English football fans will all know about this event. You can watch it on you tube. It involved a fire at a football game that engulfed an entire stand and took the lives of 56 people. 11th May 1985. The Guardian is serialising a book by a guy who suggests the fire may have been deliberate. His chief claim is that the guy who owned the club was associated with a large number of previous fires leading to large insurance claims. It is also suggested that features of the fire itself are consistent with arson. I will put the long quote below in a spoiler. I am unable to link to the Guardian
The blaze that killed 56 football fans at Bradford City’s Valley Parade ground in 1985 was one of at least nine fires at businesses owned by or associated with the club’s then chairman, according to extraordinary evidence published today for the first time.
The revelations are contained in a book written by Martin Fletcher, a Bradford fan who lost three generations of his family in the stadium fire. Fletcher believes the fire was not an accident and says he and his family are no longer willing to “live the myth”.
Fletcher managed to escape after the timber main stand at Valley Parade turned into a death trap during Bradford’s game against Lincoln City on 11 May 1985. His brother, Andrew, 11, was the youngest victim and his father John, 34, uncle Peter, 32, and grandfather Eddie, 63, all died.
Martin Fletcher, who was 12 at the time, has spent the past 15 years investigating what happened and his book, Fifty-Six – The Story of the Bradford Fire, is published today.
The book, serialised by the Guardian today and tomorrow, reveals there had been at least eight other fires at business premises either owned by, or connected to, Stafford Heginbotham, Bradford’s then-chairman, in the previous 18 years, resulting in huge insurance claims. Fletcher does not make any direct allegations but he does believe Heginbotham’s history with fires, resulting in payouts of around £27m in today’s terms, warrants further investigation. “Could any man really be as unlucky as Heginbotham had been?” he asks.
The disaster at Valley Parade came at a time, according to Fletcher’s evidence, when the businessman was in desperate financial trouble, unable to pay his workforce beyond that month. Heginbotham had learned two days before the fire it would cost £2m to bring the ground up to safety standards required by Bradford’s promotion from the old Third Division that season. Yet this has never been reported and did not feature in the Popplewell inquiry, chaired by then high court judge Oliver Popplewell, which held its investigation only three weeks after the fire.
The inquiry heard only five days of testimony and concluded the fire was probably started by a match, a cigarette or pipe tobacco slipping through gaps in the floorboards on to litter that had built up over the previous 20 years.
Fletcher does not accept that version and quotes a report by the Fire Research Station, a government-funded body, that “features of the Bradford fire required a detail of understanding greater than that presented to the formal inquiry”.
Fletcher’s evidence was collected through months of painstaking research into Heginbotham’s business history and by trawling 20 years of local newspaper reports into fires in the Bradford area.
The pattern began with a fire at a three-storey Bradford factory in May 1967 and continued on Good Friday 1968 with another fire at the premises of Genefoam, of which Heginbotham was the managing director. A firm Heginbotham had founded suffered a serious fire in 1970, before the Castle Mills building, owned by Heginbotham, had a fire in 1971.
Further blazes followed at the Douglas Mills building, also owned by Heginbotham, in August and November 1977. In December that year there was a fire at the premises of Coronet Marketing, a subsidiary of Heginbotham’s Tebro Toys. A further fire at the Douglas Mills building occurred in June 1981.
Heginbotham died in 1995, aged 61. He was never prosecuted for the Valley Parade fire, despite the coroner later saying he had given serious consideration to bringing a charge of manslaughter. Bradford City had received three separate warnings about the potential fire risk, two from the Health and Safety Executive and another from the council, but did nothing.
Fletcher’s book reveals how Heginbotham initially denied seeing the council’s letter
before repeatedly changing his story when it became clear this was not true. The author has told the Guardian it was a “litany of lies”.
Of Heginbotham’s history with fires, Fletcher writes: “To quote a Los Angeles Police Department fire investigator in Blaze, the Forensics of Fire by Nicholas Faith: ‘It’s rare to have a coincidence. If we start having multiple coincidences then it’s not a coincidence.’ It is clear to me that at Bradford, with Stafford Heginbotham in charge, there was a mountain of coincidence.”
