Football was never the ‘beautiful game’. At least not in Britain. It was earthy, its rhythms determined by wind and mud. There, it was the ‘people’s game’, a sport that energized the working class and drew huge crowds as it grew with stunning rapidity in the late nineteenth century. It quickly developed from a social pastime to a lucrative form of mass entertainment.
The seeds of the game germinated on the playing fields of England’s public schools and then branched off into various codes. Association Football, soccer, became the most popular. The Football Association was formed in 1863 and set out a series of rules for this arm of the sport. The new ruling body was largely controlled by wealthy businessmen and aristocrats.
Something else was happening, though. At the Newton Heath depot of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, the employees formed a team to play other departments for recreational purposes. At St Domingo’s in Liverpool, the muscular Christianity of the Methodist congregation was expressed by church members on the football field. Munitions workers in south-east London got together to create a side. Across Britain, the wealth of the late Victorian age allowed workers and churchgoers more free time than they had ever experienced before. They embraced the chance to play sports, especially football. Their co-workers and co-worshippers enjoyed watching their more athletic friends and colleagues compete against other teams. Soon, people from around the district started to take an interest. Newton Heath would become Manchester United, St Domingo’s developed into Everton and the group of Woolwich ammunition makers created Arsenal. Similar teams were formed in canteens and churches across the nation. Flat-capped hordes flocked to watch matches as the leagues grew and rivalries blossomed.
Rugby union, another code, had a more exulted social status. Like cricket, it was perceived to be a ‘gentleman’s’ sport. Football grew bigger though, tapping into local pride and a mass market. Its audiences were rowdier and poorer. By the early years of the twentieth century, a snobbery was developing. Football was the game of the great unwashed. By 1985, it was considered to be a downmarket and dangerous activity. It was the sporting equivalent of ‘slumming it’. Hooliganism was rife and, in the highest echelons of power in Whitehall, it was judged to be a magnet for British society’s most disruptive elements. Heysel was the final proof. It confirmed two Establishment biases: the city of Liverpool and football were both toxic environments that, when mixed, proved explosive and deadly. The game and the region were in their violent death throes in the view of the Conservative government. Heysel offered final, lethal proof.
There was no need to circle the wagons on Merseyside. They had been arranged in a defensive position for some time. In 1985, the city of Liverpool was completely out of step with mainstream life in Britain.
In the 1980s, many people wanted the barriers between Scousers and the rest of the world to be less metaphorical. ‘They should build a fence around [Liverpool] and charge admission. For sadly it has become a “showcase” of everything that has gone wrong in Britain’s major cities,’ the Daily Mirror opined in 1982. This was a region that had fallen on hard times and the events in Brussels reinforced the preconceptions of those who despised the area and its people. Yet the shock and horror of the Heysel Stadium disaster hit home more keenly on the banks of the Mersey than in most places.
Derek Hatton was as appalled as anyone by events. ‘I was watching on TV at home,’ he said. ‘It was shocking, especially as we’d been in Rotterdam with Everton two weeks before and there’d been no trouble. We weren’t expecting anything in Brussels, either.’
Once the initial jarring numbness wore off, it became clear that the tragedy in Belgium would have political consequences.
‘Margaret Thatcher knew she was on a collision course with the city,’ Hatton said. ‘The Conservative government were using anything they could to blacken the name of Liverpool. Heysel was used for that, too.’
Peter Reid, who had played in Rotterdam and has a fierce civic pride, agreed. The assault on Merseyside was about much more than football, the Everton midfielder said: ‘The Tories were trying to decimate one of the world’s great cities. They wanted to destroy us.’
His teammate Neville Southall believes it was a wider attack on an entire section of society. ‘It wasn’t about football to the Tories,’ the Everton goalkeeper said. ‘It was an assault against working-class people and their culture.
‘It was one way of breaking people’s spirit.’
And Merseyside was at breaking point.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the port of Liverpool was one of the world’s most important seafaring centres and considered ‘the second city of the Empire’. Its wealth had been built in the slave trade in the 1700s but after this traffic in human beings was abolished in 1807 the burgeoning United States economy ensured that the docklands on this part of the Lancashire coast continued to boom.
