Victoria Dock Road, London, E16: 1981 and Phase Three of my apprenticeship was about to begin in what was then one of the roughest parts of London. My time there was to be divided between class-work undertaken at Poplar College—which was on Poplar High Street overlooking the old Millwall docks—and the practical component, undertaken at North Woolwich—just past Tate & Lyle’s Silvertown sugar refinery, between the Victoria and King George V Docks. This was the year that the Thatcher policies were beginning to bite and the people at the lower end of the social scale were getting angry. Rioting had broken out, first in Brixton, Toxteth and Bristol, and then in many other run-down areas in the other provincial cities. The Britain that I knew and grew up in was about to change forever. I was to live at the Angel Hostel in Custom House: a large, drab old Victorian-looking brick building overlooking the abandoned and by then largely derelict Victoria Dock with its idle cranes and rusting old forklift trucks. It was desperate: the sort of place where (and this is true) a shotgun was pulled in an argument between gangsters in one local pub, while the landlord of another was smashed in the head with those big old pub soda siphons by one of two ‘gentlemen’ dressed in smart suits—presumably for not paying his ‘protection’ money. The locals were also highly adept thieves. One of the cadets made the mistake of leaving his 1000cc Honda motorbike running outside the main door—it was gone in less than ten seconds! Another had his car breakdown on Silvertown Way and by the time he’d got back from calling the AA, it too was gone. Someone obviously knew how to start it! We later saw it from the top of a London bus; it was at the bottom of the steps leading down to the Canning Town flyover pedestrian underpass with the wheels missing. The next day it was burnt out!
With hindsight, I don’t know why I allowed my mate from Essex to talk me into finishing my time at Poplar College; I should have gone back to South Shields. In Shields I’d made quite a few local Geordie friends; in London I made no local friends whatsoever. I always found the Geordies to be friendly, decent people, where in Custom House we were met with hostility or at best, indifference. Moreover, although South Tyneside was a tough, largely working-class area, it never felt threatening and there was always a sense of community. In London E16 there was none of that: it was much more impersonal and there always seemed to be that feeling of impending violence in the air, even if the place was quiet. In Shields you could walk around almost any part of town and bump into someone you knew, whether they were locals or from the tech; in Custom House we were largely isolated and most of the cadets remained holed up in the Angel Hostel. I later sailed on the Ability with a young AB from Custom House and I asked him why there was so much hostility towards us. His answer was that we were all Northerners in West Ham territory. Pathetic. It just reinforced my belief that although born in the South, I didn’t actually like it very much. Yes, it’s sad to say as a Southerner that, having travelled around and lived in various parts of the UK, on balance I prefer the North and the company of Northerners. I find that Southerners are either snobs or yobs—both with something to prove, whereas Northerners are generally much more down to earth, friendlier, and fundamentally more decent people. I’ve had far more fun, and met many more good people in the North of England that I ever have in the South—just my experience.
Anyway, the good news was that my old Glaswegian mate was there. Even he thought it was a rough area, and Glasgow back then had its own reputation as one of Europe’s most violent cities. He once turned to me as we were walking to the pub and remarked that “the average Geordie hard-lad wouldn’t last two minutes around here.” Our very first night out ended in a fight when the pair of us, along with another lad from North Yorkshire, made our way back to the Angel after a night out. The Yorkshire lad, who I’d only met that night, had called in at the chip-shop and grabbed a bag of chips. As we walked past the Spanish Steps a couple of locals emerged, walked up to him and one demanded a chip. I knew that meant trouble so I immediately gave the potential protagonist a right hook to the side of the head. It wasn’t one of my best—pissed as I was—but it still shook him a bit. However he regained his composure and suggested a one-on-one. I could see he didn’t really fancy his chances because I was maturing into a quite heavily built young bloke, but I also knew that he couldn’t lose face in front of his mates. At first I was up for it because I thought I would get the better of him, but then commonsense kicked in and I remembered that the problem with one-on-ones is that they never stay one-on-one for long. This is because one of two things always happens: either as soon as you get the better of your opponent his mates all jump in on his behalf and beat the crap out of you—or—you go down and his mates jump in and beat the crap out of you. Bearing this in mind, and the fact that not only did I prefer to fight sober rather than drunk, but also that we were seriously outnumbered, I decided that on balance this was probably not a good idea. Of course I had to find a way out without looking like I was backing down so I said “look mate I’m too fuckin’ pissed and too fuckin’ tired for this shit right now—but I tell you what, I’m always around so what say we sort this out later.”
