Post by hi224 on Aug 20, 2020 23:08:54 GMT
Background
Valley Parade stadium is home to Bradford City football club, based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and has been since 1903, though the stadium itself was originally built in 1886. The ground was redeveloped in 1908 when Bradford City were promoted to the First Division, and the main stand remained basically unchanged right up until the fire in 1985. The stand was built up against the side of a hill, all its entrances were through corridors to the rear, and its roof and terracing were made of wood. There were gaps between the seats and a cavity below, resulting in a significant build-up of litter piling up beneath the stand.
A health and safety official had advised the club to clear the litter as far back as 1980, but nothing had been done. In 1981, the same official expressed concerns about how easy it would be to evacuate the stand in the event of a fire. County council fire authorities had twice met to discuss safety concerns at Valley Parade and classified the fire risk as “substantial”. In 1984, after wood started falling from the roof during a match, the club committed to rebuilding the roof with the help of a grant from a body called the Football Grounds Improvement Trust. The structural engineer who visited the grounds to assess the grant again advised that the timber stand with its build up of litter was a significant fire hazard. By the day of the fire in May 1985, the club had taken delivery of new materials to replace the roof, but no work had begun.
The Fire
The fateful day happened on 11th May 1985, during a match between home team Bradford City and visitors Lincoln City. The match was broadcast live on TV, and at 3.40pm, five minutes before half time, a TV commentator remarked on a small fire visible in the main stand. Within four minutes, the entire stand was engulfed in flames. Fans attempting to escape could either flee forwards, jumping a low barrier to get out onto the pitch, or backwards, back out through the entrances to the rear of the stand. Those who tried to escape through the back found themselves trapped up against the entrance turnstiles and against exit doors which appeared to be locked. I will talk more about this later since there are conflicting witness statements about whether the doors were locked or not. Suffice to say some people were able to escape this way, but the greatest number of fatalities happened in this back corridor as fans succumbed to smoke before they could find an exit. Some were not killed by the fire itself but from a crush at the turnstiles.
Because the match was broadcast live on Yorkshire television, distressing images were seen by viewers, including images of the blazing stand with fans still inside, and a man walking around the pitch on fire (he has been identified as Roy Mason, who later succumbed to his injuries). Fifty-six people died in total, and 265 more people were injured. One survivor was then twelve-year-old Martin Fletcher. The Fletcher family attempted to escape through the rear turnstiles. Martin became separated from the others, and as the smoke descended, was able to find a route back through the stand and out onto the pitch. He was one of the last people to escape alive, and was subject to such intense heat that his baseball cap melted to his head. Fletcher’s younger brother, his father, his uncle, and his grandfather were all killed.
The Popplewell Inquiry
The Inquiry was chaired by high court judge Oliver Popplewell. The Inquiry began just three and a half weeks after the fire, and lasted for seven days. There had been rumours in the press that a smoke bomb or flare thrown by a fan had started the fire, and the inquiry did investigate this possibility, but found no evidence. Its conclusion was that the fire had been started accidentally by a dropped cigarette falling between the seats into the litter below. It recommended a ban on smoking in wooden stadiums, and that future stadium constructions should avoid using wood (a redundant suggestion, given this was no longer common practise, and the Valley Parade stand was already renowned for being antiquated).
Allegations of Arson
In 2015, survivor Martin Fletcher published a book called Fifty-Six: The Story of the Bradford Fire. His account of his experience and the aftermath is genuinely harrowing, but he also devotes several chapters to his investigations into Bradford City chairman Stafford Heginbotham. He learned that businesses associated with Heginbotham seem particularly prone to mysterious fires. Apparently rumour and innuendo about Heginbotham’s burning businesses were rife in the area even before the Valley Parade fire. Fletcher’s mother worked for a printing firm that had Heginbotham as a client, and there was a standing joke in her office: “If Stafford had a problem, it got torched.”
Heginbotham was the founder of a toy manufacturer called Tebro Toys, which suffered two major fires in succession, resulting in a significant insurance payout (equivalent to £3m in today’s money). Interestingly, he did not use this insurance payout to re-open his business, despite Bradford City Council offering him support to do so.
