PART FOUR
LEARNING ABOUT GUERRILLA WAR
Back in the early 1950s I was working on a hydroelectric dam being built in the Scottish Highlands. One of the labourers there turned out to be a former officer in the Irish Army. He had been cashiered out due to theft of the mess funds. He liked a drink, and still did. He said Irish Army officers were trained in guerrilla warfare. In the event of an invasion their job was to organise the population. It stands to sense that confrontation with a larger nation armed to the teeth, with a far superior force is illogical. PIRA eventually became better armed than the Irish Army, and fought for 28 years against great odds and survived. Now there are drones to be had.
Only the bare bones of guerrilla war tactics can be taught. It all depends on the how the enemy is going to fight the war, and the innovation of new tactics has to be thought up on the day the crisis breaks out, to be learned by the resistance.
PIRA was born in the school playground. I attended a Protestant school during WW2 and the children's war games in the playground was conventional British Army routines of English and German armies facing one another. (the Protestant children didn't say Ulster against Germany, It didn't seem to be their war). Having occasions to play with Catholic children, during WW2, the war games were akin to guerrilla warfare, a whole new thing I had to learn. The Catholic games were rough. Being ambushed led to heavy bruising and almost strangulation. The Protestant school war games were more a game of human chess. When captured you were out of the game, and put in the school boiler room that acted as a prison. You didn't try to break out.
In the Catholic games, when captured, you kicked your way out, if you could, and real painful fights broke out. There were no prisons. I tried Catholic tactics at the Protestant school, and after battering one of the prison guards, to escape from the boiler room. I was told by the organiser, a boy (who was to go to join the British Colonial Palestine Police) that I couldn't be part of the war games anymore.
The boy who joined the Palestine Police at 18 came home badly wounded - stabbbed six times by a Palestinian.
IRISH TURKS
The reaction to the Ottoman Federation, plus British/Australian, New Zealand defeat at Gallipoli, by the Turks, during WW1 didn't help. The Belfast shipyard during the late 1940s/1950s, a mainly loyalist playground, was full of Empire. The Turks were known as arse-bandits. Of course everyone knew that a Turkish military officer had raped Lawrence of Arabia, after he had been captured. The place was full of men who could quote Rudyard Kipling, or their paraphrasing of him. A Bengal Lancer was a chancer. Fitting a door to a frame a foreman might say: 'Bung it in, Gunga Din, you're a better man than me.'
Away from sectarianism you had some of the best workmates, with their humour.
In London, the Irish were known by some as Turks during the 1950s. Because they were hard to understand. This persisted into the 1970s, by an older generation, I was in a pub waiting for an Irish Times photographer to come and take a picture of me for the paper. The photographer asked the pub owner for permission, naming the Irish Times. The owner said: 'Okay, this time only. I don't want my pub full of Turks.'
This was pub in a middle-class area and the Irish were expected to do their drinking in Kilburn or Camden Town.
During this session, when he wouldn't serve us drinks because that would keep us in the pub, a stray dog came in. He tried catching it over and over again, but it gave him slip he said:
It must be fuckin ' Jewish.' Oddly enough, he was Jewish himself. I was a regular there but apparently, I had slipped through his Turk-net. I went back a few days later and he said I could stay but not bring any of my mates in.
OATMEAL, DOGS, BIRDS AND COAL-GAS MILK
When I was boy in the 1930s there was such a thing as Red Hand oatmeal for making porridge. The hand was a very prominent red on the package but without the dripping blood, obviously. Living in a Protestant area it was Protestant porridge. The Falls Road wasn't far away but I don't know what oatmeal they ate. Bakery vans were also either Catholic or Protestant, as were the bakers. I don't know what persuasion the horses were who pulled the door-to-door delivery vans, but I do know the dogs were either Catholic or Protestant. Catholic dogs were trained to look out for the RUC as they patrolled the streets, and bark like hell. Protestant dogs just didn't like nuns who strayed into their territory. Nuns back then were formidable figures in full headgear and flowing robes. Dogs made for the bottom of the robes and clung on. You had to be careful if given a dog, or bought, it could belong to the wrong national grouping, or of talking birds. Parrots were too expensive, so starlings were trapped. It's tongue was slit to help it talk. Buy or be given one and it could be shouting the wrong slogans at you. Pigeons were trapped and eaten. You were lucky to see a pigeon in the streets of Belfast during the 1930s. Generally, woodpigeon was on the menu but these were street pigeons. Starlings came into the city at dusk to roost on the shipyard gantries, the city being warmer than the country. Right into the early 1950s starlings were still having their tongues slit. They were usually caught when shipyardmen put glue on a ledge.
