PhilScraton
29th March 2009, 03:43 PM
Published in the Daily Telegraph Magazine 28 March 2009
Hillsborough football stadium disaster: a fight for justice and wounds that never heal
Twenty years after the Hillsborough football stadium disaster, questions remain unanswered and, for the families of the 96 Liverpool fans who died, justice has yet to be done.
Phil Scraton
Stephanie Jones travelled to Sheffield the night before the game to stay with her brother, Richard, and his girlfriend, Tracey, both at Sheffield University. On the Saturday afternoon Doreen, Stephanie and Richard's mother, visited her father at his home. 'I was in the back kitchen but my father shouted to me to tell me there was trouble at Hillsborough.' Doreen rushed to watch on the television. 'I saw people lying on the pitch and people coming over the fence. For somebody who is very calm in herself, I started to panic, shouting, "My three are in there." I started to cry.'
Doreen rang her husband, Les, who was also watching the coverage at work, 'already aware that there were deaths in the crowd'.
Some time before 5pm Stephanie rang from Sheffield. She was in tears because she had lost contact with Richard, 25, and Tracey, 23, at the ground. Helped by another fan, she had returned to their car and a local woman had taken her into her house to use the phone. 'She said she'd hurt her ribs, hurt her arm,' Doreen said. 'I told her to go back to the ground and tell the police what she had told me. We told her we were leaving right away for Sheffield.' As they set off, Les felt sure that Richard was seriously hurt.
The FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on April 15, 1989, was one of the highest-profile domestic football games of the season. By any standards, policing Hillsborough was a massive operation. The 1,122 officers on duty comprised approximately 38 per cent of the entire South Yorkshire force.
In 1989 Hillsborough, the home of Sheffield Wednesday, was typical of many First Division grounds. Built a century earlier, it stood two miles out of Sheffield's city centre, alongside the River Don. The east end, the Spion Kop, was a modern standing terrace holding 21,000, allocated to Nottingham fans. The west end, the decrepit Leppings Lane terrace, was allocated to Liverpool supporters.
Access to the Leppings Lane turnstiles was tight. Gates in the fencing led into confined areas feeding 23 old-style turnstiles, with exit gates nearby. The turnstiles processed fans entering the Leppings Lane terrace, the West Stand and the North Stand: more than 24,256. Three years earlier a police inspector had warned that the Leppings Lane turnstiles 'do not give anything like the access to the ground… needed by away fans'.
A beautiful spring day added to the carnival atmosphere. Many fans were led to the ground by police, who met them from trains and buses. But close to the ground there was no filtering of the crowd by the police. The bottleneck at the turnstiles became tightly packed and the mood changed. With walls, fences or gates to the sides and front the only relief was behind, but more and more fans arrived, oblivious to the mounting crush at the front.
As kick-off approached, the crush became desperate, the situation critical, as men, women, children and police officers struggled to breathe. In later testimonies police officers talked of the crowd growing 'unruly', 'nasty' and 'violent'. Those in the crush gave a considerably different account. They commented that there was no attempt to manage the crowd, no filtering and no queuing: 'It stands to sense that if you have people trying to find their turnstiles in a narrow space which leads to different parts of the ground you need a filtering system further back.'
Hillsborough's police control box was inside the ground, elevated above the Leppings Lane terrace, giving a commanding view of the crowd below.
Around 2.30pm the CCTV monitors showed the sudden build-up of fans in Leppings Lane and at the turnstiles. Chief Supt David Duckenfield, the match commander, had virtually no experience of policing football. He had taken over from his predecessor only three weeks before the game. Now he faced a serious dilemma.
The senior officer outside the ground told him that unless he opened the large exit gates, there would be serious injuries, possibly deaths. After some hesitation Duckenfield gave the command: 'Open the gates.
'Gate C was close to the turnstiles and fans walked through. 'We were just hanging back waiting for the crowd to thin out and the big blue gate opened,' one fan said. 'They called us through and we went. I had my ticket out but no one was interested. I thought, "Great, we're in," and walked straight down the tunnel in front of us.'
