At first, Liz Haigh-Reeve thought the driver of the rollercoaster was messing around, trying to give the children a bit of a scare. It was her 15th birthday, 30 May 1972, and she and her friend Alison Comerford were at the funfair in Battersea park in London. They had been on the Big Dipper once already – the wooden rollercoaster that was the main attraction, opened more than 20 years before – and had loved it so much they asked if they could stay on and go around again. Sitting in a carriage near the back, they were hauled up a steep incline by a rope, the wooden struts clacking beneath. They were expecting to tip over the brow and whoosh along the track. Instead, as they reached the top, Haigh-Reeve felt the train start to roll backwards. That’s when she thought the driver was doing it as a joke, but other children on the ride were panicking. Later, they would find out the rope had snapped.
It took seconds for the train to hurtle back down, “but it felt a long time,” she says, “and I had this logical thought process that we’re just going to swing up the hill behind us, and back again, and eventually come to a stop. By the time I thought all that, we’d crashed through the bottom of it and I was buried in debris.”
Alison was unharmed and pulled herself up, out of the car, and started to drag debris off Haigh-Reeve. There was a narrow wooden walkway along the side of the track, and when Alison stepped on it, it collapsed; Haigh-Reeve thinks she fell about 30ft (9 metres). She remembers she was in extreme pain – in hospital, she would find out that she had broken her left arm and dislocated her shoulder – “but somehow I managed to climb down and got to Alison”. She was worried that people would try to move her friend, and thought that would be a bad idea. Then a couple of people who worked for the fairground “got hold of me, one each side and said: ‘We’re taking you to first aid.’ They sort of frogmarched me away from her.”
By now, she says, “there was chaos, lots of screaming. Parents had been watching their children on the ride, so they were obviously panicking. After a few minutes, I could hear sirens.” She managed to run back to Alison, who was still unconscious. “By the time I got there, she’d been moved. She was on the grass, and I was worried that had caused her worse injury.” She remembers looking back up at the rollercoaster and seeing two little girls in a car above, “who I thought were both dead, and somebody trying to climb to them”. She stayed with Alison until the ambulances came, and they went in one together to a hospital in nearby Fulham.
The friends had been in London to celebrate Haigh-Reeve’s birthday – the first time they were allowed to spend a day in the city together without their parents. They had travelled from Cookham, a village in Berkshire, and had spent the day shopping, then headed to Battersea park. They had known each other for years – Alison’s parents ran the village shop, and so knew everybody. Alison was “really full of life and so much fun,” Haigh-Reeve remembers. “Very beautiful.” She was a talented artist and on the day of the accident, when Haigh-Reeve went to her house to collect her, Alison had been hand-painting some of the new plain tiles in her kitchen. Haigh-Reeve remembers them laughing at the suggestive look of an unfinished carrot. She laughs now. “We were in peals of laughter. She wasn’t somebody who was in any way serious – she had really got a sense of fun.”
Five children lost their lives because of the disaster, and many more were injured. At the hospital, Haigh-Reeve remembers ambulances turning up with children. “I was triaged, and someone said: ‘She’s got to be fixed, but it’s not urgent.’” The following day, she had surgery on her arm and was home soon afterwards.
Alison remained in hospital, but seemed to be getting better. The village was rallying round her parents. A church service was packed with people who rarely went, praying for her recovery. “I think everyone wanted to do something,” says Haigh-Reeve. Her family weren’t particularly religious, but the curate had been in touch and offered to drive her to London to see Alison, a couple of weeks after the disaster. “When we got there, she’d taken a turn for the worse and they said I couldn’t see her. She died some days later.”
She had been dealing, she says, “with a whole raft of emotions – shock and hope [that Alison was getting better] and then devastation and grief, and they’re all emotions that 15-year-olds haven’t been given the tools to cope with”. At another church service, Alison’s family walked in, carrying a cushion with a box on it; Haigh-Reeve suddenly realised it was Alison’s ashes, and that the service was an interment. “I was so shocked. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess that was kind of another trauma.”
For the next few months, there were a lot of practicalities to deal with. There was a court case to prepare for – a report had identified more than 50 faults on the ride and two men were prosecuted – and dealing with physical injuries. Her broken arm was treated, but not her mental health. “I just got on with it,” says Haigh-Reeve, but she was struggling. “I had a very good GP who would say: ‘Come for the last appointment of the day’, and he would chat to me, not specifically about the accident. The only thing that they did in those days was they stuck you on Valium, and so I took them for years without really thinking about it.”
Haigh-Reeve felt so guilty – that the day in London had been her birthday treat, that she had survived and her friend hadn’t. “Alison’s parents were phenomenally kind, which made it harder in a way. I think I wanted someone to say: ‘It was all your fault.’” She remembers the day she had the cast taken off her arm; she burst excitedly into the hairdresser’s, where her mother was, only to notice Alison’s mum sitting next to her. “She was so pleased for me, but I felt so terrible.” She smiles, sadly. “I can still feel that feeling now as I talk about it.”
Every time she laughed at something, “I’d find myself saying to myself: ‘It’s terrible that you can be like this when your friend has died.’ I think it made me a much more serious person. I don’t often give myself the permission – it’s not a totally conscious thing – to completely let go, and I think that’s been in me since I was 15.”
