The Crowd Looks After Its Own

Last weekend I was in the City Hall Square in Valencia for the mascleta, the downright bonkers daytime fireworks event that happens 2 pm every day between the first and 19^th of March. As it’s happening in broad daylight, the mascleta isn’t about lighting up the sky with beautiful coloured patterns. It’s about the noise. I have never been in a war zone, at least not when a war was going on, but for between five and six minutes every afternoon I firmly believe that the sound in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento of Valencia is as loud as any battlefield there has ever been. And the Valencianos love it. Anything up to a hundred thousand of them gather in the square, arriving as much as two hours early to get a spot closest to the action. 

 

Last Sunday was the first really warm day of the spring. The temperature displays in the square read 32 degrees at around 1.45. It was probably a bit cooler in the shade although there is remarkably little of that commodity in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento. With so many people crowded together for so long even Spanish people who are well accustomed to hot summer days were feeling the heat. Bottles of water were being emptied over heads. It was that kind of day. Inevitably it was a bit much for some. 

 

About twenty minutes before the mascleta was due to start there was a bit of a commotion in a section of the crowd about twenty metres away from me. Shouts and waves started and a lady started to push her way through towards the clear central area where the firefighters and ambulance people were. She was obviously agitated and my first thought was that she had been robbed and was pursuing the thief. In any case the packed crowd somehow made room for her. Next thing, she was returning through the crowd followed by a handful of Red Cross volunteers, a couple of them holding their hard hats high above their heads to announce their presence. People who had been cheek by jowl just a few seconds earlier cleared a path and a minute or so later the Red Cross people were carrying a stretcher containing a middle-aged man back to their safe zone. At no time were any orders shouted or any pushing and shoving needed. The crowd just knew what it needed to do and did it. Between then and the start of the bangs more or less the same thing happened three or four more times. Each time the Red Cross people got in and out of the tightly packed people with no difficulty whatsoever.

 

I reflected on what I had seen and heard and thought that the Valenciano people had behaved remarkably well. I also reflected on other times and other crowds. Back in my youth I attended quite a few very raucous gigs. I was born in the 50s and so came of age in the 70s, the heyday of punk. The best place to be at any punk event – or any other event really – was in the mosh pit in front of the stage. That is where a bunch of mostly young men would abandon themselves to an activity somewhere between dance and combat, slamming into each other roughly in time with the music. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Many of the participants looked like folk you wouldn’t want to meet in a back street on a dark night. And yet. 

 

Now and again someone would lose his footing in the mosh pit and fall to the floor. Dozens of pairs of Doc Martens and similar would be flashing and kicking out all around. Serious injury was a real possibility. But I never saw it happen. As soon as someone hit the deck, a space was created in the mass of heaving bodies and they were hauled back to their feet by multiple pairs of hands. Every time. I never once saw anyone trampled in a mosh pit, although I did see many, many frightening body slams once they were back upright. 

I began to reflect that this was a general characteristic of crowds. They are some sort of super organism with behaviours that go beyond the actions of individuals. Obviously there are examples of crowds behaving badly but that happens usually when they are threatened or scared. Left to sort themselves out crowds will look after their own.

 

Which is why my Sunday afternoon reflections eventually brought me around to Hillsborough in 1989. That day the crowd was forced into an impossible position by mistakes on the part of South Yorkshire Police. Reports of the events show that immediate official responses were almost non-existent and that many of those who escaped the carnage were rescued by their fellow crowd-members. Despite this the Sun “newspaper” printed completely disgusting false stories about the behaviour of the fans. Millions of words have been written about the events of that day and I doubt if I could add anything useful to the general understanding of the event, but I did have one thought that had not occurred to me before last Sunday. The Sun’s reporters and editors had either never been in a crowd in their lives or they were even more disgusting liars than I had previously realised.