← Empire: World History
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- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
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- [00:19]
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- [00:44]
Patrick Radden Keefe
When you join Metro plus tax for.
- [00:46]
Sarah Churchwell
Limited time and subject to change max one offer per account.
- [00:59]
Anita Anand
Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Anand and William Durimpool.
- [01:05]
William Dalrymple
So in the last episode, the wonderful Patrick Radden Keefe, author of the multi award winning say Nothing, was telling us about how Northern Ireland ignited between 1969 and 1970. How a place which had been quiet and there'd been discrimination but it hadn't reached a boiling point. How with the Battle of the Bogside, Molotov cocktails start to be thrown in streets in Northern Ireland, that in Derry, Londonderry, in Belfast, there is now mobs on the street, ethnic cleansing, guns going off and the beginning of bombs. Patrick, do you want to tell us about how that bombing campaign begins to kick off in 1970?
- [01:56]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, the IRA, the Provisional IRA, this sort of new offshoot, was very focused on bomb making and started planting bombs really left and right on the theory that the business infrastructure in Northern Ireland was itself a kind of expression of British power. And so you start getting these bombs, I mean, loads and loads of bombs. I don't have the statistics in front of me, but it's shocking how many hundreds of bombs every year.
- [02:29]
William Dalrymple
I have the figure. I think by the end of 1970 there'd been 153 explosions.
- [02:34]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, exactly. And this is in a very small place. Right. So much of it concentrated in more urban areas and it became an incredibly dangerous place to be. They had bomb makers, they weren't always the best bomb makers. There was a notion which was we're not trying to kill civilians here. And so we will call in warnings. But there were often problems associated with these. You know, there often wasn't enough time between when the warning was called in and when the bomb went off. Bombs went off in the wrong time, they went off in the wrong place. Sometimes a call would come in and the message wouldn't be communicated. And so people are getting killed, people are getting maimed. And there's a general kind of atmosphere of terror, I should say. There were also loyalists planting bombs. It wasn't just the ira, but the IRA really excelled when it came to the bombing campaign during this period.
- [03:29]
Anita Anand
And just, you know, to put yourself in the position of a mum who's got kids, who's just trying to get them to school and do the shop and get, you know, tea on the table, this is an utter upturning of life. There's also, I mean, we mentioned it in the last episode, this split with the ira. You've got sort of, you know, the old heritage ira, if you like. And then you've got the new young bucks who are starting to organize like a military, you know, battalions. They have a military discipline that the others did not. How are those two groups rubbing along together? Because it is the Provisional Wing who are the bomb makers at this time. So what is the relationship between these two IRAs?
- [04:04]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Extremely acrimonious. There were a whole series of incidents in which the official ira, they were known as the Stickies because of the host, sticky Easter lilies. And the Provisionals.
- [04:16]
William Dalrymple
Provost.
- [04:17]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, the provost. And even just calling the officials the stickies. The suggestion there was that rather than pin it on, you know, that the provost would be more died in the wool. But they were often fighting. And so there are episodes I describe in the book where you'll have the Provisional IRA kind of trying to do its thing and fight the British, and then suddenly it'll get kind of sidetracked into a side battle with the official ira.
- [04:41]
William Dalrymple
It's actually a shooting war. They're shooting at each other.
- [04:43]
Patrick Radden Keefe
They're shooting at each other. Yeah, absolutely. And so that's an added layer. So you can imagine you have the Provisional ira, you have the official ira, you have other various and sundry kind of little republican groups. You've got loyalist paramilitaries, you've got the British army, you've got the ruc, you've got the B Specials, the offshoot. There are a lot of different armed factions on the streets.
- [05:05]
William Dalrymple
Where are the provost getting their weapons from? You told us in the last episode of how in the 60s, the IRA basically disarmed. Where are the new weapons coming from? Is it gun running like in the Easter Rising, with shipments arriving of guns off the west coast and being brought in? Or are they making explosives from fertilizer and nails and beer cans?
- [05:25]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Gets much more sophisticated as you get through the 70s and into the 80s, and there are different sources of supply. You know, eventually they develop this long relationship with Libya, for instance. But in the 70s, they're very outgunned initially because they only have these sort of old. In some cases, kind of World War II era arms. Last time we talked about Dolash Price, there was one of the main figures in my book, this young woman who joins the ira. One of her first jobs when she became a full member of the IRA was they sat her in a kitchen somewhere and with a pile of rusty old bullets. And her job was to clean these bullets, because that's what they had.
