Torn Apart

by Ken Wharton

  Eventually, some thirty-four people were identified from TV footage, arrested and charged. Two Provisional IRA members, Alex Murphy and Harry Maguire, were found guilty of the murder of the corporals, and were jailed for life in 1989, with a recommendation of a minimum twenty-five years. Murphy received a further eighty-three years, and Maguire seventy-nine years, for bodily harm, falsely imprisoning the soldiers, and possessing a gun and ammunition. Sir Brian Hutton, sentencing, said:

  All murders are brutal, but the murders of Corporal Howes and Corporal Wood were particularly savage and vicious. They were stripped of most of their clothing and they lay in their own blood in the back of the taxi when you took them to the waste ground to be killed, and in that pitiable and defenceless state you brought about their murders as they lay on the ground.

  The IRA, although embarrassed by the fury and obscenity of the very public attack, attempted to brazen things out, when Gerry Adams said that the attack was ‘... even more sinister than the Wednesday massacre. It bears all the hallmarks of an official British undercover dirty tricks operation. What was the SAS doing at the funeral? Who or what was their target?’ It was bluster and both Adams and the Republican movement recognised that much, even if they refused to publicly admit it. Their international standing was damaged, particularly among Irish American, Irish Canadian and Irish Australian communities, who were for years the biggest source of their income and international support. Later in the day a spokesman for the Provisionals stated: ‘The Belfast Brigade, IRA, claims responsibility for the execution in Andersonstown this afternoon of two SAS members, who launched an attack on the funeral cortege of our comrade volunteer Kevin Brady.’

  The condemnation and contempt from the British press was both understandable and predictable; the Mail on Sunday led with ‘Bloody Ulster’ and ‘Funeral Mob Murders Two British Soldiers’. The Daily Express Monday edition led with: ‘Never Again. King urged to ban no-go funerals.’ One of the leading tabloids of the era, Today, featured on its front page a coloured photograph of a dead and bloodied soldier with Father Reid kneeling over the body, with the headlines: ‘Wake up, we want to kill you.’ This author has previously written of his shock on the morning after the Dublin/Monaghan bombings on seeing the severed foot of a dead woman splattered across the front page of the Daily Mirror; the big difference between that photograph and the one in Today was that the Mirror’s picture was in a less than vivid black and white.

  The two soldiers were in the wrong place at the wrong time; they were instructed not to go anywhere near the IRA funeral procession, but they disobeyed, bringing about their own deaths. Who is to blame? Corporal Wood was driving; was it his decision to take the fatal route? He had been in-Province for some time and was the more experienced of the two; Corporal Howe had only been there for a week. Could Wood have been showing off to his less experienced colleague, or was the newly arrived Howe egging on the other to take chances and show him the trouble spots? A trusted Greenfinch (female UDR) source told the author: ‘Derek Wood was not the sort to show off to anyone, I promise.’ The only people who can supply these answers are the two dead men, and as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, ‘dead men tell no tales’.

  Was there something more sinister; were they actually on an undercover mission? If so, where was their back-up? It is reported that both the RUC and senior military commanders thought that the two men were part of a Loyalist murder gang and, if so, was it decided to let them burn in a stew of their own making? No surveillance equipment was ever found by the PIRA men, who would have looked inside the car; had they found anything, Sinn Féin would have produced it in front of the assembled media at their daily press conference. Was it a spying mission, albeit a less than professional one? If that was the case, it was foolhardy and reckless. This author believes that it was very likely either the senior man showing off or his junior urging him to take a chance. It was not a surveillance operation gone wrong; it was, however, a tragedy that could have been prevented.

  I will leave the final words of this tragedy to a soldier. Phil Gilbert, one of the first soldiers on the scene, who told the author:

  I checked for a pulse on both of the bodies, unaware of their identity. They were both dead. The sight of the bodies didn’t unnerve me, as they looked so peaceful. My thoughts at that time were of anger but I still had a job to do. I covered them up with blankets from my vehicle. After a while, the Fire service arrived and extinguished the fire and it was then that a chill went down my spine; an armoured plate was identified behind the driver’s seat. These were our guys ... and I will never forget this incident.

