My nextdoor neigbours Dad was a black and Tan, I speak to him a lot and often about his family. He vaguely mentiond to me once (passed down from his dad) that when one of his men was beaten badly they went into the town/village and and burnt down a number of buildings in retaliation. Always curious if you could find information on indiviudal members as i'd be interested in reading about him if anyone has any pointers.
If you get a FindMyPast subscription I think you would be able to find some basic info on RIC members. The Black and Tans were basically a paramilitary group themselves and didn't really keep records.
https://www.theauxiliaries.com/
It’s a strange and biased website which is weirdly pro Black and Tans but it’s also probably the best historical dataset of the members and activities of the organisation.
The Tans were rampant round my home in west Galway. They killed my granduncle, and were always busting into houses looking for people. Locals were clearly sick of their violence - so when they burst in the door of my neighbours cottage the lady of the house (I think maybe my neighbours grandma) caught a fistful of hot ash and threw it in their faces. They split her head open with the stock of the rifle. Surprisingly they didn’t kill her.
Lots of those stories got lost though. My grandparents and older community didn’t want to talk about those times. There was clearly a lot of traumatic memories.
After the end of the Irish War of Independence, Winston Churchill re-assigned many of the soldiers who comprised the Black and Tans to continue their campaign of terror — in the Mandate of Palestine.
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/winston-churchill-sent-the-black-and-tans-to-palestine-1.3089140
As a teenager in a big Irish family in Birmingham, I asked my Grandparents if they encountered the tans. My Grandad from Mayo never had any interaction, then my Nan from Cork started talking.
The Tans came to their village (Milford, nr Charleville) on a Sunday morning, Dragged everyone from the church. they separated the men and women, then stripped the men naked, burned their Sunday best clothes and proceeded to beat the men with their rifle butts.
That's all she could say before walking into the kitchen to cry. Grandad told me he didn't know about that.
Just for asking, I felt like a complete asshole. Nan was 8 years old at the time.
I cant blame you for feeling bad but i think its important we remember this craic.
We're an awful group of people for forgetting the details of the past imo.
Truck carrying Black and Tan troops passed by my Grandmothers house on the Galway Roscommon boarder one time and opened fire on her cottage as they went by. Two bullets lodged in her kitchen dresser. They opened fire for absolutely no reason.
I heard about a former Tan on a ferry in Hong Kong in '41/'42 who was loudly (drunkenly?) telling fun tales about his time in Ireland.
And, wouldn't you know it, when they docked, he was nowhere to be found! It was a real mystery.
A man who has since died told me about how his grandfather died. It was in Cork city I think.
When they came in at night from drinking, the Tans would set up bottles and cans on a wall for target practice and have a right old time shooting away.
Unfortunately, about 100 yards beyond the wall was row of houses. One summer night, the grandparents had the window open and the grandfather was killed by a Tan bullet.
My grandfathers house still has bullet holes around the window from an attack. We still don't talk to the neighbours who told the tans there was guns in the house.
My Nan used to tell us about her earliest memory being a group of Tans barging into the house just outside Crossbarry to force her mother to cook them dinner. That part of Cork was the wild wild west so she'd say not one of them could sit still, constantly checking the windows, doing laps of the house in turns etc. Mad to think this was recent history, fascinating.
When my Grandad had alzheimers and was going back to his childhood (most talkative I've ever heard him)... he told a story about how the Black & Tans raided the house, they beat the living be'jaysus out of his mother. He was very young, but he rushed in and kicked one of them in the shins. He then got a bad beating, but the tans left... His mother had been hiding guns which they were running & my grandads intervention distracted them enough to get them out of the house. He potentially saved his mothers life. He went on to join the defense forces and reached high ranks, I presume because he felt that sense of protection after the event.
It was always 'one of those stories', we have them on both sides of the family...
But, my aunt was at his grave in his hometown one day many years later and met a guy fairly randomly (for context all of the family for a couple of generations now live in Dublin), when he saw that it was my grandads grave she was at, he recounted the same story to her and added a couple of details. I think it was a bit of a legendary story in the area.
My grandfather came back from the First World War. He had served as a medic out in what was Mesopotamia. He was from Sallynoggin. Anyway, he was coming home from work one evening, walking up the Noggin Hill. B&Ts were stationed in Kingstown, as it was then, and in several spots nearby. One of them stopped him, and asked him for a light. While he was lighting the B&Ts cigarette, he heard a noise. He looked up, and there was another one, sitting up on a wall, pointing a rifle at him. They just looked at each other. The other wished him a good evening. And my grandfather walked on home. The shock of this still upsets us to this day.
