by Ken Wharton
THE MURDER OF INSPECTOR HAROLD COBB, RUC
Keith Page
We were based at Kitchen Hill security base in Lurgan and we had just been tasked to act as cover for the RUC who manned the two permanent VCPs in Lurgan High Street. We dashed for 30 metres or so before regrouping and going into normal patrol mode, patrolling down the High Street, heading towards the security barrier at Church Place where we waited for the RUC men. They arrived and Jock, our brick commander, then started to have a little chat with a couple of the RUC men. I don’t know why but for the first five or ten minutes or so I started getting a little bit of an uneasy feeling. There was nothing tangible; I just felt a little bit edgy. I remember I had my weapon resting firmly in my shoulder pointing quite high. I was ballooning in and around the sentry box and I wasn’t staying still for long. It wasn’t as if we were hard targeting in a hard Republican area, or anything, I just felt a bit more switched on that morning. Having said that this immediate area had been hit a few times in the past and members of the security forces had been killed.
Anyway what we didn’t know was that as well as being dicked by a couple of women who were positioned at strategic points opposite the road to us, and up the road, we were also being watched from a shop, thirty or so metres away, by an IRA active service unit armed with American Armalite assault rifles and Garands; I think they were old Second World War rifles but they were used very effectively by the IRA and INLA in Northern Ireland. Anyway we started patrolling back up the road to the other checkpoint where we were met by an RUC police inspector; I think his personal weapon was an SMG or an M1 carbine, I can’t remember now. He’d come down to check all was well with his blokes; it was a regular thing for him to do. Jock started to have a chat with the inspector about the security situation whilst myself, Blue and Phil Solomon were just mooching around keeping our eyes open. When they finished talking the inspector prepared to get into his Land Rover to make tracks down to the other. I mentioned to him something about the weather; it was crisp but nice and sunny; he nodded and we exchanged a couple of quick pleasantries then he jumped into his rover and crawled away.
We started to patrol back down the road and as we got about half-way down, there was this deafening sound of automatic gunfire. When you get high velocity rounds being fired in a small built-up area, and you’re just about on top of it, it amplifies all the noise and the corrugated iron sheets surrounding the checkpoint makes it even louder. The sound of the gunfire crashes through your head; the sudden ferocity of the violence is a bit of a shock.
The contact only lasted about six seconds – our four-man patrol got there about 20 seconds after the shooting stopped and it wasn’t good. There were three RUC men lying in the road by the checkpoint; two of them were still alive but seriously wounded. The inspector who I’d just been talking to a minute earlier, was dead; he’d been shot in the head by a high velocity round. The fourth RUC man there was just pacing up and down screaming: ‘Bastards, bastards!’ He just kept screaming that same word out all the time, but he was armed and in shock, which could have made him a bit unpredictable. Jock switched on to this very quickly and went to try and calm him down. One of the other blokes in the patrol whom we called ‘Blue’ had a shocked woman with her arms around him. She just happened to be a civilian worker in our security base and was on her way there when she was caught up in the tail-end of the attack. It was terrible timing for this woman because she personally knew one or two of these policemen; they were all close-knit.
Incidentally, a couple of weeks earlier I’d seen ‘Blue’ hit a man in the face with his rifle butt and here he was now with his arms around this women who was breaking down on him; he didn’t know what to do. In the meantime Phil Solomon, the other bloke in the patrol, was kneeling down over one of the wounded policemen to see what he could do for him. I was kneeling over the other wounded policeman, trying to find a bullet hole to put a field dressing onto. We all carried field dressings on our belts. I remember I kept saying to him: ‘You’ll be ok mate.’ I didn’t know what else to say really as I remember during the build-up training in ‘Tintown’ [Northern Ireland training centre in Sennelager, West Germany] one of the NITAT team said to us ‘don’t keep telling people that they’re going to be all right when they’re not, or they might come back and haunt you’.
This policeman was in a bad way; he couldn’t talk or move, but he very slowly moved his head to the right and all he saw was the mess of the inspector a couple of metres away. He could also see his other badly wounded comrade and tears were rolling down his face; with hindsight, I should have stopped him from looking.
