[3] It included a main stand which seated 5,300 fans, and had room for a further 7,000 standing spectators in the paddock in front. Supporters either ran upwards to the back of the stand or downwards to the pitch to escape. [39], The tragedy received immense media attention and drew support from around the world, with those offering their sympathy including Queen Elizabeth II, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. Coach Terry Yorath described the events as "the worst day in my life. Andie . [27], In July 1985 an inquest was held into the deaths; at the hearings the coroner James Turnbull recommended a death by misadventure outcome, with which the jury agreed. It's why he gravitated to London and the enclosed spaces, moving to Brixton when his first base became gentrified. Criticising Bradford City during the case, Mr. Michael Ogden QC, highlighted that the Club 'gave no or very little thought to fire precautions', despite repeated warnings. "The Story of the Bradford Fire: 'could any man really be as unlucky as Stafford Heginbotham? [16] Messages of condolence were also received from Helmut Kohl, Chedli Klibi and Felipe González. However as the fire continued to burn, the scenes at Bradford’s Valley Parade turned into a panic. [15] At 3:44 pm, five minutes before half-time, the first sign of a fire—a glowing light—was noticed three rows from the back of block G,[10][16] as reported by TV commentator John Helm. 0:17. Here, she recalls the fateful decision that saved her. Everybody in the city was devastated, but there was an amazing number of volunteers. [4], Although there had been some changes to other parts of the ground, the main stand remained unaltered by 1985. The match against Lincoln City, the final game of that season, had started in a celebratory atmosphere with the home team receiving the Football League Third Division trophy. Fletcher has taken facts and presented them in such a way that it should make it moralistically impossible for this incident not to be looked at again. News uk home news bradford city stadium fire. [8][9] In the crowd were local dignitaries and guests from three of Bradford's twin towns—Verviers, in Belgium, and Mönchengladbach and Hamm, in Germany. Together, flanked by undocumented supporters, they managed to clear all but one person who made it to the front of the stand. After the fire, Bradford City also announced they would thereafter play with a black trim on their shirt sleeves as a permanent memorial to those who had died. "So yes, it's right that these old questions be asked now. Of the 56 people who died in the fire,[2] 54 were Bradford supporters and two supported Lincoln. As a result, Bradford-born captain Peter Jackson was presented with the league trophy before the final game of the season with mid-table Lincoln City at Valley Parade on 11 May 1985. I don't know where Falconer is getting this cock-and-bull story from… the inaccuracies in this report [documentary] are dumbfounding. Lawyers press Home Secretary May to launch new inquiry into fire that killed 56 supporters in 1985 [4] Football ground writer Simon Inglis had described the view from the stand as "like watching football from the cockpit of a Sopwith Camel" because of its antiquated supports and struts. Fletcher's appearance on BBC regional news programme Look North looked like an inquisition, with playback in his headphones as he spoke from a London studio contributing to the difficulty. The original match referee (as named in the match programme) was Don Shaw, but he could not officiate due to an injury; Glover had been appointed to the match as replacement official. A discarded cigarette and a dilapidated wooden stand, which had survived because the club did not have the money to replace it, and accumulated paper litter, were considered to have conspired to cause the worst disaster in the history of the Football League. The stadium, long-established home to Bradford City Football Club, was known for its antiquated design and facilities, which included the wooden roof of the main stand. Ran. [10][11] The city's newspaper, the Telegraph & Argus, published a souvenir issue for the day, entitled "Spit and Polish for the Parade Ground". "[36], The total amount of compensation to the 154 claimants was reported to be as high as £20 million, with the payouts covered by insurance taken out by the club. The main stand at Bradford was not surrounded by fencing, and therefore most of the spectators in it could escape onto the pitch – if they had been penned in then the death toll would inevitably have been in the hundreds if not the thousands. The money raised from this record was contributed to fund the internationally renowned burns unit that was established in partnership between the University of Bradford and Bradford Royal Infirmary, immediately after the fire, which has also been Bradford City's official charity for well over a decade. The extraordinary part of all this is that this testimony has barely been heard. "That made me angry: that people don't know about this.". The other, situated by the main entrance, was donated by the club after its £7.5 million (£12.3 million today) rebuilding of the original main stand in 2002. Part of the Appeal funds were raised by a recording of "You'll Never Walk Alone"[43] from Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Carousel by The Crowd (including Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers, who had recorded the 1963 version that led to Liverpool adopting it as their motto and team song), which reached number 1 in the UK Singles chart. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Or for a full-blown 91-day inquiry like the one which investigated the 1987 fire at London's King's Cross St Pancras Tube station, though Bradford claimed twice as many lives. No, argues her husband, insulated as he was from that momentary horror his wife felt. Fans flee to the pitch to avoid the flames in the wooden main stand, Mr Justice Popplewell, who led the inquiry into the fire, at the 'Turnstile Shrine' in the stadium (Rex), Martin Fletcher, author of '56: The Story of the Bradford Fire', A relative of one of the victims breaks down amid the ruins of the stadium (Rex), Thirty years after football's 'forgotten tragedy', the truth of what exactly happened when 56 people died in a fire at Bradford City's Valley Parade stadium remains elusive, Claims the disaster was started deliberately 'nonsense', Archives reveal the desperate rush to conjure an explanation, New evidence casts more doubt on verdict fire was accident, Bradford City stadium fire: The untold stories of the 1985 fire, Booking.com discount code: 10% with Level 1 Genius membership, Use this Debenhams discount and save up to 70% on men's lines - Spring offer, Ideal World Promo: Up to 30% discount off garden essentials, Take £12 off your £120 purchase using this AliExpress promo code, Argos discount code for 15% off selected Samsung Galaxy phones. The match was recorded by Yorkshire Television for their regional edition of the ITV Sunday afternoon football show The Big Match. Nigel Adams – who worked for 12 years as a fire investigator with a British fire service – was spurred on by the book to join the call for a fresh inquiry, stating that Fletcher's book was "one of the best accounts of a fire, as seen from a victim's point of view, and as a piece of investigative writing, I have ever read". "[24], On the 25th anniversary of the fire, the University of Bradford established the United Kingdom's largest academic research centre in skin sciences as an extension to its plastic surgery and burns research unit.[25]. Down there in the blackness lay tissues of debris which were testament to the ramshackle stadium's neglect. The stand had been officially condemned and was due to be replaced with a steel structure after the season ended. Uncensored coverage of the fire was transmitted minutes after the event on World of Sport and the BBC's Grandstand. Mr Justice Popplewell, who led the inquiry into the fire, at the 'Turnstile Shrine' in the stadium (Rex) It was clear that the stand was a fire risk; the club and local authority clearly knew that it needed improvements, even the fans who filled it could see the danger. My mum said at the time of the Hillsborough Disaster, when it all came home to me, you're angry and the hate is eating you inside out.". "Why should they not still want answers?" Each year Lincoln send representatives to the annual memorial service in Bradford city centre and between 2007 and 2009, were managed by Bradford's captain that day, Peter Jackson. "[29], West Yorkshire Metropolitan Borough Council was found to have failed in its duty under the Fire Precautions Act 1971. [59] Following this report, Leslie Brownlie, who was the nephew in question, is reported to have said that his uncle never made such an admission of starting the fire. "Why is it coming out now? Today marks the 35th anniversary of one of the worst disasters in the history of British football. A capacity 6,000 crowd attended a multi-denominational memorial service, held on the pitch in the sunny shadow of the burnt out stand at Valley Parade in July 1985. The play, entitled simply The 56, does not seek to make melodrama out of that 11 May afternoon at Valley Parade, when fans arrived to celebrate Bradford's promotion from the Football League's division 3. The father whose attempts to make him a Bradford City fan he mischievously tried to resist, especially after the family's relocation to the detached surrounds of East Bridgford in Nottinghamshire turned the boy into a Nottingham Forest fan. At Valley Parade there are now two memorials. One man clambered over burning seats to help a fan,[18] as did player John Hawley,[15] and one officer led fans to an exit, only to find it shut and had to turn around. "I was out shopping in Bradford and he had gone to the match," she says. Police Identify Australian Man Whose Dropped Cigarette Started Police have revealed the identity of the man who they believe was responsible for starting the fire at bradford citys stadium that killed 56 people according to a documentary. Ran home and put the television on." Danni Phillips, the young London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art actor who spent hour after hour listening back to the scriptwriters' interviews in preparation for her beautifully observed role in The 56, hails from South Yorkshire, half an hour down the M1 and her father played football for Halifax Town. "I wept with joy," she says. It was the place where her boys had been growing into their secondary education when the fire took them. This was all somehow ignored, put off, filed as something to sort out later. Above all else, it is a beautifully observed and incredibly detailed memoir of a son's relationship with the father he lost at the age of 12. Following the hearing in 1986, a test case was brought against the club by David Britton, a police sergeant serving on the day, and by Susan Fletcher, who lost her husband John, 11-year-old son Andrew, John's brother Peter and his father Edmond in the fire. The city has seemed to want it to remain the forgotten disaster, though for many, the sense of what-might-have-been is too acute to want to block out the past. [10] Half of those who died were either aged under 20 or over 70,[10][21] and the oldest victim was the club's former chairman, Sam Firth, aged 86. May 13, 2015 11:01am Some laughs puncture the rapt silence of the 75 minutes at Bradford's Alhambra theatre studio. 