More than 40 years after an arsonist killed 37 people in a largely forgotten attack on a nightclub in central London, family members of the victims will gather on Thursday for the unveiling of a memorial plaque.
Until the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, the attack on Denmark Place on the edge of Soho in 1980 remained the deadliest postwar fire in London. Yet the incident slipped into history with little trace, leaving many family members searching for information and recognition.
John Thompson, a career criminal, poured petrol through the letterbox of the premises and threw in a lit match, hours after accusing a barman there of overcharging him. He died of cancer in 2008 while serving a life sentence for murder.
“Up until now there’s been nothing to commemorate the victims,” said Cathie Russell, 63, whose sister Anita Murray was 24 when she died in the fire. “People thought these people were unimportant but they were somebody’s sister, daughter, brother. They belonged somewhere.”
Denmark Place was an alley that ran parallel to Denmark Street, the strip of guitar shops and music studios known as London’s Tin Pan Alley. It has now been subsumed into a £1bn entertainment development called The Outernet, which opened this month.
The new plaque has been installed on the former site of 18 Denmark Place, which in 1980 housed two unlicensed nightclubs above a ground floor store for hotdog trolleys.
Rodo’s, also known as El Dandy, was a salsa club popular with Colombians, many coming off shifts in the hospitality industry. The Spanish Rooms occupied the top floor. More than 150 people were packed into the venues at the time of the fire in the early hours of Saturday 16 August 1980.
Smoke and flames took moments to sweep through the building, which had no emergency exits. Firefighters found some of the victims still clutching their drinks. “I have seen worse fire damage, but I’ve never seen dead bodies packed together like that before,” one firefighter told the Observer the day after the attack.
“If it was arson, it could be the worst mass murder in British history,” the Sunday Times reported.
Some of the coverage appeared to judge the victims, with multiple references to the “seedy” nature of the area at the time. The Daily Mail said drinking dens such as the clubs on Denmark Place appealed “not just to minority groups and tired prostitutes, but all kinds of folk intent on slumming”.
In its report of Thompson’s trial for one murder in May 1981 – that of Archibald Campbell, 63 – the Mail said the arsonist had “felt at ease amongst the pimps, lesbian prostitutes, screeching homosexual queens, hash dealers and drooping addicts” of Soho.
“It hurts me to think these people died and nobody cared about them,” said Paddy Crossin, who went home early on the night of the fire and knew about 17 of the victims. “This was murder. It didn’t matter who they were, nobody deserved to die.”
Janette Reid, 62, had visited the Spanish Rooms in April 1980 with her brother Alex Reid, a 27-year-old teetotal labourer and security guard from Glasgow. “It had a jukebox and a bar and everyone knew one another,” she said. “It was nicer than some of the pubs I’ve been in.”
Janette took the train to London from Glasgow when she heard that Alex, whose wife was expecting their fourth child, was missing after the fire. “His car was sitting outside the club with his jacket in it, and that’s when I knew,” she said.
Reid, who still lives in Glasgow and plans to attend the unveiling of the plaque with Alex’s daughter, Nicola, remembers watching a kind of collective amnesia reduce the fire to a footnote in London’s history. “There were scorch marks on the building but even they faded over the years,” she said.
The unlicensed clubs, which were not uncommon in central London at the time, had been due to be shut down. There was no inquiry into the fire.
In 2015, a newspaper investigation brought the fire to wider attention, prompting the campaign for a plaque. Until then, the incident had only been referenced in a couple of obscure books and blogs. There was no mention of it on Wikipedia.
The article, which included the first published list of the victims’ names, also prompted many relatives to come forward. Some were discovering the circumstances of their loved one’s death for the first time, having been told little by their families, many of whom could not confront their loss.
Alex Reinhard, 43, was 10 months old when his father, Plutarco Alejandro Vargas, died. Vargas, an architecture graduate from Bogotá in Colombia, had met Reinhard’s Swiss mother while they worked at a London hotel in the 1970s.
Vargas was 32 when he returned to London for a stag party before going on to Rodo’s salsa club. “People say he was tall and slim,” Reinhard said of his father. “He liked music and he loved to dance. They said he was a very good dancer.”
Reinhard’s sister, Cristina, said the children grew up wondering if their father had died in an IRA bombing. “It feels so good to know at least something, and to know that we are not alone,” she added.
Until 2015, Pam Hopkins, 72, had no idea that her niece, Diana Coward, who was 18, had died alongside 36 other people. “It was just never really talked about,” she said. “Diana was my brother’s only daughter and it was a very sad time for him and his wife.”
The victims came from eight countries. The wording of the plaque, which has been agreed with some of their families, reads: “In loving memory of the 37 people from multicultural London who died in an arson attack here on 16th August 1980.”
“I think for me it will feel like the final chapter,” said Cathie Russell, who plans to travel to the unveiling with several members of the family. “At least these people are now being recognised. I think that’s important.”
