Castlereagh woman Lynne Lilburn firmly believes her father was the 10th victim of Bloody Friday — even though he didn’t die from his injuries until 25 years after the horrific IRA bomb blitz across Belfast half a century ago.
Lynne’s ‘miracle’ dad Jack Campbell had described himself as one of the luckiest men alive on the planet after a car bomb which he was leaning on at Oxford Street bus station exploded and hurled him onto an office roof.
Astonishingly it didn’t kill him there and then, though six other people died instantly at the depot on July 21, 1972.
However the damage to Mr Campbell’s lungs was so severe — it left him needing an oxygen ventilator for the rest of his life — that he eventually succumbed to his injuries in 1997 at the age of 79.
“I have no doubt Dad was a casualty of Bloody Friday along with the other nine people listed among the dead in Belfast that day,” says Lynne who only now has been able to talk in depth about her father’s ordeal on a sunny summer afternoon when the IRA unleashed unprecedented panic and terror to the streets of Belfast.
According to Northern Ireland Office records 19 bombs exploded in Belfast in a devastating 65-minute spell. A total of 130 people were injured. A number of other bombs didn’t go off or were defused by the security forces who were overwhelmed by the number of warnings they were receiving. Frightened shoppers and workers ran for their lives, but often found themselves fleeing from one alert into another and there were claims that cheers came from republican areas every time a bomb went off.
Bloody Friday 50 years on
The attack at Oxford Street was the deadliest of the blasts and the gruesome TV pictures of rescuers shovelling the remains of dismembered victims into plastic bags are still vividly remembered as among the most disturbingly graphic images of the Troubles.
Ninety-year-old retired firefighter John Knox says he still has nightmares over what he saw in Oxford Street. “There were bodies without a stitch on them… but we were only too aware that what we were handling were people’s loved ones.”
Daily Mirror photographer Stanley Matchett who captured the iconic Bloody Sunday picture of Father Edward Daly waving a white handkerchief in front of Jackie Duddy’s body, was on the scene of Bloody Friday too. He says as people fled from the bus station an ambulance man shouted at him.
“I thought he was telling me off for taking pictures of wounded people, but he wanted me to photograph an unrecognisable body to show just gruesome it was.”
The IRA set off 26 explosions in Belfast on Bloody Friday which killed 11 people and injured 130
Roddy’s Bar across the road was turned into a makeshift morgue. Chris Roddy whose family owned the bar was 14 at the time. He says: “It broke my father.”
He also recalls that a painting showed Belfast street fighter Silver McKee saving people’s lives, lifting a burning roof beam that had fallen on top of casualties.
Because no one had seen Jack Campbell in the aftermath of the blast, his family thought he must have been among the tragic victims who were blown to unidentifiable pieces.
His brother-in-law Bobby Lilburn was among a number of people who searched for him. He says: “After checking the hospitals, we went to the mortuary on Laganbank Road — narrowly missing injury in another explosion — but we were talked out of going inside by an RUC man because there was so little left of the bodies in there.”
As Mr Campbell’s family braced themselves for what they thought was the inevitable confirmation of his death, they were stunned and overjoyed to hear that he was still alive.
Lynne says: “Our minister told us the next morning that Daddy had incredibly survived.”
John Campbell after he was caught up in Bloody Friday
Mr Campbell’s nephew John Gibson says: “Apparently moaning was heard coming from the roof hours after the attack and someone got a ladder and discovered an unrecognisable Uncle Jack.”
Lynne says: “Slowly it emerged that Dad had been told by soldiers that a warning had been received of a car bomb at the station. He spotted a strange car and as he leant on the bonnet to see if it had a staff parking permit a bomb exploded, throwing him into the air and onto the roof.”
As well as his lung injuries, broken legs and arms, Mr Campbell, who was in hospital for nine weeks after the bombing, needed skin grafts for serious burns to his body and all his teeth were ripped out
Four of his Ulsterbus colleagues had died; driver Jackie Gibson and three young men who worked in offices, William Irvine, Thomas Killops and 15-year-old Billy Crothers, a promising footballer who had caught the eye of George Best’s mentor Bob Bishop.
