until Porter gave in and invited him over to a dark corner, where the gun was produced. Bigger promptly snatched it from him, unclipped the chamber and loaded three bullets into it. ‘I’m getting off side,’ Porter told both men. Blakely asked Porter to carry his automatic in his holster, which he did. The three men then headed to a pub on May Street, passing on the opportunity to attend the Paisley speech. Once the rally had finished and men began to disperse from the hall, the three UVF men left the pub and joined with others from their unit on the march back up the Shankill Road.
‘On the way up there was five of us; that was myself, Reid, McClean, Porter and Blakely,’ Bigger said later in a confusing recollection of the events of that day. ‘We got up the Shankill allright [sic]. We broke off at Crimea Street and I got the gun off Porter. I know Porter had a gun but I can’t remember what way the talk about it came round.’ It seemed that the men had hastily hatched a plan to attack premises in Crimea Street that, they alleged, ‘was doing business with tinkers and the like’. Bigger now had Blakely’s automatic handgun, or, ‘at least I was told afterwards by Dezzy [sic] Reid that was what it was’. Once they got to the ‘wee electrical shop’ Bigger fired one shot at the rear door and, he claimed, Blakely then fired two shots. ‘The gun Blakely had was a small one. I kept my gun and after the next morning I took it down to Des Reid at his home. What he did with it I do not know. After we fired the shots I went up Meenan Street. I ran. I don’t know what way Blakely ran ...’10
A couple of days later, with this initiation ritual over, McClean informed Porter that he had been accepted as a member of Shankill UVF, and that both men were to be officially sworn in. Porter said that the ceremony had taken place in a house on the Shankill. Also in attendance was McClean, Spence, Frank Curry and his wife Cassie, who was Spence’s sister, and one other man. ‘Robinson, Reid, Blakely and myself were then brought into the back kitchen,’ Porter recalled. ‘I was there, together with Blakely, Reid and McClean, [and we were] sworn in as members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. This was done by Spence. After this, Spence produced my 45 Smith and Wesson revolver and asked me if he could hold on to it. I told him that he could keep it. He then asked me if he could keep the revolver, and I said that he could. That was the last I seen of it.’11
A few days later, on 20 June, Alexander McClean, a young joiner from Carrick, was at home watching television with his daughter. The curtains and blinds were open, though the living room was in darkness. Only the flickering of the light from the TV could be seen outside. McClean was startled by a loud bang before seeing the whole front room window of his house come flying into the room. He panicked, jumped up and ran outside onto the street to see what had caused the window to shatter. The streets were empty. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.12 In the shadows, though, someone, somewhere bore a grudge for something. McClean went back inside and began to clear the glass. He heeded the warning. The UVF in East Antrim had carried out its first attack. They were gearing up for many more.
***
Watson’s Bar, Malvern Street, Shankill, 2 a.m., 26 June 1966
The noise of the crash and whistle of the bands echoed around the streets of West Belfast as Orangemen made their way from the Shankill Road, along Workman Avenue and onto the Springfield Road. The annual Whiterock parade would later become one of the most contentious in Northern Ireland, but in 1966 it would pass by predominantly Catholic houses without so much as a murmur from the residents. Later that evening the men returned from the centre of Belfast, some a little worse for wear with drink. Gusty Spence and other members 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