by Rikki Brown
There was, of course, Captain Pugwash and The Saga of Noggin the Nog. Noggin the Nogg was drawn in dark eerie silhouettes, the exact same dark eerie silhouettes you see when you’re coming down from an LSD trip. I only know this because someone, who obviously wasn’t me, tried acid once or twice or twenty-three times and told me it was.
Glen Michael’s Cartoon Cavalcade was unmissable, not so much for Glen, his lamp Paladin or his dog Rusty or Rudy (one dog died and was replaced with the other but I can’t remember in which order) but for the cartoons. I particularly hated Sundays when it came to TV, especially in the winter, because it was designed to suck the life out of you, leaving you with barely the will to live. It got dark at four and you’d have had your tea and be stuck on the couch while your parents watched Songs of Praise or the even more hymmie singing Stars on Sunday with Jess Yates, who it later transpired wasn’t Paula Yates’s Dad at all. It was Hughie Green. The bible-bashing was followed by The Black and White Minstrel Show and that was just depressing, with people blacked-up and singing hits from the sixties. The 1860s. It was like a racist White Heather Club. The White Heather Club? It was on weekly and it was like having fifty-two New Year’s Eves annually. The heuchter teuchter thing dominated the TV and when you’re a teenager, you’re sitting there thinking, ‘Give me a fucking break.’
If it wasn’t BBC Scotland’s White Heather Club we were being tortured with, we were waterboarded with STV’s Thingummyjig with Jack McLaughlin, otherwise known to himself as the Laird O’ Coocaddens. His catchphrase was ‘shoogle your wallies’, although my mother used to shout to my Dad if he was in another room to ‘come on through Alex and waggle your willies’. Mind you, my mother was always getting things wrong because many years later the TV newsreader appeared on Stars In Their Eyes singing ‘Fever’. My mother told me, ‘I saw your pal Kirsty Young on the telly and she was singing, “You Give Me Beaver”.’ No, Mum, she wasn’t.
It was around this time that I thought my Dad was having an affair because when you are thirteen or so you take things quite literally. Not that I thought my Dad was having an affair with just anyone. I thought he was having an affair with Kathy Kirby, a popular singing star of the day. And why did I think my Dad was having an affair? Because every time Kathy appeared on a programme my mother would say, ‘Look, Alex, your girlfriend’s on the telly.’
The Scottish soap back then was STV’s Garnock Way, of which I don’t remember much except for the actor John Stahl’s policeman character. The sleeves on his uniform were miles too short, so much so that it looked as though his uniform was short sleeved. He only even seemed to have one line, which was, ‘Will you no go out with me Mary Baxter?’ We had a girl in our class called Mary Baxter and we wiled away many a double period of Maths by rolling up our sleeves and asking her out.
For me, though, the highlight of the televisual week was Crime Desk with Bill Knox. It was hilarious, although it wasn’t meant to be. Bill would tell you about crimes and ask the public’s help in solving them, and of course, as he said, ‘Calls made to the police can be in confidence.’ What was funny about Crime Desk were the crimes because the crimes always seemed to involve the theft of a JCB. According to Bill, that’s all that was ever stolen in Scotland and they were always stolen by neds, and it was never actually very clear when the neds stole them because Bill would say, ‘Between the hours of 5pm on Friday and 10.50am on the following Wednesday, neds broke into a builder’s yard and stole a JCB.’ JCBs are big yellow things, so how did the owners not notice it was missing? Surely the big yellow thing not being where the big yellow thing usually is was a bit of a giveaway.
Bill was the first person to use the word ned on television. When I say use it, I mean overused it, because Crime Desk had a ned count of about 160 every show. The only time I think Crime Desk wasn’t about stolen JCBs was when Bill asked for the public’s help in catching Bible John. I often wonder how that panned out for him and the police.
There was a lot more religious programming than we have today and every weeknight STV broadcast Late Call, which ended up brilliantly parodied by Rikki Fulton on Scotch and Wry. The gist of 90% of Late Call shows was that it was much better to be a Protestant than a Catholic because Protestantism is very low maintenance as it doesn’t require you having to do anything. You don’t even have to go to church, which is just as well because Scotland wouldn’t really have that many Protestants if church attendance was a rigidly adhered to requirement.
