698. The Troubles: The Brink of Civil War (Part 2)

Why did the violence of the Troubles escalate as it did in Ulster? How did a series of marches from Belfast to Derry in 1969 result in terrible violence, and heighten the conflict? And, which terrible events saw the British army cross the border to intervene? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the next tumultuous stage of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. *The Rest Is History LIVE: The Ultimate Victorian Adventure* The maddest expedition in history and it’s NEVER been heard before on the show: join Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook LIVE at the Southbank as they tell the bonkers story of Queen Victoria ordering one of history’s most daring assignments ever. ⁠⁠⁠Tickets available for Friday 4th September⁠⁠⁠, the Saturday show is SOLD OUT. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  What are you doing on the 4th of September?

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  Oh, you're still free.

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  Why?

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  Haven't you heard that me and me-

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  Are all going to be at the South Bank Centre?

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  And I'm going to be sitting down with the wonderful Anita Annan, my co-host on the Empire Pod, to talk about the history of modern Iran with the absolutely brilliant Ali Ansari. Dominic and I will be telling a thrilling Victorian adventure on the Friday night to kick things off.

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• 2:35Speaker 00

  Ulster stands at the crossroads. I believe you know me well enough to appreciate that I am not a man given to extravagant language. But I must say to you this evening that our conduct over the coming days and weeks will decide our future. What kind of Ulster do you want? A happy and respected province in good standing with the rest of the United Kingdom? Or a place continually torn apart by riots and demonstrations, regarded by the rest of Britain as a political outcast? As always in a democracy, the choice is yours.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  I will accept whatever your verdict may be. If it is your decision to live up to the words, "Ulster is British", which is part of our creed, then my services will be at your disposal to do what I can. But if you want a separate, inward-looking, selfish and divided Ulster, then you must seek for others to lead you along that road. For I cannot and will not do it. So that was the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and Old Etonian, Terence O'Neill, addressing the nation on television on the night of the 9th of December 1968. And I probably didn't adequately convey in that reading

• 3:57Speaker 00

  the sheer sense of weariness and desperation that led him to make that speech.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  You were chipper. You were positively chipper.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  No, he's a military man, and so he knows the importance of preserving a sense of optimism. But that has a very ironic, a kind of bitterly ironic ring today, doesn't it? Because we know where Ulster is heading, and it is going to lead to a separate inward-looking, selfish and divided Ulster, I guess, because it's going to lead to breakdown of law and order, sectarian hatred, sectarian killings, triumph of extremism, riots, shootings, bombings, hunger strikes, troops on the streets, all kinds of, well, troubles. Doesn't really do justice to what's going to happen.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  No, exactly. And actually, probably not even Terence O'Neill in his darkest moments could have imagined exactly how grim elements of Northern Ireland's future would be. So that speech is the end of 1968. Last time, we were talking about really 1965, 66. We were talking about the roots of the troubles, the legacy of partition, the border campaign of the IRA, the rhetoric of Ian Paisley. And then we ended with the first UVF killings in the summer, spring and summer of 1966. And today, we're really going to turn to 1968 and 1969. So this is when the sectarian tension becomes real street fighting, and when Harold Wilson's government in London

• 5:24Speaker 01

  takes the fateful decision to send the British Army onto the streets of Northern Ireland. And that's something that even a few years earlier would have been unthinkable. But for Tom, for most of our, you know, the first 20-odd years of our lives, was a fact of life, the British Army were in Northern Ireland. And it seemed at one point that they always would be. So where to start this story? Well, we'll start it in what might seem a very unlikely place. We'll start it in a Pebbledash Terraced Council House in the village of Calladon in County Tyrone in June 1968. So Calladon is just inside the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was a majority Protestant, and it's controlled in 1968 by the Unionist Party.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  And as we described last time, if you're controlled by the Unionist Party, if you're in a village there or town, then most of the houses, almost all of them, are given to Unionist voters, i.e. Protestants. There are more than 250 Catholic families in the area that are on the waiting list for housing. And some of those families have been waiting for as long as a decade. But this particular council house, which is 9 Kinnead Park, has just been allocated to a 19-year-old woman called Emily Beatty, who is a secretary for a local solicitor who's very big in the Unionist Party. Emily Beatty is engaged to a member of the reservist B specials,

• 6:53Speaker 01

  and she is, of course, a Protestant. And to local Catholics, the fact that she's getting this house seems absolutely outrageous. And one of the people who objects is the nationalist MP for East Tyrone, who is a young man called Austin Curry. And on the 20th of June, Curry decides he's going to occupy this house in protest. He wants the world to notice. And with two friends, he breaks in to the house using a poker to get in. But they're not there for very long. The local police, the RUC, throw them out a few hours later. And one of the RUC men who throws them out is Emily Beatty's brother, who's come armed with a sledgehammer. You know, nobody is hurt, nobody is killed. It's not a massive story in the grand scheme of things.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  So why does it matter? Well, we talked last time about just how divisive, how toxic the issue of housing is in Northern Ireland in the 60s, both in itself, but also as a symbol of something bigger. The sense among the Catholic minority that they are second-class citizens, shut out of the top jobs, denied votes in local elections, even denied homes of their own. Now, it has to be said, a lot of working-class Protestants would take a different view of this, and we'll come back to them a bit later. And this has been going on for 40 years or so. But Austin Curry, the guy who occupied the house, is typical of a new generation. These are people who don't remember the original troubles, because the troubles, the name was used to refer to the earlier conflict. They don't remember the troubles of the 1910s and 1920s.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Somebody like Austin Curry, they've got TVs, they've seen the American Civil Rights Movement, they've seen Martin Luther King marching in Selma and Montgomery, all these places. And they're impatient to see change, and they're keen to learn from the American civil rights activists. Example.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  This is June 1968, so a month after the events in Paris. Would that be an inspiration as well, the sense that the world can be turned upside down?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, not as much, I would say.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  It's the civil rights movement.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. I mean, there was a 68 mood, which I do think matters. And there are other people who are perhaps more influenced by Paris 68, but not so much Austin Curry, I would say. Anyway, so he's an example of this. He's a history graduate from Queen's, and he's become the youngest MP at Stormont. But there are others. There's a guy called Gerry Fit. Gerry Fit had been a stoker on a merchant navy ship. He became an Irish Labour politician. And then in 1966, he won a Westminster seat for West Belfast as a Republican Labour candidate.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  So Republicans are starting to win seats now. At the start of the 60s, you were saying that they didn't have any.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  They had zero, yes, exactly. But they're starting to get one or two. I think there were two at this point. And then there's a guy called John Hume, later very well-known. John Hume came from a working-class family in Derry. He got a degree in history and French, like me. He ran the campaign to have Northern Ireland's second university in the second city, Derry. And he was absolutely outraged when the authorities said, "No, we're going to put it in a place called Colraine, which is a small Protestant town, not in a Catholic city." So all three of these men, Austin Curry, Gerry Fit and John Hume, become associated with this new movement for Catholic civil rights. They want fair electoral boundaries, an end to gerrymandering. They want the fair allocation of housing.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  They want the end of the B specials, these kind of armed reservists, the auxiliaries helping the police. And above all, I mean, the thing they say that, you know, really resonates, particularly because of what's been going on in America, they say in local elections, we should have one man, one vote. Enough of this business of only getting a vote if you're a tenant or a homeowner. You know, it should just be one man, one vote, universal suffrage. So when most people in Britain or America hear about this, it seems completely unobjectionable. Why would you disagree with the principle of one man, one vote? But actually, we've already met through your amazing powers of impersonation. We have met one person who would find this very objectionable indeed, the Reverend Ian Paisley.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  He and his supporters would say, "This civil rights movement is a Trojan horse. It is an IRA front to bring down the state that we have built here in Northern Ireland and to force us, the Protestants of Ulster, into a united Ireland." Now, most people listening to this will say, "Well, obviously, he would say that, but that's bigoted and mad and totally wrong." But actually, this is a really, really interesting question and a surprising story.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  So the main civil rights organisation was called the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, NICRA, and it was founded at the beginning in 1967. And most of its members were middle-class Catholic activists and they were genuinely outraged at what they saw as the legacy of sectarian discrimination. But you know, when Ian Paisley and people like him said, this is just an IRA front, there was actually a grain of truth in it. Do you remember last time we said the IRA had done their border campaign and they'd kind of given up on the armed struggle and they'd focused on left-wing politics?

