Читать книгу Booted and Suited - Chris Brown - Страница 14

My old workmate, Phil Peacock, was becoming even more lucid, whether through living thousands of miles away in the States or just due to the fact that he was a natural-born storyteller. Perhaps he saw it as cathartic. Either way, Phil’s frank and honest recollections echoed Eugene’s thoughts. ‘Yes, it feels good to get it out of the system. I sure as hell know that it was a tough time to be living in England in those days… I did some pretty rotten things and can only hope that I’m forgiven in some way or another. There was never any real maliciousness to it all.’

Phil, however, did have his own very strong opinions about what was happening politically in Britain in the late Sixties and how it impacted on and influenced young, white, working-class kids like him, which may partially explain why, to many skinheads, the relationship with black kids was working but why some saw the need to delve into ‘selective racism’, which ultimately manifested itself as ‘Paki bashing’.

‘Personally, I blame Harold Wilson and the Labour Party for folding under pressure from the international community to help those immigrants in Uganda and Bangladesh… for opening up the flood gates to all of the immigrants who had ever been under British rule at one time or another, or had family that were to come on in. It was this, I believe, spurred on the skinhead movement. All of these frustrated kids with no prospect of getting anything other than a blue-collar job and then that was being taken away from them by immigrants who were getting a free ride with assistance, housing, medical… you name it. These kids saw their parents become second-class citizens in their own country. These were the parents that suffered through the trials and tribulations of World War II and now they were being fucked once more by their own government and country! Fuck that! We’ll make it so fucking tough on these bastards that they’ll go home from whence they came. And while were at it, we’ll also fuck with the greasers – a dirty bloody bunch of bastards. We were working-class people. We didn’t care if you were white or black – if you worked for a living, you were one of us.’

Phil was obviously on a roll. He then sent me a candid and honest email which gives a great snapshot of the day and confirms that the violence was not restricted to the city centre. Suburban cafés and youth clubs, in particular, were also the scene of some horrendous violence. ‘In 1967, I started hanging out down town with a few of my friends from school – Nick, Paul, Andy and brothers Rich and Steve. We started going into town on a Saturday to hang out and do the shops and the record stores. There was one record store located on Union Street that was so easy to rip off it was pitiful. We would go in and listen to some of the latest records in these booths. After finding something we liked, it was only a matter of slipping it inside your Levi’s jacket or Crombie coat and out the door you went.

‘We also would hit the Coke and Clobber and, my favourite, Beau Brummel on the Centre – always had the best selection of Ben Shermans. Then it would be off to the chemist shop on Broad Street, I think, and lift a bottle or two of Brut. Now we’re set for a night out on the town. The Horse and Groom, The Hatchet, Horse and Jockey, The Pineapple, Three Tuns, Bunch of Grapes, The Mail Coach and The Crown were some of the pubs where you could drink under-age without too much of a problem down town. Of course, most of the market pubs were good, too. We would also go to the ice rink in the afternoon for a few hours of picking up the birds and some speed skating. This is where I had most of my run-ins with the Never boys.

‘It’s 1969 and a few friends of mine who lived in Fishponds wanted me to come to one of their clubs (a church one!) one Friday night. I was 16 then; I had a Lambretta LI150 with a lot of upgrades taken from here and there. Anyway, the purpose was for me to rough it up with this kid from the Concorde (a café on the Fishponds Road) who had been beating up some of the local kids at this club. I took Andy along with me and here we are waiting for the local thug – George someone – to show up… and in he walks.

‘He whacks Andy (we used to call him Bert – why, I have no fucking idea to this day). Andy’s mouth is bleeding like a stuck pig. George then focuses on me. I get a couple of haymakers in and break his nose. Meanwhile, Andy gets his senses together and pulls a badminton net off the wall and wraps it around this guy’s neck and begins to choke the bastard. Long story short, George blacks out and is unceremoniously stomped by all the local kids.

‘Then the fun begins in earnest. A friend of mine who invited me to the club, Richard, and some others from school – Bob and Steve – come running in saying that there is a whole bunch of Hells Angels coming down the road from Staple Hill and the Concorde. So Andy and myself with a few of the other locals pour out of the club.

