On Saturday 11 May 1985, the last day of the football season, Bradford City’s fans were celebrating. They had already won the Third Division: the team was presented with the trophy before the final game, at home against Lincoln City, kicked off. An unusually large crowd turned up at Valley Parade for what was more a party than a match.
What happened next has perhaps faded more than it should have from public memory, the rancid injustice of the Hillsborough tragedy having come to represent all the calamities that befell English football fans in the 1980s. But, 40 years since 56 people died in an inferno at Valley Parade, the sober, thoughtful documentary Unforgotten: The Bradford City Fire remembers them anew.
Before a tale of stunning horror takes hold, the film puts what was meant to be a glorious day in context. Jim Greenhalf, a journalist for the local Telegraph & Argus, remembers how he gradually appreciated the importance to the community of trips to Valley Parade, with its wooden main stand looking “like it used to be a railway carriage in world war one”, at a time when one of the city’s main sources of worthwhile employment, heavy engineering, had dwindled and once-proud streets were turning to ruin. Greenhalf recalls what he was thinking in the winter and spring of 1985: “This club is becoming more and more important to a fairly large group of people, because everything else is being taken away from them.”
Bradford City had survived a brush with bankruptcy in 1983, a predicament that prompted players and fans to organise a crowdfunding appeal before businessman Stafford Heginbotham stepped in. The Third Division title was meant to be Bradford’s reward. But just before half-time against Lincoln, a lit cigarette or match fell from the hand of a spectator through one of the many gaps in the main stand’s floor. It set fire to a pile of rubbish that had collected in the void below the tiered seating area. The construction was almost entirely made of wood and flammable bitumen: within four minutes the entire stand, a whole side of the ground, was ferociously blazing.
Perhaps the film’s most memorable sequence arrives when we watch television coverage of the game, which soon becomes a report on the fire, in the company of fire safety expert Ben Hanney. He commentates on the pictures, which are timecoded so we can see the sheer speed of the developing catastrophe. Hanney points out behaviours that seem odd with hindsight but are just human nature: fans initially stand watching the flames, rapt or amused; then they panic when they appreciate the danger, with no middle phase in between. The shortness of the time that elapses between minor incident and major disaster is wholly terrifying.
Unforgotten might frustrate some viewers with how little time it spends on recrimination. Rather than focus on the warnings that had been received by the club about the litter below the stand, it explains that several other similar venues had seen wooden stands catch fire in the years before the Bradford blaze, fortunately without the same dreadful consequences: such events were, apparently, just how things were back then. There is contemporaneous footage of Heginbotham defending himself against a reporter’s questions, but the programme mirrors the approach of Sir Oliver Popplewell, who led the official inquiry and is also seen answering queries in news footage from the time. “This is to improve things in the future,” Popplewell says of his upcoming analysis. A journalist asks him: not to apportion blame? “No.”
This decision becomes more understandable in the light of an interview with one of the police officers on the scene, Adrian Lyles, who tried to usher fans away from the fire when it had just started and did so successfully, despite their initial reluctance to believe this was necessary. Moments later, he remembers, smoke had “replaced the air” and scores of lives depended on him: there is a devastating moment where he says he has never recovered from hostile questioning at the inquiry, suggesting that his decision to direct fans towards the rear turnstiles – which, it turned out, were locked – had been wrong.
Unforgotten’s document of the aftermath takes in survivors’ guilt, the moral dilemmas faced by Greenhalf and other media figures as the fire became a huge story, and the pure grief of Hazel Greenwood, whose husband and two sons went to the match and didn’t come home. But it prefers to speak more about the way the community united afterwards, the safety upgrades that were made at football grounds nationwide, the fundraising that established a burns unit where globally significant medical innovations took place. Courageously, it tries to rescue hope and humanity from the ashes.
Unforgotten: The Bradford City Fire aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now
