Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Map
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
Contributors
The Year Before…
Part One: The Disaster
15 April 1989
The Next Day
The Following Week
Part Two: The Long and Winding Road
Part Three: The Truth
Part Four: Justice?
Picture Section
Picture Credits
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781448176700
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Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
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Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © Kevin Sampson 2016
With thanks to Peter Marshall and the BBC for permission to reproduce BBC Panorama’s interview with Anne Williams for ‘Hillsborough – How They Buried the Truth’ 2013
Kevin Sampson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Ebury Press in 2016
www.penguin.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
HB ISBN 9780091955618
TPB ISBN 9780091958206
On 15 April 1989, the world witnessed one of the worst football disasters in history at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. 96 people were crushed to death and another 766 injured in a tragedy that was later admitted to have been exacerbated by shocking police failures.
Hillsborough Voices honours the memory of all those who died and all those left behind. From the tragic events in the stadium to what unfolded in the hours, days and then years that followed, Kevin Sampson interweaves the voices of the people who were there with the families and friends of those who died, and all who have played a key role in the long search for the truth.
Kevin was at Hillsborough as a fan and witnessed the horror firsthand. He has conducted exhaustive and exclusive interviews both with public figures and those who are telling their heart-rending personal accounts to bring us the full story for the first time.
Kevin Sampson is the author of eight novels as well as Extra Time, his account of a season in the life of a Liverpool FC fanatic. He has contributed to football anthologies, including Here We Go Gathering Cups in May and Redmen, which he also edited.
Kevin is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Observer and Liverpool FC TV, the club’s dedicated TV channel. He lives on Merseyside where he is a member of the Liverpool Producers Association, and a long-term supporter of the Writing on the Wall festival and CALM, the mental health charity.
You can find him at @ksampsonwriter on Twitter.
For the 96 who lost their lives at Hillsborough, Anne Williams, and John and Joe Glover.
For many people of my generation who grew up in the North West, Hillsborough will always be the definitive event of our lives. It didn’t matter who you supported, we all said the same thing: ‘It could so easily have been us.’
15 April 1989 was the day when all the injustices of 1980s Britain suddenly hit very close to home for its teenagers. The riots in Toxteth and Moss Side as well as the miner’s strike had been on our doorstep, but involved people we did not know. By contrast, Hillsborough affected our family, our friends, our football clubs, our world. And it confirmed a feeling that had been building inside many of us during that divisive decade: we were indeed second-class citizens in our own country.
I was 19 at the time and can remember that fateful weekend as if it were yesterday.
The back room of the Cherry Tree in Culcheth was a long, long way away from the dreaming spires. But that’s where I was on the evening of Friday 14 April 1989, home from university and glad to be back in a world where the only Blues that mattered were not of the Cambridge Varsity variety, but the ones who played at Goodison Park.
From the moment we walked in, the air was thick with talk of the semi-final weekend.
Culcheth back then was a Kopite stronghold – most likely the legacy of local hero Roger Hunt. The Burnham brothers, on the other hand, were known as the only match-going Evertonians, so we were well used to being on the receiving end. We were ready that night to be reminded several times of the results of the previous all-Merseyside Finals. But once the jokes had subsided, we did all agree on one thing: how on earth could the Football Association, for the second year running, have allocated the inadequate ‘away’ end at Hillsborough to Liverpool?
I remember telling my old school friend Stephen Turner, who had a ticket for the Leppings Lane the following day, about our experience in its dreaded central pens the year before.
Everton had drawn with Sheffield Wednesday away in the Third Round in 1988. I recounted how, in the second half, I hadn’t watched anything happening on the pitch. I was so worried that my dad and younger brother John were in the same discomfort as me that I kept my eyes trained on the back of their heads, determined not to lose them in the crowd. In 40 years of going to matches, it remains the worst experience I have ever had.
Less than 24 hours after that conversation in the pub, I was in a car on the M6 with my dad and brothers, heading away from Everton’s game at Villa Park and listening in stunned silence as the first reports of the horror at Hillsborough drifted in. On the radio, they were already blaming the fans. We knew different from our own experience: the ground was unsafe.
That Saturday night we returned to the Cherry Tree and waited for friends to return from Hillsborough. They arrived in dribs and drabs, in varying degrees of trauma. They were never the same again.
In the years after Hillsborough, throughout the 1990s, it would be a common experience to be out on a Friday night with friends who had been at the match and, after a few social drinks took effect, they would start talking distractedly about what they saw. They would ask endlessly why there had never been any real accountability for what happened. At the same time, the very same conversation was being played out in thousands of other homes and pubs and clubs across the country.
These were the real Hillsborough voices – the lost souls who went to a football match and ended up witnessing scenes akin to hell on earth; who drifted home from the scene of a disaster but got no professional help to cope, and who, just days after the tragedy, found themselves being blamed by police and press for what had happened.
