On the evening of 21 November 1974, bombs planted by the IRA in two crowded Birmingham pubs exploded, killing 21 people and injuring 220. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in Britain during the so-called ‘Troubles’.
Within 24 hours, six men – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power, Johnny Walker and Hughie Callaghan – were arrested and charged. Callaghan hardly knew the other five. He merely went to Birmingham New Street station to see them off having gone to Richard McIlkenny’s house to pay him back a pound (worth the equivalent of six pints of Guinness in 1974). The five were travelling to Ireland for a funeral and were arrested when they got off the train at Heysham Port. All were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Fast forward 16 years, the Birmingham Six as they were known, were sensationally released. They had been imprisoned for a crime they did not commit and their release brought not only their freedom, but lasting and positive changes to the criminal justice system.
Their release was in the main due the forensic work of investigative journalist and former Labour MP, Chris Mullin, who also identified three of the four real bombers.
Marking the anniversary of an unsolved crime
To mark the 50th anniversary Mullin spoke at a meeting organised by the Bar Council and hosted by the City Law School and Department of Journalism at City University, in Islington on 20 November 2024.
The meeting took the form of a question-and-answer session. Leading the questions to Mullin was Sarah Kavanagh, head of media and communications at the Bar Council. Members of the audience also put questions to the former MP for Sunderland South, who left parliament in 2010.
Long and detailed investigation exposed judicial flaws
Setting the scene for the questions, the audience was shown the start of one of the three documentaries made for World in Action, Granada Television’s hard-hitting prime time current affairs programme, which highlighted the flaws in the case in order to prove the innocence of the six.
Asked why he got involved, Mullin explained that he was tipped off about potential flaws in the case by a Guardian journalist friend Peter Chippindale, who had covered the Birmingham trials and thought they had got the wrong people. Although at the time Mullin was an impoverished journalist, he started on a remarkable journey to expose the wrongful convictions.
He told the meeting that he followed the Birmingham case as it wound its way through the courts and eventually found a publisher, Chatto and Windus, who commissioned him to write a book (Error of Judgment: The Truth About the Birmingham Pub Bombings, 1986) on his findings.
Television documentaries boosted campaign for justice
It wasn’t until 1985 that he persuaded Ray Fitzwalter, editor of World in Action, to take him on temporarily to see if they could boost the campaign. The programmes had an impact: the first demolished the forensic evidence, the second damaged the police evidence and the third was an interview with one of the actual bombers (heavily disguised). The programmes also revealed that the six were beaten, threatened and terrified by the police, and deprived of sleep and food until false confessions were signed.
A Court of Appeal hearing in 1988 upheld the convictions, a major setback for the campaign. By then Mullin was the Labour MP for Sunderland South and able to take his campaign to Parliament where he managed to get some allies among Conservative MPs (including Nicholas Soames, a grandson of Sir Winston Churchill).
Finally, the guilty verdicts were quashed by the Court of Appeal at the second attempt on 14 March 1991.
Efforts to force disclosure of sources came to nothing
Mullin explained that this, however, was not the end of the matter. Sections of the legal and judicial establishment continued to snipe and mutter against the decision and early in 2022 the West Midlands Police applied for an order under the Terrorism Act 2000 requiring Mullin to disclose material relating to his investigations into the bombings.
With the support of the National Union of Journalists, who he praised at the meeting for their support, he fought the case on the grounds that to disclose the material requested would be a fundamental breach of the principle that journalists must protect their sources.
On 22 March 2022, the case was thrown out by His Honour Judge Mark Lucraft QC, Recorder of the London Central Criminal Court.
Error of Judgement: The Birmingham Bombings and the Scandal That Shook Britain by Chris Mullin is published by Monoray (February 2024)
Postscript: On the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings, relatives of those killed in and injured have urged the government to set up a statutory public inquiry. Renewing their calls for an inquiry, they say that “England’s biggest unsolved mass murder of the 20th century” should be at the top of the government’s list.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
