Читать книгу Booted and Suited - Chris Brown - Страница 12

It was time to take off my anorak and stop leafing through the archives of the local press. I needed to talk to the instigators of all of this chaos – the faces behind this wave of juvenile belligerence. What made the young Turks of Bristol flock to the Greek-Cypriot-owned café Never on Sunday, named after the Nana Mouskouri record, on the fringe of the grim, post-war Broadmead shopping centre in the first place?

I put the question to Jimmy Demitriou – aka Jimmy Dee – who was born in 1953 in Bristol and whose Cypriot-born father (also known as Jim) opened up the café in 1966. I had first met Jim at a reunion for the ‘Never’ boys at his smart café club, Bar Celona, in Bristol’s tough, uncompromising Kingswood district in April 2008.

‘The Never on Sunday was first one unit… he [Jim’s dad] opened it as a restaurant, serving mixed grills, omelettes, that sort of thing, but the kids would come in just for drinks – milkshakes, Cokes – then the shop next to him came up and he bought that and put in juke boxes and pinball machines. He encouraged the mods to come in – the whole wall was just pinball machines, the other side was seating and the jukebox. We were the first café in Bristol catering for the kids.

‘It was up to me and my brother [George] to buy the music – we used to get the records from Picton Street. It was Blue Beat and Motown – we had quite a few [black guys] around us like Carlton and Seymour who introduced us to Picton Street and, from there on, they knew we were from the Never and put the records aside for us. My own favourite was “Wet Dream” by Max Romeo.’

This was a nice little earner for the tiny but famous RCA record store in Montpelier run by ex-Teddy Boy Roy Pugh and his dad. These were the days when press coverage of black music was almost non-existent and there was certainly very little airplay on national radio. Even when it was played, tinny transistors didn’t do the heavily bassed-up Jamaican sounds justice. Black music charts were unheard of – word of mouth was how these records sold. Get the Never to put the records on their jukebox and the teenagers would flock to Roy’s little emporium the following week to spend their hard-earned cash on classics by Jimmy Ruffin, the Four Tops, Derrick Morgan and Prince Buster.

There was, of course, the record which the Never made its own – ‘Whisky and Soda’ – by the amusingly named Mopeds. In gratitude for boosting their profits, Roy gave Jimmy a signed copy of Millie Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’ (given to RCA when she once visited the shop herself) which he framed and proudly displayed in the café.

Jim had a good memory. He remembered fine details about his clothing and where he got it all from. ‘Millets,’ he said, without a hint of irony, ‘for the basics,’ he added quickly, ‘but a cousin to my father used to make our three-piece suits.’ He also had a mate, Paul, who was a mechanic who souped up his Lambretta. ‘It had copper-sprayed side panels,’ he said, beaming.

He also recalled wearing a gold chain in his waistcoat. ‘No watch on it, mind, just the chain,’ he said with a smile. He was out to impress the girls.

‘How about the clientele in the Never, Jim… can you remember the change from mods to skinheads?’ I asked.

Jim was hazy about the actual year but he could quite vividly recall the cold wind of change that blew down from the east. ‘Of course, the first skinheads were in London, but I remember lads being in the café one day dressed as mods, then literally the next day the hair was shorter and the jeans were up here and within two weeks they were all like it.’

Jim went on to regale me with tales of how the lads would nick money from the pinball machines but how his dad turned a blind eye to it. They obviously had a lot of respect for Jim Sr. Well, enough to nick his livelihood from under his nose, that is.

It turned out that the Never not only had a reputation with the local constabulary for the aggro but also for the shoplifting. ‘If you wanted something, you could get it in the Never… there was one guy, he could get you anything. If you wanted a fridge, he would get it for you, anything you want. Someone once said, “I saw a lovely TV in Fairfax House…” [the large nearby Co-op departmental store] and this bloke would ask, “What make was it?” Then he would go along to Fairfax House, suss out the make, take a note of the serial number on the back, then go out and get changed into a pair of white overalls he owned – it even had “Service Engineer” on the back! He would then go back in with his overalls on and his clipboard – he even had a trolley. He would just load it up and walk out with it. If anyone stopped him, he would quote the serial number and show it on his pad, saying it had to go back to the factory for repair. Worked every time.’

The Never eventually shut down for good in 1974; the café which the skinheads used to frequent closed a couple of years earlier, due in no small part to the criminal activities of the lads and the fact the kids had moved on to pastures new. The restaurant continued for a while but, without the boys’ patronage, the takings started to dwindle.

On top of that, Jim’s old man was heavily into gambling, which didn’t help. ‘He went out one night with a top-of-the-range Merc and came back with an old banger – lost it playing cards.’

Jim himself obviously wasn’t one of the ‘top boys’, and neither did he profess to be, but his clientele and his closeness with the lads in the Never ensured that Jim and his dad always commanded a certain amount of respect on the streets of Bristol. If ever they found themselves in need of a bit of ‘muscle’, the boys would not let them down. ‘If someone threatened us, we knew we had huge back-up.’

Jim remembered an incident in the Silver Blades ice rink one Saturday afternoon. ‘I remember once I got whacked in the ice-skating rink. I got nutted, there was blood all over the ice, and that was because I was chatting to some girl. Angelo [Pascoe – he and his brother Willie were notorious characters on the Bristol scene] spotted me, and said, “Jim, Jim… who did this?” Angelo wasn’t skating, he walked on the fucking ice and – bang, bang – this bloke went down. It took five guys to get Angelo off him.

