9

1

A Funeral in County Clare

‘This is something deep in their hearts; inherent in their blood. I tell them what is right but I cannot force them on to that path. I pray to God that it will end.’

father michael keating

, parish priest, Feakle, County Clare

If Harry Duggan had really been dead, Father Keating should have officiated at his funeral. Harry was a local boy, approaching his 21st birthday when, in the autumn of 1973, Harry Duggan senior was informed by the police that his son had been killed. Details were sketchy, but it seemed there had been some sort of explosion across the border; a Provisional IRA bomb had detonated prematurely; Harry had been involved; Harry was dead.

The funeral was said to be so private that neither Father Keating nor Harry’s parents were invited. An unmarked grave apparently appeared overnight in Feakle Cemetery, and it was put about that Duggan had died on active IRA service, 10that the burial had been kept secret to deprive the British of a small propaganda victory and to preserve the morale of other volunteers.

Perhaps there had been an explosion, and some young Provo had been blown to unrecognisable bits on top of his own bomb – but it was not Harry Duggan. Duggan – very much alive – protested years later* that this was no cunning plan by the IRA to give him a new identity, but a mistake by the police, which he immediately sought to correct by getting in touch with his father and a member of his local community. ‘Hardly the actions of somebody trying to fake his own death,’ he pointed out.

Whatever the truth of it, the ‘faked death’ story was widely reported, finding its way into articles and books – including the first edition of this one – as well as being taken out of the local community by informers and passed on to the security forces. In consequence, whether by accident or design, it provided its subject with a new persona: now known as Michael Wilson, volunteer Harry Duggan was ready to go on active service again.

The IRA Army Council was assembling a crack team for a job on the British mainland, chosen by one of the least known but most important Provisionals of the 1970s, Brian Keenan. At 32, Keenan was the Dublin-based quartermaster of the entire Provisional IRA effort. In 1973 he was entrusted with a new role by Dublin command – that of director of operations for mainland bombing and, in particular, with forming the Provisional IRA’s next London Active Service Unit (ASU). This was not going to repeat the mistakes of the Price sisters fiasco earlier that year, when several members of a bombing 11team, including Marian and Dolours Price, had been arrested at Heathrow awaiting take-off for Ireland just as three car bombs were primed to explode in central London. To have the bombers attempting to leave Britain on the day of the bombings, albeit before the bombs were due to explode, had been incompetent planning. The sealing of ports and airports was always the first reaction to any suspected terrorist activity on the mainland.

Keenan’s plan was to put together a team with the patience and skill to integrate themselves fully into living in London full-time, like secret agents behind enemy lines; not a one-off hit-and-run team but an undercover unit which could sustain a long-term bombing campaign and survive long spells of inactivity. Except in dire emergencies, they would have no contact with the established Irish Republican movement in London – a prime target for Special Branch monitoring. They would operate on their own initiative as far as possible to minimise contact with Dublin and the risk of being uncovered by informers. They would select their own targets and times, working to a predetermined strategy of hitting military, establishment and economic institutions. Details of fresh targets, as well as supplies and funds, would be brought into England by couriers. Keenan dispatched a former British paratrooper, Peter McMullen, for the initial military reconnaissance.

The men chosen for the ASU would have to have minimal ‘form’ and would come preferably from the South, from the Republic. So many young men in Belfast and Londonderry were routinely picked up and ‘screened’ by the security forces regarding their and their friends’ movements that volunteers from the North represented an unacceptable risk. This also suited the Belfast commanders, who had no desire to offer up their best volunteers for a Dublin plan when they were 12stretched to the limit by internment and the courts. In 1973 and 1974 the authorities had charged 2,700 people from the North with terrorist offences. Nevertheless, the preference for using men from the South was not exclusive; Keenan himself was a Northerner.

He wanted men of commando quality and his trawl concentrated on the south-west triangle of counties Clare, Limerick and Kerry, where the IRA’s roots ran back to the beginning of the century. In his view, the most reliable men came from families with an unbroken tradition of Republican action and sympathy; men with cross-border experience who were unknown to the British security forces. A shortlist of 20 was drawn up and vetted by the Army Council. Initial training was borrowed from the British Army. The men were dropped in open countryside and instructed to survive by living rough for three days. A more selective explosives course followed.

