11 hours ago
7/7: ‘There was a white light. I looked around and saw bodies'
On July 7, 2005, four suicide bombers struck London's Tube and bus network during the morning rush hour, killing 52 people and injuring more than 770 others. Twenty years on, the people caught up in the attacks — the survivors, the bereaved and the police — remember the traumatic events of that day and reveal their devastating aftermath.
Thelma Stober travels around the country regularly to give motivational speeches and offer mentoring based on her experience as a survivor of the July 7 bombings in London. It means that she has to get back on the train.'I phone the train providers for each route,' she says. 'Ask them, 'How many times do you go through a tunnel and how long does it take?' It means I can prepare myself. I put on classical music, shut my eyes, do deep breathing.'It has to be a surface train. She has travelled underground twice in the 20 years since the attacks, both times for television documentaries, but she found it too distressing.'I get to the front of the escalator,' she says. 'It's as if I'm nailed to the ground. I can't put one foot in front of the other. And I begin to feel panic attacks coming.'Stober was standing close to Shehzad Tanweer when he detonated his bomb at 8.49am on July 7, 2005, as their train travelled towards Aldgate station.
'There was a white light,' she says. 'I didn't hear an explosion. I felt as if I was lifted from the floor. I was going around in circles. I could hear screams, but at a distance. And my eyes were closed, but I could see bright lights — really bright light.
'When I woke up, I found myself on the train tracks. I was partly underneath the train and partly off. And part of the door was on my right thigh. I realised that my left foot was kind of turned backwards. I could see the door was awfully mangled. I could see people screaming. There was a man next to me and I took his hand off my head. And I looked around and I saw bodies.'
Stober's lower left leg was amputated, she suffered internal injuries and her back was severely burnt. She was so close to the blast that she lost all the hearing in her left ear and 50 per cent in her right. She taught herself to walk again but her prosthetic limb put an end to her favoured pursuits of jogging and countryside rambling. She never wears shorts and sticks to dresses with a high collar to cover up her burns. 'I want to explain to somebody what happened to me because I choose to, not because they're looking at me,' she says.
For years Stober, 58, a public sector solicitor, experienced migraines that affected her ability to focus, but it was only in 2019 that a scan revealed it was caused by shrapnel in her brain. She has annual scans now so it can be monitored.
'That's why I say injuries are not one-off. Sometimes you get latent injuries, issues that do not manifest themselves until many years later.
'And when you get things like that, it takes you back. It affects your self-esteem, your sense of security. My leg, it wasn't an easy road. It changes your life. You have to plan things ahead. You lose spontaneity. But I never say I can't do something.'A twist of fate put her on that Circle Line train, because she had intended to take the day off and spend it at her home in Hertfordshire. But on July 6, London had won the right to host the Olympics and Stober was euphoric. She had played an integral role in the legal aspects of the bid and her focus switched to the huge amount of work to be done ahead of the 2012 Games. She decided to go into the office, but first she took her three-year-old son to nursery.'Normally I'm a very early person, but I honoured my promise to my son,' she says. 'And that was the reason I was on the train later.'When she came to on the tracks, a survival instinct kicked in. 'I tried to put my hand up and say, 'Help me! Help me! I don't want to die.' I didn't want to die because of my mother, my son, my husband. And I really wanted to be part of the Olympics.'
• 7/7: The London Bombings — a potent reminder of a terrifying time for London
Tony Silvestro, a British Transport Police officer based at Aldgate, came to her aid and found rescuers to get her out. They only met for the first time last year. 'We hugged each other and we just cried. He said, 'All I wanted to know was that you're OK.' '
Colin Pettit, a passenger on the train and Thelma's 'guardian angel', put his jacket on her and kept her talking while she drifted in and out of consciousness. Emergency services were delayed but Stober felt no pain. 'I think the brain shuts down,' she says.
She had enough faculty to question why her ambulance driver did not know the way to the Royal London, and was told the incident was so huge that emergency workers had been brought in from outside the capital. When she was wheeled into hospital she told doctors to call her colleagues, including Ken Livingstone, then London's mayor overseeing the 2012 bid. 'I said, 'Tell them I've been involved in an accident and I'll be coming to the office later.' '
She did not at first understand the magnitude of her injuries, but it took months to recover and learn how to walk again. She went into severe depression after being warned she could also lose her right leg — there was a severe risk of infection because there was so much dirt from the train tracks embedded in the wound. The doctors saved it.
'I had a book by Nelson Mandela,' Stober says. 'He says one must have hope, faith and determination in the midst of unimaginable disaster. And that's kept me going.'
After learning the man whose hand she removed from her head had died in the tunnel, for many years she felt terrible guilt. She spoke of this at the inquests into the bombings in 2010 and his parents wrote her a letter saying he died instantly and she had nothing to feel guilty for. 'That helped. For years it was a weight.'
Now she supports victims of terrorism, immerses herself in mentoring work and leads plans for a memorial to commemorate the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire. She was determined to use her 'second life to continue to make a difference to society'.
Stober does not feel angry about Tanweer and the three other bombers.
