The police attack on civil rights marchers in Derry on October 5th, 1968 shocked people throughout Ireland and farther afield when they saw it on their television screens, then a rare event: hitherto, such events had not generally been filmed for television news. Fergus Pyle described what happened that day in this excerpt from his lengthy report.
– JOE JOYCE
FOR A quarter of an hour on Saturday afternoon, police in a Derry street punched, batoned and pursued Civil Rights demonstrators in a brutal and sickening display of what can only be called concerted violence.
From where I stood beside the police barricade, the final charge was utterly indiscriminate. Men and women were run down and clubbed; people were trampled and beaten as they lay on the ground. There were hysterical screams as a man was led from the crowd with blood streaming from a deep scalp wound.
I saw six policemen hotly pursuing a man in a sports coat; a young girl with a banner being grabbed and hit violently; a cordon of police moving rapidly down the street as the crowd fled in front of them. And then the water-cannon vehicles moved in. They went up and down, the streets soaking what was left of the crowd and bystanders. “They broke a bit rough,” a senior police officer said, professionally cool, “but they broke. Once the first wave went-after that, it wasn’t bad”.
While he spoke, his men were still at work in a gratuitous and, though one hates to say it, sadistic attack on people still in the streets. “From their outlook”, the officer said of his men, “the fact is the route [of the march] wasn’t given to us. The crowd seemed to turn on us.”
Mr Gerry Fitt, the Belfast MP, was clubbed and carried away as the parade reached the cordon. This initial clash, which was distinct from the final rout, was followed by several speeches by Civil Rights leaders.
The start of this bitter day for Derry and the North was at the railway station a few hundred yards away. There the banned Civil Rights marcher gathered, watched by a sizeable crowd of onlookers.
The original route would have taken them from the station up by Simpson’s Brae, Distillery Brae and along the sweeping curve of Spencer road to Craigavon bridge. The route was blocked at Distillery Brae, a steep, short street. Instead, the parade marched along Duke street, which leads directly to Craigavon bridge, from where the marchers intended to go to the Diamond in the centre of Derry.
They were met near the end of Duke street by a hastily-formed blockade of policemen, and a line of police with drawn truncheons in front. As the marchers approached, some of them shouting “Sieg Heil”, Mr [Ivan] Cooper called to them: “Go back, go back.”
There were cheers as the first line clashed with the police. I saw a girl in a mini-skirt, carrying the Plough and the Stars, wrestling with a constable, and a few men grabbing and fighting with policemen. It was at this stage that Mr Fitt went down.
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