The UK’s Daily Mirror’s superb story of the Hillsborough Disaster from the beginning to today

by Brian Reade          

How English football became a golden magnet for billionaire owners and millionaire players from every corner of the earth… at the cost of 96 lives

English football is different today.

The stadiums are home to middle-class families watching pre-match entertainment from comfortable seats and corporate clients sipping chilled wine over three-course meals in plush boxes. Potent symbols of the most lucrative brand in global sporting history.

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Twenty years ago our grounds didn’t smell of wealth and fine cuisine but resentment, from fans fenced into crumbling terraces by law- makers who viewed them as an unruly mob.

Their potential for tribal violence, not their consumer rights, were uppermost in politicians’ minds. Crowd control, not crowd safety, the guiding principles of police charged with keeping them in check.

In those decrepit sheds, many of which had changed little since the Victorians built them, a tragedy was waiting to happen.

 

It came on April 15, 1989, during an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, when police lost control, opened an exit gate and allowed thousands of fans to enter, and stream unguided, into crowded pens. They then ignored the desperate pleas from those who were perishing behind 10ft high, spiked metal. It was Britain’s worst sporting disaster and it changed football forever.

An inquiry would demand all pitch-side fences were ripped out, seats put in and fans treated as human beings.

English football became a golden magnet for billionaire owners, millionaire players and satellite customers, drawn from every corner of the earth. But at what cost? Ninety-six people – half of whom were 21 or younger – lost their lives at Hillsborough, more than 750 were physically injured, numerous suicides have been laid at its door, and thousands still bear the mental scars.

The families fought long and hard for justice for their loved ones, but despite Lord Justice Taylor laying the blame squarely at the door of the police, not one person has lost a day’s pay or a day’s liberty. Two decades on the wounds are still raw.

But on Wednesday September 12, after years of trying, families of the dead will finally get to see confidential government and police documents which they believe will show how the blame was shifted from panicked policing and flawed stadium design to innocent supporters. Follow live coverage of the Hillsborough documents release with Mirror Online, or get a local perspective from our sister paper the Liverpool Echo.

Here is English football’ s most harrowing and shameful story told by Brian Reade, the Mirror man who was there on the day and with the families throughout their elusive struggle for justice.

The morning could not have been more perfect. A cobalt blue sky, blood orange sun and a warm air filled with birdsong and blossom. Spring’s optimism flooded Liverpudlian hearts.

It was the second year running we’d been drawn to play Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough and those of us in that red procession which snaked along the M62 to Sheffield had few worries about reaching Wembley again.

But different kinds of doubts were creeping in. Major roadworks, an accident and persistent police checks were causing delays, and fears spread that the kick-off might be missed.

On reaching Hillsborough those fears were realised. At 2.30pm, Leppings Lane, the entry point for all Liverpool fans, was human gridlock.

No police or stewards were on hand to filter the thousands of fans into queues.

The only visible authority was half-a dozen forlorn figures in blue on horseback and a few on the ground, screaming at the swaying crowd to back away from the turnstiles. For the second year running, and despite protests, Liverpool were given 4,000 fewer tickets and the smaller end of the ground – despite having a much bigger following than Forest.

Geographically it made the police job of getting fans in and out of Sheffield easier.

Ensuring safety is how they termed it. It meant all 24,000 Liverpool ticket-holders, whether in Leppings Lane or the West and North stands, had to pass through 23 turnstiles, most so old they constantly jammed.

At the much newer Kop end Forest had 60 modern turnstiles. As the ground erupted with expectation at the entry of the teams, outside in Leppings Lane, there was pandemonium.

Fans, angry at the lack of movement and organisation, berated the police, some of whom were screaming into their radios for assistance. Many of us moved away from the turnstiles and looked on from a distance, convinced the kick-off would be put back while they sorted out the chaos.

Instead, at 2.52pm a huge blue exit gate opened and 2,000 of us poured in.

