by Ken Wharton
What is a Loyalist; is he/she simply someone loyal to the Crown; is it a person who detests Irish Republicanism; is it someone who wishes to maintain their ‘British’ identity, who resists at the cost of their – and others – lives what they consider is the nightmare concept of a united Ireland, ruled by Dublin and the occupants of Vatican City? Virtually unheard of before 1969/70, outside of Ulster, they burst onto the scene with a crash; literally. It was much earlier than the accepted ‘birth’ of the Troubles, a full three years in fact, back on 7 May 1966, when Augustus ‘Gusty’ Spence and other members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) attacked a Catholic-owned bar in Upper Charleville Street in the Shankill. Unfortunately, the flames spread to a neighbouring house where a Protestant, Matilda Gould (77), lived on her own. She was terribly burned, dying on 27 June, the day after another sectarian murder committed by Spence. This was 1966, a time when the only legitimate law on the streets was that of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), occasionally bolstered by the part-time irregulars, the ‘B’ Specials, or ‘Spashools’ in the dialect of the North. There were very few soldiers at the time stationed in the country; British soldiers garrisoned the Falklands (albeit a precious few), Aden, where they were fighting terrorists hell-bent on independence, Cyprus, Hong Kong, the West Indies, Malta and a few other outposts of a rapidly diminishing Empire that had once spanned 40 per cent of the globe.
The UVF was a citizen Army formed in 1921 to resist Catholic and Republican attempts to pressure the newly formed country of Northern Ireland to join the new Free State Government of Eire. If one takes a stroll along the Shankill Road in Belfast, there are several murals depicting men in civvie clothes, sporting UVF armbands, armed with an assortment of shotguns, machine guns and First World War Lee–Enfields. They were recruited from the survivors of 36th Ulster Division, who had left oceans of their blood on the muddy fields of the Somme, Cambrai, Messines Ridge and Passchendaele in 1914–18. They had fought, with a grim irony, alongside some of the 180,000 citizens of what would later be known as the Irish Republic. It is entirely possible that this citizen militia opposed many of the fledgling Irish Republican Army (IRA) who had also fought alongside them south of the Ancre, known by the name of Thiepval Wood. Ulstermen and southern Irish Catholic alike had breathed their last in the bloody mud of the gentle slope of the Schwaben Redoubt, close to ‘Hellfire Corner’.
Almost five decades later, on 11 June 1966, members of the UVF stalked and killed John Scullion (28) close to his home in Oranmore Street, in the Falls Road area. The 1966 version of the UVF contained men such as Spence, who hated Catholics with a passion, singling out Mr Scullion for no other reason than that of his religious affiliations. Close to midnight on 10 June, he was walking home from the Conway bar in the Falls; as he stopped to pick up a coin, a car that had been slowly stalking him braked to a halt; three shots rang out, sending him staggering, before he collapsed to the ground. The car sped off in the direction of the nearby Shankill Road, possibly flying past the dark and abandoned Falls Forge on North Howard Street as it did so. The old mill was occupied only by insects and the predatory brown rats, which the author saw plenty of five years later as he walked around the, by then, military base. John Scullion died the following morning in the Royal Victoria Hospital, less than half a mile from his home. Just over two weeks later, Spence was again involved, this time in the killing of another Catholic, Peter Ward (18), who had been drinking in the Malvern Bar, deep in the heart of the Loyalist Shankill. In those pre-Troubles days (if indeed there was such a time as pre-Troubles), it was considered safe, albeit inadvisable, for Catholics to socialise in the area.
Ward had served in the British Army for a matter of weeks before purchasing his discharge and returning to the Falls Road area of Belfast, his adventures as a soldier brief and unmemorable. He and two of his Catholic friends were relaxing in the Loyalist bar, seemingly without any sort of alarums, when they were spotted by Spence and at least two other UVF members, one of whom was Hugh McClean. The gang, murder in their hearts, lay in wait outside the bar, opening fire on the three young Catholics when they exited; Ward was hit in the heart, dying seconds later. His companions were also hit – one of whom sustained six bullet wounds – but they managed to escape. The UVF was banned the following morning by the then Ulster Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill. On the same day as the Prime Minister’s action, Matilda Gould finally died from the dreadful burns she had received because of Spence’s bungled attack on 7 May.
