Betty Williams
Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who suffered death threats for her activism in Northern Ireland
BETTY WILLIAMS, who has died aged 76, co-founded Northern Ireland’s Peace People in 1976 with her neighbour Mairead Corrigan, both being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; she brought to the movement outspokenness, humour and a touch of glamour; Mairead – who proved better able to cope – was more idealistic, religious and intense.
A Catholic married to a Protestant ship’s engineer, Betty Williams was a 32-year-old housewife on West Belfast’s Andersonstown estate – an IRA stronghold – with three children and a part-time job when, on August 10 1976, after the driver of an IRA getaway car was shot dead by soldiers, it mounted a pavement and careered into Mairead Corrigan’s sister Anne Maguire and her four children.
Joanne, aged eight, and her sixweek-old brother Andrew were killed outright. John (2½) died in hospital while six-year-old Mark was unhurt. Anne was left fighting for life, spending two weeks in a coma.
Betty Williams was in her car with one of her children when she heard gunfire. Turning the corner, she saw the stricken Maguire children and went to help. Already traumatised by seeing a toddler on a tricycle have the top of his head blown off by a gunman trying to hit an Army patrol, she decided the time had come to make a stand.
While Mairead tended her sister and her family, Betty banged on doors. In 48 hours she had collected 6,000 signatures for a “Provos out – Peace, please!” petition. She said soon after: “As the Troubles began to make themselves felt, thousands of women like me began to talk about them – but always in private, among close friends we could trust.
“We never spoke out openly, because we were afraid of the IRA and what they might do if we revealed our true feelings. But the dam burst when those three children died. There had been other tragic deaths, but the tragedy of the little Maguires was the moment when I felt we just could not take any more – and 90 per cent of Catholic women feel the same way.”
Four days later, Betty and Mairead led a march of 10,000 Catholics and Protestants through Andersonstown. As the Protestant women crossed the “peace line”, Betty said: “They’ve arranged it all themselves, God bless them.”
Petrol bombers attacked her house, death threats – the first of dozens – were put through her letter box and Republican-inspired rumours began about her conduct when her husband Ralph was at sea. Ian Paisley’s Protestant Belfast Telegraph denounced the campaign as a front for the Catholic church.
On August 21 Mairead and Betty read a “Declaration of the Peace People” to a rally in Ormeau Park; the turn-out of 20,000 unsettled the IRA. A week later, 25,000 Catholics and Protestants marched down the Loyalist Shankill Road, underlining the message that sectarian violence from both sides had to stop. When thugs tried to attack them, Betty led a chorus of When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, the first of many around the world.
Next they took their message to Derry, where 18,000 people rallied on the Craigavon Bridge. The Provisionals left them alone, but insisted they could not accept “peace on any terms”.
Ralph got home at the end of August to find his wife a global celebrity with journalists queuing for interviews. He declared himself “100 per cent behind what Betty and the girls are doing”, but muttered as the phone went again: “It would be more peaceful in a ship’s engine room.”
Betty addressed 5,000 people at the Pier Head in Liverpool, including the Catholic Archbishop Derek Worlock and the Anglican Bishop David Sheppard. The rallies continued: down the nationalist Falls Road, across the new bridge over the Boyne at Drogheda, in Glasgow, and that December in Trafalgar Square.
A blitz on American television was cancelled after telephoned threats. Interviewed in a safe location, the women urged Americans not to give money “for the wrong purposes”. Betty added: “If you want to help in Ireland, send money to build a factory.”
That October Betty, Mairead and Ralph were attacked by a mob on Belfast’s Turf Lodge estate, taking refuge in a church. Days later, Betty was hit by a rock at a rally in the Falls when Republicans who had commandeered the stage pelted the marchers with sticks, bricks and broken bottles. Sixteen of the 10,000 marchers were taken to hospital and a priest had his head split open.
Joan Baez added her support before the big march in London, despite Bernadette Mcaliskey telling her she was giving succour to the British. When the CND’S Pat Arrowsmith interrupted their press conference to demand the withdrawal of British troops, Betty told her: “We have nine other armies camped in Northern Ireland. What about them?”
