A former chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, Phil Hammond was a giant of the campaign for truth and justice following the disaster. After his death earlier this year, his wife Hilda reflected on the pivotal role he played in the decades after the tragedy
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Phil Hammond, former chairman of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, pictured in 2012. Mr Hammond, who was
a driving force in the campaign for justice after the death of his teenage son, Philip, in the disaster, passed away in January 2025. Photo by Colin Lane
Phil Hammond, former chairman of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, pictured in 2012. Mr Hammond, who was a driving force in the campaign for justice after the death of his teenage son Philip, passed away in January 2025. Photo by Colin Lane
There is an old wooden table in a Liverpool dining room that deserves its place in legal history.
You would not know to sit at it. Now, it is a place of serenity. A place of calm, where the spring sunlight drifts in from the conservatory windows and robins can be seen dancing across the well-kept garden.
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For decades a storm brewed around this table. Like many of those who have stretched out beneath it, it bears the scars of a traumatic past. Like many of those who have stared into their mug while contemplating the tragic events of April 15, 1989, it has stood resolute, unflinching through years of pain.
For years, the table was a nerve centre for the fight for justice after Hillsborough. It is a place where tea has been poured, coffee spilt and tears shed. Ever-present across those decades was one man, Phil Hammond.
When Phil lost his teenage son, Philip, there was a fear the tragedy would take him with it. Aged 40, the dad-of-two had already lived an adulthood beset by health problems. Yet, like with every challenge he faced, he drew on unimaginable strength.
“The injustice powered him on,” his wife Hilda reflected, speaking days after hundreds gathered at Mossley Hill Parish Church to bid farewell to a giant of the campaign for truth. “He wasn’t a well man, and when it first happened he used to sit in the corner with a bath towel around his head and he sobbed and sobbed into it. I just thought: ‘This is going to kill him.’ But he seemed to muster some strength amid all the grief.”
Aged 14 at the time, the parents had agreed to let Phil travel to Sheffield with a friend from the Boys’ Brigade. What should have been a wonderful day out following his beloved Reds as they took on Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup became a nightmare that would rip their world apart.
Philip Hammond, one of the 97 victims unlawfully killed as a result of the Hillsborough disaster, was just 14 when he died. His father, Phil, played a leading role in the campaign for justice that followed
Philip Hammond, one of the 97 victims unlawfully killed as a result of the Hillsborough disaster, was just 14 when he died. His father, Phil, played a leading role in the campaign for justice that followed
Like the families of so many others in the months following the disaster, the Hammonds lurched between devastation and a desire to challenge the lies spread about their loved ones. When the Hillsborough Family Support Group was formed, Phil, a postal worker who had refused to let the loss of his right leg in a work accident hold him back, became secretary,
The first years were tough. In Hilda’s words, the campaign “limped” on. There was the burst of hope that accountability might follow the findings of the 1989 Taylor Report - which excoriated South Yorkshire Police and labelled the failure of the match commander, chief superintendent David Duckenfield, to direct supporters away from the crowded pens when he ordered the opening of an exit gate as “a blunder of the first magnitude”.
But public bodies closed ranks and, with taxpayer funded legal teams, manoeuvred to deflect blame onto the supporters.
The initial inquest worsened the pain. Phil and Hilda would drop their youngest son, Graeme, with relatives before school each morning so they could leave Merseyside early enough to attend court. Coroner Dr Stefan Popper made the now discredited ruling no victim could have died beyond 3.15pm and a jury recorded a verdict of accidental death.
A judicial review followed, disciplinary proceedings against Duckenfield and his second-in-command on the day, Superintendent Bernard Murray, fell away as both retired, and the director of public prosecutions ruled no-one should face criminal charges.
Phil Hammond, former chairman of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, with his wife Hilda, pictured in 2012. Photo by Colin Lane
Phil Hammond, former chairman of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, with his wife Hilda, pictured in 2012. Photo by Colin Lane
This was a dark time in which hope of progress was faint. Yet Phil took on the might of the establishment from his Mossley Hill home. He started with little expertise but he knew what had happened to his son was wrong. And he knew much of what was being portrayed by police, their representatives and others were lies, mistruths in which the 97 who died as a direct result of the disaster, the hundreds injured and thousands who escaped were treated as collateral damage as those who failed to protect and save them sought to protect themselves.
His home became an epicentre of the battle that ensued - a place where legal documents were pored over, statements cross-referenced and dirty tricks exposed. Key figures in the campaign, the likes of Trevor and Jenni Hicks, Bill Pemberton, Pat Joynes, Joan Traynor, Rose Robinson and Jimmy Wafer, would meet to work through their next steps. All had lost children in the disaster.
Looking back on the resilience of the man she met as a teenager at St Finbar’s social club in Dingle, Hilda said: “From a very early stage, Phil was going ‘this is wrong’. When they were saying fans broke down the gate, he was saying ‘this is wrong, so wrong’. He felt that immediately. His mantra was ‘something will come up one day’. He would be sitting up all night and then go to work. He gave so much.”
When there were discussions about whether the HFSG should disband, Hilda said he was a voice of hope.
The 76-year-old recalled: “He would say: ‘I’m telling you, one day, someone will crack, one day, something will come up and, one day, the truth will out. What happens if we don’t exist? Who moves forward?’”
