Look back in anger

Thursday 14 August 1975 was a day of two parties. The first was in a newly built terrace house in the Southend-on-Sea suburb of Eastwood. The occasion was my second birthday. Some 280 miles away, the second and much larger party, at the Elms Hotel in Morecambe, was for Lancashire, Morecambe and Birmingham police officers. That party lasted till 5am the following morning.

The three forces had been involved in the inquiry that followed the Birmingham pub bombings, which killed 21 people the previous November. The event marked the last day of the trial of Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker, all charged with the bombings. The jury had retired at 3.33pm, but the following day’s guilty verdicts seemed a foregone conclusion.

It took until 1991 – the remaining span of my own childhood – for these wrongful convictions to be quashed.

Error of judgement

Central to this miscarriage of justice being righted was the work of freelance journalist Chris Mullin, who became Labour MP for Sunderland South in 1987. In 1985 Mullin made three documentaries for Granada Television’s flagship World in Action, the result of investigations that destroyed the forensic evidence against the six, ‘blew a hole’ in the four confessions police had secured from the men, and finally tracked down the actual bombers. What Mullin exposed was set out in more detail in his 1987 book Error of Judgement: the Truth About the Birmingham Bombings, which has just been republished. The original sold 75,000 copies.

Error of Judgement remains a shocking read. The shock begins, but does not end, with the way the police conducted their inquiry.

The six were all Irish Catholics living in Birmingham, several of them acquainted since childhood in the north Belfast district of Ardoyne. They knew James McDade, an IRA ‘lieutenant’ also from Ardoyne, who died when a bomb he was planting at the Coventry telephone exchange exploded. Two of the six regularly raised money for the dependants of IRA ‘internees’.

They did not know McDade well, but on the evening of 21 November 1974, less than an hour before bombs exploded at the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town, five of them left Birmingham by train to catch a ferry for McDade’s funeral in Ireland. They were seen off by Callaghan. The funeral seemed more community event than a moment of deep grief for the group. They were detained by police at the Heysham ferry and held at Morecambe police station. Birmingham police left for Morecambe and a forensic scientist, Dr Frank Skuse, was sent for.

Skuse’s tests, later revealed as flawed, showed a positive result for two of the men, whom he concluded had handled explosives.  

Interrogation

TV detective dramas set in the 1970s now deploy casual police violence towards suspects as a period detail. But what the men related in court reads like the work of skilled torturers – severe beatings, including one allegation of a mock execution. Four confessions followed. (Police accounts record no violence.)

Walker, whose black eye was the most visible sign of mistreatment to be noticed in public, told the court: ‘I just wanted the beatings to stop.’ When it came to signing his statement, Mullin writes: ‘He did not know what was in the document and he did not care… His hand was shaking so much that he could hardly write.’ A policeman steadied it.

Allegations that violence against the six continued on their arrival at Winson Green prison, Birmingham, were the subject of an inquiry, and criminal and civil court cases, in which prison officers and the police disputed one another’s accounts.

Mullin tells the Gazette: ‘In the Birmingham case, it was the forensic evidence that convinced the police they had got the right people.’ That belief informed police conduct and, he believes, also shaped the judicial view of the case.

Mr Justice Bridge, who presided over the criminal trial, and Lord Denning, who heard a civil claim against the police in 1980, knew the men had been tortured, Mullin now believes. ‘I believe everyone knew the men had been tortured. Even Lord Denning. Lord Bridge must have known. They reconciled it to themselves – convinced themselves – they had the right men.’  

‘At times,’ Mullin writes of the 1980 case, ‘[Denning] appeared more concerned with the consequences for the government and the police than with the due process of law.’

On the civil claim, Denning said: ‘This case shows what a civilised country we are. Here are six men who have been proved guilty of the most wicked murder of 21 innocent people. They have no money. Yet the state has lavished large sums on their defence. They were convicted of murder and sentenced to imprisonment for life. In their evidence they were guilty of gross perjury. Yet the state continued to lavish large sums on them in their actions against the police… It is a scandal that should not be allowed to continue.’

At the 1975 trial, the multiple inconsistencies in the four confessions were evident. They ranged from the number of bombs varying between accounts, to all of them being in plastic bags (which forensics from the scenes said they were not), and descriptions of the bombs being placed in different places. A decision was also taken to try all six beside two men who were members of the IRA. At trial the six gave an account of their beatings.

