Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  Recently, I plucked one out at random; the envelope was dated 19 May 1987 and the clippings inside described the events of the preceding week. The 1987 season was not particularly remarkable for trouble. The deaths at Heysel Stadium, the fire at Bradford, the rioting at Luton between Millwall supporters and the police: all that had already occurred; that was history. This was the end of the football season. It was an ordinary football weekend. It was also ten days after the punitive, let-this-be-an-example sentencing of Stephen Hickmott and Terry Last.

  Of the seventy or so clippings inside, only two were from national newspapers: the Guardian which described scuffles along the sea-front in Brighton following a match with Crystal Palace, and the Daily Mail which reported that a fan, aged nineteen, had required twenty stitches after ‘his throat was slashed by thugs before the Everton-Manchester City match.’ Everything else was from the provincial papers.

  One was the Wrexham Evening Leader. There had been violence at a Sunday League game at Gresford in north Wales. The Sunday League is amateur football, played between pub teams, and this was its Wrexham Lager Cup semi-final involving the Cambrian Vaults and the Saughall Institute at Chester. It is unclear how the trouble began, but once under way it became very violent: there were 150 injuries, most incurred from people being kicked or head-butted. One man was struck over the head with a corner post; another had his leg broken. Even the coach of the Saughall Institute football club was involved: an amateur video caught him throwing a brick into the crowd and striking someone on the head. Of the eleven people convicted of affray—the sentences ranged from three months to two years—all but one had previous convictions involving violence.

  There was trouble in Huddersfield just outside Leeds. Leeds fans had gathered at the Wharf pub to celebrate their team’s winning the match that secured it a place in the league promotion play-offs. Later in the evening members of a Rastafarian reggae band passed by on their way to buy fish and chips in the centre of town. On seeing them, the Leeds supporters emptied into the streets and surrounded the band and started chanting ‘sieg heir’ while making the Nazi salute. A beer glass was crushed into the face of one of the band members; four others were stabbed. When an ambulance appeared, the Leeds supporters refused to let it through, and one of the band members came close to dying from loss of blood.

  In Bournemouth, supporters, after roaming from pub to pub, took over the Royal Exeter Hotel, smashed its windows, set fire to deck-chairs and then stoned the police and the fire-service vehicles that had been called in to stop the trouble (Southampton Southern Evening Echo). Members of the Robstart Football Club from Stockwell, another amateur team, were involved in a brawl at the Cabot Court pub in Weston-super-Mare. There were fifty-six arrests. In Southend, Wolves’ supporters ‘ran riot’, and there was a ‘clash’ at Filbert Street following the match between Leicester City and Coventry.

  In Peterborough, 150 Derby supporters, having stopped briefly in the city centre for petrol, attacked a group of local youths, punching one so hard that when he hit the ground his skull broke. In Southport, Bangor City football fans occupied one end of the stand and then jumped up and down until they destroyed it, whereupon they attacked the officials on the pitch. In a match between two non-league teams, Gillingham and Chelmsford City, twenty-one-year-old Anthony Robertson was arrested during crowd trouble that resulted in him being caught spraying ammonia in the eyes of a rival supporter and then knocking a local policeman against the wall, kicking him and injuring his shoulder. And in Bolton, supporters, described by the local journalist as ‘howling demi-brains’ displaying ‘all the courage of a magpie with a sparrow’s egg,’ assaulted Middlesborough fans at the Green Tavern where they were having a drink and then went on to attack nothing less than the Burnden Park police station, where one climbed a floodlight pole and cut the electrical cables into the station.

  This list is already too long; in fact, it is only a partial one. It also excludes the packets that arrived around the same time—the ones postmarked 8 May, 13 May, 15 May, 20 May and 27 May. They are still unopened. The arrests and trials of the metropolitan centres are well represented by the agencies of the news media already located there. These stories are an indication of what doesn’t get in the news; this is what Saturday afternoon in Britain is really like.

