Taking into account the devastating effect that his public denouncement, on national television on 23 October 2012, was to have for me and my family, I am afraid that he is very seriously mistaken.
I can’t know of his motivation, although he told the Coroner’s Court that he had, in the late ’90s, made financial contributions to support the private prosecution of Messrs Duckenfield and Murray. I only know that he is wrong about me. After one drink in the Fleur de Lys on 24 April, I left for home and an early night to prepare for the rigours of the task in hand.
The next twenty-one days were to be frenetic. Lord Justice Taylor would open the inquiry and begin taking oral evidence on 15 May. We had yet to meet the counsel retained by Peter Metcalf but the Deputy Chief Constable had warned us that the demands from lawyers were likely to be onerous.
One of the early tasks that fell to me was to bring together copies of all CCTV material that was available (the original tapes had been taken by the West Midlands Police) and to review it to see if it might assist in making sense of the day. In real time there were dozens of hours of footage, although it was possible to fast forward the less relevant material. I made a 113-page summary of what the CCTV images revealed and submitted it, through Mr Wain, to the lawyers. Again, there is nothing within those 113 pages that hints at bad behaviour on the part of Liverpool fans. There was no such evidence revealed on the video and so I would not have included it in my summary. A further, simple counterpoint to the assertion that I was somehow employed in a ‘black ops’ squad.
Another task that I undertook during that three-week period has always remained with me because of the poignancy of the process and the significance of the result. The lawyers were keen to know, before the start of the public inquiry, whether the central pens, Nos 3 and 4, were full around the time of the opening of Exit Gate C at 2.52 p.m. With the help of a colleague from the force’s Scientific Support Department, I assembled a montage of photographs taken across the two pens at the relevant time. They were put together like a jigsaw puzzle, matching a column or a row of spectators on two adjoining images. Scientific Support rephotographed the montage and blew up the images into two panels, each approximately four feet squared. They delivered the panels to the fourth-floor conference room on a Friday evening. I recall that Chief Superintendent Wain received them and asked me to calculate the headcount by the following Monday morning.
I took Saturday as a rest day but came into Headquarters on the Sunday to complete the task. Armed with a red marker pen, I pinpointed and counted each spectator caught by the camera’s lens. I took care to avoid counting anyone twice who might have been found on two abutting images. Sometimes I could only detect a shoulder or a raised arm but I tried to be as accurate as possible. In carrying out this task, which took me most of the day, I was conscious that my red marker pen was occasionally lighting upon the last image that would ever be captured of many young lives. On Monday morning, I was able to report that both pens were equally over capacity around the time that Gate C was opened on police instruction. A fact that was to go to the very heart of the public inquiry.
By far the most pressing task that occupied the Wain team over the next two weeks came as a result of the first meeting with Bill Woodward QC. Mr Woodward was the counsel retained by Peter Metcalf to represent the Chief Constable but his brief also included the at-risk officers such as David Duckenfield and Bernard Murray as well as the Police Authority’s insurers, MMI. We met him at Police Headquarters on Wednesday 26 April 1989, eleven days after the disaster. As well as the Deputy Chief Constable, Mr Hayes, and Assistant Chief Constable, Mr Anderson, there were members of the Wain team present; Mr Woodward and his junior Mr Patrick Limb (who has subsequently become a Queen’s Counsel); Peter Metcalf and his assistant Belinda Norcliffe. The meeting was chaired, nominally, by the Deputy Chief, but it was dominated by Mr Woodward QC.
Bill Woodward was, like every QC I have met, impressive. Some parade their impressiveness, intellectual sparring being a way of flirting with their client. Some are more impressive by being understated and only reveal, by way of a crucial point made in conversation, submission or witness examination, a mastery of the subtleties of the brief. Bill Woodward was in the latter category. There was no doubt that he would lead for the Chief Constable at the public inquiry. He had lots of experience of them, whilst the police officers in the room had none. Our job would not be to manage him but to feed him. He presented, at this first meeting, as a man with a voracious appetite.
This meeting on 26 April lasted for almost five hours. It is remarkable, particularly for those who know me in recent times, that, whilst I was present throughout, I made no contribution to the meeting whatsoever. It was the opportunity for Mr Wain and Mr Mole to deliver the six-point report that had been requested by Mr Metcalf a few days previously.
When setting the task, Mr Metcalf had said that, within the week, the lawyers needed a document of sufficient breadth so that they could submit it or draft for themselves a written submission to the public inquiry. So either Mr Mole or Mr Wain had given the document the title: ‘For Submission to the Judicial Inquiry’. It was never clear that it was to be submitted as it was drafted and, in the end, Peter Metcalf prepared the submission that was delivered by Bill Woodward QC at the opening of the inquiry.
At this, our first meeting with counsel, Mr Woodward complimented the team on the material provided. In and amongst many other requirements, he asked, however, that we provide him with the fullest picture possible of what evidence the officers who were on duty at Hillsborough might give about the events of the day. He wanted their feelings, fears and opinions as well as facts. He made it clear, and it is a matter of record in Belinda Norcliffe’s file note of the meeting, that such information was for him and Patrick Limb only and not for submission to the inquiry. A deadline was set with Mr Wain outside of the meeting. This information was to be made available for lawyers by 9 May, six days before the start of the public inquiry.
