BrianH
At the Start
One of the biggest functions in London every year is the annual dinner of the editors who once sacked Jeffrey.
A Petition Well Worth Signing
- Thread starter Dave G
- Start date
:lol: :lol:
I could tell you all a very funny story about how I stopped Jeff continually sniping at me, but I'd better not
He was a sh*t on an heroic scale, but a very well-read and amusing one
One of the things which amazed me when I started coming down to Lambourn was the huge affection in which Jeff was and still is held here - since he behaved if anything even worse here than he did in London. I bet the editors all wish Jeff was still around so he could come to lunch too. Did you all know that his ashes are buried where Nicky Henderson's gallops meet Barry Hills's: at his request, so he could horses hooves thundering over him all year round
Great song &tc guys - and so nice to see Kathy take all the ribbing in good part
PS Kri - in fact Jeff was sacked for continually missing deadlines, not for being a drunk. The Spectator was the only organ which was tolerant of that - they did numerous surveys which all came up with the info that Jeff's column was the first thing most people read
I could tell you all a very funny story about how I stopped Jeff continually sniping at me, but I'd better not
He was a sh*t on an heroic scale, but a very well-read and amusing oneOne of the things which amazed me when I started coming down to Lambourn was the huge affection in which Jeff was and still is held here - since he behaved if anything even worse here than he did in London. I bet the editors all wish Jeff was still around so he could come to lunch too. Did you all know that his ashes are buried where Nicky Henderson's gallops meet Barry Hills's: at his request, so he could horses hooves thundering over him all year round
Great song &tc guys - and so nice to see Kathy take all the ribbing in good part
PS Kri - in fact Jeff was sacked for continually missing deadlines, not for being a drunk. The Spectator was the only organ which was tolerant of that - they did numerous surveys which all came up with the info that Jeff's column was the first thing most people read
Quite so Dave, but from my memory of all the interviews etc [which may be faulty after all this time] the police on the spot outside the gate were unable to open the gates from outside AND unable to contact those inside to relay the situation they found themselves in. So the ground and the forward planning on the day are also to blame, imo.
While racecourses have now come under the same Health & Safety Rules as football stadia (since this tragedy and others), not much seems to be learned by some of them, or the Police, it seems.
Last Easter, Plumpton took in some 10,000 racegoers, and rammed their infield solid with cars. There were horrendous problems in getting people off-course at the end of racing, since they refused to open their top gate, the only other egress apart from the railway gate, which was often unusable due to the trains stopping outside and the railway crossing gate being shut (usually a wise precaution when there are cars on the road!).
Not only was no security sent down to direct the internal traffic until racegoers had pulled out railings to make unofficial exit points - and eventually five, instead of one, escape roads (and blocked the emergency roads while they did so), but the security men communicated with each other by MOBILE PHONE, which meant they couldn't call anyone on a radio, and the Police had radios which didn't communicate with other racecourse staff, including the day supervisor, and of course didn't use mobile phones. So you had three layers of staff, all unable to communicate with each other, in critical security positions.
It's one of several reasons why I refused further employment with the course - having been on duty at the railway gates entrance/exit (but not in charge of traffic) I'd had enough when my radio packed in before the third race each day. Were the loose horses secured? Could I safely open the gates? Who the feck knew or could tell me, as radio after radio broke down or gradually couldn't find the range during the meetings. The supervisor employed to head up raceday personnel and H&S came up with a bonzer answer, though: take two radios with you!
So, if, after having to meet supposedly stringent H&S testing and certification, a course can be that lax, I wouldn't be surprised if football and other sporting stadia's Health & Safety was also getting a bit frayed around the edges, and their personnel complacent and corner-cutting. I hope not, but I wouldn't bank on it.
Last Easter, Plumpton took in some 10,000 racegoers, and rammed their infield solid with cars. There were horrendous problems in getting people off-course at the end of racing, since they refused to open their top gate, the only other egress apart from the railway gate, which was often unusable due to the trains stopping outside and the railway crossing gate being shut (usually a wise precaution when there are cars on the road!).
Not only was no security sent down to direct the internal traffic until racegoers had pulled out railings to make unofficial exit points - and eventually five, instead of one, escape roads (and blocked the emergency roads while they did so), but the security men communicated with each other by MOBILE PHONE, which meant they couldn't call anyone on a radio, and the Police had radios which didn't communicate with other racecourse staff, including the day supervisor, and of course didn't use mobile phones. So you had three layers of staff, all unable to communicate with each other, in critical security positions.
