Hillsborough The Truth

Hillsborough’s danger was not unforeseeable. At Burnden Park in 1946, an unexpectedly large crowd, slow turnstiles and an exit gate opened to relieve pressure had helped create a fatal crush. Thirty-three people died. The inquiry warned that terraces could be full while turnstiles continued admitting spectators, and recommended expert inspections, scientifically calculated capacities, reliable counting systems and co-ordinated control by police and ground officials. Its report cautioned that only a few additional factors might turn danger into death. Yet the deaths at Burnden Park soon faded from football’s memory, while safer management remained neglected.

For generations, clubs had profited from crowded terraces without investing adequately in ageing grounds or basic facilities. As concern about football violence grew in the late 1960s and 1970s, public debate increasingly focused on controlling supporters rather than protecting them. After the 1971 Ibrox disaster killed 66 people, the Wheatley Report stressed that crowd safety had to be a primary consideration. But the prevailing response to hooliganism was containment: police escorted, searched, segregated and penned fans, while high perimeter fences and barriers restricted movement and escape. Bradford’s 1985 fire, which killed 56, exposed the risks of inadequate exits and showed how perimeter fences could turn a ground into a trap. At Heysel, later that year, 39 people died amid appalling stadium conditions, failed segregation and ineffective policing. Yet public attention settled on hooliganism, obscuring the wider failures of safety and responsibility.

Warnings had also accumulated at Hillsborough. In 1981, a near-fatal crush on the Leppings Lane terrace had been relieved by opening perimeter gates. The ground underwent alterations, but the old and new barriers remained unevenly distributed. In 1986, an experienced police inspector warned that the Leppings Lane turnstiles could not handle the numbers of away fans and might cause disorder. The 1988 semi-final offered a further lesson: officers restricted access to the central pens once they were full, directing arrivals towards the side pens. But the following year’s operational order was largely copied from the previous one, with no contingency plan for the familiar pre-match bottleneck, overcrowded pens, opening exit gates or closing the tunnel.

The change of match commander made the omissions still more serious. Chief Superintendent Brian Mole, who had overseen earlier semi-finals, was transferred from Hammerton Road shortly before the 1989 match. His replacement, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, had little relevant experience and barely familiarised himself with Hillsborough before taking command. He did not study much of the guidance or investigate the earlier crushes and delayed kick-off. The operational order emphasised segregation, searching and control, while offering little practical direction on overcrowding or evacuation. The club, Football Association, local authority, police and safety authorities all had responsibilities in maintaining a safe venue, but complacency allowed old hazards to persist.

On 15 April, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest met in the FA Cup semi-final. Around 54,000 supporters converged on Sheffield, with most Liverpool fans unfamiliar with the ground. The police operation was extensive, but the arrival of thousands in the final half-hour was entirely predictable: tickets instructed fans to be inside only 15 minutes before kick-off. At the Leppings Lane end, just 23 turnstiles served areas accommodating more than 24,000 spectators. The narrow, enclosed spaces outside them became a dangerous bottleneck. Inside, fans entering the terrace faced a tunnel directly opposite the turnstiles. It led down to central pens 3 and 4, not to the side pens, but there were no signs or stewards to direct them elsewhere.

As the central pens filled, fans were left to “find their own level.” The system recorded only the total number entering the terrace, not the numbers in individual pens, and no one controlled the distribution. By around 2.30 p.m., the central pens were densely packed while the side pens remained comparatively empty. Outside, the turnstiles could not process the increasing crowd. Fans described a crush with no orderly queues or effective filtering; some climbed over walls to escape. Police accounts, by contrast, increasingly blamed late arrivals, drunkenness and fans intent on forcing their way in. The evidence of the wider day showed generally good-humoured supporters and little serious disorder.

With the pressure outside worsening, Superintendent Marshall asked the control box to open the exit gates. Duckenfield initially hesitated, concerned that doing so would undermine the police plan and admit ticketless or troublesome fans. At about 2.52 p.m., he authorised gate C to be opened. The decision relieved the crush outside, but more than 2,000 people entered the ground. Most took the obvious route down the tunnel into pens 3 and 4, already dangerously overcrowded. No one blocked the tunnel or redirected them to the emptier side pens. The pressure tightened until people could not breathe or move; barriers buckled and bodies fell over one another. At 3.06 p.m. the referee stopped the match. What officers first mistook for a pitch invasion was a desperate attempt to escape the crush.