And for those who couldn't stand the 1930s anymore, a bottle of milk, nicked from the doorstep of a better-off street, taken home and having a tube of coal-gas stuck in it for a few minutes and the drinker could stagger around for the rest of the day, half-asleep. The idea might have been taken from a Scottish nanny prosecuted at the time, who having a troublesome child to look after, would turn the gas on and hold the child over until she/he fell asleep. Or maybe the nanny learnt from drinker.
INVULNERABILITY OF PRACTISING PROTESTANTS
Practising Protestant Christians weren't harmed if they objected to the expulsions. This tradition carried on into NI's Long war, with Christian RUC men, who refused to carry arms. I personally witnessed a RUC police sergeant coming out of Donegall Pass barracks in Belfast, and stroll casually alone down Great Victoria Street, without the usual bullet proof vest, while his colleagues guarded the entrance to the barracks with sub machine-guns. Forgetting my identity for a moment I though him to be an eejit and hoped I wouldn't hear gunfire. PIRA seems to have left these few alone alone for in all I saw three such cops, one a district inspector, a couple of times in the street. Likewise, during the same period of the Ulster Workers' Strike, I rode on a train that ignored the strike. The driver and the guard were committed Christians. i can't explain it but there I am able to recognise the committed Protestant Christian. They seem to be of a type, afraid of nothing. During the Ulster Workers' Strike strike-breakers were being shot dead, like a few some Catholic pub owners, of course, but the guard on this train and the three RUC in the street just ignored the war situation.
THE SHIPYARD EXPULSIONS
There were two Belfast shipyards - H&W and Workman Clarke, in the 1920's. Workman Clarke, closed in 1935 (founded in 1879) after its last ship, a passenger liner, just built, went on fire under suspicious circumstances. My father served a seven-year apprenticeship as a joiner from 1914 to 1921 at Workman Clarke. He was one of the rotten prods but somehow missed the attention of the expellers maybe because he mixed them up as to his beliefs - he was both a communist and a practising Christadelphian, a Protestant sect, which he later gave up to become an atheist. Most of the prods expelled were trade union activists and socialists. Joiners, electricians, fitters and painters didn't take part in the expulsions, it was mostly the iron trades (the black squads) like riveters, platers and caulkers, who did this. They were looked on by the finishing trades as semi-illiterate and roughnecks. The working class is divided by the amount of intelligence the individual has. the middle-class and classes above them get away with it through mannerism and accent.
ROYAL NAVY CONTRACT FOR HARLAND & WOLFF
The Spanish shipyard will do most of the work. H&W has been run down to such an extent in the last 20 years that any workforce left has not had the chance to evolve into the new digital age. H&W doesn't exist. Its name is being used by several companies. The old H&W built ships from scratch and only imported the steel. A steel rolling mill had been proposed sometime in the 1920s, at the time the Craig government said trade could be continued between North and South. The rolling mill would be used by both North and South. The boycott on trade by the Sinn Fein of the day and the other Nationalist parties stopped all trade. Today, like in the car industry, parts for ships are made in a number of countries and then assembled in one country. Wallace, the UK defence minister, is throwing a crust to Belfast for political reasons. They are Royal Navy vessels and somehow a union jack has to be stuck on somewhere. Normally the work would be done in the Philippines where there are 150 shipyards and repair yards.
The really profitable work like gigantic cruise liners are built in Germany, France or Italy. Nobody thinks of Belfast anymore. What remaining facilities exist are out of date. Dry docks are differently designed now with a whole ship built on land and the area flooded until the ship floats. Spectacular launching down slipways, with champagne bottles against the hull seem to be a thing of the past in the most advanced yards. The Belfast workforce are either retired or dead, and in the meantime, there has been no room for apprentices or need of them.