For 20 years those haunted voices were shouting into a wilderness. Nothing came back. The country wasn’t listening. ‘Why can’t these whingeing Scousers let it go?’ was an infuriating comment in the South throughout the 1990s.
It took a strange twist of fate to change the course of events.
In early January 2008 I attended the opening night of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture. I was then Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The following week a call came through to my private office from Number 10: the Prime Minister wanted to speak to me urgently. Out of the blue, Peter Hain would have to resign. The Culture Secretary James Purnell would be moving to the Department of Work and Pensions to replace him. Would I like to take on the role of Culture Secretary?
My feet didn’t touch the Treasury tiles. Within minutes I was floating up Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. When I arrived, a couple of cameras were waiting outside. Instead of doing what I probably should have done, and given a sober tribute to Peter Hain which regretted the circumstances that had brought about this move, I gave enthusiastic vent to my true feelings: genuine elation at being appointed Culture Secretary in this special year for the city of my birth. I served notice on the London cultural establishment. I wouldn’t be doing what Culture Secretaries were expected to do – spending all of my time paying court to them – but would be in Liverpool instead.
And that’s what I did. Barely a week went by without me attending an event there. And at every venue I visited, the then Lord Mayor of Liverpool, Steve Rotheram, would be there too. He was a Red but we got on famously from the off. We did everything together, including working on the repatriation of the body of a young Evertonian, Gary Dunne, who had died in Spain.
In early 2009 Steve and I were on the front row of the pews in Liverpool Anglican Cathedral for Gary’s belated funeral. As we waited for the coffin to arrive, Steve whispered in my ear. What he said made my blood run cold.
I was about to get an invite to address the twentieth anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster. He said that he thought it was crucial that I accepted.
And so began weeks of turmoil. I knew the truth about Hillsborough, and a big part of it was that my own party, Labour, had not done anywhere near enough to put right the terrible wrongs that had been done. Instead, we had become enmeshed with the Establishment that had gone to great lengths to cover it all up.
I spent hours agonising with my family over whether I should accept the invitation. How could the Government not be represented at a service to commemorate the victims of one of the largest peacetime tragedies this country had ever seen? But what did I have to say to people who had been so cruelly let down by the Establishment of which I was now a leading representative?
It was the dilemma to end all dilemmas. As ever, it was my younger brother John who cut through the fog. ‘Go if you’re going to do something for them. If not, stay away.’
My decision to attend was the best I have made or will ever make.
On the night of the twentieth anniversary, the long-lost Hillsborough voices that for years had been vanishing into the abyss rolled off the Kop and into every living-room in the land. It was the moment when the dam broke; when everything changed.
Looking back now, I shudder about how close we came to missing that moment. If things hadn’t changed on the twentieth anniversary, would they ever have? Possibly not. But thank God they did. Because establishing the full truth about Hillsborough is not just vital for the people who suffered directly, it fills in missing pages of the social history of our country. Having a full and true record about what happened on the day and in the aftermath will be important for future generations. It tells us how we were governed and policed in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
Hillsborough is part of a jigsaw that includes other injustices like the trials of the Shrewsbury 24 in the 1970s, the Battle of Orgreave in the 1980s, the death of Stephen Lawrence in the 1990s and the hacking of phones in the early part of this century. A single thread ties them all together: a nexus of power created by a colluding elite of politicians, the press and the police, which served to protect each other and ride roughshod over ordinary people.
In the end, Hillsborough is a story of power and class. If we are ever to make this a more equal country, its full story must be known and understood. Because the battle for fairness goes on: even during the recent inquest on Hillsborough, almost unbelievably, police representatives have re-run their discredited slurs about the Liverpool supporters.
That is why this book is so important. Those authentic Hillsborough voices must be set down and allowed to echo through the decades and centuries to come.
I want my own great-grandchildren to be able to hear these haunted Hillsborough voices. I want them to ask themselves how it ever came to pass that, in the hours after one of the biggest man-made disasters in the history of this country, the Establishment turned on the dead, the bereaved, the injured and the traumatised – on an entire English city in its moment of grief.
And I want those future generations, fired up by the injustices of the past, to resolve to carry on the centuries-old fight to make all British citizens truly equal.
Just like thousands of other Liverpool supporters, I set off for Sheffield on the morning of 15 April 1989 with that giddy mixture of excitement, anticipation and anxiety that accompanies an FA Cup semi-final. I’d been to four FA Cup finals by then, sampling two wins and two defeats. And I’d been there, too, when Liverpool were knocked out of the Cup at the semi-final stage in 1979, 1980 and 1985. If the Cup final defeats were hard to bear, it was tougher still falling at the penultimate hurdle. There’s no pain quite like a semi-final knock-out blow – or so I thought.
