Ormonde Winter

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Sir Ormonde de l'Épée Winter
Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George
Distinguished Service Order

Anglo-Irish War. He later joined the British Fascists and fought for the Finnish Army in the Winter War
.

Early years

Winter was born in Chiswick on 15 January 1875, the youngest of five sons of a controller of the General Post Office. He was educated at Churchbury House, Great Morden, and later at Cheltenham College, before joining the British Army.

Service

Winter was a

First World War. He gained notoriety for an incident in Bedfordshire in 1904, where he and another officer confronted a group of youths who had been harassing them whilst boating, Winter killing one with a single blow from an oar when the boy attacked him with a wooden club. Subsequently charged with manslaughter, Winter was acquitted by the jury on the grounds of self-defence.[1]

First World War

Winter first saw action as an artillery officer during the Gallipoli campaign, arriving on W beach, Lancashire Landing, on 29 April 1915 after surviving an attack on his transport, the SS Monitor, from an Ottoman torpedo boat before arriving at the front. In his autobiography, he recalls turning back a fleeing gun crew at revolver point on 1 May, helping to save a battalion of Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers from annihilation. Although not a trained intelligence officer, he was noted for his skilful questioning of Turkish prisoners. He would later be put in charge of a 12 pounder field gun nicknamed 'Wandering Kate' and would be evacuated on 8 December. Winter later remarked that he enjoyed every minute of his service at Gallipoli. He would later be deployed to the

Messines Ridge on 7 June 1917 and afterwards Passchendaele
. In his autobiography, he recounts escaping death on several occasions and being horrified that the walls of his command bunker were shored up with the corpses of German soldiers.

Intelligence work in Ireland

Appointment

After the First World War, Winter was working for the Boundary Commission for Schleswig-Holstein when he was appointed in May 1920 by the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, to replace his friend General Tudor as Chief of Intelligence in Dublin Castle, taking a pay cut to accept the position.[2] Winter originally was housed in a lodge outside Dublin Castle and remarked on his unconventional introduction to Ireland when his mess steward shot himself on his first night.[3] Even given Winter's lack of experience in the espionage field, 'O' impressed at the time with his initial reorganisation of heavily centralised departments. Mark Grant-Sturgis wrote of the Dublin Castle regime; "'O' is a marvel, he looks like a wicked little white snake, is as clever as paint, probably entirely non-moral, a first class horseman, a card genius, knows several languages, is a super sleuth and a most amazing original, he can do anything".[4][5] Winter's detractors claimed him to be obsessed with cloak and dagger operations, at one point donning a disguise to personally seize part of IRA funds. Leadership within the British Army were said to be initially unimpressed by Winter and later exasperated by his slowness in building a nationwide organisation, inability to set up a single intelligence system and by his lack of "an overall perspective."[6]

In his final report to the British Government, Winter listed the following as his main methods of intelligence gathering:

  1. Agents obtained by local police and through the agency of 'local centres'
  2. Agents recruited in England and sent to Ireland
  3. Dublin Special Branch
  4. Persons friendly to the Police volunteering information
  5. Those persons who gave information whilst under arrest or in prison, with a view to escaping the punishment of their crimes
  6. Captured documents
  7. Information from ordinary Police sources based on observation
  8. 'Moutons' (infiltrators) placed either in prisons or in detention cells with rebel prisoners
  9. Listening sets
  10. Interrogation of prisoners
  11. Censorship of letters of prisoners in jail
  12. Scotland House (the address to which anonymous letters were sent)[7]

Operations

In December 1920, Winter took charge of the 90-strong Dublin District Intelligence Service, known as the "

Staines with the traditional message 'Spies and traitors beware'.[13]

communiques to their subordinates.[14]
The agent rewrote the messages summoning all IRA leaders in the district to a meeting where they were arrested. Maintaining his cover as an IRA member, Ormonde was placed into custody alongside them, gaining more intelligence from their conversations in jail.

Amongst Winter's other ideas was 'The Raid Bureau', a 150-strong unit dedicated to analysing the vast amounts of paperwork generated by IRA leader Michael Collins. Collins' dedication to paperwork would to some degree compromise certain activities of the IRA, revealing arms supplies, financial records and even providing lists of IRA members and the identities of traitors within the police. Such documents were more valuable than any informer and could be presented in court as evidence which an informer would be unwilling to do.

