Booted and Suited. Chris Brown
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