This is the story of a largely forgotten IRA campaign which was carried out in England just before the outbreak of World War II.
In April 1938 the IRA in Dublin drew up a document called the ‘S (for Sabotage) Plan’. It was decided, for the sake of diplomatic correctness, that a formal declaration of War should be presented to the British Government. The ultimatum, which demanded the removal of all British troops from Ireland, was delivered to Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, on 12 January 1939. Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and the Government unwisely treated it as just another idle threat. This was a mistake.
Carrying out the S-Plan
On the 16 January eight bombs exploded simultaneously in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Alnwick in Northumberland.
Suspects in known centres of Irish population, such as Kilburn, were subjected to intense questioning and their homes searched by the police and Special Branch. But the IRA was one step ahead, having deliberately located their Active Service Units outside these areas. The newspapers vied with each other in estimating how many people were involved, with figures fluctuating wildly from 2,000 to as many as 20,000. In fact, the real number was probably only a few hundred, including those who supported the bombers.
During their raids, the police were fortunate when they discovered guns, explosives and a copy of the S-Plan in the Clewer Crescent Harrow, home of Michael O’Shea, a 24 year old labourer. Special Branch was surprised by how detailed and well thought out the plan was. Drawn up by Jim O’Donovan and Sean Russell, the IRA Chief of Staff, the key targets were revealed as public utilities such as transport and gasworks. There was considerable public concern after the newspapers published the information in March.
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Sean Russell (WikiCommons)
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A major breakthrough happened by accident, when a Manchester plumber called Charles Heap was on a job in nearby Chorlton on Medlock. He saw several bags and other suspicious material in a cupboard. When the police searched the premises, they discovered a large amount of explosives, gelignite and detonators. Four people were arrested. The police also found a receipt from a lorry driver in Old Trafford which said,
‘For going to London and bringing back a cargo of stuff to be used on the 16 January. Paid £6 10 shillings’.
The driver told the police he had been paid to transport what was described as a quantity of beeswax on 31 October 1938. He understood the beeswax was going to be used to polish a dance floor. He couldn’t remember the address, but said it was in Kilburn. From there an Irishman had directed him through a maze of backstreets to a garage in another part of North London. To find it, detectives took the driver round the area until on the third day, he recognised a garage and house at 75 Fordington Road in East Finchley. The house was owned by John Healy, who had a furniture shop at 332 Hornsey Road and allegedly dealt in beeswax.
Healy was nothing like the IRA bombers portrayed in the newspapers. He was forty years old with a wife and two children. In his youth he had played Gaelic football in his native Derry before coming to England twenty years ago and settling down. As well running his business, Healy was also the proprietor of the Kilburn Irish Social Club. Nothing was found in his home or shop. But on 27 January when police searched the club in Kilburn, they found two tons of potassium chlorate and a ton of aluminium oxide.
Because gelignite was hard to come by, Jim O’Donovan developed a method of mixing potassium chlorate with paraffin wax which was carefully heated in a pan. This explosive was nicknamed ‘Paxo’ after the well-known chicken stuffing mix. In 1938 O’Donovan had spent five months in Ireland training volunteers how to make the bombs, holding sessions at Killiney Castle, in an affluent suburb of Dublin.
The police found that in December 1938 and January 1939, Healy had sent four barrels to Camden Town where they had been painted white on top and labelled ‘Soda’. These had been forwarded to Liverpool and another eight barrels had been taken to Manchester by lorry. IRA bombs were made and set off in each of the cities. Healy said he had bought the chlorate from a London chemist to make throat pastilles in Ireland. Later in court, when the Attorney General pointed out that two tons of chlorate would make 14 million pastels, even the defendants laughed.
In the next few months, the police traced and arrested other IRA members. Healy was the oldest of the eight men (the rest were in their 20s) arrested. On 29 March 1939 they were all found guilty and sentenced to a total of over 90 years at the Old Bailey. Michael Joseph Mason (real name Cleary), was seen as the leader and sentenced to 17 years imprisonment. Healy who was the quartermaster, received ten years for supplying material to make the explosives.
Despite these and other convictions, the IRA attacks continued almost weekly, and the Government introduced The Prevention of Violence Bill. This gave the police new powers of detention and required all Irish nationals to register with the police, just as other aliens had to do. In July when the Home Secretary introduced the Bill to Parliament, he said there had been 127 terrorist incidents since January 1939. One person had been killed, 55 injured, and 66 people had been arrested.
The most serious attack occurred later on 25 August when a bomb exploded in Broadgate, a busy shopping centre in the centre of Coventry. Five people were killed by the 5lb bomb which had been transported in the carrier of a bicycle and left propped up in the kerb.
This proved a propaganda disaster for the IRA with criticism from sympathisers in Ireland and a falling away of support from Irish republicans in the United States. The police quickly made arrests and two men, Peter Barnes, and James Richards (real name McCormick), were convicted, and sentenced to death at Winson Green prison in Birmingham.
Anti-Irish feelings ran high: John Healy and a dozen IRA men in Dartmoor were set upon by fellow prisoners. Healy was badly hurt and developed pneumonia. His situation was critical, and he spent five weeks in a Plymouth hospital before recovering and being returned to Dartmoor prison on 23 October.
The IRA sought help from Germany, and in 1939 Sean Russell and Jim O’Donovan met members of the Nazi government and the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. But Admiral Canaris, then head of the Abwehr, declined to provide the guns and explosives requested by Russell and O’Donovan.
Despite this setback, the IRA attacks continued throughout England until they finally ended in March 1940. There were a total of 265 explosions or attempted explosions, seven people had been killed and 117 injured. 99 IRA people were convicted.
