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Evil To Him Who Evil Thinks:
The 1974 London Uprising, Part 2
by Chris Oakley

Summary: In the first part of this series we reviewed the circumstances leading up to the outbreak of the British Popular Liberation Front’s 1974 uprising against the government of then-prime minister Ted Heath. In this chapter we’ll look at the SAS’ mission to retake the National Gallery from the insurgents as the uprising escalated.

  

Prime Minister Ted Heath and his cabinet were still trying to absorb the news of the National Gallery falling into BPLF hands when the mystery van with the blacked-out side windows pulled up to the curb next to No. 10 Downing Street. It was 6:05 AM London time on the morning of January 22nd, and the BPLF’s uprising against the Heath government was just one hour and five minutes old, but already the shock waves of the revolt were starting to be felt throughout the rest of the United Kingdom. The strange van which was now parked in front of the prime minister’s residence was part of that revolt; it contained a homemade bomb meant to kill Heath and as many of his senior cabinet officials as humanly possible. The insurgents were so certain the bomb would work they had already prepared a message to be transmitted by radio announcing the “execution” of Heath as a supposed war criminal.

    But as a time-honored literary proverb goes, the best-laid plans of mice and men can often go astray. The bomb was hastily constructed; in its haste to get the device assembled and smuggled to No. 10 Downing Street, the BPLF had neglected to make sure that it would actually go off. When Heath’s aides contacted Scotland Yard to inform them of the bomb, the bomb squad personnel sent to defuse it found the guerrillas had messed up the job of wiring the explosives to the timer. Defusing it proved to be a simple affair. Once the bomb had been disarmed, it was rushed to police scientists for chemical and fingerprint analysis to determine who’d made the bomb and how said bomb had been constructed.

    When the BPLF leaders found out their attempt to assassinate Heath by vehicle bomb had failed, they were both embarrassed and furious. Killing the incumbent prime minister had been a critical element to their strategy for the uprising against the government, and in a turn of events like something out of a B-movie satire it had already gone seriously awry. They pledged to redouble their efforts to liquidate Heath and rushed to devise a backup plan to assassinate him.

    In the meantime, plans had been set in motion to infiltrate the SAS into the BPLF-occupied National Gallery. The plan for subduing the BPLF occupation teams at the museum was a simple and highly ingenious one: a single group of commandos would stage a hit-and-run raid at the front of the building in a feigned strike at the guerrillas while the real attack would come from the back entrance by way of two SAS assault platoons who were specially trained for urban warfare operations. Once the SAS men had established a foothold inside the Gallery, all three units would quickly move to seize the guerrillas and secure the museum while squads of Royal Army engineers were called in to defuse the explosives the insurgents had set up on the museum grounds. The raids were a masterpiece of operational security; the Gallery’s BPLF occupiers weren’t even aware the SAS intended to make a move to retake the museum until the first flash-bang grenades had gone off inside its front halls. A former BPLF militant who later became an informant for MI-5 would tell the Guardian in a 2002 interview that the SAS operation utterly embarrassed the BPLF’s leadership.

     Once the SAS teams had established a foothold inside the museum, it was a relatively simple matter to subdue the BPLF partisans occupying the Gallery’s exhibit halls. The tricky part was to retake the administration offices and defuse the bombs planted inside the museum before the remaining insurgents had a chance to detonate them. For this part of the mission, the SAS men would need assistance from other elements of the British military. That was where the Royal Army engineers and the Royal Navy’s Special Boat Squadron(SBS) came in. The Royal Army engineers, some of whom were veterans of the Blitz, would be entrusted with the task of deactivating the bombs; the SBS team was to deploy via helicopter onto the Gallery’s roof and hit the administration offices from the rear to soften the BPLF guerrillas in those offices up for capture by the SAS.

      At 8:30 AM the helicopter carrying the SBS team assigned to retake the Gallery’s administration offices touched down on the museum roof; the started BPLF guerrillas occupying those offices put up a stiff resistance but it was quickly suppressed, and within just under thirty minutes after the SBS men arrived the Royal Army engineering teams were at work defusing the bombs the guerrillas had planted. It was another thumb in the eye to a group already smarting in the first place from the failure of their attempt to blow up Ted Heath at 10 Downing Street.

                              ******

But if the insurgents’ occupation of the National Gallery had come to an inglorious end and their attack against Buckingham Palace ended in failure, they were enjoying notable success in other parts of their plan to overthrow the Heath government. One of their more conspicuous triumphs was their seizure of the headquarters of the venerable Lloyd’s insurance company-- aided, according to some accounts, by the proverbial disgruntled employee. Some particularly paranoid conspiracy theorists have even made the shocking allegation that the company’s executives let the BPLF storm the building in hopes the resulting carnage of the fight to recapture it would engender massive destruction and give the company the perfect excuse to wheedle the government for funds to build a new headquarters.

Survivors of the Lloyd’s standoff from both sides of the uprising will attest that this theory is-- to put it generously --ridiculous. But it speaks volumes about the chaotic nature of the events which unfolded at the Lloyd’s company offices during their occupation by BPLF guerrillas. In what seemed like the blink of an eye two parties of insurgents seized the Lloyd’s offices along with the majority of the company employees who were on duty at the time. At 12:15 PM on the afternoon of January 22nd the BPLF propaganda unit issued an anonymous bulletin declaring that the insurgents had captured the staff of Lloyd’s as “prisoners of war” and would continue to detain them until its goals of overthrowing the Heath government and establishing Marxist rule in Britain had been accomplished. Not surprisingly Whitehall responded by saying it refused to capitulate to the guerrillas’ demands and pledged to fight tooth and nail until the BPLF uprising had been crushed.

