50yrs after Guildford blast, the heartbreaking story of Scots who died

It was a cool, clear October night and the welcoming Horse and Groom pub in Guildford’s North Street was already jumping to the sounds of the latest 1970s hits.

Inside, squeezed into an alcove by the ­jukebox, John Hunter and Billy Forsyth were among the fresh-faced squaddies drinking in their first taste of freedom from barracks life since joining the Army less than a month earlier.

The girls they were chatting up might easily have taken the handsome Scots teenagers for brothers, such was their easy rapport with each other. 

It was born of long years of familiarity: neighbours from the same small ­Renfrewshire town of Barrhead, John and Billy had grown up together, played in the school football team together, worked at the same factory, chased the same girls. 

They had even signed up with the Scots Guards on the very same day, with the promise of further shared adventures.

Now, after being confined to camp for their first three weeks of basic training and with their once-shaggy haircuts freshly clippered into regulation short back and sides, they and their new comrades were finally off duty and an evening of carefree fun beckoned.

Except this was Saturday, October 5, 1974, and the clock was ticking inexorably towards tragedy. At 8.50pm, without warning, there was an almighty flash, a deafening bang, then ­darkness. 

An IRA bomb, equivalent to 18 sticks of dynamite, had ripped through the packed pub leaving a trail of terror and death.

Thirty-five minutes later, a second explosion blew up the Seven Stars, a second bar popular with squaddies, stoking fresh panic. ‘Nothing was real,’ recalled Sammy Norris, one of 120 people packed into the Horse and Groom that night. ‘One minute it was laughter and the jukebox was playing, then screams and moans.’

PC Robin Young, who was on duty near the Horse and Groom that night, remembered hearing the bomb going off. ‘I thought it was a car crash – a huge bang,’ he would say.

By the time he arrived, the pub’s ‘windows were all blown out’ and people were ‘running, trying to get out’ of the building. In a statement at the time, PC Young described the scene as one of ‘utter confusion and mass hysteria’.

He would later tell an inquest the pub floor had collapsed exposing the cellar and he could see ‘bodies, a lot of debris and mess’ in the crater, with some victims ‘alive, screaming and shouting’ inside.

‘We had to get them out – we did what we could,’ he added. 

The injured and dying were found lying among the wreckage and the beer barrels, where they had fallen. Police and fire crews helped move them onto stretchers before they were passed up through the crater.

Sixty-five injured people were evacuated but not everyone could be saved. 

Five young people died that night – the oldest, plasterer Paul Craig, of Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, was one day shy of turning 22 and had met friends to toast his upcoming birthday.

If he was a civilian, then the other four were barely more than fledgling soldiers. 

Two were new recruits in the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC). Private Ann Hamilton, of Crewe, Cheshire, was 19, while Private ­Caroline Slater of Cannock, Staffordshire, was 18.

Then there was 17-year-old John Hunter, pronounced dead at the scene, and his best friend, Billy Forsyth, 18. Billy made it to hospital alive before he succumbed to his wounds two hours later.

In the intervening years, the Guildford pub bombings – carried out at the height of The Troubles – would achieve infamy as one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in British legal history.

The events became synonymous with the wrongful convictions of the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, the subsequent establishment cover-up to keep them in jail and the long battle that eventually cleared their names.

Those shameful events became the focus of a film by Jim Sheridan, In The Name Of The Father, yet those who found themselves unfairly imprisoned are not the only ones to feel aggrieved.

Today marks exactly 50 years since that terrible night, but while much remains unresolved, much has faded from the light. 

The ­tortuous legal and political ­machinations that have dogged the case meant that an inquest into the deaths was held only two years ago. 

That, in turn, laid bare the families’ deep anguish at the authorities’ repeated failure to secure justice for them.

In impact statements read to Surrey Coroner’s Court in Woking in June 2022, the relatives of John Hunter and Billy Forsyth quietly pointed out that no one has ever been held accountable for the murders of their sons.

In the shock of revisiting their grief comes another realisation – how many of us have forgotten, or simply never knew, that two young Scots were among those who lost their lives? 

They were as close as brothers before they were ever brothers in arms. If only in the name of justice, then, they deserve to have their story told.

They first met after Billy moved with his parents, Frank and Betty, older brother Tom and sister Marion to a new tenement block at 18 Kerr Street, in Barrhead, shortly after he was born in 1956.

John’s parents, Bill and Betty, lived in an identical block across the road at Number 11, with their son and two daughters, Diane and Maureen. 

Billy was nine months older, but according to John’s sister, Diane, the boys were soon ‘inseparable’.

They attended the Boys’ Brigade together and went swimming at the local Dolphins Swimming Club. Both loved football and played for Barrhead High’s team, which John captained.

Diane told the inquest that her brother was ‘tall and strong and handsome. He had blond hair and blue eyes. 

He had an adventurous spirit, so he had a lot of fun in his short life, and we are glad he made the most of the time he was given.

‘He was thoughtful of others and had a kind heart. John had many friends, including girlfriends, and enjoyed his social life and parties.’

Billy, too, was a ‘popular wee boy’, who shared a wide circle of friends with John, according to his brother Tom, who painted a picture of ‘a typical wee brother’ with an eye for mischief.

‘We all had our family arguments, and he seemed to get away with murder, but we loved him,’ he added.

