Metropolitan Police

The Metropolitan Police is presented in the account of the 1973 IRA bombings in London through the pressures of anticipating an attack, identifying its devices, and responding to warnings amid a rapidly unfolding emergency. Its officers had been briefed that an IRA operation was impending, and police activity helped uncover the bombers’ preparations; yet advance notice did not mean that the bombs’ locations were known. After the explosions, an admitted control-room error garbled the warning about the Old Bailey device and significantly delayed the response. The force’s role is therefore marked by both active detection and consequential limits in coordination.

Advance Notice and Detection

The account places Metropolitan Police officers in the effort to respond to intelligence that an IRA attack was coming. The officers had received a briefing about an impending operation, but they did not have a clear indication of the bombs’ approximate locations. That distinction shaped the difficulty of the task: warning that an attack might occur offered a reason to watch for suspicious activity, not a map of where explosives had been planted.

The operation also presented practical constraints. The police needed to use as few vehicles as possible, a requirement that affected how officers moved through the city while looking for the bombers and their devices. During that activity, officers noticed an anomaly, including a thin white cord. The detail belongs to an account in which the warning and the search did not simply resolve into immediate knowledge: officers were looking for indications of an attack while still lacking precise information about its location.

The Bomb Warnings and Emergency Response

As the bomb operation came to light, people began evacuating. The warnings sent reporters rushing to find the named cars, while emergency conditions in central London made the location and identification of the vehicles consequential. The book places Metropolitan Police officers among those dealing with an attack whose targets and devices were not all straightforward to locate in advance.

The Old Bailey warning exposed a serious weakness in the response. Police later admitted that human error in the control room had garbled the message about the bomb there, significantly delaying action. This was not a case in which the force had received no notice at all: the account says officers had prior notice that an attack was coming. Rather, warning information had to be converted into usable directions under pressure, and a failure in that process hindered the response to a particular bomb.

Responsibility and the Limits of Interpretation

The aftermath involved disputes over what the bombers intended and who bore responsibility for the civilian casualties. Dolours Price blamed the authorities for moving too slowly after the telephone warnings, arguing that they had failed to find and defuse the bombs or alert civilians promptly. The police admission about the garbled Old Bailey message gives that criticism a factual basis in one specific instance, though it does not establish that every warning or response failed in the same way.

A British prosecutor later speculated that the IRA mission was intended to kill people and that the warning call had been made only after the bombing team was arrested at the airport. The account treats that interpretation as contested rather than settled. Brendan Hughes later described the London mission as intended to be symbolic and ideally bloodless, while the account emphasizes that powerful explosives left little margin for error and that the plan produced devastating consequences. The police response is thus situated within a broader contest over intention and blame: a demonstrable communications failure mattered, but it does not by itself settle what the bombers intended or explain the whole course of the emergency.

Significance in the Account

The Metropolitan Police’s appearance is concentrated on the practical gap between intelligence and prevention. Officers could know an IRA attack was impending, use limited vehicles while searching, and notice suspicious evidence without possessing the information needed to locate every device. Once warnings were transmitted, the control-room error showed how the handling of information could itself shape the danger to civilians.

The account does not offer a general history of the Metropolitan Police or a complete institutional analysis of its work. It presents the force through a specific London operation and its aftermath: anticipation, search, evacuation, and a documented failure in the relay of one bomb warning. That focused portrayal keeps two conclusions in view at once: police action formed part of the effort to find and respond to the bombs, while an acknowledged mistake delayed a response when time mattered.