Perhaps the true legacy of Martin Fletcher's two-decade investigation into the Bradford City's stadium fire disaster in which his father, brother and uncle were among the 56 who perished is not what "comes out of it" but the fact his labours bear eloquent testimony to what they endured simply because they turned out to support their team.

There is something immediately odd about the fact that the litany of business ventures and premises belonging to City's then chairman, Stafford Heginbotham, which literally went up in flames, did not feature in the original inquiry. Fletcher research discovered eight incidents where fires destroyed businesses belonging to him. These weren't ordinary house fires but hugely destructive and sudden events: the third fire required some 40 firemen to bring it under control. They blazes occurred in and around Bradford from 1968 through to 1981.

From the distance of 30 years, the trail of fires seems have been both an obscure back story and an open secret: Fletcher’s curiosity was piqued after his mother mentioned to him that the Heginbotham businesses had been involved in several fires.

Fletcher stops short of actually stating the fire at the Valley Parade was started intentionally but does ask the question made unavoidable by the facts he accumulated: just how unlucky can one businessman be?

Oliver Popplewell, the former high court judge who led the investigation, has come out this week to dismiss the suggestions of arson as "complete nonsense" and reiterated his belief in the original finding: that the inferno had been started by a discarded cigarette. He also pointed out that the stand, which was due for demolition after that final match of the season, had "no insurance value" because it was so dilapidated.

Terrible misfortune

All of this may be so. Maybe the fire was just a terrible misfortune, an example of another post-first World War structure and the accumulation of years and debris and rubbish rendering it a cinder box. And perhaps that was the very reason that Heginbotham’s businesses were prone to fires: that they were located in the old mill buildings of Bradford and were as vulnerable as the stand proved to be.

At the very least it was catastrophically unfortunate that having survived for 77 years and the smoking of thousands of fags, the Valley Parade stand couldn’t withstand another 45 minutes of football. And if the stand was deemed unworthy of insurance cover, was it not a disgrace that supporters were permitted to use it?

The stricken commentary of Tony Delahunty who was covering the match for Pennine Radio that day gives an idea of how quickly the afternoon turned from a celebratory recognition of City's promotion to the second division to something terrifying and unfathomable. Within minutes, Delahunty goes from calling out the players' names as they receive the ball to desperately imploring the stricken fans across the field: "Don't rush! Don't push! Mind the kiddies."

Martin Fletcher was one of the kiddies: 12 years old and there with his father and brother. He had just returned from getting a coke before half-time and when one of the Bradford players lost possession, he automatically shouted "Bloody hell", only to be quickly reprimanded by his father, who said "language" and clipped him around the ear.

Seconds later, they all became aware of the smoke rising through the wooden seating and Fletcher, urged by his father, moved ahead of the group and miraculously made it through the rear of the stand within the four minutes that the structure was transformed into a terrifying, hellish otherworld generating temperatures of an estimated 800 degrees. He made it through with the baseball hat he wore melted around his head. Anyone who read the extracts of his book Fifty Six or heard him speaking on Newstalk on Thursday evening couldn't but be stuck by how close he remains to those few minutes.

English football fans in the 1980s were accustomed to putting up with all sorts of discomforts in order to follow their teams. And if that period has been characterised by rampant hooliganism which threatened to reduce football into a grubby subculture, it is becoming increasingly clear that the treatment of the thousands of decent football fans who just wanted to see a game became lost in that climate.

The footage of the Bradford disaster demonstrates repeated acts of valour on by policemen on duty and by the many fans who returned to haul the injured away from the terrible heat. England was touched by what happened to Bradford as a city and a club. The donations poured in. Liverpool and Everton football clubs donated £20,000 each – a lunch bill for some of contemporary stars but a hefty enough contribution back then.

Day of tragedy

Liverpool had its day of tragedy coming down the tracks and it seems short of negligent now that football fans would have to wait until after the Hillsborough disaster before there was a governmental acceptance that the welfare of people who attended games actually mattered.

Maybe Popplewell’s certainty of what happened will be borne out: somebody just flicked a cigarette away and instead of dying like all the others, this one smouldered close to flammable material. It was May. But even if there was no conspiracy, the claim that the stand had no value in terms of insurance doesn’t cancel Mr Fletcher’s assertion of the monetary gain of the fire: he estimates that as well as the £988,000 received from “insurance proceeds and associated grants”, the local authority gave £1.46 million to the club. At the time, Popplewell said he had come to Bradford to “Look, learn and listen” before reporting his findings in good faith.

The victims of the fire deserve the same attention now in the light of Martin Fletcher’s work. Stafford Heginbotham is not here to defend himself: he died less than a decade after the fire but his sons have passionately denounced the insinuation that their father was responsible for arson and pointed out his family was in the stand when the fire broke out. They also point to the fact Heginbotham had saved Bradford from receivership just a couple of seasons earlier.

Bradford City are mid-table in League One but knocked Chelsea out of the FA Cup in Stamford Bridge. The debate over their fire will intensify as the 30th anniversary of their worst day nears. At the very least, the families of the 56 whose names are engraved on a plaque outside Valley Parade deserve the respect of having another examination into how and why what was supposed to be a day of days turned into such an unspeakable nightmare. And maybe Stafford Heginbotham does too.