, Johnson, Doveton, and Dyer it made perfect sense to treat Indians in this way. To them, mere impudence constituted a severe crime that must be dealt with swiftly and mercilessly. They expected obedience from their servants and they strongly believed in British stewardship over inferior Indians. Any ‘native’ resentment of this ‘fact’, not to mention pretensions toward self-rule, must be responded to with a mighty show of force. Civilian administrators were no less immune to this way of thinking. Just days after Dyer’s shooting, O’Dwyer wrote to Chelmsford that ‘The Amritsar business cleared the air, and if there was to be a holocaust anywhere, and one regrets that there should be, it was best at Amritsar’.205 His word choice was telling. About a week after Dyer’s shooting, O’Dwyer visited Amritsar and found the inhabitants ‘salaaming most profusely and they are thoroughly frightened [. . .] I think our prompt action [. . .] paralysed the movement before it had time to spread’.206 O’Dwyer clearly approved of terrorising the population. So did the viceroy. He believed ‘it was Dyer’s prompt action which saved the situation from being infinitely worse. Moreover, since then, I have heard that Dyer administered Martial Law in Amritsar very reasonably and in no sense tyrannously’.207 In his farewell address, O’Dwyer summarized how men of his mindset viewed Punjabis: I could meet the Punjabi, whatever his class or condition, as man to man without suspicion or mistrust. I found him in the mass loyal but not subservient, brave but not boastful, enterprising but not visionary, progressive but not pursuing false ideals or mistaking the shadow for the substance.208

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Clearly, this idealized vision of this ‘martial race’ contradicted reality as nationalist politics spread across the province. O’Dwyer best illustrates that martial law was not really about restoring order.209 He insisted that martial law be backdated to 30 March 1919, as that was the day of the first hartals and ‘the date on which trouble started in Delhi’.210 Obviously, the government was most concerned with punishing the troublemakers whom, they claimed, had instigated riots across the province. But as there was little correlation between the suspects and the actual instigation of rioting, the regime was also applying the notion of collective responsibility and collective punishment in that all Punjabis were more or less complicit in offending the raj. Therefore, whomever was chosen for an example did not have to be guilty of any crime. One might suffer simply for being a resident of a place that rioted or because one was associated, however loosely, with a section of the community that could be labelled as troublemakers. That was guilt enough for one to be used as an example for the rest. This kind of logic explains why the regime felt justified in targeting college students, as well as the likes of the Anarkali shopkeeper, the Barrister and the Tribune Trustee, among many others. Surprisingly, however, O’Dywer expressed concern about the use of airplanes on civilians in the Punjab. He told Chelmsford, ‘I have been rather anxious about the airmen, as they don’t know the local conditions and when working in a disturbed area are apt to imagine that any collection of people is a hostile gathering’.211 But the viceroy defended it: ‘the use of aeroplanes was only an act of common intelligence’.212 O’Dwyer worried not so much about the indiscriminate nature of aerial bombing but about the fact that it was a new technology to which he was unaccustomed. Later, after receiving much bad press about bombing Gujranwalla, the viceroy claimed that if there was any wrongdoing by the pilots it was because the government was using a new technology that had never been used in India before: ‘Royal Air Force Officers who were despatched to Gujranwala to assist the civil power [. . .] had never before been employed on such service, and the situations arising could not be foreseen. Action has been taken separately to issue printed rules for the future guidance of officers in such cases’.213 Montagu felt quite frustrated with Chelmsford’s unwavering support for India’s administrators, ‘whether they are right or wrong’. Moreover, he felt highly suspicious of the application of martial law because he did not believe that Indians were actually ‘waging war against the King’. He believed that the viceroy’s need ‘to reduce the stringent punishments’ proved his point.214 He told Chelmsford: I did not ever feel that your reduction of sentences was due to clemency. I thought it was due to a desire to make the punishments fit the case,

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and on this hypothesis it seemed to me quite obvious that the sentences originally imposed were too severe . . . There is nothing so bad for public opinion, it seems to me, as to sentence a man to transportation for life, shocking his friends and horrifying those who think the sentence too severe, and then to remit the sentence to three months’ imprisonment.215 But the viceroy remained steadfast in his support, confident there had been no wrongdoing. He approved wholeheartedly of the Punjab regime because of the peculiarity of that particular province: ‘I think O’Dwyer’s methods are suitable to the Punjab and they have been most efficacious, but they would be decidedly out of place in any other province’. The strong military presence in Punjab differentiated it from other provinces and, most importantly, ‘stern rule has been the practice in the Punjab and the province is accustomed to it’. Punjabis, after all, were ‘a people addicted to turbulence’.216 The day after Dyer killed roughly 400 civilians in Jallianwala Bagh, he heard rumours that another meeting was to be held at the Sikh Golden Temple. Dyer worried that the shooting at the Bagh did not, in fact, produce the salutary effect that he thought justified it. Further, Dyer calculated that the rebellious Indians were challenging the loyalty of his Sikh Sepoys by meeting at this Sikh holy of holies. After all, if he were to open fire at the Golden Temple he would surely outrage his otherwise loyal Sikh soldiers and, he feared, provoke a mutiny.217 So, Dyer rushed to the Golden Temple where he demanded to meet with the manager, Sardar Arur Singh, and another highly influential Sikh, Sardar Sundar Singh Majithia. Dyer promised them that no harm would come to the building as long as they ensured him that no meeting would take place there. He also obtained their consent to help dispel rumours, rampant at the time, alleging that Sikh girls had been raped by British soldiers and that the Golden Temple had been bombed. Dyer was eager to keep the loyalty of his Sikh soldiers and, ‘as a result’, he claimed, ‘my Brigade-Major [Captain Briggs] and myself were made [honorary] Sikhs at the Golden Temple’.218 In other words, Dyer intimidated the Sikhs at the Golden Temple to make sure that no meeting would take place there, but he did so in a rather diplomatic fashion, as if championing Sikh religious sensibilities. In exchange, he was reassured that he would not be forced into any action that might provoke his soldiers. Pleased as he was with his skilfull manipulation of these events, Dyer soon found himself in another quandary. He infamously gave the ‘crawling’ order to punish the men responsible for brutally beating Ms Marcella Sherwood during the riots of 10 April when she was caught in the narrow street of Kucha Kurrichhan while riding her bicycle.219 Dyer did not hear of the attack

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on Ms Sherwood until nine days after the fact, but he was no less incensed than as if it just happened. So, on 19 April, he had a triangle (whipping post) erected at the spot where she had fallen, and placed guards on both sides of the street about 150 yards apart. He ordered them to make any Indian man who wished to pass between them on that street crawl on all fours.220 Shortly after giving the ‘crawling’ order, Dyer came across 11 ‘insolent inhabitants’.221 What constituted insolence on their part remains a mystery. Nonetheless, he ordered their arrest and for the police to bring them to his headquarters at the Ram Bagh the next morning. Although he claimed he was unaware of the fact, the street upon which Ms Sherwood had been beaten was on the way to the police station, so the 11 prisoners were made to crawl 150 yards in the filthy street.222 The next day, six Punjabi men arrested under suspicion of attacking Ms Sherwood were taken to that triangle and publicly flogged. They were made to crawl on their way to and from the whipping post. Dyer was quite sure that these were the men who had beaten her, although they were arrested for other offences and it was only by coincidence that he came to hear that they might have been the offenders for whom he had been searching. So he made sure that they received their punishment of 30 lashes at the exact spot where Sherwood had fallen. Later, the men were tried and convicted of attacking her, but at the time they were whipped it was possible that they were innocent of the crime against her. Here Dyer clearly laid out the notion of collective responsibility and exemplary punishment: If they were not the particular men and another man had been beaten, still it did not matter very much whether he was beaten there or somewhere else, if he was convicted. I did not wish to run the risk, if he had committed the offence against Miss Sherwood, of his being beaten somewhere else.223 The exact ground at which she fell obviously held sacred meaning for Dyer and he felt compelled to ensure that the men suspected of hurting her were beaten at the very same place.224 Meanwhile, another 50 or so men were also forced to crawl through the street during the week that the ‘crawling’ order held, mostly because they lived in the houses that were situated on that part of the street. Dyer claimed that he thought all those homes possessed alternate entrances. When he discovered they did not, he surmised that those inhabitants could walk across the roofs of houses to circumvent the street. Dyer could not ‘understand why any went through [crawling] after the 19th’, especially since the soldier ‘picquets were only on duty from 6am to 8pm’. Dyer disregarded the fact that the curfew would have discouraged Indians from venturing out while the

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soldiers were not on duty. So, he believed that the men who crawled did so to make a political statement and ‘to make martyrs of themselves’. After all, Dyer recalled that ‘one man actually crawled through three times and had to be stopped, by the picquet, from giving further exhibitions’.225 The Indians who suffered through the ‘crawling’ order experienced intense racial humiliation. One man who was forced to crawl because he lived on that street described what happened: As my house is situated in Dugglan ki Gali I had to visit that street. There I was made to crawl the whole street on my stomach. The position would be better described if I said that I had to lie with my belly on the ground and to move on my shoulders with the arms bent like a grasshopper’s. The street is very long and hence it was very difficult and painful to crawl like that. All the old and young had to go through the same ordeal if they intended to visit the street. Many people left off going to the street altogether and some found abodes in other places. If anybody raised his buttock in crawling he was kicked by the goras [whites] who patrolled the street. The street was patrolled by about 18 goras who came at 6 in the morning and left it at 8 in the evening for many days.226 As if the indignity of crawling were not bad enough, this witness reported being forced to slither on his stomach for 150 yards. Adding further insult to injury, his 17-year-old son was among the six arrested for attacking Ms Sherwood and sentenced to death for it. The government later commuted that death sentence to transportation for life, but before trial and imprisonment, his son was whipped 30 cuts just like the other young men suspected of attacking her. His father watched while his son fell unconscious while being flogged. ‘They dropped some water in his mouth. As soon as consciousness came back to him he was made to receive the remaining stripes’.227 Surprisingly, the Punjab government did not approve of the ‘crawling’ order and withdrew it on 26 April.228 But Dyer wanted the authorities to understand the importance of issuing it. He waxed apoplectic, revealing a romanticized view of British womanhood: A helpless woman had been mercilessly beaten, in a most cruel manner, by a lot of dastardly cowards. She was beaten with sticks and shoes, and knocked down six times in the street. She tried to gain entrance at an open door, but the door was slammed in her face. To be beaten with shoes is considered by Indians to be the greatest insult. It seemed intolerable to me that some suitable punishment could not be meted out.229

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The incident outraged Dyer so because he believed that ‘we look upon women as sacred or ought to’, and revenge seemed to him tantamount to justice.230 The ‘crawling’ order therefore functioned, like the shooting at the Bagh, as an act of reprisal. Just as defenders of reprisals in Ireland would later claim, Dyer suggested that his ‘crawling’ order was meant to pacify angry British soldiers as much as it was designed to punish Sherwood’s attackers. O’Dwyer echoed a similar sentiment, even though he claimed to disapprove of the order. He recalled talking to Dyer after the order had been cancelled: [I] told him that it was an irregular and improper order, and asked him what led him to issue it. As far as I remember, he referred to his position at the time, that he had a certain number of British troops, he had the greatest difficulty in restraining them because they had seen English ladies savagely assaulted, they had known that their fellow countrymen had been killed and he thought they might break out of control; he therefore ordered this punishment to make an impression on their minds.231 Of course, it seems unlikely that the man in charge thought himself unable to control his troops, but this was an explanation used regularly during reprisals in Ireland. Perhaps Dyer himself needed retribution and justified it on this rather unconvincing basis. Regardless, the notion that he could make Indian men crawl on the ground in order to ‘make an impression’ upon his British soldiers exposed an obvious racism.232 Even Montagu shared Dyer’s desire to punish the Indians for harming a British woman. He privately admitted, ‘I should not have complained if Dyer had lynched those who attacked the lady missionary’.233 What Montagu objected to was the indiscriminate nature of the punishment because the very Indians who lived nearby and rescued her quite possibly suffered as a result of the order. The authorities in Amritsar, like the other cities, treated some older, middle-class Indians harshly. A 60-year-old retired surgeon, Dr. Kedar Nath Bathia, was arrested and marched through the city with 62 other men. He was held without trial for 15 days until he was released due to a lack of evidence against him.234 Moreover, on 25 April, while the ‘crawling’ order was still in force, Dyer issued another order making it illegal ‘for any male person to carry or be found in possession of an instrument known as lathi [sticks]’. He was clearly trying to prohibit Indians from carrying the most readily available weapon to them, but Kapil Deva Malaviya, an Indian nationalist and vocal critic of the Punjab regime sarcastically remarked: ‘Is lathi a formidable and deadly weapon of warfare? If it is, I wish with all my soul, Brigadier General Dyer had made this useful discovery before the war with Germany broke

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out’.235 Malaviya voiced the anger Indians felt over the confiscation of such items, and pointed out the paranoid nature of the regime. Montagu also objected to the regime’s treatment of wealthier Indians: The idea of whipping a man for tearing down a notice is to my mind (and I know that you agree with me) ridiculous. A system of martial law which forces on Mr. Shafi’s son-in-law the necessity of salaaming a European and insists upon the Senior Puisne Judge of the High Court being in his home by 8 o’clock at night and the confiscation of his car – if these things are true, how can it make the Province better?236 Dyer proclaimed that although it is best to inflict corporal punishment in public ‘as a warning to others’, no one was actually whipped in public. He explained that the six whipped at the spot where Ms Sherwood fell were not, in his opinion, in the middle of a ‘public thoroughfare’ because the street was blockaded by soldiers on either side. But onlookers could easily see the whippings, as could the residents in the homes lining the street. Three more Indians were whipped ‘privately in the Ram Bagh [headquarters]’ and four at the police station. At least 25 others were also flogged, but Dyer remained suspiciously silent about where they received their punishments.237 As was the case in other towns under martial law, allegations of police corruption and of false accusations became rampant in Amritsar but the authorities could find no evidence to prove them. Major S.R. Shirley, the Area Officer and Provost Marshal for Amritsar District, claimed that he could not adequately follow up on the allegations because they were made anonymously. Sharing a similar disposition to Dyer, Johnson, Beynon and others, Shirley added that if the authorities did behave badly, the Indians deserved it. After all, he explained, many Punjabis proved reluctant to provide information that could help arrest ‘conspirators and rioters’. Therefore, ‘if doubtful methods were used to obtain evidence or if prosecution by the police took place, the inhabitants of Amritsar themselves are more to blame than anyone else’. With this sort of attitude widespread, it is no wonder that Indians ‘became sullen and resentful as arrests and investigations proceeded’.238 The people of the Punjab lived these days in terror. The British missionary Charles Andrews, close friends with Gandhi, recalled the atmosphere in Amritsar in early May 1919: ‘I have seen with my own eyes just such a sudden rush of panic. I have also seen the police, at every corner, dominating the city. I have seen the long lines of cavalry patrolling the streets. I have understood from the lips of many witnesses, the terror which these forces have inspired’.239 The raj created a culture of terror and intimidation to punish the

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population, much like Dublin Castle would begin using in Ireland within the next few months. The military ruled Gujrat for just over a month, and held sway in Amritsar, Kasur, Gujranwalla and Lyallpur until 9 June 1919. Lahore returned to civil law on 11 June, while the railway lands waited until 25 August.240 It took two to three months to convince the Punjab government that the province was no longer in open rebellion. Shortly after that last area under martial law returned to the civil power, the government of India passed an Indemnity Bill in September 1919 (the same month that soldiers in Ireland spontaneously sacked the town of Fermoy) to indemnify all officers, both civil and military, for their actions during martial law so that no civil or criminal suit could be brought against them.241 Dyer, however, was only protected by this act to a degree and, consequently, he was theoretically vulnerable to prosecution by the government of India or of England. The legal advisor at the India Office, Sir E. Chamier, advised the government not to prosecute him. He explained: I think he committed culpable homicide not amounting to murder according to the Indian law and manslaughter according to the English law, but it is notoriously difficult to obtain convictions in cases of this kind, and if, as is exceedingly probable, the jury, whether in India or in England, took the view that he was justified in firing in the first instance, and that he had a reasonable belief that it was his duty to go on firing, they would treat the case as one of justifiable homicide and acquit him.242 Although Dyer committed ‘culpable homicide’, no jury would likely convict him because ‘cases of this kind’ possessed a strong racial component. Furthermore, any number of private suits could be brought against Dyer by relatives of those killed at the Bagh and, although the cases would probably have to be dismissed because of the Act of Indemnity, they would be dismissed only on a case-by-case basis. As such, much evidence would be heard on the matter and create potentially bad press for the government while further poisoning the political atmosphere in India. Consequently, the British government attempted to protect Dyer from being put on trial, officially. They created a commission of inquiry to assess the appropriateness of not just his actions, but also the responses of the entire Punjab administration.

CHAPTER 2 INQUIRY, REACTIONS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF MINIMUM FORCE

Attitudes regarding what constituted acceptable strategies of British rule had changed since the Great War. Mazharul Haque resigned from the viceroy’s council because the authorities in Delhi opened fire on the crowd at the railway station on 30 March and because Chelmsford endorsed this action. He wrote, ‘Unfortunately the officials don’t recognise the changed conditions of India, and they still carry on the administration of the country according to their old, out of date, methods in which the people count not’.1 Montagu made the point even more forcefully: ‘You cannot use these methods any longer in India, and either you have got to find some way of doing without them or be prepared for a hostile and embittered population. They will not stand now what they stood in 1818 or even before the war’.2 Clearly, the war (and Wilsonian rhetoric) was partly to blame for this new context. Moreover, the press played a new role in scrutinizing government responses: ‘every little disturbance, which 20 years ago would have been passed by without notice in the papers as a not unusual incident in Indian life, is now exaggerated out of all proportion to its real significance [. . .] because our opponents imagine that we really are afraid of them and consequently are emboldened’.3 The empire had to prove it was not ‘afraid’ after all, but it was in crisis and the postwar context changed what was at stake. So, on 22 May 1919, amidst Indian allegations that the government used excessive force against peaceful assemblies, the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, decided to investigate.4 He hoped this would ‘help remove the causes of unrest’ and also ‘dispose of some of the libelous charges made against British troops and those upon whom the unpleasant duties in connection with those riots have fallen’.5 The Indian press was heavily censored under martial law, so the Indian National Congress sent emissaries to pressure Montagu. The Labour Party, working with B.G. Tilak and the London Congress

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Committee, also demanded a public inquiry and an end to martial law. Earlier that month, Labour and the Indian Committee of the Workers Welfare League of India distributed 10,000 copies of a pamphlet stating, ‘Indians are unarmed, yet they are bombed from aeroplanes and shot down with machine guns’.6 Gandhi believed an official government inquiry would ‘calm the public mind and restore confidence (much shaken by the events in the Punjab) in the good intentions of the Government’.7 Eager to win nationalist support for the Montford and to assuage embittered Indians by making concessions to the emerging mass nationalist movement, Montagu agreed. However, some resisted the idea. The government of India’s Home Member, Sir William Vincent, objected because an inquiry could renew bitterness that was ‘now wiped out’.8 Presumably, by bitterness, he meant a rebellious attitude. Of course, if it had been wiped out, then there would be no need to continue martial law for over another month. The Army Member and Commander-in-Chief, General Charles Monro, feared that the ‘authority not only of the British officer but of the army as a whole will be called in question’.9 He represented well the military mindset of the British officers of the Indian Army and what they believed to be the central importance of punishment and reprisal.10 No doubt he also worried about the army’s ability to engage effectively with rebellion in Ireland if the military in India were put under a microscope. The provincial governments of Bombay and Bengal also opposed an inquiry, fearing it would provide extremists and the press with ammunition against the Punjab regime and inflame nationalist opinion rather than calm it.11 Even the moderate Sir Harcourt Butler, Governor of the United Provinces (UP) and former member of Lord Minto’s Executive Council of 1910 dreaded the inquiry: ‘I can see scarcely any limits to racial feeling already high which will be let loose by it [. . .] It should be dropped altogether and the dead past should bury its head’.12 But Montagu held firm, insisting, ‘You cannot have disturbances of this magnitude without an inquiry into the causes and into the measures taken to cope with these disturbances’.13 Montagu sincerely hoped that the inquiry would identify some wrongdoing in Punjab. He begged the viceroy ‘not to take up the attitude that the Government must defend before the Enquiry everything that has been done and that the Enquiry must whitewash everything that was wrong. In that case we shall have achieved nothing and we shall have done more to embitter feeling than anything’.14 Roughly a year later, in the midst of public debates over what had happened in India and what was going on in Ireland, Montagu chastised Chelmsford harshly: You and the Local Governments are too much seeking the assistance that repression give you for the moment, and do not think of the aftermath.

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You will have noticed that even in Ireland where the population is actively hostile, far more universally than it ever will be in India, deportations have failed and are to be abandoned. That will be the history of this expedient all over the world. It cannot be done and it must stop.15 Clearly, the old strategies of rule proved ineffective in the new post-World War I world.

The Hunter Committee The Disorders Inquiry Committee, known as the Hunter Committee (named for its chair, Lord William Hunter), was appointed on 14 October 1919 and began meeting by the end of the month. When deciding who to appoint, Montagu initially suggested the Conservative, Lord Cave.16 Later, he decided a Scottish judge would be preferable, despite encountering resistance from other officials on his choice.17 He eventually settled for Lord Hunter, remarking dismally, ‘Try as I may I do not seem to be able to get the Punjab Enquiry going with a Chairman of really outstanding merits and a strong personnel’.18 Chelmsford agreed, wishing ‘that we could have secured someone with a more high-sounding name than Lord Hunter’.19 In time, Montagu felt at peace with Hunter’s chairmanship. They had a ‘long talk’ and Montagu found ‘Hunter a level-headed, conscientious, wise man, and although I regret that I do not know him better, I am satisfied that against time and in the present state of affairs I have done my best and got you the best man available’.20 Montagu’s instructions to Hunter and the aim of the inquiry clearly showed his regard for public opinion: ‘The object that we have in instituting this enquiry is in short to take with confidence and with courage all the steps necessary to restore public confidence, to dispel or to deal with allegations and to present to the world the truth “as to the causes of and the measures taken to cope with these occurrences”’. Lord Hunter bore responsibility for determining the extent to which the hearings would be public. Montagu cautioned him to keep public attitudes in mind: ‘The more public your proceedings are, the greater the confidence in your enquiry, but if publicity prevents your getting evidence or embroils and exasperates public feeling on either side, you will have complete discretion to hold in private such part of your deliberations as you may wish’.21 The committee was comprised of four British members, three Indian members (two Hindu, one Muslim), one British secretary, and chaired by the liberal Scottish High Court Judge. Montagu wanted the Hunter Committee

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to include ‘Indians who command the confidence of the moderates’.22 He added, ‘nothing does more harm than the allegation that we fear Indian opinion and make safe appointments that command no confidence among those they are supposed to represent’.23 The three Indians included a lawyer, Pandit Jagat Narayan, who was also a member of the Legislative Council in the United Provinces (UP); Sardar Sahibzada Sultan Ahmed Khan, a Muslim lawyer from Gwalior; Sir Chimanlal Hiralal Setalvad, a well-known judge on the Bombay High Court.24 The European members were G.C. Rankin, a Calcutta High Court Judge; W.F. Rice, the Additional Secretary to the Government of India, Major-General Sir George Barrow and Thomas Smith who also served on the UP Council alongside Narayan.25 The committee took written statements from civil and military figures (Indian and British) in each district affected by the disturbances and interviewed each based on his written statement. They heard evidence first in Delhi for eight days, for 29 days in Lahore, six in Ahmedabad, and three in Bombay, completing the proceedings by mid-December 1919. All hearings were public except for the following whose evidence, both oral and written, was given in camera so as not to ‘cause unrest in the public mind in India’: Sir Michael O’Dwyer (who had retired as Punjab’s governor by then), AdjutantGeneral Sir Havelock Hudson, Punjab’s Chief Secretary J.P. Thompson, and an elite Muslim, Sir Umar Hayat Khan.26 The Hunter Committee was thorough in its investigation – so rigorous, in fact, they offended O’Dwyer. The Indian members of the committee, to whom O’Dwyer was accustomed to feeling superior, made him feel like a criminal.27 Gandhi thought the committee was fair: ‘The British members do not appear to be partial in their questions [. . .] the members of the Committee are not such as would deliberately do injustice [. . .] [and] the Indian members are no “yes-men”’.28 Even so, the Indian members could not agree with the final resolutions of their European counterparts. All three Indians jointly published a minority report that found fault with the entire system of British rule in the province. Tensions between Indian and European members of the committee heightened. At one point, Sir Chimanlal recalled that Hunter exclaimed, ‘You people (meaning myself and my Indian colleagues) want to drive the British out of the country’. Setalvad replied, ‘It is perfectly legitimate for Indians to wish to be free of foreign rule’, but he added that this could be ‘accomplished by mutual understanding and good will. The driving out process will only become necessary if the British are represented in this country by people as short-sighted and intolerant as yourself’. After this, Setalvad reported that all the Indian members stopped speaking to Hunter for the remainder of the proceedings.29

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Although the majority and minority opinions agreed that no rebellion existed in Jallianwala Bagh to justify Dyer’s actions and both deplored his ‘crawling’ order, they disagreed on the necessity of imposing martial law and, therefore, whether the Punjab was openly rebelling. The majority (European) report found that open rebellion did in fact exist, so martial law was appropriate.30 The riots targeted British persons, whether official or not, and spread to surrounding areas while sharing underlying causes such as resentment over the Rowlatt Act. The majority report stated that ‘it would have been imprudent of the Government to treat the different occurrences as so many independent and isolated riots’.31 The report distinguished between rebellion, riot and simple political opposition. In Punjab, there existed ‘an intention to paralyse the arm of government by extensive destruction of government buildings and of means of communication’. The damage to railways and telegraph lines proved to the British members of the committee that the Punjab was indeed in ‘open rebellion’.32 The minority (Indian) report, on the other hand, condemned most actions taken by civil and military officers as punitive and excessive. It characterized the administration of martial law as marked by attempts to humiliate Indians and it found that no organized rebellion existed. Hunter’s majority report, these Indians argued, provided ‘an exaggerated view of the events’.33 Rather, the minority report explained, ‘while the attacks on communications look formidable by their mere numbers, some of them were of a very trivial character’ and none of them actually succeeded in paralyzing the government. Moreover, the attacks on railways and telegraph lines may have been perpetrated as much by disgruntled workers as by rioters because railway employees dissatisfied with their meagre wages had been threatening to strike in any case. Lastly, most lines were cut so that trains carrying goods could be looted.34 This was a far cry from a widespread revolution aimed at strategic targets. The minority report’s assessment that no Punjabi conspiracy to overthrow the raj existed was accurate. The rail and telegraph lines were obvious symbols of British power, as were banks, town hall and post offices, so it made sense that angry rioters targeted them to vent frustration. The violence was not intended to end the raj. Rather, it was a way to express Indian grievances with a despotic government at a moment when nationalism was becoming a mass movement, and rising expectations of self-government chafed against imperial intransigence. Spontaneous rioting against what Punjabis believed was a grave injustice hardly qualifies as an open rebellion. Defiance of authority and the destruction of public property are not necessarily tantamount to a revolution aimed at overthrowing the government. Most importantly, the violent outbursts burned out before the application of

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martial law, thereby making martial law unnecessary from a simple law and order perspective. But the British members of the Hunter Committee believed the Punjab’s administrators who claimed that the province was indeed waging a war against the king’s empire. Their ‘mutiny mindset’ and general fears of conspiracy resonated with their fellow countrymen.35 Indian members of the committee proved less willing to accept this idea without evidence to substantiate it. The minority report disagreed with the majority report in other judgements as well. Not only did it find fault with the entire administration of martial law and disapprove of its imposition in the first place, but it also indicted the aerial bombing of Gujranwalla, the ‘fancy punishments’ used by Captain Doveton in Kasur and Colonel Johnson in Lahore, and the many public whippings. These were not the opinions of extremist nationalists, but moderates.36 The British opinion of the committee certainly frowned upon the ‘salaaming’ orders or multiple daily roll-calls meant to punish college and medical students, nor did they necessarily approve of the other ‘fancy punishments’. However, the officers responsible for them were not called out for censure to the same extent as General Dyer. After all, no one died from these punishments, so the acts were dismissed as regrettable. But with the deaths of hundreds at stake, an apology less easily sufficed. Punishing Dyer as an egregious aberration also helped whitewash the system. Despite how conservative the majority report had been in its criticism of the Punjab administration, O’Dwyer held a grudge against it. He castigated the Hunter Committee as unqualified because it lacked ‘a single member who had ever exercised administrative authority anywhere in India’. He resented it for years to come, believing that it blamed him personally for the offences committed by Dyer, Campbell, Johnson, Doveton and others.37 If O’Dwyer had actually been found responsible for all that he felt blamed for, the Hunter Committee would certainly have recommended that action be taken against him. Rather than holding him accountable, the committee remained focused on General Dyer. O’Dwyer was highly sensitive and he was probably responding more to the criticisms of the minority report, but managed to lump their thoughts in with the majority opinion. In his defence, O’Dwyer claimed that he had tried to get the ‘crawling’ order and the ‘salaaming’ order rescinded as soon as he heard of them.38 But he refused to consider the martial law regime as at all sinister. He claimed that, ‘except for the “crawling” order, there is nothing very terrible, having regard to the situation which led to their issue in any of these orders and certainly no intention of inflicting racial humiliation’.39 He explained precisely what he meant by this rather stern attitude:

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One explanation of the whipping sentences (two hundred and fifty-eight were so punished out of one thousand eight hundred people convicted) is that nearly half of these whippings were inflicted in out-of-the-way places – Kasur, Chuharkana, etc. far from jail, and in the absence of railway facilities it was deemed expedient to inflict the punishment on the spot rather than send the prisoner to a distant jail to be imprisoned. There were even cases in which the prisoner asked to be whipped rather than fined. Whipping with a cane is a recognized punishment under Indian Criminal Law, and is a very mild affair as compared with the English flogging with the cat.40 Whipping Indians was a standard and common form of punishment which, to men like O’Dwyer, seemed perfectly appropriate. Of course, he remained suspiciously silent about whether the punishments were proportional to the offences committed, but his statement nonetheless belied a certain attitude about how to rule Indians.

The Congress Report and Decisions The Indian National Congress wanted desperately to participate in the proceedings of the Hunter Committee, but their members were unable to testify while in prison. Lord Hunter claimed that if a prisoner’s testimony were required, then he would be released temporarily to do so, but none of the imprisoned Congress leaders were called to testify. Congress waited until 30 December (the same month that the Irish Republican Army attempted to assassinate Ireland’s viceroy, Sir John French) for their members to be released from prison, but by then the Hunter Committee had finished hearing evidence and Lord Hunter proved unwilling to retry anyone simply because Congress members were now able to participate.41 So, Congress conducted an investigation of its own. The Congress appointed its own commissioners in early 1920 and published its findings in March. Like the Hunter Committee, they interviewed witnesses and published their testimony, but Congress members had no power to interview the main British officials involved. Their report, then, was a collection of Indian voices, the vast majority of which told a story of violence and humiliating punishments out of proportion to the crimes committed.42 Congress’s investigation also gave Gandhi his first major opportunity to work closely with Jawarhalal Nehru as they collected testimony from victims and witnesses.43 The report took a view similar to the Hunter Committee’s minority opinion: Dyer’s action at Jallianwala Bagh was reprehensible as was the entire administration of martial law, which never should have been imposed.

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Dyer’s testimony to the Hunter Committee was delivered in public, while ‘he was jeered by a gallery of [Indian] students at the back of the improvised court’.44 Nonetheless, he knew he had the full support of his superiors. General Monro, the Commander-in-Chief of India who had also served with Dyer in Belfast in 1886, stood behind his man, as did Chelmsford and O’Dwyer. In a letter to the king, the viceroy wrote that ‘General Dyer was placed in a position of terrible responsibility. He took the action which he thought incumbent upon him, and in the course of the enquiry he, in the most frank and open way, disclosed his innermost soul. General Dyer is an officer of great distinction’.45 Dyer also enjoyed the approval of other senior military officers, including General Hudson and the Quartermaster-General Sir George Fletcher Macmunn.46 In fact, Dyer was nominated to receive the prestigious award Commander of the British Empire (CBE Military Division).47 Hudson gave the most popular justification for supporting Dyer. Dyer’s force in the Bagh was, he believed, in danger of being overwhelmed by a rebellious crowd that greatly outnumbered him. The state of open rebellion in the province further justified harsh action because ‘It must be remembered that when a rebellion has been started against the Government, it is tantamount to a declaration of war. War cannot be conducted in accordance with standards of humanity to which we are accustomed in peace’.48 Dyer’s supporters clung to this interpretation even after Dyer clarified that he did not act out of self-defence. Justice Rankin of the Hunter Committee asked him directly whether he opened fire for self-defence. ‘No question of having your forces attacked entered into your consideration at all?’ he asked and Dyer replied, ‘No. The situation was very serious. I had made up my mind that I would do all men to death if they were going to continue the meeting’.49 Dyer believed all the inhabitants of Amritsar deserved to be shot for rioting three days earlier and disregarding his ban. This frankness, useful for historians analysing violence, ultimately was Dyer’s undoing. General Monro felt angry ‘that after a long and distinguished career in action, Dyer should have destroyed himself by failing to keep his mouth shut’.50 General Beynon defended Dyer by suggesting that the ends justified the means. ‘The wisdom of General Dyer’s action has been fully proved by the fact that there has been no further trouble at Amritsar [. . .] [they] had a far reaching effect and prevented any further trouble in the Lahore Divisional Area’.51 After all, Dyer fired for ten minutes, far too long for it to have been a decision based on fear.52 The Hunter Report was completed by 7 April 1920 (roughly one month after the Congress report had been published) and Montagu immediately noticed that the majority report failed to determine the legality of backdating

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martial law to 30 March, as that was, they claimed, outside their frame of reference. A bewildered Montagu argued, ‘there can be no justification for applying the extraordinary and abridged system of trial to events which preceded the supersession of the ordinary judicial system’.53 After all, the men who presided over the ‘special courts’ set up to try Indians under martial law ‘were not men who would have ordinarily tried them. They were not bound by the ordinary rules of evidence’.54 But Montagu’s views differed substantially from his colleagues. The British Cabinet appointed the Indian Disorders Committee (IDC) to assess the extent to which the government should agree with the Hunter Report’s majority opinion, and many of its members were the same men who served on the Cabinet Committee on the Irish Situation at roughly the same time. The IDC began meeting on 21 April 1920, one week before police in Ireland engaged in a spontaneous reprisal in Limerick. Montagu held the chair. He was deeply upset by the shootings at Amritsar and told Chelmsford, ‘I ask myself whether I could not have done more than I did to prevent it’. As news of the Hunter Committee testimonies became public, Montagu felt increasing pressure to take action, even though the committee’s finding had not yet been published. In fact, he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the first three months of 1920 convalescing in a nursing home.55 Lord Chancellor Birkenhead (Frederick Edwin Smith), well known for his staunch opposition to Irish nationalism as one of the leaders of the Unionist faction of the Conservative Party in Parliament, found himself appointed to the IDC.56 Another member was Home Secretary of State, Edward Shortt, who served as the Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1918 – 19. These men were joined by the President of the Board of Education, H.A.L. Fisher, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Alfred Milner, and the Secretary of State for War and Air, Winston Churchill. The IDC decided the government should accept all of the findings of the majority report, which validated the applicability and administration of martial law but which singled out Dyer for not giving warning before firing at Jallianwala Bagh, for shooting as long as he did, and for the ‘crawling’ order. The question now was whether Dyer should be dismissed from the Indian Army.57 The Military Secretary at the India Office, Lieutenant General A.S. Cobbe, preferred compulsory retirement to dismissal from the armed services. The latter, he argued, would forfeit Dyer’s right to receive his pension, as well as his family’s access to it after his death. A dismissal would also require a reevaluation of all the medals and honours he had won over the years. Moreover, if he were to remain on the unemployment list after being dismissed, not only would he have to live off a mere £700 a year, but Dyer would also be eligible for re-employment in the military within five years. But if he were forced to

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retire, he could not be reemployed easily, he could keep all his awards and medals and he and his family could live comfortably off his pension of roughly £1,150 a month.58 The IDC found Cobbe’s arguments persuasive and so chose to slap Dyer on the wrist by forcing him to retire. The government invoked the doctrine of minimum force to justify censuring Dyer in this way, but chose not to apply the same logic to the rest of the Punjab’s administrators. They singled out his shooting as an act of ‘frightfulness’ which they defined as ‘the attempt to terrorise a people by drastic and spectacular punishment of a particular person or persons’. This, the IDC agreed, ‘should receive emphatic repudiation from the British government. The government must uphold the doctrine that only as much and no more force than is necessary, may be used by officers of the government in the execution of their duties’.59 However, other officers engaged in the same attempt to terrorize by exemplary punishment and used excessive force, especially those who dropped bombs on helpless, unarmed crowds. And many defended Dyer on the grounds that harsh punishment was in order. Therefore, the government’s repudiation of ‘frightfulness’ seems motivated not by the doctrine of minimum force, but by the hope of assuaging Indian nationalist opinion. After all, they admitted that events in the Punjab, ‘could not be brazened out’.60 Dyer’s actions were the most egregious so he became a focal point to distract from what other officers had done. Dyer attacked the Hunter Committee as unfair, using an ‘irregular and prejudicial method of investigation’. He claimed he was denied due process of law as he was not technically on trial, but was punished by forced retirement. He complained, ‘I received no notice of any charges against me [. . .] [so] I came and gave my evidence entirely unrepresented and undefended’.61 Ironically, Indians put on trial during martial law certainly shared this experience. If the government’s outrage with ‘frightfulness’ had been sincere, then Dyer would have received far harsher punishment than forced retirement. Criminal charges could have been brought against him for ‘culpable homicide’ or ‘manslaughter’. Moreover, the government would have come out strongly against the entire administration of martial law because it revealed a culture of terror. But the IDC was aware that Dyer would likely be acquitted by a European judge or jury. Not only would an acquittal enflame Indian opinion, but it would also give Dyer grounds for reinstatement in the Indian Army. British officials were desperate to avoid both consequences not because Dyer’s behaviour was so unlike the other martial law administrators in Punjab, but because Britain’s public image urgently needed improvement. Technically, the Manual of Military Law, with which Dyer was familiar, made it clear that the use of excessive force was a crime. It provided the basis for the doctrine of minimum force:

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The law which commands the suppression of unlawful assemblies, riots and insurrections necessarily justifies the civil power in using the necessary degree of force for their suppression. The difficulty is to ascertain what is this necessary degree of force, and the danger of making a mistake in the matter is serious, as any excess in the use of force constitutes a crime.62 Accordingly, as soon as the riots in Punjab dispersed, there no longer existed the need for further state violence. Martial law ought not to have been applied at all. But the fact that so many of Dyer’s superiors and contemporaries supported his shooting suggested that the principles of exemplary and collective punishment coloured one’s interpretation of what constituted minimum force. After all, the government could have censured O’Dwyer for provoking the riots in the first place by deporting local nationalists leaders and/or for approving of the shooting at the Bagh both before and after he had the ‘full details’ in front of him.63 Yet, the IDC decided not to, partly because of an appreciation for his iron grip over the Punjab during the Great War, and partly because the British members of the Hunter Committee chose not to come out strongly against him. Dyer felt confident that he had not violated the principle of minimum force, despite the government’s perception. The IDC claimed: The principle which has consistently governed the policy of His Majesty’s Government in directing the methods to be employed when military action in support of the civil authority is required, may be broadly stated as the use of minimum of force necessary. His Majesty’s Government are determined that this shall remain the primary factor of policy whenever circumstances unfortunately necessitate the suppression of civil disorder by military force within the British Empire.64 But Dyer responded that he was ‘well acquainted with this principle, and have at all times fully accepted it’. In fact, he studied the principle of minimum force for five years while teaching military law to young soldiers as it pertained to ‘the administration of martial law during civil disturbances’. He insisted, ‘I had this principle very clearly before me during the whole time I was in Amritsar, and I never at any time failed to act up to it to the best of my judgment and capacity’. When firing upon the crowd in the Bagh, Dyer explained, ‘I used no more force than was required by the occasion’.65 Clearly, the doctrine of minimum force was subject to individual interpretation. Dyer and the martial law regime had used what they considered to be the least amount of force necessary to teach Punjabis a lesson.

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Dyer’s firm belief that he had not violated the principle of minimum force made more sense given his belief in collective responsibility and collective punishment. He equated the assembly at the Bagh with those who had rioted three days earlier. He wrote that the crowd ‘was in substance the same mob that had been in course of organization for some days and had committed the hideous crimes of the 10th April, and was the power and authority which for two days had ruled the city in defiance of the Government’.66 Dyer therefore felt it unnecessary to differentiate among the city’s inhabitants. They were all equally culpable and deserving of punishment. Nonetheless, the government decided that Dyer alone deserved all the blame for Indian discontent so that censuring him would satisfy Indian opinion and allow the government to maintain the narrative of a non-violent empire. General Monro reluctantly told Dyer to retire. The IDC released their decision and the Hunter Report to the public in May 1920.

Reactions The public reactions to Dyer’s censure ran the gamut from outrage to jubilance, and were both products and constitutive elements of two interconnected narratives about the empire: one made assumptions about how and when the empire resorted to violence, while the other focused on the Irish subtext to Dyer’s fate. Censorship of the Indian press lifted after 9 June 1919, when martial law in Amritsar ended. Working hard to suppress information, the government deported the British (Irish) whistle-blower and editor of the Bombay Chronicle, Benjamin Guy Horniman, for speaking out. They also took pains to explain the official point of view in The New York Times, hoping to keep American opinions favourable.67 British and Indian newspapers alike criticized censorship. The Bombay Chronicle believed the government meant ‘to produce pro-Government versions of the trouble [in Punjab] [. . .] If the Indian press had not been gagged, we should have had more of the truth’.68 The Times complained about the slowness with which the British press learned of Indian events: ‘the Nile might change its course, or India might be riven asunder by earthquakes and no one in Great Britain outside Government Departments would have the smallest knowledge of what had happened for a week or more’. However, it blamed Montagu for ‘bottling up information about India in time of peace’.69 Montagu, however, had little to do with it. Sitting in London (where most secretaries of state sat) he, too, struggled to get adequate information on the state of Indian affairs.70 Details finally reached the British press in mid-December 1919, after the Hunter Committee finished its proceedings. British papers expressed anger that earlier government reports had been ‘totally misleading, minimizing the extent

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of the rebellion and the extent of casualties’.71 Most Indian papers, both moderate and extreme, expressed outrage at the imposition of martial law and blamed it on British racism. But the majority opinion of Europeans in India was that Dyer wisely prevented a second mutiny from taking place. The difference of opinion between Dyer’s defenders and his detractors centred on a number of issues. Of course, the shooting at the Jallianwala Bagh and the ‘crawling’ order were major points of contention, but so was the very imposition and administration of martial law, the fact that it had been backdated to 30 March, and the passage of the Indemnity Bill of September 1919 that protected all officers, both civil and military, from civil or criminal suits against them. The government’s decision to censure Dyer became the most bitterly contested issue as he came to represent everything at stake for either side. Eventually, after much persuasion by Churchill and after reading Dyer’s written defence of his actions, the Army Council agreed not to reemploy him. The Army Council found that Dyer ‘condemns himself by saying if he had more troops he would have inflicted more [damage]’, and they could not ‘get away from the C-in-C [Commander-in-Chief Monro] having removed him’.72 On 7 July 1920, Churchill publicly announced that Dyer had been removed from employment in the Indian Army. The very next day, debates began over whether Parliament would support his removal. The question: ‘whether terrorism shall be condoned as a permissible weapon of British Imperial administration’.73 Indian reactions to events in Punjab appeared nearly uniform: the vast majority felt angry at Britain’s racially motivated violence. One newspaper from Allahabad, The Leader, criticized O’Brien’s ‘salaaming’ order as intentionally designed to humiliate: ‘To give the extinct practices of servility the status of a custom and to seek to revive and enforce them under martial law was only to remind the people of their political subjection’.74 Congress ‘condemned the majority report of the Hunter Committee on the ground of racial bias and as emphasizing the tendency to regard Indian life and honour as of little consequence’.75 Gandhi believed the Hunter Report was ‘page after page of thinly disguised official whitewash’.76 Jawarhalal Nehru wrote in his autobiography that while travelling by train from Amritsar to Delhi at the end of 1919, he overheard a number of military men talking. One of them was Dyer, who, according to Nehru, was callously ‘holding forth in an aggressive and triumphant tone [. . .] He pointed out how he had the whole town at his mercy and he had felt like reducing the rebellious city to a heap of ashes’.77 Mohammad Ali Jinnah described the Jallianwala Bagh as a ‘deathtrap’ and Dyer’s actions as ‘butchery’.78 An Indian’s letter to The Times effectively conveyed the perception of the British as cruel and racist:

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The whole of India, extremist or moderate, Liberal or Conservative, prince or peasant, is unanimous in its condemnation – not only of what General Dyer did at Amritsar, but also of the cruel, vindictive, and humiliating way the martial law was generally administered in the Punjab, even long after every vestige of excuse for its continuance had disappeared. The memories of these dark days are indelibly impressed in the mind of every Indian and the vote of the Lords certainly will . . . convince them that the highest classes in this country are still the supporters of force, of racial prejudice, and of European domination.79 Even the Maharaja of Alwar challenged (albeit gently) the notion that Dyer saved India from engaging in another mutiny. ‘Such an assertion’, he claimed, ‘does injustice to the vast majority of my countrymen, who stand second to none in their loyalty to their Emperor’.80 Unsurprisingly, the Ghadr Party, an extremist nationalist group based in San Francisco, California, argued that this violence typified British imperialism. ‘Dyer is not an isolated character in British imperialism’, they claimed. ‘History bristles with examples of misdeeds, in human activities, ruthless repression, oppression and persecution wherever the British have gone’.81 A few Indians, however, voiced their support for O’Dwyer’s regime. They of course constituted an elite minority beholden to British patronage. For example, Sir Umar Hayat Khan suggested that martial law should have been imposed sooner, while Syed Mehdi Shah described the Punjab government as a ‘brilliant regime’ faced with an ‘organized conspiracy’ which ‘was soon got well in hand by using the speedy and effective method of martial law’.82 Raja Narendra Nath claimed to speak on behalf of the ‘Hindu community’ upon O’Dwyer’s retirement from office, stating that ‘we are very sorry that foolish and mischievous acts of certain misguided men made the last few days of your Honour’s career specially strenuous’. Sardar Sunder Singh Majithia praised O’Dwyer’s methods for having ‘nipped the evil in the bud’.83 But most Indians remained outraged. Sir Rabindranath Tagore, a wellknown and respected Indian moderate and Bengali poet, protested the raj’s treatment of his countrymen by returning his knighthood. He explained, ‘the time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation’.84 Gandhi returned the Kaiser-i-Hind gold medal he received from the Crown for public service in India and his Zulu War medal. In a letter to the viceroy, Gandhi expressed his belief that Dyer’s ‘punitive’ actions ‘were out of all proportion to the crime of the people and amounted to wanton cruelty and inhumanity unparalleled in modern times’. By returning his medals, Gandhi protested Chelmsford’s ‘lighthearted treatment’ of Dyer’s ‘crime’ and the ‘exoneration of Sir Michael

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O’Dwyer’. Gandhi also felt ‘betrayed’ when the House of Lords voted to condemn Dyer’s censure.85 An Indian woman, Sarla Debi Chaudhrani, similarly returned the honour she received from the raj: a badge for wartime services recruiting for the Bengali Regiment during the Great War.86 So many nationalists spoke out against the events of April 1919 that one actually got into some legal trouble. Sir Sankaran Nair, a respected High Court Judge, published a book describing O’Dwyer’s government as full of ‘terrorism’ and ‘atrocities’. The former governor took offence and sued Nair for libel in 1924. The lawsuit again put Dyer’s reputation on trial.87 Lord Justice Sir Henry Alfred McCardie presided over the case and clearly held a bias in favour of the raj. McCardie lectured his court room that when it came to keeping the empire safe, ‘it might be necessary to do things which would not be justified in other circumstances’. He also asked rhetorically, ‘can a man be said to be guilty of an atrocity who is acting with complete integrity?’88 O’Dwyer added that the meeting at Jallianwala Bagh constituted a ‘trial of strength with the British’. McCardie agreed, telling the jury to think about what could have happened if Dyer had not acted as he did.89 McCardie explained, ‘rebellions lead to insurrections. Insurrections lead to civil war. Civil wars are terrible things [. . .] grave evils may sometimes demand grave remedies’. He added that ‘General Dyer, in the grave and exceptional circumstances, acted rightly, and in my opinion, he was wrongly punished by the Secretary of State for India’.90 Not surprisingly, the British jury found for O’Dwyer, and by implication Dyer, by a vote of 11 to one.91 While most of the British public remained fixated on Dyer, some cried out ‘against the use of aeroplanes against defenceless and unarmed people’ in Gujranwalla.92 It seemed, at least to one newspaper, as if the use of airpower constituted a crime far worse than the use of rifle fire by foot soldiers. Like Gandhi, some leftist British papers depicted the Hunter Report as a ‘whitewashing Report’ meant to ‘excuse some of the worst examples of military tyranny, and half censure the rest’.93 A letter in The Times noted, ‘nothing differentiates General Dyer’s case from that of thousands of officers except that his error of judgment involved the reputation of our whole system of government in India’.94 Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, a Labour MP, denounced Dyer’s actions. He recognized the importance of having Indian collaborators to sustain the raj. ‘The empire’, he argued, ‘can only be preserved by the cooperation of the Indians and not by any other means’.95 Condemning Dyer would help secure this cooperation. Others who preferred to believe in the narrative of a peaceful empire called Dyer ‘un-British’ and ‘inhuman’ because ‘a man who loses his head and strikes wildly and blindly is not fit for employment and cannot be exculpated because his “conception of duty” is honestly at variance with that of his Majesty’s Government’.96 In the same vein, an opinion published in

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The Times criticized Dyer for failing to display ‘the coolest and most balanced judgment’ especially because he opened fire ‘after nearly two days’ cessation of active insurgency’. Moreover, his ‘crawling’ order seemed a ‘lamentable betrayal’ of the ‘British tradition of equanimity and restraint’.97 But was his conception really at variance with government policy? For if it were, how can we explain the groundswell of support Dyer received from his superiors and substantial sections of the British public? And how else can we explain the government’s approval of reprisals in Ireland (the subject of the next chapter)? Dyer’s supporters remained committed to the narrative that he averted another mutiny.98 The Daily Telegraph, a Conservative newspaper, described the Jallianwala Bagh shooting as ‘the effectual suppression of a most dangerous uprising’, through which Dyer saved the Punjab from ‘unspeakable horrors’.99 Others championed taking a tough stance because ‘suspicion of weakness might lead to violence recalling the horrors of the Mutiny. We hold India by the sword, and we are there to rule and govern for the benefit of all’.100 In strikingly similar fashion to contemporary British apologies for the reprisals conducted by the Black and Tans against Irish civilians, the Daily Telegraph opined, ‘It would be wrong and cruel to underestimate his [Dyer’s] difficulties, unjust to withhold from him a considerable sympathy. He was the victim of a task too great for him’.101 An opinion in The Times admitted that Dyer used more force than was necessary to disperse the crowd in Jallianwala Bagh, but that mysteriously this was not more than the minimum force necessary ‘to restore order in the Punjab’.102 On 6 April 1920, when General Dyer and his wife left the Punjab for their long journey back to England, they were greeted at the train station by British and Indian officers. These men came with their wives, lit up the road to the station with flares and stood ‘at salute’.103 Earlier that day, Dyer was presented with an address on behalf of over 100 English women living in the Punjab, thanking him for ‘the firmness’ he displayed in Amritsar. In fact, these women told him, ‘we deplore the loss of life which occurred, but we believe that it was your action which saved the Punjab and thereby preserved the honour and lives of hundreds of women and children [. . .] we, who would have suffered most had the outbreak spread, are not unmindful of what we owe you’.104 By saving the Punjab, what these women really meant was that he saved European women in particular, from being attacked, raped and killed by wild, violent, over-sexed Indians.105

Parliamentary Debates Dyer attended the debates in both Houses over the government’s decision to force him into retirement. O’Dwyer sat next to him in the gallery during the

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House of Commons’ debates. The Commons voted on 8 July 1920, in favour of the decision to censure him (230– 129), but many abstained from voting.106 Over half of all Conservatives voted in support of Dyer (against the government), most of whom were also Irish Unionists led by Sir Edward Carson, the man who spearheaded the fight against Irish Home Rule. Almost all Labour MPs, Independent Liberals and Coalition Liberals voted against Dyer.107 The press took notice of this split. The Morning Post reported, ‘not since the Government was formed had it been possible to get anything like the number of Coalition Unionists to go into the lobby against it’.108 These were the same men who hoped to crush the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Dyer’s wife began to cry when the vote came out against him, but Mrs Carson, who sat by her in the gallery, quickly consoled her saying, ‘never mind [. . .] they call Edward much worse things’.109 The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, made the connection between Dyer and Ireland explicit. After all, while Parliament debated Dyer’s censure, Wilson continually begged the government to implement martial law in Ireland to crush the IRA. But in the wake of the Dyer affair, the government remained unwilling to take stronger measures. In his diary, Wilson fretted that ‘in the near future we should have many Dyer cases both in India and in Ireland, and that if we did not stand by our own soldiers we should lose their confidence. Then they would not act, and then we should lose the Empire’.110 He feared that soldiers would not act with sufficient force to crush resistance in Ireland because Dyer had gotten into trouble for it (although from an Indian perspective, he received only a slap on the wrist). A letter in The Times shared Wilson’s opinion, warning that Dyer’s censure would have the ‘dangerous’ effect of engendering ‘uncertainty [. . .] in the minds of all officers, civil and military, in India (and, indeed, throughout the empire), as to their powers and duties in dealing with riotous mobs’.111 Wilson also blamed the ‘Frocks’, by which he meant politicians, for getting ‘India (as they have Ireland) into a filthy mess’ which the soldiers cleaned up: ‘This is disapproved by all the disloyal elements, and the soldier is thrown to the winds’.112 Wilson believed the government’s policies put the empire at risk in both Ireland and India, and this was a theme to which he and his contemporaries returned repeatedly. Despite their decision not to reemploy Dyer, some members of the Army Council, including Wilson, defended him publicly and privately. For example, Army Council member Adjutant-General Sir Herbert Creedy told Churchill, ‘I am totally opposed to “frightfulness” as such, but in India and elsewhere the sole test of any action taken under Martial Law is that of necessity. Sir Michael O’Dwyer thought that General Dyer’s action was necessary [. . .] At the Jallianwala Bagh the crowd that General Dyer fired into

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was undoubtedly an unlawful assembly’.113 His meaning was clear: in India, and in the rest of the empire, shooting at an unarmed crowd that had assembled unlawfully was both militarily acceptable and necessary. The argument concerning the necessity of Dyer’s shooting hinged on the narrative (which Dyer himself repudiated) that his small force would have been overwhelmed by the crowd if he failed to act decisively in the Bagh and on the mutiny mindset. Sir William Joynson-Hicks, a prominent Conservative politician, wrote to the Sunday Times, inaccurately stating that Dyer acted merely out of self-defence.114 Montagu thought Joynson-Hicks was ‘an intolerable person, and it is quite obvious that he has battened on all the reactionary talk he could find [. . .] He comes home with a gloomy view, talks about the end of British rule and feels it his duty to tell me of my universal unpopularity’.115 Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston also clung to this view. ‘Speaking as one who has had the privilege of serving for some years with native troops in India’, he argued that ‘a determined rush [by the crowd at the Bagh] may easily [have] overwhelm[ed] his little force of fifty native soldiers’.116 Hunter-Weston believed the Punjab was in open rebellion and if Dyer had not used the ‘necessary’ force he did, then he might have ‘set alight the conflagration of another mutiny’.117 The Morning Post echoed these sentiments, and attacked the Hunter Committee for pandering to Indian nationalists.118 The Irishman and retired Catholic Archbishop of Simla, A.E.J. Kenealy, defended Dyer on the grounds that ‘an anti-white man movement’ was so widespread in the Punjab that if Dyer had ‘hesitated’, then he would have ‘failed, and failure would have meant the general murder of European men, the outraging of women, the loot of public buildings and the desecration of Christian churches’.119 The President of the European Association of India Council, Mr G. Morgan, also expressed Anglo-Indian appreciation for Dyer’s methods.120 Anglo-Indian women had a particular affinity for defending Dyer. Constance E.E. Tuting, who had lived in the Punjab for 24 years, wrote that Dyer ‘saved the Punjab [. . .] if not all India from anarchy and disaster’. No doubt, she meant he saved the British in India from an attack. She had heard that Dyer was ‘a most kindly British officer, to whom any sort of cruelty would be abhorrent’. Censuring him was tantamount to ‘encouraging the malcontents to commit fresh outrages on our fellow countrymen and loyal Indian subjects’.121 Roughly 6,250 English women in Bengal sent a petition to the prime minister in which they protested Dyer’s removal from the army. An ‘Englishwoman’ in India anonymously wrote, ‘no European who was in Amritsar or Lahore doubts that for some days there was very real danger of the entire European population being massacred and that General Dyer’s action alone saved them’.122 Another group of English women in India formed a committee of 13, presided over by Ms Florence Holland. Together they

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worked to raise funds for Dyer to present ‘the Saviour of the Punjab with a Sword of Honour and a Purse’. Their invitation for support is worth quoting at length as it was directed to: All well wishers of India, both Europeans and Indians, as a mark of gratitude to General Dyer for sparing India untold misery by arresting murder, torture, arson, loot and wholesale anarchy with sympathy for the unjust sentence passed on him as a result of partial or prejudiced evidence and indignation at the dangers of pandering to a small band of disloyal agitators whose noisy mouthings the deluded British public are mistaking for the voice of the loyal millions of India.123 They were referring to what they perceived as Montagu’s attempt to appease Indian nationalist opinion, described as ‘disloyal agitators’ with ‘noisy mouthings’. Dyer’s defenders in the Commons claimed he upheld the doctrine of minimal force because he was the only person capable of judging what constituted necessary force. Lieutenant Colonel Cuthbert James explained: You cannot put out a fire in a water house, which was caught well alight, with a teacup. Equally, as has been said, if your house catches fire, it is no use telling the fireman, after he has put your fire out, that he has used too much water to do it. You cannot kill a tiger gently. I defy you to do it. Lastly, supposing a burglar came into your house, and you had a lifepreserver, and hit him on the head with the intention of stunning him, it is impossible to say what force you would use. The only judge of the amount of force which could, and should, be used at that moment was General Dyer.124 Thus, Cuthbert James defended Dyer as if he were ‘a property owner safeguarding his premises’.125 The unarmed assembly became tantamount to a burglar in one’s home. Carlyon Bellairs, a Unionist MP and former naval commander, similarly depicted Dyer as a man who acted firmly, but justly. Bellairs perpetuated the old narrative that ‘British rule has been respected because it has been wisely strong without being cruel’. However, Bellairs also reminded the House of Commons that in 1865, Governor Eyre bloodily repressed a rebellion in Jamaica, thus setting a precedent for Dyer’s actions. He explained, ‘when a handful of whites are faced by hundreds of thousands of fanatical natives, one cannot apply one’s John Stuart Mill who, by the way, pursued Governor Eyre in his embittered retirement like a hungry hound howling for blood’.126 Liberty, he implied, was for whites only.

