Two Tribes_Liverpool, Everton and a City on the Brink

by Tony Evans

  When the Scotland Roaders went to the match – either Liverpool or Everton – people from other areas began to copy the fashions.

  It became known as ‘Scally’. The older generation liked to call young upstarts ‘scallywags’. It was a term of disdain uttered with contempt by the adults but it was soon appropriated by the new generation of young fans. It became the buzzword of the era on Merseyside. Looking ‘Scal’ was very desirable.

  It was still driven by theft from the Loadies. In the summer of 1977, brown Fred Perry polo shirts fell off the back of a lorry. Their appearance had nothing to do with a Mod revival that was beginning to develop in the south, though the Scally style did have a similar element of dandyism.

  That showed increasingly in the haircuts. The wedge – with its pageboy-style mushroom of hair on top, short sides and bountiful quiff – was a common sight across the city. It gave the youngsters a deceptive, almost feminine look. At away grounds, the locals stared on with mocking disbelief. It looked like these young Scousers were easy victims. The reality came as a shock to the old-school hooligans.

  The fashion might have withered at this point, with punk in the ascendant and the mod revival on the horizon, if it hadn’t been for Liverpool’s football success.

  In 1977, Bob Paisley’s team won the club’s first European Cup in Rome. It was a magnificent, trouble-free night and the young boys who made the trip to Italy enjoyed the experience so much that they were keen to do it again. When the team started their defence of the trophy for the new season, scores of young men were determined to follow their path across the Continent.

  The big problem was money. How could the youth of a city where unemployment was rampant and school-leavers had little chance of work afford the trip? The more brazen bunked the trains and ferries to Europe. Most headed to a company called Transalpino, who offered cheap European travel for those under 26. The company expected most of their customers to be students, so the offices were in Myrtle Parade, near the university. They suddenly experienced an upsurge of business from young Liverpool fans who were looking for a different sort of education.

  Persil vouchers and Transalpino would only get you so far, though. Trips abroad needed spending money, which many of the youthful tourists did not have. The answer was simple. The expeditions needed to be self-financing.

  Once on the Continent, some of the travellers shoplifted. The wide and colourful range of adidas training shoes had obvious resale value. There were no Fred Perry tennis shirts but Lacoste polos were similar enough. When the crocodile-logoed shirts got back to Liverpool, they sold rapidly.

  Later, talented forgers would take Transalpino inter-rail tickets and change them from the cheapest priced category to the more expensive versions, allowing longer and wider travel without the danger of being thrown off the train. The destinations – and the clothes these boys brought back – became ever more exotic. Bold, vibrant colours were in demand.

  The movement could not stay underground for long. Robert Wade Smith, an enterprising controller of adidas’s concessions in Top Man stores in the UK, spotted that a revolution was under way. In 1979, he watched the sales of the Stan Smith tennis shoe go from six pairs a week to more than 20. Liverpool’s Top Man sold more than twenty thousand ST2 kagoules between 1979 and 1981. The city loved the adidas brand and Wade Smith grabbed his opportunity.

  The shoe company believed it was a short-term fad and would pass quickly but Wade Smith talked his bosses into importing 500 pairs of the Wimbledon tennis shoe. These were top-of-the-range footwear and priced accordingly at £29.99 (more than £130 in today’s terms), a third more expensive than the Stan Smith series. They flew off the racks.

  Wade Smith upped the ante. The new trend demanded rarer and more exclusive trainers. Adidas had imported 500 pairs of the gold-striped Forest Hills shoe. Their prohibitive price tag, £39.99, meant they sat in a warehouse for a year. Once Wade Smith got his hands on them, they sold out in three months. The 21-year-old realized it was time to open his own business.

  He rented a store on Slater Street in Liverpool city centre but found that many of his potential customers were wearing more exotic training shoes than were on offer in the shop. When he asked where they had acquired their footwear, they invariably said Brussels. Wade Smith shut the store and set off for the Belgian capital.

