Hooptedoodle #219 - The Away Game (plastic mac & pilchard sandwiches)

This is really just a note to myself – I have seen some of the reaction to the recent Hillsborough verdict – I do not wish to make any me-too comment, nor falsely claim any personal involvement, but Liverpool was my home town, and I am well aware of the depth of feeling that has prevailed there for the 27 years since the tragedy.

Cold shadows that come down the years from 1989 are the extent of the government paranoia about civil unrest, urban terrorism and potential class war, and the growth in crowd trouble and neo-fascist hooliganism which marred soccer in those days. The cages behind the goals at Hillsborough where the fatal crush took place were designed as animal pens, quite simply because football crowds were viewed as exactly that – animals. Especially, I need hardly add, northern football crowds, where the proportion of Tory voters might safely be assumed to be very low indeed.

Maximum-wage heroes - Liverpool FC, season 1961-62 - Big Tam Leishman,
in the middle of the front row, still looks like something from Frankenstein's lab 

I am even less qualified to comment on this than I usually am – which may be saying something. The last time I went to watch an away league game of my beloved Liverpool FC predates Hillsborough by many years – it was on Saturday, 18^th November 1961 (I checked), when I was a schoolboy – my mate Ken Bartlett got us tickets for the Huddersfield Town vs Liverpool match, in the old English League Division Two (in which Liverpool were staging, I think, a remarkable five-year run of 3^rd place finishes, in the days when only the top two clubs were promoted at the season’s end!). Football crowds were not the high-profile violent menace which they had become by Thatcher’s time, but my 1961 memories of our day out involve very little of the match we went to see – all I can remember is the misery of the journey, the squalor and the sense of worthlessness which the police and the logistical arrangements instilled in the travelling fan.

Leeds Road, Huddersfield - pre-war photo

Ken and I were experienced visitors to Anfield, Liverpool’s home ground, though my parents insisted that I never went in the Kop end, which was famous for its passion and the surges on the terracing – as a small chap, I used to go to the Anfield Road end, which at times was scary enough.

Our trip to Huddersfield started quite early, queuing to board one of the old Football Special trains from Lime Street station. We were late getting on the train – we waited for our friend Tony Potter, but he didn’t show up, though we had a ticket for him, and we eventually gave up on him and squeezed on board. I was shaken by the police presence – I don’t know what the size of the travelling support was in those days; records show that the crowd at that game was 23,000-odd, which is not bad considering Huddersfield were having a poor season, and I guess the visitors might have brought 5,000 or so with them. In 1961 a good proportion of these would have been on the trains. There was a hefty contingent of Liverpool Police and Transport Police at Lime Street – including a good number of senior officers – the police were aggressive and profane throughout, even though there was no trouble at that time of the morning. I was upset that the police were so abusive, when it did not seem to be necessary.

It was a tradition that British Rail would use old or obsolete rolling stock for these trains – the fans, after all, were barely human, so it was probably deemed adequate. There was no heating, the toilets did not work, in some carriages there was no lighting, and only some of the carriage doors were unlocked – for security. We were also crammed in – 4-a-side in a filthy compartment designed to hold six. People standing or squatting in the corridors. Much shoving and swearing to get us all in.

The journey was cold and it took ages – the Football Specials, of course, had to work around the normal timetables of sensible trains for decent people, so the routing may have been odd, and we spent lots of time waiting at signals. We arrived in Huddersfield on a cold, soaking wet afternoon – it was already very dark at 2pm, when we got off the train. That was the first shock. We were not in a station – we were unloaded – had to jump down – in a siding somewhere, and were herded along what appeared to be a disused railway line, past derelict factories and rubbish dumps, accompanied by a lot of policemen – some of these had come on the train, some were local and met us there.

Industrial heartland - Huddersfield in the Old Days

The idea was to keep this horde off the streets of the town as completely as possible – it was a long, wet, muddy walk to the old Leeds Road ground, and only the later part of the walk was along paved streets. We got into the ground without incident, always with the watching constables, and the game itself was almost an unreal interlude (we won 2-1, Melia and Hunt scored the goals, though I don’t remember a great deal about it), and then it was time to get us all out of the town again.

