Viva Brighton October 2015 Issue #32

BRIGHTON IN history
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Manhunt
The Grand bombing police investigation
The man from Scotland Yard knew straight
away what it was he’d found. It looked a bit like
an ice-cream cone, but it was actually part of a
timing device, from the bomb which had gone
off two weeks earlier. It had been in the U-bend
of a debris-filled toilet on the third floor of the
Grand Hotel. It was a breakthrough.
Metropolitan Police experts, affectionately
nicknamed ‘the flour sifters’, had spent those two
weeks searching through hundreds of tons of
rubble and debris. They were so meticulous that
they even found a conference delegate’s missing
contact lens.
They were looking for tiny pieces of the bomb’s
circuitry and timing device. It was ambitious and
time-consuming work, ‘a dirty and often dangerous
job’, in the Argus’ words. But someone had
tried to kill the Prime Minister, and they needed
to find out who.
***
There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of
false leads. Like the bearded man seen acting
suspiciously inside the hotel, who turned out to
be a TV repair man. Or the man with a bag, who
a witness claimed ‘was very peculiar and said he
hated the Tories’. Or the Irish people spotted,
before the explosion, ‘jeering at the Tories’ at
another hotel. Or the young man who worked in
the Grand’s kitchens for a couple of weeks under
a false name. Or the ‘short, stocky man’ seen running
from the scene after the explosion.
At one point, there were more than 200 officers
working on the investigation. They traced
hundreds of people who had stayed at the Grand.
They interviewed, and did background checks
on, guests, staff, and building contractors who’d
been refurbishing the place. They went to ‘secret
prison locations’ to interview three convicted
IRA terrorists, who were uncooperative, according
to the Argus. And they pursued every lead,
however trivial it seemed.
At Brighton Police Station, in John Street, ‘noone
ambles along [the] corridors these days,’ the
Argus reported. ‘Everything is urgent. Messages
flash from room to room. Phones ring continuously.’
However, “exciting is probably not the right
word,” says Graham Hill, who was a senior
figure in the investigation. A surprising sense of
normality developed, once they’d got over the
scale of the crime. They were “working monster
hours” and the operation dragged on, but the
overall mood remained upbeat. “I think, looking
back on those sorts of inquiries, there’s always
that optimistic determination; that you’re going
to catch the person that’s done it.
“With almost every inquiry that I’ve been
involved in, officers, even after long periods of
time, still have that motivation. You might feel
one day, ‘I don’t know if this is going anywhere’,
and the next day something happens and you’re
all on that enthusiastic roll again.”
It was, the Argus noted at the time, ‘the most
secret investigation ever mounted in the county’.
Even Sussex PCs, if they weren’t involved, were
told very little. “It was very much on a need-toknow
basis,” former policeman Albert Mariner
says. “I don’t feel that I knew a great deal of what
was going on, and didn’t need to know.
“It seems like a huge event in English history, but
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