There were four of us in the car. Hobo – Ian Hodrien – was driving, with myself and my brother Neil in the back. Our special guest was a Juventus supporter, Mauro Garino, a mate we’d first met in Dover when he was hitching back from Celtic in 1981. Mauro had been coming to Liverpool every year since then, usually staying at ours over Christmas. He loved everything about Liverpool – the city and the football club. He loved the Kop: the fervour, the colour, the atmosphere. Our friendship had survived the Heysel Stadium tragedy in 1985, and Mauro’s one big ambition was to watch Liverpool in an FA Cup final at Wembley. It was his birthday on 8 April and I got him a ticket for the next best thing – a semi-final between Liverpool and one of the best teams of the country, Nottingham Forest. We picked Mauro up from Manchester airport the day before the game – this was an era away from cheap flights into Liverpool – and lapped up his excitement as he opened his birthday card and discovered his ticket inside. Gradually, the penny dropped that he was going to one of the biggest matches on the football calendar. The boy was, to be fair, over the moon.
We headed off that fine spring morning with hope in our hearts, yet hopelessly unaware of a series of unrelated events that were already combining to disastrous effect. One such factor was a major holdup between Hyde and Glossop, where roadworks slowed traffic to a standstill. This was bad news. Speaking for myself and Mauro, the pre-match atmosphere in the pubs was a massive part of the build-up to a big game. I loved it. I would usually try to get to the pub a couple of hours before kick-off and would always be in the thick of it, singing along with gusto after I’d had a few pints. Mauro, too, came to love the special flavour of the pubs around Anfield as, pint in hand, he’d urge the regulars to sing ‘song of scarf’. On the one day you’d want to be there good and early to savour the big occasion, though, the long line of cars was barely moving at all, and we weren’t even halfway there. It was starting to look like we’d miss one of the best parts of semi-final day, and I wasn’t happy.
Eventually, we got through the Glossop bottleneck and headed over the sun-dappled Snake Pass, taking the Rivelin Road shortcut into north Sheffield. I had been to Sheffield Wednesday many times before and, from my days as a student in Sheffield, I knew the Hillsborough area well. I convinced everyone that we’d get served quicker if we avoided the popular pubs near the ground and went to the Freemasons Arms, a famous old pub in the back streets of Hillsborough itself. So we parked up a fair old walk from the ground, and headed into the Freemasons around 1.30 p.m. So much for my plan, though – it was packed, with as many fans from Nottingham as Liverpool thronging the bar. The atmosphere was brilliant, everyone happy in spite of the prolonged wait to get served. Mauro tried to start his ‘song of scarf’ – a version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ that, inevitably, consisted of him wailing various syllables – and was only mildly bemused when the Forest fans drowned him out with, ‘What the fucking hell was that?’ It was the last time we’d be laughing that day.
The pub started to empty out. I was agitating for us four to take advantage of the sudden lull so we could squeeze in one more pint, assuring the others I knew of a shortcut to the ground. Neil and Hobo were wise to my shortcuts, however. They checked with the bar staff, who confirmed that the football ground was a brisk fifteen-minute walk away, so that was that. At 2.15 p.m. we made our way towards the ground, cutting through the park to quicken our progress. Sheffield Wednesday’s South Stand loomed into view ahead of us, yet, as we got closer, it became apparent that the way ahead was completely blocked. There was a backlog of Liverpool supporters, ten or twelve abreast, queuing up but, seemingly, going nowhere. Just like the traffic on the approach to Glossop, we were at a complete standstill.
This is no revisionist hindsight – the crowd was, in the main, good-humoured. There was still a good twenty to twenty-five minutes to go till kick-off, it was the FA Cup semi-final, everyone was eager to get in, and, at that stage, the isolated police you could see were viewed as a conduit to progress, not a hindrance. There was some ironic ‘baaing’ from fans imitating herded sheep, but very little antagonism at all. I’m hopeless at standing still. I went across to ask a policeman what was going on; why the crowd wasn’t moving. The only reply I received was, ‘What’s up with you? Are you nesh?’
I think he was saying that a certain amount of pushing and shoving was only to be expected at such a big game, and I should get back in there and tough it out. There was a blind faith that, even though the overcrowding was so severe, everyone would find a way through, sooner or later. Lord Justice Taylor’s Interim Report of August 1989 – to which I refer in this book – says that Chief Superintendent Duckenfield’s second-in-command, Superintendent Bernard Murray, received a message from his commander on the ground, Chief Inspector Creaser, at around 12 noon. Creaser asked Murray whether the Leppings Lane pens should be opened, and filled, one at a time. Murray’s reply illustrates a similar blind faith in what was, effectively, a type of self-policing among football crowds. He said that all pens should be opened simultaneously, as fans would ‘find their own level’. What he meant was that, if it was too crowded in one pen we’d move to another until we found a satisfactory vantage point. That kind of thinking might have some plausibility in a huge, unsegregated end like the Kop but, with Leppings Lane sectioned off into pens by radial fencing, it was a huge risk assuming we would simply work things out among ourselves. It was the same outside the ground, too. The handful of police left to marshal the turnstiles just stood there, helpless and hopeless, as the crowd struggled to find its own level.
