by A. N. Wilson
Unlike some of his successors in the republican movement in the North, Fitt had an open contempt for the IRA, which was why they tried over and over again to kill him. He showed them, unlike the weasly John Hume, darling of TV political commentators in the 1980s and 1990s, no fear. Fitt, as a clever working-class Belfast man, was aware, as the Westminster politicians were not, of how complicated matters would become once the would-be Che Guevaras, the urban guerrillas of the Provisional IRA, entered the scene, with all their nonsensical confusions: their claim, for instance, upon which so much of their propaganda success in the United States was based, that the unfortunate British soldiers, who had been sent by an impulsive Home Secretary to stop Protestant mobs from lynching Catholics, were by contrast an army of ‘occupation’.
When Mr Justice Scarman was appointed to report on the ‘Battle of Bogside’ he was shocked to read the Royal Ulster Constabulary log of the Derry events, in which he found that Bogsiders were referred to as ‘the natives’ in RUC radio reports.15 But how could a Liberal English judge hope to disentangle what was going on in this terrible place? History had forced the mutually uncomprehending parties together into the arena. Whatever the motives of the Scottish settlers in Ulster in the seventeenth century, their twentieth-century descendants had not asked to be born into a divided island in which their political destiny, their very identity as people, was perceived to be under threat by Irish republicanism. (The secularisation of the South had not yet begun, which would mean, in the event of a united Ireland, the Ulster Protestants sending their children to Catholic primary schools, since the RC Church ran the primary schools.) ‘So?’ asked a secularised English nitwit of Iris Murdoch in the days of her Paisleyite fervour.16 ‘So,’ she, whiskey-flown and flushing, retorted–‘would you be happy to send your children to a NAZI school?’ If the Protestants were in an unenviable position, so too were the Catholics, who had not wanted the 1922 settlement and who, especially the inhabitants of Londonderry perhaps, felt themselves trapped by a whim of fate on the wrong side of a border, bullied, discriminated against, besieged.
Sympathy for both sides must be keen in the bosom of any but a biased observer. Sympathy for the British soldiers must also be deep, when the difficulty, or, to be more realistic, the downright impossibility of their task is considered. Once the Troubles had begun, it was generally agreed by the politicians that the presence of the troops was the sole factor in preventing the outbreak of civil war. The historian can afford the luxury of wondering whether this was in fact the case. (The prospect of either side ‘winning’ such a war would have been a terrible one.) Responsible politicians, and the senior army officers and intelligence officers they employed, could not take that risk. A political solution had to be found–one which would satisfy the fears of the working-class Catholics and Protestants, and which would not outrage public opinion in the Irish Republic and Britain. Until such a solution was found, the British soldier, hour by hour, month by month, had to keep the two warring communities apart, had to provide security for the police, had to do what he could to root out the arms of the guerrillas. Such rooting-out, once the explosions and shootings began in earnest, would play into the hands of the Marxist propagandists in the IRA making out the poor squaddie who searches a church hall, a terraced house or a farm for illegal weaponry to be a brutally insensitive invader. The routine security checks of cars at the borders increased this perception of the soldier as the enemy.
The soldier was hampered by the fact that in as much as he was representing a political point of view, it was the one point of view which, so far as Northern Irish people as a whole were concerned, was untenable, that their affairs were best settled by the English.
The true Unionist believed that Ulster was as much part of the United Kingdom as one of the English counties. ‘I look forward to the time when the political battles of Northern Ireland are fought between Conservative and Labour… In the meantime [though], it will obviously continue for a long while on the present sectarian basis.’ So said Reginald Maudling, who succeeded Callaghan as Home Secretary when the Conservatives won the General Election on the mainland in June 1970.17 The pure Unionist belief led to some confusing analogies which dogged conservative, small and large C, thinking about Northern Ireland for a generation: the Daily Telegraph pundit T. E. Utley, a fervent defender of this position, had more influence, over other commentators and on politicians, than was desirable.
Had British Governments simply proceeded on the assumption that Ulster was an integral part of the United Kingdom their response to violence there would have been fundamentally different. It is scarcely conceivable, for example, that in a state of civil disturbance in Britain large parts of Birmingham or Manchester would have been allowed for months on end to become rebel enclaves to which the police and the Army were denied access. It would have been quite incredible also that, at a time when the lawful authorities still had overwhelming force at their disposal, the leaders of a rebellion in Warwickshire or Lancashire would have been given safe conducts to London to discuss conditions of peace.18
Utley published these words in 1975. The key words which give the lie to his plausibility are the fourth, simply, and halfway through the paragraph, Britain. Nothing about the situation in Northern Ireland had been, or would be, simple. Some Unionists believed that Northern Ireland should be treated as if it were Warwickshire or Lancashire; nonetheless, they also spoke of it as detached from Britain as, of course, it was and ever should be. It would take thirty years to persuade British governments to stop thinking in this way and to adopt the saving double-think which saw that Ulster both was–and was not–British.
