Hillsborough Untold: Aftermath of a disaster

by Norman Bettison

  The work of the task group reflected the corporate acceptance of Lord Justice Taylor’s criticisms and recommendations. I had seen those criticisms crystallise during the time spent observing the public inquiry. From the regular briefings provided to the Chief Constable, he was able to produce a draft press release in advance of the publication of Lord Justice Taylor’s interim report. It did not alter significantly in the terms of the statement he issued immediately after the 4 August 1989 publication. In that statement, Mr Wright said that he wished

  to make it clear to all concerned … that I accept the findings and the conclusions of the public inquiry in so far as they relate to South Yorkshire Police … I once again extend my heartfelt regret to those who have lost loved ones or suffered injury.

  Lord Justice Taylor and all concerned may be assured that the South Yorkshire Police will pursue every action to ensure that such an event could not occur again …

  In my report to the Police Authority in the immediate aftermath of the disaster I accepted full responsibility for police action in connection with this event. In pursuance of this responsibility, and in the light of Lord Justice Taylor’s findings, I have written to my Chairman and offered my resignation … My office is now at their disposal.

  The popular narrative in the twenty-first century implies that South Yorkshire Police never accepted any responsibility in the aftermath of Hillsborough. Mr Wright’s acceptance of responsibility was immediate and clear. It was accompanied by his ‘heartfelt regret’ offered to the bereaved and the injured. He suspended Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield that same afternoon pending a criminal investigation by an independent police force. Acceptance of responsibility was reinforced later by the settlement of all civil liability claims regardless of whether any of the other parties blamed by Taylor were prepared to step forward to contribute to those claims.

  The argument is already advanced that it would have been better if Mr Wright had been allowed to resign. It might have registered, and resonated, as a tangible and appropriate response to Lord Justice Taylor’s damning indictment of South Yorkshire Police.

  The Taylor Inquiry had influenced my own understanding and knowledge about the disaster in ways that would forever colour my thoughts and judgements about the event. The various phases of my tasking, from being seconded as a member of the Wain team right through to my last act as secretary of the Taylor Implementation Group, had encompassed only six months. Six intensive months perhaps, but I could now move on from this inquiry and the disaster. Whilst I would be occasionally asked to respond to ad hoc requests for information from lawyers representing the force in subsequent proceedings, my immediate work was done.

  The bereaved and the injured had also learned more through the Taylor Inquiry, though it did not for them represent a conclusion. Their toil and struggle was only just beginning. Theirs would be a long and arduous journey lasting twenty-seven more years. Whilst all the other actors on the stage at the Taylor Inquiry would move on and play many different roles in life, the families would be obliged to carry for many years the burden of grief and injustice…

  CHAPTER 5

  AN ENDURING HURT

  15 April 1989 – present day

  Hillsborough claimed ninety-six lives, and hundreds were injured. Thousands more were directly or indirectly affected by the tragedy. But tens of thousands share the pain of the victims and their families.

  The capacity crowds that have attended the memorial service at Anfield in the middle of April each year are a demonstration of that breadth and depth of unity. There are dedicated journalists and film makers who have kept the memory of the ninety-six alive for a quarter of a century. Some campaigning politicians, traditionally fickle in their allegiance, have remained steadfast to the cause of the bereaved families. The enduring flame motif will be for ever emblazoned on the team shirt worn by every future Liverpool player as a tribute to the terrible loss.

  Some recent events emphasise the phenomenon of social bonding that follows in the wake of disaster. The spontaneous ‘Nous sommes Charlie’ manifesto, for example, that followed the bombing, in January 2015, of the offices at Charlie Hebdo – the French satirical magazine. There was also the global demonstration of fraternity and solidarity that coalesced around Paris in the wake of the simultaneous terrorist outrages in November 2015, which left 130 dead and many hundreds injured. These are more than mawkish sentiments in an instantly connected world of social media. They seem like authentic claims of mutual hurt.

  Many of these mass social movements typically demand ‘justice’. Though there isn’t always clarity or agreement about what ‘justice’ might look like if it were to be achieved.

  There are two broad responses to any claim for justice. First of all, retribution, or punishment of individuals who are found to have done wrong. Secondly, reparation to those who have been wronged or hurt. We sometimes underestimate the power and importance of reparative justice because of a 21st-century obsession with blame.

  In the context of Hillsborough, it was undoubtedly just to respond to twenty years of hurt, as Parliament did in 2009, by setting up a process to review and share everything that could be known about the disaster and its aftermath. It was also just to set aside the verdicts in what had clearly been an inadequate and hurried Coroner’s Inquest held in 1990. This was replaced with an altogether different inquisitorial process, which has sat for more than two years and has succeeded in winning and maintaining the trust and confidence of all. The fact that the jury have reached a different majority verdict on the causes of death is a vindication of that decision. These actions have begun to repair a terrible wrong.

