Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

The deeply poignant ‘Kilmichael Ambush 1920’ Family Group to Lieutenant C. J. Guthrie, Royal Air Force, later Temporary Cadet, Auxiliary Division, Royal Irish Constabulary, and his wife Staff Nurse I. H. Guthrie, née Peach, Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, who met in Egypt, married after demobilisation and went together to Macroom, co. Cork, Ireland, as they were expecting a baby.

Guthrie drove the second of two Crossley Tenders that were ambushed by an Irish Republican Army unit commanded by Tom Barry on 28 November 1920; he was the only ADRIC man (out of 18) who managed to escape from the killing zone, despite reportedly being wounded; he made his way alone, on foot, in pitch darkness and driving rain, through hostile territory back towards Macroom; he was intercepted by I.R.A. members just two miles from safety. One of the ‘Disappeared’, his fate was unknown; extensive searches for him drew a blank; his wife returned to England and gave birth to their daughter. In 1922 the Irish government admitted that the I.R.A. had shot Guthrie and disposed of his body in a bog

British War and Victory Medals (Lieut. C. J. Guthrie. R.A.F.) in named card box of issue, surname officially corrected, extremely fine

British War and Victory Medals (S. Nurse I. Peach.) in named card box of issue, and with Q.A.I.M.N.S. Reserve Cape Badge, and two War Office letters regarding enlistment and termination of recipient’s employment with the Q.A.I.M.N.S. Reserve, virtually mint state (lot) £1,200-£1,600

M.I.D. London Gazette 30 July 1920.

Note: Much has been written about the Kilmichael ambush, both during the Anglo-Irish War and subsequently. Some is inaccurate, being strongly influenced by either British or I.R.A. mythology. Recommended reading, which focuses on the facts about the fighting around the second Crossley, is: I.R.A. Witness Statement 1,234 by Jack Hennessy, pp 4-6, August 1955; Kilmichael: A Battlefield Study by Sean A. Murphy, a small arms specialist and retired Commandant of the Irish Defence Forces, 2014; Green Tears for Hecuba by Patrick Twohig, a Catholic priest who knew the place and people well, 1994; theauxiliaries.com by David Grant, which includes helpful photographs, maps and original documents.

Cecil James Guthrie was born on 9 March 1899 at Dysart, Fife, Scotland, the son of an affluent solicitor. His mother died in 1906. He studied at Kirkaldy High School and George Watson College, Edinburgh, before attending Edinburgh University to read law. On reaching his 18th birthday, he joined the Royal Flying Corps in May 1917 and was appointed Second Lieutenant on 30 August. He was posted to successive training units in England and, from September 1917, Training Squadrons in Egypt. For most of the time he was based at El Amiriya near Alexandria and also attended courses at Heliopolis near Cairo. Guthrie became a Lieutenant on the formation of the RAF on 1 April 1918. He spent a month in hospital (27 September to 26 October 1918) and it was probably then that he met Irene Peach, a Staff Nurse in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, who had arrived in Egypt in August 1917.

Active Service on the North-West Frontier

Further east, in India, 114 Squadron RAF flew BE 2 (c and e variant) reconnaissance and ground attack aircraft. The squadron’s designated role was ‘Cooperation of Aircraft with the Army’ and most of its planes were dispersed across north-west India, to deal with mounting unrest on the Frontier and in the Punjab, which came to a head at Amritsar, 10-13 April 1919. 114 Squadron was managed from two locations, Quetta and Lahore, and was quickly bought up to full established strength, as it was being used for dispersing riotous crowds or hostile tribesmen by strafing and bombing. Guthrie, who by now had a great deal of flying time on BE 2s (he had been appointed as a junior instructor), was posted to 114 Squadron, apparently to the Flight based in Quetta, arriving on 13 April 1919.

The Third Afghan War began on 6 May 1919 and lasted until August. Individual aircraft from Quetta were involved in the capture of the Spin Baldak fortress from the Afghan army and attacks on hostile tribesmen at Fort Sandeman in Baluchistan and at Hindubagh near Quetta. Guthrie was one of four officers from 114 Squadron (one of them was the Quetta Flight Commander) who was Mentioned in the Commander-in-Chief’s despatch for his “distinguished service”. However, his name is not on the roll for the India General Service Medal.

