A brief excerpt THE PEOPLE’S GALLERY The Bogside Artists

Derry - August 12, 1969. It was a hot summer day. As the marchers reached Waterloo Place, on the fringes of

the Bogside, Catholics reacted at what they saw as “Protestant triumphalism”. Verbal jibes quickly turned into

missiles hurtling through the air. Stewards and Nationalist leaders, including John Hume and Eddie McAteer,

tried in vain to control the furious crowd. Immediately, clashes between the RUC and protesters spread like a

Mexican wave. The lid had blown in an afternoon and it would take nearly three decades to fix it back on.

In the Bogside, barricades went up and men, women and children set about gathering stones and

making Molotov cocktails. These were hurled with incessant fury at the RUC (police) who had stationed

themselves with their grey armoured vehicles at the foot Rossville Street. Over a thousand canisters of gas

were fired during the three hectic days of fighting. Paving stones were smashed to provide bricks and cars

siphoned of their petrol. More than 500 women and children were evacuated over the border into Donegal.

Local first aid facilities that had been hastily set up in the Bogside treated over 1,000 causalities. Three of

them suffered from bullet wounds. This was the first time the police had used live rounds. The CS gas hung in

the air like the sinister pestilence from Stephen King’s horror novel ‘The Mist”, burning the throat and eyes

and making the lungs vamp for air like the gills of a landed fish.

It was in the Battle of the Bogside that the famous declaration “You Are Now Entering Free

Derry,” was born, a slogan borrowed from the student Freedom of Speech movement in Berkeley College,

California. The gable-end where it was painted still stands to this day having been rescued by John Hume and

Ivan Cooper and later Eamonn Deane (Holywell Trust) from certain demolition. In September 2000 an

alliance of Sinn Fein and the SDLP on the city council voted that the area should be handed over to the

Department of the Environment's Heritage Service. The Minister appointed to look after it was Sam Foster, an

Ulster Unionist member of the new power sharing executive. Nowadays, a small group have appointed

themselves owners and custodians of the famous icon and regularly use the wall as a billboard for contentious

issues.

“No-go” areas were hastily established all over the Bogside, Brandywell and Creggan. As more

and more towns in the North staged demonstrations in support of the Bogsiders, the new Prime Minister of

Northern Ireland, old Etonian and ex-soldier James Chichester-Clarke, viewing the barricades as mutiny

against the state, called the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and asked for troops to be sent to Derry. Just

before 4 PM on the third day British troops marched across the Guildhall Square and into Waterloo Place to

separate the local RUC police and their gangs of Protestant supporters from the rioters. The Bogsiders

declared a victory even though it was doomed from the start to be a Pyrrhic one. The Irish government under

Taoiseach Jack Lynch moved its troops up to the border just five miles away in what proved to be a theatrical

gesture. The Irish Free State was not about to liberate the entrenched Catholics of the North and so declare a

suicidal war against England. As in Belfast, the rescue party was at first........