The Birmingham Six: How Six Innocent Men Lost 16 Years to the Birmingham Pub Bombings
Updated: 7 hours ago
At 8.11pm on 21 November 1974, a man with an Irish accent rang a Birmingham newspaper and gave a bomb warning using the code word "Double X". He named the Rotunda and the tax office on New Street. He didn't mention any pubs. Within minutes, bombs tore through the Mulberry Bush, in the base of the Rotunda, and the Tavern in the Town a short walk away. Twenty-one people died and more than 200 were hurt. By the next morning, police had six Irishmen in custody. Not one of them had anything to do with it, and it took 16 years, a disbanded police squad and one very stubborn journalist to prove it.
Quick Answers
Who were the Birmingham Six? Hugh Callaghan, Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker, six Irishmen living in Birmingham.
What were they convicted of? The murder of 21 people in the IRA bombings of the Mulberry Bush and Tavern in the Town pubs on 21 November 1974.
How long were they in prison? Just over 16 years, from November 1974 until 14 March 1991.
Why were they freed? New tests showed police interview notes had been altered after the fact and the forensic evidence used to convict them was unreliable.
Has anyone been convicted of the real bombings? No. A 2019 inquest heard four men named as the bombers, but nobody has ever been charged.
Are any of the Birmingham Six still alive? When Paddy Hill died in December 2024, Gerry Hunter, Johnny Walker and Billy Power were still alive. Richard McIlkenny died in 2006 and Hugh Callaghan in 2023.
The Birmingham Pub Bombings, 21 November 1974
The bombings came during the IRA's mainland campaign of the early 1970s, the same push that brought car bombs to the Old Bailey the year before (the attack that put Dolours and Marian Price behind bars). Birmingham had a big Irish community, and the bombs landed in two of the busiest city-centre pubs on a Thursday night.
There was supposed to be a third. A device left outside a Barclays bank on Hagley Road, about a mile away, failed to go off. The 2019 inquests heard it was later misplaced by police, along with a lot else from that night. Control room recordings were taped over, only three 999 logs survived and CCTV from the Rotunda lobby, which might have shown the bombers, was never even collected.
The city was also short of officers that evening. Police had been pulled out of the centre to watch the funeral procession of James McDade, an IRA man who'd blown himself up a week earlier while planting a bomb at Coventry telephone exchange. That funeral is the thread that dragged six innocent men into the story.
Six Men on the Boat Train
Five of the men were from Belfast and Johnny Walker was from Derry. They'd all lived in Birmingham since the 1960s, worked ordinary jobs and drank in the same pubs. Between them they had 27 children, the eldest 16. Hill, Hunter, Walker, McIlkenny and Power set off that evening planning to catch the 6.55pm boat train from New Street to Heysham, then the ferry to Belfast for the funeral. Hugh Callaghan, at 44 the oldest, saw them off at the station and went home.
They were stopped at Heysham by Special Branch. While they were being questioned, news of the bombings came through. That was enough. Five of them were taken to Morecambe police station and Callaghan was arrested at home in Birmingham the next day.
Beaten Into Confessing
Once they were handed to the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, the men later said, the beatings started. They described being punched, kicked, deprived of sleep and food and threatened over their families. Police records showed no violence at all. Richard McIlkenny's daughter later said her father was almost unrecognisable after his time in custody.
Four of them signed confessions. Billy Power signed in Morecambe, and Callaghan, Walker and McIlkenny signed after being moved to Birmingham. Paddy Hill and Gerry Hunter never signed anything. The confessions that did exist barely agreed with each other. The men gave different numbers of bombs, anywhere from three to seven, and different accounts of where they'd been left. Some described bombs in plastic bags, which the forensic evidence flatly contradicted.
No eyewitness ever put any of the six near either pub. When they were remanded to Winson Green prison, a fellow prisoner later testified that he'd seen them being beaten there too. Photographs taken days later showed their injuries. Nobody, police or prison officer, was ever held to account for any of it.
The Test That Couldn't Tell Explosives From Cigarettes
The other plank of the case was science. Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, ran Griess tests on the men's hands at Morecambe and said Hill and Power had tested positive for nitroglycerine. It sounded damning. It wasn't. By 1991, scientists were telling the Court of Appeal that the same results could have come from handling cigarette packets, and the men had been smoking and playing cards on the train.
Skuse wasn't a one-off problem either. Around the same time, his work helped convict Judith Ward over the M62 coach bombing. She served 17 years before the Court of Appeal found in 1992 that Skuse had held back evidence pointing to her innocence. The Griess and related tests he relied on were prone to contamination and false positives.
