Hugh Callaghan, who has died aged 93, was the unluckiest of the six unlucky men wrongly convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings. He was not even on the fateful trip to Belfast on the night of the bombings that resulted in the arrest of the other five. Indeed, he was barely acquainted with several of them, until they met in prison. He merely went to New Street station in Birmingham to see them off.
He came to be at New Street only because he owed Richard McIlkenny a pound (worth in those days the equivalent of six pints of Guinness), and had called round to his house to repay it. There, he found McIlkenny packing for a weekend visit to Belfast. Hugh spent the rest of the afternoon playing with McIlkenny’s children and then accompanied him to New Street, where they met up with Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Billy Power and Johnny Walker.
