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‘Black-and-Tan Tendencies’: Policing Insurgency in the Palestine Mandate, 1922–48

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Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day

Abstract

In April 1922 more than 700 disbanded members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its Auxiliary Division were transferred by the Colonial Office to the British Palestine Mandate. Focusing on the British sections of the Palestine Gendarmerie and the Palestine Police, Gannon examines the policing of insurgency in the Palestine Mandate, critiquing the commonplace view that the brutality that at times defined police counterinsurgency in the territory was the result of poor-quality recruitment, or the importation of a ‘Black and Tan’ ethos from Ireland. Drawing parallels with the Royal Irish Constabulary’s counterinsurgency during the Irish Revolution, Gannon argues instead that the ‘Black and Tannery’ which became a feature of the British police response to the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, and the subsequent Zionist insurgency, was a function of their inability to meet the challenges of the ‘small wars’ into which they were thrust, providing evidence for the primacy of situational factors in shaping cultures of colonial police violence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For detailed surveys of these events see Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–1929 (London, 1974); Idem, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, vol. 2, 1929–1939: From Riots to Rebellion (London, 1977); Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: the Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict, 1917–1929 (Oxford, 1991); Martin Kolinsky, Law, Order and Riots in Mandatory Palestine, 1929–1935 (London, 1993); Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (London, 2000); Norman Rose, A Senseless, Squalid War: Voices from Palestine, 1945–1948 (London, 2009).

  2. 2.

    The ‘regular RIC’ comprised the Black and Tans, here defined as any man, British or Irish, who joined the RIC on or after 2 January 1920 (the date on which the first RIC constable was recruited in Britain), and the ‘old RIC’, those who joined the service prior to this date. The ADRIC, a ‘special Corps of Gendarmerie’ composed of ex-officers, was recruited from July 1920 onwards. References to the RIC in the text refer to the ‘regular RIC’ and the ADRIC combined.

  3. 3.

    The term ‘Black and Tannery’ has been used since the time to describe the brutal counterinsurgency methods sometimes employed by the RIC during its attempted suppression of the Irish Revolution in 1920 and 1921, particularly reprisals and collective punishments involving unwonted or excessive violence against people and property, including extrajudicial killing. See, for example, Frank Percy Crozier, A Word to Gandhi: the Lesson of Ireland (London, 1931), 40, 91; Richard Bennett, The Black and Tans (London, 1959), 56; D. M. Leeson, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence (Oxford, 2011), 68.

  4. 4.

    Quoted in Alex Winder, ‘Abu Jilda, Anti-imperial Antihero: Banditry and Popular Rebellion in Palestine’ in The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, ed. Cyrus Schayegh & Andrew Arsan (Oxford, 2015), 308–320, 309.

  5. 5.

    Ibid. 317.

  6. 6.

    National Archives, London (hereafter UKNA), Colonial Office files (hereafter CO), CO 733/25, ‘Report of Palestine administration’, August 1922.

  7. 7.

    Palestine Weekly, 29 June 1923.

  8. 8.

    UKNA, CO 733/49/100-107, ‘Report on police and gendarmerie’, 15 August 1923; Norman & Helen Bentwich, Mandate Memories, 1918–1948 (London, 1965), 87.

  9. 9.

    Churchill College, Cambridge (hereafter CCC), Churchill Papers (hereafter CHAR), 17/25, Tudor to Churchill, 22 October 1922; UKNA, CO 733/65/113, Meinertzhagen, Colonial Office minute, 10 March 1924; Middle East Centre Archive, Oxford (hereafter MECA), McNeill collection (hereafter MNC), GB 165-0197, A/1, Diaries, 23 June 1924.

  10. 10.

    Matthew Hughes, ‘A British “Foreign Legion”? The British Police in Mandate Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies 49 (2013): 697; David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: the Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester, 1990), 66. See also Matthew Hughes, ‘The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–39’, English Historical Review 124 (2009): 333.

  11. 11.

    CCC, CHAR 17/11, Samuel to Churchill, 11 Dec. 1921.

  12. 12.

    MECA, MNC, A/3, Angus McNeill, ‘Notes on the British Gendarmerie’, 3 January 1923.

  13. 13.

    Douglas Duff, Bailing with a Teaspoon (London, 1953), 31.

  14. 14.

    Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary (London, 1959), 11 Apr. 1922, 116; UKNA, CO 733/61/38, Meinertzhagen, ‘Military Report on Palestine’, 25 March 1923.

  15. 15.

    Pembroke College, Cambridge, Sir Ronald Storrs papers, MSS/III/3, ‘Secret political resume for Jerusalem District’, 15 July 1922.

  16. 16.

    Doar Hayom, 14 July 1922; Jenifer Glynn (ed.), Tidings from Zion: Helen Bentwich’s Letters from Jerusalem 1919–1931 (London, 2000), 87.

  17. 17.

    Duff, Bailing, 36–38; Doar Hayom, 18 September 1922.

  18. 18.

    Duff, Bailing, 45–46; MECA, MNC, A/1, Diaries, 23 October 1922; Falastin, 28 October 1922; Jewish Chronicle, 3 November 1922.

