Hillsborough Untold: Aftermath of a disaster Read online

  Of course, his posting could have been deferred, he could and arguably should have been told to continue with operational plans in train and to command the semi-final game as the Barnsley Chief Superintendent. Though that might have appeared indecisive in the context of the 1980s police culture. Furthermore, any delay in his removal may have given Brian Mole, perceived as crafty and clever, an opportunity to change minds at Headquarters about the whole enterprise surrounding his transfer.

  Whatever the reason for Mr Mole’s departure, however, the die was cast. The match commander on 15 April 1989 was to be David Duckenfield, a man who now claims, prob ably accurately, that he was neither appropriately experienced nor sufficiently confident to fulfil that role. It was to be David Duckenfield who would be watching, via CCTV cameras, the swelling numbers gathering outside the turnstiles. It was to be he who would have seen that, at 2.45 p.m., the area was now choked to such a degree that it was becoming difficult for anyone to actually get through the turnstiles.

  Imagine a small opening in a bag of coffee beans. The hole might be big enough to let one or two beans pass through easily in turn, but when there is the pressure of other beans concentrated on that same opening then none can escape. There were 5,000 people in a frightening press and their narrow routes to a place of refuge had all seized under the pressure. David Duckenfield was watching this but had no experience of what was normal and what was extraordinary in terms of gathering numbers for a semi-final event. The time for making a decision about delaying kick-off was now.

  But he let the moment pass. He had previously given a policy decision to his staff that ruled out kick-off delay except where external factors had prevented the timely arrival of fans. Mr Duckenfield reports that by the time he was resolved to consider postponement it was too late. He might have been petrified, quite literally, at the thought of the criticism that would follow from all quarters at this, his first major operation in his brand-new command.

  The topography outside those seized turnstiles aggravated the developing crisis. There was a slight downhill gradient from the road into a bowl and then a funnel-shaped area. The front of the crowd, pressed against the turnstile wall, was maybe thirty-five people shoulder to shoulder but, back at the stadium perimeter gates, it was maybe fifty people and, by the time the crowd was back to the roadway, it was 100 or more across the fan-shaped press.

  Some eye witnesses claim that there were some individuals who did not help matters either. This has been a sensitive and controversial aspect of any account of the day. Whilst such claims deserve to be set in a proper context and not exaggerated, they cannot be ignored or concealed. I raise them here in just two paragraphs only to describe a possible source for the perceptions of a South Yorkshire Police ‘cover-up’, not to unpick the clear and definitive verdict of the recent Coroner’s Inquest.

  There has been consistent testimony that a small proportion of fans had no ticket for the game, and had been unable to acquire a ‘spare’ or a ‘swap’. On the sworn evidence of some turnstile operators, it is said that odd individuals sought to use the opportunity of the crush to negotiate their way in. Conscientious turnstile operators sent them back out but this interfered with throughput at the too-few turnstiles even before the crowd became jammed. Several in the crowd – not many – are reported to have become impatient to an assertive degree. Some are said to have pushed, although most in the throng had lost physical control and were simply being carried along by the crowd. One or two are reported to have hurled cans and abuse at mounted police who were perceived to be part of the problem in the crush rather than the solution. According to the unsolicited and unvarnished testimony of some police officers and members of the public, there were some individuals who arrived late at the back of the crowd, albeit a tiny minority of the overall throng, who acted unreasonably. These individual transgressors might have stood out to the junior officers trying, in vain, to restore order and safety even after any chance of control had been lost.

  The original evidence of the mounted officers who, against all the odds and at the height of the crush, managed to close the perimeter gates to prevent further entry to the funnel and to protect those inside of the gates, is pertinent. From their lofty viewpoint they claimed to have spotted, in the mass of the law-abiding, sober, frightened thous ands, the unreasonable behaviour of a number. The perimeter gates were forced open, the temporary relief was lost and the crowds continued pressing. The mounted officers trapped amongst the throng, incidentally, were predominantly Merseyside officers, shipped in that day to assist with the control of a crowd that would have been familiar to them at Anfield. They made their statements to assist the independent West Midlands Police investigation, not to suit a South Yorkshire Police conspiracy.

  Any police interventions at this time were too little, too late. There had been no effective policing strategy to prevent a crush from occurring and no contingency plan or coordinated response when it did occur.

  Those junior officers closest to the dangerous crush, which was a precursor to the terrible disaster that ensued in the following minutes, were asked for an early account – by supervisors, by journalists, by families and colleagues, and by a public inquiry which sat within four weeks of the tragedy. It may be no surprise that, having experienced the feeling of professional impotence, and tormented by their own post hoc guilt at having failed to avert the catastrophe, some of them should highlight the behaviour of individuals who they perceived as not helping the situation in their moment of failure.

  Thus was sown the seed of the perceived and lasting hurt, felt deeply by the families of those bereaved on this dreadful day, that ‘the police have always blamed the Liverpool fans for the disaster’. It quickly became clear, particularly once Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry had heard the wider evidence of what went on that day, that the fans in that terrible crush were in no way to blame.

