I saw that this was someone else’s busier, and more critical, RV point. Mine had been too advanced. This was a point where ambulances first turned off Leppings Lane onto the service road and the casualties had been brought from the rear of the West Stand. There were at least four or five ambulances parked here. Their crews were dispersed amongst those by the fence and also the walking wounded. There were also dozens of police officers. I saw Chief Inspector Roger Purdy as the most senior officer present. He had a radio and was wearing a uniform with a peaked cap. He had a visible authority – he was clearly in charge. Most of his troop of officers, maybe fifty or more, looked to be in a state of shock.
If this was the full extent of the disaster, as I believed that it was at that time, there was nothing useful that I could add to the professional efforts in train. I acknowledged Mr Purdy but he was busy organising and rallying. My final act at this place of devastation was to instruct some of the statuesque officers at the service road entrance to stop the general public from entering that scene. They were so much in a state of shock and impotence that they would have taken instruction from anyone, even a stranger in a green wax jacket.
I made my way to my car with the intention of driving the mile or so to the Hillsborough Divisional Headquarters at Hammerton Road. I reasoned that if this terrible event had sucked in all the local resources, then I might be of some further use at the police station. I also thought of ringing home to let my family know that I was safe and well against the context of what must have been emerging news reports of mass casualties at Hillsborough. It was at least a decade prior to widespread mobile phone ownership and I found that all the call boxes on my journey were full with long queues outside.
At Hammerton Road Police Station, there began to arrive a steady stream of visitors. People who had been at the nearby stadium and who, in the ensuing chaos, had become separated from friends. No mobile phones meant a great deal of waiting and worrying in the face of increasingly grave news from Hillsborough. I decided, along with Chief Inspector Les Agar, who had also come to Hammerton Road to see if he could help, that we might treat all of these enquirers as if they were reporting people as missing. We had forms for that, we had procedures, and we could explain it simply and easily to junior officers. This was the best means of getting consistent information about those reported as ‘missing’. It seemed obvious that at least some of these reports would tie up with people who weren’t missing but were at hospital or worse. Those who had become separated from family members and friends waited patiently for their turn to be collected from the front enquiry office and taken to the ground floor CID office by an officer armed with a report form to be completed.
As the death toll increased with every update, the mood became darker amongst those enquiring about loved ones and so, too, with the cops. There was an unusual silence about the place – no station banter and no clatter of kettles, mugs and typewriters which was the ambient noise of every CID office. The missing person reports kept churning out and they would later be compared with lists emerging from hospitals and, ultimately, with those located at their penultimate resting place – the Hillsborough Stadium gymnasium.
The numbers in the small reception area at Hammerton Road police station grew so that people were standing outside. Someone relieved that pressure point by having the Boys’ Club hall next door opened up for those who had made their report and who didn’t know what they should do next. Social Services staff supported the families and friends who endured this agonising period of apparent inactivity. The Salvation Army and others appeared out of thin air with sandwiches and drinks. It was all pretty ad hoc. Nobody had a detailed plan of what to do in circumstances such as these.
By the early hours of the morning, the numbers coming to Hammerton Road had dwindled and then ceased. Now was the time for checking hospital lists. I discovered that all those pronounced dead at any hospital had been taken back to the Hillsborough gymnasium, which had been designated, by Her Majesty’s Coroner, as a temporary mortuary. The total at the mortuary did not reach ninety-six. Some were being cared for, in extremis, by medical staff at hospitals. One of the casualties, Tony Bland, would only be pronounced dead in 1993, when doctors removed all life support. But there were scores of bodies in a North Sheffield gymnasium – more than anyone who I spoke with had ever seen in one place at the same time. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like down there, but I was soon to find out.
I spoke on the phone with Brian Mole in those early hours. Mr Mole, as Barnsley District Commander, had been on duty that afternoon at Oakwell Football Stadium. His first visit since taking over at his new division. Barnsley FC were playing Birmingham City in the old Second Division. There were 6,464 spectators at the game. Brian Mole’s extensive football command expertise, and his knowledge of safely controlling large crowds, was being tragically wasted. He was informed of the unfolding disaster twelve miles away from Barnsley and immediately got a driver to take him to the scene. He had eventually ended up overseeing the mortuary arrangements by the time I rang him to see what he wanted me to do with the sheaf of missing person reports. He asked me to take them to the gymnasium and to pass them to Inspector John Charles, who was involved in administration at the temporary mortuary.
It is too easy, at this kind of distance, to condemn the mortuary procedures that were hastily put in place that awful night. That came to mind when I saw television footage at the time of the crushing in Mecca in September 2015, which left over 2,000 Hajj pilgrims dead. I saw distraught family members sitting on the pavement outside a Saudi Arabian mortuary, three days after the event, who were still uncertain as to whether their loved ones were inside. It caused me to think that early identification in 1989, albeit traumatic and done in a sub-optimal fashion, might have been preferable to a delayed arrangement.