5
LEADER OF THE PAK
The sixties were drawing to a close and I don’t think anyone in Easterhouse was sad to see the back of them, mainly because it was the decade when the area became notorious throughout Europe for gang violence. The area of Easterhouse had been divided into sub-areas and each sub-area was the domain of a gang. I don’t know how this had been achieved, probably by some sort of gang summit where the gang leaders sat down and negotiated with each other which turf was theirs. The gang ruling the roost in my area were the Skinheads and we were bordered by the Torran Toi, the Drummie and the Bar-L, who came from just across the Edinburgh Road in Barlanark. If ever a gang were aptly named it was the Bar-L because most of them ended up in Barlinnie Prison.
It wasn’t really bordered as such, it was more like surrounded. Occasionally the West Rebels and the Pak, who hailed from slightly further away, ventured into hostile territory and it never ended well. On one lovely summer’s evening my mates and I sat on a gable end wall watching a fight between the Skinheads and the Pak. This was the only entertainment available and it usually helped pass quite a pleasant evening watching the sabre rattling. What made this encounter unusual was that there actually was a fight because normally someone would shout, ‘Come intae me,’ and one gang would charge and the other gang would run away. Then the same thing would happen in reverse. But on this evening they completely mistimed their charging and both charged at the same time. I was surprised that the two ‘leaders aff’ didn’t meet in the middle and say, ‘Come on, we had a meeting, we discussed this, we charge first, you run away, then after that it’s your turn.’ The outcome of the lack of choreography was brutal, with the Pak ending up on the losing side. Most of them eventually managed to escape, albeit with various slash and machete wounds, but two didn’t. The first ended up stabbed up the rectum a couple of times to shouts of, ‘Let’s see if the Royal can fucking stitch that,’ and, ‘You’ll be shitting out Play-Doh shapes.’
Turns out he was the lucky Pak member because the other one was lying on his back with two Skinheads holding his legs apart, while the third was swinging a golf club and trying for at least a two under par with his testicles. Judging from the noises he was making, the experience was less than pleasant for him. I’d love to say that I had sympathy for him but I didn’t. If you are going to run around in a gang waving sharp things about, you really have to expect the occasional serious assault on your man junk by a maniac with a five iron. I’m saying it was a five iron, but it could have been a sand wedge. I wasn’t getting off the wall to have a closer look.
Why machetes were used frequently was never something that could be explained but where did they get them? It’s not as if they should be widely available for purchase, as Scotland is hardly a country known for its dense jungle undergrowth. The next morning we found that someone had spray painted Skinheads 7 Pak 0 on the gable end we’d been sitting on. What had once been a gable end was now a scoreboard. It was said at the time that the Pak only lost because their leader, or ‘leader aff’ as it was more commonly known, was on holiday and hadn’t taken part. This was probably true because their leader aff – Babs – was enormous and terrifying, and more to the point, he was completely mental. I once saw him yank a metal clothes pole out of the ground and swing it about like a medieval staff. So how enormous was he? Put it this way, he played the big bass drum in the Orange Walk but because of his gargantuan stature it looked like he had a snare drum strapped to his chest. So the Pak taking on the Skinheads without Babs was
the equivalent of German tank divisions taking on the Russian tank divisions in the Battle of Kursk without their tanks.
I don’t know why his nickname was Babs, probably because having a girlie nickname allowed him to get into many, many more fights with people who pointed that out to him, or anyone who even just thought it because legend had it that Babs could read minds. When Babs got back from holiday, the first thing he did was to chib his No. 2 for taking the decision to fight the Skinheads without him, a decision that saw the Pak’s street gang rankings fall behind the Drummie, which was bad for the Pak because the Drummie were a bunch of diddies. The second thing he did was to demand a rematch but the Skinheads, while they may have been short on hair, weren’t short on intelligence and declined with excuses like, ‘Sorry, I’m staying in to wash my scalp,’ or, ‘Sorry, we’ve suddenly become pacifists and we’ve renounced violence.’