Thomas Killops who died in the Oxford Street explosion
Billy had pleaded with Jack Campbell to give him a job so that he could support his widowed mother. “Dad said taking him on was the sorriest thing he ever did because it led to his death,” says Lynne.
Two soldiers who had been standing with Mr Campbell were killed. They were Steven Cooper and Philip Price whose widow forged a bond with Lynne Lilburn after coming to Belfast for a memorial service.
Madeleine Price sent Lynne a letter saying the ‘warmth and kindness’ she encountered on her visit dispelled a lot of her negative feelings about Northern Ireland and she saluted ‘the bravery of Belfast people who had suffered so much during the Troubles’.
“It was a lovely gesture,” says Lynne, who is 74. “Mrs Price said she was praying for the success of the peace process. I think she was also glad that I was able to share with her what Dad told me about Philip’s last moments because up until then she didn’t know anything.”
Jack Campbell, who survived the Atlantic convoys with the Merchant Navy during the Second World War, was back at work as the manager of the bus station a year after the explosion but his daughter says, “He was never the same again. Like us, he couldn’t explain how he survived on Bloody Friday but he always used to say, ‘If you’re born to be shot, you’ll never be hung’.He wasn’t bitter after the blast and another thing he always said was, ‘You don’t make peace talking to your friends; you have to talk to your enemies’.”
Eventually Mr Campbell died from the injuries to his lungs. Lynne says: “They weren’t working at all and he had bits of shrapnel embedded in his body which were still coming out years later. He always said he would have lived to be 100 if it hadn’t been for Bloody Friday which destroyed his life.
“To me he was another victim of the atrocity.”
Lynne has lost touch now with the other Oxford Street families and relatives of the three other Bloody Friday victims who all died in a blast outside shops on the Cavehill Road, Margaret O’Hare, Brigid Murray and Stephen Parker.
Lynne says she feels deeply sorry for all the victims of Bloody Friday, adding: “And I always think about Mrs O’Hare’s husband and seven children who lost their mother that day.”
The scene after one of the 26 bomb blasts on Bloody Friday
Fourteen-year-old Stephen Parker was hailed a hero as he tried to warn people about the car bomb which killed him.
His father, the Rev Joseph Parker, could only identify him from a packet of trick matches that were in his packet.
The cleric set up the Witness for Peace organisation to campaign for an end to violence and chronicled the number of deaths on a noticeboard outside a Belfast city centre church.
At a four-hour vigil outside Belfast’s City Hall in 1973, I interviewed a young Catholic schoolboy, Stephen McCann, who wrote a song called What Price Peace? He told me: “Like thousands of others I am fed up with violence.”
Three years later he was dead, a victim of the UVF’s notorious Shankill Butchers gang who abducted him before shooting him and slitting his throat.
Rev Parker later emigrated to Canada.
Acclaimed Belfast-born sculptor Tim Shaw, who as a seven-year-old was caught up in the Bloody Friday bombardment, later constructed a high profile immersive installation recreating the post-blast jumble of flying chairs, upturned tables and abandoned shoes, purses and clothes in a café together with a body in plastic bags.
Belfast-born sculptor Tim Shaw who was caught up in Bloody Friday when he was just seven with his immersive installation
Tim counts himself lucky that he, his mother and his sister were not among the dead or injured.
“We didn’t know if we were heading away from one blast or running into another one,” he says.
Comedian John Linehan, whose alter ego is May McFettridge, could have been killed on Bloody Friday.
He’d been working as a mechanic under a jacked-up car in Donegall Street garage and went outside to investigate a huge explosion at Smithfield bus station.
“But after I got back to the car I realised it had collapsed off the jack and I would have been underneath it,” he said.
John and his future wife Brenda left later that evening on the Liverpool ferry for a holiday in Holland. “We watched Belfast in chaos behind us. I was never as glad to get out.”
