Down Among the Weeds

by Harry Beaves

  ‘Why did you get involved with those kids the other night? The GOC was rung by the local MP who had received complaints about it. And you risked compromising Fred Basset.’

  There was no answer. ‘I don’t know, Colonel, I am very sorry and it won’t happen again.’

  ‘Absolutely right, it won’t. Will it? Well done on last night.’ He slapped me on the shoulder and moved away.

  It had to be said and, as always, Colonel Bill hit just the right note.

  * * *

  That afternoon I packed a bag and was privileged to join the small group who were flying back for David Storrey’s funeral service which was due to take place in the Royal Memorial Chapel at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. We were met by Major Robin McQuoid who was David Storrey’s predecessor as BC of 28 Battery and was now a Sandhurst Company Commander. Robin had coordinated many of the arrangements for the funeral and he and his wife, Margaret, hosted the group from 19 Regiment.

  For about eight weeks we had been either in the bus depot or Casement Park, weapons always to hand and protected by a high wire fence from people outside who wanted to harm us. Now, suddenly I was amongst old friends whom I had not seen for a while, but it all seemed unreal and I was unable to relax. That night, secure in the warmth and comfort of the McQuoids’ home I couldn’t sleep. I felt vulnerable and needed the concrete dust of Casement Park and the snores and grunts of 6 Troop further down the void to make me feel safe.

  Someone had found our Service Dress uniforms and brought them over from Germany and the following morning I made a poor job of polishing my leather. The service was at 1100 in the Chapel which stood a stone’s throw away from the rooms I had occupied as a cadet in Blenheim Company. It was a full military funeral with David Storrey’s flag-draped coffin, his cap and medals on top, borne on a twenty-five-pounder gun carriage. As an Officer Cadet we had regular church parades and I remembered well the inside of the chapel. I noticed again, above one of the arches the Latin inscription. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori’. Translated, it means, ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’. At school we all read the war poem with the same title by Wilfred Owen, which described the choking deaths of soldiers from chlorine gas as anything but ‘sweet and fitting’. I couldn’t help feeling that there was nothing ‘sweet and fitting’ about dying in a swathe of nuts and bolts in a housing estate in the British Isles.

  David Storrey and Bob Hope both left friends and family whose lives would never be the same again, but what the armed forces were achieving in Ireland was very worthwhile and 28 Battery was playing an important part in it. The two men were from opposite ends of the Battery, but both played a vital role. David Storrey was an intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate commander. He had a keen awareness of the fact that we should be trying to make things better for the people of Riverdale. In this he was always willing to hold out a hand and listen to the views of those with whom we were working, something which I would often have found very difficult to do. This was well illustrated on 2nd August when he approached the wire in an offer to talk with the rioters who had broken into Casement Park. He was prepared to risk his life to do so and was attacked with a brick for his efforts.

  Bob Hope was very important in a different way. He was a REME specialist who was excellent at his job, but he would never let it rest there. He was full of energy, ever eager to be involved with anything that was going on, no matter how mundane. He could always be relied on to lift and shift or man a sangar to relieve the burden on those out on the streets and, most importantly, he would do so willingly and without complaint. Back in Germany the REME worked centrally in the workshops and we only got to know the Battery Fitter Section when they deployed on exercise with us. In Ireland they were fully integrated members of the team and Bob Hope was a Battery man, as proud as punch to play his part in everything that involved us.

  I remember very little of the funeral service. The sight of the coffin sent my mind racing back to that day in the stream bed, the pall of smoke hanging over the devastated area, the silence broken by the sound of gurgling and the shattering realisation of finding David Storrey. After the service the mourners went to the Indian Army Room, but we were unable to stay long because of our return flight to Belfast.

  By 2000 I was sitting on my creaking Army bedstead joking with Scouse Moore and by midnight I was walking the old familiar streets of Riverdale. That night I slept easy in the dusty security of Casement Park, more comfortable in war-torn Belfast than I had been in leafy Camberley.