‘We meet these guys coming into the parking lot and Andy kicks one off of his bike which leads to others either running into the downed bike or the rider and others, while trying to avoid the mess, running into each other. I took my belt off and whacked a few in the head and face. It was a firemen’s belt with a freaking huge brass belt buckle. I remember it being soaked in blood. After a few minutes, it was apparent that we were vastly outnumbered, especially since many of the local kids had run back into the club and locked the door. Andy and I took the better part of valour and took off running. We climbed a fence at the back of the church and took off across a field and hid in the back gardens of some of the homes behind the church. Must have hid there for what seemed like hours before coming out and heading home. I was later told that George wanted to have my head on a pike for breaking his nose.’

As an afterthought, Phil mentioned another scooter gang that was not connected with the Never but who were known to enjoy a ruck as much as the boys from Fairfax Street. ‘They were out of Bedminster and led by a kid named Bridges I think. They were always up for a scrap and were involved in some big fights in Queen Square and on the Centre. They ran by themselves but would help out the Never boys.’

Phil then confirmed what both Eugene and Lloyd had mentioned regarding football allegiances on the streets of Bristol back then. ‘I was never a soccer fan, although I’d root for the Rovers as my Dad was a City fan, just to piss him off.’

Perhaps as a way of curbing his aggression, Phil took up rugby and, for many years, played for Bristol Harlequins before emigrating to the States in 1975 where he worked at one stage for the US Coast Guard. He’s revisited Bristol a few times over the years and isn’t sure he likes what he sees. ‘Bristol has changed so much… not always for the better I’m sure.’ I could add that it’s a lot quieter since the Sea Mills warrior left.

Phil’s recollection of aggro at youth clubs was not in isolation – I had heard and read of other incidents at clubs in and around Bristol. One club on Briscoes Avenue in Hartcliffe was frequented by, among others, a fearsome duo of greaser brothers. The story goes that the Never boys made a trip to the youth club with the sole intention of attacking the greasers and cutting off the prized frills from the sleeves of their leather jackets. The urban myth circulated for years that, indeed, they had been successful in capturing the trophies of war. However, on further investigation, I found out that, although the lads did attack the club, they were repelled by a volley of chairs from inside it, which dented the pride of the Never boys as much as it did their car panels.

There were other such rumours, including attempts by some of the lads to tie wires across roads in order to decapitate passing greasers but, not surprisingly, this story was not corroborated by any of the interviewees.

One brawl at another youth club, though, definitely took place on a Saturday evening in April 1970. A dance at the Catholic Church Hall in Keynsham was the scene of a pitched battle between two separate gangs; up to a hundred skinheads fought in the street outside the hall throwing punches, kicking each other and using weapons that ranged from sticks studded with nails to the all-too-common knives and sharpened combs. More worryingly, according to the Evening Post, ‘a rifle had been spotted’. The local Canon (Reidy) went on to say that ‘There will not be a recurrence next weekend. We will have a Saturday-night whist drive – it will be a very sedate affair.’

The Never café itself, not surprisingly, was not immune from the violence. On Friday, 13 March 1970, a greaser from Marshfield was stabbed and kicked as he left the café with his mates, and you’ve got to question what they were doing in there in the first place. He stated in the subsequent court case that he left the café ‘after receiving hostile looks’. Up to 30 youths then rushed out and attacked the greaser gang. One of the Never lads was sent to Borstal while others were fined up to £100.

Another stabbing occurred in nearby Dursley in June of the same year when a skinhead gang from Southmead, not associated with the Never café, invaded the small Gloucestershire town with the sole intention of attacking greasers. A 21-year-old skinhead was jailed for four years for the attack on a ‘local, long-haired passer-by’. In court, the assailant made the following astonishing, frank admission: ‘I stuck the knife in, it went into his ribs somewhere… I twisted it while it was in him… and the blade snapped off.’

Later on that summer, some of the Never boys made another one of their excursions out of town, this time to Bournemouth on the south coast, which over the years has often witnessed outbreaks of trouble between Bristol, Birmingham and London lads, not to mention the local residents. Lloyd Sutherland had recalled that often the locals would weigh up the situation to see whose mob was the most impressive – and then join forces with them against the others. It’s not clear where the greasers who the Bristol boys battled with that day were from, but what is clear is that it was a pretty vicious altercation.

