Who do you think you are kidding, Mr COBRA?
Forty years ago, in October 1974, five people were killed in an explosion that ripped through a pub in Guildford; just over a month later, twenty-one were killed in two separate explosions that ripped through a pair of pubs in Birmingham. These awful incidents were no accidents. After a slow and gradual build-up of operations in 1973, the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign was unleashed in earnest during the autumn of 1974. This phase of IRA activity in England came at a time when the country was already gripped by a fatalistic conviction that it was trapped in an irreversible decline; all the images of Britain from the mid-70s that have now become a lazy shorthand cliché for summing-up the entire decade – the strikes, the power-cuts, the Northern Ireland Troubles, the football hooliganism, the rise of the far-right – weren’t clichés when they were present tense; they were life as the British people knew it. Even the failure of the national football team to qualify for the World Cup in West Germany was perceived as symptomatic of the overall decay. The same month of the Guildford Bombing, the nation went to the polls for the second time in less than a year, following eight shaky months of a minority Labour government led by Harold Wilson in which prices and unemployment had continued to rise as living standards continued to plummet amidst paranoid rumours of coups from both the far-right and the far-left. To say the UK was a fairly unstable country in 1974 is a bit of an understatement. The previous year’s Christmas hits were upbeat and euphoric anthems by Slade and Wizzard; one year on, the top two positions were occupied by downbeat and melancholic numbers from Mud and Ralph McTell. Coincidence?
My most telling wish as a child in 1974/75 was to visit London; already fascinated and stimulated by the rich tapestry of British history, I wanted to see where so much of it had taken place. But my timing was terrible. Although I had relations in the capital, my dad wouldn’t countenance taking his family on the London tourist trail because he didn’t consider it a safe destination. That seems an extraordinary decision in retrospect, to veto a trip around Big Ben, St Paul’s, the Tower, Buckingham Palace and all the rest because it was deemed to be too dangerous. Today, one would expect that kind of veto from a father if his seven-year-old begged to be taken on holiday to Syria; but London? Yet, his response was perfectly valid. It’s difficult, especially if you’re too young to have been around in the mid-70s, to appreciate how serious the situation was. Bombings had become such a constant threat in London that some compared the situation to the Blitz. Television images of the virtual civil war across the Irish Sea were so prevalent by 1974 that many on the mainland had reached the point whereby their response leaned towards jaded ambivalence; this was, in part, one of the reasons why the IRA Army Council decided to embark upon a concerted effort to export the daily experience of Ulster to the very streets that Ralph McTell was singing of on ‘Top of the Pops’.
When the newly-formed Provisional wing of the IRA sought support within a Catholic community that had mocked the organisation’s acronym as I Ran Away during the first few months of the Troubles, they cleverly lured British troops and the RUC out of the traditional Republican recruitment heartland by bombing economic targets in the city centres of Belfast and Derry. Similarly, when the mainland bombing campaign of 74/75 began, commerce was as valid a target as the military; both Harrods and Selfridges were hit, deliberately disrupting the British passion for shopping, as were the likes of the Tower of London and Earl’s Court, two locations that drew in the tourists and consequently benefitted the British economy. Birmingham had become a ghost town after dark in the wake of the devastating November 1974 pub bombings, and many London businesses soon experienced an equally damaging loss of trade when the public developed a perfectly understandable wariness of venturing into the centre of the capital. Even the postal service suffered following the introduction of the letter bomb. And adopting a combative public stance towards the perpetrators of the campaign at its destructive height could be just as dangerous. When Ross McWhirter, outspoken joint editor of the Guinness Book of Records and co-star of the BBC children’s series, ‘Record Breakers’, offered reward money for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for the situation, he was shot dead on his doorstep by a couple of IRA assassins. Beyond London’s borders, the bomb scare soon became a commonplace nationwide occurrence; I remember once travelling to the local Asda supermarket in Leeds for the weekly family shopping expedition at this time, to be confronted by the store’s staff standing in the car-park and police vehicles surrounding the building. It was a bomb scare and Asda didn’t receive our custom that week.
