by Tony Evans
This sort of straightforward directness was often used as evidence of Thatcher’s clarity of thought. In reality it merely illustrated the so-called Iron Lady’s instinct to distil complex problems down to simple black-and-white scenarios. In this limited world view, football in general and Liverpool in particular were part of her ‘enemy within’.
Whatever the Prime Minister believed, it was becoming clear that English clubs would not be competing in Europe in the foreseeable future. UEFA followed the FA’s example two days later with an indefinite ban on English clubs and FIFA endorsed the sanctions. The Belgian government also banned all English teams. Common sense was thrown out, too: a team of 13-year-olds from Sheffield planning to participate in a three-day tournament in Zaventem had their invitation withdrawn.
Paranoia and fear were running wild. A bomb was left outside a Marks & Spencer department store in Brussels. The government warned British tourists in Italy to be careful. Europe was in uproar.
Liverpool Football Club reacted to the withdrawal and ban in the only way they could have. ‘I think it’s a very statesmanlike decision,’ John Smith, the chairman, said. Representatives of Everton, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Southampton and Norwich City were less enamoured with the decision. These clubs had qualified for Europe. Along with the Professional Footballers’ Association, they took their challenge to the High Court, arguing that the FA should nominate the five teams for entry to European competition, that UEFA should accept them and that FIFA should lift the English suspension. They lost. There was no other course of action. The president of the Football League, Jack Dunnett, labelled the ban ‘unjust’.
At Goodison, there was resentment but it was not directed towards Liverpool. Everton, the champions, were not allowed to participate in the next season’s European Cup. ‘It’s difficult watching something unfold and easy to blame the wrong people,’ Neville Southall, the goalkeeper, said. ‘Thatcher wanted us out of Europe. She didn’t want working-class people causing problems abroad. There was another agenda going on that we weren’t party to. I’m convinced if she hadn’t stepped in we’d have still been in Europe.’
Football hooliganism had long been labelled ‘the English disease’ by the British media. It was an outrageous simplification. Violence occurred across the Continent. ‘Hooliganism was a problem but it wasn’t just English fans causing trouble,’ Southall said.
‘Everyone always wanted to blame our fans. When trouble happened abroad and the locals were responsible, you’d hardly hear about it. We had all the windows in the coach smashed on a preseason game against Galatasaray in Turkey. There was no mention of that. There were double standards against our supporters. With Britain, it was a one-way street.’
That was true but the record of English clubs and the national side abroad was sullied by repeated examples of violence. British media always focused on the misdemeanours of UK passport holders.
There are too many incidents to detail, but the worst of them made headlines across Europe. Leeds United supporters ripped up the Parc des Princes after their team was beaten by Bayern Munich in the 1975 European Cup final. Manchester United were expelled and then reinstated in the Cup-Winners’ Cup in 1977 after trouble away at Saint-Etienne. England fans were tear-gassed in Turin after fighting interrupted a European Championships game against Belgium in 1980 and a year later there were ugly scenes in Basel during and after a defeat by Switzerland. In 1983, there were more pitched battles in Luxembourg. The national side’s supporters exported their Little Englander attitudes to Europe and simplistic, right-wing politics and jingoism underpinned much of the aggression. Ironically, most of the troublemakers who followed England and caused anarchy abroad were among Thatcher’s most fervent supporters.
The club game continued to have its issues, too. Tottenham, twice, were involved in unpleasant situations. A rivalry with Feyenoord that went back almost a decade erupted in Rotterdam in 1983. The tabloids labelled Spurs ‘the shame of Britain’. A year later a supporter of the north London club was shot dead in Brussels. Football had become a national embarrassment for many Britons.
The Merseyside teams had earned a good reputation in Europe. Liverpool had an unbroken run of 21 successive years in Continental competition that stretched back to the mid 1960s. By the late 1970s, young Scousers were travelling in significant numbers to away games across the Channel. They had little patience with right-wing politics – they tended to be left-leaning – and fighting got in the way of their main interests: shoplifting and drinking.
When Liverpool supporters were involved in trouble, it was mostly on the receiving end. UEFA scheduled the 1984 European Cup final to be played in Rome despite the presence of AS Roma in the competition. When the Italian side duly reached the showpiece game, they were matched against the Merseyside club. Before and after the match, Roma fans stabbed, slashed and brutalized the away supporters on a mass scale. It was barely reported in the British press in comparison with the coverage of riotous behaviour by English fans. The festering resentment towards Italian Ultras played a significant role in the build-up to Heysel.
Everton had fewer expeditions abroad but when they played in Europe things passed off peacefully. Two weeks before Heysel, they faced Rapid Vienna in Rotterdam in the Cup-Winners’ Cup final. In a city that had a reputation as one of the Continent’s hooligan hotbeds, Everton’s 3–1 victory passed off peacefully. The enduring memory for most Blues was a massive football match involving the Dutch police in one of the main squares before the game. ‘We had such a good time when we went away,’ Derek Hatton, deputy leader of Liverpool City Council and an Evertonian, said. ‘That’s why we were appalled at the way we were punished, too.
