Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  MANCHESTER

  What are we to do with the ‘Hooligan’? Who or what is responsible for his growth? Every week some incident shows that certain parts of London are more perilous for the peaceable wayfarer than remote districts of Calabria, Sicily, or Greece, once the classic haunts of brigands. Every day in some police-court are narrated the details of acts of brutality of which the sufferers are unoffending men and women. So long as the ‘Hooligan’ maltreated only the ‘Hooligan’—so long as we heard chiefly of the attacks and counter-attacks of bands, even if armed sometimes with deadly weapons—the matter was far less important than it has become . . . There is no looking calmly, however, on the frequently recurring outbursts of ruffians, the systematic lawlessness of groups of lads and young men who are the terror of the neighbourhood in which they dwell.

  Our ‘Hooligans’ go from bad to worse. They are an ugly growth on the body politic, and the worse circumstance is that they multiply, and that School Boards and prisons, police magistrates and philanthropists, do not seem to ameliorate them. Other great cities may throw off elements more perilous to the State. Nevertheless the ‘Hooligan’ is a hideous excrescence on our civilization.

  The Times, 30 October 1890

  IN THE SPRING of 1984, Manchester United reached the semi-finals of the Cup-Winners Cup and was scheduled to play Turin’s Juventus. The teams were to play twice: the first leg in Manchester, the second, two weeks later, in Turin. I had been intrigued by Manchester United for some time. Before May 1985, English teams had not been banned from playing on the continent; the supporters of Manchester United, however, had been: by the team itself. I wanted to find out what these supporters were like. It seemed an extraordinary thing for the team’s management to ban its own fans.

  The first match was on a Wednesday evening, and I got a train to Manchester from London at around three in the afternoon. Inside, it was the familiar sight: people packed into the seats, on the floor, suspended from the luggage racks, playing cards, rolling dice, drinking unimaginable quantities of alcohol, steadily sinking consciousness into a blurry stupor.

  I walked from carriage to carriage, looking for one of ‘them’, and came across someone who was truly spectacular to look at, qualifying for that special category of human being—one of its most repellent specimens. He had a fat, flat bulldog face and was extremely large. His T-shirt had inched its way up his belly and was discoloured by something sticky and dark. The belly itself was a tub of sorts, swirling, I would discover, with litres and litres of lager, partly-chewed chunks of fried potato and moist, undigested balls of over-processed carbohydrate. His arms—puffy, doughy things—were stained with tattoos. On his right bicep was an image of the Red Devils, the logo of the Manchester United team; on his forearm, a Union Jack.

  When I came upon him, he had just tossed an empty beer can into the overhead luggage rack—quite a few were there already—and had started in on a bottle of Tesco’s vodka.

  I introduced myself. I was writing about football supporters. Did he mind if I asked him some questions?

  He stared at me. Then he said, ‘All Americans are wankers.’ And paused. ‘All journalists,’ he added, showing, perhaps, that his mind did not work along strictly nationalist lines, ‘are cunts.’

  We had established a rapport.

  His name was Mick and, on arriving in Manchester, he rushed me across the street to a nearby pub for three pints of beer, drunk with considerable speed. I accompanied Mick to the match, where he led me to the Stretford End, the standing-room section of Old Trafford, packed, enclosed, so that the chants, showing an impressive command of history and linguistic dexterity—‘Where were you in World War Two?’; ‘Va fanculo’ (‘Fuck off in Italian)—were so amplified that it was hours before my ears stopped ringing: as I fell asleep that night I found myself relentlessly repeating the not especially somniferous slogan that ‘Mussolini was a wanker.’ At half-time, Mick rushed off again for refreshment, which this time included two meat pies, a cheeseburger and a plastic cup of something which Mick insisted was lager but whose temperature and consistency reminded me of vegetable soup. I couldn’t touch it, and not losing a minute, Mick—waste not, want not—drank mine as well. At the end of the match, Mick grabbed me by my sleeve, tugged me through the crowd, ushered me down the Warwick Road North—a quick stop for two orders of fish’n’chips, grease pouring through the newspapers, Mick’s T-shirt by now a work of art—and then across the street into the pub, where, after three quick rounds at the bar, Mick bought a further two pints before sitting down with me at a table. I was the one who asked that we sit. I was starting to bloat.

