The 1985 Valley Parade fire

[EIM]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

I'm also a huge MDMA fan.

[anton pulisov]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

My Name Is Ian wrote: And this interview with Stafford Heginbotham in 1986 (two minutes in) is, well, a curio, to say the least:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLK4k1vIP30

Bizarre.

[NHH]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

There's a very clear set of circumstances that can reconstruct this: what were the ground regs at the time, what was communicated to the club and when, was the insurance policy in place?

I've read that the club found out 2 days earlier that the cost of redevelopment was going to be £2M, and also that the stand was due to be demolished 2 days later. This doesn't add up, without more info; you're not plan to demolish a stand weeks in advance and not find out the cost of the replacement structure until 2 days beforehand. Was he turned down for a grant that he'd planned to build?

The fact that the stand might not have been covered isn't as relevant as whether the club thought it was. People do insurance jobs all the time in ignorance of exclusions on their policies.

[Central Rain]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

This page contains links to a variety of relevant documents, including Popplewell's interim report.

[Kid A]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

Extract from Fletcher's book

With regards to the insurance, the key line is: "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."

So whether Popplewell is right to say that the stand wasn't insured or not, the club received quite a sum of money anyway.

[NHH]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

I've just bought the kindle edition. Couple of highlights:

- The was no planned demolition. The club lied about this, and no-one picked them up on it.
- They had discovered the £2M cost 2 days beforehand, and knew they couldn't afford it. They were due to become a designated ground under the Safety of Sports Grounds Act, which meant their status as excluded from that Act would end, and they knew large parts of the ground would be condemned.

They were, in short, fucked. Couldn't afford to do the work. Couldn't afford to operate with half a stadium if two stands were taken out of action. Didn't want write off the capital cost of moving to Odsal.

The Popplewell Inquiry was also a clear farce at best, and a stitch up to avoid political heat for the failure to properly implement the Safety of Sports Grounds Act.

What jumps out though, is where were the Bradford fans? This is familiar stuff post-Hillsborough, but why did they acquiesce so easily to the very pertinent questions? The one person who did ask questions was the Chair of the Supporters Club. Who was promptly banned from the re-opened Valley Parade.

Fuck me.

[Sash08]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

NHH,

Is there a discussion of how on earth he kept getting re-insured with his history of fires? Dodgy insurance agents/kick backs on pay outs?

It also seems that a lot of Popplewell's statements are porkies. Was he just... errr... "careless" or was this willful misrepresentation/lying?

[Sash08]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

I think the reaction of Bradford fans to the fire & Liverpool fans to Hillsborough has been compared before.

Would it be wrong to say that the overall reaction in Bradford smacks of that stereotype of fans as imbeciles who blindly love their club so much that they can't possibly see it as the culprit?

Or is it just that the authorities pulled a fast one before anyone could recover from the shock and the grief and question the process/findings?

[McAvennie]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

I've certainly been quite shocked at the response on the Claret & Banter board. Barely a dissenting voice to be heard, it is almost like they've been mass brainwashed "It was a dropped cigarette, we don't talk about it anymore..."

You'd think after all the scandals and cover ups that have been exposed over the years that something like this would have at least one or two fans questioning the official version of events. Instead they all seem to be turning on Fletcher.

The rush by Popplewell and Sutcliffe to make 'nothing to see here' statements and the general 'we've moved on, no point looking back' attitude that seemed to be established quite quickly and has become the norm amongst fans does look a bit peculiar.

It isn't quite the same circumstances but I'm finding it hard not to think of the TV serial 'Red Riding' where Sean Bean is the bastard property mogul and everyone else hides his secrets.

[Central Rain]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

Sash08 wrote:

Would it be wrong to say that the overall reaction in Bradford smacks of that stereotype of fans as imbeciles who blindly love their club so much that they can't possibly see it as the culprit?

Yes it would be wrong. Really quite offensive in fact.

[Central Rain]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

Also, if you look at the clip of the interview with Heginbotham that was posted upthread, you'll see that there was a fair bit of hostility towards him in the aftermath. I'm not sure he has always been seen as this great bloke who saved the club.

[Sash08]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

Central Rain wrote:

Would it be wrong to say that the overall reaction in Bradford smacks of that stereotype of fans as imbeciles who blindly love their club so much that they can't possibly see it as the culprit?

Yes it would be wrong. Really quite offensive in fact.

And the Claret & Banter board does nothing to reinforce this view?

