Casual culture and football hooligan autobiographies: popular memory, working-class men and racialised masculinities in deindustrialising Britain, 1970s–1990s

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Soccer
• racism
• violence
• subcultures
• hegemonic masculinity

Introduction

This article traces the development of football hooliganism in post-war Britain from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. It is particularly concerned with the period from c.1977/78 which saw thousands of younger football fans (some of whom were involved in violence) adopt the ‘casual’ look; the article will trace the development of this important subculture which has received scant academic attention. The rise of modern football hooliganism and its construction as a social problem happened to coincide with the articulation of powerful feminist critiques of patriarchy, misogyny, and gendered violence. From the later 1970s to the mid-1990s it was widely asserted, across both popular and academic discourses, that masculinity was ‘in crisis’.¹ By the late 1980s, a multi-disciplinary field of ‘masculinity studies’ began to coalesce, one which while overwhelmingly indebted to feminist theory, developed somewhat separately from, and sometimes in tension with, feminists of the second wave.²

While major feminist studies of the 1990s such as those by Lynne Segal and R. W. Connell eschewed the ‘crisis’ narrative for more historically grounded, nuanced psycho-social accounts, by this point it had become clear that some of the crucial components of mid-century working-class masculinities were in trouble; notably in relation to the decline in skilled and well-paid semi-skilled manual work.³ Jonathan Rutherford sums up much of the thinking on this trend: ‘The changing nature of work, and the disruption of work culture with the decline of manufacturing industries, the introduction of new technology and the subsequent deskilling of traditional male jobs are changes that have undermined traditional working class masculinities’.⁴ Given how widely held this view was, it is surprising that few masculinities scholars concerned themselves with working-class masculinities during the years of accelerated deindustrialisation which coincided with the rise of the football casual (i.e. between c.1977 and the late 1980s).⁵ Here perhaps Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour cast a long shadow.⁶ Moreover, the subject of hooliganism, so prominent in popular discourse at the time, received scant attention from masculinities scholars. As David H. J. Morgan argued in a book published in the early 1990s, the relationship between men, masculinities and football hooliganism was ‘perhaps too obvious’.⁷ Part of the explanation for this neglect must surely be that the study of hooliganism was, by this point, a more-or-less distinctive sub-field of British sociology, dominated initially by the so-called Leicester school. While some scholars of hooliganism seemed more focused on (sometimes rancorous) internal disagreements⁸ than developments in gender studies more broadly, by the 1990s and 2000s academics such as Emma Poulton, Nicola Rehling, Ramón Spaaij and John Williams were engaging productively with major developments in contemporary gender theory.⁹

This article takes a similar approach by historicising R. W. Connell’s concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, crucially modified by class, regional traditions and racialisation.¹⁰ In doing so I am following Ben Griffin’s suggestion that we historicise locally hegemonic masculinities in relation to ‘communication communities’ which were simultaneously legitimating and interpretive.¹¹ These arguments about masculinity will be primarily made by analysing a set of sources which have been perhaps unfairly side-lined: the hooligan autobiographies that proliferated from the late 1990s. Sociologists of football cultures have been wary about these sources. Emma Poulton notes that ‘some hooligan memoirs can be narcissistic, self-serving and characterized by bragging and bravado, so caution is needed when using them as an academic resource’.¹² Clearly, the purpose for which the analysis of these memoirs is undertaken is an important context. For the ethnographer Geoff Pearson, those seeking accurate autobiographical accounts of specific incidents of football violence will be disappointed.¹³ However, he also acknowledged their value: ‘although verifying specific incidents was usually impossible, some accounts were instantly recognisable to my own experience and observations as being reflective of the wider subculture’.¹⁴ For the social historian of football casuals there are very few relevant sources beyond these memoirs, a tiny number of ethnographies and fanzines like The End.¹⁵ As Pete Walsh, whose Milo Books have published the two most comprehensive accounts of casual culture thus far noted: ‘Chronicling this movement is extremely difficult because there is little material record; it is all personal reminiscence’.¹⁶ As I demonstrate below, the careful analysis of this corpus of material can offer insights into working-class subcultures and masculinities during a period of intense deindustrialisation.

Masculinities during deindustrialisation, c. 1970s–present

There is of course a substantial body of excellent scholarship, often based on oral history interviews, which considers the effect of deindustrialisation on aspects of masculine identities in Britain: the literature on Scotland is especially rich.¹⁷ Indeed, there is very little historical research on late-twentieth-century working-class masculinities which does not take industrial work and its loss as an organising optic. There are complimentary bodies of work on queer masculinities, ‘hard’ masculinities and the working-class body, and a smaller corpus on working-class fatherhood.¹⁸ But here, perhaps understandably, the focus is largely on the century or so before 1950, as is the case with Brad Beavan’s sensitive account of the relationship between citizenship and working men’s leisure.¹⁹

The 1990s did see important work by cultural historians of menswear and masculinities in relation to marketing and consumption.²⁰ While valuable and often insightful, the foci of these studies has been fashion design, photography, retail and particularly, the impact of style magazines marketed at men; usually from the perspective of the producers, or via analysis of the products.²¹ In contrast, the emergence of the hugely influential casual subculture (influential not least upon the fashion designers, buyers and journalists of the 1990s), which was associated with football hooliganism has received limited attention from sociologists, and, as far as I know, none from academic historians.²² The memoirs of those engaged in football-related violence therefore offer an excellent insight into the development and proliferation of one of the most popular youth subcultures of the 1980s. The popularity of this genre of writing, as I argue below, can in part be explained by growing symbolic importance of football-supporting in underpinning some kinds of working-class masculinities, as manual work cultures have declined due to deindustrialisation. As such, this article echoes some of the findings of twenty-first-century ethnographic studies into young-men’s masculinities by Anoop Nayak and Mike Ward.²³

