The British Army in Northern Ireland 1975-77

by Ken Wharton

  When we arrived I handed over the two young men to the Int team and briefed them on the reasons for the arrest. My next move was to go and get a brew with the lads but my unit Int Sergeant Mick Mander collared me and said the talkative lad would not speak to anyone except the soldier who arrested him. Well that fucked up my plans for a brew, and I was given a brief on the sort of things to ask him about in the interview room. The interview room was miked up, although I don’t know if there was any CCTV in the room; CCTV was used outside in the courtyard to capture images as arrestees were unloaded from the vehicles prior to entering the interview rooms.

  My two-hour patrol had now gone way over time and my patrol mates were now sleeping or in the choggie shop, resting and I was being called in and out of the interview room. I was told to ask this and ask that question, and there seemed to be a lot of interest in this particular interviewee! I had struck up a kind of rapport with the lad and he asked me for a fag. As I didn’t smoke, I was given fags and a light for him and this questioning went on for quite a time. I told the author of this book that I don’t know how sensitive this may still be, as it later transpired that I was given names and hide locations and PIRA quartermasters’ names and the like. It was thought that the prisoner was a bit of a ‘Walter Mitty’ character and even gave us the names of either the Guildford pub bombers or the Birmingham pub bombers!

  So back to the story; this guy sang like a canary and gave us lots to go on, and by the time I finished interviewing there were plenty of people listening into the interrogation including RUC and possibly some ‘sneaky beaky’ types too. It was agreed that we would re-arrest him on the following Wednesday, and I was to be the arresting soldier again as he trusted me completely. He knew of the planned arrest and had agreed to it. We released him and the other hard bastard who was questioned separately. We released both of them at the same time and that was that! Well, as far as I was concerned until next Wednesday that was! However whenever I questioned the Int people about the re-arrest, I was fobbed of without any real information. He was arrested later, but not by me; the ‘big boys’ carried that out. After a bit of nagging, I was finally told that the scrote I had interviewed was now in prison, as he delivered the explosives to the ASUs in England, which were used in one or both (I still am none the wiser) of the Birmingham or Guildford pub bombs!

  As a postscript, after that tour, I was in Cyprus and I was presented with a ‘Mention in Dispatches’ but to this day, I still haven’t a clue why and that is the full extent of my knowledge of this incident!

  Around the same time, Tiede Herrema, a Dutch industrialist living and working in the Republic of Ireland, was abducted and held hostage by the IRA at a house in Monasterevin, Co Kildare. Then on 21 October 1975 Gardaí, acting on a tip-off, surrounded the house where he was being held and a siege began which lasted until his release on 6 November 1975.

  Bollocking for that man! A Royal Green Jacket without his ‘flakker’. (Mark ‘C’)

  William Stevenson (37) lived in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim and on the day after the blood-letting of 2 October, he had travelled to Belfast in order to seek work and to see friends. At the end of the day, he was seen walking in Madrid Street, close to the Catholic Short Strand, telling friends that he was going to walk to Belfast train station. The station was located on Bridge Street, a relatively short walk over the River Lagan. He was picked up by a PIRA team and taken to a house in the Catholic Markets area where he was interrogated and beaten before being driven to Sussex Place, some half a mile from his intended destination. He was shot in the head and his lifeless body dumped in the street. He was a Protestant who was in the wrong area at the wrong time; such was the lottery of life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

  Three days later, a PIRA bombing unit had targeted a shop in Albertbridge Road, Belfast, not far from where William Stevenson was murdered. The shop was believed to be connected to the Loyalist Red Hand Commando who were responsible for the attack on the Strand Bar. A hurled device exploded and Alice McGuinness (57) was buried in the rubble and seriously injured; she died that same evening. Mrs. McGuinness had no known paramilitary associations and was merely making a purchase; her death left eight children without a mother.

  Shortly after the death of the mother of eight, an RUC officer was killed when a delayed action device exploded in the far north of the Province. The IRA had earlier carried out a robbery of a Protestant-owned pub close to Limavady in north Co Londonderry. The gang had left a booby-trapped explosive device and when the RUC went to investigate, it detonated. Constable David Love (45) and a father of four and who had been a policeman for over 27 years was killed instantly and a colleague and a member of the bar staff were both badly injured. On that one day, PIRA had left a total of 12 children without a parent.