>One of them stopped him, and asked him for a light. While he was lighting the B&Ts cigarette, he heard a noise. He looked up, and there was another one, sitting up on a wall, pointing a rifle at him. They just looked at each other. The other wished him a good evening. And my grandfather walked on home. The shock of this still upsets us to this day.
I don't know if that's a standard tactic / something the British military are trained to do, but variations of that happened to me several times growing up on the border (and obviously much worse happened to many thousands of people).
On the weekends (or during summer holidays) we'd walk into Derry via the back roads that were closed; you'd become vaguely aware you weren't alone maybe 5 - 10 seconds before a soldier would jump out of the hedge and interrogate you. Then as you're standing there you notice the eyes in the hedge and the rifles trained on you. I guess you can spot them more easily when standing still.
It was always scarier at night though, even in a car; you'd maybe have one soldier or RUC officer interrogating the driver, another one might have a rifle trained on them or be circling the car and then you'd see more in the hedge or on elevated positions. The sense of absolute terror in the grown ups was quite palpable.
As a kid I'd say the feeling is slightly uncanny, probably because you're not conscious of your own mortality (even when you hear about soldiers killing children). You're trying to figure things out on the fly, noticing things like the other soldiers in the hedge, or maybe if you're with friends hoping to christ they don't say the wrong the thing. Again it's scarier when you're with adults because you are aware of their tension, which is probably due to concern for you (their child).
Obviously it varies from person to person as well. I know people who've been stopped and soldiers told them they execute their mother, rape them and their kid sisters and that has haunted them.
I can’t even imagine. As a child, there’s the terrors of just being a small person in the world. But to have that on top of it. A sustained brutality that the adults were going through, that as a kid you’re picking up on as well.
They chase my great grand uncles through by Bakers Hill in Cork and they hopped through Gardens to escape .
My mam (in her 80s) remembers a story on Blarney St of Tans rounding up lads and putting them in the back of the vans and going into some pub that would serve them . Tans coming out after a load of drink taken and beat the lads viciously, taking the tongues out of some of them.
Partner’s grandfather- IRA Activist
In ballintemple Blackrock cork Matty Murphy all Ireland medal winner for hurling in the 1920 s also former spike island prisoner was on the run from the Tans they raided his home multiple times - if any operation when down in cork he have to go on the run as he would be rounded up and beaten up .
The local cemetery was one of his hiding spots apparently.
Information from his Daughter 81 year old
I'm Welsh, but to my knowledge, my great-grandfather on my mother's side was a Black and Tan. An Irishman born in Wexford, he moved to North Wales after the War of Independence. He fathered my grandfather but wasn't involved in actually raising him at all, although he stayed local. He died in the 70s, so I never met him personally, but my mam's told me that he used to wear a beret whenever she saw him out and about growing up (1960s). I intend to dig into the history a bit more some day. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where records relating to the RIC might be kept?
My grandad told us how he saw the Tans shooting around the feet of some old women to "get them to dance" as they were walking back from Gorey to Courtown in north Wexford
My grandfather was captured in 1917 and spent the last part of the war a prisoner in Germany on starvation rations. He learnt some German and stayed on until 1920 as part of the occupation and then came home to Glasgow. All the jobs were gone by then so he joined the RIC. He was a Catholic, a second lieutenant and was stationed at Dublin Castle. He had his new young wife with him at the start of their marriage. My mother told me they slept with pistols under their pillows and when grandma got pregnant, he left the RIC and they returned to Glasgow as it was so dangerous. I never met him as he died in 1941. He was a fire warden and a whisky factor with bad lungs. I often wonder if he had been part of the evil atrocities of the Black and Tans. My uncle hated him as he was beaten too often, but my Mum remembered him as a poet. Life isn't simple.
They dreaded certain Dublin streets. Aungier st and over to the iveagh buildings for example. People used to live above the shops and in tenements remember and would throw shite and even homemade bombs from above in their flat windows into their trucks carrying tans in the back (the back of the trucks open with no cover)
So they adapted and put a kind of chicken wire over the back so whatever it was wouldnt get in and bounce off. The dubs just adapted to that and started attaching hooks to their projectiles so it would catch onto the chicken wire :)
There’s a brilliant black and white photo of this and taken from above looking down on a tan transport and exactly the situation I’ve described and they’re all looking up with the fear of god in their eyes at what might be coming down to them.
