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  • Christina Drummond

Corporal Thomas Taylor, 2nd Battalion Light Infantry


Remembering the Fallen: on this day in 1973, Corporal Thomas Taylor, 2nd Battalion Light Infantry, was killed in Northern Ireland. He was fatally injured in a booby-trap bomb explosion in the Maguire and Patterson match factory on the Donegall Road in Belfast. He was rushed to the Royal Victoria Hospital but died on the operating table. Three other soldiers were seriously injured – one of them was Private John Gaskell, pictured on the right, who died the following day. They had been investigating after an anonymous telephone report of a gunman in the building – the bomb exploded just as they entered. A nineteen-year-old plead guilty to two murder charges the following year and was given a life sentence; he had laid the cable but had left the scene before others detonated the bomb. Thomas, from Sunderland, was 26 years old. John, from Thornley in Co. Durham, was 22 years old and married with a child.

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