South Yorkshire police held a briefing for CID officers two days after the Hillsborough disaster at which a senior officer told them the force was going to blame “drunken, ticketless Liverpool fans”, the new inquests into the 96 deaths has heard.



Clive Davis, an inspector for South Yorkshire police at the time of the disaster, later a superintendent, told the court in Warrington that he was in the briefing, given by chief superintendent Terry Wain, on Monday 17 April 1989.

He said that in a room used as a senior officers’ mess on the first floor of South Yorkshire police’s Snig Hill headquarters, Wain told the briefing of around 20 officers that he had been asked by the chief constable, Peter Wright, to “put a team together”. Davis said he could recall almost verbatim that Wain’s words were: “We are going to put the blame on this disaster where it belongs, on the drunken, ticketless Liverpool fans.”

He said Wain then told the CID officers: “We are going to now go away and gather the evidence to show this.”

Davis said he recalled Wain meant they were going to search the M62 for beer cans discarded by Liverpool supporters, on their way to Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough football ground for the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest. Officers would also talk to local residents, investigate how much alcohol supporters had drunk in pubs and off-licences, and take photographs of walls where fans “had urinated”.

This was “a very high level briefing,” he said. “It was really setting out that South Yorkshire police were going to pursue this strategy.”



Davis, who was not working on the day of the disaster but volunteered for duty, said that just two days later he did not how it had happened, and said of the briefing: “To me it seemed very early to have come to such a decisive and emotive conclusion. To the best of my knowledge, we hadn’t actually debriefed operational officers at that point in time.”

Davis said there was no secretary taking minutes in the meeting, no minutes were ever produced, and there was no register of attendees, which would have been the norm.



In April 1989 Davis, previously a graduate entrant on South Yorkshire police’s accelerated promotion scheme, worked and shared an office with the then chief inspector Norman Bettison on a project to introduce more civilians into the force. Bettison, Davis said, saw the Wain briefing, and the force’s post-Hillsborough operation, as a career opportunity.

Davis said: “He said to me that he felt this was an opportunity for us to get ourselves noticed, and that it would be good for us to go to this meeting.”

Davis retired from South Yorkshire police in 2006 after 26 years’ service, and he described the force to the court as one with a culture of fear in 1989, in which people did not admit to mistakes. To criticise the force to anyone outside, as a whistleblower, was considered “the highest form of treachery”. As a result, the force did not learn from any mistakes, he said.

Questioned by Patrick Roche, representing 75 families whose relatives died in the disaster, Davis agreed South Yorkshire police was “like Wolf Hall, with Peter Wright as Henry VIII”. Wright carried a “shimmer of fear,” he said, and controlled officers’ career progress. Davis also told the Independent Police Complaints Commission that freemasonry was active in the police, and that a colleague had said to him: “You need to get the strength of the lodge around you.”

Under sustained challenge from Wain’s QC, Christopher Daw, who accused him of lying, Davis maintained that the Monday 17 April briefing took place as he described it. Daw put to Davis that he was an attention seeker – raising Davis’s appearance with Sir John Harvey-Jones in a 1992 edition of the Troubleshooter BBC series. Daw accused Davis of making up the Monday briefing after reading the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s 2012 report into the disaster, after which Davis contacted the Hillsborough Family Support Group, then met Trevor Hicks and Margaret Aspinall, whose teenage children were killed at Hillsborough, to tell them about his experience.

Referring to Davis having resigned from the force in 2006, disillusioned by stagnation in his career and his treatment by some senior officers, Daw said to him: “I am suggesting that you have used and abused this investigation to get off your chest a load of absolute nonsense and theory and speculation and rumours and gossip that has been bothering you for years and years.”

Davis rejected that, and the suggestion that he was lying or seeking attention. He said he now feels he should have come forward before 2012, but had he complained about the briefing in 1989 he would have been so “out of sync” with the force he would have had to resign. He did not believe South Yorkshire police’s attitude to the disaster had greatly changed since 1989, he said.

He finally contacted the Hillsborough families after seeing how some police officers, including Bettison, responded to the panel’s report, Davis said.



“There were senior police officers still wanting to pursue the line that this was a result of drunken, ticketless Liverpool fans. I thought: oh no, not again. I wanted to go and speak to the Hillsborough Family Support Group to try to join up some of the dots, in terms of what it was like in the South Yorkshire police at that time.”

The inquests heard next from Colin Allen, who in April 1989 was a Merseyside police constable and attended the FA Cup semi-final, where he survived the crush in the Leppings Lane “pens” as a Liverpool supporter. Allen told the court he went for a drink in the South Yorkshire police’s Niagara sports club before the match, and did not see any drunkenness or bad behaviour by Liverpool fans.

He described the policing at the Leppings Lane end as “non-existent, shambolic at best”, the subsequent stories printed in the Sun alleging fans urinated on and stole from victims as “sickening speculation”, and said South Yorkshire police put out a message of “misinformation”.

Allen made a brief statement to Merseyside police after the disaster but was never called to give evidence. He had said he wanted to provide fact, not fiction, and said: “It was apparent that the authorities were trying to put the blame on Liverpool fans. I was there, and I know the Liverpool fans were not to blame.”

The inquests continue.