By the end of the 1970s the building of the Regiment had been completed. Now at the beginning of a new decade it was a matter of honing the professionalism of the battalions. Old soldiers, as old soldiers will, look back upon the first ten years as a time when life in their companies was ‘more fun’. It must seem a strange term to use of a decade in which ninety-nine serving and eighteen ex-members had been murdered. Battalions had been under intense pressure, success and tragedy had gone hand in hand. Yet there was a great sense of achievement for those who had served through the first ten years, a sense of having built out of nothing a force that was now able to take over the role of the Regular Army in a large part of the Province, a sense too of having helped to contain the violence of the IRA. The majority of men and women had had no previous service in the armed forces. They were, as they would have been the first to admit, amateur soldiers, able to stand back and find a quiet amusement in the traditional ways of the Regular Army, able to laugh at their own mistakes whilst determined to do better next time. There were more characters in their ranks and most of the light-hearted stories come from that first decade.
As the older men, many of them ex-B Specials, had begun to resign, the average age of the battalions decreased. By March 1981 the average in 3UDR was 31, the average length of service 5 years.
A change of emphasis had been adopted in recruiting advertising – the attraction of good wages rather than a call to serve one’s country, using, among others, the slogan “Can you think of a more rewarding part-time job?” It did not mean that the men and women who joined now did so only for the money, which, though improved, was still substantially less than the pay of the Police and Prison Service, but it did mark the difference between the soldiers of the 1980s and those who in the 1970s had enlisted out of a sense of duty without much regard to financial reward.
Unemployment was soaring in the Province, as one after another the big multi-national companies pared down their work force or closed down their plants altogether. Full-time service in the UDR permanent cadre had become an attractive alternative to being on the dole and battalions opened waiting lists of part-time soldiers anxious to transfer to full-time service. But the Defence budget was overspent, a moratorium had been imposed on further expenditure and for the time being any increase in the establishment of the full-time Operations Platoons, still just forty soldiers in each battalion, was out of the question.
On the other hand the total strength of the Regular Army in the Province was being run down and the UDR battalions tasked to take on a number of static duties. One of these was the guard on Cloona House, the GOC’s residence, where the situation was becoming precarious as a new housing estate, being built to relieve pressure on West Belfast, was spreading out to the perimeter fence round the house. In November one of the four Regular battalions responsible for Belfast was withdrawn, vacating the Grand Central Hotel building. Responsibility for military support in the city centre passed to the two UDR city battalions and a small increase in the full-time establishment was authorized for the two battalions to enable them to assume these additional duties.
For the remaining battalions the only way to find additional manpower was to close down some bases and amalgamate companies, releasing full-time guards and administrative staff for operational tasks. Over the next three years ten bases were closed. The closures involved longer journeys, and therefore longer nights, for some of the soldiers and marked the final break from the B Special concept of platoon huts set up convenient to the men’s homes.
On a quiet Sunday evening, 6 January 1980, a seven-man section from 3UDR’s Operations Platoon had gone out on a routine patrol west of Castlewellan. For most of the way the road from there to Hilltown lies along a winding country road, except for the first three miles to the reservoir at Loughislandreavy, where it runs broad and straight. As the patrol was heading back to Ballykinlar along this stretch of road 600lb of home-made explosive packed into a narrow pipe culvert beneath the road detonated under the leading vehicle. The second vehicle, unable to stop in time, crashed into the crater. It was a huge explosion, leaving the first Landrover a shattered wreck bent into the shape of a letter L, water rapidly filling up the crater from a broken water main.
Of the four soldiers in the leading vehicle, three died at the scene. Private Rickie Wilson of Newcastle was still in the vehicle, the other two, Jim Cochrane of Downpatrick and Robert Smyth of Comber, were trapped under water by the wreckage, their bodies recovered by firemen. Two had died from skull fractures, one may have drowned. The other four members of the patrol were injured, but not seriously. A scratch patrol sent to secure the area reported finding a command wire. Other patrols accompanied by the police spent the night visiting the houses of suspects, looking for strangers to the area, in the belief that an incident on this scale was beyond the capability of the local ASU, but they found no one, and no one has ever been held responsible for the attack. The following day 2 PARA continued to secure the area whilst a Sapper search team followed the command wire to a disused farmstead on the hillside above. The first fifty yards had been dug in alongside the road and then built into a stone wall. A motorist reported seeing a group of men and two vehicles on the road at the scene in the early hours of the Sunday morning. The location had been well chosen – a clear view over a long straight road, telegraph poles to act as markers, and on a still Sunday night the unmistakable sound of the Landrover tyres audible from far off. It was the first time a culvert mine had been used in County Down.
The tragedy was national and international news. Up to that time the casualties were the worst suffered by the UDR in any one incident, and in the moment of the explosion the total of UDR murders passed 100 and the total deaths in the Province since the troubles began exceeded the 2,000 mark.
Jim Cochrane was a member of a Catholic family. His was the first funeral, held in St Patrick’s Roman Catholic church in Downpatrick. The parish priest conducted the Requiem Mass. About half the mourners were in uniform, members of the battalion and from other battalions. The Deputy Chief Constable and Mrs McAtamney were there and local councillors from all the parties, including the SDLP. Gordon–Duff read the lesson. As the congregation sang ‘Abide with me’ the family carried the coffin out of the church and down to the road where it was draped with the Union flag and Cochrane’s belt and beret placed on top. The bearer party from the Operations Platoon carried the coffin for the first quarter mile, then took their places on either side of the hearse and, led by a piper, the cortège wound its way up the hill to the cemetery in pouring rain, watched by a few spectators. It was the last of the funerals attended by the Colonel Commandant, General Sir John Anderson. He was already suffering from the Parkinson’s Disease that was to be the cause of his death eight years later. A frail, sad figure, it was typical of that good man that, though he was wearing a coat, he set it aside when he saw his soldiers marching uncovered in the rain. The funeral, the Down Recorder commented, had “set a dignified example to the whole Province of cemented community understanding and tolerance.”(1)
The military mourners returned to Ballykinlar to dry out their uniforms on the radiators, clean the mud of the graveyard from their shoes and, an hour later, went out again to Newcastle for the funeral of Wilson. Smyth was buried in Comber the following day. The service was to have been taken by the Reverend Robert Bradford, an ultra right-wing Unionist politician and a Methodist minister. But on the previous day he made a public statement saying among other things that the tragedy had damaged the morale of the Regiment and that all IRA members should be shot out of hand. The battalion told Bradford quietly that his attendance at the funeral would no longer be appropriate.
