Being a personal reflection on the importance of anniversaries

 

As anybody who reads my blogs knows, I think that that anniversaries are important.  One piece of feedback I received was to stop ‘banging on about them’.  I value feedback but I reject this suggestion because I have seen that recognising anniversaries can be a strong force for good.  This is true emotionally, but also practically.  They serve as landmarks in the temporal landscape.  They are an aide memoire of the lessons from major events and a benchmark to mark our progress or decline.  They also allow us to respectfully reflect on lives lost and loss endured.  Of course for those with personal connections with disasters anniversaries have a deeper and rawer significance.

From a professional point of view we do well to remember the contributions of our forebears.  Their efforts are no less important than our own.

Today my appointments took me through Moorgate station in the City of London and as always my thoughts turned to the horrors of 28th February 1975.  Next year will see the 50th anniversary of the disaster that killed 43 people when a tube train failed to stop at platform nine.  The platform is now used by national rail services but little has changed, meaning that it is easy to visualise the location as it was in 1975. 

The rescue and investigative response was made difficult by the underground conditions in the dead end tunnel.  The responders from London Transport, the emergency and health services worked with great skill and fortitude for several days.  The recovery staff and investigators toiled for weeks.  Others have written in depth about the disaster.  There are a couple of books and documentaries on the subject and an excellent article by Peter Davis of the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management was published a few years ago.  These provide the detail and the background to the incident.  I expect that next year we will see a large amount of new material in circulation to mark the half century since 1975. 

I was at school when Moorgate happened (for disasters, like battles, location names come to serve a dual purpose).  I remember the sense of shock felt by Londoners and I remember that the BBC cancelled the broadcast of a documentary about the Bethnal Green disaster of 1943.  I was later to work with officers who had responded and I learnt a lot from their descriptions of the enormous challenges they faced.  Much later I had cause to go through the police files, statements, photographs and reports about the incident.  I also read the published material including the report of the official inquiry and the details of the inquest.  The inquest was held by Dr David Paul, a coroner I was to encounter many times in my early career.  He was very thorough but sometimes quite difficult. He was described by a colleague as being ‘old school in a medieval way’.  Neither the investigation by the coroner or that by technical experts could explain why the driver did not stop the train at the terminus.  Reading those papers helped me understand the dynamics at play during major incidents and informed my own professional practice when the time came for me to have command roles during major incidents.

Some of the responder lessons from Moorgate remain relevant.  They include, in no order,:  The importance of planning (the City of London Police and Barts Hospital were both praised for their emergency planning), managing traffic and vehicle attendance, inter agency working including, in this case, London Transport and HM Railway Inspectorate, balancing the various investigatory processes post disaster, establishing and maintaining situational awareness, managing the welfare of responders etc.

I mention the welfare of responders because I am not sure that this is something that we have got right in respect of long term impacts, despite the massive improvements in supporting responders in the first months after an incident.  Just because an incident was a long time ago does not mean that the trauma it caused has passed.  This is true for victims and zero responders as well as the emergency services of course.  For the police I had hoped that the coming of the covenant (the vague and Biblical sounding promise by the government to look after police officers) would provide a mechanism for longer term support for retired officers but there is no sign of this happening.  The memorial to those that lost their lives at Moorgate is rare in that it includes mention of the work of responders. 

28th February is also the anniversary of the crash at Great Heck in 2001 which killed 10 people.  Another incident and another opportunity to learn.  Great Heck occurred during the Foot and Mouth outbreak which added to the complexity of an already difficult scene.  A reminder that more than one bad thing can happen at once.   Both accidents saw good co-operation between the police forces involved and between the police and the other agencies. Great Heck was a reminder of the dangers presented to railways by road vehicles.  It also, for students of such things, well illustrates the civil legal processes that follow the criminal and regulatory inquiries.

In my experience new or potential commanders and investigators can underestimate the complexity and scale of the necessary response to incidents such as Moorgate and Great Heck. Examining past events can help overcome this.  By using anniversaries to refresh our professional knowledge of the case studies provided by the remembered incident we are also honouring those that lost their lives or who were otherwise impacted.

I will take time tomorrow (28th) to read through the names or those who were killed at Moorgate and Great Heck and to remember the work of those that responded.  Remembrance and learning are closely related things.

Philip Trendall

27th February 2024

In memory of those that were killed or had their lives changed by the rail crashes at Moorgate and Great Heck and in thanks to those who responded to these disasters.