The argument is structured as follows. After accounting for the construction of my sample I use the autobiographies to map the emergence, and consolidation of casual culture from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. Taking a popular memory approach, I argue that while in popular estimation, hooliganism reached a nadir in 1985; enthusiasts remember things somewhat differently. Popular and hooligan narratives regarding the ecstasy-fuelled decline in football-related violence do begin to converge around 1988/1989, for reasons which I explain below. Thinking about the ‘cultural circuit’ in relation to popular memory also allows us to consider casual culture as an excellent case study of ‘popular individualism’ at work.²⁴ Thirdly, I argue that a consideration of these memoirs, alongside the major ethnographic studies of the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrates the centrality of everyday violence to the construction of some masculinities.²⁵ Some of this violence was racialised; certainly, everyday racism was endemic in British society in the period under discussion and was freely expressed at football grounds across the country. I show that while such racism at most (perhaps all) clubs buttressed a normative whiteness, in a minority of football hooligan ‘firms’ black and Asian members challenged processes of racialisation and pervasive racism. Finally, I argue that attempts by some authors to downplay the extent of racism in football were echoed in liberal discourse during the 1990s positing racism’s alleged ‘decline’, both within the game and in British society at large.²⁶

Just ordinary working-class men? Football hooligan autobiographies

There are two main kinds of popular writing about football hooliganism in Britain which might broadly be described as auto/biographical. The first consists of edited accounts compiled by journalists or participants in which fragments of interview testimony and/or autobiographical reminiscence are woven into an overall narrative. Some of these provide potted histories of several hooligan firms, such as Nick Lowles and Andy Nichols two volume A—Z of Hooligan Gangs. Most commonly they consist of accounts of a particular firm, complied from a number of perspectives.²⁷ Of the 104 autobiographies collected by the late Steve Redhead, 58 are of this kind. Redhead originally collected these published accounts to serve as the source base for a number of sociological articles about the genre which culminated in his book-length study Football and Accelerated Culture, published in 2015. While I have drawn upon some of these collective accounts where relevant, this article focuses on how individuals composed their life stories in relation to the wider formations of class, gender and race. Focusing on more substantial individual life stories maximises the chance of establishing significant biographical markers in terms of age, place of birth, social class and occupation, than the collectively written accounts of a firm where little or none of this information is available. Starting with Jay Allen’s Bloody Casuals, I worked my way down the list of memoirs in Redhead’s archive, systematically excluding the collective accounts described above. I also largely excluded ‘duplicate’ books by separate individuals about the same football firm, except in the case where such doubling-up enabled me to analyse more black voices. This left me with 32 substantial accounts out of a possible 46 – representing 70% of the individual football hooligan autobiographies published in the UK between 1989 and 2014.²⁸ I stopped reading when it appeared that sufficient thematic patterns had been established and I was no longer coming across anything new that would lead me to alter the conclusions I had come to regarding the data as a whole. This is a well-established methodology for dealing with archived life history material.²⁹ To be clear, I am not making any definitive claims about the material that I have not sampled. It may be that amongst the stories that I have not analysed exist very different accounts of class, violence and masculinity. Given the patterns I have identified amongst my sample, I suspect that this is not the case but would of course welcome any research which proves otherwise.

Before going into detail about the characteristics of the subculture depicted in the sampled autobiographies, it is worth saying something further about the genre. While a couple of accounts were published in the late 1980s, the vast majority appear from 1996, when England’s hosting of the European championship, combined with the phenomenal success of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch to encourage publishers that there was a ready market. The rate of publication accelerated into the 2000s, with more than half of Redhead’s archived titles being published in the five years between 2005 and 2010 alone. Publication proliferated at the moment that actual terrace violence declined (due in part to the introduction of all-seater stadia, CCTV, more stringent policing and sentencing, and the gentrification of the game) and part of the motivation amongst authors and readers alike seems to be a nostalgia for a recent past in which violence was a regular facet of football. Sources on the readership of these memoirs are scant, but what we do have suggests an element of middle-class voyeurism at work. Cass Pennant, arguably the most prolific and successful hooligan-turned author stated in conversation with Emma Poulton:

The people buying the books are not just hooligans. Yeah, you start off with some of them being hooligans, but that’s not how you get best-sellers. I’ve got 8 titles and sold nearly 300,000 since 2000. […] The publisher said our biggest market is Cheltenham [a typically middle-class historic English Spa town]. Then Oxford. It’s ‘Middle England’, that sort of place. And I said, ‘Why’s that then?’ They said, ‘People don’t want your world, they just want to know what it’s about’. And people will pay for seeing what’s on the other side of things. It’s the same reason why they watch the [hooligan] films.³⁰

If the readership perhaps somewhat skewed towards middle-England, who were the authors? The table below outlines some of the key demographics of the sample.

Hooligan autobiographies consulted.

