The Rockers' Reunion by Ian Walker (New Society, 23 August 1984)

Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set of his articles from his time writing for New Society but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my longstanding admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background, and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.  

                                     The Rockers' Reunion by Ian Walker 

Old rockers never die, as Ian Walker found out on a bikers’ day trip to Southend.

Frank’s blue eyes narrowed against the sun to focus on the BSA Rocket Gold Star which had just arrived on the south side of Chelsea Bridge, joining around 70 other British machines for the Rockers’ Reunion Club run to Southend last Sunday. “A motorcycle like that, you don’t leave it in a garage,” Frank said. “You keep it n the front room. It’s like a painting on the wall.” He rode a Gold Star himself for 14 years and he talked about it the way you would a long lapsed love affair. “It’s been a long time, but when I see one I till have feelings for it, you know. You miss them,” he said, sweeping back his brown hair which curled long at the neck. His current pride and joy was an Egli-Vincent, a fifties racing bike worth £3,500; but he had left it at home in favour of his 750cc Triumph. The Vincent made people too envious.

Frank wore blue jeans and a battered black leather called a Highwayman. His wife normally rode with him, but their baby was only eight weeks old, he was saying when he was interrupted by another advice seeker. Frank earns his living as a mototorcycle mechanic. Aged 38, he has been meeting his mates on Chelsea Bridge for the last 22 years. In all that time, he has lost only one friend in a crash. “Don’t seem too bad. One in 22 years,” he said, climbing aboard his bike. The only accident Frank ever had was caused by a car owner, a phrase he renewed on like heartburn. The cavalcade rumbled across the bridge at 10.30 on the dot.

I sat alongside Len Paterson in the grey Transit which led the procession to Parliament Square. Founder of the Rockers’ Reunion Club, he grew up in a Battersea council estate where he made a name for himself on his bikes that he always painted turquoise and called Baby Blue. He lives now with his wife above their spare-part shop in Streatham. And is a funny thing, he said, but it is his wife who has become known as Baby Blue these days. She was pursuing the Transit on a Triumph Tiger 90, her white silk scarf flapping round her helmet. 

Crouched between two vintage bikes in the back of the van was a stocky little rocker, name of Al. He wore sunglasses to conceal the eyes, which had not looked right since a bad motorbike crash that had left him in a coma for five months and disabled his right leg. He was also missing a thumb.

“My missus got stabbed by a Hell’s Angel last week,” he said, casually, to Len. “But it only needed three stitches.”

Going down into an underpass, Len smashed the dashboard in delight. “This should sound fucking nice,” he said, as the roar in the tunnel began its crescendo. “This is just like the sixties.”

Except, of course, that he had rung Southend’s Chief Inspector to advise him of the excursion, protocol that would have been unthinkable in Len’s wild years. He had taken similar precautions on the run to Brighton last year. “The police were quite okay,” he said. “The only complaint they had was that 70 per cent of the bikes weren’t taxed.” 

Refusing one of Len’s ham sandwiches, Al said he never ate on an empty stomach. On the first stretch of open road outside London a posse of bikes roared past the Transit and Len smiled, like an indulgent father at the winning excesses of his children. Along a section of the A13 which had been converted from three lanes into two, Len put his black suede shoe hard on the gas and shot down the forbidden lane at 70mph. I think it must have been this adrenalin rush which caused him to miss the Pitsea turn-off.

Len swore and did a u-turn, then parked the van and rushed across the road with his cream loudhailer. Standing in the middle of a dual carriageway, he tried to bellow his error at the oncoming waves of leather and metal. A few riders missed this message from their sponsor, but most made it safely to the Pitsea car park where the three-man police escort was waiting.

Having taken off his helmet and restored his quiff to its original stature, Frank stood staring at a maroon bath-tub Triumph that was built in 1959. Coppers used to ride them, he said, with a sidelong glance at the current generation of law on their high-tech BMWs. At least they were preferable to the Japanese bikes, he said.

Frank ran a thoughtful finger down all four inches of his sideburn. I asked him how long, in truth, enthusiasts could keep these old bikes on the road? “Without exaggeration,” he replied, “these British bikes will be kept on the road forever. They stopped making the Vincent in 1955 and the Vincent owners’ club has 1,500 members. The bikes will outlive their owners.”

The police took the Rockers’ Reunion into town, slewing their BMWs across roundabouts and junctions so the bikers never had to stop at a red light. It was like escorting rebel troops back to the border after the cessation of hostilities. Another 40 motorcycles had joined up en route and the procession was three quarters of a mile long by the time it reached the Queens, a plastic Tudor pub built with drinking capacity in mind. Local teds and rockers leaning up against its walls were trying hard not to look too impressed as the historic collection arranged itself on the forecourt.

Bill, at 50 the oldest rider on the trip, downed his first pint inside three minutes. “Soon as you swing your leg over a bike you’re a second class citizen,” he said, over his second pint consumed in the sunshine. “I’ve been riding for 36 years and never got pulled once, till I got done twice in the last week, once for parking and once for speeding.”

Chairman of the south London branch of the Triumph Owners’ Club, Bill is nicknamed Poppa Smurf on account of his vast bulk, grey beard and pixie features. Poppa had not been to Southend since the sixties.

“We used to kip under the pier," he said. “It’s a load of old bollocks all that stuff about rucking with mods. I never saw any punch-ups in the old days. We were all too busy looking after our bikes. You used to take the girlfriend down, you know, a bit of slap and tickle. The police used to come along at night, but only to see if we were all right.”

Inside the ballroom attached to the Queens, Johnny Ace was listening to a four-piece called the Rapiers which had adopted the thin lapelled suits and synchronised dance steps of the Shadows. They stood on stage alongside a chromed Norton, coaxing from their guitars a Duane Eddy twang which is forever associated in Johnny’s mind with the Rockola jukebox at the Ace, the cafe on the Kingston by-pass from which he took his name. On the site of that cafe there is now a tyre depot. Johnny, a 44 year old truck driver, has the names of his four children tattooed on his arm.

Ever since he bought his first motorcycle, a BSA Bantam back in 1954, it has been his ambition to go to America, and it was with some pain that he listened to Len, up on stage, outlining the scheduled itinerary for the Rockers’ Reunion tour of the USA in March 1986. It included the race track at Daytona, Graceland where Elvis lived, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Niagara Falls and Disneyland. Johnny doubted he would be able to lay his hands on the requisite grand. But he could find solace at home among his 3,000 singles and 200 LPs.

Away from the permanent night of the dance floor, holidaymakers and day trippers were choc-a-block all along the front, frocks pulled up over knees to let in some sun, newspapers folded over heads — all the reassuring cliches of a lovely day at the seaside. Two Rockers’ Reunion boys from Brixton had gone swimming in their jeans and leathers and now stood shivering by an ice cream van. One of the boys had his message tattooed on his arm: “Helmet Law Sucks. Outlaw. Born To Lose.”

The rockers left the Queens under police escort at 4.45 and made good time to the Ace of Hearts cafe on the A13, one of those roadside diners that have somehow survived motorways and fast food concessions. Some 40 bikers crowded round the formica to watch Mike Halewood’s triumph over Agostini at the Isle of Man, which was playing on the video.

Outside, Baby Blue was holding court. Her husband, whom she met on Chelsea Bridge in 1969, was auctioning a load of parts that had been dumped in a plastic tray. “It’s a complete Norton Commando 850,” Len said through the loudhailer. ’’There’s fuck all missing.”

It was sold for £217. The Norton and the Triton that had been transported to Southend and back in the Transit failed to reach their reserve price of £900 each. A leather jacket that had belonged to the lead singer of the Rapiers fetched £20.

Out on the forecourt a fifties rock and roll tape was playing loud from a rusting white American convertible, a couple of rockers propped up against each shark fin. Leaning against the cafe were a cook in his white vest and another blonde with hair the colour of nicotine stained ivory. Across the road, in a white thirties bp garage, someone was performing spins and wheelies. And as the sun sank below the Ace of Hearts, it all looked like a British reworking of some Hopper roadside, this weirdly persistent struggle to inhabit an idea of America astride an old British motorcycle.

Baby Blue led the charge back up the A13 to Chelsea Bridge.

A hard rain falls on the peace march: anti-war movement's march against the war in the Falkland Islands by Ian Walker (New Society, 27 May 1982)

Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set of his articles from his time writing for New Society but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my longstanding admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background, and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.

A hard rain falls on the peace march: anti-war movement's march against the war in the Falkland Islands by Ian Walker

This uncensored despatch is brought to you from the front-line of the anti-war movement, marching through the rain this deadly Protestant Sunday, fired up by the torturous logic of McDonald, ace MOD, who told us before the Cup Final we had sent in the boys to show that armed aggression would not (could not!) pay, and marching then to become a one-minute blot of opposition on the evening news, I met the photographer, Jurgen—a Kraut, I ask you, on an assignment such as this—outside the Marble Arch McDonalds. The Odeon a few doors down was re-running Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.

