Hillsborough Untold: Aftermath of a disaster Read online

  Some colleagues have tended to look for reasons to explain my successful police career. In the early days, a common label applied to me was ‘lucky’. There is an old aphorism which describes the happy coincidence that the harder one works the luckier one becomes. In later years, and in the light of a number of promotions, the labels were to become defined by extraneous factors rather than luck. ‘It’s because he’s a graduate’ some suggested – I was, indeed, fortunate to have been given a second chance at education – or, ‘It’s because he’s on the square’ – even though I have never been a Freemason or a member of any other exclusive society.

  Whilst I was learning my craft as a young Detective, someone, it transpires, was watching me closely. Chief Superintendent Alan Robinson, Divisional Commander at Barnsley in the late ’70s, called me to his office one day and asked if I had ever heard of the Special Course at Bramshill. I had heard of neither the course nor the venue. It was a national programme in the police service, he told me, to identify and develop exceptional talent. It was a scheme intended, primarily, for graduate entrants to the service, who had demonstrated immediate potential and, more occasionally, for non-graduate, workaday officers like me. He asked me to apply for the course. My first application form was returned by Mr Robinson, who had corrected my grammar and punctuation. He supported me through the force selection process along with two other candidates. I have always been grateful for that support.

  There were two further hurdles. A regional interview, which narrowed the field of candidates from northern forces, and, later, a three-day extended process of tests and interviews in competition with the brightest and best from all forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I was successful in clearing both obstacles – without any additional help from Chief Superintendent Robinson! This opened up, at the age of twenty-six, an undreamt-of avenue of career opportunity for a lad from Rotherham.

  There was a full-time programme for twelve months at Bramshill Staff College, the police equivalent of Sandhurst for the army. I studied law, jurisprudence, sociology and politics. As well as the academic input, there was vocational training for the leadership roles that beckoned.

  Just eight of the cohort of thirty-six students were non-graduates. At the end of the Bramshill programme, and after we had each proved our potential in the field by successfully demonstrating practical ability in the ranks of Sergeant and Inspector, most of the eight were offered a funded university scholarship. I was amazed to be accepted on my first application to the Queen’s College, Oxford, as a mature student to read Psychology and Philosophy. I graduated, in 1986, with an understanding, at last, of the real benefits of education. I have been committed to personal development ever since.

  Upon my return from Oxford, I was given an operational leadership role as a Shift Inspector at Rotherham Division. Within fifteen months I was promoted to Chief Inspector, the fourth rung on the police rank structure ladder, which has nine steps ascending from Constable to Chief Constable.

  By the time of the Hillsborough disaster, I was a Chief Inspector in a non-operational post at force Headquarters. I had been tasked to create processes, within the Personnel Department, that would identify and develop young talent in the force.

  I was just thirty-three years old and, whilst I had experienced three promotions in the previous seven years, my own career still had some distance to travel. I would go on, in later years, to scale the highest peaks of the police service. Chief Constable of two of the ‘big five’ provincial forces; working alongside ministers on national policy and organisational change; overseeing national police training and development; and supporting the national and international counter-terrorism effort. On 15 April 1989, these all remained chapters of a story yet to be written.

  I was sitting that fateful day in what, for me, was a relatively expensive seat anticipating an epic football match. I was not looking down on the terraced pens in which the 1980s football industry segregated the classes of spectator as well as the few who might misbehave. I did not hold a prejudice about football fans generally, nor about Liverpool fans in particular. I stood beside them. On other occasions I had shared the experience of the cages and might have done on that tragic day if the source of my ticket had been different.

  The authorities that oversaw football in that era seemed blind to the discrimination that existed in the sport prior to the Hillsborough disaster. The cheaper standing tickets that were made available to the majority of supporters came with fewer, and rudimentary, toilets, inferior catering and other facilities, and a mean and brutal experience that was made tolerable only by the community of others in the same situation. I was a part of that community.

  On that spring day in 1989, as the tragedy unfolded, I had no predisposition to besmirch Liverpool football fans. And no one ever asked me to do that in the days, weeks, months and decades that followed.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH

  17 April – 12 May 1989

  According to the sworn testimony of ex-Superintendent Clive Davis, I returned to duty twenty-eight hours after leaving the mortuary and, without any meaningful conversation about my experiences at Hillsborough, nor exhibiting any visible sign of distress, I told him that there was to be a team pulled together under Chief Superintendent Terry Wain to collect evidence to begin to defend the actions of South Yorkshire Police. I told him, he recalls, that there would be a briefing of CID officers by Mr Wain at 11 a.m. and that he should accompany me to the briefing if he knew what was good for his career.

  His testimony is silent about where I had received that information from and fails to clarify how this briefing was to fit with, or be distinguished from, the acknowledged fact that, on Monday 17 April 1989, the residual tasks of gathering evidence by South Yorkshire Police, prior to handing the whole enterprise to West Midlands Police, was in the hands of a different senior officer, Detective Superintendent Graham McKay. Mr McKay had himself called a meeting with Detectives that day to tell them of the transition of the investigation into the ownership of West Midlands Police. That meeting did take place at 3.30 p.m. and was fully minuted. The minutes do not mention Mr Wain or any associated briefing.

