Abstract
This chapter opens with a brief overview of the life of the Irish Franciscan Eugene Hoade, whose controversial career as Palestine Police Catholic chaplain (1938–1948) coincided with a significant increase in the Irish presence in Palestine’s policing. It then outlines some of the themes addressed in this book, and continues with a discussion of these themes as explored in subsequent chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
Biographical information on Hoade gathered from articles, press cuttings, and unpublished personal reminiscences found in Irish Franciscan Archives, Dublin (IFA), Eugene Hoade papers (EHP), 1/1.
- 2.
Al-Jihad (Jordan), 5 December 1956.
- 3.
National Archives of Ireland (NAI), Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), 305/156, McCauley to Department of External Affairs, 13 December 1956.
- 4.
See, for example, Mary C. Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 212.
- 5.
The Crusader, 1 February 1931.
- 6.
Hoade held such views all his life. He treated with scepticism the Second Vatican Council’s ‘watery’ revision of Replacement Theology and continued to see the Israelis as ‘outwardly … very anti-Christian’. IFA, EHP, 1/8, ‘Notes on Jewish history’, undated, c. late 1960s.
- 7.
Connacht Tribune, 9 December 1939, 27. Hoade himself was frequently described in press reports as a former Irish rebel but evidence for this has yet to emerge.
- 8.
See undated press clippings in IFA, EHP, 1/7; Irish Independent, 17 April 1954, 9. Stamps on Hoade’s passport indicate that he was admitted to Israel in later life.
- 9.
New York Times, 28 April 1954. Hoade also denied that he had been ‘a fugitive Irish rebel’.
- 10.
Joseph Campbell, Baksheesh and Brahman: Asian Journals—India (Novato: New World Library, 1995), 2.
- 11.
See, for example, Commonwealth & Empire Museum Bristol (CEM), Palestine Police Archive, Personnel Records, uncatalogued (PPAPR), R. Fordham file, Hoade to Cressy, undated c. March 1947; CEM, PPAPR, M. Hamilton file, Hamilton to Hoade, 16 December 1947; CEM, PPAPR, F. Potter file, Hoade to Gray, 13 May 1948. See also Gerald Green, Author correspondence, 6 November 2013; Patrick McGrath, Gloucestershire, Author interview 29 November 2009; Norman Cresswell, Through the Year with the Catholic Faith (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 78.
- 12.
IFA, EHP, 1/8, Hoade to Irwin, 2 March 1947; Irish Times, 1 July 1947, 2.
- 13.
The Irish Constabulary, established as a unitary national force in 1836, was not granted the prefix ‘Royal’ until 1867 in recognition of its role in the suppression of the Fenian rebellion. In the interests of clarity and convenience, the terms Royal Irish Constabulary and RIC are here used to refer to both the pre and post-1867 force.
- 14.
The ‘dependent’ or ‘colonial’ empire comprised those territories which were governed through London, as distinct from the ‘settled empire’ (or, from 1907, the self-governing dominions) such as Canada and Australia.
- 15.
Those territories administered under Colonial Office auspices comprised, not only Crown colonies, but a variety of other possessions such as Protectorates (e.g., Swaziland and Uganda), Mandates (Palestine and Tanganyika), and a Condominium (the New Hebrides). However, in the interests of clarity and convenience, the term ‘colony’ is applied here to all.
- 16.
Anthony Kirk-Greene, On Crown Service: a History of HM Colonial and Overseas Civil Services, 1837–1997 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 13.
- 17.
However, the deputy permanent colonial under-secretary, Sir Charles Jeffries, noted that a sense of ‘unofficial unity’ developed in many of these services in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Thus, in the interests of clarity and convenience, terms such as Colonial Administrative Service, Colonial Legal Service, and Colonial Police Service are used here with reference to the pre-unification period as well. Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Police (London: Parrish, 1952), 41–43.
- 18.
Ralph Furse, Aucuparius: Recollections of a Recruiting Officer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962), 19.
- 19.
Ibid., 240.
- 20.
