A false alarm from 1881, dealt with by Lt Col Majendie, the lead British EOD agent at the time. Goes to show that press reporting can be febrile and not conducive to sensible response. The efforts of the press to spin up terrorism hysteria then as now could be a bit batsh!t crazy.
And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet
One of the strange things about terrorism, and suicide terrorism in particular, is that people always think it is “new”. There is something about the fear of terrorism that always makes it fresh, always makes it feel like a new encounter. Add to that the short memories that people have, and the general perception is that suicide terrorism is a newly thought of tactic, or strategy, but as I have detailed here before and as Iain Overton’s excellent “The Price Of Paradise” covers, these tactics are simply recycled, decade by decade, century by century.
There are themes within this tactic too. Themes that play out in public, in the mind of the public, and perhaps which terrorist groups recognise and copy, or reflect. Fact and fiction become confused. There is a theme, played out frequently, of the innocent child, an unwitting, unknowing bomber, tasked with carrying an explosive device, without being aware it is going to explode. You’ve that recently, yes? Nigeria, or was it Yemen? Gaza? Syria? Afghanistan? Well, yes probably, but it’s not new.
Here’s a clip from a 1936 film by Alfred Hitchcock, called “Sabotage”, which plays on the fear of the public in the mid 1930s, of infiltration by terrorist groups bent on destroying the nation. Here, an innocent unwitting child is tasked with delivering a package to a tube station in London- Piccadilly. The clip is classic Hitchcock. Having being delayed en route the boy is on a bus, approaching Piccadilly when the bomb detonates.
This is really very peculiar. Tube stations were attacked in the 1880s with IEDs and again in 1939, three years after this film was made Then again in the 1970s, including the Piccadilly bomb which exploded at a bus stop outside Green Park station in 1975. Then more recently buses in 1996 and 2005 were again attacked and tube stations have also been targeted again. But here in the clip, masterful suspense by Hitchcock weirdly foreshadows numerous attacks. Crowds of people, and military parades included… will the bomb go off? And of course military bands and mounted units themselves became targets for real in 1982
So, it’s really a strange thing to see this modern essence of a threat, a child proxy suicide bomber in a fictional movie from 1936. The rest of the movie (which can be found on YouTube in full) ends with the bomb maker, with a suicide IED hidden in his coat, detonating his device behind a cinema as the police evacuate the theatre and mount a raid to capture him. He had been discovered by an undercover police operation. Such modern themes.
I have written before about French EOD capabilities developed in Paris in the latter part of the 19th century. One of their techniques was to recover IEDs to one of 4 laboratories scattered around Paris. It was a practice copied by Col Majendie in the UK for a while but fell out of fashion here for a number of technical reasons.
Here’s a reminder of Majendie’s hand cart used to transport IEDs to Duck Island in St James’s Park in about 1880. At other times Col Majendie (the UK’s first official bomb disposal expert), simply hailed a cab and told the driver to drive carefully.
I’ve just found this picture dated 1906 of the French EOD vehicle in Paris used to transport the IEDs (called “engines” in this picture):
A few years later this vehicle here was used by the Paris bomb squad. Note the container on the floor, which was loaded onto the back:
The concept remained in use in a number of places, not least the USA. In 1941, following a bomb incident that killed two detectives at the World’s Fair, Mayor LaGuardia funded development of a bomb containment unit made from woven steel cables. Vehicles like this remained in service for a number of decades, and indeed a vehicle delivered to the NYPD Bomb squad in 1965 was identical in terms of the containment structure, albeit mounted on a modern truck.
Modern vehicles look somewhat different.
Another in my series of bombs on railways. (see the tags for Railway IEDs in the RH column) This one an unsolved case from 1880 where the perpetrators of an attempt to blow up the London and North Western railway were never discovered. Early on the morning of Monday 13th September 1880, a gang of workmen were doing a routine check of the line between Bushey and Watford, about 16 miles north of Euston. They were half a mile from Bushey station when they discovered an explosive device, apparently damaged by a passing train. The device consisted of a package of dynamite placed beneath the rails. Connected to it was a rubber tube filled with gunpowder and some detonators. The assessment is that the rubber tube was somehow placed on the line, with the intent that a trains wheels would have crushed the detonators, ignited the gunpowder and hence initiated the dynamite. The workers recovered the package and took it to the police, suggesting that the rubber tube had fallen off the rail due to the vibrations of the approaching train. A separate, slightly contradictory, report suggests the tube was cut by the trains wheels but no detonator had been crushed. I suspect the former is more likely. The dynamite was in the form of cylinders, 4 inches long, and one inch in diameter, then wrapped in newspaper, and then brown paper, tied with whipcord. Later analysis suggests the dynamite and detonators were standard commercially available materials for quarrying.