  Some people have clung to that false narrative for too long. They are often people who weren’t there on the day, have heard no evidence from those who were, and have never read any of the published accounts from the various inquiries. For years I have explained to the occasional jaundiced commentator that there may have been evidence of misbehaviour by a minority in the crowd but they didn’t create the situation which ultimately led to the deaths of ninety-six people. The police had lost the situation by 2.45 p.m. on that Saturday, even if that minority had all stayed at home.

  From seat NN28, I knew nothing of these events at the time. Everyone was standing in this seated grandstand, at 2.55 p.m., to welcome the players into the coliseum. An added frisson of excitement was to try to catch a glimpse of the Forest manager, Brian Clough – the 1989 equivalent of today’s ‘Special One’. Clough was under a touchline ban for thumping three fans who had, with hundreds of others, invaded the pitch at a League Cup Quarter Final game in February that year. Clough was allowed to manage the team from the stands with messages passed via runners to his bench. He was to be seated in the South Stand on this occasion and all were straining to witness this ‘momentous’ event – a football manager sitting in a seat like ours. I thought it was silly and sat down to try to encourage the same in others so we could enjoy the game.

  People did, eventually, take their seats and, as the wider scene was gradually revealed to me, I saw that twenty-two men had begun to kick a ball about. But I also saw something much more significant. I saw people climbing from the centre pens at the Leppings Lane end. Dozens were clambering over the top of the perimeter fences and scores were being lifted into the seating section above the terrace. People around me were seeing the same sight but not through my eyes. The man next to me shouted: ‘Get the dogs into them! Get them back!’ But this was no 1980s-style pitch invasion. No one escaping the cages behind the goal was venturing anywhere near the hallowed playing surface. A number were just sitting, some collapsing, on the perimeter track. This was a safety issue. There were too many people in too small a cage. The utter stupidity of human cages was being
made manifest here at Hillsborough.

  Even then, I never thought for a second that anyone would be seriously hurt. I imagined that, under police direction, a number would be decanted from one pen to another and the sacred game would continue. I couldn’t know about the opening of Gate C outside the stadium and the 2,000 additional people joining an already-full terrace. I knew nothing about the removal of crush barrier 144 at that stage. I didn’t realise that barrier 124A had by now collapsed in Pen 3. The tragedy had passed unknown and unseen whilst most of us with an individual seat in the relative calm of the South Stand were looking to see if a middle-aged man, wearing a green sweatshirt, had taken his seat in the stand.

  I realised, quicker than many around me, that this was serious. Police officers, some senior, were running. (Police officers don’t normally run, as it tends to spook the public.) I saw Superintendent Roger Greenwood stop the game and the referee remove the players from the pitch. My emerging fears were confirmed when I saw a police officer that I knew, PC Keith Marsh, carrying a young boy across the playing surface to a quieter, less chaotic area right in front of where I was sitting. He put him down on the ground and began to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, whilst another man was doing chest compressions on the boy. That little boy was in cardiac and/or respiratory arrest. He was in danger of dying before my very eyes or he may, for all I knew, already be dead. I looked around and took in the wider scene. Hundreds by now were on the playing surface and its perimeter. But, apparently, hundreds of police officers were too. Enough, in my immediate professional opinion, to resolve the most extreme operational challenge. But not enough, it transpires, to prevent the tragedy unfolding behind the impenetrable steel-mesh fences.

  Someone had joined PC Marsh and the other man attending to the young boy in front of me. This chap looked up to the South Stand, to no one in particular, and offered a joyous thumbs-up signal. He was obviously under the impression that mouth-to-mouth and CPR had saved the young boy’s life. Unfortunately, history tells us that this was a premature, and vain, hope on his part. The boy, Lee Nicol, would be one of the youngest victims of the tragedy.

  This was a major incident – anyone would describe it as such. But the emergency services use those two words as a shared code to describe an event that requires coordination of all three services in order to protect life, to search or to rescue. There were literally hundreds of uniformed officers at the point of rescue and I thought that the creation of a rendezvous (RV) point for ambulances might be a pressing need with which I could assist. Intuitively, it seemed obvious to me that if there were casualties on the pitch then they could not be taken out through the still-packed Leppings Lane terrace. I knew nothing of any contingency, and had witnessed no immediate spontaneous decision, to use the gymnasium at the north-east corner of the ground as a clearing station. If the ambulances were going to come – and they must come – then they would come, I reasoned, to the rear of the South Stand. My emergency procedures training kicked in.

  I found a large tarmac area between the gable ends of the South Stand and the West Stand. Within the curtilage of these two grandstands it was the closest point of access to the playing surface. The police control room was nearby. This would serve as an RV point for ambulances and the fire brigade.

  There was a minor obstruction. A police Land Rover. It was the same Land Rover, I learned much later, that had been used outside, at the Leppings Lane crush, as a platform stage by Inspector Stephen Ellis. In an attempt to regain some control close to kick-off, he had climbed onto the roof of the Land Rover and stretched the microphone cord that was attached to a public address system fitted to the vehicle through which he appealed to the crowd. From his unusual and elevated standpoint, he could see that unless the crush was relieved from the back there would be fatalities at the front against the turnstile wall.

