The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  We weren’t badly hurt — Broome needed a few stitches — just shaking uncontrollably and unable to hear each other for our ringing ears.

  ‘What did you say, Gordon?’ I was guiding him through the dust towards an ambulance.

  ‘I said I swear I’m never setting foot in this fucking place ever again.’

  I don’t believe he ever did. Broome was always a reluctant visitor to Belfast.

  The bomb was routine for Belfast, although on a personal level it was unsettling for us to discover it had been left in a car parked at the hotel, and we were running directly towards it. Tony Eyles, one of our photographers, had phoned from the lobby to say there was a bomb alert that looked serious. When he called, we ran for it; we would have been fine if we had stayed in the room where we were working.

  That explosion injured 70, and seriously damaged the hotel and the neighbouring Belfast–Dublin railway station, but my story the next day in The Sun was just a couple of hundred words at the top of page two. It was on television only because the Europa was where the world’s media stayed; blowing things up on our doorstep was an opportunity the IRA could never resist. Auntie Gladys in Liverpool saw me on the BBC leading Broome to the ambulance.

  I didn’t notice at first that I also had injuries, and blood was running down my face. I discovered this outside the hotel. Three women, one with a baby in a pushchair, had been laughing furtively at the mayhem and whispering to each other until they noticed me. One of them pointed: ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. The women fell into a guilty silence, and a soldier put a white wad on the cut and told me to hold it there. My wound was no more serious than the result of a clumsy morning shave, and was the only time I shed blood in the line of duty.

  In 1972, so many bombs were going off in Belfast that reporters often didn’t bother attending the scene. I was eating in the Beefeater restaurant at the Europa with Trevor Hanna, our Northern Ireland correspondent, and his wife Ann, when an explosion happened nearby. It didn’t even interrupt our conversation.

  It was a big bomb, but no one in the Beefeater restaurant flinched, except for me. Ann kept eating her smoked salmon and telling a story. I called the Army 20 minutes later to make sure no one had been seriously hurt. The newsdesk in London only wanted a bomb story if there were serious consequences. A sniper killing a British soldier warranted a few lines at most.

  The Belfast Europa was famous for being bombed more than 30 times. When the IRA were preparing to attack, it was said they made two warning calls — one to the hotel and the other to a local glazier. The Troubles wrecked the Northern Ireland economy, but glaziers must have prospered.

  Despite the attacks, the Europa was both a refuge and pleasure palace for the media, providing guilty insulation against the hardship everywhere else. In the evening, at the top of the building in the moody lighting of the Penthouse nightclub, you could survey the embattled city beneath, while cocktails were served by ‘Penthouse Poppets’ with high heels and long, stockinged legs, dressed to look like Playboy bunnies.

  There was an atmosphere of defiant jollity as well as periodic excess, but the drunken jostling that sometimes took place in the early hours was never sufficiently energetic to be described as a brawl. Michael McDonough, a high-spirited Sun journalist, walked one night through the hotel’s public places pulling decorative plants from their pots, and singing at each uprooting: ‘Oops, there goes another rubber tree plant.’ The manager, Harper Brown, had to be understanding. Without the world’s media his hotel would go broke.

  The Europa had a Graham Greene feeling of intrigue and danger, a mixture of apprehension and glamour, like a cold-climate version of the Continental in The Quiet American. The hotel was dominated by journalists, but also visited by curious strangers.

  Trevor Hanna was a shrewd and burly man with the face of a bulldog: square and big-jawed, with a slightly upturned nose. No one I knew understood Northern Ireland better than Hanna. Belfast born and bred, he would say, and he had evidently been toughened by the life. He was once in a dockside public house with cash for a newspaper buy-up when an armed gang emptied the till and took money from the customers. Hanna sat quietly at the bar as the drama unfolded and, when the gang had departed, reached into his sock, produced the buy-up money and announced: ‘I suppose I’ll have to get the next round in.’

