A warning call was made to the Birmingham Post newspaper at approximately 8:11 p.m. -- just six minutes before the first bomb detonated. The caller used a recognized IRA code word, but the message was garbled and failed to specify the exact locations of the devices. The police had no time to evacuate. In 2017, one of the alleged perpetrators, Michael Hayes, claimed the bombings were never intended to kill civilians and that the deaths resulted from a delay in delivering the telephone warning. Whether that claim holds any truth does nothing for the families of the 21 people who died in those two ordinary pubs on an ordinary Thursday evening. The victims included factory workers, office clerks, students, and a young couple who had just gotten engaged.

Within hours of the explosions, police arrested six Irish men at Heysham port as they were traveling to Belfast for the funeral of an IRA member. Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power, and John Walker were charged with the bombings. In 1975, all six were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. They maintained their innocence from the start, insisting that police had coerced them into signing false confessions through severe physical and psychological abuse. For sixteen years, the British justice system refused to reconsider. Appeal after appeal was denied. The men's claims of abuse were dismissed, their alibis ignored.

The case against the Birmingham Six slowly unraveled under public and legal pressure. Forensic evidence that had seemed conclusive at trial was discredited -- the Griess test used to detect explosives was shown to give positive results for substances as common as lacquer and old playing cards. In 1991, the Court of Appeal finally declared the convictions unsafe and unsatisfactory, and all six men walked free after sixteen years in prison. The episode is now recognized as one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history, a case that damaged public trust in the police, the courts, and the criminal justice system itself. No one has ever been successfully prosecuted for the actual bombings. In 2016, an inquest was reopened into the deaths of the 21 victims; the jury returned its conclusions in April 2019, finding the 21 were murdered, that the bombs were planted by the IRA, and that an inadequate warning call contributed to the deaths.

The Birmingham pub bombings were one of the deadliest acts of the Troubles, and the deadliest act of terrorism to occur in England between the Second World War and the 2005 London bombings. The immediate aftermath saw a surge of anti-Irish sentiment across Birmingham and beyond. The Prevention of Terrorism Act was rushed through Parliament within days, granting police sweeping new powers. A permanent memorial to the 21 victims stands in Birmingham's New Street, near the site of the Tavern in the Town. The families of the dead have spent decades seeking accountability -- not just for the bombings themselves, but for the failures of the investigation and the suffering of six innocent men who were made to pay for crimes they did not commit. The pub bombings left Birmingham with two wounds: the atrocity itself, and the injustice that followed.