Fog on the Tyne

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  The Sayers clan promoted themselves as a Kray- or mafia-type family, charitable and willing to assist the needy but equally willing to punish those they deemed to have transgressed the criminal code.

  In one incident, Stephen and John Henry heard that someone had robbed St Nicholas’s Cathedral of a valuable jewelled staff. It was 100 years old and of historical importance to the city of Newcastle. Stephen and John Henry were in a pub one day when a lad apparently came in trying to sell the staff. Quite what a beer-swilling Geordie would do with such an item has never been explained. Stephen and John Henry took it from the thief and returned it, undamaged, to the church. Within days, the Sayers family were in the evening newspaper having praise heaped on them.

  As the Conroy and Sayers children grew older, they began to socialise with one another, but egos got in the way, and so they elected to tolerate one another’s presence rather than mix. One of the local lads whom the Conroy family did embrace was Michael Bullock, who lived in the not so Noble Street flats. His mother, ‘Connie the Copper’, as Paddy used to call her, was a straight-laced lady who was adamant that her son should not have anything to do with the Conroy family. If Connie ever saw Paddy up to no good, which was often, she would immediately pick up the phone and ring the police. Michael, or ‘the Bull’, as he was known, was about the same age as Neil, the youngest of the Conroy brothers. Despite Connie’s continuous protests, the Bull and Neil became close friends. Taking Neil to his own home caused the Bull too many headaches, and so he used to spend a lot of time at the Conroys’. Eventually, the Bull moved in.

  Leonard was always lecturing the Bull and Neil about the need to be honest with those you depend on in life. ‘I don’t care who else you lie to,’ Leonard would say, ‘but you must never lie to me or anybody else close to you.’ One evening, Neil and the Bull met a couple of girls in town and stayed out all night. As soon as they walked through the door the following morning, Leonard ushered the Bull into the sitting room. ‘Where were you last night?’ he asked.

  Embarrassed, the Bull meekly replied, ‘We had a few drinks in town. The landlord let us stay late, and we got so drunk we booked into a hotel afterwards rather than come home.’

  Fixing his eyes firmly on the Bull, Leonard said, ‘What have I told you about lying to those close to you?’

  The Bull apologised and told Leonard the truth. That is how Leonard raised all his children. They had no secrets between them, and if somebody crossed one Conroy then they crossed them all. In time, the Bull became an honorary member of the family.

  In order to earn money, Neil and the Bull used to burgle factories and shops or steal cars and use them to carry out ram raids at the MetroCentre shopping complex in nearby Gateshead. They would then supply Paddy with the stolen goods, which he would sell through his network of friends and acquaintances in Newcastle. Paddy also worked the Sunday markets, which were an ideal outlet for the type of stock his unorthodox suppliers provided. From ski suits to children’s buggies – you name it – Conroy’s discounted wholesalers stocked it, and if he didn’t he could place an order and the Bull and Neil would guarantee an overnight delivery.

  Unsurprisingly, the police eventually raided Paddy’s home, in the Noble Street flats, searching for stolen property. After ransacking the place, the only thing that the officers did find was a big, heavy widescreen television. Paddy had bought it from the Bull and Neil after they had stolen it during a burglary at an electrical shop. Huffing and puffing, two detectives struggled to carry the bulky TV out of the lounge. ‘Put it down. You’re both useless,’ Paddy said. ‘I carried it up here on my own, and so I will carry it down for you.’ After the panting and wheezing officers had stood aside, Paddy picked up the television, walked out of his lounge, through the front door and dropped it straight over the balcony and onto the street far below. Boom! There was a huge explosion as the television disintegrated into a thousand pieces.

  Paddy stood there laughing as the detectives did a funny kind of dance on the spot. One ran towards Paddy and then back into the flat. The other detective held his head in his hands and swayed back and forth, as if bowing. ‘Get Conroy in the fucking car,’ one shouted. ‘Get him in the fucking car while I sort out this mess. And don’t let the bastard touch anything else,’ he added, almost as an afterthought. Paddy knew that these two Keystone Kops would have trouble explaining to their bosses how he had come to be in possession of what was an exhibit of evidential value seized from his home. Paddy spent the next 30 minutes sitting in the police car, looking out of the window and laughing at them as they scurried about, picking up all the pieces of the smashed television and putting them into evidence bags.