- [06:02]
William Dalrymple
Absolutely. It's no easy thing getting a World War II Mauser bullet if you're sitting in the middle of Belfast.
- [06:07]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, they had old stuff that had been buried after previous campaigns that they had to excavate. But all of that changes quite quickly. There's a guy who. Another big figure in my book, a guy named Brendan Hughes, who was a Belfast kind of commander in the Provisional ira.
- [06:23]
William Dalrymple
Give us a little portrait of him, because he's an important character in this story.
- [06:27]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, he was a fascinating guy. His nickname was the Dark. He had quite dark coloring, and he was very, very charismatic. A real military strategist and someone who had been in the Merchant Navy before. He ended up getting kind of caught up in the Troubles and totally fearless. Beloved by his comrades and someone who, on the one hand was, I think, very, very soulful, and on the other hand, did some truly appalling, appalling things.
- [07:00]
Anita Anand
But has the utter loyalty of those who follow him because they say, you know, he would never send you in to do something he wouldn't do himself.
- [07:05]
Patrick Radden Keefe
He wouldn't do himself. Yes, he was adored by the. It was mostly men, by the guys that he worked with. And it's funny, he was sort of a contrast. He was very, very close friends with Jerry Adams, and yet they were very different. And there was a sense of Adams as this kind of slightly chilly, cerebral, very brilliant guy, but ultimately not someone who instantly commanded loyalty and who didn't.
- [07:31]
William Dalrymple
Get his hands dirty in quite the same way as Brendan.
- [07:33]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, that was the thing. I mean, what people used to say is that you would never see Brendan Hughes without a gun and you'd never see Jerry Adams with one. I describe in the book the way there was a sense the commander, in his view, was not somebody who would actually get their hands dirty or be caught with a gun. And there might be good reasons for that. Right. That if you're the leader, you don't want to be stopped by the police and locked up for carrying a weapon.
- [07:54]
Anita Anand
Since we're talking about weapons, it's one of my favourite stories. And your book is so filled with these great vignettes. The Provisional IRA was full of such young people, but once you took the oath, you didn't even tell your parents that you were in the Provisional ira. So you would have these moments where you'd have a young youth carrying a gun, going around a corner, bumping smack back into his mother. And, you know, regardless of the fact he's carrying a gun, she will drag him back home by the ear. And the wonderful, wonderful story of Francie McGuigan, who, you know, his father is a quartermaster in the ira, looks after bullets. He's a man with a gun, but he can't ask his father for bullets, even if they live in the same house, because they're not meant to tell your dad that you're in the Provisional ira. So he has to ask his mate to ask his dad to give him the bullets to pass to him. And he's basically sitting in the same sitting room.
- [08:40]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, it's almost comical. I mean, the title of the book is say Nothing. And it gets repeated again and again, this motif. And there you have both the kind of omerta of joining a secret paramilitary organization where you're not supposed to talk about it, and then also the kind of penchant for denial and not acknowledging the elephant in the room, which would be familiar to anyone from an Irish Catholic family.
- [09:04]
Anita Anand
But is it at this point that Dolores and Marian, her sister, say, actually, we're in this fight now. You know, from that moment where she. She's looked up from being almost drowned by a unionist who hates her. But we're talking about a really vibrant, red haired, artistic young woman who could have done so many things, who had dreams of doing other things, but then who at this moment, after almost being killed and returning home, her mother saying, why don't you fight back? Instead of sort of, are you all right? Not being the first thing that she says to her, she takes the vow. She throws herself, mind, body and spirit into this, talk us through her conversion, if you like, and how she does pledge her allegiance.
