Eric Bristow (2 page)

One thing our gang prided itself on was cleanliness. We used to break into people’s houses and we never damaged a thing. We were good thieves and we did a job properly. If we were going through a chest of drawers, we started at the bottom and worked our way up; that way we didn’t make a mess of the place. We’d
never
soil the beds or urinate up the walls the way they do now because we had respect for the houses we were robbing.

We were in a house at lunchtime one day, and all of a sudden the distinctive waft of cooking came floating up the stairs. While I and a couple of others were rifling through bedroom drawers, downstairs our partner in crime was cooking. I shot down and confronted him. I was furious. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ I said. ‘Let’s get everything and get out, you daft sod, before we get caught.’

The smell was so good and so overpowering, however, that we all sat down to a full English breakfast, which was a rare treat back then in the late sixties – and because we were good thieves we even washed the pots and put them back where we found them afterwards. I bet the people who owned the home didn’t even realise we’d made a meal when they got back.

The guy who cooked it got nicked off us by another gang shortly after that, for the simple reason he was small and pencil thin. In London around that time most of the Victorian houses had small manholes outside where the coal was poured in. When they came to deliver it, they would simply pull the manhole up and tip the coal in. when this gang of black lads saw my little mate, they took him from us to get down these coalholes. He couldn’t argue with them: he had to do it or they would have put him in hospital.

So he was taken to someone’s home where they had one of these holes outside. He had to slide down into it and follow the tunnel inside the house to a flimsy wire shutter that opened to access the coal. He kicked this shutter open, climbed out, went to the front door and let the lads in. That was him done then and he’d walk off down the street, absolutely filthy. However, these lads weren’t just petty thieves; they were doing proper jobs. They were going in with vans and emptying the houses of everything. All people had to do to stop this happening was have a metal grate with a lock fitted on the outside hole, but people didn’t think.

Everywhere our gang went we came across brainless idiots: people who just didn’t have a clue. Most people deep down are basically wallies. A pal and I went to work for one down the market. He sold rollers that rubbed fluff off your clothes. Customers could buy one for fifty pence. We were working for this geezer who said he’d pay us two pounds a day to sell these things. So we said, ‘Yeah, no problem, all right, when do we start?’ It was easy money to us. We got to the market and he gave us a big bag of these rollers to sell, and when we’d sold them he got another bag out of the van and we sold them as well. They were flying out. This bloke was coining it in; we were making him stacks of money. Then this guy gave us the keys to the van and told us to look after things while he went for a cup of tea. What a stupid idiot. He didn’t know us from Adam,
and
we knew that; that’s why we went to the van, got about eight bags of these rollers and walked with them to the other end of the market where we started selling them for twenty-five pence each, undercutting him by half. We’d sold out in no time, made twenty times the amount he was paying us for a day, and scarpered.

When we didn’t rob and pilfer we’d more often than not be fighting. A typical night out, for example, was us going down to the Tottenham Royal, which was a nightclub. It was where I made my England darts debut funnily enough, and was situated right opposite a police station of all places. One night when we went – I was fifteen but looked a lot older, so I never got asked for identity in these places – it all kicked off. There was a balcony which looked out on to the dance floor, and people were being picked up and thrown over the rail, landing thirty feet below. There were bodies sprawled everywhere; it looked as if a war had broken out.

There was one particular nutcase nicknamed Cappa, who used to go to the old North Bank and fight with Arsenal, he was a lunatic. He was tooled up this night, only he didn’t have a knife or anything like that, he had a plane, a plane you use to smooth wood, which he used that night to plane the top of a poor guy’s head. This bloke was stumbling about with this plane through his skull, in agony. I was convinced he was going to die and we had to run like hell to get away from the place before the police arrived.

I used to go and watch Arsenal and see Cappa on the terraces, but I never fought, even though violence was really taking off in football. I was never a hooligan for the simple reason that I went with my dad. Dad was a big Arsenal fan and I used to go to nearly every game with him. I was fourteen when they won the double in 1971 and we went to every home game, every away game and every FA Cup game except the final. Dad went to the final on his own. I watched it on television at home with a couple of mates and tried to spot him in the crowd of one hundred thousand. But my dad isn’t stupid: he got near the ground and somebody wanted to buy his ticket off him for the equivalent of four week’s wages, so they went to a nearby pub, Dad sold it to him, and he spent the rest of the afternoon in there watching it on telly.

