Читать книгу In the Name of the Son - Richard O'Rawe - Страница 11

One

At 3.30 p.m. on 19 October 1989, in the homeland of Magna Carta and the cradle of parliamentary democracy, the underbelly of a Trojan horse opened and justice saw the light of day.

Confronted with indisputable evidence of police deception and perjury at the original trial in October–November 1975, appeal court judge Lord Lane had little option but to quash the convictions of the Guildford Four. These were individuals who had been found guilty of no-warning bombing attacks in Guildford, Surrey, and Woolwich, London, on 5 October and 7 November 1974, in which seven people died. It was a seminal and ugly moment in the history of British jurisprudence, but how did that Trojan horse ever get inside the hitherto impenetrable walls of the British judicial system in the first place? To answer that question, we must revert to the people who really did put the bombs in Guildford and Woolwich, and to Flat 7, Waldemar Avenue, Fulham.

By 1974, it was dawning on the seven-man IRA Army Council that the armed campaign to force the British government to withdraw from Northern Ireland was stuttering. In fact, the British, far from being thrown back into the Irish sea, had weathered the best that the IRA could throw at them. Not only were the British still on the field of battle, they were planning new strategies to wipe out the IRA. Against a growing realisation that the war could not be won if it was limited to the borders of Northern Ireland, the Army Council sanctioned a no-warning bombing campaign against British army targets in London, Birmingham and other major cities in England.

The prospect of civilians being blown up, as well as British soldiers, was raised by the prominent Irish journalist Mary Holland when she interviewed Army Council member Dáithí Ó Conaill a week after The Kings Arms pub in Woolwich was attacked. Holland asked Ó Conaill about civilians being killed in the bombing campaign, and he chillingly replied: ‘They [the IRA] warned civilians not to frequent places where military personnel are known to have established haunts.’1 The upshot of that answer was that, if civilians got blown to smithereens, then so be it; it was their own fault, not the IRA’s. Ó Conaill then went on to say: ‘As regards military targets, there are no warnings. There will be no warnings.’ He then promised that the bombing campaign in England would be intensified.

Bombing England was hardly a novel tactic: in the middle of the nineteenth century and during World War II, republican activists had waged bombing campaigns in London and other British cities, but to little or no effect. On 8 March 1973, the very court in which the sentences against the Guildford Four had been delivered and eventually quashed – the Old Bailey – had been car-bombed by the IRA, and one innocent person, Frederick Milton, was killed. Undeterred by the lack of success, the Army Council unleashed an IRA Active Service Unit (ASU) in August 1974 in Fulham.

The officer commanding the ASU was a County Kerry man, Brendan Dowd, and the engineering officer was Joe O’Connell from County Clare. Another member of the IRA unit was Liam Quinn from San Francisco. At 5.30 p.m. on 21 September 1974, Dowd hired a Ford Escort car from Swan National car hire and signed a contract under the false name ‘Martin Moffitt’. That night, Dowd, O’Connell and an unidentified third man reconnoitred various pubs in Guildford for possible targets. Dowd and the third man did a second reconnoitre a week later, which confirmed in Dowd’s mind that the two pubs to be bombed should be The Horse and Groom and The Seven Stars.

At 2.30 p.m. on 4 October, Dowd again used the false name ‘Martin Moffitt’ to hire a white Hillman Avenger from Swan National. The next morning, he and O’Connell made the two six-pound bombs in the Fulham flat. That evening Dowd drove the white Avenger containing O’Connell, the third man and two young IRA women to Guildford, where Dowd parked on the top floor of a multistorey carpark. After priming the bombs in the car and placing them in each of the IRA women’s handbags, he then accompanied one of the females into The Horse and Groom, while O’Connell accompanied the other to The Seven Stars, along with the third man (who has never been charged with the bombings).

In The Horse and Groom, Dowd and his female compatriot pretended to be a courting couple, kissing and holding hands. The woman slipped the handbag containing the primed bomb under her seat. Meanwhile, O’Connell, the second female and the third man had found seats in the corner of the bar of The Seven Stars. The female left her handbag containing the bomb on the floor, and the third man gently pushed it under a bench with his feet. By 8.15 p.m., the five members of the bombing team were back in London and having a drink in The Durell Arms on Fulham Road.