- [09:44]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, I mean, I think that there had been that terrible experience on the march. And then another big moment for her was internment, when the British government introduced the idea of internment without trial for people who were suspected of being active Irish Republicans. And so they, as a kind of sense of an expedient measure in A violent situation. They introduced this measure in which they would start raiding houses and dragging men off and locking them up without charge, indefinitely interning them, which obviously sort of flies in the face of the whole history of British legal tradition. Habeas corpus, all the rest of it. But, you know, you could see how they might have justified it in a world in which it was quite targeted and even worked. But in fact, they were arresting all the wrong people, basically. And so if you were Dolash Price, you had the experience of her home was raided by the British army, and these raids would often be quite violent. You know, people would come in, kind of unnecessarily disembowel the sofa in your front room, looking for weapons or whatever it was. And her father had already gone on the run, but the authorities were looking for him. And so that was something else that I think radicalized her. And she signs up to the ira, she does, along with her sister Marion. They had a kind of interesting moment where again, the politics of the early 70s are interesting. Historically, women who joined the IRA would do what their mother and their aunt had done, which was to join the. The Common Naban, the women's council of the ira, where you were sort of serving an auxiliary function. You're bandaging the men, you're helping hide weapons. And they said, no, we're feminists, which in this context meant we want to carry a gun, we want to lead missions. And so they became the first women to sort of serve as frontline soldiers in the ira.
- [11:43]
William Dalrymple
One of the features of your book, and a sense why it works so well as a work of nonfiction, is it's a very small group of tightly knit people who've been to school together, who've met each other in the same pubs where their dads are drinking together. And at every stage they're intersecting because it's a tiny society. What are the numbers? How many active IRA members are there? I mean, neither Derry nor Belfast are particularly large towns.
- [12:09]
Patrick Radden Keefe
They're not. I mean, definitely there were. There were scores of them during this time. I mean, it was a. It was a rapidly growing organization. You had a kind of interesting thing in the organizational DNA of the ira, which is that initially this feels like the kind of irony you would appreciate, but initially, you know, they're one of these anti colonial organizations. When they think about how they should organize themselves, they think, well, we should organize ourselves, just like the British army, you know, so they have this kind of very hierarchical rule bound, you know, chain of command. And it's only as they start to get penetrated by informants that they realize, maybe we should adopt more of a kind of cellular guerrilla model.
- [12:53]
William Dalrymple
We should say also that you referenced habeas corpus and said how, you know, this defies British law. But what is fascinating is that internment is something which is used throughout British colonies. It's used against the Indians in India, it's used against the Jewish Irgun and the Jewish underground in pre state Israel and indeed again on the Palestinian side are all locked up. A lot of the Palestinian leadership is sent off to Cyprus in the 1930s.
- [13:17]
Patrick Radden Keefe
But this is part of the reason I was so delighted to, to be talking to you about this story on this particular podcast. Because so much of the history of the Troubles, in fact, particularly in these early years, is a story of methods and techniques and concepts that have been applied elsewhere in the empire being imported in a kind of like, not even in a particularly well thought out way, but just in a sort of reflexive way in the Northern Irish context.
- [13:43]
Anita Anand
I mean, sometimes, you know, you have the absolute, you know, model and file that says this doesn't work. I in India as well, you know, they, they would barge in, they would arrest people without trial, habeas corpus suspended, newspapers closed down. It basically lent itself as a recruitment drive to those who wanted to fight.
- [14:00]
William Dalrymple
The British in both situations.
- [14:02]
Anita Anand
Yeah, and that happened sort of much earlier on and this is happening in the 70s and yet sort of nothing seems to have been learned at all. And one thing that does happen, you know, you do say in the book that even, you know, if you're a Catholic living in Northern Ireland, you have a sympathy, but sometimes you're irritated by what the IRA are doing and, you know, they're messing up the day and you can't get the kids out to school and planned your day, or you can't go to work, you don't get paid if you don't go to work. All of the disruption that, you know, life has to suffer because of this. But when you have these stories of internment and terrible treatment in some of the places where these brothers, sons, fathers often have been rounded up erroneously because they've got the same names in generations, you know, that radicalizes a whole civilian population to the point where anybody would be willing to hide a gun. So, you know, whereas before you'd shut the door and you put the sofa against it and hope this nonsense would pass, now somebody hands you a gun, says hide it, you're more likely to do it.
- [14:57]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think in some respects the best kind of recruiting Factor for the IRA was the behavior of the British Army. And it wasn't just bad, it was torture. I mean, they were torturing people. Again, using a playbook that had been devised in other colonial situations. They were torturing people who had been interned. There were terrible, terrible things going on.