For a time Betty Williams weathered the intimidation, saying: “I’m not a stupid person, but I’m mentally prepared for death. I would love to get my private life back, but I care enough for the Irish people to say that if I have to give up my private life, I’ll do it.”
Betty, Mairead and the former journalist Ciaran Mckeown, who became the Peace People’s ideologue, set up local peace groups enabling those who rejected violence to “control their lives”. Betty and Mairead became salaried staff – earning less than in their previous secretarial jobs. Challenged over the payments, Betty responded: “My God, we are earning it – every damned penny.”
They persuaded New Zealand to accept “refugees” on the run from terrorist groups, and helped 150 others escape to Britain. Betty worked to break down American and Canadian reluctance to accept migrants from the North because “we are all daubed with the image of terrorism.”
On the Peace People’s first anniversary, the founders met the Queen on the Royal Yacht Britannia.
“We wouldn’t dream of snubbing such a gracious lady,” Betty explained, adding that whoever had timed her Silver Jubilee visit for the height of the Loyalist marching season “should have known better”.
German and Norwegian politicians nominated Betty and Mairead for the Nobel Prize within weeks of the first rally; told they had missed the deadline, Norwegian newspapers collected £176,000 for them as a “People’s Prize”.
Presented with the Nobel Prize in Oslo in December 1977, they gave some of the £80,000 to the Third World, where they said there were “real problems”. Betty told the ceremony: “I think we have created a climate where people are starting to talk together.”
She called on women to unite and prevent their men starting wars, saying: “As far as we are concerned, every single death in the last eight years, and every death in every war that was ever fought, represents a life needlessly wasted, a mother’s labour spurned.”
Back in Belfast, the Lord Mayor invited them to coffee; Betty declined because the city council refused them a civic reception.
Four months later, the founders stood down from the Peace People’s executive committee, saying it was becoming too academic. But they stayed involved, and at the end of 1978 met Pope John Paul II – at the instigation of Cardinal Hume, not the spiky Irish primate Tomas O Fiaich.
By now the strain was telling. Betty’s marriage had broken down: Ralph, “a fine, upstanding man”, had quit the Merchant Navy to help her, but had had enough. Mairead spent her share of the prize on the peace movement, but Betty was broke. Before long she was confiding: “Sometimes I lie in bed and wish to God we’d never received that darned prize.”
In January 1980 Anne Maguire committed suicide. Betty lamented: “We tried so hard to help her.” Mairead would marry Anne’s widower and bring up their surviving children.
Next month, Betty left the Peace People after falling out with Mckeown. She was in the throes of a breakdown, which reached its nadir that May when she spent a night in Holloway after assaulting a policeman at Heathrow, having missed her flight home.
She was born Elizabeth Smyth in Belfast on May 22 1943. Her father, a butcher, was a Protestant, her mother a Catholic. She left St Dominic’s grammar school after her O-levels, and always insisted: “I’m not a brainbox”. She worked first as a receptionist, later as part-time “Girl Friday” for an engineering firm.
Three days after her divorce in 1982 she set off for Florida with one of her daughters, having won a trip to Disney World in a raffle. On her first day there she met Jim Perkins, an electrical engineer from Oregon; they married that December and settled in Florida.
In 1986 Yorkshire Television flew her home in the hope of arranging a meeting with Mairead. It did not happen, but in 1993 both were in a party of Nobel laureates who flew to Bangkok to press the Burmese junta to free Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest.
In later life, Betty Williams found her pacifism stretched to the limit. In 2006 she told schoolchildren in Brisbane: “I don’t believe I am nonviolent. Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.” She said it again in Dallas the following year, apologising after threatening emails poured in.
Betty Williams headed the Global Children’s Foundation, and was president of the World Centre for Compassion for Children International. Accolades included the Schweitzer Medallion for Courage, the Martin Luther King Jr and Eleanor Roosevelt awards and the Frank Foundation Child Care International Oliver Award.
She married Ralph Williams in 1961; they had a son, Paul, a footballer who won one cap for Northern Ireland, and two daughters. She is survived by Jim Perkins and her children.