An Accidental Villain

PROLOGUE

THE TELEGRAM ON January 24, 1965, time-stamped 3:49 p.m., extended a formal invitation to an ailing, largely forgotten ninety-three-year-old British army general in Canada to attend the funeral of a famous ninety-year-old statesman in England. “Please cable if you can or cannot accept invitation to state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill St. Paul’s Cathedral London Saturday 30th January 1965 Stop.”

The invitation was delivered to a name and an address in a distant place, St. John’s, Newfoundland, the recipient presumably unfamiliar and irrelevant to the organizers of an event of global interest and historical significance. Major General Sir Hugh Tudor had lived a quiet life in self-imposed exile in Newfoundland for nearly forty years and by 1965 was almost immobilized by the infirmities of old age.

He had not seen his old friend Winston Churchill in twenty-seven years, but the friendship obviously remained as fresh in 1965 as when it began seven decades earlier. Their correspondence had continued until, it would seem, both lost interest in the diminished empire they had served and a society that, over time, had disappointed them. Tudor’s name was on the list because he was prominent among the people who were still loved and admired by the great Englishman Churchill as he approached the end of his life on earth.

Over the years Tudor had accepted several important invitations and requests from Churchill he might prudently have declined. This one he would have wanted to accept, but by January 24, 1965, his own mortality obliged him to turn it down. The general would follow his old friend to the grave eight months and one day later, on September 25, 1965.



The broad outline of their lives offers a superficial explanation of their friendship. They met as young men in a still robust British Empire, as ardent imperialists and English army officers; both had started military careers in India and had crossed paths often as they fought in or observed the various wars of their early years.

The essence of the friendship is harder to define. While Tudor shared a surname with British kings and queens, he had no genetic link to royalty or privilege. The army had offered him a departure from the conventional Tudor family experience in commerce and religion. For Churchill, the army promised the excitement of violent conflict. He had a seemingly voracious appetite for danger. War, he once insisted to his wife, was “a game played with a smile.” His destiny, however, was determined by his DNA and British history. War would make him famous, but his role in the conflicts that would define his legacy would be, essentially, political.

It is possible that Churchill envied the clarity of his friend’s career. He and Tudor met frequently during the First World War, when Churchill served briefly as a battalion commander on the Western Front while Tudor was rising through the ranks as an artilleryman, soon to be the youngest divisional commander in the British army. Their contacts at the front continued even after Churchill became a key minister in the wartime British cabinet.

By the end of the Great War, Tudor had been ten times mentioned in dispatches for gallantry in combat. He was promoted in the field to the rank of major general. At forty-seven, he was still young. His reputation was solid. His rank guaranteed a comfortable living and, at the end, a pension that promised a sustainable retirement. He had a young family—four children whom he hoped to help through all their youthful challenges and nurture to maturity.

Instead, within two years, Tudor would be at war again, a brief war, but one that would consume his hopeful future. In the spring of 1920, he was summoned by his oldest friend to serve the British Empire in another conflict, this one close to home—in Ireland. Churchill was, by then, British secretary of state for war.

This would be a war that mocked the value of Tudor’s prior military knowledge, a war that would, for future generations, provoke debate about who, if anybody, won it—or if, in fact, it ever ended. It would affect Tudor’s life in ways he could not have imagined in the days of victory after November 1918 and then as a leader of the occupation forces in defeated Germany.

In Ireland, Major General Tudor would oversee a war for which he was personally and professionally unprepared—a war inflamed by hatred and propaganda too deeply sourced in history for a conventional response; battles fought in ditches, behind hedges; an enemy without uniforms or discipline or rules or scruples; an enemy who looked like him, who spoke his language. What he would experience in Ireland would bear little resemblance to the wars he had studied, the wars he’d fought. This would be a conflict that foreshadowed a future in which citizens demanding self-determination, freedom from colonial authority and institutions, would make armies of their own, deploying their own propaganda and any form of violence that might advance their cause.

His time in Ireland would mark the beginning of the end of the world as Hugh Tudor, his profession and his class, had known it. In Ireland, Tudor would be swept up by the primal energies that surface, even in the most seasoned military leader, when personal survival is at stake. And he would come to understand that the First World War was not, as his generation had hoped, “the war to end all wars.” It was, instead, the beginning of a century of conflict, wars of liberation from the past and struggles to control the future of a world as it was being redefined by ideology.

Ireland was, in many ways, a hopeless war for both the British war minister and the British soldier on the ground. They both knew they had but one imperative—to win. Winston Churchill would find a way to define the outcome of the Irish war as a victory. But for Churchill’s friend the soldier, his engagement with the Irish War of Independence would be the beginning of a long journey into personal oblivion.