LAUGHING IN THE FACE OF EVIL
We know all about the horror of the Brighton bomb. But a new book reveals in enthralling detail the indomitable spirit – and remarkable black humour – of Maggie and the Tories the IRA tried to kill
CABINET MINISTER Norman Tebbit was in a typically resilient mood at the re- opening ceremony of the re-built Grand Hotel in Brighton — even though he’d been buried alive there for hours and his wife was permanently paralysed when it was shattered by an IRA bomb almost two years earlier, in october 1984.
‘Room service that night was slow,’ he was still able to joke. ‘i had to wait three-and-ahalf hours before anybody came!’
Harvey Thomas, organiser of the conservative Party conference which had been the target of the devastating attack, was equally nonchalant as he recalled how he later got a bill from the hotel for his room that night. ‘i wrote back and said: “Would you mind giving me half a night’s discount, because the room didn’t exist after 3am?” ’
Such levity, such sangfroid, is remarkable, given that they’d been caught in the middle of an unprecedented act of terrorism and treason that came within inches of murdering a British Prime Minster — Margaret Thatcher. Five people did die and 31 were injured, some, like Margaret Tebbit, who was a hospital nurse, with wounds that would scar them for life.
But the chaos and the collapse of government that the perpetrators had hoped to engineer did not happen. Defiance, not defeat, was the message that came from the rubble.
i am a young journalist from near Brighton and, though i was not even born back then, i have always been intrigued by what took place in my own backyard — the courage of ordinary people thrown suddenly into an unimaginable nightmare. i sought the recollections of those involved — survivors, police, firefighters and medics. This is their story of that night 33 years ago, after which Britain was never quite the same again.
‘IT JUST went bang!’ a police officer recalled. ‘Definitely not thunder,’ was the instant verdict of one of his colleagues, who heard the noise coming from the direction of the seafront hotel where the Prime Minister and her colleagues were ensconced for the Tory Party conference.
At a Brighton fire station, a senior officer saw the hotel’s fire alarm had gone off and wondered if it was someone’s idea of a joke, to wake up all the ministers and make them stand outside in the cold.
But this was no prank. This was for real.
APOLICE van outside the Grand had been rattled by the shock wave and was covered with red and white dust so thick ‘it was almost like someone had thrown a blanket over us’, an officer recalls.
‘i jumped out and the ground was covered in rubble, broken bricks, bits of railing. People were screaming, hanging off balconies, alarm bells ringing, water pouring out of broken pipes. My immediate thought was gas explosion, but then someone saidl “IRA.”’
Meanwhile, in his bed in the Grand, Norman Tebbit, the Trade and industry Secretary, noticed the chandelier swinging above his head an instant before the explosion. ‘it’s a bomb!’ he told his wife as the room collapsed and they became part of an ‘avalanche’ of rubble.
in her suite, Mrs Thatcher was awake and working when the bomb went off. Her first instinct was to check that Denis, her husband, asleep in the bedroom, was all right. He emerged, pulling on his trousers over his pyjamas. Mrs Thatcher stayed totally calm, consoling a frightened secretary that ‘it’s probably a bomb, but don’t worry, dear’. She told an aide: ‘i think that was an assassination attempt, don’t you?’
outside, Pc Simon Parr saw bloodied women in ball gowns and men in dinner suits staggering out through windows and side doors. Such was the devastation that, arriving on the scene, senior fire officer Fred Bishop noticed sheets, pillowcases and curtains hanging from the lamp posts along the seafront.
He knew it was official brigade protocol to wait outside if a bomb was suspected. But he went inside anyway, ‘because, looking at the debris, it was obvious there were going to be people trapped’. He gave his men the choice of staying out, but they all instinctively followed him through the doors.
‘We had to go in,’ he recalled. ‘it was our duty. When i joined the fire service, they gave us a sense of responsibility, and they always said that the first responsibility is to save lives.’ Aware the hotel had at least 300 guests, he radioed for back-up ‘and as many ambulances as you can get’.
When he got to Mrs Thatcher, she said ‘Thank you for coming’ as she was ushered to safety. in the chaos outside the hotel, rumours were spreading that she’d been killed, but then the cry went up: ‘Maggie’s safe!’ Such was the relief, said a Tory MP, that strangers shook hands, and clasped each other — but in silence.