Ibid., 241.
- 21.
Bodleian Library, Oxford (BLO), Commonwealth and African Studies (CAS), MSS.Brit.Emp.s.415 Ralph Furse collection, Box 2, Richards to Furse, 4 January 1932.
- 22.
Furse, Aucuparius, 69.
- 23.
Ibid., 142.
- 24.
For example: Dubliner John Parr was governor of Nova Scotia from 1782 to 1786; George Macartney from Antrim held the governorships of Grenada (1775–1779), Madras (1781/1785), and the Cape Colony (1796/1798); Richard Bourke from Dublin was governor of the Cape Colony (1825/1828) and New South Wales (1831–1837); and Richard Doherty from Tipperary was governor of Sierra Leone from 1837 to 1840.
- 25.
Donald Harman Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: a Primer (Ontario: Institute for Irish Studies, 1993), 142; Andy Bielenberg, ‘Irish Emigration to the British Empire, 1700–1914’ in Andy Bielenberg (ed.), The Irish Diaspora (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 215–234, 215. See also Hiram Morgan, ‘An Unwelcome Heritage: Ireland’s Role in British Empire-Building’, History of European Ideas, 19 (1994): 619–625.
- 26.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds: A Four Nations Approach to the History of the British Empire’, History Compass, 6 (2008): 1244–1263.
- 27.
See, for example, S. B. Cook, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges between India and Ireland (London: Sage, 1993); Keith Jeffery (ed.), ‘An Irish Empire’? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996); Michael Holmes & Denis Holmes (eds), Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts (Dublin: Folens, 1997); Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004); Tadhg Foley & Maureen O’Connor (eds), Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture and Empire (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006); Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Patrick O’Leary, Servants of the Empire: the Irish in the Punjab, 1881–1921 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011); Barry Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks: Migration, Social Communication and Exchange in Nineteenth Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012); Helen O’Shea, Ireland and the End of Empire: the Republic and its Role in the Cyprus Emergency (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015); Timothy G. McMahon, Michael de Nie & Paul Townend (eds), Ireland in an Imperial World: Citizenship, Opportunism, and Subversion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
- 28.
On Southern Irish military service after 1922, see Steven O’Connor, Irish Officers in the British Forces, 1922–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Keith Jeffery, ‘The British Army and Ireland since 1922’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 431–458; Bernard Kelly, Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen after the Second World War (Dublin: Merrion, 2012); Richard Doherty, Irish Men and Women in the Second World War (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999).
- 29.
In the interests of convenience and clarity, the terms ‘Southern Ireland’, ‘the South’, and ‘Southern Irish’ are here used with reference to the twenty-six counties which, during the period of this study, comprised the Irish Free State (1922–1937), Éire, or Ireland (1937–1949), and the Republic of Ireland (1949–1966).
- 30.
Kevin Kenny, ‘The Irish in the Empire’ in Kenny (ed), Ireland and the British Empire, 90–122, 112.
- 31.
Irish missionaries themselves played a pivotal role in British Empire-building, enjoying a ‘clearly symbiotic alliance’ with the colonial state in certain regions. By 1965, over 6500 Irish Catholic missionaries were working in the so-called Third World, as were hundreds of others from Irish Protestant denominations. Ibid., 120; Kevin O’Sullivan, Ireland, Africa and the End of Empire: Small State Identity in the Cold War, 1955–1975 (Manchester, Manchester UP, 2012), 15. See also Fiona Bateman, ‘Ireland’s Spiritual Empire: Territory and Landscape in Irish Catholic Missionary Discourse’ in Hilary M. Carey (ed.), Empires of Religion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 267–287.
- 32.
David M. Anderson & David Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991); idem, Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917–1965 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992).
- 33.
Middle East Centre Archives, St Antony’s College, Oxford (MECA), GB165-0197 Angus McNeill collection, A/1 Diaries, 23 May 1926.
- 34.
