by Ken Wharton
In all, nine soldiers and three civilians were killed. The soldiers were: Bombardier Terence Griffin (24), Royal Artillery; Gunner Leonard Godden (22), Royal Artillery; Fusilier John Hynes (20), RRF; Lance Corporal James McShane (29); RRF, Paul Reid (17) Royal Corps of Signals; Michael Waugh (22), Guards Brigade; and Signalman Lesley Walsh (19), Royal Corps of Signals. Fusilier Stephen Whalley (19) died of his wounds three days later in hospital. Another soldier, Corporal Clifford Haughton (23), RRF, was killed alongside his wife, Linda (23), and their young children, Lee (5) and Robert (2).
Dáithí Ó Conaill, a senior member of the Provisionals’ Army Council, told a press conference that they had not known that there would be any civilians on board and that their sources had informed them that only military personnel would be present. Once the news had broken, there were urgent demands from both politicians and civilians alike for swift action and equally swift retribution. The investigation, which was led by Superintendent George Oldfield, was rushed and, like the later Yorkshire Ripper investigations with which he was involved, bodged. This author makes this comment in the full knowledge of the political situation that prevailed at the time and of the quite understandable but necessary pressures that were placed upon Oldfield and his men to catch those responsible. Former Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) soldier Mary Teresa Judith Ward, a mentally disturbed attention-seeker, was arrested and charged; described as ‘rambling and incoherent’, she pleaded guilty in court. She was sentenced to thirty years in prison, although she later retracted her statement, being freed on appeal eighteen years later.
The Provisional IRA’s Army Council was aware that Ward was not the bomber, but to take the heat off the real culprits, it cynically allowed her to take the blame and serve a gaol sentence by proxy. They made a one-off statement after her conviction – perceived as half-hearted – but refused to press for her release; their statement read:
Miss Ward was not a member of Óglaigh na hÉireann and was not used in any capacity by the organisation. She had nothing to do whatsoever with the military coach bomb (on 4 February 1974), the bombing of Euston Station and the attack on Latimer Military College. Those acts were authorised operations carried out by units of the Irish Republican Army.
Indeed, this was not to be the only time they engaged on this dark course of action. They were aware that the ‘Guildford Four’ – Paul Michael Hill, Gerry Conlan, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson – were not responsible for the Woolwich and Guildford pub bombings* but allowed them to spend fifteen years in gaol for crimes that they did not commit.
One of the M62 survivors, Phil Hutchinson, Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, said in a TV documentary:
It was about a year later that I actually did my first tour of Northern Ireland and I went over there with ‘A’ Troop. I hated the Irish and I would have killed them and every time I met one, I was in a fight with him. It was lucky that over the years I’ve grown up and I have realised that not all Irish are the same.
The last word about this tragedy will be left to Mo Norton, sister of Bombardier Terence Griffin:
We waited over 17 long and incredibly painful hours waiting for news and repeatedly making phone calls and waiting for the phone to ring with news that Terence was OK. It was then that my mother made yet another phone call to the emergency phone line, in a desperate attempt to find out whether Terence was alive or injured. We knew after all these hours that he must at the very least been injured, as my father said: ‘Terence would have rung home and let us know he was OK if he had survived.’ Upon reflection, I realised that most of us who are civilians did not know just how dangerous the situation in Northern Ireland was for those out there, trying their utmost best to keep peace.
BIRMINGHAM PUB BOMBINGS
On 19 November 1974, PIRA’s Chief of Staff Dáithí Ó Conaill (David O’Connell) warned in a press statement of an ‘... all-out war on British civilians unless the British Army is withdrawn from Ulster’. During the early evening of 21 November, several members of PIRA’s England team visited pubs in the centre of Birmingham – the Mulberry Bush, the Tavern in the Town, Yates Wine Bar and the Ivy – mingling with the other drinkers, sipping their pints or their soft drinks, before quietly leaving the respective establishments. There were few physical differences between them and the other drinkers, even their accents were not dissimilar; the difference was that these IRA volunteers had bloody mayhem in mind. They left behind their ‘calling cards’ in the form of bombs, hidden under seats and tables. They walked off into the night, having already noticed the faces of their intended victims. Two other devices were also planted that evening: outside the British Airways office in the city and another at New Street railway station; fortunately, none of these exploded.
