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ABSTRACT
This article explores the development of an important subculture which has received scant academic attention: football’s casual movement of the 1980s. By analysing hooligan autobiographies, it investigates how the casual look spread from Merseyside and Manchester in the late 1970s to encompass every major city and town in Britain by the middle of the following decade. It delineates the attractions of the hooligan firms and shows how, through their use of ritualised violence they fought to become hegemonic in working-class communities. It explores how two key myths about football hooligans became dominant in the popular memory of the 1970s and 1980s. First, the hooligan became uniquely associated with racism in the popular imaginary. The second dominant myth was that the widespread consumption of the drug ecstasy during the acid house and rave years between c.1988 and 1992 saw the end of terrace violence. While the autobiographies largely provide support for the latter, the former is more complex. Via the analysis of the testimony of black and white football hooligans, I show that the racist/hooligan couplet did important ideological work to conceal the degree to which racism continued to figure in British football, into the 1990s, despite the decline in football-related violence.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the CBH reviewers for their careful reading and helpful suggestions. Thanks are also due to my UEA colleagues Tori Cann, Georgia Walker Churchman and Richard Mills for their expert guidance in the fields of football and gender studies. Thanks also to Camilla Scofield and Matthew Worley for helpful conversations and encouragement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For an explanation and critique of this tendency, see Roberts, “Beyond ‘Crisis’ in Understanding Gender Transformation,” 358–66.
2. These divisions arguably originate in the controversial place of men within Second Wave Feminism. Compare: Owen, “Men and the 1970s British Women’s Liberation Movement,” 801–26; Hughes, Celia. Young Lives on the Left, chapter 4; Delap, “Feminism, Masculinities and Emotional Politics,” 571–93; For theoretical disjunctions and affinities see Beasley, ‘Feminism and Men/Masculinities Scholarship’.
3. Segal, Slow Motion; Connell, Masculinities.
4. Rutherford, ‘Who’s that Man?’, 23. My emphasis.
5. The exceptions include Cockburn’s ethnography of print-workers and Morgan’s synthesis of historical and sociological accounts. See Cockburn, Brothers and Morgan, Discovering Men.
6. Willis, Learning To Labour.
7. Morgan, Discovering Men, 4.
8. This tendency is of course by no means restricted to sociologists of hooliganism. For a useful albeit very partial indication of some of the divisions within the field during the 1980s and 1990s see Armstrong, Football Hooligans, 14–21.
9. Poulton, ‘“If you had Balls, you’d be one of us!”’; Rehling, ‘“It’s About Belonging”’; Spaaij, ‘Men Like Us, Boys Like Them’; Williams, ‘Who are You Calling a Hooligan?’; Williams and Taylor, ‘Boys Keep Swinging’.
10. Connell, Masculinities; Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’.
11. Griffin, “Hegemonic Masculinity as a Historical Problem,” especially 385–7. For a recent attempt to consider the struggle for masculine hegemony within a national framework, see Gibbs and Scothorne, “Accusers of capitalism,” 218–45.
12. Poulton, “The culture of production behind the (re)production of football hooligan culture,” 770–84.
13. Pearson, An Ethnography of English Football Fans, 10.
14. Pearson, An Ethnography of English Football Fans, 9.
15. For an analysis of The End and Boy’s Own in relation to casual culture, see Jones, ‘Football Casuals, Fanzines and Acid House’.
16. Pete Walsh quoted in Redhead, Football and Accelerated Culture, 46. The accounts published by Milo are: Thornton, Casuals; Hough, Perry Boys.
17. See McDowell, Redundant Masculinities; Walkerdine and Jimenez, Gender, Work and Community after De-Industrialisation; Strangleman and Rhodes, ‘The ‘New’ Sociology of Deindustrialisation?; Wight, Workers not Wasters; Perchard, ‘“Broken Men” and “Thatcher’s Children”’; Gibbs, Coal Country; Phillips, Wright and Tomlinson, Deindustrialization and The Moral Economy in Scotland.
18. See for example Smith, Masculinity, Class and Same Sex Desire; Houlbrook, Queer London; Cook, Queer Domesticities; Johnston and McIvor, ‘Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies’; McIvor, Working Lives; Ward, ‘Miners’ Bodies and Masculine Identity’; Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class; King, Family Men.
19. Beavan, Leisure, Citizenship and Working Class Men.
20. Mort, Cultures of Consumption; Nixon, Hard Looks.
21. See Nixon, Hard Looks, Part IV; Benwell, (ed), Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines.
22. For pioneering sociological accounts, see Redhead, “An era of The End or the end of an era”; Giulianotti, “Soccer Casuals as Cultural Intermediaries”.
23. Nayak, ‘Last of the ‘Real Geordies’, 7–25; Ward, From Labouring to Learning.
24. Here I am adopting the Popular Memory Group’s understanding of the cultural circuit which enables the composure of life stories by individuals out of dominant narratives in the wider culture, as elaborated in the work of Penny Summerfield, Graham Dawson and Al Thomson. See Popular Memory Group, ‘Popular memory: theory, politics, method’; Summerfield, ‘Culture and Composure’; Dawson, Soldier Heroes; Thomson, Anzac Memories.
25. Besides the ethnographies by Armstrong and Giulianotti cited above, there are only two other substantial ethnographies of domestic football hooliganism: Robins, We Hate Humans; Spaaji, Understanding Football Hooliganism.
26. Here I am building on the pioneering findings in Back, Crabbe and Solomos, The Changing Face of Football.
27. See for example, Gall, Zulus.
28. Redhead, Football and Accelerated Culture.
29. This is the method employed by Mike Savage in relation to Mass Observation and other material analysed in his Identities and Social Change.
