by Ken Wharton
This group stuck exclusively in England, ignoring Scotland and Wales in order not to alienate their Celtic support in both countries. By bombing Army barracks at Deal, Mill Hill and Chelsea, and tourist attractions such as those in the Royal Parks or even the Tower of London, the Army Council could show their Northern Irish-based support that they were taking the war to the English. Moreover, they could also demonstrate to their anti-British backers in the USA, USSR and Libya that they could take the battle to their mutual enemies.
The idea of using bombs on the streets of England was not a modern phenomenon to the Irish Republican Army, with attacks by Irish Independence movements, Fenians and United Irishmen occurring during the reign of Victoria. The Fenian dynamite campaign of 1891–95 was carried out by politically identical groups such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and United Irishmen of America, also known as Clan na Gael. The latter group also led cross-border attacks on British bases inside Canada, which led to several major rifts between the Canadians and the USA.
This earlier campaign was aimed at the infrastructure of British political and financial centres, and while not designed to take life – unlike the later Provisional IRA campaigns in the last third of the twentieth century – inevitably some lives were lost. For example, during an explosion at an Army barracks in Salford in 1880, a young child was killed. Several bombs were planted throughout 1881, notably at Chester Barracks, Liverpool Police Barracks as well as the town hall there, and also during a financiers’ meeting at London’s Mansion House; the same venue was also bombed the following year. In 1883, Glasgow was targeted, with three bombs injuring a dozen people, including one at Buchanan Street Railway Station. The worst attack took place on 30 October 1883 on the London Underground at Paddington station and Westminster Bridge station, which injured seventy people. The following year, the Fenians stepped up their bombing campaign with explosions at the offices of the Metropolitan Police’s CID and also at their Special Branch HQ. The Carlton Club was also attacked, as well as the home of anti-Irish Independence MP Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn. Ten people were injured; a fourth bomb was planted at the foot of Nelson’s Column but failed to explode. Other attacks took place at the House of Commons, although excellent detective work, plus the seizing of several boat-loads of arms and explosives, saw the campaign end in the spring of 1885.
It continued only sporadically throughout the twentieth century, but rose again in 1939, during that immediate pre-war period during which the realists such as Churchill and Eden knew that war with Germany was coming, and appeasers such as Chamberlain and Halifax tried to prevent the inevitable. In the January, with the declaration of war some eight months away, the IRA began a bombing campaign in Britain, striking targets in London and other cities. On 25 August, as part of its imaginatively titled ‘S’ Plan, designed to help the Germans ‘soften up’ England, a bomb was left, attached to a bicycle outside a shop in the Broadgate area of Coventry. Although there were later claims from the IRA that they had not intended to kill or injure civilians, it was clear that they saw innocent passers-by as legitimate targets, as part of the ‘grand plan’ to convince Hitler of their strength and usefulness. The no-warning bomb exploded, destroying the nearby shops and killing five people: Elsie Ansell (21), John Arnott (15), Rex Gentle (30), James Clay (82) and Gwilym Rowlands (50). One of the victims – Elsie Ansell – was so mutilated by the blast that she could only be identified by her distinctive engagement ring.
The IRA bombing team included Dominic Adams, who would later become the uncle of Sinn Féin/PIRA’s Gerry Adams; he managed to escape to Ireland. Two others – Peter Barnes and James McCormick – were hanged, whilst Joby O’Sullivan, who actually planted the bomb, was able to evade arrest. Just before the two were hanged, Irish Taoiseach De Valera demanded of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that they be spared; this was ignored, and they were hanged on 7 February 1940.
The bombing in Coventry was a portend of things to come, when, twenty-one months later, the German Luftwaffe bombed the city on 14/15 November 1940, destroying more than 4,300 homes, killing 568 people and injuring 1,256 others; in all 66 per cent of the city’s buildings were damaged.
The renewed mainland campaign began on 22 February 1972, when members of the Official IRA planted a device at the officers’ mess of the Parachute Regiment in Aldershot; six civilians and an Army chaplain were killed. There were more than 1,000 bombings as well as numerous planned assassinations and random killings during the twenty-four-year-long campaign. In a book of this size, it is not possible to cover every single one; it is therefore proposed that the following incidents are looked at: Aldershot officers’ mess; the Old Bailey attack; the 1973 Westminster attack; the M62 coach bomb attack; the Birmingham pub bombings; the assassination of Airey Neave MP in 1979; the Royal Parks bombings in July 1982; the Warrington bombings; and the murder of policeman Glen Goodman in 1993. This forced expediency should not reduce in terms of either significance or poignancy other bombings and murders, and this author has no intention of detracting from their importance.
ALDERSHOT BOMBING
On 30 January 1972, a NICRA demonstration in Londonderry turned violent, exactly as predicted; the march that began in the Creggan Heights, developed into pitched battles in the Bogside, culminating in the deaths of thirteen* civilians and the wounding of fifteen others. This particular section of the book is not designed to describe or criticise the events of that tragic day; however, the unit involved was the Parachute Regiment’s 1st Battalion, and from there, the trail led, almost inevitably, to Aldershot in Hampshire, the spiritual home of the Paras.