When he came home I said: ‘I couldn’t see you on TV.’

‘I wasn’t there, son,’ he replied and laughed.

Why we could only get one cup final ticket was simple: we only bought one match-day programme between us. There were tokens in these programmes and if you went to every game you would cut them out and keep them to get your ticket if Arsenal got to the FA Cup Final. So Dad got the ticket. I wasn’t that bothered anyway; I supported Chelsea. Arsenal were a better team but Chelsea, with players like Peter Osgood and Charlie Cook, had more flair, plus I liked the colour blue. When
I
was fourteen I went on my own across London to watch them lose 2–1 to Everton. I vowed never to go again, they were rubbish that day, but I still went with my dad to see Arsenal.

In the 1971 FA Cup semi-final they played Stoke City at Hillsborough in Sheffield. Me and my dad got off the train and walked down a big hill. The problem was Stoke were red and white and so were Arsenal, but Dad and I never twigged this. Walking to the ground we saw this sea of red and white in a great big park, so we headed straight for the middle of it, thinking they were Arsenal fans. When we got there all you could hear was ‘ ’Allo, duck’ and ‘How are you, duck?’ We’d walked into the middle of Stoke’s main firm, and all they wanted to do was find a couple of Arsenal fans and beat them up. Dad whispered in my ear: ‘Keep walking. Don’t say a word.’ We walked all the way through them in silence, which was hard for me because I do like to natter.

It ended 2–2 and the replay was at Villa Park, which gives a great comparison of football in the early-seventies and now. At Villa Park they were doing repair work on the end where the Arsenal fans were. There were thousands of us standing on debris, bricks, everything. Now they’d have to close that stand for safety reasons, but then they didn’t give a monkey’s. It was dangerous as well. When we scored people could have broken their ankle and got trampled in the surge forward
that
followed. Some fans did fall on the bricks and rubble and hurt themselves quite badly. The St John Ambulance staff were kept very busy that day.

If it wasn’t the poor state of the stadium you had to contend with, there was always the police who treated soccer fans like mad dogs. You could find yourself trampled on by a horse, hit over the head with a truncheon or basically just pushed out of the way by coppers with absolutely no respect for anyone. After the game Dad and I went outside, and as we were walking along he fancied a steak and kidney pie which he bought from a van and ate. There was litter everywhere, you couldn’t see the floor for aluminium pie cartons, and all the bins tied to lamp posts were full to overflowing. So Dad threw his on the floor, only for a copper to approach him and say: ‘Pick it up!’ All the bins were bursting and when Dad looked on the floor he couldn’t tell which one was his because it was just a sea of silver. This copper was just being stroppy and was probably itching to give my dad a belt. So Dad swallowed his pride and picked one up: it could’ve been his but probably wasn’t. He went over to an overflowing bin and perched it precariously on top of this mountain of silver. It was a joke. What was that all about? There was rubbish everywhere and a couple of hours later they would have sent in the vans to pick everything up. I felt like smacking this copper; I really wanted to punch his lights out for humiliating my dad like that. Give a man a uniform and
he
becomes a different person, and that applies to quite a few policemen.

These were only minor setbacks to our overall enjoyment. Dad and I used to go everywhere together on the train to all the away games. I always used to see this young lad, he must have been about ten or eleven, and he went to every game home and away but he never had a ticket, and never had a railway ticket either. He’d just get on the train and dodge his way to the final destination. I’d always see him in the ground later. How he did it I will never know. He had no money. There’d be him and two of his pals in a train toilet and when the ticket collector came round one would come out, leaving the rest inside. I think they’re a bit wise to that one now, but back then it happened all the time.

The big thing at that time was to nick somebody’s scarf and bring it back to the pub. So, for example, if Arsenal were playing Liverpool, all the hooligans would go fighting and bring Liverpool scarves back to the boozer as trophies. I just remember thinking how stupid it all was – they were hitting people they didn’t even know and the ones they were hitting could’ve been nice people but they didn’t know any better and if you’re brought up that way then that’s it, that’s the way you are. They were a product of their surroundings.

