The blaze that killed 56 football fans at Bradford City's Valley Parade ground in 1985 was just one of at least nine fires at businesses owned by or associated with the club's then chairman, according to extraordinary evidence published for the first time.
The revelations are contained in a book written by Martin Fletcher, a Bradford fan who lost three generations of his family in the stadium fire. Fletcher believes the fire was not an accident and says he and his family are no longer willing to "live the myth".
Fletcher managed to escape after the timber main stand at Valley Parade turned into a death trap during Bradford’s game against Lincoln City on 11 May 1985. His brother, Andrew, 11, was the youngest victim and his father John, 34, uncle Peter, 32, and grandfather Eddie, 63, all perished. Martin Fletcher, who was 12 at the time, has spent the past 15 years investigating what happened and his book, Fifty-Six – The Story of the Bradford Fire, is published on Thursday 16 April.
The book, serialised by the Guardian today and tomorrow, reveals there had been at least eight other fires at business premises either owned by, or connected to, Stafford Heginbotham, Bradford’s then-chairman, in the previous 18 years, resulting in huge insurance claims. Fletcher does not make any direct allegations but he does believe Heginbotham’s history with fires, resulting in payouts of around £27m in today’s terms, warranted further investigation. “Could any man really be as unlucky as Heginbotham had been?” he asks.
The disaster at Valley Parade came at a time, according to Fletcher's evidence, when the businessman was in desperate financial trouble, unable to pay his workforce beyond that month. Heginbotham had learned two days before the fire it would cost £2m to bring the ground up to safety standards required by Bradford's promotion from the old Third Division that season. Yet this has never been reported and did not feature in the Popplewell Inquiry, chaired by the then high court judge Oliver Popplewell, which held its investigation only three weeks after the fire.
The inquiry heard only five days of testimony and concluded the fire was probably started by a match, a cigarette or pipe tobacco slipping through gaps in the floorboards on to litter that had built up over the previous 20 years. Fletcher does not accept that version and quotes a report by the Fire Research Station, a government-funded body, that “features of the Bradford fire required a detail of understanding greater than that presented to the formal inquiry”.
Fletcher’s evidence was collected through months of painstaking research into Heginbotham’s business history and by trawling 20 years of local newspaper reports into fires in the Bradford area.
The pattern began with a fire at a three-storey Bradford factory in May 1967 and continued on Good Friday 1968 with another fire at the premises of Genefoam, of which Heginbotham was the managing director. A firm Heginbotham had founded suffered a serious fire in 1970 before the Castle Mills building, owned by Heginbotham, had a fire in 1971. Further blazes followed at the Douglas Mills building, also owned by Heginbotham, in August and November 1977. In December that year there was a fire at the premises of Coronet Marketing, a subsidiary of Heginbotham’s Tebro Toys. A further fire at the Douglas Mills building occurred in June 1981.
Heginbotham died in 1995, aged 61, and was never prosecuted for the Valley Parade fire, despite the coroner later saying he had given serious consideration to bringing a charge of manslaughter. Bradford City had received three separate warnings about the potential fire risk, two from the Health and Safety Executive and another from the council, but did nothing. Fletcher's book reveals how Heginbotham initially denied seeing the council's letter before repeatedly changing his story when it became clear this was not true. The author has told the Guardian it was a "litany of lies".
Of Heginbotham's history with fires, Fletcher writes: "To quote a Los Angeles Police Department fire investigator in Blaze, the Forensics of Fire by Nicholas Faith: 'It's rare to have a coincidence. If we start having multiple coincidences then it's not a coincidence.' It is clear to me that at Bradford, with Stafford Heginbotham in charge, there was a mountain of coincidence."
Once dubbed “the bravest boy in Britain”, Fletcher is the only survivor to publicly challenge the official inquiry, describing it as wholly inadequate and saying it took place far too close to the event. His family expected a fuller investigation to follow and he says his determination to find out “the truth” stems initially from a conversation with his mother, Susan, when he was 21.
“I never believed it was an accident and I never will,” she told him. “I don’t think Stafford intended for people to die. But people did. All because he went back to the one thing he knew best that would get him out of trouble.”
When Susan Fletcher brought a civil case against the club and West Yorkshire county council, meaning 110 bereaved or injured people would have their compensation claims met, she received a series of anonymous late-night telephone calls, including death threats against Martin, then 14, and the warning "nobody beats Bradford City". The grieving mother and son temporarily had to move out of their house to live in a hotel. Martin was taken out of school until it was considered safe to return.
Fletcher’s book is released on 16 April, nine days before a minute’s silence is held at every Premier League and Football League match to mark the forthcoming 30th anniversary.
“I’m not living a lie any more,” Fletcher said. “I’m not living someone else’s half-truth. I’m not living the myth. Bradford City on the day of the fire were sponsored by the council and across the shirt the slogan was ‘Bradford myth-breakers’. Well, there are a lot of myths that need to be broken.”
