Belfast and Derry in Revolt

A New History of the Start of the Troubles

Simon Prince, Geoffrey Warner

• Publisher: Irish Academic Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788550956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a civil war started in Northern Ireland. This book tells that story through Belfast and Derry, using original archival research to trace how multiple and overlapping conflicts unfolded on their streets. The Troubles grew out of a political process that mobilised opponents and defenders of the Stormont regime, and which also dragged London and Dublin into the crisis. Drawing upon government papers, police reports, army files, intelligence summaries, evidence to inquiries and parish chronicles, this book sheds fresh light on key events such as the 5 October 1968 march, the Battle of the Bogside, the Belfast riots of August 1969, the 'Battle of St Matthew's' (June 1970) and the Falls Road curfew (July 1970).

Prince and Warner offer us two richly-detailed, engaging narratives that intertwine to present a new history of the start of the Troubles in Belfast and Derry – one that also establishes a foundation for comparison with similar developments elsewhere in the world.

1

Before October

INTRODUCTION

‘Every Irishman,’ wrote John Steinbeck in 1953, ‘sooner or later makes a pilgrimage to the home of his ancestors.’ But, the American novelist continued, ‘He wouldn’t stay there if you gave him the place.’ Steinbeck and his wife found Derry to be a ‘city which is somber even … in sunlight’ – ‘and a desolation came over us’. He asked the ‘not-the-real-porter’ in their hotel: ‘“Has all illegality gone out of this rebellious island in three generations?”’ The ‘sad-looking man’ did not ‘make out my meaning’.1 When the fortieth anniversary of the start of the civil rights movement was marked in Derry, a veteran activist also did not make out his meaning. The Derryman somehow managed to claim that Steinbeck, ‘antenna alert’, ‘realised that this community around him would soon uprise’. ‘It [i.e. the civil rights movement] was a natural, organic, reflex uprising.’2

The metaphor that injustice produced a build-up of pressure which was not released by reforms and so eventually exploded in violence is a common one across history; it is also one that is powerful enough to result in evidence to the contrary being ignored. Metaphor clearly matters. It is a property of concepts and of words; it offers help with understanding ideas as well as with enjoying language; it often links together things that are not similar at all; it is an essential part of how humans think about their worlds.3 This chapter argues that for Derry before October 1968 and the emergence of the civil rights movement, another metaphor from the natural sciences is more appropriate. Evolution, put simply, involves adaptation, whereby an organism over time becomes better able to live in its habitat, and mutation, in which a dramatic change to a species – often induced by an external shock – leads to the pace of development being accelerated. Once Northern Ireland had been created during the early 1920s, the arrangements did not stay static: politics, society, economics and culture were always in flux, with each change opening up possibilities of further changes. Derry Catholics, workers and women as well as middle-class men, were able to find new ways to push at the boundaries of Unionist control and secure tangible reforms. What was important was not frustration with the lack of rights, but instead fresh power to fight for those rights. Most groups and individuals, though, shied away from direct confrontation, and the few which did not tended to launch futile attacks on the system’s strongest points. In the second half of the 1960s, however, radicals from the Labour Party and the Republican movement borrowed and adapted a new transnational form of political action – and this was to change the situation dramatically.

Although the chapter draws upon urban history, among other specialisms, its focus is not on the city itself but on local politics before October 1968. The first section introduces Derry through the stories of working-class Catholic women, which are developed into a contextualized case study of social and political activism prior to the civil rights era. The next section examines two of the main strategies employed by Derry Catholics in their efforts to reshape the city: direct action and self help. While they are separated out here to make them more convenient to study, the strategies were generally used in combination with each other. The third section explores the different approaches taken by the Unionists, in Derry and at Stormont, as they sought to retain control. Reform was seen by some Unionists to be a way of crushing and co-opting a range of internal and external challenges to the party’s dominant position. A reform could throw up temporary and uneasy coalitions between surprising allies, on both sides of the debate. The Londonderry Area Plan, for example, was backed not just by Unionists but by Nationalists as well. The moderate leadership of the self-help movement, in contrast, lined up with the radicals to oppose aspects of the plan to develop Derry. The final section describes how the leftists formulated a new strategy which broke out of the limits set by bounded reform and started a revolution. The chapter thus ends with the political actors who brought the ‘before-October’ period to an end.

WINTER IN SPRINGTOWN

‘Winter was for back lanes, cinema, Christmas presents, school competitions, dances and a sight that made my father smile: my mother standing with her back to the range, legs spread, skirt hitched up, warming her bum.’4 Nell McCafferty seems here to be selling her Irish childhood spent in the Bogside. With Ireland changing utterly in the years around the millennium, the reading public often clutched at books that carried them back to a lost time which was more innocent and more certain.5 In fact, Nell relates the young McCafferty’s uncertainties about herself to the larger uncertainties of living in Derry during the 1950s. ‘On winter nights,’ McCafferty recalls, she sat like a ‘cat’, ‘watching’: she saw husbands strike their wives, she saw two boys standing apart because they had been raped together, she saw a nervous girl who was pimped out by her father, she saw illicit affairs, she saw pregnancies outside of marriage and she saw teenagers of both sexes who desired her. This is community viewed in the harsh winter light or through the gloom, not bathed in the warm glow from hearths and oil lamps.6 Admittedly, while McCafferty may be recalling the memories that are remembered best and writing with scorching honesty, Nell should still be read as a reconstruction of her youth made in late middle age.7 Nonetheless, the book remains a warning against the will-o’-the-wisps of idealized communities. As another Derry civil-rights activist told an interviewer in 1979, ‘I never looked upon a sense of community born out of desperation as anything healthy’.8

