Martin Dillon’s The Shankill Butchers 🔖 A Reappraisal

Brandon Sullivan & Sean Bradfield 🕮 with a new review of an old book.

Introduction

If studying the conflict teaches anything, it is that arriving at objective truth is deeply challenging for historians. With this in mind, this series of articles (one per chapter of the book) are not presented as the final word, but as hopefully the beginning of a conversation about the book in question and associated themes.

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the Troubles in Northern Ireland will be familiar with Martin Dillon, Lenny Murphy and the Shankill Butchers. Indeed, Dillon’s career as a journalist has come to be defined by his 1989 book on the subject. Regarded by many as a ground-breaking journey into the heart of sectarian darkness, there can be little doubt that in writing The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder Dillon put his life on the line to document a particularly notorious example of the subterranean violence of 1970s Northern Ireland which many other journalists wilfully avoided.

Dillon’s first book, Political Murder in Northern Ireland (1973), co-authored with Denis Lehane, exposed the Northern Irish public to some of the most extreme examples of sectarian killings; details of which mainstream newspapers had elided in their coverage of the Troubles up to that point. Dillon has written of the obstinance he experienced when trying to convince his news editor at the time to run some of the stories he had researched into the ‘romper room’ killings of the early 1970s. In his autobiography, Crossing the Line, Dillon recalls that:

Much of my time in 1972-73 was devoted to writing about some of the most ghastly killings of the Troubles. Many mornings, my news editor dispatched me to alleyways where bodies had been dumped …

Dillon’s impulse to give more attention to these killings was almost immediately stymied by his bosses:

… I wanted to know why they [sectarian murders] were becoming so prevalent, but editors had no desire to devote resources to in-depth investigations … In my view, print and broadcast journalism was becoming reflexive, with little space or time being set aside for investigative journalism.

The frustration in the young Martin Dillon is tangible and no matter the shortcomings of his research and hypotheses into the Butchers his bravery and indefatigability when so many others in his profession turned a blind eye will ensure he is rightly praised for generations to come.

Dillon’s attempts to confront these often impenetrable subjects does not preclude him from criticism however, particularly some 35 years after his most famous book was published and new facts have come to light. Conor Cruise O’Brien noted in his forward to Dillon’s book that the:

Provisional IRA – by far the most important of the various murderous organisations in Northern Ireland – never unleashed on society anyone quite like Lennie Murphy (Murphy spelled his name with an ie, although some legal correspondence issued by his solicitor in later life included the spelling of his name as 'Lenny'), the chief of the Shankill Butchers.

Dillon’s book created an almost spectral image of Murphy which was quickly lapped up by readers from across all class and religious backgrounds.

We can think of two loyalist figures who were more prolific and at least as sadistic as Murphy. It is striking that neither is mentioned in Dillon’s book. This is something that we will return to.

Numerous myths were created by Dillon in The Shankill Butchers, many of which were successfully rebutted (with next to no mainstream acknowledgement) by the researcher and author Iain Turner in his 2015 article ‘In the Shadow of the Butchers.’

For a book that has had the impact of The Shankill Butchers, there is a paucity of detailed reviews of it. Justifiable critiques have appeared, starting with Steve Bruce in his 1990 book The Red Hand. We believe it is hard to overstate the influence Dillon’s book had on some students of the Troubles. The historian and author Gareth Mulvenna described the effects of the book as a “toxic glue” on his brain. Both writers of this review read it around 25 years ago, and the effects were profound and lasting.

This is a reappraisal of a landmark book in Troubles historiography, but it is also an opportunity to take a more nuanced and in-depth look again at some of the people and events portrayed in its pages.

This series of articles will criticise some of Martin Dillon’s work, but it is important at all times to recognise and pay tribute to the work he did that was accurate and unique.

