One of Liverpool’s most iconic banners referencing the long battle for Hillsborough truth and justice is to take up permanent residence at Anfield.
A flag bearing the message ‘We Climbed The Hill In Our Way’ has been a regular sight on the Kop over the last decade or so and pays tribute to all who campaigned for many years to change the establishment narrative and uncover the truth following the April 1989 disaster which saw 97 Liverpool supporters unlawfully killed and thousands of survivors traumatised in Europe’s worst ever sporting disaster.
The wording is a lyric from Pink Floyd’s 1971 track ‘Fearless’, which features a sample of the Spion Kop at Anfield in full voice, and was designed to commemorate the unstinting efforts of the countless people who fought against seemingly-insurmountable odds to change the public record of what happened at Hillsborough and overturn the initial flawed inquest verdicts of accidental death.
The original banner also featured the number 96 but, following the death of Andrew Devine who last July was ruled by a coroner to be the 97th person unlawfully killed as a result of the disaster, a new updated version has been created to acknowledge his passing, with Liverpool Football Club having now taken possession of the original.
Lifelong Liverpudlian Jim Sharman, who along with supporters from popular fans’ website Red and White Kop (RAWK) created the banner, presented the original to LFC museum curator Steven Done on Anfield’s 97 Avenue ahead of this week’s 33rd anniversary of the disaster, and told the ECHO of its significance and his pride it will now have a permanent home in L4.
“After the Andrew Devine inquest, the coroner ruled he was the 97th unlawfully killed victim of the Hillsborough disaster," he said. “The club, campaigners, relatives, families, friends, everybody has updated everything from 96 to 97 and I understand the club will update the shirts next season as the news of Andrew’s passing last July came in too late for the shirt manufacturers but we’re on 97 Avenue here, we’ve had a 97 mosaic so we needed to take the original We Climbed The Hill In Our Own Way banner and update it to 97.
“We were discussing initially on the RAWK moderators team over what we should do with the old banner and I had the idea of approaching the club museum to see if they would like to take it in. So I wrote to Steven Done and asked if he would want the banner as it is part of the history of the club and he came back with the totally not-unreasonable remark of ‘Well we can’t really take anything in with 96’ so we decided to remove the numbers from the banner and just leave the message because that’s the key point.
“That message is we got to where we got to in our own way in spite of all the obstacles, all the obfuscation and all the deliberate attempts by the establishment to deny us the truth and the justice. They denied us the justice but they can’t deny us the truth, which we got to by fighting and campaigning and standing our ground and telling the world all along what we knew from the start and that’s what this message means to us.
‘What’s happened today is the official handing over the banner - the original one - to Steve, the curator of the LFC museum, and hopefully they’ll find a place for it in the museum for everybody who doesn’t understand the message to learn what it means. We’ve heard kids around us today who’ve seen the banner and asked what it’s about so hopefully they will ‘get it’ now and generation to generation will be able to appreciate that we only got to the truth that they hid from the world by fighting for it.
“Another important thing to remember about this banner is it is not just a football banner and Hillsborough is not just a football disaster, it’s an absolute shocking, jaw-dropping miscarriage of justice in British history and to that end it’s only right this banner has appeared in other places than a football stadium. One of my fondest memories is walking around the corner approaching the inquest courts in Warrington on 26th April 2016 on the morning the unlawful killing verdicts were finally delivered with one of the survivors, Chris Lam, who noticed me carrying the banner across the car park and asked if he could carry it with me.
"I told him 'Of course because ultimately it’s not my banner, it’s yours'. He was really touched by that and was one of the people who took it Ben Nevis last summer with a number of other survivors and supporters. So it’s been to Warrington, it’s been to London, it’s been to Sheffield, it’s been all around Liverpool, it’s been up a mountain and this guy like so many others literally climbed the hill in his own way.”
Steven Done, curator of the official Liverpool FC museum since 1998, revealed the club are hoping to ensure the banner is displayed in a prominent position along the tour route at Anfield where it will potentially be seen by thousands of visitors every day.
He said: “Jim has spoken very eloquently about what this banner symbolises but the whole point around it is we’ve all grown to know and admire this fantastic banner, anyone who has watched a game in the last few seasons will recognise it, but it had the 96 on it and for obvious and tragic reasons it needed to be updated.
“When Jim first got in touch, my first thoughts were yes we really must look after this banner, it’s an important piece of history, but on the other hand we couldn’t display it with the 96 on it as although it’s historical, it doesn’t pay tribute to the tragic loss of Andrew Devine and would not have felt appropriate. So I was unsure how we could take it forward as it was but then thankfully we came to what feel is the perfect solution because as Jim rightly said it’s the message on it which is the over-riding feature. We all know the original banner served a wonderful cause with 96 on it and now a new one with 97 on has been created and was displayed beautifully on the Kop at the Benfica game this week.
“The original banner which just has the message itself I think should become part of the club’s history and we hope it will be possible for us to display this within a public space along the stadium tour where huge numbers of people every week, as many as 3,000 a day, could see it. We hope then they will question what does it mean exactly if they don’t know, I know a lot of Liverpool supporters do know exactly what it stands for and why, but some maybe don’t and I quite like the fact the nature of the message may well make people a bit inquisitive. That opens a conversation and hopefully new and younger generations of supporters, perhaps not even just Liverpool supporters, will ask what it means and look for explanations to educate themselves. So it’s important and relevant and actually quite beautiful in a way as a statement, I think there’s something very special about it and it’s vital this becomes a permanent piece of the club’s history.”
The banner originated in the wake of the landmark findings of the Hillsborough Independent Panel on 12 September 2012 and Sharman explained how it came to fruition and why it has such emotional resonance for many people.
“I think it was round about 2013 or 2014, certainly not long after Truth Day in September 2012, where a couple of lads on Red and White Kop were discussing new banner ideas and I believe it was there, I think it was Zenplasher and Kesey between them who came up with the idea of taking that line from Fearless by Pink Floyd - ‘You pick the place and I’ll choose the time and I’ll climb the hill in my own way’ - as recognition of how we got to where we got to with the Hillsborough Independent Panel report and the sense of exoneration and liberation that gave us, as well as the sense of defiance, so it was the perfect message really.
“The words came from one of the lads, the idea for the simplicity of the lay-out came from another and we all got together to crowd source and fund it that way and then the original unfortunately got lost behind the Kop at the end of the season! We couldn’t have that, I had a bit of spare cash around at the time and it was lost on my watch so I did feel responsible and paid for a reprint. When we needed to update it following the sad passing of Andrew Devine, with the help of the moderation team on RAWK, a few of us clubbed together and funded it ourselves. I first got involved with RAWK after the Truth mosaic against Arsenal in January 2007 which opened up a lot of doors for people, those are what we call the wilderness years in terms of the campaign when the road to the truth was locked tight, nobody was listening to us with a few notable exceptions. It was so hard back then to get the message of the truth out there and it’s still very important now and that’s what this banner represents - we did it our own way - and we looks like we will still have to.
“Government has now blocked the much needed Hillsborough Law eight times. What don't they want you to have? A level playing field. This policy of theirs which they call levelling up is little more than social engineering propaganda. The Hillsborough Law would be a real and tangible example of what levelling up should look like. But no, too many of them seem to want to make us keep climbing hills and denying us justice even when the truth is revealed. We shouldn't have needed to climb the hill in our own way but I'm fiercely proud that we did.”
