The Guildford Four: The Innocent People Jailed for the IRA's 1974 Pub Bombings
On the evening of 5 October 1974, a 17-year-old girl named Carole Richardson was at a gig at South Bank Polytechnic in south London. Surrey Police would later say that a little under an hour earlier, she'd been sitting in a Guildford pub with a bomb under her seat. To test whether that was even possible, a police driver took a fast car down the route and did it in 52 minutes, which left no time at all for the rest of the journey. It didn't matter. Richardson and three young men were convicted of the Guildford pub bombings and spent the next 15 years in prison for something the IRA itself kept telling people it had done.
Quick Answers
Who were the Guildford Four? Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson, four young people from Belfast and London.
What were they convicted of? The IRA bombings of the Horse and Groom and Seven Stars pubs in Guildford on 5 October 1974. Hill and Armstrong were also convicted of the Woolwich pub bombing that November.
How long were they in prison? About 15 years. They were released on 19 October 1989.
Why were their convictions quashed? Police notes were found to have been rewritten and evidence pointing to their innocence had been kept from the defence.
Who really did it? An IRA unit later caught after the Balcombe Street siege admitted the Guildford and Woolwich bombings. None of them were ever charged with them.
What about the Maguire Seven? Seven of Conlon's relatives and friends, including his father Giuseppe, were jailed on bogus forensic evidence. Giuseppe died in prison.
Is In the Name of the Father a true story? Yes. It's based on Gerry Conlon's memoir, but it changes some important details, including putting Gerry and his father in the same cell.
The Guildford Pub Bombings: Two Bombs in a Garrison Town
Guildford in 1974 was full of soldiers. There were barracks and training camps all around the town, and the Horse and Groom was a favourite with young recruits on a Saturday night. That was exactly why the IRA picked it. Some time after the pub opened at 5.30pm, a young man and woman sitting together like a courting couple left a time bomb under the bench seat in the main alcove. It held around 4.5kg of nitroglycerine-based explosive, roughly 18 sticks of dynamite, and it went off at about 8.50pm.
Five people died. Four of them were teenagers or barely out of their teens: Private Caroline Slater, 18, and Private Ann Hamilton, 19, of the Women's Royal Army Corps, and Guardsmen William Forsyth, 18, and John Hunter, 17, of the Scots Guards. The fifth, Paul Craig, was a 21-year-old civilian. Sixty-five more were injured. Those details come from the 2022 inquest, which found they were unlawfully killed by a bomb most likely planted by that couple in the alcove.
About half an hour later, a second bomb went off in the Seven Stars. The landlord had already cleared the place, so only he and his wife were hurt. It was five days before the October 1974 general election. A month later, the same IRA unit threw a bomb through the window of the King's Arms in Woolwich, another pub packed with soldiers. Two more people died there.
A Photofit and a Petty Thief From Belfast
Surrey Police set up their own bomb squad and spent weeks getting nowhere. The pressure was enormous. Then a soldier who'd known a young Belfast man named Paul Hill thought Hill looked like one of the photofits, which, as Prospect magazine later pointed out, was actually a picture of a woman. That was the start of the case.
Hill was arrested in Southampton at the end of November 1974. Days earlier, after the Birmingham pub bombings, Parliament had rushed through the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which let police hold suspects for up to seven days without charge. Hill and his friend Gerry Conlon, two small-time thieves who'd been sharing hostels and squats in Kilburn, were among the first people held under it.
Conlon was picked up in Belfast. Paddy Armstrong, a 24-year-old from the Falls Road who spent most of his time in the pub, the bookies or out of his head on drugs, was arrested on 3 December with his English girlfriend, Carole Richardson. The two of them had been planning to hitchhike around Europe and get married.
None of the four was in the IRA. Armstrong and Richardson were squatting with a crowd of hippies in north London.
Seven Days in Custody
What happened over the next week is the part that later court rulings and inquiries tiptoed around. The four said they were questioned in relays, kept awake, punched and slapped, threatened with guns and told their families would be charged if they didn't confess. Hill's relatives were raided too. Surrey Police denied all of it. Years later an independent police report found that 11 Surrey officers had been involved in malpractice.
