It was a year into these inquests, and 26 years since David Duckenfield, as a South Yorkshire police chief superintendent, took command of the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, that he finally, devastatingly, admitted his serious failures directly caused the deaths of 96 people there.

Duckenfield had arrived at the converted courtroom in Warrington with traces of his former authority, but over seven airless, agonisingly tense days in the witness box last March, he was steadily worn down, surrendering slowly into a crumpled heap. From his concession that he had inadequate experience to oversee the safety of 54,000 people, to finally accepting responsibility for the deaths, Duckenfield’s admissions were shockingly complete.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Duckenfield arrives to give evidence in March 2015. Photograph: Dave Thompson/Getty Images

He also admitted at the inquests that even as the event was descending into horror and death, he had infamously lied, telling Graham Kelly, then secretary of the Football Association, that Liverpool fans were to blame, for gaining unauthorised entry through a large exit gate. Duckenfield had in fact himself ordered the gate to be opened, to relieve a crush in the bottleneck approach to the Leppings Lane turnstiles.

The chief constable, Peter Wright, had to state that evening that police had authorised the opening of the gate, but as these inquests, at two years the longest jury case in British history, heard in voluminous detail, Duckenfield’s lie endured. It set the template for the South Yorkshire police stance: to deny any mistakes, and instead to virulently project blame on to the people who had paid to attend a football match and been plunged into hell.

The evidence built into a startling indictment of South Yorkshire police, their chain of command and conduct – a relentlessly detailed evisceration of a British police force. Responsible for an English county at the jeans-and-trainers end of the 1980s, the force had brutally policed the miners’ strike, and was described by some of its own former officers as “regimented”, with morning parade and saluting of officers, ruled by “an iron fist” institutionally unable to admit mistakes.

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The dominance of Wright, a decorated career police officer who died in 2011, loomed over the catastrophe. He was depicted as a frighteningly authoritarian figure who treated the force “like his own personal territory” and whose orders nobody – tragically – dared debate.

The families of those killed in the “pens” of Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane terrace, who have had to fight 27 years for justice and accountability, recalled the appalling way the South Yorkshire police treated them, even when breaking the news of loved ones’ deaths. Relatives and survivors recalled indifference, even hostility, in the unfolding horror – although the families’ lawyers thanked individual officers who did their valiant best to help victims. Then there was the unspeakably heartless identification process in the football club gymnasium, after which CID officers immediately grilled families about how much they and their dead loved ones had had to drink.

The families, and many survivors, spoke up in the witness box at these inquests to reclaim the good names of the people, mostly young, who went to Hillsborough that sunny April day, to watch Kenny Dalglish’s brilliant Liverpool team.

The overwhelming evidence, shown in BBC colour footage of the horrific scene, contrary to the lurid, defamatory tales spun afterwards by the police, was of Liverpool supporters heroically helping. The “fans” – a label too often applied to depict a dehumanised mob – included doctors, nurses and police officers, alongside scores of people with no medical training who, once they had escaped themselves, fought instinctively to save lives.

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The 96 people who died or were fatally injured in “pens” three and four, standing right behind the goal, so by definition Liverpool’s hard core of support, were honoured by their families in achingly tender personal statements read out in court. They came from all walks of life: working-class, middle-class, wealthy, hard-up, from Liverpool, the Midlands, London and around the country. They included a heartbreakingly large number of young people – 37 were teenagers – because to watch an FA Cup semi-final then cost only £6. They were sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, one wife – Christine Jones, 27 – and partners. Twenty-five were fathers; one, 38-year-old Inger Shah, was a single mother with two teenagers: altogether, 58 children lost a parent .

The horror the victims suffered and the generally abject response of the police and South Yorkshire metropolitan ambulance service (SYMAS) were exposed in greater detail than ever before, in months of film and photographic evidence, from cameras that had been at Hillsborough to cover a football match. Survivors of the lethal crush bore tearful witness to the vice-like squeeze, the cracking of ribs, arms and legs, faces losing colour, the vomiting and emptying of bowels and bladders, relatives and friends dying next to them, the still barely believable piles of dead bodies at the front of the “pens”.

