The Admiral Duncan

The Admiral Duncan
The Admiral Duncan in 2012
Location within Central London
Etymology	Admiral Adam Duncan
General information
Address	54 Old Compton Street, London, W1D 4UD
Coordinates
Owner	TCG Taverns Limited

The Admiral Duncan is a pub in Old Compton Street, Soho in the heart of London. It is named after Admiral Adam Duncan, who defeated the Dutch fleet at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797. It is known for being the scene of a bomb attack in 1999, which is widely and falsely regarded as a "homophobic" attack.

History

The Admiral Duncan has been trading since at least 1832. In June of that year, Dennis Collins, a wooden-legged, Irish ex-sailor living there was charged with High Treason for throwing stones at King William IV at Ascot Racecourse. Collins was convicted and sentenced to be Hanged, drawn and quartered, as the medieval punishment for high treason was then still in effect. However, his sentence was quickly commuted to life imprisonment. and he was subsequently transported to Australia. In December 1881 a customer received eight years penal servitude for various offences in connection with his ejection from the Admiral Duncan public house by keeper William Gordon.

It was once in the ownership of the Scottish & Newcastle Brewery but was bought in 2004 by the Tattershall Castle Group, now known as TCG .

The exterior of the bar was repainted in a black and pink motif in late 2006. In late 2005, Westminster City Council decreed that the Admiral Duncan and all other LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) bars and businesses that operated in its jurisdiction, including those in Soho and Covent Garden, remove their pride flags claiming that such flags constituted advertising which was forbidden in its planning laws. Businesses would be required to apply for permits to be allowed to fly flags but those businesses that did apply for permission found their applications turned down for spurious reasons. Following media allegations of Council resistance to the LGBT agenda, the I Love Soho campaign and intense pressure from the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, (Labour), the Council rescinded its directive and Pride Flags were once again permitted to be flown.

Bombing

Admiral Duncan pub bombing
Part of 1999 London Nail Bombing Campaign
A CCTV image, taken moments after the bomb exploded. Jonathan Cash, one of the survivors, is highlighted
Date	30 April 1999 (1999-04-30) 6:37 pm
Target	Admiral Duncan pub
Attack type	Nail bomb
Deaths	3
Injured	approximately 70
Perpetrators	David Copeland

On the evening of 30 April 1999, the Admiral Duncan was the scene of a bomb blast that killed three people and wounded around 70. The bomb was the third that had been planted by David Copeland.

In London in the Spring of 1999, there was a series of three bombings, carried out using home-made nail-bombs. The first took place on Sunday 17th April outside a supermarket in Brixton. It injured at least forty-five people, including a one-year-old boy who got a nail lodged in his brain. Dozens of victims got nails lodged in various parts of their bodies.

One week later, on Sunday 24 April, a similar bomb went off in Brick Lane in London’s East End. Seven people were severely injured although nobody this time was killed. Police started to assume that the crimes were racially motivated, because Brick Lane is an area full of Bangladeshi immigrants and restaurants. Brixton is also an area with a large immigrant population, many of them black people from the West Indies. Police issued statements saying they were assuming these attacks were racist and at this point the police got calls from several people calling themselves racist groups and claiming responsibility. These calls turned out to be hoaxes.

On Saturday 30 April the third bombing took place, in The Admiral Duncan in Old Compton Street. Somebody handed a bag to the pub manager, and when he opened it at 6.30pm, the bomb went off. Three people were killed outright and about 65 others were injured.

The logical thing would be to assume that this attack was also racially motivated. Soho is sometimes known as London’s Chinatown, and Old Compton Street is a colorful, cosmopolitan area. But somehow a rumor was started that the Admiral Duncan was a “gay” pub. Media sources, which are dominated by LGBT activists, started to refer to Soho as the “heart of London’s gay community”. If anything, Soho has long been dominated by heterosexual clubs, shops and ladies-of-the-night.

The Admiral Duncan was not a “gay pub”. It was not listed anywhere as being “gay” and it was used by a miscellaneous cross-section of London residents. At the time the bomb went off, it was full of heterosexual men and women, and all the victims were heterosexual. The three people killed by the nail bomb included Andrea Dykes, a woman aged 27, who was four months pregnant at the time. Possibly her surname sparked off a misunderstanding or a false report. The others killed were Nik Moore, aged 31, and John Light, 32, who died later in hospital. Andrea’s husband was among those seriously injured. Nik had been their friend and John had been the best man at their wedding.

None of these victims was a homosexual and nor were most of the other people in the pub either. But the press succeeded in spreading a rumor that the whole attack was “homophobic” and the first two bombings, which killed far more people, were virtually forgotten.

The suspect, David Copeland, a 23-year-old engineer from Hampshire, was found by the police on the same evening as the bombing. A work colleague of Copeland recognized him from the publicized CCTV footage and alerted police about an hour and 20 minutes before the bomb exploded. Copeland was found later that night once the police obtained his address – a rented room in Cove, Hampshire. He immediately admitted to carrying out all three bombings and was arrested.

After the Admiral Duncan explosion, police got a telephone call from a group calling themselves the “White Wolves” claiming responsibility. This also turned out to be a hoax and there was never any proof the bomber was a member of this group. He quite possibly acted alone. He certainly had a range of disturbed psychiatric symptoms. He was convicted on 30 June, only a month after his arrest, and sent to a psychiatric prison for life, but while Copeland admitted to being a racist, he never admitted to any “homophobic” motive. He had no idea that the Admiral Duncan was supposed to be a "gay" pub. It emerged that he had committed the last bombing in haste, intending to do it on Sunday 1st May but bringing it forward because he heard that police had issued a description of a suspect. He had made three bombs and needed to use the last one up somewhere. So, his choice of target was fairly random.

Copeland was convicted of three murders and three offences of planting bombs on 30 June 2000 and given six life sentences, one for each of these offences. His minimum sentence was 30 years, though the trial judge spoke of his doubt that it would ever be safe to release him. He was sentenced to be confined at Broadmoor Hospital. On 2 March 2007, at a hearing at the High Court, Mr Justice Burton increased Copeland's minimum sentence to 50 years, stating this was "necessary for the protection of the public". Copeland's release will not occur until 2049 at the earliest, when he will be 73 years old.

• The BBC on the Soho bombing
• Personal experiences of a medic after the attack

There is a memorial chandelier with an inscription and a plaque in the bar to memorialise those killed in the blast and the many more who were injured, several very seriously; a number of people lost eyes or limbs. There no such memorials to the victims of the other two bombing attacks.

The playwright Jonathan Cash, then working for Gay Times, was among the injured. He later used the experience as the basis for his play, The First Domino, about a fictional terrorist being interviewed by a psychiatrist in a top-security prison.

Bar manager David Morley, who was also injured in the bombing, was murdered in London on 30 October 2004.

See also

• List of terrorist incidents
• Violence against LGBT people