The first bomb exploded in The Horse and Groom at 8.50 p.m. No warning was given. A reporter who was at the scene within a minute wrote: ‘People were running, shouting and screaming. Many of them were young girls and many were clutching bleeding heads. There was blood everywhere. The entire front of The Horse and Groom was blown out – there was rubble everywhere, glass, bricks, timber. People were scrabbling amongst the debris, trying to pull people out of the mess. It was panic and chaos.’2 Five people died in The Horse and Groom and some 200 were injured, many seriously. On hearing of the bomb attack on The Horse and Groom, Owen O’Brien, the manager of The Seven Stars, had the sharpness of mind to evacuate 200 customers from the pub, and when the bomb exploded, no one was killed.

On 10 October 1974, Harry Duggan from County Clare, Eddie Butler from County Limerick and Hugh Doherty from Donegal joined the ASU. In the month that followed the Guildford bombings, Dowd and his cell were unrelenting, carrying out four more bomb attacks, none of which had fatal consequences. Then, on 7 November 1974, in Sedding Street, close to London’s King’s Cross station, Joe O’Connell got into the passenger seat of a stolen white Corsair, with Dowd in the driving seat. Duggan and Butler sat in the back of the car. The men drove to the side of The Kings Arms pub in Woolwich, in south-east London, and, after making sure that it was packed with people, some of whom they presumed were British soldiers, Joe O’Connell threw a seven-pound gelignite bomb through the window, killing two people and injuring twenty-six others. A local man, Michael Hulse, described the scene as ‘like a battlefield. I was watching television when it went off. The windows shook and rattled. It was like a 25-pounder cannon going off. I went outside and there were about a dozen bodies lying on the road.’3

The Assistant Chief Constable of Surrey, Christopher Rowe, had been put in charge of the Guildford bombings inquiry, but neither he nor those around him had a clue as to who had carried out the attacks, although they suspected it was the work of the IRA. As Gerry Conlon put it, ‘They were killing people in huge numbers. The IRA caused absolute terror. And they [the British police] couldn’t find them.’4 Nevertheless, ‘they’ soon found him.

On 28 November 1974, 21-year-old Paul ‘Benny’ Hill was arrested by police in Southampton, and the next day he signed statements confessing to the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. During police interrogations, Hill named Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Armstrong’s 17-year-old English girlfriend, Carole Richardson, as his fellow bombers. Hill also told police that he and Gerry Conlon had stayed with Gerry’s aunt, Annie Maguire, while they were in London. This, and a false confession from Gerry Conlon that was exacted by police under duress, were enough to have Mrs Maguire and six other members of her family arrested. Mrs Maguire’s protestations of innocence accounted for nothing when police alleged they had found traces of the explosive, nitroglycerine, on her hands and on the person of the six other members of her extended family. Included in what became known as the ‘Maguire Seven’ was Giuseppe Conlon, Gerry’s father, who hadn’t even been in England when the bombings occurred, and who had travelled over to England from Belfast only on 1 December to help co-ordinate his son’s legal defence. Prophetically, on the evening of 5 December, Giuseppe Conlon was in his police cell when Detective Chief Superintendent Wally Simmons of the Surrey bomb squad shouted in to him: ‘You want to know about your son? Well, he’s going to get thirty years. We’ll see to it that you die in gaol. I’ll see you later.’5

By 7 December, the Guildford Four had all confessed to the bombings and were subsequently charged with multiple murders. Gerry Conlon described his time in police custody:

In my cell I could suddenly see myself and what I was doing, maybe for the first time. I wanted to please the police just so I wouldn’t be beaten any more, screamed at, abused with dirty names. I actually wanted to please these bastards. I was in a terrible state of confusion and fear. I was crying. I was breaking down and falling apart. And all I wanted to do was to please these policemen – to please them and get away from them.6

For the police, it was seemingly a job well done. For the real bombers, it was business as usual, and for the next year their campaign of violence continued unabated as they shot people dead and bombed targets all over London, almost at will. In the period up to the IRA ceasefire, which commenced on 9 February 1975, police records show twenty-nine incidents that were directly attributable to that particular IRA cell.

When the cell continued its campaign in August 1975, after a collapse of the IRA ceasefire, its members were no less industrious, and between November and December they carried out six bomb and bullet attacks, including the doorstep assassination of Ross McWhirter, the co-founder, along with his brother Norris, of The Guinness Book of Records. Ross had put up a reward of £50,000 for the convictions of those involved in the IRA onslaught and that, in the IRA’s view, made him a target. It was not until the Balcombe Street siege in December 1975 – almost a year after the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven had been charged – that most of the IRA cell were finally arrested.