Author	Title(s)	Football Club	Age at publication	Memoir type	Parent’s occupations	Author’s occupation
Allan, Jay	Bloody Casuals (1989)	Aberdeen		Fight stories	Smallholders
Allen, Paul	Flying with the Owls Crime Squad (2008)	Sheffield Wednesday	-	Fight stories	-	Forge-man at a tool-maker
Allt, Nicholas	The Boys from the Mersey (2004)	Liverpool	-	Social history
Beech, Bob	Playing Up with Pompey (Beech 2005)	Portsmouth	40	Fight stories	-	Security
Blance, Andy	Hibs Boy (2009)	Hibernian	44	Fight stories	MoD civil servant (father)	Wages clerk; doorman
Blaney, Colin	Grafters (2004); The Undesirables (2014)	Man Utd	48	Life story/social history	Machinist (mother); Coal miner; Robber (father)	Professional thief
Brown, Chris	Bovver (2002)	Bristol Rovers	46	Social history	-	Printer
Buglioni, Gaetano	Bully CFC (2006)	Chelsea	56	Fight stories	Asphalter (father)	Asphalter
Carrick, Davie	Rangers ICF	Glasgow Rangers	40	Fight stories	Train driver (father)	Apprentice welder;warehouseman
Chester, Mark	Naughty (2003)	Stoke City	39	Social history	Steeplejack (father)	Soldier; slip-house worker
Cowens, Steve	Blades Business Crew (2001)	Sheffield Utd	37	Fight stories	Steelworker (father)	-
Debrick, Paul	The Brick (2005)	Middlesborough	39	Fight stories	Painter and decorator (father); Cook (mother)	Doorman; oil rig worker
Dodd, Paul	England’s Number One (1998)	Carlisle	27	Fight stories	Forklift truck driver (father)	-
Ferguson, C. S.	Bring Out Your Riot Gear, Hearts are Here (1999)	Heart of Midlothian	-	Fight stories	-
Francis, Mickey	Guvnors (1997)	Manchester City	37	Fight stories	Welder (father); cleaner (mother)	Painter & decorator; Scaffolder; doorman
Gardner, Bill	Good Afternoon Gentlemen (2006)	West Ham	56	Fight stories	Car-worker (father)	Builder
George, David	Apex to Zulu (2006)	Birmingham City	37	Fight stories	-	-
Hough, Ian	Perry Boys (2007)	Manchester Utd		Social history
Jones, David	Soul Crew (2002)	Cardiff City	37	Fight stories	-	DJ and club night promoter
Khan, Riaz	Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual (2012)	Leicester City	47	Social history
King, Martin	Hoolifan (1999)	Chelsea	-	Life story	-	Black cab driver; writer
Leach, Carleton	Rise of the Footsoldier (2008)	West Ham	-	Life story	-	Doorman; professional criminal
McCall, Kenny	After the Match, The Game Begins (2008)	Dundee Utd	37	Fight story		Engineer
Naylor, Douglas	Flying with the Owls Crime Squad (2008)	Sheffield Wednesday	-	Fight story	-	-
Nicholls, Andy	Scally (2002)	Everton	-		-	-
O’Kane, John	Celtic Soccer Crew (2006)	Celtic	38	Life story	Bus driver (father)	Labourer
O’Neil, Tony	Red Army General (2004)	Manchester Utd	46	Fight story	-	Youth worker; doorman
Pennant, Cass	Cass (2002a); Congratulations, You Have Just Met the ICF (2002b)	West Ham	44	Life story	Toolmaker (adoptive father); car worker (father)	Painter and decorator; doorman; writer
Rhoden, Rodney	The Young Guvnors (2012)	Manchester City	38	Fight story	-	Factory worker; clerk
Rivers, Tony	Soul Crew (2002)	Cardiff City	-	Fight story	-	-
Robb, John	After the Match, The Game Begins (2008)	Dundee	36	Fight story	-	Printer
Routledge, William	Oh Yes, Oh Yes, We are the PPS (2010)	Preston North End	45	Fight story	-	Builder

The types of memoirs are explained as follows. Most of these autobiographies recount a series of fights (usually with rival football firms) with little in the way of broader contextual information. I have categorised these as ‘fight stories’. Other writers attempt to situate their individual experience within the broader cultural and social context of their time. These I term ‘social histories’. A handful of stories derive their narrative drive from something external to football (such as alcoholism, or the risks associated with other forms of criminality) – these I term ‘life stories’.

One key debate that the data above allow us to address is that of hooliganism’s social constituency. Early sociologists of the phenomena argued that the majority of hooligans were drawn from the lower-end of the working class: the unskilled and the unemployed (discussed below). In contrast, a number of hooligan-authors argued that hooligans came from diverse class backgrounds—encompassing businessmen, managers and middle-class professionals.

As is readily apparent, one popular myth that does not hold up to scrutiny is the notion that football hooliganism encompassed the professional middle classes to any significant extent. This view (of substantial middle-class participation) is asserted by the prolific Brimson brothers and occasionally, crops up in the autobiographies themselves.³¹ William Routledge, for example noted: ‘Every match day, people from different walks of life were involved, from the unemployed right up to professional businessmen, even teachers’.³² As we can see from the table, there are no middle-class professionals amongst the sample. All the writers grew up in working-class districts and their parents had working-class jobs (besides Andy Blance, who’s single father, a low-level MoD employee, was hardly affluent). Further all the authors themselves had manual occupations or were self-employed tradesmen. If there were many middle-class professional hooligans, they haven’t published their memoirs. Equally, although there are a handful of labourers and professional criminals in the sample, most were solidly working class. Indeed, many of the writers went out of their way to emphasise their ordinary, working-class credentials. How then do we account for the persistent myths of both the ‘rough’ and ‘middle-class’ hooligan? The explanation has two main overlapping components which relate to vernacular understandings of class identities on the one hand and academic misreading of changes in working-class subcultures on the other.