  There is one further story that is worth citing. It is from the Oldham Evening Chronicle and involves two Irish sales reps, Neil Watson and Terry Moore, old friends, and long-standing Oldham Athletic supporters, who regularly flew into Manchester for a match. They made a weekend of it: a hotel, a meal and a drink on the Friday night. This match was against Leeds United, and both men had spent the evening at the bar of the Royton Hotel just outside the city. Just after closing time, they met up with a number of Leeds supporters and were attacked. Terry Moore was punched repeatedly in the face and fell to the ground unconscious, where he was then kicked in the head six or seven times. Terry Moore has a rare blood type, and this was used as evidence: forensic tests showed that it was this particular blood type that was to be found on one of the supporter’s shoes, socks, trousers, T-shirt and hair. There had been a lot of blood. After the incident, the Leeds supporters went off but they returned a short time later. This is one of the details that is so compelling: they had come back in order to resume kicking Terry Moore’s head. This was done six or seven more times; Terry Moore hadn’t moved; he was still unconscious. He still hasn’t moved. For twelve days, he was in a coma. When he emerged from it, he was paralysed and had lost his ability to speak.

  I WAS UNABLE to accompany DJ to Germany for the 1988 European Championship—I would be going later—but he phoned me on the Friday he arrived. He then phoned me regularly thereafter to keep me informed of the trouble. There seemed to be a great deal of it—most of it between English and German supporters—and several of DJ’s West Ham friends had already been arrested. And then, shortly after England’s first match against Ireland, the press got what it had been waiting for—a terrible riot, with tear-gas and scenes of spectacular violence. DJ sent back his first batch of film on a late-night flight to London.

  The next England match was in Düsseldorf—it was the dreaded one against Holland—and I flew over on a special flight added to accommodate the press. The British sports minister—a small man who spent much of his time talking about imprisoning male members of the working class under the age of thirty—sat in the front row. The flight was sold out; every seat had been taken by cameramen, photographers, columnists and free-lancers of various descriptions. Three members of an Australian film crew, having heard that I knew a real hooligan, followed my taxi into the city.

  The city looked like Beirut. The green cars of the police were everywhere. There was a water cannon and a windowless bus for mass arrests. There were policemen—armed, wearing helmets—on every corner. But there were also as many journalists. A Central Television crew was interviewing a ‘hooligan’. Later I would spot several supporters from Manchester United, including Daft Donald, the supporter armed with mace and chains and Stanley knives who, on his way to the match in Turin, had never got past Nice: Daft Donald had granted an ‘exclusive interview’ to the German correspondent of the BBC.

  In the event, I never met up with DJ: Robert, another West Ham friend, was arrested that night, and DJ would spend most of the evening trying to rescue him. I ended up befriending a lad from Grimsby.

  Grimsby, as I came to think of him, entered my life through a mix of fear and boredom: fear, because for the first time, journalists were being treated with a great deal of aggression—I saw a photographer badly hurt when supporters beat his nose in with his own camera—and I felt safer in company; and boredom, because it became apparent that, despite all the promises, the Dutch and the English supporters were not going to exterminate themselves in the riot of the century. This was partly due to the German police, who, caught out on the first night when violence erupted between English and local supporters, were not going to get caught out again.
After the match, the Düsseldorf police had succeeded in corralling most of the ‘difficult’ English supporters in the railway station. That was where I befriended Grimsby. I used an old crumpled press pass that I found in my wallet to slip through the police and search out a bar.

  Grimsby decided I was acceptable because I was writing a book. I was not, therefore, a journalist—nothing, in his view, could be more contemptible. I was an author (Grimsby’s mother was a schoolteacher, and such distinctions were important). And that was how I would be introduced throughout the rest of the evening: an author; not a journalist. He always added the important qualifier.