Directly opposite Gate C was the entrance to a tunnel under the West Stand. It was signed standing. More than 2,000 fans walked down the 1-in-6 gradient into the already packed central pens. There was no way out to the sides or the front and no way back up the tunnel.
'I don't remember seeing any stewards,' another fan said. 'We went down the tunnel and into the area right of the fence. It was really packed.' The central pens now held twice their capacity.
As the teams came out on to the pitch, the crowd was excited, cheering the names of the players. But in central pens 3 and 4 people were screaming. Others fell silent, unconscious. 'I couldn't believe what was going on. No one could move, not an inch. People around me were contorted in whatever position they'd been compressed. Heads were locked between arms and shoulders, the faces gasping in panic.'
'I was bent forward, from the waist, my full weight pressing down on people in front of me. At first the pain in my back was sharp but then it was in my chest. Suddenly, I knew I was going to die.'
In pen 3 the pressure was so great that the fans at the front were squashed into the perimeter fencing, their faces distorted by the mesh. 'I realised that the guy next to me was dead, his eyes were bulging and his tongue out. It was sheer horror.'
'I saw a young boy go down and knew that was it for him. He went under people's feet but no one could do anything about it. The pressure was so great.' Fans screamed at the police on the perimeter track to open the small evacuation gates on to the pitch, 'but they just seemed transfixed. They did nothing.' As fans tried to climb the overhanging perimeter fence, officers on the track pushed them back into the crowd.
In the police control box, Duckenfield and his colleagues had a perfect view of the central pens. Having opened the exit gate, he had failed to seal off the tunnel. Later, he stated his confidence that officers 'were patrolling the concourse area' and, acting 'on their own initiative… would have taken some action in the tunnel.'
From the control box Duckenfield saw fans trying to climb out of the pens. It did not strike him, he said later, that they were trying to escape a crush. Then he saw a perimeter gate open, apparently without authority.
'My perception is… it was a pitch invasion.' This was the message radioed to officers around the ground as they rushed to the Leppings Lane perimeter track. They thought they were dealing with crowd disorder. Duckenfield and his senior officers failed to anticipate disaster. The collective mindset was hooliganism.
Throughout the previous two decades 'football hooliganism' featured regularly in political debates. This led directly to the strategy of policing by segregation and containment. The 1977 McElhone Report on football crowd behaviour recommended lateral fences within terraces to prevent sideways movement. Perimeter fencing, high and overhanging, should be 'not less than 1.8m in height', designed to make access to the pitch impossible. Terraces were divided into pens – as many as six pens behind the goal.
The South Yorkshire police 'operational order' for the semi-final identified drunkenness as a priority. Much of the policing outside the ground, from random coach searches through to the monitoring of pubs, was supposed to be directed against drinking. What the operational order failed to address was as striking as its priorities. There were no contingencies for the inevitable build-up outside the ground immediately before kick-off. There was nothing about the bottleneck at the Leppings Lane turnstiles. There were no plans for coping with over-full pens or for closing the tunnel leading into the central pens. Committed to containment, it neglected safety.
As the officers arrived at the perimeter fence the full realisation of the situation was immediately apparent. 'This was not a pitch invasion,' one officer said later. 'There were a large number of dead, dying and injured persons in the crowd. Some crushed against the fence were blue violet in colour, others had glazed eyes, apparently dead, others were covered in vomit.'
Another officer saw a young boy close to the front of pen 3. 'He was still alive and had his fingers on the steel mesh. He was turning purple and looking straight into my eyes. I was totally helpless and could not reach [him]. I jumped down… and attempted to push my hands through the metal fence to pull him clear. It was futile. I spoke to him and told him to hang on and held his hands.'
