The Forgotten Tragedy

On March 9th 1946, a little over six months after the end of World War II, Bolton Wanderers met Stoke City in an FA Cup Quarter-Final Second Leg.

The Burnden Stand was not available to fans, as it was still in use by the Ministry of Supply. Those in charge were simply unprepared for the amount of people who wanted to see the game, the numbers swelled by Bolton's victory at Stoke and it being many people's first opportunity to see the already legendary Stanley Matthews play for Stoke, at 2:40 p.m. it was decided that the turnstiles be closed.

As the game kicked off, the crowd had already spilled onto the touchline, trying to get away from the crush, in images that were tragically recalled forty three years later in Sheffield. Two barriers collapsed under the crush and, as the crowd moved forward, it fell down, collapsing under the collective weight of thousands of people.

Play was stopped, but only to allow the police to push the spectators that had encroached onto the pitch back over the sideline. The game restarted but was quickly halted as a police officer advised them there had been a fatality in the stand and then took the teams off.

When the players returned a little under half an hour later, a new touchline had been created with sawdust and the players continued the game with bodies lining the sidelines, covered with coats. At half time, the referee turned the teams round and restarted the game immediately. The match finished scoreless and Bolton advanced to the Semi-Finals.

As with Heysel and Hillsborough, the players themselves weren't aware of the full scale of the tragedy and neither were most of the fans until after the match had finished. Matthews himself commented later:
'In our dressing-room again we heard more rumours about the increasing number of casualties. Yet it was not until I was motoring home that evening that the shadow of the grim disaster descended on me like a storm-cloud.'

Thirty three people died and more than four hundred were injured.

Hughes recommended that all terrace enclosures should be accurately monitored and feared that the disaster might easily be repeated at 20 to 30 grounds. It also stressed the need for controlling crowds well back from the entrance of a ground. Whilst the Home Office ordered the report, no official body was willing to take responsibility or to put the recommendations into effect.

On a Spring day in 1989, ninety six people died in Sheffield, in circumstances that echoed those of Burnden Park. Lack of forethought by the authorities led to a crush and caused fans to attempt to get onto the pitch. If the fences that had been erected due to the hooligan problem of the 70's and 80's had not been there then the crowd could have spilled onto the pitch as they did in 1946 and, before that, at Wembley in 1923. Whether this would have caused less fatalities, or none at all, is neither here nor there. The same mistakes were made, this time made worse by the fact that this wasn't at a time of austerity, when the authorities may have not had the necessary structure to deal with a large crowd.

Tragedy links Bolton, Liverpool, Manchester United, Glasgow Rangers and Bradford City like no other clubs in the British Isles. And yet, when it comes to what happened at Burnden Park, for most people, it is lost in the midst of time. Bolton have a memorial at The Reebok but it seldom, if ever, galvanises in the way that it does at both the Hillsborough memorial at Anfield and Hillsborough. The scarves, shirts and other mementos that surrounded it after the death of Nat Lofthouse locked yesterday and today together for a while. But they have now gone. The Munich Clock, itself an evocation of a bygone age, may have been moved around the corner at Old Trafford but is still a stark reminder of the players, staff and others who died on that runway and is still pointed out by United fans taking their children to Old Trafford for the first time.

Look around the web now and there is still little written about what happened that day. Some, indeed, are amazed that they have never even heard of it.

Sixty six years on, the club is in the quarter finals of the FA Cup again, only the ninth time that Bolton have reached this stage since 1946. For the second year in a row, Bolton find themselves playing a game live on television near to the anniversary of that day. It would be nice to think that someone, somewhere, could bring these two facts together in a piece in a national paper. Or, on live national television, Bolton and Queens Park Rangers could stand together in a minutes silence and bring to the nation`s attention the day when thirty three people set off to watch a football match and never returned home.