six Culture and the Spaces of Sport

In the summer of 1935, the American artist Ben Shahn received a commission from the photography department of the Resettlement Administration (ra), a federal agency set up as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme. His brief was to document the lives of the suffering community at Scotts Run, a small mining community in Star City, West Virginia.1 During the Great Depression, the name Scotts Run had become virtually synonymous with poverty and unemployment, one writer for the Atlantic Monthly famously describing the region as ‘the damnedest cesspool of human misery I have ever seen in America’. 2 Among Shahn’s photographs is one representing two men peering through cracks in a wooden fence (illus. 86). As the image is taken from behind, the viewer can see neither the faces of the men, nor what is happening beyond. However, their upright stance and forward lean, with hands thrust deep into pockets, suggest that whatever they are watching from this unprepossessing scrubland is of great interest and that they intend to remain at their posts for some duration, despite the fact that their view is no more than partial. The photograph, held in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, dc, is simply captioned Untitled, thus giving the viewer no immediate clue as to what precisely is happening. However, other photographs, taken at the same spot on the same day, and more helpfully titled Watching a Football Game, Star City, West Virginia, reveal the mystery of what is taking place beyond this impenetrable barrier. Shahn’s photograph can thus be conceived as operating within a genre that had come into being virtually as soon as cameras were first brought to sporting events; namely the imaging of the sports spectator. 133 Shahn’s image, it should be said, hardly conforms to conventional expectations for the representation of sports fans, or indeed the type of spaces they typically inhabit. First, these spectators are not part of, but rather excluded from, the very spectacle upon which they gaze. Second, their spectatorship is surreptitious, even transgressive, as they illicitly gain free visual access to a sight that would normally demand an admission charge. This notion is further foregrounded in another of Shahn’s photographs produced that same day, in which one of the spectators turns back towards the photographer, his expression indicating resentment at Shahn’s own visual intrusion (illus. 87). Here the illicit gaze of the photographer echoes that of the sports spectators themselves. Shahn’s striking image of Depression-era sports spectators sneaking a free view of a football match foregrounds a sense of isolation and alienation, and the exclusion of male, working-class sports spectators from the conventionally conceived leisure pursuits of their cultural context.3 In this way it offers a visual metaphor for the broader issue of male identity and the economic disenfranchisement of so many in 1930s America. The impact of Shahn’s image relies largely upon its resistance to a set of earlier established visual conventions for the photographic representation of sport spectators. Generated largely by photojournalists for illustrated

