Still Breathing

by Donnelly, Anthony; Donnelly, Christopher; Spence, Simon

  Their designer gear is so highly rated it is worn on tour by top pop bands including Happy Mondays. They have been described as the Sex Pistols of the fashion world, ‘radical and magical’.

  They splattered paint over their stand at Earls Court and threw a party for friends like Happy Mondays and Stone Roses. The brothers organised the first rave parties in Manchester in the late ’80s and made top contacts in the world of music.

  They were held in custody last night after being charged by serious crime squad detectives who raided several homes in Manchester yesterday.

  Anthony Donnelly, 29, a company managing director of ––––– was charged with conspiracy to supply drugs. Christopher Donnelly, 26, of ––––– was charged with conspiracy to supply drugs. The brothers’ father, Arthur Donnelly, 52, a scrap dealer, from ––––– faces six charges of conspiracy to supply drugs. Michael Carpenter, 40, a builder, of ––––– was charged with conspiracy to supply and possession of drugs. Jonathan Faulkner, 20, of ––––– was charged with conspiracy to supply drugs and supplying diazepam.

  A police officer from Stockport was released on police bail after detectives questioned him. He was facing possible suspension from duty today and was consulting lawyers. An accountant from Worsley was also bailed after questioning by detectives.

  1

  EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

  Anthony Donnelly: If it was not for our dad, Arthur, nobody would know who Chris and me were.

  Arthur Donnelly: When I was growing up in Wythenshawe, we had no money. As a kid I used to go with a pram down the railway lines, collecting coal for the fire. We killed chickens and pinched potatoes out of the fields. We’d rob the milkman, otherwise we’d have no milk. My dad, James, was a bricklayer, a good one, a very hard-working man, but he was a drunk. My mother, Ellen, was a bit psychotic. She was religious, a member of the Mother’s Union [international Christian charity], and would clean the church for free. She put three of us, my two brothers, Johnny and Jimmy, and me, away in St Joseph’s in Patricroft, Salford [a home for orphans and children under the age of twelve whose parents could not look after them]. We were sent there when I was about seven, Jimmy was a year older and our Johnny was about three.

  St Joseph’s was not a nice place. I had my first fight in there. I saw one of the nuns who ran the place give the other lad the cane and then kick him down the stairs. I thought I was in there for months and months and months, but I was only in several weeks. The nuns would beat us. There were beatings all the time. The dining room was a long, narrow place in the basement and if you didn’t eat your dinner, they’d put the pudding on top.

  My family life was no good. My father was drunk every night. My mother was a good cook, good housekeeper, everything very clean, but she was nasty. She was always rowing at home. There were always broken windows, blood everywhere and smashed furniture. That’s how I was fetched up – so when it came to it, I looked after my family.

  Anthony: We’re all originally from Ireland. What we were told was there were forty of the family who left Ireland and settled in Liverpool. One of them killed somebody in a pub fight and then they dispersed all over the country. Some went to Australia. The only relatives we know, or are hands on with, are the ones who settled in Manchester. Our dad’s dad, James, had helped build Wythenshawe when it was first put up in the 1920s. It was a big housing estate on the south side of Manchester, supposed to alleviate inner city squalor. That’s where my dad grew up in the ’40s and ’50s.

  Arthur: I was away all the time when I was young, approved school, borstal and prison. It was Jimmy, Johnny and me who brought the police to the door. Before that the family had never had anything to do with the police. I was a Teddy Boy. They put me in borstal for three years for a load of lead – three years for lead that wasn’t even stolen! I got put away in approved school for three years for stealing a bottle of lemonade from a café – from a back yard. I did one job breaking into Brookes Biscuits. We got a load of chocolate and fed the pigs. We nicked blocks of chocolate as big as a table – we couldn’t eat it all. We used to thieve all the time. Yes, we were villains – always in trouble. I was put in Strangeways [prison]. They used to hang people there back then and I used to clean the cell they were in the night before they were hanged for a bit of extra duff [pudding].

