The Week Before Christmas
Going Home for Christmas
George Arthur’s wife was packing suitcases on the night of 17th December 1974. The couple were due to fly to Ghana where they were to spend three weeks visiting relatives over Christmas.
As she was doing so news came through that her husband, a 34 year old telephonist, had been killed in a bomb attack on Bloomsbury telephone exchange on Tottenham Court Road. Other bombs exploded the same night at telephone exchanges in Chelsea and the West End.
Mr Arthur worked night shifts. His inquest in April 1975 heard that staff had been evacuated when a duffle bag with a battery and wires was found. Seven minutes later it exploded. It was believed that Mr Arthur was on his way to the toilet at the time.
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| Belfast Telegraph report on the London bombings (click to enlarge) |
Rodney Fenton also had thoughts of getting home for Christmas when his life was suddenly cut short on 20th December 1973. The 22 year old bank clerk rented a room in Belfast and was out for Christmas drinks with some friends the day before he travelled home to Killaloo for the festive season.
The four workmates from the Antrim Road branch of the Northern Bank were walking along Atlantic Avenue on their way to a pub when a gunman with long hair walked up behind them and shot one of them who was a reserve constable. Before running off he also shot Rodney Fenton.
The off duty RUCR man survived. Rodney Fenton did not. His father was a orthopaedic consultant at Altnagelvin Hospital and a room in the hospital for bereaved relatives was later dedicated to Rodney’s memory.
Carollers at the door
Andrew Jardin, a 65 married father of 4, was managing director of Workman Ltd, a director of Workman, Forth and Jardin and a managing director of the Black Mountain Quarry. He was also a Protestant and member of the Loyal Orders living on the edge of a Nationalist area in West Belfast.
Three years after the events of 23rd December 1970 a press report appeared which described what happened:
“Christmas Eve was only a few hours away. The night was dry and cold. There wasn’t much sign of a white Christmas. In the kitchen of her home a middle aged Belfast woman was doing some seasonal baking.
"Earlier she had helped her married daughter and her two children put up a Christmas tree. Her husband finished with the day’s work was pottering round the house.
"A knock came to the door. Expecting the carol singers the daughter quickly made her way to the hallway to welcome them. But the “carol singers” brought death and heartbreak to the family for whom Christmas would never be the same again…
“I saw a young man at the front door. I opened it just enough to speak to him. He put his hand inside his coat and immediately started to force his way into the hall.
“I tried to close the door and the man produced a revolver from inside his coat.
“I called to my father and I then saw two other men pull the front door open and the first man went into the hall. When I tried to close the door the bottom pane of glass was broken.
“As I was struggling with the men at the door I heard a number of gunshots ring out in the hall and I could smell smoke.”
Mr Jardin was a gun collector and was able to fire four times before dying.
Following the murder the RUC speculated that the primary motivation for the attack was to steal his legally held weapons.
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| Andrew Jardin |
The Turkey
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| Stanley Hazelton |
On Saturday 22nd December 1979 Stanley Hazelton, a businessman who owned a garage in Dungannon and member of the RUC part time reserve, went off to collect the family’s Christmas turkey from a farmhouse near Glasslough, Co Monaghan, in the Republic.
On leaving the farm his car was raked with gunfire from murderers hiding behind a hedge. Once the car came to a halt two gunmen stepped into the open and fired through the rear windscreen before escaping in a hijacked van.
Mr Hazelton was buried with full police honours on Christmas Eve 1979 in one of the largest funerals the Dungannon area had seen in many years.
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| Stanley Hazelton's funeral on Christmas Eve 1979 |
An Early Christmas Box
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| Article from Liverpool Echo 1978 |
A few weeks before Christmas 1978 June Duggan packaged up a gift for her son Graham. He was serving with the Grenadier Guards in South Armagh.
Speaking to the Liverpool Echo she explained why:
“Mrs Duggan said that she had had a premonition that her son Graham, aged 22, would be killed in Ulster.
“We talked about it when he left two months ago. I told him this time I was sure he would not come back. I was so certain he was going to die I sent him his Christmas parcel to him early, two weeks ago”.
Graham Duggan was part of a patrol in Crossmaglen on 21st December 1978 when it came under fire from what appeared to be a delivery van. In Ken Wharton’s Wasted Years, Wasted Lives Volume 2 the patrol commander expressed his annoyance at the press at the time for reporting that an M60 was used pointing out that in actual fact three AK47 were employed.
Christmas shoppers in the strongly Republican village had to dive for cover from the attack which claimed the lives of Graham Duggan, 18 year old Glen Ling and 20 year old Kevin Johnson.
