Paddy Hill was the angriest man I ever met.
A few months after he came out from prison after doing 17 years for a crime he didn’t commit, he was the main speaker at Free Derry Corner following the annual Bloody Sunday March.
“Have you the speech ready”, I asked him. “Nah”, he replied. “I’m just going to give it a lash.” Which he did, lashing into the British Government, police, the judiciary, the press. “They are all rotten, rotten to the core. They knew before we ever stepped into the dock that none of us had done it, but they didn’t care. They needed scapegoats to cover up their own ignorance and bigotry and we were handy fall guys. They sat down and agreed between themselves what lies to swear against us. Filth.”
It wasn’t one of those dignified addresses which can endear rebels and rascals to the liberal elite, but a rough and ready all-out polemic against the ugly contradictions and cruelties of the class-divided world.
The crowd of about 5,000 kept cheering and cheering, so much so that he was half-jokingly asked if he wanted another go. He needed no encouragement, but took to the microphone again as the applause rolled over the crowd once more to engulf the platform. As far as I remember, he repeated the speech all over again, with the same pitch of passion and gusto.
“They are all rotten, the police, the judges, the politicians, the press – all rotten. They wouldn’t know the truth if it jumped up behind them and bit them on the arse”.
It was the only time I ever heard a crowd call on a speaker for an encore.
He had not provided one of those generous addresses by someone just released from imprisonment by which they might convincingly proclaim their innocence. Paddy wasn’t a perfect example. He had dabbled in a bit of criminality in his younger years and had seen the inside of a prison before the Birmingham case arose. Inside, he wasn’t surrounded by comrades – but made no secret of his friendship with some of the most prominent gangsters of the day. He shared time with the Kray Brothers, “Mad” Frankie Fraser, Great Train Robber Charlie Richardson and many others.
“They never hurt ordinary people. They were just trying to get their own back. You don’t get many millionaires robbing trains.”
Not the socially-approved attitude of a bad boy come good.
There were many others, mostly Republicans, who served years for political offences whether there was evidence against them or not, and who bore their suffering with determination and dignity, even unto death. They had chosen their path and kept righteously on to the end of the road. Paddy wasn’t like that, not exactly. But he was a rebel to the core of his being, and knew that people like himself were never going to get an even hand out of the class-divided society around them.
I once heard him in a pub sing the old cockney song, “It’s the same the whole world over, Ain’t it all a bloody shame, It’s the rich what gets the gravy, The poor what gets the blame”. He knew all the words.
Paddy arranged through a solicitor to speak with Julie Hamblelton whose sister, Maxine, 17, had gone out for a night in Birmingham with a gang of girl-friends and been splattered across the walls and ceiling of the Top of the Town. As clear a war crime as any other atrocity of the Troubles.
Paddy arrived at her door. Julie recalls sitting in her living room across from Paddy and finding herself unable to breathe, much less carry on a conversation with one of the men she believed had shattered her happiness forever, deprived her of her only sister, poisoned any joy which still lay within her.
The police, the Crown Prosecution Service, lawyers, journalists, had backed one another up, assured her that they had gotten the right men, that the real miscarriage of justice lay in the fact that the bombers, released, were now walking the streets while Maxine lay dead in her grave. Julie believed them: why would she not?
“Have you seen the documents from my trial?” Paddy persisted. She didn’t know what he was talking about. Nobody had ever told her of the existence of this trove of evidence, although they all must have known it was there.
Had it not been for Paddy and Julie the truth about the Birmingham bombs and the cover-up might still be relatively easy for the British state to deny. After all, they have plenty of experience with this sort of thing. The official line after the men were released had been that they’d beaten the rap as a result of a political campaign on the streets and in parliament and the supposedly incomprehensible tangled politics of Northern Ireland.
The next morning, Paddy arrived back at the Hambleton’s door with a suitcase of documents – witness statements, forensic reports, transcripts of evidence from the trial and appeals, the judge’s summing-up, letters from the six men in prison to their families, friends, and sympathetic public figures. Julie, outraged, knowing now that she’d been lied to and lied to and lied to again by a succession of haughty high officials of the State.
She has since been an indefatigable campaigner against injustice at the hands of the State.
“Paddy Hill was a great man,” she says now. And Julie Hambleton is a great woman. Freedom for the future depends on the likes of them.
Paddy was from Ardoyne in Belfast, a working-class Catholic enclave which had seen and suffered some of the most horrendous days of the Troubles, arson and murder by sectarian loyalist gangs and British soldiers and cops. He was a staunch Republican, although never a signed-up member of a political organisation. He was also an instinctive militant fighter in any working class struggle he encountered.
Dave Smith of the Blacklist Support Group, formed in the ‘70s to fight for London building workers driven off the sites for striking in pursuit of union rights, remembers: “On the day the Birmingham Six were released, the news came over the radio while I was sitting in a tea-hut on a building site in Harlow. The entire job closed up early, and went to the pub to celebrate. That’s how much ordinary working class people saw the release as a huge victory.”
