Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  Billy had a happy, family-oriented childhood, with noisy, overpopulated Christmases (as well as his four ‘farm cousins’, there were a further eight on Marie’s side), sing-songs, and many a tale from Dad about his time in India at the end of the Second World War. Billy’s first point of purchase as a young explorer was Barking Park, a 76-acre, tree-filled wonderland conveniently situated ‘over the back’. The crowbar-shaped Park Avenue can be seen on local maps made as far back as 1807, when the park didn’t even exist in name, just as a recreation ground with a lake. It opened its park gates officially in April 1898, and was a typically well-groomed municipal showcase throughout the early 1900s.

  A river runs through it – or at least, a tributary of the Roding does, called Loxford Water – in which Billy and pals would fish with nets for tiddlers, and over which they would throw stones at the Ilford kids during border skirmishes. The boating lake was another pivotal landmark in the happy wanderers’ world, four feet deep, and drained for two months every winter. It was, and presumably still is, traditional for every child to fall in – although the water these days is full of horrible green gunk. Billy managed to fall in twice as a boy: the first time, he was simply running and didn’t stop in time; the second, he was ‘doing something nefarious with bangers’ (fireworks, not prostitutes or sausages) in the boathouse with his mate John Murphy, and fell off the fence into the lake. Painfully enough, it was drained at the time, and he split his head open, which required three stitches courtesy of King George’s Hospital (and a couple in his elbow for luck). He paid the waters a sentimental third visit aged 21, when, out walking the family Labrador Lucky during a freeze, he stepped on to the ice and went straight through. You can take the boating lake out of the boy, but …

  More adventurous childhood manoeuvres took Billy as far as the marshland around Barking Creek, the link between the Thames and the Roding, where it’s said King Alfred once sailed in longboats. This tributary of the Thames was vital to early Saxon settlement in Barking when it became a busy fishing port, but today it is conspicuously free of traffic, aside from the odd car wreck dumped in the adjoining swamp. It was all marshland round here when Billy was a lad. (In fact, the area’s still marshy enough to give the residents of new housing in Beckton a problem with subsidence and malaria.) This was as far as young Billy ever ventured: he remembers chancing upon ‘a suitcase full of nudey books, all warped from the rain. You had to be careful round here, though, it wasn’t your neck of the woods.’

  At the mouth of Barking Creek stands Barking’s own flood barrier, a blue guillotine that is designed to come down after the Thames Barrier at Woolwich has successfully diverted rising flood waters and sent an almighty splashback up towards Essex. In the 70s, flood-warning practice around here was common, as it’s below sea level. The dread sound of the siren meant buses to Ilford, which is higher up, in more ways than one. Billy’s nan reckoned that’s why the good folk of Ilford always voted Tory. ‘All kippers and curtains,’ she would say.

  Other less savoury aspects of the Barking wetlands in history include a nearby guano factory, which basically made explosives out of bird shit, and teething trouble with the Victorian-built Northern Outfall Sewer, whose macabre effluent was repeatedly delivered up Barking Creek by the tide. In the late 1800s, a pleasure boat sank in these waters and its occupants died not from drowning but from ingesting raw sewage.

  Billy would wait for the Woolwich ferry here on a Sunday afternoon with his dad. Looking out over the Thames towards Shooters Hill in Kent, Dad used to tell him, ‘That’s where Julius Caesar stood and looked across, and didn’t like what he saw. He saw us.’

  Marshlands included, Billy’s childhood stomping ground hasn’t altered a great deal since the 1960s. Certainly, Park Avenue is frozen in time, and Barking Park is as it ever was. A local artist has written ‘FUCK’ on the side of the boathouse; the Ilford Lane end of Billy’s street has been blocked off to form a cul-de-sac; and what used to be the newsagents from where he did his paper round is now a mosque.

  To supplement his weekly paper money, the enterprising Billy fetched shopping for an old geezer called Will Vernon at 152, Park Avenue. A former scoutmaster, he was badly gassed at the Somme and couldn’t get out of the house like he used to. (Number 152 is locally famous for copping a direct hit in the Second World War, when the poor lodger who lived in the attic was catapulted right across the street.) Helping out old Mr Vernon was worth a shilling a week. Subsequent local errands bumped it up to half a crown.