  19. 19.

    MECA, MNC, A/1, Diaries, 23 October, 2 November 1922.

  20. 20.

    See, for example, Ibid. 14 March 1923, 1 September 1924.

  21. 21.

    Duff, Bailing, 31.

  22. 22.

    UKNA, Treasury files, T172/1551, McNeill to Churchill, 7 April 1926.

  23. 23.

    On 10 April 1919, troops opened fire on demonstrators in the Indian city of Amritsar, killing at least twenty. Two days later, a detachment of riflemen commanded by Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer deliberately shot dead several hundred non-violent protestors and bystanders to (in his own words) ‘punish’ their defiance of his ban on public gatherings and to produce ‘the necessary moral and widespread effect’ to deter further demonstrations in what the former British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, denounced as ‘one of the worst outrages in the whole of our history’: Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920’, Past & Present 131 (1991): 144–146, 131.

  24. 24.

    MECA, MNC, A/3, ‘Notes’; UKNA, CO 733/62/46-7, Samuel to Devonshire, 23 February 1923.

  25. 25.

    UKNA, CO 733/49/124-34, ‘Report of the Palestine police and prisons’, 23 July 1923.

  26. 26.

    Palestine Weekly, 6 July 1923; UKNA, CO 733/128/2, ‘Report on Palestine administration, 1925’.

  27. 27.

    MECA, Geoffrey Owen collection, GB165-0403, Interview with John Knight, 13 June 2006.

  28. 28.

    ‘Police Force and Prison Service: Annual Administrative Report’, 1937 (Jerusalem, 1937).

  29. 29.

    MECA, Charles Tegart collection, GB165-0281 (hereafter CTC), 2/1, ‘Memorandum regarding the formation of a gendarmerie or semi-military force for Palestine’, undated 1939.

  30. 30.

    David Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism, 1945–1948 (London, 2009), 27.

  31. 31.

    UKNA, CO 537/2269/50-3, ‘Report on the Palestine Mobile Police Force’, 2 December 1946.

  32. 32.

    UKNA, London Metropolitan Police archives, MEPO 2/8212, ‘Recruitment of ex-members of the Palestine Police Force, 1948–49’, 26 February 1948.

  33. 33.

    The most notorious of these officers was Douglas Duff, who had transferred to the ordinary establishment of the Palestine Police in April 1926 with the rank of ‘British inspector’. While careful to distance himself from the actual practice of tortures such as water-boarding and suspension by hoist, he admitted to overseeing their employment by his Arab subordinates and using the information they yielded. Duff, Bailing, 168, 189.

  34. 34.

    Imperial War Museum, London (hereafter IWM), Sydney Burr collection, 88/8/1, Burr to parents, 19 December 1937, 29 December 1937, undated, c. December 1937; Burr to Alex, undated, c. December 1937.

  35. 35.

    See, for example, the John Briance letters quoted by Hughes in ‘Banality’, 327, 347; IWM, Sound archive 10688, Reubin Kitson interview, 26 April 1989; Roger Courtney, Palestine Policeman: An Account of Eighteenth Dramatic Months in the Palestine Police Force During the Great Jew-Arab Troubles (London, 1939), 176, 214–15, 238; Jack Binsley, The Palestine Police Service (London, 1997), 104–6, 119–20.

  36. 36.

    MECA, Jerusalem & East Mission papers, 61/1, Stewart to Matthews, 9 June 1936; MacMichael to MacDonald, 5 Sept. 1938, quoted in Charles Smith, ‘Communal Conflict and Insurrection in Palestine, 1936–48’ in Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917–65, ed. David Anderson & David Killingray (Manchester, 1992), 71.

  37. 37.

    Spectator, 14 October 1938; Irish Independent, 10 January 1939.

  38. 38.

    New York Times, 23 April 1947. See also Hansard, House of Commons’ debates, 31 July 1946, vol. 426, cc934–5, c1017 & 1 August 1946, c1315; New York Times, 10 July 1946; Irish Democrat, August 1947.

  39. 39.

    Roy Farran, Winged Dagger: Adventures on Special Service (London, 1948), 348.

  40. 40.

    Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat, vii.

  41. 41.

    Charles Townshend, ‘The Defence of Palestine: Insurrection and Public Security, 1936–1939’, English Historical Review, 103 (1988): 931; Idem, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counter-insurgency in the Twentieth Century (London, 1986), 92.

  42. 42.

    Nick Kardahji, ‘A Measure of Restraint: The Palestine Police and the End of the British Mandate’, M.Phil. thesis (University of Oxford, 2007), 45; Smith, ‘Communal conflict’, 79.

  43. 43.

    Nicknamed ‘the punishment squad’, the MPSF was composed of men ‘who were good enough as policemen but were by nature rugged individualists who needed to be kept on a tight rein’: Edward Horne, A Job Well Done: A History of the Palestine Police Force 1920–1948 (Lewes, 2003), 499.

  44. 44.