Mr Wain opened a Major Incident Room, not because he was leading an investigation but because there are procedures and systems in any Major Incident Room that would complement his task. The HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) was a computerised way of indexing and storing witness accounts to enable an investigator, or someone answering a question of counsel, to drill down or retrieve the requisite information. If, for example, a blue car was to become pertinent to any enquiry, then, providing that the indexers had done their job correctly, HOLMES allowed the retrieval of all statements that mention a blue car. Free text retrieval, whilst commonplace now, was not easily achieved in the 1980s. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who was caught and convicted in 1981, had been mentioned numerous times in the thirteen parallel inquiries but no connections were made. HOLMES was developed as a direct result of a review of the Ripper case. The letters HO, at the front end of the acronym, signify Home Office ownership and reveal the source of funds to develop the national computerised system, which was beyond the resources of individual forces.
The Deputy Chief Constable, Mr Hayes, had, a couple of days after the disaster, asked all staff involved to record an account, as an aide memoire. These accounts, it will be recalled, were intended to assist officers’ recollections when later interviewed by West Midlands Police. Chief Superintendent Wain saw that copies of these self-prepared accounts would serve his purpose, too, in meeting the requirements of the task set by lawyers. He arranged for them to be recovered in a prioritised fashion: Supervisors; followed by those on duty at the Leppings Lane end of the ground; those who addressed the crush outside; those involved in rescue and so on. He deployed a number of officers to collect copies of these self-written accounts from around the force. The original document would stay with the officer pending West Midlands Police interviews. The couriers did not take statements. It wasn’t their job and there wasn’t time. Furthermore, there was no process of vetting or emendation at this point. Mr Wain received, and thereafter his team were
furnished with, unadulterated accounts prepared by the persons giving them.
Some of these accounts contained expressions of emotion and intemperate language. Not the kind of thing normally seen in professionally taken statements. Mr Woodward QC had expressly invited such content and it had clearly been a cathartic experience, in the days that immediately followed the tragedy, for some officers to vent their feelings when writing their accounts.
All the accounts were first of all indexed and entered onto HOLMES and then passed into the fourth-floor conference room to be read and analysed. The reading was done by various members of the team although the accounts sometimes arrived with highlights and marginal comments from Mr Wain, who spent most of his time in the Major Incident Room.
The accounts were indexed against the key events of the Hillsborough disaster as identified on the ANACAPA chart, first created by DS Carr. For example, if we wished to know who could give evidence about the opening of Gate C at 2.52 p.m., we would have a list of officers and a short summary of their evidence. The team read hundreds of accounts of South Yorkshire Police officers. That is all that we had access to, for it would have been quite wrong to tread on the toes of West Midlands Police by going beyond these in-house accounts.
As the deadline approached for the information to be fed into the lawyers, we stopped reading and began to assess the product. Mr Wain chaired a meeting in the fourth-floor conference room, where, with the contributions of others from his team, he distilled the emerging picture. Mr Wain settled on eighty-one accounts that were considered to have the most objective evidence to capture the essence of what South Yorkshire Police officers could say about the events, as they had unfolded, on that spring day.
On this point I wish to be very clear. The hundreds of accounts that had been provided were available to both West Midlands Police and the counsel to the inquiry at the Taylor Inquiry. They could interview and call anyone that they wished. Mr Wain’s list of eighty-one represented what he considered to be the best attempt at giving Bill Woodward QC an illustration of the overall police officer evidence. I was given the task of summarising the eighty-one accounts.
Any file prepared for the Crown Prosecution Service is always accompanied by a summary. Preparing a summary was meat and drink to an experienced Detective. Although this was novel in that it concerned only a limited part of the evidence (the South Yorkshire officers’ aspect only) and was for barristers at a public inquiry not Crown Court, we set about producing the summary in a familiar fashion.
I was always aware that what we had in our hands was not an analysis of the causes of the disaster. It wasn’t even a comprehensive account, limited as it was to only the self-prepared accounts of police officers. Furthermore, they were officers who, perhaps because of the trauma of the events and their shared sense of impotence and failure, had sometimes been emotional in their testimony, and had often highlighted, disproportionately, the unhelpful behaviour that they claimed to have witnessed.
I wasn’t aware of Werner Heisenberg at the time, but was aware, professionally, of the limitations that he spells out so clearly about the nature of evidence. Heisenberg, the father of quantum mechanics, warns that ‘we must remember that what we claim to observe is not nature in itself, but only those aspects of nature exposed to our means and method of enquiry’. Lord Justice Taylor was going to be in a much better position, very soon, to subject the Hillsborough disaster to a greater depth and breadth of enquiry. What the Wain team had produced, in contrast, was an internal document on the direction of Bill Woodward QC, so that he could know what evidence officers might give if they were called at the Taylor Inquiry.
