Abstract
50 years ago, the government deployed troops to Northern Ireland. How did Britain's papers cover the event?
For more than 20 years, British troops have been stood down in Northern Ireland. Before that, over the course of 30 years marked by continual bloody violence, there was a running debate about the presence of those soldiers on the streets of Belfast and Derry One of the main participants in that debate was the influential London-based daily national press, which in 1969 was selling more than 14 million copies a day with an estimated readership of more than 40 million. Although the papers were largely supportive of the troops throughout their years of service, editors were altogether less sure about the initiative at the moment they were deployed.
Two themes emerge from an analysis of the papers during August 1969. First, and most significantly, there was a complete absence of gung-ho. Leading articles registered trepidation, with several urging caution and warning of dire future consequences, such as the likelihood of the military being required to stay for a prolonged period. Secondly, there was considerable sympathy for the plight of the Catholic nationalist population and a degree of disgust for the partisan system erected by the Protestant majority
Even so, there were signs of what were to become media motifs: the portrayal of the army as a piggy in the middle between warring religious tribes; the scorning of interventions by the Irish Republic's government; casual anti-Irish racism; the demonisation of individuals regarded as hostile to British policy; and fears about the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
In general, and unsurprisingly, British media shared the language of Protestant unionists/loyalists rather than that of Catholic nationalists/republicans. Hence the continuing Londonderry/Derry split. Even the designation “Northern Ireland” is resisted by nationalists, as are “the province” and Ulster. They say “Six Counties” or “the north”. It is important to grasp that the then-Northern Ireland government, based at Stormont, ruled separately from Westminster. Created in 1921, it was wholly under Protestant control.
The fateful decision by Harold Wilson's Labour government to use the British army in Northern Ireland (hereafter NI) followed 18 months of tension punctuated by sporadic outbreaks of violence as nationalist civil rights activists sought reforms over the allocation of housing, job discrimination and gerrymandering. This denial of rights, exemplified in the slogan “one man, one vote”, had long been concealed from most of the British public. Two exceptions were the readerships of the Sunday Times and The Times. In July 1966, the former published a piece headlined “John Bull's political slum”, and in April 1967 the latter reported that Catholics were deliberately rehoused to preserve a Protestant electoral majority in Derry.
Insistent demands for civil rights throughout 1968 culminated in an under-reported incident in January 1969 when a march organised by the People's Democracy movement was ambushed at Burntollet bridge by 300 stone-throwing loyalists wielding iron bars and sticks spiked with nails. Among them were members of the B Specials, a Protestant-only auxiliary force of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Its officers were also present, but did not intervene. The assault was filmed by the Republic's public service broadcaster, RTÉ, but not by BBC Ulster.
In April, after sectarian clashes, British military units garrisoned in NI were “made available” to guard electricity stations and water pipelines. But they did not leave their barracks. By July, riots were breaking out in Belfast and Derry. Stormont's bans on marches were largely ignored and families were burned out of their homes in Belfast. Barricades went up and there were violent clashes with the police. On August 4, the London press began to speculate on the possibility, and implications, of sending in the troops. Editors were firmly against.
A leading article in The Times summed up the general view: “There is a sensible determination to leave the preservation of order in Northern Ireland to Northern Irishmen. Even a limited intervention would be a move that could have grave consequences both for Ulster and the rest of the United Kingdom.” In order to avoid Westminster involvement, the Daily Telegraph urged Stormont to demonstrate “the physical superiority of the forces of law and order” which should be used “both relentlessly and impartially”. It did, however, think the troops stationed in NI could be deployed when “the lawful government in a Province of the United Kingdom is imperilled”. It was convinced that the disturbances were the result of “historic Protestant and Catholic antagonisms” which were “the product of naked sectarian hatred of the traditional Irish kind”.
