Hillsborough the 97 remembered: Andrew Sefton

This article is part of a special project from The Athletic remembering the lives of some of those Liverpool supporters who died in the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, told through the words of their loved ones. A link to other pieces in the series — which are all free to read — is at the bottom of this article.

By April 15, 1989, Andrew Sefton was starting to get his life together.

The 1980s was an extremely rough time for young lads from the north west like Andrew, who amid a recession and rising unemployment under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher faced a bleak future.

But seven years after leaving school with no qualifications, Andrew, by now 23, had a job as a security guard at Pontins in Weston-super-Mare. He was engaged, had plans to travel abroad with friends, and on the morning of April 15 said to his older sister Julie at their family house in Skelmersdale, 13 miles north east of Liverpool, that he wanted her to help him draft a CV.

This was the last conversation they had before he drove a bunch of mates to the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough. He wasn’t even a Liverpool fan — supporting Tottenham Hotspur instead because they were, in his view, simply better than any of the teams in the north west — but he could drive, so they offered him a spare ticket and hopped in his car.

Along with 96 others, Andrew never came home.

This is his story, and how the legacy of Hillsborough affected his family. How his mother confronted Thatcher soon after in an extraordinary exchange, the way the disaster “sent whatever your personality was into hyperdrive”, and why for Julie, Hillsborough was “the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to me”.

More than three decades on from Hillsborough, Julie and her husband, Leo Fallon, now live in Roby, a village about six miles from Liverpool, with Lola, their 12-year-old Staffordshire Bull Terrier. They moved to the house in 2021, and though they keep some Hillsborough documents upstairs, it has the feel of a fresh start.

The couple have been married almost 38 years and Hillsborough has been an unwanted presence for more than half their lives.

“Sometimes the volume would be up, sometimes down, but the noise from Hillsborough was always there,” Julie says. “Like having tinnitus. Very bad, very weird tinnitus.”

“Hillsborough defines your year in some ways,” Leo adds.

“It used to be that the tension would start around Christmas,” Julie says. “And it would just build and build and build and then after going to the anniversary memorial it would go pop and you could breathe.”

Julie did at least find some peace from the 2016 inquest which ruled that all of the victims were unlawfully killed and did not contribute to the disaster. “When the verdict was read out I put my hands together and went, ‘Done. It’s done’.”

Andrew Sefton at home (Photo courtesy of Julie Fallon)

Andrew was three years younger than Julie, and both she and Leo remember a boy who was naturally shy, self-conscious of his height (he was around 6ft 3in) and a real home bird — much happier at the family home in Skelmersdale, the town where Julie and Leo were both living when they met, than at school where he always struggled. He grappled with what would now be identified as anxiety but developed a wicked, dry sense of humour.

Despite the Sefton family not being interested in football, Andrew started following Tottenham and enjoyed playing. A cartilage operation at 14 halted his progress, although the injury also led to one of Julie’s favourite stories about her brother. Shortly before the operation, Andrew’s mother Teri — whom he fondly called Bid or Biddy — said they needed to see a doctor about his knee. “And because he was a minging get she said you make sure you wash before we go,” Julie remembers, laughing.

Andrew dutifully did as he was told. “He shows his knee which is gleaming, and my mum’s dead proud,” Julie says. “The doctor says ‘Let’s make a comparison’. Our Andrew goes, ‘Er, comparison with what?’. The doctor was like, ‘With your other knee’.

“He looks dead sheepish and when he rolls it up the knee was caked in mud. Of course, he only washed the sore knee. So my mother’s like, ‘You cheeky little…”

Teri might have been angry but Andrew had an exceptional ability to wrap her around his little finger. She had been abused terribly by her mother and was determined to do right by her own children. She would do anything for her children, as would Andrew’s dad Colin, and doted on her youngest child and only son.

“It was very amusing watching Andrew at work with my mum,” Julie says. “It was like he’d been on some sort of course. Once he learned to drive he and my mum ‘shared a car’. I’ve never seen a less shared car in my life. Mum paid for the car, the fuel, the maintenance, but never got to use it.

“He’d say to Mum, ‘Biddy, by taking the car out and using your petrol, I’m actually saving you going out on the road where it’s a bit dangerous’. And she’d buy it!”