The principal members of Keenan’s new ASU all had experience in laying mines and placing bombs across the border in the ‘bandit country’ of South Armagh. Each agreed to an undercover assignment in London, with an option of pulling out after three months.

They were Harry Duggan, now 21, of Feakle; Martin Joseph ‘Joe’ O’Connell, 21, of Kilkee, County Clare; Edward Butler, 24, of Castleconnell, County Limerick; Brendan Dowd, 24, of Tralee, County Kerry; and Hugh Doherty, 22, originally from the Irish Catholic estate of Toryglen in Glasgow, but brought up principally in County Donegal. They became the hard core of the London ASU, but there were more to be added to their number. Two young and trusted women were lined up as the main couriers. Graine Cooling, 28, of Dublin was appointed co-ordinator. She was valuable to the unit as she had lived in Harlow, Essex, from 131970–74 and worked for the architects’ department at the Harlow Development Corporation. They would operate a classical cell structure. As few people as possible, even in the highest echelons of the IRA, would know who they were. They were destined to become the most devastatingly successful team the IRA has ever assembled.

Harry Duggan’s background was typical: his upbringing with two brothers and a sister in a stone farmworker’s cottage in the backwoods of County Clare; remembered in his village as quiet, law-abiding and baby-faced. He was six feet tall, athletically built and good at sport and carpentry, following his father as an apprentice in the Scariff Chipboard kitchen furniture factory. Sometimes he shared a flat with Joseph O’Connell in Lower Market Street in the county town of Ennis. He knew Eddie Butler too. Then he went on a trip to Dublin and apparently never went home again. His mother, Bridget, who had separated from Harry Duggan senior, had not seen him since 1970.

The transition from country boy to effective fighter was fast. One exploit soon after his ‘death’ marked him down as being of the required calibre for Brian Keenan’s ASU: he was part of the team who pulled off one of the world’s most lucrative robberies.

On 26 April 1974 four armed men and a woman rang the front doorbell of Russborough House in Blessington, County Wicklow, the stately home of 71-year-old Sir Alfred Beit, heir to a South African gold and diamond fortune, a former Conservative MP and, more famously, the owner of one of the world’s most valuable art collections. The IRA burst into the hall and within five minutes had rounded up the Beits and five members of staff, dragged them into the library at gunpoint and tied them up with nylon stockings. They 14then deactivated the alarm system and proceeded to cut 19 Old Master paintings from their frames with a screwdriver. The paintings included three Rubens, two Gainsboroughs, a Goya, a Vermeer and a Velázquez. Within a further five minutes the gang had escaped in a silver-grey Ford Cortina. The paintings, valued at between £8 million and £10 million, were obviously impossible to sell, and three days later came a written ransom demand for £500,000 and for the return of the Price sisters and two of their colleagues from English prisons, where they were on hunger strike, to Northern Ireland. The demand was ignored, and ten days after the robbery the haul was recovered at a rented cottage in Glandore, County Cork. Harry Duggan was never associated with the crime.

Duggan went to war against the British with a sense of injustice partly instinctive and partly inculcated. He was now set on an irreversible course of multiple killings that could lead only and surely to years in a British prison, a sacrifice for the cause. He must have known it and embraced it. His colleagues were much the same.

Joseph O’Connell’s parents were County Clare farmers and the family lived in a little blue-and-white bungalow outside Kilkee, overlooking the Atlantic near the mouth of the River Shannon. The area is a stronghold of Gaelic-speaking inhabitants and old-guard IRA sympathisers and active Republicanism was well established in the family. Joseph was a ready learner. He had no difficulty in getting a job as a radio operator and electronics trainee at Marconi in Cork.

Joe was of medium height and build, and invariably well dressed; his face was markedly thin and sharp. He was remembered locally for his quiet, almost shy manner combined with a thoughtful intelligence and ready wit. He remained a 15practising Catholic, and at one stage was thought to have a vocation for the priesthood. Widely read, totally committed and clearly possessing leadership potential, he was the explosives expert for the London mission, under the assumed identity of John O’Brien.

Eddie Butler, one of four brothers from Castleconnell, a prized salmon-fishing haunt on the east bank of the Shannon, was the only one with a criminal record. As a youth, he had been caught daubing anti-British and pro-Republican graffiti on the roads near his home in County Limerick. He was never chased up to pay the fine. Butler settled down after that – there were bigger jobs to be done – and joined the Provisionals in 1972. He was tough and burly, the last man the IRA would expect to crack under police interrogation. He was, however, frightened of flying. Butler was the dependable back-up man, whose job would regularly entail providing covering fire with a Sten gun on the unit’s missions.

