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Who were the Auxiliaries?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2010

A. D. Harvey
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Extract

In the summer of 1920, as the I.R.A.'s guerrilla campaign against the Royal Irish Constabulary and the British Army approached its climax, the British government attempted to reinforce the R.I.C. by raising a force of ex-officers to act as a mobile police striking force. The new organization was called the Auxiliary Division of the R.I.C, and its members, though officially referred to as ‘cadets’, were popularly called Auxiliaries or Auxis, a denomination which suggests a kind of subconscious analogy with their I.R.A. opponents, who were generally known as ‘Volunteers’. In the subsequent mythology of the Irish ‘Troubles’ the Auxiliaries were generally lumped together with the ‘Black and Tans’ but were in fact a more elite body. The ‘Black and Tans’ were ex-servicemen recruited to serve as R.I.C. constables and initially kitted out in a motley of R.I.C. dark green and Army khaki. The Auxiliaries on the other hand were nattily dressed in tarn o'shanters, khaki tunics and puttees (or officer's gaiters) and were paid a pound a day — twice the R.I.C. constable's rate — which made them the most highly-paid uniformed force in the world at that time.1 Altogether only 2,214 were recruited (with perhaps two-thirds that number in service at the peak of the formation's strength), but they did more than their fair share to discredit the British regime in Ireland.

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Type
Communication
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The Historical Journal , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , September 1992, pp. 665 - 669
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 F. P. Crazier, commander of the Auxiliary Division, was donning his third uniform in fifteen months; he had served in the Lithuanian Army in 1919–30. The Auxiliaries' dress was later changed to dark blue tunics and Glengarry caps. Auxiliary Division strengths are given for July 1920-June 19a 1 in Appendix III of Townshend, Charles, The British campaign in Inland 1919–1981: the development of political md military policies (Oxford, 1975), pp. 211–12Google Scholar.

2 Public Record Office (P.R.O.), HO 184/50 and 51.

3 Cf. Abbott, P. E. and Tamplin, J. M. A., British gallantly awards (London, 1971). p. 215Google Scholar.

4 The three V.C.s were J. H. Leach, who won his Victoria Cross is a second lieutenant in 1914, James Johnson who won his Victoria Cross as a second lieutenant in 1918 and George Onions, who won his ai a lance-corporal in 1918. Leach resigned from the Auxiliaries after six months; Johnson deserted after two months. The two men who were decorated four times were A. T. Blake, D.F.C. and bar, A.F.C., M.M., formerly of the R.A.F., who was suspended pending court-martial lest than three weeks after joining the Auxiliaries, and J. Simmonds, D.S.O, M.C, D.C.M., Edward Medal (for acts of bravery in a factory, quarry or coal mine). Not counted in this list of multiple awards since he was not an ordinary cadet is Brigadier-General E. A. Wood who was Crozier's second in command and replaced him as commanding officer of the Auxiliaries in February 1921; he had the D.S.O. and three bars and the French croix d* gutrre. Only 6 officers with more than four British gallantry awards survived the 10,14–18 war: 5 were aviators; the sixth was Lord Gort, later G.O.C. in C. of the British Expeditionary Force in France, 1940. HO 184/50 and 51 occasionally omit detail of decorations. Major E. Cameron Bruce is not shown as having any medals in HO 184/50 but in the alphabetically ordered ‘Journal’, HO 184/52, he is shown as having the D.S.O., M.C, plus a Japanese and two Russian medals.

5 Crozier, F. P., Inland for ever (1921), p. 106Google Scholar.

6 Occasionally cadets are shown as belonging to the Royal Flying Corps or Royal Naval Air Service, pre-April 1918 predecessors of the Royal Air Force. Naval officer were also quite numerous. Many of the R.N.R. and R.N.V.R. officers had served in the Royal Naval Division on the Western Front. Not all the R.A.F. officers had been fliers. Lieutenant-Colonel F. W. Guard C.M.G., D.S.O., croix de gutrrt, Order of St Vladimir, who became second in command of the Auxiliary Division in February 1921 had been in an infantry battalion during the First World War, but entered the R.A.F. as a Squadron Leader with the R.A.F. Armoured Car detail in 1922.

7 For analysing names I have used the alphabetically ordered ‘Royal Irish Constabulary Auxiliary Division Journal’, P.R.O., HO 184/52.

8 For Crozier see his book Ireland for ever, and for Kirkwood's resignation see ibid. pp. 96–8.

9 , Townshend, British campaign in Ireland, pp. 166–8,Google Scholar quoting P.R.O., WO 35/157A 3 May 1921.

10 PRO., CO 904/149, fo. 280. Amongst those killed was Major F. Hugo M.C., O.B.E., ex Indian Army.

11 P.R.O., CO 904/149, fo. 291.

12 See P.R.O., CO 904/150, fo. 1 ff. for the British version and Who burnt Cork City? a tale of arson, loot and murder, published by the Irish Labour Party, January 1921, for the Nationalist version.

13 P.R.O., CO 904/150, fo. 194. The dead included T. W. Craven D.S.O., D.S.C., D.S.M., formerly of the Royal Navy.

14 P.R.O., CO 904/150, fo. 291.

15 , Crozier, Inland for ever, p. 99.Google Scholar Amongst those dismissed by Crozier was Major E. Cameron Bruce D.S.O., M.C., ex-Tank Corps, who later returned to Ireland and went on a looting spree (cf. , Crozier, Inland for ever, pp. 96, 110–11).Google Scholar Bruce was court-martialled at Waterford in January 1921 and sentenced to a year's jail (Times 18 Jan. 1921, p. 10a).

14 Kee, Robert, The grim flag: a history of Irish nationalism (1972), p. 691.Google Scholar Unsuitability did not necessarily imply mijeonduct. In Inland for ever, F. P. Crozier claims that Major Charles St. Aubyn Wake C.M.G. had his services ‘dispensed with’ because he was collecting evidence of Auxiliaries looting at Trim (pp. 142–3 and p. 142 n. 2). Crozier acknowledges that Wake had lost a leg in East Africa in the 1890s but does not refer to Wake's age, which was sixty in 1921. The authorities were probably justified in supposing that a sexagenarian with a wooden leg was out of place in counter-insurgency work.

17 P.R.O., HO 184/50–1 show 19 Auxiliaries struck off as absentees, and three ‘struck off missing’. The distinction seems to relate to the degree of certainty the authorities felt about the reasons for the man's absence: in at least one case an ‘absentee’ has been regraded as a ‘deserter’. Amongst those deserting was one of the men injured at Cork on 11 December 1921: he was struck off on 26 March 1921.

18 , Crozier, Inland for ever, pp. 89–90Google Scholar, and cf. pp. 120–1 n. 123. Having had problems with alcohol himself, and having taken the pledge some yean earlier, Crozier was rather sensitive on the subject of heavy drinking.

19 Macrcady, Ncvil, Annals of an active life, 2 vols. (London 1928), II, 483Google Scholar.

20 For Crozier's reputation as a brigade commander tee hit obituary in The Times, 4 Sept. 1937, p. 12c.

21 Wilfred Saint-Mandtf's real name was J. H. P. Lamont — see A. D. Harvey ‘“Oh What a Literary War!” An Alternative Version’, forthcoming.

22 SirHamilton, Ian, ‘The End of War’, Life and Letters, III (11. 1929), p. 403Google Scholar.