Viva Brighton Issue #60 February 2018

BITS & BOMBS
...............................
SOMETHING HAS
GONE WRONG
‘That’s definitely
not thunder’.
Steve Ramsey - who
worked for many years
for both Viva Brighton
(as founding Deputy
Editor) and Viva Lewes
- has written a book
about the aftermath of
the IRA bombing of the
Grand Hotel in 1984, Something Has Gone Wrong,
published by Biteback (£12.99).
My opening quote is from a policeman after the
bomb went off, and it definitely wasn’t thunder:
it was the noise of an assassination attempt on
Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet, which put
Brighton in the world news spotlight.
It’s a highly unusual book, with the narrative
driven by the voices of over 60 people involved
in the disaster, interviewed by the author. These
include policemen, hospital workers, firemen,
journalists, MPs and civil servants. The writer’s
voice seems almost non-existent, which is cleverly
achieved: he deftly provides the conjoining
sentences between quoted memories.
I’m glad to say that it works, and extremely well,
too. In fact it moves along at a cracking pace,
especially towards the end, as the police draw
their net around the perpetrator of the crime. It’s
222 pages long - knowing how much research
Steve did it must have taken some editing - and I
read it in a sitting.
One of the most prominent voices is that of
Norman Tebbit, who of course was badly injured
in the bombing. He writes the foreword of the
book, whose title is a masterwork of Blitz-spirit
British understatement, culled from the Argus
report on the disaster the next day. AL