News Letter bomb anniversary: veteran journalist’s vivid memories of the carnage

Veteran journalist and former News Letter reporter JIM MCDOWELL recalls the carnage and human tragedy when the IRA bombed Donegall Street in March 1972.
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It wasn’t the shock wave of the bomb that almost knocked me over – although I’d only missed that by seconds.

It was the shock sighting of the wave of carnage that had crashed along the length of Lower Donegall Street.

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I was 22 at the time, having started as a cub reporter with this newspaper in 1969 – the year the so-called Troubles, in reality a dirty little sectarian war which slaughtered so many innocent people, started.

Former News Letter reporter Jim McDowellFormer News Letter reporter Jim McDowell
Former News Letter reporter Jim McDowell

By 1972, I’d already reported a myriad of murders, shootings and bombings.

But nothing on the scale of what I witnessed as I sprinted round the corner of Waring Street into Donegall Street.

My ‘marking’ that day, the story I was ‘marked’ to cover by the news desk, was to report a case at the Magistrate’s Court in Belfast.

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That was cut short when a policeman I knew, who was on security duty in the court house, tipped me off about a bomb scare ‘close to your office’. That was just after 11.45am.

News Letter front page the day after the bombNews Letter front page the day after the bomb
News Letter front page the day after the bomb

I squeezed out of the Press bench, and out of the court: as fast I could. After all, my colleagues, my friends, were still in the office and I wanted to ensure they would be OK.

I was fit then, playing rugby, and I sprinted hell-for-leather the whole way back, up Victoria Street, round the corner into High Street, turned right up Skipper Street, then left into Waring Street.

And I was almost at the corner of Waring Street, opposite where the Whig bar, named after the famous old Northern Whig newspaper which used to be published from the building, when the massive car bomb exploded two minutes before noon.

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Right opposite the News Letter building, with its proud metal peacock masthead emblem perched on the ornate balcony railings above the front door.

Another couple of seconds, and I’d have run head down, head first into the path of the blast.

Other stories in this commemorative issue today will detail the shocking statistics: seven men dead, including two RUC officers and three binmen, a trio just doing their job, and 148 equally innocent people maimed and injured, including 21 News Letter staff.

But it is the sight of the sheer devastation, the siren sound of the screams of shattered human beings, and the pungent scent of death – allied to the unforgettable stench of 100lbs of gelignite which had just detonated in the first of the huge Provo car bombs later to bombard Belfast and other cities – which still stick with and still shock me to this day.

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Half a Century on from when the IRA tried to blow up Century House, the home of Century Newspapers: and the home of the unvarying and unwavering Unionist newspaper, the Belfast News Letter.

Because that’s what that bombing was: a fascist attempt to silence, gag and censor the Press, to kill off the right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, carried out by terrorists who themselves were operating the ultimate form of censorship.

Silencing people, by killing them.

Of course, there were to be more fascist attacks on the Press: the loyalist terrorist bombing of the Irish News office, and the massive bomb left at the back, close to the van loading bay, of the Belfast Telegraph: again, by the IRA.

But this March 20 1972 bombing of the News Letter – in spite of false warnings that the bomb had been planted in nearby Church Street (what were the Provos’ planning to bomb if that was the case: St. Anne’s Cathedral?) – was significant in that it was the first direct terror attack on a newspaper.

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Of course, as I scrambled through the front reception wreckage of the News Letter office, the only thing on my mind then was to help any injured and hope to find my own friends and colleagues had escaped the worst.

And then back out on to the street to help tend the wounded, of which there were many, on the street outside.

And then back inside, to report, help put together, and, amazingly, put to bed a newspaper which was back on the street the next morning.

A Herculean and heroic effort: by the proprietor, the irascible but resolute Captain OWJ ‘Bill’ Henderson, the Editor, Cowan Watson, a full-blooded blunderbuss of a brilliant newspaper man, sub-editors, reporters, photographers, printers, delivery van drivers and even the copy boys, delivering pages of copy flowing from typewriters that had survived the heat of the bomb blast that would end up as the first-hand stories hot from the rolling thunder of the huge News Letter Vickers printing presses the next morning.

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Those were all proud people. There aren’t that many left. Too many oaks have fallen among them in the last 50 years.

But I am immensely proud to have worked with, and known them.

As proud, in fact, as that old Peacock symbol which used to stand above the News Letter building front door.

On March 21, 1972, it was still perched there. Battered, surely. A bit bent. But still defiant.

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Just like the defiant professionals who had put the paper back on the streets that same morning after the bomb.

They all had ink in their blood, surely, too. But they also had a steely resolve in their heads and in their hearts.

Revolutions and two World Wars hadn’t stopped the oldest English language daily newspaper from going to press since its foundation in 1737.

Two hundred and thirty five years on, on that black March day of what the News Letter front page headline next day dubbed BLOODY MURDER, the fascist warlords of the Provos weren’t going to stop it printing, either.

And they didn’t...

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——— ———

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