Second World War

The Second World War enters the narrative not as a single continuous story but through the afterlives of its industry, weapons, buildings, and memories. Belfast’s shipyards and factories worked for the war effort, and the city itself was bombed; decades later, old rifles and a former naval vessel had been absorbed into the conflict in Northern Ireland. The war also supplied a measure of comparison for later attacks: London witnesses recalled the Blitz, while Margaret Thatcher’s experience of wartime bombing helped shape the outlook she brought to Northern Ireland.

Wartime Belfast and the home front

When the Second World War began, Belfast’s linen factories produced millions of uniforms and its shipyards turned out naval vessels. The war economy was part of the city’s everyday landscape, particularly around Harland & Wolff shipyard, where Jean McConville’s father worked. As a child, she watched the regular procession of men pass her home on Avoniel Road on their way to the yard and return at the end of the day. The account places her family within a working city whose employment, streets, and daily rhythms were closely tied to shipbuilding.

That industrial role did not shield Belfast from attack. In 1941, shortly before Jean’s seventh birthday, air-raid sirens sounded as Luftwaffe bombers crossed the waterfront, dropping parachute mines and incendiary bombs. Harland & Wolff erupted into flame. The episode links the city’s productive contribution to the war with its exposure to destruction: the shipyard that supplied naval vessels became a visible target. It also places the bombing within Jean’s childhood, before the later conflict that would dominate the lives of her family and community.

Weapons and vessels after the war

The war’s material residue reappears in the account of IRA training. Recruits were sent to camps in the Republic, where they trained with revolvers, rifles, and explosives. The Provisional IRA’s arsenal was limited, and many weapons dated from the Second World War. Recruits learned to oil and disassemble rifles, set charges, and prime explosives, as well as marching in formation. The old weapons were not merely relics: they were equipment that new recruits were expected to prepare and use in a later conflict.

A similar repurposing shaped the history of HMS Maidstone. The five-hundred-foot vessel had served the Royal Navy during the Second World War, supporting submarines. When the Troubles began, it was recommissioned first as emergency accommodation for two thousand British troops arriving in Belfast and then as HMP Maidstone, a prison. Its wartime service preceded its new roles as a troop facility and place of confinement. Prisoners were held in crowded bunkhouses beneath the deck, in three-tiered bunks and dim light from small portholes. The ship’s successive uses make the past tangible: a naval vessel built into wartime service became part of the infrastructure of the conflict that followed.

The Blitz as a measure of later violence

The Second World War also supplies a frame of reference for the London bombings. After two bombs detonated near the Old Bailey, nearly 250 people were injured. To witnesses old enough to remember the war, the scene recalled the Blitz. That comparison registers the shock of seeing a form of destruction associated with wartime London recur in a different political conflict. It does not make the events identical; rather, it shows how the memory of the earlier bombing shaped how civilians and witnesses understood the later blast.

The aftermath also contained a specific contrast with wartime emergency. A rail strike and a strike by non-medical workers were under way, yet hospital workers abandoned their picket lines when casualties arrived and went in to help. Frederick Milton, a caretaker at Hillgate House beside the Old Bailey, was covered in blood but refused medical attention so he could assist other injured people. He later collapsed and died in hospital. An autopsy found that his heart attack had begun before the explosion, so the medical evidence did not support a murder charge. The episode keeps the comparison with the Blitz grounded in the human consequences of the attack, while also distinguishing the factual questions surrounding one death from the immediate scene of mass injury.

Political memory and the war’s continuing presence

The war also forms part of Margaret Thatcher’s personal and political background. As a girl in the East Midlands during the Second World War, she lived in Grantham when it was bombed by the Luftwaffe. Her closest adviser on Northern Ireland, Airey Neave, had been a prisoner of war and escaped from Colditz Castle. Before Thatcher became prime minister, Neave was killed by a car bomb set by the Irish National Liberation Army. The narrative connects these wartime experiences and memories to the perspective Thatcher brought to Northern Ireland: she regarded its constitutional question through a comparison with the Sudetenland and did not consider Catholic grievances a right to join a neighbouring country. Neave’s assassination, shortly before she took office, reinforced her uncompromising posture toward Irish republicanism.

Across these episodes, the Second World War is neither a complete explanation of the later conflict nor a background that has simply passed away. Its industrial mobilization shaped Belfast; its weapons remained in circulation; a former naval vessel was converted to military and prison use; and memories of bombing and captivity informed later perceptions and political responses. The book uses these distinct returns to show how a past war persisted in the physical resources and remembered comparisons through which a subsequent conflict was experienced.