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Brigadier General Surtees identified clearly what his support for Dyer really meant. Most Indians, he believed, opposed the British presence in India. The only way to stay there, then, was by force. Surtees asked rhetorically: Is there a Member of this House who believes that we govern India with the approval of those governed by us? It is an undisputed fact, and one which has some bearing on the Amritsar incident, that if a plebiscite were taken tomorrow as to who should govern India the result would be against us. If we do not hold India by moral suasion then we must hold it by force – possibly thinly veiled, but still by force. This has an undoubted bearing on the case of General Dyer . . . In cases of unrest it is inevitable that a strong hand is needed . . . General Dyer applied that strong hand firmly, courageously, and promptly.127 The empire was held together by force, so he applauded Dyer for acting accordingly. Dyer tried to save British prestige, without which, Surtees argued, the ‘Empire will fall like a house of cards’.128 The MP Charles Frederick Palmer agreed. After all, in India there was, as he saw it, ‘a concerted attempt at revolution’.129 The President of the Indo-British Association, Lord Sydenham, took offence at Dyer’s censure. If the raj refused to support its own people, he argued, no one could expect even loyal Indians to ‘stand by the handful of English men and women in India’.130 The day after the House of Commons voted to support the government’s censure of Dyer the Morning Post began raising a fund for Dyer as a show of solidarity with and support for the general. O’Dwyer and Carson were among the very first contributors.131 Within a day they raised more than £1,500 for Dyer and within a week that number jumped to £10,000. The fund topped out at about £26,317, which Dyer received along with a golden sword and the title ‘Defender of the Empire’.132 Not only did the fund grow quickly, but it also received subscriptions from varied social classes. Rudyard Kipling sent £10 with a note exemplifying a common view among Dyer’s supporters: ‘He did his duty as he saw it’. One-third of the total came from India, partly from Anglo-Indians in general and partly from Indian Army officers and civil servants who submitted money under pseudonyms to avoid the official prohibition by the raj against making contributions to this fund.133 Aristocrats subscribed to the fund, including the Countess of Bathurst and the Duke of Westminster. A Brigadier General anonymously subscribed, saying, ‘the sympathy of practically every officer in the Army is extended to [Dyer] today’.134 People of meagre income submitted their donations anonymously as ‘poor and proud’, ‘a patriotic Englishwoman and one of the new poor’, ‘a widow’s mite’, and ‘daily breader’. Others emphasized that they were

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experienced with life in India: ‘another disgusted sahib’, ‘eight years in the East’, ‘An Old woman with an all too vivid memory of the horrors of the Indian Mutiny of 1857’, and ‘Survivor of the Indian Mutiny’.135 The latter, of course, implied that Dyer averted another mutiny. Montagu, however, remained unconvinced. He asked a powerful question in Parliament: Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation and subordination, and frightfulness, or are you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill, of the people of your Indian Empire? I believe that to be the whole question at issue. 136 In Montagu’s opinion, the government must choose what kind of policy it would pursue in the empire in general and in India in particular. They could either hold India by ‘goodwill’ or, as Montagu challenged them, ‘hold India by the sword, to recognize terrorism as part of your weapon, as part of your armament, to guard British honour and British life with callousness about Indian honour and Indian life’.137 Montagu believed Dyer represented the extent to which the empire relied on ‘terrorism’, or as the Liberal MP Lieutenant Commander Kenworthy called it, ‘Prussianism’, which compared Dyer’s actions to the behaviour of Germans in Belgium during the Great War. Kenworthy and Montagu objected to such a foundation for the empire: If an officer justifies his conduct, no matter how gallant his record is . . . by saying that there was no question of undue severity, that if his means had been greater the casualties would have been greater, and that the motive was to teach a moral lesson to the whole of the Punjab, I say without hesitation . . . that it is the doctrine of terrorism.138 Montagu chastised Dyer further, adding ‘when you pass an order that all Indians, whoever they may be, must crawl past a particular place [. . .] [or] must forcibly or voluntarily salaam any officer of His Majesty the King, you are enforcing racial humiliation’.139 Bonar Law disagreed with those who justified Dyer’s actions for the effect they had on Indian morale across the province. This, Bonar Law felt, was ‘a principle opposed to the whole of the British Empire and, in my opinion, can never be justified’.140 He reasoned, ‘[if] in inflicting punishment on any set of men, you are to consider not merely that of which they are guilty, and that which they should receive, but also the effect of their punishment upon other people, then there is no end to it’.141 Indeed, the bottom line for many of Dyer’s detractors was that he had picked for ‘punishment an unarmed crowd

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which, at the time of the punishment, had committed no act of violence and had made no attempt to oppose him by force’.142 And yet, it was exactly this kind of justification that the government later used to defend unofficial, spontaneous reprisals in Ireland. Churchill criticized Dyer for violating the principle of minimum force. He declared, ‘our reign in India or anywhere else has never stood on the basis of physical force alone [. . .] The British way of doing things [. . .] has always meant and implied close and effectual cooperation with the people of the country’.143 He continued that Dyer could not have saved India because, ‘British power in India does not stand on such foundations’.144 Churchill condemned ‘the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorizing not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country’, and yet, ironically, it was exactly this policy that Churchill later upheld in Ireland.145 Nonetheless, Churchill focused on the singularity of the massacre, as if it were ‘without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire’. Churchill waxed poetic as he perpetuated the narrative of a peaceful empire: ‘It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation’.146 Similarly, an optimistic letter to the editor of The Times declared, ‘justice has held India in the past and it is by justice that she will remain a free and willing partner of the Empire in the future’.147 Dyer’s critics employed a narrative in which the British Empire was simply too good to resort to violence. Churchill explained: Governments who have seized upon power by violence and by usurpation have often resorted to terrorism in their desperate efforts to keep what they have stolen, but the august and venerable structure of the British Empire, where lawful authority descends from hand to hand and generation after generation, does not need such aid. Seizing ‘power by violence’ and ‘terrorism’ were ‘absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things’.148 Herbert Asquith shared Churchill’s views.149 The narrative of a peaceful empire was well constructed for (and by) Asquith and Churchill, as past violent episodes in India and elsewhere appeared forgotten, along with many more incidents of ‘racial humiliation’ during martial law in Punjab and reprisals in Ireland. Hilton Young perpetuated this narrative, arguing that Dyer must be censured, ‘not because we think that this action of General Dyer was in any way typical, or an example of the methods of a Government and of an Army of which we are proud, but because

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we think it so different, so absolutely untypical of their ordinary methods’.150 He criticized Dyer for applying the principle of minimum force as if it were a principle for preventing future crises. In other words, a preventative massacre was, to Young, intimidation, which he could not support.151 The Labour Party came out decidedly against Dyer as well, but, characteristically, pointed a finger at the entire administration in the Punjab. At a conference, they unanimously denounced Dyer’s ‘cruel and barbarous actions’, demanding that he and all senior officers in the Punjab be put on trial for their actions during martial law. Chelmsford, they added, should be recalled from India and repressive anti-sedition and press censorship laws repealed. John Scurr, who had been in Amritsar during the violence, emphasized that as long as the Rowlatt Acts and the Press Act remained on the books in India, ‘it would always be possible for the Chelmsfords, O’Dwyers and Dyers to carry on as they were doing’.152 In fact, the radical newspaper Labour Leader ran the following headline on 3 June 1920: ‘The Hunter Report, How it Hides the Ugly Truth of the Punjab Terror’. A front-page interview with Congress leader V.J. Patel attacked the committee for focusing on Dyer in order to whitewash the system and prevent public scrutiny.153 The Labour M.P. Ben Spoor challenged Churchill and Asquith’s narrative of a peaceful empire. Rather, he asserted that Dyer and men like him presented the ‘greatest menace to the security of the Empire’.154 Spoor argued that ‘Amritsar is not an isolated event any more than General Dyer is an isolated officer’ and he laid blame on the raj itself for allowing this kind of violence to occur. This ‘resulted from a certain policy that some men have pursued, from a certain mentality that some men seem to possess in India in a most extraordinary degree’.155 Spoor hinted that Dyer, O’Dwyer, Beynon, Johnson, Doveton and many other officers who administered martial law were actually racist. And Spoor suggested that by scapegoating Dyer, who represented only the most egregious example of violence in the empire, the government could sustain the false narrative that empire was not predicated on the use of force.156 When Spoor attacked Chelmsford, Major Earl Winterton interrupted him. Procedurally, no one could ‘criticise the action of the Viceroy of Ireland [. . .] [so] it is equally out of order to criticise the doings of the Viceroy of India in his executive capacity without putting down a Substantive Motion’.157 In response, Spoor thundered that Dyer should not be ‘made a scapegoat’ when the ‘truly responsible persons must be discovered, and, without vindictiveness, they must be punished, in justice to the people of India’.158 T.J. Bennett (MP) pointed out how little ‘the broad interests of India and the feelings and expectations of her people figure[d] in the debate!’ He stormed against ‘members who jeered at the Secretary of State’ for depriving Dyer of due process of law as having given little thought to ‘the

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countless other wrongs and humiliations that were inflicted under martial law in the Punjab [. . .] the cumulative weight of [which] far exceeds that of any wrong that even the severest judgment could have inflicted on an individual officer’.159 About two weeks after the House of Commons voted to censure Dyer, the House of Lords debated whether they agreed. Here, the ConservativeUnionist opinion emerged victorious. Dyer, they decided, had been treated unjustly and this sent a bad message to the officers trying to hold on to Ireland. The Scottish-born Viscount Sir Robert Finlay put forward a motion, ‘that this House deplores the conduct of the case of General Dyer as unjust to that officer, and as establishing a precedent dangerous to the preservation of order in face of rebellion’.160 The very wording revealed a concern that censuring Dyer could inhibit soldiers in Ireland from behaving with as firm a hand. Finlay stated, ‘the effect of this case upon the future of our public service in India, and indeed in all parts of our Empire, opens up a very large field’.161 He clarified that he did not favour ‘frightfulness’, and neither did Dyer: If you are dealing with a formidable mob, assembled in defiance of the express orders of the Government, and at a time when an insurrectionary movement is in progress throughout the whole district, are you not justified, when you choose your way of putting down that insurrectionary movement, in doing it in a way which will have a beneficial effect on the restoration of order throughout the whole district?162 He presumed, unfairly, that an insurrection took place in the Punjab and that Dyer’s actions restored order. But this was the ‘moral effect’ argument castigated by Dyer’s detractors as exactly the kind of ‘frightfulness’ with which they did not want the empire associated. In any case, Finlay held that Dyer was right to fire on the crowd, and that if the government did not support him in this, it would lose the confidence of soldiers throughout the empire.163 Lord Ampthill agreed, adding that, ‘all persons not associated with the revolutionaries felt profound gratitude towards General Dyer for having saved them from the horrors of bloody anarchy; because not only would the Europeans have suffered from the anarchy which would have resulted, but the Indians themselves’.164 He continued, ‘For every man who may agree with the saying of the late Prime Minister, Mr Asquith, that the treatment of the rebellious crowd at Amritsar was the grossest outrage in our history, there are at least a hundred who consider the real outrage has been the treatment of General Dyer by the Imperial Government and the Government of India’.165 Clearly, British opinions were polarized.

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Irish Unionist MPs interpreted Dyer’s censure as evidence that Britain was losing its will to hold on to the empire. This was, after all, a moment of imperial crisis. Unionists feared that if Britain shunned violence, the colonial nationalists in Ireland, India and elsewhere would feel emboldened and rebel (or in the Irish case, succeed in winning complete independence). Thus, Lord Ampthill warned, ‘India is no longer safe from further outbreaks, and when they occur it is ten times less likely that they will be suppressed [. . .] a dangerous precedent has been established’.166 Whereas Lord Finlay focused on the fact that Dyer did not receive a fair trial, Lord Sumner claimed, quite remarkably, that ‘it was in mercy to them [the Indians], in order that they might not die, that it became the duty of General Dyer to use force and put to death those who were challenging the authority of the Government, who were rebels, only not in arms’. If Dyer had not acted ‘to maintain peace and order’, then a greater outbreak of violence could have occurred, in which case Sumner asked rhetorically, ‘who would have suffered more than the Indian population themselves?’167 Presumably, he meant that the hundreds that Dyer killed paled in comparison to how many more Indians the British would have killed if another mutiny ensued. He, too, assumed a mutiny was imminent and Dyer stopped it with collective and exemplary punishment. Of course, these unapologetic defences did not go unanswered. The Scottish Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, suggested that if the Lords voted in Dyer’s favour they would provoke Indian nationalists.168 Sir James Meston, another Scottish Liberal, echoed this concern for Indian opinion, saying he had ‘never seen nor heard such bitterness as was expressed to me when I re-visited that country [India]’.169 Lord Meston had served as the Lieutenant Governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh during the Great War. He warned that if the Lords failed to condemn Dyer they risked alienating ‘the stable, moderate elements in Indian society working with us in political cooperation’.170 The former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, also spoke against Dyer, and his voice carried weight. He attacked Finlay and Sumner by asking, ‘how can we be sure that this particular step was necessary, and that it was the only step to produce the same result, or that a smaller display of force might not have been equally effective?’171 Continuing this rhetorical vein, he asked, ‘How can we be sure that 400 killed, and 500, or 800, or 1,000, or whatever was the number of wounded, were required in order to save the Punjab?’ He then proclaimed, ‘You do not, in my judgment, any more save India by a massacre at Amritsar than you defeat the Bolsheviks or save Russia by a massacre at Odessa or Warsaw’.172 The Lords discussed Dyer’s ‘crawling’ order and the public floggings of the Indian boys rumoured to have attacked Ms Sherwood. Lord Birkenhead

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maintained that these decisions showed deep flaws in Dyer’s judgement. Dyer’s victims were ‘subjected to this vile racial humiliation which, though it does not count by the side of blood, is sometimes far more tenacious in the memories and resentment of individuals and peoples than mere violence and blood’.173 Birkenhead condemned Dyer for treating the spot at which Ms Sherwood fell as a ‘holy place’ that required ‘obeisance, or the personal genuflexions which he ordered. I cannot accept this [. . .] It was a place, not of sanctity but of crime. The physical abasement which General Dyer ordered was not ordered as reverence, but as an indignity and humiliation’.174 Lord Curzon felt similarly disgusted with the ‘crawling’ order. It ‘makes one wonder very much whether ‘the man on the spot’ can always be vested with the unquestioning discretion which was claimed for him by Lord Finlay’.175 Lord Carmichael, a former Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, agreed that in ordering the ‘crawling’ order, Dyer revealed himself to be a man whose judgement was not ‘as correct as I think a man’s judgment ought to be’.176 But he also pointed out that ‘those who feel most strongly and most indignantly are the very men who say it is not Dyer that they blame; he was the tool’.177 Carmichael was keenly aware of the extent to which some held the entire government of India responsible for allowing a system of rule to continue that used violence to frighten its subjects into submission and collaboration. After all, many Indians remained resentful that Dyer alone was discussed in public, rather than the entire system of martial law.178 Even Lord Milner spoke against Dyer. He explained that as a member of the committee that advised the government on the findings of the Hunter Report, he was originally in favour of Dyer just as he was ‘in favour of a course of firm and even stern repression of sedition and of the maintenance of Imperial authority’.179 But as he read more of the evidence, ‘I was forced to the conclusion, against my wish . . . that in the suppression of the disorders . . . some acts [. . .] were likely not to strengthen, but to undermine [the maintenance of authority]’.180 Moreover, he added quite rightly, ‘we have dealt with General Dyer with consideration and with leniency’.181 The Conservative Lord Salisbury, another staunch opponent of Indian selfgovernment, mentioned that the Lords on either side of the Dyer debate found fault with how his case had been conducted, although for different reasons. Some Lords objected to the fact that he was not given a fair trial or that the Hunter Committee was not fairly selected or that there should never have been an official government inquiry into the Punjab disturbances in the first place, while other Lords complained that Dyer had been ‘made a scapegoat for the misfeasance of the civilians [administrators]’ and that the delay in time between the incident, investigation and censure were unfair.182 To this extent, a Lord could vote for Finlay’s motion without meaning to show support for

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General Dyer. Indeed, that is how Lord Lamington explained his vote for Finlay’s motion, ‘not to show approval of General Dyer’s action, but from disapproval of that of the Government’. What he objected to was the government’s delay in addressing what happened in the Punjab which, Lamington suspected, was because the government feared ‘public knowledge of the disturbances in the Punjab should hinder the passing of the [Montford] Reform Scheme through Parliament’.183 The Marquess of Crewe, who once served as the Secretary of State for India and as the Irish viceroy, voiced his disapproval of Dyer and the entire Punjab administration. He depicted the deportations of Drs. Kitchlew and Satyapal as the first ‘blunder’ by the government.184 He then pointed out the obvious: that if Dyer intended to disperse crowds by force, he should have taken a force with him sufficient for the job. ‘If it be that with an inadequate force you can only deal with a crowd by starting to shoot at it, and continuing to shoot at it as long as your ammunition holds out, that seems, in itself, to be a condemnation of your going with that particular force to disperse that crowd at all’, he reasoned.185 Nonetheless, Finlay’s Resolution passed the House of Lords on 20 July 1920, with 129 voting for Dyer and 86 against.186 Although Dyer felt somewhat vindicated, The Times lamented that the Lords ‘are out of touch with the newer conditions of Imperial rule’ because ‘the growth of a more liberal conception of Imperial rights and Imperial duties in our democratic Commonwealth has outpaced the slow progress of the older conservatism’.187 These new conditions required greater power-sharing and conciliation, or at least the appearance of it, rather than heavy-handed tactics. The system of empire was, as The Times asserted, liberalizing, but the old guard stood firm, insisting on the use of coercion rather than concessions to deal with nationalists. One opinion in particular articulated the consequences of this division: A vote in favour – even indirectly – of ‘Prussianism’ in India by a House representing especially the old British ‘governing classes’ must not merely do harm in India . . . It must also do harm at home, where the minds of a dangerously large number of workmen are already possessed with the explosive idea that the ‘capitalist’ classes are working themselves up to an attempt to re-establish their declining power with machine-guns. The meaning attributed to Dyer’s support stretched far beyond India, to Britain itself. If the ‘old governing classes’ remained stubborn in their ‘contempt for subject races’, then they were similarly opposed to the interests

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of British labour on the verge of a major general strike.188 If this vote had implications for the domestic workingman, then it definitely had meaning for Ireland.

Amritsar and the Irish Connection Several of the politicians discussed earlier possessed administrative experience in Ireland, but that doesn’t necessarily prove they were thinking about Ireland while discussing the Punjab. That Ireland was at the forefront of their minds was obvious in the ways in which they voted and in their words. It was no coincidence that almost all those who voted against Dyer’s censure were Irish Unionists.189 As their leader, Carson made a powerful speech about the need to maintain the confidence of the empire’s soldiers: If you are going to lay down here today this doctrine for your officers who are put into these situations ‘before you act, no matter what state of affairs surrounds or confronts you, take care to sit down and ask yourself what will Downing Street think, what will the House of Commons say . . .?’ If that is to be the position of your officers and you make a scapegoat of them . . . you will never get an officer to carry out his duties towards his country.190 He meant that the government might not be able to rely on its men to crush the IRA if Dyer did not receive support for his tough actions in India. While Carson chastised Montagu for speaking too emotionally against Dyer, Carson was interrupted by one of his fellow Conservative MPs, Howard Gritten, who yelled that Montagu ought to resign. An unidentified MP yelled back at him, ‘So should Ulster!’191 The Irish subtext was clear. Carson resumed his speech and warned, ‘this will have a great effect on the conduct of officers in the future as to whether or not they will bear the terrible responsibility for which they have not asked, but which you have put upon them’. He meant that soldiers in Ireland worried about how they will be judged.192 One of Dyer’s vocal supporters, Lord Sydenham, believed scapegoating Dyer would not satisfy Indian nationalists because nothing short of indicting the entire raj could satisfy them. So, censuring him, Sydenham argued, ‘will not carry peace but the sword to an India dominated, like Ireland, by intimidation’.193 An editorial in the Manchester Guardian explicitly charged Dyer’s supporters with thinking of Ireland. Calling the vote a ‘Unionist Revolt’, it argued, ‘General Dyer’s more thorough supporters by no means intend to stop at India. They mean the principle of undiluted violence – the violence that knows no scruple and brooks no question – to be of general application. After India,

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Ireland. After Ireland, British workmen on strike’.194 Other newspapers discussed Punjab events as if their similarity with the Anglo-Irish War were self-evident. One asked, ‘What should we say if the things done in India, Egypt and Ireland had been in Belgium under German occupation?’195 The Allied powers decried German abuses during the Great War, and the accusation that Britain might share something in common with Germany would have been quite intolerable to supporters of the use of force. Another paper remarked presciently, ‘There are potential imitators of this man [Dyer] in many a messroom in India, Egypt and Ireland [. . .] What was done in Punjab, in April, may be repeated in Dublin tomorrow’.196 Using the same logic, albeit in Dyer’s defence, Lord Sumner (who supported Dyer) claimed that Dyer’s shooting was unlikely to happen ‘in Limerick, in Glasgow, or anywhere else [. . .] But if it should arise, in any part of the Empire where such things are possible [. . .] the same rule should apply there as applied at Jallianwallah Bagh’.197 The politics of Dyer’s censure were a double-edged sword. Consequently, both Dyer’s critics and supporters were aware that ‘Dyerism’, the name given to harsh treatment of imperial subjects, had implications for Ireland. Montagu worried about the effect of Dyer’s censure on Ireland. He heard rumours that soldiers in Ireland feared sharing the same fate as him.198 This turned out to be an unfounded fear as the army in Ireland became infamous for its reprisals against the Irish population. The Irish nationalist leader Eamon de Valera, therefore, spoke against the British use of violence in India and in his own country. At a speech in New York in 1920, he said: The British are in India, not for India’s good but to exploit India and the Indians . . . to ensure the continuance of their exploitation the British do not hesitate to resort to any means, no matter how revolting and how cruel, provided these means appear to them the readiest and most effective for their purpose. Dyer had to shoot the people of India else the British Empire could not endure in India. He was nothing but a faithful servant of his imperial masters.199 Not content to allow British violence to continue unchecked, de Valera invited India to fight back: ‘there is one lesson that Ireland’s struggle teaches very plainly. It is only through the influence of fear and the pressure of force that Britain has ever been brought to consider even partially the claims of Ireland’.200 By implication, Indians would also have to rebel violently if they wanted Britain to take them seriously. Like de Valera, Jinnah used the rhetorical power of connecting India with Ireland. In a speech to the Muslim League in the same year as de Valera’s speech

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above, he placed the Jallianwala Bagh massacre as one in a series of incidents, ‘one degrading measure upon another, disappointment upon disappointment and injury upon injury’ that Indians suffered. This kind of treatment, he added, ‘can lead a people to only one end. It led Russia to Bolshevism. It has led Ireland to Sinn Feinism. May it lead India to freedom’.201 Churchill also made the Irish connection. He attacked Dyer on the principle that such actions would lose valuable collaborators. ‘What is going on in Ireland today’ made Churchill appreciate how important it was ‘to keep alive that spirit of comradeship, that sense of unity and of progress in cooperation which must ever ally and bind together the British and Indian peoples’.202 If Dyer were not censured, it would mean ‘that any military officer was entitled to apply a maximum degree of force if only he cast his eyes away from the arena and looked over a sufficiently wide field. The officer himself was to be the sole judge’. Ironically, Churchill asked, ‘If that doctrine were applied in Cork, or Glasgow, or in any civil riot in the country, would any British Government stand for 48 hours?’203 Yet privately, he and other Cabinet officials supported collective punishment in Ireland partly for its larger effect on the region’s morale. But some MPs represented India as rebellious as Ireland in order to support Dyer. Colonel James believed the Punjab was in open rebellion against the regime and he therefore ridiculed the Hunter Report. ‘To say there was not general conspiracy [in the Punjab] [. . .] is just as absurd as if you were to set up a court of inquiry in Ireland at the present time and say: “From the evidence before us we find that no [Royal Irish] constable has been killed.”’204 Lord Ampthill, a former Lieutenant Governor of Madras, also employed the image of a rebellious India connecting with rebels in Ireland to make his case in support of Dyer.205 He believed it was obvious ‘to everyone else, Europeans and Indians alike, that there was a widespread and carefully organized conspiracy to overthrow the British Government by force’, which only the Hunter Committee was too blind to see. Ampthill claimed this conspiracy ‘was connected with the scheme for an Afghan invasion and which was within the cognisance of the enemies of England in other parts of the world’.206 He therefore hinted that these other ‘enemies’ who existed ‘far beyond the confines of India’ could be Irish rebels, Bolsheviks across Europe, or, worse yet, both.207 At a conference in Scarborough, the Labour Party resolved to support selfdetermination for both Ireland and India, and believed repression in both places only intensified resistance to the empire.208 As early as 14 June 1919, the New Statesman, a Fabian paper, argued that British violence against Irish nationalists was actually encouraging extremism. More directly, the Labour Leader published an article entitled, ‘Is India to be another Ireland?’209

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Government policy, as embodied in the administration of martial law in the Punjab, could create the same extremism in India that such policies had already created in Ireland. The Labour MP Colonel Wedgwood voiced a similar opinion. He cautioned that India could become alienated like Ireland if Dyer’s actions were not condemned. Anglo-Indian support for Dyer was, he warned, ‘making the Indians enraged, antagonistic, anti-English and Sinn Fein’. The British would lose moderate Indians if this continued. The Members of Parliament, he felt, ‘do not understand how near we are to Sinn Fein in India’.210 Wedgwood connected India’s fate with Ireland’s with regard to the need for collaborators. He warned, ‘once you get people refusing to take part in government, you may carry on for a few years, but in the end you will find yourself where the Irish Government is today – and without an Ulster!’211 Like Montagu, Wedgwood felt the postwar world changed what it took to maintain collaborators. He acknowledged that ‘terrorism as the essence of British Rule’ was ‘most attractive’ in the ‘old days’ of the empire, but ‘it will not work now’.212 In the new global context, using coercion against nationalists generated negative press. Acutely aware of this, Wedgwood called for an end to ‘the fire of racial hatred’, so that Indians could ‘come into the British Empire on equal terms, so that Indians should be British citizens, and have the same rights as Englishmen or Australians’. Wedgwood looked idealistically to the Commonwealth as a new way to maintain imperial connections. In his mind, Dominion Status would provide ‘a certain attraction to people to belong to the British Empire’.213 Montagu also recognized the transitional moment upon Britain in that the empire could not rely on the same level of violence to function as it once did. He explained: The great objection to terrorism, the great objection to the rule of force, is that you pursue it without regard to the people who suffer from it, and that having tried it you must go on. Every time an incident happens you are confronted with the increasing animosity of the people who suffer . . . and the national pride and sentiment of the Indian people rise together in protest and terminate your rule in India as being impossible on modern ideas of what an Empire means.214 These ‘modern ideas of what an Empire means’ included the gradual move toward self-government, embodied in the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, but also the eventual membership of India in the Commonwealth of Nations that would, ideally, one day replace the entire imperial system as a more equitable and benign means of imperialism. His sensitivity to the racial component of

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empire was also remarkable, as he asked, ‘Is your theory of domination or rule in India the ascendancy of one race over another, of domination and subordination [. . .] or is your theory that of partnership?’215 An article in The Times shared similar opinions about how the Great War had changed imperial relations: The Great War has forced in a few years an advancement in human thought that would, in the normal course of the world, have taken decades to accomplish. The growth of the ideal of nationality . . . has not been confined to Europe; it has expanded swiftly over Asia . . . For an Empire based on organized force . . . the people of this country have substituted, in their own minds, the conception of a British Commonwealth founded on the willing cooperation of free peoples.216 This was a moment when the idea that the empire could, over time, be transformed into and replaced by the Commonwealth was gaining popularity among those sections of the British public eager to maintain an imperial connection with their subjects without relying on traditional means of coercion and force. Rather to the point about the India-Ireland connection, the former Irish viceroy and former Secretary of State for India, Lord Crewe, got to the very heart of the matter: Here are 300 or 400 people who were shot at sight because a meeting had been proclaimed. Well, for ‘India’ read ‘Ireland’. No one will deny, I think that, so far as the maintenance of the law is concerned, the South and West of Ireland are in a considerably worse state than the Punjab ever was; probably in as bad a state as it was ever feared it could be, in April of last year. Yet, for ‘Amritsar’ read ‘Limerick’ or ‘Ennis’, or some town in the South and West, and conceive a precise repetition of the circumstances there . . . the parallel seems to me fairly exact. . .you must take the Irish parallel and see what would be said supposing indiscriminate shooting took place in the same way in an Irish town.217 Oddly enough, this is exactly what happened in Ireland just four months after the Marquess gave this speech.218 As he put it, the question was whether ‘the lives of Indian rioters are less important than those of European rioters’.219 In his mind, the Irish qualified as Europeans, but to his surprise, the British government and many politicians would soon defend incidents in which Crown Forces shot up Irish towns or crowds, and burned the homes of suspected rebel sympathizers.

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In fact, violent incidents in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War were depicted in the Irish press as ‘Irish Amritsars’, including an event in 1920 at which the authorities opened fire on a crowd that gathered around a bonfire to celebrate the release of hunger striking Sinn Fein prisoners at Miltown Malbay, a village on the west coast of Ireland, near County Clare.220 Of course, the Irish press also compared ‘Bloody Sunday’, to Amritsar.221 Even a paper in New Zealand sympathetic to Ireland wrote, before ‘Bloody Sunday’, that ‘there are men in authority in Dublin Castle who are deliberately plotting to instigate a rising which will give excuse for an Irish Amritsar, and for “stamping out Sinn Fein” in a bloody terror’.222Another Irish newspaper applauded the Indian nationalist Rabindranath Tagore for returning his knighthood in disgust after the Jallianwala shooting.223 It would be instructive, then, to turn our attention to concurrent developments in Ireland.

CHAPTER 3 THE ANGLO-IRISH WAR

After the Great War, Ireland began a guerilla war culminating in its independence and partition. The British used police forces to fight this undeclared war. The military helped, too, partly by arming and staffing the police forces as paramilitary units. There was no rebellion in the Punjab in the summer of 1919, although the Hunter Committee and the British government believed the Punjab’s administrators who claimed there was one. Ironically, in Ireland, the British Cabinet insisted that the island was not in rebellion despite the presence of thousands of guerilla warriors and multiple civilian riots demanding independence.1 How can this be explained? This chapter argues that the Liberal administration of Prime Minister David Lloyd George struggled to save face in Ireland in the shadow of the Punjab controversy. If Dyer deserved censure for an un-British use of excessive force, then Ireland became the testing ground to show that the empire was not at its heart dependent on the use of ‘frightfulness’. If the British ‘way of doing things’ was not as Dyer did, then in Ireland, Britain had to demonstrate the softer side of imperialism. This proved to be an impossible task. Ireland was at war with Britain, and the government’s reluctance to impose martial law on the Punjab model served only to embitter key military figures, to engender criticism in the British press, and failed to defeat the Irish rebels. But beneath the level of official rhetoric, British forces sought to pacify Ireland and India in ways that bore striking similarities. In both situations, the civil law ceased to function and the military filled the vacuum. The Punjab government instituted martial law and backdated it to the day of the first riot because the military had been behaving as if the Punjab were under de facto martial law, anyway. Similarly, the paramilitary police forces and the military in Ireland engaged in severe reprisals against civilians even without an official declaration of martial law. The military leadership proved willing to use punitive measures to restore

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‘law and order’ in both places, and the critics of empire cried out against this lack of restraint.2 Structurally, the British attempt to subdue Ireland differed from the regime in India. Although both Ireland and India had a viceroy, in Ireland his official title was lord lieutenant and he held far less power than the Indian viceroy. Unlike the Indian viceroy, in Ireland, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland traditionally acted as a figurehead, while the Chief Secretary of Ireland and his under-secretary, both appointed cabinet positions, held the reins of power. In other words, ‘the Lord Lieutenant wore the insignia of command and signed the log, but the Chief Secretary was really the Captain of the ship, while the Under Secretary was the man at the wheel’.3 In May 1918, the new representative of the king in Ireland, Sir John French, held firmly to the conviction that Sinn Fein and the IRA were in no way representative of the majority opinion in Ireland.4 He therefore attempted to exert greater influence over the course of Irish events by behaving more like an Indian viceroy. French’s administration in Ireland was characterized by constant frustration over the government’s refusal to authorize martial law across the island. Whereas the regime in India was quick to resort to martial law, in Ireland the civilian power, aided by the military, held the responsibility for arresting and fighting the rebels. Thus, most of Ireland was not under martial law while in rebellion until very near the end of the Anglo-Irish War. Even so, the civilian (and later martial) response was strikingly similar to the ways in which the raj responded to threats in the Punjab. They used reprisals, both official and unofficial, to punish the Irish for moral effect. French preferred to use far more coercion than the Liberal British Cabinet. His ideas were like that of other military men of his generation, including his contemporaries General Dyer and General Sir Henry Wilson, then serving as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. In fact, the IRA attempted, unsuccessfully, to assassinate French in December 1919.5 But because of the public outrage over Amritsar, French, Wilson, and other believers in the efficacy of imperial coercion found themselves frequently frustrated by the Liberal government’s reluctance to use martial law against the IRA. Thus, Arthur Balfour lamented, ‘the Dyer debate has not helped us to govern by soldiers’.6

From Easter Rising to Full-Scale Rebellion On the eve of the Great War, Ireland was gearing up for Home Rule due to be implemented in September 1914. Accordingly, London would have devolved most powers of self-government to Dublin, reserving greater matters of defence and foreign policy. But with the outbreak of hostilities, this was put

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on hold until the war’s conclusion.7 More than 200,000 Irishmen volunteered to fight.8 Initially, they hoped to show Britain their loyalty, demonstrating that Home Rule would not be incompatible with a friendly connection.9 But within two years, an act by a small group of ‘physical-force’ republicans, Irish nationalists who championed the use of violence over constitutional politics to achieve their goal of a united, independent republic, changed the tenor of Irish public opinion. Led by Patrick Pearse, among others, the Easter Rising of 1916 was a desperate attempt by roughly 1,000 romantic Irish nationalists to martyr themselves in the cause of freedom, with the hope that this would spark a more general rising across the island. With no chance of success, these men occupied strategic buildings in Dublin, declared Ireland to be an independent republic, and declared themselves to be the republic’s army.10 British forces shelled the Rising into submission in less than a week. Initially, much of the Irish population denounced the Rising, but the harsh treatment of its leaders by Commander in Chief John Maxwell had the unintended effect of changing public opinion in favour of the rebels. Martial law was declared across the island and many were arrested, courtmartialed and sentenced to death. The executions were stretched out over a series of days. Herbert Asquith, then prime minster, worried about Maxwell’s severity, presciently remarking that ‘any wholesale punishment by death might easily cause a revulsion of feeling in this country and lay up a store of future trouble in Ireland’.11 Indeed, Maxwell’s measures created martyrs of Pearse and his fellow republicans, and inspired an ever-increasing number of Irishmen to join the republican movement. By May 1916, even Maxwell noted that he unwittingly inspired greater rebellion, as ‘the younger generation [typified by Pearse] is likely to be more revolutionary than their predecessors’.12 The remainder of the war witnessed a significant increase in nationalist activity, exemplified by the Irish Volunteers, an organization whose name became increasingly synonymous with the IRA.13 No longer satisfied with Home Rule, more Irish began demanding a fully independent republic through the political party Sinn Fein. Although the party publicly professed a preference for non-violence and constitutional politics, it quickly earned a reputation as the political wing or mouthpiece of the IRA. Many British officials scarcely differentiated between the two. The southernmost province of Munster, and its County Cork in particular, witnessed the greatest agitation for independence from 1916 to 1923.14 From 1919 to 1921, the official dates of the Anglo-Irish War, more than 1,000 were killed, including civilians.15 As early as June 1916, Maxwell noted that ‘sedition and discontent’ were remarkably widespread.16 Arrests during the war increased under the Defence of the Realm Acts (DORA), which had been

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passed in 1914 as a measure to allow the government to prevent internal rebellion during the war (much like the Rowlatt Acts intended to do for India after the war). Irish nationalists in prison used hunger strikes to protest their status as criminals or traitors rather than as political prisoners of war. The consequent bad press this generated induced both the British Cabinet and Dublin Castle to release the prisoners under the Prisoners’ Act of 1913. Also called the Temporary Discharges Act or, derisively, the Cat and Mouse Act, the law (which was created in response to hunger-striking suffragettes) allowed prisoners to be released until they regained their health, at which point they could be re-imprisoned. Dublin Castle felt concerned about the negative press associated with keeping hunger strikers in prison, and Irish civilians were quick to notice the same. Prison mail censors reported that most letters made ‘Constant references to ill health’, which made censors worry: that the ill health of certain prisoners is to be exploited for purposes of propaganda in Ireland, e.g.: ‘Poor Eamon still continues very weak, if he is not soon released I fear for him’. ‘I am feeling very nervous lately and very easily startled at the least sound . . . I am not the only one either as all the men’s nerves are on edge’. ‘I am afraid the health of some of us is irretrievably ruined, we have not even sufficient energy to walk even to warm ourselves’.17 One letter to a prisoner urged him to keep up his morale, arguing that ‘the British Government are doing the best recruiting possible for Sinn Fein by their cruelty and inhumanity. Ireland is the only country now with prisoners and those that hold them prisoners have the nerve to dictate to all the other nations of the world’.18 A prisoner wrote to a fellow inmate, ‘that we should still be held on an admitted falsehood while Wilson’s Fourteen points are seemingly being argued in Paris is, surely a commentary and exposition of humbug which should stir the angels to laughter’.19 Many prisoners, in fact, made references in their private letters to President Wilson and the notion of self-determination.20 One in particular, who was an elected Sinn Fein representative, wrote to his constituency, ‘I believe I can be of service to you, even in Jail, if only by exposing the hypocrisy of England’s ministers, who proclaim to the outside world they went to war to safeguard the rights of small nations, while they continue to rule by the naked sword in Ireland, the oldest of the small nations’.21 Another prisoner, annoyed by the censorship, wrote, ‘We cannot discuss politics in our letters [. . .] President Wilson’s visit [to Ireland] does not come under this heading so I am at liberty to say, “Long live President Wilson and his views on democracy, and [d]own

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with tyranny and autocracy in all lands and in all islands – amen!”’22 These prisoners clearly perceived the empire as tyrannical and violent. The release of hunger strikers demoralized the police. In 1917, 24 per cent of men arrested were released after hunger-striking and another 61 per cent had their sentences cancelled, so only 10 per cent served their full sentences.23 Sympathetic juries became reluctant to convict physical force nationalists, while witnesses to testify against them became scarce.24 The tension between hardline Conservatives focused on smashing the IRA and the Liberal government’s concern for public opinion only heightened during the AngloIrish War. In April 1920, while Indian Disorders Committee (IDC) reviewed the Hunter Report, Sir John French pressed the government to announce that hunger strikers ‘will simply be allowed to die’.25 But the government shared Irish Chief Secretary Sir Hamar Greenwood’s view that if hunger strikers were to die in prison, the public scandal would do ‘the govt [sic] more harm than their freedom can’.26 Frustrated police lashed out, although not nearly at the scale they would during the Anglo-Irish War. On 22 May 1917, a demonstration in support of Sinn Fein during which civilians shouted ‘Up the rebels’ and flew a tri-colour flag, so enraged the police that they charged the crowd.27 Police often got into scuffles with Irish who raised republican flags (as they were illegal). Using words reminiscent of British descriptions of Indians during hartals, the police complained that Irish Volunteers were ‘distinctly insolent and menacing’.28 Demoralized RIC officers resigned, so much so that by1918 Dublin Castle took a tougher stance against hunger strikers with the hope of curbing resignations.29 Even so, resignations continued unabated partly due to the systematic ostracism of police by the Irish public.30 Priests threatened to excommunicate any Catholic policeman attempting to enforce the draft in Ireland.31 For example, a sergeant in Monroe, County Tipperary (in Munster Province), named Anthony Moody reported that the pews at which he and his fellow men of the RIC sat in the Catholic Church had one day been removed, leaving him, his men, and their families to kneel on the ground. ‘Occasionally I could see persons looking in our direction and laughing’, he stated. His wife and children had gone to church before he had gotten there, but were stopped from entering at the door by four men, one of whom allegedly said, ‘Let them clear off to Hell they won’t get in to our Chapel’, while another said, ‘We won’t have their breath among us’.32 Thus, the RIC was quickly losing its membership, which had been almost exclusively Irish.33 The mood of the country shifted significantly by 1918, as physical force nationalists gathered in political meetings and scuffled with the authorities. Many letters encouraging IRA prisoners also criticized the racial subtext in British policy: ‘John Bull I am sure does not know how to deal with you

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Irish Hottentots, you are really a thorn in his poor old side. . . he thinks he will clear the earth of the wild Irish by conscription’.34 The Under-Secretary for Ireland, Sir William Byrne, wrote to Irish Chief Secretary Edward Shortt using the same language that martial law administrators used a year later when describing the Punjab: that in Ireland there was ‘a fairly wide estrangement of the people from law and order, and a contempt of authority’.35 Byrne blamed this, unsurprisingly, on the British policy of ‘pin-pricking coercion’, meant to be strong enough to circumscribe extreme nationalists but mild enough to co-opt moderates.36 Byrne’s mindset was much like the mindset of the Punjab administration, and it was shared by other powerful figures such as French and Sir Henry Wilson. For them the only solution was to crush Sinn Fein and the IRA into oblivion.

Sir John French and the Anglo-Irish War Born in 1852 near Kent, Sir John French hailed from an Anglo-Irish family of landowners in Roscommon (in the northern part of the western province of Connaught), although they had been living in England for several generations.37 French served in India in 1888 – 89 and under General Roberts in South Africa during the Boer War. Roberts had also been Dyer’s commander in the Burmese War, so both Dyer and French learned from the same man how one ought to respond to rebellion. French had originally been staunchly against Home Rule. In fact, he was involved in the Curragh Mutiny just before the outbreak of the Great War when British Army officers threatened that they would refuse to enforce Home Rule on Protestant Unionists in Ulster. But by 1918, he had become committed to the idea of Home Rule. French ordered a number of arrests of Sinn Fein leaders in May 1918, almost as soon as he was appointed lord lieutenant. Some physical force leaders including Michael Collins and Cathal Brugha escaped capture and filled the vacuum created by the arrests of more moderate leaders. The following month, French declared Sinn Fein meetings illegal, along with other nationalist organizations such as the Irish Volunteers. He even outlawed meetings of the women’s organization Cumann na mBan and the ostensibly apolitical Gaelic League.38 Thus, Sinn Fein met in secret. Shortly thereafter, constables were attacked in Cork. Although no one was killed, military reinforcements were sent to Cork.39 The British Army in Ireland was an obvious target for physical force republicans. In September 1918, two soldiers were beaten up in Bantry and two more in Castletownbere – jokingly called ‘castleterrible’ by British troops. This kind of fighting became common in 1919 before spiralling into

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more lethal assaults.40 The British Army in Ireland had a peculiar status. Its purpose was to provide training to new recruits before they were drafted into overseas units, as had been Dyer’s experience. In August 1918, there were 111,222 troops in Ireland, almost half of which were there for training only, expecting to find permanent station elsewhere in the empire. By contrast, the Indian Army numbered only slightly more, at 150,000 troops on the eve of the Great War, but swelled to more than half a million troops by war’s end, many of whom had to be demobilized.41 Most of the remaining troops in Ireland were convalescents, so that only 9,919 were available to help police the island. The minimum thought necessary to ‘restore law and order’ was 15 battalions of 800 men each, and 24 cyclist units of 450 men each, for a total of 12,000 soldiers and 10,800 cyclists.42 It wasn’t until the summer of 1921 that the army reached these numbers, and by then it was too late as hostilities had mostly ceased in a truce. The military in Ireland fought constant depletion unsuccessfully. The government continued transferring soldiers outside of Ireland, despite the increase in IRA attacks on Crown Forces. For example, 112 soldiers from one regiment were sent to India in December 1919 and another 135 in March 1920. That regiment received only 30 new recruits in July 1920. Thus, the general pattern was that infantry battalions lost one-third to two-thirds of their trained men and got far fewer new recruits. General Boyd of Dublin District complained, ‘With the troops now available, I have no hope of dealing the rebels in Dublin the swift and heavy blow I had planned’.43 The situation got so desperate that at one point General Sir Nevil Macready, the Commander-in-Chief of Ireland from 1920 to 1922, exclaimed that if he lost even ‘10 battalions from Ireland the whole of the R.I.C. would go, and he would have to “put up the shutters”’.44 In the December elections of 1918 to the Westminster Parliament, Sinn Fein won the overwhelming majority of Irish seats. Under the leadership of Eamon de Valera, Sinn Fein’s platform for complete independence meant that, in practice, the party served as the political wing of the IRA.45 The newly elected MPs refused to sit in Westminster, interpreting their electoral victory as a mandate for the establishment of an Irish parliament, the Dail, on 21 January 1919. On this day, they declared Ireland an independent republic. De Valera became its president and Arthur Griffith, the original founder of non-violent Sinn Fein, became vice-president.46 On the same day as the declaration of Irish independence, an IRA attack on an RIC patrol inaugurated the beginning of the Anglo-Irish War.47 Led by nationalist hero Sean Tracy, the IRA ambushed a cartload of gelignite, an explosive made from a gel of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose used for rock blasting, at Soloheadbeg quarry in Tipperary, Munster. They killed two

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officers of the RIC. The war lasted until a truce was called two-and-a-half years later, in July 1921. In the early stages of the war, violence was sporadic as the IRA focused on obtaining arms from the police and soldiers they attacked. Their objective at this stage was to arm themselves rather than to inflict casualties, although deaths did occur. On 7 April 1919, just days before Dyer’s shooting, a constable was accidentally killed along with a prisoner the IRA was trying to rescue. On 13 May 1919, two men of the RIC were killed in another rescue attempt of fellow nationalists on a train at Knocklong in Limerick.48 The actual number of people killed in this early stage of the war remained relatively low, but the number of public riots, especially in Cork, increased. 49 Whereas only a handful of riots in the Punjab resulted in martial law in 1919, seven Irish riots took place in 1916, 24 in 1917, 16 in 1918, and 23 in 1919 – none of which resulted in martial law.50 By January 1920, the IRA authorized attacks on all Crown Forces. This was a turning point in the war, as the IRA high command and Sinn Fein realized that they could no longer hold back the men on the spot from engaging in full-scale attacks.51 Thus, ten RIC stations were attacked within the first three months of the year in Cork alone. By March 1920, this resulted in the RIC evacuating hundreds of barracks across the island. The IRA and Sinn Fein quickly filled this vacuum in civil authority by establishing their own local systems of government, from police to courts. Three months later, a total of 55 policemen were dead and 74 wounded in Cork alone.52 The IRA celebrated the fourth anniversary of the Easter Rising by burning 28 government buildings in Cork and about 315 evacuated buildings across Ireland.53 By contrast, only a handful of public buildings were burned in the Punjab the previous year, obviously because the province was not in full rebellion or waging a war against the raj. Whereas the perceived threat of rebellion in India in 1919 resulted in immediate martial law, the administrators in Dublin Castle felt increasingly frustrated over the Cabinet’s refusal to permit the military to respond in the same way in Ireland. The government preferred to rely on the civil government to restore law and order, empowered by ever-increasing powers of search and arrest. Due to the bad press generated by General Dyer in Amritsar, the army in Ireland was to perform only a supportive role in this endeavour. In place of martial law grew an unofficial system of reprisals designed to punish civilians for moral effect, much like Dyer believed he had done. But some argued that reprisals generated far worse public opinion than martial law. It was not until December 1920 that martial law was finally applied, but even so, it was never enacted across the entire island, despite multiple requests by military officials. Unofficial reprisals were accompanied by new ‘official

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reprisals’, designed to supplant the unauthorized ones while also legitimizing the violence as both necessary and restrained, according to the principles of minimum force. They, too, would be unsuccessful.

Martial Law and Public Opinion Both military and civil regimes resorted to punitive measures against the Irish population as a whole, a form of collective punishment familiar to Indians as well. However, punishments under military rule, some argued, would be constrained by military law and therefore maintain a level of moral legitimacy lacking in unrestrained, spontaneous reprisals by the civil government. Thus, Assistant Under-Secretary Mark Sturgis believed, ‘I see no reason to change my view that if hard hitting is the policy it is the soldier’s job and is done by him more efficiently and more cleanly than can be the case under the cloak of so called Civil Government’.54 Paradoxically, the military proved as susceptible to spontaneous eruptions of punitive violence as did the police. Therefore, the underlying idea behind the debates over reprisals was whether the principle of using only the minimum amount of force necessary to subdue a rebellious population was being regularly ignored in Ireland or, as Dyer claimed about his actions in the Punjab, that the goal of producing a sufficient moral effect justified collective punishment in Ireland. On the eve of his appointment as lord lieutenant, Sir John French held the opinion that ‘Martial Law should be declared at once for the whole of Ireland’.55 French strongly opposed the conciliatory policy of Canadian Sir Hamar Greenwood, a Liberal MP and Irish Chief Secretary from 1920 to 1922. Thus, French wrote to then-Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill on 30 July 1920, less than a month after the House of Commons voted to support the government’s decision to censure General Dyer, ‘In my mind I am convinced that “force” is the only power that will ever solve the Irish question; and I am equally convinced that if applied at once and efficiently it [martial law] would solve the question in a very short space of time’.56 He begged Churchill to smash the IRA. In India, there was no debate over whether martial law should be imposed. Governor O’Dwyer simply requested the right to implement it on the grounds that a rebellion was spreading across the province, and the viceroy immediately granted it. However, in Ireland, the British government remained committed to Home Rule, despite the fact that most Irish nationalists were demanding complete independence.57 This was partially due to a belief held by key figures like Greenwood and the Chief of the RIC, Major-General Sir Hugh Tudor, that the IRA was a small group of extremist ‘thugs’ or members of a ‘murder gang’ without popular support in Ireland.58

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They were unwilling to use martial law fearing that it would only harm the chances of any peaceful settlement. Others in Dublin Castle disagreed, including H.A.L. Fisher who had also served on the IDC and therefore had Dyer and the Punjab martial law regime at the forefront of his mind.59 He and his compatriots held the Irish population at large culpable and continually suffered frustration as their demands to impose martial law fell on deaf ears. Ironically, Ireland’s Supreme Court Judge William Wylie justified the use of martial law by defending democracy: the law’s ‘ultimate sanction is the people. In any democratic country that is so and the root reason why the present administration of Ireland is so difficult is that there is no body of people (or call it public opinion) behind the administration’.60 Martial law would, he thought, generate positive public opinion not just in England but in Ireland as well. French’s good friend, the Conservative MP Walter Long explained how this could be so: ‘The Irishman is easily dealt with if you stand up to him, but he is the worst man in the world from whom to run away’.61 A strong hand would save Ireland according to these men, much as a strong hand had already saved India. Walter Long believed he possessed special insight to the Irish character, which needed martial law to break the IRA. His mother and his wife both hailed from the landed elite in the southern part of the island, and he had served as Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1906 to 1914. Long was decidedly against Irish Home Rule until 1918, when he chaired the Irish Cabinet Committee and drafted the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 partitioning the island.62 But Lloyd George was slow to take his advice. He remained hopeful that martial law would not be necessary in Ireland, adding, ‘You do not declare war on rebels’.63 Declaring ‘war on rebels’ would elevate their status from criminals to warriors, as the Irish Republicans wanted. This, the prime minister was desperate to avoid. Ironically, the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (August 1920) admitted that Ireland and England were at war, stating, ‘the ordinary law is inadequate for the prevention and punishment of crime or the maintenance of order’, and so courts-martial were to be used increasingly to aid in ‘the termination of the present war’.64 If military courts were better suited than ‘ordinary law’ to prevent/punish crime and to maintain ‘order’, then why not declare martial law? Indeed, there were complicated reasons for not using martial law in Ireland, one of which included a fear that it could push the majority of the population into the arms of the IRA. Commander-in-Chief General Macready initially opposed martial law because waiting to implement Home Rule until ‘order is restored by force would, I am convinced, shake any remaining faith in the sincerity of the Government’.65 He shared with Chief Secretary

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Greenwood the fear that a stern reaction might push Irish moderates to side with the IRA.66 Macready eventually changed his opinion, deciding to support the use of martial law, but his initial reluctance is telling. He and Greenwood likely remembered that martial law was last used in Ireland by General Maxwell after the 1916 Rising. He unwittingly created martyrs of the leaders of the Easter Rising, and also lost the government the support of Irish public opinion. Repeating this mistake seemed too risky in the early stages of this war. Financial concerns and a lack of personnel added to the fear of alienating what might be left of moderate Irish public opinion. After all, this was the aftermath of the Great War and for the economically drained imperial power, it seemed far less expensive to fund the police rather than military action. Moreover, the high mortality during the war and the impossibility of replacing an entire ‘lost’ generation made manpower an issue. The army was being demobilized so it would have been a daunting task to make available enough troops to enforce martial law in Ireland.67 As discussed in previous chapters, Britain also worried about the threat of Communism infiltrating its borders as working-class riots became rampant during the immediate postwar economic slump. Any available troops might have to be used to suppress upheaval in Britain.68 In fact, Sir Henry Wilson expected British coal miners to go on strike imminently. Troops would then be needed to ‘restore law and order’, but Wilson worried that none might be available. He warned the British Cabinet Committee on the Irish Situation that ‘at the present moment we have absolutely no reserves whatever (in formations) with which to reinforce our garrisons in any part of the world where an emergency may at any moment develop without warning’.69 Wilson pessimistically assessed Britain’s military power: We have 28 battalions in England and 40 in Ireland. When we have drafted from Ireland for India we shall be 4,500 men down on our present effectives. Macready will then ask for another 8 – 10 battalions. Then, if we go to martial law, Macready says he will want another 9 battalions. This will leave 10 battalions (and of these 3 are for India and 5 are Irish and very weak), besides 10 Guards battalions, to look after England. Altogether we are now pretty near our disaster.70 It was therefore imperative to put the Irish rebellion down quickly and effectively. Whereas money and manpower shortages made Macready and Greenwood nervous about using martial law in the very beginning of the AngloIrish War, Wilson believed martial law was the only way to crush the rebellion quickly and effectively so that troops could then be available for other causes.