The team behind the majority of the mainland incidents became known as the Balcombe Street Gang, following the dramatic siege that took place at a flat in London’s Balcombe Street in December 1975, in which a couple were held hostage for six days by the cornered bombers. Long before rolling news channels were even conceived, the drama unfolded live on television and finally ended with a series of delicate negotiations that climaxed with the team surrendering and confessing their activities over the past fourteen months. IRA bombings didn’t stop with the arrest of the Balcombe Street Gang, of course – indeed, just over a month later in January 1976, twelve bombs exploded overnight in London’s West End; but the gruesome intensity of the 74/75 campaign, when the kind of heightened terror alert that is today only spoken of by politicians relishing the rush of testosterone was a genuine reality for millions of people, has never been matched since. Because I am old enough to remember when being killed or maimed by a bomb merely by walking the streets of the nation’s capital city was a very real possibility, part of me cannot be thrown into the desired state of panic by constant government warnings of how the country is currently facing its greatest-ever terror threat courtesy of the online bearded beheaders. What happened in the middle of the 1970s was worthy of our collective fear, but I don’t feel the same sense of anxiety now. I should imagine anyone who actually lived in London during that onslaught feels similarly sceptical.
Isolated incidents of butchery and botched plots aside, since 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, London has suffered one appalling terrorist act – the 7/7 bombings of 2005. Either the combined macho might of Special Branch, the Secret Service and the mighty COBRA are doing a damned fine job in keeping us safe or the threat isn’t as dangerous as we’ve been told.
Are you scared?
Petunia Winegum
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October 22, 2014 at 10:47 am -
I’m scared of shadowy elements of the Government pulling off another false flag attack like I believe they did on 7/7. Same thing as 9/11 and in Madrid and probably on Bali.
These multi-location attacks have the hallmarks of state-sponsored terrorism. If thousands of Muslims have been to training camps in Afghanistan and are living in the West, ready and willing to kill and be killed and with the knowledge of making bombs – why has there not been a multiple location event since 2005?
It seems clear that the PTB behind the scenes carried out these initial attacks on a large enough scale to ‘justify’ the phony wars and domestic anti-freedom measures.
That’s not to say they won’t do it again to remind us to always be afraid or to try to justify yet another war, but they leave so many clues behind that every government attack involves the risk of being uncovered.
The only reason the real perpetrators haven’t been brought to justice is because too many people ignore the evidence and believe that anything other than the official story is a “conspiracy theory”.
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October 22, 2014 at 11:28 am -
Has there ever, ever been a real terrorist attack, Stewart? One that isn’t a false flag attack?
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October 22, 2014 at 12:05 pm -
I asked something like that once on a 9/11-7/7 conspiracy theory forum, and was immediately banned! There is a default position amongst conspiracists that whatever the “official” story is, the reality must be the opposite. On the aformentioned forum, there were those who in all seriousness argued that while 9/11 and 7/7 were obviously “false flags,” the Buncefield oil depot fire must have been the result of a real terrorist attack, precisely because the authorities said it was all accidental!
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October 22, 2014 at 11:14 am -
Not the least bit worried here, but part of that is that I know where the ‘slims congregate my way and am sufficiently sick of both them and the whiny PC shitheads who enable them that the first tosser allah snackbarring down my road will get an arrow through his gizzard just to open proceedings; always providing I get to him before the local Sikhs!
ALL, and I do mean ALL of this crap is brought about by our wanting to be loved and showing our tolerance and understanding, if a letter bomb in London had been followed by ten in Dublin, how long would the ‘troubles’ have lasted before serious talks took place? If some ragheaded pigfucking nutter (muslim, but I repeat myself!) killing someone helpless in Iraq was followed by a mass strike on the pricks AND THEIR FAMILIES, how long would it last? We used to understand this; we didn’t have the pax Brittanica by being NICE, we did it by being FEARED. We didn’t get the Sikhs and Gurkhas on our team by being wishy-washy, but by being worthy of the respect of warriors. Time to learn from history.-
October 22, 2014 at 11:18 am -
Have you ever considered a career in the diplomatic corps, Robert? Just wondered!
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October 22, 2014 at 11:34 am -
Only if they excused me from wearing a tie.
Mind you, what was it Clausewitz said? “War is diplomacy carried on by other means”
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October 22, 2014 at 4:15 pm -
Cos barbarism is a really comfortable way of life…
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October 22, 2014 at 4:21 pm -
Yes, it is, which is why all your muslim pals can’t wait to lead us to that promised land of FGM, sharia, daft beards and banging your head on the floor five times a day while you pretend to pray. It’s so good for us that they are willing to kill anyone who disagrees.
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October 22, 2014 at 4:52 pm -
FFS Robert, there is no “they”. There are only individual people, some of whom are unhinged. If one took comments from any of our political parties, would they represent you? Does UAF speak for you? Self-appointed “teachers” and “spokesmen” only ever represent a viewpoint within a community, not the whole community.
