WHAT IF THERE WAS A SECOND BOMB?

THE possibility was seriously considered that the IRA might attempt a follow-up attack on Brighton, with the Royal Sussex Hospital as its target. Urgent security measures were needed, just in case.

Hospital manager Michael Forrer had a machine rushed from Gatwick Airport to produce security cards for everyone, and there were police on every entrance 24 hours a day.

A few members of staff objected to this on a matter of principle, and a bolshie anaesthetist refused to show his pass, ducking underneath the police security guard. He was instantly tackled to the ground.

Police also asked for the flowers building up in the window of Norman Tebbit’s room to be removed in case it was pinpointed and attacked.

David Bowden, the administrator for Brighton’s hospitals, was phoned by a Royal Sussex receptionist the week after the bombing, who told him: ‘I’ve just received a call from someone with an Irish accent to say that a bomb’s been planted in a hospital in Brighton.’ ‘Which hospital?’ ‘That’s all that was said before the person rang off.’

Bowden was in a quandary. ‘It was eight o’clock on a Saturday evening, and there were ten hospitals in Brighton. It could have been in any one of them.’

He rang all of the managers and got them to check every department. It was a hoax.

There were many other hoax calls in Brighton, so many that police search-dog handler Leslie Jeavons didn’t have a rest day for seven weeks.

Police took seriously a man who phoned to warn about a bomb in a shopping centre . . . until he told them that it was a nuclear one!