‘We finally won the league and had a chance at the European Cup and then it was taken away from us. There was some resentment: “That’s the only way those red bastards can stop us.” It was the sort of thing you’d say to your mates, banter almost. It was disappointing to be banned, though.’
The authorities acted quickly, as if they knew the answers to why things had gone wrong in such a deadly fashion in Brussels. In reality they did not even know the right questions to ask. They groped around in the most foolish manner to try to explain what happened.
Smith, the Liverpool chairman, suggested that the National Front were responsible for the violence on the terraces that caused the crush, pointing the finger at Chelsea fans in particular. It was palpable nonsense. The presence of fascist infiltrators would have been noticed by Liverpool’s hard-core support; the right-wingers would have been dealt with long before they reached the stadium. Peter Hooton, the lead singer of The Farm and one of the founders of The End, the seminal football, music and fashion fanzine, was adamant from the start that Scousers were at the forefront of the trouble. ‘As soon as the police released pictures of the charge, it was clear and undeniable,’ Hooton said. ‘It was Liverpool. There was no doubt about it. It was ludicrous to say anything else.’
At the other end of the political scale, Cold War paranoia crept in. David Miller of the Sunday Times was at an International Olympic Committee meeting in East Berlin less than a week after the catastrophe in Belgium. He wrote: ‘The facts are as yet imprecise, but there is grounding for belief that the quite clearly organized assault by alleged Liverpool supporters in the Heysel Stadium had financial and ideological backing from left-wing agencies outside Britain.’
The only thing this analysis had going for it was the recognition that match-going Scousers tended to left-leaning politics.
Crank theories about what had happened were everywhere. In the febrile, furious atmosphere, the madness was not confined to the terraces. The one thing everyone agreed on was that football’s future was bleak.
2
The people’s game
Football was never the ‘beautiful game’. At least not in Britain. It was earthy, its rhythms determined by wind and mud. There, it was the ‘people’s game’, a sport that energized the working class and drew
huge crowds as it grew with stunning rapidity in the late nineteenth century. It quickly developed from a social pastime to a lucrative form of mass entertainment.
The seeds of the game germinated on the playing fields of England’s public schools and then branched off into various codes. Association Football, soccer, became the most popular. The Football Association was formed in 1863 and set out a series of rules for this arm of the sport. The new ruling body was largely controlled by wealthy businessmen and aristocrats.
Something else was happening, though. At the Newton Heath depot of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, the employees formed a team to play other departments for recreational purposes. At St Domingo’s in Liverpool, the muscular Christianity of the Methodist congregation was expressed by church members on the football field. Munitions workers in south-east London got together to create a side. Across Britain, the wealth of the late Victorian age allowed workers and churchgoers more free time than they had ever experienced before. They embraced the chance to play sports, especially football. Their co-workers and co-worshippers enjoyed watching their more athletic friends and colleagues compete against other teams. Soon, people from around the district started to take an interest. Newton Heath would become Manchester United, St Domingo’s developed into Everton and the group of Woolwich ammunition makers created Arsenal. Similar teams were formed in canteens and churches across the nation. Flat-capped hordes flocked to watch matches as the leagues grew and rivalries blossomed.
Rugby union, another code, had a more exulted social status. Like cricket, it was perceived to be a ‘gentleman’s’ sport. Football grew bigger though, tapping into local pride and a mass market. Its audiences were rowdier and poorer. By the early years of the twentieth century, a snobbery was developing. Football was the game of the great unwashed. By 1985, it was considered to be a downmarket and dangerous activity. It was the sporting equivalent of ‘slumming it’. Hooliganism was rife and, in the highest echelons of power in Whitehall, it was judged to be a magnet for British society’s most disruptive elements. Heysel was the final proof. It confirmed two Establishment biases: the city of Liverpool and football were both toxic environments that, when mixed, proved explosive and deadly. The game and the region were in their violent death throes in the view of the Conservative government. Heysel offered final, lethal proof.
There was no need to circle the wagons on Merseyside. They had been arranged in a defensive position for some time. In 1985, the city of Liverpool was completely out of step with mainstream life in Britain.
In the 1980s, many people wanted the barriers between Scousers and the rest of the world to be less metaphorical. ‘They should build a fence around [Liverpool] and charge admission. For sadly it has become a “showcase” of everything that has gone wrong in Britain’s major cities,’ the Daily Mirror opined in 1982. This was a region that had fallen on hard times and the events in Brussels reinforced the preconceptions of those who despised the area and its people. Yet the shock and horror of the Heysel Stadium disaster hit home more keenly on the banks of the Mersey than in most places.
Derek Hatton was as appalled as anyone by events. ‘I was watching on TV at home,’ he said. ‘It was shocking, especially as we’d been in Rotterdam with Everton two weeks before and there’d been no trouble. We weren’t expecting anything in Brussels, either.’
Once the initial jarring numbness wore off, it became clear that the tragedy in Belgium would have political consequences.
‘Margaret Thatcher knew she was on a collision course with the city,’ Hatton said. ‘The Conservative government were using anything they could to blacken the name of Liverpool. Heysel was used for that, too.’