The two extremist wings of the explosive situation had seen this from the beginning. The Provos saw that the war which they intended to conduct to drive the British out of Ireland would be a long one. They had the good fortune to have established links with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. An English tutor at Tripoli College, known to his Libyan handlers as Mister Eddie, was given the status of IRA Ambassador, with a splendid Italianate villa in the middle of Tripoli’s embassy district. In the three years of the IRA–Libyan liaison, over $3.5 million ($10 million by 2002 values) was funnelled via banks in the City of London into the IRA’s bank accounts. Mister Eddie, an IRA sympathiser rather than a full member, was to fall foul of the Provisionals when in 1974 he organised a conference between them and the loyalist paramilitaries the UDA (Ulster Defence Association) with the aim of discussing setting up an independent Northern Irish state. Mister Eddie foresaw the solution offered to, and accepted by, Paisley and the IRA leadership by Tony Blair thirty years later.19 Since ‘Mister Eddie’s’ plan would have eventually dissolved any need for the IRA to exist, it is not surprising that it was vigorously rejected.
At the time of the split in the IRA it probably had no more than forty to sixty members in the whole of Belfast. Among the families which joined the Provos was that of the Adamses. Grandfather Gerry Adams had fought alongside Michael Collins in the Irish Republican Brotherhood against the English in the pre-1922 war. Gerry, the father, had served an eight-year jail sentence after ambushing members of the RUC in 1942. Their son, also Gerry, had natural qualities of leadership, which showed themselves during the Easter Riots of 1970. Billy McKee, the new Provo Belfast commander, heard that riots had erupted in the Lower Falls Road and commanded his men to go to Ballymurphy and take on the British Army. It would have led to certain defeat at the hands of superior British firepower. Adams dragooned all McKee’s men into a terraced house in West Belfast and held them at gunpoint. As one of them realised, ‘Adams wanted ordinary people involved in the rioting as a way of radicalizing them.’ The riots lasted four days. Thousands had appeared on the streets. On and off the riots repeated themselves all summer, and, by the end of it, the Ballymurphy IRA with Gerry Adams as its commander was the most militant in Belfast. Adams’s position as the dominant figure in the IRA over the next thirty years was assured. In the general elections of June, which s
aw Harold Wilson’s government defeated by the Conservative Party of Edward Heath, Ian Paisley defeated the official Unionist candidate and became the Member of Parliament for Bannside, Co. Antrim. He was now a figure not merely in the streets and conventicles of Ulster but in the national Parliament and on the national stage.
13
The 1960s
It was a violent decade, which saw the murder of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States; the fatal stabbing of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in South Africa; and the grotesque murder of Sharon Tate with four friends in Beverly Hills, followed by the murder of Leno Lo Bianca in the same district. Charles Manson, a charismatic hippy, was found guilty of the crimes. It was the decade of the Vietnam War, in which the South Vietnamese lost 150,000 lives (400,000 wounded), the North Vietnamese 100,000 (300,000 wounded) and the United States military 45,941 (300,635 wounded). The reactions in Europe and America to the war were not all of a pacifist character. There was street fighting and rioting in London, Paris, Washington and Chicago. In Northern Ireland, the Troubles escalated and in Czechoslovakia (20 August 1968) Soviet tanks threatened a repeat of Hungary, 1956, when they entered Prague and brought to an end the benign reforms of Dubc'ek. So for all the summer of love and the love-ins and the everlasting songs, it was a blood-spattered, confused time. Peter Weiss’s 1964 play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade was the archetype of the Theatre of Cruelty. The convulsions would seem to many apocalyptic, as if some rough beast were to be born, as in Yeats’s horrific prophecy; perhaps as if Dostoyevsky too was right to have foreseen a time when, God having been discarded, anything would be deemed permissible.
In Britain, the practice of hanging criminals was discontinued. Revulsion against the ghoulish ritual had been growing ever since the Second World War, particularly in the prison service itself, where the doctor, the chaplain in full canonicals, and prison officers, together with the governor assembled to watch the hangman demonstrate his skills. Albert Pierrepoint (1905–92) was the most prolific exponent of the art. He had taken part in his first hanging when he assisted his uncle Tom hang Patrick McDermott at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin on 29 December 1932. He believed himself to be the swiftest in the business, executing James Inglis on 8 May 1951 at Strangeways Prison in Manchester in a mere seven seconds. In all, he executed an estimated 433 men and 17 women in the course of his career, including 200 war criminals at Hameln Prison in the British-controlled sector of Germany after the Second World War, the celebrated pro-Nazis John Amery, who was hanged at Wandsworth in December 1945, and William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, the Irish-American Nazi broadcaster who, in spite of not being a British subject, was hanged for treason at Wandsworth on 4 January 1946. Pierrepont also hanged Derek Bentley (28 January 1953 at Wandsworth). Bentley, who had the mental age of eleven after a head injury sustained during the war, shot a policeman. He was out with Christopher Craig, who shouted out the words ‘Let him have it!’ before Bentley pulled the trigger. On 30 July 1998, the Appeal Court finally ruled (after forty-five years of campaigning by his father, sister Iris and, since Iris’s death the previous year, by her daughter, Maria Bentley Dingwall) that his conviction was unsafe.
