By Eamonn Keyes

Preamble

I suspect that this is the closest I will ever get to writing a headline that resembles the many scholarly articles I have read throughout my life. Academics should note that this should not be used as a reference piece as it has been dictated by the nine year old boy who still curates a large trove of dubious information in my head, wheeling it out for approval usually around 1am or 2 am to prevent any possibility of my getting to sleep and driving me to get it down for posterity in some form.

Many people will be surprised to discover that even before the Troubles got seriously started in August 1969 that we were rehearsing unknowingly for the main event. And by ‘we’ I mean children of primary school age in some parts of North Belfast, soon to be one of the main conflict areas, and by ‘some parts of North Belfast’ I mean the street where I lived and several surrounding streets.

I lived in Ardoyne, a mainly Catholic enclave with a population of about 10,000, and a much smaller population of Protestants concentrated almost entirely in the three streets running above us, as the part where I lived looked like a military barracks from the air, with seven long streets of terraced housing bisected by a long straight dividing road and with another at the bottom end. Unfortunately when the estate was completed the Luftwaffe got much the same impression, and there were frequent gaps in the terraces where houses had suffered the consequences of the May 1941 raids, which affected Belfast badly. Next to London it had the highest ratio of air raid casualties for its size.

Even during the early Beatles years and the years of World Cup winning and hippiedom there was always tension present, and we were all affected by it to some degree.

This tension resulted in a bit of name calling and the occasional stone being thrown between two groups of small children. Stones were graded, with a small stone or pebble being referred to as a (wait for it) ’stone’, and the larger examples that might crack a window or put some actual hurt on an opponent was known as an ‘acre’, although they were somewhat smaller than that in area.

We were extremely territorial, and no boy would willingly stray to or walk down a street in enemy territory because of the possible consequences. I often had visions of torture which usually involved being in a cellar under someone’s house and being tied to a wall by my arms as I was questioned and threatened with grave actions by other 8-9 year olds whilst being called names and given Chinese burns.

However, any real fights or battles only took place in our imagination, until the afternoon ‘that’ influential movie was shown at the Saturday matinee in the local cinema, the Forum.

‘That’ movie was ‘The 300 Spartans’, released in late 1962, and starting to feature in children’s matinees by about 1964-65. The story of the defence of Thermopylae in 480 BC during the Graeco-Persian wars, it possessed us and we were never the same again.

In the weeks following the screening, which hundreds of local children had seen, we made a transition. We now knew the benchmark to aim for in defending our street from our rivals, and during one of our meetings we were addressed by our leader and elder, Laurence, who had just reached his ninth birthday:

“Men, the time has come to arm yourselves” he told us from his position on the top step in the backyard of a vacant house, and we went off to comply after some discussion on what we needed to fulfil the military requirements of the film and of defending our street, pooling our memories of the movie to ensure we captured all details. To be fair, finding the 2,500 year old panoply of a trained Spartan hoplite might be difficult in 1960s Belfast, but we soon improvised. The main weapons were spears, shields and swords.

The nine-foot long spear, known historically as a dory, was easy. Broom and mop shafts were removed, along with those of some gardening equipment, and the result was impressive. Tin cans were hammered on and around the end of the shaft to give a metallic spearpoint still easily capable of sending a young boy to A&E. Swords were fashioned from lengths of wood, usually broken from fences, with a smaller cross piece to enable it to be stuck through our elasticated Snake belts and held in place.

The true ‘pièce de resistance’ was the aspis shield, fashioned from dustbin lids. These were of two kinds, a light and thin lid, and the thick hollow lid, which was much heavier and difficult to hold as it was made from galvanised zinc and steel. Unfortunately for us, and less so for ancient Sparta, plastic bins did not exist yet. The bin lids then had a Greek lambda painted on them, looking like an upside down ‘V’, to mimic the Spartan lambda standing for the name of their polis, or city state, Lacedaemon.

Armour was a problem, until we discovered that a slab of cardboard stuffed up the front of a jumper was enough to protect from enemy stones whilst additionally terrifying unsuspecting pensioners in the process.  One of us would stick the cardboard armour up his jumper and stand on top of a garden wall. When a tired pensioner would slowly pass us by, lugging her shopping, we would implore her to look, and then throw real darts at the wall-standing victim’s chest area. They would stick with a loud thud into the cardboard armour, he would shriek in mock agony and fall backwards off the wall into the garden whilst the pensioner would have a near cardiac arrest at the sight of this apparent death.

This just left the Spartan cloak. Historically, this was red. In Belfast the cloak often had stripes or a paisley pattern depending on whether a towel or a mother’s head scarf was pressed into service as a replacement.

Additional elements included the odd bow and arrow, and several grave discussions took place before several ‘troops’ were told that cowboy hats, Winchesters, Colt 45 guns and holsters were not permitted.

The first time we formed a shield line was impressive, a line of bin lids, some having to be dropped every few seconds due to the weight on our underdeveloped wrists, and a number of broom shafts stood out ready to deal with any massed assault from the street opposite. Some of us had even got lucky, having found some additional old ‘poles’ as we called them from broken brushes and rakes. That meant these could be treated as disposable javelins and could actually be thrown at the enemy, as opposed to most of our ‘spears’ which would need to be returned to the brooms and mop sockets after the battle, or even earlier if their absence was discovered by irate parents.

The enemy really didn’t know who they would be messing with if they attacked.

We needed a marching song, to keep us in step the fifty yards or so we’d be travelling to battle, and as we didn’t have any Spartan flute players this was a problem.

