How the Kop became the Kop (2024)

When it came to burying the dead, they discovered 70 of the British had been killed by a bullet to the right temple. In the stinging African sun, soldiers had been shielding their eyes, looking away, while Boer snipers took aim.

The heat had already forced many to discard their heavy uniforms, into which names and numbers – their only ID – had been sewn. Dressed for January in Lancashire, they fell in summer near Ladysmith.

On a green hill far away called Spion Kop, the British Empire was fought to a bloody standstill and a 25-year-old reporter-cum-lieutenant called Winston Churchill sent back alarming eyewitness reports. On another slope, a 30-year-old lawyer-cum-volunteer called Mahatma Gandhi tended the wounded.

It was a day of military disarray, when one British general surrendered as another shouted “No Surrender”, when reinforcements ferried water in biscuit tins because mules were dead from exhaustion or gunfire. It was a day of countless human tragedies and futile fighting. Not an inch was gained. The Boer War would last two more years. England was shocked. The Empire was rocked. And the Kop was born.

‘The acre of massacre’, it came to be called. In the history of warfare, never had so many died in such a small space. “About as large as Trafalgar Square,” was Churchill’s description of the summit of Spion Kop. “Into this confined area 2,000 British infantry were packed […] All were appalled by the carnage. The shallow trenches were choked with dead and wounded.”

The Boers were far outnumbered but knew the terrain and knew the climate. They knew cold rain and morning mist could suddenly become 40-degree sunshine. And they knew they had fresh weaponry — recently acquired from England. There is money in war.

There was money and minerals in South Africa. British soldiers were 6,000 miles from home due to gold and the Boers’ challenge to the globalised Empire’s authority. The Tugela River was a line not to be crossed and the Boers had crossed it. Spion Kop, or Lookout Mountain as it translates, stands above the Tugela. From the top of the Kop, it is a dramatic panorama.

Over a century on, as we stand by those trenches, the once mighty Tugela weaving through the drought-smacked landscape beneath us, Raymond Heron, a walking history book on the battle, reflects on its scale, its losses and its impact. “Officially 322 British were killed,” he says. “Propaganda”.

He points to a monument 20 yards away: “That’s the Imperial Light Infantry’s, they said they saw in excess of 700 bodies.”

Churchill, too, said that over half the 2,000 British were either dead or wounded. His dismay at the incompetence of those in command was plain.

The battle took place over two days in January 1900. On the third day, as was the protocol, a truce was declared so both armies’ dead could be buried and their remaining wounded treated. Side by side, Boers and British filled trenches with corpses.

Gandhi, seeking legal and human parity of esteem for Indians within the Empire, had helped organise an ambulance corps of 1,100 men during the war. It included Indians and local Zulus.

Initially they were instructed to remain outside the firing line but at Spion Kop, that changed at the request of the British government.

“The action at Spion Kop found us working within the firing line,” Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, My Experiments with Truth. “During these days we had to march from 20-25 miles a day, bearing wounded on stretchers.” The corps sustained many casualties but only recently, due to Heron, have they received a memorial on the summit.

Gandhi felt the contribution meant “the white man’s attitude seemed to be distinctly changed”. He said “contact with thousands of Tommies” had altered perceptions.

Hundreds and hundreds of those Tommies – slang for a British soldier — were buried where they died, in the shallow trenches today marked by white stones. Many were unnamed due to their discarded uniforms. They became unknown soldiers.

But there is no such thing as an unknown soldier and back in Britain, as doors were knocked in Liverpool and Blackburn, Middlesex and Falkirk and relatives given grim news, the repercussions of Spion Kop grew.

The Army and Navy Gazette of early February listed names of those killed. Among the 2nd Royal Lancaster Regiment were surnames such as Hughes, Fairclough and Moran, names that would take on a different meaning for Liverpool decades later. A Liverpool Echo headline from January 27th was ‘Spion Kop Mystery’. In Yorkshire it was ‘Spion Kop Disaster’. In Dundee, ‘Spion Kop Muddle’.

The two-word phrase quickly entered the everyday vocabulary as areas of land, such as in Mansfield, were called Spion Kop. There was a cemetery in Hartlepool called the same, a Scottish coal mine, a racehorse, holes at golf courses. There is a flower called Spion Kop.

These were not celebrations. The Suffolk Evening Star referred to: “The melancholy story of Spion Kop with its manifold lessons”. This was the prevailing mood as the term pushed through football’s turnstile.

The Arsenal, or Woolwich Arsenal, had a military connection apparent from the club’s name. In 1903-04 Arsenal were promoted to the First Division for the first time and as the club prepared for a higher level, it developed the Manor Ground in Plumstead.

In August 1904 the Sporting Life described the growing stadium and mentioned that “the huge mound at the Abbey End, which has been getting higher and higher, is now known as Spion Kop”.

Two months later a letter to the Woolwich Gazette concerned the numbers “streaming down from the Spion Kop” at the Abbey Wood end of the ground.

The term was in use, part of football. By 1907 it was established in the game’s lexicon.