  When the matter came before the courts, Paddy pleaded not guilty. The prosecution summoned the owner of the television to identify his property, which was now in approximately 20 different evidence bags. Bemused, the man looked at each bag, looked at the magistrates and shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t recognise any of this.’ Moments later, Paddy was walking out of the court having been told that there was no case to answer.

  After a few months of working at The 69 Club, Paddy was relocated to work at a bar in the centre of Newcastle called The Lowthers. Paddy used to work there until it closed, at 10.30 p.m., and then he would cross the Tyne Bridge into Gateshead to work at a nightclub called Wheelers. That was where all the local heavy drinkers used to congregate once the pubs had kicked them out. It is an indisputable fact that alcohol and humans do not mix, and so Wheelers was quite a lively club, to say the least. The regulars who managed to remain upright until closing time tended to fight one another, and those who had failed in their efforts to consume twenty pints of brown ale before the bar closed were left where they fell to help soak up the vomit and beer from the sopping-wet, sticky carpet.

  One evening, Paddy broke up a fight near the bar in Wheelers between Michael Sayers and another man, who had somehow offended him. As Michael was from the West End and Paddy knew of him, he told Michael to step aside and grabbed his opponent by the arm. Another doorman, named Derek, gripped the man’s free arm and together with Paddy began frogmarching him out towards the exit. Before they had left the bar area, somebody ran up behind them and rammed a beer glass into the neck of the man they were in the process of ejecting. Blood gushed from a gaping wound, and Paddy thought the man was in danger of bleeding to death. He told the bar staff to fetch beer towels, and these were then used to apply pressure to the wound until an ambulance arrived. As the trembling man was carried from the premises on a stretcher, he was advised to keep his mouth shut if questioned by the police. Nodding furiously, the victim was loaded into an ambulance and taken to hospital, where he received more than 30 stitches before being discharged the following day.

  As a result of that incident, Paddy barred Michael Sayers from the club. The following week, Michael’s mother, Yvonne, arrived at Wheelers and began shouting and screaming at Paddy for having the audacity to exclude her son. Even when Paddy tried to explain what had happened to an innocent man, Yvonne was not prepared to listen. Despite his mother’s protests, Michael Sayers remained barred from Wheelers, and that, as far as Paddy was concerned, was the end of the matter. Not long after this incident, Michael’s eldest brother, John Henry, started work at the club as a doorman. John Henry was an ex-paratrooper who kept himself in extremely good shape: he never drank and he never smoked.

  One evening, a gang of men from Gateshead burst through the door of Wheelers and came running up the stairs. Paddy had no idea of their intentions, but he was pretty sure that they were not making a social call. After launching himself at the mob, Paddy began knocking them back down the stairs, punching each face as it came into view. When the snarling, spitting mound of writhing bodies reached the reception area, Paddy found himself buried beneath two or three of his opponents and so looked up to see if any of the other door staff were coming to his aid. Suddenly, John Henry appeared and stood above Paddy and the Gateshead men. ‘Thank fuck f
or that,’ Paddy said. ‘Help at last.’ But his relief was both short-lived and misguided. All John Henry did to assist Paddy was shout, ‘Howay, lads, if you want to fight, make it one against one.’ Fortunately for Paddy, John Henry’s ‘intervention’ broke up the fight and the men made their escape via the front door. ‘Disappointing’ is how Paddy described John Henry’s unwillingness to fight that night.

