This article was originally published in Familia, journal of the Ulster Historical Foundation (volume 2, no. 7, 1991).
Sourced from: www.irishtimes.com (2014-02-28)
Sourced from: www.irishtimes.com (2014-02-28)
The Irish in South Africa
The Police, A Case Study
by Donal P. McCracken, University of Durban-Westville
Nineteenth-century South Africa did not attract mass Irish migration, but Irish communities were to be found in Cape town, port Elizabeth, Kimberley, and Johannesburg, with smaller communities in Pretoria, Barberton, Durban and East London. As one would expect, a fair number of those in British colonial service in the sub-continent were Irish. A third of the Cape's governors were Irish, as were many of the judges and politicians. Both the Cape Colony and the colony of Natal had Irish prime ministers: Sir Thomas Upington, "The Afrikaner from Cork"; and Sir Albert Hime, from Kilcoole in County Wicklow. Place names such as Upington, Porteville, Caledon, Cradock, sir Henry Lowry's Pass, the Biggarsberg Mountains, Donnybrook and Belfast reflect Irish impact on the development of the subcontinent. [1]
|
One of the reasons for the prominence of the Irish was the fact that, while a few in numbers, they tended to be concentrated in specific occupations. Excluding the Irish administrators who could be found in any part of the British Empire, there were several professions and trades in South Africa which attracted the Irish.
There were the professional men: the lawyers, dentists and doctors. Though part of middle-class society in the colonies, they retained their attachment to Ireland There were the Irish Catholic priests, led initially by the Wexford-born Bishop Griffith, and especially strong in Eastern Cape. There were the retailers, their profession dominated by Ulster Protestant-owned chain stores such as John Orr, William Cuthbert and R. H. Henderson - well-known names even today. [2] Irish journalists worked on major newspapers and often edited them, the most important being Frederick St. Leger, founder and editor of the Cape Times. In the 1890's the railways and the diamond and gold mines absorbed numbers of Irishmen as well. And finally there were the Irish in British Colonial police forces. Nineteenth-century South Africa did not attract mass Irish migration, but Irish communities were to be found in Cape town, port Elizabeth, Kimberley, and Johannesburg, with smaller communities in Pretoria, Barberton, Durban and East London. As one would expect, a fair number of those in British colonial service in the sub-continent were Irish. |
|
A third of the Cape's governors were Irish, as were many of the judges and politicians. Both the Cape Colony and the colony of Natal had Irish prime ministers: Sir Thomas Upington, "The Afrikaner from Cork"; and Sir Albert Hime, from Kilcoole in County Wicklow. Place names such as Upington, Porteville, Caledon, Cradock, sir Henry Lowry's Pass, the Biggarsberg Mountains, Donnybrook and Belfast reflect Irish impact on the development of the subcontinent. [1]
One of the reasons for the prominence of the Irish was the fact that, while a few in numbers, they tended to be concentrated in specific occupations. Excluding the Irish administrators who could be found in any part of the British Empire, there were several professions and trades in South Africa which attracted the Irish.
There were the professional men: the lawyers, dentists and doctors. Though part of middle-class society in the colonies, they retained their attachment to Ireland There were the Irish Catholic priests, led initially by the Wexford-born Bishop Griffith, and especially strong in Eastern Cape. There were the retailers, their profession dominated by Ulster Protestant-owned chain stores such as John Orr, William Cuthbert and R. H. Henderson - well-known names even today. [2] Irish journalists worked on major newspapers and often edited them, the most important being Frederick St. Leger, founder and editor of the Cape Times. In the 1890's the railways and the diamond and gold mines absorbed numbers of Irishmen as well. And finally there were the Irish in British Colonial police forces.
Two salient points emerge from any study of police work in South Africa in the colonial period before 1910. The first is the extraordinary number of police forces which existed. We find borough forces in towns such as Ladysmith and Kimberley. Durban had its own Water Police, which contained many Irishmen. [3] The Natal Government Railways also had their own police force. The situation was complicated by the multitude of political divisions in southern Africa. There was the Cape Colony, which contained the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape, British Kaffraria and later Griqualand West and the Transkei. There were British Bechuanaland, British Basutoland, the land of the British South Africa Company. In south-eastern Africa Natal and Zululand had their own police forces. [4] And finally there were the Boer Republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal, both of which survived until 1901. Little is known of the composition of the early Transvaal police but interestingly enough it was Fermanagh journalist, Andrew Trimble, who helped found the Republic's detective force in 1894. [5]
The two major British colonies of South Africa were the Cape of Good Hope, British since 1806, and Natal, taken from the Boers in 1842. Both regions proved to be a security problem for the British, who held them essentially to protect their route to India. Three wars were fought against the Dutch and the Boers, who had been at the Cape since 1652. In addition, seven wars were fought against the Xhosas on the Eastern Cape frontier, one major war was fought against the Zulus; and several African insurrections had to be dealt with by the British authorities in Natal.