  It was an unsuccessful trip. He was unable to find the sort of styles he was looking for. The turning point came at Ostend, where the putative retail king bumped into a group of Scallies with their Head bags brimming with stolen goods. After a bargaining session, Wade Smith bought 25 pairs of shoes, mainly the popular and colourful Trimm Trab. He also learnt where the best place to find rare specimens was actually located.

  Back in Liverpool he sold 23 of the 25 pairs in a single morning, hired a van, collected a wad of Deutsche Marks and headed for Aachen. Once there, he bought 475 pairs of shoes from the main adidas dealer in the German city. They sold like wildfire and the trip to West Germany became a regular run. Trimm Trabs became so popular that ‘trab’ is still used as a generic term for any training shoe around Merseyside.

  Sportswear had already become streetwear but retailers like Wade Smith pushed the fashions further. Fila, Ellesse and Kappa clothing became popular, often in vivid primary colours. Match-going youths were the spearhead of the fashion. It took quite a while for the public to associate the style with hooliganism.

  At away games, legions of young Scals would be subjected to abuse from the denim-wearing seventies Neanderthals that still dominated football crowds. Even the ICF held on to their post-skinhead flying jackets too long. Scousers were setting the agenda on the terraces and on the streets. The London-based media would not discover the new movement until well into 1983, when Kevin Sampson wrote about the groundswell of style for The Face.

  Punk, for all its sound and fury, has become an historical sideshow. The anonymous thief who forced the lock on a truck outside Arden House in 1976 was opening the door on a youth culture that still defines streetwear in Britain and across the world.

  7

  No vision

  The prurient obsession with football violence was huge across the country. Interest in the actual game was at an all-time low. No wonder. The two months before Heysel were particularly gruesome. In March, on a fraught night at Kenilworth Road, Millwall fans invaded the pitch during an FA Cup tie against Luton Town and chased away the police. The game turned into a full-scale riot.

  A month later, at Goodison Park in the semi-final of the FA Cup, Liverpool and Manchester United supporters fought in every section of the stadium. Magnesium flares were fired at close range into opposition crowds, golf balls hammered through with six-inch nails were hurled across divides and Stanley knives were the weapons of choice on an afternoon where it was clear this was not just hooligan gangs clashing. Large sections of supporters on both sides were involved in the violence. All bets were off and no one was safe. There were no ‘civilians’. Those who were there still speak of the day with awe. The ferocity of the fighting in and around Goodison was shocking. It was surprising that there were no fatalities.

  Deaths came on the final day of the season. Leeds United and Birmingham City fans fought at St Andrew’s and a wall collapsed amid the madness. Ian Hambridge, a 15-year-old, was killed. It was a horrible precursor of what was to come at Heysel. The death in Birmingham was overshadowed by events in Bradford, though, even if the shocking news from Yorkshire had nothing to do with hooliganism.

  Bradford City were enjoying the end of a successful season when they hosted Lincoln City at Valley Parade. The home team and fans celebrated receiving the third division trophy before the game and the match was meandering towards half-time when the first wisps of flame were spotted in the main stand. Four minutes later, the entire structure was ablaze. Supporters ran for their lives. Those who headed for the pitch made the right choice; those who went back into the stands towards the exits were doomed. The gates were locked.

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p; Fifty-four Bradford fans were killed and two Lincoln supporters died, bringing the death toll to 56. More than two hundred and fifty people were injured in a stand that had already been condemned and was due to be demolished. It looked like football had hit its lowest point. That notion would last a mere 18 days until Heysel.

  How could the sport rebound from this series of events? Attendances had been declining rapidly for a decade. The Thatcherite middle classes saw the game as beneath them and new, glamorous, family-friendly activities like American football were attempting to make inroads into Britain’s sporting culture. There were plans in place to play gridiron at Wembley in 1986 and a sell-out and widespread TV coverage was guaranteed.

