Crown forces in Northern IrelandPosters

Troubled Images. Posters & Images of the Northern Ireland Conflict from the Linen Hall Library

edited by Yvonne Murphy et al, The Linen Hall Library, 1-90092-120-0, pp 48-9, 112-13

Ireland in Schools

1. ‘Ulster Impressions, 1970-79Collage of the British Army in Northern Ireland, 1974

2. ‘Our Murdered Colleagues‘Memorial to 300 members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary killed in the Troubles, 1968-98, 1998

3. Notes on the posters

Poster 1: ‘Ulster Impressions, 1970-79’, 1979This poster was commissioned by Army Headquarters,Northern Ireland. The poster shows the army performingvarious security functions and depicts soldiers both on an offduty. In the centre of the image an army patrol passes aposter stating, ‘Smash Internment’.

Poster 2: ‘Our Murdered Colleagues‘, 1999 This poster was produced by the RUC in 1999 and serves as a memorial to 300 members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary killed in the Troubles. The massed photographs are shown chronologically, from Victor Arbuckle, killed in 1969, to Frank O'Reilly, killed in 1998, both by Loyalists. In between, the vast majority were IRA victims, and most notably the nine killed in Newry police station on 28th February 1985. Full colour, and the decorative crown and harp emblem of the force, provide due dignity.

By 1974, when the British Army commissioned Joan Wanklyn to produce this collage of their experience in Northern Ireland, the August 1969 warning of the then Home Secretary, James Callaghan, to West Belfast MP, Gerry Fitt - ‘I can get the army in but it’s going to be a devil of a job to get it out’ - had been grimly realised. In the three preceding years, 211 soldiers had been killed.

Veteran war artist Wanklyn’s experience stretched back to the Korean War, and for the British Army, Northern Ireland was already the most costly and intractable conflict since then. Wanklyn had primarily painted the Canadian forces but her capacity to portray ‘the isolation, boredom and anxiety’ of Canadian peacekeeping was readily transferable.

This is a portrayal of the Army community with others appearing only as incidental extras. The semi-derelict urban terrain is closely observed, and even the posters in one street scene are authentic, including a People’s Democracy anti-internment poster.* Bad news is not evaded, as in the scene of an armoured car blown up by a land mine, and a soldier injured in Derry riots. A prison escape is featured, but Republican mass breakouts were not made over the wire, as here. The identifiable presence of Northern Ireland GOC, General Sir Frank King, in the operations room confirms the veracity.

Above all else the sepia tone strikes the mood. This is no gung-ho view of a triumphant army. Look at the exhausted soldiers who have come off duty (see upper left-hand corner).

The poster was produced for relatives, friends and colleagues, but even its genesis lay in inescapable wider public debate. On 22 April 1998, just eleven days after the Good Friday Agreement, most of the photographs were published in the Daily Telegraph. Toby Harnden’s accompanying article noted that the Agreement provided for the Patten Commission on the force’s future, with the possibility of ‘radical reform or even disbandment. The Telegraph, under Charles Moore’s editorship, was vehemently opposed to any such development.

The Telegraph went on to sponsor a ‘Defend the RUC’ campaign, which focussed on the disregarded sacrifices of the dead and the threat to the force’s emblem. This poster was evocative of both issues.

The Labour Government, in some measure, acknowledged these sensitivities by awarding the George Cross to the force, and by introducing legislation that fell short of the full Patten proposals. In particular, the issue of the emblem of the new Police Service was left to the incoming Police Board, or, failing that, the Secretary of State.