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 climate that gave birth to an extremist form of Ulster loyalism.
Although it has never been proven who exactly recruited Spence and the others into the UVF, the faceless men responsible had inadvertently created a Frankenstein’s monster they could neither hope to lead nor control – as events would soon prove.
2
HELL SLAP IT INTO THEM
Shots were fired of plenty, some say even twenty,
Were fired that warm June night in Malvern Street,
Three taigs lay on the ground, and a fourth was wisely bound,
From a fate the others thought they’d never meet.
Anon, Ambush (1966)
Conway Bar, West Belfast, Evening, 27 May 1966
‘I am going to get it tonight. I’m going to get a hiding,’ said the heavyset man sat at the bar. John Patrick Scullion, a twenty-eight-year-old labourer from Oranmore Street in Belfast, was out for a few drinks on a Friday evening after work. He was employed at the textile machine manufacturers James Mackie and Sons on the Springfield Road. It was said of Scullion that he was a man of intemperate habits. Described by his workmates as a ‘good comrade’, he was a popular figure on the factory floor. A large man of eighteen stone, Scullion had earlier dressed in a smart dark suit, white shirt and sensible tie when he decided to pay a visit to his local bar near the bottom of the Springfield Road. As he sank pint after pint of Double X Guinness, Scullion would become increasingly distraught. The landlord of the pub, Frank Kelly, knew Scullion well, and was keenly aware that he could be prone to bouts of paranoid delusion the more alcohol he drank. Kelly later recalled how Scullion would frequently talk about how he expected to die before his thirtieth birthday.
As Kelly called last orders at the bar, Scullion rose from the stool he had been perched on for much of the evening, staggered across to the toilets to relieve himself, before leaving for the home he shared with his aunt Alice. Minutes later, he was spotted by eyewitnesses stumbling in a southerly direction, down the Springfield Road, then hanging a left along an entry near the junction of Falls Road and Clonard Street.
As Scullion made his way onto Clonard Street, he burst into song, drawing the attention of a small number of people still out and about. It wasn’t long before he tripped and fell over. Watching him hit the road with a hefty thump, four local men rushed over to help him up. A local police officer on the beat also caught a glimpse of Scullion as he fell. He had even contemplated arresting him on the charge of being drunk and disorderly, though resisted the temptation and, reassuring himself that Scullion would continue on his way, let the matter drop. A few moments later Scullion turned from Clonard Street onto Oranmore Street, where he was spotted by two young girls. It was 11:30 p.m. when the girls registered the drunk man shuffling across the street. Seconds later, they heard two loud bangs pierce the still, night air. One of the girls thought it was the sound of gunfire, while the other believed it was a car backfiring in the direction of Oranmore Street. As they ventured along the pavement, a car came racing out of Oranmore Street, before turning left into Clonard Gardens and then right into Waterville Street, a few yards from Bombay Street. The vehicle accelerated onto Cupar Way and slipped away into the heart of the Shankill. Moments later, it vanished. As the car passed the girls, they recalled how the occupants stared straight at them, their faces those of strangers. Inside the vehicle were several young men, one of whom had blonde hair.
Oblivious to the injuries he had sustained by the gunshots, John Scullion continued on home. As he reached the front door, he paused for a moment while he fumbled in his pockets for his keys. After finding the right key, he thrust it into the lock. He staggered into the hall and slammed the door behind him. A few minutes later he slouched into an armchair in the living room noisily exhaling breath as he did so. His aunt, who had been asleep upstairs, woke to the sounds of her nephew’s groans. Just as Alice Scullion came to her bedroom door, she was met by John who had forced himself upstairs, before collapsing at her feet. ‘When he left me after tea, John was in good form’, she later said. ‘He was not injured in any way.’ Realising her nephew