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
