The Manchester Woolworths Inferno of 1979 | Episode 70

If you're like me and you would rather burst into flames than go shopping, have we got the story for you? Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll take an unusual look at just how cold and aloof British parenting can be. We'll see how bad psychology can make some people believe that they are practically immortal and fireproof. And we'll see which planet in our solar system has better and more breathable air than was available in today's story, and hint, it's not Earth. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you would also find out where Filipino dictators and Donald Trump fit into New York City's real estate dick measuring contest. You would find out where American rednecks came from. You would hear us dive into the conspiracy surrounding mattress stores on every corner across the US. And we'll take a minute to find out just how much Hitler hated Woolworth's This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that can potentially save your life, our work is done. So all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. As someone who knows what it feels like to struggle financially and entirely, possibly because of my gender, I would rather be hunted as human prey than go shopping. How many teeth would I willingly surrender if it meant never having to visit another mall voluntarily? Well, I don't really know, but a lot of them. Of all the places that I have been haplessly dragged to give away money, few have the power to make me want to pry my fingers under my lower eyelids and yank. Quite like a trip to Ikea. I would rather sit in a hot car full of bees rather than spend hours wandering around that absolute maze of a building with my wife. As soon as I see the endless expanse of parked cars outside, it's like the building itself is telling me not to go in, And I always say I don't want to, but this is not my choice. You ever go to one of these If you haven't, it's this giant retail warehouse with a seven mile footprint where you can pick up an unassembled dresser and a bag of Swedish meatballs at the same time. Sounds great, you say, shopping is such a fun way to relax. You say, what's the worst that could happen at an Ikea? Well, in nineteen eighty three, when Ikea opened its first store in Jetti, Saudi Arabia, the turnout was overwhelming. They are the world's largest furniture manufacturer, with four hundred and seventy three stores worldwide, so when a new one opens, people react. In fact, so many people came to the Jedda opening that when management yelled who wants coupons? Thousands of impatient would be shoppers surged forward, creating a bit of a stampede and a human crush. Three people were killed and sixteen were injured. Seriously, you'd probably think of shopping frenzies as more of an American phenomenon, but it really is not. It's a global phenomenon. People around the world have been punched to death over parking spaces now, Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam. We just visited there pretty recently, and the people are fairly conservative and by choice and by law, do not go in for a lot of shenanigans. Well, Ikea is Swedish, and what better way to play that up than by naming all of its product after random Swedish words. I'm sure that never causes horrible translation issues, which, sarcastically is why I was surprised to find that a deeply religious people would show up en mass to a foreign owned big box store that offers a four poster bed frame called eater Vadge. They also have a pillowcase that translates into English as cuddle rape, and a children's toy that translates in Cantonese into your mother's genitals. I tell you this story because as boring as shopping can be, sometimes it can be dangerous too. You're probably guessing that this episode is going to do a lot more than separate some hardworking people from their hard earned money, and you'd be right. Just wait and word of warning, the store that will be visiting today does not validate parking. However, the local hospitals do so let's get into it. In days of yore, when you went to the store, things worked a lot a little different. One did not simply browse. Browsing was loitering. No, a shopper went to the store prepared with a list of necessities. You didn't stroll around aisles getting wooed by packaging and comparing one thing to another. You went in, you shared your list with a clerk who would go into the back and fetch everything you'd need and bring it up for you. You didn't find yourself getting fleeced by point assail displays of last minute purchasables. Not like today. There is an entire business philosophy called shopper marketing, and it works to optimize your chance to be wooed into emptying your pockets using distance, legibility matrices, and a coordinated assault of consumer touch points. There are even technologies that will track the way that your eyes move over a page in order to help marketers make ads more effective. But back in nineteen seventy nine, they were really just discovering the power of coupons. The retail world was wide open for ideas, and