Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  I walked with the United supporters to Old Trafford. There were recriminations.

  ‘We’ve been humiliated,’ someone said. ‘They’re going to laugh at us now when they get back to London.’

  ‘Fucking yobs,’ someone else said. ‘They had to start chanting when they went up the ramp.’

  ‘We would have had them.’

  ‘We should have had them.’

  ‘But didn’t you see them waiting for us?’ someone said, referring to that rather majestic moment in which Bill Gardiner stood his ground, flanked by his troops. ‘They were waiting for us to charge. But no one would chance it. There was no one around.’

  ‘This doesn’t happen abroad. That’s where we show what we’re made of.’

  ‘It didn’t happen in Italy.’

  ‘It didn’t happen in Luxembourg.’

  ‘In Spain, forty of us would have taken on fifteen hundred of those bastards.’

  ‘Why can’t we fuckin’ do it? What’s the matter with us?’

  There were skirmishes throughout the day—outside the ground just before the match; outside the ground just after it. A tram ran from Old Trafford to Piccadilly station, and the West Ham supporters were put on it by the police. Sammy, knowing the routine, had taken a hundred of his ‘troops’ to one of the stops. He came charging down the stairs of the station, his lads just behind him, filling up the staircase, their chant—‘Manchester, la-la-la, Manchester, la-la-la’—echoing loudly. When the tram approached, Sammy ran up to it and pulled apart the doors with his hands. And then he stood back. The station was ringing with the noise. There were not many police, only two or three buried deep within the carriage and unable to get out.

  ‘Come on,’ Sammy was shouting, standing in front of the door, waiting for the supporters behind him to follow on down the staircase.

  ‘Come on. We’ve got them.’

  Only they didn’t come. Sammy turned round angrily, incredulous that he was standing alone on the platform: ‘What are you waiting for?’ The doors closed and the tram left.

  The moment had come and gone. It was not meaningful, except for me and only in one respect. Just before the tram pulled up, Sammy turned round and surveyed the supporters he had brought with him. He did a head count, one by one, looking everyone straight in the face. I was included in the head count. Sammy shook his head and cursed, realizing he had made a mistake. And then he looked at me again, stared, and counted me in. I was pleased.

  What did I think I was doing?

  PART TWO

  BURY ST EDMUNDS

  One British supporter, himself a referee, said that the ground outside the Stadium was littered with British National Front leaflets, some overprinted by the British National Party with their address. One witness spoke of passengers on the boat crossing the Channel with National Front insignia singing songs of hatred and exhibiting violence.

  Mr John Smith, Chairman of Liverpool Football Club, spoke of how six members of Chelsea National Front had boasted to him of their part in provoking the violence and said that they seemed proud of their handiwork. Mr Bob Paisley, a former manager of Liverpool Football Club, said that he was forced to leave the Directors’ Box at the start of the game as dozens of fans poured over the dividing wall and that the person next to him claimed that he was a Chelsea supporter and was wearing a National Front badge. A number of banners decorated with swastikas were recovered after the match, including one marked ‘Liverpool Edgehill’ . . . A banner with ‘England for the English’ and ‘Europe for the English’ was observed and a contingent of the National Front were clearly seen in Blocks ‘X’ and ‘Y’. One party leaving Brussels main station was observed to be Londoners wearing Liverpool colours, carrying Union Flags and having National Front and swastika tattoos.

  Mr Justice Popplewell

  Final Report on the Deaths at Heysel Stadium, January 1986

  THE FIRST NATIONAL Front disco I attended was in Bury St Edmunds on an unseasonably warm evening in the middle of April. Bury St Edmunds is a highly ordered, middle-class town in East Anglia. It is known for its Georgian architecture and its rural ways, and I had decided beforehand that, following the disco, I would spend the night there. But around midnight it became evident that what I had planned for myself and what others had planned for me were not the same. It was around midnight that I found myself in the market square pushed up against a lamp-post, looking into the eyes of a young man named Dougie. Dougie, who was about my height, had gathered a great quantity of my cotton shirt in such a way that he had me standing on tip-toe, and every now and then, serving to reinforce the occasional phrase that Dougie wished to stress, I was lifted off the lamp-post and then pushed back sharply against it, knocking my head.

  You like the National Front, don’t you? Dougie was asking, stretching out his question to accommodate the full, painful rhythm of his lifting me up, bumping me back and knocking my head again.

  Yes, Dougie, I said, I like the National Front very much.

  But the point is, Dougie said, you really like us. He paused. Don’t you?

  Lift. Push. Bump.

  Yes, Dougie, I really like the National Front.

  I had grown fascinated by the tattoo on Dougie’s forehead, right there in the middle, a small but detailed blue swastika.

  And [lift] you are going to write nice things [bump] about us, aren’t you? Knock.

  Dougie had become a problem.