“Do you agree it is madness, the war?” Jurgen said, walking towards Speaker’s Corner. 1 said I agreed, which meant he could tell me that the way his liberal English friends had become defensive nationalists overnight reminded him of his time in South Africa, where the whites always froze when he tried to bring up apartheid. Out on the park, beyond the green canvas of the empty deckchairs flapping in the wind and rain, the first thousand or so had gathered by two o’clock.

The newspaper sellers hustled their sheets through the crowd. I paid 20p for the newsletter of the Committee for Human Rights in Argentina. Its front page showed a sad-faced mother at a recent demonstration in Buenos Aires, holding a placard which said: “The Malvinas are Argentinian, but so are the disappeared people.”

A gaggle of reporters had surrounded a man who was explaining forcibly why he was opposed to the march. “If someone nicks your pint from the bar,” he said, “you ask for it back. If you don’t get it, you have to give him some of that.” His fist hit his palm. An American steelworker who said he was in London on holiday and in the park for peace took up the story. But say the other guy claimed it was his pint, he said. Rather than fight it out, wouldn’t it be better to talk it over with the barman?

The argument deadlocked, the American strolled off, laughing at a protester who’d constructed a hat from hate-Argy headlines which have decorated recent numbers of the Sun. It was falling apart in the rain.

I stood talking to a 28 year old secretary from Birmingham and her friend, who was embarrassed that she worked for a chartered accountant. “I’m as upset when it’s an Argentinian as I am when it’s a British soldier gets killed,” said the Brummie. “It’s just totally crazy.”

Speeches were being delivered from a lorry. No one took much notice, apart from a lone and fat loyalist barking out old favourites, like “get back to Russia,” until a speech-maker made the blood rush to his head by asking who, exactly, our boys were fighting and dying for? “They are fighting for you. For you,” screamed the barracker. “Traitors.”

He battered his skull in desperation at these people, who resisted the embrace of the nation, who felt no pride, only guilt at their connivance in the English way, saying please and thank you, queueing at bus stops and dreaming of a win on the pools, leaving Hyde Park in an orderly procession at 2.30 pm, church groups at the head of the march.

Two guitarists wanted to get the people singing in the rain. “Ain’t gonna study war no more,” they tried, their heads turning and asking for voices. But people were too self-conscious, too wet, or too aware that the currency of the old peace anthem has got devalued through the years.

I walked for a while behind the banner of the West Middlesex branch of the Communist Party, talking to a middle aged school teacher who said she was sickened by the hypocrisy of it all: a government that had always supported fascists now claiming to fight fascists? “I was rising nine when the first world war broke out,” cut in her friend, still at 77 marching upright on blue sensible shoes. “Mrs Thatcher wants to get the whole country thinking she’s Joan of Arc.”

‘Too young to die’

Rainstorms were followed by brief spates of sun. One of those days, people concluded. The weather may explain the English stoicism, but not the jingoism, nor the politesse, I was thinking, trailing along behind a home-made placard which said, “Mrs Thatcher. Are your victims really necessary?” Quite so.

Some heads were turned by the boom of a massive stereo-cassette, playing a jazz-funk tape at top volume, and humped along by Clinton Friend, a 20 year old white from Ladbroke Grove. “Nah. Don’t usually come on marches. But I’m too young to die,” he said, turning down the volume control so we could talk all right. He stood at about five foot five, had tattoos on both arms, wore black leggings over his jeans. He had worked as a car park attendant, till he was laid off last April, he said, transferring the boom-box from one hand to the other.

Isn’t it a drag, I said, shlepping that thing all around London? “Yeah,” he said. “But I brought it along to help me unwind. And it annoys the police. They keep telling me to turn it down.”

Clinton lives in a Cyrenian hostel off the Ladbroke Road. “Better than home. You can do what you like,” he said, flicking his head in recognition of the two friends, both black, who had started walking alongside.

“Stop the navy, pay the nurses,” said one of them, Henderson, whose mother is a nurse in a hospital, St Mary’s at Paddington, scheduled for closure. Winston said through a stutter that his mother was a nurse too. Going down Grosvenor Place, it started raining again. Clinton wrapped up the boom-box in black plastic.

“No to the chauvinism of all the bourgeois parties,” chanted the small contingent from the Communist Party of Great Britain : (Marxist-Leninist), down by Victoria failure-is-unthinkable Station. It is not in truth the kind of chant you can really wind into. The ' problem is in the show-vin-is-m.

A leafletter proffered one of his A5 sheets to two women sheltering in the porch of the Esso Petroleum office block. “Fuck off,” they said, in unison, waving him away with frantic gestures. He didn’t stay to protest.

I got into conversation with a computer programmer called Jimmy, who said that the experience of the last six or seven weeks, or however bleeding long it was since the ships set sail, had been like watching a car crash in slow motion.

Behind the PROTEST AND SURVIVE banner, white on black, were the same group of minstrels with painted faces who had marched with CND last October, when their trumpets and tubas, trombones and flutes, had a more exuberant sound. The peace movement then seemed to have come in from the cold. There were mass protests all over western Europe, ushering in, some thought, a new phase of post-war history: Europe slowly slipping from the clutches of the United States. The banners all said NO TO CRUISE and NO TO TRIDENT and no one ever dreamed of being rocked back on their heels by a war waged with frigates and Harriers and Sea Kings?

Walking past the Army and Navy department store, I decided the path of this match was so soaked in ironic detail it wasn’t really worth writing down, especially as the ink was blotting in the rain, and the point of the report anyway was to record that at the height of this mass outbreak of atavism, : there were in London some 7,000 souls at least who thought it sinful that hundreds should die so the Kelpers could again drive on the left.

Four Buddhist monks, beating drums with curved sticks, lent to their section of the parade an urgency, the beat, which was absent from the main body, drifting through the drizzle, chanting half-heartedly at times, but mainly just embroiled in the kind of conversation millions would be having in different corners of the nation, on strolls consequent upon the roast beef.

The nation has gone to war. But perhaps it takes a while for the battles to become real while the war is still lived by the British as a parlour game played on Newsnight by retired rear admirals, air commodores and the rest. If there had been war photographs, war newsreels, war correspondence, instead of Eagle-style kerrunch graphics and PR pictures of children smiling while marines raised the union jack, then perhaps the mood everywhere would be different. Down here on the march the war can, as yet, only be described as a kind of aberration: Falklands madness, craziness, lunacy, a nightmare and a car crash.

The procession wound round Parliament Square, where tourists stared and took snapshots. Three workmen on a break leaned up against the metal barriers which lined the rest of the route. Two of the workmen, sniggering, pointed out all the people wearing funny clothes, but the third, a fortyish man in a dirty jumper, was more considered. “You know, I really don’t understand them. Because of all the people who fought the Spanish fascists in 1936, it was them, these people,” he said, addressing a finger at some faces beneath banners and placards. He shook his head, pulled out a tin of Old Holborn. Big Ben’s cracked face showed ten to four.

Past Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, at the top end of Whitehall, a mighty blast of the national anthem from speakers set up on the third and fourth floors, above the Rabb Inns Steak Bar (sirloin steak with all the trimmings, £4.80), drowned out all chants and conversations. Banners were draped up there; but from my angle 1 couldn’t read them, so I asked a policeman on the other side of the street what they said.

“I think it says traitors or something, the top one,” he said. “And then, ‘Free the Falklands’ and, hang about, ‘Ban the Benn’.” God Save the Queen was followed by Land of Hope and Glory. This counter-protest took place bang opposite the Whitehall Theatre, where Anyone for Denis was in its nth great week. “Outrageously funny,” Daily Mail. Thinking of the close-up of Denis Thatcher’s neck muscles straining through Abide With Me on Saturday, I was reminded too of the gusto with which, for once, Wembley ripped into the anthem, after Brian Clough, on ITV, had said that Ricky Villa (Ricardo could never be one of us), Tottenham’s Argentinian star, should have struck a blow for democracy by having the bottle to go out on that green and pleasant pitch, to show all those rag-tag-and-bob-tails from that God-forsaken corner of the world what liberal tolerance is all about.

Such thoughts were interrupted by a tap on the shoulder from a tall young man in a brown corduroy jacket. “Harry Phibbs,” he said, handing me his card. I don’t care what Harry does, but Harry wanted to tell me that he was one of the people who had organised (he nationalist binge over the steak bar. A Young Conservative, he was also a member of the Coalition for Peace through Security.

“New Society? Great. I can give you a good quote,” he said brightly. “We’re against all this, er, rabble, that’s a good word, and we think the Falkland Islanders have a right to be British.” Carrying a blue box of Croxley script, Harry disappeared up the back alley where ten policemen had gone in order to effect an entry, take down those banners, turn off the stereo. It was ten past four by the time the brouhaha had died down, and I walked on up, past the Souvenir Soda Fountain and the Tennessee Pancake House, into Trafalgar Square, where the speakers were huddled under umbrellas by the base of Nelson’s Column.

Proceedings were kicked off by the Catholic bishop for the diocese of Westminster, who closed his speech with a recital of the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t hear anyone else joining in. Rafael, who had served five years in an Argentinian jail, said from the platform that he was implacably opposed to the junta, but that he believed, nonetheless, that the Malvinas, taken by force by the British in 1833, belonged to Argentina. He was loudly cheered by the Revolutionary Communist Party, who are opposed to any attempt, by either military or diplomatic means, to restore the islands to British rule.

