Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  One of the pitched battles between fans and police at Kenilworth Road at a Luton Town v Millwall FA Cup match, 13 March 1985 (PA Photos / Topfoto).

  Luton lost 2–1 to Everton in the semi-final but recovered their league form to the extent that they finished in mid-table and Millwall won promotion six weeks after the chaos in Luton. But something had snapped: traditional football supporters, horrified by the scenes transmitted by television, started to dissociate themselves from the game. Many of the thirty-one men who were arrested appeared in the local magistrates’ court the following morning and declared themselves fans of either Chelsea or West Ham United. Ken Bates, the chairman of Chelsea, not only vowed to erect fences at Stamford Bridge but threatened to electrify them. Luton banned visiting fans from Kenilworth Road for the next four seasons and introduced an ID card scheme for its own supporters.

  The Luton Town chairman was David Evans, who in 1987 was elected Conservative Member of Parliament for the nearby constituency of Welwyn Hatfield. He was a classic Thatcherite, born into a working-class home in Edmonton, north London. At the age of twenty-five he borrowed £500 to start an industrial cleaning company which he sold in 1986 for £32 million. He served on the board of Luton Town from 1976 to 1990, becoming chairman in 1984. His positive response to the riots at his ground delighted the prime minister who could not understand why every other Football League club would not follow Luton’s lead. What ensued was a culture clash between the football establishment and a prime minister who was determined to quell civil unrest wherever it broke out. Over the next few weeks Mrs Thatcher came into conflict with the FA who felt that the government had no understanding of the game. Cabinet papers released in 2015 indicate that she made her feelings abundantly clear.

  Immediately after the riots in Luton she told her colleagues, ‘It is not enough to condemn football hooliganism. More effective action must be taken to deal with it.’ The sports minister Neil MacFarlane was instructed to write to Ted Croker at the FA but he was shown the full face of the maker’s name on the bat as the FA played it carefully straight back down the wicket. The minister became peeved and wrote again, complaining, ‘Your letter does not address my specific request about what action the FA intends to take.’ Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s Chief Press Secretary, then offered blunt advice to the cabinet:

  The FA and the Football League should be roasted. They should be told in no uncertain terms that it is their game and that they must act to make it wholesome. The trouble at Luton Town is a watershed not necessarily because it is the worst incident but because it has engendered the thought after the miners’ strike that this sort of behaviour simply cannot be allowed to go on.

  The perceived connection between the miners’ strike and football hooliganism bothered the government enormously and fuelled the passion with which they pursued the ID card scheme. As far as Thatcher and her cabinet were concerned there was no essential difference between striking miners and flying pickets fighting with the police outside Orgreave Colliery and football hooligans resisting arrest in the shopping centres of industrial towns. They were both evidence of an increase in civil disorder and they both had to be stopped, but the government found that the support and respect which the police had traditionally enjoyed from the British public started to diminish in the 1980s.

  In 1981 riots broke out in Brixton as trust between black communities and the police evaporated. Four years later similar disturbances would break out on the Broadwater Farm estate in north London. When Lord Taylor conducted his investigation into the 1989 Hillsborough disaster he concluded that the higher up the police chain he went the less credible became the witnesses. Interminably delayed confessions from individual police officers after further investigations twenty-five years later proved he was right to be sceptical.

  This breakdown in relations between the police and the people they were supposed to be protecting alarmed a Conservative government which had always championed the cause of the police. However, they saw no reason to change their minds throughout the period that Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Michael Heseltine, a member of successive Thatcher cabinets during the 1980s, later remarked:

  I remember very clearly the period of the 1979 election in which we had seen the Labour party destroyed by violence on the streets and this was symptomatic that the first solution to anything that happened was violence. It destroyed Labour, we came in and before we knew where we were there was a violent confrontation with the miners, we had clashes at Greenham Common and with CND. There was an atmosphere out there on the streets that was extremely nasty and quite unlike anything we have got today.

