Lincoln Seligman, 75, remembers trying to help survivors with his girlfriend, now wife, Patricia (Image: Humphrey Nemar/Daily Express)
It was meant to be a fun day out to the Yorkshire Dales on a sunny Bank Holiday. Dorothy White, 62, a former Lady Mayoress, had organised the trip for 45 ladies from Thornaby-on-Tees to go to Grassington.
The popular Good Samaritan had been running the outings, known as Auntie Dorrie’s Mystery Trips for 30 years.
But on May 27, 1975, while driving on a downhill stretch of the B6265 road at Dibble’s Bridge, between Greenhow and Hebden, stand-in coach driver Roger Marriott, a British Steel Corporation security officer, missed a gear and applied the brakes of the yellow Bedford bus.
His actions should have halted the coach immediately but the brakes proved insufficient, despite having only been serviced one week earlier. Instead, the coach accelerated and heated the brakes until they failed, leaving it to career down the 1,300-metre steep hill to the bottom of the valley.
After crashing through a steel crash barrier and the bridge’s stone parapet, it plunged five metres into the garden of a cottage below and landed on its fibreglass roof. The aluminium sides of the coach buckled on impact with the ground, leaving most of the passengers dead in a mangled metal coffin.
The aftermath of the Dibble’s Bridge coach crash which killed 33 people on May 27, 1975 (Image: Mirrorpix)
It was, and remains to this day, the worst road traffic accident in British history – a total of 33 people lost their lives including Dorothy White and the driver. Only 13 passengers survived.
Lincoln Seligman, a 25-year-old barrister from London, was first on the scene with his girlfriend Patricia. The couple were staying at Patricia’s family’s holiday cottage situated below the bridge.
Lincoln, now 75 and a world renowned sculptor and painter, has granted the Daily Express a rare interview to recall his memories of that terrible day.
Half a century may have elapsed since the disaster but he has never forgotten its sights and sounds.
“We had been having a barbecue out in the front garden and had gone back inside when we heard this almighty bang. We rushed outside to this scene of total devastation,” he recalls today. “The bus was upside down on its roof and one side had been completely crushed. If we hadn’t gone inside there is every chance it would have hit us.
“After 50 years it is hard to remember all the exact details, and I know I have blotted a lot of it out, but I do remember the silence. A massive bang, then nothing.
“As we rushed over all I could hear was the sound an engine makes when it is cooling down. And then after what seemed like forever but was probably only a matter of minutes there was groaning from inside the bus. The driver had been partially thrown through the windscreen but was in a really bad way.”
Patricia and Lincoln, both 75, have never forgotten what they witnessed (Image: Humphrey Nemar)
In an era before mobile phones and without a landline in the cottage or neighbours for miles, the couple did the best they could to help.
“We managed to drag a few of the injured out, I don’t know how many,” Lincoln says.
“The injuries were horrific. I saw limbs crushed by the metal seats of the bus, but in some cases they weren’t attached. I had never even seen a dead body before and then, to see so many…” He tails off overcome with emotion.
Patricia, now his wife and mother of their three children, has been reluctant to speak about the tragedy in the past.
But sitting at his side, she adds poignantly: “I still remember some of their faces, the pain etched on them. We just did our best to comfort them until help arrived.”
At first that came in the form of three teenage boys from Hull who were camping nearby and also heard the crash. They too managed to drag some of those still alive out of the twisted wreckage. But it took nearly two hours before ambulances arrived.
A farmer had also heard the crash and knowing the bridge was an accident black spot, had returned home to telephone for help without actually seeing the devastation.
A single ambulance duly arrived about an hour later and, according to testimony from the teenagers at the inquest, “the ambulance driver’s face just fell”. Ambulance driver David Rhodes described the crash scene as “the worst thing I’ve ever seen”.
He radioed a code calling for more help and eventually a fleet of ambulances arrived.
Lincoln says: “It was then we finally felt a bit more useful. We were able to help carry the injured on stretchers back up the hill to the road and into the ambulances.
“But I will never forget the sight of the body bags piled up against the cottage wall. I have never been an optimist, always more of a pessimist, but to some extent that day turned me into a catastrophist.”
Trip organiser and former Mayoress of Thornaby Dorothy White, 62, was among the victims (Image: PA)
The cottage, which had been in Patricia’s family for years, was later sold.
The injured were transported to Airedale General Hospital in Keighley – 32 died at the scene and 14 were seriously injured, all with major head and neck traumas. One of the injured passengers later died. No one escaped unharmed.
An inquest at Skipton Town Hall, in July 1975, recorded a verdict of accidental death. The pathologist reported that the main cause of the loss of life was the crushing of the victims between the seats. The proprietor of the coach company, Norman Riley, was later fined £75 (equivalent to £795 in 2023) for running a motor vehicle with defective brakes.
“The bus looked so old-fashioned and rickety, more like something from the 1950s than the 1970s,” recalls Lincoln.
Witnessing the disaster did impact him but he is stoic in his response when asked about this. “People weren’t offered counselling in those days and anyway it wasn’t about us,” he says. “I did go and stay with an uncle who had been in the war, at the D-Day landings and had seen some terrible things. I could talk to him. He understood.”
Campaigners had called for electro-magnetic retarders to be fitted to all coaches preceding the crash. The use of such a retarder means that the frictional brakes are kept cool for use at slow speeds. But it brought the issue to a wider public and legislation was ultimately passed requiring the improvement of braking systems.
Meanwhile, the tight-knit Thornaby community was devastated by the tragedy. Everyone knew someone who had lost someone. It still elicits painful memories today.
In 2019, a film by Teessider Derek Smith told the story of the disaster which included eyewitness accounts from survivors Margaret Robinson, May Richardson and Doreen Parkinson. Margaret and May spoke of how the coach picked up speed as it went down the steep hill towards Dibble’s Bridge.
Doreen recalled seeing black smoke at the side of the coach, followed by “the awful sound of rushing wind”. She said: “Oh, it was terrible – and then I heard the sound of breaking glass and I knew no more.”
Memorial stone made by Irene Jessop Funeral Service to commemorate those killed in the crash (Image: Evening Gazette)
Lincoln and Patricia attended the 40th anniversary memorial of the crash in Thornaby in 2015 when a memorial plaque was unveiled outside the town hall listing the names of those who died. In 2022, a four-ton memorial stone was erected in the town centre to better reflect the enormity of the disaster.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the crash today, a church service is being held at St Paul’s Church in Thornaby presided by the Bishop of Whitby with flower tributes.
Thornaby councillor Steve Walmsley was in the town’s social club when he heard about the disaster. He believes more could have been done to remember it over the years. “You would mention it and people would say, ‘I’ve never heard of it’,” he previously said.
“I always thought if a disaster like that affected a more prominent city there would have been a monument or memorial built years ago. For it being the worst road disaster in British history very little is still known about it outside Thornaby.”