Qualla: 1975 Dibbles Bridge Coach Crash

1975 Dibbles Bridge Coach Crash: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the morning of 27 May 1975, forty-five women from Thornaby-on-Tees climbed aboard a coach for a day trip to Grassington in the Yorkshire Dales. Many were members of the local Townswomen's Guild. Most were pensioners. The Lady Mayoress of Thornaby, Dorothy White, had organised similar outings before, and the day promised tea rooms, stone-built market squares and the long views over Wharfedale. By the afternoon, thirty-three of them were dead, and Britain had its worst road accident on record. The cause was a steep hill, a missed gear, and a defect in a brake drum on the offside rear wheel.

1975 Dibbles Bridge Coach Crash: Down the Hill

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The coach was a 1967 Bedford VAM5, run by Riley's Luxury Coaches. Its regular driver was unavailable that day, and the relief driver was Roger Marriott, a security officer at British Steel. The party had visited Grassington and was making its way home along the B6265 between Gree...

1975 Dibbles Bridge Coach Crash: Those Who Came Running

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lincoln Seligman, a London barrister visiting his in-laws nearby, was having a barbecue in the garden when he heard the crash. He was the first to reach the wreckage. Three teenagers from Hull, Steven Griffin, Steve Jennison and Carl Dickinson, were camping nearby and ran to help...

1975 Dibbles Bridge Coach Crash: A Bridge That Had Killed Before

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The cruelest detail in the local memory was that the same bridge had taken a Sunday school party half a century earlier. In 1925 another coach had crashed at Dibble's Bridge, killing seven children and adults from Charabanc party. Two coach disasters at the same hill, fifty years...

1975 Dibbles Bridge Coach Crash: Remembering Them

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The thirty-two passengers who died were almost all elderly women on what should have been an ordinary outing. Their families spent decades pressing for the dead to be remembered properly. On 27 May 2022, the forty-seventh anniversary, a stone memorial was unveiled outside Thornab...