87 Ben Shahn, Watching a Football Game, Star City, West Virginia, 134 1935, photograph. 88 Anon., Sheffield Wednesday publications, these tended to be celebratory, emphasizing community Fans Watching a Game from the and togetherness, the notion that the shared witnessing of an event Terraces, c. 1940. united a crowd of disparate individuals (illus. 88). In this way, they broadly followed conceptualizations of the positive and unifying power of social gatherings, a concept described as ‘collective effervescence’ by Émile Durkheim in 1912.4 However, Durkheim’s views, principally concerned with religious community practices, notably ran counter to earlier fin de siècle anxieties regarding crowd psychology, not least a focus on the potentially malevolent, atavistic or regressive behaviour of crowds as articulated in the writings of Georg Simmel and Gustave Le Bon.5 It is noteworthy here that, at this time, the vast majority of photographers who pointed their lenses away from the sporting action and towards spectators predominantly adopted Durkheim’s view, rarely foregrounding the notion that such gatherings might, in fact, pose a threat to the social order. Doubtless sport’s overt association with leisure, rather than political protest, would have shaped this thinking. 135 But it should be noted that crowd transgressions at sporting events, though far from common, were neither unknown, nor unreported, even at this early stage. During the mid- to late nineteenth century, for example, press reports on sports that drew large crowds regularly documented incidents of antisocial behaviour, violence and even rioting. As Stephen Riess has reported, in the United States in 1882 alone, ten incidents of attacks on baseball umpires were recorded, resulting in one Boston team separating supporters from the field of play with barbed wire.6 Three years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, as Allen Guttmann has recounted, a football match between Preston North End and Aston Villa ended in crowd violence, with spectators using fists, feet, sticks, umbrellas and stones as weapons.7 In some instances, goalposts were uprooted and even set alight.8 Whatever the sport, press reports were usually unambiguous in concluding, though frequently on the basis of little evidence, that this unruly behaviour was caused exclusively by the ‘lower-class’ spectators. Yet while anxieties concerning the darker side of sports spectatorship were frequently voiced in the press, they were rarely articulated in visual form. Clearly difficulties, both in terms of being in the right place at the right time and the relative technical limitations of the photographic medium at the time, diminished the likelihood of capturing such moments of ill behaviour. But this does not explain the predominance of an opposite emphasis, namely the establishment of a set of conventions that typically visualized the sports fan as a member of an idealized ‘imagined community’ (to deploy the concept developed by Benedict Anderson) in which spectators were joyous, well behaved and united in support of the team or individual being watched, the sport itself and, by extension, wider society.9 Countless examples of happy, and socially unthreatening, crowds permeated the pages of the general and sports press during the early twentieth century. Some focused on the orderly nature of crowds either gathered tightly together within the stadium space, or awaiting admittance to a game (illus. 88). Here, despite the claustrophobic proximity generated by frequently overcrowded conditions, or poor organization, an emphasis on contentment and compliance dominated any sense of dissatisfaction or unrest. During the 1930s, British press photographers introduced a new 136 convention for the visual representation of the sports fan, though this did little to alter the emphasis on sports spectatorship as unproblematic and socially unthreatening. Now, the individual, eccentric football supporter, usually colourfully costumed and represented at a moment of exuberant behaviour, made frequent appearances in journals such as Picture Post. Typically, this fan was represented in a public space, yet distanced from the stadium context in which spectatorship usually occurred. For example, a photograph from the Hulton Archive shows a victorious Everton fan celebrating in London’s Trafalgar Square following his team’s 3-0 victory over Manchester City in the 1933 fa Cup final (illus. 90). The jubilant supporter is dressed in a suit, purpose-made for the occasion, and although the photograph is monochrome it is clear that this is divided into blue and white quarters, the colours of his team. His costume is further decorated with rosettes, a top hat and a scarf, and he stands on top of a concrete bollard waving an umbrella decorated with a cardboard cut-out of the trophy his team has just won. In his other hand he rings a bell while he sings loudly enough to draw the attention of both photographer and passers-by. This, by most measures, would of course constitute inappropriate comportment in a public space, yet the smiles of the surrounding men, only one of whom can be identified specifically as a football fan from the rosette he is wearing,

89 Anon., No Known Restrictions – Baseball Fans at 7 a.m. outside Polo Grounds, c. 1908–25. 137 90 Anon., An Enthusiastic Everton Fan Celebrates his Team’s Victory Against Manchester City in the fa Cup final by Waving a Customised Umbrella in London’s Trafalgar Square, 1933.