One doctor said the crush, which caused death by compression asphyxia as people could not expand their chests to breathe in, was “like a constrictor snake”. Survivors recalled their own helpless entrapment, the agonising suffocation, the eye-popping panic, the terrible screams for help, the delayed reaction of South Yorkshire police officers on the other side of the metal perimeter fence.

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The makeshift courtroom, assembled within the ground floor of a plate glass office block on a Warrington business park, often felt blankly incongruous for stories of such human extremes.

Yet the remnants of the police effort to blame the supporters were on show even here, despite the families’ long, exhausting battle against it, and the lord chief justice, Igor Judge, having stated when he quashed the first inquest that the narrative was false.

Duckenfield’s own barrister, John Beggs QC, an advocate instructed by police forces nationwide, pressed the case most forcefully that supporters had misbehaved, persistently introducing as context into his questioning notorious previous episodes of football hooliganism, his manner often repellent to the families attending.

But Beggs was not alone. The present-day South Yorkshire police force itself and the Police Federation also argued that Liverpool supporters outside the Leppings Lane end could be found to have contributed to the disaster because “a significant minority” were alleged to have been drunk and “non-compliant” with police orders to move back. Yet survivors gave evidence of chaos at the Leppings Lane approach, no atmosphere of drunkenness or misbehaviour, and no meaningful police activity to make orderly queueing possible in that nasty space.

Many officers who made such allegations against supporters in their original 1989 accounts, which the force notoriously vetted and altered, maintained that stance under scathing challenge by the families’ barristers. For periods, these inquests felt like an inversion of a criminal prosecution, in which police officers were repeatedly accused of lying, covering up and perverting the course of justice, while sticking insistently to their stories.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The confrontation between riot police and miners at Orgreave in 1984. Photograph: Photofusion/Rex

Even as the terrible failures of Hillsborough were being laid bare at the inquests, the South Yorkshire police culture of the 1980s, and its other infamous scandal, Orgreave, were being further exposed. In July, the Independent Police Complaints Commission decided not to formally investigate the force for its alleged assaults on striking miners picketing the Orgreave coking plant in June 1984, and alleged perjury and perverting the course of justice in prosecutions of 95 miners which collapsed a year later.

However, the IPCC’s review found “support for the allegation” that three senior South Yorkshire officers had “made up an untrue account exaggerating the degree of violence” from miners, to justify the police’s own actions that day. It revealed that senior officers and the force’s own solicitor privately recognised there had been some excessive police violence, and perjury in the 1985 trial, but never acknowledged it publicly, and settled 39 miners’ civil claims, paying £425,000 without admitting liability. The IPCC said the evidence “raises ... doubts about the ethical standards and complicity of officers high up in [South Yorkshire police]”.

Wright never doubted the rightness of the violent defeat meted out to the miners, and when the prosecutions collapsed adamantly denied any malpractice. No police officer was ever disciplined or held accountable, and there was no reform.

Four years later, on 15 April 1989, 24,000 Liverpool supporters set off in high spirits for the semi-final in Sheffield, their safety dependent on the same police force.

Wright’s high-handed rule was at the root of the disaster, the inquests heard. Just 19 days before the semi-final, he abruptly moved his seasoned, expert, popular commander at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium, Ch Supt Brian Mole. In Mole’s place, Wright promoted Duckenfield, who had never commanded a match at Hillsborough before, nor even been on duty there for 10 years.

A trail of former officers bleakly confirmed the farce behind the switch: a bullying prank played on a probationary constable by officers in Mole’s division the previous October. Reportedly to teach him a lesson because they felt he was making radio distress calls too readily, the officers put on balaclavas and terrified the probationer with a mock armed holdup. On 20 February 1989, Wright personally sacked four officers and disciplined four more for this excessive internal prank. But Wright’s disastrous decision to move Mole was never questioned by senior officers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The crowd builds up with 20 minutes to go before the game. Photograph: The Guardian

Peter Hayes, deputy chief constable in 1989, and Stuart Anderson, assistant chief constable in charge of personnel, came as old men to these inquests, and denied Mole was moved because of the prank, saying it was for “career development”. Anderson said Mole needed experience outside Sheffield and the force was having problems policing Barnsley, which could be “extremely hostile” after the miners’ strike, in a climate of “social disintegration” and the impending closure of 14 pits.