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, they'd gone off and become woke.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  They'd become woke, exactly. And as part of this wokeness, they had set up a series, what they called Wolf Tone Societies. So these were basically radical republican talking shops. Men in polo necks and very earnest-looking women would join a Wolf Tone Society. It's named after a revolutionary from the 1790s and they would talk about how to bring about Irish unity, how to smash sectarianism, ideally how to bring down imperialism and capitalism as well.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  And it would be presumably joined up with other freedom struggles across the world.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  The wretched of the earth.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, how can we take inspiration, all of that kind of thing. Somebody would bring along a dogged copy of Franz Fanon on Albercamu, no question whatsoever. But there would be a hard-faced man in the corner who's no stranger to blowing up a post office, that kind of thing. And it was actually from the Wolf Tone Societies that the idea of a big civil rights campaign really took off. And when you look at the first meeting of this NICRA, Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, when you look at who was there at the first meeting, yeah, there are a load of people who like civil liberties and are members of like a Labour Party this and a Labour Party that or whatever, but there are communists and there are IRA men, including the commander of the IRA's Belfast Brigade. I mean, this isn't just me making this up.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  There's a brilliant book on all this by Richard English, it's probably the definitive history of the IRA called Armed Struggle.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Right, Richard English.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  And yeah, I know, he's got very.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  He would say that, wouldn't he?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, mental. He's a Northern Irish historian called Richard English who writes about the IRA.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Richard prod.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  So here's the thing, in some ways it does kind of start as an IRA front, but it becomes something much bigger. I mean, you mentioned Paris, because it does catch the mood of the mid 60s, it attracts loads of people, especially students, who are not really interested in the IRA, they're not interested in overthrowing the state, they're not Marxists, they actually are genuinely interested in housing and in fair voting and all of this kind of stuff. So in that sense, Ian Paisley and people who are talking about the Trojan Horse, you know, they're right in one way but wrong in another.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Isn't that history all the time?

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, history is a land of contrasts. The civil rights movement might have in some ways started as an IRA front, but it has become something much bigger and much broader. And actually, the real tragedy of the civil rights movement really is its timing, because as we said, it's modelled on the American civil rights movement. But the thing about the American civil rights movement that's easily forgotten is that it comes to fruition, it peaks at a point when people in America are extremely well-off, including people in the South, which is booming. You know, it's the affluent society, massive economic growth, rising wages, people feel very optimistic about the future, it's easier to make changes against that background than it is when things are bleak.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  And of course, in Northern Ireland, the civil rights movement is coming to prominence, 1967, 68, precisely the point when the traditional industries on which Northern Ireland depends are in real trouble, the jobs are drying up, the working-class Protestants that probably you do need to persuade are frightened about economic and cultural change. So it's much more difficult. If you've come back from the shipyard, you're worried your job's going to go and you open the newspaper and you see a load of people are complaining about something effectively you have to make the concession, it's much harder to do, I would say. And this is one reason why I said we'd come back to this issue about second-class citizens.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  It's why it's very hard for a lot of unionists to accept the second-class citizen criticism. So there's a great book called Loyalists by Peter Taylor. Peter Taylor, BBC journalist, did three books called Provost's Brits, Loyalists, basically oral histories, lots of interviews, looking at the conflict through three different lenses. And there's one on loyalists, it's full of interviews with poor, working-class Protestants who are very defensive, indeed outraged, when they hear about Catholics saying they are second-class citizens. Our housing was the same as our Catholic next-door neighbour, two up, two down, with an outside toilet. It really irks me when I hear about the disadvantages that the Catholics had.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Protestantism and unionism in Northern Ireland is not a monolith, there are a lot of very poor people who are part of that community and they feel, you know, when they're told, oh, you are the first-class citizens, you have the whip hand over your neighbours, they're offended by this because they don't feel that way at all. And so of course, the tragedy in some ways, the tragic irony of the civil rights movement is that it actually inadvertently, through no fault of their own in many ways, drives people like this into the arms of Ian Paisley and away from the centre ground and away from Terence O'Neill.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Because there was never any opportunity that they could have signed up with housing activists in Protestant community, do you think?

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Well, they didn't have housing activists in Protestant communities because they were getting housing.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  But they were kind of houses with no toilets, couldn't, we get together and improve housing across, across Northern Ireland.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  There were organisations like that for you. You could join the Northern Ireland Labour Party and the Northern Ireland Labour Party would say, we are open to all people irrespective of religion and we're fighting for better conditions and rights and whatnot for working-class people, that's what we're all about. But it's a less sexy story, isn't it, than one that is about suffering and adventure and fighting and dying to quote, was it Gusty Spence, all of that kind of thing? That's a story that seems richer and has much more traction and is more emotionally meaningful than one that's just a bit bland and the sort of old working-class people getting together and fighting for better toilets or something, I would say.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Better washing machines.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Better washing machines, well, this is the Samba Review of History. Anyway, let's get back to Austin Curry and that house in Callaghan. You know, asked about Paris, 1968, of course, it's also the Prague Spring, the student protests in America, all of this kind of thing. And when people read about Austin Curry occupying the house, they're like, yes, this is exciting. You know, the revolution is coming to Northern Ireland, brilliant. And a few weeks after his Callaghan protest, Curry goes to a meeting of the civil rights groups and he says, let's do something bigger, let's have a march like they have in America. You know, Martin Luther King would do these marches through Alabama or something, loads of publicity, let's have a march of our own, we'll have a march to draw attention to housing discrimination in County Tyrone.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  And so it is that on the 24th of August, 4,000 people join him in Northern Ireland's first big civil rights demonstration. They march from the village of Cole Island to Dungannon. And it all goes well, you know, 4,000 people, they're trudging along, they're all happy, singing songs, whatever, but the people who are the more radical side of the movement are very disappointed. They say, well, come on. The thing about Martin Luther King's marches is they got the publicity because they were attacked, because they ended in violence. If you want to grab people's attention, you actually do need a bit of violence, you need confrontation, you need to expose the sordid reality of the state. So then people will see you as martyrs and they'll see the state for what it really

