A firm Heginbotham had founded suffered a serious fire in 1970 before the Castle Mills building, owned by Heginbotham, had a fire in 1971. 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. 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”.įletcher’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 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. Photograph: PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images 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.īradford City chairman Stafford Heginbotham, left, with Mr Justice Popplewell, at Valley Parade after the disaster. 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. 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. “Could any man really be as unlucky as Heginbotham had been?” he asks. 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. 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. 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. His brother, Andrew, 11, was the youngest victim and his father John, 34, uncle Peter, 32, and grandfather Eddie, 63, all perished. Fletcher believes the fire was not an accident and says he and his family are no longer willing to “live the myth”.įletcher managed to escape after the timber main stand at Valley Parade turned into a death trap during Bradford’s game against Lincoln City on.
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.
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