I say this as a flaming woofter who has walked the streets of Tower Hamlets and volunteered alongside women in burkas without ever being beheaded, stoned or even remotely dis-respected. People are people. Let them get on with their lives. To say “the first tosser allah snackbarring down my road will get an arrow through his gizzard” shows a fundamental lack of respect for anyone who is not you.
Believe me, I’m no fan of Sharia, but you know what? I’ve met white people who live by it and who don’t hate me. I believe people largely pick and choose their morality based upon their experience and not entirely upon what religious leaders or books tell them (just look at Roman Catholics who are gay, who have abortions and who divorce to see that). Your attitudes would give anyone a bad experience (no offence).
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October 22, 2014 at 5:30 pm -
Oh Puhleeese!
I loathe and detest islam, ok? You don’t have to agree, but they really piss me off. Bringing in RC’s is a strawman, they aren’t busy trying to conquer the world, change everything to suit them (ok, maybe not so much) or hitting the news every day with yet another bomb or atrocity. In muslim countries, you could be hanged (Iran) beheaded (Saudi) or have a wall pushed on you (Pakistan) simply for being a flaming woofter as you put it; something I would never have called you btw. There may be individual muslims, but there is ONE koran, ONE set of agreed hadith, ONE shahada, because there is ONE islam; the differences between shia and sunni are so slight and trivial in the real world as to be laughable, the fact that they kill each other over them when they run out of ‘infidels’ says more about them than us. My attitudes would give anyone a bad experience? Possibly, but I would be the one coming to your defence if your Tower Hamlets pals decided they were now powerful enough to kill the queer, because, fuck your sharia and muslim areas, all around, MY country. No offence taken or given I hope, lets pray the world changes so that I am seen as a quaint loony who thought islam would cause a load of grief, I wouldn’t mind a bit-
October 22, 2014 at 7:06 pm -
I loathe and detest ALL bloody religions, but not the people who practise them. I have to accept they have their own views and approaches and beliefs which are as unfathomable to me as fascism, or communism. Religion is just politics with supernatural boogeymen to back it up. I do not, however, choose to belittle people for believing those things.
If I went to Iran (I’d love to – it looks like a fascinating country , but let’s say that is unlikely), I’d be bloody careful not to do anything to alert any locals to my woofter tendencies. When in Rome etc., although you’d only get me to Saudi or Pakistan if I was already dead. Went to Muslim Tunisia with a partner by the way – no hassle at all.
And thank you for potentially coming to my defence, but on this one, we stand shoulder to shoulder: no sharia for non-muslims in MY country (if they choose to live by it, that’s their business, although when it conflicts with the law of the land, I believe UK law should have supremacy).
No offence taken – you believe strongly one way, I believe strongly the other. But this is a pub so heated debate goes with the booze, really. Brandy and Babycham please (nah, just playing with stereotypes – make mine a Jim Beam – a stiff double….)
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October 22, 2014 at 11:29 am -
In the early 70’s, my office was in St. Martins Lane, near Trafalgar Square, and when the Old Bailey bomb went off, I was visiting a client in Threadneedle Street.
I had to walk back to St. Martins Lane and, when I got there, I found that there had been bomb scares in that area. Several of my staff were three sheets to the wind, having been prevented by the police from leaving the pubs whence they had gone for the usual lunchtime drinks. The co-tenants of our building were, by contrast, out on the pavement. Our lot were at their desks, as the MD had said that he was damned if the IRA were going to screw our business up.
I lived and worked in London all through the 70’s and 80’s, and bomb scares, along with actual explosions and deaths became a part of daily life. I also had business in Belfast, and going there was something of an adventure which I could have done without. Even in mainland UK, it became second nature to check under pub settles, chairs in restaurants etc. for suspicious objects. It did get very worrying when my wife and her friend were caught up in some bomb scare at the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia. Was nothing sacred?
We all managed through the 70’s with bombs, strikes and power cuts, with the sort of Blitz spirit and sang froid the English can turn on when required. For myself, having, as a child and schoolboy, lived in Kenya with Mau Mau, Malaya in the Emergency and then Aden at the end of Empire there, it all just seemed to follow on. Unfortunately, having dealt with one lot, another springs up.
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October 22, 2014 at 12:27 pm -
Although much derided at the time, and especially after 7/7 actualy happened, Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmare really did hit the nail on the head in terms of the threat from – at the time – Al Qaeda being blown up (not apologies for the pun) out of all proportion. It’s not that such attacks couldn’t occur, and wouldn’t cause death and injury, just that in the grand scheme of things they would be minuscule.