• 19:19Speaker 01

  is, which is repressive and cruel and violent and so on. And so they say, the next march should be somewhere much more high-profile, namely the city of Derry or officially London Derry. So this, as we said last time, Northern Ireland's second city, 60/40 Catholic Protestant. Economically, Derry is really struggling. One in five men are out of work. The mood is very bleak, it is very fractious, it is the worst possible place to hold a demonstration.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  And not just because it's poor, but because it has such a symbolic resonance for the Protestants.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Symbolic for both sides. Symbolic for the Catholics because it's a Catholic majority city run by Protestants. Symbolic for the Protestants because there was this siege in 1689 and they hold the Apprentice Boys of Derry March every year to remember it.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  But if their goal is to, is to get a kind of violent reaction, then they need to annoy Protestants, don't they?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is the place.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  You know, they want the kind of the equivalent of the bull-necked sheriff going in.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Bull Connor.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, all that kind of thing and, and smacking up civil rights protesters in America. They, if, if they want the same thing, then they have to kind of press Protestant neuralgia areas.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally, totally. And this is what they're doing. Their plan is they will start on the east side of the city across the River Foyle, they will cross the Craighaven Bridge, they'll go into the city centre, they will go through Protestant areas, they will end inside the city walls, which are of course sacred really to Protestants, where the Apprentice Boys of Derry have their parade, and they will end near the War Memorial in the centre of Derry again, a sacred spot for Protestants. Now, as the Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan, not everybody's cup of tea, quite nationalist to history, but as he rightly says in his book, The Troubles, he says, it was as though Hamas were to parade through Jerusalem's holy places and conclude with a rally at the Wailing Wall.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Wow, when you put it like that.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  But it's not quite as bad as that, but it's kind of, it's very provocative. And at Stormont, the hard-line Home Affairs Minister, William Craig, who's always keen to bolster his popularity with the sort of more extreme unionists, he does the obvious thing, he bans the march as he's empowered to do. But on the 5th of October, 1968, about 400 people, including Austin Curry and Gerry Fit and some, I think it's three, British Labour MPs, they turn up at the appointed spot on Duke Street anyway. And when they turn up, they find the street is blocked at both ends by lines of RUC policemen who have been ordered to clear the road by force.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Now, if you read some accounts, they will say that the Derry IRA had had a meeting beforehand, they had planned for this and they had said, when it kicks off, make sure those MPs are in the front line so they get hit because that will give us the publicity that we want. Well, this is exactly what happens. The RUC, you know, they play the part appointed for them as the bull-necked kind of American sheriff. They pile into the marches. Some of the marchers managed to get to the bridge, but there they are driven back by a water cannon into a kind of hail of baton blows. Eighty or so people are taken to hospital with injuries and one of them is Gerry Fit.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Remember, a Westminster MP who was beaten, he's dragged away, put in a police van and taken to the police station. At the police station, the police say to him, clean yourself up and he refuses. I wanted the outside world to see the blood flowing strongly down my face. And what is really toxic for Northern Ireland's image is that an Irish TV crew, an RTE crew, had filmed the whole thing. So the footage of the RUC officers absolutely leathering Fit and the others with their batons and their sticks, goes around the world. If you kind of Google it, you can see photos of it.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  I mean, that is what they wanted, isn't it? I mean, it couldn't be better for them.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  You're right, from their perspective, it couldn't be better. But I think if you were to pick one moment, well, there are lots of different moments. But this is a contender for one of the moments where the sort of spiral into disaster becomes inevitable. Because it's followed by days of rioting in Derry in the working class bogside area, very heavily Catholic. There are young men throwing stones and petrol bombs at the police and then there are kind of copycat riots across Northern Ireland. Watching all this from Belfast, Terence O'Neill knows that he has to do something. And five days afterwards, he says to his cabinet, he meets his cabinet, he says, I'm going to go to London. I'm going to see Harold Wilson and I know that Harold Wilson is going to ask me for some pretty big changes.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  And O'Neill, I mean, I have to admit, I think O'Neill is hapless, but I feel really sorry for him. Because I think his instincts are often, you know, admirable. He says to his colleagues, look, we know how this works. Whenever there is trouble, and I quote, "The first reaction of our own people is to retreat into old, hardline attitudes." He says, come on, let's be honest. Can any of us truthfully say in the confines of this room that the minority has no grievance calling for remedy? Says, "We cannot govern by police power alone. It will be a very hard job to sell concessions to our people, but in this critical moment, may this not be our duty." I mean, I think now you read that and you think, fair enough.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  But not all of his ministers agree with him. So I already mentioned the hardline Home Affairs Minister, William Craig. William Craig says to him, hold on, you can't go over to London and meet Harold Wilson and sell out and let him and make you introduce reforms. Because if you do that, you will, and I quote, "Provoke a massive uprising in the loyalist community." I mean, this is the dilemma for Terence O'Neill. Basically, the obvious thing might seem to be to make concessions to the Catholics. But if you do that, you're in danger of losing your base. Now, a very skillful politician might be able to do that. Whether he is that man, we will find out. He flies off to London, 4th of November, to meet Wilson and his Home Secretary, friend of the show, Jim Callahan.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Now, just for people who haven't listened to our series about Britain in the seventies. Harold Wilson, enthusiast for scouting.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Tight shorts, isn't he? Tight, very tight shorts on holiday in the city islands.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Loves modernisation, the whitey to technology.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Giving the Beatles MBEs.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Correct, exactly. Economic growth. He came to power, people thought he might be quite left wing. He became more and more centrist as time went on. He had become Prime Minister in 1964. Some Labour backbenchers, as we said last time, were already complaining a lot about discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. But most people in the Labour Party don't really care that much and Harold Wilson certainly doesn't care. He's much more interested in the economy, in the trade unions, in Rhodesia, even in Vietnam. When you read the diaries of his ministers like Tony Benn, Barbara Castle, Richard Crossman, they basically never talk about Northern Ireland at all. It's not the top of their list.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  I think what listeners will want to know is, is Marcia on the scene at this point? His domineering secretary, who in the mid seventies, people are plotting to kill.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no plots to kill Marcia at this point. Marcia and Harold, if they had their affair, they've had it. Remember, they slept together a number of times, but it was not satisfactory.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Found it disappointing, yeah.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  So she's lurking, but it hasn't all completely gone mad at this point. It's quite understated. His Home Secretary is Jim Callahan, friend of the show, Portsmouth, the Royal Navy, very puritanical, big man, bit of a bully, great Sandbrookian hero. He's been Home Secretary since the end of 1967. As we said before, he has an Irish background, hence the name Callahan. His grandfather had moved to England during the famine. But Callahan basically has very little knowledge or interest of Northern Ireland. He wrote a book about it or had a book ghost written for him in the early 1970s about it. Can't remember what it's called, "The Problem of Ulster" or something like that. And he said that when he arrived at the Home Office, they gave him a huge sort of briefing document.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  There was lots of stuff about prisons, race relations, the fire service, the police. And there was nothing in this document about Northern Ireland at all.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  There isn't at this point, a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, they don't need one because it's been run from Belfast. However, Wilson and Callahan are interested now because there's a lot of fighting. You know, there's been this, this business in Derry. They can see there's a problem. By the end of 1968, they've got a problem. They want Terence O'Neill to fix it. And they're quite hard on him, actually. For people who listen to previous series, who think they're sort of all a bit limp, not at all. Harold Wilson said to him, look, you need our money. You can't survive without British money. If you don't start introducing reforms, we'll cut off your money. Callahan, "We have had enough of you stringing us along." He says, "We've got a list of changes, we want to see them right away." And O'Neill said to them, "Look, I'm going as far as I can. I'm getting death threats from loyalists, you know, don't push this.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  I can't, if you push us too far, there'll be a loyalist uprising or whatever." Anyway, he goes back to Belfast and he says to his colleagues, they were very tough, I've got to give them something. And so he unveils this very limited reform package. So limited to reformers and who gets the vote. There's a new system for allocating housing, some police reformers, all of this. And it is your classic case of, if you'd offered this in 1963, it would have been a different story, but now it's 1968 and you please nobody at all. The civil rights activists say, come on, this, like, you've got to dismantle the whole discriminatory system. You can't just give us this.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  But on the other side, some of O'Neill's own ministers say, "God, you're a total wuss and an appeaser. You go over to London, you let them push you around, tell us what to do in our own country." So this guy, William Craig, it says, well, Paisley was obviously right about you. You know, you're just a weakling. You don't stand up for Ulster. You're just too interested in pleasing the English. You know, you're basically an Englishman anyway with your Eton background.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  I mean, just to remind people, this is a guy who'd fought in the Second World War and taken out tank platoons, I imagine.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Most people in this story have some sort of war. I mean, it's always the way with sixties, seventies UK history, isn't it?

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Except for Gerry Adams.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Well, Aaron Paisley didn't fight in the war.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  No.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  No doubt made warlike speeches, but I don't think he took out a German machine gun nest or anything like that.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  It's the shabby men in London, isn't it, who did that?

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Men with glasses, yeah, who've become incredibly ineffectual Ministers of Transport or something. Anyway, so this is the context for O'Neill to give that speech that you read at the beginning. This speech where he basically says to people, look, come on, this is where we are. Peace on one side, total disaster on the other. If you read the text, it's a very sincere appeal by a man who's clearly exhausted and the end of his tether. He says to the civil rights activists, you know, "I'm sure I'm not going to completely satisfy you, but this is a democracy. I ask you now with all sincerity to call your people off the streets. You're Ulstermen yourselves. You know, we are all of us stubborn people who will not be pushed too far." And then of his critics, the hardline loyalist critics, he says, "They're not merely extremists.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  They are lunatics who would set a course along a road which would only lead to an all-Ireland republic. They're not loyalists, but disloyalists. Disloyal to Britain, disloyal to the constitution, disloyal to the crown." I mean, it's quite strong stuff, you know.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  It's punchy, isn't it?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  It's punchy. And at first it seems that it might do the trick. Actually, the civil rights campaigners do listen to him. They say, fine, we will suspend our demonstrations for a month as an act of goodwill. And the Belfast Telegraph newspaper organises a petition, "I'm backing O'Neill", and they get 150,000 signatures, which is a tenth of the population. But deep down, I think even O'Neill knows that he's actually left this too late. So Christmas Eve, he wrote a note to his private secretary. He said, "1968 has been a terrible year, but 1969 is going to be even worse. As I look in the glass darkly, I see demonstrations, counter demonstrations, meetings, rows and general misery."