An operational police commander setting up procedures such as those at the Hillsborough gymnasium would naturally hope and expect that every single officer involved in each and every encounter with a bereaved family member would demonstrate the appropriate level of compassion, empathy and patience. Not just to get the job done effectively, but to meet the particular needs of the bereaved. I heard some positive reports to that effect but have read compelling evidence from many families who felt that ‘getting the job done’ took precedence in those dark hours of Sunday morning before the dawn. That is lamentable.
On delivering the missing person reports as instructed, I witnessed for myself the awful, awful situation for all concerned. Around 4 a.m., there was still a double-decker bus parked outside the gymnasium – temporary shelter for those who still had to perform the dreaded task of identification, which would be the final trigger for grief. I could see the people on that bus, illuminated starkly against the surrounding blackness, most of whom were staring blankly into distant space.
I found John Charles easily in the cavernous, echoing gymnasium and I completed my assigned task. But not before I had seen the rows upon rows of zipped body bags laid in an orderly fashion on the floor. To the right of each body bag was placed a chair and on each chair sat a police officer, some in uniform, some who I recognised as Detectives. Every one of them had the same drained and gaunt expression. Even professionals can succumb to shock and trauma. Those who had been deputed as body continuity officers had sat for hour upon hour with their charge, surrounded not only by death but also by the pain of the living.
The anguish of the living is what haunts me about that fateful day. I saw the temporary ante room at the gymnasium into which each body bag was wheeled, in turn, aboard a trolley. The body bag was destined to arrive under the gaze of relatives brought to undertake the dreadful duty of identification. It isn’t just the sight of the dead that I witnessed that day that moves me, even now, to tears. It is the sounds of the living and the lost. I handed over my unimportant forms to John Charles, but not before I had heard more than one family cry out in grief at the revelation of their loved one. Their tortured cries echoed around that
otherwise silent gymnasium as if they would go on for ever.
For me, at least, this longest day was over.
CHAPTER 2
THE FELLA IN SEAT NN28
3 January 1956 – 15 April 1989
I have already addressed the curious fact that I have never been asked to recount my testimony about the day of the disaster as I saw it unfold from seat number NN28 at the Hillsborough Stadium. There is another fundamental question, though, that no one has asked me over the last twenty-seven years… What was I doing at Hillsborough, on my day off, having bought an expensive ticket to go to a football match that was to be televised and that involved two out-of-town teams?
It was because I have followed the fortunes of Liverpool Football Club since 1 May 1965. There was nothing unique about such an affiliation, for Liverpool FC was the most successful British team throughout my formative years and had a reputation for playing in a swashbuckling style. It was the favourite team of most boys of my generation who read football magazines such as Goal and Shoot, watched Match of the Day on television and decorated their bedrooms with football paraphernalia. I wasn’t a diehard ‘Red’ and it was an attachment that I kept to myself whenever I was invited, in later years, as a guest to Goodison Park.
The 84th FA Cup Final, played at Wembley in May 1965, was the first I had ever witnessed. I watched the whole event, with my dad, on our Bush black-and-white television. In those days there was a televisual build-up to the match which included footage of how each team had reached the final; images of the players eating breakfast at their match-day hotels; in-depth analysis of a few of the key players; a roving cameraman following the team coaches along Wembley Way pausing for vox pop interviews with passionate fans of both teams. During the build-up I folded some paper and wrote out a mock match day programme with the names of all the players of each team arranged symmetrically, on either side of the fold, in the two-three-five formation of the era. It was a spectacle being played out in my own front room and I was gripped by it.
In 1965, the final was contested by Liverpool and Leeds United. (For those watching in black and white, Liverpool were wearing dark shirts, shorts and stockings.) I had no particular allegiance going into the game. My uncle had taken me a couple of times to Millmoor to watch our local team, Rotherham United, who played in the Second Division. But this game was different. There were almost 100,000 fans in Wembley Stadium. Some of the gladiators were household names and television elevated their status, and that of the event, even higher. At the age of nine, I was mesmerised.
The game was nil-nil after ninety minutes but Liverpool had been dominant and threatened on every attack. Extra time, the first in an FA Cup Final since 1947, added even more drama. Liverpool scored first, three minutes into extra time, through a Roger Hunt header. Bremner equalised for Leeds before the teams changed ends for the last time. Midway through that final fifteen minutes, Ian St John headed a whipped cross from Ian Callaghan to score the winning goal. There was pandemonium in the sitting room of 35 Mansfield Road, Rotherham, and I have had a soft spot for Liverpool FC since that moment.
I don’t want to overstate my attachment. For the most part, my support was confined to the armchair in front of the TV or wearing my treasured all-red football kit in park knockabouts. It would only be when I later lived in Liverpool that I came to rarely miss a match. But Hillsborough Stadium was only five miles from where I was living in 1989 and so an important match involving ‘the Reds’ seemed a natural place for me to be. I went to Hillsborough as a football enthusiast and my only prejudices as I took my South Stand seat were the positive ones held by a supporter of any club.
Nine years prior to my epiphany as a Liverpool supporter, I was born in the front bedroom of 24 Temple Street, Temple borough, on the boundary of Rotherham and Sheffield. The house was within sight and sound of Steel, Peech and Tozer’s electric arc furnaces. Steel, Peech and Tozer, known locally as Steelos, was a giant in the South Yorkshire steel manufacturing industry, employing thousands of men. My father was a furnaceman, my mother a housewife, and I had an older sister. We lived, happily, in our two-up-two-down Steelos house between Dad’s furnaces and the strip mill, which fashioned the steel for use in the factories that were turning out the cars, washing machines and refrigerators that all postwar families aspired to.
