MARTIN FLETCHER WAS just 12 when tragedy struck.
At the time, he was attending a football match, along with his father, younger brother, uncle and grandfather. It was supposed to be a celebratory occasion — the final game of the season, involving their local team, Bradford City, who had already secured promotion to England’s second flight.
Yet during the game, a fire started under the stands, which would ultimately cause the death of 56 people during the 11 May, 1985 encounter.
Of all the Fletcher family members who attended the game that day, Martin was the only survivor. Fletcher’s father had instructed both himself and his brother to go on ahead of him as the queue filtered out of the stadium once the fire began. His brother refused, while Martin reluctantly obliged.
Now in his 40s, Fletcher recounts the traumatic day in 56: The Story of the Bradford Fire.
I jumped on to our now empty row of wooden bench seats, and ran to the end of the plank, past everyone who was filing out. I turned back to look hesitatingly at my family at the end of the slowly emptying queue. They were starting to move a bit more quickly, but rather than tell me to wait, as I’d secretly hoped he might, Dad shouted in encouragement: ‘Go on, Martin. We’re following.’ So, nodding, I simply jumped from our row on to the row behind, then sneaked through the congestion round the stairwell entry into the rear corridor of the stand, losing sight of them.”
So while Fletcher escaped, the rest of his family, who were at the game, died as a result of the fire.
Over 30 years on and Fletcher still recalls the tragedy vividly. And instead of trying to block out this trauma, he has confronted it. For a period of 15 years, with various breaks in between, Fletcher has painstakingly researched, written and re-written the aforementioned book, which was finally released earlier this year to considerable acclaim.
As well as recounting the trauma, Fletcher’s meticulously researched book also underlines some uncomfortable truths.
Many of 56’s revelations were highlighted in The Guardian earlier this year, with former Bradford chairman Stafford Heginbotham at the centre of these unsettling findings.
Heginbotham was a salesman by trade who Fletcher describes as having “a larger-than-life persona” with a “gift of the gab”.
Before the Valley Parade disaster, Heginbotham was linked with at least eight other fires and would receive roughly £2.74million (the equivalent of £27million today) from various compensatory payouts, while his struggling toy manufacturing business would go into receivership three months after the Bradford Fire.
In the book, Fletcher notes how, after one fire, the young chairman casually told reporters: “I have just been lucky.” The author adds: “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.”
And so the obvious thought, given the deeply suspicious circumstances surrounding the fire, is why more questions weren’t asked? Why did only one or two journalists investigate it rather than hundreds? Why was a criminal investigation never launched?
“It’s the old adage of the truth and can you handle it,” Fletcher tells The42. “Sometimes, if you tell people what they want to believe, they’re happy to believe it. Especially if you don’t give them reason not to actually question it. Sometimes people can cling to what they want to believe in, as misguided or as superficial of what they’ve been told is. In the case of what happened at Bradford, it’s a community where people generally do live all their lives, and it’s affected the heart of that community as regards its football club and local institutions.
I find it staggering that the existence of Stafford Heginbotham’s previous fires were not disclosed to Sir Oliver Popplewell, as he said on the day my book was published, by either West Yorkshire Fire authorities or West Yorkshire police. They have to answer those questions. As regards the people of Bradford, the easiest lie to believe is the lie you want to believe.”
Needless to say therefore, the book makes for powerful, painful reading. And unsurprisingly, writing it took its toll on Fletcher.
“Every time it dragged me back, it felt as if 50 or 60 pounds of weight would go on,” he says. “I had a number of seizures as well. Most of those happened the first time I wrote it, which is why I kind of backed off it. I ended up in a hospital bed with a suspected brain tumour on the morning of my 30th birthday.
It was tough when I re-wrote it 2012 and 2013, but it had to be done and what I wrote about is always going to be in my mind. But there’s a point where you can maybe lock it away, and obviously, in writing, it is all unlocked and all still there. It always will be there, but it’ll be nice to get back to a point in my life where what happened 30 years ago is not uppermost in my mind.”
And while those disturbing memories will never fully go away, Fletcher has at least derived some degree of solace from writing the book.
“Ultimately, I felt I was living a lie for much of the last 30 years,” he says. “To be liberated from that lie is personally a huge achievement really. The reaction from football journalists and across the country has been great.
It won’t nag me anymore because the facts are out there and the truth is out there. The truth is that there was evidence of only one person smoking after three o’clock that day — 40 minutes before the fire began at 3.40.
“I’m never going to have my father back. I’m never going to have my brother back. With what I’ve suffered, you just have to learn to live with it. The reality is that, no matter what you do, it’s never going to be put back as it was. One day I went to a football match with my family and the next day, I woke up and didn’t have a father, a brother, or a grandfather or uncle, and I never will again. My Dad would be 65 today, so he’d still be a relatively young guy.”
In an incredibly unfortunate coincidence, Fletcher was also in attendance on that fateful day in Hillsborough in 1989, when a human crush caused the death of 96 people and left 766 others injured. Furthermore, he was also at Twickenham in 2006, when dangerous crushing incidents occurred prior to an England-Ireland Six Nations game.
“I certainly feel better since the book has been published. I’ve never felt able to escape, because quite often, when the past is left unresolved, you’re not able to escape it, as it has a habit of dragging you back.
I look back today and see it dragged me back in 1989, when I was at Hillsborough. It dragged me back in 2000, when I embarked upon writing and researching this book to try to give my mother peace of mind.