  The first part of March 1988 was a seminal time in every interpretation of the word: it was a violent and bloody period in the course of what was a violent and bloody three decades. But what made it more significant than other seminal moments was the very public nature of the attacks and the way in which significant film and newsreel footage was spread around the globe; remember also that these events occurred in the pre-internet world. For example, atrocities such as the Abercorn Restaurant, La Mon House, Kingsmills, Frizzell’s and Greysteel were only reported and filmed post-atrocity. Even on Bloody Sunday, film footage was sketchy and nowhere naer as detailed or as graphic as the Milltown attack and the beating of the two corporals. Only the Gibraltar shootings were not covered live.

  That three major events occurred in such a very short period of time was a mere, albeit tragic, coincidence. But all three were linked inextricably and were more than the ‘simple’ tit-for-tat sectarian murders that were the hallmark of the Troubles. Gibraltar resulted in three PIRA funerals, which attracted the murderous attention of Michael Stone, and the resulting outrage in Milltown Cemetery produced the mob rage, triggered when two soldiers strayed into the subsequent funerals. Once the undercover soldiers fired their first shots on Winston Churchill Avenue, the deaths of Thomas McErlean, John Murray, Caoimhin Mac Brádaigh (Kevin Brady) and Corporals Derek Wood and David Howes were simply inevitable; the countdown to their deaths was inexorable and unpreventable.

  ________________

  * Eibhlin Glenholmes, from Belfast’s Short Strand, was at the top of Scotland Yard’s list of suspects in the 1980s for five IRA bombings and three murders – including a blast at the Harrods department store that killed six people. In 1984 there were nine extradition warrants against her, including three murders, one attempted murder, three explosives charges and one charge for possession of weapons, including a sub-machine gun, an Armalite rifle and five pistols. While it was not included in the warrants, police also wanted to question her about the bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel during the 1984 Conservative conference. She escaped extradition from the Republic twice due to mistakes in the British warrants. In 1986 she walked free because her name was spelled without an ‘s’ on her arrest warrant. Source: Belfast Telegraph, 7 June 2012.

  ** Political branch of the Irish Republican Army.

  *** Officers Ernest Carson and Robert Malone.

  * Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan.

  * Stone Cold Killer, Martin Dillon (Hutchinson, 1992).

  ** None Shall Separate Us, Michael Stone, (John Blake Publishing, 2004) pp.140–41.

  * None Shall Divide Us, Michael Stone (John Blake, 2003).

  * Times of Troubles: Britain’s War in Northern Ireland, Sanders & Wood (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

  * Hansard, 21 March 1988.

  CHAPTER 12

  ATROCITIES (1980–94)

  The arrival of 1980 saw the Troubles enter a third decade of violence. There was an inevitable increase in terrorist activities as the Republicans continued their long war with the avowed intention of driving the British into the sea. On the other side of the barricades, the Loyalists continued with their sectarian murder campaign, only occasionally assassinating a PIRA member, mainly killing randomly selected Catholics.

  In both this chapter and in Chapter 4 we have discussed a series of atrocities, committed
in the main by Republicans. To set the parameters, I have intentionally looked at, mostly, multiple murder outrages. Had I not done so, this book by definition would have covered almost 2,000 murders alone. Outrages such as Frizzell’s Fisheries, the Andersonstown Cleansing Depot and Rising Sun are dealt with in a separate chapter. I have purposely not included in this chapter or in Chapter 4 individual killings carried out by Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries. However, it would be morally incorrect not to include the wanton, cowardly and pointless murder of Chris Watson, Joanne Mathers, or the death, three years later, of Mary Travers.

  Christopher Watson, known to his friends in the Royal Green Jackets as Chris, was from Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire; he had served in Northern Ireland in 1979, marrying a local Catholic girl from the Rosemount area of Londonderry. As she later became pregnant, the couple were given married quarters in Cambridgeshire. However, the young girl missed the support of her tightly knit family, so returned to Northern Ireland. On the eve of Rifleman Watson’s departure for a United Nations tour of Cyprus, his wife was sadly delivered of a stillborn baby.

