The organisational skills of the loyalists were impressive then. The strike was run from Vanguard headquarters at 9 Hawthornden Road, in east Belfast, by the UDA spokesman and Vanguard Assembly member Glenn Barr, with a fifteen-strong committee that included representatives of all the main political parties. Also on that committee along with the politicians and trade unionists were Andy Tyrie of the UDA, Ken Gibson of the UVF, and Lt Col. Brush of Down Orange Welfare. As well as power cuts, the strike committee started a system of issuing ‘passes’, so that workers in essential services could buy petrol: anyone who wanted to move about had to apply to the strike headquarters. Initially, the politicians were told to stay away for the duration of the strike – and it suited them perfectly. For although the idea of the strike, according to Trimble, had originally come from Vanguard, they did not want it to be thought to be theirs alone or even originating primarily with them.17 The focus of attention soon moved even further away from conventional politics and street protest: on 17 May, the UVF bombed Dublin and Monaghan, killing 33 people. It was the heaviest day of casualties during the entire Troubles. ‘I was very surprised,’ says Trimble. ‘The whole object of the strike was that it was non-violent action. The perceived wisdom was that it was mid-Ulster UVF. I could never see the logic of sectarian attacks. This is one of the worrying things about loyalist paramilitarism, its absence of intelligence in both senses of the word.’18 Trimble was present at Hawthornden Road on the evening that the Dublin-Monaghan bombs went off: despite Craig’s instruction to key Vanguard figures to stay away so that the grassroots elements could appear to run the show, he could not stay away from the scene of the action for very long.19
After acting as telephone operator, Trimble graduated to printing very amateurish passes on a children’s Letraset, which those who applied to the UWC could show at road blocks to go and buy fuel. Eventually, he produced the daily strike bulletin with Sammy Smyth of the UDA.20 Smyth was a figure given to very extreme pronouncements: the Irish Times reported him as saying that ‘I am very happy about the bombings in Dublin. There is a war with the Free State and now we are laughing at them.’ For these, remarks, Smyth was ‘disciplined’ by the UDA – that is, beaten up – and was removed as a spokesman; he was murdered by the IRA in 1976.21 (Curiously, until I raised the matter with him, Trimble states that he was unaware of Smyth’s views, since he rarely read the newspapers in those fevered days). Indeed, at one point, Trimble was embarrassed when a professor at Queen’s turned up at Hawthornden Road wondering how examinations would be run with petrol so severely rationed. ‘Oh, Trimble knows all about that,’ replied the trade unionist. The two university colleagues then had a strained conversation. For the most part, though, Trimble – who at the time stayed at his mother’s house in Kilcooley – remembers ‘an almost blitz spirit’. Local farmers, for instance, gave milk away rather than throw it out because they could not sell it. The sense of solidarity was reinforced by the knowledge that they were being listened to by the security forces. Trimble remembers watching a British soldier crawling along the ground trying to install a microphone at Hawthornden Road: he laughed loudly when George Green simply placed a radio near the device and switched it on, drowning out the loyalists’ words. Trimble suspected that his mother’s telephone was tapped, and his concerns were vindicated when she returned from holiday and was surprised to find that the line had been broken, which tended to occur when the primitive devices of the period were disconnected: Trimble, though, never sought to venture an explanation to her for this inconvenience!22 In fact, says one senior security source of the era, the technology even then was such that a breakdown of Ivy Trimble’s telephone could not have been caused by the removal of the tap. But the source confirms that Trimble’s telephone, along with many others, was monitored in this period.23
In these heady days for loyalists, Trimble was hugely animated. Herb Wallace, his closest colleague at Queen’s, remembers that he was ‘terribly excited to be associated with the leading lights on the UWC. Glenn Barr even told him that when he became Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Trimble would be Minister of Law Reform.’24 On the morning that the Prime Minister was to make a broadcast to the nation about the growing crisis, Trimble attended a key meeting of the strike coordinating committee. Present were Craig, Paisley, West and the workers’ representatives. They had just received a draft of Wilson’s address condemning the strikers in even harsher language than the Prime Minister eventually employed. Trimble, like everyone else, thought that if he went ahead with that version, there would be an explosion of uncontrollable violence. ‘I reckoned: “This is madness. This will destroy the country and double the death toll overnight.”’25 Word also came through back-channels that as they watched the broadcast that night, the UWC would be swooped on by the Army. Accordingly, the UWC high command went to ground and left the elected politicians behind: the Army would then find they had bagged a bunch of parliamentarians, plus the Assistant Dean of the Law Faculty at Queen’s University. But before they departed, the UWC did have one serious discussion about the legal aspects of a possible declaration of martial law. Trimble had brought along a copy of R.F.V. Heuston’s Essays in Constitutional Law, which had an excellent treatment of the subject. The strike leaders were obviously sufficiently impressed by Trimble’s exposition to borrow his copy of Heuston. It was not returned – and the Army never came anyhow.26
Wilson, in the end, diluted his speech, but it nonetheless turned out to be his best-known pronouncement ever on Ulster, in which he attacked the loyalists for ‘sponging’ on Westminster.27 The strikers promptly began to wear little sponges on their lapels, and the effect of Wilson’s speech was, Trimble recalls, to send the already high levels of support for the loyalists through the roof.28 Despite Wilson’s own resentment of the strikers, neither the Northern Ireland Office nor the Army wished to confront them: why risk bloodshed, they reasoned, for the sake of a doomed executive? Faulkner, faced with a complete end to electricity supplies, more unburied dead, and untreated sewage bowed to the inevitable and resigned with the executive on 28 May 1974. The Council of Ireland died with it and Merlyn Rees, the Ulster Secretary, resumed full-scale direct rule from London. Thereupon, the raison d’être of the strike vanished: those who wanted to press on and secure the return of the old Stormont were left isolated. Unionists had shown that they could veto unwelcome developments, but they had neither the strength nor the cohesion to reimpose Stormont.
Trimble, though not a figure of the first rank in the strike, had impressed many of those around him by taking his stand. ‘It could have ruined his career in law – but he stood up and was counted,’ says Andy Tyrie. ‘David Trimble, David Burnside and Bill Craig were prepared to suffer the consequences. It could have been a failure. There were no MPs there. They all ran and hid over the law-breaking. All those generals and captains in the Orange