Service Crew: The Inside Story of Leeds United's Hooligan Gangs

Product Information

Saunders’ voice again came across the airwaves – ‘In the name of football, please stop’ – and the violence did gradually subside, but it needed actions rather than strong words to have an effect: a final police charge, led by the ‘cavalry’, helped to scatter the mob and curtail the riot. Brimson, D. and Brimson, E. (1996a) England, my England: the Trouble with the National Football Team (London: Headline). The CI shouted in true Monty Python fashion: ‘F*** me, right lads, run away,’ and we retraced our charge at about the same speed.

Leeds united Service Crew are a football hooligan firm which are linked to the Championship team “Leeds United”. The Service Crew were first brought to the forefront within 1974 and were named after the public service which brought the fans to the away games, instead of the heavily policed special football trains which were organised for such instances. The service crew have a reputation within the hooligan groups for being one of the most violent firms in English football history. However the firm are not as active nowadays and tend too stay much quieter. Redhead, S. (2007b) ‘This Sporting Life: The Realism of The Football Factory’, Soccer and Society. Vol 8 No 1.And because of the seemingly spontaneous and ‘unplanned’ nature of these offences, committed by random individuals and gangs, the police and authorities were only ever able to react to situations rather than be proactive. He was in full charge mode but eventually realised that the playground was occupied by several hundred youths busily ripping the swings out of the ground to use as weapons. As we appeared a primeval roar went up and, as one, we skidded to a halt at the edge of the drop. On this methodology there are estimated to be 242 other firms, distinct from the ones talked about in the football hooligan memoirs themselves. All of these British hooligan gangs have been in existence at some time over the last 40 years; some are still in existence. The approximate total of football hooligan gangs in Britain since the watershed year of 1967-1968 (when skinheads were first emerging as a youth subculture) can be calculated, adding the previous 154 identified. It is a total of 396. It is noteworthy that the authors of two volumes on British football hooligan gangs history (Lowles and Nicholls, 2007a, 2007b) claim to have interviewed 200 hundred former hooligans. Casuals mentions nightclubs where ‘posses’ engaged in dancing contests. I remember there were a good few lads into the casual scene, right into the late 1980s, and they frequented all the clubs, but I don’t remember any of them taking it that seriously. There were some claims made in Casuals that seemed like total nonsense though. Pete Hooton says he and his scouse mates met some Millwall fans in Newquay in 1977 and they were all wearing the same clothes – Lois jeans matched with adidas Stan Smith trainers. I mean, what are the chances of that? It would be like finding a kangaroo on one of Jupiter’s moons. Stan Smiths came in at the end of 1979 in both Manchester and Liverpool as testified by Robert Wade Smith who worked for adidas at the time and described how a ‘phenomenal 2,000 pairs’ of the white leather shoe were sold in the run-up to Christmas 1979. That said Hooton’s account of Hillsborough is very moving, especially how he describes it sinking in that all those people they’d seen ‘unconscious’ on advertising hoardings were actually dead. Phil Saxe was the best contributor to Casuals. He was at the head of several fashion waves and he even mentions the first time he ever saw mods in Manchester, in 1964. The mods he describes were wearing knitted long sleeved polo shirts, which were to prove the longest lived aspect of the whole thing. Several specific items of clothing united Liverpool and Manchester in a single distinctive fashion at the turn of the 1980s. Chief among them were the adidas cagoule and the Peter Werth long sleeved knitted polo (often in burgundy). Manchester’s Perries had been wearing Peter Werth with the thin hoops for years. It just seemed to complement the wedge hairstyle and the rest of the costume. 24

The Three Legs to my memory always had an offical branch & eventually evolved into what's now become the Vine Branch[/quote]

Keywords

The initial outrage…turned to a full outcry of anger and disbelief when the authorities discovered my intended launch venue and so a media campaign against the book gained momentum. Despite once being a fiercely private person, I had spilt my guts on to the keyboard of a laptop over the previous 12 months and I now found myself toe to toe with the media, the police and Stoke City Council…The fact that I was one of those ‘mindless thugs’ who could actually hold an intellectual conversation, instead of frothing out abuse and foul-mouthed obscenities, meant the council raised no objection…The event was something a bit special even by our standards. The Kings Hall in its heyday was a concert venue, and that’s exactly what we had, a rowdy concert. In excess of 1,300 people crammed into the venue from two in the afternoon until mid-night…Between bands, DJs kept the mood moving with guest appearances from the author of Casuals, Phil Thornton, and Farm front man Peter Hooton. The whole place was enveloped in testosterone as 90 per cent of the congregation was male and most full-on football hooligans of all ages and experience. (Chester, 2005, p.1-3) Ten Birmingham City fans will be appearing at court in Oldham after trouble flared at Blues’ first match in the Second Division at Oldham Athletic on Saturday. Hayward, K. (2004) City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience (London: Cavendish).