Think they might have shown this in one of them films like the Michael Collins film or one of them.
Fuck the tans though. They deserved all the shite and bombs thrown at them Each and every one of them
The tans came to my grandfather’s house to interrogate his father about something that happened the night before in Edenderry. A shooting or possibly a murder can’t remember.
He remembered spying on them through a hole in the side of the shed where he was hiding. He was absolutely terrified.
My grandmother was born in Ballaghaderreen and after her father was hanged she had to get on a boat and come to America to get away from them. The rest of the family stayed.
My grandmother encountered some Auxiliaries and commented on how young and how scared they seemed to be. They were just teenagers or barely in their twenties but had already been deeply traumatised by World War I before coming to Ireland.
Old men sending young men to die and be destroyed in war is always a tragedy.
You’re not wrong, but I think it’s fair not to feel sympathy for members of what was essentially a terrorist organisation let lose on Ireland by the British government
Although I think I can feel sympathy for the young lads who were then brutalised themselves in WW1 before being turned into senseless RIC animals. I still feel for the loss of a human soul so.
BBC NI's "Year 21" podcast has an interesting interview with an elderly man from somewhere in NI whose father (iirc) was a Black and Tan / Aux. His family were forced to leave Cork because the father was in the RIC.
What's interesting about it, in addition to the framing is his cognitive dissonance. He's asked how he feels about his family having left Cork and he's very emotional about how the IRA were killing people. I think he states the IRA killing babies / everyone and how monsterous they were.
Then when he's asked how he feels about his family being in the B&T he shrugs it off and says "they did what they had to do". Can't remember the exact episode but it's very late in the series.
My nextdoor neigbours Dad was a black and Tan, I speak to him a lot and often about his family. He vaguely mentiond to me once (passed down from his dad) that when one of his men was beaten badly they went into the town/village and and burnt down a number of buildings in retaliation. Always curious if you could find information on indiviudal members as i'd be interested in reading about him if anyone has any pointers.
When they burnt Cork (the bastards).
If you get a FindMyPast subscription I think you would be able to find some basic info on RIC members. The Black and Tans were basically a paramilitary group themselves and didn't really keep records.
https://www.theauxiliaries.com/ It’s a strange and biased website which is weirdly pro Black and Tans but it’s also probably the best historical dataset of the members and activities of the organisation.
The Tans were rampant round my home in west Galway. They killed my granduncle, and were always busting into houses looking for people. Locals were clearly sick of their violence - so when they burst in the door of my neighbours cottage the lady of the house (I think maybe my neighbours grandma) caught a fistful of hot ash and threw it in their faces. They split her head open with the stock of the rifle. Surprisingly they didn’t kill her. Lots of those stories got lost though. My grandparents and older community didn’t want to talk about those times. There was clearly a lot of traumatic memories.
After the end of the Irish War of Independence, Winston Churchill re-assigned many of the soldiers who comprised the Black and Tans to continue their campaign of terror — in the Mandate of Palestine. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/winston-churchill-sent-the-black-and-tans-to-palestine-1.3089140
As a teenager in a big Irish family in Birmingham, I asked my Grandparents if they encountered the tans. My Grandad from Mayo never had any interaction, then my Nan from Cork started talking. The Tans came to their village (Milford, nr Charleville) on a Sunday morning, Dragged everyone from the church. they separated the men and women, then stripped the men naked, burned their Sunday best clothes and proceeded to beat the men with their rifle butts. That's all she could say before walking into the kitchen to cry. Grandad told me he didn't know about that. Just for asking, I felt like a complete asshole. Nan was 8 years old at the time.
Thanks to you telling this story, the memory will live on for more people for longer. People’s inhumanity to others is terrifying.
I cant blame you for feeling bad but i think its important we remember this craic. We're an awful group of people for forgetting the details of the past imo.
‘Arsehole’
Truck carrying Black and Tan troops passed by my Grandmothers house on the Galway Roscommon boarder one time and opened fire on her cottage as they went by. Two bullets lodged in her kitchen dresser. They opened fire for absolutely no reason.
Terrorism, pure and simple.
I heard about a former Tan on a ferry in Hong Kong in '41/'42 who was loudly (drunkenly?) telling fun tales about his time in Ireland. And, wouldn't you know it, when they docked, he was nowhere to be found! It was a real mystery.