Hugh Doherty, born in Glasgow, was ostensibly the odd man out, but his Irish roots stood out as much as his red hair and beard. His family, like many others, had migrated from the Irish Republic to Scotland to look for work after the Second World War, but every year the Dohertys returned to Donegal for the summer holidays and Hugh eventually settled there with his elder brother. He was the altar boy who left school at 15, became an itinerant building-site labourer and then a Provo volunteer.

The acknowledged first boss of the unit was Brendan Dowd, an imposing six-footer. He was the nerveless leader-by-example. He was brought up the youngest of a family of seven brothers and seven sisters (six of whom died) in a smallholder’s cottage at Raheeny, near the riverside town of Tralee on the Dingle Peninsula. His father, a retired forestry 16worker, was a member of Sinn Féin, and his mother was equally committed.

En route to enlisting with the Provisionals, he became a crane driver and motor mechanic, a line of work that led him to travel frequently to England. His expertise with vehicles would later be adapted to serve an additional skill – stealing cars – but his principal job was to establish the London ASU and, once that was operating effectively, to set up further ASUs elsewhere on the mainland.

Dowd and O’Connell were the first to arrive, crossing from Shannon to Heathrow in early August 1974, ostensibly looking for work. Once in London, they headed for Fulham, where there were enough Irish residents not to make them conspicuous but not so many as to constitute an obvious community like that in Kilburn, where Irish gregariousness and police interest could put them at risk. They rented a twin bedsit flat at 21 Waldemar Avenue, close to Fulham Road, where they were joined by ‘English Joe’ Gilhooley, who had already been operating on the mainland since at least March. Selected as another member of Brian Keenan’s chosen team, Gilhooley, born in 1951 of Irish parents, had grown up in Moss Side, Manchester, settled in Dublin and adopted Irish citizenship.

The £10 weekly rent on the flat was paid with scrupulous punctuality. They were polite to the neighbours but never stopped to encourage conversations on the doorstep or in the hallway. They left and returned at regular hours, as if going to work. They were seen to be smartly but casually dressed. The first of a number of London safe houses was thus quietly established.

* in An Phoblacht, Republican News, 1 December 1988

17

2

On Active Service

‘The British Government and the British people must realise that because of the terrible war they wage in Ireland they will suffer the consequences.’

dáithí ó conaill

, IRA Chief of Staff, ITV, 1974

The IRA rationale for bombing Britain is, of course, rooted in history that long pre-dates the formation of the IRA.

In 1867 a group of Fenians planted a bomb at Clerkenwell Prison in London in an unsuccessful attempt to spring a colleague. It killed 12 people and moved Ireland to the top of the British political agenda of the day, thus giving birth to the Republican notion that one bomb in Britain is worth 100 bombs in Belfast. Both the truth and the fallacy of the argument hold today. A bomb on ‘England’s sod’ has always commanded overwhelmingly greater press and public reaction than any explosion in Ireland, either north or south of 18the border. The corollary has also been vehement anti-Irish emotion, with stiff anti-terrorist legislation and a redoubled political will set against concessions in the face of violence.

Although the IRA has, at regular intervals, brought the war to Britain, in the late twentieth century this didn’t occur until well into the Troubles. In 1972 the Official IRA bombed the military garrison at Aldershot in a claimed reprisal for the Catholic deaths on Derry’s Bloody Sunday. The bomb killed a Roman Catholic chaplain, five cleaning women and a gardener – a catastrophic outcome which prompted the Officials to order a ceasefire for an indefinite period.

By now, the Provisional IRA had taken over the military side of the campaign, considering the Officials to have reneged on the true principles of 32-county Republicanism and to have failed to protect the Belfast Catholic ghettos against the waves of Protestant attacks in 1969. The split was formalised in 1970 and the Provisionals’ first mainland bombings followed in 1972 with the Price sisters’ car bombs in Whitehall and the Old Bailey.

In 1973 and 1974 a number of one-off attacks took place: 40 schoolchildren were injured and a woman killed by a blast at the Tower of London (the standing instruction to avoid ‘innocent’ victims was interpreted loosely throughout the history of the mainland campaigns).