Mrs Cochrane told an American reporter:
“I am proud that my son fought for his country, the country he loved, and I am proud that he died with two Protestant friends. It goes to show that they can enjoy life, make entertainment together and even die together in a common cause.” Wilson’s mother agreed, “I have no bitterness with my neighbours. It is definitely not religion, it was never religion . . . I can’t blame all Roman Catholics for the IRA.”(2)
For months afterwards, opposite the estate at Annsborough where exactly two years before the battalion had gone to the help of the residents when the river broke its banks and flooded into their homes, a sign was daubed on a wall pointing the way to the ‘UDR graveyard’. In 1996 the Cochrane family placed a small unobtrusive memorial recording the names of the victims at the site of the landmine. Within days it had been smashed to pieces. There were those for whom hatred must be carried beyond the grave.
PIRAs tactic of using a culvert mine in a relatively quiet area where none had been used before had proved so successful that there was an ever-present concern that they would try it again. The Battalion’s reaction was not to be deterred by the threat, but to put into effect more unpredictable patterns of patrolling, making greater use of foot patrols deployed into the country north of the Mournes. Throughout the Brigade, areas of greatest threat were placed out of bounds to ‘green vehicles’ and patrols deployed by helicopter or by other means, but helicopter flying hours were limited, money was short and the moratorium was in force.
The aim of operations was to keep the members of the ASU off balance, to make them realize that there was no time of day or night and no corner of their neighbourhood where they could rest assured that they would not encounter a UDR patrol. With the improved training standards of the full-time soldiers the Operations Platoon began undertaking extended patrols, going out for 48 hours, walking across the country to carry out VCPs on the roads, then disappearing again, bivouacking by night in the forests, keeping some outlying farmstead under observation. Before moving on, they would enter the farmyard to leave footprints in the mud or to set the dog barking, so that the farmer would know a patrol had passed by. In time the part-time soldiers also were able to undertake these extended patrols at weekends. By midsummer word came back to 3UDR that these tactics were succeeding and the local ASU had indeed been knocked off balance, and for months thereafter there were no more culvert mines in South Down.
The new pattern of operations demanded higher standards of training. Greater use of foot patrols required improved physical fitness. Cross-country movement called for better map reading and instruction on how to cross obstacles avoiding the obvious route, for gateways could be booby-trapped. Extended patrols involved living out in the open, posting tactical sentries, setting up bivouacs, the cooking of army ration packs, the performance of limited observation of suspect dwellings. As always there was a continuing need for improved terrorist recognition, total understanding and instantaneous recall of the provisions of the Yellow Card, describing the circumstances in which the individual soldier could open fire, weapon skills, confident use of the increasingly sophisticated search equipment, how to react in an ambush and carry out a follow-up, action to be taken on locating the terrorists’ command wire and firing point, personal security, and an understanding of the organization and methods of working of the police.
The announcement of the Annual Services Pay Review gave the part-time soldiers an added incentive to train. As well as an average increase in basic pay of sixteen and a half percent, at last the parsimonious annual bounty, which had always lagged far behind the Territorial Army rate, was increased from £25/£35 to £150 for the first year, £250 for the second, £350 for the third and subsequent years. It continued to be tax-free. In addition the arrangement whereby a soldier on training was paid only a nominal sum, which had long acted as a disincentive to take part in training days and evenings was cancelled and from then on each soldier received the same rate of pay for training and operations.
Brigadier Pat Hargrave, who had taken over from Miller in March, already had experience of the UDR while commanding his battalion at Ballykelly in 1974. His impression then had been that the staff and Regular Army battalions failed to appreciate the worth of the Regiment. On returning to the Province he found that attitude still existed. If it was to be dispelled, training must be improved.(3)The number of courses at the UDR Training Centre in Ballykinlar was extended. The centralized course for permanent cadre recruits was increased from four to six weeks, then eight, eventually to ten. In eleven months of 1979/80 over 1,000 soldiers had attended courses at Ballykinlar, with thirty–forty permanent cadre recruits under training at any one time. Since the formation of the Regiment the training of part-time recruits had been a battalion responsibility and usually took place over three weekends. Now the battalions were encouraged to run these courses over a continuous eight-day period, and if at the end the recruits failed to pass an efficiency test they were not allowed to go out on patrol. As well as Warcop and Barry Buddon the locations for the annual camps were extended to include Lydd and Hythe where the ranges provided a degree of realism not available on the conventional butts and firing points of Ballykinlar (though improvements had begun there, including the building of a mock Belfast street). At Hythe a similar street scene had been laid out inside the circular walls of one of the old 18th century coastal fortifications. Another range consisted of gunmen moving through a street crowded with pedestrians, the firer’s ability being tested by the number of gunmen he could shoot without hitting an innocent pedestrian. (The range warden showed a marked degree of trust in the firers; he kept pet rabbits and goldfish between the firing point and the targets.) For the men it was an interesting week and for everyone there was the attraction that on their day off London and France were in reasonable reach. In fact it was possible at the end of a day’s training to take the ferry across the Channel, dine in Calais and catch the boat home at midnight.
Hargrave introduced other measures to improve the image of the Regiment – stricter enforcement of the upper age limit and that problem that no Commander so far had been able to eradicate entirely, the wearing of long hair and the occasional beard. That was resolved once and for all two years on when the Falklands Campaign and the image of the lean, mean warriors of the Commandos and Parachute battalions, close-cropped and clean shaven, put hirsute man out of fashion.
To mark the tenth anniversary of the Regiment the officers held a dinner in the banqueting hall of the City Hall, attended by the Secretary of State, the Lord Mayor, General Sir John Anderson, making his last appearance in his Regiment and greeted with a standing ovation, and all the previous Commanders. The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Edwin Bramall, told the officers:
“I have come here quite simply with one important purpose and that is, as the professional head of the British Army, to bring the Army’s warmest best wishes and to pay its greatest respect to you, our youngest regiment.” He concluded, “The United Kingdom as a whole is proud of you, and it is a privilege for me to be the instrument by which this respect, admiration and gratitude is passed on to you.”
