King Arthur’s round table hung on one wall, with bands of green paint radiating from a Tudor Rose.
Mug shots of Dolours and Marian Price
The Price sisters and their co-defendants sang rebel songs on the prison bus to Winchester. Each morning throughout the trial, the defendants would be escorted in and out by a convoy of motorcycles and police cars. The bombings had occasioned such hysteria that the proceedings were marked by an extreme, almost theatrical devotion to security. A complete daytime parking ban was imposed on the whole surrounding area, to prevent car bombs. Police marksmen patrolled surrounding rooftops. (This may not have been entirely unreasonable: it would later emerge that republicans had tried to purchase a house directly across the street from the prison where the defendants were being held, with an eye to digging a tunnel under the street and directly into the cellblock, to spring them out. The plan was abandoned after the local woman who owned the house developed second thoughts about selling, for sentimental reasons.) As the bus drove into the complex under heavy armed guard, Dolours and Marian flashed V signs to the spectators outside.
The trial was a huge event, attracting widespread fascination. The actress Vanessa Redgrave volunteered to post bail for the defendants, and offered her own house in West Hampstead should any of them need a place to stay. (None of the bombers was released from custody to take her up on this magnanimous proposal.) The English public and press became particularly fixated on Dolours and Marian. They were dubbed the ‘Sisters of Terror’, and depicted as hugely dangerous. To The Times, Dolours became a paradigm of political radicalism and countercultural instability, with her ‘enthusiasm for the wider concept of violent world revolution and support for the diverse aims of Che Guevara, the Black Panthers and the Palestinian guerrillas’. She might have been the more dominant sister, the paper continued, but ‘Marian’s soft speaking voice and apparent innocence disguise a 19-year old well-versed in the arts of guerrilla warfare,’ whose ease with a rifle had earned her the nickname ‘the Armalite widow’. Detecting, in the sisters, evidence of a disturbing trend, the Daily Mirror noted that ‘the legend that women are passive, peace-loving creatures who want only to stay at home and look after children has been finally exploded in a thunder of bombs and bullets’. The tabloid drew a direct line from the Price sisters to Leila Khaled, the Palestinian hijacker, and diagnosed the violence of these women as a dangerous by-product of feminism – ‘a lethal liberation’.
At the opening of the trial, in September, the attorney general, Sir Peter Rawlinson, a debonair barrister with a mellifluous voice, whom the newspapers described as the ‘Laurence Olivier of the bar’, pointed out that the car bomb, while a novelty in London, was part of everyday life in Northern Ireland. ‘Those who place car bombs can walk away to safety,’ Rawlinson said. ‘When the bomb explodes, they are safe and sound many miles away. It is a very cowardly practice.’ As he laid out the details of that awful day, Rawlinson singled out Dolours Price as the leader of the group, ‘the girl who plays a major part in this operation’.
The sisters were resolutely defiant. Apart from one member of the team, nineteen-year-old William McLarnon, who pleaded guilty on the first day of the trial, all the defendants maintained their innocence. Dolours said that she had flown to London on the day before the bombing for a short holiday with her sister and their friend Hugh Feeney. She used the pseudonym Una Devlin because, as the daughter of a well-known republican, she was always getting hassled by the authorities, and offering a false name had become practically second nature. The girls were sassy and carefree in the courtroom, even upbeat. They chuckled when the prosecution showed a photo of Michael Mansfield’s wrecked Triumph. (Mansfield, less amused, pointed out to them that he could have been in it.)
For much of the ten-week trial, the defendants simply stonewalled. But there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence connecting them with the crime. Rawlinson spelled out the sequence of events leading up to the bombings and the particular charges against each individual, in a statement that took twelve hours, over several days. When Dolours was stopped by the officers at Heathrow, she had been carrying a black canvas shopping bag. Inside, along with a programme for the Brian Friel play and what was described as a ‘large