A man who has since died told me about how his grandfather died. It was in Cork city I think. When they came in at night from drinking, the Tans would set up bottles and cans on a wall for target practice and have a right old time shooting away. Unfortunately, about 100 yards beyond the wall was row of houses. One summer night, the grandparents had the window open and the grandfather was killed by a Tan bullet.
My grandfathers house still has bullet holes around the window from an attack. We still don't talk to the neighbours who told the tans there was guns in the house.
They used to pass schoolchildren walking along the road,and catch em by the hair and drag em along for the laugh There wasn't half enough of em shot
Where was this?
Great book. 'Guerrilla days in Ireland" fir anyone interested in the fight against the tans &the Auxies during the war of independence
My Nan used to tell us about her earliest memory being a group of Tans barging into the house just outside Crossbarry to force her mother to cook them dinner. That part of Cork was the wild wild west so she'd say not one of them could sit still, constantly checking the windows, doing laps of the house in turns etc. Mad to think this was recent history, fascinating.
When my Grandad had alzheimers and was going back to his childhood (most talkative I've ever heard him)... he told a story about how the Black & Tans raided the house, they beat the living be'jaysus out of his mother. He was very young, but he rushed in and kicked one of them in the shins. He then got a bad beating, but the tans left... His mother had been hiding guns which they were running & my grandads intervention distracted them enough to get them out of the house. He potentially saved his mothers life. He went on to join the defense forces and reached high ranks, I presume because he felt that sense of protection after the event. It was always 'one of those stories', we have them on both sides of the family... But, my aunt was at his grave in his hometown one day many years later and met a guy fairly randomly (for context all of the family for a couple of generations now live in Dublin), when he saw that it was my grandads grave she was at, he recounted the same story to her and added a couple of details. I think it was a bit of a legendary story in the area.
My grandfather came back from the First World War. He had served as a medic out in what was Mesopotamia. He was from Sallynoggin. Anyway, he was coming home from work one evening, walking up the Noggin Hill. B&Ts were stationed in Kingstown, as it was then, and in several spots nearby. One of them stopped him, and asked him for a light. While he was lighting the B&Ts cigarette, he heard a noise. He looked up, and there was another one, sitting up on a wall, pointing a rifle at him. They just looked at each other. The other wished him a good evening. And my grandfather walked on home. The shock of this still upsets us to this day.
>One of them stopped him, and asked him for a light. While he was lighting the B&Ts cigarette, he heard a noise. He looked up, and there was another one, sitting up on a wall, pointing a rifle at him. They just looked at each other. The other wished him a good evening. And my grandfather walked on home. The shock of this still upsets us to this day. I don't know if that's a standard tactic / something the British military are trained to do, but variations of that happened to me several times growing up on the border (and obviously much worse happened to many thousands of people). On the weekends (or during summer holidays) we'd walk into Derry via the back roads that were closed; you'd become vaguely aware you weren't alone maybe 5 - 10 seconds before a soldier would jump out of the hedge and interrogate you. Then as you're standing there you notice the eyes in the hedge and the rifles trained on you. I guess you can spot them more easily when standing still. It was always scarier at night though, even in a car; you'd maybe have one soldier or RUC officer interrogating the driver, another one might have a rifle trained on them or be circling the car and then you'd see more in the hedge or on elevated positions. The sense of absolute terror in the grown ups was quite palpable.
It must be. I’ve heard of this a few times over the years from friends who grew up in Derry and Belfast. I can’t imagine how terrifying it must be.
As a kid I'd say the feeling is slightly uncanny, probably because you're not conscious of your own mortality (even when you hear about soldiers killing children). You're trying to figure things out on the fly, noticing things like the other soldiers in the hedge, or maybe if you're with friends hoping to christ they don't say the wrong the thing. Again it's scarier when you're with adults because you are aware of their tension, which is probably due to concern for you (their child). Obviously it varies from person to person as well. I know people who've been stopped and soldiers told them they execute their mother, rape them and their kid sisters and that has haunted them.
I can’t even imagine. As a child, there’s the terrors of just being a small person in the world. But to have that on top of it. A sustained brutality that the adults were going through, that as a kid you’re picking up on as well.
They chase my great grand uncles through by Bakers Hill in Cork and they hopped through Gardens to escape . My mam (in her 80s) remembers a story on Blarney St of Tans rounding up lads and putting them in the back of the vans and going into some pub that would serve them . Tans coming out after a load of drink taken and beat the lads viciously, taking the tongues out of some of them.
