I first came across the name Phil Scraton while studying with the Open University as a republican prisoner in the H Blocks of Long Kesh. He was part of the team on D102, a social science course. It was distance teaching so I never got to meet him. I had no idea or reason to know that we had a shared passion: Liverpool FC.
He has been a Liverpool FC fan for 60 years, a frequent presence at games until the 1980s by which time he had:
grown weary of the often-appalling treatment meted out to committed fans whose hard earned money supported their clubs … disillusioned with being aggressively herded and policed.
He did not attend the ill-fated 1989 FA Cup semi-final at Sheffield’s Wednesday’s ground where 96 Liverpool fans from across England were crushed to death. He took up the cause of those who were, and vented his sense of outrage against the type of injustice described by the novelist and slave abolitionist Lydia Maria Francis Child: “we first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.”
From shortly after the disaster, appalled by the way the fans had been treated in public discourse - maligned, smeared, lied about, denigrated - Scraton committed “to research and tell the story of Hillsborough with thoroughness, rigour and authority.” He succeeded and, with his work done, in December 2016 he refused an OBE, simply stating:
I could not receive an honour on the recommendation of those who remained unresponsive to the determined efforts of bereaved families and survivors to secure truth and justice.
The crime of unlawful killing was inflicted on one single day in April 1989: the crime of cover up and institutional lying continued for decades before being knocked off its lofty perch by a long process that culminated in the 2016 inquests. Phil Scraton was central to that, having “researched Hillsborough from 1989, publishing reports, articles and the first edition of Hillsborough The Truth in 1990.”
Crucially he served on the ground-breaking Hillsborough Independent Panel and ultimately “did more than anyone to expose the institutional deceit that hid the truth of why 96 Liverpool fans died at Hillsborough.”
Hillsborough The Truth, in its fourth and final edition, takes the reader to the point where the second inquest concludes in 2016, and the verdict of unlawful killing delivered. South Yorkshire Police were indicted, and the fans exonerated.
The book is an unrelenting blitzkrieg on the well-fortified ramparts of institutional lying and systemic resistance to truth recovery. Step by step the author advances into the citadel of power and bit by bit rescues truth from its midst. Then brick by brick he builds an edifice that towers over all before it, diminishing and overshadowing completely the phalanx of batons that so steadily sought to beat down the truth behind the crush at Hillsborough.
As Andy Burnham, MP, would put it:
The full truth about Hillsborough would never have been known were it not for Phil Scraton's meticulous efforts over many years - he has done a huge service not just to the Hillsborough families but to this country.
Over the course of my 61 years I have read thousands of books. Lengthy imprisonment tends to lend itself to voracious reading. To have gone so far before finding the best book I have ever read might in other circumstances be described as joyous. Every word absorbed, allowing for no meandering where the text is read but fails to make it beyond the cornea, and then have to be revisited in order to maintain the thread. There is no joy in this book. The satisfaction derived from the restorative accomplishment whereby the reputation of the tarnished Liverpool fans is rebuilt from the rubble of police, media and government lies, is not pleasurable. If pleasure can be compared to sustenance, there is not one calorie or nutrient to be drawn from this book. It is abundantly rich in many things, a literary tour de force, but justifiably impoverished in the delectation it serves up. It surpasses everything that has gone before because of its power to convey raw, ragged, painful truth. Engaging, absorbing, it draws the reader into a dark place where there is no redemption from a terrible knowledge about power and its willingness to crush human dignity.
There is only one light moment, if I dare to call it that. It is in the words of a father of a 14-year-old boy crushed to death in his arms as he tried desperately to save him, calling to a police officer yards away to open a gate so that his child might again breathe and be saved. The cop ignored him.
Eddie Spearritt slipped into unconsciousness. When he came to, he was in hospital, his son Adam dead, and placed in the makeshift mortuary – the gymnasium at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground. Nobody accounts for Eddie Spearritt getting to hospital. It has never been explained. His survival would become crucial to unearthing the truth that the coroner in the first, and subsequently quashed, inquest, Dr Stefan Popper had suppressed. Too close to the police for either comfort or objectivity, Popper ruled that everybody had died by 3:15. This was demonstrably wrong. Many had survived the immediate crush and medical evidence would later show that 41 might have been saved but for inadequate and tardy medical intervention. The myth of 3:15.
Eddie Spearritt, now dead, was fortunate, in a sense. In a dry comment he said he "could have crawled, unconscious, to the hospital. That would've taken about two hours:" the gap no one else has accounted for. Had he not regained consciousness in the hospital, instead slipping away to join his son sometime after 5 o'clock, the coroner would then have ruled he had died two hours earlier, so that the institutional lie could be protected.
