The Day The Guns Came Out

August the 14th 1969 was the night it happened. There had been trouble in Londonderry involving the police and residents of the Bogside area. An appeal went out from the civil rights movement and from various nationalist politicans including Gerry Fitt,urging nationalists to come out onto the streets in every town and village,in order to stretch the police and ease the pressure on the Bogsiders. To a good degree this was successful. The police were stretched and were unable to cover all the events which were about to unfurl.

Belfast was one of the places where the nationalists responded to this call. They held a protest march up along the Falls Road to Springfield Road police station. As they marched back down the Falls Rd they burned down a Protestant owned car showrooms on the corner of Northumberland Street. They then continued on down the FallsRd/DivisSt until they reached Hastings Street police station. When they arrived there they proceeded to attack the police station with missiles and petrol bombs.

At this stage some of the crowd decided to head for the Shankill Road. They went up one of the streets that led to the Shankill Rd,cut through another street, onto a street which ran parallel with the one they had proceeded along. When they came out onto this street they proceeded along again towards the Shankill Rd,but as they did this manourve,they came into full view of a crowd which had been milling about on the Shankill Rd. The atmosphere had been electric for days,with rumours flying about that Roman Catholics were intending to attack Protestant areas. They had been watching with some trepidation as events unfolded in Londonderry. Now it was happening. What they had dreaded was now at their 'doorstep'. So time now to defend their area....they advanced to meet the invading foe.

Belfast Explodes
The first disturbances in Northern Ireland's capital took place on 13 August, when a crowd of roughly 500 staged a rally on Divis street in protest at the RUC's actions in Derry. This rally was initially peaceful and a petition was handed in at Springfield RUC station. However, before long the demonstration turned violent and the nationalist crowd attacked the RUC and a Protestant owned business. The Springfield road RUC station was pelted with stones and petrol bombs and an RUC armoured car was attacked with a hand grenade and rifle fire. Who was responsible for this attack has never been determined. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) denied involvement and indeed was in a very weak situation in the city at the time. However it seems likely that the only nationalists who had access to such weapons would have been present or former members of this organisation. In addition to the attack on the RUC, the car dealership of Protestant Isaac Agnew on the Falls Road was destroyed.[1]
That night barricades went up at the interface areas between Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods.

The S.T. Insight team 1972
The events in Belfast are now known in Catholic mythology as 'the pogom'. This is a misreading of history. The Scarman tribunal transcripts not only disclose nothing remotely akin to the Turkish massacre of the Armenians. They do not even support the idea that there was a Protestant plot to attack the Catholics - except late in the rioting,and even then in self-defence.

The communal rioting of the early 1920s was almost forgotten. But tensions had been mounting there for months - mainly because of the Civil Rights campaign,but inevitably heightened in the previous forty eight hours by the news from Derry. Now, seeing the Catholic crowd approaching,the Protestants thought an attack was coming.

From early in the evening of the 14th,the tension was evident in the mixed streets running between the Falls Road and the Shankill Road - particulary in the two, Dover Street and Percy Street,up which the crowd scattered by the Shorlands had scattered the night before. Knots of people gathered in doorways.

The Catholic crowd scattered up into the mixed streets Percy Street and Dover Street - down which a murmuring Protestant crowd was gathering. The Protestants of the mixed streets believed that the Divis Street rioting was part of a coordinated insurrection. When Catholic crowds then began to appear on Percy Street and Dover Street for the SECOND night,the Protestants,assumed the worst: their area around the Shankill was going to be invaded. In self-defence the Protestants prepared to strike back.

A crowd of about a 100 Catholic youths had marched north from Divis Street up the mixed Dover Street carrying a tricolour and singing the Irish Republic's national anthem, 'A Soldier's Song'. They then cut through into the next 'mixed' street which was Percy Street. They emerged into full view of the Protestant crowd milling around at the Shankill Road end.

The Protestants were electrified. The Republican attack was coming. Within seconds, the raging Protestant mob began to counter-attack southward down Dover Street and Percy Street,some armed with sticks and a few with hatchets. The time was about 10.30. Hundreds of stones and petrol bombs were thrown as the Catholics tried to halt the Protestant advance by tearing down iron hoardings for barricades. But the Protestants came on. And as they came they tossed petrol bombs into Catholic houses on the way. By midnight both streets were ablaze.

As the Catholics retreated back into Divis Street,a number were wounded. Around midnight the Protestants broke out of the Southern end of Percy Street and Dover Street,and into Divis Street - where a Union Jack was then triumphantly planted in the centre of the nationalist stronghold.

S.T. Insight Contd
The Protestant crowd began to attack St Comgall's school with petrol bombs. Suddenly,a burst of automatic fire swathed across Divis Street. A Protestant Herbert Roy,was cut down. Other Protestants were injured. At that moment three police armoured cars arrived on the scene. The police at the southern end of Dover Street hearing the fire that cut down Herbert Roy, then opened fire thinking they were under fire from Divis flats,they returned fire. Two people were later found dead.

