Fog on the Tyne

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  Moments later, Paddy was running across the fields to freedom, but he had been spotted by the school bully, who informed the teachers, and was soon apprehended. Threats, slaps and promises of further punishment accompanied him back to his bed. When the onslaught had ended, rather than sleep, Paddy lay awake in the darkness, planning his next move. He couldn’t see what was happening in his dormitory, but the cries of pain and anguish from within the darkness made it abundantly clear that some of his fellow inmates were being either raped or beaten, or both. Paddy could live with the threat of violence, but the very thought of being raped inspired him to run away at great speed the following morning.

  Paddy didn’t know it at the time, but running away from that institution was one of the wisest decisions he would ever make. The abuse, both sexual and physical, turned out to be far more sinister than he had experienced during his own short stay. In 2007, scores of former pupils at care homes throughout the north-east, including Netherton, sued for damages. It was proven that they had suffered rape and sexual, physical and emotional abuse. So much for sending young children who have stolen a single bottle of beer to such an establishment for ‘rehabilitation’.

  After making his way to the nearest town, Paddy used the £5 note that his father had given him to get home. Seeing the famous Tyne Bridge from the window of a bus later that afternoon would undoubtedly have been one of the happiest moments in Paddy’s life. After fleeing from the approved school, he did his best to change his ways and avoid contact with the police. But, however good his intentions may have been, he still needed money to pay for his day-to-day needs and so, inevitably, returned to committing petty crime.

  During the execution of one particular criminal enterprise, Paddy happened upon a pretty girl named Maureen, who later turned out to be the love of his life. Their first meeting was hardly romantic: Maureen was mugged, by Paddy, as she was making her way to the shops. Paddy had been told by a friend that Maureen was paid to do the shopping for her landlady, and so he decided that he would relieve her of the cash. In many ways, it was the perfect crime. Maureen did not argue when Paddy demanded that she hand over her cash to him, nor did she report him to the authorities when she had complied with his request.

  After being robbed two or three times in as many weeks, Maureen didn’t even bother waiting for Paddy to ask for the money when they next met. Paddy just stood outside the shop, and Maureen walked over to him and handed over her cash. Then, one day, Paddy decided to carry Maureen off home along with her money. They have been together ever since.

  The authorities regularly searched Paddy’s grandmother’s home and scoured the local streets in pursuit of him. He was confident that he would never be caught, but his father sat him down one day and explained that it would be only a matter of time before they got lucky and he would be returned to the approved school. Leonard was no stranger to being on the run and advised his son that if he wished to stay free he would be better off moving to London to live with a good friend of his named Jack Mulholland. Paddy knew Jack, as he had been a regular visitor to the Conroy household over the years. Paddy liked him, and so he agreed that he would move to London.

  Jack was a member of Leonard’s criminal ‘firm’, and together they used to burgle country houses, hijack lorries and rob post offices. Leonard knew that Jack would accommodate Paddy, as the Conroy home had regularly been used as a safe haven for his criminal associates. Sometimes it would be because they had just got out of prison and had nowhere else to stay, but more often than not it was because they were hiding from the police. Amongst the many guests over the years were Danny Burns, Norman Short, Leonard’s brother William, Kenneth ‘Panda’ Anderson, Billy Gascoigne, Charlie Francis and Sugar Bentley. These men were all notorious villains in the north-east during the 1960s and ’70s.

  Jack Mulholland was a single man who lived in the Southall area of west London. Despite his single status, Jack was hardly unattached. In fact, he was attached to a different female nearly every evening of the week. To fund his extensive wining, dining and romancing habit, Jack worked full-time as a security guard controlling the gate of a large industrial estate. Paddy grew extremely fond of Jack, who would mesmerise him with fascinating stories about his life and the criminal enterprises that he and Paddy’s father had embarked upon. During one such conversation, Paddy learned that Jack held the rather dishonourable honour of being the most flogged man ever to be incarcerated at HMP Durham. Considering the establishment was built in 1810 and has housed some of Britain’s most notorious prisoners, Jack’s punishment record was quite remarkable.