The home of the Hammonds was not just a place of legal discussion, Phil’s work supported by the expertise of the likes of Ann Adlington and Kathy Durham. It was a focal point for the campaign. One consequence of having their details on HFSG correspondence was the trolls who would lash abuse down their phoneline. Another, was how their home became a refuge.
Hilda said: “We had an awful lot of survivors come here to talk to us. That was hard. We wanted to help them. We wanted to listen to their accounts, but to envisage Philip being in all of that was very traumatic for us. But we couldn’t turn them away. I look back and question how we got through it.”
Jimmy McGovern’s landmark 1996 docu-drama galvanised a campaign that had been pushed into the shadows. The heartbreaking portrayal of the families’ experiences added fresh momentum to the cause. It was used to organise the Hillsborough Justice Concert, when the likes of Manic Street Preachers and Stereophonics helped to raise money and awareness. Somewhere, hidden in their home, is the Filofax in which Phil kept the phone numbers of some of music’s biggest names.
As the momentum appeared to be turning, the incoming Labour government offered new hope - until the judge appointed to lead a review of evidence, Lord Justice Stuart-Smith, greeted Phil on the steps of Liverpool’s maritime museum by asking whether other families would be late that day “like the Liverpool fans”. The remark, repeating one of the core myths peddled after the tragedy, eroded all faith in the project.
The money raised at the Anfield concert months earlier was the last source of optimism and was used to fund private prosecutions of Duckenfield and Murray. Again, it was a David and Goliath fight, one of long nights spent studying statements and documents, now at the HFSG office in North John Street, as well as at the Hammonds’ home.
Murray was acquitted at Leeds Crown Court but the jury was unable to reach a verdict on Duckenfield. When the families’ legal team was asked to offer “no evidence” it was Phil’s belief that would prove pivotal almost 20 years later.
Family barrister Alun Jones, KC, recalled the meeting in Liverpool that night as he paid tribute to Phil following his death on January 16, aged 75, writing: “Phil was the decisive voice in a downcast mood of pessimism. He said he had not come this far with the case after so many years of struggle to give up now, and urged everyone, with real passion, to vote that we should not offer no evidence. That carried the day and put an end to all argument, and we told the judge that the next day. He could not force us to offer no evidence, something which would have resulted in a formal ‘not guilty’ verdict and ruled out all chance of a retrial.”
Phil Hammond heads up a demonstration by families of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster outside the Houses of Parliament in 1998. A former secretary of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, Mr Hammond helped lead the fight for truth and justice after his son, Philip, was killed in the Hillsborough tragedy.
Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
Phil Hammond heads up a demonstration by families of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster outside the Houses of Parliament in 1998. A former chairman of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, Mr Hammond helped lead the fight for truth and justice after his son, Philip, was killed in the Hillsborough tragedy. The protest took place years before the death of Andrew Devine, recognised as the 97th person unlawfully killed as a result of the tragedy Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
Phil’s intervention made it possible for Duckenfield to face a criminal prosecution for gross negligence manslaughter almost two decades later. He was acquitted after a retrial at Preston Crown Court.
The years between the private and criminal prosecutions were, initially, difficult. After Leeds, the families had bloodied the noses of the authorities but had little hope of gaining the truth or justice they craved. Then came the outpouring of anger at the 20th anniversary, an emotional occasion that led to renewed calls for a true examination of the disaster and its aftermath and from which, three years later, the Hillsborough Independent Panel published its landmark findings - vindicating the families’ campaign and detailing the operational failings before, during and after the fatal crush and the chilling efforts to deflect blame onto supporters.
Even that can be traced back to Phil’s influence. By then its chair, Phil was forced to step back from the HFSG after suffering a brain haemorrhage when he banged his head while working in the campaign office in Christmas of 2008. Much of the planning for the tide-turning commemoration had been completed, however, and he still managed to attend amid a year-long battle to recover.
The HIP report prompted an apology from then prime minister David Cameron and paved the way for the fresh inquests that, in 2016, concluded with a jury finding the victims were unlawfully killed and that supporters played no role in causing the tragedy.
Despite his health problems, Phil had returned to that fabled dining room table to support proceedings, helping new legal representatives locate and understand the fruit of his labours over previous decades.
“He was thrilled”, Hilda said of the verdicts. “At last”, he kept saying. Nine years later, with the truth firmly established, she is desperate for the world to know of her late husband’s work in those difficult early years.
She said: “He was a remarkable man. I am immensely proud of him and the more I have heard the more I think how he held that group together. He is the reason they got so far. All the way there were curveballs thrown at us. A lesser person would have given up. I just want everyone to know Phil was a leading light in getting justice. His flame will never be extinguished.”
And he never lost his spirit.
One of Hilda’s most profound memories was created just weeks before his death. She said: “On Christmas morning, I said to Phil that me and Graeme were going up to Allerton cemetery to see Philip. He said: ‘Give him a love from me’. We had a white headstone and I would have to scrub it clean with bleach. I couldn’t do that neatly anymore so when I came back I said to Phil I was thinking of getting a new stone, a grey one that could be cleaned more easily.
“The stone we had said: ‘Our beloved son Philip, who lost his life needlessly at Hillsborough.’ He said: ‘When you get the new stone, you change that wording to unlawfully killed.’ That was his goal, to prove they were unlawfully killed.”