During questioning, Eddie Butler and Joe O’Connell told police that they had bombed Woolwich. Moreover, they said they did not know any of the Guildford Four. Despite this confession, the police failed to inform the Guildford Four’s defence counsel about the IRA men’s admissions, but they did tell the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Curiously, the DPP’s office never acted on the senior policemen’s report; they buried it. Accordingly, no further action or inquiries were initiated, no one went back to Butler or O’Connell to challenge their accounts, and neither man, nor any member of that IRA cell, was charged with the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. No one in the DPP thought it prudent, or desirable, to question whether or not the Guildford Four or the Maguire Seven might be innocent. Besides the IRA, it took a formidable effort by the police and the judiciary to put and keep the Guildford Four in prison.

On 16 September 1975, Mr Justice John Francis Donaldson, Master of the Rolls, opened the trial of the Guildford Four. Donaldson had been president of the National Industrial Relations Court and had antagonised trade unionists so much that they tried to impeach him ‘for political bias’.7 Michael Foot, the former Labour Party leader, accused him of having a ‘trigger-happy judicial finger’.8 His trigger-happy judicial finger pointed the jury in only one direction. In the matter of Paddy Armstrong’s evidence, where Armstrong had said he had made a confession only because he was high on drugs, Justice Donaldson told the jury: ‘He was high on drugs when he was arrested and when the effects of them wore off thereafter, he said, he was induced to sign them because he was very frightened of the Surrey police.’ Justice Donaldson thereafter told the jury that, ‘I would not have made a false confession, but Armstrong may be different from me.’ One could be forgiven for asking the obvious questions: how would his honour know if he would have made a statement or not? Had he ever been high on drugs?

Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson pleaded not guilty, but Paul Hill, when asked to plead, said: ‘I refuse to take part in this. I refuse to defend myself. Your justice stinks.’ Hill may have been correct in his assessment, but to a London jury in 1975, a plea of non-recognition of the court – which was essentially what Hill had first entered – was akin to admitting to membership of the IRA, and wasn’t it the IRA that had carried out these atrocities? After conferring with his client, Hill’s counsel, Arthur Mildon QC, entered a plea of not guilty on Hill’s behalf.

Sir Michael Havers, the Conservative Shadow Attorney General, led the prosecution team. The only evidence against the four was their jumbled confessions, but that was enough. During his summing up of the evidence against Paul Hill, which was applicable to all the defendants, Justice Donaldson said: ‘Finally, as with all these confessions, you may wonder how it is possible to produce quite so detailed a confession if it is not true. You will wonder whether there is any other reason, because certainly none has been suggested, for making such a suggestion, other than it being true. There it is.’

There it was indeed.

Oblivious of the fate of Gerry Conlon and his three co-defendants, the IRA cell launched ‘phase two’ of its bombing campaign on 27 August 1975, when cell members Harry Duggan and Hugh Doherty placed a ten-pound bomb under a seat in The Caterham Arms, in Caterham, Surrey. Twenty-three civilians and ten soldiers were injured in the no-warning blast, with eight victims being critically injured. More attacks followed. It was as if nothing had changed. Nothing had for the real bombers.

Shortly after two o’clock on 22 October, the jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts on all counts against the four accused. Bemoaning the fact that he could not put the black cap on his learned head, Justice Donaldson, in his sentencing, expressed regret that the four individuals had not been charged with treason, which carried a mandatory death sentence. Nevertheless, he took some comfort in sentencing the four to life imprisonment. Justice Donaldson recommended that Paul Hill never be released from prison, and Gerry Conlon should serve a minimum of thirty years.

But Justice Donaldson was not finished with this matter. On 27 January 1976, he presided at the Maguire Seven trial. His final words to the jury on that occasion could not have been clearer: ‘But if, members of the jury, having considered all these matters, you are sure, then it is your duty, your duty in accordance with the oath that you have taken, to bring in a verdict of guilty.’ When the guilty verdicts were returned, Justice Donaldson gave Annie Maguire, who was surely the IRA’s most unlikely bomb-maker, the maximum sentence of fourteen years’ imprisonment. Her husband Paddy received the same sentence. Giuseppe Conlon was sentenced to twelve years. Seán Smyth and Pat O’Neill were sentenced to eleven years each. Sixteen-year-old Vincent Maguire was given five years, and his brother Patrick, a fourteen-year old, four years. Of Annie Maguire, her son Vincent later told Grant McKee and Ros Franey, authors of the book Time Bomb, that ‘My mother couldn’t even put a plug together. She was nearly blind. She had to wear real strong glasses to see what she was doing. I don’t even think she could put a screw in a plug, let alone make bombs.’9

Absurdity was heaped on top of absurdity when, on 24 January 1977, the trial of Joe O’Connell’s IRA ASU opened. Judge Sir Joseph Donaldson Cantley OBE QC presided. In accordance with IRA protocols, none of the defendants entered a plea. However, O’Connell went further. ‘I refuse to plead,’ he said, ‘because the indictment does not include two charges concerning the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings. I took part in both, for which innocent people have been convicted.’ Here was a claim from the real bombers that miscarriages of justice had occurred in the trials of the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven.