The Woolwich Gazette of February 1that year covered Arsenal’s ‘Half-Yearly meeting’ at length. A director called Kennedy gave detailed accounts and, commenting on Arsenal’s new financial stability, said “one of the biggest insurers in Lombard Street” – in the City – had offered the club a loan of £9,000 secured on the stadium, which had “a banking at Spion Kop better than on any other ground in the country, and it was going to be higher still. As soon as the County Council had finished repairing the road they would be nearer to Heaven than they had ever been.”

When Birmingham opened St Andrew’s at Christmas 1906, the Birmingham Mail reported a 25,000 crowd in the heavy snow: “Spion Kop, as that portion of the unreserved enclosure near to Emmeline Street has been called, was thronged.”

Other Kops would rise, at Hillsborough and Bramall Lane in Sheffield for example, and in 1906 Liverpool, recently crowned champions, began to reconfigure Anfield. The club had just bought it from William Houlding, son of the club’s founder John.

For the 1906-07 season “re-construction on a huge scale of their ground at Anfield Road”, meant pre-season friendlies were played at New Brighton. The Sporting Life’s season preview called the stadium “completely metamorphosed”.

The scale of the hill of earth growing on Walton Breck Road and Oakfield Road led the Liverpool Echo’s sports editor Ernest Edwards to label it Spion Kop. It was not the first, but it would last.

Liverpool dropped to 15th in that first season of the Anfield Kop. When they played Derby there in April, “practically deserted was Spion Kop”, wrote the Athletic News. It was already part of Liverpool’s language.

In 1913, Arsenal left Plumstead and their Manor Ground Kop for Highbury and in September 1914, six weeks into another war, the Liverpool Echo carried a front page picture of a full stand captioned: ‘The Spion Kop Army at Anfield’.

Arsenal’s Kop had gone. Liverpool’s Kop was young. It was neither famous nor infamous. Its time would come.

Near the bottom of the dusty path leading to Spion Kop, a small gateway has been built. Inside is a Liverpool FC scarf, two pennants and a Liverbird flag with ‘Durban Supporters Club’ written on it.

Ian Parker is chairman of the Johannesburg Liverpool Supporters Club and every year, on the anniversary of Hillsborough, fans would travel from across South Africa to climb the mountain and listen to the names of the 96 killed on Leppings Lane before a bagpiper played You’ll Never Walk Alone.

“For us Spion Kop is something to be proud of,” Parker says of the South African connection, “but it’s also a sad thing to be proud of.”

There are official supporters’ clubs in Pretoria and Cape Town, as well as in Durban and Johannesburg and Parker says there were 2,500 at a screening of Liverpool’s latest Premier League home game against Tottenham. “It’s a huge club,” he says, “and when the game’s big, we open four big rooms, erect marquees, bring in food trucks.”

Back in 1906, Liverpool fans came from Liverpool; today Liverpool have over 300 supporters’ clubs in 90 countries. Win a first league title since 1990 and that number will only rise. It is why there will be such a focus on reigning champions Manchester City on Sunday.

At Spion Kop Lodge, where Churchill stayed briefly in 1900, and where there is a memorial bench with 96 slats, Raymond and Lynette Heron are looking slightly further ahead. January 2020 marks the 120th anniversary of the battle and they have been in touch with Liverpool to see how it could be recognised. They will travel to Anfield soon.

Liverpool are at Wolves on the actual anniversary, January 23; their previous home game is against Manchester United.

In an era when football has been co-opted as a prominent part of the public expression of remembrance, we have entered the period of silences and salutes. Many are uncomfortable with this. Many are not. The words Spion Kop are a reminder that football has performed this role before.

The reputation of Anfield’s Kop grew steadily. Elisha Scott, the great Liverpool goalkeeper who played for the club for 22 years from 1912, became the first ‘King of the Kop’ in the early 1920s as two titles were won. The Kop was uncovered then, 106 steps high it was said. In 1928 it was given a roof, 130 metres wide and 24 metres long.

The acoustics improved but there were lean spells, when there was not a lot to shout about. Liverpool won one league title between 1923 and 1964. It was in 1947. Bob Paisley had joined the club as a player.

Five years later, Anfield held a record attendance – 61,905 against Wolves in the FA Cup – but in 1954 Liverpool were a Second Division club. Then the transformational figure arrived: Bill Shankly.

Shankly revolutionised the team, the club, the stadium, the kit and the Kop. When he joined in December 1959, Shankly would say: “The ground was not good enough for the people of Liverpool and the team was not good enough for the people of Liverpool.”

Within four years both were. Liverpool were League champions again and the Kop was overflowing with people, songs and bodily fluids. With Beatlemania sweeping the world, in April 1964 BBC’s Panorama covered Liverpool’s title-clinching 5-0 defeat of Kop-less Arsenal sociologically.

“I’ve never seen anything like this Liverpool crowd,” says the presenter in clipped tones in front of the Kop. “The Duke of Wellington before the battle of Waterloo said of his own troops: ‘I don’t know what they do to the enemy, but by God they frighten me.’ And I am sure some of the players here in this match this afternoon must be feeling the same way.”

With the camera lingering on the crowd, he then adds: “An anthropologist studying this Kop crowd would be introduced into as rich and mystifying a popular culture as on any South Sea island.

