Amongst the countless brutalities of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, the murder of Captain Robert Nairac in the early hours of 15th May 1977, just across the Irish border from South Armagh, still has a special resonance. Partly this is because his remains have never been located and he is counted as one of ‘the disappeared’. His death has been the focus of sometimes outlandish speculation in the media and from conspiracy theorists, and has been the subject too of several books.

None of these come near in quality to the new biography of Captain Nairac by Alistair Kerr, an Edinburgh University graduate, recently retired from Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He has given us a substantial work, running to the best part of five hundred pages, which fully deserves to become the definitive treatment of its subject. It is immensely scholarly, eloquent and often deeply moving, and makes for compelling reading.

One of its many virtues lies in how effectively the author unpicks accusations from Irish Republicans and their well-wishers that Robert Nairac worked in collusion with Loyalist assassination squads. By simply deploying the chronology of his subject’s army career, the author demonstrates clearly that Nairac was not even in Northern Ireland when some of the worst Loyalist atrocities occurred, like the Miami Showband massacre in July 1975.

Robert Nairac was three and a half months short of his 29th birthday when he was beaten close to death then shot dead by a group of low-level and drunken IRA supporters, who had abducted him from a Republican bar at Drumintee. He had been on an intelligence-gathering mission there, one cleared with superior officers.

Six years earlier he had been commissioned into the Grenadier Guards. He had never been in the SAS, though his remit on the border was intelligence liaison work among them, other army units, and the RUC. He was also a practising Catholic who loved Ireland, and had a real empathy with its history and culture. At the time of his death he was learning the Irish language and he made no secret of his aversion to some of the hostility to the Irish that he heard from within the army. This made him enemies and questions still abound as to why not enough was done on the night of his death to activate in time a search and rescue operation, which could have saved him.

Alistair Kerr blames a Scottish officer for this, now dead but still a hero to his former regiment, who had come to dislike and distrust Captain Nairac as a fantasist and rogue operator. His account of events seems persuasive to the reviewer but it has exposed him to some toxic and threatening abuse. There has been press coverage of this and an Edinburgh bookshop earlier this year abandoned an event to launch the book for fear of what might happen if the author appeared on their premises.

 

There was, in fact, no paradox in Robert Nariac’s love of all things Irish and his commitment to defeating the sterile and divisive violence of the IRA. His posthumous George Cross was well-earned for, as a battalion officer on foot patrols with his men or working undercover, he was as courageous as he famously was on the rugby field or in the boxing ring.

 

Guardsmen and NCOs idolised him and his easy rapport with people, whether in Ardoyne or Armagh, equipped him well for the dangerous business of intelligence work. So too did his penchant for singing rebel songs and talking like someone from Belfast, though on the night of his death, his Ardoyne accent may not have been quite good enough to stop his cover being blown. Prior to that, the intelligence he gathered was highly rated by the army, whatever his detractors then and since may have said and written to tarnish his memory.

 

Alistair Kerr, at some points in his book, accords Nairac the attributes of a lost leader, like Rupert Brooke or Lawrence of Arabia. At others, he writes of him as someone out of step with the time in which he lived his short life. Here the author trails his coat politically. He too appears to dislike the Britain of the 1970s, yet for many, those were the days of hope when Labour governments enacted long-needed social reforms and brought about real reductions in income inequality.

 

Organised labour too raised the standard of workplace democracy and could stand up to over-mighty employers and the great predators of corporate wealth. None of this was Robert Nairac’s scene. He was never politically minded, but he clearly revered tradition, while, as the author says, being cynical about convention.

 

His school, Ampleforth, embodied the former. Even though, as a young pupil, he was brutally sodomised there by senior boys, an episode which went unpunished, he never spoke out against it. What happened to him there, along with drug use at Oxford, may well have done him real psychological and emotional damage. Some friends sensed this behind the charm and charisma that he could radiate so easily.

 

Off-duty Robert Nairac liked to walk on the wild side. His taste for pub brawls in Kilburn might have got him into trouble with one commanding officer, who, in any case, had little liking for Catholics in his mess. Even so, his world was still one of class entitlement. Boarding school, Oxford, sports cars and a commission in the Guards were all part of that as were escapades from which he seemed to be able to extricate himself without serious repercussions.
For example, while on ceremonial duty at the Tower of London, he used a fire hose after a party to drench spectators as well as soldiers performing the Ceremony of Keys. Nothing appears to have happened to him over this, yet only a few months ago a young private in the Royal Regiment of Wales died from the punishment meted out to him over a very similar exploit.

 

None of this, however, diminishes the courage and leadership qualities of a young man whose talents any army would have valued. Even one of his murderers paid tribute to him in court. Alastair Kerr’s superb book is as fine a tribute as his surviving family could wish for, and also a highly important contribution to the history of the army, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and of post-war Britain.

- Ian S. Wood is a distinguished Military historian, lecturer and journalist. He is the author of Gods, Guns and Ulster (Caxton 2003); Crimes of Loyalty: a History of the UDA (Edinburgh 2006); Britain, Ireland and the Second World War (Edinburgh 2010) and is a contributing author to A Military History of Scotland (Edinburgh 2012).