The 1973 trial of the London bombing defendants at Winchester Castle brought Dolours Price, Marian Price, and eight other captured defendants before a jury in an improvised courtroom. It ended in convictions for the remaining defendants and long prison sentences, but the sentencing also transformed the dock into a public political arena: after months of refusing to discuss their IRA membership, the defendants declared themselves republican volunteers and prisoners of war.

Setting and Stakes

The proceedings began in autumn 1973, after the London bombing had damaged the Old Bailey. The courthouse remained under repair, the government wanted the case expedited, and trying defendants accused of seeking to destroy the Old Bailey inside that same building risked appearing prejudicial. The trial was therefore transferred to the Great Hall of Winchester Castle, a thirteenth-century chamber whose medieval stone, marble columns, and stained glass gave the proceedings a setting unlike an ordinary modern courtroom.

The hall’s history sharpened that contrast. Sir Walter Raleigh had been convicted of treason there in 1603 for plotting against King James I. An enormous oak replica of the surface of King Arthur’s round table hung on one wall, its bands of green radiating from a Tudor Rose. In this old seat of judgment, the prosecution sought to establish the defendants’ part in a contemporary bombing campaign. The ten defendants faced charges of conspiring to cause an explosion likely to endanger life.

Michael Mansfield agreed to represent the Price sisters despite the political hostility surrounding the case. He had been injured when the bomb exploded and his Triumph was ripped apart, yet he accepted the brief and was curious to meet the women accused. They sat on plastic chairs with their knees drawn up and spoke to him about abuses against Catholics, internment, Bloody Sunday, and the loyalist attack at Burntollet Bridge. Mansfield, who considered himself a radical, saw that they had chosen a life more exposed to danger than his own legal vocation. His personal proximity to the bombing did not prevent him from defending its accused perpetrators.

Evidence and the Fracture in the Defence

The defendants mostly denied the charges. Nineteen-year-old William McLarnon pleaded guilty on the first day; the others maintained their innocence. Dolours Price said she had come to London the day before the bombing for a short holiday with Marian and Hugh Feeney. She explained that she had used the name Una Devlin because her republican family background brought unwanted attention from the authorities, and giving a false name had become almost instinctive.

The courtroom performance was at odds with the gravity of the allegations. The sisters appeared lively and confident, and laughed when the prosecution displayed a photograph of Mansfield’s wrecked car. Mansfield reminded them that he might have been inside it. Their composure did not remove the pressure of the evidence. At the airport, Dolours had been stopped with a black canvas shopping bag containing, among other things, a Brian Friel play programme, makeup, two screwdrivers, and a spiral-bound notebook. Its surviving pages included religious reflections and calorie lists, but other pages had been torn out. A forensic witness showed the jury indentations left on the blank pages: they formed a bomb-timing diagram. Mansfield, who had previously challenged handwriting evidence successfully, could not blunt the force of this exhibit.

A more consequential fracture came from Roisin McNearney, the youngest member of the team. At first she repeated the others’ account that she was merely visiting London. During police questioning, however, she said that she supported a united Ireland but opposed violence, and feared that disclosing what she knew would bring a bullet. She told investigators she had joined the IRA six months earlier and described her part in the operation, while presenting herself as a minor figure at its edge. Although she confessed and cooperated, she pleaded not guilty. The others did not learn until the trial began that she had given the police a detailed account.

Verdict and Political Defiance

The ten-week trial presented McNearney’s cooperation as a concealed breach within the group, but it did not immediately reveal its consequences to the defendants. On the day of the verdict, security at the makeshift courthouse was unusually conspicuous: entrants were searched, fifteen prison officers accompanied the defendants, detectives sat behind the jury, and the doors were bolted. Mansfield thought the arrangements fostered an atmosphere of guilt. The public gallery, crowded with Irish supporters, watched as the jury delivered its decisions.

Judge Shaw first announced McNearney’s acquittal. He addressed her as she stood in a white shawl and pink blouse, expressing the hope that she had learned not to become involved in murderous enterprises and warning that he could not know what dangers might await her outside court. The defendants responded with a funeral march: they hummed Handel’s “The Dead March” from Saul as McNearney was led away. Hugh Feeney threw a coin after her and called it blood money. McNearney fled the hall in tears. The scene made the group’s judgment of her betrayal audible and public, even as the court released her.

The remaining defendants were convicted. Judge Shaw imposed the maximum so-called life sentence, which in practice meant twenty years for five of the bombers. He gave Dolours, Marian, and Hugh Feeney thirty years because of their leadership roles. Dolours called the sentence a death sentence. Shaw then reduced the three sentences to twenty years, but the defendants objected loudly enough that he ordered them to be quiet. The Price sisters refused.

Their silence about IRA membership ended only after the sentences had been passed. The defendants began speaking at once, turning from legal defence to political declaration while friends and relatives applauded from the gallery. Marian announced that she stood before the court as an IRA volunteer and considered herself a prisoner of war; supporters called for the Provisionals and shouted that there would be no surrender. Judge Shaw insisted that the dock was a court of law, not a political arena. By then, his attempt to define the meaning of the room had lost control of the moment.

Memory and Later Reassessment

The trial’s importance did not end with the verdict. Its courtroom disclosures, denials, and divided loyalties became part of a larger struggle over who could speak about the conflict and whose account would be believed. Years later, the children of Jean McConville recalled that she had been abducted in early December 1972, after being questioned and beaten. A police log reviewed by Nuala O’Loan recorded a woman identified as Mary McConville, apparently Jean, found wandering in West Belfast after being warned to stop giving information to the military. The log dated that episode to 29 November, complicating both the family’s chronology and Brendan Hughes’s later account. The discrepancy illustrates why recollections and official records could not simply be made to fit a single, settled story.

The same tension reappeared in oral-history disputes. Dolours Price did not mention Jean McConville in her recorded conversations with Anthony McIntyre for the Belfast Project, but separate interviews Ed Moloney conducted with her included a detailed discussion of the disappearance. In one exchange, Price said that she and others had been called back to Dundalk after McConville had been held for several days. A local unit had dug a grave, she said, but its members did not want to shoot her, perhaps because she was a woman. These later accounts were not evidence presented at the Winchester trial; they show how its unresolved questions continued to circulate through testimony and retrospective investigation.

The book’s wider account places the trial within a post-conflict contest over public memory. It describes Sinn Féin’s leadership as maintaining a coherent account of republican armed struggle and peace, while critics such as McIntyre regarded that discipline as a monopoly over memory. A later assessment of paramilitary cohesion, by contrast, suggested that continuing hierarchies could restrain members and help prevent a return to violence. Those interpretations do not settle the truth of the trial’s disputed claims. They echo the conflict already visible in Winchester: a court sought to classify acts and assign sentences, while the defendants and their supporters insisted that the same proceedings must also be read as a political struggle.