The fact that his work is being debated 35 years after publication is a tribute to the quality of some of it, but also that he brought into the public consciousness a deeply disturbing aspect of the Troubles that might otherwise not have been recognised for what it was. As a journalist in the early 1970s he was brave and passionate about unearthing the truth that so many, including those in officialdom, were keen to keep a shroud over.

Chapter One – The Making Of A Killer

Dillon focuses a lot of the first chapter, 'The Making of a Killer', by theorising a motive for Lenny Murphy’s evolution into a sadistic murderer. This is understandable - it is human nature to try and rationalise or find a thread of logic behind brutality when we are confronted with it, but we are quite convinced that he got it wrong. Dillon wrote that the family surname, Murphy, marked them out as “different” to the Protestant community that they lived among, and resulted in Lenny being bullied – referred to as “Murphy the Mick.” There was also, Dillon alleges, community gossip about how Lenny’s father, William Snr., could have been a Catholic.

The Balaclava Street blog had this to say on this:

One of the most enduring theories concocted by Dillon … is that Murphy developed a pathological hatred of Catholics as a result of being taunted about his “Taig” surname. This is a classic piece of amateur psychology and one for which there is no real supporting evidence. Murphy is a faintly uncommon name amongst Protestants but it is not unusual by any means. A glance at a list of UVF prisoners in Long Kesh from the 1970s reveals plenty “Taig” names, such as Galway, McCracken, Quinn, Kirkpatrick, McCartney, O’Neill, even an O’Malley…presumably all incarcerated for fits of nominative homicidal rage. He also claims that Murphy used the name Len or Lenny over Hugh as the former sounded less Catholic!”

A quick search of a Belfast street directory in 1960 has the following Murphys living in strongly loyalist areas, or in close proximity to Orange Halls or Protestant churches:

Annie Murphy (Newcastle Street), James Murphy (Newtownards Road), Margaret Murphy (Nile Street), Noel Murphy (Norwood Street), N.K. Murphy (Oberon Street)

Ellen Murphy (Old Lodge Road), Marion Murphy (Oldpark Avenue), Hugh Murphy (Orangefield Avenue), John Murphy (Parkgate Parade), Edward Murphy (Pisa Street), A. Murphy (Pity Street), Wm. Murphy (Prestwick Park), John Murphy (Ainsworth Avenue), Elizabeth Murphy (Albertbridge Road), N. Murphy (Albertbridge Road), Albert Murphy (Alloa Street), James Murphy (Alloa Street).

And then there was Samuel Murphy, the UDA “Brigadier” who was charged with the murder of Ann Ogilby, and later jailed for 439 years and described as a loyalist “terrorist Godfather.” And there was a leading UDA man convicted of various serious terrorist offences in 1975 named Walter Murphy.

We believe that Dillon’s theory on the supposed impact of the Murphy surname had a structural effect on the book. As early as 1973 he and Lehane had focused on Murphy as being a loyalist with a Catholic surname: “Murphy - the Protestant with a Catholic name" (Political Murder, p127) yet even the most light-touch research at the time (street directories, phone books) would have thrown up a plethora of Murphys in loyalist areas as well as Molloys and other Catholic-sounding surnames in neighbourhoods such as the Shankill. Attaching such significance to something that doesn’t stand up under the lightest interrogation cannot fail to subtract from the historical value of the work. We do not wish to spend much more on this theory, except to note that we consider it debunked, and that Dillon advanced the same theory about Michael Stone in a biography of him.

Dillon is on more solid ground revealing the criminal background of Lenny Murphy. Petty crimes, not unusual for a young man of his social class in that era came to characterise his evolution from a boy into a young man. Murphy is remembered as a bully at school, disinterested in studies, and prone to throwing his weight around using as back-up the threat of his two older brothers, William Jnr. and John. John was two year older than Lenny, and William about four years older. Both were physically more imposing than Lenny.

