Ormonde Winter

Winter was born in Winchester in January 1875, the youngest of 5 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 army.

Winter was a Royal Artillery officer and served in the India with the 67th Battery at Peshawar and in Ireland with the 131st Battery in Kildare prior to the First World War. He gained notoriety for an incident in Ireland in 1903 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 man attacked him with a wooden club. Subsequently charged with manslaughter Winter was acquitted by the jury on the grounds of self-defence.

Winter first saw action as an artillery officer during the Gallipoli campaign, arriving on W beach, Lancashire Landing on 29 April 1916 after surviving an attack on his transport, the SS Monitor, from a Turkish 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 Enniskillen 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 Western front, arriving in France as part of the 11th Division on 7 September and taking command of the artillery for the 34th Infantry Brigade on 24 October. He would take part in the battles for 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.

Post war Winter was working for the Boundary Commission for the 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.[1] 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.[2] 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 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".[3][4] If nothing else he was innovative, yet his detractors claimed him to be obsessed with cloak and dagger operations, at one point donning a disguise to personally seize part of IRA funds.

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)[5]

In December 1920 Winter took charge of the 90 strong Dublin District Intelligence Service also known as the "Cairo Gang" possibly named after their meeting place the Cairo Cafe or possibly due to many having served in the Middle East, uniting military and police intelligence for the first time.[6] Amongst his plans was for potential informers to write to a secret address in England, and the net result as he freely admitted was a pile of hoaxes and abusive mail. However, amidst this mass were some valuable nuggets of genuine intelligence. As the conflict progressed letters were received purporting to come from IRA members who wished to be captured and interned in order to remove themselves from the conflict.[7] He would also import bloodhounds to track fugitive IRA members and recruited female police officers from the Women's Police Service in London to search female prisoners and suspected couriers[8] One informer for Winter was Vincent Fovargue, an intelligence officer in the Dublin IRA who provided information which led to the arrest of several IRA members. On 31 January 1921 Winter staged a fake escape of Fovargue from custody whilst on a lorry taking him to Kilmainham gaol. Between February and March 1921 he would successfully infiltrate the IRA in England who would suffer over 200 members arrested before the end of the conflict, providing information on their activities to Scotland Yard.[9][10] His body was eventually found upon a golf course in Staines with the traditional message 'Spies and traitors beware.[11]'

Another was revealed to be a criminal fraud, uncovered not by Winter but by newspaper reporters and IRA intelligence. The IRA allowed this man to live so that he could be uncovered. Other agents were more successful. One quoted at length in led a raid that captured 3 senior IRA members writing communiques to their subordinates.[12] He rewrote the messages summoning all IRA leaders in the district to a meeting where they were arrested. Maintaining his cover as an IRA member he was placed into custody alongside them, gaining more intelligence from their conversation 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. An obsessive clerk, his 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. The principal reason for lack of informers, jury, and even judges in the civil courts was intimidation, which was one of the reasons martial law was in place. From October 1920 to July 1921 6311 raids were launched capturing over 1200 IRA documents some consisting of over 200 pages and resulting in 1745 arrests in the Dublin area alone.[13] 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 was able to recruit at least three leading IRA members as informers and many lesser ranks.[14]To supplement the Cairo Gang, Winter formed his Identification Squad also known as the igoe Gang named after its commander, Eugene Igoe a policeman from County Galway, who was expelled from Ireland after the Anglo-Irish War but would later return to Northern Ireland to provide security for US airbases in Northern Ireland from IRA sabotage during World War 2. They were a unit of plain clothes police who had limited success in killing and capturing IRA members and a number of other young men who fell into their hands on the streets of Dublin. Ormonde personally killed one IRA assassin and sustained a small wound to the hand whilst shooting his way out of an ambush and captured another, professing disappointment that the IRA bounty on his head was only £1000.[15] He would enjoy a personal meeting with David Lloyd George briefing him on the nature of the conflict.[16]

During the first months of 1921, Hamar Greenwood and others were declaring that the IRA was near defeat, critically short of arms and ammunition and with up to 4500 members interned in addition to hundreds more arrested. IRA leader Michael Collins later referred to the organisation as being 'dead beat' and within 'six weeks of defeat'. However, it quickly became clear that the British Government strategy of combining repression with limited concessions was still not working. Faced with the choice of either waging a war of reconquest or negotiating peace, the government chose negotiation. A Truce was signed in July 1921, and the Treaty in December. This proved acceptable to Irish Unionists and the British Government but caused the Irish Civil War between the pro and anti Treaty IRA forces, breaking out on 28 June 1922.[17]

Post Ireland Winter was put in charge of the resettlement of former RIC officers abroad, accompanied by police bodyguards and habitually carrying a pistol for 2 years afterwards. Major General Hugh Tudor attempted to have Winter appointed as deputy chief of police for Palestine, alongside many other British veterans of the Irish conflict recruited into the Palestine Gendarmerie. However the War Office vetoed his request, Winter having been resented by General Neville 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, which held several massive rallies (12,000 at one) in the London Parks, their followers being mainly women, ex suffragette types as The Times reported. Winter may have been an agent provocateur. Winter replaced another British secret agent, Maxwell Knight, as head of BF intelligence but never took up his post, replaced instead by a Lieutenant-Colonel Bramley who was persuaded to keep Knight on as his deputy.[18]

The 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 BF faded into obscurity in the late 1920s and membership was swallowed up by other fascist movements. In his book Winter makes virtually no mention of this period, perhaps under the Official Secrets Act. After the financial demise of the BF, he apparently took no further part in Fascist politics.

It was later rumoured that Winter was involved in plots to overthrow the Spanish government in Morocco and stage a revolution for the Slovak minority against the Czech government.[19] In 1940 at the age of 65, he offered his services to the Finnish Army, in their defence against Communist Russia. He was honoured for his service—certificates can be seen in his personal collection in the Imperial War Museum. He was a master of five Russo-Slavic languages and was a chain smoker. He died peacefully in 1962 aged 87, his obituary reading that he neither feared God nor man,[20] (Times Obits).

General Winter appears in the RTÉ miniseries Resistance (2019), played by Paul Ritter.[21]

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