State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In many ways the green movement of the 1970s was a failure. It never dislodged economic growth from the forefront of the political agenda; indeed, as the economy lurched close to the abyss in 1974 and 1975, environmental issues faded from the headlines, not reappearing until a decade or so later. To some extent, environmentalism was a middle-class fad, as its critics had claimed, and its strident, apocalyptic tone, so redolent of protest movements in the early 1970s, meant that it never attracted a mass following. The young man who placed a personal ad in The Ecologist in March 1974, hoping for a partner to ‘share the remaining years of industrial civilisation’ and experience the ‘end catastrophe’, may well have found a girlfriend eventually, but it is hard to believe that he was a very jaunty date. Even Jonathon Porritt, the Old Etonian baronet who chaired the Ecology Party in the late 1970s and became one of Britain’s best-known environmental campaigners, conceded that ‘there was too much doom and gloom in the early seventies, and there’s a limit to how much people will take’. They may have laughed along with Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal, but most were too attached to their comforts to contemplate a life of self-sufficiency, and while they may have enjoyed watching Survivors on Wednesday nights, they had no desire to re-enact it themselves.57

  And yet there is another side to the story. The green movement may have disappeared from the headlines, but environmental concerns continued to seep into the mainstream, with consumer groups and publications like Which? taking up issues like pollution and over-packaging. In cities and town centres, there was no return to the unchecked philistinism of the 1950s and 1960s. Although development continued, it was more sensitive to the historic landscape, and attempts to knock down much-loved Victorian or Edwardian buildings typically provoked angry public debates. Industrial agri-business still ruled the countryside, but in 1978 Labour introduced a conservation bill that was inherited by Michael Heseltine and eventually passed as the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981. The Ecology Party slowly picked up recruits, Friends of the Earth went from strength to strength, and more established groups like the RSPCA, the RSPB, the National Trust and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England attracted millions of supporters and acquired a more assertive, even mildly radical edge. And in a piece entitled ‘How people have been made to care about their surroundings’, The Times noted that by the summer of 1975 there was already a vast array of unsung little groups and societies: ‘organizations for the preservation of ancient monuments, birds, canals, friendless churches, green belts, rights of way, steam engines and village ponds; for the promotion of archaeology, tree planting, light railways, public transport and road safety; and opposed to airports, motorways, Concorde and much else’. They might not win every battle; they might even lose more than they won; but the revealing and heartening thing was that they were fighting at all.58

  And there were other legacies, too. Thanks to Elisabeth Beresford’s wonderful characters, a generation of children were converted to the joys of recycling by the Wombles of Wimbledon Common, who first appeared on television, making good use of the things that they found, in February 1973. Meanwhile, it was thanks to the conservationist, backward-looking spirit of the early 1970s that traditional country crafts – basket-weaving, pottery-making, iron-working – were saved from extinction, and that the antique shop became such a familiar and much-loved fixture in the alleys and back streets of little towns across the country. It was thanks to the well-meaning muesli-eaters of the 1970s that macrobiotic restaurants and wholefood shops became common sights in big cities, gradually evolving into the vegetarian restaurants and organic cafés that later generations took for granted; and it was partly thanks to the sandal-wearing members of the Campaign for Real Bread that the sliced white loaf did not destroy traditional baking for ever. And it was thanks to the Campaign for Real Ale – founded in 1971 by a stereotypical group of bearded do-gooders, one of whom, Roger Protz, was expelled from first the Socialist Labour League and then the International Socialists for being too left wing – that keg beers like Watney’s Red Barrel and tasteless lagers like Skol and Hofmeister did not kill off the traditional ales of England, and that British drinkers could hold their heads high in the beer halls of the world. These groups were much mocked at the time, and indeed there was often something faintly ridiculous about them. But it is only a slight exaggeration to say that whenever a modern Briton eats brown toast for breakfast or has a pint of proper beer after work, he ought to mutter a quiet thank-you to those real-life Wombles of the early 1970s.59

  6

  A Bloody Awful Country

  For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country!

  – Reginald Maudling, 1 July 1970

  You may not totally eliminate the IRA, but the army has the power and certainly the intention of reducing the level of violence to something which is acceptable.