Not long after 3.15pm, after the match had been abandoned, Duckenfield told representatives of the Football Association, including the chief executive, Graham Kelly, that Liverpool fans had forced Gate C, causing an inrush into the stadium, down the tunnel, into the backs of those already in the central pens. Duckenfield stated later that, 'The blunt truth [was] that we had been asked to open a gate. I was not being deceitful… we were all in a state of shock.' He continued, 'I just thought at that stage that I should not communicate fully the situation… I may have misled Mr Kelly.' He did.
Kelly unwittingly and in good faith repeated Duckenfield's lie to the waiting media. Within minutes it was broadcast around the world: an appalling disaster was happening, and Liverpool fans were to blame.
The medical assistance officially on call at Hillsborough was provided by 30 St John Ambulance officers, five of whom were young cadets. As fans were pulled from the pens through the two narrow perimeter track gates they were laid out close by. As bodies multiplied there was congestion on the pitch.
It was clear that those dying had suffered asphyxiation and needed proper medical care. To get them to hospital it was necessary to carry them the length of the pitch where they could be transferred to ambulances. Realising the urgent need for paramedical attention and hospital treatment, fans tore down advertising hoardings to use as makeshift stretchers. Bodies were placed on the hoardings and, running, fans carried them to the other end of the pitch. When they got there they were directed to lay people down in the club gymnasium.
By 3.45pm a doctor who had been treating people on the pitch was asked by a senior police officer to go to the gymnasium to examine bodies and certify death. On arriving in the gymnasium he found four or five rows of bodies and, with a GP, began examining them: 'We were accompanied by a police officer who made a note of every body… I performed a normal examination on each body and pronounced life extinct in turn.' In an estimated 25 minutes, he examined and certified 20 bodies.
Each body was given a number, put in a bodybag and allocated a police officer, who wiped the face with a sponge or rag. Polaroid photographs were taken, numbered and posted on a board close to the entrance of the gymnasium.
Doreen and Les Jones arrived in Sheffield late in the evening. Relatives were held at a disused boys' club and bused to the ground. At about 2.15am, a police officer announced that they 'were being taken to the ground to look at some photographs'. Doreen shouted out, 'Why? What are we going to look at photographs for? Why aren't we being taken to a hospital?'
She continued, 'He knew what the photographs were and I suppose I did… but I didn't know what was going on, possibly I didn't want to accept what was going on.'
Once at the ground, they were shown the full horror of the gymnasium. Surrounded by gym equipment, and what looked like 'curtains hanging', they watched 'a guy standing there punching a brick wall… people screaming and God knows what… nobody even taking a blind bit of notice.'
Les then saw the photographs, 'pinned on to the divider… any old way'. Doreen said, 'They were only small Polaroids and we seemed to go along loads of them. And then Les pointed out Richard without telling anybody that it was Richard… And then he said he couldn't find Trace. I said this was Trace… Les didn't recognise her at first.'
They were taken through a door, 'and they brought us two trolleys together, pulled one out – unzipped it, just showed you the head and you just said, "Yes" and they pulled the next one forward.' Doreen bent down, 'to cuddle Richard', but she never made it. 'I don't know who it was but… they hawked me up and told Les that they [the bodies] were the property of the coroner and we couldn't touch him.'
Of the 96 Liverpool supporters who eventually died, only 14 made it to hospital and, of those, 12 were pronounced 'dead on arrival'.
Extensive press coverage the following morning carried explicit, close-up photographs and graphic descriptions of the dead and injured. Media coverage rushed to judgment, and unqualified blame was directed against Liverpool fans.
Police sources and a local MP continued to allege that Liverpool fans were drunk and violent, attacked rescue workers, urinated on police officers while abusing and stealing from the dead. This led to the Sun's infamous front page three days after the disaster: 'THE TRUTH: some fans picked pockets of victims; some fans urinated on the brave cops; some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life'. Eight newspapers carried the allegations, consolidated by senior police officers in 'off-the-record' briefings. Consequently, Hillsborough became synonymous with soccer-related violence and hooliganism.