At the back of the Leppings Lane terrace, stewards who were supposed to be dispersing the supporters evenly into five pens had vanished. Consequently the bulk of fans ignored the lesser populated pens at the sides of the terrace and headed into the two central ones behind the goal, already over-crowded. Those at the front became packed tighter and tighter. The game was now under way and fans at the back, ignorant of the crush, concentrated on trying to get a view of the pitch.

They weren’t to know that ahead of them on this shallow-sloping concrete there was panic, fear, hyper-ventilating, fainting, hair drenched in sweat and vomit matting on the metal fencing.

And death. Survivors speak of faces pushed against them that were wide-eyed and blue, of their bodies going numb and limp, and their minds suffering neardeath experiences. Eddie Spearritt, whose 14-year-old son Adam died in the crush, lost consciousness. He said: “They’ve said it was a surge but it wasn’t. It was a slow, constant build-up of pressure, like a vice getting tighter and tighter until you couldn’t breathe.”

Fans screamed at passing police to open the perimeter gates but they walked on by. Some who tried to climb over the fence were battered back down. Others crawled on all fours above heads towards the back of the terrace and were hoisted to safety by fans in the stand above.

Despite the obvious density of the crowd, the screams, and the pain etched on the faces of the suffering – and despite CCTV cameras feeding these images back to the police control room – the perimeter gates remained locked.

When one was temporarily forced open by fans and a few spilled on to the pitch, the police thinking became clear.

Reinforcements moved in with dogs. They believed what they were seeing behind the cages was not innocents trapped in a killing field, but hooligans orchestrating a pitch invasion.

Goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar, a couple of yards from the unfolding disaster, was one of the first to raise the alarm.

He said: “There were people with their faces pinned against the fence saying to me, ‘Bruce, can you help me. We can’t breathe’. So I asked a policewoman to open the gate and she said, ‘We have to wait for our boss to give the word’.”

By 3.04pm, when Liverpool striker Peter Beardsley crashed a shot against the bar causing a surge, many of the 96 had already lost their lives.

Some died standing up, of traumatic asphyxia. Others were crushed or trampled when a crash barrier gave way.

At 3.06pm after the police reinforcements had signalled the severity of the problem, the referee led both teams off.

The perimeter gates were opened and hundreds of seriously injured fans spilled on to the grass and collapsed, desperate for ambulances, stretchers and oxygen that never arrived.

The penalty area looked like a battlefield.

Between the bodies, casualties staggered around, dazed, confused, weeping.

Apart from a handful of St John Ambulancemen, the only medical aid for the dying came from fellow fans.

They tried resuscitation and tore down advertising hoardings to ferry victims the length of the pitch to what quickly became a makeshift mortuary. Some policemen joined in. Others berated fans for ripping down the hoardings to make stretchers.

Dozens more police were drafted on to the pitch, not to help casualties but to form a wall across the half- way line to prevent rival fans getting at each other.

Clearly back in the control room the carnage was still being put down to hooliganism.

Half an hour after the players had left the pitch a solitary ambulance made its way slowly towards the Leppings Lane end. That even one made it was a minor miracle.

Tony Edwards, the only professional ambulanceman to reach the Leppings Lane end, recalled what happened outside the ground. He said: ” A policeman came to my window and said, ‘ You can’t go on the pitch, they ‘re still fighting’.”

He went on nonetheless, but his job was made impossible by the scale of the casualties.

The memory of bodies being piled on to his ambulance, of people pleading with him to take their friends and loved ones, of the anarchy that made his job impossible, haunts him to this day.

But what haunts him most is the knowledge that he was the only paramedic trying to help. He said: “There were 42 ambulances, including mine, waiting outside the stadium. That means 80- odd trained staff could have been inside the ground. They weren’t allowed in because they were told there was fighting.

“But there was no fighting. The survivors were deciding who was the priority, who we should deal with. The police weren’t. We weren’t . Can you imagine a rail accident where all the ambulances wait on the embankment while survivors bring the casualties up?”

Of the 94 who died that day ( 14-year-old Lee Nicol died four days later and 18-year-old Tony Bland had his life support machine turned off in March 1993) only 14 made it to hospital.