It would take a book the size of Hillsborough The Truth to properly review it. There is so much to say. The reader will get little from this review other than an impressionistic account of the most powerful book I have ever had the sorrow to read.
Disaster at big sporting events were not a new phenomenon. There had been enough learned over the years but ignored in terms of implementing preventative measures. After Spurs fans had narrowly escaped with their lives in 1981 in the Leppings Lane end of the Wednesday ground, Hillsborough no longer qualified as a FA Cup semi-final venue. Restored in 1988, the then match commander was suspended from duty three weeks before the 1989 semi.
This is the backdrop to a narrative which takes the reader from the build up to the game, the dangerous congestion outside Leppings Lane occasioned by the dearth of turnstiles, the crush, and the immediate aftermath where the cover up was being crafted while the dead were still warm. It traces the failures of Sheffield Wednesday and its safety consultants who paid scant if any attention to the fact that the ground’s safety certificate was out of date, the "inefficient and dilatory" - terms employed by Justice Taylor - attitude of Sheffield City Council’s to the certificate. It carries on to South Yorkshire Ambulance Service’s dire response, the grossly insensitive police treatment of the bereaved in the makeshift mortuary, the lies of the Sun and South Yorkshire Police, the amending of police statements to shift the blame from cops to fans, the despicable decision of the coroner at the behest of the police to test all the victims including children for alcohol, the Taylor Inquiry that blamed the police but left so much unsaid, the Popper inquest which did to Liverpool what Widgery did to Derry, the Scrutiny by the Jack Straw appointed Justice Stuart-Smith, the failed private prosecution of two senior police officers, the perennial disappointment of relatives endlessly denied justice, many dying short of the goal. At times the narrative is painstakingly told though the voices of the bereaved. It was not ticketless, late or drunk fans who caused this disaster. The police did, and have lied about it ever since.
The match commander gave the order to open the exit gate, having earlier failed to filter the fans safely on the approach. Crucially, he negligently overlooked the dire necessity of blocking off the tunnel leading into the middle pen with a police line. A human tsunami, totally unaware that anything was wrong, surged into the pen from which there was no escape, only up for those lucky enough to be hauled into the stands by fellow fans. On the very same day the match commander blamed the fans, accusing them of forcing the very gate he had ordered to be opened. The lasting smear had begun.
Revenge is said to be a dish best served cold. This book shows how the concept could be applied. Scraton did not resort to it. His clinical approach was cold not vengeful. Although Scraton depicts match commander David Duckenfield as the bĂȘte noire of Hillsborough, "in public discourse, despised in print and song", he never actually takes advantage of the deflated hubris to target the disgraced police commander even further. It is destruction without degradation, the false narrative blasted, the real man not belittled gratuitously. His treatment of Duckenfield is dispassionate but fair. Duckenfield, whose response to people dying was to send in the dogs, emerges from the book as a match commander rookie out of his depth, undertrained, arrogant, limited, mendacious, but not as a hate figure. The forensic focus is on the institutional.
Phil Scraton, when in search of the truth about 96 people who entered a football stadium with no possible comprehension that they were stepping into a death chamber, was threatened in the most chilling manner by an anonymous caller, and menaced by Norman Bettison, now a former police chief with more to answer than he ever will. Resisting the Sinclair Lewis observed practice whereby “every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile”, Scraton remained undaunted. Hillsborough The Truth is the result of his fortitude, a courage that was matched by his readiness to confront the emotional volcano that he would have to descend into in order to complete an odyssey from which society would benefit immeasurably.
I have often taken my son to big football matches and held onto him tightly as I guided him out of the ground in the midst of milling fans, Hillsborough always in my mind. Everything can turn on a second. When he stumbled outside the Aviva but far enough removed not to be trampled on by an unsuspecting throng converging on him, two female American fans had him on his feet in seconds. At Hillsborough the fans were so pinned in they could not move their arms to help the person dying next to them. Now thirteen, a year younger than Adam Spearritt, Philip Hammond, Paul Brian Murray, Lee Nicol or Tommy Howard when their lives were crushed, I took him aside recently and spoke to him. It was April, the thirtieth anniversary of the crush, and his interest was stirred. I told him that every time he goes to a match, or in later years brings his own children to a venue where they are not penned in like caged animals, where their safety is increased immeasurably, he should remember a man called Phil Scraton for his very real part in making that possible.
A day or two later he asked me the name of the man again. I had got through.
Phil Scraton, 2016, Hillsborough The Truth. Mainstream Publishing. ISBN-13: 978-1910948019
Heartfelt words Anthony. Reading your words it kept coming into my thoughts how it was a miricle that there were no deaths on Hill 16 at Dubs games during the 70s and 80s.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
DeleteAnd probably everywhere else where huge attendances were in place. I have one memory of a swaying crowd at Hampden in 1973 at the Scottish Cup final. 134,000 were officially at the game if I remember correctly. The way it swayed forward and my friend asking me to hold onto his father, was the strangest of feelings. The Ibrox Disaster had happened two years earlier and that might have been in our minds at the time.
