Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  Then came the call for Ireland as the call had come before,

  Another bloody chapter in an endless civil war.

  It wasn’t an appealing proposition, and Andrews’s gloomy assessment was shared by Lieutenant General Sir Ian Freeland, the first commanding officer to be appointed to the province: ‘Why won’t they realize we are on the brink of civil war?’ he asked in despair at his superiors in July 1969. For most of the UK population, however, a more typical response was summed up in the reported words of the home secretary, Reginald Maudling, on the plane back from his first visit to Ulster: ‘What a bloody awful country!’ he remarked to an air stewardess. ‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch.’

  Maudling it was who made the most profound mistake of the period when, on 9 August 1971, he authorized the introduction of internment without trial for suspected terrorists and their sympathizers. The decision was made in the context of enormous pressure from the Protestant-dominated Parliament of Northern Ireland in Stormont, which still nominally controlled policing policy, but in the face of advice from Lt. Gen. Sir Harry Tuzo, who had taken over the military command: ‘Other possibilities for disrupting the IRA should certainly be tried first,’ he warned, adding that it would have a ‘harmful effect’. In fact, the effects were beyond harmful and more akin to calamitous, with massive resentment at both the measure itself and its illiberal and incompetent implementation – amongst those imprisoned without charge was a seventy-seven-year-old blind man, who had last been arrested in 1929. Before internment, thirty-one people had been killed in the province in 1971; between then and the end of the year, the death toll rose by a further 150. The following year was the worst of all, with nearly 500 killed, and ten times that number injured; there were ‘almost 2,000 explosions and over 10,000 shooting incidents, an average of around thirty shootings per day’.

  In the midst of this mayhem, the Army itself had become complicit, firmly identified in the minds of Catholics with the repressive tactics of the Protestant state. As barricades went up in the streets of Belfast and Londonderry, creating no-go zones for the forces of law and order, and a virtual state of siege for some communities, reports spread of Army brutality and of simple callousness. ‘She didn’t have to tell me the story about the dead dog. I’d heard it,’ reported Michael Walsh in Tribune; ‘how soldiers had shot someone’s pet, brandished the carcass before a Catholic crowd that hadn’t been able to buy food for two days, and told the crowd, “Here’s your fresh meat”.’

  From the point of view of the soldiers, they were engaged in an undeclared war with the IRA, one in which, they felt, their actions were constrained by civilian concerns. On one of the rare occasions when their grievances were aired publicly, Lord Richard Cecil, formerly a captain in the Grenadier Guards with three tours of the province, told the press that the troops were ‘frustrated by the politicians’ failure to combat the terrorists with strength’. And, he added rhetorically: ‘What can you say to one of your men when he asks, “Which side are the politicians on, sir?”’ With such public outlets few and far between, the barrack-room culture of the time was dominated by a grim humour, mostly at the expense of the untrained amateurs on the other side; a contemporary collection of ‘Rhymes From Ulster’ includes this typical example by a serving soldier:

  Jack and Jill went up the hill

  To plant a claymore mine,

  But got their neg and pos mixed up,

  The clever little swine.

  A great big bang spread them around

  Up in a cloud of smoke.

  I wish I could have been there,

  I do enjoy a joke.

  The most significant deaths in that appalling tally for 1972 came on 30 January, ‘Bloody Sunday’, when thirteen unarmed civilians on a civil rights demonstration were shot dead by members of the Parachute Regiment. The horror of that day inaugurated a new, wider phase of the conflict, first with a 30,000-strong mob burning down the British embassy in Dublin, ‘already blackened and damaged from petrol bomb attacks on two previous nights’, and then with a bomb attack in Aldershot that killed seven people and brought the spectre of terrorism to England. In vain did A.W. Anderson, the home affairs minister in the Stormont government, try to put the Bloody Sunday deaths in perspective: ‘Let us remember that terrorism has led to the deaths in only one year of seventy-two innocent civilians, forty-three soldiers, eleven policemen and five men of the Ulster Defence Regiment.’ His pleas were futile, not least because in March, Edward Heath announced that the Northern Ireland Parliament was forthwith suspended, to be replaced by direct rule from Westminster, under a new secretary of state, William Whitelaw. So extreme had the situation become that the transfer of power was by no means assured: ‘In the general turmoil and emotional upheaval,’ wrote Whitelaw of his arrival in the province, ‘even the long-established loyalty to the Crown of the civil service and the police could not be taken for granted.’