Amid street violence and fears about a planned Protestant march in Derry, there were attempts to educate British readers about the reasons for the violence. For the best part of 45 years, there had been sparing coverage of Northern Ireland, so people were ignorant of the reasons for the religious division. Cyril Aynsley, the Daily Express's NI correspondent, began in clumsy fashion by referring to “Mick and Prod” as “slaves of history”. But his main message was unequivocal: “For far too long the Unionist government at Stormont, which has ruled unchallenged since 1921, ignored accusations of gerrymandering, sectarianism, anti-Catholicism and nepotism.”
Bowler-hat Conspiracy behind Burntollet Ambush
In the Daily Mail, Peter Black identified Britain as the historical villain: “The story is so awful that no Englishman with any sense of history can feel quite easy in Ireland. And the situation in the north right now is as mathematical a product of it as two plus three makes five.” Cecil King, the recently deposed chairman of the Daily Mirror's publishing company, was given space in The Times to rage against “the regime at Stormont”, calling it “the ignoble creation of Carson, Craigavon, Brookeborough and such men, determined to maintain Protestant supremacy in the North quite regardless of any other consideration”.
As a Protestant himself, and raised in Dublin, King's opinion carried weight. He wrote: “Orange politics have no counterpart in the United Kingdom. Such supremacy can only be maintained by discrimination against Catholics and the gerrymandering of constituency boundaries. These practices have for 50 years been acquiesced in by successive Westminster governments.” He would not have been impressed with the Mirror's “teach-in on Ireland”, which offered a potted history of the island, a slapdash profile of the Orange Order and a piece on the IRA that was overblown, given that it was not involved at the time beyond issuing a statement of intent about being “committed to some form of action”.
By chance, August 12 marked the publication of a meticulous analysis of the Burntollet violence by two academics, Bowes Egan and Vincent McCormack. Newspapers, including the Telegraph and The Times duly reported its central finding: the Orange Order and the B Specials had planned and executed the attack on the marchers. The Sun's reviewer wrote: “What emerges first from the documentary evidence is that the RUC are not an impartial peace-keeping force, but a passionately Protestant body.” The Mirror ran a surprisingly sympathetic piece about the “B men”: “Part-timers brave the bullets.” The Mail's NI correspondent, Edward Scallan, called them “a group of tough, dedicated men”, Protestants “drawn from all levels of society” whose “dedication to Ulster is complete”. A Telegraph editorial, while recognising that the Specials were partisan, spoke of them having a “by no means dishonourable history”.
With rioting in Belfast and Derry occurring on a nightly basis, editors began to augment NI-based correspondents from newsrooms in Manchester and London. Young journalists suddenly found themselves trying to understand a conflict they knew nothing about. With the exception of those raised in Glasgow, the communal strife between Protestants and Catholics made little sense. Yet their reportage of increasingly bitter street battles came to dominate the front pages of their papers alongside pictures of burning buildings, stone-throwing youths and gun-toting police.
Back in their London offices, there were three strands of argument in commentaries. First, the undesirability of Westminster supplanting Stormont. Second, concern about the consequences of sending troops. Third, a demand for reforms to be implemented. The Telegraph's commentator, TE Utley, disagreed with a suspension of NI's constitution: it would be hard to imagine a more disastrous course, he argued, because Protestants wouldn't like it. His paper's editorial writer took the same line. If London assumed control, it would upset moderate Protestants and give extremists an excuse for more “savagery”. The “troublemakers” needed to know that Whitehall would back Stormont “to the hilt”. If troops are used, it added, they will be there to restore law and order, not as “what could be construed as a London-directed coup”.
The Guardian was equally worried about any displacement of Stormont's authority. Using troops “should be vigorously resisted”, it said, because it “would inflame the situation further”. The Times, which also thought the use of troops would prove inflammatory, urged the NI government to ban parades and marches. The Mirror was much more interested in the plight of the nationalists than the fate of Stormont's rule. “Nobody wants the troops to go but if the violence continues what other course is possible?” It added: “The Catholics know that the British people are overwhelmingly on their side in their political aims.”
This support was manifested in the Mirror advocating “a credible and urgent plan for reconciliation and reform”. The Mail not only urged social reforms, including the launch of housing and schools programmes “to ease the grievances of Catholics”, but also concluded that “the Ulster government will have to swallow some political reforms”. And the Express called for a “respite” to allow the Ulster government to produce “reforms in an atmosphere of peace and calm”. But Stormont dragged its heels.
The Troops march into Londonderry
The turning point, the moment when it became clear that the Ulster government led by James Chichester-Clark could not cope, was its decision to allow a march around the walls of Derry by the Apprentice Boys, a Protestant society described by the Telegraph as “profound and mystifying to all but the Irish”. Several press commentators had warned against it. On August 12, The Sun (the pre-Murdoch version published by Mirror Group) ran a leader calling for a 12-month moratorium on all marches: “With Northern Ireland simmering with religious bitterness and with civil war a dreadful possibility, it is madness to march at all.” The Guardian contended that the Unionist government lacked the guts to ban a march by its own followers but also criticised Catholic leaders for not having “the courage to tell their own people to treat this anachronistic coat-trailing with the contempt it deserves”.
The march was a provocation too far for the nationalists in Derry and heralded a three-day spate of violence that would come to be known as the Battle of Bogside. Catholic residents, with petrol bombs, fought local unionists and the RUC, which employed tear gas for the first time. The Mail's front page carried a large picture of Bernadette Devlin, the 22-year-old civil rights activist who had been elected as an MP five months before, smashing a rock behind a barricade. A press villain was born. A Mail writer accused her of being “a rabble rouser”. She was, said the Express, stirring up mob rage.
Amid lurid reports on August 13 of 90 police being hurt, and of refugees fleeing across the border to camps hastily set up by the Irish Republic's government, a second villain was identified: Jack Lynch, the mild-mannered prime minister of Eire (as British papers chose to call it). Papers of left and right criticised him for making a statement in which he suggested UN forces would be preferable to British troops while also daring to point to the pernicious matter of partition. The Express scorned him for seeking “a review of the entire constitutional position of Ulster”. The Times said “blue-helmeted Swedes or Indians would be wholly out of place in Derry”. The Mirror accused Lynch of being rash and provocative, and the Telegraph thought him “impudent”. It resented Lynch's decision to set up field hospitals in the Republic's border counties. The Guardian called him “mischievous or wrong-headed”. By contrast, the man in the eye of the storm, Chichester-Clark, got off relatively lightly, with only the occasional waspish aside, such as a comment by the Express that he had “abdicated the prime task of government – preservation of law and order”.
On August 14, with front pages reporting on five riot deaths, Wilson and his home secretary James Callaghan ordered British soldiers on to the streets. Even those papers that had counselled against the use of troops accepted the wisdom of the move. Some were prescient, accepting that the government claim of it being a “limited operation” was highly unlikely. None, of course, realised that it would become one of the longest continuous deployments in British military history. There was naivety too. According to The Times, “the troops can be relied on nowadays to show complete impartiality between Catholics and Protestants”. Two days later, it observed: “Londonderry is a small town, easily controlled.”
“The decision to put British troops on to the riot-torn streets of Ulster is the right one,” said the Mirror. “Vastly regrettable, but regrettably unavoidable.” And its assessment of the soldiers’ “unenviable” role prefigured what would become an enduring newspaper narrative in future years: “As the men in the middle, their presence will be resented by extremists on both sides.” The Times, in agreeing “it was right to call in the army”, predicted that “the troops will be required in strength and for a longish period of time”. In what can be seen as a prophetic forecast, The Guardian imagined what might happen should the soldiers be attacked: “The peace of Ulster will rest very heavily on the shoulders of the individual officer and soldier on the streets… men on the spot will be obliged to take the most difficult decisions themselves.”
Most papers pointed to the generally positive welcome for the troops’ arrival by nationalists, especially in Derry's Bogside. At the same time, they highlighted the belief of the officer now running NI military operations, Lieutenant General Sir Ian Freeland, that the honeymoon period would be short-lived. The Mail argued that “the cheers which greeted the arrival of British troops and the cups of tea and sandwiches which people brought out to them should deceive nobody. Ulster remains a powder keg that a single spark could ignite”. In its view, “every second that British troops remain there holding Catholics and Protestants apart is fraught with intense danger”. The Telegraph contended that the troops and the Westminster government would soon be confronted by the same problems as those which Stormont had failed to deal with. More controversially, it claimed that the RUC was “never the brutal and undisciplined mob of progressive myth”. Elsewhere, there were calls for the disarming and disbandment of the B Specials, recognised by all but the Telegraph as a necessary gesture towards building nationalists’ confidence in what was, in all but name, rule from London.
BBC gets it from both sides
With the Specials’ fate in the balance, Chichester-Clark made a speech in which he accused “subversive Republican elements” of being “to the fore in Belfast violence” and alleged, wrongly as it transpired, that “15 known active Republicans are being held by the RUC”. This claim was belittled by a guest columnist in the Mirror, the novelist and historian Constantine Fitzgibbon. He wrote: “The IRA is a nasty and dangerous group of armed men and arsonists but its leaders nowadays are so stupid they could not run a fruit barrow, let alone a successful insurrection.” Less colourfully, the Mirror's political editor, John Beavan, lamented that the “high minded and noble” civil rights movement which appealed “to people of all faiths” had gradually given way to “the traditional cry” for the end of partition by “the Republican Catholics”.
In urging retention of the Specials, the Telegraph demanded that Callaghan “clear up the misunderstandings” over the force's future. “We need the Specials to fight the IRA,” said a leader in late August, adding: “It would certainly be an insult to the intelligence of the IRA… to suppose that they will not try to exploit the present tension.” A Times reporter, Julian Mounter, was sceptical about IRA involvement and whether it had either the will or capability to mount any operation. (The major split in the IRA, which led to the formation of the Provisionals, was still four months away).
A month of intense newspaper coverage of the situation in Northern Ireland was not matched, according to TV critics, by Britain's public service broadcaster. Peter Black in the Mail decried the lack of analysis. “It's a seemingly incurable weakness of TV,” he wrote, “that it seems only to take a news crisis on the run and takes the root causes as understood.” Mary Malone in the Mirror was scathing about the BBC's failure to broadcast an “enlightened, up-to-the-minute appraisal, assessment and discussion” about the “unholy war in Londonderry”. She asked: “What is this strange blind spot the BBC has over Ulster?”
The Times’ diarist went so far as to accuse the BBC of censoring its NI news coverage. The corporation was guilty of “journalistic emasculation”, which had prevented it from covering the troubles “as vividly as either Independent Television or the press”. It attributed the failing to the BBC's “excessive sense of responsibility and fear of inflaming local passions” and alleged that “to the frustration of BBC reporters, they are not allowed to do street interviews, for fear of broadcasting extremist opinions”.
The diarist quoted John Crawley, the BBC editor of news and current affairs, as saying: “News cannot be balanced artificially, but one must be impartial in its presentation. We are aware of the fact that we are listened to in Northern Ireland, and we do have to take account of the possible effect of inflammatory statements… I know this is not an infallible defence. We have been greatly assailed from both sides.”
In conclusion, what stands out about the majority of the press coverage was a mixture of ingenuousness and incredulity. With newspapers having absented themselves from Northern Ireland affairs for so many years, there was a lack of knowledge about the depth of distrust between the nationalist and unionist population, particularly the injustices suffered by Catholics during almost 50 years of Stormont rule. It was also noticeable that, despite the differing political allegiances of the papers, there was unanimous support for the Westminster government's response to the crisis. It was a clear sign that Northern Ireland was being treated as a place apart from the rest of the UK. Just as it is today