The return march seems to have been more direct – we actually walked through central Huddersfield – I recall being surprised that they had trolley-buses – but you could not stop – certainly no chance of going into a pub or buying food. Prodded and abused, we were at least taken to a station this time. The train, however, was the same as before, and we reached Liverpool many hours late, frozen stiff, and I was seriously traumatised by the experience. I was never allowed to go to an away game again – in fact the home games were off limits for a few weeks as well.

The point of this insignificant tale, if there is one, is that there was no trouble – maybe that is a vindication of the methods, I really don’t know. It was a competely routine transport exercise, to move PAYING CUSTOMERS (I capitalise that to remind myself that we were not, in fact, convicts or prisoners of war) to a public sporting event in a town that really was not so far away. It must have happened, just like that, many, many times, every weekend, all over the country. The police, famously, did not relish football duty on the weekend, and it was very obvious that the fans were uniformly regarded as vermin. Again, maybe we were – I certainly felt degraded and distressed by the experience – Ken and I were just naïve young boys from a decent school, and being shouted and sworn at on a routine basis was upsetting.

Of course, it was all right really – just a growing experience, something to toughen us up, but if you wanted to radicalize the working classes that was one way of going about it. My grandmother use to say that if you expect the worst of people, that’s just what you will get. It doesn’t seem particularly sensible that league football matches should become a long-running war between the police and the public, especially if they didn’t have to, but that was certainly the tradition.

Chester Trip – Preamble

It isn’t Regensburg, but my ECW trip to Chester is on. I’ll be going there with a friend from 1^st to 3^rd December – the hotel is booked, so we’re going. We have both read John Barratt’s excellent book on the Great Siege, so the idea is to have a look at what remains of the Civil War sites, and the odd pub would be all right too.

Chester is not unfamiliar to me; as a child, I used to visit the place – and especially its zoo – but in those days the journey from Liverpool was a bit of an epic – long and tiring. We didn’t have a car (I had a rich Auntie in the Wirral who had a pre-war Vauxhall, but she didn’t really speak to us), so sometimes the journey involved a train from Birkenhead Woodside station (which I think you would struggle to find now), sometimes not, but it always involved a few of those green Crosville buses. It is an attractive city, and it looks the part for an ECW trip, but I am aware that very little of it dates back to the Civil War. For a start, much of the city was destroyed in the siege, and there have been frequent improvements over the years since then. The walls are marvellous, but a substantial part were widened and turned into a promenade for the townspeople in the 18^th Century.

I originally had a picture of a wartime Crosville Guy Arab bus here
- it was pointed out that not only was it too early, but it was probably red.
Here's a proper Bristol Lodekka from the 1950s, with the correct livery of Tilling Green

We’ve made bookings with Ed Abram’s fine Chester Civil War Tours operation – we will definitely be going on the standard tour, and, though the Rowton Moor tour is not officially open so late in the year, we have the offer of going there too if the weather is passable and if the farmer is happy to let us on his fields. Serious walking boots will be taken. There is also an interesting tour of ECW public houses, but we may do that ourselves in the evenings. I was recently walked around the field of Eggmühl by a uniformed fusilier of the 5^th Bavarian infantry regiment from 1809, so being taken around Chester by a Royalist gentleman in full period costume for 1645 will be quite normal.

It would be nice to wander a little further afield – Brereton’s trip up to Mostyn is a possibility, as is a quick look at Nantwich, or Beeston Castle – but the main thing we have to decide is what to do about our 4^th day. Originally, my colleague found he had to be back in Scotland on the 4^th day, but he has subsequently got out of his prior engagement, so an extra day is again available. We could stay on in Chester, of course, but I fancied a trip to Ormskirk – they had a nippy battle there – quick but influential, it effectively finished off the Royalists in Lancashire in the First Civil War apart from the garrisons at Lathom, Greenhalgh and Liverpool. Also, we could have a look for the site of the original Lathom House, pay our respects to poor old Lord Derby, who is interred in the local parish church (in however many separate bits), and – failed trump card! – I have family in Ormskirk who kindly offered hospitality, but, alas, the dates don’t line up and they have other plans! Like many local people must have done in the 1640s when they learned that Rupert or Brereton were coming, they have obviously made quick evacuation arrangements when they heard about our trip. Not a huge problem – we can still go to Ormskirk, or we could go over to Yorkshire and have a look at Marston Moor, or Adwalton (less easy to find), and someone has suggested Pontefract Castle.

