Patrick Comerford
Two of us were in Marylebone last weekend, with a number of appointments.
Marylebone Station is London’s last main line terminus to be built and one of the smallest. Marylebone station opened on 15 March 1899 as the London terminus of the Great Central Main Line, linking London with Leicester, Sheffield and Manchester. Today it is the southern terminus of the Chiltern Main Line to Birmingham.
Traffic at Marylebone Station fell off from the mid-20th century, particularly after the GCML closed. By the 1980s, the station was threatened with closure, but it was reprieved in 1986 because of commuter traffic on the London to Aylesbury Line and from High Wycombe. The station was expanded with two additional platforms in 2006 and with improved services to Birmingham Snow Hill.
Marylebone is one of the squares on the British Monopoly board and the station is popular for filming because of its relative quietness. The most famous film made at Marylebone Station must be A Hard Day’s Night made with the Beatle in 1964. In the opening credits, the Beatles are chased by fans along Boston Place, a street running between the station and Balcombe Street, before diving into Marylebone in an attempt to board a train.
The streets around Marylebone once formed part of the Portman Estate. Their layout shows a social hierarchy of square, thoroughfares and side streets mirrored in a hierarchy in the design of houses, from the grand four-storey buildings in Dorset Square to the rather less grand terraces and smaller houses in Balcombe Street and Gloucester Place, and the significantly smaller scale of the three- and two-storey ‘third rate’ houses in the side streets and mews.
There are 180 Grade II buildings in the area, including the whole of Dorset Square, most of Balcombe Street and Gloucester Place. The predominant materials are brick and stucco.
The London part of the Portman Estate in Marylebone covers 110 acres with 68 streets, 650 buildings and four garden squares. The estate was valued at £10 million in 1948, when it was subject to death duties of £7.6 million, and resulted in the sale of the northern part of the London Estate in 1951.
Marylebone gives its name to the Marylebone Cricket Club and Dorset Square is the site of the original Lord’s Old Cricket Ground that was relocated in 1810 and eventually moved to St John’s Wood. Today, Dorset Square is a serene setting with a laid-back feeling, while Balcombe Street is typical of the streets off Dorset Square, lined with elegant Gregorian terraces that have a timeless charm.
Balcombe Street, Dorset Square and Gloucester Place all date from 1815-1820. Balcombe Street was first known as Milton Street, and the name Balcombe Street is possibly a corruption of Batcombe, Dorset, like other Dorset-related street names in the area, although the name of a pub on the street would have you believe it was named after a 19th century Sir John Balcombe.
Balcombe Street is a quiet, residential road that runs parallel to the station. But its peace and tranquillity were shattered 50 years ago with the ‘Balcombe Street Siege’ from 6 to 12 December 1975. I was then a journalist with The Irish Times, and I remember how I stayed up late into the night many working nights in a row, waiting for news of the siege unfolded.
In 1974 and 1975, London suffered an intense 14-month campaign of gun and bomb attacks unleashed by the Provisional IRA. In one incident, the Guinness Book of Records co-founder and right-wing political activist Ross McWhirter was murdered after he offered a £50,000 reward to anyone willing to inform the security forces of IRA activity.
The Balcombe Street siege involved four members of an IRA cell – Joe O’Connell, Edward Butler, Harry Duggan and Hugh Doherty – who were involved in an IRA bombing campaign in Britain at the height of the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’. Two other members of the gang, Brendan Dowd and Liam ‘Yankee Joe’ Quinn, had recently shot dead a police constable Stephen Tibble in London. The flat Quinn had fled from had been used as a bomb factory used.
The events began at Scott’s Restaurant on Mount Street, an exclusive restaurant in Mayfair that was once a favourite of the James Bond author Ian Fleming. The IRA considered it to be a ‘ruling-class’ establishment, and targeted it in not just once but twice at the end of 1975.
They first attacked the restaurant on 12 November 1975, throwing a bomb through the window, murdering John Batey (59) and injuring 15 other people.
In the second attack a month later, the gang used a stolen Ford Cortina to carry out a drive-by shooting, firing gunshots through the window of Scott’s. Two plainclothes police officers, Inspector John Purnell and Sergeant Phil McVeigh, had anticipated the second attack and were waiting. However, they had no car of their own and had to flag down a taxi to give chase.
The car chase continued for several miles across the West End, before the IRA gang abandoned their stolen car and fled on foot, firing at the police who were in pursuit.