Guthrie was posted to 31 Squadron at Risalpur near Peshawar on 30 October 1919, as 114 Squadron was starting a conversion programme to re-equip with Bristol Fighters. It was considered pointless to retrain Guthrie, as it had been agreed that he would leave India and the RAF within a few weeks. He returned to Britain in January 1921 and was ‘dispersed’ on 15 February 1921. His marriage to Irene Peach took place shortly afterwards.

Temporary Cadet, ADRIC

On 17 August 1920, Guthrie joined the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (ADRIC, commonly known as the Auxies) a heavily armed and motorised mobile force, recruited from young ex-Military Officers with good records. It was described as a police force, but was in reality essentially a military unit, whose mission was to hunt down and eliminate members of the Irish Republican Army. However, most of its members lacked the skills required for this role, and they received little useful training for it before they were rushed into the field.

Since ADRIC was set up in great haste from July 1920 and as quickly disbanded after the Truce in 1922, its records are incomplete and raise many questions which are difficult for historians to answer confidently. One question is why it attracted a disproportionate number of ex-RAF officers (426 according to David Grant, double the number expected if ex-officers of each Service had joined in equal proportions to their total manpower). Alexander Lewis (a contemporary of Guthrie’s in the RFC/RAF and in ‘C’ Company ADRIC, who joined ADRIC four days before Guthrie) recorded that “I was too unsettled to return to university with all the terrors and nightmares fresh in my mind of the air war”. He had no job and little money. When he saw an advertisement for ADRIC in the Sunday Pictorial, he travelled to London the next day.

“Arriving at Scotland Yard, I was taken down innumerable passages and several flights of stairs to a huge long room at the end of which was a large desk and behind it was the commissioner in charge of the Special Branch. [Probably this was Major Cyril Fleming, R.I.C.]. Without wasting any time he looked at my identity papers, then picked up the phone and called the Air Ministry to confirm everything I told him… I was immediately sworn in… my experiences in Ireland would fill a book, and I was still suffering nightmares for more years after.”

Guthrie was designated RIC number 77863 and ADRIC number 294. He was assigned to ‘C’ Company (one of about twenty Companies stationed around Ireland), which was made up of three Platoons, each split into three Sections of up to nine men. After a few chaotic weeks in Dublin, the Company deployed to Macroom, county Cork, on 17 September 1920. They were billeted in Macroom Castle, a dilapidated stately home on the edge of the town. Unusually, Irene Guthrie accompanied her husband to Macroom, as she was four months pregnant. Although she lived in a kind of ‘married quarter’ in the Castle, where the Company had guards on duty 24/7, some who knew the family say that Irene got a job in the local hotel, which was heavily patronised by off-duty Auxies.

‘C’ Company began patrolling the neighbouring roads, raiding and searching villages, travelling in Crossley tenders. These tenders were a versatile, open-topped light truck, an ancestor of the modern pick-up, which could carry a driver and commander on the front bench seat and up to ten well-armed men sitting on wooden benches along the length of its rear wooden flat-bed. On 16 October Ballymakeera was raided and an Auxie shot dead James Lehane, an incident which was reported by local newspapers (Sunday Independent, 17 October 1920 p 5 refers). Republican sources claim that the Auxie was Guthrie, but this appears to be an attempt to justify his subsequent execution. It also seems unlikely, given his role in a similar incident on 10 November, when an Auxie killed Christopher Lucey, an unarmed I.R.A. member who was on the run. Guthrie officially reported what had happened (none of his colleagues planned to do so). As a result, the Auxie was sent to Dublin Castle and dismissed by order of the Police Advisor (Cafferata papers refer).