Bill Deal, president of the Fire Brigades Union, attacked the shadow cabinet for giving Thatcher licence to send the task force. He was in the middle of a call for the unity of all anti-war groups, when an explosion of thunder took his sentence apart. “Christ,” he said. “I’m not sure He’s on my side.” As the rain came down again in sheets, 1 took shelter underneath an SWP placard, Blood on Thatcher's hands, it said.

The sun came out again, while Tony Benn was saying that half a million people marched against nuclear weapons in Tokyo that morning, and that the very first time he spoke at Trafalgar Square was in 1956, when the nation was cheering off the task force Eden despatched to Suez. It was still raining slightly, so the sun should by rights have made a rainbow. I looked all round, but couldn’t see one, just more black cloud blowing in from the north.

Beneath the city streets by Ian Walker (New Society, 15 January 1981)

Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set of his articles from his time writing for New Society but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my longstanding admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background, and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.

Beneath the city streets by Ian Walker

“Rain this morning got to it,” says the superintendent, pointing to the collapsed brick wall of a sewer which was built more than a century ago. The superintendent, Francis Dillon, has been a sewer worker in Bolton for 47 years. His five men, in hard hats and jump suits, labour in the mud, shouting to each other above the whirr of an electric pump which is diverting sewage around the collapse.

Down this street, lined on one side by redbrick terraces, Dillon walks me away from the noise. The other side of the street is a cotton mill turned tube warehouse. Another mill, next to a railway line 50 yards away, is now making seats for Fords. But the sewerage system, 100 miles of which were built between 1860 and 1880 when Bolton was a boom town, is still doing the job for which it was intended. At current prices it would cost £53 million to replace the Victorian sewers with ones that didn’t cave in after heavy rain. Bolton metropolitan borough has an annual budget of £2 million for sewerage projects.

“I’ve earned a good living from it,” says Dillon, sucking on his pipe. “It a challenge. Every job’s different. It’s not always regarded as a skilled job; but on the other hand it is—timbering and all that. Very skilled.” Walking back to the collapsed sewer, he says that all these different chemicals they’re using now for car-spraying and such like are getting into the sewers, giving off poisonous gases. He shakes his head.

Parked next to the tube warehouse is a yellow van containing the safety equipment. David Wilkins, who has been a sewer worker for eleven years, shows me how it all works. “This is a gas detector,” he says, pulling out what looks like a biggish transistor radio. It has flashing red lights and an alarm device which buzzes when it detects gas.

He points to a small oxygen tank. “That gives you 15 minutes. If it’s a long job we use these,” Wilkins says, tapping a five foot high tank. “That gives you about eight hours. And we’ve got another one so we can keep going all the time. . . And we’ve just got a radio too.”

Some of the sewers are six foot in diameter, some three foot and others only two foot. “You more or less crawl up them,” Wilkins says. He does maintenance as well as getting called out on emergencies like this one. Often he does repair work at night, starting at 11 pm and finishing at 5 am. Sometimes, during heavy flooding, he has to work a straight 24 hours. A married man, with four children, he is on £74 basic. “With the overtime you can just about scrape by.”

“Better than being on the dole, isn’t it?” adds his workmate, Steve Pollitt, who has just walked into the van. David Wilkins is in the Transport and General, Pollit in General and Municipal Workers, two of the five unions involved in the current water workers’ dispute. “Weeks you get no overtime in pay packet, you throw your cap in at wife before you walk in and that. Terrible,” says Pollitt, who has three children. He has been with the council for a while, but only on sewers for a year. He thinks it’s great, “It’s varied all the time. Different jobs and that.” Didn’t it bother him when he first went down?

“I was a bit doubtful at first, but you get used to it. A lot of blokes won’t go down there. I was on a course, and a lot of the blokes panicked, like. Nothing to be ashamed of. If it doesn’t suit, it doesn’t suit.”

“It’s a bit warmer down there,” says David Wilkins. “Only thing is rats, when they won’t bugger off. You just shout, and usually they run off. But you get the odd one that’ll stand its ground and look at you.” They don’t even attack, do they? “No, they don’t bother you.”

Sewers aren’t dangerous, these men say, if you follow the drill and you’ve got the right gear. The only thing that sometimes worries them is Weil’s Disease (a form of jaundice, transmitted by rats), which David Wilkins reckons you can catch if you get cut while you’re down a sewer, or if something gets in the mouth. “Had one of our lads in for checks not long ago, put him in quarantine and that. He was okay, like. It’s very rare.”

Danger, anyway, always adds a dash of glamour. Standing up there by the gear, Wilkins in his green PVC suit, Pollitt in an orange one, these two talk about their work with real pride: they’re bored by all the shit jokes made at their expense, upset about public lack of interest in sewerage. (Interest is, of course, awakened under threat of a strike, as now). “People don’t understand anything about it. There’s a manhole in the road, and water underneath, and that’s as far as it goes.” Everyone wants more recognition.

Alan Howarth, one of three assistant directors of engineering in the borough, drives me to a £700,000 sewerage system under construction in Westhoughton on the outskirts of Bolton.

He parks the maroon Dolomite by one of the Portakabins on the construction HQ and introduces me to the site engineer, Harry Mitchell, who says that all the sewers in Westhoughton were built around 1875. “In them days, as you know, labour was very cheap. They had gangs of 20 and 30 navvies spading on to carts. They had good engineering. They knew what they was doing. But they wasn’t particular about detail. Course, these were the days of horses and carts, and a toilet at the end of the street.” These days the pipelines in new systems are set straight by laser beams.

I get changed into blue overalls, wellingtons and a white hard hat, so that Mitchell can take me to the new sewer they’re tunnelling. I follow him down a rocky ladder to the mud at the bottom of the heading. The small truck, on rails, which brings out the clay has just been emptied. Lit by a string of light bulbs, the tunnel is four feet high—too low to walk in, too high to crawl. Hump-backed, we slouch through the puddles till we get to the two Irish miners at the face.

Vince Dunne is taking a breather, smoking a cigarette. He and his workmate, Ray Falsey, are both caked in clay. There’s a strong smell of sweat. Dunne points at a tree trunk embedded in the face: that is what’s holding them up. These two are on £60 a day, and can make up to £400 a week with overtime. “Top hand, eh, Harry?” Dunne boasts. His boss nods, says he’s lucky to have him. Dunne has been tunnelling for 24 years.

He attacks the clay around the tree trunk with a clay-spade, which is like a pneumatic drill. The noise in this small tunnel is ear-splitting. Dunne screws up his face against the flying fragments of clay. Falsey, the surgeon’s assistant, then hands over the circular saw and, after two minutes sawing, Dunne picks up a hammer and deals huge blows to the trunk, which still won’t budge. I walk back down the tunnel with Harry Mitchell. When we get to the end, there is a triumphant shout. Vince Dunne has won his battle with the tree trunk.

Back at the council’s engineering department, Alan Howarth and his colleague, Gordon Sheldon, are talking about the major sewer accidents they’ve had in Bolton. In 1958 there was a massive sewer collapse in Fylde Street: they show me the pictures. It looks like an earthquake. The whole street had to be demolished. The next big collapse was in 1976.

Most dangerous of all, through, was a| caved-in sewer which created a huge hole ; under a busy road used by double-decker buses. People could have been killed. 

I ask him what might happen if the strike went ahead. “Sewage spilling into the streets,” interrupts Alan Howarth. “That’s the emotive thing someone on the radio was talking about. Bubbling up out of the grids. . . Still, I suppose if a sewer got blocked, and no one went to unblock it. . .”

In 999 cases out of 1,000, says Sheldon, ; the sewage would end up in the water supply. “It’s not nice, no,” he says. “But sewage does get into the water supply anyway. There’s less risk to health than sewage on the street.”

“I thought, ‘What an emotive thing’: causes alarm and despondency,” Howarth continues, gloomily. “Although if someone wrecked it, if you got sabotage. . .” His eyes light up. “We could soon get sewage running in the street, couldn’t we?”

“Yes,” says Sheldon. “We could all right.”

Awayday at Henley by Ian Walker (New Society, 10th July 1980)

Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set from his New Society days but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.

Awayday at Henley by Ian Walker

Young boys in boaters stare lustfully at future wives now covered in pastel silks and cottons. Old boys dressed as schoolboys in caps and blazers stagger along the meadow like sick jokes in search of a punch-line. “So typically English,” recite the Americans and Australians who’ve made it past the blue-uniformed security guards into the steward’s enclosure here at the Henley Regatta last week.

The Grenadier Guards play Day Tripper and the race commentator drones on, "St Joseph’s Preparatory School striking 41.” But only a handful of hard-core rowing fanatics pay any attention. The real sport, this morning in the sun, is to be had promenading the wide green avenues between the river, the grandstand and the three bars.

“What’s it made of?” one schoolboy inquires of another, pushing the foliage in his glass with a Pimms plastic agitator. “Gin?” replies his friend, studying a Greta Garbo lookalike, black veil pendant from box hat, who sweeps past. Another woman loses her hat in the wind so a gallant can retrieve it before it blows into the Thames.

