The lad from a South London council estate who caught the Brighton Bomber

Like many people who pass David Tadd in the street, those who drift by the cafe we sit in do not recognise him as the man who caught the Brighton bomber.

On January 17, 1985, Mr Tadd matched 16 points of a palm print with that of Patrick Magee. 

It had been 97 days since the IRA had blown up the Grand Hotel in Brighton in an attempted assassination of then Prime Minister Margret Thatcher on October 12, 1984.

Mr Tadd had identified the suspect behind one of the most ambitious attacks in the history of British Government.

Now aged 77, the former head of forensic investigation at Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch is sitting across from me dressed in a maroon quarter zip and cream trousers.

He said: “For a long time no one knew how important forensics were in that case.”

Mr Tadd grew up on a council estate in Blythe Hill. He remembers not thinking he was poor “because everyone was poor after the war”, but recalls the outdoor toilet and tin basin that needed to be warmed by a fire for a bath.

He got four O-levels in his fourth year at senior school, passed A-level art in a single year and became a layout artist aged 16.

It was a trade he thoroughly enjoyed, but he was laid off after two years. 

In 1967, aged 20, Mr Tadd saw an advert for a job at the Met and joined the force as a trainee fingerprint expert.

He said: “Having an artistic eye made me good at what I did.

“At A-level we studied Renaissance paintings, which are quite violent. I always related that to crime scenes – here’s the picture, what does it mean?”

Two years later, Irish Catholics marched from Belfast to Derry in a civil rights protest to end discrimination. 

They were beaten by police. Riots flared as Protestants and Catholics clashed. 

The British Army was called in to restore order, a decision that would have profound consequences in a conflict already rooted in centuries of history between Irish rebels and their British neighbours.

The years that followed would see Mr Tadd busy in the rubble of IRA bombs both in Ireland and London.

He said: “It started with letter bombs. Quite basic. Then, like every organisation, they progressed.”

Despite the horrors he saw, Mr Tadd could keep his emotions separate from his work. 

This was no different when a bomb claimed the life of his friend and colleague, Met explosives officer Ken Howarth, in October 1981.

Cops had received an anonymous tip off that three bombs had been planted in Oxford Street, one in a Wimpy fast food restaurant concealed behind the sink in the basement toilets.

Mr Howarth had been handling the bomb when it detonated.

As Mr Tadd approached the scene, the smouldering ruin spat smoke into Oxford street. From the basement, the bomb had exploded upwards, spreading carnage as it tore through water pipes.

Mr Howarth could not be physically identified. He was identified by fingerprints.

Mr Tadd said: “I didn’t think about it. If you start thinking about them and their life you can’t do your job.

“I was looking for opportunities to fingerprint anything at the scene that was still intact.”

The Wimpy bomb was part of a new, sustained campaign from the IRA which had already set off two explosives that month.

Mr Tadd said: “It was the first time they used different bombs for each attack. One might be a mercury tilt switch and the next a typical IRA TPU (time power unit) with an anti-handling device.

“If you’ve got different methods of detonation, is it one team doing five jobs or five teams?

“We didn’t know until Pangbourne.”

On October 26, 1983, police discovered a cache of IRA weapons, including six long delay timers in Pangbourne, West Berkshire.

Mr Tadd’s team was called in, evidence was labelled, bagged and taken back to the office for photographing. Fingerprints were matched to a database and to previous bombings. 

The discovery of the long delay timers would be key in their investigation of the Brighton bombing one year later.

On October 12, 1984, a bomb hidden beneath the bathtub of room 629 in the Grand Hotel detonated. The hotel housed most of the Conservative party cabinet, including the Prime Minister herself, who were visiting for the party conference. The explosion would eventually kill five.

Mr Tadd said: “When we heard about the Brighton bomb, I knew we’d be up to our necks in it.”

Thanks to Pangbourne, police knew it was a long delay timer and roughly how long it could have been hidden in the building before detonating. 

Registration cards going back 48 days were pulled out by Sussex Police and passed to Scotland Yard for forensic analysis.

As Mr Tadd worked through the stack of papers, police worked their way to each address to confirm identities.

He said: “Then they found the New Cross card.”

One registration card had the address 27 Braxfield Road, New Cross, and was signed Roy Wash –  an IRA bomber convicted for his part in the 1973 Old Bailey bombing.

Police checked the address, no one knew a Roy Walsh.

Mr Tadd got to work. He immersed the card in ninhydrin, a chemical which reacts with the amino acids found in the sweat on a finger tip. 

Fingerprints could take anywhere from 10 days to two weeks to develop. He kept it in a locked safe and looked at it every day.

One of the prints was a palm print, the size of his thumb nail, on the bottom right-hand corner of the card.

Mr Tadd said: “We started searching the database for IRA palm prints.”

On January 17, 1985, one of Mr Tadd’s colleagues, Steve Turner, found a match of 16 points of similarity between the print and that of Patrick Magee. 

To stand up in court, three officers needed to independently identify 16 points of agreement. Mr Turner passed the card to his team leader Matt Egan. Another 16 points found. Mr Egan passed the card to Mr Tadd.

He said: “After I found the 16 points, I hand wrote the statutory report to the commander and took it to the typing pool.

“Asked them to type it for me. I left the name out: “We have identified … blank”. I hand wrote Patrick Magee after.”

Mr Tadd remembers a short thrill of excitement. But, he said: “You never got them until you got them. I knew there was going to be a huge process going to court.”

Mr Magee was arrested in Glasgow on June 22, 1985, with four other IRA members, while planning a lethal swathe of 16 bombings – four in London and 12 in seaside towns.

In court, Mr Magee stood trial for the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. 

Mr Tadd stood in the witness box, accused by Mr Magee’s lawyer of planting the fingerprint.

He said: “I remember them saying, ‘you must have been under a lot of pressure’. I’m always under a lot of pressure. There was no more pressure than five people killed at Harrods.”

Mr Magee was found guilty. He received eight life sentences but was released after serving 14 years under the terms of the Good Friday agreement.

From 1986, Mr Tadd headed forensics, covering murders across South London.

In 2004, he was part of the first British team sent into the chaos of Thailand after the Tsunami.

He said: “In a natural disaster, the coroner doesn’t allow visual identification. It becomes a forensic process. We had 5,600 bodies in postmortem. It took us just over 12 months.”

He retired in 2007. But his past dealings with the IRA were not over.

Last year, he spent three and a half hours in a witness box in Canterbury Police station giving evidence via video link to a court in Belfast during a trial of an IRA member accused of the 1982 Hyde Park bombing.

Mr Tadd’s career saw him visit 23 countries, meet the Queen in Buckingham palace, Tony Blair at number 10 and Ronald Reagen in the White House.

He said: “Not bad for a little lad off the council estate in South London.”

Pictured top: Anti-terrorist squad officers sifting through the IRA bomb rubble at the Grand Hotel in Brighton (Picture: PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo)