Torn Apart

by Ken Wharton

  This chapter will link the deaths of Constable Victor Arbuckle (29), the first police officer to be shot dead during the Troubles, hit by a Loyalist bullet on 12 October 1969, and Frank O’Reilly; both were killed by Loyalist paramilitaries, almost exactly twenty-nine years apart. Whereas Constable O’Reilly is accepted as the final victim of the Troubles, it would be to this author’s dishonour not to mention the murder of Constable Carroll.

  Following Home Rule and partition of the island of Ireland, the fresh Ulster Government needed a new police force to replace the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). This resulted in the forming of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which served from 1922 to 2001. In 2001, following full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement which effectively ended the Troubles, the RUC stood down; it in turn was replaced by the PSNI. During the Troubles (1969–98), a total of 303 ‘Peelers’ – men and women – were killed in the fight against both Republican and Loyalist terrorism. Even today, the police in Northern Ireland are known colloquially as ‘Peelers’. Indeed, it is the epithet of the police throughout the island of Ireland.

  At the height of that period from 1969 to 1998, 13,000 men and women served in both a full-time and part-time (RUC Reserve [RUCR]) role. In addition to the 303 deaths, more than 10,000 were also injured; of these, more than 300 were left permanently disabled. By 1983, the RUC was recognised by international observers as the most dangerous police force in the world in which to serve. Even the horrendous job faced by the NYPD in New York City paled into insignificance when compared with the job faced by the men in the bottle-green uniform of the RUC.

  Colin Breen, in his highly readable oral collection A Force Like No Other (Blackstaff Press, 2017), writes of the pressures that faced even the families of officers within the force. He writes of wives and partners not being allowed to hang any item of police uniform on the washing line for fear that it identified that an officer lived there. PIRA/INLA dickers existed in surprisingly large and effective numbers; additionally, there was the occasional neighbour who covertly sympathised with the Provisionals. For them, they misguidedly felt that it was their ‘duty’ to betray a supposed friend to Republicans. A UDR source also told me that his mother and father knew never to hang out any item of laundry that could indicate that he was a soldier in the regiment.

  A total of six female RUC officers were killed during the Troubles. The first to die was Reserve Constable Mildred Harrison (26), a mother of two, killed by a UVF bomb on 16 March 1975 in Bangor, Co. Down. The following year, on 2 June 1976, Reserve Constable Linda Baggley (19) was shot dead by PIRA gunmen in an attack on a mobile patrol in the Waterside area of Londonderry. Her father, William, also an RUC Reservist, was killed on almost the same spot by PIRA gunmen, who opened fire on his patrol car on 29 January 1974.

  No more female officers died until a PIRA mortar attack on the RUC station at Newry on 28 February 1985 which killed nine police officers. Constable Ivy Kelly (29), Constable Rosemary McGookin (27) and seven others were killed when a 40lb (18kg) mortar hit the police canteen – the worst single loss of life suffered by the RUC during the Troubles. Just three months later, Constable Tracey Doak (21) was killed alongside three male colleagues when a PIRA trailer bomb weighing 1,000lb (454kg) exploded at a border crossing point at Killeen, near to Newry. On 27 March 1992, Constable Colleen McMurray (34) was killed by a PIRA remote-controlled improvised explosive device (IED) in a car as she patrolled alongside Merchants Quay in Newry; she was the last female RUC officer to be killed by terrorists.

  In the forty-seven years that spanned the ‘long weekend’ of the post-partition period and the onset of the Troubles, a total of fifty RUC officers lost their lives: fourteen died after collapsing on duty, nine were killed in negligent discharges, nine were killed in road traffic accidents (RTAs) and seven were killed in German air raids. Additionally, two more were killed while apprehending robbers, but a further nine were killed by the IRA. The officers were: Charles Sellery Anderson in October 1933; Patrick Murphy in April 1942 (posthumously awarded the King’s Police and Fire Services Medal for Gallantry); Thomas James Forbes in April 1942; James Millar Laird in September 1942; John Scally in December 1956; Thomas Cecil J. Gregg in July 1957; Arthur James Ovens in August 1957; Henry Balfour Ross in July 1958; Norman John C. Anderson in January 1961, the first RUC officer to be ambushed by the IRA while off-duty; and finally, William John Hunter in November 1961.