PART 2 on next thread
Adapted from the new edition of Phil Scraton's book 'Hillsborough: The Truth' (Mainstream), available for £9.99 plus 99p p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk) Phil Scraton is Professor of Criminology at Queen's University, Belfast
Hillsborough football stadium disaster: a fight for justice and wounds that never heal
Twenty years after the Hillsborough football stadium disaster, questions remain unanswered and, for the families of the 96 Liverpool fans who died, justice has yet to be done.
Phil Scraton
Stephanie Jones travelled to Sheffield the night before the game to stay with her brother, Richard, and his girlfriend, Tracey, both at Sheffield University. On the Saturday afternoon Doreen, Stephanie and Richard's mother, visited her father at his home. 'I was in the back kitchen but my father shouted to me to tell me there was trouble at Hillsborough.' Doreen rushed to watch on the television. 'I saw people lying on the pitch and people coming over the fence. For somebody who is very calm in herself, I started to panic, shouting, "My three are in there." I started to cry.'
Doreen rang her husband, Les, who was also watching the coverage at work, 'already aware that there were deaths in the crowd'.
Some time before 5pm Stephanie rang from Sheffield. She was in tears because she had lost contact with Richard, 25, and Tracey, 23, at the ground. Helped by another fan, she had returned to their car and a local woman had taken her into her house to use the phone. 'She said she'd hurt her ribs, hurt her arm,' Doreen said. 'I told her to go back to the ground and tell the police what she had told me. We told her we were leaving right away for Sheffield.' As they set off, Les felt sure that Richard was seriously hurt.
The FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on April 15, 1989, was one of the highest-profile domestic football games of the season. By any standards, policing Hillsborough was a massive operation. The 1,122 officers on duty comprised approximately 38 per cent of the entire South Yorkshire force.
In 1989 Hillsborough, the home of Sheffield Wednesday, was typical of many First Division grounds. Built a century earlier, it stood two miles out of Sheffield's city centre, alongside the River Don. The east end, the Spion Kop, was a modern standing terrace holding 21,000, allocated to Nottingham fans. The west end, the decrepit Leppings Lane terrace, was allocated to Liverpool supporters.
Access to the Leppings Lane turnstiles was tight. Gates in the fencing led into confined areas feeding 23 old-style turnstiles, with exit gates nearby. The turnstiles processed fans entering the Leppings Lane terrace, the West Stand and the North Stand: more than 24,256. Three years earlier a police inspector had warned that the Leppings Lane turnstiles 'do not give anything like the access to the ground… needed by away fans'.
A beautiful spring day added to the carnival atmosphere. Many fans were led to the ground by police, who met them from trains and buses. But close to the ground there was no filtering of the crowd by the police. The bottleneck at the turnstiles became tightly packed and the mood changed. With walls, fences or gates to the sides and front the only relief was behind, but more and more fans arrived, oblivious to the mounting crush at the front.
As kick-off approached, the crush became desperate, the situation critical, as men, women, children and police officers struggled to breathe. In later testimonies police officers talked of the crowd growing 'unruly', 'nasty' and 'violent'. Those in the crush gave a considerably different account. They commented that there was no attempt to manage the crowd, no filtering and no queuing: 'It stands to sense that if you have people trying to find their turnstiles in a narrow space which leads to different parts of the ground you need a filtering system further back.'
Hillsborough's police control box was inside the ground, elevated above the Leppings Lane terrace, giving a commanding view of the crowd below.
Around 2.30pm the CCTV monitors showed the sudden build-up of fans in Leppings Lane and at the turnstiles. Chief Supt David Duckenfield, the match commander, had virtually no experience of policing football. He had taken over from his predecessor only three weeks before the game. Now he faced a serious dilemma.
The senior officer outside the ground told him that unless he opened the large exit gates, there would be serious injuries, possibly deaths. After some hesitation Duckenfield gave the command: 'Open the gates.
'Gate C was close to the turnstiles and fans walked through. 'We were just hanging back waiting for the crowd to thin out and the big blue gate opened,' one fan said. 'They called us through and we went. I had my ticket out but no one was interested. I thought, "Great, we're in," and walked straight down the tunnel in front of us.'