Walter Jackson, assistant chief constable for operations, however, told the inquests that he did believe Mole was moved for not having dealt with the indiscipline firmly.

Within F division’s base at Hammerton Road station, the Guardian has been told, rank-and-file officers believed that Mole, their popular “gaffer”, was moved because of the prank. If it had been career development, there was no explanation as to why it had to be so sudden or so close to the semi-final, the force’s biggest operation of the year, nor why Mole was said by several witnesses, including Duckenfield, to have been disappointed. Nor was it clear why the force organised no professional handover: Mole cleared his desk and left. A dispute still rattles down the years about whether he offered to help Duckenfield with the match, which, in his evidence, Duckenfield denied.

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Jackson and Anderson still stood by their belief that Duckenfield could handle the semi-final, given experienced officers and the operational plan in place from the previous year when, under Mole’s command, an identical match between the same two clubs was played at Hillsborough.

It was revelatory to hear F division officers recount Duckenfield’s heavy-handed manner on his arrival, how unpopular he made himself. William West, a constable, remembered Duckenfield telling officers “we were useless, we were no good, we had been doing it all wrong … He got us into the briefing room and he basically spoke at us for 20 minutes, telling us how the district was a disgrace, it had been badly run, it was going to be his way now.” Duckenfield, said West, “wasn’t a pleasant man”. He imagined he would be a bully, and “look for scapegoats”.

Duckenfield told the inquests that he did inherit disciplinary problems from Mole, that he believed this was a reason why Mole was moved, and that he himself was from the force’s “disciplinarian” wing. After taking over on 27 March 1989, Duckenfield found time to lay down the law to his officers, but he admitted to Christina Lambert QC, for the coroner, Sir John Goldring, that he failed to do basic preparation for the semi-final. He did not study relevant paperwork, including the force’s major incident procedure, and signed off the operational plan two days after taking over, before he had even visited the ground.

He turned up to command the semi-final, he admitted, knowing very little about Hillsborough’s safety history: about the crushes at the 1981 and 1988 semi-finals, or that the approach to the Leppings Lane end was a “natural geographical bottleneck” to which Mole had carefully managed supporters’ entry.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An image of the gate that was opened to allow fans in. Photograph: Hillsborough Inquests/PA

Duckenfield admitted he had not familiarised himself in any detail with the ground’s layout or capacities of its different sections. He did not know the seven turnstiles, through which 10,100 Liverpool supporters with standing tickets had to be funnelled to gain access to the Leppings Lane terrace, opened opposite a large tunnel leading straight to the central pens, three and four. He did not even know that the police were responsible for monitoring overcrowding, nor that the police had a tactic, named after a superintendent, John Freeman, of closing the tunnel when the central pens were full, and directing supporters to the sides. He admitted his focus before the match had been on dealing with misbehaviour, and he had not considered the need to protect people from overcrowding or crushing.



The families of the people who were ushered into that terrifyingly unsafe situation and died read shattering personal statements, many remembering their loved ones’ casual goodbyes. Irene McGlone recalled her husband, Alan, 24, skipping with their daughters, Amy, then five, and two-year-old Claire, before driving to Hillsborough with three friends including Joseph Clark, 29, another father of two, who also died. That night, Amy asked if her dad could wake them up when he came home.

“I am still waiting to wake my girls up from this nightmare, and send their daddy in to them,” McGlone wrote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The control room at Hillsborough in 1989. Photograph: Inquest handout

Having failed to prepare, Duckenfield admitted 26 years later that he also failed profoundly at the match itself. He did not know what he was doing. While Mole used to be driven all over Sheffield before a big match to check on traffic flows, then, closer to the 3pm kickoff, patrol around the ground, Duckenfield said he still could not remember at all what he did in more than two hours between concluding his briefing of officers and arriving in the control box at 2pm. Once in the small control room, he stayed there.

Supt Roger Marshall, put in charge outside, was new to the role. In his evidence, he accepted the police had no plan to filter people’s entry into the Leppings Lane bottleneck, using police horses or cordons, beyond “some random ticket checking and … some checks for drunkenness”. Repeatedly played footage of the mass congestion that developed, Marshall admitted that it was a problem starting at 2.15pm, with thousands more people still arriving, and by 2.35pm, police had “completely lost control”.