Fletcher’s research identified a total of eight fires associated with Heginbotham’s businesses and properties, not including the Valley Parade fire:
May 1967 - Fire at a factory owned by Heginbotham on Cutler Heights Lane, Bradford
April 1968 - Fire at Genefoam Ltd, also based on Cutler Heights Lane. Heginbotham was managing director
August 1970 - Matgoods, a firm founded by Heginbotham, had £500,000 worth of stock destroyed in a storeroom fire
Dec 1971 - Frionor Packing,a frozen food company who were tenants in a building owned by Heginbotham, had £15,000 worth of damage done to packing equipment in a fire
Aug 1977 - Fire at Yorkshire Knitting Mills, tenants in a building owned by Heginbotham (Two boys were arrested for arson in connection with this fire. I can’t find any further information as to who they were – if they were minors, their names may not be in the press – but they don’t appear to have been charged)
Nov 1977- Fire at Douglas Mills factory, owned by Heginbotham.
Dec 1977 - Fire at Coronet Marketing, a subsidiary of a company owned by Heginbotham. All stock and machinery destroyed. Determined to be the result of a fractured gas pipe, but due to a firefighter’s strike, no thorough investigation was carried out.
June 1981 - Another fire at Douglas Mills, a site owned by Heginbotham
As far as I can find, no fatalities were associated with any of these earlier fires, although four firefighters were hospitalised after breathing toxic fumes at the first Douglas Mills fire. Heginbotham was quoted in the press as saying “I have just been unlucky”.
Fletcher reveals that the club was in financial trouble prior to the fire, struggling to pay the club workforce, and unable to meet the cost of upgrading the grounds, which was required to meet safety standards as the club was promoted to the 2nd Division.
Fletcher contends that the Popplewell Inquiry was rushed, taking place as it did less than a month after the fire and concluding in only 7 days, and that the possibility of arson was never investigated. Due to the timing, many survivors and family members of victims were not able to participate as they were still dealing with the aftermath of the fire itself. Forensic fire investigators who testified expressed some doubt that a cigarette dropped into litter would have resulted in a fire which became so intense so quickly. A groundskeeper testified that the litter under the stand had in fact been cleared out at the beginning of the season. In addition, several witnesses, including police officers, reported a strong smell of burning rubber or plastic a few minutes prior to the fire breaking out. The source of this was never investigated.
It is fair to say that a great deal of the testimony to the Popplewell Inquiry is conflicting, contradictory, and unclear, and no attempts were made at the time to clarify statements or the precise sequence of events. In such a chaotic and fast-moving situation, a degree of confusion is to be expected. One area that Fletcher highlights is testimony regarding the exit doors at the back of the stadium, and whether or not they were locked at the time of the fire. At the time, it was club policy that the exit doors be kept padlocked until the second half of matches to prevent fans without tickets from trying to sneak in. Remember the fire took place just before half time, so it seems that ordinarily the doors should have been padlocked. In fact, however, they were not. There were four exit doors at the back of the stadium, and during the evacuation, police officers found two of them unpadlocked and were able to open them by sliding back the bolts. A third door was forced by fans, though later testimony suggests this door might actually not have been padlocked either. A fourth door was unlocked by groundsmen at some point during the evacuation.
It’s an extremely good thing the doors weren’t locked or else hundreds more might have lost their lives. Those who succumbed were those who rushed to the wrong door or who simply didn’t make it in time. Fletcher was struck however by this apparent violation in club policy – the doors should have been padlocked, but they weren’t. In addition, there is testimony from one of the keyholders that he was asked to unlock the rear doors at 3.30pm, and at that point he was unaware of a fire or anything wrong, and the back corridor was empty. The time he gives is ten minutes before the fire was known to have broken out, and even if he got the time wrong, it seems implausible to Fletcher that the keyholder could have been unaware something was wrong or found the corridor empty had he been asked to open the doors after the fire was discovered. Remember the entire stadium was aflame within four minutes of smoke first being observed. It’s also unclear if the keyholder actually did unlock the doors, or if they were already unlocked at this point. Fletcher’s contention is this suggests someone had foreknowledge of the fire and ensured in advance the doors could be opened from the inside to allow escape.
