On this day in 1922, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Unionist MP and former Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was shot dead outside his home in Belgravia. His assassins, Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, were both veterans of the Great War. @HistIreHedge

O’Sullivan had enlisted with the London Regiment and seen extensive service on the Western Front, where he sustained an injury at Third Ypres in the summer of 1917 that led to the loss of his right leg below the knee.

Dunne had served with the Irish Guards, rising to the rank of corporal before being invalided back to Britain with a serious leg wound. Both men were English-born, first-generation Irish immigrants and both joined the London Brigade of the IRA in the years after the war.

A genuinely fascinating case in which one of the most senior British Army officers of the era was shot dead by two former privates who had both served with distinction during the war.

[the illustration above and in the Irish Times piece is taken from the front page of Le Petit Journal]