Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
Both of Brendan Hughes’s parents and one set of grandparents had been involved in the IRA. He grew up hearing all the stories of the terror Belfast Catholics had experienced in the 1920s and how sometimes the IRA could strike back, although such incidents would pale in comparison to the activities of the IRA units of 1972 that he would lead. One famous action, ‘The Raglan Street Ambush’, took place in West Belfast on 10 July 1921, just a day before a truce between the British and the IRA was to come into effect, and two days before the annual Orange ‘Twelfth’ celebrations when Protestant emotions usually ran high. The timing was unfortunate. A large force of policemen, known then as the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), and Specials – an exclusively Protestant auxiliary
police force established by the new Northern Ireland government – were on a mission to raid homes in the Lower Falls Road area when they were ambushed by the local IRA. One policeman was killed and two were wounded in the fierce gun battle that followed. Already angered by the truce with the IRA, which proved to be a prelude to the Treaty negotiations, lorry loads of Specials went on the rampage in Catholic parts of Belfast shooting wildly. In the following few days twenty people were killed, scores wounded and over a hundred and fifty Catholic homes were torched.
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Four months before, in March 1921, a great-uncle, Eoin Hughes, was taken off a tram in the York Street area of North Belfast and shot dead. His killer is believed to have been a notorious Loyalist gunman known as ‘Buck Alec’ Robinson, a petty criminal who had been inducted, despite his lengthy criminal record, into the Specials. ‘Buck Alec’ was a member of one of several murder gangs made up of RIC officers and Specials that carried out unofficial reprisals during these turbulent years, activity that in his case did not deter the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord French, commending him ‘for his good police work’.
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Hughes’s father, Kevin Hughes, better known as ‘Kevie’, was active again in the 1930s and in the early 1940s he was interned, ending up in Belfast’s Crumlin Road jail alongside Gerry Adams’s father. Growing up, Brendan Hughes rubbed shoulders with men who were IRA heroes in the local community, none more celebrated than Billy McKee, later a founder member of the Provisional IRA in 1969 and its first Belfast Commander. Ironically Hughes and McKee would eventually find themselves on opposite sides during Gerry Adams’s bid to gain control of the IRA.
…
my mother was involved in the 1930s, my grandmother was
involved, my grandfather was involved … my father, as I say, was
an old Republican; he did time in prison but very seldom would he
tell us any stories about his involvement. He never ever talked about
any operation that he was on, even though I know he was on operations.
He was interned in 1942, during the war years. My father’s
great friend was a man called Billy McKee; my father would have
spoken more about Billy McKee than about himself. And Billy was a
person that I admired and looked up to even though I didn’t know
him. He lived in McDonnell Street just across the street from where I
lived. We’re talking about the 1960s. My father would bring us all to
Mass and we’d walk past Billy McKee’s house on McDonnell Street
and we almost felt like genuflecting because my father thought so
much of him. Billy McKee was one of those people who spent his
whole life in the Republican movement, in and out of jail, hunger
strikes, being shot, and I remember picturing Billy McKee with a .45
stuck on his belt … one of my memories of him was in a house in
the Falls Road, Belgrade Street – a friend of my father’s, John
O’Rawe, his mother had died, and we were all in the back room, in
the scullery where the tea was being made, and Billy was there. And
I remember purposely bumping up against Billy to find out if he had
a .45 stuck in his belt and, yes, he did, he had a .45 automatic stuck
in his belt, and I remember asking him could I look at it. I don’t
know what age I was; I was young. But later on, in years to come,
I saw Billy with more than a .45 in his hand. I was so enchanted by
him, and admired him so much, and my father was there as well.
I was so sort of romantically involved with the IRA, even before I
joined it. It was just something that I believe I was destined to be,
and I don’t think my father actually directed me towards this, consciously
directed me towards this, [but] he probably unconsciously
directed me towards the movement. Well, it was not so much the
IRA as the resistance to what was going on; a resistance to, and a
resentfulness towards, the way life in the six-county state that I lived
in, the way that it was treating my family, treating my father. The
stories of the B Specials, of the shootings and of the oppression and
of all that was all consciously ingrained. I remember the story of my
uncle, my uncle Eoin Hughes. He was on a tram in the 1920s going
down to York Street and he was taken off the tram and shot dead in
the middle of the street. One of the names mentioned at the time [as
being responsible] was a famous Loyalist from down there, ‘Buck
Alec’. It was hard to differentiate a B Special from a Loyalist assassin;
they were one and the same. And, I mean, we heard all the stories –
my grandmother used to tell me stories about the 1920s and of the
shootings and the murders and so forth, and I remember being
really scared about the B Specials … stories about my Uncle Eoin
and of my great-grandfather during the War of Independence,
losing his arm, throwing a hand grenade at an armoured car somewhere
in County Louth. The grenade went off and blew his arm off.