  It was clear that the soldier needed to be at his wife’s side, but the dangerous situation in Ulster precluded him from visiting her home area of Rosemount. The Army agreed that he would be permitted compassionate leave, but on the strict proviso that he met her at a relative’s house in North Antrim. However, the young rifleman made the fateful decision to enter not only Co. Londonderry, but the city also, making his way to the Nationalist area of Rosemount. On the evening of 19 July 1980, he went to the Village Inn for a drink with his wife and in-laws. What is certain is that he was killed very shortly after entering the pub, but what remains unclear is exactly who informed the Provisionals that an unarmed soldier was in a Nationalist area. The author has been told several conflicting stories in relation to the events, none of which can be substantiated. It is alleged that a member of his in-laws, a passionate hater of the British Army, betrayed him to local PIRA commanders. The late Martin McGuinness was in overall command of the North at that time, living in the Creggan, so it would seem likely that he would have been party to the decision to kill Rifleman Watson. A further claim is that as he entered the pub, dickers recognised himand sent word to the local gunmen. In either hypothesis, McGuinness would have either made the decision or approved the actions of the Rosemount unit.

  As Chris Watson sat in the pub with his wife and in-laws, several PIRA gunmen – known to virtually every one of the patrons in the establishment – walked over to his table. One of them produced a handgun, shooting the defenceless man twice in the head at very close range. He died almost instantly; the killers casually made their way out of the pub and into a waiting car. The RUC and soldiers attended shortly afterwards, but perhaps unsurprisingly, nobody had witnessed anything. A spokesman for the Provisionals said later, ‘As a guerrilla army confronted with a highly sophisticated and technologically advanced army, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of fighting a war on our opponents’ terms.’

  On 7 April 1981, during the IRA/INLA hunger strike that saw ten convicted terrorists starve themselves to death, the IRA shot dead a defenceless woman who was collecting census forms on the Gobnascale estate in Londonderry. Mrs Mathers, who was the mother of a young boy, had just knocked at a door in Anderson Crescent on the notoriously hard-line Republican estate.

  A waiting gunman ran up to her, snatched her clipboard and census forms, then shot her in the head at point-blank range; she died almost immediately. The Provisionals have always claimed that they were a non-sectarian organisation, although it is difficult to describe this murder as anything but. Raymond Gilmour alleges that the late Martin McGuinness, the Provisional IRA’s top man in the North, wanted to send a message to the British Government. He claimed that McGuinness sent a direct order via Creggan PIRA member Brendan Docherty to their armourer in the Creggan. He was instructed to issue a weapon to a local gunman, who was in turn dispatched to the Gobnascale. The Provisionals have always denied responsibility, but the gun used to kill the defenceless woman had been previously used by them in punishment shootings. Someone in the Londonderry IRA knew who carried out the cowardly and despicable murder of a helpless young woman.

  Lisburn Fun Run, six soldiers killed. All that remains of their van after an IRA bomb explosion on 15 June 1988.

  Writing in The Belfast Daily (22 September 2014) Raymond Gilmour said:

  This woman [female PIRA operative], who was a good-looking girl in her day, came over from the Shantallow area and walked to the Waterside in the east to provide the gun. The murder weapon was a .357 Magnum revolver which had been stolen from the home of a part-time RUC officer. This girl was a courier for the IRA in the city. She never came to the attention of the police, which allowed her to move easily from the west bank to the east bank of Derry.