‘Our ties with the Pascoes go further back than the Never – they worked in the fruit market and my dad had his first café there. I used to take them their coffees and egg and bacon sandwiches. It was a real, real buzzing place… by four in the morning it was packed.’

It turned out there were quite of few of these Never lads who worked in the nearby fruit market, including a certain individual whose name would crop up time and time again, who, as it turned out, would ‘borrow’ his parents’ lorry to transport the skinheads around, often hidden behind the crates of fruit. More of him later.

I could have spoken to Jim for hours; he was an engaging character and he looked back on those days with a great deal of affection, his eyes misting over with many of the recollections. He was clearly not a big-time player, though, and, whether through a fading memory or just a reluctance to name names, I wasn’t really getting into the zeitgeist of the day. I knew the Never was not up there in the league of the Soho coffee bars that spawned the mods at the start of the decade, where Jack Kerouac and Colin McInnes were debated with gusto over their espressos, while Miles Davis played effortlessly in the background, but I had expected a bit more than ‘Viennese steaks were popular with the lads’.

So I decided to go for the $64,000 question with Jim: ‘Can you remember the very first skinhead in Bristol, Jim?’

I waited with bated breath. Would my search for ‘Wally’ be resolved right at the start of my investigation?

Jim cast his eyes over his restaurant, scratched his head, looked at the ceiling and took in a breath. ‘No,’ he answered.

Thanks, Jim. My search was to continue, then.

Prior to the Never reunion at Jim’s club, the Evening Post ran a feature on the infamous café. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was no reference to ‘skinheads’ or of the bovver that was associated with it. Even the photo that was reproduced, which clearly showed a group of mischievous, cropped-haired and booted youths was accompanied by the caption: MODS OUTSIDE THE CAFÉ IN THE LATE ‘60S. Forty years on and the Post was still struggling with the taboo terminology.

A week or so after the article in the Post, letters started appearing listing name after name of bygone boys who had at one time stomped with pride through the streets of Bristol. One such letter appeared from Bob Feltham of Whitchurch, who wrote, ‘I got to know the café through a guy called Gary Briar who I worked with at the old Robertson’s jam factory in Brislington in the late Sixties, and after that through the Number 9 scooter boys from Broomhill. These included friends Johnny Love and Gerry Hodgson (who were neighbours) and the Broomhill and St Anne’s crowd. This included Lawrence Hobden, Craig Britton, Martin “Jinx” Jenkins, John “Fitz” Fitzgerald, Martin “Tap” Walters, Martin “Taz” Taylor, Eggy, Tinker, Joe, Andy Gunton, Martin Webster, Danny, Johnny Calabrese, Brian Strange and Charlie Travis, among others. The names that I remember from the Never crew were Brian Balson, Johnny Cowley, Chris Summers, Martin and Paddy Walsh, Andy and Paul Stone, Stevie Elvins, John Onuyfrick, Vernon, Snowy, Keith Langdon, Tony Horton, “Daddy” Stevens, Mike Thorne, Dave Mealing, Carl and, of course, Angelo Pascoe… The Never crowd were either in or outside the Locarno or at the Horse and Groom or the Way Inn on College Green. I also recall the trips to Burnham on a Sunday and to the Devon coast on bank holidays.’

I managed to make contact with Bob and, after several conversations via email, he went into a bit more detail about those days. Bob was born in 1952 and started frequenting the Never in his teens in the late Sixties. Like many of the guys from back then he’s a family man (married for over 30 years to Caroline) and a successful businessman who runs his own international shipping business. Perhaps those ‘bad old, good old days’ taught these kids a thing or two. Many of them were ruthless risk-takers on the streets back then and maybe that ‘savvyness’ and sense of loyalty that they shared with their mates stayed with them in later years.

‘I lived in Edward Road, Brislington, in those days and travelled into town either on the back of a scooter or in Johnny Love’s Triumph Herald. At the same time, I introduced some other friends such as Dave Bonomi, Eamonn Kelly and Steve Pawlak to the “town” scene, although Steve already knew two of the existing members [of the scooter club], John Onuyfrick and Bob Knight who both hailed from Shirehampton. The Number 9s were mostly all already acquainted with the café…

‘I had an old Mark 1 Lambretta when I moved to London to work at Heathrow in late 1969, but returned in 1970 back to the area. I remember that the Number 9s had a variety of souped-up Lambrettas and Vespas with all the “bells and whistles”. In those days, I used to wear a pair of “Royal” brogues [bought from Hounslow], Ben Sherman shirts with or without braces, Sta-Prest trousers or jeans. I also had a Crombie coat, pair of Doc Martens and, of course, we were all spotless and smelled of Brut aftershave. If we wore a suit, the trousers were, of course, flared and the jackets had about a dozen buttons on the sleeves. I guess that I was a true skinhead in those days.

‘We used to hang around either inside or outside the Locarno, in the Top Rank, in the Gaumont picture house, in the “Groom” or in the café. I can remember the running battles in Weston-super-Mare during the bank holidays, the mass fight and subsequent peace “charter” with the greasers in the city centre.

‘Also at that time I played rugby with Bishopston Colts with Gerry Hodgson [rugby seems to be a common theme with a lot of the Never boys]. Other members of the side were Seymour Baugh, Tennis Russell and Caron Downer, who were later to become famous for their DJ activities in town. The music at this time was soul, Blue Beat and reggae, with Tighten Up Volume 2 the top reggae album. I was a Rovers’ fan in those days and used to travel away to watch matches, invariably ending up in some sort of “rumble” with the away supporters – something that I am not proud of now that I think back, but it seemed the thing to do at the time.