Marshall conceded he did not make any decisions of his own to alleviate the developing crisis, or give orders to his officers, who he agreed became “inoperative” and “ineffective” at the turnstiles, despite doing their best. He was seen forlornly asking people in his sight, with thousands behind them, to move back. Challenged that he failed to deal with the situation, Marshall said: “Well not really, because I was active in the middle of the crowd … waving my arms about.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Roger Marshall in the crowd outside the stadium. Photograph: The Guardian

Asked if he should have called for a delay to the 3pm kickoff, to relieve the pressure of people anxious to be in for the start, Marshall said: “That is one of the most profound regrets … that I did not do so.”

By 2.48pm, the crowd at the turnstiles had compacted into a dangerous crush, and Marshall radioed the control room, asking if the large exit gate C could be opened. Duckenfield did not respond until Marshall said somebody would die outside if he did not open the gate. At 2.52pm, Duckenfield ordered it open.

Reaching this notorious moment on his second day in the witness box, Duckenfield made more landmark admissions that went far beyond what he had confessed previously, to Lord Justice Taylor’s official 1989 inquiry, the first 1990-91 inquest in Sheffield, and the families’ private prosecutions of him and Supt Bernard Murray in 2000, when Duckenfield exercised his right to stay silent.

At these inquests, he admitted he had given “no thought” to where the people would go if he opened the gate. He had not considered the risk of overcrowding. He had not foreseen that people would naturally go down the tunnel to the central pens right in front of them. He had not realised he should do anything to close off that tunnel. The majority of the 2,000 people allowed in through gate C went straight down the tunnel to the central pens, and gross overcrowding there caused the terrible crush. Of the 96 people who died, 30 were still outside the turnstiles at 2.52pm. They went in through gate C when invited by police, and were crushed in the central pens barely 10 minutes later.



Paul Greaney QC, representing the Police Federation – who on behalf of the rank and file principally sought to emphasise senior officers’ lack of leadership – took his turn on Duckenfield’s sixth day. Standing three rows of lawyers back, he elicited from Duckenfield admissions that he lacked competence and experience, that his knowledge of the ground was “wholly inadequate”.

In tense, charged exchanges, Greaney asked Duckenfield if he had frozen in the crucial minutes when making the decision to open the gate. Duckenfield denied this four times. Then Greaney asked again: “Mr Duckenfield, you know what was in your mind. I will ask you just one last time. Will you accept that, in fact, you froze?”

Slumped in his seat, “Yes, sir,” Duckenfield replied.

Then Greaney put to him: “That failure [to close off the tunnel] was the direct cause of the deaths of 96 persons in the Hillsborough tragedy?”

“Yes, sir,” Duckenfield said.

The horror in pens three and four was described by traumatised survivors and police officers over subsequent months of graphic, terrible evidence.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The tunnel at the Leppings Lane end of Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough ground. Photograph: PA

A police constable, Andrew Eddison, who went into the pens to pull people out, said in his statement that “everybody had urinated themselves” and defecated, and that vomit swirled over the bodies and around his feet. There were two piles of bodies at the front, and Eddison said a hand at the bottom of one was pulling at his trouser leg. Once the bodies were finally cleared, it turned out to be a child.

David Lackey, a man trapped in pen three, recalled Thomas Howard, 39, a married father of three who worked in a chemicals factory, crushed next to him, saying repeatedly: “My son, my son.” Howard’s 14-year-old son, Tommy Jr, died with him.

Duckenfield admitted quite readily in court that as people were suffering this terror, he told his lie to Kelly. This fiction, that fans without tickets had forced the gate, had already found its way to the BBC, reported as a version by John Motson, the television match commentator, at 3.13pm. Alan Green, commentator for BBC Radio 2, broadcast an unconfirmed report of “a broken-down door” at 3.40pm, then at 4.30pm he reported that police had said “a gate was forced” – the police story of misbehaviour settling on the initial public consciousness.

Jackson, the assistant chief constable who was at the ground as a guest of Sheffield Wednesday, was in the control room and heard Duckenfield say it. It took an hour for Jackson to learn the truth, when Marshall told him, at 4.15pm, that Duckenfield himself had ordered the gate opened.

