One-Eyed Baz - The Story of Barrington 'Zulu' Patterson, One of Britain's Deadliest Men. Barrington Patterson & Cass Pennant
together later in security; I actually brought him back to Birmingham to work. There was a problem in my mate’s shop with some of the young gang members; the gaffer was having trouble with them so we came back to Birmingham to try to solve the situation. That’s when The Bear stopped coming to town – when he found out Barrington was back in Birmingham.
Rupert: It was because he had that fight with Thomas first, do you remember?
Todd: Thomas Coley was Barrington’s partner from when he first came to Birmingham. I think at the time Thomas was actually tougher than Barrington, he was a nasty piece of work – but he became a very good friend of mine and still is! When you saw him coming and you saw Barrington behind him, you thought, Thomas Coley was Barrington’s partner from when he first came to Birmingham. I think at the time Thomas was actually tougher than Barrington, he was a nasty piece of work – but he became a very good friend of mine and still is! When you saw him coming and you saw Barrington behind him, you thought, Shit!
Rupert: They were in the same class at school and they both got expelled.
Then we got to know some of these skinhead guys and we started talking. Before you knew it, the fashion changed so quickly that by the next football season you would notice all these dressers come into town wearing Tacchini, Fila, Ellesse and all that. Then the London club guys would come in with their Pringle and Armani and Lacoste and we’d think, We can’t afford all those fucking things! But they were on our manor so we taxed ’em.
At most of the matches we’d go to, we’d have a little earner. Sometimes we would send the lads to have a fight so that they could distract the police; we would leave them and go to the pub, wreck it and break open any fruit or fag machines. The same if it was a shop – we would go in to steam it, grabbing whatever we wanted.
It was around this time that there was a major problem within the black community. We were treated like shit, the police had no respect for us, and all the black and Asian families were dumped into the ghettoes of Birmingham. I guess it had happened in other places as well, like Toxteth and Brixton, but we were acutely aware of the underlying issues as we experienced them day after day and we were involved in the Handsworth riots. We had the idea that, if we created enough chaos, we could make some money – as all the shopkeepers would abandon their shops. That was our way of life. We came about 20-handed and all we were interested in was breaking into shops and taking what we could.
Sometimes you just wanted to destroy things; other times you’d run into a shop and come out with things you didn’t even need, running straight home, putting it away in the house and running back out again. You would have maybe one room full up with stolen goods, including quite a few things you’d never had before. Then your house would get raided.
That first night of the riots, we all arranged to meet up at the top of Handsworth and plan what we were going to do. The police had the SPG (Special Patrol Group) at the time and they were just bastards. All they wanted was to beat people with their long truncheons, and you knew that when the SPG were coming you had to run.
Everything was directed against the police. We just wanted to tell people what they were like and what they were doing, but nobody wanted to take it onboard. It was like a cry for help – people knocked Handsworth, Toxteth and Brixton, but all they remember about those areas is the riots. If they hadn’t actually lived there, then they didn’t know what they were like. Handsworth had as nice a community as anybody else’s area.
It was a nice feeling too – people were trying to put their point across because the government were not interested. Everyone was trying to get the aggression out of themselves, because in those days a black lad could be walking down the street and he would get stopped for no apparent reason. Or he would be told to get out of his car; the black guy would turn round and say, ‘Why? I ain’t done nothing,’ and the police would hold up a bag of weed and say they found it in the car. They were well known for planting drugs on people and saying it was theirs.
Most of the towns that rioted back in 1981 did so for a reason – not like the recent riots around the UK in August 2011, after the police shot and killed Mark Duggan. People just wanted to be heard as they were putting up with a lot of shit in those days. But for us it was just about money, money, money. We weren’t into that aspect – we were into the looting.
Riots are riots at the end of the day, but they’re not like they used to be years ago. Some of the guys go over the top with the rioting – setting fire to people’s houses and things like that. When we were rioting we were just grabbing things, we weren’t setting light to the premises; we were just providing things for our families – or for ourselves, or whatever. Fuck burning down a big store when there are people living on top of the fucking building!
While the riots were on, we made a lot of money. We looted shops of their stock, including food, fags, booze, furniture, TVs, anything that we could. But one of the sad things that came out of the riots was that my good friend, Thomas Coley, got jumped on by the SPG and beaten very badly. Thomas had a promising career ahead of him as a boxer and was due to represent England; his beating changed that and he’s never been right again. He was one of the guys I used to look up to, coming from Handsworth. He was a wicked fighter, but when the SPG got him in the riots they fucking hammered him.
RUPERT & TODD
Todd: Barrington came from Handsworth and when he came up into the city he had the Handsworth mentality; they used to go up to the skinheads and take their boots off them, and their laces! But Barrington kind of turned. He left the Handsworth lot and started to hang around with us lot in town. He started going to the football, shoplifting, everything that we were doing as kids, which progressed into the football violence and meeting women, and his life kept on accelerating to where he is now.
Rupert: Barrington always had money, he always worked. I wish I was like that. Anyone he met or had a bond with, he would keep in contact with.
Todd: He had a job, he always had money, and he always had a missus. His only downfall at the time was gambling, he’d always be across the road in The Night Rider and he’d be playing cards: blackjack and brag. Barrington was our mate but we couldn’t get in the way of his gambling, because if we went to the pub where he was gambling with the older lot he’d tell us to piss off! But he was the only one who had a job and he was in a stable relationship; he thought so much of the girl he was with at the time, I’m surprised he never ended up marrying her. She was a blonde-haired girl from Erdington, wasn’t she?
As kids, we never really knew about designer clothes and, even if we did, we couldn’t afford those things. I remember your Adidas four-stripe and wearing an Adam and the Ants T-shirt. We’d go to school in plimsolls with the cardboard pushed down inside to try to stop the water soaking through, and side-pocket trousers with a big utility belt.
When the shops finally took notice of all this designer stuff and started to stock all these smart tracksuits, a big sports shop opened up. On the first day it opened, we broke into it and robbed all the tracksuits – Ecko, Ellesse, Sergio Tacchini. Before that I was wearing Adidas, with the four-stripe trainers, and in town people would be taking the piss out of me. People all around, including us, started to come out of wearing Sta-Press and brogues and became a bit more casually dressed.
It had mainly been a music scene, but then all the casual clothes started coming in. You had all these shops opening in Birmingham like Cecil Gee and other shops were selling Gabicci and all that. As soon as the shops opened, we were breaking into them and robbing them. On a Friday or Saturday, you’d just walk in and take a handful of clothes. You’d walk out and nobody could stop you. We continued steaming into designer shops and taking all the stock out – Armani jeans, Nevica skiwear, Tacchini and Fila tracksuits. In and out in one minute, that was our aim. Then there were all the guys coming from London wearing Tacchini and Fila. We just taxed them and took it off them.
Now that we’d started to go places, some of the ex-skinheads we knew would ask, ‘Why don’t you come to a game?’ So we started to go down to the football match; that was where it all began.