Metropolitan Police of London

The Metropolitan Police of London was the principal police force responding to the 1973 Provisional IRA London bombings. Its officers received advance information, searched a city crowded with vehicles, defused one bomb and arrested members of the bombing team as they tried to leave through Heathrow Airport. The response also became part of a lasting dispute over what the police knew, how quickly they acted, and how their delays affected the civilian toll.

Advance warning and deployment

At 7 a.m., as the bombers were positioning their cars, the Special Patrol Group received a briefing at Cannon Row police station in Westminster about an impending IRA attack. Officers were told to look for suspicious vehicles, particularly near likely targets such as government buildings. The warning gave the force an operational lead, but the scale of the task was complicated by a rail strike. Parking restrictions had been suspended, and central London was unusually full of stationary cars—the very conditions the bombers had used to leave their vehicles in place.

Later that morning, two constables patrolling near Scotland Yard noticed a green Corsair with no tax disc. Its details did not fit: it was a 1968 model carrying 1971 plates, and its number plate had four drill holes rather than the usual two. Looking through the windows, the officers spotted a thin white cord running from the front seat to the back, partly concealed beneath the carpet. The discovery turned the general warning into a specific bomb emergency.

The Corsair and the citywide search

Bomb-disposal experts found nearly 200 pounds of explosives packed beneath the Corsair’s rear seat. Its timer was audibly ticking. As spectators watched from nearby windows, one bomb expert shouted for them to be moved away. A member of the squad held the cord connected to the timing device while a partner cut it. The bomb did not detonate: the team had defused it.

The investigators estimated that it would have exploded at around 3 p.m., though the minute hand had been removed, making the exact timing uncertain. The long fuse raised the possibility that the bombers intended to flee before the explosions. Police sent a bulletin to Special Branch officers at ports and airports, directing them to close exit routes and question Irish people seeking to leave. Officers then spread through central London to find three other cars, but congestion and the absence of precise locations made the search difficult. The vehicles could have been almost anywhere in the crowded streets.

A warning call later identified the remaining bomb locations, including the Cortina outside the Old Bailey. A communication failure inside the police department delayed the dispatch of officers to the sites. A reporter reached the Old Bailey car more than twenty minutes before the police; further time passed before the bomb squad arrived and buildings were evacuated. The force’s difficulties were not only a matter of locating the vehicles: the warning had to be relayed accurately and acted upon quickly across a crowded city.

Arrests at Heathrow Airport

The long delay between placing the bombs and their scheduled detonation had been intended to let the bombing team return to Ireland. Most of the group were travelling to Heathrow Airport when a BBC report announced that the first bomb had been discovered and defused. They did not hear the report and arrived unaware that the police were looking for them. Some had already boarded a British European Airways flight to Dublin when officials ordered passengers off the plane.

Dolours Price, Marian Price and Hugh Feeney were due to take a later Aer Lingus flight. When they reached the terminal, Special Branch officers were waiting and asked whether they were flying to Dublin. The three were taken into custody for questioning. The team had prepared no convincing cover story because its plan assumed that its members would be outside the country before any bomb was found. They gave false names, denied knowing one another and answered questions about the bombs with silence. One member of the group had escaped arrest and gone to ground in London; the book records that he was never identified or captured.

The arrests sharpened the question of how much police intelligence had preceded the operation. British authorities later presented the force’s early response as good fortune. Press accounts also suggested that police might have known an attack was coming and that it would involve several bombs. The Price sisters and Hugh Feeney believed an informant had betrayed the mission. Decades later, a retired Special Branch officer said that he had received a tip fourteen hours before the bombs were due to explode. According to his account, the source was a senior member of the Provisionals, and the information identified four bombs and named Gerry Kelly and the Price sisters as members of the bombing team. The advance briefing and the later account of a specific tip together complicate any explanation based on luck alone.

Delays, casualties and public accountability

The force’s response to the Old Bailey bomb became a central point of criticism. Police were still trying to clear the area as the timer approached three o’clock, and a school bus carrying forty-nine children arrived within about fifty yards of the Cortina. The book describes the bomb squad’s efforts to defuse the device as unsuccessful. Two bombs eventually detonated, injuring nearly 250 people. Frederick Milton, a caretaker at Hillgate House beside the Old Bailey, was covered in blood and stayed to help other injured people; he later collapsed and died in hospital.

An autopsy found that Milton’s heart attack had begun before the explosion, so the medical evidence did not support a murder charge. Dolours Price blamed the civilian casualties on the authorities’ slow response to the warning calls. That argument was self-serving, but the police themselves acknowledged that human error in their control room had garbled the message about the Old Bailey bomb and significantly delayed the response. The evidence therefore leaves two judgments in view: the bombing team’s use of powerful explosives created grave danger to civilians, while police communication failures reduced the time available to find the devices and evacuate the public.

Security and the police account

The bombings prompted an extraordinary security presence during the defendants’ trial. Each morning, police cars and motorcycles escorted the defendants to and from court. A daytime parking ban covered the surrounding area, and police marksmen watched from nearby rooftops. The precautions were shaped by the fear of another bombing and by an unrealized republican plan to buy a house across from the prison and tunnel into the cellblock to free the defendants.

The force’s role thus extended from investigating a particular bombing operation to protecting the trial and its surroundings. Its conduct remained entangled with competing accounts of responsibility: the authorities emphasized the police operation and subsequent arrests; critics pointed to the prior warning and the delay at the Old Bailey; and the bombing participants treated the arrests as evidence that an informant had compromised them. The Metropolitan Police of London appears in this episode not as an all-knowing security apparatus, but as a force acting on advance intelligence amid severe logistical pressure, capable of uncovering a bomb and arresting the team while also making errors with consequential effects.