Trevor Hicks was one of the few who got a loved one into Tony Edwards’ ambulance. He was trying to resuscitate his 19- year- old daughter Sarah when he spotted her 15- year- old sister Victoria being placed into the ambulance.

Trevor tried to push Sarah in alongside her but the bodies were piled high and he had to lay her back on the pitch.

He said: ” The ambulance started to move away. I saw the door close and I had to make a decision in that split-second. I thought ‘the fella with Sarah knows what he’s doing, I’ll leave her with him and another ambulance will be along in a minute’.”

Another one never came and both of his girls died. Trevor, now 63, added: “In the ambulance, I was sucking the vomit from Vicky’s throat. I couldn’t get rid of that taste for six months.

“A psychiatrist said I was either trying to hang on to the last contact with my daughters or it was guilt – I was punishing myself for not saving them.

“The hurt I suffered that day was so extreme I can’t be hurt any more.”

Outside the ground as we devastated fans made our way home grief turned to rage when word spread that we were being blamed for the disaster.

The FA’s Chief Executive Graham Kelly, told the media that the policeman in charge, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, had accused us of kicking down an exit gate and flooding the terraces.

Duckenfield, in charge of his first big football match had given the order to open the gate without ensuring the thousands who entered Leppings Lane would be funnelled into the outside pens.

He had seen the over- crowding and suffering on the terraces on CCTV cameras with zoom facilities and done nothing. And when asked for an explanation he mouthed something he believed outsiders would buy.

A hooligan mob had stormed the stadium and killed their own.

It was a lie which would travel all the way around the world before it was corrected.

A calculated slur that would never go away.

Uefa president Jacques Georges picked up on Duckenfield’s words and laid the blame squarely on the Liverpool fans.

He said: “They were beasts waiting to charge into the arena.” When Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher turned up at Hillsborough on the Sunday, she expressed her sympathy but little else.

However, her closest aide, Yorkshireman Sir Bernard Ingham, was blaming a “tanked-up mob”.

This was the line now being peddled by South Yorkshire Police as the enormity of their culpability hit home.

Before a single corpse had been buried the second Hillsborough tragedy was under way. The cover- up.

A Sheffield news agency and Tory MP Irvine Patnick, were fed lies by an unnamed

Police Federation official and soon a fantasy tale, copper- bottomed by officialdom, was in the public domain.

Hordes of Liverpool hooligans had turned up drunk and ticketless and caused mayhem outside the ground leaving police with no option but to open the gate.

As brave emergency service workers battled to save lives, the yobs abused them in the vilest of manner and stole from the dead.

The Establishment was putting a classic smear on the fans to duck the blame for almost 100 deaths and so low did the public hold football followers back then, it swallowed it.

One man in particular, Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie, made a terrible miscalculation.

Under the headline THE TRUTH he cleared the front page to tell the world: “Some fans picked pockets of victims. Some fans urinated on the brave cops. Some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life.”

The words that accompanied it claimed that ” drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers as they tried to revive victims” and ” police officers, firemen and ambulance crews were punched, kicked and urinated upon”.

One anonymous copper was even quoted as saying that a dead girl had been abused, while fans ” were openly urinating on us and the bodies of the dead”.

With Merseyside still trying to come to terms with the enormity of the tragedy and families making arrangements for burying their dead, it felt like a knife being forced deeper and deeper.

Scousers, regardless of their football leanings, were apoplectic. To accuse them of killing their own was bad enough but to state as fact that they picked the pockets of the dying was a call to arms.

Overnight thousands of copies of The Sun were destroyed. There were public burnings.

Delivery men refused to touch it, shopkeepers refused to stock it. The boycott is still observed by the vast majority of Merseysiders to this day.

In 20 years, not one witness has come forward to back up any of those allegations. Not one image has been unearthed from thousands of photographs and hours of film to vindicate the slurs.

That’s because they were outright lies.

Behind the scenes police were attempting to harden up the case of the drunken, ticketless mob.

