Recent Talks

The Embassy Siege of 1980 Re-visited 

On Thursday 19th September Guy Bartlett returned to Matfield Village Hall to give a talk on how the SAS raid on the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 revealing fresh information recently obtained by one of the SAS officers that took part.

Until that time, the SAS was almost completely unknown to the general British public. But that was about to change.

Day 1

11.20 on 30 April, six armed members of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan (DRFLA) led by man known as Salim storm the Iranian Embassy on Princes Gate in South Kensington, taking 26 people hostage, overpowering the diplomatic protection officer PC Trevor Lock. The group was fighting for that region’s autonomy and the release of 91 rebels.

11.44 A retired SAS officer who happened to be walking his dog near by, overheard on his radio what was happening and immedaitely reported it to his old SAS boss. 

11.48 The SAS Special Projects call Red & Blue troop to action.

3pm The government convenes an emergency committee meeting of COBR, which includes The PM, Margaret Thatcher, Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, Deputy Assitant Commissioner Dellows & Brigadier Peter de la Billière, Director of the SAS.

Mrs Thatcher declares “No terrorist will leave the UK under any circumstance”

Day 2 

SAS arrive at Regents Park Barracks and form an IAP – Immediate Acrtion Plan. Using Blue Prints and models of each floor of the Embassy.

There is now a requirement to drop microphones down the chimneys and through the walls from next door. To mask this activity and more, Heathrow are ordered to divert all aircraft over central London and British Gas dig up near by roads using jackhammers.

Two sick hostages are released. A pregnant woman and Chris Cramer, a BBC Staff member who aquires a serious stomach illness. They provide intelligence to the police, who continue to negotiate with the terrorists. The gunmen demand safe passage out of Britain, communciating through a second floor window using PC Lock as a shield from any sniper.

Day 3

Police send in a field telephone and food from which they gain valuable finger prints. The phone is also fixed so that even when hung up it is still listening in.

Days 4 & 5

Terrorists getting mentally and physically exhausted. They demand that the BBC broadcast a statement. The police agree to this in retrurn for the release of two more hostages. A woman was selected and also a man who the hostages selected due to his nightly snoring.

SAS prepare ropes from the accessed roof as well as discovering an unlocked skylight. They are also informed by the caretaker that the front windows and doors had recently been replace by bomb-proof materials.

Day 6

The BBC broadcast the Terrorists sprawling statement although the gunmen are angry about their negative portrayal. 

1pm the gunmen threaten to kill a hostage, if an Arab ambassador is not provided for them to talk to. The Iranian cultural attaché, Abbas Lavasani, offers himself as a martyr to the the Islamic revolution. At 1.45pm, three shots are heard.

3.50pm the government orders Colonel Rose, commanding the SAS to prepare an assault. By 5pm, two teams are in position. It is still unclear at this point whether a hostage has been killed or not.

7pm, the body of Lavasani is pushed out of the Embassy. Fearing for the remianing hostages’ lives, Margaret Thatcher orders an SAS assault.

At 7.07pm. Dellows signs a hand written note that hands over control to Rose. 

On the roof, one team abseils down the rear of the building, but a soldier gets entangled in ropes and a window is broken. The gunmen realise an assault is beginning.

With their colleague dangling from his ropes, the team at the rear ground floor cannot use their explosives. They instead smash their way in with sledgehammers.

At the front, another team crosses from an adjacent balcony and detonates frame charges against the armoured windows. They throw in stun grenades and enter the building, which is soon ablaze.

On the first floor, PC Lock wrestles with Salim. Ordered to roll away by intruding SAS, Salim is shot. Elsewhere in the building, one hostage is killed and two others injured by terrorists, before being eliminated.

The SAS evacuate the hostages down a staircase, but another gunman – armed with a grenade – conceals himself amongst them. The SAS spot him, consider the threat he is posing to the hostages, and shoot him.

The hostages are led outside to lie down with hands bound. The last remaining gunman, Fowzi Nejad, is discovered hiding amongst them. He is quickly removed and arrested.

7.40pm The assault ends. Control of the situation and area passes back to the police. 

Five terrorists were eliminated during the raid, The sixth, Nejad, served 27 years in jail in Britain. On his release in 2008 he could not be deported under human-rights law for fear of his life in Iran and now lives in Peckham under a new idenity. Just one hostage was killed and two others wounded by the terrorists during the raid. 17 hostages were realesed alive and well.

