Booted and Suited. Chris Brown
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.
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