Once dubbed “the bravest boy in Britain”, Fletcher is the only survivor to publicly challenge the official inquiry, describing it as wholly inadequate and saying it took place far too close to the event. His family expected a fuller investigation to follow and he says his determination to find out the truth stems initially from a conversation with his mother, Susan, when he was 21.
“I never believed it was an accident and I never will,” she told him. “I don’t think Stafford intended for people to die. But people did. All because he went back to the one thing he knew best that would get him out of trouble.”
When Susan Fletcher brought a civil case against the club and West Yorkshire county council, meaning 110 bereaved or injured people would have their compensation claims met, she received a series of anonymous late-night telephone calls, including death threats against Martin, then 14, and the warning “nobody beats Bradford City”. The grieving mother and son temporarily had to move out of their house to live in a hotel. Martin was taken out of school until it was considered safe to return.
Fletcher’s book is released nine days before a minute’s silence will be held at every Premier League and Football League match to mark the forthcoming 30th anniversary of the fire.
“I’m not living a lie any more,” Fletcher said. “I’m not living someone else’s half-truth. I’m not living the myth. Bradford City on the day of the fire were sponsored by the council and across the shirt the slogan was ‘Bradford myth-breakers’. Well, there are a lot of myths that need to be broken.”
I knew the scale of this task. I’d have to get to the British Library newspapers archive for 9am each morning, fill in the slips for the maximum number of items I could order – usually four bound volumes of the Bradford Telegraph & Argus, dating from January 1965 onwards, the year Stafford Heginbotham became involved with Bradford City – and sit at a desk, scanning each article until I’d covered 20 years’ worth of newspapers. The whole process took two months, during which time I discovered there was a pattern to Stafford Heginbotham’s fires. In a nutshell, they all spread incredibly quickly, produced an unbelievable amount of toxic smoke and devastation, and they all caught the firefighters unawares. But even more staggering was the sheer number of them.
Inline image
I read how on a Sunday afternoon, 21 May 1967, fire engulfed a three-storey factory and its two-storey loading bay as a 200ft pall of toxic smoke temporarily overcame two firemen in Cutler Heights Lane, near Bradford city centre. Fifty firemen in all, deploying 14 jets, eight pumps and a turntable, were needed to bring it under control.
The young Bradford City chairman was surrounded by scores of boys watching the inferno and the police, mystified as to how a fire might have started in the factory, with no employees at work and no sign of a forced entry, announced their inquiries would continue with the children who were playing outside. At a time when the average national UK house price was £3,700, the fire caused £25,000 of damage, with a stock loss of £10,000 (the equivalent, in terms of house-price inflation today, of £1.6m and £600,000 respectively).
Then, on Good Friday 1968, overtime staff at Tebro Toys looked out of their windows as an “awfully black” pall of smoke drifted towards their premises from a three-storey factory at the opposite end of the industrial estate. When the managing director went to investigate he found what he described as a “fire going like a bomb” in the neighbouring building, also occupied by Tebro Toys and, the Argus stated, “Genefoam (Bradford Ltd) rubber manufacturers whose managing director is Mr Stafford Heginbotham, the Bradford City chairman”.
By the time the fire brigade arrived a 500-gallon fuel tank had exploded, bringing down the factory’s 40-foot walls and roof. Again, 50 firemen and 11 appliances were needed to bring the blaze – visible for miles around – under control.
I thumbed through another decade’s worth of newspaper archives before I found another fire involving a firm owned by Stafford Heginbotham. On Tuesday 8 November 1977, the front page of the Telegraph & Argus reported that Heginbotham was still at his desk around six the previous evening when he heard the sound of breaking glass. Thinking his car was being vandalised he ran out, presumably to confront the vandals, only to find glass falling from the top two floors of the three-storey Douglas Mills, when he reportedly raised the alarm and called the fire brigade. The fumes breathed in by the first four firemen to arrive at his blazing toy firm were so toxic they were violently sick and required hospital treatment. In the end, 40 firemen were needed to control the blaze.
Nobody picked up on the
fact that Heginbotham’s
total fire proceeds from his Bradford firms were £2.74m
In 1971 Stafford had formed a new Tebro Toys company – six years later his extensive stock of soft toys for Christmas was destroyed. With a fire-brigade strike having started that November (it would last until January 1978), there was no thorough fire investigation, and a discarded cigarette was considered the most likely cause.
