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get started at factormeals .com slash Factor podcast and use code factor podcast to get 50 % off your first box plus free shipping that's code factor podcast at factormeals .com slash factor podcast to get 50 % off plus free shipping on your first box the History Channel original podcast there are more than 200 episodes of history this week so far and we've decided to make a list of some of the best.
This is just our opinion.
Go check it out for yourself and see if you agree.
Go to harkaudio .com slash history to listen to some of these surprising stories from our archive.
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Let us know what you think?
History This Week March 14, 1991 I'm Alana Casanova -Birgis.
The Old Bailey is very old...
It's a courthouse in London that was first built in the 1500s, and has seen some of the more famous criminal proceedings in British history.
The gross indecency trial of Oscar Wilde, treason charges against Radio Propagandist Lord Ha Ha — the trial of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, convicted of murdering 13 women.
But today, out of the thousands of guilty verdicts handed down at the Old Bailey, one of them or actually six of them are being appealed.
Lord Justice Anthony Lloyd asks the six defendants to stand.
And these men are better known as the Birmingham Six.
They've been in prison for 16 years, since 1975.
The men were convicted on 21 counts of murder, held responsible for the bombings of two pubs in Birmingham, England's second largest city, on a busy Thursday night.
The prosecution said they were acting on behalf of the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, carrying out this bombing as a terrorist act against the United Kingdom.
The Birmingham Six have maintained their innocence since day one, even though newspapers referred to them as the bombers before they were even convicted.
They've faced countless death threats and physical abuse across their sixteen years in prison.
Now, after their second appeal, they'll learn their fate." Lord Justice Lloyd peers down his bifocals.
He reads, "...In the light of the fresh evidence which has been made available since the last hearing in this Court, your appeals will be allowed, and you're free to go." Outside the Old Bailey a big crowd is celebrating.
Eleven -year -old Ed Barlow is watching on TV from his living room in Wales.
I must have been watching the news with my parents and I saw this thing about six men being released from prison and they were walking onto the streets for the first time in years and they were cheering and they were shouting and they were a mixture of anger and happiness and joy and all those emotions.
— The six men take in the crowd, pumping their fists in the air.
They're hugging their families, hugging each other.
— I do just remember looking at the TV screen and just seeing the intensity of emotion on their faces.
— Patrick Hill, better known as Paddy, who has just been freed, steps up to a microphone.
— Paddy Hill, one of the men, speaks angrily into the microphone in kind of an iconic moment.
really. The police told us from the start that they knew we hadn't done it, they told us they didn't care who'd done it, they told us that we're gonna free him with justice.
The Birmingham six line up in a row, grab each other's hands and raise them into the air.
And I didn't really know what was going on and my parents explained that they had been in prison for 16 years for something they didn't do today the Birmingham pub bombings why were these six men imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit and why have the actual bombers never been brought to justice there's a long backstory here of conflict and violence between English and Irish people that goes back centuries.
In 1801, the Act of Union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and put Ireland firmly under British rule.
Irish nationalists fought back, and the next hundred -plus years are marked by intermittent violence, rebellion, and repression.
In 1921, the two -year long Irish War of Independence ends with a treaty that divides Ireland, establishing the 26 mostly Roman Catholic counties of Southern Ireland as the Irish -free state while making the six mostly Protestant counties of Northern Ireland a self -governing part of the UK.
And so from that point on Britain retained control of the north and the south of Ireland became independent.
Ed Barlow is now a producer who created a podcast all about this story for a BBC.
That is why the IRA started a campaign of violence, because they wanted a united, and independent, Ireland once again.
The IRA, or Irish Republican Army, is first formed in 1919 with the goal of reunifying Ireland and freeing it from British rule.
In 1969 it splits into two groups, the officials, who seek independence through peace, and the provisionals who are willing to use violence.
The provisional IRA attacks British military targets and infrastructure in Northern Ireland, mostly by planting bombs.
They wanted to put pressure on the UK government to give up Northern Ireland.
Now, this wasn't killing people.
It was all about disruption.
So the IRA were tending to plant bombs or explosives lives in disused factories or empty buildings, often governmental buildings, where the tax office might have been.
But in 1973, the IRA turns its campaign to mainland Britain.
They start on March 8th, exploding two bombs outside the Old Bailey, that courthouse in London.
180 people are injured.
They began to feel that one bomb in England was worth 20 or even 100 bombs in Ireland.
