Terrace Banter: researching football hooligan memoirs

Abstract

This essay draws on an original research project into football hooligan memoirs to present an oral history of the phenomenon. An archive of football hooligan memoirs over a 25-year period was created, and interviews with publishers and authors were conducted. Detailed interviews are presented in the essay to create a raw, unedited picture of the research into how and why authors wrote their memoirs. The research also shows how an underground subculture of football hooligan writing became a mainstream phenomenon for a time. In the sense that the football hooligan memoirs themselves represent a kind of oral history, this essay is a fragment of an oral history of an oral history. It is argued in conclusion that future research needs to use the hooligan memoir archive to conduct detailed historical and ethnographic research in order to map the field.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ben Horne, Simon Penny and Patrick Slaughter for their involvement in the research work on the ‘hit and tell’ archive project, to my colleagues at Charles Sturt University for their support and to all the authors, novelists and publishers who gave their time freely to answer our questions and correspondence.

Notes

^1. Routledge is publishing an edited handbook of ‘physical cultural studies’ (Andrews, Silk, and Thorpe 2016). Walter DeKeseredy (DeKeseredy 2011, DeKeseredy and Dragiewicz 2012) has produced an overview of the origins and recent development of ‘critical criminology’ in general and sub-sub-disciplines such as cultural criminology in particular. In terms of ‘subcultural studies’, Gelder 2007) has argued that subcultural identity is primarily a matter of narrative and narration, the focus literary as well as sociological.

^2. Pete Walsh's Milo Books republished in 2011 a book by academic writer, the late Dave Robins, entitled We Hate Humans (Robins 2011), originally published in 1984, with the banner headline ‘the football hooligan classic’ across its cover. ‘We Hate Humans’ comes from a 1970s football chant addressed to those who described football fans as ‘animals’. Also, Cass Pennant's publishing arm, Pennant books, published Geoff Pearson and Clifford Stott's academic book on football hooliganism in 2007 (Stott and Pearson 2007).

^3. Bloomsbury publishers (now including what was, formerly, Berg), for instance, commissioned a new international book series, with myself as academic commissioning editor, called Subcultural Style in 2006. Books in the series include Body Style, Queer Style, Fetish Style, Punk Style, Goth Style and Hip Hop Style.

^4. See www.urbanedgefilms.com

^5. Cass Pennant has confessed that his original title for the film Casuals made by his company was ‘the last of the working class subcultures’, conceived on a national level. Subcultural styles in Britain are always heavily regionalized, however. William Routledge entitled one of his books ‘Northern Monkeys’ (Routledge 2012) in ironic response to Southern English football fans' view of Northern English fans.

^6. Phil Thornton's e-book 100% Pure Wool (Thornton 2013b), an outtake from the writing of the second edition of his book Casuals (Thornton 2013a), is an autobiographical account of the complexity of the formations of working class identity around music, fashion and football in Runcorn, a sub-urban UK geographical location between Liverpool and Manchester, in a specific period of the late twentieth century.

^7. Leeds casuals celebrated their history with a travelling photographic exhibition which became a book in 2013 (Slaughter and Gosling 2013). As Patrick Slaughter, a former Leeds casual, shows (Slaughter 2004) the ‘old boys’ are an important part of this long history, even when they themselves have passed away.

^8. Terrace Banter is the name of a football hooliganism focused website: see http://www.terracebanter.com/