Guildford Pub Bombs Continue to Haunt Victims and the British Criminal Justice System 50 years later.
Exactly 50 years ago, on Saturday night October 5, 1974, IRA bombs exploded in two pubs in the Surrey town of Guildford, south of London.
But despite a series of trials, appeals, an official inquiry and a coroners inquest, the full story of the attacks is still not public, and decades later victims and their families, lawyers, journalists and others are still campaigning for the truth.
The first bomb went off at the Horse and Groom pub at 8.50pm, killing 21-year-old civilian Paul Craig and British soldiers Ann Hamilton, 19, Caroline Slater, 18, William Forsyth, 18, and John Hunter, 17, and injuring more than 50 more people. The second bomb, at the Seven Stars pub at 9.30pm, injured eleven more people.
The attacks were part of a prolific series of IRA bombings in and around London that lasted for several years. More than 70 explosive devices had been planted in London in the previous 12 months, plus various shootings. London’s Metropolitan Police joined the Surrey Police in the hunt for the bombers.
Under pressure, police arrested and then framed three young Irishmen and a 17 year-old English girl for the Guildford bombs. Paddy Armstrong, Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill and Carole Richardson were convicted of the murders, and became known as the Guildford Four. Hill and Armstrong were also framed and wrongly convicted of the November 1974 IRA bombing of the King’s Arms pub in Woolwich, south east London, when two more people – a soldier and a civilian – were killed. All four of those charged were innocent, and their convictions were eventually overturned after they had spent 15 years in prison.
Seven more innocent people, including two more children, were also wrongly convicted in relation to the bombings, and are known as the Maguire Seven, as many were from a London-Irish family, the Maguires, These included Gerry Conlon’s father Guiseppe (who died in prison), Conlon’s aunt, Anne Maguire, and her two teenage sons, Vincent and Patrick. The Maguire Seven had their convictions overturned in 1991.
Many people know a version of what happened from the 1993 movie In the Name of the Father.
The cases are now often viewed as terrible miscarriages of justice which were eventually rectified, where the British justice system self-corrected, albeit belatedly. But the aftermath of the bombings remain very much in the present for the victims’ families, for those wrongly convicted, and for those still trying to get to the truth of what really happened – who framed the eleven innocents, who participated in the cover-up of what happened, and what is still being kept from the public.
Despite the exoneration of the eleven, the case is far from resolved. In April this year police said they had found “new evidence” which is now being handled by the controversial new body the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery, set up to investigate crimes related to the Northern Ireland conflict. It is unclear what this new evidence is.
Alastair Logan was a young solicitor in Guildford in 1974 when the four were arrested. He said at the time none of the local law firms wanted to take on the cases, and nor did he, thinking it would require a much bigger team than at his small practice. “The legal aid office called me at 10am on December 10 and I said no – they called me back at 2pm and said everyone else had refused to take on the case, so I agreed to represent Paddy Armstrong.”
Logan said he knew very little about Northern Ireland politics then, and when he first met Paddy Armstrong he couldn’t understand his accent. “I wrote down his mother’s address in Belfast phonetically at that first meeting but afterwards I couldn’t figure out where it was.”
The Four were convicted on the basis of coerced and false confessions, not on forensic evidence. Police methods to force them to confess included physical abuse, making death threats against them and their family members, putting glass in their food. and urinating in their drinks.
The child suspects gave detailed accounts of their abuse in custody. Patrick Maguire was 13 when he was arrested, and was sentenced to four years in prison. He reports that during his 1974 police interrogation, “[t]hey kept asking me about the nitroglycerine, … and every time I denied it the bloke hit me. He slapped me round the face and cuffed me at the back of the neck and on the head.” His arrest was “probably when my childhood stopped,” he said.
Carole Richardson, 17 when she was arrested, was sentenced to life in prison. During her 1974 police interrogation, she said “…(Police Officer W) hit me. He hit me one in the left jaw with the back of his hand. I lifted my arm to my face to protect myself and he punched me in the ribs.”
Logan and other lawyers, including Gareth Peirce, were joined by journalists, senior clergy and others who campaigned for years to have the convictions overturned.