The Crown prosecutor, John Mathew QC, moved quickly to dismiss O’Connell’s explosive declaration by telling the jury: ‘Guildford and Woolwich are not a matter for you.’ Joe O’Connell and the IRA men had never been schooled in the niceties of judicial decorum and they begged to differ. So much so that they instructed their defence counsel not to prove that they were innocent of the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings, but to prove that they were guilty. Conversely, this approach placed an onus on the Crown prosecutor to prove that the IRA cell did not carry out the pub bombings. It was a bizarre state of affairs.

One of the most important witnesses at the Balcombe Street trial was independent forensic scientist Douglas Higgs, who had also given evidence at the Guildford Four trial in September 1975. It emerged during the Balcombe Street trial that Higgs had prepared a statement for the Guildford Four court on 24 January 1975, which provided an analysis of the bomb-throwing attacks. In his statement, Higgs had said that five attacks, carried out between 22 October 1974 and 22 December 1974, were so similar in nature that they had obviously been perpetrated by the same individuals. Among the attacks to which Higgs referred in his statement was the Woolwich pub bombing. But the alleged Woolwich pub bombers, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, had all been arrested by 3 December 1974. The logic of this was if, as Higgs confirmed, the same individuals had carried out all the bombings and some of those bombings had occurred after the arrests of the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven, then they could not possibly have bombed the Woolwich pub. An upshot of this is that the statements of admission made by the Guildford Four, in which they said they had bombed the Woolwich pub and Guildford, would have to have been deemed worthless – since they would be patently untrue – and the judge would have had to acquit them of all charges. Unfortunately for the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, the Crown did not forward Higgs’s 24 January 1975 statement to the Guildford defence, but they did send them a further statement that Higgs had composed on 17 June 1975. This was similar to his previous statement, with the exception that any reference to the Woolwich bombing had been omitted.

After persistent questioning, Higgs said that it was the police who had asked him to leave out the reference to Woolwich in his second statement. Judge Cantley wondered aloud who, in particular, had asked him. The answer to that question emerged in court when, under cross-examination, Chief Superintendent Jim Nevill divulged that it had been the Director of Public Prosecutions, the late Sir Norman Skelhorn, who had sent a directive down the line to Douglas Higgs to remove the Woolwich reference from his 17 June statement.

Sir Norman Skelhorn was a man who neither shirked his responsibilities nor hid his prejudices. In October 1973, at the Harvard Law School Forum, he told the audience he accepted that torture had taken place in Northern Ireland, but, ‘When dealing with “Irish terrorists”, any methods are justified.’10 This end-justifies-the-means approach from Sir Norman explains why he had no qualms about sending instructions to Douglas Higgs to doctor his statement. Only one conclusion emerges from this revelation: Sir Norman Skelhorn attempted to pervert the course of justice in order to make sure that the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven should serve out their full sentences. While the prominent High Court Judge and Master of the Rolls Lord Denning did not accuse Sir Norman of perverting the course of justice, he nevertheless identified him as the single most culpable person in the false imprisonment of those convicted of the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. In 1990, a reporter for The Spectator asked Lord Denning to comment on the evidence that the Guildford Four were innocent and the judge replied: ‘That troubles me a lot, because I knew Sir Norman Skelhorn, the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, a first-rate man. He’s dead now. He’s unable to explain what happened, and it was his responsibility.’11

Detective Chief Superintendent Hucklesby of the Metropolitan Police was asked to retake the witness stand and was forced to concede that he had recommended to Sir Norman Skelhorn that Eddie Butler and Joe O’Connell should be tried for the Woolwich pub bombing. The police, to all intents and purposes, had a strong case in the form of damning forensic evidence and, by this stage, five admissions of guilt from the IRA cell, which, crucially, they were prepared to stand over in court: it does not get any better for prosecutors. Predictably, Sir Norman Skelhorn did not act on Hucklesby’s recommendation, and thus once more left himself open to the charge that he was intent on perverting the course of justice and keeping innocent people in prison.