In May the Council granted the Freedom of the City to the Regiment. A representative guard of honour, selected from all the battalions, with a detachment of Greenfinches at its centre, was drawn up in front of the City Hall under the stony gaze of Queen Victoria’s statue and inspected by the Lord Mayor. The guests were invited into the Council chamber to watch the conferral of the Freedom, Alderman Bell handing over the scroll contained in a silver casket. He pointed out that the roll of Honorary Burgesses was a long and illustrious one, including the names of members of the Royal family, Sir Winston Churchill and the Ulster Field Marshals. “On no occasion,” he told the guests, “has the Freedom of our City been more dearly won, more richly deserved, or more gladly given than the honour we confer today on The Ulster Defence Regiment.”(4)It was the first of eleven Freedoms to be conferred on the Regiment during its lifetime. In June the Duke and Duchess of Kent attended a Regimental garden party in the gardens of Hillsborough Castle.
Another nine serving soldiers and four former members of the Regiment were murdered in 1980. Off-duty soldiers were attacked on over fifteen occasions. Eight were wounded, including two Greenfinches. Patrols came under attack on six occasions. Half the killings occurred along the Border.
A Corporal in the Lisnaskea Company, a former member of the Irish Guards, was ambushed as he was driving up to his house. He was hit several times. After months of slow and painful recovery he returned to duty. His wife, who was eight months pregnant, lost her baby; it was thought that shock had brought on her miscarriage. Three days later Corporal Aubrey Abercrombie, also from 4UDR, was found shot dead at the wheel of his tractor on his farm north of Kinawley. In the same month a Greenfinch was wounded outside her parents’ home. A car had stopped down the road, three men got out and one lifted up the bonnet. Along with her mother she went out to see if they could help. Two of the men opened fire and shot the Greenfinch in the thigh. They had probably been waiting for her father. She had joined the UDR after her boyfriend, Alan Ferguson, had been killed in the ambush of the patrol on the Garrison–Belcoo road two years previously.(5)
In June Private Richard Latimer of the Lisnaskea Company was murdered as he was serving two customers in his hardware shop in Newtownbutler. He was the third member of the parish church to be murdered since the beginning of the year.
Anger was escalating among the Protestant community over these repeated murders along the Fermanagh Border and, as the people saw it, the failure of the Government’s security measures. Fermanagh families are closely knit. If one is hurt, there are many to grieve; the hurt spreads through the community, among relatives, in-laws, cousins. Some have farmed the land for generations; it is their land. When the Archbishop of Canterbury visited the Province, the Reverend Kille, Rector of Rosslea, told him that it was the heirs in the families with one son who were being targeted in order to end the inheritence.(6)
Until the troubles began the two communities had lived for years in quiet harmony with each other. Now the IRA had destroyed that. Protestants could not but be aware that information about their daily lives was being fed to the IRA based across the Border by their Catholic neighbours. Not all, but which? Whom could one trust? There were acts of courage when Catholics warned their Protestant neighbours of an impending attack. There were also acts of betrayal when they failed to do so, as Roy Kells was to experience a few months later.
Kells is well known and respected by both communities in Fermanagh. He owns a Ladies and Gentlemen’s Fashion business, set up by his father in the 1920s, with three branches across the county. The Lisnaskea shop has been destroyed twice by bombs and rebuilt each time. Lisnaskea is a pleasant town, one long main street on the road from Enniskillen to the Cavan border. Like Castlederg in Tyrone it is one of the frontier towns that has suffered grievously from bombs and shooting attacks. When a car bomb had wrecked the town centre in 1972, it was Kells and five of his men on their way home from patrol in the early hours who had seen the lights of the car parked in the main street, realized what it was and evacuated the town centre.
In 1980 Kells was commanding the Newtownbutler platoon. Latimer was one of his soldiers. He was determined that something must be done to persuade the Government to take more resolute action to protect his people. Together with some other senior members of his platoon he set up the rather grandiosely named Fermanagh Committee for the Defence of British Democracy. It was, he insisted, no more than a pressure group. It did not make use of vigilantes, it had no connection with Paisley’s Third Force, and when the UDA announced it would send down some of its people to sort out the IRA, it was told they were not wanted. The committee did nothing unlawful and, by persuading the people that something was being done to fight their case, it prevented them, if they were considering doing so, from taking the law into their own hands.
Once it had been set up, Kells handed over the running of the committee to local leaders of the community, people who had no direct involvement in the UDR. A protest rally in Newtownbutler, attended by several thousand people, was addressed by the two Unionist party leaders, Paisley and Molyneaux, and drew the attention of the media to the plight of the people. In July Paisley arranged for four of the widows to meet the Prime Minister. Kells flew over with them and sat in an outer room at 10 Downing Street whilst Mrs Thatcher saw the four women alone, “and cried with them,” he said.(7)Mrs Latimer told reporters that the Prime Minister had been very kind and listened very attentively. “She gave the definite impression that she did not realize things were quite so bad.”(8)In the House Mrs Thatcher told MPs, “I think I learnt more from seeing them than I ever could have by reading any number of papers or letters.”(9)
One of those attacked while going about his civilian job was a Sergeant in 8UDR who had already undergone two terrifying experiences – being forced to drive his van with a bomb on board and dealing with a proxy bomb delivered to his company base. On this Saturday in July he had a letter to deliver to a house where an old couple lived “away up an awful old lane”. His suspicions had been alerted by a car moving around in the area with three people in it, two of them girls, though they could have been men wearing wigs. He took a 9mm pistol from its hiding place between the front seats of the van and slipped it into the waist band of his trousers:
“The only mistake I made, I didn’t put one up the spout. So I went on out and across the road, over to another place and just the same car went past with the same people in it. Says I, ‘there’s something wrong’. I went to this house. The door was closed. I got the letter ready in my hand as I was driving up and before the van stopped, I pulled the brake on her and was out like lightning. Just as I was going to put the letter under the door, the door opened, two boys came out masked to there, one fired one round and it went past my face. You know a bullet would suck the wind. It was that close to me I thought I was hit but I couldn’t feel nothing, so I rolled and he fired another one at me on the ground and he missed again and just at that I rolled and got a shot off into the air. I didn’t aim, for I couldn’t. I didn’t have time to look. So I took a run down this lane. It was an old isolated place, there could have been thirty men, I didn’t know how many, and I didn’t know which way to run really, but I saw a bunch of nettles and says I, ‘There’s a sheugh there’. I had a good few rounds loose in my pocket. Says I, ‘If I could get in there and get a bit of cover I could hold them off.’ Jesus, I jumped in, there was a big stump of a tree, there was no sheugh at all. I just hit my backside on the tree and bounced out in the middle of the lane again. By that time they were standing behind the wall and I could hear them cursing and swearing. So I went down the lane a bit, nice and quiet, for I didn’t know if somebody else would step out with an Armalite or something. The next thing I heard was thump, thump, and I saw the two boys coming running down the field. They were sixty yards off me in this field of hay cut. So I lined up on the first boy and I called him but he didn’t stop, and I got blazing. He went to ground so I moved to the second boy, who did the same. Says I, ‘God I have got them.’ Then I looked round and the first boy, he was running again and the second boy got up and I shot again. I had only seven rounds in the magazine, that’s all she held. That was my last episode.”