  The evening was meant to be a good-natured Saturday-night outing, a party among friends, commemorating the opening of the Bury St Edmunds branch of the National Front and celebrating the twenty-first birthday of a new member. The party had been organized by Neil, the new chairman. It was an important event for Neil. This was his first National Front disco, and there would be members of the executive branch up from London to judge his performance. There was an approved way of holding such events, and Neil had worked hard to ensure that it was all done in the proper way. There was the party’s climax, for instance. It was essential, as branch chairman, that you did not allow your lads to get too excited too early. A branch chairman would know not to do this. He would want the lads to get too excited—crowd frenzy was a valuable tool—but only briefly, right at the end, just before closing time. It was even permissible that some people might become a little violent—a little violence was an acceptable thing—but, again, only at the end. Any earlier, and the police would have to pay a visit. There was an understanding with the police of Bury St Edmunds, I was told: they didn’t want to have to pay a visit.

  But Dougie had become very excited very early. What’s more, Dougie had become not a little violent, but very violent. Dougie had become a problem. And now this problem had a good part of my throat gathered into his fist.

  There was another problem about Dougie: he was related to the new branch chairman; Dougie was Neil’s brother.

  I had met Neil and Dougie at a Cambridge United football match. Both were Chelsea supporters, and the match where we met had marked only the second time in its history that Chelsea had travelled to Cambridge. After the first match, there had been so much trouble—Chelsea supporters had ‘done’ Cambridge—that there had been a call to abolish the Cambridge team and ban football from the city.

  Trouble was likely at the second match as well, and I made a point of getting into the Chelsea side of the ground. On the way over, I came upon a boy who had fallen on to a car bonnet, having stumbled into the street beforehand, stopping traffic. Blood was pouring from his throat, which someone had cut open with the serrated neck of a broken wine bottle. There was more fighting further down the Newmarket Road. I saw a fence being taken apart, the slats of wood being handed out as weapons. There were roving gangs of lads—six or seven in each—and every few minutes a new one appeared and then went chasing down one of the side-streets.

  I entered the stands for the visiting supporters and ended up following a skinhead—big and brawny with a tight-fitting white T-shirt and fleshy biceps. His name, I would le
arn, was Cliff, which—sheer, unadorned, vaguely suggestive of danger—seemed entirely appropriate. The skinhead phase had long passed and, even here, in this crowd, Cliff stood out as a nostalgic anomaly, but Cliff had such an aggressive manner—the regulation braces and the heavy black boots and pockets full of twopences (their edges sharpened beforehand) to throw at the Cambridge supporters—that he seemed the most obvious person to befriend.

  Once the match ended, I followed him outside the ground. He began panhandling to raise the money to pay for his fare home, and I offered him some change and introduced myself.

  Why me? he wanted to know.

  I didn’t know what to say. And that was when he pointed to the badge attached to his braces. Is it because of this? he asked. Is that why you picked me?

  And then, for the first time, I noticed a discreet little badge. It said: ‘NF’.

  Cliff was a drummer in a rock band (Have you heard of White Power music? I had not heard of White Power music) and an unemployed bricklayer. He was accompanied by several others, another feature about him I had failed to notice. One was Dougie. Dougie neither spoke nor smiled. He stared. His head, gaunt and darkened with exhaustion, could only have looked more like a skull if the skin had been peeled away. Another was Dougie’s brother, Neil.

  Neil concluded that I would want to visit his operation in Bury; he was just setting it up and there would be a party some time soon. I could come over, meet the lads. He would put me up himself.

  I asked Neil for his number.

  He wouldn’t give it. He asked me for mine. He had to have mine—and my address, please—before he could give me any further information. There were people he would have to clear this with.

  Somebody would be in touch.

  And the following week, somebody was in touch. I received a large brown envelope. My name and address had been written out by hand. There was no indication of the contents or the sender except the postmark: Croydon.

  Inside, I found three editions of Bulldog, printed in exclamatory red and black. Bulldog—its title invoking that highly expressive icon of English male culture—was the publication of the Young National Front. According to the banner at the bottom of the front page, it was the paper ‘THEY WANT TO BAN.’

  I picked up one and read—beneath the headline, ‘SEX SLAVES! BLACK PIMPS FORCE WHITE GIRLS INTO PROSTITUTION’—a graphic account (beatings, kidnapping, torture, a bathtub full of spiders) of white prostitutes working for black pimps. There was an editorial. ‘We hate what these Black animals are doing and we think that all of them should be locked up until such time as a National Front government can send them back to their own countries.’

  I flipped through the pages. In each edition there were two regular columns. One was ‘Rivers of Blood’—its tide borrowed from Enoch Powell’s speech predicting rivers of blood if the immigration of blacks into Britain was not stopped. ‘Rivers of Blood’ listed the incidents of racial injustice that had occurred the month before: a white youth had been killed by a ‘Black bastard’; a race riot at a disco; an account of Savile Town, the multi-racial district of Dewsbury in Yorkshire, accompanied by a photograph of a member of the National Front kicking an Asian in the face. ‘The trouble in Dewsbury,’ the column concluded, ‘will only get worse unless the Blacks are sent home. The choice is an easy one: repatriation or race war!’

