A veteran journalist has recalled how staffers at a regional daily were unable to cover one of the biggest stories in their patch’s history – because of strike action.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham Pub Bombings, which claimed the lives of 21 people and injured around 200.

The Birmingham Mail, which has campaigned for decades for justice for the victims, recently asked its readers to share their “untold stories” of the night of the bombings.

But the Mail’s own coverage of the atrocity was affected by strike action among its journalists who were holding a chapel meeting at the time the explosions occurred.

Here veteran journalist Bob Haywood (pictured), explains why many of the city’s reporters were unable to cover what was probably Birmingham’s biggest news event of the last century.

Bob’s piece was first published in the recent Birmingham Press Club newsletter.  We are reproducing it in full below.

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On the night of 21st November 1974, bombs ripped through The Tavern in the Town and The Mulberry Bush pubs in Birmingham city centre, killing 21 people and maiming more than 200.

It was the worst IRA outrage on the British mainland in the 20 years of The Troubles.

With the 50th anniversary of the massacre looming, much will be written yet again about this day of infamy.

But anyone looking back in the files of the Birmingham newspapers at the time will probably be surprised at the sketchy coverage in the immediate aftermath.

This is because the copy was written – and the photographs taken – by just a few staff journalists, bulked out by coverage from news agencies such as the Press Association.

In those days, The Birmingham Post & Mail Ltd – publishers of the Birmingham Evening Mail, The Birmingham Post and the Sunday Mercury – employed about 250 journalists.

Most of them worked at Post & Mail House in Colmore Circus, but others were based all across the West Midlands in district offices.

So why was the pub bombings coverage at the time so sparse?

Well, at the time, almost all of the editorial staff were effectively on strike – more coyly ‘attending a continuous mandatory meeting’ of the Post & Mail chapel of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).

By chance, dozens of the chapel members were actually in the Post & Mail building…but not in the newsroom.

They were two floors up in the The Quiet Room where (in more normal times) staff could go during their shift breaks to read a paper or book in a comfy chair.

The room had no TV or radio or landline phone, and even whispering was frowned on.

But during this era of industrial relations turbulence, The Quiet Room was an arena of noisy debate and discussion….for hours on end!

At the time, I was a firebrand member of the NUJ chapel committee so it was often me making most of the noise.

Because we were all jammed into The Quiet Room with no contact with the outside world (no mobile phones in those days, of course) we knew nothing of the pub bombs going off until the city centre was suddenly engulfed in a cacophony of sirens from police cars, fire engines and ambulances rushing to the stricken pubs.

Soon, a messenger from the skeletal news desk tapped on the door and passed on the message: “There have been two bombs. It looks really bad.”

The go-between later returned at quick intervals, saying: “There are fatalities”, then “The death toll is five”, then “Ten”, then “Twenty”.

The duty editors asked for a pow-wow and the chapel committee agreed. But no deal could be hammered out on a return to work – solely to cover the bombings.

After the chapel negotiators trooped back to The Quiet Room to break the ‘no deal’ news to members, a vote was taken. It was overwhelmingly against calling off the meeting. A handful of members voted to go back – and walked out of the room, very vocally or in silence.

In both factions, NUJ members were stunned – some in tears as their loyalties and consciences were being ripped apart.

Those NUJ members who walked out joined the few Birmingham Post editors and other editorial staff who were either in the rival Institute of Journalists (IoJ), or in neither union, and still working in the newsroom and naturally struggling to get editions out.

If a back-to-work deal could have been done, the Post & Mail would have had (by pure chance) dozens of its seasoned reporters and photographers ready to dash out to cover the bombings, just five minutes’ walk away. Looking back 50 years, this all seems a very odd, even perverse, standoff. But these were febrile times in provincial journalism with the NUJ and newspaper companies, locally and nationally, virtually in a state of perpetual war.

Circulations were sky high – and so were profits – but rank-and-file journalists felt they were under-valued and badly underpaid. So goodwill was a very rare commodity. On the night of the Birmingham pub bombings, principle – or obstinacy if you wish – ruled in the end.

* Bob Haywood is a former journalist on the Birmingham Evening Mail and news editor of its sister-publication, the Sunday Mercury. He started his career as a trainee reporter with the Smethwick Telephone and was twice named BT Midlands Journalist of the Year.