  UUP leader Tom Elliott said a year or more before McGuinness died: ‘It is long past time he came clean about what he knows about the crimes committed by the IRA in Londonderry whilst he was in command.’ A former soldier told the author:

  As we know, the murder of Joanne was a disgusting act of revenge because the terrorists didn’t want the census carried out and when their wishes were ignored they replied in their usual fashion. If you have a copy of Raymond Gilmour’s book Dead Ground the incident is mentioned. There appeared to be a bit of anger amongst the grass roots boyos about the murder, but the Londonderry Brigade commander dismissed it with a wave of his hand. That person is called ‘Shorty McNally’ by Gilmour to hide his real identity. I recognised who it was by his description and he was McGuiness’s sidekick when he ran the Bogside, and later the whole west battalion PIRA. His real name is [censored] normally known as ‘Drew.’ Pity you can’t name and shame the bastard. It’s him in the photo that was taken of the gunman firing a handgun during Bloody Sunday. Much as it goes against the grain saying anything good about them, as you know, the PIRA were not an out of control bunch of freelance murderers. They were quite disciplined, and no operation was carried out without the say so of their director of operations, who was usually the second in command of the brigade. So, it is plain as the nose on your face that Joanne’s murder was carried out on the orders from the top. Whether she was the intended target, or she was just unfortunate enough to have been the one doing the collecting in that area that day is open to comment.

  The following is reprinted from an interview with Mrs Mathers’ husband in the Belfast Telegraph (18 March 2011):

  Joanne Mathers’ son Shane was under two years of age when a police officer arrived at the family home in Bready to tell Mr Mathers his wife had been gunned down in broad daylight as she went door-to-door collecting completed census forms. Shane has no memory of his mother, other than what his father has told him. Mr Mathers says it is this more than anything else that means he will never be able to forgive the IRA members who murdered his wife. Speaking from the same home he and Joanne shared as a newly married couple, Mr Mathers said he often wonders how the killers live with themselves. ‘Over the years I have wondered if they went on to have children of their own, and did they ever look at them and think about my son who was a year and 10 months when he was left with no mother? The simplest things have been the hardest for me, like watching other children running to their mothers at the school gate, but Shane missed out on that and so much more. Shane has no memories of Joanne except for what I have told him. I know she would have been so proud of him, but they took that away from her and from him, and for that I will never, ever forgive them. I want the HET to reinvestigate her death for Shane, more than anything else. Joanne deserves justice, even if it is 30 years later.’

  The author was told by a reliable source that after she was killed, her little boy would still run to the front door every time he heard it open, thinking it was his mother returning.

  The following month, the frailties of the Saracen armoured car were fully exposed. On 19 May, a mobile patrol comprising two vehicles from the Royal Green Jackets,
driven by soldiers of the Royal Corps of Transport (RCT) were driving along Chancellor’s Road close to Altnaveigh, Co. Armagh. It was a route that had been used many times before; too many times for it not to have come to the attention of the South Armagh Provisionals. In the very early hours of that morning, a PIRA unit had planted a device containing 1,000lb (454kg) of explosives in the culvert underneath the road. The first of the 10-tonne Saracens passed over the bomb, but the watching bombing team – allegedly containing Brendan Burns – triggered the device as the second ‘Sarra’ passed over. The vehicle was shattered, with thousands of pieces of material and human bodies being thrown high into the air; mercifully all five soldiers were killed instantly. The debris, human parts and all, crashed into a field some 200 yards away, with a massive piece of the engine narrowly missing a farmer on his tractor.

  The soldiers were Lance Corporal Grenville Winston (27); Rifleman Andrew Gavin (19); Rifleman Michael Bagshaw (24); Rifleman John King (20); and RCT Driver Paul Bulman (19). It is thought that the bomb was intended to mark the hunger strike being undertaken by several Republican prisoners in the Maze at that time. PIRA hunger striker Raymond McCreesh was very close to death at the time of the bombing; in fact, he died less than forty-eight hours later. It is alleged that McCreesh was among the gunmen who shot ten Protestant workers dead at Kingsmills in January 1976. If Burns was the bomber, karma caught up with him seven years later on 29 February 1988 just outside Crossmaglen when a bomb he was preparing exploded prematurely, killing him and Brendan Morley. Burns had been arrested in the Irish Republic but was released by an Irish court that stated that his extradition warrant was ‘invalid’.