look back and if someone asks me, ‘Where were you at the weekend?’ I can say about that weekend: ‘I was at the Oscars.’ Know what I mean?
One
At 3.30 p.m. on 19 October 1989, in the homeland of Magna Carta and the cradle of parliamentary democracy, the underbelly of a Trojan horse opened and justice saw the light of day.
Confronted with indisputable evidence of police deception and perjury at the original trial in October–November 1975, appeal court judge Lord Lane had little option but to quash the convictions of the Guildford Four. These were individuals who had been found guilty of no-warning bombing attacks in Guildford, Surrey, and Woolwich, London, on 5 October and 7 November 1974, in which seven people died. It was a seminal and ugly moment in the history of British jurisprudence, but how did that Trojan horse ever get inside the hitherto impenetrable walls of the British judicial system in the first place? To answer that question, we must revert to the people who really did put the bombs in Guildford and Woolwich, and to Flat 7, Waldemar Avenue, Fulham.
By 1974, it was dawning on the seven-man IRA Army Council that the armed campaign to force the British government to withdraw from Northern Ireland was stuttering. In fact, the British, far from being thrown back into the Irish sea, had weathered the best that the IRA could throw at them. Not only were the British still on the field of battle, they were planning new strategies to wipe out the IRA. Against a growing realisation that the war could not be won if it was limited to the borders of Northern Ireland, the Army Council sanctioned a no-warning bombing campaign against British army targets in London, Birmingham and other major cities in England.
The prospect of civilians being blown up, as well as British soldiers, was raised by the prominent Irish journalist Mary Holland when she interviewed Army Council member Dáithí Ó Conaill a week after The Kings Arms pub in Woolwich was attacked. Holland asked Ó Conaill about civilians being killed in the bombing campaign, and he chillingly replied: ‘They [the IRA] warned civilians not to frequent places where military personnel are known to have established haunts.’1 The upshot of that answer was that, if civilians got blown to smithereens, then so be it; it was their own fault, not the IRA’s. Ó Conaill then went on to say: ‘As regards military targets, there are no warnings. There will be no warnings.’ He then promised that the bombing campaign in England would be intensified.
Bombing England was hardly a novel tactic: in the middle of the nineteenth century and during World War II, republican activists had waged bombing campaigns in London and other British cities, but to little or no effect. On 8 March 1973, the very court in which the sentences against the Guildford Four had been delivered and eventually quashed – the Old Bailey – had been car-bombed by the IRA, and one innocent person, Frederick Milton, was killed. Undeterred by the lack of success, the Army Council unleashed an IRA Active Service Unit (ASU) in August 1974 in Fulham.
The officer commanding the ASU was a County Kerry man, Brendan Dowd, and the engineering officer was Joe O’Connell from County Clare. Another member of the IRA unit was Liam Quinn from San Francisco. At 5.30 p.m. on 21 September 1974, Dowd hired a Ford Escort car from Swan National car hire and signed a contract under the false name ‘Martin Moffitt’. That night, Dowd, O’Connell and an unidentified third man reconnoitred various pubs in Guildford for possible targets. Dowd and the third man did a second reconnoitre a week later, which confirmed in Dowd’s mind that the two pubs to be bombed should be The Horse and Groom and The Seven Stars.
At 2.30 p.m. on 4 October, Dowd again used the false name ‘Martin Moffitt’ to hire a white Hillman Avenger from Swan National. The next morning, he and O’Connell made the two six-pound bombs in the Fulham flat. That evening Dowd drove the white Avenger containing O’Connell, the third man and two young IRA women to Guildford, where Dowd parked on the top floor of a multistorey carpark. After priming the bombs in the car and placing them in each of the IRA women’s handbags, he then accompanied one of the females into The Horse and Groom, while O’Connell accompanied the other to The Seven Stars, along with the third man (who has never been charged with the bombings).
