by Peter Taylor
Even with hindsight, William Craig, the hard-line Stormont Minister for Home Affairs who had not banned the Derry march but restricted its movement, had no regrets about the way the police handled the march. ‘I was quite pleased with the way the RUC reacted,’ he told me thirty years later. ‘Maybe we’d made a mistake and we should have strengthened the RUC. The march was approached with a virtually certain knowledge that it would end in disorder.’ Didn’t he see anything wrong with scenes of policemen beating demonstrators over the head? ‘They were a few that caught the attention of the media. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. People were involved in violence, they weren’t marching.’18
Craig had acted as he did to prevent a confrontation between the civil rights march and a parade planned by the Protestant Apprentice Boys of Derry for the same day. Many of the violent clashes that were to follow in the months and years ahead came in the wake of marches by Protestant Orangemen and other loyalist organizations.19
The events in Derry on 5 October 1968 were a watershed and the first of many to come. As the months went by, things went from bad to worse with protesters determined to march and Stormont determined to resist. Violence flared time and again as the situation seemed to veer out of control. The situation became even more critical in mid-April 1969 when loyalist paramilitaries blew up Belfast’s water supply and some of its electricity installations. They hoped to make the attacks appear to be the work of the IRA and thereby destabilize further the shaky position of Terence O’Neill.20 The British Government responded by sending 1,500 soldiers to the province to guard vital installations. Paisley and the hardliners in the Ulster Unionist Party demanded O’Neill’s head and finally got it when he resigned on 28 April 1969.
By now, many Catholics had become totally alienated from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which they had always seen as a sectarian force and which, with the exception of a tiny handful, they had never been prepared to join. The way that the police and their adjuncts, the ‘B’ Specials, conducted themselves in Derry simply confirmed what most nationalists had believed all along – that they were a Protestant force determined to keep Catholics in their place and, when necessary, beat them into submission.
By the summer of 1969, the explosion was ready to happen. Not surprisingly, it was ignited in Derry, swiftly spread to Belfast and then engulfed the whole province. There appeared to be a tragic inevitability to it all that neither the British Government at Westminster nor the unionist Government at Stormont seemed able to stop. By the time politicians woke up to what had to be done, it was too late.
Under growing pressure from the British Government, ‘one man, one vote’ and the reform oflocal government boundaries had been introduced by O’Neill’s successor, Major James Chichester-Clark, shortly after he took over as Prime Minister on 1 May 1969, beating his hardline opponent, Brian Faulkner, by a single vote. But in a summer of growing tension, the biggest test of the resolve of the Wilson Government was still to come. On 12 August, the Apprentice Boys of Derry prepared to march through the city and around its walls in their annual commemoration of the lifting of Catholic King James II’s siege of the city in 1689. Chichester-Clark was not minded to ban the parade given that he needed to maintain his image as a unionist strongman, which he never was. To his unionist right wing, a ban would have been seen as a sign of weakness and further capitulation to the civil rights movement that was now seen as the enemy within. The Wilson Government had no such excuse and could have banned the march itself through an order from the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, thereby saving Chichester-Clark the embarrassment and potential political danger of having to do so himself. But no such move was made. ‘I’m a libertarian,’ Callaghan said. ‘I don’t like banning marches.’ It went ahead and the fuse was lit.
On Tuesday 12 August, before the parade proper began, some Apprentice Boys tossed coins from the city wall into the Bogside below, where ‘small knots’ of Catholics were congregated.21 By early afternoon, nails followed by stones had been thrown at the police who had erected barriers to keep the two sides apart. The young Bogsiders’ throwing range had extended to the marching Apprentice Boys themselves whose supporters began to throw stones back. By the evening, a full-scale riot was under way. This time when the police pursued the rioters back into the Bogside, they were met by a hail of petrol bombs, many hurled from the roof of the Rossville Flats that guarded the entrance to the area. Its residents were ready. The police were not. The ferocious rioting lasted for three days and became known as the ‘Battle of the Bogside’.22
In the end the police, who had even resorted to throwing stones back, could not cope and took heavy casualties. They were ill-trained and ill-equipped to deal with what now appeared to be a major insurrection. Police reinforcements were brought in from other parts of the province but they fared no better. Two-thirds of one unit from County Down – forty-three out of fifty-nine officers – were injured. Water cannon and, for the first time in the United Kingdom, CS gas were used but had little effect on the rioters’ enthusiasm for the fight. The rioting continued throughout Wednesday 13 August, with the newly elected Westminster MP for Mid Ulster, Bernadette Devlin, urging the Bogsiders on and helping them to break up paving stones for ammunition.23 One of the young men in the heat of battle was a young republican called Martin McGuinness who was to become one of the IRA’s most senior figures and, astonishingly, more than thirty years later, Minister for Education in a devolved Stormont Government.
