And I went down and it was live broadcast from Liverpool and people were being pulled out of pens. And I was like, what the hell… what has happened? And that night I happened to be meeting Paula Skidmore who’d been working with me on the Prisons Under Protest book in Liverpool. And I went in and we met in a pub and there was one of those small televisions that you used to have in those days, black and white, and people started coming into the pub, coming back from Sheffield, and they were just coming back from Sheffield, broken.
And they started pouring out the stories, and we were watching the stuff on television and then the mile of scarves over the next few days and people going to Liverpool’s ground, Anfield, and putting out wreaths and filled the whole, nearly the whole playing surface and The Kop with wreaths and scarves.
And myself and my two sons, we stood in the mile of scarves that linked Liverpool’s football ground with Everton’s football ground, across Stanley Park, it’s approximately a mile. And we went back and I was like thinking, I’m hearing these stories from survivors and I can see already that the police and the local politicians are putting their house in their order. It’s drunken fans, latecomers, people without tickets, violent, all of these issues. And yet the stories I’d heard that night were nothing like that, and the stories in the subsequent days were nothing like that. And now I was using all my resources to think about how are we going to face down the inquests and all that’s going to follow. When two parents arrived at the university, unannounced, and said we’ve heard all about your work, will you work with us on Hillsborough. And so we founded the Hillsborough Project that year, we got funding from the local authority.
We got, we appointed, I appointed three researchers to work with me, and Kathryn, and we developed the Hillsborough Project and we published our first report within a year, in 1990. And we published our second report, the major report, in 1995. We fed into Jimmy McGovern’s film, Hillsborough, and then, because all that had happened, no prosecutions, accidental death verdict by a majority. And I sat through the inquest and my researchers sat through the inquests, accidental death verdict.