Members of an IRA unit captured in London’s Balcombe Street in December 1975 gave voluntary, detailed confessions to the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombs. At their 1977 trial, one of them, Joe O’Connell, gave a speech from the dock saying “…four totally innocent people – Carole Richardson, Gerard Conlon, Paul Hill and Patrick Armstrong – are serving massive sentences for three bombings, two in Guildford and one in Woolwich. We and another man now sentenced have admitted our parts in both the Guildford and Woolwich bombings…. The Director of Public Prosecutions was made aware of these admissions and has chosen to do nothing.”
The authorities refused to charge those captured at Balcombe Street with the attacks, as a public prosecution risked exposing the innocence of the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven.
The Guildford Four were exonerated in 1989, and the Maguire Seven in 1991, after documents were discovered, including those showing that information about an alibi for Gerry Conlon had not been shared with the defense lawyers, and that detention sheets and confessions had been falsified in Guildford police station.
But the full truth of what happened that led to the false convictions has yet to be made public. Thirteen Surrey police officers were investigated, and in 1993 three – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – were tried for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. All were acquitted.
In 1989 Sir John May was appointed by the government to head an inquiry into how the the Guildford and Woolwich cases had been handled. His report did not appear until 1994. It criticized the police, and the handling of scientific evidence linking the bombings to other cases. It said “the miscarriages of justice …were not due to any specific weakness or inherent fault in the criminal justice system itself, nor in the trial procedures which are part of that system. They were the result of individual failings….”
May concluded that “The truth, where I have not been able to establish it, must now and hereafter remain a matter for the consciences of all those concerned.” No further action was taken after his report.
Much of the evidence heard by the May Inquiry remains secret. The inquiry papers were supposed to be released in 2021, but then in 2020 the government decided to have them sealed for another 75 years.
Logan is currently pushing for some of the documents to be made public, including the Habershon Report – a report from the anti-terrorist squad handed to Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, Norman Skelhorn in September 1975, in the middle of the trial of the Guildford Four. “It showed there was extensive forensic evidence collected, none of which connected the Four to any crimes, including 19 sets of fingerprints from IRA suspects. None of that was passed to the defense,” said Logan.
He describes what happened as “a huge scandal that reaches at least as far as Norman Skelhorn, who told the government’s forensic scientist not to show links between evidence from the Guildford bombs with other IRA bombings which the Four couldn’t have done.” In 1973, when asked about the use of torture by British security forces in Northern Ireland, Skelhorn refused to deny torture had happened, and said that “when dealing with ‘Irish terrorists’ any methods were justified.”
Christopher Stanley is a lawyer at the human rights law firm KRW representing Gerry Conlon’s sister Bridie Brennan, who has brought a civil action against the Police Service of Northern Ireland and Surrey Police regarding police brutality against Conlon in Belfast prior to his transfer to London to be questioned about the bombings.
The campaign for the whole truth to be disclosed continues. In 2019, after a campaign by victims’ families, a coroners inquest into the bombings was announced. Coroner Richard Travers concluded in 2022 that the deaths were “unlawful killings”, caused by a “violent, intense and devastating” explosion, probably planted by a young couple who were never identified. But the inquest was very limited in scope and did not look at perpetrators or the wider IRA campaign.
Stanley says the inquest was “seriously flawed because the family of Ann Hamilton [one of those killed by the Guildford bombs] were refused legal aid necessary for them to be able to effectively participate in proceedings.” Ann Hamilton’s family have called repeatedly for a new criminal investigation into the bombings, and said it was time for Surrey Police to be “held to account by way of an independent and human rights compliant” public inquiry, which they would seek from the government.
Fifty years on, the case continues to haunt those involved and the wider British criminal justice system. Logan said: “The acquittals of the Four showed there was perjury on an industrial scale by the Surrey and Metropolitan police forces, including doctored detention sheets for the accused which were signed off by 32 police officers. Police officers committed crimes to get the Four convicted. All this is still being covered up to protect reputations of people who are still alive, some of them in the House of Lords.”
Note: 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the Guildford, Woolwich and Birmingham pub bombings in England, for which 17 innocent people were wrongly convicted in three separate cases. Irish America will be running a two-part series on these cases, covering what has happened since, and where they stand now. Part One runs today, Saturday October 5, to coincide with the Guildford anniversary, Part Two will be posted on the Birmingham anniversary in November.
The Guildford 4: Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson at the time of their arrest.
Follow Brian on Twitter @dooley_dooley
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