Let This Be Our Secret

by Deric Henderson

  Even though he feared he wasn’t smart enough or as tall as he needed to be, as a teenager Trevor Buchanan never lost hope that one day he would be able to stretch himself sufficiently – physically and intellectually – to become a police officer. Two of his older brothers, Raymond and Victor, were already members of the RUC.

  It was the mid-’70s, and with the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries involved in murderous campaigns these were dangerous times in Northern Ireland, especially for policemen. Victor, who had joined up in 1969, had been critically injured and left badly maimed in an IRA bomb attack in 1972, the deadliest year of the Troubles. And now, several years later, there was widespread sectarian strife on the streets too. It was hardly the time for young men to put their lives on the line, but Trevor was determined to follow in his brothers’ footsteps.

  In his quest to make himself tall enough to meet the height requirements for entry into the force (5 feet 8 inches [1.73 metres] in those days) Trevor insisted that the mattress on his bed at the family home in Dromore was replaced with wooden boards. And his parents would often find their son hanging by his legs over the door of the bedroom he shared with his brother Gordon, who was also very keen to join the RUC. Gordon remembers the antics of his older brother: ‘Trevor was … a few millimetres too small. In those days, they wouldn’t take you. He did everything under the sun to make the height. He had wooden boards under the mattress. The hard surface you lay on would apparently help you grow. He even hung himself upside down, like a bat, with his legs over the door, or a bar, to help stretch himself. He was so determined.’

  The brothers faced another obstacle in their quest to join the force. They had left school at an early age to work as carpet fitters in Omagh and neither was academically inclined. In particular they needed to improve on their maths skills. And so once or twice a week they were tutored by a teacher from Omagh Academy, their sister Valerie’s old school. It was money and time well spent. In 1980 Trevor made the necessary height requirement, and after both he and Gordon had successfully sat the entrance exams they were accepted as recruits at the RUC Training Centre in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. Gordon went to the depot in 1980, and Trevor a year later. Their perseverance finally paid off.

  When they married in 1946, Trevor’s father Jim and mother Lily moved to Strawduff to live on a small farm. Lily, who was just seventeen at the time, always insisted: ‘And I didn’t have to get married, either.’ Later the couple moved into the village of Dromore to a house at Johnston Terrace, before going to live in Omagh, first at Lisanelly Heights and then at Festival Park, where they bought their own home. Jim was a skilled farm worker, but he never enjoyed good health. A heart condition meant that he had to avoid too much strenuous physical exertion. He later became chief security officer at the Crown Buildings in Omagh.

  The Buchanans had two daughters, Valerie and Melva, and six sons. Jackie, the eldest, became a prison officer. Robert joined the RAF and went to live in England and the other four sons – Victor, Raymond, Trevor and Gordon – all joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

  Trevor Andrew Buchanan was born on 2 May 1959, the third youngest of the family. In his later life, many people, especially within the ranks of the police, knew him as ‘Ted’. He attended the local primary school and by the time he went to secondary school – the Duke of Westminster school in Kesh and Ballinamallard, County Fermanagh – he had already developed a work ethic outside the classroom. The young Trevor didn’t particularly like school, and money in the Buchanan household was scarce. He became an enthusiastic worker in Fred Kenwell’s village hardware store at weekends and during the holidays. He also worked on a couple of local farms, sometimes having a three-mile walk each way to his place of work.

  He got a motorbike – a Honda 50 – when he was sixteen, and soon had aspirations for one with a more powerful engine. He borrowed a gold-coloured Suzuki 250 from a friend whose father owned a farm where his brother Gordon worked, but he crashed it, effectively signalling the end of his motorcycling career. Later, cars became one of his great passions. He drove far too quickly, and crashed a couple of times – once, when he was a policeman, at the wheel of a Ford Capri on his way home. A senior officer in Castlederg gave him a dressing-down for speeding. He raced a quad bike at the Elkin farm and on land owned by a police colleague, also outside Omagh. At one stage he had a 1600cc Ford Escort Sport with EJI 8400 as the registration plate – which was the same as his police regulation number.