It is a different winter and it is a different story from McCafferty, this time she is telling someone else’s – Peggy Deery’s. The ‘one thing for a Catholic mother to do in Derry on a fine, wintry, Sunday afternoon’, McCafferty explains, was to ‘stroll … in the city cemetery’. Deery was barely a decade older than McCafferty, but her biological clock had a mechanism that dated back to the Victorian era: she gave birth to her fourteenth child in her late thirties and may have had pregnancies into her forties if her husband had lived.9 At the start of the 1960s, one third of Derry’s population was under 14 years of age, as compared with one quarter in Britain.10 Nineteenth-century patterns survived in the shirt factories, too, where 90 per cent of employees were women – one fifth of the total workforce – and their hours varied as their lives and the economy changed.11 For many mothers, with two, demanding roles to fulfil, a Sunday in the cemetery was ‘a comparative treat’, offering ‘a rich source of gossip, speculation and tribal perspective’. The children, who came from homes that lacked gardens, played among the graves, and may have noticed that the Protestant high crosses tended to be grander than the Catholic low tombstones.12

Looking out from a hill of the dead upon a city that was slowly dying, the families could see this and other divisions among the 50,000 people living there. St Columb’s Church, Long Tower, sat at the heart of Derry and was dedicated to the monk who had founded a settlement there in the sixth century.13 Rising above this Catholic church was the Church of Ireland Bishop’s Palace and a short distance away was the Anglican cathedral of St Columb’s, which had been built by the City of London in the early seventeenth century. The new city of Londonderry, as it was named in the royal charter, was one of the last of Europe’s bastides, providing defences for the Protestants from England and Scotland who had been settled there during the plantation of Ulster. Derry’s walls were never breached, not even when James II’s soldiers laid siege to Derry in the second year of the War of the League of Augsburg. The loyal order of the Apprentice Boys, which had its hall inside the old city, continued to mark this epic with annual commemorations, remembering both triumph and treachery.14 At the end of the eighteenth century, the Catholic population outside the walls in what became the Bogside area, which had been reclaimed from the River Foyle, began to grow rapidly – and from 1920 to 1923 Derry was run by a nationalist and Sinn Féin council. When the Irish Republican Army (IRA) began its offensive, the resulting loyalist backlash initiated a cycle of reprisals which left the city ravaged by fire and eighteen people dead in just a single week during the summer of 1920. Afterwards, however, Derry’s Irish Revolution was comparatively peaceful, as local Republicans thought violence was counter-productive and headquarters wanted recruits to be sent south to fight.15 Still, the new Northern Irish Government decided to abolish proportional representation and Derry duly returned a Unionist council again. As late as the mid-1930s, Stormont believed that ‘the fate of [the] constitution was on a knife edge’ and that it was therefore ‘defensible’ to gerrymander Derry ‘on the basis that the safety of the state is the supreme law’. In a ‘Nationalist city’, a ‘Unionist majority [was] secured by a manipulation of ward boundaries, for the sole purpose of retaining … control’.16 The gerrymander was copper-fastened by the property franchise, which put rateable values above population sizes and which deprived more Catholics than Protestants of the vote.17 In 1958, the Unionist Chief Whip cautioned party grandees that ‘if we were to allow universal suffrage’, ‘we may lose Derry’.18 Partition deformed the city in another way: Donegal, which had once been inside its hinterland, was now part of a different state and the local economy was hit by the loss. War and welfare eventually pulled the city out of the slump. On the slopes of the Creggan, which lay above the cemetery, a vast public housing estate was built in the post-war years – and on these foundations were being built dreams of indoor toilets and bathrooms.19 Some of the mothers had not waited for the state to solve Derry’s chronic housing problems and were living with their families in huts that had been put up for the American naval personnel stationed in the north east of Ireland during the Second World War. (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces posted to Derry were fighting the Cold War from new bases.) The Deerys were among the first squatters in Springtown Camp.20

Although desperation had pushed them to go outside the law, most of the Springtown squatters, Protestant and Catholic, had wanted to remain respectable. So, they worked hard to transform temporary barracks into permanent family homes and they were also happy for Londonderry Corporation to take over the management of the site and charge them rent.21 However, despite all that was achieved through self-help and pressurizing the authorities into action, Springtown was still a dangerous, depressing and disease-ridden place for the hundreds of people who lived there. Many residents, including Deery, chose to emigrate rather than suffer through another winter waiting for the council to give them a decent house – in a ward where their vote would not wreck the gerrymander.22 During the winter, families had, as one father put it, to risk ‘fire or freeze’, and in November 1959 an oil heater set fire to one of the huts and five children almost died. This was the spark that began an eight-year campaign to get homes for the remaining residents.23

On a march through the city in January 1963, one of the placards carried the slogan ‘Springtown – Derry’s Little...