In 1969, as shown in Chapter 1, Loyalist paramilitaries had already killed a Catholic in an overtly sectarian attack that year – Gerald McAuley was IRA, but the gunmen wouldn’t have known that at the time. On 12 October, the first RUC officer to be killed in the Troubles, Constable Victor Arbuckle (29), was shot by UVF gunmen during terrible rioting on the Shankill Road. That number was soon to increase and would go on increasing exponentially over the years of the Troubles.
It is estimated that between 1969 and 1998 Loyalist paramilitaries, consisting of the UVF, Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), Red Hand Commando, Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) and various other groups flying ‘flags of convenience’, killed 1,015 people, the overwhelming majority being Roman Catholics. While it is true that the Provisional IRA, INLA and IPLO claimed that they were not sectarian organisations, it is axiomatic that they did make direct sectarian attacks, killing Protestants for no other reason than religion. However, the Loyalists were unashamedly sectarian, killing Catholics on purely sectarian grounds. It may be said that the Dublin/Monaghan bombings were sectarian, as the terrorists knew that with a massive Catholic majority in both locations, it was guaranteed that they would only kill their sectarian ‘enemies’. Whereas Loyalists claim that they were punishing Catholics for their support, both overtly as well as covertly, of Republican paramilitaries, it is equally axiomatic that many of their members killed Catholics just for the sake of it. One needs only look at the list of Catholics killed on the orders of Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, and the leader of the UVF’s Mid-Ulster Brigade, Robin ‘the Jackal’ Jackson, or directly by Stephen ‘Top Gun’ McKeag and Stephen ‘Inch’ McFerran, for further corroboration of this claim. For sheer sectarian slaughter, the murders committed by Lenny Murphy and the ‘Shankill Butchers’ offer conclusive evidence of this blood lust.
It is important to note that the following incident – the bombing of McGurk’s bar – was simply the culmination of a series of outrages throughout the year of 1971; it was by no means isolated. On 20 September, PIRA bombed the Bluebell bar on Sandy Row, injuring more than a dozen; nine days later, on the 29th, PIRA then bombed the Four Step Inn on the Shankill Road, killing Alexander Andrews (60), a father of eight and Ernest Bates (38), father of two, seriously injuring twenty-seven more. On 9 October, the UFF retaliated, bombing the Fiddler’s House pub in Durham Street in the Falls. It killed Winifred Maxwell (45), a mother of one and ironically a Protestant; nineteen people were injured. On 2 November, PIRA planted a bomb at the Red Lion pub at Ballynafeigh, just off the Ormeau Road; John Cochrane (67), a father of three, Molly Gemmell (45) and William Jordan (31) were all killed, with thirty people being badly injured. Finally, another PIRA attack on the Protestant Toddle Inn on York Street wrecked the interior but there were no fatalities. In the space of a little over two months, PIRA had killed five Protestants, injured sixty-nine and left thirteen without a parent. Historians such as myself are blessed with the 20:20 vision of hindsight; however, it didn’t take a genius to work out that the Loyalists were going to retaliate and retaliate in bloody style.
One of the worst Loyalist atrocities of the Troubles took place at McGurk’s Bar on the night of 4 December 1971. It was officially known as the Tramore, situated on the junction of Great George’s Street and North Queen Street, at the foot of the Nationalist New Lodge area. It was run and owned by Patrick and Philomena McGurk, with the pub being known locally as McGurk’s. Indeed, a mural facia constructed on the site where the bar once stood shows the original purple
frontage with the legend ‘B&P McGurk’ displayed next to the number 81; standing proudly in the ‘doorway’ is a smartly dressed man, presumably Mr McGurk himself. Around the corner, it announces proudly: ‘Retail Wine Co.’, and close by is a memorial stone to the customers who died there that night.