Even though the IRA campaign of the 1970s was more actively intensive, the comparison with the Blitz – eight months of near continuous aerial bombardment – may be comparable in terms of how the population came to live with it, but not the actual effects. Even after 7/7, it as darkly amusing to hear people saying the Piccadilly line in particular would be out of action for 6+ months, considering that during the War the damage to tunnels by far more destructive bombs had been fixed in in considerably less time. As it was, of course, the Piccadilly line was fully operation again within a month.
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October 22, 2014 at 3:25 pm -
There is a superb edition of Horizon called ‘Race to Ruin’ from the early eighties, available on iPlayer, about exaggeration of Soviet weapons production and the quality of their space program. It makes the point that US weapons suppliers benefited from this fear. The problem is still with us, even though there is no more Soviet Union. What to make of the absurd F-35 project, for example?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0285z2y/horizon-19811982-the-race-to-ruin
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October 22, 2014 at 4:02 pm -
In the early 1990s Horizon did a programme on the Soviet space programme, and despite unrivaled access, they came close to not showing something that they did get to include in the end: the actual one-man lunar lander the Soviets would have used, had they got to the moon. Even by their own standards, it was pretty basic, and probably 50/50 whether the hapless cosmonaut would have either survived the landing, or been able to take off again afterwards.
Soviet technology was generally relatively simple, but still expensive for the economy paying for it. In contrast, America spent far more money by being more cuttting edge, but could afford to do so. The modern proverb of the NASA weightlessness pen and the Soviet pencil, even though not actually true, rings as if it was.
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October 22, 2014 at 12:53 pm -
Working in London in the early 80s; IRA bomb scares were common and freqent and evacuations of both workplace and tube/mainline stations became routine – you got used to it. An American working for me never did and finally went back to Boston because they “couldn’t stand being under threat in their everyday life” – which was nicely ironic since it was Noraid contrbitions that were funding the bastards.
Never forget that our septic cousins didn’t get the point on terrorism till 9/11 and still cannot comprehend that anyone could possibly hate them – but have gone out of their way to ensure that more and more people hate them year on year. Sadly we have been dragged in
their wake, lead by our own PC liberal fools who can’t see that the are other categories of bastard who simply hate us and cannot be appeased or reasoned with. -
October 22, 2014 at 1:01 pm -
I grew up in London and was a teenager there in the 60s and there were bombings then. I was woken up early one morning by a rattling of my bedroom window; it was the Post Office Tower bomb going off. And before the IRA there was the Angry Brigade – rank amateurs the lot of them, all they managed to blow up was an innocent traffic bollard, as I recall.
I was out of London during the 70s, but my mother still lived there. A Northern Irish Catholic, she had lived in England since 1938 but still retained her accent. During the ‘bombing years’, she soon learned not to open her mouth in public in the day or two after a bombing, after being spat on and sworn at by forerunners of Robert the Biker.
And speaking of which, people like him may be interested to know that the Irish Republic also got bombed, several times, during those years.-
October 22, 2014 at 1:31 pm -
” after being spat on and sworn at”
Not just the Irish..
The Bestes Frau In The Whole World has learnt that speaking German around the time of the Poppy Clad Sheeples is a good way to collect DNA samples…of splutter if not gob. One memorable occasion an elderly bloke felt the need to shout at her in the supermarket for her conversing with me in German , however I was around the corner of the aisle so he couldn’t actually see me. He felt brave enough to verbally abuse my just-over-the-legal-height-to-be-classed-as-a-dwarf wife but when my 6ft in paraboots of shaved headed perpetual annoyance rolled into view he acquired some ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ (ie ran away with a shit trail behind him).-
October 22, 2014 at 1:45 pm -
Bit odd that, even my Dad who was sunk three times (Coastal Forces) was well over the Germans by about 1950, had German friends , including a Korvettenkapitan with whom he used to swap yarns (amazing to hear the opposites sides view of an engagement) and did a lot of work for German clients.
Sounds to me like the bloke was a nutter, though it is just possible he lost someone close in the Blitz and never got over it; I worked in Munich and a few of the old ‘uns got a bit peculiar about an Englishman in ‘their’ city working for Linde.
