Steve Potts survived the 1980 Tenerife Dan Air crash by one last minute decision, and two IRA bombings. If he had made three slightly different decisions any one of these incidents would mean he was not here today.
It sounds like something from the plot of a horror film like Final Destination – someone who escapes plane crashes, bombs, and impending doom.
But rather than a screaming blonde heroine, this real-life death-dodging man, up on his luck, is a normal, open, divorcee from Bognor Regis.
Steve Potts, 71, first escaped death in 1974. A regular at the Horse and Groom in Guilford, Steve would be at the bar most weekends, especially a Saturday night.
On October 5, 1974, a Saturday, Steve was instead at a wedding down the road in Guilford.
Steve told The Daily Star: “I’m not religious or spiritual or anything, but do feel I may have a guardian angel watching over me. And I’m very happy it continues, I may say.”
“One of the rare Saturdays I was not there the IRA bombed that pub plus another one called the Seven Stars, killing and injuring a lot of innocent people. By sheer chance I was at a wedding reception in Woking that night about 8 miles away so I dodged a bullet then.”
And so the first skirt around death was made. In 1980, Steve had been married to his wife for a little over a year. He and his wife have been divorced for many years now but at the time they would to go on lots of long weekends away for free thanks to his wife’s job.
She worked for a now discontinued holiday company in Bognor Regis and one day phoned Steve up at work and asked if he wanted to go to Tenerife the next day for a few days for free as there were spare seats on a plane from Manchester.
This plane was the Manchester Dan Air flight which crashed in Tenerife, becoming the deadliest UK aviation accident, killing all 146 souls on board.
Their tickets were booked and they were ready to make the drive to Manchester from Surrey, when the couple started to think going all the way to Manchester would be an inconvenience, but that flight would take them to the North of the island, where their hotel was.
Steve said: “I said yes, and we were both booked on to go and all was well but very late in the day she called and said 2 tickets are available from Gatwick on another plane but into the south Tenerife airport so we would have to transfer up to-the north area so it was 50/ 50 what to do, almost a flip of a coin. But we decided to go from Gatwick and travel to the North area by transfer. That decision saved our lives.”
Steve found out about his second duck from death in the most pedestrian way.
He explained: “Two days into the holiday we saw a local guy reading a paper with pictures of an air crash on it. We asked a waiter and he explained what had happened and we realised it was the plane that we were originally due to fly out on and sadly all those poor people had perished on that plane.”
The paper did not hold its punches when illustrating the tragedy, with Steve’s alternate reality splayed out on two sheets of newspaper, clear as day.
He said: “From my distant memory, I sort of remember that they were not very censored in those days in Spain. The images were very graphic It was a very, very sad thing for them and their families.
“I never forgot how fate sometimes can be so close to making the difference between life and death. I was very scared to fly back after seeing the story in the local papers and the pictures of the crash. It was scary. I think from memory it was only my third flight ever in my life so it had a very big effect on me then and for a few years afterwards.
“I always tried to remember my ex-RAF father’s advice that flying is hugely safer than driving up the road in a car. I trusted his advice.”
Steve said reading about the crash decades later helped understand the full scope “of this terrible tragedy and the loss of so many lives that terrible day in 1980.”
Then came Steve’s third and final miracle. It was 14 years since the Dan Air crash and 20 since the first IRA bomb in 1994.
This time, Steve had his children with him. He was loading his food shop into the car in the car park directly behind Woolworths when “an enormous explosion went off.”
He said: “It was so loud and scary as shop windows were shattering.”
The IRA had left a bomb made of 2.5lbs of Semtex packed into the pannier of a cycle left locked to the cycle rack outside Woolworths.
Steve said: “That definitely shook all of us up but thankfully nobody was killed or injured including my family thank God.”
It seems bad things may come in threes, as Steve, now retired, lives a peaceful life on the coast in Bognor Regis, and it has been over two decades since his last brush with death
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