  In 1971, aged thirteen, Billy enjoyed an early whiff of fame, plucked from the universal routine of conkers and V-necks and offered a brief glimpse of what it feels like to be special. He wrote a poem for school called ‘This Child’, about Jesus saving the world. Written by candlelight during a power cut, when he handed it in his teacher asked him where he’d copied it from. Nowhere, he assured them. The school got in touch with Mr and Mrs Bragg, who confirmed their son’s authorship, and the next thing anybody knew young Stephen Bragg was reading it out on Radio Essex.

  ‘That was the first thing that stood me out from everybody else in the class,’ he says. ‘I’d done something that was different. I can’t tell you how impressive that was, in the sense that it suggested I might be able to do this job that I do now.’ The freckly thirteen-year-old had been granted a glance at the future.

  Back on terra firma, newspapers delivered, the young poet would get on with less Bohemian pleasures: ritualistically dribbling a football up and down Park Avenue while he waited for his dad to come home from work, using his left foot up and right foot back, systematically tapping it off the front wall of every house in the street (‘I was useless’). A West Ham supporter since the crib, he was chuffed when the Seventh Barking Sea Scouts merged with the Eleventh Barking and the combined scarf came out claret and blue (West Ham’s colours, if you’re not au fait with such detail, and for many years accompanied by the name of sponsors – who else? – Dagenham Motors).

  The borough is steeped in football heritage. Arguably the most famous English footballer, Bobby Moore, was born and raised in Barking. He joined West Ham in 1958, and made the England team in 1962. He captained them 90 times, heroically holding aloft the World Cup in 1966. England’s legendary manager, Sir Alf Ramsey, was a Dagenham boy, as were Jimmy Greaves, Terry Venables and Trevor Brooking. ‘When I was a kid the only thing to do in Dagenham was play football,’ says Greaves in his autobiography.

  Billy has a clear early memory of watching the 1966 World Cup on TV (along with 30 million other Britons), and the image of his mum doing the ironing and expressing an ill-placed sympathy for ‘those poor Germans’ when the crowd thought it was all over. His dad took him out into the street, to Ilford Lane, and told him to savour the fact that there wasn’t a single soul in sight. ‘You’ll never see this again, short of there being a world war,’ he said. ‘It was very spooky,’ Billy remembers.

  Billy’s lifelong love affair with West Ham FC is borne of a loyalty passed down through the Bragg generations. Somewhere along Barking Road lies the exact spot where his family traditionally stands whenever West Ham bring back the cup (not an especially worn bit of pavement then, we may assume). He cannot divulge the exact location to anyone outside the family (‘It’s one of those kind of things’). Billy’s own participation in West Ham’s fortunes reached its dizziest heights in his early teens. A glance at his schoolboy’s diary from 1971 reveals a typical, soccercentric entry: ‘Most people in school were looking sad, after West Ham’s sad but very good performance at Old Trafford last night. Today, West Ham lost 2–1 to Stoke City.’

  He often went to see ‘East Ham’ (as his mum calls them) at their Upton Park ground, but would strategically choose European matches, because there would be less chance of trouble from away fans. Billy admits that he had ‘started getting in with a crew’ around this time, but any potential slide towards hooliganism was fortunately curtailed by his first Saturday job in 1972, ‘and that put the mockers on it. Save
d my life really. I could’ve got killed’.

  In 1975, after West Ham had won the FA Cup (2–0 against Fulham), Billy proved that he hadn’t grown out of his obsession by managing to collect some hallowed Wembley turf – not at the match itself, but from under the tarpaulin at a subsequent Elton John gig in the Stadium that summer. The dehydrated remnants still exist in a little plastic pot in a trunk in the attic (‘Sad, sad, sad,’ he says smiling, shaking his head). The adult Billy hasn’t been to a Hammers game for five seasons, but he can still bluff his way through a football conversation.

  John Murphy’s family (he was the boy with the bangers in the boathouse) also lived down Park Avenue, as did the O’Briens and the Browns and the Handleys (clan of Robert, later the drummer in Riff Raff) – but the most important residents of all, certainly to the Billy Bragg story, were the Wiggs. They lived next door, in ‘Livingstone’. (Curiously enough, the Braggs and the Wiggs had actually swapped houses in the 1930s, when the two dads had been kids. Talk about in and out of each other’s front doors.)

