Birmingham pub bombings: Broadcasting legends recall night of terror

To this day, no-one has been rightfully brought to justice for the Birmingham Pub Bombings and campaigners are calling for a public inquiry.

You can hear more about this in the new series from BBC Sounds, In Detail: The Pub Bombings.

OWEN: It seems incredible to me that 50 years after it happened, we’re still talking about the Birmingham pub bombings. Something that happened when I was early in my broadcasting career. Every time there’s a new development you think perhaps we’re getting somewhere. And then at the end of it, you feel perhaps we aren’t. I just really feel for the campaigners – they must go through such agonies. It’s dominated their lives since 1974.

MITCHELL: I think the stories I’ve heard, people that were there, but not badly injured, were affected more psychologically than people like me were. And somebody said to me, that’s because I was in hospital and so I had a lot, a lot of attention.

I did meet with one man who said he was he wasn’t that injured, he walked out, he didn’t even go to hospital. He said he went home, he never told his wife that he was actually there. In all the years after, he never told his wife how he felt. Another lady got in touch who said she and her husband, were actually just walking past [one of the pubs].

And she said he was such a gentleman, such a quiet man, but she said he started drinking and it totally changed him.

BUERK: It still sticks in my craw that nobody has faced justice for doing the most appalling thing that I can imagine anybody ever doing.

OWEN: As someone who was there at the time, I would like to know. I would like some sort of closure from a journalistic point of view. I think it’d be really good to know and to see the faces of the people who actually did it, if they’re still alive.

These extracts were taken from interviews given to the new BBC podcast ‘The Pub Bombings’, available here.