Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  Q. [Anthony] ‘Chuck’ Berry,|| Lenny Murphy, people like that?

  A. Yeah, and I think that the [prison] leadership’s view at that time was that the UVF had lost its way, it didn’t have the degree of discipline that it needed to have, that there were excesses, and there were larger-than-life cardboard cut-out characters within the UVF whose outlandish behaviour was detrimental to the UVF as a whole, and I think that was one of the reasons why the leadership changed, that the coup took place.

  [As far as the prison leadership was concerned] it was a fucking ignorance and an arrogance [on the part of the deposed leaders] that saw people who hot-housed the issues, thought about them, deliberated about them and then sent opinions and found those opinions within seconds torn up and thrown in the bin … There was no opportunity for a dialogue or a conflict, and in that respect they had no interest in listening to analysis … it’s always a treacherous and difficult time when something like a coup happens, but set against the backdrop of a set of prisoners who were analysing and doing anything that they could for their country in the confines of Long Kesh and finding that they were being treated like fools … I think sets in context my argument that over a period of time no one was crying into their tea about the change of leadership.

  After being released from jail in May 1975, Lenny Murphy gathered around him a team of like-minded followers, which, at its height, according to one account, ‘contained dozens of members’.33 One was William Moore,** who worked in a meat-processing plant where his job entailed butchering cattle, and another was Robert ‘Basher’ Bates, who would befriend Brendan Hughes some years later in the H-blocks. On the night of 24–25 November, the gang carried out the first of the killings that would earn it infamy and a name for extreme brutality. Their victim was picked up late at night in the city centre as he walked from Crumlin Road to the Falls Road to pick up a taxi ride to his home in Andersonstown. The route he took was a sure sign that he was a Catholic and choosing their victims in this way became the modus operandi of the Shankill Butchers. Francis Crossan, a thirty-two-year-old married man with two children, was knocked unconscious with a wheel brace wielded by Murphy and bundled into a London-style black taxi where he was savagely beaten and driven to an entry off the Shankill Road. There he was beaten again before Murphy used a butcher’s knife provided by William Moore to cut his throat almost through to the spine. Over the next two years the Shankill Butchers would embark on a savage carnival of death, taking an estimated thirty lives with furious, bloodthirsty violence; their leader and murderous muse, Lenny Murphy, was directly involved in at least eighteen of the killings until his own death, at the hands of IRA assassins, in 1982. The bulk of their victims were Catholics although Protestants were killed in mistake for Catholics and some were killed in Loyalist feuding. However, it was the random selection and brutal murder of Catholics in North Belfast for which the gang became notorious, a reign of terror graphically captured in one account:

  They were killed using implements such as cleavers, axes and the butcher’s knives, which earned the gang its nickname. Some of their victims were killed with axes while others had their throats cut. The victims were picked out solely for their religion. Some were tortured. In a statement to police about one murder, a member of the gang said, ‘When he was lying on the ground I cut his throat. It was a butcher’s knife I had, sharp as a lance. I just slit his throat right open.’ In at least one case, an attempt appears to have been made to decapitate a victim … In another Butchers killing, a man had all but three teeth ripped out with pliers.34

  Five days after the killing of Francis Crossan, Murphy crossed swords with the new UVF leadership with such chilling violence that from thereon few in the UVF would wish to confront him. The clash began with the robbery by members of a separate UVF unit of a seventy-three-year-old Shankill woman who was tied to her bed as the gang ransacked her house. The UVF leadership ordered the punishment shooting of those responsible and this was carried out by some of Murphy’s men. But during the operation one of the burglars, Stewart Robinson, was shot dead as he tried to run off. He was killed by Archibald Waller who had helped Murphy kill Francis Crossan. Robinson’s unit demanded revenge and so they shot Waller dead. Murphy’s response was to have the gunman responsible, Noel Shaw, brought to a drinking club. Murphy lined up his entire squad to watch Shaw’s bloody death. After a pistol-whipping, Murphy shot him five or six times and the rest of his unit were forced to clean up the mess afterwards. It is easy to see why David Ervine concluded in his interviews with Boston College that the UVF leadership was too scared of Murphy to intervene in the Butchers’ killing.