  Although the levels of 1972 were never again to be reached, the remorseless cycle of killings and revenge killings, reprisals and counter-reprisals continued through the decade, as did the frustration amongst politicians and public alike on the mainland at the apparently irreconcilable historical grievances. ‘There are two rival slogans to be seen around Belfast,’ reported the press at the end of 1976: ‘the Peace Movement’s “Aren’t Seven Years Enough?” and the Provisionals’ “Aren’t Seven Hundred Years Too Much?”.’ The bitterness of the religious divide between the two communities also left the rest of the country bewildered: a 1969 survey showed that 25 per cent of Britons declared no religious affiliation, while the comparable figure in Northern Ireland stood at just 2 per cent. In an increasingly secular society, the fact that three-quarters of the local population thought it important that the province ‘should be a Christian country’ was hard to comprehend.

  The violence reached a new low in November 1974 when the Provisional IRA planted bombs in two Birmingham pubs, the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town, killing twenty-one members of the public and injuring another 182. Years later, after the release of the six men who had been wrongfully convicted of the murderous attacks, Birmingham-born Lawrence Hayward of the band Denim captured the still raw emotions of those in his home town: ‘All around the people say, we hate the IRA, and we asked for justice but it never came . . .’

  The fact that one has to reach into the 1990s to find a song articulating such feelings is indicative of one of the most notable aspects of the civil war raging in the United Kingdom: its virtual absence from the popular culture of the time. At the peak of the troubles, in the early ’70s, Northern Ireland was the dog that didn’t bark in the night. Despite the precedent of the politicization of American rock, for example, there was little response by musicians, save for a small handful of records in the early days: McGuinness Flint’s 1971 single ‘Let the People Go’, John Lennon’s Dylanesque album track ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ in 1972 and, in the same year, ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, a minor hit for Paul McCartney’s band Wings, also written in response to Bloody Sunday:

  Great Britain, you are tremendous

  And nobody knows like me,

  But really what are you doing

  In the land across the sea?

  Tell me how would you like it

  If, on your way to work,

  You were stopped by Irish soldiers?

  Would you lie down, do nothing,

  Would you give in, or go berserk?

  For those who thought this represented a low point in McCartney’s lyric writing, the follow-up single, ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, was to demonstrate that there was further yet for the ex-Beatle to fall. Such was the nervousness of the times, however, that even the triteness of ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ was banned by the BBC on political grounds. The Corporation did broadcast two interviews with David O’Connell, a self-professed member of the IRA, around the same time, but found itself in a running battle with the government for allegedly giving succour to Britain
’s enemies. ‘They want us, in effect, to conduct a propaganda campaign for the Army, and for the government of Brian Faulkner, and against the Catholics,’ a senior BBC executive, John Crawley, complained. ‘We say we should be wrong to do that.’ It was a short-lived protest. In 1971 the telecommunications minister, Christopher Chataway, pointedly remarked that the BBC should remember ‘the values and the objectives of the society that they are there to serve’, and the following year – with the pressure intensifying – the organization issued a statement explaining that while impartiality was important ‘between the two communities in Northern Ireland’, there were limits: ‘between the British Army and the gunmen the BBC is not impartial and cannot be impartial’.

  Over on ITV there was likewise little inclination to provoke a full-scale confrontation with the government by discussing the issues at stake, though again there were early exceptions. In a December 1970 edition of Coronation Street, during a discussion in the Rovers Return on the image of America overseas, Len Fairclough pointed out that ‘ours isn’t looking too good in Belfast at the moment, is it?’ Similarly ‘The Blue and the Green’, a storyline in the children’s series The Tomorrow People, sees civil disorder break out between two groups, identified by blue and green badges, and the parallels are spelt out: ‘If you think there’s no harm splitting people up into factions of any kind, religious or just the colour of a badge, well, look at Northern Ireland.’

