I wrote this in The Times in 2009. A lot of people will not have seen it. I’m not sure I can say anything to add to it. Nothing has changed since I wrote it. I still go back there, too often. God knows what the people who really suffered go through.
THE last time I was here, there was fear in the air. Looking down at the turnstiles from Leppings Lane, there was a tumult surrounding a tiny tunnel, a filthy, evil plughole sucking all life towards it and extinguishing the breath of all who were pulled into it. And it was dragging us towards it. We knew what was coming but could not break the crushing, malignant force. I’m here often, the last time about two weeks ago. In a nightmare.
Two decades ago, there were no bad dreams, just a sunny spring day and an optimism that was curiously out of kilter with the decade for Scousers. In 1989, with my mate – also called Tony – I came down the hill laughing and approached the crowd outside Hillsborough with confidence.
There were a lot of people eager to get into the game. Kick-off was looming and agitation was growing. But we worked the crowd, exploiting its pressing and ebbing, to gain yards. We had experience in this sort of thing – veterans in big crowds since junior school. We had been caught up in this sort of congestion countless times throughout the years, so we were soon at the turnstiles.
Then the first unusual thing happened. An exit gate suddenly opened and there we were, inside the ground, our tickets redundant. “See you later,” I said. “Tomorrow,” he replied. Then he walked down the tunnel.
His next words to me came some 36 hours later: “Have you ever felt someone’s ribs breaking under your feet?”
Why did you go down the tunnel? The question came 20 years later, after an emotional visit to Hillsborough, this time in waking hours. “I think,” Tony said, “I caught a glimpse of the pitch. That was it. I knew it was the worst place in the ground. But I saw the pitch. You know what it’s like when you see the pitch.”
When gate C was opened on the orders of the chief superintendent, David Duckenfield, a man in charge of crowd control for the first time on FA Cup semi-final day, April 15, 1989, thousands of fans spilt into the stadium bemused and clutching tickets. The only entrance to the viewing areas visible as they surged in was the tunnel. It led to two pens that were already horribly overcrowded. Now they were about to become fatally so.
“As soon as I was in the tunnel, I knew there were problems,” Tony said. “There was no going back. Just too many people. I kept telling myself to be calm, not to panic. I knew that if my head went down under the level of the crowd, I wouldn’t come back up. But the pushing just carried on.
“Then I was out of the tunnel. I thought it was over, just for a second. Then I knew it was worse. Much worse.”
People were still trying to force their way through the underpass, believing, like Tony, that the sunlight and terraces meant safety. Instead, horror waited. “I’d been turned around, facing away from the pitch, so I didn’t know what was happening behind the goal. It was hard to breathe and stay upright, but it had gone past the point of struggling and moving. My elbow was jammed into a fella’s neck and he was pleading with me to move it. He kept saying: ‘I can’t breathe, I’m dying.’ But I couldn’t move it. Then he stopped talking. His head went under.”
While Tony was fighting for his life, I was watching from a seat in the stands, trying to comprehend the enormity of what was unfolding. Most people around seemed, at first – like the police – to assume it was a hooligan incident. Then the sights became uglier. A young lad walked around the pitch, holding his arm up under his elbow. The forearm was broken at a neat right angle. Two fans were pumping at the chest of a big man wearing a red shirt. They gesticulated at police to help, but the officers stood by, seemingly paralysed. Then one of the would-be medics pulled up the red shirt, exposing a bare belly, and covered the man’s face. It sent a shock wave through the seats.
I had done some CPR training. As the boys on the pitch began to rip down advertising hoardings to create makeshift stretchers, I ran around to the tunnel again, hoping to help.
The exit gates were all open at the Leppings Lane, but a line of policemen stood still, on a diagonal, as if to stop anyone leaving. Near the tunnel, under the stairs to the upper section, people lay on the floor. For some reason I thought they were sunbathing. Then I realised they were dead.
How long did it last, I asked Tony. “It seemed ages. Hours,” he said. “Probably minutes. Then the crush eased off and I was pushed back towards the tunnel. There were three fellas there. Looked like they were in their 50s. We used to call big fellas Dockers. You’d say, ‘The size of him. He’s a Docker.’ Well these were Dockers. That’s the only way I can explain it. They were grabbing people, giving them a leg up and throwing them up to the stands, where people were pulling them up. One did it for me. Then I was looking down at the chaos.”
Outside, trying to stay calm, I asked a policeman a simple question. “How many?” His only reply was a huge, racking sob. Unable to control myself, I ran away up the hill crying. Almost 20 years on, I’m in the same spot. Still crying. Looking at that tunnel. It’s taken almost that time to stop running.
Inside the ground, Tony was making the transition from victim to rescuer without a second thought. “I started pulling up people; dragging them out. It went on for a while and then there didn’t seem any more need to be there. I walked out, saw some buses and got on one. There was only me and an old woman on it. Then I got the train back to London, where I was living. Everyone around was normal.”
But Tony was not normal. Some weeks later, he began to lose weight in a drastic manner. He saw his doctor, an ancient Irishman, who could find nothing wrong. The doctor asked his usual question: any serious traumas lately? Tony could not think of any. At home, he mentioned the exchange to his girlfriend, now his wife. After a moment or two of disbelief, she suggested that Sheffield may have fit the category. He was genuinely shocked. Hillsborough happened to the dead, injured and their families. He was just there. The doctor explained in blunt terms. “He said ‘We call it the weeping willows’,” Tony recalls. “You can’t cry, so that’s how it comes out. You’re weeping through your a***.”
So how do you let it out? How do you let it go when the lies persist, the fingers still point, 20 years on, against every shred of evidence?
