To this day, no one has been properly brought to justice for the Birmingham Pub bombings and campaigners are calling for a public inquiry.

You can hear more about this in the new series from BBC Sounds, In detail: The pub bombings.

OWEN: It seems incredible to me that 50 years after it happened we are still talking about the Birmingham pub bombings. Something that happened when I was early in my broadcasting career. Every time there’s a new development you think maybe we’re on our way somewhere. And then at the end you feel like maybe we’re not. I just really feel for the activists – they have to go through such agony. It has dominated their lives since 1974.

MITCHELL: I think the stories I’ve heard, people who were there, but not badly hurt, were more affected psychologically than people like me. And somebody told me, it’s because I was in the hospital and so I got a lot, a lot of attention.

I met a man who said he wasn’t that hurt, he walked out, he didn’t even go to the hospital. He said he went home, he never told his wife he was actually there. In all the years that followed, he never told his wife how he felt. Another lady got in touch to say that she and her husband were actually just passing by (one of the pubs).

And she said he was such a gentleman, such a quiet man, but she said he started drinking and it changed him completely.

BUERK: It still sticks in my throat that no one has been brought to justice for doing the most horrifying thing I can imagine anyone ever doing.

OWEN: As someone who was there then, I would like to know. I would like some kind of closure from a journalistic point of view. I think it would be really good to know and see the faces of the people who actually did it, if they are still alive.

These extracts were taken from interviews given to the new BBC podcast ‘The Pub Bombings’, available here.