An Accidental Villain: A Soldier's Tale of War, Deceit and Exile

After distinguishing himself on the battlefields of the First World War, Major-General Sir Hugh Tudor could have sought a respectable retirement in England, his duty done. But in 1920, his old friend Winston Churchill, minister of war in Lloyd George's cabinet, called on Tudor to serve in a very different kind of conflict--one fought in the Irish streets and countryside against an enemy determined to resist British colonial authority to the death. And soon Tudor, newly responsible for policing Ireland, was directing a brutal campaign of terror against rebel "terrorists" in the Irish War of Independence. It was a conflict he didn't entirely understand but one he was determined to win at all costs--including utilizing police death squads and inflicting brutal reprisals against IRA members and supporters and Sinn Fein politicians.

Tudor left few traces of his time in Ireland. No diary or letters that might explain his record as commander of the notorious Black and Tans. Nothing to justify his role in Bloody Sunday, November 21, 1920, when his men infamously slaughtered Irish football fans. Was it retaliation for the IRA's earlier murder of British military officers? Also, why did a man knighted for his efforts in Ireland leave his family and homeland in 1925, moving across the sea to Newfoundland where he remained in quiet obscurity until he died forty years later?

Linden MacIntyre--a storyteller and journalist long fascinated with the toll of violence and war--has spent four years tracking Tudor through archives, contemporaries' diaries and letters, and the body count of that Irish war, in search of answers. In An Accidental Villain, he delivers a consequential and fascinating account of how events can bring a man to the point where he acts against his own training, principles and inclination in the service of a cause--and ends up on a long journey toward personal oblivion.