‘As usually happens I became friendly with certain members of the Never crowd such as Brian Coombes, Daddy Stevens (you didn’t tangle with these guys), Austin Hardwick (Ossie) and Les English. I also met Steve McManus, who is a friend to this day, and Dave Mealing, who I still see from time to time. There were so many guys that I knew from that era that I could not possibly name them all. Having said that, how could I not mention Roy and Mike Thorne (Thorny), Martin and Paddy Walsh and Chris Summers?’

In later years, Bob and his mates spread their wings and started going further afield. Maybe the lure of the Never itself was on the wane. Bob added, ‘As time went on, Johnny Love and I became friendly with Les Gortat and the inimitable Willy Pascoe. We used to collect them from Willy’s flat in Clifton (Willy would not sit down in case he creased his Sta-Prest trousers) and drive to the Star at the top of the “Roddy” in Congresbury where they had a disco. The Broomhill guys and a fair few of the Never crowd used to meet up and chaperone the local “country” girls. Good days! Other places that we frequented with the boys were the Mexican Bar and the Hawthorns and, as mentioned earlier, “The Rank” where Jason was the DJ. The pre-club drinks were usually downed at the Way Inn on College Green, part of the old Royal Hotel.’

Some of the names that Bob mentioned I recognised, and one or two sent a chill down my spine. These guys were the stuff of myth and legend.

Someone else who was making a name for himself back then was Phil Peacock, who then lived in Sea Mills but who now resides in the USA. I worked with Phil in the early 1970s, and I had a lot of respect for him (as well as an irrational fear – he was built like the proverbial brick out-house) and I knew that he had some stories to tell.

Phil, if not remembering who or where he saw the first skinheads, recalled the momentous day when he decided to have all his hair shaved off, which wasn’t as common as you might think in the late Sixties. ‘As for the first [skinhead] in Bristol – I remember the mods with their stylish hair and the primping. I think the scooter riders were some of the first to start chopping the hair ever shorter as it wouldn’t get in their eyes while riding, since helmets were not required. They were carried more as a weapon than to protect your noggin. That would have to be in 1967, early ’68.

‘I got my head shaved for the first time in Lewis’s department store in 1968. I remember there was a young kid probably getting his first haircut and he was throwing a fit. The barber called me up to the chair, I sat down and he asked what I wanted. I said, “Shave it off.” He did a double-take and asked again. I replied, “Shave it off,” and he then took the clippers and went right down the middle saying, “You can’t change your mind now.” Meanwhile, the little kid’s eyes were as big as saucers and he stopped screaming. His dad took him by the hand and they left the shop. Mind you, when I got home my mum had a fit! I believe I was the first in Sea Mills to do that voluntarily, other than the kids who had their hair cut every Saturday morning by their fathers who only knew one way to cut hair!’

Once you’d taken that giant leap in getting your hair cut, there was no going back; the next stage was to get kitted out. Phil recalled how the ex-Army stores saw an opportunity for a quick profit in the burgeoning market. ‘The army surplus stores were quick to catch on and cash in on the trends. They would bring in American “Bomber” jackets in nylon and leather, and the boots – you could get a pair of hobnails [authentic British Army] for ten shillings [50p]. However, when the demand increased, the prices went up exponentially. I think a shop was selling them for £2 a pair for well-used ones and a fiver for the good ones at the height of the movement. The police also started cracking down on the shops that sold them, too, in an effort to thwart the violence on the streets.’

No matter what your choice of clothing – your strutting gear or your fighting gear – you had to be prepared for the aggro that, not surprisingly, was never too far away. ‘I remember a black Fred Perry with black braces, black brogues with double soles, black socks and black Tonics. Man, that was sharp dressing in those days. Everyone wanted to see and be seen in those days. Everyone wanted to look their very best when they went out for the night, not like the wankers these days with their hoodies and their underwear showing. These guys would be beaten to a pulp on a regular basis 40 years ago. Even when going to a fight, we dressed well. Nothing stopped you from looking good. I got the biggest beating of my life from someone who also ran with the Never boys. I was drunk on my ass and he sucker-punched me as I came through a door, breaking my nose. He then proceeded to beat the crap out of me, but, hey, I looked good!’

Phil then went on to elaborate on those trips to Weston-super-Mare that Bob Feltham had mentioned. ‘It was customary to ride down to Portishead on the scooters and meet up with the locals there, Skippy being one. And then, after several laps of the town, we’d head on down to Clevedon via the back roads. Once there, the same thing would happen – ride around for a while gathering up anyone else who wanted to ride. Then on towards Weston-super-Mare.

‘At this point, we normally would meet up with others from Bristol also heading towards Weston. Many of these would be just blokes and their girls out for a Sunday ride. However, on those occasions when the Never boys were out, there was chaos in the air. One of their clan drove a lorry from the fruit market. They would put all of these empty crates up around the edges and the boys would be inside, hidden from view. However, once they came upon some unsuspecting greaser on his bike – and there were a few as many from Fishponds and the other more popular motorcycle neighbourhoods would also ride down to Weston on a Sunday, usually for the same purpose – there was always a bit of fun and perhaps a fight or two. Anyway, once alongside the bloke and his bike, the lads on the lorry would begin to hurl crates at the unsuspecting biker. Needless to say, there was many a biker run off the road, knocked of his bike by flying crates or lost a passenger. There was quite a lot of carnage to be had between Bristol and Weston in those days.