“Their rhythmic swaying is an elaborate and organised ritual. The 28,000 people on the Kop itself begin singing together. They seem to know intuitively when to begin. Throughout the match they invent new words, usually within the framework of old Liverpool songs, to express adulatory, cruel or bawdy comments about the players or the police. But even then they sing these new words with one immediate, huge voice. They seem mysteriously to be in touch with one another, with ‘Wacker’, the spirit of Scouse.”

Shankly was in touch with it. He was the Kop’s preacherman, its mythologist. He told stories of caskets buried in the Kop goalmouth so fans could support the team in death as well as life. He was responsible for perhaps its loudest night – in May 1965, when Inter Milan, then European champions, were beaten 3-1, and it could have been more.

“Dear God, what an eruption, the noise was unbelievable,” Shankly said. “The people were hysterical.”

Corriere della Sera referred to “the moving, colourful picturesque and electrifying support”. It was the night Inter’s formidable manager Helenio Herrera said: “We have been beaten before, tonight we were defeated.”

By then ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ had been adopted as an anthem and the Kop was acquiring a European reputation. It grew as the team came to dominate the 1970s and 80s.

In March 1972 Shankly had the ‘This Is Anfield’ sign painted and erected by maintenance foreman Bert Johnson. “A form of intimidation,” Shankly called it. In its first game Liverpool beat Newcastle 5-0.

In 1977 Alex Ferguson attended the legendary European Cup quarter-final between Liverpool and Saint-Etienne. In his next programme notes as St Mirren manager, Ferguson wrote: “I didn’t walk away from the ground after the game, I floated out.” Anfield was no myth to him.

But then the 1980s brought Heysel, Hillsborough and in 1990 the Taylor report. Four years later the Kop was all-seater, 12,000 capacity. A statue of Shankly was placed outside the entrances but, even so, plenty felt it was a diminished presence compared to what it had been. There were also plans to leave Anfield for Stanley Park.

As the team worsened, trophies dried up. Liverpool have still not won the Premier League. It is another reason why Sunday matters so much.

The Kop continued to produce gloriously raucous European nights and after Juventus’s 2-1 Champions League loss in 2005, Fabio Capello said: “At Anfield even experienced players can have a bad start because of the excitement of playing in such a stadium. We were almost in a daze at the start. Pushed by their fans, the Liverpool players seem unstoppable.”

Yet among Liverpudlian fans, there was frustration that the Kop and the ground was often flat, noiseless. There were too many routine Saturdays. As recently as May 2015, The Anfield Wrap could write about the stadium and include the line: “This is not another article about the appalling Anfield atmosphere.”

Five months later Jurgen Klopp was appointed Liverpool manager.

On May 72019, Liverpool prepared to face Barcelona in the second leg of their Champions League semi-final. The Catalans led 3-0 from the first leg. This seemed set to be another Lionel Messi story.

At half-time Liverpool were winning 1-0. In the second half, they would be playing towards their Kop, towards Shankly’s caskets, towards their history. On a night when even the divine Messi was overshadowed, Liverpool and their Kop were sensational. They scored three more, won 4-3 on aggregate and 25 days later became champions of Europe for the sixth time when beating Tottenham in Madrid.

But it is Barcelona at Anfield that people will speak about 20 years from now.

It was after the season was done when Guardiola spoke to a Catalan newspaper, Ara, about that Barca night. He recalled the previous season’s Champions League quarter-final, when Liverpool scored three in the first 31 minutes against City.

“I thought they’d score a goal at Anfield,” he said of Barcelona, but he then added: “And I am sure the players knew that Anfield is Anfield.

“The motto ‘This is Anfield’ is no marketing spin. There’s something about it that you will find in no other stadium in the world. They score a goal and over the next five minutes you feel that you’ll receive another four. You feel small and the rival players seem to be all over you. We’ve all gone through what happened to Barca.

“They were laughing at me when we were losing 3-0 after the first 15, 20 minutes of the quarter-final. It’s a bugger of a ground.”

Liverpool will take the compliment. Anfield and the Kop have changed but under Klopp, it has rediscovered its essence. His team has moved into Shankly/Paisley territory at home: unbeaten there in 45 matches dating back to April 2017. The record is the 63-game run under Paisley between 1978 and 1981.

As Jimmy Case said a fortnight ago: “Anfield is back to what it was in my day. This Liverpool team walks out there believing they’re going to win. That’s a great feeling to have. The fear factor is back. Opposing teams are afraid to come here now. You can see it with how teams line up.”

It was reminiscent of Roy Keane saying how teams were already beaten in the tunnel at Old Trafford. How Guardiola and City would love that aura and atmosphere; how interesting it would be were he and City still at Maine Road. The stadium as influencer.

Liverpool’s has long been Anfield. From the top of the Kop the noise and history can still inspire the home team and rush all over the opposition. From the rocky top of Spion Kop, the Tugela River below, the towering Drakensburg mountains in the distance, memorial stones at your feet, the view is equally enthralling. From here you can begin to see and understand how a gory battle on an African hillside became the name of a red institution in Liverpool 4.