Within a year, there's an average of one attack in Britain every three days.
They wanted to attract their attention, and so doing that on the streets of Britain was likely to get more of a response as they saw it.
It was about creating disruption, getting headlines, but also, yes, that fear that they wanted people to feel, oh gosh, there's a battle on our streets here.
Most of the provisional IRA's targets are military and economic and hundreds of British soldiers are killed and wounded.
Civilians are also killed but in much smaller numbers.
To help avoid extensive civilian fatalities IRA operatives would typically call local police or newspapers notifying them where a bomb had been planted before it set off.
There were a load of hoax calls.
Now that may have just been kids messing around.
It may have just been people just thinking they were being funny.
The authorities knew that an IRA warning call was a genuine one.
There was a code word developed and that code word was double x.
The provisional IRA is trying to disrupt daily life, create chaos and fear.
The atmosphere on those streets of Britain was tense.
People were genuinely scared.
One of the focal points of this bombing campaign in Britain is Birmingham, in the heart of central England.
Between 1973 and 74, the IRA sets off more than 30 bombs in the city.
Birmingham is, then and now, Britain's second largest city.
But it doesn't have the long, storied history of other British cities.
It really only develops during the Industrial Revolution.
It used to be a village, Ham means small town Birmingham.
But over the years it got bigger and bigger and bigger and throughout the 20th century it had a lot of migration.
immigrants come from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Ireland.
After the war in particular, there was a massive wave of Irish people coming to Britain for work.
A lot of the buildings in Birmingham today were built by Irish laborers, so huge Irish community.
So if you were part of the IRA council in the island of Ireland, planning on escalating the conflict in mainland Britain.
Birmingham would have absolutely been one of the cities you'd have looked at to grow a cell.
Yes, IRA operatives live among Birmingham's Irish immigrant community, but that doesn't mean everyone who lives in that community agrees with their tactics.
You can be an Irish Republican, i .e.
wanting a united Ireland without being a paramilitary member or without being violent or justifying bomb attacks.
So a lot of people would have had sympathy, but not agreed with the methods.
On July 14th, 1974, in that single day, five bombs are detonated in the Birmingham area.
The city is on edge.
If you went to the cinema, you went to watch a movie, you'd check under the seats.
If you went on the bus on the way home, you'd check under the seat.
It was things like that.
It became a way of life.
As 1974 drags on, the bombings continue, in Birmingham and throughout Britain.
The IRA isn't gaining any momentum towards a reunified Ireland, and British forces aren't having much luck stemming this wave of violence.
It didn't really feel like either side was making much progress, and it was probably only ever going to get worse before it got better.
In October, the IRA does take things a step further.
They set off bombs at two pubs in the town of Guildford, not far from London.
This is an escalation.
Pubs aren't government offices or empty storefronts.
Pubs are a very traditional part of life in Britain.
They often go back hundreds of years.
Some of the oldest pubs in Britain will have a little plaque saying there's been a pub on this site since 1500 and whatever it might be, so it's very much a tradition really.
The pubs targeted in the Guildford bombings, the IRA says, these aren't typical pubs.
They're fair game. Those pubs were well -known drinking haunts of local soldiers.
There was an army barracks there.
So the IRA arguably felt justified in attacking them as if they were almost military targets rather than civilian pubs.
But there aren't just soldiers drinking there that night.
The IRA kills four soldiers and one civilian in the Guildford pub bombings.
Just over a month after that attack, there's another death – an IRA operative.
An Irishman called James McDade was planting a bomb in Coventry, which is a city near Birmingham.
And as he was doing this, he made a mistake.
Something happened...
And he blew himself up, died instantly.
Now, although it was quite clearly his mistake, his fault, the IRA seized on this moment to almost make him a martyr.
The IRA plans a massive funeral from McDade back in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland.
They publish all these articles, essentially blaming the British government for his death.
They used it as propaganda.
Hundreds of police officers line the street as McDade's body is brought to the airport.
The IRA's rhetoric and the last year and a half of bombings in Britain meant that there's a very real threat of retaliation.
It's only a question of when.
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The night of Thursday, November 21, 1974, feels like most Thursday nights in Birmingham.
Yes, the IRA's bombing campaign has left the city on edge, but people are trying to maintain their normal routines, which include going to the pub.
Would have been no different to any other nights really.
People went out to meet a few friends, meet colleagues, whatever it might have been.