Fans, including myself, were interviewed by West Midlands CID, who were charged with finding out the causes of the disaster.

But the main thrust of their questions was how much people had drunk before the game and whether anyone travelling with them did so without a ticket. Bereaved parents told how, when they arrived in Sheffield on the night of April 15, their dead children were being treated as suspects in a criminal investigation.

All were asked how much their loved ones had had to drink.

It later turned out every corpse had been tested for alcohol content, with small amounts or nothing found in all of them.

But why had it suddenly become a crime to have a drink before a sporting event or turn up ticketless in the hope of buying one off a tout? Were they implying you’d never see that at Wimbledon, Twickenham or a Rod Stewart concert? Of course many fans had been drinking before the game and some turned up without tickets.

It had happened every year at FA Cup semi-finals. Why suddenly, at this particular game, did police decide that doing either made you a potential murderer? Amid the slurs and questions, Liverpool was trying to come to terms with its grief. The day after the disaster people drifted towards Anfield seeking a focal point for their mourning.

The club’s chief executive Peter Robinson opened the ground and the Kop and its goalmouth, became a shrine to the dead.

Within days, a third of the pitch would be blanketed with flowers, scarves of all colours from followers of different clubs and heart-felt messages of support from around the world.

The players became social workers, sometimes attending half-a-dozen funerals a day. Striker John Aldridge said: ” It hit me very, very hard. To the point where I couldn’t cope.

“It weakened me physically, emotionally and mentally. The thought of training never entered my head. I remember trying to go jogging but I couldn’t run. There was a time when I wondered if I would ever muster the strength to play. I was learning about what was relevant in life.”

He did go back to playing though, and three weeks later, scored twice against

Nottingham Forest to knock them out of the re-scheduled semi-final .

Liverpool went on to win the FA Cup in an emotional final against neighbours Everton. But many believe the fact that the competition wasn’t abandoned that year was yet another insult to the dead.

As spring turned to summer there was little to extinguish the pain and anger among Liverpudlians. Until August 4, when the late Lord Justice Taylor published his interim report into the disaster and finally the truth was heard.

And it was the complete opposite of the lies being peddled by certain people in Yorkshire and Wapping.

He ruled that drunkenness, late arrivals and fans turning up without tickets were red herrings. That there was no evidence of any kind of hooliganism and that fans were not to blame for the crush. He even described their role in trying to save the dying as ” magnificent”.

Instead, Lord Taylor laid the blame squarely at the door of the police.

He highlighted their planning failure which allowed ” dangerous congestion at the turnstiles” and ruled that “the immediate cause of the disaster was gross overcrowding, namely the failure, when the exit gate was opened, to cut off access to the central pens which were already overfull.

“They were overfull because no safe maximum capacities had been laid down, no attempt was made to control entry to individual pens numerically and there was no effective visual monitoring of crowd density.”

He hit out at the police’s “sluggish reaction and response when the crush occurred” and claimed that the total number of fans who entered the Leppings Lane terrace ” did not exceed the capacity of the standing area”.

So much for the thousands of ticketless fans theory.

And he lambasted Chief Supt Duckenfield who he said “froze” after ordering the exit gate to be opened.

“A blunder of the first magnitude,” he called it.

Taylor’s report not only vindicated the fans but gave hope to the bereaved families that they would receive justice. That the people into whose care they had entrusted their loved ones would face up to their responsibilities for allowing a wholly avoidable disaster to happen. But their hope was shortlived.

The inquests, held before a Sheffield jury, and a coroner who was in the pay of Sheffield Council ( themselves culpable for not issuing Hillsborough with a valid safety certificate) delivered verdicts of accidental death. The coroner had imposed a 3.15pm cut- off time, claiming that every victim would have been brain- dead by then and ruling out any evidence relating to events after it.

It automatically hauled the emergency services off the hook, making it that much harder to prove there had been criminal neglect. The DPP threw out all charges against the police on grounds of insufficient evidence. No senior officer was prosecuted and a disciplinary case against Duckenfield was stopped when he took early retirement at 46 on medical grounds, with a full pension.

