Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  We are free, the faces are saying.

  We have got past the police, the faces believe.

  We cannot be stopped now.

  All day long a crowd has been trying to form, and all day long it has been prevented from doing so. It has been cribbed and frustrated and contained. The experience of the day has been one of being boxed in: the pub in the morning; the train at Euston Square; the platform at Fulham Broadway where everyone was frisked, scrutinized, surrounded and then escorted to the ground. They were boxed in during the match—literally a box, its sides made of the heavy steel fences of the enclosed terraces. Throughout, the containment has been absolute. At every moment, there have been limits.

  And now there is none.

  The pace picks up. I can feel the pressure to go faster, an implicit imperative, coming from no one in particular, coming from everyone, a shared instinct for the heat and the strength of feeling, knowing that the faster the group goes the more coherent it becomes, the more powerful, the more intense the sensations. The casual stroll becomes a brisk walk and then a jog. Everyone is jogging in formation, tightly compressed, silent.

  I am enjoying this. I am excited by it. Something is going to happen: the crowd has an appetite, and the appetite will have to be fed; there is a craving for release. A crowd, already so committed, is not going to disperse easily. It has momentum: unstoppable momentum.

  I catch sight of a street name—Dawes Road. I press on, going a little faster, wanting to get to the very front, while repeating the name of the street as I run. I recognize the familiar high-street businesses—a Ladbrokes, a Lloyds Bank, a building society, a shop selling fruit and vegetables—but they could be anywhere. I could be anywhere.

  It is getting congested. I am on the pavement, which is filled with supporters, and I am having difficulty getting any closer to the front. There are more supporters on the other side of the street as well, on the opposite pavement, and some running between the cars.

  For the first time I hear shouting, although it is some distance away. It is a football chant, but I can’t make out what is being said. I am surprised by the sound. Someone says: ‘Their lads.’ These words seem slightly intrusive—their lads—and they echo round in my head. The shouting, I then understand, comes from Chelsea supporters. What does this mean? That we are being chased by Chelsea supporters? I find the idea thrilling. The crowd has a purpose: the Chelsea supporters have provided one. Actually I find many things in the idea. I also find it frightening: there are no police; this is about to become ugly. And I find it confusing. How, at this point, can the Chelsea supporters be behind us? I look back but see little: only members of the Manchester crowd, who seemed to have swelled now, a bloated presence, filling the full width of Dawes Road. I can’t see beyond them. I can’t tell if anyone is chasing us, but I hear them. Yes, the chanting is definitely Chelsea’s.

  Yes, someone else says, it’s their lads.

  I press forward. I don’t want to get caught from behind in a fight, but to get any closer to the front I have to push people out of the way. I inadvertently make someone stumble, but he doesn’t fall. He swears at me, and I mumble an apology, and when I look up again I see the most astonishing sight: it is Sammy. Sammy is at the front of the group. Where did he come from?

  I remember Sammy in the pub in that morning, but I haven’t seen him since. It seems fitting that as this crowd came into being he. would emerge out of it, pushed up to the front, created by the crowd. I feel reassured seeing him. I watch him. He is jogging steadily, his little lieutenants by his side. He has noted that the Chelsea supporters are behind us—he turns his head every three or four steps—but the prospect does not disturb him. Sammy does not look unhappy. Something is going to happen—that’s his look; he knows it’s going to go off.

  Even so, I still don’t understand: where have the Chelsea supporters come from? It is as if they have materialized out of our footprints. There was the police barrier; the police at Fulham Broadway; the quick route through the back streets. But nowhere were there Chelsea supporters. Something is missing. Is it possible that the United supporters set out in this direction knowing they were going to be followed? But how could they have known that? Were the Chelsea supporters in hiding, waiting for them to pass? Did I miss them?