The problem that faced us was that there were only seven turnstiles servicing that particular route into the ground. Yet many of the 10,000 Leppings Lane ticketholders, as well as the 4,500 with seats in the West Stand above it, would all be gravitating towards those solitary seven turnstiles. And, on the day, it was even worse: because of the way the police were segregating fans, they blocked off access to the main road feeding the remaining sixteen turnstiles on the other side of Leppings Lane. This meant there were also North Stand ticketholders compelled to enter the ground via the same besieged turnstiles. It was turning into a free-for-all, and I was, by now, very glad that we hadn’t stayed for that third pint. Thousands of ticketholders were converging on seven turnstiles with less than twenty minutes to go until kick-off. It was madness.
The atmosphere changed as the noise from inside the ground increased. One or two mounted police began to appear, but they had no information to give, nor any assurance that we’d make it inside for kick-off. They now became the focus of anger from fans who were stuck in the logjam – there were shouts of ‘Sort it out!’ and ‘Let us in!’ Up ahead you could see snatches of brick wall, blue gates, blue railings, but the crowd was eddying by now, spilling en masse left and right.
I was accustomed to the swells and surges of huge crowds on the Kop. For me, it was a part of the magic, especially at night matches – a crowd so tightly packed that you could see the steam coming off it. For the biggest games we were packed shoulder to shoulder in there, and the volume was often so loud that it would treble out into one long, distorted, oscillating sound wave. If you touched the crush-barrier, you could feel the current of the white noise vibrating through the tubular metal bars. At any moment, an exciting passage of play could see you propelled 20 yards forward, 10 yards to the side, often without your feet touching the ground. The popular description of the ‘swaying’ Kop was exactly that – a whole series of crowd surges and eddies all over the vast terrace, creating the impression of a swaying tidal wave. When David Fairclough scored his ultra-dramatic, late, late winner against St Etienne in 1977, a tsunami-force surge pinned my diminutive frame against a barrier, so that I was folded double on myself, my nose near-touching my knees. My midriff was trapped on the barrier and I could feel the air being squeezed out of me. I was delirious with joy – we’d surely just won one of the greatest games of my life – but, Christ, it was starting to hurt! These crowd surges never lasted more than a few seconds, but I could feel the pressure still piling down on me, long after the ball hit the net, more and more and more … ‘Surely they’ll start backing up, now?’ I can only liken the experience to a kid having one of those giggling fits where they laugh and laugh, almost in fits. Surely they’ll have to take in air any second, before they pass out? I was beginning to white-out when, finally, the crowd relented, everyone spilt sideways and backwards, and I was able to slip down from the crash-barrier I’d been trapped against. It was the worst crowd-crush I’d encountered, but by no means the only one.
Outside the Leppings Lane end on 15 April 1989, it was different. In spite of the dangers of that goal celebration against St Etienne, there was almost a protocol to the surges on the Kop. You knew you could ride it out, that it would only last so long before the sway changed course and took the crowd in a different direction. As kick-off time approached outside Hillsborough, though, it became a mêlée, the likes of which I hadn’t encountered before.
With hindsight, the lack of turnstiles, added to the physical restrictions of the area outside the ground, are the main reasons for the insufferable build-up before the game. In simple terms, the geography of Leppings Lane dictated that there was no overspill, nowhere for the ever-growing crowd to go. But there are other factors, too. There was absolutely no leadership or direction from either the police or the Sheffield Wednesday stewards. Just two or three officials with loud-hailers organising the crowd into distinct columns and queues, assuring everyone there was still plenty of time to get in, would have calmed the agitation that began to fester. Similarly, experienced officers and stewards directing fans towards alternative entrance points would have relieved the pressure, too. None of these things happened, though, and as a result there was an ever-increasing logjam as more fans arrived, with insufficient space for people to queue in comfort while they awaited their turn. As more and more people tried to fit into the narrow confines outside the turnstiles, I found myself being propelled, feet off the floor, closer and closer towards a red-brick wall. I was powerless to change my direction, or the angle at which I was being carried. At any moment I’d be pinned against the wall, and then what?
My face was being pushed into the wall, when my brother, Neil, arrived behind me. He forced the palms of his hands flat against the wall, either side of my head, and used the leverage to push back, creating a little space for me to manoeuvre in. At that exact moment, the concertina gate to our left opened. We stood back for a second – as did everyone else – expecting the police to eject someone, or police horses to come in or out. Then, slowly, people started to file in. Neil and I went through, and waited for Mauro and Hobo.
We stood to one side on the concourse, just inside the gates, where people were buying refreshments and match-day programmes. The concourse area was small, almost diamond-shaped, and would have seemed crowded with just a few hundred people standing around chatting, sipping Bovril and flicking through the programme. But with the steady flow of fans now coming in three, four or five abreast, sight-lines to the limited signage directing supporters to alternative entrances were almost completely obstructed by the ever-growing number of fans on the concourse.