  Bernard Ingham certainly had a jaundiced view of the people who ran the national game. He thought that boards of directors were ‘not generally very good or politically sensitive or bright’ and that football managers ‘would be better off looking after the players instead of giving press conferences in which lots of trivia are given currency and provocative statements are made’. As for the media, ‘I have an extremely poor view of football writers, generally a poor lot, failed in other areas of journalism, with notable exceptions’.

  In response, the FA was brusquely dismissive of Mrs Thatcher’s preferred initiative that club membership schemes should be introduced that would require all fans to carry ID cards. In a letter to the minister of sport it attempted to acquaint an ignorant cabinet with the real facts of football life: ‘There is a very real possibility that the need to check people entering football grounds would cause irritation leading to misbehaviour from a wider section of football supporters.’

  It was true enough but it found no favour in Whitehall. Indeed, the minister was incensed by what he saw as a lazy response: ‘It is not satisfactory. There is no analysis of the pros and cons of a membership scheme, just an assertion that it wouldn’t work. I fear that their failure to adopt a sufficiently analytical approach may be due to their approaching the task with insufficiently open minds.’

  The tone of the correspondence between government and FA between mid-March 1985 and mid-May 1985 became increasingly bitter. On the field of play the morale of English football was enhanced by Liverpool reaching the final of the European Cup for the fifth time in eight years. They appeared to stand a good chance of retaining the trophy they had won in the previous year’s final against Roma. But even this good news turned to tragedy. An hour before kick-off, trouble flared on the crumbling terraces of the dilapidated Heysel Stadium in Brussels. Violent clashes between Liverpool and Juventus fans led to the collapse of a wall and audiences around the world were greeted by the horrific sight of football supporters dying in front of the television cameras. By the following morning it was confirmed that thirty-nine supporters had died, thirty-two of them Italians. The international reputation of English football was in ruins. Mrs Thatcher was incensed not so much because of the problems it would cause English football clubs, but because it would make her relationship with European leaders much more difficult and not help Britain’s cause in her negotiations with the European Economic Community. Her Private Secretary Charles Powell later said:

  Mrs Thatcher was indignant about Heysel, furious about the effect on Britain’s reputation internationally. It was nothing to do with football. She hadn’t got a clue about football. It was just this idea that British hooligans were ruining the country’s good name on the Continent after they had been doing the same at home. She was determined to bring about change.

  The morning after the Heysel Stadium disaster, Thatcher appeared on television to express her views very clearly. ‘I watched last night and heard what people said and I felt exactly the same. I wish we could get those people responsible, get them before a court and [give them] stiff sentences so that they stop anyone else in their tracks from doing this.’

  Instead, there were immediate calls for UEFA to impose a ban on English clubs participating in European competition. When it came it would be a ban that would last for five years. However, if Mrs Thatcher thought t
hat what happened at Heysel, taken together with the events at Kenilworth Road, would induce a change of attitude at Lancaster Gate she was greatly mistaken. The FA continued to pour cold water on her pet project. She called together a group of football officials and others closely associated with the game and asked what football was going to do about its hooligans. According to Ted Croker, she seemed ready to have professional football banned altogether. While others timidly kept their opinions to themselves, Croker allegedly remarked: ‘We don’t want this made public, but these people are society’s problems and we don’t want your hooligans in our sport, Prime Minister.’ The prime minister was incensed. It was perhaps not a coincidence that Croker, unlike his predecessors as secretary of the FA, never received a knighthood.

  If Thatcher thought she would receive a more sympathetic hearing for her ID scheme from the Football League she was to be disappointed. Graham Kelly, the lugubrious Football League secretary, wrote to her saying: ‘a club membership card scheme could not be done. Football club chairmen feel very strongly that the idea is being put forward by people who do not go to football matches, have never been on a regular basis and do not have the inclination to attend at the present time.’

  The BBC television commentator Barry Davies, who had had to spend an hour describing the distressing scenes at Heysel while UEFA debated whether or not the European Cup final could proceed, also questioned whether the measures advocated by the government were the right ones. He described the government’s attitude as follows:

  Football hooliganism was seen quite clearly as a football problem and that if the stringent plans that Margaret Thatcher was putting forward actually took place they might solve the problem for football but they would push it somewhere else. In other words it’s football’s problem – you sort it out. I found that completely lacking in sensitivity as to where the hooligan problem came from. It became accepted that spectators turned up for a football match and were frogmarched to the ground. That attitude by the police led straight to the disaster at Hillsborough.