Glad you stuck up for your missus, well done, I would have too.-
October 22, 2014 at 1:53 pm -
“old ‘uns got a bit peculiar about an Englishman in ‘their’ city working”
By the time I was living and working in Germany, people (employers and Landlords) used to say things to me like : “Oh when we said ‘NO FOREIGNERS NEED APPLY’ we didn’t mean you of course! “
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October 22, 2014 at 2:09 pm -
This was all of six months ago Dwarf! Maybe there was something going on or they were just odd (my long hair and beard can set some a-tremble) or perhaps it is the rising tide of nationalism in Germany – there’s a movement for an independant Bavaria and a few others, Bismark must be spinning in his grave. Could be I’m too sensitive a little flower too of course
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October 22, 2014 at 2:18 pm -
WOW! I would have expected that back in say the 70s, but nowadays?! Might be down to the whole ‘EU Immigrant’ thing, lot of Germans regard the new EU migrant workers the way UKIP do….and I for one will be there cheering when they crown King Louey The Loop 3 of Bavaria. I used to live on the border of Hessia and Bavaria (well ‘plastic’ Bavaria or ‘Franken’ as it is more properly known) and learnt very quickly that Bavarians are NOT German….they don’t even speak it.
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October 22, 2014 at 2:28 pm -
Yes, I heard the Berliner definition of a Bavarian as “three quarters of a German tall and a German and a half wide”
Funny, the ones I worked with were all tall and thin!
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October 22, 2014 at 1:37 pm -
Ooooh, struck a nerve did it? Since I’m 61, they are scarcely my forerunners, but I did not nor will not spit on anyone. What did you do to assist against the murderers of women and schoolkids? Fuck all, like the rest of the bullshit and blarney brigade. Yes, the Republic suffered a couple of small attacks, rather different than the relentless campaign (Omagh?) by your great heroes, the shit of the ira.
Yes, I would have paid out in their own coin, but then I guess you think 25 years of murder and mayhem, with a community still nearly as polarised now as then is ok.
You may not like my opinions, you’re scarcely alone in that, but I’ve never bothered anyone who left me alone. Guess what? Being a woman in a sharia compliant England due to surrender to the shit of islame will be far worse for your mum than any viewpoints of mine.-
October 22, 2014 at 2:11 pm -
Sorry, sore point, was in the army myself and it was all ‘warmongers and baby killers’
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October 22, 2014 at 5:03 pm -
Robert, I wasn’t going to mention this. But here goes. I lost two Irish cousins in the Troubles. One was a shopworker in Omagh – and yes, I’m talking about the Omagh Bombing. The other was an active IRA member who got himself shot dead by the British Army, on the way, along with his mates, to a so-called spectacular. That was a few years before Omagh; his dad, a rabid republican, was the black sheep of his very large Catholic family. He hailed his son (his only child) as a “martyr” to the bloody cause. He was dead before Omagh happened. Which was lucky for him as otherwise, my surviving uncles and aunties would have had some words with him.
Thank you (not) for your words about my mother. She is now dead, having survived the ignorant bigotry of people like you.-
October 22, 2014 at 5:14 pm -
There is as much anti-English bigotry as anti-Irish and always has been, or take the Scots, the ‘auld enemy’ is those of us below the wall. Or perhaps we could agree with George Bernard Shaws definition, “a bigot is someone who zealously and obstinately clings to an opinion you do not entertain”
Sorry about your Mum, no offense was intended there.
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October 22, 2014 at 1:09 pm -
I’m toooo stooopid to be scared. It’s gives me an advantage…
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October 22, 2014 at 1:42 pm -
Indeed it does. I think it was Micky Collins (peace be upon him) who said ‘the object of terrorism is to terrorize’. If one refuses to be frightened, or is too stupid to be frightened, then one has won from the start.
On another note, but concerning fear; a man who drives a stolen lorry full of notoriously instable homebrew explosives through London is many things but a ‘coward’ he ain’t.
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October 22, 2014 at 1:41 pm -
In answer to your question, Petunia, no I’m not scared now and I wasn’t in the 70s either, when I was growing up in London. As I recall, life went on as usual. In fact I remember my bus passing a pub in Caterham, outside the Guards barracks there, that had been bombed that very evening.
Nowadays I bet the whole area would’ve been sealed off, because nowadays the police make much more of a “big production” out of these events, as with everything else. Mainly because modern police chiefs are more focused on “reassuring the public” (ie terrifying the public) or “helping victims to achieve closure” rather than actually catching crims or deterring them by a visible presence BEFORE the crime has occured.
classic example was the day after our local jihahi, an English convert, tried to blow up a family-friendly pub-restaurant in Exeter with a nail bomb (fortunately he only succeeded in injuring himself). The Chief Constable put plods on the intercity trains Paddington to Penzance, patrolling the aisles with machine guns. To “reassure the public”, as an ex-cop friend of mine explained.
What reassures ME is that the vast majority of people, even now, resist the media hysteria and carry on as normal. I still have my uncle’s diary that he kept as an 18-year old living through the Blitz in Plymouth (over 1,000 civilians were killed in that one city). The interesting thing is that his diary takes far less note of the bombing raids than of what films he’d seen and which girls he was hoping to ask out.
