From book to play, and now Hillsborough: One Boy’s Story of a Tragedy is set to become a film

It was written as a children’s book to teach young people about the Hillsborough disaster.

Now three years after Shaun Millea’s children’s tale, When Will Dad Be Home?, was turned into a play, it’s set to become a film.

Publisher Kevin Roach who also produced the play, Hillsborough: One Boy’s Story of a Tragedy,is creating a screen version with actor/director Andrew Games and Kevin Cubbin – the play’s director and ‘Uncle Terry’ – which will see it shown to its widest audience yet.

Talks are being held with Prime and Netflix and there are hopes it could be premiered at Woolton Cinema when it’s completed and released around May or June this year before going into schools across the city region.

For former teacher Shaun, 60, from Halewood, it’s more than he could ever have hoped for.

“It feels very surreal and yet fills me with pride,” he says.

“I never dreamed the book, or the play, would have had the power to have done what they have, not only to teach youngsters – and adults – about what happened at Hillsborough in April 1989, but to help people cope with grief, its central story.”

Shaun adds: “It shows the power of Hillsborough to help and to heal.

“We have had a lot of stuff thrown at us as a city, things like Hillsborough that, while we would have preferred them not to happen, have made us what we are.

“That we don’t suffer fools, and we don’t take injustice lying down.

“But also, that we stick together and look after each other.”

 Shaun wrote When Will Dad Be Home? In 2019 while working at a primary school in Garston. 

It tells the story through nine-year-old Frankie whose dad dies at Hillsborough, looking at how he and the rest of the family cope and exploring the impact of what happened on them.

He explains: “I’ve written other children’s books and was doing a reading at Toxteth Library. It was a summer’s day so I had shorts on and my LFC socks.

“A woman who worked there came up to me during a break and said how her auntie and family had come up from Bath.  They were LFC fans who’d done the stadium tour which ended at the memorial, and the children asked what it was for.

“The mum didn’t know, and I thought how can you not know, but told myself they were from outside the city. 

“I was still teaching at the time and so asked my year 6 class what Hillsborough was.  Thirty hands went up – with 30 wrong answers.  When I asked their mums and dads, all quite young, half of them didn’t know either.

“This was in the middle of Garston, a school where my mate Stephen Copoc who died at Hillsborough went, and they didn’t know.”

Shaun set about writing about Hillsborough in a child-friend way and it took him just three days: “From Friday to Sunday. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done – and I only stopped to wipe my eyes!”

It was around the time West Derby MP and Hillsborough campaigner Ian Byrne was looking for a gateway book that could teach kids more about what happened – and not only did Shaun present him with the ideal book, he drew up lesson plans and how to deliver it in schools.

Ian worked with the LFC Foundation which now delivers lessons to schools across the city.

“We gifted the book because I didn’t want to make money from it, I just wanted the story to be told,” says Shaun. “The Foundation does weekly projects and workshops.

“For every book I sell at £10, I buy three at cost price and they go straight to the LFC Foundation.”

The two-act play, Hillsborough One Boy’s Story of a Tragedy, was adapted from the book: “I’d seen Blood Brothers as an 18-year-old and was blown away when I heard people talking like me and I told Kevin I’d always wanted to write a play like it. So he said ‘why don’t we do a play from the book?’.

The play has been shown across theatres in the region with audience sizes growing all the time.

It can next be seen at the Floral Pavilion in New Brighton – its biggest audience yet – on April 25, and sales are doing well.

Again it’s not for profit and so when Shaun and Kevin have paid the actors and technicians and the theatre, all the profits buy more books (incidentally, it’s on Merseyside Schools’ curriculum).

Shaun goes on: “A teacher friend told me she’d told the story to a young boy who was playing up after his mum had died, and he recognised himself; that he wasn’t being ‘naughty’ but was struggling to cope with his feelings and emotions, his grief, just like Frankie in the book.

“So it’s not just about Hillsborough but about us all, and what we all go through.”

Why is it important that the Hillsborough story keeps being told?

“As a former history teacher and historian, I believe that if you forget history, it can happen again.  If you don’t remember, it will happen again.

“I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and that my mate Stephen Copoc and the other 96 are aways remembered.”

Get tickets to see Hillsborough: One Boy’s Story of a Tragedy at the Floral Pavilion here.

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