At 20.11 hours, a caller with a distinct ‘Irish’ accent telephoned the Birmingham Post and Mail warning of two bombs – there were six – that were due to detonate in the Rotunda building and the local income tax office in New Street. There was no mention of any of the pubs that were attacked; the reference to the Rotunda building only obliquely referred to the Mulberry Bush as it occupied two floors of the building. Precisely six minutes later, with the information having only been passed to Birmingham Police a few minutes earlier, the first device in the Mulberry Bush exploded. As the explosion rent the night air, a police car, alerted by radio was just 300 yards away. One of the officers later said:
... there was the largest thunderclap and rumbling and the ground shock. Debris was coming down all over the road. It was like a volcano had erupted, people running and screaming. The Mulberry Bush had sort of exploded out onto the pavement; rubble, half a staircase, glass, carpets, bar tops and furniture blown to bits, and injured people staggering out.
The Tavern in the Town in New Street was close by; with the sound of the first explosion clearly audible inside the pub, some drinkers had walked outside to see what had caused the noise. At 20.30, just three minutes after the first explosion, a second device, hidden inside the Tavern, exploded; 100 drinkers were still inside as the building was torn apart. A further three minutes elapsed before the third device in Yates exploded, but fortunately astute police and the pub management team had already evacuated all the drinkers.
Survivors of the two blasts, which had killed twenty-one people, told of harrowing scenes inside the smoking wreckage: ‘I was hit by a tremendous rush of air. You couldn’t see. There was pandemonium. People were falling over one another to get out,’ Anthony Bailey said, ‘We were sitting by the toilets. Suddenly there was one howl of an explosion. It went off by the jukebox. The ceiling fell down on top of us and water began pouring everywhere.’ Susan Edkin said, ‘There was a tremendous rush to get out. People were shouting and screaming ... I remember there was a man lying on the floor who couldn’t see because his eyes had gone. It was terrible.’ Mitch Wheeler: ‘There was this terrific blast and I was hurled off my feet. Everything went black and there was choking fumes. People were screaming and moaning. There were bodies everywhere. It was horrible, but as I struggled to get out, I knew I was trampling over bodies. About five minutes earlier we had heard a dull thud and someone said it’s probably a bomb. Some people went up to investigate. They were the lucky ones and escaped.’
This author has described the Troubles in Northern Ireland and on the English mainland between 1971 and 1996 as a time of ‘blood and broken glass’. The scenes inside the two wrecked pubs epitomised these words: smoke, broken glass, people screaming, others quietly sobbing, still others looking at bloody bundles that had been the people with whom, minutes earlier, they had enjoyed a pint and a joke. More than anything, before the anger and the cries for retribution, there was shock; people were dazed, disorientated and bewildered by what had just happened; the recriminations would follow shortly afterwards.
Those killed in the two blasts were: Michael Beasley (30); Lynn Bennett (18); Stanley Bodman (51); James Caddick (40); Paul Davies (20); Charles Gray (44); Maxine Hambleton (18); Ann Hayes (19); Neil Ma
rsh (17); Marilyn Nash (22); John Jones (51); Pamela Palmer (19); Maureen Roberts (20); John Rowlands (46); Jane Davies (17); Desmond Reilly (21) and his brother Eugene (23); Trevor Thrupp (33); and Stephen Whalley (24). Additionally, the following two people were fatally injured: Thomas Chayter (28), a barman at one of the pubs, died in hospital on 28 November, and James Craig (34), who died on 10 December. There were 203 casualties in all.
One of the bomb-makers, Michael Christopher Hayes,* who was 25 at the time of the bombings, spoke to Kevin McGee of BBC Northern Ireland in 2017; while he refused to name the men and women who had planted the bombs, he said that he was sorry about the atrocity. He also refused to confirm if he was the bomber but claimed that he defused the bomb that had been left at the Ivy pub in Hagley Road. One person** who was less than impressed by Hayes’ contrition was Julie Hambleton, sister of one of the dead, Maxine Hambleton. She said:
He’s a coward, as simple as that. He said he does not want to be an informer, he’d rather die? Oh, really? So, he’s more than happy to help and take collective responsibility for those who were murdered and unarmed, innocents ... but he won’t tell us who actually did it and also dismisses himself as being party to it? He’s gutless and spineless ... he’s told us nothing, he’s admitted nothing.