On 30 January, on a cold Sunday morning, the march began just below the Creggan Heights, winding down the hill to the Bogside. It was understood from the NICRA organisers that the protestors would then return to the starting point. However, there were elements of the march, PIRA- as well as OIRA-influenced, who wished to get into the city centre and continue the destruction of the mainly Protestant-owned businesses, thus completing the task set in motion by the bombing campaign of the Provisional IRA. Despite the best efforts of the stewards to prevent the breakaway, sections of what the soldiers called the ‘Derry young hooligans’ (DYH) began taunting troops before hurling any missile on which they could lay their hands. Shots then rang out from the direction of the nearby Rossville flats, leading to a violent reaction from the Paras manning the blockades. The rest, as they say, is history.
It was decided by the OIRA that retaliation was vital in order to avoid losing ground in the ‘popularity war’ with the Provisionals. Their target was to be the officers’ mess of the Parachute Regiment in Aldershot. The date was to be Tuesday, 22 February, twenty-three days after the slaughter in the Bogside. Given the likely repercussions expected following Bloody Sunday, security at the HQ of 16th Parachute Brigade was incredibly lax, with soldiers armed with only pick-axe staves defending the vicinity; the area was open, with no controlled access to the garrison.
Just before midday, on a bitterly cold winters’ day, Noel Jenkinson, a communist and a Maoist member of the OIRA, along with several other members, drove up to the mess, parking a stolen Ford Cortina packed with 200lb (91kg) of high explosive in the street alongside the building. The men walked off unhurriedly to another stolen car, which whisked them away into the Hampshire countryside. At precisely 12.40 hours, the bomb detonated, wrecking the mess as well as seriously damaging other Army buildings nearby.
The mess contained only a few junior officers, with the highest ranking being Padre Captain Gerard Weston (38). He was killed instantly, along with domestic staff: Joan Lunn (39), Cherie Munton (20), Thelma Bosley (44), Margaret Grant (32), Jill Mansfield (34) and gardener John Haslar (58). Mrs Bosley had been off work ill, but she had returned early to help out her colleagues. Senior officer Brigadier Rowley Manns said afterwards: ‘Whatever part or faction of the IRA claim this battle honour, it is completely negated, is it not, this war as they call it, that has been waged against a ch
aplain and innocent women.’ A spokesman for the Official IRA told a press conference in Dublin: ‘Our intelligence reports indicate that at least 12 officers were killed.’ They persisted in this belief even when it was revealed that they had killed, in the main, innocent civilian staff, calling the British press ‘... reactionary and hypocritical ...’
Jenkinson was jailed for life, but he died from a heart attack inside prison just four years into his sentence. The other members of the gang were never captured. The landmark bombing – the first against the military on British soil for decades – was an unmitigated disaster for the Officials; it marked them as ruthless and indiscriminate killers as well as being inept. If they had intended to establish themselves as defenders of the Catholic community as well as put them in the ascendancy against the Provisionals, it backfired. It was their last attack on the mainland, and, when one includes their role in the unnecessary death of Ranger William Best in May of the same year, it was to be the death-knell for the organisation.
THE OLD BAILEY ATTACK
In 1973, the Provisionals decided to bomb targets in England, encouraged by the feeble security that had allowed their rivals, the OIRA, to plant a bomb at a high-security target in Aldershot. The Army Council dispatched an eleven-person ASU to select targets in London in early March, but, unknown to them, an informer had already leaked information about the proposed attacks to the RUC. They in turn relayed this information to the Metropolitan Police in London, although it does appear that this warning was not sufficiently heeded.
At approximately 06.00 hours on 8 March, the ASU, which included Marion and Dolours Price, Gerry Kelly, William McLarnon and Roy Walsh, planted a series of four car bombs at locations in central London, which included the Central Criminal Courts at the Old Bailey, New Scotland Yard, an Army information office, and the Ministry of Agriculture, all in or near Whitehall; they were all timed to go off at around 15.00 hours, by which time the bombers would be back in Belfast. The bomb at New Scotland Yard was spotted by an alert officer, who noticed that the car’s registration plates were false; this device was safely defused. The authorities were now sufficiently aware that this was unlikely to be a lone bomb, consequently sparking off a series of warnings to personnel at several high-risk sites. The device at the Army careers office was also spotted and defused, but at 14.35 hours, police found the Old Bailey bomb. They were in the process of evacuating the area when it exploded. At around the same time, the device outside the Ministry of Agriculture also exploded; in the two attacks, Frederick Milton (60) died from a heart attack brought on by the explosion and more than 200 people were injured. The explosions caused major damage to both buildings.
By the time of the discovery of the first bomb, police and immigration authorities had been ordered to check passengers embarking at airports and docks travelling to Belfast and Dublin. Ten of the ASU, including the Price sisters, were arrested as they tried to board a plane at Heathrow Airport, whilst an eleventh man escaped.
