Opinion: Art created by Ken Howard during the Troubles shows the power of images to control the conflict narrative and conceal the reality of war
By Clare Carolin, King's College London
Anyone familiar with Irish history will know that a watershed moment in the Troubles occurred on 30 January 1972 when British Army paratroopers opened fire on civil rights protesters in Derry, killing 14 innocent people and injuring and traumatising many more. These events may conjure pictures of protestors lying in pools of blood, a priest waving a bloodstained white handkerchief and a shocked group of men struggling to support the body of a critically injured teenager.
In the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday, these images of bloodshed and community solidarity were transmitted around the world. Photographic reporting of these events was a public relations disaster for the British government who wanted their operation in the North to be seen as a friendly peacekeeping mission. Days after the shootings, British prime minister Edward Heath called his military and political aides to a secret meeting, reminding them ‘we are in Northern Ireland fighting not only a military war, but a propaganda war’.
In my book The Deployment of Art, I argue that art was used as an instrument of war after Bloody Sunday, to control the conflict narrative and win hearts and minds for the British army on both sides of the Irish Sea. The early 1970s was the dawn of the era of image-led real-time news with newspaper ‘colour supplements’ and television readily accessible in most British and Irish households.
For soldiers patrolling the streets and fields of the North this brought new pressures. Army commanders accustomed to operations in the remote bush or jungle of former colonies like Kenya and Malaya now found themselves under intense media scrutiny. Colin Wallace, Commander of Army Psychological Operations in Belfast, explained to me that soldiers would return from operations to see themselves on the television evening news. Negative news coverage seriously threatened troop morale and public support for the army.
After Bloody Sunday, the British government sent a cash injection to the North via the Foreign Office's undercover propaganda unit, the Information Research Department. Wallace and his army PSYOPs colleagues used the money to pull out all the creative stops to get the optics right on army activity.
This is where art and artists came into the picture. During the two world wars, hundreds of artists were commissioned to record frontline action and war’s impact on ordinary people. Painter Paul Nash and others made work condemning the violence, but the main aim and thrust of British official war art was propagandistic and diaristic.
The British saw war art as a morale-boosting way to ‘record’ conflict for posterity from their own perspective. This was exactly what the top Army commander in Ireland, Harry Tuzo had in mind when, a year after the Derry massacre, he wrote to the Imperial War Museums' Keeper of Art expressing his wish to see ‘a record of some of our moments in Northern Ireland displayed on your walls’.
Soon afterwards, the museums appointed a working-class Londoner, Ken Howard as their first ‘official artist in Northern Ireland’. Howard had trained as a draftsman and painter and spent time with elite Special Forces as a Royal Marine Commando. However, he was forbidden to call himself a ‘war artist‘ because, as he told me in 2017, "Northern Ireland was never a war".
Under the close eye of army PSYOPs, Howard made numerous art-making excursions to the North during the 1970s. He painted watercolours and oils on commission for the Artistic Records Committee that the IWM had set up in line with Tuzo’s idea, and celebratory drawings of the regiments that adopted him as their mascot. He sketched illustrations for the Northern Ireland Telephone Directory. He even painted a huge altarpiece called Ulster Crucifixion showing children playing amongst ruined Belfast streets plastered with sectarian graffiti.
Howard worked in different styles, but the message in his art was always the same: the conflict was 'not a war' but a sectarian scuffle; and the British army was doing a difficult, dangerous and heroic job, reluctantly keeping the peace between 'emotional' local factions.
Most of all, the message was that the army’s conduct was unimpeachable. For every incident of chaos, confrontation or alleged misconduct involving the Army, Howard created a picture that showed the opposite. Long Kesh prison, the site of serious riots. was sketched from a picturesque distance. Army checkpoints in Belfast and Derry were shown as if they were perfectly normal, or in the illustration of Belfast City Hall on the phone book cover, simply redacted. In 1977, Amnesty International reported that paramilitary suspects had been tortured in Castlereagh RUC Station. Howard later visited, repeating that he ‘never saw anyone being manhandled, or beaten or anything’.
Nervous of IRA attacks, the IWM never exhibited Howard’s work as Tuzo had imagined. But from a propaganda perspective this didn’t matter because Howard’s art and opinions reached a wide audience through his regular TV appearances. He always used these moments in the media spotlight to stress the truthfulness and accuracy of his work.
During the 1970s, the North was one of the most surveilled places in the world and Howard’s custom of setting up his artist’s easel to draw in strategically important places like checkpoints and interface zones meant he was probably useful to British army intelligence. Drawing from life on the streets allowed him plenty of opportunity for casual contact with local people, while observing a location for hours, and sometimes days on end. All artists and photographers working in Northern Ireland were accredited through army PSYOPs and debriefed after their assignments. Even incidental information gathered and passed on innocently would have made Howard an unconscious agent.
Half a century on the ‘truth’ of what happened during the Troubles is still not settled. Howard’s art and recollections of his time in the North support an Army-friendly account of the conflict, largely in contradiction to known facts. If we are to build a peaceable future, we must learn to distinguish fact from fiction.
Today's world of social media and digital imaging technology is saturated with images of conflict the accuracy of which are constantly in dispute. Understanding the individuals who create images and the forces that drive them is key. Howard’s art serves as a reminder of the power of images, and art in particular, to conceal the reality of war and support a false narrative that continues to press into the present and perpetuate the injustices of the past.
The Deployment of Art: The Imperial War Museum's Artistic Record's Committee 1968-1982 by Clare Carolin is out now on Routledge
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Dr Clare Carolin is Senior Lecturer in Art and Public Engagement and Director of Educational Partnerships and Collaborations in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at Kings College London
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