Questions remain to be answered: did Sir Norman Skelhorn act alone, or was he merely the cutting edge of an establishment conspiracy? Did he receive instructions from above – from the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, or even from Prime Minister James Callaghan? Gerry Conlon’s view on this matter was unambiguous: ‘And in our case, and that of the Birmingham Six, we are now, at this moment, actively pursuing the release of confidential documents that have been held from 1974 under the Official Secrets Act that are not to be released for seventy-five years. Now that only proves our innocence from day one, and it proves state collusion between the government, the judiciary, the police and the press.’12

As anticipated, the four members of the IRA cell were all sentenced to life imprisonment, but they had prevailed in the trial of contradictions: they had demonstrated that it was they, and not the Guildford Four or the Maguire Seven, who had carried out the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings.

Category ‘A’ prisoner 462779, Gerry Conlon, now locked up in a cell on the third floor of ‘A wing’ in Wakefield Prison, Yorkshire, was closely following events in court. Writing to his mother, Sarah, on 31 January 1977, Conlon said:

It’s the first time I’ve shed a tear in prison. Mum, you’ll never know how happy I was to read it [the IRA cell’s assertion that they, and not the Guildford Four, had carried out the Guildford and Woolwich bombings] and see for the first time since I was arrested that the truth is coming out. Now it’s been publicly admitted in a court of law that we were not responsible for the charges on which we were convicted. I’m feeling confident about the outcome. Everyone must know now that I should be out, as the police fitted up the wrong people and it’s now out in the open, Mum.13

Gerry’s optimism was premature and was soon to be dashed. On 10 October that year, the Guildford Four appeal opened at the Old Bailey. Lord Roskill presided, accompanied by Mr Justice Boreham and Lord Justice Lawton. Once again, the indefatigable Sir Michael Havers led for the Crown.

The Guildford Four’s appeal was based on affidavits taken by Conlon’s and Hill’s lawyer, Alastair Logan, from members of the IRA ASU while they were in prison, and from the evidence garnered at their trial. It included 135 discrepancies between the IRA men’s accounts of the bombings and those of the Guildford Four. Such was the strength and quality of detail in their evidence that Havers, after grilling Eddie Butler, said he accepted Butler had been present at the bombing. Then he found Harry Duggan’s evidence ‘convincing’. Of Joe O’Connell’s testimony that he had been at both the Guildford and Woolwich bombings, Havers said there was ‘such a ring of truth’ about it, the Crown accepted that ‘a great deal of what he says is true’. On hearing these astounding admissions, Gerry Conlon and the other three defendants must surely have thought that their ordeal was over and that they would soon be walking out of the front door of the Old Bailey. How elated they must have been when they heard even Lord Roskill fall in behind Havers: ‘We are content to assume that O’Connell’s story of his presence [at Guildford] and preparation may indeed be true and that Dowd may also have taken part.’ How sweet those words must have been to the ears of the Guildford Four, but they would have been wise to remember Banquo’s words in Macbeth, ‘What, can the devil speak true?’14

Havers, rather astutely, had anticipated it would be almost impossible to counter the deluge of intimate detail that the real culprits would bring to the court and instead offered a new proposition: far from having arrested and sentenced the people who had carried out the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings – which had been the Crown’s position right up until the appeal – there were now another four culprits: the IRA ASU. It must have been a mouth-dropping moment for Gerry Conlon and his co-accused. Since the Guildford Four were innocent of all the charges, Havers could not offer the court a single piece of evidence to link them with the IRA ASU, despite the fact that when police searched the IRA men’s safe houses, they had found documents, letters and eighteen sets of fingerprints, none of which matched any of the Guildford Four’s.

In a case noted for its anomalies, observers were left wondering why, having accepted that the Balcombe Street IRA unit had bombed Guildford and Woolwich, no direction was given to police from the bench that they should be charged with the murders of the five people killed in the pub bombings. Despite the absence of evidence, the appeal court judges accepted Havers’s proposition that the Guildford Four had been in league with the Balcombe Street IRA team and they upheld their convictions.

In many ways, the British judiciary was a prisoner of its own inflated ego. In the Guildford Four appeal, it appears that it mattered little what defence counsel said or proved, because Lord Roskill and his fellow judges were never persuadable. Rather, their judgement was always infected by self-interest and fear, and by that which they held most dear – the British judicial system. Given the manifold implications of allowing this appeal to succeed, their view was that they had no option but to send these four innocent people back to prison. Lord Denning succinctly summed up his fellow judges’ mindset when it was put to him that, had the Guildford Four been hanged, they (the judiciary) would have hanged the wrong people: ‘They’d probably have hanged the right men. Not proven against them, that’s all.’15 Lamenting the days when judges had the power to sentence three men to hanging before lunch and two afterwards, Denning went on to say: ‘The Guildford Four should have been sentenced by twelve good men of Hampshire to be hanged. Then we should have forgotten all about them.’16 Unfortunately for His Lordship, Gerry Conlon and his co-accused were not forgotten about, even if they had to spend another twelve years in prison before they obtained their freedom.