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The longer the government remained unwilling to use martial law in Ireland, the more dejected Wilson grew. He bemoaned the state of affairs in his diary: The news from Ireland continues even worse. The Sinn Feins are steadily getting the upper hand, and unless this Cabinet act soon all this will spread to this country and become wholly unmanageable. Basil Thomson’s secret report for this week is the gravest I have read yet and forecasts revolutionary strikes for the end of September. And we have practically no troops to meet this.71 Wilson and like-minded British figures believed that martial law would lend legitimacy to whatever violence Crown Forces engaged in, just as martial law in Punjab legitimized aerial bombing and other collective punishments to the Hunter Committee. At one point, Wilson angrily exclaimed that a list of wanted rebels should be posted ‘on the church doors all over the country; and whenever a policeman is murdered, pick five by lot and shoot them!’72 This attitude suggested that almost anything goes in a state of war. Perhaps the most compelling reason not to enforce martial law in Ireland had to do with the concurrent troubles in India and the public fallout over Dyer’s case.73 The government felt wary of repeating another public relations scandal in Ireland as it had just experienced in India. The kinder face of empire had to be put forward, and the cabinet was painfully aware of the importance of maintaining positive British public opinion. Moreover, most members of the Cabinet Committee on the Irish Situation possessed some sort of connection to India and therefore could not help but think of the Dyer controversy. Churchill, Balfour and H.A.L. Fisher were all highly involved in evaluating and defending the martial law regime in the Punjab. The Unionist Lord Chancellor Birkenhead (Frederick Edwin Smith) had also served on the Indian Disorders Committee with Fisher, and Austen Chamberlain was a former secretary of state for India.74 Together, these men worried that martial law would result in a free-for-all by the police and the military, committing ‘the most terrible atrocities’.75 In fact, once they decided to finally use martial law, Macready noted that martial law officers will ‘have to watch the Police very carefully, for certainly [retired Brigadier General and current Divisional Commander of Royal Irish Constabulary, Cyril] Prescott-Decies [sic] will think that martial law means that he can kill anybody he sees walking along the road whose appearance may be distasteful to him’.76 Prescott-Decie held particular disdain for the Irish, believing ‘this population is one of the worst in the world – cruel, cowardly, idle, and inefficient, corrupt, and born intriguers’.77 One can imagine, then, that the cabinet worried that

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Prescott-Decie shared Dyer’s mindset and therefore he, along with martial law in Ireland, might invite the same public outcry. Yet diehard imperialists, especially Unionists like Sir Edward Carson and his supporters, demanded that the government use martial law in Ireland, just as they defended Dyer’s heavy hand in India. The Statesman opined, ‘instead of with a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other’, Carson and his supporters thought the government ‘ought to confront the recalcitrant population with swords in both hands [. . .] They have shown it on such questions as the Dyer affair’.78 Similarly, Sir Henry Wilson urged Churchill to impose martial law, all the while acknowledging the importance of public opinion: I told him that the present policy was suicidal, that it would lead to our being put out of Ireland, that we must take strong measures or retire, that if we retired we lost our Empire, that before taking strong measures we must convince England that they are necessary.79 Thus, Wilson echoed a common fear that the loss of Ireland would mean the eventual loss of the entire British Empire. As he saw it, Lloyd George had only two options: One is to clear out of Ireland and the other is to knock Sinn Fein on the head. But before you do the latter, you must have England on your side, and therefore you must go stumping the country explaining what Sinn Fein means. If you get England on your side – and you can – there is nothing you can’t do. If you don’t, then there is nothing you can do.80 Even if Wilson incorrectly estimated the British public’s potential willingness to support a harsh regime in Ireland, his sensitivity to public opinion was noteworthy. So, to save face, Dublin Castle began employing exemplary and collective punishments for moral effect and harsher laws in lieu of outright martial law. By the end of July 1920, Chief Secretary Greenwood amended the Defence of the Realm Acts (DORA) to allow courts-martial to try capital cases in Ireland because, until this point, not one suspected rebel accused of murder had been convicted by civilian courts since the war began in 1919.81 For similar reasons, Military Courts of Inquiry increasingly replaced coroners’ inquests.82 Most importantly, the government kept its faith in a few public executions because they believed, like Dyer, that exemplary punishment would be more effective in demoralizing the IRA than a mass deportation of suspects.83 Roughly one month later, the British government passed the

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Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (ROIA), which, like the Rowlatt Acts in India, increased the powers of search and arrest, as well as the jurisdiction of military courts to try insurgents. Cabinet deliberations over ROIA revealed the hope that instead of resorting to martial law, this act would help maintain good PR, lest there ‘might come a time when public opinion would desert the Government’.84 An ever-greater number of offences were added to the list that could be tried by courts-martial under ROIA so that Ireland was de facto under martial law by June 1921.85 In some cases, there were up to 60 courtmartials per week.86 Furthermore, the ROIA facilitated greater raids, up to 450 in Cork alone in less than one week between 21 and 28 November 1920.87 The ROIA and subsequent convictions from courts-martial forced some members of the IRA, by the end of August 1920, to go ‘on the run’. This meant that IRA men under threat of arrest and court-martial left their homes and civilian status (they had only engaged in IRA activities on a part-time basis), and joined full-time guerilla groups called Active Service Units or ‘flying columns’ of 20 – 30 men. These flying columns hid in the rural countryside, waiting to ambush police and British military patrols or convoys.88 In his explanation for the reluctance to use martial law, historian Charles Townshend perpetuated the idea that the British Empire was essentially opposed to the use of violence. He explained the aversion to military rule in terms of the difficulty of reconciling it with ‘the normal British way of resolving conflicts’ and what he described as the government’s ‘natural antipathy to military rule’.89 He accepted uncritically the idea that the British Empire was predicated on consent and civility rather than on coercion. But as this book has shown, administrators in the Punjab and men like Wilson had no qualms about using force in the empire. Other members of the cabinet voiced their concerns about the harshness of military rule, but this was motivated by the need to maintain positive public opinion in the wake of the Dyer controversy. Moreover, despite this ‘natural antipathy’, Townshend later admitted that ‘the British response [to the IRA] was brutal [. . .] The terrorism practiced by a section of the Crown Forces – significant out of all proportion to its size – both spread and stiffened opposition in Ireland, and left a legacy of bitterness which has not yet been eradicated from Anglo-Irish relations’.90 His use of the term ‘terrorism’ was at odds with his argument about the ostensibly non-violent nature of British rule. Therefore, a better explanation for Britain’s unwillingness to impose martial law is a combination of logistical concerns (in terms of manpower and money) and the government’s desperation to avoid another public controversy like the one Dyer brought to light. After all, in this post-World

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War I world that touted self-determination and amid fears that the war had brutalized society, the cabinet felt constrained. If it labelled the attempt to fight the IRA as martial law, then it could have made British policy vulnerable to major criticism. But as a practical matter, avoiding public disapproval proved impossible. The behaviour of Crown Forces in Ireland sufficed to attract public criticism and revealed the coercive nature of the empire.91

The Black and Tans Throughout 1919, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) recruitment fell drastically while incumbent police officers resigned (partly because of IRA threats against the families of current and prospective police officers).92 Yet the cabinet’s refusal to declare martial law meant that the burden of fighting the IRA rested on the police force, now desperate for reinforcements. If Irishmen were not willing to volunteer for the RIC (either due to IRA threats or a genuine disinterest in collaborating with the Crown), then men from outside Ireland would have to be found in Scotland and England. As the British military demobilized, men struggled to find jobs. So, the cabinet decided to recruit former soldiers and officers in a temporary capacity, serving either six months or a year.93 General Macready wanted to separate these World War I veterans from the RIC in battalions operating under military law, and he intended to use eight such battalions to police Ireland. The cabinet, however, feared that this could generate bad press because it would look too much like martial law and ‘the beginning of a reconquest of Ireland’.94 The Inspector General of the RIC was against the policy of recruiting non-Irishmen, so French, in his desperation to increase RIC numbers, replaced him with T.J. Smith.95 By the end of 1919, special recruiting officer Major Fleming established recruiting offices in London, Glasgow, Birmingham and, eventually, 20 other cities to funnel recruits into RIC. By January 1920, more than 100 had joined. Because of a shortage of RIC uniforms, these former British Army soldiers wore military-style khaki shirts and RIC-style dark green (almost black) trousers.96 When on 28 April 1920 they raided Limerick, breaking windows and beating up civilians, they earned their moniker, ‘Black and Tans’, as their uniforms reminded Irish civilians of a legendary pack of black-and-tan-coloured hunting dogs from Limerick, infamous for their savagery.97 General Tudor, who became the chief of the RIC in May 1920 and who had served in India twice (for a total of 15 years) before the Great War, aided Fleming’s efforts.98 Tudor remained a staunch opponent of martial law during his tenure in Ireland and

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was the man most responsible for militarizing the RIC in Ireland. In fact, it was his idea that the recruits simply be added to the existing ranks of the RIC rather than organized in their own ex-soldier battalions. He argued, ‘The formation of ex-soldier battalions would probably militate against recruiting for the R.I.C. It is far better to very largely increase the R.I.C. in my opinion’.99 After all, this would appear, on the surface, less akin to martial law than what Macready had in mind. In theory, the RIC operated as a police force, supplemented by the British Army in Ireland.100 Unlike the Dublin Metropolitan Police Force, which followed the model of the unarmed English ‘bobby on the beat’, the RIC had always been an armed gendarmerie that ‘was military in organization, training, appearance, and for a long time, attitude’, even though most of its rank and file had been Irishmen.101 Now, under Tudor, it was further militarized with weapons such as rifles, grenades, and Lewis machine guns, and composed of increasingly non-Irish veterans of the Great War.102 By July 1920, an elite anti-IRA force formed, the Auxiliary Division (ADRIC), comprised of ex-British military officers who enjoyed a lofty pay of £1 per day and the temporary rank of sergeant.103 Brigadier General Frank Percy Crozier, an Irish Unionist and former member of the Ulster Volunteer Force that fought the implementation of Home Rule, began commanding the auxiliaries from August 1920 to February 1921. The auxiliaries looked somewhat different from the other new recruits, wearing dark blue trousers, high leather boots, and officer-style khaki tunics with the letters ‘TC’ on their shoulder straps to indicate their status as temporary cadets who enlisted for six months to a year.104 The auxiliaries formed companies separate from the RIC rank and file, and therefore, separate from the Black and Tans, but they, too, developed a reputation for brutality.105 Eventually, the RIC swelled to more than 13,000 and over 1,300 former British Army officers in the auxiliary division.106 The foreign component of both the auxiliaries and the Black and Tans helps to explain why the police and the Irish public began to view each other as enemy combatants.107 However, using a military force comprised of extra-local ethnicities in order to police a specific territory was not an entirely novel concept. The Indian Army had long been using regiments from provinces that were not local to the part of India they were policing. General Dyer, after all, used Baluchis and Nepalese Gurkhas to shoot the Punjabis and Sikhs in Amritsar. But the RIC had historically consisted of Irishmen, so the change in composition bolstered perceptions of them as a foreign occupying army eager to engage in brutal reprisals against the Irish population. These punishments bore resemblance to the strategies used in the Punjab under martial law in that both were designed to punish the general population for moral effect.

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A War of Reprisals The Anglo-Irish War was characterized by frequent reprisals to punish the Irish public after an IRA attack. Crown Forces identified communal targets like pubs and creameries and, much like martial law in Punjab, made themselves a ‘suffocating presence, blanketing daily life with curfews, restrictions on trade and movement, arbitrary detentions, and other forms of harassment’.108 Reprisals were typically the work of the Black and Tans or the auxiliaries, but the military engaged in them as well. In September 1919, the IRA attacked soldiers in Fermoy, County Cork, and killed one of them. The coroner’s jury decided that his death was accidental, because the main goal of the IRA attack had been to seize the soldiers’ rifles rather than to kill any of them. The soldiers responded to this verdict by sacking the shops owned by jury members.109 Weeks later, the men of the Essex Regiment arrived in Kinsale, County Cork, and began intimidating residents and breaking windows while marching down the city street.110 These incidents are somewhat reminiscent of the shooting in Lahore, where police opened fire on a crowd on 10 April, 1919 and again on 12 April as civilians exited the Badshahi Mosque. The punitive nature of these shootings and the reprisal at Fermoy is obvious.111 The men carrying out this reprisal did so partly out of frustration. Not only had the Irish public demonstrated an unwillingness to inform upon rebels or to assist Crown Forces in arresting them, but also sympathetic juries (or jurors who had been intimidated by the IRA) refused to convict rebels on trial.112 Some of the RIC responded by resigning, while others engaged in reprisals thereby creating a mafia-like vicious cycle of attack, reprisal, and counterreprisal. For example, on 18 March 1920 the RIC attacked a Sinn Fein alderman, to which the IRA responded the next night by shooting down an RIC constable while he was unarmed and unable to defend himself.113 As a result, the RIC broke into the home of the Mayor of Cork, Toma´s MacCurtain, who was also the Commander of the 1st Cork Brigade of the IRA, and shot him dead in front of his wife and children. The RIC were wearing masks to disguise their identities and the next day declined to investigate the shooting. The coroner’s jury blamed the RIC for the murder, but went on to indict Lloyd George and senior officers of the Cork police as the ultimate parties responsible.114 This was remarkably bad press for the government, which continued stubbornly to support the RIC in lieu of declaring martial law. In fact, the next Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, went on hunger strike partly to protest these reprisals and died in October 1920. India’s Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu, worried, ‘I think we shall have difficulty about hunger-striking in India after the very unpleasant incident of the Lord Mayor of Cork. They are so imitative’.115

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The County Inspector of the Cork RIC attempted to excuse his men for engaging in this kind of violence, believing that ‘the only way to stop these murders is by way of reprisals or retaliation’. Thus, he added, ‘it is becoming difficult to restrain men’s passions aroused at the sight of their murdered comrades and when they have the means of executing vengeance it is likely that they will use them when driven to desperation’.116 But unlike in the Punjab, where martial law was declared in areas that had already become quiet after a shooting incident, reprisals in Ireland did not succeed in putting an end to the rebellion. The obvious explanation for this is that Ireland was committed to an all-out war against the Crown, whereas no such rebellion existed in the Punjab. Moreover, a policeman’s passion is no excuse for indiscipline. His superior officers must ensure restraint, for the good of the unit and to maintain moral legitimacy. The bulk of reprisals were conducted by the Black and Tans and reveal the indiscriminate nature of British coercion. ‘Informal police death squads’ used titles like ‘the Anti-Sinn Fein Society’, and were dedicated to haphazard retaliatory violence.117 One East Lancashire soldier remembered that the intelligence officers commanding his unit ‘were after certain persons, and if they didn’t find them persons, they’d come back with somebody or, should I say, take somebody and put ’em in the back van, in the back lorry [. . .] But the intelligence officer gave instructions [. . .] [for us to] let he to escape and when he were escaped, he were shot in the road and left there’.118 In this mindset, reminiscent of Dyer’s remarks about the men responsible for Ms Sherwood’s attack or the others who suffered during his ‘crawling’ order, all Irish were equally guilty, deserving punishment. The RIC had a reputation for firing their guns in the air as they drove around and on 3 November 1920, by doing so they accidentally killed a woman sitting with her child by the road in County Galway.119 Outright killings such as this were rare, although when they occurred they were highly publicized, as in the case of an eightyear-old girl, Annie O’Neill, who was mistaken for an IRA gunman, and killed by the RIC.120 Whereas in the Punjab citizens under martial law were harrassed with ‘fancy’ punishments or held responsible for the upkeep of British posters on their property or made to stand for hours in the hot Indian sun, in Ireland, the RIC typically destroyed private property. Barns and creameries belonging to suspected IRA families were burned down, along with shops and pubs. The Irish White Cross reported that this was part of ‘the systematic destruction of industry [which] was one of the objects of the terror’. As a result, ‘the already large volume of unemployment due to ordinary economic depression was greatly increased, and many thousands of persons who had been able to live in comfort were reduced to poverty and made dependent on charity’.121 The IRA

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responded in turn by burning government buildings such as courthouses and customs houses, and the homes of suspected loyalists. As IRA violence escalated in the summer of 1920, so, too, did the number of reprisals.122 The military did not remain immune to the temptation to engage in reprisals. For example, on 25 April 1920 a group of Lancashire Fusiliers in Arklow, County Wicklow, just south of Dublin, happened upon a celebration of the release of hunger-strikers. Tensions escalated between the two groups and the celebration turned into a violent attack on the soldiers. Later that night, about 15 soldiers snuck out of their barracks and attacked civilians in the town in retaliation, killing one and wounding another. One soldier was wounded as well.123 As in India, innocent and guilty were lumped together in Arklow because, in many ways, no subject of either Ireland or the Punjab was thought to be truly innocent. Rather, by engaging in collective punishment, the authorities were making it clear that all their subjects were complicit in some degree of resistance or rebellion. In both places an impression had to be made. Most of the reprisals in Ireland before October 1920 were taken under cover of nightfall because of the cabinet’s unwillingness to declare martial law, whereas in India martial law enabled the Punjab’s administrators to retaliate against civilians with the full sanction of the raj. In June 1920, the IRA in Cork captured several high-ranking commanders of the 16th Brigade while they were on a fishing trip.124 In response, soldiers of that brigade left their barracks in Fermoy, just as they had in September 1919, but this time they sacked the town causing £18,000 in damages.125 There were also military reprisals in Limerick, Tuam and Tipperary in 1920.126 An IRA ambush killed the local District Inspector in County Clare (on the west coast of Ireland) near Rineen.127 Almost simultaneously but on the eastern end of the island in County Dublin, the IRA engaged in another successful ambush in Balbriggan, killing a constable. His death was ‘immediately followed by a violent outbreak of reprisals by the Police who executed summary vengeance’.128 The police waited until night fell on Balbriggan and then looted the town, burning public houses and damaging at least 49 private homes and one factory. In the process, they killed two suspected IRA men by bayonet.129 A socialist paper, the Daily Herald, reported that the men had been tortured before being killed, and their bodies mutilated.130 The RIC in Clare retaliated by attacking the three closest towns to the Rineen ambush: Milltown Malbay, Ennistymon and Lahinch. At Milltown Malbay, the RIC killed a man in a hay cart and burned eight houses. The police forces then turned their attention to Ennistymon, where they set a drapery shop on fire, killing a man and a 12-year-old boy who was trying to put out the flames on one of the 26 buildings that the RIC set on fire. Police

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continued the reprisal by attacking Lahinch, setting its town hall ablaze along with seven private homes. In one such home, a suspected IRA man was burned alive.131 In October 1920, the RIC engaged in a reprisal in Tubbercurry, County Sligo (north-west Ireland). Their Divisional Inspector had been killed by an IRA ambush, and his men lashed out all night to early morning, setting fire to a creamery, among other things.132 A few months later, the IRA ambushed an auxiliary division in Cork at Dillon’s Cross, just 200 yards away from their barracks. Thirteen auxiliaries were wounded. A major reprisal followed that night as auxiliaries, under the command of their officers, set fire to Cork, causing £3 million in damages.133 Troops came out to quell the situation but took no action once they realized that auxiliaries were responsible for the havoc.134 Perhaps the army was reluctant to stop the reprisal because it tacitly approved. The military was no stranger to reprisals of its own, and the war was about to enter its third year. Perhaps they judged that greater reprisals would be necessary to make an impression on the population. Such a judgement would fit with the British reaction to the attack in Kasur, Punjab, where two officers on a train were killed by an angry crowd that proceeded to riot. Although in India there was no carefully planned ambush and it was the crowd that was responsible for setting fire to the local houses of government rather than the police, the punishment that Punjabis received, in which soldiers and police opened fire on the crowd, flowed from the same logic of collective punishment as the reprisal in Cork. But whereas the shooting on Kasur was fully sanctioned by the Hunter Committee and the Punjab government, setting fire to Cork was not. This resulted in a military inquiry right away, not because the logic of collective punishment was in question, but rather because martial law was not in effect and Crown Forces had not been officially ordered to exact such a reprisal. Sir Hamar Greenwood’s initial public response to the attack on Cork was to say that there was as yet no proof that Crown Forces were responsible for the fires. But at least one member of the auxiliaries who took part in this reprisal wrote to his mother while convalescing: I am . . . recovering from a severe chill contracted on Saturday night last during the burning and looting of Cork in which I took a reluctant part. We did it alright never mind how much the well intentioned Hamar Greenwood would excuse us. In all my life I have never experienced such orgies of murder, arson and looting as I have witnessed during the past 16 days with the RIC Auxiliaries. It baffles description. And we are supposed to be officers and gentlemen. There are quite a number of decent fellows and likewise a lot of ruffians . . . Many who witnessed

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similar scenes in France and Flanders say, that nothing they had experienced was comparable to the punishment meted out to Cork . . . Reprisals are necessary and loyal Irishmen agree but there is a lot which should not be done.135 The military inquiry blamed the auxiliary division for the entire reprisal. A second, more thorough military inquiry also found fault with the auxiliaries, but this time the report also blamed ‘the higher authority who ordered a unit in so raw a state to an area where active operations might be expected’. Such a scathing indictment of government policy made the report impossible to publish, even though the government originally expected to do so.136 In December 1920, a member of the auxiliary division killed a young Irishman and a 70-year-old priest on the side of a road near Dunmanway, County Cork, generating more bad press for the government. Lloyd George wanted the man responsible to be tried and hung on the spot, but Macready put him on trial and found him to be insane.137 This shooting and countless others were part of a long list of complaints made by the Irish and British public over the conduct of the Anglo-Irish War. Similar to Indian allegations against the martial law regime in the Punjab, the IRA alleged that Crown Forces engaged in prisoner abuse and summary executions.138 Reporting with first-hand accounts on the state of Ireland, the journalist Hugh Martin asked, ‘Why do these things happen? Why are servants of the Crown charged with pillage and arson and what amounts to lynch law, and even with drunkenness and murder? How can the reign of terror be stopped?’139 One might assume that whenever soldiers of predominantly one nationality or ethnicity are expected to police an alien population, violence will occur. But it is the responsibility of civilian and military administrators to ensure that the use of force is not disproportionate to the level of disorder, and that it is conducted with restraint. What, then, would constitute proportioned restraint? Upon being ambushed or losing a comrade in arms, whole companies would attack and loot the local village in order to punish those responsible, but also to vent frustration. A restrained approach would involve the systematic search for the participants in the ambush, according to the powers of search and arrest laid out in the law. If the population should prove unable or unwilling to assist in identifying the responsible parties, as indeed many Irish were, then police have to come up with alternative means for capturing the criminals. Resorting to violence against civilians at large to scare them into cooperation hardly seems appropriate, and yet, according to one’s belief in the moral legitimacy of collective punishment, contemporaries found this to be either perfectly justified or

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reprehensible. Thus, political and military officials could argue either side of the case in Ireland, just as they had in India. It is nonetheless worth analysing why the RIC and military engaged in reprisals in Ireland. Surely, it was one way to let out steam and frustration when arrested prisoners were not convicted by sympathetic juries or when they were released for ill health on hunger strike. Some scholars have argued that the new recruits to the RIC engaged in reprisals because they were poorly trained, experienced only in trench-warfare rather than as expert marksmen, so they lacked individual self-control in police matters.140 The problem with this explanation is that the RIC was not alone in conducting unauthorized reprisals, for the military in Ireland did so as well, and the army actually provided exceptional training and discipline. After all, former Irish volunteers in the British Army were also recruited by the IRA to help train their men. These veterans planned attacks that ‘showed careful preparation and good discipline’.141 So, the reprisals were probably caused less by a lack of discipline than by the fact that the recruits, as World War I veterans, received better training according to the standards of military discipline than civilian police forces. Their limited six-week training on how to police Ireland before being deployed would hardly counter the years of experience they had gained in the trenches. Soldiers were trained to destroy the enemy. This is quite different from preserving peace, protecting innocent civilians, or maintaining law and order. Not surprisingly, veteran soldiers using military weapons behaved more like an army at war than a police force. Reprisals occurred because the RIC ‘were soldiers in enemy territory rather than policemen in their own country. Their brutality was a direct consequence of their alienation and wartime experience, and their arrival frequently acted as a catalyst for violence’.142 The RIC were further alienated as a result of race because they were mostly not Irish. But contemporary defenders of government policy had a different explanation. They argued that Crown Forces were subject to such frustrations that the temptation to unleash their fury was too great to bear. Greenwood publicly defended the police as they ‘have been cruelly tried by the callous indifference shown towards their unjust persecution by the general body of the public, and I doubt whether any other military or police force in the world would have borne the strain of the ill-treatment to which they have been subjected without greater damage to their discipline’.143 Greenwood’s notion that no army in the world could withstand the temptation to engage in reprisals runs counter to the general assumption that it is the responsibility of commanding officers, whether civilian or military, to ensure discipline among their men. Soldiers and police must act as ordered rather than out of frustration if they are to maintain legitimacy.

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The key to understanding these reprisals, then, is in the fact that superior officers tacitly condoned reprisals. In fact, commanding officers encouraged their men to engage in reprisals. For example, the Divisional Commissioner for Cork, Colonel Gerald Smyth, who had been wounded six times in the Great War in France, instructed the RIC in Listowel, County Kerry (Southern Ireland) to shoot without fear of punishment. He used words that one might have expected to hear from General Dyer: If the persons approaching you carry their hands in their pockets, or in any way look suspicious, shoot them down. You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped, and you are bound to get the right parties sometimes. The more you shoot, the better I will like you and I assure you, men, no policeman will get into trouble for shooting anyone. Smyth actively promoted indiscriminate shooting. Unsurprisingly, the IRA killed Colonel Smyth the following month.144 Even the Irish Supreme Court Judge, William Wylie, tried to defend reprisals (which is ironic for a judge) on the grounds that the average constable was so frustrated that he ‘either saw white or he saw red’.145 General Dyer gave the same excuse for the ‘crawling’ order. Without it, he argued, he would not have been able to control the passions of his soldiers who would otherwise have wreaked havoc on random inhabitants. Others claimed that reprisals depended on the personal character of the officers commanding or on the volume of alcohol consumption within a particular unit.146 Therefore, some companies performed well as a police force without engaging in reprisals while others had a drinking problem that was to blame for their poor discipline.147 For example, whereas the legendary nationalist hero Tom Barry described the auxiliaries as engaging in a ‘terror campaign’, the same could not be said of the auxiliary division’s C Company, which kept cadets under control and prevented heavy drinking.148 But many constables, whether auxiliaries or not, engaged in reprisals despite being mostly sober.149 Journalist Hugh Martin reported on such a reprisal on Granard (County Longford) in retaliation for the deaths of District Inspector Kelleher and Sergeant Cooney: ‘It had been coolly, scientifically, methodically gutted by men who from first to last remained under some sort of discipline. Planned vengeance had had its ordered result’.150 Escalating tensions between those in the government who tacitly condoned reprisals and those who condemned them further complicated the situation. General Macready increasingly disliked reprisals, so much so that in August

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1920, he circulated a Special General Order that any officers engaged in looting or reprisals would be severely punished. A month later, he ordered the army to withdraw its support if at any point the police they were supporting engaged in reprisals.151 Three weeks before ‘Bloody Sunday’, Sir Henry Wilson reported to Churchill that ‘Macready was going to take more severe disciplinary action, even to removing C.O.s [commanding officers] if the men took reprisals on their own [. . .] it was not fair on the soldiers, and if the present regime was continued much longer the Prime Minister would have the army against him, or else have a mob instead of an army’.152 Wilson’s disgust with reprisals is significant, but must not be interpreted as an indictment against the notion of collective punishment. Wilson, after all, was one of Dyer’s greatest supporters. What he disliked was the spontaneous and haphazard approach to punishment. He much preferred Dyer’s and the Punjab regime’s use of martial law to lend, in Wilson’s mind, moral legitimacy and structure to retaliations. The continued allowance of reprisals offended other military generals as well. Even General Sir Hubert Gough, who once led the Curragh Mutiny in 1914 (and so bore little sympathy for Irish nationalists), spoke against them. He waxed apoplectic: ‘the police in many cases and the soldiers in some, have been guilty of gross acts of violence, without even a semblance of military order and discipline, and that these acts are not only never adequately punished, but no steps are taken to prevent their recurrence’.153 But General Tudor worried that orders against reprisals would hurt morale and so played a key role in supporting RIC retaliations. Despite repeated requests by Macready, Tudor kept delaying issuing orders against reprisals. Rather, he began a weekly newspaper for the police called Weekly Summary on 13 August 1920, designed to boost morale, partly by encouraging reprisals.154 One edition suggested that the policeman’s job was to make ‘an appropriate hell’ for rebels.155 Macready hoped that raids and searches would satiate the desire for reprisals. His policy of ‘taking no measures that may cause irritation, except in retaliation’ showed a sensitivity to Irish public opinion, and he defined ‘retaliation’ as a restrained, orderly raid: ‘that is to say, a murder or outrage is committed, and we at once retaliate by a raid for arms or persons in the immediate vicinity’.156 However, Macready remained unable to prevent the military from engaging in reprisals, as they did in Fermoy, and he was in no position to control the RIC, which remained firmly in Tudor’s hands. Under Tudor, reprisals ballooned as he, Churchill and Lloyd George all tacitly consented. Wilson, sickened by this, privately indicted all three men: Tudor made it very clear that the police and Black and Tans and the 100 Intell: [sic] officers are all carrying out reprisal murders. At Balbriggan, Thurles and Galway yesterday the local police marked down certain SFs

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[Sinn Feiners] as in their opinion the actual murderers or instigators and then coolly went and shot them without question or trial. Winston saw very little harm in this but it horrifies me.157 What Wilson found so ‘horrifying’ about this behaviour was not that it was particularly violent or cruel, but rather that it was occurring haphazardly at the hands of civilian police rather than systematically by the military. The difference between a ‘reprisal murder’ and shooting wanted IRA men in exchange for each police officer killed (as Wilson had suggested earlier) was simply a matter of declaring martial law: so long as martial law did not exist, Wilson could not abide by reprisals. Wilson was not alone in indicting the government’s implicit support for reprisals. The Times editorials wondered if these reprisals were tacitly condoned by the government, suggesting, ‘so long as reprisals are committed, the public is forced to infer one of two things – either that the executive authority regards them with a certain lenience or that it is powerless to stop them’. The press correspondent added, ‘I think that all moderate Irishmen would welcome a clear statement of the Executive’s attitude to these reprisals, and of the steps, if any, which it has taken or intends to take to suppress them’.158 Indeed, the government did tacitly approve of reprisals. Churchill, Tudor and Lloyd George held high hopes that reprisals would crush the IRA and whatever level of Irish public support existed for it. In fact, Churchill thought the RIC reprisals were doing a better job ‘getting to the root of the matter quicker than the military’. 159 Churchill had been among Dyer’s greatest detractors emphasizing the policy of minimum force, which he believed Dyer had violated, but he approved of reprisals in Ireland. This distinction makes more sense given the fact that Churchill did not speak out against the entire administration of the Punjab, as did many Labour politicians. It was only Dyer’s behaviour that Churchill reprimanded, while remaining silent about the actions of Colonel Johnson and others in the various Punjabi cities under martial law. Thus, there existed nothing inherent to the concept of collective punishment to which Churchill objected. Rather, Churchill’s issue with Dyer was that Dyer gave no warning and that he continued to shoot after the crowd had begun to disperse. In Ireland, destruction of property was far more common than actual shootings. When men were killed, they were often dragged out of a home (either theirs or of whomever was willing or forced to harbour them) and shot. This probably seemed less indiscriminate to Churchill than Dyer’s shooting did, and less extreme in that fewer people were killed or wounded. It makes sense then, that like Lloyd George, Churchill hoped that reprisals would frighten the population into informing on the rebels, thereby helping to crush them.

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Wilson railed against the government for condoning reprisals. During the Dyer debates, he confronted the government over its Irish policy. He wrote in his diary, ‘We discussed Ireland, and Lloyd George is under the ridiculous belief that for every one of our people who was murdered, two Sinn Feiners [sic] were murdered! And Lloyd George was gloating over this and hugging it to his heart as a remedy for the present disgraceful state of Ireland’.160 To Wilson, it seemed that Lloyd George condoned the reprisals, as if ‘a countermurder association was the best answer to Sinn Fein murders. A crude idea of statesmanship, and he will have a rude awakening’.161 French and his good friend Walter Long supported the use of reprisals, especially after the IRA attempted to assassinate French.162 Lloyd George fully supported Tudor’s encouragement of reprisals.163 At a cabinet meeting in October 1920, which included Tudor and Macready, it appeared that ‘unauthorized reprisals had unquestionably had a visible effect both in enabling the executive to obtain information about ambushes and plots, and in driving a wedge between moderates and extremists in the Sinn Fein’.164 Crown Forces were winning. But Wilson had little faith in the civil government, as it had already collapsed. Police were evacuating their barracks, leaving entire villages in the hands of Sinn Fein and the IRA. The government needed only to admit the fact and introduce martial law. He lamented, ‘more murders in Ireland yesterday, and more reprisals. How the Cabinet can agree to all this and not take responsibility absolutely beats me, or how they think this class of work will solve the Irish question passes my comprehension’.165 Wilson wanted ‘responsible authority’.166 However, by November 1920, after the shooting at Croke Park, even Churchill’s ideas about reprisals began to change. He noted, ‘the troops are getting out of control, taking the law into their own hands, and that besides clumsy and indiscriminate destruction, actual thieving and looting as well as drunkenness and gross disorder are occurring’.167 The solution was not to put an end to reprisals, but rather to do what Wilson had been demanding for so long: to make them official, conducted by sober and responsible soldiers acting under martial law rather than the spontaneous actions of frustrated policemen.

Official Reprisals and Martial Law The authorities were quick to employ martial law in the Punjab but highly reluctant to do so in Ireland, largely because of the fear of more public accusations about the empire’s overreliance on violence so soon after the Dyer debate. Yet, as reprisals began generating negative press, the government finally resorted to a combination of ‘official’ reprisals and limited martial law

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in some parts of the island to solve the Irish problem. But unlike the Punjab, the government implemented martial law in Ireland in a highly prescribed manner, eager to project a public image of civility rather than severity. On 23 September 1920, the Director of Military Operations in Ireland, Major General Radcliffe, wrote to Wilson calling for ‘a system of official reprisals’ to prevent spontaneous attacks on civilians, thereby avoiding public criticism while still effectively (he hoped) punishing the IRA and its supporters.168 Macready wholeheartedly supported this idea. He believed collective punishment was working: ‘where reprisals have taken place, the whole atmosphere of the surrounding district has changed from one of hostility to one of cringing submission’. As evidence of ‘cringing submission’, Irishmen had begun doffing their caps to officers in Galway and began giving information against the IRA.169 Macready wanted to give this kind of collective punishment official sanction and structure. Wilson also preferred official reprisals, as it moved the government closer to martial law. After all, Wilson once ‘asked Winston [Churchill] to remember that in the end the authority of the Cabinet rested on the bayonets of the soldiers’.170 This applied whether in Ireland, India, or any other part of the empire. The raj had already shown itself willing to remind Indians of this basic fact. However, in Ireland, this was a reality that the government was desperately trying to avoid. Wilson pressured Lloyd George to implement the policy of official reprisals, but the prime minister ‘danced about and was angry’. What bothered Wilson, simply put, was the fact that ‘these reprisals were carried out without anyone being responsible [. . .] If these men ought to be murdered, then the Government ought to murder them’.171 Lloyd George maintained an unwillingness to suffer the public criticism that might follow the coercion Wilson demanded. ‘No Government could possibly take this responsibility [of murder]’, he claimed, but Wilson railed against ‘this method of out-terrorizing the terrorists by irresponsible persons’. Instead, Wilson preferred ‘responsible persons’ to conduct such a campaign.172 Indeed, Macready, Wilson, Radcliffe, French and countless other military men all shared this sentiment and therefore supported the imposition of martial law in Ireland. Their problem with government policy lay in the haphazard nature of the reprisals, not in the use of collective punishment itself. Of the range of violent methods used by those exacting reprisals, the most common had been house burning. Divisional Commander General Sir Peter Strickland explained in language strikingly similar to Dyer’s description of his ‘painful duty’: We do not destroy houses simply because an ambush has taken place and the house has been occupied by the ambushers . . . It is only where a

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resident who refused to give information, as many of them do on the ground of Republican sympathy, and where they are known Republicans, that we have to perform this unpleasant duty.173 In response to this ‘unpleasant duty’ of house burning, the IRA adopted a counter-reprisal policy in which two houses belonging to loyalists would be burned in retaliation for every republican home.174 The IRA used intimidation as well, forcing civilians to choose between losing their homes to a British force or losing their lives to IRA gunmen.175 Lloyd George hoped that reprisals would work, thus obviating the need for martial law. Although he wanted to put an end to arson-based reprisals because the damage to property typically hurt loyalist landlords, he remained quite comfortable with ‘gunning’.176 Thus, new orders were given on 4 October 1920, that ‘destruction of buildings’ was to be avoided but the use of weapons was encouraged. Officers were to ‘hunt down murderers by every means’.177 Churchill also came to support official reprisals. He told Wilson, ‘You have been right all along, CIGS [Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff], and the Government must shoulder the responsibility of reprisals’, to which Wilson responded, ‘once the Government shoulder responsibility the reprisals can start in mild form and go on crescendo if necessary’.178 Even so, a declaration of martial law would not come for another two months. The decision to employ martial law in Ireland came, as discussed earlier, slowly due to the cabinet’s fears of public criticism. The incident that finally pushed Lloyd George and others into resorting to this method was an IRA ambush that killed 16 auxiliaries on patrol near Kilmichael, County Cork, at the end of November 1920.179 The attack on Kilmichael was so shocking to the authorities, coming a week after the Amritsar-like shooting at Croke Park, that one Irish priest at the time alleged it even ‘jerked the people of India to a new appraisal of their position’.180 Unlike previous ambushes, this one was not followed with a reprisal. Cabinet deliberations determined that the attack was so clearly military in nature, it required a military response: martial law.181 Finally, by 1 December 1920, the cabinet authorized Greenwood to impose martial law where necessary, and hardliners insisted that it should be applied across most if not all of the island. Macready happened to be on vacation at the time, so Major-General Sir Hugh Jeudwine served as acting Commander-inChief and therefore held responsibility for enforcing martial law. He too hoped it would be imposed all over the island.182 Jeudwine revealed that he shared Dyer’s opinion of using force to make an impression: he gave nine major reasons for island-wide martial law, one of which was for ‘moral effect’.183 Wilson supported Jeudwine’s idea. Irritated that Churchill and

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Greenwood suddenly behaved as if they had always supported using martial law, Wilson, who had been demanding martial law for the last two years, argued that the government must implement it in at least three of the island’s four provinces; otherwise it would be useless.184 Similarly, Lord Milner who had also served on the Indian Disorders Cabinet Committee warned the Cabinet Committee on Ireland: ‘unless you apply it [martial law] to a sufficiently wide area your attempt to get arms will fail’.185 Wilson’s annoyance with the government’s, and especially Churchill’s, change in policy regarding martial law makes sense. Originally, Churchill had been a vocal supporter of reprisals and his rationalization is tellingly similar to the Punjab regime’s perception that civilians only suffer violence when they fail to collaborate with the regime. On one hand, Churchill claimed that ‘everything will be done to prevent violent, harsh or inhuman action by the troops’, but on the other he added that the key ‘in this respect’ would be Irish civilians themselves. In other words, the responsibility for preventing troops from engaging in violence rested, according to Churchill, in the hands of ‘the Irish population of towns where troops are quartered if they not only abstain from murdering the soldiers and their officers by treacherous means but also render the assistance which it is easily in their power to give for the detection of the actual criminals’. All civilians living in a village where Crown Forces suffered ambush were, to Churchill, as guilty as the gunmen themselves if they did not step forward with information to help find and destroy the responsible parties. Perhaps it did not occur to Churchill that to have rendered such assistance would have meant certain death for many at the hands of the IRA, or perhaps he did not care. Regardless, Churchill depicted reprisals as ‘the loyalty and zeal of the troops in defending themselves from cowardly and treacherous attacks’.186 But two months later, he decided that allowing such reprisals to occur outside the bounds of martial law was unacceptable due to complaints about troops ‘taking the law into their own hands, and that apart from clumsy and indiscriminate destruction, actual looting and thieving as well as drunkenness and gross disorder are occurring’. Churchill was now ‘prepared to support and to defend in Parliament a policy of reprisals within strict limits and under strict control in certain districts [. . .] [because] conditions approximating to a state of war exist’. In this way, he hoped ‘the excesses of the troops may be controlled’.187 Yet martial law was never applied throughout the island, just as it was not applied across all of India the year before, despite disturbances outside the Punjab.188 Both Churchill and Greenwood stood firmly against applying it to the entire island. They first applied it on 12 December 1920, but only in four counties in southwest Ireland: Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary.189 The proclamations of martial law, published the day before, resulted in an

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outburst of anger from Lord Lieutenant French, apoplectic that Dublin escaped the list.190 By 30 December, Greenwood extended martial law to four more counties in the south so that most of Munster fell under martial law. Martial law did not put an end to reprisals. Rather, it added official sanction to them, technically called ‘official punishments’ by the government, but the public at large referred to them as ‘official reprisals’. The first official reprisal took place on 29 December 1920, in Midleton, near Cork. Here, Crown Forces officially destroyed six houses in retaliation for an IRA ambush that killed two RIC men. The houses ‘belonged to people who must have known of the ambush but failed to give information’.191 This justification echoed Dyer’s sentiments when he gave his ‘crawling’ order, as well as the general justification behind marching 20 ‘respectable’ men of Gujranwalla handcuffed through the city and onto a coal truck.192 The most common form of official reprisals consisted of property damage rather than executions. Buildings from which IRA gunmen had fired shots at the authorities were destroyed, as were buildings in which IRA ambush preparations were thought to have taken place. Usually, the inhabitants of these buildings were evacuated by the military before the buildings were destroyed. The idea was to force Irish civilians to choose between assisting the authorities in their attempts to restore order and assisting the insurrection. The Military Governor of the Martial Law Area, General Strickland, held the opinion that a public ‘attitude of neutrality’ must be ‘inconsistent with loyalty’ to Crown Forces or to Britain.193 No doubt, Dyer, Lahore’s Colonel Johnson, and the Punjab’s Michael O’Dwyer held the same opinion in India. Ironically, many of the destroyed buildings belonged to loyalist landlords who also suffered the IRA’s ‘counter-reprisals’ as their own manor houses on their large estates were burned.194 Curiously, the government chose not to keep track of how many official reprisals took place. So, in the absence of an official number, historian Charles Townshend pieced together an estimate based on RIC reports and concluded that Crown Forces engaged in more than 150 official reprisals in less than six months. This number averages to four reprisals per county per month.195 By contrast, in the village of Kasur in the Punjab, where two Europeans had been killed by an angry crowd, the population of 25,000 suffered more than 600 incidents of public flogging and two deaths, one of which took place while the Punjabi suspect was running away from authorities. The mechanism by which official reprisals functioned in Ireland is noteworthy. The Commander-in-Chief explained: Punishments will only be carried out on the authority of the Infantry Brigadier, who before taking action will satisfy himself that the people

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concerned were, owing to their proximity to the outrage or their known political tendencies, implicated in the outrage, and will give specific instructions in writing or by telegram to the officer detailed to carry out the operation . . . The punishment will be carried out as a Military Operation, and the reason why it is being done will be publicly proclaimed.196 Thus, reprisals would be controlled, accountable, and would clearly communicate to civilians the reasons they were being punished. Furthermore, officials conducting reprisals had to follow certain rules, which Irish civilians were quick to use against Crown Forces in making claims. For example, civilians living in a building targeted for reprisal had one hour to move ‘any valuable foodstuffs hay or corn but not furniture’ before their homes were blown up. Claims could be made against the government if the inhabitants did not receive the required amount of time to collect food beforehand. If setting fire to a house’s furniture might spread fire to other houses, Crown Forces were required to move the furniture into the street before setting it ablaze.197 Ostensibly, this was collective punishment with restraint and accountability. In contrast to martial law in the Punjab, in Ireland the civil courts were allowed to continue sitting despite martial law. Summary trials or rulings were therefore often appealed to the high court for various reasons, including that the military court had been constituted improperly.198 Consequently, few death sentences were carried out as the vast majority were overturned by appeals.199 In the Punjab, most Punjabis sentenced to death by the martial law regime had their sentences commuted not by appeal, but rather by the civil government, which feared the potential negative effect such a high number of executions might have on the population. Martial law in Ireland was further complicated by the fact that the tactics used did not differ greatly from what the civil government could do in areas not under martial law. For example, summary courts possessed the power to order the execution of individuals for carrying or harbouring arms, and could impose six-month sentences for lesser offences. Other offences that could be tried under martial law included harbouring rebels, refusing to give information, or giving false information including a false name. Crown Forces also engaged in internments without trial, restricting the use of cars and bicycles, and implementing a curfew, just as the martial law regime had done in India. But internment, curfews, and restricted movement were not unique to martial law areas in Ireland, for they were being used in troubled areas across the island under the Restoration of Order of Ireland Act (ROIA). This suggests ‘the prime effect of martial law was moral rather than physical’.200

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In addition, martial law and official reprisals failed to stop unofficial reprisals. On 9 February 1921, some auxiliaries of N Company at Balbraddagh near Trim, County Meath (north of Dublin on the eastern side of the island) attacked part of the town. They set fire to a local store after stealing £325 worth of liquor and food. Irish nationalists referred to this as the ‘looting of Trim’. The same night in Dublin, two IRA prisoners held by F Company of the auxiliaries in Dublin Castle were taken to a field in the nearby suburb of Dromcondra and shot. Such indiscipline required a response by British authorities. The Captain of F Company and two of his men were arrested. Meanwhile, General Frank Crozier, the head of the auxiliary division, interrogated 26 men of N Company in Trim. He fired 21 of them and put five under arrest awaiting court-martial. But General Tudor, the over-arching commander of the entire RIC (including the auxiliaries) re-hired those 21 men. Accusations in the press mounted, alleging that these men were only rehired because they threatened to reveal all the incidents the police had been involved in, thus embarrassing or further discrediting the government. In the midst of all this, General Crozier resigned his command of the auxiliaries.201 An investigation and trials ensued. Eighteen of the 21 men originally fired were found innocent of misconduct in Trim. Eight were convicted, but four were never suspected by Crozier.202 Moreover, these courts-martial did not take place until July, five months after the fact.203 Thus, there was no immediate deterrent to prevent other policemen from behaving similarly. With respect to the captain and his men who shot the two prisoners in Dromcondra, he and the two men who aided him were court-martialed on 15 April, but were found innocent of any wrongdoing.204 Nonetheless, by February 1921, the government’s opinion of the RIC began to change. Lloyd George criticized them as ‘no longer the guardians of the law, but are themselves guilty of unlawful acts against the population it is their duty to protect’. The prime minister worried that this could cause public opinion to ‘swing round and withdraw its support’ for him.205 Consequently, Macready placed the military in supreme command of martial law areas for the first time, so as to eliminate competition with civil authorities. Even so, many auxiliaries ignored their military governors, reporting instead directly to Tudor.206 Moreover, Crown Forces tried to cover up reprisals. The man in charge of public relations in Dublin Castle, M.T. Loughnane, told the Under-Secretary for Ireland, Sir John Anderson, of his disgust at keeping reprisals quiet. Anderson reported that Loughnane was angry that ‘the police reports from the country are on the face of it false in the main, and that he feels he is being employed creating some screen for the CS’s [Chief Secretary’s] parliamentary answers, under cover of which these things [reprisals] can continue’.207

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Indeed, reprisals did continue.208 Galway, on the Irish west coast, was not under martial law but despite this the divisional commander claimed that he was conducting ‘official reprisals’ during March 1921. General Tudor fully supported him in this.209 One violent incident in Ireland, which would never have occurred in the Punjab as that province was not truly in open rebellion against the raj, resulted in a particularly heated debate in the House of Lords. Roughly two years after Dyer’s shooting in Amritsar, the auxiliaries in Killaloe planned to raid the Shannon Hotel in Castleconnell (near Limerick), hoping to find IRA there. Captain D.I. Wood was to lead the raid. The plan was to send two officers and 12 Temporary Cadets to the hotel in plain clothes, looking for suspicious activity while a uniformed party of 20 auxiliaries armed with two machine guns surrounded the hotel. But the plan fell apart as the raiding party was driving up to the hotel. They saw men who they assumed were rebels running away from the hotel. Urgently, the plain-clothes policemen rushed into the hotel, to the bar, and yelled at everyone to put their hands up. Unfortunately, three off-duty constables happened to be at the bar and mistook the auxiliaries in plain clothes as IRA. The off-duty police began shooting at them, effectively pushing them out of the building until the uniformed party arrived. At this point, the off-duty constables realized they had been shooting at the wrong people and quickly surrendered. But the uniformed auxiliaries outside kept shooting until Captain Wood ordered them to stop. During the shooting at the Shannon Hotel, the hotel landlord was killed while surrendering, along with one off-duty constable and one auxiliary cadet. A witness to the shooting, a local surgeon in his late seventies named Dr. Cripps, reported, ‘both my wife and I were held up by revolvers pointed dead at our breasts’. Cripps added, ‘the whole place was shot to pieces by a machine-gun placed inside the hotel’, and ‘the Auxiliaries [were] behaving like demented Red Indians’. Dr Cripps happened to have a brother in the House of Lords, Lord Parmoor, the father of Sir Stafford Cripps who would famously travel to India during World War II to offer a plan for Indian independence, unsuccessfully. Lord Parmoor demanded a full inquiry on 26 April 1921. He read his brother’s letter to the House, qualifying it by adding, ‘my brother does not agree with me generally as regards Irish matters, and has always been strongly in favour of what I may call the Government’s policy. Whether he will be so in the future is another matter’.210 Parmoor denounced the reprehensible behaviour of the auxiliaries: ‘This vendetta of violence is doing more harm to the prestige of this country than any other fact in its modern history [. . .] the worst violence of all is that of reprisals, connived at or organized under conditions of this kind, by the Government

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itself’.211 Lord Shandon also called for an inquiry, adding that the fact that the police mistook the plain-clothes officers to be IRA men ‘is no excuse whatsoever for the act committed [. . .] The point is that the force apparently set out from Limerick to do something of a violent character; that they selected this particular place; and that, without inquiry or anything else apparently, they created this havoc’.212 Shandon saw a difference between such reprisals and the restoration of law and order.213 A military inquiry was already in progress, but some remained skeptical. Lord Buckmaster in particular responded, ‘This is not the first Inquiry that has been held into undoubted outrages that have occurred in Ireland. With very rare exceptions they appear to have resulted in nothing at all’. He referred to the shooting of two Irish rebels at Dromcondra, and the reprisal on Balbriggan which ‘was sacked and people killed; but no one has been punished’.214 Days later, Lord Birkenhead presented the inquiry’s findings. They found ‘the cadets were under complete control and ceased fire the moment that they were ordered to do so’. Officially, no ‘indiscipline’ or ‘illegal violence’ took place, but rather an unfortunate incident of mistaken identity.215 Surprisingly, General Macready disagreed, believing that the RIC behaved with severity. Although he had been defending them before implementing martial law, now he spoke out against them: ‘They all had the wind up, blood up, and did what they used to do in the trenches in France. In the circumstances you cannot hold them criminally responsible, but they are not fit to be policemen – but are any Auxiliaries?’216 Ironically, Macready now believed that only the military could police Ireland effectively, even though these men who he deemed unfit actually possessed military backgrounds. In India, the Hunter Committee (along with the government) found that the military policed the Punjab under martial law adequately. A similar perception clearly applied in Ireland: once the government identified a full-scale rebellion, whether real or imagined (as in the Indian case), martial law and collective punishments became legitimate strategies in the official mind, and convincing the general public of the same became of paramount political importance. That, however, presented yet another insurmountable challenge.

CONCLUSION

‘Bloody Sunday’ at Croke Park On the last day of the year 1920, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, FieldMarshal Sir Henry Wilson, grieved the situation in both India and Ireland: What a miserable and disappointing year. Lloyd George and his Cabinet have lamentably failed, whether in England where Lloyd George has given in every time to the Trades Unions and has tolerated the formation of a Council of Action, or in Ireland, where ever since the spring he has handed over the Government to the ‘Black and Tans’ until public opinion and the logic of facts have driven the Government to martial law for Munster . . . or in India where Montagu favours the rebels against the loyalists.1 The government seemed to him too lenient with forces demanding change, whether the IRA in Ireland, the anti-Rowlatt protestors in India, or even labour unions at home in England. In every case, Wilson feared the government’s inability to hold on to the pre-war world. The violence the state had engaged in by the end of that year was, to him and other diehard imperialists, simply not enough. Yet, dramatic incidents of collective punishment abounded, not just in Amritsar, but also in Dublin a little over a year later. On Sunday, 21 November 1920, the IRA assassinated a number of British intelligence officers at eight different places in Dublin.2 Twelve were killed, five wounded, and two police officers who had the misfortune of passing by during these shootings were also shot dead, thereby constituting the first fatal casualties sustained by the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary since its inception earlier in the year.3 The intelligence officers were part of a group of 60 agents sent to Ireland for espionage under the direction of Major C.A. Cameron. Their goal was to destroy IRA intelligence networks and their

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mastermind, Michael Collins. One officer in particular described their mission as ‘the stamping out of terrorism by secret murder’.4 These men meant to implement Lloyd George’s plan to grab ‘murder by the throat’, by destroying the IRA as covertly as possible so as not to draw negative public attention.5 The IRA assassinated these men on the same day as a major Gaelic football game in Croke Park, where large crowds could provide good cover after completing their missions. Like the Jallianwala Bagh, Croke Park was not really a park, but rather the largest football field in Ireland at the time. It had entrances on each of its four corners, and on one side it had a ‘grand stand of concrete terracing, with an incompleted framework of roofing over it’, while on the remaining three sides of the field the spectators gathered ‘on earthy banks’. A 20- to 30-foot-high railway wall on one side and a canal on another side bound the spectators. A fence surrounded the football pitch itself ten feet high, with ‘barbed spikes at the top’.6 Thus, Croke Park, like Jallianwala Bagh, was a difficult place from which a large crowd could escape gunfire easily or quickly. The authorities soon suspected that the men responsible for the deaths of 14 British officers that morning might be hiding among the audience at Croke Park, and so set out to search the crowd.7 After all, the Gaelic football game was sponsored by the Gaelic Athletic Association, known for its strong ties to the IRA, and the proceeds from the match were to benefit the families of imprisoned or dead IRA men.8 So, the police suspected that the IRA might take advantage of the large crowds to hide. Lieutenant Colonel Bray received orders: ‘You will surround the ground and picquet all exits’ in order to search every person leaving the game, and his men were to be reinforced with two armored cars with machine guns while ‘a Special Intelligence Officer will warn by megaphone all people present at the match that they will only leave the ground by exits. Anybody attempting to get away elsewhere will be shot’.9 Meanwhile, the police were ordered to assist the army in searching the spectators. Bray took 180 to 200 soldiers with him. However, the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary’s I Company arrived at Croke Park ‘ten minutes before the time arranged’, and therefore before the military finished surrounding the area. Just after Bray and his soldiers arrived at the scene, he saw police rush the park, open fire, kill more than a dozen and wound roughly 80 to 100 civilians.10 One casualty was a 14-year-old boy who was shot in the back.11 Unlike the depiction in Neil Jordan’s 1996 movie, Michael Collins, the military did not use machine guns to shoot up the crowd. Rather, a machine gun mounted on an armored car outside the field shot bullets into the air to discourage members of the crowd from escaping before being searched.12

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Later that night, three suspected IRA men who had been arrested the night before were shot ‘while attempting to escape’, quite possibly after being tortured by the police.13 On the same day, but in Navan, County Meath (north of Dublin, in Leinster Province), ‘a civilian who three times failed to reply to a Sentry’s challenge was shot dead’.14 This was perfectly within acceptable police behaviour, according to Colonel Gerald Smyth, the Divisional Commissioner for Cork: Any policeman is perfectly justified in shooting any man who is seen with arms, and who does not immediately throw up his hands when ordered. A policeman is perfectly justified in shooting any man who he has good reason to believe is carrying arms and who does not immediately throw up his hands when ordered.15 Shooting someone only because one suspects he possesses a weapon hardly sounds like restrained police work or the use of minimum force. Yet, Smyth openly advocated this policy and rationalized it in terms similar to the defence of the ‘salaaming order’ in the Punjab. Authorities in both Ireland and India appeared to share a siege mentality which distinguished little, if at all, between civilians and rebels as if neither were truly innocent.