‘As for myself… one Sunday I had a friend on the back of my Lambretta headed from Portishead to Clevedon and then on to Weston. There were quite possibly 20–25 scooters. About 15 miles out of Weston, I blew a spark plug. So I pulled over to the side of the road to effect repairs. Paul, my buddy, was crouched down watching me; he was to my right. The next thing I see is Paul rolling over on to the grass with his mouth all busted open and blood all over his face. Looking back, I see a procession of greasers riding by. I then looked up the road and there is one riding with his left foot trailing. Paul later recalled that he heard the noise of the bikes and turned towards the sound and the next thing he knew there was a boot kicking him in the face.

‘My scooter took a few kicks from passing greasers as did most of the others who had stopped to wait for me. That was one thing – you never left someone on the road by themselves for this very reason. Once back under way, our group caught up with some of the back markers and took revenge. I smacked one biker’s right hand with a big spanner, used for the rear suspension on my scooter. The police would stop you and want to see if you had any weapons, so anything that could be explained away as a tool for repairing the scooter was not seen as a weapon per se. Anyway, I’m sure I broke his hand and then a couple of kicks and he was in a ditch, bike and all. The others began to harass the greaser and they finally took off towards Weston.

‘The greasers would hang out in a café across from the pier. It was down a few steps and located in a basement of sorts. The name escapes me. I recall an ornamental garden across the street from it and I think it was the Winter Garden at the end of the road. Ken Dodd was playing there, or was coming.

‘Anyway, upon arriving in Weston, most if not all of the mods, skinheads and Never boys would park their rides across from the beach front. Word soon spread of the incident and I would estimate a hundred of us began a march on this little café. Funny really, the beat cops began to scurry away and call for help, as did most of the locals. Businesses would lock their doors. Vandalism reigned.

‘Upon arriving at the café, a steady stream of us began to enter through the front door. Once the place was jammed tight, with all of the greasers confined to the back of the café, with no avenue of escape, all hell broke loose. I cut one bloke’s face open with a razor knife. He may well have lost the use of that eye, but he has a spare. That was the feeling then, anyway; today, it would be different (I hope)!

‘Blood covered everything. You didn’t dare go to the floor for fear of being made part of it. Chairs and table legs were being used as clubs. Some of the lads went over the counter and began throwing crockery and others helped themselves to the cash register.

‘The scrap went on for maybe five minutes and then the call went out that several Panda cars were seen coming our way. Exit stage left! The stream of bodies that exited that café was something to behold, lads were running this way and that so as not to get caught. Those that couldn’t get into the café knocked over bikes and smashed them as best they could, and slashed the tyres. I later heard from a friend travelling in a Morris Minor with three others from the Never that they were pulled over by a single cop in a Panda as they tried to head out of Weston towards Brean Down. He said that a certain individual wanted to get out and do the cop in, but he was talked down by the other three! They were able to bullshit the cop and get on their way, although several were caught and arrested. I was able to get out of Weston with my buddy Paul, Skippy and a few others. We went out past the old pier and high-tailed it through the country roads back to Clevedon and Portishead.’

I had unearthed stories in the Evening Post which confirmed Phil’s recollections. The Bank Holiday weekends of 1970 in particular saw large-scale outbreaks of violence, with the Easter weekend signifying the start of the aggro season. After a long, dark winter, it would be inevitable that the youngsters from the cities would want to stretch their legs, grab some rays and breathe in the sea air… and cause mayhem. The Evening Post reported that an estimated 200 youths were involved in disturbances in Weston over the Easter weekend of 1970 and that nine were arrested and charged ‘after clashes between skinheads and rockers’ broke out on the town’s seafront. At least the Post was beginning to get the hang of the terminology, even if they were still confused over what they should call the bikers. ‘Extra police had to be called in when steel-helmeted and crop-headed youths were seen converging in packs on the Promenade. Officers posted near the pier went into action immediately fighting broke out near the pier entrance… a running fight ensued and spread on to the nearby sands – several youths were arrested on the sands and frogmarched across the Promenade before being bundled into police cars.’

Superintendent Gerald Lockyer of the local police believed that their decision to break up the gangs of youths had in the main been successful. ‘If it had not been for our prompt action, I believe a very nasty situation could have developed.’

Not that the bovver was confined to the beleaguered Somerset town. There were outbreaks of violence at many seaside resorts around the country; any beach town with the misfortune to be within a motorcycle or train ride from a large city was likely to be targeted by the greasers or the boot boys. That same Easter weekend also saw trouble break out in Rhyl, North Wales, between a 200-strong gang of bikers and a much smaller gang of only 30 skinheads. This in itself was unusual as, in the main, the bikers were usually heavily outnumbered, but what made this attack even more bizarre was that, among the standard terror fare of weapons used to inflict damage – wooden posts, metal rods, studded leather belts and motorcycle kick-starters – an ‘animal bone of unknown origin’ was also used. Six ‘long-haired youths’ subsequently appeared in court where a Nazi steel helmet was confiscated and fines totalling £165 were handed out.

The Whitsun Bank Holiday in May saw a repeat of the trouble at Weston when up to 500 teenagers caused a ‘frightening scene’, according to the police, and, in Brighton on the south coast, skinheads wrecked the train they had been travelling on from London and knocked over people as they strolled along the Promenade.