- [15:19]
Anita Anand
I mean, let's talk about some of the things they did, because they do sound sort of horribly and sadly familiar. But we're talking about putting people in stress positions, tying them to radiators, not feeding them for days on end, not letting them sleep.
- [15:30]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Sleep deprivation. Yeah.
- [15:32]
Anita Anand
And actual beatings were quite commonplace. I mean, which was the most dreaded place for an interned prisoner to be taken at this time.
- [15:39]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It's funny because we're sort of talking about this moment and we're looking backwards at other parts of the empire. But there's also a really interesting thing you can do, which is to look at this moment and then actually leap forward to the use of torture in places like Iraq. Right.
- [15:54]
Anita Anand
Guantanamo Bay, with stress positions and sleep deprivation.
- [15:56]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Absolutely. And in fact, what would happen with. With some of these people is, you know, many of these people would end up at Long Kesh, which was the prison. But in the case of some of these detainees, they would fly them off to an undisclosed location. There were effectively black sites, which were often like old abandoned RAF bases that were kind of sort of a ways from any scrutiny, and you would just disappear.
- [16:21]
Anita Anand
A hood put over your head, so you don't know where you're. I mean, all of these things are horribly familiar. Yeah.
- [16:27]
Patrick Radden Keefe
There's a story I tell about a guy in the book who was one of these detainees, and they put him in a helicopter with a hood over his head. And then what they do is they make a big show of opening up the door of the helicopter and pushing him out. He doesn't realize that they're only about 6ft off the ground at that point. And he falls into somebody's arms. He's caught. But imagine psychologically, you're in a helicopter, you've got a hood over your head, and somebody. You hear the door open, and then you feel yourself get pushed out.
- [16:53]
Anita Anand
There's something really unusual, though, in this colonial experience in that, you know, all of the people involved are white and they all look the same. And so unless you know their name and unless you have intelligence, you know, Whereas if it's colonialism in. I don't know, we'll come to Kenya in a minute. Very shortly, in fact. But, you know, India or any part of Africa or any other parts Far flung parts of the empire. You can see who you want to round up. You have a better idea? But these are major scoops of people. Just speak to that a little bit, because I'm just trying to think what that must be like or feel like on the ground.
- [17:23]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I wonder. I mean, I wonder if you give them. If you give them too much credit. I think the whiteness of the people that they were going after in this case made them, at least in principle, easier to differentiate that in theory this was a less foreign milieu. Right. That these were people who spoke English. Again, it was a very small place. So the cast of characters, in theory should be kind of finite. Nevertheless, they managed to screw it up royally by pulling in the wrong people. And, you know, all these mistakes and as you said, this. This tendency in Irish Catholic families to name fathers after sons and so forth meant that you had people of different generations pulled in. And so you get this kind of bizarre spectacle with internment, which is that this sort of older generation is rounded up in this very extreme way that alienates the local population and flies in the face of the law and kind of principles of human rights and so on and so forth. And meanwhile, the younger generation of, like, really hardcore IRA members who've joined the Provisionals mostly are just kind of standing by, watching this happen, but not ensnared, at least initially, in that net.
- [18:35]
William Dalrymple
So this brings us, Patrick, to one of the most fascinating characters in your book and a guy who is absolutely central casting Empire pod material. Who is this extraordinary figure? Frank Kitson. What intrigued Anita and I, reading about Kitson in your wonderful book, is the fact that he comes to Northern Ireland from anti insurgency training and leadership in the MAU MAU in Kenya. He's involved, or at least studying the disastrous anti insurgency campaign in Malaya, and that he's very much bringing these colonial techniques home to Northern Ireland and applying them there as if he's sitting in the bush in Kenya. Tell us about him.
- [19:20]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, Kitson's just an amazing figure who recently died, actually just within the last year.
- [19:26]
William Dalrymple
I saw an obituary. And he ends up as an equity to the Queen.
- [19:29]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, well, so he grows up in a very military family, joins the army and ends up deploying to Germany just as the war's ending. And he has this feeling that he's missed the action, that, like, history has just passed him by. And so he arrives in Germany and he ends up basically just kind of going to the opera and riding horses. He initially has this feeling that it's like the end of History and he's missed his chance. And then he basically goes off to Kenya, but also in Malaya and in Cyprus. And he was writing about it. He wrote books, which were a great resource for me. He's not an amazing writer.