indicate that this exuberance is regarded as entirely acceptable in the context of the occasion, his team’s victory in the nation’s pre-eminent football competition. By the 1930s, fa Cup final day had virtually become an English national holiday. Up to this point, the final had mostly been staged in London, initially 138 at the Oval ground and, from 1895, in the shadow of the famous Crystal Palace at the Victorian pleasure gardens at Sydenham.10 In 1923 the role of hosting the competition’s grand finale shifted to , purpose-built for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–5. Since the 1890s the match had attracted attendances of over 100,000 spectators, many travelling to London from the Midlands and the North, the homes of the clubs that had come to dominate professional football. A consequence of this was that Cup Final day typically witnessed vast numbers of supporters from outside London ‘occupying’ the capital for the day. For many, the carnivalesque atmosphere of a trip to London had become what Jeff Hill has evocatively called a ‘rite of spring’.11 Read within this context, this photograph of an Everton supporter in London clearly foregrounds a sense of northern otherness articulated through its emphasis on costume and behaviour. Moreover, this eccentric self-presentation is set against a backdrop of the National Gallery, thus juxtaposing the fan’s populist expression of artistry with the notionally more acceptable high culture of the metropolis. Yet it is perhaps the isolation of the supporter that is most striking. This diminishes any notion that such supporters pose a threat to public order or that their image might invoke the concept of a threatening mob. And this was of some significance in the spring of 1933. Just six months earlier, Trafalgar Square had been the site of a major rally attended by over 150,000 hunger marchers, many from the North, the conclusion of a widely publicized demonstration organized by the National Unemployed Workers Movement.12 With this event fresh in the memory, the image of a lone northern ‘invader’, inspired by football rather than socialist politics, appears quaint, a reassuring example of tolerated antisocial behaviour typical of a carnivalesque, temporal overturning of conventional social values, made acceptable only because of its alignment with this one-day-a-year festival. A second representation of a colourful individual football supporter, also from the Hulton archive, was produced the following year when Portsmouth took on Manchester City in the fa Cup final (illus. 91). This photograph adopts many of the compositional qualities of the previous image. However, the seemingly candid nature of the Everton supporter has here given way to a more manufactured image in which a fashionably dressed young woman is posed seated on a wall overlooking Portsmouth harbour. Only the prominent rosette and beribboned football rattles held in her elegantly gloved hands 139 suggest her status as football supporter, while her naval hat reinforces an association with the team from the southern port city shortly to appear at Wembley. Notably, this hat bears the inscription hms Impregnable, a wry comment, perhaps, on the high moral standing of this more middle-class representative of British youth. However, this is also doubtless intended to allude to the status of Britain’s defences in this border region overlooking the English Channel. The woman’s inward gaze, turning her back on Europe, and the concrete balustrade that stands metaphorically for the border itself, suggests a confidence in British naval might, reinforced, both metaphorically and actually, by the ghostly presence of seagoing vessels in the near-distance. Even the physical gestures of her arms recall communication by semaphore, the system so famously deployed by Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. This image of a football supporter celebrating her team’s success in reaching the fa Cup final is thus transformed into a cipher for the British Navy’s finest hour and, not least, the role of Nelson’s flagship, hms Victory, since 1922 dry-docked in the self-same Portsmouth harbour. As Mark Dyreson has claimed, referencing the growth of sport in 1920s America, ‘Spectatorship marked one of the new sets of behaviours which knitted the nation together into a mass society.’13 In mid-1930s Britain the sports spectator, mythically constructed in visual form, could similarly be deployed to act as a signifier of both national and political identity, not least at a time when the first stirrings of Nazism were beginning to pose a threat to peace in Europe. The interwar years witnessed the expansion of sport, and football in particular, as a vital component within an emerging leisure and consumer culture, not just in Britain but throughout the world. Ever- growing attendances at sporting events drew increasing media coverage, from newspapers and magazines to radio and newsreels, and this in turn encouraged more to attend. As the audiences for sport grew, so too would new conceptions of how to represent sports spectatorship as a new form of social practice. The more riotous behaviour of sporting crowds undoubtedly posed a threat to the social order, yet photographs representing such behaviour remained rare in the extreme. By the latter years of the twentieth century, however, this would change dramatically. The period between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s is typically 140 considered a low point in the reputation of football in Britain, largely 91 Anon., Come on Pompey, 1934.

as a consequence of the social phenomenon of football .14 Countless factors have been proposed as contributing to this notional shift in crowd behaviour, including frustrated masculinity, disillusioned youth, racial tensions, the rise of far-right extremist groups, Thatcherite political policies and post-imperial decline.15 The arrival of televised football, and the media’s extended reach into the game itself, has also been seen as having an 141 impact. From this latter perspective it is worth noting that it was during this period that some photojournalists first went out of their way to document such antisocial activities. Here it will be useful to consider how their photographs depart from the wider conventions for the representation of sports spectators outlined above. One of the most widely reported, and still notorious, incidents of crowd trouble at this time came when a large number of Scottish supporters invaded the Wembley pitch following a 2-1 victory over England in the 1977 Home International match. One such photograph shows a large group of what appear to be exclusively male, predominantly younger, Scottish supporters, some dressed in tartan hats and scarves or Scotland team shirts (illus. 92). Though the scene is raucous, and the destruction of the goalposts clearly 92 Scotland Fans Celebrate documents acts of vandalism, it is notable that there is little evidence of Victory over England at Wembley, any of the physically aggressive behaviour or violence more widely seen 1977.

