Sir Graham Shillington, a former chief constable of the RUC, who died on August 14th aged 90, commanded the force during the most murderous period of the Troubles.
In August 1969, as Deputy Inspector-General, he requested the first use of CS gas in the United Kingdom in an attempt to bring the "Battle of the Bogside" to an end and relieve his exhausted officers. When that failed, and with pressure mounting for more police in Belfast, he asked for British troops to go onto the streets of Derry.
Later, as chief constable from November 1970 until October 1973, he supervised the RUC's re-training and rapid expansion from 3,000 to 4,500 officers, while simultaneously enduring the first IRA murders of police officers, the escalation of the IRA's economic bombing campaign and a surge in brutal, sectarian tit-for-tat killings. It was a period which embraced such grim landmarks as the introduction of internment, Bloody Sunday, the Abercorn Restaurant bombing, Bloody Friday and Operation Motorman, during which about 800 people died.
His position as chief constable was an unenviable one with his chief, Sir Arthur Young, scuttled from the RUC after just a year, muttering that his work to implement the Hunt Report was being obstructed from within. In fact, the process of civilianising and disarming the force could not proceed because of the ferocity of the IRA threat and Graham Shillington was forced to fight the British government and the army to ensure, first, adequate protection for his officers and, then, the re-issue of firearms to them.
Early in 1972, with the British government contemplating direct rule, the very integrity of the RUC was being questioned in memoranda from British officials in Belfast to their masters in London, who were told the force could not be relied on in the event of a Protestant uprising. With the RUC still reeling from its ordeal at the hands of civil rights marchers and loyalist counter-demonstrators in 1968-1969, Graham Shillington quietly put in place the machinery to rebuild its morale and capacity, work which ensured its ability to cope, in the years ahead, during what proved to be sustained conflict of a then unthinkable duration.
Given such a trying combination of public disorder and urban terrorism, gruelling internal politics with ministers and the army and the constant stream of death and injury to his officers, it is not surprising that he suffered a heart attack in early summer 1972, which caused him to miss the RUC's 50th anniversary march past. A year later, in July 1973, he announced his retirement to take effect the following October, the decision deliberately signalled in advance to forestall any suggestion he had been pushed after 40 years' service.
One of the most important contributions he made to the RUC was to spot and put into key positions, talented officers like Jack Hermon, who built on the foundations he had laid to ensure the modernisation of the RUC and its ability to combat the debilitating terrorism which was to blight life in Northern Ireland for so long.
Robert Edward Graham Shillington was born in Portadown, Co Armagh, on April 2nd, 1911, the son of Major David Shillington, a prominent member of the Orange Order and commander of the self-styled Ulster Volunteer Force in the town, which was preparing to resist the prospect of Home Rule by force. After distinguished service in the first World War, his father, a prosperous agricultural and builders' merchant, went on to become a long-serving Unionist MP for Armagh and one-time minister of Labour at Stormont.
Graham Shillington was educated in Dublin, then at Sedbergh School in Yorkshire. Having graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, he joined the RUC as a cadet officer on February 8th, 1933, at a salary of £1-3s-6d a month. Within a year he was promoted to district inspector and put in charge of the Glenravel Street area of Belfast. A year later he married, but was forced to cancel the planned honeymoon in France when serious rioting erupted over the Twelfth of July and he was required to remain on duty, taking command of troops and police reinforcements, drafted in from the country, to enforce a curfew which lasted for eight nights.
After the outbreak of the second World War, he was transferred to Musgrave Street in central Belfast where he was in the midst of what he described as the "trauma" of two major Nazi air raids on the city in 1941. In 1944, he was transferred to Derry where he was to spend nine years, "the happiest times of my service". In those halcyon days, his wife could happily go off on her own to visit her dressmaker on the Lecky Road and the biggest problem for the police was the, often drunken, high jinks of the sailors who put into the port for rest and recuperation after dry and celibate weeks at sea.
Promoted county inspector in 1953, Graham Shillington returned to Belfast to an administrative post at headquarters. In 1961, he was promoted again, this time to Belfast City Commissioner. Although the IRA's 1956-1962 campaign had quickly collapsed, Republicans played a key part in the civil rights agitation that followed and, in the eye of the gathering storm, he was at the forefront of the RUC's inadequate efforts to manage it. In late 1969, after the inspector-general, Anthony Peacock, was replaced by Sir Arthur Young, who took the title chief constable for the first time, Graham Shillington remained as deputy to help implement the RUC reform package outlined in the Hunt Report, before becoming chief himself.
Graham Shillington, who was knighted in 1972, also received the MBE, OBE and CBE. His wife, Mary (nΘe Bulloch) pre-deceased him in 1977 and he is survived by two sons and a daughter.
Robert Edward Graham Shillington: born 1911; died, August 2001