1981: The IRA announce a bloody return to London

On Saturday, October 17, 1981, the head of the Royal Marines, Lieutenant-General Sir Steuart Pringle found himself with a morning off duty.

At 11.30am, he left his home in South Croxted Road, Dulwich, and got into his red Volkswagen Passat with his Labrador Bella in the back. 

But before he managed to pull out into the road, a bomb exploded. 

A magnetic explosive device had been stuck to the wheel-arch of his car by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

The blast blew the car’s bonnet clean-off, catapulted half the engine away, and ripped the Marine’s legs to shreds.

In a statement read out at the bombers’ trial in February 1985 at the Old Bailey, he said:  “I heard a roar and saw my legs moving to the nearside of the car.

“Then I heard the sound of falling bits and pieces and then silence. I saw that my right leg was a mess. My right foot and shoe were on top of my leg. I knew that I was badly injured but that I was not going to die.”

Thirty years’ war zone experience told him there might be a second bomb set to catch rescuers. 

He warned his son Simon, 22, to stay back and call for help. He also asked: “Is my dog all right?” She was. 

It took surgeons three hours to cut the Lieutenant from his car and stabilise his condition.

The attack took place in the year of the hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands in protest at Margaret Thatcher’s denial of political status to IRA prisoners, and marked the midpoint of the “Troubles”, during which the British Marines were sent out on rotational Northern Ireland tours.

The IRA had announced a bloody return to London a week earlier with a bomb at the Chelsea Barracks in Ebury Bridge Road which killed two civilians – Nora Field, 59, and John Breslin, 18 – and wounded 50 people, including 20 soldiers.

Two weeks later they would strike again with an anonymous warning of three bombs in Oxford Street – two in department stores and one at a Wimpy fast-food restaurant – where suspicious padded envelopes in boxes taped together had been found.

Only one of the bombs detonated, killing Kenneth Howorth – a Met explosives officer – as he attempted to defuse it.

The swathe of attacks that swept London would culminate in the IRA’s most ambitious plot – the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, in 1984.

Thomas Quigley and Paul Kavanagh, both 29 and from Belfast, were jailed with multiple life sentences for the attack on Lieutenant Pringle. 

They would later be released under the Good Friday Agreement after serving less than 16 years.

As for the Lieutenant, he was back at the Ministry of Defence by April 1, 1982, where he continued as Commandant-General until 1984. 

The handover put him back at work only 24 hours before a right wing military junta in Buenos Aires, Argentina, invaded the Falkland Islands.

He stayed in London, close to the heart of decision-making while his men attempted to retake the Falklands 8,000 miles away.

Living with an artificial foot and relying on a walking stick, Lieutenant Pringle used his experience of disability to advise wounded Falklands veterans, and later campaigned to help disabled people, soldiers and civilians to find work and improve mobility.

In retirement he became chairman and chief executive of the Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust. He died in London on April 18, 2013.

Pictured top: The bomb attack in South Croxted Road, Dulwich, where Lieutenant-General Sir Stuart Pringle was critically injured as he drove his car away from his home (Picture: PA)