ORANGEMEN AND SOCIALISTS IN THE SHIPYARD
H&W had no specific Orange Lodges. Shipyard workers would have joined a lodge in the area they lived in. Most Protestants weren't members. I have a good friend who was an apprentice during my time there and who later became a Presbyterian minister and later on a university lecturer in literature. His family were anti-Orange. The Orange Order members who did exist in H&W were on various levels with the lower levels complaining that the upper degrees were getting all the overtime and the last to go in redundancy. Free masonry was also on the go but at a minority level. Socialists also existed who were against both organisations. With two nationalities that was socialism within the Protestant community while the Catholics had Connolly and Liam Mellows. So, neither would see eye to eye. The CPNI couldn't resolve this matter even if they wanted to, and they didn't seem to want to. It was: 'You lot get socialism and our lot will get socialism and we'll see then what's to be done.'
H&W management turned a blind end to the pogroms against Catholic shipyard workers in the 1920s. The shipyard management of the other shipyard, Workman Clarke, were actively engaged in it. During the Long War H&W management decided against sectarianism and pogroms and threatened to sack any worker engaged in it. Being sacked from H&W was for life. One Catholic welder was murdered but it was by someone infiltrating the shipyard from outside. Shop stewards were given instructions to stop sectarianism, and the unions for the first time acted on it. Some Protestant shop stewards carried licensed handguns against threats from paramilitary loyalists.
Orangemen and Free Masons and Protestant socialists were recognised by H&W management to such an extent they kept them separated as much as possible. One ship I worked on had Orangemen and Free Masons on one deck and the socialists on another deck to prevent political discussions during working hours.
LIFE BEFORE THE NHS
I am old enough to remember life without the NHS. I was 16 years old before it was brought in. When I was 4 years old in 1936, living in Belfast, back then tonsils were removed by surgery (antibiotics does the job today). I remember the operating theatre of the Hospital for Sick Children, the red rubber mask being put over my mouth. What I remember most was the hospital almoner asking my mother how she was going to pay for this operation. This was during mass unemployment. When she didn't have the full money she was told to put something in the poor box. Sixpence was all she had but she put it in the poor box. That could have bought half a dozen eggs or six herrings.
All you heard were people complaining about their health. Women could have varicose veins all their lives, children were dying from various illness, and quite a lot of that was the fault of hospitals saying their illnesses were too severe and would cost too much to treat. Men hobbled around from leg and knee injuries. People generally had an unhealthy pallor and looked wane. Coughing and spitting in the street was common. Everywhere you looked there were signs on walls against spitting and warning of a £5 penalty. The signs were also in trams and buses.
In the countryside to visit a doctor cost 10 shillings, which was the average weekly rent. Visiting meant the bus fare on top of that for a long journey to the nearest town. It wasn't unusual for the person going to the same destination, behind you in the bus to be suddenly vomiting. Ambulances were for people who were terminally ill. It was impossible to pay for dentistry so, there were a great number of people with missing or rotten teeth. At my elementary school a dentist and his assistant suddenly visited to our surprise. The drill was operated by foot peddle and situated at the back of the classroom. You were told not to look around or you would have more than a toothache. Drilling for a filling was very painful. It was done without anaesthetic. The pulling of teeth was also without anaesthetic, The whole day it was the sound of the drill whirring and the screaming of young children. At least it was free. It was WW2 and children were being made fit for war, when they grew up.
Then the optician came round to test eyes at the school. But that meant you had to go to an optician in Belfast, the tester's business, and you had to pay for that.. My father suspected that too many children were being recommended for glasses. He decided I had to opt out of the scheme. He was right, I didn't need glasses until I was near 50 years old, Most of the parents of the pupils didn't have the money, which was probably good for the majority of the children. Being made fit for a possibly long world war wouldn't encroach on the profits of the optician. I was never to trust opticians after that.
When the NHS came in 1948 the Unionist government was against it. It seemed that people needed to be tough, and handouts weren't good in forming the Ulster character of the up and coming generations. The British socialist government forced it on them. What a relief to have free modern dentistry and free glasses, if required, free hospital treatment and free GPs.
WEDDING BREAKFAST
NOTE: Although John was resident playwright in the Lyric Players Theatre, Belfast, the theatre formed by the remarkable Mary O'Malley, they didn't perform the plays he wrote for them. I asked him why - PB.