[Central Rain]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

A few people on the internet is not the same as the "overall reaction in Bradford".

[jeanmid]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

Central Rain wrote:

Would it be wrong to say that the overall reaction in Bradford smacks of that stereotype of fans as imbeciles who blindly love their club so much that they can't possibly see it as the culprit?

Yes it would be wrong. Really quite offensive in fact.

I'm with Central Rain that is offensive

[Ray de Galles]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

Central Rain wrote: Also, if you look at the clip of the interview with Heginbotham that was posted upthread, you'll see that there was a fair bit of hostility towards him in the aftermath. I'm not sure he has always been seen as this great bloke who saved the club.

You can't see the graffiti in that video without wondering if some people at the time had the same theory about Heginbotham that Fletcher is airing now.

[McAvennie]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

Isn't there meant to be a second part to the Guardian's "serialisation"?

I assumed that would be released today. Planned for publication on Friday or delayed for other reasons?

Seems like some more interesting stuff to come based on NHH's overview.

[Patrick Thistle]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

I can believe that someone with experience of receiving insurance payouts for fires could see burning down a football stand that was on the brink of being condemned as a way forward.

I can also believe that someone who wanted to burn down a stand would make sure there was lots of flammable material in place to burn.

It's not a huge leap to imagine that flammable material was ignited accidentally by something else and the whole thing caught fire well ahead of the time it was meant to.

If my father, brother, granddad and uncle had died in a fire I would want to know for absolute certain that it was an unpreventable accident. And if I found things that seemed a bit convenient or unlikely I'd want to investigate it.

Totally get where the author is coming from.

[Tapiocahead]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

I think the main difference between the Bradford fans attitude to the fire and Liverpool's to Hillsborough is that nobody blamed the Bradford fans for the disaster.

I attended that match as a 10 year old with my grandfather and uncle and it was only through blind luck that we ended up in the kop. I was asked if I wanted to go in the stand that day and said no.

As a kid I accepted the rubbish under the stand/accident verdict and never had the inclination or motivation to think about it in any great detail since.

I am dismayed at the stance of many of the Bradford fans on that message board, but I'm satisfied that it's not the consensus view.

My view is if that is Fletcher has come up with compelling enough evidence to justify the launch of a fresh enquiry then that is exactly what should happen.

[NHH]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

The more I think about it, the key fact here is that the ground wasn't going to be renovated.

As a 4th tier club, it wasn't a designated ground. That meant that it wasn't required to be safety compliant. Local fire and police had the power to compel such clubs to do so, but rarely did because the clubs pleaded poverty and said to such people that their over-zealous approach would cause the clubs to fold.

The club started to make plans for what would be necessary in the second half of the season, and an emergency board meeting held two days beforehand showed that the cost would be £2M, of which a maximum of 500K was available in grants from the Football Stadium Improvement Trust. The 1.5M they needed represented three years' entire turnover and the club had only exited insolvency as a reformed club two years' earlier, and so bank lending was out as they had a terrible record.

Stafford Heginbotham's businesses were collapsing and none of the other Directors could afford it.

The club knew that two stands - and maybe more - of the capacity would be lost if they went up, because the stands would be closed (this happened to Halifax as a result of the changes brought about by the fire, where the 1975 was brought in across the board overnight).

The only other option was to go to Odsal, and share with Bradford Northern. The Council owned it, and a deal could have been done (it's been spoken about for donkey's years in the city) but that would have required losing control of their ground, and writing off the money that'd been sunk into it in repairs by the current regime.

However, as things stood that Thursday evening at the board meeting, all they knew was that they couldn't afford the work.

But the day after the fire, the club were putting it about that the stand was due to be demolished. The steel for a new roof, the vice chairman told Yorkshire TV, laid out in the car park.

None of this was true. Helicopter pictures of the site on the news clearly show no such steel or other material. But no-one pressed the club on this arrant nonsense. Everyone was focussed on the Inquiry as the proper place.

But the Inquiry was shite. It last 5 days in terms of evidence taking in the city, 3 weeks afterwards when many witnesses were still hospitalised. The brief for the Inquiry was muddled, and mixed up the the deaths the same day at Leeds vs Birmingham, and the interim report of findings was published 6 weeks' later (Hillsborough was 3 and a half months).

But the issue of the stand is the telltale. Why lie about what was about to happen? What did such a bare-faced and brazen lie achieve? The only thing I can see is that it suggested that the club was preparing to modernise its ground as required, and had the funds to do so. That works to suggest only there was no motive whatsoever for any involvement, as the outcomes that eventually occurred - money from insurance and a new redeveloped stadium - were things they were already going to get.

