Sunday, 3 November 2013

Old Bailey and Whitehall IRA bombings

Daily Mirror dated Friday March 9th 1973
Click to read
Click to read
Click to read
In the first IRA mainland bombings since 1940, four car bombs were planted in London on March 8th. Two were defused, one in a car outside a Post Office in Broadway and the other outside the BBC's armed forces radio studio in Dean Stanley Street. However, the other two exploded, one near the Old Bailey and the other at the Ministry of Agriculture off Whitehall. As a result of the explosions one person was killed and almost 200 people were injured.

At the time I worked near the Old Bailey at the top of Ludgate Hill, directly opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. I had a habit of popping out mid-afternoon to buy a Mars bar and was crossing the old Paternoster piazza when there was a very loud boom that I felt as much as heard. As the crow flies I was only about 300m from the blast. Luckily there were a lot of buildings in the way.

Click to read
Click to read
The people arrested at Heathrow included Marian and Dolours Price, Gerry Kelly, Hugh Feeney and Roisin McNearney. In November 1973 all except McNearney, who had turned Queen’s evidence, were convicted of the Old Bailey and Whitehall bombings. 

Click to read
Rail chaos, miners' strikes, dock strikes, go-slows, walk outs - this was the hay-day of the militant unions, but they had no way of knowing that Margaret Thatcher’s reign was only 6 years away (give or take 4 or 5 days).

Click to read
The London School of Economics had been a hot-bed of student unrest since 1966 and this was yet another in a series of protests. 

Click to read
On March 5th sixty-eight people had been killed when a Douglas DC-9, flying from Palma to London, collided in midair with a Convair 990 Coronado aircraft over Nantes in western France. The accident occurred during a French air traffic controller’s strike and stand-in military controllers were being used.

Click to read
The problem is whether to watch ‘The Virginian’ and then ‘Morcambe and Wise’ or ‘Hawaii Five-O’ and ‘On the Buses’? There’d be no hesitation in watching one of my favourite films though – Jean Luc Goddard’s ‘Alphaville’.

Click to read
Straight forward story – fan sends Paul McCartney seeds, he plants them, they come up as cannabis, police see them, he appears in court and is fined. I think there is a printing error though. McCartney is quoted as saying ‘there should be legislation on the use of cannabis’. Surely there was or he wouldn’t be in court.

Click to read
Fans got more than they bargained for when, in 2002, the iconic Wembley Stadium was demolished and a new stadium built on the site.

No comments:

Post a Comment