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"Wuuuuuuummmmmmmmpppppphhh!"
As bomb blasts went, the bang that was heard in Coventry city centre on the night on Sunday 14th November 1974 didn't sound like that big of a deal. But then my only point of comparison was the explosions that wheezed through the tiny speakers on my mum and dad's primitive early 70s telly.
Tragically, that unassuming initial rap on the door would quickly mutate into an angry pounding that would end 21 lives and leave lasting scars on 182 more some 25 miles and seven days later.
I was sitting in the lounge bar of a long-gone Coventry city centre pub called The Penny Black when the bomb went off. Curious as to what we had heard, everyone put down their drinks and piled outside into the chilly late autumn gloom.
The sight and smell that awaited us was not pretty. For there in the centre of the road lay a sizeable pile of steaming, blackened meat. It later turned out that this hunk of muscle, fat, bone and gristle was the torso of James McDade. Now little more than a footnote in the history of the Troubles, McDade enjoyed brief notoriety as the first IRA volunteer to die on the mainland while on active service.
Intent on striking fear into the hearts and minds across the UK's then declining industrial heartland, McDade tried to incapacitate Coventry's telephone exchange. His fatal mistake in losing his balance resulted in him being dismembered so thoroughly, he was only identifiable by a thumbprint and the tattered remains of his clothing. It was widely rumoured at the time that McDade's constituent parts were still being found around the city fully two weeks later.
The November 1974 explosion was not the first time the IRA had targeted Coventry. In August 1939, five people had died and some 70 more were injured by the detonation of a 5.1 lbs device in the city's Broadgate shopping hub. The two IRA bombers caught and convicted for the attack were subsequently hanged.
The mid-1970s resurgence of the IRA's bombing campaign would reach its zenith with the senseless slaughter at Birmingham's Mulberry Bush and Tavern in the Town pubs on Thursday November 21st. Aside from those killed and injured, its victims included the six patsies who the West Midlands Police ("WMP") - then, it later turned out, one of the UK's most hopelessly corrupt forces - blamed for the atrocity. Guilty of nothing more than being Irish in the wrong place at the wrong time, they and their loved ones were to spend the next 17 years vainly pleading for justice.
The night before the Birmingham pub bombs wrought their carnage, a bunch of us were in the Tavern in the Town. We'd gone there to have a few pre-gig drinks before catching the second of Jethro Tull's two nights in the Birmingham Odeon just a few yards down the road. Irrational believers that any first-night staging issues would have been ironed out by the second and final night, our persnicketiness very probably ended up saving our lives.
As always seems to happen in the aftermath of such barbarism, people's initial confusion and fear quickly mutated from disbelief to anger and ultimately blind rage. Following the triple murder of the three tiny girls in Southport earlier this year, it was Moslems and refugees who unfairly ended up in the firing line. Back in 1974 it was Irish immigrants facing the screams and jabbing fingers of a mob who only hours earlier had viewed them as valued friends and trusted neighbours.
I know because My Dad was one of those on the receiving end of the vitriol.
I'll never forget how the night after the Birmingham bombings he arrived home from work in tears as a result of the treatment he received from pals he'd worked happily with for the previous twenty-odd years.
It seemed Dad's workmates had started a collection on behalf of the families of those who had been killed or maimed the night before. When my Dad reached into his pocket to contribute a few quid, he was told to "f*** off back to the bog you crawled out of you murdering Irish c***!"
As harsh as the treatment meted out by the workplace bigots was, it pales into insignificance when compared to what might have happened had he fallen into the clutches of the WMP.
Brought up to be very respectful of authority, Coventry's large population of post-war Irish immigrants were considerably less street smart than the children they raised.
Roughly half the kids in my class at school had either had a bad experience with the local boys in blue or knew someone who had. Having had my own run-in with "the finest police force money could buy" about 18 months earlier, I could well believe it.
While still under legal drinking age, I'd taken a bar job with a lovely old Irish couple called John and Maureen Griffin, who ran the Coombe Ex-Servicemen's Club about two miles from my parents' house.
The summer of 1973 was the year Pot Black had really taken off. All wannabe Hurricane Higgins, myself and my fellow barmen, Paul and Declan Bergin, enthusiastically took to the club's table once the bar had emptied for the night. Sustained by pints of John Griffin's splendid Guinness, we'd then play into the early hours of the morning before heading off to our respective homes.
About halfway there, I was manhandled into the back of a Panda car and accused of burglary by two of Coventry's finest. Presumably bored of the nice cop/nasty cop used by most policemen, PCs Riff and Raff had adopted a nasty and even nastier cop approach to policing.
The proof of my guilt? That my shoes and trouser cuffs were sopping wet from fleeing across a golf course from the house a neighbour had apparently seen me breaking into. Dismissing my protests that it had been raining heavily all night, the intellectually challenged Holmes and Watson spent the next 90 minutes giving me the third degree. Unable to shake my story, they eventually let me go.
Usually the mildest of men, my Dad was determined to lodge a complaint down at the local cop shop when he heard why I'd been so late in arriving home. It took me the best part of an hour to dissuade him. Given the fate that befell Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker, I am forever glad I did.
END.
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