A group of 50 skinheads, all from the Bristol area, attacked a smaller number of greasers. ‘Fists and boots were used as well as missiles such as bricks and bottles, and at least one knife was used to inflict a very serious wound.’ So intense was the attack that one scared greaser escaped by jumping off the pier into the sea and, when the greasers tried to make their exit in a van, the skinheads attacked and tried to overturn it.

In the ensuing court case, three Bristolians were imprisoned, one for three years, while another four were sent to Borstal. The judge, Mr Justice Wills, commented, ‘I don’t pretend to know what skinheads are or why you become skinheads, but I have been told by the police what people like you do.’

‘Tony’, one of the Never lads who was imprisoned for this incident, recalled that when he was banged up word got around that Jimi Hendrix, who had been performing at the nearby Isle of Wight rock festival, sent out a message from the stage to the jailed skinheads and greasers asking for peace between the two warring groups. It appears that, yet again, the calls for calm, whether from outraged provincial newspapers or bona fide guitar legends, were falling on deaf ears.

The events of the previous few months once again made the front page of the Evening Post: IT’S ALL-OUT WAR ON THE HOOLIGANS, the paper declared, but you get the impression the authorities and the police in particular were fighting a losing battle. A joint statement by councillors and police pledged an ‘all-out fight against hooligans and violence in Bristol caused by a rash of disturbances’, but it was all hyperbolic rhetoric, and, just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, the new football season kicked off.

On 1 August, 250 youths of ‘the skinhead type’ from the Midlands descended upon Eastville for a pre-season ‘friendly’ between Rovers and Birmingham City. It was a ferocious battle, one which I could only watch with both fear and wonderment from the sidelines. The Brummies comprehensively took the Rovers’ Tote End and it wasn’t until half-time when reinforcements arrived from around the city that Rovers’ fans managed to claim some of their terraces back. The main recipients of the Midlanders’ violence was the small gathering of Rovers’ greasers. One in particular got a severe beating at the back of the Tote End. I can recall seeing him prostrate on the ground, barely moving; it was a sickening and disturbing sight, but, like a rubber-necker at the scene of a car crash, I found it difficult to look away.

One of the Brummies appeared in court on the Monday and was giving a derisory fine after stating, ‘Two Rovers kids who were Hells Angels started following us. We got in first, I kicked this kid once, it was either him or us, we thought they were going to work us over. I was wearing working boots… I tripped over him, someone put the boot in but it wasn’t me.’ Putting the boot in was becoming a way of life for many… and it was a way of life I was soon to take up myself.

If that Saturday’s events weren’t bad enough for Rovers fans, the following Monday’s friendly game at Newport County proved just as eventful. In a crowd of under 2,000, over 200 youths from both sides battled it out on the terraces. One Rovers fan ended up in hospital with serious head injuries after a group of Newport youths charged through the crowd waving metal chains.

Two weeks later, the new season kicked off with, once again, the Evening Post reporting that authorities were determined to stamp out the trouble. ‘SOCCER BOVVER SQUAD IN ACTION’, they declared, more in hope than anything else, but the opening weeks of the new season brought more violence than ever before with serious crowd disturbances across the country. From Plymouth to Aberdeen, the boot boys were stamping their authority and throwing down the gauntlet to the police and the use of weapons in particular was causing alarm. This was no more true than at Highbury where, among the many who were arrested for fighting, was a youth from Swindon who was fined for being in possession of a tin opener at the Arsenal v Manchester United game – I can only assume it was not an electric one.

I’m not trying to make light of events that happened nearly four decades ago or even romanticise the skinhead movement. Many of them were bad lads who enjoyed nothing better than a ruck and whose only rationale for kicking the living shit out of someone they didn’t like was just that – they didn’t like them. But, like me and my mates who I hung around with a few years after the Never boys were causing mayhem, these lads thought, rightly or wrongly, that a lot of their escapades were just ‘high spirits’ that often would get out of hand, inevitably leading to violence and, at times, serious injury and incarceration.

