merse
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Post by merse on May 11, 2010 8:20:10 GMT
 It's May 11th today, a date that always ends a shudder through my mind; indelibly effected by the trauma of the Bradford City fire in which 56 people lost their lives, a further 200 were physically injured and many many incalculable numbers emotionally traumatised through either witnessing for themselves or via the media those awful, awful scenes. I know I count myself amongst that last category, and even though exposure through the media is by far the gentler of the awful first hand witness of such destruction and death, suffering and even torture; even now a quarter of a century later I am still reduced to stunned disbelief of the sight of people some distance away from the seat of the fire; hair and clothes smoldering and even spontaneously combusting into flames, collapsing and writhing on the round as those around them bravely attempted to beat out the flames emanating from their bodies. My own personality certainly changed over the days and weeks following that tragedy, enough to change my own personal path in life and something I now look back on with much regret. I wonder how many others can look back on that time and recognise a similar reaction that hit ALL true football people so badly. I wonder how many others then took another huge blow from the later Hillsbrough and Heysel disasters and decided enough was enough and that they would no longer view a football match and it's so called "life and death importance" as literally as they once did?
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Post by capitalgull on May 11, 2010 8:34:08 GMT
It's one of the few days I never forget. I spent quite a few of my childhood summers with relatives in Bradford and went to a fair few City matches while I was there (along with the old Bradford Northern rugby league team).
I sat in that rickety, wooden stand many a time, never once fearing for my safety, but realising as soon as the disaster had occurred just how easy it would have been for the whole thing to go up in flames. The Health and Safety executive nowadays would have had a field day, with smoking still allowed in and around such a wooden structure.
Sadly, one of those who died was a friend of my Uncle, and we were only speaking about him on the phone the other night.
Never forget!
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Post by khilllegend on May 11, 2010 12:13:48 GMT
is it really 25 years ago,i remember watching the tragedy unfold on television,whatever any supporter or club goes through with relegation or whatever,this was awful,respects to those who lost their lives and sympathy for family and loved ones on this poignant day.Also least we forget those people who witnessed this first hand,probably still getting post traumatic stress,this day will bring it all back for many
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merse
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Post by merse on May 11, 2010 12:22:16 GMT
If you study the names on the memorial illustrated on my website, you become aware of how many family members died together.............truly tragic.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on May 11, 2010 14:18:34 GMT
As I might have said before, I was at a wedding reception at Whittle-le-Woods between Preston and Chorley on the day of the fire, sharing a table with a colleague who was the daughter of a Bradford City season ticket holder. In those pre-mobile days we only picked up on the news because a few guests had passed a television in another room. By now it must have been late afternoon and, once Bev found a phone to ring her mum, she was relieved to discover her father had arrived home a few minutes before. Only later did we appreciate the full magnitude of the tragedy. Then, when more details emerged, I remembered the piles of rubbish under the seats from when I sat in that stand in 1976.
I can recall a strange sort of “at least it wasn’t hooliganism” feeling because – to be honest – there had been predictions of violence-related catastrophe for several years. It must have taken a while for the penny to drop that these deaths were the result of a structural decay which afflicted many grounds at the time. For my part I wasn’t put off watching football even though people had questioned my sanity for even bothering with the game. As this frequently came from aspiring middle-class professionals (a group of which I was supposed to be part) I’d been fighting a kind of rearguard action. Bradford wasn’t going to dissuade me – “terrible but just one of those things” - and, besides, I had Everton’s Cup Winners Cup Final in Rotterdam to look forward to on the following Wednesday.
That game – to Rotterdam and back by train from Lime Street – was a wonderful experience. But then, of course, Heysel occured a mere fortnight afterwards. That was probably my first “by grace of God go I” moment followed by Hillsborough four years later. In the case of Hillsborough, it wasn’t so much a case of having been there with Torquay United earlier that season. It was more to do with the number of times I’d been crushed at football, something which – again – you learned to take almost for granted. And, of those occasions, my most vivid memory is of the mayhem when approaching the turnstiles on the night of the Wolves v Liverpool championship/relegation decider in 1976. As have people said on other occasions: “there could have been deaths that night”.