Yet half an hour before that, when Jackson still believed – as he said in his evidence – that fans had “stormed” the gate, he had ordered Ch Supt Terence Addis, head of CID, to set up an investigation into the deaths. Addis, under questioning, said he had arrived at Hillsborough and talked to Jackson at 4pm but repeatedly said he could not remember what Jackson had told him; Addis said he did not think he had even asked Jackson for an initial view of what had caused the unfolding disaster.

Addis also denied that he had instructed his CID officers in the gymnasium to ask relatives about alcohol, but his account did furnish the families with an explanation for how they were questioned. The Hillsborough gymnasium was designated as the place to house bodies in a fatal emergency. With only four ambulances making it on to the pitch, 82 bodies were taken by supporters and police officers to the gymnasium, using advertising hoardings and even a stepladder as makeshift stretchers. Addis set up the gymnasium, he revealed, not just as a place of identification, but as the CID “incident room” – the centre for his investigation – “to try to identify the cause of the incident”.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Footage released by the Hillsborough inquest.

He said he had talked to Det Supt Graham McKay on the way to the gymnasium, and from McKay, Addis said, “I got most of the gist of what happened”. Although Addis did not specify what he was told, McKay, who gave evidence at the inquests, has always vehemently made the case that Liverpool supporters misbehaved and were drunk.

An extraordinary revelation was that at 5.58pm, with so many people dead, injured and traumatised, a police inspector, Gordon Sykes, sent a force photographer to take pictures of litter outside. Mark George QC, for 22 bereaved families, accused him of “digging for dirt” to establish evidence of drinking by supporters outside. Sykes denied that but admitted it was “to gain evidence of what’s been happening, one way or the other”.

In fact, the photographs showed the bins outside the Leppings Lane end, which 24,000 Liverpool supporters had passed, about a third full, mostly of soft drinks cans including Vimto, Sprite and Coke, with a few beer bottles or cans.



Addis decided all the identification should take place in one location, so he ordered the bodies of 12 people who had been taken to hospital and certified dead to be taken back to Hillsborough where the other 82 bodies were being kept. The other two victims were Lee Nicol, 14, who was pronounced dead two days later, and Tony Bland, then 18, who was kept on life support for four years, before he died in 1993.

SYMAS had supplied body bags to transport the bodies to Sheffield’s medico-legal centre, a state-of-the-art mortuary designed for sensitive treatment of relatives. Addis, in his evidence, said he believed it was too small.

At the gymnasium, families were made to queue outside in the cold, clear night, then eventually brought in and told to look through Polaroid photographs of all those who died, not grouped by age or gender. Families whose loved ones had bus passes or other identifying documents on them were also made to go through this process. When their dead relatives were brought out to them, they were in those body bags. Several parents testified that they were told they could not hold or kiss their dead children because they were “the property of the coroner”.

Dr Stefan Popper, the coroner, who approved the arrangements, ordered blood samples to be taken from all victims and tested for alcohol – even the children, including Jon-Paul Gilhooley, the youngest, aged 10. It has now been revealed that some people lying injured in hospital also had their blood taken and tested for alcohol. Popper has never fully explained why he decided it was appropriate to take and test people’s blood.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Injured fans lying on the pitch. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images

Theresa Arrowsmith and John Traynor, whose two brothers, Kevin and Christopher Traynor, 16 and 26, both died, drove over from Liverpool with Chris’s wife, Liz, identifying the men at 2.45am in the gymnasium. They were then immediately interviewed by CID officers. Arrowsmith recalled they would not believe her when she said the brothers had had only two pints before the match. Her barrister, Stephen Simblet, told Addis the Traynors were distressed that police officers were eating fried chicken and chips in the gymnasium, and they now associated the smell with their grief and trauma.

Addis said the officers had been on duty for a long time, deserved a meal, and there was nowhere else they could have had it. “I didn’t ever detect any smell of fried food,” said the head of CID.

The story that the disaster should be blamed on the supporters was, meanwhile, being spread throughout that night by South Yorkshire police officers in their Niagara sports and social club, including the most lurid tales that would be published by the Sun, under the headline The Truth, during the week. It emerged at the inquests that one of the nastiest stories, that fans had picked the pockets of the dead, was not just untrue, but that the police had evidence that it was untrue from the beginning because they had made routine logs of all the cash and other property found on each person.