Having a pint of bitter pint of lager.
Genentonic, who knows?
Two of the most popular pubs in Birmingham are the Mulberry Busch and Tavern in the Town.
The Mulberry Busch was in the basement of a skyscraper called the Rotunda.
it's a really sort of iconic building in Birmingham.
Tavern in the town was sort of below ground level but in the busy street where there were shops, there were buses, people walking left right and center it was five minutes around the corner from the main train station so it was really in the heart of a city.
We may never know exactly what happened on those nights but we believe that two men went into the two pubs, ordered a drink, left their case under a table, walked out and we also think that another member of their group, who was a little little outside the city, his job was to make the warning calls.
There's some dispute about this, whether a third man was responsible for placing the phone call or whether it was one of the men who planted the bombs.
But whoever it was, that person was delayed.
We now believe that the reason there wasn't much notice given was because the phone box where the man had planned to make the warning call from, it was out of order.
So by the time he actually found another phone that he could use, 10, 11 minutes had passed.
So frankly, the police who may well have taken the warning call very seriously, just wouldn't have had time to do anything.
The man calls the Birmingham Post, gives the double X code word that proves his call was legitimate.
He tells the operator at the paper that there are two bombs planted.
That warning call was a bit vague.
It didn't actually mention the pubs by name, it just mentioned the complex, the buildings they were in.
— Within minutes police arrive at the Rotunda — the landmark building where the Milbury bush is located.
— They just went and they tried to find a bomb, you know, in this building.
And obviously with hindsight you're like, why the hell didn't you just get everybody you could out.
So that's been sort of one of the things that's been disputed or debated a bit over the years.
Seven minutes after the phone call was placed to the newspaper, the first bomb goes off at the Mulberry Bush.
I walk pass the retunder where the Mulberry Bush was every week or two, and obviously I always have a think about what it must've been like.
Two minutes later, the second bomb detonates at Tavern in the Town.
I just think, of all the people who were in there, the average age was really young.
It was a Thursday night, it was Payday in Birmingham.
A lot of the victims were, you know, early twenties.
They were just normal people.
They went for a drink after work, it was in the lead up to Christmas.
You just think, what a waste.
I mean, what a waste of life, what an awful thing to happen.
Obviously, the city centre kind of grand to a standstill.
The police put up barricades.
They were, you know, everyone was just in a sense of panic.
There are so many casualties that there aren't enough ambulances to bring all of the victims to the hospital.
There were all these taxis waiting around the city as they would be on any other night.
and they got on the taxi intercoms, the taxi radios and they kind of rallied all the taxi drivers who basically became standing ambulances just just transporting people to the hospitals around the city and those taxi drivers deserve all the plaudits they get because nobody knows but they must have saved many lives that night.
These explosions would ultimately kill 21 people and would injure many many more.
I think the people who survived almost don't get talked about enough.
Some of them had life -changing injuries, lost limbs, lost their vision.
But it's the PTSD, the post -traumatic stress that people have lived with.
I was speaking to another guy a couple of weeks ago even who was in one of those pubs and he walked out uninjured physically.
But it still haunts him to this day.
This is a man now in his 70s who broke down in tears talking to me on the phone.
Said it never leaves me every day.
Every day he thinks about it.
Birmingham has been attacked on a whole new scale and people in the city start to ask themselves, did I see anything suspicious?
Could I help identify those responsible?
There was a ticket inspector at the railway station in Birmingham and he remembered seeing five Irishmen getting on a train going to the north of England where they would catch a ferry to Belfast and this train was leaving in a matter of minutes really before the bombs exploded, and so this ticket inspector thought, I'm gonna let the police know.
Within three hours, the five Irishmen had been detained by police.
They'll soon arrest a sixth who had seen the group off at the train station.
One of the first things they did was get a forensics expert to come in and swab their hands.
A doctor performs what's called a greasetest, it's meant to test for chemicals that can indicate someone has recently handled explosives.
He did his tests, he swabbed the men's hands, and he proclaimed that he was 99 % certain that two of the men had recently handled explosives.
The interrogation ramps up.
Police have the suspects change their clothes and discover something in one of the men's belongings.
Prayer cards for the funeral of James McDade.
That IRA operative who blew himself up a week earlier and whose death had been lionized by the IRA.
That's why the men were headed to Belfast.
His funeral was going to be in Belfast and these men were on the way back to Belfast to go to his funeral.
