Summerland disaster: Families fight for justice after holiday paradise inferno kills 50 people
When Heather Lea waved goodbye to her family 50 years ago as they boarded the ferry to the Isle of Man, she couldn’t have known it would be the last time she would ever see them.
Heather’s parents, Elizabeth and Richard Cheetham, along with her little sister June, were going on holiday.
It was an annual family ritual they all looked forward to, going on a trip to the island in the Irish Sea and staying at a seafront guest house in Douglas.
Although Heather, 69, wasn’t joining this time and instead, seeing off the family alongside her husband Reg, now 79, she knew one of the highlights of their trip would be somewhere they’d all visited before – the newly opened Summerland.
A dazzling building designed to hold 10,000 tourists, the Summerland leisure complex was everything you’d want from a seaside holiday under one roof – dance halls, bars, restaurants, a bingo hall and five floors of amusement arcade games.
It was made all the more impressive by a cavernous glass structure that covered the building, a dome that made it seem ‘sunny’ all the time, no matter what the weather.
On Thursday 2 August 1973, the Cheetham family visited the complex. They never made it out alive.
The family, alongside 47 other people, including 11 children, died after a fire engulfed the entire building in under an hour in one of the biggest fire disasters since the Second World War.
“We were watching TV and we’d seen there had been a big explosion,” Heather recalls.
“The shock of seeing it on television like that… once the fire took hold, the building came down so quickly, everyone thought it was an explosion.
“A number appeared on the screen and we started dialling, but it took 12 hours for us to get through and they still couldn’t tell us whether my family was alive or dead.”
The next week, the newly married Heather and Reg lived through what they describe as a “horrendous nightmare”.
“I had a sinking feeling I would never see them again, because if they could’ve got to a phone, they would have called.”
Eventually, they were told of the deaths of Elizabeth and 13-year-old June.
Reg was asked to find the dental records of his father-in-law Richard as his body wasn’t even recognisable.
All three died of burns, according to the coroner’s office.
June with her mother Elizabeth in 1972. Pic: Reg Lea
“A witness at the time said my mother and sister had gone into the building to collect some bingo winnings, and when the fire started, my dad ran into the burning building to try and save them,” says Heather.
“It’s a horrible thing to happen to anybody.”
The main causes of death for the victims were suffocation, carbon monoxide poisoning, burns and multiple injuries from falling.
A total of 102 people were injured – almost all were holidaymakers who had come for a break from the north of England.
The fire was thought to have been started by a discarded cigarette.
“We coped because we were newly married, we had a new life,” says Heather.
Reg adds that the couple stuck to their daily routine and tried to carry on as best they could.
“But I remember about two months after it happened, I went to see my doctor to ask for help, and he said, ‘is your marriage OK?’
“I had to say… ‘I’m not here for my marriage, can you help me with Summerland?'”
The couple, who now live in the Wirral, Merseyside, still find it painful to talk about the subject to this day – but it’s the findings of an investigation into the inferno that stays with them.
‘They said no villains’ were responsible
On 24 May 1974, a report was released cataloguing a series of failures regarding the Summerland disaster, from the design of the building, to the fire safety regulations.
No individuals or groups were singled out to blame for what happened, and all the deaths were ruled as “death by misadventure”.
The report said the accident was down to “human errors, a reliance on the old-boy network and poor communications”.
Dr Ian Phillips of Birmingham University, who documented the disaster in a report, says “[the ruling] was wrong”.
“They said in it that there were no villains and I believe the coroner was influenced by that line and that’s why the ruling was ‘death by misadventure’.”
A death by misadventure verdict is defined as “a death that is primarily attributed to an accident that occurred due to a risk that was taken voluntarily”. In other words, those that died were held to have been at least partly responsible for their own deaths.
The Summerland Fire Commission who investigated the incident, listed several reasons for the huge loss of life:
The evacuation of the building was delayed;
No fire alarm rang inside Summerland, even after the entire building was in flames;
The fire brigade was not called for 21 minutes after the fire began;
The internal layout didn’t take into consideration fire escape routes;
There was misuse of new building materials – Oroglas, Galbestos and Decalin.
The remains of the Summerland building
What was clear from the report was just how many things had gone wrong – both on the night, and from the day the ideas for the complex were drawn up by James Phillipps Lomas and a team of architects hired by Douglas Corporation to create the leisure centre.
One element focused on was the Oroglas material. It was used by the architects for its ‘transparent effect’ to give the building its greenhouse look – but didn’t satisfy building regulations on the island.
At the time of building, the law was waivered.
Dr Phillips explains that while the waiving of building regulations isn’t entirely uncommon, other measures are usually put into place.