By the time the Bank Holiday season drew to an end, the boot boys were in the mood for a last huge hurrah. The police estimated at the time that around 2,000 skinheads from Bristol invaded Weston on the August Bank Holiday Monday of 1970 and around 200 were involved in an afternoon of running battles, assaults and general mayhem. Under the headline SKINHEAD BATTLE – TOWN COUNTS COST, the Post went on to report that, ‘at one stage, a bunch of bovver boys and girls, complete with reinforced bovver boots, were parading down the seafront clapping and chanting, “We are from Bristol.” The police were less than impressed. Nevertheless, vicious fights still broke out all over town but those tended to be between various gang members. More frightening were mass charges by packs of howling teenagers which bowled over any unfortunates who happened to get in the way.

‘Skinheads hurled bottles, stones, dustbin lids and clods of earth at the police who were trying to confine the gangs on the beach. One policeman was cut on the face and others badly bruised by the missiles as the battles moved into Oxford Street and the roads leading from the seafront. A gang of 50 rampaged through an outfitters in the High Street grabbing anything they could before police arrived.’

Another incident occurred in the famous Forte ice-cream parlour on the seafront where one youth went into the toilet and stole the pipework, presumably to use as a weapon. Miss Olga Forte, owner of the parlour, told the Post, ‘This youth came out of the toilet. He didn’t buy anything. He just said “Thank you” and left. Five minutes later we had a flooded toilet and we have to get new pipes fitted.’

At least he had the manners to say thanks. More disturbing was the group who ‘enjoyed frightening the ponies and donkeys on the sands’… I mean, you wouldn’t want ‘animal worrying’ on your police record, would you? People might think you were Welsh!

The Evening Post continued, ‘Twenty youths were arrested and twelve detained. At a special court the following day, one was sent to a detention centre for assaulting a policeman and seven were fined for obstructing police, blocking the highway and threatening behaviour.’

No doubt, many of those involved in the disturbances that day frequented the Never. Like the outraged Evening Post, I sensed with Phil Peacock that, although he was very much part of this ‘scene’, he wasn’t particularly enamoured with the Never boys. ‘Quite a few out there saw them as nothing but a bunch of yobs who stole everything in sight and beat the crap out of everyone that either crossed them or had something they wanted. I walked up on one lad and a few of his cronies mugging a bloke just off the Centre one night. Not a pretty sight… the poor bastard looked like raw meat in a suit. This geezer saw me and told his buds to split; he then told me that I’d better not say a word to anyone, stuffed a fiver in my hand then high-tailed it towards the fruit market. I picked the bloke up, took him into the Unicorn [a hotel on the waterfront] and cleaned him up. Then I gave him his fiver back and got him a cab.’

After my meeting with Jimmy Dee, I knew that to get a sense of what drove these lads on, I needed to talk to the real ‘movers and shakers’ of the day. I wanted to know what attracted them to the Never but, more importantly, what attracted them to the skinhead movement in the first place.

Lloyd Sutherland was one of the black ‘kiddies’ that Jim had mentioned and whose young fresh face can be seen in that famous photo of the ‘truce’. Lloyd was astute, meticulous on detail and, at 58, a few years older than Jim. His memory was unfailing and, best of all, he had an impressive, if faded, collection of photos circa 1969–71 featuring the Never gang, one of which he permanently kept in his wallet. Those days obviously meant a lot to Lloyd; he loved that sense of camaraderie and loyalty with his mates, many of whom he still counts as friends to this day.

He was now employed by the prison service, working with young offenders; you could tell he had a real sense of responsibility about him, so was he trying to give society something back? Not that I was suggesting that he took anything out in the first place.

Lloyd brought along one of his good mates from those days, Eugene. We met in the Shakespeare Tavern in Prince Street, one of the few remaining pubs in the city centre and one that probably hadn’t changed much since the heyday of the skinheads. I let them put their sides of the story. These guys remembered the good times, but their memories faded somewhat when I probed them on the bad times. One question I asked related to the supposed drug scene that undoubtedly featured strongly in the mod era but seemed less important to the emerging skinheads, and how about the ‘hard Cokes’ that I had read about that could be bought in the Soho cafés with a nod and a wink, the ones that had the ‘extra’ ingredients?

‘Phensic,’ said Lloyd, ‘we used to add Phensics to our Coke.’ The two giggled like naughty schoolboys – London had Drinamyl, Bristol had Phensic (which contained aspirin and caffeine). Yeah, baby.

Although it’s been well documented that the early skinheads evolved from their older cousins, the mods, it appears that many of them didn’t really have much time for their close relations – perhaps it was the arrogance, the peacock-strutting of the mods they objected to. There was even a hint of the effete about many of the mods and their choice of clothing, hairstyles and mannerisms; their Italian palaces on wheels that they lovingly cared for and coveted were not for the skins. If the young cropheads did manage to get their hands on a scooter, it was not looked upon as a fashion statement in the way that the mods viewed them. The skinheads would routinely strip them of their fripperies and crank up the engines; gone were the banks of mirrors with which the mods adorned their Lambrettas (in order to check themselves out more often than not). Also binned were the fox tails and the myriad fog lamps, to be replaced with the pared-to-the-bone, engine-exposed, down-to-earth embodiment of the skinhead itself, the ‘skelly’.