By this time the quick reaction force lads were out on the ground and the follow-up was on. I remember standing up and I saw this one bystander about 20 years old had a faint smirk on his face and he wouldn’t move away. Quick as a flash, one of the lads just slammed him up against the wall, face first then started searching him. He stopped smiling after that. Then, shortly afterwards, the ambulance guys finally got there and picked up the wounded RUC man that I was helping; with that, he let out a huge scream of pain.
PIRA had been watching and planning this attack for quite some time. We were only about 20 seconds away from the end of the contact, so they had nerve cutting it that fine. They knew exactly where our foot patrol was in relation to them, and had a window of about 30 seconds to operate in. They must have been under a lot of pressure and yet they were still professional enough to make a head shot and nearly kill two others. It was done with military precision and it really pisses me of having to say that. I would love to be able to say that something went wrong for them and that we managed to get a couple of rounds off into them but it didn’t; that’s what we were up against in Northern Ireland. We had one of the best armies in the world but they nearly always had the jump on you.
The two wounded RUC men both managed to live, probably helped a little bit that the doctors operating in hospitals in Northern Ireland were regarded at that time as the best in the world in dealing with bullet wounds. One other thing that I would like to mention is that for the first five minutes or so of that morning, there was just our four-man foot patrol and an IRA ASU just metres away from us. There was no one else on the ground, just them and us, and they didn’t attack us. We patrolled past that shop twice before the contact; we were only a few feet away from them twice. We would have been a bigger prize for them, although the four policemen all had rifles and were pretty well armed but they would have been a softer target than us. I think that the other reason they never went for us was because they were targeting the inspector all along; they were professional and weren’t going to deviate from what they were originally going to do.
What does cross my mind on the odd rare occasion was that if I had not been switched on that morning, they might have said to each other: ‘Sod it; let’s go for the Army patrol instead!’ Anyway, they escaped down an alleyway and across a small field onto a road then disappeared. They later found two of them in a car in Portadown; another one was also caught quickly, found in bed with all his clothes on. A fourth was arrested in Belfast. Three of them were linked forensically to the shootings. The incident was shown on TV that night, and it was a bit strange seeing myself on News at Ten that night.
Florence Cobb, widow of RUC Inspector Harry Cobb, said at her husband’s funeral: ‘After they die, they will be forgotten, just as the policemen and soldiers who died are forgotten after a while, except by those who loved them.’
On the 26th, emergency legislation was passed in relation to hoax bomb warnings. Because of the necessity to attend to every single warning, on the basis that it just might be real, a massive amount of time and energy was being expended by the RUC and Army. There was also the worry that an EOD officer, professional and dedicated though they may be, would be complacent, even blasé, about future warnings. After a spate of further hoaxes which again crippled the commercial heart of Belfast, the legislation came into force. From now on, bomb hoaxes would attrac
t a maximum prison term of five years. On that same day, there was a lucky escape for a Catholic man from the Bawnmore area of Belfast. He was shot and seriously wounded as he lay in his bed and the attack was thought to have been carried out by the Loyalist ‘window cleaners’ gang.
The 27th saw another soldier’s death and it was, as before, an off-duty UDR soldier who was killed. It was a day of madness in which no less than five people would die violently. Corporal James McFall (38), a father of five, worked as a postman for the Belfast GPO as well as being a part-time soldier. He lived at Cuan Parade, just off the Woodvale Avenue in North Belfast. He had just returned to his home after having completed an early morning mail delivery and received a knock at the door. As he went to answer the knock, two masked gunmen fired at him through the frosted glass of his front door. He was hit several times and collapsed in a pool of blood, witnessed by his wife and 15-year old son. He died in his distraught son’s arms in full view of another of his children. The IRA killers would have had only a vague shape at which to aim at through the frosted glass and it begs the question what if Mrs McFall or the son had answered the door; would they have fired anyway? James McFall was armed with a pistol, issued to some off-duty UDR personnel, but didn’t have the chance to use it. Not all UDR soldiers were issued with personal protection weapons (PPW); some were turned down out of hand, whereas others were allowed to buy their own. However, a lot of UDR soldiers went through the Troubles without having a PPW. Over 1,000 of his postal colleagues turned out to pay homage to their fallen friend.