In The Horse and Groom, Dowd and his female compatriot pretended to be a courting couple, kissing and holding hands. The woman slipped the handbag containing the primed bomb under her seat. Meanwhile, O’Connell, the second female and the third man had found seats in the corner of the bar of The Seven Stars. The female left her handbag containing the bomb on the floor, and the third man gently pushed it under a bench with his feet. By 8.15 p.m., the five members of the bombing team were back in London and having a drink in The Durell Arms on Fulham Road.
The first bomb exploded in The Horse and Groom at 8.50 p.m. No warning was given. A reporter who was at the scene within a minute wrote: ‘People were running, shouting and screaming. Many of them were young girls and many were clutching bleeding heads. There was blood everywhere. The entire front of The Horse and Groom was blown out – there was rubble everywhere, glass, bricks, timber. People were scrabbling amongst the debris, trying to pull people out of the mess. It was panic and chaos.’2 Five people died in The Horse and Groom and some 200 were injured, many seriously. On hearing of the bomb attack on The Horse and Groom, Owen O’Brien, the manager of The Seven Stars, had the sharpness of mind to evacuate 200 customers from the pub, and when the bomb exploded, no one was killed.
On 10 October 1974, Harry Duggan from County Clare, Eddie Butler from County Limerick and Hugh Doherty from Donegal joined the ASU. In the month that followed the Guildford bombings, Dowd and his cell were unrelenting, carrying out four more bomb attacks, none of which had fatal consequences. Then, on 7 November 1974, in Sedding Street, close to London’s King’s Cross station, Joe O’Connell got into the passenger seat of a stolen white Corsair, with Dowd in the driving seat. Duggan and Butler sat in the back of the car. The men drove to the side of The Kings Arms pub in Woolwich, in south-east London, and, after making sure that it was packed with people, some of whom they presumed were British soldiers, Joe O’Connell threw a seven-pound gelignite bomb through the window, killing two people and injuring twenty-six others. A local man, Michael Hulse, described the scene as ‘like a battlefield. I was watching television when it went off. The windows shook and rattled. It was like a 25-pounder cannon going off. I went outside and there were about a dozen bodies lying on the road.’3
The Assistant Chief Constable of Surrey, Christopher Rowe, had been put in charge of the Guildford bombings inquiry, but neither he nor those around him had a clue as to who had carried out the attacks, although they suspected it was the work of the IRA. As Gerry Conlon put it, ‘They were killing people in huge numbers. The IRA caused absolute terror. And they [the British police] couldn’t find them.’4 Nevertheless, ‘they’ soon found him.
On 28 November 1974, 21-year-old Paul ‘Benny’ Hill was arrested by police in Southampton, and the next day he signed statements confessing to the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. During police interrogations, Hill named Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Armstrong’s 17-year-old English girlfriend, Carole Richardson, as his fellow bombers. Hill also told police that he and Gerry Conlon had stayed with Gerry’s aunt, Annie Maguire, while they were in London. This, and a false confession from Gerry Conlon that was exacted by police under duress, were enough to have Mrs Maguire and six other members of her family arrested. Mrs Maguire’s protestations of innocence accounted for nothing when police alleged they had found traces of the explosive, nitroglycerine, on her hands and on the person of the six other members of her extended family. Included in what became known as the ‘Maguire Seven’ was Giuseppe Conlon, Gerry’s father, who hadn’t even been in England when the bombings occurred, and who had travelled over to England from Belfast only on 1 December to help co-ordinate his son’s legal defence. Prophetically, on the evening of 5 December, Giuseppe Conlon was in his police cell when Detective Chief Superintendent Wally Simmons of the Surrey bomb squad shouted in to him: ‘You want to know about your son? Well, he’s going to get thirty years. We’ll see to it that you die in gaol. I’ll see you later.’5
By 7 December, the Guildford Four had all confessed to the bombings and were subsequently charged with multiple murders. Gerry Conlon described his time in police custody:
In my cell I could suddenly see myself and what I was doing, maybe for the first time. I wanted to please the