Booted and Suited. Chris Brown
sit-ins, live-ins and the long-haired cult of non-violence’.
The reaction to the hippy movement and its music featuring sitars, cowbells and those obligatory ten-minute guitar solos was as extreme as it was rapid. The skinheads chose to grossly exaggerate their working-class background and deliberately accentuated its hard image: the braces, overtly exposed working boots, close-cropped hair, collarless shirts – all stereotypical working-class imagery. It could even be argued they were making a political statement but, back then, politics was the last thing on a young skinhead’s mind, they didn’t really care much for Vietnam, Tariq Ali or CND; their thoughts were elsewhere. It’s those thoughts that I now hope to reveal and retell in the next few chapters – thoughts, memories and recollections of those first-generation skinheads, those boys and girls who were around when the mods drew their final breath, cast off their parkas and laced up their boots. Welcome to Booted and Suited.
‘This Is a Scene, There’s Some Kind of Code’
I read somewhere that Bristol could have been as glorious as Rome, except the locals couldn’t be bothered, or that it could be Britain’s equivalent of San Francisco. Certainly, the geography resembles the Californian city and Bristol’s got an amazing bridge – and a prison – but that’s where the similarities end. San Francisco was the birthplace of the free-loving hippies, Bristol the birthplace of Methodism; somehow, I can’t see the connection.
Since the 1950s, coffee bars have played an important part in the life of the British teenager. From ‘Coffee An’ off Wardour Street in London to the ‘Cona Coffee Bar’ in Tib Street, Manchester, teenagers flocked to them in their droves – it’s amazing what a jukebox, pinball machines and a Gaggia can do. Warm, inviting, slightly racy, with a hint of the Continent, British youth is easily pleased.
In Bristol, we had the ‘Never on Sunday’ in Fairfax Street, just around the corner from Woolworth’s and the Co-op and just a stone’s throw from the Central Police Station in Bridewell. Good thinking, lads.
Iain McKell, the well-known fashion photographer who learned his trade back in the Seventies and Eighties through shooting skinheads and new romantics, and who photographed Madonna for her first magazine cover, recalls, ‘I remember skinheads the first time round, in 1969, when it was really hardcore. I must have been 12, 13 and I was in a café in Bristol when this bloke walked in, hair cropped, wearing a Ben Sherman shirt, braces, Levi’s and DM boots. Then another one… and another one. And I thought, Hang on a minute, there’s something going on here, this is a scene, there’s some kind of code. And in those days, it was shocking to see something like that.’
A public schoolboy with working-class parents from Weymouth, McKell was awestruck by the skinheads’ defiance and aggression, and it wasn’t long before he wanted to be part of this ‘scene’. ‘This big firm of lairy skinheads would stand behind the goal at Bristol City’s ground [no accounting for taste], so one day I joined them, just to experience this feeling, this roar. They’d bang their boots against the corrugated tin wall behind them, then they’d surge forward in this big wave.’
‘Defiance and aggression…’ It’s easy to see how the movement roared through Britain in the summer of 1969, a bit like Concorde had done in April that year on its maiden flight… from Filton, Bristol, for the record.
This ‘scene’ was being repeated up and down the country. Chris Welch, the esteemed rock journalist, writing in Melody Maker in 1969 made a similar observation: ‘it’s a curious thing that whenever… a pillar of our bewildered society wants to cast stones, they instantly start talking about long-haired louts/yobs/hippies/students etc… Yet anybody who has ventured on the streets will instinctively know that they have nothing to fear from the long-haired youth who merely wants to turn on in peace to his favourite band and chick. The sight of cropped heads and the sound of heavy boots entering the midnight Wimpy bar or dancehall is the real cause for sinking feelings in the pit of the stomach.’
Strangely for someone who supposedly had his finger on the pulse of Britain’s street culture, Welch identified the new breed as ‘mods’. It’s probably easy now to look back and be critical but, as the modernists first kick-started their Lambrettas some six or seven years earlier, it’s difficult to see how he arrived at this tag, but then again ‘post-modern mods with big boots’ just doesn’t put the fear of God into anyone.
Welch wasn’t the only one who was unsure what to call this new breed of cropped-haired adolescents roaming the streets of Britain. As mentioned previously, the media of the day, although aware of the new youth phenomenon, were also unsure what to call them. During the period of unrest that erupted during the summer of 1969 on the streets of Bristol, the Evening Post constantly referred to them as ‘the Cropheads’ with their enemy of choice being ‘the Rockers’, as if they were two distinct street gangs in the mode of ‘the Jets’ and ‘the Sharks’ in West Side Story, not that Bristol’s city centre resembled Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen and it certainly didn’t feature Natalie Wood singing ‘I Feel Pretty’.
Although there had been sporadic clashes between these two groups throughout the year, it appears that the catalyst for all this mayhem was an assault on Saturday, 19 July 1969 inside the Never on Sunday itself. A 19-year old ballsy greaser (the more common reference of the day for the rockers, or ‘greebo’ if you really wanted to chance your arm) from Knowle West entered the café and assaulted one of the Never boys. In court on the Monday, he admitted that he ‘butted the youth in the face, threw him to the ground and kicked him’, claiming that the youth had ‘kept interfering with him and he just lost his head’. He had six previous convictions and was fined £30 plus £2 costs.
This assault quickly resulted in a revenge attack by the enraged cropheads on the 63 Club,* the motorcycle gang’s café in Old Market less than a mile away, but this was just a prelude to the mass battle which took place on the following Tuesday when up to 300 youths fought in the city centre. Under the headline GANGS AT WAR, the Evening Post reported with as much relish as the modern-day Daily Mail gleefully informs its outraged readers of yet another attack on a frail pensioner by a hooded thug: ‘About 300 youths from rival gangs were involved in a series of running fights near the centre of Bristol… a number of “nasty implements” were later found to have been discarded, including iron bars, sticks, broken bottles, knives and a scalpel. A number of youths faced charges including assaulting a policeman, malicious wounding, threatening behaviour and carrying offensive weapons.’
Detective Sergeant Peter Webster, who opposed an application for bail by one youth, stated, ‘There is concern by the prosecution that they haven’t heard the last of these incidents…’ – an understatement if there ever was one. Most arrested that night were teenagers; in fact, nearly all were just 17. Most ended up with £25 fines while others were put on remand. The most serious offence by a 23-year-old greaser of an assault on a police officer resulted in a two-month prison sentence – or ‘gaol’ as it was commonly called back then.
In an entirely separate incident, the Evening Post also reported a 21-year old man being shot and two other people suffering stab wounds at a party in woods in nearby Stroud in Gloucestershire. Of course, this was the period of ‘peace and love’ – the Rolling Stones were performing for free in Hyde Park in the name of love in a concert which got hijacked by London skinheads, while John Lennon and Yoko Ono were singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’ from their hotel bed. It sounds like it was falling on deaf ears. Well, in the West Country at any rate.
The following Thursday, the ante was well and truly upped. Barry Cowan, an 18-year-old greaser from Stoke Gifford, was killed when his 650cc Norton motorcycle was in a collision with another motorcycle and a Triumph Herald car in Temple Way. His distraught mother denied that Barry had ever been part of a gang, saying, ‘He wore a flying jacket and jeans when riding his