Fifty-Six by Martin Fletcher

Author:Martin Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

9

Reclaimed/Central Failure

The Bradford Fire. Everyone knows it involved a carelessly discarded cigarette end or match that set light to rubbish beneath the stand. It was ‘a tragic accident’. I grew up believing this – and I was there. I was Martin Fletcher, ‘Kid Courage, the Bradford Fire Survivor’, whose family perished in the flames.

I’d known Ben six years now – although we’d never talked about the fire. Or, rather, he knew what had happened, but through student days and drunken nights in Reykjavik or Berlin, the actual events of 11 May 1985 had been off limits.

Then, on a cold February afternoon in early 2000, Ben came up to Yorkshire with me to see Dean Windass and Dean Saunders get the better of Thierry Henry’s Arsenal, Bradford somehow winning 2–1. After the match we were having a pint at the back of the Kop, watching a groundsman tending the pitch. The floodlights were still on, but the deserted neon-lit stadium felt ghostly. I talked Ben through, moment by moment, the events of 11 May 1985.

He was pretty stunned, but pleased it seemed relatively easy for me to talk about it at last. ‘Tell me what caused it again?’ he asked.

‘A cigarette, or a match setting light to rubbish beneath the stand.’

‘And you’re happy with that?’

‘Happy? Mate, I’ll never be happy about anything that happened that day, will I?’

Ben apologised, alarmed he’d disrupted our relative calm. ‘No, sorry. I meant, are you happy with that as an explanation?’

‘Of course. Why not? That’s what the Popplewell Inquiry thought.’

‘Oh, I was just wondering . . .’ He shot me a look that unnerved me. It was a look I’d seen before in a Warwick seminar: ‘C’mon, you’re smarter than that.’

I’d lived through Bradford, I’d been at Hillsborough; and I’d started writing about May 1985 as a therapeutic release. Now, armed with the degrees I had, and the vague notion I might try to write a book – I didn’t have a great deal else on, after all – I decided to start researching the fire properly. Maybe I’d come up with those answers Ben was so surprised I didn’t have.

As far back as our first day at Warwick I remembered Professor Iain McLean telling us that, as we didn’t live in a world preordained by God, there could be no such thing as an ‘act of God’. It had struck an instant chord. Where an event such as Bradford, say, could be termed ‘an act of God’, my Warwick training suggested a moral imperative to look beyond any superficial analysis of what brought the accident to pass, and to focus on the goverment policy-making decisions from which everything else flowed. The only place to start was by analysing the history of UK sports-ground safety legislation. I knew my Simon Inglis (I never really stopped digesting The Football Grounds of England and Wales, and subsequent editions), but I also headed to the British newspaper library at Colindale, north London, to see what had contemporaneously been said in response to Britain’s various football disasters.

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