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1

THE BISHOP

‘In such cases, where law and justice fail him, the Ulster Protestant will infallibly take his own measures for his protection. He is built that way. His resolution and his courage are unshakeable. He has all the unflinching determination of his border ancestors and by a question of principle he will stand to his last gasp.’

Lord Ernest Hamilton, The Soul of Ulster, 1917.1

It was a stormy night in mid-November 1965. Snow was forecast, as gale-force winds continually battered Northern Ireland. A car carrying four men steadily made its way from the Shankill Road in Belfast, south-west via the towns of Lisburn, Moira, Lurgan and Dungannon to the outskirts of the rural County Tyrone village of Pomeroy, some eighteen miles from the Irish border. It was a long and slow journey, as the roads got increasingly narrower and the bad weather made it difficult to navigate as the driver turned off the main A-road out of Dungannon. While Pomeroy was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic in religious composition in the mid-1960s, it had a long association with Protestant militancy that stretched back to the late eighteenth century. The Orange Order was formed not far away at the Diamond near Portadown, in 1795. It had been established at a time of great uncertainty. Revolution abroad, sectarianism at home and debates over constitutional issues and the fear of invasion brought the Order together.2 It was also a time when militia-based organisations flourished, with the predominantly Presbyterian United Irishmen raised a few years earlier to agitate for religious freedom for Catholics and dissenters. Both organisations had a resemblance to earlier, agrarian-based secret societies, like the Peep O’ Day Boys and their rivals, the Defenders.

As the antagonism between these revolutionary and counter-revolutionary groups developed, the United Irishmen became imbibed with a culture of popular radicalism common in Britain and America at the time. Meanwhile, Orangeism became more aggressively anti-Catholic and reactionary. Opposing social and political outlooks soon triggered conflict between both organisations. To Protestant vengeance groups, ‘the entire Catholic population became defined as the enemy’.3 Portadown, in North Armagh, was the epicentre of the trouble and would remain so for the next two centuries.

As the carload of Belfast men made their way along the rolling countryside, with its narrow country lanes, prominent hedgerows and wide-open emerald green fields, they passed workers’ cottages and farms scattered along the side of the roads. This was farming country and, on the surface at least, places like Pomeroy appeared all but immune from the modernisation programme gripping Northern Ireland in the 1960s.4 Some Protestants, in fact, harboured a deep-seated feeling of bitterness, anger and fear as the winds of change blew through their land. What would they usher in, other than the creeping hand of Irish nationalism, which had always aspired to gain a foothold in their beloved Ulster? To the more militant-minded Protestants, change of any kind pointed towards dark days ahead for their homeland.

The terrible weather conditions on that November night in many ways matched the foreboding that had been percolating down to the Protestant grassroots who resided in the surrounding rural hamlets of Cappagh, Carrickmore and The Rock. Chief amongst these was the feeling that the Unionist government at Stormont was far too liberal and soft on those who, hardliners believed, were dedicated to the destruction of the Northern Ireland state. Evidence of this existential threat came in the form of a summit a year earlier between the Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill and the Irish Taoiseach Seán Lemass. The meeting was held in private, but did not escape the prying eyes of a thirty-nine-year-old lay preacher Ian Paisley, the rabble-rousing leader of the Free Presbyterian Church, a fundamentalist Christian sect formed in 1951. Born in Armagh in 1926, another citadel of Orangeism, Paisley burst onto the scene in the late 1950s when he formed Ulster Protestant Action (UPA), a sectarian-based organisation that lobbied against unemployment within the majority Protestant population.5

By 1964, Paisley was threatening to lead a Protestant mob to the offices of Irish Republican election candidate and Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader Liam McMillan in West Belfast. McMillan had placed an Irish tricolour in the window of his office on Divis Street. It caused uproar amongst Protestant extremists in the neighbouring areas. In a bid to quieten tensions, the RUC intervened in the dispute and removed the flag. When it appeared back in the window a short time afterwards, Paisley brought a Protestant mob back onto the streets, provoking a three-night riot with local Catholics and the police.

