Torn Apart

by Ken Wharton

  One Protestant told Burgess:

  The biggest problem for anybody living on the west bank of the Foyle and one of the main reasons for the exodus was that anybody with teenagers, especially sons, they could not let these sons out on a night and walk freely around the streets. They couldn’t go to the Boys’ Brigade, they couldn’t go to the youth club, they couldn’t go to the scouts, they couldn’t go anywhere because they would have been assaulted.**

  Another said:

  I was born in Londonderry and lived in Shantallow. My dad was in the RUC ... We weren’t allowed to tell anyone what our dad was. He was a ‘civil servant’ but the reality was that everyone knew us. At the start of the Troubles, we lived alongside our Catholic neighbours. After ‘Bloody Sunday’ I remember getting out of the car after going to church and our Catholic friends started calling dad a Nazi. We didn’t play with them after that. I wasn’t allowed to go to school for a few weeks after ‘Bloody Sunday’ because there was a threat on police families ... we didn’t open the door until we knew who was there ... Our friends were moving across the water. We moved in 1972. We just didn’t feel safe anymore ... It’s painful to talk about.***

  The Belfast Newsletter wrote in 2008:

  Some 12,000 to 15,000 Protestants over four decades fled their homes on Londonderry’s cityside, leaving behind houses their families had lived in for generations. Even the Creggan, the first housing estate to be built in Londonderry after the Second World War, had a sizeable Protestant community, though they were among the first to flee when the violence broke out at the end of the 1960s. Over the turbulent years, as the IRA spread fear throughout the west bank, the trickle of fleeing men, women and children became a mass exodus and by the 1970s no members of the RUC could live on Londonderry’s cityside. A side effect was the dwindling numbers of children attending Protestant schools, while church congregations on the cityside faded away.*

  There were many instances of a ‘scorched earth’ policy being employed on both sides, which subsequently resulted in an inexorable, irrevocable widening of the sectarian divide. Catholics, on being forcibly evicted, were setting fire to their homes to deny them to a Protestant family and, of course, Protestants were doing the same to their houses.

  A fine example was New Barnsley; it was a small post-war estate built to the west of Belfast with easy access to the Springfield Road and the nearby Protestant estates of Springmartin and Woodvale. In 1964, earlier census returns indicated that it was about 94 per cent Protestant. However, as the sectarian tensions of 1967 and 1968 began to build, so militant Catholics from the ’Murph became more emboldened as they began to make open attacks on the Protestants across the Springfield Road. A Unionist source referred to the invaders as ‘Gerry Adams’ boy soldiers from the Ballymurphy’. These thugs and vandals began to make increasing inroads into the area. There were isolated attacks on Protestant children on their way to and from school, as well as sporadic acts of vandalism and assaults on the residents, both men and women. Encouraged by centuries of hatred and division and the growing strength of NICRA, these attacks became increasingly frequent. This built to a head in 1970 when the event of an Orange parade gave rise to an outbreak of intense rioting by mobs from the Ballymurphy, Turf Lodge and from as far away as Andersonstown.

  Sinn Féin and other Republican organisations extracted great political capital from this rioting – openly encouraging Catholics to force a Protestant exodus from ‘their area’ – giving full propaganda support to their people. The effects of this sustained rioting were gradual, but steady; in 1970, the Army and RUC had to step in to prevent continued violence. The Protestants of New Barnsley knew that their days there were numbered, with families starting to move further northwards, towards Springmartin, Woodvale and the Shankill. What began as a trickle soon turned into a raging torrent as family after family packed up their furniture and personal possessions. It was the reverse of the earlier Catholic evacuation of their homes in the Crumlin Road area.

  A family flee their home during rioting in Belfast, 1969.

  Within two months of the onset of this quite deliberate campaign of harassment and intimidation, more than 700 Protestants had moved from New Barnsley. Some had deliberately smashed water pipes, damaged the electrical supply and performed other acts of vandalism to ensure that incoming Catholic families would not have a smooth transition. A former soldier and former resident of New Barnsley told the author:

  British soldiers patrol Belfast in 1969.