    Florence O’Donoghue, ‘The Sacking of Cork’, in Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story, 1916–21: Told by the Men who Made It, ed. Brian Ó’Conchubhair (Cork, 2009), 88–105, 90; D. M. Leeson, ‘The Scum of London’s Underworld? British Recruits for the Royal Irish Constabulary, 1920–21’, Contemporary British History 17 (2003).

  45. 45.

    Anne Dolan, ‘The British Culture of Paramilitary Violence in the Irish War of Independence’ in War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, ed. Robert Gerwarth & John Horne (Oxford, 2012), 200–215, 212.

  46. 46.

    Leeson, Black and Tans (Oxford, 2011), 191.

  47. 47.

    Duff, Bailing, 19–20; Tom Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security: the Case of Ireland 1916–1921 and Palestine 1936–1939 (London, 1977), 154–55; Geoffrey Morton, Just the Job: Some Experiences of a Colonial Policeman (London, 1957), 19. See also Hughes, ‘British Foreign Legion’, 697.

  48. 48.

    Cafferata to his mother, 29 Nov. 1929, quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, 325. Cafferata, a former section leader with ADRIC ‘C Company’, was acting police district superintendent in Hebron where the worst of the rioting occurred.

  49. 49.

    Townshend, ‘Defence’, 934, 946.

  50. 50.

    Ted Swedenburg, Memories of the Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis, 1995), 94. British police referred to the insurgents as ‘Oozlebarts’, their rendering of the Arabic Ursabat (‘gangs’).

  51. 51.

    CCC, CHAR 2/126, Tudor to Churchill, 21 September 1923.

  52. 52.

    Douglas Duff, Palestine unveiled (London, 1938), 73–74.

  53. 53.

    W. J. Lowe and Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘The Domestication of the Royal Irish Constabulary 1836–1922’, Irish Economic and Social History 14 (1992): 27–48.

  54. 54.

    CCC, CHAR 2/348, McNeill to Churchill, 20 December 1937; MECA, CTC, 2/2, Tegart, ‘Report on Police Reorganisation’, January 1938, Section 3.

  55. 55.

    Report of the Palestine Commission, Cmd. 5479. H.M.S.O., 1937, 198.

  56. 56.

    UKNA, CO 850/40/7, Spicer to Hathorn Hall, 30 January 1934; The Times, 27 January 1938.

  57. 57.

    MECA, CTC, 2/2, ‘Tegart Report’, Section 6.

  58. 58.

    UKNA, CO 733/389/13/35, MacMichael to MacDonald, 8 February 1939.

  59. 59.

    UKNA, CO 733/297/2, Colonial Office minute, 5 June 1936. Spicer was forcibly retired in October 1937 due his hardline approach.

  60. 60.

    Binsley, Palestine Police, 99.

  61. 61.

    Quoted in Horne, Job, 212.

  62. 62.

    IWM, Kitson interview.

  63. 63.

    C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (3rd edn, London, 1906), 148.

  64. 64.

    Briance quoted in Hughes, ‘Banality’, 352; CCC, CHAR 2/348, McNeill to Churchill, 20 December 1937. See also Courtney, Palestine Policeman, 176; Duff, Palestine Unveiled, 60–62.

  65. 65.

    Cesarani, Major Farran’s Hat, 26.

  66. 66.

    The Yishuv (literally the ‘settlement’) refers to the Jewish community in Palestine in the period predating the establishment of Israel in 1948.

  67. 67.

    B. L. Montgomery, The Memoirs of Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (London, 1958), 378–79; Georgina Sinclair, ‘“Get into a Crack Force and Earn £20 a Month and all Found”: The Influence of the Palestine Police upon Colonial Policing, 1922–1948’, European Review of History, 13 (2006): 55.

  68. 68.

    Quoted in Paul McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels: British Intelligence and Ireland, 1916–1945 (Woodbridge, 2008), 164.

  69. 69.

    MECA, Desmond Morton collection, GB165-0405, Morton to parents, 15 November 1947.

  70. 70.

    IWM, Sound archive 10392, Richard Charles Catling interview, September 1988; R. D. Wilson, Cordon and Search: With the 6th Airborne Division in Palestine (Aldershot, 1949), 45.

  71. 71.

    Kardahji, ‘Measure’, 66–67.

  72. 72.

    Binsley, Palestine Police, 128–29.

  73. 73.

    J. J. W. Murphy, ‘Irishmen in Palestine, 1946–1948’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 40/157 (1951): 88.

  74. 74.

    R.A.F. Museum, London, Viscount Trenchard papers, MFC76/1/285, Tudor to Churchill, 1 October 1922.

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  1. Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

    Seán William Gannon

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Correspondence to Seán William Gannon .

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  1. University of Exeter , Penryn, United Kingdom

    Brian Hughes

  2. Trinity College Dublin , Dublin, Ireland

    Fergus Robson

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Gannon, S.W. (2017). ‘Black-and-Tan Tendencies’: Policing Insurgency in the Palestine Mandate, 1922–48. In: Hughes, B., Robson, F. (eds) Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49526-2_4

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