Reprisal or Self-Defence? Initially, the government claimed that the IRA men hiding among the spectators fired shots, which compelled I Company to respond by firing into the crowd.16 The Chief Secretary of Ireland, Sir Hamar Greenwood, reported: The police were fired upon by armed Sinn Fein pickets at the entrance to the field and shots were fired simultaneously from within the ground, obviously for the purpose of creating a stampede which would afford cover for the escape of persons wanted. The police returned fire and I regret to state with the result that ten persons were killed and eleven seriously wounded. In addition to these casualties, a woman was trampled to death in the crush and a man appears to have died from nervous shock, and about fifty-four persons sustained injuries of various kinds . . . about thirty revolvers were found lying on the field, and there is no doubt that some of the most desperate criminals in Ireland were amongst the spectators. The responsibility for the loss of innocent lives must rest with those men, and not with the police or military who were forced to fire in self-defence and used no unnecessary violence.17

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Ostensibly, Crown Forces engaged in self-defence at Croke Park, not indiscriminate collective punishment.18 The government therefore blamed the IRA for the death of innocent civilians, and the 30 revolvers found abandoned on the football pitch helped make that case. Commander-in-Chief of Ireland, General Nevil Macready, agreed that all the abandoned guns ‘fully justified the assumption that the match was being made use of for the concealment of armed men who had come to Dublin for a purpose other than watching football’.19 Like General Dyer, who initially claimed he had fired in self-defence and then maintained he shot the crowd for moral effect, the authorities in Ireland offered two different explanations for letting bullets fly at the Irish football game. Dublin Castle’s first public statement on ‘Bloody Sunday’ alleged that the police were fired upon by ‘Sinn Fein pickets’ and so were forced to shoot back, thereby killing and wounding some unspecified number of people. Sir Hamar Greenwood reported to the House of Commons using words similar to his report to the Cabinet Irish Situation Committee above: The authorities had reason to believe that Sinn Fein gunmen came into Dublin on Sunday under the guise of attending a hurling match between Dublin and Tipperary, but really to carry out the Sunday morning’s murders . . . [the police] force was fired upon and they fired back, killing 10 and wounding others. About 3,000 men were searched. Thirty revolvers and other firearms were found on the field. I regret to say that a woman and a man were crushed to death in the crowd.20 But subsequent public statements moved away from this explanation. In Parliament, Sir Hamar Greenwood emphasized that the police were fired upon, but then implied that most people were killed or wounded by stampede rather than by police fire: Of this [Sinn Fein shooting at police] there is indisputable evidence. It seems quite clear that these shots were a pre-arranged signal of warning to certain sections of the crowd. A stampede was caused not by the firing alone, which caused considerable alarm, but also by a rush of men seeking to make their escape from the field. They hurried mostly to one side of the field, where a corrugated iron railing was the only barrier to be surmounted. Through its fall a number of people were crushed. Meanwhile, the armed pickets outside joined, no doubt, by gunmen, escaping from inside the ground, were maintaining a fire in the direction of the police, who returned fire. The firing lasted not more than three minutes. About thirty revolvers thrown away by men who had formed part of the spectators, were picked up on the ground. Twelve

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persons lost their lives, eleven were injured seriously enough to warrant their detention in hospital, and about fifty persons sustained slight hurt. These casualties include perfectly innocent persons whose death I deeply regret. The responsibility for them, however, rests entirely upon those assassins whose existence is a constant menace to all law-abiding persons in Ireland. 21Greenwood likely based this defence on Commander-inChief General Macready’s report, which asserted that the dead and wounded had been crushed by the stampede rather than shot by police, despite the fact that this clearly contradicted his earlier statement and his official report to the cabinet.22 Of course, stampeding crowds would increase the number of casualties, as they did in Jallianwala Bagh, but bullets accounted for their fair share of deaths as well. Greenwood left out some important details in his speech to Parliament, like that in the seconds of shooting, police emptied 114 rounds of rifle fire and an unknown number of bullets from revolvers into the football field. Nor did he mention that in addition to the 12 killed on 21 November, another five died from their wounds later that day, including a man who was walking down the street, away from Croke Park, toward his home.23 An 11-year-old boy named William Robinson, who had been sitting on a tree, facing the pitch at Croke Park, was shot and killed as was a ten-year-old, Jerome O’Leary.24 Although these figures pale in comparison to 1,650 bullets emptied into Jallianwala Bagh, which killed at least 379 and wounded 1,200, the shooting at Croke Park proved no less traumatizing to Irish civilians because this was the single largest attack on the population by Crown Forces during the immediate postwar years. An eyewitness to the shooting ‘spoke with horror of the screaming of the women and children of whom there were many present at the match’, and many eyewitnesses claimed that the police entered the field and began to open fire unprovoked.25 In the House of Commons, the Liberal Lieutenant Commander Joseph Kenworthy challenged Greenwood’s version of events. With pointed rhetorical questions, he asked if Greenwood was: aware that many eye-witnesses are prepared to swear that no shots were fired at the police? Is he also aware that the so-called pickets were men selling tickets outside the field? Does he justify firing into a struggling mass of people, including women and children . . . in an attempt to pick out a very small minority of armed men? Kenworthy had similarly spoken out against General Dyer, so he continued angrily, asking ‘at what stage it became necessary to turn a machine gun on

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the people’, but Greenwood’s only response was that he was not aware that any machine guns were used. Remarkably, the government’s attempt to defend the police in Ireland stood in sharp contrast to the recent censure of General Dyer for disregarding the use of minimum force. In Ireland, the Chief Secretary claimed, ‘it is impossible for the Government to lay down rules governing the action which the police and military are compelled to undertake in the necessary duty of searching for arms’.26 But identifying the rules by which police and military must conduct themselves is a central component of a liberal democracy, and many rules were laid down already, both in Ireland and in Punjab, including the principle of minimum force. Furthermore, the government later created detailed rules guiding the use of ‘official reprisals’ and other instances in which the police and military engaged in restoring law and order, especially under martial law. So Greenwood’s comment deferring to the judgement of the men on the spot appeared both puzzling and unconvincing. Inquiries would have to be made. Whereas Indian newspapers had been suppressed and censored during the months of martial law, Irish newspapers immediately expressed their scepticism of Greenwood’s explanation. The republican parliament’s paper, the Irish Bulletin, pointed out that if IRA gunmen had provoked the police into returning fire, then they would have been among the killed or wounded. Yet this was not so. No IRA man was pursued, much less captured by police either. The paper criticized the authorities for hiding their role in inflicting casualties, as if ‘all casualties were caused by the fall of a corrugated iron railing and by the stampede. The words “lost their lives” and “were injured” are carefully used to hide the truth that all the deaths [. . .] were caused by. . .constabulary attacking unarmed civilians’.27 In fact, General Frank Crozier, after his retirement as head of the RIC, confirmed Sinn Fein’s allegation that no one fired upon the police. The order to search for rebels at Croke Park sounded to him ‘stupid, ill-judged, [and] ill-timed’. Crozier blamed police forces ‘ablaze with blood lust and fury’ for firing into the crowd.28 Major E.L. Mills, the man in command of both the auxiliaries and regular Black and Tans, told Crozier that he witnessed the Black and Tans opening fire without provocation, but Dublin Castle ignored this.29 Mills actually put a stop to the shooting outside the park because he recognized that ‘no shots were coming from the football field and all the RIC constables seemed excited and out of hand’. But Mills reported that his second in command, Major Dudley, eventually managed to stop the shooting from inside the park while yelling, ‘What is all the firing about? Stop that firing’.30 In fact, Major Mills also testified that, unlike Greenwood’s statement to Parliament and unlike Macready’s statement to the government, no revolvers

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were found on the ground: ‘when the ground was cleared we searched for arms and found none’.31 Crozier himself noted the connection between this shooting and General Dyer’s the previous year. He wrote, ‘Both crowds were huddled together in enclosed spaces; both were holiday-making and both had collected for their enjoyment or recreation without hostile intent’. However, Crozier noted, ‘There was only one difference: at Amritsar a general officer gave the order to massacre; at Croke Park the “Budmash” [foolish] police fired without orders’.32 In Dyer’s case, one man could be scapegoated for the shooting for the sake of a better public image, but in the Irish case, the entire system of law and order would have been called into question if the government could not justify the shooting to the public. For similar reasons, the martial law regime in Punjab had to be found legitimate by the Hunter Committee and the government. Therefore, determining whether ‘Bloody Sunday’ was an act of self-defence by Crown Forces became of serious importance. On 30 November 1920, the Labour Party created a commission to investigate the shooting at Croke Park. Over the next five days, the commission heard evidence and ‘reconstructed the scene’ of the shooting before moving on to Cork, Limerick and Killarney to hear evidence of reprisals there. They did not find a single witness who corroborated the government’s allegation that the police were fired upon. Rather, they reported that the police appeared to have opened fire in ‘a spirit of calculated brutality and lack of self-control’.33 The Labour commission concluded, ‘Croke Park was a ghastly tragedy resulting from official errors of judgment and incompetence’.34 The plan to raid and search the spectators was, according to the Labour Report, ‘dangerous [. . .] its execution was a lamentable failure, and . . . there was no justification for what occurred’.35 Thus, Labour called for a truce and for the British public to demand an end to reprisals: Things are being done in the name of Britain which must make her name stink in the nostrils of the whole world . . . Not only is there a reign of terror in Ireland which should bring a blush of shame to every British citizen, but a nation is being held in subjection by an empire which has proudly boasted that it is the friend of small nations.36 Labour’s indictment of the Anglo-Irish War and its previous criticism of the martial law regime in India rested largely on the post-World War I context in which Britain was the ‘friend of small nations’, yet engaging in ‘terror’. Meanwhile, a military inquiry had been underway since 23 November 1920, two days after the shooting. In just under three weeks, after interviewing 35 witnesses (of which ten were RIC and seven were soldiers), the inquiry

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concluded that the shooting ‘was carried out without orders and exceeded the demands of the situation’.37 The General Officer Commanding Dublin District, Major-General Boyd, added that the shooting ‘was indiscriminate, and unjustifiable’.38 Although the military could not definitively determine whether rebels fired at the police, the inquiry concluded that police behaved reprehensibly. The government chose not to make this public, so Greenwood blatantly lied to Parliament: All that I can say in this case is that the court, after a very exhaustive inquiry, formed the conclusion that the firing was started by certain civilians in the enclosure and that fire was opened by other civilians upon a detachment of the Royal Irish Constabulary who were approaching one of the entrance gates.39 But in all likelihood, ‘certain civilians’ did not start firing. The persuasive and strongly corroborated testimony of several key witnesses to the event, in contrast to the uncorroborated and suspicious claims of a handful of policemen who claimed they were fired upon, suggested that the police entered Croke Park with guns blazing.40 An eyewitness, Thomas Doyle, recalled that because he was standing near the main gate to the park, the police ordered him to open it: ‘they threatened to shoot me if I did not. I opened the gate, and as soon as the Black and Tans got in they began firing towards the hill on the other side of the ground’. The basic version of these events, in which the police began firing upon entering Croke Park without provocation, was corroborated by multiple witnesses. However, only three RIC officers, Sergeant Daly, Constable Gordon and Head Constable Lynch, claimed to have witnessed rebels firing at them, but their testimonies either contradicted or ignored details in the testimonies of one another. Although all three claimed to be at the same place at the same time, none could account for the others and each described rather different scenarios in which rebels ran away from them, shooting. The other police and soldiers simply testified that they heard shots fired but could not identify who was engaged in the shooting.41 If the police were not fired upon, then what else could explain the shooting? Historian David Leeson suggested that the police may have been afraid for their own lives, their ‘fearful imaginations might have transformed ticket-sellers into sentries, and panic-stricken spectators into sinister fugitives’.42 Much like Nick Lloyd’s assessment of General Dyer, this interpretation represents British authorities as deeply paranoid. Or, Leeson posited, the shooting could have been accidental. After all, ‘Black and Tans were often careless with firearms, and accidental fire was common’. For example, during the three years of the Anglo-Irish War, there were 35

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instances of policemen being shot and killed by accident.43 Perhaps one accidental shot at Croke Park encouraged many to open fire. This argument leaves one with an impression that the British authorities were hopelessly incompetent. A third possibility Leeson offered was that the men were shooting not to kill, but to make an impression. Thus, many shots were fired into the air or above the heads of the crowd but not intended to kill anyone.44 Again, ineptitude prevailed. My argument, however, is not that the authorities panicked, whether in Ireland or India, and that these were not the actions of a few bumbling idiots. Rather, the best explanation for the shooting at Croke Park is as a reprisal for the assassination of British intelligence officers earlier that morning. The Manchester Guardian echoed this sentiment: ‘Everybody believed that they were being massacred as a reprisal’.45 The idea that Crown Forces would begin shooting on an unarmed crowd is not terribly at odds with examples of RIC behaviour before then. The authorities had engaged in many reprisals before ‘Bloody Sunday’, such as the soldiers’ attack on Fermoy and Kinsale in September and October 1919; a reprisal in Fermoy again in June 1920; the assassination of Cork’s Mayor in March 1920; the reprisal on Limerick in April 1920 which famously earned the Black and Tans their nickname; the sacking of Balbriggan and three towns near Rineen just a month earlier. Thus, the Croke Park shooting stands out, like Dyer’s shooting in Jallianwala Bagh, only to the extent that it was more terrifying than the reprisals that had preceded it (and, in the Indian case, than the collective punishments that followed). It set a new precedent for the kinds of punishments the RIC could utilize. Consequently, the entire city centre of Cork was set ablaze just weeks after ‘Bloody Sunday’, on 11 December 1920 (the same day the military completed its inquiry of the shooting), in retaliation for an ambush at Dillon’s Cross. The New Year and declaration of martial law added ‘official reprisals’ to the long list of unauthorized reprisals that continued unabated, including the looting of Trim in February 1921, reprisals in Galway in March and in Arklow in April, and the shooting at the Shannon Hotel in Castleconnell.

Public Responses, Propaganda and Censorship When Sir Henry Wilson heard of ‘Bloody Sunday’, he focused his attention on the 14 men killed by Collins’s men at a cabinet meeting, just as he had previously focused on the European deaths in the Punjab: This ought to be sufficient to ease the conscience of the Cabinet in taking strong Govt [sic] measures instead of leaving the Government of Ireland to the Black & Tans . . . Tonight Winston insinuated that the

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murdered officers were careless useless fellows and ought to have taken precautions. This fairly roused me, and I let fly about the Cabinet being cowards and not governing, but leaving it to the Black and Tans etc. No Cabinet meeting, as the Cabinet do not seem to think that anything out of the way has happened! I urged on Winston ‘for the 100th time’ that the Govt [sic] should govern, proclaim their fidelity to the Union and declare martial law. But this had no effect.46 Wilson, enraged that Churchill thought the lost intelligence officers were somehow culpable in getting themselves assassinated, blamed the Cabinet for not ‘governing’. His use of the term illustrates that, as he (and diehards like him) understood it, the very nature of ‘governing’ the empire involved applying extreme force against rebels, ideally via martial law. The IRA engaged in an unprecedented attack, displaying great discipline and skilled coordination, to which Crown Forces answered with an unprecedented shooting. But what offended Wilson the most was the fact that the police acted without orders. Wilson would have liked it much better if they had been ordered to open fire, so that their actions were officially sanctioned by the government and therefore held the appearance of accountability. Wilson counted only the deaths of the authorities among those ‘murdered’. Days later, Wilson wrote with increasing angst: ‘It is all simply past belief; a matter of 17 murders in 48 hours is considered of no importance by Lloyd George and his amazing Cabinet’.47 Wilson was not alone in his outrage over unofficial reprisals, nor was he the only one thinking also of the Punjab. Whereas Sir Edward Carson encouraged all to focus on the crimes committed by the Irish rebels against Crown Forces, the Marquess of Crewe, who had formerly served as Secretary of State for India and ‘Viceroy of Ireland [when] I was burned in effigy [. . .] because I had refused to commute the death penalty of a man who was guilty of a peculiarly atrocious agrarian murder’, denounced reprisals. He resented that inquiries into reprisals were often not released to the public, and suggested that an inquiry ‘might be made by some form of Special Commission, in some ways analogous to that which enquired into the Punjab disturbances’. Thus, while he was not originally in favour of the establishment of the Hunter Committee because: I thought it a mistake in the special conditions under which India is governed, but I think there is far more to be said for it in the case of Ireland, both from Ireland’s nearness to this country and from the possibility of the proceedings of such an Inquiry being carefully watched here and being ultimately, with full comprehension, sanctioned or criticised by Parliament.

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Lord Crewe denounced Dyer’s actions and eagerly demanded the formation of a committee to investigate reprisals in Ireland. However, Lord Buckmaster pointed out ‘there is no geographical limit to the administration of justice. You cannot possibly justify the thing that is wrong because it is taking place in Ireland. If it be wrong in itself, it is wrong everywhere’. So, Buckmaster called for an inquiry and an end to reprisals. Yet, in doing so, he echoed the Edwardian narrative of a peaceful empire: ‘It is not by terror, it is by the administration of justice and the administration of justice alone that English rule may be respected and obeyed’.48 Viscount Bryce condemned reprisals as well. But unlike others such as Wilson who hoped for responsible reprisals, meaning those conducted according to a code of behaviour and with military authority, Bryce railed against all forms of retaliatory punishment aimed at the general population. He argued, ‘Reprisals in this sense may be defined as being the punishment of the innocent because you cannot find the guilty’.49 The fact that the use of excessive force failed to subdue Ireland, and a similarly harsh regime in the Punjab enflamed nationalist opinion in India, revealed how circumstances after the Great War changed what constituted an acceptable use of force. The press steadily condemned government policy in Ireland and therefore played a key role in this, as both a product and a constitutive part of this new context, which the imperial system was eventually forced to accommodate.50 Whereas the press appeared deeply divided over General Dyer’s fate, it was only divided over reprisals in Ireland during the first year of the Anglo-Irish War. Thus, Conservative newspapers including the Morning Post, the National Review, and the Spectator hoped that government policy would succeed, while the Daily News, Manchester Guardian, Westminster Gazette and Daily Herald remained critical.51 However, by the second half of 1920, the vast majority of papers, whether Conservative, Liberal or radical, turned highly critical. For example, in 1919 the Round Table applauded Lloyd George’s efforts to keep Ireland from seceding as Lincoln kept the American South from doing the same. But after the reprisal on Balbriggan in September 1920, the same journal declared, ‘the Government which dismissed General Dyer least of all Governments can afford to leave subordinates in Ireland to take unauthorized measures’.52 The public controversy over the Punjab brought increasing scrutiny to collective punishment in Ireland. Even King George V deplored reprisals for punishing indiscriminately. He worried that ‘in punishing the guilty we are inflicting punishment no less severe upon the innocent’.53 Conservative MPs and some of their Unionist allies also spoke out against reprisals.54 Similarly, The Times condemned reprisals unequivocally:

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The police live lonely and hunted lives and would be more or less than human if their passion of resentment did not sometimes strain the bonds of discipline to breaking point. Nevertheless, the reprisals are deplorable and are regretted deeply by sober Irishmen of all parties. It is argued, indeed, by some people that reprisals have the merit of checking outrage in places where discipline and vigilance hitherto had failed. Certain towns which were the scene of reprisals are now comparatively free from crime, and it is said that, in other districts, outrage has been discouraged by a lively fear of retaliation. Such relief, however, one fears, is being purchased at a heavy cost. The continuance of reprisals must create permanent bitterness between different classes of Irishmen and must weaken to a dangerous degree any respect that survives in Ireland for the constitutional virtues of law and order.55 These arguments revealed an increasing skepticism over the efficacy of exemplary punishment, and their moral legitimacy. Even the Daily Express argued, ‘Murder for murder is, however, a confession of impotence, a return to sheer barbarism’.56 The very narrative of a peaceful empire seemed called into question as the violence in Ireland escalated so soon after the Punjab and in the midst of imperial crises elsewhere. The government’s decision to keep the military inquiry’s findings private certainly aroused suspicion regarding ‘Bloody Sunday’, but more importantly, the government could identify no particular figure in Ireland to chastise in order to satiate public opinion. Unlike the shooting at Jallianwala Bagh, there exists no evidence that one officer in particular gave the order to shoot at Croke Park or to set fire to Cork. Even if one had, he would not have held Dyer’s high rank. Thus, no one person could be publicly pegged, as Dyer had been, as either a ‘butcher’ or a ‘saviour’. In the House of Commons, Lieutenant Colonel Malone distinguished his criticism of reprisals from the soldiers themselves. He emphasized ‘that no one had any contempt or bad feeling towards the troops in Ireland [. . .] When they criticized them for the murders which they were forced to commit it was not because they reflected on their personal gallantry. Criticism was directed not against the soldiers in Ireland, but against the policy which they were carrying out’.57 Without a scapegoat like Dyer to censure, public scrutiny over events in Ireland centred on government policy. Churchill, of course, found this criticism quite intolerable. He complained that men criticized ‘on the one hand that there was an excess of violence, and on the other that there was an excess of timidity’. But Churchill believed that Crown Forces had ‘a very difficult and terrible task in Ireland’, and that ‘they far more often erred on the side of weakness, even though it put them in a

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foolish position, than they did on the side of cruelty and violence’.58 Ironically, the man who had spoken so heatedly against General Dyer depicted the police in Ireland as ‘foolish’ for not engaging in even greater acts of ‘cruelty and violence’. Opinions in the House remained intensely divided. In fact, when Mr Devlin, the Irish nationalist MP for Belfast, rose to ask Greenwood about the shooting at Croke Park, he was shouted down several times. Greenwood had given details about the assassinations of the British officers, but had not mentioned the shooting at the football field. When Devlin finally got the chance to ask why these details were not mentioned, amidst cries of ‘sit down!’, Greenwood answered with the initial version of events given above. However, while Devlin was trying to ask his question, the Conservative Major Molson, who had been sitting on the bench in front of Devlin, turned around, grabbed Devlin by the shoulders, and pulled him face-first into the bench seats and onto the floor. The Times reported, ‘Mr Devlin struggled to free himself, and hit out blindly, as anyone would have done in that position’. Someone in the House cried, ‘Kill him!’ Devlin and Molson began fighting each other. In a comedy of errors, ‘all blows missed their aim, but an innocent neutral was hit across the mouth’. Other members of the House intervened to stop the fight, at which point Devlin exclaimed, ‘This is your British chivalry, your British courage – Six hundred on one!’ Some ten minutes later, Major Molson apologized to Devlin and the House saying, ‘I forgot myself’.59 The House literally came to blows over the appropriateness of using violence in Ireland. Although such brawls over Irish policy occurred rarely, there existed an intense fear among Conservatives in particular about the future of British world power. When Labour leader Arthur Henderson demanded an independent investigation into these reprisals, British Conservatives waxed apoplectic.60 In a letter to the editor of The Times, Colonel West Ridgeway accused Labour of wanting: Home Rule all round to all people, ‘whatever its colour’ . . . the Empire is to be broken up, for it is the evident policy of the Labour Party that India should have Home Rule . . . that Ireland is to be practically a Republic; and in short, that the British Empire is to be reduced to England, Wales, and Scotland – as long as the two latter do not also claim independence . . . The disruption of the Empire seems to be at hand. Revolution threatens us at home, and if Ireland is allowed to become a Republic our national existence is more than threatened. 61 Britain’s very survival seemed intimately connected to events in Ireland and India to this former Under-Secretary for Ireland and former Governor of

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Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Rebellion, he thought, simply must be crushed and if Ireland should win independence, it could, he feared, bolster a working-class socialist revolution at home. After all, the British Socialist Party stood adamantly against government policy in Ireland and India. At their Annual Conference in April 1920, they adopted resolutions ‘expressing detestation of British Imperialistic rule in India, Egypt, Ireland, and elsewhere [. . .] [and] sympathy with the demands of the Irish people for complete national autonomy and condemnation of the methods employed in Ireland by the British Government’.62 After ‘Bloody Sunday’, an Anti-Reprisals Association formed in London under the leadership of MP Joseph Kenworthy and the writer G.K. Chesterton. They campaigned to embarrass the government over reprisals. In this endeavour, they generated coverage of reprisals in the press to such an extent that Irish propaganda minister Desmond Fitzgerald observed that their efforts were ‘most damaging to England’s prestige’.63 More importantly, a cross section of British intelligentsia came together to form the Peace with Ireland Council in October 1920. This remarkable association cut across party lines. Intellectuals such as Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw accompanied journalists, bishops, Conservatives like Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck and Oswald Mosley (who, ironically, later founded the British Union of Fascists after a brief stint as a Labour MP), Liberals such as Sir John Simon and Labour politicians such as J.R. Clynes. Their shared goal was ‘to work for the cessation of the attempt to solve the Irish problem by force’, and to employ public opinion to this end.64 This kind of public pressure forcing the government to defend its use of collective punishment was unprecedented. Although the press heavily criticized reprisals, not everyone was in agreement over the solution: should they let Ireland go, should they institute martial law, or was there a third option? There existed a common misperception that the military did not engage in reprisal in Ireland, probably because the military retaliated far less frequently than the police.65 Therefore, public attention centred mostly on the Black and Tans and encouraged some in the media to believe, as did Stephen Gwynn for The Observer, that martial law would be ‘less barbarous and brutal and far less demoralizing than the present anarchic and futile campaign of revenge’.66 If ‘revenge’ possessed the stamp of official approval, as it did in India, then perhaps Gwynn would find it far less ‘barbarous and brutal’. Sinn Fein’s Arthur Griffith, however, was well aware of the military’s willingness to carry out reprisals. In interviews with the Irish News and Irish Independent, Griffith accused the army of using reprisals as a form of premeditated terrorism.67 The Irish Bulletin published every week a ‘List of the Acts of Aggression committed in Ireland by the Police and Military of the

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Usurping English Government’. By the end of August 1920, it listed a total of 290 ‘acts of aggression’. By the end of November 1920, that number jumped to 3,197.68 The government remained unable to respond effectively to all this negative publicity. Sir Hamar Greenwood’s initial response was to declare, unconvincingly, that no one could prove definitively whether the RIC had engaged in reprisals, for they often wore masks or some sort of disguise. He also proudly emphasized the freedom of the press in Ireland, telling Parliament that he had gone out of his way to help the press ‘of the world to see Ireland as it is’, because ‘the more publicity Ireland gets from the people who visit it, the stronger and more united will be the support [. . .] behind the British Government’. Thus, he claimed, ‘I welcome them [the press], and so does General Macready’.69 But as this tactic failed to generate positive press, the government finally established a propaganda department within Dublin Castle by August 1920, headed by Basil Clarke, the Director of Public Information.70 His job was to prevent news of the actions of Crown Forces from harming the British government and to counter Sinn Fein propaganda. Another branch of this propaganda department was established at the Irish Office in London (administered by Major Street under Clarke’s supervision). Clarke’s goal was to counter ‘the plethora of adverse news reports’ with ‘suppression or if suppression be either undesirable or impossible, the neutralization, so far as is possible, of the unfavourable factors in news having a minus or unfavourable propaganda value’. One of Clarke’s tasks included neutralizing the potential negative public impact of news of a reprisal in which three policemen sacked a pub, ‘shot up the bar, stole whiskey and cigars and decamped after setting fire to the wreckage’. This story could be manipulated, Clarke thought, by adding that ‘it was in this house three days ago that two unarmed police constables were murdered’. Clarke believed this addition would justify police behaviour because ‘for the simpler minds (and most minds are not analytical), it [the negative effect] is well-nigh removed’.71 Clearly, he hoped that most of the British public would find revenge an acceptable form of good police work. Unlike the Indian press, the Irish press was not heavily censored. Newspapers criticized Dublin Castle, especially when it transferred an inquest over the death of an Irishman, shot by police, from the civilian coroner to a Military Court of Inquiry. This court sat in camera and ruled that the police shot him rightfully ‘in the execution of their duty’.72 As long as newspapers did not incite violence outright or engage in false reporting, Dublin Castle remained willing to allow them such freedom.73 The British press influenced the government to pursue this relatively lenient policy. For example, in December 1920, Dublin Castle prosecuted the Freeman’s Journal for printing a false report. They imprisoned the editor and the owner of the journal, but

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when both fell ill, newspapers pressed for their medical release.74 Macready wanted to continue censoring this journal, along with the Independent, believing both of them to be mere mouthpieces for rebel propaganda. But his fears of British press reaction kept him from doing so.75 However, small gestures of kindness towards ill prisoners failed to stem the tide of public criticism, even of officially sanctioned reprisals. The Westminster Gazette condemned the policy of official reprisals as ‘cruelly severe’.76 The Times described the victims of official reprisals as helplessly caught between Crown Forces and the IRA.77 The Labour Commission’s report on Ireland fueled negative public reaction. The Labour Commission’s military advisor, Brigadier General C.B. Thomson, declared that the army in Ireland was poorly trained, ‘ignorant of their professional duties’.78 He described the Black and Tans as ‘men who were habituated to violence in thought and in deed’.79 While hearing testimony in Ireland, Labour witnessed ‘lorries of armed men with their rifles “at the ready”’, used not as a form of defence but rather as a display meant ‘to spread the feeling of terror [. . .] calculated to terrorise the civilian population’.80 Thus, the Labour report depicted the army and the auxiliaries as out of control and ruthless. Meanwhile, parliamentary debates over reprisals heated. The Earl of Donoughmore accused the government of actively encouraging reprisals and then lying about it. He claimed that the Irish public despised the ‘policy of reprisals – reprisals which were at first denied, then palliated – “Poor fellows, look at the temptation they have” [. . .] But reprisals are going on, they are multiplying, they are officially ordered, officially sanctioned, officially avowed’.81 Similarly, Viscount Bryce lamented: Since the end of last year things have been going from bad to worse in Ireland. There are now in prison 3,691 persons. That number is always increasing, but the fact has not had the result of tranquillising [sic] the country. The casualties to the Crown Forces last week were the highest yet reported. All this has happened in spite of the policy which the Government has followed. The policy of reprisals, official and unofficial, was justified on the ground that it was inevitable, that the condition of the country was such that these grim stern measures must be resorted to. Reprisals have failed, just as the [Home Rule/Government of Ireland] Act has failed . . . What we have been doing [with reprisals] is to throw more power into the hands of the ferocious extremists.82 Whereas in India, the harsh regime appeared to have worked (because there was no actual rebellion in the Punjab), those same measures simply were not working in Ireland. Many feared, as Bryce did, that excessive force could

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produce more rebels rather than eliminate them. But the government remained steadfast in its commitment to keep the civil power intact. However, criticizing reprisals could, at times, be tricky business as politicians were quick to defend the reputation of the honorable British solider. In response to the shooting at Croke Park, Herbert Asquith put forth a motion that the House ‘condemns the outrages committed against the Forces of the Crown’ on ‘Bloody Sunday’, but also ‘deplores and condemns the action of the Executive in attempting to repress crime by methods of terrorism and reprisals which involve the lives and property of the innocent and are contrary to civilised usage’.83 This opened a floodgate of support for Crown Forces. Greenwood declared the non-Irish recruits were ‘the cream of the ex-service men [. . .] most of them having decorations for valour’. When Crown Forces engaged in reprisals, he insisted, they did so with good reason. Shooting or setting fire to a building was mostly ‘done deliberately to prevent a future ambush at the same spot’.84 Similarly, Lieutenant Colonel John Ward of the Independent Labour Party felt compelled to stand against ‘the accusations that have been made against the ordinary British soldier’. He possessed first-hand knowledge of how British soldiers behaved ‘under many peculiar conditions. It is impossible for an English soldier or a British soldier, in whichever way you describe him, to perform the atrocities that have been alleged’. He waxed on, ‘of all the heroic figures the world has ever seen I think the most heroic, the most chivalrous, the most honourable is the ordinary British Tommy’.85 Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Page Croft echoed Ward’s sentiments about the impossibility of the ordinary British Tommy committing atrocities or behaving with excessive force. He opined, ‘the one weakness of the British soldier in face of an enemy is his extraordinary power of forgiveness too soon’.86 Thus, they could not be responsible for the alleged reprisals of which they stood accused in the press and Parliament. Furthermore, the motion Asquith put forward was tantamount to ‘a vote of censure against all ranks of the Army and the Royal Irish Constabulary in Ireland’. After all, Croft argued, if the soldiers were not to blame, but the government, ‘then I say you must produce your proof that the Government have actually given orders for any one of these things [reprisals] to happen’.87 Croft assumed that without orders, the military and police in Ireland could never engage in such bad behaviour. Although the government did tacitly consent to reprisals, none were specifically ordered before the turn to martial law and official reprisals, so Asquith’s motion was re-worded to such an extent that his original motion was nearly undone. The House voted to denounce the attack on British officers on that fateful Sunday morning, but also expressed gratitude to Crown Forces for ‘the courage and devotion with which they are fulfilling their duty in

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Ireland in circumstances of unexampled difficulty; and expresses its approval of the steps which are being taken by His Majesty’s Government to restore peace in Ireland’. Instead of voting to condemn government policy in Ireland and reprisals as ‘terrorism’, some 303 MPs voted to support the government against 83 detractors.88 But as news of reprisals continued through 1921, some previous champions of Crown Forces turned critical. Despite the fact that Greenwood continued to uphold the RIC as ‘gallant officers and men’ who would, he felt, succeed at subduing the island, others began to change their tunes.89 Eventually, even Croft admitted that the Black and Tans should behave with greater discipline.90 William Ormsby-Gore also came to believe that reprisals constituted only ‘murders, and more murders, on either side’.91 By the middle of 1921, as public criticism intensified, the government became increasingly interested in negotiating a peace with Sinn Fein. Lord Lieutenant Sir John French adamantly opposed this, so he resigned in April and was replaced by the first Catholic to hold the spot, Viscount Edmund Fitzalan, a Unionist member of parliament. Bonar Law had retired just weeks earlier, on 17 March – the same month during which Crown casualties reached a high point.92 Meanwhile, the army steadily lost strength in Ireland. The garrison dropped to less than 40 battalions, and thus Ireland had about 7,800 fewer men than army officials estimated were necessary to police the island. Dublin Castle was told in early April to get ready to lose another ten battalions to Britain, where they might be needed to put down industrial strikes, especially in Liverpool.93 Despite the loss of available troops and the recent crescendo in violence and negative public opinion, the cabinet decided to hold stubbornly to the principle of implementing Home Rule for Southern Ireland. Elections for the Southern Home Rule Parliament were held in May 1921.94 Sinn Fein ran unopposed, winning all but four seats that belonged to the Anglican school, Trinity College (Unionists). The party interpreted this victory as a public mandate for their efforts to secure complete independence, and so refused to sit in the Home Rule Parliament. Britain therefore had to rule Ireland as a de facto Crown colony.95 By this time, more than 5,000 men were still active in the IRA, of which at least 3,300 were in Munster alone.96 Police casualties rose to 55 by the middle of May 1921, and by early June those numbers rose to 67 casualties.97 The total casualties from May to July 1921 amounted to 25 per cent of the total casualties for the last two-and-ahalf years of war.98 The number of loyalists houses burned by the IRA also jumped sharply by that summer.99 In fact, Irish rebels had become so successful in conducting counter-reprisals, in which they burned loyalist homes in retaliation for official reprisals that set fire to suspected nationalist

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homes, that Sir Hamar Greenwood ordered an end to official reprisals on 3 June 1921.100 And the IRA remained armed, importing American-made Thompson machine guns through the Irish-American nationalist organization, Clan-na-Gael.101 In other words, the IRA showed no serious signs of slowing down its campaign.102 The Commander of Chief in Ireland, General Macready, issued a report at the end of May 1921 stating that the military could not sustain the apparent stalemate between it and the IRA. The army, he feared, would be defeated under the strain. He hoped either to persuade the government to come to an agreement with Sinn Fein or to use martial law across most of the island. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, presented this report to the new Secretary of State for War, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, who had replaced Churchill in February 1921. The Irish Situation Cabinet Committee had not met since August 1920, and by May 1921 the membership had changed substantially. Churchill was gone, as was Milner. But Chamberlain was still present, along with Greenwood, Arthur Balfour, Edward Shortt, H.A.L. Fisher, Nevil Macready and Sir Henry Wilson. They debated again whether to extend martial law to all of southern Ireland, but unlike debates in the past, this time they decided they would indeed do so on 12 July 1921. In order to assist the army in implementing this major policy change, it was to receive 16 more battalions and full naval support. Their reasoning was that ‘Martial law [across the most of the island] will be a substitute for authorized reprisals, which are disliked by the military, but which could not be abandoned without something to take their place’.103 This ushered in a new regime of even harsher coercion on the Punjab model. Macready possessed a clear vision of just how severe this new regime ought to be. He recommended that the IRA and the republican Dail Parliament should both be declared treasonous. Further, he wanted all newspapers to be properly suppressed, and to use economic punishments such as closing Ireland’s ports and stopping most exports. Most importantly, Macready warned the cabinet to expect much higher casualties, such as shooting 100 Irish per week. To this point Balfour objected, as he felt, surprisingly, that this could be ‘unnecessarily terrifying’.104 To him, the vague principle of minimum force seemed violated once casualties hit triple digits on a weekly basis. Ultimately, the cabinet faced two choices: to negotiate a truce before 12 July or to implement martial law over all of southern Ireland. Lloyd George chose to negotiate and declared a truce one day before Macready’s deadline.105 Sir Henry Wilson derided the truce as the result of ‘rank, filthy cowardice’, and ‘nursed hopes that the Anglo-Irish negotiations would break down and there might yet be a final “push” in Ireland’.106 In his mind, anything short of martial law to crush the rebels threatened the integrity of the empire.

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To Wilson’s disappointment, Michael Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty to end the war and to establish the Irish Free State as a self-governing dominion (along the lines of Canada and South Africa) in December 1921. *** After Ireland won Dominion Status in 1922, George Bernard Shaw made a prescient comment about India. Shaw regretted that reprisals provided a lesson in ‘how to make a successful rebellion’. Instead of crushing the IRA, he believed that reprisals only emboldened them while creating public pressure on the government that eventually resulted in the establishment of the Irish Free State. Shaw added that the IRA’s success ‘has settled the Irish question; and it will settle the Egyptian and the Indian question’.107 Similarly, in a 1931 book entitled A Word to Gandhi, General Frank Crozier argued that the ‘trouble’ in Ireland and in India ‘possess a common factor’, namely ‘a mistaken idea on the part of the English of what is really true “Patriotism”’. The former commander of the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) used ‘Patriotism’ to refer to the belief that equated holding onto the empire with national security and greatness. He recounted ‘horrible deeds’ enacted in the ‘worship of our false god, “Patriotism”’, including reprisals in Ireland. This false god ‘caused rebellions, revolutions, wars, massacres, slavery and misery’, and even ‘lost England her North American Colonies’. He claimed for himself the status of true patriot when he refused ‘to condone crimes of violence’ against ‘defenceless and “loyal” women in Ireland’. Crozier believed ‘the future of India is inscrutably bound up with a clear conception of what “Loyalty” and “Patriotism” really are [. . .] India can be free...provided this world religion called “Patriotism” is destroyed and in its place is set up “loyalty” to the religion of humanity’.108 To him, imperial violence against the forces of decolonization became untenable, and what happened in Ireland had clear implications for India and elsewhere. Although Ireland and India experienced the immediate aftermath of the Great War differently (a war for independence is obviously quite different from a few spontaneous riots), important connections between them clearly abound. Britain’s use of collective punishment and the public controversy over it in both places (including parallels made by contemporaries between the two), created common threads. British strategic concerns resulted in harsh coercion in both parts of its empire and imperialists used similar public justifications for the violence, but the negative press over Dyer affected the government’s willingness to implement martial law in Ireland. The mutiny of the Connaught Rangers called further attention to the imperial connection between India and Ireland. The Rangers were Irish infantrymen stationed in the Punjab, reputed as ‘a great fighting regiment’ on

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French battlefields. On 28 June 1920, about 200 Rangers refused to serve in order to protest the use of reprisals against their fellow Irishmen at home and because they felt the Indian Army similarly coerced Indians. These mutineers were stationed at Dyer’s last post, in Jullundur, near Amritsar. Their protest was mostly non-violent, as ‘they appear to have been respectful, and intimated their willingness to give up their arms to any British troops sent to relieve them’. However, they sent a few soldiers to other Ranger companies throughout the Punjab to unite all in the protest and at Solon (on the KalkaSimla railway), two such emissaries from Jullundur were arrested. Their arrest incited some Rangers stationed nearby to rush the armory, but they were fired upon by other Rangers who remained ‘loyal’.109 Moreover, Irish and Indian nationalists attempted to connect with one another during the Anglo-Irish War. Eamon de Valera understood the benefit of keeping in contact with the subcontinent. In 1921, he told his newly established Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Robert Brennan, to ‘pay particular attention to the subject peoples of the British Empire e.g. India, Egypt, etc. and also to the self-governing Dominions’.110 Two famous Sinn Fein politicians, George Gavan Duffy and Sean T. O’Kelly, tried, unsuccessfully, to create a union of Ireland, India, Egypt and South Africa just months after the Amritsar affair and in the wake of Duffy and O’Kelly’s failure to gain recognition for Ireland as a sovereign republic at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.111 Personal contacts between Indians and Irish during the Anglo-Irish War were easiest to maintain in the United States, for obvious reasons. Thus, Lala Rajput Rai participated at an Irish convention in Philadelphia in 1919. Meanwhile, the ‘Friends of Irish Freedom’ organization lobbied the US government to get involved in the immediate aftermath of martial law in Punjab.112 This organization also invited Indian speakers, who often spoke about the ways in which the imperial connection had destroyed the economies and languages of each country, or about how Britain sought to encourage internal dissension in both India and Ireland.113 Thus, some British Conservatives worried, ‘the active and malicious few will twist our motives and actions in Ireland, Egypt, and India on every occasion’ while campaigning in America.114 Just one month after the IRA authorized attacks on all Crown Forces, an editorial in the Gaelic American newspaper suggested that the Irish should reach out to all Indian immigrants seeking political asylum on the island.115 Irish nationalists in particular were quick to play upon British fears of public criticism by employing India’s experience in Irish propaganda. They used the trope of Amritsar to describe the British response to the IRA. For example, after the shooting at Croke Park, the Irish nationalist paper Freeman’s Journal reported the incident with the headline, ‘Amritzar [sic]

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Repeated in Dublin’.116 It suggested that in both India and Ireland, a large crowd of unarmed, innocent people were shot at without warning as a form of collective punishment for earlier rebellious acts. The Dyer controversy received significant press coverage in Ireland. Arthur Griffith believed his supporters wanted to reward the man for doing exactly what he should have done in any imperial context.117 The IRA journal An t-Oglach reported that the passive resistance movement in India was likely to turn into a full-scale rebellion that they hoped would tie down British troops that would otherwise be sent to Ireland.118 The journal pointed out, ‘calm consideration of the English hold on India is a factor in our consideration of their hold here [in Ireland]. They cannot reinforce each garrison from the other at the same time’.119 A British officer, Major B.C. Denning, lamented the power of the press in that insurgents ‘today, [have] a new weapon, political propaganda, which draws blood upon the home front of the great power’.120 The recent experience in India had obvious implications for Ireland, and vice versa. The Liberal MP Major Barnes of Newcastle asked Lloyd George whether the officers executing martial law in Ireland would draw on the lessons learned from martial law in India.121 The Anglo-Irish Treaty reverberated in India as well. It was partially responsible for inspiring Gandhi to ratchet up his noncooperation movement to include civil disobedience at the Congress meeting at Ahmedabadad in December 1921, although that ended with the Chauri Chaura attack on a police station the following year.122 In fact, earlier that year, The Times reported that ‘the old Indian National Congress, which, with all its shortcomings, always claimed to be thoroughly loyal and constitutional, is dead’. In its place came a ‘new doctrine’ demanding Indian independence on the Irish model. The correspondent then turned his attention to ‘the wound left by the Punjab tragedy’, by which he meant General Dyer’s actions and subsequent martial law regime. He argued that the government must ‘assuage the rankling sense of racial humiliation engendered by the Punjab methods of repression’; otherwise, as Ireland had shown, ‘merely repressive measures against Gandhiism [sic] may prove futile’.123 Irish nationalists who opposed the Anglo-Irish treaty on the grounds that it did not establish a fully independent republic (due to the required oath of allegiance to the British Crown), argued that the treaty betrayed Ireland’s allies, including India. One Irish republican condemned the treaty because accepting ‘the status of a dominion in the murder machine which is at present doing Indians to death, [would] release Black and Tans from this country to carry on in another’.124 An anti-treaty cartoon depicted India and Egypt fighting Britain while Ireland shamefully surrendered.125 In their defence, pro-treaty nationalists claimed that as a dominion, Ireland would work to change the imperial system from within, to India’s benefit.

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Indian reactions to events in Ireland were, of course, highly varied. In an angry speech to the Indian National Congress, Motilal Nehru engaged in a ‘bitter condemnation of the administration of the Punjab’, and connected that to the fact that ‘Ireland and Egypt were being made to feel the might of the British Empire’.126 But Gandhi thought the IRA’s tactics were as bad as Dyer’s ‘frightfulness’.127 Still other Indians were disappointed by the AngloIrish Treaty, writing in an Irish newspaper, ‘Woe to the land of Erin!’ Ireland should have continued its fight for a republic, according to this Indian, to set an example for the rest of the empire.128 The public controversies over the violence in Ireland and India ultimately impacted British strategies of rule, especially during counter-insurgency campaigns. Historian Thomas Mockaitis argued that the treatment of General Dyer impacted future operations by impressing upon soldiers the importance of using minimal force against all forms of civil unrest, whether riot or insurrection. Thus, a 1934 pamphlet meant to guide military authorities in counter-insurgency methods explicitly stated that when firing upon a crowd, soldiers must not fire longer than is necessary to disperse the crowd. What Dyer did, which was ‘to prolong the firing beyond this point with the ultimate object of impressing the population generally and discouraging rebellion in other localities should not be countenanced’.129 The Anglo-Irish War also influenced the 1934 policy of relative restraint. Thus, both the Dyer affair and the Irish reprisals exemplified the ways in which the colonial power thought about the use of force as a tool. Like in the Punjab, where the government feared, however incorrectly, they were in the midst of a full-scale rebellion, in Ireland, British officials conducted an all-out war against the IRA despite their reluctance to enforce martial law. The military in Ireland was subject to the same rules as in India. In fact, after the Amritsar affair, the Manual of Military Law was amended to take account of the events in the Punjab even though the original 1914 publication laid out the principle of minimum force, in which Dyer claimed to be an expert.130 Thus, the principle of minimum force applied in Ireland in much the same way as in India, and in both cases, the authorities judged that the minimum amount necessary could only be determined by its intended moral effect, as evidenced by Dyer, the Hunter Committee’s ruling on the martial law regime, and the cabinet’s support for reprisals. Colonel Charles Callwell’s book on military law, which Dyer would have studied himself and taught to his students of military law, equated all types of resistance to the imperial power as ‘small wars’. Whether the authorities fought a full-scale insurrection, suppressed ‘lawlessness’, or engaged in ‘punitive expeditions’, Callwell made no legal distinction. Unlawful assemblies, riots and rebellions, he instructed, must be handled in ways

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which ‘may shock the humanitarian’. In so doing, Callwell explained the guiding principles that undergirded Dyer’s actions, the Punjab’s martial law regime, and the reprisals in Ireland: The object is not only to prove to the opposing force unmistakabley which is the stronger, but also to inflict punishment on those who have taken up arms . . . Expeditions to put down revolt are not put in motion merely to bring about a temporary cessation of hostility. Their purpose is to ensure a lasting peace. Therefore, in choosing the objective, the overawing and not the exasperation of the enemy is the end to keep in view. To this extent, the reprisals in Ireland, and most certainly the shooting in both Croke Park and Jallianwala Bagh would have ‘overawed’ the enemy. But whereas in India, such a program was undertaken systematically under martial law, in Ireland, the fear of public criticism resulted in the concurrent maintenance of the civil power, limited martial law application, and mostly spontaneous reprisals. According to Callwell, ‘enemy forces in small wars swell and contract according to the moral effect which is produced’.131 For those who abided by this interpretation of the appropriate use of military force, Dyer produced a sufficient moral effect in India, but Major Mills failed to allow the RIC to do the same in Croke Park when he and his second in command put an end to the shooting. British notions of counter-insurgency were still developing during the Anglo-Irish War so the idea that restraint could give a ‘moral or political advantage in a civil conflict’ was only just coming to surface.132 The world after the Great War had changed. Fears of how the forces of technology and warfare had ‘brutalized’ society, that war and destruction were the ultimate products of scientific progress over the last century, haunted Britons.133 Wilsonian rhetoric of self-determination had taken root in the hearts of subject peoples across the world, just as Bolshevism increasingly inspired both colonial nationalists and the working classes in Europe. The war itself had further radicalized nationalists and increased economic and tax burdens on most everyone. The combination of these fears, ideas and realities created the ‘modern’ world in which global toleration for empire, as it was known in a formal sense, would soon wane.134 At this formative moment, the British Empire stood in the public eye between coercion and conciliation. Men with their foot in the world as it was before the Great War, men such as Dyer and Wilson, viewed restraint as ‘an obstacle to the enforcement of military power’, while men such as Ben Spoor and Arthur Henderson of the Labour Party identified such tactics with the imperial past.135

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Reprisals in Ireland and the martial law regimes on both the island and the subcontinent intended to make an impression on the population but failed to achieve their objective. The military in India was expected to police the subcontinent inasmuch as it was to defend it. Similar to the military in Ireland, the Indian Army was supported by a civilian police force, but when martial law was implemented in the Punjab, the military in India displayed the same eagerness to punish the population as did the military in Ireland. This was exemplified by the policy of reprisals, a feature that eventually gained official sanction. In both India and Ireland, the government hoped that this attempt to re-instill fear would push civilians to shun rebellion and rebels. But this simply did not work. In a letter to the editor of The Times, an Indian Muslim who was usually pro-British, made a powerful criticism to this end about imperial violence in both his country and Ireland: England, with her great power and splendid organization, has not succeeded in stopping atrocities in Ireland; and in India riots attended by ‘massacres’ are ordinary occurrences . . . The application of outside force, the policy of the ‘big stick’, has the fatal tendency to move in a vicious circle; it involves the necessity of continued application of force, resulting in inevitable reaction and unrest.136 In this ‘vicious circle’, the IRA countered reprisals with their own, leaving the population stuck between a rock and a hard place. In India, where there was no actual rebellion to counter martial forces, the punitive actions of the regime also failed to stop nationalists in their quest for greater self-government. General Crozier appeared painfully aware of this reality. He argued that all the good Britain had done for India, which he believed included abolishing sati, Thuggee and other forms of ‘religious’ or ‘secret murder’, was undone in Ireland where ‘we organized secret assassinations by the police so late as 1920–21!’137 Despite the fact that British policy proved ultimately ineffective in both Ireland and India after the Great War, most men in positions of authority, ranging from those on the spot to those in the cabinet, continued to believe in the usefulness of punitive measures. Whether in India or in Ireland, Crown Forces relied on moral effect, targeting civilians for punishment rather than specific individuals, so as to punish their imperial subjects for rebellious acts or attitudes. In this way, there was little to no differentiation between guilty and innocent, for all Punjabis and all Irish were similarly lumped into the category of rebel. More importantly, coercion was thought all the more necessary because Ireland’s fate had direct implications for the remaining empire. If Ireland were allowed to become independent, it would inevitably result in the disintegration of the empire, partly because control of Irish water

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was key to naval defence and partly because Irish success would fan the flames of other aspiring nationalists, including Indians.138 In fact, some powerful figures adamantly defended the use of reprisals in Ireland because of their implications for India. Lord Salisbury hoped that even stronger measures of repression would be used not just in Ireland, but in India as well: ‘An end must be put to vacillation in restoring order and in vindicating the law: there must be no truck with rebels, for the future no concession in the face of rebellion, whether in India, in Egypt, or in Ireland’.139 Churchill echoed this sentiment, waxing apoplectic: We have not defended our Empire all these years against the strongest enemies in the world, and beaten them at last with a prodigious sacrifice, in order to surrender it piecemeal at the hysterical dictation of the foolish, the feeble-minded, and the flighty. Nor will we succumb to revolutionary violence in any form or from any quarter, in India, in Egypt, in Ireland.140 Although both men advocated different policies (Salisbury wanted martial law in Ireland and Churchill remained satisfied with reprisals), they shared the conviction that if the empire were to cave in any one of these places, it would embolden the others to whom it would have to give in as well. Meanwhile, Lord Curzon, who had served as Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, also supported government policy in Ireland. He explained that the IRA engaged not in guerilla warfare, but in ‘the warfare of the Red Indian, of the Apache. It is the warfare which nearly a hundred years ago the Government of India had to suppress, and which was known as “Thuggee” – the manoeuvres [sic] of the thugs of that country’. Therefore, to him reprisals were ‘entirely legitimate’ because ‘no one would contend for a moment that if a policeman or soldier is shot he is not entitled to shoot back – and I think it can fairly be argued that, given the nature of the danger that confronts him, he is not very far wrong if he gets his shot in first’.141 Rhetoric like Curzon’s provoked radical critics of empire to question whether Britain’s global power was ultimately beneficent and civil or violent and coercive. The lawyer Holford Knight contrasted publicly declared notions about British power resting on the rule of law with the violent realities in India and Ireland.142 Norman Angell worried that the Great War had desensitized the British public to political violence. He wrote, ‘if every schoolboy and maidservant felt as strongly over Balbriggan or Amritsar as they felt over the Lusitania and Louvain – our problem would be solved’.143 The question of what constituted an appropriate use of force included the efficacy of aerial bombing. The king’s representative in Ireland, Lord

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Lieutenant French, hoped to use aerial bombing to subdue Ireland as it had been used to subdue Gujranwalla, Punjab. French told Lloyd George that such bombing would ‘put the fear of God into these playful young Sinn Feiners’.144 However, the Royal Air Force was in the midst of demobilizing, so many planes simply were not available. General Tudor reported in September 1920 that in Ireland only 18 planes were usable. Churchill, who had high hopes for the use of air power to subdue the island, suggested that the number of planes be increased to 50. Their presence would, he believed, provide ‘a great deterrent to illegal drilling and rebel gatherings’.145 However, the few planes used in May 1921 found it difficult to spot small groups on the island if they were not moving. Moreover, the planes lacked radios and so were unable to coordinate with ground forces effectively.146 Despite Churchill’s interest in using air power to crush the IRA, the government remained unwilling to authorize the use of planes saddled with bombs or machine guns. The cabinet was clearly thinking of the experience of using planes in India in 1919, explaining that aerial bombing would not be worth ‘the great risk of death and injury to innocent people, owing to the extreme difficulty of distinguishing innocent from guilty from an aeroplane summoned possible from a great distance by telephone, and necessarily proceeding at high speed and operating at considerable height’.147 The public criticism over using aerial bombing in Gujranwalla (despite the Hunter Committee’s approval of it) played a role in discouraging a similar strategy in Ireland. The recent experience in India created a discrepancy between the firmness with which senior military officials wanted to proceed in Ireland and the cabinet’s need for public approval. Thus, diehards like Sir Henry Wilson, who fully supported General Dyer and the Punjab regime, contended with those who believed that violence for moral effect was either un-British or morally illegitimate. The government in power straddled the middle, both denouncing Dyer by claiming that the empire was based on the rule of law and apologizing for reprisals in Ireland, either as effective (if unseemly) tools of empire or as understandable responses by policemen in an impossible situation. But the connections between Dyer’s supporters and those who wished for greater coercion in Ireland were not always seamless. Whereas Unionist Lord Midleton, who had served as Secretary of State for India from 1903 to 1905, supported Dyer and shared Wilson’s notions about how to proceed against the IRA, the Lord Chancellor, Birkenhead, who was disgusted with Dyer’s behaviour, fully supported stronger measures against the IRA. Lord Birkenhead argued that ‘continued outrages on the part of the Irish Republican Army seem to call for increasing and more drastic measures of repression on ours’.148 What Birkenhead objected to with regard to Dyer was

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his use of the crawling order. Repression of rebellion was not something to which he objected, per se. Rather, it was the type of force used and the rebel actions that preceded it which mattered to him. Thus, Birkenhead took issue with reprisals only because they were not, in his opinion, strong enough measures to crush the IRA. Dyer’s shooting was less acceptable to some than to others, but the martial law regime in the Punjab was generally accepted by British officials and the public. The haphazard, unrestrained reprisals in Ireland were unacceptable mostly because they lacked the legitimacy that declaring martial law would have provided. British politicians, military officials and intelligentsia demanded not an end to the use of collective punishment (although some certainly did), but accountability. Thus, official reprisals were regarded as better than unofficial.149 That is to say that in most cases, whether in the opinion of Sir Henry Wilson, The Times, or General Macready, the problem with Ireland was not that ‘innocents sometimes perished’ during reprisals, but rather that Crown Forces were not ‘placed from the outset on an avowed and constitutional basis’.150 The martial law regime in the Punjab, according to the Hunter Committee, did have this moral legitimacy, although the committee chose not to explore the constitutionality of backdating martial law. Of course, there was a strong element of humanitarianism present among some critics of Dyer and of Irish reprisals, who found coercion reprehensible. Commander Kenworthy exemplified consistency in this respect, whether he denounced Dyer or the Black and Tans. Many members of the Peace With Ireland Council shared a similar view, such as the Labour politician J.R. Clynes, who told his supporters, ‘If the law cannot detect the guilty and arrest the wrongdoers the agents of the law should not be used to murder the innocent and burn down the homes of those guilty of no offence’.151 Most Indian and Irish nationalists criticized both Dyer and Black and Tan reprisals.152 To these subjects of empire, the use of coercion stood at odds with Britain’s commitment to the Wilsonian notion of self-determination. To other critics of coercion, the violence in the Punjab and the reprisals in Ireland violated the contemporary notion that the empire was based on the rule of law and justice. But this perception did not necessarily come to mind in both circumstances. Thus, Churchill denounced Dyer’s policy of ‘frightfulness’, but championed the use of reprisals in Ireland, at least until 1921. The use of force was questioned because of the new context created across the world in the aftermath of the Great War. There was a ‘crisis of empire’ in which Britain had to deal not only with India and Ireland, but also with a series of revolts across the empire. What ensued, then, was in the context of a sort of siege mentality. British officials had to contend with a new weakness in military and economic strength after World War I, their army was still tied

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up fighting across the globe, in Iraq (in 1920) and Palestine, in Egypt against the Wafd, in Ireland against Sinn Fein, and in the Russian Empire with the White forces against the Bolsheviks. Moreover, during martial law in Punjab, the Third Afghan War began. This was the same day that General Dyer left Amritsar, 7 May 1919, to take his new post at the foothills of the Himalayas near the Kashmir border, thus leaving Amritsar to Lieutenant Colonel Hynes. Meanwhile, the Indian North-West Frontier remained constantly threatened by Nadir Khan and the Afghani attempt to incite Pathans to rebel against the raj (at least until 1924, if not later). There was also a (Chanak) crisis in Turkey in 1922, which followed on the heels of the Khilafat Movement in India. Nationalists across the empire radicalized in the wake of the war, empowered by the ideology of self-determination. The revolts against the empire were further complicated by British fiscal difficulties after the Great War. The pressure to demobilize soldiers compounded the ensuing economic crisis, itself accompanied by industrial unrest and strikes. Meanwhile, Britain kept troops in both Russia and Mesopotamia until 1921, thus keeping a wary eye on Pan-Islamism as well as the spread of Bolshevism, which threatened to infect the empire as well as the working class at home. The empire was in crisis. Traditional methods of coercion became suddenly less acceptable in these new circumstances, and also less possible due to public pressure. Also, with British resources stretched so far and wide, few soldiers, a declining economy (relative to its pre-war strength), and the seemingly ubiquitous aspiration for self-determination, Britain’s physical ability to coerce its empire without adequate local collaborators was in doubt.153 As a result, the empire began to re-shape itself. Appeasing nationalist sentiment and promising eventual responsible government went hand in hand with much rhetorical justification for the use of force, when necessary. The humanitarian critics were partly responsible for this, as were critics who demanded greater coercion through martial law (for the sake of accountability). The crisis of empire and Britain’s myriad of other problems also played an important role in this change. Thus, Ireland gained Dominion Status and India implemented important reforms. There was still a long way to go before the era of decolonization was upon Britain, when, after World War II, the empire transformed itself into one of informal control, hoping to transfer power to ‘moderate’ nationalists when necessary.154 The aftermath of the Great War was an important moment in time when this change was in its most incipient stages.155 It is instructive for the ways in which different parts of the British public tried to reform the use of imperial force as much as for how some stood steadfastly against such a reformation.

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Sir Auckland Colvin, once Governor of the United Provinces (UP), wrote about how best to rule India: Whatever may be hazarded with the educated minority, the real India is only to be found in the masses of the ignorant millions. To govern this real India, authority and justice should be in full view; but in reserve must be ample force. These are the only methods which under their own rule the masses of that country have ever respected, not even at the desire of the British Government will they readily adopt any other.156 O’Dwyer found Colvin’s words so moving that he wrote, ‘The views [Colvin] so admirably expresses are those which many of us, more crudely, in vain endeavoured to impress on those responsible for the Reforms [of 1919]’.157 O’Dwyer lamented the fact that ‘a change has come over the spirit of [India’s] rulers’, as men like Montagu worked to reform the imperial system and to share power with their subjects.158 O’Dwyer was painfully aware that the system of rule was changing. Indeed, this was a time of great change in the imperial system. It was a moment when more modern, liberalizing strands of thought within the British regime were redefining the relationships between ruler and ruled during a crisis of empire. It was also a time when conservative elements dug in their heels in resistance against this development, believing that such redefinition of the imperial relationship was still in its nascent state and that it could be stamped out with a strong force of will. The clashing convictions about how best to rule the empire in the modern era of mass nationalist movements were both confusing and frustrating for Indians on the ground whose lives were indelibly touched by both liberal and coercive British impulses simultaneously.159

The Deaths of Dyer and O’Dwyer Suffering a stroke just a few years after his forced retirement, General Dyer finally died on 23 July 1927, and received a military funeral. Sir Michael O’Dwyer was killed on 13 March 1940 by Sardar Udam Singh, a Punjabi Sikh who had survived the shooting at Jallianwala Bagh and finally got the chance to punish the man he held most responsible. Singh had been a water carrier in the Bagh when Dyer shot at the crowd, and he swore to avenge the deaths of his fellow countrymen. As a young adult, he moved to the US, where he became involved with the Ghadr party and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (led by Bhagat Singh) and bent on the violent overthrow of the raj. In 1927, Udham Singh returned to Amritsar. His goal

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was ‘to have the country vacated forthwith from the Englishman’. But he was picked up by police, arrested for the illegal possession of firearms, and put in prison for five years.160 A year after he was released from prison, Singh made his way across Europe, North Africa and Russia before landing in Britain. Here, he made contact with a member of the IRA, worked with them to smuggle guns into the country, and stayed with one of the IRA leaders on the Isle of Wight.161 He remained in England until Wednesday, 13 March 1940, when a joint meeting of the East India Association and the Royal Central Asian Society took place at Caxton Hall, London. Sir Michael O’Dwyer was one of the primary speakers, as were Lord Zetland, Sir Louis Dane and Lord Lamington.162 At 4.30pm, when O’Dwyer had finished giving his talk, Udham Singh walked toward him and fired six shots from his pistol, killing O’Dwyer instantly and injuring the others. Members of the audience attacked Singh as he tried to flee the scene, and held him until the authorities arrived.163 The police questioned Singh, who retorted, ‘only one dead? I thought I could get more. I must have been too slow’.164 Singh told the authorities that his name was Mohammad Singh Azad, an alias combining Muslim and Sikh names to suggest religious unity. He explained, ‘it was my duty to do so [to shoot], just for the sake of my country’.165 While in prison before his trial, Singh went on a 41-day hunger strike and was force-fed.166 Singh was found guilty and sentenced to death. In his statement to the court, he shouted: I did it because I had a grudge against him [O’Dwyer]. He deserved it. He was the real culprit, he wanted to crush the spirit of my people, so I have crushed him. For full twenty-one years I have been trying to wreak vengeance. I am happy I have done the job. I am not scared of death – I am dying for my country.167 On 31 July 1940, Singh was executed by hanging.

