Don McCullin and a Wall in Derry

A supplement to my previous post about photographing the Troubles... Yesterday I caught the hour long BBC4 documentary Don McCullin: Looking for England, in which the great photojournalist, now in his 80’s, takes a journey around the country in search of contemporary English life in all its richness and diversity. It’s a rather lovely and gentle film, full of compassion and kindness, but its timing did jog a memory of a series of photographs McCullin took during a tour of Northern Ireland in 1971 just as the Troubles were intensifying. The images were collected for a 12-page Sunday Times photographic supplement entitled War on the Home Front (19 December 1971), and I was specifically thinking of McCullin’s striking photograph depicting a gang of Derry youths scrambling over a wall to escape a cloud of tear gas fired by British soldiers. It may not be one of the more emblematic photographs that emerged from the conflict but it’s surely one of the most widely seen – in 1980 Killing Joke adapted the image for the cover of their debut album, which served as my first introduction to the work of Don McCullin.

I was curious to hear more about the image and McCullin’s experiences in Derry so I turned to his excellent 1992 autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour...

I can vouch for the effectiveness of the CS gas used by the British army against riotous demonstrators in Northern Ireland. The first time I received a serious dose, in the Bogside area of Derry later in 1971, I went blind. The demonstration had become ugly, with rubber bullets and great shards of glass from shattered milk bottles flying around. Then, suddenly, a tremendous burning sensation seized my nose and throat, and forced me to close my eyes. I can remember groping my way back from the fray and leaning my face to a wall. I was thinking that if I could zone in on an area of total darkness and flick my eyes open, the trouble would go away. It didn’t work. As I stood there in total darkness—eyes, nose, throat, ears, mouth, all burning - I felt a great lump in my back. It was a rubber bullet. Behind me a voice said, ‘The bastards. The inhuman bastards.’

I had to pass the British soldiers posted at the street corner. I held up my cameras prominently as the badge of my profession, and saw the looks of scorn and heard the swearing under their breath. As far as they were concerned I was consorting with the enemy which they had just tear-gassed.

Further reading: Whilst preparing this entry, I stumbled across this post by New York blogger Alex who writes about the Killing joke album cover: Back Again to the Bogside: Revenge of the Killing Joke Wall