Peter Reid, who had played in Rotterdam and has a fierce civic pride, agreed. The assault on Merseyside was about much more than football, the Everton midfielder said: ‘The Tories were trying to decimate one of the world’s great cities. They wanted to destroy us.’
His teammate Neville Southall believes it was a wider attack on an entire section of society. ‘It wasn’t about football to the Tories,’ the Everton goalkeeper said. ‘It was an assault against working-class people and their culture.
‘It was one way of breaking people’s spirit.’
And Merseyside was at breaking point.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the port of Liverpool was one of the world’s most important seafaring centres and considered ‘the second city of the Empire’. Its wealth had been built in the slave trade in the 1700s but after this traffic in human beings was abolished in 1807 the burgeoning United States economy ensured that the docklands on this part of the Lancashire coast continued to boom.
Under the surface of prosperity lurked serious social issues. The potato famine of 1846–47 caused the area to be swamped by refugees from Ireland. More than a million desperate, starving Irish came into Liverpool and while most used it as a staging post en route to America or the colonies, enough stayed to change the character of the city’s identity. Their poverty brought a new level of squalor to Victorian life. The strong anti-Irishness in England made it easy to dismiss the problems within Liverpool’s poorest communities as symptoms of inherent barbarism. Punch illustrated the mood of the English with its cartoons depicting the Irish as apes. One of its satires from 1862 said:
A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers.
It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo.
When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.
In London, the immigrants were subsumed into the larger population of the capital. Beside the Mersey they formed new communities, particularly in the North End, an area that ran a mile or so from the city centre to Boundary Street and another mile inland to Great Homer Street. Its main thoroughfare was Scotland Road, which was soon to become a byword for debauchery and anarchy.
Incidents in Liverpool made national headlines where similar crimes elsewhere went unreported. In 1874, on Tithebarn Street where the North End meets the city centre, a man was kicked to death while scores of bystanders watched. The Daily Telegraph reacted with horror: ‘In all the pages of Dr Livingstone’s experiences among the negroes of Africa, there is no single instance approaching this Liverpool story, in savagery of mind and body, in bestiality of heart and act.’
A gang from the streets around Scotland Road, the High Rippers, caused national outrage. Salford’s Scuttlers and Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders were no less dangerous or disruptive but the whiff of Celtic violence in Liverpool made it more sinister to the general public.
Alcohol played a significant role in establishing the city’s reputation as a semi-civilized no man’s land. In the same year as the aforementioned murder, 10 per cent of all drunks detained in Britain were apprehended in Liverpool. Dinah Mulock, a Victorian writer, provided a standard view of the place. ‘Liverpool is an awful town for drinking,’ she wrote. ‘Other towns may be as bad; statistics prove it; but I know of no other place where intoxication is so open and shameless.’
Despite what the cold hard facts said, Liverpool was perceived as worse than elsewhere. Biases like this persisted long into the twentieth century and still linger today.
They were fed by the religious divide in the city. Sectarian rioting was a fact of life in Liverpool in the years before the First World War. Catholics and Protestants did come together to fight for workers’ rights but that made things worse. During the 1911 Transport Workers’ strike, the government sent troops on to the streets and had gunboats on the Mersey ready to shell the city. Soldiers fired into a rioting crowd and killed two men. Viewed from Whitehall and Middle England, it looked like this was a war zone.
Even its politics were alien. The poorest area of t
he city, the North End, returned an Irish nationalist MP, T. P. O’Connor, to Westminster from 1885 to 1929. It was in this constituency, in the dense tenement slums around Scotland Road, that the Scouse identity was formed.
Until after the First World War, most of the people in the dockside areas of north Liverpool would have described themselves as Irish. There had been other nicknames for people from the city but they had not stuck. The obsession with dressing and acting like Americans was reflected in the term ‘Dicky Sam’, dicky meaning fake and Sam from Uncle Sam, the symbol of the United States. Little wonder it didn’t catch on. Wack, or Wacker, was sometimes used but rarely in Liverpool. Perhaps it comes from the children’s song ‘Nick, nack, Paddy-Wack.’ After all, the ‘old man’ who ‘goes rolling home’ is drunk in this anti-Irish ditty.
At this point, scouse was a type of seaman’s stew – a corruption of the Scandinavian word ‘lobscouse’ – made of the cheapest ingredients. Carts in the Scotland Road area sold the inexpensive gruel to workmen, who were sneeringly nicknamed ‘Scousers’ by wealthier citizens. The term spread to mockingly describe the residents of this poverty-stricken area but before long the people of north Liverpool were adopting the tag with a sense of pride. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s it spread across the city and jumped the religious divide. The Oxford English Dictionary claims the first usage of the word Scouse was in 1945. They were 25 years or more behind the times.
Liverpool’s status as an outsider in England did not change. Even in the 1980s, parts of the media referred to Merseyside sourly as ‘the capital of Ireland’. The relationship between the city and the rest of the country was shaped and defined by this idea of an alien group of people within the body politic of England.