Eugene, however, put forward a more simplistic explanation as to why the skinheads weren’t so taken with Milan’s finest. ‘We were skint! We would scrounge lifts… we had limited amounts of money. If you were spending it all on scooters, you had nothing for going out or buying clothes.’

As an apprentice engineer on less than £6 a week, Eugene found the choice was simple – what was the point of being able to afford a flash mode of transport if you couldn’t afford to go out on it, and ‘going down town’ was, without a doubt, what mattered to the lads more than anything else. It’s an interesting observation – virtually all of the skinheads from that period were young lads, mostly in the 16–18 age group, barely out of school. Booted and suited but without a pot to piss in.

There’s a certain amount of ‘rose-tinted glasses’ going on when it comes to looking at the past, especially when it comes to Britain’s teen cults. Nostalgia certainly isn’t what it used to be. We now look back on mods with a great degree of affection, even fondness, at that ‘clean living under very difficult circumstances’ as The Who’s manager Peter Meaden observed of the self-obsessed, working-class dandies, while we conveniently overlook the gratuitous violence, the drug taking and petty criminality. An admission now that you were an original mod back in the 1960s will earn you admiring glances, a slap on the back and furtive questions about what scooter you owned. Admit to the fact you were a skinhead and you’re in big trouble; you might as well confess to being a kiddy-fiddling Islamic fundamentalist.

Yet perhaps skinheads should also be looked upon in the same favourable light – certainly in the fashion stakes they were up there with the mods. They, too, had a penchant for sharp clothes and sharp looks. Ben Shermans, Doctor Martens, Crombies, sheepskin coats… all cost big money and were all worn at some stage by the sartorial street warriors but, truth be told, for a lot of lads back then, you made the most of what you could get, so with money being tight the boys sought out ways of ‘looking good’ without breaking the bank. As well as the army surplus stores, another cheap way of obtaining your boots was remembered by Eugene who recalled buying his first pair of steel-toe-caps from works catalogues where you could purchase them by paying in instalments of five bob (25p) a week. Once he had moved on to Doc Martens, it was KBK on Cheltenham Road where the legendary eight-eyelet 1460s DMs became standard issue. As for heading into the metropolis to buy his threads and footwear, he says that was the stuff of dreams. ‘I could never afford to go to London, let alone shop there.’ But the Never lads were resourceful if nothing else, especially when it came to getting around.

As I was to discover through many interviews, there was one mode of transport that was as unusual as it was practical for the boys from the Never – the fruit and veg wagon that both Jim Dee and Phil Peacock had mentioned which was owned by a character called ‘Barney’. Eugene recalled a time when all the lads piled in to Barney’s ex-army wagon (it wasn’t just boots the skinheads got from the MoD) and headed towards the coast. On the way, they inevitably got stopped by the law. The young copper looked into the back at the gathered boot boys all eagerly looking forward to their outing to the seaside. The copper, who clearly had a sense of humour, eyed them all up and stated the obvious: ‘You lot must be bananas.’

Being a Bristol Rovers’ fan, I got on to the topic of football allegiances within the clientele of the Never, something I had already brought up with Jim Dee; like him, Lloyd and Eugene both confirmed that football didn’t feature highly on the list of their pastimes. This surprised me. Skinheads and their proclivity for violence, together with football’s tribal history and the lure of the terrace for a rumble, seemed to me an obvious attraction, but, although many of the Never boys had a passing interest in the beautiful game (mainly, it seemed, with Bristol City – perhaps because of the amount of greasers who followed Rovers), it didn’t seem to be the obsession it was with me. They had other priorities and, perhaps, better ways to spend their money. I suppose, if you analyse it, there is an absurdity about getting up at four in the morning, as I often did, to travel halfway across the country just to roll around in the dirt of a gravel car park of some grubby northern town and, more often than not, get a split lip in the process.

Of course, you could turn this on its head and say it dispels the myth that all football hooligans aren’t interested in the game itself, just the violence. While I enjoyed the football as much as the aggro, the Never boys, with their fearsome reputation, would have been naturals for the terraces. Some were and, indeed, many of them forged their notoriety on the terraces of City’s East End or Rovers’ Tote End, but it clearly didn’t form part of the cachet of the café or indeed divide it – reds and blues rubbed shoulders with each other in there. Sometimes it may have been uneasy but it rarely, if ever, spilled over in the café itself, as Lloyd observed, ‘The crowd down there was never into football, or, if they were, it wasn’t mentioned.’

Eugene recalled his first excursion into the world of the terrace terrors which perhaps goes some way to explaining why the Never boys weren’t so enamoured with football. ‘I went into the Never one Saturday morning, and these kids said they were going to a game, so we jumped on the train and went up to Birmingham. As soon as we got off the train, there was all these local kiddies waiting for us – the kids I had gone with weren’t regulars at the Never and we wouldn’t have run, but they all legged it. I was lucky there was a couple of coppers there and they chucked me in a shop doorway, stopped all these other kiddies doing me in like. I was thinking this gang of kids I went up with, if they was going to have something, they would stay and fight.’

The fact that they didn’t ‘stay and fight’ had a long lasting impact on the young Eugene, and to this day he has little interest in football.

It became quite evident during my research and talking to some of the older lads that the divide in Bristol football in the late Sixties and early Seventies didn’t manifest itself on the streets or in the pubs and clubs of Bristol as it did in later years. The aggro was more or less restricted to the terraces and the surrounding area when the two teams played each other – as in the Gloucester Cup Final in 1969 at Eastville when City fans invaded the pitch after a lucky 5–0 win and not only broke the crossbar and painted the goalposts red and white but also trampled the famous flower beds behind the goal.