Luckily Lonnie Donegan, still basking in fading popularity, came to our rescue, and our army became the first Spartan army ever which marched to the old Deep Southern States work song ‘Pick A Bale of Cotton.’

‘Gonna jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton
Gonna jump down, turn around, pick a bale a day
Oh Lordy, pick a bale of cotton
Oh Lordy, pick a bale a day.’

We were breaking new ground.

We had a few skirmishes with the enemy in the street above us, which involved the tried and tested name-calling and stone-throwing, often by even younger kids who saw us as their main influence and wanted in on the action. In later years I discovered that this had happened in the actual Greek battles, where poorer men and servants, called ‘peltasts’, had thrown stones, used slings and the odd javelin as they couldn’t afford armour and weapons.

It seems that even history was on our side. However, as they couldn’t run fast they were occasionally captured and thumped or hit by stones. This usually ended any incipient battle as an irate mother marched her wailing child across the battlefield to confront those responsible, scattering the military formations as they ran home to avoid charges of involvement in the incident.

However, the big day arrived, and we faced our enemy fully armed and armoured with all the cardboard we could find. Laurence made an epic speech to us, telling us we were fighting for the glory of the street, and that we were the better men, and we nodded gravely as our 8 and 9 year old shoulders took this great responsibility on board.

A few brush shafts were thrown, usually turning sideways when thrown, and there was only one injury, one of our soldiers who fell over his own ‘spear’ when it got caught between his feet and he tripped, breaking the shaft in the process as he fell. An ominous ‘ooohhh’ went up from the formation, as it still belonged to his dad’s rake, and he was now a dead man hobbling.

After a lot more name calling a decision was made for the two leaders to meet and discuss the terms of conflict, and Laurence and his counterpart met unarmed on the manhole cover in the middle of the road, dodging the very occasional car, usually a Morris Minor 1000.

Laurence came back from the parley and asked us to gather round. “Men” he said, “I’ve spoken to their commander and we have agreed that in order to prevent bloodshed the battle will be decided by single combat.” I thought this was an entirely spiffing idea until he turned to me and added “and you will fight for us.” 

When I asked who I would be fighting he pointed to a guy twice my size, three times my weight and about 14 years old. Peter Crozier was a big lad indeed, and was also dressed in his school gym kit, meaning I could see his muscles, huge thighs and head somewhere in the clouds above me. I was indeed a David to his Goliath, and that visualisation gave me an idea, possibly the only way I might survive the personal slaughter this encounter promised.

I expected to be badly battered and so did everyone else, looking at me with pity. If we’d had a religious child present among us he’d be pretending to give me the last rites.

Peter walked up to me, and a barely- decipherable deep bass rumble from his chest informed me that I was now going to be “dead.”

The two commanders told us that the battle would begin on the count of three.

“One,” they commenced as both my plan and survival instinct swung into action and I booted Peter as hard as I could in the balls. I had just enough time to register the sight and noise of a colossus falling to earth in an early version of the 9/11 Twin Towers collapse before I took off as fast as I could. And boy I could run, and I did, all the way home. Until my knees started playing up at age 15 I was a sprinter, probably the second fastest in my school year even then, so there was no chance the Godzilla I had just grounded would catch me, even if he could get up.

Next day I met up with some of the men. I expected to be shamed and expelled from the ranks, but instead my action was taken as a great victory. It seemed that everybody else would have just run away, but I had actually battered the enemy, and the tale had grown as it was retold. The single combat option was not seen as a successful one for the future, as nobody else wanted any part of it, and it was a poor commander’s decision, as everyone thought Laurence should have been the one to fight.

It was the beginning of the end. The crack army of 8 and 9 year olds had been drilled to perfection, armed to the teeth and were prepared to battle against the odds to preserve our way of life. But the troops ebbed away, unwilling to fight unless it was in their formations.

Within a few weeks there was little archaeological evidence of the existence of the Stratford Gardens Spartan Army, just as with the polis of Sparta itself in real life.

The only memory remaining of this fine army of diminutive soldiers could be seen for years afterwards on Bin Collection Day, when there was a long line of bins left outside for emptying- many of which were topped with lids with a sad lambda still painted on them.

Sadly, the story doesn’t end there, and the ending isn’t happy.

The smouldering fires of sectarianism which produced the Spartan Army broke out in earnest within less than 5 years in 1969, and the small boys were replaced in their conflicts by grown men, some with guns, some with bricks and petrol bombs.

As in other areas of Belfast the two communities could not live in this close proximity, and this ended for good in August 1971 with the introduction of internment without trial for many people.

The city descended into chaos, and the Protestant community of the three streets we fought fled for places where they felt safer, mirroring the Catholic exodus that had already gone on for two years by that point.

As they left, they burned their houses, and the three streets, Farringdon Gardens, Velsheda Park and Cranbrook Gardens, became a wall of flame, with chaotic scenes as families fled and others tried to stop the flames spreading to their own homes, with British soldiers not knowing exactly what to do about any of it.

Ironically, by that time we had forged friendships with some of the boys we had fought in our earlier campaigns, playing football with them and mixing as adolescent boys will do once girls come on the scene, which they had by then for the bigger Spartan veterans among us. The burnings tore the friendships asunder forever, and many of the new friends we played with every day were gone forever. War claims its price, even among the young.

Some 9 years later, in 1980, the burning of Cranbrook Gardens became immortalised when a photograph taken amid the burnings and exodus was featured as the cover of a very influential album that made it to number 6 in the UK Album Charts, called ‘Searching for The Young Soul Rebels’ by Dexys Midnight Runners, featuring a young refugee the Spartan Army may well have faced during those earlier glory days. I hope he won many battles in later life.