She was taken to Brighton police station, where — says police protection officer David Bard — ‘some people were suggesting the conference should be abandoned. And she sat upon that idea straight away. “No way. We are continuing. They don’t beat us.” ’
This was the message she rammed home to the gathering Press, in the process exasperating another police protection officer, les crabb, who was anxious to get her out of sight.
‘Anybody could have been there but the damn woman insisted on stopping to have a chat.’
Meanwhile, Norman Tebbit was trapped and quietly awaiting rescue. He knew that he was badly injured but there was no point in calling for help because there would be no one to hear just yet. ‘Save your energy,’ he told his wife, Margaret, as he held her hand to comfort her.
But he was worried. ‘ We could hear water running and didn’t know if it was rising about us.
‘i suffered a couple of very strong electric shocks, when the people beginning to attempt the rescue cut through a cable which was still live.
‘That was a moment when i thought i was dying, but the pain went away and i realised i wasn’t dead...’ By now, a systematic search of the hotel was under way. Room doors were kicked open on the top floors, but it was conditions on the lower ones that were most worrying. The explosion had dislodged a heavy chimney stack, which had come crashing through the floors, punching a hole like a lift shaft through the building and creating a large pile of rubble at the bottom.
As firefighters were lowered down on ropes, it was feared there could be hundreds of people buried underneath it. one fireman recalled: ‘We were expecting an awful lot more casualties. everyone was thinking that.’ Bravely
they battled on, despite fears that there might be more bombs and that the building itself was on the verge of collapse. one of those they rescued was press director Harvey Thomas, after two- and- a- half hours trapped in the rubble. The time went quickly, he recalled.
‘I was alive, and they’d found me, so I just had to lie there till they got me out. During the Blitz in London, I remember as a tiny boy hearing a Doodlebug and us all diving for cover. our generation didn’t faff around or make a fuss.’
He was eventually pulled out completely caked with mud and stark naked.
Some, though, were making a fuss, as Detective Inspector John Byford recalled. As survivors of the blast milled around outside, he was trying to draw up lists of names to find out who was missing and who had been killed.
This was a time before conference security was as tight as it is today, and no one knew for sure who’d actually been in the hotel and who might have gone out for dinner or been doing other things. The police were asking questions, and one particular minister was shouting the odds, insisting that he had to get back to his room to collect his personal belongings.
It turned out that he’d been in bed with a woman who was not his wife when they’d had to get out in a hurry.
He was desperate to remove the underwear his lady friend had left behind before the room was searched and his secret tryst uncovered.
The rescue effort was now in full swing as fire-fighters combed the remains of the building. once one person had been found, Bishop says: ‘We would call for silence, and shout out to see if anyone could hear us. And that’s how we found the Tebbits’.
‘oh, who’s that?’ called a voice from the rubble. ‘No, who’s that?’ Bishop asked. ‘No — I asked first,’ said the voice, which turned out to be Margaret Tebbit.
The Tebbits’ bed, with them inside it, had fallen down three floors, the remains of which had come down on top of them.
‘You couldn’t see them initially; you could only talk to them. We had to cut a lot of the bed away just to get to them. And they were completely covered by masonry.’
BUT getting them out was no easy matter. Their position was so precarious that it was like the children’s game pick-up sticks, according to a fellow officer, shifting the debris bit by bit without causing a further collapse. It took a long time and he kept up a conversation — about schoolday games of conkers, of all things — with the couple to keep them conscious.
They freed Mrs Tebbit first and covered her in a tin-foil-type ‘space blanket’. ‘I feel just like a chicken being wrapped up to go into the oven,’ she said to Bishop. ‘ And I thought for her to come up with that given the terrible pain she must have been in for three hours was incredible.’
Then they got to Norman, ‘who grabbed my hand and refused to let it go. He asked after his wife and I lied to him. I knew she was paralysed and her neck broken. But I told him: “Margaret’s fine, we’ve got her off to hospital, just to get checked over.”
‘If I’d told him the truth and said: “oh, she’s broken her spine and her neck and is likely to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life,” he would have worried. So I lied to him to keep his spirits up’.
Fireman Paul Robb recalls Bishop climbing into ‘a very, very small space’ to complete the rescue of Norman Tebbit. ‘It was only big enough for him to get in, and all you could see most of the time was his feet sticking out. If anything had moved, it would have come down on him.’