ideas are what made Frank Woolworth a retail super juggernaut. Franklin Winfield Woolworth was born a poor baby with dreams of making it big. He started working sales as a young man and was inspired slash uninspired by the way stores had such lackluster window displays. The idea of window shopping goes all the way back to the seventeen hundreds, when people would just stroll by to admire merchandise. He was a man with a vision for a better customer experience, and he was always thinking there must be a better way, but no one shared his vision. By the age of twenty one, Frank Woolworth cuts the ribbon on a store of his own in Utica, New York, but no one shared his enthusiasm for it, and it died. But instead of giving up, he disguised himself with a mustache and opened a new store in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and it got the same lukewarm welcome. Frank Woolworth just wasn't setting the world on fire with his stores, at least not yet. Frank Woolworth didn't quit. He did not give up. He held the belief that you can learn more from failure than success, and it wasn't until eighteen eighty nine, at thirty seven years of age, when he opened the F. W. Woolworth COO five and ten cent store. And finally people were all shut up and take my money. And if you have any feelings of well it took long enough, well don't. Sam Walton didn't open the first Walmart until he was forty four, and he didn't stop with just one store either. Frank Woolworth opened a second store and it was just as popular, and he bumped that up to twelve stores by eighteen eighty nine. In just two years, sales doubled and doubled and doubled, and within twenty years the F. W. Woolworth Company had five hundred and eighty six looks to choose from. And I'm about to tell you just how successful Frank became. Make sure that you're sitting obviously, I'm fast forwarding here a bit. But by the time he found himself opening a franchise location in Heaven, he was worth seventy six and a half million dollars and that was in nineteen nineteen. When he died in nineteen ninety two, Sam Walton was famously known as the wealthiest man in America, and he was worth eight point six billion dollars Today, that will be worth closer to nineteen billion dollars. However, by that same comparison in today's currency, Frank Woolworth would have been worth almost one hundred and forty billion dollars. And he did it all by wondering if maybe you'd like some socks or a belt to go with your knit cap. Frank had developed a philosophy. He said, I am the world's worst salesman. Therefore I must make it easier for people to buy. And people were there for it. Wolworths took over America with simple five and dime stores. They're basically the dollar store of their day, and they had a different philosophy than other stores. For one, yes, everything cost five or ten cents, but unlike other stores, every item in the store had a price tag confirming it. See up to that point, you went into a store, you found the product you needed, and then you had to haggle. It goes way back before we used currency to pay for everything. Bartering was how we traded, which could get difficult. I mean, how many eggs is a coat worth? You know that kind of math. Now things were much quicker. There was no haggling, and it turns out not everybody loved haggling with store owners of a price to begin with. And today, if a cashier tells you something's ten dollars and you turn around and start negotiating to get it for eight, both the cashier and everyone in line behind you is going to tell you to just die already. And it wasn't just the relative convenience that people loved. Frank Woolworth out how to compete on price because the stores he were opening were often converted warehouses. He figured out that he had the capacity to buy in bulk directly from manufacturers and then store it himself. Discounted both purchases meant he could keep prices low and still make a profit, maybe even a little more profit than his competition. And this also meant he could offer new items almost every week, which kept a constant parade of shopping carts coming through his store every week. People were in love with the novelty and the variety, and he did it without hypnosis, although hypnotizing kits were available on floor three. And Frank Woolworth wasn't one of these blustering tycoons who drank the blood of children to preserve his youth. He believed that you owe it to yourself to try to make as many of your dreams come true as you can. And now that his had, he used his excess wealth to help people. He gave money to schools, he gave money to charities. He even helped save and preserve historic buildings. And on that note, in nineteen thirteen, Frank's company built the Woolworth Building in New York City. It was this Gothic cathedral reaching into the sky and at the time people said it was easily one of the most beautiful buildings ever built. It was also the tallest building in the world, standing at seven hundred and ninety two feet, and he paid for it all in cash. It wasn't enough to simply become the retail king of America. Woolworst had its eye