IRA bombings in London

Under 17 November 1939 chronologies record that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was blamed for bombs that had exploded in London. Lists of incidents in this campaign record four explosions at business premises in London in mid-November and two bombs that were found and defused, but place them under 18 November; these may well be the same events, dated either by the explosion or by the press report. No one was killed, and in the wartime press they were a minor item. They belonged, however, to a campaign that the IRA had been waging in England since January 1939 and which, once war with Germany had broken out, ceased to be for the British merely a police matter. For behind the Irishmen planting bombs in England the shadow of German intelligence was beginning to loom.

The IRA and its “declaration of war” on England

The IRA, which had fought for Irish independence in 1919–1921, split after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The treaty gave Ireland dominion status and left the six counties of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. The opponents of the treaty lost the civil war of 1922–1923, but some of them never laid down their arms and, under the old name of the IRA, continued to regard themselves as the army of the only legitimate Irish Republic. When Éamon de Valera, himself a former opponent of the treaty, took power in Dublin in 1932, the organisation lost many members to constitutional politics, and in 1936 it was banned in Ireland. Its most radical wing concluded that the unification of the island could be won neither in Dublin nor in Belfast, but only in England.

In April 1938 Seán Russell became the IRA’s chief of staff. At his request Seamus O’Donovan, formerly the organisation’s explosives expert, drew up a plan for a sabotage campaign in England, called the S-Plan. Its targets were to be power stations, gasworks, waterworks, railway lines, canals, bridges, the post, banks and shops – not people. The attacks were meant to paralyse public life and force London to withdraw from Northern Ireland.

On 12 January 1939 the IRA Army Council sent the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, an ultimatum. It demanded the withdrawal of all British armed forces from Ireland and gave four days for a reply. No reply came, and on 15 January a proclamation was posted up in Ireland in which the IRA, in the name of the “Government of the Irish Republic”, called on England to leave the island. The next day, 16 January, five bombs exploded in London and three in Manchester, where one man was killed.

The S-Plan campaign

Over the following months bombs went off in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Coventry. On 4 February two bombs hidden in suitcases in left-luggage offices damaged the Underground stations at Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square. At the end of March Hammersmith Bridge in London was damaged. In May and June incendiary and gas bombs were planted in cinemas, hotels and post boxes, and in June explosions wrecked several London bank branches. Most of the devices were crude, many failed to go off, and the police quickly rounded up those responsible, who included even teenagers.

On 24 July the Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, introduced in the House of Commons the Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Bill. He said that since January there had been 127 attacks, 57 in London and 70 in the provinces, that one man had been killed and 55 people injured, and that 66 offenders had already been convicted. He added that, according to certain information, the campaign was being “closely watched and actively stimulated by foreign organisations”. He did not say which, but everyone understood that he meant German ones. Two days later, on 26 July, bombs exploded in the left-luggage offices at King’s Cross and Victoria stations; at King’s Cross one man was killed and more than a dozen people were injured. The bill was rushed through and came into force on 28 July. It gave the Home Secretary the power to expel from Great Britain persons suspected of links with the IRA, to prohibit them from entering and to require them to register with the police.

The bloodiest attack came a week before the war. On the afternoon of 25 August 1939, in the centre of Coventry, on the crowded street of Broadgate, a bomb left in the carrier basket of a bicycle exploded. Five people were killed, among them a fifteen-year-old boy, and about seventy were injured. According to later republican accounts the bomb was meant to go off by a police station, not among passers-by. The attack provoked a wave of hostility towards the Irish in England. A few days later Britain declared war on Germany, and the Coventry affair vanished from the front pages.

Bombs in wartime

The war did not stop the IRA. Russell, who had been detained in Detroit in June 1939 during a propaganda tour of the United States, argued that “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity”, in keeping with the old slogan of Irish nationalists. But the campaign was weakening. Expulsions under the new act, arrests and wartime port controls cut off the supply of explosives from Ireland, and the men on the spot were ever less well prepared.

The attacks of mid-November show this weakness. In London bombs went off at business premises; on 24 November explosions damaged two police boxes and two telephone kiosks; and on 28 November there were two explosions in Southampton. On 30 November the Post Office stated in the House of Commons that repairing the telephones and kiosks damaged by the IRA had so far cost about £550. On 1 December the sixteen-year-old Brendan Behan, the future writer, was arrested in Liverpool with explosives; he later described his experience of a British reformatory in his book Borstal Boy.

In December five people accused of the Coventry bombing stood trial in Birmingham. Two of them, Peter Barnes and James McCormick, were sentenced to death, although neither had planted the bomb himself. Despite appeals from the Irish government and protests throughout Ireland, both were hanged in Birmingham prison on 7 February 1940. In retaliation for the refusal of a reprieve the IRA planted bombs in mailbags at Euston station and in Birmingham, and in February and March 1940 several more devices went off in London, one of which, in Oxford Street, seriously injured seven people. In the spring of 1940 the campaign petered out. According to the tallies, the campaign as a whole saw some 300 explosions and acts of sabotage, in which 10 people were killed and 96 injured.

The IRA, Dublin and Germany

The campaign also struck at Ireland. De Valera’s government, which had declared its neutrality in the war, regarded the IRA as a threat to the state: its activities might give the British or the Germans a pretext for intervention. Already in 1939 the Offences against the State Act had been passed, allowing internment without trial. On 23 December 1939 an IRA unit raided the Magazine Fort ammunition depot in Dublin’s Phoenix Park and carried off more than a million rounds, most of which were soon recovered. The response was new emergency powers and the internment of hundreds of IRA members in the Curragh camp. During the war several of its members were executed in Ireland, and several died on hunger strike.

The British fears of which Hoare had spoken had some foundation, though less than was believed. In 1939 Seamus O’Donovan travelled to Germany several times and held talks with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris’s Abwehr about supplies of arms and radio sets. German intelligence was interested in the IRA as a tool against Britain, but the campaign of attacks on civilian targets in England irritated it rather than pleased it; in February 1940 the Abwehr passed O’Donovan a request that the IRA strike at military rather than civilian targets. In May 1940 a German agent, Hermann Görtz, was dropped by parachute into Ireland and went into hiding with O’Donovan. Russell made his way from America to Germany, and in August 1940 was sailing back to Ireland aboard a U-boat, but died on the way. British counter-intelligence (MI5) later concluded that it knew of not a single case of espionage or sabotage carried out by the IRA or by the Germans through the IRA.

Significance

The S-Plan campaign brought the unification of Ireland no closer, and its author, O’Donovan, wrote as early as August 1939 that it had been prepared in haste and had “fizzled out like a damp squib”. Its most lasting result proved to be the Prevention of Violence Act, which made it possible to expel more than a hundred people from Britain and remained in force until the 1950s. In 1974, after a new wave of IRA bombings in England, it returned in similar form as the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

For the history of the Second World War the attacks of 1939–1940 have one further significance. They showed the British that neutral Ireland, from which the IRA drew its men, might become Germany’s route into the British Isles, and showed the Germans that the Irish republicans could not be counted on as a serious ally. London’s fears of a German landing in Ireland, and the dispute over the Irish ports – handed over to Dublin in 1938 but needed by the Royal Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic – overshadowed British–Irish relations throughout the war. In fighting the IRA, de Valera’s government was at the same time defending the neutrality of its own state, and that neutrality, for all the tensions, survived until 1945.