My childhood predated Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ era. I lived in a steel-making community at the very heart of the fiery yellow heat and red oxide dust fallout of the industrial age. Dad, who had been a Coldstream Guardsman, and a tank driver in the Second World War, was earning what he referred to as ‘good money’ as a furnace second-hander (the number two on the shift). We had a factory house; an Austin A30 car, one of only four cars in our street; and a share in a family caravan at Mablethorpe. Life was OK. We would later move to Mansfield Road, when I was six, to another Steelos-owned house, to make way for the demolition of Temple Street and factory expansion. At Mansfield Road, we would enjoy the novelty of an indoor toilet and bathroom.
I went to Alma Road Infants and Junior School, a stone’s throw from home. Even closer, just at the top of the street, was South Grove Comprehensive, a 1,000-pupil educational conveyor belt that produced, each year, the next generation of steel men, coal miners, secretaries and factory girls. I was in the top stream at South Grove and I can only recall five or six of my class going on to university. None of them were the sons and daughters of steel workers. Ours wasn’t a school, or a town, that produced academics or captains of industry. We were factory fodder, and the schooling reflected that.
On leaving statutory education, my very moderate examination results were a little below average for the top stream, well above average for the school. I was luckier than most, however, for I had a vocation. All I ever wanted to be, from a very early age, was a policeman. Not a Chief Constable, but a bobby. School, for me, therefore, was a legal requirement to occupy my time until working age. At sixteen, I became a police cadet in the Sheffield and Rotherham Constabulary. A couple of years later, I fulfilled my ambition when I passed out as a Constable. I built a reputation for being good at my job.
My career choice, like anyone else’s, must have been a result of many influences. Some I recall, whilst others may be less obvious. I was always the tallest amongst my pals, over six feet at the age of fourteen, and I had often been given positions of authority at school, in sports teams and in the Cubs. These factors created a trend. I remember my paternal grandfather, who also worked at Steelos, telling me from an early age that I was destined to be a bobby on account of my height. After military service, both he and my father had been tempted by another, civilian, uniform role but took the ‘better money’ on offer in the steel industry. I knew that neither wanted me to follow in their footsteps.
When I was about thirteen, Dad dressed me as a young apprentice furnaceman in one of his wool shirts and sweat caps and took me onto the floor of the melting shop. The heat and the noise were terrifying. It was like one of Dante’s circles of hell. Dad told me later that his intention, in taking me to see where he worked, was to put me off the idea of ever gaining employment at Steelos.
The nationalised steel industry was decimated within ten years of my leaving school: it couldn’t compete with cheaper imports. Dad and most of his colleagues were made redundant and, in his early fifties, he never found work again. It seems that my father’s influence on my career choice was prescient.
I also had two formative, and positive, experiences of meeting police officers that left a lasting impression. Through out my career in leading fellow officers, I have always exhorted them to strive, in every encounter with the public, to create a similar positive view of the police service. The average law-abiding person comes across a police officer so infrequently that they will recall, for years, the impact of any meeting. It is therefore in the hands of every cop, every day, to create a positive or negative public opinion about the profession.
One Christmas Day, in the mid-’6
0s, I was wearing my newly unwrapped football kit and playing keepy-uppy in the back yard when I noticed a torrent of water gushing out of an overflow pipe of the Conservative Association office next door. The pipes had frozen, and then burst, in the empty building. In the steel town of Rotherham, the Conservative Party needed only a token presence, and they achieved it in a converted end-of-terrace house next to ours. The only up-side of this proximity, as far as I could see, was that Captain Basil Rhodes, the local party Chairman, occasionally parked his green Aston Martin DB4 outside our house, and this created quite a stir amongst my school pals. Anyhow, my report of the burst pipe led to a bobby attending. He had a cup of tea in our kitchen whilst he waited for the key-holder to turn out. He was complimentary about my new kit and about my footballing skills. He impressed me. I wouldn’t be very much older when it dawned on me that he was actually only being polite.
A few years later, I noticed suspicious activity on a building site across from our house and ran home to phone the police. I gave a running commentary on the phone that enabled the capture of two thieves. I was praised by a uniformed Inspector who was present at the arrest. The Chief Superintendent in the town wrote a letter of thanks to an impressionable fourteen-year-old boy. My mother kept it for a long time with other family papers.
So, because of this constellation of half remembered experiences, and other unconscious pushes and pulls, it was always going to be a policeman’s life for me.
I was a successful cadet and excelled in recruit training. I strove to succeed. My vocation gave me what I had lacked in my school years: desire and ambition.
I was a prolific ‘thief-taker’ as a young bobby and became a Detective in CID with just eighteen months’ service. This was unusual. I wasn’t a bad Detective either. Though I had much to learn through working alongside more experienced hands, I was a quick learner.
Hillsborough Untold: Aftermath of a disaster Page 4