The Kilmichael Ambush

The leaders of ‘C’ Company, in particular District Inspector F.W. Crake, the Number 2 Platoon Commander, quickly grew complacent, falling into predictable patterns of patrol activity that the watchful eyes of the Republicans quickly detected. Cadet Alexander Lewis makes this clear in a letter to his mother, dated 17 December 1920 – this letter also exposes the cruel trick of fate that sent Guthrie to his death: “On the Sunday afternoon, old Crake… took out two cars for a patrol that afternoon. I was fitting a new petrol tank on to my bus, my old one having been punctured, otherwise I should have been on that fateful patrol. I had been on that same road three times with Crake that same week, so Guthrie who was also driving the car, took his instead…”

Late on the afternoon of Sunday 28 November, the two Crossley tenders, travelling at about forty miles an hour and about fifty feet apart, entered a sharp double bend at a desolate, boggy spot on the Macroom to Dunmanway road. As they slowed down to enter the second bend, a figure appeared by the side of the road, wearing the uniform of an army officer, standing erect and impassive, probably with his hands behind his back, a common pose adopted by British officers. The patrol commander, Crake, who was sitting in the front next to the driver, knew that there were army units operating in rural co. Cork and may not have worried (or even noticed) that the man’s uniform was subtly different in colour and cut from normal. The British army was full of regiments that proudly cherished their traditional variations on the regulation ‘uniform’, and he would have been quite used to meeting oddly-dressed officers. Tom Barry was actually wearing the uniform of an officer in the Irish Volunteers, ancestors of the I.R.A., which was modelled on standard Service Dress.

Crake ordered his driver to stop, so that he could speak to the unknown officer. As the Crossley slowed down, Barry suddenly lobbed a grenade into the tender, produced a pistol and shot Crake through the head, before wounding the driver. It was an act of enormous daring and audacity, which required great self-control and perfect timing. Before setting up the ambush, Barry had given his men orders not to take prisoners. He had stationed sections of men armed with rifles on nearby rock outcrops which overlooked the bend, and they opened fire on the Auxies who were rapidly dismounting from the first tender. The I.R.A. gunmen were armed with Canadian Ross service rifles and bayonets which they had captured from Irish Coastguard stations, straight-pull bolt-action weapons which could deliver high rates of fire. All of the nine Auxiliaries in the first tender were put out of action before they could fully deploy to take on their ambushers.

The fighting around Guthrie’s tender was more protracted. Our understanding of what happened is guided by a sketch map of the scene made the next day, on which the relative positions of the two tenders and each of the Auxie bodies was carefully noted, statements made by I.R.A. participants and by an Auxie from the second Section who, grievously wounded and left for dead, became the only British survivor.

“It was our job to deal with the second lorry…” wrote Jack Hennessey. “I heard a shot followed by a bomb explosion from the Column O/C’s position. At this time the second lorry was just opposite our position. The Auxies jumped out and tried to find cover. The lorry driver held his seat and attempted to back the lorry out of the position. I was engaging the Auxies on the road. I was wearing a tin hat. I had fired about ten shots… [when bullets passed through Hennessey’s helmet and wounded him in the scalp.] Vice/Comdt. McCarthy got a bullet through the head and lay dead.”

It seems that, as the first tender slowed, Guthrie had conformed to its movements, so as to maintain the 50 yards separation distance. When the first shot was fired, Section Leader W.T. Barnes, who was in charge of the second tender, yelled orders to dismount. According to the positional map of the Auxie corpses, two were very close to the first tender, three were over 100 yards further back and the remainder lay individually within 100 yards of the second tender, which was 300 yards away from the first Crossley. This would be consistent with Guthrie reversing back over 200 yards as men were jumping from it, while at least one man was attempting to cover them by (accurately) firing at the I.R.A. ambushers. It is unclear why Guthrie’s tender stopped where it did, still inside the killing zone of the ambush. Maybe he was wounded, maybe he misjudged and ran off the road into the bog, maybe he decided to join the fight, using his revolver. The surviving Auxie believed that the Crossley’s differential, which was notoriously unreliable, suddenly broke.

The firefight did not last long. The ranges were extremely close, and when the I.R.A. gunmen moved down to the road from the rocky outcrops they had initially occupied, it was an affair of Ross bayonets and rifle butts, as the I.R.A. were short of ammunition. The retired small-arms expert, Commandant Murphy, deduced that the Auxies fired 31 rounds from their SMLE service rifles and at most 68 from their pistols. Guthrie emptied his pistol, which, as a former pilot, was the weapon he was most used to firing. He may have been unable to reload it or to get to his rifle. Two I.R.A. men died from bullet wounds and a third was killed when the bolt of his rifle blew out backwards into his face (an uncommon but well-documented hazard of the Ross rifle). Hennessey describes how, once the Auxies had been finished off, Barry’s men started stripping the bodies of their weapons, ammunition and equipment:

“One of our men, Sonny Dave Crowley, shouted to the Column 0/C that an Auxie was running away across country. He was the driver who had been hiding under the lorry and who had slipped out from cover while our men were engaged taking the stuff of the other Auxies. Some shots were fired at the fleeing Auxie, but he got away… “

‘Disappeared’

In Father Patrick Twohig’s words [slightly abridged], Guthrie stumbled back towards Macroom “though the winter darkness, rain and cold, alone, wounded and despairing. He called at Twohigs of Cooldaniel, and asked to be driven into Macroom. They pleaded that the horse was indisposed. Once he left, word was passed on. He passed Dromcara Bar, where the Dromeys have been for over a hundred years, and down the bog road towards the Gaeragh marshes. He was trailed from the Bar first by the O'Mahony brothers, Jerry and John, who were then joined by Danny and Mikey O'Shea. A message was sent to Louis Dromey, the local I.R.A. Commander. At the "cross of four roads" they lost him in the darkness. They headed for the wilderness crossing and passed him sitting in a bush. He said "Good Evening". They walked on a little, then returned. He said "If I had ammunition for this, you fellows wouldn't take me". He threw out his empty, now useless, revolver. Louis Dromey arrived and a council of war was held. There were no alternatives. He was taken to a section of the Annahalla bog, shot and buried.”

Guthrie was shot on the evening of 28 November 1920. Reports that he was held for two days before being killed are not credible and are probably due to Guthrie being confused with two other ‘C’ Company men, Mitchell and Agnew, who were abducted earlier in November, held for interrogation and executed before being buried in a bog at Rusheen (their bodies have never been found up to this day).

After the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty ended the war, the British Government made official inquiries about a number of Crown Forces personnel among ‘the Disappeared’. The Free State Government replied: ”Lt. C. J. GUTHRIE, R.A.F. This officer escaped from the scene of the Kilmichael ambush on 26th (sic) November, 1920, and ran in the direction of Macroom Town. He was captured within two miles of the town, convenient to a marsh land known as “The Garagh” where he was shot and buried. The exact place of burial cannot be located.”

Irene Harriette Peach was born in Peterborough on 24 October 1888. She became a trained nurse, probably enlisting in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service several years before the First World War. She was sent to serve overseas in Egypt from August 1917, as General Allenby was demanding many extra medical resources to support his planned offensive which broke through the Turkish defence lines running east from Gaza.

Irene Peach married Cecil Guthrie in Amersham, Buckinghamshire (Qtr 1 1920 Page 1551). After the Kilmichael ambush, Cecil was posted as ‘Missing’. Extensive searches made by ‘C’ Company in December and January failed to find any trace of either Guthrie, Mitchell or Agnew. By the time these searches were completed, Irene had returned to her parents’ house in Amersham.

On 15 January 1921 Irene gave birth, prematurely, to a girl. She named her daughter Dorothy Guthrie. In June 1921 Irene’s claim for £12,000 criminal injury compensation for her husband’s death came to court in Cork. £5,200 was awarded, comprising £3,000 for Irene, £2.000 for Dorothy, and £200 for Cecil’s father.

After the end of Irish Civil War, the Guthrie family made further inquiries about the whereabouts of Cecil’s body. The I.R.A. disclosed enough information for an exhumation to occur in 1926. The family were perhaps mindful of the tradition that British soldiers killed in action were buried near where they had fallen, and it seems that the relatives were concerned that Annahalla bog might have been a secret burial site where multiple victims of I.R.A. terror were concealed, with no certainty that the body that had been dug up was that of Cecil. The family declined the costly option of repatriating the human remains to England, and they were laid to rest in the local Church of Ireland burial yard in Inchigeelagh. The simple grave is inscribed ‘In Memory of Lieut. Cecil J. Guthrie November 28 1920’.

Irene never re-married, and lived for another sixty-five years. She always wore an RAF Wings brooch that had been a present given to her by her husband. She died on 10 March 1986 at Four Winds, Bransgore, Christchurch, Dorset and was buried still wearing Cecil’s Wings brooch.

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