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.