The following year really made the headlines when a ferocious battle erupted in the exotically named Maritas greasy-spoon café on Winterstoke Road before the game, which saw not only rival skinheads fighting each other but greasers thrown into the mix as well. Something else that was thrown was the lit workman’s lamp which went through the window. Thankfully, it failed to ignite, unlike the flare that was let off during the game itself. There were over 50 ejections from the ground and 43 arrests, some of whom were fully paid-up members of the Never who weren’t particularly interested in the football. Most bizarrely of all, one of those arrested was a Rovers-supporting Never boy who really found his loyalties tested when he came face-to-face with his arch-rival greasers decked in the blue and white of Rovers – a rock and a hard place if there ever was one. The subsequent court case resulted in hefty prison and Borstal sentences being handed out to those involved, including one or two well-known Never boys.

At the time, Rovers’ General Manager, Bert Tann, commented in the local press, ‘I can only repeat what I have said many times before – we will only stop these things [the violence] happening when we start smacking their bottoms hard.’ The comment is as laughable now as it was back then.

These divided loyalties were causing quite a headache for many of the skinheads, although it was not unknown for both Rovers and City skinheads to join up and take on visiting supporters if it seemed necessary. One old mate of mine, whom I had always assumed was a dyed-in-the-wool Rovers fan, got arrested at Ashton Gate in 1969 for fighting with visiting Watford fans. He was fined £50, but to his eternal shame he was referred to in the local press as a Bristol City hooligan, something that, to this day, still haunts him.

As well as the Never, Lloyd and Eugene recalled other venues the skinheads would gather in – the Top Rank, which was actually part of the same building complex that the Never was in; the Locarno, with its famed Bali Hai bar, resplendent with plastic palm trees; and two small but significant pubs, The Horse and Groom and The Horse and Jockey (now the Queen’s Shilling, a well-known gay establishment).

The Horse and Groom in St George’s Road behind the Bristol Council House in particular had been a favourite with ‘town kiddies’ for a number of years. My brother Mike and his mates Dave Baker and Rodney Manns were regulars in there, showing off their bespoke mohair suits in the post-mod, pre-skinhead era. The ‘Groom’ was a honeypot for lads around town. It was here you could serve your apprenticeship in town and sample the favoured drinks of the day – the famed light or brown splits, lager and lime, rum and Coke, vodka and orange, rum and black and the fearsome barley wine. Strange, then, that following on from the wave of violence that erupted on the streets of Bristol in the summer of 1969, the landlord of the Horse and Groom, Peter Jacobs, speaking in the Evening Post, stated, ‘I’ve had to turn away scores of them… but the main gathering point seems to be outside, in the car park opposite. I’m afraid to leave my car there. I’m leaving soon to take over a pub at Stapleton and I shan’t be sorry to go.’

Another popular pub was the nearby Pineapple. Speaking in the same article, landlord Roger Baker-Gill stated that he ‘planned to give up his pub and emigrate if teenage mob rule continued in central Bristol’. In just three nights, he had barred more than a hundred young people from his pub, and stated, ‘These gangs of youths and girls are taking over the central part of the city and frightening away respectable people.’ Nearly 40 years on and the same complaint is being reeled out about today’s alcopop-swilling chavs – no change there then.

So determined were the lads to get in an extra bit of drinking time they would often jump into cars and head into nearby north Somerset where the pubs were open until 11pm (Bristol pubs shut at 10.30pm in those days). As Bob Feltham had recalled, The Star near Congresbury on the Weston Road was a particular favourite. He had mentioned that the local girls were particularly taken with the boys from the big city, although the local lads weren’t so keen on the booted and suited interlopers. The inevitable conflict was brewing – ‘They took umbrage,’ as Eugene put it.

I had heard rumours of one notorious incident which occurred one weekend when 20 or so Never boys entered the pub and a ferocious brawl broke out almost straight away. Various weapons, including an axe, were allegedly used, but neither Lloyd or Eugene could recall this incident.

The two of them were honest enough to admit that they had a few run-ins with the law or ‘bogies’ as they were known back then. Eugene, who was obviously up for a laugh at any opportunity, recalled one incident with a distinct amount of glee. ‘I remember coming out of the Locarno one night and a Panda car was parked outside – the coppers had gone up the stairs [to the Locarno] to sort out some trouble. This was a two-door car, a Morris 1000, and we thought we’d take it to get home.

‘I was just getting in the back and the fucking copper seen us and shouted, “Oi!” and the others legged it. I was getting out of the car and I seen a helmet on the back parcel shelf so I thought I’d have that… I was running down the road with this copper’s helmet on and I just got under the bridge on Park Street when they caught up with me… I chucked the helmet up in the air. I got a beating for that, I got a £10 fine, but they got a bigger bollocking for leaving their car unlocked.’

You sometimes have to question the mentality of some of these lads. I mean, who in their right mind would think of getting away with nicking a police car? (See Part 2, Chapter 16.)

Eugene continued, ‘Then down Weston, I got done for obstructing the pavement just outside the pier. They told me to move on, I said, “No,” I was waiting for someone. They pulled me in, took me to the police station and put my arms up behind me back. Made us miss the last train home… got a £10 fine.’