  I was only a wain when it happened, but I remember my wee mammy and my da’ being upset and always trying to get us to stay in the house. And I remember bricks and stuff being thrown at our house by the taigs from across the big main road. One day, my uncle came and he and da’ packed everything onto the back of a lorry; beds, sofa, chairs, suitcases and a wee box of my toys. Then he and my father went to the ‘jacks’ [toilet] and they shoved loads of bits of stone and clay from the garden down the bowl. Then my uncle got a big hammer, so he did, and smashed all the pipes. Mammy was crying, but my uncle he just looked very, very angry.

  Again, these were identical tactics to those carried out by intimidated Catholics on the other side of the sectarian divide. In mid October, a Presbyterian minister vacated his house – located, with a certain irony, on the Ballymurphy side of the Springfield Road – as he no longer had a congregation; his church, which had been located in the Henry Taggart Memorial Hall, was eventually taken over by the Army and used as a base.

  This naturally raises that most obscene of phrases: ‘ethnic cleansing’. It is a vile crime that has been practised down the centuries, from the days when Anglo-Saxons fought the Danes and Norsemen in the ninth and tenth centuries; and when William the Conqueror, better known as ‘William the bastard’, wiped out much of the population of what is today modern Yorkshire, citing their bloody resistance to his rule as his reason for butchery on a mass scale. Hitler’s extermination camps brought about the deaths of more than 6 million European Jews; his ethnic cleansing brought about mass deaths amongst gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally ill and the disabled. As recently as 1992, the Serbians set out to ethnically cleanse Bosnia, massacring thousands of Bosnian Muslims – known as ‘Bosniaks’ – including 8,000 men seized in Sarajevo.

  Although the term has been used in the forced exodus of Catholics from Protestant areas and, of course, vice versa, with some justification, this author concedes that it is difficult to reconcile the use of this term in Belfast and Londonderry, particularly considering the hideous murder of Jews between 1938 and 1945, Bosnians in the 1990s and minority tribes during the Biafran Civil War (1967–70). Parts of Belfast were subject to a form of ethnic cleansing, but only on a microcosmic scale when compared to the bigger situation in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Interestingly, the Provisional IRA, which stated that it was not a sectarian organisation, nevertheless displayed what can only be described as overt sectarianism in its selection of some targets. Indeed, veteran Republican Colm Murphy spoke in 2016 of the IRA’s contingency for plans for what it described as ‘... ethnic cleansing in South Armagh’ should there be any Loyalist retaliation for the Kingsmill massacre in January 1976. The IRA’s selection of victims included Protestant workmen – Kingsmill and the later Teebane attack in 1992 – and Protestant businessmen on the spurious grounds of ‘collaborating with Crown Forces’. The killing of Protestant shopkeeper Douglas Deering in Rosslea on 12 May 1977 is further evidence of their sectarian tendencies. His shop in the fiercely Republican village of Rosslea in Co. Fermanagh was bombed no fewer than four times before PIRA gunmen shot him dead there. The attacks on Protestant farmers in the border areas of both Co. Tyrone and Fermanagh was a conscious form of border genocide as they sought to force out the minority Protestants. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ may not have been on the scale of the attempted eradication of European Jewry or the Muslims of Bosnia, but it is further evidence of the practice by both sides during the Troubles; it also
shows further evidence of the IRA’s involvement with sectarianism.

  Later, that year – 1969 – Loyalists killed two Catholics following the death of IRA man Gerard McAuley, and Loyalist gunmen shot and killed the first RUC officer to die because of the Troubles. On 16 October, Constable Victor Arbuckle was killed during disturbances on the Shankill, ironically during Protestant protests at the disbanding of the discredited ‘B’ Specials. (See Chapter 8: Loyalist Paramilitaries.)

  The siege mentality that would later result in the ‘Berlinisation’ of Belfast, Londonderry and many other Northern Irish towns and cities was being set in motion. Was it irrevocable? This author sadly thinks so and, having visited Northern Ireland seven times since his first post-Troubles return in 2008, has seen nothing to convince him otherwise that the ‘peace lines’ are now set permanently into the landscape.

