Warrington will soon fall silent as it remembers a tragic 1993 bomb attack that led to the death of two boys.
On Mother's Day 30 years ago, 12-year-old Tim Parry and three-year-old Johnathan Ball were both out in town hoping to buy a card for their mother. Half-an-hour prior, a coded IRA message to the Samaritan warned that a bomb would go off in Liverpool city centre - 19 miles away from Warrington.
Just three weeks before, on February 26, 1993, an initial IRA attack on Winwick Road gas works had left the city wary. The group planted four bombs, throwing a fireball 1,000 feet in the air.
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In this initial attack, however, no one was injured and one bomb on a petrol tank didn't go off alongside another failed explosives underneath a series of tanks located 50 yards away from a housing estate, avoiding a potential tragedy, the Liverpool Echo reports.
Cheshire County Fire Officer Dennis David said in 1993: "There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if the bomb on the cylinders had gone off we could have been facing a most dreadful situation. But luckily, the device only damaged the mountings."
Tragically, the second attack didn't have the same outcome. On March 20, 1993, police in Warrington were alerted to the possibility of a bomb going off before, at 12.12pm, two bombs exploded in the town centre - one outside Boots on Bridge Steet and another outside Argos.
Johnathan was killed at the scene while Tim tragically died five days later in hospital. Superintendent Deborah Hooper had only been working as a police constable for 12 months at the time of the bombing on Bridge Street. In a previous interview, she said: “As soon as I saw it on the news I said ‘I’m going into work’.
"At the police station I was sent with a colleague, who’s no longer in the job, to the accident and emergency department at Warrington Hospital. I knew a bomb had gone off in Bridge Street but I didn’t know if anyone had been injured or killed.
“Walking into the hospital, it was like a scene from a disaster movie. It was such a shock. There were injured people everywhere. I saw Bronwen Vickers – and I remember one of her daughters (the then four-year-old Hannah), whose lovely blonde hair was red with blood. And I remember a girl saying she had lost a small boy in the town centre – this turned out to be Johnathan Ball."
Since the tragic event, Tim's parents, Colin and Wendy, have searched for answers around his death and have dedicated their lives to supporting those affected by the conflict in Northern Ireland as well as other terror attacks such as the Manchester Arena bombing.
Mr Parry previously said: "We wanted no more families to suffer as we and so many others had suffered. We wanted peace and that gave a sense of purpose to our lives which would otherwise have been empty of anything but grief and anger and incomprehension.
"We wanted to do our utmost to see that such an act of savagery which killed our son never happened again."
In 1995, Colin and Wendy set up the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Peace Foundation in order to help their effort and support the promotion of peace and non-violent conflict resolution. A Peace Centre was opened on the seventh anniversary of the bombing in 2000, thanks to Wendy's efforts.
People will gather from Market Gate in Warrington town centre at midday on Monday to mark the 30th anniversary of the bombing. A minute's silence will also be observed at 12.20pm to remember the two boys who lost their lives.
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