  Trevor was still at school when he started to drink and occasionally make a nuisance of himself. His sister Valerie, three years older, once had to take him home from a dance in Trillick, County Tyrone, after he was ordered out for unruly behaviour. At home he was an untidy teenager. He would leave his room in a mess and never washed the dishes, especially after coming home late at night or in the early hours when he would switch on the cooker to make himself some food. His little sister Melva would clear up; sometimes he paid her for doing so.

  After leaving school and working for a while with Gordon as carpet fitters, Trevor left to become a member of the RUC Reserve, completing his training at the age of nineteen. His first posting as a full-time reservist was in Omagh RUC station, just ten miles from his home in Dromore. It was July 1978. On his first day on duty he was asked to collect his personal-issue Walther pistol. He wasn’t quite sure where to go until somebody pointed him in the direction of the armoury.

  During the three years he worked in the Reserve, Trevor was based in Omagh and the neighbouring villages of Beragh and Newtownstewart. Violence in Northern Ireland was widespread at the time, and the level of civil unrest severe. In Omagh, the new recruit went out on patrol in a bombproof car, carrying either a submachine gun or an M1 Carbine rifle. Every morning and evening one of his duties was to open and close the security barriers which prevented car bombs from getting into the centre of the town. But this didn’t always stop the IRA, and on one occasion a bomb exploded in Bridge Street. There had been a warning and Trevor and his colleagues managed to evacuate the area without any loss of life.

  There were also more mundane policing duties such as burglaries, assaults and car accidents. Trevor was once called out after a motorist crashed into some cattle that had strayed into the road outside Omagh. He managed to clear the scene and then tried to calm down the farmer who owned the livestock as he remonstrated with the shocked driver in a badly damaged car.

  The young man enjoyed his early police work and, according to friends, went about his business professionally and sometimes in a very direct manner. Once he was charged with clearing the scene of a bomb alert in the town centre. People in the immediate vicinity were curious and reluctant to leave – until they heard a sharp voice over the police loudspeaker system using the sort of language not permitted in the police code of conduct, but which they quickly understood. ‘Look,’ declared Constable Buchanan, ‘there is a bomb up there. What are you standing around for? Can you move away!’

  A former colleague recalls Trevor’s skills in dealing with the public: ‘Having worked as a carpet fitter, he already knew a lot of people in Omagh. He was always able to approach them and strike up a conversation. His knowledge of the town was far, far better than officers who came from places like Belfast and Ballymena. He was a great communicator … He was the sort of guy who would ask for a cup of tea, rather than wait to be offered one. And he got it. There wasn’t anybody who could not have warmed to him, because he was so nice. There was a very, very easy way with Ted.’

  Because of the times in which he lived, Trevor had to be careful about his off-duty movements. There were a couple of places in Omagh where he felt safe enough to order a vodka and Coke, among them McAleer’s pub in Campsie, just across the road from where he first met his wife.

  He was transferred to Newtownstewart for a couple of months, and then to the village of Beragh, where once more he opened and closed the security gates every day – without being as vigilant about his own safety as he might or should hav
e been. He and others like him often travelled the back roads but they didn’t always vary their route or routines, which left them vulnerable to attack. One of Trevor’s ex-colleagues recalls: ‘It was sheer madness. How we escaped, I don’t know. We would have parked our cars up the street, opened the big armoured barrier, unlocked the station gates and driven the cars in. Doing that, the same thing every morning, left you wide open. There were maybe three or four ways to travel to Beragh, but through time, you just took the most direct route.’

  In 1980 Trevor decided to try for a place as a regular in the force. One of the factors which held him back from doing so until this point was the difficulty with his height. A close friend at the time remembers: ‘He was told he would have a better future for himself if he went into the regular force. I had seen him operate on the ground without any training, and it was obvious he was more than capable of doing the job. He was more concerned about exam failure than he was about his height. It bothered him a lot.’ His brother Gordon also explains: ‘[Trevor] had a three-year contract in the full-time reserve, but he wanted a job with more security and longevity.’