It's one of several reasons why I refused further employment with the course - having been on duty at the railway gates entrance/exit (but not in charge of traffic) I'd had enough when my radio packed in before the third race each day. Were the loose horses secured? Could I safely open the gates? Who the feck knew or could tell me, as radio after radio broke down or gradually couldn't find the range during the meetings. The supervisor employed to head up raceday personnel and H&S came up with a bonzer answer, though: take two radios with you!
So, if, after having to meet supposedly stringent H&S testing and certification, a course can be that lax, I wouldn't be surprised if football and other sporting stadia's Health & Safety was also getting a bit frayed around the edges, and their personnel complacent and corner-cutting. I hope not, but I wouldn't bank on it.
Apparently K Mackenzie was on question time last night and when asked by Claire Short to make a public apology, he refused. He then later went on to demand Tony Blair make a public apology to those families who lost sons or husbands in the Iraq war. One fecking low life scum.
Lots of rubbish here
I watched the Tv pictures live. Never really properly been shown again since of course
People crushed and obviously screaming and over spilling. It was right there. I have been in many packed terraces away with Chelsea but I had never seen anything like this
This went on for what seemed ages
and what happened
The police just stared back and did NOTHING
They watched people die and DID NOTHING
Frankly I have never seen anything like it. The crush was incredible. Any idiot could see that. It was bound to kill people.
But they just stared back
I hope they wake up screaming every night for the rest of tehir overpaid miserable lives
In April 1989, the single biggest controversy during MacKenzie's reign occurred, later described in a Sun editorial in 2004 as "the most terrible mistake in our history", during the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, a deadly crush which occurred during an F.A. Cup semi-final at Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield which claimed the lives of 96 Liverpool fans. The Sun printed the front-page headline "The Truth", with three sub-headings, "Some Fans Picked Pockets of Victims", "Some Fans Urinated on the Brave Cops" and "Some Fans Beat Up P.C. Giving Kiss Of Life". The accompanying article claimed that ticketless and drunken Liverpool F.C. fans were responsible for the disaster, having supposedly tried to fight their way into the stadium by rushing the turnstiles and attacking policemen outside the ground. Further specific allegations were made that during the disaster itself Liverpool fans inside the stadium had stolen wallets and other items from the dead, had urinated over policemen and the bodies of dead fans, that they had beaten policemen attempting to save the lives of other fans and had sexually abused the body of a dead girl after shouting "throw her up and we'll **** her" to policemen moving her body. The sources for these allegations were stated to be anonymous police officers and a Conservative MP from Sheffield (the only Sheffield Conservative MP in 1989 was Irvine Patnick) who wasn't actually present at the game. The article was accompanied by graphic photographs showing Liverpool fans, including young children, choking and suffocating as they were being crushed against the perimeter fences surrounding the terraces - this was widely condemned as severely inappropriate[14].
The coverage and the allegations caused intense uproar on Merseyside (where The Sun was boycotted, with public burnings of the paper organised and many newsagents refusing to stock it at all) and widespread criticism and condemnation from many commentators. The Press Council described the allegations unequivocally as "lies". The official government enquiry into the disaster dismissed the allegation that drunken Liverpool fans had been responsible for the disaster and concluded that inadequate crowd control and errors by the police had been the cause of the disaster. Various investigations conclusively disproved most if not all of The Sun's allegations - when clothing from each of the victims was recovered, none had any trace of urine other than those who had been found to have wet themselves during the crush (this also not surprisingly occurred with some fans who survived having been pulled from the terraces); all wallets, items of jewellery and significant personal possessions of each of the victims was quickly accounted for (thus disproving the allegation of pick-pocketing); no female victim was found to have been sexually abused; and while it has been established that a small number of Liverpool supporters verbally abused policemen who they apparently held responsible for the disaster, no policeman has ever come forward to claim that he was physically attacked by a fan. Some weeks after the disaster, Joan Traynor, who lost two sons in the disaster, was asked by ITN for permission to film the funeral of her sons. Traynor refused and publicly requested that the media respect her family's privacy with regard to the funeral. ITN and all other British media outlets did indeed respect Mrs Traynor's wishes with the exception of The Sun. Kelvin MacKenzie sent photographers to the funeral who clambered over a wall at the cemetery and took numerous photographs of the family laying the two boys to rest before eventually being chased away. The following day photographs of the family at the funeral appeared on the front page of The Sun. Mrs Traynor was said to be deeply upset about the intrusion at the funeral and the subsequent publication of photographs of her and her family on the front page of the same paper which had printed the aforementioned allegations about the disaster itself[15].