By now search teams within the Operations Platoons were carrying out frequent searches, some speculative, some based on information supplied by Special Branch, others the result of detailed search analysis, taking into account such factors as the location of suspect houses, reports of suspects passing through road checks, previous finds and attacks, the remoteness of an area and likely supply routes. Their persistence paid off and battalions marked up an impressive record of finds in the first five months of the year. In February a search team from 1UDR, acting on a report that a civilian had stumbled upon weapons and ammunition near Ballymena, uncovered two home-made sub-machine guns, a zip gun, pistol, safety fuse, detonators and ammunition, almost certainly belonging to Loyalist paramilitaries. In March the Dungannon Company of 8UDR found two weapons on the wartime airfield at Ardboe. In April 2UDR, 8UDR and the RUC carried out a highly successful search operation south of Blackwatertown, discovering two hand guns, one of them brand new, followed the next day by two .303 rifles, an SLR and some 4,000 rounds, hidden in a plastic pipe built into a bank. Four days later a routine patrol from the Cookstown Company came upon a massive 900lb landmine, packed into nine milk churns, already wired up and emplaced in a culvert under a road a mile from Cappagh. It was the biggest bomb found so far that year.
John Turnly was a member of a Protestant family established in the Glens of Antrim for over two centuries and a leading figure in the Irish Independence Party. He was shot in front of his Japanese wife and children, as he arrived at a hall to address a meeting in Carnlough, twelve miles along the Antrim Coast Road from Larne. Larne was a hotbed of Loyalist paramilitaries, some of whom had served, and regrettably two who still served, in the local UDR company. It is hard to believe that suspicions did not exist, not least because the Company IO, a man of absolute integrity, had a close and trusted working relationship with the local Special Branch.
The police acted resolutely in the aftermath of the murder, rounding up some thirty to forty people representing all the Loyalist paramilitary organizations. Among those taken in and subsequently charged with paramilitary-related offences were two permanent cadre soldiers, one of them a Sergeant. One of the three UFF members eventually found guilty of the killing and sentenced to life imprisonment had served in the company as both a permanent cadre and a part-time soldier and had been allowed to continue to use the company canteen after he resigned from the Regiment.(10)
There was a positive side to what was otherwise deplorable publicity for the UDR. At the murder trial it was revealed that it was as a result of the suspicions of a Corporal in 5UDR who stopped the getaway van on the Ballymena road two and a half hours after the shooting that the three were identified and subsequently arrested. And, though this could not be revealed at the time, the Larne Company intelligence cell had submitted a report some ten days before the murder giving positive evidence, provided by soldiers living along the coast, that Turnly was under surveillance by Loyalist paramilitaries.(11)
For the first two years of the decade events in Ireland were dominated by the hunger strike conducted by the Republican prisoners in the H–Blocks in the Maze. In the first instance they refused to wear prison clothes, wrapping themselves in blankets. When the authorities refused to concede their demands to be allowed to wear their own clothes, they escalated their protest, smearing their cells with their own excrement. That too failed to move the authorities and on 1 March 1981 the leader of the Provisional prisoners, Bobby Sands, began his fast to the death.
The National H–Block Committee showed great skill in publicizing the plight of the prisoners, albeit self-inflicted, organizing street protests throughout Ireland. At first the marches were orderly, but, as the strikers weakened, the protests grew more angry, with demonstrations in towns and villages across the Province regularly ending in hooligan violence, supplemented by hoax bombs to cause further disruption. It was a time when the RUC came into their own, handling the demonstrations virtually without military intervention, though there were many nights when UDR patrols deployed to protect them against the threat of gunmen while they policed the parades. As Sands weakened the tension grew and the rioting escalated, hyped up by the international media who had returned in force to their usual watering hole in the Europa Hotel. UDR battalions were instructed to advise those soldiers whose circumstances put them at high risk to move into barracks for the time being. Few accepted the offer; it was not a time to leave one’s family on their own. Annual camps across the water were postponed until later in the year.
Sands died on 5 May 1981. The huge funeral passed off peacefully and the press corps switched their attention to Londonderry to await the imminent death of the next prisoner, Francie Hughes of Bellaghy, former OC of the South Derry ASU.