Pierrepont also hanged Timothy John Evans for murdering his wife at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill–a crime for which he was posthumously pardoned, when John Reginald Christie (hanged Pentonville Prison, 15 July 1953) was condemned for murdering seven women at that address. He also hanged the pathetic Ruth Ellis on 13 July 1955 at Holloway Prison; a mother of two who shot her lover in a crime passionnel, hers was a case which shocked the public and did much to alter the mood about capital punishment.
When Harold Wilson’s first government came in, the death penalty was suspended; the Private Members’ Bill to do so (sponsored by Sydney Silverman MP) received Royal Assent on 9 November 1965, suspending the death penalty for a period of five years and in effect abolishing it. The last two executions in Britain were carried out simultaneously in Walton and Strangeways prisons (the former in Liverpool) when Peter Anthony Alen and Gwynne Owen Evans (real name John Robson Walby) were hanged for the murder of a laundry man by the name of John West.
Even while these liberal laws were being passed in London, to the immense relief of Christians who questioned the legitimacy, and humanists who deplored the indecency, of hanging, murders were taking place.
Ian Brady worked at Burlington Warehouses, a big catalogue company in the middle of Manchester. Myra Hindley got a job there as a typist, and soon fell under Brady’s hypnotic sexual allure. Quite early on in their relationship, he persuaded her to buy a tape recorder, then (1961) a newfangled device only recently on the market.
Hindley was not herself unintelligent (she’d turned down a place at a teacher training college because she wanted to start earning her living as a secretary) and Brady gave himself intellectual airs, reading Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, alongside Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers, with its message that rape and incest were exciting.1 He liked playing a tape of Hitler’s speeches. His copy of The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade is now preserved in the National Archives at Kew, because Hindley and Brady were the most notorious British murderers of the twentieth century.
He began with simple beating. She had discovered, once she became his lover, that he was a sadist and he easily initiated her into the ideas and appetites which that involved. They liked stalking unknown men in pubs and, when they found them in a darkened spot, giving them ‘punishment’ beatings. In bed, they fantasised about the perfect murder.2 They got hold of a friend’s van and enjoyed driving round contemplating their first murder. The killings were meticulously planned, with Brady carefully counting all the buttons on his clothes and listing all the items of clothing which would have to be burned when the deed was done. Their first victim was Pauline Reade, whom Myra Hindley had known since childhood, and whom they picked up as she was walking along the street in broad daylight. Brady raped her and killed her with a knife, and then Hindley drove them to the moors to bury the body. ‘If you’d shown any signs of backing out you’d have ended up in the same hole as her,’ he said. ‘I know,’ was her reply.3 That was 12 July 1963.
Ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was probably the next victim. Once again, the murder was carefully planned in advance. They would find a victim and get ‘it’ to help carry some boxes to the back of the van. They found Lesley Ann at a fairground, as they staggered about with boxes of food and drink. Lesley Ann’s cry–‘Please, Dad, no!’–was carefully recorded on the newfangled tape recorder. Myra turned up Radio Luxembourg to drown the noise while Brady raped the child. Brady photographed his victim, and the next day they drove to the moors to bury the body.
By the time they were brought to trial at Chester Assizes for what had come to be known as the ‘Moors Murders’, on 27 April 1966, the police knew of just three killings–Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, aged seventeen, and Pauline Reade. Brady was also convicted of the murder of twelve-year-old John Kilbride. After the murderers had been imprisoned for life, it became clear that there were other victims.
Naturally the case excited interest, much of it extremely prurient. The tape recorder had enabled the jury, and those in the public gallery, to hear Brady and Hindley torturing their victim. Pamela Hansford Johnson, novelist wife of C. P. Snow, attended the trials and wrote a book4 claiming that Brady and Hindley were the product of what had come to be known as the ‘permissive’ societ.4 But what society had ever permitted crimes such as theirs? Another writer, Emlyn Williams, the Welsh playwright, wrote an account of the murders, Beyond Belief, which must have left readers with the queasy sensation that he had enjoyed the shock and horror which he professed so to abominate.
Most of Brady and Hindley’s crimes were committed before the abolition of the death penalty. If anyone deserved to hang, was it not they? The debate between adv
ocates and opponents of a death penalty continued in Britain until membership of the European Union (which bans capital punishment in its member states) made it a non-issue. After abolition in Britain, the rates of murder increased steadily. In 1957, there were fewer than sixty offences committed which, under the term of the current legislation, would have merited death. By 1968, this number had crept up to a little less than one hundred. By 2004, there were over nine hundred murders a year.
In the case of Hindley and Brady, however, the arguments were less about deterrence than about the need for ‘closure’. They began their career of torture and murder before hanging was abolished, so they knew what they risked: it probably increased the thrill. As it was, they were sentenced to life imprisonment, Brady to a psychiatric prison–Broadmoor–and Hindley to a series of women’s gaols. Hanging them would not have brought back their victims. For some people, who certainly include their victims’ families, however, the ritual of violence, and the fact that the story was given an ending, would have provided, if not consolation, a degree of satisfaction.