Sykes confirmed that in the Niagara he had seen a local Conservative MP, Irvine Patnick, and asked him if he wanted to know “the truth”. He then took Patnick to several officers who told him that some supporters were “pissed out of their minds”, and that they were “pissing on us” and kicking and punching police during the rescue operation.



“It was booze that did it,” Patnick, in a note, recorded Sykes telling him. “You speak up for us to tell them in parliament what happened.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The police’s Niagara club.

The astounding hypocrisy of this became plain as Sykes admitted it in court: this was all said in the bar. Even with the deaths of so many people who had been in their care, and with their distraught relatives and friends still strung all over Sheffield desperate for news, many police officers went for a drink when their shifts officially ended. Those at the Niagara club included Duckenfield, Murray and other senior officers. Sykes confirmed, almost casually, that the police were “upset, shocked, and having a drink, and talking about their experiences”.

A picture emerged in glimpses of a drinking culture in the South Yorkshire police, with most stations at the time having a bar. In the midst of a hard-faced culture in which officers rarely talked about their feelings, some drank heavily after the disaster. Police Federation minutes noted that officers “got considerably drunk” that night while bereaved relatives were queueing outside to enter the hell of the gymnasium – where police would interrogate them about drinking.

Duckenfield was one of several officers who developed a drink problem afterwards, describing himself sinking “half tumblers of whisky” in the mornings to enable him to read documentation for the Taylor inquiry.

That put into perspective the relentless police allegations about people who had a drink before a football match, the po-faced assertions that people smelled of “intoxicants” or were, in the odd phrase favoured by Beggs, “in drink”.

At the inquests, lawyerly detail was focused on the few, startling internal documents produced by the force from 2010 in the public disclosure process to the Hillsborough Independent Panel, evidential foundations for the projection of blame.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An injured fan on the pitch. Photograph: PA

Wright had opened a fact-finding meeting at 9am on 16 April 1989, the day after the disaster, by immediately exonerating his force. “I’m not in the business of questioning decisions,” the minutes record him saying, to a group including Duckenfield and all senior officers responsible for the match.

They then told him stories against the fans: they were not inside the ground by 2.30pm because there were “hordes of people drinking”; they were “not normal”. Not one officer mentioned the actual cause of the deaths, the failure to close the tunnel, or the horror people suffered. Nobody mentioned Mole’s removal, and nobody, Duckenfield included, accepted any responsibility. Wright told his officers: “You did a good job.”

He moved on to discuss how the story of “drunken, marauding fans” would be got out, saying the force could not do it too publicly because it had to respond “professionally”. But, he said, the “animalistic” behaviour of fans would emerge.

Later that day, the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, visited Hillsborough. Wright briefed them. Ingham has always since said of Hillsborough that he “learned on the day” it was caused by a “tanked-up mob”.

Ingham, who was later given a knighthood, has confirmed to the Guardian that this was what the South Yorkshire police told the prime minister. The police, he said, never even told them Duckenfield was inexperienced.

The South Yorkshire Police Federation secretary, Paul Middup, widely quoted in the media at the time, used the same phrase: “A tanked-up mob.” In a television interview played in court, Middup said the disaster was not the police’s fault, and criticised supporters’ behaviour, saying they would not follow officers’ instructions.



The Sun quoted him in its article published on the Wednesday, 19 April 1989, saying “I’m sick of hearing of how good the crowd were” and adding that he did not doubt the notorious police stories that fans had urinated on and assaulted the “brave cops”. Giving evidence, Middup said he was only reporting to the media what police officers had told him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Margaret Thatcher visits the Hillsborough ground. Photograph: ITN, ITV News

That same day, Wright attended a Police Federation meeting at Pickwick’s restaurant in Sheffield. Far from condemning the stories, the minutes of the meeting record Wright congratulating Middup for the case he had been making. Wright actually said of Duckenfield in that meeting that “unfamiliarity” as a match commander could be an advantage, because an inexperienced officer would be “more on their mettle”. Wright told the meeting: “If anybody should be blamed, it should be the drunken, ticketless individuals.”