This, of course, did not sit well with the BPLF leadership, and at 6:20 PM that evening they issued the first of several threats to blow up the Lloyd’s building. Given what had happened with their previous attempt to bomb the National Gallery, one has to wonder what possessed them to make such threats. Certainly it was a question that ran through the minds of the men and women of New Scotland Yard more than once during the late evening of January 22nd and the early morning hours of January 23rd-- not to mention the Lloyd’s employees who had the misfortune to be stuck in the company’s offices. But the insurgents were convinced that if they made such threats often enough and loudly enough the British government would eventually give in to their demands.

At 5:26 AM on the morning of January 23rd a combined task force of Scotland Yard special branch officers and MI-5 agents infiltrated Lloyd’s by surreptitiously traveling through the water and sewer pipes which ran underneath the insurance company’s headquarters. Once they’d gained entry, the task force moved swiftly to disarm the bombs the BPLF had planted and arrest the guerrillas who’d been occupying the Lloyd’s; remarkably, there were no deaths as a result of this operation(although one Scotland Yard DI did sustain facial lacerations and a BPLF guerrilla sprained his ankle in an attempt to escape through a first floor window). The guerrillas seemed to be on the run....

******

...but at 10:00 AM events took a horrific turn when the BPLF set off a bomb at the Charing Cross subway station, killing nearly a hundred people in the blast. The attack not only sent Londoners into a spiral of shock, grief, and terror but also seriously disrupted the city’s transport system and diverted police and emergency personnel who were badly needed elsewhere in the British capital. It was around this time that Heath and his senior advisors began to conclude that further military intervention might be necessary to put an end to the uprising.

Accordingly, just over two hours after the Charing Cross bombing the prime minister ordered the activation of several divisions of the Territorial Army and the immediate deployment of those divisions to the metropolitan London area to root out the guerrillas and put an end once for all to the BPLF. Within minutes after those orders were issued, the roads and bridges leading into metropolitan became packed with military vehicles of all sizes as the British Army prepared to confront a domestic insurrection for the first time since the Battle of Culloden in 1745.

For the insurgents, the news of British government troops being dispatched to London to put down the BPLF uprising meant an already complicated and star-crossed undertaking was about to become even more so. They hadn’t prepared for a direct face-to-face confrontation with the Territorial Army, and they certainly hadn’t expected Heath to dare to risk pitched battles on the streets of the British capital no matter how intense his loathing for the leftist faction or how great his rage over the group’s attempt on his life at 10 Downing Street. Yet here was the muscle of the regular British army on full display, ready to finish what the SAS had started as Whitehall battled to crush the BPLF uprising once and for all.

A BBC camera crew happened to be on the scene as the first unit of Territorial Army troops made its way into metropolitan London; the shot of these troops crossing the Thames River bridge has since become known as one of the most iconic pieces of news footage in television history. While the BBC crew was filming the troops, some of the troops were also filming them in return-- an enterprising TA lieutenant in the first wave had given the men in his platoon home movie cameras as a means of putting together for their superiors a visual record of their operations against the BPLF guerrillas. The BPLF partisans opposing the TA forces would have undoubtedly preferred to stay off camera, given that excerpts of the home movie footage would later be used by the British government to prosecute the surviving guerrillas for treason.

******

It was just after 1:15 PM London time on the afternoon of January 23rd when the Territorial Army troops first engaged the BPLF insurgents. The issue of who actually fired the first shot is still in dispute even now, but it is generally agreed that the skirmish began within less than ten minutes after the two sides made visual contact with one another. As one TA veteran put it in a Sky News interview thirty years later: “Soon as we laid eyes on those swine, our operational plan went right to hell.” So for that matter did the strategy of the BPLF insurgents, who had been hoping to wait the Heath government out and force it into either surrender or a miscalculation so severe it would drive the masses into the arms of the rebel side. Now the guerrillas found themselves knee-deep in the very scenario they’d been hoping to avoid-- a pitched battle with regular army units.

At one point there was some debate among Heath’s senior military advisors about the possibility of using air strikes to dislodge the BPLF forces from their defensive strongpoints. This idea was rejected on the grounds that if the pilots missed their targets it might incur excessive civilian casualties. However, the RAF would continue to fly patrol sweeps every hour on hour over the British capital for the remainder of the BPLF uprising. Their presence, although they never fired a single shot in anger or took any fire from the enemy, gave the guerrillas cause to be nervous; for all their bluster about striking a blow against the Heath government, the insurgents feared the RAF might yet wipe them off the map with a well- timed strafing run or bomb hit.

The heaviest fighting between the guerrillas and regular British Army troops that afternoon centered around the monument to martyred 19th century general Charles “Chinese” Gordon. By the time BPLF insurgents withdrew from the vicinity of the monument just before 5:30 PM London time, the monument had taken no less than three hundred nicks from bullets fired by both sides in a series of bitter firefights; it also took some blast damage due to an errant hand grenade through by a TA private. After the rebellion collapsed, the British government would be deluged with letters pleading for something to be done to fix the battered statue.

Around 6:00 PM two armored battalions and a detachment of Territorial Army infantry troops were dispatched to Buckingham Palace to strengthen the palace’s defenses against the possibility of another BPLF attack. TA troops were also dispatched to London’s East End to deter would-be looters as well as BPLF attempts to scavenge supplies from local shops. At Heathrow Airport TA soldiers joined Metropolitan Police constables in patrolling the airport runways and terminals in order forestall possible hijacking attempts by the BPLF guerrillas. If anybody had any doubts the Heath government was totally serious about crushing the BPLF uprising, those doubts would soon be erased once and for all...

 

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