Talbot Arms pub bombing  The Talbot Arms pub bombing took place on 30 November 1974. It was carried out by the Provisional IRA's London-based active service unit (later nicknamed the Balcombe Street Gang). Eight people were injured in the attack, which involved the IRA men throwing homemade bombs through the pub's window. Only one of the devices exploded; the other was taken as evidence and used to discover how the unit assembled its devices. Fingerprints were also found, but, when the unit was arrested and brought to trial the following year, they were not charged with the attack. The attack came on the back of a string of IRA operations in England carried out by the Balcombe Street unit. The unit had already carried out attacks on pubs in and around London, including in Guildford on 5 October—killing four off-duty soldiers and a civilian, and injuring 65 others—and on 7 November another off-duty soldier and a civilian were killed in the Woolwich pub bombing in which 35 people were also injured. The day before the Talbot Arms bombing, the British government had passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act. At the time described as “draconian”, it banned the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Britain and gave the police unprecedented peacetime powers. The Talbot Arms pub has been described as then being a family friendly hostelry situated in Little Chester Street, a small mews in the upper-class area of Belgravia, Central London. It was, one recent commentator observed, "ideally situated" for the IRA's purposes, as it attracted "little or no passing traffic". The attack on the Talbot Arms pub happened at around 10:00pm on the night of 30 November 1974. ASU members Eddie Butler and Joe O'Connell were both armed with a short-fused throwing bomb. With them was a third man, Brendan Dowd, who drove their stolen Mark III Ford Cortina, and who had assisted O'Connell in the bombs' construction. Parking their getaway car a short distance away, they approached the pub on foot; there were approximately 70 customers inside. Butler threw his bomb first, intending it to smash a window and detonate inside the pub; however, he misaimed and the device bounced off the window-frame, exploding outside. The bombs were wrapped in industrial tape and contained shrapnel composed of nuts and bolts packed around the gelignite, which was later found to be labelled "Irish Industrial Limited Eversoft Frangex".