on global expansion, and by nineteen o nine they opened their very first store in the United Kingdom. It was built in a renovated warehouse space in Liverpool, which up till then was really most famous as the starting block for the Beatles. And quick sidebar about the Beatles, there's fifty two weeks in a year, and they spent twelve hundred and seventy eight weeks on the Billboard charts. After pausing briefly for World War One and World War Two, woolworf eventually became a household name. Woolworths expanded rapidly across the UK. Music, flatware, books, meatballs, toys, furniture, so much furniture. There was an entire section Choca Block with stylish furnishings of the age and yeah, we will come back to that Manchester's Woolworth's opened with what was described as a significant amount of fanfare, with fireworks and circus acts and even a full orchestra to entertain and welcome the crowds. When it opened, it was said to be the largest Woolworth's in all of Europe. Picture six floors plus two basement levels, with all of the sales floors connected by escalators. You might be familiar with this kind of layout as a lot of retailers copied and pasted it from Wolworths. There was even a restaurant on the second floor mixed candies, wigs, driving gloves, if you can name it. Woolworths had it in under five years. They had forty four stores of across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. For today's story, we're heading north. If you can't tell, we're going to Manchester, the so called capital of the North. Manchester began as a Roman fort that involved into a medieval town that morphed into the birthplace of human industry. For better or worse. It was the world's first industrialized city. It was the point of origin of an industrial rash that spread across the face of the globe. The world as it existed before the Industrial Revolution is dead, killed and paved over. And Manchester was the bullet wound. I never described anywhere as a bullet wound before, and I don't mean it disrespectfully. I love Manchester. Grown up in the nineties, Manchester was home to most of my favorite music, my favorite brand of beer, and my favorite football club. But before all that, all of human history was irrevocably changed by what began right here. A gurarian farming economies became industrial machine based economies. Goodbye plowshares, hello factories and environmental damage and economic disparities and social upheaval. And add to that, in nineteen twenty eight, they got a Woolworth's, the fourth in the country. The Manchester location opened up at the corner of Piccadilly and Oldham Street and was very close to a Marx and Spencer's, which was a real shot across the bow for the time see Marx and Spencer's or Marks and Sparks, or just Marx, as people called it was a beloved British shopping institution. Think of it the way Americans love Walmart, but with more reverence and pride. Marx was basically Woolworth's one hundred and forty years ago, and now this rude American upstart came to town just to cause it grief. See the nineteen twenties weren't like today, where you can find a dollar store or a mattress shop competing on every corner of the same intersection. Back in the nineteen twenties, setting up your lemonade stand across the street from a previously existing lemonade stand was considered the height of rudeness, but Woolworths just kind of went for it. It's always been easier to apologize after than ask permission before doing something crappy, and the result of being this close meant that customers ended up visiting both stores and ended up kind of embracing Woolworth's as much as Marx and Spencer. They ended up calling it Wooli's. And on this day Catherine mcgwyn and her daughter found themselves at Wooli's. They were dining in the cafe and enjoying some light music piped in from overhead. The cafe sat just across from the furniture department. Now, the following interaction I'm about to describe may not make sense to you if you've not spend a lot of time around an older generation of British parents. They are known to be standoffish and aloof when it comes to the emotional needs of their kids. They seemed to have no developed concept for emotional intelligence or warmth. My wife was raised this way and I can attest they can give Reptilian parents a real run for their money. It was just after one pm and Catherine was telling her daughter all the ways that she had been a terrible disappointment growing up, again, something my wife experiences weekly. And this went on unbroken until someone came in and shouted fire. Her daughter was perfectly happy for the interruption, but her mom did not respond. She gave no acknowledgment at all. So her daughter tried to remind her, you know, fire, but that only earned her a scolding for being silly. Again. They carried on eating while panic erupted around them, you know, stiff up her lip kind of stuff or whatever. And minutes later another girl ran into the cafe, only this one shouted fire, get the off, go out at the absolute top of her lungs. Now to this, her daughter thought, surely this is the end of lunch, surely