While they waited a journalist from RTE suggested they should cover the other side of the story by interviewing the widows of the victims of terrorism. A local man, Alistair Wilson, gathered together a group of local widows and brought them to the hotel. Among them was Sylvia Deacon, whose husband, Colour Sergeant David Deacon, had been murdered in 1973. They gave a number of interviews and were filmed for the American Broadcasting Company television network. Encouraged by the media interest that their interviews had generated, and with the help of Wilson and Marlene Jefferson, who had just completed her term of office as the city’s first woman Mayor, they formed a small group, calling it “The Widow’s Mite”. They took David Deacon’s wedding ring, engraved with the names of his wife and children, and had it melted down and refashioned in the shape of a biblical mite, stamped with a candle to represent the Light of Truth. The mite was passed to groups of widows across the Province, shown to the local press and to District Councils to persuade them not to provide financial support to the H–Block Committee Campaign. In three cases they were able to reverse a council’s decision. They travelled to Scotland where they addressed meetings, appeared again on television and raised enough money to finance a trip to America. Sylvia Deacon was invited to address the Monday Club at the Conservative conference at Blackpool and afterwards talked with Mrs Thatcher in her hotel room. As a result the British Embassy arranged for Mrs Jefferson and three of the widows to carry out a lightning speaking tour of the United States. The three were Sylvia Deacon, Marlene Wilson, who had lost a husband and a brother in the RUC, and Georgie Gordon, whose UDR husband and 11-year-old daughter had been killed by the under-car booby trap. In five days they travelled to six centres across the country, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St Louis, where, among others, they addressed an audience at the University’s centre for International Studies, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington. They gave talks, were interviewed on television, including the Walter Cronkite Show, and took part in radio phone-ins, during one of which they talked to Father Sean McManus, head of the Irish National Caucus, and were a match for him. It was an exhausting schedule, repeating time and again the stories of their bereavement. By the time they came home they were worn out. It had been a courageous campaign by women, who, apart from Marlene Jefferson, had no experience of public speaking. “I’m glad we did it,” Sylvia said. “We got a good reception from the American people. They had no idea what was going on. They heard only one side of the story – the IRA propaganda machine.”(12)
When Francie Hughes died, a week after Sands, another prisoner came forward to take his place. All through the summer that pattern continued. As one died another took over, until in time the world lost interest, the press corps departed, the deaths were no longer news, their names forgotten by all but the grieving families. The Dungannon priest, Father Faul, played a leading role in advising relatives to persuade their menfolk to abandon their protest, until at last, on 3 October, the last five agreed to give up their fast. The hunger strike was over. By then ten had died of starvation. Three days later the Government agreed that prisoners should be allowed to wear their own clothes.
Ireland had a new generation of martyrs. From a position of weakness Sinn Fein had gained the support of the Irish people at home and abroad, including many who had no truck with violence of the IRA. For a while there was a very real concern that Sinn Fein would take over from the SDLP as the principal political party of the Nationalist community.
As 1980 drew to a close morale in the Province was low. Soaring unemployment and the failure of the political parties to agree on the formation of a new Assembly and Executive, as proposed in a Government Green Paper published in July, affected both communities. Protestants had no faith in Government security policy. They saw the Army strength being run down and bases closed, and the killings went on. The success of the protests by the H–Block Committee and the start of the hunger strike in October were creating international sympathy for men who had been involved in the murder of their people.
The UDR, being drawn in the main from that community, shared its feelings. There were other factors. In accordance with the policy of police primacy, the public profile of the Army, including the UDR, had been lowered “until it just about disappeared from sight”.(13)The fact that advertising for recruits on television, radio and in the national press had been stopped and the annual camp at Lydd/Hythe for the permanent cadre cancelled, officially because of the need to cut back on defence expenditure, had raised doubts about the Government’s commitment to the future of the Regiment.
As the hunger strike moved on its tragic course through 1981, the level of violence increased, fuelling Protestant disillusionment. Excluding the ten hunger strikers, 100 people died; half of them were members or ex-members of the security forces, twenty-two RUC, eighteen UDR and ten Regular Army. The combined total of serving and former members of the Regiment was the highest since 1976 and exceeded only in 1972. There were ten attacks on patrols resulting in the death of one soldier and the wounding of six others. In addition to the fatalities there were twenty other assassination bids against off-duty soldiers in which ten were wounded, among them another postman and three school bus drivers. The attacks included four under-vehicle booby-traps. Three of them failed to detonate properly, one under the car belonging to the Operations Officer of 10UDR; the fourth killed the 17-year-old son of a soldier from Lisnadill in Co Armagh as he was putting his father’s car away in the garage for the night.
Ivan Toombs was an officer in Customs and Excise and commanded the UDR company in Rathfriland. In 1976 as a part-time Captain he had been shot and seriously wounded on his way to work at the Customs post on the Dublin road south of Newry. On recovering from his wounds he had been transferred for his own safety to the VAT office in the Customs and Excise headquarters in Belfast. However, Warrenpoint, his home town, was rapidly increasing in importance as a container port, and Toombs applied to become the senior Customs Officer there. On 16 January he was working at his desk when two gunmen rode into the dock area on a motorcycle. While one of them covered the Customs Officer on duty at the door, the other burst into Toombs’ office, weapon in hand, took up a firing position and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. Toombs tried to reach his pistol in his briefcase. The gunman lunged at him. Toombs grappled with him and, being the stronger, would have overcome his assailant, but the second man, hearing the first calling for him, ran down the corridor, told his companion to stand aside and opened fire. As Toombs lay dying, the first man calmly cleared his weapon and pumped further rounds into his body to make sure he was dead. His wife Mary, who was in Daisy Hill hospital in Newry recovering from a serious operation, was brought the news by her rector. She got up from her bed and returned home to look after the five children. She and Ivan had talked about the arrangements for his funeral. With typical modesty he had asked that it should take place without military honours. Bishop Eames gave the address, recalling a conversation with Ivan at a lunch in the Battalion Officers Mess at Ballykinlar two months earlier:
“We talked of many things, not least the difficulties of the present time in our Province. How well I recall his words, ‘Surely some day people will come to see that there are some things that are so good that they will endure.’ What a memorial those words provide.
“As Christians we believe there are certain ‘things so good that they will endure’, – love, so much stronger than hatred; unity of purpose so much more lasting than division; charity and understanding which outlive suspicion and violence; faith which endures and outlives smallness and meanness.”