Only one sign could be clearly seen. Directly above your head as you came through the turnstiles was the tunnel that led to the central pens, 3 and 4. This was the only entrance with visible, above head-height signage. It was unmissable, one big sign directly above the tunnel with the word STANDING. The tunnel shelved down to a steep, 1:6 gradient. Such tunnels in city centres, train stations and pedestrianised areas are typically flat, with 1:10 the accepted norm for a safe, gently sloping tunnel. But at Hillsborough, at peak, pre-match capacity, many fans would be swept down the steep Leppings Lane tunnel towards whichever pen the flow might take them. This is what was happening, right there, right then. Fans coming in through the turnstiles and the now wide-open gates could just about glimpse a swathe of green, green grass down that central tunnel. Hardly anyone thought twice. They headed right down it.
The Leppings Lane terrace had been divided into six sections, each closed off with radial fencing – pens, essentially – of which numbers 3 and 4 were situated directly behind the goal. The terrace was just about fit for accommodating a small-to-average 1980s away support. But for a major occasion like the FA Cup semi-final, with huge, ebullient crowds, the turnstiles, the concourse and the terracing itself at the Leppings Lane end were all woefully ill-equipped.
And Leppings Lane had already experienced a history of crowd problems, particularly in high-priority matches, and especially in the FA Cup. At the 1981 semi-final between Wolverhampton Wanderers and Tottenham Hotspur, Spurs fans experienced unbearable crushing on these same terraces. On that occasion the South Yorkshire police responded quickly to the danger and opened gates in the fencing to allow Spurs fans to spill out on to the pitch. After the problems at that game, Hillsborough was not used again as a semi-final venue until 1987, when Leeds United played Coventry City. Sheffield Wednesday had been promoted back to the top flight in 1985, and set about ‘improvements’ to the Leppings Lane terrace. But, rather than taking the (more expensive) advice of civil engineer Dr Wilfred Eastwood, who recommended more turnstiles and separate entrances and exits for the (then) three pens in Leppings Lane, the club followed the (much cheaper) advice of South Yorkshire police. They wanted to remove barriers and add more radial fencing, creating more pens, along with a ‘sterile’ central walkway. So, although Hillsborough had last received a safety certificate in December 1979, the club was reinstated as a venue for FA Cup semi-finals in 1987.
But the lessons of 1981 had not been learned. Despite Leeds having the larger support of the two teams, once again the South Yorkshire police insisted that the team coming in from the north were housed in the smaller Leppings Lane end. There was, once again, overcrowding in the central pens, and Leeds fans in the seats above had to haul crushed and fainting fans to safety.
Yet, rather than heed the warning signs and act accordingly, there was a school of thought within the police establishment that football supporters were a high-risk element who brought these problems upon themselves. The Hillsborough Independent Panel Report cites a 1987 document produced by the Association of Chief Police Officers that noted that it had ‘become increasingly apparent that large numbers of spectators are arriving extremely late at the ground. This may be related to the restricted access to alcohol inside grounds and the prohibition on taking alcohol into grounds.’ This gives an eloquent insight into the way the police were viewing football supporters at the time; their movements, in the view of the Association of Chief Police Officers, being governed by the availability of alcohol. Consequently, to avoid disorder, ‘police ground commanders have occasionally requested that the kick-off be delayed’, but ‘this pressure should not be acceded to in future, the police should not be dictated to by supporters’.
We spotted Mauro and Hobo heading for the tunnel. I managed to weave my way through the crowd and grab Hobo’s jumper, pulling him back and shouting ‘Mauro’ at the same time: ‘This way!’ I said. To this day, even writing this now, I cannot contemplate what might have happened had I not known the ground’s layout as I did. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so slight – I’m 5 foot 9 and less than 10 stone – I’d have taken my chances with the majority. But my instinct, especially after the scrummage outside, was to head away from the numbers and find a quieter ‘spec’. Even as we made our way to the corner passageway, carnage was already unfolding on the Leppings Lane terracing.
What happened next has come to be known as ‘the Hillsborough tragedy’, and I feel the pain and the sadness of the day intensely. Yet the word ‘tragedy’ implies something accidental, a horrific turn of fate. But what readers will learn from the accounts in this volume is that Hillsborough was far from being a tragic accident; it was a man-made disaster. There were warning signs – many of them – and opportunities in the build-up to the game, and on the day itself, to avert the inevitable. These indicators and options were ignored, fatally, leading 96 innocent football fans to their deaths. So our sadness for that tragedy should be matched by our righteous anger at its causes.
