Last Saturday marked 50 years since the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s infamous Guildford pub bombings that left five dead. It was one of the bloodiest and most spectacular atrocities in what went on to become the deadliest year of the Troubles in mainland Britain.
Forty-one civilians and soldiers were killed in 1974, while hundreds more were injured in a series of attacks.
Jonathan Mayo tells the story of the IRA’s year of terror…
Saturday January 5
At 3.45pm a bomb explodes at the Earls Court Boat Show in west London, destroying two yachts and setting fire to an exhibition stand, which the Fire Brigade manage to extinguish quickly.
Thirty minutes later a man phones the Press Association to say that a bomb has been placed at Madame Tussauds waxwork museum. After a swift evacuation, the bomb explodes causing little damage.
Monday February 4
On the M62 motorway, a coach is taking Army and RAF personnel and their families back to their bases in Yorkshire after weekend leave in Manchester. It’s early in the morning and the coach has 56 passengers, including children, crammed onto the vehicle’s 49 seats, most fast asleep. Suddenly a 25lb bomb in the luggage compartment explodes, destroying the rear of the coach and sending debris and severed limbs across the tarmac.
Driver Rowland Handley is hit by flying glass but manages to bring the coach to a stop on the hard shoulder. Fifty passengers are injured and 11 are killed, including an entire family – Corporal Clifford Haughton, his wife Linda and their two sons: five-year-old Lee and two-year-old Robert.
As teams search the wrecked coach, the air is full of the perfume from a girl’s tin of talc. One rescuer smells the air and says: ‘The bastards must have known there would be women and children on this trip – and they didn’t care.’
Tuesday February 12
A 20lb bomb explodes at the National Defence College in Buckinghamshire, where officers from all three armed services are trained. Miraculously no one is seriously injured. Over 80 houses in the London area are raided in the search for the bombers.
Monday June 17
At the Houses of Parliament, workmen are building a £2million underground car park for MPs. An IRA bomber dressed as a builder slips past a security checkpoint and leaves a bomb at the corner of the 900-year-old Westminster Hall.
At 8.28am it explodes igniting a gas main which sets fire to an annex of offices sending a black pall of smoke 300 feet into the air. Six people are injured, including cleaner Patricia Gaskin, who is trapped under rubble.
Irish builder Sean Fitzgibbon who is constructing the car park tells a reporter: ‘It’s a terrible thing that the IRA did this. Seventy per cent of the blokes here are Irish.’
Wednesday July 17
An IRA terrorist leaves a bomb in a carrier bag next to the wooden carriage of a bronze cannon in the Tower of London’s Mortar Room. Without a warning, the bomb explodes while the room is packed with families.
School librarian Dorothy Household, from south London, is killed and 41 people are injured, many of them children. A child’s foot is found underneath the cannon.
August
A new IRA squad known as an active service unit comprising terrorists Joe O’Connell, Eddie Butler, Harry Duggan and Hugh O’Doherty arrives in England and rents separate flats in areas of London with a large Irish population so they can blend in.
The men keep to themselves and receive money every month brought by female couriers from Ireland. Although the unit receives occasional instructions from the IRA Army Council, they are given freedom to act independently. Their mission is to aggressively attack targets in London and the south-east.
Saturday October 5
8.30pm: Guildford in Surrey is a garrison town with a number of public houses in the town centre known as ‘army pubs’; the Horse And Groom is known for its cheap beer and the Seven Stars for its disco.
Tonight the Horse And Groom is packed with army personnel, easily outnumbering the locals. A contingent from the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) and some male soldier friends are sitting in an alcove celebrating WRAC Carol Burn’s 19th birthday. Underneath their bench seat is a brown satchel containing a bomb made from a Smith’s pocket watch, a small electro-mechanical timer and 6lb of nitro-glycerine, planted by the new IRA unit.
8.50pm: Billy Forsyth, a private with the Scots Guards has just put his favourite song, Long Tall Glasses by Leo Sayer, on the jukebox and is walking towards the alcove to sit with fellow guardsman John Hunter.