  Now the claim for ‘justice’ is once again attached to calls for a retrial of David Duckenfield on a charge of manslaughter. It should be noted that the legal definition of ‘unlawful killing’, arising as a verdict of a Coroner’s Court, does not amount to the requisite legal burden of proof sufficient to convict an individual for homicide. No verdict of the Coroner’s Court can be framed in such a way as to appear to determine the question of criminal liability on the part of any named person.

  That is, though, to temporarily split hairs of jurisprudence, because it is obvious why, at an emotional level, any call for ‘Justice for the 96’ might encompass an ambition to see the retrial of an individual whose actions and omissions were so closely connected with the disaster. Wide spread anger remains around the fact that no person appears to have been punished for the untimely deaths of ninety-six people.

  Retribution, according to the philosopher John Stuart Mill, has three moral justifications: to ensure the deterrence of others; to achieve the rehabilitation and changed behaviour of the offender; and to secure the safety of the majority. These limited moral grounds are the reason why retributive justice must always rest upon sober judicial decisions, based on all the evidence that is currently known, rather than be driven by popular demand or a political imperative.

  Whilst the issue of retribution is a live issue, particularly around David Duckenfield, it may be that further reparations remain necessary for justice to finally prevail in respect of Hillsborough.

  ‘Justice for the 96’ is a flag that has bound people to a common cause, and the campaign arose because of what happened to ninety-six innocent people who lost their lives at Hillsborough. There may, however, be some issues more directly connected to the bereaved that have sustained the campaign. It might be that what happened to the families and friends of the ninety-six at Sheffield, and in the aftermath of the disaster, is a source of hurt and anger in addition to that arising from the tragic loss of a loved one. As well as failing in the duty of care to ninety-six victims, South Yorkshire Police and many other institutions may have also failed in their duty of care to the bereaved.

  If that is the case, then the law courts might not be the most appropriate venue at which to seek redress. The redress that is owed to the bereaved, as opposed to the deceased, must begin with an acknowledgement that they were let
down by the procedures that followed their loss and by those who devised and managed the procedures. Acknowledgement of injury is the necessary first step on any journey towards reparation and reconciliation.

  At a very fundamental level, I think it is significant that Liverpool supporters travelled away from home on 15 April 1989. The procedures that immediately followed the disaster were therefore alien and de-humanising to everyone caught up in them.

  I have often wondered why, in the context of the Bradford City fire in 1985, there have been no similar and persistent calls for ‘Justice for the 56’, the number who perished at the Valley Parade football stadium. There appears, at the very least, to have been negligence and an irresponsible disregard for the risks in relation to the potential for fire in a wooden stand that was known to be packed underneath with combustible litter. There existed a report to the club safety committee which warned that decayed boarding, and the felt which covered the roof of the stand, created an unacceptable fire safety hazard. The report went unheeded.

  There were no fire extinguishers in that part of the ground. There should have been but they were removed to prevent hooligans having access to them. The water pressure was reported to be insufficient to deal with the resultant fire because the water board reduced the pressure at weekends.

  When the fire took hold there was, apparently, misdirection of some fans who perished beside exit gates that were locked and unmanned. They shouldn’t have been. It was reported that there were untrained stewards on duty as young as twelve and as old as seventy-five.

  There seems to have been a sub-optimal response from the emergency services, too. There were ad hoc and extraordinary mortuary arrangements which were imperfect.

  There was a public inquiry which took evidence for a matter of days. The judge in charge of the inquiry was asked to also make recommendations about dealing with hooliganism at football stadia as well as fire risks. As at Hillsborough, there was no hooliganism on the day of the Bradford disaster. But it was everyone’s obsession in the 1980s.

  There was an inquest which lasted only a few weeks and returned a verdict recommended by the Coroner. ‘Death by misadventure’, not ‘unlawful killing’.

  There was mourning and there are annual memorials held. But there was no outrage and no collective sense of injustice. Although it should be acknowledged that there is a recent campaign launched by Martin Fletcher, who survived the Bradford fire disaster whilst his father, brother, uncle and grandfather all perished. He is now seeking a public inquiry along the lines of that undertaken by the Hillsborough Panel, but his campaign does not appear to be gaining significant traction and support.

  At a simplistic and humanistic level, Valley Parade, Bradford was ‘home’ to the local fans. Fifty-four of the fifty-six people who died that afternoon were regular City fans. Most were sitting in familiar seats in a familiar stand. Whilst they may have been unaware of, or inured to, the risks present in that football stadium, they felt at home in the fabric of Valley Parade.

  Bradford folk and Bradford cops were caught up in the conflagration together. Whilst no officer died, several were badly injured that day. The footage of a dazed officer staggering out of the burning stand with the back of his jacket ablaze is just one of the striking television images from that dreadful event.

  The injured and dying from Valley Parade were taken to familiar Bradford hospitals. The mortuary was in Bradford. The inquest was held in Bradford under the direction of a Bradford coroner. The police investigation was conducted by Bradford Detectives. In Bradford, the disaster was terrible and shocking but it was a disaster that unfolded and was addressed within the community.

  In stark contrast, the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield created, at almost every turn, a feeling of alienation amongst the bereaved. At least 5,000 Liverpool supporters endured a frightening and shocking crush outside an unfamiliar stadium. That will be, for those thousands, the lens through which the disaster is always seen.