The Popplewell Inquiry did briefly consider the suggestion, based on rumours, that the fire had been started by a fan throwing a smoke bomb or flare. Fletcher was able to identify the source of these rumours as Heginbotham himself – he found an interview Heginbotham gave to the press, in front of the still burning stadium, in which he stated he heard the fire had been started by a smoke bomb thrown by a fan. Fletcher contends that even as the fire was still raging, Heginbotham was trying to control the narrative and direct the investigation away from himself.
The Bradford City fire resulted in an insurance payout of £988,000 – the equivalent of about £7 million in today’s terms. The club was also gifted a further £1.4 million (equivalent to about £10m) from the local authority. Heginbotham resigned as chairman after the fire, though he did return to the club for a later stint. His run of bad luck seemed to come to an end, and there were no more fires associated with him or his businesses after this date. Heginbotham died in 1995 at the age of 61, following an unsuccessful heart transplant.
Following the publication of Fletcher’s book, Popplewell, who is still alive, rejected the idea that the Valley Parade fire was arson as “nonsense”, but said that he would have examined evidence on the previous fires associated with Heginbotham had he known about them.
Dropped Cigarette?
On the release of Fletcher’s book, the Daily Mail reported that a retired detective called Raymond Falconer had told a BBC documentary crew that police had identified the man who accidentally started the fire with a dropped cigarette, but had decided at the time not to name him. He identifies the man as an Australian named Eric Bennett, who was at the match with his nephew. Falconer claims Bennett told him he had dropped a cigarette on the floor, intending to stamp it out with his foot, but it had fallen down a knot hole. He poured coffee down the hole in an attempt to extinguish it, but smoke started to rise, and then the fire took hold. Bennett has since died, and the Mail reports his family confirmed he was at the match, but say he never mentioned dropping a cigarette.
Interestingly, the Popplewell inquiry took testimony from surviving fans who were sitting in the area that the fire started. They took testimony from a man from Australia called Bennett who was attending the match with his nephew, but they give his name as Samuel Bennett, not Eric. Bennett confirmed that he was smoking during the match, but he was smoking a pipe, not cigarettes. This would seem to contradict Falconer’s story.
Conclusion
Despite the suspicious number of fires Heginbotham was associated with, the Valley Parade fire was uncharacteristic with his previous ones in terms of the death toll. It’s one thing to suggest the man might have been prone to destroy his businesses for insurance payouts, quite another to suggest he would wilfully participate in the deaths of so many football fans. Added to this, Heginbotham himself attended the match along with his wife and sons, and the director’s box in which they sat was located only 50 yards away from where the fire started. It’s possible however that Heginbotham did not anticipate how quickly and fiercely the fire would spread, or the difficulties with evacuating the stadium. He may have imagined fans would easily be able to escape before the fire became lethal. Timing the fire to take place during the match ensured that the investigation focused on the actions of fans and never seriously investigated the possibility of arson.
On the other hand, Valley Parade stadium had long been recognised as a fire risk, and it seems, from the repeated warnings, that it was a disaster waiting to happen. At best, the club were certainly negligent in failing to address safety concerns before the worst happened. I agree with Fletcher however that the inquiry was rushed and failed to provide clarification on many points. For me, the question remains open. If anyone is interested in reading more, I would recommend Fletcher’s book. He’s a very good writer, and it’s a fascinating account of the disaster and the aftermath of dealing with trauma and loss.
Links:
Bradford City Stadium Fire: The Untold Stories of the 1985 Fire that Devastated Valley Parade
Martin Fletcher: Maybe the reason I am here is to finally reveal the truth
What do we know about the mysteriously unlucky Bradford Chairman?