Teri (bottom left) and Colin Sefton (top left), parents of Andrew and Julie (Photo courtesy of Julie Fallon)

On another occasion, Andrew, who became increasingly political and went on anti-unemployment rallies, skipped work to picket the hare coursing at Altcar. To avoid detection by his employers, Andrew wore a balaclava to the event but, swept up in the emotion of it all, he took it off. Sure enough, that evening’s local TV news bulletin showed Andrew, much taller than everyone, front and centre and very much recognisable.

He was sacked the next day but said to his mum, “Well, you have to stand up for your principles. So, er, sorry you won’t be getting any rent this month.”

“Did your mum ever see any rent from him?” Leo asks.

“Did she heck?” is Julie’s response.

Andrew duly bounced from job to job, on top of dealing with upheaval at home. First, his father Colin, who was already technically blind in one eye, lost sight in the other one overnight when a blood clot reached his optic nerve. He had to quit his job as an engineer and move to Birmingham to retrain as a push bike mechanic. It meant Teri, who had previously been a nurse and was “extremely intelligent — just like Julie” according to Leo, had to take on even more work and was at home less. Julie, meanwhile, headed off to Lancaster University.

It was a tough period for Andrew, but by 1989 he was finding his feet. “He was just beginning to realise that there were things he could do, and going down south for the Pontins job was a massive step,” says Julie.

In a letter home to his mum shortly before Hillsborough, Andrew wrote from Pontins about the prospect of going away with mates in the summer. “Andy Leekah wants me to go to Portugal and Brian wants me to go to Israel,” he wrote.

“This was his first exposure to the idea that there was a whole world out there,” Julie says.

April 15 was a lovely, sunny day and since he was home for the weekend and interested in football, Andrew happily said yes to the Hillsborough ticket.

He’d watched Tottenham live and had a pennant that hung over his bed when he was younger, as well as Spurs shirts. His favourite player was Gary Mabbutt, with his love for the Spurs captain a running joke between him and his fiancee Helen. He would say: “I’m going out with you but if Gary Mabbutt walked in, he’s got such fantastic legs it would have to be a tie!”

Typical of the man, Mabbutt attended Andrew’s funeral.

A letter sent to the Sefton family by Terry Venables, then Tottenham manager, after the Hillsborough disaster (Photo courtesy of Julie Fallon)

With no interest in football, Andrew going to Hillsborough barely registered with Julie. She had stayed the previous night at the family home in Skelmersdale with her 10-week-old daughter Maria, Andrew, and their parents. The last conversation she had with Andrew was about helping him with his CV. “I said get your shit together if you’re serious about a CV, and we’ll discuss it in the week.

“The last thing I remember about our Andrew was him sitting in our living room putting his boots on.”

One thing Julie recalls with undimmed clarity from the day is running into a friend who asked her the time. “I could see this big clock face and so I said, ‘Well it depends on how precise you want to be — if you want to be really precise then it’s six minutes past three’.”

GO DEEPER

Life after Hillsborough, told by the men and women who survived

3.06pm was the precise time when the semi-final was stopped. At this point, Julie had no idea of the situation at Hillsborough.

For Leo, everything changed when he was called by a panicked Teri telling him that something had happened. He drove to Skelmersdale to take Teri and Colin to Sheffield to try and find their son.

Leo recalls reaching the gymnasium at Hillsborough that was now doubling up as a mortuary.

“You were asked…” He pauses, gathering his thoughts. “Teri was a wreck. She was incoherent — subdued or hysterical, veering from one to the other. I don’t think I was much better myself, and Colin, a lovely man, was an old-school Scouse working-class bloke. He was just going into himself.”

Leo took on the task of identifying Andrew’s body. He was taken to a room, shaking from the cold outside, where badly taken Polaroid pictures hung alongside numbers.

“I collapsed when I saw what I thought was Andrew, literally just collapsed on the floor.”

After identifying his brother-in-law, Leo was directed to a desk with a few policemen, and Andrew’s body was brought in on a stretcher. “And then… they open up the body bag and say ‘Can you confirm this is your relative?’.”

This is the point at which the emotion begins to overwhelm him.

Like the other bereaved family members, he was then subjected to the horrific line of questioning from South Yorkshire Police about whether Andrew had been drinking, or on drugs, or had a criminal record. The cover-up and portrayal of Liverpool fans as causing the disaster was already underway. He also shudders at the memory of a few policeman sat laughing.

A devastated Teri insisted on seeing Andrew’s body and so Leo returned to the mortuary with her. He then had to call Julie. Her first words were: “This will kill my mother.”

