Booted and Suited. Chris Brown
on it, mind, just the chain,’ he said with a smile. He was out to impress the girls.
‘How about the clientele in the Never, Jim… can you remember the change from mods to skinheads?’ I asked.
Jim was hazy about the actual year but he could quite vividly recall the cold wind of change that blew down from the east. ‘Of course, the first skinheads were in London, but I remember lads being in the café one day dressed as mods, then literally the next day the hair was shorter and the jeans were up here and within two weeks they were all like it.’
Jim went on to regale me with tales of how the lads would nick money from the pinball machines but how his dad turned a blind eye to it. They obviously had a lot of respect for Jim Sr. Well, enough to nick his livelihood from under his nose, that is.
It turned out that the Never not only had a reputation with the local constabulary for the aggro but also for the shoplifting. ‘If you wanted something, you could get it in the Never… there was one guy, he could get you anything. If you wanted a fridge, he would get it for you, anything you want. Someone once said, “I saw a lovely TV in Fairfax House…” [the large nearby Co-op departmental store] and this bloke would ask, “What make was it?” Then he would go along to Fairfax House, suss out the make, take a note of the serial number on the back, then go out and get changed into a pair of white overalls he owned – it even had “Service Engineer” on the back! He would then go back in with his overalls on and his clipboard – he even had a trolley. He would just load it up and walk out with it. If anyone stopped him, he would quote the serial number and show it on his pad, saying it had to go back to the factory for repair. Worked every time.’
The Never eventually shut down for good in 1974; the café which the skinheads used to frequent closed a couple of years earlier, due in no small part to the criminal activities of the lads and the fact the kids had moved on to pastures new. The restaurant continued for a while but, without the boys’ patronage, the takings started to dwindle.
On top of that, Jim’s old man was heavily into gambling, which didn’t help. ‘He went out one night with a top-of-the-range Merc and came back with an old banger – lost it playing cards.’
Jim himself obviously wasn’t one of the ‘top boys’, and neither did he profess to be, but his clientele and his closeness with the lads in the Never ensured that Jim and his dad always commanded a certain amount of respect on the streets of Bristol. If ever they found themselves in need of a bit of ‘muscle’, the boys would not let them down. ‘If someone threatened us, we knew we had huge back-up.’
Jim remembered an incident in the Silver Blades ice rink one Saturday afternoon. ‘I remember once I got whacked in the ice-skating rink. I got nutted, there was blood all over the ice, and that was because I was chatting to some girl. Angelo [Pascoe – he and his brother Willie were notorious characters on the Bristol scene] spotted me, and said, “Jim, Jim… who did this?” Angelo wasn’t skating, he walked on the fucking ice and – bang, bang – this bloke went down. It took five guys to get Angelo off him.
‘Our ties with the Pascoes go further back than the Never – they worked in the fruit market and my dad had his first café there. I used to take them their coffees and egg and bacon sandwiches. It was a real, real buzzing place… by four in the morning it was packed.’
It turned out there were quite of few of these Never lads who worked in the nearby fruit market, including a certain individual whose name would crop up time and time again, who, as it turned out, would ‘borrow’ his parents’ lorry to transport the skinheads around, often hidden behind the crates of fruit. More of him later.
I could have spoken to Jim for hours; he was an engaging character and he looked back on those days with a great deal of affection, his eyes misting over with many of the recollections. He was clearly not a big-time player, though, and, whether through a fading memory or just a reluctance to name names, I wasn’t really getting into the zeitgeist of the day. I knew the Never was not up there in the league of the Soho coffee bars that spawned the mods at the start of the decade, where Jack Kerouac and Colin McInnes were debated with gusto over their espressos, while Miles Davis played effortlessly in the background, but I had expected a bit more than ‘Viennese steaks were popular with the lads’.
So I decided to go for the $64,000 question with Jim: ‘Can you remember the very first skinhead in Bristol, Jim?’
I waited with bated breath. Would my search for ‘Wally’ be resolved right at the start of my investigation?
Jim cast his eyes over his restaurant, scratched his head, looked at the ceiling and took in a breath. ‘No,’ he answered.
Thanks, Jim. My search was to continue, then.
Prior to the Never reunion at Jim’s club, the Evening Post ran a feature on the infamous café. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was no reference to ‘skinheads’ or of the bovver that was associated with it. Even the photo that was reproduced, which clearly showed a group of mischievous, cropped-haired and booted youths was accompanied by the caption: MODS OUTSIDE THE CAFÉ IN THE LATE ‘60S. Forty years on and the Post was still struggling with the taboo terminology.
A week or so after the article in the Post, letters started appearing listing name after name of bygone boys who had at one time stomped with pride through the streets of Bristol. One such letter appeared from Bob Feltham of Whitchurch, who wrote, ‘I got to know the café through a guy called Gary Briar who I worked with at the old Robertson’s jam factory in Brislington in the late Sixties, and after that through the Number 9 scooter boys from Broomhill. These included friends Johnny Love and Gerry Hodgson (who were neighbours) and the Broomhill and St Anne’s crowd. This included Lawrence Hobden, Craig Britton, Martin “Jinx” Jenkins, John “Fitz” Fitzgerald, Martin “Tap” Walters, Martin “Taz” Taylor, Eggy, Tinker, Joe, Andy Gunton, Martin Webster, Danny, Johnny Calabrese, Brian Strange and Charlie Travis, among others. The names that I remember from the Never crew were Brian Balson, Johnny Cowley, Chris Summers, Martin and Paddy Walsh, Andy and Paul Stone, Stevie Elvins, John Onuyfrick, Vernon, Snowy, Keith Langdon, Tony Horton, “Daddy” Stevens, Mike Thorne, Dave Mealing, Carl and, of course, Angelo Pascoe… The Never crowd were either in or outside the Locarno or at the Horse and Groom or the Way Inn on College Green. I also recall the trips to Burnham on a Sunday and to the Devon coast on bank holidays.’
I managed to make contact with Bob and, after several conversations via email, he went into a bit more detail about those days. Bob was born in 1952 and started frequenting the Never in his teens in the late Sixties. Like many of the guys from back then he’s a family man (married for over 30 years to Caroline) and a successful businessman who runs his own international shipping business. Perhaps those ‘bad old, good old days’ taught these kids a thing or two. Many of them were ruthless risk-takers on the streets back then and maybe that ‘savvyness’ and sense of loyalty that they shared with their mates stayed with them in later years.
‘I lived in Edward Road, Brislington, in those days and travelled into town either on the back of a scooter or in Johnny Love’s Triumph Herald. At the same time, I introduced some other friends such as Dave Bonomi, Eamonn Kelly and Steve Pawlak to the “town” scene, although Steve already knew two of the existing members [of the scooter club], John Onuyfrick and Bob Knight who both hailed from Shirehampton. The Number 9s were mostly all already acquainted with the café…
‘I had an old Mark 1 Lambretta when I moved to London to work at Heathrow in late 1969, but returned in 1970 back to the area. I remember that the Number 9s had a variety of souped-up Lambrettas and Vespas with all the “bells and whistles”. In those days, I used to wear a pair of “Royal” brogues [bought from Hounslow], Ben Sherman shirts with or without braces, Sta-Prest trousers or jeans. I also had a Crombie coat, pair of Doc Martens and, of course, we were all spotless and smelled of Brut aftershave. If we wore a suit, the trousers were, of course, flared and the jackets had about a dozen buttons on the sleeves. I guess that I was a true skinhead in those days.
‘We used to hang around either inside or outside the Locarno, in the Top Rank, in the Gaumont picture