Directly opposite Gate C was the entrance to a tunnel under the West Stand. It was signed standing. More than 2,000 fans walked down the 1-in-6 gradient into the already packed central pens. There was no way out to the sides or the front and no way back up the tunnel.
'I don't remember seeing any stewards,' another fan said. 'We went down the tunnel and into the area right of the fence. It was really packed.' The central pens now held twice their capacity.
As the teams came out on to the pitch, the crowd was excited, cheering the names of the players. But in central pens 3 and 4 people were screaming. Others fell silent, unconscious. 'I couldn't believe what was going on. No one could move, not an inch. People around me were contorted in whatever position they'd been compressed. Heads were locked between arms and shoulders, the faces gasping in panic.'
'I was bent forward, from the waist, my full weight pressing down on people in front of me. At first the pain in my back was sharp but then it was in my chest. Suddenly, I knew I was going to die.'
In pen 3 the pressure was so great that the fans at the front were squashed into the perimeter fencing, their faces distorted by the mesh. 'I realised that the guy next to me was dead, his eyes were bulging and his tongue out. It was sheer horror.'
'I saw a young boy go down and knew that was it for him. He went under people's feet but no one could do anything about it. The pressure was so great.' Fans screamed at the police on the perimeter track to open the small evacuation gates on to the pitch, 'but they just seemed transfixed. They did nothing.' As fans tried to climb the overhanging perimeter fence, officers on the track pushed them back into the crowd.
In the police control box, Duckenfield and his colleagues had a perfect view of the central pens. Having opened the exit gate, he had failed to seal off the tunnel. Later, he stated his confidence that officers 'were patrolling the concourse area' and, acting 'on their own initiative… would have taken some action in the tunnel.'
From the control box Duckenfield saw fans trying to climb out of the pens. It did not strike him, he said later, that they were trying to escape a crush. Then he saw a perimeter gate open, apparently without authority.
'My perception is… it was a pitch invasion.' This was the message radioed to officers around the ground as they rushed to the Leppings Lane perimeter track. They thought they were dealing with crowd disorder. Duckenfield and his senior officers failed to anticipate disaster. The collective mindset was hooliganism.
Throughout the previous two decades 'football hooliganism' featured regularly in political debates. This led directly to the strategy of policing by segregation and containment. The 1977 McElhone Report on football crowd behaviour recommended lateral fences within terraces to prevent sideways movement. Perimeter fencing, high and overhanging, should be 'not less than 1.8m in height', designed to make access to the pitch impossible. Terraces were divided into pens – as many as six pens behind the goal.
The South Yorkshire police 'operational order' for the semi-final identified drunkenness as a priority. Much of the policing outside the ground, from random coach searches through to the monitoring of pubs, was supposed to be directed against drinking. What the operational order failed to address was as striking as its priorities. There were no contingencies for the inevitable build-up outside the ground immediately before kick-off. There was nothing about the bottleneck at the Leppings Lane turnstiles. There were no plans for coping with over-full pens or for closing the tunnel leading into the central pens. Committed to containment, it neglected safety.
As the officers arrived at the perimeter fence the full realisation of the situation was immediately apparent. 'This was not a pitch invasion,' one officer said later. 'There were a large number of dead, dying and injured persons in the crowd. Some crushed against the fence were blue violet in colour, others had glazed eyes, apparently dead, others were covered in vomit.'
Another officer saw a young boy close to the front of pen 3. 'He was still alive and had his fingers on the steel mesh. He was turning purple and looking straight into my eyes. I was totally helpless and could not reach [him]. I jumped down… and attempted to push my hands through the metal fence to pull him clear. It was futile. I spoke to him and told him to hang on and held his hands.'
Not long after 3.15pm, after the match had been abandoned, Duckenfield told representatives of the Football Association, including the chief executive, Graham Kelly, that Liverpool fans had forced Gate C, causing an inrush into the stadium, down the tunnel, into the backs of those already in the central pens. Duckenfield stated later that, 'The blunt truth [was] that we had been asked to open a gate. I was not being deceitful… we were all in a state of shock.' He continued, 'I just thought at that stage that I should not communicate fully the situation… I may have misled Mr Kelly.' He did.
