State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  As the team’s fortunes deteriorated, so did the behaviour of its fans. By May 1974 the Mirror had placed the Stretford Enders at the top of its ‘League of Violence’, naming United as ‘the team whose visit is most dreaded’. After the pitch invasion that greeted the team’s relegation, the club erected a massive steel fence across the Stretford End; unfortunately, this only added to the ‘prestige’ of United’s hooligans. The fence had made the Stretford End ‘a kind of academy of violence, where promising young fans can study the arts of intimidation’, reported the Observer in December 1974. ‘It resembles the sort of cage, formidable and expensive, that is put up by a zoo to contain the animals it needs but slightly fears. Its effect has been to make the Stretford terraces even more exclusive and to turn the occupants into an elite.’24

  The comparison with a zoo was not unfair: the fans themselves used to chant ‘We Hate Humans’. And a year later, as Tommy Docherty’s revitalized side took the Second Division by storm, so the Stretford Enders conducted a campaign of terror across provincial England and Wales. In September, hundreds of extra policemen had to be drafted in to keep the peace when United visited Cardiff. In January 1975, enraged supporters smashed shop windows and overturned cars after their team’s defeat to Norwich; in April, they caused yet more trouble during a game away at Notts County. And after Manchester United won promotion to the First Division, the fans celebrated in predictable style. In their very first match, away at Wolverhampton, fourteen people were stabbed, local businesses suffered thousands of pounds’ worth of damage, and eighty-six United supporters were arrested after an afternoon of mayhem. ‘We have seen nothing quite like it,’ a West Midlands police spokesman said sadly. ‘It must have been bottling up inside them all through the long, hot summer.’25

  Football grounds were far from pleasant places to be in the 1970s. ‘They are hideously uncomfortable,’ wrote Arthur Hopcraft. ‘The steps are as greasy as a school playground lavatory in the rain. The air is rancid with beer and onions and belching and worse. The language is a gross purple of obscenity.’ When the crowd surged after a shot, he noted, ‘a man or boy, and sometimes a girl, can be lifted off the ground in the crush … and dangled about for minutes on end, perhaps never getting back to within four or five steps of the spot from which the monster made its bite’. In these conditions, it was a miracle that more people were not badly injured or killed. But disaster was always lurking in the shadows. At Ibrox in January 1971, sixty-six Rangers fans, many of them children, were crushed to death when barriers collapsed after the Old Firm derby. At the time there were plenty of fine words from FA officials and Cabinet ministers about the need for more safety measures. But as the decade progressed, with clubs’ revenue threatened by inflation and falling attendances, it became clear that this was just talk. Most grounds were grim, dilapidated places, the paint peeling, the stands rusting, the terraces stained with urine, rainwater and even the blood of those supporters caught up in the game’s growing culture of violence. When Reginald Maudling told clubs that they had a ‘right and duty’ to keep troublemakers out of their grounds, it was symptomatic of the general defeatism that the Arsenal secretary claimed it would be ‘quite impracticable’ to do so. ‘Football wasn’t just out of kilter with fashion,’ the journalist Duncan Hamilton wrote later. ‘It was regarded as faintly repellent, like a sour smell,’ a crude, primitive pastime played by long-haired yobs and watched by the dregs of society, a game whose supporters were more likely to end up with a knife between the ribs than to see a genuinely exciting sporting occasion.26

  In later years, football hooliganism was sometimes associated, quite wrongly, with Thatcherism. In fact, it had first become a major public concern during the 1960s, the last years of buoyant growth and full employment. Even before the 1966 World Cup there were fears of crowd trouble, with stories describing Saturday afternoons ‘somewhere between the storming of the Bastille and a civil rights march in Alabama’, and accounts of court cases in which skinny youths from Liverpool or Manchester pleaded guilty to possession of flick-knives or kicking policemen. Violence was particularly common at games in London, partly because the capital had eleven league clubs, but also because its transport links made it easy for visiting fans to attend games but hard for the authorities to police them. And by the end of the 1960s many of the familiar ingredients of football hooliganism were already present, including the phenomenon of end-taking, which involved visiting fans fighting for control of the ends usually reserved for the keenest home supporters. In January 1970, for example, sixty-one people ended up in hospital, fourteen of them with serious injuries, when Leeds fans ‘took’ Stoke City, and a few months later the FA advised clubs to install small fenced ‘pens’ to control visiting fans.27