First, the idea that hooligans were part of a particularly ‘rough’ section of the working class was popularised in the academy by Eric Dunning and his colleagues at the University of Leicester. Drawing on Norbert Elias’s theorising of the impact of the ‘Civilising Process’ on masculine behaviours and emotional regimes, Dunning et al. argued that football hooligans were drawn from a ‘rough’ fraction of the working class which refused to be incorporated into bourgeois norms.³³ This interpretation—that hooliganism was the unique property of the ‘rough’ or lumpen proletariat—was reinforced in popular cultural representations of the era such as the notorious 1977 documentary on Millwall’s hooligan gangs and the 1985 ITV documentary on West Ham’s Inter-City Firm. By this date, the reputation of football was at such a nadir amongst the professional middle classes that the Sunday Times could editorialise without the least compunction that the sport was: ‘a slum game played in slum stadiums watched by slum people’.³⁴

Both the academics and the journalists were however lagging some distance behind cultural and social developments on the terraces. Starting in Liverpool and Manchester in the late 1970s, by the mid-1980s the ‘casual’ style of high-end European sportswear and designer clothing dominated the terraces.³⁵ Aquascutum, Armani, Versace and Burberry displaced the platform boots, flares and scarves of the seventies: the casual look had arrived and with it came a modernist, confident working-class sensibility (discussed below). By the later 1980s, when Dunning et al.’s theories about ‘rough’, ‘unincorporated’ lower-working-class hooligans were on their way to becoming the academic orthodoxy, football casuals were wearing the most expensive prêt-à-porter menswear available in Europe. While some of this was obtained by criminal means, much of it was paid for in cash. In short, academic and popular understandings had failed to keep pace with changes on the terraces.

At a time of deindustrialisation and mass unemployment then, football casuals were displaying all the accoutrements of affluence of the sort which would have been lauded by Thatcherites in other contexts. Indeed, there are obvious homologies here between the football casual and Simon Heffer’s ‘Essex Man’.³⁶ They looked smart and they looked successful—indeed in material terms, many of them were highly successful—working as self-employed entrepreneurs and skilled tradesmen. To be a petty-bourgeois businessman or highly paid contractor was in many ways the pinnacle of working-class aspiration, without taking the leap into the (usually unreachable and undesirable) ranks of the professional middle-classes. As Mike Savage has shown, the affluent working classes marked themselves out as ‘ordinary’ compared to those with greater economic capital above them and stigmatised groups (immigrants, the poor, the unemployed) below them.³⁷ Similarly, football casuals felt themselves to be neither part of a wealthy elite or middle class, nor a stigmatised underclass. Moreover, whilst they claimed an ‘ordinary’ working-class position they also sought to mark themselves out from the run-of-the-mill ‘scarfers’ (i.e. normal fans) both through their propensity for violence and their distinctive subcultural style. This seeming contradiction—of wanting to assert individuality, whilst simultaneously belonging to a group—is a common facet of all working-class youth subcultures, and it is to the emergence of the casual look that I now turn.

From suede-heads and skins to smoothies and dressers³⁸: tracing terrace fashions

For those interested in working-class subcultures, hooligan memoirs offer some rich evidence for sartorial trends since the 1960s. Chris Brown, for example, provides an outstandingly detailed account of the subtle sartorial shifts and musical tastes of an original 1960s skin in provincial Bristol, up to the skin-head revival of 1978/1979.³⁹ Martin King seems to have regretted leaving the boot-boy look behind for a rather more flamboyant style as a follower of glamorous Chelsea in the 1970s:

Out went Dr Martens, Ivy loafers, box Gibsons, Smooth Levi sta-prests, Ben Shermans and most of the other badges of the skinhead era. They were replaced by baseball boots, stars and stripes T-shirts, Levi denim jackets, flowered shirts with dodgy large collars and Rupert the Bear checked trousers which would later grow into the even more laughable Oxford bags. Not many months later those ‘70s trademark platform shoes and Budgie jackets also arrived … For fortysomethings who lived through this era and were not individual enough to resist being a dedicated follower of fashion, this was a bad time.⁴⁰

C. S. Ferguson’s second love after Heart-of-Midlothian was Paul Weller and his charming account of Gorgie Aggro is interspersed with fond memories of the looks and sounds of the Mod revival.⁴¹ Ferguson soon moved seamlessly to embrace the emerging ‘casual’ style during the early 1980s, and others such as Paolo Hewitt and Weller himself have seen in the casual look a distinctively modernist sensibility, the origins of which however are somewhat contested.⁴² For Londoners such as Mick Mahoney, the metropolis was (inevitably!) the epicentre: ‘The original guys were gangster types, criminals, cockney cab drivers and the like … they were wearing Gabicci tops, Farah trousers and crocodile skin shoes. London. 100%’.⁴³ Norman Jay concurred, arguing that the casual look owed much to the ‘Sticksman’ style prevalent in London’s black communities from the mid-1970s.⁴⁴ While this may well have influenced the development of a localised style in the capital, the overwhelming consensus is that casual look originated in Liverpool. Dave Hewitson dates the style’s debut to the 1977/1978 season, and this is confirmed by fanzine and magazine sources from the period.⁴⁵

The most obvious early manifestations of the casual look were on the terraces and in the streets, so it is difficult to map the pace of its diffusion beyond Merseyside definitively. This said, a number of published accounts make a strong case for the early adoption of similar styles amongst Manchester and Salford’s ‘Perry Boys’ by 1979/1980 and amongst fans of Tottenham Hotspur and Leeds United shortly thereafter.⁴⁶ The analysis of Liverpool’s The End fanzine allows us to trace a growing interest in casual fashions in London, the North-west and parts of Yorkshire over the course of the early 1980s.⁴⁷ Perhaps the most important article to draw wider attention to the phenomena was Kevin Sampson’s in the May 1983 issue of The Face. For Riaz Khan, who was drawn to football through his interest in fashion, the article’s influence was formative:

I remember reading The Face magazine’s article about the ‘Soccer Casual’; it was not so much the article but the photos that got me intrigued. This one picture had three young men sitting on a train sporting these flick haircuts and wearing clothes I had never seen before, except at Wimbledon or the US Open. I also read another article in a national newspaper … focused on the Leeds Service Crew. There was a picture with a group of 30-odd young white lads sporting flicks and designer gear. I had that clipping for quite a while, and every so often I’d look at the phot in admiration and picture myself looking like that.⁴⁸