But, with Merse, posing the question, I still believe I dug in after Hillsborough with my resistance to change. I’m now not sure what to make of my political outlook in those days but – and some people may struggle to appreciate this – many of my generation (and worldview) absolutely despised Margaret Thatcher and her cronies. This meant the tragedies of the 1980s not only saw natural outpourings of grief, outrage, concern and compassion but also anger with how the press reported events and fear over what the government might do to the game. It was as if every event had a political significance and, to use the rhetoric of the day, there was a belief the government was about to clobber football as part of an anti-working class crusade.
Twenty odd years later it’s all history and a matter of conjecture. Nonetheless I remember fearing the introduction of football ID cards from 1985 onwards. Often predicted and threatened but - local schemes aside (and we all know about one of those) – it never happened on a national-scale. There was never much detail in the proposals but the prevailing argument appeared to be in favour of banning away supporters at all matches. If logic was fully-applied, that meant restricting registered fans to just one venue. Needless to say that, as I was living in Lancashire during those years, it would have been pretty pointless signing up to watch my football at Plainmoor. What if, what if…?
So, perhaps, I carried on going to football because it was a privilege I feared might be withdrawn. Clearly there were many who stopped watching – look at the attendance figures for the evidence – and, I imagine, very few who started. As it happened, events followed another path after Hillsborough – a change of culture; the 1990 World Cup; the Premier League; Sky TV, etc. Oddly, I now found myself back in the South West watching Torquay United (which I wouldn't have forecast in 1985) and my enthusiasm for Sky and the Premier League soon waned. And, given my limited patriotic fervour, if I wasn’t interested in the Premier League I wasn’t bothered by how its products did for England. Indeed, just as Jon remembers Germany equalising in 1996, I – for the first time I could recall – forsook such an occasion to do something else. Nor have I since shown any interest in televised football, who wins the Premier League or how England perform. My interest in football – for all manner of reasons – is still serious but now very different and less-strongly expressed in ways I would have never predicted twenty-five years ago. I guess that's due to a whole mixture of football and non-football reasons but - yes - I'm sure the events of 1985 to 1992 played their part.
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joebarlow
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Post by joebarlow on May 11, 2010 14:28:16 GMT
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Post by stefano on May 11, 2010 15:47:37 GMT
An excellent reflection on those times Barton and I know in the mid to late eighties I had fallen out of love with football. The Bradford disaster, Heysel, Hillsborough, the ever present hooliganism (Wolves 1986 springs to mind!), English teams banned from European competition for what eventually became five years, the poor spectator facilities, and generally the way fans were treated. Plus of course my own team had managed to finish bottom of the league in both 1984/85 and 1985/86. Although living in North Devon at that time I did see quite a few games in each season but the football was frankly dire. 1986/87 nearly became my first season of not seeing Torquay play a game since I had started watching in 1963. It wasn't just the fact we were always at the bottom, it was the general state of football at that time. Barnstaple rugby club became my venue of choice that season. They were playing a good standard of rugby with a few County players, crowds of about 500, and a brilliant atmosphere with no underlying threat of violence. The only thing that changed my mind was the threat of Torquay going out of the league, so I went to the Rochdale game a week before the end (having had to phone to find out how to get into the ground as I had not bothered to join the Membership Scheme introduced after violence earlier that season) and the Crewe game the following week.
Dire times for football, and the Bradford fire was one of the worst episodes of many awful incidents during that time.
When we talk about the decline in football crowds from those days of regular 9000 to 10000 crowds at Plainmoor, I wonder how many children were forbidden to attend football in the mid to late eighties by concerned parents because of the state of the game at that time, and because of that how many were totally lost to the game having not been exposed to it during their formative years.
A sad period, and the Bradford fire probably the saddest of them all.
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Dave
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Post by Dave on May 11, 2010 18:27:55 GMT
Like others on here I sat and watched this tragic event unfolding on the TV and while you were watching football fans doing all they could to try and save their lives and the lives of others, you had some senseless morons dancing in front of the TV cameras. I’m sure they never stopped for a second to think that people might be losing their lives in the burning stand and my memories are both of the tragic suffering going on before my eyes and fools somehow appearing to be celebrating the stand was burning down.
Why does it always take such an event to happen before measures are put in place to try and stop a repeat of such a tragedy? Maybe its just some disaster needs to happen so lessons are learnt, but it’s hard to believe that stands like the Bradford one clearly never had any proper risk assessments done on it.
I have never been to the Bradford ground so I don’t know what it was like to sit in or exit from, but on the J.Vine show today when this was discussed, it was clear listening to what some had to say who were sat in the stand that day, that no one had ever given a thought to what might happen if the stand did ever catch fire.