  Arthur’s partner in crime was often ‘Little’ Albert Gibbons. He was the nephew of the well-respected Davies brothers, ‘Ginger’ and Georgie – young men who drove Bentleys and had interests that included car dealing, haulage and pubs. Little Albert was also sometimes known as ‘Albert the Blade’. In 1965, he stabbed to death Pat Fallon, a doorman at Manchester’s Stork club, in a fish & chip shop.

  Arthur: Georgie Davies did ten years for shooting a policeman and when he came out I was with Albert Gibbons. I was eighteen. It was the guys younger than the Davies brothers who I knocked around with. Albert was only small and he always had big knives. I was good with a knife myself – and the axe. I never missed. Albert and me worked on the horse and carts as Rag and Bone men. We used to collect dunnage, good second-hand clothes. I used to go on Smithfields market, in the city centre, and sell them. There was a firm called Cohen’s and all they bought was rags by the tonne – cottons and wools. It was my idea to sort out the good clothes and take it on the market and sell it. So we had a garage full of clobber in Whalley Range. That was the ‘Rag Trade’. We took it one step further and we got nicked. It was a new idea to go round door to door, put a plastic bag out and say you were collecting for the Benevolent Fund. ‘Any old clothes, please give to the blind’ or whatever. It was when I was working on the market that I met June.

  June Donnelly: I was born and bred in Ardwick [inner city Manchester] in a two up, two down with a toilet in the back yard. It was a very happy place to grow up. I met Arthur at the Plaza dancehall when I was sixteen. He was very shy and very particular about his clothes. He used to get his suits, shirts and shoes made by an Italian tailor. I set my sights on him. They were Wythenshawe and we were Ardwick. I got pregnant [with Tracey] and then we got married. We had a house in Ardwick at first, with all my family and cousins. We were very close knit until the slum clearance separated us all.

  Arthur: We always got in everywhere free, all the clubs. Never paid. Be it Ginger or Georgie, the older fellas who were the governors then, we always knew someone to get us in. It was a well-known thing – any trouble in the clubs the lads would sort it out. They weren’t on the doors. They had that much respect that club owners rang them up to say someone has had a go at the club. Then they’d go sort it out for them. They’d look after everybody. There was no trouble in the clubs, all taken care for, one big happy family … right through the ’70s as well. But June and me had no money when we lived in Ardwick. I used to go to town and steal gear. Little Albert and me went out one day, went in a coffee bar and walked out with the jukebox – in broad daylight.

  In the ’60s, Jimmy, Johnny and me started a company together: Donnelly Steel Erection Company. We worked for ourselves putting up steelwork. In the beginning we’d go working away with no money and you’d try and borrow a car and steal petrol. The business grew and we got one job at Stafford Airbase that would be worth £5 million in today’s money. June worked in the office at one point. We did all Comet Discount warehouses, ICI and Cammell Laird Shipyard. We were travelling and fighting all over the county, in pubs and clubs. I worked in a coalmine in Barnsley. I slept in the coalmine. Jimmy also had a construction firm, doing houses in Stockport. I’d put in the sewers and build the interior walls. We knew then, at that young age, that the country was fucked. We knew what the situation was in this world: that the working class was trodden on and all the fuckers in the Government were robbing everyone and getting away with it. When we did the steel erecting we used to meet people all over the country and give them back handers – one or two thousand pounds. How else do you think we got the work? We used to get false Union cards … how else could Jimmy and I go in
ICI working on a big job?

  Arthur and June’s second child, Anthony, was born in February 1965. He was born in June’s mum’s house, the house she had grown up in, on Carmen Street in Ardwick. June was pregnant with Christopher when the family left Ardwick and moved to Wythenshawe – the council estate Arthur had grown up on – in 1968. Christopher was born in May 1968 at the same Manchester city centre hospital as his sister Tracey, St Mary’s on the corner of Oxford Road and Whitworth Street near the future site of The Hacienda. The post-World War Two slum clearances of inner city Manchester, places such as Ardwick, saw Wythenshawe grow to be the largest housing estate in Europe. By the late ’60s, the estate had been split into nine named areas and covered eleven square miles, with an estimated population of 70,000. Unfortunately, in 1970, shortly after moving to Wythenshawe, Arthur was sent to Walton Jail [now HM Prison Liverpool] for two and half years for con spiracy to commit robbery – involving a jewellery salesman and Albert Gibbons.