  Bob Hope’s funeral had taken place privately at his home in Buckinghamshire some days earlier.

  * * *

  By now I was living on my nerves. All through life it seemed that I was always the person that things happened to, usually unwelcome things. I was the self-conscious little boy at the Christmas party who was covered with embarrassment when the conjuror called him out to help with the tricks. As an adult, I was the one who never took more than the duty-free allowance, but was always turned out by customs. ‘Murphy’s Law’ states that ‘Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong’ and I was sure it was meant for me. I was convinced that if the odds were a hundred-to-one against something happening then I would be the ‘one’. Since coming to Ireland I had made a huge number of finds and lifted lots of suspects, many more than anyone else in the Battery. I couldn’t help it, things just happened.

  Charles Moran, in his book Anatomy of Courage, talks of each person having a reservoir of courage, an analogy that I find easy to understand. Ian Gardiner, who I knew when he served in the Royal Marines, suggests that ‘Courage is what fills the gap between what you would prefer to do and what you actually do.’ To bridge that gap we draw on Moran’s reservoir.

  The reservoir is filled by knowledge, experience and positive events which must be kept topped up by those things in the military context that we recognise as good for morale, like shelter, rest, warmth, food and comradeship. Paradoxically, when the reservoir is low a person will lack courage, which in some way explains why a person can be extraordinarily brave one day and behave in a seemingly cowardly manner the next.

  My reservoir was filled by my upbringing and my military training and topped up by our training prior to going to Northern Ireland. Events in Belfast drew on this and, while my increasing experience helped to refill it, the unrelenting strain of living in Casement Park, ready to face danger at any moment, was a constant, steady drain.

  The gap between what I wanted to do and what actually did was narrowing. I was taking easy, risk-averse options and I was ashamed of it. Yet when I did so, as when I chose to patrol at the safe time of 0450 on a Sunday, I still tripped over a huge arms find. I somehow felt that Murphy had me in his sights and that sooner or later my luck was going to run out. I was moving down the anxiety spiral.

  Chapter 14

  The Net Begins to Close

  In Casement Park alcohol was strictly controlled. There were no spirits and each man was permitted to buy only two cans of beer each day. Sales were logged down, all beer had to be drunk in the bar of the old social club and there was no ‘stacking’ – carrying one or more day’s untaken entitlement over to the next. Even with these controls there were potential problems. On one occasion all three troops were crashed out in quick succession to an incident. The Troop Commander who was nominally on two hours’ notice left his first can and rushed out to set up a vehicle checkpoint (VCP) and monitor traffic on Finaghy Road. The locals came out of their houses shouting and throwing stones. One woman came right up to him, screamed in his face and caught the smell of beer. It was just what she wanted and she went away screaming, ‘Smell the drink. Smell the drink. The drink is on them’. The next day the story was put around the local community that drunken troops had been pushing women and children around, a PR gift to the Republicans. With the benefit of hindsight a total drink ban would probably have been wiser than the two cans rule.

  One evening I came in off a late patrol. Hot, tire
d and fed up, as usual, I threw my kit in a corner and sat down heavily on the bed.

  ‘Jeez, I could murder a beer,’ I said.

  Scouse Moore was lying on his scratcher. He looked up from his Dusty Fog. ‘Really, that much?’

  ‘Yeh,’ I said. ‘A real pint, not that canned piss we get in the Battery Bar.’

  ‘Really?’ he said again. ‘My brother can sort that out’. He went back to his book.

  This was one of his favourite sayings. He had a brother back home in Speke, a typical Scouse ‘Mr Fix It’ who solved many problems for him. I thought no more about it, got a shower and went to bed.

  Mail is the vital link between the soldier and his home and has always been essential for the maintenance of morale. There is great anticipation when letters arrive and they are always opened eagerly. A few days later I noticed a small package addressed to Sgt Moore in the Battery Office. An hour later he had collected it and, later in the day, I was surprised to see it on his bed, still unopened. That evening, when the Troop Duty Man had left his desk to go down for a cup of tea, Sgt Moore reached under his bed, pulled out the package and threw it over to me. Inside there was a box on which was the label ‘SCOUSER BREW – HOME BREW KIT’.

