And I remember getting this call from Ruth and holding my phone out, hoping I wouldn’t fall over the balcony to my death. And I said yes, but I then said to her, I’ve just remembered about three weeks ago I was approached by somebody working for the IPCC and they were interested in instructing me in Hillsborough as junior to their counsel, whoever that was, but they hadn't decided yet. So I said that to Ruth, I said yes, definitely I will, I’d love to represent the families. And as soon as I got off the phone I rang Chambers and I said, tell the very nice solicitor at the IPCC that I’m not available to appear for them. And I wanted to kill that dead so that I could get involved in representing the families. And so that was the last inquest I did, but of course, it was also the most significant in so many ways. And in particular for me, because that courtroom was full of literally, probably at least 100 lawyers on any given day, that’s solicitors and barristers. Five long rows of lawyers. And although some of the solicitors were from Liverpool, none of the barristers was from Liverpool except me. I mean not that I was from Liverpool in the current sense, I wasn’t living there, but I was the only Liverpudlian at the Bar who was in that inquest. And for me it was a trip down Memory Lane because one of the people who’d died had gone to my school, somebody else had gone to my sister’s college, the places they were talking about were places that an awful lot of the time I knew, I’d walked down, I’d cycled along. You know, it was incredibly moving for me to be there representing people from my own home town. I couldn’t have asked for a better case to do.
And what was your relationship like with the families that you were representing?
Oh, Ruth and I represented three families. They came to the hearing late. I don’t know why one of them, the Thompson family, I don’t know why they… they may just have decided they didn’t need legal representation until quite late on when they were told you can have it, you know, you don’t have to do this by yourself. And then the other two families, one of them was a family who I think definitely were um-ing and ah-ing about whether or not they wanted to take part. And they were told, look, you can have this solicitor, Ruth, she’ll come and see you and talk to you. And then the third family was a split family. In the Hillsborough case there were a number of what they called split families, where you would have half the family at loggerheads with the other half, for various reasons, but when you’ve been waiting the better part of 30 years for the inquests it’s inevitable. The two big support campaigns, the leaders of the two big support campaigns wouldn’t look at each other, let alone speak to each other. Families are the same, you get people who say, I’m, you know, I totally disagree with the way you’re dealing with this. So we represented the children of the birth mother of Peter Burkett, other lawyers represented the family of his now dead father and his stepmother, who insisted on being referred to as his mother, which was a very difficult thing to negotiate because the lawyers representing her were lawyers we worked very closely with and had great respect for, but it was a difficult one to navigate. But, so our families, Pat Thompson’s wife didn’t come very often, she was in ill health. Then Arthur Horrocks’ family, again, his wife, his widow had some mobility issues and lived over the water on the Wirral, and she didn’t come very often at all. And her, one of her two sons did come, but he lived in Ireland. Now the other family, Peter Burkett’s family, they all lived in north Wales, so they, again, they hardly ever came, for obvious reasons. However, Ruth and I stayed in Liverpool. I stayed in Liverpool throughout the whole of the inquests. The inquests were held in Birchwood, which is one stop beyond Warrington going towards Manchester, and it was about an hour’s journey by the time you’d walked up from where we staying to Lime Street Station and then catch the train for 45 minutes or whatever, and then catch the bus from the station to the inquest. So we got to know a lot of the other families and we became very close friends with a lot of the other families, who we would see every day at Lime Street Station, we'd all crowd onto the train together. Ruth would do the crossword from The Independent newspaper on the way back and we’d all gather round and we’d be doing the crossword, and we’d even ask other people on the train if they knew the answer to some of the clues. And so we got on like a house on fire and of course, you know, a lot of them knew that I was originally from Crosby, from Liverpool. And so we had a wonderful, marvellous experience with these lovely families.