The Trial at Lancaster Castle
The trial opened on 9 June 1975 at Lancaster Castle, in front of Mr Justice Bridge. Before the jury got anywhere near the confessions, Bridge held an eight-day trial within a trial on whether they'd been given voluntarily, and found they had. Defence expert Dr Hugh Kenneth Black challenged Skuse's results, but the jury went with the Crown. On 15 August 1975 all six were found guilty of 21 murders and given life.
The atmosphere around the case had been poisonous from day one. Police held a press conference within days of the arrests, and an MP made remarks about the men in the Commons that the barrister Michael O'Connell later called badly prejudicial. Leave to appeal was refused in 1976.
"An Appalling Vista": How Lord Denning Shut the Door
Stuck inside, the six tried a different route. They brought a civil action against the police over the beatings, which would have forced a court to look at the evidence of violence all over again. In 1980 the case reached Lord Denning, the most famous judge in the country, and he struck it out.
His reasoning has been quoted in law schools ever since. If the men won, Denning said, it would mean police had lied, used violence and threats, extracted false confessions and sent innocent men to prison. That was such an "appalling vista" that the action shouldn't be allowed to go ahead. In other words, the possibility that the six were right was the reason not to find out. Mullin later argued Denning seemed more worried about the consequences for the police and the government than about whether the men had been framed.
Chris Mullin Goes Looking for the Real Bombers
Chris Mullin was a left-wing journalist who'd later become a Labour MP. He started digging in the early 1980s and did something no police force had bothered to do: he went looking for the people who actually planted the bombs. He tracked down IRA members in Ireland, interviewed Michael Murray in Dublin and got one of the bombers to admit his part under a promise of confidentiality.
Granada's World in Action ran his findings in 1985, taking apart the forensics and the confessions.
Mullin's book Error of Judgement went further and claimed to know who the real bombers were. In 1990 Granada turned it into a TV drama, Who Bombed Birmingham?, with John Hurt playing Mullin. By then the campaign, founded by Paul May, a housing director at Islington council who did it all unpaid in his spare time, had gone international.
The 1988 Appeal: "The More Convinced This Court Has Become"
Home Secretary Douglas Hurd sent the case back to the Court of Appeal, and in late 1987 a hearing began that ran for six weeks into January 1988, the longest of its kind at the time. Gareth Peirce was the men's solicitor, with Michael Mansfield QC and Lord Gifford arguing for them. The Crown, represented by Igor Judge QC, argued the forensic evidence didn't really matter anyway.
In January 1988 Lord Lane, the Lord Chief Justice, threw the appeals out. He said that the longer the hearing went on, the more certain the court had become that the jury had got it right. It's one of the most notorious judgments any senior British judge ever delivered, and it aged about as well as Denning's.
Freedom, 14 March 1991
What finally broke the case wasn't sympathy, it was paperwork. In August 1989 the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad was disbanded after a run of scandals over fabricated evidence, and Devon and Cornwall Police were brought in to look at the Birmingham investigation. They found the detention records hadn't been kept properly. Then electrostatic tests on the interview notes showed that pages supposedly written down as the men spoke had been written up later and altered.
The Crown gave up defending the convictions. On 14 March 1991 Lord Justices Lloyd, Mustill and Farquharson ruled them "unsafe and unsatisfactory", and that afternoon the six walked out of the Old Bailey to a crowd of supporters. They'd served 96 years between them. Paddy Hill came out shouting at the court behind him, and the image of the six with their fists in the air became one of the defining photographs of the era.
Nobody Paid
Three former West Midlands officers, Superintendent George Reade, Detective Sergeant Colin Morris and Detective Constable Terence Woodwiss, were charged with perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. They never stood trial in any meaningful sense. In October 1993 Mr Justice Garland halted the case because of what he called saturation publicity, and directed not guilty verdicts without hearing any evidence. The Court of Appeal had already said that, on what it had seen, Reade had deceived it.
The Serious Crime Squad's legacy went way beyond Birmingham. Its officers were accused of fabricating confessions in many other cases, and some of those people, like Paul Dandy, later won damages from the force. Hornby, the detective who took Callaghan's confession, retired on health grounds after the squad was broken up, faced no disciplinary action and kept his Queen's Police Medal. It's a pattern with uncomfortable echoes of the Battle of Orgreave, where riot charges against dozens of miners collapsed in 1985 over police statements that looked suspiciously alike.
Who Really Bombed Birmingham?
For the families of the 21, the release of the six was only half an answer. After years of campaigning by the group Justice 4 the 21, led by Julie Hambleton, whose sister Maxine was killed in the Tavern in the Town, new inquests finally ran in Birmingham in 2019 under the former chief coroner Sir Peter Thornton.