Homework

Now that we are definitely going, we can approach the details with a bit more focus.

What fun!

Computers in Wargaming - 1 - Preamble

The other week, one of the less supportive comments I received accused me of "ridiculous intemperance" (isn't that wonderful? - I'm really very proud of that) and, naturally, I value this feedback, as they used to say in the upwardly-mobile 1980s. Unfortunately, it was a good way wide of the mark - the truth is that behind my flatulent presentation and verbosity beats the sad, dry little heart of an actuary.

As a kid I designed all sorts of solitary games for my own amusement – cricket matches played with dice, a jousting game using Timpo knights and playing cards – all sorts. When my cousin and I were both about 11 we built up a model bus fleet to serve a large mythical island in the Irish Sea (alarmingly similar in concept to the Thomas the Tank Engine idea), but, instead of sensibly crawling round the place with toy buses, uttering gear-changing noises, we got hopelessly sidetracked into drawing maps and producing detailed timetables. Later, my education and professional training were heavily mathematical, and included a lot of statistics and probability, stochastic modelling and so on, so I guess I have always had an interest in playing around with mathematical simulation.

Which gently leads me into a topic which I have been intending to cover for a few months. Computers. If you feel a cold twinge at the mention of the word, do not be alarmed. I have no drums to beat here, but I do have a lot of experience of the subject, both in a wargaming context and from the wider viewpoint of process automation in general. I promise not to tell you what is right, or what you should all be doing, and I hope that some of this may be of interest. A blog, after all, is useful not least because of the opportunity it gives to take a peek through someone else’s windows.

Digression: mention of what is useful about blogs reminds me that one of the big benefits I have gained from writing this stuff over the past five months is the sorting out of ideas. To write something down in an intelligible manner, it is necessary for me to tease out the knotted string which normally fills my head into a more linear, structured form, and a great many light bulbs turn on while I am about it. So, even if you find my blog tedious and/or pointless, you will now have the comfort of knowing that I, at least, am getting something out of it!

End of digression.

The subject of computers is a big one, almost certainly far too big to cover in a single post. This is a bit of a shame, in a way, since dividing the topic up into a series of threads will inevitably risk someone coming back to me and pointing out that I have overlooked such-and-such, when I have not forgotten it, but haven’t got to it yet. That’s all OK – I’m quite happy with that. I’ll try to keep the subject matter focused and relevant – if you are prepared to give it a go then maybe we can help each other out if need be.

Areas I intend to discuss will include some general points on the practicalities and pitfalls of automation, what computers are good at, their use in miniatures wargames (and some of the things which really don’t work very well), some examples of commercial or shareware software of which I have some experience, how I have developed my own game-management systems, and my theories on why the majority of wargames programs are handicapped by some fundamental conceptual and design flaws. I am very much aware that some of this sounds a bit dry – I hope I’ll be able to enhance it with occasional touches of intemperance to brighten things up a bit.

One subject area I wish to swerve is that of self-contained computer games of a wargaming nature. This is – I admit it – a little like my former avoidance of the subject of board wargames, in that there is an element of fear of the unknown in there. I have seen Total War and Cossacks, though not for a couple of years, and some aspects of them look wonderful. I am nervously aware that if one day someone does this right, and we can switch on the PC and find ourselves in a customisable game which looks like a Sergei Bondarchuk movie, we may wonder what on earth we were doing all those years messing about with painted toy soldiers. Having said which, I think we are some years short of that, and I recall that Cossacks II once corrupted the operating system on one of my computers (it rendered the CD writer useless), so there is still some room for scepticism.

If, at any point during the next few postings, anyone spots that we are entering a non-trivial debate about run-time environments, or if someone mentions Unix, please blow a whistle and we’ll stop immediately.