Locals didn’t always escape from IRA operations in South Armagh though. A year and a day earlier, on 20th December 1976, 29 year old Catholic Josephine McGeown was killed when the car she was travelling in struck a hijacked lorry near Crossmaglen. The married civilian was the front seat passenger in a car which hit the vehicle which the IRA were using it to block the road.
The Christmas Tree
On 17th December 1983 the IRA bombed the Christmas shoppers at Harrods, murdering six and leaving around 100 wounded. You can read details of the bombing here.
The 6th victim of the bombing was Inspector Stephen Dodd.
He died on Christmas Eve.
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| Belfast Telegraph article from December 1983 (click to enlarge) |
On 29th December the Belfast Telegraph carried comments from his widow, Maureen, who was originally from Northern Ireland and like her husband had joined the Metropolitan Police:
“The tiny former WPC disclosed that she and her husband had been separated a year after “drifting apart” but planned to spend Christmas together with their three young children with hopes of a reconciliation.
“He phoned me the day before the bombing to say he would take the children to get the Christmas tree and do the decorations.
“The children heard about the bombing on the television. I turned to my little one and said to her: “You can forget daddy for this afternoon, because he is going to be busy”.
Christmas Morning in Divis
On Christmas morning 1972 Jean McConville’s seven youngest children, including six year old twins, were still on their own in the flat from which their mother had been abducted from a fortnight earlier.
Some time later that week the family were visited by a stranger who gave them their mother’s purse containing 52 pence and her three rings.
It wasn’t until 16th January the following year that the story became public with a front page headline appearing on the Belfast Telegraph and an interview with the children broadcast on the BBC programme Scene Around Six the following day.
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| First report on the disappearance of Jean McConville |
The family was split up by social services and brought into care with one of the orphans sent to a children’s home which was to become notorious for child abuse. In 2014 he testified to the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry describing repeated sexual and physical abuse and starvation.
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| Some of the McConville children in a news report from January 1972 |
Conclusions
Across the years of the PIRA campaign between 18th and 25th December the following people were murdered or killed as a result of PIRA activity:
UUP councillor William Johnston on 18th December 1972 , two soldiers murdered in a bomb attack in 1975 - Cyril McDonald and Colin McInnes, James Burney, a soldier shot on 19th December 1978, bar steward and off duty UDR man Austin Smith on 19th December 1982, Catholic civilian Margaret McCorry shot at a bus stop on 20th December 1971, electrician and off duty UDR man George Hamilton on 20th December 1972, bank clerk Rodney Fenton on 20th December 1973, off duty RUCR man Wilfred Wethers shot in the gateway to his home on 20th December 1990, Catholic civilian Josephine McGeown who was killed when the car she was travelling in crashed into a hijacked lorry the PIRA were using to block a road on 20th December 1976, Catholic bar owner John Lavery on 21st December 1971, soldiers Graham Duggan, Kevin Johnson and Glen Ling on 21st December 1978, sales rep and off duty RUCR Samuel Armour on 22nd December 1976, businessman and off duty RUCR man Stanley Hazelton on 22nd December 1979, company director Andrew Jardin on 23rd December 1970 and coach builder Aubrey Harshaw on Christmas Eve 1973.
That’s a total of:
6 soldiers,
6 civilians,
3 off duty RUCR,
2 off duty UDR and
1 politician.
The fact that the PIRA didn’t murder anyone on Christmas Day itself wasn’t because they didn’t try as an article published in the Belfast Telegraph on 27th December 1973 illustrates.
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| Click to enlarge |
As the years went by and Republicans became more PR conscious it become customary to call Christmas ceasefires. You will note that all but one of the cases occurred in the 1970s.
However, as the bombing of Harrods illustrated they were prepared to engage in the most callous of murders at Christmas time well into the 1980s - an act which Gerry Adams refused to condemn at the time and since.
But perhaps most telling of all the murders when we look at where Northern Ireland is today is that of Aubrey Harshaw. In the blast which killed the 18 year old on Christmas Eve 1973 two others died. Bombers Edward Grant and Brendan Quinn were killed as they placed the bomb in the bar.
On Christmas Day 2018 we have a definition of victim in Northern Ireland which draws no distinction between those bombers and young Aubrey Harshaw.
Now there's something which should give us all pause for thought.
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| One of the many other instances which could have been included. Click to enlarge, |
A note on sources
In order to write this blog post I have drawn material from the following sources:
Lost Lives by McKittrick et al.
Lost Lives by McKittrick et al.
Constabulary Heroes 1826-2009: Incorporating RUC GC/PSNI by Sam Trotter
Microfilm records of the Belfast News Letter
I have sought to be careful but if anyone spots factual errors in the above piece please email me at onthisdayni@gmail.com , message the Facebook page or PM me on Twitter.
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