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 32(1) of the Larceny Act, 1916’. It transpired that Spence had claimed overtime that, it was alleged by his employers, he did not undertake. Twelve separate charges – relating to falsified overtime claims for each month between 27 October 1963 and 4 November 1964 – were put to the court.28 The Post Office Investigating Officer put the allegation to Spence, who claimed that, ‘Any overtime that I have claimed on the forms P1. 21B has been performed, and if you think otherwise you will have to prove it.’29 When questioned under caution, Spence told the investigating officer Detective Constable Leonard V. McConaghy at Queen Street RUC Station that he had ‘nothing to say to all the charges at this particular time’.30 He had been released on bail, but was later recalled and convicted of theft.
As Spence and the other UVF men began their lengthy prison sentences in Crumlin Road prison, the police released a statement to reassure the wider community that the threat of IRA violence had vastly diminished. The Easter Rising jubilee commemorations, which the IRA hoped would stimulate recruiting and draw more youths into the ranks, ‘fell far short of expectations’ an RUC spokesmen told the Belfast Telegraph. ‘In the few months before the celebrations there was a slight rise in recruiting, but interest since has waned. It is known that there is a swing towards a much more cultural approach, and that the militants are having a poor show.’31 Militant Protestants, like Spence, were now being exposed as having manufactured enemies out of the unfounded paranoia that had temporarily gripped the darker recesses of the Ulster Protestant psyche.
That an armed republican campaign had not materialised did not deter UVF supporters from believing that the imprisoned men had been right to take the actions they had taken. As he languished in his Victorian-era prison cell, one UVF member composed a poem called ‘The Man in the Soft Black Hat’ to celebrate the murder of Peter Ward:
The Peelers came and the ambulance too and took the three men away, ‘Three taigs they were’ said ould Liza Jane, ‘and one of them’s dead they say.’ ‘I don’t know what they were doing up here, especially the Shankill Road,’ ‘Hell slap it into them,’ big Joe declared, ‘You’d think they wouldn’t have knowed.’32
Such sentiment played straight into the hands of Protestant extremist opinion on the Shankill, and in other places throughout Northern Ireland. If the IRA threat did not exist, they would continue to manufacture it.
***
The incarceration of the UVF’s ‘leading lights’ in 1966 may have decapitated the organisation, but the genie of violent sectarianism was now well and truly out of the bottle. The liberal unionist editor of the Belfast Telegraph, Jack Sayers, a close ally of Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, warned of the growing ‘dangers of Paisleyism’, which he found ‘are not only that it provokes communal strife, but that the belief in its leader’s “fundamentalism”, in politics as well as religion, colours as much as half of the working class backbone of unionism’.33 For his part, Paisley refused to acknowledge the consequences of his rampantly sectarian sermons and speeches, with Spence’s co-accused Hugh McClean, admitting under interrogation that he was ‘terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisley or decided to follow him’.34
Unlike Doherty, Billy Mitchell stayed the course with Paisleyism. If the ‘bishop’ warned of dangerous times ahead, then that was something the Protestant people should take as gospel. Privately, though, he began to harbour some doubts. ‘Despite all the rhetoric I never consciously felt that there was going to be this all-out war where loyalists and republicans would be in the field fighting,’ he later said. ‘We always assumed that if there was [going to be] anything like that … it would be the B-Specials and the police [who] would have dealt with it … But, at that time, Paisley was whipping us up into believing it.’
For Mitchell, dangers did lie ahead, but he wasn’t quite sure what they were. ‘The object of our wrath was more O’Neill and liberal unionism than it was the republicans, because, being honest with you, we wouldn’t have known an IRA man from a man on the moon,’ Mitchell said. ‘Most of the big rallies we attended, all the rhetoric of Paisley at that time – ok the IRA came into it – but the main object of his attention was O’Neill and liberal unionists, ecumenical clergy … So, I never consciously felt to myself that we would be lining up with guns to go and fight the IRA. The object seemed to bring O’Neill down, and to establish a strong government that would deal with any threat.’35
The imprisonment of leading UVF men did little to take the wind out of the sails of the challenge now underway against O’Neill, nor did it stop the growth of the organisation. In late 1966, the UVF had ‘a nucleus of about thirty men on the Shankill Road’, though the more rural parts of the organisation became moribund.36
O’Neill was facing a conflict on two fronts. From the Protestant grassroots who were angered by the Stormont government’s refusal to ban Easter Rising parades, and by Catholics who remained unconvinced at the pace of reform O’Neill had put in motion. It was the latter who took to the streets, first, by forming the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in January 1967. This protest movement had its roots in the agitation of a husband and wife team, Con and Patricia McCloskey,