Within weeks of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in January 1972 by British Army paratroopers, the British army’s most senior officer in Northern Ireland, Henry Tuzo, mused about getting a war artist to come to record soldiers’ lives on the ground.
The focus on such an issue so soon after Bloody Sunday had brought the British army’s actions, complete with photographs of civilians lying in pools of blood, before a worldwide audience may appear odd nearly six decades on.
However, in the eyes of British academic, Clare Carolin, the move was no accident, but rather part of a long campaign by the British army to promote itself “as a kindly force of non-partisan peacekeepers”.
In her book, The Deployment of Art: The Imperial War Museum’s Artistic Records Committee, Carolin argues, trenchantly at times that art was used “an instrument of war” during the conflict.
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In March 1972 the Imperial War Museum’s trustees met to consider Tuzo’s call, agreeing to set up the Artistic Research Committee and to begin again to collect officially-commissioned war art for the first time since the second World War.
First deployed on Operation Banner, the British army 37-year operation in Northern Ireland, the committee later played a role in British propaganda surrounding the retaking of the Falklands after the 1982 Argentinian invasion.
More than a year after the trustees met, the museum formally commissioned former marine, Ken Howard to fill the role: “All the work I was doing was simply recording Northern Ireland,” the now-deceased artist said in an 1991 interview.
Carolin is less than sympathetic, even going so far as to allege that the British army used him as “a conscious agent” because he had some greater freedom than uniformed soldiers to be on the streets.
His presence in Belfast was heralded by the Daily Telegraph: “Armed only with a pencil and sketchpad, and protected from missiles by a tin helmet, he has stood in the midst of flying stones, bricks and rubber bullets in Belfast as soldiers fought rioting teenagers.”
Throughout his sketches, Howard depicts troops “in security and peacekeeping roles, lounging off duty in makeshift barracks”, with “the potential for violence” still present, but “safely beyond each picture frame”, she charges.
Carolin is scathing of a 1973 ink and watercolour that was later destroyed in a 1977 fire of the Long Kesh prison, later called the Maze, which is guilty, in her words, of leaving “the squalid reality of incarceration” indecipherable.
And she is even more so when she recounts Howard’s own recollections of visiting the interrogation centre at Castlereagh, one frequently mentioned then and later in claims of police brutality.
“I think that the army was quite conscious of wanting to be a civilised as they could, really. I mean I was working in ... what do they call the place where they did all the interrogations in Belfast.
“It was an old police station. Well, I went in there and I never saw anyone being manhandled or beaten or anything. And I went in there when they were doing interrogations, when they were being questioned,” Howard told the author in 2017.
Set against the backdrop of what was known then about Castlereagh, Howard’s “hazy recollection of the peaceful scene ‘at the old police station’ implicitly corroborates the British government’s account that its forces behaved unimpeachably”, she argues.
Though the Imperial War Museum made little use of Howard’s work, his drawings were photographed by the British army and used in its own Visor newspaper, which was given to soldiers weekly.
For many years during the Troubles, the museum was wary of dealing with Northern Ireland, illustrated best by a decision not to go ahead with a showing of a film on the subject.
The fears were far from misplaced, in Carolin’s view, quoting the words of IRA bomber Dolours Price who was jailed after the Old Bailey bombing in 1973 that targets were chosen if they were “emblems of the British empire”.
Even if some of the people involved still insist that Howard’s work and British PR was not propaganda, Carolin insists that everything that was done after Bloody Sunday was coloured by the fact that the Derry killing happened.
The official British version of Derry – that the Parachute Regiment had been fired upon before they opened fire themselves – set in stone by the Widgery findings for nearly 40 years, showing why artists and historical memory matter, she argues.
The reckoning over the United Kingdom’s “long, turbid” propaganda war in Northern Ireland has still to happen leaving “an atmosphere of fear, denial, avoidance and ignorance” over legacy questions.
Often loaded in her language, Carolin has, nevertheless, shone a light in little-visited places showing how British establishment voices influenced the presentation of Northern Ireland in British museums and elsewhere for decades.
