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Ulster on the Brink Part 2

Ulster arms itself
Behind the scenes the Military Council was organising and becoming more professional. Roberts had established his HQ in the Old Belfast Town Hall back in July and rapidly appointed his staff. Craig was identified as Political Officer, but in practice his duties also included securing enough arms for the rapidly growing UVF to allow proper training and equipping. To this end he had suggested to Roberts the appointment as Director of Ordnance of Major Frederick Crawford. Crawford had become convinced that Ulster would have to fight for its existence during the Home Rule debates of the 1880s and 90s at which time he had first begun trying to import arms. In 1906 he had advertised in various French, Belgian, German and Austrian newspapers to buy 10,000 rifles and 2m rounds of ammunition. In 1911, with the use of aliases and disguises, he had with some local support (including from police officers who looked the other way) made some small scale purchases in Glasgow and later acquired five hundred rifles and 3m rounds in Manchester. Attempts to import these had failed however and they had been seized by customs officials on the docks in Liverpool. He had been unsuccessful on that occasion but in the process had gained a great deal of knowledge of the arms market to supplement his practical experience during the Boer War under Roberts.

Crawford immediately set to work. His past experience told him that although it was technically not illegal to buy arms, there were technical restrictions on their movement and import and he would need to operate in some secrecy, especially since he was now able to consider the purchase and import of much larger quantities and of much improved quality. To support him, he recruited two licensed Belfast gunsmiths, Robert Adgey and William Hunter who had themselves also been attempting to import weapons. Over the previous two years the pair of them had managed to import some 500 rifles and 3m rounds of ammunition.

In February 1912, Adgey had managed to buy 50,000 rifles, 100 Maxim machine guns, 1500 Webley pistols and 2 batteries of field artillery from a dealer in Birmingham. These were still sitting in the suppliers warehouses waiting to be collected. Crawford now sent Adgey and Hunter to England where, using respectable businesses as a fronts, they set up a network of depots in Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London, West Hartlepool, Bedford, Rugby and Darlington. The weapons already acquired were moved from the warehouse into these depots, where they were repackaged under a range of guises and quickly moved on to another depot. Within a few weeks the entire consignment had been dispersed and hidden. The next steps were to arrange shipment to Ireland and dispersal to the various UVF units. Crawford left this to Craig with Adgey and Hunter, while he travelled to Germany with the aim of buying more weaponry.

He had already made contact with Bruno Spiro, an arms dealer in Hamburg, who had been very helpful and more to the point discreet. In 1911 an attempt to buy 20,000 Italian rifles was frustrated when the company with whom they were negotiating informed the British government. Spiro had stepped in and recovered the weapons and then stored them safely without disclosing the fact that their eventual destination was still Ulster. Crawford and Spiro had since then built up a firm friendship and trusted each other beyond the limits of their commercial dealings. In August of 1912 Crawford met Spiro and negotiated the purchase of 35,000 modern rifles and 4m rounds of ammunition for £83,000. Funding for this was now in place, raised in part from the same businessmen who had underwritten the Indemnity Fund for British officers, but also from Orange groups in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA. An Australian millionaire of Ulster origins, Sir Samuel McCaughey contributed £25,000 in one donation while several others exceeded £10,000.

The purchase made and payment arranged, it was now time to organise shipment to Ireland. Crawford decided, after consultation with Craig and with Carson to go for a single big shipment. “I'll see you through this business, if I should have to go to prison for it” said Carson as he endorsed the plans. It was clear that attempting to use English or Scottish ports would only result in the loss of most of the weapons, since Customs officers were becoming increasingly well informed about attempts to move arms. The weapons purchased in Birmingham were still sitting in various locations around the coast. The rifles however were of various obsolete designs without much in the way of ammunition and Crawford now developed an elaborate plan to use these as decoys while the main shipment was being brought in.

Cruise of the Berthe
In Bergen, Crawford found a ship, the S.S. Berthe. The Antrim Iron Ore and Coal Steamship Company released a ship's master and his engineer and they now travelled to Hamburg to join Crawford and from there went to Bergen to inspect the Berthe. She proving suitable, the purchase went ahead and the ship's crew were recruited for the venture under their original captain. Crawford now returned to Hamburg while the Berthe set sail under a Norwegian flag for a rendezvous point in Danish waters. He had made arrangements with Spiro for each rifle to be packed with 200 rounds of ammunition and these then wrapped in bundles of five. He expected that when the guns were landed they would need to be offloaded and dispersed very quickly. The repackaging had cost him another £2000 but would prove well worth the effort. Spiro also added the 20,000 Italian Vetterli rifles from the previous purchase to the shipments being prepared. If all went well, Crawford would be landing some 55,000 rifles of which 35,000 had only just been withdrawn from use in the Austrian Army.

The packages were loaded onto a barge and towed through the Kiel Canal to the rendezvous point in shallow waters off the Danish coast near the port of Langeland. There in early October they were trans-shipped to the Berthe. The transfer of cargoes however caught the attention of Danish port officials who boarded the ship and demanded to see the manifest. Suspicious, they took away the ships papers, promising to return them the next morning at 8.00. Overnight the weather worsened with heavy seas and a thick fog. It became obvious that the launch carrying the Port Officer would not be able to come out. Crawford waited until the appointed hour so that he could if need be claim the moral ground later, and then gave the order to set sail, anxious to get out of Danish waters as soon as possible.

Back in the UK, Crawford's team began an elaborate shell game, moving consignments between ports along the West Coast while two small freighters, the SS Cabinet Minister and the SS Larne Queen also wandered up and down the coast as if waiting for instructions. Meanwhile, the Berthe with her funnel now painted black instead of its previous bright yellow and with a new name, Doreen painted on canvas sheets, quietly headed north as if for Bergen. The intention was that the movements of the two decoy vessels along the coast and the moving of various consignments, some fake, on shore would be conspicuous enough to attract the attention of the authorities who would hopefully be distracted while the Berthe slipped north to a planned rendezvous in the remote Loch Laxford in the far north west of Scotland. Unfortunately crossing from the Swedish coast towards England they hit some heavy weather and were forced to put into the coal port of Blyth in Northumberland, this time under a third name of Fanny. Without papers this was a risky decision, but coming in at night they avoided problems. Fortunately by dawn the next morning the weather cleared and they managed to slip away without further difficulties to continue their journey north but not before sending a coded cable describing their progress.

Meanwhile, in Barrow, the Cabinet Minister had been boarded by port authorities but unable to find anything they were eventually released. Seizing the opportunity they took on 5,000 rifles and the component parts of two field guns that had somehow escaped detection on the quayside plus some coal and set off for Belfast. A further ship, the Clydevalley was at the time in Greenock awaiting instructions. On receiving the cable from Berthe she was sent north to meet them in Loch Laxford. The rest of Berthe's journey passed without incident. They were pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of the busy coastal traffic. At the end of October they edged their way into Loch Laxford to see the Clydevalley waiting. Against all the odds the cruise of the Berthe had succeeded, although the difficult task of actually landing the weapons in Ulster was still ahead.

[Part 3 to follow soon]