During those twelve years, Conlon crossed paths with some of Britain’s most notorious psychopaths. At the turn of the New Year 1979, Sarah Conlon visited her husband Giuseppe in the hospital wing of Wormwood Scrubs prison in London. Accompanying the matriarch was her daughter Ann and her husband Joe McKernan, along with their one-year-old daughter, Sarah. Giuseppe, although gravely ill, was in reasonable spirits. Gerry was brought into the hospital wing, handcuffed to a prison officer, while another prison officer kept hold of a guard dog. The visit began and the usual pleasantries were exchanged. Suddenly Giuseppe’s gaze shifted to something or someone beyond the visiting party. Ann McKernan recalled:

I don’t know where my daddy got the strength from, but he pushed aside the bedclothes and got out of bed. We were telling him to get back into bed, but he wasn’t listening. Then he shuffled across the room to this man who was mopping the floor and grabbed him by his shirt. My daddy was right into the man’s face, and he said to him, ‘If I ever get you putting your eyes on my grandchildren again, I’ll personally kill you.’ We didn’t know who the man was or what was happening. Then our Gerry shouted, ‘It’s that bastard, Ian Brady!’ I didn’t know who Ian Brady was. It wasn’t until later that I found out that he was the Moors Murderer [Brady and his lover, Myra Hindley, murdered five children between 1963 and 1965 and buried their bodies on Saddleworth Moor]. Anyway, our Gerry jumped up and said, ‘Get the fuck out of here, you fucking bastard!’ Well, Brady dropped his mop and ran out of the wing, and we helped my daddy back to his bed. His breathing was shallow; the exertion had almost killed him. When he recovered his breathing, he sent for the doctor and told him, ‘See in future, when I’m getting visits, keep that animal away from my family.’ The doctor settled my daddy down.17

Despite being terminally ill with emphysema and lung cancer, Giuseppe Conlon’s fighting spirit never wavered, nor did his love for his family. This was never more apparent than when, several weeks later, Gerry was taken out of his cell in Wormwood Scrubs and brought to Hammersmith Hospital. He was led, handcuffed, into a room that was crowded with priests, Home Office officials, prison wardens, police officers and doctors. Gerry was taken to the side of his father’s bed. On seeing him, Giuseppe pulled away his oxygen mask and told Gerry: ‘I’m going to die.’

‘No, you’re not. You’re not going to die.’

‘Yes I am. Don’t be worrying. I want you to promise me something.’

‘Yes, okay.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Yes, I promise you.’

‘When I die, I don’t want you attacking no screws. I want you to start clearing your name. My death’s going to clear your name and when you get your name cleared, you clear mine.’18

Nine more years would pass before Gerry’s name would be cleared, while Giuseppe’s name would not be fully cleared until Tony Blair, as British prime minister, apologised to the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven in February 2005.

It was towards the end of those nine years that Gerry Conlon first met Paddy Joe Hill, one of six men falsely accused of the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974, in which twenty-one people died. Conlon had an instant special affection for Paddy Hill, and Hill was similarly struck with Conlon:

When me and Gerry were together, it was fucking mayhem. When we [the Birmingham Six] were brought to Long Lartin for our appeal, I went over to Gerry’s wing, and I said to the screws, ‘Is Conlon on the wing?’ and one of them says, ‘Aye, he’s up the stairs’ and I shouts up, ‘Conlon, get your fucking arse down here, and bring your snout, and your money, and your fucking drugs.’19

In Proved Innocent, Conlon confirms that a dynamic presence had arrived on the prison wing that night:

I was up in my cell when I thought I heard my name. It was yelled out amid an unholy commotion that had suddenly swept into the wing, a bellowing Irish voice that I’d never heard before.

‘Conlon, you gobshite! Get your arse down here.’

I thought I must have misheard, so I didn’t move. The third time I couldn’t mistake my own name being roared out.

‘CONLON! Get fucking down here, now.’

I saw this small, solid, and incredibly animated figure, leaning against the railing at the bottom of the stairs, giving out to all these people around him. His dentures had been damaged when he was beaten at Winson Green prison, so you hardly ever see the man with teeth. His mouth is like one of the puppets on Rainbow [a children’s TV programme], the one with the zipper over his lips. But I’d like to see someone brave enough to try to zipper Paddy’s mouth.

He looked up, recognized me at once and stuck his hand through the railing.