Most commentators now believe this overly ambitious campaign had failed.
This was due to the reduction of funding which had mainly been provided by republican supporters in America, and the fact the idealistic volunteers only received basic training. Also, many of the young people came from rural areas of Ireland and were not used to living in the English cities, such as London, Manchester, Liverpool, and Coventry.
Brendan Behan
The most famous example of a 1939 IRA volunteer is 16 years old Brendan Behan, who came from a family of staunch Irish republicans. After the War he became a very successful poet, writer, and playwright.
In the opening of his autobiographical novel Borstal Boy (1958), he wrote:
‘Friday, in the evening, the landlady shouted up the stairs: Oh my God, oh Jesus, oh
Sacred Heart, Boy, there’s two gentlemen to see you’.
I knew by the screeches of her that these gentlemen were not calling to enquire about my health, or to know if I’d had a good trip. I grabbed my suitcase, containing Pot. Chlorate, Sulph Ac, gelignite, detonators, electrical and ignition, and the rest of my Sinn Féin conjuror’s outfit, and carried it to the window. Then the gentlemen arrived. A young one, with a blonde, Herrenvolk head and a BBC accent shouted, ‘I say, greb him, the bestud’.
Behan was a poor choice of saboteur. From a young age he was susceptible to drink. He once famously said: ‘I only drink on two occasions, when I’m thirsty, and when I’m not’. After the short training course in explosives, he had been sent to London where he was engaged in making bombs. He was sent to Liverpool, and after visiting several pubs he began shouting about his proposed activities of blowing up the city. The police were tailing him after they received a tip off from the Irish security service. They went to his lodgings in 17 Aubrey Street on 1 December 1939 where they arrested him for possession of 20oz potassium chlorate, and a bottle of sulphuric acid which was used to make the detonator. They also found plans of targets in the Liverpool docks and shipyards.
On 7 February the judge sentenced Behan to three years borstal detention. He was released after two years and deported back to Ireland in 1941. During a gun battle with the police the following year, he snatched a pistol from an associate’s hand and shouted ‘Give it to me and I’ll shoot the bastards’. He fired at two officers and was arrested. Behan was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment but was released under a general amnesty for IRA prisoners in 1946. He would serve other prison terms, some for republican activity and sometimes simply for being drunk. When he died aged only 41 in 1964, he was accorded a full IRA guard of honour at his funeral.
There is a local connection to West Hampstead. When Brendan visited London, he stayed with his best friend Desmond MacNamara, the Irish sculptor and stage designer, who lived at 1b Woodchurch Road from about 1957 till his death in January 2008.
The History of the Kilburn Club
The ‘Kilburn Irish Social Club’ only lasted a few years and may have just been a front for Healy. It took us considerable research to work out where it was. We eventually found Vale Hall numbered as 15b Kilburn High Road, in Bridge Place (now demolished), near the Queen’s Arms pub at the bottom of Kilburn. 
1930 Map showing the position of the Kilburn Club
Its original name was Kilburn Hall, built for Charles Hurditch as an Evangelical Mission Hall about 1868.
Charles Russell Hurditch was born in Exeter in 1840. Aged 20 he came to London and joined the Young Men’s Christian Association. In 1864 he became secretary of Stafford Rooms, a YMCA centre in Tichborne Street, just off the Edgware Road. Here he met William Holmes, a stationer and bookseller, whose family had been involved in one of the mass conversions of Plymouth Brethren held at the Stafford Rooms. Charles married Mary Holmes on 11 May 1865, and they moved to 164 Alexandra Road in South Hampstead, only a few doors from the Holmes family at No.156. Charles left the YMCA and established himself as a preacher. He built or rented halls across London to spread his message to the poor, as well as producing magazines, books and composing hymns. He died in 1908 and was buried in Hampstead Cemetery, Fortune Green Road.
From 1904 the Kilburn Hall was used as a cycle works, then for motorcycles and as a motor garage into the 1920s. It was destroyed by fire early one morning in June 1928, watched by hundreds of women and girls, who had to leave their homes in the neighbouring houses dressed only in their night clothes. It was re-built as the New Vale Hall and in the 1930s it was used for whist, dancing, and for boxing and wrestling matches. Originally run by Max Lerner, it was taken over by the entrepreneur and showman Harold Lane in 1936. He had started by organising whist drives, and in the late 1920s he hired Olympia where 16,000 people played cards for a world record £1,000 top prize. He went on to open Lane’s London Clubs. The first was at 7-9 King Street, Baker Street; the second was at 11a Queen Street, Hammersmith and the third was The New Vale Hall, Kilburn.
Lane introduced All-in wrestling to England about 1930. This proved very popular, but he ran into trouble by organising matches on a Sunday. In 1935 Lane was summonsed under the ancient Sunday Observance Act. A solicitor’s clerk said he paid 2/6 and went to the Hammersmith club on the evening of 6 October where he saw three well-attended contests. Repeated police raids on his clubs forced Lane to close permanently in 1938. .jpg)
Harold Lane shaking hands with a group of wrestlers in 1934
By the 1950s the Hall was being used as a factory to manufacture steel cabinets. Along with nearby wartime damaged properties, it was demolished in the 1960s and today lies under the Tollgate Gardens estate, owned by Westminster Council.
For further information on the IRA campaign:
Dick Kirby provides an excellent account in his 2021 book, ‘IRA Terror on Britain’s Streets. 1939-1940’.
It is also well covered by Joseph McKenna (2016), ‘The IRA Bombing Campaign Against Britain, 1939-1940’.
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