Indeed it had been a most unfortunate year for Douglas Mills. Three months earlier, in August 1977, two boys had been arrested for arson after pouring oil over, then setting light to, 150 paper rolls at Yorkshire Knitting Mills, which had occupied the ground floor of the Douglas Mills building owned by Stafford Heginbotham. A Tebro Toys employee who noticed smoke rising through the floorboards raised the alarm, and four fire engines took over 20 minutes to control the blaze. The police explained: “The fire brigade were able to deal with it promptly, or it could have got out of hand.”
Four weeks to the day after the Tebro Toys fire, a 100ft pillar of flame threatened to devastate the industrial heart of Bradford city centre. Monday 5 December was a month into the firemen’s strike, and two army fire crews arrived at the Coronet Marketing factory in Leeds Road, confident they could control the flames, only to pull back after a series of explosions saw the four-storey building completely alight within two minutes.
It was the most serious fire of the strike and took 50 soldiers and a dozen army appliances to bring the blaze under control. Coronet Marketing rented the premises from the council. They were an outdoor lighting manufacturer and a subsidiary of Tebro Toys, owned, needless to say, by Stafford Heginbotham. Somehow, a ground-floor gas pipe, normally designed to withstand a fire’s heat, had fractured and in seconds the building became an inferno – all stock and machinery was destroyed. Although Heginbotham talked of moving production to Douglas Mills, he simply collected the fire insurance and wound the company up. His two big fires of 1977 saw him collect a striking total of £174,663 (£3.165m in today’s terms) in insurance payouts. But again, with the fire service strike ongoing there would be no explanation of how that gas pipe came to break.
A headline on the front page of the next day’s Telegraph & Argus had announced: FIRM IS DOGGED BY BIG FIRES. “I need fires like I need a hole in the head,” claimed Stafford Heginbotham, after the latest in a series of fires to hit his businesses. He told the newspaper: “It makes you wonder what is happening,” before adding: “I have just been unlucky.” The printing and stationery firm where Mum worked in Leeds had Stafford as a client at one point. That was before her time, but she remembers the standing joke in the office being: “If Stafford had a problem, it got torched.”
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. In today’s adjusted terms that’s £7m. It’s also a bit of a joke that, back in 1985, nobody picked up on the fact that Heginbotham – seemingly a one-man walking nightmare for insurance companies – had already recouped nearly £1m (£10m in today’s terms) before his club was rewarded with the further gift of £1.46m (worth £10.25m in today’s money) by the local authority, to take his total fire proceeds from his Bradford firms to £2.74m – or £27m in today’s adjusted terms.
I decided to extend the search into companies and premises Stafford had had some link with. It wasn’t long before I discovered that Matgoods, a firm Heginbotham had founded, also had a fire in 1970, which started with an explosion in a storeroom that destroyed another £10,000-worth of foam rubber (£500,000 in today’s terms).
Then Castle Mills, which Heginbotham also owned, had a tenant fire in December 1971. Although Stafford’s tenants, Frionor Packing, a frozen food company, had an operable automatic fire alarm system – one which, the local fire chief said, once fitted, was responsible for keeping all fire damage claims below £5,000 over a 20-year period – the blaze saw £15,000 damage (£650,000 in today’s terms) to packaging equipment used for frozen fish.
Heginbotham-owned Douglas Mills, once over their fire-ravaged year of 1977, fell victim to another tenant fire in June 1981. This time 100 workers had to be evacuated from a ground-floor plastics factory, with industrial quantities of plastic melting, running and resetting to form a waist-high barrier that, while keeping the flames in, did nothing to alleviate the toxic fumes.
Could any man really be as unlucky as Heginbotham had been? From standing around with a bunch of kids and onlookers on a Sunday afternoon in May 1967, as his former foam-cushion business went up in flames, to standing on the pitch at Valley Parade 18 years later, making noises about smoke bombs while 56 people perished behind him …
Re-reading Heginbotham’s profile from the Up with City! promotion supplement, first published on the day of his last fire, it sent a shiver down my spine. The piece opened with the line: “There’s a sign in Stafford Heginbotham’s office which says: ‘There are three types of people – those who make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who wonder what happened’. Stafford certainly falls into the first category.”