Intruding upon the discreet sexuality of the occasion is a model, here with a photographer to do some glamour shots, wearing a black satin skirt slit to the top of her thigh. “Shouldn’t be allowed,” grunts one of the blazer brigade. The model is being followed around by a gaggle of schoolboys. One of them wins out. She poses in his boater and he gets to put his arm round her.

“We don’t get to see too much of it,” says a Grenadier Guard saxophonist when he’s finished playing Hey Jude. “Just sit here all day.” Underneath the bandstand, Which like all the marquees and stands is candy-striped in blue and white, the Guards will provide the cabaret till eight tonight.

An 18 year old security guard keeping watch over museum pieces in an adjacent marquee earns around £50 a week, depending on how much overtime he does. His firm specialises in keeping yahoos out of the upmarket enclosures at events like the South of England Show and Brands Hatch. “It used to be really nice,” says a middle- aged man inside this makeshift museum, examining an 1877 oil painting of the regatta. “Everyone out on their boats and punts.” His companion sighs wistfully.

One foursome on a punt attempt to recreate this spirit of ’77: champagne in an ice bucket, strawberries and cream, the art deco trumpet on their antique record player blaring out old 78s. There is a part of England will be forever twee. An awayday from modernism to a toytown by a river framed in champagne-blurred soft-focus, all greenness and white, sweet smelling and so polite.

I saw one black woman in the Steward’s Enclosure, accompanied by a white man. It’s a hard place to break into, even if you have got the five quid admission charge. For those without the contacts, the money, or the inclination, there is the Regatta Enclosure (entrance fee, £2) downriver.

Here you can buy hamburgers and hot dogs. Women can wear trousers and men can take their jackets off. Rows of OAPs sit on foldaway chairs, families eat cheese sandwiches from Tupperware containers, young couples sunbathe on the grass. The security man guarding the gate between the Steward’s and Regatta Enclosures wipes some sweat from the back of his neck and asks me what time the last race is on? 7.45pm. Six hours to go. Jesus.

Past another heavily guarded boatclub, the Remenham, I walk down the river to the starting line. Old boys on bicycles bellow, “towpath,” out of loud hailers. A black steel band entertains the white guests aboard the Pink Champagne, moored the other side of the river. Steel band rhythms, the calypso cliche, are in tune with the day, jolly and lightweight. No reggae at the Regatta.

Back in the Steward’s Enclosure at four, the guardstands are packed. The six-deep rows of deckchairs next to the Thames are full of people sleeping off the lunchtime wine, the women’s bare shoulders burning in the sun. Four schoolboys standing in the Fawley Bar are trying to get a good angle on the two drunk women sitting in front of them, trying to look up their pink frocks. “I’ve been seeing her every night this week and she’s not easy,” another teenager confides in his friend, over a Pimms. “I respect her for that,” he says, as an afterthought.

In the Champagne Bar (cheapest bottle £12.50, dearest £16.50) five men slumped round a table, which supports them and the four bottles they’ve got through since lunch slur “cheerzz” ritualistically. One of them has a sneezing bout, spattering lines of snot down his light blue blazer. An American sings God bless America. “I like big whites in black,” says another drunk, pointing at a fat waitress collecting glasses.

“I chat a bit, but you get no response whatsoever,” says Louise, one of the waitresses. “Blank faces I get. We’re just servants.” Louise is 20, she hopes to go to art college in Edinburgh if her A level grades are good enough. Working for Bear Catering all summer, she’s done Oxford college balls and lunch at Blenheim Palace. She gets £1 an hour. “Great, eh?” she grins. “I started at seven, and I’ll finish at eight. At least, we were supposed to finish at eight, but I don't think there’s much chance.”

Louise says she’s never seen anything like this, “Hundreds and hundreds of bottle's of champagne drunk today . . . In Edinburgh we’ve got the festival, but nothing as decadent as this.” Chairs knocked over, glasses smashed, she shakes her head. One couple fall over and decide to stay there, locked in an eye-closed kiss on the grass littered with fag ends and Pimms stirrers,

At five to eight the grandstands are deserted. Green canvas on long rows of deckchairs billows in the wind. One of the last to leave the Champagne Bar picks up an empty bottle and stares down its nozzle. The Grenadiers sign off with The Queen  . . .  In the town a long queue stretches back from the chip shop.

The road to Southend by Ian Walker (New Society, 13 March 1980)

Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set from his New Society days but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.

The road to Southend by Ian Walker

The remains of a neon BINGO hang from the half-moon portico of a 1930s cinema which has corrugated iron all over its doorways and windows. A tea house and Madame Rosalind’s (“Palmist and Clairvoyant”) are all boarded up, too, The only place on this street doing any business is a cut-price store which has great rolls of carpet propped up outside in the rain. From this empty street it’s a steep climb down to Southend’s burned out pier.

Alf Pullen has lived in Southend for the last 30 years. Retired now, at 66, he comes down to the promenade most days to sit in one of the blue-and-white huts that run all along the front. “All sorts of things are closing down,” he says. “People on short time, on the three-day week, that kind of thing. The atmosphere was better before they built that shopping precinct. People came down here and used to enjoy themselves.” He’s complaining that the council let the gas board build an office block on the seafront, when his theme is disturbed by three loud booms.

“That’s from Shoebery,” he says, pointing down the Eastern Esplanade. “Some experimental military place. They try out new things, got half the beach. Can’t let people on it because of all the unexploded shells.”

It sounds like world war three, started ahead of schedule, over the road in the Monte Carlo arcade. Electronic explosions on the Space Invaders, bells and buzzes on the pinball tables, rifle shots, ejaculating one-armed bandits, simulated growling of Grand Prix cars. You can hardly hear the disco number that an off-work drill operator, here with three schoolgirls, has put on the jukebox. What does he think of Southend? “Shit,” he says, smiling.

In the arcade next door, run by a northerner called Jack, it’s much quieter. Just a few women wheeling infants round on pushchairs and a couple of OAPs waiting for a few more to show so they can have a game of bingo. The caller has a Bureau of Police, Richmond, Virginia, badge on his short-sleeved blue shirt. He’s reading the Southend Standard. Lead story is about teachers who don’t mark books. “Prisoners of death block,” on page three, is about suicide and Valium in a ten-storey block of flats. A cat was discovered in a lift shaft on page five. Today’s by-election in Southend East makes it on page 13.

Jack sits before stacks of cans containing pears, carrots and soup. “The truth is,” he says, “the place is going downhill and absolutely without any action from the council, who are trying to turn Southend into a commuter town for London. The council let the pier go downhill after the main part was burned down three years ago. They got these high-falluting plans for a £200 million marina and the rest of it and, of course, it all falls through. You used to get a lot of families down from London once, but not now. The fares have gone up so much, £2.60 for a single. If a man brings his family down, that’s a tenner before he gets anywhere. It’s an expensive do, coming to Southend, now.”

In season Jack would have over 200 bingo games a day, but at this time of year it’s down to 30 or 40. “Just ticking over,” he says. “It’s just the old locals, and they come mainly for the foodstuffs. Three cans of soup for one win. Get a bit lucky and it’s cheaper than the shops.”

I’m walking up the hill which leads from the seafront to the high street when the rain turns to hail. In a doorway next to a tattooist’s, a middle-aged Welsh woman I’d noticed back in Jack’s is sheltering. “Look at the front,” she spits, staring down the hill. “They call it the Golden Mile. What do you think of it? Bloody tatty, that’s what it is. All we get down here these days are the drunks, the skinheads and the rock-and-rollers. Jack’s had a lot of trouble with them, you know.” Inside the tattooist’s, which advertises “bright colours, modern equipment,” a young bloke in a combat jacket inspects the designs that are pinned to the. wills. Two girls toy with the idea of getting their ears pierced for four quid.

The Palace Hotel, at the top of Pier Hill, must have been quite ritzy in its day, before the white paint crumbled and before the bingo parlour was installed on the ground floor. Now it’s the flop-house with the best seaview in town. Jack said the council put up homeless here who can’t be housed anywhere else. In the Palace’s amusement arcade four 14 year old girls from nearby Benfleet are trying to amuse themselves.

“We came to go roller-skating, but it wasn’t open. We’re going to McDonalds now, then look around for some records.” These girls think Southend’s great. More to do here than there is in Benfleet. They’re looking forward to the time, in a couple of years, when they can go disco in Southend, they say, walking up the high street for their hamburgers. Past the message spray-painted in black on a boarded-up Betty’s Restaurant: “In all your decadence people die.”

Although the pier's superstructure was destroyed, fishermen were allowed on to the walkway tip until 28 February; according to a council notice at the entrance to the pier. An amusement arcade, bowling alley and cafe are all the entertainment now on offer at the surviving front end of the pier. Through the cafe windows you can see across the water to the industrial islands of Sheppey and Canvey, the Shellhaven refineries. The pier divides the town. Eastward it’s the Golden Mile. Westward it’s residential, green lawns, women in fur hats taking classy dogs for walks..

One of these women walking along the West Cliff says she is happy in Southend, “Although I must say I preferred the old high street to the shopping precinct. But that’s progress I suppose, isn’t it?”