  ________________

  * He was one of the first PIRA OCs in the Falls/Leeson Street area of Belfast.

  * The OIRA were known by this epithet because they sold stick-on lilies to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising; the Provisionals, because they produced pinned-on lilies, were known as ‘pinnies’, although this did not survive and they were generally were known as ‘Provies’ or the RA.

  * The Exodus, Jonathan Burgess (Causeway Press, 2011).

  ** Ibid. pp.89, 90.

  *** Ibid. pp.91, 92.

  * www.newsletter.co.uk/news/finally-the-truth-about-londonderry-s-exodus-to-betold-on-television-1-1862606.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FIRST BRITISH SOLDIERS DIE

  The first ‘official’ death of a soldier as a consequence of the Troubles was Gunner Robert Curtis on 6 February 1971; the 20-year-old father of two was mortally wounded by an IRA gunman in a brief but deadly firefight in the Catholic New Lodge. However, before then, in addition to Trooper McCabe, killed on 14 August 1969, a further twenty-one soldiers had been returned to their families on the mainland or in Ulster in Union Flag-draped coffins, killed in or because of the Troubles.

  On 13 September 1969, Lance Corporal Michael Spurway was shot in ‘controversial circumstances’. On the same day, Craftsman Christopher Edgar (19) from REME died from ‘violent or unnatural causes’; just eleven days later Lance Corporal Michael John ‘Mickey’ Pearce (23) of the Royal Green Jackets died in the same manner. The author is fully aware of the circumstances behind the Jackets’ death but will never reveal them in public. On the 25th of the following month, two more Jackets were killed on duty: Rifleman Michael ‘Mike’ Boswell (19) and Rifleman John Peter Byrne Keeney (24) died when their vehicle was ploughed into by a lorry while they were en route to set up a vehicle checkpoint (VCP) close to Omagh in Co. Tyrone. Three months later, Major Philip Cowley (45) of the Royal Corps of Transport died on duty; in the March, Guardsman John Edmunds (24) of the Scots Guards drowned while on duty. A total of eight soldiers – including McCabe – had now been killed in the Troubles, and the troops had only been on the ground for seven months. More were to follow, as on 21 May Private Peter Docherty (19) of the Parachute Regiment was stabbed to death. Four weeks later, Private James Singleton (36) of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment died while on duty. The following day, another Para, Private Victor Richard Chapman (26), was drowned while on duty, the second such death. A total of twelve Operation Banner personnel died through this means, in what has been seen as an inexplicable, certainly bizarre, series of events.

  In June 1970, Private David Pitchford of the Queen’s Regiment was killed in a road traffic accident (RTA) while on duty. A month later, Staff-Sergeant Peter David Sinton (44) of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers died through violent or unnatural causes. On 22 October, Private Thomas McMaster Wilton (27) of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) died on duty. This was followed by the death of another UDR soldier, John George Proctor (32), in that most ubiquitous killers of members of the Ulster Defence Regiment: the RTA. Just forty-eight hours later, Major Peter Doidge (35) of the Royal Anglians was killed when his Browning 9mm fell on the ground and discharged a round into his head. The following month, another Royal Anglian was added to the Roll of Honour (ROH) when Private Brian John Sheridan (20) was killed in an RTA. Eleven soldiers had died this year, a total of sixteen since the first ‘boots on the ground’. Finally, on 24 November, Trooper James Christopher Doyle (28) of the 17/21 Lancers died on duty in Omagh, Co. Tyrone.