‘What took you so long, you bollocks? Paddy Joe Hill, good to meet you, son.’20

With the Birmingham Six appeal imminent, and with an outside chance of being released, Hill pledged to Conlon: ‘Well, if I get out at this appeal, you’re coming out too. Because I’ll be going everywhere, doing whatever I can for you. OK?’21

On 28 January 1988, the appeal of the Birmingham Six was turned down, and Hill was returned to prison to serve out his life sentence. In prison, character is the cement that holds a person together, and Paddy Hill had character to give away. If he was entertaining pangs of despair, Hill soon fought them off, convincing himself that he could see a ‘light shining at the end of the tunnel more brightly than ever before’.22 He was right inasmuch as there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but it would shine, first, on the Guildford Four, not on the Birmingham Six.

‘It was on the 16 October 1989. I’ll never forget it,’ Paddy Hill said in Belfast in 2015. ‘After Long Lartin, Gerry and me was moved to Gartree, and we’d been knocking about together for nearly two years. Now, we were sitting in the workshop and a screw says to Gerry that he has to go back to his cell immediately. I went with him, and when we got to the wing, the Principal Officer told him, “There’s a van waiting to take you to London immediately.”’23After helping Conlon to pack up his meagre belongings, Hill walked him over to the prison reception. ‘He was nearly crying,’ Hill recalled, ‘but I said to him, “Never fucking mind that. Just do what you have to do.” And fair play to him, when he got out, he did the business.’

While Gerry Conlon no doubt pondered his fate in the back of a prison van as it made its way to London’s Brixton Prison, his family in Belfast was unaware that anything was afoot. The next day, however, a phone call from Gerry’s solicitor in London, Gareth Peirce, would change everything.

Ann and Joe McKernan had been buying wallpaper in Belfast city centre and on their way home they stopped at a shop in Church Lane which sold religious items. For Ann it was a weekly chore: ‘My mother had been buying her candles out of the holy shop every Tuesday for fifteen years, ’cause Tuesday was St Martha’s day, and St Martha’s was the patron saint of servants and cooks, and for my mammy coming out of work, we had to have her candles there.’24

It was 11.05 a.m. and the McKernans had just got into their family home at 52 Albert Street in the Lower Falls area when the phone rang. Joe answered it. He listened carefully, put down the phone and turned to Ann: ‘That was Gareth Peirce. She says Gerry’s getting out on Thursday.’ At Ann’s insistence, Joe rang Gareth back and she reiterated her message, saying to Joe, ‘Go tell Mrs Conlon.’

The McKernans got a taxi up to the Royal Victoria Hospital, where Sarah Conlon had worked as a catering assistant for sixteen years. ‘I cried all the way there,’ Ann said. ‘When I told her, she collapsed against the wall. She couldn’t believe it. It was such a shock.’ If Sarah Conlon’s faith in the power of prayer had been challenged during those lonely, desolate years, she never showed it and now it seemed as if her prayers had been answered. But sometimes good news can be too good and, like a geyser, a degree of scepticism now burst forth, with Sarah casting doubt on the veracity of what Ann and Joe were telling her. Eventually Ann persuaded her mother that Gerry was about to be released, and Sarah left work to the cheers and applause of her workmates.

Money was tight and times were hard. Flying to London was an expensive business for a working-class Belfast family. Sarah was troubled, Ann remembers. ‘She kept repeating, “How am I going to get over to London for our Gerry’s appeal?”’ Trying to come to terms with one miracle – the imminent release of her son – was hard enough, even for someone as immersed in the Catholic faith as Sarah Conlon, but what happened next must surely have convinced her that prayer had no master. The house-phone rang. Again Joe answered it. This time, instead of Gareth Peirce, it was a reporter from the British television news station ITN, who offered to fly the Conlon family over to London in a private jet for the appeal, in the expectation that the station’s helpfulness to the family would see them rewarded with that exclusive first interview with Gerry Conlon upon his release. The offer was gratefully accepted.

That night, after flying to London, with almost empty purses, the Conlon family – Sarah, Gerry’s two younger sisters, Bridie and Ann, and two relatives – put their heads down in a one-bedroom flat in Westbourne Terrace Road, Maida Vale. The flat was occupied by Sarah’s brother, Hughie Maguire, and his wife, Kate. The Conlons slept on ‘the floors, the settee and chairs’.

The next day, Sarah, Bridie and Ann visited Gerry in Brixton Prison. He was as baffled as they were about the speed of events, but he had enough of a grasp of the situation to put in an order for new jeans and a shirt – in case he had to stand in front of the television cameras. His mother protested, saying that she did not have the money to buy him new clothes. But, as mothers often do, she found it. Sarah’s brother, Hughie, on hearing of Gerry’s request, put his hand into his pocket and handed his sister enough money to buy the jeans and shirt.