One of the two plays she didn't do was Wedding Breakfast, which is about a young Provo's wedding breakfast in a derelict house on the Falls Road. Mary had a cleaner, a Protestant, who unbelievably organised the wedding breakfast. She had a daughter married up there to a Provo, and visited them regularly.
The theme of the play is about the British Army finding out about a meeting but too afraid to have a head-on onslaught but instead begin to hammer their way through the walls of the derelict houses. The guests at the wedding breakfast leave when they hear the hammering. The couple, still in their wedding gear, stand transfixed by the hammering. A table is full of drinks and eatables plus the wedding cake. The bride gets hungry and is about to reach for a sandwich but her new husband tells her to leave things as they are. When the army is at the last wall they escape over the wall and into an entry. The army seeing the wedding breakfast table so neat and untouched, with the candle burning, decide it's a booby trap and withdraw.
Mary O'Malley said someone should write about that, so I did, and offered it to her. Her comment was: 'Are you trying to get the Lyric blown up and me assassinated?'
I could see her point. She had had enough already with my play Within Two Shadows, when shots were fired through the theatre windows one night. Later Pearse, her husband, foiled the placing of a car bomb in an alley beside the Lyric by placing his car there to block any attempt. The car bomb had been abandoned outside the theatre with its doors open. Pearse said it was a loyalist attack. We never did find out who was responsible. Two of Catholic backstage staff packed the job in when they were asked to build an Orange arch for the play.
Wedding Breakfast was produced at the National Theatre in London in 1976. The reviews in the media were very hostile without mentioning the real reason for their disgust.
The other play I sent her was called Catching Up. It was about life generally in Catholic West Belfast and the myth of a social group who are designated as terrorist by the media, when they are just next-door neighbours pushed into war through circumstances.
Mary couldn't see her way to producing it. She was already under a lot of strain because of death threats. I stayed over in her house one night, The next morning as Pearse drove her, her son and me, along the street, we saw an RUC roadblock. The son voiced her fears by suggesting they might be the UDA or the UVF in police uniforms. I think it was the RUC protecting her for as soon as they saw the car, they waved us on.
I had been promised production of Catching Up by two London theatres. The readers had given glowing reports and then suddenly the offers were withdrawn.
Include anything you like of mine, Peter. I'm only too glad to have a bit of an airing sometimes.
A bit more on Wedding Breakfast:
The Protestant women cleaner said that the army had hammered their way through the walls and then withdrew suddenly. She didn't know why until people nearby said the bomb squad arrived later and with a controlled explosion blew the entire house up. It was ready to tumble down anyway.
The late Peter Hall, artistic director of the National Theatre, had a lot of opposition within the theatre about producing the play. I encountered nothing but hostility when I was there from staff members. They went around saying Peter Hall produced it not the National Theatre. On opening night, the director, sensing hostility in the audience, said he wanted to dissociate himself from the production. He wasn't really the right person anyway. He was much happier directing crap in the West End.
Wedding Breakfast was one of three one act plays. The two others were Newsflash, about two elderly Protestant sisters living in the border area, trying to cope with PIRA action and their memory of a sexually abusive father.
The other one is Roost. A young Cambodian girl is whisked out of her homeland during the US bombing, illegally and fostered with an English couple. She has totally blocked out on her past life until she notices vapour trails in the sky from an aircraft. This triggers her memory. Her foster father has been in British Army military intelligence. She finds his old service revolver and shoots both foster parents dead. It is a monologue told by the girl to a social worker, while in custody. National Theatre staff didn't like that play either. In the media I was not only disgusting now but absolutely disgusting. The literary manager, at the National, a Professor in Shakespeare Studies, suggested to me that the Cambodian girl should be crushed under foot like a cockroach, over a sherry in his office of course. The plays were published by Heinemann with the professor writing a good preface to them. Later he said he had done this for his good friend Edward, the head of the company, but not for me. The professor was tweedy old gent, born in the 19th Century, a dry stick, who still lived in the colonial past, and defended it.
ONE CIGARETTE
The Catholic areas of Belfast still had people looking gaunt and ill right into the 1950s, despite more food and the NHS. I remember being in a shop in a Catholic area and a poorly dressed teenage girl coming in and buying one bap, one envelope and one cigarette. Unemployment makes people feel worthless and the years of boredom has a bad affect on health physically and psychologically.