Nineteenth-century South Africa was militarily not very stable for the British and, not surprisingly, permanent British garrisons were stationed in Natal and the Cape. Six Irish regiments served in South Africa before the second Anglo-Boer war: 6th Dragoons (Inniskillings); 8th Lancers (King's Royal Irish); 27th Foot, 83rd Foot; 86th Foot; and 88th Foot (Connaught Rangers). [6]
But despite this sizeable military presence, the settler population, especially in the Eastern Cape around Grahamstown and in Natal, was ever nervous of an African uprising or of a Boer invasion from the Transvaal Republic. There was also the problem of crime, especially cattle rustling, and the magistrates needed their own armed units to impose justice in the African areas and to collect the 'Native Hut Tax'. The obvious solution was to form small, disciplined, armed and mounted paramilitary police units.
At first, police units were under individual magistrates or a field cornet. The first sizeable police unit that could be called a force in South Africa was the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police Force, set up in the Eastern Cape in 1855. So militarily orientated was this force that in 1878 it changed its name to the Cape Mounted Riflemen. How many Irishmen were in the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police is not known but names such as O'Brien, O'Donnell, Kavanagh, McBride and Reilly appear in the early enrolment books. [7]
Other police forces existed for varying periods. There were the Griqualand West Police, the Piquetberg District Mounted Police Force, the Mashonaland Constabulary, the British South African Police and the Bechuanaland Border Police. In the 1870s in the Cape there was a Special Rinderpest Police unit and in 1902 a temporary Natal Border Police was set up, centred in Vryheid. But the two largest police forces were the Cape Police and the Natal Police.
The Cape Police was raised in 1882 and had headquarters at King William's Town, Kimberley and Cape Town. In March 1904 its name was changed to the Cape Mounted Police (CMP), with its headquarters at Cape Town and 22 smaller divisions. It ceased to exist in 1913. [8] The Natal Police, later the Natal Mounted Police (NMP), was raised in 1874 following an African insurrection by Chief Langalibalele. The first commandant was Major John Dartnell of the 27th (Inniskillings), and the first enrolled trooper was Edward Babington of Londonderry. Initially the force mustered 50 whites and 150 Africans. By 1885 the roll-call was 300 whites and 25 Africans. In 1913 the NMP was converted into the 2nd and 3rd Regiments of the South African Mounted Riflemen. Policework passed to the new South African Police. [9]
The records of the CMP and the NMP are incomplete so exact figures of the Irish component cannot be given. Sixty-five boxes of CMP enrolment forms survive in the Cape Archives in Cape Town and 16 books of NMP records in the Natal Archives in Pietermaritzburg. These surviving records mainly refer to the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century. From them 634 Irishmen have been identified in the CMP and 376 in the NMP, making a total of just over 1,000 men. As these police forces were not large - NMP never had more than 300 whites - so the Irish constituted a sizeable proportion of the men, perhaps a quarter of the CMP and maybe more in the NMP.
The average age of new Irish recruits in the CMP was quite high at 24 and a half years old. This is explained by the fact that some 45% were already living in South Africa for less than one year and 28% were recruited directly in Ireland. Men joining from Ireland had their third-class fare on a Union Castle liner paid for them by the police.
Recruits, who at first had to buy their own horse, were paid six shillings a day. They had to be over 5'6", with a chest of 34" or more, weighing 175 pounds and aged between 18 and 30. Pay was not very good. They signed up for three years but could, and did, often purchase their discharge at a rate of £15 during the first year, £10 during the second and £5 in the last year.