Violence and Punishment The fact that Ireland escaped martial law for as long as it did was not exceptional. Indian ‘mob’ violence in April 1919 was not limited to the Punjab, but violence in Delhi and Bombay were dealt with without martial law. Perhaps the officers in charge of Delhi and Bombay possessed a less punitive mindset than those in the Punjab, or perhaps they hoped the specter of martial law in the north-west would suffice to keep order in other parts of the subcontinent. After all, Dublin and Delhi were both capitals, where administrators might have felt compelled to maintain a more even-handed presence.

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This book has discussed the ways in which the debate over Dyer’s censure was a debate over the future of the empire and how best to hang on to it. Similarly, the debate over Irish reprisals was both influenced by the Dyer affair and had implications for the rest of the empire. Another theme has been that the use of force in the Punjab and in Ireland was highly punitive in nature, bent more on exacting reprisals than simply on restoring order. However, it is this very notion, that punitive force and reprisal were the effective means of restoring order that underpinned the military administration of the empire. This is evident in the words and deeds of men like Dyer, O’Dwyer and Wilson, the ways in which Dyer’s supporters spoke about his actions in India and the ways in which others defended government policy in Ireland. What, then, does this mean for the British Empire at large? It may be a simple point, but one worth making in any case: the use of force was an important component of the imperial system. But it is worth noting that the British Empire was not nearly as violent as other empires. Even the Indian radical nationalist Har Dayal bought into this notion in 1919 when he wrote, ‘Imperialism is always an evil, but British and French imperialism in its worst forms is a thousand times preferable to German or Japanese Imperialism’.168 It is also important to note that the violence discussed in this book was by no means exceptional to the history of the empire. Ireland had a long history of experiencing imperial violence. While denouncing reprisals, the former Chief Secretary of Ireland, Viscount Bryce, declared that this behaviour reminded him of ‘outrages’ that occurred after the 1798 Irish rebellion, when soldiers ‘traversed the country’ and, without orders, were ‘arresting, flogging, shooting people on suspicion, and looting wherever they went’.169 Dyer’s shooting was an example of such ‘frightfulness’, as were Carberry’s bombs on Gujranwala, the ‘fancy punishments’ of martial law and the reprisals in Ireland. Colonel Johnson of Lahore had no regrets about the ways in which he administered his district, especially with regard to making individual property owners responsible for taking care of the martial law notices posted on their property and for keeping seditious literature off of it.170 Similarly, Captain Carberry had no compunction about dropping bombs on Indians outside Gujranwala. He said, ‘I could not discriminate between innocent and other people who were, I think, doing damage or were going to do damage [. . .] The machine gun [on his plane] was not fired indiscriminately. It was fired on the people running away’. He was questioned by Sir Setalvad, one of the Indian members of the Hunter Committee: Q: When you threw the bombs [which did not explode] on them they began to run away. Was not your object really accomplished? A: No.

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Q: What was the further need of machine-gunning them and killing them? Your object was to disperse the crowds . . . Was there any further need of machine gun fire? A: Yes, to do more damage . . . I was trying to do this in their own interests. If I killed a few people, they would not gather and come to Gujranwala to do damage.171 Similarly, reprisals in Ireland, both official and unofficial, were designed to do damage without discriminating between innocent and guilty. Thus, there is nothing exceptional about the statement that the British Empire has had its share of violent incidents in which exemplary, collective punishment was a defining characteristic. In another incident in the Punjab, an uprising among the Kukas in 1872 was harshly suppressed. The local police rounded up Kuka rebels and the local British official summarily executed 70 of them. He had another 49 rebels blown from the mouths of cannons. When his superior, the divisional commissioner, arrived at the scene, he ordered 16 more to be hanged. Certainly this quelled the disturbance, but the two officers were censured for using such force.172 Denshawai, a village in Egypt, experienced an incident similar to the Jallianwala Bagh and Croke Park shootings. On 13 June 1906, five British officers, two Irish and three English, went pigeon hunting in Denshawai, but this act was upsetting to the locals who kept pigeons as pets. When they remonstrated, the officers opened fire upon them, wounding five and setting fire to a local notable’s grain depot. This unleashed a storm of protest, including stone-throwing from a crowd that gathered. Two officers ran away. One informed the British Army, but the other died of heat stroke in a neighbouring village. The remaining three officers surrendered and were eventually allowed to return to their base. But the next day, the British Army arrested 52 men and put them on trial for the murder of the officer who had died of heat stroke. Four Egyptian notables were sentenced to death by hanging.173 Incidents of violence did not disappear after the events of 1919– 21. In 1921, just as a truce was in effect between the Irish and British forces, a rebellion ensued in India, on the Malabar Coast in the Madras Presidency. Here, Muslim Mapillas, or Moplahs, who constituted one-third of the population, became active in the Khilafat Movement, and turned violent, engaging in a jihad. The Mapillas created the ‘Khilafat Volunteers’, a paramilitary organization, led by Ali Musaliar.174 Between 300 and 400 men became Khilafat Volunteers, and they declared an end to the British raj. Their insurrection alarmed the Governor of Madras, Lord Willingdon, to such an

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extent that he asked Viceroy Lord Reading for permission to implement martial law. Viceroy Reading permitted martial law, but gave strict instructions that the incidents in the Punjab not be repeated in Madras. Thus, it was ‘essential that trials and punishments should be left as little as possible in hands of military officers’. Furthermore, the martial law included ‘legal methods of punishing acts which [. . .] are breeches of martial law regulations and incompatible with maintenance of order’, and prevented ‘irregular or improper punishments for breeches of military rules’. As usual, an indemnity act would follow ‘for acts done in good faith and in reasonable belief that they are necessary’.175 Lord Willingdon objected to the limitations on the military’s ability to exact punishments as a ‘travesty of martial law’. The ‘excessive caution’ he thought was ‘due to the trouble over the Punjab’, especially the Dyer controversy, so he told the viceroy, ‘I am sorry, very sorry, you found it necessary to water the original [martial law] ordinance down’.176 Regardless, there were excesses. On 19 November 1921, just one year after the shooting at Croke Park in Dublin, a rather odd incident occurred in Madras. About 100 Moplah prisoners were being held, mysteriously, in a locked baggage car, waiting for transport by train, rather than in an open third-class carriage. At least 56 of them died of asphyxiation, but the police sergeant in charge of them was tried and found not guilty of any wrongdoing.177 Chin and Karin irregulars from the Burma Rifles decapitated dead Moplah guerrillas, and they may have been aided in this gruesome behaviour by an auxiliary police force of former Indian sepoys eager to take revenge against the Moplahs for killing their family and friends.178 The Moplah Rebellion was finally put down by February 1922. At first, the raj relied on the police, reinforced by a company of the Irish Leinster Regiment in the Indian Army. But as rebel numbers swelled to 10,000, as estimated by the General Officer Commanding, Major-General BurnettStuart, and took to waging a guerilla war, five battalions were added, as was a new martial law ordinance that removed much of the previous limitations on the military. By the time the rebellion was officially over, 2,339 rebels had been killed, 1,652 wounded, 5,955 captured and more than 39,000 surrendered. The British lost seven officers and 43 soldiers. Major-General Burnett-Stuart felt ‘satisfied that punishment has fallen on the guilty’ and that no smaller use of force would have been sufficient to ‘bring the misguided and fanatical rebel community to their senses’.179 Violence erupted in Bengal in the 1920s and 1930s. The Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose founded the New Violence Party in 1927 and the Bengal Volunteer Group the following year. He and his fellow ‘extremist’ members of Congress were committed to the use of violence to attain Indian

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independence at moments when Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement seemed, to them, futile. The New Violence Party borrowed directly from the IRA and openly called upon Bengali youth to study the writings of Irish Volunteers such as Patrick Pearse, the hero of 1916, and Dan Breen, a hero of the Anglo-Irish War.180 The legacy of the Irish War for Independence, then, reached India far and wide. At the funeral for the British officers killed by the IRA on the morning of ‘Bloody Sunday’, journalist Hugh Martin lamented: The lives of these brave men had been wasted. Heaven forbid that I should say one word that could add to the sorrow of those who loved them. But the funeral did seem to me a most dreadful symbol of waste – waste of youth, of honour, of enthusiasm, of like itself. All, or almost all, of what used to make the funerals of the Great War endurable was (if you hold the faith that I hold) absent from this funeral of the Little Irish War. I mean the inspirations flowing from a great cause – freedom for others and the defence of our own fatherland . . . I am sure they [the soldiers] were game to the last. I am sure they believed that they were dying for their country. It is not the soldiers whom history will gibbet, but the statesmen who sacrificed the lives of the soldiers in a mean and unnecessary war.181 Britain was fighting a ‘mean and unnecessary war’ in Ireland, and events there remained connected in the public sphere to events in India. Public attitudes towards violence were indeed changing in the aftermath of the Great War. A letter to the editor of The Times lamented what should have been the ‘year of peace’: If there is one word more than another which sums up the year 1919, it is surely ‘disillusionment’. The contrast of these days with the close of 1918 – the time of President Wilson’s triumphant progress as prophet of the new world ideal – makes the present darkness and doubt almost too heavy to be borne . . . In the year of ‘peace’, the year which needed harmony and production more urgently than any before it . . . there is Ireland, and Egypt and India, and all the rest. 182 Imperial crisis took the place of much-needed ‘harmony’.

NOTES

Introduction 1. For an overview of the revisionist-nationalist debate in Irish history, see Fanning, Ronan, and Fennell, Desmond in ‘Nationalist perspectives on the past: a symposium’, Irish Review 2 (Spring 1988), pp. 15 – 26; Candaele, Kelly and Kerry, ‘Revisionists and the writings of Irish history’, Irish America Magazine (July – August 1994), pp. 22– 7. 2. Harte, Liam, and Whelan, Yvonne (eds), Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies in the Twenty-First Century (London: Pluto, 2007), pp. 3 – 4, 6. 3. This is starting to change, as evidenced by one of the companion series to the Oxford History of the British Empire, which includes a few chapters considering Ireland’s relationship with India. Kenny, Kevin (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 4. See King, Christopher, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994); O’Leary, Philip, The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881– 1921: Ideology and Innovation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); McMahon, Timothy, Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893– 1910 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008). 5. Militant forms of Indian nationalism include Bengali bomb throwers and the Ghadr party, discussed in subsequent chapters. See Silvestri, ‘The “Sinn Fein” of India’; Puri, Harish K., Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation, and Strategy (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1993). 6. Dewey, Clive, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London: Hambledon Press, 1993). 7. Cook, Scott, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges Between India and Ireland (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993); Lord Salisbury, ‘Disintegration’, Quarterly Review (October, 1883), pp. 559 – 95. 8. Howe, Stephen, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). He criticizes comparisons from an Irish vantage point rather than from the more useful Indian perspective. After all, many Indian nationalists found Ireland’s experiences instructive, as discussed below. 9. The Irish were commonly referred to as ‘Irish Hottentots’ as late as 1918. See Boland, Kathleen to O’Donovan, Considine, 19 September 1918, ‘Postal censorship report on the correspondence of 97 Irish internees’ (July to October 1918), p. 859, The National Archives: CO 904/164/4. See also Bruce Nelson, Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

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10. Racism against the Irish was more prevalent in the centuries preceding the twentieth, although they did not disappear with the conclusion of the Great War. See Miles, Robert, ‘Labour migration and racism: the case of the Irish’, in Racism and Migrant Labour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 121–50; Curtis, L.P., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, Conn.: Conference on British Studies at the University of Bridgeport, 1968); Foster, R.F., Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Penguin, 1993). The Irish also had difficulty establishing themselves as ‘white’ in America. See Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). Also, but not necessarily for the Irish case, Mohanram, Radhika, Imperial White: Race, Diaspora and the British Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 11. Miles, Robert, Racism and Migrant Labour (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 121– 2. 12. With regard to the British in India, see Ballhatchet, Kenneth, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793 – 1905 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980); Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Duke University Press, 2006). For a different view that class was more important to imperial attitudes than race, see Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). However, it is worth noting that Cannadine lumps Ireland in with the rest of the empire rather than discussing it as one of the colonies of ‘white settlement’. 13. Curtis, Lewis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1971). 14. Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, pp. 50, 62, 64, 67. The statement was made to Philip Kerr in 1917, another member of Curtis’s Round Table. For more on Curtis’s role in establishing dyarchy, see Lavin, Deborah, From Empire to International Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 135– 57. 15. In Lavin, From Empire, p. 156. 16. This is Lavin’s argument, although she notes that others have disagreed. Lavin, From Empire, p. 182 17. Ibid., p. 183. 18. Crozier, A Word to Gandhi, pp. 128– 9. Interestingly, he depicted the Anglo-Irish War as all ‘white’. 19. Montgomery to Major A.E. Percival (stationed in Bandon with the Essex Regiment), 14 October 1923, in Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies, p. 139. 20. Wilson Diary, 29 November 1920 in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 270. 21. Wilson Diary, 28 November 1920 in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 270. 22. In Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies, p. 139. 23. Macready to Macpherson, 11 January 1919, in Townshend, Charles, The British Campaign in Ireland: The Development of Political and Military Policies (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 20. 24. Cabinet Conference, 30 January 1921, in Jones, Thomas, Whitehall Diary: Volume III, Ireland 1918– 1925 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969– 71), pp. 49 – 55. Also, Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 136. 25. Somerville-Large, Peter, Irish Voices: An Informal History 1916– 1966, 2nd edn. (London: Pimlico, 2000), pp. 38 – 9. See also, Ainsworth, ‘The Black and Tans’, p. 3. The officer served in Cork and in Munster as part of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Regiment. In Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies, p. 83. 26. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 136. For more on British attitudes towards the Irish, see Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts. 27. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 200.

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28. Gorman, Daniel, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 8– 9. 29. See Rich, Paul, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Rich, Paul, ‘The long Victorian sunset: anthropology, eugenics and race in Britain, 1900–1948’, Patterns of Prejudice 18, no. 3 (1984), pp. 3–17; Hall, Catherine (ed.), Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), especially Luke Gibbon’s chapter, ‘Race Against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History’, pp. 207–23. He notes the Irish were compared to blacks and Native Americans, but he also suggests that they were indeed white. For a similar argument against defining Anglo-Irish relations in terms of ‘racial prejudice’ because there was no ‘objective criterion of race like skin colour’, and because as long as Irish conformed to British values they were accepted, see Sheridan Gilley, ‘English attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780–1900’, in Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, ed., C. Holmes (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 91–93. Contrast with Curtis, Apes and Angels. 30. Literary scholar Julia Wright has called for a ‘move beyond classifying Ireland as either a colony or not’. To her, Ireland is neither ‘this’ nor ‘the Other’ but ‘that’: ‘European but colonized, Christian but not Protestant, rebellious but providing soldiers and administrators for the British Empire [. . .] In some texts, Ireland is sufficiently “like” Britain that it does not require colonial administration [. . .] In other texts, however identifying Ireland with other colonial spaces, particularly those which, like India, were more subject to emerging racist paradigms, makes possible the dramatization or defamiliarization of colonial abuses in Ireland [. . .] This fluid middle category [‘that’] retains Irish distinctness from both the metropole and the new colonies and so can be used to argue both for Irish autonomy and the impropriety of colonial dominance in Ireland.’ Wright, Julia, Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 10, 16. 31. There is a collection of articles comparing Ireland to places outside the British Empire. See Darby, John; Dodge, Nicholas; and Hepburn, A.C. (eds), Political Violence: Ireland in a Comparative Perspective (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1990). Ireland is compared to Holland, the Canadian province of New Brunswick, Algeria and Corsica. The book is also useful for how the French press depicted the IRA. 32. Irish nationalists had long sought support from Catholic Spain and France. In the twentieth century, they often looked to Germany as well as to their allies in the US and Dominions of Canada, Australia and South Africa. Many became involved in the Spanish Civil War as well. See Cumpston, Mary, ‘Some early Indian nationalists and their allies in the British Parliament, 1851– 1906’, English Historical Review 76, no. 299 (1961), pp. 279 – 97; Brasted, Howard, ‘Indian nationalist development and the influence of Irish Home Rule, 1870– 1886’, Modern Asian Studies 14, no. 1 (1980), pp. 37 –63; Silvestri, Michael, ‘The “Sinn Fein of India”: Irish nationalism and the policing of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal, 1905– 1939’, Journal of British Studies 39 (2000), pp. 454–8; Thapar-Bjorkert, Suruchi and Ryan, Louise, ‘Mother India/Mother Ireland: comparative gendered dialogues of colonialism and nationalism in the early twentieth century’, Women’s Studies International Forum 25, no. 3 (2002), pp. 301 – 13; Cook, Imperial Affinities; Lennon, Joseph, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004); See Babington, Anthony, The Devil to Pay: the Mutiny of the Connaught Rangers, India, July 1920 (London: Leo Cooper, 1991); Pollock, Sam, Mutiny for the Cause: The Story of the Revolt of Ireland’s ‘Devil’s Own’ in British India (London: Leo Cooper, 1969). 33. O’Malley, Kate, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections: 1919 – 64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). Her focus is on the Indian-Irish

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34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

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Independence League and the League Against Imperialism from the 1930s on. There are a few excellent edited collections on the Indo-Irish connection such as Jeffery, Keith (ed.), An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Holmes, Michael and Holmes, Denis (eds), Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons and Contrasts (Dublin: Folens, 1997). Cadell, Patrick, ‘Irish soldiers in India’, The Irish Sword: The Journal of the Military History Society of Ireland 1, no. 2 (1950– 1), pp. 75 – 9. See also, Cook, Scott B., ‘The Irish raj: social origins and careers of Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service, 1855– 1919’, Journal of Social History 20 (Spring 1987), pp. 507 – 29; Morgan, Hiram, ‘An unwelcome heritage: Ireland’s role in British Empire-building’, History of European Ideas 19, no. 4 (July 1994), pp. 619– 25. Jackson, Alvin, ‘Ireland, union, and the empire, 1800– 1960’, in Ireland and the British Empire, Kenny, Kevin (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 123. In some cases, this had the effect of encouraging Irish nationalists to make common cause with colonial nationalists across the British Empire, especially in India. See Crangle, John V., ‘Irish Nationalist Criticism of the Imperial Administration of India (1880– 1884)’, Quarterly Review of Historical Studies 11, no. 4 (1971 – 2), pp. 189– 94; O’Malley, Kate, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections, 1919– 64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). Disorders Inquiry Committee, Report, p. 107. CAB 27/91. Henceforth referred to as Hunter Report. For the remarkable influence that Wilson’s rhetoric and ideas had on Indians, see Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Manela, Erez, ‘The “Wilsonian Moment” in India and the crisis of empire in 1919’, in Yet More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, Wm. Roger Louis (ed.) (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005), pp. 271– 88. Report by the Secretary of State for India, Indian Constitutional Reforms 29 May 1918, Defence of India, ‘D’ Series, Papers 101–130 Inclusive, No. 112–D. The National Archives of the UK (TNA): CAB 6/4. Henceforth referred to as Indian Constitutional Reforms. Dewey, Clive, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London, Hambledon Press, 1993), p. 219. For more on the ways in which the British tried to sustain control over India, even as late as 1935, see Bridge, Carl, Holding India to the Empire: The British Conservative Party and the 1935 Constitution (New York: Envoy Press, 1986). For the classic work on the various reasons to table Home Rule, see Dangerfield, George, The Strange Death of Liberal England 1910– 1914 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1935, repr. 1961). For the change in Irish public opinion in 1916 and an excellent but brief general history of Ireland, see Ranelagh, John O’Bierne, A Short History of Ireland, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Townshend, Charles The British Campaign in Ireland: The Development of Political and Military Policies (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 3. Thus, the list of reserved powers was eventually reduced to the judiciary, post and income tax. Even so, the Government of Ireland Act had little effect, for with the island in rebellion, nothing short of Dominion Status sufficed. See Darwin, John, Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War, 1918 –1922 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981). This seminal work applies to the inter-war period the ideas of Robinson and Gallagher about the Victorians’ need for collaborators and use of informal control where possible, formal control where necessary. Thus, Britain relinquished formal control in areas where collaborative regimes could be created to safeguard British interests, not because it had lost its will to empire, but rather

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46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

NOTES TO PAGES 7 –10 because empire by ‘other means’ became both possible and desirable. See also, Gallagher, John, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Horniman, Benjamin Guy, Amritsar and Our Duty to India (London: T.F. Unwin, Ltd., 1920) and Horniman, Benjamin Guy, British Administration and the Amritsar Massacre (Delhi: Mittal, 1984; orig pub 1920). These are the same books published by two different titles. This has also been republished as ‘part two’ of a collection of articles: Gursharan Singh, Parm Bakhshish Singh, Devinder Kumar Verma and Raj Krishan Ghai (eds), Jallianwala Bagh: Commemoration Volume and Amritsar and Our Duty to India (Patiala: Punjab University Press, 1994). More of Horniman’s ideas are discussed in later chapters. Mohan, Pandit Pearay, An Imaginary Rebellion: And How it Was Suppressed (Lahore: Khosla Brothers, 1920), pp. 81 – 121. Both Mohan and Horniman had limited access to evidence in making these claims, relying only on some official reports from Legislative Council Debates. Only one volume focused on Amritsar, and originally the volume that focused on the testimony and reports of high-ranking Punjab government officials was not made public. Gwynn, Charles W., Imperial Policing (London: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 34 – 5, 60 – 2, 63. Colvin, Ian, The Life of General Dyer (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1929), pp. 172, 177. It is worth noting that Dyer left behind no diary and few personal papers for Colvin or other scholars since to consult. His wife, Annie Dyer, commissioned Colvin to write her deceased husband’s life story, and this he did with little to no citation of evidence. Colvin also wrote a biography of Sir Edward Carson, casting him in a similarly favourable light. Furneaux, Rupert, Massacre at Amritsar (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), pp. 164–7. But Nigel Collet states it was not until after Dyer’s campaign in the Afghan War at the end of June 1919 that he suffered ‘the first evidence of the arteriosclerosis which was thenceforth gradually to dominate his life’. Collet, Nigel, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), p. 321. Bond, Brian, ‘Amritsar 1919’ History Today 13, no. 10 (1963), pp. 666– 76. He offers no bibliography and no citation of his sources/quotes/statistics. The interview is reported to have taken place, ‘when the book was at the proof stage’, which must have been sometime between 1963 and 1964. Swinson, Arthur, Six Minutes to Sunset: The Story of General Dyer and the Amritsar Affair (London: Peter Davies, 1964), p. 210. Swinson, Six Minutes to Sunset, pp. 193, 201– 5. Swinson blames the failure of the raj to put down quickly the Moplah Rebellion in Kerala in 1921 on the government’s fear of repeating what happened in Amritsar. For more, see my conclusion. This is most evident given that Swinson believed that the ‘mob’ of 10 April was actually a rebellion: ‘If a mob attacks a factory or shop this constitutes a riot. But if it suddenly switches to a barracks or a post office or indeed (it would seem) any government installation, then the riot becomes an insurrection [. . .] if a dozen, armed only with canes, attack government property, they may be held to be taking part in an insurrection and be waging war against the King,’ in which case, Swinson argued, the use of only a minimum amount of force would not be necessary. This is what, to his mind, justified Dyer’s actions. It is also worth noting that Swinson criticized the Hunter Committee for not conducting itself as if it were a court of law, although indeed it was not one. Swinson, Six Minutes to Sunset, pp. 95 – 9, 109. Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. x. This is strikingly analogous to the main character in Orwell’s short story, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, although Collet does not intend to make that point. See George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1945), pp. 3 – 12.

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56. Lloyd, Nick, The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011), p. 183. 57. Woolman, David, ‘Massacre at Amritsar’, British History Illustrated 5, no. 3 (1978), p. 46. 58. Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. x. Collet is ignoring many other violent episodes in British imperial history including Governor Eyre in Jamaica, the violence in Ireland that I discuss in this book, the Kenyan Emergency and the Middle East, to name few. See Elkins, Caroline, Imperial Reckoning: the Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2005); Satia, Priya, Spies in Arabia: the Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 59. Metcalf, Thomas, The New Cambridge History of India III.4: Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 39. See subsequent chapters on how some members of parliament perpetuated this narrative. 60. Ram, Raja, The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: A Premeditated Plan (Chandigarh: Punjab University Press, 1969), pp. 138– 9. 61. Ram, The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, p. xii. 62. For more on the relatively few numbers of soldiers in Amritsar around the time of the riots and the Bagh shooting, see Colonel E. A. Stead, ‘General Dyer and the Punjab Disturbances of 1919’, Army Quarterly and Defence Journal 110, no. 2 (April 1980), pp. 219– 23. 63. Ram, The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, p. 133. 64. Boyce, D. George, ‘From Assaye to the Assaye: Reflections on British Government, Force, and Moral Authority in India’, Journal of Military History 63 no. 3 (1999), pp. 661, 662, 668. 65. Brown, Judith, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 214; Boyce, ‘From Assaye to the Assaye’, p. 665. 66. Stead, ‘General Dyer and the Punjab disturbances of 1919’, Army Quarterly and Defence Journal 110, no. 2 (April 1980), p. 221. 67. Fein, Helen, Imperial Crime and Punishment: The Massacre at Jallianwalah Bagh and British Judgement, 1919– 1920 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai, 1977). 68. Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment, p. x. She’s clearly drawing on the classic works of Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956) and Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959). 69. Sayer, Derek, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919–1920’, Past and Present, 131 (May 1991), pp. 130–64, especially p. 163. See also ‘Oral evidence of Brigadier General R.E.H. Dyer, commanding 45th Brigade’, in Disorders Inquiry Committee, Evidence Taken Before the Disorders Inquiry Committee, vol. 3 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1920), p. 131. CAB 27/92. Henceforth referred to as Evidence. 70. Sayer, ‘British Reaction’, p. 163. 71. Ibid., pp. 160 – 2. 72. Ibid., pp. 162, 139–40, 147, and Kiernan. V.G. The Lords of Human Kind; Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), p. 57. The British took pains to create and maintain considerable social distance between Europeans and Indians including European-only clubs, laws against miscegenation and geographical separation between European and Indian quarters within most cities. For such a discussion about multiple parts of the empire, including the French Empire, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). However, the British in India also appropriated certain aspects of Indian royal court culture, such as durbars and architecture, to legitimize

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74. 75.

76. 77.

78.

79.

80. 81.

82.

NOTES TO PAGES 12 –13 their rule. See Cohn, Bernard S., ‘Representing authority in Victorian India’, in Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Hutchins, Francis, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Datta, V.N., Jallianwala Bagh (Ludhiana: Lyall Book Depot, 1969), p. 173. Kamlesh Mohan’s 1996 article perpetuates this nationalist historiography by depicting the shooting as singular and isolated. She argues that after the shooting Indians in general and women in particular became more active publicly in resisting British rule. She also claims the colonial state was based not on consent or hegemony, but on coercion. In this, Mohan is in general agreement with the likes of Bipin Chandra, Caroline Elkins and Priya Satia (although the latter two authors do not discuss Amritsar). Mohan, Kamlesh, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh tragedy and its impact as a catalyst of Indian national consciousness’, International Journal of Punjab Studies, 3, no. 2 (1996), pp. 151–80. Chandra, Bipin, ‘Colonialism: Stages of Colonialism and the Colonial State’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 10, no. 3 (1980), pp. 272–85; Elkins, Imperial Reckoning; Satia, Spies in Arabia. Garewal, Sher Muhammad, ‘Jallianwala Bagh tragedy and its impact on contemporary Indian history’, Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, 30, no. 2 (1993), pp. 9 –22. Garewal, ‘Jallianwala Bagh’, 14; Gopal, Ram, Indian Muslims: A Political History (1858 – 1947) (Bombay: Asia Pub House, 1964). Although he does not mention it, there is also the fact that few Muslims are among those counted dead at the Bagh. Also, Hans, Surjit, ‘Jallianwala Bagh: The construction of a nationalist symbol’, in Singh et al, Jallianwala Bagh, pp. 82 – 105. See Kumar, Ravinder, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh tragedy, the Rowlatt Satyagraha and the character of the nationalist struggle in India: Some reflections’, in Singh et al., Jallianwala Bagh, pp. 14 – 22. Kumar, ‘Jallianwala Bagh tragedy’, p. 14. See also, Kaur, Madanjit, ‘Jallianwala Bagh tragedy: its impact and emergence as national historical monument’, in Singh et al., Jallianwala Bagh, p. 166, for more on how ‘communal harmony’ was established ‘overnight’ as a result of the shooting. The implication is that this harmony has remained ever since. See the classic works of the Cambridge School for this Napier-esque perspective, including Seal, Anil, Emergence of Indian Nationalism; Washbrook, David, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), and Robinson, Francis, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Province’s Muslims, 1860–1923 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Khan was a local Muslim malik (tribal leader) and had been good friends with O’Dwyer when he was a young assistant commissioner. See Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, p. 218. Mehdi and the others were also local notables. These men are discussed in Chapter Four. See also Rai, Satya M. ‘Jallianwala Bagh tragedy: Its impact on the political awakening and thinking in India’, in Singh et al., Jallianwala Bagh, p. 134. They base this on a poorly corroborated rumour that the city inhabitants believed that Dyer’s proclamation was a bluff or that he would fire blank bullets rather than real ones to scare the crowd. Datta, Jallianwala Bagh, and Tuteja, ‘Jallianwala Bagh’, p. 78. Rai, ‘Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy’, p. 130; Swinson, Six Minutes to Sunset, p. 45. See also, Bajaj, Y.P., ‘Carnage at Jallianwala Bagh: the constitutional responsibility’, in Singh et al., Jallianwala Bagh, p. 159. This is more in line with the findings of the Hunter Committee. These Indian scholars are not unaware of this, pointing out that the Canadian Derek Sayer and American Helen Fein are the only two noteworthy scholars who have thought to look at the shooting at the Bagh from an ostensibly balanced perspective. See Datta, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

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83. Bajaj, ‘Carnage at Jallianwala Bagh’, p. 160. This is generally in line with my argument. What differentiates my work from that of these Indian scholars, in addition to the ways in which they portray the violence as unprecedented and galvanizing, is their tendency to exaggerate the facts, claiming, for example, that the Dyer fund raised £30,000 ‘overnight’, when in fact the amount was closer to £26,000, collected over a number of weeks. For such exaggerations, see Rai, ‘Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy’, p. 133 and Ahluwalia, M.L., ‘Jallianwala Bagh – a tragedy or massacre’, in Singh et al., Jallianwala Bagh, p. 147. 84. Ferguson, Niall, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. xix – xx. 85. See for example, Kwarteng, Kwasi, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012); Gott, Richard, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (New York: Verso Books, 2011); Parsons, Timothy, The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 86. Elkins, Caroline, Imperial Reckoning: the Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005). 87. For an excellent analysis of these, especially in the case of India, see Metcalfe, Thomas, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 88. The Oxford History of the British Empire does not discuss violence, although some of its companion series have attempted to include it. Charles Townshend ironically believes in the respect for the rule of law! But then there’s Peter Hart among others who said, ‘The British Army’s official histories of the guerrilla war, like the contemporary police reports, ignored the systematic use of illegal violence by their own soldiers while highlighting the I.R.A.’s reign of terror.’ Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 320. 89. This narrative is still powerful in the British imagination of themselves as non-violent, as evident in public reactions to the student riots of December 2010. See Daily Mail, 13 December 2010 and ‘Will London’s student riots change Briton’s self-image?’ Time, 14 December 2010. 90. Sherman, Taylor, State Violence and Punishment in India, 1919 – 1956 (London: Routledge, 2010). 91. Howe, Stephen, ‘Historiography’ in Ireland and the British Empire, Kenny, Kevin (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 239– 40. 92. This was long before World War II made civilians a common target in warfare. Although, to be fair, this had been going on for some time – at least since the New Imperialism and Boer War, but perhaps one could even go back to the days of the East India Company during the Mutiny of 1857– 8. 93. For a general and wide-ranging example, see Das, Veena; Kleinman, Arthur; Rampghele, Mamphela; and Reynolds, Pamela (eds), Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 2000). 94. Thornton, A.P., The Imperial Idea and its Enemies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959); Porter, Bernard, Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa, 1895– 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968); Howe, Stephen, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Thornton connects the rise of the urban bourgeoisie over the aristocracy to the end of empire by arguing that accompanying this process was the gradual replacement of an autocratic ethos with democratic egalitarianism. Of course, by working in the Indian Civil Service and other colonial services, the middle classes were also able to enjoy far more comfortable lives than they may have found at home. For the ways in which a class of people benefitted from imperial expansion, as well as the atavistic impulse to conquer, see Schumpeter, Joseph,

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95. 96.

97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104.

NOTES TO PAGES 16 –19 Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: A.M. Kelly, 1951). Porter’s is a useful intellectual history of the interplay of ideas about the African Empire, especially in terms of a LiberalLabour Party ideological alliance, typified by the likes of J.A. Hobson and Ramsay MacDonald. See Hobson, J.A., Imperialism, a Study (London: J, Nisbet & Co., 1902) and MacDonald, James Ramsay, Labour and the Empire (London: G. Allen, 1907). Howe focuses on left-wing radical opinions about empire in Africa, what he calls the ‘unofficial (and/or oppositional) mind’, from the 1930s to 1950s in order to make an argument about their role in decolonization as one that forced the government to be accountable for its actions. In other words, Howe argues that the radical left-wing stance among anti-colonialists who insisted that unconditional self-determination was a moral imperative forced the defenders of empire to prove the opposite, which they could not do successfully, especially after World War II. Boyce, D.G., Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy, 1918– 22 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). He mentions Dyer only in passing. For example, Thompson, Andrew, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2005); Hall, Catherine and Rose, Sonya O. (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Oddie, Geoffrey, ‘Some British attitudes towards reform and repression in India, 1917– 1920’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 19, no. 2 (1973), pp. 224 – 40, especially pp. 232– 3. Oddie, ‘Some British attitudes’, n.71, 240; Morning Post, 10 July and 14 July 1920. Indians set up a ‘Jallianwala Bagh massacre fund’ in 1920 as well, through which they raised part of the 565,000 rupees spent by Indian nationalists such as Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and Doctor S.C. Mukerjee to buy Jallianwala Bagh from the 34 individuals who owned it and turn it into a national memorial. See Rai, ’Jalliwanwala Bagh tragedy’, p. 133, and Kaur, ‘Jallianwala Bagh tragedy’, p. 167. Construction of the memorial did not begin until November 1957. Such as Elkins, Imperial Reckoning and Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2008). Stokes, Eric, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 299. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p. 44. He adds, ‘Sepoys, even if only suspected of mutiny, were blown from cannon; villagers were, on occasion, indiscriminately shot’, p. 43. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 228. The idea that the Punjab government had been especially tough on Indians when compared to other provinces is common in the literature. For example, V.N. Datta has pointed out that although Gandhi was based in Gujarat and Bombay, the anti-Rowlatt agitation there was far less intense than in the Punjab because ‘Punjab was a sensitive and turbulent province known for its sturdy soldiery and hardiness and whose record of gallantry in the Anglo-Sikh wars had greatly impressed the British. In this province the main concern of the government lay in the preservation of law and order.’ Datta, V.N., ‘Introduction’, in Jallianwala Bagh, Singh et al. (eds), p. 5. The Anglo-Sikh wars were with the East India Company in the 1840s and part of the conquest of the Punjab, completed in 1849. For more on army recruitment from the Punjab, see Talbot, Ian, Punjab and the Raj (New Delhi: Manohar, 1988). It is also worth noting that anti-Rowlatt protests in the Punjab began ‘before Gandhi had formally decided to launch agitation’. Tuteja, K., ‘Jalliianwala Bagh tragedy: A reassessment’, in Jallianwala Bagh, Singh et al. (eds), p. 72. To this end, Metcalf admits, ‘the cast of mind which led to the massacre in the Jallianwala Bagh was by no means exceptional to the Punjab.’ Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p. 228.

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105. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, p. 229. 106. Bose, Purnima, Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency and India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 26 – 7. 107. Ibid., p. 33. She also resisted the narrative of Dyer as a ‘deadly aberration of the colonial rule of law’, which she termed ‘the ideology of rogue-colonial individualism’. Instead, she depicted him as ‘paradigmatic of the peculiar logic of colonialism and its reliance on deadly force’. Bose, Organizing Empire, p. 72. 108. Bose, Purnima and Lyons, Laura, ‘Dyer consequences: the trope of Amritsar, Ireland, and the lessons of the “minimum” force debate’, Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2 (Summer, 1999), p. 222. It is worth noting that they do not make the connection to the Croke Park shooting discussed in Chapter Eight, but rather the more recent trouble in Northern Ireland. 109. Bose and Lyons, ‘Dyer consequences’, pp. 213– 14. The same statement also appears in Bose, Organizing Empire, p. 60. 110. For a similar list and point, see Bose, Purnima and Lyons, Laura, ‘Dyer consequences: the trope of Amritsar, Ireland, and the lessons of the “minimum” force debate’, Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 213 – 14; and see Bose, Purnima, Organizing Empire, p. 60. Bose adds the name of Field Marshal Sir Hugh Henry Rose (Baron Strathnairn), who served in Ireland putting down agrarian unrest in the 1820s before finding himself in India, helping to put down the Mutiny in 1857. He eventually became Commanderin-Chief of India from 1860– 65 before becoming Commander-in-Chief of Ireland from 1865– 70. See Robson, Brian, ‘Rose, Henry Hugh’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com; accessed online 6 June 2008. 111. Cook, Scott, ‘The Irish raj: social origins and careers of Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service, 1855– 1919’, Journal of Social History, 20 (1987), pp. 507– 29; Karsten, Peter, ‘Irish soldiers in the British Army, 1792– 1922: Suborned or subordinate?’, Journal of Social History, 17 (1983), pp. 31 –64. 112. See Kenny, Kevin (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 113. Bose and Lyons, ‘Dyer Consequences’, p. 202. 114. Datta, V.N. pointed out that Philips, C.H. and ‘his pupils had projected the British rule in India as significantly benevolent.’ Datta, ‘Introduction’, in Singh et al. (eds), Jallianwala Bagh, p. 2. 115. Helen Fein also made the Irish connection via Carson in her work, although, like Sayer, this was not the main thrust of her scholarship. Sayer, ‘British reaction’, p. 153; Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment, p. 133. 116. Fraser, T.G., ‘Ireland and India’, in Jeffery (ed.), An Irish Empire?, p. 89. Fraser has also produced a case study of partition: Partition in Ireland, India and Palestine: Theory and Practice (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984). See also Lustick, Ian, State-Building Failure in British Ireland and French Algeria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) and Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 117. See Nationality, 26 April 1919 and Young Ireland, 3 May 1919. Also in Davis, ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, p. 79. 118. Davis, ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, p. 89. 119. Lawrence, Jon, ‘Forging a peaceable kingdom: War, violence, and fear of brutalization in post-First World War Britain’, The Journal of Modern History, 75 (September 2003), p. 560. 120. Ibid., p. 562.

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121. Leeson, David, ‘Death in the afternoon: the Croke Park Massacre, 21 November 1920’, Canadian Journal of History, vol. 38, no. 1 (April 2003), pp. 43 – 68. His is the only study devoted to Croke Park alone. 122. Leeson, David, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920– 1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 123. Kent, Susan Kingsley, Aftershocks: The Politics of Trauma in Britain, 1918– 1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 124. Townshend, Charles, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 139. 125. Townshend, Charles, The British Campaign in Ireland: The Development of Political and Military Policies (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 136 –7. 126. Mockaitis, Thomas, British Counterinsurgency, 1919– 60 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 3. 127. He suggests that the ‘body of traditional wisdom on how to combat irregulars’ that was devised in Ireland was applied to the Malabar Coast of India in 1921, to Lower Burma in 1930 and Palestine in 1936, but he does not explain how so. He argues that campaigns in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus between 1945 and 1960 were similarly influenced by the Irish experience. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, pp. 4, 12. 128. Ibid., pp. 13 – 14. He claims none of these were effectively employed until the 1930s and even so, all three were not successfully used until the Malayan Emergency. 129. He gives salient examples: Ireland in 1920 and in 1969 with the ‘B’ Specials, Palestine in 1945 (Police Mobile Force) and the Kenya Police Reserves in 1952. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, p. 188. 130. The classic example of the call for reform and responsible government, first published in 1902, is Hobson, J.A., Imperialism: A Study, 3rd edn. (London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1938). For a good example of the Labour Party’s perspective at the time, see Woolf, Leonard, Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (Westminster: Labour Research Department, 1919). See also, Thornton, A.P., The Imperial Idea and its Enemies: A Study in British Power (London: Macmillan, 1959); Semmel, Bernard, The Liberal Idea and the Demons of Empire: Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Matthew, H.C.G., The Liberal Imperialists: The Ideas and Politics of a post-Gladstonian Elite (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). 131. Datta, Jallianwala Bagh, frontispiece; Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1739; The Times, 25 June 1920; Sayer, ‘British Reaction’, p. 133. 132. I do not necessarily mean that these authors would deny that there were instances of imperial violence before Amritsar, but rather that they focus on the ‘tragedy’ of this event without asking harder questions about it.For example, see Garewal, ‘Jallianwala Bagh tragedy’; Mohan, Kamlesh, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh tragedy and its impact as a catalyst of Indian national consciousness’, International Journal of Punjab Studies, 3, no. 2 (1996), pp. 151– 80. 133. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, cols. 1725, 1736, and Sayer, Derek, ‘British reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919 – 1920’, Past and Present 131 (May 1991), p. 131. It is worth noting that Churchill’s view, informed in large part by his experience as an army officer, was that given human nature, such things were always possible, but that eternal vigilance was necessary to prevent them. He emphasized the military doctrine of ‘Minimal Force’ at this time, in which the state must use only the minimal amount of necessary force that would result in the minimum loss of human life. See 1st Minutes of Indian Disorders Committee,

NOTES TO PAGES 24 –29

134. 135. 136.

137.

138.

139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

144. 145.

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21 April 1920, CAB 27/91; Statement of Case of Brigadier-General R.E.H. Dyer, 5 July 1920, CAB 27/91. Masani, Zareer, Indian Tales of the Raj (Berkeley: Univ of Calif Press, 1990), p. 107. See for example, Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, pp. 210– 24. See Collet, Nigel, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (London: Hambledon and London, 2005). See also Bond, Brian, ‘Amritsar 1919’ History Today, 13, no. 10 (1963), pp. 666 – 676; Furneaux, Rupert, Massacre at Amritsar (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963); Draper, Alfred, Amritsar: The Massacre that Ended the Raj (London: Cassell, 1981) and Swinson, Arthur, Six Minutes to Sunset: The Story of General Dyer and Amritsar Affairs (London: Peter Davies, 1964). For more on collaboration, see Robinson, Ronald, ‘Non-European foundations of European imperialism: sketch for a theory of collaboration’, in Owen, Roger and Sutcliffe, bob (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (New York: Longman, 1972); Newbury, Collin, Patrons, Clients, and Empire: Chieftancy and Over-rule in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Although his focus is to invalidate the argument that the empire was based on force, he does concede that force was an important component of the imperial system in India. For an excellent intellectual history of the interplay of ideas about empire, although concerned more with expansion into Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rather than India, see Porter, Bernard, Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa, 1895– 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968). Howe, Stephen, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918 – 1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Sayer, ‘British reaction’, p. 153. Ullman, Richard, Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917– 1921, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 –73). ‘Perceptions of popular struggles as Bolshevik-inspired conspiracies were not confined to the Punjab, nor to Sir Michael O’Dwyer. This was 1920 and the papers were full of Bolshevik atrocities.’ Sayer, ‘British reaction’, p. 152. That is not to say that the English working-class rank and file necessarily felt outrage against Irish reprisals. At least one historian suggested that if they were not unconcerned with Irish events, they actively applauded harsh repression. See Boyce, D.G., Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy, 1918– 22 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), pp. 70 – 1. Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics. For more on this, see Louis, Wm. Roger and Robinson, Ronald, ‘The imperialism of decolonization’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 22, no. 3 (1994), pp. 462 – 511; Darwin, John, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Gallagher, John, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Chapter 1

Punjab ‘Disturbances’

1. Indian Constitutional Reforms, ‘Part 1: The material’, p. 5. The National Archives of the UK (TNA): CAB 6/4. 2. The Defence of India Act had been in force since March 1915. It was not until the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 that provincial lieutenant governors were retitled simply as governors, although no one at the provincial level sat higher.

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3. Nation, 13 May 1919, in Kaul, Chandra, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880– 1922 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 202. 4. Reynolds’s News, 20 April 1919, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 202. 5. Daily Herald, 16 April 1919, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 203. 6. Westminster Gazette, 23 April 1919, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 203. 7. After his tenure in India, Lord Hardinge chaired the government investigation into the causes of the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916. 8. For Bengali ‘terrorism’ in the 1920s, especially with respect to their connection to Irish freedom fighters, see Silvestri, Michael, ‘“The Sinn Fein of India”: Irish nationalism and the policing of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal’, Journal of British Studies 39 (October 2000), pp. 454– 486. For more on violent nationalism in the Punjab after the Amritsar Massacre, see Mohan, Kamlesh, Militant Nationalism in Punjab (New Delhi: Manohar, 1985). 9. See Brown, Emily C., Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975); Naidis, Mark, ‘Propaganda of the Ghadr Party’, The Pacific Historical Review, 20 (August 1951), pp. 251– 60; Sareen, Tilak Raj, Indian Revolutionary Movement Abroad (1905 – 1921) (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1979); Jensen, Joan ‘The “Hindu conspiracy”: a reassessment’, The Pacific Historical Review, 48, 1 (February 1979), pp. 65 – 83. For the ways in which Germany tried to use Ghadr and Bengali revolutionaries, see Fraser, Thomas, ‘Germany and the Indian Revolution, 1914– 18’, Journal of Contemporary History 12 (1977), pp. 255– 72. For the relationship between the United States and Indian nationalists especially during and after World War II, see Clymer, Kenton, Quest for Freedom: The United States and India’s Independence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 10. Collet, Nigel, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), pp. 137 – 41; Popplewell, Richard, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904– 1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995). 11. For the Khilafat Movement, see Minault, Gail, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). The movement lost much of its intercommunal unity when Gandhi ended non-cooperation in 1922, after a mass demonstration of civil disobedience in Chauri Chaura turned violent. It was essentially over only a few years later when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the caliphate altogether, preferring a Western-style secular state. 12. For the influence that Wilson’s rhetoric and ideas had on Indians, see Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 13. Jinnah, M.A., Speech given at the Ninth Session of the All-India Muslim League, December 1916, Lucknow in The Indian Muslims: A Documentary Record (1900 –1947), Shan Muhammad (ed.), vol. iv (Meerut: Meenakshi Prakashan, 1981), p. 277. 14. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 222; ‘Written statement of Mr. A.J.W. Kitchin, Commissioner, Lahore’, in Evidence Taken Before the Disorders Inquiry Committee, Disorders Inquiry Committee, vol. 3, 222. TNA: CAB 27/92. Henceforth referred to as Evidence. For more on the economic impact of World War II, see Tomlinson, B.R., The Political Economy of the Raj, 1914–1947 (London, 1979) and P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: 1688–2000, 2nd edn. (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2002), especially pp. 548–51. 15. Naidis, Mark, ‘Amritsar Revisited’ Historian, 21, no. 1 (1958). p. 4. 16. Ibid., p. 4. Of course, this upset the merchants. 17. For details of the ‘super tax’ of April 1917 and another income tax in April 1918, see Mohan, Militant Nationalism, pp. 15 –16.

NOTES TO PAGES 31 –34

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18. For more ‘predisposing causes’ see ‘Oral evidence of Mr. Miles Irving, Deputy Commissioner, Amritsar’, in Evidence, vol. 3, 1. TNA: CAB 27/92. For background on India in the early twentieth century, see Datta, V.N., Jallianwala Bagh (Ludhiana: Lyall Book Depot, 1969), pp. 1 – 60. For a quick survey of Indian history from 1858 to 1919, see Fein, Helen, Imperial Crime and Punishment: The Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and British Judgment, 1919– 1920 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1977), pp. 48– 70. 19. Although I discuss these dynamics in later chapters, see Sires, Roland V., ‘Labor unrest in England, 1910– 1914’, The Journal of Economic History (September 1955), 15(3), pp. 246– 266 for more on domestic unrest. For the Anglo-Irish War, see Hart, Peter, The IRA and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916– 1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Hopkinson, Michael, Green against Green: The Irish Civil War (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1988). 20. ‘Oral evidence of Mr. F.H. Burton, Deputy Commissioner, Amritsar’, Evidence, vol. 3, 62. TNA: CAB 27/92; Naidis, ‘Amritsar revisited’, p. 5. Technically, Burton was the assistant commissioner. 21. The Ghadr Party tried hard to infiltrate the military but succeeded only enough to scare British administrators. See ‘Oral evidence of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, formerly LieutenantGovernor of the Punjab’, Evidence, vol. 6, 44. TNA: CAB 27/93. Also, O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, pp. 190 –209. 22. Disorders Inquiry Committee, Report, pp. 82 – 3. TNA: CAB 27/91. Henceforth referred to as the Hunter Report. 23. For more on the Rowlatt Acts, see, for the British side, Robb, Peter G., The Government of India and Reform: Policies Towards Politics and the Constitution, 1916– 1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) and for the Indian side, see Ravinder Kumar (ed.) Essays on Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 24. O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, p. 266. The government also did little to persuade Indian elites of the need for these acts, waiting far too long (until 6 April 1919) before advertising in the Indian press. By that time, much nationalist opinion was bitterly opposed to them. See Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 221. 25. Secretary of State for India to Viceroy Chelmsford, 8 March 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, no. 7, pp. 34– 8. 26. Report by the Secretary of State for India, 29 May 1918, Indian Constitutional Reforms, Defence of India, ‘D’ Series, Papers 101 – 130 Inclusive, No. 112– D. TNA:CAB 6/4. 27. Of course, many moderate nationalists supported Montford, including Gandhi, initially. For how Gandhi’s views changed and his reasoning for launching the first civil disobedience campaign, which was due in large part to the experience of the Khilafat movement and British reactions to anti-Rowlatt demonstrations in the Punjab, see Brown, Judith, Modern India: the Origins of an Asian Democracy, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 220, and an excellent biography, Brown, Judith, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 28. Chelmsford to Earl of Selbourne (William Palmer), 17 October 1918, IOR: MSS Eur E264/15, vol 1, no. 147, p. 115. See also Chelmsford’s letter to Sir William Duke, 24 December, 1919, no. 248, p. 200. 29. O’Dwyer, Michael, India as I Knew it 1888– 1925 (London: Constable, 1925; repr., Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988), pp. 1 – 3. Citations refer to 1988 edition. 30. See Comerford, R.V., The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics & Society 1848– 82 (1985; repr. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988), pp. 223 – 49; Clark, Samuel, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Kee, Robert, The Green Flag, volume ii: The Bold Fenian Men (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972; repr. in 3 volumes London: Penguin, 1989); Townshend, Charles, Political Violence in Ireland:

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31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

NOTES TO PAGES 34 –36 Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), pp. 105 – 80. Citations of The Green Flag refer to the 1989 edition. O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, p. 8. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 7. For more on the murders, see Comerford, Fenians in Context, pp. 242– 5; Molony, Senan, The Phoenix Park Murders: Conspiracy, Betrayal and Retribution (Cork: Mercier Press, 2006); Tynan, P.J.P., The Irish National Invincibles and their Times (London: Chatham, 1894). O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, p. 1. See Indian National Congress Punjab Subcommittee, Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the Indian National Congress Punjab Sub-Committee, vol. 1 (Bombay: Karnatak Press, 1920), pp. 6 – 7, 13 –15. Henceforth referred to as Congress Report. The members of this committee were Madan Mohan Malaviya, Motilal Nehru, Mohandas K. Gandhi, C.R. Das, Abbas S. Tayabji, M.R. Jayakar, and Secretary K. Santanam. O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, pp. 14 – 15. Congress Report, vol. 1, pp. 10 –12. No doubt the act also helped O’Dwyer put down the Ghadr movement during the war. Malaviya, Kapil Deva, Open Rebellion in the Punjab: (With Special Reference to Amritsar) (Allahabad: Abhudaya Press, 1920), p. 7. See his feelings about Montford and the future of India in O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, pp. 369– 453. ‘Written Statement of Brigadier-General R.E.H. Dyer, Commanding 45th Brigade, Amritsar’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 201– 2, CAB 27/92; ‘Written statement of Rai Bahadur, Sultan Singh, Banker, Delhi’, Evidence, vol. 1, 193, CAB 27/92. See also, O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, pp. 267– 8. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, pp. 1 – 8. Maintaining social distance from the locals was a common feature of British life in India, although in Simla this feature was particularly salient. See Kanwar, Pamela, Imperial Simla: The Political Culture of the Raj (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); Metcalf, Thomas, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 9. Dyer’s biographer, Nigel Collet, depicts Dyer not as a racist, but as a man who preferred the company of any soldier (white or not) to civilians. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 422. However, socializing with Indians, especially when off duty, would have been highly irregular. The entire Anglo-Indian world was steeped in heavy racism. For more, see Masani, Zareer, Indian Tales of the Raj (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). There’s actually no hard evidence to substantiate his potential Anglo-Irish ancestry. Collet suggests that he was sent there because it was a far less expensive alternative to the prestigious schools of England. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 16. But Dyer’s family could have afforded the more expensive schools and, as they had no relatives to look after their sons in Cork, it wouldn’t have made sense to send both their sons to live amidst the turbulence of the Irish land war if there were no familial connection. It’s quite possible that Dyer’s family was, at some point, Anglo-Irish, and his father wanted his sons to have some connection with and awareness of their ancestry, however far removed. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 19. See also, Colvin, Ian, Life of General Dyer, pp. 8 –12. Ibid., p. 21. See also Guinnane, Timothy, The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 38– 57. He disagrees with the generally accepted argument that the poor rural economy at this time also encouraged emigration. For example, see Miller, Kerby,

NOTES TO PAGES 36 –37

48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

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Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 398– 409. For more on Parnell, see Kee, Robert, The Laurel and the Ivy: The Story of Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish Nationalism (London: H. Hamilton, 1993); Lyons, F.S.L., The Fall of Parnell (1890 – 91) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960); Bew, Paul, C.S. Parnell (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980); Hachey, Thomas, Britain and Irish Separatism: From the Fenians to the Free State 1867/1922 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1977), pp. 11–3; Mansergh, Nicholas, The Irish Question 1840– 1921: A Commentary on Anglo-Irish Relations and on Social and Political Forces in Ireland in the Age of Reform and Revolution, 3rd edn. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), pp. 133 – 74. He tried his luck at pursuing a medical career with his brother at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin first, but his disgust with dissecting quickly led him to aim for the army. See Colvin, Life of General Dyer, pp. 10 – 11 and Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, pp. 23 – 4. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, pp. 31–2. He served in Cork and Dublin first, before Belfast. For the process by which Catholics eventually won ‘emancipation’ in 1829 through a non-violent mass movement, see O’Ferrall, Fergus, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy 1820– 30 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985). As for the Belfast riots, tensions mounted until the summer of 1886 when Protestant Unionists who worked for Harland and Wolff’s shipyard began rioting to protest Home Rule. Some 3,000 Catholics were evicted during these riots and 28 public buildings were burned to the ground, 31 public houses looted and at least 50 people died. The police suffered 371 injuries and 190 Catholic workers were kicked out of the shipyards. See Bardon, Jonathan, Belfast: An Illustrated History (Dundonald, Northern Ireland: Blackstaff, 1982), pp. 149– 50. He was hated by the Protestants, and nicknamed ‘Black Michael’. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 32. Morley was not only one of the architects of the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886 but he also became Secretary of State for India in the early 1900s, where he felt much less sympathy for the demand for self-government. He put down a riot in Punjab and Bengal in 1907, but he also initiated the Indian Councils Bill of 1909, known as the Morley-Minto Reforms, which was an important step toward responsible government. See Hamer, David, John Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968). His biographer has a different take, arguing that Dyer’s experience in Belfast taught him of the dangers of ‘civil weakness’. Collet also argues that the violence in the countryside and the Phoenix Park Murders left him with a sense of insecurity and an awareness of the weakness of government. See Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, 33, p. 22. Floggings were also common and the Provost Marshal, Colonel Hooper, became infamous for tying a Burmese in Nga Neing to a stake in the midst of a pile of dead Burmese and in front of a firing squad. He set up his camera to photograph the scene before ordering fire. ‘Despite protests in the London press, Hooper was not punished.’ See Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 35. General Sir Frederick Roberts, Instructions for the Guidance of General and Other Officers Commanding Columns in Burma, 20 November 1886, in Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 38. Like Dyer, Roberts was Anglo-Irish but born in India, and strongly opposed to Irish Home Rule. He actively supported Ulster Unionists and was involved in the Curragh Mutiny of March 1914 when some high-ranking officers of the British Army at the military camp near Dublin reported that they would rather resign than enforce Home Rule upon unwilling Ulster Unionists. Major-General (later Field Marshal) Sir Henry Wilson (Chief of Imperial General Staff in Ireland) and Field Marshal Sir John French

190

56.

57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70.

