Another Coloured Police Horse
South Yorkshire Police gave the horses an exercise, whilst Town were in Barnsley.
As you can see, one is a very striking coloured horse, which the officer told me proudly was one of a matched pair. It certainly proves the odd Suffolk phrase.
A bad horse is always a bad colour, but a good horse is always a good one.
Usually, that was said in respect to chesnut mares, but then in Suffolk, chesnuts are always liked because of the Suffolk horse, which only come in that colour.
Andy Murray’s Balls
They’ve just announced that the tennis balls Andy Murray used at the Olympics will be auctioned along with lots more Olympic memorabilia. The Sun has the story here, together with a beach volleyball picture. The reason for the picture is that a rake used in the women’s final sold for £261.
Is This London’s Ugliest Tube Station?
I went to West Ham station today and took a few pictures.
It really is truly awful, unless you like piles of bricks. It isn’t correctly named either, as it’s nowhere near the Boleyn Ground and I suspect on match days, staff are for ever rounding up lost away fans. Crystal Palace station is another badly named one, as that is nowhere near Selhurst Park.
Marshgate Lane Revealed
This is the first time, I’ve been on Pudding Mill Lane station and could get a reasonably clear view of where Marshgate Lane goes under the Greenway and the Northern Outfall Sewer into the Olympic Park.
Marsh Gate Lane Revealed
As I said here, it was a complicated and expensive job. Also,because of European Union rules, it had to be open to all EU companies. It was a fixed price contract and it was won by the Germans. Rumours abound that Marshgate Lane lived up to its name and they didn’t make the profit they expected.
Sporting Trophy Of The Week
The Tour of Britain cycle race started this week in Ipswich. The first stage took them from the county town of Suffolk to Norwich.
Kristian House was listed as the winner of the King of the Mountains for the stage!
When Was It Known Hillsborough Had No Safety Certificate?
It has been said many times in the last day or so, that Hillsborough had no safety certificate, at the time of the disaster on April 15th, 1989.
Perhaps, my memory has gone, but although I can remember the disaster, I can’t associate it with what I was doing at the time. I wouldn’t have been at football at Ipswich, as at that time I didn’t go. I can remember where I was when I heard about Lockerbie a few months earlier.
So for how long has it been known that Hillsborough did not have a valid safety certificate at the time of the disaster?
Surely to knowingly book the stadium without a valid safety certificate, is akin to flying a Boeing 747, without a valid certificate of airworthiness.
Or was that something that always happened in those days?
In trying to get more answers to my question, I came across this page on the web site of the Football Industry Group at Liverpool University. It is something everybody should read. This is one of the page’s conclusions.
The disaster was basically caused by the failure of South Yorkshire Police to control a large
crowd of Liverpool fans outside the Leppings Lane End, and the poor state of the ground,
but it was also clear that football’s total failure to learn from the numerous disasters that had
afflicted it during the twentieth century, and a police force conditioned to view supporters as
potential hooligans and so always expecting violence, contributed significantly to the 96 deaths
and many hundreds of injuries.
I agree very much about learning from the past. In the 1960s, I was in a few crushes at White Hart Lane and Highbury, and how they avoided a Hillsborough-type disaster in some matches, was more down to luck than any planning.
The page also says this about the safety certificate and emergency plans.
Sheffield Wednesday had redeveloped parts of the ground without obtaining
a new safety certificate, or telling the emergency services: the result was that the safety certificate was
outdated and useless, and that plans Sheffield Wednesday had developed with the local emergency
services could not be put into practice, as the layout of the ground had changed.
That to me is inadequate, to say the very least. An emergency plan like that, only works without an emergency.
Do We Learn From Football Crowd Tragedies?
In my lifetime, there has been three football crowd tragedies; Ibrox in 1971, Bradford City in 1985 and Hillsborough in 1989.
We may have dealt with the problems inside the grounds by better stadium design and rebuilding, but have we properly dealt with the problems the tragedies create for the emergency services and especially the paramedics.
Sadly, I think that it took some time for the message to get through. For example, with the latest news on Hillsborough, it becomes apparent that the paramedics couldn’t cope and this was probably the case at other non-football-related disasters in recent years. The attacks on the London Underground on the 7th of July 2005 come to mind. In that attack, how many lives were also saved as one bomb went off outside the Royal College of Surgeons?
We have to accept that tragedies and disasters will happen. But are we prepared for the worst, when they do? This week for instance there was a coach crash on the A3 at Hindhead, where three died. Did the emergency services of rural Sussex cope well?
Knowing the A14 well, what would happen if a coach crossed the dual-carriageway at say Newmarket and hit another head-on going the other way? The nearest hospitals are in Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds, almost twenty miles away. Do the emergency services train for such an emergency? Or do they hope it won’t happen?
What I feel sorry about the past couple of decades is that Bradford was the wake-up call and everybody ignored it! There was a mixture there of a dilapidated wooden stand with rubbish underneath it. Just one stray cigarette was al it took.
Doesn’t that sound a lot like the wooden escalator at Kings Cross, that caught fire in 1987. It probably wasn’t that simple, but surely the engineers in London Underground must have thought about the danger, after the fire at Bradford.
But the modern safety culture may be just that. Modern!
In the 1970s, I worked on a chemical plant and an instrument that the section I worked for, found that the plant was going into a regime, where it could explode. The plant manager immediately shut the plant and informed the makers. They informed him, that what we had proven, couldn’t be measured and we should keep the plant going. Two years later their plant buried itself in a hillside, killing a number of people.
So we were right! And they were wrong! It is not a nice thing to say, as people died, because of the blinkered thinking of others.
Even today, on my travels around the UK, visiting all the football grounds, one stood out as a place, where a bad accident could happen again! Not I hasten to add in the ground itself, but in the railway station, which brings large numbers of supporters to the ground.
The Anonymous Widower 