“When Donaldson speaks to us it’s like I’m under water and his voice is miles away. Patrick Armstrong. Life. His eyes are fixed on me the way a cat looks at a mouse trapped under his paw. This is where most judges stop, but he doesn’t stop. He goes on. Life with a formal recommendation of not less than 35 years… I do not mean by this recommendation to give you any reason for hoping that after 35 years you will necessarily be released.”
Thus Patrick Armstrong describes the moment he was sentenced for the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings. He was just 25 years old and entirely innocent.
In October 1974 the IRA detonated bombs in two public houses in Guildford, killing five people (four of them soldiers) and injuring 65 others. A month later another bomb was thrown through the window of a public house in Woolwich, killing two and injuring 28 others. In so doing the bombers lit a long fuse that ultimately detonated under the entire British criminal justice system.
Three months after the bombings, three young Irishmen and a 17-year-old English girl were arrested and after several days in the custody of the Surrey police they confessed to responsibility for the bombings. They would become known as the Guildford Four. Their confessions – unrecorded and unwitnessed – were the only evidence against them. Protests that the confessions had been extracted by violence and intimidation were brushed aside; likewise the evidence of alibi witnesses. They received some of the longest sentences in British criminal history.
The men – Patrick Armstrong, Gerry Conlon and Paul Hill – came from the Falls Road area of Belfast. Like many others of their generation, they had fled to London to escape the Troubles and in search of work. The teenager, Carole Richardson, was Armstrong’s girlfriend. Armstrong, Conlon and Richardson were unlikely IRA bombers. They lived dissolute lives – in a squat in Kilburn, drinking, gambling, taking drugs and occasionally shoplifting.
No sooner had they been convicted than the case against them began to unravel. In December 1975, four members of an IRA unit that had terrorised London for months were captured in what became known as the siege of Balcombe Street. They immediately owned up to the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. At this point alarm bells ought to have rung. Instead the authorities resorted to a cover-up. News of the admissions was suppressed. The long list of charges against the Balcombe Street men was edited to omit any reference to Guildford and Woolwich, even though they were prepared to admit responsibility and indeed able to describe what they had done in such detail that it wasn’t possible to pretend that they hadn’t been involved. The forensic scientists were persuaded to rewrite their evidence – and were caught red-handed in open court.
The new script was so preposterous that only appeal court judges of the old school could have fallen for it. Indeed, such was the ingenuity employed by the crown and its agents to explain away the inexplicable, that it is hard to believe that all concerned didn’t know what was going on.
It wasn’t until many years later that the vast edifice of lies on which the case was built came tumbling down. Early drafts of the forged confessions were discovered in an official archive and alibi statements that had never previously been disclosed came to light. In October 1989, in a blaze of publicity, the Guildford Four were suddenly released. It was the beginning of an avalanche. Next came the Birmingham Six, then Judith Ward. Annie Maguire and her family, who had been falsely accused of making the Guilford and Woolwich bombs, were also exonerated.
Life After Life is Paddy Armstrong’s account of the nightmare that engulfed his life. It is an extraordinary, terrifying, gripping story. Armstrong, as he would be the first to admit, is not the most articulate or literate of men and could never have written a book like this. Instead he has told his story to the Irish journalist Mary-Elaine Tynan, and what a brilliant job she has done.
Told in the first person, she painstakingly reconstructs Armstrong’s life, growing up in the Falls Road amid the chaos of the Troubles, his time as a wastrel in London, the devastating impact of his long imprisonment, his enduring love for Carole Richardson, and finally the shock of being suddenly catapulted back into the world, entirely unprepared to cope with life outside.
I am familiar with just about all the considerable body of memoirs arising from the miscarriages of justice of the 1970s, but I can say without equivocation that this is the best. Beautifully written. If it were a work of fiction, it would be worthy of the Man Booker shortlist.
• Chris Mullin is the author of Error of Judgement: The Truth About the Birmingham Bombings. He has recently published a memoir, Hinterland. Life After Life is published by Gill Books (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
