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A private army from police guns
Docherty's volunteers
Docherty was a protege of Ian Paisley. He had been a teenage fundamentalist, then a printer, and then a loyalist paramilitary, and Paisley's oratory held him spellbound. In April 1966, with the anniversary of the Easter Rising coming, he set up a vigilante group, the Ulster Protestant Volunteers. Its stated aim was to be ready for an IRA uprising on the anniversary, with cells all over Ulster that would rise on command. The name and the motto, for God and Ulster, evoked Carson's volunteers of 1912.
Guns from the B Specials
Like Carson's volunteers, the group wanted guns. Docherty recruited heavily among the B Specials, who had been issued revolvers and submachine guns and were allowed to keep them at home. His aim was a private army like Carson's, with Paisley as a second Lord Carson.
Gusty Spence
Hunting for guns that spring, Docherty came into contact with another group that looked back to Carson, the Ulster Volunteer Force. It had been founded a few months earlier by men who met in the pubs of the working-class Protestant Shankill. The chief among them was Gusty Spence, in his early 30s. Spence's father had been in Carson's volunteers and had served in the First World War. Spence himself had served in the British Army, in Cyprus, and then worked as a scaffolder at the Harland and Wolff shipyards. He was a very hard man, a keen Orangeman, and no stranger to a pub brawl, and people looked up to him because of the army.
How did the first UVF get its guns?
In April 1914 the Ulster Volunteer Force staged the Larne gun-running, landing roughly 25,000 rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition from Germany and Austria. Fred Crawford organized the purchase, and volunteers distributed the weapons across Ulster in a single night. Police and customs officers did not stop the operation. Nationalists responded by forming the Irish Volunteers in 1913 and landing their own rifles at Howth.
What was Cyprus like when Spence served?
British forces in Cyprus faced the EOKA insurgency, a guerrilla campaign for union with Greece that began in April 1955. Thousands of British troops took part in the fight, which ended with the London and Zurich agreements in 1959. Cyprus became independent in August 1960.
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