Anne – ITV mini-series by World Productions, broadcast 2-5 January 2022, written by Kevin Sampson, with Maxine Peake as Anne Williams
Anne Williams’ son Kevin died at Hillsborough football stadium on 15 April 1989. In all, 97 Liverpool fans, who had travelled to Sheffield to watch the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest died as a result of the behaviour of the police on that day.[i] Anne herself died of cancer on 18 April 2013 after 24 years’ tireless campaigning to prove that the deaths at Hillsborough were not an accident but the result of police negligence. This four-part drama tells Anne and Kevin’s story, and by extension that of all those who perished at Hillsborough and all those who fought for the truth to be told.
In 1989 football stadiums still had pens in which large number of fans could watch the game standing. Following pitch invasions by rival fans, Hillsborough, like many other grounds, had also been fitted with high steel fencing between the spectators and the pitch. When the police failed to control the western entrance to the ground, as large numbers of Liverpool fans poured in, people were crushed up against the fencing. This initial negligence was then compounded by the failure to allow ambulances into the ground to treat the injured. Negligence was followed by cover-up, as the police, and its vile mouthpiece The Sun newspaper, blamed allegedly drunken fans for the crush, accusing them of attacking rescue workers and urinating on the dead. To this day, the people of Liverpool largely boycott The Sun. The cover-up extended much further, however, with the 1990 Taylor Report into the disaster, the first set of inquests and the inquiry into the conduct of South Yorkshire police by West Midlands police all exonerating the culprits and declaring the deaths a tragic accident.
Maxine Peake as Anne Williams repeatedly refuses to accept the idea that her son’s death was ‘an accident’ – how could a 15-year-old boy could just go out to a football match and die, but nobody be responsible? Although the drama is very much her story, it is clear that the families of 96 other people were asking the same question, and the first episode ends as Anne attends a meeting of the Hillsborough Family Support Group. As her story unfolds we see Anne move on to working with the indomitable Sheila Coleman in the more militant Hillsborough Justice Campaign, which involved not just the bereaved relatives of the dead, but other fans and campaigners, including many of those who survived on the day but were traumatised by what they had experienced.
While Anne, Sheila, the lawyer Elkan Abrahamson and other relatives, survivors and campaigners are the heroes of the piece, there are many villains, whose role is shown up in the drama. Alongside the South Yorkshire police match commander David Duckenfield and his colleagues, the roll of shame includes judges, the press and politicians, in particular Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw. The drama cleverly intersperses real news footage from the events with actors playing out key scenes.
The disaster and the initial round of inquests and inquiries having all happened while Thatcher’s Conservatives were in power, the Hillsborough families had high hopes in 1997 that the change of government would mean a change of fortune for their quest for what they knew to be the truth to come out. However, Straw commissioned another whitewash of an inquiry, which concluded that there was no new evidence which could require the cases to be re-examined, and that the coroner was correct in his assertion that any evidence related to events after 3.15pm on the fateful day was inadmissible. Overturning this point about the time cut-off has been crucial to the Hillsborough campaign, and the drama emphasises it repeatedly, as Anne Williams insists that in fact her son was still alive at that point and his life could have been saved.
The tide only changed after the 20th anniversary of the tragedy when then Labour Sports Minister Andy Burnham was booed and heckled by the entire Anfield stadium. The moving, dramatised scene of 50,000 people chanting ‘Justice for the 96’ as Burnham fails to make his speech ends the third episode.
Faced with mounting public pressure, the Labour government commissioned the Hillsborough Independent Panel to review afresh all the evidence. The Con-Dem Coalition took power in 2010 but the inquiry continued, with the panel reporting in 2012, to damning effect. The fans were exonerated from all blame, while the police had made every effort to cover up their wrongdoing, with 116 police statements amended to remove unfavourable entries. The Panel found that the inquest ruling was wrong and 41 of the dead could potentially have survived after 3.15pm if they’d had proper medical care. A weakened Anne, who by now knows her cancer is terminal, is shown attending the report launch. Archive footage of David Cameron apologising to the families in Parliament is cut into the dramatised scenes.
As a result of this new report, in December 2012 the Attorney General quashed the original inquests and ordered fresh ones. These then commenced in 2014, ending in April 2016 with a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ for all those who died at Hillsborough.
This compelling drama both tells of one mother’s fight to make sense of her son’s death, and of the power of collective working class community action against a murderous state and its auxiliaries. It also exposes the way in which legal and political processes provide frustration at every turn. Even in the closing titles, we are told that despite the final successful outcome of the second inquest, not a single police officer has been prosecuted or held accountable for the avoidable deaths of the 97. Dramas like Anne are important, as they help us to see both the human cost of such tragedies and the immense fight which those involved have to put up to obtain even a modicum of what passes for ‘justice’ in this country.
POST SCRIPT
A year after the second Hillsborough inquests concluded, 72 people were killed by a fire in Grenfell Tower in west London. Like the deaths at Hillsborough, this was entirely avoidable – on this occasion the murderous negligence was down to corporate greed. Many of the lawyers who had represented the Hillsborough families in the two-year long inquest are now doing the same in the Grenfell Inquiry, which is now in its fifth year. Horrendous details are coming out of the Inquiry at every sitting but yet again, nobody is being held accountable.
Nicki Jameson
[i] 94 people died on the day and one in hospital days later. The 96th Hillsborough victim died in 1993. In July 2021, a coroner ruled that Andrew Devine, who died 32 years after suffering irreversible brain damage on the day, was the 97th victim