News of the murder reached 10 Downing Street as an Alliance deputation was meeting with the Prime Minister. Oliver Napier, the Party leader, who had attended the same lunch in Ballykinlar, recalled that Mrs Thatcher was horrified. “The message came through as we were discussing the security situation. It reinforced the kind of thing we live with.”(14)
Ivan Toombs was a thoroughly good man, father of a charming, attractive family, assistant Scout master, keen sports player, a moderate man who had joined the UDR at the beginning after ten years in the USC, a man who believed he had a duty to help protect the whole community. He was typical of the best type of UDR officer. Talking to him one would never have known he was a man living under constant threat; his calm acceptance that he would be killed sooner or later was extraordinary. “I’m not bitter,” his wife said. “We both knew this would happen sometime, and now I must pick up the pieces and keep our family together in the town we grew up in.”(15)
Toombs was set up for murder by a fellow Customs Officer, Eamon Collins, who in his youth had worked as a clerical officer in the MOD in London. In 1978 he joined Customs and Excise and was stationed at the post on the main road to Dublin in his home town of Newry. Already an angry and embittered man, he soon discovered that his work gave him access to information about members of the security forces. He began passing this information on to the IRA in Dundalk. He arranged to be attached to the Customs Office in Warrenpoint where he spent most of his time “working out ways to kill Ivan Toombs. The more I found out about him, the more admirable I found him. He was a man of simple tastes who behaved decently towards all, the sort of man who would have rebuked anyone who made an anti-Catholic comment. I liked him and felt that in other circumstances we might have been friends.”(16)
Collins provided the IRA with detailed drawings of the layout of Warrenpoint Customs Office and official papers to enable the assassins to persuade the officer on duty to let them in. After two years of planning, the killing took place. Collins attended the funeral, to show the respect of one soldier to another, or so he claimed in a 1995 television programme, though in his book he records that he did so to target other members of the security forces among the mourners; the probable reason is that suspicions would have fallen on him if he had stayed away. He went on to become an effective and dedicated member of the IRA, reconstituting the ineffectual local Newry ASU and acting as its intelligence officer. In 1985 he was arrested. He turned supergrass, but under pressure from his family and on the basis of an assurance from the IRA, delivered to him in prison, that no action would be taken against him so long as he did so, he retracted his evidence. He was taken to court charged with five murders and forty-five terrorist-related offences. Though he had provided the evidence against himself in the first instance, the judge was concerned that the confessions might have been obtained under duress and Collins was released. In 1997 he was seriously injured when the IRA tried to kill him in a hit-and-run accident. In January 1999, after he had given evidence on behalf of the Sunday Times in a libel case involving a senior South Armagh Provisional, he was brutally murdered outside his home in Newry. There is little doubt that his assassins belonged to one of the Republican groups.
His book is a disturbingly honest account of how after four years as an IRA activist he “no longer existed as a human being”.(17)It answers the question that many have asked, “How could they do it?” They could because they hated with a deep, corrosive hatred, the unforgetting, unforgiving legacy of centuries. In Collins’ case he began to hate, he claims, because of the harsh treatment of his family by a Regular Army patrol, but the sum of the evil he generated far outweighed any wrong that may have been done to him and his people. “The IRA always approved attacks on the UDR with a special enthusiasm,” he wrote, “and within the wider nationalist community the killing of a member of the UDR is always more popular than the killing of a policeman.”(18)
In February a second attempt was made to murder Roy Kells as he was working in the shop window in Lisnaskea with two assistants, changing the seasonal display.
“I was facing the front out on to the main street when I heard two shots fired. I immediately turned to my right and my eyes met a gunman standing four feet away from me and pointing a gun directly at me. Our eyes actually locked together. He fired a third shot which hit me, grazing my temple and drawing some blood. I fell to the ground and he fired two more shots over my head. There was a semi-circle of five shots in the hoarding behind the back of the shop window.”
The gunman hid his weapon under his coat and ran. A fellow member of Kells’ platoon from up the street had heard the shots, handed him a gun and together they rushed into the bar next door. A customer told them the man had run through the bar and out the back by a door that was always kept locked but on that day had been left open.(19)
Private John Smith of 7UDR worked in a garage in Ormeau Avenue. Each day he walked there from his home in East Belfast. His route took him through the Markets district, the home ground of an INLA unit. In March two INLA gunmen, wearing white painters’ coats and carrying a tin of paint, followed him along the street and shot him in the back of the head. On the following Sunday the priest in nearby St Malachy’s Church challenged any member of the congregation to get up and leave if they supported the killers. No one moved.(20)
Three members of the Regiment were killed in April. On 28 April Lance Corporal Richard McKee was killed outright when the civilianized minibus he was travelling in on an administrative run from the base at Rathfriland to Ballykinlar came under fire. His funeral took place in Clonallan churchyard where Toombs had been buried three months earlier. The night before, Cardinal O’Fiaich called on the family in Warrenpoint and prayed at the coffin, accompanied by Monsignor John Magee, a Newry man and the Pope’s personal emissary in the Vatican. He had come from Rome in the last fruitless attempt to persuade Sands to call off his hunger strike.
In May Private Alan Richie was killed when gunmen stepped out into a quiet country road at Gulladuff after a two-vehicle patrol from 5UDR had passed by and fired through the open door into the back of the rear Landrover. Two days later the CO of 7UDR, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Cowan, who had only taken over the Battalion a fortnight earlier, came within inches of being killed when a high velocity round fired by a sniper overlooking the Short Strand bus depot grazed his neck. Apart from the graze he was unhurt and joined in the hot pursuit to locate the firing point and empty cases. Over the next six weeks there were other sniper attacks in the same area, a run-down Catholic enclave in the predominantly Protestant East Belfast, and two policemen were wounded. When later in the year in the same area a member of a 7UDR patrol was shot and wounded in the arm, the Battalion mounted a major follow-up operation carrying out a systematic house-to-house search lasting over two days, assisted by the police and Regular Army search teams. One of the companies cordoned off the area. Angry residents told the media that the UDR had placed them under virtual curfew. Unfortunately, when terrorists base themselves on a network of small streets it is the innocent inhabitants who suffer. The searches uncovered, as well as various items of bomb-making equipment, the sniper rifle and ammunition. An 18-year-old girl was arrested at the scene and charged with attempted murder.(21)
In June three armed masked men took over a house in the country south of Lisnaskea. When Lance Corporal Ronald Graham arrived to deliver groceries they shot him dead. A Sergeant in 8UDR was shot as he was delivering mail to an isolated farm near Ballygawley. Although wounded he returned fire with his PPW, hitting one of his attackers in the chest. A man, said to be a heavily traced member of PIRA from the Dungannon area, was admitted to a Monaghan hospital. He had not been taken into custody and two weeks later he slipped away, leaving a relative in his place in the hospital bed.
In July another Sergeant in 8UDR had a lucky escape from death. He had driven down to Cookstown from his home out in the country. As he was going through the gates of the company centre the sentry shouted at him, “Get away from that car.”
“I thought they’re taking a bloody hand out of me, so I drove on down and parked. Someone came running down after me, saying, ‘Get away from the car, get away from the car.’ I didn’t know whether to take him seriously or not but by God when I went back a bit I saw this white lunch box underneath the car. The ATO was sent for, and the Commanding Officer arrived down. My whole fear was the Commanding Officer lighting on me and giving me a bloody dressing down for not checking my car. He was very nice about it, he never said a word.”
