Trouble soon popped up again though when I went to a nightclub in Redcar with a couple of lesbians I knew through my mate Andy. One of them was so butch that she looked just like a man. While she was dancing, I could see a lad starting to get clever with her. Something was bound to happen. I waited until it was going to kick off and went over. The lad squared up to me in a boxer’s stance. I tore straight into him and hit him with about four short, fast punches. He lay there unable to move, covered in claret. The bouncers were pals of Bri Cockerill, so they left me alone and chucked out the prick I had done. That was the end of that story, but a bit later on at New Year I got caught up in trouble because of the dykes yet again. I had taken some ecstasy drugs off a dealer in a pub, given him a good slap in the process, and decided to give them to the lesbians, as they were into that scene. Little did I know that they were also getting their gear off a father-and-son team who dealt to the dealer that I had slapped. Word got back to them and they ended up setting the lesbians up for a police raid, as they thought they had fucked them over. Unluckily for me, I wandered into their house to say hello just as they were getting raided. To top it off, I had a stun gun in my pocket, which I had confiscated off a guy in one of the pubs I was working the night before. The pigs stripsearched me, found the gun, and arrested me and took me to the station. It went to court, where on my solicitor’s advice I pleaded guilty. I got a fine, but the two lesbians ended up taking all the blame for the drugs, and each got 18 months inside.
I still blame my fine on the stupid father who set the lesbians up. Quite conveniently, I bumped into him one morning outside some busy shops. I cuffed him with a right to the body and a left into his smarmy face. He never went down but staggered and ran over the road. He started mouthing off threats about what he was going to have done to me. I was told later that, as a consequence of our short and sweet reunion, he had a smashed rib and broken nose. The punk also put a figure on my head. My mate Maori made a few phone calls and found out there was an underworld hitman coming from Newcastle to put one in me, but he managed to get it stopped.
As soon as that little episode came to a close, I was rocketed into another situation one night when I bumped into an old acquaintance on a pub crawl. Ron K, as he was known, was a short and powerful man, who had just been released from prison. We were getting on OK to begin with but, as he got drunk, he started getting on people’s nerves shouting about how hard he was. Then he shouted to me, ‘Oi, you, outside.’ Now I thought the prick was just joking, but he wasn’t. ‘I’m the best fourteen stone you’ll come across,’ he screamed. So off comes my coat and we step outside.
The pub had a glass front so everyone could see us. I have to admit I loved the feeling of having a crowd. Without any hesitation, he came straight at me. BANG! I catch him with a short, powerful left hook. He folded like a ten-pound note and hit the ground with the finesse of a smashed egg. What an anti-climax. You have to think of the crowd in these situations, so I bent over him and put about four face-bursting rights on his chin. He was whisked away to another planet. When the ambulance stretchered him away about 15 minutes later with an oxygen mask on, he was still sleeping soundly. His jaw was shattered in four places, so they had to put a fancy steel plate in with screws to fix it. I had no sympathy for him because he brought it all on himself with his big loud mouth.
Yet I was also realising that this intensity of fighting couldn’t go on. I went for a private sitting with a clairvoyant, who sensed that I was a fighter. He got hold of my hands and said, ‘I can’t tell you to stop fighting, but if you continue and you don’t start pulling your punches, I can see you killing someone, someday.’ I had already had a few lucky escapes with people hovering at death’s door and took that as a serious warning. I slowed down and took a back seat. Linda had filed for a divorce on the grounds of ‘unreasonable behaviour’. I had to have a sit down and have a think about what I was doing with my life.
The situation of one of my mates, H, really brought things home to me. He had got into some trouble in Lincoln, but his father wouldn’t stand as a guarantor for him over the deal. He’d been treated badly by his father all his life and had a stammer because of it. So when he wouldn’t stand guarantor he was pushed over the edge and went round his father’s house. A big argument erupted and H pulled out a gun and shot him three times at point blank range: in the head, chest and kneecap. His father was lying in a pool of blood. H must have known he was going to get life, and thought, Fuck it, I’ve had enough. He put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. The father miraculously survived, but H died. It was a sad time for all concerned. The last time I had seen him alive, he had made us both bacon and toast and we’d had a chinwag. I think of it like the last supper and still have some fond memories of him.