This violence is not something that can be denied; it was a violent time and something that should be remembered by today’s tub-thumpers who regularly berate modern youth on how ‘it was safer to walk the streets 40 years ago’. The plain truth is: it wasn’t. The papers from those days are full of reports of stabbings, robberies and vicious assaults; there were even reports of ‘a gang of knife-wielding coloured youths’ or ‘the shadow gang’ as the local press dubbed them, who were based in Stokes Croft and who would jump out from shop doorways and demand money with menaces from passing pedestrians. The word ‘mugging’ had not entered the language of the day.

This little island of ours has long been a violent place. Today’s much-maligned youth are no better or no worse than their parents, grandparents and, in some cases, great-grandparents. ‘Victorian values’ is a figment of Tory politicians’ imagination. Where do they think the original ‘hooligans’ came from? If you want a real eye-opener, read Hooligan – A History of Respectable Fears by Geoffrey Pearson for an amazing insight into the history of the British hooligan. What must be remembered, however, is that becoming a skinhead is not about making a fashion statement. If you were prepared to wear the boot, then you were prepared to use – and receive it – as General George ‘old blood and guts’ Patton once said, ‘A soldier in shoes is only a soldier, but in boots he becomes a warrior.’

The Bar Celona reunion brought a lot of the old ‘warriors’ out from the comfort of their armchairs and their slippers. I was a tad disappointed that few, if any, wore any of their old clothing from back in the day, although judging by the waistlines on show even if they did still own any it was unlikely it would still fit. At least Angelo Pascoe made an effort – his brogues looked as polished and pristine as the day he must have first bought them. Of course, at the time, although you were aware that you were part of a ‘scene’, you didn’t really appreciate just how significant it all was. Your threads were just that – threads – that would be updated and replaced as quickly as the ‘scene’ itself was updated.

One of the lads who turned up that night and who was an original Never boy was Chris, still looking as fit and trim as he was nearly 40 years previously. In fact, he had more hair now than he did then and a moustache to rival those of his old enemies, the greasers. After several phone calls, I arranged to meet him in the centre of Bristol.

‘Where do you fancy meeting?’ I asked.

‘How about the Way Inn?’ replied Chris.

‘Sorry, mate, been shut about 30 years,’ I replied.

Fortunately, when we did meet, in the aforementioned Horse and Groom, Chris’s memory had been restored and we spent an enjoyable evening reliving those distant days, only this time he didn’t have to keep on eye on the door for the law who regularly visited the hostelry searching for under-age drinkers.

Chris, like Lloyd, who also joined us for the evening, was born in 1950 and started frequenting the Never at the age of 16. At the time, he lived in Knowle West and recalled buying his first boots at an army surplus store in Bedminster. Like Eugene, he remembered being skint most of the time so couldn’t afford a scooter. ‘Couldn’t even afford to buy any records,’ he recalled. He brought along one of the younger members of the ‘crew’, Pat ‘Paddy’ Walsh, who, along with his brother Martin, were up there with the Pascoes, the Stones (Andy and Paul) and the legendary Roy and Mike Thorne as ‘top boys’ on the town circuit.

Chris and Paddy both remembered the fracas at The Star pub where, allegedly, ‘that axe’ was used, but again the memory became selective. They both admitted to being involved in the clashes in and around the city centre with the greasers, recalling how a mob of them would go to the greasers’ café but how they would only send four or five to gather outside to goad the greasers into coming out, where they would then face the full force of the gathered Never boys. Again, the devilment inside them was the main cause of the mayhem. Paddy recalled his brother Martin ‘taking a pair of scissors out with him, not as a weapon but to go around the Locarno cutting the ties in half of other lads’. You can only guess at the reaction from the ‘victims’ – the consequences likewise can only be imagined.