I drive out for a twilight tour of the Shoeburyness military base. Some of the best beach in town is on the military range. I drive alongside barbed wire past tall grey buildings with green guns parked outside, on past Wakering church graveyard and down a bumpy mudtrack as far as you can go, to the MOD checkpoint. There is a small island all lit up. I’m told they store “atomic hardware” out there. Maplin Sands are out there, too. “I’ve watched shark out there come in with the tide following the mackerel shoals,” a man tells me.

On the way back I go past an office block which is said to have stood empty for ten years before becoming one of the VAT headquarters. I travel down an underpass, which he calls Southend’s folly. “You drive down there and you just have to turn round and come back,” a cabbie tells me. “It doesn’t lead anywhere. They put it in hoping they’d get the airport. They say it cost millions of pounds.” He shrugs, “The road to nowhere.”

Back in the centre of town, a crowd of skinheads have gathered in McDonalds. A market research woman buttonholes people as they walk through the door. She wants to know what they think of the service, how often they eat here, what papers they read, the last time they went to the cinema.

One boy sits in the corner trying to shield a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken with his hand, but he is noticed. “I don’t think you ought to be eating that here,” says one of the managers, a McDonalds kipper tie over his white shirt, as he escorts the boy to the exit.

“Raining,” one skinhead says as he steps outside. “Fucking rain,” replies his mate. They turn their collars up, hunch their shoulders into the rainfall and make for the pub on the corner. Inside, a sepia photo of King George hangs over a pink-and-purple neon jukebox playing the current No. 1, Atomic. ’There are skins, hippies, punk and teds all in the same bar, but nothing happens. No one here would make it past the bouncers at any of the town’s six discos. Respectable dress only.

Some of the unrespectables gather later at a seafront pub called the Ivy House, on the Golden Mile. A DJ plays soul and reggae and sixties hits, but there’s no dancing. No licence and no room. Someone smashes an orange glass lampshade on his way out, but that’s the only violence all night. After closing time, queues form first at the hamburger stand next door and then at the bus stop. The lights from the refineries look beautiful at night.

“Morning, nice morning,” chirps a tramp the next day. He isn’t asking for money, either. A green Tory Cortina cruises down the seafront playing brass band music out of a PA rigged up next to a Teddy Taylor banner. A brown Mini urges Saturday morning shoppers to vote Liberal. Labour activists in the precinct hand out leaflets which avoid mentioning Southend.

Cold turkey in Harlem by Ian Walker (New Society, 6 March 1980)

Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set from his New Society days but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.

Cold turkey in Harlem by Ian Walker

Heroin addiction is becoming an increasing worry in Britain. This is the New York scene.

Salvatore Domani—the surname means “tomorrow”—glanced round the bar to make sure no one was looking, then rolled up his shirtsleeve to show me a small scar on his inside left arm. “I reckon I musta shot $250,000 worth of heroin into there,” he said.

Salvatore, his friends call him Sal, kicked the habit five years ago. The State Department estimated that in New York City, during 1979, there were approximately 164.000 who hadn’t kicked it. Another 35.000 or so New Yorkers are now hooked on a lime-green liquid called methadone, invented by German scientists in world war two and now given out free to heroin addicts by the New York City Methadone Maintenance Programme.

This is a story about the effect of a drug on a city. About a life on the streets led by Sal when he was pumping $300 worth of heroin into his veins daily. About the administrators who run New York’s methadone programme. About some old Chinese men who were opium addicts when they came over to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and who now meet every day in a room on the fourth floor of the Lower East Side Service Centre in Chinatown to drink methadone, smoke cigarettes and talk.

I met Sal in a bar in Brooklyn. His father was a Sicilian sailor who raised the family in the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn. “The streets were mean and I ran with mean people, tough kids who’d commit burglaries and homicide, no trouble,” said Sal, who started working when he was nine, as a butcher’s boy. Now, at 32, he works in the machine room at the New York Daily News. His father died young; so he was, he said, “the man of the house from the age of twelve.” Which meant he had neither the time nor the money to get involved in the drug culture till he was much older.

Sal remembers the first time he snorted heroin. He was at someone’s house. A friend brought out a plate with a mountain of heroin. “He said, ‘C’mon, you won’t get hooked just doing it once. You of all people.’ Me, the street-wise tough kid. I tried it and it was a big mistake,” he laughed. “But I only know that now.”

Whether they quit the drug or not, junkies have to live with the sensation heroin provides for the rest of their lives. The temptation never goes away. Even now, five years after he kicked, Sal gets almost ecstatic describing the euphoria: “An eighth or a sixteenth of a teaspoon of powder on the tip of a matchstick. Two or three inhalations and the feeling that comes over you is absolutely unbelievable. I can’t equate it with nothing. Not sexual orgasm, not winning money. It’s the greatest, the grandaddy of them all. There’s no other feeling, none . . . and when you get to the point when you send it into your pit [veins] no words can describe it.”

He continued snorting but, as is always the case, the dosage increases while the euphoria diminishes. Meanwhile, the amount of powder Sal was snorting was destroying the tissues in his nose. “On the street, the expression for getting a syringe is ‘getting your wings.’ Some junkies pride themselves on giving somebody their wings. Others will say, ‘I ain’t giving you any injection. I’m not gonna be the one to give you your fucking wings’.”

To inject heroin, junkies put the powder in a bottle cap with a few drops of water and “cook it up,” heat the cap over a lit match until the liquid starts to bubble: that’s the heroin solution. And that’s what is injected, first into the muscular tissue and then, just a short time later, into the veins. “You realise finally there’s only one way to do this thing and that’s to send it straight into your fucking heart, immediately.”

The ‘shooting galleries’

Wherever heroin is sold, Sal says, it’s used. In New York, it’s where the bureaucrats call the “core ghetto areas,” Harlem and the South Bronx and Bedford Stuyvesant. Sal would go along to “shooting galleries” in Harlem. “Heroin makes you an outcast because you spend the entire time looking for it, it’s all that’s on your mind. You will not seek out anyone’s company for any reason that doesn’t have to do with this substance. So you limit yourself to running around with junkies.”

The shooting galleries are storefronts, cellars, rooftops, wherever addicts converge to shoot heroin. “In Harlem, the galleries would hold as many as 40 to 50 people at a time. The way it works is you find the shill in the street.” [Shillibeer was a German in the hearse business. The word shill has somehow come to mean go-between or side-kick.] “There’s a look about him that you recognise and a look about you that he recognises, A passer-by wouldn’t see it.

“The shill will say, ‘You lookin’? You lookin’?’ In Harlem they sell dope in quarters, but it doesn’t mean $25. I don’t know what it means, if it’s some specific weight, but a quarter in Harlem these days is $70. And they come in these big envelopes, about a headed teaspoon of white powder. White Harlem dope has a lot of quinine in it. When you inject yourself, it makes you itch. Brown Mexican dope doesn’t have so much quinine. They cut it with bonita, a horse laxative, which is very bad. It’s similar to cocaine and it jolts your fucking heart.” That’s why heroin’s called junk and that’s why many people believe that the provision of pharmaceutical, pure heroin would be a better option than methadone.

“You go into where the shill sends you. There’s a guy standing. He takes your money, disappears a moment, comes back and gives you your package. For convenience, they also sell throwaway syringes and needles. So if you want a whole set-up you tell them, ‘Set me up would ya?’ And he gives you something to cook the dope up in, a clean bottle cap with a little piece of cotton in it. You go into a room where there’s a whole bunch of mattresses or pillows. The place is dimly lit. It stinks. All over the floor are opened up and discarded envelopes, bottle caps, wads of cotton, blood on them. All around there’s cups of dirty water with blood in them that they used to clean their syringes.”

Junkies use belts as tourniquets; but as time goes on, all the available veins collapse. They start injecting all over their body: “I seen a nice-looking young girl, but she had the tombstones in her eyes, take her pants down and inject herself right here,” Sal pointed to his groin, "not two inches from her bush. I seen another guy hit himself in the vein in his neck. I seen a guy stick the needle in his cock. I seen people looking in the mirror stick it in the vein under their tongue. Most incredible sight I ever saw was a black guy who sat down in his chair like this,” he stretched out both his arms. “And he had a girlfriend on either side. Each cooked up a bottle-cap for him and each shot him up simultaneously.”

Sal was using heroin from 1968 to 1974. At the peak, for a period of 18 months, he was pumping $300 worth a day into his system. I asked him how he got hold of that kind of money and he said he hustled, dealt, conned, borrowed and never paid it back. “I went through every aunt, uncle, neighbour, friend, and I would rotate it . . . I tell you I had clothing, books, great collection of jazz records, jewellery, stereo, TV, pots and pans, candlesticks. As you begin to methodically pick your house clean, you have the entire inventory in your head: what things are worth and in what order you should get rid of them. The day comes when you put the key in the door and there’s a bare apartment and no toilet paper in the place.” When that day came, Sal went and slept in doorways.