  And here, at the lowest point in its history, football decided to pick a fight with television. The clubs blamed the decline at the turnstiles on the cameras. Instead of addressing the dangerous, decrepit, uncomfortable stadiums and countering the threat of hooliganism, those running the sport fell back on their traditional prejudices.

  There had been a two-year experiment with live league matches shown on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons and it was felt that screening entire games encouraged the public to watch from the sofa instead of the terraces. Football League chairmen wanted to cut back on 90-minute programming and increase the highlights packages. The broadcasters did not agree.

  The offer on the table from the BBC and ITV was £19 million over four seasons to show 14 league games and two League Cup semi-finals as well as recorded highlights. The clubs offered ten live games. ‘Recorded football is a dead duck as far as the viewer is concerned,’ John Bromley, the TV negotiator, said. Graham Kelly, the secretary of the Football League, articulated the clubs’ position. ‘The more live games there are the less likely people are to go through the turnstiles of their local club,’ he said. The new season would start with a total TV blackout.

  There were plenty of people who were happy to see the game kept off the screen. ‘It is television which has largely fanned the fire of self-indulgence, a self-indulgence epitomized by players who can spend £800 on a fashionable pair of leather trousers,’ David Miller wrote in The Times as the row began to develop.

  The game was committing suicide and even those who were supposed to be its biggest advocates were intent on helping it end its own existence. Football journalists, chairmen and the game’s administrators were all complicit.

  Even the players felt conflicted. They loved their jobs but some sections of ‘polite society’ regarded the profession with the same scorn as they did the fans on the terraces. ‘It was a time when it wasn’t cool to say you were a footballer,’ Mark Bright said. The striker was in his early twenties and playing for Leicester City in 1985. People looked askance when he admitted his profession. ‘You didn’t say you were a footballer when you went on a night out,’ he said. ‘You could get away with it because there was no wall-to-wall TV and people didn’t recognize you. You could say you were an accountant and get away with it. Being a footballer put a lot of people off.’

  It was a problem fewer players were experiencing. In the weeks after Heysel, teams were cutting staff loose in anticipation of declining revenues. The Professional Footballers’ Association, the players’ union, said that 250 of its members were without a club. It was the highest number of unemployed footballers since the Second World War. The dole queues were getting bigger across Britain and football, arguably the biggest expression of working-class culture, was not immune to Thatcherism.

  The Sunday Times’ verdict after the Bradford fire seemed to be the prevailing view. Football was ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people, who deter decent folk from turning up’.

  The attendances in the opening weeks of the season seemed to endorse this view. The game was leaking its lifeblood: supporters.

  What was it like to be a young football fan in the summer of 1985? In Liverpool, it was difficult.

  At 24, I was a veteran match-goer, a good example of one of the ‘slum people’. In the tenements between Scotland Road and Vauxhall Road, playing and watching football was the main pastime for most young men. It was not an affectation. Everyone you knew went to the match. No one chose it. It was something everyone did.

  When Liverpool and Everton reached cup finals, most families decorated their flats with red or blue. Concrete street bollards were painted to look like fans wearing hats and scarves. In 1965, when Liverpool reached Wembley, the bollards in Burlington Street looked like a row of Kopites; a year later when Everton reached the cup final they had changed their allegiance, the fresh blue paint covering the faded colour of the previous year.

  For people my age, hooliganism was part of the normal backdrop to the game. A sense of danger heightened the enjoyment of away travel. Trouble was not quite as pervasive as the hysterical headlines suggested. In more than a decade of following Liverpool around England and Europe, I’d experienced a handful of serious incidents. There was plenty of posturing, charges and counter-charges across streets, but very few blows were thrown or landed – even in scenes where there appeared to be a full-on riot in progress. Generally, you could avoid trouble unless you were determined to find it.