The 4th was a Saturday night; the bar was packed; what could go wrong? The RUC station was a few dozen yards up the street, and there were regular foot patrols by the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Anglian Regiment, based at the nearby Girdwood Barracks. However, the spirit of Gusty Spence lived on, for although by then behind bars, he was still in a prominent position with the organisation. A four-man UVF team, including Robert James ‘Jimmy’ Campbell, met in an Orange hall in the Shankill, many of which in those days had a small bar. They were ordered to bomb the Gem bar on North Queen Street as it was a known haunt of the Official IRA (OIRA). It is alleged that the man who gave the order to attack the Gem was Sam ‘Bo’ McClelland, a former British soldier who had served in the Royal Ulster Rifles. The team set off, but on reaching the Gem, they saw an Army foot patrol, as well as security staff guarding the entrance. Instead they decided on the nearest Catholic pub; the thin gossamer thread of fate led them to McGurk’s. From the arrival outside McGurk’s to the moment that a dozen life-clocks suddenly reached zero occupied only 120 seconds, not much longer than it takes Athlete David Rudisha to run 800m. Those 120 seconds were among the bloodiest of the entire Troubles.
They arrived at approximately 20.45 hours, stopping in Great George Street; Campbell remained at the wheel of the stolen car, while two of the team placed the bomb, weighing 50lb (22.7kg), in the side entrance to the bar. As the device, wrapped in brown paper and plastic, was left, an 8-year-old boy observed the men behaving suspiciously. He noticed that the parked car still had its engine running, and that there was a small Union Flag in the rear windscreen. The little boy – these days a man in his mid 50s – told the RUC that he saw the man strike a match and then run back to the car, which drove off at speed. He walked over to see what the man had left, but quickly realised that it was a bomb; he immediately turned, shouting a warning to passers-by and began running. At that precise moment 20.47, the device exploded, destroying the pub, taking fifteen lives and changing the world forever; it also blew the boy and two other people off their feet.
The dead were: the eponymous Philomena McGurk (46), a mother of four and wife of the bar owner; her daughter Maria (14); James Cromie (13); Edward Keenan (69); his wife Sarah (58); John Colton (49); Thomas McLoughlin (55); David Milligan (52); James Smyth (55); Francis Bradley (61); Thomas Kane (45); Philip Garry (73), the local ‘Lollipop Man’; Kathleen Irvine (45); Edward Kane (25), and Robert Spotswood (38). Additionally, a further sixteen people were injured, some very seriously.
Memorial facia on the spot where McGurk’s Bar once stood.
The bar was demolished; the heat of the blast burned and scorched; the shockwave tore off limbs and heads, and, a millisecond later, the roof and walls crashed down upon the surviving drinkers and staff alike; tons of rubble buried the dead and the dying; in some cases, the pressing cloying bricks merely accelerated the process of dying that the blast had started. The former ITN journalist Desmond Hamill* wrote about the anatomy of a blast. For a civilian, conditioned by years of Hollywood simulated explosions and CGI, the following piece might be somewhat sobering:
A bomb blast in a confined space is devastating. First the shock wave spreads out, faster than the speed of sound. Some heavy objects deflect the waves, but other solid material is changed instantly into gas, creating an enormous increase in volume and pressure. People in the way can have their limbs torn off, and in the millisecond which follows, the energy waves go into their mouths and upwards, taking off the tops of their skulls and other parts of the body so that sometimes all is left is the spine, held together by the vertebrae. The shock wave, travelling at 13,000 miles per hour, pulverises the floor immediately below the explosion. It slows down quickly, but more damage is done by the blast wave which follows at half the speed. This has the pressure of pent-up gas behind it and it can also tear off limbs, perforate eardrums and smash up furniture, the pieces of which in turn become deadly weapons.
One of the survivors, John Irvine, whose wife was killed in the blast, told the BBC:
The next thing, chairs and tables were piled up all around me and a roof beam was slung across my chest, pinning me in my seat. I do not know how long I was there. Then I heard someone shout to bring the hose. The firemen doused me and all around me to stop the fire getting to me. I was conscious all the time but I went out after they had freed me.
Another eyewitness said: ‘There was just a great cloud of smoke where the pub was, and soot all over everything. There was nothing left of it.’
The car containing the UVF bombing team had driven off at speed, driving to a spot a few hundred yards away from St Anne’s Cathedral in Donegall Street. They were then collected by another car and driven the short distance back to the Orange hall in the Shankill. There is some speculation that they may have been driven to either the Brown Bear or the Windsor Bar, both notorious UVF haunts, but the author learned from a trusted source that the location was an unnamed Orange hall. It is alleged that they reported to McClelland: ‘The job is done.’ In 1978, purely by chance, Campbell was arrested by the RUC, when the intention was to arrest his son, Robert Campbell Jr. A simple mix-up over dates of birth resulted in Campbell Snr being taken to the Interrogation Centre at Castlereagh near Belfast.