“Compensatory measures are usually made to make up for any potential shortcomings where fire safety was concerned – but not in this case.”
The list of failings in the report continued. The open design led to the fire spreading at speed in all directions, according to the investigators.
The person in charge of the control room on the day of the fire who needed to sound the alarms throughout the building in the event of such a blaze didn’t know how to operate the fire alarm panel.
No staff called 999 when the fire began, and the first calls came from a local taxi firm 21 minutes after it erupted – because staff had not been trained in emergency evacuation procedures. The external wall made of Galbestos wasn’t fire resistant.
Half a century later, the ruins of the site, now derelict, are still standing.
‘An insult to blame those who lost their lives’
An Apologise For Summerland campaign has been launched to fight for the ‘death by misadventure’ verdict to be overturned.
They say their support is growing in numbers, from cross-party MPs and organisations such as Grenfell United – who say the similarities are “chilling” between the Isle of Man disaster and Grenfell tower.
A spokesperson for the campaign told Sky News: “Summerland was sold as a holiday paradise. Instead, it was a death trap and yet no one was held accountable for the tragedy or has apologised for what went wrong.
“We are asking for an apology for the blatant disregard for basic fire safety, and a recognition that the ‘death by misadventure’ verdict was inappropriate.
“We feel it is an insult to blame those who lost their lives in a fire that was no fault of their own. Our campaign’s demands are not hard to accomplish, but they would help to heal the wounds of the past.”
In an interview with Sky News, MP John Madders, who has pushed for a public inquiry in the Commons, said it seemed like “everyone on the Isle of Man wanted to forget about it and the families deserve proper recognition”.
Mr Madders said: “The way the aftermath was handled was bad.”
“The verdict was wrong and it can’t stand – if there’s an acknowledgment that that was inappropriate that would help people cope with this.
“If you look at the multiple failings in the inquiry, it’s staggering that no one was held accountable for this.
“It’s an offensive verdict for those who have lost someone – almost implying that someone who went on holiday were somehow responsible for fire safety.”
The Chief Minister of the Isle of Man has since made a statement to the island’s parliament to mark the anniversary.
Alfred Cannan MHK said: “There were inadequacies, failings and lapses identified by the Commission, and that had matters been addressed differently, some of the loss of life at Summerland may have been prevented.
“The causes and contributing factors are individually serious. Collectively they resulted in a tragedy. I am sorry. Sorry for the pain and suffering felt by everyone affected by the fire and sorry for the failings that could have prevented such a tragedy.
“The 50th anniversary of the Summerland fire is the right moment for this government to offer an apology for the suffering caused by the wrongs of the past.”
It is the first apology ever given by the government, something the campaign considers a win.
But the fight continues to get the verdict overturned.
‘We’ll fight to the end for this’
Heather and Reg Lea on holiday last year. Pic: Reg Lea
Heather and Reg say their daughters, Vicky and Jane, began finding out what really happened to their grandparents in their teenage years, and it was clear the legacy of what happened is far from forgotten.
“They took it in their stride, but it was a shock to them. Then a few days later my daughter started crying and she said she realised her loss,” said Heather.
“Vicky wants to know more about her aunty June and nan and grandad, she backs us all the way, they believe it needs recognition.
“When the campaign became public, the government said, ‘why now’?” she says, fighting back tears.
“Time shouldn’t matter. It happened. We want recognition for the people who died. They weren’t doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. Deep down, I know my sister would’ve wanted us to do something.
“We’ll fight to the end for this – and it hasn’t ended for us, why should it for the Isle of Man?”
“That smell of maggots, rotting food and maggots, my house smells like that.”
For Louise, not her real name, home has become a hell she cannot escape.
“We just couldn’t move for flies, and then we noticed an increase in rats,” she says.
Louise lives near Bolton House Road in Wigan. At the end of a row of terraced houses sits a former scrapyard, which has been transformed into an industrial-scale illegal dump site.
The wagons started coming last winter, “20, maybe 30 times a day,” Louise remembers.
“Eighteen-tonne wagons. Full of all sorts; nappies, black bin rubbish, chemicals, plastic.”
Within a few weeks, she and her neighbours realised the waste was just being dumped, not sorted or managed. It piled up, higher and higher.
They contacted the council, the Environment Agency and the police – but Louise claims no one did anything to stop the lorries.
Her retired neighbour, Tom, says it felt like the authorities “didn’t want to know”.
Though he does remember someone from the council asking him if he could go and “have a look for them” and “report back” information about what sort of waste was being dumped.
