Brussels Attacks

[Kaz]

[Suff]

Reading this Guardian article on the details of the attackers highlights many reasons why I left Brussels.

They never appeared to understand the urgency of what needed to be done or how to approach it. We will probably find that the police and security services had all the information they required in order to find these people and keep them under surveillance. But significantly failed to do so.

A little too late for the dead but thankful that the second, larger, bomb at the airport found nobody to kill... It could have been a LOT worse. It's hard to say they were lucky without causing distress to the families of the dead and injured. But, honestly, they were.

[Diflower]

Suff it really brings it home when it's somewhere so familiar doesn't it, so many what ifs.
I was in Guildford the night of the Ira bombings with a bunch of friends, and on other occasions we'd been in each of the bombed pubs.
That particular night we drank in one, then someone said there was a party back in Farnham (where most of us lived), so we went back. Pure chance.

[Workingman]

FCOL Di, that was a close call!

[Diflower]

I guess it was, but my mum was a telephonist at Aldershot.
The bomb at the barracks blew her office windows out.
I worked in London, just around the corner from the Balcombe St siege.
We were all kind of used to it, plus being young you accept it and don't realise what a big thing it is.
The seventies were a pretty violent time, but that's largely why we have such a brilliant intelligence and security network now, in that respect the IRA did Britain a favour.

[Suff]

I know exactly how you felt Di and I was nowhere near so close.

Of course in the Military we all expected that something might come at us and in the Army our training was all about going out there and meeting it head on.

You're absolutely right about the learning experience we had with the IRA and how it now helps us avoid a much bigger problem. We could have pulled out of Ireland and given our citizens a choice to stay or come over to the UK. With the current problem it's bigger. We have given them a home and allowed them to flourish. So now they think our country belongs to them and they can do whatever they want. We have no more choice than we did in WW2. Either we stop it or we are overwhelmed.

[Kaz]

Absolutely right Di! I lived and worked in West London from '76 to '79, my workplace was in a huge government building in Acton where there was DHSS (where I worked) Admiralty and MoD amongst others. Bomb scares were the norm, we had lots, although I never came quite as close as you did. The scariest time was one on a tube station, that did rattle me as I'm not keen on being underground at the best of times You just had to get on with it, didn't you?

[medsec222]

We have given them a home and allowed them to flourish. So now they think our country belongs to them and they can do whatever they want. We have no more choice than we did in WW2. Either we stop it or we are overwhelmed.

Absolutely correct Suff. They don't have to fit in with us, we have to fit in with them. Otherwise we are racist.

[molly]

Crikey Suff, scary .

I also came close to a bomb in London. I was on a bus going along Kensington High Street when I heard it go off. It had been left in the Saxone shoe shop doorway in Kensington Church Street and a bomb disposal man, Roger Goad (I don't think I will ever forget that name) was killed whilst trying to defuse it.

I was on the bus rather than the tube because I felt very unsafe on the underground with the bombings going on in London. I was always surprised that the IRA didn't target it.

I also heard the bomb go off on the BT Tower. I was safely up in Edinburgh and was on the phone to my boyfriend…..now my husband….he was working in London, when I heard the bang in the background.


To add: I have just looked looked Roger Goad up, it was August 1975 and he was awarded the George Cross posthumously for his bravery.

[TheOstrich]

Crikey Suff, scary .
I also came close to a bomb in London. I was on a bus going along Kensington High Street when I heard it go off. It had been left in the Saxone shoe shop doorway in Kensington Church Street and a bomb disposal man, Roger Goad (I don't think I will ever forget that name) was killed whilst trying to defuse it.
To add: I have just looked looked Roger Goad up, it was August 1975 and he was awarded the George Cross posthumously for his bravery.

Mrs O was teaching at the Royal School for Deaf Children near Five Ways, Birmingham when an IRA bomb exploded about 200 yards away from the school in Calthorpe Road. Captain Ronald Wilkinson of the Bomb Disposal Squad was killed in the blast (this was 17/09/73). She told me that the bang was so loud that some of the profoundly deaf children actually "heard" it via the soundwaves - it was the first time they had experienced sound and some burst into tears.

21/11/74, I phoned a mate up and asked him if he wanted to go into Birmingham for a drink. "Nah, Ossie", he said "I want to watch Mastermind. We'll go have a drink locally afterwards." So a couple of hours later, we were sitting inside a pub on the Hagley Road wondering what on earth all the emergency vehicles were doing speeding towards the city. It was the Birmingham Pub Bombings. If we had gone into town, we would have been in either the Mulberry Bush under the Rotunda (used by British Railways staff, my mate worked for them) or the Tavern In The Town round the corner (young folks' pub). These were the two that were bombed.

My S. was a police cadet at the time. There were other bombs planted that night that did not go off. That night, she was put on duty in the aftermath of the atrocity at Five Ways roundabout, turning general traffic away from the city; there was an unexploded bomb in the petrol station nearby ....

As Di said earlier, the 70's were violent times, but we were young and we just got on with life.

To end on a slightly lighter note, in the following days, she and other cadets were put in charge of the room at the local police training centre where all "suspicious packages" subsequently found were taken (for lack of anything better to do with them). She always said the room was deathly quiet - if anything had started ticking, they'd have run like Hell .....