Hyde Park's IRA Car Bomb

London Newspaper Group — CN/WPN 23-07-1982

The aftermath...

By Christopher Long

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Minutes before, in bright sunshine, a troop of the Household Cavalry had moved off towards Buckingham Palace, dressed in the gleaming uniforms that hundreds of tourists were waiting to see at the Changing of the Guard.

Suddenly, horrified tourists, shoppers and people exercising their dogs in Hyde Park heard a deafening explosion, saw a sheet of flame and then, as the smoke cleared, the tangled pile of writhing horses, riders and car wreckage in the middle of the road, halfway between Knightsbridge Barracks and Apsley House.

There was chaos and confusion everywhere as roads around Knightsbridge were cordoned off; police were drafted in from all over London within half an hour. Scares and alerts that further bombs and suspicious vehicles were still around led to still greater confusion as police and soldiers shouted at spectators to stand clear.

At the gates of Knightsbridge Barracks horrified NCOs and men looked shocked and paranoid as they chased away anyone who came near.

"What can I say – what can anyone say!" said one officer as he looked down the tree-lined road to where eight struggling horses were being put out of their misery in the middle of the road.

In Knightsbridge itself there was broken glass from windows four storeys high all over the road. The deputy managed of the Hyde Park Hotel was busy reassuring over-excited American visitors that everything was under control.

"I don't know how this will affect us," he said. "We've got functions on tonight..."

Meanwhile, behind the hotel, firemen were hosing down the blood-stained roads as the last of the casualties (two of them already dead) were rushed to nearby hospitals.

Military police and army experts were already examining the surrounding area as ordinary police kept back the crowd from a huge cordoned-off area.

New alerts of suspect vehicles and the news of another explosion in Regent's Park heightened the tension as camera crews and hundreds of journalists watched police, dressed in overalls, sifting the wreckage of the IRA's car and prepared to remove the dead horses from the road.

"Bastards... bastards," was the universal army comment.

Photograph taken by David Ingham

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By chance I happened to be walking my dog in the area and was on the scene within a few minutes of the explosion as the giant column of sooty smoke was still drifting in the wind. The bomb had been placed in a car parked on the south side of the park's southern carriage drive. It had been triggered deliberately to slaughter or maim the mounted ceremonial guard of the 'Blues & Royals' as it left Knightsbridge Barracks on its way to Buckingham Palace.

As in other almost identical IRA bombings in London during this period, the building opposite the explosion – the headquarters of the National Farmers' Union – was covered in scaffolding. After reporting so many of these IRA bomb attacks in London, it became clear to me that they occurred at or very near places where buildings had scaffolding on them. This was the case in incidents such as Knightsbridge, Harrods, Regent's Park, Chelsea Barracks, etc.

However – and astonishingly – when I contacted Scotland Yards 'bomb squad' and the security services to suggest that there might be a link between bomb attacks and the presence of scaffolding (from which bombers posing as builders could lay cables, have a good view and an easy means of escape), my information was rejected out of hand and disregarded. The IRA's London bomb attacks continued remorselessly throughout the 1980s – killing and maiming hundreds. This need not have been the case.