Both the NMP and the CMP were very cosmopolitan. There were to be found in their ranks Canadians, Americans, Australians, Germans, Russians, Norwegians and Anglo-Egyptians, as well as those from the British Isles and local South African recruits. The last of these included a number of men who called themselves 'colonial Irish', that is born from South Africa of Irish parents. The police forces attracted a cross-section of Victorian society. The occupations given by new Irish recruits included: doctors, engineers, accountants, a large number of clerks, grooms, telegraphists, labourers, miners, commercial travellers, porters, waiters, firemen, shop assistants, farriers, lawyers, men terming themselves 'gentlemen', barmen, a circus artist and a divinity student from Tipperary. But the largest groups, comprising 60% of the Irish in the CMP, were either former military or Royal Irish Constabulary men, or farmers and sons of farmers, both categories deemed capable of riding a horse and shooting straight. There was a high proportion of middle-class and skilled Irishmen in both police forces: in the CMP only 6% of the Irish were unskilled and in the NMP a mere 4%. This reflects the fact that destitute Irish migrants tended to ignore South Africa.
None the less these police forces reflected Irish society in that the main occupational and social divisions of late Victorian Ireland were represented. There were even a few Gaelic Irish speakers in the CMP. But perhaps more interesting than that was the religious breakdown of the Irish troopers in the police, a reflection of the general pattern of Irish society in southern Africa at the time. Of those Irishmen who stated their religion when they enrolled, 60% were Protestant from all parts of Ireland and 40% were Catholic. In the CMP, of the Irish Protestants 65% belonged to the Church of Ireland and 35% were nonconformists, mostly Presbyterians.
There was one Irish Jew. In the early part of the nineteenth-century Irish Catholics had far exceeded Irish Protestants in South Africa. This was partly due to the fact that 96% of the Irish who came out with the 1820 British settlers were Catholic, and partly due to the British army's practice of discharging time-expired soldiers at the Cape to save the expense of shipping them home to Ireland. [10] But the Irish who came out to South Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century were not popular in English-speaking society. Finally, in 1860, all assisted Irish immigration to the Cape was halted. From then on any Irish person who wanted to come to the Cape had to pay a full fare. That made emigrating to South Africa a far more expensive proposition than taking an assisted passage to Australia or north America, where, in any case, the Irish were well entrenched, with family and cultural networks firmly established. In 1876 the Cape Town Daily News noted:
"We are afraid we could not induce the Irish labouring classes to come to this colony in anything like sufficient numbers. They know nothing of it beyond having a dim idea that it is associated with Kaffir wars; but they know all about America and Australia, or think they do, having heard them talked about from their infancy by those who had friends there."
Thus South Africa was bypassed by the great waves of post-famine Irish migrants. In 1904 there were about 20,000 Irish-born people living in South Africa, though there were many more of Irish descent. [11] But those who did come to South Africa are of interest, for they tended to be either the better off, hence the higher proportion of Irish Protestants than would be found in Australia or the USA, or they were strong and adventurous. [12] The two Irish commandos which fought for the Boers in the second Anglo-Boer war are famous, but there had been previous Irish commandos in the subcontinent as well as Irish revolutionaries, big-game hunters and explorers.
Life in the police force often meant living for days on and in the saddle, coming under fire, breaking up African faction fights and being ordered about by arrogant soldiers contemptuous of the colonial police. Danger interspersed with long periods of boring routine led many Irish policemen into trouble and the turnover of Irish recruits was high, few surviving more than three years. Some, like Robert Austin of Enniskerry, deserted with horse and revolver. Troopers were constantly being fined or demoted for drunkenness or improper behaviour: Victor Morris of Dublin got 14 days confined to barracks for creating a disturbance in a brothel; William Thom of St. Peters, Roscommon, was discharged in 1904 for 'having a colonial woman in his barrack room'; and Thomas Treanor of Mayo was admonished for 'making a rude and insolent remark to the [Natal] governor', Sir Matthew Nathan, Ireland's lord-lieutenant in 1916.
Matters were not made any easier by a depression after the second Anglo-Boer war, which brought cuts resulting in large-scale police demotions and redundancy. A humorous poem appeared in the CMP regimental magazine. Entitled 'The Irish-man's Rise', it tells the story of an Irishman who joined the police in 1892 and rises to become an subaltern. From 1908, however, because of financial cuts, he is progressively demoted until:
One of the reasons for the prominence of the Irish was the fact that, while a few in numbers, they tended to be concentrated in specific occupations. Excluding the Irish administrators who could be found in any part of the British Empire, there were several professions and trades in South Africa which attracted the Irish.