Birthday girl Carol swaps places on the crowded bench seat with family friend Paul Craig whose 22nd birthday is tomorrow, and in doing so saves her life. As Carol’s friend Sammie Parrotte puts down her drink the bomb explodes sending lethal debris in all directions. A hole opens up in the floor and Carol, John and Sammie fall into the cellar. All three are pulled out alive but John dies in the street while attempts are made to save him.
Billy Forsyth and Paul Craig are also killed. In all, there are five dead and 52 injured. Minutes later a second bomb explodes up the road at the Seven Stars pub but, after hearing about the first bomb, the landlord stopped the disco and evacuated the building, but ten people are still injured.
Friday October 11
There had been widespread revulsion at the Guildford attacks, with messages of sympathy sent to the bereaved from the Queen and the Pope condemning such acts as ‘menacing human dignity and society’.
The new IRA active service unit is undeterred and follows up the Guildford bombs with attacks on institutions linked to the British ruling class.
The evening after the general election that gave Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson a slim majority, a bomb with a short fuse is thrown through a basement window of the Victory, an ex-servicemen’s club near Marble Arch in London. A short time later an identical bomb is thrown into the ground floor bar at the Army and Navy Club in St James’s Square. Only one person is injured.
Thursday October 24
The next establishment target is Harrow School in north-west London. Just before midnight, a 5lb bomb goes off outside a house in the school grounds that until six weeks ago was lived in by the man in charge of the school’s Army Cadet Corps.
Scores of boys in pyjamas and dressing gowns pour out of the dormitories to see what has happened.
One eyewitness said: ‘They were having the time of their lives. They all seemed most disappointed at not being able to stay.’
Thursday November 7
At 10.17pm a group of off-duty soldiers and their wives and girlfriends are drinking in the packed lounge bar of the Kings Arms pub in Woolwich, London, a few hundred yards from their barracks. The pub, nicknamed the Army House, is an obvious terrorist target and so there are signs outside warning that packages must not be taken into the premises.
The IRA throw a bomb loaded with shrapnel through the pub’s large ground-floor window and drive off at high speed. Part-time barman Alan Horsley tries to grab the device but it explodes killing him and soldier Richard Dunne and injuring 35 others. After the attack an anonymous man calls a Fleet Street newspaper saying, ‘We have planted bombs. The first one has gone off in Woolwich.’
An IRA leader, David O’Connell, says on television: ‘Responsibility rests squarely and clearly with the British government. [They] simply have to say we are not going to stay in Ireland.’
Thursday November 21
8.11pm: A member of the Birmingham branch of the IRA rings the Birmingham Post newspaper, giving a code word and a vague warning, ‘There is a bomb planted in the Rotunda and there is a bomb in New Street at the tax office.’ The Rotunda is a high-rise office block in the city centre andthe tax office is a short walk away. The bombs have in fact been placed in pubs underneath each building.
Just six minutes later as the police search the Rotunda’s upper floors, a bomb explodes beneath them in the Mulberry Bush pub, blowing 9in thick hole in its concrete ceiling. Ian MacDonald Lord and his fiance Maureen are thrown across the pub. He said later, ‘I knew immediately what it was and even before I landed, I was shouting, ‘Bastards!’ In the nearby Tavern pub under the tax office, the staff hear the explosion and start searching for suspicious packages.
8.27pm: They are too late. A bomb placed close to the entrance to the Tavern detonates. A 20-year-old woman who had just arrived at the pub said, ‘There was a bang and everything started falling upon us. I flicked on my lighter and saw my friend next to me had lost her foot.
‘I thought I was also dead and that my spirit was just carrying on, for everywhere I looked there was murder.’
In the two pubs a total of 21 people are killed and 182 injured. There is such carnage at the Mulberry Bush that a fireman asks the police to allow TV crews inside to show the IRA what they had done, believing the shocking footage would make the terrorists stop their bombing campaign, but the police refuse.
Even though some of the dead and injured are Irish, over the next few days some Irish residents of Birmingham are attacked in the street, refused service in shops and kicked-off buses and a fire is started at a Catholic school.