All four confessed. Armstrong later wrote that he signed just so he could sleep. Hill and Armstrong confessed to Woolwich as well. Their statements were the only evidence. No survivor identified them, no forensic scientist linked them to explosives and nothing bomb-related was found where they lived. The confessions didn't even agree with each other. The four's solicitor, Alastair Logan, counted more than a hundred points where they contradicted one another.
Richardson's alibi was the gig. Three friends told police she'd been with them in London before the concert. They were taken in, slapped and threatened with being thrown off the roof of Guildford police station. Two of them changed their statements and the third withdrew. Conlon had an alibi too. A statement placing him in Kilburn on the night of the bombings, not in Guildford, was buried and the jury never heard about it.
The Maguire Seven
The confessions dragged in more people. Conlon had named his aunt, Annie Maguire, who lived in London. Police raided her home and charged her, her husband, her two teenage sons, her brother and a family friend with handling explosives. Conlon's father, Giuseppe, a sick man from Belfast who'd come over to London to help sort out a lawyer for his son, was arrested at the Maguires' house and charged along with them.
There were no explosives. The case rested on thin-layer chromatography tests on swabs taken from their hands, the same unreliable kind of science used against the Birmingham Six. They were convicted in 1976 and became known as the Maguire Seven. Their convictions weren't quashed until 1991, long after most of them had served their sentences.
The Trial at the Old Bailey
The Guildford Four went on trial at the Old Bailey on 16 September 1975. Nine days in, Commander Roy Habershon of Scotland Yard's Bomb Squad sent the Director of Public Prosecutions a report linking the Guildford and Woolwich bombings to a single IRA active service unit that was still out there bombing London. The four were in custody by then. The report was never shown to the defence.
On 22 October 1975 all four were convicted of murder. The judge, Mr Justice Donaldson, said he regretted that they hadn't been charged with treason, which still carried the death penalty. Conlon got a recommended minimum of 30 years and Armstrong 35. Hill, told he should die in prison, was to serve life until "great age" or infirmity, the longest sentence an English court had ever recommended at the time. Richardson, who'd been 17 at the time of the bombings, was detained at Her Majesty's pleasure.
The IRA Men Who Said "It Was Us"
Six weeks after the trial ended, the real bombers ran out of luck. After a botched attack in Mayfair in December 1975, four members of the IRA unit fled into a flat in Balcombe Street in Marylebone and held a couple hostage for six days. This was the same unit that had shot dead the Guinness World Records co-founder Ross McWhirter on his doorstep less than two weeks earlier.
In custody, the Balcombe Street men started talking about Guildford. Peter Imbert, the Scotland Yard detective who'd earlier interviewed Hill and Richardson and would later run the Metropolitan Police, interviewed one of them, Eddie Butler, who said he'd never heard of Hill or Armstrong. Joe O'Connell said much the same. Scotland Yard didn't tell the Four or their lawyers. Alastair Logan only found out through the prison grapevine. When he visited O'Connell and another senior IRA man, Brendan Dowd, they admitted Guildford and Woolwich and said the Four had nothing to do with either.
When the Balcombe Street men went on trial in 1977, the prosecution simply left Guildford and Woolwich off the charge sheet. Under cross-examination, the government explosives expert Douglas Higgs admitted that he'd altered his statement to remove the forensic links between their other bombs and Guildford and Woolwich, because a Bomb Squad officer had told him to. An official inquiry later found that officer had been acting on the prosecutor's instructions. In court, the IRA men said openly that the Guildford Four were innocent.
The Court of Appeal heard all this in 1977 and still threw the appeal out. Lord Justice Roskill's solution was that the Four and the Balcombe Street men must all have done it together, even though that flatly contradicted the Four's own confessions. Dowd could describe sitting in the exact seat where Armstrong had supposedly been at the same moment. It made no difference.