  After gaining entry to the regular force, and successfully completing a period of training at the RUC depot in Enniskillen, in 1981 he was posted to Castlederg – a town just a few miles from the Donegal border. The police station was an old, dilapidated former doctor’s surgery on the Castlefin Road. There were just two dormitories upstairs with holes in the roof. There was no central heating. One officer from Belfast threatened to leave on his first night. The station sergeant was Raymond Cummings, who had done his training in Enniskillen at the same time as Trevor’s brother Victor.

  Castlederg was one of the most bombed towns in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Black-and-yellow-painted forty-gallon barrels filled with concrete and connected with steel piping lined the sides of the streets where parking was banned in a bid to thwart the bombers, who struck as many as eighty times between 1971 and 1991. When Trevor Buchanan was posted there in 1981, it was during the time of the second IRA hunger strike at Maze Prison, where Bobby Sands and nine other Republicans would die. Demonstrations and protest marches in support of the prisoners in the jail’s H-blocks were held all over Ireland. Tensions were high everywhere, but particularly in Castlederg, a small but hopelessly divided community where many Catholics and Protestants detested each other. It was a part of west Tyrone which all but resembled a war zone for the entire duration of the Troubles. There is a cemetery on the outskirts of the town with the graves of almost twenty police officers and soldiers of the Ulster Defence Regiment who were killed by the IRA, all but two of them in the Castlederg area. Jim Emery, a former police reservist who knew Trevor, recalls of that time: ‘I well remember standing outside the cemetery gates after another funeral, wondering who was going to be next. Castlederg was not a nice place to be, back then.’

  Trevor was stationed in Castlederg for five years. The town and surrounding roads had become a virtual death-trap for members of the security forces. Every time a Ford Cortina patrol car left the station, it was followed by a second as a back-up. Car engines were never switched off, even outside the station door, when officers changing shifts swapped places. They wore body armour over their tunics and carried high-powered rifles. Nobody left the station unless it was absolutely necessary, and only provided they had the support of the military, especially along the twenty-six miles of border where there was just one permanently manned security crossing. Police and heavily armed British troops who were billeted outside the town would be there all the time. On the Republic’s side of the border, just a few miles up the road, there was a constant police presence. The men from the two forces got on well. They would meet regularly to exchange intelligence, and sometimes the Special Branch men shared a beer, either in a bar near their own place in Castlefin, or at the back of Sammy Walls’ pub in Castlederg. It was good to put a face to the voice at the other end of the telephone. Relations with the Irish Army, however, were not as good; there wasn’t the same level of trust.

  Trevor was out at all hours, stopping cars and checking the identities of the occupants, as well as dealing with general run-of-the-mill crime. He once investigated a spate of malicious fires at derelict buildings in and around the town, but because of the times he was living in most of the day-to-day policing work involved matters of security. On another occasion, in March 1985 he was involved in the car chase of fleeing IRA gunmen who had opened fire on Castlederg police station. Officers protecting the home of the local resident magistrate fired on the gunmen’s car as it raced along the Strabane Road, but they managed to escape.

  Trevor was called upon for one special operation which few people knew about. Police received a tip-off that Dominic McGlinchey – a dangerous and feared terrorist from south Derry and a close friend of Francis Hughes, one of the ten Republicans who died on hunger strike – was planning an attack in Castlederg. McGlinchey, a ruthless gunman and an expert at making booby-trap bombs, had killed many times before and the RUC believed he was on his way to murder again. An SAS man, disguised as a police officer, was waiting for McGlinchey’s arrival and stood inside the military sangar at The Diamond, gun at the ready, while Trevor was outside, stopping and examining cars before they were waved through. They waited several hours, but McGlinchey never appeared, and the operation was quietly called off without a word to anybody.