BTW, @Robert the Biker, you clearly don’t know much about the theory and practice of terrorism. The IRA would have very much WELCOMED a British bombing campaign in the Irish Republic- it would have brought them thousands more recruits and millions more supporters, in Ireland and overseas. Their most successful recruiting campaign was created for them by the Parachute Regiment, or by the anonymous “suits” who gave the Paras their orders on Bloody Sunday.
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October 22, 2014 at 1:52 pm -
Never quite got this Pete, either the Paras were loonies just opening up on some bods, or they were reacting to an attack – disciplined soldiers, and the Paras are definitely that, do not just open up, and really, really do not just accept orders to wipe out that lot over there!
My view is admitedly coloured by walking past Harrods about five minutes before one bomb went off. I was thinking more of a UVF response to them, it was and to an extent still is a civil war; the problem is that we went in to try and keep the peace and ended up the bad guy for both sides. Perhaps we should just keep out of all these places, let them kill one another to hearts content, and only come down like a ton of brick when the bring their bullshit to these shores.-
October 22, 2014 at 2:12 pm -
“the problem is that we went in to try and keep the peace”
I sometimes wonder if TPTB really, truly, thought having Crown Forces patrolling the streets of Derry would be a GOOD Idea and would ‘keep the peace’. It seems almost too stupid to be true now. Surely the first rule of Peace Keeping between two warring factions is that the Peace Keepers have to be totally neutral and seen to be such? Which bit of ‘neutrality’ did the Brit Government not get? Or to quote a Provo mate of mine ;” the day I woke up to soldiers of a foreign army walking our streets is the day I green booked”. You may disagree about the ‘foreign army’ bit but it’s perception…
Personally I always thought the Government had really wanted peace then they should have gotten another country to supply the troops, I mean everybody hates the French…
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October 22, 2014 at 2:24 pm -
Yes, I would think that le Legion Ettrangerre would have sorted things, or perhaps the Green Berets.
The problem is there will always be one side who feel themselves ‘wronged’, perhaps we should have asked the Republic to provide troops:
1. Irish Republic trops arrive
2. Side one claims victory ‘the boys are here’
3. Side two raises the barricades
4. Full on war!
This is Ireland, so time between 1 and 4 about two minutes and thirty seconds.
Swap armies to hearts content,I doubt it would have made any difference, attitudes were and are too entrenched!-
October 22, 2014 at 3:16 pm -
I was thinking more in terms of the Gendarmes than the la Légion étrangère-who to my certain knowledge are all, every last man, clinically insane by the time they leave (I’ve worked with enough of them to know). The FFL has , traditionally, always equated ‘peace keeping’ with pacification ….violently so. The Proddies wouldn’t have accepted US troops as neutral -that whole NORAID /Land Of My Fathers thing . But you’re no doubt right that the French would have been seen as fellow Papists by the Prods and it never would have worked…
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October 22, 2014 at 2:25 pm -
It was more the case that the Paras – who were brought in to the city specifically for the operation – were over-briefed to a point where they were convinced they would come under attack. Some members of the Official IRA (not the Provos) did take a few unauthorised shots at them, but they were bundled out of the area by irate local residents (who made no secret over the eyars of having done so). At one point a Para officer fired a warning shot over a hostile crowd, and it’s likely that the sound of that – due to the acoustics of the large buildings – were misinterpred as fire at the Paras from the same buildings, and some of them opened up in response. The reality is that most of the shots that killed the unarmed civilians came from a very small number of soldiers (one admitted to firing more rounds than he had been officially issued with), whereas the majority didn’t open fire at all.
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October 22, 2014 at 1:52 pm -
I remember those times. There were more bombing incidents but people got on with their lives. London continued to be a magnet for me and many like me. Most people could work out that on the mainland the risk of being directly affected was quite low. Nothing like the blitz casualty rates, it seems to me. Street crime was a much more present danger to me, and the streets seem to me to have got progressively safer, for me at least, though not for my friends’ teenage sons.
I wish I thought that the terrorist risk now was being overhyped, but I’d be surprised. I doubt if many would be jihadis are as intrinsically dangerous as the provos, who had been operating as a terrorist group for years, but they have easy access to the technology and, as they are English, it is much easier for them to form cells here unnoticed. Just wotIfink, though. -
October 22, 2014 at 2:29 pm -
I was in a position of responsibility once upon a time. We had bomb threat after bomb threat and had to close and have the sniffer dogs in and of course nothing was ever found. Eventually it got so that we were told by the police that if it was really the IRA or anyone else we would be given a code. Never had the faintest idea what it might be, but one time we phoned, the police asked us what was said, we repeated it and they told us not to worry; it was a hoax. Imagine the cosy arrangements bewteen cops and crooks. Enough to build a modern Conspiracy Theory on I should imagine.