  Perhaps the decisive moment in public perceptions of football violence came in September 1969. Returning from Derby, where their team had been thrashed 5–0, five hundred Tottenham fans ran amok on their special train, smashing up fixtures and fittings, hurling furniture out of the windows and repeatedly pulling on the emergency cord, which automatically triggered the brake and risked causing a crash. By the time the train had reached Bedfordshire, the driver had had enough. Passing through the village of Flitwick, he slowed the train to a halt and refused to move until the fans were kicked off. Scores of local police rushed to the scene and managed to force the fans out of the carriages, but then they somehow lost control. The next thing anybody knew, hundreds of fans were off on what a reporter called ‘a stone-throwing spree, terrorizing villages, smashing windows, and attacking cars’, as though the Visigoths had descended on rural Bedfordshire. As luck would have it, many residents were at a wine-and-cheese party in Flitwick’s village hall; alarmed by the noise, they rushed out to find themselves in a re-enactment of the sack of Rome. Some took refuge in the local pub while the battle raged outside; others tried to defend their homes, not unlike Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Straw Dogs. Although the police finally regained control, the evening sent a powerful message that ‘hooliganism was quite capable of moving into anyone’s back garden’. The government immediately announced new measures to fight disorder, and one newspaper even ran the headline ‘Home Office Acts To End Football Hooliganism’. But hooliganism was far from beaten, and the Battle of Flitwick was just a taste of the horrors to come.28

  In the 1970s and 1980s, football hooliganism became a staple topic of Sunday supplement journalism and second-rate sociological studies. Some writers, treating football fans like some bizarre Amazonian tribe, devised elaborate anthropological classifications, tracing the hooligan’s ‘career development’ from 11-year-old ‘Novice’ to adolescent ‘Rowdy’ and hard-case ‘Nutter’. In fact, even during the worst years of hooliganism the common stereotypes were misleading: most fans were not hooligans, while most violence was disorganized, drunken and largely symbolic. And yet, behind all the sociological waffle about rituals and subcultures, hundreds of people were seriously hurt and some lost their lives. The disasters at Heysel and Hillsborough in the 1980s were often blamed on police and officials, but they would never have happened without the climate of fear and violence created by hooliganism. Indeed, the surprising thing is that more people were not killed, especially given the kinds of weapons being taken to games. On Arsenal’s North Bank, some fans carried a terrifying array of hardware, ‘from meat-cleavers and sharpened combs to knuckle-dusters studded with broken razor blades’. And during Hunter Davies’s season with Tottenham, one game was nearly abandoned when steel staples were fired at a visiting goalkeeper from a catapult.29

  Indeed, these weapons were not just for show. On Saturday, 24 August 1974, English football recorded its first murder, when 18-year-old Kevin Olsson was stabbed to death during Blackpool’s clash with Bolton. At the same game, two Bolton fans – neither the killer – were arrested for carrying knives, while another was fined for carrying a 4-foot sharpened wooden stake. In Manchester, another fan was arrested for wielding a carving knife during a fight at Picc
adilly station. Yet there was no shortage of commentators who insisted that hooligans should be pitied rather than punished. ‘The malaise is not in the adolescent, whose male aggression is innate and biologically healthy, but in our urban society which fails to provide a socially advantageous outlet for a natural force,’ one John Cole of Oxford wrote to The Times. Hooligans would be forced to misbehave, he explained, until society met ‘their innate biological needs for a gang, a territory and a goal that they can achieve’. Not unpredictably, he was an Anglican vicar.30