“Then it dragged me back in 2006 when I found myself at a crush in Twickenham Stadium, which coincided with someone telling me who (the journalist that originally wrote about Heginbotham and the Bradford Fire) Paul Foot’s source was, and me speaking to Paul Foot’s source.
“Then, in 2011, when Sir Oliver Popplewell attacked the Hillsborough campaign, it dragged me back again. Even when you try to move on, the unresolved nature of it has a way of dragging you back every few years. Ultimately, it had to be done, because of the nature of what’s in the book — one way or another it has dragged me back into this vortex.”
Fletcher’s tireless work and painful recollections have certainly not been in vain, however, as the book has had a clear impact. Last month, it was announed that West Yorkshire police had voluntarily referred itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) after a senior officer met with Fletcher.
In terms of getting closure, do I feel that this has been stripped of its power? Yes, addressing this as I have, I’ve got the answers that I want and I’ve got what I want out there. With the next steps, West Yorkshire Police are voluntarily referring themselves to the IPCC and we’ll see what comes of it, but I now no longer feel that I’m living a lie constructed by other people.”
And as traumatic as the tragedy was, it also brought out the best in human nature. In the book, Fletcher describes how while trying to escape the fire, he was saved by some quick-thinking strangers, writing: “It seemed as if I was having an out-of-body experience. Flying through the air I could see the Kop and the Midland Road terraces, my burning head and blurred watery vision the only reminders I was still conscious.
“I closed my eyes as I felt myself fall, and was dragged like a rag doll over, before I came to rest on the soft, wet grass on my bare, naked stomach, my jacket and top having run up. As I’d made it through the inferno molten tar from the burning roof had dripped on to my jacket, scarf and cap.
By the time I’d reached the front paddock I was on the brink of becoming a human torch — then someone had picked me up and literally hurled me over the wall (hence the flying), as another fan ripped his jacket off and smothered me with it, before others dragged me by my jacket away from the burning stand, knocking my burning cap off, then rolling my smouldering body twice over.
“These people had all gone to a football match, like we had, to watch their team lift a trophy. But many reacted in that sudden hell, to save lives. They were the heroes of the Bradford Fire, unsung.”
Fletcher says that he will be eternally grateful to the courageous individuals in question.
“I was one of many (whose lives were saved),” he says. “There were over 50 people commended for bravery that day. They all saved at least one life. And the attitude of many of them was that they’d done nothing different to those around them.
So the actions of both the police and the public that day prevented a three-figure death toll. At the very least, it saved me from being seriously scarred for the rest of my life.
“If you got to the front of the stand, you were pretty much guaranteed to get out of the stand. Only one person died at the front of the stand, because essentially, there were remarkable efforts to make sure people — if they could get to the front of the stand — were saved. A number of people got themselves badly injured in ensuring that. A number of people were hospitalised, having gotten out of the stand themselves, going back into that stand to save lives. They really ended up badly injured as a consequence, in certain cases, for several weeks.”
After suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder for a period after the tragedy, these days, Fletcher is in a better place emotionally. Still an avid sports fan to this day, he has attended several major events from Rugby World Cups to 100m finals and of course, his beloved Bradford City’s 2013 League Cup final appearance against Swansea. Having taken a gap year, Fletcher is now preparing to go back to normality and full-time employment. He has earned the necessary qualifications and consequently, is optimistic of securing a job with a big accountancy firm.
And while British football stadiums are far safer and have come a long way since the dark days of the 1980s, as our interview comes to a close, Fletcher issues a stark warning in relation to modern grounds.
A few years ago, I was twice caught in a crush at Twickenham stadium for England rugby internationals. And had the terrorists at the Stade de France (last month) turned up 10 or 15 minutes before kick-off rather than 10 or 15 minutes after kick-off, we would have had a stadium disaster.
“So there are issues as regards evacuation. There’s a view that eight minutes is too considerable a time to evacuate a structure under any emergency circumstances. You don’t actually perceive where they’re going to come from. We saw that at Bradford. We saw that at Hillsborough.
“Ultimately, it’s making sure that the fabric of the stadiums is as good as can be. With certain stadiums they are (well constructed), and with other stadiums, they still have idiosyncratic faults. I know that the RFU, when I approached The Guardian about what was going on, basically said that the end of one (Six Nations) game and the beginning of another would never be so close together again. And they have ensured that has been the case.
But the fact is (another disaster) could happen — it’s the complacency as well. I spoke to a chief steward outside of Twickenham, and he said ‘I can see why you said it was a bit like Hillsborough, but it wasn’t like Hillsborough, because it was all on CCTV.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, Hillsborough was on CCTV’.
“It’s supposed to be less than eight minutes (to evacuate), but if I go to Arsenal, Chelsea or a number of big grounds, it can take more than 10 minutes to get out under normal circumstances. You don’t wish to scaremonger, but equally, complacency can lead to disasters.”
Yet regardless of all these potential issues and despite the considerable pain with which it has been associated, Fletcher remains steadfast in his love of the beautiful game. For the author, life, death and football will perpetually be interlinked.
“When we had the funeral, the tributes were football-related: Bradford City shirts, Bradford-coloured footballs and a programme from the day — they were left at the turnstiles the day after the funeral. The Christmas after the disaster, we went to Valley Parade. So football’s always been there, and it always will be.”
56: The Story of the Bradford Fire is published by Bloomsbury. More info here.