0:06. The scriptwriters' hours of interviews with those caught up in the horror are distilled into the narratives of three survivors, and the casual horrors of what befell football supporters that day are all in there. [1] When the association football club was formed, the ground was changed very little and had no covered accommodation. The lack of perimeter fencing kept the death toll down, and prevented it from reaching the hundreds or potentially the thousands. When a memorial service was held on the pitch later in summer, part of it was in Urdu and Punjabi in recognition. One, now re-situated to that end of the stand where the fire began, is a sculpture donated on the initial re-opening of Valley Parade in December 1986 by Sylvia Graucob, a then Jersey-based former West Yorkshire woman. The fire brigade arrived at the ground four minutes after they were initially alerted. Previous warnings had also been given about a major build-up of litter in the cavity below the seats in the stand. I've never seen anything like it. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project, see a list of open tasks, and join in discussions on the project's talk page. The real joke was that his next fire, which killed 56 people, resulted in Bradford City receiving insurance proceeds and associated grants of £988,000. This is the kind of understated remembrance we have seen in Bradford these past few months, at the onset of another significant anniversary of the 1985 fire which tore across the local football club's old wooden main stand, reducing it to a collapsing inferno in a mere four minutes and claiming 56 lives. I do not include the people currently running the club, who have always displayed a great, sensitive duty to the memory of those who died. On the recording are Dene Michael (Black Lace), The Chuckle Brothers, Clive Jackson of Dr & The Medics, Owen Paul, Billy Pearce, Billy Shears, Flint Bedrock, Danny Tetley and Rick Wild of The Overlanders. It was 30 years ago. There was no appetite for a re-enactment of events, such as that which Dublin embarked upon when a fire at the Stardust nightclub fire in Arcane claimed 48 lives in 1981. The director of that organisation, Dr David Woolley, was interviewed for just two hours by the inquiry team, and his private papers reveal his desperate rush to assemble information into a report for Popplewell. Since then, it has been further re-developed and, today, Valley Parade is a modern 25,136 all-seater stadium, which is virtually unrecognisable from how it was at the time of the disaster, save for the original clubhouse that still stands beside the main stand, and the flank support wall that runs down the Hollywell Ash Lane at the "Bradford End". [10][16] Geoffrey Mitchell said: "There was panic as fans stampeded to an exit which was padlocked. And only after she had gone – vanished into the kind of warm Bradford Saturday night on which wives, children, parents and friends first learned that they were the bereaved, 30 years ago next week – did the significance of her gratitude become clear. This early part of the narrative is so readable that you wonder how Fletcher, a qualified accountant, did not wind up as a writer. The theatre production moved on to London last week, its players and writers wondering as they packed up what the response would be, in the capital city, to a subject even less well known and understood beyond the Yorkshire boundaries. "We were concerned there might be, because of the rapidity of the fire, a mechanism unknown to us." The children were still nestled under the warden's thick overcoat when they discovered them. "[60], Raymond Falconer's reliability had previously been questioned by Daniel Taylor in The Guardian who stated that: "The Bradford Telegraph and Argus described him as a 'top detective'. Lincoln City's board responded by committing £1,100,000 (£3.4 million today) to their ground's renovation in the year that immediately followed the fire at Valley Parade, and over the following decade made improvements that eventually totalled £3,000,000. Bradford City stadium fire - WikiMili, The Free City maintained their superiority and opened up an 11-point gap over the rest of the league by February, and were assured of the championship title courtesy of a 2–0 victory against Bolton Wanderers in the penultimate game of the season, guaranteeing Division Two football for the first time since 1937. Fire at Bradford school (video: Glynn Beck) Yorkshire Evening Post. He and his mother rattled around in the beautiful detached Nottingham home afterwards and the place "was almost mocking you, like the birds in the trees," he says. Called 'The 56' the play dramatises actual accounts of the Bradford City Fire with the purpose of the play showing how in times of adversity, the Football Club and the local community came together. [citation needed], Most of the exits at the back were locked or shut, and there were no stewards present to open them, but seven were forced open or found open. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. It has a black marble fascia on which the names and ages of those that died are inscribed in gold, and a black marble platform on which people can leave flowers and mementos. Some repair work was carried out, but in July 1984, the club was warned again, this time by a county council engineer, because of the club's plans to claim for ground improvements from the Football Trust. [41] Matthew Wildman was 17 at the time and needed crutches to walk because of rheumatoid arthritis. He later said: "I have never known anything like it, either before, or since. Fans in the next stand (the "Bradford End") pulled down the fence separating them from the pitch. The timber construction of St. Andrew's Stand, Main Stand and the roof of its popular Railway End terrace were immediately condemned as fire hazards, which saw seating capacity briefly cut