History is an unsparing taskmaster, particularly when charting the murky waters of Anglo-Irish allegiance. As an author who has spent years unearthing the uncomfortable truths of this shared history—most notably during the composition of my novel, Part an Irishman—I have long been drawn to those individuals who inhabited the perilous margins of loyalty. Chief among them stands 2nd Lt John Charles Reynolds, a man who wore the uniform of the hated Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (ADRIC) while systematically dismantling its operations from within as a mole for Michael Collins.

Writing for The Wild Geese history site, it is my intention to scrutinise the baffling contradictions of Reynolds’ life by cross-referencing witness statements, The Auxiliaries Website, and declassified highlights from the Military Service Pensions Archive.

Reynolds’ origins were entirely divorced from the traditional British officer class. Born on 9 October 1898 in Rowley Regis, Staffordshire, his father was a police constable and his brother a manual labourer. By 1911, the family moved to Blackheath, Birmingham, where his retired father ran The Royal Exchange Inn.

Upon the outbreak of the Great War, a sixteen-year-old Reynolds lied about his age to enlist as a private in the 6th Royal Berks. Discharged weeks later due to poor eyesight, he managed to land in France by May 1915 as a driver in the Royal Engineers. In the mud of the Western Front, the war decimated the aristocratic officer corps, forcing the army to promote on merit. Reynolds rose up from the ranks to be commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the South Staffordshire Regiment on 1 May 1918.

Demobilised into a depressed post-war economy, he joined the Auxiliaries on 17 September 1920 out of financial necessity. He was appointed a Section Leader in F Company on Christmas Day, 1920, placing him at the apex of British counter-insurgency inside the fortified viper's nest of Dublin Castle.

Reynolds’ transition to a republican asset began almost immediately, leaking files as early as July 1920. His link was facilitated by Brigid Foley, whom he encountered during a routine British military raid. As a policeman’s son who had crawled through the mud as an enlisted private, Reynolds harboured a profound cynicism toward high command. When confronted with ordinary Irish citizens defending their homes, he did not see the "terrorists" described by imperial propaganda.

Foley's brother, Dick, commended him to republican intelligence. Frank Thornton—Collins’ deputy director of intelligence—subjected Reynolds to "trial" assignments to verify his integrity. Once approved, Reynolds became a crucial pipeline for high-grade visual intelligence. His primary coup was procuring crucial photographs of the elite, plain-clothes Igoe Gang operating right out of Dublin Castle. For decades, this captured image was mistakenly captioned by historians as "The Cairo Gang". In reality, Reynolds single-handedly identified and captioned all 37 undercover counter-intelligence operatives in the album, effectively rendering the Castle's secret weapon blind.

The grim reality of his double life hit close to home in March 1921. Before his deployment to Ireland, Reynolds had married Jane Winifred Appleton while stationed at Sniggery Camp in Hightown. Her father owned a prominent farm in Little Crosby, near Liverpool. At this juncture, the Liverpool IRA was executing an aggressive arson campaign against properties connected to Crown forces. Unaware of Reynolds' relationship with Collins, local volunteers raided the Appleton farm, burning the barn to the ground.

Standard military history chalks this up as a classic operational failure born of the absolute secrecy of Collins’ intelligence cell. Collins kept his primary assets strictly compartmentalised; the volunteers on the ground were entirely oblivious to the fact that they were ruining the livelihood of their chief informant's family.

Yet, as a novelist tracking the extreme paranoia of Dublin Castle, one cannot help but speculate on an alternative layout. Was the destruction of the Appleton barn a calculated double bluff? To cement an informant's "Auxie" bona fides, what better theatre than to have his own family targeted by an IRA arson team? If Dublin allowed the strike to happen, it bought his safety inside the Castle with a heap of ash.

Historical evaluations often stumble because Reynolds was compensated £6 to £8 per week by IRA GHQ—a sum matching his official ADRIC salary. To the purist, this marks him as a mercenary. To the historian, such a conclusion is lazy. No quantity of currency can adequately offset the psychological toll of walking into Dublin Castle under the constant threat of the hangman's rope.

Was he part of the Irish Diaspora? The surname occupies an ambiguous space, representing either the English Reinald or the Irish Mac Raghnaill of Leitrim. Despite an exhaustive search of the archival record, I have been unable to definitively identify his religion. The files are silent on whether he was a Roman Catholic carrying a quiet ancestral duty or raised in an Anglican household.

By June 1921, Reynolds was transferred to G Company in Killaloe and Corofin, County Clare. There, he handed over the British military's secret cipher code book to IRA officer John Minihan and looked the other way as a Lewis machine gun was extracted from the barracks. The heist was compromised; Reynolds was court-martialled and sentenced to death for high treason. He was saved by history itself—released under the general amnesty of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in January 1922.

Upon release, he aligned with the Free State Army as a Colonel Commandant. Here, his timeline blurs into a doppelgänger riddle. His pension papers claim he was the officer at Renmore Barracks visited by anti-Treaty icon Liam Mellows during the Civil War split, even meeting Mellows at the Four Courts. Yet external military logs attribute this station to a "Colonel David Reynolds". Did John Charles weave another officer's frontline credentials into his pension appeal, or did administrative chaos muddy the ledger?

By late 1922, Reynolds returned to the Midlands "in some trouble". Hunted by factions aggrieved by his duplicity, he spent months living in the attic of his sister Julie's terraced house, once frantically hiding inside a narrow back-bedroom cupboard while unidentified Irishmen demanded his appearance downstairs.

He eventually emerged to build a transient career in the film business and later joined the detective branch of the Garda Síochána under the protection of Frank Thornton's endorsements. Following a 1940 divorce, he remarried a local woman named Dorothy in Birmingham. He vanished entirely from the state ledger by 1942, his pension letters stamped "Gone Away". He suffered a series of devastating strokes in his twilight years and died in a coastal nursing home in 1971, leaving his true motives to the grave.

Tim Flynn (writing as T.S. Flynn) is a researcher and historical novelist focusing on figures on the margins of loyalty. He is the author of Part an Irishman and a regular contributor to The Wild Geese.

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