Paisley had always made sectarianism the leitmotif of his political protests. Apart from agitating on exclusively Protestant issues, he opposed attempts by the Roman Catholic Church to reach out to other Christian denominations in a spirit of harmony. Paisley and his followers found ecumenicalism abhorrent and, as a result, set themselves against it just as firmly as they had done the rapprochement between the two governments north and south of the border. Underpinning this acrimony was an undercurrent of violence, a spectre that continually haunted politics and society in this part of the world. Paisley warned that the IRA, which had dumped arms in 1962 after its six-year border campaign fizzled out, was still waiting in the wings. McMillan’s defiance in West Belfast proved as much, Paisley told his supporters, despite IRA guns having fallen silent amidst widespread apathy from the northern nationalist community.6 With the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the failed Easter 1916 rebellion against British rule in Dublin, further impetus was given to militant Protestants who feared the ‘unholy alliance’ between the Irish government, Roman Catholic Church and the IRA.

A propensity for regular elections in Northern Ireland – there were seventeen local government, Stormont and Westminster parliamentary elections between 1945 and 1965 – gave Paisley the opportunity to test his paranoid claims on the voting public. Something was stirring amongst Ulster Protestants, and Paisley erroneously tapped into it. He was fast becoming the midwife in the rebirth of a noxious strain of militancy that was prepared to take the law into its own hands. By doing so, millenarian Protestant fundamentalists who identified with Paisley saw themselves as a bulwark against greater encroachment of British liberal democratic norms on their state. Paisleyites, as they soon became known, departed from this inclusive form of liberal unionism, preferring to hold fast to the belief that Northern Ireland should govern only on behalf of one section of its divided population. For these extremists, Northern Ireland was truly a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’. The faith-based ideology expounded by Paisley blended an extreme loyalty to the Crown with a narrow and exclusive interpretation of Ulster unionism and, above all, a rabid hatred for all things Roman Catholic.

By the mid-1960s, Paisley had attained cult-like status. His stirring speeches whipped his wide array of followers into a frenzy, and helped galvanise street protests. On one level, his oratory was certainly effective in winning over adherents, but his ‘swift rise to prominence occurred because fertile ground awaited the seeds of his bigotry’.7 He was an effective speaker, but he acted principally as a lightning rod for angst, frustration and fear amongst the Protestant working class.

***

The car carrying the Belfast men pulled off the minor B-road and followed a country lane towards a series of farm buildings, including a large barn. Outside, hurricane lamps swung violently in the wind. Men mingled in small knots. Some smoked cigarettes, while others avoided being drawn into small talk by looking at their feet. Those gathered outside only averted their eyes into the darker recesses of the surrounding undulating landscape when they spotted the car carrying the Belfast men approaching. As the vehicle pulled up next to the barn, the driver let the engine idle for a few moments before finally switching it off. The doors flung open to reveal the four visitors. They climbed out of the car with bearing and purpose. The Belfast men were greeted by an organiser, who had been expecting them. They exchanged pleasantries before being shown inside to the poorly lit barn. Shadows disappeared into the ambient light of the lamps which dangled from high wooden beams.

About forty men had gathered from different parts of the country on land owned by a prominent family in the area. The men stood side by side as they were brought to attention by a former British Army colonel and told to raise their right hand as they were sworn into a newly rejuvenated grouping, which was to become known as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), tracing its lineage back to the paramilitary organisation formed in the early twentieth century.8 While the objective of the old UVF was to oppose the British policy of Home Rule for Ireland by ‘any means necessary’, this new UVF was raised to oppose ‘an assumed threat’9 from physical force republicanism. In reality this new private army was formed by elements within the right wing of the Unionist Party as part of a wider conspiracy to oppose O’Neill’s liberal unionist agenda.10

These were desperate times, said the faceless men presiding over the secret ceremony, and they called for desperate measures. The visitors from Belfast readily agreed. Some of them had seen the dangers posed by subversive movements in far-flung colonial outposts, like Cyprus; others were led to believe they were joining an underground organisation, preparing for a doomsday scenario in which armed republicans would be fielded in an attempt to seize control of the local state and impose upon them an island-wide Irish republic.11