• 31:39Speaker 01

  And really telling is that at this point, O'Neill says to his secretary, "The only real solution for this is basically for London to shut us down and impose direct rule from Westminster. But they will never do it, they don't have the courage to do it. And so we will drift from crisis to crisis." Just 10 days after that, the hopes for a sort of peaceful resolution take another big hit. So we talked about the radicalism in 1968. On New Year's Day in 1969, a radical kind of socialist republican group began a civil rights march from Belfast to Derry. And this was a group that called themselves People's Democracy. And they'd been founded at Queen's University Belfast. And their best known member was a young woman called Bernadette Devlin.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  She was 21 years old, she was a Catholic student, psychology, I think. And the People's Democracy members had been watching Paris and Prague and the American civil rights marches. And they really did want to provoke violent reprisals. Because they said, "This is the only way to expose the true nature of the state we're living in." So Bernadette Devlin, "What we really wanted to do was to pull the carpet off the floor to show the dirt that was under it." And O'Neill begged them not to go ahead and do this march. Other civil rights activists asked them not to go on the march. They go on the march and by the 4th of January, they have reached a place called Burn Tolett Bridge,

• 33:07Speaker 01

  which is six miles east of Derry. And here, 400 loyalists are waiting for them, armed with sticks and stones and iron bars and cudgels studded with nails. And many of these people waiting in ambush are off-duty B specials. And they absolutely lay into the student marches, beating the living daylights out of them. And meanwhile, members of the police, the RUC, are standing there, watching and doing absolutely nothing.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  And it's covered on TV and it's basically just what Bernadette Devlin and the other marchers had expected in a way what they wanted. And this is, I think, is a really good example, the point that we were talking about earlier. People often talk about the troubles and so they, they sort of arise organically by accident or by magic. Actually, this is a really good example of how they are willed into being by people who could have made different choices. Because as we said, lots of other civil rights campaigners had said, please don't go on this march, you'll only make things worse. They thought that by marching through, I mean, the People's Democracy March goes through the small Protestant towns of County Antrim. And they said, don't do this, it is needlessly provocative. But

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Bernadette Devlin and Co, their attitude was, well, we're suffering terrible discrimination. We want to provoke people. We want the reaction. We want the publicity. And of course, on the other side, the loyalists didn't have to turn up with their kind of cudgels and nails. I mean, they could have just let them do it. They could have just let them march.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  I just, their strategy seems mad. I mean, it's like the nationalists have said, here's an elephant trap. Oh, brilliant. Let's jump into it. It's just lunatic behaviour from them.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  They would say, we're defending our state from people who want to destroy it.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  I mean, I know what they say, but they have failed to understand how it will play on the screens of the world. I mean, I suppose they would say they don't care.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  I suppose they would say they don't care, but I agree with you that so they haven't been watching TV. Because when Martin Luther King did his marches in America, the ones that worked best were the ones where the forces of authority, or white racists or whatever, showed the ugly side to their society. And if you don't do that, then it's much harder to cut through with the public.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  To cast yourself as the victim.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Of course. So I think everybody involved in that burnt Ollit Bridge story, you know, they, they got what they wanted. And the, and the person who loses most is of course the one person who's trying to hold the whole thing together, which is Terence O'Neill. Because this is terrible for him. Because first of all, Catholics say, for these TV pictures of people being beaten once again shows the state will not protect us, the RUC will not protect us, the B specials are not the solution, they are the problem, they are violent, bigoted, sectarian, they cannot be reformed, all this. On the other hand, the loyalists and unionists say, well, burnt Ollit Bridge shows that the civil rights activists, they're only interested in provoking disorder. They want to, they deliberately

• 36:14Speaker 01

  sought to provoke chaos because they want to undermine our state. And Terence O'Neill has given them far too much. He makes concessions, but it's never enough for them. Somebody one day will have to stand up to these people. This is what both sides say. And this leads O'Neill in a really, really tricky position. And what he decides to do, he says, basically, sod it, I'm going to gamble everything. And on the 3rd of February, he decides to throw the dice. He says, I'm going to dissolve the parliament in Stormont. I'm going to call a general election. And I'm going to say to the people of Northern Ireland, what do you want? Do you want peace? Or do you want civil war? Back me or sack me. I mean, he's taking a massive risk. And at the point that he's doing that, in London, Harold Wilson's

• 36:58Speaker 01

  government at last finally wake up to how serious this is. And they say, God, we're going to have to think about a doomsday scenario here. So just six days afterwards, Callahan tells one of his cabinet colleagues, Richard Crossman, who writes a diary, he says, we have been drawing up a contingency plan. If things go wrong for Terence O'Neill in this election, we may have to send British troops into the streets of Northern Ireland and to take over the government ourselves. So as the people of Northern Ireland prepare to go to the polls, the stakes could not be higher, not least for O'Neill himself. Because in his own constituency in Bandside in Antrim, where for election after election,

• 37:37Speaker 01

  he has been unopposed, he now faces a challenge from a unionist hardliner, a rival unionist. And Dominic, who is this unionist hardliner? Surprise, surprise. It is the Reverend Ian Paisley. Unbelievable. Okay, we'll come back after the break to find out what happens in this Titanic clash.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Tom, throughout history, change has often been driven by businesses and institutions that end up having a massive impact on society as a whole. And there's probably no better example than the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford and his managers revolutionised production through their pioneering assembly lines. And they influenced factories and working practices in countries all over the world.

• 38:29Speaker 00

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• 38:47Speaker 01

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• 39:11Speaker 00

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 39:53Speaker 00

  So they asked over 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Ask yours at claude.ai/restishistory and keep thinking.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Hola camaradas, it's Dominic here. Sorry to interrupt the episode, but I just thought you'd like to know that we've been thinking about something that you've been writing to us a lot, one of the most requested subjects ever since we started The Rest is History, which is the Spanish Civil War. Now, I can tell you exclusively that plans are afoot for us to do the Spanish Civil War at some point, hopefully next year in 2027. But as a little taster or teaser, on our sister show, The Book Club, my co presenter, Tabby, and I have just released an episode on perhaps the emblematic novel of the Spanish Civil

• 40:54Speaker 01

  War, which is Ernest Hemingway's book, For Whom the Bell Tolls. So in this episode, we do dig into the history. We talk about the clash between fascism and idealism. We talk about the roots of the conflict. And of course, the way in which it drew in so many foreign intellectuals and artists and writers, Hemingway, of course, among them. And many of you will know that Hemingway was in Spain during the war. He was a correspondent in Madrid, which was under siege by Franco's forces. And he draws on that experience in For Whom the Bell Tolls, to tell the story of an American volunteer who's part of a guerrilla unit who are fighting Franco's troops. So if you keep listening at the end of this episode, we will have an exclusive short clip which discusses the history of the Spanish Civil War.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Rest is History, where it is the evening of the 24th of February, 1969, and the polls have closed in the elections for a Northern Irish parliament at Stormont. And the mood is incredibly tense, isn't it? Because for the last few weeks, the Reverend Ian Paisley has been tramping the streets with bands and drummers and holding up bibles. And he's been denouncing the traitor who will soon be crushed beneath the marching feet of the Protestants.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  The stakes are high, so in Bandside, Terence O'Neill's supporters are watching very anxiously as the pile of Ian Paisley's votes is going to getting higher and higher and higher. And eventually, the result comes through. And Terence O'Neill has just scraped home. He's won a majority of just 1,400 votes over Paisley. And this for somebody who had always been unopposed before is a real shock. But actually, this is the only good news that he gets of the night. Because when you look at the rest of the results, they're very confused. He hasn't got the mandate that he wanted. In working class Protestant areas, moderate unionism has hemorrhaged support. The hardliners have done very well. And his party, although the unionists are still in control of Stormont, of course,