So all of a sudden it's really not looking good for them, it's looking suspicious.
The police turn violent.
The man who had the prayer card, John Walker, is taken into another room where they beat him, burn a cigarette against his toe and perform a mock execution, putting a blanket over his head and pulling the trigger of an empty gun against his temple.
They had basically been beaten into submission.
All six suspects would be subject to physical abuse.
They were beaten black and blue, they were tortured, they were terrified.
They were sleep -deprived.
Within two days, four of the men had signed false confessions.
They probably, barely knew what they were doing, but were told, just sign this, it'll all go away.
The fallout from these bombings obviously spreads well outside of Birmingham.
This is the worst domestic attack in the United Kingdom since World War Two.
As the pictures got out around the country around the world even the whole country went into a state of shock a sense of mourning and anger because for the first time really this was a big attack on members of the public.
There was nothing military about these targets.
There was nothing to say that the IRA didn't mean to kill all these people.
They knew where they were putting these bombs.
People were, you know, incensed.
The IRA denies any involvement and, they add, if they found out their members had done this, they would be subject to the death penalty for putting civilians in harm's way.
Even people who might have previously supported them or believed in the cause were so appalled, and I think even many members of the IRA were so appalled that they wanted to distance themselves from it.
The six Irishmen are in custody, the grease test, the intention of going to James McDade's funeral, and the confessions they signed.
This is the evidence against them, and it's how they'll come to be known as the Birmingham Six.
It was such an awful attack on innocent people that it's entirely understandable that there was such national outrage.
Somebody needed to pay for this.
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The trial of the Birmingham Six begins in June 1975, almost seven months after the pub mummings.
Leading up to the trial, the six men are subject to further beatings and physical abuse in prison, and the circumstances surrounding their trial likely don't boost their spirits.
It didn't take place in Birmingham because there was probably no way that the men would get a fair trial in the city this had happened.
It took place in another English city called Lancaster and in fact it took place inside the castle in Lancaster.
The security was extraordinary.
It was taking place in a castle with walls that were 10 foot thick.
There were dogs all over the place, there were people with guns.
The courtroom was described as a Gothic chamber, vaulting ceilings, boronial shields on the walls.
Judge Nigel Bridge sits high above everyone else.
It's a show of force, and it reflects the national mood.
The whole country was watching this trial.
These were the most hated men in Britain, now, yeah, innocent until proven guilty and all that, but it was going to be hard for those men to overturn that degree of national hatred.
Now, there are numerous holes in the prosecution's case.
They can't explain who made the bombs, since they never found any bomb -making materials after searching the six men's homes.
Nobody could identify any of them at the Pubs that night either.
100 witnesses testify, a neighbor who saw some suspicious behavior, co -workers who attested to the men's IRA sympathies.
Those aren't direct observations of any crime, and those confessions that they signed, they're not exactly ironclad.
Now, the thing about these confessions, if you actually read them, they don't really make much sense.
they contradict themselves.
One of the men supposedly would have been in two places at the same time.
They didn't really add up.
When the defense asks that the confessions be tossed out, because they were basically beaten out of the defendants, the judge denies that motion.
I would have to suppose that a team of 15 officers had conspired among themselves to use violence on the prisoners and to fabricate evidence.
That, the judge says, seems to me a most extraordinary state of affairs.
Motion denied. The trial lasts for 45 days, one of the longest in British criminal history.
The jury deliberates for just six and a half hours and delivers a unanimous guilty verdict for all six defendants.
Judge Bridge delivers the sentence, He concluded and said, You stand convicted on each of 21 counts on the clearest and most overwhelming evidence I have ever heard of the crime of murder.
Each of the men receives 21 life sentences.
And that was it, the men went off and were due to spend the rest of their lives probably in prison.
If the death penalty for murder had not been abolished in the UK just six years earlier, it's likely they would have been hanged.
So the men have been in prison for a number of years and they've tried to get appeals, they've been writing letters to politicians on newspapers but nobody was really paying them much attention.
But that changes when an investigative journalist named Chris Mullen takes up the case.
He and his team set about recreating the forensics test that had been done on the men at the time they were arrested.
Mullen helps produce a TV documentary on the case, part of a long running investigative series in the UK called World in Action.
The first episode focused on the Birmingham Six airs in 1985, and recounts the beatings, the false confessions, the flimsy evidence connecting them to the bombings.
