When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

by Andy Beckett

  was crammed into what was called the General Department … It covered such matters as ceremonial functions, British Summer Time, London taxicabs, liquor licensing … and the protection of animals and birds. One Division [of the department] also dealt with the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, the Charity Commission and Northern Ireland, and this group of subjects was under the control of a staff of seven … There seemed to me at that time no reason to disturb the arrangement.

  Briefing papers that Callaghan requested on the impending problems facing his ministry contained ‘not a word about Northern Ireland’. Yet unknown to him and this token group of civil servants, events in Belfast had already begun to make British policy towards the province obsolete. Eleven months earlier, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association had been founded. Its aim was to end the anti-Catholic discrimination in housing, employment and the voting system that had been ubiquitous in Ulster since partition. The Civil Rights Association was broad in its membership, containing Protestants as well as Catholics, unionists as well as nationalists, and at first mild in its methods by the standards of the late sixties, relying on marches and small acts of civil disobedience. But its challenge to the status quo in Ulster was a fundamental one. Even worse for the Association’s chances of securing reforms without a confrontation, many unionists regarded it as a Trojan horse for Irish nationalism, with the undeclared goal of undermining Ulster and uniting the province with the Republic.

  The situation was further sharpened by the decay of Ulster’s economy. During the nineteenth century, Belfast had been a model imperial boom town, noisy with shipbuilders and linen mills, its centre a handsome grid of domes and columns, its west Belfast suburbs packed with rural incomers. But, by the late sixties, the empire and the boom were over, and Belfast’s empty factories and patchy government regeneration projects were a bleak vision in lumpy concrete and orphaned brick of what might await the rest of the UK. Unemployment in the province was three times the national average; in west Belfast, long divided into neighbouring sectarian ghettos such as the Catholic Falls Road and the Protestant Shankill, the rate was six times worse.

  The first confrontation, however, came in Londonderry. Only a few miles from the Republic, Derry was much less Protestant than Belfast, and anti-Catholic discrimination there was even more blatant. Although Catholics of voting age outnumbered Protestants by two to one, restriction of the right to vote and manipulation of electoral boundaries kept the city council Protestant. In October 1968, a civil-rights march there was attacked by a unit of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland’s paramilitary, Protestant-dominated police force. In front of television cameras and three British Labour MPs taking part in the march – for decades a minority had vainly campaigned against discrimination in the province – demonstrators were viciously beaten with batons and battered with water cannon. That evening, Northern Ireland’s minister of home affairs, William Craig, who had initially tried to ban the march, defended the RUC’s conduct and denounced the civil-rights demonstrators as connected to ‘the IRA and Communism’. But the pictures of the beatings went around the world. In Britain, almost overnight, it was no longer possible to believe – or to pretend to believe – that the province was a healthy democracy which could be left to its own devices.

  Over the next ten months came ample further evidence. The Northern Irish prime minister Terence O’Neill, a relatively moderate unionist, was summoned to Downing Street and agreed to make concessions to the civil-rights movement. Yet while these were insufficient to satisfy the movement’s radicals and the young disenfranchised Catholics who were now engaged in regular stone-throwing battles with the RUC and were erecting street barricades in Catholic areas, they were enough to convince some Protestants that a sell-out of Ulster unionism was imminent. In January 1969, another civil-rights march was attacked; the same month, the Bogside, a poor Catholic enclave downhill from the Creggan, declared itself ‘Free Derry’ and Catholic vigilante groups with clubs began patrolling its alleyways. In March and April, bombs planted by unionists but blamed on the IRA destroyed parts of Ulster’s water and electricity network. In April, O’Neill was forced to resign by the escalating disorder. As spring became summer, traditionally the peak period for sectarian frictions, something approaching a civil war spread through Derry and Belfast and the pale country towns of Northern Ireland. There were petrol bombs and gunshots, house burnings and households fleeing, tear-gas clouds and panicking policemen, even rumours of an invasion by the Irish army. There was the sobering – or intoxicating – reality of the casualties: ten killed in the instantly mythologized ‘battles’ of July and August, and approaching a thousand wounded.