Two years later the Sergeant was to suffer a greater tragedy. In July 1983 he had gone to Bisley with the Battalion shooting team. On the last day an announcement was made over the tannoy that a member of 8UDR should report to Range control.
“I went and was told there had been a bomb attack on a UDR man’s home. It’s funny the way you get a feeling like, I just knew that it was my house. I had the key left for my sister in a wee shed at the back. She was that type of a woman, she liked to make sure when I was coming home that the house was right. She went to get the key, opened the door of the wee shed – Boom! The bomb was in behind the door and she was just plastered up against a wall. Her legs was an awful mess.”
She died of her injuries two months later.
“I had my ups and downs, but that was the worst,” her brother said. “It is something you never get over because I know she died because of me. It was hard to take. I left the wee house and went to live in Cookstown then.”(22)
Faced with the continuing attacks on off-duty members of the UDR, the Scientific Adviser at HQNI had drawn up in 1978 a fairly rudimentary method of assessing the extent to which each soldier was at risk of attack. This system of Risk Assessment was now being refined in each battalion and within each intelligence office a Risk Assessment cell was established. The core of the system was the soldier’s risk assessment file, covering such questions as where he lived and worked, whether his job meant that he had to maintain a fixed daily schedule, whether he had been attacked in the past or attacks on other people had taken place in his neighbourhood. The answers to these questions enabled the Risk Assessment Officer to calculate a ‘score’; anyone scoring twenty was at High Risk, over that figure, Very High Risk. These were supplemented by individual interview sheets, giving the address and grid reference of the soldier’s home and work place, details of the family, the car, where it was parked during working hours and so on. The file was continuously updated with any reports the soldier might make about cars he believed had followed him home, suspect persons that he believed had been observing his movements, or anything he felt might indicate he was under risk.
Completing the details involved a great deal of work by the companies. The problem was to convince the soldiers that they must keep the information up to date. Information might be received that a soldier driving a red car was under threat; a warning would be sent out to all red car owners, only to discover later that several others had sold their cars and bought others which happened to be red, but had never told their company office so that their record could be updated. It was a matter of dispelling the ‘it-won’t-happen-to-me’ syndrome; but in time, as lives were saved, soldiers came to realize that the Risk Assessment System was not just another facet of military bureaucracy.
By 1983 the system was computerized, with a computer in each Risk Assessment cell and all members of the intelligence staff trained how to operate it. If a warning was received, it was passed on by the duty watch-keeper to the company operations room; the company informed the Company Commander who would warn his platoon commanders and so on down the line to the individual soldiers. There were times when the warning had to be passed on immediately, for a life could be at imminent risk. Sometimes it was vague – “a UVBT under a soldier’s car in County Down tonight” – at other times specific. When Special Branch obtained information that a man possibly working for a certain firm in a certain area who rode a small red motorcycle and wore a green jacket and a blue helmet with a distinctive badge was under threat, the computer printed out his name in minutes, the soldier was brought into barracks, resigned from his civilian job and was taken on the permanent cadre.
On other occasions the information left vital questions unanswered, such as “a man who leaves his daughter to college will be shot at 8 am on 9 June”. What man? What college? The information was received at midnight on the 8th. The first trawl showed that no one had recorded on their risk assessment proforma information about leaving a daughter to college. The trawl was narrowed down to married soldiers with daughters of college age who could be pupils at the two colleges in the area from which the information had originated. When this still produced no results attention was turned to former soldiers. With two hours to go a man was identified who fitted the information – a former soldier whose brother was a Member of Parliament. An hour later the polling stations were due to open for the Westminster General Election.
At times the information was so precise and the threat so imminent that the soldier and his family would be moved out overnight into a mobile home or an empty married quarter in the nearest military barracks and stay there, sometimes for months, until such time as the Housing Executive could allocate him a house in a safe area.
Sometimes the system was not enough to save a soldier’s life but the information he had provided for his file could contribute to the arrest of his killers. When a Corporal was shot dead in Kilkeel it was found from his file that he had repeatedly reported a local man watching his movements. The name was passed to the police who confronted the man with this evidence. He admitted passing the information to PIRA and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Soldiers graded as being at Very High Risk were issued with 9mm service pistols in place of the smaller calibre .22 Walther. Individual anti-ambush drill became a regular feature of annual camp, with soldiers being taught how to tumble out of a moving car, roll into a fire position and open fire against a figure target with a PPW.
On 5 August a series of bomb attacks took place across the Province, the worst for over a year – a car showroom in Armagh, a hotel wrecked in Dunmurry, twelve shops destroyed in the centre of Lisburn, widespread blast damage behind the City Hall, two bombs in Newry and the railway line to Dublin cut again near the Border. On the 22nd a car bomb exploded in the main street of Bangor. Fifteen minutes later another exploded in Fisherwick Place near the City Centre, wrecking a newly completed office block and causing extensive damage to the Presbyterian Assembly Building.
In September two more members of the Regiment were murdered, in October another, plus a former member who had resigned a month earlier. At the beginning of November the Chief Constable warned that the Provisionals, having regrouped during the hunger strike, were about to step up their attacks. The recruits who had flocked to join the organization during the H–Block campaign had now been trained and the success of that campaign in the United States had ensured that ample funds and munitions were available.
The Chief Constable’s warning proved all too accurate. Within 24 hours a part-time soldier in 5UDR was shot six times and was very seriously injured while he was up a ladder, painting premises in the centre of Londonderry. In the early hours of the morning of the 10th Private Cecil Graham, brother of Ronald who had been murdered in June, was shot as he was leaving his in-laws’ home after visiting his wife, a Catholic, and their six-week-old baby. The child had been born prematurely with a heart murmur and, in order to help the mother to nurse him, she and their infant son had moved temporarily into her parents’ home. Wounded, Graham tried to crawl back into the house but the gunmen closed in and pumped ten rounds into him. His father-in-law, who had served in the Army in France during the war, helped him into the house. It was said that none of the neighbours dared to go to his aid. He died the following day. Eight hours later a Corporal in the same company was ambushed as he drove down the lane to his farm. Despite being hit he was able to drive on but crashed the car further down the lane. He took to the fields, lay low for a while and then walked one and a half miles cross-country to a safe farmhouse. That same day Charles Neville, a former Sergeant in 2UDR, was murdered as he left his place of work in Armagh.