  – Reginald Maudling, 15 December 1971

  It was late on Friday afternoon, when the working day is winding down and thoughts are turning to the blessed relief of the weekend, that a police car, two army Land Rovers and four armoured personnel carriers of the Royal Scots Guards turned off the heavily Catholic Falls Road, Belfast and into the narrow, brick-terraced warren of streets below it. Their destination was 24 Balkan Street, where the Official IRA had hidden a small cache of weapons just days before, and, as the Scots Guards sealed off the street, their major and a group of Royal Ulster Constabulary men searched the house. But by the time they emerged, carrying fifteen pistols, a machine gun, a rifle and some ammunition, it was to a scene rapidly descending into chaos. At either end of the street, crowds of angry residents had surrounded the Scots Guards, pushing and shouting. And as the soldiers regained the safety of their personnel carriers, the crowd was on them, banging on the doors and trying to rock them from side to side. In the confusion, one of the drivers tried to reverse past the crowd, but he had barely got his one-tonne Humber into gear when he heard a sickening crunch. Without meaning to, he had reversed his vehicle into one of the local men, crushing him against the spikes of the iron railings at the edge of the street. From the crowd there came a great howl of rage, then the clatter of stones, raining down on the armoured personnel carriers. The soldiers radioed for help, and minutes later more Royal Scots roared into the Falls. It was not even 5.30; most people were still at work. But already the evening’s bloodshed had started.

  By six o’clock, the narrow brick streets of the Lower Falls – streets that would have seemed immediately familiar to the residents of countless British industrial towns – were the backdrop for what might have been a medieval pitched battle or a vision of the Inferno. As more and more troops were sucked into the warren, each detachment supposedly going in to rescue the last, thick clouds of CS gas drifted down the alleyways and along the back streets, under doorways and windows, into bedrooms and kitchens, choking and suffocating men, women and children alike. As terrified residents cowered behind their doors, they heard the ominous percussion of nail and petrol bombs, and then the louder bangs of grenades and gelignite. High in the skies above Belfast, where the army’s commander was watching events from his helicopter, it must have seemed like a scene from Bosch or Breughel, hundreds of angry figures scurrying furiously through the little streets, the landscape dotted with bursts of flame and clouds of smoke. At seven, Brigadier Hudson gave orders for the troops to regroup outside the Falls. Already residents had started erecting makeshift barricades, setting light to tyres, mattresses and old bits of furniture, while the word on the street was that the Official IRA were on their way with guns.

  But Hudson had no intention of giving up. By eight o’clock he had 3,000 men stationed just outside the Falls, among them units of the Black Watch and Life Guards whose ship had docked in Belfast only that afternoon. Twenty minutes later, he sent them in and sent them in hard, with instructions to clear the barricades, disperse the rioters and secure the area. Now there were no half-measures, and when the first shots rang out from the IR
A men in the shadows, the soldiers fired back; one officer’s log recorded that some 1,500 rounds of ammunition were fired that night. Yet again there was no escape from the CS gas; indeed, this time canisters smashed through roof tiles into attics, filling the houses with smoke. On the doorsteps stood little bowls of vinegar, left by housewives for their men to protect them from the gas; in the dark back alleys, IRA snipers ran for cover. Such was the chaos, the clouds of gas, the confused hell of bullets and shouting and screaming, that it was a miracle only four more people were killed and forty-five injured. Even so, these were terrible scenes to be unfolding on a Friday night in one of the United Kingdom’s great old ports. By ten o’clock, in fact, the situation seemed so far out of control that the army’s commanding officer in Northern Ireland, General Sir Ian Freeland, decided it was time for drastic measures. Above the noise of battle, a new sound broke through: a clipped, upper-class English voice, booming from loudspeakers in a helicopter high in the sky, declaring that the Falls were under curfew, and ordering all civilians to get off the streets immediately or risk being shot.