It was all too much, so I packed the door work in to get away from all the trouble. But the faster I tried to get away from it, the faster trouble came after me. One time I was out in a pub with my mates Mick, Freddie, Peter and Johnny. I went to the toilet while they went to the bar, where there was a skinhead looking the worse for drink. He mumbled, ‘What’s your name?’ I told him and his chest plumed out another foot. He put his hand out for me to shake it. Peter had followed me in and was watching the proceedings. I went to shake the affable skinhead’s hand, but he pulled it away and slurred, ‘Dry your fucking hand, first.’ What a cheeky cunt! I planted a left hook on his chin and as he went down he cracked his head off one of the urinals. He was laid out with blood spewing from his head. ‘Dry your fucking head, first,’ I laughed at the floored skinhead. The slurring skinhead recovered but that was the moment when I thought I had better stop going out drinking as well or, like the clairvoyant said, ‘someone would die’.
I started to turn my life around for the better and tried to instil a bit of stability and balance back. I wanted to leave that part of my life behind. The leopard wanted to ditch its spots! The divorce finally went through, although a few months later Linda and I ended up going out again, but only as boyfriend–girlfriend. It was a case of can’t live with her, can’t live without her. We were together for eight years. In the meantime I was beginning to realise how lucky I was when I started sponsoring a girl in Ecuador, South America, after seeing an advert on TV about the Third World. Every time the advert came on, I saw the pain and suffering in the children’s eyes. Jomayra’s life is much better these days and she is getting an education. If she becomes ill, a doctor will see her due to the sponsorship. I have been her sponsor since 1997 and it’s a very rewarding experience. We exchange letters and Jomayra always tells me how grateful she is and calls me her foster parent. I send her two presents a year, as well as cards and photos. She is now fourteen years old, and the difference in her over the seven years from the first photo to the present one is amazing. It’s great being a part of another family’s life that live on the other side of the world. It opens your eyes as to how people in other countries live.
I enjoyed being compassionate, which made a nice break from the fighting. One day I was looking through the paper and saw a picture of a woman who had had her pet African Grey parrot stolen. Funnily enough, I then got a phone call from Brian Cockerill asking for my help in respect of this stolen parrot as he was good friends with the lady in the paper. My mate Ste had a pet shop and said he had just been offered such a parrot. The lad offering the parrot for sale was a friend of Mick’s, and so Mick and I went to see him. We soon discovered that he had sold the parrot on to a dealer for £200. Armed with the dealer’s address, we paid him little visit. On finding him, we told him the parrot was stolen and that we wanted it back for its owner. We asked him very kindly to go and get the bird and to bring it to my house … or to face the consequences! He looked as sick as a parrot. He came around the next day with the parrot, and we went around the real owner’s house. Her and the kids were over the moon. The bloke told her the story of how he came across it and she couldn’t thank me enough. I received a follow-up phone call from Brian Cockerill, w
ho thanked me and said he owed me a favour. A few days later, the newspaper ran the story, along with a photo, of the woman being reunited with her parrot, but I told her to keep my name out of it, which she did. I do love happy endings.
If I was going to get a truly peaceful life, I had to get out of Hartlepool, so I got another job installing heavy electric cables around the country. The first job I took was at ICI, Wilton, which I was on for a few months. I really wanted to make a go of it, and stuck at it, even though it was hard graft. The safety code was stringent, and at all times you had to wear a hard hat, safety boots, goggles, overalls and gloves. Even on hot days when your goggles were steaming up with sweat and you couldn’t see, you weren’t supposed to take them off. The cables I worked with aren’t the little piddling things for domestic use. The ones I’m on about are always on big round drums; once you got the drum in the exact place you wanted it, you put a jack either side with a steel bar running through the drum and then it would be jacked off the floor ready to pull the cable off. Sometimes, the cable would go in a trench or up a riser, but mainly it was tied on to giant racks and it all had to be held in place with cleats. It was proper hard work, as the big drums can weigh as much as nine tons. There were plenty of hazards in this line of work. Once, when I was working in Edinburgh, we were rolling a drum that weighed about six tons when it ran over my foot! My steel toe collapsed and came through the side of my boot. My toes came up like puddings. I was lucky because if it was another inch over I would have lost my toes. On another job, we were working under a canal and the tunnels went on for a couple of miles. After we renewed the cable we had to make a hasty retreat as there were always toxic gasses being released.
