FT266

The morning of 13 July 1980 was a fresh one, promising a glorious summer Sunday for the annual Hollinwell Show in fields by the small Nottinghamshire mining town of Kirkby-in-Ashfield. The highlight would be a competition involving around 500 children in 11 junior marching bands, for which they had all been practising their music and routines for months. No one could have guessed that this would become, in a policeman’s words, “like a battlefield with bodies everywhere”. Precisely what happened was endlessly and acrimoniously debated in the following weeks by medical and welfare experts, government scientists, local council officials, witnesses, the afflicted and their relatives.