please empty your brain below |
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Stairway to Heaven, mind... ick. |
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According to Wikipedia, 96 people died in the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, and 31 people died in the King's Cross Fire in 1987. These were major disasters, but it's worth remembering that the crush at Bethnal Green tube station in 1943 caused more deaths than these other two disasters put together. I think it's sad that the government, almost 65 years later, is still hesitant to publicise the event. After all, World War II censorship is hardly relevant now. Hopefully, the building of the Stairway to Heaven monument will help remind people of this event and the the many other terrible things that happened in London during the Blitz. Just a question, though. Did they name the monument after the Led Zeppelin song? |
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The story is just so sad. I'm surprised it took this long for people to become aware of it, I don't get it; why would decades of successive governments wish to *not* make people aware of what happened? after all there was a lot to be learned from it. Decades later we *were* learning about tragedies caused by human crushes as Andrewh points out above. |
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As Andrewh says, many other terrible things happened that were hushed up. One such set of statistics was the appalling number of people killed or injured in the UK in road accidents due to the blackout. |
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I don't think it's that surprising that it was not kept in the forefront of the public memory. Even after there was no longer a need for wartime concerns about security for new weapons and about morale, it would have been all too easy to imagine those precise circumstances wouldn't happen again. Today's "health and safety" consciousness is a fairly recent development. (Oh, and the wartime road accident statistics were also not totally hushed up - it was certainly a live and publicly-discussed issue in 1940 - again, just overtaken in salience by events). |
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