  The two-day curfew imposed on the Falls Road from the evening of Friday, 3 July 1970 was one of the pivotal moments in Northern Ireland’s descent into sectarian bloodshed. As the army moved in to search the Falls, there were reports of more gun battles across Belfast, while three bombs went off in the city centre, the biggest at the offices of the city’s Unionist Belfast News Letter. Clouds of CS gas still hung in the air as the armoured personnel carriers moved through the shattered streets, littered with debris, ash and broken glass. Toddlers watched with handkerchiefs pressed over their mouths as the Black Watch moved from house to house, kicking in locked doors, ripping up floorboards, tossing family photographs and religious trinkets contemptuously to the floor. For many, this was their chance to get their revenge on the IRA bastards who had been shooting at them; some, however, felt qualms of unease as they smashed their way through one house after another, like an invading army on foreign soil. Inside, parents hugged their children close as they heard the tramp of the soldiers’ boots; in some houses, trapped IRA men sat clutching mugs of tea, their guns hidden, their taut faces trying to contain their fear. No house escaped, and by the time the curfew was lifted, the army had arrested more than 300 people and collected some 100 firearms, 100 homemade bombs, 250 pounds of explosives and 21,000 rounds of ammunition. But their haul came at a heavy price; too heavy, many thought.

  ‘Some of the houses I had seen were totally wrecked,’ said the Provisional Sinn Fein activist Marie Moore, who led a group of women to bring bread, milk, tea and sugar to the imprisoned residents on Sunday morning. ‘Holy statues were smashed on the floor. Family portraits and pictures were smashed. Furniture was ripped and overturned. Windows were broken and doors off the hinges. Some of the people who’d been beaten were still lying there, bloody and bruised.’ Perhaps she exaggerated a little. But when a senior British officer looked into allegations of looting and pillaging, he estimated that about sixty of them were true. And when residents saw two hard-line Unionist politicians touring the area in an army Land Rover, like colonial officials surveying the repression of the natives, even the most moderate struggled to contain a surge of fury. For the men and women of the newly formed Provisional IRA, who had spent the last few months seething at their fellow Catholics’ apparent passivity in the face of British occupation, it was a moment to savour. Women who had once given soldiers cups of tea now slammed their doors or spat in their faces; children who had once watched the armoured personnel carriers passing with fascinated awe now threw stones and chanted abuse. ‘Thousands of people who had never been republicans now gave their active support to the IRA,’ one of the Provisionals’ rising stars, a young man called Gerry Adams, wrote later. As men and women poured furiously out of their homes in the moments after the curfew had been lifted, a helicopter cruised overhead, a British officer repeating through a loudspeaker: ‘We are your friends. We are here to help you.’ But nobody was listening.1

  When Edward Heath became Prime Minister, the agony of Northern Ireland was already several years old. The so-called Six County state, which had been detached from the rest of Ireland in the Partition of 1922 and ruled since then by the Ulster Unionist Party, had a strange and uneasy relationship with the rest of Britain. It was part of the United Kingdom, but although its Protestant majority often described themselves as British, it was not technically part of Great Britain. Meanwhile, although the Republic of Ireland still maintained that the Six Counties were part of Ireland, most southern politicians had lost all interest in the province and consistently ignored its minority Catholic representatives. Since the late 1960s, however, Northern Ireland had found itself making international headlines thanks to a deadly cocktail of industrial decline, sectarian tensions and the violent repression of civil rights marches. Since 1963 its patrician Prime Minister, Captain Terence O’Neill, had falteringly tried to guide the province towards modernization and reform, partly by trying to attract international investment and partly by trying to reach out to the Catholic minority, who suffered from voting, housing and job discrimination. But as so often happens, his tentative reforms proved the worst of all worlds. At a time when the Belfast shipyards were struggling to stay alive, O’Neill’s programme alienated working-class Protestants who were already frightened for their jobs, pushing them into the arms of anti-Catholic demagogues like the evangelical minister Ian Paisley. And by 1966, a group of working-class loyalists from Belfast’s staunchly Protestant Shankill Road had already founded the vigilante Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and committed the first murder of the Troubles, drunkenly killing a Catholic barman in cold blood.