  Anthony: At home, whilst my dad was away, we went to bed with candles – we could not afford the electric. Either that or there were strikes. Mum had three children under five to look after. The DHSS paid for Tracey and me to go on holiday to Dr Garrett’s Memorial Home in Conway [north coast of Wales] for six weeks. It was supposed to take the pressure away from the single parent. My mum only let us go on the understanding that me and Tracey would not be split up but that was the first thing that happened to us on arrival. They put me in a room with a kid with a glass eye. Every night he would take it out and leave it on the side. It would stare at me all night. As soon as he was asleep I was out of bed and ransacking the crisp box. I knew from an early age that I wanted stuff. I felt I had to use my imagination and my hands to get it.

  My dad’s dad, James, died when I was very young, before Chris was born, and we never got on too well with Nana Ellen, my dad’s mum. My actual earliest recollection is of Chris being born. I ran in the street shouting that I had a baby brother. When we moved to Benchill [one of the nine areas of Wythenshawe] we lived in a three-bed council house, the corner plot, on Benchill Road. We thought Wythenshawe was a beautiful place, the bollocks, surrounded by lovely green fields. Back then I believe there was only a small network of criminals in Manchester operating.

  On my mum’s side, our granddad, George, was a labourer. It was our Grandma Frances on my mum’s side that helped raise us when my dad was in the nick and all through when we were kids. I was very, very close to her. She was a seamstress. Later, when I got into punk through our Tracey, I asked her to make me a mohair jumper. If you had an electric blue mohair jumper you were somebody. It came back as an old fisherman’s Aran jumper – the correct style but wrong type of wool. I also asked her to make me a straight-legged pair of trousers that came back making me look like I played polo – tight at the bottom and baggy at the top. Although she had a job in the fashion industry it didn’t shine through. We loved her, though.

  The night before my dad got out of prison, my mum decorated the house from top to bottom. She bought new clothes for me and Chris and Tracey. I had braces on and a pair of short pants. My dad screeched up outside the house in a Ford Corsair with all his boys inside. He gave me ten pence and took me to the shops. I was proud as punch walking with my dad to the shops. I was six and everyone on the estate had a dad except us. He’d made a gypsy caravan out of matches in jail. That was in the house for a long time.

  Christopher: People were dispersing from Ardwick because they were regenerating the whole area. They sent almost everyone, the overspill, to Wythenshawe. It was the Promised Land at the time … it was all green, lots of grass and trees, farmland. My mum said she had never seen anything like it.

  We were very close to our grandma. When they knocked the houses down in Ardwick she moved to Hattersley [ten miles east of the city centre and, like Wythenshawe, another overspill council estate]. We used to go up there and stay with her. She was like a proper grandma. There was a lot of love there. She remarried after George died. Her new husband, Jack, was a nice fella. Grandma was funny. She’d come to all the family parties and body pop or moonwalk. She was ninety-one when she died. She used to smoke and drink Gold Labels [a very strong barley wine beer up to 12% alcohol]. For Christmas I’d buy her a crate of Gold Label and a bottle of whiskey.

  My mum had a bleached-blonde beehive. She’s from a 100 per cent hard-working family. Her brother and sister are the most strait-laced, normal people. We have always been close to my aunty Norma and her husband, Uncle Alan, and Uncle Ray and his wife, Aunty Sylvia. Sadly my aunt Sylvia and uncle Alan have passed on.

  My dad is the middle child of seven, four sisters and two brothers. His brothers Jimmy and Johnny and their families have always been a big part of our lives. My mum’s life changed when she met my dad, who was a complete rogue.

  Albert Gibbons lived just up the road from us in Wythenshawe. He was always at our house. He was a top geezer.

  June: Their dad was back but things changed – the routine changed. Chris used to sleep with me every night while Arthur was away. The day his dad came home he decided to sleep with Tracey and Anthony. He was only young, but it was his own decision. Arthur went to work and worked away most of the time. He is a very hard-working man. While working at Clarks [putting in steel shelving] he brought a big bagful of shoes home. Every shoe was a left shoe. I kept them because maybe I thought we’d get the right ones some day.

