The Irish Imperial Service

Policing Palestine and Administering the Empire, 1922–1966

Seán William Gannon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319963938
• eBook ISBN: 9783319963945
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book explores Irish participation in the British imperial project after 'Southern' Ireland's independence in 1922. Building on a detailed study of the Irish contribution to the policing of the Palestine Mandate, it examines Irish imperial servants' twentieth-century transnational careers, and assesses the influence of their Irish identities on their experience at the colonial interface. The factors which informed Irish enlistment in Palestine's police forces are examined, and the impact of Irishness on the personal perspectives and professional lives of Irish Palestine policemen is assessed. Irish policing in Palestine is placed within the broader tradition of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC)-conducted imperial police service inaugurated in the mid-nineteenth century, and the RIC's transnational influence on twentieth-century British colonial policing is evaluated. The wider tradition of Irish imperial service, of which policing formed part, is then explored, with particularfocus on British Colonial Service recruitment in post-revolutionary Ireland and twentieth-century Irish-imperial identities.

© The Author(s) 2019

Seán William GannonThe Irish Imperial ServiceCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96394-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Seán William Gannon¹

(1)

Centre for Contemporary Irish History, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Seán William Gannon

End Abstract

In early December 1956, the custodian of the Basilica of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, Fr Eugene Hoade, was declared persona non grata by the Jordanian interior ministry, taken under armed guard to the city’s Qalandia airport, and put on a flight to Beirut. The summary expulsion of the Irish Franciscan brought to an extraordinary end a 25-year career in the city, during which he had played a prominent role in its religious and political life. Born near Headford in Galway in 1903, Hoade was educated at Multyfarnham Franciscan college in Westmeath, entered the Franciscan noviciate in September 1921, and was ordained in Rome six years later. A redoubtable scholar, he studied at Louvain and the Gregorian University in Rome, which awarded him a doctorate in theology in 1928. He then returned to minister in Ireland, before being sent to Jerusalem in 1931 as vice principal of the Franciscan Terra Sancta College, subsequently rising to principal. In 1937 Hoade was appointed custodian at Gethsemane, the first Irishman ever to hold this prestigious position, and he remained in this role when the basilica, situated just to the east of Jerusalem’s Old City, came under Jordanian control as a result of the 1947–1949 Arab-Israeli War.¹

Amman cited Hoade’s ‘suspected political activities’ as the reason for his summary expulsion, and few doubted that there was truth in the charge.² The Irish ambassador to the Holy See was told by a senior Vatican official that his deportation should cause no surprise; Hoade was, after all, ‘something of a busy-body [who] got mixed up in all sorts of matters, including political’.³ The Jordanian authorities did not disclose details of Hoade’s suspected activities and rumours have swirled since the time.⁴ What is clear is that he was deeply involved with Palestinian Arab militias who were conducting small-scale attacks on the fledgling Israeli State, and that this was his expulsion’s proximate cause. Hoade was certainly fervently anti-Zionist in outlook. He blamed ‘Zionism—political and acquisitive’ for destroying the harmonious relations that he believed Palestine’s Arab and Jewish communities had, historically, enjoyed, and although he insisted that ‘Zionism and Judaism differ toto caelo’, his views on the Zionist project were deeply coloured by the theological Judaeophobia which pervaded contemporary (Irish) Catholic thinking.⁵ In Hoade’s opinion, Jewish nationhood effectively ended ‘in the infamy of Calvary’ and the Jewish dispersal was divinely ordained (‘everybody must see in the history of the Jewish people the hand of God’), and drawing on Catholic doctrine about enduring Jewish enmity, he believed that Zionist forces had attempted deliberately to destroy Palestine’s Christian heritage in 1948–1949 through the systematic desecration of churches and shrines.⁶ But Hoade’s opposition to Zionism also had a strong political-national dimension. He came from a staunchly Irish advanced-nationalist background (his mother ‘gave every assistance’ to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the 1919–1921 War of Independence, and three of his brothers also ‘took a prominent part in the struggle’), and he viewed Palestinian Arabs as the victims of a colonialist enterprise.⁷ As early as 1954, an Associated Press report concerning the refusal of Israel’s authorities to allow him entry into their side of Jerusalem described him as a ‘presumably suspect old enemy of Israel’, and noted stories of how he ‘took up arms against and fought against Israel in the Palestine War of 1948’.⁸ Hoade denounced the claims as ‘malicious’, and he was supported in this by the Anglican archdeacon for Palestine, Transjordan and Syria, Rev. Weston Stewart.⁹ These stories, however, persisted, fuelled by Hoade’s unconcealed animosity towards Israel in subsequent years: he was, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell noted after meeting him in Jerusalem in 1953–1954, ‘very strong in his feelings for what the Jews had done’ to Palestine’s Arabs, and he self-identified with their struggle, declaring that ‘we are at war … six years of it’.¹⁰

Hoade’s militancy was partly fuelled by his anger at ‘what the Jews had done’, as he saw it, to the Palestine Police. Established in July 1920, the force had formed the front line against the Zionist insurgency against British rule, which was waged by Lehi (‘the Stern Gang’), Haganah, and the Irgun Zvai Leumi variously, or in concert, during the final nine years of the Mandate (Fig. 1.1). The main burden was shouldered by its British Section (BSPP), created in April 1926 as a 200-strong crack squad to stiffen the main locally recruited body of the Palestine Police, but which had evolved by the late 1940s into a 4000-strong semi-civil police unit comprising more than half of the entire force. The BSPP paid a high price as a result: 116 members were killed by Zionist insurgents in 1940–1948, with many more wounded. Hoade was directly affected by their deaths: in September 1938 he had been appointed Palestine Police Catholic chaplain and was made an honorary district police superintendent seven years later in recognition of his services. A formidable presence within the force, he was admired, respected, and feared in equal measure by Catholics and non-Catholics alike. He not only took a proactive interest in the spiritual wellbeing of his Catholic charges, but extended his remit to cover non-religious matters as well; for example, he intervened to dissuade policemen from marrying Palestinians (particularly Jews) and interceded with the authorities on behalf of policemen seeking compassionate leave or facing severe reprimand.¹¹