NOTES TO PAGES 37 –39 (Lord Lieutenant/Viceroy of Ireland), assured them they would not be asked to do so, but Asquith’s government would not support such a pledge. However, the government was made painfully aware of the unreliability of its armed forces in opposing Irish Unionists. See Ranelagh, John O’Beirne, A Short History of Ireland, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 164 – 7; Fergusson, Sir James, The Curragh Incident (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). ‘Note on Punjab disorders by Sir Michael O’Dwyer, late Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab’, 12 December 1919, Evidence, vol. 6 (Punjab Government’s Written Statement) in Datta, V.N. (ed.), New Light on the Punjab Disturbances in 1919: Volumes VI and VII of Disorders Inquiry Committee Evidence, vol. 1 (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975), p. 795. Also in TNA: CAB 27/93. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, pp. 229– 30. On 4 April, O’Dwyer placed this gag order on Pandit Dina Nath (editor of Waqt newspaper), Pandit Kotu Mal, and Swami Annubhava Nand, also. But Kitchlew was ‘a rousing advocate of both political change and Gandhi’s non-violent methods’. See ‘Written Statement of Punjab Government’, Evidence, vol. 6, p. 103. TNA: CAB 27/93. Kitchlew was friends with Nehru while at Cambridge, and he had a doctorate from Germany, which is why some British officials feared that he was infected with ‘German ideas’. On Kitchlew and Satyapal, see Singh, Fauja, Eminent Freedom Fighters of Punjab (Patiala: Punjab University, 1972), pp. 200– 1, 205– 6. Some Congress members actually voted against the hartal. See Hunter Report, pp. 19– 20. CAB 27/91. See also Toufique Kitchlew, Saifuddin Kitchlew: Hero of Jallianwala Bagh (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1987), pp. 1 – 21. It is worth contrasting this with the depiction of him at the opposite extreme, as violent agitator, in O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, p. 265. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 231. Ibid., p. 231. He does not provide a clear citation, but he does indicate that this was dated 8 April. ‘Irving’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 179 –80. TNA: CAB 27/92. Malaviya, Open Rebellion in the Punjab, p. 11. Baisakhi is a Punjabi harvest festival that also coincides with the Hindu and Sikh new year and lasted a few days. Hunter Report, pp. 20– 21; Irving’s oral evidence, Evidence, vol. 3, 7; ‘Oral evidence of Mr. Plomer, Deputy Superintendent of Police, Amritsar’, 37. TNA: CAB 27/92. ‘Irving’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 180, TNA: CAB 27/92; ‘Written Statement of Major-General G.L.W. Beynon, Commanding 16th (Indian) Division, Lahore’, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 321; ‘Oral Evidence of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, formerly Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab’, Evidence, vol. 6, p. 46; ‘Punjab Government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, p. 105, TNA: CAB 27/93. ‘Beynon’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 320, TNA: CAB 27/93; ‘Irving’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 180; Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 232. TNA: CAB 27/92. ‘Irving’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 180, TNA: CAB 27/92.; ‘Punjab Government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, p. 105; ‘Beynon’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 320, TNA: CAB 27/93; ‘Written statement of Captain J.W. Massey, Officer Commanding, Amritsar’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 192, TNA: CAB 27/92. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 232. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 233. ‘Massey’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 192, TNA: CAB 27/92; Hunter Report, p. 29, TNA: CAB 27/91.

NOTES TO PAGES 40 – 43

191

71. ‘Punjab Government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, 118; ‘Beynon’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 4, 320, TNA: CAB 27/93; Hunter Report, pp. 24 – 27, TNA: CAB 27/91. 72. ‘Beynon’s written statement,’ Evidence, vol. 4, pp. 320– 1, TNA: CAB 27/93; Hunter Report, pp. 24 – 25, TNA: CAB 27/91. 73. ‘Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, 118, TNA: CAB 27/93. Interestingly, this statement reports that the Alliance Bank managers were saved by the police, rather than emphasizing the role of the Indian clerks in getting the managers to the police. Actually, the Central Police Station, or kotwali was close to these banks, but not one of its 75 policemen did anything to quell the situation for over half an hour. The statement is also suspiciously silent about the number of Indians killed by rifle or revolver fire during the riots. See also, Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 232. 74. ‘Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, pp. 118– 9, TNA: CAB 27/93; ‘Irving’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 4, TNA: CAB 27/92. 75. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 202, TNA: CAB 27/92. 76. Telegram, Major MacDonald to Beynon, 11 April 1919, Evidence, vol. 4, 326; ‘Beynon’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 321, TNA: CAB 27/93. 77. ‘Kitchin’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 221, TNA: CAB 27/92; “Beynon’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 321, TNA: CAB 27/93. 78. ‘Beynon’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 321, TNA: CAB 27/93. Beynon refers to him as a major, but because he ‘held local rank’ his contemporaries referred to him as lieutenant colonel. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 485 n. 39. Regardless, he was senior to Major MacDonald. 79. M.H.L. Morgan, War Diary, 11 April 1919, in Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 240. 80. See introduction & reference to Clive Dewey’s argument about post-World War I changes in imperial attitudes in India. 81. ‘Kitchin’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 220, TNA: CAB 27/92; Hunter Report, p. 29, TNA: CAB 27/91. Kitchen consented to this, but one might suspect that MacDonald’s powers of persuasion played a substantial role. 82. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 202, TNA: CAB 27/92; ‘Beynon’s written statement,” Evidence, vol. 4, p. 321, TNA: CAB 27/93. This was not the first time Dyer had taken military matters into his own hands, as he did in Sistan (in Persia near the Afghan border) some three years earlier when he signed a treaty without the knowledge or consent of his superiors, which had significant consequences in the region. See Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, pp. 143– 57. 83. ‘Beynon’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 321, TNA: CAB 27/92. 84. ‘Dyer’s Written Statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 202, TNA: CAB 27/92. 85. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 244. 86. Hunter Report, p. 30, TNA: CAB 27/91. 87. ‘Irving’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 6 – 7, TNA: CAB 27/92. 88. ‘Oral evidence of Brigadier General R.E.H. Dyer, Commanding 45th Brigade’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 115; ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Appendix V, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 212 –3, TNA: CAB 27/92. For details on Kasur, see ‘Beynon’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 321, TNA: CAB 27/93. 89. Hunter Report, p. 30, TNA: CAB 27/91; ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Appendix iii, Proclamation No. 2, 13 April 1919, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 212, TNA: CAB 27/92. 90. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 202, CAB 27/92. He claimed that it was around or after 9.30am when they headed out, and that they announced the proclamation for ‘a few hours’. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 115, TNA: CAB 27/92.

192

NOTES TO PAGES 43 – 46

91. Hunter Report, p. 30, TNA: CAB 27/91; ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 116, TNA: CAB 27/92. 92. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 258. Both Pizzey and Anderson were of the Londons. 93. Dyer freely admitted that if the passage had not been too narrow for the armoured cars, he would have used the machine guns on the crowd. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 126, TNA: CAB 27/92. 94. Dyer never specified how it was that he later came to know the figure was this large, but that is what he reported. The government investigation into this incident, known as the Hunter Committee, estimated that the crowd was somewhere between 10 and 20,000 strong. Presumably, it was while the committee was in the process of hearing evidence about the number of Indians present at the Bagh that Dyer later came to know of the much larger number. Hunter Report, p. 31, TNA: CAB 27/91; ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 116– 17; ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 203, TNA: CAB 27/92. 95. Evidence of Rup Lal Puri taken on commission in the Punjab, The Times, May 1924 (Transcript of the Sir Michael O’Dwyer versus Sir C. Sankaran Nair trial, May 1924), in Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, pp. 246– 7. The meeting was organized by Dr. Mohammed Bashir. 96. ‘Written statement of Lala Jowahar Lal, Inspector of Police, Punjab, Lahore’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 220, TNA: CAB 27/92. He left shortly before Dyer arrived because he knew there would be a shooting. 97. Evidence, vol. 3, Dyer’s written statement, p. 203. 98. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 117, TNA: CAB 27/92. 99. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 203, TNA: CAB 27/92. 100. The term ‘bagh’ typically refers to a garden, but this ‘garden’ had very little greenery to it, especially in the dry heat of an Amritsar April. It was surrounded on all sides by the walls of houses that ranged in height from ten feet to four stories, and it had only five narrow entrances, most with locked gates. 101. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 203, TNA: CAB 27/92. 102. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 127, TNA: CAB 27/92. Dyer was quick to add that they did ask to bury their dead the next night and he let them, but warned them, ‘There must be no demonstration or disorder of any kind’. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Appendix VI, 14 April 1919, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 214, TNA: CAB 27/92. 103. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 117, TNA: CAB 27/92. 104. Chelmsford to Montagu, 16 April 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, no. 14, p. 61. 105. Chelmsford to Montagu, 7 May 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 18, p. 135. 106. ‘The Statement of Maulvi Gholam Jilani, son of Mian Gholam Qadir Kashmiri, aged 32, Deed Writer and Imam of Masjid, in Katra Garba Singh, Amritsar’, Congress Report, vol. 2, no. 134, p. 181. Also in Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 262. 107. Congress Report, vol. 1, pp. 56– 7. Also in Malaviya, Open Rebellion, pp. 60 – 3. He reports that 42 boys were killed, of which one was a seven-month-old baby and many were 12 to 15 years old. 108. ‘The statement of Mohammad Ismail, aged 20 years, son of Wazir Mohammad, butcher, resident of Kucha Gujran, Amritsar’, Congress Report, vol. 2, no. 46, pp. 91 – 2. Also in Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 262. This butcher was one of many witnesses to the violence, such as Lala Girdhaari Lal, who claimed, ‘I saw hundreds of persons killed on the spot . . . The dead bodies were of grown up people and young boys also. Some had their heads cut open, others had eyes shot, and nose, chest, arms or legs shattered.’ Congress Report, vol. 1, p. 58.

NOTES TO PAGES 46 – 49

193

109. ‘The statement of Sardar Pratap Singh, son of Bhai Man Singh, aged 45 years, book seller, resident of Bazar Mai Sewan, opposite Clock Tower, Amritsar’, Congress Report, vol. 2, no. 49, p. 95. Also in Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 261. 110. ‘The statement of Lala Duni Chand, M.A. Vakil High Court, Amritsar, age 50 years’, Congress Report, vol. 2, no. 93, p. 150. 111. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 128, TNA: CAB 27/92. 112. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 252. 113. ‘Plomer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 40, TNA: CAB 27/92. 114. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 117, TNA: CAB 27/92. 115. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 203, TNA: CAB 27/92. 116. See Lord Birkenhead’s (F.E. Smith) condemnation of this statement. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords) 5th Series, 19 July 1920, vol. 41, col. 272. 117. This number was calculated in part by information provided by the Allahabad Seva Samiti social service league. Hunter Report, p. 31, CAB 27/91. 118. The actual figure may have been much higher. Assistant Commissioner Burton reported that it was his job to check the figures given to him by Dr. Rozdon, Amritsar’s Health Officer, and by V.N. Tivary, Secretary of Allahabad Seva Samiti. Burton estimated that 415 died, of which one-fourth were not residents of Amritsar but in the city for Baisakhi, 60 per cent Hindu and 33 per cent Muslim. ‘Burton’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 62– 3, TNA: CAB 27/92. See also Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 263, on how the number of dead may have been much higher than Burton’s estimate. He explains that the government of Punjab waited until 7 August to ask people to submit names of casualties. Even so, many did not come forward at first for fear of being identified as rebels, but numbers eventually trickled in. Collet claims that a civil servant by the name of Bayley came to Amritsar on 20 April 1919 and thought 800 to 1,800 must have died. Hasan Imam (a leader in Bihar) said he had information totaling 941 dead. Pandit Madan Malaviya told the Imperial Legislative Council on 12 September 1919 that 1,000 were killed. 119. Mohan, Militant Nationalism in Punjab, p. 29. The term ‘jat’ is a broad label loosely referring to Punjabi peasants or villagers. 120. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 256. 121. ‘Copy of secret report by Brigadier-General R.E. Dyer commanding 45th Infantry Brigade, on the operations from the 11th April 1919 to 14th April 1919’, in ‘Beynon’s written statement’, Appendix III, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 327, TNA: CAB 27/93. 122. Telegram, General Staff Division to General Brigade, in ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Appendix VIII, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 214, TNA: CAB 27/92. 123. ‘Written evidence of Mr. J.F. Rehill, Deputy Superintendent of Police, Amritsar’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 41–2; ‘Oral evidence of Mr. J.F. Rehill, Deputy Superintendent of Police, Amritsar’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 189–190; ‘Plomer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 34– 41; ‘Plomer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 188–89. See also ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 126–7, TNA: CAB 27/92. Also see Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 267. Nick Lloyd, however, argues that Dyer’s first explanation was the truth and his later ones were lies meant to cover up his initial fear of being overwhelmed. The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011). 124. Letter from ‘A British SNCO’ (Sergeant Anderson) to Rupert Furneaux, Times Literary Supplement, 9 April 1964, in Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 260. 125. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 126, TNA: CAB 27/92. 126. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 202, TNA: CAB 27/92. 127. O’Dwyer’s support for Dyer’s actions led eventually to his death at the hands of Udam Singh, who had survived the shooting at the Bagh. On 13 March 1940, he assassinated

194

128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

NOTES TO PAGES 49 –53 O’Dwyer at a meeting of the Royal Central Asian Society at Caxton Hall in London. See Conclusion. ‘Beynon’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 322; ‘O’Dwyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 6, pp. 44 – 5, TNA: CAB 27/93; and O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, pp. 303 –12. Evidence, vol. 6, O’Dwyer’s oral evidence, p. 46, TNA: CAB 27/93. ‘Note on organization’, in Punjab government’s written statement, Appendix IV, Evidence, vol. 6, pp. 185 – 8, TNA: CAB 27/93. See also the Government’s Annexure xliii, ‘Bolshevik intrigues with Pan-Islamists’, Evidence, vol. 6, p. 217. The government strongly suspected Bolshevik involvement with the Afghan War, which began in May 1919, and it was concerned about approving comments in the Indian press about Bolshevism. See Datta, New Light, vol. 1, pp. 406– 10. ‘Irving’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 6, TNA: CAB 27/92. The Times, 28 January 1920, ‘Lord Channing’s letter to Mr. Lloyd George’, p. 8. Interestingly, Channing was born an American who had become a naturalized British citizen and lord much later in life. See Hopkirk, Peter, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1994). O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, p. 312. See also ‘Connection between Afghanistan and the rising in India’, in Punjab government’s written statement, Appendix III, Evidence, vol. 6, p. 181, TNA: CAB 27/93. For more on the war, see Robson, Brian, Crisis on the Frontier: The Third Afghan War and the Campaign in Waziristan 1919– 20 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2004). Montagu to Chelsmford, 9 September 1920, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/6 vol. 5, No. 20, p. 77. Sinha to Chelmsford, 1 May 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 13, p. 59. Ibid., pp. 60, 62. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 134, TNA: CAB 27/92. A similar fate befell the districts of Gujranwalla, Gujrat, and Lyallpur at midnight, 16, 19 and 23 April, respectively. Hunter Report, p. 72, TNA: CAB 27/91. Martial Law Ordinances, ‘Ordinance no. I of 1919’, in Punjab government’s written statement, Appendix XIV, Evidence, vol. 6, p. 276. TNA: CAB 27/93. Also in V.N. Datta (ed.), New Light on the Punjab Disturbances in 1919: Volumes VI and VII of Disorders Inquiry Committee Evidence, vol. 1 (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975), p. 543. Another 23 were commuted to transportation for life, 26 to rigorous imprisonment for ten years, and the remainder to shorter periods. Hunter Report, p. 73, TNA: CAB 27/91. Hunter Report, p. 166, TNA: CAB 27/91. Hunter Report, p. 73, TNA: CAB 27/91. See also Kapil Deva Malaviya, Open Rebellion in the Punjab: (With Special Reference to Amritsar) (Allahabad: Abhudaya Press, 1920), Appendix C, p. 56. Hunter Report, pp. 37 – 8, TNA: CAB 27/91. Gandhi was not put in jail, but rather escorted by the authorities to a town away from the Punjab. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, pp. 67– 8. He reports that the crowd was stopped by police and turned back, but while they were going back they were fired upon. Malaviya was an angry Indian nationalist, so his reports are clearly biased, but he was making a conscientious effort to record the events at the time. I approach his evidence with a degree of scepticism. In any case, the civilians did not retaliate after being fired upon. They simply fled. Yet the government was in a state of ‘panic’, expecting retaliation. There was not any, and O’Dwyer was even able to attend his going-away party that night as he was to leave his post as Lt. Gov. at the end of April. Obviously, he chose to continue in this capacity until the end of May, when martial law was mostly over. ‘O’Dwyer’s oral

NOTES TO PAGES 53 –56

147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156.

157. 158.

159. 160. 161. 162. 163.

164.

165. 166.

195

evidence’, Evidence, vol. 6, p. 44, TNA: CAB 27/93; ‘Oral evidence of Major Malik Sir Umar Hayat Khan’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, p. 838. Hunter Report, p. 39, TNA: CAB 27/91. Ibid., p. 40, TNA: CAB 27/91. This strike lasted until 18 April, when the martial law regime forced Lahore’s inhabitants to end it. Hunter Report, p. 43, TNA: CAB 27/91. See also Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 69. Ibid., p. 41, TNA: CAB 27/91. Ibid., p. 41, TNA: CAB 27/91. Ibid., p. 42, TNA: CAB 27/91. They approve of this action, arguing that ‘the greatest care was taken and the least possible degree of force was used.’ Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 91. Hunter Report, p. 44, TNA: CAB 27/91. Muharram is a Muslim religious month marked by intense mourning rituals and, in some cases, by Shia-Sunni sectarian conflict. See Ilahi, Shereen, ‘Research note: Sectarian violence and the British raj: The Muharram Riots of Lucknow’, India Review Vol. 6, No. 3 (July – September 2007), pp. 184 –208. Hunter Report, p. 44, TNA: CAB 27/91. Ibid., p. 45, TNA: CAB 27/91. The Hunter Committee found that the incident with the warrant officers occurred after the mob had tried to attack Limbey, Munro and the Sherbournes. See Malaviya, Open Rebellion, pp. 92– 3, for a different take on the details and sequence of events. He reports that the crowd did not attack the railway station and telegraph office at first, but rather that it approached the train, in which he claims there were only four European passengers. He mistakes them for the warrant officers who fired into the crowd, and he explains that the firing is what incited the crowd to attack and kill them both, after which they attacked the Sherbournes before rioting throughout town. Ibid., p. 46, TNA: CAB 27/91. Ibid., p. 48, TNA: CAB 27/91. Baisakhi celebrations were also held in Amritsar, where they co-incided with a horse and cattle fair. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 77. Hunter Report, pp. 48 – 9, TNA: CAB 27/91. For contrast, see Malaviya, Open Rebellion, pp. 78 – 9. He reports that it was Munshi Din Mohamed, a local Muslim leader, who persuaded the crowd that the calf wasn’t killed by Muslims but by ‘police underlings’ to cause a rift between Hindus and Muslims. He also claims, incorrectly, that the calf was hanging from Siddhan bridge rather than Katchi. Most likely, his facts are incorrect because he was trying to gather them hurriedly, based partly on hearsay, whereas the Hunter Committee could rely on a more methodical approach. Yet the idea that there was an official attempt to divide Hindus and Muslims is also mentioned in the Hunter Report. Ibid., pp. 48 – 9, TNA: CAB 27/91. For another contrast, see Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 79, who reported that Mr. Heron was knocked to the ground and had his gun taken away from him until Din Mohamed persuaded the crowd to return his revolver. It was at this point, according to Malaviya, that the superintendent fired into the mob, thus moving it to violence. Ibid., p. 50, TNA: CAB 27/91. Ibid., pp. 51 – 2, TNA: CAB 27/91. See also Malaviya, Open Rebellion, pp. 81– 3. A second plane shot 25 rounds from its machine gun on a crowd of 25 to 30 persons, but did not drop any bombs. Officially, a total of 11 villagers died and 27 were wounded, but the numbers could have been higher.

196

NOTES TO PAGES 56 –59

167. Telegram Chelmsford to Montagu, 13 April 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/10 vol. 4, No. 379. The next day he described the Punjab as in open rebellion and warned that the ‘situation is grave’. See no. 383 and 384. 168. ‘O’Dwyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 6, p. 69, TNA: CAB 27/93. 169. 837 were convicted, 766 sentenced to prison. Two hundred and ninety six received the maximum sentence of two years, 233 for one to two years. Eventually, 188 were released by the local government and 428 had their sentences reduced by half on average. Hunter Report, p. 90, TNA: CAB 27/91. 170. Hunter Report, p. 90, TNA: CAB 27/91. The sentence to transportation for life was later commuted to prison terms of seven years or less. Seven were acquitted, 28 discharged, and two absconded. 171. ‘Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, p. 319. Actually, 208 were convicted, of whom 20 served terms in prison, 66 were flogged an average of 12 stripes, and 136 fined an average of 50 rupees. Those flogged and fined were not included in the total figures for Punjab listed above. It’s worth noting that British records remain unusally imprecise about how many Indians were actually flogged. 172. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, Appendix C, p. 57. At the time he was writing, only 301 dead had been counted in Amritsar. The Hunter Committee found that the actual number was at least 379 if not much higher. Hunter Report, p. 31. Two other European officials were killed in the Bombay Presidency. 173. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 83. The author reports that this was the reason given by O’ Brien, but he gives no evidence to prove his point. Among the men arrested were two lawyers, Lala Mela Ram and a Mr. Labhsing. 174. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 84. Although at times Malaviya’s facts are off or his evidence is missing, his reliance on interviews with eyewitnesses and persons directly affected by the administration of martial law makes his report a valuable resource, albeit one that is prone to exaggeration. To this extent, it is not unlikely that a few men were not allowed to relieve themselves as needed, although this may not have been the experience of the vast majority of detainees. 175. For the classic work on this, see Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 176. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 95. The Hunter Committee explained that the number of arrests made without evidence was ‘regrettably large and the period of detention in some cases seem unduly long’, but that ‘disorders so widespread and serious, and in which so many persons participated, were bound to strain any system that could be improvised to deal with them’. Hunter Report, p. 93, TNA: CAB 27/91. 177. Indian National Congress Punjab Subcommittee, Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the Indian National Congress Punjab Sub-Committee, vol. 2 (Bombay: Karnatak Press, 1920), no. 280, ‘The statement of L. Manohar Lal, Pleader, Gujranwala’, pp. 380 – 1. Henceforth referred to as Congress Report. 178. Hunter Report, p. 96, TNA: CAB 27/91. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 96, focuses on the extension of this enactment to Lyallpur by area officer Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Hodgson. 179. Ibid., p. 141, TNA: CAB 27/91. 180. Ibid., pp. 145 – 6, TNA: CAB 27/91. 181. Ibid., p. 90, TNA: CAB 27/91. 182. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 95. See also, Hunter Report, p. 90, TNA: CAB 27/91. Malaviya’s report certainly gets less academic weight than the Hunter Report for reasons already mentioned, but it is more descriptive. 183. Hunter Report, pp. 97 – 8, TNA: CAB 27/91. 184. Ibid., p. 162, TNA: CAB 27/91.

NOTES TO PAGES 59 – 61

197

185. ‘Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, p. 324; Hunter Report, p. 88, TNA: CAB 27/91. With exception of the schoolboys, Kasur was the only area in which the regulation ‘cat’ was used for whipping rather than a cane. The boys were selected by size: the six biggest students were the ones who were punished to set an example for the rest of the students, regardless of their complicity in the riots. Hunter Report, p. 146, TNA: CAB 27/91. 186. The official number is 258 for the duration of martial law in all areas, not including the six boys at Kasur and the six men on trial for Miss Sherwood’s attack. Hunter Report, p. 162, TNA: CAB 27/91. See O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, p. 304. 187. Hunter Report, p. 97, TNA: CAB 27/91. 188. Other British persons dissented from this harsh view of the raj. 189. ‘Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, pp. 317 –18. 190. Hunter Report, p. 163, TNA: CAB 27/91. 191. ‘Written statement of Major-General Sir W. Beynon’, Evidence, vol. 4, p. 325. TNA: CAB 27/93. 192. It also became illegal ‘for more than two persons to walk abreast on any pavement or the sidewalk’. Some students of Dyal Singh College were allegedly involved in spreading false rumours about the ‘political or military situation’ on 18 April, the day that to do so became illegal. So all students of that college were ordered to report themselves to military authorities four times a day as well at the telegraph office, where the civil magistrate was sitting. “ Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, pp. 316 – 317; Hunter Report, p. 96, TNA: CAB 27/91. 193. Hunter Report, p. 141, TNA: CAB 27/91. Along similar lines, all the male students who lived at the Sanatan Dharam College Hostel were arrested and interned at the Lahore Fort because a martial law notice had been found torn outside of their school. Roughly 50 to 100 students were arrested, along with some of their professors, and were forced to march three miles to the fort, where they were held for 30 hours. Hunter Report, p. 96, TNA: CAB 27/91. 194. Ibid., p. 141, TNA: CAB 27/91. 195. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 73. The medical students were not included in roll-calls until 25 April when some were found in possession of newspaper illustrations of ‘obscene allusions to Europeans’. The roll-calls of these students remained mandatory until 5 May, and that of the other college students until 12 and 13 May, by which time the principals of these schools had taken disciplinary action against several students. ‘Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, p. 317. 196. ‘The statement of Mr. Sant Ram Grover, M.A. B.Sc., Professor of English, Dyal Singh College, Lahore’, Congress Report, vol. 2, no. 151, p. 202. He was fined rupees 250, a hardship for an Indian principal in 1919. 197. The official total figure of all those arrested and held without trial from all areas in Punjab is 789. Hunter Report, p. 166, TNA: CAB 27/91. 198. ‘Oral evidence of Mr. J.P. Thompson, Chief Secretary to the Government of the Punjab’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, pp. 115 – 16. The Punjab government suspected him of editing the paper as well. 199. ‘The statement of Mr. Manohar Lal’, Congress Report, vol. 2, no. 150, p. 200. 200. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, Appendix A, 35, 41, pp. 71 – 2; Hunter Report, p. 166, TNA: CAB 27/91. By outhouse, he probably meant ‘out buildings’ or servant’s quarters, since that is what Manohar Lal reported in his statement to Congress. Her husband remained in prison until 16 May and, ‘During the whole of this time, I was given no indication as

198

201. 202.

203.

204. 205. 206. 207. 208.

209.

210.

211. 212. 213. 214. 215.

NOTES TO PAGES 61 – 64 to what the charge or accusation against me was. I was left in a state of complete uncertainty.’ ‘The statement of Mr. Manohar Lal, M.A. Barrister-at-Law, and a Trustee of the Tribune, of Lahore’, Congress Report, vol. 2, no. 150, p. 200. ‘The statement of Dr. Gokal Chand Narang, Barrister-at-Law, Lahore’, Congress Report, vol. 2, no. 152, pp. 214–16. ‘The statement of Imam Din, son of Mehar Din, Moslem, age 35 years, shopkeeper and basket maker, residing in Anarkali, Changar Mohalla, Lahore’, Congress Report, vol. 2, no. 242 O, p. 340. In another instance in Lahore, just after the eight pm curfew, a cloth merchant attempted to milk the cow that was tied to the door of his house. Upon seeing him violating curfew, the police arrested him and kept him overnight. At 10am the next day, Colonel Johnson ordered a fine of ten rupees and five cuts from a whip. The merchant had to wait until 6pm for the order to be executed. He was one of 66 convicted offenders of the curfew in Lahore. His brother, who was also a cloth merchant, reported that ‘From 8 – 15 pm the previous evening to 7 pm on that day, my brother was not allowed to attend the calls of nature and was given nothing to eat or drink.’ Malaviya, Open Rebellion, pp. 74 – 5. ‘Note on Punjab disorders by Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Late Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab’, 12 December 1919 in ‘Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, p. 801. O’Dwyer incorrectly recollected that the war started on 4 May. The army received orders to mobilize on 5 May and war was actually declared on 8 May. See Hunter Report, p. 85, TNA: CAB 27/91. ‘Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, p. 318. O’Dwyer to Chelmsford, 16 April 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E264/22 vol 6, No. 215, p. 315. O’Dwyer to Chelmsford, 21 April, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E264/22 vol 6, No. 236, p. 336. Chelmsford to Montagu, 11 June, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E264/5 vol 4, No. 23, p. 166. ‘Note on Punjab disorders by Sir Michael O’Dwyer’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.) vol. 1, p. 817. For more on British attitudes on the different ‘martial races’ of India that they preferred to recruit into the Indian Army, see Street, Heather, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857 – 1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Interestingly, Datta blames his Irishness for this: ‘Being a “rough Irishman” he knew what conspiracy and outrage had meant and therefore dealt severely with the agrarian rising in the South-West, the Ghadrites and the Silk Letter Conspiracy...O’Dwyer represented the outlook of the late nineteenth century Empire builders who believed in the white man’s burden and in England’s divine mission to bestow on India the blessings of a sound, strong and efficient administration.’ New Light, Datta (ed.), p. 19. Hunter Report, p. 73, TNA: CAB 27/91. This is an act about which the Hunter Committee conspicuously had no opinion. Montagu, however, found the order to implement martial law retrospectively to be completely unjustified. See ‘Ordinance no. IV of 1919’, Indian Disorders Committee Document (IDC) 14, TNA: CAB 27/91. O’Dwyer to Chelmsford, 21 April, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E264/22 vol 6, No. 236, p. 337. Telegram Chelmsford to Montagu, 21 May 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/10 vol. 4, No. 643, p. 354. Telegram Chelmsford to Montagu, 14 August 1920, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/13 vol. 7, No. 224. Montagu to Chelmsford, 8 August, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 20, pp. 89 – 90. Montagu to Chelmsford, 2 October, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 25, p. 104.

NOTES TO PAGES 64 –68

199

216. Chelmsford to Montagu, 30 April, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 17, p. 131. 217. ‘Written statement of General R.E.H. Dyer’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 204, TNA: CAB 27/92. Although Dyer did not order Sikhs to open fire on the crowd at the Bagh, he had plenty of Sikh soldiers under his command and was aware of the central importance of loyal Sikh recruits from the Punjab in the Indian Army. 218. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 204, TNA: CAB 27/92. 219. Hunter Report, p. 27, TNA: CAB 27/91. See also interview with Miss Sherwood in Daily Express, 23 January 1920; Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 234. 220. Ibid., pp. 95 – 6, CAB 27/91; ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 205, TNA: CAB 27/92. 221. This is what he reported in his written statement, but the Hunter Report’s version is different. They report that he interviewed two Punjabis at the Ram Bagh who had been brought to him by the police for not salaaming and, ‘on account of their impertinent demeanour to him [sic]’, Dyer ordered that they be taken to the police office and arrested. Hunter Report, pp. 95 – 6, TNA: CAB 27/91. 222. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 121, TNA: CAB 27/92. 223. Ibid., p. 124, TNA: CAB 27/92. 224. No doubt there was an element of humiliation involved in these kinds of beatings that may have had the effect, intentionally or not, of attacking the masculinity of the men being stripped naked and whipped at the spot where Marcella Sherwood fell. Obviously, this was part of a culture of terror and humiliation, which in Amritsar, if not elsewhere, contained a substantial gendered component. 225. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 205, TNA: CAB 27/92. 226. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 38. 227. Ibid., pp. 37 – 8. 228. Hunter Report, 95 – 6, CAB 27/91; ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 120, TNA: CAB 27/92. 229. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 205, TNA: CAB 27/92. Dyer got the facts quite right – she was beaten with sticks and shoes, and she did turn for help but was rejected several times. See Hunter Report, p. 27, TNA: CAB 27/91. For more on the ways in which the image of European women in the raj was used, see Ballhatchet, Kenneth, Race, Sex, and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793– 1905 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980); Bush, Barbara, ‘Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century’, in Gender and Empire, Philippa Levine (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 77 – 111; Paxton, Nancy, Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830 – 1947 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999). 230. ‘Dyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 120, TNA: CAB 27/92. 231. ‘O’Dwyer’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, p. 137. 232. See Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 285. 233. Montagu to Chelmsford, 17 July 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5, vol. 4, No. 18, p. 83. 234. Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 63; Hunter Report, p. 166, TNA: CAB 27/91. 235. Ibid., pp. 48 – 9. Because Dyer failed to define the term, the police confiscated actual lathis along with ‘walking sticks, riding sticks, [and] fancy canes’. 236. Montagu to Chelmsford, 29 August 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5, vol. 4, No. 23, p. 97. 237. ‘Dyer’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 205, TNA: CAB 27/92. See Annexure B to this written statement that states no one was whipped in public. The discrepancy suggests that Dyer took liberties in defining ‘public’ space. 238. Annexure B to Dyer’s written statement, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 207, TNA: CAB 27/92.

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NOTES TO PAGES 68 –73

239. Letter from C.F. Andrews, Tribune, 5 – 7 November 1919, in Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 291. Also in V.N. Datta and S.C. Mittal (eds), The Sources of National Movement, I, January 1919 to September 1920: Protests, Disturbances and Defiance (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1985), p. 166. 240. Hunter Report, p. 72, TNA: CAB 27/91. 241. ‘Indian Indemnity Act (Act No. XXVIII of 1919)’, Indian Disorders Committee Document (IDC), p. 3, TNA: CAB 27/91. 242. ‘Note by the Legal Advisor at the India Office [Sir E. Chamier]’ (IDC) 13; 1, TNA: CAB 27/91.

Chapter 2 Inquiry, Reactions and the Principle of Minimum Force 1. Mazharul Haque to Chelmsford, 9 April 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E264/22 vol 6, No. 196, pp. 293– 4. 2. Montagu to Chelmsford, 20 May 1920, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/6 vol. 5, No. 10, p. 39. 3. Chelmsford to Marquess of Crewe, 26 January 1921, IOR: MSS Eur E264/16 vol. 2, No. 360, p. 283. 4. For such allegations, see Maliviya, Kapil Deval, Open Rebellion in the Punjab: (With Special Reference to Amritsar) (Allahabad: Abhudaya Press, 1920), pp. 51 – 2. He waxed apoplectic at British official claims that they were acting in the name of law and order to prevent ‘mischief’, when, Malaviya argued, ‘had it not been for the folly of officials themselves, there would have been little or no trouble in the town[s].’ 5. Telegram, Montagu to Viceroy Chelmsford, 18 June 1919, in New Light on the Punjab Disturbances in 1919: Volumes VI and VII of Disorders Inquiry Committee Evidence, V.N. Datta (ed.), vol. 1 (Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975), pp. 1, 4. 6. Williams, Robert, Smillie, Robert and Lansbury, George, Coercion, Repression and Butchery in India, in Nigel Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (Hambledon and London: London, 2005), p. 301. Vitthalbhai Patel, N.C. Kelkar, Bipin Chandra Pal, Surendranath Banerjea, Tej Bahadur Sapru, and Srinivasa Sastri were also among the influential characters pressing for an inquiry. See Chand, Tara, ‘The story of the first unarmed revolt’ in 1921 Movement: Reminiscences (New Delhi: Government of India Publications Division, 1971), p. 12. 7. Gandhi to S.R. Hignell, Private Secretary to the Viceroy, 30 May 1919, in Datta (ed.) New Light, vol. 1, p. 3. 8. Note dated 29 May 1919, in Datta (ed.), New Light, vol. 1, p. 4. 9. Note dated 19 June 1919, in Datta (ed.), New Light, vol. 1, p. 4. 10. Monro had served with Dyer in Ireland in 1886. See Purnima Bose and Laura Lyons, ‘Dyer consequences: the trope of Amritsar, Ireland, and the lessons of the “minimum” force debate’, Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2 (Summer, 1999): pp. 213 – 14; Bose, Purnima, Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency and India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 60. 11. Note by W.S. Marris, Secretary of the Home Department, 23 June 1919, in Datta (ed.), New Light, vol. 1, pp. 4 – 5. 12. Telegram, Butler to Chelmsford, 25 July 1919, in Datta (ed.), New Light, vol. 1, p. 5. 13. Under-Secretary of State for India (Lord Sinha) quoting Secretary of State for India (Montagu), Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, 6 August 1919, vol 36, col 502. 14. Montagu to Chelmsford, 29 August, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 23, p. 97. 15. Montagu to Chelmsford, 20 May, 1920, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/6 vol. 5, No. 10, p. 39. 16. Montagu to Chelmsford, 28 May, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 15, p. 68.

NOTES TO PAGES 73 –74

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17. Montagu to Chelmsford, 8 August, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 20, p. 88. 18. Montagu to Chelmsford, 15 August, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 21, p. 91. He offered it to Lord Dunedin, but when he declined Montagu asked Lord Hunter. 19. Chelmsford to Montagu, 22 August, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 32, p. 236. Hunter was born in 1865 and served as a Liberal MP from 1910– 11 while holding the position of Solicitor General for Scotland. General Barrow described him as ‘a mild man somewhat dazzled on his entry on a new stage’. Hunter allegedly fell asleep during a tiger hunt at Dehra Dun, and was criticized by some Indians for not speaking Hindi. But of course, all the proceedings were in English only, and many members of the committee spoke Hindi. See Who’s Who (London: A. & C. Black, 1936), 1689; Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 333; Sir George de S. Barrow, The Fire of Life (London: Hutchinson, 1941), p. 227. Datta claims that Hunter ‘had been associated with’ the inquiry into the Irish 1916 Rising. Datta (ed.). New Light, vol. 1, p. 6. However, I have not found Hunter’s name listed in the reports associated with this inquiry and Datta gives no citation for the claim. The 1916 commission was chaired by Sir Charles Hardinge. The other two commissioners were Sir Montague Shearman and Sir Mackenzie Dalzell Chalmers. E. Grimwood Mears served as secretary. They blamed the Rising on ‘lawlessness [that] was allowed to grow up unchecked’ and the Irish government was reluctant ‘to repress by prosecution written and spoken seditious utterances, and to suppress the drilling and manoeuvering of armed forces known to be under the control of men who were openly declaring their hostility to Your Majesty’s Government’. See Command 8279: Parliamentary Papers (Lords), 1916, vol 11, Reports, ‘Royal Commission on the Rebellion in Ireland: Report of Commission’ (London: H.M. Stationary Office; Darling and Sons, 1916), p. 13. 20. Montagu to Chelmsford, 29 August, 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 23, p. 98. 21. Montagu to Lord Hunter, 29 August 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/5 vol. 4, No. 23, p. 100. 22. Telegram, Montagu to Viceroy Chelmsford, 7 August 1919, in Datta (ed.), New Light, vol. 1, p. 5. 23. Telegram, Montagu to Viceroy Chelmsford, 13 August 1919, in Datta (ed.), New Light, vol. 1, p. 6. 24. Of these three, the Punjab government only opposed the appointment of Narayan because he had ‘crossed swords’ with O’Dwyer. Datta (ed.), New Light, vol. 1, p. 7; Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 333; Ian Colvin, The Life of General Dyer (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1929), p. 237. 25. Barrow had also attended Staff College with Dyer in their younger days but they were not friends. Although Barrow did not like Dyer, he warned him to get legal counsel before giving oral evidence. Dyer refused. Even General Beynon told him, ‘There are on this Inquiry several extremely clever Indian lawyers, who are out to get you. For God’s sake stick to facts and keep your mouth shut.’ In Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 335. 26. Two other reasons for not publishing the Punjab government’s testimony were that its preoccupation with the loyalty of the troops might cause resentment among the soldiers and because it would ‘endanger the security of our Military Intelligence arrangements and disclose matters of strategical importance’. Note by G.B. Jacob, Chief of the General Staff, 12 March 1920, in Datta (ed.), New Light, vol. 1, p. 10. Some called Khan’s testimony ‘a mass of hearsay evidence and unsupported statements’, which if published would be ‘deleterious to the cause, to say nothing of the possible consequences on the individual himself who is a native of the country’. Note by Sir Havelock Hudson, in Datta (ed.), New Light, vol. 1, p. 10.

202

NOTES TO PAGES 74 –78

27. O’Dwyer, Michael, India As I Knew It, 1888– 1925 (London: Constable, 1925; repr., Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988), pp. 318 – 29. 28. Letter from Gandhi, 23 November 1919, in Bhatia, H.S. and Bakshi, S.R., Encyclopaedic History of the Sikhs and Sikhism (New Delhi: Deep and Deep, 1999), p. 118. Also in Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 334. 29. Sir Chimanlal Setalvad, Recollections and Reflections: An Autobiography (Bombay: Padma, 1946), pp. 311– 12. Also in Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 340. The parenthetical comment is his, not mine. 30. ‘Draft Conclusions’, Indian Disorders Committee (IDC) 19, p. 6, CAB 27/91. They did, however, suggest that 10 April would have been a more appropriate start date. 31. Hunter Report, pp. 75, 77, CAB 27/91. 32. Ibid., p. 75, CAB 27/91. 33. Ibid., p. 104, CAB 27/91. 34. Ibid., 141, pp. 108– 11, CAB 27/91. 35. For a number of examples, see Hunter Report, pp. 109– 10, CAB 27/91. 36. See Smith, Ray ‘The Role of India’s “Liberals” in the Nationalist Movement, 1915– 1947’, Asian Survey, 8, no. 7 (19 July 68), pp. 607– 24. 37. O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, p. 304. 38. ‘Note on Punjab Disorders by Sir Michael O’Dwyer’, ‘Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, p. 802. 39. O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, pp. 303– 4. 40. Ibid., p. 304. Presumably, he is referring to the ‘cat of nine tails’, a braided leather whip with multiple wisps of leather at the very end. He appears to have forgotten that in Kasur the officials did indeed use the cat. 41. Memo, Hunter to Secretary to Government of India, 8 March 1920, Hunter Report, pp. 1 – 3, CAB 27/91. 42. The Congress Report’s investigators were Motilal Nehru, who was later replaced by M.R. Jayakar, C.R. Das, Swami Shraddhanand, C.F. Andrews, Jawarhalal Nehru, Purushottham Das Tandon, and Mahatma Gandhi. 43. Gandhi applied his experience as a barrister, carefully recording only testimony that would stand up in a court of law. Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 332; M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography; Or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House,1927; repr., London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), pp. 429, 437. 44. Pioneer Mail, 29 July 1927, Obituary, in Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 339. Dyer also suffered from gout and jaundice, although not during these proceedings. 45. Chelmsford to King George VI, 25 May 1920, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/1 No. 33, p. 43. 46. ‘Extract from speech of Adjutant-General of India, Sir Henry Havelock Hudson before Legislative Council of India on 19th September 1919’, and ‘Hudson’s oral evidence’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 2, pp. 1102 – 4, 1143, 1147; Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 325. General Hudson even defended Dyer’s ‘crawling’ order in debates over whether to pass the Indemnity Bill. See Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 331. 47. This was for the Afghan War in which he fought after leaving Amritsar. The recommendation was cancelled due to Dyer’s standing in the Hunter Report. See Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 330 and India Office Records, L/MILITARY/7/946. A few scholars have suggested, incorrectly, that Dyer was promoted. For example, see G. Oddie, ‘Some British attitudes towards reform and repression in India, 1917 – 1920’. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 19, no. 2 (1973), p. 236. 48. ‘Extract from Hudson’s Speech’, Appendix B, Statement of Case of Brigadier-General R. E.H. Dyer to Army Council, 5 July 1920, IDC 25, CAB 27/91. 49. ‘Dyer’s Oral Statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, p. 123, CAB 27/92.

NOTES TO PAGES 78 – 83

203

50. Swinson, Arthur, Six Minutes to Sunset: the Story of General Dyer and the Amritsar Affair (London: Peter Davies, 1964), p. 200. 51. ‘General Beynon’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 4, pp. 322, 325, CAB 27/93. 52. Dyer lost his composure, becoming ‘tetchy’ during Narayan’s questioning, partly because he was tired and suffering from arteriosclerosis, and partly because Narayan’s questions were short and sharp, ‘coming in staccato bursts and leaving Dyer little time to think of his replies’. Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 338. For examples, see ‘Dyer’s Oral Statement’, Evidence, vol. 3, pp. 128– 36, especially p. 134, CAB 27/92. 53. Ordinance No. IV of 1919, 22 April 1920, IDC 14, CAB 27/91. 54. Sir Sankaran Nair, ‘Enclosure to memorandum by the Secretary of State for India on Ordinance IV (IDC 14)’, 22 April 1920. IDC 14, CAB 27/91. 55. See IOR: MSS Euro D523/3 and Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, pp. 341– 2. 56. He was good friends with Edward Carson and took his position as attorney general in October 1915, after which Birkenhead worked to execute Irish nationalist Roger Casement for his conspiracy to ship arms from Germany to Ireland during the Great War. Ironically, Birkenhead would, in 1921, negotiate with the IRA to establish Dominion Status, to the dismay of his former friend. He also became Secretary of State for India from 1924– 28. See Campbell, John, F.E. Smith: First Earl of Birkenhead (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983). 57. ‘1st minutes of meeting held in the military committee room, India Office’, Indian Disorders Committee, 21 April 1920, CAB 27/91. 58. ‘Note by the military secretary, India Office’, 21 April 1920, IDC 18, CAB 27/91. His pay as an active brigade commander was a hefty 2,300 rupees a month at a time when one rupee was about 1s. 4d. 59. ‘1st Minutes’, pp. 3 – 4. CAB 27/91. 60. Ibid., p. 5, CAB 27/91. 61. Dyer’s statement to Army Council, IDC 25, 4, CAB 27/91. 62. War Office, Manual of Military Law (London: HMSO, 1914), p. 223. Interestingly, by the 1960s, the training manuals at Staff College used Amritsar as an example of what not to do when assisting civil power. Thomas Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919– 1960 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), p. 24. 63. ‘2nd minutes on meeting held in the Military Committee Room, India Office’, Indian Disorders Committee, 26 April 1920, p. 4, CAB 27/91. 64. ‘5th minutes on meeting held in the Lord Chancellor’s Room, House of Lords’, Indian Disorders Committee, 18 May 1920, CAB 27/91. 65. Dyer’s statement to Army Council, IDC 25, p. 5, CAB 27/91. 66. Ibid., p. 12, CAB 27/91. 67. How successful they were in this endeavour is not clear. See Chandra Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880 – 1922 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 205 – 6. 68. Bombay Chronicle, no date given, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 200. 69. The Times, 10 April 1919, in Ibid., p. 204. The slowness of news was an issue even before the shooting at Amritsar. 70. Montagu to Viceroy Chelmsford, 28 May 1919, IOR: MSS Eur E264/5 vol 4, no. 15. See also Kaul, Reporting the Raj, pp. 204– 14. 71. Manchester Guardian, 13 December 1919, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 210. This may have been part of the reason that strict press censorship was not enforced in Ireland. 72. Major-General Sir C.H. Harington to Wilson, 4 – 7 July 1920, in The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson 1918– 1922, Jeffery, Keith (ed.) (London: Bodley Head, 1985), pp. 184– 7.

204

NOTES TO PAGES 83 –85

73. Westminster Gazette, 21 July 1920, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 220. 74. In Malaviya, Open Rebellion, p. 97. The Hunter Committee also disapproved of this order, not because it was wrong to demand to be respected, but because the details of how to do so in the order were no longer the common practice. Hunter Report, p. 96, CAB 27/91. 75. The Times, 4 June 1920, ‘Plea for Indian peace. Racial bias alleged’, p. 15. 76. Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 218. 77. Nehru, Jawarhalal, Toward Freedom: the Autobiography of Jawarhalal Nehru (New York: John Day Company, 1941), pp. 49 – 50. His memory may not have been entirely accurate, but it is clear that Dyer made an impression. 78. Bombay Chronicle, 14 April 1920. 79. The Times, 26 July 1920, ‘General Dyer’s case’, letter by Gupta, K.G., p. 10. 80. Ibid., 30 July 1920, ‘Loyal India. Ruling princes on reform. Mr. Montagu’s tribute. The Maharaja of Alwar’, p. 16. He was joined in sentiment by the Jam of Nawanagar. The comments were made at a dinner party at Lancaster House, at which none of the MPs who voted in Dyer’s favour were present. 81. Karr, Surrendra, British Terror in India (San Francisco: Hindustan Gadar Party, 1920), p. 1, in Rai, Satya M., ‘Jallianwala Bagh tragedy – Its impact on the political awakening and thinking in India’, in Jallianwala Bagh: Commemoration Volume and Amritsar and Our Duty to India, Singh et al (eds) (Patiala: Punjab University Press, 1994), p. 136. 82. Khan had been ‘friends’ with O’Dwyer when he was a young assistant commissioner. See Dewey, Clive, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), p. 218. Mehdi Shah was another Punjabi elite who served on the Governor’s Council. See Tribune, 23 September 1919, and Rai, ‘Jallianwala Bagh tragedy’, p. 134. 83. In Rai, ‘Jallianwala Bagh tragedy’, p. 134. 84. Government of India, August 1919, in V.N. Datta, Jallianwala Bagh (Ludhiana: Lyall Book Depot, 1969), p. 170. He received the following reply from the viceroy’s private secretary, Hignell: ‘His Excellency is unable to relieve you of your title of knighthood.’ See also Tagore’s letter in Hindi Weekly, 29 July 1920. 85. Government of India, 2 August 1920, in Datta, Jallianwala Bagh, p. 171. Also, Tribune 28 October 1920 and 3, 6, 28 November 1920. 86. Mohan, Kamlesh, ‘The Jallianwala Bagh tragedy and its impact as a catalyst of Indian national consciousness’, International Journal of Punjab Studies, 3, no. 2 (1996), p. 169. 87. Nair, C. Sankaran, Gandhi and Anarchy (Madras: Tagore Press, 1923).The Times, 1 May 1924, ‘High Court of Justice. King’s Bench Division. The disorders in the Punjab: Libel action. O’Dwyer vs Nair’, p. 5. 88. The Times, 6 May 1924, ‘High Court of Justice. King’s Bench Division. The disorders in the Punjab: Libel action. O’Dwyer vs Nair’, p. 5. McCardie, too, was Irish, or at least half from his father’s side. His interference angered a number of Labour MPs, such as George Lansbury (who wanted him removed from the bench) and Ramsay MacDonald. See Lentin, A., ‘McCardie, Sir Henry Alfred’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www. oxforddnb.com (accessed online 20 June 2008). 89. The Times, 5 June 1924, ‘High Court of Justice. King’s Bench Division. The disorders in the Punjab: Libel action. O’Dwyer vs Nair’, p. 5. 90. Ibid., 6 June 1924. ‘High Court of Justice. King’s Bench Division. The disorders in the Punjab: Libel action. O’Dwyer vs Nair’, p. 5. 91. The one who did not find for O’Dwyer was Harold Laski. Nair was ordered to pay a rather substantial fine of £500. The Times, 6 June 1924, p. 5. 92. Nation, 17 May 1919, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 203.

NOTES TO PAGES 85 –88

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93. Ibid., 29 May 1920, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 220. 94. The Times, 21 July 1920, ‘Lords support Gen. Dyer. A government defeat. Lord Sumner’s case for Amritsar’ (by a student of politics), p. 14. 95. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, cols. 1787– 8. For collaboration, see Newbury, Colin, Patrons, Clients, and Empire: Chieftancy and OverRule in Asia, Africa and the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robinson, Ronald, ‘Non-European foundations of European imperialism: sketch for a theory of collaboration’, in Owen, Roger and Sutcliffe, Bob (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (New York: Longman, 1972). I do not use the term ‘collaborators’ in a pejorative sense, but rather to refer to those subjects of empire who were willing to work with and help administer the empire to suit their own ends, including moderate nationalists eager to use peaceful, constitutional methods to win a greater share of power. 96. Westminster Gazette, 27 May 1920, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 221. 97. The Times, 8 July 1920, ‘The Amritsar debate’, p. 15. 98. This, of course, was a false analogy, but one the British made often. 99. Daily Telegraph, 20 May 1920. 100. Daily Express, 22 April 1919, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 203. 101. Daily Telegraph, 9 July 1920, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 221. 102. The Times, 8 June 1920, ‘General Dyer’s action’ (by ‘Freelance’), p. 10. 103. Ian Colvin, The Life of General Dyer (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1929), p. 257. The Connaught Rangers were the only major group of officers not present at the station because they had been forbidden to attend by their colonel. This was shortly before they mutinied and were disbanded. See Conclusion. 104. Draper, Alfred, Amritsar: The Massacre that Ended the Raj (London: Casell, 1981) pp. 214– 15. Even the Irish woman (and strong Indian advocate) Annie Besant, condemned the violence in Amritsar on 10 April, arguing that ‘brickbats have to be answered by bullets’, and that it is better to move toward independence through constitutional means. Times of India, 18 April 1919 excerpted ‘Note on organization’, Annexure xxi, Appendix IV, ‘Punjab government’s written statement’, Evidence, vol. 6, in New Light, Datta (ed.), vol. 1, p. 440. 105. See Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 106. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1816. 107. The Times, 9 July 1920, ‘The Dyer division. Ministers saved by the opposition’, p. 16. 108. Morning Post, 9 and 10 July 1920. 109. Colvin, The Life of General Dyer, p. 304. 110. Wilson’s Diary, 15 May 1920, in Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Bart., G.C.B., D.S.O.: His Life and Diaries, Major-General Sir C.E. Callwell (ed.), vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1927), p. 238. General Rawlinson agreed and claimed he would not accept the position of Commander-in-Chief for India if Dyer did not get a ‘proper’ military inquiry. Wilson was a symbol of anti-nationalist repression, so much so that the IRA assassinated him in 1922. He railed against unofficial reprisals, preferring official coercion instead. His killers acted alone, not, as some have suggested, on the orders of Michael Collins. See Jeffery, Keith, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. viii – ix, 284. 111. The Times, 14 July 1920, ‘After Amritsar. Civil and military authority. Need for clear instructions’ (letter by J. Wilson), p. 8. 112. Wilson’s Diary, 16 May 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 238. 113. War Office, 19 April 1920 in Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 354. 114. Sunday Times, 23 May 1920, ‘Amritsar. Hunter Commission Report. Shall General Dyer be sacrificed?’, p. 8.

206

NOTES TO PAGES 88 – 89

115. Montagu to Chelmsford, 22 April 1920, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/6, vol. 5, No. 7, p. 28. 116. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, cols. 1743, 1749. 117. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1750. See also Colonel E. A. Stead, ‘General Dyer and the Punjab disturbances of 1919’, Army Quarterly and Defence Journal 110, no. 2 (April 1980), pp. 219– 223. The rebuttal to such an argument by another military man follows: ‘Anyone who has any knowledge or experience of internal security duties when soldiers have to operate in aid of the civil power, would know that the unarmed crowds could not pose any real threat to the security of Dyer and his men.’ Lieutenant General Zorowar Chand Bakshi, ‘General Dyer and the Punjab disturbances of 1919’, Army Quarterly and Defence Journal 113, no. 2 (1983), p. 174. 118. Morning Post, 24 May 1920, ‘The Amritsar episode. Some sidelights on the event’, p. 6. 119. Daily Telegraph, 27 May 1920. 120. The Times, 10 June 1920, ‘Amritsar’, p. 12. 121. Ibid., 1 June 1920, ‘General Dyer and Amritsar’, p. 12. 122. Blackwoods Magazine, 207 (April 1920), p. 446. 123. Madras Mail, 22 July 1920, Front page advertisement by the Committee of Women to raise money for a Dyer Appreciation Fund. Their members included Mrs. E.C. Agabeg, Mrs. Dunlop, Mrs. Halliday, Mrs. Conts, Miss Baird and Miss E. Hadgkinson. They were based in Mussourie and Allahabad. 124. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1753. 125. Bose and Lyons, ‘Dyer consequences’, p. 206. 126. The Times, 8 July 1920. ‘Amritsar. The issue of to-day’s debate. India and the parliament’, p. 10. He called him ‘a great and tried Governor, who saved Jamaica’. Also in Sayer, Derek, ‘British reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919–1920’, Past and Present, 131 (May 1991), p. 152. Brigadier General Herbert Conyers Surtees recalled ‘Governor Eyre’s energy and courage saved the European inhabitants from massacre’, and like Dyer, ‘the European inhabitants of Jamaica subscribed £1,500 for the defence of Governor Eyre.’ See Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1776. Eyre suppressed the black revolt in 1865 by instituting martial law and killing hundreds. Eyre claimed that ‘a mere handful of troops amidst numerous and disaffected peasantry’ could rule only with ‘the dread of immediate and severe retribution’. Even the legal advisor to the government of India in the 1870s, Sir James Fitzjames Stephens, who, incidentally, was also the uncle of Virginia Woolf, argued that the British raj was founded ‘not on consent but on conquest’. See Stephens, J.F., ‘Foundations of the government of India’, Nineteenth Century 80 (October 1883): pp. 541–68. Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf, also spoke against imperial violence. In Eyre’s case, a riot in Morant Bay in which 22 died, 34 were wounded and five houses were burned, led Eyre to declare martial law for a month. Eyre then killed 439 blacks, either by having his soldiers shoot them as rebels without trial or by hanging them after a court-martial. He flogged 600 more, including women, and burned 1,000 cottages and houses. Like Dyer, Eyre’s actions were investigated and he was dismissed from office. However, unlike Dyer, the debates in Parliament found Eyre not guilty of any crime against his subjects or the empire. Eyre’s supporters included Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Ruskin and Charles Dickens. These were the same men who also supported the harsh reaction to the 1857 Mutiny in India. Eyre’s critics included John Stuart Mill, John Bright, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spenser and Charles Darwin. Eyre was ‘vindicated’ in 1872 and received not only his pension, but also the money he had spent for his legal costs. See Bose and Lyons, ‘Dyer consequences’, p. 219. Also, Semmel, Bernard, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon and Kee,

NOTES TO PAGES 89 –92

127.

128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133.

134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139.