we can go now. But missus mc gwinn was not to be questioned. She said, oh, bother some one will simply get a fire extinguisher and put it out, and got back to her food. I should point out that dark, billowing smoke was gushing out of the furniture department directly behind them. Yes, this is all happening very quickly. Woolwurst was very much on fire. Welcome to the episode. Outside the restaurant, a passing taxi saw flames pouring out of an upper story window and called it in to his dispatcher, who told the emergency services, who told the fire brigade, who told everyone to get out of their way because here they come. And what I am about to tell you will probably never happen again in the history of this show. From the time of the call to the time that fire and rescue services pulled up to the scene was less than two minutes, one minute and fifty seconds. That is an Olympic record response time. We'll never see the likes of again. But as fast as that is, or was by the time they pulled up. If I had to pick a word to describe the scene, it's gonna be chaotic. First, rescue vehicles had to push through and move all the gaulk blockers off the road. Now, imagine pulling up and a woman runs screaming out of the store with flames chasing or as she went. Her scarf was on fire and she ran directly through the crowd. It was more than chaotic, it was frightening. Woolworths was a large, white, six story building that rounded the corner of Piccadelli and Oldham Street. Literally, its white facade was covered in windows that stretched down the block in either direction, with a tall red banner above the first floor shouting its name for all to see. And now flames and smoke were pouring from the second story windows. Fire crew saw people waving frantically from different floors, which should be no worries. They just pop up a ladder and wait, what's this? The windows were barred. In a previous life, the building basically existed as a mixed use warehouse with office space, which made it perfect for a giant retail operation. It was, but the windows had these thick iron security bars to stop theft. And any time I say that, it's never long before I end up telling you that emergency exits were also chained up or something. Well, we'll see fire crews armed with axes and crowbars struggled frantically with all their might to free those trapped inside. But the bars appeared to be made part of the building, so they had to wait while proper cutting equipment was brought in. And believe me when I tell you they would have rather struggled against the bars with their teeth than sit there trying to calmly reassure the people that the tools they so desperately needed would be there any minute now. Customers and staff were even seen gathering on the roof, screaming and waving desperately for help. And I should mention this whole thing happened live on air. See here's a thing. BBC Radio was located right next door, and the BBC and Granada TV studios were also really close by, and what they saw was described as shocking. Because Wolworth sold everything you can imagine. Everything you can imagine was on fire. Eyewitnesses described the sounds of things like paint cans exploding like gunfire from within, yet somehow, still in a cafe, Missus mcgwinn was perusing the dessert menu. The fire had begun in the furniture department right behind or kind of beside, the restaurant on the second floor, and the sight of it sent shoppers and staff running for the exits. It was clear that the staff had not been trained on how to act during an inferno, and the mcgwinns had seen groups of panic shoppers running for the exits a little more sparsely now that the building was actively evacuating. Still, she dismissed them as hooligans and ignored them, but her daughter was adamant. She was pressuring her pretty hard. Just please simply turn your head ever so slightly and allow for one small glance towards the furniture department, And when she finally relented, what she saw would or should have scared her senseless. The thickest, blackest smoke you can imagine was rolling and moving in buldous waves across the ceiling. A lot of staff members were working in offices and stock rooms at the time, and they couldn't see, smell, or hear what was going on. I mean, alarms were ringing out, but they seemed to only be on the main floor, which is weird because somehow this five alarm blaze that stopped traffic dead outside remained the best kept secret. Actually at Woolworth's, rescuers ordered a thorough search of the building. Some inside found it impossible to find an exit through the thick black smoke, and rescuers found it impossible to find the customers for the same reason. The fire we gave blasted water into the store, and there seemed to be no kind of sprinkler system inside to help. Now imagine crawling for an exit from a burning building under a poison blanket and all that stress. And I don't think I've ever mentioned this before, but if you get enough fire together in one place, it gets loud, so you're having the worst day of your life, but you find an exit hooray, but it's been locked in an attempt to