Some ISF skepticism on this one please.
The blaze that killed 56 football fans at Bradford City’s Valley Parade ground in 1985 was one of at least nine fires at businesses owned by or associated with the club’s then chairman, according to extraordinary evidence published today for the first time.
The revelations are contained in a book written by Martin Fletcher, a Bradford fan who lost three generations of his family in the stadium fire. Fletcher believes the fire was not an accident and says he and his family are no longer willing to “live the myth”.
Fletcher managed to escape after the timber main stand at Valley Parade turned into a death trap during Bradford’s game against Lincoln City on 11 May 1985. His brother, Andrew, 11, was the youngest victim and his father John, 34, uncle Peter, 32, and grandfather Eddie, 63, all died.
Martin Fletcher, who was 12 at the time, has spent the past 15 years investigating what happened and his book, Fifty-Six – The Story of the Bradford Fire, is published today.
The book, serialised by the Guardian today and tomorrow, reveals there had been at least eight other fires at business premises either owned by, or connected to, Stafford Heginbotham, Bradford’s then-chairman, in the previous 18 years, resulting in huge insurance claims. Fletcher does not make any direct allegations but he does believe Heginbotham’s history with fires, resulting in payouts of around £27m in today’s terms, warrants further investigation. “Could any man really be as unlucky as Heginbotham had been?” he asks.
The disaster at Valley Parade came at a time, according to Fletcher’s evidence, when the businessman was in desperate financial trouble, unable to pay his workforce beyond that month. Heginbotham had learned two days before the fire it would cost £2m to bring the ground up to safety standards required by Bradford’s promotion from the old Third Division that season. Yet this has never been reported and did not feature in the Popplewell inquiry, chaired by then high court judge Oliver Popplewell, which held its investigation only three weeks after the fire.
The inquiry heard only five days of testimony and concluded the fire was probably started by a match, a cigarette or pipe tobacco slipping through gaps in the floorboards on to litter that had built up over the previous 20 years.
Fletcher does not accept that version and quotes a report by the Fire Research Station, a government-funded body, that “features of the Bradford fire required a detail of understanding greater than that presented to the formal inquiry”.
Fletcher’s evidence was collected through months of painstaking research into Heginbotham’s business history and by trawling 20 years of local newspaper reports into fires in the Bradford area.
The pattern began with a fire at a three-storey Bradford factory in May 1967 and continued on Good Friday 1968 with another fire at the premises of Genefoam, of which Heginbotham was the managing director. A firm Heginbotham had founded suffered a serious fire in 1970, before the Castle Mills building, owned by Heginbotham, had a fire in 1971.
Further blazes followed at the Douglas Mills building, also owned by Heginbotham, in August and November 1977. In December that year there was a fire at the premises of Coronet Marketing, a subsidiary of Heginbotham’s Tebro Toys. A further fire at the Douglas Mills building occurred in June 1981.
Heginbotham died in 1995, aged 61. He was never prosecuted for the Valley Parade fire, despite the coroner later saying he had given serious consideration to bringing a charge of manslaughter. Bradford City had received three separate warnings about the potential fire risk, two from the Health and Safety Executive and another from the council, but did nothing.
Fletcher’s book reveals how Heginbotham initially denied seeing the council’s letter
before repeatedly changing his story when it became clear this was not true. The author has told the Guardian it was a “litany of lies”.
Of Heginbotham’s history with fires, Fletcher writes: “To quote a Los Angeles Police Department fire investigator in Blaze, the Forensics of Fire by Nicholas Faith: ‘It’s rare to have a coincidence. If we start having multiple coincidences then it’s not a coincidence.’ It is clear to me that at Bradford, with Stafford Heginbotham in charge, there was a mountain of coincidence.”
Once dubbed “the bravest boy in Britain”, Fletcher is the only survivor to publicly challenge the official inquiry, describing it as wholly inadequate and saying it took place far too close to the event. His family expected a fuller investigation to follow and he says his determination to find out the truth stems initially from a conversation with his mother, Susan, when he was 21.
