Birmingham Pub Bombings: 50 Years On, Witnesses Recall the Horror

Fifty years ago this month, two bombs detonated in Birmingham pubs, resulting in the deaths of 21 individuals and injuries to 220 others. This incident constituted one of the most severe atrocities during the Troubles, a period of conflict involving the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Loyalists concerning a unified and independent Ireland. While most of the violence occurred in Ireland and Northern Ireland, the IRA had initiated a campaign of attacks in England by the early 1970s. The Birmingham explosions devastated numerous lives and continue to impact many individuals even now. Broadcasters Michael Buerk and Nick Owen, who covered the events, and Maureen Mitchell, then 21 years old and present in one of the pubs, are three individuals who will forever remember the occurrences of that evening. They shared their experiences for a new BBC Sounds podcast titled “In Detail… The Pub Bombings,” from which these excerpts are drawn. During 1974, Nick Owen served as a reporter for BBC Radio Birmingham. On the day the bombings took place, he had been reporting on a different significant news event within the city. The week prior, IRA bomber James McDade had died while planting a bomb in Coventry. OWEN: “James McDade’s body was going to be flown back to Belfast and I remember hundreds and hundreds of police officers lining the route from Coventry all the way along the A45 to the airport. Tensions were so heightened at that time that anything to do with an IRA person could be a target for a further outrage, and I think the police just wanted to make sure that his body got from A to B without any trouble whatsoever. So his body was taken to Birmingham airport and I reported that at about 7pm – I think I did a report for Radio 4 as well as Radio Birmingham.” The arrangements did not proceed as intended. Delays occurred because baggage handlers in Belfast declined to handle the coffin. OWEN: “I rang the newsroom of Radio Birmingham and the news editor said to me ‘you’d better come back, we think two bombs have gone off in pubs in town and there may be casualties’. We were on a war footing. The IRA basically had brought their war to the mainland because they were so desperate to get the British out of Northern Ireland, get the army out and so on. There’d been this build up where everyone was nervous, anxious, feeling that sort of threat in the air. But no-one, even for a minute, envisaged something quite so cataclysmic as that.” At 20:11 BST, a warning call was placed to the Birmingham Post and Mail offices. Merely minutes subsequently, the initial bomb detonated at the Mulberry Bush pub, situated at the base of the prominent Rotunda building. Soon after, a second explosion occurred at the Tavern in the Town, a basement establishment on New Street. Maureen Mitchell was present with her fiancé, Ian, inside the Mulberry Bush when the explosion took place. MITCHELL: “I don’t remember the bang. It was just like a flash. And then it was just a feeling of floating through the air until you landed, and you knew what had happened straight away. You knew what it was. All you could hear was screaming. Ian and a security guy carried me out, and they lay me by the wall, the wall’s still there now by New Street Station. And I just kept saying ‘give me something for the pain’.” That evening, Michael Buerk was working at the BBC in London. BUERK: “Big stories have a momentum of their own. First of all, a phone on the news desk goes off and you suddenly see people running around, and then all the phones are going, and that was what happened that night. I think within five or six minutes of the first call reaching the BBC newsroom, we were in the big, green, Vauxhall saloon crew car that we had in those days. And my memory is touching a hundred miles an hour going up the motorway.” By this time, Nick Owen had returned to his newsroom in Birmingham. OWEN: “People were shocked because stories were coming in that there were casualties, and a lot of them. At that stage it was just mayhem. A feeling of chaos because no-one knew what we were dealing with. We didn’t realise the enormity immediately, but it soon became clear.” BUERK: “I grew up on the outskirts of Birmingham. I did holiday jobs in New Street when they were finishing off [constructing] the Rotunda. I drank in the pubs around there, as a late teenager. This was home ground.” We first arrived at the Mulberry Bush. It had been transformed into a vast, gaping cavity by the blast. Body bags were present, and individuals were still moving about. I distinctly recall a man in a double-breasted blazer covered in a significant amount of blood. He did not appear to be severely wounded, yet he was weeping outside the remnants of the establishment. MITCHELL: “Outside the Mulberry Bush Ian asked this guy next to us, ‘have you got a cigarette, mate?’ And this guy apparently said to him, ‘well, you can have one. But I don’t know where you’re going to put it’. And he realised he’s got a hole the size of an old half-crown in his cheek – he could put his tongue through his