'Anger eats you up,' she says. 'They're dead. Why would I expend energy being angry with people that I could expend doing good? I can't forget of course, and I don't forgive them. I release them. I release them for my own sanity and for me to focus on the positives that I can do.'
It took six days for police to confirm to Graham Foulkes that his son, David, had been killed in the 7/7 London bombings.
Six sleepless, harrowing days. Waiting at home with his wife, Janet, agonising whether to go to London but concluding that, with no information other than their son being missing, there was nowhere to go. Frantically calling hospitals. Hoping, when the police turned up asking for dental records and DNA swabs but had no other details, that David, 22, was one of the many unidentified but unconscious victims in hospital.
Then, on July 13, officers knocked on the door and delivered the news.
'David had a job opportunity in London, but he hadn't been down on his own before,' says Foulkes. 'The night before, I remember printing off a map of the Tube and we worked it all out. He needed to get the Circle Line.
'When I found out he was at Edgware Road, westbound, I knew he'd gone on the wrong train. He should have been going the other way.' Foulkes's voice falters.
'But he'd never been on the Tube before. So he shouldn't have even been there. And he was standing next to Mohammad Sidique Khan.'
Twenty years later, Foulkes's thoughts rarely turn to Khan and the three other suicide bombers. 'I don't want to dwell on them, because of the stress and distress that would cause. But that level of evil can never — should never — be forgiven.'
The Foulkeses redecorated David's room in their home in Oldham, Greater Manchester, but it has never been used again. 'We walk past an empty bedroom every morning. So we're reminded of David every morning. And when we go to bed at night.'
Two years ago, when David would have turned 40, family and friends gathered at a local pub.
'Forty is one of those milestone things, isn't it?' Foulkes says, smiling wanly. 'We had a chat about him. It was great.'
The weeks after the attack are a blur. Driving down to London to lay flowers at Edgware Road station, to meet politicians, to see the bombed carriage that was being forensically examined in a depot west of London. 'That was massively important, carriage No 6505. I don't know why. It's a purely emotional thing, nothing rational. I just had to see it, to put out my hand and touch the floor.'
He was taken to a makeshift mortuary, set up under a marquee in the grounds of a government building. 'I remember them saying to us, 'David's under a blanket. You really should just sit next to him. You don't want to look under the blanket.' ' Foulkes looks at me and takes a deep breath to steady himself. 'You're a parent. You'd look.' His eyes brim with tears.
He was given a small cardboard box with David's belongings. His watch was completely intact despite the force of a blast that killed six people and seriously injured several more.
'I'd bought him that watch for his birthday,' Foulkes says. 'I still wear it.'
David's body was released shortly afterwards, but Graham and Janet had to pay for him to be brought home. It was the first of many experiences of being failed by the state. Foulkes emphasises it is not about the money — he would have paid anything to bring his son home — but the lack of compassion.
Slight and softly spoken, Foulkes's kind exterior belies a steel beneath, as the government was to soon discover.
He was furious when he found out that bereaved families were told they needed representation at the 2010 inquests into the attacks — their only chance to get answers about the emergency response to 7/7 and to establish whether the bombings could have been prevented — but would not receive legal aid.
'I was absolutely enraged by that,' he says. 'I think it was probably the vent for all the emotion of everything that had happened.' He went to the press, campaigned for funding and the authorities capitulated.
Families faced another battle during the inquests when the government tried to hold closed hearings into what MI5 knew about the bombers. When families objected, their legal aid was temporarily withdrawn but they won their fight for open justice. Foulkes pushed for a judicial review, threatening to fund it himself, where the families went on to win.
The inquests lasted five months and were distressing. Bereaved families endured detailed evidence about the final moments of their loved ones as well as the delayed and chaotic response of the emergency services. Foulkes was distraught when he discovered that a senior official had ordered firefighters to stay above ground at Edgware Road because of fears of a dirty bomb, which resulted in delays to first aid and retrieval of the victims.
'People had their legs blown off. There were massive injuries. They were being brought up past [the firefighters]. I cannot find words to describe what I think about this man who ordered them not to help. It distressed me enormously.'
For the first time he learnt that his son died instantly, and it brought him some peace. 'The thought that he might have been down there and taking an hour to pass, in considerable pain and distress, it would be too much,' Foulkes says.
Later he channelled his grief into programmes to help challenge extremism, speaking to school pupils about the bombings to try to build resilience against such ideologies. Ten years ago, we met at a community centre in Warrington, Cheshire, where teenagers listened intently as he talked about his son. 'David was in a suit and tie on the Tube on his way to work. I don't think that's fair. Because post-7/7, post-9/11, after all these atrocities, it has made no difference. So what was the point? It was just so unfair.'
Today, he is frustrated that such community initiatives can't attract funding and worries that the approach to extremism is still reactionary rather than tackling root causes.
'You're knocking your head against a brick wall. These programmes are being defunded. How many times do you have to jump out of an aeroplane without parachutes? Pay for the parachutes.'
Now 73, Foulkes still visits his son's grave weekly and lays flowers. Sometimes he takes his grandchildren and talks to them about Uncle David.
