Obituary: Gerry Fitt, the founder leader of the SDLP who in 1984 became Lord Fitt of Bell's Hill, died yesterday at the age of 79. He had long become alienated from the SDLP, decrying it for decades as "green" and sectarian.
He was born on April 9th, 1926, on the Antrim Road in north Belfast, and like most children of poor families at the time had no secondary schooling. He worked first as a "soap boy" in a local barber's shop and then went to sea with the merchant navy from 1941 for 12 years, sailing in many wartime convoys to the US. He said later that he tried to educate himself at sea by reading about law and politics. By the time he married Ann, the Tyrone girl he met in 1946 in London, where she was working as a telephonist, he was interested in socialism.
Ann Fitt gave him five daughters - the Miss Fitts, their father called them - and, despite chronic asthma, she ran his constituency from their Antrim Road house until loyalist and republican attacks drove the family out of Belfast to London in the early 1980s.
The most vivid image of Fitt in middle age was his own description of himself in string vest and Y-fronts brandishing his legally held gun, facing intruders who in 1976 broke into the house in the night chanting IRA slogans.
In 1983, a republican mob burned down his home in Belfast. His house was broken into and his wedding pictures taken out of their frames and torn up.
He won his first Belfast Corporation seat in Dock in 1958 for Irish Labour and went on to become Stormont MP for the constituency in 1962. He held his council seat until the voters rejected him when he condemned the 1981 H Block hunger strike.
Fitt's greatest electoral triumph came in March 1966, when he beat unionist Jim Kilfedder to take the Westminster seat of West Belfast by 2,000 votes.
The arrival in government in Britain in 1964 of Labour led by Harold Wilson, an instinctive anti-unionist, was a turning point for Northern Ireland. When Fitt arrived, he and the MP Paul Rose, who led the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, with the help of material from the NI Campaign for Social Justice, targeted the "convention" that Westminster ignored nationalist complaints.
Fitt told London newspapers they should report how "British Ulster" was governed in their name. Mary Holland, then in the Observer, decades later recalled his battered suitcase full of documents and how he nagged her to come to Derry to cover a banned march in October 1968, which made news when police attacked the marchers.
Fitt repeatedly described in television reports what happened, dishevelled and still wearing his bloodstained shirt. Decades later, he would pull open a drawer and show unwary visitors the rusty stains on the shirt. "As I fell to my knees I was roughly grabbed and thrown into a police van ... At the police station I was told to clean up but I was not interested in that. I wanted the outside world to see the blood which was still flowing strongly down my face."
The perfect man for a barnstorming moment, Fitt never found another role as apt. It was arguably the high point of his career, even though he later became the first leader of the SDLP when the party was formed in 1970 from the bunch of individuals elected on the back of the civil rights campaign.
John Hume's intellectual dominance always irked Fitt, though he preferred to characterise it as conservative and nationalist Catholicism. "I'm up to my arse in country schoolteachers," was how he summed up the SDLP's development. In a short time, it was clear that Fitt was leader in name only, Hume the driving force.
When the power-sharing executive was constructed after the Sunningdale talks in 1973, a post with undefined functions was created for Fitt as deputy to Brian Faulkner's chief executive. But on the executive's first day, as then senior civil servant Maurice Hayes recounted, he seemed lost. "Here was a man who had fought at least existentially for power for two decades, and power, when achieved, was an empty desk."
Having worked alongside Fitt as well as observing his place in the development of modern nationalist politics over decades, Hayes was unsparing: "Very little work did Gerry. Files bored him and he would not carry a brief. He announced that I was to be his speech-maker, an empty occupation if ever there was one."
The loyalist workers' strike brought down the power-sharing executive in May 1974. When the SDLP voted to walk out, mid-strike, rather than have the proposed Council of Ireland diminished as a concession to the strikers, a gap opened up with the leader. In the following years resistance to an "internal" settlement and emphasis on a role for Dublin became a guiding principle of SDLP policy. Fitt became steadily more centred on Westminster.
The attacks on his home, where his wife was often alone while he was in London, understandably embittered him. Maurice Hayes remembered from a 1980 visit the elaborate locking system and wire mesh on front windows to deter loyalists, and at the back, the "cagework of iron mesh erected to prevent stoning and invasion by his more aggressive republican neighbours".
Fitt resigned from the party in late 1979 when the SDLP voted to boycott a devolution conference convened by secretary of state Humphrey Atkins, because it lacked an Irish dimension. His formal replacement by Hume seemed almost unnecessary.
Like Paddy Devlin who had left earlier, Fitt said the party had become more nationalist, less socialist. The charge was true, but when nationalism shifted direction, Fitt and Devlin were isolated. The passions of the hunger strike in 1981 added the final bitterness, both men and their families facing threats and attacks.
In the general election of June 1983, Fitt lost his West Belfast seat to Gerry Adams, Sinn Féin's first major electoral victory. Fitt had campaigned primarily on an anti-republican platform but also accused Hume and the SDLP of cowardice towards the IRA. The following year he was given a peerage. In 1985 he was critical of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, saying that London and Dublin had come up with a deal without consulting the Unionists.
Fitt had a fondness for libel suits, and succeeded in having several books pulped. His lifelong conviviality, as Maurice Hayes noted, was matched by a zest for enmity: "With his rolling seaman's gait, cigarette in mouth, his 'How's about ya', the story, the nudge, the wink, he conveyed the feeling of being inside or having the inside story as he laid the destructive little anti-personnel mine of character assassination."
His wife Ann died in 1996, one of the earliest victims of the hospital infection MRSA.
He attended the funeral of Mary Holland in Dublin in 2004, and said later that he had "cried his eyes out". Despite the harsh words down the years he joined Hume and the other founding SDLP members Austin Currie, Ivan Cooper and Paddy O'Hanlon later in a bar near the cemetery, where others left them to themselves.
Gerry Fitt (Lord Fitt of Bell's Hill): born April 9th, 1926; died August 26th, 2005