- [20:07]
William Dalrymple
You describe him as a warrior, intellectual.
- [20:09]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yes. I mean, it's amazing because we now we know about the fight with the MAU MAU.
- [20:14]
William Dalrymple
Karen Elkins does this same thing of showing how these British army figures move from counterinsurgency to counterinsurgency. One day they're in Cyprus, the next day in Malaya, next they're in MAU MAU, then they turn up in Palestine or the Canal Zone at the end of Suez. They are using enhanced interrogation techniques that in any definition stray over the border from interrogation into torture.
- [20:37]
Patrick Radden Keefe
There were details from her book on the MAU MAU that I omitted from say Nothing because they were so horrifying that I thought if somebody reads this, they will hurl the book across the room and they won't pick it up again. Part of what's so fascinating about guys like Kitson is they kind of fail upwards now with like the fullness of time. We look back at what they did to the Mao Mao and we think how appalling. In Kitson's case, he kept getting one military commendation after another, getting promoted left and right. You know, he's regarded as this kind of premier intellectual of how to do these things.
- [21:14]
Anita Anand
Kitson was short and stocky, with piercing eyes, a jutting chin. He carried himself ramrod straight as if on a parade ground and swung his shoulders as he walked, which gave the impression that he was larger than he actually was. And you talk about, you know, how he really treats this whole Kenyan experience. It's like a boy's own adventure. You know, he goes plunging into to brambles. He's the one who's going to get people to put hoods over their heads, get them to point to collaborators. And out of absolute terror of this kind of torture that's going on in the background, people are putting their finger on completely innocent men and boys who are then getting rounded up, tortured in the most obscene ways.
- [21:51]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, and not only that, but he then ends up, after all of this as a treat, he ends up with a kind of a year long appointment at Oxford. And the idea is that this will be his opportunity to sort of think deeply about counterinsurgency and teach the next generation. And it's after that that he then is deployed to Northern Ireland. There's a sense of this is the guy who will get to sort it all out. And he's not in Northern Ireland for long, I should say. Kitson's defenders will say he gets blamed for everything. He became a hate figure. But I mean, it's a tricky thing, right, because he did come in and kind of set the tone and I think kind of provide the intellectual architecture for the way in which the army behaved during the Troubles in that first decade.
- [22:36]
Anita Anand
It's a good place to take a break. Join us after the break when we meet Kitson in Ireland and see how he deploys what he's learned elsewhere in the world.
- [22:49]
Sarah Churchwell
I'm Sarah Churchwell, author, journalist and academic.
- [22:52]
David Aldershogga
And I'm David Aldershogga, historian and broadcaster.
- [22:55]
Sarah Churchwell
And together we're the hosts of Gullhanger's latest podcast, Journey Through Time.
- [23:00]
David Aldershogga
We're going to be looking at hidden social histories behind famous chapters from the past.
- [23:05]
Sarah Churchwell
Like what was it like to actually live during Prohibition or to have been there on the ground for the great. We'll be uncovering it all and we'll.
- [23:13]
David Aldershogga
Have characters and stories that have been forgotten but shouldn't have been.
- [23:17]
Sarah Churchwell
This week we've got one of my favorites, Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for US president all the way back in 1872, 50 years before American women could even vote. She was also the first woman to address Congress and to open a brokerage on Wall, where she made a fortune.
- [23:38]
David Aldershogga
It's an incredible story, but it is also full of contradictions. She was a trailblazing woman in politics, but later in life she also turned to the pseudoscience of eugenics.
- [23:50]
Sarah Churchwell
So join us on Journey Through Time and hear a clip from the Victoria Woodhull story at the end of this episode.
- [24:02]
Anita Anand
Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about Frank Kitty and his manual. He's been in Oxford for a year writing a manual about how to run a counter insurgency. And now he's in Northern Ireland.
- [24:14]
William Dalrymple
One very nice touch, we should say in the book, is that the IRA get their hands on the manual and read what Kitson is up to so.