The South Yorkshire police officers were ordered, contrary to all regular practice, to record their Hillsborough experiences not in their official pocketbooks but on plain paper. A series of officers acknowledged at the inquests that this was unprecedented: it was a disciplinary offence not to write in a pocketbook, which is a contemporaneous note, very difficult to amend without it being obvious, and therefore persuasive, credible evidence in a courtroom. Accounts on plain paper could be – and infamously were – amended before going to the official public inquiry by Lord Justice Taylor.

Several officers defended this process. McKay said it was because memories came back in patches. Jackson, asked if the order to use blank pieces of paper was “improper”, replied: “Well, the normal practice is to write your notes in the notebook.”

Some officers did write in their pocketbooks. Some, including Marshall, said they handed theirs in, but they have not been found by the force or given to the investigations. Most wrote on plain paper, the majority including descriptions of supporters drinking and misbehaving. Many made a similar observation: that the pens, even when they went in after the crush, “smelt of alcohol”.

Simblet, representing bereaved families, suggested to one of these officers, Alan Ramsden, that that was “a surprising observation” to have made about that place of disaster. Ramsden replied: “Yes, I did make reference to that. But in hindsight, which we are all blessed with, it could be the smell of death.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An image released by the Hillsborough inquest. Photograph: Inquest handout

Don Page, head of SYMAS at the time – who accepted the ambulance response was inadequate – told an extraordinary story about Wright’s insistence on alleging supporters were drunk. Page had read of police officers saying that dead and injured people strongly smelled of alcohol. He told Wright that ambulance officers were reporting “very, very few people [injured and] in the fatality stage had strong smells of alcohol on them”.



Wright, Page told the court, responded by saying: “That’s our position, that’s our stance, and that’s what we’ll have to stand by.” Wright barely ever spoke to him again.

The plain paper accounts were amended before they went to the Taylor inquiry. The Hillsborough Independent Panel reported in 2012 that 164 statements had been altered. In 116 of these, criticisms of the police operation and senior officers’ lack of leadership were removed. Pete Weatherby QC, for 22 bereaved families, questioned Peter Metcalf, the solicitor for South Yorkshire police who implemented this process, and Ch Supt Donald Denton, who headed the police amendment operation. Weatherby concentrated on just a few of the 164 statements, showing that all references to the “Freeman tactic” (closing the tunnel to the central pens) were deleted.

Weatherby put to Metcalf that this was concealing important evidence from Taylor. Metcalf denied it, saying he was advising on statements being in suitable form for Taylor. He told Goldring: “I think I was serving the interests of truth, sir.”

Denton actually admitted that removing the evidence about previous tunnel closures “impeded” Taylor’s inquiry, which was kept “in the dark”. But to his own barrister, Christopher Daw QC, Denton said he was following legal advice, that while changing officers’ statements was “unorthodox”, he believed everything he did was “proper, lawful and in good faith”.



The statements were collated for Wright’s submission to the Taylor inquiry on behalf of South Yorkshire police. The document is known as the Wain report, because Ch Supt Terry Wain compiled it. Norman Bettison, then an inspector at South Yorkshire police – later, to the families’ fury, chief constable of Merseyside – wrote most of section V, the force’s account of what happened.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The scene at Hillsborough at 4.17pm, an hour after the disaster unfolded. Photograph: The Guardian

It admitted no fault whatsoever. Duckenfield was described as an officer of “wide experience”. The move of Mole was not mentioned; nor was Duckenfield’s failure to close the tunnel. Bettison included descriptions of supporters as “animals” and “savages”.

This official police submission said of the cause: “Senior officers found themselves suddenly overwhelmed by several thousand spectators who had converged on the Leppings Lane entrance within a few minutes of the designated time for kick-off, many of whom being the worse for drink embarked upon a determined course of action, the aim of which was to enter Hillsborough football stadium at all cost; irrespective of any danger to property, or more importantly, the lives and safety of others.”

Wain, questioned by Daw, his own barrister, accepted that the report could have been “better expressed” in places, but asserted he produced it “honestly and in good faith”. Asked about being party to a cover-up, Wain replied: “I wouldn’t have allowed it. My nature wouldn’t have allowed it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police collect evidence at 4.42pm, shortly after the Hillsborough disaster.

