An extract from my book, 'London’s Firefighters' an anthology. The Hills Hotel fire. 1971.

The Denmark Place fire occurred on 16 August 1980.

Until the recent tragic North London Grenfell Tower fire the worst post war UK fatal fire occurred in London’s Soho. It killed 37 people and injured another 30. Outside of terrorist attacks it remains the worst single event mass murder on mainland Britain. The fire was the result of an arson attack. The majority of those who perished were believed to have been Spanish and Latin American customers and staff of the unlicensed club and drinking bar. 

Located at 18 Denmark Place were two unlicensed, but popular, Soho bars. Both were located on the building’s top two floors. Named ‘The Spanish Rooms’ they were a late night bar, frequented by locals, and a salsa club popular with Latin American immigrants.

Admission to either bar was restricted to members who obtained entry by shouting up from the street below in order to obtain a key. Access was through the locked front door and up a fire escape enclosed with plywood. Being unlicensed the bars were obscured from the outside world by boarded up windows. The door in Denmark Street that led to the fire escape was bolted shut. The Metropolitan Police were planning to shut the place down on Monday 18 August. A farewell party was being thrown over that fatal weekend.

On the night of 16 August, John ‘Gypsy’ Thompson, age 42, had entered ‘The Spanish Rooms’ and drank there. Thompson, a petty drug dealer, was known to the police. Believing that he had been overcharged for the drink an argument and then a fight ensued with the bartender. Thompson was ejected from the building and the entry door was locked behind him. Thompson had found a 2-gallon container outside the club before hailing a taxi and then travelled to a 24-hour petrol station in Camden. There he filled the container with petrol before returning to 18 Denmark Place. In the darkened alley of Denmark Place he poured the petrol through the letterbox of No 18’s front door followed by a lit piece of paper.


The petrol erupted with explosive force. The burning petrol swiftly igniting the staircase owing to its considerable timber construction. Flames, and superheated gases, rose upwards with great energy and force. The fireball found those on the upper floors. The searing heat peeling skin whilst cloths caught fire. People could not easily escape their fate due to the boarded up windows; the locked fire escape and the lack of any fire safety precautions owing to the bars unlicensed status. The club, being unlicensed, was off the London Fire Brigade’s inspection radar.


The fire moved quickly up and through the building, destroying the main entrance and the exit from the bars. Some patrons tried to escape via the back door but found it locked. Others smashed windows and jumped out onto the street below. On Denmark Street there was a music shop that backed onto the clubs and some patrons were found here trapped behind the security shutters fearful the fire would follow them. Some were clearly luckier than others.


Soho’s firefighters, in their Shaftsbury Avenue station, were still up having recently returned from another call on a typically busy Soho night shift. They were chatting in the mess-room. In fact they were listening rather than chatting; listening to their Guvnor, Station Officer Turk Manning who was reminiscing about the ‘good old days’. At 03.33 the station bells sent the Green Watch crews on their way once again, However, the address given was Denmark Court, off Charing Cross Road and Turk Manning knew that there was no Denmark Court on Soho’s ground. He contacted the Wembley Control room immediately by radio message and told them so. Whilst the crews waited for the control room staff to check the address someone came running up to Soho fire station to report a fire in Denmark Place. Manning instructed his crews attend Denmark Place.


When Soho’s crews arrived Turk Manning looked down Denmark Place and saw what he thought, at first, was a rubbish fire some way down the narrow alley. As he went to investigate a man came out of the night, a man who Turk Manning thought might have been in a fight by the way he looked and staggered. The man, clearly distressed, said “There are people in there-lots of them.”

As Station Officer Manning reached the building he saw smoke escaping from around the shuttered windows, then the flames appeared from the first before showing from the second floor windows too. The fire was spreading and very fast. Instructing that a hydrant be set in and jet got to work Station Officer Manning sent a priority message making ‘pumps four-persons reported’.


Soho’s crews had struggled to break into the locked door as shards of hot sparks and glowing embers showered down on them. They watched as people ran off into the night despite some clearly being injured. But from inside the building, other than the sound of burning, nobody was heard calling for help, not even a shout of panic.

As entry was finally made from Denmark Place they saw the fire which was consuming all before it. The staircase was fully engulfed in flame. Turk Manning had sent a firefighter to check the other side of the building. When he arrived he had found six people trapped behind security grills of an adjacent shop. With an entry affected the people inside were rescued, all suffering various degrees of serious cuts or burns. It was through that shop that the first effective attack on the fire was made. Turk Manning had also instructed Soho’s turntable ladder be pitched to see what rescues it might be able to perform and to assess the true extent of the fire from its high vantage point.

Divisional Commander Roy Baldwin.