BBC Documentary Reveals Identity of Man Police Claim Dropped the Cigarette which Started the Blaze
Former Chairman’s son vows to clear father’s name
Claims the disaster was started deliberately ‘Nonsense’ according to high court judge
Valley Parade stadium is home to Bradford City football club, based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and has been since 1903, though the stadium itself was originally built in 1886. The ground was redeveloped in 1908 when Bradford City were promoted to the First Division, and the main stand remained basically unchanged right up until the fire in 1985. The stand was built up against the side of a hill, all its entrances were through corridors to the rear, and its roof and terracing were made of wood. There were gaps between the seats and a cavity below, resulting in a significant build-up of litter piling up beneath the stand.
A health and safety official had advised the club to clear the litter as far back as 1980, but nothing had been done. In 1981, the same official expressed concerns about how easy it would be to evacuate the stand in the event of a fire. County council fire authorities had twice met to discuss safety concerns at Valley Parade and classified the fire risk as “substantial”. In 1984, after wood started falling from the roof during a match, the club committed to rebuilding the roof with the help of a grant from a body called the Football Grounds Improvement Trust. The structural engineer who visited the grounds to assess the grant again advised that the timber stand with its build up of litter was a significant fire hazard. By the day of the fire in May 1985, the club had taken delivery of new materials to replace the roof, but no work had begun.
The Fire
The fateful day happened on 11th May 1985, during a match between home team Bradford City and visitors Lincoln City. The match was broadcast live on TV, and at 3.40pm, five minutes before half time, a TV commentator remarked on a small fire visible in the main stand. Within four minutes, the entire stand was engulfed in flames. Fans attempting to escape could either flee forwards, jumping a low barrier to get out onto the pitch, or backwards, back out through the entrances to the rear of the stand. Those who tried to escape through the back found themselves trapped up against the entrance turnstiles and against exit doors which appeared to be locked. I will talk more about this later since there are conflicting witness statements about whether the doors were locked or not. Suffice to say some people were able to escape this way, but the greatest number of fatalities happened in this back corridor as fans succumbed to smoke before they could find an exit. Some were not killed by the fire itself but from a crush at the turnstiles.
Because the match was broadcast live on Yorkshire television, distressing images were seen by viewers, including images of the blazing stand with fans still inside, and a man walking around the pitch on fire (he has been identified as Roy Mason, who later succumbed to his injuries). Fifty-six people died in total, and 265 more people were injured. One survivor was then twelve-year-old Martin Fletcher. The Fletcher family attempted to escape through the rear turnstiles. Martin became separated from the others, and as the smoke descended, was able to find a route back through the stand and out onto the pitch. He was one of the last people to escape alive, and was subject to such intense heat that his baseball cap melted to his head. Fletcher’s younger brother, his father, his uncle, and his grandfather were all killed.
The Popplewell Inquiry
The Inquiry was chaired by high court judge Oliver Popplewell. The Inquiry began just three and a half weeks after the fire, and lasted for seven days. There had been rumours in the press that a smoke bomb or flare thrown by a fan had started the fire, and the inquiry did investigate this possibility, but found no evidence. Its conclusion was that the fire had been started accidentally by a dropped cigarette falling between the seats into the litter below. It recommended a ban on smoking in wooden stadiums, and that future stadium constructions should avoid using wood (a redundant suggestion, given this was no longer common practise, and the Valley Parade stand was already renowned for being antiquated).
Allegations of Arson
In 2015, survivor Martin Fletcher published a book called Fifty-Six: The Story of the Bradford Fire. His account of his experience and the aftermath is genuinely harrowing, but he also devotes several chapters to his investigations into Bradford City chairman Stafford Heginbotham. He learned that businesses associated with Heginbotham seem particularly prone to mysterious fires. Apparently rumour and innuendo about Heginbotham’s burning businesses were rife in the area even before the Valley Parade fire. Fletcher’s mother worked for a printing firm that had Heginbotham as a client, and there was a standing joke in her office: “If Stafford had a problem, it got torched.”
Heginbotham was the founder of a toy manufacturer called Tebro Toys, which suffered two major fires in succession, resulting in a significant insurance payout (equivalent to £3m in today’s money). Interestingly, he did not use this insurance payout to re-open his business, despite Bradford City Council offering him support to do so.