But the day came when Sal ran out of friends and relatives and street contacts to hustle. “I was so sick, so sick. I needed that shot so bad, so bad I needed it. I just didn’t have the money and my next step was to go out and pull a gun or clock an old lady. I couldn’t do it. So I managed to scrape up $10 or $12. Now I thought of buying with that. But $10 or $12 of heroin? It wouldn’t even have relieved my nose running or my diarrhoea. After a while, $300 is just enough so you are well enough not to throw up.”

At a methadone clinic Sal scored a bottle of methadone off someone he knew. “I said to myself, you’re a slave and the meth is worse because you’re putting yourself in the hands of the establishment.

“I said man, you’re fucked. I drank this 80 milligrams of meth and since that day 1 have not shot dope, bought dope, looked at it, sniffed at it. I have nothing to do with meth, opiates, any. of that shit.” He recited that piece with the force of a man who still needs an iron will to stay away from powder and needles.

Sal has endured the withdrawal tortures, the sweating, the sickness, the aching, the convulsions, and pulled through. People I talked with later, on the methadone programme, used words like “miraculous” and ‘unbelievable” when I told them how Sal kicked the habit. Only rarely do they meet anyone who’d gone into sudden “cold turkey” withdrawal and made it.

I went down to City Hall to meet two of those running New York City’s shrinking methadone programme, the administrator, Sylvia Bascall, and, the director of training, Nick Titakis. The programme was set up in 1970 with a budget of $12 million a year to deal with the growing number of heroin addicts (no one knew exactly how many there were in the city; estimates ranged from 150,000 to 500,000) and the street crimes committed to pay for the habit, before cutbacks, there were 39 clinics in the city. Now there are 31, supplying methadone to 10,000 ex-junkies. Two other programmes in the city have 20,000 patients.

Officially, there are 30,000 methadone drinkers in New York. In fact, there are more than that: it’s common for patients to get a bit of extra pocket money by dealing it in the street.

The crime rate of those joining the clinics drops by approximately 80 or 90 per cent after the addicts have been on methadone for six months. “They don’t have to pay for their own drug, that’s where it’s at,” said Nick Titakis. “We take people off the street, put their lives together.”

Once junkies are on methadone, not heroin, they receive no euphoric effect when they use the latter. So after a while most give up trying. The difference between heroin and methadone, a synthetic opiate, is that heroin’s “action cycle” is four to six hours, while methadone’s is 24 to 36 hours.

Similarly, during withdrawal, the pain lasts longer with methadone. “In sudden, cold turkey withdrawal,” said Nick, “the symptoms from heroin are more severe but shorter in duration. On heroin you can get the pains of death for two, three, four days. With methadone, it’s a slower pain over two, three, four weeks.”

But what research has been done into the long-term side effects of methadone? “The Food and Drug Administration found no significant long-range side effects. Opiates as a class, if you don’t kill yourself with them, are probably the safest drugs there are,” was Nick’s reply. “You can’t overdose on methadone,” said Sylvia.

Heroin is a big problem wherever it is sold and used. The question remains: how much less of a problem is methadone? The citizens of a city queue up each morning to receive a swig of a lime-green fluid, without which they can’t function. So I went down to a methadone clinic on the Lower East Side to see what they are like.

The restaurateurs in Chinatown were dumping black plastic bagfuls of last night’s leftovers on the street as I walked down East Broadway towards the Lower East Side Service Centre. This is how the methadone clinic euphemistically describes itself, in white paint, on the first floor of one of those five storey buildings which have iron fire escapes zig-zagging down the back.

On the fourth floor of the Service Centre is a room that’s called the Chinese Lounge. It looks like an opium den, except that the old Chinese men who frequent it have been weaned off opium and on to methadone. Outsiders in their own community because of their drug use, these men can meet in the lounge to make lunch, chat, smoke cigarettes.

“They’re all very lonely sad people,” said ° Rebecca Sanger, who wants to be a dancer, but at the moment still works as Outreach Coordinator (“reaching out” to the community) in the clinic. “They left behind families in China when they came over in the 1920s and 1930s and haven’t been able to establish lives here because of their drug habit.” Every day they sit around in the lounge from 10.30 am to 4 pm.

I tried to talk to the people sitting in the red plastic chairs which line the clinic on the ground floor. But everyone was more interested in getting their drink from the black nurse in the white coat standing next to the lime-green liquid. This was bubbling in one of those glass cases self-service cafes use for orangeade and coke.

The centre, Rebecca told me, had 1,000 patients and comprised two methadone maintenance clinics (the other one was just down the street), a mental health clinic and a residential methadone-to-abstinence building where people live 24 hours a day for a year and a half to try and get detoxicated. For those who stay in residence, the success, rate is very high, but many leave. All the counsellors on the residential programme and about half in the clinics are ex-heroin and/or methadone addicts.

Rebecca does not love the methadone clinic. She thinks the mental health clinic, to which addicts are referred, is doing very useful work and she has particular respect for the residential centre which she sees as “really positive,” freeing people from their enslavement to drugs. But she has become disillusioned with that solution which, for her, is no solution, methadone; “Some people have been coming here for years . . . methadone slowly destroys you."

Meanwhile, the methadone addicts will continue drinking the lime-green liquid until they either die or try and kick the habit.

The sound track of their youth by Ian Walker (New Society 20/27 December 1979)

Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set from his New Society days but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.

The sound track of their youth by Ian Walker

It came into the charts on 13 July 1965. It stayed there for eleven weeks, and was No. 1 for two. It was their first hit and it is the first number they do tonight, “Sweets for my sweet, sugar for my honey. I’ll never ever let you go.” The Searchers are top of the bill at the social club in a car plant near Southampton airport.

For the car workers and their wives the Searchers are part of the soundtrack of their youth. They sit round tables cluttered with pints and the remains of ham sandwiches and memories of Saturday nights down the palais, eyes across crowded ballrooms. For the Searchers, it is just a living.

Mike Pender, lead singer, and John McNally, lead guitar, are the two faces people recognise sitting in the TV lounge section of the bar before the gig. They are the two surviving members of the original band. They grew up on the same street, but went to different secondary moderns because Mike lived at the Bootle end of the street and John at the Kirkdale end.

They both still live in Liverpool, and drove down here this Sunday night for the start of their one-week tour of the south coast. There’s nothing much on the television; but in clubs like this, says John, “only the social secretary is allowed to switch channels.” The Searchers are not due on till around ten: after the comic, the hypnotist, the girl singer and the raffle.

“Do you still do Needles and pins?” asks a woman who wants an autograph. “Oh yeah,” smiles Mike. “They’d go mad if we didn’t do Needles,” he says when she’s gone.

There is a constant traffic of men carrying trayfuls of drink from the bar to the main hall, where about 250 couples are seated. The men are in suits and ties, the women mostly with the kind of hairdo you end up with after you’ve sat under a drier. Through the blue haze of smoke that hangs six feet above the tables, you can just about make out the comic on stage. “There’s these two punk rockers lying in bed making love,” he says. “And they’ve got the old punk rock on the stereo. ‘Is that Johnny Rotten?’ the girl says to the boy. ‘Well, it’s never let me down yet,’ he says.” It is the biggest laugh the comic gets all night.

“This is clubland,” says Frank, the Searchers’ bass guitarist, who has just driven down here from his home in London. Before the set, he must do an interview with a reporter from the local hospital radio station. Frank does the interviews, because like Mike and John say no one can understand their Scouse accent. He also does the stage chat.

After Sweets for my sweet, Frank speaks 'into the microphone, “You all happy?”

When most of the audience shout that they are, he uses the follow-up he always uses, “Oh, you been drinking as well?” He goes on to tell them that, as well as the band’s “glorious past,” they now have a “bright future,” the Searchers have recently been signed up by Sire Records, put out their first LP and single in years.

An old woman wanders round the hall collecting the empties. When she sees that our photographer is taking pictures of her, she lifts her skirt up above the knee and giggles. Frank gestures to the photographer and says, “Here mate, you missed the wedding.” This goes down well. John whispers to Frank that the photographer’s name is Homer and Frank gets another laugh out of that, before explaining that Homer and I are here for a magazine which is “a kind of intellectual Sun . . .”

The Searchers close their set with Needles and pins, but are called back for two encores: Where have all the flowers gone? and their new single, Hearts in their eyes. A man sitting at the table nearest the stage knows all the words to all the songs. He is the only male in the queue for autographs outside the dressing room, after the comic has wound up the show. “That’s all we have time for I’m afraid. Go out and buy the record and put the Searchers back where they belong, in the charts.”

A teenage girl at the head of the line for the autographs was born the year after Needles and pins came out. She came here with her mother and father.

Mike is-first out to do the signatures. One woman says to him, “Oh, Needles and pins, I used to get sent out of the kitchen to play that.” She looks like she spends a fair amount of time in the kitchen herself these days. Maybe she sends her own children out of the kitchen? In the generation was the oppressed grew up to be the oppressors of the next generation’s thing.

The woman who showed a leg for the photographer makes the band a cup of Nescafe to go with the ham sandwiches she has saved them. The Searchers sit round in a circle near the stage. All the other seats are empty. The fluorescent lights have gone on, the tables abandoned to the cleaners. Empty crisp packets and pint pots, well filled ashtrays, plates with strips of bread crusts on them.