Take away that and you're left with the fact that a club with no money, owned by people with no money, was about to enter an impossible situation for which they had no legal means of resolving to their satisfaction. So it's not just that Fletcher establishes that they had a very strong motive, it's that he shows how they actively and demonstrably were engaged in dissembling this motive.

[Flynnie]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

Worth pointing out that Martin Fletcher didn't just personally suffer greatly in this tragedy; he is a pretty successful tax lawyer in the City and his book is being published by Bloomsbury, a large and reputable publishing house.

All of that strongly points against this being the tinfoil hat rantings of a lunatic out for money. Not that anybody here buys that, I think, but it really, really underlines how off-base B&C forum is acting.

By the way, he grew up in Nottingham (his family moved there for work) and he was also at Hillsborough. Which is remarkable.

[longeared]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

The inquiry being held three weeks afterwards would have presumably meant that the attention of the national media would have been primarily focused on the aftermath of Heysel.

[Kid A]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

McAvennie wrote: Isn't there meant to be a second part to the Guardian's "serialisation"?

I assumed that would be released today. Planned for publication on Friday or delayed for other reasons?

Seems like some more interesting stuff to come based on NHH's overview.

Second extract from Fletcher's book

This is about his experience of the fire itself, rather than why it happened.

[McAvennie]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

It does seem, if you are to run with the implications in the Guardian story, that Heysel was a massive stroke of luck - in the most horrible terms - in that its occurrence three weeks later involving a much bigger club shifted the attention of the media. With the inquiry already carried out that quickly and the cigarette theory accepted it was easy to say 'Time to move on...'.

There are a lot of snippets of information that start to add up. There also seems to be a lot of lies or wrong facts out there that are bandied about as fact. NHH's note about there being no steel outside, several different sources mentioning the stand was/was not insured - too many questions. Maybe it is all answered in the Popplewell Report. I have not read it. However, the best way to sort the truth from the half-truth and try and answer all these questions and look at their validity would be a completely fresh analysis and review of the case.

I'm not signed up to the C&B board, obviously, but it has had me mentally screaming at the laptop with some of the comments.

One poster in particular seems very dismissive and 'nothing to see here' while another states "There is no need to 'look for answers', the answers are already there. An elderly supporter dropped a lit cigarette that fell through the cracks in the stand and ignited rubbish that had accumulated there. The Police, Fire Investigators and a number of other forensic teams confirmed this. The poor guy who dropped the cigarette was interviewed and every piece of evidence backed up that scenario." Really? If that was the case surely that would be known more widely. You can understand them not publicising the guy's name but if that is true it would be in the police case files and a fresh review would see that. Even so, it still doesn't answer why a dropped cigarette on accumulated rubbish that had been building there since 1968 sparked a huge blaze on that day. Why had it never happened before? Given the state of many grounds in those days how had it not happened at any other grounds? Is there instances of this ever happening on smaller scales at grounds in the 80s?

The more you think about it the more questions arise.

[Central Rain]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

I also have the Kindle edition now. Won't have time to read it just yet but my first thought is that it is a shame the book doesn't contain proper references (I assume the hardback is the same). There's just a short note at the back saying where he did his research and a few of the books he read.

[Central Rain]

The 1985 Valley Parade fire

McAvennie wrote:

One poster in particular seems very dismissive and 'nothing to see here' while another states "There is no need to 'look for answers', the answers are already there. An elderly supporter dropped a lit cigarette that fell through the cracks in the stand and ignited rubbish that had accumulated there. The Police, Fire Investigators and a number of other forensic teams confirmed this. The poor guy who dropped the cigarette was interviewed and every piece of evidence backed up that scenario." Really? If that was the case surely that would be known more widely. You can understand them not publicising the guy's name but if that is true it would be in the police case files and a fresh review would see that. Even so, it still doesn't answer why a dropped cigarette on accumulated rubbish that had been building there since 1968 sparked a huge blaze on that day. Why had it never happened before? Given the state of many grounds in those days how had it not happened at any other grounds? Is there instances of this ever happening on smaller scales at grounds in the 80s?

The more you think about it the more questions arise.

I don't think the report was anything like as conclusive as they are claiming there. They decided that it was probably a match/cigarette/pipe tobacco but certainly didn't identify which person it had come from.