That birthday was the day she felt she grew up. The following year she met her first husband, and they were married two days after she turned 17. Looking back, she says, “it was a reaction to thinking: ‘I need to get out, I need to not keep bumping into people who talked to me about the accident.’”
Does she feel sad not to have had a carefree teenage life? “It wouldn’t have felt right to go off and do all the things that other people do as teenagers, where you’re allowed to be ultimately selfish for a few years before real life kicks in. I’m sad that I didn’t have that, but I wouldn’t have felt right doing that. I did become quite a serious person.” What she regrets most is stopping things she had previously enjoyed, such as the drama club she was part of.
She and her husband moved to Kent, and had two children not long afterwards; she set up an events company, then moved into charity fundraising. Now 67, Haigh-Reeve has struggled with anxiety ever since the disaster. “I try and manage it, but there are times when it’s really not great,” she says. She tried not to be an over-anxious mother, she says, aware of worrying her children, but even now that they are grown up, when she hears about a car accident on a local radio traffic report, she rings to check they weren’t involved.
The sense of survivor’s guilt has been present since that day, “which you can’t do much about, other than have therapy and have somebody tell you that it’s not your fault, it’s just a set of circumstances. You hear that, and it hopefully improves how you’re feeling, but it’s never fully gone.” It has given her the feeling that she can’t waste time, which can be helpful, but also comes with pressure. “I’ve always been someone who likes to have a full diary. Now I’m allowing myself a bit more time to enjoy a walk or something, but I suppose there’s had to be a purpose to everything.”
It might have made things difficult for her family at times. “I’m not very laid-back. As a mum, I wasn’t going to let my children not make an effort in whatever they were doing. I think that that comes from [the disaster] – you are lucky because you are alive and other people have terrible things to contend with, or don’t even make it to being 16, so you’ve got to do the best. I expect a lot of myself and a lot of the people I love.” It was fundamental, she says, in the breakdown of her first marriage after 20 years. “It’s that realisation that you do have to be responsible for your own life. You need to sometimes actually take stock and say: ‘Am I happy?’ I owed it to myself and the fact that I’d survived, and that Alison hadn’t, to make sure that I was living a life to the full.”
On the 50th anniversary of the disaster, in 2022, Haigh-Reeve went back to Battersea park to attend the planting of a tree to commemorate those who had died – there had been no other acknowledgment of the disaster at the site. She and her husband, Scott – they met in 2002, and run a fundraising consultancy together – went the day before to walk in the park because she didn’t want to break down on the anniversary. “I did cry and I did shake. I walked down the steps and my stomach flipped, and you feel just a bit overwhelmed with it all.”
She had already met other survivors, and says that was helpful; one, Mark, “his story mirrored mine. He survived and his friend died.” On the day of the anniversary, she met more, including one of the two girls she remembers looking up at on the rollercoaster, thinking they were dead. She survived, although her injuries were life-changing, while her sister had died.
The year after the tragedy, the ride’s manager and engineer were tried for manslaughter, but acquitted. Haigh-Reeve was at the Old Bailey with her father. “They stood on the steps of the Old Bailey and there were a lot of press, and they were jubilant. My father was furious; so were the other parents there. What I felt was an overwhelming sense of justice not being done.” When she looks at photos, she can’t believe how rickety the Big Dipper looks. “That fairground ride was not safe and shouldn’t have been allowed to operate, and there were a lot of grownups – people in the council, people at the fair, people who owned it, people who maintained it – who should have been responsible for making sure that kids who went on it were safe, and they didn’t.”
Haigh-Reeve didn’t have counselling to help process the experience, but the kindness of two doctors – the registrar who sat with her all through the first night she was in hospital, talking to her, and then her regular chats with her GP – did help. “I was lucky because I’d had that bit of support and other people hadn’t had anything.” After the anniversary, Haigh-Reeve started therapy, which helped. “I realised that that kind of trauma doesn’t leave you.” She has always found it difficult “to give myself permission to have fun sometimes, because it feels like I shouldn’t”. She was very different before the disaster – she loved drama, and was outgoing and quick to laugh. “That’s been something that was taken, and I’ve fought quite hard to try and get it back.” Recently, she has returned to that lost interest – she is about to start a course on writing for theatre, and plans to return to drama.
Haigh-Reeve was shocked to find that nothing in the park – before the tree and small plaque – acknowledged the disaster that had killed five children. The incident feels buried – literally. The mound near where it happened is, she believes, where some of the debris was piled up and earthed over. She and other survivors are about to fundraise for a children’s open-air theatre on the site, and to build an adjacent counselling room for children who have suffered trauma.
The effects of that day have been lifelong, and the fact that the anniversary falls on her birthday has been an annual reminder of the years she has lived that Alison didn’t. “I always think about Alison and about the randomness of how it’s one person and not the other, and that’s just horrible. I thought about it when I walked into church in my wedding dress, and saw my friends smiling, and when I had my first baby – that kind of thing. I don’t take it for granted. It’s really easy to take life for granted, but it is a bit of a nudge in the ribs every so often that says it’s not like this for everyone.”