  The more common response, however, was simply an increase in the number of Irish jokes turning up on comedy shows and in society more generally. A typical example, taken from a 1975 student rag mag, shows every sign of having being amended from Catholic to Protestant terrorists, presumably in the interests of balance: ‘Two UDA men were driving through Belfast, one of them with a bomb on his lap. “Patrick, I’m sure this thing’s going to go off.” “Don’t worry, Mick. I’ve got a spare one in the boot.”’ The gags were, for the most part, non-political in nature, but the relentless mocking of the supposed stupidity of Irishmen acquired a certain edge in the ’70s, as some noticed even at the time: ‘Irish jokes are getting boring,’ comments the narrator of Gordon Williams’s 1974 novel Big Morning Blues. ‘If they’re so fucking dim, how come the whole British Army can’t beat ’em?’

  Apart from the self-censorship of the broadcasters, there was another key factor in the difficulty of portraying the conflict: the absence of any recognizable figure who could represent the Catholic minority. The biggest constitutional party, the SDLP, had been founded in 1970 with Gerry Fitt as its first leader, but he made little impact in most of the UK, while the IRA was pictured primarily as an anonymous, balaclava-wearing gunman. Certainly there was no face that could come close to matching the public profile enjoyed by Ian Paisley, who had emerged as the voice of the Protestant working class in the 1960s, and who was elected to the Westminster Parliament in 1970 as MP for North Antrim amidst much local rejoicing: ‘This day,’ he announced in his stentorian tones, ‘it is known in North Antrim that there is God in heaven.’ Elsewhere, his election was greeted with more trepidation. The Sun advised the new prime minister to steer clear of any deals, linking the new MP with a more established rabble-rouser; Heath, it urged, ‘must not compromise with Powellites and Paisleyites, however popular they may be with some voters’. It wasn’t long before a single shout of the word ‘No!’ in a Northern Irish accent was sufficient to constitute an impression of Paisley and, by extension, of the Protestant majority. For those seeking ‘impartiality’ there was no Catholic equivalent until the rise of Gerry Adams a decade later.

  In the absence of commentary from TV, cinema or rock music, the one area of culture that could freely address Northern Ireland was popular fiction. Among the first entries in the field was Peter Leslie’s The Extremists (1970), which was advertised as ‘a sensational novel of riot-torn Belfast’, though it failed to deliver on the promise; by chapter three, it had become sufficiently aware of its clichés that it was abbreviating the phrase ‘riot-torn Belfast’ to ‘RTB’. Later novels, most of them thrillers, had a broader perspective, while sharing a sense of weariness and exasperation at the intractability of the situation. ‘The real agony for Christie was that he belonged to an establishment which, with the situation steadily deteriorating, was being brought increasingly under the control of London,’ wrote John de St Jorre and Brian Shakespeare of a Protestant police officer in The Patriot Game (1974). ‘And there was no way out even though, in common with many Ulster Protestants, he disagreed almost as much with Whitehall as he did with the declared enemies in the IRA and Republic.’

  In Brian Freeborn’s Good Luck Mister Cain (1976) a senior officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary travels to London to hire a hitman prepared to kill a leading member of the IRA; ‘I don’t concern myself with politics,’ warns Harry Grant, the small-time villain whom he recruits, but even he later confesses: ‘I don’t know what the British think they’re doing over there.’ And Graham Lord’s The Spider and the Fly (1974) shows a British MP drinking in a Dublin pub: ‘He felt a sudden anger at the blatant racialism, the powerful ignorance of a people drugged with legend. Who did they think they were, these leeches swollen with the very blood they denigrated? A rabble that had gnawed for centuries at England’s breast, singing Roisin Dubh in English, a whole race denying its dependence with melancholy jests and a mawkish way with words.’