Metcalf, in the end, put a line through that narrative, and it did not go to Taylor. He said he realised by then the police were facing substantial criticism, and the “one-sided” account “wouldn’t have done”. Yet when they went to Taylor, the police did make that case, insisting they bore no responsibility and claiming as the cause supporters arriving late, drunk and unmanageable.

In August 1989, at a time when football supporters were still being collectively stigmatised for the hooliganism of a few, Taylor found completely against that case, and criticised the force for making it. Publicly, Wright accepted the Taylor report; privately, his force redoubled its efforts at the first inquest to blame supporters. Their relative success at doing that, securing a verdict of accidental death in March 1991, fuelled the families’ continuing trauma, and their long campaign for justice.

The inquest’s verdict, when it finally arrived, represented the most thorough vindication imaginable for the families of the dead and an equally damning indictment of South Yorkshire Police. The jury supplanted the 1991 verdict with one of unlawful killing, laying blame squarely on the police in the process. Critically, it agreed that Liverpool fans had in no way contributed to the disaster. The families gathered outside the Warrington courtroom and sang You’ll Never Walk Alone before a throng of media.

Finally, after 27 years of horror, heartbreak and struggle, the families have seen a jury deliver the verdict they, their loved ones, and those who suffered and survived but found themselves targets of South Yorkshire police’s ferocious campaign required. The families were people mostly trusting of the police, who after their horrific loss found themselves in a nightmare, fighting the police’s false case and repeated letdowns by the legal system. Derided and denigrated as “animalistic”, they were ultimately driven on by the power of human love and loyalty, and the bonds of family.

The lessons for British policing from this needless devastation of so many lives stretch far beyond the failings of one out-of-his-depth officer who took 26 years to fully confess. The police have a difficult, vital job, to keep society safe. However here, where they failed, their use of the word “animals” documented an inability to see a group of citizens even as people.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police officers and supporters help one of the injured. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

They came to the Warrington business park mostly as old men, with hearing problems, impaired memories, illness and trauma. Yet many seemed oddly still like a force apart, speaking a macabre, dehumanised language: males, youths, casualties, intoxicants. Some did make expressions of empathy, but not many – Duckenfield, blunderingly, was one; Jackson and Marshall were others. Some junior officers were clearly moved; several criticised the police operation and process of changing statements. Others, with bereaved families sitting feet away, repeated their original allegations and went no further.

There were some police officers whose decency stood out. One was Russell Greaves, a detective constable who tried to revive Sarah Hicks, 19, on the pitch after she had been brought out of the crush next to her sister, Vicki, 15. Trevor and Jenni Hicks, the girls’ parents, had given heart-wrenching evidence. Trevor was said by witnesses to have been running between the girls, as desperate attempts were made to revive them, shouting and pleading: “Not both of them: they’re all I’ve got.”

Trevor Hicks himself tried to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Vicki, which involved, he testified, sucking vomit from her mouth, then he went with her in an ambulance – another scene of hell, with a teenage crush victim, Gary Jones, on the floor, and Hicks trying not to stand on him. He believed another ambulance would be along for Sarah but, as Greaves recalled, no ambulance came. They carried Sarah on an advertising hoarding to the gymnasium, but there were no ambulances there either, so they laid her on the pitch and performed CPR again. Eventually, qualified medical staff told them she was dead. Greaves recalled that he closed Sarah’s eyes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Twisted metal in the Leppings Lane stand at Hillsborough.

At the end of his evidence, Greaves asked if he could say a few words. A big man with a moustache, overcome with emotion, he then read something he had prepared, to a rapt courtroom. “Just mere words cannot comfort Trevor or Jenni Hicks, or remove their sense of loss, pain and utter devastation,” he said. “But I would like to take this opportunity to say to them that I did my very best for Sarah in the circumstances. I could not have done more. For the time I was with Sarah, Sarah was with someone who cared. Sarah was not alone.”

Greaves and his friend Fred Maddox were police officers, but they were off duty that day. They were there with other police colleagues to support Liverpool football club. They had gone for a drink before the match. They were “fans”. Then when the disaster happened, they did everything citizens could expect of police officers, and of fellow human beings. As with many survivors who gave evidence a generation on, and the families who have endured an unimaginable ordeal, their honesty and humanity shone through.