  He would guide me through the drinkers at the Whip & Saddle bar in the Europa, peering round over his glass of Bushmills, the Irish whiskey he favoured. ‘Now, that lad in the brown suit there, he’s here working for Army intelligence. And him at the bar, they say his son is a Loyalist gunman … See that young girl in black? Now she has very, very strong republican sympathies.’

  The Europa felt dangerous, but it was the only place for a journalist to be. Hanna told me always to put shoes under my bed so I could escape over the carpet of glass if a bomb shattered my window.

  To keep his customers coming in hard times, Harper Brown employed a novel marketing technique, presenting his loyal visitors with a commemorative tie that was brown and imprinted with a golden E in the style of the Europa’s logo. It came with a yellow certificate that felt like parchment and declared:

  Be it known that Leslie Hinton is authorised to wear the Belfast Europa tie which signifies that the owner was a valued guest during these unhappy days, as a memento of their stay and with the assurance that its owner will always be welcome back to enjoy the hotel, both during the present troubles and when peace returns.

  A tribute such as that made it churlish to seek less risky accommodation. I treasure the tie as a medal, and the document as the closest I ever received to a citation for bravery.

  Northern Ireland was my first complete escape from the trivial side of The Sun. I spent eight months there in the deadliest year of all The Troubles. During 1972, 479 people died, including 249 civilians, 148 British soldiers, and 70 IRA terrorists. All sides — republican, loyalist, and government — were scrambling for moral high ground, but there didn’t seem much left to occupy among the grief and ashes and mutual wreckage.

  Security forces would later curtail attacks on the city centre with a network of checkpoints and barricades, but that year everything was out of control and Belfast was a desolate place. At night it was deserted. A lone Chinese restaurant remained open through it all, serving excellent spare ribs that tempted us often to make the dark walk from the hotel. We never needed a reservation or saw diners who weren’t other journalists.

  The British Army arrived in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1969, after months of riots and shootings. Their role was to prevent violence between Catholics and Protestants, and at first everyone welcomed them, even serving them tea and biscuits in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast.

  But as the violence went on and the IRA became more active, British soldiers became the enemy in the eyes of most Catholics. They were no longer seen as peacekeepers, but as enforcement agents of the Protestant-dominated government.

  It did feel like a military occupation. Army patrols spaced themselves along inhospitable streets, tucking themselves for cover into the entrance of little terraced houses. Dark and ugly Army vehicles roared through the streets. At night, when your car lights illuminated one of these patrols, you were regarded with dangerous suspicion until you turned them off.

  Roadblocks were equipped with spiked chains to be pulled across the road to shred the tyres of any car failing to stop. Belfast was not a city suited to fancy cars; high speed bumps outside sandbagged barracks and police stations were constructed to prevent drive-by shootings. They made it difficult to navigate the streets in a low-slung sports car.

  An evening walk in the wrong area could end badly. I strolled ill-advisedly one evening near the Divis Street flats, a perennial stress point and favoured haunt of IRA snipers until the Army turned the top floor of the main tower into a fortified observation post. A squaddie spread-eagled me against a wall. Another, flat on t
he ground, aimed his rifle at me while I was roughly frisked. They were apologetic upon discovering my National Union of Journalists press card.

  There were many victims in Northern Ireland, from innocent civilians to defenceless politicians and unarmed activists. British soldiers no doubt did bad things, and Irish Catholics surely had deep and powerful historic cause for their grievances. But the soldiers, most of all young squaddies, were in a unique way also victims. Many were teenagers from tough neighbourhoods all over Britain, where choices narrowed down to the Army or the dole. They were following orders in a conflict they couldn’t fathom, trained as fighters, yet expected to act like understanding policemen. They were murdered with bombs and bullets, and captured and tortured now and then. The IRA tied cheese wire between lampposts in the hope of slicing a squaddie riding shotgun through his throat. No wonder the hatred became mutual.