Monday November 25
In response to the Birmingham Pub bombings, the Prevention of Terrorism Act is rushed through the House of Commons and passed in the House of Lords in just five minutes. The new legislation outlaws the IRA and gives the police power to hold terrorist suspects for a week without charge. Home Secretary Roy Jenkins says the new law is ‘unprecedented in peacetime’.
At 6pm, businessman Robert Whitfield is driving near King’s Cross station when a pillar box explodes. He recalled, ‘There was a sudden bang. Pieces of the letter box went flying in all directions and one large chunk hit my car.’ Moments later a bomb detonates inside a pillar box outside the Swan & Edgar department store in Piccadilly Circus injuring 16 people.
Then a third pillar box explodes outside Victoria Station; two passers-by are injured including a woman hit by a huge chunk of metal. Commander Robert Huntley in charge of the Scotland Yard’s bomb squad says that the IRA is now using a ploy first used before the Second World War, ‘Pillar boxes were a favourite target of the IRA in 1938. It’s a classic tactic to cause chaos.’
Tuesday December 17
The IRA once more switch tactics – this time targeting telephone exchanges in the West End of London. A bomb goes off at an exchange close to the Phoenix Theatre causing actress Elaine Stritch to drop the glass she is holding during a production of the play Gingerbread Lady. A second bomb strapped to a bicycle detonates in Chelsea and a third injures a cleaner and kills telephonist George Arthur at the Bloomsbury exchange.
Tom Jackson of the Post Office Workers Union is visibly upset after visiting the scene and tells reporters, ‘This is an absolute bloody outrage. Our members are copping it time after time. If the IRA think they’re going to bomb telephonists and postmen out of jobs, they are not going to do it.’
Thursday December 19The IRA give a warning that a device has been planted in Oxford Street which is packed with shoppers doing their Christmas shopping on one of the busiest evenings of the year. After the area has been safely evacuated, a bomb in a stolen Ford Cortina parked outside Selfridges department store explodes. No one is injured but the bomb is later estimated to have caused over £1.5 million pounds worth of damage.
Saturday December 21
Department stores across London are now on high alert. A security guard on the second floor of Harrods discovers a bomb in a holdall behind a paint display and immediately activates an evacuation of the whole store.
Shop assistant Wendy Loxton is in the middle of serving a customer in the perfume department and said later, ‘She grabbed her £5 note out of my hand and we all ran.’ Once out of the store Wendy looks back at the store as the bomb explodes. ‘I saw smoke and flames belching out of the second-floor windows and glass crashing on the street.’
The bomb starts a small fire that damages walls and the ceiling and some of the stock. The fact that there are no injuries prompts the press to dub the evacuation ‘the Christmas miracle of Knightsbridge.’ Out on the pavement policemen offer their greatcoats to the female shop assistants and a nearby hotel invites about 100 of them inside for hot drinks.
The IRA claim responsibility for the attack. Sir Robert Hobart, the personal assistant to Harrods owner Sir Hugh Fraser tells reporters, ‘These rascals are becoming a bit of a bore.’
Sunday December 22
Two IRA terrorists walk up to the Belgravia house of the leader of the Conservative Party Edward Heath and throw a bomb through a window which explodes inside. The men drive off at speed in a Jaguar which is found abandoned a short distance away.
Heath wrote later, ‘It was a narrow escape. I had been delayed from my annual carol concert and missed the attack by five minutes.’
Meanwhile Harold Wilson’s government have signalled privately to the IRA that they are contemplating a withdrawal from Northern Ireland, so the paramilitaries announce a Christmas ceasefire starting at midnight. The ceasefire ends in March when the IRA announce, ‘We achieve more in wartime than in peacetime.’
Aftermath
In December 1975 the IRA active service unit responsible for the attacks in London and the south-east was captured at the so-called Balcombe Street Siege, after which the 1970s bombing campaign fizzled out. The police who caught O’Connell and the rest of the gang found a long list of targets, including judges, royal aides, military chiefs and the Leader of the Opposition Margaret Thatcher.
But the police investigation into the 1974 IRA attacks was scandalous. All those imprisoned for the worst atrocities – the M62 coach bombing, the Birmingham, Woolwich and Guildford pub bombings had their convictions quashed in the late 1980s and 1990s.