Twenty-seven years later, we are still waiting for those responsible to be held to account. Compiling these accounts from those who were there and those most closely touched by the disaster has been the most difficult project I have ever taken on. For a period of eighteen months I effectively asked my interviewees to revisit the darkest episodes of their lives, and describe them all over again in unflinching detail. In speaking to these people I have come to understand just the tip of their pain; for many of them, this will never, ever go away. Ordinary men and women have taken on the carapace of warriors, the precise language of lawyers and the cynicism of those who have come to know so much disappointment that basic human hope is all but extinguished. I can pay these people no compliment worthy of their courage, their unfailing commitment to the ultimate cause of truth and justice. It has been a humbling and deeply humanising experience for me, and I thank each and every interviewee for their sincerity, their patience and their fortitude.
One of the first people to encourage my work on the book was Anne Williams. She opened up her contact book and spoke passionately over the telephone, never once believing that she would not get justice for her son Kevin. It is one more tragedy of the Hillsborough story that Anne died before seeing that day arrive. I thank her for the inspiration she provided. Anne Williams grew too ill to complete our interviews for Hillsborough Voices, and I am indebted to Peter Marshall for allowing me access to transcripts of the BBC’s own very personal recordings with Anne for Panorama’s 2013 film ‘Hillsborough: How They Tried to Bury the Truth.’
My aspiration in accepting the invitation to compile this volume for Ebury was – and is – that each and every time the true story of Hillsborough is told it claws back the truth, for posterity, from those who sought to bury it. Each new reader who comes to understand what really happened on 15 April 1989 is another who can bear testimony to others less aware until, finally, the truth about Hillsborough is accepted as the truth.
The interviews in this book were conducted after the Hillsborough Independent Report was published in September 2012. Since then we have had the monumental results of the new inquests, which have changed everything. But there’s still a fight to be fought, and this book is a testament to why.
Kevin Sampson
John Ashton was 41 in 1989. He was, at that time, a senior lecturer at Liverpool University’s School of Medicine.
Andy Burnham, 19, was in his first year studying English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University.
Peter Carney was a 29-year-old play development worker for Liverpool City Council, living in Kirkby.
Sheila Coleman, 32, was lecturing at Liverpool City College in April 1989. She left in September 1989 to start work as a researcher on The Hillsborough Project.
Barry Devonside was 42. He worked for the Prudential Assurance company and lived in Formby.
Jegsy Dodd was a 31-year-old performer, musician and poet from Moreton, Wirral.
Steve Hart was 29. He was working as a barman in Kirkby.
Peter Hooton, 32, was the co-editor of cult fanzine The End. He worked for Liverpool social services as a youth worker.
Damian Kavanagh was 20, and living in Skelmersdale. He worked for the Royal Insurance Company.
Steve Kelly, 29, was a taxi-driver living off Penny Lane in south Liverpool.
John Maguire was 13 in 1989; his friend Dan Nicolson was 4. They were founder members of Reclaim the Kop, the fan group that organised Truth Day in 2007.
John Mackin was 30 and worked at the civil service in Bootle, north Liverpool.
Tony O’Keefe, originally from Liverpool, was working as a fireman in south London.
Danny Rhodes, a Nottingham Forest supporter, was a 17-year-old Associate Postman from Grantham, Lincolnshire.
Steve Rotheram was at the time working as a bricklayer in Kirkby. He is now the MP for Walton, where Liverpool FC’s Anfield stadium is located.
Martin Thompson was 19 in 1989, working in a frozen-food packaging factory.
Anne Williams was the 38-year-old mother from Formby who lost her son Kevin at Hillsborough. She spent the remainder of her life campaigning for the truth about the circumstances of her son’s death.
Stephen Wright was a 20-year-old plumber from Huyton.
It had become my favourite ground, Hillsborough. I first went there in 1984 for a League Cup game. They were in the Second Division but there was 50,000-odd people there that night, and I just thought, ‘What a place, what a ground!’ That big Kop end with no roof on … it was a proper, old-fashioned footy ground. I just loved it.
Third round of the Cup the year before, January 1988, Sheffield Wednesday v Everton. Wednesday are winning 1–0, Peter Reid equalises in the 80th minute … I have never in my life experienced a crush like it. I’ve never been so uncomfortable at a football match, ever. I was hardly watching the game … you know when something about where you are makes you scared about the situation? Well, I spent the whole of the second half with my eyes glued to the back of my dad’s head, and my younger brother. I wouldn’t let them out of my sight. I remember when we eventually got out we all, sort of, came round. It was as though we’d passed out and come back out of it, it had been so horrible in there.
I agreed with Bill Shankly’s quote about the greatest day of the English season being FA Cup semi-final day. There’s nothing quite like it – so much to win, so much to lose. For the previous season’s semi-final I’d gone with my mates to Hillsborough for the first time. We popped into the first ale house we came across, but it was at the Forest end of things. We had a bevvy there, kept a low profile and there were no problems but you can’t beat being with your own – especially our own – so we got off. We found this pub, the Horse & Jockey, which was sound.