Kelly unwittingly and in good faith repeated Duckenfield's lie to the waiting media. Within minutes it was broadcast around the world: an appalling disaster was happening, and Liverpool fans were to blame.
The medical assistance officially on call at Hillsborough was provided by 30 St John Ambulance officers, five of whom were young cadets. As fans were pulled from the pens through the two narrow perimeter track gates they were laid out close by. As bodies multiplied there was congestion on the pitch.
It was clear that those dying had suffered asphyxiation and needed proper medical care. To get them to hospital it was necessary to carry them the length of the pitch where they could be transferred to ambulances. Realising the urgent need for paramedical attention and hospital treatment, fans tore down advertising hoardings to use as makeshift stretchers. Bodies were placed on the hoardings and, running, fans carried them to the other end of the pitch. When they got there they were directed to lay people down in the club gymnasium.
By 3.45pm a doctor who had been treating people on the pitch was asked by a senior police officer to go to the gymnasium to examine bodies and certify death. On arriving in the gymnasium he found four or five rows of bodies and, with a GP, began examining them: 'We were accompanied by a police officer who made a note of every body… I performed a normal examination on each body and pronounced life extinct in turn.' In an estimated 25 minutes, he examined and certified 20 bodies.
Each body was given a number, put in a bodybag and allocated a police officer, who wiped the face with a sponge or rag. Polaroid photographs were taken, numbered and posted on a board close to the entrance of the gymnasium.
Doreen and Les Jones arrived in Sheffield late in the evening. Relatives were held at a disused boys' club and bused to the ground. At about 2.15am, a police officer announced that they 'were being taken to the ground to look at some photographs'. Doreen shouted out, 'Why? What are we going to look at photographs for? Why aren't we being taken to a hospital?'
She continued, 'He knew what the photographs were and I suppose I did… but I didn't know what was going on, possibly I didn't want to accept what was going on.'
Once at the ground, they were shown the full horror of the gymnasium. Surrounded by gym equipment, and what looked like 'curtains hanging', they watched 'a guy standing there punching a brick wall… people screaming and God knows what… nobody even taking a blind bit of notice.'
Les then saw the photographs, 'pinned on to the divider… any old way'. Doreen said, 'They were only small Polaroids and we seemed to go along loads of them. And then Les pointed out Richard without telling anybody that it was Richard… And then he said he couldn't find Trace. I said this was Trace… Les didn't recognise her at first.'
They were taken through a door, 'and they brought us two trolleys together, pulled one out – unzipped it, just showed you the head and you just said, "Yes" and they pulled the next one forward.' Doreen bent down, 'to cuddle Richard', but she never made it. 'I don't know who it was but… they hawked me up and told Les that they [the bodies] were the property of the coroner and we couldn't touch him.'
Of the 96 Liverpool supporters who eventually died, only 14 made it to hospital and, of those, 12 were pronounced 'dead on arrival'.
Extensive press coverage the following morning carried explicit, close-up photographs and graphic descriptions of the dead and injured. Media coverage rushed to judgment, and unqualified blame was directed against Liverpool fans.
Police sources and a local MP continued to allege that Liverpool fans were drunk and violent, attacked rescue workers, urinated on police officers while abusing and stealing from the dead. This led to the Sun's infamous front page three days after the disaster: 'THE TRUTH: some fans picked pockets of victims; some fans urinated on the brave cops; some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life'. Eight newspapers carried the allegations, consolidated by senior police officers in 'off-the-record' briefings. Consequently, Hillsborough became synonymous with soccer-related violence and hooliganism.
PART 2 on next thread
Adapted from the new edition of Phil Scraton's book 'Hillsborough: The Truth' (Mainstream), available for £9.99 plus 99p p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk) Phil Scraton is Professor of Criminology at Queen's University, Belfast