The motive for the attack was unclear. One suggestion was that the device was the work of Russian “nihilists” attempting to assassinate Grand Duke Constantine of Russia, who travelled on the line a day or two earlier.
Modern terrorism today, where it occurs in the West, frequently revolves around terrorists obtaining innocuous materials from which they make explosives and IEDs. Over recent years Police in the UK and elsewhere have engaged with pharmacies, chemist shops, fertiliser suppliers and others seeking support from the proprietors to report suspicious acquisition of explosives or other items for IED components. On occasion in the last few years legislation has been discussed which might limit the availability of such things as acetone, peroxide and sulphuric acid. These modern concerns are sensible and a useful “flag” set to trigger – on occasions, in the last few years, successful police operations have interdicted terrorist attacks by being alerted when a terrorist attempted to buy components or precursors for an IED.
Readers of this blog will know that I have a theme of seeking older patterns for what we regard as modern characteristics of terrorist use of IEDs, and there are useful antecedents here. I have being studying the court transcripts of historical trials and there is a nice example here:
In the 1880s and 1890s, terrorist IEDs were quite common in major European cities like London and Paris. This meant that the public were aware of the threat, suspicious of certain activity, and police operations were significant, as was their engagement with suppliers of material that might be of use to those with evil intent.
In 1894, two Italian anarchists, Guiseppe Farnara and Francis Polti were prosecuted for possession of explosives with intent to endanger life and property. The two had been attempting to make IEDs with pipe work purchased from engineering companies , to be filled with explosives manufactured from supplies purchased from chemists. The two Italians had tried to purchase iron piping from an engineering firm run by a Mr Cohen at 240 Blackfriars Road in London. One of the managers who worked for Mr Cohen, Thomas Smith, was suspicious of the Italians and the purpose for which they were acquiring the pipe. He persuaded the Italians to return to the shop at a future date when he would have the piping and end caps ready for them. Mr Smith then reported his suspicions to the local police station, and a team of police officers subsequently “staked out” the premises waiting for the Italians to return. Smith was also able to elicit that the suspects were having other pipework supplied by another company, Millers, of 44 Lancaster Street Borough Road. The police were able to follow that line of investigation too. So, Cohen’s establishment was staked out and Smith was given clear instructions on how to engage in a dialogue with the terrorists. The terrorists were put under a major surveillance operation , involving quite a number of police and followed around London. I’m intrigued as to what we would regard as a highly proficient surveillance operation, comparable to today’s surveillance operations – for example, a police sergeant described how a terrorist, carrying the IED components from Cohen’s, was followed on to an omnibus. a total of four police officers, part of the surveillance team, operating undercover, were also aboard that same bus. One sat in the seat immediately behind the suspect. After leaving the bus, the suspect apparently carried out anti-surveillance drills, looking for tails. At this point he was arrested. Subsequent investigation of the suspect’s living accommodation found explosive recipes and IED manufacturing instructions along with other chemicals including a bottle of Sulphuric Acid. The instructions were disguised as a recipe for “polenta”, and appear to be a chlorate explosive of some kind which would be initiated by the addition of acid.
The terrorists had approached Taylor’s drug company of 66 High Holborn and bought two pounds of Sulphuric Acid in a bottle.
In the trial the government explosive chemist, Dr DuPre gave expert evidence to the manufacture of the explosives. Col Majendie, the Chief Inspector of Explosives and the nearest equivalent to the head of the bomb squad also gave evidence. Interestingly the court transcript is deliberately vague, I think, when describing the initiation system, and the “polenta” explosive.
My view is that the device would have been designed to be thrown, and initiated when the device hits a target, so in effect was a very large impact grenade, such as the device used to assassinate the Tsar a few years earlier. But something more sophisticated is possible. Readers might wish to refer to some early blog posts about similar devices.
http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2011/11/7/the-tsar-and-the-suicide-bomber.html
http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/10/5/the-curious-death-of-louis-lingg.html
I’m also intrigued by the use of the word “polenta” to describe a yellow chlorate based mix or compound, which seems to have similarities to these Irish chlorate based explosives that were encountered in the 1920s.
From this one case we can see that a population who were aware of IED threats in 1894 were able to report suspicious acquisition of components and that the police were able to act on those tips and plan subsequent detailed surveillance operations.