It gave him a way out and so we parted company. We did pass each other several times in the street after that night, but nothing ever happened beyond eyeballing each other.
We soon realised that the whole East-End Cockney knees-up in the pub thing that you see on the TV was a total myth, at least around Custom House and Canning Town. All the pubs there seemed to be ghastly drinking pits devoid of women and filled with psychos just waiting for any old excuse to beat the crap out of each other—or anyone else for that matter. Sitting in the Spanish Steps one night we witnessed a ferocious attack that started over who was going to break in a game of pool. These two blokes were into each other with pool cues, and when one went down the other systematically smashed every single pool ball onto the guy’s head. By the time it was finished his face was a mess and he’d crapped his pants. So we soon decided to give drinking around London’s East End a miss and began drinking elsewhere. From then on the only pub we ever frequented in the East End was The Londoner at Limehouse—and that was only to score ganga.
Although we weren’t strictly students, we managed to obtain some student cards which delivered various entitlements. One of those was access to various student bars, some of which at the time were hosting the Skol Lager Roadshow with its free beer, which we took full advantage of at both the University of London and Goldsmiths College. The University of London gig was a real laugh and I had a great time, but things got a bit out of hand at Goldsmiths and I had a fight with the lad who was going to drive us back to Custom House. The upshot was that having no money I had to stagger back all the way from New Cross via the Blackwall Tunnel in the early hours. Another favourite haunt was Greenwich where we located some decent pubs, or the London Hospital Tavern on Whitechapel Road. Most of the time, however, we went up west—sometimes out as far as Putney. Anywhere was better than Custom House!
It was during one of our West End drinking sessions that I inadvertently found myself in the bomb-disposal business. It was May 1981 and the IRA were busy setting off bombs in London after the death of Bobby Sands and after a big night we headed to Fenchurch Street to get the train back to Stratford. It was 4am and the first train should have been leaving but the gate to the platform was closed even though the train was there. Being drunk and a bit aggressive I pushed hard against the gate and forced it open. We then made our way onto the train. It was empty. We walked towards the front and as we did so I noticed a package on one of the seats. Being young, drunk, and stupid I picked it up, threw it in the air and dropkicked it down the carriage. It split open and showered the carriage with cold fish and chips. We eventually sat down but within a few minutes the train was crawling with police.
“How did you blokes get on here?” one asked.
“Through the gate mate” one of us answered.
“Well you shouldn’t be on here—have any of you seen or touched a package on here?” asked one of them.
“Nah mate” came the joint reply.
“Only there’s been a bomb alert” he added.
“Nah, we haven’t seen anything” we declared.
With that they told us to get off the train until they’d made it safe.
“I think we’ve already done that” I said quietly to my Scots mate. “From now on we’ll call ourselves the Canning Town bomb-disposal crew!”
On the 16th of July 1981 I had to undertake another fire-fighting course. And this time it was the big one we’d all been warned about. There were rumours, of course, about how at least two men had died whilst undertaking it—but who listens to rumours? What was worse was that it was to be done at Plymouth, where the firemen were all ex-marines that supposedly hated merchant seamen. We were not disappointed! Our first demonstration consisted of being put inside a mock-up of a ship while one of the firemen lit a fire and closed all the doors and portholes. Within seconds the place was filling with smoke and the coughing began. The fireman, meanwhile, had put his breathing apparatus on; we didn’t have any. He told us to remain standing and enjoy the aroma of burning wood and paper. He was really enjoying himself. Then, just as we were all coughing so badly that we were on the verge of passing out, he told us to lie on the floor. Relief, as we gulped in huge lung-fulls of relatively clean air. He’d made his point, but he could have just told us! We were then subjected to various horrible ordeals that were largely based around being totally disorientated in the smoke and pitch-black darkness while being weighed down by heavy clothing and BA sets. Then, on the last day, the grand finale: the test.
After setting some preliminary smaller fires to get us in the mood, we were sent to lunch around midday and told to be back in an hour. We were also advised not to drink any alcohol as the sort of physical and mental pressure we would be under would lend itself to our throwing up in the BA sets; not that the firemen cared about our well-being, they said, they just didn’t want vomit in their kit. So off we went while they prepared the fires. We came back from lunch to find the steel external of the pretend ship buckled and glowing red in some places, and the rain hissing and turning into steam on contact. It was time. We were told to kit up with the protective gear and breathing apparatus and assemble on the top of the mock ship. The firemen were grinning in anticipation and one stepped forward. He opened the hatch and a ten-foot wall of flame erupted immediately from within. It looked like Krakatoa! We were shitting ourselves and there was a collective sigh of relief when he selected a lad called Willy and informed him that he was the lead hose man.
