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Ross McWhirter and the Balcombe Street gang

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

IRA explosion in Campden Hill Square, Holland Park

On the 22nd October 1975, the very same day that the Guildford Four were wrongly convicted of a pub-bombing, a man telephoned the large Holland Park home of the Conservative MP Hugh Fraser and his wife, the author Antonia Fraser, and asked what time the MP left in the morning.

The cook, who had answered the telephone, innocently told the caller that it was usually around nine. During that night someone planted a bomb underneath one of the wheels of Fraser’s Jaguar XJ6 that always stood outside his house in Campden Hill Square.

The next morning Professor Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, a neighbour of the Frasers and an internationally renowned cancer specialist, was out walking his two dogs. He noticed a strange device underneath Fraser’s car and bent down to investigate. He accidentally activated the bomb’s ‘anti-handler’ micro-switch and, along with his two poodles Benny and Emmy Lou, he was killed instantly.

Sir Hugh Fraser and Antonia Fraser in 1959

Had Jonathan Aitken not called at 8.45am that morning, delaying the departure of Fraser and his guest Caroline Kennedy (she was in London attending an art appreciation course at Sotheby’s), they would have died instead.

The world's press on the morning of the explosion at Campden Hill Square

This bomb was only one of 40 explosions set off in the capital by the Provisional IRA in a 14 month bombing campaign over 1974-5. It left 35 people dead and many more injured. The IRA Active Service Unit that was responsible for the Professor’s death in Campden Hill Square was actually responsible for the bombings for which the Guildford Four were infamously tried and wrongly convicted.

Edward Butler, Hugh Doherty, Martin O’Connell and Harry Duggan were all in their early twenties and all from the Irish Republic (which meant that they were more difficult to trace by the British police).

After the Campden Hill Square mistake the ASU reverted their attention to prominent ‘ruling class’ restaurants such as the Trattoria Fiore in Mount Street, W1 which they bombed on the 30th October, injuring 17 people, and Walton’s restaurant in Walton Street in Chelsea where they killed two diners.

The bloody aftermath of the Mount Street bomb, 29th October 1975

Police at the scene of the IRA Walton Street bomb

At this stage the inhabitants of London, if not panicking, were starting to think twice about going for something to eat in the West End and the restaurants were becoming virtually empty. At a news conference the right-wing Ross McWhirter, one of the twins who created the Guinness Book of Records, offered £50,000 for information leading to the arrest of the terrorists.

Not long after on the 27th of November Duggan and Doherty staked out McWhirter’s house and shot him with an Astra Magnum revolver when he answered the door expecting his wife. One of the gunmen said:

“He thought it was the Wild West. He put a price on our head. The man thought he was living in Texas”

Ross and Norris McWhirter in 1953, a year before the first Guinness book of Records was published.

Ross McWhirter in the year he was murdered.

Margaret Thatcher and Airey Neave arriving at Ross McWhirter's memorial service

By now the IRA ASU were acting as if it WAS the Wild West. They were seemingly able to drive round bombing and shooting at ‘ruling class’ restaurants and hotels at will.

However on the 6th December 1975 their luck ran out. The gang had stolen a blue Cortina and were spotted by an observant policeman who noticed that they were driving unnaturally slowly. Following them, he incredulously watched them brazenly open fire at the Mount Street restaurant they had attacked only a few weeks earlier.

Along with fellow officers who had heard his radio call, the policeman followed the four members of the ASU, now on foot after abandoning the car, to Balcombe Street near Marylebone Station. On the way, the gang and the police were now exchanging gunfire at each other with shocked members of the public diving out of the way.

Meanwhile at number 22b Balcombe Street, John and Sheila Matthews were watching an episode of Kojak both presuming, unsurprisingly, that the gun shots they could hear were coming from the television. Suddenly the gunmen burst in through the door and took the couple hostage, unfortunately Telly Savalas was nowhere to be found, and an epic six day siege had started.

The seige was a carefully directed Metropolitan Police operation and they were determined not to create ‘martyrs’ of the gang. On the sixth day, with the gang becoming hungrier and hungrier, some sausages, brussels sprouts, potatoes and tinned peaches and cream were lowered down to the flat by the police and with 25 minutes the whole gang surrendered.

The Balcombe Street siege December 1975

The IRA ASU eventually received 47 life sentences between them and were subsequently given the suitably Wild West style moniker of the Balcombe Street gang. One of the members read out a statement in court:

“As volunteers in the IRA we have fought to free our oppressed nation from its bondage to British imperialism of which this court is an integral

part.”

The Balcombe Street gang were in the end responsible, in a ferocious burst of IRA activity during five months in 1975, for fifteen murders. The no-warning attacks included the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings which together killed seven utterly innocent people.

Relatively soon after the IRA bomb had accidentally killed her neighbour in Campden Hill Square, Antonia Fraser left her husband for Harold Pinter, eventually marrying him in 1980. The couple lived in the same house in Campden Hill Square until Pinter died in 2008. Her former husband, Sir Hugh, died of lung cancer in 1984.

