Part II – the day the queen got stoned
**See also >>Day queen got stoned – the full story 40 years after event
“Paisley worked on my bench, making boxes and wooden practice targets for the RAF, I think. He knew my point of view and listened to me. We had many arguments over 1916 and what happened here after 1921. Sometimes they were so hot and heavy that the work stopped”
Danny Morrison
29/06/2006
After being sentenced to four years imprisonment for dropping a breeze block on the British queen’s Rolls Royce, 17-year-old John Morgan was brought to the reception in Crumlin Road jail where he was roughed up by warders. He spent a month on ‘stage 1’, a period during which he had to qualify for association and to earn privileges such as tobacco and wages.
He was physically attacked and was involved in many fights. But he had been a boxer and could handle himself and was initially supported by five young men from Andersonstown who were serving short sentences for political offences. He was made to wear a brown prison uniform with a red star sewed onto one of its arms. This indicated that he was a ‘first-time’ offender and was to be kept away from ‘habitual criminals’. Ironically, he was put to work in the same joinery shops as Gusty Spence and the rest of his UVF gang who had just been sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering two Catholics – John Scullion and Peter Ward – earlier that year.
“It was very tense at first. There was a lot of dirty looks but that eventually died. One of my workmates was a nationalist who had got 18 months for the Cromac Square riots which Paisley had provoked.
“We were supposed to be separated from the lifers by a sliding wooden door between the workshops but it was left open because of the dust. We had loud arguments which became discussions.”
In the workshops were Leslie Porter, a UVF driver, who was doing four years; Noel Docherty, serving two years, a former B-Special who had set up the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee with Paisley, and the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, which Docherty ‘secretly’ armed. Docherty had supplied the gelignite to the UVF which was used in the bombing campaign to bring down the government of Terence O’Neill (for which the IRA was falsely blamed). The others were Spence, William Millar, Bob Williamson and Eddy McCullagh.
Hugh McClean, who, when arrested for murder, told police: “I am terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisley or decided to follow him”, worked elsewhere, in the plumbing shop.
“I was there when Paisley came in after getting three months for unlawful assembly. My family lived in Dover Street, off Divis Street, and Paisley had been well-known for triggering the riots there by threatening to come in and remove the Tricolour from Sinn Fein’s election offices in 1964. That was the first time I was beaten up by the RUC.
“Paisley worked on my bench, making boxes and wooden practice targets for the RAF, I think. He knew my point of view and listened to me. We had many arguments over 1916 and what happened here after 1921. Sometimes they were so hot and heavy that the work stopped.
“We ended up walking around the yard together much to the disgust of the ‘hardliners’ but I totally disagreed with his whole philosophy and outlook as regards republicanism. He would not acknowledge what was wrong here and would fly off the handle. I found him a very funny man, at times, but a fanatic. We parted on good terms and he said that if I was ever in trouble he would ask, help, assist if he could.”
Leslie Porter also became friendly with Morgan. For walking around the yard with him and learning Irish (as Gusty Spence was later to do) Porter was put off the wing by the UVF and went on to share a cell with Morgan. They were actually released from prison on the same day.
“Just before we were released we were measured up for clothes. Noel chose slacks and a jacket and I ended up getting a pinstripe 1920s-looking suit, with a hat, fit for a Chicago gangster. We walked out of the jail together but I never saw him again.”
Three months after Morgan’s release his family in Dover Street and hundreds of other Catholic families across Belfast were intimidated or burnt out of their homes in the pogroms of August 1969. Morgan subsequently worked for many years in London before returning to Belfast when his mother, who has since passed away, became seriously ill. He worked up until five years ago when he developed a degenerative disease of the arteries and has had three minor strokes. He guards his privacy and only recently agreed to talk about the incident which at the time made the headlines in Britain and Ireland.
“I had left school at 15 without any qualifications and joined a plumbing firm. But when I was overlooked for an apprenticeship, which was given to the younger brother of a Protestant co-worker, I decided to go to Dublin. I was given work by Harry White, a former neighbour of my father, who had his own plumbing business.”
White had been active in the IRA bombing campaign in England during the 1940s and had been sentenced to death for the killing of a Garda special branch officer during a shoot-out but the sentence had been commuted.
“Harry White opened my eyes to the history and politics of Ireland. I got involved with the Kevin Barry Club and with the renovation committee for Kilmainham jail on which Harry and his wife Kathleen were members. All Harry’s family spoke nothing but Irish in their home – and I was amazed. Every Friday night we went to a republican gathering where traditional Irish music and patriotic ballads were kept alive.
“I got involved in the campaign to replace the post boxes which had been merely painted green after 1921 but still had the royal emblem embossed on them. At the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising myself and a couple of Dubs were arrested for heckling de Valera.”
When John returned to Belfast he heard about the forthcoming Queen’s visit.
“I asked republican friends what they were going to do about it and was amazed that no protest was planned. I brooded on it and decided that something had to be done about the state of nationalists in the North. So, I decided to take action.”
He hands me an ageing clip from a newspaper, an interview with his mother.
“John was a quiet boy,” she said. “He liked watching TV and making plastic aircraft models. He would go to dances. He was just a typical teenager but not a mod or a beatnik. There was a big change in him when he came back [from Dublin]. He had joined a debating society, an amateur dramatics society and a ballad group. He started reading a lot. I saw him with books on government and the Irish constitution. This was out of character too. To this day I still don’t know what was in my son’s mind when he dropped that block of concrete.”
John started to laugh. “I got some of my republicanism from her!” he said.
She said: “I took time off to watch the Royal procession. I stood near the spot where the incident happened. I cheered with the others as the royal car passed. I will never really know why, when it turned the next corner my eldest child dropped a concrete block on top of it from the highest building.”
Today, 57-year-old Morgan – who was a bit of a hero to my generation - remains unrepentant about the day, 40 years ago, when the queen got stoned in Belfast.