***

A few weeks before the swearing in ceremony in Pomeroy, the Honorary Secretary of the East and Mid Tyrone Unionist Association had written a gloomy letter to the Minister of Home Affairs, Brian McConnell, to inform him of some worrying developments. At their last meeting, reported the party functionary, a motion had been unanimously passed pleading with those ‘responsible for the peace of our beloved Province’ to ‘take immediate and appropriate action to ensure that peace will prevail during this dangerous period’. Local party members were people who took a ‘serious view … of the fact that preparations are in hand, by our political enemies, to have large scale celebrations on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916.’ Republicans were not only content to commemorate the past violent deeds of their ancestors, warned the East and Mid Tyrone Unionist Association. They were also intent on spreading fear by intimidating Protestants living along the border with an irredentist neighbour next door. ‘We fear that these celebrations could disturb the present peaceful state of Northern Ireland and lead to grave breaches of the peace,’ wrote the Honorary Secretary.12 Something had to be done, he urged, and fast.

What compounded frustrations amongst Protestants in his part of Mid Ulster was the political dominance of the old Nationalist Party, which had returned Austin Currie in the 1964 Westminster election. To those living in the Mid Ulster area there could be no compromise with nationalism wherever it reared its head, whether politically or culturally. A handful of members of the Orange Order, including several who wore the uniform of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC, known popularly as the ‘B-Specials’), an auxiliary force to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), met in secret to plan for the worst. They were determined to step into the breach, should O’Neill’s government prove unwilling or unable to confront what these hardliners suspected was a direct threat to their security. Matters soon came to a head when local newspapers reported that up to 30,000 people planned to gather in Pomeroy for the town’s Easter Rising parade.

A few miles north of Pomeroy, in Magherfelt, nine prominent unionists from the area, who also held overlapping members of the Orange Order and, in some cases, the B-Specials, paid a visit to the local RUC commander for the area. They warned of ‘strong intervention by loyalists’ if republicans were permitted to hold a commemorative parade in a local centre known as the Loup, which would ‘probably result in the use of firearms’ if it was to go ahead. After he showed them out, the police chief reported to RUC Headquarters that he was ‘convinced beyond all doubt’ the men were ‘prepared, if necessary, to use sufficient physical force in order to prevent these celebrations taking place’.13 An undercover Crime Special Department (later renamed Special Branch) detective attending a local election meeting in South Derry also reported how republicans wished to hold a protest in a ‘peaceful and orderly manner’ but that if they were given any trouble would ‘give all the trouble that would be needed’. Applause and loud cheers greeted these defiant words.14 Tensions between both communities ran exceptionally high.

At Stormont, McConnell’s replacement at the Ministry of Home Affairs, Bill Craig, was busy poring over more detailed intelligence reports from the RUC about the steps they were taking to tighten up the security situation. Craig promised Inspector General Sir Albert Kennedy the fullest co-operation and support from the government as they moved to preserve law and order. The Minister informed Parliament that he had authorised the mobilisation of the B-Specials as a necessary precaution, ‘to deal with the threatened IRA outbreak which constituted a very serious threat to the peace of this Province’.15 Briefings provided by intelligence chiefs in London, far removed from Mid Ulster, concluded that 3,000 IRA members were armed and poised to take action.16 Such alarmism within security circles was now matched by Paisleyites, who stoked fears amongst grassroots Protestants of an imminent armed attack by republicans.17

Not far from Stormont on the Ravenhill Road, Paisley was busy playing to a packed congregation in his church, the Martyrs Memorial. ‘England had always been weak in the face of Roman Catholic onslaughts and now rebels were dictating the policies of the country’, he told his flock, many of whom were thrown into hysterics by his booming, uncompromising rhetoric. ‘Free Presbyterians had been branded extremists’, he said, ‘in a way that left them with few options to register their grievances.’ This only encouraged them to amplify their chorus of disapproval, argued Paisley. The more republicans and the unionist government played up to one another, the more extreme Free Presbyterians would become. ‘My fellow ministers and I are united in denouncing the action of the Northern Ireland government in allowing celebrations of the Easter Rebellion to take place’, Paisley told them. Concluding his remarks, the Free Presbyterian leader vowed to continue to ‘protest in the strongest possible manner’.18