Dillon writes that as he entered his late teens, and political violence became more intense:

Lenny was regularly seen frequenting two bars on the Shankill Road, the Gluepot and the Bayardo, the latter being a haunt for men connected with the UVF. It was at this time, as events in Northern Ireland were beginning to make headlines, that he joined the junior wing of the UVF. He was observed associating more openly with prominent figures in the community, unlike his brother, William, who was regarded as a loner, and his other brother, John, who had a small circle of friends but did not visit bars where trouble was easily found.

It’s worth discussing Lenny’s brothers as they are significant figures in the book. John, as is widely known, was the “Mr B” who appears many times throughout the book. John Murphy was a member of the UVF and was allegedly involved in many of the “Shankill butcher” crimes. John was a powerfully built man and worked as a plumber. In 1982 he was employed a team of men, mostly UVF members, to complete plumbing contracts. Some of this team were extremely violent men with short fuses. Dillon’s claim about John Murphy “avoiding bars were trouble could easily be found” is especially strange considering he was convicted of a serious assault in the late 1970s, and served time in prison. William, far from being a loner, managed a popular loyalist club on the Shankill Road. The Murphy brothers' father, William, was also a UVF man, who died in 1990 and was honoured an a UVF “roll of honour.”

In relation to family matters, Dillon provides a fascinating vignette about how Lenny's mother Joyce arrived at a disco one evening in the spring of 1969 to remove Lenny - dragging the drunk youth by the hair from the crowd and trailing him home. Murphy's relationship with Joyce isn't developed, but those who the authors of this article have spoken to knew Joyce Murphy (née Thompson) to be a formidable woman who wrapped Lenny up in cotton wool. Many killers have unhealthily close relationships with their mothers, but this isn't a psychology article. Suffice to say that Joyce Murphy was outspoken, dominant and potentially encouraging of her son's propensity for violence. Future studies of the Butchers might do well to probe into this sort of family history with more texture like Gordon Burn did in his magnificent deep-dive into the community from which Peter Sutcliffe emerged.

Dillon also states that Lenny Murphy had joined the Young Citizen Volunteers (YCV), the “youth wing” of the UVF in 1970. This is untrue. While Murphy certainly joined the UVF at an early stage, there was no YCV until 1972. The YCV was formed in the summer of 1972 by young Shankill loyalists including Billy Hutchinson who were self-starters galvanised by the restructuring of the UVF led by Gusty Spence then on the run. Hutchinson also revealed in his 2020 autobiography that Murphy was keen to take over the YCV and ended up poaching one or two members from the organisation Hutchinson had helped to create at the age of 16.

So, not for the first time, Dillon get important details wrong, whilst still being able to accurately describe the man in question. Other than his brothers, Dillon details two of his later to be infamous associates:

(Lenny Murphy) was in the UVF and was surrounding himself with a group of people loosely known as the ‘Murphy gang … among them were two young men, Robert Bates and Samuel McAllister, two nonentities ideally suited to be Murphy’s cohorts, and who were to figure prominently and infamously in Murphy’s later life.

We have never heard any mention in any history of the Troubles of the “Murphy gang” though Lenny was a member of the pre-Troubles teenage Ant Hill Mob gang which included other future prominent Shankill loyalists.

Robert “Basher” Bates was many things, but nonentity is a strange description for him. He was well-known and well-regarded in paramilitary circles, and gave interviews to the press under the anonymity afforded to him on behalf of the UVF in 1971. Bates had also been called to testify publicly to the Scarman Tribunal in 1971 which sought to assess the tumult of August 1969 when parts of Northern Ireland had quite literally gone up in flames. Along with Davy Payne, a former UVF member, Bates had been an early member of Tara and the UDA during the fluid nascent years of loyalist militancy when regimental loyalty was not the important concept it later came to be.

McAllister could perhaps more fairly be described as the nonentity type, though it is notable that Dillon fails to mention the fact that his brother, Joe, was convicted of the murder of drink salesman Barney Moane in 1972. Like Bates, Joe McAllister was well-regarded within paramilitary circles. Interestingly the investigation into Moane's brutal murder revealed that McAllister became angry when goaded on by some of his co-accused during the murder, stating that he would deal with the person who lied about Moane being a republican; unlike his more infamous brother Sam, Joe may well have possessed the ability to feel remorseful for what he had become involved in.