Peter McMullen, who had deserted from the 1st Battalion of the British Army’s Parachute Regiment three days before Bloody Sunday, had meanwhile linked up with Joseph Gilhooley. On 25 March 1974, the two men walked through the front gates of Claro Barracks in Yorkshire, a base of the Royal Engineers, and planted a time bomb which injured a woman canteen worker. The following month, on 28 April, their flat in Bootle was raided by police, who discovered 19forensic links with the Claro Barracks bomb. Gilhooley’s fingerprints were identified in the flat, together with a sketch-map of Bruneval Barracks in Aldershot, almost certainly drawn by McMullen. This information was duly passed to Hampshire Police and the relevant military authorities in Aldershot in June – four months before the Guildford bombings. Somewhat surprisingly, it was decided not to raise the alert state from ‘Bikini Black’ in Aldershot or the surrounding military establishments.* The men themselves had melted away, but in August Gilhooley resurfaced in London at the heart of the ASU.

These bombings coincided with a spate of mainland letter-bomb attacks, involving another man whom Keenan would attach to the London ASU – William (Liam) Joseph Quinn. Quinn had been born and brought up in the Irish American district of Sunset in San Francisco – an American citizen. But by 1970 what he saw on television news from Belfast spurred him into active Republicanism. In 1971 he quit his job with the US Mail and left for Ireland: the letter bombs of 1974 were his induction into active service for the Provisional IRA. Quinn’s fingerprints were on devices sent to three of the numerous ‘establishment’ British mainland targets.

Frightening as the flurry of letter-bomb attacks was, it was the M62 coach bomb that proved that the Provisionals were now able to place highly proficient bombers in England. During the 1974 general-election campaign, reconnaissance 20had established from where and when troop-carrying coaches left a Manchester bus depot for Catterick Camp in Yorkshire. As the soldiers’ belongings were loaded into the luggage hold, a time bomb was slipped in alongside. High on the Pennines between Huddersfield and Bradford it ripped the coach apart, killing two children, their mother and nine soldiers. The two main perpetrators got away and have never been caught. Judith Ward, a flatmate in their safe house, was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment for her role in the attack. She was to serve 18 years before being released in 1992, following a unanimous ruling by the Court of Appeal that her conviction was ‘a grave miscarriage of justice’.

All this was a grim foretaste of the campaign to be waged by the new ASU now settling in to Fulham. Brendan Dowd, the leader, and Joe O’Connell, the explosives expert, began to list their targets, make their first discreet recces and assemble their lethal equipment.

From the beginning it was apparent that they intended to bomb and shoot their way through as much of the British legal, political and military establishment as possible. They obtained the Army List, the Civil Service Year Book, Who’s Who, Whitaker’s Almanack and lists of senior policemen, stipendiary magistrates and high sheriffs.

Potential targets in London ranged from the luxury department store Fortnum & Mason, Cartier, Harley Street and various streets in Knightsbridge to the International Telephone Exchange, a major telex exchange for City dealers, Walthamstow reservoir and Hackney Downs pumping station. O’Connell made a sketch plan of the environs of New Scotland Yard.

They accumulated railway timetables, a set of Liverpool and London telephone directories, stolen from post offices and 21libraries, and enough maps to fill a British Airways holdall: street maps of London, Liverpool, Bristol and Bath and the Medway towns, and bigger motoring atlases of Great Britain. Their reading matter was often austere: Freedom: The Wolfe Tone Way, Technology of Repression: Lessons from Ireland and The Anarchist’s Cook Book, which did at least promise in its foreword to provide a witty guide to bomb manufacture.

Harry Duggan, the youngest, and Eddie Butler, perhaps the toughest, arrived on 10 October 1974 to take a second bedsit on the top floor of the same Waldemar Avenue house. Social life was necessarily spartan. The team drank occasionally and sparingly at the Durrell Arms round the corner in Fulham Road. Hugh Doherty, who arrived in late 1974, joined an Irish social club in Camden Town – a dangerous move by the unit’s rigorous standards. The only evidence of incipient sexuality was Harry Duggan’s visit to a Soho strip club (enabling him to confirm to his colleagues that the management did not search the clientele) and a spoof reply to a Time Out lonely-hearts advertisement, filled out by the rest on behalf of Doherty but never posted.