- [24:21]
Anita Anand
They know what they're expecting. But the Northern Ireland that he's walking into, in August 1971, the 2nd Battalion Parachute Regiment of the British army, the Paris, they move into Ballymurphy. It's an area of West Belfast because they're enacting this internment policy that we were talking about in the first, first half of this podcast. And what happens is there are arrests, there are violent clashes between British soldiers and local residents. And the Paras resort to Shooting at anybody who tries to get in their way. And as a result, the British army shoot dead 10 civilians between the 9th and 11th August in 1971. There's another injured person who dies later of a heart attack because it is all so very traumatic. And you know, also, you know, the killing of Scottish soldiers. The violence escalates and so you have the provisional IRA luring three off duty Scottish soldiers from the British army to a pub that they think is in a safe area. And two of the soldiers are teenage brothers and there is killing that goes on there as well. And Kitson walks into this whirlwind of.
- [25:20]
William Dalrymple
Violence as well as Kitson enhancing the, as he sees it, the capabilities of British intelligence. Although the famous joke goes, military intelligence is a contradiction in terms. There's also on the Republican side, and you write wonderfully about this. Brendan Hughes forms D Company partly to weed out, as they see it, traitors from IRA ranks the word tout.
- [25:45]
Anita Anand
Yeah, I came across that, you know, first time in your book. Yeah.
- [25:47]
William Dalrymple
Dizzying number of operations performed by D Company under Brendan Hughes.
- [25:52]
Patrick Radden Keefe
You say, I mean, you have this kind of moment where as you described, you have these British soldiers who arrive, these Paras who are out on the streets the IRA is specifically targeting with the bombs. They might say, listen, we don't want to kill civilians. If civilians die, it's not deliberate calling in warnings and what have you. But when it came to particularly British soldiers, there was a sense that we are shooting these people to kill them. We want to pick these soldiers off one by one. So I think for the army it becomes a very paranoid environment. Right. They do have a sense that they are kind of targeted and that they're walking into dangerous territory. Which then leads to these moments like the Valley Murphy massacre, like Bloody Sunday, in which you get large numbers of civilians killed and in fact, I think a lot of official dishonesty about. If you remember, in the case of Bloody Sunday and Derry, the initial report is, oh, all of the people that we shot were carrying weapons when in fact it turns out none of them were.
- [26:54]
William Dalrymple
We should follow this, Patrick, because we haven't mentioned Bloody Sunday. There are in fact three times that people talk about Bloody Sunday. One is way back in the Michael Collins era that we dealt with in the Easter Rising episode when Michael Collins assassinates all the British intelligence G men and then the Black and Tans go and shoot into the crowds in a football match. Then there's another one which is called the Belfast Bloody Sunday, when again, soldiers fire into a crowd and the famous one, which is the one in Derry, 1972. Tell us what happens, Patrick.
- [27:28]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, you had this unit of British Paras who end up shooting into the crowd and it's a massacre.
- [27:34]
William Dalrymple
Why? Because they're being monitored. Cocktail? Because they're ordered to. What's going on?
- [27:38]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, I mean, there have been any number of investigations into this subsequently. I think what happened is that you had these armed, hopped up, nervous young guys who end up firing.
- [27:50]
Anita Anand
They're marching, though. It's a peaceful March. It's like 15,000 people who gather in a part of Derry to take part in this. Again, a civil rights march, exactly like the one that Dolores Price and Marion Price will be caught up in. But marches have been banned by the government instalments, and that's why the troops are on the streets, because they've got to stop this march and they're told that the marches are going to be peaceful, just let them go. But it approaches a place called William street, where the military presence is really very overwhelming. And again, as you say, there have been many investigations into this. It turns violent and the response from the military is what I mean.
- [28:30]
Patrick Radden Keefe
They start shooting. You know, you end up with civilians who were peacefully protesting murdered on the street by the British Army. British citizens shot in broad daylight.
- [28:41]
William Dalrymple
Famous Don McCullen black and white photographs too, from that time.
- [28:45]
Patrick Radden Keefe
And there's an extraordinary film about Bloody Sunday that I'd encourage people to watch that Paul Greengrass made, which gives you a sense of, you know, those moments, just the brutality of it and also.
- [28:54]
William Dalrymple
Just the pointlessness of why are Paras who are, you know, in a sense, crack troops meant to be sent into a battle anywhere near a civil rights march?
- [29:03]
Anita Anand
Westminster regards this as a war. I mean, you know, it's quite far away.