With the rioting into its third day, Thursday 14 August, and the situation critical, the Stormont Government implemented hastily drawn-up plans to call in British troops to aid the civil power and relieve the exhausted and demoralized police. By late afternoon, the 1st Battalion, The Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment of Yorkshire marched into Derry. They had been brought in from Belfast to the outskirts of Derry the previous month because of the deteriorating situation in the city. The battalion was a constituent part of the province’s garrison known as 39 Brigade. Its C company was commanded by Major David who had to act swiftly when the order suddenly came to deploy.
I was actually wearing desert boots at the time because the company commanders had spent the day going backwards and forwards into Derry in civilian clothes to monitor the situation. When I got back from one of the recces, we suddenly got the order to deploy. I dashed into the Officers’ Mess to change but didn’t have time to put my boots on. We drove in to cheers, presumably from the Protestants because they thought we were going to sort out the Catholics. It was during the parade that the aggro really started. We took over from the ‘B’ Specials. They looked like pirates with hankies over their faces.
The hope was that the arrival of British troops would calm things down and the situation would then return to what passed as normality. But it was not to be. The significance of the deployment of the army was not lost on Frank Cooper, then a civil servant at the MOD. ‘There was a fear that you were going into an unknown mire and that you didn’t know what was there,’ he told me. ‘You didn’t know what was going to happen to you when you were there and how you got out at the other side of the bog. But I think people were persuaded that something had to be done.’ At 5 p.m. on Thursday 14 August 1969, reluctantly and belatedly, the ‘Brits’ touched the Tar Baby. The repercussions were monumental.
Chapter Two
Honeymoon
August 1969–October 1969
Brian was a young Lance-Corporal in the Prince of Wales’s Own Regiment when he drove into Derry with Support Company that Thursday afternoon. He had until recently been a full Corporal but had lost a stripe after he had been ‘busted’ for losing one of his prisoners whilst on night duty in the guard room back in England before the battalion had been deployed to Northern Ireland. Support Company’s entry into the heart of Derry was somewhat delayed when a smoke grenade accidentally fell off one of the Land-rovers as they were driving over the Craigavon bridge across the River Foyle that separates the Protestant Waterside from the Catholi
c Bogside and the Creggan estate that rises above it. Brian was shocked when he first saw the state of the police. ‘They were tired and dejected. They’d been at it for three solid days and nights. I think with the limited resources they had, they had done a pretty good job. The force was too great against them at the time and it was obvious that they needed back-up. They probably resented the fact that we’d had to help them.’
Support Company took up position on the section of the ancient city walls by Bishop’s Gate that afforded a grandstand view of the Bogside below, littered with the debris of three days of rioting and the smouldering remains of burned-out buildings and cars. ‘We didn’t exactly know what to expect. We were clapped and cheered. We looked down and people were waving at us and being very friendly towards us. They were even wolf whistling. They were shouting, “We’re glad to see you. Thanks for coming. Thanks for saving us.” I felt quite elated about it. We were doing a good job, doing something that we’d been trained to do. Then they started to shout up the walls, “Are you hungry?” “Yes.” So we sent down a rope and they tied baskets onto it and put fish and chips and flasks of coffee in them. It was wonderful. This was obviously the honeymoon period. They had no reason to fear us. As far as they were concerned, we were there to stop them being subjected to bashings by the police.’
By that Thursday evening, the rioting in Derry had died down. To Brian and his mates, it was mission accomplished. ‘We thought, This is it. The end of the Troubles. If only we’d known.’ But by that time what was happening in Belfast made Derry look like a side-show. There had been fierce rioting the previous evening along the interface known as the ‘Orange–Green’ line that separates the Protestant Shankill Road from the Catholic Falls Road on one side and the Catholic Ardoyne on the other. The circumstances that gave rise to it were not as simple as both sides now like to make out. Both maintain they did not start it. Republicans insist that nationalists were subjected to an unprovoked attack by loyalists. Loyalists maintain they were simply responding to attacks by nationalists and the IRA. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. The already tense atmosphere that Wednesday evening was heightened by a television broadcast by the Irish Prime Minister, Jack Lynch, who said his Government could ‘no longer stand by’ and was sending field hospitals to the border. To the fury of unionists, he also raised the constitutional spectre.
Recognizing, however, that the reunification of the national territory can provide the only permanent solution for the problem, it is our intention to request the British Government to enter into early negotiations with the Irish Government to review the present constitutional position of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland.1
The message was inflammatory, fuelling the emotions already felt by both sides. Nationalists thought that the deployment of the Irish army to the border meant that the Fifth Cavalry was coming. Loyalists thought that doomsday was at hand. The British Government thought that the normally mild-mannered Taoiseach had lost his head.