John, lead guitar and business manager (“We couldn’t afford to pay out another 10 per cent”), tells the others the itinerary for the rest of the week: Ford open prison tomorrow, Monday, night; a social club in Godalming on Tuesday; Broadmoor (mental hospital) social club, Wednesday night; the Wellington Club, Portsmouth, Friday; a gas board social club on Saturday. On Sunday they fly to Holland for a one- nighter. Back to England for a couple of ays, then off to West Germany.

“We’re working flat out, so we can have Christmas and New Year off,” says John, driving the car down a deserted motorway at two in the morning, towards a motel in Hayling Island. There is a copy of Lyle’s Official Antiques Review on the back seat. It gives you something to do during the day, going round the junk shops—if there’s no movies on or anything,” says Mike, who paid £3,500 for a pair of antique pistols.

I ask them why they did Where have all the flowers gone? tonight. “It was on an early LP of ours,” replies Mike. “The song was associated with us at one time.” Long time passing.

At regular intervals, Mike and John say that they will sleep tonight. And then tomorrow night they will play exactly the same set. “We know exactly what we can do,” John says. “We never thought' we were genius musicians or anything. We couldn’t go away and make brilliant solo albums. . . All we’ve got is the group. We’ve got a good name, and we can work till the cows come home. I mean, we’re earning the same money we always earned, even when we were very successful, like.” Both Mike and John are married men with kids and mortgages; they need to keep working; and John says he doesn’t know any

thing else that would give him a decent living. Both their fathers were dockers.

Over the bridge that leads to Hayling Island we finally pull up outside the marina. A note is pinned to the door of the motel, “Searchers rooms 5 and 7. Keys in room.”

The view out of the window the next morning is of cabin cruisers on mud, a grey sky, and by the carpark a line of Christmas trees bent by the wind. I can hear a typewriter clattering somewhere in the motel. Maybe someone’s laying down some epic about alienation? Strangled passion in the off-season on the south coast?

In the motel bar at noon, one couple are playing the one-armed bandit, and another are discussing arrangements for their office Christmas party with the proprietor, Pierre. He used to run a nightclub in Portsmouth called the Stage Door. The walls are covered with stars who worked there: James Stewart, Frank Ifield, the Spinners, Bert Weedon, Alvin Stardust.

“Is it Monday today?” asks a grey-haired old man who’s come down for his first drink of the day. Pierre tells him that it is.

The bar manager was born in Malta, he’s only 20 but says he has worked for Pierre for years. He takes some two-bobs out the till and feeds the jukebox, then tells me there are a lot of rich people who live on Hayling Island, “God knows why.”

Mike and John come down to the bar at two. We decide to go to Portsmouth for the rest of the day. There’s nothing to do in Hayling Island, except get drunk, and Mike and John don’t believe in that. You don’t last as long as the Searchers if you follow the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.

One of the original members of the band did just that: got seduced by fame and wealth, fast cars, women who collect rock stars like cigarette cards. He invested what little he had left of his money in a Majorca disco. “We saw him about six months ago, as it happens,” says Mike. “He looked kind of old.” Mike is 38 and John 39, but they keep in shape.

In Portsmouth we go to Boots for shampoo and soap, W. H. Smith for magazines. Mike buys a copy of Guns Review and a local paper which will tell us what’s on at the local flicks. One hour later, we are in the circle at the Odeon (the stalls are closed), watching Yesterday’s Hero. And we stick it out till the Roy of the Rovers ending, when Ian McShane, yesterday’s hero, converts the penalty which wins the FA Cup for Windsor United. “They should have made it tough and gritty, like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” John says as we walk to the multi-storey car park.

John supports Liverpool and Mike, Everton. A lot of their friends on Merseyside are professional footballers. One of them, Souness of Liverpool, has just bought a new white Porsche. “He’ll learn, the old gob-shite,” says John. Smokey Robinson plays on Radio One, as we drive back to Hayling Island. Mike and John know all the words. They start reminiscing.

About the early days of Merseybeat in Liverpool. They often played with the Beatles, and went to the same parties. They speak affectionately of “Eppie,” Brian Epstein, the opportunist record shop manager who saw the possibilities in the Mersey-sound and who later committed suicide. About the clubs in Hamburg they used to play. They’d do a four-hour set, the show would start at four in the afternoon, and finish at four in the morning. About the tours of America with the Zombies and the Ivy League, and once with Dionne Warwick and the Isley Brothers, who would book just one room in motels and sleep on the floor, taking it in turns to sleep in the bed.

Back at the motel, there’s just time to shower and shave, and eat a quick steak dinner, before getting back in the car for the drive to the open prison. “I suppose Frank will make his usual crack about liking a captive audience,” Mike smiles. “I can just see it coming.” The sign at the gates says HM Prison, Ford. A prison officer directs us to the social club for prison officers, where the comic is telling exactly the same jokes, in the same order, as last night, and where Frank and Billy, the drummer, are sitting in the snooker room.

The cabaret room is much smaller than at the car workers’ club. About 100 couples are packed into a long room, partially divided by wallpapered neo-classical arches. There are ham rolls in plastic cabinets at the bar. Like last night, it is an all-white audience, which means the comic can tell all his Paki jokes, although the prison officers and their wives are less responsive than the car workers and their wives.

In the snooker room, Billy is telling everyone about the blow-out he had last night on the way back to Luton. There is a drape over the table which, being full length, occupies almost all of the room. Just space enough for a line of chairs on which we sit. A man comes round with a tray of hot pies. Billy and Frank take one, then they all go backstage to change.

But Mike returns to the snooker room complaining, ‘‘You’ve got a guitar neck up your arse trying to get changed. John’s trying to tune up. Everyone’s in there getting changed, including the comic, it’s diabolical.” Mike is taking off his brown cord trousers, folding them neatly before putting on the black cord ones. “I can’t even be bothered to shave tonight,” he says.

He decided to wear the khaki shirt, not the 'blue one. “When it comes to these kind of places there’s crap and really crap. This is really crap . . . Most of them would’ve come here tonight, whoever was on. It’s their local club. Maybe we put a few on the gate.” He shrugs. “I’m not motivated now. I’ll go on that stage, and go through the motions. Well, I’ll be into the songs from the album, but the rest of it . . .” He shrugs again. There’s peals of laughter coming from the cabaret room. Perhaps that was the Johnny Rotten joke.

A man calls out the winning raffle numbers and then the Searchers come on stage, which is in darkness. “There’s two settings for the lights here: on and off,” says the roadie, sitting at his control panel behind the wallpapered arches, which makes it hard for him to get the sound right. The lights go on, and the band grind into Sweets for my sweet. Mike is smiling. He said he would go through the motions. They do the same songs in the same order as last night and a hundred nights before that.

Frank’s chat, too, is the same. “This was a hit in 1965. I won’t even tell you the title. I’ll see if you can remember it.” The Searchers play the opening chords of What have they done to the rain? and get applause from those who recognise it.

But the set goes down well, as it should. They are good and get called back for two encores. On the second, Frank asks if there are any requests. “Silence is golden,” an old lady pipes up. “I’m sure it is, dear, but that was by the Tremeloes.” The old lady collapses in giggles,

“Johnny B. Goode ” someone else shouts.

“As it happens, we know that,” shouts Frank above the squeal of John’s Yamaha guitar, which is already winding into the rock ’n’ roll classic.

Billy beats the drum for the final time tonight. The rest of the band unplug their guitars and walk off. Another night’s wages earned.

I talk to two couples at the back of the hall. “We’ve had them all here, you know,” says one of the men. “Billy J. Kramer the other week. Searchers tonight. All we need now are the Beatles.” I ask if he enjoyed the show? “Yeah, great. Takes you back to when you were courting like.”

The other man at this table has decided that the way I am standing, one arm akimbo, is too camp for his tastes and he makes sub-Larry Grayson duckie lips at me, while I’m talking to his friend. His wife keeps nudging him, tries to engage him in conversation; but none of this works, he continues with the pouting. He has had too much to drink, but he is still a jerk. Homosexuals under his charge must get a hard ride. His wife comes with me to get Mike’s autograph in the snooker room.

Last in the queue for an autograph is a woman who thanks him and says, “I love that Needles and pins. It’s really great.” Mike flashes despairing eyes, signs her book, and when she has gone, explodes. “I told you didn’t I? That’s all they want to hear. They piss me off. It’s the same old question, the same old answers. It gets to you sometimes.” It has got to him tonight.

I get a lift back to London with Billy, who comes from the Gorbals, and has played the drums for his living since he left school at 15. “When I was younger, I grew up with ballrooms all round me, and I thought I could work as a musician forever. But disco has killed live music and, to be honest, the working men’s clubs have killed cabaret as well. People won’t pay two or three quid when they can get into a working men’s club for a quid. That’s why the cabarets are closing.”

He talks about the break-up of the Gorbals, how the whole slum has been shifted out to huge housing projects on the edge of town, where his mother now lives. “These people were used to a pub on every corner, shops and everything. But they just built these giant blocks of flats, and nothing else. No wonder they go round destroying it all.”