  I can’t say that there was anything special about Grimsby—no trait or feature that I hadn’t already seen countless times in countless others—except that, no matter how many times I met the specimen, I was always a surprised to see what one of them would do next. It was predictable, but, in its very uninhibited excess, it was more than I could ever get used to. I was never able to become entirely accustomed to the lad character in its expressive mode.

  Grimsby entered that mode the moment we got into the taxi. The driver, a woman, was reluctant to accept the fare and before setting out she turned to Grimsby and, in English, established the rules that would govern our journey if we were to reach our destination: there would be no smoking, no open windows, no bad behaviour. My companion promptly lit a cigarette, opened the window and let fly a string of abuse—‘cow’, ‘cunt’, ‘Nazi whore’—that stopped only when the taxi finally stopped and we were ordered out.

  The exchange established a pattern for the rest of the evening. We didn’t stay long at the bar we found—a working man’s place filled with what I judged to be a pretty rough crowd—because Grimsby had taken to chanting ‘Heil Hitler’. I ushered him out. There were similar encounters later, including one in a restaurant with a Dutch supporter in his mid-fifties who was eating dinner with his three sons. As he was the only Dutch supporter there, Grimsby took it upon himself to walk across the room, interrupt the family’s meal, lean over and call the father a wanker, while jerking his hand up and down in his face, as though masturbating into it. He made a fizzy foaming sound with his mouth. Then he called the father a fuckface; a fucking fuckface wanker; and finally a Dutch shitbag cunt of a coward.

  Grimsby believed that he needed to prove his cultural superiority to every foreigner he met; I had forgotten just how violent the violent nationalism of the English football supporter could be, and being in Germany had made him vigorously nationalistic. There was also the war: the one ‘we’ won. Although he was only twenty years old—Grimsby worked as a lorry driver, making deliveries for a local brewery—his talk was almost exclusively about World War Two: it provided him with the images and the history to attach his nationalism to. He wanted to fight the war all over again. The viciousness of the Germans, the spinelessness of the Dutch, the bulldog bravery of the English: these were tenets of a fundamental belief, and Grimsby would be an unhappy man if he couldn’t go into a battle of some kind to illustrate that they were more—that they were in fact incontestable verities of national character.

  We ended up at a bar called the Orangenbaum, which, if it wasn’t Dutch to begin with, was certainly Dutch now. This was the thing that Grimsby had been looking for, and he flew into the crowd, pushing and shoving, ready to punch the first person who responded with even a modicum of aggression. I stayed outside. The bar was crowded but I could, see everything through the open doors. Behind me were the German police. They had been following Grimsby for some time. But it seemed that nothing, yet again, was going to happen. The Dutch supporters were large, big-boned meaty sorts of fellows who seemed capable of absorbing anything that was hurled at them—including Grimsby who, although he sallied into them at full speed, was merely embraced and offered a beer. Grimsby did not want to drink the beer of the enemy.

  Finally, after an interminable amount of friendliness, someone responded aggressively to one of Grimsby’s provocations and, with the nation’s reputation at stake, fists were momentarily flying. Actually I was exhausted by that late hour, and so bored and indifferent that I am not certain that anyone did respond; it might have been a lamp-post. It was possible that Grimsby had reached the point where he had started punching a small functional article of urban architecture. Grimsby was then arrested.

  For reasons that remain a mystery to me, I argued with the police and—against the interests of Germany, Britain and European harmony—dissuaded them from carting Grimsby off to jail, provided that I would take him in my care and return him to where he was staying.

  He was staying, as such, at the railway station. I left him there at about three in the morning. He found an empty bench, but before settling in he started shouting ‘England’ at the top of his voice. This woke up some of the supporters sleeping on the ground nearby, who cursed him, but Grimsby persisted: he repeated the name of his country, over and over again. His arms had dropped to his side and his torso was tilted slightly forward. He was in a peculiar nationalist stupor—no longer noticing me or, I suspect, much of anything else—and so I slipped off and set out for my hotel. The sound of ‘England’ echoed off the buildings. I imagined returning in the morning and finding Grimsby still there, his voice grown hoarse, croaking noiselessly. As I walked on, his chant grew quieter until it disappeared behind the shouting of other England supporters in other parts of the city.