  Murphy was arrested in March the following year and charged with attempted murder. In a deal with the prosecution, he pleaded guilty to firearms charges and was sentenced to twelve years. The Butchers’ killings continued in his absence, with Moore and Bates leading the gang, but with Murphy, who had been present at only the first three knife murders, directing the killers from his cell. The authorities got their big break when the Butchers made their first mistake. In May 1977, a young Catholic man, Gerard McLaverty, was abducted by the Butchers, beaten and tortured, but somehow the gang failed to finish him off. He was dumped in an alleyway and, while badly injured, he survived. McLaverty’s miraculous escape came just as Loyalists, led by Ian Paisley, were planning a general strike in protest at British security policy towards the IRA and when it began the Shankill Road was thronged with excited Loyalist paramilitaries. RUC detectives took McLaverty on a tour of the area in the hope that he would be able to identify his assailants from the crowds. He picked out two of them and they were arrested, questioned and eventually admitted their role in the Butchers gang, identifying in the process other members of the gang who also confessed. Eleven members of the Butchers, only a fraction of the gang, were convicted of a total of nineteen murders in February 1979. Forty-two life sentences were handed out, eleven to Moore and ten to Bates. Lenny Murphy was never convicted of any Butcher killing and was released in July 1982, killing four more times before the IRA, allegedly assisted by a Loyalist informer, tracked him down and riddled him with bullets. Although it was said that many of his former colleagues were privately relieved at his death, there was no question that the UVF might disown him. Far from that, he was given a full paramilitary send-off: a four-man guard of honour on the coffin all wearing the UVF’s uniform of black leather jacket, balaclava and a commando hat, a similarly attired firing party that discharged three volleys from handguns in a nearby entry as his coffin was taken from his house, and a piper who played ‘Abide with Me’ as the casket was placed inside a hearse. It should not have surprised anyone that he was given such a send-off. After all, according to Billy Mitchell’s definition, the UVF’s job was to ‘instil fear and terror’ in the Catholic community and, by that light, Lenny Murphy was an exemplary UVF member. While someone such as David Ervine was very conscious of the bad image that Murphy and the Shankill Butchers had created for the PUP and the more politically minded UVF leaders, his carefully chosen words about the Butchers are probably as close to a reproof as he could safely go.

  … my personal view? One of abhorrence, absolute abhorrence. The difficulty you had was that there were divided loyalties in Long Kesh. Some of the people who would have been responsible … would have had friends in jail, and one had to be cautious. You weren’t going out of your way to fight World War III in Long Kesh where you had little influence or control on the affairs on the outside.

  There were those who believed that the UVF leadership were afraid of some of the personalities. It’s as simple as that. Some of the personalities who were driving the excess were so powerful that they were bigger than the whole organisation; that was the view of many of the prisoners.

  I have no doubt that the [prison] leadership would have lobbied and reflected not just their own views [about the Butchers] but the views within the compounds. There were a lot of UVF prisoners and UVF prisoners had the highest incidence of life-sen
tence prisoners in any of the compounds, so they weren’t angels or pussycats. So I think when multiple murderers are saying, ‘Hey, for frig sake’, I think it’s worth listening to them … but there was no opportunity for the volunteer or even the relatively low-level officer to hear the dialogue between the leadership on the outside and the leadership on the inside. That was all done very privately.