The SAS raid, televised live around the world on a bank holiday evening, became a defining moment in British history.

Penny Harris’ talk was a reminder that some of the most fascinating voices from

history are those of ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times.

This was about one of those ‘ordinary’ people – Edwina Hallett – the daughter of

a working class family who lived in Rusthall throughout the turbulent years of the

Second World War.

Edwina was a bright girl who won a scholarship to the County School (now

TWGGS). In 1940 she turned eighteen. Her diary is packed with observations

which paint a vivid picture of the times she lived through:

‘On 29 December the German bombers were almost successful in burning down

the city of London. Thirty miles away on my way home from a dance at the Royal

Mount Ephraim Hotel in Tunbridge Wells, I saw the entire sky over London ablaze.’

As invasion became a real threat, she wrote:

‘Hitlers armies have overrun Europe. Remnants of the British Expeditionary Force

have been taken off the beaches in Dunkirk and nightly bombers are coming over.’

In due course Edwina joined up and was sent to a medical unit in Sevenoaks,

before moving to Camp Innsworth in Gloucestershire, where she was housed in

a Nissan Hut with beds known as ‘biscuits’; straw filled pallets covered with grey

blankets. When she was given her kit, Edwina, as the youngest of four children,

was delighted that, for once in her life, she was getting new things rather than

hand-me-downs! She and her colleagues were taught to march and lectured on

topics from germ and gas warfare to lesbianism and venereal disease. Apparently

she had not heard of the last two topics!

 

 

 

In 1941 Edwina was sent to a Mechanical Transport Training Unit where a London

bus driver taught her how to drive a variety of vehicles, including a three tonne

truck. Then, in 1942, she was sent to a large army base in Chessington, where

she became aware that civilians were being used to build dummy Spitfires and

Hurricanes, which were then sent to airfields where they were deployed to give

the appearance that we had far more planes than we actually did. Eventually

Edwina was given the chance of a commission but, when she completed her forms,

she was told that if she altered her father’s occupation to something a bit more

professional, she would stand a better chance of becoming an officer. Her father

was a guard at West Station, Tunbridge Wells. Her indignant response was that

‘my father’s occupation should have no bearing on my ability to become an

Officer’ and she refused to take the matter further.

 

 

In 1942 Edwina took an ambulance to Houghton Hospital to pick up wounded

ex-servicemen who had been repatriated from Italy as POWs. She was confronted

with fifteen men, thirteen of them amputees. One of these men was John Brodie

Thompson Hall. John’s Hurricane had been shot down by a Messerschmitt 109.

He had landed with his parachute behind enemy lines, unconscious and with a

damaged leg. A German doctor tried to save his injured leg but, after he was

sent to an Italian POW camp, gangrene set in and eventually his leg had to be

amputated above the knee. In a letter he sent home to his family in 1943 he

included a photo of himself in the POW camp, accompanied by the reassuring

words: ‘Dear folks, all is well just slightly short in the left leg’.

In 1943 love bloomed between Edwina and John and they decided to marry after

courting for about ten weeks. Edwina’s mother decided she wanted her daughter

to be married in white and not in uniform and so a dress was borrowed, with

gussets from her mother’s nightie to make it fit. The reception was held in the

Rusthall Working Mens Club, and Edwina’s brother managed to bring bananas

which the children had never seen before.

 

Rusthall 

 

John still wanted to fly and managed to persuade the Air Ministry to allow him

to fly Spitfires and Hurricanes until the end of the war. He ended up in India and

Burma, finally returning in 1946. Edwina, meanwhile, was driving Lancaster crews

to their aircraft and then returning them to base. On one of her weekend passes

back home to Rusthall she writes:

‘I saw a Tempest fighter tip the wing of a B1 rocket causing it to crash before it

got to London. It exploded in Chadwell Woods about a mile from where dad was

picking raspberries. A tremendous explosion which blew off his straw hat’.

After the war and John’s return home, the couple ran a pub, the Blacksmiths Arms in Chiddingstone. However, in 1951 Edwina and John had a child, decided they did not want to bringup the child in a pub and moved to a tenanted farm near Penshurst.

 

Another story for another day!

 

Lisa Severi

Local History Society