Duff’s memoirs of his police service in Ireland and Palestine include Sword for Hire: the Saga of a Modern Free-Companion (London: John Murray, 1934); Palestine Unveiled (London: Blackie & Son, 1938); The Rough with the Smooth (London: J.M. Bent, 1940); Bailing with a Teaspoon (London: John Long, 1953).
- 35.
See, for example, Peter Hart, The IRA at War, 1916–1923 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 223–258; Andy Bielenberg, ‘Exodus: the Emigration of Southern Irish Protestants during the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War’, Past and Present, 218 (2013): 199–233; David Fitzpatrick, Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014), 157–240; Gemma Clark, Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014), 98–153; Brian Hughes, Defying the IRA? Intimidation, Coercion, and Communities during the Irish Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016), 171–204.
- 36.
The British National Archives (TNA) has yet to decide on the future of these files and they are currently unavailable to researchers. Consequently, cited material from this uncatalogued archive, which was consulted while in Bristol, is referenced as CEM.
- 37.
The overwhelming majority of these records pertain to constables and non-commissioned officers: almost all personnel records for police officers of gazetted rank (assistant superintendent and upwards) appear to have been lost during the evacuation of Palestine in 1948.
- 38.
These personal testimonies comprise 19 personal interviews with Irish BSPP veterans (16 conducted by this author), and detailed author correspondence with a further 3; interviews and correspondence with, and documentary material such as letters, diaries, and unpublished memoirs supplied by the families of 22 others deceased; personal correspondence and memoranda in BSPP personnel files; and published biography and memoir.
- 39.
Keith Jeffery, ‘Introduction’ to Jeffery (ed.), An Irish Empire, 17.
- 40.
See, for example, Akenson, Irish Diaspora, 7–9; O’Leary, Servants, 6–7.
- 41.
Ibid., 7.
- 42.
‘In 1600, as later, Ireland was characterized by a fragmented polity: varieties of peoples, defining their “Irishness” differently.’ R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), 3.
- 43.
The capitalized term ‘Republican’ in this book refers to the rump Sinn Féin and IRA (and their supporters), who rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 and continued to pursue an irredentist nationalist line. Although small in number, they remained a force within Southern Irish society after 1922.
- 44.
Christopher Hammond, ‘Ideology and Consensus: the Policing of the Palestine Mandate, 1920–1936’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London: 1991); Edward Horne, A Job Well Done: a History of the Palestine Police Force 1920–1948 (Lewes: Book Guild, 2003); John L. Knight, ‘Policing in British Palestine, 1917–1939’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2008).
- 45.
With few exceptions, British colonial police forces consisted of a locally enlisted rank-and-file officered by a cadre of commissioned (mainly) British officers recruited by the Colonial Office in London. Although their inspectorates were generally promoted from the ranks, some colonial governments (e.g., Kenya, Uganda, and Hong Kong) occasionally recruited police inspectors in the UK through the offices of the Crown Agents for the Colonies, while those of Bermuda and, most significantly, Palestine, recruited from there at constable rank. As the British commissioned officer class alone comprised the Colonial Police Service, the capitalized term Colonial Police is here used to refer to the service in its entirety, inclusive of gazetted and non-gazetted grades. The term Colonial Police here also includes the Shanghai Municipal Police which, recruited by John Pook and Company in London on behalf of the Shanghai International Settlement’s municipal council, was completely independent of Colonial Office control.
- 46.
Jeffries, Colonial Police, 30–31.
- 47.
On the evolution of the RIC presence in the Colonial Police, see Georgina Sinclair, ‘The Irish Policeman and the Empire: Influencing the Policing of the British Empire-Commonwealth’, Irish Historical Studies, 36 (2008): 173–187; Michael Silvestri, ‘“Paddy Does Not Mind Who the Enemy is”: the Royal Irish Constabulary and Colonial Policing’ in McMahon et al., Ireland in an Imperial World, 179–199.
- 48.
RIC Magazine, 1/4 (1912), 177.
- 49.