stop shoplifting. The biggest corporately owned grocery store in my area recently put up waist high fencing across the front of the store for the same reason. And yeah, you make apples twenty five dollars, people are going to steal, I'm just saying. And at first people just hurdled over it or climbed through it, so they added plexiglass sheeting to make it harder. Well, today there's a plexiglass wall dividing the store into two areas. We don't trust you zone around the carts and parking lot, and we really don't trust you shopping area inside the store. And my point of this is that it's twenty twenty four and they did all this without a single thought to what would happen during a fire. Woolworth, some of the fire exits had been blocked and others had just been decorated over to make them less obvious, because a lack of fire safety sometimes is an aesthetic choice. Fire crews brought in cherry pickers to rescue people from the roof, but with only room for five people at a time, so it was a painfully slow process. They started with about fifty people on the roof and they could only pull off five at a time, and the fire fighters returning after each rescue, the crowd on the roof shrank. People left. Every time they returned, the roof saw lesson less people if it really got to them. They tried to assure the people that the fire was not going to break through the roof, but some people didn't want to risk it, and they actually re entered the building to look for a different way out. And of those fifty people, only thirteen were pulled from the roof that day. Fire services fought for two and a half hours to bring the fire under control, and by the time the flames were extinguished, ten people had lost their lives, nine customers and one employee. Thirty people were rescued and forty seven were taken to hospital, including six fire fighters. Among the dead was a man named Cyril Baldwin who had been a warths employee but who had also been an auxiliary fireman during the Second World War, and on this day he died helping customers escape. So what happened, Remember how we said that Frank Woolworth became overwhelmingly rich by increasing margins on products through bulk discounting. Well, this meant that not only did his shops require a lot of floor space for displaying items, it also meant that they needed a whole lot of storage space to prevent stock issues. No one wants to hear that something is on back order. It's actually the entire reason that when Target came to Canada, it died. Two years later, the entire billion dollar enterprise collapsed because of stock issues. In the aftermath of the disaster, an investigation was launched which concluded that a damaged electrical cable had ignited a piece of furniture in a section of the store that had been used for storage. It was on the second floor against the external wall facing Piccadilly, and the whole area had been cut off from prying eyes, with rows of bedroom wardrobes and dressers all stacked together. There were pullout sofas, love seats, beds, mattresses, chairs of every description, and most of it was stacked vertically and for reasons of the age. The softer furniture, you know, the kind of stuff you sleep or sit on, was full of polyurethane foam. Polyurethane was brand new. It was a space age material. Back then. It was soft and durable and cheap, and it was adopted everywhere. Manufacturers loved its strength, and it was also low weight and low cost, and consumers were absolutely in love with its visco elasticity. It's what visco elasticity. It's the term that they made up to describe how quickly the foamer terms back to its original shape after you compress it. It was all good, except for the part where no one understood just exactly how dangerous it could be. In the modern age, if you wanted to create an ottoman, you would. We need to have it tested for toxicity, inflammability, and explosivity, all kinds of things. It is crucial to know just how much danger something like that presents to your home. People want to know just how ugly it can get and how fast it can get there. And we're not talking about some obscure ocean submersible or some seven thousand pounds solid steel suv here. What we now know quite clearly is that polyurethane, once ignited, burns fast. It produces a ton of heat and dense toxic smoke. It actually answers the question what is the most dangerous thing that I can bring into my home. Investigators believe that the fire started from a faulty extension cord being used to supply power to the display lights on the wardrobes and the dressing units hiding the storage section, and the result with smoke thick enough to obscure the exit signs. And that's actually another thing about smoke that people don't realize. It gets hot. Smoke's actually made out of time deconstructed particles of whatever it came from, and if it gets hot enough, it can actually ignite and flash over. If you had to choose between shopping at Woolworth's this afternoon and say, hyperventilating in a room full of pepper spray, I would recommend the pepper spray parlor. There are so many toxins released by the burning of