My Troubles With the British Military in Derry

Street scene in Derry (or Londonderry) after Bloody Sunday. Naturally, this isn’t my own photo…

I’m currently reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s brilliant book, “Say Nothing”, which chronicles the Troubles in Northern Ireland from a night in December 1972 when Jean McConville, a mother of ten, was abducted from her home in Belfast and never seen alive again, all the way to the Good Friday agreement that ended the most brutal struggle in modern European history which cost an estimated 3,500 lives and countless millions in property damage. In fact, the book starts way back to 1922 with the establishment of the Irish Free State and describes a painful peace process that isn’t entirely complete today.

The Troubles reached their climax on „Bloody Sunday„, January 30, 1972, when British soldiers shot and killed 13 unarmed civilians during a civil rights protest in Derry – or Londonderry, depending on which side you took. I went to Derry (or Londonderry) in July of that same year as a reporter for auto motor und sport, a leading automotive magazine in Germany, to find out for myself if Derry (or Londonderry) was in fact a safe place to travel to. I was 22 at the time, young and carefree as most 22 years-olds are, so I wasn’t especially worried. Besides, I’m an American citizen, so no one would touch me, or so I thought.

Derry (or Londonderry) is the only completely walled town in Ireland and has been the scene of horrible atrocities by both Protestants and Catholics for ages. First settled back in the Mesolithic, Derry was refounded in 1609 by livery companies of the City of London, who took out a royal patent to “plant” English colonists in what was considered uncivilized Northern Ireland; thus the name “Londonderry”. Of course, for the Irish, it’s still just plain Derry.

The town, the second-largest in Northern Ireland which remains part of the United Kingdom, became notorious during the siege of Derry which began in December 1688 when 13 Protestant apprentice boys shut the gates of the city against a regiment of twelve hundred soldiers loyal to King James II, commanded by the Roman Catholic Alexander Macdonnell, Earl of Antrim.

I was walking down Shipquay Streeet which leads from the River Foyle up the hill to the war memorial. There I saw a pillbox manned by British soldiers stuck like an infected pimple right smack at the center of town. There were sentries perched on sandbag barriers watching the passersby through their binoculars.

Naturally, as a reporter I had to take a few pictures. After that, I strolled down a busy side street doing some window shopping, when suddenly I noticed people were disappearing into doorways and cross-streets until finally I was the only one left. Then I heard the low growling of heavy trucks approaching from the direction of the war memorial.

Gradually, three troop transports pulled up, one ahead of me, one behind and the third right next to me. Soldiers jumped out and began aiming their weapons at the nearby rooftops. One of them, a burly staff sergeant, came over to me, pushed me into a doorway and pinned me to the wall with a strong arm. “Well, laddy, what were you taking pictures of just now?”, he asked me – not too friendly, either.

I was flummoxed, of course. “I’m just a dumb tourist”, I pleaded, “taking some pictures to show at home.”

“I’ll have that film, please”, he went on, proceeding to open my camera and take out the film, thus exposing it to daylight and ruining my whole day’s work. He then patted me down expertly and, finding nothing, relaxed slightly. “You know”, he explained, “the terrorists like to take shots of Brits in uniform and pass them around in the evening to the most popular pubs. If they discover one of our boys in civvies, they take them out and shoot them.”

He said this casually, like a tour guide explaining the sights. After a few minutes, all the troops piled into their trucks again and went their way.

Reading Keefe, I realized that what seemed to me like an enormous breech of privacy was in fact and everyday occurrence in Derry (or Londonderry). I just had to write it down now because my two little granddaughters live down in County Kerry, and someday they are going to learn about the Troubles in school. I want to be able to give them a description of my own very minor role in this point in history, along with some sage advice like “read the newspapers before you travel to a foreign country”, or “watch who you are taking pictures of – they may be loaded!”