  In many ways [we] had little control or influence over what was going on, but it was tragedy and it was sad. The Butcher stuff was … I’m not sure how to describe it other than to say that it was obscene, and nobody could defend it. I remember one suggestion that, ‘Well, you know, there’s not a lot of weapons and you use whatever weaponry you have’, and that just never washed with me, ever, although I have to say maybe we were callous enough not to be dismayed but I always sensed a pride in the UVF. You only had to see us; you only had to watch the way we lived our lives, the discipline in the cages, the cleanliness, the sense of self-esteem that the UVF had. It stood out against all other sections of prisoners in Long Kesh, but certainly I have to say that there was abhorrence … now it wasn’t just the Butchers. But I have to say we can set this in some interesting context. I was in Long Kesh the night that La Mon House hotel was torched and lots of people were burnt to death, incinerated.†† I wonder were the Provos dismayed? I imagine not, I suppose we lived in a callous world …

  I think that the bombardment of information certainly makes a difference to how you view things, and that, yes, one could say that if there had not have been the hype around [the Butchers] that maybe they wouldn’t have had the same degree of intensity … but when it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s abhorrent, and we knew it. But there were many other things … remember the Maguire children; the Provo car mowed three young Maguire children down. We were watching this society of ours going to hell, there were bars with large numbers of people wiped out, whether it was McGurk’s or La Mon or the Droppin’ Well or the Mountainview, a whole host of these things. This was cruel and brutal and evil. We lost our way, our society lost our way, not just the UVF, our society was losing its way. Even as far away as Long Kesh you could hear the ambivalence within our own community about what was happening to the other side, and you could make the assumption that [there was] ambivalence in the Nationalist community about what was being inflicted upon our side …

  But it was being said [inside jail], ‘What a fucking mess that is’, ‘Jesus Christ, it was awful’, and that was the attitude. One of the quite brilliant ways in which prisoners attacked that era was: ‘Sure, they kill as many Prods.’ Now from my own personal point of view, it didn’t matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant. I believe if someone was an enemy, and was a legitimate enemy, that you didn’t let it be perceived that there was enjoyment in taking their lives … but it was a bad time, it was a very emotional time for a lot of prisoners because there was no standing over that, you know, there was no standing over that at all and from my own personal point of view absolute abhorrence. I make no apologies for feeling that way.

  A year or so before the Shankill Butchers were jailed, in the spring of 1978, Gusty Spence resigned as Camp Commander. His health had been failing for some time and in March 1978 he suffered a heart attack which for ten minutes left him clinically dead. Recurring coronary problems meant he eventually had to have triple bypass heart surgery and it was clear that twelve years of prison leadership had taken its toll. He had also by this stage undergone his conversion to non-violence and when he quit there was predictable speculation that unease within the ranks at Spence’s moderation had forced his departure. Mainstream UVF claims that this was untrue, while also to be expected, found support in the shape of his successor, his brother Bobby Spence, a former British naval gunner and an unlikely choice if grassroots sentiment had indeed moved so strongly against him. At the same time, commanding a group of people who believed that taking life randomly was a legitimate political tactic while personally espousing non-violence was a balancing act beyond his or anyone’s ability. A campaign seeking Gusty Spence’s early release from jail had begun and since one argument in his favour was his new political disposition, it made sense for Spence to stand down from the leadership job. In line with the campaign, the UVF leadership, ‘Bunter’ Graham and others, encouraged Spence to distance himself from the organisation for which he had become the byword. David Ervine would soon join Spence, still a major influence, in Compound 21. Ervine resigned as a Hut Commander in Compound 19 after friction with the new Compound Commander and joined a group of people who would form much of the PUP leadership during the peace-process years. It was here that the PUP’s willingness to accept power-sharing was forged, foreshadowing similar moves on the part of UDA in the 1980s. One of the ironies of the Troubles was that those who were to the forefront in the killing of Catholics were the first to accept bringing Catholics into government, while those Unionists quickest to condemn their violence were so much slower. In the UVF’s case, Long Kesh became home to people who had been involved in some of the worst anti-Catholic violence of the Troubles while elsewhere in the same part of the jail other UVF inmates were working out ways and means of sharing power with Catholics.