  They witnessed unfamiliar police officers failing to sort out the problem as Merseyside cops always seemed to be able to do at Anfield. Cops, too, who had a barely hidden prejudice. Not against Liverpool football fans, as is so often alleged, but against out-of-town football fans in general. Visiting football fans, in the context of 1980s policing, were often associated with trouble. Whilst they were generally happy to take the overtime payment that rewarded football duty, most officers hated close-quarter deployment amongst the fans, particularly at the away end of the ground, where they regularly emerged with spittle-covered coats and worse. I’ve worked in three different police forces and there was nothing unique or endemically worse in the underlying prejudice felt by South Yorkshire officers towards visiting football fans. But just because an attitude might be widely held, that does not excuse it.

  As the disaster unfolded, those present saw police officers standing, helplessly, at the unyielding fence whilst people were suffering and dying a few feet away. They saw the cops form a cordon on the half-way line rather than assisting the rescue effort. They witnessed fans, their neighbours from Merseyside, working tirelessly to ferry the dead and injured on advertising hoardings fashioned as makeshift stretchers. The occasional brave and instinctive response from junior officers was overshadowed by the general impression of impotence.

  In the chaos that ensued at Hillsborough immediately following the disaster, Liverpool fans lost their friends. For the lucky ones, it was only a temporary loss. It meant, for each of these thousands of individuals, a frantic search to locate their loved ones. Many of the police officers they met were unhelpful. Not intentionally so. They knew little more than the fans about what had happened to the injured and the dead. Most of the officers had been bussed in from outer divisions to bolster the police numbers at what was expected to be a large public order event. They didn’t have radios and didn’t have the least clue about what was going on. Many who had seen anything of the tragic consequences of the crush were in a state of shock themselves.

  A lot of the bereaved and the separated found their way, perhaps via the local police station, to the Hillsborough Boys’ Club. This was little more than a space enclosed from the elements and, whilst there were well-intentioned volunteers on hand, the abandoned were fed a diet of curled-up sandwiches but starved of information. At Hammerton Road Police Station next door, the police on duty were simply filling out forms and they appeared to be treating their loved ones as if they were temporarily lost. Whereas the person making the report knew their loved one wasn’t lost. All of the ‘missing’ had been at Hillsborough Stadium, less than a mile away, as recently as three o’clock that afternoon. All they wanted to know was whether they were OK. It was a reasonable request. We couldn’t tell them, so the officers continued filling out their forms.

  Not everyone who found their way to unfamiliar hospitals in an unfamiliar town was allowed to see their loved one even if there was reason to believe they were there. Those who arrived at a hospital late in the evening were told that all the deceased had been returned to the Hillsborough gymnasium on the order of the Coroner and that they would need to see the police, now acting on the Coroner’s instructions, to confirm whether that number included the one they really cared about. A crazy and inhuman game of pass the parcel.

  Only when the Coroner and the police were organised and ready did the music stop. And then what happened? A number of double-decker buses, commandeered from the local bus garage, were loaded up at the Boys’ Club and hospitals. The passengers, by now broken and numbed by the isolation, the lack of information and the bureaucracy, were driven silently through strange streets to arrive outside the Sheffield Wednesday gymnasium where they were parked. The people as well as the buses.

  One by painstaking one, the bereaved were invited from the bus to be tortured at the Polaroid wall. All the known deceased, photographed in their body bag, were on that wall. Each next of kin was invited to scrutinise more than eighty post-mortem images. It must have seemed, to someone, an effic
ient way of linking bodies to next of kin, but think about it for more than one second; put yourself in the shoes of these families who may never have seen a single dead person in their entire lives. Now, in a state of traumatic paralysis, they were being asked to look at pictures of scores. They were families who had been waiting hours to perform this dreadful task and families who were praying not to find any hint of recognition amongst this sea of Polaroid images. It is unsurprising that the majority of identifiers had to be encouraged to look again when declaring their dearest to be absent from the board.

  Some of the deceased had identifying documents – a bus pass or a working men’s club card or a bankcard. How much more humane might it have been to have shown just one photograph in those cases where there was corroborating evidence that pointed towards identity?

  Imagine sitting on that bus until nearly dawn hearing the accounts of those who had been to hell and back in the nearby gymnasium. I would have wanted to storm the door and tear open the zip of each body bag until I knew the answer that I most feared to learn. Yet, unfamiliar police officers in this unfamiliar town and in the most horrific of circumstances were inviting families to sit on a bus and wait.

  Coronial procedures always have professional and dispassionate requirements which were, in the 1980s, even stricter and less humane than they are today. It is easy to understand how lots of individual decisions were taken to arrive at this detached and alienating process.

  Affording the slightest degree of compassion and empathy towards those caught up in these bureaucratic processes, however, one can see that it was so obviously wrong. It magnified their suffering and it created within hours of the disaster a foundation for mistrust and disaffection. Each link may have been forged with good intentions but, in hindsight, the finished whole created an inhuman chain.