- [29:06]
Patrick Radden Keefe
They regard it as a civil disturbance.
- [29:08]
Anita Anand
They won't call it war, but they've sent soldiers who fight in wars to go and deal with this.
- [29:12]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I mean, there's so many ironies here, right? But when I was working on my book, I would interview these, these former British army guys who'd been over in Belfast and Derry. It's so fascinating. Some of them feel a great sense of grievance that it was never called a war, because they felt like it was at the time. But there is no monument for them, you know, there's no parade for them. They look at people who served in the Falklands and think, why is that called a war and not what we went through.
- [29:41]
Anita Anand
The reason the British decide not to call it a war, I think I mean, it comes out of Kitson's mouth in the serialization of your book, is that it just will give them a sense of importance, of credibility.
- [29:50]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, but the other thing that Kitson employed, and I think this is sort of what you were getting at earlier, Willie, when you asked about D Company, and this was something he very much had picked up in Kenya, was the idea that if you have an insurgency, what you need to do is infiltrate that insurgency and start turning people, that the best way to defeat it is to get the insurgents to turn on their own. And so he had done this with the MAU MAU. And then this is very much what the army did, and this is a story that then goes on for decades with the ira, was that that the British strategy was, we need to start buying these people off, compromising these people, members of the ira. And the brilliance of that is that they'll feed you information which will be helpful. They'll feed you the kind of intelligence that we didn't have before. But then the other thing is you will create a climate of distrust and hysteria, which will actually get them to just start kind of killing themselves, killing their own.
- [30:54]
Anita Anand
But the outrage that's felt with, you know, sort of trained soldiers firing at civilians is such that there is a decision made to take the fight to England. And so you've got, in February 1972, the bombing in Aldershot that takes place. And this is the official ira, so not the Provisional ira, but the older version. They bomb an army base in Aldershot, they kill seven civilians.
- [31:17]
William Dalrymple
And this is literally three weeks after Bloody Sunday, isn't it? It's a direct reaction.
- [31:22]
Anita Anand
And also there's civilian casualties, which is also important to note here, you know, that civilians will be afraid wherever they might live. They were targeting the headquarters of the 16th Parachute Brigade, elements of which were involved in the Bloody Sunday shootings. But this is a new thing now, which is, you know, we'll take it to you. That's what we're gonna do. And it's something that becomes a part of the fight from here on in.
- [31:46]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It does. I mean, there's a moment where the woman who's sort of at the forefront of my book, Dolores Price, basically pitches her superiors in the Provisional ira. She says, you know, we plant a thousand bombs in Northern Ireland, and nobody seems to notice in England that we're kind of blowing ourselves up and alienating the very constituency that, in theory, Irish nationalists would want to have on their side, which is the civilian population. And Catholic areas in the North Why don't we bring the fight to them? Them? Why not actually go and bomb London.
- [32:22]
Anita Anand
Instead and also make them feel afraid, like we feel afraid? I mean, isn't that, you know, part of her reasoning is that we feel fear every single day here now they should feel the same fear.
- [32:33]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, I think that's right. But I think that again, you know, I mentioned earlier, in reference to the Unionists and the Loyalists, that I think there is some sort of deep fear, fundamentally that England doesn't care. And there was a sense at this point in 72 that life sort of went on as usual in London, that it was kind of easy to ignore what was going on.
- [32:53]
William Dalrymple
You quote in your book, a character putting it very concisely. They've got to bring home the reality of colonialism home to England.
- [33:03]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Exactly. Which they proceeded to do. It's fascinating, isn't it, to think back. You think about now, if you live in London or you've spent time in London, the degree to which. I mean, I was in London a few weeks ago and I. I was at Paddington Station and I got a coffee at the Caffeinero or whatever it was, and I finished my coffee and I had to throw it away and I couldn't find a rubbish bin to throw it in. Like, even today, there are these little elements of the kind of texture of daily life in London that are a direct consequence of what ended up being the bombing campaign. But that doesn't start until 1972.
- [33:40]
Anita Anand
So, you know, apart from taking the fight to the mainland, as it were, there is another really important moment that happens here in early 1972, and that is the picking up of Jerry Adams. Now, whether you believe he was involved in actual killings and commanding some of the violence, or he's in it in a political capacity, he is snatched by troops in a dawn raid on his West Belfast home. And that is through intelligence. I mean, they sort of find out that he's going to visit his. His wife, who he loves very much, and they're sort of waiting and they pick him up. What happens to Gerry Adams once they pick him up? In the wee small hours in the morning.