The late Brendan Hughes, a leading member of the Provisional IRA, told author Ed Moloney:
It was a Belfast Brigade initiative that brought about the London bombings. It was ourselves who planned, organised and recruited for the London bombings; The initial idea was discussed at Belfast Brigade meetings with myself, Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell, Pat McClure, Tom Cahill, basically that group of people. We would have been the main people in the Belfast Brigade at the time ... No one dissented. At that particular period, everyone knew we had to step up the war and bring the war to England, and I can’t remember anybody dissenting from that ... Once the decision was made, the next thing was to pick who would go ... we ordered people from different units within Belfast to come to a call house in the Lower Falls ... Myself and Gerry Adams were there, and it was put to these Volunteers that there was a job planned; it was a very dangerous job.
It has always been claimed by the Provisionals that they didn’t intend to kill people but that they intended instead to cause severe structural damage as well as maximum embarrassment for the British authorities. However, as was proven at the time and in myriad bombings afterwards, when an explosive device detonates in areas where people live, work or congregate, casualties are inevitable, given that their warnings were often inaccurate and often deliberately misleading. Given that the Provisionals would later use a dedicated England team employing ‘sleepers’ who would have been deeply embedded in local communities for years before they were activated, the attempts of the London ASU to escape en masse were amateurish. The plan should have been to dispatch in groups of no more than two, or even singly, by separate routes to different parts of England, Wales or Scotland, lying low for weeks, even months. It was a lesson that they would heed in future.
1973 WESTMINSTER ATTACK
Eight months after the Old Bailey attack, another took place in central London, again aimed at the seat of the British government. A bombing team had been placed in situ for some time before the attack. It was planned to set up a distraction by sending explosive devices in the post, one of which injured a senior police officer. At this stage, Edward Heath’s government was in deep peril following a crippling coalminers’ strike, fuel crisis and a shortly-to-be introduced three-day working week. He would lose a General Election the following February on a snap election with the preposition ‘Who rules?’ With the government in crisis, the Army Council gave the go-ahead for another attack.
On 18 December, a car bomb was placed near the Home Office building close to Horseferry Road in Millbank; a warning was telephoned through to a London newspaper – the Evening News – some thirty minutes prior to the explosion; a further warning was called through to Horseferry House, claiming that the bomb would explode in thirty minutes; it exploded just five minutes later. It did so while police were evacuating the area, injuring sixty people, including several officers, some seriously. In a later statement, the Provisionals declared that the attack was in retaliation for the ‘savage’ gaol sentences handed out a month or two earlier to the Old Bailey bombers. It is thought that it was the same unit that had bombed King’s Cross and Euston stations only three months earlier.
Home Secretary Robert Carr told the House of Commons:
At about 8.50 this morning a bomb exploded in Thorney Street, which leads off Horseferry Road. The bomb was planted in a car which is known to have been stolen in London last night, and was parked outside Horseferry House, a building occupied by my Department, and opposite Thames House, which is mainly occupied by the Department of Trade and Industry. Both these buildings, and others nearby, were extensively damaged. I regret to say that a considerable number of people were injured, and about forty received treatment in Westminster Hospital. Two of these were seriously injured and required operative treatment, although I am glad to say that I understand that their condition is now satisfactory. When I visited the hospital at midday a further seven were still detained for treatment for cuts, shock and other minor injuries.
The British Government was privately rocked by the explosion, which was virtually on their doorstep. None more so than Prime Minister Heath, who had made a massive gamble only two years before in inviting leading Provisionals – including Gerry Adams – to private peace talks in nearby Chelsea. The IRA had learned lessons from the mass arrests at Heathrow the previous February and on this occasion none of the bombers was apprehended.
THE M62 COACH BOMB ATTACK
In the early 1960s, the British Government began to build a motorway between Manchester and Leeds; eventually this cross-Pennines route would link the famous port cities of Liverpool and Hull. On the evening of Sunday, 3 February 1974, a specially commissioned coach set off from the Chorlton Street station in the centre of Manchester, planning to use this motorway; on board were soldiers returning to Catterick after leave; also on board were some Army wives and children. In what was yet another tragic example of appalling security, an IRA Volunteer was allowed to place a suitcase containing explosives and timer alongside the luggage already i
n the side holds.
Just after midnight on the 4th, close to Hartshead Moor Services and Chain Bar, Bradford, the device exploded. A massive explosion tore the coach apart, hurling wreckage as well as body parts over a wide radius; it killed twelve people, injuring more than fifty others. A first-responder said, ‘You can’t imagine a thing like this on a British road. How could it have happened?’ The first sights that greeted those who stopped to help were those of bloodied bodies, twisted metal and shattered glass; possessions such as children’s toys, books and newspapers completed the scene of the carnage. The driver of the coach told the Daily Express: ‘Suddenly there was a tremendous crash. Everything blew up in front of me. I thought it was the windscreen. I managed to pull the bus on to the side of the road 200 yards on. There was a little child laid among the wreckage. I picked it up, but it was dead.’
One wounded solider – Signalman Neville Maw – said, ‘It was a terrible sight; those of us who were OK started to help the injured out of the bus. It was the most terrifying experience – something I will remember all my life.’ Senior police officer Donald Roy declared, ‘It was a bloody sight. It was a dastardly and horrifying crime. People who commit crimes like this have no souls.’