The female couriers began their runs from Dublin, once every two months, usually carrying fresh targeting suggestions and £1,000 in cash for living expenses. The route used for guns, ammunition and explosives is less clear. In 1974 the Provisionals had supporters installed in ferries and airlines and among baggage-handling staff at points of entry to Britain. There were stories of explosives being smuggled in the door panels of cars, but the most common method was still by fishing boat, with secret landings on the Lancashire coast, or in containers through the port of Liverpool. In Fulham, the gelignite was wrapped in sawdust and wood shavings, placed in suitcases or under floorboards, and intermittently turned 22to prevent ‘weeping’ and the onset of ‘NG head’, the searing headache caused by proximity to exposed nitroglycerine.

The unit also did their own shopping. Coach bolts for inclusion in anti-personnel shrapnel bombs were picked up at hardware stores. For use in delayed-detonation devices – time bombs – Smith’s pocket watches were bought in quantity at branches of Comet and Woolworth. Thus equipped, the unit chose its first target.

* Army security section report dated 7 June 1974. (Had the alert state been raised, it is possible security measures would have been introduced in and around Aldershot, which might have made it more difficult for the IRA to penetrate the military pubs in the vicinity of Aldershot and nearby Guildford.)

23

3

Preparations for a Bombing

‘I was in charge of the operation.’

brendan dowd

, 26 October 1976

The car was a Ford Escort. Dowd signed his name clearly: ‘Martin Moffitt’. The woman from the rental agency, Swan National, checked his driving licence and added the time and date: 17.30, 21 September 1974. She signed her own name, ‘Liz’, with a small circle over the ‘i’. Dowd needed no instruction about the car; he was used to Escorts. He swung out into the Saturday traffic and headed west from Victoria back to Fulham. It would be useful for Joe O’Connell to come on the recce to Guildford tonight with him and the other guy. Joe was good, but inexperienced in England, having arrived from Dublin only a month before. They would all three go, Dowd decided; two bombs, two pubs – one to enter each and Joe to observe.

They had been given the names of several suitable pubs in Guildford. The first, the Star, had no soldiers and they left at once. The Seven Stars was better. Then, finding themselves 24in North Street, they spotted the Horse & Groom. Glancing around from the doorway, Dowd took in a collection of tables set in alcoves to the left and a bar to the right, a jukebox, dim lighting. The place was already crowded with soldiers. The three stood near the bar and had a drink. Dowd made a mental note that it would be necessary to arrive here early to ensure getting a seat. They would have to do another recce on a quieter night. Dowd was a meticulous planner.

Returning to the Seven Stars, they found that the disco was now packed with people. Most of them were soldiers; it was the haircuts that gave them away. Again, the three Irishmen stood at the bar and watched the drinkers and the dancers. These were the right pubs, military pubs, Dowd thought. There would be no warning.

At 2.30 p.m. on Friday 4 October, ‘Martin Moffitt’ presented himself once more at the Swan National office next to Victoria Coach Station. This time he hired a white Hillman Avenger, RAE 211M, arranging to keep it over the weekend, though in the event he retained it for almost a week.

The bombs were made at the flat in Waldemar Avenue, Fulham, the next morning; there were six pounds of explosive – 12 sticks of gelignite, Frangex – in each. Dowd and O’Connell made the two bombs. The third man made the timers, using Smith’s Combat pocket watches. O’Connell explained later how this was done: first he removed the glass of the watch and snipped off the second hand, leaving nothing but a stump. At the ten o’clock position he stuck a piece of tape onto the glass of the watch and made a hole towards the centre so that the hour hand would pass underneath it, across the hole. Then he replaced the glass onto the watch mechanism. Removing an inch of plastic coating from a piece of wire, he doubled the end back and inserted it through the 25hole he had made in the glass and taped it in place. The other end of the wire was connected to a four-and-a-half-volt bell battery with two terminals, via an electrical detonator which was inserted into the centre of the sticks of gelignite. As the hour hand touched the wire, the circuit would be completed and the bomb would explode.*

In the late afternoon, the team was ready to set out. The bombs were to be carried into the pubs by two young women who now arrived from north London. Each carried two bags of similar design: one bag to convey the bomb into the pub, while the other, hidden under her coat, would be produced afterwards so that she appeared to carry out what she had brought in. They were handbags, about 12 inches long and seven inches deep; one pair were imitation-leather shoulder bags with a flap and a fastener (one brown, the other black); the second pair were identical to each other, dark cloth with wooden handles which closed together. The five young people climbed into the Avenger and headed south for the A3. Dowd, as usual, was driving. He had dressed unobtrusively, in a grey-flecked sports jacket and black trousers, and was clean-shaven, with his dark hair cut fairly short. He was to forget what the women were wearing; the important thing was not to attract attention.

