It was a time before rolling news channels and mobile phones, but the horror of the Bradford City fire of 1985 was allowed to unfold in front of a live television audience.
Cameras were only sent to Valley Parade to record the joyful finale to Bradford’s championship-winning season in the Third Division. But as flames ripped through the wooden main stand and fans poured on to the pitch, ITV went on air for the nation to watch a catastrophe that claimed 56 lives.
It was a media first and a dubious decision. The traumatising imagery and agitated commentary of John Helm is so haunting that it is today subject to a strict embargo.
Media coverage of this tragedy – a mix of sensationalism and later disregard – has led to one of the worst episodes in British sporting history being marginalised in the national consciousness and little known among younger generations, beyond West Yorkshire.
“The event has faded from the nation’s memory,” reflects the introduction to a major new film, Unforgotten: The Bradford City Fire (Sunday, BBC Two, 9pm), which aims to tell the full story through the voices of Bradford people who experienced it.
The Valley Parade fire was initially world news. Margaret Thatcher declared it “one of the worst things I have ever seen” and ordered an inquiry. From New Zealand to Argentina, people saw coverage and sent money to the Bradford Disaster Appeal. Then the city was left to grieve alone. “It was global and then all of a sudden it wasn’t,” reflects Tony Worboys, director of the 90-minute documentary. “The funerals had not happened but the news cycles moved on.”
The contemporary news agenda can seem dystopian. But the 80s in the UK was dubbed “the decade of disasters”. Within three weeks of the fire, came the Heysel disaster, when 39 fans died in Brussels at the European Cup final. Soon after came the Zeebrugge ferry sinking, the King’s Cross fire, the Lockerbie plane bombing, the Piper Alpha oil rig explosion and the Hillsborough stadium crush, all with terrible death tolls.
There was no social media but the news cycle still moved at pace. Bradford dropped out of view.
The tragedy was misrepresented by a press that was more prone to following an agenda, in this case demonising football fans. On the same day as the fire, a teenager died at Birmingham City after a game marred by hooliganism. Weeks before, another riot took place during a televised match between Luton Town and Millwall. Several tabloids suggested “yobs” were to blame at Valley Parade. The Daily Star wrongly claimed the fire was started by a fan with a smoke bomb.
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Read MoreEven the ensuing Popplewell inquiry into stadium safety conflated Bradford with Birmingham and Heysel, both of which involved fan violence. “The fact that Heysel came three weeks after has a major impact on how we remember this story… and then Hillsborough happened four years later,” says Worboys, who won a Bafta for his work on Hillsborough, a film on the 1989 disaster, in which 97 Liverpool fans died.
Unlike Bradford, Hillsborough stayed in the media spotlight. There are many reasons why, not least the deep injustice felt by the people of Liverpool over the inept policing of the match and outrageous coverage by Kelvin MacKenzie’s The Sun, which put blame on the supporters. Bradford City fans mostly accept that the fire was an accident in a dilapidated stadium.
“Bradford never wanted the headlines,” says Worboys, a Yorkshireman. “People from Yorkshire, we tend to bury things. We have people in our film who have never spoken about it and pretend they weren’t there.”
But this same “Bradford spirit” brought the city together and led to the creation and public funding of its world-leading burns research unit. And while the original footage of the fateful game is not shown by the media, it is used to this day in training fire service personnel.
This tragedy was a consequence of the institutional neglect of working communities during the 1980s, when football fans were treated like cattle. Since Hillsborough, stadiums have been upgraded and the sport transformed. But as Bradford went off the media’s radar, the neglect of fire safety precautions took hold in other parts of society. The Grenfell Tower inferno of 2017 did not look so unprecedented to those who remembered Valley Parade.
After 40 years, Bradford people are more willing to speak up. “People who didn’t want to talk are realising that the story is not quite landing with the next generation,” says Worboys. “That spurs individuals to tell people what they know.” It is not too late for lessons to be learned, including by the media in covering the tragedies of the future.
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