'Jenny's life ended at Edgware Road'
Twenty years on, the families of the victims, survivors, police and rescue workers recall the horror of the London bombings on 7/7
Alamy
- Kathryn Knight
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Julie Nicholson can recall the pause at the end of the telephone line that made her realise the worry bubbling inside her was rooted in something all too real. Minutes before, in her holiday cottage in Wales, she had watched “in shock and awe’’ as TV footage showed the unfolding devastation in London, where four suicide bombers had struck at the heart of the capital’s transport network.
Worried, she phoned the music publisher where her 24-year-old graduate daughter worked to see if Jenny, a “joyous’’ person with an immense zest for life, had arrived safely.
“They said, ‘Oh, it’s chaos here, it’s amazing any of us managed to make it in’. And I don’t know what prompted me, but I asked whether anybody else failed to turn up that morning. There was a pause, and the voice changed. And they said, ‘Only Jenny’. That was the moment I knew this was serious.’’
It took several more agonising days for Julie, who was a priest at the time, to receive the devastating news that her daughter was one of the 52 people killed in the terrorist bombings on 7 July 2005, when three devices were detonated on the London Underground and a fourth on a bus. A further 770 people were injured.
“Jenny’s life journey ended at Edgware Road Underground,” as Julie puts it now. “She was away from us and all who loved her.”
Over the years, she has “spoken to friends and colleagues who had a loved one in London at that time. We were all holding our breath until we heard from that person. Most people were able to let their breath out and breathe a sigh of relief. That, tragically, didn’t happen for us.”
“My hope was that Jenny knew nothing about what happened, because she didn’t like Tube travel, and she used to bury her head in a book – and I hoped that was what indeed happened.”
I feel compelled to go back each year, but I don’t linger
Julie Nicholson
Today, Julie’s is one of the stories told in an extraordinarily moving, four-part documentary released ahead of the 20th anniversary of the attacks. Featuring the testimony of survivors and victims’ loved ones, as well as senior police officers and rescue workers, it’s a forensic account of a day that transformed lives but also the landscape of British policing.
The events are seared on the minds of everyone involved. For Julie, the endless frantic calls and texts to a number that would never respond were followed by a desperate drive to London, and hours spent in the relatives’ room at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, where those with missing loved ones had been asked to gather. “It felt like the whole world was there – people of all cultures, all races, all asking the same questions,” she says.
Told that Jenny wasn’t in the hospital, Julie could only return home and wait. “Deep down I knew she’d gone, but I wouldn’t allow myself to countenance that.”
Five days later, any last glimmers of hope were extinguished when the family were told that Jenny had been identified as among those who died in the explosion at Edgware Road. “We were expecting it by then, but it was as if something massive just tore through us,” Julie says. “I’ve never experienced a tsunami, but I guess that’s what it can feel like. This massive pressure comes and knocks everything out of you.”
Julie Nicholson Julie with Jenny and her sister Lizzie. Courtesy of Julie Nicholson
In the bewildering aftermath, Julie recalls her determination to see her daughter’s body, however grievously injured. “The coroner’s office was trying to dissuade me, because it would be something that I would never be able to get out of my head. I remember standing up firmly against that and saying, ‘Well, that’s my responsibility. This is my daughter. I am her mother, and I will take responsibility for that.’”
Her voice falters as she recalls how her final act as a mother was to anoint her daughter’s body. “It was like a moment of giving birth; I couldn’t be with her at her end, but I could be with her in this way,” she says. “It was a very sacred moment.” Unable to forgive her daughter’s killer, Julie left the priesthood eight months after her daughter’s death.
Yet as Julie and hundreds of others were plunged into grief, the documentary also depicts the challenges and pressures on rescue workers and police presiding over what would become one of the biggest police criminal investigations since the Second World War.
Andy Hayman, then the Met’s assistant commissioner, had started that July day pounding the treadmill, delighted by news announced the previous day, that London was to host the 2012 Olympic Games. “I knew there was a high probability that No 10 or senior civil servants would want to see me to say, ‘You lot have talked a good job, now you’ve got to deliver,’” he recalls.
Instead, within hours, he found himself in the “pressure cooker” of an emergency Cobra meeting, being asked for answers he didn’t have. Just three weeks earlier, Hayman had been involved in a weekend training course preparing for a terrorist event in the city – but he concedes that little can truly prepare you for the reality.
We thought we had plans to prevent an attack – we didn’t’
Andy Hayman
“A field exercise is one thing. But when it’s in your face, it’s a different creature,” he recalls. “For a start, most of the plans were not relevant because we were predicating everything on bad people who lived outside the UK coming in – because that’s what happened in 9/11. Then suddenly, here they are, with a Yorkshire accent. It was shocking. We had never faced, in this country, the potential that in a split second someone could detonate suicide bombs. We thought we had plans in place to prevent a terrorist attack – but we didn’t.”
Hayman was also facing a melee of conflicting aims. “I wanted to preserve the crime scene but, understandably, the transport minister wanted to get London moving again. You’ve got this push and pull going on all the time. The pressure is really high – and no one’s been there before.”
The public was also desperate for reassurance that there wouldn’t be another attack, a question that was grimly answered when, two weeks later, four more bombs were left on the Underground and a bus. Thankfully, only the detonators exploded. The terrorists who planted them fled, but were subsequently captured and each sentenced to life imprisonment.
Twenty-four hours later, intelligence led police to an address in south London, from which they followed a man called Jean Charles de Menezes. Believing him to be a suicide bomber, they shot him on a train at Stockwell Underground station. He was, in fact, completely innocent. In the documentary, the then Met commissioner Sir Ian Blair reflects on the errors carried out by the Met in the aftermath of the shooting.
Former Met assistant commissioner Andy Hayman BBC
Hayman later spoke of his own regret at not challenging his senior officer at the time, although today he is more measured. “It was an absolutely dreadful event for everyone involved, not least Jean Charles and his family,” he says. “But it boils down to someone having one shot, one second to make a decision. Those cops never came to work any day of the week to do the wrong thing. We do our best, and for that split second it wasn’t good enough. And when that happens, we have to stand up, be honest and be held accountable.”
Nothing, of course, will bring back those whose lives were lost. This July, as she does every year, Julie will return to the scene where her daughter died to mark the anniversary of her death.
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“I do still feel a compulsion to go back each year, but I don’t linger long, and it’s a private thing,” she says. “Whoever pitches up on that day, we go out and have a really special brunch. We drink champagne and we toast Jenny’s memory.”
Authors
Kathryn Knight
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