Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  By now the police knew they were not just dealing with copycat gangs. But there were no leads. They set up a confidential hotline so that local people could give information without fear of reprisals. Still nothing. At the end of March, they launched a string of pre-dawn raids, arresting more than twenty-five people, including several schoolteachers, a lecturer, a publisher, a former trade union official, a farmer and four former Plaid Cymru parliamentary candidates. But the suspects were released without charge. The next day, Not the Nine O’Clock News ended with a clip of flames flickering over a pile of blackened wood, parodying the Coal Board’s recent adverts for coal fires. ‘Come home to a real fire,’ says Rowan Atkinson’s reassuring voiceover. ‘Buy a cottage in Wales.’3

  Although the culprits were never caught, attention eventually focused on a single group, who called themselves Meibion Glyndŵr (‘Sons of Glendower’). The police claimed they were a handful of fanatics. But this was not quite true. Some polls suggested that in Welsh-speaking areas they enjoyed considerable sympathy, while nationalist students wore T-shirts that proclaimed ‘Taniwch dros Gymru!’ (‘Light for Wales!’) or ‘Ta ta tŷ ha’ ha ha’ (‘Bye bye, summer house, ha ha’). When visitors asked about them, plenty of people said they sympathized with the arsonists. In the summer of 1982, Paul Theroux could not find ‘anyone in Wales who objected to the burning of English-owned cottages’. ‘They burn these cottages, the Plaid Cymru,’ said a landlady in St Dogmael’s, Pembrokeshire. ‘Some of the chaps are very tough, you know. That’s what I don’t understand – there are still so many English cottages! The chaps do try, but they haven’t been successful.’

  The arson campaign did not come out of nowhere. Household incomes in parts of North Wales were barely two-thirds of the national average, while in Gwynedd, where there were an estimated 7,500 holiday homes, some 4,300 people were on the council-house waiting list. But the decisive factor was not economic; it was something more primal. When nationalists talked of ‘English occupation’, they were talking not just about people buying holiday homes; they were talking about the remorseless spread of English expressions, habits and customs, the decline of the Welsh language, the steady drift of cultural and economic power to London. To nationalists, the holiday homes were symbols of something deeper. In the Welsh magazine Arcade, one reader claimed that anybody ‘with a modicum of sense coupled with patriotism’ could see ‘that we are witnessing genocide by substitution’. ‘Large areas of west and north Wales’, agreed the Plaid Cymru MP Dafydd Wigley, ‘are in danger of being no more Celtic in character than is the Lake District or Cornwall today. What military conquest has failed to do over two millennia is now being accomplished by the cheque-book invasion in two decades.’4

  In hindsight, the striking thing about Wales and Scotland in the early 1980s is the nationalists’ total failure to profit from the economic downturn. In industrial working-class areas, the recession had fallen like a hammer-blow. British Steel employment in South Wales plunged from 66,000 in 1973 to less than 20,000 ten years later. In Scotland the collapse of textiles, coal, steel and shipbuilding similarly felt like the death sentence for an entire working-class ecosystem. In Kilmarnock and Paisley, as in Port Talbot and Newport, the headlines were dominated by factory closures, job losses, poverty and deprivation. And in both countries Mrs Thatcher’s middle-class Englishness, as well as her rhetorical stridency and the standing affront of her gender, made her an irresistible hate figure. ‘Scotland’s ruled by the bloody English,’ a purple-faced man shouted at Paul Theroux in a pub in Dunbar, East Lothian. ‘They dropped Exchange Control so they could spend our money abroad – they don’t spend it in Scotland, though they stole it from us in the first place by stealing our oil resairves [sic] … I’m a freedom fighter – don’t let these tweeds fool you. You can ask my wife if you don’t believe I’m a freedom fighter.’5

  In reality, self-styled freedom fighters were surprisingly few on the ground. After having made great strides in the early 1970s, both the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru had gone backwards. The failed devolution referendums of 1979 had punched a gaping hole in their morale. In the general election a few weeks later, Plaid Cymru won just 8 per cent of the Welsh vote and two seats, down from 11 per cent and three seats in October 1974. Even more strikingly, the Scottish Nationalists collapsed to 17 per cent and two seats, down from 30 per cent and eleven seats. Demoralized and bitterly divided, Plaid Cymru lost one in four members almost overnight. And as both parties sank into introversion and faction-fighting, they conspicuously failed to exploit the Conservatives’ unpopularity and Labour’s divisions, not least because they could not decide whether they were vehicles for middle-class nationalism or parties of the radical left. In 1983, thanks partly to the emergence of the Alliance, they went even further backwards in vote share, though both clung on to their two seats. As a parliamentary force, nationalism seemed close to extinction.6

