Bankmore Star
| Bankmore Star | |
| Full name | Bankmore Star |
| place | |
| Founded | unknown |
| Dissolved | 1973 |
| Club colors | Green-white-orange |
| Stadion | Belfast Park Department |
| Top league | Willowfield League |
| successes | |
Bankmore Star was a mixed - religion amateur football club in Belfast that was dissolved in 1972/73 due to the civil war in Northern Ireland .
This sports club gained importance because it got caught up in the blood feud, Ireland's 50-year struggle for independence. A total of four players were shot on the street because fanatics would not tolerate the joint sporting appearance of Protestant and Catholic players. The secret of the soccer club murders has never been fully clarified.
The club and its gaming operations
The year of foundation is unknown. In 1971 the club had 24 members, the players on the team - six Protestants and five Catholics - had grown up together in the Ormeau Road district, and they played in the colors of Ireland : green-white-orange.
Bankmore Star took part in the Willowfield League , a ten-year-old association at the time, comparable to the colorful leagues in Germany. Here 18 clubs, works teams such as Harland and Wolff Welders (the welders at the Harland and Wolff shipyard), street teams such as Cupar (named after Cupar Street) or Deaf United (the Deaf Games Association) played the Henry McWilliam Cup every year. The trophy was named after its founder, a Belfast football enthusiast who later emigrated to Canada.
The games were played on Saturday afternoons, kicking off at 2:30 p.m. Most of the time, the game was played on one of Belfast Park Department's 54 fields . That cost fees, and because many more teams wanted to play there than there were playing areas, schedules had to be drawn up well in advance.
1971 seemed to be the most successful year for the Green-White-Oranges in the club's history when they started a winning run. Away from the soccer field, however, the end of the club was soon heralded.
The events
On the evening of March 13, 1972, the doorbell rang for 19-year-old Catholic plumber apprentice and Bankmore right winger Patrick McCrory. When it opened, two people shot him. He died of a shot in the back.
At 4 a.m. on July 12, 1972, residents of Springhill Avenue in West Belfast heard gunshot noises, and about four hours later, walkers found a lifeless body next to a factory building. He died from a shot in the head and his face was covered with a pillowcase. The dead was 21-year-old Protestant David Colin Poots, a baker by trade. He was also a member of the Bankmore Stars .
On September 6, 1972, 21-year-old mill worker Samuel Boyde, the third member of the club - albeit not a player on the team - was murdered. He had previously been sent a warning, a book whose contents can be summarized as follows: “Tom Moody, a Protestant, married Aileen O'Meara, a Catholic. A week after the wedding, Moody is killed. ”Samuel Boyde had married the Catholic Rosemary Seales and had even converted to the Roman Catholic faith. Playing children discovered his body in a garden, gunshot wounds in the head and chest, covered with a bloody cloth.
Before his murder, 23-year-old Robert Millen also received a warning letter with a rifle bullet attached. "You are next!" It said. The letter also included a death list with the names of nine men, including the Bankmore footballer. Ten days later, on the night of April 13, 1973, the 23-year-old Protestant was shot dead from a moving car near a large Methodist church.
Assassinations were also perpetrated on the Bankmore team manager and two other players. However, the shots missed their target. The club then disbanded.
Root cause research
Until the death of Samuel Boyde, after all the third victim from the ranks of the club, the members of Bankmore Star had been of the opinion that the series of murders was more of an accumulation of coincidences as far as the club was concerned. Then people began to rethink, hid, and avoided the games and club events. The Bankmore Stars were soon excluded from the Willowfield League due to a lack of contributions . But it was of no use: the murderers found more victims from among the stars . The killer seemed insane, the Belfast coroner explained after investigating the death of Patrick McCrory, the first victim.
Walter Gloede, at the time the chief editor of Der Spiegel magazine, agreed with a more likely explanation : "The club broke religious barriers. That is why the Bankmore team seemed to the radicals as an unreasonable example."
This thesis is also represented by Martin Dillon and Denis Lehane in their book Political Murder in Northern Ireland (page 209): “The Bankmore Star soccer team was a casualty of the deterioration in community relations from 1968 onwards, in more ways than just its disbandment. [...] It would appear that the Bankmore Star football team had been earmarked for special attention by the assassins - probably because its composition crossed sectarian boundaries and seemed to suggest that Protestants and Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland could live in peace with each other ”(German:“ The Bankmore Star football team was a victim of the deteriorating social relations since 1968, even after the club was dissolved. [...] It seems that the assassins paid special attention to the Bankmore Star players had - probably because the composition of the team crossed denominational boundaries and was a sign that Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland could live together peacefully ”).
Joseph Murdoch, then General Secretary of the Willowfield League, speaks out against this thesis : “This is all nonsense. Many of the teams in the 'league' were mixed teams with players from both religions. "
Robert Cantwell suggested in The Shattered Face of Belfast Sport (German: The smashed face of the Belfast Sports ) that the secret is about the football club killings remain a mystery forever, will because no institution in Belfast to be able, light on bring to. He points out that religious differences could also have been used as a pretext for longstanding conflicts of all kinds.
Web links
- Robert Cantwell: The Shattered Face Of Belfast Sport . In: Sports Illustrated . tape 39 , no. 20 , November 12, 1973, pp. 46-52 ( si.com [accessed February 14, 2009]).
- "But we won the war" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 22 , 1974, p. 113 ( online - May 27, 1974 ).
literature
- Martin Dillon, Denis Lehane: Political Murder in Northern Ireland . Penguin, 1973, ISBN 978-0-14-052308-9 , pp. 209 .
- Walter Gloede: Sport, the unknown quantity in the political game . Goldmann Sachbuch 11286, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-442-11286-9 , p. 312 f .
- Team that will never play again . In: The Irish Times . April 18, 1973, p. 1 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ The bloody story of the Bankmore Stars at www.11freunde.de, accessed on February 26, 2019.