“I never believed it was an accident and I never will,” she told him. “I don’t think Stafford intended for people to die. But people did. All because he went back to the one thing he knew best that would get him out of trouble.”
When Susan Fletcher brought a civil case against the club and West Yorkshire county council, meaning 110 bereaved or injured people would have their compensation claims met, she received a series of anonymous late-night telephone calls, including death threats against Martin, then 14, and the warning “nobody beats Bradford City”. The grieving mother and son temporarily had to move out of their house to live in a hotel. Martin was taken out of school until it was considered safe to return.
Fletcher’s book is released nine days before a minute’s silence will be held at every Premier League and Football League match to mark the forthcoming 30th anniversary of the fire.
“I’m not living a lie any more,” Fletcher said. “I’m not living someone else’s half-truth. I’m not living the myth. Bradford City on the day of the fire were sponsored by the council and across the shirt the slogan was ‘Bradford myth-breakers’. Well, there are a lot of myths that need to be broken.”
I knew the scale of this task. I’d have to get to the British Library newspapers archive for 9am each morning, fill in the slips for the maximum number of items I could order – usually four bound volumes of the Bradford Telegraph & Argus, dating from January 1965 onwards, the year Stafford Heginbotham became involved with Bradford City – and sit at a desk, scanning each article until I’d covered 20 years’ worth of newspapers. The whole process took two months, during which time I discovered there was a pattern to Stafford Heginbotham’s fires. In a nutshell, they all spread incredibly quickly, produced an unbelievable amount of toxic smoke and devastation, and they all caught the firefighters unawares. But even more staggering was the sheer number of them.
Inline image
I read how on a Sunday afternoon, 21 May 1967, fire engulfed a three-storey factory and its two-storey loading bay as a 200ft pall of toxic smoke temporarily overcame two firemen in Cutler Heights Lane, near Bradford city centre. Fifty firemen in all, deploying 14 jets, eight pumps and a turntable, were needed to bring it under control.
The young Bradford City chairman was surrounded by scores of boys watching the inferno and the police, mystified as to how a fire might have started in the factory, with no employees at work and no sign of a forced entry, announced their inquiries would continue with the children who were playing outside. At a time when the average national UK house price was £3,700, the fire caused £25,000 of damage, with a stock loss of £10,000 (the equivalent, in terms of house-price inflation today, of £1.6m and £600,000 respectively).
Then, on Good Friday 1968, overtime staff at Tebro Toys looked out of their windows as an “awfully black” pall of smoke drifted towards their premises from a three-storey factory at the opposite end of the industrial estate. When the managing director went to investigate he found what he described as a “fire going like a bomb” in the neighbouring building, also occupied by Tebro Toys and, the Argus stated, “Genefoam (Bradford Ltd) rubber manufacturers whose managing director is Mr Stafford Heginbotham, the Bradford City chairman”.
By the time the fire brigade arrived a 500-gallon fuel tank had exploded, bringing down the factory’s 40-foot walls and roof. Again, 50 firemen and 11 appliances were needed to bring the blaze – visible for miles around – under control.
I thumbed through another decade’s worth of newspaper archives before I found another fire involving a firm owned by Stafford Heginbotham. On Tuesday 8 November 1977, the front page of the Telegraph & Argus reported that Heginbotham was still at his desk around six the previous evening when he heard the sound of breaking glass. Thinking his car was being vandalised he ran out, presumably to confront the vandals, only to find glass falling from the top two floors of the three-storey Douglas Mills, when he reportedly raised the alarm and called the fire brigade. The fumes breathed in by the first four firemen to arrive at his blazing toy firm were so toxic they were violently sick and required hospital treatment. In the end, 40 firemen were needed to control the blaze.
Nobody picked up on the
fact that Heginbotham’s
total fire proceeds from his Bradford firms were £2.74m
In 1971 Stafford had formed a new Tebro Toys company – six years later his extensive stock of soft toys for Christmas was destroyed. With a fire-brigade strike having started that November (it would last until January 1978), there was no thorough fire investigation, and a discarded cigarette was considered the most likely cause.
