General Sir Cecil Frederick Nevil Macready, 1st Baronet, GCMG, KCB, PC (Ire) (7 May 1862 – 9 January 1946), known affectionately as Make-Ready (close to the correct pronunciation of his name), was a British Army officer.

[1] As a captain, returning from bringing in wounded, he first met Major-General John French on the battlefield of Elandslaagte, giving him a cup of coffee which he had looted from the Boers.

[10] In March 1907, Macready was appointed an assistant adjutant-general in the directorate of personal services at the War Office in London, taking over from Colonel Colin Mackenzie,[11] and helped to form the Territorial Force (TF).

[1] Also having responsibility for military aid to the civil power, he played a large part in a series of labour disputes and in deploying troops to Ireland in anticipation of disturbances there.

[1] Unusually for an army officer of the time, he had marked liberal tendencies, believed in the right to strike, and supported Irish home rule.

[17] Macready advised General Maxwell (whose courts-martial condemned the leaders of the Easter Rising to death) not to delay, and not to be afraid of overstepping authority.

The BEF suffered an alarming rise in drunkenness, desertions and psychological disorders; reports were gathered of soldiers returning from the front grumbling about "the waste of life" at Ypres.

He had already written to Ian Macpherson on the latter's appointment as Chief Secretary for Ireland in January 1919: "I cannot say I envy you for I loathe the country you are going to and its people with a depth deeper than the sea and more violent than that which I feel against the Boche".

Sir Henry Wilson only learned of the request the evening before the Cabinet meeting and thought Macready "a vain ass" for not seeking his advice first.

[28] In July an argument with Catholic Archbishop Gilmartin, led him to exclaim that men could not be tried in Tuam, because nobody was willing to come forward for Jury service, "the people at least indifferent".

[29] With the army stretched very thinly by the deployment of two extra divisions to Iraq, and the threatened coal strike in September 1920, Macready warned that the planned withdrawal of ten battalions would make peacekeeping in Ireland impossible (unless the Army was given a free hand to conduct purely military operations, which the politicians did not want) and large portions of the RIC would probably change sides.

Dublin Castle wrote to Bonar Law, the Conservative Party leader, urging that the coalition government ban any recruitment from the Ulster Volunteer Force, an unreliable gang of paramilitaries.

[31] A military committee of review appointed by the Cabinet, which Macready chaired, opposed the recruitment of the Black and Tans and Auxiliary Division, and he continued to be a strident critic of these bodies.

[34] Macready and Wilson became increasingly concerned that Tudor, with the connivance of Lloyd George, who loved to drop hints to that effect, was operating an unofficial policy of killing IRA men in reprisal for the deaths of pro-Crown forces.

However, Macready also told Wilson that the Army was arranging "accidents" for suspected IRA men, but did not tell the politicians as he did not want them "talked and joked about after dinner by Cabinet Ministers".

"[36] In December 1920 Macready informed the British Cabinet that the Military Governors of the martial law areas had been authorized to conduct reprisals.

[37] The new "Auxies" were following the bad example set by the local Irish police, the RIC, who had begun a process of reprisal killings for IRA attacks, which gave Macready considerable cause for concern.

[42] Macready recruited Major Ormonde Winter, an intelligence expert, as head of police detectives, to train sergeants to build networks; but it was probably too slow a decision, and too little too late to win the war.

If they were turned into an unarmed police force they would fulfill their functions in time of peace a good deal better than at present", he told Sir John Anderson.

But Macready stalled for time, and delayed justice, so that Harte eventually received a proper trial and was found guilty but insane.

[52] Macready backed a policy of "deterrent effects" against the IRA; houses were ordered to be destroyed, tenants evicted to remove those who shot at patrols.

An extra seventeen battalions were sent in June and July, bringing British strength up to 60,000, but the politicians drew back from the brink and opened secret talks with James Craig and Éamon de Valera (who had been born in New York of Spanish descent and whom Macready called Wilson's "Cuban Jew compatriot").

[55] Macready was instrumental in negotiating the truce in July 1921, although he suggested, perhaps in jest, that the entire Irish Dáil could be arrested whilst in session.

[56] He suffered the irritation of being found in contempt of court for refusing to obey an order of habeas corpus in the Joseph Egan case;[57] but the Truce rendered the matter academic.

Wilson was shot dead at the doorstep of his London home by two Irishmen, former British Army soldiers who had served in the Great War.

[59] The murder precipitated a policy of "Official Reprisals", sparked by Rory O'Connor's anti-Treaty IRA occupation of the Four Courts, home of the Provisional Government's ministry.

[63] These were used to pound the Four Courts garrison into surrender but they missed; the officers were so inexperienced that Emmet Dalton, the Chief of Staff required artillery training from Macready's men.

[28] He briefly returned to police service during the 1926 General Strike, when he served as a staff officer to the Chief Commandant of the Metropolitan Special Constabulary.