He reminisces. About happy holidays in Malta and Newquay — 'We've been to lots of places, but we can't go back there.' On how David used to delight in beating his father in their weekly squash game. Foulkes hasn't played since the bombings.
'We're an ordinary, normal family and the world is still, even after 7/7, an ordinary, normal world. But we also live in a parallel world that isn't normal for us.'
On the first weekend of July 2005, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Peter Clarke took a group of his officers from Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch to a hotel near Basingstoke in Hampshire for a secret planning exercise.
'We modelled what we considered to be possibly the most challenging and difficult thing we could face in an attack,' Clarke recalls. 'The scenario we chose was a multiple attack on the Underground.'
The following Thursday morning — July 7 — Clarke was at home when the phone calls came tumbling in from Scotland Yard. 'I was told something was happening on the Underground,' he says. 'I immediately feared the worst.'
Clarke was rushed into London in a police car — blue lights flashing and sirens wailing like so many emergency service vehicles in London that morning — to take charge of a police investigation that would run for years.
The attack was something he had been both fearing and expecting. Since the 9/11 attacks in the United States, the nature of the terror threat in the UK had changed dramatically. Irish republican groups — with defined political objectives, crude warnings and the intention of escaping — had been replaced by suicide attacks directed by al-Qaeda aimed at killing as many people as possible.
Between 2001 and 2005, Clarke and his officers had dealt with a plot to make the poison ricin, the murder of a police officer by a fugitive jihadist in Manchester, a plan to explode radioactive 'dirty' bombs and myriad schemes inspired by London hate preachers. Before 7/7, he was routinely accused of exaggerating the scale of the threat in order to justify British foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. 'It was inevitable,' he says. 'At some point, an attack was going to get through.'
• Manchester Arena bombing: lessons from 7/7 should have stopped history being repeated
In the immediate aftermath of the bombings, you could be mistaken for thinking that this solid, well spoken, bespectacled police officer was the man running the country. It was Clarke rather than the prime minister, Tony Blair, or the Met commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, who was on our televisions every day keeping us informed. He was unflustered and reassuring. He had an air of competence and confidence. He steadied our nerves. Was he actually that calm?
'It's funny, but when you're in the middle of something as enormous as this, it's as if you're in the eye of the storm. In the centre, it did feel quite calm.'
He says the calmness stemmed from having confidence in his team. 'It makes life so much easier. You can focus on what leaders should be doing, which is not getting down in the weeds but thinking about two days ahead, three days ahead. Dealing with the politics and creating an environment in which your specialists are able to do their job unhindered, uninterrupted, undistracted.'
Politically, there were tense moments. For several days there were genuine fears that the bomb gang had had a fifth member who was at large and might try to strike again. On the night of July 12, a sighting of a suspect led to Clarke ordering a total lockdown of the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.
The lockdown lasted just 90 minutes but 'raised eyebrows' in government circles. Clarke says, 'It's the sort of thing that prompts questions — 'Why are you doing this?' So we just told them.'
The 'fifth bomber' posed another problem. 'Until it was firmly established that there hadn't been a fifth bomber, a question was, do I go public and say there might be another bomber on the loose or do I not go public to try to develop potential lines of inquiry?
'If you go public you cause panic. If you keep it quiet and a ghastly attack happens, then it's, 'Why didn't you tell us?' That was probably the most difficult thing I had to decide during that time.'
Clarke made it clear he would not open Tube lines until he was satisfied that all the bodies, and body parts, of the victims were recovered and until every fragment of potential evidence had been collected.
One of his abiding memories is leaving the Yard to visit the officers working on body and evidence recovery 70ft below ground at Russell Square station, where 26 passengers were murdered.
'I felt it was very important that I and a couple of other very senior people could see for ourselves,' he says. 'To show support for the people working down there and to understand the appalling conditions in which they were operating.
'I'm glad I did that because, to this day, I'm conscious of the stresses and strains some of those people have faced ever since. They were down there for days and days. I've been to a few bomb scenes, but I've never seen anything like that carriage at Russell Square.'
Clarke is now 69 and retired after a significant career in public service during which he become HM Chief Inspector of Prisons after he left the Met. Over the years, I have met two Peter Clarkes: the deadly serious one respected throughout law enforcement and the convivial one with a passion for cricket, a taste for red wine and a gift for telling a story.
Surely, the intense events of July 2005 must have had a personal and emotional impact?
'I'm probably the wrong person to ask.'
But I can only ask him. It is a question about him.
'I don't know,' he says. 'It must have done, I suppose, but don't ask me to describe what it is or was.'
I press on. Is he the sort of bloke who just doesn't go there?
'Yeah, probably.'
He hasn't had any counselling or anything? How does he let go?
'Cricket, red wine, golf, holidays, family. All of those things.'
In so many ways, I suggest, with that ability to compartmentalise and focus, make decisions and move on, when 7/7 happened, 'You were the right man for the job.'
'That's for others to say, isn't it?'
Hair, make-up and grooming: Ariane Young at Joy Goodman using got2b, By Terry and Witch skincare
