Hillsborough: How Liverpool and Nottingham Forest fans found common ground in tragedy

Diane Lynn accepted a rival fan’s offer of a cup of tea while sitting on the side of the field in horrified astonishment.

At the Sheffield Hillsborough Stadium’s Leppings Lane end, Lynn, then 22 years old, and her brother, then 17 years old, were rescued from a mass of bodies on a renowned beautiful spring afternoon in 1989.

The crush would eventually claim the lives of ninety-seven of their fellow Liverpool supporters.

The tragedy had occurred in one of the two centre enclosures where Lynn and her brother had been.

Lynn says, “I knew I was dying.”

However, she managed to survive and quickly found herself on the pitch in front of the nearby South Stand after climbing across onto a separate area of the Leppings Lane terrace.

There, she collapsed in front of a group of Nottingham Forest supporters—fans who had travelled to South Yorkshire to watch their team play in the FA Cup semifinal, just like those of Liverpool.

“We collapsed near Nottingham Forest fans, and they were offering us cups of tea and coffee from their flasks,” Lynn says in the Hillsborough Unheard: Nottingham Forest Fans audio for BBC Sounds.

“I’d love to know who they were. They soothed us, thus they assisted us in a way. My brother – I’ve never seen someone is such shock. We’ve never discussed it, so I still don’t know what he saw, and he was so pale that he was unable to speak.

“One of the Forest fans was a dad with a couple of kids – you think now, those poor, young kids, what they saw.”

That day, Britain’s biggest stadium disaster unfolded in front of 28,000 Forest fans, although none of them died.

And they have been Hillsborough’s silent witnesses for a large portion of the 35 years that have passed.

Now, as vice-chair of the Hillsborough Survivors Support Alliance (HSA), Lynn has helped some Forest fans open up about what happened and come to terms with Hillsborough’s horrors.

“People in Liverpool need to hear what Nottingham Forest fans have got to say,” she claims.

“They need to know exactly what happened to them, what they saw and that they were part of that tragedy.”

What took place at Hillsborough?
timeline of the Hillsborough disaster
Hillsborough: The Complete Narrative
For this reason, she sent a word of solidarity to their followers who were present in 2021 in response to a tweet from Forest on the 32nd anniversary of the tragedy.

She signed off the HSA’s reply by writing, “we are here for everyone”.

Those five words meant so much to Forest fan Martin Peach.

“That was a huge moment,” he says.

“That was the first time I had seen acknowledgement that what the Forest fans had witnessed that day might have had an impact on them,” I simply recalled thinking.

“It felt like a real relief to be recognised and the responses to that from Forest fans were quite overwhelming.”

In 1989, when Peach was twelve years old, he was seated in the South Stand, nearer the fenced-in Spion Kop end of Hillsborough—the terrace behind the goal where thousands of other Forest supporters had gathered, watching a catastrophe unfold.

“I remember that day more vividly than any other day in my whole life, and I have thought about it every day for 35 years,” says Peach, who now has a 12-year-old daughter.

Among the images ingrained in his memory are the police setting up a cordon at the halfway point and the Liverpool supporter, dressed in full ’80s rocker’ regalia—long hair, beard, torn jeans, and a leather jacket—breaking through the line and sprinting in the direction of the Forest fans in a state of despair.

“He ran the whole length of the pitch and got to the goalmouth in front of the Kop, in front of 20,000 Forest fans, and he just dropped to his knees and was screaming his head off up to the heavens,” Peach recalled.

“It was at that very moment that Forest supporters realized something was wrong. It’s not pitch invasion, this. There is something seriously wrong’. It was a significant incident that profoundly affected me when I was young. It has just remained etched into my memory because there was never a way to discuss it or share it. The match was on Saturday and on Monday I was back at school and got on with it. I don’t recall going into great detail about it, but I’m sure my parents asked if I was okay.” Peach was a music-loving, football-mad child from Swanwick, a small village which falls on the Derbyshire side of the county border with Nottinghamshire.

He wasn’t the only youngster from the old mining community who went to the game. Two local Liverpool supporters, both eighteen, also travelled.

LISTEN: Unheard in Hillsborough
Peach claims that “one of them came home and the other didn’t.”

“For this reason, Hillsborough has been a very significant issue to me.

“I know how easily it could have been me who didn’t come home that day, if I’d chosen to support Liverpool instead of Forest, or we had been given opposite ends that day.”

For more than an hour, Peach was among the Forest fans who could do nothing but watch on.

At least one Forest fan sat by him attempted to get on to the pitch to help administer first aid, but police blocked their access.

An inquest held in 2016 concluded that a series of police mistakes resulted in the wrongful deaths of the 96 fans, who would subsequently number 97.

It took 27 years for that verdict to be passed down.

Survivors and families campaigned for three decades to discover what led to the deaths.