Cardiff City fan Dave Jones also remembers the formative influence of Sampson’s Face article which saw local shops begin to stock more casual gear Unfortunately for them, they were being relieved of that stock by high-tech ram-raids by crews from Llanrumney and the Docks. We had got wind that Porthcawl Golf Club had been stripped bare of its Pringle and Burberry range, and for the rest of the summer most of Cardiff’s West Glamorgan contingent could be seen in Burberry check.⁴⁹ Later in the summer, he set off with a friend for Amsterdam in search of rare Adidas trainers. In doing so he was following in the footsteps of Liverpool fans who had been relieving the boutiques of Europe of their stock as they followed their football team around the continent from the late 1970s. Andy Blance recalled being struck by his first sight of the Hibs Capital City Service firm in action:

The clothes worn by Robb and his pals were also a huge attraction and not just because they made us less conspicuous than the skinhead out-fits. They were interested in quality gear, gear that was stylish, sophisticated, expensive […] Within a few weeks there were visible changes in the way I looked. I ditched the Doc Martens, the Ben Sherman shirts and the sta-press trousers and replaced them with Trim Trab trainers, Pringle sweaters and bleached jeans.⁵⁰

The casual look then, which inspired individual one-upmanship, and inter-firm rivalry was undoubtedly part of the appeal, and I have written more extensively about this elsewhere.⁵¹ Another major attraction was the opportunity to engage in organised violence and it is to this subject that I now turn.

Historicizing masculine violence and the popular memory of hooliganism

Membership of a hooligan firm had other draws besides violence. For many, the gang provided a sense of belonging; a camaraderie sustained by homosociality. For Mark Chester, going to watch Stoke City as a youth fulfilled an emotional need for communion with others:

That unison, those cries of emotion – it got me. I was doing that. I was part of that clapping and people were nodding at me. I must fit in. Yes! City, City. This was the best feeling ever. I would shout as loud as I could, always lose my voice, clap until my hands were ringing. And when no one was looking, I’d cry tears of joy because I was so happy. People hugged you in the Boothen End.⁵²

There were also, as the major ethnographies by Armstrong and Spaaji make clear, other benefits: from material gain through to enhanced social status.⁵³ All of these advantages of hooliganism were underpinned by the attractions and pleasures of violence. The readiness to commit acts of violence (in certain circumstances) was a central plank of hegemonic masculinity in many working-class communities where men were expected to be handy with their fists and being a good fighter conferred status. The first point to emphasise then is that we need to follow feminist sociologist Elizabeth Stanko in viewing violence as neither deviant nor abnormal but rather as ‘an ordinary part of life’.⁵⁴ Male violence was moreover rooted in ‘men’s structural power and the negotiation of this power with others’.⁵⁵ By the first half of the twentieth century, the historian Shani D’Cruze notes that ‘violence was a tactic deeply embedded in ordinary social interactions between men, women and children’.⁵⁶ The capacity to practice violence became, moreover, central to the construction of elite, middle class and working-class masculinities: ‘Violence employed in defence of the weak, of one’s good name, of one’s country or Empire was considered honourable by dominant cultures’.⁵⁷ A cross-class masculine consensus emerged about the honourable uses of violence in, for example, ‘a fair fight’ or where a husband chastised an ‘unruly wife’.⁵⁸ When we turn to the hooligan autobiographies then, it should hardly surprise us that violence features as a significant part of social life, which was moreover, frequently framed as normal, justifiable and (even) honourable. I outline below how media representations helped to fuel interest in the casual gangs, which themselves were often amalgamated from smaller territorial mobs intent on defending their own patch. As social historians of the late Victorian and inter-war periods Andy Davies and Steve Humphries have shown, the violence of such youth gangs was far from novel.⁵⁹

Football-related violence has been a part of the game in Britain since at least the 1890s, as Dunning, Murphy and Williams demonstrated in The Roots of Football Hooliganism, which remains the definitive historical account.⁶⁰ While such ‘rowdyism’, ‘hooliganism’ and ‘unsportsmanlike’ behaviour did draw admonishment from the press in the years before the mid-twentieth century, the discursive construction of the modern football hooligan is arguably indebted the ‘moral panics’ surrounding the development of distinctive youth subcultures. Stan Cohen’s identification of a media-fuelled moral panic concerning the ‘Mods and Rockers’ bank holiday disturbances of the 1960s has been much imitated in relation to perceived deviancy and ‘delinquent’ criminality.⁶¹ There was a similar moral panic around football hooliganism from the 1970s onwards and the autobiographies provide evidence of the extent to which media reports stirred youthful interest in the casuals. Portsmouth fan Bob Beech became obsessed with hooliganism: ‘I decorated my bedroom with newspaper clippings, much to the annoyance of my parents, not just Pompey, I trawled the Sunday papers for reports from across the country’.⁶² Aspiring young casuals were also enthralled by television representations of football violence, as Steve Cowens recalled I remember watching a now legendary BBC TV documentary about Millwall in 1977 and being fascinated. Millwall had built up a reputation for violence that was second to none. Harry the Dog and his head-the-ball mates in “F Troop” caused mayhem … A trip to their intimidating home ground, the Den, was a kind of rite of passage for any would-be soccer lout.⁶³ Ian Studdard’s documentary about West Ham’s ‘Inter-City Firm’ which was broadcast on ITV in 1985 was also very influential. As Kenny McCall of the Dundee Utility remarked: If I had a pound for every time I’ve watched that documentary over the last 20 years, especially in 1985 and 1986, I wouldn’t need to write this book. The look, the quotes and the walk—they were all studied by budding young firms up and down the land. I’m sure I even spoke with a cockney accent for a while, it was that bad!⁶⁴

Such mediated versions, both the condemnatory and the more explanatory, formed a key part of the cultural circuit which sustained dominant images of the football hooligan in popular memory. Individuals drew upon, and, as we’ve seen above and will explore below, sometimes challenged these dominant constructions of the archetypal hooligan in their own memoirs.