  I continue watching Sammy—in control, still checking behind him, judging how close the Chelsea supporters are. Everything, his manner suggests, is going to plan. And then the thought occurs to me: yes, it is going to plan. It is an improbable notion, but it makes sense of everything. It has been planned. Riots are meant to be spontaneous and sudden: you don’t control the uncontrollable. Crowd violence is never planned—or is it? Is it possible to have a riot by appointment?

  I want to ask, but things are moving very fast. Sammy, having been offered control, is exercising it. The pace quickens. I am running hard, too hard to catch sight of anything. There are shops, but they are unfamiliar. I don’t even recognize the high street standards. It is a strange sensation: I feel as though I am running in a tunnel. Along the peripheries of my vision is a blurry darkness, the light—from a sign or a window or a headlamp from a car—is intermittent and unfocused. I am having to concentrate on the back of Sammy’s head; I have hooked my gaze there so that I can be dragged along by it, so that I won’t stumble or fall. The chanting of the Chelsea supporters is louder—progressively louder. They are getting closer.

  Someone says: They are on our tails.

  Sammy presses on. Stay together, he calls out; it is the first thing he has said. Stay close together, he repeats.

  I still can’t see any Chelsea supporters, but I believe that I can feel them. They are just behind the last members of the Manchester crowd, keeping pace but also distance, maintaining a buffer.

  Streets start appearing rapidly on our right. I catch the name of one, but then forget it. There are more streets. For some reason, there are many. Every fifteen or twenty yards, it seems, there is another one. I notice Sammy noticing them. He seems to be looking for a particular one. There is a strategy at work but I am not understanding it. Sammy then shouts something—he has discovered the street he wants—and the crowd, sprinting now, runs with him. He leads us round the first corner. Then a quick right: after ten yards, there is another corner. And, surprisingly, another quick right. Three small streets, and then we are back to where we started from, except in one crucial respect: before we were being chased; now, having looped round, we are the ones chasing.

  Later, looking at a map, I will discover that Dawes Road passes through the area at an angle, cutting diagonally across the other streets, breaking them into small residential triangles, making it possible for Sammy to run round one rapidly enough to be able to re-emerge directly behind the Chelsea supporters.

  It is the first time I have seen them, but it is, I think, only the younger ones I see, the ones hanging back, at the rear of the crowd, bouncing in and out of my vision. I can take in little more than vague figures, the occasional face, a look of panic as someone turns round to see what is chasing him down from behind. The pavement ends, we enter the street, cross it, the pavement begins. I see this because I am watching my feet, everyone pressed so closely together and moving so fast that I don’t want to fall. But I don’t know how many streets we have passed. I perceive them not as facts, but as symptoms of movement. Where is the traffic?

  It goes on. I was convinced that, having looped round, the momentum would carry us straight into the violence, but it doesn’t. It is a chase, and the chase continues, pressing against this barrier, this threshold, the act of transgression moments away, but no one prepared to undertake it: on and on and on and nothing is happening. I am being held back, restricted, leashed. The buildings around me, although hardly discernable, have a weightiness about them: they are shadowy and dark and oppressive. I find that I am noticing them—more than I am noticing the supporters. I want the buildings not to be there. It is as if the street were no longer wide or large enough for me. T
he buildings have become aggressive physical facts, constricting and overbearing. Something has got to give way, something has got to give.

  And when it does, it is property.

  There is glass breaking: it is a window. I hear it, I don’t see it, but the effect is sensational—literally sensational: it fills the senses, reverberates inside me, as though a blast of voltage has passed through my limbs. Something has burst, erupted. There is another sound: the soft, crushed sound of a windscreen shattering. The sensation of hearing this is intensely gratifying. There is another muted crash, another windscreen. And then everywhere, glass is breaking. It is property that is being destroyed first, in order to help us across this barrier: property, the symbol of shelter, the fact of the law.

  And then they are gone. They go over the crest. There is the roar, and then everyone flies—as though beyond gravity—into violence. They are lawless. Nothing will stop them except the physical force of the police. Or incapacitating injury.

