Brigadier-General Sir Ormonde de l'Epee Winter, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, was a British Army officer and author who, after service in the First World War, was responsible for intelligence operations in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War.
23 Facts About Ormonde Winter
2.
Ormonde Winter later joined the British Fascists and fought for the Finnish Army in the Winter War.
3.
Ormonde Winter was educated at Churchbury House, Great Morden, and later at Cheltenham College, before joining the British Army.
4.
Ormonde Winter was a Royal Artillery officer and served in India with the 67th Battery at Peshawar and in Ireland with the 131st Battery in County Kildare prior to the First World War.
5.
Ormonde Winter gained notoriety for an incident in Bedfordshire in 1904, 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 boy attacked him with a wooden club.
6.
Subsequently charged with manslaughter, Ormonde Winter was acquitted by the jury on the grounds of self-defence.
7.
Ormonde Winter first saw action as an artillery officer during the Gallipoli campaign, arriving on W beach, Lancashire Landing, on 29 April 1915 after surviving an attack on his transport, the SS Monitor, from an Ottoman torpedo boat before arriving at the front.
8.
Ormonde Winter later remarked that he enjoyed every minute of his service at Gallipoli.
9.
Ormonde Winter would take part in the battles for Messines Ridge on 7 June 1917 and afterwards Passchendaele.
10.
Post war, Ormonde Winter was working for the Boundary Commission for 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.
11.
Ormonde 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.
12.
In December 1920, Ormonde Winter took charge of the 90-strong Dublin District Intelligence Service, 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.
13.
On 31 January 1921, Ormonde Winter staged a fake escape of Fovargue from custody whilst on a lorry taking him to Kilmainham Gaol.
14.
Ormonde Winter's body was eventually found upon a golf course in Staines with the traditional message 'Spies and traitors beware'.
15.
Ormonde Winter rewrote the messages summoning all IRA leaders in the district to a meeting where they were arrested.
16.
Ormonde Winter claimed to have recruited at least three leading IRA members as informers and many lesser ranks.
17.
Ormonde Winter would enjoy a personal meeting with David Lloyd George, briefing him on the nature of the conflict.
18.
Major General Hugh Tudor attempted to have Ormonde Winter appointed as deputy chief of police for Palestine, alongside many other British veterans of the Irish conflict recruited into the Palestine Gendarmerie.
19.
However, the War Office vetoed his request, Ormonde Winter having been resented by General Sir Nevil Macready and others over his attaining police primacy in intelligence matters over their Army preferred candidate, Lt-Col Walter Wilson.
20.
Ormonde 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.
21.
Ormonde Winter was a master of five Slavic languages and a chain smoker.
22.
Ormonde Winter died peacefully in 1962 aged 87, his obituary reading that he neither feared God nor man.
23.
Brigadier-General Ormonde Winter appears in the RTE miniseries Resistance, played by Paul Ritter.