Belfast and Derry in Revolt - Simon Prince

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treasurer, John Hume, explained in the press, was ‘Catholic in origin’ and had been ‘endorsed down the years by many eminent Church leaders’.63 Hume himself was a product of the Catholic counter-society and, in turn, felt a responsibility to this society; yet, he was a beneficiary of the welfare state, too, and an example of what could and could not be achieved under Stormont. The 1947 Education Act as well as the Catholic Church had provided the Bogside boy with a route – via St Columb’s College and Maynooth – out of poverty and into the professions. The Credit Union’s ‘practical Christianity’ now offered the chance of a route out for the community as a whole. Within eight years, the Derry branch had attracted around 6,200 members, loaned out over £1,000,000 and moved into a ‘splendid new £26,000 headquarters’.64 Such was the extent of this achievement that Hume advanced from a branch treasurer through the Northern chapter and the all-Ireland league to become a director on the world governing body.65 The local was tied to the global.

      ‘The movement creates self-help,’ Hume told the Chamber of Commerce in October 1966, ‘out of which will rise other things.’66 That summer, the Derry Housing Association, which had been founded by Father Anthony Mulvey and was chaired by Hume, had bought a two-and-a-half acre site at the edge of the city on which it was putting up thirty-two semi-detached houses. By the start of 1967, Hume was telling the first annual general meeting that the ‘only final answer’ was the ‘provision of homes on a large scale and at speed’.67 The help in reaching this ambitious goal, though, was not only going to come from within the community itself. When the association drew up plans to build 211 houses, the authorities agreed a loan of £800,000 to pay for the entire cost of the project.68 The housing associations created in Northern Ireland during the 1960s essentially owed their existence to the post-war expansion of the state. As Hume admitted, they had received ‘endorsement and excellent assistance from the Ministry of Development’.69 The Catholic counter-society in Derry was working with the Protestant state; social teaching which had been developed in opposition to socialism was being used by Hume and Mulvey in conjunction with collectivist legislation. Indeed, as early as 1947, the Catholic Church had set up a social services centre, funded by collections, to help their flock receive the benefits owed to them by the welfare state.70 The people of Derry were travelling down roads that merged and parted in ways that may have seemed surprising, but the debates over tactics and strategies were about what practical steps to take next rather than about academic points of interest. Hume’s attempts to guide both communities along twisting paths in 1965 led them to lose what they had set out to find and instead put them, by chance, on the road to what a Nationalist councillor described as the ‘prospect of a revitalised city’.71

      THE WEST’S ASLEEP

      In the autumn of 1958, the Unionist MP for the City of Londonderry wrote to the Northern Irish Prime Minister about the likelihood of more factories coming to his constituency. To Viscount Brooke-borough’s dismay, Teddy Jones was lobbying against this happening. ‘No government’, Brookeborough confided to his diary, ‘can stand idly by and allow possible industries not to develop’.72 This nonetheless was the approach that he and his successor, Terence O’Neill, generally ended up taking. From the late 1950s onwards, Londonderry Unionists, who saw ‘industrial expansion in Ulster [as] a most dangerous thing’, were allowed to let their city gradually die rather than risk losing control of it.73 With the staple industries of shipbuilding and linen in long-term decline and the major employer, Birmingham Sound Reproducers, laying off workers, the number of people signing on was to pass over 5,000 in the first months of 1967.74 But, this meant that Catholic emigration was far outstripping immigration and that the gerrymander was protected. Catholics were also being pushed out of Derry by the chronic housing shortage. In 1963, for example, thirty-three families moved into new homes provided by the corporation and ten times that figure put in fresh applications.75 The Northern Ireland Housing Trust (NIHT) – the public body charged with supplementing private and local authority house building – had made up for some of the corporation’s failings; the Unionist council, though, restricted most of the NIHT’s activities to the overwhelmingly Catholic South Ward, as the trust did not allocate tenancies on a directly sectarian basis.76 So, by 1966, the NIHT was giving notice that there was ‘virtually no land left for housing within the city boundary’.77 The corporation had helped make Derry one of the most overcrowded cities in the whole of Britain and Ireland and had stranded hundreds of families on the waiting list for public housing.78 But, this meant that the North and Waterside wards kept their Protestant majorities and that the gerrymander was protected. Stormont only abandoned its malign neglect when the local Unionists came close to losing control of Derry in 1965, during a crisis which was sparked by British officials deciding that the second city should not get the second university and which saw Jones fighting for the best interests of all his constituents.