  Philip Wigg, better known as Wiggy, was born in 1960, two school years behind Billy, but, naturally enough, the two knee-high neighbours quickly became running mates, united by the park and bike culture. Wiggy had a three-wheeler with a boot at the back, seasonally full of conkers, while Billy rode an RSW (Raleigh Small Wheel). Wiggy has vivid memories of his knees hitting the trike’s handlebars. He and Billy, he recollects, were initially brought together by the back fence and ‘a bit of Cowboys and Indians’. Both boys had younger brothers, as if to complete the symmetry. Wiggy’s was Alan, or ‘Little Wiggy’.

  ‘It’s standard issue in Barking,’ says Wiggy, ‘to have two brothers, two or three years apart.’ He was a tallish lad, so being two years junior to the rest of the Park Avenue mob was never an issue. ‘I was always this height even when I was ten, so I could hang with them a bit.’

  Although working class from one end to the other, Park Avenue conceals a subtle, two-tier hierarchy between skilled and unskilled workers. The dads who were builders, plasterers, engineers and decorators formed a working-class aristocracy, and it was they who first had colour televisions. Billy takes the divide further: ‘Their kids had Johnny Sevens [enviable plastic rifles subtitled the One Man Army, which came apart to make seven subsidiary guns], and later Gibson SGs, while the rest of us were playing Japanese cheesecutters [now he’s talking about guitars].’ When the Braggs belatedly acquired their first colour telly in 1972, Billy’s Great-aunt Hannah, the only surviving relative on his dad’s side, would walk round specifically to watch The Black And White Minstrel Show on it.

  Beyond the symbolic ownership of mod cons, young Billy’s idea of ‘posh’ was anyone who went to Manor Junior School or lived on the nearby Leftley estate. (The Leftleys were an old dairy-farming family in Barking whose name was later ubiquitous on the sides of assorted-goods lorries in the area.) Billy and Wiggy went to Northbury Junior School, then on to the 1920s-built Park Modern Secondary, as their fathers had. In September 1970, after Billy had been at Park Modern a year, it went comprehensive, merging with Barking Abbey Grammar School. It was here that he received his one dose of corporal punishment: six of the best for the heinous crime of playing football in the playground with a tennis ball. (It’s the only language they understand.)

  At Northbury Juniors, Billy had been a reasonable scholar, regularly ranking in the top five of his class. In his penultimate year, he managed to come second, behind Ricky Ogland, the swot who was also good at football, ‘so it was hard not to like him’. Billy’s last chance to be top of the form, in 1969, was snatched when his mum went into hospital for an operation that April. While she was convalescing at home and unable to clear up after her two boys, Billy and brother David were packed off to Auntie Pat and Uncle Don’s farm. They spent the summer term at a tiny Warwickshire school (where, Billy recalls, they brought jam biscuits round at playtime), thus depriving him of finishing Northbury as number one.

  This near-miss would haunt Billy throughout life, significantly in the army, and even in pop. ‘I felt it deep in my heart,’ he reveals. ‘When I was second Most Wonderful Human Being in the NME polls of 1987 behind Morrissey it brought it all back.’ (Although it’s of little consolation to Billy, they later knocked Ricky Ogland’s house down to build the North Circular to Beckton.)

  Those months at the farm were ‘like already being on holiday’, since it was where the Braggs customarily spent the summer break. (Otherwise, it was out to the seaside at Shoeburyness or a modest chalet belonging to one of Marie’s friends, at St Osyth near Clacton.) Billy remembers watching the moon landing while he was a farm evacuee in July, and Dennis writing him a letter on that historic day. There was also a memorable dead cat by the side of a country lane which the boys would monitor on a diversion from the walk home from school while it gradually decomposed – better than any science lesson.

  Back in Barking for a new term and a new school at the end of that lazy, hazy summer, Billy’s learning curve seemed to take a nose dive. After he failed his eleven-plus, and effectively preordained the direction in which his education would take him – not to grammar school, not to university, very probably to Ford’s production line – his Barking Abbey school reports tell a sorry tale with an all too predictable ending. When he was in form 4G1 (or ‘Fourgone’, as he so enjoyed putting it on the fronts of his books), the recurring adjective in his end-of-term assessments was ‘lazy’. Some lowlights from his 1971 reports: ‘His lazy attitude is affecting his work … Far too lazy. More effort needed … Could do so much better.’ Things picked up a little in 1972, despite what his physics teacher deemed ‘an unfortunate result’, but there is one particular appraisal from Christmas of that year that manages to define both Stephen Bragg of the time, and Billy Bragg in general: ‘Uses his obvious intelligence more as a disruptive influence.’

