Lights, camera, action as the B Specials are put in spotlight
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LAST weekend the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association held a meeting to commemorate its 40th anniversary.
During the course of the event one founding member praised the courage of all those who had risked life and limb to bring about social justice for all creeds in what was then a society where Protestantism ruled the roost. He went on to say that the movement had achieved its three main objectives through peaceful protest, namely one man/one vote, the disarming of the RUC and the disbandment of the B Specials.
The B Specials were an armed militia composed almost completely of Protestant loyalists. Indeed, the first gun I ever fired was a Lee Enfield rifle that belonged to a pal of mine who had joined the Bs. At weekends he would bring his weapon to a field near where we lived and give us turns at shooting a piece of paper pinned to a tree. Thinking back on it, I realise that what we were doing was probably highly illegal but it was much more exciting than trying to hit those wee metal ducks with an air rifle at the amusement park in Bangor.
A year or two later I saw the B Specials in action for the first time when I was stopped by them at a roadblock near Portrush in the middle of the night. When I wound down the car window one of them thrust the barrel of his machinegun into my ear and demanded to know where I was going. This was still several years before the so-called “Troubles” began so I’m not quite sure what he and his chums were looking for. When I showed him my driving licence he examined it suspiciously, before handing it back reluctantly and telling me to move on. I thought he meant that I could continue my journey so I began to drive off, passing one of his colleagues as I did so.
This was almost a fatal mistake on my part. As I pulled away from the second gunman he roared: “Stop or I shoot!” Thank goodness I had practised my emergency braking technique. I braked so hard that my passengers nearly went through the windscreen. Apparently the first constable had meant for me to drive just as far as the next part-time cop for further questioning. It was quite a hair-raising moment. That machinegun would have made an awful mess of my dad’s Morris Minor.
That was my first and last run-in with those special constables but I was able to use the experience to inform my performance some 20 years later when I was cast in the role of a B Special sergeant in a BBC Northern Ireland television drama called The Cry. The story revolved around a young Ulster journalist who was based in London and who had come home for a short visit. On his first night back he hears someone crying for help and looks out the window of his parents’ house in time to see three B Specials kicking lumps out of a young Catholic man.
Given the sensitivity of the subject and the fact that the nationalist community had less than fond memories of the Bs the BBC decided to shoot the scene in a loyalist village. This proved to be a disastrous choice. On the first day of filming we were bussed to the village’s Orange Hall to change into our uniforms. The first scene saw me marching my men down the main street to the town’s car park where I was to drill them. Little did I know that one of the extras I was drilling was to go on to be one of Northern Ireland’s most successful actors. At a charity golf match last year a certain James Nesbitt informed me that he was one of the merry band under my command that day.
The first day’s filming went according to plan but when we returned the following day all hell broke loose. One of the actors had left the script in the Orange Hall and the caretaker had read it. Discerning that it did not show the B Specials in the best possible light he informed the president of the association that represents the disbanded force. This gentleman was waiting for us when we arrived at the hall. He told the director that he had read the script and that the play was a disgraceful slur on a fine body of men. The director, an Englishman who was not totally au fait with the tribal divisions in that part of the Emerald Isle, did his best to placate the man but he was having none of it.
Ignoring him as best he could, the director attempted to shoot the first scene of the day’s schedule, one that involved me addressing my troops, but as soon as he called “Action” a tractor was driven between me and the camera by a burly big farmer who shouted “No surrender” before bursting into a chorus of The Sash My Father Wore. More tractors and trucks appeared and filming had to be abandoned. We were all told to go home and await further developments.
The whole incident went out on the six o’clock news. As a result, a nationalist village welcomed the production with open arms and I found myself a week later being bussed into said village where the locals turned out en masse waving their Irish tricolours.
Unfortunately, not all the villagers knew exactly what was going on. That night as we rehearsed the scene where my character beats up his victim, one of the lighting men ran up to me and said: “You better get after those two fellas. They came out of the pub across the road and I heard one of them say ‘Jeez, boy, the Bs are back. Come on an’ we’ll get our guns and come back and sort them out.’” I ran off after them, ignoring the protests from the director. When I caught up with the two bhoyos one of them snarled: “What d’you want?”
I explained that I was just an actor playing a part but I could see they weren’t convinced so I took my hat off and danced up and down the street singing Give Me that Old Soft Shoe. Thankfully, that seemed to do the trick. One of them muttered: “You might be an actor, but you’re certainly no dancer.”
Everybody’s a critic.
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