  For observers on the political right, football hooliganism, like other social ills, was ultimately a product of the permissive society, its perpetrators mollycoddled by liberal parents, progressive teachers and profligate politicians. Football violence, Norman Tebbit once said, was a result of ‘the era and attitudes of post-war funk’. But this explanation had serious problems. Since most hooligans were unskilled or unemployed manual workers – labourers, bouncers, bricklayers, factory workers and so on – they were precisely those people least likely to have grown up with liberal, indulgent parents, while their own values were decidedly non-permissive. What was more, hooliganism had a very long history. ‘Across the centuries,’ wrote the historian Geoffrey Pearson in 1983, ‘we have seen the same rituals of territorial dominance, trials of strength, gang fights, mockery towards elders and authorities, and antagonism towards “outsiders” as typical focuses for youthful energy and aggressive mischief.’ The ‘modern football rowdy’, he thought, was simply ‘a reincarnation of the unruly apprentice, or the late Victorian “Hooligan” ’, or even the ‘hostile factions at the theatres and hippodromes in Byzantine Rome and Constantinople’. Even in the supposedly staid and orderly 1950s, football violence was not unknown. ‘Trains, carrying rampaging young fans, would end their journeys with windows broken, upholstery smashed, lavatory fittings broken, the carriages running with beer and crunching underfoot with broken glass like gravel,’ wrote Arthur Hopcraft – a vision of Harold Macmillan’s Britain very different from the cosy caricatures becoming popular two decades later.31

  On the left and in academic circles, a popular explanation was that football hooliganism was a moral panic fuelled by the press, who had ‘invented hooliganism as a “social problem” ’ by drawing attention to ‘relatively minor acts of rowdyism’. It is certainly true that from about 1967 onwards, the popular newspapers, fighting desperately for circulation in an increasingly competitive market, adopted a much more sensationalist attitude to football violence, with the Sun and Mirror leading the way in banner headlines and military metaphors. ‘Thugs’ and ‘louts’ were regularly ‘marching to war’, ‘on the warpath’ or ‘preparing for battle’, while potentially troublesome matches were previewed with almost gleeful pessimism. Before one game in November 1967, for example, the Mirror reported that ‘Oldham’s young fans have already been told to stand by for major trouble from Stockport supporters when the clubs meet’ – which inevitably meant that fans arrived at the game spoiling for a fight. And by September 1974 the Mail, like the Mirror, was running a ‘Thugs’ League’, which was supposed to shame clubs into cleaning up their act but probably had the opposite effect. ‘Chelsea, London’s soccer violence champions for two years running, are in line to land the hat-trick,’ one report began, noting that they ‘share the lead with West Ham in Scotland Yard’s league of violence’. On occasions the press even reported hooligan clashes as though they, not the action on the pitch, were the real sporting story: when Manchester United visited Cardiff in September 1974, previews of ‘Cardiff v United’ referred to the violence, not the football. Papers even had their favourite villains, with the hated Stretford Enders at the foot of the list. When fighting broke out at the West Ham–Manchester United game in October 1975, the press cast West Ham’s hooligans as ‘avenging angels’ dealing out a hard lesson. ‘The Day The Terrace Terrors Were Hunted Like Animals and Hammered!’ roared the Sun’s triumphant headline.32

  Blaming the press for ‘inventing’ hooliganism, though, is not very convincing. As the historian Richard Holt points out, interviews with hooligans provided no evidence that they had learned ‘how to behave from the papers’. And the common academic claim that ‘alarmist’ columnists ‘distorted the scale and seriousness of the incidents’ seems downright deluded given how many people were seriously hurt at football matches. The anthropologist Desmond Morris even insisted that hooliganism was nothing more than ‘ritual rudeness’ with ‘little or no bloodletting’, which would have come as scant consolation to the families of those injured, blinded or killed, or to the innocent passers-by caught up in the fighting. And the other fashionable explanations of the 1970s and 1980s are equally unsatisfying. Left-wing commentators often liked to quote the FA secretary Ted Croker’s remark that the troublemakers were not football’s hooligans, but Mrs Thatcher’s hooligans, the implication being that their violence flowed from working-class unemployment and inner-city decline. But this is clearly nonsense. Many hooligans came from small towns and suburbs, not big cities, while violence first became a major social problem during an era of almost full employment. Even in the Thatcher years, many hooligans came from the booming South-east of England and had steady jobs: a Thames Television survey of 140 members of West Ham’s ‘Inter City Firm’ found four chefs, three electricians, three clothes-makers, six motor mechanics, two solicitors’ clerks, a landscape gardener and an insurance underwriter – people for whom violence was hardly some kind of protest against modern economic conditions.