  Despite the explosions in Birmingham, Guildford, Aldershot and London, the real tragedy of Northern Ireland was of course primarily played out in the province. But, more widely, the sense of incipient civil war provided a terrible counterpoint to the tensions engendered by strikes and blackouts. Mark Patterson, chairman of the Film Viewing Committee at the Greater London Council, warned in 1972 that ‘We are going to have to consider the social and political implications of certain films.’ He was being interviewed by critic Alexander Walker, who noted: ‘Dr Patterson was at pains to stress that political censorship was not sought by his sub-committee, but I formed the impression that its members, disturbed by chaos in Ulster, the Aldershot outrages and violence in the picket lines during the miners strike, are tending to sharpen and harden their attitude to films that reflect anarchy without providing answers.’

  The movie that was causing such soul-searching was Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a shockingly violent film based on Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel. ‘It is not, in my view, a very good novel,’ commented Burgess himself, but even if one accepts his self-criticisms (‘too didactic, too linguistically exhibitionist’), there is no doubting its power or its influence. The plot concerns a small-time gang leader named Alex, who loves Beethoven and thuggery in equal measure and, having been convicted of murder, finds himself being reprogrammed through a form of aversion therapy to reject violence, before reverting to type. In the last chapter of the novel Alex decides that he wants to settle down to raise a family, and while it’s far from a conventional happy ending – since he’s also aware that his own children will have a similar phase of development to pass through – it does change the nature of the story, by recasting the earlier violence as a disorder of male adolescence. Kubrick, however, jettisoned this chapter in his adaptation, a decision that brought forward a more immediately troubling, though more superficial, theme: that violence is an essential part of humanity.

  The film was supposedly set in the future, but there was actually little to distance it from contemporary Britain, a fact which made it all the more disturbing when it premièred in January 1972 at the height of the first miners’ strike. It also attracted much negative criticism since its stylized visuals, invented slang and gang costumes had an enormous fascination for the youth market, for the very people that Burgess had warned were prey to violent tendencies. In particular, the set pieces in the first forty minutes – the almost balletic scenes of Alex and his droogs on the rampage, staging a fight with a rival gang, committing a rape and then a murder – imprinted themselves so strongly on the imagery of British youth culture that they show
no signs of being forgotten.

  The press campaign against the film centred, as such media controversies invariably will, on the supposed possibilities of copycat violence, and the usual search for related incidents was undertaken. One of the most publicized was the murder of a tramp in Buckinghamshire, which appeared to mimic a scene in the movie, though the manufactured outrage fell a little flat when it was discovered that the killer, while he had read the book, had never actually seen the film. Even so, the hostile reception persuaded Kubrick, apparently fearful that he would become a target for violent attacks by anti-violence campaigners, to withdraw the film from public screenings in Britain in 1974, a decree that lasted until his death. This unprecedented act of self-censorship enshrined the movie’s status as a key work of rebel art. Just as it became important in the mid- to late ’70s for any poseur worth his salt to claim a long-standing love of commercially unsuccessful bands like Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvet Underground, so too was he obliged to have seen A Clockwork Orange, preferably at the time, but if that couldn’t be made credible, then at least in Paris, where it proved a popular tourist attraction for visiting British youth.

  A simultaneous controversy engulfed Straw Dogs, another film by an American director – Sam Peckinpah – that was based on a British novel and filmed in Britain. Dustin Hoffman played David Sumner, a mild-mannered mathematician seeking refuge with his wife (Susan George) in an apparently idyllic Cornish village. From this distance, his native America is perceived as a society in crisis: ‘Bombing, rioting, sniping, shooting the blacks – can’t walk down the streets, they say,’ comments one of the locals, a man who will later be seen throwing live rats at Sumner’s terrified wife during a night of siege and slaughter. Rural England turns out to be every bit as brutal as downtown Los Angeles or Detroit, and ultimately Sumner has to turn to the violence within himself simply in order to survive and to retain any sense of self-worth. ‘I care,’ he declares defiantly, when he finally decides to take a stand against the thugs who have been taunting and persecuting him throughout the long build-up and who have, though he isn’t aware of the fact, also raped his wife. ‘This is where I live. This is me. I will not allow violence against this house.’