Fifteen Years Inside
Paul Hill was moved between prisons more than 50 times in 15 years and spent five of them in solitary confinement. Carole Richardson had several nervous breakdowns. Giuseppe Conlon, who had serious lung disease when he was arrested, got steadily worse in prison and died in custody in January 1980, still insisting he and his son were innocent. Gerry Conlon carried the guilt of that for the rest of his life, because his father had only come to England to help him.
Outside, the campaign grew slowly. Cardinal Basil Hume and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, both pushed for the case to be reopened, as did two former Law Lords, Lord Devlin and Lord Scarman. Paul May, the Islington housing director who'd founded the Birmingham Six campaign, worked on Guildford too. Books by the journalists Robert Kee, Grant McKee and Ros Franey picked the confessions apart. The Pogues' song about the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four was banned from British airwaves. Mikhail Gorbachev is even said to have brought the case up with Margaret Thatcher. A 1987 Home Office memo conceded the Four were unlikely to be terrorists, but decided that wasn't enough to send them back to court.
19 October 1989: The Day the Case Collapsed
In January 1989 Home Secretary Douglas Hurd finally referred the case back to the Court of Appeal, and Avon and Somerset Police were brought in to go through the original Surrey files. In May 1989 they found what Surrey officers had sworn under oath didn't exist. There were two earlier, amended drafts of Armstrong's supposedly word-for-word interview record, notes of two interviews with Hill that officers had denied ever happened and two sets of custody records, the second one rewritten to fit the police version of events.
The Crown's barrister, Roy Amlot QC, told the court the prosecution could no longer stand behind the convictions. On 19 October 1989 the Court of Appeal quashed them. Conlon walked out of the front of the Old Bailey to a waiting crowd, and Armstrong and Richardson were freed the same day. Conlon stood in front of the cameras and said that if you were Irish and arrested for terrorism, you don't stand a chance. Lord Devlin called it probably the most important ruling of the century.
Hill didn't go home that day. He'd also been convicted, on another confession, of murdering a former soldier named Brian Shaw in Belfast, so he was taken to Northern Ireland and released on bail. That conviction was quashed in 1994.
Nobody Was Punished
The government announced a judicial inquiry under Sir John May the same day. It sat largely behind closed doors and, in Prospect's verdict, smoothed over the worst of it. Three former Surrey detectives, among them Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Style, were charged with perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. At their trial in 1993 they didn't give evidence, and a jury cleared them by majority verdict. The judge was Sir William Macpherson, who a few years later led the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence that found the Met was institutionally racist.
The paperwork still hasn't all come out. Around 700 pages of official files were due to be released in January 2020, but the Home Office blocked them at the last minute. In 2017, lawyers for Conlon's sister Ann McKernan asked the Attorney General for a fresh criminal investigation after the writer Richard O'Rawe found that a forensic expert had been asked to redraft a 1975 statement to remove any reference to Woolwich, a bombing that happened while the Four were already in police cells.
On 9 February 2005, Tony Blair recorded a televised apology to the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, saying he was very sorry they'd suffered "such an ordeal and such an injustice". Gerry Conlon's mother, Sarah, who'd campaigned for her husband and son for decades, lived just long enough to hear it.
In the Name of the Father: How True Is the Film?
Most people who know the Guildford Four know them from the 1993 film In the Name of the Father, directed by Jim Sheridan and based on Conlon's memoir Proved Innocent. Daniel Day-Lewis played Conlon, Pete Postlethwaite played Giuseppe and Emma Thompson played the solicitor Gareth Peirce. It picked up seven Oscar nominations.
The broad story is true. The four were beaten into confessing, Giuseppe really was jailed as one of the Maguire Seven and really did die in prison, and the convictions did collapse over hidden evidence. But the film takes big liberties. Gerry and Giuseppe never shared a cell, which is the emotional heart of the whole film. Peirce was a solicitor, not the barrister standing up in court, and the dramatic courtroom showdown is invented. In reality the case fell apart after Avon and Somerset detectives found the rewritten Surrey notes, and the Crown simply told the court it couldn't defend the convictions any more.
What Happened to the Guildford Four After Their Release?
