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BELFAST AND DERRY
IN REVOLT
Simon Prince is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University’s School of Humanities. His publications include Northern Ireland’s ’68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles (IAP, 2007; New Edition, 2018).
Professor Geoffrey Warner is a Supernumerary Fellow in Modern History at Brasenose College Oxford. He is the author of many books and has published widely in the field of Northern Ireland’s history.
BELFAST AND DERRY
IN REVOLT
A New History of the Start
of the Troubles
NEW REVISED EDITION
Simon Prince
&
Geoffrey Warner
First published in 2012; new revised edition published in 2019 by
Irish Academic Press
10 George’s Street
Newbridge
Co. Kildare
Ireland
© Simon Prince & Geoffrey Warner, 2019
9781788550932 (Paper)
9781788550949 (Kindle)
9781788550956 (Epub)
9781788550963 (PDF)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Typeset in Classical Garamond BT 11/15 pt
Cover: The Troubles: Derry riots, Derry, 1969.
(Gilles Caron copyright: Fondation Gilles Caron/Clermes)
Contents
The Divis Street Riots of 1964
CHAPTER FOUR
The Day the Troubles Began
CHAPTER FIVE
The Civil Rights Movement
CHAPTER SIX
To the Brink in Belfast
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Battle of the Bogside
CHAPTER EIGHT
From the Ashes of Bombay Street …
CHAPTER NINE
The Weekend of 27–28 June 1970
CHAPTER TEN
The Falls Road Curfew
ENDINGS
Endnotes
Index
Preface
‘Once upon a time’ was how the Derry radical Eamonn McCann began an August 1969 pamphlet that told his story of the civil rights movement.1 Everyone was putting together their own narratives to make sense of the extraordinary events they were living through at the start of the Troubles. From the moment that the civil rights movement came into being on 5 October 1968, people felt a need to remember and commemorate it. Memorabilia was created, songs were composed, records were produced, special anniversary issues were published, and documentary films were made.2 Narratives of the start of the Troubles were personal, but they were also political. During the February 1969 Stormont election campaign, the three candidates in the Foyle constituency presented voters with different accounts of the origin, course, and future direction of the civil rights movement.3 Northern Ireland’s ‘memory wars’ often began before the event had even ended. In Belfast, while the conflagration of August 1969 was still happening, the Bishop of Down and Connor telephoned police headquarters to ‘contradict official Press, TV & Radio reports’.4 The struggle to shape how the event was described and interpreted – to control the narrative – was an integral part of the event itself. Definitions were imposed and rejected, blame was assigned and displaced, responsibility was claimed and contested, and past causes and future courses were suggested and debated.5
Activists have worked hard to construct and sustain narratives about how a civil war began in a devolved region of the United Kingdom. Indeed, as the fiftieth anniversaries roll round, the tales are getting told again. Belfast and Derry in Revolt: A New