After leaving school in 1972, Billy found work as a ‘store boy’ before getting a job at the town’s Armitage Shanks factory. 

John tried his hand at carpet-fitting before joining his friend at Shanks.

While John was regarded as polite and reliable, Billy was laid off by the company in early 1974 for his poor timekeeping.

It didn’t set him back for long. Later that summer, he came home and announced that he and John had enlisted in the Scots Guards on the same day. 

According to his brother, Billy saw the Army as a chance to get on with his life. ‘In his application to the Army, he said that he had joined for a sense of adventure and travel, to learn a trade and to earn a good pay while at it,’ Tom explained.

Both John and Billy seemed to take quickly to Army life. Things were going well in training and they were looking forward to their first weekend pass.

What they could not have been aware of was the shifting political sands which were about to place them in grave danger.

A few days before Billy left home for Army training, his sister

Marion gave birth to her first son, Stephen, while living in Cardiff. ‘Our parents were thrilled at being grandparents, and Billy and I were over the moon at being an uncle,’ said Tom. ‘Less than five weeks later he was dead.’

Historian Professor Thomas Hennessey told senior coroner Richard Travers the Guildford bombs were part of the IRA’s escalating terror campaign in England, where targets included soldiers.

A stick of dynamite thrown into tents at Pirbright training camp in Surrey in 1973 was an early attack against a military target.

The next significant attack came with the M62 coach bombing in Yorkshire, in February 1974, where nine soldiers, an army wife and two children were killed.

Guildford was on the edge of

one of the largest Army training complexes in the country, which meant the Surrey town centre’s pubs were a familiar weekend haunt for soldiers. The bombers knew this only too well.

The Horse and Groom was popular because it was reputed to have the cheapest beer in town, while the Seven Stars had a disco. 

Army recruits would start their evening at the Horse and Groom and then move on to the Seven Stars. Billy and John just followed the crowds.

Concluding that the five victims were unlawfully killed by ‘a powerful time bomb planted by Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorists’ planted under a bench seat, the coroner stressed: ‘None of them was targeted personally, rather the public house and the area in which they were sitting were targeted because they were crowded with military personnel.’

The two families have rarely spoken about their loss. Tom Forsyth once described how they found out Billy had died: ‘It was a Saturday night. I was 22 and mum and I were watching television when a newsflash came on saying a bomb had gone off at a pub in Guildford killing people. 

I saw the shock and fear on my mum’s face, but I never thought for one minute Billy would be anywhere near it.

‘The next morning there was a knock at the door while I was still in bed. It was an Army colonel and a policeman and I could hear voices, then my mum shouting, “He’s WHAT?”

‘They left our house then crossed the street to go to Mr and Mrs Hunter’s door.’ A few brief steps and the pain was spread across Kerr Street.

With the bodies of their loved ones returned to them, the Forsyths and the Hunters felt the only fitting tribute was to hold a joint funeral for John andBilly held by the Arthurlie and Bourock churches in Barrhead.

More than 600 people came to pay their final respects.

They now lie in adjacent graves in their local cemetery, the grass as neatly clipped as a soldier’s haircut. Only the shared date of their deaths on their headstones offers any clue to the horrors which befell them.

While the families dealt privately with their grief, they expected the law would deal with the culprits. But any hope of closure vanished in the storm of controversy that enveloped the case.

The bombings took place days before the 1974 general elections and huge pressure was brought to bear to catch the terrorists. In 1975, Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill, ­Carole Richardson and Paddy Armstrong were jailed for life for carrying out the bombings.

Later Mr Conlon’s father Giuseppe, and members of the Maguire family – who became known as the Maguire Seven – were jailed for supplying the IRA with the explosives for the bombs.

All those involved protested their innocence, while as early as 1976 IRA members Brendan Dowd and Martin O’Connell admitted responsibility for the bombings.

They were never charged, as both men had been imprisoned in the 1970s for other offences and freed during the Northern Ireland peace process. In October 1989, after years of campaigning, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of the Guildford Four after they had served 14 years, amid doubts raised about the police evidence against them.

An investigation into the case by Avon and Somerset Police found serious flaws in the way Surrey Police handled the case.

Recently, Surrey Police ‘identified a potential forensic line of inquiry’ but any hopes of a fresh investigation have been stymied by efforts towards reconciliation that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the new Northern Ireland Legacy Act, which came into force on May 1 and allows those involved with The Troubles to seek immunity from prosecution. Peace, it seems, trumps justice.

The sense of loss and grief weighed heavily on John and Billy’s parents. Frank and Betty Forsyth both passed away in 2006, within 11 weeks of each other.

‘They both went to their graves with heavy, heavy hearts,’ according to their son, Tom, who also died last year aged 71.

John’s sisters, Diane Reid and Maureen O’Neill, said their family never recovered from losing John and all that his life could have brought them. ‘Bill and Betty endured years of agony imagining John’s suffering,’ said Mrs Reid.

‘His life was brief. He was prevented from falling in love, getting married, having children and grandchildren, having a career, travelling and all the things that make for a happy and fulfilling life.’

She added: ‘Others robbed him of his opportunities. How their actions contributed anything to a political cause is bewildering to us as his sisters, and indeed as human beings. It was and remains such a waste.’