The execution of Tom Williams and rioting in Belfast

Some war chronologies record under 4 September 1942 that riots instigated by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) broke out in Belfast during the night. The sources do not confirm any large-scale street disturbances in those days. What they do describe is the chain of events behind that note: on 2 September 1942 a nineteen-year-old IRA member, Thomas (Tom) Williams, convicted of killing a policeman, was hanged in Belfast’s Crumlin Road Gaol, and over the following days, in accordance with an earlier order from the organisation’s leadership, IRA units attacked police stations and patrols in Belfast and in the provincial parts of Northern Ireland. In gunfights in the Catholic districts of west Belfast on 3 and 4 September the police shot two IRA members, and the round-ups took in more than two hundred people. It is most likely this series of attacks, rather than mob rioting, that lies behind the entry about “IRA riots”.

The IRA and the war

Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom since the partition of the island in 1921, was governed by Protestant unionists, while the Catholic minority, concentrated in Belfast in the districts around the Falls Road, regarded itself as discriminated against. The IRA, which recognised neither partition nor the government in Dublin, had waged a bombing campaign in England in 1939–1940 that ended with the arrest and internment of its members on both sides of the border. The war brought Northern Ireland German air raids and, from January 1942, American troops as well. The Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, protested against their presence, and the IRA leadership saw it as an opportunity: in the spring of 1942 the new chief of staff, Hugh McAteer, was preparing a campaign against the British administration and armed forces in the North.

Some IRA activists also pinned their hopes on the Germans. In 1942 the organisation’s adjutant general met Günther Schütz, an Abwehr agent in hiding in Ireland, but no real German help came of it. For the government in Belfast, as earlier for the government in Dublin, the IRA in wartime was above all a threat to the security of the state, and its activities a matter in which no leniency would be shown.

Easter 1942

For Easter 1942 the Northern Ireland government banned parades commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916. On Easter Sunday, 5 April, six members of C Company of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, supported by two women, were to draw off the police so that illegal parades could go ahead in west Belfast. The group fired on a patrol of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), Northern Ireland’s police force, and fell back to a house in Cawnpore Street, where a gunfight followed. In it Constable Patrick Murphy was killed – a Catholic from the Falls Road area, a father of nine and one of the few Catholics in the ranks of the RUC. Tom Williams, who led the group, was shot three times, and all six men were arrested.

Who fired the fatal shot remains disputed. Williams, lying in hospital, took full responsibility as the group’s commander. The court, however, sentenced all six to death under the doctrine of common purpose, by which every participant in an attack is answerable for a killing committed in its course. Among those sentenced was the 21-year-old Joe Cahill, later one of the leaders of the IRA.

Five reprieved, the gallows for one

The death sentences passed on six young men stirred Catholics on both sides of the border. A petition for clemency was signed, according to various accounts, by about 200,000 people (the figure most often given is 207,000 signatures). De Valera’s government supported the campaign and made representations in London, Catholic clergy also pleaded for mercy, and according to some sources the State Department and the Holy See of Pope Pius XII took an interest in the case. At the end of August the Northern Ireland authorities, with whom the decision lay, commuted five of the sentences to life imprisonment. Williams, who had admitted to leading the operation, was excluded from the reprieve.

The sentence was carried out at 8 a.m. on 2 September 1942 in Crumlin Road Gaol. The hangman, Thomas Pierrepoint, assisted by his nephew Albert Pierrepoint, later Britain’s chief executioner, came over from England. From seven o’clock the police had closed the Crumlin Road for about a quarter of a mile on either side of the prison. Crowds, mostly women, gathered in the nearby streets. As eight o’clock approached, Catholics knelt in the roadway and recited the rosary, while groups of loyalists responded by singing Orange songs and hurling abuse at those praying. There were no serious clashes. Several people were detained as the crowd was dispersed, and two men were later sentenced to three months in prison for taking part in an unlawful assembly. Williams’s body was buried in an unmarked grave within the prison grounds.

IRA attacks in early September

On 1 September the IRA leadership issued an order that, if the execution went ahead, all commanders were to go over to offensive action. On the day of the execution some twenty IRA men set out in a commandeered lorry to attack the barracks at Crossmaglen in County Armagh, but on the way they ran into an RUC patrol; after an exchange of fire the policemen surrendered and were let go. On 3 September a mine wrecked the front of the police station at Randalstown in County Antrim, wounding a sergeant. The same day, in Sultan Street in west Belfast, the police shot the sixteen-year-old IRA member Gerry Adams, father of the later Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams; the following day another IRA member, James Bannon, was wounded in an ambush in Leeson Street. In County Fermanagh a mine laid under the police station at Belleek failed to explode, and at Clady in County Tyrone, according to listings of the campaign, two RUC constables were killed; these listings date the attack to 5 September. On the morning of 3 September the RUC detained more than two hundred people in Belfast.

Historians treat the shootings and round-ups of early September as the beginning of the IRA’s so-called Northern Campaign, waged intermittently until 1944. According to J. Bowyer Bell, the organisation carried out some sixty armed attacks by December 1942, even though only a few dozen of its active members were still at large.

Significance

The IRA’s September offensive soon petered out. The police in the North and the government in Dublin responded with round-ups and internment. On 9 September Sergeant Denis O’Brien of the Irish Special Branch, a former IRA member, was shot dead in Dublin in defiance of a ban on armed operations in the South, which only hardened the line taken by de Valera’s government. On 30 September Patrick Dermody, one of the leaders of the attack on Crossmaglen, was killed in a gunfight with police in County Cavan. In October the RUC arrested the chief of staff, McAteer, and according to listings of the campaign about 320 members and sympathisers of the organisation were detained in the North. Escapes from the prisons in Belfast and Londonderry in early 1943 did not restore its strength, and many of the escapers were caught by the Irish Army on the other side of the border. In November 1942 the Dublin government executed the IRA member Maurice O’Neill, convicted of killing a detective, and in 1944 Charlie Kerins for the murder of O’Brien. By the end of the war the IRA was practically inactive in Northern Ireland, and the Irish Minister for Justice, Gerald Boland, boasted that he had “killed” it. The organisation revived only in the 1950s.

For the course of the war the September events in Belfast had no military significance. Northern Ireland remained an important Allied base: the escorts of the convoys of the Battle of the Atlantic operated through the port of Londonderry, and American troops trained on its territory before the landings in North Africa. The Williams case nevertheless showed that the war had not suspended the island’s old divisions. Catholics remembered the execution of a nineteen-year-old; unionists remembered the murdered policeman, a father of nine. Williams’s remains were released to his family only after Crumlin Road Gaol had closed; on 19 January 2000 he was buried in Milltown Cemetery in Belfast in the presence of thousands of people, among them Joe Cahill, who outlived him by more than sixty years.