At eleven minutes past eight, on the evening of November 21, 1974, a man with an Irish accent telephoned the Birmingham Post newspaper and said that there was a bomb in the 25 storey Rotunda office block housing the Mulberry Bush pub. Police went to the Rotunda to investigate. The police started to check the upper floors of the building but failed to clear the crowded pub which was situated at street level. Just minutes later, at 20:17, the bomb exploded, devastating the crowded bar. Warnings had just reached the equally crowded Tavern in the Town pub nearby, when at 20:27 a second bomb there exploded. A passing West Midlands bus was caught in the blast and subsequently written-off. A third device, outside a branch of Barclays Bank on Hagley Road, failed to detonate. Collectively, the attacks were the most injurious terrorist attacks in England until the July 2005 London bombings; 21 people were killed (ten at the Mulberry Bush and eleven at the Tavern in the Town) and 182 people were injured.
On 28 March 1990, ITV broadcast the Granada Television documentary drama, Who Bombed Birmingham? The programme claimed the bombings were planned by Seamus McLoughlin (aka Belfast Jimmy). Others bombers included Mick Murray who made the warning; bomb maker James Francis Gavin (aka Jimmy Kelly) and bomb planter Michael Christopher Anthony Hayes. In the book Error of Judgement, Mick Murray (a Provisional IRA volunteer arrested later for other bombings) is quoted as telling Paddy Hill and Johnny Walker (two members of the Birmingham Six) that the phone boxes that were supposed to have been used by IRA volunteers to phone in a warning about the bombs were vandalised so they had to find another one some distance away. In 2004 – thirty years after the bombings – Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams expressed regret for the loss of life in the attacks, but no admission of responsibility by the Provisional IRA has yet been made
The Birmingham Six (Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, William Power and John Walker) were immediately accused of carrying out the attack; they were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. They all spent 16 years behind bars, before their convictions were overturned after the scientific evidence was discredited, and the documents setting out the confessions were found to be unreliable due to police tampering (i.e., the police wrote the "confessions" that the men signed after several days of torture). They were all released from prison after the ruling by the Court of Appeal on 14 March 1991.
Those killed: Jane Davis (17); Eugene Reilly (23); Desmond Reilly (20); Maureen Roberts (20); Marilyn Nash (22); Pamela Palmer (19) Stephen Whalley (21); Lynn Bennett (18); Anne Hayes (19); Michael Beasley (30); Maxine Hambleton (18); John Jones (51); Charles Gray (44); John Rowland(46); Stanley Bodman (51); Trevor Thrupp (33); James Caddick (40); Paul Davis (20); Neil March (20); Thomas Chaytor (28); James Craig (34).
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