IRA Coach Bomb

 

We’ve come to terms with it, but we’ll never ever forgive, and never ever forget. It will be with me to the day I die, that morning.

Anne Morrison

 

The bombing of a coach carrying British army soldiers and their families from Manchester to an army base in Catterick, North Yorkshire, was just one atrocity in a long campaign of bombings mounted by the terrorist Irish Republican Army (IRA) on mainland Britain during the 1970s. Eleven people died in the coach bomb blast, including two young children; 12 more were seriously injured. Later in the same year, the IRA began to plant bombs in pubs, in Guildford and Birmingham, killing 26 people and injuring many more. In all these cases, the wrong people were jailed for the murders, in a series of high-level miscarriages of justice that did little to enhance the reputation of the police and judiciary in Britain. In the case of the coach bomb, the woman jailed for the crime was Judith Ward, a woman with a history of mental illness who served 18 years in prison before eventually being released. During the investigation, it became clear that police had cobbled together a story from the garbled evidence she gave, so that they could secure a conviction for the crime. Thus, the M62 coach bombing, and the attacks that followed it, were not only disasters for the victims involved, and for the security of the British public in general; in the aftermath of the events, the way they were handled in the courts also turned out to be indictments of the British justice system.

 

Twisted Metal

 

In the early hours of Monday, February 4, 1974, a coach was travelling up the M62 motorway between Gomersal and Birkenshaw. It had come from Manchester, and was on its way to a British army base at Catterick, in North Yorkshire, and to an RAF base near Darlington. The coach was full of soldiers and their families, who had been taking a weekend break together. Normally, soldiers with 48-hour passes would have taken trains, but at the time, there was widespread industrial unrest, and many railway workers were on strike, so the trains were not running properly. Thus the soldiers had come to rely on the coach rather than the rail services to get them back to their stations on time, and special coaches had been commissioned to take soldiers out on their weekend leave and run them back again to their bases on Sunday night.

As the coach sped along the motorway south of Leeds, near Bradford and Drightlington, there was a massive explosion. It was just past midnight. The sound of the blast was carried for several kilometres, and the blast itself left the coach a tangle of twisted metal. Bodies were strewn along the motorway, in some cases blasted 228 metres (250 yards) away. Police and army bomb disposal experts were immediately called to the scene, but in the pitch-black darkness, it was difficult initially to work out what exactly had happened. In their first public statements, West Yorkshire police only commented: ‘We are treating this with an open mind. It could have been the work of terrorists.’

 

Young Family Dead

 

As daylight dawned, it became clear what had happened. Out of a coach load of more than 50 people, 11 people were dead. Tragically, in one instance an entire young family had lost their lives: Lance Corporal Clifford Houghton, his wife Linda, both aged only 23, and their two sons Lee and Robert, aged five and three. In addition, 12 people had been taken to hospital with serious injuries, including a six-year-old boy who had suffered severe burns. Many more of the passengers had sustained minor injuries.

A memorial service for the victims was held shortly after the bombing, led by the chaplain of the First Battalion King’s Regiment. Linda Houghton’s sister, Anne Morrison, spoke of her loss, saying, ‘We’ve come to terms with it, but we’ll never ever forgive, and never ever forget. It will be with me to the day I die, that morning.’

 

Miscarriage of Justice

 

When news of the atrocity was reported, with horrifying pictures showing the extent of the damage, the public were outraged. The attack was condemned by all the major political parties, and the government vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice as soon as possible. Naturally enough, given this pressure, the police were extremely keen to make an arrest, but in their haste to find a culprit for the atrocity, they initiated a terrible miscarriage of justice that later came back to haunt them.

Judith Ward, a 25-year-old woman from Stockport, voluntarily confessed to the crime, and to two other IRA bombings: the bombing of Euston station, London, in September 1973; and the bombing of the National Defence College in Buckinghamshire on February 12, 1974. What the court was not told was that Ward had changed her ‘confession’ repeatedly, and that parts of it were so confused that the police and the prosecution had to select sections from it so that it made sense.

Moreover, the forensic evidence that was available for the case was faulty.

 

False Forensic Evidence

 

Ward had apparently been found to have traces of nitroglycerine on her hands, on her bag and in the caravan where she was living. These traces had been picked up using tests, such as the Greiss test, which have since been discredited. The Greiss test is a chemical analysis that shows whether organic nitrites are present on the surface of an item. However, since it also shows the presence of nitrates that are found in ordinary household cleaners, it often gives false positive results. In addition, the forensic scientists working on the case did not give impartial evidence, exaggerating some features of their findings, and they withheld information about other aspects of the case.

In retrospect, Judith Ward appears to have been used as a convenient scapegoat for IRA crimes that the police were unable to solve. Her history revealed her to be a woman who suffered from mental illness and who had led an unstable life. As a young adult, she had worked as a horse-riding instructor in Dundalk, Ireland, and she had then joined the Women’s Royal Army Corps. However, she went absent without leave from the army, and she was later discharged after claiming that the IRA had tried to recruit her. She then broke into the British army headquarters in Northern Ireland, but was not charged. In the years leading up to the bombing, she had had a variety of jobs, including working as a chambermaid in London and travelling with Chipperfield Circus. While in custody for the bombings, she made a suicide attempt, which was not reported to the court.

 

Improbable Confession

 

The prosecution barrister in the case, John Cobb QC, alleged that Ward had joined the army under instructions from the IRA, so that she could pass information to them that would help them select targets for their bombings. This information had led to several attacks, and to the deaths of at least six people. For the defence, Ward’s solicitor Andrew Rankin QC said that there were many anomalies in her confession, and that much of it seemed highly improbable. Ward’s family maintained that she was innocent and had never been a member of the IRA. According to her brother Tommy, much of the testimony she gave, such as the information that she had been married to an IRA Provo and had borne a child by another IRA man, was ‘romancing’.

Nevertheless, Judith Ward was jailed for life at Wakefield Crown Court in 1974, and went on to serve 18 years of her sentence. Then, on May 11, 1992, her conviction was declared unsafe by a Court of Appeal. The three Appeal Court judges in the case stated that there had been a ‘grave miscarriage of justice’: the jury in the trial should have been told of Ward’s history of mental illness. Moreover, forensic scientists had withheld evidence in the case that could have led to a different outcome. The judges declared that Ward’s conviction had been ‘secured by ambush’, and went on to free her.

After her release, Ward wrote an autobiography entitled Ambushed, which was published in 1992. She also began to study criminology and campaigned for prisoners’ rights.

 

Antiterror Laws

 

As well as the M62 coach bomb case, there were other important miscarriages of justice that took place in the 1970s as a result of the police and judiciary’s haste to find scapegoats for what were, of course, appalling terror attacks. In 1974, the IRA mounted a series of horrific pub bombings, resulting in the deaths of five people in Guildford and 21 in Birmingham. Four people were convicted for the Guildford atrocity, and six for the Birmingham attack. After a long campaign, all the convictions in both cases were overturned by the Court of Appeal: the Guildford Four, as they became known, were released in 1989, followed two years later by the release of the Birmingham Six.

As well as leading to these miscarriages of justice, the bombings also prompted the government to introduce new antiterrorist laws in Britain. The police gained powers to allow them to hold suspected terrorists for seven days without charge, while the authorities also gained the right to expel individuals from mainland Britain to Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. However, despite these and other measures, the IRA campaign of bombings on the British mainland continued for two more decades, before a lasting ceasefire was declared.