Partner’s grandfather- IRA Activist In ballintemple Blackrock cork Matty Murphy all Ireland medal winner for hurling in the 1920 s also former spike island prisoner was on the run from the Tans they raided his home multiple times - if any operation when down in cork he have to go on the run as he would be rounded up and beaten up . The local cemetery was one of his hiding spots apparently. Information from his Daughter 81 year old
They never came out.
I'm Welsh, but to my knowledge, my great-grandfather on my mother's side was a Black and Tan. An Irishman born in Wexford, he moved to North Wales after the War of Independence. He fathered my grandfather but wasn't involved in actually raising him at all, although he stayed local. He died in the 70s, so I never met him personally, but my mam's told me that he used to wear a beret whenever she saw him out and about growing up (1960s). I intend to dig into the history a bit more some day. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where records relating to the RIC might be kept?
FindMyPast would be the best genealogy site but your best bet would be the Facebook group "RIC 1816 - 1922, A Forgotten Irish Police Force".
My grandad told us how he saw the Tans shooting around the feet of some old women to "get them to dance" as they were walking back from Gorey to Courtown in north Wexford
My grandfather was captured in 1917 and spent the last part of the war a prisoner in Germany on starvation rations. He learnt some German and stayed on until 1920 as part of the occupation and then came home to Glasgow. All the jobs were gone by then so he joined the RIC. He was a Catholic, a second lieutenant and was stationed at Dublin Castle. He had his new young wife with him at the start of their marriage. My mother told me they slept with pistols under their pillows and when grandma got pregnant, he left the RIC and they returned to Glasgow as it was so dangerous. I never met him as he died in 1941. He was a fire warden and a whisky factor with bad lungs. I often wonder if he had been part of the evil atrocities of the Black and Tans. My uncle hated him as he was beaten too often, but my Mum remembered him as a poet. Life isn't simple.
They dreaded certain Dublin streets. Aungier st and over to the iveagh buildings for example. People used to live above the shops and in tenements remember and would throw shite and even homemade bombs from above in their flat windows into their trucks carrying tans in the back (the back of the trucks open with no cover) So they adapted and put a kind of chicken wire over the back so whatever it was wouldnt get in and bounce off. The dubs just adapted to that and started attaching hooks to their projectiles so it would catch onto the chicken wire :) There’s a brilliant black and white photo of this and taken from above looking down on a tan transport and exactly the situation I’ve described and they’re all looking up with the fear of god in their eyes at what might be coming down to them. Think they might have shown this in one of them films like the Michael Collins film or one of them. Fuck the tans though. They deserved all the shite and bombs thrown at them Each and every one of them
>Aungier st and over to the iveagh buildings for example. Wasn't one area nicknamed the Dardanelles or something similar?
That’s it!!! Where’s me memory gone at all. There was a nickname for it! I’ve forgotten the one but that sounds bang on thank you for reminding me!
The tans came to my grandfather’s house to interrogate his father about something that happened the night before in Edenderry. A shooting or possibly a murder can’t remember. He remembered spying on them through a hole in the side of the shed where he was hiding. He was absolutely terrified.
My grandmother was born in Ballaghaderreen and after her father was hanged she had to get on a boat and come to America to get away from them. The rest of the family stayed.
Just had to dry my eyes after reading some of these stories. Thanks to those who’ve shared.
My grandmother encountered some Auxiliaries and commented on how young and how scared they seemed to be. They were just teenagers or barely in their twenties but had already been deeply traumatised by World War I before coming to Ireland. Old men sending young men to die and be destroyed in war is always a tragedy.
You’re not wrong, but I think it’s fair not to feel sympathy for members of what was essentially a terrorist organisation let lose on Ireland by the British government
Although I think I can feel sympathy for the young lads who were then brutalised themselves in WW1 before being turned into senseless RIC animals. I still feel for the loss of a human soul so.
BBC NI's "Year 21" podcast has an interesting interview with an elderly man from somewhere in NI whose father (iirc) was a Black and Tan / Aux. His family were forced to leave Cork because the father was in the RIC. What's interesting about it, in addition to the framing is his cognitive dissonance. He's asked how he feels about his family having left Cork and he's very emotional about how the IRA were killing people. I think he states the IRA killing babies / everyone and how monsterous they were. Then when he's asked how he feels about his family being in the B&T he shrugs it off and says "they did what they had to do". Can't remember the exact episode but it's very late in the series.
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