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Bradford City stadium fire

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The Bradford City Fire Disaster occurred on Saturday May 11, 1985 when a flash fire consumed one side of the Valley Parade football stadium in Bradford, England. The fire broke out during a football match between the home team Bradford City and Lincoln City, on the day that Bradford City were supposed to have celebrated their winning the Football League Third Division trophy.


Background to the disaster

1984-85 in English football saw Bradford City enjoy a most successful season in Football League Division 3 (today's Football League One), and by May 11, the final Saturday of the season, had secured enough points to be crowned league champions, gaining promotion to the Football League Division 2 (today's Football League Championship) for the first time since 1937, 48 years earlier. With Bradford City already champions, and Lincoln City safely occupying mid-table, the game was a meaningless sideshow to what was supposed to be a very rare day of celebration for Bradford City.

As it was the first piece of domestic silverware that the club had captured since they won Football League Division Three North 56 years earlier, in 1929, 11,076 supporters, double that season's average attendance, packed into the then ramshackle 16,000 capacity Valley Parade, to see their club crowned league champions. Of these, 2,000 filled all the ground's seats and a further 2,000 stood on the Paddock terrace that ran immediately to the front and side of the Edwardian Main Stand, also filling it to capacity.

Half an hour before the game, the Bradford City team did a lap of honour after club captain Peter Jackson was presented with the Third Division trophy. For the first 40 minutes of the game, the two sides played out a dull goalless draw, then disaster unfolded.

The Disaster

It is believed the fire started when a spectator disposed of smoking materials, which fell through a damaged empty space beneath the seats of the main stand and onto a pile of rubbish that had accumulated beneath the stand for approximately 20 years.

Five minutes before half-time, white smoke was seen rising from the rear of the 77-year-old wooden stand. Fire-fighting equipment was immediately requested and the police began to move fans from the rear of G Block, the area in which the fire started. Three minutes later, after flames emerged from beneath the stand, match referee Don Shaw stopped the match, which the Football Association ultimately declared to be a 0-0 draw, the score at the time of the game's abandonment.

All thoughts of the match were now forgotten as people were evacuated onto the playing field. Only the fire rapidly took hold 90 seconds later, after a flashover occurred throughout G Block, with the entire main stand then engulfed within two minutes. Whilst most escaped onto the playing field, others seated towards the rear of the stand were trapped in the narrow rear corridor at the back of the stand. Most of the fire's fatalities were found along this corridor where they had been overcome by toxic smoke, by the rear inward opening exit doors and turnstile entrances, which had been locked to prevent unauthorised access.

After flashover the fire raced along the stand's wooden roof with wooden boards and burning melting tar falling from its bitumen-coated roof and onto escaping fans below. Ironically, the steel that the club said it intended to use to update the aging wooden roof the following Monday was lying in the car park behind the stand.

Only countless acts of heroism by police and supporters prevented the death toll from being much worse. Fans who had escaped the fire switched their attentions to saving fellow supporters, with 28 police officers and 22 supporters who were publicly documented as having saved at least one life later receiving police commendation of bravery awards. Together, flanked by undocumented supporters, they managed to clear all but one person who made it to the front of the stand.

A total of 56 people died in the fire, with almost 250 of the most injured overwhelming local hospitals. A further 200 required St. John Ambulance first aid treatment at the ground and countless others of the least seriously burned treated themselves in their homes or in the houses that the largely British Asian community opened up immediately around Valley Parade.

Aftermath

The inquiry into the disaster, the Popplewell Inquiry, led to the introduction of new legislation to improve safety at the UK's football grounds. One of the main outcomes of the inquiry was the banning of the construction of new wooden grandstands at UK sports grounds.

The Popplewell Inquiry found that the club had been warned about the fire risk that the rubbish accumulating under the stand had posed. However, as there was no real precedent, most Bradfordians accepted that the fire was a terrible piece of misfortune. A discarded cigarette and a dilapidated stand, that had survived because the club simply didn't have the money to replace it, was considered to have conspired to cause the worst disaster in the history of the Football League.

The Bradford Disaster Appeal fund, set up within 48 hours of the disaster, eventually raised over £4 million. The most memorable of hundreds of fundraising events was a recreation of the 1966 World Cup Final, which began with the original starting teams of both England and West Germany, was held at the Leeds United stadium, Elland Road, in July 1985 to raise funds for the Appeal fund. England won the re-match 6-4.

Part of the Appeal funds were raised by a cover version by The Crowd of the Gerry & The Pacemakers hit You'll Never Walk Alone, which reached number 1 in the UK Singles chart. 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 the Bradford City FC's official charity for well over a decade. The unit's innovative use of a sling to relieve the pain of severe burn injuries and reduce the risk of their infection in the days immediately after the fire gave birth to a medical product that is still in use today.

A capacity 6,000 crowd attended a multi-demoninational memorial service, held on the pitch in the sunny shadow of the burnt out stand at Valley Parade in July 1985. A giant christian cross, made up of two large charred wooden embers that had once been part of the stand was constructed in front of the middle of the stand and behind the pitchside speaker's platform. Part of the service was also held in Urdu and Punjabi as a sign of appreciation to the local Asian community in Manningham, Bradford around Valley Parade that had opened up their doors to Bradford City supporters in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. The following day work began on clearing the burnt out shell of the stand and Justice Popplewell released his findings into the disaster.

Valley Parade was eventually re-developed and re-opened on 14th December 1986, when Bradford City beat an England XI 2-1 in a friendly. 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, bar 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 of the ground.

Today, two memorials, at each end of the Main Stand, remembers those who perished and suffered as a result of the fire. Of the 56 who died, two were supporters of the visiting Lincoln City side, Bill Stacey and Jim West. As a memorial, Lincoln City named its home end at their Sincil Bank ground the 'Stacey-West Stand' when it was redeveloped in 1990. There are also memorial sculptures donated by Bradford's German twin city of Hamm, in front of the City Halls of both Bradford and Hamm. After the fire Bradford City also announced they would thereafter play with black trim on their shirt collars and arms as a permanent memorial to those who had died.

By the City Hall memorials, in a tradition similar to Remembrance Day, a short memorial service follows a minute's silence held on the 11th hour of the 11th day of each May. This is perhaps due to 24 of those who died at Valley Parade having been above the age of 60, who would have therefore served during and survived World War II, with the 40th anniversary of VE Day only 3 days before the fire, with the civic ceremonies of reconciliation that surrounded this anniversary the reason why a dignitary party from Hamm was present in the stand on the day of the fire.

Controversy

There was some controversy regarding the disaster in early 2007, when original TV news footage of the fire was illegally posted on the internet website YouTube. Copyright of the TV footage of that day's events is strictly controlled by Yorkshire Television and is only meant to be used for fire awareness training purposes. Following threats of legal action from Yorkshire Television, and considerable protest from Bradford City supporters' groups (with endorsement from the club itself), the footage was removed. The footage had also been posted on a second more sinister site where its presence had gone undetected until it was discovered by a bereaved survivor in April 2007. Similar action brought its immediate removal. To this day the fire remains a most awkward taboo like topic of conversation for many within the city of Bradford.

Yet as of 7 September 2007, the night when Bradford City visited Lincoln City for the first league meeting between the two teams in 22 years, at least three recordings of the disaster had since been re-posted and were available on You Tube.

Further reading

  • Firth, Paul (2005). Four Minutes to Hell: The Story of the Bradford City Fire. Manchester: Parrs Wood. ISBN 1-903158-73-7.

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