The Birmingham Pub Bombings: 1974, the Injustice, and the Long Aftermath

On the evening of 21 November 1974, two bombs exploded in Birmingham city centre. The first, at the Mulberry Bush pub in the Rotunda, detonated at 8.17pm. The second, at the Tavern in the Town on New Street, detonated three minutes later. Twenty-one people died. A hundred and eighty-two were injured. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in mainland Britain since the Second World War and it produced one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history.

The Night of the Bombings

The Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town were both busy pubs on a Thursday evening. The Mulberry Bush occupied the lower floors of the Rotunda, the circular tower that had become one of the defining landmarks of Birmingham’s 1960s redevelopment. The Tavern in the Town was a basement pub on New Street. Both were civilian targets with no specific military or political function. The victims were ordinary people – office workers finishing their week, young people on a night out, groups of friends having a drink.

The IRA, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, carried out the bombings. A third device, planted at the Hagley Road offices of the Inland Revenue, failed to detonate. The campaign of bombings on the British mainland in 1974 also included attacks in London, Guildford, and Woolwich. The Birmingham bombings were the largest in terms of casualties.

The Arrests and Convictions

Six Irish men living in Birmingham were arrested within days. Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power, and John Walker were charged with the bombings and convicted at Lancaster Crown Court in August 1975. They were sentenced to 21 life sentences each. The convictions rested substantially on forensic evidence – the Griess test for nitroglycerine – and on confessions that the six men said had been obtained through violence and duress. Both the forensic evidence and the confessions were subsequently shown to be unreliable.

The Long Road to Release

The Birmingham Six, as they became known, maintained their innocence throughout their imprisonment. Journalists, lawyers, and campaigners – including Chris Mullin MP, who published the book Error of Judgment in 1986 – gathered evidence that progressively undermined the original convictions. The case became a reference point for concerns about the reliability of forensic evidence, the conduct of West Midlands Police, and the willingness of the criminal justice system to acknowledge its own mistakes.

The six men were released on 14 March 1991, after the Court of Appeal quashed their convictions. Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power, and John Walker had between them served a total of 96 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. The real bombers were never charged. The West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, implicated in extracting false confessions, was disbanded in 1989 amid multiple allegations of misconduct.

Memory and the Present

The victims of the bombing waited twenty years for a memorial. The Memorial Garden in St Philip’s Cathedral grounds was opened in 1997. The families of the victims have campaigned consistently for a proper public inquiry into the bombings and the subsequent miscarriage of justice. Birmingham remembers both the victims and the injustice, in the knowledge that the two cannot be fully separated. The 21 people who died in the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town deserved better than being the occasion for the imprisonment of innocent men. The city has not forgotten either wrong.