Eugene continued with his perception of the much reported disorder on the streets of Britain today. ‘When you look in the papers now and you read about the problems and violence and that, bloody hell, if you wanted to get into violence [then] you didn’t have to look very hard, there was always someone willing to accommodate you.’ Lloyd added, ‘We used to walk through Broadmead and you could see people terrified, they would get out of the way. We didn’t have mobile phones – if you wanted it, it just happened.’

Neither of them could recall that momentous day when the first skinhead appeared on the streets of Bristol. ‘The clothing just evolved,’ observed Eugene, who recalled many mods in previous years wearing boots of one form or another, but they did offer up some names of guys who seemed to have had all the skinhead accoutrements at an early stage – Des Lewis, Keith Langdon, Alan ‘Beaky’ Hope and the legendary Pascoe brothers were certainly among the first cropheads viewed on the streets of Bristol. Eugene himself became a full-on skinhead with boots and an attitude to go with them. Lloyd never owned a pair – he had a cheap pair of Sta-Prest, managed to get a Ben Sherman, never wore the braces, ‘kept the hair short otherwise it would have been an afro’. They both remembered buying their clothes in Austin’s, Mr Zeus ‘used to be a moddy shop called Carnaby One,’ said Eugene, or Stuckeys and Millets.

Like many young males from that era, the boys would have at least one quality, hand-made suit adorning their wardrobe, usually purchased from Burtons, Jacksons or John Collier – ‘the window to watch’ – and, occasionally, from bespoke tailors such as David Ferrari on the Gloucester Road. Material, the length of the vent, stitching, the amount of buttons on the sleeve and the width of lapels were all exact and precise in their detail. Mostly, they got it right, ensuring admiring glances from both males and females as they paraded their latest threads. Occasionally, they got it wrong, very wrong, as did one lad known as ‘Dosser’ who turned up one evening in the Never in a bright-orange suit.

Saturday night couldn’t come round quick enough for them to show off their finery and strut their stuff on the dancefloor of the Top Rank, and, if the latest sounds from Jamaica or Detroit didn’t give them their instant hit of gratification, their almost weekly punch-ups with the visiting hordes from the Welsh valleys surely would.

Although the Never boys’ obvious nemesis were local greasers and their ilk, it was not unknown for them to have a row with fellow boot boys from across the country, whether they were the visiting Celts from across the Bristol Channel on a Saturday night or, more often than not, ‘mouthy Cockneys’ who would cross their paths when they visited coastal resorts on bank holidays. Eugene recalled trips to Weston and Bournemouth, ‘but Torquay was the main one – you would go round the Never and no one would be around, they would all have gone away. It was more territorial when we went to Torquay, fighting with Londoners in the Yacht if they were bouncing over, but the Never were the biggest mob.’

Racism rarely reared its ugly head in those days; in fact, there was a great deal of racial harmony on the streets between the skinhead and West Indian community, perhaps surprisingly when you think Enoch Powell was trying his hardest to stir up trouble between the two ethnic groups. Lloyd never had any trouble with black and white issues – ‘There might be comments but that would be it.’ He even recalled one incident when ‘a young black girl got slapped by a greaser – she used to go in the Never so we went around the Top Rank and got the black guys [who used to gather around their own bar at the back] and we all went around Old Market to sort them out.’

Eugene added, ‘The West Indians were working-class people like us – all the music was Motown or reggae – there was more harmony then between white and black kids. I can remember me, Carl [another black member of the Never boys] and one or two others would go to the Bamboo Club* for the reggae. You’d be taking your life in your hands if you tried that a few years later. We just went for the music.’

The last words of the evening came from Eugene when I queried him about regrets and how he had managed to leave it all behind. ‘There was a lot of violent behaviour back then. Regrets about it? Yes, but it was part of my life, I enjoyed it. Things could have gone seriously wrong. People got locked up but you weren’t aware of it, unless you were a close friend. Not many people would know. You would say, “Haven’t seen so and so for a while…” An easy decision was to not go down town again. You got a girlfriend, your circumstances changed.’

Although Lloyd and Eugene remembered Barney’s fruit wagon with fondness and affection, for others, not associated with the Never, the sight of the wagon coming into view wasn’t a laughing matter. For some, it caused genuine fear, ‘that sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach’, as Chris Welch noted. And this fear wasn’t just felt by hippies and greasers; other lads around town weren’t immune from the attention of the Never boys.

Jim Burnham, a streetwise mod (both then and now, he and other enthusiasts from that era are involved in the Bristol Mod Scooter Club: www.bristolmod.co.uk), remembered the Never and the fruit wagon well. ‘The Never gang went around for a while in what was called “the fruit wagon”… I guess one of their guys maybe worked down the fruit market and I guess he would “borrow” it from work. They would cruise around, all piled in the back of this truck, on their way to “do” some other gang over, allegedly with a few tools (crowbars, bits of wood and even, again, allegedly a few scaffold poles!). Whether they actually used these, I don’t know, but the thought of it at the time scared the living daylights out of everybody!

‘I can remember being in Clifton village with a couple of mates one Saturday night, we were wearing suit jackets, Ben Shermans and Levi’s (I guess it’s what you might call smart/casual) and we saw the fruit wagon coming around the corner. I don’t mind admitting that we were shit scared and ran like fuck! They were notorious for beating up anybody they didn’t know or didn’t like the look of – we weren’t prepared to hang about!’

* The famous, and notorious, West Indian club in St Pauls, owned by Tony Bullimore who went on to became a well-known, if somewhat accident-prone, round-the-world lone sailor.