  I will not describe the violence because what I want to depict is this precise moment in its complete sensual intensity—before chronology allows the moment to evolve into its consequences. What has occurred? What has happened when a crowd goes over the edge—or the cliff: the metaphors, though hackneyed, are revealing.

  This is the way they talk about it.

  They talk about the crack, the buzz and the fix. They talk about having to have it, of being unable to forget it when they do, of not wanting to forget it—ever. They talk about being sustained by it, telling and retelling what happened and what it felt like. They talk about it with the pride of the privileged, of those who have had, seen, felt, been through something that other people have not. They talk about it in the way that another generation talked about drugs or drink or both, except that they also use both drugs and drink. One lad, a publican, talks about it as though it were a chemical thing, or a hormonal spray or some kind of intoxicating gas—once it’s in the air, once an act of violence has been committed, other acts will follow inevitably—necessarily.

  And how would I talk about it?

  I think of consciousness as having to be aware of the present on a multiplicity of levels. The human mind is never at rest in the present; it is always roving, recalling, remembering, selecting, adding, forgetting. Sitting in this room as I write my mind is accommodating so many different activities at once: it encompasses this sentence as I write it; it has already composed the next one; it has completed this book and it has, at the same time, not completed it; it has never completed it. It accommodates the state of the kitchen; the sounds of the birds outside; the quality of the light; the items that I must address later in the day—tonight, this weekend, next month, when I am old. It has, over the time it has taken me to write this paragraph so far, addressed my relationship with the bank, with my family; noted the eye make-up that my sister wears on national holidays, recalled a death; lingered upon a sad memory. Human consciousness exists on far more levels than consciousness itself could represent. This is our reality; our humanness: the thousand million stimulants of the moment, the indiscriminate mass of motion that the mind is constantly engaging, disengaging, abandoning, retrieving.

  I am attracted to the moment when consciousness ceases: the moments of survival, of animal intensity, of violence, when there is no multiplicity, no potential for different levels of thought: there is only one—the present in its absoluteness.

  Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences and, for those capable of giving themselves over to it, is one of the most intense pleasures. There on the streets of Fulham, I felt, as the group passed over its metaphorical cliff, that I had literally become weightless. I had abandoned gravity, was greater than it. I felt myself to be hovering above myself, capable of perceiving everything in slow motion and overwhelming detail. I realized later that I was on a druggy high, in a state of adrenalin euphoria. And for the first time I am able to understand the words they use to describe it. That crowd violence was their drug.

  What was it like for me? An experience of absolute completeness.

  PART THREE

  DÜSSELDORF

  The disaster of the 9th March, 1946 . . . occurred at Burnden Park, Bolton, the home ground of the famous Bolton Wanderers Football Club, on the occasion of a Cup-Tie between the Wanderers and Stoke City. Disaster it was, for it brought death to 33 persons and injuries to the hundreds of the crowd assembled on the ground. The disaster was unique. There was no collapse of a structure: it was the first example in the history of football following of serious casualties inflicted by a crowd upon itself . . .

  One of the deepest impressions left upon my mind from the enquiry is how simple and how easy it is for a dangerous situation to arise in a crowded enclosure. It happens again and again without fatal or even injurious consequences. But its danger is that it requires so little additional influences—an involuntary sway, an exciting moment, a comparatively small addition to the crowd, the failure of one part of the barrier—to translate the danger into terms of death and injuries. The pastime of football watching is on the increase and the chances of danger among the crowds are rising.

  Moelwyn Hughes

  Report of an Enquiry into the Disaster at the

  Bolton Wanderers Football Ground (24 May 1946)

  I MET DJ at an Italian restaurant in April 1988 in Woodford Green, a leafy district of outer London not far from Epping Forest. The restaurant had candles and linen table-cloths; in the corner, a piano player was singing early Bee Gees tunes with a Mediterranean accent. The restaurant was DJ’s choice, and he was a regular customer; he had an account.