30. Poulton, ‘The culture of production’, 779.
31. Brimson, Dougie and Eddy. Everywhere We Go, 9.
32. Routledge, Oh Yes, Oh Yes, We are the PPS, 12.
33. Dunning, Williams and Murphy, Hooligans Abroad.
34. Quoted in Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, 544.
35. On the origins and dissemination of the casual style, see Hewitson, The Liverpool Boys are in Town and Hough, Perry Boys.
36. Heffer, ‘Maggie’s Maulers’; Davis, ‘The London Cabbie’.
37. Savage, ‘Working Class Identities in the 1960s’, 929–946.
38. ‘Smoothies’ and ‘dressers’ were alternative terms for ‘casuals’ prevalent in parts of Northern England and Scotland.
39. Brown, Bovver.
40. King and Knight, Hoolifan, 68.
41. Ferguson, Bring Out Your Riot Gear.
42. Hewitt, The Soul Stylists.
43. Hewitt, The Soul Stylists, 171.
44. Hewitt, The Soul Stylists, 173–4.
45. Hewitson, The Liverpool Boys Are In Town, 13.
46. See Hough, Perry Boys, 63–69; 112–115; Beech, Playing Up With Pompey, 103–5.
47. For a more extensive discussion, see Jones, ‘Football Casuals, Fanzines and Acid House’.
48. Khan, Khan: Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual, 20.
49. Jones and Rivers, Soul Crew, 48.
50. Blance, Hibs Boy, 43.
51. Jones, “Football Casuals, Fanzines and Acid House”.
52. Chester, Naughty, 18.
53. Armstrong, Football Hooligans; Spaaji, Understanding Football Hooliganism.
54. Stanko, Everyday Violence, 5.
55. Stanko, Everyday Violence, 7.
56. D’Cruze, ‘Unguarded Passions: Violence, History and The Everyday’, D’Cruze, (ed.), Everyday Violence, 13.
57. D’Cruze, ‘Unguarded Passions’, 15.
58. Compare Clark, ‘Domesticity and the problem of wifebeating’, with Archer, ‘Men Behaving Badly? Masculinity and the uses of violence, 1850–1900’, in D’Cruze, (ed.), Everyday Violence.
59. Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels?; Davies, The Gangs of Manchester.
60. Dunning, Murphy and Williams, The Roots of Football Hooliganism, chapters 2–7.
61. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics; Osgerby, ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics Revisited, in Black, Pemberton and Thane (eds), Reassessing 1970s Britain.
62. Beech, Playing up with Pompey, 6.
63. Cowens, Steve. Blades Business Crew, p. 2.
64. McCall and Robb, After the Match, the Game Begins, 40.
65. Chester, Naughty, 248.
66. Jones and Rivers, Soul Crew, 87.
67. Beech, Playing up with Pompey, 112.
68. Pennant, Cass, 11.
69. George, Apex to Zulu, 49.
70. Khan, Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual, 7.
71. Khan, Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual, 7.
72. Khan, Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual, xvii. Here, tantalisingly the manuscript breaks off (the following page is missing seemingly due to a printing error).
73. Khan, Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual, 213.
74. Khan, Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual, 34.
75. Khan, Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual, xi; McDonnell, Getting a Nasty Shock.
76. See Francis with Walsh, Guvnors, 32–34.
77. Francis with Walsh, Guvnors, 32–33.
78. Gall, Zulus.
79. Pennant, Congratulations You Have Just Met the I. C. F., 374.
80. On composure and discomposure see Summerfield, ‘Culture and Compsure’.
81. On the far right see Lowles, and Nicholls, Hooligans 2, 221–228; Lowles, White Riot.
82. Brown, Bovver, 291.
83. Brown, Bovver, 285.
84. Beech, Playing up with Pompey, 119.
85. Buglioni and King, Bully C. F. C., 113.
86. Buglioni and King, Bully C. F. C., 114.
87. Lowles and Nicholls, Hooligans 2, 223.
88. Lowles and Nicholls, Hooligans 2, 224.
89. Nicholls, Scally, 149.
90. Nicholls, Scally, 149.
91. Back, Crabbe and Solomos, The Changing Face of Football, 28.
92. See for example, Jones, Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football; Montague, 1312 Among the Ultras; Spaaij, Understanding Football Hooliganism. It is worth noting that, while often involved in violence, neither the Torcidas of Brazil or Barra Bravas of Argentina would likely recognise the European description of them as ‘Ultras’. My thanks to reviewer one for emphasising this point.
93. Here the Hillsborough tragedy casts a long shadow. See Scraton’s monumental Hillsborough: The Truth and Tempany, And the Sun Shines Now; on pre-Hillsborough fatalities see Inglis, The Football Grounds of Great Britain, 28–39.
94. My thanks to reviewer one for emphasising the latter point.
95. See Allan, Bloody Casuals, 20; Blance, Hibs Boy, 142.
96. Blance, Hibs Boy, p. 120.
97. O’Kane, Celtic Soccer Crew.
98. Carrick and King, Rangers I. C. F.
99. Jacobs, “Introduction.” In A New Formation, edited by C. Jacobs, 5.
100. Thanks to Camilla Schofield for pointing this out. See Schofield, ‘In Defence of White Freedom’.
101. See Evans and Tilley, The New Politics of Class; Pilkington, Loud and Proud; Allen, ‘”The Football Lads Alliance and Democratic Football Lad’s Alliance,” 639–46.