“Loved-up” louts or racist boot-boys? Investigating hooliganisms’ popular myths through the autobiographies

One popular myth which the autobiographical evidence overwhelmingly supports is the degree to which the arrival of acid house and rave (and the drug Ecstasy) led to a sharp (albeit temporary) reduction in football-related violence. In Stoke, the rave scene peaked in the summer of 1991 and Mark Chester noted that ‘after the excesses of Friday night it became difficult to muster a firm for the away games’.⁶⁵ For Dave Jones of Cardiff’s Soul Crew, the house scene was life changing:

By 1988 a shift from the terraces to the dance floor was becoming apparent. Clubs like the Hacienda, Konspiracy and the Boardwalk in Manchester, Quadrant Park in Liverpool and the big warehouse parties of Sunrise and Biology in London were becoming the weekend buzz as the dwindling mobs of footie boys became fed up of punching each other. […] I was to spend many nights popping pills on the Hacienda’s dancefloor with my mate Wigan and a host of lads who supported Man Utd, Liverpool, Blackburn, Man City and so on. All these hooligans danced under one roof on the happy tablets.⁶⁶

Jones, like many other former hooligans devoted himself to the music scene, becoming a successful promoter and DJ. In contrast, other hooligan writers, like Bob Beech were dismayed: Before long many of those that had spent most Saturdays creating havoc across the country were now “loved up”. Those of us who were not taken over by the musical phenomena, and I was one of them, couldn’t understand all this smiley faces bollocks. We still longed for Saturday afternoon, whereas those who were looked at us with some sympathy: we had missed the point and a good time along with it.⁶⁷ Whatever people’s individual perspective on ecstasy, one thing everyone could agree on was that the second ‘summer of love’ resulted in a prolonged pause in football violence. Of course, violence didn’t disappear completely. In some firms, the younger members (often called the ‘under fives’) took over as older hooligans retired from the scene as other mundane matters, from mortgages, jobs and family commitments to tougher sentencing for football offences and more stringent policing took their toll. Nevertheless, the involvement of football firms in the rave scene had substantially hastened the decline in casual violence. The other popular myth—of the hooligan as a far-right lout prone to racist violence—was one which, while having some basis in fact, is rather a more complicated case than it might first appear.

Racism in football: beyond the racist/hooligan couplet?

The autobiographies are undoubtedly replete with evidence of the extent of everyday racism in post-war Britain. Cass Pennant, who was fostered by white parents in Slade Green, South-East London remembers being racially abused and spat at as walked hand-in-hand down the street with his foster mother: ‘Even adults passing in cars would hurl insults’.⁶⁸ David George from Birmingham’s vast overspill estate of Chelmsley Wood recalled:

Standing back-to-back in the playground at Alcott Hall primary school in the late ‘70s with my brother Gary, taking on all comers while holding a compass in each hand. Kids can be very cruel … and its best to wake up to it as soon as you can, especially when another TV show was about to start at the time called Roots. With one of the main protagonists called Chicken George, you can guess the rest.⁶⁹

For Riaz Khan, growing up in Leicester, racism at school was constant: ‘I was always getting abuse form the Mods, Skinheads and Greboes’.⁷⁰ However, there was a certain ambivalence when it came to some of his white peers: The boys in my class were racist but they tolerated me … My best friend at school was Paul Canham. Paul was a nutter and he loved fighting … he would always stick up for me, even though he said he hated “ethnics”! … If anyone called me a “Paki” he would stand in front of me and basically tell them to back off and leave me alone.⁷¹ Khan paints a complex picture of the racial dynamics of Leicester, which saw Young Asian men mobilise against racism:

The first Asian gang in Leicester was known as the Sapna gang. It formed in the mid-‘70s, against the rise of racist attacks … The majority of its members were from a Sikh background, with a few from the Pakistani Punjabi community. The main gangs in the early ‘80s – apart from the Baby Squad [Leicester’s hooligan firm] – were the Razz and the Riff. Both gangs were multicultural in the sense that they had members from all works of life. However, the Razz (who mainly came from the Highfields area) had no white members.⁷²

Khan, who had been chased and beaten up by skinheads grew-up thinking he would never attend football due the endemic racism at Filbert Street. However, as we have seen above, he was attracted to the scene through the casual fashions and he eventually became part of Leicester’s multi-racial ‘Baby Squad’. The work of challenging racism, even amongst members of the same firm was more or less constant, as Colin K, another member recalled: We were united against racism, even from the home fans. The Braunstone lads were always backward people … it wasn’t good for black people to live in those areas of Leicester. After a while though, people got to know you and attitudes did start to change. […] There were quite a lot of racists within the Baby Squad, in fact it was rife. But we got through it, became friends, and we are still friends today.⁷³ Ryan Bartley credited one key member of the firm with breaking down racist attitudes (including his own):

Racism was never an issue with the majority of our lads. One of the main reasons was a guy called SH, one of the top boys, black, hard and as courageous as they come […] He was a real unifying figure amongst us and was responsible for breaking many barriers down among people who perhaps harboured racist thoughts, but never openly expressed them. After five minutes in SH’s company, you were completely won over by his charm, wit, sense of loyalty and courage. Because of him and his ability to reach out to other lads from other areas of the city, more and more black and Asian lads became not just a minority, but an integral part of who we were.⁷⁴

