HILLSBOROUGH: CHANGING PERSPECTIVES
>From www.twohundredpercent.net
Now the whole truth about Hillsborough is out, perspectives on the tragedy
have changed, as they have continually down the years. This week I read past
Hillsborough material from my magazine and book collection; When Saturday
Comes (WSC) magazine editorials from June 1989 and March 1990; and two
chapters from Nick Hornby's 1992 book Fever Pitch and from each of Guardian
journalist David Conn's books The Football Business (1997) and The Beautiful
Game? (2005). WSC, was then still as much a "fanzine" as a magazine, so it
was natural for its first post-Hillsborough issue to rail against the
misrepresentation of fans' role. The cover, headlined "Hillsborough: The
verdict," had pictures of the recently-appointed FA Chief Executive Graham
Kelly, South Yorkshire Police Chief Constable Peter Wright and our dear
leader, Margaret Thatcher, all telling us via speech bubble: "It wasn't our
fault." The football crowd in the fourth picture confessed via speech
bubble: "Oh well, it must be our fault again." It was, of course, an ironic
take on post-tragedy attitudes, made more ironic by this week's confirmation
of whose fault it really "wasn't."
The WSC editorial had a wearied tone. "We quickly reached saturation point,"
it noted, "because there are a limited number of ways in which the same
points can be made
and because so many stupid things have been said."
Cynicism abounded. "Fans have been both the prophesiers and the victims of
Hillsborough. But who believes that they will be invited to play an active
part in solving the problem which it highlighted?" Any "inquiry" was defined
as a "key ritual of organised disinformation," of which there had already
been plenty, besides the infamous Sun front page of April 19th, a graphic in
John Duncan's round-up of Hillsborough media coverage.
The resultant report would lead to "the cheapest and most expedient bits
(forming) part of a new law
the rest is made voluntary. Identification of
the real culprits is lost amid desperate, scurrying attempts to avoid
blame." Despite the considerable efforts of Lord Justice Peter Taylor, at
least some of WSC's cynicism was well-founded. Duncan's media review noted
that "the problem pressmen everywhere had to wrestle with was that the TV
pictures spoiled any attempt to blacken the fans." This should have been
true, especially as the Sun quickly issued "what, for them, amounts to a
grovelling apology under the heading Fans' Film Clears Fans."
Duncan also referenced a readers' letter "which read rather similarly to a
Sun editorial
the reader, Mrs Clementson of Portsmouth is either not on the
phone (there are no Clementsons listed in Portsmouth) or she doesn't exist.
Make your own mind up." WSC mirrored the broadsheets' tone: "depressed
rather than aggressive." And Duncan said the tabloid coverage was typically
written by people who "knew nothing and cared less." There were tabloid
calls to "tear down the cages of death," - a reference to Football League
grounds' perimeter fencing - from what the editorial darkly noted were "the
same people who demanded that they should be put up in the first place." And
Duncan rightly highlighted the usual contemporary "mess of ideas and
crackpot notions" which did more to "set the agenda for what happens beyond
the disaster itself," than any Sun apology.
In 2005, David Conn's made the pertinent point that "so many fans still
believe" the Sun's notorious "Truth" partly because of "how poorly the
Taylor Report itself was reported
people are not only ignorant of Taylor's
findings, they mostly don't even know he produced two reports." In 1989, WSC
didn't mention Taylor's first report which, Conn wrote, "dealt in detail
with the causes of the disaster
and who was to blame," and was "produced in
impressively quick time, by August 1989." Taylor's second report was
thoroughly dissected in WSC in March 1990. But their focus was Taylor's
all-seater stadia recommendations, which it saw as based on both "a simple
lack of comprehension" and an incomplete "appraisal of all the available
evidence."
In 1992, in Fever Pitch, committed Arsenal fan Nick Hornby focused on the
same issues, largely endorsing Taylor's views on all-seater stadia and
striking numerous other discordant notes. An earlier chapter, entitled Part
of the Game, was a chillingly familiar recall of a crush outside Highbury's
turnstiles in 1980. Many 1980s football fans, myself included, had similar
experiences and thought, like Hornby, that "it might seem as though the
authorities were pushing their luck
but that was because we didn't
understand properly how they were organising things." Hornby concluded,
"they really had been riding their luck all that time." And his conclusions
in his "Hillsborough" chapter were stark. "Every football ground should
become all-seater," Hornby noted. And he added, in his most strident tone:
"If clubs have to close down because they do not have the money for the
changes deemed necessary to avoid another Hillsborough, then so be it.
Tough."
Fans' complaints about being priced out of football by "clubs having to
charge more as a consequence" of ensuring fans' safety were "a particularly
poor argument, a whinge rather than a cogent objection." He criticised fans'
"conservatism" and opined that "the likelihood of dying in the way that
people at Hillsborough died will be minimised if the clubs implement
(Taylor's) recommendations properly, and that, as far as I can see, is all
that matters." And he quoted approvingly from the Economist magazine, which
criticised the game's own role, declaring. "Hillsborough was not just a
calamitous accident. It was a brutal demonstration of systematic failure."
