When my wife suggested that we watch this four-part ITV drama from earlier this year, I wasn't sure if I was up to it, knowing that it would be a tough watch, documenting as it does the struggles of Liverpool mother, Anne Williams,
to achieve justice for all the 96, later 97 victims of the Hillsborough football disaster in 1989, whose number tragically included her own fifteen year-old son Kevin who she'd only reluctantly allowed to attend the game.
Not only did all the relatives have to undergo the shock and loss of their loved ones at what was a national sporting event, an F. A. Cup semi-final, they were all led by the authorities to believe that the victims had all died by 3.15, fifteen minutes after the game had kicked off and worse still that the conduct of the supposedly out-of-control drunken fans on the day had contributed to what was officially pronounced the "accidental death" of all the deceased.
But at their son's own inquest, Anne and her second husband, her children's stepdad, encounter a serving policeman who had tried to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their son around 3.30 which clearly contradicted the official version of events. This sets Anne on a path of determining the exact circumstances of her son's last minutes and leads to her horrific discovery that if he and several others of the deceaed could have had access to the prompt medical treatment they should have had by right, over forty of them could possibly have survived. She then tracks down an off-duty health worker who actually helped carry her son out of the crush and onto the pitch and a woman who heard him utter the word "Mum" again, just before he died, well after the official 3.15 time of supposed death.
It takes time for her to find a way out of her grief but we see her eventually hook up with supportive people in authority including a female council officer with whom she strikes up a friendship and a sympathetic local lawyer to unceasingly probe for answers. Despite setback after setback from authority figures who either aren't or don't want to be convinced by the mounting evidence, she keeps on keeping on, pursuing whoever was the Home Secretary of the day, through changing governments, before finally achieving a breakthrough.
Tragically this by then had taken well over twenty years and in the interim cost her both her marriage and her health as she succumbs to cancer but at least she dies knowing that the Hillsborough victims were just that, victims and weren't in any material way and certainly not accidentally, the cause of their own deaths.
Maxine Peake rightly won acclaim for her committed performance as the untiring Williams, who by the end of the exhaustive process was recognised as the figurehead of the Justice for the 96 (later 97) tragic victims that day.
There are still outstanding issues today which will now likely go unanswered as to who was ultimately responsible for the terrible decision-making which turned a much anticipated football match into an infamous national disaster.
This was a story which deserved to be told and hopefully helped correct once and for all, any lingering misconceptions stoked by the gutter press as to what happened on that terrible day as well as documenting the unstinting effort and courage of one ordinary woman's determination to get to the truth.