  Between the death of Constable Hunter on 12 November 1961 and 12 October 1969, there were no recorded RUC deaths at the hands of terrorists. On that evening of the first Troubles’ autumn, Constable Victor Arbuckle (29), father of a young child, was on duty in the Shankill area following an outbreak of violence among Loyalists. Ironically, they were protesting at the proposed disbandment of the ‘B’ Specials. The violence was described as ‘extraordinarily severe’ as UVF gunmen began firing at both soldiers and police alike. The Army returned fire, killing Herbert Hawe (32), who was mistaken for a petrol bomber, and George Dickie (25), who was hit by a ricocheting bullet that had been fired at a UVF gunman by a soldier in Downing Street, just off the Shankill Road.

  Constable Arbuckle was standing next to a colleague, Sergeant Dermot Hurley, who himself was later killed, by the Provisionals in the Oldpark Road. Arbuckle was struck by a Loyalist bullet as he stood on the Shankill Road; he died at the scene. There were no further deaths until August the following year, when the Provisionals ambushed a police car at Cullaville, close to Crossmaglen in South Armagh. Constables Sam Millar (26) and Samuel Donaldson (23) were patrolling about a mile outside the town that would become known as XMG to several generations of British soldiers. The town is often referred to as the epicentre of ‘bandit country’. They had gone to investigate an apparently abandoned Ford Cortina car in Lisseraw Road; it exploded as they attempted to affix a tow rope and both officers were mortally wounded, despite the best efforts of a local district nurse and a Catholic priest who tried desperately to save them. They died shortly afterwards from their blast injuries.

  RUC constable Victor Arbuckle, who was shot during street disturbances on the Shankill Road, Belfast, in October 1969. He was the first RUC man killed in the Troubles.

  Victor Arbuckle’s widow at his funeral at Roselawn Cemetery.

  As the Troubles continued, with no sign of any let-up, more RUC officers died as the country moved inexorably but unknowingly towards the ‘bloodiest year’ of 1972, when Northern Ireland ‘officially’ went collectively insane. Eleven officers died during 1971, ten of whom were killed by both wings of the IRA in Nationalist areas of North and West Belfast. In the two years of the Troubles to date, the IRA had killed more policemen than they had during the twenty-eight years of 1933–61. The force was exhausted, undermanned and morale was at an all-time low; they were deflated and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of Nationalist discontent as well as by paramilitary firepower and determination. Their stations were beleaguered – Springfield Road in 1972 was the most attacked police station in the world. At one stage, with the British Government acting upon the recommendations of the Scarman Report, the RUC was disarmed, unable to enter particularly dangerous Republican areas without a heavy military presence; this was the period of Army primacy, with many police officers quitting because they felt that they were being constantly undermined. Sick leave due to stress had grown out of all proportion.

  In late 1969, after the forced disarmament, a new rank structure was introduced. The ‘B’ Specials, which had a membership of about 10,000 in 1969 and had been increasingly seen by Catholics as a ‘Protestant army’, were disbanded; this brought about the creation of the RUCR, formed as an auxiliary police force. Fortunately, in the face of a growing and increasingly well-armed Republican paramilitary group, the Provisional IRA, common sense was seen, with the RUC being rearmed. In 1971, however, only side arms were issued, but as the IRA campaign against them intensified, so too did the level of police armament, with vehicles and buildings being armoured to protect against
gun, bomb and missile attacks. Automatic rifles were again issued in the face of an increasingly well-armed terror group.