  One night, after the Army had exchanged fire with a sniper, I made the mistake of peering into the back of a vehicle where an injured soldier was being treated. His naked left arm was dark with blood. I don’t know who he thought I was, but he threw himself at me, screaming curses before a captain and sergeant wrestled him to the back of the vehicle. The hate of the republican protesters was a familiar sight, but I had never before seen such unmasked fury from a British soldier. I think he wanted to kill me.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said the captain. ‘He’s had a bad night. He’ll face action for what just happened.’

  ‘Please don’t bother,’ I said. ‘Who can blame him?’

  There were moments of humanity in surprising places. I was in the republican enclave of Andersonstown one Saturday afternoon as the Army and the police clashed with locals after a protest. I can’t remember what the protest was about, or if it was about anything in particular, but rocks and petrol bombs were thrown, and the Army had fired rubber bullets, which were like propelled truncheons that would bounce through a crowd and cripple anyone they hit.

  A soldier had been separated from his patrol and was standing in the front garden of a council house with his back to the front door, attracting a threatening crowd of men. He had no idea what to do. He didn’t even raise his weapon, but just stood there in terror. He was very young, and his life was under serious threat.

  ‘We can’t do anything. They’ll think we’re plainclothes Army,’ said a man beside me. I don’t know who he was — plainclothes Army for all I knew.

  As we stood there, a white-haired woman wearing a wraparound pinafore like my grandmother’s opened the front door behind the trapped squaddie and shouted at the gathering mob in her garden, ‘Stop it, the lot of you. He’s a lad. Let him be.’

  The mob on her doorstep was stunned long enough by her intervention to allow the old lady to grab the squaddie by the arm and push him out her garden gate, from where he fled to find his lost patrol.

  It was an unnerving city for any newcomer. Elizabeth Riddell was an Australian writer and poet, a sophisticated woman who taught me which end of an asparagus spear to eat first. She contacted me through a mutual friend and asked if I would be her guide. I would receive such requests from time to time, but not from small, delicately framed poets in their mid-sixties.

  Riddell was persistent in overcoming my reluctance to show her the bad side of Belfast. When I told her we might have occasion to run extremely quickly, she presented a pair of tennis shoes and offered to bet that she would be able to keep up with me.

  I turned out to be a careless minder. On the evening I took Elizabeth out with me, we found ourselves standing at a wall with no retreat between the opposing forces of a solid line of advancing troops behind tall shields and an ever-growing group of young men and children who were hurling rocks and petrol bombs. We had been attracted to the scene by a theme tune of The Troubles. It sounded in republican Northern Ireland whenever a fight was coming. Women would leave their houses, banging dustbin lids on the pavements outside their homes, and blowing whistles. It was their alarm system to warn of arriving soldiers — they seemed to know before anyone else.

  It was not a wise place to be, or even worth the risk; the London desk had no interest in an everyday Belfast skirmish. For Riddell, it was different; the moment provided perfect colour for the piece she wanted to write, and she leaned calmly against the wall making notes until the gap between army and rioters became too narrow. We negotiated with the Army, who allowed us to move behind their wall of Perspex after deciding that a tiny, elderly woman with a distinct Australian accent provided no threat.

  Whenever I could find the excuse of a story that warranted it, I would escape by train to the peace and hospitality of Dublin. On my walk to the station, I would pass what must have been Belfast’s most prosperous pharmacy, its success due to the flow of customers from the Catholic south, where in the early 1970s the sale of contraceptives was banned.

  I once had to hurry back from Dublin to Belfast during a day of numerous bomb attacks. I took a taxi for the 100-mile journey and my driver slowed up at the outskirts of the city. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s a bad day in there today. You’ll need to walk. Even if I got home without a scratch, the wife would kill me for taking you.’ No amount of money would change his mind and I walked the rest of the way to the Europa.

  Terrifying as it could be, every journalist wanted to be there for the biggest stories. I remember my disappointment being safely home in England on 30 January 1972 — Bloody Sunday — when members of the Parachute Regiment shot dead 13 protesters in Derry.