When the report of the sermon by the RUC’s Crime Special Department eventually landed on Craig’s desk, it left him in no doubt that Paisley was planning to heighten tensions, though few knew what form his plan would take. Less than forty-eight hours after Paisley’s dire warnings, UVF members sworn in at Pomeroy were taking to the streets armed with pistols. They fired shots at the home of the Stormont Unionist MP for the area, Johnny McQuade, in an attempt to create the impression that the IRA had awoken from its self-imposed slumber. The feigned attack at McQuade’s home was by no means an isolated incident and there was soon a close correlation between the escalation of Paisley’s rhetoric and the actions of the UVF.19

Two days after the attack on McQuade’s house, twenty-five-year-old Noel Doherty, a member of Paisley’s church, was busy in his printer’s shop, composing an intemperate letter to Bill Craig. Doherty was born in Cuba Street on the Newtownards Road on 26 December 1940 and attended Beechfield Elementary School. In 1956, aged fifteen, he left school and joined the Free Presbyterian church. By 1965, Doherty had set up the Puritan Printing Company with Paisley, publishing their fortnightly Protestant Telegraph. He was mesmerised by the clergyman he affectionately dubbed ‘The Bishop’. Under Paisley’s tutelage, Doherty contested the 1964 Belfast Corporation election as a Protestant Unionist Party candidate. Although he failed to win a seat, the experience left him enthralled by the gravitational pull of radical, fringe politics. By April 1966, Doherty had established the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee (UCDC), a vehicle for rejuvenating Paisley’s flagging electoral fortunes.20

As he worked late into the night at his printer’s shop, Doherty allowed his frustration with the liberal unionist agenda to spill out of his pen and onto every page of every letter he drafted to Stormont officials. His correspondence grew in volume, especially those letters personally addressed to Bill Craig. They typically elicited the same tawdry answer from his Private Secretary, who informed Doherty that he ‘should rest assured that the Minister would read the correspondence’. The evasiveness of the Stormont bureaucrats infuriated the East Belfast man. These were wily men who worked for even wilier politicians, he believed. Doherty knew instinctively, from the moment he opened the official-looking envelopes, that his letters were going unread. Much to his chagrin, the government was showing no sign of taking the dire warnings of ‘the bishop’ seriously. The young East Belfast man resolved to make them listen. ‘My chairman,’ Doherty began his latest diatribe, ‘had certain plans for Easter about which he wanted to tell the Minister but, as the Minister would not see him, he must be held responsible for the consequences.’21

Doherty signed off the letter just as sharply as he had started it. This obstinacy by the government officials would not do. He would up the ante to force them all to pay attention to the chorus of Free Presbyterian criticism. By now his plans for forming a secretive, illegally armed unit within the UCDC, known as the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV), were at an advanced stage.

***

‘I’ve called for the gelignite’, said the man with black curly hair and a long fringe. James Frederick Marshall, a forty-six-year-old quarryman from Bond Hill, Derrycrew, in Loughgall, was expecting the stranger. He had earlier been informed by his friend, twenty-nine-year-old Jim Murdock, a machinist by trade who lived at Grange Lower, Portadown, that someone would call to his home to collect the explosives ‘for a job in Belfast’. Marshall had carefully secreted them in an outbuilding on his farm, situated in rolling countryside just over seven miles due west of Portadown. The man with the curly hair who called to his door that evening was not alone. In the farmyard behind him sat a white Hillman Imp car with three other men in the vehicle. The car engine ticked over while the two men spoke in hushed tones about the secret work they were engaged in. Marshall led his visitor to the outhouse, where he encountered another man, who stood motionless with his hat pulled tightly down over the tip of his nose to disguise his face. Marshall was not alarmed by the presence of the strangers. Deep down he knew they were all brothers in a struggle that relied upon the strictest of secrecy and trust. They were, after all, his kith and kin.