Hollands, R. (2002) ‘Divisions in the Dark: Youth Cultures, Transitions and Segmented Consumption Spaces in the Night-Time Economy’, Journal of Youth Studies. Vol 5 No 2. I think the club just thought, ‘We need to get our act together on that.’ But we did have to force them.” What about the explicit connection between football hooligan subcultures and subculture in general? A recent book covering subculture as a whole fails to mention football hooligan subcultures at all (Gelder, 2007). Significantly, too, work on football hooligan subcultures has not featured in this rethinking of subculture in post-subcultural studies, or in the sub-discipline of cultural criminology (Redhead, 1995, Ferrell and Sanders, 1995, Ferrell, Hayward, Morrison and Presdee, 2004, Presdee, 2004), though related studies of contemporary rave culture have figured strongly (Presdee, 2000, Muggleton and Weinzierl, 2003, p.101-117, Bennett and Kahn-Harris, 2004, p.65-78, Gelder, 2007, p.64-5, Nayak and Kehily, 2008, p.56-9). Perhaps the reason for this omission is that little sustained sociological and anthropological theorising and rigorous academic ethnography of football hooligan subcultures has been conducted over the last 25 years. Honourable exceptions to this rule are relatively rare (Armstrong, 1998, Robson, 2000, Sugden, 2002, 2007, Slaughter, 2004). In these and a few other cases long term participant observation work has been carried out. Clubs whose football ‘firms’ have been involved include Sheffield United, Millwall and Manchester United. In many other instances, it is clear that fans winding up gullible authors and journalists with hooligan stories have become almost a full time job. Another reason is that the specific intertwining of football hooligan subcultures and rave culture was generally a UK phenomenon rather than an international one (Redhead, 1990, 1991, 1993a, Anderson and Kavanaugh, 2007). A further reason is that football hooliganism has become something of, in Jean Baudrillard’s terms (Pawlett, 2007, Merrin, 2005), a simulacrum through media simulation. The extreme form of football hooligan subculture has manifested itself in the strange ‘pulp faction’ of the once underground football thug writing scene. Much of this is now online. I suggest that one way into a realm of better informed ethnographies of contemporary football hooligan subcultures is through this simulacrum (Redhead, 2008b, 2010). There were a few of us who were doing broader anti-racist stuff in Leeds, but those of us who were football fans were going, ‘If you want to do something about racism in Leeds, then the football is the most obvious manifestation of it,’” says Paul Thomas, one of the founding members of the group.STEVE BURROWS: "The second invasion involved hundreds of youths, all Birmingham ‘fans’ and all from the Railway End. Seats were ripped up and skimmed as missiles. I recall being hit on the arm by one and it was thrown from such close range. I think Tony O’Neill had come to know Steve Barnes following Steve’s retirement from Greater Manchester Police. Steve left the force after an operation to remove a brain tumour. Subsequently he was involved in a hospitality business with his father in law, the former Manchester United player Wilf McGuiness. It may well have been through this that he met Tony, who has a travel business around United matches, although obviously they would have recognised each other from Tony’s days as an active hooligan. When I started working on the second of Tony’s books, which I ghost-wrote, he suggested that Steve might be prepared to talk. We met in an Indian restaurant and Steve was very friendly and was happy to reminisce. He was not discussing anything of any current operational sensitivity because he had left the force in 2000, some years earlier, so he talked quite freely. One thing he remarked on was that after his operation, the first people to send him a get well card were the United hooligans. I think it still rankled with Steve that he had not received a similar card from any of his bosses or his colleagues in football intelligence. Without second guessing his motives, perhaps that was at least partly behind him agreeing to talk. From my point of view it was fascinating to hear about the same violent incidents told from two opposing viewpoints. 28 On 11 May 1985 (the same day as the Bradford City stadium fire) a 14-year-old boy (Ian Hambridge) A Leeds fan attending his first ever game died at St Andrew's stadium when fans were pushed by police onto a wall which subsequently collapsed following crowd violence at a match between Birmingham City and Leeds United. Fans started fighting when Birmingham took the lead, and riot police were called in to stop Leeds fans pulling down fencing. It was estimated that more than 1,000 fans became involved in the ensuing riot, which saw seats and advertising hoardings being torn up and used as missiles, 96 policemen being injured and the collapsing wall also crushing several parked motor vehicles beyond repair. [6] The Popplewell Committee was set up to investigate both the fire at Bradford City's Valley Parade (which was not hooliganism-related) and the riot at the Birmingham City versus Leeds United match, but the higher number of fatalities in the former case meant that it received much more attention. The fighting between Birmingham City and Leeds United fans was described by Justice Popplewell as more like "the Battle of Agincourt than a football match". [7] In preparation for the visit of Leeds, the Junior Business Boys were supposedly ‘tooled up’ with weapons and had been actively looking for their rivals.