From October 1920 to July 1921, 6,311 raids were launched capturing over 1,200 IRA documents, some consisting of over 200 pages and resulting in 1,745 arrests in the Dublin area alone.[15] Upon capturing the IRA's financial records, Winter noted that many contributors were his own Unionist friends, forced to pay protection money.

Another innovation was collecting photographs of IRA members netted as results of raids and the establishment of local centres across the country allowing an exchange of intelligence between areas. Winter claimed to have recruited at least three leading IRA members as informers and many others from lesser ranks.

Second World War. They were a unit of plain-clothes policemen who had limited success in killing or capturing IRA members, going after young men who fell into their hands on the streets of Dublin. Ormonde personally killed one IRA assassin, sustained a small wound to the hand whilst shooting his way out of an ambush, and captured another IRA man, professing disappointment that the IRA bounty on his head was only £1,000.[17] He met David Lloyd George, briefing him on the nature of the conflict.[18]

The Truce

During the first months of 1921,

Irish Unionists and the British Government but caused the Irish Civil War, fought between the pro and anti Treaty IRA forces, breaking out on 28 June 1922.[19]

Later service

After his service in

Sir Nevil Macready
and others over his attaining police primacy in intelligence matters over their Army preferred candidate, Lt-Col Walter Wilson. Winter eventually retired from the army in 1924.

In the 1920s, Winter joined the directorship of the burgeoning but badly managed

British Fascisti, the first political organisation in the United Kingdom to claim and adopt the "fascist" label, which held several massive rallies -twelve thousand people one time- in London parks. Winter was appointed head of the organisation's intelligence section, taking over from another British secret agent, Maxwell Knight, but eventually did not take up the post, filled by Lieutenant-Colonel Bramley who kept Knight on as his deputy.[20]

The organisation's director was Brigadier General

Robert Byron Drury Blakeney, ex Royal Engineers, who was in part responsible for the birth of the extremist Imperial Fascist League. Through mismanagement and scandal, the British Fascisti faded into obscurity in the late 1920s while its membership was swallowed up by other fascist movements in Britain. In his book, Winter makes virtually no mention of this period, possibly on account of the Official Secrets Act.[citation needed
]

It was later rumoured that Winter was involved in plots to overthrow the Spanish colonial government in

Spanish Morocco and also to stage a revolution for the Slovak minority against the Czech government.[21] In 1940, at the age of 65, he offered his services to the Finnish Army
, in their defence against the Soviet Union.

He was honoured for his service with certificates that can be seen in his personal collection in the Imperial War Museum.[citation needed] He spoke five Slavic languages and was a chain smoker. He died peacefully in 1962 aged 87, his obituary reading that he feared neither God nor man.[22]

Cultural depictions

Paul Ritter.[23]

Works

  • Winter's Tale, An Autobiography, Richards Press: London, 1955

References

  1. ^ "Remarkable river fatality". Gloucester Citizen. 12 July 1904.
  2. ^ A Winter's Tale p288
  3. ^ A Winter's Tale p289
  4. ^ (Sturgis papers)
  5. ^ Hopkinson The Last Days of Dublin Castle p40
  6. ISBN 019821863X
    .
  7. ^ P Hart (ed.), Narratives; British Intelligence in Ireland 1920–1921; The Final Reports.
  8. ISBN 978-1-84889-306-1
    p42
  9. ISBN 1-85918-201-1
  10. ISBN 978-1-84889-306-1
    p37
  11. ISBN 0-7509-4267-3
  12. ISBN 978-1-84383-656-8
  13. ^ A Winter's Tale p305-6
  14. ^ Peter Hart (ed.), Narratives; British Intelligence in Ireland 1920–1921; The Final Reports.
  15. ^ A Winter's Tale p304-5
  16. ^ A Winter's Tale p300
  17. ^ A Winter's Tale p332
  18. ^ A Winter's Tale p339-341
  19. ^ ^ "The Troubles". Claregalway Historical Society Sharing our historical & cultural heritage.
  20. ISBN 978-1-78475-204-0
  21. ISBN 978-1-84383-656-8
    p37
  22. ^ Havoc p258
  23. ^ "The Voice UK, Dancing with the Stars, Resistance - Top TV picks for tonight and tomorrow night". independent.

Bibliography

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ormonde_Winter&oldid=1207001483"