Despite the Taylor report. When, increasingly, opposing supporters sing: “You killed your own fans,” and otherwise sensible people repeat the accusations that ring across two decades with the hollow resonance of a great lie. When the coroner ruled that all of the dead were gone by 3.15pm, but Anne Williams has evidence that her 15-year-old son, Kevin, asked for his mum almost an hour later. When Andrew Devine, deprived of oxygen in the crush, remains in a vegetative coma, being cared for by ageing parents whose life was destroyed at the same time as their son’s.
You don’t. You go back to Hillsborough, like I did last week, and cry for the dead, the crippled and their families. But you also weep for the fools who believe “The Truth”, those who think that my friend and I were wilful killers.
And hope that justice will one day be done. That no one else has to live through something like this at a football match again. Because even us lucky ones have to dream.
Such a powerful and emotional read. I can relate to so much of what was said.
Nobody could ever imagine what people who where there went through I can’t but justice needs to be done. 96 souls lost forever going to watch a football match. This is such an emotional and compelling read. JFT96
Wow, that was an emotional read that takes me straight back to the day i sat and watched in horror as the awful events unfolded on the tv in front of me and i’m sitting here, remembering all the lies that were told about our fans. i have always hoped that the truth will eventually come out and i do believe that Justice WILL be done! R.I.P. to “the 96”, you are always in our hearts and prayers.
It all comes flooding back whenever I read or hear anything about that afternoon. I was 3 away fromt he ticket window when they sold out for Hillsborough that year. I’d been the previous year, stood in the centre pen. Unable to get there in 89 I was dragged shopping by my girlfriend. as we left Liverpool city centre I truned on the radio and listened with a sense of horror at what was unfolding. Go home I phoned my mum who was distraught thinking that I was there! 3 mates went and all came back, so many others didn’t though. Justice for the 96 Still goes unheeded! YNWA
I wasn’t even a Liverpool fan (or more precisely I didn’t even know a single PL football team back then) yet when the disaster happened. But Tony’s piece brings tears to my eyes. I cried & stopped & am crying again while typing.
This wasn’t the 1st injustice disaster that I knew as many lies & injustices are playing live in my country. The government here is just similar to UK’s, FEAR of TRUTH, FEAR of losing POWER & LACK of political will to change & reveal the TRUTH. The RCI here is known as “Royal Circus of Inquiry or Investigation” instead of Royal Commission of Inquiry ‘cos no one will be convicted at the end of the inquiry but hidden truth & injustice.
No, I don’t expect the same result here repeats in UK but TRUTH nothing but the TRUTH. RIP96. JFT96.
very powerful tony first time i have read it
How the relatives and the survivors have coped for so long and with such dignity amazes me.
I shook my head when I heard of the Cabinet Office appealing against the release of the Hillsborough files. Sadly, that didn’t amaze me. Politicians and successive governments seem determined to drag out the torment of all those affected.
I hope and pray that there is justice for the 96
Brilliant article. Brings back so many sad memories. I just hope The Real Truth comes out soon (……and that rag goes to the wall) and that the families and friends of the 96 have justice at last.
powerful stuff…god bless ye mate.
I’m just reading this in school, thinking I’ve read enough Hillsborough stories to be able to keep my emotions in check. But I can’t. I’ve just burst into tears and I can’t stop crying. I can’t stop crying for the people who had their lives taken from them because of a silly mistake. I can’t stop crying that after 22 years still no justice has been done and we’re so close to it yet so far. I can’t stop crying because all they ever wanted to do was go to a football game to support their favourite come. I can’t stop crying because they never came home.
I returned a couple of years ago.I’d first returned in the September?after the disaster.I stood in the Wednesday Kop with my future Mrs.the minutes silence was weird.A few Wednesday fans didn’t take kindly to being in their end.
My sister had an interview at Sheffield uni.I decided to take her to the scene of the crime on our way home.we had a look around the club shop then we walked straight into the ground unchallenged.I couldn’t believe I was stood under the same police box looking at the now seated Leppings Lane and the same deadly tunnel.She asked if I was ok..I was choked to be honest.I couldn’t get my head around how peaceful it was.I retraced that half an hour of hell right on front of me.I tried to explain the story of the crush,getting over the fence and walking amongst the dead and injured on the pitch in a daze.I told her about the young boy receiving CPR in the six yard box being egged on to breathe by two scalleys.I still don’t know if the young lad lived or died.we walked around the outside of the ground.My sister was born in the November after Hillsborough.I went on to have two of my own.The drive home to Liverpool with my little sister,now 18 was quiet.R.I.P 96 and Justice 4 the 96.
Tony, that story is so close to my own experience on the day it’s scary. Made me upset but thanks.
I went through the opened exit gate, got pushed through the tunnel, couldn’t move but got lucky from help from “the dckers” as you call them. I remember watching myself being pulled out of the crowd on News At Ten. I was 21, now 43 and still have my ticket intact today.
I just wish I could say thanks to the dockers and if anybody knows who they are please tell me.
What a terrible incident. When it happened i was two month old baby and still from what i read its shocking that the truth hasnt come out for all those years. Football brings people together not separate. I’m from zimbabwe but i felt like i lost family during the incident. I have seen one thing from it all politicians wishes are different from what we get in football. Like what Wenger said that football unites boys from johnsberg, del rio, rio genero, paris, hong kong much respect to it by only that but politicians would not want that. Hope everyone gets justice.
JFT96. You’ll never walk alone!
It never gets any easier reading about the horror of Hillsborough, I can only hope that Justice will soon be served & our 96 lost souls can rest in peace and the true heroes of April 15th 1989, our fans, are given the credit they richly deserve for what they did that day. God Bless the 96 RIP.
Genuinely moving and shocking. Shows how far the trauma of Hillsborough (and other disasters) spreads. Way beyond what most people see as the victims [dead and physically injured]. PTSD must be common amongst those who were there that day.