  Whenever Jack was taken from court to prison, he would spit into the face of the first prison officer who spoke to him. Then – bang – he would throw a punch and a fight would begin. Jack knew that he would never be able to defeat all the prison officers, but he told friends that he wanted them to know he didn’t fear them. After being restrained, Jack would then be manhandled to the punishment block, stripped and repeatedly lashed with the birch. There were no general rules for administering this barbaric form of punishment, and so each individual prison officer devised his own personal preferences. Some would flog Jack across the buttocks, others across his back or shoulders. Some would administer a beating that combined all three areas. The beatings left Jack with terrible scarring and a deep-seated hatred of anybody in authority.

  On the Uxbridge Road in Hayes, west London, which is where Jack worked, stood the EMI Music record factory. Any records that were marked or had covers that were in any way damaged were thrown into large skips adjacent to the factory wall. An LP back in those days retailed at around £5, and so Paddy decided that he would set up his own record stall on Brick Lane Market in the East End and sell them at a heavily discounted rate. After getting the all-clear from Jack, Paddy climbed a wall on the industrial estate and stole about ten boxes of records. The following day, Paddy ‘acquired’ a wheeled trolley with racks on, loaded it up with his stolen goods and caught the Tube to Aldgate East, which is just a short walk from the famous Brick Lane Market. Paddy didn’t bother with the expense of hiring a stall; he just stood on a street corner, and in no time at all he had sold all his stock. He was hardly going to become a millionaire from selling damaged records, but his income wasn’t bad and the overheads were no more than a return Tube ticket.

  Paddy was soon expanding his business by sending boxes of the stolen records back home to Newcastle for his friends and associates to sell. Everything appeared to be going well for Paddy: he was happy living with Jack, he had built up a regular customer base on the market and he was earning more than enough to pay his own way. Then, just nine months after Paddy moved to London, tragedy struck: Jack was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He contacted Paddy’s father from his deathbed and offered him his job as a security guard at the industrial estate. ‘It’s a cracking job,’ Jack said. ‘The wages aren’t great, but the fiddles more than make up your money.’

  At the time, the country was being held to ransom by the unions, the dockers, the car workers and the miners, and anybody else who was fortunate enough to be in employment was either on strike, working reduced hours or working to rule. Money was hard to come by, and so Leonard accepted Jack’s kind offer and moved to London, taking his wife and family with him. The West End of London bore no resemblance to the West End of Newcastle, where the Conroy family had lived; in fact, it turned out to be a bit of a culture shock for them all. They had never set eyes on an Asian person in their lives, and in Southall, where they had settled, white people appeared to be in the minority. The Conroys had no problem with their neighbours being from another part of the world; they just found it difficult to converse because of their strong Geordie accents. Even the native cockneys used to ask them to slow down when they spoke so that they could try to understand what it was they were saying.

  After Jack died, Paddy returned to Newcastle and moved in with Maureen, who was living in a flat with her sister Pat. When Maureen and her brothers and siste
rs were all very young, they had been adopted or put into care homes. Initially, Maureen had gone to live in Leeds with a foster family, but she had returned to Newcastle to reside with her sister, whose partner was a well-known villain named David Glover. He had a son, also named David, who was eight years younger than Paddy. When Paddy first moved in with Maureen and the Glovers, he got on well with David junior, but he soon realised that he was an extremely volatile and devious character.