  Conflict ratcheted up in 1984. Confrontation was everywhere. The entire philosophy of the government was to crush the opposition. It was easy to dismiss the link between social disorder and poverty but Britain had been growing more spiteful as the divide between north and south and rich and poor grew wider.

  On Merseyside, we felt close to the bottom of the pile.

  No one knew at this stage that the British government had discussed the ‘managed decline’ of the city at Cabinet level but you did not need access to the corridors of power to feel the resentment towards Scousers. It even permeated pop culture. The Bangles, an American group, had a minor hit with a record called ‘Going Down To Liverpool’. The song had been written by a band from Cambridgeshire, Katrina and the Waves. Its lyrics could have been conceived anywhere in the affluent south of England. The simplistic and crude words talked about going to the city ‘with a UB40 in your hand … to do nothing’. The UB40 was the form used when signing on to receive a social security payment. The feckless, workshy image of Scousers was deeply ingrained in the popular imagination. In December 1985, the BBC started filming a sitcom set in the Dingle, an area on the banks of the Mersey. The basic premise of Bread concerned a Catholic family with no visible means of support and a loose attitude towards the law. They lived hand to mouth but managed to accrue cars and even cordless phones despite being on the dole. It became massively popular – at one point attracting 26 million viewers. Its writer, Carla Lane, rejected accusations that it stereotyped Scousers, because she was from the city. It helped present an image much at odds with reality. Being poor was no fun.

  The Conservative Party’s attitude to unemployment was simple. Norman Tebbit, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, thought the answer was easy. ‘I grew up in the thirties with an unemployed father,’ he said. ‘He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work. He kept looking until he found it.’ It is a trait of the very worst politicians that they cannot imagine an experience other than their own and then apply their principles to other people. Middlesex, where Tebbit grew up, is in close proximity to London. The job market in the capital and the Home Counties has never plumbed the depths that Merseyside did in the 1980s.

  Plenty of people ‘got on their bikes’ and left Liverpool looking for employment. That brought Scousers into contact with wider English society. Yet the biggest interaction most young residents of the city had with other places was through football. From late summer to spring, thousands travelled up and down the country to watch Liverpool and Everton. A faintly hostile, suspicious view of Scousers was common.

  Trying to spend a £20 note was an adventure. Publicans would not take them from people like me because of a rumoured spate of forgeries. In shops, servers who greeted customers with a smile would clam up and become surly wh
en they heard the Liverpool accent. Away fans from all regions were susceptible to this sort of treatment but a special contempt seemed to be reserved for Scousers.

  After Heysel, it got worse. Those of us who were there in Brussels had a difficult cocktail of emotions. There were many Liverpool supporters who went to Belgium and behaved in a civilized and normal manner. Many of the younger, hard-core travelling support had overstepped the mark.

  David Geey, a barrister who had been at the club’s previous European Cup finals, was having lunch in the Grand-Place in the Belgian capital. ‘You could see things turning ugly early in the afternoon,’ he said. ‘There was a restaurant with a glass frontage and Liverpool fans were urinating on to it with people sitting inside eating. It was horrible.’ Geey, who was in the stands and had a clear view of the collapsing wall at the stadium, left Heysel before the match kicked off after realizing the gravity of the disaster.

  Others did not have such a clear view. It was obvious that something very ugly had happened but when the match kicked off, many of us on the terraces behind the goal assumed that things were not too bad. Our rationale was that the game would not have been allowed to go ahead if there had been fatalities.

  When Michel Platini and his Juventus teammates pranced around the running track with the trophy, pursued by hundreds of celebrating fans – many of whom had a clear view of the deadly events at our end – it confirmed the impression that the situation was not as awful as originally suspected. We’d all drunk too much and behaved like idiots, most of us thought, but no real harm was done. It was not until 6 a.m., on the boat heading back to Dover, that the gravity of what had happened became clear when BBC news reported the death toll. It came as a shock for most people on the ferry.