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 to carry out armed actions in a very different, less conventional, way than their hero King Billy. Although 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,