Indeed it had been a most unfortunate year for Douglas Mills. Three months earlier, in August 1977, two boys had been arrested for arson after pouring oil over, then setting light to, 150 paper rolls at Yorkshire Knitting Mills, which had occupied the ground floor of the Douglas Mills building owned by Stafford Heginbotham. A Tebro Toys employee who noticed smoke rising through the floorboards raised the alarm, and four fire engines took over 20 minutes to control the blaze. The police explained: “The fire brigade were able to deal with it promptly, or it could have got out of hand.”
Four weeks to the day after the Tebro Toys fire, a 100ft pillar of flame threatened to devastate the industrial heart of Bradford city centre. Monday 5 December was a month into the firemen’s strike, and two army fire crews arrived at the Coronet Marketing factory in Leeds Road, confident they could control the flames, only to pull back after a series of explosions saw the four-storey building completely alight within two minutes.
It was the most serious fire of the strike and took 50 soldiers and a dozen army appliances to bring the blaze under control. Coronet Marketing rented the premises from the council. They were an outdoor lighting manufacturer and a subsidiary of Tebro Toys, owned, needless to say, by Stafford Heginbotham. Somehow, a ground-floor gas pipe, normally designed to withstand a fire’s heat, had fractured and in seconds the building became an inferno – all stock and machinery was destroyed. Although Heginbotham talked of moving production to Douglas Mills, he simply collected the fire insurance and wound the company up. His two big fires of 1977 saw him collect a striking total of £174,663 (£3.165m in today’s terms) in insurance payouts. But again, with the fire service strike ongoing there would be no explanation of how that gas pipe came to break.
A headline on the front page of the next day’s Telegraph & Argus had announced: FIRM IS DOGGED BY BIG FIRES. “I need fires like I need a hole in the head,” claimed Stafford Heginbotham, after the latest in a series of fires to hit his businesses. He told the newspaper: “It makes you wonder what is happening,” before adding: “I have just been unlucky.” The printing and stationery firm where Mum worked in Leeds had Stafford as a client at one point. That was before her time, but she remembers the standing joke in the office being: “If Stafford had a problem, it got torched.”
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. In today’s adjusted terms that’s £7m. It’s also a bit of a joke that, back in 1985, nobody picked up on the fact that Heginbotham – seemingly a one-man walking nightmare for insurance companies – had already recouped nearly £1m (£10m in today’s terms) before his club was rewarded with the further gift of £1.46m (worth £10.25m in today’s money) by the local authority, to take his total fire proceeds from his Bradford firms to £2.74m – or £27m in today’s adjusted terms.
I decided to extend the search into companies and premises Stafford had had some link with. It wasn’t long before I discovered that Matgoods, a firm Heginbotham had founded, also had a fire in 1970, which started with an explosion in a storeroom that destroyed another £10,000-worth of foam rubber (£500,000 in today’s terms).
Then Castle Mills, which Heginbotham also owned, had a tenant fire in December 1971. Although Stafford’s tenants, Frionor Packing, a frozen food company, had an operable automatic fire alarm system – one which, the local fire chief said, once fitted, was responsible for keeping all fire damage claims below £5,000 over a 20-year period – the blaze saw £15,000 damage (£650,000 in today’s terms) to packaging equipment used for frozen fish.
Heginbotham-owned Douglas Mills, once over their fire-ravaged year of 1977, fell victim to another tenant fire in June 1981. This time 100 workers had to be evacuated from a ground-floor plastics factory, with industrial quantities of plastic melting, running and resetting to form a waist-high barrier that, while keeping the flames in, did nothing to alleviate the toxic fumes.
Could any man really be as unlucky as Heginbotham had been? From standing around with a bunch of kids and onlookers on a Sunday afternoon in May 1967, as his former foam-cushion business went up in flames, to standing on the pitch at Valley Parade 18 years later, making noises about smoke bombs while 56 people perished behind him …
Re-reading Heginbotham’s profile from the Up with City! promotion supplement, first published on the day of his last fire, it sent a shiver down my spine. The piece opened with the line: “There’s a sign in Stafford Heginbotham’s office which says: ‘There are three types of people – those who make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who wonder what happened’. Stafford certainly falls into the first category.”
Some ISF skepticism on this one please.
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1DmKcur
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