By 1968, the gang warfare had reached such a level that Easterhouse was awash with TV crews reporting on the impact the situation was having on the vast majority of people who had absolutely nothing to do with gangs. Having a TV crew in Easterhouse was never something that ended well, especially for politicians when appearing on camera making platitudes. Every interview would start with the politician’s face to camera with no one in the background, but five seconds into the interview the background would be filled with neds who’d suddenly appeared from nowhere to flick the Vs or make the wanker sign behind the politician’s back.
It’s a tradition that continues to this day with the latest victim being the then Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson. There she was spouting forth about all that the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Labour party were doing for disaffected youth and all the time a disaffected youth in a shell suit was flicking the Vs behind her back. It became an iconic image that left me strangely very proud of where I’d come from.
In actual fact, all the social commentary was patronising and in the end, utterly meaningless because it was never backed up with action. That was until Frankie Vaughan came along. Frankie, or Mr Moonlight as he was known because that was his biggest hit, read about Easterhouse, saw it on the TV news and on the Pathe News at the cinema, and decided that he had to do something about it. He’d grown up in Liverpool, which had a gang problem too, but Liverpool had the Beatles now so the city was world famous for something positive. We didn’t have the Beatles to take the bad look off it so Frankie thought we needed help.
So what gave Frankie Vaughan the right to get involved in what was basically absolutely none of his business? He’d winched Marilyn Monroe so that gave him the right. Winching one of the most beautiful women in the world not only gave him the right, it made him a legend amongst winchers. There were those who claimed he was only doing it for the publicity but that was just jealously on the part of people who were jealous that they hadn’t got to winch Marilyn Monroe. Yes, there was much local bemusement, but bemusement is much better than hostility.
Frankie called for a weapons amnesty that was much publicised and Frankie and the press descended on Easterhouse. A metal bin was provided as the receptacle for the weapons, but it was just one bin. By local reckoning, Frankie was about ninety-nine bins short of what would have been needed should the gangs genuinely disarm. Many gang members did indeed turn up carrying an assortment of weapons, some dangerous, but mostly just odd bits and pieces they’d found en route to the photo opportunity. ‘Aye the Frankie Boy man, this is ma chibbing brick, which naw, I didnae just find it, naw, naw, me and this brick have been in hunners a’ gang battles man,’ and another ned, ‘And see this bottle, see whit he’s just said, well ditto, big Frankie man.’
The gangs may not have properly disarmed but what Frankie’s interest did achieve was to focus public attention on the area’s problems. Up until then every story had simply been full of tut-tutting and verbal disdain but now there were calls for something to actually be done about it. Frankie started the ball rolling by donating £3,500 – the proceeds of his concert at the Glasgow Pavilion. This shamed Glasgow Council into action and they said they’d donate double what Frankie made. The £10,500 raised was spent on what was called the Easterhouse Project, the result of which was a couple of Nissen Huts erected just off Lochend Road. This may have sounded like a great idea, but unless you lived in the immediate area it was pointless because the gang borders still existed and you’d still get your head kicked in if you didn’t hail from within an 800-yard radius of the huts. The attitude of the gang who ran the area was, ‘Naw, I think you’ll find that Frankie built us these Nissen huts, no youse, so fuck off.’
An odd thing happened when Frankie was in Easterhouse. My pet hamster disappeared. I looked everywhere. I say everywhere but really I just looked behind the fridge because that’s the usual place where hamsters turn up, dead or otherwise. Hammie was nowhere to be found so I came to the conclusion that, as Hammie’s disappearance coincided with Mr Vaughan’s visit to Easterhouse, Frankie Vaughan ate my hamster. Well you do hear about showbiz people and their strange goings on with small rodents, don’t you? The rumours about Richard Gere and the gerbil, for instance, that I won’t go into because it’s all a bit weird.