The response was confused and inadequately co-ordinated. Some police officers and fans worked to pull people from the pens, but locked perimeter gates and the mass of bodies impeded rescue. Fans tore down advertising hoardings to carry the injured across the pitch. Medical provision at the ground was minimal: the official support consisted largely of St John’s Ambulance volunteers, with few stretchers or supplies. Ambulances arrived, but communication failures, congestion and uncertainty about where to go hindered their work. The police did not promptly activate an organised response, and the public were left without clear information. At the gymnasium, bodies and casualties arrived amid general confusion; there was no immediate, coherent triage system, and some people were assumed dead without adequate examination.

Families searching for loved ones were passed between the ground, hospitals, a police station and a boys’ club used as a reception centre. Phone lines were overwhelmed, information was scarce, and some people were told that relatives were safe when they were not. Barry Devonside, whose son Christopher was in the crush, was repeatedly asked to describe him, including the distinctive Welsh rugby shirt he wore. He was told Christopher was not in the gymnasium and searched the hospital before returning to Hillsborough late at night. There he was shown numbered photographs of the dead. When he recognised his son, Christopher was brought to him in a body bag. Barry was hurried through identification and questioned about the journey and drinking, despite his shock and grief. Other families faced similarly rigid procedures. The coroner’s arrangements took precedence over their need for time, privacy and information; at 9.30 p.m., six hours after the evacuation, identification began in the gymnasium.

For some families, the first photographs brought an end to hours of searching; for others, they deepened uncertainty. Dolores and Les Steele spent much of the evening trying to find their son Philip. At the Northern General Hospital, they heard a list of descriptions, including one that seemed to fit him, but were initially told not to pursue it because some details were wrong. When a social worker pressed for the belongings to be checked, Philip was identified. Les was then separated from Dolores and questioned about the journey and drinking. Other families encountered similarly confusing information and abrupt procedures. Jimmy Aspinall, searching for his son James, was told that he was not on the lists of the dead or injured. He returned to Sheffield after learning that James had not arrived home, and finally identified him from a photograph in the gymnasium. At home, his wife Margaret had waited through the night, clinging to the belief that James must still be alive.

The Jones family’s experience was no less distressing. Doreen and Les travelled to Sheffield after their daughter Stephanie reported that she had lost her brother Richard and his girlfriend, Tracey. At the gymnasium they waited among other families, then were shown small photographs and brought to the bodies. Doreen tried to reach Richard but was forcibly stopped. Police then demanded statements while the family was still in shock. Les recalled questions about drinking and the night before the match, followed by a statement containing basic errors. The experience left them feeling that they had been processed rather than cared for: their need for time and privacy gave way to officials’ demands for information.

The aftermath was soon shaped by a second injury: the public blame placed on Liverpool supporters. Before the disaster’s circumstances were properly established, police claims that fans had forced their way into the ground, were drunk and had behaved violently were repeated as fact. Early reports spoke of a broken gate and ticketless supporters rushing the stadium. Then came accusations that fans had attacked rescuers, stolen from the dead and urinated on police officers. These allegations, attributed to police sources and Sheffield MP Irvine Patnick, dominated headlines. The Sun gave them its front page under “THE TRUTH,” asserting that fans had robbed victims and attacked a constable giving the kiss of life. The claims were unsupported, but their force was immediate: the dead and survivors were made to appear responsible for the disaster that had killed and injured them.

Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry rejected that account. His interim report, published on 1 August 1989, identified overcrowding as the real cause and police failure as the main reason. Once gate C was opened, the failure to close the tunnel allowed people to pour into already overcrowded central pens. Taylor called that failure a “blunder of the first magnitude,” and criticised the sluggish response, poor leadership and inadequate rescue arrangements. He found that the dangerous build-up outside the turnstiles should have been anticipated and that drunkenness and hooliganism did not cause the disaster. He also criticised the club, Sheffield City Council and the Football Association for failures concerning the ground, its safety arrangements and the out-of-date safety certificate. Yet the report did not fully examine the medical response or the treatment of families, and its recognition of serious police failure did not lead to criminal prosecutions.

