Bunch of Five

Product Information

An estimated 90,000 Kenyans were slaughtered in the Kikuyu uprising while just over a thousand were hanged on a portable gibbet. Fish vary from place to place in accordance with the sort of water in which they are designed to live, and the same can be said of subversive organisations. Bloody Sunday campaigner Eamonn McCann says glowing obituaries of General Sir Frank Kitson show that the “British Establishment has learnt no lessons” and still reveres one of the Army’s “top killers”. Kitson later wrote in his memoirs, Bunch of Five, “Most soldiers [regarded the] finding and disposing [of Mau Mau] in the same way as they would regard the hunting of a dangerous wild animal”.

In Ireland during the War of Independence they had used paramilitary police units, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. If it seems odd that a British policeman would be given such a job, it’s worth briefly reviewing the history of this island in the Gulf. During the 1950s, the British tried to retain control of lands in Kenya stolen violently stolen from the Kikuyu by white settlers. When Frank Kitson arrived in Northern Ireland during the early days of The Troubles he had already established himself as a highly respected officer, especially in the fields of counter-insurgency and peacekeeping.The same battalion was involved six months earlier when 10 people were killed in west Belfast in the wake of an Army operation in Ballymurphy. In Low Intensity Operations Kitson infamously wrote that, although the law must be respected when fighting opponents, it can be changed to fit the circumstances so that it equates to “little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public”.

In British-controlled Iraq the future head of the Second World War Bomber Command, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, used air power to crush a revolt there, including using chemical weapons in the form of poison gas.

They cannot dare tell the truth for it would destroy their reputations and that of other luminaries in the Ministry of Defence and British Army. He dismissed Hoggart's article, saying: "An unknown captain talking to some journalist on a subject of this sort does not seem at all convincing.