My job has taken me the length and breadth of the UK: Barnsley, Manchester, Widness, Newcastle, Reading, London, Derby, Middlesex, Scotland, Portsmouth, Southampton, Bournemouth, Rhyl, Cardiff and plenty of other places. I even once had a piss on the roof of the Hilton Hotel, in Park Lane, London, when we were putting some cable in. I was bursting and the toilet was too far away. Sometimes, there’d only be half a dozen cables to pull in and once you’d done that, you were off somewhere else. One day you could be in Leeds and the next in London; I liked it better like that instead of being stuck in the same place. Once we went to a job at Derby for about six weeks. I had a look for the house me and the family stayed at back in 1975–1976. It was in Boyer Street but it had been pulled down and new houses had been built. Nothing stays the same. While I was at Derby, I got a phone call off Maori. It was bad news. His son Mark had just died of leukaemia, only four weeks past his 18th birthday. It was another heartbreak. Mark was a lovely lad. We – Wally, Dickie and me – all went home for the funeral. It was a very sad time.
One of the main benefits of moving around was that I could go drinking again without getting into trouble. One time we were staying above a pub in St Helens. We went downstairs for a drink, and I spotted a face I recognised. But it wasn’t an old opponent from Hartlepool. It was the well-known rugby player, Andy Gregory. I went over and said, ‘Hello, Andy. You don’t know me, but I’m working round here and would just like to say hello.’ He shook my hand and asked where I was from. Then in another pub I heard, ‘Not you again.’ It was Andy. Later, in a nightclub, I spotted him at the bar so I went over and tapped him on the shoulder, When he turned round I said, ‘Are you fucking following me?’ He started laughing and repeated, ‘Not you again.’ He had a good sense of humour, and was a really nice bloke.
Even when there was a bit of trouble, I kept things as quiet as possible. On the job in Liverpool, there was a new mush that had started for us called Trevor. He thought he knew everything, so I called him ‘Know It All Trevor’. On the way down there on a Monday morning, he did everybody’s head in. As soon as we got on the job, he started running around like he was the boss and talking to people as if they were idiots. He was a cheeky cunt. I let him get away with a couple of remarks, but when he said another thing I thought I’d teach him a lesson. I later spotted Mr Know It All up in what is called a cherry picker. A cherry picker is simply a mobile gantry tower that is like being on the end of a giant moveable arm; you’ve probably seen them around when the local council use them for replacing streetlight bulbs and the like. Mr Know It All was up there with a lad called Varley. I shouted to Varley, ‘Bring that fucking cherry picker down here, now!’ I stood and watched as my prey was being moved in my direction. As he was getting closer and closer, his face became whiter and whiter. As soon as he reached me, I dragged him out of his harness and nearly took his head off with a persuasive slap. It was so powerful that it spun him around so fast that, for a few seconds, he looked like Michael Jackson doing one of his routines. For a couple of days after that, he walked around with what looked like a big purple birthmark down half his face. He never talked to me out of turn again.
Another benefit of travelling was getting to know the history of various places. When we went to London I took a day off and spent a full day in the Tower of London. I love history, and the day passed really quickly. After that, we went to Scotland for six weeks to put the cable in on a place in the middle of the Firth of Forth. One of the local lads called Gregor started telling me a bit of Scottish history about William Wallace and the like. I enjoyed our chats. A couple of years later, he emigrated to Australia, from where he still sends a Christmas card every year, even if it does arrive in January. We stayed in Dunfermline, right opposite the abbey where Robert the Bruce is buried. There is a story that Robert the Bruce was born in Hartlepool, so I went to his grave to pay my respects to a fellow hard bastard from the North East.