There had been no noticeable police presence in the Forest pub, so it stuck out to me big time when they were showing up and were almost antagonistic when talking to the Reds’ fans. They were a bit like them nightclub bully-type bouncers in the days before the registration cards; you know, ‘What are you looking at, lad? I’ll give you a smack,’ all that. ‘We’re big and we’ve got this uniform and if you look at us the wrong way we’ll stop you enjoying your day.’ But, in a way, it was normal to be treated with disrespect by the police – in a way that I now can’t explain to my son. If you wanted to go to the footy, you had to put up with that – and it was a factor in what happened. It’s not the whole story, but everything is cumulative – trickle, trickle, trickle. And there’s no doubt that the attitude of the police towards Liverpool fans was pre-set and, twelve months on from my first taste of Hillsborough, it was a huge factor in the way things happened.
But the year before, even though we’d won and we had a great day, I remember getting back and going to my mate’s house, who was a big Blue. He said, ‘Oh aye, come to gloat, have you?’ And I told him about the coppers at the pub, how nastily aggressive they’d been. I told him I was only aware of the contrasting attitude towards us because we’d wandered into the Forest pub earlier that same day.
I was there the year before. At that time I was 27 years old: a bricklayer; an amateur footballer, and fairly physically fit. I went to the game with a mate who was a PT instructor in the navy. Both of us were physically pretty strong, yet both of us had felt peculiarly uncomfortable on the terraces of Hillsborough in the build-up to kick-off. I had a standing ticket for the terraces, in the now infamous pen 3. Despite being as fit as I was, there were times when the numbers in the pen caused me concern and I felt frighteningly constrained. For reasons I was unaware of at that time, the mounting crowd could be released at either side, and the crowds in each section appeared to find their own level. Obviously people had either moved to parts of the terrace that were less full, or headed out of the back of the pen via the tunnel entrance/exit to stand in a different pen.
We went on the coach the year before, so it was all a little bit regimented. I was still only about 16 or 17, working as a printer on a YTS (Youth Training Scheme). We had our regulars who went week in, week out, but with it being a semi-final we filled six coaches. There were a lot of hangers-on, who were into making a day of it, having a lot to drink, but that wasn’t really my thing. I just wanted to get inside and enjoy what was going to be my first really big game. So, anything to do with policing or anything like that – it didn’t make any impression on me, either way. All I remember in real clear detail was that, once that big Hillsborough Kop filled up, you could feel it move underneath you, like being on a ship. Then the match started, Aldridge scored quite early on … then it was 2–0. We scrambled one back towards to the end, and there was an eight- or ten-minute spell when it was quite exciting, but, other than that, it was all a bit of a damp squib.
It hurts me to think about 1988. Notts Forest were a good team in those days, one of the best in the country. And the FA Cup really meant something back then, so to beat them – what a joyous day! But, now, thinking back, it hurts. It meant so much at the time, beating them, getting to the final. But now … it’s meaningless. It’s nothing.
I was in the North Stand in ’88, at the Leppings Lane end of the stand by that slightly raised bit of terracing near the corner – so I could see right across the Leppings Lane terrace. It was packed tight, but that was the norm. Being crowded, being squashed – you went on the terraces, and that was the absolute norm. I remember as a kid on the Kop being packed that tight that your feet haven’t touched the ground. Big games, derby games, late seventies, early eighties; the sway of the crowd was that powerful I’ve been turned round, feet off the ground, so my back was to the pitch. Frightening, that – but you took it. You’d see people getting passed down over your head but you never batted an eyelid. It’s how it was.
At the ’88 semi, you had to go through crowd control. It was all fenced off on the walk up to the ground and you had to go through barriers and ticket checks and so on. As you go through the turnstiles the first thing you see is the tunnel leading on to the Leppings Lane terraces. There’s a big sign above the tunnel, you can’t miss it, right in front of you: STANDING. Now, in ’88, I had my dad with me and as soon as we came through we got directed to the side pens because they told us the central pens were full. They blocked off the tunnel and just kept people moving, either side.
I’ve got three boys, so at any given time there were different permutations of who I’d be able to take to the game with me. Myself, I’d been to Hillsborough many, many times since I was a teenager, so I was used to the conditions there. But at the 1988 semi-final we were in the corner of the Leppings Lane terrace and it was packed very tightly; abnormally so, I thought. So, for the 1989 game, I was determined to get seats.
Everyone knew the Leppings Lane was a bad end. It was a case of, ‘Not again!’ I was in the North Stand for the semi-final the year before and, all through that game, Liverpool fans were being pulled up from the terracing into the seats. Afterwards, people I knew were saying they’d had to get out of there because it felt so tightly packed – it was uncomfortable.
Nowhere, in any of the papers relating to this tragedy, will you find anything that explains or puts into context the removal of Chief Superintendent Brian Mole from his role as chief of police in the Hillsborough area. We now know, from public records, that he was hurriedly transferred to Barnsley only a week or two before the forthcoming semi-final, as part of an internal measure.