The ruins of McGurk’s Bar, December 1971.
The interviewing officer quickly realised that he had the wrong Campbell, but as he was preparing to release him, the man said, ‘I was involved in planting the bomb at McGurk’s Bar.’ He was later sentenced to a minimum of twenty years in gaol after he also admitted to taking part in the murders of fifteen Catholics between 1971 and 1977. He refused, however, to name any of the other members of the murder gang. The man’s son was known to the RUC, but the leader of the bombing gang was completely below the radar, being unknown to the police, thus ruling out any sort of collusion between the SF and Loyalists. In 2018, the author was told that the man who planted the bomb had always claimed that the devastation of the pub was not caused by his device alone. The claim was that the Provisionals had had a device stored there that was set off by the UVF bomb. Initially, the Army had claimed that it was an own-goal explosion that caused the blast, firmly pinning the evidence to the Provisional IRA.
However, there is no substantial evidence to indicate that the bomb was either a premature detonation caused by the Provisionals or a ‘sympathetic explosion’ caused by the UVF device. Then there are those who have also claimed that PIRA had a device ready to attack the Gem bar as it was an OIRA location. It is purely hearsay and, at best, circumstantial. This author firmly believes that the device was planted solely by the UVF and that the resulting explosion was caused by their bomb and their bomb alone.
Ciarán MacAirt – whom the author has had the pleasure of meeting – wrote a very well-researched, poignant, albeit highly biased book on the attack, The McGurk’s Bar Bombing. Mr MacAirt sees collusion at every twist of the tale and is one of the many members of the Nationalist community who cannot see beyond the allegation of this highly emotive term. This section on what was without a shadow of a doubt an utter tragedy and an outrage committed against innocent Catholics, including Mr MacAirt’s grandmother, is not intended to be an open discussion about collusion. This author has spoken times passim about such an issue, including numerous instances of acts of collusion between the Provisional IRA and An Gardaí Siochana, the Irish police force. This is a subject for another time. However, there are some purely circumstantial pieces of ‘evidence’ that the conspiracy theorist is able latch on to:
(i) There wasn’t a security force presence on the night.
(ii) In the days leading up to the attack there had been a heavy military/police presence in the area, which had ‘disappeared’
by the night of the attack.
(iii) Senior Army men spread ‘disinformation’ relating to the Provisionals, who had intended to attack the Gem but accidentally detonated their device inside McGurk’s being two of their ‘compelling’ pieces of evidence.
The claim by the Army that it was a PIRA device that had prematurely exploded is laughable, but it is innocently laughable.
In the first instance, it is true that there wasn’t an SF presence nearby, but this is hardly compelling; there were times when neither the Army nor the RUC were on the streets; it was not a twenty-four-hour role, and indeed there were time vacuums caused by the very nature of the job; the SF were overrun, undermanned and beleaguered, and were simply not able to maintain a 24/7 presence.
There had been a mass escape of PIRA prisoners from the Crumlin Road gaol just two days earlier. It was likely that they would head for safe houses in either the New Lodge or the nearby Ardoyne areas of Belfast. As a consequence, there would have been a large SF presence in the area during that investigation.
Yes, it is entirely true that they (the SF) would have benefited from a PIRA attack against an OIRA bar, provoking violent internecine conflict. It was, after all, far preferable to have Republican terrorists killing each other, rather than SF members or innocent civilians. However, I believe that the Gem was the original target for the UVF as it would have killed OIRA personnel as well as Catholics; they were thwarted by a military presence, choosing McGurk’s simply from expedience.
The arrest of one of the bombers – ‘Jimmy’ Campbell – came completely by chance, with the man being unknown to the police. Had there been any collusion, Campbell would have been known to the RUC Special Branch, who would have wasted no time in ‘turning’ the man and using him as an informant inside the UVF. A family member informed the author that, in fact, he had simply disappeared after the bombing, only emerging when he was mistakenly arrested.