UVF. Aaron Edwards
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Two days after the attack on McQuade’s house, twenty-five-year-old Noel Doherty, a member of Paisley’s church, was busy in his printer’s shop, composing an intemperate letter to Bill Craig. Doherty was born in Cuba Street on the Newtownards Road on 26 December 1940 and attended Beechfield Elementary School. In 1956, aged fifteen, he left school and joined the Free Presbyterian church. By 1965, Doherty had set up the Puritan Printing Company with Paisley, publishing their fortnightly Protestant Telegraph. He was mesmerised by the clergyman he affectionately dubbed ‘The Bishop’. Under Paisley’s tutelage, Doherty contested the 1964 Belfast Corporation election as a Protestant Unionist Party candidate. Although he failed to win a seat, the experience left him enthralled by the gravitational pull of radical, fringe politics. By April 1966, Doherty had established the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee (UCDC), a vehicle for rejuvenating Paisley’s flagging electoral fortunes.20
As he worked late into the night at his printer’s shop, Doherty allowed his frustration with the liberal unionist agenda to spill out of his pen and onto every page of every letter he drafted to Stormont officials. His correspondence grew in volume, especially those letters personally addressed to Bill Craig. They typically elicited the same tawdry answer from his Private Secretary, who informed Doherty that he ‘should rest assured that the Minister would read the correspondence’. The evasiveness of the Stormont bureaucrats infuriated the East Belfast man. These were wily men who worked for even wilier politicians, he believed. Doherty knew instinctively, from the moment he opened the official-looking envelopes, that his letters were going unread. Much to his chagrin, the government was showing no sign of taking the dire warnings of ‘the bishop’ seriously. The young East Belfast man resolved to make them listen. ‘My chairman,’ Doherty began his latest diatribe, ‘had certain plans for Easter about which he wanted to tell the Minister but, as the Minister would not see him, he must be held responsible for the consequences.’21
Doherty signed off the letter just as sharply as he had started it. This obstinacy by the government officials would not do. He would up the ante to force them all to pay attention to the chorus of Free Presbyterian criticism. By now his plans for forming a secretive, illegally armed unit within the UCDC, known as the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV), were at an advanced stage.
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‘I’ve called for the gelignite’, said the man with black curly hair and a long fringe. James Frederick Marshall, a forty-six-year-old quarryman from Bond Hill, Derrycrew, in Loughgall, was expecting the stranger. He had earlier been informed by his friend, twenty-nine-year-old Jim Murdock, a machinist by trade who lived at Grange Lower, Portadown, that someone would call to his home to collect the explosives ‘for a job in Belfast’. Marshall had carefully secreted them in an outbuilding on his farm, situated in rolling countryside just over seven miles due west of Portadown. The man with the curly hair who called to his door that evening was not alone. In the farmyard behind him sat a white Hillman Imp car with three other men in the vehicle. The car engine ticked over while the two men spoke in hushed tones about the secret work they were engaged in. Marshall led his visitor to the outhouse, where he encountered another man, who stood motionless with his hat pulled tightly down over the tip of his nose to disguise his face. Marshall was not alarmed by the presence of the strangers. Deep down he knew they were all brothers in a struggle that relied upon the strictest of secrecy and trust. They were, after all, his kith and kin.
Some weeks earlier, Marshall had been invited to join the UCDC22 following a meeting with two of Paisley’s key lieutenants, Noel Doherty and his twenty-six-year-old acquaintance Billy Mitchell, at Murdock’s home on 21 April 1966. As staunch Protestants and committed Paisleyites, the Loughgall men were eager to do their bit for their country. They were bound together with these men from Belfast by their extreme views and through their overlapping memberships of the Orange Order and the B-Specials. Their position was simple: in the event of any police or B-Specials being shot, ‘reprisals might be taken against the IRA’.23 Although aware that their actions would place them outside the law, these men were guided by a single-minded commitment to defend Ulster by any means necessary. Doherty provided the men with that opportunity, when he recruited them into the ranks of a highly clandestine cellular group within the existing ranks of the UPV. It may have been devised as a ‘loose association’, but it pulled in people from across the province who believed in the efficacy of armed resistance against ‘known enemies’. They were a force within a force, and the nucleus of an ultra-right-wing conspiracy that now ran through the veins of Protestant Ulster.
This was not the first time Doherty and Mitchell had met the Loughgall men. Both men had previously travelled down to Loughgall in a car driven by none other than Ian Paisley himself. Doherty later recalled how:
He was going to a meeting in Armagh and offered to pick us up on the way back. During this meeting I met a man called Winters, [and also] Marshall and Murdock. There was [sic] other people present whose names are unknown to me. The meeting took place in Murdock’s house, and I learned at the meeting that arms could be supplied. These men were of the opinion that IRA monuments and IRA leaders could be shot. While I agreed to a certain extent on blowing up monuments, never could I sanction the taking of life. After the meeting was over, Mitchell and myself travelled home in Mr Paisley’s car. Mr Paisley is a friend through his church of Mr Murdock and entered the house and waited on us drinking tea. I would state here that Mr Paisley knew nothing of the discussion that had taken place.24
In Doherty’s mind, it was vital to keep Paisley in play as a ‘figurehead’, but not to involve him in the intimate detail of the ‘job underneath him’.25
After returning to Belfast with Doherty and Paisley, Mitchell, the key link-man between the UPV and UVF, met with twenty-eight-year-old Geordie Bigger. Mitchell wanted to discuss with Bigger, believed to be the main organiser for the group, the transportation of explosives to Belfast from Loughgall. Bigger, a tyre process worker by trade, lived with his wife and children in a modest three-bedroom house in Queen’s Park, Glengormley, a solidly working-class area on the northern outskirts of Belfast. He had a reputation as a hard man, though he also had a predilection for talking when he should have been listening. Nevertheless, his willingness to obtain explosives for a ‘big job’ made him just the sort of character the UPV and UVF needed in their ranks. The meeting between Bigger and Mitchell was a low-key affair, but it would prove to have profound repercussions for the course of Northern Irish history.
Later, Doherty said Bigger and his thirty-one-year-old friend and colleague Dessie Reid contacted him at his mother’s home in Cuba Street. He claimed he did not recognise the two men at first, though after speaking to someone about Bigger – in all probability Billy Mitchell – Doherty travelled to Queen’s Park to ‘make sure who he was’. Once he reached Bigger’s home, the men entered into a fairly lucid discussion centring on the acquisition of explosives. At this point, Doherty promised to introduce them to the quarryman, Jim Marshall. It was arranged that Doherty would accompany Bigger to Portadown, where they would collect the illicit cargo. In the meantime, Bigger had acquired a pistol, a Webley revolver, which he brandished in the company of the men who were now meeting on an almost nightly basis.26 The conspiracy against O’Neill was now beginning to take on a much more serious form.
Ten miles north of Glengormley, in Carrickfergus, forty-five-year-old bricklayer Hugh McClean of Larne Road in the town was presenting himself as another willing volunteer in the cause. Carrick has long been a place etched in the Ulster Protestant psyche. It was the hallowed ground where William of Orange first set foot in Ireland before marching south to fight the forces of King James II, at the celebrated Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Now, Carrick would play host to a smaller and more clandestine army of men who were prepared