Under the surface of prosperity lurked serious social issues. The potato famine of 1846–47 caused the area to be swamped by refugees from Ireland. More than a million desperate, starving Irish came into Liverpool and while most used it as a staging post en route to America or the colonies, enough stayed to change the character of the city’s identity. Their poverty brought a new level of squalor to Victorian life. The strong anti-Irishness in England made it easy to dismiss the problems within Liverpool’s poorest communities as symptoms of inherent barbarism. Punch illustrated the mood of the English with its cartoons depicting the Irish as apes. One of its satires from 1862 said:
A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers.
It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo.
When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.
In London, the immigrants were subsumed into the larger population of the capital. Beside the Mersey they formed new communities, particularly in the North End, an area that ran a mile or so from the city centre to Boundary Street and another mile inland to Great Homer Street. Its main thoroughfare was Scotland Road, which was soon to become a byword for debauchery and anarchy.
Incidents in Liverpool made national headlines where similar crimes elsewhere went unreported. In 1874, on Tithebarn Street where the North End meets the city centre, a man was kicked to death while scores of bystanders watched. The Daily Telegraph reacted with horror: ‘In all the pages of Dr Livingstone’s experiences among the negroes of Africa, there is no single instance approaching this Liverpool story, in savagery of mind and body, in bestiality of heart and act.’
A gang from the streets around Scotland Road, the High Rippers, caused national outrage. Salford’s Scuttlers and Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders were no less dangerous or disruptive but the whiff of Celtic violence in Liverpool made it more sinister to the general public.
Alcohol played a significant role in establishing the city’s reputation as a semi-civilized no man’s land. In the same year as the aforementioned murder, 10 per cent of all drunks detained in Britain were apprehended in Liverpool. Dinah Mulock, a Victorian writer, provided a standard view of the place. ‘Liverpool is an awful town for drinking,’ she wrote. ‘Other towns may be as bad; statistics prove it; but I know of no other place where intoxication is so open and shameless.’
Despite what the cold hard facts said, Liverpool was perceived as worse than elsewhere. Biases like this persisted long into the twentieth century and still linger today.
They were fed by the religious divide in the city. Sectarian rioting was a fact of life in Liverpool in the years before the First World War. Catholics and Protestants did come together to fight for workers’ rights but that made things worse. During the 1911 Transport Workers’ strike, the government sent troops on to the streets and had gunboats on the Mersey ready to shell the city. Soldiers fired into a rioting crowd and killed two men. Viewed from Whitehall and Middle England, it looked like this was a war zone.
Even its politics were alien. The poorest area of the city, the North End, returned an Irish nationalist MP, T. P. O’Connor, to Westminster from 1885 to 1929. It was in this constituency, in the dense tenement slums around Scotland Road, that the Scouse identity was formed.
Until after the First World War, most of the people in the dockside areas of north Liverpool would have described themselves as Irish. There had been other nicknames for people from the city but they had not stuck. The obsession with dressing and acting like Americans was reflected in the term ‘Dicky Sam’, dicky meaning fake and Sam from Uncle Sam, the symbol of the United States. Little wonder it didn’t catch on. Wack, or Wacker, was sometimes used but rarely in Liverpool. Perhaps it comes from the children’s song ‘Nick, nack, Paddy-Wack.’ After all, the ‘old man’ who ‘goes rolling home’ is drunk in this anti-Irish ditty.
At this point, scouse was a type of seaman’s stew – a corruption of the Scandinavian word ‘lobscouse’ – made of the cheapest ingredients. Carts in the Scotland Road area sold the inexpensive gruel to workmen, who were sneeringly nicknamed ‘Scousers’ by wealthier citizens. The term spread to mockingly describe the residents of this poverty-stricken area but before long the people of north Liverpool were adopting the tag with a sense of pride. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s it spread across the city and jumped the religious divide. The Oxford English Dictionary claims the first usage of the word Scouse was in 1945. They were 25 years or more behind the times.
Liverpool’s status as an outsider in England did not change. Even in the 1980s, parts of the media referred to Merseyside sourly as ‘the capital of Ireland’. The relationship between the city and the rest of the country was shaped and defined by this idea of an alien group of people within the body politic of England.
Even before the arrival of the twentieth century, Merseyside’s reputation as a violent, drunken place was well established. Then, in the 1960s, against all expectation, Liverpool became the centre of the world, at least for teenagers and devotees of pop culture.
The Beatles took the planet by storm. Their music had a phenomenal effect but it was only part of their appeal. Their irreverent attitude – cheeky, faintly hostile, rebellious – was as quintessentially Scouse as their accents and suddenly everyone wanted to talk with this nasal cocktail of Irish, Lancastrian and Welsh tones. Briefly, Liverpool was the most fashionable place to be. Of course, the Beatles left for London as soon as their bank balance could justify it.