  On 8 April 1977, the RUC reached an unwanted milestone when they lost their one hundredth officer of the Troubles. Two officers from the Special Patrol Group (SPG) attempted to stop a suspect car close to the hamlet of Gortagilly in Co. Londonderry. Three officers in the car ordered a VW car to stop as it drove in the direction of Moneymore; the car failed to do so, leading the officers to give chase. Inside the suspect car were PIRA hard-liners Francis Hughes and Dominic ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey; the third man was never identified. The VW crashed, but as the SPG officers approached on foot, the occupants of the crashed car emerged from the wreckage armed with automatic weapons, opening fire immediately; all three officers were wounded, two of them fatally. As the gunmen walked over to the prostrate men, another vehicle approached; at this, the gunmen ran across fields, having fired a burst of shots at the approaching vehicle.

  The two badly wounded men died shortly afterwards. Constables Kenneth Sheehan (19) and John McCracken (22) became the 100th and 101st RUC officers to die as a result of the renewed terrorism since the start of the Troubles in August 1969. What was particularly poignant was that Constable Sheehan had only just returned to duty after being seriously wounded in a PIRA ambush the previous year in Londonderry.

  This author has frequently written about a common and often deadly PIRA tactic: the ‘come on’. It was designed to lure both soldiers and policemen into ambushes, such as the one that killed Stephen Carroll in 2009 in Craigavon. It would sometimes involve a real, albeit contrived, robbery or break-in, often involving intimidating residents into dialling 999 to call out the RUC. One particular faked break-in at a library in the Falls Road area led to an ambush of police, resulting in one officer killed. On 9 April 1980, the police were called to the Suffolk Library on Stewartstown Road, Belfast, by concerned library staff. It was, in fact, a ‘come on’ with several windows being broken to simulate a robbery. A four-man patrol duly arrived at the library, but even before the extravigilant officers could set up an all-round defence, a well-concealed M60 machine gun spat out several deadly bursts containing around 100 rounds of 7.62mm. This impacted in and around the car, wounding Constable William Magill (24); he was hit several times and died very quickly. Three of his colleagues were also hit and wounded, one of them female. In fact, despite being wounded, the female officer managed to radio for reinforcements. The gun crew melted away into the Lenadoon area. The author drove past the scene on one of his return trips to Belfast and noted that the library is still there, close to funeral directors O’Neill’s and cheap and cheerful supermarket Lidl.

  The same was done several times, particularly in chemists in Nationalist areas; in these instances, PIRA knew that the police would have to investigate the possibility of drugs finding their way on to the streets. The Provisionals had taken over a nearby house, keeping the residents under an armed guard, while several members set up a deadly M60 machine gun.

  David Truesdale, RUC:

  You have missed out what was probably the most important thing that kept us all going over those years, other than vodka!

  Humour was the driving force that kept up morale and allowed us all to keep reasonably sane. If it were not for the humour, the jokes and practical tricks we played, it would have been a miserable existence. I’ve lost friends and colleagues and forever grateful that I came through it with nothing more than minor physical wounds, but when I get together with ‘the boys’ for a drink or just a coffee, which occasionally happens, we talk not about the bombs, bullets or the dead, but remember the mad antics, some totally insane antics that made our time survivable. Police humour, like medical and fireman and soldier humour is dark, sometime totally black, but it is humour and it is a necessary ingredient for survival.

  It is true that a policeman wasn’t killed every day, but it is nonetheless true that every time an officer got out of a vehicle, pausing only to check his weapon and ensure his peaked cap was on straight, his or her life was at risk. One has to remember that, despite the savagery and violence of the Troubles, where death lurked around every corner, the RUC still had to carry out the staple, mundane diet of their British counterpart: delivering summons for parking and speeding, investigating domestic assault, chasing hooligans away from elderly residents’ property, investigating reports of missing persons, cautioning people for non-payment of court-imposed fines and a dozen other tasks of the same nature. Boring and routine to the bobby in Leeds and Huddersfield, Cardiff, and Edinburgh and a myriad number of places in England and Scotland and Wales, but potentially life-threatening to the policemen and women of Northern Ireland.