  LONDONDERRY

  Driver Alasdair Sutherland, Royal Corps of Transport

  My first Northern Ireland tour was in Londonderry from Oct 1975 until February 1976; I was 18 years old. We arrived at Aldergrove airport and were taken to Fort George in Derry on a normal civvie buses! It was the weirdest thing ever; driving through VCPs and checkpoints we looked out the windows at all these heavily armed troops and here was us on a couple of coaches carrying weapons but no ammunition and no flak jackets.

  In Fort George all the RCT detachments were issued with flak jackets, ammunition, riot helmets and all the other kit they need before disappearing out to the infantry units they were going to be attached to. I remained in Fort George and next day myself and three others escorted the outgoing unit back to Aldergrove airport on another Ulster bus; we were in an armoured Land Rover; again another surreal day. I always wondered how we would have coped looking back: one experienced Lance Corporal and three 18 year olds on their first tour with around 80 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition between us, taking 60 RCT lads back for their flight to Germany. God knows what would have happened if the IRA had decided to attack our little convoy.

  From then on it was patrolling with infantry, driving the Pigs and Saracens out on the streets of Londonderry. I was then moved to Bridge Camp next to the two-tier bridge over the River Foyle, attached to a section from the Worcester and Sherwood Foresters who were on an 18 month tour in the Province. My section commander was Cpl Johnny Burrows; a giant of a man, a real soldier; we all held him in awe. Those infantry lads treated me as one of them it was pleasure to work with them and I learnt so much about soldiering from them.

  Our TAOR was the Brandywell district up to the Free Derry wall in the Bogside, where we patrolled in Land Rovers and the Pigs; we drove around in our Land Rovers with no doors, at around walking pace, taking constant streams of abuse from the locals. Our favourite response to a girl who screamed a torrent of abuse at us was ‘Talk dirty to me, we love it when you talk dirty’. It usually made them worse some going apoplectic with rage.

  That was our life, mobile patrols, and standby section ready to go out in the Pig to back up any patrol in contact or dealing with a situation. Some days were spent manning cordons while search teams were searching known player’s houses, the RCT drivers always staying with our vehicles. There was always bother on the cordon, bottles and stones being thrown, although I don’t recall any live fire aimed at me, but there was always contact of some kind. One cordon we did was to arrest a certain player called Martin McGuinness.

  One of our jobs was manning the permanent VCP (called Victor 6) on the Letterkenny Road. My main job was searching the vehicles, and there were lots of hilarious incidents like the time we thought some used tampax pads on a bus were explosives and one of the lads stuck his nose in them sniffing deeply. On the anniversary of Bloody Sunday there was a huge riot in Bishop Street Without on the crossroads leading down to the flyover into the Bogside. When we got there hundreds of rioters attacked us as we sheltered behind the Pigs, with the RCT drivers tasked to watch the rooftops for snipers. I remember volleys of rubber bullets being fired into the crowds as snatch squads moved out to grab the ringleaders. If I re
call correctly the rioting went on for days, and at one stage a Post Office depot was set on fire, with red Post Office vans used as barricades. The barricade was eventually removed by a Para Engineer who picked up a burning bus with a digger and threw the bus at the rioters. I still recall the rioters scattering as this burning bus landed in amongst them; how no one was killed amazed us.

  We then charged through in our Pigs, the infantry debussing to grab rioters and drag them back into the back of the Pigs ready to be taken up to the Police cells in the city centre. Once at the cop shop we gave statements and handed the rioters over to the RUC.

  There are too many memories to remember them all; a drunk driver running into our Saracen: scratch one Saracen, drunk’s car a total write off. I remember fighting with a crowd of drunks outside the Lecky Inn in the Brandywell when someone shouted ‘gun’. I never saw it but we got out of there sharpish, with the section 2 I/c with blood streaming down his face after being grabbed by the crowd as they tried to take his SLR off him. We returned with the whole company but the Brandywell was deserted; not a soul was about as they knew we would be back.