There were the professional men: the lawyers, dentists and doctors. Though part of middle-class society in the colonies, they retained their attachment to Ireland There were the Irish Catholic priests, led initially by the Wexford-born Bishop Griffith, and especially strong in Eastern Cape. There were the retailers, their profession dominated by Ulster Protestant-owned chain stores such as John Orr, William Cuthbert and R. H. Henderson - well-known names even today. [2] Irish journalists worked on major newspapers and often edited them, the most important being Frederick St. Leger, founder and editor of the Cape Times. In the 1890's the railways and the diamond and gold mines absorbed numbers of Irishmen as well. And finally there were the Irish in British Colonial police forces.
Two salient points emerge from any study of police work in South Africa in the colonial period before 1910. The first is the extraordinary number of police forces which existed. We find borough forces in towns such as Ladysmith and Kimberley. Durban had its own Water Police, which contained many Irishmen. [3] The Natal Government Railways also had their own police force. The situation was complicated by the multitude of political divisions in southern Africa. There was the Cape Colony, which contained the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape, British Kaffraria and later Griqualand West and the Transkei. There were British Bechuanaland, British Basutoland, the land of the British South Africa Company. In south-eastern Africa Natal and Zululand had their own police forces. [4] And finally there were the Boer Republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal, both of which survived until 1901. Little is known of the composition of the early Transvaal police but interestingly enough it was Fermanagh journalist, Andrew Trimble, who helped found the Republic's detective force in 1894. [5]
The two major British colonies of South Africa were the Cape of Good Hope, British since 1806, and Natal, taken from the Boers in 1842. Both regions proved to be a security problem for the British, who held them essentially to protect their route to India. Three wars were fought against the Dutch and the Boers, who had been at the Cape since 1652. In addition, seven wars were fought against the Xhosas on the Eastern Cape frontier, one major war was fought against the Zulus; and several African insurrections had to be dealt with by the British authorities in Natal.
Nineteenth-century South Africa was militarily not very stable for the British and, not surprisingly, permanent British garrisons were stationed in Natal and the Cape. Six Irish regiments served in South Africa before the second Anglo-Boer war: 6th Dragoons (Inniskillings); 8th Lancers (King's Royal Irish); 27th Foot, 83rd Foot; 86th Foot; and 88th Foot (Connaught Rangers). [6]
But despite this sizeable military presence, the settler population, especially in the Eastern Cape around Grahamstown and in Natal, was ever nervous of an African uprising or of a Boer invasion from the Transvaal Republic. There was also the problem of crime, especially cattle rustling, and the magistrates needed their own armed units to impose justice in the African areas and to collect the 'Native Hut Tax'. The obvious solution was to form small, disciplined, armed and mounted paramilitary police units.
At first, police units were under individual magistrates or a field cornet. The first sizeable police unit that could be called a force in South Africa was the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police Force, set up in the Eastern Cape in 1855. So militarily orientated was this force that in 1878 it changed its name to the Cape Mounted Riflemen. How many Irishmen were in the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police is not known but names such as O'Brien, O'Donnell, Kavanagh, McBride and Reilly appear in the early enrolment books. [7]
Other police forces existed for varying periods. There were the Griqualand West Police, the Piquetberg District Mounted Police Force, the Mashonaland Constabulary, the British South African Police and the Bechuanaland Border Police. In the 1870s in the Cape there was a Special Rinderpest Police unit and in 1902 a temporary Natal Border Police was set up, centred in Vryheid. But the two largest police forces were the Cape Police and the Natal Police.
The Cape Police was raised in 1882 and had headquarters at King William's Town, Kimberley and Cape Town. In March 1904 its name was changed to the Cape Mounted Police (CMP), with its headquarters at Cape Town and 22 smaller divisions. It ceased to exist in 1913. [8] The Natal Police, later the Natal Mounted Police (NMP), was raised in 1874 following an African insurrection by Chief Langalibalele. The first commandant was Major John Dartnell of the 27th (Inniskillings), and the first enrolled trooper was Edward Babington of Londonderry. Initially the force mustered 50 whites and 150 Africans. By 1885 the roll-call was 300 whites and 25 Africans. In 1913 the NMP was converted into the 2nd and 3rd Regiments of the South African Mounted Riflemen. Policework passed to the new South African Police. [9]
The records of the CMP and the NMP are incomplete so exact figures of the Irish component cannot be given. Sixty-five boxes of CMP enrolment forms survive in the Cape Archives in Cape Town and 16 books of NMP records in the Natal Archives in Pietermaritzburg. These surviving records mainly refer to the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century. From them 634 Irishmen have been identified in the CMP and 376 in the NMP, making a total of just over 1,000 men. As these police forces were not large - NMP never had more than 300 whites - so the Irish constituted a sizeable proportion of the men, perhaps a quarter of the CMP and maybe more in the NMP.
