Queen’s art gallery at Buckingham Palace was IRA target

The list was compiled following the Balcombe Street Siege in 1975 in which the gang responsible for the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings was captured.

The Balcombe Street terrorists were responsible for a 14-month campaign of violence and admitted to carrying out the Guildford and Woolwich attacks at their trial but 11 people remained in jail for another 15 years.

The “death list” was compiled for Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, from “dossiers of paper” and files containing references to “names, restaurants and Army establishments with information on how to enter them,” according to a memo from Nigel Wicks, Wilson’s private secretary.

The information was found in a house in Milton Grove, Stoke Newington, in North London, four days after the siege in Marylebone, central London, ended in December 1975.

The names of the people on the 86-page list, which included MPs, Lords, some press photographs, a number of people at an Investor’s Bulletin seminar, and “civilian personnel” has been withheld for another 36 years.

The pages released at the National Archives disclose that Regent’s Park Barracks was on the list, close to the site in the park where seven bandsmen were killed by an IRA bomb in 1982.

The list of 96 places includes a number of museums such as the British Museum and the Imperial War Museum and a number of art galleries including the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery and the Queen’s Gallery, housing the Royal Collection.

It also includes landmarks such as Post Office Tower, London Stock Exchange, Scotland Yard, the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand and Madame Tussauds.

There are also a number of events mentioned such as a meeting of the Law Society in Holborn and the Conservative Party’s Monday Club annual dinner at the Savoy Hotel.

More mundane targets included pumping stations, prisons and post offices.

The Home Office told Wicks the list was not in fact a “death list” and was instead “a compilation of a vast amount of low-grade ‘intelligence’ material” found in one of the flats occupied by the gang.

It added that the material “has yet to be assessed and evaluated and no significance or meaning can be attached to any of the names on the list.”

However they asked that the list should be regarded as “secret and personal” and asked Wilson not to divulge the contents to any of those mentioned in the list, adding that the “police will use their judgment whether any on the list need warning or protection.”

The Balcombe Street siege in December 1975, which was carried on live television, ended with the surrender of four IRA terrorists and the release of two hostages.

The gang was responsible for a 14-month campaign of violence that included around 40 bomb attacks in London which left 35 people dead.

They had also shot dead the co-founder of the Guinness Book of Records and conservative political activist, Ross McWhirter, who had offered a £50,000 reward to anyone willing to inform on the IRA.

The siege started after a chase through London that followed gunshots fired through the window of Scott’s Restaurant in Mayfair.

The gang had already thrown a bomb through the restaurant window a month earlier, killing one person and injuring 15 others.

The police realised the IRA active service unit was returning to some of their targets to attack them again and flooded the streets of London with plain-clothes officers.

After the second attack at Scott’s, two unarmed officers flagged down a taxi and chased the men through London, continuing on foot and dodging gun fire before holding up in a council flat in Marylebone and taking its two residents hostage.

The six-day siege ended peacefully and Joe O’Connell, Eddie Butler, Harry Duggan and Hugh Doherty were found guilty of seven murders, conspiring to cause explosions, and false imprisonment in 1977.

They became the only IRA prisoners to receive whole life tariffs but were released in 1999 under the Good Friday Agreement.

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