Five die and 87 injured in a train crash at Purley, and football hooligans jailed
This week in 1989, five people died and 87 were injured in a train crash at Purley in Surrey. The accident happened when a train travelling from Horsham to London was hit from behind by another train going from Littlehampton to London.
The trains should have been two-and-a-half minutes apart. Two signals should have warned the Littlehampton driver there was a train ahead.
In September 1990, the driver of the Littlehampton train, Robert Morgan, was jailed for 18 months, 12 of which were suspended, after admitting passing a red signal.
He appealed the jail term in October, 1990, and it was reduced to four months.
In December 2007, the Appeal Court in London quashed his conviction and cleared him of any blame.
In other news, nine football hooligans who knifed rival Scottish fans in an organised attack were sentenced to a total of 20 years custody.
Judge Alistair Bell said they had been involved in “gang violence of the most appalling kind”.
The youths from Carlisle and Liverpool, were part of a group of 22 which attacked Scotland supporters travelling to Wembley the previous May for the England-Scotland football international.
Seven Scots needed hospital treatment after the fighting at Killington services, on the M6 in Cumbria.
Also this week in 1989, British rock musicians were mobbed by music fans in Moscow as the environment campaigners, Greenpeace, launched an LP to coincide with moves to open their first Soviet office.
The enthusiastic music fans lined up in a snowstorm outside record stores to buy the double album – which was the first Western record to have its launch in the Soviet Union.
Many of the artists appearing on the Greenpeace double album, Breakthrough, including Annie Lennox of Eurythmics, Peter Gabriel, Dire Straits and Talking Heads, were thronged by music fans when they signed copies in Moscow shops.