| On This Day 1989 11:40 - Apr 15 with 1086 views | SaintNick |
Hillsborough, a day when even at West Ham where Saints had just won a tense relegation battle, that fans stopped fighting each other for a little while and forgot differences and felt the pain that Liverpool supporters felt.
Back then there was no calling them names, just sympathy, sadly over the years that has all been forgotten.
|  |
| Satisfying The Bloodlust Of The Masses In Peacetime |
| |  |
| On This Day 1989 on 12:42 - Apr 15 with 1027 views | MytchettSaint |
I was in west London (as opposed to east London) at Hayes v Bognor Regis listening to the football on a little hand held radio when the news started filtering through the airwaves that the stoppage wasn’t due to hooliganism but something very serious was amiss. Then that the match had been abandoned and there had been loss of life.
Very saddening still to this day. |  |
| Sports Republic; owned by idiots, run by idiots. |
| |
| On This Day 1989 on 18:24 - Apr 15 with 854 views | LondonSaint76 |
Spot on Nick, not long after the tragic event Everton played Liverpool at Goodson Park. Red & Blue stood side by side,as you rightly say, just sympathy, no rivalry.
At the time I was managing a programme dealership that had the Wembley contract, we used to distribute League & FA Cup Final programmes all over the world by mail order plus programmes for England games. We also used to distribute Div 1 match day programmes to ex-pats and collectors worldwide.
Obviously we had a pre-order of the Hillsborough programme that was in transit from the printer, JW Northend. The programmes arrived mid-morning on the Monday. Nobody wanted to touch them. I got into the office at 8.30 and both the main and back up answer machines were full - so that’s one hour in total of taped messages from collectors desperate to know if we were getting the programmes and if so how much were we going to charge and how many could they have! From 9.00am onwards we were literally bombarded with calls, I found that quite hard to stomach. We left the phones off the hook all day Monday from about 10.00am onwards.
We had an arrangement prior to the event with Sheffield Wednesday to take any surplus programmes afterwards. One call I did take on our back office line for the trade was from Graham Mackrell who was the club secretary at SW at the time. He was in bits as you could well imagine. If I thought we had it bad over the programmes, he had it ten times worse. He said we have about 3,000 left over, I know we have an arrangement, but these people, have they no respect? He said his gut reaction was to destroy them, I didn’t protest, so they went in a skip and had a fire hose added and were turned to pulp.
We never put our pre-order up for sale, however, the owner of the business did open one box to look at a copy of the programme months later. All I heard from his office a few moments later was OH MY GOD! - NO WAY. I went in to the office to see if he was OK , he was sat at his desk as if he’d seen a ghost. You could say he’d seen 96. For cup semi finals when they were hosted by neutral clubs it was custom & practise for the host club to write a welcome to both clubs which is on the inside of the front cover and the adjacent page as you open the programme. As you opened the programme for that game the inside cover was a full page picture of the Leppings Lane end terrace. It literally made your blood run cold. We must have both sat there in total silence for 5 minutes or more, there just weren’t words.
That’s my somewhat unique memory of that weekend. Those so desperate to obtain a programme were I am sure a minority of people and I doubt many, if any, of them were true football fans who as you say Nick behaved with respect and sympathy. [Post edited 15 Apr 18:34]
|  |
| |
| On This Day 1989 on 20:29 - Apr 15 with 743 views | felly1 |
Sadly not true.
18 years old, 3 weeks after passing my test I drove up with my mate in my battered old Vauxhall Cavelier that kept overheating .
If my memory serves me right they announced the tragedy at half time and my mate cheered...there were knobheads then just as there is now. |  | | |
| On This Day 1989 on 08:47 - Apr 16 with 402 views | Number_58 |
I was at Upton Park that day but I didn't know anything about the events at Hillsborough until I was on the tube after the game. I do recall a few people on the train jumping to conclusions and blaming the Scousers, assuming they'd started a riot. After all, this was only four years after Heysel. |  | | |
| |
By continuing to use the site, you agree to our use of cookies and to abide by our Terms and Conditions.