Conlon struggled badly with post-traumatic stress and drugs after his release, then threw himself into campaigning against miscarriages of justice around the world, including meeting former Guantanamo Bay detainees. He died of cancer at his home in Belfast in June 2014, aged 60.
Paddy Armstrong was given £75,000 in interim compensation and, by his own account, drank and gambled through a lot of it before getting sober. He settled in Clontarf in Dublin with his wife Caroline and their two children, and his 2017 memoir Life After Life, written with Mary Elaine Tynan, is one of the best first-hand accounts of the case. He and Carole Richardson stayed close friends after their release, though they decided not to pick the romance back up. Richardson died of cancer in her mid-fifties.
Paul Hill married Courtney Kennedy, a daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, in the 1990s. They had a daughter and later divorced. A play built from his prison letters, Your Ever Loving, won best play at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017.
Still Unsolved, 50 Years On
Nobody has ever been convicted of the Guildford or Woolwich bombings. Dowd and O'Connell admitted them as far back as 1976, but they were already serving long sentences for other attacks and were eventually freed under the peace process. The 2022 inquest, run by Surrey coroner Richard Travers, only looked at how the victims died, not at how the police behaved.
There has been one real twist. In August 2023, during a review of the case, scientists developed a DNA profile from the timer of one of the Guildford bombs. It only became public in January 2025, when UTV reported it, and it's still not known whether the profile matches anyone or whether that person is alive. Surrey Police said it wouldn't take its own investigation further because of the Troubles Legacy Act, and the case passed to the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery, which confirmed it was investigating. In August 2025 the commission's deputy, Keith Surtees, said new forensic testing on 1970s bombing cases had produced "highly significant leads" and that he expected arrests in some of them.
Conlon's sister Bridie Brennan has been pursuing a civil case against several state bodies, and a 2024 TG4 documentary for the 50th anniversary included interviews with Gerry that had never been seen before. The families of the five who died in the Horse and Groom are still waiting to find out who sat on that bench.
Why the Guildford Four Still Matter
Guildford, Birmingham and the Maguire Seven together forced one of the biggest shake-ups British criminal justice has ever had: a Royal Commission, the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 and the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Taped interviews under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 had already made it much harder to manufacture a confession out of a frightened, exhausted 17-year-old.
It's also a reminder of how close the case came to being worse. Donaldson's wish that he could have tried them for treason was a wish that he could have hanged them, barely a decade after Britain stopped executing people like Ruth Ellis. If capital punishment had still been on the books in 1975, the Guildford Four probably wouldn't have lived long enough to be cleared. Like Joe Arridy, they'd have been exonerated in their graves.
Further Reading
Paddy Armstrong's memoir Life After Life is the best place to start, an honest and often bleakly funny account of the arrest, the 15 years inside and what freedom actually felt like. For Gerry Conlon's side, his own book Proved Innocent is the one the film was based on.
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Sources
The Irish World, "Guildford pub bomb planted by 'courting couple', coroner rules" (2022)
The Irish Post, "Paddy Armstrong on his Guildford Four memoir" (2017)
Alastair Logan, "A sewer runs through it", London Review of Books (1993)
HuffPost UK, "What happened to Guildford Four's Gerry Conlon should haunt us forever" (2014)
MOJO Scotland, "32 years on from the exoneration of the Guildford Four" (2021)
The Irish Post, "13 facts about Paul Hill and the Guildford Four"
The Irish Times, "Paul May, who helped free the Birmingham Six, dies aged 74" (2026)
The Christian Science Monitor, "Landmark ruling stirs Britain" (1989)
The Irish News, "Calls for new Guildford Four investigation" (2017)
CAIN Archive, Tony Blair's apology to the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven (2005)
IrishCentral, "Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four dies in Belfast at the age of 60" (2014)
ITV News UTV, "DNA discovered on IRA Guildford bomb timer" (2025)
The Irish News, "DNA profile developed during Guildford bomb investigation" (2025)
The Irish Times, "Forensic advances bring chance of new prosecutions for 1970s IRA bombings" (2025)
