The Irish Imperial Service by Seán William Gannon

Author:Seán William Gannon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319963945
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Most nineteenth-century British imperial police forces were, to some extent, RIC-modelled and, to varying degrees, RIC-manned, as colonial governments seeking to reorganize or stiffen their locally recruited police turned to the Old Force as a model and/or manpower source. In 1843, Sir Charles Napier, the Anglo-Irish governor of the newly annexed Indian province of Sind, established its police force along RIC lines, and a number of RIC personnel were seconded to assist him in so doing.4 Other Indian governors gradually followed suit (including Irishman Robert Montgomery in Oudh), and the 1861 Police Act, which standardized policing across most of the Raj, was modelled on the Irish example.5 The fact that the superior ranks (the so-called Imperial Police) were initially recruited from the Indian Army ensured that Irish representation was maintained;6 and although the introduction of recruitment through competitive examination in June 1893, and incremental moves towards the ‘Indianization’ of the officer class 20 years later, saw numbers decline, the Indian Police still boasted a sizeable Irish contingent in the run-up to 1922.7

Policing in the British Caribbean was similarly RIC-influenced. In 1845, RIC sub-inspector Patrick Brenan was appointed police commissioner in St. Lucia, where his ‘brief but influential tenure’ (which saw improvements in force organization and discipline, as well as the enforcement of law) inaugurated a significant Irish police presence in the region, which persisted until the empire’s end.8 This was especially true of Trinidad, where the decision to model its police force on the RIC in the late 1860s resulted in the recruitment of several Irish non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who soon ‘dominated the third-level rank’ and, subsequently, the inspectorate.9 Five RIC officers were appointed in September 1874 to reorganize the Trinidad Police Force’s fledgling CID (one of whom, J. N. Brierley, subsequently became inspector-general), while a further 16 RIC personnel were recruited between 1884 and 1890 to boost the force’s military efficiency in the wake of the Hosein riots. So too in Jamaica, where the Jamaican Constabulary Force (JCF), established in 1866, was explicitly modelled on the RIC. The JCF’s failure to deal effectively with the Cumberland Pen Riots in 1893 resulted in the authorization of the recruitment of up to 30 RIC members as sergeants or sergeant-majors to ‘improve [its] efficiency’.10 RIC personnel were also used as ‘trouble-shooters’ in British Guiana: three officers were sent to reform its failing police force in 1884, signalling the start of its rapid reorganization along RIC lines.11 And although there was resistance in Colombo to mid-nineteenth-century attempts by ex-RIC officers such as Thomas Thompson and William Macartney to recast the Ceylon Police in the Old Force’s image, several RIC-style innovations were implemented and remained in place until the early twentieth century.12

Even forces which were not RIC-modelled, such as those of the ‘Far East’ (the Straits Settlements, the Federated Malay States (FMS), and Hong Kong), recruited significant Irish contingents in the second half of the long nineteenth century; the inspectorships they offered attracted an inflow of RIC constables. The police forces of East Africa

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