Just as the Listowel, County Kerry born Herbert Kitchener did wonders for Imperialism as a super Recruiting Sergeant, Frank Kitson (whose place of birth is unrecorded in Obituaries) was an outstanding Recruiting Sergeant for Republicanism. Kitson died,aged 97, on January 2nd this year He was the Grisly Eminence who co- ordinated the Parachute Regiment, the Force Research Unit, and similarly motivated warriors in a campaign which alienated the non-militant nationalists in the North of Ireland and transformed a small, virtually irrelevant resistance movement into a formidable revolutionary movement with military and political wings which nullified all of his efforts, together with all the Queen’s horses and men.
Kitson expressed nostalgia for his time during the 1952-1960 “Emergency” in Kenya. More white “settlers” – land thieves who had stolen land from the natives, their sole source of sustenance – were killed. More died in traffic accidents. Nearly 1,100 Africans were hanged by Her Majesty’s official executioners at Thompson Falls. Many more Africans, men and women, were murdered, tortured or raped by or on the instructions of white British forces, in gaols or concentration camps.
In the House of Commons Enoch Powell was one of the few MPs to condemn the atrocities in Hola Camp.
Kitson recalled how he had enjoyed, on horseback, chasing unarmed, defenceless African civilians as if hunting foxes.
The first black soldier to win a Commission in the King’s African Rifles, Idi Amin, earned his pips in that campaign
When later Amin seized the Presidency of Uganda he was seen as Edward Heath’s protégé.
lBut Frank Kitson didn’t earn his spurs in Kenya, or when the Tories were in power in London. He earned them during the “Emergency” being waged on Malaya awhen Labour, led by Clement Attlee was British Prime Minister.
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