  Because Paddy and Maureen were both working hard and not spending money socialising, Paddy had managed to save approximately £5,000, which he decided to invest in a business rather than waste on brown ale. The Tyneside economy had originally been founded on the coal industry. As demand for the fuel increased, deeper pits were excavated, which led to a huge rise in production, a railway network being introduced and large cargo ships being built by Vickers-Armstrong at their factory on the banks of the Tyne. The Newcastle shipyards became so successful that they began to take orders for the construction of naval and commercial vessels from all over the world. An ever-increasing migrant workforce, needed to meet the labour demands, resulted in a rapid expansion in house building, which in turn brought new shops, pubs, churches and, eventually, a thriving community. In keeping with this, Vickers-Armstrong built a pub, called the Hydraulic Crane, for its 50,000 employees. After the war, however, the workforce was dramatically reduced, the pub closed and it and the surrounding area fell into disrepair.

  Paddy and his eldest brother, Lenny, had made enquiries about the availability of the pub, and much to their surprise they were able to purchase it for a meagre £6,000. It was their belief that the Hydraulic Crane could be renovated and revamped to sell food as well as drink, which would once more attract the Vickers-Armstrong workforce at lunchtimes, and locals in the evenings.

  Lenny’s enthusiasm for the venture waned when a friend of his who worked for the local council suggested that he would never get planning permission. Paddy, on the other hand, has never backed down from a challenge and decided to go it alone. He sold everything he owned and other items that he didn’t quite own, including his partner Maureen’s jewellery, to raise the £3,000 he needed in order to buy out his brother’s share. The last thing Paddy wanted was for Lenny to sell his stake in the pub to somebody he couldn’t or didn’t wish to work with.

  Having secured total ownership of the Hydraulic Crane, Paddy brought in a new partner, who was aptly named Stuart Beveridge. Paddy planned to use the money that Stuart had invested in the project to pay for the renovation work, but before that could begin Stuart and Paddy had to apply for the planning permission that everybody had doubted they could ever obtain. Initially, their application was turned down, but, while reading and researching every possible clause and law relating to the planning procedure, they discovered that the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had earmarked certain deprived areas in many major cities for special concessions. Thatcher had named these areas ‘Enterprise Zones’ and stated that anybody seeking planning permission for business premises within these zones could not be refused.

  Rolling out a map to compare the position of the Hydraulic Crane with the boundaries of Newcastle’s Enterprise Zone, Paddy and Stuart were pleasantly surprised to find that the pub fell just inside. They immediately sat down and penned a letter to Margaret Thatcher, complaining bitterly that Newcastle City Council was ignoring the government’s directive by refusing them planning permission. It is not known if Thatcher personally intervened, but within weeks Stuart and Paddy had been granted permission to renovate the pub. As soon as it became common knowledge that the Hydraulic Crane was going to reopen and Paddy was a partner, one particular police officer did everything in his power to make life difficult for him.

  Knowing Paddy ran a market stall was upsetting enough for some members of Northumbria Police, but the very thought of him running a public house was clearly tipping others over the edge. When the warnings came that the pub would never get a licence to sell alcohol while Paddy was involved in the running of it, he refused to be deterred and the renovation work continued. When it was nearing completion, Paddy was approached by a man who claimed to represent a third party who wished to purchase the pub. Thinking it was some sort of underhand tactic or ploy to glean information about his future plans, Paddy threw caution to the wind and said that the asking price was £45,000. Expecting the man at least to raise a wry smile, Paddy was surprised when he simply said, ‘I will be in touch,’ before turning and walking away. Later that evening, the man returned and said that the third party he represented was willing to pay the full asking price. A few weeks later, the sale went through; Paddy paid his partner back his investment and walked away with more than £35,000 profit.

  Paddy must have felt like the richest man in Newcastle. It was certainly a lot of money to have back in those days. However, he decided that he wasn’t going to get carried away. He had one or two debts to settle, and the remainder of the cash was going to be invested in his family’s future. Paddy’s first mandatory purchase was to replace the jewellery that he had sold belonging to his partner, Maureen. Now that he had a bit of capital, he promised her that he was done with being a villain, that he was going to try to make a legitimate living and, in the hope of sounding sincere, that he wasn’t even going to buy any more heist (stolen property). It was an ambitious statement for Paddy to make, and for a while he actually believed it himself.

