by Peter Taylor
The demand for troops was passed on to the RUC’s Inspector-General (the Chief Constable), who in turn prepared a written request for the Stormont Home Affairs Minister. The Northern Ireland Cabinet met at midday and at 12.25 p.m. on Friday 15 August, Chichester-Clark made a formal petition for military aid to the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, in London. He submitted this, the second request in two days, with increasing foreboding. ‘I thought that initially it would probably blow over,’ he told me, ‘but when we had a sort of “second calling” of the troops into Belfast, I was beginning to wonder just a little bit where we were really going and whether we would really be able to solve all the problems.’8 Callaghan had cut his holiday short and returned to the Home Office in the wake of the Lynch broadcast after his civil servants had warned him that the situation was getting critical.
Callaghan, like his Labour Cabinet colleagues, had been extremely reluctant to become directly involved and later admitted to a woeful ignorance of Northern Ireland. ‘I never do believe, frankly, that anybody from this side of the water understands Ireland,’ he said, ‘and I’ve never flattered myself that I understand the situation fully. I think very few people do. Certainly we didn’t have enough understanding of it at the time.’ Callaghan also made it clear that there was no enthusiasm for deployment.
I don’t think anybody wanted to send troops in. That was the last thing we wanted to do. We held off until the last possible moment, until we were being begged by the Catholics of Northern Ireland to send them in. What an irony of history, that it was they who begged us, and I understand why. Their lives were in danger and we had to respond, especially as the police seemed to be exhausted and quite incapable of controlling the situation.9
At 3.10 p.m. that Friday afternoon, the United Kingdom Government authorized the deployment of British soldiers on the streets on Belfast in aid of the civil power that was the Stormont Government. Three hours later, around 250 soldiers from the 1st Royal Regiment of Wales marched onto the Falls Road and set up their headquarters in Springfield Road police station. This was a truly momentous decision since it entailed sending troops from England to reinforce the limited manpower available on the ground in the province. Among the first to arrive as members of the army’s emergency ‘Spearhead’ battalion were soldiers from The Light Infantry. So unprepared were they that they had to buy maps of Belfast from a filling station on their way into the city from Aldergrove airport. One of their officers, Major Keith, had been in the province on exercise exactly a year before. ‘Then all was peace and light,’ he told me. ‘There were no problems at all. But to arrive back in August 1969 to find the whole place on fire and to sense all the enmity and bigotry was pretty frightening.’ His experience going into Belfast was not unlike Major David’s going into Derry. ‘The Protestants cheered you on because they thought you were coming in to finish off the Catholics. Then when you crossed the divide, the Catholics did think you’d come to finish them off. It took us a long time to persuade them that we were actually there to stop the fighting. When they realized that it was true, they actually got down on their knees and prayed. It was quite extraordinary. They were convinced that if we hadn’t gone in that night, a huge number of them would have been burned out and probably killed by the next morning. It was very difficult to get through to both sides exactly what our role was.’10
To many of the soldiers who arrived, internal security such as this was not a new departure. A huge body of experience had been built up over the years which the army had no doubt would stand them in good stead when soldiers suddenly found themselves keeping the peace in a corner of the United Kingdom. In the late sixties, Jamie was on the threshold of a military career that, thirty years later, was to see him as a senior officer in Northern Ireland.
The army’s experience in 1969 was a complete mixture – a combination of internal security and counter-revolutionary warfare which had been developed after the Second World War in the context of the withdrawal from empire. It covered Brunei, the Far East, Aden, Kenya, Cyprus, a whole host of colonial-type campaigns. We had to deal with the revolutionary organizations that were coming to government and internal security situations for which tactics and, to a certain extent, doctrine had been developed over the years.
Do you think that the army realized that it was dealing with a similar situation when it was deployed in Northern Ireland?
I don’t think we probably saw it as a counter-revolutionary warfare situation, far from it. I think probably the first year or so it was very much an internal security situation in support of the police. I think everyone was pretty amazed at finding themselves on the streets of the United Kingdom.
