Brief Biography:

He was born in the Shankill Road area of Belfast and was educated locally before leaving school at an early age to take up employment in various manual occupations. In 1957 Spence joined the British Army and served in the Royal Ulster Rifles until ill-health forced him to leave in 1961 to return to civilian life. Later he became involved in the loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which was to be reformed in Belfast in 1965. A year later in October 1966 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a young Catholic barman, a charge he was always to deny, outside a public house in the Shankill Road area. Within the Maze Prison Spence assumed the position of UVF commander and on the outside he emerged as something of a hero to militant loyalists.

By 1977 however his views had undergone a dramatic change and in a public statement he called for reconciliation in Northern Ireland and condemned the use of violence to secure political objectives on the grounds that it was counter-productive. Having resigned as the UVF leader in the Maze in 1978 Spence was finally released in December 1984. Although he had also by this stage severed his links with the UVF he still maintained an association with it through his involvement with the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) which offered political advice to the UVF. In addition Spence devoted much of his time to in encouraging the growth of community politics in Protestant working class communities such as the Shankill. In doing so he was also to be highly critical of the established unionist parties arguing that, in his view, they had failed to properly represent such areas. His standing within loyalism was clearly established in October 1994 when he was chosen to read out a statement from the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC), representing the main loyalist paramilitary groups, which announced the calling of an immediate ceasefire. After this development he went on to support the emerging 'Peace Process' and backed the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of April 1998 in the subsequent referendum campaign of May 1998.

Book References:

Elliott, Sydney. and Flackes, W.D. (1999), Northern Ireland: A Political Directory 1968-1999. Belfast: Blackstaff Press.
Garland, Roy. (2001), Gusty Spence. Belfast: Blackstaff Press.
McRedmond, Louis. (ed.) (1998), Modern Irish Lives: Dictionary of 20th-century Biography. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.

Web Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/troubles/factfiles/uvf.shtml

[Entry written by B. Lynn 5 January 2003]