Fights in the dancehalls were a common occurrence. I read of one in the Locarno in the Evening Post from late 1969 that resulted in one poor lad receiving 200 stitches in a face wound after being attacked with a glass. The boots may have been outlawed on the dancefloors but the result of a ‘glassing’ were just as serious, if not more so. The fighting in the Locarno or the Top Rank, whether over a girl, a spilled drink or, more often than not, just a look (‘You dogging I up?’ would often be the precursor to a smack in the mouth) led to police being stationed in the clubs themselves. The Bali Hai became a battleground, the pint mug became a weapon of mass destruction and the acrid smell of Brut filled your nostrils – all to a blistering backing track featuring Jamaica’s finest. Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff and The Maytals sung of freedom, wonderful worlds and pomp and pride while blood flowed and stained the polished maple sprung dancefloor.

Chris recalled another weapon being used with devastating effect one Christmas when the BBC’s Radio One Club visited the Top Rank for a live broadcast – as it turns out, the only one in history that was ever cancelled live on air due to the disorder. ‘We heard that the Radio One Club was in the Top Rank that night so one of the boys paid to get in then let the rest of us in by opening the side door. The bouncers (who truly lived up to their name in those days) knew we had done this so they were looking for us.

‘Once we got in, we mingled with the crowd. We saw a handbell on stage so we nicked it and would ring it to annoy the bouncers, because they could not see who had it. Later, we went upstairs where I bumped into one bouncer who I had frequent encounters with. I had the bell and he asked me for it so I said, “Are you sure you want it?” He said yes, so I gave it to him right on the head.’

In a way, the bouncer got off lightly; the weapon could have been a lot worse. On a trip to London, a group of the Never lads visited the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth where one of the boys tried to purloin a World War II machine-gun from a display – thankfully, he didn’t succeed.

It was inevitable that Barney’s trusty fruit and veg wagon would come up again. Paddy remembered how his brother Martin would ‘hold on to bars on the back as Barney drove around the Pithay, then lift his legs off as he careered around the corners… thought he was Superman!’ It seemed many of the lads thought at some stage they were super heroes, from moonwalking around the Top Rank in homage to Neil Armstrong, to their choice of stylised, sometimes even uniform clothing. The language, the swagger, but mostly the attitude set them apart from the rest of the proletariat.

At the time, Chris was a kitchen porter, Pat was still at school and Lloyd, like Eugene, was an apprentice engineer. But, unlike their predecessors, the aspirational and elitist mods who proclaimed ‘mods didn’t do sweat’, the skinheads ‘did do sweat’ and were fiercely proud of their working-class roots, even their ‘Britishness’, despite coming from backgrounds as diverse as Ireland, Jamaica and, as with the Pascoe brothers, Italy.

True mods with their narcissistic splendour strove to leave their working-class backgrounds behind them – it could be argued they were the first yuppies. They looked to French art-house films, Italian Soho coffee bars and American jazz musicians for their inspiration. Skinheads looked to the military, American astronauts and Jamaican rude boys for theirs. Mod was a way of life; skinheads, on their own admission, were more one-dimensional and lived for the weekends and the immediate satisfaction that went with it. They set their sights slightly lower.

Paolo Hewitt, the mod historian and author of such books as The Soul Stylists – 40 Years of Modernism and My Favourite Shirt: A History of Ben Sherman Style, when asked to write an essay in school about ‘what you most want out of life’ chose to write a two-page treatise on the attributes of a blue window-pane-check trim-fit Brutus Gold shirt. His classmates no doubt wrote of train drivers, nurses and the astronaut heroes of that era.

Personally at the age of 13, I longed to emulate the young skinhead who worked on the paper-sack wagon that came down our street. I thought Mervyn from Lawrence Weston had the best job in the world, standing atop the caged lorry, stomping down the sacks that were chucked up to him by his colleagues, stripped to the waist with his braces hanging down, his oversized bovver boots doing the business with extreme efficiency. If Richard Allen’s Joe Hawkins had lived in Bristol and not the East End of London, he would have been called Mervyn and instead of being a coalman he would have worked on the paper-sack lorry. Mervyn was my hero.

Apart from setting my sights on those paper sacks, I also longed for a pair of Monkey boots, as did Pat Walsh, who recalled travelling to Camden in North London with his mum to get his as they couldn’t be found on the streets of Bristol. Brutus Gold shirts and Monkey boots…we were easily pleased in those days.