Still, Bridge J concluded the trial by outlining the implications for the police if the defendants had given an accurate account of their interrogation. ‘His every sentence reeked of incredulity,’ Mullin writes. ‘Consider,’ Bridge J said, ‘the scale of the conspiracy in terms of those involved. It ranges, does it not, from the detective constables right up through the police hierarchy… It involved… close collaboration in a criminal enterprise between officers who did not know each other… If the evidence of the defendants is true, it shows the police not only to be masters of vile techniques of cruelty and brutality to suspects. It shows them to have a very lively and inventive imagination.’

Bombers and appeals

Mullin met ‘X’ in 1985 in Dublin. Following an appeal by Mullin to talk to ‘the bombers’, Republican high command told X he should meet Mullin on condition of anonymity. X was Michael Murray, who died in 1999 and can therefore now be named. He had been one of two bomb makers. Mullin also interviewed one of the planters.

The pressure of such revelations led to a first appeal in 1987-88. The six were better represented than at their first trial, with Gareth Peirce as solicitor and silks Michael Mansfield and Lord Gifford as counsel. The Crown, though, fought the case hard, despite the strength of evidence that the original forensic tests were flawed.

Igor Judge QC was counsel for the Crown. Judge argued that the forensic evidence was not essential to the Crown’s case, though the scientific evidence ‘remains overwhelming’. ‘Second,’ he continued, ‘even if it were to be totally ignored, the case would remain overwhelming.’ The unaddressed elephant in the courtroom was Mullin’s claim that he had traced and interviewed the actual killers.

It took another appeal in 1991 for the convictions of the Birmingham Six to be quashed.

Legacy

Together with the case of the Guildford Four, that of the Birmingham Six exposed a side of the police and justice system that demanded reform. ‘It led to the Royal Commission,’ Mullin recalls, ‘which in turn led to the creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission.’

The Conservative government, he notes, ‘initially weren’t going to set it up. [Michael] Howard as home secretary did so under political pressure. Then he wasn’t going to give it independent powers of investigation’. Under political pressure, those powers were conferred on the CCRC. ‘It did a lot of good work,’ Mullin believes, though ‘subsequently it got too close to the Court of Appeal.’ (One criticism levelled at the CCRC is that it refers only those cases deemed to have a very high chance of succeeding.)

‘Hopefully, the judiciary aren’t as gullible as they used to be,’ Mullin says. ‘Judges are now recruited from a wider pool since the creation of the Judicial Appointments Commission. One has to pinch oneself to recall that, as recently as the 1950s, we hanged people on the basis of uncorroborated, unrecorded confessions in police custody.’

And what of the police? We reflect that the murder of Sarah Everard and the toxic culture exposed at Charing Cross police station highlight ongoing problems. Still, Mullin says: ‘I have the impression there is not the same culture of impunity. It was a problem in elite squads.’  

He also offers thoughts on miscarriages of justice that have occurred since 1991. ‘The Post Office has some similar and some different features,’ he notes of the Horizon scandal. ‘A different feature is that the Post Office operates independently of the CPS. So whatever safeguards the CPS now applies did not apply to the Post Office prosecutors.’ But what the Post Office cases and many other miscarriages have in common, Mullin notes, ‘is failure to disclose evidence’.

Could a case like the Birmingham Six happen again? ‘The 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which requires all interviews with suspects to be recorded and witnessed, makes it difficult for confessions to be fabricated in the way that they were in this and other notorious miscarriages of justice. Likewise, advances in forensic science, such as the discovery of DNA, have made wrongful convictions less likely.’

One can, he concludes, ‘just about imagine a scenario involving a serious terrorist incident triggering a wave of public hysteria, fanned by irresponsible tabloid media, leading to the conviction of innocent people. At the time of writing, there are several people, serving long prison sentences, whose convictions hang only by the slenderest thread.’

Talking to Mullin, and reading Error of Judgement, it is hard to not to reflect that the biggest threat to the positive legacy of this and other miscarriages of justice may be cuts to public funding. The CCRC’s annual budget in 2003/4 was £9.2m – its net expenditure in 2022/23 was just £7.9m. The standard of forensics is also compromised. In 2019, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee warned: ‘Forensic science in England and Wales is in trouble and unless the Home Office and Ministry of Justice act now, crimes may go unsolved and the number of miscarriages of justice may increase.’

 

• Error of Judgement by Chris Mullin is published by Monoray (£10.99)