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Bradford fire

Superhudd

Superhudd

Simon Davies
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/apr/15/bradford-fire-stafford-heginbotham-martin-fletcher

The book, serialised by the Guardian today and tomorrow, reveals there had been at least eight other fires at business premises either owned by, or connected to, Stafford Heginbotham, Bradford’s then-chairman, in the previous 18 years, resulting in huge insurance claims. Fletcher does not make any direct allegations but he does believe Heginbotham’s history with fires, resulting in payouts of around £27m in today’s terms, warranted further investigation. “Could any man really be as unlucky as Heginbotham had been?” he asks.

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.

:eek: Unbelieveable. How did it not come out at the time!
 
seems like an irresponsible and sensationalist move

there may be a story here, the chairman may well have been crooked, we know he is at the very least incompetent

this is accusation of murder based only on conjecture and goes against the findings at the time

if he has hard evidence he should go to the police not the printing press

it will bring back a lot of painful memories for a lot of people (including the author I'm sure) without offering them anything new or any kind of closure

he might make a few quid though eh
 
If he has so called previous,why didn't he set up the fire a couple of hours after the game had ended,the same excuse could have been given that a lit cigarette had started the fire,why put thousands of people at risk and in the end deaths??
 
It doesn't make sense, does it? He might well be a crook involved in insurance fraud, but killing loads of people is likely to bring far more attention.
 
a spur from swansea said:
If he has so called previous,why didn't he set up the fire a couple of hours after the game had ended,the same excuse could have been given that a lit cigarette had started the fire,why put thousands of people at risk and in the end deaths??
Click to expand...

Maybe he didn't envision people dying. Maybe he thought they would all just get out. The weird bit for me is that the council said many times about removing the garbage under the stands and he just left it.. that there is pure negligence surely! Yet nothing in terms of wrong doing was found.
 
I didn't realise it was the 80s, I thought it was 60s.

Football has come a long way since the 80s,doesn't seem like a fun time
 
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