  ‘Well that’s great, what are we going to do with it?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Boss. We’ll find a way’.

  And find a way he did. As his patrol returned the following afternoon he stopped outside the little hardware shop near Casement Park and positioned his men around it. What followed resembled the scene in a Western, where John Wayne enters the saloon with his sheriff’s badge and the regulars tremble in nervous expectation. Sgt Moore paused in the doorway and the woman at the till looked up cautiously from behind the counter. There were a number of people in the shop so he walked over and stood behind the man being served at the time. When the shopkeeper had taken his money she pointedly ignored Sgt Moore and began serving the person behind him.

  Moore got the message. If the shopkeeper had been seen serving the British Army she would have been reported to the IRA and someone would have ‘paid her a visit’. He looked around the shop, found a large black plastic dustbin and walked back to the till. The shopkeeper continued to ignore him. He placed the muzzle of his rifle on the counter with the exact money beside it, fixed the trembling shopkeeper with his Liverpool version of the John Wayne stare, then turned and walked out with the bin. All that was missing was the jangle of spurs. Back in the stadium the new dustbin was placed under the table at which the Troop Duty Man sat.

  * * *

  On the evening of 24th August ‘Fred Basset’, who was on patrol with one of the other troops, recognised a car belonging to Billy Roberts, QM of E Company, parked outside 7 Riverdale Park Drive, a house we had lifted at least once before. The locals had seen the patrol and began banging dustbin lids, a sure sign that something was going on in the area. The patrol could do nothing for fear of compromising Fred Basset so quickly withdrew as 6 Troop were called out to do a snap lift-and-search.

  We quickly set up a cordon and crashed through the door, but were not surprised to find the birds had flown. I had looked quickly upstairs and was with the team in the kitchen when a sudden thought struck me and I went back to the main bedroom. We had all walked straight past the obvious. Against the wall were two large plywood packing cases, unmistakable to any soldier as MFO Boxes, the crates used to transport a soldier’s belongings from one posting to the next. Stencilled neatly on each one were the words ‘L/CPL G P McMULLEN 1 PARA’ and on top of the wardrobe was another very familiar sight, an Army issue suitcase with the same name on it. We had found the house being used by Peter McMullen, known as ‘Peter the Para’ who was a heroic IRA figure of the time and high on our wanted list.

  Peter McMullen was an Irish Catholic serving with the 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment (1 Para) stationed in Palace Barracks, Holywood. His in-laws were heavily involved with the IRA and, although at that time he was not, he was troubled by the harsh way that he felt the British Army was dealing with the Catholic community. He asked to be taken off frontline duty and was sent to work as a chef in the Officers’ Mess. Here he was able to eavesdrop on conversations between the officers and began to pass information to the IRA. Shortly before 1 Para deployed for the operation which was subsequently known as Bloody Sunday he planted a bomb in Palace Barracks, then deserted from the British Army to become an active member of the IRA. He was believed to have been a member of the Belfast Brigade Staff and around the time of Motorman was rumoured to be fundraising for the IRA in America.

  7 Riverdale Park Drive was registered in the name of Eileen Loughran. The Loughran family tree was pinned on the wall of our Int Cell. John Loughran, for many years an active IRA sympathiser, had (we believe) ten children. Eight of the ten were also actively involved, the most notorious being Seamus Loughran, a senior member of the IRA, who we had arrested on 18th August. His sister Eileen, in whose name the house was registered, was a ‘lilywhite’; she had no convictions and there was nothing about her to raise the suspicions of the police or intelligence organisations. She was, however married to Peter McMullen. Her sister, Rita Murphy, lived in America and Peter McMullen and his family stayed with her for much of the time that he was fundraising in the USA.

