Those of us who were around at the time recall only too well just where we were when, on April 15th 1989, Hillsborough happened. Those of us who were most closely interested in it were doing the same thing as those 96 were. We were at a game, because we were football supporters.
But we came home.
By Dave Bowler
Back in April 1989, personal communications were altogether more rudimentary than they are today. You didn’t go to a football match with a phone in your pocket that has more processing power than the computers that powered the moon landings.
The best you could do to keep in touch with what was happening elsewhere in the country was to take a tiny transistor radio with you, maybe even a fancy dan Sony Walkman with a radio in it. From there you might get scratchy scoreflashes from around the land, but that was it.
So as the FA Cup semi-final unfolded at Hillsborough, few of us knew what was going on. Murmurs went around the crowd that the game had been delayed in some way or another. Early suggestions were that here might be crowd trouble of some sort, an easy enough assumption back in the 1980s when such things, though still statistically pretty rare, were far from unknown.
Cover up
Nowadays of course, we would know exactly what was happening within seconds. Any such tragedy would be filmed and photographed by thousands upon thousands of iPhones and there would be no hiding place for anyone for the images would tumble out across cyberspace through Twitter and Facebook within moments.
Back then, we knew what we were told, and not a lot more. Daft as it seems now, we tended to believe it too. And what we were told, as we know now, was a long, long way from the truth. Actually, most of us realised that at the time, that at least some, if not all of the stories were complete fabrications, designed to shift the blame from the authorities and an Establishment that routinely treated public safety – especially that of the footballing public – in cavalier fashion, and to place it on us.
For make absolutely no mistake about it, if you were a football supporter that went to any kind of game in the 1980s, the 96 at Hillsborough, just like the 56 at Bradford, could very easily have been you or me.
Cages
Clubs paid no heed to providing a safe, secure environment in rotting concrete bowls that, in many cases, were 60, 70, 80 years old and falling apart where they stood. They caged us into pens like rats in a trap so that we could not move from the exact spot where they wanted us. Safety certificates seemingly came free with packets of Corn Flakes. What little building and repair work was done was, according to the Hillsborough Inquest, done by cutting so many corners you were left only with a vicious circle.
The police were, very often, at war with supporters. Hooliganism had unquestionably disfigured the game, but the cages, the police escorts, the provocation that ordinary, decent folk – the 99% of the fans incidentally – received was, in no way, proportional to the risks they caused.
But the Establishment saw football not as the national game, but the national stain. We were the new enemy within, dehumanised, treated as one homogenous, unruly mass that needed to be controlled.
Contempt For Football
The government of the day was floating ideas such as banning England fans from travelling abroad, perhaps withdrawing England from international competition altogether, and was toying with the idea of bringing in identity cards for football supporters, a draconian measure not employed for any section of society since the war.
Viewed through the lens of history, we can see that what was gathering was a hideously perfect storm, a world in which a Hillsborough not only might happen but in which it had to happen. If not there, if not then, then somewhere and soon.
As we know now, 96 people were unlawfully killed. Think of that. Unlawfully killed. And not by an axe wielding homicidal maniac, a drug addled lunatic or a psychopathic murderer. These fellow fans, fellow citizens were unlawfully killed by the actions of those we trust to keep us, our parents, our children, safe. They were unlawfully killed by the machinery of the state.
Black Ops
For those people, for those families and friends, that is unspeakable tragedy and while the events of the last days will have given some comfort, they bring none of those people back. Theirs is a personal, private grief and, after having had to live it in the public eye for 27 years, a special kind of torture, it’s time that at last we gave them the privacy that we all crave in mourning.
But beyond those losses which can never be truly understood by the rest of us, there is a wider story here in which football fans sit at the centre. Within hours of the disaster, the mother of all propaganda operations went into overdrive, what we would now call black ops.
We soon read of Liverpool supporters stealing from the dead, drunkenly urinating on them, we saw the dead being turned from victims into people somehow complicit in their own demise, their fellow supporters demonised as their uncaring killers. The government itself played a role, as did the biggest selling newspaper in the country as something little short of war was declared upon football supporters – me and you.
Lies Discredited
The release of so many documents at the Hillsborough Inquiry and now the verdict of the Inquest have completely discredited those odious lies, pointed out with forensic clarity the duplicity of those who failed on the day and who failed thereafter, who did not understand, or chose to ignore, the fact that holding high public office means that you are responsible for all of us, that you do not pick and choose sides.
But for a time, the future of our very game was in danger and had it not been for the dogged determination of those Hillsborough families and their all consuming craving for justice for their loved ones, perhaps football as we know it would have fallen too. But their refusal to be silenced chipped away year on year, opened more and more minds day by day until gradually, we reached critical mass and the stench became too overpowering to be ignored any longer.
Hillsborough Families
In years to come, Hillsborough will be seen as an English Watergate, the point at which any remaining semblance of innocence left the public mind forever, the final nail in the coffin of a post-war dream of a benevolent Establishment that would care for us cradle to grave. Trust, once lost, never comes back, not the same way.
The Hillsborough families have done their country the most incredible service for they have changed it, they have made it clear that there really can be a holding to account of those who have done wrong, however high the office they hold. They are quite extraordinary people doing extraordinary work over an extraordinary period of time.
But they will be the first to admit that they are just ordinary men and women, galvanised to do something by the most devastating circumstances, by events that, God willing, none of us will ever be required to go through. They have shown us that we all have it in ourselves to be extraordinary.
Justice For The 96
The test is for us to find those reserves and use them before tragedy demands it from us. We knew football grounds were unsafe, but we did nothing about it. We knew we were treated badly but did nothing about it. Football, this extraordinary game, and those remarkable people have shown us a better way. It’s a path we should look to take, one that will allow us to hold our heads high in future and protect one another from the horrors of the past. For history demonstrates that the only duty of care we can expect is from one to the other.
As to those who denied the truth, who deliberately smeared, who twisted grotesquely a national tragedy into a parochial political gain, let’s discuss them no further. We can leave them to their conscience, if conscience they have, for if they have none, we cannot change them anyway and we merely build up a reservoir of bitterness in ourselves, a worthless, destructive emotion. We know who they are and we know how to treat them and the organisations they still represent.
May the 96 from Hillsborough rest easy and may the families and friends who have long been tortured, finally find some peace. And those who caused such catastrophe, who lied, who cheated, who covered up the truth, the very people to whom we as citizens give our trust for our protection? May they never sleep again.
