Tudor's brass knuckles, WW1 memoir, and medal
If you'd like to find out more about General Tudor, you can check out the links below There's not much information available about his time in Newfoundland – not officially, anyway. He kept a low profile here; there seems to be only one photograph, and he avoided interviews altogether.
In fact the interview you hear in the documentary may be the only one he engaged in – at the age of 92 he may have thought he had nothing to lose at that point by speaking publicly. The interviewer you hear with him was Iris Power. Iris wrote feature articles for local newspapers and periodicals and had a weekly radio program during the 1960's. The interview may have been recorded for that.
A small personal footnote: it was through Iris Power that I once met Hugh Tudor myself. I was a young teenager, dating Iris' daughter. She decided it would be good for daughter and boyfriend to meet this elderly British general, and so I remember her taking us both up the stairs to his apartment in Churchill Park, St. John's. I suppose I shook his hand, but I don't really remember that. In fact I don't recall anything at all about him. I was 17, at that age with about as much interest in elderly generals as I had in my parents' record collection.
I wish now that I had been interested, and that I'd known about his activities in Ireland, because there are questions I could have asked him. I wish that Iris had asked him some of those questions in the interview, but she didn't. She asked only about his friendship with Churchill. Even when he spontaneously veered into a condemnation of Brigadier General Frank Crozier, she didn't pursue it. Perhaps it was a precondition of the interview that no questions would be asked about Tudor's time in Ireland, for none were.
And a year or two after I met him, he went to his grave, remembered in Ireland as an incarnation of evil – and remembered in Churchill Park as a quiet old man strolling with a cane over to Monty's Delicatessen.
- Chris Brookes
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