Big Bang near Scunthorpe

40 years ago to this very day is one of my strongest memories.

I was ten years old, a bit frantic and mad and certainly a challenging and demanding child.

That day, 1st June 1974 started bright and by 9am there was already that hot, dry smell in the air of an early summers day. I was excited as it was a saturday and I could forget, momentarily, about the stresses of Junior School. There was a lot I had set myself to do to make it a worthwhile saturday. Mostly play based. Perhaps superficially tidy the bedroom I shared with my younger brother and do a few chores for my parents. My eldest sister, age 12 was getting ready to go to Youth Orchestra practice, yawn, yawn although I would soon have to do the same in a couple of years time when I got to Grammar School.

I was filling up the day with such activities to speed it along. This was because, at 3pm there was the rarity on ITV of a live football match. It was only a schoolboys international between England and West Germany from the iconic Wembley Stadium but it was live. Most other football that I could get to see was late at night on Match of the Day when I could barely keep my eyes open, the occasional Cup Final and the complete footie fest of a World Cup. 1974 was a World Cup year and I already had my wallchart blu-tac'd to the wall in my half of the bedroom, had a good start to filling up the official sticker book and was accumulating pre-tournament press cuttings for my scrapbook.This was in spite of England failing to actually qualify. Any football in the English close-season would be welcome.

I can visualise the schoolboys game in full and glorious technicolour which is strange because we only had a black and white television. Such was my imagination that I could mentally colour in the grainy images myself. In my later years I would think back on this and be a bit worried about my apparent super-powers.

The commentator for the game was Brian Moore. He was a great authority and very well respected but, frankly, I found his monotone voice a bit boring. Being a schoolboy match, therefore of under 15's age, there had been a large release of tickets to education authorities throughout the country . These had been well received and the stadium was, from the crowd shots, almost half full so about 40,000 to 45,000 in attendance. On the basis that a typical spectator was of the profile, male, under 15, pre-pubescent, excitable, high on fizzy pop and sugary sweets the crowd noise from the stadium was very high pitched and rather girly.

The match was fast, frenetic and not very skilfull on the part of the English players. The West Germans looked twice as big in physical presence and a bit like the characters in my Commando comic books. There were no pitch-side microphones to pick up any guttural utterances of  'Achtung', ' Donner und Blitzen' or ' Macht Schnell'  which made up my whole vocabulary of the German language at the time.

If there had been an equivalent betting culture to today the result would have been a major income generator for Bet888.com. The gallant, diminuitive England lads won easily by 4 goals to zero.

I was as euphoric as an 10 year old could be and ran around on the patio after the broadcast had finished close dribbling a tennis ball, jinxing around massive Germans and wacking a volley home into the mesh fence onto the fence with Mrs Waggs house next door.

In a brief respite from my action replays I heard a low, sustained and ominous bang. In the seconds following the noise I was conscious of fine ash type debris particles floating down all around the patio, garden and neighbourhood. This was unusual for a saturday and scary. I went indoors. My parents had also heard the noise and father, working on the car on the front drive, had definitely felt a shock wave that had not got around the bulk of the house to me. The bringer of news and information, the portable radio, was consulted. Local radio was, within minutes, speculating on a huge explosion just west of Scunthorpe at a chemical plant called Flixborough. I had not heard of the name before but I knew in what direction was west from my Cub Scouting. From the street pavement there was a good distant view over the town and beyond, some 6 miles, to a horizon of dense woodlands. The hazy June day was quite light grey with thin clouds and powder blue sky apart from a huge column of very black and billowing smoke right up to high altitude, almost a mushroom cloud, with a slight toppling lean towards the north.

In later years a few witnesses of the explosion had first thought it had come from a nuclear strike. The actual very big bang had come from an escape of a volatile chemical, cyclohexane,  used in nylon production from a ruptured pipe. This had formed an undetected dense vapour cloud around the plant and with ignition from a furnace at a hydrogen facility on the same site. The explosion constituted the biggest in peacetime in the country.

The subsequent statistics were tragic on many levels but morbidly fascinating to a young lad. The workforce at the time, 28, were killed although on a week day there would have normally been  upwards of 500 employees in situ. The blast which was witnessed as a visible wave destroyed and damaged 1800 buildings in the nearby villages and up on the Lincolnshire Cliff to the east. My father drove to Scunthorpe to collect my sister from her music practice and saw a devastated town centre with blown in shop windows.

The cloud was thought to be highly toxic and settlements across the Humber which were downwind were prepared for evacuation. I remember praying that the distant plume would not turn and come towards our house, which was a genuine fear in my head.

The plant continued to burn for 10 days. Human interest stories began to surface and these were graphic and disturbing. My friends dad worked at Flixborough in the offices where the highest loss of life had occurred but it had been his day off. A crown green bowling club in Hull, a good distance away, had found a large sheet of corrugated iron embedded in their otherwise immaculate and manicured playing surface. It was traced back to Flixborough. Employees of the destroyed plant later stated to the Enquiry that there had been an overwhelming odour of chemicals on a daily basis and they had been instructed to use plastic tools so as not to risk the production of potential ignition sources.

The day had gone from lazy and lackadaisical on my part to a full on crisis in a matter of a few explosive minutes. I was reminded of the frailty of human existence but as an 10 year old I was not really that bothered. Parents were there for that sort of contemplation. I was already looking forward to saturday night TV. It was going to be  epic with a full schedule from tea time to my bedtime- bring on Cilla Black, Val Doonican, Ironside and Upstairs, Downstairs.

(first written in June 2012)