The British Gendarmerie was a British paramilitary

police field force A field force in British and Indian Army military parlance is a combined arms land force operating under actual or assumed combat circumstances, usually for the length of a specific military campaign. It is used by other nations, but can have a dif ...

created by Colonial Secretary

Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from ...

in April 1922 to police

Mandatory Palestine Mandatory Palestine ( ar, فلسطين الانتدابية '; he, פָּלֶשְׂתִּינָה (א״י) ', where "E.Y." indicates ''’Eretz Yiśrā’ēl'', the Land of Israel) was a geopolitical entity established between 1920 and 1948 ...

. Concerned with the high cost of

British Army The British Army is the principal land warfare force of the United Kingdom, a part of the British Armed Forces along with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. , the British Army comprises 79,380 regular full-time personnel, 4,090 Gurk ...

units acting as police forces in Palestine, Churchill decided that an elite police force similar to the

Royal Canadian Mounted Police The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP; french: Gendarmerie royale du Canada; french: GRC, label=none), commonly known in English as the Mounties (and colloquially in French as ) is the federal police, federal and national police service of ...

South African Constabulary The South African Constabulary (SAC) was a paramilitary force set up in 1900 under British Army control to police areas captured from the two independent Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State during the Second Boer War. Its firs ...

would be created for Mandatory Palestine. The unit was intended more for riot control rather than crime solving. The 43 officers and 700 other ranks force were mostly recruited from the recently disbanded

Royal Irish Constabulary The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC, ga, Constáblacht Ríoga na hÉireann; simply called the Irish Constabulary 1836–67) was the police force in Ireland from 1822 until 1922, when all of the country was part of the United Kingdom. A separate ...

and its Auxiliary Division who had themselves been recruited from ex-officers of the

Great War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

. Many of its original formations had been intended to be horse mounted but these plans were dropped in an economy measure.Barker, James "Policing Palestine" in ''History Today'' June 2008 The force was disbanded in June 1926 with its duties taken over by the

Transjordan Frontier Force The Trans-Jordan Frontier Force was formed on 1 April 1926, to replace the disbanded British Gendarmerie. It was a creation of the British High Commissioner for Palestine whose intention was that the Force should defend Trans-Jordan's northe ...

Notes

{{reflist

External links

*Black and Tans in Palestine http://www.jerusalemquarterly.org/ViewArticle.aspx?id=305 *The Formation, Composition and Conduct of the British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9059656&fileId=S0018246X13000253 History of the British Empire Mandatory Palestine Defunct law enforcement agencies of Mandatory Palestine Auxiliary military units Auxiliary police units 1922 establishments in Mandatory Palestine

See also

Notes

External links