Jim White
IT IS not often spontaneous singing erupts outside a coroner’s court. It is not often a verdict elicits shrieks of delight from the public gallery. It is not often a jury is loudly applauded for their work. But then there are not many coroner’s verdicts that those involved have waited 27 years to hear delivered, the length of their wait etched out in balding pates, furrowed brows and walking sticks.
Moments after Lord Justice Goldring had announced his conclusion to the Hillsborough inquest, relatives of those who died gathered with those who survived to celebrate. Outside the court they were ecstatic, belting out the Liverpool anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone with gleeful purpose. After 27 years of unrelenting fighting, battling, struggling, for them at last the truth has been officially acknowledged.
“My head feels cleared,” said Adrian Tempany, who was 19 on the day of the disaster, and, crushed into unconsciousness, almost did not live to see another. “I’m 46 years old, now I can begin to get on with my life.”
According to the jury who had painstakingly considered the evidence, the 96 people who died at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989 were unlawfully killed.
More to the point, their own behaviour did not contribute to their own demise. As verdicts go, it could not have been more pointed, and from those who had long been obliged to live in a murk of disinformation and alleged cover-up, more welcome.
“This is a day to be remembered,” said Trevor Hicks, who lost both his daughters in the crush. “I had black hair when this started.”
Everyone involved in the struggle for justice wanted to be there, on the business park near Warrington where a special court had been constructed, to hear the conclusion of Lord Justice Goldring’s two-year long inquiry.
The courtroom was so packed, several hundred were obliged to watch the verdict on television in a building nearby.
Outside a phalanx of cameras filmed those arriving. Two men flourished a huge banner which read ‘We climbed the hill in our own way.’ One woman revealed she was wearing a new Liverpool scarf, which she will be taking to Sheffield to lay on the spot where her brother died, as she has done every year for the past 27.
When everyone had been accommodated, the proceedings began. The jury had been given 14 questions to consider. Lord Justice Goldring asked the foreman to deliver their response. For each she was unequivocal. On questions of official liability, of the behaviour of senior police and ambulance staff, of the condition of the stadium, the jury was convinced: at every stage there was error or omission in planning and operational execution which caused or contributed to a life-ending situation.
On question seven there was no doubt either: the behaviour of fans did not contribute to the mayhem. It was the answer greeted by the biggest cheer.
Of all the traumatic public disasters of the 1980s, Hillsborough long stood alone as the one in which the victims themselves were reckoned culpable.
“It’s a terrible thing to be nearly crushed to death, and then face the allegation that you’ve been responsible for killing people,” said Adrian Tempany. “Talk about adding insult to injury.” What thrilled him and the others there was that now finally that narrative had been exposed. What has now been acknowledged was these were ordinary people doing something that should have been entirely ordinary: they were going to a football match, from which, because
‘These were ordinary people doing something that should have been entirely ordinary: going to a match’
of a collective failure to secure their safety, they never came home.
And Lord Justice Goldring invited us to remember those people. He listed each victim and asked the jury their findings about the cause and time of death. Compression, asphyxia, inhalation of stomach contents: the medical terminology did not disguise the horror of the fact that James Delaney, Sarah Louise Hicks, Francis Joseph McAllister and 92 others died in wretched squalour within 90 minutes of each other (Tony Bland died in 1993, after lying in a coma for four years).
It is in such detail that the disaster still appalls. Of the 96 who died, as many as 58 might have lived had the medical response been better coordinated; 79 were under 30; 37 were teenagers; the youngest was just 10. This is what the families have been haunted by ever since that day: what might these people have contributed to society? What lives might they have lived?
It has taken 27 years for their memory to be properly recognized. For the families, praised by the coroner for their steadfast loyalty across the years, at last it is vindication.