REVIEW - Hillsborough Voices - The Real Story.

Kevin Sampson - Ebury Press.

Jan 22, 2025

Without any doubt whatsoever, the Hillsborough disaster is the most important point in my life as a football supporter. I was 25 when the disaster happened. God, that seems a lifetime away. Younger than my daughter, who I still think of as a bairn.

I'd been going to away games since I was about 18 and had enough awareness of "bad ends" at football grounds, over-crowding, the behaviour of the Police and the general antipathy that existed towards football supporters and working class people from the authorities.

The Hillsborough Disaster happened only four years after the end of the Miners Strike of which South Yorkshire was at its heart (and the most defining moment of my political life still) and Orgreave remains an open wound from that era.

I’d been in the Leppings Lane End several times, most memorably for a big promotion game with Sheffield Wednesday, which we lost 4-2 and sub-consciously registered how much of a crush it all was with those pens.

Ironically, I didn't think Hillsborough was the worst terrace I'd stood on.

There were lots of crap grounds but ironically my least favourite was that awful terraced corner between the Anfield Road End and what was the Kemlyn Road Stand (now the Centenary Stand) followed by the awful Park End at Goodison.

There was nothing worldly about me. Anyone who went away following United in those days will be able to relate tales of awful facilities - White Hart Lane in the FAC in hindsight being the closest I'd come to football disaster on a personal basis though Hillsborough was terrible as well.

Anyone with any experience of being part of big away supports really knew what happened at Hillsborough on 15/Apr/1989. I was never in any doubt of the general cause of the tragedy was down to terrible facilities, mismanagement and the mindset of the Police.

Of course, anyone who wasn't there couldn't have been alive to the details of what went on, on the day but my intuition has always been that supporters were never to blame. But even I underestimated the venality of the Police and judiciary.

I have Phil Scraton's excellent tome Hillsborough - The Truth on my bookshelf, well-thumbed and it vindicated everything I thought had happened that terrible day. Its a must-read for anyone who really wants to understand the disaster.

I've watched documentaries and I've followed the twists in turns in the campaign at times bewildered by the legal detail but full of admiration for the survivors and the people of Merseyside who refused to allow themselves and their loved ones to be disgraced and denied justice.

This book was first published in 2016 but I've only just got round to reading it for some reason. Everything I've read previously about the Hillsborough disaster was a precursor to this book.

The author is Kevin Sampson, a Liverpudlian whose name some of you might recognise as the writer of AwayDays but also the lad who has written Powder, Leisure, Outlaws, Clubland, Freshers, Stars Are Stars, Extra Time, The Killing Pool and The House on The Hill.

If you are looking for recommendation, I'd go for Stars Are Stars. Sampson has done an outstanding job presenting the experiences of some of those deeply affected by Hillsborough. He presents their voices in a skillful and structured way - from the run up to the disaster until final vindication. But there is a rawness that will reach inside you. There were several moments when I cried reading this book.

That's not because I suffer from the weird form of modern emotional incontinence we see so much these days but because what these people have been through, people just like you and I, has been beyond description in what has been presented to us as a just and civilised society.

There were other moments when I felt my fists clench in rage at the treatment of the bereaved and those who wanted answers and sought justice. I was unaware of a bereaved father being being beaten up in front of a senior Police Officer or the wire-tapping and thefts from those who campaigned for justice. This was Liverpool, in the 1990s ... this wasn't East Germany in the 60s.

The book is tremendously uplifting as well. Aside from the grotesque injustices visited upon these people like you and I which will enrage any of us, there are numerous stories of kindness - the people of Sheffield opening their doors to distraught Liverpool supporters and their families as well as the humbling determination of those damaged and traumatised by loss.

These people were on their own for so long. They were isolated, ignored and often vilified, dismissed and ridiculed. None of us in the football community, as supporters did anywhere near enough and I cringed at a bereaved father being on the end of a thoughtless jibe in the workplace for a man the writer describes as a Geordie.

While the SKY dishes were going on the sides of houses and new all-seater stands were being built, these people went through agony and we did virtually nothing to support them.

Few politicians come out of this very well - particularly the Thatcher-Major Governments who I believe were culpable in giving the Police a free pass. Neither does Blair's Government and in particular Jack Straw but in fairness Andy Burnham, Gordon Brown and latterly David Cameron and Theresa May deserve credit of a kind.

There is much to admire in Andy Burnham. It took a Liverpool-born, working class lad elevated to a ministerial position to pull the levers to get some justice for those bereaved and damaged by Hillsborough. That's almost a freak situation and suggests an access to justice based upon random patronage of a kind.

Where I depart from Burnham is in his framing of the context for the disaster and the Establishment cover-up that followed it.

Burnham creates an 80s Thatcherite paradigm that explains it all and which might be comforting for some. But he is of course only partially correct.

There are other injustices which suggest an institutional malaise going back to the Birmingham Six, Bloody Sunday and I'm sure many, many more smaller and unknown injustices that we'll never know which have destroyed people.

If you are looking for another spectacular injustice unfolding, you should pay some attention to Grenfell.

The final passages of this book talk about Hillsborough forming part of the school curriculum. I agree. No account of modern British history, politics, media and social attitudes is better illustrated than the experience of this disaster.

But it is says much more for the triumph of the human spirit too. You should read this book.

True Faith - Independent NUFC Fanzine

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