The Athletic piece from Simon Hughes. Quite sure they won't make a fuss about the paywall:
I was fortunate enough to grow up living over the road from a park and in the early 1990s, I’d spend most of my evenings playing football.
My dad, who probably loves football more than me, could not resist getting involved himself.
Lots of other kids would join in with their dads. We’d have a big game. They were glorious days. The sun always seemed to be shining.
But on one occasion, a man walked slowly past. His hands were placed behind his back and his head was bowed. I sort of recognised him. He always looked sad. He lived nearby. His house backed onto the park. I can remember my dad telling me that he’d lost his son at Hillsborough. The man was called Christopher. His son had the same first name as me. He was 12 years older. He was Simon Bell.
It would take 25 years for the details of Simon’s life and death to be laid bare in a courtroom. In 2014, his sister Fiona read out a statement on behalf of the Bell family. It turned out Simon had a younger brother called Duncan. When Duncan and Simon attended their first match at Anfield together, they got off the train at Sandhills. Duncan wanted to see if there was a shortcut to the ground and ended up being chased by a group of boys. Simon saw what was happening and scared the boys away. He was a typical big brother.
Fiona described him as being “always popular with people; he could talk to adults as though they were friends”. Yet it was only after his death that the Bells found out how respected he was. His mother Joan remembered seeing 17-year-old Simon before he set off for the FA Cup semi-final on April 15, 1989.
Simon told her he might be home late as he would go to the nearby Northern Cricket Club on the way back from Sheffield. She asked him to pop in and see her before going anywhere else.
The knock on the door never came. Simon was crushed to death later that day, beside two friends. Gary Church was 19 and Christopher Devonside was 18. The verdict from the Hillsborough inquests, which concluded nearly two years after Fiona’s statement, analysed 14 points of contention.
It would find that Simon was one of 96 people who died in the disaster. It would find that there had been errors in police planning. It would find error in the way the police had manned the turnstiles at the stadium. It would find error from the police command. It would find error in the decision by the police commander to open the gates. It would find error around the issue of stadium safety. It would find planning error on behalf of Sheffield Wednesday but it would not find error in the conduct of Sheffield Wednesday’s staff.
It would find that the stadium design had contributed towards the crush and resulting deaths. It would find that stadium engineers could have done more. It would not find that supporters had caused danger. It would find error in the ambulance response. It would find error in the police response.
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96 Liverpool fans died as a result of the disaster on April 15, 1989 (Photo: David Cannon/Allsport)
Most significantly, it would find unlawful killing. After the last verdict was read out, I decided to jot down a few thoughts. It was April 26, 2016. I was sitting in front of a computer screen more than 27 years after the disaster, unsure whether it was my place to write anything at all.
I was only five years old when Hillsborough happened. I couldn’t remember the day. I couldn’t remember the aftermath. But I lived with its legacy. It affected every person in the city one way or another. I could remember Liverpool losing the league title in injury time to Arsenal in May 1989 and my dad telling me it didn’t really matter.
I could remember being taken to the corner shop on Forefield Lane in Crosby that summer by my nan who was minding me while my parents were at work. An old man was arguing with the shopkeeper. “If you don’t stop selling that shit, I’ll buy my paper from the place on Endbutt Lane,” he told him.
Considering Endbutt Lane was a 10-minute walk away and the old man had a walking stick, I considered it quite a statement. As he left, without buying anything, he turned to my nan and apologised for swearing. It transpired that copies of a publication that had printed lies about the role of Liverpool supporters at Hillsborough were still being sold in some places, despite a boycott.
We went on holiday that August, to Menorca. I could remember conversations near the pool and at the bar at night. They made me feel uncomfortable. I remember a heavy-looking father of two with an indeterminable middle-England accent and tattoos who kept making confident jokes about “you” Scousers, as if we had landed on the island having flown there from a different planet.
My mum wasn’t the type of person to tolerate it. She’d confront situations if she was unhappy. I think she called him a male chauvinist pig. That was her standard insult for men she didn’t like. He ended up leaving first, along with his tattooed wife.
From there, each anniversary was marked by a procession underpinned by hopelessness. It was only between the 15th and 20th anniversaries that I really began to appreciate the unfairness of it all.
Around the time of Hillsborough, I was too young to grasp its magnitude: the sorrow, the anger, the raw injustice. Liverpool had been framed as maudlin. Everyone had a chip on their shoulder. We felt sorry for ourselves. I did not recognise this image. The opposite was the case. It had to be.
What happened at Hillsborough and in the quarter of a century since was, all at once, the most desperate, the saddest and the most inspiring story ever told. The families never gave up. In 2016, I concluded that the verdicts from the inquests told any person that you should never be afraid to go your own way and to stand against authority, the bullies and the liars.
Not everyone will believe you. But you’ll get there in the end. Beneath all of that, I hoped Simon Bell’s family felt a little bit better.
As it was pointed out to me today, had 96 police officers or 96 politicians been unlawfully killed at Hillsborough, things would have no doubt been very different.
Instead, after nearly five years when suffering families have been told not to comment on legal proceedings because it might jeopardise the pursuit of a fair hearing, a judge has essentially thrown out the whole criminal case against two former police officers and an ex-solicitor on a technicality.
Former chief superintendent Donald Denton, former retired detective chief inspector Alan Foster and former solicitor Peter Metcalf were accused of trying to minimise the blame put on South Yorkshire Police following the disaster by altering statements. However, judge William Davis said the statements had been prepared for the public inquiry chaired by Lord Justice Taylor in 1990. He said this was not a statutory inquiry and therefore not considered “a court of law”. This meant it was not a “course of public justice” that could be perverted.
This means the only conviction has been against Graham Mackrell, then secretary of Sheffield Wednesday, who was found guilty of a single safety offence, and fined £6,500.
Within an hour of the judge’s ruling, Jonathan Goldberg, a QC who had previously acted on behalf of South Yorkshire Police, was allowed by Adrian Chiles, a radio presenter on the BBC, to accuse the Liverpool supporters of “perfectly appalling behaviour” on the day of the disaster, causing “a riot”. At no point did Chiles challenge him despite the overwhelming evidence and the findings against those claims, which include not only the results of the inquests in 2016 but the Hillsborough Independent Panel review four years before that.
On Merseyside, there is a pervading sense of history repeating itself, one where those claiming victory rewrite the story. The accusations by Goldberg were as inaccurate as they were appalling.
Families, who were informed about the development from a room in Liverpool’s St George’s Hall by video-link, had barely been able to process what was happening before smears were transmitted to a national audience.
It was an awful moment for broadcast journalism and an awful day for justice, the scales of which — as Manchester mayor Andy Burnham put it — are not just weighed against football supporters but “against ordinary people”.
Ordinary people like Simon Bell and his family.