• 43:03Speaker 01

  their party is now very deeply fractured. And after this, it's the classic story, you know, a prime minister calls a snap election to try and shore up their authority. They don't get the mandate they wanted. And after that, they're basically a dead man walking. And the end for O'Neill comes a few weeks later. And it comes in very dramatic circumstances. On the evening of the 30th of March, 1969, he's waiting for a vote of confidence from the Ulster Unionist Council, when a bomb goes off at the Castle Ray Electricity Substation. And that plunges half of Belfast into darkness. And in the next few weeks, there are more bombs at water installations and water pipelines and electricity stations. And so by the 26th

• 43:43Speaker 01

  of March, much of Belfast is without water. There are actually trucks crawling through the streets, giving water to people who can't get to standpipes. Now, in his Protestant telegraph, Ian Paisley says this is the handiwork of the IRA. Loyalists must now appreciate the struggle that lies ahead and the supreme sacrifice that will have to be made in order that Ulster will remain Protestant. But do you know what the irony of this is? These bombs weren't planted by the IRA. They were planted by the Ulster Volunteer Force, working alongside Ian Paisley's own Ulster Protestant volunteers.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Which Paisley presumably knew about.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  He must have known about it, surely.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  So he was lying.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  I guess so, yeah. Yeah, he was.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  That's poor from a man of the cloth.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Remember the bloke we met last time who runs the UVF? Gusty Spence.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Oh, the guy who shot everyone in pubs?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's in prison at this point because of his pub shooting record. Although he actually denied that he'd pulled the trigger. He's in prison and he says quite openly afterwards, he says, we did this to expose O'Neill's weakness, to show people that he would be, he would be soft on the IRA if the IRA were to blow things up. It was carefully planned to bring down O'Neill, to quote him directly. And it works because two days after the peak of the water business, O'Neill resigns as Prime Minister. He's absolutely exhausted, he's totally demoralised, he can't see any future, to a prosperous future for Northern Ireland. And when he goes on TV to explain this, he's completely candid. He says, the old fears, the old prejudices, the old loyalties were too much for me and I couldn't overcome them.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  I suppose the problem for him was that he seemed too, too kind of posh, too landed, too grand. And so I imagine that the obvious strategy for his party is to elect his replacement, someone with roots in the local community. Someone who, you know, the average guy in the pub on the Shankill Road could identify with. So is that what they do?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  No, they basically choose the same person again. I mean, this is a bit harsh because there are differences, but the person they choose is yet another member of the landed gentry and he's James Chichester Clarke. He's a landowner from County Londonderry. So Terence O'Neill, you may remember, went to Eton. James Chichester Clarke went to Eton, so.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  So he's another old Etonian.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, he joined the Irish Guards. I think actually Terence O'Neill did as well. He rose to a major. He was at ANCIO.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Oh, so better than O'Neill.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. He was wounded at ANCIO and he was left with injuries that plagued him all his life. He is more hardline than O'Neill. He'd actually resigned because he didn't agree with the way they were bringing in one man, one vote. But O'Neill is more urbane. Chichester Clarke is, he's a bit of a farmer. He's sort of slow. He's a bit wooden, he's very earnest, he has no sort of flair or imagination. And Ian Paisley, when he was asked, what do you make of Chichester Clarke? He said, I've already taken down a captain, I reckon I can handle a major. So ominous. And Chichester Clarke inherits a situation that's now really spiralling out of control. So in Derry, we talked about Derry, in Derry, random sectarian violence is becoming much more common. People being beaten up at night.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  You're walking down the street, there's a group of men, they say to you, what's your name? Where are you from? If you give the wrong answer, they basically kick the living daylights out of you. There's a terrible story which is in the headlines at this point. So in Derry, in the Bogside district, a group of policemen had invaded the home of a taxi driver called Samuel De Venney and they beat him up so badly that he later died of his injuries. And this is a huge scandal. And on top of all this, there has just been a by-election in mid Ulster, a Westminster by-election. And the winner was the 21-year-old Bernadette Deflin of the People's Democracy Group, who at the time became the youngest woman ever to win a Westminster seat.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  And she gave her maiden speech on 22nd of April in the Commons in London, Westminster. She gave a speech that got enormous attention and praise at the time, especially from sort of more left-leaning papers in Britain. She said, there can be no justice in Northern Ireland while the unionists run it. They are corrupt, bigoted and self-interested. She basically dared Harold Wilson to abolish Stormont and rule Northern Ireland from Westminster. I was reading the speech yesterday, there's a very telling moment. She says to him, people are saying now, maybe you could send in troops to keep the peace. She says, this is a very bad idea. If British troops are sent in, I should not like to be either the mother or the sister of an unfortunate soldier stationed there.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  The one point in common among Ulstermen is they are not very fond of Englishmen who tell them what to do.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  So they'll be enjoying this podcast.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Surely. I suspect that what Northern Ireland audience we have switched off when they heard the first two minutes of the first episode and the dulcet tones of Ian Paisley being performed by somebody from Wiltshire.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, can I just say, I checked with my friend Michael Taylor, who is from Ulster.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, a man of very strong opinions, no?

• 49:03Speaker 00

  He has very strong opinions and he wouldn't be afraid to tell me that I was making a catastrophic mistake. I'll tell you what he said. He said, I would love to hear it. He'd be the third great balamina figure to figure, to feature on the show after Neeson and Casement.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Well, and we've had Neeson again.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  In some ways, too much Liam Neeson on this show, I think. He's like the Welsh, just keeps getting in. All right, so Bernadette Deflin has given her speech. What's Harold Wilson up to? Wilson and his government, you know, they've lost Terence O'Neill now. They've got this other bloke, Chichester Clarke. And on the 7th of May, the Cabinet have a meeting. And Jim Callaghan says to, look, you know, I know we hate talking about Northern Ireland because it's really boring, but we have to talk about it. Here are the different options. And he says, one of the options is we could send in troops and run the province ourselves. And loads of Harold Wilson's ministers say, oh, that's mad. No, we don't know anything about this. Like best not get involved, we don't know anything about it. So Dennis Healy, the Defence Secretary, also an ANCIO man, of course, with their famous hinterland.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Dennis Healy says, and I quote, it would be crazy to go in there and take things over. We would be siding with the Roman Catholics and the civil rights movement against the government and the IUC, although we know nothing at all about it. That line, we know nothing at all about.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  The amazing thing about this, I think that's so comical in some ways that runs through this story for about 10 years, is people in Britain say, well, obviously we know nothing at all about this and we never will. So, so let's either not get involved or just make terrible random decisions. But obviously informing themselves about it would be an outlandish.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, he wants to bother with something as dull as that.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Whenever they say, we know nothing about it, they talk as though that's like a fact of nature or an act of God that cannot possibly be remedied and they shouldn't be ashamed of it.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Isn't that a legacy of how intractable the Irish question was in the early decades of the 20th century? That it's hardwired into British politicians. We don't understand this.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  We don't understand this and there's something wrong with you if you take an excessive interest in it. It's somehow suspect to be overly informed about this. And the best thing to do is to take no interest in it whatsoever. Of course, though, the British government may not be interested in Northern Ireland, but Northern Ireland is going to be interested in them. And a big theme of this story is that British governments are constantly sort of struggling to catch up because they are always behind the pace of events. So the 12th of July, there are big parades. This is the high point of what's called the marching season. So for people unfamiliar with Northern Ireland, there are annual parades held by the Orange Order and other Protestant societies to celebrate things like the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. And they are always tense.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  And this time, 12th of July, 1969, the sort of fighting and rioting surrounding the parades is worse than ever. And in the next few weeks, there is more rioting, especially in Belfast. You have rival gangs forcing Catholic and Protestant families out of their homes, you know, different gangs. And everybody knows the next flashpoint will come on the 12th of August because this is the annual march of the apprentice boys of Derry. So this is the biggest of all Northern Ireland's Protestant parades. And it commemorates the relief of Derry by William of Orange's troops in 1689. Derry had been under siege by James II and the sort of Jacobite army.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  And the Protestant William of Orange, William III, relieved the city. And it's seen as this totemic moment in the history of Ulster Protestants. And they mark it every year. 15,000 members of the Orange Order marched through the streets. Flutes, drums, they're wearing the sashes, they've got the bowler hats on. They would say, I mean, they do say to this day, this is an expression. It's one of our great communal traditions and expression of our history, of our culture, of our identity.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  There was that famous image of an American tourist in a cab getting caught up in it and thinking it was great and kind of grooving along to it. Loving Irish customs.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I remember that, yeah, it was so comical. Now, obviously in 1969, this is going to be incredibly fraught. James Chichester Clarke could ban it. He has the power to ban it, but of course he's not going to because that would tank his reputation among the Protestants of Northern Ireland. And it would be a massive gift to Ian Paisley. He's never going to ban it. James Callaghan as Home Secretary could ban it, but Callaghan decides, I'm not going to ban it. A delegation of Labour backbenchers went to see him and said, come on, Jim, what are you going to do about this march? And he said, we have a policy, we don't interfere in Northern Ireland. The problems of Northern Ireland should be solved within Northern Ireland without any outside intervention. Goes back to your point about the Irish question.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Basically, he would say, we've learned in Britain to stay out of Ireland and to get involved as little as possible because when we do, it always goes wrong. But of course, this means the march goes ahead and this sets the stage for one of the landmark set piece confrontations of the entire troubles. So in early August, in Derry, the Catholics are preparing for a fight. They have set up a Citizens Defence Association under an IRA veteran called Sean Keenan. They are stockpiling petrol bombs, they are planning barricades at street corners. You know, they're preparing for trouble. We get to the night of the 11th, the day before the parade. The first barricades go up in the Catholic Bogside area.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  But in the Protestant areas, people have already lit bonfires celebrating the parade. Everybody knows this is going to be very, you know, it's going to be very spicy tomorrow. The 12th dawns, at noon, the apprentice boys, as they're called, the kind of fraternal order and their allies, they form into parade order on the city walls. And below, there are groups of kind of Catholic teenagers and young men shouting abuse up at them. And they're throwing coins down, sort of traditional gesture of contempt. They're throwing pennies down at the Catholics below. A couple of hours later, the first scuffles break out. People are throwing nails and stones as the apprentice boys set off on their march. The IUC, the police have put barriers to keep the two sides apart.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  But by late afternoon, most of these barriers have been dismantled. And basically the march has degenerated into a kind of general melee.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  At this point, desperate to kind of regain control of the streets, the RUC launch a baton charge into the bogside. So this is a kind of fairly tightly packed Catholic area of London Derry or Derry. And when they get advanced, they're actually walking into a trap because the Derry Citizens Defence Association, they've got kids with petrol bombs on top of the high-rise flats at the entrance to the bogside. So they're throwing down these petrol bombs. And as night falls, there's a scene of total chaos. There are baton charges, petrol bombs, there are burning shops, the RUC bring up their water cannons, they start firing tear gas. It's an incredible sort of scene of disorder. By dawn the next morning, which is the 13th, the bogside has

