Did The IRA Burn Down Hyde Road's Main Stand?
My new book will be published on 26 October. I hope it will answer all your questions about the club’s formation and early growth, as well as more recent mysteries such as why Steve Coppell and Kevin Keegan quit.
It will also answer questions not commonly asked, such as the one in the above headline.
At around 11.20pm on 6 November 1920, Hyde Road’s main stand caught fire. Built in 1900 out of wood with steel supports for the roof, the 2,500-capacity stand was ablaze from end to end by the time the fire brigade arrived. Within an hour it had fallen in on itself, taking with it all of the club’s books and ledgers that were kept in the stand’s offices.
Many locals appeared to treat the blaze as a giant bonfire, coming a day after Guy Fawkes Night. According to the Liverpool Daily Post,
'The heat was so great that thousands of people who watched the spectacle from the terraces on the popular side had to move away.'
The fire had long-lasting consequences for the club. As well as hastening their 16-year search for a new ground, the destruction of shareholder records would play an important role in the takeover battle of the early 1970s.
It was officially attributed to a discarded cigarette or cigar. But according to historian Gerard Shannon, who in 2014 published a book on the Irish Republican Army in Britain during the 1920s, it was claimed to have been the work of the IRA.
Searching through releases from the Irish Military Archives, Shannon came across a testimony from a former IRA Volunteer, Thomas Morgan. In 1939 he had applied for a pension under a scheme designed to recognise military service during the campaign for Irish independence.
In a sworn statement, Morgan claimed that one of the services he performed was the torching of the Hyde Road stand. He provided little detail about how the operation was planned and executed, but his involvement in the attack was relayed to his pension assessors on more than one occasion. In an initial question and answer exchange with the Irish pension authorities, he remarked that
‘...me and Harding and about six men...took part in the burning of the Hyde Road football grounds.’
In a later written testimony detailing his service he wrote,
‘Hqrs (sic) of Manchester City Football. We decided we would burn the stands. They were preparing for a big match.’
The ‘Harding’ referenced here was Charles Vincent Harding, who made no mention of the Manchester City attack in his own pension application. However, he did refer to his involvement in other IRA activity in Manchester at the time. This included a planned attack on Manchester Race Course in November 1920, an actual attack—and arms raid—on a golf links the follow month and the burning of a warehouse during which a police constable was shot in January 1921.
The visit to Hyde Road of King George V in March 1920—the first time a reigning monarch had attended a football match outside London—would certainly have made the ground a target, as would the club’s ties with the hated politician “Bloody” Balfour in the late 19th century. An IRA arson attack was certainly attempted at Old Trafford on 22 March 1921, the night before an FA Cup semi-final was due to be played there. The police officer who foiled it was shot.
However, the date of the Hyde Road fire seems a little early. For most of 1920, the 100 or so IRA volunteers in Manchester focused on providing practical assistance to the campaign back in Ireland, such as fundraising, acquisition of arms and ammunition, and dissemination of propaganda. But operations escalated in the aftermath of Dublin’s Bloody Sunday on 21 November, beginning with up to 18 separate arson attacks in the cotton warehouses and timber yards of the dock areas of Liverpool on 27 November.
So Morgan's story doesn't really add up. But if the IRA didn't do it, who was responsible?
It is possible that it was the work of arsonists who didn’t have a political motive. Historically, arson attacks do tend to increase around Bonfire Night (5 November for our non-British readers).
But there’s no good reason to discount the official explanation that it had been started by a discarded cigarette or cigar.
There was a reserve match at Hyde Road earlier on the day of the fire. But as fires of this nature, such as the Bradford Stadium fire, typically take hold in a very short space of time, the idea that a cigarette or cigar could smoulder for hours after it was discarded seems unlikely.
More likely was that someone was working late in an office located in the stand and failed to extinguish their cigarette or cigar properly. Maybe they tipped the contents of an ashtray into a waste basket before heading off home?
City's manager at the time was Ernest Magnall. Now, I'm not making accusations, but in every team photo I've seen that features Magnall, he's holding a lit cigar.
So did City's manager accidentally burn down his club's main stand? Perhaps the answer to that question is best left in the ashes of history.
—A detailed account on the IRA’s activities in Manchester in the early 1920s, including their attack on Old Trafford, can be found here.
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