Bradford City Stadium Fire The Bradford City stadium fire was the worst fire disaster in the history of football. It occurred during a league match, on Saturday, 11 May 1985, killing 56 and injuring at least 265. In early 2007, original TV news footage of the fire was illegally posted on the internet website YouTube. Following threats of legal action from Yorkshire Television, and considerable protest from Bradford City supporters' groups (with endorsement from the club), the footage was removed. The Bradford City stadium fire was the worst fire disaster in the history of football.It occurred during a league match, on Saturday, 11 May 1985, killing 56 and injuring at least 265. BBC Sport looks back at the Bradford City fire disaster that claimed the lives of 56 spectators when a stand caught fire at Valley Parade on 11 May 1985. Shrewsbury fight back to shock.

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Bradford City Stadium Fire 1985

'Thank you. Thank you for telling this,' said the woman, who was perhaps 60 or so, to one of the young people whose stage play, based on football's Bradford disaster, had just concluded on the small theatre space behind her. 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. She was Hazel Greenwood – the mother whose children, 13-year-old Felix and 11-year-old Rupert, had been ushered away from the flames of the stadium fire all those years ago by a traffic warden, seeking to shelter them under his tunic. He and the children all perished, along with the boys' father. The children were still nestled under the warden's thick overcoat when they discovered them.

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. Andrew crane and dirk matten 2010 3rd edition business ethics pdf. The play reflects that it had been 'the Yorkshire way' not to make a fuss, to bear a loss and move on. And so it has been that while Liverpool supporters' refusal to accept the received narrative of Hillsborough – the stadium disaster 40 miles north across Yorkshire in which 96 died – has made it a source of anger and liberation at the heart of the national consciousness, Bradford became the forgotten tragedy.

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 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. The men with no hair feeling the searing pain first; supporters entering hospital with their hands melted to their heads by the asphalt which has leaked from the stadium roof; a fan's trilby hat igniting. And so, too, is the black tragicomedy which can exist at the boundaries. The unheroic obstinacy of the woman who refused to leave without her handbag 'because my teeth are in it.' Some laughs puncture the rapt silence of the 75 minutes at Bradford's Alhambra theatre studio. So do the sounds of some of those 150 people present, packing the little theatre's benches to capacity, needing to leave the dark space and take a moment to recover themselves. A half dozen walked out. They all ventured back.

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So much testimony was gathered by the writers, Matt Stevens-Woodhead and Gemma Wilson, that some extraordinary stories did not even make the final script. Such as the narrative of Martin Preston – a young police constable that May afternoon in 1983; retired now – who saw a man staggering across the pitch towards him, on fire, grabbed at him and rolled him on the turf, over and over and over, until the flames went out. 'Rolled him like a rolling pin,' as Preston recalls it. And the memory of Mick Spencer, who encountered a desperately burned man called Jim West, one of the contingent supporting Bradford's opponents, Lincoln City, at the makeshift check-in desk they created in the aftermath at Bradford Royal Infirmary. 'He told me: 'Will you tell my wife that I don't want toast in the morning!?' Spencer recalls. Mr West did not live to see her again.

The extraordinary part of all this is that this testimony has barely been heard. 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. 'But I'd never heard of the Bradford disaster until I auditioned for this,' she says. 'That made me angry: that people don't know about this.'

That certainly changed when Martin Fletcher told his story. His afternoon intersected with that of Preston, who was in an ambulance on his way to St Luke's hospital to be treated for burns when a 12-year-old was bundled aboard, concerned only at the moment to know 'how did Leeds United get on' that day. The boy – Fletcher – discovered soon enough how boundlessly and profoundly life-affecting the afternoon would prove to be. He lost his father John, 34, his 11-year-old brother Andrew, uncle Peter, 32, and grandfather Eddie, 63, in the fire. Only now, in 56: The Story of the Bradford Fire (Bloomsbury, £16.99) has he completed a 15-year quest to challenge history's interpretation of why the fire broke out.

Even the received wisdom is enough to make you rage against football's breathtaking complacency: the same complacency which would turn the terrace at Hillsborough into a killing ground, four years later. The Valley Parade fire took hold, it has always been said, because a match must have been dropped into the reservoir of rubbish in the dark cavity beneath the main stand's seats. Down there in the blackness lay tissues of debris which were testament to the ramshackle stadium's neglect. A charred copy of the local paper from Monday, 4 November 1968, was among the litter. That was the open and shut case, the inquiry into the disaster chaired by Sir Oliver Popplewell, a High Court judge, concluded. And Bradford seemed happy with it: five days of testimony, a 27-page report and everyone moved on. 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. 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.

It was Fletcher's mother, Susan, who had always said that she did not believe the fire was an accident and who talked of the other blazes at businesses owned or linked to Stafford Heginbotham, the Bradford City chairman of the day. 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.' Fletcher's dogged attempts to demonstrate whether that was just urban rumour included poring over 20 years of local newspaper reports and the business history of Heginbotham. He established that there had been eight other fires at businesses owned by or associated with the entrepreneur, who > died in 1995, aged 61. 'It seemed that this should at least have been examined,' Fletcher says. 'When I read the Popplewell transcripts I could see they were processing 10-15 witnesses a day. That was nothing compared with the time it took to interview witnesses in the Hillsborough Inquiry.'

The Independent Magazine's own investigations, at the National Archive at Kew, bear out the nagging suspicions Fletcher always had. The largest volume of evidence stored there relates to the Department of the Environment's Fire Research Council – the body responsible for providing scientific evidence for Popplewell. The director of that organisation, Dr David Woolley, was

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