  It might have made Mr Davis’s evidence less credible if he had happened to light upon the same time for these two parallel briefings taking place. Their timings are, rather tantalisingly, four hours apart. Mr Davis recalled these matters from April 1989 with great clarity only after the publication of the Hillsborough Panel Report in September 2012. At the time of the publication, and the attendant press reports, he was on holiday in Mallorca, where he claims that he saw me on television ‘continuing to blame Liverpool fans for the disaster’ and he felt compelled, on his return to the UK, to contact the Hillsborough Family Support Group in order to unburden himself about this briefing, which, on his own account, he had not discussed with many people over the intervening twenty-three years.

  It wasn’t much of a briefing by his account – short and perfunctory. Hardly worth bringing the brightest and best Detectives together from around the force area. I was there, he says, and so too was Chief Superintendent Wain, who Mr Davis reckons had called the meeting. We had both been mentioned by name in the Hillsborough Panel Report, which Mr Davis had read, and had been identified, too, in the media frenzy that followed. Standing beside Mr Wain at the briefing was Superintendent Malcolm Seller. Those were the only three names that Mr Davis could recall at this distance. Of the thirty or so Detectives in the room, whom he thought were mainly Detective Sergeants and above, he could not recall the name of one.

  Mr Wain, according to Mr Davis, told the assembled number that he intended to put the blame where it belonged, on the drunken Liverpool fans. It transpires that everyone was then permitted to leave the briefing room to go who knows where without a single person being given a recognisable task. That sounds like an unusual briefing. It was not one that I was at or even knew about.

  Mr Davis had given this evidence at the Coroner�
�s Court in March 2015, and it was very widely reported in the press. After all, his account fitted perfectly with the popular narrative at that time. When I gave evidence, a few weeks later, I was asked whether I considered Clive Davis an honest man and I gave an honest response. I worked alongside him in the ’90s and knew him reasonably well. In years gone by he had visited my home with his family. I set out an Easter egg hunt for his children on one visit. I never had any reason to doubt his honesty and integrity until this latest revelation. Mr Wain had been asked a similar question under oath a few days earlier and he had been much more blunt and rude about Mr Davis in his response. Mr Seller had replied by witness statement that he was on holiday in a caravan with his family at the time of the disaster. He had rung HQ on that relevant Monday morning to see if there was anything he might do to assist. He was told no and therefore continued with his holiday. He remembers it vividly.

  I was asked if I had any explanation as to why Mr Davis, and others who had delivered such devastating testimony about me at Warrington, might tell an untruth. Again I gave an honestly held response. I think that a lot of people, when history is being written, strive to be ‘on the side of the angels’. From my recent experience as an ‘accused’, I have deduced that some try just a little too hard to achieve this celestial status.

  There was no briefing or meeting that I attended on Monday 17 April. I had been, as an off-duty spectator, to a football match, which turned into a disaster. I had no ongoing responsibilities or reason to commit anything more than a professional interest to the question of how it had happened. In any case, I attended day release at Sheffield Hallam University on that Monday, leaving the office around lunchtime.

  In 1988, whilst I had the professional development bug carried over from my time at Oxford, I had suggested to my managers in the force that I might be permitted some flexibility to attend Sheffield Hallam University from time to time to study for a Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA). I reasoned that managing police organisations of 10,000 personnel, which have budgets of hundreds of millions, would need business acumen and skills in the future. I would pay the course fees myself and do the necessary work in my own time. I would just need to be able to attend a tutorial day on an afternoon and evening during term time for three years. I undertook to make up the time over the working week somewhere. I was permitted to sign up for the programme, which ran between 1988 and 1991.

  On Monday 17 April 1989, two days after the disaster, I was due to leave work early for my class. I was then employed as a Chief Inspector, tasked with creating a new department at Headquarters – the Career Development Department. It was my job to find ways of identifying, nurturing and developing talent within the organisation. New appraisal systems; mentoring schemes; and promotion board arrangements were early fruits of my labours.

  I was back at my desk some twenty-eight hours after leaving the gymnasium at Hillsborough. Of course there was office comment about the weekend’s events, but not as much as might be supposed. The force, as a whole, was in a state of shock, if it is possible for organisations to exhibit emotional responses.

  It is said of the Taj Mahal that it separates the world. There are those who have seen it and those who haven’t. The two camps cannot speak about it with any shared comprehension. Well, the same is true of Hillsborough. There are those who were there or who have been directly affected by it and those who weren’t, and haven’t been, can have no similar understanding. This was true by 8 a.m. on the Monday after the disaster and has, in my long experience, remained true ever since. Those who were there didn’t want to talk very much to colleagues around the metaphorical water cooler, and those who hadn’t been there allowed their troubled peers the time and space for personal reflection.

  By the time I left for the MBA course, I had learned nothing much more than I had read in the papers and heard on the TV and radio news about the tragedy. I had no clue about its causes, or how South Yorkshire Police intended to respond to it.