  In Castlederg Trevor had a close and tight social circle, nearly all of them police. Personal security meant everything. It was all about self-preservation, looking out for each other, and never dropping your guard. But he also had one or two good friends outside the job in the town. One of them was a local businessman, John Doherty, a Catholic who ran a TV rental business and later a coffee shop and who was heavily involved in building and developing relations between the Catholic and Protestant communities. Trevor used to call regularly for a cup of tea at John’s home. Doherty recalls of his friend: ‘[Trevor] was a very down-to-earth, special type of person. He had no trouble making friends, and we were sorry when he left for Coleraine. It would have been much quieter than Castlederg, and maybe that was a blessing. But it turned out that it wasn’t.’

  After they married in 1981, Hazel and Trevor’s first home was a rented house not far from the Elkin farm at Gillygooley. Hazel had her first child, Lisa, when they lived there. After about a year or so, they moved into Omagh town, where they bought a house not far from the Gortin Road, just a few doors down from Trevor’s brother Gordon, his wife Donna and their children. Andrew, their second child, was born about eighteen months after Lisa.

  Hazel’s influence on her husband became obvious fairly quickly to those who knew him. Trevor started to cut back on his drinking and stopped smoking, as one of his friends recalls: ‘Hazel … became anti-drink … and she was critical of him drinking. He might say: “OK, I’ll just have one or two,” and she would sit there and count them.’ The young policeman also became a lot more disciplined about the house: now everything was put into its proper place.

  Hazel clearly held sway in spiritual matters too. Trevor joined her Baptist church and quickly became a regular, as a friend remembers: ‘The influence of her family also started to show and he became more committed to the Baptist Church. I don’t think he went willingly into the Baptist Church.’ If it is true that Trevor was lukewarm about the Church initially, this would certainly change, and in 1985 he decided that he wanted to commit himself fully to his Christianity. He made a profession of faith in front of a gathering at his brother’s home in Enniskillen where Victor hosted a small group of churchgoing people of different Protestant faiths after he committed himself to God two years previously.

  Victor confirms: ‘Trevor’s faith was something which had a real and meaningful bearing on the way he lived … He knew about God, but he wanted to commit his life in a personal way. He wanted his faith to mean something. He didn’t suddenly become somebody who wasn’t connected to the real world. It meant he had a personal fai
th which he could hang on to when times were difficult. [This] … created a closer bond between Trevor and me, because he was the only other one in the family who had made a personal commitment to the Lord. He was saved.’

  Victor is adamant that his brother’s religion was an important part of his life, not something that he felt obliged to pay lip service to for the sake of his wife and her family: ‘Trevor enjoyed his faith, he didn’t endure it. If something wasn’t right, he would say: “Right, that’s it. No more of that for me.” He wasn’t afraid to talk about his life as a Christian, or his faith. He was laid back, but if an opportunity arose in conversation and he found it would be beneficial or helpful to the individual he was speaking with, then he would have had no difficulty referring to his faith. He wasn’t ashamed of his faith, but he wasn’t on a recruitment drive. His personality wouldn’t have allowed him to do that … It is “life-style Christianity”, when people see the change the Lord has made to your life … People in Coleraine wouldn’t have seen the change, because he was a believer when he went there. Back in Omagh, people would have seen the difference, because he had given up his smoking and drinking days.’

  Derek Ewing, a former colleague and near neighbour of Trevor’s in Coleraine, sees things slightly differently: ‘Trevor was influenced by the church in trying to please Hazel and make her happy and settled … Previously he was somebody who would have enjoyed a drink, and maybe on occasions taken too much drink. I remember one night he and I ended up in our company and he was tiddly [inebriated]. That caused him some problems. It wasn’t the accepted thing, because a couple of days later, he told us he was in the doghouse. He regretted it. I always felt there was somebody in there waiting to get out, and I believe his involvement in the church stymied him, suppressed him.’