The Battle of the Bogside
Posted by Jim on August 12, 2017
The scene for the Battle of the Bogside was set long before August 1969.
For years the nationalist majority of Derry had suffered a unionist
gerrymander of the city which left many Catholics living in slum
conditions.
Matters came to a head in October 1968 when a civil rights march was met
with force by the RUC.
Pictures of MPs leading the parade were beamed across the world,
bringing the problems in the north of Ireland to a global audience.
In January 1969 the situation deteriorated further when loyalists
attacked a People’s Democracy march from Belfast to Derry at Burntollet.
Days later ‘Free Derry’ was born in response to attacks on Bogside
pensioners’ homes by the RUC.
The July 12 Orange Order parades in 1969 were accompanied by violence
and so it was not a surprise that tensions were high leading into the
Relief of Derry march planned for August 12.
The largest loyal order march of the year, the Relief of Derry, was
organised annually by the Apprentice Boys to mark the end of the Siege
of Derry in 1689.
For years it had been a source of tension in the city as a coat-trailing
exercise and it was often accompanied by violence.
Despite the rising tensions, on August 8 1969 the Stormont government
decided to allow the parade to go ahead.
As it passed close to the Bogside at Waterloo Place on August 12,
rioting erupted between nationalists and Apprentice Boys and their
supporters.
RUC immediately used armoured cars and water cannon – followed by
loyalist rioters – to chase nationalists back into the Bogside.
What became know as the Battle of the Bogside began.
Rioting ebbed and flowed as day moved into night and Bogsiders,
supported by nationalists who rallied from all over the north-west,
forced police and loyalists back out of ‘Free Derry’.
Rioters used the vantage point of the high-rise Rossville Street flats
to keep police at bay with missiles and petrol bombs.
At one stage — with concern rising that rioters would run out of petrol
— the Derry Citizens Defence Association dispatched representatives to
obtain petrol from a garage, providing a receipt against the petrol
seized.
By the morning of Wednesday August 13, rioting had spread to other
nationalist areas of the north in a pogrom of Catholic areas.
Taoiseach Jack Lynch issued his famed and usually inaccurately quoted
message that “we will not stand idly by” as he sent Irish troops to the
border to establish first-aid posts.
What Lynch actually said was: “The present situation is the inevitable
outcome of the policies pursued for decades by successive Stormont
governments.
“It is clear also that the Irish government can no longer stand by and
see innocent people injured and perhaps worse.”
With refugees fleeing south, Stormont mobilised the B-Specials who were
soon repelled by the Bogside nationalists.
As the north faced into an abyss on day three, two people were killed by
the RUC.
Nine-year-old Catholic boy Patrick Rooney was shot dead in his Divis
Flats’ home in west Belfast when police fired from a Browning machine
gun mounted on an armoured car.
In Armagh, John Gallagher was also shot dead at Cathedral Road by
B-Specials.
With the RUC now completely exhausted and over-stretched, Six County
prime minister James Chichester-Clarke asked the British government to
deploy troops.
At 4.30pm, British PM Harold Wilson agreed.
At around 5pm on Thursday August 14 the first soldiers of the Prince of
Wales Own – on standby outside Derry – marched into the Waterloo Place
front line in their distinctive ‘Tommy’ tin hats and carrying tin
shields and SLR rifles.
Their commander, Major David Hanson told journalists:
“Provided one is pleasant and polite, one can achieve an awful lot in
this world.”
Their arrival marked the start of what the British army code-named
Operation Banner, a campaign of atrocities that was to last 38 years.
The next day, August 15, six people Herbert Roy (26), Hugh McCabe (20),
Samuel McLarnon (27), Michael Lynch (28), Gerald McAuley (15) and David
Linton (15) were dead.