  There was much more talk about Hillsborough amongst fellow students at university than there had been amongst colleagues at Headquarters. Our custom, on the tutorial day, was to adjourn, at the end of our studies around 8.45 p.m., to the local pub, the Fleur de Lys at Totley. There would usually be a dozen of us, sometimes more, chewing over matters of local or current interest. A general observation about human nature is that the volume of any expressed opinion is often in inverse proportion to the amount of personal experience or research. And so it was in the pub that night. People were holding forth about the disaster and its causes in a bar-room style, and by that I mean an uninformed style. I was no better positioned than anyone else, although I had witnessed the tragedy end of the disaster even if I knew little of the causal end at that time. I remember making it clear that David Duckenfield’s intimation that fans had broken down the gates was not true. My Chief Constable, Peter Wright, had said that it wasn’t true on national television on Saturday evening within a few hours of the misinformation being propagated. I had read of his correction. I also recall that I knew that South Yorkshire Police were in the process of handing over the investigation of the causes to an independent force and I shared this fact with others who were unaware.

  I had not read The Sun, which I later learned had published an edition on Monday 17th under a headline ‘The Gates of Hell’. The article offered, in typical Sun style, ten simple ‘Deadly Reasons Why it Ended in Bloody Carnage’. Some of this analysis littered early bar-room-style conversations about the Hillsborough disaster. The Sun was to completely overreach itself, however, two days later. Publishing under the banner headline ‘The Truth’, it quoted unnamed police officers involved in the rescue effort, and it cast some hateful aspersions upon the Liverpool fans who were at Hillsborough. Amongst other calumnies, it alleged that Liverpool fans had stolen from, and urinated on, the dead.

  When I left the Fleur de Lys on the evening of Monday 17 April, I was no wiser about the events of the weekend. Furthermore, I had not presented myself as having any particular knowledge other than my experiences after the match was stopped and after the disaster had occurred.

  I had not, by this time, begun to write my account about my experiences on the day. A general request was made from Police Headquarters, early that week, for any officer who was at Hillsborough, whether on or off duty, to capture their recollections whilst fresh so that they would be available as an aide memoire when the officer was later seen by the West Midlands Police investigation team. The request was made, in the fashion of the 1980s, by telex to all divisions and departments. No one indicated what should or should not be included. There were no additional instructions about contemporaneous pocket notebooks, which, by the time the telex was distributed, would have been overtaken by time and events. No one told me that I should not make a pocketbook entry. I simply assumed that my written recollection, prepared in several sittings over the next seven or eight days, would suffice as a first account.

  It was pointed out in cross-examination, when I gave evidence to the recent Coroner’s Inquest, that my detailed written statement produced in the days following the disaster contained neither criticism of fans nor any observation of any bad behaviour in the lead-up to the disaster. That is true, for I witnessed none and therefore could produce no evidence of it. This simple fact in itself might give the lie to lingering suspicions, arising from the Hillsborough folklore narrative, that from an early time after the disaster I was involved in concocting black propaganda.

  When I left the Fleur de Lys on Monday 17 April, I had said nothing, to any of my fellow students, about joining a team at South Yorkshire Police to gather evidence for my senior officers and for the lawyers representing the force. I couldn’t have done, for that call was still two or three days away.

  In the middle of the week, most likely Thursday 20 April, I was at my desk on the fourth floor of Police Headquarters. It was open plan and from my location I had a sweeping view of the whole floor. Beyond the double d
oors in the far left-hand corner lay the command suite. Individual offices were occupied by the Chief Constable and his deputy and assistants. There were smaller offices for a few Chief Superintendents who oversaw Headquarters activity. My boss, in that regard, was Chief Superintendent Arthur Ball, whose office was next door to that of his boss, Stuart Anderson, who was Assistant Chief Constable Staff Services. Two or three doors further on was the fourth-floor conference room where, although I didn’t know it at the time, I would spend most of my waking hours over the next four weeks.

  Arthur Ball told me that Stuart Anderson wanted to see me. Mr Ball was always discreet so gave nothing away about the reason. It wasn’t unusual to be called by Mr Anderson, as he took a personal interest in the processes and people that were being developed in my department. He asked me to close the door and to sit down. He told me that the Chief Constable had asked West Midlands Police to investigate the causes of the Hillsborough disaster, which I knew. He then told me that he and other Chief Officers had been engaged in a meeting with lawyers the previous day, which I didn’t. The upshot of that meeting was that, notwithstanding the West Midlands Police inquiries, the Chief and the force’s legal team needed to have some idea about what went on, to make sense of the day, he said, so that the lawyers were in a position to represent the force at a forthcoming public inquiry. He had, with no prior consultation, for that’s how it worked in those days, volunteered me to join the team that would support the task. It had nothing to do with me being at Hillsborough on the day. It may have had nothing to do with any particular skill set. Every division had simply been asked to provide a pair of hands. I was deputed from Headquarters. My day job was a non-operational role that could be left unattended for some time with no immediate detrimental impact on the operations of the force. I accepted the secondment. You always did in those days.