  Back in London, the British government had dispersed for the summer recess regardless. But, by 14 August, Callaghan had decided that the disorder in Ulster required a radical solution. Harold Wilson was on holiday in the Scillies, so Callaghan flew to meet him nearby in Cornwall and they held a hasty discussion. ‘We did not have a map of Northern Ireland with us,’ Callaghan later recalled, ‘so when at one point Wilson wanted to know how far somewhere was from somewhere else the Group Captain hurried off and came back with a small atlas which we all pored over.’ Wilson agreed that British troops could be deployed on the streets of Ulster if required. Then he flew back to the Scillies. Callaghan got a plane back to London:

  We had not been in the air for more than ten minutes when the navigator came into the cabin with a pencilled message scribbled on a signal pad … An official request for the use of troops had been made by the Northern Ireland Government. I immediately scribbled ‘Permission granted’ on the signal pad and handed it back to the navigator.

  *

  Northern Ireland can be a disorientating place, now as in the seventies, for inexperienced visitors from Britain, whether writers or soldiers or politicians. I went there for the first time in December 2005. From the plane, the Ulster countryside looked faintly claustrophobic and foreign, all dark lakes and tiny fields. I worried fleetingly about whether sons of British army officers should make research trips to the Bogside or the Falls Road. But then I read the front page of my copy of the Irish News – ‘Troops cut to lowest level since early 70s’ – and the opposite anxiety stirred. There might not be much of Heath and Callaghan’s Northern Ireland left to look at.

  I needn’t have worried. The centre of Belfast was like Leeds, proud Victoriana and post-war concrete disappearing behind confident new office blocks. Yet it only took a few minutes walking westwards to leave it behind, for a tattier no man’s land of cheap cafes and butcher’s shops. Beyond them was a ring road. Beyond that, the Falls Road.

  The first thing that struck me was the scale of it. The Falls rose steadily for miles towards an enclosing wall of bare hills, twisting and dipping and steepening, but everything either side of it seemed in miniature. Narrow side streets ran off at seemingly random angles, revealing the smallest Victorian terraces I had ever seen. Behind the houses were minuscule walled-in yards and tight back alleys full of dustbins and blind corners. There were no front gardens, no window boxes, no trees set in the mean, uneven pavements – nothing to conceal an outsider for a second as they passed the endless rows of net curtains.

  Near the lower end of the Falls Road there was an IRA ‘Garden of Remembrance’. It was immaculately kept, all buffed black stone and gold and not a quiver of graffiti. One of many plaques began, ‘Roll of Honour D Coy 2nd Battalion Belfast Brigade …’ A list of activists’ names followed, when they died – ‘1971 1972 1972 1972 1972 1973 1973 1974 1974 1975 …’ – and their ages – ‘26 17 21 24 18 17 27 17 54 20 …’ At the centre of the garden a mural commemorated the local resistance to an official curfew in 1970. In it eager children shoved aside coils of barbed wire, and women held aloft dustbin lids, the area’s traditional tool to warn of approaching soldiers and policemen. Everyone in the painting had an expression of utter happiness and defiance.

  Even in 2005, there was still not much along the Falls to s
uggest other, less charged ways of living: just a few shops and small businesses, the smell of frying from the open doors of takeaways, and an extravagant new leisure centre. A few hundred yards behind it, oddly, there was another. I set off down a side street towards it. The terraced houses ended abruptly in a stretch of waste ground, all ancient buddleia and dumped mattresses and fire extinguishers; and then the terraces started again, but with conspicuously different murals: this leisure centre was in the Shankill.