The killings built up to a crescendo on 14 November when three gunmen walked into a community centre in Finaghy and shot dead the Reverend Robert Bradford and the caretaker. Bradford, a Unionist MP, was an ultra-Loyalist, the man whose immoderate public statements had prompted 3UDR to ask him not to officiate at the funeral of one of the three soldiers killed in the landmine at Castlewellan. Loyalist anger was near boiling point. Next day two Catholics were shot and one of them died. Even moderate men were voicing their dissatisfaction over Government security policy. There had been too much talk of reductions in force levels and the closing down of bases and of looking ahead to a time when the police could take over sole responsibility for security. As a result of the policy of maintaining a low public profile in the media and of conducting more operations covertly, the impression had been created that military operations had been run down and the close accord between the Army and the Protestant community had suffered as a result. Distrust of Government intentions had been heightened by a meeting that had taken place at 10 Downing Street a week before Bradford died between the Prime Minister and the new Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald, when the two had agreed to set up, as Thatcher recorded, “the rather grand sounding Anglo–Irish Inter-Governmental Council which really continued the existing ministerial and official contacts under a new name’.(23)
The Official Unionists and the DUP, Molyneaux and Paisley, reacted with anger, but separately. When the former said that, unless security was improved, he would advocate the setting up of a citizens’ force, the latter said he already had a Third Force in existence and could put between 25,000 and 50,000 men on the streets. Some 600 men, some masked and wearing combat jackets, paraded for Paisley in Enniskillen. The Unionist stoppage next day was marked by dignified gatherings at war memorials across the Province, but the Secretary of State was jostled and booed when he attended the Bradford funeral. That same day another member of the Lisnaskea Company, Corporal Albert Beacom, was murdered on his isolated farm near Maguiresbridge. His wife was feeding their tenmonth-old daughter when she heard the shots and ran out into the yard. He died in her arms. A Catholic was killed in Lurgan by the UVF. In the evening the Third Force paraded again, at New Buildings in Co Londonderry. Press photographers were taken aside to a lonely place nearby where a line of masked men on a given signal raised handguns into the air. It was the first time that members of the Force had appeared with weapons in public. Next day James McClintock, formerly a Corporal in 5UDR, was murdered at New Buildings on his way home from work; the day after, Lance Corporal John McKeegan of 6UDR was shot dead while delivering wood in the Ballycolman estate in Strabane. McKeegan was a cousin of McClintock’s widow.
On the Wednesday the Newsletter published a page-high notice, signed by Paisley and the other two DUP MPs, headed “The Crisis of our Generation now upon us,” listing the attacks on members of the UDR and RUC that had taken place in the previous week, culminating in the murder of Bradford and declaring an “Ulster Day of Action” on the following Monday. It would involve a total stoppage of work from midday, tractor and car cavalcades converging on major towns and a massive demonstration in Newtownards that evening. “Units of the Third Force – which already exists – will parade,” the announcement concluded.
Security arrangements for the Day of Action were in the hands of the police and UDR battalions received their instructions from RUC divisions. A call-out was not considered necessary, but part-time soldiers patrolled the main roads overnight and all the permanent cadre were called in to supplement the patrols, act as a reserve and carry on patrolling the following day. In the event the day passed peacefully. The UDA, who had little use for Paisley since the UWC strike, refused to have any part in the demonstrations and instead held their own protest meeting in the shipyards. Molyneaux addressed a smallish crowd at the Cenotaph beside the City Hall. The police estimated that some 10,000 men and a few women paraded in Newtownards, three-quarters of them wearing some form of paramilitary dress, some with official armbands. The man leading the parade wore a combat jacket, UDR beret and cap badge and was thought to be a UDR ‘company commander’. Afterwards several battalion adjutants were summoned to HQUDR to see if they could identify him, but police had failed to photograph the ringleaders and the only photograph of the man, reproduced from television, was so blurred as to make positive identification impossible. The adjutants had little doubt that the man was not and never had been a ‘company commander’ in the UDR.
When, later in the week, a group of about 100 men paraded in a Loyalist estate in Londonderry and their anonymous leader claimed that there were UDR soldiers and RUC reservists in their ranks, SDLP and Alliance politicians demanded that the RUC should carry out an investigation. Father Faul claimed that the police and UDR had failed to take any action against the armed men in the parade at New Buildings and repeated the allegation that there were members of the security forces amongst them. These accusations of UDR involvement in the Third Force were to be repeated on numerous occasions. There may have been a few serving soldiers in these publicity demonstrations, but it is unlikely that men who were carrying out regular operational duties with their companies would be willing to give up any more nights out of bed for the sake of Paisley’s self-aggrandisement. There was little Paisleyite involvement in the Regiment. The media reported that the CO of 11UDR in Portadown had issued an order to his battalion that any soldiers who became involved in the Third Force would be dismissed. It was the kind of unequivocal statement that should have been issued by Headquarters Northern Ireland, both then and even more so in the early 1970s in regard to UDR/UDA dual membership, but, when asked if the order was official policy, an Army spokesman stated only that it was not the custom for a Headquarters to comment on orders given by a Commanding Officer to his soldiers. During his two years in command Hargrave never heard of a single case of a serving member of the Regiment being identified with the Third Force. Within HQNI it was not considered a matter for serious concern.(24)
Major General Peter Chiswell, the new CLF, a former PARA CO who had commanded his battalion in Belfast, a man with a reputation for standing no nonsense, issued unequivocal orders on how the Army should react on encountering a Third Force patrol. If the members were armed or acting illegally (and the carriage of clubs or wearing of face masks was now illegal) they were to be arrested. 3UDR expanded the orders into a directive for patrol commanders. On encountering an illegal patrol the UDR patrol commander was to deploy half his men in fire position and block off the road. He was then to go forward on foot with the other half of his patrol, block off the road on the far side of the illegal VCP and tell the men they were under arrest. The situation never arose. From then on the Third Force faded into obscurity.
After the violence of the previous two months December passed peacefully. The future looked hopeful. Information provided by supergrasses was making inroads into the leadership of the paramilitaries. There were signs of a high-level leadership struggle in the INLA, with two leading members shot. Members of the Mid–Ulster UVF had been rounded up and in general the Third Force rallies had been poorly attended. For the first time in three years a month had passed without anyone being murdered; the Segment gates were opened for late-night shopping and Christmas was a peaceful time.