UK - Explosive revelations about 1985 Bradford fire, 8 fires linked to manager.

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”.

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“I never believed it was an accident and I never will. 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.”

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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.
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