Booted and Suited. Chris Brown
his father and I would not allow him in the house like that.’
Undoubtedly, the incident was related to the troubles of that week and perhaps this was a step too far. The next day, the cropheads and the greasers met on College Green in front of Bristol Cathedral for a ‘truce’. Under a photo of the two warring tribes shaking hands, the Evening Post’s headline proclaimed: GANGS RELAXING BUT POLICE STAY ALERT. The report went on to say that a crowd of 120 gathered and the truce was signed with a handshake, and the two gang leaders collected £3 from their own members for a wreath for Barry. The Evening Post continued, ‘Many members of the motorcycle gang seem to think his accident was an indirect result of their war with the cropheads. Police said it was being treated the same way as any fatal accident and that witnesses were still being interviewed.’
What you can’t fail to notice about the photo is the difference in both age and physique of the two gangs’ members – the fresh-faced cropheads barely reach the shoulders of the greasers and while the bikers proudly display moustaches and sideburns the short-haired cropheads haven’t got as much as a bit of bum-fluff between them. One other curious thing about the photo is that, if you look very closely, you can make out a couple of black guys among the cropheads. More of them later.
After a week of reflection on the events, the Evening Post took its eye off the Apollo 11 moon mission which was enthralling the nation and ran a half-page interview with the Bristol Police. The headline read: THIS UGLY RASH WILL BE STAMPED OUT. The report by the esteemed reporter Roger Bennett went on to say, ‘First there were the Teddy Boys. Then came the Mods and Rockers. Now, in Bristol, it’s Hells Angels v Cropheads. The names change. So do the uniforms – from drape jackets and crêpe-soled shoes to crash helmets and swastika-emblazoned jackets. But the disease is the same – an ugly rash of teenage terrorism. The battleground has moved from the dancehalls to the streets over the years. And this makes police all the more determined to stamp out the new wave of juvenile belligerence.’
Chief Superintendent George Fisher, commander of the Bristol Police ‘A’ division, discounted the suggestion that the teenage gangs should be put in a field and left to fight out whatever they are fighting about, ‘whereas in the Teddy Boy era, most of the trouble was among young people in places frequented by young people. Over recent years, it seems to have moved into the streets. The general public, in particular elderly people and the very young, can be badly frightened by this kind of behaviour, and we cannot allow it to continue. I must make it clear that, if these young people continue with their course of conduct in the centre of Bristol or elsewhere, they will be dealt with firmly by the police.’
Another senior police officer, the aptly named DS Frederick Clash, commented, ‘The increasing use of weapons like sticks, knives, chains and stones also increases the danger that someone will be seriously hurt. But it is unlikely to spiral into the use of firearms.’ Then, in a sentence that could be lifted from any of today’s tabloids, he states, ‘The teenage gangs are composed of youths with juvenile minds influenced by films and TV.’ However, he then tries to lighten the picture somewhat, by saying, ‘This isn’t gang warfare. It’s two little groups of silly kids.’
The night before this report, in a scene reminiscent of the film The Wild One, over 60 of one group of these ‘silly kids’ – with names such as Danny the Pervert, Doc Puffer, Maverick, Big Jim, Ruby and Tank, all members of either the Bristol Nomads or West Coast Chapter of the Hells Angels – rode into Keynsham on their Triumphs and Nortons where they stayed for an hour before leaving without causing any trouble. However, the following evening, 30 of them rode into Chipping Sodbury where they fought with local youths. ‘Beer glasses were thrown and there was fighting and swearing under the clock tower.’
Contrary to the police’s optimistic message, this ‘teenage terrorism’ was not about to fade away – the tension of that blisteringly hot summer continued into the flame-red autumn. On Friday, 5 September, the violence erupted again, youths fighting toe-to-toe on the streets culminating in a near riot. When 200 youths clashed in the Centre, one lad was seriously injured when he was thrown through a plate-glass window; a police officer also received a broken arm in the disorders which lasted for over an hour and also saw the overstretched Bristol Police having to call for reinforcements from across the region – the truce was well and truly forgotten.
The aggro wasn’t confined to Bristol, though, as the same weekend saw 13 ‘soccer hooligans’ from London arrested and fined after trouble flared at the Aston Villa v Millwall match in Birmingham. The cult of bovver was well and truly on the march.
* My research threw up several names for this café, many seemed to think it was called the ‘63 Club’ but others offered up the ‘69 Café’, while one of the few bikers who I managed to talk to from that era thought there were two cafés, the ‘66 café’ and the ‘99 café’ while someone else suggested it was the ‘Route 66 Club’. There was certainly a motorcycle gang called the ‘63 Club’ so it seems logical that they were named after the café they frequented.
The Service Engineer and the Fruit Wagon
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