Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine
about in our woods, all you’ve got to do is go and pick it up. I’d actually help them pick it up and make their bonfire with them – not a hope – they must go and cut down young trees instead. I got fed up with this, and I remonstrated with them.’ He was told, ‘We’ll get you for this!’
One night shortly afterwards Beresford-Ash and his wife were asleep in bed, when ‘there was a crash. It was the hall windows coming in, and petrol bombs landing. I was a damn sight fitter in those days, and I was down in a few seconds. My daughter also came down and, between us, we put the fires out.’
Six months later the house was attacked again. ‘This time it was much more dangerous, because they bust a hole through a window, and put a can of petrol on the window seat. They sprayed paraffin all round it, and set it alight; the idea was that when I came down to put the fire out, it would explode and blow me up, and the house as well. But someone – “the man upstairs” – was looking after me because the petrol can leaked. So when I came downstairs I saw a terrific ball of fire. There were fumes, and smoke, and flames, but I could see the white faces of my ancestors on the walls, and I remember saying to them, “It’s all right, chaps! I’ll save you!” And by God, I bloody well did! I still get quite emotional about that. I went over to pick up the water fire-extinguisher, and my bloody hip dislocated. Agnès was ringing up the fire brigade in the kitchen, and she heard me yelping, and she thought I’d caught fire, so she came in with a bucket of water. “Darling, don’t throw it over me,” I said, “throw it on the fire!” Then the fire brigade arrived, and they were absolutely superb.’
A few months later Beresford-Ash had a sixtieth-birthday party. ‘The local paper took a picture of Agnès, myself, and our three daughters outside the house, which they published, and we had a nice birthday lunch. Very soon after that, there was a hell of a thumping on the windows. By this stage we’d got bulletproof security windows, so they couldn’t fire-bomb the house. Instead they lit five fires on the gravel at the front, which represented myself, my wife, and our three children being burned.’
Beresford-Ash is convinced that he knows the identity of the chief culprit: ‘It was all done by the same people, led by the same man, and everybody knew it, the police knew it, it was the joke of the local pub.’ He later met a barrister, and told him the whole story: ‘I said, “For you, in the legal profession, how do you feel about this?” He said, “We know, and our judges know, who has done these things over the years, who these people have killed, and when and how they killed them.” I said, “Look, mate, point of it is, you’re prepared to say that, but then you’re prepared to go back on Monday morning and draw the old pay?” And he said, “Yes. Why not? Because if I didn’t, somebody else worse than me certainly would.” What can you say to that?’
I asked Beresford-Ash whether he considered moving away from Ashbrook after the attacks. ‘What? Leave here? Good God no! My dear Josh! This house has woodworm and dry rot, but, my God, I’m fond of it, and nobody’s going to kick me out of here! My daughter summed it up: after the second petrol bombing, Agnès was fed up and said we ought to go, but my daughter said, “Come on, Mum! We were here before these people, and we’ll be here after them!”’
Beresford-Ash is a man of great charm, who has made efforts over the years to foster good local relations, and this fact probably saved his life in the Creggan. Nevertheless, his attitude hardens as he discusses the peace process. ‘When the process started, I would wake up in the morning and listen to the news on Radio 4, and think to myself, thank God another soldier or policeman hasn’t been killed. But that has been the only real benefit. Otherwise I consider it the most disgraceful and despicable surrender by the British politicians, the judiciary, the legal profession, and it should have been stopped immediately it started. Because the Queen’s enemies were attacking the Crown forces. They should still be hanged – they’ve done it. And that’s my instinct.’
In Killyleagh I met another man whose family arrived in Ulster four centuries ago. Denys Rowan Hamilton is a man of precise military bearing beneath which lies a charming streak of mischief who, after coming to live in Northern Ireland in 1967, quickly became infuriated by much of what he saw. Born and raised in Scotland, Rowan Hamilton spent his childhood holidays in Ireland, and on leaving the army in his late forties he moved to County Down. He became the master of Killyleagh Castle, a fairy-tale fortress of towers and dogtooth walls that stands above the town. The first castle on the site was built by the Normans shortly their arrival. In 1604 the castle was taken over by Sir James Hamilton, an Anglican from Ayrshire, who was granted extensive lands in Ulster during the first plantation. It has remained in the family ever since. In 2000 Rowan Hamilton passed it on to his son and now lives in a house outside the town, where I kept him from his lunch, urging him to tell of his experiences.
‘When I made up my mind to come here,’ he says, ‘I was wondering what the hell I was going to do. I was going to start a new life. It’s quite a thing to do at 47.’ He was immediately fêted by well-to-do society: ‘They were saying, “We’ve got to have him!” and it was because I was the young Hamilton of Killyleagh. It really makes me laugh. They didn’t know me at all. I might have been the most ghastly shit.’
Killyleagh Castle, into which the ‘young Hamilton’ was moving, had been requisitioned by the army during the war, and had suffered from years of neglect: ‘My great uncle was clever, he wrote Latin poems and that sort of thing, but he was a useless fellow, and never did a stroke of work. Not much happened when he was in the castle. He sold a farm a year to pay his servants. When I finally took over, there were only twenty-seven acres left out of an estate that once ran up to Bangor. If we hadn’t come along, the castle would never have survived. Now it’s in better nick than it’s been for 150 years. And my son, the first Hamilton in four hundred years to make a penny, has redecorated it very nicely.’
On arriving in Northern Ireland, Denys Rowan Hamilton took an interest in more than just his castle, however. He had entered a world that was quite alien to him: ‘I had arrived from a sane society. This place wasn’t a democracy!’ He remembers meeting a clerk of the works at the council: ‘He would wring his flat cap in humility, asking if I had any jobs for him to do, and then he would start talking about all the dreadful murders of Protestants throughout history. He knew them all. He’d been taught at his mother’s knee how dreadful the Catholics were.’ Rowan Hamilton was furious at much of what he saw and heard, and he freely expressed his views. His stance, he believes, reflected his family’s values: ‘My family had always been moderate and liberal in their views. When Catholics had wanted their own church, the Hamiltons provided them with a place to hold their services.’
Rowan Hamilton was asked to stand as a reforming unionist candidate in the 1969 General Election. ‘I said I would stand. It was totally on principle. I wasn’t a politician, but I couldn’t believe that people could not try to get on with the other side. As soon as it was announced that I would stand, two staunch, bigoted unionists arrived at the castle. They demanded that I stood down. These were “respectable” people, masters of the stag hounds, and they marched towards me, yelling “No Surrender!” I pleaded my case to them, but they were pretty threatening. They told me that my mother would never speak to me again. I wouldn’t have come here if I’d known it would be like this! It was disruptive of the peaceful life that I’d wanted!’
Rowan Hamilton lost the election heavily, but it is a measure of his principle and determination that in a later election he agreed to stand for the Alliance Party, which seeks to bridge the gap between Catholics and Protestants. ‘In the run-up to that election,’ he says, ‘the person who invited me to stand, declined to come out in public and support me. He was frightened and didn’t have the guts to stand up for his views. I would say that I was socially ostracized for my stance.’ This foray into politics placed him in unlikely situations: ‘I found myself taking part in a roadblock for half an hour near Seaforde, at a junction of some importance. I was compelled to do it for political reasons, but I was rather embarrassed. It wasn’t really my thing.’
Rowan Hamilton is not the first member of his family to take a controversial political stance. His great-great-great grandfather, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, had been a prominent member of the Society of United Irishmen. The Society, formed in 1791 in Ulster, was a secret organization,