140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

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1962), pp. 171–9; Craton, Michael, Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1974), pp. 314–5; Dutton, Geoffrey, The Hero as Murderer: The Life of Edward John Eyre Australian Explorer and Governor of Jamaica, 1815–1901 (Melbourne: Collins, Cheshire, 1967), p. 283. The 1857 Mutiny was evoked several times during debates over Eyre. See Hall, Catherine, ‘Competing masculinities: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and the case of Governor Eyre’, in White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), pp. 255–95. In case the reader is interested, Eyre was Australian, not Irish. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1777. Surtees came from a long line of English Lords from Durham. He, too, was disgusted with the behavior or Irish ‘rebels’. See Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series vol. 156, 13 July,1922, cols. 1469 – 70. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1775. Ibid., col. 1778. The Times, 13 July 1920, ‘General Dyer’, p. 8. O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, p. 325. Indians also established funds, including the Jallianwala Bagh Memorial Fund and the Tilak Memorial Swaraj Fund (named for the nationalist leader who died in August 1920, and primarily used them to support the non-cooperation/swaraj movement of boycotting of the British goods and government; in its initial stages it also provided assistance to victims of martial law. For details about government payout to European parties for damages during the riots (roughly rupees 450,000) versus Indian parties injured/killed (roughly rupees 13,840), see Telegram Chelmsford to Montagu, 25 October 1920, IOR: MSS EUR E264/13 vol 7, No. 479, p. 356. The Morning Post advertised its subscriptions in many Anglo-Indian newspapers including the Pioneer, Statesman, Englishman, Madras Mail, and the Civil and Military Gazette. W.B. Gladstone sent ten guineas. Draper, Amritsar, p. 237. Obviously, the prohibition was not effective. Other funds for Dyer were set up in India as well, including The Statesman, which raised rupees 20,000, the Pioneer and Englishman, which raised rupees 10,00, and other newspapers, such as the Rangoon Times, and the Civil and Military Gazette, which raised smaller amounts. Morning Post, 12 July 1920. The Morning Post, 9 – 15 July 1920 published most of these subscriptions to the Dyer Fund. Also in Sayer, ‘British reaction’, p. 158. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1708. Ibid. Ibid., col. 1707. Ibid. An editorial in The Times attacked Montagu for beginning this impassioned speech because it was not in keeping with how ‘the English mind’ works and ‘Mr. Montagu, patriotic and sincere English Liberal as he is, is also a Jew, and in excitement has the mental idiom of the East.’ The Times, 9 July 1920, ‘Amritsar Debate’ (by ‘a Student of Politics’), p. 16. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1811. Ibid. Yet, this was exactly what happened in Ireland, endlessly for two years. Stanley Rice, Fortnightly Review, 19 July 1920. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1731. Ibid., cols. 1730. Ibid., col. 1728. Churchill would not condemn the shooting of an unarmed crowd at Croke Park, Dublin, four months later. Ibid., col. 1725.

208

NOTES TO PAGES 92 –96

147. The Times, 8 July 1920, ‘Amritsar. The issue of today’s debate. India and the parliament’ (letter by Archdale Earle), p. 10. 148. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1729. 149. Ibid., col. 1736. 150. Ibid., col. 1783. 151. Ibid., cols. 1785 – 6. But preventative violence is exactly what the government would pursue in Ireland. 152. The Times, 25 June 1920, ‘Labour Party Congress’, p. 6. Perhaps this showed, ‘a wider working-class identification with the victims of Jallianwala, and fear that their strikes might meet with the same treatment’. Sayer, ‘British reaction’, p. 152. This may have been true from elite Labour’s perspective, but the English rank and file seemed less concerned that ‘Dyerism’ would come home to roost, in some cases encouraging the use of violence, especially in Ireland. See Boyce, D.G., Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy, 1918– 22 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). 153. Labour Leader, 3 June 1920. See also, Labour Leader, 11 March, 10 June, and 15 July 1920. 154. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1740. 155. Ibid., col. 1739. 156. Ibid., cols. 1738 – 40. 157. Ibid., col. 1740. Sir John French served as Ireland’s viceroy at the time. 158. Ibid., col. 1741. 159. The Times, 12 July 1920, ‘The Dyer debate. Sacrifice of broader issues. Personal Antipathies’, p. 10. 160. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 41, 19 July 1920, col. 222. 161. Ibid., col. 223. 162. Ibid., col. 225. Punitive actions in Ireland, where there was an insurrection, failed to restore law and order. 163. Ibid., cols. 236 – 7. 164. Ibid., col. 291. 165. Ibid., col. 289. 166. Ibid., col. 298. 167. Ibid., col. 234, 338. 168. Ibid., cols. 318 – 22. 169. Ibid., col. 353. 170. Ibid., col. 352. 171. Ibid., col. 363. 172. Ibid., col. 364. Some early speculation about the nature of the unrest in Punjab, before adequate information was released to the public, actually connected it to Bolshevism. One editorial believed what happened in Jallianwala Bagh was ‘a deliberate attempt to overturn British rule altogether’ fueled ‘unquestionably’ by ‘the Russian Bolshevist movement’. The Times, 15 and 19 April 1919, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 202. 173. Ibid., col. 275. 174. Ibid., col. 276. 175. Ibid., 20 July 1920, col. 359. 176. Ibid., 19 July 1920, col. 300. 177. Ibid., col. 301. 178. Datta, Jallianwala Bagh, p. 150. 179. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 41, 19 July 1920, col. 312. 180. Ibid., col. 313. 181. Ibid., col. 318. 182. Ibid., 20 July 1920, col. 368.

NOTES TO PAGES 97 –100

209

183. The Times, 23 July 1920, ‘General Dyer’s case’, p. 10. An Indian, K.C. Gupta, responded to this logic as ‘a curious confusion of thought’, suggesting that Lamington ought to have censured the government directly rather than to have voted for Dyer if it was not his intention to defend him. The Times, 26 July 1920, ‘General Dyer’s case’, p. 10. 184. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 41, 19 July 1920, col. 260. 185. Ibid., col. 261. 186. Ibid., col. 376. 187. The Times, 21 July 1920, ‘Amritsar in the Lords’, p. 15. 188. Manchester Guardian, ‘An unwise vote’, 21 July 1920. Also Kent, Susan Kingsley, Aftershocks: The Politics of Trauma in Britain, 1918– 1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 189. Also Sayer, ‘British reaction’, p. 153; Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, p. 377. 190. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1715. 191. Ibid., col. 1711. 192. Ibid., col. 1712. 193. The Times, 13 July 1920, ‘General Dyer’, p. 8. Also in Sayer, ‘British reaction’, n. 85. 194. Manchester Guardian, 9 July 1920. Also in Sayer, ‘British reaction’, p. 153. The period after the Great War was marked by serious labor strife, including a general strike in 1926. But using force to crush strikes was not unprecedented, as Churchill did to a miner’s strike in Tonypandy, South Wales, in 1910. See Fox, K.O., ‘The Tonypandy Riots’, Army Quarterly and Defence Journal 104, no. 1 (October 1973); Jeffery, Keith and Hennessy, Peter, States of Emergency: British Governments and Strikebreaking since 1919 (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1983). Also, Kent, Aftershocks. 195. Daily Herald, 13 July 1919, in Chandra Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880– 1922 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 211. 196. Nation, 20 December 1919, in Kaul, Reporting the Raj, p. 211. 197. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 41, 20 July 1920, col. 338. 198. Montagu to Churchill, 25 June 1920, in Collet, Butcher of Amritsar, pp. 368 –9. 199. De Valera, Eamon, India and Ireland (New York: Friends of Freedom for India, 1920), p. 15. 200. Ibid., p. 22. 201. Jinnah, M.A., Presidential Address to Muslim League, Calcutta, 1920, in Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents, 1906 – 1947, Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada (ed.), vol. 1 (Karachi: National Pub. House, 1969), pp. 242 – 3. 202. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1732. 203. The Times, 21 July 1920, ‘Parliament. General Dyer’s case. Lord Finlay’s motion adopted’, p. 7. Ironically, he supported the reprisals against the IRA by the end of the year. 204. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1754. 205. Baron Ampthill (Oliver Russell) served as Governor of Madras from 1900 –1906 and interim Viceroy of India in 1904. He co-founded the National Party in 1917, which was a right-wing split from the Conservative Party, known for its particularly harsh stance towards Ireland. 206. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 41, 19 July 1920, col. 293. 207. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 41, 18 July 1920, col. 294. 208. The Times, 25 June 1920, ‘Labour Party Congress. The Irish problem. Ulster cannot be ignored. The Amritsar shooting’, p. 6. What ‘self determination’ meant was debatable. 209. Labour Leader, 15 July 1920. The comment was by A. Fenner Brockway, who was born in Calcutta and became a fierce anti-imperialist. Along these lines, A.J. Brobin made a resolution at the 28th Annual Conference of the Independent Labour Party in Glasgow

210

210. 211.

212. 213.

214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221.

222. 223.

NOTES TO PAGES 100 –106 ‘that complete autonomy be granted to Ireland, India, and Egypt in accordance with the expressed wishes of the populations of these lands’. In Mesbahuddin Ahmen, ‘Indian political developments and the British Labour Party (1919– 1924): Some reflections’, Journal of Indian History 60 (1982), pp. 170– 1. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1789. Ibid., col. 1790. At this point, the fact that India might be partitioned was still unthinkable. Arguably, it remained so until well into the 1940s. See Jalal, Ayesha, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1791–2. Ibid., cols. 1792– 3. This was not unlike the opinions of Milner’s Round Table, which pre-dated the war. On the Commonwealth idea, see Curtis, Lionel, The Commonwealth of Nations: an Enquiry into the Nature of Citizenship in the British Empire, and into the Mutual Relations of the Several Communities Thereof (London: Macmillan, 1916); Miller, J.D.B., Britain and the Old Dominions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966); Mansergh, Nicholas, The Commonwealth Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 131, 8 July 1920, col. 1709. Ibid., col. 1710. The Times, 8 July 1920, ‘The Amritsar debate’, p. 15. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 41, 19 July 1920, col. 263. I am referring to the Croke Park shooting of 21 November 1920, along with other incidents of violent reprisals against the IRA in numerous Irish towns, discussed in the next chapters. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 41, 19 July 1920, col. 263. See Young Ireland, 24 April and 29 May 1920. Also, Davis, Richard P., ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda, 1905 –22’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh 22, no. 1 (1977), p. 79. Irish Catholic, 27 November 1920. This is notable because it was an anti-revolutionary paper. See also, Gaelic American, 27 November 1920; World, 25 November 1920; Advocate, 25 November 1920. The last two were based in Hobart, Tasmania, and Melbourne, Australia, respectively. In fact, Old Ireland, 20 December 1919 held O’Dwyer responsible for the shooting at Amritsar and suggested that he should be excommunicated. All in Davis, ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, pp. 79–80. See also Bishop Charles Gore’s editorial, The Times, 19 November 1920, 6e and Moulton, Mo, Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 88. ‘Our home letter’, Maoriland Worker, 2 June 1920, vol 11, no 181, p. 2. See Republic, 28 June 1919.

Chapter 3

The Anglo-Irish War

1. In Cork County alone there were 23 riots in 1919, 13 in 1920, but none in 1921, which historian Peter Hart argues, ‘reflects the increased danger of such activities but it also indicates the end of republicanism as a mass movement and the dampening of popular enthusiasm for “the cause”.’ Hart, Peter, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916– 1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 104. 2. ‘These men have undoubtedly been influenced by what they have taken to be the passive approval of their officers from Tudor downwards to believe that they will never be punished for anything.’ Sturgis Diary, 19 December, 1920, in Hopkinson, Michael. ed., The Last Days of Dublin Castle: The Mark Sturgis Diaries (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999), p. 95.

NOTES TO PAGES 106 –107

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3. R. Barry O’Brien in Leon O Broin, Dublin Castle and the 1916 Rising (Dublin: Helicon, 1966), p. 20. Also in Holmes, Richard, The Little Field Marshal Sir John French (London: J. Cape, 1981), p. 321. 4. French supported wholeheartedly General Maxwell’s treatment of the leading rebels of 1916. French described Maxwell as “a tough [Scottish] Highlander.” Holmes, Sir John French, pp. 323– 5. 5. He eventually resigned as lord lieutenant on 30 April, 1921 and passed away in 1925 from cancer of the bladder. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes French as ‘the product of the nineteenth century and intellectually and temperamentally unsuited to meeting the challenges of the new conditions pertaining to warfare. Yet he was neither a butcher nor a bungler, and in many respects French was the best the system could produce at that time and place.’ Beckett, Ian, ‘French, John Denton Pinkstone,’ available at www.oxforddnb.com; accessed online 29 May, 2008. 6. In Jeffery, Keith, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 267. 7. It was put on hold because Britain was on the verge of a civil war as Unionists, led by Sir Edward Carson, threatened to revolt if Home Rule should be implemented. The classic work on this, which has stood the test of time, is Dangerfield, George, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York: Capricorn Books, 1935; repr., 1961). For more on the Curragh Mutiny and how difficult it would have been to force Home Rule on Ulster, see Fergusson, James, The Curragh Incident (London: Faber and Faber, 1964) and Muenger, Elizabeth, The British Military Dilemma in Ireland: Occupation Politics, 1886 – 1914 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1991). For details about Home Rule itself, see Childers, Erskine, The Framework of Home Rule (London: E. Arnold, 1911). 8. Despite the official decision by the British War Cabinet to extend conscription to Ireland in April 1918, a draft was never implemented because of a fear that to have imposed one on the island after 1916 when the general sentiment had turned against Britain would have sparked an eruption of violence. The police in Ireland preferred to resign rather than to enforce the order. Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies, pp. 59 – 61. 9. Ranelagh, John O’Bierne, A Short History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 175– 6. This show of loyalty was John Redmond’s policy, the leading Irish MP. See also, Harris, Henry, The Irish Regiments in the First World War (Cork: Mercier Press, 1968); Denman, Terence, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers: The 16 th (Irish) Division in the Great War, 1914– 1918 (Dublin: Academic Press, 1992); Callan, Patrick, ‘Voluntary Recruiting for the British Army in Ireland during the First World War’ (unpublished PhD Dissertation, University College Dublin, 1984). 10. The Rising also included some small skirmishes in the Irish countryside, especially in Meath, Galway, and Cork, but these events were not nearly of the same scale as the events in Dublin. For more on the Rising, see Edwards, Ruth Dudley, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London: Gollancz, 1977); Martin, F.X. (ed.), Leaders and Men of the Easter Rising: Dublin 1916 (London: Methuen, 1967); Nowlan, Kevin, (ed.), The Making of 1916: Studies in the History of the Rising (Dublin: Stationary Office, 1969); Townshend, Charles, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion (London: Allen Lane, 2005). 11. French Diary Entry in Holmes, Sir John French, p. 325. 12. Maxwell to French, 13 May, 1916, in Holmes, Sir John French, 325. See also, Kee, Robert, The Green Flag: Volume III, Ourselves Alone (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 6 – 17. Kee’s book was first published in New York by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1972, but it has held up well over the years. See also, Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland; Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies.

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13. Technically, it would be fair to refer to the Volunteers as the IRA from 1916 onwards, although they did not necessarily use the name IRA so regularly at the time. 14. In Cork alone, more than 700 died from 1917 to 1923, of which 400 were killed by the IRA and 900 were wounded. Over a third dead were civilians, averaging one victim for every 240 people, according to the Irish Census. This did not include ‘beating, raids, kidnapping, torture, arson, robbery & vandalism,’ which amounted to the ‘every day traffic in terror and destruction.’ Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, pp. 50 – 1. 15. Statistics vary, but probably around 366 policemen were killed along with 162 soldiers. 1,166 police and soldiers were wounded. Roughly 552 IRA men and about another 200 Irish civilians were killed. Macardle, Dorothy, The Irish Republic; A Documented Chronicle of the Anglo-Irish Conflict and the Partitioning of Ireland, With a Detailed Account of the Period 1916– 23 (London: Farrar, 1968, first pub 1937), p. 478; Bennett, Richard, The Black and Tans: The British Special Police Force in Ireland 3rd edn. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995), p. 188– 89; Hopkinson, Michael, Irish War of Independence (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2002), pp. 201 – 2. These statistics are for the area that became the Irish Free State only. Another 450 or so were killed in what became Northern Ireland during roughly the same years. Lynch, Robert, ‘The People’s Protectors? The Irish Republican Army and the “Belfast Pogrom,” 1920 –1922’, Journal of British Studies 47 (April 2008): 375; Hart, Peter, The IRA at War, 1916– 1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 50. By contrast, the Punjab suffered, officially, a total of 412 deaths in the few days of rioting preceding the subsequent months of martial law. 16. French Diary, 14 June, 1916, in Holmes, Sir John French, p. 326. 17. Postal Censorship 6th Report on the Correspondence of the Irish Internees, 1 to 15 January, 1919, CO 904/164/3. 18. Kathleen Fallon to Bernard J. Fallon in Birmingham Prison, 13 January, 1919, Postal Censorship 6th Report, 1 to 15 January, 1919, CO 904/164/3. 19. D. Figgis, Durham Prison to M. Murphy, Brixton Prison, 13 January, 1919, Postal Censorship 6th Report, 1 to 15 January, 1919, CO 904/164/3. 20. Indian nationalists were also referring to Wilsonian notions at the same time. See Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Manela, Erez, ‘The “Wilsonian Moment” in India and the Crisis of Empire in 1919,’ in Yet More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, ed. Wm. Roger Louis (London: I.B.Tauris, 2005), pp. 271– 88. 21. Joseph McGuinness, Gloucester Prison (elected representative of North and South Longford) to a constituent, Miss Bridget Lyons, 29 December, 1918, Postal Censorship 5th Report on the Correspondence of the Irish Internees, 16 – 31 December, 1918, CO 904/164/4. 22. Peter O’Hourihane, Birmingham Prison, to Miss Roisin McCabe, 26 December, 1918, Postal Censorship 5th Report on the Correspondence of the Irish Internees, 16 – 31 December, 1918 (12), CO 904/164/4. Of course, Indians also had a long history of enduring censorship, both in the press and in prison. 23. Register of Civilians Tried by Courts-Martial for Breaches of the Defense of the Realm Regulations, in Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 56. 24. Ibid., p. 57. 25. Memo to Chief Secretary Ian Macpherson, 4 November, 1919, in Holmes, Sir John French, p. 355. 26. Chief Secretary of Ireland (Greenwood) to Lord Privy Seal (Bonar Law), 18 May, 1920, in Townshend, Charles, The British Campaign in Ireland: The Development of Political and Military Policies (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 77.

NOTES TO PAGES 109 –110

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27. Examiner, 13 July, 1917 reported this as an instance of police brutality. See Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 54. 28. County Inspector Monthly Report, North Tipperary, July 1917, in Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 55. 29. However, it was left ‘to the discretion of the Medical Officers to take whatever measures may be necessary to prevent collapse. The Chief Secy. [Secretary] holds a strong opinion that if feeding is necessary to maintain life it must be resorted to, as otherwise those responsible might render themselves liable to verdict of manslaughter.’ Memorandum in Reference to the Practice of the Abandonment of Forcible Feedings in Ireland, 9 November, 1918, CO 906/18/3. 30. Prisoners threatened to go on hunger strike as late as April 1920, in some cases for reasons such as not hearing whether they would be granted parole to spend time with an ailing family member. See CO 906/18/3. For a comparison between Indian and Irish hungerstriking, see Grant, Kevin, ‘The transcolonial world of hunger strikes and political fasts, c. 1909–1935,’ in Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, eds. Durba Gosh and Dane Kennedy (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006), pp. 243–69. 31. ‘A movement to boycott the police seems to be in general contemplation.’ County Inspector Monthly Report, West Cork, April 1918, in Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, 61. 32. For more on how they ostracized the RIC, see Sergeant Anthony Foody’s Report, 4 April, 1920, CO 904/148 and Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 76. 33. The RIC had been a respectable career for Irishmen before 1916. See Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, 1 – 4; Brewer, John, The Royal Irish Constabulary: An Oral History (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1990). 34. Kathleen Boland to Considine O’Donovan, 19 September, 1918, Postal Censorship Report on the Correspondence of 97 Irish Internees, July to October, 1918 (859) CO 904/164/4. 35. Under-Secretary to Chief Secretary, 15 June, 1918, in Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 10. Townshend’s focus is on the poor intelligence gathering techniques of Crown Forces, and on how the civil authorities did not coordinate well with the military. See also Townshend, Charles Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983/2001). For a different view, see Hart, Peter, British Intelligence in Ireland: The Final Reports (Irish Narratives) (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002). Hart argues that the IRA was not nearly as adept at intelligence gathering as historians previously thought. 36. Lyons, F.S.L., Ireland Since the Famine (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 386. 37. Ironically, his sister, Charlotte Despard, was a feminist and Sinn Fein nationalist who criticized her younger brother’s commitment to crushing the Irish rebels. She also participated in societies supportive of Indian independence, and helped found the Indian-Irish Independence League in 1932. O’Malley, Kate, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections: 1919 – 64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 184. 38. For women’s experience during the war years, see Ward, Margaret, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1983); Sheehan, Aideen, ‘Cumann na mBan: policies and activities’ in Revolution? Ireland 1917 – 23, ed. David Fitzpatrick (Dublin: Trinity History Workshop, 1990); Buckley, Margaret, The Jangle of the Keys (Dublin: J. Duffy and Co., 1938) and McCoole, Sinead, Guns and Chiffon: Women revolutionaries and Kilmainham Gaol (Dublin: Stationary Office, 1997). 39. They declared a ‘Special Military Area’ over Cork and a 7pm curfew in Eyeries. Acting County Inspector RIC, Cork West Regiment, to Inspector General RIC, 7 October to 19 November, 1918, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 11.

214

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40. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 63. 41. See Holmes, Richard, Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914 (London: Harper Collins, 2005); Mason, Philip, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (London: J. Cape, 1974). 42. Report of General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Ireland, 30 August, 1918, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 12. 43. General Boyd (Dublin District) to Macready, 8 October, 1921, in Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, pp. 91– 92, 110. 44. (Macready to Wilson) Wilson Diary, 10 September, 1920, in Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: His Life and Diaries, Major-General Sir C.E. Callwell, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1927), 262. The battalions were to be taken away from Ireland in order to put down the coal and railway strike the government was expecting in September 1920. 45. For more on the many differences of opinion both between the IRA and Sinn Fein and within the IRA, see Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies. 46. Both men were in prison at the time, but de Valera was sprung from jail by Michael Collins about a month before the British government agreed to release all Sinn Fein MPs from prison as a sign of good faith and to appeal to ‘moderate’ opinion. De Valera then left for the US to raise funds for the republic, leaving Griffith as acting president. Interestingly, Griffith remained intellectually committed to non-violence. See Davis, Richard P., ‘Griffith and Gandhi: A Study in Non-Violent Resistance’, Threshold, 3 (1959): pp. 29 – 44. Also in January 1919 the Liberal Ian Macpherson became the new Chief Secretary for Ireland, but only for a year until Sir Hamar Greenwood was appointed to the position from 1920 to 1922. 47. Technically, there was no explicit declaration of war that marked the actual beginning. 48. They were trying to rescue Sean Hogan. By summer 1919, the IRA focused intentionally on assassinations, as on 23 June 1919, when RIC District Inspector Hunt was killed at the centre of Thurles in County Tipperary. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 20. Also Holmes, Sir John French, p. 350. 49. The most violent county, Cork, witnessed a total of ten people killed and 44 wounded from 1917 to 1919. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 71. 50. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 104. 51. For more on how the local IRA units acted in such secrecy that their planned attacks were often not made known to or authorized by the IRA high command, see Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 72. 52. Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland, p. 194. 53. Ibid., p. 194. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 73. 54. Sturgis Diary, 1 November, 1920, in Hopkinson, ed. The Last Days of Dublin Castle, p. 64. 55. French Diary, 30 April, 1918, in Holmes, Sir John French, p. 335. 56. Ibid., p. 357. Sir Hamar Greenwood became the Chief Secretary of Ireland in 1920 and although he was a Liberal at the time, he became a Conservative by 1924. Churchill served as War Secretary from January 1919 to February 1921. He was preceded by Alfred Milner (1918 to 1919) and succeeded by Sir Laming Worthington-Evans until October 1922. 57. The idea of offering Dominion Status to Ireland, as was the case for Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, was still ‘impossible’ during much of the Anglo-Irish War. See CAB 27/70. Ironically, this is what Southern Ireland eventually won by 1922. 58. As late as August 1921, members of the cabinet also refused to give the rebels the official status of prisoners of war because they lacked uniforms and would not often fight in the open, as traditional enemy combatants. To this extent, it was thought that the rebels

NOTES TO PAGES 113 –116

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

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could be treated kindly on humanitarian grounds or could be treated harshly as ‘murderers’. CAB 27/130. Others included Alfred Cope, an Assistant Under-Secretary for Ireland; William Wylie, an Irish Supreme Court Judge; Mark Sturgis, another Assistant Under-Secretary; Sir John French. Cabinet Conference, 31 May, 1920, in Jones, Thomas, Whitehall Diary: Volume III, Ireland 1918– 1925 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969– 71), pp. 17 –18. See also Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 88. Parenthesis not added. Law Advisor to Chief Secretary of Ireland, May 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 98. Long to Prime Minister Lloyd George, 18 June, 1920, in Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 99. See Alvin Jackson, ‘Long, Walter Hume’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available at www.oxforddnb.com; (accessed 14 June, 2008). Cabinet Conversation, 30 April, 1920, in Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 40. For a similar point, see Bowden, T., ‘Bloody Sunday – A Reappraisal’, European Studies Review, 2, no. 1 (1972): 28. Memorandum, Commander-in-Chief Ireland, 24 May, 1920, in Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 99. Macready, the son of a famous actor, had served in the Indian Army in Ceylon from 1890– 2, in Dublin from 1892 to 1899, and then returned to India in 1899 before being transferred to fight in South Africa. In 1918 he became Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police just after they had gone on strike for better wages, and he remained a Liberal supporter of Home Rule. He was offered the chance to head both the army and the police force in Ireland, but refused it, which is how Sir Henry Tudor found himself in charge of the RIC. See Jeffery, Keith, ‘Macready, Sir (Cecil Frederick) Nevil,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, available at www. oxforddnb.com; (accessed 29 May, 2008). In the early stages of the Anglo-Irish War, Greenwood’s rather conciliatory policies included an unwillingness to hold suspects without trial for very long. He also reduced the number of deportations of suspected rebels and insisted on the use of trial by jury even though juries were not likely to convict most IRA men. Eventually, he used stronger measures, which I discuss below, but he never wholeheartedly supported martial law. See Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, pp. 99–100. Townshend argues that what underlined the ‘campaign to restore order’ in Ireland was the belief among British officials such as Lloyd George that they could return to ‘moderate Irish opinion’ and constitutional politics if only they could crush the IRA; but crushing guerillas could not be accomplished without negatively affecting the civilian population. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, pp. 38–9. See Tudor’s observations about this in Crozier, Frank P., Impressions and Recollections (London: Werner Laurie, 1930), p. 251. See also, Holmes, Sir John French, p. 351; Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, pp. 41 – 4. Ireland actually lost troops for this reason, as I discuss below. See also Susan Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918– 1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Parenthesis not added. British Military Liabilities: Minute by Chief of the Imperial General Staff (Wilson), 15 June, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, 87. It was not until July 1920 that there were 40 infantry battalions and eight cavalry regiments in Ireland, which were just barely enough to police the island. See Note on the Garrison in Ireland by the Imperial General Staff, CAB 24/107. Wilson Diary, 28 July, 1920 in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, 254. Ibid., 30 July, 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, pp. 254– 5. Clearly, Wilson made no distinction between Sinn Fein and the IRA.

216

NOTES TO PAGES 116 –119

72. In Jeffery, Keith, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 266. 73. I am referring to the violence in Punjab and the northwest Frontier Province. A rebellion on the southwest Malabar Coast of India (then part of the Madras Presidency, but now Kerala) broke out in the summer 1921. Historian Charles Townshend has argued that the government preferred to ‘shroud’ their efforts in Ireland ‘in obscurity’, so that the officer on the spot was to judge how much force he should use in a given situation. If he were to make a mistake, he alone would suffer for it. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 43. Townshend doesn’t make the connection to Dyer, but I argue that their sensitivity to public opinion was largely informed by it. 74. Sir John Anderson was appointed to the committee from May 1920 to 1922 as Joint Under-Secretary for Ireland, but he would go on to become the Governor of Bengal from 1932– 37. 75. Jones, Whitehall Diary, pp. iii, 42. Also Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 137. 76. Macready to Jeudwine, 10 December, 1920, in Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 138. 77. Memo by Decie, no date, in Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 139. 78. Statesman, 10 August, 1920, in Helen Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment: The Massacre at Jallianwalah Bagh and British Judgement, 1919 – 1920 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1977), pp. 133 – 4. 79. Wilson Diary, 12 July, 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 252. 80. Ibid., 17 July, 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 254. 81. Memo, Chief Secretary of Ireland, 24 July, 1920, in Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 103. Before, DORA only allowed this if one had allegedly helped an external enemy. 82. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 106. 83. Cabinet Conference, 14 November, 1919, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 39. 84. Cabinet, 13 August, 1920 and Cabinet Irish Situation Committee, 26 May, 1921, in Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, p. 136. 85. 26th Brigade Instructions, June 1921, in Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 83. 86. Ibid., p. 84. 87. Irish Bulletin, 27 November, 1920 and Examiner, 23 –30 November, 1920, in Ibid., p. 84. 88. See Breen, Dan, My Fight for Irish Freedom (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1924); Barry, Tom, Guerrilla Days in Ireland: A Firsthand Account of the Black and Tan War (1919 – 1921) (New York: The Devin-Adair, 1956). The British formed their own flying columns in order to ambush the IRA by April 1921, a few months before the truce. Before then, they relied on large, motorized groups that were easily detected by IRA men and ambushed. See Mockaitis, Thomas, British Counterinsurgency, 1919– 60 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 149 – 52. 89. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland, pp. 136– 7. 90. Ibid., p. 206. 91. Townshend also suggests that public opinion was important, arguing, ‘The Cabinet’s belief that the Black and Tans, being nominally police, would be less offensive to public opinion than outright military administration, was a monumental act of self-deception.’ Ibid., p. 104. 92. English, Richard, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 20– 1; Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 92. Also, RIC Reports, Inspector General, June 1920, CO 904/11. On how the IRA intimidated the RIC, and the general public, see Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies.

NOTES TO PAGES 119 –120

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93. ‘The men we may expect to recruit are largely men of the New Army, willing to join up again for a short period, who will need the strictest discipline.’ Report of Committee under General Sir C.F.N. Macready, 19 May, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 93. 94. Cabinet, 21 May, 1920, in Ibid., p. 93. 95. Lloyd George realized that this may have been a mistake, but felt that ‘until we are through with Home Rule a man of less intelligence and more stolidity would be a more useful instrument to administer the interregnum.’ Lloyd George to Bonar Law, 30 December, 1919, in Ibid., 45. 96. They actually earned this nickname after a reprisal in Limerick, discussed below. For more sartorial details about their uniforms, including the unwillingness of Irish tailors to produce police uniforms, see Leeson, David, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 25–6. 97. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, 94. Also CAB 23/23 and 24/122. The dogs were known for their ‘ability to hunt and kill anything’. Crozier, Frank, A Word To Gandhi: The Lesson of Ireland (London: Williams and Norgate, 1931), 27; See also historical fiction by Llywelyn, Morgan, 1921 (New York: Forge, 2001), pp. 210 – 11. 98. Technically, he was appointed as police advisor even though he lacked any experience in police work (unlike Macready). As he came to direct the RIC, his position was changed in November 1920 to chief of police. Leeson, The Black and Tans, p. 32. 99. Letter from Tudor to Churchill Enclosing Notes on Certain Points Raised by Two Sergeants of the Royal Irish Constabulary, 27 June, 1920, SIC 4, CAB 27/108. 100. The British Army in Ireland had a long history of both ‘coercion and conciliation’. See Curtis, Lewis Perry, Coercion and Conciliation in Ireland, 1880– 1892: A Study in Conservative Unionism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963) and Muenger, Elizabeth, The British Military Dilemma in Ireland: Occupation Politics, 1886 – 1914 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1991). The latter is helpful in its discussion of the Curragh Incident of 1914 when British officers refused to use force against Ulster Unionists to enforce Home Rule. 101. Townshend, Charles, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 47–8. Also, Abbott, Richard, Police Casualties in Ireland, 1919– 1922 (Cork: Mercier Press, 2000); O’Donnell, Stephen, The Royal Irish Constabulary and the Black and Tans in County Louth, 1919–1922 ([Ireland]: S. O’Donnell, 2004). 102. Letter, Tudor to Churchill, 27 June, 1920, SIC 4, CAB 27/108. 103. C Company was among the first auxiliary divisions set up, recruited in July and August, and trained for only six weeks at the military camp at Curragh, near Dublin. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 27. 104. Ainsworth, John, ‘The Black and Tans and Auxiliaries in Ireland, 1920– 1921: Their Origins Role and Legacy,’ (paper presented to the Annual Conference of the Queensland History Teacher’s Association in Brisbane, Saturday, 12 May 2001), p. 5. 105. Ostensibly, Divisional Commissioners controlled each company and consulted with the military, but in practice, they only trained their companies for a brief six weeks, after which the companies acted independently, commanded by former army officers, each of whom had three section leaders under them. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 112. 106. Ibid., 142. To reach such great numbers, the RIC reduced their standards for recruitment. Thus, they began accepting men shorter than five feet, eight inches. This upset some of the older members of the RIC, and is partly why local Irish referred to the Black and Tans as ‘little chaps of 5 foot 6 – and with no character.’ Robinson, Lennox (ed.), Lady Gregory’s Journals (London: Putnam and Co., 1946), p. 144.

218

NOTES TO PAGES 120 –123

107. Fitzpatrick, David, Politics and Irish Life, 1913– 21: Provisional Experience of War and Revolution (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977), p. 27. 108. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 102. 109. Phillips, Alison, The Revolution in Ireland (London: Longman’s, 1923), 69; Irish Times, p. 9 September, 1919. See also, Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 30. 110. Examiner, 23 October 23 and 5 November, 1919, in Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 63. 111. The military sacked Fermoy again in June 1920, as discussed below. 112. For example, it became increasingly common for the IRA to force Irish civilians to contribute to their Arms Fund, and those who did not could be tortured or killed. See Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 81. 113. The IRA often attacked unarmed men who were either off-duty or for some other reason unable to defend themselves. See Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, pp. 87 – 9. 114. The coroner’s jury accused Lloyd George, French, Macpherson, T.J. Smith, Divisional Inspector Clayton, District Inspector Swanzy and other members of the RIC. See Report of Coroner’s Verdict, 17 April, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, 97. Also, Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, pp. 78– 9. 115. Montagu to Chelsmford, 9 September, 1920, IOR: MSS Eur E 264/6 vol. 5, No. 20 (p. 78). 116. County Inspector Report, West Cork, June 1920, in Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 77. 117. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, 100. See also, Borgonovo, John, Spies, Informers and the ‘Anti-Sinn Fein Society’: The Intelligence War in Cork City, 1920 –1921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007). 118. Interview with soldier of 2nd battalion, August 1986 in Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 95. Hart adds the war was characterized by ‘terror and counter-terror, murder after murder, death squad against death squad, fed by both sides’ desire for revenge. Each new atrocity demanded a reply and so set off another round of reprisals. . .This pattern was repeated all over the country . . . [in] sequences of interlocking reprisals.’ Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, pp. 96 –7. 119. Macready to Anderson, 3 November, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 113. Also, Irish Independent, 3 November, 1920. 120. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 80 and Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, p. 19. 121. Report of the Irish White Cross to 31 August, 1922 (Dublin: Martin Lester, 1922), pp. 47 –8. 122. The IRA also attacked Protestant minorities in Cork and elsewhere, usually via robbery, extortion, and arson. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, 80, p. 83. 123. Officer Commanding, Minden Coy, 1st Lancashire Fusiliers, Arklow to Headquarters Dublin District, 26 April, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 96. 124. Report on the Situation by General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Ireland, 29 June, 1920, SIC 2, CAB 27/108. 125. Report, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Ireland, 29 June, 1920, SIC 2, CAB 27/108; The Times, 20 June, 1920. 126. Street, Major, The Administration of Ireland 1920 (London: Phillip Allan, 1921). Also, Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 96. 127. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 115. 128. Chief Secretary of Ireland, Weekly Survey of the State of Ireland, 23 September, 1920, SIC 39, CAB 27/108. 129. Chief Secretary of Ireland, Weekly Survey, 20 September, 1920, SIC 39, CAB 27/108. Also Irish Independent, 22 September, 1920. The reprisals damaged a large English-owned hosiery factory (a major employer of the local population), four public houses and 49 private homes.

NOTES TO PAGES 123 –127

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130. Daily Herald, 23 September, 1920, in Lawrence, Jon, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post-First World War Britain’, The Journal of Modern History 75 (September 2003): p. 577. 131. Ainsworth, ‘The Black and Tans’, 4; Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 115. 132. Irish Government Statement in Irish Times, 7 October, 1920. 133. Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland, 195; Ainsworth, ‘The Black and Tans’, p. 6. 134. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, pp. 138 – 40. Much of Townshend’s book focuses on the tensions between the police and military in Ireland. 135. Letter, 16 December, 1920, in Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins: The Man Who Made Ireland (London: Hutchinson,1990; repr. New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 165. 136. Finding of Military Court of Inquiry at Victoria Barracks (General Strickland’s Report), Cork, 16 – 21 December, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, 139. Tudor became so angry with Strickland’s Report that he had another set up which exonerated the police. See CO 904/150. 137. The Cabinet was reminded of a similar case in 1916, called the Sheehy-Skeffington case, in which the killer, Captain Bown-Colthurst, was also acquitted for being insane. Cabinet, 30 December, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 139. 138. Ernie O’Malley, a famous IRA officer, wrote of his experience as a prisoner of the auxiliaries, who beat him during interrogations and threatened to blind him with a hot iron. O’Malley, Ernie, On Another Man’s Wound (London: Rich & Cowan, 1936), pp. 247 – 52. See also the 1936 edition published by The Sign of the Three Candles, Ltd., Dublin. Apparently, the 1936 London publisher suppressed the description of this abuse. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, p. 19. 139. Martin, Hugh, Ireland in Insurrection: An Englishman’s Record of Fact (London: Daniel O’Connor, 1921), p. 160. 140. For the limited police training of the Black and Tans, see Valder Duff, Douglas, Sword for Hire: The Saga of a Modern Free-Companion (London: J. Murray, 1934), pp. 58– 61 and Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 53. For a different argument, see Leeson, David. The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920– 1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 141. RIC Reports, Inspector General, January 1920, in Townshend, in Ireland, p. 55. 142. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, 82. For more on World War I brutalizing society, see Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom’ and Kent, Susan Kingsley. Aftershocks: The Politics of Trauma in Britain, 1918 – 1931 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 143. Chief Secretary for Ireland, Weekly Survey, 23 September, 1920, SIC 39, CAB 27/108. 144. His comments were made on 19 June 1920 and he was killed in July. Bowden, ‘Bloody Sunday’, 35; Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, 97; The Times, 30 July, 1920. 145. Cabinet Conference, Speech of Law Adviser, 23 July, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, 101. 146. General Officer Commanding 6th Division to General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Ireland, 3 January, 1921, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 111. 147. General Tudor, Cabinet Conference, 29 December, 1920, in Ibid., p. 112. 148. Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland, 36 – 7. Also Frank Crozier, Ireland for Ever (London: J. Cape, 1932). The Commander of C Company, a former colonel of the British Army named Buxton Smith, killed himself in London around January 1922, after his company was disbanded. He told a friend of his in late 1920: ‘I can trust no one. Already I have lost twenty-five of my men, and they are getting hard to hold. I can’t give them any exercise – can’t even allow them to knock a ball about in the park, lest they are sniped at from over

220

149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160.

161. 162. 163.

164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

NOTES TO PAGES 128 –132 the wall. They can’t walk a yard or go into a shop without danger, and they are savage for revenge.’ In Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, 28, p. 36. Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland (London: Labour Party, 1921), 7. Also Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 112. Martin, Ireland in Insurrection, p. 156. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 112. Wilson Diary, 2 November, 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 268. Gough, Hubert, ‘The Situation in Ireland’, Review of Reviews lxiii (February 1921): 35. See also Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 160. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 112. In Martin, Ireland in Insurrection, p. 188. Macready to Walter Long, 23 April, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 83. Wilson’s Diary, 23 September, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 116. The Times, 20 September, 1920, ‘Disquieting reports’, p. 12. Cabinet Conference, 2 June, 1921, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 184. Wilson Diary, 1 July, 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, pp. 247– 8. This idea was also in the RIC paper, Weekly Summary, no.10, 29 October, 1920, 3 citing an article from the Morning Post entitled ‘An Anti-Sinn Fein Society: Two Lives for One Threatened.’ It stated that one such society decided that for each member of Crown Forces killed, ‘two members of the Sinn Fein party in the County of Cork will be killed. And in the event of a member of the Sinn Fein party not being available, three sympathizers will be killed. This will apply equally to laity and clergy of all denominations.’ In Martin, Ireland in Insurrection, pp. 189– 90. Wilson Diary, 1 July, 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 251. Holmes, Sir John French, p. 352. Cabinet Conference, 7 June, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 100. The following month, on 1 July 1920, Lloyd George told Wilson that two rebels were being killed for every loyalist killed and that this was the best solution to the trouble. Churchill told Wilson that he agreed with Lloyd George about this on 12 July, 1920. See Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 100. Cabinet Conference, 1 October, 1920, in Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, p. 20. Wilson Diary, 6 November, 1920 in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 268. Ibid., 2 November, 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 268. Memo, Secretary of State for War, 3 November, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 122. The italics are in the original. DMO to Chief of Imperial General Staff, WO 32/9537 in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 119. General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Ireland to Wilson, 28 September, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 120. Wilson Diary, 2 November, 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 268. Ibid., 29 September, 1920 in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 263. Ibid., 29 September, 1920 in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 264. Strickland Papers, Imperial War Museum, 363, 5 in Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, p. 66. He commanded the sixth division area in Ireland. Barry, Guerrilla Days, 154. See also Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, p. 67. This applied on many levels across the island. For example, railway workers were intimidated against cooperating in the transportation of Crown Forces or munitions. On 15 September, 1920, a driver in Armagh who drove a train that included military passengers was ‘stripped and tarred as punishment’ and received warning that if he did so

NOTES TO PAGES 132 –135

176. 177. 178. 179.

180. 181. 182. 183. 184.

185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192.

193. 194. 195. 196.

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again, he would be killed. Chief Secretary for Ireland, Weekly Survey, 23 September, 1920, SIC 39, CAB 27/108. Cabinet Conference, 1 October, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 120. RIC Circular Orders by Deputy Inspector General, 4 October, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 120. Wilson Diary, 13 October, 1920 in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 265. The italics are in the original. Police patrols had been following fixed routes for some time, which made a successful ambush relatively easy to plan and implement. This attack on C Company made Tom Barry, the leader of the West Cork ‘flying column’, legendary. The auxiliaries were headquartered at Macroom Castle and one of them had previously served as a major in the Indian Army. See Dublin Castle Press Statement, CO 904/168; Irish Times, 12 January, 1921; Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, 27. For more on Kilmichael, see Chief Secretary Ireland, Weekly Survey, 29 November, 1920, SIC, 58, CAB 27/108. Examiner, 11 July, 1966 (Father O’Brien’s oration at the ambush site), in Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 22. Cabinet Conference, 1 December, 1920, C.65A(20), CAB 23/23 in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 133. Acting General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Ireland to Wilson, 2 December, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, 133. Previously, Jeudwine had been the General Officer Commanding 5th Division at the Curragh military base near Dublin. Holograph note, 1 December, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 134. Wilson marvelled: ‘Greenwood inferred that he had always been in favour of it [martial law] and so did Winston their only doubt being whether we had enough troops! What amazing liars.’ Wilson Diary, 30 November, 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 271. Cabinet Conference, 1 December, 1920, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 134. Churchill to Wilson and General Macdonagh, 18 September, 1920 in Gilbert, Martin. ed. Winston S. Churchill 1874– 1965, Companion Volume IV, Part 2 July 1919-March 1921 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1978), p. 1209. Churchill Cabinet Memorandum, 3 November, 1920, in Gilbert, ed., Churchill Companion Volume IV, pp. 1229– 30. Martial law was also not applied across the entire province of Punjab. Proclamations by Lord Lieutenant and Military Governor of Ireland, pp. 207– 8, CAB 23/23 in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 135. Ibid. General Officer Commanding-in-Chief for Ireland, Weekly Survey Report, 3 January, 1920, SIC 68, CAB 27/108. The 1st Cork Brigade of the IRA had been inflicting heavy damage on the RIC in Midleton for most of 1920 and continued to do so after official reprisals began until February 1921. Shortly thereafter, a combination of soldiers and RIC men found the brigade’s hideout and attacked. The IRA surrendered but were executed, anyway. Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland 2nd ed.,195; Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, pp. 97 – 8. Irish Times, 3 January, 1921. Also, The Times, 3 January, 1921, ‘First official reprisals,’ 10. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 42, 20 October, 1920, cols. 30 –1. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, 149, n.107. He used RIC Reports from January to May 1921, CO 904/114– 115. General Officer Commanding-in-Chief Ireland, Weekly Survey Report, 3 January, 1921, SIC 68, CAB 27/108.

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NOTES TO PAGES 135 –139

197. Official Reprisals in Ireland, WO 35/169. Also, The Times, 3 January 3, 1921, “First Official Reprisals,” 10. 198. See Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, pp. 146– 7. 199. Fourteen death sentences were actually executed, and the rest got off on appeals. Ibid., 194. Similarly, in India, only 23 were executed. 200. Ibid., pp. 147 – 8. 201. Ibid., 163. He does not cite any of the press saying such things. 202. Chief Secretary of Ireland, Weekly Survey, 11 July, 1921, in Ibid., p. 164. 203. Similarly, the Punjab had to wait six months for the Hunter Committee to begin its investigation. 204. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 164. 205. Prime Minister to Chief Secretary of Ireland, 25 February, 1921, in Ibid., pp. 164 – 5. 206. Ibid., p. 166. 207. Sturgis Diary, 12 February, 1921, in Ibid., p. 168. 208. The 24th Brigade in particular continued this kind of behaviour. Violence occurred on the east coast, in Gormanstown, County Meath, and in Drogheda, County Louth. Ibid., 166. 209. Ibid., p. 166. 210. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 45, 26 April, 1921, cols. 15-18. Parmoor was a Labour MP. Much of the details of the shooting are discussed here. For more, see Proceedings of Military Court of Inquiry in Lieu of Inquest on Denis O’Donovan, Sgt. William Hughes, R.I.C. and Temporary Cadet Donald Pringle, A.D.R. I.C., WO 35/157A. 211. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 45, 26 April, 1921, col. 20. 212. Ibid., col. 24. 213. Baron Shandon was born Ignatius John O’Brien in the year of the Indian Mutiny, 1857, to a Catholic family in Cork. He was of moderate nationalist opinion and eventually became the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. He left Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War, after his home was raided by Irish rebels, but this sad experience did not colour his opinion on how to restore law and order. See Moore, T.C.K. ‘O’Brien, Ignatius John,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography available at www.oxforddnb.com; (accessed online 15 June, 2008). 214. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 45, 26 April, 1921, cols, pp. 33 –4. 215. Ibid., 5 May, 1921, col. 262– 3. 216. Note by General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Ireland, 1 May, 1921, and Note by Deputy Adjutant-General Ireland, 3 May, 1921, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 168.

Conclusion 1. Wilson Diary, 31 December 1920, in Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: His Life and Diaries, Sir C.E. Callwell, vol. 2 (London: Cassell, 1927), p. 275. 2. For details, see Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 135, 22 November 1920, cols 35–8. Also, Townshend, Charles, The British Campaign in Ireland: The Development of Political and Military Policies (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 129; Bowden, T., ‘Bloody Sunday – A Reappraisal’, European Studies Review 2, no. 1 (1972), pp. 25–42; Gleeson, James, Bloody Sunday: How Michael Collins’ Agents Assassinated Britain’s Secret Service in Dublin on November 21, 1920 (London: Peter Davies, 1962; repr., Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2004). As a nationalist and a journalist, he did not produce an unbiased account. See also, Barry, Tom, Guerrilla Days in Ireland: A Firsthand Account of the Black and Tan War (1919–1921) (New York: The Devin-Adair, 1956); Ryan,

NOTES TO PAGES 139 –141

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

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Desmond, Sean Treacy and the Third Tipperary Brigade (Tralee: The Kerryman, 1945); Daltan, Charles, With the Dublin Brigade (1917–1921) (London: Peter Davies, 1929). For historical fiction, see Murphy, Joseph, Bloody Sunday: The Story of the 1920 Irish Rebellion (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2006). Temporary Cadet C.A. Morris was one of the unlucky auxiliaries killed, as was Section Leader Frank Garniss. Ainsworth, John, ‘The black and tans and auxiliaries in Ireland, 1920– 1921: their origins role and legacy’ (unpublished paper presented to the Annual Conference of the Queensland History Teacher’s Association in Brisbane, Saturday, 12 May 2001), p. 6; Bowden, ‘Bloody Sunday’, p. 41; Leeson, David, ‘Death in the afternoon: The Croke Park Massacre, 21 November 1920’, Canadian Journal of History, 38, no. 1 (April 2003), p. 45; CO 904/168, pp. 50 – 61. See also, Report by Denis Begley, late “E” Coy 2nd Battalion Dublin Brigade IRA, Collins Papers A/0532/I, Irish Military Archives, Dublin; Military Courts of Inquiry into the Deaths of British Officers and Auxiliary Cadets on 21 November 1920, CO 904/189/2. The auxiliaries began serving in Ireland officially on 27 July 1920, but non-Irish recruits to the RIC had been in Ireland since 25 March 1920. Bennett, Richard, The Black and Tans: The British Special Police Force in Ireland 3rd edn. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995). Dene, C. Prescott, Number I Division Munster to Assistant Under-Secretary for Ireland, 1 June 1920, in Bowden, ‘Bloody Sunday’, p. 34. The Times, 10 November 1920, ‘“Murder By the Throat” in Ireland’, p. 12. Ibid., 23 November 1920, ‘Croke Park panic’, p. 12. Chief Secretary, Weekly Survey, 23 November 1920, SIC 56, CAB 27/108. For the ways in which the GAA recruited for the IRA, see Hart, Peter, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Major R. Burnbury RGA, 21 November 1920, in Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 45. The military inquiry into the Croke Park shootings was assembled under Major-General Boyd of Dublin District, from 23 November to 11 December 1920. The findings were not made public. Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 46. General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Weekly Report, 24 November 1920, SIC 57, CAB 27/108; Ainsworth, ‘The Black and Tans’, p. 6. The crowd in attendance at the match may have been as small as 5,000 or as large as 15,000. For the smaller figure, see Chief Secretary of Ireland, Weekly Survey, 23 November 1920, SIC 56, CAB 27/108. For the larger figure, see The Times, 23 November 1920, ‘Croke Park panic’, p. 12. The estimates of the crowd in Jallianwala Bagh varied similarly, from 5,000 to 30,000. Daily News, 23 November 1920, p. 1; Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, n. 37. His name was John Scott. Also, Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 135, 24 November 1920, col. 454. Compare to Chief Secretary of Ireland, Weekly Survey, 23 November 1920, SIC 56, CAB 27/108. Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, n. 37. For some historians’ reactions to the scene in the movie, see Kee, Robert, ‘An honest film but flawed’, Guardian, 25 October 1996, sec 2, p. 3 and Bew, Paul, ‘Truth died when Jordan shot Collins’, The Sunday Times, 10 November 1996, sec 3, p. 6. For the retort that few complained over the ‘dramatic licence’ that Richard Attenborough took for the scene of the Amritsar shooting in his movie, Gandhi, see O’Farrell, Michael, ‘Cinema Verite’, The Sunday Times, 27 October 1996, sec 3, p. 10. Clancy, Peadar, Clune, Conor, and McKee, Dick. Chief Secretary, Weekly Survey, 23 November 1920, SIC 56, CAB 27/108; Bowden, ‘Bloody Sunday’, p. 27; Coogan, Michael Collins, p. 159. Clune was thought to be unconnected to the IRA by most

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14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

NOTES TO PAGES 141 –144 accounts, including Coogan’s, but Bowden argues that he was in fact meeting with intelligence officers of the IRA. General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Weekly Report, 24 November 1920, SIC 57, CAB 27/108. Lieutenant Colonel G.F. Smyth, Division Commissioner, Munster, No. 2, 17 June 1920 in Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 132, 29 July 1920, col. 1609. CSO Report, CO 904/168, but this conflicts with republican versions by Gleeson, Bloody Sunday, and Macardle, Dorothy, The Irish Republic; A Documented Chronicle of the AngloIrish Conflict and the Partitioning of Ireland, With a Detailed Account of the Period 1916– 23 (London: V. Gollancz, 1937; repr., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965). See also, Townshend, in Ireland, p. 130. Chief Secretary, Weekly Survey, 23 November 1920, SIC 56, CAB 27/108. Irish nationalists and those sympathetic to them certainly disagreed. For nationalist histories, see Coogan, Michael Collins, p. 163, and Gleeson, Bloody Sunday, pp. 135–6. Those who believe the shooting was a raid gone wrong due to the IRA shooting upon the police, include Townshend, in Ireland, pp. 130–1; Bennett, The Black and Tans, pp. 127– 8; Phillips, W. Alison, The Revolution in Ireland 1906–1923 (London: Longman’s, 1923); Holt, Edgar, Protest in Arms: The Irish Troubles, 1916–1923 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1960). For more balanced accounts, see Kee, Robert, The Green Flag: Volume III, Ourselves Alone (London: Penguin, 1989); Ranelagh, John O’Bierne, A Short History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’. General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Weekly Report, 24 November 1920, SIC 57, CAB 27/108. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 135, 22 November 1920, col. 41. Also, Daily Telegraph, 22 November 1920, p. 9; Daily Mail, 22 November 1920, p. 9; Manchester Guardian, 22 November 1920, p. 7. ‘Archbishop Mannix, speaking to 4,000 people...said that the world had never seen worse frightfulness than was to be seen in Ireland to-day. There were no outrages and no murders in Ireland until British soldiers and “Black and Tans” went over there.’ The Times, 22 November 1920, ‘No murder gang’, p. 12. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 135, 23 November 1920, cols 200– 201. His response was first drafted by Basil Clarke, head of the propaganda department (see below), and then revised by Under-Secretary Sir John Anderson. Anderson to Chief Secretary for Ireland, 22 November 1920, in Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 46. General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Weekly Report, 24 November 1920, SIC 57, CAB 27/108. Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 51. According to him, the shooting only lasted for 90 seconds. See also, WO 35/88B. Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 55. The Times, 23 November 1920, ‘Croke Park panic’, p. 12. See also, Glasgow Herald, 23 November 1920, 9; Daily Mail, 23 November 1920, p. 7; Daily Telegraph, 23 November 1920, p. 11. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 135, 23 November 1920, col. 201. Irish Bulletin III, 60, 25 November 1920, in Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 48. See also Freeman’s Journal, 22 November 1920, p. 5. Crozier, Frank, A Word to Gandhi: The Lessons of Ireland (London: Williams and Norgate, 1931), pp. 58 – 9.

NOTES TO PAGES 144 –149

225

29. Crozier, Frank, Impressions and Recollections (London: Werner Laurie, 1930), pp. 256 –7; Crozier, Frank, Ireland For Ever (London: J. Cape. 1932), pp. 104 – 5; Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 49. 30. Mill’s Report, WO 35/88B in Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 51. Mills was assisted by Major Fillery. 31. Mill’s Testimony, in Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 56. 32. Crozier, A Word to Gandhi, p. 59. 33. Labour Party, Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland (London: Labour Party, 1921), pp. 40 – 3, 6 – 8. 34. Ibid., p. 43. 35. Ibid., p. 42. 36. Ibid., p. 47. 37. Findings of Inquiry, 8 December 1920, in Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 49. 38. Opinion of Convening Authority (Boyd), 11 December 1920, in Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 49. 39. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 140, 7 March 1921, col. 44. 40. For an exhaustive study of witness testimony in the Croke Park shooting, see WO 35/88B and the Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland, and Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, pp. 51 – 7. He also concludes that there were no rebel shots fired. 41. Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, pp. 52– 3. 42. Ibid., p. 56. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., p. 57. 45. Manchester Guardian, 23 November 1920, p. 11, in Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon’, p. 57. 46. Wilson Diary, 22 November 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 269, and in Winston S. Churchill 1874 – 1965, Companion Volume IV, Part 2 July 1919– March 1921, Gilbert, Martin (ed.) (Houghton Mifflin 1978), p. 1248. This was not unusual, as historian Peter Hart has argued, ‘The British Army’s official histories of the guerrilla war, like the contemporary police reports, ignored the systematic use of illegal violence by their own soldiers while highlighting the I.R.A.’s reign of terror.’ Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies, p. 320. 47. Wilson Diary, 24 November 1920, in Callwell, Sir Henry Wilson, vol. 2, p. 270. 48. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 42, 20 October 1920, cols. 10, 18, 26. 49. Ibid., col. 21. 50. See the 1934 manual of military law on the principle of minimum force. The principle of minimum force was further developed in successive manuals. See Mockaitis, Thomas, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 25. He argues that the use of ‘restraint’ has been the key to British ‘success’ in counter-insurgency campaigns. He claims that this restraint is what kept Britain out of propaganda wars. His main example of this is the use of air control over Iraq during the 1920 revolt, which was made the permanent form of defence in 1922. This, he believes, did minimal damage to Iraqis because of a policy of dropping leaflets warning that an area would be bombed within 24 hours in order to give time for evacuation. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, pp. 26–30. For another view on British aerial bombing, see Satia, Priya, Spies in Arabia: the Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Omissi, David, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 51. Boyce, D.G., Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy, 1918– 22 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), p. 51.