Just to get inside the space, Bishop had to remove his helmet, which earned him a telling off later for putting himself in danger. ‘A lot of us at the time thought he was absolutely mad doing it,’ Paul Robb recalls, ‘but he’s of the opinion that’s what he’s there for.’
Tebbit was finally eased out, bleeding profusely from horrific injuries to his shoulder, ribcage, and hip bone. Paramedic Dave Weir inserted two intravenous drips and painkilling drugs, and routinely asked if he had any allergies. ‘Yes,’ Tebbit replied. ‘To bombs!’
Gradually, the casualty situation was becoming clearer. At 5 am, Robin Butler, Mrs Thatcher’s principal private secretary, knew that some people were dead and others were still being dug out, but he let the Prime Minister get some sleep before telling her at 8 am.
He was appalled when she replied that the conference was due to reconvene at 9.30 ‘ and we must make sure it starts on time’.
He told her: ‘You can’t be serious. Terrible things have happened. You can’t just go on with the conference as if nothing has happened, surely?’
But she was adamant. ‘ This is our opportunity to show that terrorism can’t defeat democracy. It’s what the victims would have wanted.’ That phrase struck Butler, ‘because I wasn’t quite sure how she could have known’.
Back at the Grand, ministers, MPs and delegates were milling around on the sea front, many still in pyjamas and slippers. A coach arrived to take them to a shopping centre, where Conservative Party treasurer Lord McAlpine had arranged for M&S to open early.
He spread the word among Brighton’s taxi drivers that anyone without clothes was to be brought there and he would settle the fares, which he did. A journalist who saw people queuing up to be driven to the shops was amazed by the organisation. ‘ You could see how the Conservatives always win elections.’
At the Royal Sussex County Hospital, where casualties were taken, everyone was working flat out. The call went out for extra staff, and administrator Michael Forrer recalls how people phoned in anyway, or just turned up. ‘Junior medical staff, nursing staff, pathology staff, the lot.’ Even the gynaecologists came in.
NORMAL departmental niceties were put aside as everyone pulled together at top speed, sending the injured to theatre, operating on them, before moving on to the next priority.
Management was in the control room: do you need more beds, do you need blankets, do you need whatever.
‘The whole thing ticked over like a clock,’ said one doctor.
For the authorities, there was a major problem in simply keeping up with developments because casualty figures were very hard to identify. Hospital press officer Andrew Partington remembers working through handwritten l ists because there were no computerised records then.
‘ This person’s come in, this person’s been discharged, this person’s been treated, this person’s in the operating theatre, think this one’s dead, check that later, don’t confirm anything till we know that next of kin have been informed.’
Press director Harvey Thomas was one of those now in hospital. He was told that no bones were broken but that he was likely to suffer from shock and trauma and needed to stay in bed.
He was not impressed by the diagnosis. ‘ Listen, mate,’ he told the doctor, ‘I’ve just been blown up by a bomb and buried under ten tons of rubble. What bigger shock can I have than that?’
Stiff-upper-lip attitudes like this amazed Carlos Perez-Avila, an A&E consultant from South America: ‘ At home there would have been hysteria but here there was no crying and no one moaned, despite very serious injuries. I had never come across that sort of attitude before. It was surreal.’
He offered tea and sympathy to an elderly lady with blast injuries and shrapnel wounds peppering her body, sitting waiting patiently for treatment, which was inevitably
slow in coming given the rush of priority cases. And she just smiled and said: ‘You know, there’s nothing like a lovely cup of tea at four o’clock in the morning.’
But not everyone was quite so calm, especially the journalists now congregating in large numbers at the hospital wanting information and stories. A press room was found for them to keep them away from the patients and the wards, and they were fed what meagre facts were available. But they were understandably hungry for news.
Then Perez-Avila had an idea. He’d noticed that Harvey Thomas, though looking awful and ‘half- dead’, wasn’t actually injured but was very talkative. ‘He knew the Conservative Party, knew the organisation of the conference, knew the politicians, and was happy to talk. So we put him up in front of the press.’
Thomas provided some great quotes, describing how from his trapped position, ‘I had to scratch and claw to keep the rubble away from my face and squirm to stay away from water cascading from a fractured pipe. At least I hope it was water’.