The tragedy of the murdered soldier was soon dwarfed as the still simmering feud between the OIRA and their hated rivals in PIRA burst into vicious life again in the hours following the shooting of the UDR soldier.
The Belfast Telegraph led with: ‘Five Dead as Gunmen hunt in City of Fear’ as the vicious internecine feuding echoed across an already tense Belfast. This was accompanied by the following report: ‘Republican Club leaders – including three Belfast councillors – went into hiding last night as Provisional IRA gunmen stalked city streets to ‘shoot it out’ with their bitter rivals.’ Four people died over a period of between four and five hours. The tit-for-tat killings began when OIRA member Kevin McNulty (29) was shot dead in the New Lodge area. He was an executive member and education officer of the Republican Clubs’ political organisation. At 14:55, McNulty and a friend had just arrived at Alexander House flats and were about to step into a lift, when two men called out just one word – ‘Freeze!’ As the two OIRA men turned to face them, the men produced weapons and then fired seven shots at McNulty and his friend. Both men were hit, but McNulty was mortally wounded as three rounds hit him in the head and he died very shortly afterwards. The killers then ran off in the direction of North Queen Street which runs below the New Lodge. The author, on a visit in 2012, walked along this street whilst photographing the memorial to the McGurk’s Bar bombing in 1971. The streets even today holds a menace which is quite tangible.
Just 95 minutes later, James Foots (29), who was only connected with the Provisionals by virtue of being the brother of a leading Sinn Fein member Malachy Foots, was shot dead by OIRA gunmen. Foots had just arrived at the Nationalist Unity Flats with his father and was confronted by gunmen as he got out of his car. Both men were shot without any preamble and the younger Foots died at the scene; his father was wounded in the legs. Exactly four hours later, the feuding continued and the OIRA attacked Daniel Cowan (30), father of three, in the mistaken belief that he was a member of PIRA. Mr Cowan had not lived at the house at Riverdale Park East for very long and the previous occupant was the one whom the Officials were trying to kill. Two masked gunmen broke down the door and fired several shots at Mr Cowan – a grocer – who was sitting with his sister. He died almost immediately but his sibling was untouched. The following year, one of the dickers who wrongly pointed him out to his murderers was jailed for life for his role.
The next – and final – killing took place only two minutes later, when a PIRA member Thomas ‘Toddler’ Tolan (31) was shot and killed by OIRA gunmen on the Ballymurphy Estate. Tolan had been one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ who had escaped from HMS Maidstone, used as a floating prison in 1972 [see The Bloodiest Year: Northern Ireland 1972 by the author]. He was standing outside his home, seemingly unaware or unconcerned about the internecine feuding, when OIRA gunmen walked up to him and shot him several times; he died almost instantly. The following day, a Republican newspaper ran the following obituary: ‘Deeply regret the death of Volunteer Tommy Tolan, ‘B’ Coy, 2nd Batt. Belfast Brigade, murdered by cowards July 27th 1977.’ Other obituaries mention that Foots was ‘…murdered in cold blood….’ And of McNulty, ‘We knew his value to the workers’ cause; his killers knew it also.’
The feuding continued the next day when a hail of bullets were fired by unknown gunmen at Kelly’s Bar on the Whiterock Road, although there were no injuries. A little while later, eight shots were fired at workmen on the Grosvenor Road and there were punishment shootings which injured several teenagers at Monagh Drive and Ardmonagh Gardens, both in the Nationalist Turf Lodge. There were other shootings in the Turf Lodge and two men were wounded at Norglen Gardens; two men were shot at Whitecliffe Crescent in the Ballymurphy and a further two at Springfield Park. The shootings continued and a man with possible PIRA links was shot six times at Norglen Parade, Turf Lodge, but lived through his ordeal. The attacks continued into a third day and two local youths were fired upon by gunmen in a passing car as they walked through the Turf Lodge. One was hit in the back and badly wounded; the other received only superficial wounds. Shortly afterwards, the fighting flared up again at Kelly’s Bar and shots were fired from a passing car; a nine-year old boy was hit and wounded. Finally a petrol bomb was thrown into a house in the Ballysillan area and a family narrowly escaped being burned to death.
