of the Shankill UVF decided to call into Watson’s Bar after they broke from the parade. They spent the whole evening drinking, which had, by now, become a predictable pattern of behaviour for the gang.
As the moon rose high in the night sky four young friends made their way up from where they worked at the International Hotel in the city centre to Watson’s Bar on the Lower Shankill, one of the few bars that stayed open after licensing hours. It was 1 a.m. Having consumed a fair amount of alcohol, Spence returned to the bar for more, where he caught a glimpse of the four young men entering the premises. When he returned to the table, he told the men in his company what he had seen, namely that ‘four IRA men’ had entered the premises. Spence left after a decision had been made to fetch a sack of guns from his sister Cassie’s house. Within an hour the UVF men had taken up firing positions on the corner of Ariel Street and Malvern Street. As eighteen-year-old Peter Ward and his three friends exited the bar, they were shot at by the UVF men. Three of the young friends were wounded, two seriously. Peter Ward tragically died at the scene, after being shot through the heart.13 It was a cruel sectarian act brought about as a direct result of Spence’s unit being unable to kill a well-known republican, Leo Martin, who lived in the Falls Road area. Frustrated by their failure, the UVF men resorted to Spence’s base philosophy of ‘If you can’t get an IRA man, get a Taig.’14
Robert Williamson, one of the UVF men involved in the shooting, later explained how events unfolded that night:
I went around to Watson’s Bar. I had a Luger gun in a shoulder holster with me. It was loaded with six rounds of small calibre ammunition. I think it was .79 ammunition. I joined two comrades, who I don’t want to name. I was told that there was [sic] four IRA men in the bar. There was [sic] instructions given by one of my comrades to scare them. I took up a position at the corner of Malvern Street and Ariel Street. My comrades took up their own positions. The four IRA men came out of Watson’s Bar through the Ariel Street door. I moved out towards the centre of the road. I drew my gun and fired towards the men, but low. Everybody was told to fire low. I mean my comrades. My gun jammed twice and I had to ‘cock’ it, and a round was ejected each time. That’s how I know that I fired four rounds. We all ran down Longford Street and made our way to a certain place where we all put our guns in a sack. I went home after that. This was not a deliberate attack, it happened on the spare [sic] of the moment. I think that the one who got away had a gun on him. We did not know that these IRA men were going to be in Watson’s Bar that night.15
In the twilight of the night, one local boy living across from Watson’s Bar witnessed the aftermath of the shooting. As he looked out of his bedroom window, he could see the body of one young man, Peter Ward, slouched against the wall of the bar. He had been shot in the chest. His white shirt was plastered in blood. Nobody in the area witnessed the actual killing, only its aftermath.16
The Stormont government reacted swiftly to the Malvern Street shootings, promptly proscribing the UVF under the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) (Northern Ireland) Act (1922), where it was to remain alongside the IRA as an unlawful organisation. Speaking in a rare debate on Northern Ireland at Westminster, Prime Minister Harold Wilson reassured his fellow MPs, who were concerned with the security implications of the Queen’s proposed visit. ‘With regard to this organisation,’ Wilson told the House, ‘I do not think that the hon. Member overstated the position in the words he used; it is a quasi-Fascist organisation masquerading behind a clerical cloak.’17 Following hot on the heels of Prime Minister, Gerry Fitt, a Republican Labour MP who won a seat at Westminster a few weeks earlier, made his first determined breach of the convention that prohibited discussion of Northern Ireland affairs in the chamber. He asked Wilson if he was ‘further aware that there are Unionist extremists and murder gangs operating in the streets of Northern Ireland?’ Demanding that Whitehall ‘take action and not the Government of Northern Ireland’,18 he was interrupted by heckling from Unionist parliamentarians. The Speaker of the House then took steps to censor Fitt. The debate ended abruptly.
At the Stormont Parliament on the same day, Fitt’s Republican Labour colleague, Harry Diamond MP, told those in the Belfast chamber that the attacks were not the work of an ‘isolated crackpot’ but a resolute armed conspiracy against Roman Catholics. Diamond illustrated his point by highlighting an incident in which police discovered that a bullet had been fired through the back window of a house on the Glen Road in West Belfast, something that had received ‘no publicity’ but was duly noted in the minds of Roman Catholic residents in the area.19
Before panic could set in further, the perpetrators, including Spence, were quickly apprehended by the RUC and charged with Ward’s murder. Detective Sergeant Robert Agar, based at Leopold Street, interviewed the men for several hours but couldn’t get them to admit their respective roles. In an interview with Spence, the Shankill man remained deeply evasive. ‘Was Hugh McClean, or a man named Porter from Carrickfergus, in your company last Saturday night?’ asked the detective. ‘I don’t know anyone named Hugh McClean, and I don’t know Porter,’ Spence told him flatly.20 Despite Spence’s ardent refusal to give details, some of the other men did begin to break after further, much harsher, questioning, and after threats were allegedly made against them by the detectives.21 According to McClean, Detective Constable Leo McBrien told him, ‘Once your name is in the paper, the IRA will shoot you and your family.’ McClean also reported that Detective Constable Robert Crockett had struck him on the side of the head with a rolled-up sheaf of paper. Both detectives denied making the remarks, that they had coerced a confession out of him or that they had said ‘Give us Spence and you can get out.’ Curiously, the only evidence the detectives had against Spence and his co-accused were ‘verbal’ statements, supposedly made to the police, which the witnesses refused to repeat in court. McClean later denied making the statement,22 confirmed by the fact that he was admitted into what became the UVF wing at Crumlin Road gaol.
While McClean was being questioned, the RUC had arrested Dessie Reid. He broke after only a short spell in interrogation, and voluntarily took Detective Constable George Thompson to a place known as Cherry’s farm in Ballyboag in Mallusk, where the UVF had secreted the two glass sweet jars of gelignite in an outhouse. Beside the jars, Reid showed Detective Constable Thompson six detonators wrapped in cotton wool and a length of fuse.23 Once the RUC officers obtained further evidence of the type and calibre of weapons used in the attacks from their suspects, their forensics team worked to link spent cases to several shooting incidents, including one in Carrickfergus and another found in the doorway of 2A Oranmore Street.24 They were found to be a match for the same gun, a .455 calibre Webley revolver. It did not take detectives long to piece together the conspiracy, involving men from Belfast, Glengormley, Carrickfergus and Loughgall.
The suspects rounded up by the RUC were quickly charged. After spending the summer on remand, they appeared in court on 5 September 1966. As Billy Millar, Geordie McCullough and Gusty Spence stood solemnly in the dock awaiting news of their fate, the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice MacDermott, took his seat. Looking across at the three defendants, he read out the charges against them, which included the murders of John Scullion and Peter Ward. The judge told them he believed they had committed these acts ‘in the course or furtherance of a dangerous conspiracy and, or alternatively, or, in the course of furtherance of the activities of an association or organisation which is an unlawful association’.25 Sentencing each of the men to at least twenty years’ imprisonment, Lord MacDermott said the murder of Peter Ward had been especially ‘brutal, cowardly and cold-blooded’.26
As the wives of the defendants wept openly in the courtroom, one of them collapsed and had to be helped from the public gallery.27 Wracked with emotion, all three men did their best to look composed as they stood to attention, facing the judge. In chorus they replied ‘No Sir’ to the charges. With the exception of Spence, all of the men who appeared in the dock had broken under interrogation.
This was not the first time Spence had found himself in court. Eighteen months earlier, he had been working for the Post Office in Belfast when, on 11 March 1965, he was arrested and charged with the offence of ‘Obtaining money by false pretences contrary to Section