Fletcher’s research identified a total of eight fires associated with Heginbotham’s businesses and properties, not including the Valley Parade fire:
May 1967 - Fire at a factory owned by Heginbotham on Cutler Heights Lane, Bradford
April 1968 - Fire at Genefoam Ltd, also based on Cutler Heights Lane. Heginbotham was managing director
August 1970 - Matgoods, a firm founded by Heginbotham, had £500,000 worth of stock destroyed in a storeroom fire
Dec 1971 - Frionor Packing,a frozen food company who were tenants in a building owned by Heginbotham, had £15,000 worth of damage done to packing equipment in a fire
Aug 1977 - Fire at Yorkshire Knitting Mills, tenants in a building owned by Heginbotham (Two boys were arrested for arson in connection with this fire. I can’t find any further information as to who they were – if they were minors, their names may not be in the press – but they don’t appear to have been charged)
Nov 1977- Fire at Douglas Mills factory, owned by Heginbotham.
Dec 1977 - Fire at Coronet Marketing, a subsidiary of a company owned by Heginbotham. All stock and machinery destroyed. Determined to be the result of a fractured gas pipe, but due to a firefighter’s strike, no thorough investigation was carried out.
June 1981 - Another fire at Douglas Mills, a site owned by Heginbotham
As far as I can find, no fatalities were associated with any of these earlier fires, although four firefighters were hospitalised after breathing toxic fumes at the first Douglas Mills fire. Heginbotham was quoted in the press as saying “I have just been unlucky”.
Fletcher reveals that the club was in financial trouble prior to the fire, struggling to pay the club workforce, and unable to meet the cost of upgrading the grounds, which was required to meet safety standards as the club was promoted to the 2nd Division.
Fletcher contends that the Popplewell Inquiry was rushed, taking place as it did less than a month after the fire and concluding in only 7 days, and that the possibility of arson was never investigated. Due to the timing, many survivors and family members of victims were not able to participate as they were still dealing with the aftermath of the fire itself. Forensic fire investigators who testified expressed some doubt that a cigarette dropped into litter would have resulted in a fire which became so intense so quickly. A groundskeeper testified that the litter under the stand had in fact been cleared out at the beginning of the season. In addition, several witnesses, including police officers, reported a strong smell of burning rubber or plastic a few minutes prior to the fire breaking out. The source of this was never investigated.
It is fair to say that a great deal of the testimony to the Popplewell Inquiry is conflicting, contradictory, and unclear, and no attempts were made at the time to clarify statements or the precise sequence of events. In such a chaotic and fast-moving situation, a degree of confusion is to be expected. One area that Fletcher highlights is testimony regarding the exit doors at the back of the stadium, and whether or not they were locked at the time of the fire. At the time, it was club policy that the exit doors be kept padlocked until the second half of matches to prevent fans without tickets from trying to sneak in. Remember the fire took place just before half time, so it seems that ordinarily the doors should have been padlocked. In fact, however, they were not. There were four exit doors at the back of the stadium, and during the evacuation, police officers found two of them unpadlocked and were able to open them by sliding back the bolts. A third door was forced by fans, though later testimony suggests this door might actually not have been padlocked either. A fourth door was unlocked by groundsmen at some point during the evacuation.
It’s an extremely good thing the doors weren’t locked or else hundreds more might have lost their lives. Those who succumbed were those who rushed to the wrong door or who simply didn’t make it in time. Fletcher was struck however by this apparent violation in club policy – the doors should have been padlocked, but they weren’t. In addition, there is testimony from one of the keyholders that he was asked to unlock the rear doors at 3.30pm, and at that point he was unaware of a fire or anything wrong, and the back corridor was empty. The time he gives is ten minutes before the fire was known to have broken out, and even if he got the time wrong, it seems implausible to Fletcher that the keyholder could have been unaware something was wrong or found the corridor empty had he been asked to open the doors after the fire was discovered. Remember the entire stadium was aflame within four minutes of smoke first being observed. It’s also unclear if the keyholder actually did unlock the doors, or if they were already unlocked at this point. Fletcher’s contention is this suggests someone had foreknowledge of the fire and ensured in advance the doors could be opened from the inside to allow escape.
