Paul Hill with the Obamas

PRISON letters penned by one of the “Guildford Four” have been unearthed in the archive of London Metropolitan University and turned into a play.

Your Ever Loving – based on letters sent by Paul Hill from prison over 15 years – runs until tomorrow night (Saturday) at the London Irish Centre, Camden.

Mr Hill was one of four men wrongly jailed over the IRA pub bombings in Guildford in 1974, in which five people died and 65 people were injured. He was living with his family in Islington at the time of his arrest, and later wrote regularly to his mother from prison.

Playwright and journalist Martin McNamara found the boxes of letters while researching another project at London Met’s Irish Archive Library in Holloway Road.

He said: “I was doing a bit of research for Radio 4 up there in the Holloway Road and they have all these boxes of tapes of people who came over here in the 1950s.

One of the letters written by Paul Hill to his family

“There were six boxes of letters from Paul Hill, all sent to his mother and his family. They had preserved them. I was fascinated, he is very articulate, even though he left school at 16. He’s a natural kind of storyteller, so emotionally articulate. And you get his sense of humour.”

Mr McNamara said that Mr Hill was a “bit wary of journalists with English accents” but that he won his trust and got consent to put on the play.

He said: “Law lords, solicitors and the press are all in there – Jeremy Corbyn even turns up. Paul married a woman while he was in prison in the Isle of the Wight and the Sun was outraged. There were calls to get rid of the governor who married them in jail. A group of Labour MPs congratulated him and one of the guests at the wedding was Jeremy. I think that’s quite good.”

Mr McNamara, who used to live around Holloway and Archway, said Mr Hill and the Guildford Four had “a lot of support from those London left-wing MPs who were willing to become hate figures of the Sun”.

He added: “I couldn’t give a toss about football, but Paul is a fanatical Arsenal supporter. That’s part of the reason why the letters are in Holloway. Politics, music and football are his big obsessions.

“When we talk, we talk about the Arsenal.”

Playwright Martin McNamara

Of the case, he said: “One of the reasons I wanted to do this play was that there was a relevance to this play. Theresa May was talking about terrorists on our streets, and how we need to suspend some of our human rights.

That’s what happened in the 70s – the IRA was bombing pubs and high streets, and a Labour government bought in the Prevention of Terrorism Act. In fact it was a huge propaganda boom for the IRA; it blackened the name of British justice. Now it’s young Muslim men. The importance of not making the wrong response is still the same.”

Mr Hill, who for 13 years was married to Courtney Kennedy, daughter of assassinated American senator Robert F Kennedy, now lives in Washington.

He was convicted in 1974 on the basis of confessions he – and the rest of the Guild­ford Four – maintained were made by police violence, intimidation and threats to their lives and the lives of their families.

After a long campaign, their sentences were quashed in the Court of Appeal 25 years ago and the case has become regarded as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history.

Your Ever Loving will switch to the Edinburgh Fringe after its three-day run at the London Irish Centre, until July 29. For tickets visit www.londonirishcentre.org/events/