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outdated and useless, and that plans Sheffield Wednesday had developed with the local emergency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.
Reasons To Go To Liverpool
I’m always being asked by people, why they should go to Liverpool.
Here’s a few reasons.
- St. George’s Hall, which Nikolaus Pevsner described as one of the finest neo-Grecian buildings in the world.
- Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, which is a superb neo-Gothic creation by Giles Gilbert Scott, an architect, who also created Britain’s red telephone box.
- The Victoria Building of Liverpool University, which gives red-brick university its name and has some good art in its gallery and museum, including some by Freud, Turner, Frink and Epstein. I saw an excellent special exhibition there of art by Stuart Sutcliffe, the so-called “fifth Beatle”
- St.. Luke’s Church or as Liverpudlian’s call it the bombed-out church, which has been left as a memorial to the Second World War. This church was my late wife’s, C’s, favourite building in the city.
- Oriel Chambers, which is the first modern building in the world.
- The Walker Art Gallery or the National Gallery of the North. It is administered by central government, although many of the paintings came from local sources. It also has one of the largest collections of pre-Raphaelite painting in the UK and the Liverpool School of the movement is well-represented.
- Liverpool has more street statuary than any city in England with the exception of London. I particularly like Eleanor Rigby by Tommy Steele.
- Superlambananas are fairly numerous.
- The Pier Head, the Three Graces and the Mersey Ferries. Do remember that when a lady walks in front of the Liver Birds on the Royal Liver Building, and they flap their wings, she’s a virgin. They also flap their wings for honest men.
- The Albert Dock, the Tate Liverpool and the other museums in that area.
- Goodison Park. The home of Everton along with Craven Cottage in London, is one of the most complete works of Archibald Leitch, the architect of many sports grounds in the UK.
- Hope Street that connects the two cathedrals and also contains the most amazing pub in the world, the Philhamonic Dining Rooms.
I could add a few more, but I won’t.
A Memory of Liverpool University Panto Week
My late wife and I, both went to Liverpool University and the Rag Week then, was called Panto Week and it was rounded off by a fancy dress ball called Panto Ball. I don’t know whether it’s still the same, but the aim of Panto Week was to raise money for various charities.
One year, the Panto Secretary was a girl, who wasn’t particularly liked. So that year, a male student, went to the Ball dressed in exactly the same elaborate and expensive ball-gown she’d hired for one of the other balls earlier in the year. She had fairly recognisable hair to say the least and an appropriate wig was secured. She was reported to be absolutely incandescent and even more so, when she found out that her look-alike had been danced with by something like fifty gallant engineers.
Angels of Mersey
I missed Angels of Mersey about the work of chaplains in Liverpool and caught up with the first episode last night on the iPlayer.
It showed the University in Freshers Week and in some respects it hasn’t changed much since I went to my Freshers Week in 1965.
We often talk about bad building in the 1960s, but Liverpool University seems to have avoided some of the worst examples.
Climbing The Shard
It would appear that a group of intrepid climbers have climbed the Shard by London Bridge station. Read the story here in the Belfast Telegraph.
People and especially students have always been doing this.
At Liverpool in the 1960s, I was in a year with Alvin John Slasser, who was usually known as Sean.
One night he climbed the crane of the Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool, which was being built at the time. I suspect that the Shard was taller, although the crane was several metres taller than the cathedral and Sean did claim to have gone right out to the driver’s cabin.
Sadly, Sean is no longer with us. In the first year of the course he died in a freak climbing accident in I think North Wales.
If there is something tall there, someone will climb it!
It must have affected me greatly, as when C named our second son, he had a middle-name of Shaun. She got the spelling wrong.
The French are Complaining
According to The Times, the French are complaining that the official Olympic brochure is not available in French.
But if you do put it into French, do you use French French, which I can read or Canadian French, which I can’t and a lot of French people from France have been known to laugh at in the same way we treat American English.
In my view there might be a more serious problem on the various Olympic sites. All sports with the exception of football, cricket and one or two others are performed with respect to metric units. Even rugby talks about 10 and 22 metre lines!
So do we put up the signs inside the Olympic park with yards or metres. As most of the competitors and spectators, think a yard is somewhere to keep your rubbish, we should use metres.
But I bet we don’t!
The only place I know in the UK, with metric signposts, is Liverpool University’s campus.
There is an e-petition on metrication here.
For those who are against this on account of it’s not the British thing to use metric units. I have never used Imperial units in business and don’t ever use them to measure anything. My eldest child will be 43 this year and he didn’t even learn about Imperial units at school.
So why do we keep them?
Dinosaurs Can Bite
It was reported yesterday that Liverpool University has found out that dinosaurs such as T-Rex bit with the force of a medium-sized elephant sitting on you.
I had thought that dinosaurs were extinct, until I heard Len McCluskey’s call for disruption during the Olympics. Even his friends in the Labour party didn’t feel they could support him.
So perhaps they aren’t extinct and they can still bite.
Mums Launch Student Home Swap Scheme
It’s all here on the BBC. And their web site is here at unihomeswap.co.uk.
As it says in the article it’s just returning to how it was done in the 1960’s, except that you didn’t actually swap.
For instance in my first year at Liverpool University, I was in digs at Huyton, which was quite a long bus ride to and from the City Centre. Students may moan about their lot these days, but we had a whole different set of moans and digs a long way from the University was one of them.
These days as I wander around London, it seems most students have their own room in a modern block, somewhere near their University or College. But then they are expensive.
Even when I got into Hall for the third year of my course, it was still a long way from the University.
Incidentally, C wasn’t very lucky with the digs she shared with a girl called Sandra and had terrible trouble finding something where they could stay. In one case, the landlord wasn’t a man, any sane father would let near his daughters.
I think it’s a good idea and I wish the designers of the site well.
It was the Crowd What Won It
At Liverpool University, in I think, 1968, the University Rugby team, got to the final of the British Universities Rugby Cup. Usually, this final would have involved two of the more sporting universities. But somehow, we got there and would have been long odds to win against Loughborough.
However, some old fart, decided to have the final at Birkenhead Park just across the Mersey one Wednesday afternoon.
So the whole University marched down the hill to the ferries and virtually filled the ground.
To say we were raucous would be an understatement, but Loughborough fell apart under the battering from the crowd and Liverpool won the trophy for their only time.
In the Telegraph next day, we were described as a mini-Kop that nearly rioted.
It was certainly an afternoon to remember.
The University Doctor Smellie
The GP at Liverpool University in C’s and my time there was a Doctor Smellie. He was one of the better GPs I’ve had and I’ve been lucky to have at least two good ones.
When C became pregnant with our first child, she went to see him and he suggested she have a home birth. Not something that she was thinking of and she wnt to Oxford Street Maternity Hospital instead.
If you research the name Smellie amongst doctors you’ll find an interesting history, including a William Smellie, who is sometimes called the father of British midwifery. So perhaps the good Dr. Smellie was just wanting to follow the family tradition.
The Anonymous Widower 