• 56:18Speaker 01

  basically become a battle zone. The RUC are camped at just outside it, kind of holding a front line. Inside it, people have set up emergency first aid stations, they've got women and children in kind of relays making petrol bombs. And they've, they've got a kind of weird catapult thing on top of these high-rise flats, it's like firing petrol bombs down at the police. One British reporter who was there said, he said, I wasn't really shocked by the hatred of the Catholic residents for the police because I kind of expected that. He said, what shocked me was the hatred coming from the RUC, from the police themselves. And I quote, the obscenities, the threats, the religious tauntings, and all coming from a peacekeeping force. But it has to be said, Derry's Protestants don't see it that way. So I mentioned Peter Taylor's book,

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Loyalist. In that book, he's got a quote from a shop assistant who went down to the front line to help the police. And this bloke said, what I saw was an insurrection. I saw groups of people defying law and order, trying to destroy Northern Ireland, and the police were the bulwark against them. They needed all the help they could get. So all day, the fighting continues. And then night falls on the 13th, this is day two, remember? And there's still a stalemate. The RUC is still camped at the entrance to the bogside. There are shops and homes burning, there are clouds of tear gas. And at this point, the Derry Citizens Defence Association issues a public statement, and they say, we're appealing to every able-bodied man in Ireland to come and help us. Now, every able-bodied man in Ireland,

• 57:48Speaker 01

  of course, there are a lot of people in Ireland who live in the Republic of Ireland. And all this time, the government in Dublin has really tried to stay out of this. Remember, they still have this sort of nominal, um, claim to the entire island of Ireland, which they have never really bothered to pursue. All this time, they have issued well-meaning statements defending Catholic interests, but they have kept pretty quiet. But that evening, the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, so he's from Cork, actually, um, he says, okay, I'm going to have to say something, you know, I have to. And he's quite a mild-mannered man. You can see the clip online. Lynch goes on Irish TV and he says, we've been watching in

• 58:29Speaker 01

  horror the scenes in Derry, and this cannot continue. The Parliament of Northern Ireland has clearly lost control, and the Irish government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse. He says, I'm asking the British to allow UN international peacekeepers to keep the two sides apart. And I've told the Irish Army to set up field hospitals along the border so that injured Catholics who don't want to go to Northern Irish hospitals can be treated by our army field hospitals. The Irish Army. Right. And as soon as you mentioned the Irish Army, right, that makes things immeasurably worse. Because in

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Northern Ireland, the reaction to Lynch's speech is like, oh, my God, the Irish Army are coming. They're going to get stuck in as well. And loads of people completely wildly don't really pay attention to the details of his remarks, but they just genuinely assume that the Irish Army is about to cross the border and it's really all going to kick off. So in the bogside, people are delighted. They're like, brilliant, our current religionists are coming to our aid. But local Protestants in the town and the surrounding villages, they're like, oh, my God, the Irish Army are coming, we've got to go and support our police. So they all pile into the streets to support the RUC. You then that evening have a scene of unbelievable chaos. So the RUC who've been actually fighting the people in the bogside, there's now a third element, which is this great Protestant mob, which breaks through the RUC

• 59:58Speaker 01

  lines into the bogside, the Catholics then pile into them, massive fighting. One RUC man starts shooting and wounds two people. How many people have died in this? Have anybody died? Nobody has died yet. Meanwhile, that same night, um, so we're on the 13th, the Jack Lynch has made a speech, this is day two. Fighting breaks out in Belfast, people in Belfast have been watching this, and everybody in Belfast now is expecting a similarly apocalyptic showdown in Belfast. So to quote one young loyalist, everybody was involved, the whole community. Basins of water were set out and doors left open for people to run into. Everybody was bracing themselves for what they believed was going to be a massive attack from

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  the nationalists on the Falls Road. Of course, the people on the Falls Road are expecting exactly the same thing. They're like, oh, the people on the Shankill Road are about to attack us. So we enter the third day of this, Thursday, the 14th of August. In Derry, the RUC are basically exhausted, they've lost control, they send out a call, mobilize all the B specials. And all these B specials start to assemble outside the bogside with all their weapons, right? Then they've got makeshift weapons and all this. They're intermingled with crowds of Protestant teenagers and young men and whatnot, getting ready to launch, like, let's go in and take this by force. In Belfast, things are actually, if anything, even worse, it's properly kicked off in Belfast. So there are loyalist gangs roaming the streets, they're throwing petrol

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  bombs into Catholic schools, they're burning down Catholic houses. You know, we're right back in the 1920s, back in 1921 or 22 or something. Meanwhile, you've got the first gunfights between the police and the IRA. Remember, the IRA had gone quiet in the 1960s, but they had not gone away. And the local IRA commander in Belfast, Liam McMillan, has called up some of his old comrades, says, come on, we've got to go and defend our people. But you asked about guns before, they don't have many guns. They have two submachine guns, they've got a Lee Enfield rifle, and they've got six revolvers. So that's sort of all competing to see who gets the guns. And the fighting becomes concentrated on Divis Street. So when you look at the map, the people are interested, Divis Street is basically the entrance to the Catholic Falls Road area. And

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  there you have the IRA firing with these two machine guns and whatnot at loyalists and the police. And the RUC are firing back with armored cars with heavy machine guns on the armored cars. And in all of this kind of chaos, the armored cars start firing into the high-rise flats, the Divis Street flats. And they hit a Catholic schoolboy called Patrick Rooney, who was in bed trying to sleep through this. And he was the first child killed in the troubles. He was just nine years old. Actually, the amazing thing is that the casualties aren't even higher. Seven people were killed in total, two of them shot