Dillon writes that:

the UVF and UDA recognized that they could not acquire the weapons or perhaps the expertise to fight ‘the enemy’. So they decided it was better to engage in a ‘dirty war’ of indiscriminate terror which would prove that the IRA was incapable of defending its own people. Such a view is simplistic, though there is little doubt that by the summer of 1972 a decision had been made by the UDA/UVF to conduct a sectarian assassination campaign.

In fact, sectarian murders of Catholics by Protestants started prior to the summer. And the raison d'etre usually given by loyalists is less that the IRA couldn’t defend “its own people” and more that killing Catholics would, somehow, drive Catholics to pressurise the IRA into stopping its campaign. But Dillon misses some important information. The IRA had carried out some murders that could be described as sectarian assassinations. One of them, a man named Thomas Kells, was a close friend of Murphy, as well as a criminal associate. The killing of Thomas Kells is covered in Political Murder in Northern Ireland, but Dillon and Lehane’s account of it is inaccurate. This has previously been written about the Kells killing on TPQ:

19 year old Thomas Henry Kells was found dead … shot by the IRA. Rumours abounded that Kells and McFarland had been viciously tortured before being killed. Mulvenna reported Stormont MP Johnny McQuade saying in parliament:

Nobody in the Shankill or Woodvale areas will believe anything other than that young Kells had a tattoo on his arm cut off before the bullets were used on him.

These rumours, and Kells' friendships with later-to-be infamous loyalist paramilitaries such as Stewart Robinson and Lennie Murphy, had a radicalising effect on young loyalists.

Dillon and Lehane allege that Kells was killed by the IRA for spying on them. Information emerged rebutting Dillon and Lehane’s theory, and noting that Kells had in fact fired a shotgun through the door of a house on Clifton Park Avenue where some republicans were attending a party. That particular road had a number of houses in decline that were being rented out for the purposes of hosting parties and drug-taking. In some ways, similar to AirBnB now-a-days. Lenny Murphy and Thomas Kells attended many of these parties in the 1960s, and took LSD, and other drugs. At one of these parties, Murphy is alleged to have raped a young woman from Bangor, who was aged 16. Murphy is also alleged to have burgled houses along the Antrim Road. None of these allegations would appear out of place alongside the details of Murphy’s other crimes, pre and during the Troubles.

Dillon ends the chapter by discussing the effects of the absence, through imprisonment, of “older men” such as Gusty Spence on young men like Lenny Murphy. He wrote:

The absence of the older men paved the way for Lenny Murphy, ‘Basher’ Bates, ‘Big Sam’ McAllister and many others like them to develop their own type of warfare in alliance with the omnipresent UDA, which was prepared to flex its muscles to establish credibility as a paramilitary force.

On the Shankill Road at that particular time were two men who would commit sadistic murders with knives. They were two or three years older than Murphy – at the age of 19 or 20, however, a 22 or 23 year old can appear far more worldly. The two men were John White and Davy Payne. It is impossible to say if they influenced Murphy directly, but he must have known about their crimes.

An intriguing article from the Belfast Telegraph, 21st October 1970, describes how “nine members of the Pride of the Shankill flute band” were convicted of “aiding and abetting the holding of a public procession” and, despite being defended by Desmond Boal, were fined. Among the nine were William Murphy, and Lenny Murphy. Also convicted was Henry Victor Matthews, who would feature in a number of loyalist trials. We could not find anything else related to the Murphy brothers time in a flute band.

‎Martin Dillon, 2009, The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder. Cornerstone Digital.

ASIN: ‎B003RRY608

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

⏩Sean Bradfield is a Former researcher who shouldn't care about this stuff so much but can't help himself.