On 19 October 1989, two black London taxis brought the extended Conlon family to the Old Bailey. At a side entrance, they were met by a court official who led them up a set of back stairs and into the upper gallery of Court Number Two, the court where the original verdicts had been pronounced fifteen years earlier. At the same time as Sarah and her family were entering the court, the Guildford Four walked up the stairs from the cells below and stood in the dock. Before long, they heard evidence that at their original trial in 1975, the police had deleted, and added to, parts of Paddy Armstrong’s original interview notes. This could be viewed only as an attempt by police to enhance their case against him. The case was then declared unsafe and the verdicts quashed.

Finally, having emerged from the underbelly of the Trojan horse, Gerry Conlon, in a cyclone of righteous fury, stormed out of the Old Bailey and told the world’s press: ‘I’ve been in prison for fifteen years for something I didn’t do. For something I didn’t know anything about. A totally innocent man. I watched my father die in prison for something he didn’t do. He is innocent. The Maguires are innocent. Let’s hope the Birmingham Six are freed.’

It is not hard to imagine old men in long wigs and ermine groaning and gnashing their teeth as they watched Conlon on television. Never one to hold his tongue, Lord Denning said publicly what many of his fellow law lords would, no doubt, have been saying in private: ‘British justice is in ruins.’

Later, in an interview with ITN, Conlon said of his Old Bailey pronouncement: ‘That wasn’t me speaking. That was my dad. That was my dad.’

Gerry’s mother was not a lady who courted the limelight. While Gerry and his sisters Ann and Bridie were driven in a limousine to the Holiday Inn, near Swiss Cottage (where ITN had organised a champagne reception), Sarah and other family members took a taxi to the hotel. On the way across London, Gerry was full of verve. Ann McKernan recalled: ‘He couldn’t sit for a second. There was a sunroof in the limo, and he opened it and stuck his head out the top of the car, and he was waving the whole way to the hotel, and people were shouting at him as if they knew what had happened and who he was.’25

When Conlon was led into the reception room in the Holiday Inn, the first person he saw was his mother, whom he lifted off her feet, whirled around and kissed. For Sarah Conlon, it must have been a bittersweet moment; she had finally been reunited with her son, but her husband would never be coming home.

Also present was Diana St. James, Gerry’s pretty American girlfriend. Diana, with whom he had been corresponding while in prison, would travel back to Belfast with him.

The mood was light for the rest of the evening, but Gerry felt uneasy about the pervasive attention. Strangers were coming up to him and shaking his hand, asking him to relate his experiences of prison. Later that night, as he was going up in the lift to his room, he noticed that two burly men had walked into the elevator with him. When he proceeded down the corridor to his room, they followed him. He turned and asked them what they were doing and they told him they had been hired as bodyguards by ITN to ensure his safety. As the bodyguards stood on either side of his bedroom door, Conlon felt that they represented a life experience he wanted to put behind him: ‘To my mind the only difference between these two and a couple of screws were the clothes.’26

There was a party that night in Gerry’s penthouse suite, with the mini-bar being continually emptied and restocked. Then, at around five o’clock in the morning, Gerry took a panic attack. He went to his mother’s room and explained to her how miserable he was feeling. He wept. At this point, his Uncle Hughie brought him back to his flat in Westbourne Terrace Road.

At breakfast in the hotel the next morning, Ann McKernan asked Hughie what had happened to Gerry, and Hughie said: ‘I gave him my leather jacket and we went for a walk in the rain.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘And then Gerry said to me, “Isn’t this brilliant? I haven’t walked in the rain for fifteen years.”’

Hughie went on to tell Ann that Gerry later phoned his solicitor and friend Gareth Peirce to come and collect him. Gerry was discovering that there was a lot more to freedom than simply not being locked up: he had got out of jail, but jail had not got out of him.

On 31 December 1974, Gerry Conlon was flown from Belfast to England on a draughty RAF transport plane. Handcuffed to a hostile detective, he was bewildered at the enormity of the charges being levelled against him, and he was terrified. Perhaps his teeth were chattering; perhaps he was shivering. For sure, he had no idea of the hardships and tribulations that lay ahead. On 21 October 1989, he returned to Belfast with no hostile detective. He was not handcuffed, and he was not on board a chilly RAF transport plane. Instead, he was on a plush private jet with his sister Ann, Diana St James and friends, courtesy of ITN. During the flight, he helped himself to smoked salmon and champagne. Gerry Conlon probably thought he was free at last. He wasn’t.