Some weeks earlier, Marshall had been invited to join the UCDC22 following a meeting with two of Paisley’s key lieutenants, Noel Doherty and his twenty-six-year-old acquaintance Billy Mitchell, at Murdock’s home on 21 April 1966. As staunch Protestants and committed Paisleyites, the Loughgall men were eager to do their bit for their country. They were bound together with these men from Belfast by their extreme views and through their overlapping memberships of the Orange Order and the B-Specials. Their position was simple: in the event of any police or B-Specials being shot, ‘reprisals might be taken against the IRA’.23 Although aware that their actions would place them outside the law, these men were guided by a single-minded commitment to defend Ulster by any means necessary. Doherty provided the men with that opportunity, when he recruited them into the ranks of a highly clandestine cellular group within the existing ranks of the UPV. It may have been devised as a ‘loose association’, but it pulled in people from across the province who believed in the efficacy of armed resistance against ‘known enemies’. They were a force within a force, and the nucleus of an ultra-right-wing conspiracy that now ran through the veins of Protestant Ulster.

This was not the first time Doherty and Mitchell had met the Loughgall men. Both men had previously travelled down to Loughgall in a car driven by none other than Ian Paisley himself. Doherty later recalled how:

He was going to a meeting in Armagh and offered to pick us up on the way back. During this meeting I met a man called Winters, [and also] Marshall and Murdock. There was [sic] other people present whose names are unknown to me. The meeting took place in Murdock’s house, and I learned at the meeting that arms could be supplied. These men were of the opinion that IRA monuments and IRA leaders could be shot. While I agreed to a certain extent on blowing up monuments, never could I sanction the taking of life. After the meeting was over, Mitchell and myself travelled home in Mr Paisley’s car. Mr Paisley is a friend through his church of Mr Murdock and entered the house and waited on us drinking tea. I would state here that Mr Paisley knew nothing of the discussion that had taken place.24

In Doherty’s mind, it was vital to keep Paisley in play as a ‘figurehead’, but not to involve him in the intimate detail of the ‘job underneath him’.25

After returning to Belfast with Doherty and Paisley, Mitchell, the key link-man between the UPV and UVF, met with twenty-eight-year-old Geordie Bigger. Mitchell wanted to discuss with Bigger, believed to be the main organiser for the group, the transportation of explosives to Belfast from Loughgall. Bigger, a tyre process worker by trade, lived with his wife and children in a modest three-bedroom house in Queen’s Park, Glengormley, a solidly working-class area on the northern outskirts of Belfast. He had a reputation as a hard man, though he also had a predilection for talking when he should have been listening. Nevertheless, his willingness to obtain explosives for a ‘big job’ made him just the sort of character the UPV and UVF needed in their ranks. The meeting between Bigger and Mitchell was a low-key affair, but it would prove to have profound repercussions for the course of Northern Irish history.

Later, Doherty said Bigger and his thirty-one-year-old friend and colleague Dessie Reid contacted him at his mother’s home in Cuba Street. He claimed he did not recognise the two men at first, though after speaking to someone about Bigger – in all probability Billy Mitchell – Doherty travelled to Queen’s Park to ‘make sure who he was’. Once he reached Bigger’s home, the men entered into a fairly lucid discussion centring on the acquisition of explosives. At this point, Doherty promised to introduce them to the quarryman, Jim Marshall. It was arranged that Doherty would accompany Bigger to Portadown, where they would collect the illicit cargo. In the meantime, Bigger had acquired a pistol, a Webley revolver, which he brandished in the company of the men who were now meeting on an almost nightly basis.26 The conspiracy against O’Neill was now beginning to take on a much more serious form.