      The Lockwood Committee, which was charged by the new O’Neill Government with making recommendations about higher education, was led by its British members.79 They followed long-standing British practices for selecting a location for a new university, which was to leave the process mired in the bog of Northern Irish politics. The authorities in Coleraine, a solidly Unionist town in County Londonderry, had noticed that the new universities of Sussex and Essex had been built near to the south coast because of the availability of seaside lodgings.80 Putting up students in boarding houses cost much less than providing them with halls of residence. Coleraine’s bid as a result focused on how close it was to the resort towns of Portrush and Portstewart. The Derry bodies, in contrast, had not done such thorough research; so, the city’s Magee University College was presented as an asset rather than a liability. The committee recognized Magee for what it was: a college that had a Byzantine system of administration, incompetent staff and bad relations with Queen’s University Belfast. Magee could not be used as a nucleus for the second university. The committee therefore dealt Derry a double blow by advising the government at the end of 1964 to choose Coleraine and to close Magee.81 O’Neill, who had been part of the 1949 enquiry into the college’s affairs and still recalled his bruising encounters with the Magee lobby, had no intention of agreeing to this second recommendation. Jones concurred with his Prime Minister that a future had to be found for Magee. Working closely with the Minister of Education, he started to broker a settlement that was acceptable to Magee’s trustees and faculty.82 Admittedly, when other figures in the local party came to Stormont on 19 February 1965, they again brought up concerns to do with how industrial development would make it difficult to ‘retain our position’ – yet, they also begged O’Neill to give Magee one of the new university’s departments.83 The government, however, was more impressed by the previous day’s visitors from Derry: a motorcade made up of about 2,000 vehicles that had carried ‘all creeds and classes and all shades of political opinion’ to the seat of power as a protest against Lockwood preferring Coleraine to their city.84 ‘What happens there is my problem,’ Jones had told the Cabinet Secretary two weeks before the demonstration, ‘but only to some extent because … such an infection could well spread’.85 Derry was ‘in revolt’ and was now Stormont’s problem.86

      The University for Derry Committee had been formed by a group of ‘business and professional men’, Protestants and Catholics, in January 1965 after news about the Lockwood report leaked out to Magee’s trustees.87 Hume was chosen to front the campaign; he did not belong to any political party, his Credit Union work had made him a community leader and he was young enough not to have any serious enemies. Derry’s four main Churches were brought on board and issued a joint statement welcoming the ‘beginning [of] a period of greater co-operation among all the citizens for the … development of their city’.88 To show that there was also ‘no suggestion of any division of opinion in our ranks by reason of differing political views’, Hume chaired a meeting in the Guildhall at which Nationalist, Liberal and Labour MPs as well as the Unionist Mayor, Albert Anderson, spoke.89 The drive to unite Derry behind the campaign accelerated with the motorcade and with the plan to bring the city to a ‘standstill’.90 ‘Clergy of all denominations’, purred the Derry Journal, ‘joined with business and professional men, factory workers, dockers, school teachers and students in a motorcade which varied from the stately limousine to furniture vans, coal lorries and bread vans’. They left behind a city where ‘shops, schools and public houses [were] closed’ and ‘most traffic [was] stopped’. When the motorcade arrived, Hume stood on the steps of Stormont with the leaders of Nationalism

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