By the Nineties things had moved from Irish to Middle Eastern voices on the telephone and since the frequency had dropped right off the radar the police systems had reverted to full-on Red Alert procedures. I guess it would be the Palestinians by then? Cannot actually remember now. Anyway, I’d had enough of it in the past, so when the lady from Marrakech phoned and said the bomb would be going off at 9pm I decided enough was enough and I would instigate my own local version of Hoax bluff-calling. At 9pm I arranged myself in the midst of everyone else that was going to die, on the basis that if I was wrong, I’d be better off dead too. As you can see I’m still here. We never had another bomb threat at that place btw. No way to run a war though and I’ve wondered since if some folks lost their gamble of a lifetime.
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October 22, 2014 at 3:27 pm -
I remember the IRA bombing campaign in London very well as I was working in Whitehall at the time but I don’t think it compared with the Blitz in its effect on the public generally. Personally, I was far more scared of the Luftwaffe and the V1 flying bomb than of the IRA which indeed we came close to defeating in the end. It was our truly awful economic situation in the 70s, which you rightly highlighted, that I recall
as being the most worrying aspect of those years and I still wince when I remember the effect of the inflation rate which reached around 25% I think. And those unspeakable unions! I used to keep a camp bed in the office for use on the occasions when I reached Charing Cross station to find the concourse jam-packed with commuters unable to go home because the train drivers or guards had suddenly decided to go on strike.I think today’s Islamist fanatics (so unlike, by the way, the friendly people I knew in Muslim countries in the 50s and 60s) are potentially far more dangerous than the IRA ever was. There must be plenty of braindead “jihardists” who would jump at the chance to use a weapon of mass destruction if they could lay their hands on one. I’m sure we owe a great deal to the Security Service, SIS, GCHQ and Special Branch and will continue to rely very heavily on them for our security for a long time to come.
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October 22, 2014 at 5:04 pm -
* I think today’s Islamist fanatics (so unlike, by the way, the friendly people I knew in Muslim countries in the 50s and 60s) are potentially far more dangerous than the IRA ever was *
The day they blow up the British governing party in their beds, I’ll start believing that.
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October 22, 2014 at 6:23 pm -
“The day they blow up the British governing party in their beds, I’ll start believing that”
The IRA murdered 5 in Brighton. Al Qaeda murdered 3000 on 9/11 and they and others like them are still at it.
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October 22, 2014 at 4:04 pm -
Scared?
Occasionally in the Channel tunnel, but given the many opportunities for nastiness on a major scale here, and the very few that happen, either we’re well protected or the risk is small, or both.
I remember the regular bomb threats in the early ’70s. It’s one thing to stand outside in the rain; entirely another to carry out a search of a large& potentially dangerous industrial site for ‘something’. Along with the 3 day week, decimalisation of coinage, strikes, & having to queue for petrol, just one more thing in a dodgy decade. At least in RSA in the mid ’80s we had pictures of likely devices, usually eastern bloc mines. No, never found any; if the site perimeter was breached it was always far more likely to be stuff illicitly going out, rather than nasties coming in. -
October 22, 2014 at 5:37 pm -
I recall walking through a tube station concourse which was completely empty, platform empty ,in the seventies. Train drew in I hopped on , got to Liverpool St and home. My husband was so relieved. A suitcase bomb was on the concourse I walked though and did not go off!!! Later on we were in a shop where fire bombs went off in the basement and we were all herded out of the building. Another time Liverpool Station signal box went on strike at 6pm and jammed up everything around. I got off the train I was on and walked to a telephone box, rung home and my husband gave me an alternative way home which worked very well. Did not stop us from going to London until 7/7. By then I had enough. Only been as far as docklands/ Greenwich since then or driven through. At the moment there is a hoo ha in Canada of all places! These things can cause mayhem but so can signalmen and home grown rioters. I was in London too the day they mortared at no 10. I was down the nearest tube and homeward bound after I saw it on the TV in a shop….photo. Too old for all that now!