  But on the other side, too, O’Neill’s reforms failed to satisfy the demands for change. From August 1968 onwards, Catholic nationalists mounted a series of high-profile civil rights marches, demanding an end to gerrymandered voting, the elimination of job and housing discrimination, and the abolition of the unionist state’s security force, the B Specials. In the background, however, hovered the spectre of Irish unity, which was utterly unacceptable to their Protestant neighbours. Meanwhile, television pictures of the marchers being beaten by Protestant policemen were flashed around the world, horrifying most British observers. In Northern Ireland, however, the chief effect of the marches was to crank up the tension. Protracted rioting saw the first barricades go up in nationalist parts of Belfast and Londonderry (or Derry; the confusion over its name reflects the sectarian passions at the heart of Northern Irish life), and in August 1969 the violence reached a terrifying climax when pitched street battles in Derry’s Bogside ignited three days of bloodshed across Northern Ireland, with 8 people killed, 750 injured, and 1,500 Catholic and 315 Protestant families expelled from their homes. With the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary so clearly hated by the Catholic minority, the government in Westminster was left with no choice but to send in British troops to maintain order. Initially the troops were seen as the protectors of the Catholics, who greeted them with smiles, cheers and fish and chips. But the man who ordered them in, Labour’s Home Secretary James Callaghan, was never so naive as to think that the honeymoon would last. Sending in the army ‘was the last thing we wanted to do’, he said later. ‘We held off until the last possible moment, until we were being begged by the Catholics of Northern Ireland to send them in. What an irony of history.’2

  Like most of his ministers, Heath knew next to nothing about Northern Ireland and had little interest in its affairs. But he had only been in office for three days when his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke Trend, handed him a memo that made deeply disturbing reading. Events since the spring of 1970 had made a mockery of predictions that the troops could be withdrawn in a matter of months; indeed, far from dying down, the fires of sectarian hatred seemed to be reaching a new intensity. At the end of March, rioting on Belfast’s Ballymurphy estate had seen British troops in action for the first time against Catholic youngsters, prompting General Freel
and to warn that in future petrol bombers risked being shot dead. As Trend saw it, these events were merely a taste of what was to come. For the situation to improve, he wrote bluntly, it would take a ‘miracle’. More likely was that it would ‘remain much as it is – stabilized by the presence of British troops and trembling on the edge of disaster but never quite tipping over’, which would mean an ‘intolerable’ burden, ‘in terms both of men and money’. But there was a still worse possibility. ‘It could get worse and finally tip over the edge,’ Trend wrote; ‘the Northern Ireland Government proving incapable of holding the position, civil war breaking out within the Province and Dublin being compelled to intervene. This would present us with a political and constitutional crisis of the first order.’3

  The sheer intractability of the problem facing Heath in Northern Ireland was nicely summed up by his very first dilemma: should he impose a ban on the Protestant marching season, which had provoked so much violence the year before? As one historian remarks, ‘it was a case of being damned if he did and damned if he didn’t’, for a decision either way would inevitably inflame one of Northern Ireland’s communities. In the end, he left the decision to his Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, who elected to let the marches go ahead under strict supervision from reinforced security forces. It was the first of many disastrous decisions, for what looked to Maudling like a sensible compromise was seen in Belfast and Derry as a nakedly partisan surrender to unionist interests. At the end of June the marching season got under way amid scenes of almost apocalyptic violence, and when Protestant mobs threatened to overrun the Catholic Short Strand enclave in East Belfast, the Provisional IRA made their first appearance on the streets, blasting away in a fierce gun battle around St Matthew’s Church. Six people were killed that weekend and 200 injured; ten soldiers ended up in hospital, homes and businesses suffered half a million pounds’ worth of damage, and hundreds of Catholic workers were expelled from the shipyards. For the Provisional IRA, which had been founded only months earlier, it was a terrific public relations coup and the moment that they staked their claim to be the heroic defenders of the embattled Catholic minority. For the government, though, it was a catastrophe. Surveying the wreckage afterwards, the British government’s official representative in Belfast remarked to a friend: ‘That was the greatest single miscalculation I have ever seen made in the course of my whole life.’ It was made under extreme pressure, when there was no right answer; even so, it was the first mistake of many.4