A hundred years of solitary
Anthony Howard
PROVED INNOCENT by Gerry Conlon
Hamish Hamilton, £12.99, pp. 234
STOLEN YEARS by Paul Hill with Ronan Bennett
Doubleday, £12.99, pp. 287
The Prevention of Terrorism Act is by no means the only dubious constitutional legacy of the IRA's mainland bombing campaign of the mid-1970s. It is now painfully clear that a kind of lynch law came into operation — and the courts, and the judiciary in particular, threw all cau- tion to the winds in seeking to identify themselves with it.
There have been few more shameful episodes in the annals of the British judi- cial system than the trials of the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and the Birming- ham Six — with the last still awaiting any admission of official error. Even in the first two cases there has been a notable lack of inclination on the part of authority to offer up much by way of an act of contrition. The 11 people who, between them, spent nearly 100 years in prison for crimes they did not commit have yet to receive any adequate compensation; and, as for the man partly responsible for putting them there, he contrived the other day to sound as if he still regarded himself as someone more sinned against than sinning. Judges, remarked Lord Donaldson, who presided over the trials of both the Guildford Four in 1975 and of the Maguires in 1976, must never ever reply to criticism: the implica- tion was that, however hurtful it might be, they must continue to do their self- sacrificing duty by remaining silent.
The disingenuousness displayed by the Master of the Rolls in giving that advice to his brother judges could hardly be more brutally underlined than by this pair of books from two of the Guildford Four who walked to freedom last October. Neither author is exactly an Emile Zola — but there is no denying the forcefulness of the indictment each makes out. It could, admittedly, be argued that it is the Surrey police who emerge as the prime culprits: by picking up innocent suspects, slapping them around and extracting confessions from them they must bear the principal responsibility for all that followed. But the touching thing is that both authors seem to have believed that somehow everything would come out right once they had the chance of putting their case before an English judge. They were soon to discover how misplaced that faith was — not just at the original trial but in the Appeal Court as well, where Lord Roskill decided that the way to deal with the fact that others had by now owned up to the bombings of which the Guildford Four were accused was simply to pronounce that the whole thing had been a joint enterprise.
As Gerry Conlon insists, in the better of these two books, the three Appeal Court Judges just did not seem to recognise the contrast between the Balcombe Street Gang and the Guildford Four:
The active-service unit were all from the Republic. They were disciplined, quiet types who never drew attention to themselves, while we were drunken, drug-taking, thiev- ing, gambling young vagabonds from Bel- fast. The judges didn't seem to ask them- selves whether we could have all co-operated together in an operation so precise, danger- ous and difficult. They just accepted that we must have.
It is the stubborness of the English judici- ary that is the most alarming thing to emerge from the whole story. The Birm- ingham Six were the first to have their case referred back by the Home Secretary to the Court of Appeal — and they, after all, are still in prison. In that sense, the Guildford Four were probably luckier in being made the subject of a police inquiry which, greatly to the credit of the Avon and Somerset Force, seems to have been both thorough-going and meticulous. (It was a rub-off from these inquiries that appears to have led to last week's declara- tion from the Director of Public Prosecu- tions that the Maguire convictions were unsafe, too.) One of the reasons why the Conlon book is the more interesting of the two lies in the author's close connections with the Maguire family. Not only were Patrick and Annie Maguire his uncle and aunt; his father, Guiseppe Conlon, was also round- ed up along with the rest of the mythical bomb-manufacturing gang in Kilburn. Guiseppe Conlon (he carried the Christian name simply because he had an Italian godfather) is almost as much the hero of Paul Hill's book as of Gerry Conlon's. It is plain that he was a man of unusual sweet- ness of character — and it was almost certainly his death in prison that spurred both Gerry Fitt and Basil Hume in their campaign to get the whole case re- examined.
In Stolen Years Hill comes across as much the harder case. Although he pays tribute to two or three backbench Labour MPs, neither Neil Kinnock nor Roy Hat- tersley escape criticism for not having been energetic enough on his behalf. He is manifestly far more of a politician than Conlon — and probably the stronger per- sonality. Paradoxically, however, it was he who gave in first to the determination of the Surrey police to extract a confession. It took them just 36 hours to get him to make that confession — a warning perhaps to those (like Lord Donaldson) who believed at the time that all four of the accused, con- victed on uncorroborated confessions, were singularly fortunate not to be hanged.
'1 don't know much about art, but I know what I can't afford.'
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