“As children,” Julieann Campbell writes in her introduction to this intricately woven oral history of Bloody Sunday and its long aftermath, “we were told stories about my uncle, Jackie Duddy – a teenage boxing champion – who went on a civil rights march and was shot by British soldiers.”
Jackie Duddy, aged 17, was the first fatality on the afternoon of 30 January 1972. A photograph of his limp body being carried by local men, while a priest walks uncertainly ahead of them waving a white handkerchief, has since become the single most memorable image of the day’s horror. For his close family, it is also a constant and painful reminder of the casual brutality of his passing. “We knew Jackie’s face from family photographs, book covers and the Bogside mural,” she elaborates, describing the discomfort she felt as a child “seeing mum subjected to her brother’s dying moments again and again” each time footage of Bloody Sunday aired on the news.