  There were many other incidents that highlight the cynical opportunism of the terrorists, who attempted to turn the mundane into a fatal act. An armed PIRA gang witnessed an accident in the west of the country; they parked up close by, waiting for an RUC unit to arrive. When one of the arriving officers – a female – dashed over to comfort the injured driver, the gunman shot her; the incident in Co. Tyrone resulted in a very badly wounded policewoman. On 1 April 1979, the Provisionals made another opportunistic attack on RUC officers close to Armagh; armed men spotted the police attending an injured dog. A patrol car containing two males and one female officer had stopped on a road in Armagh City to treat the shocked animal, when a car containing armed PIRA drove past, opening fire as they did so, slightly wounding the three RUC personnel.

  THE DAY THEY TRIED TO KILL MY DAD

  Robert Stewart:

  My Dad was an RUC officer and if he were alive he would have been a difficult man to talk to or to interview; getting him in right form would have been critical, he told things once and that was it; if you missed it the moment was lost. I remember him telling me of being on one of the Royal Navy MTBs sent out to sink the Nazi’s Brest Squadron when they forced the Channel in 1942, and how his MTB was one of those tasked with taking Frost’s Paras off from Bruneval; for him it was all water under the bridge, which was sad.

  The morning he was almost killed is really burnt into my memory, from my mother screaming, to getting out of bed (usual teenager who tried to get the last minute in bed before school). Then the bang, instantly awake; that frantic run-down stairs, out across a lawn still wet with dew thinking that is wet. Hitting tarmac which was superheated from the energy of the bomb; kneeling beside him asking if he was alive; glancing to my left seeing a neighbour looking on. I remember glancing at the garage; the small crater; smoke still rising from it. The blood sprayed in an arc from the point of injury like a glass of wine tossed against the garage door; seeing something bloody in the garage. I remember the boot of the car blown open, some holes punched in it; small but you say to yourself that should not be like this, and this is not really happening, yet your feet tell you that the tar should not be burning and almost as quickly you feel it cooling.

  Then he began to talk: ‘Take that dog away!’ Our dog had come over and he was licking blood which, when I glanced back, was running down from my Dad in small streams of bright red. The sound of that small bomb, the dull thud, the screams of my mother, the wet grass, heat of the tarmac – nearly 40 years ago but so much like it was only yesterday.

  Later, it turned out that I could recall seeing them [PIRA] scout the place out; my brother Donald, who was also RUC, disturbed them when they tried to kill the dog by poisoning it. We had a large stone which was set against the back gate – to alert us if anyone went around the back of the house. They heard Donald coming out and high tailed it, because he went out armed, but when Dad came home, he told him he was imagining it; don’t worry was his view. When they were lifted some months later, they got several hundred years jail, turned out my father knew them all, some even greeting him when he met them in town, calling out things like: ‘How you doing, Bob?’

  On Thursday, 28 February 1985, in what was the biggest single loss of life of any Troubles incident, nine officers, including two females, were
killed by a PIRA mortar attack on Newry RUC station. Newry sits on the border of Co. Down and Co. Armagh in the Belfast–Dublin ‘corridor’, often referred to as the ‘gap of the north’. It was of crucial strategic importance to the Provisionals, being only 6 miles from the border with the Republic as well as providing many safe houses and arms caches in the notorious Derrybeg estate. The RUC and Army attached the same importance to the area, with a large barracks in the town as well as frequent snap VCPs on the town’s roads and surrounding areas.

  The Armagh/Down Provisionals had been planning one of their infamous ‘spectaculars’ for some time; the timing and the target was crucial as they were aware of the exterior defences of the RUC barracks at Corry Square. They were equally aware that around 18.00 hours many of the base’s occupants would be on their evening meal break in the flimsy portakabins. Accordingly, at 18:35 hours a stolen flatbed lorry, fitted with a makeshift mortar base-plate, stopped along Monaghan Street, some 60–70 yards from the base on Belfast Road. A total of nine Mark X mortars were fired over the roofs of the Nationalist housing estate. Six fell short, causing twenty-seven civilian casualties in surrounding streets; a further two fell outside the base perimeter, failing to explode.