The average age of new Irish recruits in the CMP was quite high at 24 and a half years old. This is explained by the fact that some 45% were already living in South Africa for less than one year and 28% were recruited directly in Ireland. Men joining from Ireland had their third-class fare on a Union Castle liner paid for them by the police.
Recruits, who at first had to buy their own horse, were paid six shillings a day. They had to be over 5'6", with a chest of 34" or more, weighing 175 pounds and aged between 18 and 30. Pay was not very good. They signed up for three years but could, and did, often purchase their discharge at a rate of £15 during the first year, £10 during the second and £5 in the last year.
Both the NMP and the CMP were very cosmopolitan. There were to be found in their ranks Canadians, Americans, Australians, Germans, Russians, Norwegians and Anglo-Egyptians, as well as those from the British Isles and local South African recruits. The last of these included a number of men who called themselves 'colonial Irish', that is born from South Africa of Irish parents. The police forces attracted a cross-section of Victorian society. The occupations given by new Irish recruits included: doctors, engineers, accountants, a large number of clerks, grooms, telegraphists, labourers, miners, commercial travellers, porters, waiters, firemen, shop assistants, farriers, lawyers, men terming themselves 'gentlemen', barmen, a circus artist and a divinity student from Tipperary. But the largest groups, comprising 60% of the Irish in the CMP, were either former military or Royal Irish Constabulary men, or farmers and sons of farmers, both categories deemed capable of riding a horse and shooting straight. There was a high proportion of middle-class and skilled Irishmen in both police forces: in the CMP only 6% of the Irish were unskilled and in the NMP a mere 4%. This reflects the fact that destitute Irish migrants tended to ignore South Africa.
None the less these police forces reflected Irish society in that the main occupational and social divisions of late Victorian Ireland were represented. There were even a few Gaelic Irish speakers in the CMP. But perhaps more interesting than that was the religious breakdown of the Irish troopers in the police, a reflection of the general pattern of Irish society in southern Africa at the time. Of those Irishmen who stated their religion when they enrolled, 60% were Protestant from all parts of Ireland and 40% were Catholic. In the CMP, of the Irish Protestants 65% belonged to the Church of Ireland and 35% were nonconformists, mostly Presbyterians.
There was one Irish Jew. In the early part of the nineteenth-century Irish Catholics had far exceeded Irish Protestants in South Africa. This was partly due to the fact that 96% of the Irish who came out with the 1820 British settlers were Catholic, and partly due to the British army's practice of discharging time-expired soldiers at the Cape to save the expense of shipping them home to Ireland. [10] But the Irish who came out to South Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century were not popular in English-speaking society. Finally, in 1860, all assisted Irish immigration to the Cape was halted. From then on any Irish person who wanted to come to the Cape had to pay a full fare. That made emigrating to South Africa a far more expensive proposition than taking an assisted passage to Australia or north America, where, in any case, the Irish were well entrenched, with family and cultural networks firmly established. In 1876 the Cape Town Daily News noted:
"We are afraid we could not induce the Irish labouring classes to come to this colony in anything like sufficient numbers. They know nothing of it beyond having a dim idea that it is associated with Kaffir wars; but they know all about America and Australia, or think they do, having heard them talked about from their infancy by those who had friends there."
Thus South Africa was bypassed by the great waves of post-famine Irish migrants. In 1904 there were about 20,000 Irish-born people living in South Africa, though there were many more of Irish descent. [11] But those who did come to South Africa are of interest, for they tended to be either the better off, hence the higher proportion of Irish Protestants than would be found in Australia or the USA, or they were strong and adventurous. [12] The two Irish commandos which fought for the Boers in the second Anglo-Boer war are famous, but there had been previous Irish commandos in the subcontinent as well as Irish revolutionaries, big-game hunters and explorers.