  On the day that they first met, Paddy heard a car engine roaring from behind a pair of locked garage doors. Suddenly, there was a huge crash, and a car, reversing at speed, burst through the doors and out onto the car park where Paddy was standing. Shrouded in a cloud of exhaust fumes, smoke and dust, Paddy was unable to see who was in the driving seat of the vehicle, but as the smoke began to clear he could see a small boy grinning maniacally behind the steering wheel. The boy was so short that he had put a milk crate on the driving seat to be able to see out through the windscreen. Bending down to wedge an iron bar onto the accelerator, the boy had nearly run Paddy over as the car jumped forward and then raced out of sight. David Glover was only around nine at that time, and he was already terrorising the area where he lived.

  Whenever David Glover senior was sent to jail, David junior would burgle local houses to put food on the table for his family. At the tender age of 13, he was caught trying to break into HMP Durham via the high-security walls so that he could give his father contraband. The local community was absolutely terrified of David. If he couldn’t get his way, or if he lost a fight, it wouldn’t end there. Those who were naive enough to cross him or to take him on were usually found lying unconscious in their own bloody mess.

  A kind, caring woman named Cathy, for whom Maureen regularly babysat and did odd jobs, suggested that Maureen and Paddy live with her. Maureen was often at her home from early evening until the early hours of the morning caring for the children while Cathy worked, and so it made sense to Paddy for both of them to move in there. Cathy’s home was only a stone’s throw from the Glovers’, and so Maureen accepted her offer, as she would still be near her sister.

  One evening while Maureen was babysitting, Paddy had gone out and accepted a lift from a friend in a stolen car that was subsequently stopped by the police. They were taken to the local station to be questioned. The desk sergeant soon realised, after making checks, that Paddy was on the run from the approved school, and so he refused to grant him bail. When Paddy appeared in court the following morning, he was remanded in custody to HMP Low Newton, a purpose-built remand centre that lies just four miles south of Durham. It was built in 1965 to hold 65 males and 11 female prisoners, but when Paddy arrived it housed a total of 215 inmates. To say the place was overcrowded would be a gross understatement.

  Paddy’s time in Low Newton during the late ’70s was pretty uneventful. Because of the overcrowding, there wasn’t enough work to go around, and so inmates spent the majority of their time locked in their cells. After three months of mind-numbing incarceration, Paddy appeared in court for sentencing. It was agreed by all concerned that Paddy was now too old to be returned to the approved school, and so the magistrate fined him for allowing himself to be carried in a stolen vehicle and ordered his immediate release. Shortly after that, the rest of the Conroy family returned from London to live in Newcastle. Paddy’s recent stay in prison and the presence of his mother had a sobering effect upon him, and so, for the first time in his life, he decided to seek legitimate employment.

  Chapter Two

  AND PIGS MIGHT FLY

  THE FIRST LEGITIMATE job that Paddy ever had was making sausage skins at the local abattoir. The rancid stench of animal guts and carcases clung to the clothing and skin of everybody who worked there. The workforce could scrub themselves for a week with bleach, but there would always remain a slight minty smell that identified them to others as abattoir employees. Paddy stomached the job for only two weeks, because he was offered and accepted a job as a doorman at a venue called The 69 Club.

  Two legendary fighters named Paddy Leonard and Billy Robinson provided the security at the venue, and both were friends of Paddy’s father. A man named ‘Lucky’ Joe Lyle actually owned the place, but he spent the majority of his time in the comfort of his home on the Isle of Man. The clientele tended to be made up of rough-and-ready characters, but, apart from the odd punch-up that one might witness in any establishment that sells alcohol, there was very little for the bouncers to sort out. That was because the people who frequented the club respected Paddy and Billy, and so if customers did encounter somebody they disliked they would usually ignore them and sort out their differences elsewhere.

  A decade before Paddy Conroy was employed at The 69 Club, the Kray brothers had visited the venue while on a business trip to Newcastle. A Geordie named Vince Landa had made a fortune from fruit machines during the 1960s, when the gambling industry was still in its infancy, and the Krays were hiring and installing Landa’s machines in the pubs and clubs that they protected throughout London – for a non-negotiable fee, of course. As their business boomed, the Krays decided to cut out the middleman and purchase rather than hire the machines, and so they travelled from London to discuss a deal with Landa.