to nil. Fletcher said that "The club at the time took no actual responsibility for its actions and nobody has ever really been held accountable for the level of negligence which took place. Otherwise, I would not have been able to get out. (2015), 2003 Football League Third Division play-off Final, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bradford_City_stadium_fire&oldid=1023313432, Building and structure fires in the United Kingdom, Fire disasters involving barricaded escape routes, Pages containing London Gazette template with parameter supp set to y, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2010, Articles with unsourced statements from December 2018, Articles needing additional references from May 2018, All articles needing additional references, Articles needing additional references from December 2018, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Fan attempted to extinguish a lit cigarette, it slipped through floorboards and fell on trash, igniting it. There actually used to be an old saying in Bradford: "If you see smoke go up in Bradford after 6pm, that'll be one of Stafford's." But looking back and seeing how much it really affected my dad makes me realise what we went through." He agreed that the inquiry into Bradford, led by the judge Oliver Popplewell, was inadequate and that there are many unanswered questions. Bradford City stadium fire: Remembering the 56 who died at Valley Parade It was the worst fire disaster in the history of English football. 0:10. "[38], Fletcher subsequently published a book in 2015, Fifty-Six: The Story of the Bradford Fire which revealed a history of fires at businesses owned by the Bradford City chairman Stafford Heginbotham. "[61], 1985 disaster in Valley Parade Stadium, Bradford, England. Gray Kelley … Brief Synopsis: On Saturday 11 th May 1985 during a televised third division football match between Bradford City and Lincoln City a fire started within block G, underneath the wooden seating area, within the main stand of the Bradford City Football ground at Valley Parade. You could hardly breathe. [54], In 1986, a year after the disaster, Yorkshire Television aired a documentary presented by John Helm entitled Bradford City – A Year of Healing. The local Bradford Telegraph and Argus has found many voices to challenge his testimony, too. The father whose burgeoning success as a metals stockholder, driving a BMW 323i, took him a long way from his roots, selling coach trips to Mablethorpe. The Bradford Disaster Appeal fund, set up within 48 hours of the disaster, eventually raised over £3.5 million (£10.7 million today). IFSEC Global. The smoke was choking. "I feel like I've been in my 20s for years," he says and his life now – south-west London flatshare, single professional – seems to reflect the world of a restive soul, struggling for an anchor. England won the re-match 6–4. Helm described the start of the fire in an interview to the Express newspaper: "a man over from Australia visiting his son got two tickets to the game. Popplewell's report was nowhere close to the quality of Lord Justice Taylor's report after Hillsborough, and since reading it as an adult I have always been very disappointed in it and considered it a poor piece of work. "[56], Adams also went on to state that "I have read in some newspapers that he is being berated for his campaign to have a new inquiry. No one gave it the attention it ought to have received.. .. 2–4 Bradford City A.F.C. ("And Dad being Dad, he blagged it all like a dream."). Some of those back in Bradford have not welcomed his turning over of the stones. Reading back the transcript in a 21st-century, Hillsborough Inquiry environment you expect this to be the moment when Popplewell pushes Woolley to elaborate. "[16] As spectators began to cascade over the wall separating the stand from the pitch, the linesman on that side of the pitch informed match referee Norman Glover, who stopped the game with three minutes remaining before half-time. Bradford played its part in that. And there are also repeated references to the smell of burning plastic. However, the responsibility of the Club is, in my view, very much the greater and I apportion responsibility between the two defendants as to two-thirds on the first defendant and one-third on the third (sic) defendant. But Ms Ibrahim saw her husband on her TV set, on the Valley Parade half way line, helping stretcher some of the injured away to safety. I don't see that. As he received the injured at Bradford Royal Infirmary he was able to call upon 10% of the UK's population of plastic surgeons. The two sides met for the first time after the fire in April 1989, when they arranged a benefit match in aid of the Hillsborough disaster, at Valley Parade. He was evidently very successful when his mother's acquaintance with local Bradford broadcaster Tony Delahunty – whose commentary of the fire is part of many Bradfordians' recollections – helped fix him some work experience, as a 14-year-old. It's hard to avoid the sense that Fletcher might have done, had it not been for that fateful May afternoon, which took away so many of the buttresses of his life. There was talk of "a raincoat smell" about 15.40pm that afternoon, as the fire took hold. "[34], Central to the test case were two letters sent to Bradford City's Club Secretary by the West Yorkshire Fire Brigade; the second letter dated 18 July 1984 specifically highlighted in full the improvements needed to be actioned at the ground as well as the fire risk at the main stand. The Bradford City stadium fire was the worst fire disaster in the history of English football. Bradford City Association Football Club had played their home games at Valley Parade, in Bradford, since the club was formed in 1903. Bradford City Stadium Fire - 36 years ago today.