the rumoured IRA assault on the Northern Ireland state had failed to materialise, McClean nonetheless remained convinced that the threat had not gone away. He wholeheartedly believed Paisley’s dire warnings, and saw violence as the only way to respond. As an ex-serviceman, McClean knew his way around weapons and explosives. McClean’s contact from Glengormley, Dessie Reid, soon paid him a visit to inform him that Bigger was organising volunteer groups. He asked McClean if he would like to join their ranks. McClean said he would and, crucially, that he knew of others who were prepared to step forward and be counted. One of those he proposed for membership was his neighbour and close friend, twenty-two-year-old William Blakely.
Willie Blakely was a well-regarded young man who served as an apprentice for the Electricity Board for Northern Ireland. To his friends, Blakely was a ‘very capable and dependable tradesman’ who ‘worked in closest harmony’ with his colleagues, including his foreman, a devout Roman Catholic who held the young Blakely in high regard. ‘We always found him to be strictly honest and trustworthy,’ the foreman later said of him.27 There were no outward signs that Blakely had become involved in militant Protestantism. He had apparently been ‘very popular with his workmates, both Protestant and Catholic alike’.28 Beneath the affable exterior, though, the truth was more complicated. Within a short space of time, Blakely found himself involved in a conspiracy he was neither prepared for, nor fully understood.
Events now moved quickly. After the meeting between Reid and McClean, the Carrick men travelled to Bigger’s house to join the group. When they arrived, Bigger denied the existence of a group in Glengormley and, he told them, they would have to establish one of their own in Carrick. It is likely that Bigger wanted to keep the Glengormley group under his direct control and, having picked up on McClean’s military bearing, saw him as a challenge to his own authority as a member of the Shankill UVF. Disappointed, albeit undeterred, the Carrick men returned along the coast to their homes in the picturesque seaside town.
A couple of days later, Reid again called on McClean to tell him that he had made contact with another group in Armagh. Meanwhile, Bigger travelled forty miles south to Loughgall with Doherty, where they met Marshall. They vowed to return a week later to collect the explosives.29 On their next visit, Reid, Bigger and McClean collected two sweet jars with twenty-seven sticks of gelignite, six detonators and a length of fuse wire. The men carried them to the car, placed them in the boot and then drove back to Glengormley, where Bigger held them overnight. The next day they took them to an old disused house on the Hightown Road where they ‘planked them’.30
The reason why the men had to move the explosives so quickly after depositing them in Bigger’s home was probably a direct result of the Glengormley man’s penchant for alcohol. ‘I was really drunk that night as Dessy was driving his car,’ he later admitted. ‘Well whatever talk went on as far as I know the transaction was made. Anyway as I told you I was drunk, when I woke up in my own house I saw the gelignite at my feet. There was [sic] two glass bottles of it – about ten pounds. I put it out in the back yard to protect my family. The first thing next morning I took it up to that a farmyard, which I think belonged to Montgomery at one time. That’s where it stayed and it has remained.’31 McClean denied that the men had ever intended to use the explosives. ‘We never used any of the gelignite up to that date but we were thinking of blowing up the Monument to St. Patrick in Downpatrick,’ he said. ‘In fact, we went to Downpatrick and inspected it. About two weeks later we joined the Shankill Road volunteers and we never got around to the monument.’32 It is impossible to really know why the men opted not to use the explosives they had brought up from Loughgall. It could have been due to the lack of leadership in directing the conspiracy, or that the men had simply been incapable of developing a plan beyond ‘big talk’. For the moment, they resolved to concentrate their efforts on shooting at the homes of those they considered to be their ‘enemies’.
Over the coming weeks, the men began to meet more frequently, and their conversations would turn to talk about using their newly acquired guns and explosives. At the same time, Doherty was fast becoming disillusioned by Bigger’s increasingly erratic behaviour and sought to distance himself from his co-conspirators. ‘This was the start of my breaking away from this group,’ he later confessed. ‘I believe that when men start handling arms their intention is to kill. These men were intent on killing IRA leaders as reprisals. This was the last contact I had with this group as I did not agree with taking life.’ In his role as a B-Special, Doherty had considerably more experience of handling weapons than most of the other men involved in the conspiracy. ‘As a member of the USC seeing firearms in the hands of men who could not handle them really frightened me,’ he would later admit.33
At this time, volunteer groups had begun to spring up in other parts of the province too, testament, perhaps, to Doherty’s skills as an organiser. The conspiracy now extended from the Shankill, Ligoniel, Willowfield and St Annes in Belfast south to Lisburn and deep into the rural Protestant heartlands of Portadown and Pomeroy, and beyond to Iveagh and Kilkeel.34 The conspiracy’s tentacles were spreading far and wide, as more and more disaffected working-class Protestants found a sense of belonging in its ranks.
***
On the Shankill Road, the men of the newly formed volunteer unit, known locally as the UVF, had other things on their minds, and the destruction of nationalist memorials was not one of them. These men, ten of them in total, most of whom were ex-servicemen,35 were on the lookout for a live target, one that would send out an altogether more amplified message that a new, more militant organisation had formed to defend the Protestant community.
The leader of this group was thirty-three-year-old Augustus Andrew Spence, one of the men who had travelled to Pomeroy to be sworn into the newly reconstituted UVF. A former soldier with service in the Royal Ulster Rifles, ‘Gusty’ Spence had seen action on counter-insurgency operations in Cyprus in the late 1950s. Although he was first and foremost a hard man, with few qualms about killing for what he considered to be the loyalist cause, he was also a reasonably competent tactician of terror, who had watched and learned from EOKA, the Greek nationalist terrorist group he had encountered at close quarters in the Eastern Mediterranean. Spence knew, as Colonel George Grivas who commanded EOKA had known, that armed propaganda helped spread fear amongst the people and that could have a far greater political effect disproportionate to the real size of the threat the group actually posed.
Spence had initially been approached to join the UVF by two people, one of whom was a Unionist Party politician.36 It has been alleged that the RUC’s Crime Special Department was so ‘anxious to uncover links between the UVF and any so-called respectable politicians opposed to the O’Neill government’ that they harboured ‘suspicions regarding a number of well-known figures within unionism’. Amongst those suspected of – but never directly implicated in – some kind of involvement in the conspiracy were thirty-seven-year-old James Kilfedder (the Unionist Party MP for West Belfast), thirty-six-year-old Desmond Boal (a Stormont Unionist MP for Shankill and close adviser to Ian Paisley) and fifty-four-year-old Johnny McQuade (a former dock worker who had just won the Stormont seat for Woodvale).37 A key linkman between these Unionist Party politicians and militant Protestants was Billy Spence, Gusty’s brother, who had served as Kilfedder’s election agent in the 1964 and 1966 Westminster elections.
The friendship between Kilfedder and Boal had its origins in the close bond they had forged as schoolboys. Both men attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, a private institution founded in 1608 during the reign of James I.38 Portora, like so many other independent schools, prided itself on turning out young men fit to lead their country in some of the most sought-after positions in middle-class society. As a result, Kilfedder and Boal were brought up on a staple diet of tales of intrigue and adventure in the service of Britain, at a time when it still controlled a quarter of the world’s population. Both men even followed their hero Sir Edward Carson in becoming barristers after a spell at Trinity College in Dublin. But it was in their concerted opposition to the liberal policies of Terence O’Neill that Kilfedder and Boal truly excelled. They might not have been fully aware of it at the time, but they were helping to create a political