Leo, Teri and Colin stayed the night with a family in Sheffield, and much to Teri’s fury were denied access to Hillsborough the following morning because Thatcher was visiting and the area was off-limits. The Conservative prime minister was already persona non grata in Liverpool, her hardline policies blamed by many on Merseyside for precipitating a decline in the city.

Margaret Thatcher at Hillsborough the day after the 1989 disaster (Photo: Phil O’Brien/EMPICS via Getty Images)

A couple of weeks after Hillsborough, despite calls for her to stay away, Thatcher attended a memorial service at the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool.

At the end of the service, the families were invited to the crypt, where Thatcher was waiting. Moments later Leo turned to Julie and said incredulously, “Your mother’s got Thatcher.”

With the prime minister’s security detail shuffling uncomfortably, Teri grasped her hand and said to her: “After the things that you’ve said about people in this city, I don’t know how you have the nerve to show your face here. It’s an absolute disgrace. But do you know what, Mrs Thatcher, I do have one consolation.”

“What’s that?” Mrs Thatcher replied.

“Well, you’re elected and one day the people of this country will wake up to who you are and they will get you out. And on the day that you are forced to leave No 10, as you leave, just stop for a moment because if you listen really hard you’ll hear a woman in the north of England laughing very, very loudly. I’ll let you go now.”

Leo and Julie remember Teri speaking very calmly, very rationally, very lucidly, and how the other mothers who had just thanked Thatcher for her sympathies were suddenly voicing their agreement.

Teri was a force of nature and dedicated the rest of her life to fighting for justice for those, like Andrew, who died at Hillsborough. She pored over video footage that she requested from the authorities, and was described by Phil Scraton, whose investigation was crucial to the victims’ ultimate exoneration, as an excellent, self-trained researcher.

But the legacy of losing her son at Hillsborough was brutal, and she exemplifies Julie’s view that the disaster “sent whatever your personality was into hyperdrive”.

“So my mother became three hours sleep a night, 80 fags a day, ringing everybody, reading everything, drinking endless cups of tea. She would scour the video footage. She was one of the founders of the Hillsborough Families Support Group. She was go, go, go.”

Eventually, it proved too much for Teri, who died of a heart attack at 64.

“I’m still astonished that we got 15 more years out of her. It was the equivalent of taking a car where the engine was already not in the best of nick and just putting your foot on the accelerator and running it into a wall.”

If a frenzied energy was how Teri’s personality “went into hyperdrive”, what about the rest of the family?

Colin retreated further and further into himself until he died of dementia in December 2012, on the day that the original verdicts of 96 accidental deaths were quashed by the High Court.

In Julie’s case, her natural stoicism became even more exaggerated — so much so that her daughter Maria mistook it for indifference. “During the inquest she just looks at me, sobbing and goes, ‘What’s fucking wrong with you? You’re not upset, you’re not bothered’.

“But I had seen it all before and I was certainly not going to relive all that grief.”

Maria, now 34, lives in central Liverpool and works in the charity sector. Hearing about how Hillsborough affected her is a reminder of the disaster’s legacy on generations of family members, even ones who were barely alive when it happened.

For Leo, the worst thing “was the guilt. That I couldn’t be the person that I should have been. What Julie needed was somebody much more stable and dependable and solid. I don’t know if I could have done it, but in terms of the aftermath, I feel dreadful. Just guilty, guilty over that.”

Leo and Julie Fallon, with their dog Lola, at home in Roby

“That’s Hillsborough, though, that’s what it does to people,” Julie says. “It’s like a massive planet with this force and you get too close to it at your peril. It will suck you in and do such dreadful things to you. We know people who were on the periphery to begin with and it’s messed with their heads.”

The 2016 exoneration of the Hillsborough victims was a huge moment in helping Julie find closure. It’s taken Leo and Maria a bit longer.

Julie even insists that Hillsborough is equally “the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to me”.

“Because at 26 I realised there are no second chances,” she says. “Death really does mean death and so you may as well just bloody well get on with it. Because there’s no replay. This is it.”

Julie cites decisions like quitting a youth service to set up her own business helping to put kids in schools. Or trips she and Leo have taken to California and Alaska.

Now, with Leo and Maria finding some of the peace she gained in 2016, Julie is looking forward to a life not dominated by the events of 34 years ago.

“I’m excited to know what life actually looks like without Hillsborough because I don’t really know what that’s like — we’re only just starting to find out.”

To read the other articles in our series, Hillsborough – the 97 remembered, click on the links below:

(Top photo design by Eamonn Dalton)

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