  Tracey Donnelly: We used to have a cubbyhole under the stairs. My dad came home one night with a load of shoes and they got put in the cubbyhole. After about a day I realised they were all left feet. And I used to sit in there with one shoe on that I really liked, thinking, ‘I wish I had the other.’

  Our dad would surprise us. When he worked away doing the steel erecting he’d come back with posters and albums. You always knew you were going to get something when he came back. Our dad’s a workaholic, that’s his thing. He always provided.

  Arthur opened his first scrapyard – Donnelly Auto Spares – in the early ’70s in Ancoats, on Ancoats Lane, a former thriving industrial area of inner city Manchester gone to seed. It was a culturally rich but stubbornly poor area – sometimes known as ‘Little Italy’. Squatting on derelict land, Arthur ran the Ancoats Lane scrapyard successfully – becoming an expert on motor engines. There were also a number of car pitches nearby run by friends, and the area became a strong powerbase for this clique.

  Arthur: My first scrapyard was in Ancoats, then I had one on Hyde Road [Ardwick] and then I wound up with one back in Ancoats, on Hoyle Street. The one on Hyde Road I camped on the site for seven years. At the start, I gave two grand to a couple of kids to fuck off. There was a lump of land across the way with four or five cranes parked up. I fenced off the land so it was ours and I took the engines out of the cranes – Gardner Engines worth about three grand. In the end the kid who owned the cranes paid us ten grand to move his cranes off the land.

  Then I started ripping all the bushes out of the yard and building a wall. I was putting a footing in when this kid walked up with a clipboard. He said, ‘I’m from the bank.’ I said, ‘Lovely. What you doing? Selling insurance?’ He said, ‘We own this land. Do you want to buy it?’ I said, ‘How much is it?’ It was a lot of money, thirty grand, something like that – so I said I’d think about it. Then I moved around the corner and got someone to tip three or four hundred tonne of bricks and shit on this land. The bank rang me up again and said, ‘Do you want to buy it?’ I said, ‘Have you seen the state of it down there?’ They said, ‘Well, what would you give for it?’ I bought it for thirteen grand. The day I moved back on there, I got the machines and pushed the mountain of shit across the road onto the croft next door. When you see an opportunity – take it.

  Anthony: We grew up around scrapyards and car pitches. We were walking down the road in Ancoats one day and we found a pigeon with a sore wing. My dad wasn’t in the yard so we took it to the bloke next door who wears three ties because he can’t make his mi
nd up which one to wear. We asked him if he could fix the pigeon. He’s sat with a dirty old hat, a sheepskin jacket, just like Arthur Daley, next to an old steel bucket with holes in with flames coming through the holes. He said he could fix it, then took the pigeon off us, wrang its neck, pulled its head clean off and threw the body in the bucket, spitting blood out. That’s what we grew up with. Always expect the unexpected.

  We lived at 5A Benchill Road back then until we moved next door to 5 Benchill Road. Number five was a bigger house. The family who lived there was involved in a house swap with someone – and we sort of jumped in the middle of that. We sent the people moving to number five to our old house. You’d go home at night and there’d be five big boxes of biscuits in the kitchen from somewhere or other – so you’d be the kid at school the next day selling fifty Penguins or Jaffa Cakes. Or there might be 800 Jaws T-shirts in the front room.

  Christopher: My dad had been to approved school – he didn’t have much growing up and was trying to make something out of nothing. When we were very young there wasn’t a load of money. It wasn’t until my dad developed his business through the scrap and the engines that we started to see money. My dad used to buy engines for reconditioning and send them all over the world. We lived on the edge of the estate next to what is now a motorway, the M56 – at the time it was just fields. There were always stacks of tyres and engines in the garden. There was a string of nice cars and wagons full with oily engines, dripping oil onto the road. We were the family no one wanted to talk to unless you knew us. Even the police – when they came to our house, they’d throw stones at the door or window. Or they’d come down the path, knock on the door and then run back to the gate. They were frightened to death of us. My dad would run out with a spade and threaten them. We saw all that when we were very young. The police wouldn’t leave my dad alone. We wondered why.