these materials that you would have just as much luck trying to breathe on Jupiter. And it wasn't just that. For one, stored furniture was wrapped in highly flammable polyethylene. I mean, it's not what it's called. It's plastic wrap, and they used it to protect the furniture and just keep it dust free. And like everything else in the store. Once burned, it became its own life threatening irritant. Flames were first visible behind the rows of wardrobes and dressers and units like we described, and within a few moments they had reached the ceiling and the rest of the stock and display units went up in flames, and temperatures quickly passed seven hundred degrees or thirteen hundred fahrenheit. That is as hot as a commercial oven, and theoretically, at those temperatures, the nerve endings on your skin would be destroyed and you would no longer be feeling any pain. Panic, yeah, absolutely, but just no physical sensation. And the same goes for your precious lung tissues. The store quickly became an inferno, and by two minutes into it, smoke had reached from the ceiling all the way down to nostril height. The entire second floor and restaurant were overcome with it, including nine diners who didn't like the tone of those telling them that they were going to die. This disaster would become an actual area of study for academics interested in the bizarre behavior of people in emergency situations. While most beat feet at the first sign of danger, let's call them survivors. A percentage of customers refused to leave. Imagine being such a contrarian that you would choose to remain inside a burnie building, despite the sound of alarms and screaming staff, and even the smell and sight of smoke. You deliberately reject the popular opinion no matter what. Well, there's a new old saying on this show, obstinate people get closed casket funerals. Some shoppers even stood there at the checkout even though they could see the cashiers were outside of the store, standing by fire trucks, wrapped in rescue blankets, sucking on oxygen tanks while trying to calm their nerves. The second floor was completely gutted by the fire, and the third floor was pretty well destroyed by the resulting smoke damage, and of course all the floors were pretty well destroyed by the water damage. I always wonder that whether the cause or the cure is worse when it comes to fire fighting. The deceased were all found collapsed and very close to one of the fire escape staircases. Three people had been found just six feet away from safety, with another three bodies very close by. They were all overcome before they could complete their escape. And here's a pro tip, don't dawdle in fact. Okay, so you're having lunch at this restaurant and it burst into flames, including all the take home boxes, and you're not done with your food yet, would you know what to do? Well, if you come across fire or smoke in any kind of business, you want to do the whole see something, say something thing, pull the nearest fire alarm, and make yourself the hero by saving everyone in the building. You're going to want to call nine one one or nine nine nine, I should say, in this case, to get the fire services rolling as quickly as possible. And yeah, they're going to have questions about if anyone is trapped or missing, and about the fire's location or any potential hazards inside the building. But if you're still sitting in a building answering questions, do not feel obliged to sit there doing a whole survey. Your job is to get out of there. Anything you can tell them can save time and lives, but not at the risk of your own. Now of experiencing a fire in a business or a public building is that they're obliged to have an emergency evacuation plan, and this is usually in the form of fire exits, so use the nearest one and help others to do the same. Again, as long as it's safe to do so. I don't need you to be heroic. I just need you to be a little brave and don't use the elevators. I promise you will not be brave if you get stuck in an elevator during a building fire. If you were trapped in an elevator during the fire, all elevators should have some kind of communication device, so use the emergency phone or whatever to let building staff or rescuers know how many people are trapped. And then you're going to need to designate one corner of the elevator for defecation because it's going to be that scary for everyone not in the elevator who's leaving the building. It helps to close doors behind you as you leave. This helps contain fire and it also reduces the spread of smoke. You need to stay low to the ground where the air is as clear as it's going to get. Just drop your crap and crawl away if necessary. And once you're outside, it's actually good to go to whatever predetermined meeting area they might have set up so that they can do a head count. The idea is, you don't want anyone unnecessarily risking their lives to try to find you just because they think you're still inside. If you inhaled this wisdom, that is good, and I'm glad to still have you. But if you inhaled smoke while you're in there, you want to tell a paramedic because