Life in the police force often meant living for days on and in the saddle, coming under fire, breaking up African faction fights and being ordered about by arrogant soldiers contemptuous of the colonial police. Danger interspersed with long periods of boring routine led many Irish policemen into trouble and the turnover of Irish recruits was high, few surviving more than three years. Some, like Robert Austin of Enniskerry, deserted with horse and revolver. Troopers were constantly being fined or demoted for drunkenness or improper behaviour: Victor Morris of Dublin got 14 days confined to barracks for creating a disturbance in a brothel; William Thom of St. Peters, Roscommon, was discharged in 1904 for 'having a colonial woman in his barrack room'; and Thomas Treanor of Mayo was admonished for 'making a rude and insolent remark to the [Natal] governor', Sir Matthew Nathan, Ireland's lord-lieutenant in 1916.
Matters were not made any easier by a depression after the second Anglo-Boer war, which brought cuts resulting in large-scale police demotions and redundancy. A humorous poem appeared in the CMP regimental magazine. Entitled 'The Irish-man's Rise', it tells the story of an Irishman who joined the police in 1892 and rises to become an subaltern. From 1908, however, because of financial cuts, he is progressively demoted until:
|
They're going lower every day,
They're giving us now damn all for pay, And yet it's very hard to say What next they will connive at; For me I can revert no more In this assassinated corps, And there can't be "wusser" times in store, For I'm now a native private. [19] |
|
|
But many Irish policemen distinguished themselves in South Africa. To quote the discharge forms, they had 'sobriety, zeal and efficiency'. They often were good linguists and we find Irish policemen in South Africa speaking Dutch, Xhosa, Zhulu, Matabele, accomplishments for which they were tested and received extra pay, as well as Spanish, French, German, Latin, Greek, Italian and Irish. Few who were asked admitted either belonging to a secret society or to having a venereal disease.
There were many Irish chief constables with names such as Sullivan, Whitsitt, Shea, Hagan (Armagh), Molloy. Famous Irish police inspectors in South Africa included names such as Blake, Dorehill, Lyttle, Prendergast, Keating, Lindsay and Esmonde-White. Two of the NMP's six sergeant-majors, Shackleton and O'Brien, were Irish.
An interesting phenomenon of the colonial South African police is the large number of sons of eminent or well-to-do Irish people who were sent to join one of the police forces. One such example was William Porter, son of Reverend Classon Porter of Belfast and nephew of the Honourable William porter of Limavady, the celebrated Attorney-general at the Cape who gave the vote to educated blacks in the 1870s. Young Porter, from Larne, joined the NMP in 1881. Another was William henry Carson, son of Sir Edward and Lady Carson, who joined the CMP in 1905.
In 1913 the modern South African police (SAP) was formed and the number of Irish recruits began to decrease. None the less in its early years there were such Irish notables as Major John Tate of Downpatrick and lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Perry from Lisburn. There were also the lesser-ranking Irish policemen, among them Sergeant Ferguson Fee from Greeve in Longford. At the Saturday races at Cape Town he was wont to line his horse up at the start beyond the fence and take on the field. [20]
But by the 1920s Irishmen in the police were becoming rarer. A generation before, the Irish in the Cape Mounted Police and Natal Mounted police had been as prominent as the Irish in the New York Police. [21]
There were many Irish chief constables with names such as Sullivan, Whitsitt, Shea, Hagan (Armagh), Molloy. Famous Irish police inspectors in South Africa included names such as Blake, Dorehill, Lyttle, Prendergast, Keating, Lindsay and Esmonde-White. Two of the NMP's six sergeant-majors, Shackleton and O'Brien, were Irish.
An interesting phenomenon of the colonial South African police is the large number of sons of eminent or well-to-do Irish people who were sent to join one of the police forces. One such example was William Porter, son of Reverend Classon Porter of Belfast and nephew of the Honourable William porter of Limavady, the celebrated Attorney-general at the Cape who gave the vote to educated blacks in the 1870s. Young Porter, from Larne, joined the NMP in 1881. Another was William henry Carson, son of Sir Edward and Lady Carson, who joined the CMP in 1905.
In 1913 the modern South African police (SAP) was formed and the number of Irish recruits began to decrease. None the less in its early years there were such Irish notables as Major John Tate of Downpatrick and lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Perry from Lisburn. There were also the lesser-ranking Irish policemen, among them Sergeant Ferguson Fee from Greeve in Longford. At the Saturday races at Cape Town he was wont to line his horse up at the start beyond the fence and take on the field. [20]
But by the 1920s Irishmen in the police were becoming rarer. A generation before, the Irish in the Cape Mounted Police and Natal Mounted police had been as prominent as the Irish in the New York Police. [21]
Donal P. McCracken is professor of History and dean of Humanities at the University of Durban-Westville in South Africa. He is also the author of several publications. Click here to visit Donal P. McCracken's page on Amazon.com.