  It was almost career advice. His headmaster was moved to add: ‘Take heed of these remarks!’ (His exclamation mark.)

  Away from school, young Billy’s lifestyle can be glimpsed in another entry in the 1971 diary: ‘Beat the rest of the family in a game of “Campaign”: I was Russia and, after crushing Austria (Dave), and Spain (Dad), I grappled with Mum to gain control of Europe.

  ‘Didn’t feel well today after a long lie in. Got a new parka, and I went out to give it an airing. My parka was given a wink of acceptance from the lads. Oatmeal and soap flakes.’ (Even the author doesn’t know what he meant by the last line, but there is something deeply evocative about it.)

  Diplomatic board games notwithstanding, politics did not loom large in the Bragg house. Dad didn’t tell Mum how he voted, so as not to influence her vote, but Billy suspects he may have been voting Communist. Although not a Red in a card-carrying or even an ideological sense, one of Dennis’s old friends from school, George Wake, stood for the Communist Party in their Barking constituency – ‘I have a sneaking suspicion my dad voted for him out of loyalty and respect to a schoolfriend.’ The mantra over the tea table was, ‘It doesn’t matter how you vote in Barking, Labour always get in.’ (When Billy first voted in 1983, he voted Labour and Labour got in.) The nearest thing to a political discussion in the house where Billy grew up was when Marie complained to Dennis that, logically, if he didn’t tell her which way he was voting, she might end up voting for the opposite lot, and thereby cancel out his vote.

  Immigration was an emotive issue in London – and across Britain – and Billy today is grateful for the tolerant attitude of his parents towards race. Tolerance was by no means guaranteed in the 1960s. The size of the immigrant population in Britain quadrupled between 1951 and 1961 (from 100,000 to 400,000, as the expanding labour market ‘sucked in’ workers and their families from the New Commonwealth). In 1962, the government’s Commonwealth Immigrants Act, opposed by Labour, put restrictions on the incoming flow, but roughly 50,000 a year still passed through the gates, and, particularly in the cities, white Britons were forced to deal with a much more colo
urful view (indeed, the term ‘coloured’ quickly became the net-curtain euphemism for Blacks and Asians).

  Billy’s parents were fortunate enough to be able to associate the New Commonwealth intake with positive experiences: an Afro-Caribbean doctor had delivered both of Marie’s babies in 1957 and 1963, and there was an Indian family over the road, the dad of which would pop over to fix the television if you asked. They thus avoided the convenient xenophobic view that the immigrant community miraculously combine being lazy with a burning ambition to take all our jobs. It is hard to stomach, but historian Peter Clarke in his fine book Hope And Glory, cites an electoral slogan used unofficially by Tories in Smethwick in 1964 and Haringey in 1968: ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.’

  Billy says that race politics were the first he learnt, gleaning much of his multi-culturalist conviction from listening to music. Further parental enlightenment arose from Dennis’s wartime posting to India, which, Billy believes, ‘opened his eyes to a different culture’. (Like so many of his peers, Dennis hadn’t been out of the South of England before he joined the army.) Billy was lucky to grow up in such a fair-minded, white working-class household. In 1990, he would crystallise his own beliefs in a rewrite of the socialist anthem ‘The Internationale’: ‘We’ll live together or we’ll die alone.’

  Away from such weighty matters, the Bragg–Wigg friendship flourished; albeit in a pragmatic, football-card-swapping way (‘We got on,’ recalls Wiggy. ‘Not incredibly close, but always there’), but 1971 was a crucial year for them. When the eleven-year-old Wiggy joined a thirteen-year-old Billy up at ‘big school’ and bought Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’, the two boys entered a new phase of shared passion. They became bonded – for ever – by pop music. Wiggy had a record player and no records; Billy had the software but no hardware, and thus a symbiotic union etched in extruded polyvinyl was inevitable. They were Jack Spratt and his wife: made for each other. ‘It was a definite mutual interest,’ Wiggy confirms. ‘After bikes and falling in the lake.’