  The Sheffield Wednesday-supporting Roy Hattersley, who in 1985 was shadow chancellor and deputy leader of the Labour party, also expressed doubts about the government’s proposed course of action:

  No one doubts the extent of the problem – it was the absurdity of the solution I objected to. The moral of this from a legal point of view was, as the FA said, it was people who had never been to a football match trying to impose a solution on football. Bernard Ingham came up with a marvellous idea, a campaign he called ‘Goalies Against Hoodies or Goalies Against Woofties’, or something like that.

  However, doing nothing was not an option that Mrs Thatcher was likely to endorse and as far as she could see the problem was that the football professionals had no idea how to solve the problem. They had absolutely no constructive proposals to make of any sort and Powell felt nobody could blame Margaret Thatcher for wanting to fill the vacuum. Hattersley disagreed but he accepted the fact that football hooliganism wasn’t a problem for football alone. It was, as the football authorities had claimed from the beginning of this acrimonious debate, a problem for society:

  I certainly don’t want to support the football authorities. No good supporter had a good word to say about them. But Mrs Thatcher had a duty to come to a sensible conclusion and she came to an absurd conclusion very largely because she relied on people who didn’t know what they were talking about.

  Thatcher never pretended to know anything about football but, to Hattersley’s undisguised scorn, she relied on Bernard Ingham for policy advice on football. That was because she regarded him as the nearest thing she had to someone who understood the sport, probably because Ingham came from Hebden Bridge in west Yorkshire, which was certainly closer to the northern heartlands of football than Grantham in Lincolnshire. Conservative cabinet members might have been sympathetic to the idea that it was a general social problem rather than a specifically football one because it linked to their conviction that it was further evidence of the worrying breakdown in civil order. However, they felt, perhaps justifiably, that reform had to begin somewhere and if the problem manifested itself in and around football grounds then the response that this was a wider problem for society in general was not an acceptable one in political terms. The prime minister had the press on her back demanding to know what she was going to do about it. She reiterated strongly her belief that the problem of football hooliganism had to be solved by the football authorities.

  The arguments on both sides had some justification. Blaming society is the default excuse that is invariably assumed by authorities who demonstrate an inability or an unwillingness to take unpopular or difficult decisions. Yet although Thatcher felt Europe looked on football hooliganism as the ‘British disease’, in fact there were similar outbreaks of footballing violence all over Europe. Deliberate violence, the Conservative cabinet felt, was not caused by society. It was caused by people who wished to practise violence. The Ultras in Italy, Den Bosch in Holland and disruptive fans in Germany all had links to far-right groups who specialised in street brawls. To that extent England was simply part of a wider European problem, just as football claimed it was part of a wider social problem. This point of view didn’t please Mrs Thatcher, who continued to berate the FA for its lack of action. It was only in the aftermath of the tragedy at Hillsborough in April 1989 that there was an acceptance that ‘something had to be done’. Whether it was football’s fault or society’s fault no longer mattered. The fences had to come down, stadia needed to be redesigned and policing methods had to change.

  Inadvertently, the arrival of the Premier League and the consequent rapid escalation of ticket prices and gentrification of crowds, though regretted by traditionalists, had the effect of pricing the underpaid hooligan element out of football. There were plenty of well-paid hooligans who still enjoyed a fight, but there is no doubt that, since the implementation of the Taylor Report at the start of the 1990s, evidence of hooliganism dropped significantly from what had been seen throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Most big matches no longer permitted entry through payment at the turnstile on the day, which meant that every match became effectively all-ticket. Eventually, alcohol sales were banned on grounds and football specials and fans were further contained and escorted. The courts issued more exclusion orders for problem fans and the widespread use of CCTV gave police and stewards better pictures of where the trouble was starting.