So Frankie left and everything returned to normal. When I say normal, I mean normal for Easterhouse. Now you may ask where the police were in all this. Usually nowhere to be seen. No, not usually, always nowhere to be seen. This wasn’t helped by the fact that Easterhouse didn’t get a police station until 1972. But on the odd occasion when someone bothered to phone the police station in the city to report a pitched battle, they’d turn on the police sirens so that they could be heard from miles away in Baillieston. If their plan was to let everyone know they were coming and give the gangs time to run away, then their plan worked brilliantly. When they did arrive, slowly, being over-taken by milk floats and pedestrians, the battle was over and there was no one to arrest. In all the years I lived in Easterhouse, I never ever heard anyone shouting, ‘Run, here’s the polis.’ I did hear, ‘Right, there’s the polis sirens, that gives us a couple of hours to wrap this fight up and stroll off at a very leisurely pace.’
The police inaction led to vigilantism. A group of grown men decided to take the law into their own hands and formed what they called the White Panthers. But they were just as crap as the police. They travelled around in a blue Bedford minibus, not accosting any gang members but accosting plenty of innocent passers-by. I know this because one night my mates and I were walking along the road doing nothing of any consequence when the van screeched to a halt beside us, the grown-up men jumped out and they dragged us all into the back of the bus. Nowadays I think that would be called an abduction and false imprisonment. They played the hard-men card and threatened us, which pissed us off no end because it was an injustice. None of us were gang members. We knew the gang members and they knew us but that was because we’d made them aware of us. Our thinking came from The Beach Boys’ song ‘I Get Around’, which contains the line ‘the bad guys know us so they leave us alone’. It seemed to work.
The more the White Panthers questioned us as to what we were up to, where we lived, etc, the more belligerent we became and that resulted in the fattest one losing his temper and slapping Eddie across the face. At that point they realised they’d gone too far as Eddie told them, ‘I’ll get you done for assault ya fat bastard.’ They opened the bus doors and let us go and that was it, our only run in with the White Panthers. If they’d tackled the gangs they would maybe have done some good but they didn’t because they were basically ineffectual cowards.
The only positive of living in a gang-controlled area was the protection it sort of afforded. The gangs had some kind of distorted honour, which made them see themselves as the local inhabitants’ protectors. The Skinheads’ main members were Alka, Virgo and Nervo. Nervo had a nervous tic (hence the name). Knowing who they were was always handy when you were stopped by a minor member of the gang. In the American West, the Apache handed out a tomahawk with feathers attached in such a way that
it acted as a sign of safe passage. Any traveller passing through their territory simply had to show it to a war party and they’d remain unscathed. In Easterhouse, a name was our Apache tomahawk. When stopped by a Skinhead war party, you simply had to say, ‘Alka, I know him,’ and that would be it. But you had to ensure that the ned you were attempting to appease came from the gang which included the person’s name you were dropping. If you got it wrong, the only other hope you had was that you were a faster runner than the other guy.
Of course, it did get ridiculous when, for instance, the ned didn’t take your word for it and demanded to know how you knew Alka. This left you explaining, ‘Well, see, his sister, she’s got a pal whose going out with a guy who lives in the next close to me whose cousin’s mate’s pal’s brother lives in Halliburton Crescent, and that’s how I know Alka.’ Usually the confusion confused them.
Alka, it has to be said, was responsible for the only working telephone box in Easterhouse, which was situated on Ware Road. Every other one was vandalised, but the Ware Road box was in perfect working condition because this was the box that Alka used to phone his girlfriend in Shettleston and he let it be known that anyone who damaged the phone box would end up being damaged by him. That phone box stood out as a beacon of normality in a world gone destructive.
One of the gangs bordering Skinheadland was the Torran Toi. They deserve a mention because they were the scariest gang of all. They came from Torran Road, a road no one ever ventured along. Like not ever, because even on the sunniest day it seemed to be shrouded in an evil fog. Torran Road was like Easterhouse’s Castle Dracula. You could see it in the distance but you didn’t want to go anywhere near it. The thing was, though, that they had a reputation and no one knew why. They were never in any gang fights, so where this reputation that they were all ‘dead good fighters’ came from was a mystery and even more of a mystery was why Torran Road was viewed with such trepidation. But it was and staying with the movie theme to labour the point, Torran Road could have been an alternative urban setting for Deliverance. It was all the plunk of banjos and the pretty mouth squealing of pigs.