  In a broader sense, however, nationalism remained very much alive. A survey in Wales in 1979 found that, if forced to choose, 57 per cent described themselves as Welsh and only 34 per cent British. And given what had happened in Northern Ireland, few people treated national sentiment as lightly as they had done a decade earlier. Even the Conservatives, the party of the Union, were careful not to dismiss it out of hand. In the general election of 1979, they explicitly promised that to reverse the precipitous decline in the Welsh language they would establish a separate Welsh television service, to run for twenty-five hours a week on the new fourth channel. In September 1979, however, they changed their minds, partly because it would be very expensive, partly because Wales’s independent channel HTV lobbied fiercely against it, but also because many Welsh-speakers feared the new channel would become a ‘ghetto’. Instead, Willie Whitelaw announced that, every week, they would split twenty-two hours of Welsh programmes between BBC2 and the fourth channel. That, he thought, would be a reasonable compromise.7

  Unfortunately, many nationalists saw Whitelaw’s plan as a monstrous betrayal. On 5 May 1980 Plaid Cymru’s veteran president, Gwynfor Evans, told the press that the government had five months to reverse its plans. If not, on 6 October he would begin a hunger strike, and he planned to continue until he died. At first some people thought he was joking. One Tory MP offered to sponsor him. Evans himself remarked that the only thing that really worried him was the agony of smelling his wife’s gammon. But it soon became clear that he was in deadly earnest. Depressed by the stagnation of the nationalist cause, he had decided that in 1980 his people would ‘raise themselves to the level of history’. ‘The Government has shown such contempt for us in Wales’, he said, ‘that there is no other way.’ His old friend Sir Goronwy Daniel, the former head of the Welsh Office and vice-chancellor of the University of Wales, warned Whitelaw that Evans was not joking. ‘Anybody who knows anything about Wales’, he said, ‘will tell you he means it.’8

  In London, it seemed inconceivable that Evans would starve himself to death in order to get twenty-five hours of Welsh-language television on one channel rather than twenty-two hours on two channels. But Evans was not a frivolous person. Having led Plaid Cymru for the last thirty-five years, he had become the party’s first MP at the Carmarthen by-election in 1966 and held the seat again in the late 1970s. Tall, white-haired, a committed Christian and fervent pacifist, he made a very plausible martyr. And now, single-handedly, he turned an obscure disagreement about a television channel into a matter of life and death. When the Welsh Secretary, Nicholas Edwards, arrived at the Eisteddfod in August, he was attacked by members of the Welsh Language Society, who besieged him in his car, beating on the windows with their fists, and laid waste to the nearby HTV Wales stand. All the time, dozens of robed druids looked on approvingly.

  Until now, the dispute had seemed like the plot of a 1950s comedy. But, as the Guardian remarked, it could no longer be shrugged off as a joke. Given the growing mood of ‘anger and resentment’, as well as the arson campaign against English-owned homes, th
ere was a ‘widespread feeling that breaking point cannot be far off’. The Commons Select Committee on Welsh Affairs warned that ‘public disorder could break out’ unless the government acted, with Evans’s hunger strike acting as the ‘detonator for an all-Wales explosion’. Even the fiercely anti-nationalist Labour MP Leo Abse feared Evans’s hunger strike could turn into a national crisis. There was a serious risk, agreed the Observer, of ‘old racial hatreds’ escalating into bloodshed, just as in Northern Ireland.