Leicester’s Baby Squad were not the only side with a multi-racial football firm in the casual period. In the lower leagues there was the Bradford Ointment and Luton’s MIG (‘Men In Gear’), while Derby’s Lunatic Fringe, Arsenal’s Gooners, West Brom and Villa youth had smaller numbers of ethnic minority members.⁷⁵ Black and mixed-race youth from Moss Side formed the core of Manchester City’s multi-ethnic, multi-generational firm which evolved from the Cool Cats to the Guvnors via a 1980s incarnation as the Mayne Line Crew (named after the coaches they hired for away games).⁷⁶ During the later 1970s and early 1980s this ethnically diverse gang was in frequent conflict, not only with opposition fans but also with other Manchester City supporters who were members of the National Front.⁷⁷ The far right also had a substantial presence at St Andrews and the home terraces saw vicious fighting between the NF and Birmingham’s racially diverse Zulu Army.⁷⁸ The hooligan autobiographies therefore provide important insights into the evolution of multi-ethnic firms and shed some light upon a largely unfamiliar story of vernacular, anti-racist action.

It is however important to bear in mind that such multi-ethnic firms formed a small minority of hooligan outfits. For black members of other hooligan gangs, remembering the racism of the time was often painful and difficult to process, as Cass Pennant noted:

Everyone I interviewed felt uncomfortable even talking about the question of being black and supporting West Ham. Clearly, black is not part of the club colours. Personally, I’ve always been there throughout and never had a major problem within West Ham’s support, even when the British Movement had targeted the clubs supporters in a recruitment drive. We had a problem with racists and a period of far-right politics – it crept into youth culture when we had another skin-head revival in the punk era of ’78-’79. I think quite a few clubs had the same problem around the country.⁷⁹

Clearly, the interminable racism of the time prevented black hooligans ‘composing’ a narrative that sat comfortably with their psychic and social selves in the present.⁸⁰ Pennant’s attempt to rationalise racism in the game is instructive, however, since it largely reproduces the stance of the white hooligan writers when they did address the issue of racism (and more were silent on this question): firstly to tie it to the organised far right and secondly to identify it with supporters of other clubs. I explore these attitudes below.

Despite the substantial evidence for far right organising within football firms (notably at Chelsea, West Ham, Millwall, Leeds, Glasgow Rangers, Newcastle, Burnley and Blackburn but also elsewhere) and the endemic racism at football grounds in Britain between the 1970s and 1990s, the memoirs of white hooligans are largely notable for their silences and evasiveness on the issue.⁸¹ Just one white author gave a sense of the pervasive racism of the time. Chris Brown, a Bristol Rovers skinhead graduated from casual racism to joining the National Front in 1977:

That winter had seen the Tote End become a bastion of right-wing politics. Rigid arm salutes were a common sight and NF, British Movement and Column 88 badges were de rigueur. The black kids who had followed Rovers in the early Seventies had, understandably, disappeared from the terraces […] Our hatred filled the cold night air and the black kids who followed Ipswich became the objects of our shameful hostility […] ‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack, send the bastards back!’ rang out from the assembled Tote Enders. The nods of approval from the local constabulary and their obvious reluctance to arrest any Rovers fans for the racist chants merely confirmed our belief that the extreme right was becoming a force to be reckoned with in Britain.⁸²

Facing the growing hostility of Bristol City fans, and increasingly unable to reconcile his love of black music with NF ideology, Brown had something of a breakdown and abandoned the far right: ‘I can look back on it now and can see that it was all as repetitive and tiresome as it was contemptible, but to my eternal shame I was part of it’.⁸³ No other white writer acknowledged the extent of everyday racism or racialised violence so evident in Brown’s account and those of the black and Asian authors. When racism was addressed by white hooligans, it was commonly downplayed, or identified exclusively with the organised right. For Bob Beech: ‘To say the 6.57 Crew was a racist firm would be wide of the mark. While it would be wrong to say that nobody held those views, it wasn’t widespread and certainly not something that was widely discussed’.⁸⁴ Some of this denialism could be taken to absurd extremes. Gaetano ‘Bully’ Buglioni, member of the notoriously racist Chelsea ‘Head-hunters’, also claimed that theirs was not a racist firm (‘the name was made up as a bit of a piss take, courtesy of Mr Hickmott’.⁸⁵) The ridiculousness of this claim is reinforced by his faux naivety. For example, when recalling some tattoos that young members of the firm had had done: ‘[they] had the skull and crossbones and all the Head-hunter thing and they had “Chelsea youth—never run” but the “never run” was written in German. Don’t ask me why’.⁸⁶

While few accounts were as disingenuous as Buglioni’s, the main thrust was to substantially downplay racism in the game and to displace it elsewhere: onto the far right and onto the supporters of ‘other clubs’. I’ll conclude with one further telling case before outlining a plausible explanation for such denial. Liverpool had a reputation in the 1980s and 1990s as being one of the most hostile cities in the country among black away fans and black players.⁸⁷ Both Liverpool and Everton (who didn’t sign a black player until 1994) had deserved reputations for racist hostility. Manchester City hooligan Donald Farrer recalled: We always did alright at Liverpool but to be honest for the black lads like myself Goodison was like Nightmare on Elm Street. […] We never used to take the numbers there and a lot of it was to do with the racist thing, if you got collared at Goodison and you were a black kid you were in serious trouble.⁸⁸ For Andy Nicholls, a white Evertonian, the racist abuse of Man City’s black goalkeeper Alex Williams was ‘mainly the urchins having a “laugh”. I don’t think most of them cared about race one way or another. […] He got the same at other grounds’.⁸⁹ In the following paragraph Nicholls writes: I do remember one time when there was a minute’s silence for Harry Catterick, our ex-manager. We were playing Ipswich and the whole place was silent, hear-a-pin-drop material, when a shout of, “Get out of our ground, nigger”, went up. Everyone looked and amongst the away fans was one black face that someone had spotted. That was the end of the silence.⁹⁰ How are we to explain such a disavowal and avowal of racism in such breath-takingly short order?