The Director of Public Prosecutions decided in August 1990 that the evidence was insufficient to prosecute any officer or other individual. Families were given no detailed explanation and no access to the material on which the decision rested. Meanwhile, the inquests offered little reassurance. Coroner Stefan Popper first held individual preliminary hearings, or mini-inquests, where police officers read summaries of evidence that families could not challenge. Blood-alcohol results were announced, reinforcing the implication that the dead had been drunk. The families’ solicitor even described a proportion of those killed as too drunk to drive, while the press turned the figures into further evidence of culpability.

When the generic inquests resumed, Popper imposed a 3.15 p.m. cut-off, excluding evidence about the rescue, medical care and deaths after that time. He reasoned that crushing had caused fatal injuries and that death followed within minutes. Families seeking answers about whether more effective treatment might have saved lives were therefore prevented from examining those circumstances. The hearing also restricted disclosure, relied on selected evidence and left survivors without legal representation. Families were represented by one barrister, while several lawyers represented police interests. At the end, Popper directed the jury on the available verdicts, explaining that accidental death could include negligence. The jury returned accidental-death verdicts for all 96. Families regarded the result as a grave miscarriage of justice, not an answer to how their loved ones had died.

A judicial review brought by six families failed in November 1993. The judges upheld the inquests, including the coroner’s cut-off, and accepted that the police had already paid compensation. The families’ belief that the proceedings had never properly tested the evidence was not resolved. Nor did the ruling end the public accusations. Brian Clough and Margaret Thatcher’s former press secretary, Bernard Ingham, repeated claims that Liverpool fans had caused the deaths. Their comments revived the same stigma Taylor had rejected, leaving bereaved relatives to defend the names of their loved ones as well as seek accountability.

In 1995 the Hillsborough Project published No Last Rights, a detailed critique of the inquests, media coverage and legal processes. It argued that the bereaved had been denied justice by restricted disclosure, unequal representation and procedures that prevented meaningful cross-examination. Its 87 recommendations addressed crowd safety, the immediate treatment of bereaved families, public inquiries and inquests. The report also argued that the inquest verdicts concealed the sequence of negligence that had led to the deaths. Its findings reached few national newspapers.

Television brought the case before a wider audience. Jimmy McGovern’s drama-documentary Hillsborough drew on the research and family testimony, challenging the established story of drunken, violent supporters. It highlighted the testimony of stadium video technician Roger Houldsworth, who said the cameras had shown the central pens filling before gate C opened. The Daily Mirror called for the inquests to be reopened, while the South Yorkshire police maintained that the programme revealed nothing new. In Parliament, Home Secretary Michael Howard acknowledged the families’ distress but stood by the previous investigations. Without access to the evidence needed to judge what had been withheld or distorted, the families were again left confronting the limits of the process that claimed to have established the truth.

Labour’s 1997 election victory brought a new Home Secretary, Jack Straw, and another opening for the Hillsborough families. He promised an independent judicial scrutiny to examine new evidence and invited Lord Justice Stuart-Smith to conduct it. The announcement was widely reported as a new inquiry, but its remit was much narrower: evidence had to be genuinely new, previously unavailable to the Taylor Inquiry, the inquests and prosecuting authorities, and significant enough to have changed their decisions. The families were not being offered a fresh investigation into what had happened; they were being asked to satisfy a judge that something unknown could overturn conclusions already reached.

The South Yorkshire police held the records gathered by the West Midlands investigators, including statements, photographs and video material. Families still had not seen much of this evidence. Under pressure from the scrutiny, they began receiving “body files” on their loved ones, and found contradictions and inaccuracies in accounts they had never previously been allowed to examine. At their first meeting with Stuart-Smith in Liverpool, the judge greeted them with a joke comparing their arrival to that of Liverpool fans, who supposedly turned up late. Families were appalled. Though he apologised, his opening remarks did little to ease their concern that the scrutiny had already accepted the old account of events. He also made clear that he could not act as an appeal court for the Divisional Court’s ruling on the inquests.

One of the families’ central concerns was the way South Yorkshire officers’ accounts had been prepared. In the aftermath, officers were told to write personal “recollections” on plain paper, including their feelings and observations, rather than make formal, witnessed statements. These accounts were then reviewed by the force and its solicitors before formal statements went to the West Midlands investigation. A former officer showed Stuart-Smith how his recollections had been cut and rewritten. He believed that criticism of senior officers and failures of organisation had been removed. The judge focused largely on whether particular deletions altered facts, accepting that some changes were errors of judgement and that lawyers could exercise judgement about material unhelpful to the police.

