![]() The pictures can be shown without upsetting viewers. We have all seen pictures of the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield. In a sense that was partly a function of the medium in which I now make a living. ![]() There was grumbling in the city when the inquiry into the cause of the blaze was lumped in with a riot which happened on the same day by Leeds United fans in Birmingham.īut, other than that, there was little in the way of immediate memorialising or ostentatious grieving. Unlike Hillsborough, it did not become a cause celebre for campaigners. He was walking as if oblivious to his injuries, perhaps in shock, perhaps simply symbolic of an older, stoical generation who did not like to make a fuss, however justified.Īnd, in a sense, that man became emblematic of the country's reaction to the Bradford fire. The past, as they say, is another country.Īs I headed into town, I noticed an elderly man in front of me with terrible burns to the back of his neck and ears. Sporting arenas have become highly medicalised venues, with paramedics and hi-tech, life-saving equipment on hand. Today, even if this disaster had happened (which it wouldn't), such scenes could not be witnessed. I moved towards the goal posts at the Bradford End, for no better reason than that was the way towards the town centre, and my bus home.īetween the posts, and I struggle to recall this with composure to this day, lay the body of a middle-aged woman.Īgain, I cannot remember her face, but I do remember the way her tights and clothing had warped like burned plastic. TV pictures of the Valley Parade disaster communicate many things - terror, pathos, loss - but they never get across the sheer volume of that hideous inferno.įor a couple of minutes I, in common with thousands of others, shuffled around the pitch, shouting out for loved ones or gazing at the stand. ![]() Running towards the centre circle I became aware of two things an old man gazing out from the centre of the grandstand, standing stock-still, looking out towards me, just before blazing timbers fell and entombed him. I became wedged against the wall, until a stranger - whose face I never saw - hauled me over. The crowd surged away from the seat of the fire, which was moving towards us at speed, its energy accelerated by the stadium roof, which turned the grandstand into an oven. This was before the fences - which would truncate so many lives at Hillsborough a few years later - had been erected to foil hooligans. I was standing in what was known as 'the Paddock' - a standing area beneath the grandstand roof, which ran around the edge of the seating blocks.Īt the edge of the pitch there was, thank God, simply a 4ft-high stonewashed brick wall. But I remember with bitter clarity the exact moment when the jokes and banter turned sour, when the bonhomie turned to panic, when grown men started climbing over others to escape the smoke. Some people sang, never imagining what was about to unfold, "burn it down, burn it down". I was at the opposite end of the grandstand from where the smoke initially appeared.Īt first spectators assumed it was a smoke bomb.
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