  It was a long walk to my hotel, and over the course of it I watched the gaggles of English supporters, weaving drunkenly through the streets, chanting their crude phrase of nationalistic belligerence, until, one by one, they all started to drop away. At one point, I paused and followed a group as it struggled across a square. The square was a large one, and I didn’t think that the group was going to make it. Everyone was clinging to consciousness by the thinnest of threads. They were singing ‘Rule Britannia’, holding on to each other’s shoulders, now mainly for support, in what must have started out as a conga-style singalong. And then one supporter fell off. He collapsed, crumpled and didn’t move. Two more followed. Finally only three supporters remained and, seeing that they were alone, they stretched out on the ground and went to sleep.

  The city was at last growing quiet. Everywhere you could see the bodies of English supporters. In the strange, shadowy, lamp-lit light, they looked like sacks of rubbish, strewn randomly across the pavements, under bus shelters, heaved atop park benches and under the bushes of the city’s squares.

  Grimsby gave me his phone number and his address, but I never contacted him. I was not persuaded that, by spending more time in his company, I would discover hidden depths in his character. I did not think that there would be any surprises. In Grimsby, what I saw was all there was.

  DJ, I thought, was different, and I made a point of staying in touch. He had made his debut as a photographer—two of his pictures appeared in a prominent American weekly magazine. In July he asked if I wanted to join him and his friends for a trip to the boating regatta at Henley-on-Thames. He had hired a Daimler and a driver and would bring along ice buckets filled with bottles of champagne. The idea was that DJ and members of the Inter-City Firm would mingle among the home counties crowd.

  At the last minute, however, there was a problem: DJ had to fly to Greece. There were business difficulties, and no time to waste. He needed to get a flight that evening, and we were able to meet for a drink as he made his way to the airport. DJ could spare thirty minutes. The trouble seemed to involve some friends, fellow supporters of West Ham, who needed help.

  The next time I heard from DJ it was through his father. It was the first time we had spoken and he wanted me to explain why his son, who, the father believed, was involved professionally in my own work in some way, had just been arrested in Greece on charges of passing counterfeit money.

  I couldn’t explain. I knew that there was a lot of counterfeit money about. I had heard people mention an operation in Manchester that printed American dollars: the bills were sold on to a sm
all network of ‘friends’ (almost exclusively football supporters) who then went abroad—often to remote outposts unused to tourists—to exchange the counterfeit money for real money. I even saw some of the currency once—the ‘moody money’. It was a fifty-dollar bill that, to me, looked like any other fifty-dollar bill. I would happily have accepted it. It was then put against a real American fifty-dollar bill, which was alike in every respect, except size: the counterfeit note was marginally larger than the real one.

  I wasn’t in a position to know what had happened in DJ’s case, except that I understood that the charges were serious. Two others were in jail with him: Martin Roche and Andrew Cross, both West Ham supporters. Andrew Cross had been the first one arrested: the night before there had been a dispute between him and Martin Roche, and Cross was beaten up; the next day, he was caught exchanging counterfeit fifty-dollar bills and led the authorities to Martin Roche’s hotel room. It was where DJ was staying. Outside, on the ground below the balcony of their room, a wallet was found; it was full of moody money. In the hotel’s safe, there was another wallet; it held ten thousand pounds worth of Greek drachmas. There were also two passports; one was DJ’s.

  I got my first letter at the end of July. It was articulate and careful and remarkably cheerful; in a surprising way, prison life suited DJ—a closed society with a number of systems in place that a crafty operator could learn to master. He had set himself up as the resident prison cook, doing deals for dishes, and had established an effective but complicated route to the local supermarket. He was still in import-export.