  ‘Ulster Will Always Remain British’, said the walls; and ‘No Surrender!’; and ‘1969 Volunteers Defend Shankill Community from Republican Attack’. There was another commemorative list of the fallen – the same sense as in the Falls of history slowing to a crawl. ‘Beatties High Class Restaurant’, said a sign over a cafe. ‘Teas. Coffees. Bovril.’

  The situation in Ulster at the end of the sixties, however much it was of the British government’s own making, was, short of a world war, perhaps the most extreme test that could have been devised for politicians such as Callaghan, Wilson and Heath, with their limited knowledge of and inherited assumptions about the province, coupled with their dislike of confrontation and their belief in negotiation and compromise, even when undignified. Sectarianism based on centuries of history and dogma, fundamental conflicts of interest, terrorism, the possible collapse of law and order – such challenges can bring out the worst, as well as the best, in politicians who think of themselves as reasonable and moderate. Britain’s actions in Northern Ireland during the seventies would demonstrate the former reflex more than the latter.

  Then again, the unfamiliarity of the situation in Ulster could be overstated. Bitter animosity between Catholics and Protestants, expressed through riots and religious discrimination and at elections, had existed in northern England, notably in Liverpool, and Scotland since at least the nineteenth century. And British troops had been sent to pacify Northern Ireland before: in 1907, 1920 and 1935, for example. For anyone who cared to notice, the 1907 deployment contained ominous lessons about the suitability or otherwise of British soldiers for policing urban Ulster. During a riot in the lower Falls, the Belfast News-Letter reported, ‘in one of the bye [side] streets a squadron of cavalry were subjected to a terrific storm of paviors [paving stones], which rained down on them from the upper windows, and the men to save their faces had to lie down on their saddles’. The Northern Whig recorded that the troops found the spidery layout of west Belfast bewildering, ‘while the rioters knew every hole’.

  Yet for all this the Ulster crisis of the late sixties and early seventies was something new. Unlike its predecessors, it came as a shock to the rest of the UK; it arrived during a period of wider national self-doubt; and it was broadcast on television. And by the time Heath became prime minister in 1970, it had got much worse.

  After the troops’ arrival the previous August, there had been a brief lull. Using simple streetcorner diplomacy – wearing berets rather than helmets, making a show of consulting all parties – and occasional force – when unionist demonstrators shot at soldiers, they shot more lethally back – the army restored a degree of order. Famously, soldiers were given tea and even fish and chips by grateful Catholics, who thought that the policing of Northern Ireland was now in neutral hands. In Britain, there was a sense of cautious satisfaction about how things were going. ‘In Belfast the British army is once again in the old routine,’ began a television documentary broadcast a month into the deployment. ‘Men in the middle, keeping the peace between two warring factions. But this isn’t Aden, or Cyprus. It is, incredibly, in Britain’s own backyard.’

  Yet citing Aden and Cyprus, and by implication the dozens of other civil wars and end-of-empire conflicts which Britain had been involved in since the Second World War, was more double-edged than the documentary-makers probably intended. The behaviour of the British army during these operations had not always been as benign as mainstream British opinion liked to maintain. And when the documentary-makers interviewed the soldiers as they tramped the Belfast pavements, their answers were not wholly reassuring. ‘They change their minds by the hour,’ said one crisp young officer of the local residents, with a slow smile and shake of his head. A skinny private was asked if he and his comrades understood what Ulster’s sectarianism was really about. ‘No. Not really,’ he said. ‘We’re not really interested about the problem. We’re just here to do a job.’ And that job was about to change.