For many of the soldiers who arrived in Northern Ireland in the summer and autumn of 1969, their most recent operation was in the British colony of Aden. It marked the final stage of Britain’s surrender of empire as pink gradually faded from the globe. The Government set 1968 as the deadline for withdrawal from Aden and did so well in advance. The Union Jack was finally lowered on 30 November 1967 but only after two years of bloodshed and civil unrest as two rival liberation movements, the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY), not only fought British soldiers but each other to seize power in the political vacuum that the British would leave.11
Aden added to the army’s experience in dealing with both rioters and ‘terrorists’ in built-up urban areas. At one stage, the NLF turned to selective assassination and, taking the bloody approach of Michael Collins, tracked down and shot the entire operational body of the Aden Police Special Branch. Their corpses were left on the ground.12 The Crater district, a hot, dusty and inhospitable warren of streets and alleys, was the West Belfast of Aden and the seat of resistance to the British army. Like their future counterparts along the Falls Road, its inhabitants perfected the techniques of rioting and the army its techniques of response. The most dramatic was the curfew, the most common was the deployment of the ‘banner men’. When rioting became dangerous, the platoon commander would normally shout through a loudspeaker ‘Banner men out!’ and they would then march forward and unfurl their banner on which was written in Arabic the words ‘Stop or we will open fire’. At that point, the rioters were supposed to disperse. If they didn’t, the threat would be carried out. George, who later became a corporal in The Gloucestershire Regiment in West Belfast, knew the Aden drill well.
If there was a riot situation, you used to have a hollow square with platoon headquarters in the middle and your riflemen on the comers. You’d advance towards the crowd and then stop and someone would go out in front of the crowd and put down a piece of white tape, maybe twenty feet away or whatever. Then you’d have an Arabic-speaking person who would shout out in Arabic, ‘If you cross the white line, we will fire.’ And that’s what they did. Or they’d pick the ringleader out and say in Arabic and English, ‘This is an unlawful assembly. Disperse or we’ll open fire.’ If they didn’t, then the man in charge, the sergeant-major, would say, ‘The man in the white turban, directly in the middle,’ and we all knew who he was. ‘Fire!’ and someone would drop him. The boss had already told the guy he was going to do it. And that’s what would happen. And then they’d all disappear.
‘The man in the white turban’, more colloquially known as ‘the bugger in the red shirt’, became part of army folklore. But the tactic did not always work out as planned. The Parachute Regiment thought better of it. When their predecessors, The Royal Anglians, tried it three weeks before the Paras arrived, they were hand-grenaded four times. In the early days in Belfast, the banner men came into their own again and during at least one riot unfurled their banner to find the order still written in Arabic.13
George knew that dealing with rioters and insurgents in a distant colony was very different from tackling sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. In Aden, George enjoyed a freedom he felt he was denied in Northern Ireland, not least because in the colony soldiers were not bound by the Yellow Card that came to be issued to every
soldier in the province. It stipulated that lawfully they could only open fire if there was a threat to life, and that a warning must always be given unless doing so would increase the risk.14
We weren’t governed by the same rules that we were in Ireland. The lads over there could be a lot rougher, a lot harder because we never had the newspapers there and we never had the Press there or anyone else who could actually see what we were doing. It made a lot of difference because you were given a freer hand right across the board, from commanding officers right down to the corporals in charge of the men on the ground. You could just be a lot harder, a lot tougher and a lot more ruthless.
When George marched into a still-smouldering Belfast in August 1969, the last thing he expected was another Aden. Most soldiers saw their intervention in simple terms: to stop Catholics being burned out by Protestants. The reception they received was ecstatic. ‘We were treated as saviours,’ George said. ‘There were tears and they were very thankful because we had stopped quite a lot of houses being burned, not all of them because we got there too late. The Protestants were baying at us and they weren’t very pleased to start off with but when they realized that we were fair and firm to both sides, then it all settled down.’ I asked George how long he thought he would be there for. ‘I thought that was it. Clean the mess up, let people re-build their houses and get out. We thought it was a quick nip-in and nip-out job. We didn’t realize we were going to be there for thirty-odd years.’