  On 8 October, Richard McCann (32) who had been injured in a UVF attack on Shore Road, Belfast (see Chapter 8) died of his injuries. In a week, 15 people had died as a consequence of the Troubles and yet the madness, for that is what it was, continued; the litany of violence had more lives to take before the month was over.

  The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (RRF) whose motto is Honi soit qui mal y pense (evil to him who evil thinks) was formed as an amalgamation of several other regiments in 1968; like many others, it suffered in Northern Ireland. To all causes, the RRF lost 28 men during the Troubles. On the 9th, a Saracen armoured vehicle was patrolling in the Crossmaglen area. As it reached Ford’s Crossroads, a large device was detonated by a hidden IRA bomb team and the Saracen which weighed around 11 tons, was hurled into the air by the blast. Two soldiers were badly injured, but Corporal David Gleeson (29) a father of two, was killed instantly. The armoured vehicle was wrecked and a passing civilian car driver narrowly escaped death. The bombers must have seen the civilian car but still fired the device, believing that it was morally acceptable to kill one of their own so long as they ‘stiffed’ British soldiers. Corporal Gleeson came from Colchester in Essex and is buried in Beckenham, Kent; the AFM list him as ‘Edward.’

  PIRA’s England team was in action over on the mainland on the same day and a young down and out paid the price for their activities. An attempt was made to cause a major explosion in the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly, London, simply because of what it represented. However, the bomber panicked and tried to disarm the device; he was confronted in Green Park tube station and ran off, abandoning the device at a bus stop. Graham Tuck (23) from Dorset who had been living rough in London was walking past when the device exploded; he was killed instantly. Over 20 other people were injured in the blast, some seriously. The net was closing in what modern historians would refer to as the ‘Balcombe Street Gang’ but they still had people to kill and property to destroy before their day in court.

  Ernest Dowds (21) was a member of the UFF and lived close to the Ormeau Road in Belfast. Early on the morning of the 10th, a PIRA murder gang arrived outside his home and lay in wait until he left at his normal time to head for his place of work. Their intelligence had identified his place of residence, where he worked and his other regular routines. As he came out of his house, and began walking towards a bus stop, he was shot dead by a member of the gang. The PIRA men escaped in a stolen car. It is thought that Dowds had either taken part in some sectarian murders or was closely associated with others who committed the crimes.

  Later on the same day, an Official IRA unit, operating from either the Ballymurphy Estate or the Turf Lodge attempted a ‘fund-raising’ robbery on a business premises near the Whiterock Road. During the robbery, the owner of the business, Sean McNamee (24) tried to stop the armed robbers but he was shot and mortally wounded. One of the gunmen escaped but the other was attacked by employees and wrestled to the ground before being handed over to the RUC and an Army patrol.

  The Provisionals carried out a campaign of ‘economic warfare’ as they chose to try and bomb the province’s economy to a standstill. One of the Army’s tactics to keep car bombs out of city centres was to build and operate segment gates. These stopped vehicles from entering; added to this, soldiers and civilian searchers prevented, or at least reduced the flow of explosives into the target areas. In Portadown, Co Armagh, the gates were locked by the RUC at night time and then unlocked each morning. Sometime during the evening of the 13th/early hours of the 14th, an IRA bombing unit placed an explosive device on the security gates there. When an RUC attempted to unlock them, the device detonated and fatally injured police reservist Andrew Baird (37); he died later that same day in hospital. He left two young children and a heavily pregnant widow.

  This author has never been slow to utterly condemn the Loyalist paramilitaries; gangs such as the UVF and UFF were responsible for many appalling sectarian crimes. It has been suggested that not only were psychopaths attracted to these organisations, but petty criminals also. UVF member Stewart Robinson (23) was also a known criminal and an anti-social resident of the Oldpark area of North Belfast. He went a step too far in the October of 1975 and was known to have terrorised some elderly residents of the Shankill. He was marked for punishment by the UVF and was picked up by members of the Shankill Butchers. After interrogation and the ‘traditional’ beating in a Loyalist ‘romper room’ at a pub on the Shankill Road, he was taken away to be knee-capped. However, he managed to break free, but was chased and shot by Archibald Waller. He died at the scene; his killer was shot himself on 29 November that year.