Matthew Hughes, ‘A British “Foreign Legion”? The British Police in Mandate Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies, 49 (2013): 696–711, 706. See also Charles Smith, ‘Communal Conflict and Insurrection in Palestine, 1936–1948’ in Anderson & Killingray, Policing and Decolonisation, 62–83; Nick Kardahji, ‘A Measure of Restraint: the Palestine Police and the End of the British Mandate’ (M.Phil., University of Oxford, 2007); Richard Andrew Cahill, ‘“Going Berserk”: Black and Tans in Palestine’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 38 (2009): 59–68.
- 50.
On 3 February 1960, British prime minister Harold Macmillan told South African parliamentarians in Capetown that ‘the wind of change is blowing through this continent and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.’ J. E. Lewis, ‘“White Man in a Woodpile”: Race and the Limits of Macmillan’s Great “Wind of Change”’ in L. J. Butler & Sarah Stockwell (eds), The Wind of Change: Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 70–95, 75.
- 51.
O’Sullivan, Ireland, Africa, 16. See also Michael Kennedy & Deirdre McMahon (eds), Obligations and Responsibilities: Ireland and the United Nations, 1955–2005 (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2005); Joseph Skelly Morrison, Irish Diplomacy at the United Nations, 1945–1965: National Interests and the International Order (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997).
- 52.
The primary collections used were as follows: TNA, Home Office files (HO), HO/184/1-43, Royal Irish Constabulary General Registers of Service; TNA, HO/184/50-53, Irish Constabulary Records: Auxiliary Division; TNA, Paymaster General series, PMG/48, Royal Irish Constabulary Pension Registers; Jim Herlihy, The Royal Irish Constabulary: a Complete Alphabetical List of Officers and Men, 1816–1922 (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999); TNA, War Office files (WO), WO/363 & WO/364; TNA, Colonial Office files (CO), CO/429 Colonial Office: Patronage Correspondence, 1867–1919; MECA, GB165-0365 Palestine Police Service Records Card Collection; Commonwealth & Empire Museum Bristol, Palestine Police Archive, Palestine Police Personnel & Pension Records, uncatalogued; Colonial Office List for 1862–1925; or General Register of the Colonial Dependencies of Great Britain (London: British Library, 1992); Colonial Office List, 1925 (London: Harrison, 1925); The Dominions Office and Colonial Office List (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1926–1940); Colonial Office List (London: HMSO, 1946–1966); Colonial Agricultural Service List (London: HMSO, 1936–1939); Colonial Administrative Service List (London: HMSO, 1933–1939); Colonial Medical Service List (London: HMSO, 1936–1939); Colonial Legal Service List (London: HMSO, 1935–1939); Anthony Kirk-Greene, A Biographical Dictionary of the British Colonial Service, 1939–1966 (London: Hans Zell, 1991); The India Office List (London: Harrison, 1886–1895); The India List and India Office List (London: Harrison, 1896–1906): The India Office List (London: Harrison, 1907–1937); The Sudan Political Service, 1899–1929 (Khartoum: Sudan Government, 1930); A. H. M. Kirk-Greene & G. W. Bell, The Sudan Political Service, 1920–1952: a Preliminary Register of Second Careers (Oxford: 1989); D. G. Crawford, Roll of the Indian Medical Service, 1615–1930 (London: W. Thacker, 1930); United Kingdom Medical Registers, 1859–1959 (London: General Medical Council, 1859–1959); United Kingdom and Ireland Register of Nurses, 1898–1968 (London, Royal College of Nursing, 1898–1968); Census of Ireland, 1901 & 1911 (www.census.nationalarchives.ie); Irish civil registration records (www.irishgenealogy.ie); Irish ecclesiastical records of baptisms and marriages (www.rootsireland.ie); Shipping lists and emigration records’ collections (www.ancestry.com, www.findmypast.co.uk).
- 53.
Kirk-Greene, Biographical Dictionary, v, vii.
- 54.
Gerry Northam, Shooting in the Dark: Riot Police in Britain (London: Faber, 1988).
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Gannon, S.W. (2019). Introduction. In: The Irish Imperial Service. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96394-5_1
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