Thomas himself recalls how he was asked to be the ‘sacrificial lamb’ and agreed. ‘I went in front of the cameras, though I hadn’t had a chance to wash or even clear some of the rubble out of my ears.
‘Later that day, an old friend of mine from Bible College in Minneapolis, who was married with a family in California, sent me a telegram, addressed to “Harvey Thomas, care of Margaret Thatcher, Brighton, England”.
‘So the telegram came through, and I went in to see “Mother” — we used to call Mrs Thatcher “Mother” — and with half the Cabinet all there, she said: “Oh, Harvey, I’ve got a telegram here for you. It says: ‘Dear Harvey, I saw you on television here in California this morning. Do you know, we’ve known each other 25 years and I’ve never seen you naked before? Love, Diane.’ ’
Early in the morning, at the Brighton conference centre, the Tories had re-assembled, as instructed by their leader. Concerned to get Mrs Thatcher safely inside, Sussex chief constable Roger Birch asked for her to be brought in through the back and waited there for her. She went in through the front to show the world that it was business as usual.
She spotted Harvey Thomas, who, against doctors’ advice, had discharged himself from hospital. He had a conference to run and wasn’t going to be stopped. ‘My God!’ said Mrs Thatcher. ‘We thought you were dead.’
As far as he was concerned he was just carrying on as expected. ‘I was very tired, but you’re always tired on the last day of a conference anyway. I was naturally concerned about my friends who’d been killed, five of them, and also the injured. But, with me, there was nothing broken and in those days, we hadn’t been clever enough to invent posttraumatic stress, so we just got on with it. It was a different world.’
The atmosphere at the conference centre was terrible, according to Conservative politician Ann Widdecombe.
‘Everyone was asking about somebody that they couldn’t find. We didn’t know who was alive, who was dead, who was still under the rubble. There was an elderly lady that I was very close to, and I knew had been in the Grand. And it was absolutely ages before I was able to find out that she was all right.
‘No one was pretending that everything was fine, because it clearly wasn’t. But what we were saying was: “The IRA is not going to stop us. We’re going on.” ’ Backbench MP John Powley recalls ‘this British stoicism, that we were going to carry on, business as usual, or as near usual as we possibly could’.
Thatcher’s conference speech had been rewritten to reflect what had happened. She delivered it without an autocue. The key passage denounced the bombing as ‘ an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected government’.
‘That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared, and the fact we are gathered here now — shocked but composed and determined — is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.’
After her speech, she didn’t stick around to mingle with the audience; she wanted to get straight to the Royal Sussex Hospital, where she insisted on seeing all the bomb victims who were still there.
JULIA CUMBERLEGE, chair of Brighton Health Authority, took her round the wards and at one point warned her: ‘Now we’re going into the intensive care unit. You realise it’s quite brutal.’ ‘Of course!’ Thatcher said.
‘She went to people’s bedsides, and talked to them. She was very much the Prime Minister, and, in front of her colleagues and friends, she was very authoritative.
‘Only once did she burst into tears — when she saw a badly injured policeman. I think what got to her was that here was this man who had nothing to do with the Conservative Party and was just doing his duty in front of the Grand Hotel, and he was caught in the blast.’
To medic Carlos Perez-Avila, who joined them for tea, what was remarkable was Thatcher’s composure. ‘It was 5 o’clock and I was shattered by this time, absolutely knackered. I hadn’t slept at all — the tension, the adrenaline, and everything.’
‘So, you come from El Salvador?’ the Prime Minister asked him. ‘President Duarte is a good man. I met him three years ago.’
This really impressed Carlos. ‘Who, having been almost blown to bits, doesn’t sleep a wink, rewrites a speech, delivers it, and is perfectly coiffured, and still remembers the bloody President of El Salvador?’
But for Thatcher’s principle private secretary, Robin Butler, who’d been at her side when the bomb went off, there was no such heroic accolade when he got home after the conference. ‘That’ll teach you for sitting up with a blonde at ten to three in the morning,’ his wife Gillian told him when he walked through the door.
Something has gone Wrong: Dealing With the Brighton Bomb by Steven Ramsey is published by Biteback on January 11, 2018, priced £12.99. to order a copy for £10.39 (20 per cent discount), visit mailshop. co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15. offer valid until January 17, 2018.