Fig. 1.1

Fr Eugene Hoade, Jerusalem, undated

Hoade was particularly solicitous of his compatriot policemen, whom he described as his ‘special Irish charges’, and his appointment as chaplain coincided with an increase in Irish recruitment by the BSPP which saw Irishmen account for 11 per cent of enlistments in 1938–1939, rising to almost 20 per cent in the final 12 months of the Mandate. Indeed, by July 1947, the Irish Times was reporting that the percentage of Irishmen in the BSPP was ‘higher than in any other disciplined body in the British Empire, excluding … purely Irish units’ of the British Army.¹² Irishmen had in fact been a significant presence in Palestine’s policing since April 1922 when the Colonial Office sent over 700 disbanded members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its Auxiliary Division (ADRIC) to the country as the British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie (British Gendarmerie), 40 per cent of them Irish.¹³ The transfer of hundreds of Irish British Gendarmerie and BSPP personnel to other theatres post-Palestine ensured an Irish presence in colonial policing that persisted until the end of Britain’s imperial era.

I

But Ireland also provided a significant source of manpower for the non-policing civilian services of Britain’s ‘dependent empire’ throughout the twentieth century.¹⁴ This dependent empire was not a monolith administered in a uniform fashion by a unitary ‘Colonial Service’. India (which included, until 1937, Burma) was administered separately to the rest: it had, since the mid-1850s, its own civil, political, and medical services and, since 1858, its own government department, the India Office, while Burma had its own independently recruited civil service from 1937 until the British withdrawal in 1948. The Anglo-Egyptian condominium of Sudan, which came under Foreign Office jurisdiction, also had its own independently recruited political service established in 1899, as had Egypt itself during the period of the British protectorates. The Colonial Office essentially administered the rest of the dependent empire, which by 1922 comprised approximately forty territories. Nor was their administration uniform. By 1922, each colony (or group of colonies) had evolved individualized vocational services with varying remuneration rates, emoluments, and terms and conditions of employment.¹⁵ This meant that, with the exceptions of administrative officers recruited by the civil services of Ceylon, Hong Kong, and Malaya, who were in common recruited under a single scheme called the Eastern Cadetships, colonial officers were recruited for, and appointed to, a particular territory, where they generally served out their careers; inter-territorial transfers were uncommon outside of the highest ranks. So disparate in character were the various colonial services that the secretary of state for the colonies, Leo Amery, could tell the First Colonial Office Conference in 1927 that:

Strictly speaking there is … no Colonial Empire and no such thing as a Colonial Service. … I deal in this office with twenty-six different governments, each entirely separate from the rest, each administratively, financially, legislatively self-contained. Each, whether it deals with nearly 20m people over an area as large as central Europe or with 20,000 people on a scattered handful of Islands, has its own Administrative Service, its own Medical Service, its own Agricultural, Public Works, and other technical Services, its own scale of pay, its own pensions.¹⁶

Amery saw the creation of a unified Colonial Service as an institutional imperative and he commenced moves to standardize the colonial services in 1930, when a committee headed by the permanent secretary to the Treasury, Sir Warren Fisher, recommended the unification of all colonial public services into a single ‘British Colonial Service’ (BCS). This process began with the creation of the Colonial Administrative Service in 1932 which, in effect, unified the various colonial civil services, and continued with legal services in 1933, medical services in 1934, police services in 1937, and so on, until the final unification, that of research services, in 1949.¹⁷ In Fisher’s view, this new unified BCS would require a uniform recruitment process to replace the two distinct models in operation at the time. The first was recruitment through competitive examination, the model employed by the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and the British Home Civil Service. Of the territories under Colonial Office control, just Ceylon, Malaya, and Hong Kong recruited their civil services in this way: in fact, from 1896 onwards, candidates for these Eastern Cadetships sat the same examination as did those for the Indian and Home civil services. The second, far more widely used, recruitment model was ‘patronage’. As the term suggests, this had its origins in an era when colonial appointments were gifted by the colonial secretary as a favour or reward. But it had evolved, by the late nineteenth century, into selection through written application and personal interview. Yet the process was still so inherently personalized that it was widely considered rather suspect because, although in theory, the colonial secretary appointed all officers, in practice primary responsibility for recruitment rested since 1919 on the shoulders of his assistant private secretary, Ralph Furse, whose selections he invariably accepted. This concentration of power in Furse’s hands inevitably gave rise to what he himself described as accusations of ‘snobbery, jobbery, and “old school tie” prejudice’ from both inside and outside Colonial Office walls. (Furse was an old Etonian and had taken a degree at Balliol College, Oxford).¹⁸ But these accusations he flatly denied, and he was officially exonerated by the Fisher Committee, which acknow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘Our Irish Constabulary’: The British Palestine Gendarmerie, 1922–1926
• 3. ‘A Strong Seasoning of Irishmen’: The British Palestine Police, 1926–1948
• 4. Palestine ‘From the Aspect of Irishness’
• 5. Irish Models and Irishmen: Irish Imperial Policing in the Twentieth Century
• 6. Colonial Service Recruitment in Independent Ireland
• 7. Irishness and Empire in the Twentieth Century
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter