Pardon my French: the failed assassination of Lord French

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December 19th 1919 started like many other days, but in one pub in Ashtown, Ireland, there was great excitement. The highly confidential news that John Denton Pinkstone French would pass the public house on his way to Dublin later that day reached a group of IRA men. French, better known as Lord French, had become the head of the British government in Ireland over a year earlier.

But what is more: by December 1919 French had probably also become the most hated man in republican Ireland. He had been receiving death threats since early that year, “which he believed were a sign that government measures were having an effect”. It did, but it would be a dangerous effect. A group of eleven IRA men planned to ambush and kill French as he returned from Ashtown railway station in Phoenix Park, Dublin, that day. Three of them started by pushing a hay cart halfway across the road, blocking the path of French and his team. When the convoy appeared minutes later, the IRA unit focused their attack upon the second car, which they were sure he was in – as he usually did.

But French, the veteran of many colonial campaigns and operations during WW1, was known to often change his plan at the last moment. And perhaps that was just why he was in the first car instead. A crossfire followed; one of the eleven IRA men was hit in the leg and another was killed. French’s bodyguard was wounded too, and was only saved by the quick thinking of his driver. A grenade, which would almost certainly have killed him, exploded very near. And so the assassination attempt failed after the first car sped quickly away from the scene, with only a few bullet holes in its body.

The press turned against the ambush men the next day. “The Irish public will congratulate the Lord Lieutenant upon his escape and the country will congratulate itself that it, too, has escaped an irredeemable misfortune”, wrote the Freeman’s Journal. It would not calm down the arguments.

We just wonder what the car shown in this famous picture is, in which a Dublin police officer points out the bullet holes in the back of Lord French’s car. Who knows?

Words: Jeroen Booij; Picture: Wikipedia

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