  Football in the 1980s seemed to be caught in a downward spiral of hooliganism and declining attendances. Crowds which had totalled seventy-seven million in the late 1950s had fallen to around twenty million thirty years later. The English public fell out of love with football in the 1980s because of hooliganism, and half-empty grounds, even in the First Division, and a half-empty Wembley Stadium for England matches were visible evidence of this diminishing appeal. The grounds themselves fell into disrepair. The tax structure gave clubs tax relief on transfer fees but not on ground improvements, so there was no financial incentive to refurbish them. This sharp fall in public interest in the game gave television the whip hand in their negotiations with the beleaguered football authorities. At the same time, Jonathan Martin at the BBC and John Bromley at ITV had to justify their expenditure on football to their own bosses. In the mid-1980s Martin and Bromley offered the Football League only £1.86 million between them for the weekend highlights which formed Match of the Day and The Big Match and ITV regional variations, claiming that was all they were worth, that nobody was interested in them and they could take it or leave it. The old cartel, which had been disturbed by the so-called ‘Snatch of the Day’ seven years before, had been restored. The Football League bridled and turned the offer down, believing it to be far below its own valuation of what it thought football rights were worth. As a consequence, at the start of the 1985–6 season there was no football at all on television for the first six months. It did not return until January 1986. Astonishingly, the world continued to turn during this hiatus.


  Once it was no longer seen on television, football’s central place in the conversations of the nation disappeared with it. In certain circles it became a social embarrassment for supporters to admit their interest in the game. Patrick Barclay noted the change from the glory days of 1966 after which the culture surrounding football started to change:

  Books started to appear that were not just slavish autobiographies or biographies – Arthur Hopcraft’s The Football Man followed by Hunter Davies on Spurs in The Glory Game and you get Glanville referencing Italian football so football starts to creep into the colour supplements. Any hope that it would become fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s was then killed by the rise of hooliganism. Margaret Thatcher clearly had distaste for football and who can blame a prime minister who has to go into an EEC meeting in 1985 after thirty-two Italian fans have died at Heysel? Is she supposed to like it? I can remember distinctly going to parties in the mid-1980s as a football writer and desperately hoping people did not ask me what I did for a living. Whereas now when I go to parties I am equally afraid to say what I do for a living but now it’s because I don’t want to talk football all night.

  The behaviour of the violent section of England supporters deteriorated still further as the national team failed to give it much to feel happy about. After an encouraging World Cup in 1986, the European Championship two years later was a catastrophe, Bobby Robson’s England losing all three matches. The hooligans seemed determined to put in a performance to make the country even more ashamed as they rampaged their way through Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Cologne. Mrs Thatcher felt compelled to apologise to the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, a conversation she no doubt found extremely difficult.

  There were few sporting heroes to be found in England in the 1980s. Ian Botham might have won the Ashes in 1981 and England regained the urn in 1985 with the aid of two of the country’s finest batsmen in David Gower and Graham Gooch, but none of them had an answer to the overwhelming power of West Indies during that decade. The England cricket team suffered humiliating defeats at home in 1984 and 1988 and in the Caribbean in 1985–6 (the first and last of these reverses being 5–0 ‘blackwashes’). The British tennis team which had performed so well in the Davis Cup at the end of the previous decade now slipped back down the world rankings and a British winner of Wimbledon seemed as far away as ever. The British Ryder Cup side was beaten so comprehensively and so regularly by the United States that, in the middle of the decade, golfers from the rest of Europe had to be drafted in to give the competition any meaning. England had won rugby union’s Five Nations Championship under the leadership of Bill Beaumont in 1980 but made little impact thereafter until the following decade when Will Carling’s side emerged triumphant. There was certainly some comfort to be taken in the Olympic victories of Coe, Ovett, Cram and Wells but perhaps the most representative English sportsman of the 1980s was Eddie the Eagle, who, at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, finished eighty-sixth – and last – in the 70m and 90m ski jumps. The worse he performed the greater became his popularity even if it originated in the British sense of humour. The search for a genuine hero became increasingly desperate.