For many yearsa I have owned a book which I inherited from my Father called “The O Dwyers of Kilnamanagh ” written by a Sir Michael O’ Dwyer.
This man , although he mentions our family in Cork in his book as possible connections , was not closely related (I sincerely hope not anyway)
As I came across the book which had spent the last five years in a box , just a few days ago I was prompted to try and find out where he came from and where he acquired his title.
He was it turns out an extremely bright boy from near Kilnamanagh in Tipperary who by brains and scholarship gained a scholarship to Baliol College in Oxford where he got a first class degree in Jurisprudence.
He went to India where he rose through the ranks and in 1912 was appointed Lieutenant General of the Punjab.
The following is how the rest of the history of his life was reported by the Sikh Times on March 25th 1940 :
In April 1919, Indian nationalist agitation racked Amritsar, in the Punjab of northern India. When British officials arrested two nationalist leaders, British agents were murdered, a bank was plundered, the city hall and a church burned. Europeans were attacked in the streets. On April 13, Brigadier General Reginald E.H. Dyer arrived with 600 troops, sent a drum crier through the streets shouting an edict which forbade meetings of more than three people.
That day in the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled enclosure about the size of Manhattan’s Times Square, upwards of 5,000 Indians, who may or may not have heard of General Dyer’s edict, assembled peaceably and passed resolutions condemning the rioting. General Dyer chose to see deliberate defiance of his orders in the meeting, decided to make it an example. Posting 50 tough Gurkha troopers with rifles at all the gates of the Bagh, he ordered them to fire into the trapped crowd of men, women and children, and to keep on firing until their ammunition was exhausted.
It lasted for ten terrible minutes. ‘The targets,’ remarked General Dyer, ‘were good.’ The official casualty list was 379 killed, 1,200 wounded. From Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer, fire-eating Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, next day came the message: ‘Your action correct. Lieutenant Governor approves.’ Other Britons and most Indians decidedly did not approve the massacre of Amritsar.
For six months word of Amritsar was kept from British Parliament and public. Then the news got about and there was an investigation. General Dyer was censured and pensioned out of the Army. He died in 1927. Sir Michael O’Dwyer resigned under fire to become the most hated man in India and the bitterest opponent of Indian reforms in Great Britain.
Last week, 21 years less one month after the massacre of Amritsar, an elderly audience of 200 men and women, mostly retired Indian civil servants and their wives, attended at London’s Caxton Hall a staid lecture by Sir Percy Sykes of the Royal Central Asian Society. Subject: Afghanistan: The Present Situation.
Sir Michael O’Dwyer followed Sir Percy with an impromptu 15-minute speech. Now mellowed into a famed raconteur, he turned his sarcastic Irish wit on the Indian nationalists, whom he still despised. He delighted his dignified (and conservative) audience with anecdotes.
All the while, in the shadows at the back of the hall, sat a swart, beady-eyed Indian Sikh who neither laughed at Sir Michael’s jests nor applauded his jibes. Udham Singh Bawa had left India seven years ago, reaching Europe by way of California and Brazil. For five years he had lived a hermitic existence in England, his one thought to avenge a brother killed at Amritsar.
The meeting broke up. Singh thrust his way forward, aiming a heavy military revolver at the front-row seats. Singh’s targets, like General Dyer’s, were good. One of two point-blank shots got Sir Michael in the heart and killed him instantly. Four other bullets, discharged into the group of bigwigs assembled before the speakers’ platform, winged Britain’s Secretary of State for India, Lawrence John Lumley Dundas, Marquess of Zetland, and two aging British aristocrats. One, Sir Louis Dane, was Sir Michael O’Dwyer’s predecessor in the Punjab; the other, Baron Lamington, a onetime Governor of the Bombay Presidency. It was Britain’s first major political assassination since 1922, when Irish terrorists shot and killed Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson on the doorstep of his London home for somewhat kindred reasons.
Assassin Singh, captured through the combined efforts of a woman ambulance driver and an R.A.F. officer, smiled as he was charged with murder, remarked placidly: ‘I didn’t mean to kill him. I only wanted to protest.’
To non-violent Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose Indian National Congress Party was at that time in momentous session and about to decide whether to renew the campaign of civil disobedience against British rule, this piece of violence was ‘an act of insanity.’ But it made a fine story for Lord Haw-Haw, the German broadcaster who so frequently reminds Britons of the shortcomings of their colonial policies.
As for Sir Michael, long ago he gave his opinion of the Mahatma: ‘The biggest impostor that ever fooled the credulity of a people or frightened a cowardly Government.’
Well well well , I do seem to have a habit of discovering some thoroughly disreputable ancestors.
Comments
Isabel Healy
on February 26, 2012Awful. I had heard of this terrible massacre and the brutality of the British rule in India in general – soldiers would pick off people on the road in the countryside just for sport and were neither questioned or censured. Horrible to think O’Dwyer might have been an ancestor….but then, you could also be related to Michael O’Dwyer. We also appear to have a bad colonial link: General Peter Sheridan in the U S – after whom, I think, all the places called ‘Sheridan’ (and they are many) are named – when I asked my mother if we were related she said “Of course not, he was not from the same place” I looked up his family home….it was 6 miles up the road.
Jim Flanagan
on February 26, 2012The “sarcastic Irish wit” and “famed raconteur” would suggest a possible connection.
betty
on February 27, 2012How interesting. I’d heard of the Caxton House assassination, but I always thought it was General Dyer himself who was shot.
Now that I think of it… Dyer/Dwyer? Are you by any chance also related to the General? I think we should be told!
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