On the 23rd, the Provisionals denied responsibility, claiming that the attacks ‘... contradicted the official IRA code of conduct when attacking non-military targets’. The President of Sinn Féin, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, issued a second statement in which he claimed that the bombings had not been approved by the IRA Army Council. He intimated that the outrages could be the responsibility of rogue elements of the organisation. Finally, in an attempt to distance the leadership of the Provisionals from the bombers, Dáithí Ó Conaill said on 12 December: ‘If IRA members had carried out such attacks, they would be court-martialled and could face the death penalty. The IRA has clear guidelines for waging its war. Any attack on non-military installations must be preceded by a 30-minute warning so that no innocent civilians are endangered.’ The contradictory nature of these statements indicate that the Provisionals had either lost control over their bombing personnel or were trying to distance themselves from this carnage among a purely civilian target.
By way of a postscript, families of those killed in the two blasts asked to meet Michelle O’Neill, leader of Sinn Féin. A meeting was held at Stormont with representatives of the Republican group in July 2018. The families came away, assured by Sinn Féin that their calls for an investigation would be ‘looked into’. Julie Hambleton, sister of one of the dead women, described the meeting as ‘...very positive ...’ She also said, ‘We feel now that we have taken a positive step forward, we have gone into uncharted waters and hope now that we move from dark into light.’ However, only posterity will be the judge of whether the Republicans will co-operate, but it seems highly unlikely that they will assist any future prosecution of the bombers. The author remains highly sceptical of a positive outcome.
On 29 November 1974 the Prevention of Terrorism Act was passed, introducing severe and very draconian measures aimed at both prevention of attacks and retribution against the bombers. Additionally, six Irish men, thereafter known as the ‘Birmingham Six’, were arrested and convicted of causing the explosions, serving sixteen years in prison before being freed on appeal on 14 March 1991. It was almost a case of ‘any Mick will do’ as the police investigators were so desperate to bring the perpetrators of this carnage to book; sadly, their zealous behaviour resulted in a grave miscarriage. The general public would have been delighted had the Birmingham Six served their time correctly and rightfully; the fact that they were, in all probability, innocent and rightly released, however, pours shame on the police. The West Midland Serious Crimes Squad was shown to have lied, falsified evidence and ‘probably’ beaten confessions out of the six innocent men. The disbanding of the squad is a testimony to their corruption; it was a shameful performance by people to whom we all looked for better things.
THE ASSASSINATION OF AIREY NEAVE MP IN 1979
In 1976, following Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s resignation – allegedly because of outside pressures that have never been substantiated – James Callaghan became the new occupant of 10 Downing Street. He was Prime Minister for thirty-seven months before losing a vote of confidence in the House of Commons that brought down his Labour Government. Waiting in the wings throughout the infamous ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978/9 were Margaret Thatcher and her close ally, Airey Neave: MP for Abingdon, a former Royal Artillery captain* and one of the first to escape from the German POW fortress at Colditz. They were expected to play a key role in a seemingly inevitable Tory General Election victory. In particular, Neave was expected to take the Northern Ireland office with orders to crack down on the Provisionals. His life came to an end on 30 March 1979, a scant thirty-four days before Thatcher’s eventual triumph.
Just before 15.00 hours, on Friday, 30 March, Neave, having finished his parliamentary duties for the day, returned to his Vauxhall Cavalier. In an appalling lapse of security, a person or persons had accessed the House of Commons’ car park and fitted a mercury tilt explosive device under the MP’s car, before melting away into the London crowds. As he drove up the exit ramp, the small but deadly device exploded, ripping off one of his legs and mortally wounding him. The car was completely wrecked, taking almost an hour for firefighters to cut him free from the mangled metal. Rescue workers fought to keep him alive, applying tourniquets to both shattered legs, as well as feeding him oxygen, but he had lost far too much blood in the seconds after the blast, which made survival highly unlikely. He died shortly after being admitted to Westminster Hospital.