  Paddy purchased a derelict three-storey town house for £15,000, which he then converted into eleven bedsits. Paddy named the property ‘The Happy House’, which he had engraved in large letters above the front door. The rooms were furnished with the assistance of the burglary business of his brother Neil and the Bull. The end result seemed to justify the fact that he had broken his promise to Maureen about buying stolen property.

  On 19 July 1988, Paddy went for a drink in Newcastle city centre with three friends named Tommy Findlay, Tony Thomas and Barry Redfern. Paddy wanted to speak to a bouncer by the name of Viv Graham, who worked in town, about an incident at a restaurant called Santino’s that had resulted in Viv barring some of Paddy’s other friends. Viv was later to become a fighting legend in the north-east, but Paddy never considered him to be the lean, mean, unbeatable fighting machine that some have described him as. Viv had begun his career as a bouncer at the Travellers Rest pub in the village of Burnopfield. The owner had two other pubs in the area, and, after witnessing just how competent Viv was at preventing and breaking up trouble, he employed him to clear his other premises of undesirables. From the village of Burnopfield, Viv’s reputation as a hard man soon spread, and he accepted work at venues such as the Whitemare Pool Hotel and Finnegan’s nightclub, in Gateshead.

  It was while working at Finnegan’s that Viv really made a name for himself. He had fought a man named Paul Ashton while Paddy’s boss on the doors, Billy Robinson, looked on. According to those present that night, Viv gave a very good account of himself during 20 gruelling minutes of fighting at the end of which Billy Robinson recruited him to work for his security company.

  Within a relatively short period of time, Viv Graham had become the name that landlords uttered whenever a pub or club in or around the city of Newcastle was experiencing trouble that needed sorting out. Some even began to refer to him as the fourth emergency service. There are, of course, others who claim Viv was just a bully who picked on those he knew he could beat. Paddy’s opinion of Viv fell between both camps. He was undoubtedly an able-bodied fighter, but there was also undeniable evidence of his bullying. In Newcastle, at least one brain-damaged young man bears testament to that.

  When Paddy went to Santino’s restaurant to speak to Viv about why he had barred his friends, he knew that there was a good chance the debate would end in violence, but Paddy had decided that if Viv wanted to resolve the grievance that way then so be it. As Paddy approached the restaurant where Viv was working, one of the bouncers recognised him and locked the door. A dustbin flashed past Paddy’s head as he tried to attract the bouncer’s attention, and the window he was
peering through exploded into a thousand pieces. One of the lads Paddy was with had clearly grown impatient. A burglar alarm and diners in the restaurant immediately began to wail and scream. The bouncers ran out of the main dining area and into the safety of the kitchen, while Paddy and the others ran, laughing hysterically, to their car.

  As they sped away, a policeman noticed that their BMW Cabriolet was travelling the wrong way up a one-way street and decided to pull them over. At first, they thought the policeman was going to question them about the dustbin being thrown through the restaurant window, but it soon became apparent that he wasn’t aware of the incident. ‘Where have you been, lads? Have you been drinking?’ he asked. The driver of the vehicle, Tommy Findlay, stared straight ahead and didn’t bother to reply. He had been drinking all day and knew he would fail a breathalyser test, so he just slammed the car into gear and sped off, leaving the officer shrouded in a cloud of tyre smoke. The policeman ran back to his own vehicle, activated the siren and blue flashing lights, and gave chase.

  Within a few minutes, the speeding car had left the city centre and was careering through the streets of Paddy’s neighbourhood, where the occupants believed that they would be safe. Paddy rang Maureen on his mobile phone and told her to make sure the back gate was open for the driver. Paddy knew that if Findlay was able to get into his house via the rear entrance there was no way the police would give chase, because he had a couple of huge Rottweilers roaming around in the garden. Paddy was living at 113 Northbourne Street at the time and should have known things wouldn’t go according to plan, because over the years the property had been a magnet for bad luck for his family. Paddy’s 19-year-old cousin Jimmy Conroy had lived in the house before him, and he had ended up being convicted of murder.