On game day, Forest supporters found it difficult to comprehend the seriousness of the situation from their position just 100 yards down the field.

Peter Hillier, then a 25-year-old Forest supporter, had taken the train from London to join his father and brother on Hillsborough’s Kop to cheer a team challenging for every major honour at home and abroad.

For more than a decade Forest had battled with Liverpool for some of the game’s biggest prizes.

The rivalry was strong and tensions between supporters were often high. Crowd trouble was common.

When Hillier first saw people in the Leppings Lane terrace trying to climb over the fences, he admits his “first suspicion” and the “assumption” of many at the Forest end was that it was an attempted pitch invasion.

“Those things happened in those days,” he continues.

“And people hurled abuse. That changed when you could see people were desperate.

“The gates were then opened, and they started bringing people out and you had Liverpool supporters ripping up the advertising hoardings to carry what you assumed might be injured people away.”

Many of those individuals were carried over and placed on improvised stretchers in front of the Forest supporters in the penalty area.

“You realised these people weren’t injured with a broken leg. People performing resuscitation and attempting to save lives were visible. Then you would witness them ceasing “states Hillier.

“Somewhere along the line you realised someone has died there.

“It was numbing, because you couldn’t do anything. It was silent by then. There was no more chanting, no abuse. It was perplexity.”

Although Hillier could chat to his brother and father on the terrace, neither of them discussed what they had seen at the time or in the years that followed.

“We stood there not wanting to be there,” he says.

“It is not a normal human experience to watch 97 people be killed.”

For years afterwards, Hillier says he had recurring nightmares, struggled to form relationships and grappled with alcohol issues.

He feels he reacted, like the vast majority of Forest fans, by bottling up the trauma.

“There was the feeling that it didn’t happen to us,” he says. “We were there, but it’s Liverpool’s tragedy and we are a by-product of it.”

The perception of Forest fans was damaged on Merseyside by what Brian Clough, Forest manager at the time, said about the catastrophe.

Clough, who had guided Forest to an English title and two European Cup triumphs, repeated infamous and inaccurate claims that Liverpool fans were to blame for what happened.

Clough later apologised for his comments before his death in 2004.

“It caused a lot of resentment and probably an assumption in Liverpool that everyone in Nottingham feels like that,” says Hillier.

“He was a hero, and is still my hero, and he made a mistake on that. If people delve into that, they will find that he was badly advised.

“He retracted it much, much later, and people in Liverpool will say too little, too late.”

Supporters of the Forest, including Hillier and Peach, created a large banner demanding an end to tragedy chants and honouring the 97 fans who died in the Hillsborough tragedy. It was first unfurled at Anfield in 2023.

Forest fan Amanda Stanger, who was in the South Stand at Hillsborough in 1989, says the memory of that day “never goes away”.

She now works in a prison and the sight of people behind fences has provoked flashbacks. She has been stricken by panic attacks in crowds.

But she worries most about what some fellow supporters may chant whenever Forest play Liverpool – a fixture that has only become regular again in the past two seasons after her club ended their 23-year Premier League absence.

“My anxiety levels go through the roof,” she claims.

“I wonder, what will I do? What will I say? I can’t ignore it.

“We’ve had that only recently, but Liverpool supporters have that every single match, no matter who they play.”

Stanger was once invited by an anti-discrimination charity, Kick it Out, to meet with a Forest fan who had been found to be tragedy chanting.

“The shock was that his dad was at Hillsborough,” Stanger says.

“I asked him, ‘why did you do it and how is your dad?’ Because he didn’t talk about Hillsborough, he assumed his dad was alright with it, but that tells me a lot. That tells me he doesn’t speak about it because emotionally he probably can’t speak about it, not because he doesn’t want to speak about it.”

Stanger has found comfort in recent years by talking about her experiences.

She took up the offer of therapy that the HSA funds, and has since set up a Nottingham branch of the alliance.

On her first trip to Anfield to attend an HSA meeting she says she was “petrified”. Afterwards it was as if she had “found a new family”.

“When I sat there and was asked to introduce myself, I got emotional,” she says.

“I said, ‘I’m Amanda and I’m a Forest supporter and was at Hillsborough’. And one individual turned to me and said, ‘you are a survivor – you are one of us’.

“Nobody had ever said that. You don’t think of yourself as a survivor – you think of yourself as a Forest supporter who was there and nothing more than that.”

Whenever she is at Liverpool’s home ground, she visits the eternal flame memorial to think about all of those who lost their lives.

Stood in front of that tribute, she shed a tear explaining what it would mean to have something at Forest’s City Ground to remember a tragedy that has linked the Reds from the banks of the River Trent to the Reds from Merseyside.

“This is what we need at Forest, just somewhere to go and have a cry and to say we are sorry – sorry because it should never have happened,” Stanger stated.