Documents later made public showed a much wider process. More than 400 recollections had passed through the solicitors; over 90 were recommended for alteration. South Yorkshire’s review team helped discuss revisions with officers, and many deleted passages concerned poor communications, lack of leadership and confusion during the rescue. Criticism of Liverpool fans, by contrast, often remained. Stuart-Smith acknowledged a pattern of removing criticism of senior officers while retaining criticism of fans, but concluded that the process had not impeded the Taylor Inquiry and that the solicitors had committed no professional misconduct. The files exposed a force preparing its defence while the independent investigation was under way, yet the scrutiny produced no further inquiry. Straw accepted the judge’s conclusions and promised reforms to police discipline, including changing the standard of proof and preventing officers from escaping hearings through early retirement.

The families’ private prosecution of former match commander David Duckenfield and his deputy Bernard Murray eventually brought the central question of individual responsibility before a criminal court. Their lawyers argued that, after opening exit gate C, the officers failed to close the tunnel into the already packed central pens. The prosecution said that this failure, over more than twenty minutes, exposed spectators to an obvious and serious risk of death. The defence argued that the disaster was unforeseeable, that the officers faced a crisis, and that no reasonable match commander could have predicted the force of the crowd in the tunnel. Hooliganism resurfaced, though in softened form: the defence suggested that late, frustrated supporters might have pushed forward, without claiming that they intended harm.

The trial was significant because the families had been denied a prosecution for years, but its legal test was formidable. The jury had to decide whether death was foreseeable, whether effective steps could have prevented it, whether the officers’ failure was negligent, and whether that negligence was so grave as to constitute a serious criminal offence. Judge Mr Justice Hooper repeatedly reminded the jury that the officers had acted in a crisis and that a guilty verdict might send the wrong message to others dealing with emergencies. He also referred to the deaths of 96 people as a “mere fact,” a phrase that devastated the families. Murray was acquitted; the jury could not reach a verdict on Duckenfield, and the judge refused a retrial, ruling that a fair trial was no longer possible. The outcome left the families without a determination of Duckenfield’s guilt, though the fact that the case reached a jury confirmed that their prosecution was not misconceived.

The proceedings could not erase the wider institutional failures. Unsafe stadiums, out-of-date safety certification, inadequate turnstiles, poor crowd management and a policing culture preoccupied with controlling football supporters had developed over decades. The club, the Football Association, the local authority and safety regulators all had responsibilities, as did the police. Yet the public debate continued to return to the myth that Liverpool fans had caused their own deaths. The Sun’s false allegations, originally based on police briefings, endured long after Taylor had rejected them. Writers, journalists and broadcasters repeated claims of drunkenness, violence and ticketless supporters forcing their way in. Some accounts even folded Hillsborough into a broader stereotype of Liverpool as a city that supposedly wallowed in victimhood.

The Sun’s 2004 apology called its coverage a “terrible mistake,” but families rejected it as insufficient and suspected it was intended to restore sales. Kelvin MacKenzie later insisted that he had told the truth, repeating the false claim that drunken fans caused the disaster. The families continued to answer such claims, not because they sought revenge, but because misinformation tarnished the dead and burdened survivors with having to defend themselves. Their distress was renewed by careless media references and jokes, and by demands that they find “closure” and move on. As they made clear, grief could not be separated from the continuing failure to acknowledge responsibility.

The unresolved questions were not only about who opened the gate, but what happened to the injured once they were removed from the pens. The Taylor Inquiry did not investigate medical care in sufficient detail, and the coroner’s 3.15 p.m. cut-off prevented evidence about many later deaths and treatment from being heard. Anne Williams, the mother of Kevin, pursued evidence that he might have been alive after that time, including conflicting police accounts and medical opinions challenging the official estimate of when he died. Having exhausted domestic remedies, she took his case to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the state had failed to provide an effective investigation into whether he could have been saved. Her case carried implications for all the families.

Twenty years after the disaster, bereaved relatives and survivors continued to seek acknowledgement and accountability, not a convenient story of closure. They had endured bereavement, trauma, hostile myths and investigations that restricted disclosure and cross-examination. The systems intended to establish the truth had repeatedly protected institutions and narrowed scrutiny. Their anger was not a failure to move on, but a reasoned response to injustice that remained unanswered.