In Guildford, he parked the car in a multi-storey car park tucked into a hollow behind the shops and flanked on one side by a cliff. It was not yet dusk when they arrived, though rain clouds reflected a fading, greyish light over the city. They sat in the car park, set the wire of the timer to the battery and the detonator. The bombs were placed into the two handbags with the battery and the watch packed on top.

26They discussed who should enter which pub. Dowd sent O’Connell with one of the women and the third man into the Seven Stars; then he and the second woman set out for the Horse & Groom.

It was still early when they entered the bar. Dowd was pleased with his timing: the Irish couple could mingle unobserved with the gathering crowd, but there were still empty seats in the dim recesses of the bar. Dowd ordered lager. They sat on a bench seat in an alcove with their backs against the gable-end wall, and surveyed their fellow customers. Many of them were Saturday-afternoon shoppers waiting for buses home, Dowd guessed; he had noted the bus stop outside the pub door. A few Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) recruits started to arrive and, as time passed, an increasing number of young soldiers. Dowd’s choice was possibly more clever and more deadly than he knew. With the cheapest beer in town, the Horse & Groom was a favourite among young recruits from the Army bases at Pirbright and Aldershot. After an initial month confined to barracks, a Saturday night at the Horse & Groom or the Seven Stars disco was often the first taste of freedom for those servicemen and women, many of whom were no more than 17 years old.

The woman with Dowd slipped her handbag under the seat. They sat over it for long enough to have three drinks. There wasn’t a great deal to say. Witnesses saw them kiss each other; police were later to call them the ‘courting couple’. Dowd estimated their time in the pub at an hour or more.

O’Connell and the others were quicker. They had planned to leave their bomb under a table in the disco, but the only suitable table was occupied, so instead they found seats in a corner of the bar, to the left of the door as they went in. The woman put her bag on the floor and the man pushed it with his 27foot under the bench on which they were sitting. O’Connell noticed the barman watching them closely. Some Guardsmen came and sat beside them. One asked them a question about the time of buses to Aldershot.

After two drinks, the three left the pub and walked back to the car park. It was 15 minutes before Dowd and his companion reappeared, but they had allowed plenty of time. They reached Fulham, by O’Connell’s estimation, at about 8.15, and had a drink at the Durrell Arms. As the time drew towards nine o’clock, the hour they had set for the detonation of the Guildford time bombs, they left the pub. Dowd and O’Connell drove the women home. They switched on the car radio to listen for the news.

* Part of O’Connell’s description has deliberately been omitted here.

28

4

Explosion

‘You do appreciate that in the manufacture of devices there is something known as modus operandi; that you can see between devices which are made by the same man, subtle techniques of assembly which show up time after time …’

donald lidstone

, forensic scientist, Old Bailey, February 1977

There was no warning.

The hour hand of the Smith’s Combat pocket watch approached 8.50 p.m. and touched the bare wire in the timing device. The nitroglycerine-based explosive erupted from the bag beneath the bench seat in an alcove of the Horse & Groom in Guildford.

It exploded with pulverising force. A phenomenon known as ‘gas wash’ hurled the tiniest particles – dust, grit, scraps of paper – from the point of detonation at a rate of two feet per millisecond to scour surrounding surfaces with the combined effects of a sandblaster and a shotgun.

29Those who heard it described the sound as a ‘dull thud’, a ‘large woomph’, a ‘buzzing’ and a ‘muffled roar’. There was a dazzling flash of blue light, then blackness as everyone in the pub was engulfed by a wave of intense heat.

A passing motorcyclist was blown off his machine. A woman police constable [WPC] in a nearby Panda car radioed, ‘Priority! Priority!’ Special Constable Malcolm Keith stumbled into the Horse & Groom. He shone his torch on to a pile of people bleeding in a hole in the floor. He swung one woman to safety and grabbed at someone’s leg. It came away in his hand and he