Later, Prime Minister Callaghan, now in the final few weeks of his Premiership said, ‘No effort will be spared to bring the murderers to justice and to rid the United Kingdom of the scourge of terrorism.’ Thatcher, said to be enraged by the lapse in security as well as the loss of her close ally, told the press:
He was one of freedom’s warriors. No one knew of the great man he was, except those nearest to him. He was staunch, brave, true, and strong; but he was very gentle and kind and loyal. It’s a rare combination of qualities. There’s no one else who can quite fill them. I, and so many other people, owe so much to him and now we must carry on for the things he fought for and not let the people who got him triumph.
The killing was thought to have been the work of the Provisionals but, following a half-hearted initial claim of ‘we did it’, they remained quiet, leading to a counter-claim by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). They made a short statement, stating that he was killed because of his planned hard line against Republican paramilitaries during a future Tory Government. It was the timing, however, of their clarification claim that first raised suspicions about their involvement. It was more than four months before the INLA went public about Neave’s death. In August of that year, a spokesman said:
In March, retired terrorist and supporter of capital punishment, Airey Neave, got a taste of his own medicine when an INLA unit pulled off the operation of the decade and blew him to bits inside the ‘impregnable’ Palace of Westminster. The nauseous Margaret Thatcher snivelled on television that he was an ‘incalculable loss’ – and so he was – to the British ruling class.
The Daily Express on the morning of Saturday the 31st led with the banner headlines: ‘Bloody Murder’ and ‘IRA kill top Tory in Commons bomb outrage’. Their front page on the morning after shows an overhead photograph of Neave’s damaged car and, poignantly, a single shoe among the debris of the explosion. Alan Cochrane and Derrick Hill wrote, ‘This is the horrifying wreck of a car in which an IRA [sic] bomb at the House of Commons yesterday killed Mr Airey Neave, war hero Tory MP and Shadow Ulster Secretary.’
The major questions that still persist are: when was the device fitted and by whom? The police have always maintained that their system of checks and cameras would not have allowed a bomber to enter the car park, surmising
that, instead, it could have been fitted outside the MP’s Westminster flat. This is unlikely, as the device was triggered by a tilting device – mercury or ball-bearings – and there was nothing to stop it from detonating on the short journey to and from the Commons. If it had already been fitted, why did it not explode as he drove down the entry ramp to the car park?
Why did the Provisionals first claim the attack and then back down in the light of the INLA claim? Was it because, although they undoubtedly rejoiced in the death of one of their enemies, their support particularly from the British left might not have approved of an attack in the ‘Mother of parliaments’. Why did the INLA leave it so long before their announcement in Starry Plough newspaper in August that year? This author does not believe that the Republican splinter group that came from a split in the Official IRA (OIRA) had the resources or capability to have carried out such a risky attack on a high-profile target such as Neave. I have always believed that PIRA’s England team, with almost a decade’s experience of operating on the British mainland, with their resources and dedicated personnel, killed Neave. It is known that they had agents or at worst sympathisers in the Ulster Civil Service, in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, even inside the British Army, so how much more difficult would it have been for a rogue employee inside the Commons to access the car park and plant the device?
From the ‘Princes in the Tower’ disappearance and suspected murder, right up to the 11 September attacks in the USA, conspiracy theories about almost everything have abounded. This author simply chronicles the following without attaching serious credibility to the claims. Rumours have included a British Secret Service plot to eliminate Mr Neave. Kevin Cahill, an Irish investigative journalist, claims Neave was on the verge of a massive overhaul of the security services, possibly involving a merger of MI5 and MI6, arising from his belief in corruption in the security services. Mr Cahill’s most frequent claim was that ‘everyone knew’ the story behind Neave’s death but that no one could talk about it in detail because it would have been too dangerous. He claims that many did not believe that the INLA killed Neave but that it was an ‘inside job’. Cahill concluded that Neave was killed by the security services, in all probability MI6 agents working with the CIA, because Neave sought to prosecute senior figures in the intelligence establishment for corruption. The final theory is that INLA claimed the murder purely as an opportunistic way to elevate their status from ‘splinter group’ to a paramilitary organisation to be reckoned with.