  I moved compounds and I went to live in Compound 21 where Gusty was and where there was still a rational … leadership. It was in the other two compounds that one worried, and the South-East Antrim mafia, as we used to call it, was on the rise, led by [Geordie] Anthony. I viewed him as an abomination frankly, and the style of his leadership encouraged sycophants [who were] not people that I really wanted to be around, so I moved …

  Spence operated a system in which there were no bullies in our compounds, you didn’t raise your hands, you were equal. Geordie Anthony’s leadership was not like that; there was one rule for one and another rule for another. I remember him walking into my hut on one of his inspections, a real soldier, he couldn’t get the sleeves of his short-sleeved shirt tight enough to bulge his muscles, you know, and a sort of hard-man swagger in a UVF uniform. There was a guy with long hair, who always had long hair and was spotless, ‘Tombo’ Clarke from Portadown, doing life. Gusty never had any problems with his hair, and as the person in charge of the compound I never felt that there was a need to tell him that he needed his hair cut … and here was Geordie Anthony walking in. ‘Get two inches off that hair.’ It was all about Geordie Anthony, it wasn’t about making this lad’s time easier. I told him that day that if he wanted to get Tombo’s hair cut that he could come and do it himself, but that he had to get past me first, and that was the type of atmosphere that existed between us. But I should have stayed. I should not have resigned my commission.

  Well, I moved to Compound 21 where Spence was, and there were an awful lot of the class of ’74 who were there: Eddie Kinner, Marty Snodden, Billy Hutchinson. I just fitted in and kept my head down and, as a Volunteer, did my job. I think that Spence lit the touch paper and the flame raged on in terms of discussion. I would imagine that if you sat that class of ’75 down and said to them, ‘Give me an A4 sheet of paper, tell me what the plans for Northern Ireland’s future will be’, I think it’d be very, very hard to separate us. All right, some of us would use different language than others but I think in essence you’d find it very similar, and is that by accident?

  I think the core politics, the power-sharing politics of the PUP, has its antecedence in Long Kesh, no question in my mind about that, in that those who were considered as thinkers within the Progressive Unionist Party in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, or before, were in many ways Long Kesh people … I was not in a position to know but I’m not aware of any great political prowess coming out of any other compound. I think Billy Mitchell and all ended up in Compound 21. Spence’s regime was seen as harsh by some, and yet Compound 21 ended up being the most liberal compound of the three … Now work that one out.

  Nearly eight years after he had been arrested ferrying a bomb for the UVF in East Belfast, David Ervine was freed from prison.

  I first came
out on [pre-release] parole in Christmas 1979. I was on crutches because I’d had a cartilage operation and I remember preferring to walk into the town with my wife rather than get the bus. I was afraid of the bus, I couldn’t handle money, it was frightening to me … She eventually tortured me onto the bus and I was in one of the big stores, Anderson and McAuley, and there was a café there. We were sitting there getting something to eat and the noise was deafening. It was actually quite strange, it was exciting, but in its own way maybe a wee bit frightening …

  I was released in May 1980 and came home very conscious of the fact that probably the greatest suffering out of my incarceration was by my wife and son as opposed to me and that it was really about time I got myself sorted out and got work and started to honour my responsibilities. So I did that. I became a milkman, would you believe, and in no way in my mind was there any idea of getting [back] into paramilitarism because I thought, you know, ‘I’ve really got to focus here and do logical things for a family that’s suffered.’

  I didn’t knock around with the people I used to before I went into prison, but with a totally different set of people. I’d drink in the Cosy Bar, and I would have been standing having a yarn and the next thing you’re talking about politics and I can remember one time talking about equality and the responsibility of Unionism to sell the concept of the United Kingdom to Nationalists and what have you, and this guy, he hadn’t a shoe on his foot nor an arse in his trousers, hit me a dig in the gob, and shouted, ‘You’re a fucking communist.’ I was so taken aback I didn’t hit back. It wasn’t a question of whether I was or wasn’t a communist; it was that he couldn’t cope with the logic of the argument and that at some point he did what many working-class people do, they strike out as a conversation-stopper or potentially an argument-winner.