They had been making plans for the future; building a new home for themselves in Donegal, on Ireland’s west coast. Their conversations had been full of their interior design plans on the evening before Marion Townsend waved her husband, Mark, off to Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough ground to watch his beloved West Bromwich Albion play.
Mark had worked hard for that house by the sea, which he’d visited two weeks earlier. He’d worked his way up from a job in the paint shop of Longbridge Rover plant, aged 16, to a foreman’s position, troubleshooting in the manufacture of BMW V8 and V12 engines for Jaguar Land Rover and Rolls-Royce at Birmingham’s Hams Hall factory. He was 57. It was finally time to think of retirement.
It was a familiar lunchtime kick-off routine for him, on Saturday September 28 last year. Pick-up by the WBA supporters’ coach at 7.30am, breakfast at Wetherspoons in Barnsley, messages exchanged on WhatsApp with his brother, Steve, and a few others in the group they called ‘Promotion Party’.
A call home to Marion, who was to pick him up back in West Bromwich at 5.30pm and a selfie with his nephew, Matt, with whom he headed into Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane End.
And then, events which would upturn all those plans for a life ahead. Just before Wednesday scored a 23rd-minute goal to go 2-0 up, Mark complained of feeling hot and was sitting down when everyone else was standing.
His subsequent collapse – after a cardiac arrest which claimed his life – was dealt with by Wednesday’s stewards, the club’s privately contracted medical team and the Yorkshire Ambulance Service, in a way which on Friday resulted in South Yorkshire’s senior coroner raising several concerns at the end of a two-week inquest.
Mark Townsend had been planning to retire to Ireland with his wife Marion when tragedy struck
Play was stopped at the Hawthorns when West Brom hosted Middlesbrough last October, so that fans could pay their respects to Mark, who died the previous week
Tanyka Rawden said that the decision by a paramedic and director of the private medical company employed by Wednesday not to give Mark oxygen through a mask where he had collapsed had ‘possibly’ contributed to his death. ‘It would have been possible to use the mask. The absence of the mask is likely to have contributed to, but not caused, Mark’s death,’ she said.
Mrs Rawden also expressed concern about a lack of radios in the Leppings Lane End that left stewards struggling to find someone who could call in Mark’s collapse to the ground’s control room, to summon paramedic help. The same failing contributed to the Hillsborough Disaster, 36 years ago.
CCTV footage showed a steward running down a staircase in the stand to a group of Wednesday staff, thinking one would have a radio – but then leaving them to run for another group, a further 20 seconds away to get one. ‘Any unnecessary delay however small is just that – “unnecessary,”’ said the coroner, who will be writing a ‘prevention of future deaths’ report, on this issue. ‘Every second counts in an emergency situation.’
Though work is now under way to ensure Lambda Medical, the private company, and the Yorkshire Ambulance Service cooperate more effectively than on the day of Mark’s death, the coroner expressed frustration that it has taken a year, and the inquest hearing, for this to happen. ‘It’s disappointing that I have had to raise the issue (and that) work is only now getting under way, over a year after Mark’s death.’
This combination of failings during a rescue effort described by witnesses as ‘chaos’ and ‘a shambles’ were not ultimately contributory to Mark’s death, the coroner found, concluding that Mark died of natural causes.
A supporter who suffers a cardiac arrest of Mark’s kind has a 25 per cent chance of survival. A slicker, superior emergency operation would not, on the balance of evidence, have saved his life. But the inquest raises questions for every club to consider today, given the access challenges that any medical emergency creates.
The member of Wednesday staff whom the steward found equipped with a radio was Leppings Lane stand supervisor Gill Wild. She told the inquest that she had not had a full emergency evacuation practice for four years, had never undergone practice in removing a fan from the stand and couldn’t ‘think of anything’ that a ‘spectator supervision’ course had taught her.
At one stage during the rescue effort, she could not use her radio because she had left it in the pocket of a coat which she had taken off.
A West Brom shirt is draped over Townsend’s seat at the Hawthorns following his passing
Townsend with his nephew Matt, a fellow West Brom supporter
One of many who testified to frustration with the time it took to summon a paramedic was Steve Langston, a WBA away fan that day and an event safety officer, contracted to work for three local councils, who has overseen the safety of up to 18,000 fans at events and prosecuted companies over safety breaches.
He described running up the Leppings Lane stand to see how he could help after hearing Albion fans 20 rows back urging stewards to summon medical help for Mark for a period of two minutes.
Langston said the first steward he encountered, a woman, responded with a blank look and the words ‘No English’ although this was challenged by Wednesday’s medical coordinator, JP Ashton-Kinlin, who is employed part-time by the club. He insisted that the 30 per cent of stewards who are agency staff were put through a conversation with one of his colleagues when they headed into the ground and would be removed if they failed this test.
