Told by the people caught up in the nightmare
The pain of Britain's biggest unsolved mass murder is still raw 50 years onWhile it was a miserable, foggy night, it was payday for many and the shops were open late.
But, shortly after 20:00 GMT, bombs exploded in both pubs, bringing mass murder to the streets of Birmingham. It was about 19:30 GMT as the couple threaded their way to their regular haunt, a pub on the ground floor of the city’s the iconic high rise Rotunda building called the Mulberry Bush. As she was speaking, she experienced a flash of light from the blast, then found herself floating through the air.
Ian had suffered serious wounds to his face and legs, but his sheepskin coat had shielded his body. Maureen says: “It was probably the best £80 we ever spent.”“They saved me,” she says. “I was one of the lucky ones.”Everything Paul Bridgewater knows about his dad is pieced together from other people’s memories.
Paul grew up believing the Birmingham Six were responsible for his dad’s death, and was shocked when they were acquitted. “There was no thought to my mother, and I imagine none of the other families as well,” he says. “In the paper, my dad had always been a black silhouette,” he says. “Meeting all the family members and they'd all experienced similar things. It opened that book again, that I thought was closed.”Paul Anthony Davies was a big fan of karate movies.The Birmingham Six, with MP Chris Mullin in the centre, on the day of their release in 1991. Billy is on the far right.
He recalls being “brutalised” in police custody after forensic tests appeared to show he had handled explosives. “I just started crying because I thought it meant that my dad was dead,” she says. “I thought he'd died in the atrocities.” The next day, Breda and her sister were on a plane to Cork to stay with their aunt.Her childhood was dominated by prison visits. Extended family would fight over who got to go, meaning Billy was never short of callers.
Entertainers and politicians lined up to offer support. As the campaign snowballed, Breda was even invited to meet President Gorbachev in the former Soviet Union, though the visit was cancelled after an earthquake. Eventually, after Mullin’s work helped erode the so-called evidence, in 1991 Billy and the others walked free.
The native Dubliner arrived home from a work trip abroad to find his wife, Maureen, red-eyed while nursing their cranky baby. Frank says the officer told him: “It could be a neighbour. It could be somebody you work with. It could be a friend who did it for a joke.” At the Tavern in the Town, some of the dead had been blasted through a wall. Their bodies remained inside until electrics could be made safe.
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