The murdered professor has a plaque in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, the inscription of which reads:

“Gordon Hamilton-Fairley DM FRCP, first professor of medical oncology, 1930-75. Killed by a terrorist bomb. It matters not how a man dies but how he lives.”

In 1998, a fortnight after the Good Friday Agreement, the Balcombe Street gang made a dramatic appearance on the platform of a special Sinn Fein conference in Dublin (they were now in prison in Ireland but the Irish Government gave them a special day-release for the conference). There was ‘stamping feet, wild applause and triumphant cheering’ while the four men stood grinning with clenched fists in the air. At the conference Gerry Adams described them as ‘our Nelson Mandela’s'! They had come home as heroes. Hmm.

Survivors of the Mount Street restaurant bombing 29th October 1975

Telly Savalas – Rubber Bands and Bits of String

Average White Band – Pick Up the Pieces

Tags: bombs, Gerry Adams, guns, Harold Pinter, IRA, Irish, terrorism
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Camden Town, Verlaine and Rimbaud, a toilet, Sid Sods Off and the McAlpine Fusiliers

Monday, December 31st, 2007

‘Those were wild days you know’

The Electric Ballroom opened in 1978 and, amongst others, Public Enemy, Joy Division, Madness, U2, The Smiths, The Pogues and Iggy Pop have all been on the famous Camden stage. However the place, initially called The Buffalo, has long been part of the Camden nightlife and originally opened in the mid-thirties catering for the large numbers of Irish immigrants who lived locally. It was a rough and ready sort of place with different tribes of drunken Irishman fighting every weekend and after the police were called out one too many times the ballroom eventually closed down.

At the end of 1937 The Buffalo was saved by a red-haired Irish man, a 20 year old contractor and amateur wrestler from Kerry called Bill Fuller. It was still a tough place – “We’d get all the Connemara lads in, and they were all well used to fighting, those were wild days you know”. In 1941 a bomb fell on Camden Town Tube station that also blew away the back of The Buffalo as well as the adjacent terrace, Fuller took the chance to extend the ballroom so it could now hold 2000 people.

The Big Bands all played there, the most famous of which was led by Joe Loss, one of whose singers was named Ross McManus – the father of Elvis Costello. McManus was the man who wrote and sang the song The Secret Lemonade Drinker in the famous R Whites Lemonade commercial which featured a man in striped pyjamas creeping downstairs to raid the fridge for lemonade. His yet to be famous teenage son sang backing vocals.

Jim’s not playing

In February 1964, to great excitement to the locals, the Country and Western star Jim Reeves was booked to play at The Buffalo. It’s difficult to believe now, but at the time and as far as the local Irish Catholic community was concerned, if there had been a popularity contest Jim Reeves would have come somewhere between the Pope and John F Kennedy. Reeves had but one request on his rider – the piano must be in tune. Unfortunately the piano wasn’t in tune, and the star’s manager turned to the promoter and said ‘Jim’s not playing’. By this time the ballroom was utterly packed with expectant punters and the manager of the ballroom and his staff soon realised what was likely to happen. They took the not inconsiderable amount of money from the cash box, hid it in a manhole behind the building and to a man did a runner. It didn’t take long for the audience to know what was going on and they began to riot and smash up the place. The police soon arrived, literally riding into the ballroom on horseback to disperse the crowd.

Jim Reeves died in a plane crash just five months later and never had the chance to return to Camden. Luckily, he lived a lot in his time:

Sid Sods Off

In July 1978 Bill Fuller, along with the former tour manager of Thin Lizzy, Frank Murray, changed the old two-levelled ballroom into a rock venue, renaming it to The Electric Ballroom. Sid Vicious formed a band called the Vicious White Kids which included the original Pistol’s bassist Glen Matlock (the musician he ironically replaced in the Pistols) and played their one and only gig just two weeks after the renamed ballroom opened. The gig was entitled ‘Sid Sods Off’ – the point being to raise his and Nancy Spungen’s air fare to the US. Shane MacGowan remembered the concert – “It was a great band and the place was packed out with a really hip audience. There were a lot of transactions going down – people joining groups, buying drugs, fucking each other in toilets, you know, the usual stuff.” A fortnight later, Sid and Nancy, as promised, did sod off, of course never to return.

You Really Look Like A Dick!

For me, my glory is but an ‘humble ephemeral absinthe’

Drunk on the sly, with fear of treason

And if I drink no longer, it is for good reason!

Paul Verlaine

Camden Town is world-renowned for its music scene, but two former Camden inhabitants had a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle that most of the musicians who live or work in the London borough these days can only dream about, perhaps even Amy Winehouse, and the two men lived there over 130 years ago.

There is a small plaque, placed anonymously in the 1950s, on the wall of number 8 Royal College Street in Camden – it marks where the French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud lived, somewhat rumbustiously, during the year 1873.

Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 and from the age of 6 was brought up solely by his mother. He ran away from home consistently during his childhood and eventually left home to join the Paris Commune in 1871. He had already decided that he was to be an anarchist and a poet, and had started drinking very heavily. He sent poems to the eminent poets of the time, one of whom was the symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, and due to the ridiculously prodigious quality of Rimbaud’s writing and troubled home-life he invited him to stay at his family house in Paris.

Verlaine, who was ten years older than Rimbaud and was until then happily married with a small baby boy, promptly fell in love with the sullen blue-eyed adolescent prodigy and he left his wife. The two lovers scandalised literary Paris with their general licentious behaviour usually involving absinthe or drug-taking of some sort. They eventually ran away, initially to Brussels but then travelling to the huge and haphazard city of London, losing themselves amongst the hundreds of thousands of refugees and where they revelled in the city’s strange language:

Dans le brouillard rose et jaune et sale des sohos

Avec des indeeds et des all rights et des haos

Le feu du ciel sur cette ville de la Bible

In the pink and yellow and dirty fog of the Sohos

With ‘indeeds’ and ‘alrights’ and ‘hos’

O Heaven’s fire fall on this city of the Bible

Both were at the height of their poetical powers and were writing poetry that remains central to 19th century French literature, but they were desperately poor and advertised in the Daily Telegraph, offering lessons in French, Latin and Literature and promising ‘perfection’ and ‘finesse’. However the beginning of the end of their stormy, infamous relationship took place while living in Camden and summed up their life together being equally comic and grotesque.

Verlaine had gone to the market in Camden for lunch and brought back two kippers and some oil to cook them in. He was holding the kippers out in front of him at arm’s length and Rimbaud sitting on the window ledge of the room they rented at the top of the house caught site of his older lover and burst out laughing. When he knew Verlaine was in earshot he shouted out ‘Ce que tu as l’air con!’ (You really look like a dick!). Verlaine, with all the dignity he could muster, walked quietly into the house, packed his case and while not saying a word walked out of the door. Rimbaud tried, but failed, to get him to see the funny side of his comment, but Verlaine hailed a cab and subsequently caught a ferry from St Katherine’s Dock to Belgium.

A week later they were briefly reunited in Brussels, but after a drunken night full of arguments and fighting. Their fights often involved one or both of them drawing knives or razors, however this time Verlaine went further and shot Rimbaud through the wrist. Verlaine was arrested and subsequently imprisoned, officially for assault, although realistically it was for sodomy. The two lovers never met again.

Sanitary Accommodation

George Bernard Shaw was a councillor in the borough of Camden between 1897 and 1906 and championed the cause and energetically campaigned, for “the unmentionable question of sanitary accommodation” for women. He also thought that the normal charge of one penny “an absolutely prohibitive charge for a poor woman.” He was criticised by other councillors who thought that women who so far ‘forgot their sex’ did not deserve toilets. Despite this eventually Shaw got his way and in 1910, at the junction of Parkway and Camden High Street, he was more than responsible for the first ever purposely built free public convenience for women in the United Kingdom.

Building on an angry hangover

One of the best songs written and recorded by Madness, but less well-known than many, is One Better Day which has the opening line Arlington House, address: no fixed abode. The song was written about a huge homeless shelter, one of a chain of hostels, built in 1905 by the Victorian philanthropist Lord Rowton. Rowton wanted to provide clean and healthy accommodation for working men, who in those days were forced to stay in filthy and flea-ridden lodging houses or often, of course, nowhere at all.

George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London written in 1936 wrote about Arlington House, “The best lodging houses are the Rowton Houses, where the charge is a shilling

, for which you get a cubicle to yourself, and the use of excellent bathrooms. You can also pay half a crown for a special, which is practically hotel accommodation. The Rowton Houses are splendid buildings, and the only objection to them is the strict discipline, with rules against cooking, card playing, etc.”

Other writers who have in their time stayed at Arlington House are the Irish poets Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh who wrote in his autobiography The Green Fool – ‘Many Irish boys made Rowton House, Camden Town, first stop from Mayo…the soft voices of Mayo and Galway sounding in that gaunt impersonal place fell like warm rain on the arid patches of my imagination. These boys were true peasants. They walked with an awkward gait and were shy. To me they looked up as to a learned man and asked me questions I couldn’t answer.’

The area around Camden has had a large Irish community since the 1840s when waves of Irish emigration occurred mainly because of the devastating famines in Ireland, but also because of the workforce needed to build the network of railways spreading across Britain at an incredible rate. After the Second World War another generation of Irish immigrants arrived to help re-build ‘on an angry hangover’ swathes of London destroyed by the German bombs. Thousands of men mostly from rural close-knit communities descended on London working ‘on the lump’ for Murphy, John Laing, Wimpey and McAlpine. Many of these hard-working, hard-drinking Irish navvies, especially as they grew older, became destitute and alcoholic and often both, ended up living at Arlington House. It still exists as a hostel today with a third of its inhabitants of Irish extraction – victims of displacement and poverty amongst what has become one of the flashier and trendier parts of London.