Adrian Lee is a solicitor-advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
Forty years ago, at 2.54 am on Friday 12th October 1984, the Provisional I.R.A. made their most audacious attack, detonating a time bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Conservative Party Conference. The bomb had been primed and planted in Room 629 on the sixth floor, inside a bath’s side panel by P.I.R.A. bombmaker Patrick Magee.
The I.R.A. didn’t know on which floor the Prime Minster intended to stay but guessed that it would be an upper floor.
Magee had enjoyed a long terrorist career.
Only a year before he had placed a bomb in a pub called the Eagle and Child, just across the road from Weeton Barracks in Lancashire, on the off chance that it would kill some visiting soldiers. He arrived at the Grand Hotel on the 15th, September 1984, during the Trades Union Congress and signed the register as “Roy Walsh”, giving a fictional address in Southeast London and paying £180 immediately for his intended three-night stay. He played the part of an Englishman perfectly, which was not surprising as he grew up in Norfolk.
The cover name “Roy Walsh” was an in-joke thought up by those naturally humorous men in the P.I.R.A. The real Roy Walsh was the bomb maker of the Old Bailey car bomb, which seriously injured up to 200 people in the City of London when it was detonated outside the Courthouse on “Bloody Thursday” 8th March 1973. He was already over ten years into his twenty-one-year sentence when the Brighton atrocity was being planned.
Magee was visited daily by a male assistant, known to the I.R.A. as “The Pope”. On the first day, they had a lovely lunch together in the posh hotel restaurant. There were also visits to his room by two females delivering various bomb making equipment. They just wandered through the lobby and took the lift to the sixth floor. It is highly likely that some other males popped into Room 629 to deliver things or lend a hand, but nobody gave them a glance.
This bomb was going to be special, comprising 105 pounds of gelignite and fitted with a battery-powered long-delay timer, originally extracted from a video cassette recorder. No ticking alarm clocks here, although he did install a small back-up timer, known as a Memo Park, just in case the fancy VCR one failed. Magee was nothing if not thorough. Another problem that this master craftsman faced was the smell. Gelignite tends to whiff; in fact, it positively stinks of almonds (just like cyanide). The larger the quantity of T.N.T., the greater the smell. A bomb of this size could attract every Police sniffer dog in East Sussex. However, Magee had a solution: the whole devise would be tightly wrapped in several layers of plastic.
Building a time bomb took skill and patience and Magee had to work diligently if he was to leave on the third day. Equipment and parts were laid out on the floor. He spent hours in the room, and the only attention that he aroused was from one of the chambermaids, who noticed that the “Do not disturb” notice was hanging from the doorknob for three days in a row.
The chambermaid grew suspicious. Who on earth wants to sleep in an unmade bed for three nights on the trot? Especially at these prices. Perhaps the guest had passed away in his sleep? Eventually, she knocked on the door and asked if him if he required her cleaning services, or even just fresh towels. Magee urgently fobbed her off before she could get the Manager with the pass key. As she walked away, she surmised that it was probably a businessman enjoying “a dirty weekend”. You used to get a lot of that sort of thing in Brighton.
On the last day, the 17th, September, Magee was working with two colleagues and finished the entire job by 10pm. How do we know? Simple, they celebrated the completion by ordering a large bottle of vodka and three Coca Colas to be delivered by room service. One can only imagine the elation that Magee, “The Pope” and an anonymous terrorist pal must have experienced after completing this precision instrument of death. The next morning at 9am “Roy Walsh” checked out of the hotel.
The Provos’ aim was to murder the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher and members of her government. They failed. Five people were killed, the highest ranking was Sir Anthony Berry, Deputy Chief Whip and M.P. for Enfield Southgate. The other four were the Chief Whip’s wife, Roberta Wakeham, the Western Area Chairman’s wife, Jeanne Shattock, the Chairman of North-West Are, Eric Taylor and the Scottish Chairman’s wife, Muriel Maclean. In addition, 34 others suffered serious injuries, including Norman Tebbit and his wife Margaret.
To this day, some Irish Republicans perceive the “Brighton job” as a great adventure and even romantic but it is worth briefly pondering on the horrible deaths suffered by the victims. Jeanne Shattock had the misfortune of being in the bathroom of Room 628 at the time the bomb exploded next door in Room 629. The wall between the two rooms instantly disintegrated and, in the words of a forensic explosives’ expert, splinters of the ceramic bathroom tiles were “driven into her body like bullets”. She was also decapitated by the blast and her torso was blown across the corridor into Room 638 opposite.
It was not only the I.R.A. who celebrated this carnage. In his 1998 bestselling memoir as a Labour Party activist “Things Can Only Get Better”, John O’Farrell wrote “I felt a surge of excitement at the nearness of her (Thatcher) demise and yet disappointment that such a chance had been missed. This was me – the pacifist, anti-capital punishment, anti-I.R.A. liberal – wishing that they had got her.”
It took detectives three months of painstaking work to determine that Patrick Magee was the bomb maker.
Ironically, he sealed his fate the moment that he went up to the Grand Hotel’s reception desk. In those pre-computer days, everyone checking-in was asked to complete a room registration card. Magee left a partial palm print on the card whilst he completed it. All registration cards were placed in an archive in the hotel basement after they had departed.
These records were unharmed by the blast many floors above. Two weeks after the bombing, Police discovered part of the Memo Park back-up timer lurking in the U-bed of the toilet in Room 329. In January 1984, an I.R.A. arms cache had been discovered in Salcey Forest in Northamptonshire. A batch of V.C.R. timers were found alongside guns, grenades and ammunition. All the timers were set for twenty-four days, six hours and thirty-six minutes from the moment of activation. Counting back that exact amount of time from 2.54 am on the 12th, October brought Police to the 17th, September as the date that the bomber almost certainly set the timer and checked out of the hotel. It was then only a matter of time before they found the “Roy Walsh” registration card.
Magee was eventually arrested in Glasgow by Strathclyde Special Branch in June 1985. A year later, he was tried and found guilty at the Old Bailey. He was sentenced to eight concurrent life sentences. Magee was released on licence just 14 years later under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. “The Pope”, the two female couriers and the other male assistants who visited the hotel between the 15th-17th September 1984 were never discovered.