We now know this is true, but not how either the Economist or Hornby meant.
Hornby fleetingly references the bereaved families, admitting it was "easy
to understand" why they wanted "officers from South Yorkshire Police brought
to trial." But history has been brutal to his suggestions that "it would be
terribly vengeful to accuse (the police) of anything more than incompetence"
and that "blame attached to the police, or stewards, or drunken fans, or
somebody
wouldn't have been right" because "Hillsborough" could have
happened "anywhere" - at, for instance, "Loftus Road, where thousands of
fans can only gain access to the away end through a coffee bar." Only in
1996 did the families become the focus of "Hillsborough." By then, Taylor's
recommendations and SKY TV multi-millions had repainted football's
landscape. But while football moved on (often callously - Hillsborough was
an FA Cup Semi-Final venue again in 1992), the families couldn't, as the
early 1990s brought endless obstruction and evasion from a legal system
seemingly set against them.
Football journalism had moved on, too, with David Conn's weekly Independent
newspaper column at the forefront of more investigative attitudes to a game
which, even before SKY's millions, Hornby had described as "a multi-million
pound industry which doesn't have two pennies to rub together." Conn looked
behind the glossy façade of the "new" football. And while his attention was
more frequently attracted by the financial woes paradoxically emerging from
football's new riches, he was willing and able to bring the bereaved
families' wholly contrasting plight to a wider, sympathetic audience.
In The Football Business, Conn acknowledged the impetus given to the
families' campaigning by the ITV screening of Jimmy McGovern's drama
Hillsborough in December 1996, which focused on the families' fight for
truth and justice. In both 1997 chapters, Conn covered much of what is now
the Hillsborough news agenda - the screaming legal injustices (too numerous
to even list within my word count); the political contexts ("in the
Thatcherite lists of 'them and us', football was firmly 'them'"); and moving
personal accounts of Phil and Hilda Hammond, whose 14-year-old son Phillip
is one of the 96.
Amid Conn's darker emotions ("the Hillsborough files" on the Taylor Report -
"can make you cry
angry, too"), he still raised a smile in recalling Ken
Bates' installation of electric fencing at Chelsea in the 80s: "The local
council did not, in the end, believe the Chelsea chairman's custodian duties
extended to electrocuting his customers." But re-reading these chapters and
those in The Beautiful Game? makes it seem more remarkable that the whole
truth took 23 years to emerge. In 2005 Conn re-covers much of the 1997
material, but only out of necessity. Between the books, there were yet more
screaming legal injustices.
In 1998, Home Secretary Jack Straw ordered a "scrutiny" of what Conn called
"new areas of doubt" by judge Lord Justice Stuart-Smith. Much of this week's
truth was scrutinised by Stuart-Smith. And he dismissed it - even the
revelation that "147 statements out of 400 made by South Yorkshire policemen
were changed," 87 of them "substantially." This revelation drew the most
gasps from the House of Commons this week when Prime Minister David Cameron
referenced it. Yet there it was, 14 years ago, for all to see, only for
Stuart-Smith to excuse the South Yorkshire Police: "There was an
understandable desire not to give anything away." Conn also recalls a
Sheffield Wednesday fan ("an intelligent, decent guy") who "trotted out the
old, tired falsehoods" about Liverpool fans being to blame ("a lot of
Wednesday fans think it should be called the Liverpool disaster"). "Our club
didn't get Semi-Finals for a long time," he continued, incorrectly (see
above). Conn quoted Taylor's August 1989 report - dismantling his theories.
"Maybe," the Wednesday-ite admitted, echoing what should long have been the
thoughts of a nation, "I should read the Taylor Report." Conn re-visits the
Hammonds and describes them as "more at peace" than in 1997, because "they
can now say they have done right by their children, by fighting as hard and
as far as they possibly could."
"They are convinced there is a lot they still don't know," Conn writes,
correctly. And this week's events give added poignancy to Phil Hammond's
words of 2005: "I have this feeling that someone, sometime, will tell us
everything. I am convinced that will happen, that we will find out." And
now, they have. Conn also focuses on "the force which conducted the
investigations
the West Midlands Police." Particular attention is paid to
this force's still-recent role in other infamous miscarriages of justice and
the still semi-shady role of Detective Superintendent Stanley Beechey in
"aiding" the Hillsborough investigations. It is, though, tempting to say
that the Hillsborough "cover-up" wasn't over-successful, because so much
information became public. That this information was wilfully abused by the
relevant authorities is arguably as shameful as anything covered-up.
Lies continue to be told about football. I am currently researching a
football finance story which contains demonstrable lie-upon-lie. But that is
only a football finance story. After Hillsborough, there were demonstrable
lies-upon-lies about people's lives and, worse, their deaths. Perspectives
changed as information emerged. But football supporters always knew that
lies were told about Hillsborough. WSC exposed general lies in June 1989.
Taylor exposed specific lies in August 1989. And, most importantly, the
bereaved families and their supporters have now exposed them all.
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PETE CASS (1962 - 2011) Rest In Peace Mate
