HUGH CALLAGHAN, ONE OF THE BIRMINGHAM SIX, VICTIMS OF A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE OVER THE IRA PUB BOMBINGS OF 1974 – OBITUARY
Hugh Callaghan, who has died aged 93, was one of the six men jailed in 1975 for the IRA Birmingham pub bombings of November 21 1974 in which 21 people were killed and 182 injured.
It was one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles, and the “Birmingham Six” spent 16 years in jail. But their convictions turned out to be one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British criminal history and in 1991, after a protracted legal battle and a long-running campaign led by the journalist (later Labour MP) Chris Mullin, the six were freed by the Court of Appeal.
In 1991 Michael Ignatieff wrote in The Observer: “Of all the IRA’s dirty victories this is perhaps the bitterest. Their atrocities created a climate of loathing and fear which ended up contaminating British justice itself.”
Hugh Daniel Callaghan was born on March 24 1930 in the mainly Catholic Ardoyne area of Belfast, where he spent an impoverished childhood. Aged 17 he went in search of work to Birmingham where he married Eileen, with whom he had a daughter, and settled down in a small terraced council house, working as a welder in a factory that made lighting. He liked going to the pub and watching Aston Villa.
On the evening of November 21 1974, hundreds of people, many of them young office workers, were enjoying a drink in two busy pubs in the centre of Birmingham – the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern In The Town. At 8.11pm, a man with an Irish accent telephoned the Birmingham Post with a warning, but it was too late. At 8.18pm a bomb exploded in the Mulberry Bush, killing 10 people. Two minutes later another blast at the Tavern In The Town killed 11. The dead were seven women and 14 men, aged between 17 and 51.
Four hours later five men, Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and John Walker – all Irish, all Catholic, all republican sympathisers – were arrested as they waited at Heysham in Lancashire to board the overnight ferry to Belfast.
Callaghan later recalled: “On the day of the bombing, it was my wife’s birthday. I’d gone around to see Richard McIlkenny to pay back £1 and he said he was heading to Ireland for the funeral of James McDade, an IRA bomber who had been killed.
“I’m not a republican, I wasn’t interested in politics. But I had nothing else to do so I went with him to the station to meet the other four who I knew to say hello... After they left I went out for a few more drinks and got home at 11pm.
“The next day when I heard the police had arrested the five I thought they’d want to talk to me. When I got home the police were waiting.” But instead of interviewing him as a witness, the police arrested him and took him into custody.
A few hours earlier William Power had signed a statement implicating himself and five friends, including Callaghan, in the bombings. According to Chris Mullin, this confession was extracted after Power had been subjected to extreme physical and psychological abuse by West Midlands Police. Callaghan, McIlkenny and Walker also signed confessions, after allegedly being subjected to similar assaults. Hill and Hunter never signed confessions, but the police claimed they made verbal admissions, which they both denied.
In an interview in 2014, Callaghan recalled how a policeman “got out a gun and told me to say what happened. Every time I said something they didn’t like they would pull the trigger and it would click and I thought I was going to be shot.”
Knowing that he was, as he put it, “a nervous individual” and afraid of dogs, the police had put Alsatians into his cell and ordered them to attack him, before restraining them at the last minute. “I still have nightmares about it,” he told The Guardian last year. “I was terrified and signed what they wanted me to, thinking the solicitor I was promised would sort it later.”
The trial of the six on charges of murder took place at Lancaster Crown Court in 1975 and lasted 45 days. The evidence against them consisted of the four confessions, evidence from the forensic scientist Frank Skuse, who claimed, “with 99 per cent certainty”, that Hill and Power had handled explosives – and circumstantial evidence indicative of Irish republican sympathies.
All six pleaded not guilty, and the defence challenged the admissibility of the confessions on the grounds that the men had been beaten into making them. Skuse’s findings were refuted in court by Dr Hugh Black, the former HM Chief Inspector of Explosives. None the less the judge, Mr Justice Bridge, allowed the confessions to go before a jury and preferred Skuse’s evidence and testimony to that of Black.
The jury found the six men guilty of murder and on August 15 1975 they were each sentenced to 21 life sentences, the judge declaring the evidence against them to be “overwhelming”.
In prison, they continued to maintain their innocence, but for years efforts by them and a growing band of campaigners to have their case reconsidered got nowhere. In 1976 they were denied leave to appeal. In 1980 the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, threw out a civil action they had brought against West Midlands Police, describing the possible revelation of police perjury and brutality as “such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say: ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”
In 1985 the current affairs programme World in Action challenged the validity of the convictions. Their interviewees included two forensic scientists who threw further cold water on Skuse’s evidence, a former West Midlands policeman who confirmed that the Six had been beaten and threatened in police custody, and Joe Cahill, a former IRA chief of staff, who acknowledged the IRA’s role in the pub bombings.
In 1986 Chris Mullin, in his book Error of Judgement, included interviews with IRA members who claimed to have been involved in the bombings and who had spoken to Mullin on the condition of anonymity. They confirmed that the Birmingham Six had not been involved in the pub bombings or in any other paramilitary activity.
The Home Office referred the conviction to the Court of Appeal in January 1987, but even though Skuse’s evidence had by now been discredited, the convictions were upheld. Lord Lane, the Lord Chief Justice, declared: “The longer this case has gone on, the more convinced this court has become that the verdict of the jury was correct.”
It took another appeal to exonerate them. On March 14 1991 the Court of Appeal quashed their convictions based on police fabrication of evidence, and the six men walked out of the Old Bailey, accompanied by Chris Mullin, their hands aloft.
Callaghan admitted to spending the first few years of his time in prison in a state of astonishment at his wrongful conviction. In those early days, he recalled, “the other prisoners didn’t like you because they knew what you were in for.” He had hot tea and cans of food thrown in his face. Later, however, “word got around that we were innocent, then they were very nice”.
Music helped him through: “I sang in the shower. A warden heard me and asked: ‘Would you join the choir?’ All the inmates took to me after that.” His signature tune, Danny Boy, even brought tears to the eyes of the prison governor.
After his release Callaghan moved to London, where he became involved in Irish community organisations, joined the Irish Pensioners’ Choir and published a memoir, Cruel Fate (1994, with Sally Mulready).
He received almost £1 million in compensation from the Government and fought a successful campaign to have rights to a full pension and benefits, to which the Birmingham Six had not been entitled because they had not paid NI contributions during their time in jail.
On the 40th anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings in 2014 Callaghan paid his respects to the victims at Birmingham Cathedral. “A woman came up beside me,” he told the Sunday People. “She said it was such an awful thing, but there weren’t just 21 victims, there were the six who went to prison for something they didn’t do.
“I didn’t tell her who I was, but it makes me glad people know what happened and that we were innocent.”
After his release, though he remained in touch with his wife Eileen until her death, they no longer lived together. In later years he lived with his partner Adeline Masterson, who survives him with his daughter.
Last year West Midlands Police, who have yet to make progress finding the true culprits, applied for a court order against Chris Mullin to force him to reveal the identity of one of the IRA men he had interviewed for his book on the promise of anonymity. His refusal, on the grounds that protection of sources is vital to journalism, was backed by the court.
Hugh Callaghan, born March 24 1930, died May 27 2023
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