milling. The now closed Allman's Distillery produced at one point over 600,000 gallons of whiskey annually. The industrial revolution in the 1800s and the advent of the railways had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural ecosystem of the area. Local weaving operations could not compete with mass-produced cheap imports. In 1847, St Peter's Church was built. Major General Arthur Ernest Percival was commander of the British garrison in Bandon in 1920–21 during the Irish War of Independence. He was subsequently the commanding officer of the British troops who surrendered Singapore to the Japanese forces in 1942. In 1945 he was invited by Douglas MacArthur to witness the surrender of Japanese forces in Tokyo in 1945 which ended the Second World War. Irish army leader Michael Collins was killed in an ambush at Béal na Bláth, about outside Bandon. Between 1911 and 1926, the non-Catholic population of Bandon dropped from 688 (22% of the population) to 375 (13% of the population), a decline of 45.5%. Peter Hart argued, in The IRA and its Enemies (1998), that during the Irish War of Independence, Bandon's Protestant population, which was largely unionist, suffered from Irish Republican Army (IRA) reprisals. In particular, ten Protestant men were shot over 27–29 April 1922 (two months before the start of the Civil War), "because they were Protestant." Niall Meehan argued, however (2008, 2014), that Hart was mistaken. The killings were not "motivated by either land agitation or by sectarian considerations." In Peter Hart, the Issue of Sources, Brian Murphy noted a British intelligence assessment, A Record of the Rebellion in Ireland in 1920–1921, that Hart cited selectively. Hart wrote, "the truth was that, as British intelligence officers recognised, "in the south the Protestants and those who supported the Government rarely gave much information because, except by chance, they had not got it to give".”. Murphy observed, "Hart does not give the next two sentences from the official Record which read": an exception to this rule was in the Bandon area where there were many Protestant farmers who gave information. Although the Intelligence Officer of the area was exceptionally experienced and although the troops were most active it proved almost impossible to protect those brave men, many of whom were murdered while almost all the remainder suffered grave material loss. Murphy, therefore, concluded in a 1998 review of Hart's research, "the IRA killings in the Bandon area