142 at other matches during this time. In a similar image produced that day, a lone policeman stands to the right and although he has clearly failed to make his authoritative presence felt, he seems relatively unthreatened by the jubilant crowd. Over the next few days, English press reports went overboard in their condemnation of Scottish fans, one Daily Mail correspondent referring to ‘a minority of upwards of 10,000’ as ‘brawling, foul-mouthed, drunken, belligerent, vomiting poison dwarfs’ responsible for ‘as gruesome a sporting occasion as Britain has ever had to endure’.16 Such sensationalist responses were typical of an age in which the press, as Stephen Wagg has indicated, regularly described football hooligans as ‘Savages! Animals!’ and ‘mindless morons’.17 Even the broadsheet newspapers were mostly condemnatory. In The Times, for example, Football Association Secretary Ted Croker was reported as claiming that this was ‘the worst invasion I have ever seen’.18 Yet, in a somewhat contradictory manner, The Guardian reported the same individual as describing what he had witnessed as ‘a good natured invasion’.19 Such actions were hardly a rare occurrence at this time, either in British football or indeed any number of other sports throughout the world. Moreover, unlike earlier pitch invasions, this one had not resulted in violent pitched battles between rival supporters. As Wagg has further argued, ‘Whatever else may be said about it, “” has definitely to do with territory’, and here it was the physical occupation of the Wembley pitch, the symbolic site of England’s World Cup victory just over a decade earlier, far more than any violence that seemed to generate most offence.20 Moreover, as was widely reported in the press over the following days, several Scottish fans had dug up sections of the Wembley turf to bring back as living reminders of this momentous day. Indeed the wartime territorial nature of this gesture was invoked by one reporter’s headline, ‘Scots Dig for Victory at Wembley’.21 As other reporters noted, calls for Scottish devolution were on the rise at this time.22 All of this added grist to the mill of a section of the press fraternity that embraced the opportunity not only to demonize football supporters, but to shift the burden of blame for this squarely away from English supporters and onto the shoulders of the Scottish nation. The Wembley pitch invasion of 1977, though clearly demonstrating antisocial behaviour on the part of Scottish football supporters, was far from 143 the more extreme and violent activities of football crowds during this period, as the countless photographs and television footage of the event demonstrate. Nonetheless, the high profile of the game, and its coverage in the press, reinforced public fears of football supporters and almost certainly rang the death knell of the resistance to putting up fences at all major football grounds in Britain. This action, albeit inadvertently, would ultimately contribute to the horrific tragedy at Hillsborough Stadium a dozen years later, when 96 Liverpool supporters were crushed to death behind the very fences that so many insisted be erected in the wake of the England vs Scotland match. Many of the photographs produced of the Hillsborough tragedy reveal a very different side to sports spectators, whether representing terrified supporters trapped behind fences like caged animals, or fans desperately improvising the use of advertising hoardings as stretchers to carry the injured and dying away. Far from the sordid claims made in certain sections of the right-wing press, most notoriously The Sun newspaper – that ‘some fans picked pockets of victims’, ‘some fans urinated on the brave cops’ and ‘some fans beat up pc giving kiss of life’ – the photographic evidence offers a very different image of the incident, one in which the suffering of football fans on that fateful day was a consequence not of football hooliganism but of failures in policing (illus. 93).23 It would be over a quarter of a century before the fans themselves were fully vindicated at the Hillsborough inquest of 2016, perhaps itself a reflection on shifting attitudes towards football spectators in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. An immediate consequence of the was the government-commissioned Taylor Report published in January 1990. This made several major recommendations and, most famously, a demand that football clubs should replace terraces – where football supporters had traditionally stood to watch the game – with seating. Though flexibility was granted to teams from the lower leagues, all major football stadia in the United Kingdom would undergo significant renovations and many new stadia would be built over the next few years. This dramatic transformation of the spaces of football prompted one photographer, Stuart Roy Clarke, to launch what has become the biggest and longest-lasting sport photography 144 project ever undertaken: The Homes of Football. Seeing the Taylor Report as a ‘watershed moment’, Clarke decided to travel the length and breadth of England and Scotland, taking photographs at clubs at both the top and bottom of the sporting ladder, from club Arsenal to non-league York City. Though he set out explicitly ‘to capture the things that are going to disappear’, Clarke was no nostalgist, and also aimed to ‘show the new spirit of the game’.24 Initially he proposed to record changes and transitions not only to the stadia themselves, but to the game and its supporters, over a ten-year period. However, he has never ceased working on the project, which continues over a quarter of a century after it was first launched. To date he has produced more than 100,000 photographs that now reside in an archive at the National Football Museum in Manchester. 93 Anon., Distraught Young Liverpool Fan after the Though Clarke occasionally points his camera at the on-field action, his Hillsborough Tragedy, 1989. imagination seems most captured by the physical spaces of football, empty

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