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October 22, 2014 at 5:46 pm -
A number of people have commented that there is no, or very little threat to the inhabitants of the UK by Moslems. Perhaps I live on a different planet to them. We do know that HUNDREDS of OUR fun loving Moslems are fighting in the Middle East. Some have allegedly been killed on operations there. I shed no tears for them. Among those who return to this country some will be fully radicalised, make no mistake about it. The fact that their ethnic homelands have been reduced to waste will not prevent outrages being carried out here. By letting them back we are importing time bombs into our culture, and it is one they detest. It was a huge mistake to permit such vast numbers from the third world to live here and be given British Passports. There was no prospect of them being assimilated into our community in the time available. I see no prospects for that ever to happen now.
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October 22, 2014 at 6:42 pm -
I thought it was the younger generation that tended to be the fanatics, as opposed to the older generation greeted with “no blacks” signs.
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October 24, 2014 at 1:40 pm -
A few hundred out of 1.6 million, with the vast majority just as interested in keeping their heads down and living a quiet life as the rest of us. There are probably far more Muslims directly working against the radicalised than there are of the latter.
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October 22, 2014 at 5:53 pm -
I always thought that the government supplied the wrong response, which was to offer Northern Ireland to the Republic for their share of the National Debt and the promise that any Unionist who wanted one could have an automatic rifle and as many rounds of ammunition as they wished, plus a free issue of grenades, mortars and other explosives courtesy of the British taxpayer, plus the offer that any terrorist incident on the rest of the UK would be met with a redoubling of supply and sanctuary for the perpetrators of attacks in the Republic – a bit like us supporting the French Resistance.
The RoI population simply isn’t big enough to prevent civil war, and a few months later they’d have begged us to take the North back! Then we could have said ‘No way’ …
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October 22, 2014 at 10:22 pm -
Am I scared? No, not particularly. If I end up caught in a terrorist outrage, so be it. The chances are very slight, all things considered.
One thing that does occur is that modern communications do give the Security Services a bit more of a chance than in the 1970s, when the height of communication surveillance was either a phone tap (if they could find out which phone to tap) or mail interception. Now they can at least monitor all the interweb traffic and mobile phone signals, and look for the needles in the haystack. Does this bother me? Not in the slightest. I have no intention of placing an order for Semtex, nor do I know what the dodgy websites with bomb-making instructions are called. Anybody sitting in GCHQ reading my emails will be falling asleep with boredom in no time flat.
Yes, there is a threat from misguided ‘jihadists’ or whatever they call themselves. The best thing the ordinary person can do is follow common sense – report anything suspicious, allow the Police and Security Services to get on with their job, and otherwise keep calm and carry on.
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October 23, 2014 at 12:00 am -
‘…Either the combined macho might of Special Branch, the Secret Service and the mighty COBRA are doing a damned fine job in keeping us safe or the threat isn’t as dangerous as we’ve been told.’
Unfortunately, I think we are due an atrocity, one which slips unseen past the vigilance of the above named, and others. It is virtually impossible to forsee all the actual threats – there seem to be so many disaffected groups of people in the world and indeed, closer to home, and be it because of religious beliefs or some other grievance; it seems to me that there are way too many ‘unhappy campers’, some more technologically aware and determined than others who will have the determination to see their mission through. A depressing thought but a very interesting article.
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October 23, 2014 at 8:39 am -
“Are you scared?”
No, but I am mindful of the fact, as said about the aforementioned Begorrah Boys, ‘we have to be lucky all the time, they just have to be lucky once’.
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October 25, 2014 at 9:39 pm -
Agreed…
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October 23, 2014 at 11:52 am -
Did a lot of work in Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland during the Troubles. Wasn’t exactly discreet about being English either … Red Transit van with English plates. Went across on the ferry to either Belfast or Larne at least once a week and then stayed at the minimum 2 days. Was in places like Derry and the borders … also known as ‘Bandit Country’. Went through numerous checkpoints ands always talked to our lads stationed over there.
We always had what we called an ‘expenses night’ … which was going out to the local pubs and getting hammered. Never did it cross our mind to find what loyalties the clientele of each pub was … we just went. I have to say that those years of working there were amongst the best of my life.
So am I scared of this bogeyman we see portrayed virtually every day in the media? …. not a chance!
To be a terrorist nowadays all you need is a mobile phone … our government will do the rest for you. If a terrorist wanted to do real damage, they don’t even need explosives or weapons. Think what the SOE and such as Churchill’s Angels did in occupied Europe … it wasn’t all Hollywood type plots. Derailing trains, arson etc etc were commonplace but all done under the dangers of curfew policed by such as the SS and Gestapo. None of that exists here in UK …. you can go virtually anywhere you want.
The media and government’s bogeyman terrorist must be the dumbest son of a bitch alive! Oh, and don’t get me started on the security circus and it’s clowns at our airports. Now that would be a target for a real terrorist!
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