The other lads started getting into the history too, so one day Dickie, Wally, and I went for a historic day out to Bannockburn where the Scots won their fight for independence in 1314. We went in the Visitors Centre where Robert the Bruce’s helmet and chainmail were on display, bolted to the wall on the end of a small chain. I was really excited when the curator allowed me the privilege of wearing this warrior’s helmet and chainmail. I’ll tell you what, it was bloody heavy. I wouldn’t have wanted to go 12 rounds with that kit on. I had my photo taken and we took a camcorder with us, so we have the whole day on film. From there we went to visit the William Wallace Monument, which I would very much recommend. They have Wallace’s sword in a glass case. It’s the actual sword that was taken off him in 1305 when he was captured by the sheriff of Dumbarton. The sight of such implements of war conjures up many things in the imagination. I had nothing but respect for these ageless warriors.
The bloke who owned the cable firm was a millionaire and once you got to know him he was a nice fella. He owned houses, clubs and businesses. In one of his clubs the manager and manageress were taking him to the cleaners, saying that stuff was being stolen, but they were behind it all along. They were a pair of cheeky, loud-mouthed bastards who always had to have the last word. He wanted them out but wanted to do it legally, so he got papers drawn up for the manager to sign. He knew he wouldn’t sign them and that there’d be trouble, so he phoned me and asked for my help. After we agreed on a price for the job, he came and picked me up and we went along. When I got to the club in question, I told the manager to sit down and ordered, ‘Listen to me and listen good, if you open your mouth just once to speak or answer back when I’m speaking, I’m gonna break your fucking jaw! Now listen to what that man has to say and sign the papers. Do you understand?’ He knew the game was up and mumbled, ‘Yes.’ His woman must of known the game was up as well because she never came into the room, preferring to stay out of the way. The papers were duly signed with no problems and they were evicted.
All the history visits must have made me sentimental, as not long after I wanted to get myself my own piece of history. I had noticed a beautiful pot statue behind the bar of a bare-knuckle fighter and asked the millionaire club-owner about it. He raised an eyebrow and said that plenty of people wanted it. I said that I would like to buy it but, as an act of generosity, he gave me it as a present. It sti
ll stands tall and proud in my bedroom. The boxing promoter Frank Maloney has the exact same one in his house, as I saw it one day on the TV programme Through The Keyhole. He must have very good taste.
CHAPTER 18
IT’S NICE TO BE IMPORTANT, BUT IT’S IMPORTANT TO BE NICE
I ended up working on the cable installations for three years. I enjoyed that time and generally avoided trouble, although the little rascal had a habit of turning up from time to time. One night I was enjoying a few drinks on my own in a pub away from home. I got talking with the doorman about boxing, and everything was fine. But then a bunch of pissed people walk in. I was stood at the end of the bar minding my own business, just deciding whether to have one more for the road or to go. As I looked up I noticed I was being stared at. Five lads, all in their mid-twenties, were slowly getting closer and closer. Instinct told me they were going to have a pop at me. Knowing how important it is to be the first to the fight, I started up right off, and belted the biggest one with a cranking right hand. BOSH! He was out for a nice sleep. Always deck the strongest of the group to send out a clear message to the other pricks. I blasted his mate, who was stood to the right of him, with a beautiful, classic left hook bang on the chin. It rocked him so much that he was out of it before he hit the deck. Why bother stopping now, I thought to myself, so for good measure I put the third one away into cloud cuckoo land. The doormen arrived just as I had just put the last one of the five to bed. All the time, I had been expecting to be punched from the side or bashed over the head with something, but luckily for me that never happened. The next day, my elbow was swollen right up and I could hardly move it. For the next week, I was being woken up during the night with jolts of pain in my elbow. I decided to get an X-ray and found out that it was fractured, but I decided against a pot – plaster cast – as it would have driven me fucking mad.
Born to Fight--The True Story of Richy 'Crazy Horse' Horsley Page 14