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  by the IRA, one by loyalists, and four of them by the security forces. Probably 1,000 injured. It's hard to tell because it was often said that Catholics would be less likely to go to hospital. But what's very ominous, of the people injured, more than 100 of them are injured with gunshot wounds. So this is the point where the shooting has really started in earnest. 200 homes are destroyed, probably get just under 2,000 families have to flee their homes. A lot of those end up basically going as refugees across the Irish border. I mean, as, as melodramatic as it sounds, the Irish government actually established kind of refugee camps on the, on the southern side of the border. Now, in Britain, Harold Wilson

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  and Jim Callahan, who of course can't have been expected to do anything about this because they don't know anything about it, they're watching the TV pictures in absolute horror. Because it's pretty clear at this point that unless something changes, Northern Ireland is going to head for a full-scale kind of civil war. And the pressure to intervene is overwhelming. So the civil rights campaigners, people like John Hume and Gerry Fit, in the last couple of days have started begging Westminster to send troops. Gerry Fit tells the story that on the 14th of August, he's in Belfast, he's actually taken refuge from the fighting in a bookmakers, that's his excuse anyway, he's in a bookies, and he says, a crowd of Catholic people came in, and they were, quote, screaming and shouting that they were going to be murdered in their beds and

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  begging, begging me to get the army in. And he rang James Callahan and said, I'm pleading with you, Jim, send in the army. And I'll never forget his reply. Gerry, he says, I can get the army in, but it's going to be a devil of a job to get it out. So it's a very good story, whether this actually happened, I don't know. But actually, the decisive request comes from Stormont itself, from the Northern Ireland government. Late that afternoon, the 14th of August, James Chichester Clark formally asked London to send troops into the streets of Derry. Now, Callahan, when he got the call, was on a plane, he was coming back, almost unbelievably, he was coming back from the silly Isles, where he'd gone to meet

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Harold Wilson, who was on holiday in his shorts. And he got a note from the navigator on the plane, basically, Chichester Clark was asking you to send in the troops, permission to send in the troops, and Callahan scribbled on a note on it and handed it back to the navigator, the words, permission granted. And at five o'clock that afternoon, the first battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment marched towards the bogside. And almost immediately at that point, the various combatants kind of downed tools and retreated back into their homes and whatnot. And the next afternoon, the 15th, Callahan got a second request, this time, can you send troops into Belfast as well? And by nightfall on the 15th, the British soldiers are marching down the Catholic Falls Road.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  And this is a massive moment in this story. A massive moment. I mean, we grew up with British troops on the streets of Northern Ireland. But this is when it all started.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  And all those kind of search points and helicopters and things. And it is obviously seen as a mistake, a terrible mistake to send the troops in. But what alternative was there? If they, if they didn't get sent in, then the whole thing just explodes and becomes Bosnia or whatever.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  It's one of those things that American newspapers in the sixties used to always have this joke that, you know, people, Americans have gone all the way to Ireland. They get lost in the lanes of Ireland and they, you know, wind down the window. You'd ask the sort of farmer or something, how do I get to Dublin from here? And the farmer would say, well, to start with, I wouldn't start from here. And this is, I think, what you'd say about this story. That by the time when you're making that decision, do we send troops in or not? It's actually too late. The ship has sailed. You're in a massive mess and you're not going to put it right. I think there is no scenario at this point when it's, the fighting is so bad. When people are firing submachine guns and people are being shot and it's like armoured cars with machine guns firing into tower blocks.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  There is no way you're not going to send troops. I mean, any British government at this point would have sent the troops. The problem, of course, is they've sent the troops and they have absolutely no political strategy about how they're going to put this right. And the time to fix it would have been 10 years previously, 20 years previously. But not now, when you've let it get to this point.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  That's not very helpful advice, is it?

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  If you're. No, it's not helpful advice. I wouldn't start from here.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  Advising.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  So basically they have to do it despite all the horrors that will then follow.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  If they hadn't done it, lots of people would have been killed and everyone would have said, everyone internationally would have said, what an unbelievable act of irresponsibility from the British government. They won't, they have this army, but they won't use it to protect citizens of the United Kingdom.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  But at this point, it is seen by Catholics as peacekeeping.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Yes, totally. I mean, this is the great irony of this, right? The British army was sent in to protect, largely to protect Catholics.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Because I'm just thinking of Withnail and I, famous film set in late 69. And, and Withnail pretends that he's been in the army in a pub in Cumbria.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  And he said, I've served in Northern Ireland. And the landlord says, ah, crack at the mick.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  But actually that's historically inaccurate because at this point, that is not how it is being seen.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  It's a very good point. It's seen as protecting the Catholics, exactly so. I mean, all the British troops, almost, I mean, if the politicians don't know anything about Northern Ireland, I think it's a pretty safe bet that like a load of 18, 19, 20 year old squad is don't. They have no idea what awaits them. There's this famous story that when they sent the first lot of reinforcements, the reinforcements were flown into an airfield and they were sort of bussed into the centre of Belfast or to their barracks or whatever. And they all stopped at a petrol station to buy maps of Belfast because they didn't have any maps. And as far as they're concerned, this is going to be pretty easy. I mean, don't forget they've been in Cyprus in the 50s, they've been in Malaya, they've been in Kenya.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  Malaya, they had defeated an insurgency, hadn't they?

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Of course they had.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  It's the kind of the model of how to defeat an insurgency.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  A lesson for the Americans of Vietnam, which the Americans did not heed. And they think, well, by these standards, this is going to be pretty straightforward. As far as I understand, you know, can you imagine them saying, as far as I understand it, there's a load of Protestants, a load of Catholics. The Protestants are kicking seven bells out, the Catholics, our job is to go in, tell them to stop, separate them, and then we can all go home. Bang, job done. And at first they are welcomed with open arms. I mean, you can see the news footage, you can see photos, you can read the reports online. Catholics shouting at them, thank you for coming, people clapping and cheering them. Stories about in Derry, people would bring them fish and chips. You know, people would kind of winch fish and chips up the city walls to them and stuff.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  There was a, in Peter Taylor's book, Brits, he has a quotation from an interview with a soldier in Belfast. "I felt like a knight in shining armour. Kids were following you everywhere. There were tea and buns and sandwiches. They'd be out there with trays. I must have put on about a stone," this guy says. You can see photos of soldiers leaning on their armoured cars, they're showing kids their guns, they're chatting up housewives. It's very chummy. In fact, so chummy that old Republicans were shocked by it. So Brendan Hughes, who was later the commander of the IRA in Belfast, said, he said, as a, you know, I was young and I can remember people bringing them tea at the street corners and my dad, who was an old kind of IRA bloke, and my dad

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  objecting to it, saying, I never thought I would see the day when, you know, nationalists, Catholics would be bringing cups of tea and fish and chips and cakes and stuff to British soldiers. The end of August, so not long afterwards, Callahan flies to Northern Ireland to see how it's all going. And he goes to Derry, he goes to the bog side. They've already, you know, there are already no-go areas that are painted with white lines. And he steps over the white lines to go into the no-go areas and it's fine. People, you know, thank him, they clap him and stuff, they cheer him. And when he gets back to London, the papers say, well, James Callahan, who'd been a terrible chancellor and had moved to Home Secretary. This Northern Ireland business has completely rebuilt his reputation.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  You know, it's the man of the hour, British decisiveness and sang froid have prevailed. But actually on this trip, Callahan, because he's not an idiot, he notices that he's getting a lot of smiles from the Catholics, but he's not getting many smiles from the Unionists. And a lot of the hardliners are really not happy at all. As one of them said later, "It felt as if we were being invaded by our own army." And he has this incredible exchange with Ian Paisley. Callahan, who was a Baptist, said to Ian Paisley, "You know, Dr Paisley, we're all the children of God." And Tom, what does Ian Paisley say? "No, we are not, Mr Callahan. We are the children of wrath."