that is not good for you. And if you're with someone so obstinate that they are not ready to leave, just tell them there's going to be a fire sale after this, which they can only attend if they survive. The investigation uncovered issues. On top of issues, the store had no sprinklers, despite its size, which meant that until the fire crews arrived, no real effort could have been made to extinguish the flames. And why not two no, three reasons. First, nowhere in that safety segment did I tell you to fight fire with your bare hands. No, you need to get some flames out of your face. You want a fire extinguisher, and Woolworths carries them, but they weren't readily available the way that you would think they were exploding on a shelf somewhere instead of hanging on the walls. Second, the fire alarm did not sound across the whole building, so many people didn't even know there was a problem. And Third, even if they had, the staff had no fire training and probably would have died from trying. On top of that, exits had been locked or disguised or both. Staff didn't even know that they were supposed to call the fire brigade, and they didn't. Of the twelve calls made to the fire services that day, not one came from the store itself. The only reason this wasn't a much, much worse disaster was because of that Cabby, and we owe him a huge debt of gratitude, but we don't even know his name. The need and weight for cutting equipment was an unexpected waste of valuable time. It's almost like no one learned any lessons at all from the last fire. The what oh, yeah, this was not the first time a Woolworth store had caught fire. In nineteen seventy three, just six years earlier, a fire ripped through their Colchester location. Colchester. Well, yeah, this is the first major city and capital of England and you've never even heard of it. Well, it's okay again. It was the same thing. There was no sprinkler system, and they found themselves with customers who refused to evacuate until they had finished whatever they were eating. The similarities were I was going to say striking, but I really mean astonishing, And instead of holding an all staff meeting to discuss what had happened, they got themselves a fat insurance payout check and took over a bigger and more modern building and they never looked back. The media coverage, on the other hand, was less forgetful or forgiving. Their bullet points included an utter failure of management, a poor building with feeble precautions and untrained staff. They built up a narrative where management basically hurdled over customers bodies to escape the heat and flames, and just days before Woolworths and Manchester caught fire, a man named Mike Fordham became the first national Health and Safety official in the UK. The Manchester disaster would be his office's first debut to the public. And do you think this guy took his job seriously? Well, you tell me. In nineteen sixty eight, Fordham was only eighteen years old. He was a junior firefighter, and on Christmas Day he found himself at a house fire where five children had died. A piece of gift rap had caught fire, which ignited their sofa, which was full of polyurethane, which went up in flames and suffocated everyone. And it was young Fordham's job to carry the children's bodies from the home. So yeah for him, his reasons for wanting flammable and toxic foam products removed from furniture were deeply personal and traumatic. Have to binge the entire back catalog of the show to see how politics, sometimes, well most times, gets in the way of reform and change, and in this case, the disaster took place on May eighth, nineteen seventy nine. Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of England on May the fourth. She is not remembered as the warmest woman in the world. She came across as the product of emotionless British parenting. Anyway. Among the many things that the new Tory government didn't care about was safety. Their party had been ideologically committed to cutting red tape and removing burdens on business, not adding to them, and well, safety is a burden, and accountability is a burden also. Of the many lobbying groups that the government was in the pocket of, the furniture industry was one of them. It took nearly nine years after the wools fire and the deaths of seventeen more children killed by burning furniture for the government to finally act. Under the new regulations, all furniture would come with mandatory warning labels about their flammability and would ideally ignite less easily and earn slower. This move has easily saved thousands of lives over the years. But it wasn't just all safety lessons and legislative changes. The fire led to changes at Woolworth's itself. And I mean you're ready for me to tell you how everyone was fired and the company went all to hell. Well, yes, people were fired over this, but the company did something incredible. Watch this. First things first, across the UK, Woolworst became the home to some of the greatest state of the art sprinkler systems in the world. Staff were trained for multiple fire scenarios and managers worked to promote the