The article started off by playing the clip from the radio and is the same one heard in the link Joe put up, it is very moving and even if you had never seen the TV images, you would still feel the whole pain of what happened that day.
I don’t know when the stand was built and how many years it had stood there or how many fans over the years had used it, but it’s unbelievable to believe it had to only last one more hour, as it was being pulled down after the game (or at least in the summer before the next season started) why did it not last that last hour that would have seen all the fans go home that day.
From what I heard today it seems the caged end was normally used by away fans, only on this day it was filled with home fans and maybe Andy can confirm if I have got this right, but one man talked about how you had to lower yourself down over a wall that was a six foot drop and then climb seven or eight feet to get onto the pitch.
Most died in the back of the stand as they tried to get out of the doors, only they were all locked and while the construction of the stand caused the fire to spread so quickly, it seems clear it was a very difficult stand to escape from when it did catch on fire.
Many found they got burnt on the tops of their heads and the backs of their hands; this was due to the intense heat and one guest on the show was a plastic surgeon who treated many of the burn victims.
He explained that there was then a new way of treating burns and it had to be done in a three day time window between the second and the fifth day after the burns happened. The burns were literally sliced off and then skin grafts were done and it was not only a quicker way to deal with such burns, it was also the best way.
He went on and talked about how there were over 80 fans that were having these operations and how they all supported each other while they were in the hospital and summed it up by say it was because they were football supporters.
I expect it was because they felt as one as they were all fans of the same club, much like the Londoners stuck together so well and showed such a united front when the capital suffered those terrible bomb attacks a few years ago. Fans may well get divided sometimes over their points of views, but will always be united when such a tragedy happens.
I don’t think I was anymore effected by this tragedy just because it was football related than all the others I have learned about in my lifetime, all such events where people lose their lives has the same effect on me and as someone who really is unable to see others suffer as I somehow feel their pain so much, such events hit me hard and reduce me to tears.
Hillsborough was slightly different as I had stood in that Leppings Lane end stand with a very young Anthony supporting Torquay United not that many weeks before so many Liverpool fans lost their lives. It was my first experience of being in a ground with such a fence in front of the stand and while I understood why they were erected, it played a big part in so many losing their lives and I think we all felt that all such fences had to come down in all grounds and never ever be used again.
I have been guilty of complaining about our stewards enforcing such things as yellow clearway grids on the popside, yes I asked for a bit of common sense to be shown when some fans stopped for a few minutes to talk with another fan etc and that happened, but at the end of the day I always know such stewards have a duty to try and ensure my safety in the ground and that is why we do need them there.
There were words said that day that were repeated on the J.Vine show, “they only went to watch a game of football” something we have done ourselves hundreds of times and have all come home back to our loved ones, sadly that day that was not the case for 56 people who loved football and their club as much as we all do.
None of us know what tomorrow will bring, there will be people sitting at home tonight with their loved ones who will go out tomorrow and be in the wrong place at the wrong time and won’t be coming home tomorrow night.
It’s the reason I know you have to fight those very low times in your life when everything seems so dark because we all need to get everything we can out of each and every day. We need to tell those we do love everyday just how much we do love them and how much they mean to us.
Life is so much shorter than we think and I now feel time is speeding up and the time I have left to live is not on my side and that I have lived a large part of my life. Maybe it’s the reason I try so hard to make this as happy a forum as possible, why I hope we can all be able to disagree when it comes to our viewpoints on football etc, but still always remain good friends and all on the same side.
To day is a day to look back and say a few prayers for all those fellow football fans who lost their life just going to watch a sport they loved and for everyone else who have had their lives cut short by such tragic events.
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Jon
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Post by Jon on May 12, 2010 23:33:19 GMT
Wasn't our grandstand fire the day after the Bradford one?
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Post by stefano on May 13, 2010 6:23:51 GMT
Wasn't our grandstand fire the day after the Bradford one? I believe it was, although the Bradford fire was an accident. Fortunately our cups weren't damaged ... it didn't spread as far as the kitchen  Strange rumours went round about the Plainmoor fire although I have got no idea what the truth is. In fact as nobody was hurt I didn't give it much thought at the time after the tragedy at Bradford. Probably too long after the event for the truth to emerge now ... unless somebody knows |
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Post by loyalgull on May 23, 2010 21:44:14 GMT
Wasn't our grandstand fire the day after the Bradford one? hmm the dave webb era  |
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