Prior to the publication of The Sun's initial article, a number of local newspapers in Yorkshire published very similar allegations (such as The Sheffield Star and The Yorkshire Post)[8]. It has since emerged that many British national newspaper editors were offered the same story from the same sources the day before The Sun article was published (including Andrew Neil at Murdoch's The Times) but while many national newspapers printed allegations about Liverpool fans being responsible for the disaster, only MacKenzie and his counterpart at The Daily Star were prepared to print the more outlandish allegations about theft and abuse of dead bodies, with many editors feeling that the claims sounded dubious. Furthermore, the other national papers which printed coverage claiming Liverpool fans to be responsible for the disaster, including The Daily Star, apologised the day after publication, whereas The Sun did not. In their book about the history of the Sun, Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote: "As MacKenzie's layout was seen by more and more people, a collective shudder ran through the office [but] MacKenzie's dominance was so total there was nobody left in the organisation who could rein him in except Murdoch. [Everyone] seemed paralysed, "looking like rabbits in the headlights", as one hack described them. The error staring them in the face was too glaring. It obviously wasn't a silly mistake; nor was it a simple oversight. Nobody really had any comment on it, they just took one look and went away shaking their heads in wonder at the enormity of it. It was a classic smear."[16] Murdoch for his part ordered MacKenzie to appear on BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend in the aftermath of the controversy to apologise. MacKenzie was quoted on the programme as saying: "It was my decision and my decision alone to do that front page in that way and I made a rather serious error". In 1993 he told a House of Commons National Heritage Select Committee that: "I regret Hillsborough. It was a fundamental mistake. The mistake was I believed what an MP said. It was a Tory MP. If he had not said it and the chief superintendent (David Duckenfield) had not agreed with it, we would not have gone with it." In 1996, MacKenzie again discussed the matter on Radio 4 but this time claimed: "The Sun did not accuse anybody of anything. We were the vehicle for others."
Sales of The Sun on Merseyside have never recovered, costing News International several million pounds a year,[17] despite a belated full page apology by the newspaper in 2004.
Lord Justice Taylor was appointed to conduct an inquiry into the disaster. Taylor's inquiry sat for thirty-one days and published two reports, one interim report that laid out the events of the day and immediate conclusions and one final report that made general recommendations on football ground safety. As a result of the inquiry, fences in front of fans were removed and stadiums were converted to become all-seated. This became known as the Taylor Report.
There was considerable debate over some aspects of the disaster; in particular, attention was focused on the decision to open the secondary gates. It was suggested that it would have been better to delay the start of the match as had often been done at other venues and matches. In defence the police claimed that they were concerned that the crush outside the stadium was getting out of control and accusations were made that some Liverpool fans did not have tickets and were trying to force the turnstiles. Other accusations of misbehaviour were made in relation to the crowd. However, no substantial evidence was presented to support any of these claims, with Lord Justice Taylor making particular effort to refute them in his final report.
Sheffield Wednesday were criticised for the low number of turnstiles at the Leppings Lane end and the poor quality of the crush barriers on the terraces there. The Taylor Report however stated that official cause of the disaster was the failure of police control. Due to the low number of turnstiles it has been estimated that it would have taken until 3.40pm to get all ticket holders in to the Leppings Lane end had an exit gate not been opened. Gate C was opened to let more fans in, however the total number of fans entering the terrace is not thought to have been more than the capacity of the standing area.
The disaster was caused by the fact that the majority of fans entering the terraces headed for the central pens 3 and 4. Normally a police officer or steward would direct fans away from full pens, but on the day this did not happen. The official capacity of these pens was around 2000, however the Health and Safety Executive later found that this should have been reduced to around 1600 as the crush barriers did not conform to the Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds 1986. It is estimated that the number of people in these pens shortly after kick off at 3.00pm was over 3000. This overcrowding caused the fatal crush.
Source - Wikpedia
The coverage and the allegations caused intense uproar on Merseyside (where The Sun was boycotted, with public burnings of the paper organised and many newsagents refusing to stock it at all) and widespread criticism and condemnation from many commentators. The Press Council described the allegations unequivocally as "lies". The official government enquiry into the disaster dismissed the allegation that drunken Liverpool fans had been responsible for the disaster and concluded that inadequate crowd control and errors by the police had been the cause of the disaster. Various investigations conclusively disproved most if not all of The Sun's allegations - when clothing from each of the victims was recovered, none had any trace of urine other than those who had been found to have wet themselves during the crush (this also not surprisingly occurred with some fans who survived having been pulled from the terraces); all wallets, items of jewellery and significant personal possessions of each of the victims was quickly accounted for (thus disproving the allegation of pick-pocketing); no female victim was found to have been sexually abused; and while it has been established that a small number of Liverpool supporters verbally abused policemen who they apparently held responsible for the disaster, no policeman has ever come forward to claim that he was physically attacked by a fan. Some weeks after the disaster, Joan Traynor, who lost two sons in the disaster, was asked by ITN for permission to film the funeral of her sons. Traynor refused and publicly requested that the media respect her family's privacy with regard to the funeral. ITN and all other British media outlets did indeed respect Mrs Traynor's wishes with the exception of The Sun. Kelvin MacKenzie sent photographers to the funeral who clambered over a wall at the cemetery and took numerous photographs of the family laying the two boys to rest before eventually being chased away. The following day photographs of the family at the funeral appeared on the front page of The Sun. Mrs Traynor was said to be deeply upset about the intrusion at the funeral and the subsequent publication of photographs of her and her family on the front page of the same paper which had printed the aforementioned allegations about the disaster itself[15].