The most incriminating evidence was found like this, a cotton wool swab drawn over a suspect's hands can reveal to a forensic scientists whether someone has handled explosives.
This is the moment that sticks.
The grease test. The alleged residue that was the only forensic proof in the entire case.
Ed Barlow explains.
It proved that you'd been handling something called nitrocellulose, which, yes, that is found in explosives, but it's also found in a number of other things, including playing cards.
And the men on that train journey the Night of the Pub bombings had been playing cards.
But could the men have picked up nitrocellulose on the train?
The five have always said they played cards with an old pack on the journey to Hesham.
The playing cards were taken and in the same way they were swabbed with ether on a cotton wool swab.
The ether was extracted in the usual way.
And the spot test, the grease test, was performed in the way we perform them in all tests.
And the positive response was obtained.
So in this TV programme they reproduced the test, they got the producer to shuffle some cards and he returned the positive result.
This is the first major break the Birmingham Six have gotten since their arrest 10 years earlier.
Momentum slowly starts to build in their favour.
Mullen writes a book on the case, Error of Judgment, and helps produce subsequent episodes of World in Action.
For one of them, he manages to track down someone who claimed to be one of the actual IRA operatives behind the Birmingham pub bombings.
Tonight, for the first time, a man admits that he bombed the pubs.
There never will be, there never can be any justification for taking the lives of innocent people.
And it's something I will have to live with.
One of the men admitted planting the bombs, saying, this is what we did.
This is where we put them.
These six people are innocent.
I have never met these six guys before in my life.
And yet, the men were still locked up in prison.
Until 1991. This was the Birmingham Sixes second appeal case, and on March 14, they learned they will be free.
They celebrate outside of the Old Bailey.
But they can never fully recover from 16 years of false imprisonment.
Where do you even begin to pick up your life after that?
Where do you even begin?
Ed Barlow spent time getting to know a couple of the Birmingham Six as part of his podcast for the BBC.
They've been out 33, 34 years now.
It's a lot longer than they were in.
But the effects are still there, the effects don't go away.
And one of the men I spoke to and got to know a little bit, Paddy Hill, said something to me like, we were inside all that time dreaming of getting out, but there's an old saying, be careful what you wish for.
So, when they got out, life was not suddenly perfect.
Billy Power, one of the other men I met, he joked that he's the only person who's been caught trying to climb back inside the prison he was in.
I mean, I think he was joking, but that sort of sums up the institutionalized feeling you must have having spent all that time in there.
He said he knows his grandchildren better than he knows his own kids.
Now at least he got to know his grandchildren.
But isn't that in itself sad?
To this day, nobody has been correctly convicted for the Birmingham pub bombings.
It's the deadliest unsolved mass murder in UK history.
Families of the victims and survivors of the attacks are still pushing the British government to act.
Even 50 years later.
When the Birmingham Six were released that day, yes, that was good news for them and their families for the most part, but do think about the families of the victims for whom these wounds reopened.
Through Chris Mullen's work, we know four of the people who are likely responsible for the bombings.
Two of them died a number of years ago, two of them are still alive.
One of them I tracked down recently.
I was standing in his house in Dublin, standing in the house of somebody who may well have been involved in the pub bombings was was a strange experience his house was like a shrine to the IRA I mean it's the wrong word to use but you'd almost say it was full of memorabilia posters scarves cushions mugs all sorts of press cuttings.
We're not disclosing this man's identity since he's never been formally charged.
But he says he does regret what happened that Thursday night in Birmingham.
He's always said it was not intended to go as it did that night.
That people weren't intended to be killed now I mean that's it's all still inexcusable of course.
Justice is probably never really going to be done.
It's too long ago. It doesn't seem like there's much momentum on the part of the British government to reopen this case.
Irish independence is still a subject of debate throughout the UK, so politics may be a factor.
There is no happy ending here, but at least six men were freed from imprisonment for a crime they didn't commit.
Thanks for listening to History This Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel.
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Special thanks to our guest, Ed Barlow, producer for the BBC and creator of the podcast in detail, the Pub Bommings.
You can find a link to it in our episode description.
This episode was produced and sound designed by Ben Dickstein and was hosted by me, Alana Casanova -Berges.
For Back Pocket Studios, our Executive Producers are Ben Dickstein and David Weissbord.
From the History Channel, our Executive Producers are Eli Lair and Liv Fidler.
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