Mackers -
ReplyDeleteA harrowing review of a harrowing event. Your decision not to have the book by the bedside makes me pause. I remember standing in the Stretford End and the Kop in the 80s and feeling utterly powerless, a hair from disaster, just as you describe. We were cattle in pens. Thanks for writing this excellent review. That you rank the book above thousands of others is quite the recommendation. If you haven't seen the ESPN "30 for 30" documentary on Hillsborough, try to find that. Phil Scraton features prominently. The film elicits disbelief, anger, and dread.
Mike - thanks for this. Crowd control over crowd safety - as the book lays out, much of it shaped by a class attitude towards people regarded by Thatcherite logic as children of a lesser god. I should watch the documentary and will but I have avoided (if I can) looking even at the images of the crush. I find them very upsetting. And when I read that the documentary "elicits disbelief, anger, and dread" I start to get cold feet. They leave me in a bad mood. I guess after reading this book, I am ready for it. Am also getting ready for the final on Saturday - trying to get my son to watch it with me but he and a school friend have for years made a day (and night) from watching the final together and I think they have chosen the friend's house for this one.
ReplyDeleteListen to Phil Scraton
ReplyDeletePhil Scraton on how hundreds died as a result of Hillsborough
ReplyDeleteMike - posted the above two for yourself. Just listened to them this morning
ReplyDeleteI haven’t read the book but I might. I have a fair knowledge of what happened during the build up and on the day itself but, like yourself, Tony, find it traumatic to even think about it. I can’t watch the images either but remember them well from the time. Horrifying, like much of our own experiences here. Not sure if I could watch the documentary Michael has mentioned but perhaps. YNWA.
ReplyDeleteSean - I think this is a problem many of us have - we want to know about it without getting too close to it - it is painful. This book at least helps the families emerge from that terrible sense of betrayal-induced impotence. And they were betrayed by all those who owed them a duty of care and candour. We are all too familiar with what cops do and I am sure many Liverpool working class people have a long experience of their nefariousness as well. But I read an interview with the mother of the two sisters killed, Jenni Hicks. And she said her husband Trevor - who became an irrepressibly campaigner for justice - was an establishment man before Hillsborough, thinking the police had a difficult job. Those people are shattered to their core by what the police did. For us it is "well, that is what the police do." Another thing that annoyed me was how the cops could have put people like Norman Bettison in charge of policing in Liverpool, given his own role subsequent to the disaster.
ReplyDeleteMackers -
ReplyDeleteGreat to learn more about Phil Scraton and his upbringing on Merseyside. A seminarian, a bookie, and a bus conductor -- what an education. So many can be grateful that Scraton emerged from the Magnum Silentium to become a champion for social justice. Thanks for posting those podcasts, and good luck to all of you Liverpool fans. The big day in Madrid approaches.
Mike - he has a few strings to his bow. I thought the observation about never factoring in a university education and his dad advising him to get a trade caught just how atypical it was for working class kids to consider a university education. One of the sisters who died was a university student at Liverpool, having turned down places considered by academia to be more prestigious: yet that was robbed from her by Hillsborough. It makes me think had Phil never have gone to university then the chances of the massive institutional lie ultimately being upended decrease. How many other academics would have withstood the pressure from within to get on with the academic career and get off the Hillsborough campaign for justice? I would not be hopeful.
ReplyDeleteA belated thanks for this Anthony - a powerful review of a very powerful book, which was crucial to the campaign and the setting up of the Independent panel, when the narrative finally changed, and the 'official' version was demolished. After 2012, the range of 'permissible lies' about Hillsborough was considerably narrowed, but as always with historical narratives, it is never set in stone or once-and-for-all. So, the truth about the events of the day and the cover-up need to be reinforced, and the regular updating and republication of Phil Scraton's book help to achieve this. I would also recommend two other oral histories, where the bereaved and survivors put their experiences and feelings into words: "The Day of the Hillsborough Disaster: A Narrative Account" (edited by Rogan Taylor and Andrew Ward, 1995); and "Hillsborough Voices" (edited by Kev Sampson, 2017).
ReplyDeleteHi Steve - thanks for that. A great book without doubt. I still keep thinking about the book every day since finishing it. Phil has done a tremendous job. I intend getting both of the above - The Sampson one is on Kindle but not Taylor's. Just finished the Sara Williams one and the Robert Lynch one before that. Intend reading Bettison's but will have to steal it - don't want him getting a cent from royalties! Hope all is well with you.
ReplyDeleteLet’s see how this will go
ReplyDelete