Saturday May 11th 1985 was meant to be a day of celebration in Bradford, especially for fans of Bradford City. On the previous Monday the city’s football team had won at Bolton Wanderers, becoming champions of League Division Three. It was the first trophy they had won since 1929.
On that Saturday afternoon all the plans were in place for a family day out. There would be a packed ground, including 4,000 fans in the only stand with seats. There were majorettes, a band, the presentation and a lap of honour to entertain the crowd before kick-off. The game itself turned into an anti-climax, but it was destined never to finish. Just before half-time a fire broke out in the stand and winning a trophy became an irrelevance. Lives saved became the only reason to celebrate.
I was in that stand, on the back row, with my father-in-law and an old friend from school and university days. It was my father-in-law, quite a small man and two days short of his 65th birthday, who first noticed the heat coming through the floorboards beneath us. ‘I think we’d better move.’ Probably the wisest statement he ever made.
As the three of us headed for the walkway at the back of the stand, the grey smoke turned jet black. You truly couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The narrow walkway was not meant for so many people at one time and we were crushed together in the blackness. I knew my friend was just in front and my father-in-law at my shoulder.
A lifetime passed while we made our painfully slow progress along the stand. To my amazement I found myself at the bottom, vaulting over the wall on to the track at the side of the pitch. I turned to see my father-in-law behind me doing just the same – except he wasn’t there and the stand I had just left was ablaze from top to bottom.
By now there were thousands of people on the pitch, forced away from the side nearest the burning stand by the sheer intensity of the radiant heat. I started what I thought was a systematic search up and down through the hundreds of others similarly looking for family and friends. After a while we were asked by the police to leave the ground by an exit at one end. Only then did it first dawn on me that perhaps not everyone had got out of the blaze.
I went down to a corner of the street from where I could see exits from two sides of the ground. From that vantage point I was sure I’d find my father-in-law. Then the ambulances started to arrive. As I checked each one being loaded with more patients, I didn’t know whether I was hoping to find him or not. All I discovered was that he wasn’t on his way to hospital.
We’d come together in my car, which was parked about half a mile away. Abandoning my ambulance search, I set off toward the car, at first running, but soon having to walk. It turned out I had taken in rather a lot of smoke and running was out of the question. Turning a corner, I came within sight of where the car was parked. There was no sign of him standing by the car and I had the keys.
I was about to turn back and search more ambulances when I got to the last road junction before the parking space. A car pulled very slowly across the sharp junction and there, in the front passenger seat, was my father-in-law. I must have seemed like some sort of lunatic jumping into the middle of the road and frantically waving my arms at the unidentified driver. He turned out to be the brother of a former neighbour of my in-laws, but this was his first meeting with me!
I was in my mid-thirties and totally unaccustomed to hugging near-pensioners in the middle of the road. I made an exception in this one case.
Before the evening was out, we had both been to hospital, with help from one of my neighbours, where we had been reunited with respective wives and, in my case, a two-year-old, who was later to join his dad as a season-ticket holder. Later still the third member of our group arrived at our house. At least for the three of us and our families there was a relatively happy ending and some cause for celebration in advance of that 65th birthday.
Others, as we were quickly to find out, had not been so fortunate.
Paul Firth
Memory added on August 22, 2012
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