When I started playing darts on a Saturday, that’s when the football stopped, but back home in Stoke Newington there was still the gang. There were still fights, we still
went
on the rob and things were no different. What changed everything for me came shortly after my sixteenth birthday. Me and the lads had a bit of trouble in a pub called the Queens. There were about seventeen of us, and we slaughtered this bloke and his mate inside the pub. The mate scarpered, but this guy simply refused to go down. We just couldn’t beat him, even after we’d hit him with chairs, bottles, pool cues, anything we could lay our hands on. It was a trouncing, but he just stood in this corner and took it, and while he took it he kept saying, ‘You’ve picked on the wrong bloke here, lads.’

I’ll always remember that. They were like famous last words: ‘You’ve picked on the wrong bloke.’ His eyes were bloody, his head was ripped to pieces, his nose was shattered, and he was bleeding profusely, but he was a tough guy, and eventually he got out of the place. We just carried on enjoying ourselves in the pub and thought nothing more of it.

Then, a week later, one of our gang, Dum Dum, who had helped beat him up, was walking along the street when a car came screaming up to him and knocked him flying. It was a classic hit and run. He was left with two broken legs and a broken arm and was in a wheelchair for months.

Another week went by, and then another of the gang who was in the pub that night got jumped as he was walking along on his own. They put him in hospital;
he
was in a right mess, stitches everywhere. He was lucky to survive. All I could think when I heard about this was that this was no coincidence, that whoever that guy was, yes, we had definitely picked on the wrong bloke.

Less than a week later, another one of our lot got done, so there were three down. If you’ve ever seen the Shane Meadows film
Dead Man’s Shoes
, in which a paratrooper returns home to exact revenge on the tormentors of his younger brother and picks them off one by one, you’ll know what it was like. A few of the lads were scared because they didn’t know who they were up against, or who this bloke was in the grand scheme of things, and more terrifyingly for them they didn’t know when and who he was going to strike at next. Unfortunately their fear didn’t rub off on me. I know no fear, that’s my problem. Pull a gun on me and I won’t give a damn. I have no idea whether any of the others got taken out.

I was getting good at darts by then, I was earning money from it, I had a great life, was having fun and all of a sudden I could see the world opening up for me. I didn’t need the hassle that came with being in a gang. I was on enough money to have a decent life; I didn’t have to rob cars or houses to survive. Suddenly I remember thinking: I’m legal, I’m legit. So I left the gang behind; those days were over. Or so I thought.

*

After making the decision to leave the gang I also left home and went to live with a mate called Eddie. He had a flat about two streets away from where I lived with my mum and dad. I wanted to move out because, as with most youngsters, I craved independence and being able to do my own thing. I’ve always been like that.

So I was with Eddie and we were having a whale of a time, going out, pulling women every weekend and bringing them back to the flat. Everything was going fine until he committed the cardinal sin: he went to a pub nearby that wasn’t our local and glassed some geezer in a fight, cutting him badly and leaving him scarred for life. I found out about this, and I also found out who he’d glassed and said to him: ‘Eddie, you’ve messed with the wrong family there, mate.’

The guy he’d glassed was a big-time gangster with a big-time crew who were a nutty lot you didn’t mess around with, so I made the decision to move back home right away. I didn’t even hang around to take all my stuff with me; I left a lot of it there. Three or four days later I still hadn’t gone round to collect my stuff, and that’s when the dad of this bloke who’d been glassed came round to Eddie’s flat with three of the bloke’s brothers. You had to get up four flights of stairs to get to the flat. There were two flats to each floor; and Eddie’s was at the top. Eddie was in when they came and he heard them kick in the front door downstairs. Luckily for him
the
flat opposite his was vacant. This meant the door had been left open, so Eddie grabbed a hammer – it was probably my hammer that I normally took everywhere with me as protection – and went in. All that was left in there was a big old wardrobe that was part of the fixtures and fittings. Eddie climbed into it and shut the door, but not completely or he would have been locked inside, and he waited. He heard these blokes go into his flat, open the window and throw all his belongings and personal possessions out on to some spiked railings four floors below. He later told me: ‘I was worried my heartbeat would give me away. I felt sure they’d hear it because it was really hammering against my chest and going bang, bang, bang.’