  I had heard about DJ from a friend, a television journalist who, having produced a story about West Ham’s Inter-City Firm, had become friends with the supporters and remained in touch. He wanted me to meet DJ. DJ was, according to my friend, one of West Ham’s ‘Top Men’, but was also someone who wanted to do something new. He wanted to be a photo-journalist and make his name taking pictures of crowd trouble. My friend thought we might be able to work together and so he arranged a dinner between the three of us. He also asked another friend to come along, the managing director of a photo agency.

  DJ’s crowd was extraordinary, even by the standards set by the supporters I had met. My friend mentioned Kelly, a very small man interested in only very big crimes. My friend asked me if I remembered the Leicester prison break-out in 1986. That was the one in which a helicopter flew into the grounds during the exercise period and whisked off two inmates. Kelly was the pilot of the helicopter.

  My friend also described a Sunday excursion to the beach. Someone had hired a coach—as became apparent later, cash was never a problem—and fifty or sixty members of the firm headed out of East London for the coast. They were near Clacton-on-Sea when my friend decided that he had seen enough. He announced that he was getting off the bus then and there unless the supporters stopped what they were doing. They got angry. They pouted. They called my friend a spoil-sport. But finally they stopped.

  It had started shortly after setting out. Most people on the bus were in a state of moderate brainlessness—there had been drink and dope and cocaine—when, after passing a hospital for the mentally ill, they spotted a woman on the roadside, looking for a lift. They told the driver to stop.

  She was about seventeen, wearing a night-dress, and had escaped from the hospital. Her thinking facilities were severely impaired—she couldn’t see straight or talk, properly or move with any kind of grace—but she was a sexual being and responded to the attention that was paid her. The supporters gathered round: they tickled her, played with her nipples, rubbed her clitoris, stripped off her clothes and placed her naked on the floor in the aisle between the seats. They were waving their penises in her face. Someone had urinated on her. They were about to rape her—one of the supporters, crouched between her legs, was holding his erection in his hand—when my friend stopped the coach and asked to get off.

  They drove on through the morning and rea
ched Great Yarmouth in the early afternoon and entered the first pub they saw. They were in a mood for trouble. Everyone ordered up a big lunch and then hurled the various items of it at each other—a food fight involving pies, pub lasagne, whipped potatoes, the basic hot lunch menu. They were thrown out. They entered another pub, which was filled with ‘squaddies’, troops from the local RAF air bases, a feature of East Anglia. A fight began, one involving nearly seventy people—chairs, bottles, tables, a bench; the supporters got away before the police arrived.

  They entered a third pub.

  By this time the local constabulary was looking for them. In addition to the pub disturbances, they were spending money that was ‘moody’. It was counterfeit. Their trail was easy to follow.

  Through all this, they retained the girl. They hadn’t raped her, but kept her on as a mascot of sorts—a plaything.

  The bus driver had been following many of these antics from the car-park and had decided that he had seen enough. He started up the engine and pulled out into the street. Unknown to him, three West Ham supporters were asleep in the back. They had passed out earlier from any possible combination of drugs, but one of them was alert enough to register that the bus was moving and he woke up the other two. The driver would have been startled to hear their voices. They offered him a choice: either he returned the bus to the parking lot or they would set it alight: they would torch it.

  The point about my first meeting with DJ, however, was not to learn about West Ham supporters; it was to see if DJ could make it as a photographer. By the time we sat down at our table—we had cocktails first—the managing director of the photo agency had already agreed to put up the money for DJ’s film and processing just to see what she got back. The European Championship was to be held in Germany that summer and would be the first of several ‘hooli-fests’. Ever since the Heysel Stadium deaths, the England team was always accompanied by many journalists when it went abroad—as many journalists as supporters, sometimes—eager to capture the next instance of violence.