  During the morning of 25th August we noticed that the streets of Riverdale were unusually full of people. In the afternoon a group of women and children were seen picketing some of the houses. It was clear that Mrs Hallyday, our friend from 51 Riverdale Park South, and her children were amongst the leaders together with Mrs Herdman and Mrs McGuinness, both of whom had sons whom we had several times arrested. Four families had been told to leave Riverdale because they were either too friendly with the British soldiers, not sufficiently helpful to the IRA or maybe just didn’t blow their whistles with sufficient enthusiasm when we came by. Tommy Gorman, Stu Rooney and Terry Herdman had planned the action. We discovered that in all about nineteen families had been threatened, though only two or three actually moved out.

  Terry Herdman, who with Tommy Gorman and James Rooney were ordering families out of Riverdale on 24th August 1972. Picture 19 Regt.

  During the afternoon 4 Troop lifted Stu Rooney and at 0200 we called for Terry Herdman. Mrs Herdman answered the door wearing only tight trousers and a bra and immediately began screaming and attacking us and I suspect it was with some delight that Sgt Moore forcibly restrained her, but Gorman continued to evade us.

  When we got back in, the Troop sorted their kit out and went to bed. Sgt Moore and I hung around for a while and, when we were sure that a long line of zzzs was rising over Casement Park and all but the Duty Staff were asleep, we moved silently downstairs to a corner of the dining room where, earlier in the day, Sgt Moore had left his plastic dustbin. We carried it into the kitchen, sterilised it with boiling water, dropped in the contents of the ‘Scouser Brew’ pack and added more boiling water. The aroma of yeast and hops was magnificent, but wasting no time we put the lid on, staggered back upstairs and took it out on to the terrace by 6 Troop’s accommodation.

  I stayed outside while Sgt Moore went in and told the Troop Duty man. ‘Nip and get a brew, lad, if you like. The boss and I will stand in for a bit.’ The Duty Man took the hint and went down to the kitchen with his mug. As soon as he was gone we brought the dustbin in and slid it under his table. I was pulling Sgt Moore’s leg about Mrs Herdman when the Duty Man returned.

  * * *

  For some reason ‘Intelligence’ had the opinion that the weapons that we found on 19th August did not belong to E Company (perhaps it was too obvious an answer). They felt that E Company’s weapons were hidden somewhere in the sewers of Riverdale so they had to be searched. Codenamed ‘King Rat’, the operation had taken time to organise as the Sappers involved needed to use breathing apparatus and special equipment. It began at 0200 on 27th August and was fruitless, less for a biscuit tin, which was discovered by Sgt Moore about ten feet inside a drain in Riverdale Park East.
The tin contained a number of detonators, a small find for such a large operation, but it was to link with a much larger discovery some weeks later.

  Demonstrations and riots against our presence in Casement Park still frequently took place and there had been a lot of publicity for a major meeting planned for 27th August by the People’s Democracy. We expected the normal format gathering, speeches from Michael Farrell and Máire Drumm, stone-throwing and then a riot. To our delight, the event had much less support than planned with only a couple of hundred people attending. All of the soldiers were out of sight and, though the speeches dragged on, everything seemed to be progressing quietly, but it became obvious that some among the crowd were using picks and shovels to dig up the ‘sleeping policemen’ that had been laid to slow traffic and deter drive-by attacks on us by gunmen.

  The speeches ended with a roar of approval for those who had done the digging and it looked as though it might remain peaceful as many began to walk home. Then an Army four-tonner from another unit unwittingly drove down the road. This was the catalyst for it all to start and the vehicle was pelted with bottles and stones.

  Our plan was to box the rioters in and make arrests. To this end 6 Troop were behind the gates ready to make first contact, while the Fusiliers were in the Stockmans Estate ready to sweep down Andersonstown Road behind us. The rioters would be cut off by the Green Jackets in the streets to the north of Andersonstown Road and 5 Battery, who would be in Riverdale, would send snatch teams out from the flank. The plan was fine, but the Green Jackets failed to seal the northern exits and we made many fewer arrests than we had hoped, although the TV did have some very good shots of Bdr Wylie and L/Bdr Taylor ‘assisting’ two of those arrested into a Pig.