Billy has been in jazz bands, soul bands, and with the Searchers for six years. He says he has often thought of trying to do something else, but what else can he do? “I haven’t any qualifications or anything. I think Frank’s the only one in the band who’s got O-levels or something.”

He is going back to Luton, at two in the morning. In rock ’n’ roll romance, the road is freedom and escape. In the rock ’n’ roll life, it’s the way you get there and get back. “It’s the work, the work, just the working life,” sings Bruce Springsteen, star of the 1970s, of the production line.

Billy drops me off at King’s Cross. There are some dossers trying to keep warm in cardboard. Thirty miles to Luton.

Meet the Chairman (New Society, 8 November 1979)

Found some old Ian Walker articles from his New Society days that were not previously online, so I've done the right thing and scanned them in and put them on the blog. Sadly, I don't have a complete set from his New Society days but I'll keep looking. If you are new to my admiration for the late Ian Walker, I suggest you check out this old blog post for more background and also check out this page which lists all the Ian Walker articles from New Society which are already on the blog.

Meet the Chairman by Ian Walker

A black limousine parked in the farmyard has a red flag on its bonnet and a tea lady on its back seat. The chauffeur told her to get in so she would know how the Queen feels. At first, she sat in the front, but the chauffeur told her that the Queen always travels in the back.

“I’ve done ’em all,” he says. “King Hussein, Castro, Faisal before he died. They’re all punters, aren’t they?” That is, they all help pay his wages. Today’s wages: courtesy of the Chairman Hua Roadshow.

At 9.30 that morning at Sherwood House farm, in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, policemen marched round in wellies speaking into walkie-talkies. County types stood around in small groups, shaking hands and forcing smiles. A man in shirt-sleeves led by a white rope, connected by a ring to the nostrils, a black bull, which was to be “a present from the British people to the Chinese' people.” An XJ6 flying the union jack swept into the farmyard. Colonel Sir John Thompson, Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, stepped out: a chestful of medals on his navy blue uniform, a red stripe down the trousers, boots with silver spurs, a ceremonial sword. Was he to play the part of paper tiger?

“I say hello and salute.” The colonel rehearsed his routine. “But, of course, he won’t understand what I’m saying so I’ll have to sort of . . .” He made a shoving motion towards the table in the barn where the speeches were to be made and the cups of Twining’s Lapsang Souchong tea drunk.

Flashing blue lights on the BMW police bike at the head of the entourage. Photographers and camera crews jostled for position. “We don’t want any injuries,” said a police sergeant. “We’ve forgotten our first aid kit.” A cavalcade of black limousines pulled up. The colonel clicked his heels to attention and saluted Chairman Hua, more modestly attired in a grey raincoat over a Chinese tunic. Even though the farm had been hosed down the night before, the Chairman still got mud on his black side-gusset shoes as he walked towards the table in the barn. “I got a policeman’s head,” one photographer moaned to another.

After brief speeches, the entourage drifted up a track which led to a bungalow inhabited by a cowhand and his family. The Chinese delegation had requested that the Chairman be shown some peasant’s quarters.

A police cordon was thrown round the bungalow to prevent the mob of photographers tramping all over the garden. They had to wait outside while the Chairman went inside, before appearing on the lawn with cowhand David, his wife Linda, their six girls and one boy, this last a baby cradled in David’s tattooed arms. They posed for pictures. Chairman Hua wore the frozen smile Chinese leaders always have on those socialist realist portraits in oil.

The delegation shlepped off to the fleet of Range Rovers which would whisk them round the farm. The photographer carrying the step-ladder said to one of his mates, “Shall we go and get this bull, then?” 

“Yeah, let’s get the bleedin’ bull.”

I walked back with them to the farm where I found the tea lady giggling at the idea of sitting in for the Queen. A few yards from the car, a young girl held a miniature porcelain Friesian on a black base. “Don’t let go until he’s definitely holding it,” said her mother.

“Oh, you’ve said that so many times." 

The delegation returned from its quick tour of the farm for the next set piece: The Presentation Of The Galloway Bull (donated by the Galloway Society and due to travel over to China next April).

The Chairman Hua Roadshow is now behind schedule. The convoy of limousines, motorbikes, XJ6s and police buses raced at high speed through Brightwell-cum-Sotwell and then through Wallingford streets lined with citizens who smiled and waved.

Chinese traffic lights have a different colour code: red means go. This convoy went on red, orange and green. It did 60 mph in 40 mph built-up areas, and slowed to 40 only to take the roundabouts, all manned by police holding back the rest of the traffic. The convoy’s destination was the Randolph Hotel, Oxford’s swankiest.

I was thrown out of the foyer by an official who was unimpressed with the reasons for my lack of official accreditation. Down the road in the narrow wood-panelled bar at the Eagle and Child two dons discuss the Chairman’s visit:

“Were you interrupted by Chairman Hua this morning?”

“Insofar as I was stuck for half an hour at Giles Circus.”

“You know, if anyone wanted to take a potshot at him, they could do so from one of the windows . . .”

“Who wants to?”

A crowd gathered outside the Randolph at 1.45 pm. The Chairman is due out at 2 pm. A student stood on a limousine’s back bumper to get a photo of the foyer. He is chastised by a fat chauffeuse in a green uniform: “These cost £30,000 you know, and you pay for it.” A red carpet was rolled out from the hotel to the limo and a doorman vacuumed it.

Passing students, on bicycle and on foot, tended to stop and join the crowd. Workers mostly walked on by. They, after all, had work to do. No time for the lunchtime theatre “Where do correct ideas come from?” asked Chairman Mao in his Little Red Book. “Do they drop from the sky? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone.”

Would Chairman Mao, who put “politics in command,” be as happy about being feted in the shadow of the dreaming spires as Chairman Hua?

The Chairman must still be eating dessert. “Running late. Running late. Three zero minutes late. Hold positions,” crackled a woman’s voice over the police walkie- talkies. “This Hua, he’s not as charismatic as Mao is he?” asked a young woman of a man in a college scarf. “No. He doesn’t write as many books.”

Forty minutes late, Hua walked down the red carpet to receive the acclaim of the crowd. No voices were raised in criticism, though one man raised a poster, PINOCHET, POL POT, HUA, MURDERERS OF THE PEOPLE.

The Chairman Hua Roadshow drove the short distance to the Bodleian library, but the Chairman now only had time for a quick in-and-out en route to Merton college. The photographers resumed their battle with each other and with the police as we walked down a high-walled alley to Merton, where Harold Macmillan was waiting to take tea with Hua in the Breakfast Room. A woman outside the college with a bouquet of flowers fought hard to hold ground as the photographic swarm encircle her. A placard held aloft the waiting crowd said, “Down with Lapsang Souchong, PG tips is tops.” The chant worked out a small group of demonstrators was the whacky: “Down with Chinese and Soviey Chinese Imperialism.” It didn’t really scan.

Once past the man on the door who inspected the IDs, photographers enlisted to help of students in finding places in the college from which they could photograph Hua and Macmillan with a zoom lens. One press man took some film off a student who said that he was editor of Cherwell, the undergraduate newspaper, and that he bribed a college servant to gain access the Breakfast Room.

How much would Hua and Macmillan have to say to each other? Not that much. The Chairman was on the move again ten minutes, accompanied round the grounds by the university vice-chancellor Sir Rex Richardson. Through the interpreter, he explained that the building this court had a sundial 300 years old “And the part of the building we were before, that is 700, er, no, 600 years old . . ."

As I left the 600 year old court, I was buttonholed by a policeman. He said: - "A police spokesman said, ‘We’re fucking pissed off with it all.’ ”

Now, off to the station to snap the Chairman boarding the high-speed train back to London. The train, all first-class carriage stood at the platform. But the entourage was on board already. No pictures. “I hope you got something at Merton,” said the Brummie reporter to his photographer.

On the next train back to London (standing room only in second class) a youung man, in a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt read Workers Weekly, an irregular production of the Communist Party of England Marxist-Leninist. Down with Modern Revisionism! said one of the headline (most seem to start with down and end with!). This maoist group, which is pro the Gang of Four, broke with China some time ago over the Chinese three-world view. Outlined first by Mao, it is still the guiding principle of foreign policy.

The first world is that of the superpowers (of which the more dangerous is the Soviet Union); the second world is that of the European powers who, Mao believed could be brought into alliance with the main progressive force, the third world, against the super-powers. “The logic of the Chinese view,” said a Sinophile friend when I go home, “leads them to support Pinochet in Chile. Whereas the Albanians say that you cannot support Chile, only Chilean workers.”

So the third world came to the second world to engineer a kind of alliance agains the first world. Friendship-cum-business in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, through the Randolph Hotel, the Bodleian, the Breakfast Room in Merton and a first class compartment on a high speed train. DOWN WITH THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD!

Just in . . .

Just found some old Ian Walker New Society articles that were hiding in an email folder, which were previously not posted on the blog. Watch this space . . . 

. . . If you cannot be arsed watching this space, checkout the Ian Walker New Society articles that are already on the blog.

Hopefully the others will be posted on the blog in the next couple of days.

Note to self:

Reread Zoo Station. It's been a while.

Update.

I finally got round to adding those promised Ian Walker articles. Click on the link.