use of smoke detectors. Actually, I want to elaborate on that Wolworst became one of the most enthusiastic outlets for smoke detector safety across the UK. Store managers worked hand in hand with fire brigades across the country to promote the devices. They'd only been created back in nineteen sixty five, but they still hadn't become widely adopted yet, and funnily enough, they had been invented purely by accident. In the late nineteen thirties, a Swiss physicist named Walter Yegger was attempting to create a poison gas detector, but he discovered by accident that cigarette smoke could set it off. And take from that what you will about cigarettes. So Woolworth used Frank's strategy and was able to slash the prices of smoke detectors by more than half to encourage people to buy them, and by doing that they dragged or shamed or forced their competitors to follow suit. So in reality, this terrible disaster became a pivotal moment in British safety history, between the foam legislation and Woolworth's fire safety blitz. There is no way to say just how many lives have been saved, certainly more than the ten lost that day in Manchester and if anyone listening wants an autographs detector, just let me know. After the death of Frank Woolworth, the company continued as a retail powerhouse, and in time they restructured, like all companies do. They decided, rather than being one superstore that carries everything, they should diversify into all kinds of specialty store concepts like Footlocker. For example. They also launched a discount store chain called Wolco maybe you heard of that one. Over time, these offshoots became more profitable than the regional chain and it sank. In nineteen ninety seven, the company changed its name to Venitor, and then two years later it officially became Footlocker Incorporated. In its time, Woolworth changed the way people shopped, and even with it dead and gone, Frank Woolworth's ideas still shape how we shop today. People will tell you that the story of Frank Woolworth is a reminder that with determination, dreams can come true. But I will tell you that I think lesson here is to check your smoke detector batteries. Frank Woolworth made shopping simple and affordable and ironically safer. The Manchester Wolworsts inferno of nineteen seventy nine made it safer for all of us, even though at the time the inferno was the deadliest fire related tragedy in the UK since World War Two. Oh and, two years after the Manchester disaster, the woolworst at Wimbledon burned down. Remember me talking about Mike Fordham, who fought so hard to improve fire safety. Well he's another one who doesn't get the credit he deserves after a lifetime of campaign. Who Well, fast forward to June of twenty seventeen and poor Mike found himself watching as flames shot off the sides of Grenville Tower, a twenty four story apartment building in West London. He was disgusted that, after all his work getting this stuff banded from insides of buildings, they had started using it on the outside of buildings. Seventy two people died at Grenville, showing that even after you think you've won, you can never relax your guard. Oh and I never got to finish up my thought on how much I hate shopping. I did some research and get this men when specifically pulled on their least favorite thing to shop for furniture. How crazy is that also related, check your smoke detectors. If you were a regular listener, why not consider becoming a supporter. It really helped me fulfill my dream of doing this full time, and if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really be helping keep the show and frankly me alive. Before I tell you about Patreon, if you are into it but aren't looking for a whole relationship, you can visit buy me a copy dot com slash doomsday to make a one time donation, and those of you who do, I appreciate you from a deep place. I think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material is worth it, and if you agree, you can find out more at Patreon, dot com, slash few, Naroka Zoo. I like to offer a quick but heartfelt shout out to Rain Woodcock, Lacrisia Wynn, James Kwood, Christopher eleanor, Myron Wall, Alexander Hubble, and Chatto Latte for helping support me on Patreon. You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can fire me an email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. I love hearing from you, and I'm really slow to respond, but I have been caught up as far as I know, and I'm proud and happy to say that older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank my Patreon listeners, new and old for their support and encouragement. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, I ask you to consider I'm making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot ca. On the next episode, are you the kind of person who gets a little chuckle when an expert gets knocked down a peg or two, Well, a whole bunch of experts are going to get their pegs blown off and set on fire. In the next episode, it's the Galerous volcanic disaster of nineteen ninety three. We'll talk soon. Save Yogagos off and thanks for listening.