Football, Fainting and Fatalities
John Walton looks at the hidden problems of crowd safety off the pitch in England in the first half of the twentieth century.
Questions of crowd safety at football matches in the first half of the twentieth century have received little attention. Yet tragedies occurred, notably at Ibrox in 1902 (when terraces collapsed, killing twenty-six and injuring 500) and Hillsborough in 1914 (where eighty were injured by a falling wall), and the Bradford and Hillsborough disasters of the 1980s. Concerns about the size, nature and behaviour of crowds at leisure have a long history, with those in positions of authority adding legal regulations to the self-policing conventions of the participants themselves.
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