Kevin Sampson - Voices of Hillsborough: the real story told by the people themselves

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Epub ISBN: 9781448176700
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Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
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London SW1V 2SA

Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright Kevin Sampson 2016

With thanks to Peter Marshall and the BBC for permission to reproduce BBC Panoramas interview with Anne Williams for Hillsborough How They Buried the Truth 2013

Kevin Sampson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Ebury Press in 2016

www.penguin.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

HB ISBN 9780091955618
TPB ISBN 9780091958206

On 15 April 1989, the world witnessed one of the worst football disasters in history at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. 96 people were crushed to death and another 766 injured in a tragedy that was later admitted to have been exacerbated by shocking police failures.

Hillsborough Voices honours the memory of all those who died and all those left behind. From the tragic events in the stadium to what unfolded in the hours, days and then years that followed, Kevin Sampson interweaves the voices of the people who were there with the families and friends of those who died, and all who have played a key role in the long search for the truth.

Kevin was at Hillsborough as a fan and witnessed the horror firsthand. He has conducted exhaustive and exclusive interviews both with public figures and those who are telling their heart-rending personal accounts to bring us the full story for the first time.

Kevin Sampson is the author of eight novels as well as Extra Time, his account of a season in the life of a Liverpool FC fanatic. He has contributed to football anthologies, including Here We Go Gathering Cups in May and Redmen, which he also edited.

Kevin is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Observer and Liverpool FC TV, the clubs dedicated TV channel. He lives on Merseyside where he is a member of the Liverpool Producers Association, and a long-term supporter of the Writing on the Wall festival and CALM, the mental health charity.

You can find him at @ksampsonwriter on Twitter.

For the 96 who lost their lives at Hillsborough, Anne Williams, and John and Joe Glover.

For many people of my generation who grew up in the North West, Hillsborough will always be the definitive event of our lives. It didnt matter who you supported, we all said the same thing: It could so easily have been us.

15 April 1989 was the day when all the injustices of 1980s Britain suddenly hit very close to home for its teenagers. The riots in Toxteth and Moss Side as well as the miners strike had been on our doorstep, but involved people we did not know. By contrast, Hillsborough affected our family, our friends, our football clubs, our world. And it confirmed a feeling that had been building inside many of us during that divisive decade: we were indeed second-class citizens in our own country.

I was 19 at the time and can remember that fateful weekend as if it were yesterday.

The back room of the Cherry Tree in Culcheth was a long, long way away from the dreaming spires. But thats where I was on the evening of Friday 14 April 1989, home from university and glad to be back in a world where the only Blues that mattered were not of the Cambridge Varsity variety, but the ones who played at Goodison Park.

From the moment we walked in, the air was thick with talk of the semi-final weekend.

Culcheth back then was a Kopite stronghold most likely the legacy of local hero Roger Hunt. The Burnham brothers, on the other hand, were known as the only match-going Evertonians, so we were well used to being on the receiving end. We were ready that night to be reminded several times of the results of the previous all-Merseyside Finals. But once the jokes had subsided, we did all agree on one thing: how on earth could the Football Association, for the second year running, have allocated the inadequate away end at Hillsborough to Liverpool?

I remember telling my old school friend Stephen Turner, who had a ticket for the Leppings Lane the following day, about our experience in its dreaded central pens the year before.

Everton had drawn with Sheffield Wednesday away in the Third Round in 1988. I recounted how, in the second half, I hadnt watched anything happening on the pitch. I was so worried that my dad and younger brother John were in the same discomfort as me that I kept my eyes trained on the back of their heads, determined not to lose them in the crowd. In 40 years of going to matches, it remains the worst experience I have ever had.

Less than 24 hours after that conversation in the pub, I was in a car on the M6 with my dad and brothers, heading away from Evertons game at Villa Park and listening in stunned silence as the first reports of the horror at Hillsborough drifted in. On the radio, they were already blaming the fans. We knew different from our own experience: the ground was unsafe.

That Saturday night we returned to the Cherry Tree and waited for friends to return from Hillsborough. They arrived in dribs and drabs, in varying degrees of trauma. They were never the same again.

In the years after Hillsborough, throughout the 1990s, it would be a common experience to be out on a Friday night with friends who had been at the match and, after a few social drinks took effect, they would start talking distractedly about what they saw. They would ask endlessly why there had never been any real accountability for what happened. At the same time, the very same conversation was being played out in thousands of other homes and pubs and clubs across the country.

These were the real Hillsborough voices the lost souls who went to a football match and ended up witnessing scenes akin to hell on earth; who drifted home from the scene of a disaster but got no professional help to cope, and who, just days after the tragedy, found themselves being blamed by police and press for what had happened.

For 20 years those haunted voices were shouting into a wilderness. Nothing came back. The country wasnt listening. Why cant these whingeing Scousers let it go? was an infuriating comment in the South throughout the 1990s.

It took a strange twist of fate to change the course of events.