In an important piece of research into racism in football carried out between the mid-1990s and c.2000, Les Back, Tim Crabbe and John Solomos provide a credible answer. Their research criticised approaches (similar to those reproduced above) which correlated a decline in visible far-right activity and football hooliganism over the course of the 1990s with a decline in racism per se. This view—that football had changed for the better in terms of race—was frequently repeated by people that they interviewed. They write: The racist/hooligan couplet makes it possible to both establish a moral pariah, and then in contrast to this image of deviance promote new codes of propriety and “acceptable behaviour” inside football stadia. The point here is that “anti-racist” responses of this kind are the result of a very particular set of discourses that, in order to work, conceal the complexity and variety of expressive racism at all levels of football.⁹¹ Obviously, hooligans themselves were the subjects of this ‘othering’; most of the white hooligans refused this pariah status, either projecting it somewhere else (e.g. onto the far right or really racist firms) or downplaying the extent of racism (even, as we have seen above they often simultaneously affirmed it). In doing so they entirely reproduced the strategies of ‘respectable’ figures in the sport: football had changed; because hooliganism wasn’t a problem anymore, nor was racism. Thus, in their strategies of denial and disavowal, both the mainstream and the marginal were uncomfortably close to one-another.

Conclusion

If we consider the longer-term and take a broader geographical perspective, the extent to which football-related violence was either particularly characteristic of the 1970s and 1980s, or characteristically British, as the popular memory of the casual period would have it, is questionable. As Dunning et al. have shown, crowd disorder has been a part of Association Football since the 1890s (see above). Moreover, major, sometimes fatal violence has been associated with ‘Ultra’ fans in many other countries, and there have been substantially more deaths resulting from intra-fan violence in countries such as Italy, Greece, Turkey, Argentina and Brazil over the last 40 years compared with Britain.⁹² A spectator was more likely to be killed or seriously injured at a British football match during the twentieth-century due to unsafe grounds and/or negligent policing than intra-fan violence.⁹³ What was distinctively British was the casual look, originating on Merseyside in the late 1970s and widely adopted by football fans across Europe since the 1980s. It was this idiosyncratic style which became associated with the violence of Britain’s hooligan firms, yet as we have seen above, older stereotypes of the Doc-Marten-booted, skin-headed bully-boy persisted well into the casual era. The autobiographies do however suggest that there was some truth to the popular myth that the coming of ecstasy and acid house substantially impacted football violence. But here some qualification is needed: terrace violence did not disappear, while other factors, such as intensified policing and the limited availability of away tickets as stadia were redeveloped following the recommendations of the Taylor Report (1990) also played an important role.⁹⁴

As I have argued above, football firms who adopted casual styles exhibited a locally hegemonic masculinity through their sartorial one-up-manship and, especially, their use of violence against rival firms. In some cases, casual firms literally had to fight for hegemony with local rivals. In Scotland, the major hooligan firms Aberdeen’s Soccer Casuals and Hibs Capital City Service fought not just each other, but the sectarian supporters of the ‘Old Firm’.⁹⁵ Hibs hooligans deliberately antagonised Celtic fans, who thought that in sectarian terms Hibernian supporters ought to have been on their side.⁹⁶ Elsewhere ordinary Celtic supporters frequently assaulted the casuals of their own Celtic Soccer Crew who eschewed sectarianism and engaged in antifascist action.⁹⁷ In contrast, Rangers’ casuals were closely associated with both Loyalist terror groups and the far right.⁹⁸ As I have shown above, while racism was ubiquitous in the game, some mixed-race firms actively opposed it. Moreover, the racist/hooligan couplet persisted in popular memory and thus ‘obscured the more nuanced and complex forms of racist expression that permeated British football’.⁹⁹ While the 1990s did see high profile attempts to tackle racism in football (e.g. the FA’s Kick It Out campaign), and racist chanting within top-tier stadia arguably declined—many if not all football grounds continued to be unwelcoming spaces for non-white supporters. Perhaps a more productive way of framing the issue would be to follow the lead of historian Camilla Schofield in thinking about working-class sociality and spaces in terms of the claims made by a dominant and often exclusionary ‘whiteness’, rather than trying to measure racisms’ ‘rise and fall’.¹⁰⁰ Other evidence suggests the proliferation of Islamophobic and anti-immigrant hostility in British society more broadly which legitimated more widespread racialised (and racist) sentiment. Indeed, the continued decline of football hooliganism in the 2010s coincided both with the rise in electoral support for the BNP and UKIP and the growth of racist street movements such as the English Defence League and the Football Lads Alliance.¹⁰¹ Important as they are, these renewed expressions of far-right, anti-immigrant and racist sentiment lie beyond the purview of this study. What I have shown above is that the relationship between working class masculinities and race between the late 1970s and the 1990s is significantly more complex than the dominant popular myths allow. Moreover, viewing the violence of the era, which was frequently performative and exaggerated (not least by hooligan writers themselves), as just one facet of casual culture, means that we can begin to think in more complex terms about the relationships between deindustrialisation and masculinity; popular individualism and the collective ties of belonging. Beyond the workplace, the football club arguably became an increasingly important source of communal identity from the 1980s onwards. It would require substantial further research to investigate precisely how this figured in localised accounts, but it is my contention that no adequate account of working-class experience in the era of deindustrialisation can afford to ignore it.

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.