The four eventually found themselves on Balcombe Street, just a stone’s throw from Marylebone Station. They they forced their way into 22A Balcombe Street and a block of working class, post-war council flats, built on the site of Georgian houses destroyed during the Blitz. There they barged into the flat of an elderly couple, John and Shelia Matthews. At the time, the couple were engrossed in an episode of the popular 1970s television detective drama series Kojack and did not realise that the sound of gunshots was coming from the street outside.
John and Shelia Matthews were held hostage in their own home for the next six days as the IRA demanded a plane to fly them to Ireland. However, the siege began to take its toll and, along with a number of psychological tactics employed by the police.
Peter Imbert, later Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was the chief police negotiator. Max Vernon, who was later the chief negotiator during the Iranian Embassy siege, was another negotiator.
The siege came to an end as a result of the combined psychological pressure exerted on the gang by Imbert, the deprivation tactics used on the four men, and carefully crafted misinformation. A BBC report said the Special Air Service (SAS) was about to storm the building and release the hostages. The gang finally surrendered and the hostages were released unharmed.
It emerged later that O’Connell, Butler, Duggan and Doherty had carried out a large number of attacks across London and in the murder of 15 people. They were found guilty at their Old Bailey trial in 1977 of seven murders, conspiring to cause explosions and falsely imprisoning John and Sheila Matthews.
O’Connell, Butler and Duggan were each given 12 life sentences, and Doherty was given 11 life sentences. Each of the men was later given a whole life tariff, the only IRA prisoners to receive this tariff.
During their trial, the four also admitted to the 1974 Guildford pub bombing on 5 October 1974, when five people were murdered and 65 people were wounded. Two of them also admitted to the Woolwich pub bombing on 7 November, when two people were murdered. But four innocent people, the ‘Guildford Four’, spent years in jail for the Guildford bombing.
After 23 years in prison, the four were moved to Portlaoise Prison, Co Laois, in early 1998. Later that year they were lauded by Gerry Adams to applause at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis as ‘our Nelson Mandelas’.
It was an odious comparison considering the number of civilians they had murdered in London, the homes, restaurants and pubs they had regularly targeted, and the way they shattered the lives of an elderly working class couple in Balcombe Street. Their victims included Ross McWhirter, Roger Goad, Gordon Hamilton Fairley, Robert Anthony Lloyd, Graham Ronald Tuck, Audrey Edgson and John Francis Bately. After the trial, press reports described the unit ‘the most violent, ruthless and highly-trained’ to date sent to Britain.
The four members of the Balcombe Street Gang were released in 1999 as part of the Good Friday Agreement.
Across the street from the site of the siege, the Sir John Balcombe is at 21 Balcombe Street, on the corner with Huntsworth Mews. There has been a pub there since the 1830s, with a variety of names, but this is another post-war rebuild on yet another site razed during the Blitz. It was renamed ‘Wood Marylebone’ in 2010, reopened as the Sir John Balcombe in 2014 and was refurbished again in 2019. Sadly, it seems, memorabilia from the Balcombe Street Siege disappeared during the latest refurbishment.
So, who then was Sir John Balcombe?
Sir (Alfred) John Balcombe (1925-2000) was a high court judge and a Lord Justice of Appeal from 1985 to 1995. He had universal respect for his sound judgment and a quick appreciation of issues to ensure that justice was done.
Balcombe was active in many societies and causes in the Jewish community. He was president of the Maccabeans, a cultural and charitable foundation, and president of the Wimbledon Reformed Synagogue. But his devout religious beliefs did not prevent him from being elected dean of chapel of Lincoln’s Inn in 1995. In that role, he attended the Anglican chapel services and regularly read the Old Testament lesson.
In 1964, Balcombe represented the Earl of Sefton who, in 1945, had sold Aintree racecourse to Mirabel Topham, on condition that it should continue to be used for horseracing. She had sold the land to developers, but Lord Sefton’s action resulted in the condition being enforced, and Aintree remains the home of the Grand National to this day.
Balcombe also acted for Caitlin (Macnamara) Thomas (1913-1994), the widow of Dylan Thomas, in her action for possession of the original manuscript of Under Milk Wood, and for Alan Klein, the then manager of the Beatles, in an action concerning the break-up of the group in 1969 – and that, needless to say, brings me from Balcombe Street back to Marylebone Station.
