Page 145 - Once a copper 10 03 2020

drawn and mounted a ferocious charge. The battle of St Andrews was almost
over with only the Leeds fans left penned behind their fence.

Sadly, it was not over, and the most terrible incident of the day was to come.

Soon after the match ended, the young Leeds fan, Ian Hambridge, aged
fifteen, was killed by a long section of wall collapsing and crashing down on
him in the Leeds section of the stadium between the Tilton Road and Garrison
Lane ends. This was his first ever professional football match.

An ambulance belonging to the St John Ambulance was attacked with
bricks, and stones were thrown at individual St John volunteers, with at least a
dozen of them suffering injuries as a result.

After the wall collapsed our serial was posted to helping the ambulance
teams get in and out of the area around the ground, a tremendously sad
duty knowing that a young life had already been senselessly lost this day.

Outside the ground, a gang of 200 Leeds fans attacked a coach carrying
Birmingham guests back from an Indian wedding, smashing most of the
windows. The coach was showered with bricks, injuring five people inside.

There would over one hundred arrests, about half of them made after-the-
event with the aid of video footage. More than five hundred people were
injured, including at least a hundred police officers.

The mob factor continued as the hooligans spewed onto the streets and into
the city centre, throwing bricks at passing cars and at any police they saw
too.

In the city centre, shops were looted.

East Birmingham and Birmingham Accident Hospitals treated 40 and 35
injured people with 12 being detained. Fourteen people were treated at the
General Hospital.
Ninety-six officers needed hospital treatment, twelve of them being detained,
including PC Michael Corrigan of the Operational Support Unit (OSU) with
back and foot injuries. He was hurt when the twelve-foot-high wall above an
exit collapsed under crowd pressure in the terrible incident in which young
Ian Hambridge died.

It is to the eternal shame of the perpetrators of the trouble that Ian became a
forgotten victim in the sad history of football violence.

Whilst I would like to have gone home early after this day crammed with
unpleasant experiences, it was not over for us. Posted to van patrol in the
area between the round and the city centre, we were flagged down by Page145
witnesses to a burglary who had followed the burglars to this area. Within