The 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment had been on standby for several weekends and finally went into Belfast in the small hours of Monday 13 October 1969. It was the first of the Regiment’s many tours that were to be marked by controversy, the most contentious of which was ‘Bloody Sunday’. In the years that followed, they supplied many of the recruits for the army’s Special Forces, 14 Intelligence Company and the SAS, that were to play such a vital role in the intensifying conflict. ‘Jim’ was in the car on a Sunday afternoon driving back from East Anglia and listening to Alan Freeman and ‘Top of the Pops’ (‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’ by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg was number one) when he heard that his unit was being sent to Northern Ireland. The standby was over.
The soldiers knew a little more about the situation than they did before the army was deployed. ‘It had been in the news,’ ‘Jim’ told me. ‘We knew there were operations going on over there. There were troubles and riots.’ Jim’s battalion took up positions along the Falls Road and received the same kind of hero’s welcome from the nationalists that soldiers from other regiments had received when they marched into Belfast a few weeks earlier. By this time, ‘Jim’ and his mates had some idea of the geography of Belfast and did not have to buy their maps at filling stations. ‘They were very glad to see us. We came as their saviours, as their protectors. They were clearly worried about what was going on and they welcomed us with open arms and with endless cups of tea and biscuits.’ ‘Jim’ was stationed in an observation post (OP) on top of a building and therefore denied the luxury of ‘scoff’ back at the mess, but the locals ensured that he did not go hungry. ‘Jim’ and his mates used the same emergency plan that Brian and the Prince of Wales’s Own had done atop Derry city walls. ‘We had a basket with a piece of string attached to it and we used to lower it down with some money in it for the kids and they used to go off and get fish and chips. Then we’d haul the basket back up again and that’s how we would eat for most of the time. They used to resupply us.’ ‘Jim’ had no idea that many of the young boys who filled his basket and his stomach would be shooting at him in a few years’ time.
The OP was located in the heart of the area that had seen some of the fiercest rioting and burning only a few short weeks before. ‘This was the place where a police armoured car had gone up and down the road with machine-guns blazing. A young soldier on leave in fact had been killed right opposite the position I was in.15 There were machine-gun bullets in the primary school. Opposite me there was a row of houses which had been burned down. Clearly, the place was in turmoil.’ The more ‘Jim’ heard about the history of the Troubles, the more he realized, unlike George, that the army was not going to be home by Christmas.
By the time the Paras arrived, the Wilson Government had introduced a series of measures via Westminster and Stormont that it hoped would bring an end to what the Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, referred to during a visit to the province as ‘this nonsense in the streets’.16 The local-government franchise that had disadvantaged nationalists was to be abolished, a Community Relations bill was introduced and a New Deal for Ulster was announced in a package that included aid for development, jobs and housing. Within less than a month of the deployment of British troops, most of the grievances that had fuelled the civil rights movement had been addressed. But it was too late to stuff the genie back in the bottle. Looking back, the most glaring omission that Westminster made was not to abolish or suspend the Stormont parliament and bring in Direct Rule from Westminster. If any political excuse was needed, the deployment of the army provided it. If Westminster was supplying troops because the Northern Ireland Government could not cope, why should it not go the whole way and take over the Government itself? But that was not the way that the Labour Cabinet was thinking. Callaghan believed in being realistic.
You have to do things as they become politically possible. Not only would it have become politically impossible at that time to have abandoned Stormont because public opinion wouldn’t have been ready for it, but we would not have been in a position to handle the situation. It was far better that the Northern Ireland Government should handle it themselves, provided they accepted the basic principles of human dignity, human liberty and civil rights, and they introduced the reforms that we wanted to see. It was much better than that the British should try to do it. I’ve always adhered to the view that it will be the people of Ireland themselves who will eventually solve the Irish Question, not Westminster and not Britain.17
Whitehall mandarins were of like mind, aware too of the potentially seismic repercussions that acting against Stormont would provoke on the unionist side. Ian Burns, who by the late 1980s had became one of the early advocates of engaging the IRA in dialogue, had no doubt as a Private Secretary at the Home Office in 1969 that such a radical step would have been unwise.
