Colonel Derek Wilford
Commanding Officer of 1 Para on the day of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Londonderry
COLONEL DEREK WILFORD, who has died aged 90, had a distinguished career in the Army, serving at various times in Malaya, Cyprus and Anguilla, but his name will forever be associated with the events of “Bloody Sunday”, when he was CO of the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment (1 Para), some of whom opened fire in the Bogside area of Londonderry on January 30 1972, killing 14 unarmed civilians and wounding 14 others.
The events became the subject of two inquiries. The first, held by Lord Widgery a few weeks after the killings, largely absolved the Paras of blame. In 1998, however, on the basis that there was new evidence that had not been available to Widgery, Tony Blair’s government set up an inquiry under Lord Saville.
His report, published in 2010, came to very different conclusions, and it singled Wilford out over his decision to send troops into the Bogside in a disastrous “arrest operation”. Wilford, Saville wrote, had either “deliberately disobeyed” orders or “failed for no good reason to appreciate the clear limits on what he had been authorised to do”. He “should not have launched an incursion into the Bogside”, Lord Saville concluded.
The events of Bloody Sunday came against a backdrop of rising sectarian violence in the Province, following the introduction of internment without trial for men suspected of belonging to the IRA. By the end of 1971 barricades had been erected in Londonderry, nail bombs and petrol bombs were being thrown, and gunmen used rioters as cover when setting up ambushes. Three days before Bloody Sunday the IRA had murdered an RUC sergeant and a constable a few hundred yards from where the action would take place.
As the Civil Rights Association’s January 30 march through the Bogside drew near, there was political pressure for tougher action. Until the end of 1971 Army policy in Derry had been to contain rioters within “no-go” areas and to conduct very limited “scoop up” (i.e. arrest) operations. Wilford was among those who wanted a tougher approach, as was then Brigadier Frank Kitson, CO of 39 Brigade in Belfast, of which 1 Para was a part, who was known as an exponent of uncompromising measures to crush internal insurgency.
It was Kitson who agreed to 1 Para being sent to Derry in readiness for the march, despite reservations among other Army units in the area and the RUC about the possible consequences.
The sequence of events on Bloody Sunday remains disputed, but Saville found that just after 3.55pm, Wilford, from his position near a church, radioed his brigade HQ in Belfast for permission to send some of his men over a barrier to conduct an arrest operation.
At 4.07pm, Brigadier Patrick Maclellan, Wilford’s commander, radioed back with the go-ahead to mount an arrest operation at William Street – known as Barrier 14 – but not to “chase people down the street”, because he was concerned that rioters and peaceful marchers would become mixed up.
Wilford deployed one company through Barrier 14, but also sent another, Support Company, in armoured vehicles through nearby Barrier 12 on Little James Street. As the men from Barrier 12 gave chase, rioters and peaceful marchers did became mixed up, so there was no means for soldiers to identify and arrest only the trouble-makers.
Although neither Maclellan nor Wilford had intended soldiers to enter the no-go area of Bogside, Support Company drove deep into the area and dismounted. Assessing that they had come under sporadic gunfire, Support Company launched a full combat operation, with lethal results. (Saville found that firing at the soldiers did take place, but not by the civilians subsequently shot.)
“Colonel Wilford decided to send Support Company into the Bogside,” Saville wrote, “because at the time he gave the order he had concluded, without informing Brigadier Maclellan, that there was now no prospect of making any significant arrests in the area he had originally suggested, as the rioting was dying down and people were moving away.
“He sent his soldiers into an area which he had told [them] was dangerous. He knew that his soldiers would not withdraw if they came under lethal attack, but were trained not just to take cover, but instead to move forward and, as he himself put it, seek out the enemy.”
The Saville report provoked a fightback from 35 former members of Wilford’s battalion, present on Bloody Sunday but not involved in the shootings. In an open letter passed to The Daily Telegraph, they wrote: “We believe the inquiry as convened was fundamentally flawed and its conclusions based upon a subjective interpretation of only some of the evidence adduced before it.”
Lord Saville, the letter went on, “chose one position and cherry-picked his evidence to support it”, and his conclusions regarding Wilford were a “cynical exercise to head off the possibility of criticism that the inquiry might condemn only lowly ranking officers and men”.
In December 1972 Wilford was appointed OBE and subsequently became a full Colonel, but Bloody Sunday spelt the end of his military career. “I’ve always thought of myself as a humanist, and to me it was a terrible thing that had happened,” he told Valerie Grove in 1999. “I believe I recognised, although it only became clear later, that this was the end, for me, as a soldier.”
Wilford remained CO 1 Para in Northern Ireland for another four months, after which, as he told Valerie Grove, he was “got out of the way” – sent to Australia, then to a desk job in the MOD. He blamed the pressure for the breakdown of his first marriage. After it foundered he retired in 1981.
Saville’s report concluded: “What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the Army and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.”
Derek Wilford was born on February 16 1933 in Leicestershire to an unmarried mother; he never knew his father and was brought up by his grandparents, believing they were his parents and that his mother was his sister.
Attending school in Loughborough, where his fees were paid by an anonymous benefactor, he excelled at Latin and Greek, acted in Greek plays and Shakespeare, claimed the School Prize, and in his final year was declared Victor Ludorum. He was offered a place at Rada, but declined.
Called up for National Service in 1952, Wilford was commissioned into the Leicestershire Regiment and the following year was posted to Malaya on secondment to the 5th Battalion of the Malay Regiment during the Emergency. He took part in jungle patrols and was involved in several successful actions against the Communist Terrorists. He then volunteered to do a second two-year tour, with the 7th Gurkhas.
Wilford served in Cyprus during the EOKA troubles and on operations in the Arabian Peninsula. In 1960 he was briefly in the newly formed East Anglian Regiment before transferring to 22 SAS, where he stayed for three years, including a spell with the US 7th Special Forces in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
While serving with the SAS in Malaya, Wilford led an operation to recover an airman whose Auster aircraft had crashed in an area controlled by insurgents. After two days in the deep jungle, they reached the scene of the crash and found the airman just as the insurgents were closing in. It took a further four days to transport the severely injured man to a safe extraction point.
After attending Staff College, where he was one of the top three students, Wilford was appointed Brigade Major of 2 Infantry Brigade. He was subsequently approached by the Parachute Regiment and offered command of D Company of 2 Para. In 1969 they took part in Operation Sheepskin, a shortlived and non-violent operation which restored British rule on the Caribbean island of Anguilla.
He took D Company to Northern Ireland on 2 Para’s first Operation Banner tour before being promoted in 1971 to Lieutenant Colonel and command of 1 Para.
After his retirement and divorce from his first wife Janet, Wilford married Linda and moved to Belgium where she had a job at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, Europe. He had hoped to work there too, but no job materialised. The couple settled in Belgium, where Wilford restored an old farmhouse and took up landscape painting.
Derek Wilford was a man of great personal charm, and the loyalty of his men to him was as absolute as was his to them. In 2019, when it was reported that veterans of 1 Para might face prosecution over the events of Bloody Sunday, Wilford told The Daily Telegraph that he was sorry for what took place in January 1972, but that “I don’t regret what the soldiers did”: “One loses sight of how it was… These people on the barricades were out to kill us… My sympathy lies with my soldiers, who day after day were obliged to go out into the wilderness of hostility.”
He is survived by his wife and daughter and by two sons from his first marriage, one of whom also became a lieutenant colonel in the Parachute Regiment.