  Hooligans themselves often reacted with horror and contempt when they came across academic arguments that their actions were a form of insurgency against bourgeois ideology. ‘All we are going for is a good game of football; a good punch up and a good kick up,’ one bemused fan told an interviewer from the BBC’s Panorama. And after watching a panel of self-styled experts on a television show in the early 1970s, one young Arsenal fan put it very nicely. ‘Well, there was this geezer sitting there who thought he knew all about it, but he didn’t know nothing if you ask me,’ he said (and it would be fun to know which academic expert he had in mind). ‘He was going on about soccer hooligans and how they carry on down the ends, and he says, well, it’s all because they don’t like the middle classes taking over the game.’ But the Arsenal fan was having none of it. ‘Anybody who ever been down the North Bank’ll tell you they don’t give a sod for all the students and all the other wankers and pooftas that turn up,’ he said. ‘They never go down the end anyway, they’re too scared. All the North Bank care about is their team and the other end and that’s all there is to it.’33

  The obvious explanation for the surge in football hooliganism in the early 1970s is very simple. As the heirs to a long tradition of adolescent gangs, tribal aggression and general mischief-making, football crowds had always had the potential for violence. Until the 1960s, however, this potential was contained by the fact that there were very few away fans and, crucially, that football crowds contained thousands of older men, including the fathers and grandfathers of the youngsters present. Fans went to games in family, neighbourhood or factory groups, standing beside people they knew, with youthful high jinks effectively controlled by married men who had no desire to get involved in a mass punch-up. Interviewed in the 1980s, fans who remembered those days often pointed out that while there was plenty of banter and bad language, teenagers who stepped out of line were given ‘a bloody good hiding’ by their fathers. But once working-class supporters began to share in the fruits of affluence, the composition of the crowds changed. Married men stayed at home, tinkering with their cars, taking their wives shopping, or going out for drives and day-trips, instead of automatically going to the match. Between the early 1950s and the early 1980s, football attendances fell by half, mirroring similar declines in pubs, churches, music halls and cinemas. Remaining older fans moved to the seats, leaving the cheaper terraces – the ‘ends’ – to young, unskilled manual workers who had nobody to supervise them. And as more fans trav
elled to away games, the process of segregation became self-reinforcing. Older men stayed away from areas where there might be trouble; young men took over and began to enjoy the violence for its own sake, a ritualized display of masculine aggression that began to eat into the game like a cancer. It was not poverty that opened the door to hooliganism; it was affluence.34

  By 1975 it was obvious to all but a handful of sociologists that football hooliganism was out of control. Copying the Stretford Enders, other fans were now treating away games as an opportunity to run amok in railway stations, town centres and motorway service stations. Even the Cup Final was no longer sacred: after West Ham’s victory over Fulham, celebrating fans invaded the pitch and tried to taunt their disappointed rivals into a fight. But worse was to come a few months later, when the 1975–6 season opened amid scenes of medieval savagery. The opening day alone saw Manchester United fans clashing with police in Wolverhampton, Nottingham Forest and Plymouth Argyle fans fighting on the pitch (undeterred by Brian Clough, who ran on to restrain them), and Sheffield United fans rampaging down the Southend seafront. But it was the last Saturday of August that marked the nadir. When Chelsea went three goals down in their Second Division game at Luton, enraged fans invaded the pitch, attacking players and officials, punching the Luton goalkeeper to the ground, and leaving one steward with a broken nose and another nursing stab wounds. After the final whistle, they ran wild in the streets, vandalizing cars and shops; on the journey home to St Pancras, they burned out one railway carriage, threw seats and toilet fittings out onto the track, and forced the guard to lock himself in to protect the mail. On the same day, fifty Manchester United fans were arrested after fighting broke out in Stoke, sixty Rangers fans were arrested outside Ibrox, and dozens of Liverpool supporters – giving the lie to their tiresome claim that they were only ever the victims of football disorder, never the perpetrators – set fire to the train carrying them home from Leicester, causing £70,000 worth of damage.35