Louise and Tom are both so worried about who could be behind this that they are only comfortable speaking anonymously.
The fire which lasted nine days
By July’s heatwave, the site had long been full. The wagons had stopped months earlier, so 25,000 tonnes of waste, several storeys high, sat festering in the sun.
Lorries and vehicles in the former scrapyard lay buried, unseen, beneath the shredded and rotting filth – and then the fire started.
For nine days, dozens of firefighters from across Greater Manchester fought to bring the fire under control.
Pic: Wigan Council
Pic: Wigan Today
The nearby primary school had to shut due to the acrid smoke.
The sheer amount of water needed by fire engines to tackle the blaze left residents without any – while many were forced to keep their windows and doors shut in the 30C-plus heat.
Some were left with chest infections, others were hospitalised.
“I think it’s awful to let people live with that toxic rubbish right next to our house after us all asking for help and nothing’s materialised,” Louise says.
The crime costing the economy billions
Sky News has been investigating how, across the country, waste crime is a growing scourge and a booming business being exploited by criminal gangs.
Being paid to remove rubbish only to dump it illegally without sorting it or paying tax is an easy way of making huge amounts of money, with poorly enforced legal repercussions and a huge cost to the environment.
It’s something the previous head of the Environment Agency called “the new narcotics”.
– It’s thought a fifth of all waste in England is being illegally managed
– That’s around 34 million tonnes a year, enough to fill about four million skips
– It costs the economy around a billion pounds a year, with legitimate operators thought to be losing a further £3bn from missed business
In July, we tracked down a group of suspected organised fly-tippers who waved wads of cash on TikTok after dumping waste in the countryside.
‘Absolutely soul-destroying’
The residents of Bolton House Road are not the only victims of this toxic dump.
Last winter, Neil Hardwick rented out three diggers to an individual, unaware of the growing illegal dump site in Wigan.
By March of this year, he had not received several rental payments and had received a call from the Environment Agency warning him about what was happening at the site.
Neil and Carla Hardwick
With his daughter Carla, he went to Bolton House Road in an attempt to retrieve the machinery, worth approximately £300,000 in total.
At the site, Carla says a group of men slapped her, as well as spat at her. The men allegedly told her father: “We want you to give us £100,000, and we’ll allow you to take your diggers back, or we can cut your throat.”
Carla and Neil say an officer from Greater Manchester Police dismissed their report, and claimed their machinery was not stolen.
That officer also threatened to arrest the pair if they did not leave the area, they say.
“I just wanted us to get those machines back. But the fact that a man can spit in a woman’s face and get away with it, and the police are not interested, well, it is maddening,” Carla said.
The Hardwicks returned to the site 10 days later with officers from the National Crime Agency but found their machines smashed up and destroyed.
Mr Hardwick said the ordeal was “absolutely soul-destroying”.
“It’s caused us so much grief, damage to business, just absolutely brought us to our knees,” he said.
A vehicle used to transport waste to the illegal dump
Greater Manchester Police told Sky News there is an ongoing complaint relating to the incident involving Neil and Carla Hardwick at Bolton House Road, and “this process will take time”.
“As part of this complaint, our Professional Standards Directorate are assessing all elements of the investigation including all crimes and reviewing bodyworn footage,” a spokesperson said.
The £4.5m bill
Finding out how the illegal dump in Wigan happened, and who’s responsible, is hugely challenging.
The landowner has not responded to Sky, nor have the companies which allegedly own the lorries seen by residents transporting the waste.
They appear to be either refuse or haulage companies that boast of their environmentally friendly credentials.
The firms seen moving waste to the illegal dump did not reply to Sky News
One company’s website claims it diverts most of its waste away from landfill, and advertises its “innovative approach” to waste management.
“We’re passionate about the environment,” the website says.
Josh Simons, the local Labour MP, has been outraged by the case.
Speaking before his promotion to the Cabinet Office, he said it is “buck-passing” between Wigan Council, the police, and the Environment Agency.
Mr Simons says he was told at the start of the year that there was a criminal investigation, “and therefore no action can be taken to prevent people from dumping more on the site or intervening”.
“That just doesn’t seem right to me,” he says.
He also says information and financial support from the Environment Agency to Wigan Council has been poor.
“The number [the council] have come up with is about £4.5m to clear the waste.
“Anybody who knows local authority budgets at the moment knows they don’t have nearly five million pounds stashed behind the sofa. So what’s supposed to happen?”
The land itself is not worth £4.5m – and Mr Simons thinks this makes working-class areas uniquely vulnerable to this kind of crime.