Prior to the publication of The Sun's initial article, a number of local newspapers in Yorkshire published very similar allegations (such as The Sheffield Star and The Yorkshire Post)[8]. It has since emerged that many British national newspaper editors were offered the same story from the same sources the day before The Sun article was published (including Andrew Neil at Murdoch's The Times) but while many national newspapers printed allegations about Liverpool fans being responsible for the disaster, only MacKenzie and his counterpart at The Daily Star were prepared to print the more outlandish allegations about theft and abuse of dead bodies, with many editors feeling that the claims sounded dubious. Furthermore, the other national papers which printed coverage claiming Liverpool fans to be responsible for the disaster, including The Daily Star, apologised the day after publication, whereas The Sun did not. In their book about the history of the Sun, Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote: "As MacKenzie's layout was seen by more and more people, a collective shudder ran through the office [but] MacKenzie's dominance was so total there was nobody left in the organisation who could rein him in except Murdoch. [Everyone] seemed paralysed, "looking like rabbits in the headlights", as one hack described them. The error staring them in the face was too glaring. It obviously wasn't a silly mistake; nor was it a simple oversight. Nobody really had any comment on it, they just took one look and went away shaking their heads in wonder at the enormity of it. It was a classic smear."[16] Murdoch for his part ordered MacKenzie to appear on BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend in the aftermath of the controversy to apologise. MacKenzie was quoted on the programme as saying: "It was my decision and my decision alone to do that front page in that way and I made a rather serious error". In 1993 he told a House of Commons National Heritage Select Committee that: "I regret Hillsborough. It was a fundamental mistake. The mistake was I believed what an MP said. It was a Tory MP. If he had not said it and the chief superintendent (David Duckenfield) had not agreed with it, we would not have gone with it." In 1996, MacKenzie again discussed the matter on Radio 4 but this time claimed: "The Sun did not accuse anybody of anything. We were the vehicle for others."
Sales of The Sun on Merseyside have never recovered, costing News International several million pounds a year,[17] despite a belated full page apology by the newspaper in 2004.
Lord Justice Taylor was appointed to conduct an inquiry into the disaster. Taylor's inquiry sat for thirty-one days and published two reports, one interim report that laid out the events of the day and immediate conclusions and one final report that made general recommendations on football ground safety. As a result of the inquiry, fences in front of fans were removed and stadiums were converted to become all-seated. This became known as the Taylor Report.
There was considerable debate over some aspects of the disaster; in particular, attention was focused on the decision to open the secondary gates. It was suggested that it would have been better to delay the start of the match as had often been done at other venues and matches. In defence the police claimed that they were concerned that the crush outside the stadium was getting out of control and accusations were made that some Liverpool fans did not have tickets and were trying to force the turnstiles. Other accusations of misbehaviour were made in relation to the crowd. However, no substantial evidence was presented to support any of these claims, with Lord Justice Taylor making particular effort to refute them in his final report.
Sheffield Wednesday were criticised for the low number of turnstiles at the Leppings Lane end and the poor quality of the crush barriers on the terraces there. The Taylor Report however stated that official cause of the disaster was the failure of police control. Due to the low number of turnstiles it has been estimated that it would have taken until 3.40pm to get all ticket holders in to the Leppings Lane end had an exit gate not been opened. Gate C was opened to let more fans in, however the total number of fans entering the terrace is not thought to have been more than the capacity of the standing area.
The disaster was caused by the fact that the majority of fans entering the terraces headed for the central pens 3 and 4. Normally a police officer or steward would direct fans away from full pens, but on the day this did not happen. The official capacity of these pens was around 2000, however the Health and Safety Executive later found that this should have been reduced to around 1600 as the crush barriers did not conform to the Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds 1986. It is estimated that the number of people in these pens shortly after kick off at 3.00pm was over 3000. This overcrowding caused the fatal crush.
Source - Wikpedia