Ten miles north of Glengormley, in Carrickfergus, forty-five-year-old bricklayer Hugh McClean of Larne Road in the town was presenting himself as another willing volunteer in the cause. Carrick has long been a place etched in the Ulster Protestant psyche. It was the hallowed ground where William of Orange first set foot in Ireland before marching south to fight the forces of King James II, at the celebrated Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Now, Carrick would play host to a smaller and more clandestine army of men who were prepared to carry out armed actions in a very different, less conventional, way than their hero King Billy. Although the rumoured IRA assault on the Northern Ireland state had failed to materialise, McClean nonetheless remained convinced that the threat had not gone away. He wholeheartedly believed Paisley’s dire warnings, and saw violence as the only way to respond. As an ex-serviceman, McClean knew his way around weapons and explosives. McClean’s contact from Glengormley, Dessie Reid, soon paid him a visit to inform him that Bigger was organising volunteer groups. He asked McClean if he would like to join their ranks. McClean said he would and, crucially, that he knew of others who were prepared to step forward and be counted. One of those he proposed for membership was his neighbour and close friend, twenty-two-year-old William Blakely.

Willie Blakely was a well-regarded young man who served as an apprentice for the Electricity Board for Northern Ireland. To his friends, Blakely was a ‘very capable and dependable tradesman’ who ‘worked in closest harmony’ with his colleagues, including his foreman, a devout Roman Catholic who held the young Blakely in high regard. ‘We always found him to be strictly honest and trustworthy,’ the foreman later said of him.27 There were no outward signs that Blakely had become involved in militant Protestantism. He had apparently been ‘very popular with his workmates, both Protestant and Catholic alike’.28 Beneath the affable exterior, though, the truth was more complicated. Within a short space of time, Blakely found himself involved in a conspiracy he was neither prepared for, nor fully understood.

Events now moved quickly. After the meeting between Reid and McClean, the Carrick men travelled to Bigger’s house to join the group. When they arrived, Bigger denied the existence of a group in Glengormley and, he told them, they would have to establish one of their own in Carrick. It is likely that Bigger wanted to keep the Glengormley group under his direct control and, having picked up on McClean’s military bearing, saw him as a challenge to his own authority as a member of the Shankill UVF. Disappointed, albeit undeterred, the Carrick men returned along the coast to their homes in the picturesque seaside town.

A couple of days later, Reid again called on McClean to tell him that he had made contact with another group in Armagh. Meanwhile, Bigger travelled forty miles south to Loughgall with Doherty, where they met Marshall. They vowed to return a week later to collect the explosives.29 On their next visit, Reid, Bigger and McClean collected two sweet jars with twenty-seven sticks of gelignite, six detonators and a length of fuse wire. The men carried them to the car, placed them in the boot and then drove back to Glengormley, where Bigger held them overnight. The next day they took them to an old disused house on the Hightown Road where they ‘planked them’.30

The reason why the men had to move the explosives so quickly after depositing them in Bigger’s home was probably a direct result of the Glengormley man’s penchant for alcohol. ‘I was really drunk that night as Dessy was driving his car,’ he later admitted. ‘Well whatever talk went on as far as I know the transaction was made. Anyway as I told you I was drunk, when I woke up in my own house I saw the gelignite at my feet. There was [sic] two glass bottles of it – about ten pounds. I put it out in the back yard to protect my family. The first thing next morning I took it up to that a farmyard, which I think belonged to Montgomery at one time. That’s where it stayed and it has remained.’31 McClean denied that the men had ever intended to use the explosives. ‘We never used any of the gelignite up to that date but we were thinking of blowing up the Monument to St. Patrick in Downpatrick,’ he said. ‘In fact, we went to Downpatrick and inspected it. About two weeks later we joined the Shankill Road volunteers and we never got around to the monument.’32 It is impossible to really know why the men opted not to use the explosives they had brought up from Loughgall. It could have been due to the lack of leadership in directing the conspiracy, or that the men had simply been incapable of developing a plan beyond ‘big talk’. For the moment, they resolved to concentrate their efforts on shooting at the homes of those they considered to be their ‘enemies’.