The Popplewell Inquiry did briefly consider the suggestion, based on rumours, that the fire had been started by a fan throwing a smoke bomb or flare. Fletcher was able to identify the source of these rumours as Heginbotham himself – he found an interview Heginbotham gave to the press, in front of the still burning stadium, in which he stated he heard the fire had been started by a smoke bomb thrown by a fan. Fletcher contends that even as the fire was still raging, Heginbotham was trying to control the narrative and direct the investigation away from himself.
The Bradford City fire resulted in an insurance payout of £988,000 – the equivalent of about £7 million in today’s terms. The club was also gifted a further £1.4 million (equivalent to about £10m) from the local authority. Heginbotham resigned as chairman after the fire, though he did return to the club for a later stint. His run of bad luck seemed to come to an end, and there were no more fires associated with him or his businesses after this date. Heginbotham died in 1995 at the age of 61, following an unsuccessful heart transplant.
Following the publication of Fletcher’s book, Popplewell, who is still alive, rejected the idea that the Valley Parade fire was arson as “nonsense”, but said that he would have examined evidence on the previous fires associated with Heginbotham had he known about them.
Dropped Cigarette?
On the release of Fletcher’s book, the Daily Mail reported that a retired detective called Raymond Falconer had told a BBC documentary crew that police had identified the man who accidentally started the fire with a dropped cigarette, but had decided at the time not to name him. He identifies the man as an Australian named Eric Bennett, who was at the match with his nephew. Falconer claims Bennett told him he had dropped a cigarette on the floor, intending to stamp it out with his foot, but it had fallen down a knot hole. He poured coffee down the hole in an attempt to extinguish it, but smoke started to rise, and then the fire took hold. Bennett has since died, and the Mail reports his family confirmed he was at the match, but say he never mentioned dropping a cigarette.
Interestingly, the Popplewell inquiry took testimony from surviving fans who were sitting in the area that the fire started. They took testimony from a man from Australia called Bennett who was attending the match with his nephew, but they give his name as Samuel Bennett, not Eric. Bennett confirmed that he was smoking during the match, but he was smoking a pipe, not cigarettes. This would seem to contradict Falconer’s story.
Conclusion
Despite the suspicious number of fires Heginbotham was associated with, the Valley Parade fire was uncharacteristic with his previous ones in terms of the death toll. It’s one thing to suggest the man might have been prone to destroy his businesses for insurance payouts, quite another to suggest he would wilfully participate in the deaths of so many football fans. Added to this, Heginbotham himself attended the match along with his wife and sons, and the director’s box in which they sat was located only 50 yards away from where the fire started. It’s possible however that Heginbotham did not anticipate how quickly and fiercely the fire would spread, or the difficulties with evacuating the stadium. He may have imagined fans would easily be able to escape before the fire became lethal. Timing the fire to take place during the match ensured that the investigation focused on the actions of fans and never seriously investigated the possibility of arson.
On the other hand, Valley Parade stadium had long been recognised as a fire risk, and it seems, from the repeated warnings, that it was a disaster waiting to happen. At best, the club were certainly negligent in failing to address safety concerns before the worst happened. I agree with Fletcher however that the inquiry was rushed and failed to provide clarification on many points. For me, the question remains open. If anyone is interested in reading more, I would recommend Fletcher’s book. He’s a very good writer, and it’s a fascinating account of the disaster and the aftermath of dealing with trauma and loss.
Links:
Bradford City Stadium Fire: The Untold Stories of the 1985 Fire that Devastated Valley Parade
Martin Fletcher: Maybe the reason I am here is to finally reveal the truth
What do we know about the mysteriously unlucky Bradford Chairman?
BBC Documentary Reveals Identity of Man Police Claim Dropped the Cigarette which Started the Blaze
Former Chairman’s son vows to clear father’s name
Claims the disaster was started deliberately ‘Nonsense’ according to high court judge