No legal, moral or financial compensation came the families’ way. The majority receiving little more than funeral expenses.

In contrast, 14 police officers who were ” traumatised” by what they saw that day picked up £ 1.2million.

Astonishingly, their claims for compensation were based on the insurers accepting that their superiors had been negligent.

However, there was a momentum gathering behind the belief that a major miscarriage of justice had taken place. Screenwriter Jimmy McGovern was commissioned by Granada TV to tell the families’ stories in a two- hour drama- documentary.

Researchers unearthed new evidence which undermined the police case, crucially that the CCTV camera trained on the Leppings Lane end, which they said had not been in operation, was working.

The ground engineer swore an affidavit to that effect which proved South Yorkshire Police had been lying when they told the inquest they couldn’t see the extent of the crush from the control box.

This could not have been challenged at the inquests because, mysteriously, the CCTV tapes from the day were ” stolen” and never found.

On December 5 1996, Hillsborough was back on the front pages of a national newspaper. This time The Mirror splashed with a headline THE REAL TRUTH urging every reader to watch McGovern’s drama.

The Mirror’s phone lines were swamped with angry readers demanding justice – 25,695 adding their names to the paper’s petition calling on the Attorney General to launch a new inquiry. Within weeks of Labour winning power in 1997 Home Secretary Jack Straw appointed Lord Justice Stuart-Smith to scrutinize the new evidence to see if it merited a fresh public inquiry.

Once again the families believed justice would soon be delivered. But within minutes of meeting Stuart- Smith they knew they were walking into the latest brick wall.

When there was a delay at the start of proceedings, due to the absence of some family members, Stuart- Smith turned to Phil Hammond, who lost his son Philip in the disaster, and said: “Are they like the Liverpool fans, turning up at the last minute?”

The Lord Justice cross- examined nobody and studied the evidence in private. And despite discovering that 183 police statements had been edited to remove criticism of senior police management, he ruled there was not enough evidence to merit a fresh inquiry..

By now the families were running short of stamina and options but still they fought on.

They took out private prosecutions against Duckenfield and his deputy on the day, Supt Bernard Murray, who went on trial at Leeds crown court in July 2000 charged with manslaughter and wilful neglect of duty.

But once again justice eluded them. Murray was cleared of all charges and when the jury failed to reach a verdict on Duckenfield the judge halted the trial, cleared him, and ruled there could be no retrial.

This was their last collective shot at justice. It ended with eight armed police officers escorting the families out of the court building. Presumably in case they caused trouble.

Eleven years after their loved ones lost their lives for being viewed as a problem they ended their legal fight in the exact same way. But they’d battled their hearts out for some vague notion of justice. For the belief that when you bring children into this world, the facts on the birth certificate are accurate.

And when they leave, the least you can do for them is put the true facts on their death certificate.

Jimmy McGovern said: “All the families ever wanted was for someone to put their hands up and be accountable for the deaths of their loved ones.

“But no one has said sorry. Now that runs contrary to basic human instincts. If we bump into each other, we both say ‘Sorry’. It’s a basic human response.

“But not in tragedies of this scale. They can’t say sorry. It implies liability. That’s why the families kept on fighting.”

And those of us who walked through that opened Leppings Lane gate and have felt guilty ever since for coming home alive owe them.

For seeking truth in the face of vicious lies and prejudice. For fighting for the memory of people whose only crime was being naive enough to turn up at, supposedly, one of the country’s finest football grounds in the belief that their safety was paramount in the eyes of those charged with their care.

If you are a football fan you should remember them when you look around today’s affluent, cage-free, well-stewarded, all-seater stadiums.

You should remember the agony they went through in the first Hillsborough Disaster and the suffering their families went through in the second one.

And you should never forget that for English football’s bright tomorrow they gave their todays.

For more on this story and live coverage of the reaction to the report go to:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/hillsborough-documents-released-brian-reade-1318730