Cruel Fate

On 14 March 1991 the Birmingham Six were released from custody after a successful appeal at the Old Bailey in London. Hugh Callaghan and the other men had spent over sixteen years in prison as a result of an appalling miscarriage of justice.Cruel Fate is Hugh Callaghan's own personal account of his life, the many strange twists of fate that saw him arrested and charged as an IRA bomber after the Birmingham pub massacres of November 1974 and his survival through the years spent in many different prisons. Born in the Ardoyne in Belfast in 1930, he emigrated to Birmingham after the war as a soccer-loving youth, settled and reared a family there. An ordinary man, with little interest in politics, he was stunned by his arrest, brutalised, and perplexed by the operation of the criminal justice system.Hugh Callaghan's account of his life is a story of the triumph of the human spirit over impossible odds. The author emerges as a thoughtful, humane person, without bitterness but with the ability to see clearly the faults in the system that caused his long nightmare. His family, friends, the many supporters who struggled desperately for justice, the kindness - and inhumanity - of strangers all emerge vividly from this moving story.