  Wales has gone a small but significant way down the road to terrorism in the past year. Attacks on TV transmitters and English-owned cottages, incendiary devices left here and there, the smell of violence at this month’s National Eisteddfod; the threat of a ‘fast to death’ by Gwynfor Evans, Welsh nationalism’s peaceful patriarch and mentor – all these are warning signs.9

  Evans himself believed Mrs Thatcher would never countenance a U-turn. On 1 September, his sixty-eighth birthday, he told the Guardian that he genuinely expected to die. In Cardiff a few days later, thousands marched in his support – and his hunger strike was still a month off. At the Welsh Office one junior minister wrote in his diary that Evans was determined to become a martyr, was bound to become a national hero and might well ‘inspire a less able breed to violence’. Even Nicholas Edwards was now persuaded that unless they backed down there would be ‘intolerable consequences’. On 15 September he and Whitelaw told Mrs Thatcher that Evans was genuinely going to kill himself. That would be ‘disastrous’, she said. ‘The last thing the Government needed was to inflame nationalism again.’ They had made a mistake, and must change course.10

  Two days later, the government announced that Wales would get its own channel, the future S4C, after all. The hunger strike was off. At a rally near Evans’s Pembrokeshire home, almost a thousand people gathered to cheer their hero. Deep down, though, Plaid Cymru’s president was a little disappointed. He had never expected Mrs Thatcher to give in so quickly, robbing his party of a unique propaganda coup. But as Nicholas Edwards told the press, the danger of provoking nationalist violence had proved decisive. The hunger strike had worked. Across the Irish Sea, another group of radical nationalists drew the inevitable lesson. Five weeks later, they began a hunger strike of their own.11

  Not long after Mrs Thatcher had come to office, her first Northern Ireland Secretary, Humphrey Atkins, sent his colleagues a paper on the situation in the United Kingdom’s smallest country. Even though Northern Ireland’s interminable saga of killings and bombings was more than a decade old, it made for sobering reading. Of the province’s 1½ million people, Atkins wrote, about two-thirds were Protestants, most of whom were fiercely loyal to the union with Great Britain. The remainder were Catholics, many of whom dreamed of unification with the Republic of Ireland. These were distinct and often antagonistic communities, divided by ‘housing, education, ways of life, culture and attitudes to history … People know to which community they belong and they live, and vote, accordingly.’

  After the outbreak of fierce inter-communal violence at the end of the 1960s, the British Army had been sent in to restore law and order. But their intervention had seen the conflict escalate into a low-level guerrilla war, peaking with the deaths of 480 people in 1972. Two years later, a general strike by militant Protestant workers had brought down the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive, and since then the province had been governed directly from Westminster. Yet the security situation, Atkins reported, had greatly improved in recent years. Bombings, attacks on civilians and army casualties had fallen sharply, with civilian deaths down from 207 in 1976 to just thirty-seven in 1979. And contrary to the stereotype that children in Northern Ireland came into the world wearing a balaclava, most of the country was ‘almost permanently free’ from terrorism.

  Quite apart from the violence of the Provisional IRA and the various loyalist vigilante groups, Northern Ireland was not a happy place. Nowhere in the United Kingdom had been harder hit by the decline of heavy industry; nowhere was poverty more endemic, insecurity greater or alienation more entrenched. Even before the recession, more than one in ten people were out of work; in some areas, such as Catholic west Belfast, the jobless rate among adult men was closer to 50 per cent. Housing conditions were far worse than in Britain, infant mortality was higher and average weekly household income was only £79, compared with £93 in Britain. In some parts of Belfast and Londonderry, living standards were so low that they reminded observers of southern Italy. This was the environment in which paramilitary groups found willing recruits.

  The prospects for recovery, meanwhile, were bleak. Historically, Northern Ireland’s economy had rested on agriculture, shipbuilding and textiles, all of which were in deep decline. Successive governments had poured in torrents of money, but with four out of ten people employed by the state, the province was already more reliant on public sector jobs than anywhere else in Western Europe. By the turn of the decade, Northern Ireland took more than £1 billion a year from Westminster, which amounted to at least a quarter of the province’s GDP. Every single job at the giant shipbuilder Harland and Wolff, long a pillar of Protestant working-class identity, was subsidized by British taxpayers to the tune of £7,500 a year, the equivalent of at least £40,000 a year today. Atkins did not see any solution. Neither did anybody else. In ten years, more than 140,000 people had left Northern Ireland to build new lives overseas, the highest emigration rate in the Western world.12