But there are two other things we know, too: one is that Mole was a hugely experienced police officer, accustomed to policing the biggest matches at Sheffield Wednesday FC. The second thing we know is that his replacement, David Duckenfield, had next to no experience at all, and very little time to get himself acclimatised. These two things added up to disaster. The decision to relieve Brian Mole of his duties, and the timing of it, right before such a high-profile, high-impact football match, was a mistake of the most profound magnitude. Everything we have subsequently heard from the police has been an attempt to hide this enormous error of judgement.
There was a near identical situation before the 1981 semi-final, when Tottenham played Wolves. But there were no lateral fences, then – no pens – so the crowd could move outwards from the middle of the terrace, to the sides. Obviously Sheffield Wednesday removed barriers in response to the problems they had at the ’81 semi, and divided the Leppings Lane end into pens. There were gates between the pens at the rear but, once the two middle pens were packed to capacity, there was no way of getting out of there for those at the front. There was nowhere to go. The ground had no valid safety certificate, the FA carried out no checks. They were basically playing Russian roulette every time there was a match. Every game played there once they took out those barriers, they were playing Russian roulette; with disastrous consequences.
I was 29 – I turned 30 in the May of 1989 – and I’d been working for the youth services as a play development worker that past year, based out of Kirkdale Youth Centre. The week before the game, we’d taken a group of kids on a barge trip and, apart from the first day when it was glorious sunshine, the elements threw everything at us – rain, hail, even 6 inches of snow, one day. I was in bed most of the week leading up to the game with the flu.
Then, on the Thursday, my wife Tina told me she was pregnant. That was just … it was the best. It hadn’t been straightforward, we’d been trying; it had been going on a number of years. So that was a big, big moment.
I was living in Streatham. I’d moved to London for work, as so many of us did at the time. Football was my big link with home, with Liverpool, my family. I was with the fire service. By 1989 I’d done three years with the London fire brigade and two of those years were with the Rescue. So I’d seen a lot in that time. Obviously a detailed knowledge of first aid is a major part of your training but, above and beyond that, I’d had direct experience of several death situations. Our watch was at the King’s Cross fire in 1987. I’d pulled bodies out of there, burned to death. I’d seen quite a lot in quite a short time. But, like I say, football was my release. I came up on the Friday night, full of excitement for the game.
I was working at the Royal Insurance in town, living at home in Skelmersdale with my mum and dad. Typical Liverpool lad, football mad, bang into it – I played on a Sunday and I watched the Reds every Saturday. I was watching the most exciting Liverpool team I’d ever seen, week in, week out. I loved it, and at 20 years of age I went to my second consecutive FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough. Same ground, same opponents, and we were to wear red again. It couldn’t get better!
The Leppings Lane end was widely disliked as a ‘bad spec’. The sightlines were notoriously poor and the terracing was always packed tight. My season ticket qualified me for a terrace ticket – that is, the Leppings Lane – but, after the previous year’s overcrowding, I wasn’t keen. The system at Liverpool was that, if there had been any tickets returned, or if the players and so on hadn’t taken their allocation, they would go on sale last thing, the day before the game. So I decided to take my chances. I left work at 4, went up to Anfield and hung around in a queue that was forming. After a bit, Peggy, the manager of the ticket office, chased off a couple of well-known ticket touts. Then, to my great delight, she sold the last few remaining tickets in the North Stand – one per person – to the small queue of regulars waiting there. That night I sold my Leppings Lane ticket to a friend of a friend in the Coffee House pub in Woolton. I was looking forward to the semi even more, now.
The night before, I was in my local – the Cherry Tree, in Culcheth – with all my mates, a mix of Liverpool fans and Everton fans, all buzzing about the semi-finals the next day. I was with my best mate, Steve Turner – a Liverpool fan – both of us saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if our teams got to Wembley again.’ But the conversation turned to the ticket allocation: ‘How come Liverpool are in the away end again?’ Because anyone who’d been to Sheffield Wednesday knew what that was like. And we were ridiculing the FA for this weird decision, based on the Hillsborough Kop vaguely tilting towards Nottingham.
I’d just started as an Associate Postman – bit more money and, apart from the time you had to get up in the morning, I enjoyed that job. I remember in the run-up to the game, there was a lot of talk about Forest and Liverpool swapping ends; about us having the Leppings Lane end. Part of it was that Forest didn’t have as big a support as Liverpool, but part of it was – yes, we had the big end last year, Liverpool should have it this year. Certainly among our little gang the thinking was – yes, it’s only fair.
So, after all the overcrowding the year before, my feeling was that the game should have been played at Old Trafford. We’d had to travel the furthest distance in 1988 so, in the interests of being fair, it should have been Old Trafford – which would have been more convenient for us. But not only did we not get Old Trafford, we also got given the same end again.
please