I believe my [grand] father was involved in Raglan Street, even
though he never told me that, but I know he was there and abouts.
It was one of the famous ambushes in the Falls area, and, I mean,
Raglan Street has drifted into oblivion because of all the other gun
battles that have taken place since. The Raglan Street Ambush was
small fry compared to some of the stuff that happened afterwards
.
These were the influences that shaped Brendan Hughes as he reached adulthood, and in that regard he was not very different from hundreds of other young working-class Catholics in Belfast at that time whose parents and grandparents could tell equally chilling stories about the violence of the 1920s and 1930s. In his and their lives the IRA was an organic part of their community, even if not all would approve or adopt their methods. The IRA was made up of neighbours, friends and even relatives, people they knew and respected and to whom they would naturally turn for protection from the worst excesses of Orange extremists. Distrust and dislike of the police, a feature of working-class life the world over, was so much more intense in such communities because, for Republicans and Nationalists, the RUC was seen as the political enemy, the force that imposed their second-class status and upheld Unionist rule and with whom co-operation was frowned upon.
…
we never had money to buy bikes when we were growing up so
we would go to the scrapyard and buy scrap pieces and so forth to
build an old bike and ride about the place. Four or five times I was
arrested, for not having brakes, for not having lights, for playing
football on the street … We used to play cards at the bottom of the
street which was illegal as well … we’d have people out watching
for the cops coming. But, as a Catholic family in the area, we were
constantly singled out for special attention. I mean, I was arrested,
God knows how many times, taken to court and fined five shillings
or ten shillings for not having lights on the bike, for not having
brakes on the bike, for playing cards on the street, for playing football
on the street. But there was one time, we were playing cards on
the street and the cops came and everybody bolted, but I was caught,
and I was taken to the barracks and I was interrogated. I think I
must have been thirteen, maybe fourteen. And I gave the names
of the people who were in the card school with me and the cops
brought me back to the house and left me there. They then came
back and gave me a summons to go to court. My father asked me
what did I say, and I told him and I got a powerful smack on the
face, not for playing cards but for giving the names of the other
people who were involved with me … Right through my early years,
I had plenty of run-ins with the RUC, over petty little things, but
I can’t remember anyone else, any of my other Protestant friends,
being arrested as often as I was. And I think there was a great
understanding there with my father, that he knew that there was
a certain amount of discrimination going on here and that I was
being picked on
.
Going to sea with the Merchant Navy was the next major influence on Brendan Hughes’s political journey. In South Africa he witnessed the cruel consequences of apartheid for that country’s black population and it hardened his hatred of injustice. His travels away from Belfast also brought his first brush with the British Army, albeit in very different circumstances than would be the case a few years later – although the reason for that encounter, his swarthy looks, would later give him his IRA nickname, ‘The Dark’. British troops first gave him that soubriquet, and it was later adopted by all who knew him, because they had no photographs of him, just an idea of what he looked like and the nickname stuck. His father had destroyed any pictures there were and even earlier,
when Hughes went to sea, he seemed to anticipate the turn his son’s life would take when he told him never to get a tattoo because it was a sure way of identifying someone.
My first job was bringing a ship from Belfast to Southampton. It
was a scrap ship, and it was probably the best job I ever had because
there was no cleaning … and it was pretty basic and simple. I then
signed on to a British Petroleum boat, British Courage, a tanker
going to the Middle East for oil. I sailed out of Belfast on that and
it’s probably [the source of] some of my fondest memories, although
the fondest of all was sailing back … after three or four months at
sea with a brilliant tan, well dressed, plenty of money in my pocket,
looking forward to getting home. On that trip, we went to a place
called Aden in the Persian Gulf and, at the time, the British
occupied Aden. We were not allowed to go into the town, so, if we
wanted a drink, we had to go to a British Army camp, which we
all did. And me being the only Irish one there! But there was no
hostility between the people I went to sea with; most of them were
English and Scottish … We had been drinking all night in this
British Army camp. I got detached from the crowd I was with, and
was walking across an open field outside the camp when I was
attacked and pushed to the ground and a rifle put to my head. It
was the British Army. Luckily, I had a Merchant Navy ID card with
my photograph and name in it. I was thrown into the back of a jeep
and roughly treated, initially, until they found out that I wasn’t an
Arab terrorist. At that time I was very, very dark and could easily
have been mistaken for an Arab … But I was brought back to the
ship [and let go]
.