Langston described how Lambda’s first paramedic, Lewis Wright, had been passed a defibrillator but found the battery flat on a second attempt to shock Mark’s heart into action with it. The medic declared, ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ though almost immediately got an alternative power source.
Challenging though the scene was, the inquest heard that the electric shock treatment did begin in good time. But the absence of an oxygen mask being applied to Mark surprised Langston and it was also considered a crucial omission by an expert and consultant in emergency medicine who provided an independent professional assessment on the case to the inquest.
Providing electric shocks to get a patient’s blood pumping without also trying to apply oxygen through a mask would have created a build-up of carbon dioxide in Mark’s body. That, said Dr David Kirby, was detrimental to efforts to get his heart re-started, initially undertaken by a young female off-duty paramedic and WBA fan in the away end, administering CPR.
Dr Kirby raised other concerns about Lambda paramedic Mr Wright’s decision-making. He had not administered adrenaline to Mark – the ‘holy grail’ in such emergencies – at any time in approximately 15 minutes before he was stretchered down to a bigger makeshift treatment area on the concourse. The coroner’s finding do make clear however that the rescue effort failings were not ultimately contributory to Mark’s death.
West Brom and Middlesbrough players pay their respects to Townsend
Wednesday and West Brom players in action during the match in which Townsend passed away
The process of moving Mark to that concourse, where oxygen and drugs were applied and the arrival of a Yorkshire Ambulance Service turbo-charged attempts to save his life, was also a challenging one.
Since Lambda had not brought straps to secure him to the stretcher, he had to be carried down the steep stairs without them – anathema to paramedics given the risk of a patient falling off.
Langston, who assisted, described the difficulty of navigating the stretcher through the tight vomitory linking seating area to stand. One female member of staff was too large to tackle it with a stretcher. Langston took over and found handrails in the confined space digging into his back.
The ambulance crews should not have been needed, under the terms of the commercial deal by which Lambda, in medical charge of fans for their fourth league match since winning the contract, had been engaged by Wednesday. They were called in because an ambulance service commander, who had a legal duty to be in the Hillsborough control room, judged a Lambda medic to be hesitant in the ensuing crisis.
Lambda’s dislike of the way that the ambulance crew took charge was evident in an extraordinary morning’s testimony during which one of its freelance paramedic staff, Sarah Linaker, accused the arriving team’s leader of ‘aggressively’ barging in on attempts to save Mark’s life. A picture emerged of two teams tackling the same emergency, with no one able to work out who was in charge. ‘It was like an orchestra with no conductor,’ Dr Kirby said.
Wednesday’s part-time medical coordinator Ashton-Kinlin, who also works for Sheffield United as well as running other businesses, criticised the ambulance commander’s unusual decision to call in two of her own teams. The coroner concluded that the decision to summon the ambulance crews was entirely appropriate. This was a deeply unsavoury dimension to proceedings for the bewildered Townsend family.
Mark twice showed signs of resuming a heartbeat – the second time in the ambulance, after the crews had fetched out the straps needed to get him carried into it, and raced him off to Sheffield’s Northern General hospital. But the cardiac output was terribly weak. He suffered a heart attack at the hospital and was declared dead at 14.38pm that afternoon.
Mark’s family is left only with the bewilderment and loss. For his brother, Steve, there will be no more afternoons with Mark and Matt in their familiar seats at the Hawthorns’ Brummie Road End, Row LL, seats 184, 185 and 186.
Approached by Daily Mail Sport on Friday about his decision not to give Mark oxygen, the paramedic, Lewis Wright, of Lambda Medical, said his actions that day had been in line with ‘Resuscitation Council guidelines’ but refused to comment further.
The rescue effort at Hillsborough was described by witnesses as ‘chaos’ and ‘a shambles’
‘I expected him home. It was the day a tornado hit,’ says Mark’s wife Marion
Steve Townsend told Daily Mail Sport he was disappointed by Wright’s unwillingness to accept the coroner’s observation on the failure to use oxygen. ‘I would have hoped they would want to question themselves and learn,’ he said.
Marion Townsend has sold the home she and Mark had made in Oldbury, Birmingham, and is returning to her family in Donegal, where she will live in the house they were building, near the pretty little church where they married in 2013.
She remembers the simple pleasures Mark took through life – Northern Soul music, their cocker spaniel dog and his mother’s Sunday roast – and reflects on life without him, now.
‘Things will never be the same again,’ she said. ‘He went off to Hillsborough that day and I expected him home. For me it was the day a tornado hit.’