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I guess at some level Paisley is right. Because at this point, August 1969, they are the children of wrath. It is too late probably to turn back. There is too much distrust, there's too much antagonism, there's too much violence. And I think a point that's probably not brought out as often as it should be. Because in the wake of this sort of peace agreement, there's to some degree a slight culture of forgetting, which is completely understandable, by the way, politically. But I think what's underestimated is how much, everything that goes wrong, a lot of it is willed by people who actively wanted to see things get worse because they would suit their political interests.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  So people who wanted to see fighting and who connived at killing and escalation and all of this. So loyalists who wanted a showdown with the sort of the enemy within. Republicans who wanted to see the violence escalate because they wanted to turn people against the British. They wanted to get a united Ireland. I always think that the obvious parallel is the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. So in, you know, 1994 or something in Bosnia, people would say, well, this is all the result of ancient hatreds. There's nothing anyone can do about it. Or they would say, well, actually it's just being directed by a few malevolent monstrous people who've led, you know, led their voters sort of down the road of chaos and hatred and all of this.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  And actually what's, the truth is, is the interplay of two different things. It's the interplay of the context, the history of suspicion and conflict, which can't be wished away. But also individual decision makers, we've seen them in already, you know, Ian Paisley or whoever. Or the people who go, who organise the marches or the people who deliberately try to provoke violence. Or the people who pick up their guns, people who, for what perhaps seemed to them rational political reasons, they consciously decide to choose escalation and tension rather than, as they would call it, appeasement.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  And already, actually at this point, so we're in late summer of 69, there are lots of people, young men largely in Belfast and Derry, who are saying, "Okay, well, that was round one, but round two is coming very soon. The state won't protect us. We need to protect ourselves. We need guns. We need to get ready. And, you know, when the shooting starts next time, we will be, you know, we're not going to mess around." And in fact, they don't have long to wait. Because on the 10th of October, the British government published a report on the recent disorder. And insanely, this report was written by Sir John Hunt, the man who had led the expedition to conquer Everest in 1953. It wasn't the fact that he was a great mountaineer that gave him the expertise, he was also in the British Army.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  His recommendations were, "The army should take over kind of military policing from the RUC and let us disband the B specials. The Catholics hate them. They see them as a tool of oppression. Get rid." And this sets off three days of rioting in the Protestant Shankill Road. You have this extraordinary spectacle of mobs attacking British troops while waving the Union Jack. You know, "We are the defenders of Britain against you."

• 1:15:12Speaker 05

  And the climax comes on the night of the 11th. Two thousand people marching on these high-rise flats on Divis Street, which have been guarded by lines of British troops. It's a pitched battle, stones, petrol bombs, tear gas, the usual. Somebody starts shooting in the chaos and the troops start shooting back. Sixty-six people are injured, 21 of them soldiers. Two local men, George Dickey and Herbert Howe, who were both Protestants, are shot dead by the British Army. And also killed is a young RUC constable called Victor Arbuckle, who was 29. He was married with two very small children, a boy and a girl.

• 1:15:52Speaker 05

  And he was killed, ironically, by a sniper, not from the IRA, but from the Ulster Volunteer Force. He was the first Northern Irish policeman to be killed in the troubles. But he was not, alas, the last.

• 1:16:07Speaker 00

  No, far from it. So next time, we will be heading into the 1970s and Northern Ireland will be spiraling towards effectively a civil war. So in the next episode, the provisional IRA will be entering the story. The British Army will be taking its first casualties. The bombings will worsen. And Ted Heath, hero of our series on 1974, enters the chat. And people will be stunned to hear that Ted Heath's government is preparing to take a truly disastrous gamble. What are the odds on that? And then in our final episode, the bloodiest year of the troubles,

• 1:16:52Speaker 00

  which is 1972, Bloody Sunday in Derry, Bloody Friday in Belfast, and one last chance for peace. So club members, of course, can hear those two episodes right now. And if you're not a member, you can join them on the rest is history.com. And members also receive our brilliant newsletter full of amazing features, quizzes, competitions, just unbelievable value.

• 1:17:20Speaker 05

  Essays by historians.

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  Essays by historians. Who doesn't love an essay by a historian? I know I love an essay by historian.

• 1:17:26Speaker 05

  Of course you do.

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  Thank you, everyone, for listening. Thanks, Dominic. Bye-bye.

• 1:17:29Speaker 05

  Bye-bye.

• 1:17:33Speaker 05

  Hi, everybody. Dominic again. Now, here is the clip that we promised you from our show, The Book Club, which talks about Ernest Hemingway's book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and specifically, the history of the Spanish Civil War. So Spain has not been involved in the First World War at all. It's been a backwater. Basically, it's been really politically turbulent. There is a king. It's nominally a parliamentary system. Most of Spain is untouched by the modern world. So it feels like there's these huge estates called the latifundia, which go back to the Roman period.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  I found this extraordinary. I had no idea until I started reading up for this.

• 1:18:12Speaker 05

  Well, this is true of Spain and Portugal, actually. They would have absolutely gigantic rural estates run by landowners, almost a kind of feudal system. The peasants are enthralled to the landowner and to the church and whatnot. There are parts of Spain that have industrialized, the Basque Country, the North and Catalonia. And those are obviously places with separatist movements. So Spain feels very fractured. And there's lots of labour unrest. There's a big anarchist movement. There is a socialist movement. There's a Communist Party. In the 20s, there was a coup and a general took power called General Miguel Primo de Rivera, you know, under the king. But that didn't really work out. They brought back democracy at the beginning of the 1930s,

• 1:18:56Speaker 05

  but it's incredibly polarized and unstable between right and left. There are terrible strikes. So, for example, in the North in 1935, there are assassinations. There are kind of paramilitary movements and whatnot. The son of the previous dictator, Primo de Rivera, sets up a little fascist party called the Falange, which actually sort of gives its name really to... It's then co-opted by the right, by the conservatives, who win the Spanish Civil War. I mean, whether they're really fascists or whether they're just basically using the fascist label is an interesting question. Right, so it all comes to a head in 1936. There's an election at the beginning of the year, which means that a Popular Front, which is a kind of left-wing alliance

• 1:19:41Speaker 05

  of liberals, socialists, you know, sort of left-wing parties, some of the separatists, the more nationalist groups from the areas like the Basque Country or Catalonia, they come to power. And there's a lot of social unrest because they want to push through radical changes and the right don't like that. And in July 1936, the army launches, right-wing elements within the army launch a coup. The reason the Spanish Civil War happens is the coup doesn't fully work. So basically, the trade unions, the big cities in Madrid, Barcelona and so on, stay loyal to the elected government. So Spain is divided between the rebels, the coup people in the army, and their allies, who are often like big landowners, the Catholic Church and so on,

• 1:20:26Speaker 05

  who want to defend the status quo. They've got half the country, often kind of rural areas, more conservative and so on. But the big cities and Catalonia and so on, so Madrid, Barcelona, places like that, they stay loyal to the elected government. So on the one hand, you have what are called the nationalists. And these are the forces of the right, the army, the coup plotters and so on. Effectively, from day one, they have very, very strong international backing from Mussolini in Italy and then Hitler in Germany. And then on the left, you have the elected government, who are the Republicans. And they get help eventually from the Soviet Union, which is something of a poison chalice.

• 1:21:08Speaker 05

  And they do appeal to Britain and France for help, but they don't really get it. And they have help from foreign volunteers. And this war becomes incredibly bitter and incredibly bloody. I mean, this is always the way with civil wars because people feel it's an existential struggle. The future of their country is at stake. They come to believe, you know, their neighbours, the people in the next town, the landowners or the priests or the anarchists or whoever are going to kill them and their families, so we've got to kill them first. People in some places, there are horrendous, horrendous sadistic massacres and things.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  I think they found something like at the end of, maybe the start of the 21st century or something, that Spain had the highest number of mass graves after Cambodia.

• 1:21:55Speaker 05

  So if you want to hear the full episode, just go to Apple or Spotify or YouTube and search for The Book Club. And there it is.

• 1:22:11Speaker 06

  Stonefire Naan is made with real buttermilk and ghee. It's the perfect flatbread for any occasion.

• 1:22:16Speaker 07

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• 1:22:19Speaker 00

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• 1:22:22Speaker 06

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• 1:22:26Speaker 07

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• 1:22:36Speaker 06

  From our tradition to yours, Stonefire. Together, we Naan.

• 1:22:41Speaker 08

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