  In Mick, I felt that I had finally met one of ‘them’. At the same time, I felt that perhaps he wasn’t the best one of ‘them’ to have met. There were problems. For a start I could see that he was not going to fit easily into my thesis: he was not unemployed or, it seemed, in any way disenfranchised. Instead he appeared to be a perfectly happy, skilled electrician from Blackpool, recently brought in as part of a team rewiring a block of flats in London. He also had a very large wad of twenty-pound notes stuffed into his trousers: I know this because Mick continued to buy rounds, and the wad never seemed to diminish.

  There had to be quite a lot of money if only because Mick had not missed a match in four years. Not one. In fact, Mick said he couldn’t imagine how it would be possible to miss one in the future. The future, I pointed out, was quite a long time, and Mick agreed, but, still, it was not a prospect—‘Miss Man United?’—that his mind could accommodate comfortably. I didn’t know how he had been permitted to leave his building site earlier in the day to catch the train up to Manchester, but I knew that he intended to be back there first thing in the morning. Some time later in the night, after closing time, he would wander down to Manchester Piccadilly and, with cans of lager stuffed into his coat pockets, make his way to the milk train that would get him to London in time for work. I have, since wondered what it would be like to have your house rewired by Mick and imagined that moment—the children just finishing their breakfast, the rush to get them off to school—when the bell rings and there, with the members of your curious family clustering round the door beside you, is Mick, recently ejected from the milk train, still swaying, a light fixture in hand.

  It was my turn to buy a round and when I returned Mick explained to me how the ‘firm’ worked. He mentioned some of the characters, whose nicknames were remarkably self-explanatory: Bone Head, Paraffin Pete, Speedie, Barmy Bernie, One-Eyed Billy, Red (the communist) and Daft Donald, a fellow of notoriously limited intelligence who tended to destroy things with chains. At the time, he was in jail. For that matter, at one time or another, just about everyone, if not actually in jail, was at least facing a criminal charge or had recently been tried for one. Mick, who was not of a violent disposition, had been arrested once, although it was, he assured me, an unusual occurrence and one marred by bad timing: the police happened to enter the pub the moment that Mick, standing astride the unfortunate lad whom he had almost rendered unconscious, had raised a bar stool in the air, poised to bring it crashing down with maximum force and maximum damage. ‘But I wasn’t actually going to do it,’ Mick said. There was no chance to argue, because in no time Mick was up again and heading for the bar, saying over his shoulder, ‘Same again?’

  Same again?

  I could not see how I would make it to closing time. I got up to go to the loo—my fifth visit—and, hearing a terrible sloshing sound from within, reached out to a chair for support. Mick’s thirst appeared unstoppable, or was at least as unstoppable as his stomach was large, and his stomach was very, very large. By the time I returned from the loo. there he was again, approaching the table, two pint glasses in hand. For a moment, the scene appeared to me in duplicate: a watery second Mick and an endless succession of pint glasses in his many hands. I was in trouble. I exhaled deeply. My stomach rolled. Once again, there was another, completely full pint glass. Once again, the froth on top. It was detestab
le. I stared at it.

  Mick gulped.

  Most of the supporters, he went on to explain, alcohol having no visible effect, came from either Manchester or London. ‘The ones from London are known as the Cockney Reds. Gurney is a Cockney Red. He doesn’t travel anywhere unless he’s on the jib.’

  Mick was surprised I didn’t know what ‘being on the jib’ meant. I was surprised I was able to pronounce the words.

  ‘Being on the jib,’ Mick continued, with only a half-pint now remaining in his glass, ‘means never spending money. That’s always the challenge. You never want to pay for Underground tickets or train tickets or match tickets. In fact, if you’re on the jib when you go abroad, you usually come back in profit.’

  ‘In profit?’

  ‘Yeah. You know. Money.’