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NOTES TO PAGES 149 –153

52. Round Table (December 1919, September 1920) in Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles, p. 51. Lloyd George wrote, ‘The present struggle is not about the Home Rule Act at all. Fundamentally the issue is the same as that in the war of North and South in the United States – it is an issue between secession and union.’ Lloyd George to the Bishop of Chelmsford, April 1921, in Townshend, in Ireland, p. 37; Phillips, The Revolution in Ireland, pp. 197–202. Balbriggan may have caught the press’s attention because it was so close to Dublin, so the news was more accessible to press correspondents than the previously attacked towns further south and west. See Macardle, Irish Republic, p. 404; Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles, p. 54. 53. Nicolson, Harold, King George the Fifth: His Life and Reign (London: Constable, 1952), p. 346. Also, Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles, p. 51. 54. For example, Samuel Hoare, Edward Wood, Lord Robert Cecil, Unionist MPs Walter Elliot and Sir James Grant, Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Oswald Mosley and Brigadier-General Sir George Cockerill. 55. The Times, 20 September 1920, ‘Disquieting reports’, p. 12. For other examples of public outrage at reprisals, see September 1920 to March 1921 issues of the Manchester Guardian, Daily News, Westminster Gazette, and Daily Herald. In particular, see Daily News, 13 and 20 October 1920. 56. Daily Express, 28 September 1920 in Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles, p. 53. 57. The Times, 24 March 1920, ‘House of Commons. The troops in Ireland’, p. 9. 58. Ibid., 24 February 1920, ‘Parliament’, p. 9. 59. Ibid., 23 November 1920, ‘Suspension of the House’, p. 12. Also Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 135, 22 November 1920, cols. 38 –9. 60. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 133, 20 October 1920, col. 943. 61. The Times, 15 January 1920, ‘The coalition. A free Liberal on his party’ (letter to editor by Colonel Sir Joseph West Ridgeway), p. 8. 62. Ibid., 6 April 1290, ‘I.L.P. and Moscow International. A brigands’ peace’, p. 14. 63. Ainsworth, ‘The Black and Tans’, p. 4. In fact, the Labour Party ran a number such campaigns against reprisals in from January to February 1921, rallying in more than 30 towns and thus, they succeeded in getting much of the Irish working-class vote. See Daily Herald from 17 January to 16 February 1921. The Irish trade unions in Britain, which were affiliated with British trade unions, failed to persuade their affiliates to strike on Ireland’s behalf. Boyce explains this as part of the English working class’s disinterest in Ireland. Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles, p. 71. 64. Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles, p. 65. 65. This was despite the reprisals the military had already engaged in, such as the two in Fermoy, September 1919 and June 1920, Queenstown, Mallow, Ennistymon, Templemore and Gort. For more, see Hugh Martin, Ireland in Insurrection: An Englishman’s Record of Fact (London: D. O’Connor, 1921), pp. 102–5. 66. ‘Ireland week by week’, The Observer, 26 September 1920 in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 116. 67. See issues for 1 October 1920. 68. For a more balanced set of statistics, see Appendices in Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies. 69. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 134, 4 November 1920, col. 719. 70. His aims and methods are in CO 904/168. See also previous chapter on public relations officer, M.T. Loughnane’s discomfort with covering up news of reprisals; Bowden, ‘Bloody Sunday’, pp. 31 – 2. 71. Bowden, ‘Bloody Sunday’, p. 33.

NOTES TO PAGES 153 –156

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72. His name was John Lynch, which suggests that Crown Forces may have mistaken him for the Cork IRA leader Liam Lynch. See Coogan, Michael Collins, pp. 157– 8. 73. Under Secretary to Editors and Proprietors, Various Newspapers, 27 August 1920, in Townshend, in Ireland, p. 118. The army, however, worried about how this might hurt morale. 74. See Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, pp. 158– 9. 75. Ibid., pp. 158 – 9. 76. Westminster Gazette, 4 January 1921. 77. The Times, 3 January 1921, ‘First official reprisals’, p. 10. 78. Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland, p. 9. 79. Ibid., pp. 106– 7. The report also pointed out that many of the ex-officers serving in Ireland had been promoted during the Great War instead of attending the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. This could partly explain why some were more willing to resort to violence than others, although the report did not draw a clear correlation between one’s training and one’s involvement in reprisals. See Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland, p. 6. For the makeup of these soldiers, see Petter, M., ‘“Temporary Gentlemen” in the Aftermath of the Great War: Rank, Status and the Ex-Officer Problem’, Historical Journal 37 (1994), pp. 127– 52. 80. Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland, p. 12. 81. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 45, 16 June 1921, cols 612– 3. 82. Ibid., col. 632. 83. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 135, 24 November 1920, col. 487. 84. Ibid., col. 501. 85. Ibid., col. 584. 86. Ibid., col. 525. 87. Ibid., col. 525. 88. Ibid., col. 600 – 1. 89. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 5th Series, vol. 139, 7 March 1921, col. 111. 90. Ibid., col. 158 – 9. 91. Ibid., col. 93 – 4. 92. Townshend, Charles, The British Campaign in Ireland: The Development of Political and Military Policies (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 174. 93. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 175. See also G War Diary, GHQ Ireland, 1, 6, 7, 9 April 1921, WO 35/93(1)/1. The government ended up reversing this policy soon afterwards in preparation for implementing martial law across most of the island if the IRA proved unwilling to accept the terms of the treaty that would eventually establish the Irish Free State. 94. The Home Rule Bill technically became law on 23 December 1920 as the Government of Ireland Act. This modified the original Home Rule Act, which would have been implemented in 1914 if the Great War had not begun, by partitioning the six counties in the North from the rest of the island, and giving each part its own Parliament. See Ranelagh, John O’Bierne, A Short History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 197. 95. Since 30 March 1921, de Valera had declared that the Irish Republican Parliament, called the Dail in Irish Gaelic, took responsibility for the actions of its army, the IRA. The elections were held on 19 May but the results made public on 25 May. Following the electoral victory of Sinn Fein, de Valera ordered the IRA to set fire to the Dublin Customs House for moral effect. The subsequent loss of tax and property records did not cripple the government of

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96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109.

NOTES TO PAGES 156 –159 Ireland, but the act persuaded de Valera that he had full control of the IRA. Roughly 80 to 100 IRA men were captured. See Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland, p. 198. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 179. See also, Home Office Report on Revolutionary Organization in the U.K. No 106, 19 May 1921, CP 2952, CAB 24/123. Ibid., p. 180. See also Chief Secretary for Ireland Weekly Survey, 16 May 1921, CP 2945, CAB 24/123, and 6 June 1921, CP 3027, CAB 24/124. At least 48 soldiers and 114 policemen were killed in these few months. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 185. Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland, p. 198. Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 185. Bell, J. Bowyer, ‘The Thompson submachine gun in Ireland, 1921’, Irish Sword viii, no. 31 (1967), pp. 98– 108; Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 180. The IRA was not near collapse when the signatories to the Anglo-Irish Treaty agreed to the establishment of the Irish Free State. The famous remark made by Michael Collins to Hamar Greenwood after signing the treaty, ‘You had us dead beat. We could not have lasted another three weeks’, should not be taken seriously because, according to Townshend, it was not an admission of military defeat but ‘a boast of moral success’. See also, Amery, Leo, My Political Life vol. 2 (London: Hutchinson, 1953), p. 230. Tom Barry probably exaggerated the IRA’s strength when he told de Valera that they could last another five years. See Barry, Tom, Guerrilla Days in Ireland: A Firsthand Account of the Black and Tan War (1919 – 1921) (New York: The Devin-Adair, 1956), p. 175. However, the IRA was losing arms to British searches and raids while the army began receiving ever more battalions to gear up for martial law across the whole island towards the end of 1921. For details, see Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, pp. 192 – 4. Report of Cabinet Irish Situation Committee, 27 May 1921, CAB 24/123. Also in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 184. Cabinet Irish Situation Committee, 9th Meeting, 15 June 1921, SIC 9th conclusions, CAB 27/107. Also in Ibid., p. 184. On 24 June 1921, Lloyd George began corresponding with de Valera and Sir John Craig, the leader of the Northern Irish Unionists. Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty that established the Irish Free State on 6 December 1921, taking effect at the beginning of the following year. As the treaty did not secure an Irish Republic, a civil war ensued in Ireland between pro- and anti-treaty factions of the IRA, during which Collins was killed. Although the pro-treaty forces eventually won this civil war by 1923, factions of the IRA continued to behave as if the Anglo-Irish war was not over. The issue of republican status became supplanted over time by the concern over the integration of the six northern counties into the republic. IRA splinter groups still exist to this day, hoping to unify the entire island. See Bell, J. Bowyer, The IRA 1968– 2000: Analysis of a Secret Army (London: Frank Cass, 2000). For the ways in which Gerry Adams contended with these divisions, see Moloney, Ed, A Secret History of the IRA (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002). Jeffery, Keith, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 273. In Boyce, D.G., Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy, 1918– 22 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), p. 180. Crozier, Frank, A Word to Gandhi: The Lesson of Ireland (London: Williams and Norgate, 1931), pp. 11, 12 – 13, 15. Two were killed and one wounded. Another group of Connaught Rangers stationed at Jutogh outside Simla stayed loyal as well. Colonel H.R. Deacon was in command of 1st

NOTES TO PAGES 159 –162

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

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Battalion of Rangers and Major Alexander was his second in command. See The Times, 5 July 1920, ‘Tampering with the Army. Sinn Fein in India. Connaught Rangers Mutiny’, p. 14; Babington, Anthony, The Devil to Pay: the Mutiny of the Connaught Rangers, India, July 1920 (London: Leo Cooper, 1991); Pollock, Sam, Mutiny for the Cause: the Story of the Revolt of Irelands’ ‘Devil’s Own’ in British India (London: Leo Cooper, 1969). De Valera to Brennan, 6 February 1921, Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, Volume I, 1919– 1922, doc no. 59 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1998), p. 109. See also, doc no. 10 and 11. Irishman, 14 June 1919 in Davis, Richard P., ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda, 1905– 22’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 22, no. 1 (1977), p. 85. See Young Ireland, 30 August 1919 and Davis, ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, p. 85. For more on how the Friends of Irish Freedom in the US encouraged Indian speakers to talk about these issues, see Young Ireland, 29 May 1920; New Ireland, 23 August 1919; Davis, ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, p. 85. The Times, 7 January 1920, ‘U.S. elections and the treaty’, p. 11. Gaelic American, 28 February 1920. Freeman’s Journal, 22 November 1920, p. 5, in David Leeson, ‘Death in the afternoon: The Croke Park Massacre, 21 November 1920’, Canadian Journal of History, p. 38, no. 1 (April 2003), p. 48. Young Ireland, 19 June 1920, in Davis, ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, p. 81. See also, Young Ireland, 5 June 7 August, 11 September, 1920; Irish Times, 5 June 1920; Calcutta Statesman, 25 December 1919 and 9 June 1920. An t-Oglach, 9 and 30 September 1921. This journal advertised itself as the ‘official organ of the army’, and was edited by Pearce Beasley. An t-Oglach, 21 October 1921. This issue also has a section on the Moplahs and on how important the NWFP was in defending the Indian border from Afghanistan. For more, see Conclusion. Major B.C. ‘Denning in Mockaitis’, British Counterinsurgency, p. 21. The Times, 29 June 1920, ‘Ireland and martial law’, p. 9. See Davis, ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, p. 85; Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922– 1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). The Times, 3 January 1921, ‘Indian creed of hatred’, p. 10. See New Ireland, 24 December 1921 (editorial by Aodh de Blacam, against the Treaty) in Davis, ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, p. 87. New Ireland, 21 January 1922 in Davis, ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, p. 87. The Times, 7 January 1920, ‘Indian racial bitterness’, p. 11. Young India, 1 September 1920, in Davis, “India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, n. 54. Although Gandhi did not find Ireland to be a fruitful model for Indian independence because of the Irish use of violence, other Indian nationalists such as Subhas Chandra Bose, who were willing to use force, found the island’s history instructive. See O’Malley, Kate, Ireland, India and Empire: Indo-Irish Radical Connections: 1919– 64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). New Ireland, 1 April 1922 (by anonymous Indian correspondent) in Davis, ‘India in Irish revolutionary propaganda’, p. 87. War Office, in Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, p. 25. See War Office, Manual of Military Law (London: HMSO, 1914), p. 223. Callwell, Charles, Small Wars: Their Principle and Practice (London: HMSO, 1906), pp. 21– 8, 41, 72– 8. In Collet, Nigel, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), pp. 435– 7. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 435.

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133. Lawrence, Jon, ‘Forging a peaceable kingdom: war, violence, and fear of brutalization in post-First World War Britain’, The Journal of Modern History 75 (September 2003), pp. 557– 89. 134. Unless, of course, that empire helped fight the ever-present spectre of communism in the post-World War II world. See Wm. Roger Louis and Robinson, Ronald, ‘The imperialism of decolonization’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 22, no. 3 (1994), pp. 462–511. They also discuss the idea of unofficial or informal empire. 135. Collet, The Butcher of Amritsar, p. 435. 136. The Times, 1 April 1920, ‘Peace in Asia Minor’ (letter to the editor by Ameer Ali), p. 12. 137. Crozier, A Word to Gandhi, p. 118. 138. See Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 36. 139. The Times, 17 January 1920, ‘The coalition. A policy of Ccmpetence’ (letter to the editor), p. 6. 140. The Times, 16 February 1920, ‘Mr. Churchill on Russia. Socialists and the empire’, p. 7. 141. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 42, 20 October 1920, cols. 34 –8. Curzon was referring to Indian bandits, whose name has passed into English as ‘thugs’. See Dash, Mike, Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult (London: Granta, 2005). Also interesting is travel writer Rushby, Kevin, Children of Kali: Through India in Search of Bandits, the Thug Cult, and the British Raj (New York: Walker and Co., 2003). 142. Lawrence, ‘Forging a peaceable kingdom’, pp. 572– 3. 143. Angell, Norman, The Fruits of Victory: A sequel to “The Great Illusion” (New York: Century, 1921), p. 153. 144. Lord Lieutenant to Prime Minister, 18 April 1918, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 170. 145. Churchill to Sir Hugh Trenchard, 24 September 1920, in Winston S. Churchill 1874– 1965, Companion Volume IV, Part 2 July 1919-March 1921, Gilbert, Martin (ed.) (Houghton Mifflin 1978), pp. 1215– 16. 146. Townshend, Charles, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 64. 147. Cabinet, 24 March 1921, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 171. He adds that the cabinet was thinking of north-west India at this point. 148. Deputation to Lord Chancellor, C.P. 2807, CAB 24/122, in Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, p. 174. 149. See for example, Manchester Guardian, 3 January 1921. 150. Round Table 11, p. 143. 151. Manchester Guardian, 23 November 1920. 152. Gandhi also criticized the Irish Republican Army’s violent tactics. 153. Darwin, John, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (1988). Although his focus in on the ways in which World War II acted as a catalyst for decolonization, his argument about multiple levels of causation are instructive even for the inter-war period. See also, Gallagher, John, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 154. Wm. Roger Louis and Robinson, Ronald, ‘The imperialism of decolonization’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 22, no. 3 (1994), pp. 462– 511. 155. John Mackenzie, in an editorial note, described this general period as ‘a transitional era in which characteristics of the past survived into a time of palpable change’. Gorman, Daniel, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. ix.

NOTES TO PAGES 168 –172

231

156. Sir Auckland Colvin, in O’Dwyer, Michael, India as I Knew it, 1888– 1925 (London: Constable, 1925; repr., Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988), p. 451. Citations are to the 1988 edition. Clearly O’Dwyer was deeply affected by Colvin’s ideas. 157. O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, p. 451. 158. Ibid., p. 452. 159. This same phenomenon also created a division within British politics, if not also its culture, that deeply affected what it meant to be British as much as it did the imperial system. 160. Draper, Alfred, Amritsar: The Massacre that Ended the Raj (London: Casell, 1981), p. 269. 161. Ibid., p. 270. 162. Zetland had been the Secretary of State for India, Dane was a former under-secretary to the Governor of the Punjab and Lamington had once been the Governor of Bombay. 163. Draper, Amritsar, p. 274. 164. Ibid., p. 275. 165. Ibid., p. 276. 166. Ibid., p. 279. 167. Ibid., p. 282. This statement was not reported in the British press under orders of the presiding judge, Atkinson, but Draper reports that ‘it was published in India many years later’. Draper does not provide a citation for this. 168. In Majumdar, Bimanbehari, Militant Nationalism in India: And its Socio-Religious Background (1897– 1917) (Calcutta: General Printers & Publishers, 1966), p. 175. No citation is given. See also Orwell, George, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), pp. 92 – 103. 169. Hansard Parliamentary Debates (Lords), 5th Series, vol. 42, 20 October 1920, col. 20. 170. ‘Oral evidence of Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Johnson, D.S.O., Royal Sussex Regiment, Commanding, Lahore’, Disorders Inquiry Committee, Evidence Taken Before the Disorders Inquiry Committee, vol. 4 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1920), p. 12, CAB 27/93. Henceforth referred to as Evidence. 171. ‘Oral evidence of Captain D.H.M. Carberry, Flight Commander, No. 31 Squadron, Royal Air Force’, Evidence, vol. 5, p. 39, CAB 27/93. 172. Metcalf, Thomas, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 38 – 9. 173. See Shaw, Bernard, The Denshawai Horror and Other Colonial Atrocities (Berlin: German Information Service, 1940); Great Britain, Correspondence Respecting the Attack on British Officers at Denshawai (London: Harrison and Sons, 1906); Great Britain, Further Paper Respecting the Attack on British Officers at Denshawai (London: Harrison and Sons, 1906); Luke, Kimberly, ‘Order or justice: The Denshawai incident and British imperialism’, History Compass, 5, no. 2 (2007), pp. 278 –87. 174. Townshend, Charles, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), pp. 140 –1. 175. Telegram, Viceroy to India Office, 24 August 1921, in Ibid., p. 142. 176. Governor of Madras to Secretary of State for India, 10 October 1921, and to Viceroy, 6 September 1921, in Ibid., p. 142. 177. Ibid., p. 144. He states that 70 of 97 died, so there is a discrepancy in the exact numbers. See Choudhary, Sukhbir, The Moplah Uprising (1921 – 23) (Delhi: Agam Prakashan, 1977), pp. 59 – 63; Panikkar, K.N., Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar 1836 – 1921 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Wood, Conrad, The Moplah Rebellion and its Genesis (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1987). 178. Mockaitis, Thomas, British Counterinsurgency, 1919– 60 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 38.

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NOTES TO PAGES 172 –173

179. General Officer Commanding Madras, March 1922, in Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, p. 144. Also Hardgrave, Jr., Robert L. ‘The Mappilla Rebellion, 1921: Peasant revolt in Malabar’, Modern Asian Studies, 2 (1977), pp. 75– 6; Hitchcock, R.H., Peasant Revolt in Malabar: A History of the Malabar Rebellion, 1921 (Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1925; repr., New Delhi, Usha, 1983); Nair, C. Gopalan, The Moplah Rebellion, 1921 (Calicut: Norman Printing Bureau, 1923). Again, the numbers dead vary by author. Choudhary suggests that 3,000 moplahs died, 191 were hanged, 5,000 captured, and 50,000 surrendered. He adds that many of those who surrendered were deported. Choudhary, The Moplah Uprising 59; Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency 38; Minault, Gail, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 180. See Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, pp. 145– 9 and Silvestri, Michael, ‘The “Sinn Fein of India”: Irish nationalism and the policing of revolutionary terrorism in Bengal, 1905 – 1939’, Journal of British Studies 39 (2000), pp. 454– 86. 181. Martin, Hugh, Ireland in Insurrection: An Englishman’s Record of Fact (London: Daniel O’Connor, 1921), pp. 221– 3. 182. The Times, 1 January 1920, ‘What is our hope?’ (letter to the editor by E.A. Burroughs), p. 8.

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Abbreviations CAB CO HO IDC INC IWM IOR RIC WO

Cabinet Records at The National Archives of the UK: Public Record Office Colonial Office at The National Archives of the UK: Public Record Office Home Office at The National Archives of the UK: Public Record Office Indian Disorders Committee (Cabinet Committee) Indian National Congress Imperial War Museum (London) India Office Records at The British Library Royal Irish Constabulary War Office at The National Archives of the UK: Public Record Office

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INDEX

The index is in word by word order. Dates in brackets are of lifespan rather than of rule. accountability, 135, 166 Act of Indemnity (India, 1919), 69 administrators India, 4 India and Ireland, 23– 4 martial law, 75, 101 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 35 Punjab, 93 violence, 38 aerial bombings, 55 – 6, 76, 164– 5 Afghanistan, 7, 50 – 1, 61 – 2, 167 aftermath of World War I, 22 air power, 63, 85, 165 All-India Muslim League, 31 Am t-Oglach, 160 Ampthill, Lord see Russell, Arthur Oliver Villiers (2nd Baron Ampthill, 1869–1935) Amritsar Beynon, Major-General Sir William George Lawrence (1866– 1955), 39 curfew, 43 Ireland, 98 – 103 martial law, 41, 52, 69 martial law ended, 82 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 62 – 3 police corruption, 68 rebellion, 47– 8 riots, 37–41 Amritsar Massacre (1919) Bloody Sunday (1920), 9, 103

Croke Park (Dublin), 21– 2 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 8 – 14, 24, 41 – 9, 91 – 2 medical aid (lack of), 45 reports, 49 scholarship, 11 Townshend, Charles (b. 1945), 22 Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act (1919) act passed, 29 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA, 1914), 21 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) (1869 – 1948), 13 introduced, 32 Jallianwala Bagh, 44 Lahore, 52 necessity, 30 resentment, 75 riots, 51 Scurr, John (1876 – 1932), 93 Anderson, John (1st Viscount Waverley, 1882–1958), 136 Andrews, Charles Freer (1871– 1940), 68 Angell, Sir Ralph Norman (1872 – 1967), 164 Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), 157, 160 Anglo-Irish War condemnation, 125 French, John Denton Pinkstone (1st Earl of Ypres, 1852– 1925), 110– 13 Labour Party, 145 policies, 161

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public opinion, 109 reprisals, 121– 30 started, 111– 12 Army Council, 83, 87 arrests, 53, 55, 61, 110 Asquith, Herbert (1852– 1928), 24, 92, 107, 155– 6 assassination attempt, 106 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 139 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 168 – 9 Phoenix Park Murders (1882), 34 policies, 21 reprisals, 147 Smyth, Colonel Gerald Bryce Ferguson (1885 – 1920), 127 Wilson, Sir Henry (1864– 1922), 25 Auxiliary Division Royal Irish Constabulary (ADRIC), 120, 121, 125, 139 Balfour, Arthur James (1st Earl of Balfour, 1848–1930), 106, 116, 157 Bellairs, Carlyon Wilfroy (1871 – 1955), 89 Bengal, 30, 172 – 3 Beynon, Major-General Sir William George Lawrence (1866– 1955), 39, 48, 49, 52, 59, 62 biography, 33 – 4, 35 – 7, 110 Birkenhead, Lord see Smith, Frederick Edwin, Lord Chancellor Birkenhead (1872– 1930) Black and Tans (Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force) Bloody Sunday (1920), 147 – 8 Croft, Henry Page (1st Baron Croft, 1881– 1947), 156 Croke Park (Dublin), 144, 146 Ireland, 8, 119– 20, 139 Irish race, 3 – 4 opposition, 160 public opinion, 152 reprisals, 121, 122, 128– 9 violence, 154 Bloody Sunday (1920) Amritsar Massacre (1919), 9, 21 – 2, 103 Asquith, Herbert (1852– 1928), 155– 6 Croke Park (Dublin), 139–41 Crown Forces, 145

massacre, 8 military inquiry, 150 propaganda, 147– 58 reprisals, 128 Bolshevism, 17, 25 – 6, 31, 49 – 50, 162, 167 Bombay Chronicle, 82 bombings, 55 – 6, 76, 164– 5, 170– 1 Bose, Purnima Organizing Empire, 20 – 1 Boyce, D. George (b. 1942), 11, 16 –17 British Army Ireland, 110– 11, 156 legitimacy, 126 martial law, 136 reprisals, 124– 5, 126 violence, 113 British Cabinet, 79, 105, 106, 108 British Empire administration, 170 collective punishment, 24, 139, 158 crisis of empire, 166 – 7, 173 criticism, 84 de Valera, Ea´mon (1882– 1975), 99 force, 12 Irish Unionists, 95 loss, 117 narratives, 82 policies, 91 propaganda, 21 punishment, 18 – 19 reprisals, 170 Ridgeway, Colonel Sir Joseph West (1844 – 1930), 151 – 2 security, 93 self-government, 24 – 5, 29 soldiers, 98 terrorism, 101 training grounds, 20 violence, 11, 14 – 20, 109, 118, 130 vulnerability, 19 British government, 110, 113, 117 – 18, 156, 161, 165 British Socialist Party, 152 British women, 19, 86 Brodrick, William St John Fremantle (Lord Midleton, 1856– 1942), 165 brutality, 9, 20, 120 Bryce, James (1st Viscount Bryce, 1838–1922), 149, 154– 5, 170

INDEX Buckmaster, Lord see Buckmaster, Stanley Owen (1st Viscount Buckmaster, 1861–1934) Buckmaster, Stanley Owen see Buckmaster, Lord (1st Viscount Buckmaster, 1861–1934), 138, 149 Calcutta Statesman, 21 Callwell, Major-General Sir Charles Edward (1859– 1928), 161– 2 Carberry, Major D.H.M. 55– 6, 170– 1 Carmichael, Lord see Gibson-Carmichael, Thomas David (1st Baron Carmichael, 1859–1926) Carson, Edward (1854 – 1935) Croke Park (Dublin), 148 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 21, 25, 87 martial law, 117 Morning Post, 90 soldiers, 98 casualties, 82 – 3, 139, 154, 156 Cavendish, Lord Frederick (1836 – 1832), 34 censorship, 82, 93, 108, 147 – 58 censure, 76, 82, 87, 92 – 3, 95 Chesteron, Gilbert Keith (1874 – 1936), 152 Churchill, Winston (1874– 1965) air power, 165 Bloody Sunday (1920), 147 – 8 British Empire, 14 criticism, 150– 1 Crown Forces, 133 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 24, 83, 92 French, John Denton Pinkstone (1st Earl of Ypres, 1852 –1925), 113 Indian Disorders Committee (IDC), 79 Ireland, 100 martial law, 116, 117, 133 official reprisals, 132 reprisals, 128– 9, 130, 164, 166 Wilson, Sir Henry (1864– 1922), 128 civil authority, 112, 154– 5 civil disobedience, 160 coercion Black and Tans (Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force), 122 British Empire, 119, 158 Crown Forces, 163 Dyer, General Reginald (1864– 1927), 37

247

French, John Denton Pinkstone (1st Earl of Ypres, 1852– 1925), 106 Ireland, 110 opposition, 166 public opinion, 167 The Times, 97 Wedgwood, Colonel Josiah (1872 – 1943), 101 collective punishment British Empire, 24, 139, 158 Churchill, Winston (1874–1965), 100, 129 Croke Park (Dublin), 142, 160 Crown Forces, 163 Dyer, General Reginald (1864– 1927), 82 Ireland, 113, 117, 121, 152 legitimacy, 125 Macready, General Sir Neville (1862 – 1946), 131 martial law, 63 minimum force, 81 mutiny averted, 95 official reprisals, 134 –5 punishment, 66 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 120 Collett, Nigel, 10, 11, 48 Collins, Michael James (1890– 1922), 110, 140, 158 colonialism, 2, 16, 20 Colvin, Ian (1877 –1938), 9, 10 Commonwealth, 5, 101 Communism, 26, 115 composition of committees, 73 – 4, 79 condemnation, 95, 96, 149 – 50 conscience, 22, 23 Conservative Party, 26 Cork reprisals, 124– 5, 147 crawling order, 19, 52, 64 – 7, 75, 86, 95– 6, 166 Creedy, Sir Herbert James (1878– 1973), 87– 8 Crewe, Marquess of see Crewe-Milnes, Robert Offley Ashburton (1st Marquess of Crewe, 1858– 1945) Crewe-Milnes, Robert Offley Ashburton (1st Marquess of Crewe, 1858– 1945), 97, 102, 148– 9 crisis of empire, 7, 166– 8 criticism British Empire, 26 coercion, 166

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Crown Forces, 118 Dyer, General Reginald (1864– 1927), 92 martial law, 68 policies, 150 reprisals, 156 Croke Park (Dublin) Amritsar Massacre (1919), 21 – 2 Bloody Sunday (1920), 8, 139 – 41 Crown Forces, 142, 143 Freeman’s Journal, 159–60 Labour Party, 145 military inquiry, 145– 6 reprisals, 130 self-defence, 142 stampede, 142 Crown Forces Bloody Sunday (1920), 145 casualties, 154 Churchill, Winston (1874– 1965), 133, 150– 1 collective punishment, 163 criticism, 118 Croke Park (Dublin), 142, 143 defence, 126 discipline, 148 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 111, 112, 147 Leeson, David, 21 Manchester Guardian, 147 official reprisals, 135, 154 propaganda, 153 reprisals, 121, 124, 130, 134, 136 status, 166 support, 155 terrorism, 118 violence, 18, 21, 116 Crozier, Brigadier General Frank Percy (1879– 1937), 3, 120, 136, 144–5 curfew, 43, 51, 59 – 60, 61, 121, 135 Curtis, Lionel (1872 – 1955), 2 – 3, 96 Curzon, George Nathaniel (Lord Curzon, 1859–1925), 95, 164 Curzon, Lord see Curzon, George Nathaniel (Lord Curzon, 1859 – 1925) Daily Daily Daily Daily

Express, 150 Herald, 123, 149 News, 149 Telegraph, 86

Datta, V.N., 12, 13 de Valera, Ea´mon (1882– 1975), 99, 111, 159 Defence of India Act (1915), 35 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA, 1914), 21, 107–8, 117 destruction of property, 122– 3, 131– 2 Disorders Inquiry Committee, 73 – 7 Dominion Status, 3, 8, 17, 101, 158, 167 Donoughmore, Earl of see Hely-Hutchinson, Richard Walter (6th Earl of Donoughmore, 1875 –1948) Dublin, 8, 34 Dublin Castle, 117, 153, 156 dyarchy, 6 – 7, 33 Dyer, General Reginald (1864– 1927) Amritsar, 49 Amritsar Massacre (1919), 8 – 14, 24, 41 – 9, 91 – 2 biography, 35 – 7 British women, 19 brutality, 20 – 1 censure, 76 Churchill, Winston (1874– 1965), 100 condemnation, 84, 95, 96 crawling order, 64 – 7 criticism, 92 deaths, 168–9 Finlay, Robert Bannatyne (1st Viscount Finlay, 1842– 1929), 94 force, 95 Hunter Committee (1919– 1920), 12, 75, 78 Indemnity Bill (India, 1919), 69 Indian Disorders Committee (IDC), 79 – 80 Indian nationalism, 98 Kenealy, Archbishop Anselm Edward John (1864– 1943), 88 minimum force, 82 opposition, 166 parliamentary debates, 86 – 98 public opinion, 83 punishment, 24 racism, 67 rebellion, 47– 8 reputation, 85 revenge, 67 Roberts, Frederick Sleigh (1832 – 1914), 110

INDEX Russell, Arthur Oliver Villiers (2nd Baron Ampthill, 1869– 1935), 94 scapegoat, 93, 96 Sikh Golden Temple, 64 strikes, 35 support, 25, 86, 88 – 91, 94 violence, 14 Easter Rising, 106– 10, 115 economics Great Britain, 8, 115 India, 31 Ireland, 34, 36, 115, 122 postwar, 167 World War I, 162 effects of World War I, 162, 164 Egypt, 5, 7, 16, 171 Empire, 4, 6, 7, 17 Finlay, Lord see Finlay, Robert Bannatyne (1st Viscount Finlay, 1842– 1929) Finlay, Robert Bannatyne (1st Viscount Finlay, 1842– 1929), 94, 95, 97 Fisher, Herbert Albert Laurens (1865– 1940), 79, 114, 116 FitzAlan-Howard, Edmund Bernard (1st Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent, 1855–1947), 156 FitzGerald, Desmond (1888 – 1947), 152 force British Empire, 12, 90 defined, 17– 18 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 11 – 12, 95 excessive force, 80 – 1 use of, 166, 170 Wilson, Sir Henry (1864– 1922), 23 Freeman’s Journal, 153– 4, 159– 60 French, John Denton Pinkstone (1st Earl of Ypres, 1852– 1925) aerial bombings, 164 – 5 Anglo-Irish War, 110– 13 assassination attempt, 106 hunger strikes, 109 Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 106 martial law, 113 official reprisals, 131 reprisals, 130 resignations, 156 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 119

249

Gaelic American, 159 Gaelic Athletic Association, 140 Gaelic League, 110 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) (1869– 1948) Amritsar Massacre (1919), 13 Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act (1919), 32 Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), 160 arrested, 53, 55 British politics, 15 Hunter Committee (1919– 1920), 74 Hunter Report, 83 India, 7 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 161 martial law, 72 Nehru, Jawarhalal (1889– 1964), 77 non-violent resistance, 18, 173 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 39 returned medals, 84 – 5 strikes, 35 Gascoyne-Cecil, James Edward Hubert (4th Marquess of Salisbury, 1861–1947), 96, 164 George V (1865– 1936), 149 Ghadr Party, 19, 30, 84, 169 Gibson-Carmichael, Thomas David (1st Baron Carmichael, 1859– 1926), 96 government, 13, 24 Government of Ireland Act (1920), 114 Government of Ireland Bill (1886), 36 Great Britain, 5, 7, 31, 80, 115 Great War see World War I Greenwood, Hamar (1st Viscount Greenwood, 1870– 1948) Cork reprisals, 124– 5 Croke Park (Dublin), 141–2, 144 Crown Forces, 126, 155 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA, 1914), 117 French, John Denton Pinkstone (1st Earl of Ypres, 1852 –1925), 113 hunger strikes, 109 martial law, 132 official reprisals, 157 parliamentary debates, 146 public opinion, 153 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 126, 156 Griffith, Arthur (1872–1922), 111, 152, 160

250

IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

Gritten, William George Howard (1870– 1943), 98 guerrilla war, 31, 105, 118, 164 Gujranwalla, 51 – 6, 57 – 8, 69, 85, 170 – 1 Hamilton, John Andrew (1st Viscount Sumner, 1859– 1934), 95, 99 hartal, 37, 38, 52 – 3, 54, 55 Hely-Hutchinson, Richard Walter (6th Earl of Donoughmore, 1875–1948), 154 Hindus, 38 – 9 Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, 169 Home Rule British government, 113 Crozier, General Frank (1879 – 1937), 120 French, John Denton Pinkstone (1st Earl of Ypres, 1852– 1925), 110 Ireland, 4, 6, 106– 7 Macready, General Sir Neville (1862– 1946), 114– 15 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 34 – 5 policies, 156 Horniman, Benjamin Guy (1873 – 1948), 9, 82 house burning, 131 –2 House of Commons, 151 House of Lords, 95 –6, 97 Hudson, General Sir Havelock (1862– 1944), 74, 78 hunger strikes, 108, 109, 169 Hunter Committee (1919– 1920) Amritsar Massacre (1919), 9 composition, 73 –4 Crewe-Milnes, Robert Offley Ashburton (1st Marquess of Crewe, 1858– 1945), 148 Disorders Inquiry Committee, 73 –7 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 12, 78, 80 Gascoyne-Cecil, James Edward Hubert (4th Marquess of Salisbury, 1861– 1947), 96 Indian National Congress, 77– 82 Morning Post, 88 reactions, 82 – 6 Hunter, Lord William (1865– 1957), 73, 77 Hunter Report, 78 – 9, 85, 100

Imperial crisis, 4 – 8 imperialism Amritsar Massacre (1919), 13 – 14 Ireland, 105 Irish history, 1 protests, 7 racial hierarchies, 2 reforms, 23 state violence, 84 The Times, 102 violence, 9, 22 independence declared in Ireland, 111 implications, 163– 4 India, 5, 13 Ireland, 15, 107, 152, 163 –4 partition, 2 Independent, 154 India administrators, 4, 23 – 4 Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), 160 Bolshevism, 49 – 50 colonialism, 2 Colvin, Sir Auckland (1838– 1908), 168 contact with Ireland, 159 de Valera, Ea´mon (1882– 1975), 99 dyarchy, 6, 33 Dyer, General Reginald (1864– 1927), 35 extremism, 101 imperial crisis, 4 – 8 imperial violence, 14 – 15 independence, 13 Ireland, 20 Irish history, 1 justice, 92 Labour Leader, 100 martial law, 51, 52, 113, 162 military power, 163 Montagu, Edwin (1879 – 1924), 102 nationalism, 1 – 2 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 34 – 5 raj, 2 – 3 rebellion, 15, 171 reforms, 167 self-determination, 100 self-government, 16, 29 Silk Letter Conspiracy, 19 terrorism, 91

INDEX violence, 161, 169 World War I, 5 Indian Army, 120 Indian civil disobedience, 50 Indian Civil Service (ICS), 5, 34 Indian Committee of the Workers Welfare League, 72 Indian Disorders Committee (IDC), 79, 81, 82 –6 Indian National Congress Amritsar Massacre (1919), 13 Hunter Report, 83 inquiry, 77 –82 Montagu, Edwin (1879 – 1924), 71 – 2 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 35 Patel, Vithalbai Jhaverbhai (1873 – 1933), 93 The Times, 160 Indian nationalism, 13, 95, 98 Indian press, 83 inquiry, 77 – 82, 138 international politics, 4– 5, 8, 15 Ireland administrators, 23 – 4 Amritsar, 98 – 103 Black and Tans (Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force), 119– 20 British Army, 110– 11 British Empire, 173 civil authority, 154– 5 collective punishment, 113, 117, 152 contact with India, 159 court martials, 118 Curtis, Lionel (1872 – 1955), 3 Dominion Status, 8, 17, 167 dyarchy, 6 – 7 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 82, 99 Free State Treaty (1922), 3 guerrilla war, 31, 105 Home Rule, 4, 6, 113 imperial crisis, 4 – 8 imperial violence, 14 – 15 independence, 152, 163– 4 India, 1, 2, 20 inquiry, 138 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 113 Manchester Guardian, 98 – 9

251

martial law, 107, 115– 16, 135, 139, 162, 169 massacre, 20 –7 military leadership, 105 – 6 negative racial attitudes, 3 partition, 114 policies, 110 press coverage, 153 public opinion, 109 reprisals, 42, 106, 126, 163, 166 self-determination, 100 self-government, 16, 36 terrorism, 102– 3 Thesiger, Frederic (1st Viscount Chelmsford, 1868– 1933), 33 unemployment, 122 violence, 18, 51, 109, 150, 161 Wilson, Sir Henry (1864– 1922), 87 Irish history, 1 – 2 migration, 4 Parliament, 111 policies, 130 race, 3 –4 republicanism, 4 Unionists, 95 Volunteers, 107, 110 Irish Bulletin, 144, 152– 3 Irish Free State, 7, 158 Irish nationalists Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), 160 de Valera, Ea´mon (1882– 1975), 99 hunger strikes, 108 New Statesman, 100 perceptions, 3 propaganda, 159 public opinion, 107 Tracy, Sean (1895 – 1920), 111 Irish News, 152 Irish Republican Army (IRA) assassination, 21, 139 attacks, 156 British government, 110, 117 Brodrick, William St John Fremantle (1st Earl of Midleton, 1856 –1942), 165– 6 Carson, Edward (1854– 1935), 98 counter-insurgency, 22 Croke Park (Dublin), 142 discipline, 148

252

IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

French, John Denton Pinkstone (1st Earl of Ypres, 1852 –1925), 106 Gaelic Athletic Association, 140 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) (1869 – 1948), 161 guerrilla war, 164 house burning, 132 independence, 8 Ireland, 87 Irish Volunteers, 107 martial law, 133 Montgomery, Major Bernard (1887 – 1976), 3 reprisals, 129, 154, 163 support, 113, 114– 15 violence, 112, 123 The Irish Times, 21 Irving, Miles (Deputy Commissioner, Amritsar), 38, 39, 42, 50 Jallianwala Bagh Amritsar Massacre (1919), 8, 9 Creedy, Sir Herbert James (1878– 1973), 87 – 8 Croke Park (Dublin), 21– 2 Daily Telegraph, 86 Datta, V.N., 12 deaths, 24 Hunter Committee (1919– 1920), 75 Indian National Congress, 77 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali (1876– 1948), 83, 100 meeting, 43 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 85 Sikh Golden Temple, 37 – 8 James, Lieutenant Colonel Cuthbert (1872– 1930), 89 Jeudwine, Major-General Sir Hugh Sandham (1862– 1942), 132– 3 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali (1876 – 1948), 31, 83, 99 –100 Johnson, Colonel Frank, 54, 59 – 60, 62, 170 Joynson-Hicks, Sir William (1st Viscount Brentford, 1865– 1932), 88 justice, 67, 92 Kasur, 51 – 6, 57, 58 – 9, 69 Kenworthy, Joseph (Baron Strabolgi, 1886–1953), 91, 143– 4, 152, 166

Khan, Sir Malik Umar Hayat (1875 – 1944), 13, 74, 84 Khilafat Movement (1919 – 1926), 30, 38, 167, 171 Khilafat Volunteers, 171– 2 Kitchlew, Dr Saifuddin (1888– 1963), 38, 39, 43, 97 Knight, George Wilfrid Holford (1877– 1936), 164 knighthood returned, 84, 103 Labour Leader, 93, 100 Labour Party British Empire, 26 Croke Park (Dublin), 145 Dyer, General Reginald (1864– 1927), 93 martial law, 71 – 2 military inquiry, 151 reprisals, 154 self-determination, 100 Lahore administration, 170 Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act (1919), 52 – 3 curfew, 61 martial law, 54, 69 punishment, 57, 59 riots, 51–6 Law, Andrew Bonar (1858 – 1923), 3 – 4, 91, 156 Leader, The (Allahabad), 83 Leeson, David, 21– 2, 146– 7 legitimacy British Army, 126 British Empire, 35 collective punishment, 125 Empire, 17 lack of, 166 martial law, 128 punishment, 113 reprisals, 150 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 122 state violence, 116 violence, 113 Liberal Party, 26 Lloyd George, David (1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, 1863– 1945) aerial bombings, 165 Bloody Sunday (1920), 148 British Empire, 139

INDEX called truce, 157 Ireland, 105, 117 Long, Walter Hulme (1st Viscount Long, 1854– 1924), 114 official reprisals, 131, 132 reprisals, 125, 128– 9, 130, 149 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 136 Lloyd, Nick, 10 – 11 Long, Walter Hulme (1st Viscount Long, 1854–1924), 114, 130 Lord Chelmsford see Thesiger, Frederic (1st Viscount Chelmsford, 1868– 1933) Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 106, 110, 156 Lyallpur, 69 Lyons, Laura, 20 – 1 Macready, General Sir Neville (1862– 1946) Black and Tans (Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force), 119 censorship, 154 collective punishment, 131 Croke Park (Dublin), 142 inquiry, 138 Ireland, 3, 111, 157 martial law, 114– 15, 116– 17, 120, 136 press coverage, 153 reprisals, 125, 127– 8 majority report of the Hunter Committee, 76 Malaviya, Kapil Deva, 67 –8 Manchester Guardian, 98 – 9, 147, 149 Manual of Military Law, 80 – 1, 161 martial law administrators, 75 air power, 63 Amritsar, 41, 44, 52 application, 162 British violence, 1 casualties, 82 – 3 censorship, 71 condemnation, 84 duration, 69 ended, 82 extended, 157 Hunter Committee (1919– 1920), 75 implemented in Ireland, 132 – 4 India, 113, 172 India and Ireland, 51 Ireland, 87, 107, 112, 139, 163, 169 Johnson, Colonel Frank, 59 Kasur, 54 – 5

253

lack of, 106 Lahore, 54 legitimacy, 116, 128 lessons, 160 mindset, 61 –9 Montagu, Edwin (1879 – 1924), 68 The Observer, 152 official reprisals, 130 –8, 147 opposition, 119 police corruption, 68 policies, 101 public opinion, 113 – 19 punishment, 56 – 61 Punjab, 93 – 4, 163 purpose, 62, 63 use of, 158 violence, 12, 18 Wilson, Sir Henry (1864– 1922), 115– 16 Martin, Hugh (journalist), 125, 127, 173 martyrs, 107, 115 massacre, 20 – 7 Maxwell, General John Grenfell (1859– 1929), 107, 115 mechanism, 134 – 5 medals returned, 84 – 5 Midleton, Lord see Brodrick, William St John Fremantle (1st Earl of Midleton, 1856–1942) military inquiry, 124– 5, 145–6, 149, 150 justice, 45 law, 161– 2 leadership, 105–6 power, 115, 163 strength, 49 Military Courts of Inquiry, 117 Milner, Alfred (1st Viscount Milner, 1854–1925), 79, 96, 133 Milner, Lord see Milner, Alfred (1st Viscount Milner, 1854– 1925) mindset, 61 – 9 minimum force criticism, 92 interpretation, 81 Ireland, 113 Jallianwala Bagh, 86 Manual of Military Law, 80 – 1 martial law, 157 principles, 144

254

IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

Smyth, Colonel Gerald Bryce Ferguson (1885 – 1920), 141 strategies, 161 Young, Edward Hilton (Baron Kennet, 1879– 1960), 93 minority report of the Hunter Committee, 76 Mockaitis, Thomas, 22, 161 Monro, General Sir Charles Carmichael (1860– 1929), 20, 72, 82, 83 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919) Cochrane-Baillie, Charles Wallace Alexander Napier (2nd Baron Lamington, 1860– 1940), 97 expectations, 32 – 3 Ireland, 7 Oddie, Geoffrey, 17 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 35 self-government, 6, 101 Montagu, Edwin (1879 – 1924) Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act (1919), 32 Bolshevism, 51 Carson, Edward (1854– 1935), 98 Dyer, General Reginald (1864– 1927), 89 hunger strikes, 121 Hunter Committee (1919– 1920), 73 Hunter Report, 78 – 9 India, 5, 91 Ireland, 99 Joynson-Hicks, Sir William (1st Viscount Brentford, 1865– 1932), 88 martial law, 45, 63 – 4 public inquiry, 72 – 3 punishment, 67 – 8 race, 2 riots, 71–2 self-government, 29 terrorism, 101– 2 Thesiger, Frederic (1st Viscount Chelmsford, 1868– 1933), 56 The Times, 82 Morning Post, 21, 87, 88, 90 – 1, 149 Muslim League, 99– 100 Muslims, 38 – 9 mutiny, 158– 9 National Review, 149 nationalism British Empire, 16

India, 31 Ireland, 107 Ireland and India, 1 – 2, 159 radicalized, 162, 167 reprisals, 166 Nehru, Jawarhalal (1889– 1964), 77, 83 Nehru, Motilal (1861 – 1931), 161 New Statesman, 100, 117 New Violence Party, 172– 3 New York Times, 82 New Zealand, 5, 103 non-violent resistance, 13, 18, 44, 160 O’Brien, Ignatius (1st Baron Shandon, 1857–1930), 138 O’Brien, Lieutenant Colonel (Deputy Commissioner for Gujranwalla), 58, 83 The Observer, 152 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864– 1940) Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act (1919), 32 biography, 33 – 5 Colvin, Sir Auckland (1838– 1908), 168 crawling order, 67 deaths, 168–9 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 25, 48 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) (1869 – 1948), 39 Hunter Committee (1919– 1920), 74, 76 – 7 imperial violence, 11 Indian civil disobedience, 50 – 1 Jallianwala Bagh, 85 martial law, 52, 61 – 3, 113 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919), 33 Morning Post, 90 parliamentary debates, 86 – 7 punishment, 56 Punjab, 64 rebellion, 49 riots, 81 support, 84 terrorism, 85 official reprisals Crown Forces, 135 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 166 ended, 157

INDEX martial law, 130– 8, 147 property damage, 134 rules, 144 unofficial reprisals, 136 opposition, 119, 160 Organizing Empire, 20 Ormsby-Gore, William George (4th Baron Harlech, 1885– 1964), 156 Pal, Dr Satya (1884 – 1954), 37, 39, 97 Palmer, Charles Frederick (1869 – 1920), 90 Pan-Islamism, 8, 29, 30, 50, 51, 167 parliamentary debates, 86 – 98, 146, 154 partition, 2, 30, 114 Peace with Ireland Council, 152, 166 Pearse, Patrick (1879 – 1916), 107 police, 68, 105, 109, 120, 148 policies Anglo-Irish War, 161 assassination, 21 British Empire, 91, 110 British Socialist Party, 152 criticism, 150 Home Rule, 156 imperial violence, 14 – 15 Ireland, 130 Kasur, 58 – 9 martial law, 101 raj, 93 Wilson, Sir Henry (1864– 1922), 87 politics, 1, 7 –8, 15 power, 2, 12, 16, 75, 164 power sharing, 6, 33 press, 82 – 3, 160 British press, 85, 99 Indian press, 82 Irish press, 153 principles, 22, 144 propaganda, 21, 147– 58, 159 property, 122– 3, 131–2, 134, 171 protests, 7, 53 – 4, 55 public image, 80 inquiry, 72 relations, 23 response, 147 – 58 speaking, 37 – 8 public opinion British government, 165 coercion, 167

255

collective punishment, 158 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 82, 83 imperialism, 22 – 3 Ireland, 109, 112, 128 Irish nationalists, 107 martial law, 113– 19, 130 Montagu, Edwin (1879 – 1924), 73 Peace with Ireland Council, 152 violence, 173 punishment British Empire, 16 collective punishment, 24, 63, 66 House of Lords, 95 – 6 Hunter Committee (1919– 1920), 76 importance, 72 Kasur, 58 – 9 legitimacy, 113 martial law, 52, 56 – 61 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 77 reprisals, 121, 166 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 120 students, 60 violence, 18, 169 – 73 Punjab administrators, 93 Afghanistan, 50 – 1, 167 Crewe-Milnes, Robert Offley Ashburton (1st Marquess of Crewe, 1858 – 1945), 102 elections, 31 – 2 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) (1869 – 1948), 39 government, 13 Hunter Committee (1919– 1920), 75 insurrection, 94 martial law, 18, 57, 62, 93 – 4, 163 nationalism, 31 North-West Frontier, 19 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 34, 64 rebellion, 10, 15, 88, 100 purpose of martial law, 62, 63 race, 2, 3, 4 racism, 3, 67, 83, 91, 93 raj attitudes, 71 culture of terror, 68 –9

256

IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

Curtis, Lionel (1872 – 1955), 2 – 3 Dyer, General Reginald (1864– 1927), 35 Ghadr Party, 30 government, 24 reprisals, 131 riots, 51 Spoor, Benjamin Charles (1878– 1928), 93 support, 85 violence, 11 reactions, 82 – 6 rebellion Amritsar, 47 French, John Denton Pinkstone (1st Earl of Ypres, 1852– 1925), 110 India, 32, 171 Ireland, 15, 106– 10 Jallianwala Bagh, 85 Punjab, 10, 51, 75, 88, 100 response, 16 Ridgeway, Colonel Sir Joseph West (1844 – 1930), 152 riots, 49–51 recruitment, 119, 120 reports, 49, 75 repression, 20, 42 reprisals Anglo-Irish War, 112– 13, 121– 30 Asquith, Herbert (1852– 1928), 155 British Empire, 170 condemnation, 149 condoned, 127 covered up, 136 crawling order, 67 criticism, 156 Croke Park (Dublin), 147 Crown Forces, 121, 124, 130, 134 importance, 72 Ireland, 99, 105, 106, 163 Labour Party, 145 martial law, 56 – 7, 62, 130– 8 officially sanctioned, 134 parliamentary debates, 154 propaganda, 153 public opinion, 166 punishment, 58 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 120 self-defence, 141– 7 Shaw, George Bernard (1856– 1950), 158 resignations, 109, 121, 156

Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (1920), 114, 117– 18, 135 riots Amritsar, 37 – 41 Great Britain, 115 Gujranwalla, 55 Ireland, 112 Kasur, 54 – 5 Lahore, 51– 6 Montagu, Edwin (1879 – 1924), 71 – 2 raj, 51 rebellion, 49– 51 state violence, 81 Roberts, Frederick Sleigh (1832 –1914), 20, 37, 110 Round Table, 149 Rowlatt Act (1919) see Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act (1919) Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Anglo-Irish War, 112 Bloody Sunday (1920), 8 casualties, 156 Croke Park (Dublin), 140 Greenwood, Hamar (1st Viscount Greenwood, 1870– 1948), 153, 156 legitimacy, 126 militarization, 120 Montgomery, Major Bernard (1887 – 1976), 3 recruitment, 119, 120 reprisals, 122, 126, 147 resignations, 109, 121 unofficial reprisals, 136 violence, 113, 123, 138 Russell, Arthur Oliver Villiers (2nd Baron Ampthill, 1869– 1935), 94, 95, 100 Salisbury, Lord see Gascoyne-Cecil, James Edward Hubert (4th Marquess of Salisbury, 1861– 1947) Sayer, Derek, 12, 21, 25 scapegoat, 93, 96 scholarship, 11, 13 – 14, 17, 22 self-determination, 5, 6, 8, 15, 23, 25, 29, 30, 108, 119, 162, 166, 167 self-government British Commonwealth, 5 British Empire, 24 – 5 Dyer, General Reginald (1864– 1927), 48

INDEX Egypt, 16 India, 29 Ireland, 36, 106, 158 Labour Party, 100 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919), 6, 101 Wilson, President Woodrow (1856 – 1924, USA), 15 Shandon, Lord see O’Brien, Ignatius (1st Baron Shandon, 1857– 1930) Shannon Hotel, 137– 8 shootings, 41– 9 Shortt, Edward (1862– 1935), 79, 110 Sikh Golden Temple, 37 – 8, 64 Silk Letter Conspiracy, 19, 30 Singh, Udam (1899 – 1940), 168 – 9 Sinha, Lord Satyendra Prasanno (1st Baron Sinha, 1863 –1928), 51 Sinn Fein Anglo-Irish War, 112 army veterans, 20 British government, 110, 156 counter-insurgency, 22 Croke Park (Dublin), 141, 144 Home Rule, 156 independence, 107 India, 101 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 3 leaders arrested, 110 meetings banned, 110 parliamentary elections, 111 propaganda, 153 recruitment, 108 reprisals, 130 support, 109 Smith, Frederick Edwin, Lord Chancellor Birkenhead (1872 – 1930), 79, 95 –6, 116, 138, 165– 6 Smyth, Colonel Gerald Bryce Ferguson (1885– 1920), 127, 141 Spectator, 149 Spoor, Benjamin Charles (1878– 1928), 93 state violence, 14, 81, 84, 92, 116 status, 15, 111, 166 Stokes, Eric (1924– 1981), 19 strategies, 15, 161 Strickland, General Sir Edward Peter (1869– 1951), 131– 2, 134 strikes, 35, 37, 38, 115 students, 59 – 60

257

Sumner, Lord see Hamilton, John Andrew (1st Viscount Sumner, 1859– 1934) Sunday Times, 88 support Crown Forces, 155 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 21, 25, 78, 84, 86, 88 –91 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 114– 15 Sinn Fein, 109 Thesiger, Frederic (1st Viscount Chelmsford, 1868– 1933), 93 Swinson, Arthur (1915 – 1970), 10, 13 Tagore, Rabindranath (1861 – 1941), 84, 103 terrorism Asquith, Herbert (1852– 1928), 155 Bengal, 30 British Empire, 101 Churchill, Winston (1874– 1965), 92 India, 91 Ireland, 102– 3 O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor Michael (1864 – 1940), 85 reprisals, 152 state violence, 118 Thesiger, Frederic (1st Viscount Chelmsford, 1868–1933) Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) (1869 – 1948), 84–5 Haque, Mazharul (1866 –1930), 71 Hunter Committee (1919– 1920), 73 Labour Party, 93 martial law, 45, 52, 63 – 4 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919), 33 Montagu, Edwin (1879 – 1924), 56 public inquiry, 72 – 3 Turnour, Edward (6th Earl Winterton, 1883– 1962), 93 The Times Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 85 – 6 House of Commons, 151 House of Lords, 97 imperial relations, 102 Indian National Congress, 160 letter to, 83 –4, 92, 151, 163, 173 Montagu, Edwin (1879 – 1924), 82

258

IMPERIAL VIOLENCE AND THE PATH TO INDEPENDENCE

official reprisals, 154 reprisals, 129, 149– 50 Townshend, Charles (b. 1945), 4, 22, 118, 134 Tribune, 61 Tudor, Major-General Sir Henry Hugh (1870– 1965), 113, 119– 20, 128, 130, 136 United Kingdom, 5 see also Great Britain United States of America, 8, 159 Vincent, Sir William Henry Hoare (1866– 1941), 72 violence administrators, 38 Black and Tans (Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force), 154 British Army, 113 British Empire, 14 – 20, 22, 109, 118, 139, 170 colonialism, 16 defined, 17– 18 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 9 imperialism, 11, 22 increased, 123 Ireland, 27, 150 Ireland and India, 161 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 112 Kasur, 54 legitimacy, 113 martial law, 1, 130 public opinion, 173 punishment, 169– 73 racism, 83

state violence, 25 Wilson, Sir Henry (1864– 1922), 23 warfare, 5, 7, 105 weapons, 144 – 5 Wedgwood, Colonel Josiah (1872 – 1943), 85, 101 Weekly Summary, 128 Westminster Gazette, 30, 149, 154 Wilson, President Woodrow (1856– 1924, USA), 5, 15, 108–9, 162 Wilson, Sir Henry (1864 – 1922) Bloody Sunday (1920), 147 – 8 British government, 139 Churchill, Winston (1874– 1965), 128 Dyer, General Reginald (1864 – 1927), 21, 25, 87 force, 23 Ireland, 157 martial law, 3, 115– 16, 117, 132– 3 official reprisals, 131 reprisals, 128– 30 Word to Gandhi, A, 158 World War I British Empire, 15 crisis of empire, 7, 166 – 7 economics, 115 effects, 162, 164 imperial relations, 102 international politics, 4 –5 Ireland, 105, 106– 7 Kent, Susan Kingsley, 22 Wylie, William (Ireland Supreme Court Judge), 114, 127

PLATES

Plate 1

A British soldier in India q The British Library Board.

Plate 2

The entrance to Jallianwalah Bagh, Amritsar q The British Library Board.

Plate 3 The location of Dyer’s firing line inside Jallianwalah Bagh, Amritsar q The British Library Board.

Plate 4

An Indian being made to crawl in Amritsar q The British Library Board.

Plate 5 View of Croke Park, Dublin, 22 November, 1920. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Plate 6 Black and Tan soldier with Lewis machine gun, Dublin. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Plate 7 Michael Collins and Sean MacKeon in Croke Park at the Leinster hurling final game. Croke Park, 11 September 1921. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Plate 8 Interested parties outside Jervis Street hospital (Dublin) during military enquiry into the Croke Park shooting. 24 November 1920. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Plate 9 Black and Tans about to search civilians, Dublin. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Plate 10 Conducting an official reprisal. Meelin, Co. Cork. 1 February 1921. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Plate 11

Post-reprisal. Cork, 1921. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Plate 12 Post-reprisal. Meelin, Co. Cork, 1921. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Plate 13 Post-reprisal. Templemore, Co. Tipperary. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Plate 14 Post-raid celebration by Crown Forces at London and North Western Hotel, Dublin, 11 April 1921. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.