The funding and powers of the Environment Agency need to change, says Josh Simons MP
Paul Barton, director for environment at Wigan Council, said: “Our top priority is to ensure those residents feel heard and safe while the Environment Agency carries out their investigation with our full cooperation.
“We want the site to be cleared as a matter of urgency and are continuing to work with the Environment Agency to survey and sample the waste so polluters/landowners – who are the responsible parties – can progress this as soon as possible.”
Paul Clements, director of operations at the Environment Agency, said: “We are prioritising local people, businesses and the nearby school as we work… to deal with this illegal waste site as quickly as possible.
“Our staff continue to visit the site and at the forefront of our minds is the impact the illegal waste is having on the local community.
“We are continuing to progress our criminal investigation as a priority. This includes actively pursuing many lines of enquiry, interviewing under caution and using the enforcement tools available to us.”
Additional reporting by Adam Parker, OSINT editor, and Niamh Lynch, planning producer
The Environment Agency (EA), police and other agencies are failing to stop fly-tipping by organised crime groups, a cross-party group of peers has found.
In a damning letter to the government, members of the House of Lords’ Environment and Climate Change Committee called for an independent review of waste crime, with the current approach “inadequate”.
Their report described the EA as “slow to respond to even the most flagrant and serious illegality” – and said its taskforce on waste crime appears “ineffective”.
Police are accused of showing a “lack of interest” in the crime, while penalties for criminals do not match their profits and are “insufficient to deter future offending”.
Read more:
Dirty work: The fly-tippers turning trash into cash
The Lords’ committee has called for the EA’s Joint Unit for Waste Crime to do more to encourage collaboration between various authorities, and for the Department for Environment, Rural and Food Affairs to develop and publish targets for tackling this issue.
Peers have also demanded an end to what they call the “merry-go-round of reporting” where members of the public who report fly-tipping and waste crime in their area get bounced between various agencies.
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Criminals benefitting from trash
This is something Sky News has often heard from victims – they will call the police, only to be told to speak to the council, which then pushes them over to the EA.
Peers want a “single telephone number and web portal” which would triage responsibility for each case.
Read more from Sky News:
Could the UK run out of drinking water?
Mystery of what killed billions of starfish solved
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The boom in waste crime
An EA spokesperson said: “We recognise the recommendations of the report and are committed to doing more.
“Last year alone, our dedicated teams shut down 462 illegal waste sites and prevented nearly 34,000 tonnes of waste being illegally exported – showing that we can make real change despite the challenges involved.”
The King has been heckled over his brother Prince Andrew’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a visit to a cathedral.
Charles was shouted at by a man in the crowd outside Lichfield Cathedral in Staffordshire on Monday, who asked: “How long have you known about Andrew and Epstein?”
The protester, who was filming on a mobile phone, also said: “Have you asked the police to cover up for Andrew? Should MPs be allowed to debate the royals in the House of Commons?”
King Charles during his visit to Lichfield Cathedral. Pic: AP
The King did not respond to the comments, which came as the monarchy faces increasing pressure to resolve the controversy surrounding Andrew, who earlier this month said he would stop using his Duke of York title and his knighthood after revelations in the posthumous memoir of sex assault accuser Virginia Giuffre.
The prince has always strenuously denied all allegations against him from the late Ms Giuffre.
Reports also emerged that claimed Andrew asked a royal close protection officer to “dig up dirt” on Ms Giuffre. The Metropolitan Police said it is “actively looking into the claims”.
At the moment, Andrew resides at Royal Lodge, a Windsor mansion where he effectively lives rent-free. He’s done so since 2003.
Obstacles to a settlement are reportedly where the prince, who remains eighth in line to the throne, will live and what financial recompense he will receive for the funds he spent renovating the home.
The Sun reported he is keen on Harry and Meghan’s former home Frogmore Cottage.
Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein. Pics: PA/Sipa/Shutterstock
‘The royals need to be challenged’
Calls are still growing for Andrew’s dukedom to be revoked, which can only be done by an act of parliament.
Downing Street has indicated it its reluctance to do so, suggesting the King would not want the issue to take up politicians’ time.
Graham Smith, chief executive of anti-monarchy group Republic, said: “The royals need to be challenged, and if the politicians won’t do the job and the police won’t investigate, then more and more members of the public will be asking tough questions.”
He said he believed Monday’s heckler was “one of our own members but doing their own thing”.
After the visit to the cathedral, the King laid flowers at the UK’s first national memorial commemorating LGBT armed forces.
He was joined by dozens of serving and former members of the armed forces, as he met veterans who told of the trauma inflicted by the military’s former “gay ban”.
The memorial, titled An Opened Letter, was unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum.
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