On This Day PIRA

Going Home for Christmas George Arthur’s   wife was packing suitcases on the night of 17th December 1974. The couple were due to fly to Ghana where they were to spend three weeks visiting relatives over Christmas. As she was doing so news came through that her husband, a 34 year old telephonist, had been killed in a bomb attack on Bloomsbury telephone exchange on Tottenham Court Road. Other bombs exploded the same night at telephone exchanges in Chelsea and the West End. Mr Arthur worked night shifts. His inquest in April 1975 heard that staff had been evacuated when a duffle bag with a battery and wires was found. Seven minutes later it exploded. It was believed that Mr Arthur was on his way to the toilet at the time. Belfast Telegraph report on the London bombings (click to enlarge) Rodney Fenton   also had thoughts of getting home for Christmas when his life was suddenly cut short on 20th December 1973. The 22 year old bank clerk rented a room in...

John Proctor The 14th September 1981 hadn’t been an easy day for John Proctor. Earlier he had served as a pallbearer for his friend and neighbour Alan Clarke, a UDR man shot two days earlier as he walked along Hall Street in the Co Londonderry town of Maghera. The two had been close friends. Paradoxically, however, as the off duty RUCR man arrived at Magherafelt Hospital his thoughts were of new life. He was going to visit his wife June who had just given birth to a baby boy, the couple’s second child, and his wife recalled some thirty years later how they teased one another over how fast she had been in getting back to her ward to watch her husband from the window after leaving him to the front door of the hospital. She said that as he passed the hospital ward window, he joked: "You're very fast tonight", to which she joked back: "I'm not as fat as what you are”. As her husband walked on, she told him for the last time: "God ble...

I have previously blogged about how the PIRA often didn’t claim murders which they obviously carried out because they believed admitting to them would damage their campaign and the image they sought to present, particularly outside Northern Ireland. That is not to say that they never owned up to murders which they recognised might damage their cause. In fact, throughout the terror campaign they quite often issued statements apologising for murders. The idea for this blog came to me when I recently tweeted about the bombing of Newry customs office in 1972. I noted that on that occasion that the PIRA apologised for the “unintentional loss of life” but seemed more concerned with responding to a statement issued by the Official IRA which criticised the bomb: “In their very prompt statement condemning this morning’s accidental explosion in Newry, the National Liberation Movement (Official IRA) have once more joined in the Imperialist chorus led by British Government mem...