  Manchester United’s firm was known as the ICJ, the Inter-City Jibbers (named after the British Rail commuter service), and Mick proceeded to list the great moments in the ICJ’s history—in Valencia and Barcelona during the World Cup when it was in Spain, in France during the qualifying matches for the European championship. Or Luxembourg. That, apparently, was from where Banana Bob returned wearing a fur coat and diamond rings on each of his fingers. Or Germany. That was where he boarded the train back to London with his underpants full of Deutschmarks. Roy Downes was another one. He had just been released from prison in Bulgaria, where he had been caught trying to crack the hotel safe. And there was Sammy. ‘Sammy is a professional.’

  ‘A professional hooligan?’

  ‘No, no. A professional thief.’

  Sammy, Roy Downes and Banana Bob were all leaders, or at least that’s how Mick described them. I had no idea that there were leaders. It sounded like some kind of tribe. Clearly I would have to meet them. They were the ones to get to. I pursued the subject.

  What, I asked Mick innocently, made a leader exactly?

  ‘Doing,’ Mick said and then paused, clearly refining his thought, ‘yes, doing the right thing in the right circumstances at the right time.’

  Ah. ‘That’s not,’ I offered gently, ‘a particularly helpful definition.’

  I asked if there was one principal leader at United, but Mick said, No, there wasn’t one leader, which was a problem, but several. ‘Sammy, Roy, Banana Bob, Robert the Sneak Thief. They all end up competing with each other. And each has his own firm, his own following—with as many as thirty or forty people. Most of the followers are little fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who are out to prove they can be a “bob” and will do anything. They’re the most dangerous. They’re the ones who start most of the fights. They’re like sub-lieutenants and they answer only to their own leader. Sammy probably has the most loyal following.’

  And then Mick stopped, suddenly.

  I thought that my questions were making him uncomfortable—leaders? sub-lieutenants? little armies?—but, no, Mick was looking at my beer, noticing that, while he had finished his pint, my glass was still full, although I had repeatedly brought it to my lips. ‘You’re not much of a drinker, are you?’

  It was eleven o’clock at last, and someone was calling ‘Time’ (beautifully, I thought), and I calculated that in addition to an order of fish’n’chips and a thoroughly indigestible cheeseburger I had had two cans of lager and eight pints of bitter. That was a lot, I thought. I had done rather well. But now Mick was telling me that I wasn’t much of a drinker. Mick certainly was. He was not keeping track of what he consumed, but I was so impressed that I was. In addition to a newspaper full of fish’n’chips, his two cheeseburgers, his two meat pies, his four bags of bacon-flavoured crisps and the Indian take-away he was about to purchase on his way to the station, Mick had had the following: four cans of Harp lager, a large part of a bottle of Tesco’s vodka and eighteen pints of bitter. As the pub closed, Mick bought a further four cans of lager for the train-ride home.

  It was an expensive business being a football supporter, and I could see that it was important that Mick not miss work in the morning. For although Mick might have talked about being on the jib as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I noticed that he had a return ticket to London and had had a ticket for the match. All in all, he had spent about sixty pounds that evening. He mentioned that, the previous Saturday, he had spent about the same. He also said that he had spent £155 the day before on a package tour to Turin for the second match with Juventus. That is, between Saturday and Wednesday, Mick had spent £275 on football. In all likelihood he would spend another fifty or sixty pounds the following Saturday—£335 in a week, an exceptional week perhaps, but, even so, more than most members of the British population were spending on their monthly mortgages.

  The package to Turin was interesting for another reason. As I knew, Manchester United’s supporters were banned from matches played in Europe—the ban, according to Mick, was because there was a riot every time the team played abroad—but it appeared to be enforced in a rather casual way: the club’s management had simply refused to take up the standard allocation of tickets for the visiting team. But what was to stop the supporters from going over on their own and buying from touts? Or what was to stop some enterprising entrepreneur from buying a lot directly from Italy and selling them expensively here in England?

  Mick explained the package, which included air fare, hotel, and match tickets—seats, not standing. That was a big feature: they would be good tickets. He pulled out a tiny newspaper clipping, two centimetres of a column, taken from the Manchester Evening News. It was all being handled by a travel agent whom, for reasons that will eventually become apparent, I cannot refer to by his real name. I will call him Bobby Boss. And his agency? The Bobby Boss Travel Agency.