With Assistant Division Officer Tom Kennedy now en-route from Paddington, the ‘A’ Divisional headquarters, Wembley control’s Officer of the Watch rung the Divisional Commander, Roy Baldwin, at his Paddington quarters to inform him of the incident. Balwin was not required to attend this size of incident but responded immediately. Balwin was later to comment that; “Manning would not normally make-up unless he had a good job and his fours were normally worthy of a six!”


At 0341, eight minutes after the time of call, Station Officer Manning made pumps six. Balwin would take command of the fire two minutes after he arrived at the scene. Details, on the ground, were scant about who and how many people might still be in the building? Balwin found the street filled with ‘foreign-looking’ people all seemingly in great distress. None would give answers to the firefighters requests for information about who else might be inside the burning building. It was a policeman that informed Balwin that the building was used as illegal club and as many as 150 people may have been inside it.

Sub Officer Ron Morris. QGM.

It was Soho’s Sub Officer Ron Morris (QGM) who led his crew to the main staircase and made a successful attack on the fire, although it was not out by any means. Now Balwin and Manning could make a preliminary survey of the devastating effects of the fire. Balwin’s message back to the Wembley control room gave the initial body count as eight. But what was evident to the experienced fire officers looking at the severity and pattern of burning was that this was no accidental fire. The smell of an accelerant, most likely petrol, was still present at the base of the staircase. The fire was deliberate and Baldwin sent a request for the Brigade photographer to attend the scene and the police to commence their investigations.

The main fire was put out in just under two hours. Crews had used three jets and breathing apparatus. Now as the damping down started the death toll rose to 13 as five more charred bodies were found on the second floor. The total number in the clubs prior to the arson attack was never actually determined but 50 people were recorded as escaping the blaze and 30 of those were treated in hospital for a variety of injuries and some with serious burns. 

No 18 Denmark Place

It soon became difficult for the crews to give Balwin a definitive number of fatalities. The speed of the fire was so rapid that many of the bar patrons died where they were sitting or standing. So firefighters found bodies slumped exactly where they had been when the fireball hit them, some apparently still clutching glasses. Bodies were pilled one on top of another or filling tiny spaces after they had crawled in attempting to escape the horror of the flames. Others had tried to escape by clawing at the walls and windows. Some did break through into the guitar shop behind the club on Denmark Street and used electric guitars to smash through its front window. (It took forensic experts two months to identify all the victims and who came from eight countries.)

Now the daunting task of body recovery began. It was a harrowing assignment for those concerned. Baldwin was later to comment to the Press that he had nothing but praise for the firefighters performing their unenviable job. “It was above and beyond the call of duty and I am proud and privileged to serve with such men.”
  

As Soho’s Green Watch left the scene at 9 a.m. they were replaced by the station’s Red Watch who continued the task of removing the charred bodies, many unrecognisable, from the scarred building. Lowing the bodies to the ground proved problematic too. Despite the firefighters desire to handle the bodies with dignity some body parts fell to the ground whilst another broke in two hitting the round with a sickening thud.

 The charred remains of people trapped in No 18 Denmark Place.

‘Gypsy’ Thompson was arrested nine days later while drinking at a club a short distance from his own crime scene. He was tried at the Old Bailey in May 1981 and charged with just one murder, that of Archibald Campbell, 63. (It was apparently simpler that way.) His trial clashed with the Yorkshire Ripper’s, drawing most reporters to the next-door court. Thompson’s life sentence earned a few column inches. When he died of lung cancer on the anniversary of the fire, in 2008, handcuffed to a hospital bed, nobody noticed.

Footnotes;

More striking than the actual fire was the speed at which it was forgotten. There were headlines the next day, once the bodies had been counted. “If it was arson, it could be the worst mass murder in British history,” The Sunday Times reported on its front page (This was, before Harold Shipman got caught). The Observer quoted a fireman: “I have seen worse fire damage, but I’ve never seen dead bodies packed together like that before.”  Then the coverage fizzled out. 


Look today and online searches reveal only a few mentions. Two or three little-known books devote a passage or two to the mass murders. Although Martin Lloyd-Elliott’s ‘City Ablaze’ give a comprehensive account. Many of the victims’ families still know very little about the fire. Seven years later, when 31 people died in the King’s Cross Underground fire (including Station Officer Colin Townsley GM, from Soho) inquiries, services, documentaries and memorials followed. Princess Diana unveiled a plaque. Yet at Denmark Place there was never any memorial service, there is no plaque! The only commemorative plaque in the area is devoted to the inventor of the diving helmet. Moreover, there was never a public inquiry. The clubs were illegal. There seemed to be few lessons to learn, no institution to blame. This also means there is no official account. The Metropolitan Police’s archive contains only basic facts, which it only releases in response to a Freedom of Information request. 

No 18 Denmark Place was gutted for demolition in 2016. It, like the dreadful fire, to be forgotten.