Belfast and Derry in Revolt - Simon Prince

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Deery was barely a decade older than McCafferty, but her biological clock had a mechanism that dated back to the Victorian era: she gave birth to her fourteenth child in her late thirties and may have had pregnancies into her forties if her husband had lived.9 At the start of the 1960s, one third of Derry’s population was under 14 years of age, as compared with one quarter in Britain.10 Nineteenth-century patterns survived in the shirt factories, too, where 90 per cent of employees were women – one fifth of the total workforce – and their hours varied as their lives and the economy changed.11 For many mothers, with two, demanding roles to fulfil, a Sunday in the cemetery was ‘a comparative treat’, offering ‘a rich source of gossip, speculation and tribal perspective’. The children, who came from homes that lacked gardens, played among the graves, and may have noticed that the Protestant high crosses tended to be grander than the Catholic low tombstones.12

      Looking out from a hill of the dead upon a city that was slowly dying, the families could see this and other divisions among the 50,000 people living there. St Columb’s Church, Long Tower, sat at the heart of Derry and was dedicated to the monk who had founded a settlement there in the sixth century.13 Rising above this Catholic church was the Church of Ireland Bishop’s Palace and a short distance away was the Anglican cathedral of St Columb’s, which had been built by the City of London in the early seventeenth century. The new city of Londonderry, as it was named in the royal charter, was one of the last of Europe’s bastides, providing defences for the Protestants from England and Scotland who had been settled there during the plantation of Ulster. Derry’s walls were never breached, not even when James II’s soldiers laid siege to Derry in the second year of the War of the League of Augsburg. The loyal order of the Apprentice Boys, which had its hall inside the old city, continued to mark this epic with annual commemorations, remembering both triumph and treachery.14 At the end of the eighteenth century, the Catholic population outside the walls in what became the Bogside area, which had been reclaimed from the River Foyle, began to grow rapidly – and from 1920 to 1923 Derry was run by a nationalist and Sinn Féin council. When the Irish Republican Army (IRA) began its offensive, the resulting loyalist backlash initiated a cycle of reprisals which left the city ravaged by fire and eighteen people dead in just a single week during the summer of 1920. Afterwards, however, Derry’s Irish Revolution was comparatively peaceful, as local Republicans thought violence was counter-productive and headquarters wanted recruits to be sent south to fight.15 Still, the new Northern Irish Government decided to abolish proportional representation and Derry duly returned a Unionist council again. As late as the mid-1930s, Stormont believed that ‘the fate of [the] constitution was on a knife edge’ and that it was therefore ‘defensible’ to gerrymander Derry ‘on the basis that the safety of the state is the supreme law’. In a ‘Nationalist city’, a ‘Unionist majority [was] secured by a manipulation of ward boundaries, for the sole purpose of retaining … control’.16 The gerrymander was copper-fastened by the property franchise, which put rateable values above population sizes and which deprived more Catholics than Protestants of the vote.17 In 1958, the Unionist Chief Whip cautioned party grandees that ‘if we were to allow universal suffrage’, ‘we may lose Derry’.18 Partition deformed the city in another way: Donegal, which had once been inside its hinterland, was now part of a different state and the local economy was hit by the loss. War and welfare eventually pulled the city out of the slump. On the slopes of the Creggan, which lay above the cemetery, a vast public housing estate was built in the post-war years – and on these foundations were being built dreams of indoor toilets and bathrooms.19 Some of the mothers had not waited for the state to solve Derry’s chronic housing problems and were living with their families in huts that had been put up for the American naval personnel stationed in the north east of Ireland during the Second World War. (The North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces posted to Derry were fighting the Cold War from new bases.) The Deerys were among the first squatters in Springtown Camp.20

      Although desperation had pushed them to go outside the law, most of the Springtown squatters, Protestant and Catholic, had wanted to remain respectable. So, they worked hard to transform temporary barracks into permanent family homes and they were also happy for Londonderry Corporation to take over the management of the site and charge them rent.21 However, despite all that was achieved through self-help and pressurizing the authorities into action, Springtown was still a dangerous, depressing and disease-ridden place for the hundreds of people who lived there. Many residents, including Deery, chose to emigrate rather than suffer through another winter waiting for the council to give them a decent house – in a ward where their vote would not wreck the gerrymander.22 During the winter, families had, as one father put it, to risk ‘fire or freeze’, and in November 1959 an oil heater set fire to one of the huts and five children almost died. This was the spark that began an eight-year campaign to get homes for the remaining residents.23

      On a march through the city in January 1963, one of the placards carried the slogan ‘Springtown – Derry’s Little Rock’.24 Comparing their plight to that of African Americans in Arkansas framed the Springtown struggle as a moral one conducted within the system. But, the two movements were linked by more than a metaphor. The protests of poor African American and Irish Catholic women were politicizing their identities as mothers and wives who were working for their homes, families and communities.25 The Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) in the United States referred to these local leaders as ‘mamas’. ‘There is always a “mama”,’ explained a SNCC activist in 1962, ‘usually a militant woman in the community, outspoken, understanding and willing to catch hell.’26 When Springtown’s ‘mammies’, led by Sadie Campbell, opened the campaign in November 1959 by occupying the council chamber, they stressed that they were there to demand their citizenship rights on behalf of their husbands, some of whom had served in the army, and of their young children.27 The respectability that they had battled so hard to hold onto in the camp was now another weapon in their hands. Respectability was a tactic that had long been used by American ‘mamas’, too. Racists defended segregation by portraying blacks as naturally lazy, ignorant and irresponsible. So, civil rights activists behaved in accordance with prevailing middle-class standards of respectability and thus turned this stereotype back on the segregationists; they made themselves seem deserving of full citizenship and their opponents appear as little more than animals.28 In Northern Ireland, as a prominent Tyrone Unionist told the party leadership in 1950, the authorities often assumed that ‘Respectable families’ were ‘PROTESTANT FAMILIES!’29 The Springtown ‘mammies’ employed respectability to overcome these sectarian and class prejudices. It helped them prove that they were not to blame for their problems and that the authorities were failing in their moral duties under the welfare state.30 (The welfare state was neither an historical inevitability nor a monolith, but rather a contingent and hybrid achievement – one that gave the ‘mammies’ new opportunities and new objectives.)31 The press photographs taken at the October 1960 occupation show that the protesters were smartly dressed, their faces were made up and their hair was in a permanent wave.32 The last was the ultimate symbol of post-war respectability, marking women out from those at the very bottom of society who had unkempt greasy hair.33 The ‘mammies’ fighting the Springtown campaign were to prove a greater threat to Unionist power than the ‘boys’ fighting the IRA’s Border Campaign.

      That threat, though, should not be exaggerated nor should it be simplified. The Springtown campaign did prefigure some of the tactics that would be used at the end of the 1960s, yet it followed established political practices as well. The Springtown protesters occupied the council chamber, disrupted the corporation’s meetings, squatted in houses, staged marches that ignored the city’s sectarian geography and courted the media; they also asked their local MP to help, wrote to the Prime Minister, organized petitions, sent delegations to the authorities and appealed to the courts.34 The campaign did open with young, working-class women entering the political sphere, yet it closed with middle-aged, middle-class men cutting a deal. The Springtown Camp Housing Committee was all male, and they were negotiating with men in the corporation, Londonderry Rural District Council, the local business community and the Northern Irish Government.35 The campaign did show up the failings of Unionists and Nationalists, yet it demonstrated how flexible and effective they could be, too.36 Nationalist politicians gave constructive support to the campaign from the first protest and Unionist councillors and ministers re-housed hundreds of families and turned the empty site into an industrial estate.37 A range of strategies

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