  In December 1969, the Provisional IRA was founded. The armed struggle for a united Ireland was about to resume. In recent decades it had been less than glorious. Since its peak in the early twenties during the war of independence against the British and during the Irish civil war that followed, the Irish Republican Army had been steadily suppressed in the Republic and had lost momentum in Ulster. It mounted campaigns in the late thirties and early forties, and again in the late fifties and early sixties, but with diminishing returns: whereas the former included bomb attacks across Britain, from Coventry to King’s Cross station, and prompted repressive British emergency legislation, the latter was confined to Ulster and was so fitful that it barely featured in British newspapers. By the late sixties, despite the political polarization in Ulster, and the frequency with which unionists invoked the spectre of armed republicanism, the IRA was, in reality, dwindling and divided. In Belfast, it was down to fewer than sixty members and a few guns. In Dublin, where the IRA leadership was based, there was a growing inclination to abandon violence in favour of a peaceful left-leaning nationalism. ‘It seemed to me that if this went on much longer,’ wrote the IRA’s head of intelligence Seán Mac Stíofáin afterwards, ‘the IRA would end up as a paper army.’ When Protestants rampaged through Catholic areas of Belfast in August 1969, the IRA did little to stop them. Angry residents and local graffiti began to say that IRA stood for ‘I Ran Away’.

  Mac Stíofáin helped organize a breakaway by IRA members who still believed in military methods. He became chief of staff of the new group, which called itself the Provisional IRA. The Provisionals, or the Provos, or simply the IRA, as they soon became known, were even less of an army at first than the body from which they had seceded. But their timing was perfect. During early 1970, relations between the British troops and many Catholics began to fray. In the Catholic parts of Derry and Belfast, the army had effectively replaced the RUC as the local police. On isolated housing estates and in the mazes of inner-city terraces, soldiers with limited experience of and patience for policing, and sometimes with heads full of the age-old British prejudices against the Irish, met bored young men with few job prospects and their own deep-set enmities towards the forces of law and order, towards the British, and towards British soldiers on Irish soil in particular. At the same time, the events of 1968 and 1969 had created a new and lingering appetite for disorder, ‘a sudden generation of kamikaze children’, in the phrase of the civil-rights activist and author Eamonn McCann.

  In March 1970, an RUC post in Londonderry used by British troops was attacked by a crowd, and twelve soldiers were injured. In April, troops trying to stop a sectarian confrontation on a Belfast estate used tear gas and dragged alleged ringleaders out of the melee. The soldiers were pelted with stones and bricks. The same month, the commander of the British forces in Ulster warned that petrol-bombers would be shot. In July, a patrol searching for weapons around the Falls Road was trapped by a hostile crowd, and other soldiers nearby were shot at by snipers from the Official IRA, as what was left of the original IRA now called itself. More troops were sent in to save the situation and conducted pointedly brutal house-to-house searches. Four civilians were killed by the soldiers, a visiting English photographer among them. The restraints and studied optimism of peacekeeping were being superseded by another military mode, of which Britain also had much recent experience: counterinsurgency, war waged against both guerrillas and the civilians who support them.

  It was just what the Provisionals needed. ‘The behaviour of the British army was quite stupid,’ writes Gerry Adam
s, then a young but rising IRA activist in Belfast, in his memoirs. ‘They acted as an oppressive occupying force… affecting everybody [on my estate] and uniting against them people who were already fairly coordinated … dealing with refugees and defending their area.’ Some British officers came to share this view. ‘The Lower Falls operation changed everything,’ wrote Colonel Michael Dewar, who had extensive experience of commanding troops in Belfast, in his 1985 book The British Army in Northern Ireland. ‘PIRA grew from fewer than 100 activists in May–June to roughly 800 in December 1970.’

  And not all these recruits were stone-throwing teenagers. Many already had military skills which they had acquired – such are the black ironies of civil wars – in the British armed forces. Mac Stíofáin himself, who was born and grew up in London and claimed to have been politicized then by the anti-Irishness he encountered, had served in the Royal Air Force in the late forties: ‘I would get what I realised by then was very useful to have, which was some military training.’ The campaign he now intended to launch in Ulster had three elements: the IRA would aggressively defend Catholic areas; it would attack ‘economic’ targets, making Northern Ireland’s place in the UK financially unsustainable; and it would kill British soldiers. Mac Stíofáin estimated that when the death toll reached forty, the British government would pull its troops out.