  In an attempt to be the perfect host, Landa took the Krays to the Club A-Go-Go in Whitley Bay before arriving at The 69 Club later the same evening. When Joe Lyle realised who Landa was attempting to bring into his club, he told the Krays that they were not welcome and threatened to call the police. Not used to being excluded from any establishment, Reggie Kray is said to have glared at Lyle and warned him that his insolence would not be forgotten. Quickly reflecting upon his actions, Lyle is said to have given a notorious Geordie villain named Kenneth ‘Panda’ Anderson £1,000 in cash to give to the Krays by way of an apology.

  Panda, who knew the Krays and many other cockney villains following periods he had spent with them in prison, offered Reggie the cash, and he accepted it. Very ‘Lucky’ Lyle’s lack of tact was put down to an unfortunate misunderstanding. The stories that have circulated for years about the Krays being threatened and chased out of Newcastle are nonsense; they left of their own accord after completing their business there. Why Joe Lyle objected to the Krays going into The 69 Club is a mystery, because the only people who drank in there were villains.

  Being employed as a doorman suited Paddy Conroy; he was free to do what he wanted during the day, and while he was working at night his partner Maureen was generally earning money too, by babysitting. In order to make ends meet, Paddy took on a couple of casual day jobs. For a while, he worked as a builder and, later, as a glazier at the Clayton Glass factory on West Road.

  A few years earlier, Paddy’s father had assaulted a policeman, whom I shall call Pinky, after a difference of opinion, and this disgruntled officer had decided to make it his life’s work to cause problems for the Conroy family. Pinky and his colleague, whom I shall call Perky, used to relentlessly patrol the street where the Conroys lived. These two particular officers were generally known for throwing their weight around and slapping any teenagers they found committing misdemeanours. They didn’t ever slap Paddy, despite the fact that he used to verbally abuse them whenever he saw them out on patrol. Paddy’s safety was ensured by the fact that Pinky and Perky both feared his father.

  When Paddy arrived at the glass factory for work one morning, he was called into the manager’s office and advised that ‘a problem’ had arisen regarding his employment. ‘The police have been in to see me,’ the bleak-faced manager said. ‘And they say that I am unwise to employ a man whose family is involved in serious crime.’ Paddy asked if he was going to be sacked, but, to his credit, the manager replied that he would do no such thing. ‘I won’t be dictated to by the police about whom I employ, but if you are involved in any wrongdoing it must cease forthwith,’ he said sternly.

  Despite the manager’s initial good intentions, things were never quite the same for Paddy at work after that. The police returne
d on two or three occasions and asked the manager how some of his customers would feel if they knew he was employing ‘a Conroy’, and so Paddy saved his boss the embarrassment of having to sack him by handing in his notice. Paddy wasn’t that bothered about losing his job, but he was troubled by the attitude of the police, because he was not involved in any criminality at that time. Paddy was at the glass factory during the day and working the doors at night, and so he had more than enough money to make ends meet. Paddy believed that it was just a case of certain police officers victimising his family because of his father’s criminality and the company that he chose to keep.

  The Conroys were far from unique in the West End of Newcastle. Just a stone’s throw from their front door lived the Sayers family. For generations, they had worked the markets in Newcastle. In fact, they were the first licensed ‘barrow boys’ in the city. To this day, a member of the Sayers family runs a fruit and vegetable stall that has been in Northumberland Street, the main shopping thoroughfare, since 1884. Like the Conroys, father and sons alike were villains, but neither family had much to do with the other. With the passing of time, that situation has changed. Members of the Sayers family have been accused of involvement in armed robbery, blackmail and murder, and the Conroys, Paddy in particular, have become their arch-enemies. It is widely believed in the north-east that the eldest son, John Henry Sayers, is ‘the Godfather of Newcastle’, a title he has done very little to disown.