Due to Parliamentary commitments, I was unable to attend the memorial service for the 80th Anniversary of the Burden Park Disaster. Below is a statement I would have given if I was able to attend.
Eighty years ago today, this town woke up and got ready for a football match.
People put on their coats. They kissed their families goodbye. They walked down familiar streets, full of the anticipation that only a cup tie can bring, just six months after the end of a war that had taken so much from so many. Football was back. Life was beginning again. And Bolton was going to watch Wanderers.
Thirty-three of those people never came home.
I think about that a lot. Not the statistics, not the crowd figures, not the barriers that gave way. I think about the moment a family started to wonder why their husband, their father, their son, hadn’t walked back through the door. Thirty-three ordinary people who deserved to grow old, and didn’t.
What happened at the Railway End that afternoon was not an accident of fate. The ground was dangerously overcrowded. The barriers were not fit for purpose. And when those barriers collapsed and people fell, the match was eventually restarted, with those who had died lying along the touchline, covered in coats. Think about that. Think about what that says about how the lives of ordinary working people were valued.
Bolton knew. The families knew. And Bolton has never forgotten.
That is why we remember this event tonight. Not out of obligation. Not to mark a date in a calendar. But because remembrance is an act of love. Because the 33 deserve more than a plaque on a supermarket wall. Because in this town there may be a grandchild, or a great-grandchild, who has grown up carrying a name and a story and a grief that was handed down to them. To those families: Bolton stands with you tonight, as it always has.
Eighty years on, we still say their names. We still make sure to remember them. Because that is what Bolton does. We do not forget our own.
Thirty-three people went to a football match. Let us make sure the world never stops knowing who they were.