Bradford City stadium fire: Archives reveal the desperate rush to conjure an explanation

The unexpected postscript to the investigative work undertaken by Martin Fletcher, who survived but lost so much and so many on the day fire engulfed Bradford City’s stadium in May 1985, is the criticism he has had to take for it.

The social media comp-onent is to be expected. That’s the kind of repository Twitter is. But it’s been coming from some of the journalists who you would imagine had learned something about complacency and lack of curiosity, when the lid was blown off the Hillsborough story two years ago and the truth came tumbling out. When Fletcher wrote a book saying that the Bradford Disaster warranted more than a five-day inquiry and that another eight fires linked to the club’s late chairman Stafford Heginbotham deserved examination, it felt like a Hillsborough moment. Then Fletcher went on BBC’s Look North to discuss his evidence and found himself subjected to the inquisition that made him look like the enemy within. The local Telegraph & Argus newspaper found an abundance of fans to criticise his work.

The papers on Bradford at the National Archive prove how wrong these people are. Not so much as a cursory mention, in there, of the kind of forensic examination which might have ruled arson in or out. Just the sense of the Department of the Environment’s Fire Research Station’s frantic search for evidence to inform a report that its director, Dr David Woolley, might put before Sir Oliver Popplewell. You have “four weeks’ notice to submit evidence,” Popplewell’s clerk told the FRS. Throwing struck matches up in the air and seeing whether they extinguished before they landed is a metaphor for a unit doing the best it could to come up with something.

There was a desire to put a tick to the theory that debris under the stand caused the fire. Where did that theory emanate from? The papers offer no clear answer. A number of low-quality photographs depicting smoke coming from beneath the stand proved significant, plus the testimony of a supporter, Leslie Brownlie, visiting from Australia, who felt heat beneath his seat, suspected flames and tried to put them out with his coffee.

I have seen an updated FRS report, written three months after the Inquiry, in which the organisation admitted the shortcomings of its June study for Popplewell. Entitled “Fire Precautions in Football Stadium – a post Bradford analysis,” the updated report states: “During the early stages of this study of remedial measures, it became clear that features of the Bradford fire required an understanding greater than that presented to the formal inquiry.”

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Even this updated report, three months on, had only been published, the FRS admitted, with “a limited study of still photographs taken from various positions and without such other potentially significant information as the evidence of survivors, precise dimensions of the roof etc.”

The Bradford inquiry was rushed. A level of rigour and scrutiny which now belongs to the accepted formula of the Hillsborough inquiries was absent. Fletcher has done more than anyone to spell this out.