The situation was already tense because of developments earlier that day. Republicans in Derry had asked their comrades in other parts of the province to take the heat off them by fomenting disturbances elsewhere designed to stretch the RUC even more. However, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association decided to exclude Belfast from such diversionary tactics on the grounds that they would be likely to intensify the sectarian tensions already simmering there. But some Belfast republicans disagreed and organized marches that Wednesday evening to Springfield Road and Hastings Street police stations off the Falls Road, protesting ‘police brutality’ in Derry. Lynch’s words spurred the crowd on. Stones, missiles and some petrol bombs were thrown. The targets were the police, not loyalists on the Shankill Road. The police believed they were facing serious attack and, mindful of what was happening to their fellow officers in Derry, mobilized some of their Commer armoured personnel carriers (APCs) to disperse the rioters. The APCs were known as ‘Mothballs’ because they had been in storage and were designed for use along the border, not urban riot control.2 As the Commers drove the crowds back, five shots, believed to have come from the IRA’s guns, were fired at one of them and a hand grenade was hurled in its direction. Half a dozen further shots then rang out. At this stage, there is no evidence that the police returned fire. It was the first shooting in Belfast that week. Whilst these confrontations with the police became increasingly serious, loyalists were assembling missiles and petrol bombs on their side of the Orange–Green line, out of sight of the Catholic crowds along the Falls Road and the streets running off it.
In the early hours of Thursday morning, 14 August, Dr Paisley had a meeting with the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, James Chichester-Clark, and offered him the use of a Protestant force should the British Government only agree to send in the army on terms which were unacceptable to unionists.3 Chichester-Clark had been summoned to London the previous week and warned by the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, that if he requested troops, there might be constitutional strings attached. The Stormont Government had no doubt that this meant their parliament might be suspended or abolished and Direct Rule imposed from Westminster.4 Such a move was the unionists’ nightmare, entailing the loss of all they held dear and the end of the institution by which they had maintained their grip on the province for almost fifty years. Chichester-Clark declined Paisley’s offer of assistance.
By the evening, the scenes along Belfast’s sectarian interface had become decidedly ugly and a handful of IRA men had laid their hands on the few guns that had been stashed away after previous campaigns and gone into action. The organization that had renounced physical force at the beginning of the decade was in no position to fulfil its traditional role in Belfast as the defender of the nationalist community and had to do the best it could with what few men and weapons it had. The IRA was unprepared because defence was not IRA policy. Its Dublin-based Chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding, believed that defending Catholics from Protestant attack was a sectarian act and counterproductive since the aim of the reconstituted Republican Movement was to bring the two working-class communities together and not drive them further apart.5 In the two highly charged days and nights of Thursday 14 and Friday 15 August, veterans of the IRA’s recent border campaign, ‘Operation Harvest’, like Billy McKee, Joe Cahill and John Kelly, who had long disagreed with the Goulding line and remained wedded to the IRA’s traditional weapon of physical force, did what they could to defend their community from what they saw as an RUC and loyalist onslaught.
On Thursday night, Hastings Street police station came under further missile and petrol bomb attack from the nationalist crowd, triggering a new phase in the violence. Hitherto, most of the fighting had been between nationalists and the police but now the rioting became sectarian as some of the nationalist crowd spilled over into the Protestant end of the streets that ran from the Shankill to the Falls. The loyalists were ready. Vicious street fighting erupted. There were clashes too along other parts of the Orange-Green line. Again, the IRA opened fire and the police returned it. Shortly after midnight, shots were fired at a group of policemen and Protestant civilians standing on a corner. One of them hit 26-year-old Herbert Roy in the chest, killing him almost immediately. Three policemen received gunshot wounds. Less than half an hour later, the police deployed three Shorland armoured cars equipped with .30 mm Browning machine guns capable of firing 500 rounds a minute. As the Shorlands roared into action, they were pelted with stones and petrol bombs. A tracer bullet from one of the Brownings came through two walls and killed a nine-year-old Catholic boy, Patrick Rooney, as he lay in his bed in Divis Flats. Ironically his father was a former British soldier who had served for three years with the British army in Cyprus.6 In the violence that continued throughout Friday 15 August, five more people were shot dead, four Catholics and one Protestant. Three of the Catholics were killed by RUC bullets. As the shooting intensified through the night, loyalist mobs invaded the Catholic ends of the streets they shared in common and torched their
houses. In Conway Street, forty-eight homes were burned to the ground. In Bombay Street, 60 per cent of houses were consumed by flames. Dramatic television pictures of the time show flames leaping out of windows and roofs and people salvaging what they could from their homes. That night entered nationalist folklore as the loyalist ‘pogrom’, ethnic cleansing in the United Kingdom.
By dawn on Friday morning, the local police commanders decided that the situation was out of control and they would have to ask for the intervention of the British army. They were ‘satisfied that the night’s events had been the work of the IRA’ and informed their superiors that they had intelligence of an imminent armed incursion by the IRA from the South.7 The intelligence was fanciful. There is no doubt that the IRA was involved but what few veterans there were only came onto the scene once the rioting had become serious and the police had deployed their armoured vehicles. The IRA’s most notable engagement, which also entered republican folklore, was the defence of St Comgall’s Roman Catholic school which had come under loyalist petrol bomb attack.