Head Constable Gray first told the armoured car crews they could open fire, Gray was under considerable pressure. 'People were shouting, ''A man is dying,a man is dying. What are you going to do [The man was Herbert Roy bleeding to death on the pavement.]

There was machine-gun fire at one point from Divis Street and a street off it. And three or four men armed with Thompson sub-machine guns and a revolver opened up from inside St Comgalls school. Eight Protestants were injured in Percy Street.

When daylight broke on 15th August, a scene of utter desolation lay around Divis Street and the Arydone.

They started it,and what happened afterwards is the responsibility of the mob that seen fit to move towards the Shankill.

There are a couple of articles which have been in the Belfast Telegraph which tell also of how the happenings of the 14/15 of August were instigated.

Malachi O' Doherty an eyewitness recalls Belfast burning and asks if history is in danger of losing the truth.

Many people will remember this week as the anniversary of a pogrom,an attack on Catholic homes. Two great lessons were assimilated by many Catholics from that experience,or their understanding of their experience. These were that the N.I. state was hostile to them and that the IRA which had failed to defend them would have to be beefed up so that it could do a better job the next time the Prods went doo-lally and descended on them.

The flaw in this version of August 1969 is that it takes no account of the plain fact that it was rioters in Ardoyne and the Falls Road - Catholics - who started the trouble in Belfast that week,and it was very big trouble that they started.

The rioting in August was part of a plan to overstretch the police who had been drawn into a huge riot in Derry after the Apprentice Boys parade on August 12. No shots had been fired in Derry. I watched the Falls Road part of the operation on the second night of rioting,August 14.

The plan there was,apparently,to burn down a red brick police station at Hastings Street,situated just where the Westlink now comes off at Divis Street. The rioters would chuck stones and petrol bombs. The police fought with a combination of baton charges and 'whippets' light armoured cars with machine guns,designed for use against an open field cross border attack.

As the rioters inched closer,the 'whippets' would prance out of side streets to scatter them and then the baton charge would go forward and try to grab a couple of them. The other part of the rioters' plan was a squad at the top of Divis Flats with petrol bombs. I saw them drop a crate of unlit bombs onto the road and when the police ran after them,someone dashed a proper petrol bomb on to this,setting the whole lot alight. This was an entirely Catholic attack on the police. It was clever and it was dangerous. The Minister of Home Affairs later shed tears on television for not having been able to cope with this without the use of guns.

There was an audience of about a dozen of us watching this. I had joined this group after leaving my girlfriend at the bus station at Smithfield so that she could get the last bus home to Rathcoole. An inspector came out and told us that things were getting very dangerous and we should disperse. I went down Durham Street and up the Grosvenor Road.

The next day Protestant rioters burnt Bombay Street,and that attack became the symbolic moment of the whole period,according as it did,with the easy myth that innocent Catholics were swooped on by Protestant bigots and barbarians. Indeed,for many who had stayed at home that night,that is what their experience was.

They should not pass the story on to their children however,that it was a one-sided fight. It was the Falls that started it.

The article is quite long and have only typed what is revelant to the thread. There were 3 people killed that night 2 were Catholic and 1 was Protestant.

Very true mate, what makes it all the more both strange and disappointing is the fact much of this recognition comes from irish catholic writers and historians, while little comes from our side in particular our politicians.

I have another couple of wee bits about that time. I'll post them up later,if I can find them. BTW seen SRG and Bilk.

The spark that was,to ignite the Clonard was once again over-reaction - this time by a Catholic priest. On the afternoon of Thursday the 14th an anonymous telephone call warned a priest that Clonard monastery was to be burned down. Father McLaughlin began to raise a local vigilante force to protect the monastery[The police of course had other worries]

News of the riots brought to the monastery two men - one armed with a shotgun,the other with a .22 rifle. There already were Catholics patrolling the grounds outside. But Father McLaughlin,his fears apparently confirmed by the 'sniper', let the two new recruits take up position actually INSIDE the monastery,on the top floor.

When the Protestants learned in the course of Friday of the two IRA gunmen' there was hysteria. The Peace Committee met at 2-30 Friday afternoon and set about to try to calm tempers. But the Protestant crowds of Cupar Street and Conway Street were now in no mood to consider peace after the armed uprising around Divis Street the night before,and particulary,the take over of Clonard by IRA gunmen'.

The trouble broke out around 3.00 p.m. on Friday afternoon. Within half an hour a Catholic boy - Gerald Macauley,aged fifteen - had been shot dead. As the Protestants invaded the monastery grounds they were fired on. The Protestants fired back. And an entire Catholic street, Bombay Street was razed.

Gerald Macauley was a member of the junior ira