The Irish in South Africa - The Police, A Case Study: Notes
by Donal P. McCracken, University of Durban-Westville
by Donal P. McCracken, University of Durban-Westville
- For a detailed analysis of the Irish in the region, see D.P. McCracken. (ed.), The Irish in southern Africa. 1795-1910, (Perskor, Johannesburg. forthcoming in 1991). The author is grateful to Mrs P. A. McCracken for assistance in researching this article and to the University of Durban-Westville for providing a research grant.
- See, for example, R.H. Henderson, An Ulsterman in Africa, (Cape Town, 1944 and 1945 ed.).
- Jack Jewell, A history of the Durban City Police, (Durban, 1989). For Irishmen. see pp.41 and 99-103. See also Natal Archives, Durban corporation papers, superintendent of police reports, 5/25/31-5, (1865-1903); minutes of the borough police board, Al/I, (1856-61); and reports El/I, (1897).
- For Irish policemen in the pioneering days of Rhodesia. see D.W. Lowry, 'The Irish in Rhodesia', in McCracken, (ed.), The Irish in southern Africa, (forthcoming); and Col. A.S. Hickson, 'The Mashonaland Irish', Rhodesiana, no.5(1960), pp.1-6.
- Dictionary of South African Biography, p.786; and Barry Ronan, Forty South African Years, (London,1919), pp.174-5. Inspector Lorimer of Armagh set up the Cape's CID unit.
- See S. Monick, Shamrock and springbok: The Irish impact on South African military history, 1689-1914, (Johannesburg,1989).
- Cape Archives, Cape Town, Cape Mounted Rifles papers, CMR, DD,7/33, (1855-59).
- The Cape Archives contains an extensive collection of papers on the Cape Mounted Police. These are in 161 boxes; vol. 87A also contains enrolment names for the Griqualand West Border Poice for the early 1880s. On 1 October 1900 The Bandolier, the regimental monthly of the Cape Mounted Police, began to be published in Kimberley. The South African Library in Cape Town has an incomplete run of this periodical.
- The Natal Archives in Pietermaritzburg houses 16 volumes of manuscript material on the Natal Mounted Police. Volumes 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10 contain enrolment details. Books on the force include H.P. Holt, The Mounted Police of Natal, (London, 1913), and Major Arthur A. Wood, Nonqquai: Natal past and present, (Ilfracombe, 1962).
- On the Irish 1820 settlers, see G.B. Dickason, Irish settlers to the Cape: A history of the Clanwilliam 1820 settlers from Cork harbour, (Cape Town, 1973).
- D.H. Akenson, Occasional papers on the Irish in South Africa, (Grahamstown, Rhodes, 1991),p.64.
- D. P. McCracken, The Irish Pro-Boers, 1877-1902, (Perskor, Johannesburg, 1988), pp.141-9.
- P. Colum, Arthur Griffith, (Dublin, 1959), p.32.
- M.C. Seton, 'Irishmen in South Africa', The Gael, January 1900, P.19.
- T.K. Daniel, 'Irish networks', in McCracken, (ed.), Irish in southern Africa, (forthcoming).
- Natal Volunteer Record: Annals and rolls of service in the Anglo-Boer war, 1899-1900, (Durban, n.d.), pp.89-93 and 181-4.
- G.A. Chadwick, The role of the fifth (Irish) brigade in the battles of Colenso and Tuqela Heights, (pamphlet, Durban, 1990).
- The Times, 20 June 1901; and 'The Irish hospital corps (field force) in South Africa', The Royal Irish Constabulary Magazine, vol.1, no.9, July 1912; 11.1, Nov.1912; 11.2, Dec. 1912,11.4, Feb 1913; 11.5, March1913; and 11.6, April 1913.
- The Bandolier, l August 1908.
- Personal communications from Dr J. Tate, Mr Stanley Fletcher and Mrs M. Verrier.
- The names of many notable Irish policemen in South Africa can be found in either the volumes of the Dictionary of South African biography or Men of the times (the Cape edition is dated 1906 and the Transvaal edition 1905). On the other side of the coin, some South African prisons had a high proportion of Irish inmates. See, for example, the Cape Archives, P.O.C. (Breakwater Prison), Vol.11,1986.
SHARE THIS PAGE
