Do you know the mystery woman who helped save iconic Bloody Sunday images?

by Marianne Flood

A world-renowned photographer has revealed his iconic images of Bloody Sunday were saved by a quick-thinking Derry woman who smuggled his film out of the Bogside inside her underwear.

Gilles Peress, who captured the final moments of Bloody Sunday victim Patrick Doherty’s life, was in Derry yesterday to meet Mr Doherty’s son Tony.

Thirteen people were shot dead by British soldiers in Derry on January 30, 1972 during a civil rights demonstration, an atrocity which became known as Bloody Sunday.

A 14^th victim died a number of months later.

Mr Peress’s photographs of the bodies of Mr Doherty and Barney McGuigan, who was killed coming to his aid, were later published in the Sunday Times.

Mr Peress yesterday spoke for the first time about an unknown local woman who helped ensure the pictures were made public.

“After the ambulances had come and people were being arrested I realised I better get myself and my film out of here,” he told the Derry News at the scene of the Bloody Sunday shootings in the Bogside.

“There was a phone booth at the corner of an alleyway by the flats and I met two or three young women who were around 18 or 19.

“I approached one, a blonde, and I told her ‘I need to get my film out of this pocket. If they find me they will take it’.

“She took the rolls and she put them in her panties.

“I met her later in the City Hotel and she gave them back to me.”

Mr Peress said he never saw the woman again and does not know her name.

He drove to Dublin that night and sent the film to the Magnum Foundation photography company in Paris, because he was afraid it would have been intercepted if he shipped it to London.

Magnum’s Parisian Bureau Chief, Russ Melcher, processed the images and it was he who realised they showed the last seconds of Patrick Doherty’s life.

Mr Doherty, a married father of six, was just 31-years-old when he was killed in Joseph’s Place as he crawled towards safety.

In the 1980s, Mr Doherty’s son Tony made contact with Mr Peress and struck up a friendship with the man who witnessed his father’s death.

Yesterday, after visiting the spot where Patrick Doherty died, Mr Peress recalled how they met in an alleyway leading to Joseph’s Place

His photographs show Mr Doherty crawl through the passageway and emerge near the corner of the flats between Rossville Street and Joseph Place where he died. 

“It was a moment that affected me deeply because it was so vicious,” he explained.

“He was trying to survive.

“There’s one thing I remember Tony telling me about that day.

“I think he was 9-years-old. He had been playing with other kids outside his home and one kid said to him ‘Your father is dead’.

“That moment must have really marked Tony for life.

“How brutal and definitive that moment was.”