  On the same day, a soldier of the King’s Regiment died in the Province; his death may have been accidental. Kingsman David Owen (18) died just three days before his 19th birthday; he was from Worsley in Manchester.

  To the Loyalist paramilitaries, the very act of being a Catholic was offensive and sufficient cause for murder. In their perverted logic, any Protestant who either married a Catholic or converted to Catholicism was equally subject to a ‘death sentence.’ One such person was John Greer (35) a North Belfast taxi driver. He was lured to an address in Upper Cavehill Road on the far northern outskirts of the city. The house to which he had been lured had been taken over by armed UVF men who stabbed him and then shot him dead as he approached the front door to collect his fare.

  The scene then switched back to the British mainland and the elusive England team was ordered by the Army Council of PIRA to kill a prominent member of the Government. Conservative Sir Hugh Fraser, MP was an outspoken critic of Irish Republicanism and was targeted for assassination. The team planted a device under the MP’s car in Camden Hill Square, Kensington, London. Tragically, the device exploded as a leading cancer specialist Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, a neighbour of the MP, was walking past. As he walked his dog, the surgeon noticed a device on the car and bent down to examine it. It exploded, dreadfully injuring him; he died very shortly afterwards. He had four children, the youngest of whom was 12 years old when he died. Hamilton-Fairley had been offered an appointment as the Queen’s personal physician, but he turned it down, preferring to work with the public. More than 10,000 people attended his funeral, and the Queen sent a representative to pay her respects. He is commemorated by a blue plaque in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral which reads: ‘Gordon Hamilton-Fairley DM FRCP, first professor of medical oncology, 1930-75. Killed by a terrorist bomb. It matters not how a man dies but how he lives.’ A ward at St Bartholomew’s Hospital was named after him.

  Brian Keenan a senior PIRA commander, was later apprehended and stood trial at the Old Bailey in London in June 1980 accused of organising the IRA’s bombing campaign in England and being implicated in the deaths of eight people including Gordon Hamilton-Fairley. Keenan was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment after being found guilty on 25 June 1980.

  On the same day, b
ack in Northern Ireland, the UVF had targeted some known Republicans in the Moy, Co Tyrone area. However on the day that they chose to strike, the murder gang went to the wrong address and gunned down a middle-aged couple – both Catholics – who had no Republican ties. The armed gang burst into a farmhouse and shot Mrs. Jane McKearney (58), mutilating her body with bursts of fire from an automatic weapon. Seconds later they then shot her husband Peter (63) riddling his body also. The murderous attack orphaned five children and ended the lives of two more innocent Catholics for absolutely no reason other than to satisfy their blood-lust.

  On the 29th, in what was the inspiration for an excellent film Five Minutes of Heaven starring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, a UVF gang murdered James Griffin (20). The killing, which was witnessed by his younger brother Joe, who was only 11, took place in Hill Street, Lurgan in Co Armagh. The gang had targeted the older Griffin boy and they pulled up outside the house in a car and one member of the gang – Alistair Little – walked up the front window and shot him through the glass. They then escaped into a nearby Loyalist area, leaving Mr Griffin dying from several wounds; he died before he reached hospital.

  There were four further deaths in the Province in the final three days of that bloody month and all were the results of an internal feud between the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA. On the 29th, OIRA member Robert Elliman (27) was talking to friends in McKenna’s Bar in the Catholic Markets area of Belfast. Masked PIRA gunmen burst in and opened fire at Elliman and two other men; he was hit several times and collapsed to the floor dying. Between 29 October and 12 November, 11 people were to die in the continuing feud between the two wings of the IRA. Most of those killed were OIRA members. The next day, PIRA gunmen attacked a house in the Republican Beechmounts area, close to the Falls Road. They had targeted a prominent OIRA supporter but opened fire indiscriminately and shot and killed the man’s daughter, Eileen Kelly (six) despite her father’s courageous efforts to shield her with his own body. Lost Lives reports that the child was buried in Milltown cemetery and that the Falls Road was lined by thousands of people who wished to pay their final respects.