The British Army in Belfast [later] … called me ‘Darkie’. They
didn’t have any photographs of me, but they knew of me … and the
reason they never had a photograph is, when I went on the run in
1970, my father destroyed every photograph of me in the house, so
any time the British Army raided my home, which was often, there
was never a photograph of me there to be found. For all the years I
was on the run, the British Army never had a photograph of me
.
There were times when I was one of the most wanted men in the
North, walking past a British Army foot patrol … I don’t know
whether my father had a premonition of this, but when I joined the
Merchant Navy, my father insisted that I didn’t get any tattoos. It
was a common thing for seamen to have tattoos and many a time I
sat in a tattooist’s in Europe or the Far East, with other people [but]
I never ever got one because I always remembered my father telling
me, ‘Never get a tattoo, because it’s an identifiable mark’, and this is
long before I went on the run. That’s why I’m saying he must have
had a premonition that I was going to be on the run. And I don’t
know where that came from, whether my father knew the road I
was going to be taking or he suspected I was going to be taking. But
anyway I never got tattoos, and they never had a photograph of me
until I was arrested in 1973
.
After the British tanker, I came back to Belfast, was at home for six
weeks and then re-signed on to a fruit boat, the
Carrigan Head,
which went to South Africa. We sailed from Southampton to South
Africa, down to Durban, and that was the first time that I saw the
deprivation and the squalor and the slavery [of apartheid]. When
we [sailed] into Durban, to load with oranges, there was possibly a
hundred and fifty men or so, black men, all labouring, all [the loading]
done by hand … I worked in the galley at that time and I
remember looking out the porthole at lunchtime, all these guys sat
along at the deck of the ship with milk bottles full of cold tea and
whatever food they had; it was mostly bread and cold tea. And I
remember feeling angry, the way these people were treated … if I
was never a socialist [before] I certainly became a socialist during
that period in South Africa. I went to the galley and I got milk,
cheese and whatever else out of the freezer and brought it out, and
the first guy I went to, a black guy sitting there, drinking a bottle of
cold tea, he says, ‘No.’ He wouldn’t take it, he was so proud, and I
suppose I was being naively charitable, but I felt compassion for
them and, in my naive way, I was trying to help. I was told to go
away, which was good. These people … didn’t want my charity. It
affected me so much. And as soon as these guys finished work, the
beer was there, in a massive big barn. And … as soon as they got
paid, [they went] into the beer hall, and I’ve no doubt, the people
that owned the fruit going on that boat also owned the beer hall.
And they wondered where the drink problem in Cape Town [came
from]? You were allowed ashore, obviously when you were in dock,
especially me being a deck hand. We were all lined up and told that
there were certain areas that we were not allowed to go to. One of
these areas was called District Six in Cape Town. We were told to
stay away from it or we’d be killed … But being curious, as I was,
I went to District Six. Cape Town was a sprawling big city, all the
amenities were there for the white man. I searched out District Six
which was a massive area of cardboard-box houses. I remember the
cornflake boxes, vividly, in this field where people were living and
I was really affected by that … in the city centre of Cape Town,
where there was anything you wanted there [and] just a mile or so
outside the city here was a sprawling slum, where people survived,
didn’t live! They survived there. This had a bigger impact on my
thinking as a socialist than reading books, or studying revolutionary
tactics. That had a deep effect on me as regards fair play and socialism.
When we left there and went to Mozambique, and it was even
worse. The Portuguese were there at the time, in a place called
Lourenço Marques [now Maputo]. I’m not sure if the conditions
have changed in Mozambique, but then it was total and utter
depravity, poverty and oppression. Going back onto the ship you
realised just how lucky you were. Yet we weren’t supposed to experience
that; we were to stay in our wee cosy, white shells, in the city,
where we were safe. I just didn’t become a rebel in 1970. I didn’t
become a gunman in 1970. I didn’t become a revolutionary in 1970.
That process was being built up over the years, and years of seeing
privation, years of seeing exploitation, years of hunger and sadness
and love
.