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“We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” Many ascribe this saying to police referring to catching criminals as “eventually we will get you.” But the origins of it are more terroristy, even though cops can be pretty fucking terrifying. It was uttered by the IRA after a failed attempt to blow up Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 12, 1984--
The Irish Republican Army was a paramilitary organization that sought to end British rule of Northern Ireland. It operated between 1969 and 2005, killing about a thousand British security forces and roughly 600 civilians via shooting and bombing campaigns. On October 12, 1984, the IRA exploded a time bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England. The bomb was placed an amazing three weeks earlier by IRA member Patrick Magee who spent three days as a guest at the hotel to plant the bomb under his room’s bathtub, using a special long-delay timer in anticipation of Thatcher staying at the hotel for a planned conference.
The targets were Thatcher and her cabinet ministers. The bomb exploded just before 3:00 in the morning, six floors above Thatcher’s suite. The explosion brought down a massive chimney stack, destroying a large section of the hotel, crashing downward into the Prime Minister’s quarters. Thatcher was still awake and working on a speech she was to give the next day. The bomb wrecked her bathroom, but as the IRA said, she was lucky and escaped harm. Many others did not.
Conservative member of parliament Sir Anthony Barry died in the blast, along with four others associated with the reigning conservative party. Thirty-one others were injured, some of them permanently disabled. The following day the IRA, as part of their “We only have to be lucky once” statement, proclaimed that they would try again. They said, “Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.” Thatcher said get fucked.
Not those exact words, but she remained coolly defiant. And while far from being a loved politician—“Thatcherism” economics sent child poverty skyrocketing and she set the stage for Brexit—her stoic reaction to almost being blown to shit caused her popularity to soar. She was compared to Churchill in his defiance of the fucking Nazis when Britain stood alone after the fall of France early in World War II.
MI5 launched an investigation and Patrick Magee was arrested less than a year later; he had been planning future bombings. Magee was given eight life sentences but only served 14 years, being released in 1999 under the Good Friday Agreement that ended most of the violence of the Troubles.
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