  There was a gaggle of police officers handily near my imagined RV point. Something that is difficult to understand today is that no police force in 1989 held sufficient numbers of police radios to enable personal issue. The Home Office owned and operated the radio network and loaned a sufficient number of handsets to each force for normal day-to-day operations. These officers had no radio between them and probably knew less than I did about what was going on. I showed them my warrant card and dispatched an officer to find the keys to the Land Rover and to move it. The others I deployed to keep the area secure for ambulances that would, I told them, undoubtedly come.

  It was then that I encountered, directly, a casualty of the Hillsborough disaster. The day of 15 April would be a long one and my perception of the degree of tragedy involved would multiply many times. I had seen PC Marsh giving mouth-to-mouth to one young boy on the pitch, now here was a second, and then quickly a third, casualty in my personal orbit. I turned around from the issuing of instructions about the Land Rover and RV point to find a man laid out on a metal stretcher on the floor. I can’t say how he got there, but the idea of a South Stand ambulance station seemed prescient now. There was a policewoman and a St John’s Ambulance volunteer with the man. The St John’s Ambulance man was raising his head from what I took to be mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The policewoman was kneeling at the side of the stretcher. Both uniformed personnel looked frightened and exhausted.

  I knelt at the other side of the stretcher and held the man’s wrist. I could find no pulse, but that is a fickle signal. I cannot honestly say that there was no pulse, I just couldn’t find one in that urgent moment. But my additional observations indicated that the man appeared to have passed away. He was ashen in colour, a kind of blue-grey of Westmorland slate. His eyes were open and vacant. I could not see, hear or feel any breathing.

  Fortunately, an ambulance then appeared at precisely what I was calling, unilaterally, an RV point. Two ambulance personnel immediately attended to the man on the stretcher. I could see now that he was around twenty-eight or thirty years old, of heavy build and about six feet tall. He was having his chest thumped by an ambulance man whilst another tried an oxygen mask. After a few moments they seemed to give up and moved towards putting him in their ambulance. There were sufficient police officers around to help lift the stretcher.

  Casualty number three, as listed in my mental ready reckoner, was a walking wounded. He, too, had simply appeared whilst my back was turned. He was holding his arm and I would describe him as more in discomfort than out-and-out pain. In other circumstances he might have received more attention and more sympathy. As it was, there seemed greater priorities. He climbed into the ambulance, whether of his own volition or at the invitation of the ambulance crew I know not.

  The ambulance, with one occupant apparently dead and another very much alive, was prepared for departure. I said generally to the group of police officers that I wanted someone to accompany the deceased. Continuity of identification in a case of sudden death is a fundamental tenet of our police training. I didn’t need to say why I sought an accompanying officer.

  Then something happened which has always stuck with me. I have sought to explain it, or at least verify my recollection of it, since that time without success. I remember, and said so in my first written account in the immediate aftermath, that a uniformed officer stepped forward and said: ‘I’ll go. I know his family.’ That sounds incredible, I realise, but that was my contemporaneous recollection. I have scoured the transcript of the recent Coroner’s Inquest but have found no testimony to support that recollection. Perhaps if someone with an overview of all the available evidence had spoken with me about my recollection, then my memory and my own self-doubts about this exchange may have been reconciled.

  Whilst I understand, from a purely evidential point of view, that my description of a 28- to 30-year-old man who appeared to me to be dead does not take the jury much further in their understanding, there is, somewhere, a mother, or a wife, or a sister, who might take comfort from the knowledge that professional carers – especially St John’s and ambulance personnel – did all they could. Their lov
ed one, within a very short time of the tragedy unfolding, appeared to me to be at peace. Of course, the other thought that has occurred to me since is that, miracle of miracles, the man on the metal stretcher may have been resuscitated in the ambulance, or at hospital, and be a survivor with no knowledge of the emergency first aid that was rendered.

  The ambulance left. My so-called RV point was secure and sterile. There were no other casualties at that point. I walked up the service road behind the South Stand and past the gable end of the West Stand to check the route for the further ambulances that were sure to come in response to this major incident.

  It was at this point that I reached the next rung on the ladder of escalating astonishment. I had already seen a young boy in difficulty on the pitch in front of me; I had happened upon an apparently deceased man and a walking wounded. Now, as I turned the corner of the West Stand, I saw what I then considered to be the full horror of the tragedy. If only it had been so.

  There was a plastic-coated mesh perimeter fence on the south side of the stadium service road beside a river. At the foot of that fence were laid ten or twelve bodies. All appeared, from a distance of five metres, lifeless. The facial appearance of these bodies was disparate. Some were heavily cyanosed, with blue veins apparent on their cheeks. Some were the ashen colour previously described and some appeared normal. Many, I can’t say all, were laid in what is called a recovery position, laid on one side – their right side mainly – with the lower arm outstretched beneath the head and the upper leg bent at the knee to prevent their rolling over onto front or back. It is called a recovery position, but these ten or twelve young people looked, from a distance, to be beyond recovery. I found the sight shocking and was struck by a sense of impotence which was only partially due to my being in civilian clothes.