“OK, in you go” said the fireman.
Willy took one look at the huge wall of flame
“Fuck that!” he declared, “I’m not going in there!”
At first the rest of us thought the fireman was joking, that he was having a laugh at Willy’s expense, and that we’d probably just put a couple of hoses down the hatch and try to put the thing out that way. But he wasn’t joking—we really did have to go in there!
“Think about your training” he said. “What’s the first thing you should do?”
“Set the hose to spray” came the collective reply when we realised that he was serious.
“That’s right, set the hose to spray and use the spray as a water wall…now put the spray on, get behind the spray, and climb in”.
It bloody worked too, so much so that in a matter of a few minutes we were getting quite professional, even blasé, about some pretty big fires. In fact, once you got over the initial fear it was quite fun.
We had two main tasks: one to put out the fires, obviously; the other, to find the various ‘bodies’ that had been concealed about the place. On finding a body we were instructed to shout “body”, and then try to get the thing out into the fresh air. Sounds easy, but not so when you are disorientated, have a bucket-load of adrenaline pumping around your body, and are heavily constricted by all the protective clothing, heavy gloves, helmet and BA. Under those conditions, any form of physical exertion is ten times what it otherwise would be. Hence my enormous respect for professional fire-fighters.
“Body!” shouted my Scots mate before hurling it out of the window. Afterwards there was a post-mortem. The firemen were quite impressed by our group, but cautioned against throwing bodies out of windows.
Travelling between the Angel Hostel and tech was a bit of a pain. It wasn’t too bad getting to North Woolwich: the hostel was opposite Custom House station and it was only a couple of stops on the train and a few minutes walk at the other end. Getting to Poplar college however was a different matter. This involved two buses: one the length of Freemasons Road up to Newham Way, then another to East India Dock Road, Poplar. Standing between the two destinations was the ghastly Canning Town flyover and the East India Dock Road/Blackwall Tunnel junction. It was a journey that could take up to forty five minutes and on one occasion, when I missed the bus, I actually walked and made it before the bus! Early in the summer I decided to go back to Shoreham and collect my motorbike which then made travel around London a lot easier. A few of us used this means of transport, however it was not without its pitfalls. It was around this time that one of the cadets, a lad from Belfast, was riding his machine two-up to North Woolwich and had a terrible accident. It was at a junction just before Silvertown station (see photo) that a flat-bed truck pulled out in front of him. It had been raining and the road was slippery. He had no chance. I arrived on the scene almost immediately and my pillion and I got off the bike and walked over: he was under the truck and it didn’t look good. His pillion was unharmed and walked over to us. Together we went to see how he was.
“I can’t feel my legs” he said.
I turned to my pillion and, out of earshot, said “he’s fucked…I reckon the poor bastard has broken his back.”
We waited around until the ambulance arrived. It was just as I’d suspected, and that was the end of that lad’s career as a ship’s engineer. Thirty seconds earlier and it would have been me!
“I could think of a lot worse people that that could have happened to” I said to my mate when we found out the news.
During my Phase 3 I also had to endure the royal wedding between Charles and Diana. It was just what the proles needed after all the rioting, public disorder and unemployment. It’s so transparent, and in the light of later events, obviously something Charles didn’t want! Not that I care about the man’s well-being. Still, as a royal, one must do one’s duty I suppose. Anyway, after a big night drinking up the West End, we decided to call it a night around four in the morning and head back to Victoria Dock Road. The problem was that because of the stupid royal wedding none of the cabs would take us there. They were all making big money running tourists around the West End so we were forced to stay. In those days the Underground was closed between one and five am so we tried to make our way to Fenchurch Street railway station where we could get a train to Stratford and then the night bus down to Prince Regent’s Lane, but the crowds were getting too big and heading in the opposite direction to which we wanted to go. Eventually we gave up fighting and ended up being more or less carried along by the crowd as far as Admiralty Arch where we managed to pull free. But we were stuck there for hours and ended up watching all the inbreds parade past on their way to St Paul’s—to the huge roar of the cretinous crowd! So there I was, a staunch lifelong republican, watching a royal wedding. It wasn’t by choice! We eventually managed to escape around lunchtime and get ourselves back by mid-afternoon.
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