This is an important point of emphasis because the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) appear to have misunderstood the purpose of this internal briefing document.
The Hillsborough Panel had referred to the document, which had been carefully preserved in the South Yorkshire Police archive for their subsequent discovery, as ‘The Wain Report’. We never called it that. If we had ever thought of giving it a name we might, more accurately, have referred to it as the Woodward Report, for it was he who commissioned it. The Hillsborough Panel were struck by the one-sided view offered by the report but seemed pretty clear that it was only ever an internal report. It was never submitted to any judicial inquiry or proceedings. From the outset, Mr Woodward QC had deemed that it should not be submitted anywhere.
In spite of these well-documented constraints on its scope and purpose, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), when giving their written and televised response to the Hillsborough Panel’s report on 12 October 2012, four weeks after its publication, hit out publicly at the so-called ‘Wain Report’ and my contribution to it. Deborah Glass, the forthright Deputy Chair of the IPCC, declared that she intended to consider whether ‘the Wain Report was a biased report which sought to divert criticism from South Yorkshire Police’. That is an entirely appropriate line of enquiry given the Hillsborough Panel’s concerns about its one-sided nature. But Ms Glass went on to conclude: ‘At its highest this could amount to perverting the course of justice, and at least raises questions of discreditable conduct, and honesty and integrity.’ And so, four years ago, before an investigative stone was turned, the narrative of conspiracy and cover-up, insinuated by the Hillsborough Panel and asserted by some campaigners and politicians, was reinforced publicly by an early judgement of the Deputy Chair of the IPCC.
On 9 May 1989, Mr Wain delivered the document that had been commissioned by Mr Woodward QC in two twelve-inch cubed document boxes. The covering document alone was about two inches thick. It was accompanied by the eighty-one statements in full, from which the summary had been drawn, and many other appendices, which, together, filled the boxes. There is ample evidence, in comparing the summary to the eighty-one original statements, that we had not misrepresented the first-hand accounts. Some were left on the cutting room floor because they were considered to be heavy on rhetoric but light on objective facts.
I also offered the following caution to Mr Woodward QC under the heading, ‘Behaviour of supporters and actions of ground staff’:
In the preceding paragraphs a number of references have been made to the unruly behaviour of some of the spectators. It is important, however, that a sense of perspective should be maintained as it would appear that this behaviour was limited to a relatively small minority of the total number of spectators in attendance.
Hardly the tone of a ‘black propagandist’.
It ought to be acknowledged that on the final draft of the document someone higher up the food chain had appended a set of observations. It is implied in the opening paragraph that they were the observations of the Chief Constable who was not, by raising them, seeking to draw any definitive conclusions as to the cause of the tragedy. These observations have been described at the recent inquest as a less dispassionate analysis than the rest of the report. That is coy. I believe that there are aspects of those observations that go beyond the evidence known and presented to Mr Woodward in describing the behaviour amongst football fans on that fateful afternoon. Certainly, the so-called observations were not fully supported by my summary of the evidence that was to hand at that time.
I don’t believe that the Chief Constable wrote those observations. They are written in a curious, self-righteous manner that was not the style of Mr Wright. I do not know who wrote them. Whether they influenced the thinking of Bill Woodward QC I cannot say, but I would doubt it very much. If he attached any credence to the observations then it would have been quickly dispelled by the broader evidence that was presented to Lord Justice Taylor’s public inquiry, which opened six days after Mr Woodward received the report.
As far as my own contribution to the post-disaster/pre-inquiry tasks are concerned, I responded professionally, and in good faith, to the requests of lawyers. That is also what I witnessed in those around me. We were, however, working in a bubble. The so-called Wain Report was completed within twelve days.
We had no connections to the wider world of evidence and only had, in preparing for the pressing public inquiry, the self-prepared accounts of officers who were closest to the traumatic events, and the contemporaneous photographs and CCTV footage from around the stadium.
Might my contribution have been written differently once I had discovered more about the tragic events? That is a fair question, for I was about to learn a great deal more over the next few weeks… and I would share that more developed analysis with Mr Woodward QC.
CHAPTER 4
HELPING WITH INQUIRIES
15 May – 17 July 1989
I had been a junior member of the Wain team. I was seconded to that role from a Headquarters post where my three-week absence had caused no immediate problem for the operations of the force. I had also demonstrated, during this short secondment, a talent for fulfilling parallel tasks set by multiple masters. These three criteria meant that the gaze fell upon me when the Deputy Chief Constable was looking for someone to be a runner for the legal team that would be representing the force at the Taylor Inquiry.
It was only a few days before the start of the inquiry when I was told by Mr Hayes to clear my diary for its duration. I was to perform two functions. Firstly, the Wain team was to be wound down and I would act as a point of liaison with the legal team in order to furnish their ongoing needs for information or documents from the force. Secondly, I was to follow the proceedings at the inquiry and update the Deputy and Chief about its progress.
Hillsborough Untold: Aftermath of a disaster Page 7