  The rotation of my life in 1972 was two weeks in Northern Ireland then one week at home. We lived in a silent, leafy part of north London, but after eight months of Belfast, I jumped when a garage door slammed. This experience put an end to the life I had imagined as an action-man journalist. I did not have a life-risking temperament. Winston Churchill once said: ‘Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.’ That’s nonsense, I promise.

  I tried pre-empting my panic attacks by consuming large quantities of gin and tonic, but that was not a good idea; the gin didn’t release stress so much as store it up, to be delivered all at once the next morning in the form of throbbing hangovers and depression. Alcohol has never been a stress reliever for me; I only enjoy it if I’m in a good mood.

  Self-hypnosis helped me, but that’s not exactly what I did. I would lie still on a hard surface and employ relaxation techniques I learned as an aspiring actor from the book An Actor Prepares by the great Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski. In a chapter called ‘Relaxation of Muscles’, he writes: ‘At times of great stress it is especially necessary to achieve a complete freeing of the muscles.’

  Stanislavski’s exercise involved identifying every area of tension in the body and slowly relaxing, starting at the head and descending. It was intended to calm overwrought actors, but it worked for me in Belfast. At the same time as doing this, I imagined the face of my sleeping baby, Martin, soft and free of care. These days, this ritual sounds like a form of yoga, but it continued to work when the stress of Belfast and other arduous places was replaced by business crises and executive politics. As the children became adults, I replaced their faces with those of my grandchildren.

  Northern Ireland was the place to be for young journalists who wanted to make a name. Four of the names to emerge at the bar of the Europa in the year I began going there, 1971, were: Seymour, Dacre, Fisk, and Buckland.

  Gerald Seymour was a bland young television reporter from ITN who became a successful author of bestselling thrillers. He was inspired by his Belfast experience to write Harry’s Game, a frightening recreation of the darkness and terror of the early Troubles. He became a full-time writer, with many of his novels being adapted for television.

  Paul Dacre was a 23-year-old from the Daily Express Manchester office who would become loved and hated by rival journalists, and politicians, as the editor of the Daily Mail. Dacre favoured writing col
our pieces rather than hard news. He confessed to having an undeveloped sense of news, and it was easy to agree. He had eliminated this gap in his skills by the time we were together again a few years later working as correspondents in New York.

  From his beginnings in Northern Ireland, Robert Fisk of The Times, and later The Independent, covered probably more conflicts than any British journalist of his generation; he interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times.

  The irrepressible Chris Buckland, bureau chief of the Daily Mirror, later covered wars and politics on numerous Fleet Street newspapers. The Mirror irritated the IRA so much they bombed its Belfast printing plant. Buckland’s customary coolness was disturbed when he received a threatening call. ‘We’re watching you,’ he was told. ‘And by the way, the third step on the fire escape leading to your bedroom window needs fixing.’ Buckland checked — his caller was correct.

  Other careers flourished in the autumn of 1975, when the world’s media invaded the tiny town of Monasterevin in the Irish Republic. The drama that attracted us was an irresistible combination of romance, riches, stolen masterpieces, and murderous intent.

  The police and the Irish Army had surrounded a terraced white-stucco council house where two IRA members were holding hostage a Dutch businessman, Dr Tiede Herrema. Until being abducted on his way to work in Limerick two weeks before, Herrema had led a quiet life as the boss of a steel-cord factory.

  The kidnappers were Eddie Gallagher and Marion Coyle, and they threatened to execute Herrema unless the Irish government released three IRA prisoners. One of the prisoners was Rose Dugdale, the daughter of a rich English family, who had been presented as a debutante to the Queen before turning away from her privileged life to become one of the IRA’s most imaginative members, and one refined in her crimes. She burgled her own family home of silverware and art to fund the IRA. She bound and gagged a wealthy knight and his wife, and made off with their collection of masterpieces, including works by Goya and Gainsborough, and the only Vermeer in a private collection. Most dramatically, Dugdale helped commandeer a helicopter in Northern Ireland to drop bombs on a Royal Ulster Constabulary station in Strabane. Happily, they failed to explode.