  The first five weeks of 1971 would witness three more military deaths, before Gunner Robert Curtis’ death sent shockwaves throughout the British public, blissfully unaware that twenty-one other soldiers had already been returned to their loved ones in coffins, sometimes marked ‘unviewable’. On 19 January, the Royal Irish lost two of their soldiers when Sergeant Thomas McGahon (25) and Corporal James Singleton (32) were killed as rioters stoned their Land Rover, which overturned killing both men. On 3 February, the 14/20 Hussars lost Sergeant John Ernest Platt (25), who was killed at Crumlin when his vehicle was forced off the road by Republican paramilitaries. The stakes were about to be raised quite dramatically just seventy-two hours afterwards, on what Royal Artillery soldier Mick Pickford described as the ‘long streets’ of the Republican New Lodge. The long, grimy red-bricked terraces seemed to stretch for miles; places such as Spamount Street, Duncairn Gardens and Hillman Street offer grim evidence of the enclaves into which many Catholics huddled together, their fears and their trust implanted deeply in the siege and safety in numbers mentality.

  On the evening of 6 February 1971, another soldier was killed, officially the ‘first’ to die on active service during Operation Banner (Op Banner). The Royal Artillery, one of the oldest regiments in the British Army, were being used in the infantry role, a role for which they were neither accustomed nor trained. In the darkness of a cold February night, Gunner Curtis (20) was standing on the corner of Lepper Street where it met the New Lodge Road. He was close to Fitzgerald’s Bar, a grimy haunt at the best of times, and one where this author would certainly not be welcomed. A Catholic mob of around 100 had been petrol-bombing the Gunners; things were fraught and dangerous, with the soldiers staving off missile after missile and the flaming bottles of petrol that burst with a life-threatening whoosh at their feet. A PIRA gunman, known to be Billy Reid, armed with a Thompson machine gun, had positioned himself at the base of one of the New Lodge Tower blocks, a little distance away. Reid opened fire from beyond the recommended firing distance, either with haste or just hoping for a lucky ricochet, firing a burst of twelve or thirteen rounds. The rounds, which travel at 935ft per second (285m per sec), sped towards the distracted soldiers. The .45 bullet was almost spent when it penetrated the unprotected armpit of Curtis’ flak jacket and entered his heart, causing him to stagger and fall, letting out a scream. His comrades pulled him into cover, unaware that he was mortally wounded; indeed, one soldier placed a lighted cigarette in the wounded man’s mouth but when it failed to glow in the dark, the realisation struck home that his comrade was dead. Two other soldiers were also wounded. In total, nine soldiers from the Royal Artillery/Royal Horse Artillery would be killed in Northern Ireland before the year was over. The following morning, Sir James Chichester-Clark, then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland said, unequivocally: ‘Northern Ireland is at war with the Irish Republican Army Provisionals.’

  The dead soldier’s wife was three months pregnant at the time of her husband’s death and was flown from West Germany to be with her parents in the Newcastle-upon-Tyne area; she gave birth to a baby girl later that year. The PIRA gunman, William ‘Billy’ Reid, was killed three months later by a Scottish soldier, ironically in Curtis Street, central Belfast.

  By the end of 1971, the second full year of the Troubles, a total of eighty-nine British military personnel had been lost to all causes, the majority to the IRA’s bullets or bombs. In the four years of the Aden crisis (1963–67), the British lost 227 dead; in the five years of the Cyprus Emergency (1955–60), fatalities totalled 371. By the end of the following year, in a place fondly known as Britain’s back yard
, the numbers of the dead would surpass the losses in Aden; soon the fatalities would also surpass those of Cyprus.

  A soldier receives first aid after being injured by debris after a car bomb explosion on the Crumlin Road on 29 May 1972.

  A soldier in prone position keeps a watch for gunmen.

  During the main years of the Troubles (1969–98), a total of 1,369* British military personnel died as a consequence of the conflict; some were killed in terrorist action, others died through negligent discharges, yet others died in suicides. One other major cause of death was road traffic accidents (RTA), which particularly cut a swathe through the UDR. This is unsurprising given the long hours that they worked, especially the part-timers who had day jobs on farms, in factories, warehouses, etc., before donning their uniforms and carrying out night-time as well as weekend foot patrols, manning VCPs as well as other military duties. A perusal of the UDR Roll of Honour, which includes 368 names, shows a quite staggering seventy-two deaths through RTAs.