Amidst all of this internecine carnage, the Royal Engineers lost one of their soldiers in circumstances unknown. On the 28th, Corporal John Albert Haynes (29) died whilst on duty in the Province; nothing further is known.
LET THEM KILL THEMSELVES; SAVES US A JOB
Corporal, Royal Green Jackets
We didn’t find out for a few days that the IRA were shooting each other as we didn’t always get the papers straight away down in the cuds [rural areas]. However, as soon as we got the word, we were all tickled. Just as long as they were killing each other, we didn’t give a flying fuck! We all worked on the basis that just as long as they were occupied doing that, they’d leave us alone. If I recall correctly, we had about four or five days during which we had the usual swear words and insults but nothing worse than that. It just showed you that if they were nutters with each other, what would they be like with those that they hated?
It was a bad time because we lost the CO shortly afterwards [Lt Col Corden-Lloyd] but for a few days we had a bit of a break from the usual shit.
The Loyalist UVF then sent a timely message to add to the Republican woes with a ‘we’re still here’ firebomb which badly damaged Holy Cross School in the Ardoyne. Worryingly for the SF, it was claimed that the Provisionals had obtained a highly secret document which showed all of the routes which the Royal party proposed to take on the forthcoming Silver Jubilee tour of Northern Ireland.
July came to an end, and the killings stayed below 20 again for another month. Had it not been for the flurry of feud deaths, it might have fallen below ten for the first time in six years. In all, ten people died this month; two soldiers and two policeman died in addition to one prison officer. Only one civilian died – a Catholic, killed by the Republicans in a case of mistaken identity. There were no identifiable sectarian murders. The Republicans lost three and the Loyalists one, all in internal feuding incidents. Republicans were responsible for eight of the deaths this month.
32
August
This month the death toll remained below 20 for the third month in a row – total deaths were ten – but soldiers would make up 70% of the fatal
ities. A Royal Engineer would die in unknown circumstances; intriguingly, he would be the fourth member of this Regiment to die for reasons unknown in an eight month period.
On the first day of the month, Sapper Stephen Lloyd Worth (21) of the Royal Engineers died in Northern Ireland. He was the fourth member of this famous corps to die during the year and in every case it was ‘cause of death unknown.’ I have approached the MOD and contacts in the Royal Engineers for further details, but none have been forthcoming at the time of publication. He was cremated at Park Crematorium, Guildford Road, Aldershot. One death attributable to this is not uncommon, two is rare, but four deaths in an eight month period in the same unit?
That same day there was a near tragedy when a nine-year old boy was wounded by a bullet fired from an Army rifle in the Nationalist New Lodge. EOD had been called in to deal with a suspected car bomb and a round was fired into the car as per standard operating procedure. Unfortunately the round fragmented and a fragment hit the child, wounding him; he later recovered in hospital after what was a dreadful accident. Sinn Fein made full capital out of the incident and no doubt when the Irish-Americans learned of the incident, the sound of coins dropping into NORAID collecting tins must have been deafening. Later, there was a major firefight involving a unit of the Royal Marines, who fired over 100 rounds at Republican gunman in the area of Carlingford Lough, near Greenore. There were no casualties.
On the following day, the Belfast Newsletter reported ‘Firebomb Attack Launched by Provos’: a wave of IRA bombing attacks was launched in Belfast and Lisburn during the evening. Six shops were set alight in the centre of Lisburn and commercial premises were also alight in Dunmurry, Springfield Road, Oldpark, Royal Avenue and Ligoniel, as the Provisionals continued their ‘economic’ warfare. At one stage 24 fire engines from Belfast were fighting the blazes and literally had to race from one end of Belfast to another in order to combat the conflagration. The multi blazes caused extensive damage all over the city and all emergency services were stretched to breaking point.