- [34:17]
Patrick Radden Keefe
You know, there's this fascinating aspect of this, which is that they didn't know what Jerry Adams looked like initially. And so initially they just kind of hear a name and their intelligence is so bad, and he was kind of living on the run and they. They didn't know how to pick him up, but they finally get him. And when they picked him up, there's this fascinating thing that Happens, which is that they'd beaten him up quite a bit, and they want to interrogate him. And they said, all right, Jerry, you know, you have to tell us all about the ira. And he said, there's been a terrible mistake. I'm not Jerry Adams. And they continued to kind of beat him and question him and beat him and question him, but he wouldn't acknowledge who he was. And he's actually subsequently written about this. He's talked about this, but he said, you know, that I had realized that if I just sort of resisted the whole premise that I was who they said I was, we would get stuck on that, and we would just litigate that forever, and they wouldn't be able to ask me anything substantive. And to me, it's always just been such a. Such a revealing moment, because I think in some ways, in that strategy, you see the seeds of some of Jerry's subsequent denials.
- [35:30]
William Dalrymple
So he's not long in prison, because we then have, in June 1972, a brief ceasefire, and Jerry is picked up out of prison, and he ends up talking to Willy Whitelaw in London.
- [35:41]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. And what's crazy, I mean, it shows you how precocious he was. He was just in his early 20s at this point, and he's released from prison because it was a condition of the IRA that if they were going to go to the negotiating table in London, they wanted Gerry Adams to be on the negotiating team, and so he's released for these purposes. There's this delegation that flies to London. There's a detail that I loved, which is that Martin McGuinness is part of this delegation as well. They had a real chip on their shoulder, and they didn't want to be patented, patronized by white law. And they meet at this mansion in Chelsea. But the IRA guys all wore sort of ratty sweaters and. And jeans because they didn't want to show up and feel as though they weren't up to snuff. So they show up. But unfortunately, the talks kind of go nowhere because the negotiators, who are of an older generation than Adams, essentially lay down a series of demands that. That the British refuse to honor. And so then the ceasefire, almost as quickly as it had started, it ends.
- [36:41]
Anita Anand
And that's a good place to end this particular podcast. Patrick's been incredibly generous with his time, but really, we are going to drill down into the story of one of the most fascinating women. Honestly, if she was a work of fiction, you'd go, I don't believe she's real. But she's real Dolores Price. But that's in the next episode. If you want to hear all of the episodes in one go, you know what you do? You join the club. Empirepod uk.com and then we just shower you with these miniseries all at the same time at Incredible Value. Whichever podcast platform you use, just tap the follow button at the top of the page so you can stay up to date when we drop a new episode. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita.
- [37:18]
William Dalrymple
Anand, and goodbye from me, William Dalrymple.
- [37:26]
David Aldershogga
I'm David, or the Shogger. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on.
- [37:32]
Sarah Churchwell
You see spiritualism kind of working its way up the social hierarchy, up the ladder of respectability, because people are desperate and they will cling to anything and remember that we're still in an age of great religiosity. And so if kind of traditional Christian messages are not enough consolation, then you might seek something more direct, like trying to speak to a lost loved one. It's also worth saying that historians have pointed out, I think this is really interesting, that in an age where telegraphy had just been invented, you suddenly have telegraphs which can send invisible messages across the ether, apparently, almost magically. Almost magically. And suddenly people can receive them. It's not really that much of a stretch to then start to imagine people receiving messages clairvoyantly. You start to think about telekinesis. You start to think about the idea of invisible movement, of messages, invisible transmission. It's a really interesting idea, isn't it?
- [38:27]
David Aldershogga
It's so fascinating.
- [38:27]
Sarah Churchwell
I mean, I think it's a really, really smart idea, and it suggests the ways in which other cultural factors can help influence those kinds of trends. Why would you suddenly believe in spiritualism? Well, if telegraphs, well, why not? Who says it's not possible?
- [38:42]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Right?
- [38:42]
Sarah Churchwell
If you want to hear the full episode, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.