11 Dead In Big Liverpool Fire

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29239, 24 June 1960, Page 13

11 Dead In Big Liverpool Fire

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

(Rec. 10 p.m.) LONDON, June 23. Firemen early today were searching the smouldering wreckage of a big Liverpool department store after yesterday’s blaze in which 11 people are known to have died and nine others were injured. They feared that they might find more bodies. A senior fire officer said it might be a week before they could say if there were more.

All but one of the dead, a woman, were named by the police last night. They included the store’s assistant manager, staff manager and the superintendent and the assistant manageress of the restaurant

The fire. Liverpool’s worst blaze since the war, spread across the street to a music shop and also set roof timber in an adjoining news theatre alight Today. Church street —the centre of the city’s shopping area—was closed to traffic.

The dead—eight women and three men—were so badly burned that they had to be identified by rings, jewellery and charred papers they were carrying AU but one were on the building's top storey, where the restaurant was situated.

The exception was Colin Murphy, a heating engineer, who was killed when he fell more than 40 feet from a parapet on the fourth floor after helping five members of the staff to escape

His death was described by Mr John Moore, a 25-year-old advertising representative making a business call opposite the store:— “Murphy helped five girls through a window and then climbed a ledge on to a flat roof next door. He got hold of a ledge to save himself, but part of it fell. He swung himself over and hung on with his finger tips. “Before a fire escape reached him he fell 40 feet, hit a glass canopy and bounced on to the road way. “It was the bravest thing I have ever seen.”

At the height of the blaze two men and two women formed a human chain on an 18-in ledge on the fourth storey, and edged their way 50 feet to a turntable ladder to safety. One of them, Caro Parry, a 15-year-old cashier of the restaurant. said: “I was in the cafe with 8 lot of customers when smoke Poured in. Some of the elderly women hurried downstairs when the cry of fire was raised 1 went to collect my cash, then found the staircase blocked by smoke.

‘I saw a man in a boiler suit 'Murphy) fall to the street below I also saw a number of other girls at windows, but they appear to have been driven back by dense

smoke 1 hope I never have to face a similar nightmare." It was only after a four-hour brttle against a raging inferno that firemen, wearing breathing masks, were able to force their way into the store. The fire, in Henderson’s department store. Church street, owned by Harrods, a London combine, was the biggest blaze in Liverpool since the war. Nearby buildings were endangered as giant flames shot from the engulfed building. Three hundred shop assistants and hundreds of lunch-time shoppers escaped the blaze before it engulfed the building. Many people were overcome by th° thick smoke and others were cut by glass from bursting windows or other debris.