They produced the most dramatic moment in the whole story. A convicted former IRA bomber, known only as Witness O, gave evidence and named four men: Seamus McLoughlin, Mick Murray, Michael Hayes and James Francis Gavin. He said the IRA leadership in Dublin had given him permission to do it. McLoughlin, who he said planned the attacks, died in 2014. Murray, said to have made the warning call, died in 1999. On 5 April 2019 the jury ruled that all 21 victims had been unlawfully killed.
West Midlands Police then went after Chris Mullin's 1980s interview notes, which they believed contained a bomber's confession. In March 2022 the Recorder of London, Judge Mark Lucraft, refused, ruling that the public interest didn't override journalistic source protection. In August 2023 the Crown Prosecution Service said it wouldn't charge anyone after a file on one suspect, saying it couldn't prove who made the confession to Mullin.
The fight has carried on. In October 2025 the government told the families there'd be no public inquiry, and that the case could instead go to the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery, the body set up under the Troubles Legacy Act. Birmingham MP Liam Byrne wrote to ministers calling the commission not fit for purpose and backed the families' call for a judge-led statutory inquiry. Justice 4 the 21 say they won't take part in anything less.
What Happened to the Birmingham Six? Are They Still Alive?
In 2001, a decade after their release, the six were awarded compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million. In the early 1990s they'd also won libel damages from The Sun and The Sunday Telegraph. None of it gave back the years, the marriages or the childhoods they'd missed.
Richard McIlkenny died in 2006. Hugh Callaghan settled in east London and became a familiar face at his local church, where his party piece was Danny Boy. He died of a heart attack in May 2023 at 93, having sung for the ward staff shortly before, and a recording of him singing was played at his funeral. Paddy Hill, the angriest and most outspoken of the six, founded the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (MOJO) to help other people who'd been wrongly convicted. He died at home on 30 December 2024, aged 80. Gerry Hunter, Johnny Walker and Billy Power were still alive at the time.
Paul May, the campaigner who'd done more than almost anyone to keep their names in the papers while holding down a full-time council job, died in York in May 2026, aged 74. Billy Power's daughter Breda called him the heart of the campaign. He'd gone on to help free Judith Ward and the Guildford Four as well.
The 21 Who Died
Seven women and 14 men aged between 16 and 56 died in the blasts. They were Michael Beasley, John Rowlands, Stanley Bodman, John Clifford Jones, James Caddick, Neil Marsh, Paul Davies, Maxine Hambleton, Jane Davis, Stephen Whalley, Lynn Bennett, Desmond Reilly, Eugene Reilly, Marilyn Nash, Anne Hayes, Charles Gray, Thomas Chaytor, Pamela Palmer, Maureen Roberts, Trevor Thrupp and James Craig. Desmond and Eugene Reilly were brothers.
Why the Birmingham Six Still Matter
The Birmingham Six weren't a one-off. Within a couple of years of their release, the convictions of the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and Judith Ward had all collapsed too. The Guildford case was linked to the same IRA unit that later murdered Ross McWhirter and was cornered in the Balcombe Street siege. On the day the six were freed, the Home Secretary set up a Royal Commission on Criminal Justice. That led to the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 and the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which opened in 1997 to look at possible miscarriages of justice independently of the courts that made them.
The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which brought in taped interviews, had already made it much harder to fake a confession like the ones that convicted the six. But the case is still the go-to example of how false confessions, shaky forensics and public fury feed off each other, from Joe Arridy in 1930s Colorado to Lindy Chamberlain in Australia. More than 50 years on, the six have their names back. The families of the 21 are still waiting for the truth.
Further Reading
If you want the full story of how the case was cracked, Chris Mullin's Error of Judgement is the book that did it. It's part investigation, part detective story and it names names the police never managed to.
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Sources
ITV News, "Birmingham pub bombings inquests conclude 21 people were unlawfully killed" (2019)
Morning Star, "Beaten up and left to rot in jail: the Birmingham Six"
The Irish Times, "Forensic advances bring chance of new prosecutions for 1970s IRA bombings" (2025)
Alastair Logan, "A sewer runs through it", London Review of Books (1993)
The Irish Post, "CPS to bring no charges after reinvestigation into Birmingham pub bombings" (2023)
Liam Byrne MP, "Birmingham pub bombings: Byrne urges minister to rethink ICRIR referral" (2025)
Tipperary Live, "Member of Birmingham Six sings at his own funeral" (2023)
Newstalk, "Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six has died at 80" (2024)
The Irish Times, "Paul May, who helped free the Birmingham Six, dies aged 74" (2026)