  The other column, entitled ‘On the Football Front’, took up the back page and was devoted to activities on the terraces. This is one of the letters to the football editor:

  Dear Bulldog,

  In issue 35 you printed an article on the racist ‘boys’ who support Newcastle United. The ‘boys’ were pleased to have been mentioned but they disagree strongly with Bulldog’s claim that they don’t have as many racist ‘boys’ as Leeds, Chelsea or West Ham. In fact the ‘boys’ believe that they have more and that they are now the number one racist ‘firm’ in the country . . .

  Yours sincerely,

  Joe of the East Stand

  This is another:

  Dear Bulldog,

  I buy your paper regularly but a lot of your reports are the same: it’s always Leeds or Chelsea or Spurs or West Ham in every issue. I follow Rochdale AFC and at every home match you can count on hearing racist chants and songs. The police have tried to stop us but to no avail. Recently they were stupid enough to send a Paki copper but he got so much abuse that he hasn’t been seen at the Dale since. If you print this letter it will show people that there is NF support at the smaller grounds as well as the big ones.

  Yours sincerely,

  The Rochdale AFC National Front

  From my reading of Bulldog, the member from the Rochdale National Front was unnecessarily worried about his minority status as a racist supporter from the provinces. In these three issues of Bulldog, there were accounts of racial abuse in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Cardiff, Portsmouth and Folkestone Town, which wasn’t in the league (‘During a Southern League Cup match between Folkestone and Welling, the Folkestone fans threw bananas at the opposing Black players’).

  How was I to view these publications? I was surprised by how much I disliked receiving them. I found them repellent—spread across my kitchen table, having been delivered in the ordinary way, arriving with the morning letters and bills—and I was reluctant to touch them: it would be a few days before I was prepared to examine them again. I didn’t believe that they were widely read: the writing inside was characterized by too much ranting; it was the hortatory hysteria of someone who wasn’t being listened to. Even so, I was sure that many people shared its views, although I didn’t think that I personally knew many of them. I was confident that my English friends didn’t, but my English friends—met in Cambridge or London or Oxford—were of a different world. I was coming to wonder how much they knew about England.

  The first time I heard the ape grunt—the barking sound that supporters make when a black player gets the ball—it was so foreign I couldn’t figure out what it was. It was a deep, low rumbling, and I had trouble placing where it was coming from: from underneath the ground perhaps? That such a sound could be coming up from the ground was frightening. I thought: it’s an earthquake, if only because that was the only sound—that low, bass drumming—that seemed at all comparable. I remember a friend visiting from the United States. He was here for a week and I wanted to show him the football terraces. There was a match at Millwall—the names alone evoked what I wanted to him to see: Millwall at the Den on Cold Blow Lane. But there had been rain and the pitch was a swamp, and the match was cancelled. We crossed London and got to White City in time to watch Queen’s Park Rangers. A black player touched the ball and the grunt started: uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh.

  My friend turned to me and said: What is that curious sound?

  I said nothing, but the grunt continued: uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh.

  What is it? he asked again.

  It’s because a black player has the ball, I said. They are making an ape sound because a black player has the ball.

  The looks that crossed my friend’s face were so genuine and so unmediated—bewilderment, outrage, disgust, but mainly incomprehension: he couldn’t understand it. The grunt continued: uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh, uggh. Both of us looked round. The grunt was coming not from a few lads, but, it seemed, from everyone on the terraces—old, young, fathers, whole families. Everywhere we looked we saw the ugly faces of men grunting, sticking out their lower jaws in their crude imitations of apes. Why was it so much worse here? I thought, appreciating suddenly the ironies of being in White City, having entered from South Africa Road—until finally the black player passed the ball on and the grunting stopped.

  And then another black player got the ball and the grunt resumed.

  My friend’s face was still fixed in an expression of intense incomprehension. I couldn’t explain it. I was embarrassed to be living in this country.

  It’s England, I said.

  There were other items inside my brown parcel. One
was a copy of National Front News, a more serious periodical, full of opinions about the National Health Service, British Rail, employment, crime figures and a piece on deer hunting entitled ‘Stop this Barbaric Sport’: a publication that had set out to tell a young man what to think. There was a compliments slip from Nationalist Books and a note wishing me luck with my writing about football supporters, hoping that the enclosed publications might help. It was signed ‘Ian’.

  ‘Ian’ was Ian Anderson. I identified him from my copy of National Front News; its back page listed developments in the Party. Ian Anderson had a number of responsibilities. He was the Party’s Deputy Chairman, the second in command. But he was also the head of the Branch Liaison Department. And he was the head of the Administration Department. And he was involved in the Activities Department, but of the Activities Department Ian Anderson was joint-head with a man named Joe Pearce (Joe Pearce was the Chairman of the Young National Front; he was also head of the Education and Training Department; and he was the principal organizer of the Instant Response Groups and the apparent ‘genius’ behind the Unemployed Activist Units). The National Directorate of the National Front—I learned this as well from my back page—had ‘made a number of changes in the party administration designed to increase its effectiveness.’ It seemed to me that there was an underlying purpose to this back page that was more than keeping people informed about what was happening in the Party; it was also to convey a reassuring message about the Party’s organization: that it had one. The National Front was real, this page said; it was not an arbitrary convocation of loons on the fringe of society trying to get people to listen to it. It was a real party, with a real bureaucracy, with departments that needed running and managing.