  Mick disappeared into the Manchester night—the streets around Old Trafford were now deserted—and started off on the two-mile walk to the station, eating a second Indian take-away on the way, his weighted coat pockets swinging with his stride. He was, it must be said, not fun to look at, but, finally, not a bad sort. For all his stories of violence and mayhem, he himself seemed to play by the rules. It was just a good time out; it was a club. He was excited to have the chance to talk about it, and the more he talked about it the more excited he got. He was open and generous and trusting. That was the thing: he trusted me.

  I FOUND BOBBY Boss in Soho, up stairs that smelled vividly of the people who had slept there the night before and in a very big room shared with several other businesses, each divided by an elaborate but flimsy network of highly portable plywood partitions. In fact, I did not find Bobby Boss himself, but only his business, represented by a perfectly agreeable receptionist named Jackie or Nicky or Tracy, something light and cheerful, someone, in any event, who seemed not to share my anxiety about embarking on a clandestine trip that had been banned by the management of Manchester United, the supporters’ club, the Football Association and the UEFA executive. Business was business; I gave her £155 and she gave me a piece of paper. It said ‘Received with thanks.’ Match tickets, I was assured, would come later.

  The journey began the following week, many hours before the sun came up, just outside the Cumberland Hotel by Marble Arch. For some reason, the airport had been changed the night before and a minibus had been hired to drive us all to Manchester. Nobody in the group found this particularly remarkable. On the other hand, there was nothing particularly remarkable about the group. There was a boy in glasses, with a clogged-up nose, who kept saying, ‘There’ll be no trouble. We are here for the football.’ There was a lawyer. And there was a bunch of kids. Why was I doing this? I knew nobody. Mick, although meant to be working in London, wasn’t there. I resolved never again to make travel plans after drinking eight pints of beer.

  As it turned out I did happen to sit among three people who knew each other, Steve—an electrician, who was married and lived in St Ives, the sleepy, suburban town forty miles north of London—and an improbably named pair, Ricky and Micky, good-looking boyish fellows in jeans and jackets. I asked them what they did, and they
were guarded and suspicious—just what was an American doing on this minibus, anyway? ‘This and that,’ Ricky said, and turned to his paper, the Sun, which everybody else was reading as well. I couldn’t be bothered. It was five o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t imagine that Ricky and Micky—who, with their floppy dark hair and innocent round faces, looked like teenage pop stars from the early sixties—could possibly be relevant to what I was doing. But I had much to learn.

  We arrived at Manchester Airport around nine o’clock. Mick was there after all, looking grey and bleary-eyed—obviously the morning after a night spent with a real drinker. He had grown more and more enthusiastic about the prospect of seeing his name in print, and, hoping that I might be accompanied by a photographer, had dressed for the occasion: a T-shirt—‘I don’t have a drinking problem unless I can’t find a drink’—and, regrettably, a pair of very tight-fitting shorts. He had sun-glasses and an instamatic camera and was in a great hurry to get to the duty-free shop. I asked him if he could identify any of the people he had mentioned to me before—Sammy, Banana Bob, Roy Downes, Robert the Sneak Thief—but they were not to be on the flight. Foot—soldiers, that’s what I would learn we were called. Those on the flight were just the troops. The generals, as would be expected of them, made separate travel arrangements.

  Until I came to live in England I had always assumed that the ugly tourist—with his money, his broad accent, his ignorance—was an American. But the American tourist—intimidated by the size of the world and always surprised at just how old it is—is a quiet, deferential one, even if a little goofy to look at sometimes. He’s not ugly. I had not been to the Costa del Sol yet. I had not met a lager lout. I had not met tourist trash. Tourist trash, who travels only on package holidays, has an ever—present little camera, a peculiar way of dressing which usually exposes great expanses of flesh best left covered and an irrepressible appetite for cheap wine, two-litre bottles of lager and, regardless of the country or the language, vast, greasy, Mail-on-Sunday-newspaper quantities of fish’n’chips. Tourist trash is conspicuous when it travels. But football supporters are different; they’re worse. Much, much worse.