  To most outside observers, the stark facts of Northern Ireland’s economic plight paled beside the horrors of terrorist violence and sectarian hatred. Paul Theroux, who visited the province during his journey around the coastline of Great Britain, was entirely typical. Almost despite himself, Theroux could see that for most people life went on as normal. In supposedly strife-torn Londonderry, for example, he went to a festival where thousands enjoyed bicycle races, a talent show and cookery demonstrations. But like most visitors, he was drawn to the signs of abnormality: the graffiti in Protestant areas that said, of the republican hunger strikers, ‘Let Them Die’; the people in Derry who said that the British were ‘brutes’ and ‘murderers’. And he found Belfast ‘demented and sick’, with soldiers, fences and metal detectors everywhere; a city of ‘bellicose religion, and dirt, and poverty, and narrow-mindedness, and sneaky defiance, trickery and murder, and little brick terraces, and drink shops, and empty stores, and barricades, and boarded windows, and starved dogs, and dirty-faced children’. It was, he concluded, ‘the blackest city in Britain, and the most damaged’.13

  Theroux probably saw what he had always wanted to see. But he was far from alone. At the end of December 1979, reflecting on the last ten years in Northern Ireland’s history, The Times’s correspondent, Christopher Thomas, struck a similarly bleak note. Even now, after the death toll had fallen, four people were killed by bombs and bullets every week. ‘The deprivation in parts of Belfast is frightening,’ he wrote. ‘Anybody who feels like risking a drive through Turf Lodge, Whiterock, Ballymurphy or the Lower Falls district cannot avoid being moved. There, fear is the master.’ The city had long since been carved up into Catholic and Protestant areas; to wander into the wrong street, depending on your surname, could literally mean death. ‘But wherever you are’, Thomas went on, ‘the scene is the same: relentless rows of centuries-old terraces, some of them bombed and bricked up; Army vehicles everywhere; barbed wire and great walls of corrugated iron protecting vital installations; roads strewn with bricks and stones that have been hurled a thousand times at military vehicles. Hope, tragically, is in short supply.’14

  To millions of ordinary Britons, all this confirmed Northern Ireland’s image as an alien and violent place: a ‘bloodstained land’, said the Express, ‘which seems to be cursed by the God they worship so assiduously’. Private Eye’s Denis Thatcher jokes that the only solution is to ‘get the hell out of Ireland and leave the little monkeys to pelt each other with droppings in perpetuity’. The real Denis Thatcher thought much the same. ‘If the I
rish want to kill each other’, he once remarked, ‘that does seem to me to be their business.’ His wife, meanwhile, never pretended to take much interest in Northern Ireland. As a self-conscious patriot, Mrs Thatcher never wavered in her support for the army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But she found the Irish in general annoying, intractable and bewilderingly un-English. In theory she was a committed Unionist, but she made no secret of her exasperation with the actual Unionists and often asked her ministers why she could not just hand Catholic areas over to the Republic of Ireland. Later, her critics painted her as the reincarnation of Oliver Cromwell, thirsting for Irish blood. In fact, as her biographer observes, it would be better to describe her as someone who just wished the entire problem would go away.15

  Mrs Thatcher’s hatred of terrorism, however, carried an electric charge. Her antipathy to the bombers was not just political; it was intensely personal. On 30 March 1979, only a day into the general election campaign, her Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, Airey Neave, had been killed by an Irish National Liberation Army car bomb at the Houses of Parliament. A decorated war hero who had escaped from Colditz, Neave had managed her campaign for the party leadership. Even years later, her voice throbbed with emotion whenever she said his name. ‘Some devils got him,’ she said to the press afterwards, fighting back tears. ‘They must never, never, never be allowed to triumph. They must never prevail.’16

  She was under no illusions, though, that victory would be straightforward. Indeed, less than four months into her premiership, the Provisional IRA pulled off an even more spectacular coup. On the morning of 27 August, the 79-year-old Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the Queen’s cousin, formerly Supreme Allied Commander in South-East Asia, Viceroy of India, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff, was on holiday at Classiebawn Castle, County Sligo, just over the border in the Republic of Ireland. A few moments after his wooden boat had pulled out from the harbour for a day’s fishing, the IRA detonated a radio-controlled bomb hidden aboard the previous evening. Mountbatten was killed instantly; so were his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas and a 15-year-old deckhand, Paul Maxwell. Another passenger, the 83-year-old Lady Brabourne, died the next day.