Over the coming weeks, the men began to meet more frequently, and their conversations would turn to talk about using their newly acquired guns and explosives. At the same time, Doherty was fast becoming disillusioned by Bigger’s increasingly erratic behaviour and sought to distance himself from his co-conspirators. ‘This was the start of my breaking away from this group,’ he later confessed. ‘I believe that when men start handling arms their intention is to kill. These men were intent on killing IRA leaders as reprisals. This was the last contact I had with this group as I did not agree with taking life.’ In his role as a B-Special, Doherty had considerably more experience of handling weapons than most of the other men involved in the conspiracy. ‘As a member of the USC seeing firearms in the hands of men who could not handle them really frightened me,’ he would later admit.33

At this time, volunteer groups had begun to spring up in other parts of the province too, testament, perhaps, to Doherty’s skills as an organiser. The conspiracy now extended from the Shankill, Ligoniel, Willowfield and St Annes in Belfast south to Lisburn and deep into the rural Protestant heartlands of Portadown and Pomeroy, and beyond to Iveagh and Kilkeel.34 The conspiracy’s tentacles were spreading far and wide, as more and more disaffected working-class Protestants found a sense of belonging in its ranks.

***

On the Shankill Road, the men of the newly formed volunteer unit, known locally as the UVF, had other things on their minds, and the destruction of nationalist memorials was not one of them. These men, ten of them in total, most of whom were ex-servicemen,35 were on the lookout for a live target, one that would send out an altogether more amplified message that a new, more militant organisation had formed to defend the Protestant community.

The leader of this group was thirty-three-year-old Augustus Andrew Spence, one of the men who had travelled to Pomeroy to be sworn into the newly reconstituted UVF. A former soldier with service in the Royal Ulster Rifles, ‘Gusty’ Spence had seen action on counter-insurgency operations in Cyprus in the late 1950s. Although he was first and foremost a hard man, with few qualms about killing for what he considered to be the loyalist cause, he was also a reasonably competent tactician of terror, who had watched and learned from EOKA, the Greek nationalist terrorist group he had encountered at close quarters in the Eastern Mediterranean. Spence knew, as Colonel George Grivas who commanded EOKA had known, that armed propaganda helped spread fear amongst the people and that could have a far greater political effect disproportionate to the real size of the threat the group actually posed.

Spence had initially been approached to join the UVF by two people, one of whom was a Unionist Party politician.36 It has been alleged that the RUC’s Crime Special Department was so ‘anxious to uncover links between the UVF and any so-called respectable politicians opposed to the O’Neill government’ that they harboured ‘suspicions regarding a number of well-known figures within unionism’. Amongst those suspected of – but never directly implicated in – some kind of involvement in the conspiracy were thirty-seven-year-old James Kilfedder (the Unionist Party MP for West Belfast), thirty-six-year-old Desmond Boal (a Stormont Unionist MP for Shankill and close adviser to Ian Paisley) and fifty-four-year-old Johnny McQuade (a former dock worker who had just won the Stormont seat for Woodvale).37 A key linkman between these Unionist Party politicians and militant Protestants was Billy Spence, Gusty’s brother, who had served as Kilfedder’s election agent in the 1964 and 1966 Westminster elections.

The friendship between Kilfedder and Boal had its origins in the close bond they had forged as schoolboys. Both men attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, a private institution founded in 1608 during the reign of James I.38 Portora, like so many other independent schools, prided itself on turning out young men fit to lead their country in some of the most sought-after positions in middle-class society. As a result, Kilfedder and Boal were brought up on a staple diet of tales of intrigue and adventure in the service of Britain, at a time when it still controlled a quarter of the world’s population. Both men even followed their hero Sir Edward Carson in becoming barristers after a spell at Trinity College in Dublin. But it was in their concerted opposition to the liberal policies of Terence O’Neill that Kilfedder and Boal truly excelled. They might not have been fully aware of it at the time, but they were helping to create a political climate that gave birth to an extremist form of Ulster loyalism.

Although it has never been proven who exactly recruited Spence and the others into the UVF, the faceless men responsible had inadvertently created a Frankenstein’s monster they could neither hope to lead nor control – as events would soon prove.