A decade on, things had changed significantly for the worse. Britain’s trading outlook switched from the Commonwealth and Americas towards Europe. The docks began to contract and industry relocated. Between 1966 and 1977, 350 factories closed or moved away from Merseyside. More than forty thousand jobs disappeared in the 15 years before 1985. In the year of the Heysel disaster, Liverpool’s unemployment rate reached 27 per cent. Nearly half the young men aged between 16 and 24 – the age group that comprised the football clubs’ most fervent fans – were on the dole. This did not go unnoticed. The undercurrents of class war were evident in the coverage of events in Belgium. ‘Unlike Juventus, the majority of Liverpool fans who travelled to Brussels were recognizably and overwhelmingly working class,’ the Sunday Times said. ‘Even without their team favours, many would be instantly recognizable in their ragged jeans, training shoes and do-it-yourself haircuts.’
Refugees from the potato famine would be more identifiable from this description than the sharply dressed Scallies who followed Liverpool around Europe. Ragged? I set off for Brussels wearing a pair of expensive suede boots from London’s Jermyn Street, Levi 501s bought on New York’s Sixth Avenue, shrunk to fit in the bath at home and bleached pale in the same tub, a Ralph Lauren polo shirt and a John Smedley crewneck sweater. As for the haircut, that was the cheapest bit: £6 in Torbo’s on Scotland Road. It was not a high-end barbers but it looked presentable enough. The sweeping generalizations had less to do with dress sense than snobbish assumptions. Wilful misunderstanding dominated most of the discourse about Liverpool and football.
If the unemployed were to be sneered at, those who were in work earned little more respect. When they fought for their jobs and refused to accept the terms offered by management and government, they were looked upon as troublemakers. Liverpool’s dockers were prominent when the port workers faced down the Conservative regime in 1972. Ford’s factory in Halewood became a byword for industrial action. Genuine grievances were dismissed as pointless militancy and laziness by outsiders.
By the early 1980s, poverty was growing and an outburst of social disorder cemented Liverpool’s reputation as a grim and forbidding place with a populace of shirkers. In July 1981, longstanding tensions between a heavy-handed police force and the predominantly black community of Liverpool 8 erupted into violence. CS gas was used by the authorities against rioters – the first time it had been deployed in the United Kingdom outside Northern Ireland – even though gas had not been used in Brixton during arguably more severe rioting earlier in the year.
The Conservative government’s reaction was to discuss whether Merseyside should be cut loose and left to wither. Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposed running down the area as government policy:
I fear Merseyside is going to be much the hardest nut to crack. We do not want to find ourselves concentrating all the limited cash that may have to be made available into Liverpool and having nothing left for possibly more promising areas such as the West Midlands or, even, the North East.
It would be even more regrettable if some of the brighter ideas for renewing economic activity were to be sown only on the relatively stony ground on the banks of the Mersey.
I cannot help but feel that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether. We must not expend all our limited resources in trying to make water flow uphill.
It would take 30 years for the public records office release of documents to confirm this but many residents of Liverpool knew they were considered worthless by those at the highest level of politics. They fought back at the ballot box, voting for a left-wing Labour council that immediately set itself on a collision course with Whitehall.
‘It was seen as a rogue area because it was resisting the Thatcher government,’ Peter Hooton said. ‘Every other area complied with the free-market zealotry.’
Merseyside’s one saving grace during this period was football.
‘In a city cast as an outsider in its own land, battered by the deliberate economic downturns and clear-outs of the early 1980s, Liverpool Football Club was an enduring source of pride, a magnet for the energies and emotions of a public hungry for success,’ wrote David Goldblatt in The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football.
Everton had emerged as the other most significant team in the English game in the mid 1980s. The clubs were flagbearers for the city. The players recognized it. ‘We all understood the situation,’ Graeme Sharp, the Everton striker, said. ‘Unemployment was high and you knew the hardship the fans were going through. You’d see all the away fans and think, “How did they manage that?” It made you realize how important football was. We were well aware what people were sacrificing. It gave you great respect for the fans.’
Everton and Liverpool’s success lifted spirits in a depressed region and gave people who had little to boast about bragging rights over the rest of the country. The horrible deadly night in Brussels had undermined this.
In among the shame, anger, mourning and confusion, it felt like something special had been ruined. Little wonder Grobbelaar considered walking away from the sport.