Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine
surprised members of a neighbouring battalion. Why shout about surrender at the start of a major push? But the cries were not referring to the current battle, but to a siege long gone, and to a state of mind ever present.
Walking through John Beresford-Ash’s house, with its portraits and its treasured jumble collected down the centuries, gave me a vivid sense of the family’s continuity. But his story is interesting in its own right. He came back to Northern Ireland in 1959, after school at Eton and a spell in the Irish Guards. ‘I became the first member of either the Beresford family or the Ash family to employ Catholics. Of course, they had had Roman Catholic tenants, but they had never employed them in the house, or on the farm, or as coachmen. I did it because I thought it was the most sensible thing to do.’
Beresford-Ash says that he could see the political situation deteriorating in the Sixties: ‘It was entirely the intransigence of the Proddies. The problem was not just the virulent speeches of people like Paisley, but also the blind stupidity of the so-called posh Protestants who ran everything. Roman Catholics in the Creggan and the Bogside had no vote at all. It was just so thick and stupid. And the British government took no interest in the situation. They couldn’t give a damn. I joined what was then the Unionist and Conservative party, and I had ideas. I said, “You’re riding for a fall!” I said the business about voting and gerrymandering has to end, but I was told that I was a new boy, and that I knew absolutely bugger-all about anything. Those were the things that kept us free, as they put it. Up in the Creggan, the roads were one-track because it was said the Roman Catholics would never have enough money to buy cars, so there was no need for cars to be able to pass each other. All this went on until the mid-Sixties. Most extraordinary blinkered situation among the Proddies over here.’
He remembers the reaction of other Protestant landowners to the fact that he was employing Catholics:
‘Oh, they thought I was beyond the pale. I was “one of them”. But my employees got on perfectly well with each other. There was no way they would be allowed to fight – or I would just sack the lot of them. I was the first member of our family to go to the Catholic church on Beech Hill, to a funeral. Paddy Gormley, our stack man, had died. I put on tails and a top hat, and I went inside the church, and none of them had ever seen that before. It impressed them that I would bother to do that, but I didn’t expect my Presbyterian men to go inside the church. They were willing to stand outside, and go to the grave – and none of them had ever done that before.’
In 1970 he met Cardinal Conway, the Catholic Primate of All Ireland:
‘The Cardinal had been asked to St Columb’s by the Dean, but nobody would talk to him at the Diocesan tea party afterwards. So I said to Agnès, “For God’s sake, go and get a table, and I’ll bring him over.” We started talking about life – not about Northern Ireland – and he realized that Agnès was French, and he said, “Whereabouts are you from?” and she said her father lived in Bar-le-Duc, and he said, “I remember coming back from Rome once, we stopped there when I was a young priest, and we went to the barber. We were talking among ourselves in Gaelic, and the barber said to us, in French, ‘What the hell language is that?’ and I said it was Gaelic. The barber looked at me and said, ‘Mon père, vous êtes préhistorique!’” But nobody else would talk to Conway at this tea party, and Agnès said that the thing to do was not to treat him as a bloody pariah. Agnès can do that, and so can I, and that’s how you make friends.’
For all that he recognized the political tension in Northern Ireland forty years ago, Beresford-Ash did not foresee the Troubles. ‘I don’t think anybody did,’ he says. He and Agnès were married in Paris in the spring of 1968, at the time of the student riots: ‘It’s so funny, I remember all the people at the reception after the service, saying it was wonderful that I was taking Agnès away to this lovely place from the ghastly city of Paris. Then, the next forty years…’
In 1971 Beresford-Ash almost lost his life, during an encounter with a local figure: ‘I was listening to the ten o’clock news one evening, and I realized I’d run out of cigarettes. I got in the car – Agnès was away in Paris – and I went to Guildhall Square. But the cigarette machine had been vandalized, so I went to Fiorentini’s café. There were two girls sitting in the café, and they asked me if I could give them a lift home. I thought to myself, well now, two young girls, my wife’s away. What about it? So I said yes, and asked where they lived. They said in a very subdued whisper, “The Creggan.” I thought about it – my God! This really is an opportunity. The Creggan was a no-go area, I could say that I’ve been there, and nobody else has. So I said OK, and I finished my cup of coffee, and Mr Fiorentini gave me two packets of cigarettes. We got in the car, and went up into the Lecky Road, and there were armed IRA men all over the place. The girls said some password to them, and we were let through. Then we were let through a second one by Free Derry Corner. Just after that there was a third one – and all hell broke loose. The car was surrounded. I was pulled out and forced onto the ground, and the girls were taken away.
‘Now, I looked and sounded like a British officer; I was about 30, and spoke the Queen’s English, so somebody must have assumed that I was a British officer, or that I was trying to spy on the IRA. My car was taken away, and I was bundled into the back of another car, and I was sat on by about five heavy young men – which was a most horrid thing. I was given a few kicks – not in the balls – but around the back and arms, and I was manhandled across a bit of green in front of the modern Catholic cathedral, into a place where I was sat in a chair, with a lightbulb above me, just like interrogations in films. A couple of fellows were behind me with old-fashioned Sterling machine guns, pointing at the back of my head, and then the most extraordinary sight. A crocodile of about a dozen men entered, all in balaclavas, a pretty shambolic-looking lot. Then an extraordinary character came in, who had the air of a deserter from the army. He was clean, fair-haired and much younger than me.’ (This man would one day rise to political prominence in the republican movement.)
‘The man took position behind my head, drew a pistol from his belt, and asked me various questions – which were pretty banal. Since I wasn’t in the army, and I wasn’t in the Ulster Defence Regiment, he couldn’t get any information out of me. He said, “Your car’s been seen going out of Ebrington Barracks on many occasions, so you must be a spy!” I said to him, “My dear fellow, you’re completely and absolutely crazy! These are my friends. These people were at school with me. Of course I’m going to go and see them and have them to my house. Do you think they’re going to tell me secrets about you? You’d have to be joking – they just don’t do that sort of thing!” Eventually he got fed up talking to me, and I stayed with these fellows guarding me for several hours. There was absolutely no brutality whatsoever, no question.
‘Eventually somebody else came in, and said, “OK, you. We’ll give you back your car” and I was led outside, and there was the car, engine running. The man who had been interrogating me was in an absolute fury. His eyes were just full of fury. He drew his pistol, cocked it, put it beside my head, and this other fellow said, “Oh no! Don’t kill him! We’ve checked him out with the boys in Ardmore, and he and his family have always been decent to people like us. He’s OK.” I remember those words very well; one tends to listen if you think you’re about to be killed. The man was absolutely livid. He put his pistol back in his belt and said, “Fuck off!” So I got in the car and drove away. But I had to ask, “Could you please show me the way out? I’ve never been here before.” And they did – they got into another car and they drove in front of me! They also pinched my cigarettes, which I really objected to. I still didn’t have any cigarettes after the whole bloody night.’
Many years later Beresford-Ash came across his interrogator again. ‘We were in a pizza restaurant one day, eating our nice pizzas, and as I walked through to have a pee, I walked past him. His table had a screen in front, with a bit of ivy on it, and as I went past, I put my fist through the screen, just to annoy him. I don’t know if he saw my face, but he could have seen my fist, all right.’
Thirty years after his experience in the Creggan, Beresford-Ash was again fortunate to escape with his life; between August 1997 and June 1998 his house was fire-bombed three times. He explains, ‘On the feast of the Assumption in August – the “Catholic Twelfth”