Birmingham reels from bombings

Blasts rip through two local pubs, leaving 21 dead

Thursday night in Birmingham in late T

1974: it was payday and the pubs were heaving. The Tavern in the Town, not far from New Street station, was packed, the air thick with conversation and cigarette smoke. Just after 8.15pm, a few drinkers heard a mu ed thump. Though none of them knew it, a bomb had gone off in another busy pub a few moments’ walk away, the Mulberry Bush.

Ten minutes later, there was a gigantic bang – and the roof fell in on the Tavern in the Town. Outside, the survivors told tales of unimaginable horror. One bystander said he had seen “bodies and blood everywhere”. Another witness said: “There were women and young girls screaming, blood pouring everywhere. I saw one man who seemed to have half his body blown off. It was horrible.”

In total, 21 people were killed that evening in November 1974. Although the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) have never oʛcially admitted responsibility for the attack, at an inquest in 2019 a former IRA intelligence head testified that the group had carried out the bombing, and a British jury subsequently found that the victims were unlawfully killed by the IRA.

On the night of the attack, the Birmingham Post had received a phone call containing a vague warning, but too late for the pubs to be cleared in time.

Under intense public pressure, the police arrested six men originally from Northern Ireland who had lived in Birmingham since the 1960s, and beat confessions out of some of them. Sentenced to life imprisonment, the men were only released in 1991, and the true killers have never been charged. And so, the bombings became synonymous with a gross miscarriage of justice, rather than the loss and suffering inflicted by republican violence.