Spectators later spoke of initially feeling their feet becoming warmer; one of them ran to the back of the stand for a fire extinguisher but found none. A police officer shouted to a colleague for an extinguisher. His call was misheard, and instead the fire brigade were radioed. The call was timed at 3:43 pm. The fire escalated very rapidly, and flames became visible; police started to evacuate the stand. The blaze began to spread, and the roof and wooden stands were soon on fire. One eyewitness, Geoffrey Mitchell, told the BBC: "It spread like a flash. I've never seen anything like it. The smoke was choking. You could hardly breathe." As spectators began to cascade over the wall separating the stand from the pitch, the linesman on that side of the pitch informed match referee Norman Glover, who stopped the game with three minutes remaining before half-time. The original match referee (as named in the match programme) was Don Shaw, but he could not officiate due to an injury; Glover had been appointed to the match as replacement official. Shaw is still sometimes wrongly named as the match referee.