There was no intrinsic reason to believe that a government, properly authorized in Northern Ireland, could not deliver the proper agenda for change. I can’t pretend to see into Ministers’ minds as they were in 1969, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t feel that the right thing to do was to get the duly elected government to change its policies and to deliver the changes. To sweep it out of the way and create a new machinery of government would have been an extra problem rather than a way of solving problems.
To unionists, the most controversial and wounding reforms the Labour Government introduced were the disbanding of their beloved ‘B’ Specials and a proposal to disarm the RUC so it could become an unarmed, civilian police force like those throughout the rest of the United Kingdom. The recommendations were made by committee under the chairmanship of Lord Hunt, the conqueror of Everest. Reforming the RUC was an even bigger mountain to climb. He recognized the need to do so but in a way that would not jeopardize security. He admitted that ‘although the threat of terrorist attack may not be great, the fear of them is very real, and public anxiety will not be allayed unless precautions are taken and seen to be taken’.18
The Westminster Government hoped that the ‘B’ Specials replacement would allay unionist anxieties. The force was to be known as the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), a locally recruited part-time force under the command of the British army. But far from calming these anxieties, the publication of the Hunt Report on Friday 19 October 1969 caused an unprecedented riot on the Protestant Shankill Road, fuelled by loyalists who saw the axing of the ‘B’ Specials as capitulation to nationalist demands. That evening crowds roamed the Shankill shouting ‘Paisley is our leader’ and jeering at the po
lice. The following day, the process of disarming the RUC began, a visible sign to already angry loyalists that Hunt’s recommendations were for real and Westminster was not bluffing. The Shankill erupted with loyalist crowds shouting at the soldiers who had been brought in to contain the disturbances, ‘Englishmen, go home, you are not needed here. We want the “B” Specials.’19 Few soldiers had any sympathy for the ‘B’ Men or shed any tears for their demise.
The loyalist mob tried to make its way to the Catholic Unity Flats, the notorious sectarian flashpoint at the bottom of the Shankill Road, but found the police and soldiers of The Light Infantry blocking their way. Major Keith, who regarded the ‘B’ Specials as ‘thugs’, had barely seen anything like it before. ‘There were thousands and thousands of them and most of them had been at the Guinness or Bushmills, so they were in a right old fit state. By 11 o’clock that night, the noise and the numbers of them were absolutely terrifying.’ Hundreds of petrol bombs lit up the night. Major Keith recorded that during the riot, as in peace-keeping operations in Aden and the former colonies, the opposition lost ‘the man in the red shirt’. ‘He actually existed and was wounded whilst in the act of throwing a petrol bomb,’ he wrote.20 In the increasingly violent confrontation, the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) brought out its guns and shot dead a 29-year-old policeman, Constable Victor Arbuckle, who was married with two children. He was the first RUC officer to be killed in current conflict, ironically shot dead by loyalists protesting at the disarming of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. No wonder outsiders were bemused.
That night, the army had its first taste of a gun battle in Belfast. Fourteen soldiers, three policemen and twenty civilians received gunshot wounds.21 The so-called ‘Battle of the Shankill’ raged for almost two days and nights. According to Major Keith, his men stationed in the neighbouring Catholic Ardoyne said that the Catholics cheered every time they heard shots, ‘because they thought we were having a go at the Protestants’. In the fifty-two hours that Major Keith spent on the Shankill, he calculated that his men had fired 68 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition, 394 CS gas cartridges and 52 smoke grenades. They, in turn, had been on the receiving end of ‘a thousand rounds of assorted calibres, a couple of hundred petrol bombs and half the pavement of the Shankill!’ He said he was not sorry to hand over to the 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, so he and his men could return ‘to our well-ordered areas and our beds’.22 The Paras, who had just arrived, had the job of cleaning up.