ABSTRACT
The public order concerns that football matches had occasionally given rise to since the 1880s first attracted the prolonged attention of the Government in 1923. The Home Secretary established a committee of inquiry to look into the disorder that accompanied the FA Cup Final of that year – the first to be staged at the new Empire Stadium, Wembley. The Committee’s Report concerned itself with the division of responsibility for crowd control within football grounds. It recommended that ‘the police should be responsible for all matters appertaining to the preservation of law and order and that, for arrangements for the convenience of the public, the ground authority should be responsible’ (Shortt Report, 1924, para 22). It is worth noting that the Report also stated that, in order to discharge those duties relating to the convenience of the public, ‘stewards should always be employed. It is in the highest degree important that any such stewards should be properly trained and ... organised as a disciplined body’ (para 27). The intervention of the legislature was not deemed necessary, however:
But the governing bodies did not ‘promote public safety’; far from it. That no major crowd disaster occurred at a football ground until after the Second World War was more a matter of luck than a manifestation of the authorities’ concern with the wellbeing of spectators. When barriers collapsed behind a goal at Burnden Park, Bolton in March 1946, 33 spectators died and over 500 were injured. Another Home Office inquiry, chaired by Moelwyn Hughes QC (Hughes Inquiry, 1946), noted that, instead of the projected 50,000 supporters, over 85,000 had turned up for an FA Cup tie against Stoke City. Supporters gained access after a man who wanted to leave the ground successfully picked the lock on an exit gate, and Burnden Park exceeded its nominal capacity over 30 minutes before kick-off. In fact, the capacity of the ground had never been properly assessed: along with other football grounds, its ‘capacity’ merely represented ‘the greatest number that has been safely accommodated there on a previous occasion’ (Scraton, 1999, p 18). Knowing no better, the turnstile operators allowed another 2,000 fans to gain entry to that section of overcrowded terracing before the game kicked off.
