Crudely speaking Sham’s reference points (as were mine in those days) were more likely to be Wimbledon dogs, the bookies, the pub and family life than the ICA, the student union bar and cultural networks. They didn’t come out of the art school scene that created the London punk bands like the Clash, the Sex Pistols and The Slits. So although Julie Birchall in typically sniffy fashion wrote, “It must have been a bloody strong wind the day the sound of Bow Bells reached Hersham,” Sham 69 might not have been cockneys, but they were certainly working class. In the 1970s the have-nots, like Pursey and his crew (and me) lived on mainly white working-class areas and scratched around to make a living. Pursey and his mates from Hersham, Surrey, (a couple of miles from Epsom) had formed Sham 69 the year before, while he was working at Wimbledon dogs.Īlthough most people think of Surrey as posh stockbroker-belt territory, it was (and is) a patchwork of towns and villages divided between the haves and have-nots. So when Jimmy Pursey, the lead singer of punk band Sham 69, burst on the music scene with the band’s first single “I Don’t Wanna” in 1977, I clocked him immediately. There I rubbed shoulders with the urchins, chancers and mouthy fly-boys who worked in the kennels for thirty quid a week. He owned a couple of greyhounds and every Tuesday morning he would send me off to Wimbledon dogs to clock the trials before the Thursday evening race meeting. The betting-shop manager was a lovable rogue called Bob who became my early mentor in life. I went to work in a bookies in the horse-racing town of Epsom and fed back to my father the tips the stable-lads brought into the shop. I guessed he thought they owed him something. You would have thought he would have taught his kids to steer away from gambling, but when I left school he got me a job in Mecca Bookmakers – a firm in which he had over the years “invested” a substantial portion of the family budget. He had a complete phobia of snakes, ever since his youth when he badly broke his wrist falling out of a palm tree after being surprised by a snake hiding among the coconuts. He was also a charmer, with a slight hint of Clarke Gable about him, I always thought.Įven after the family bank account was made out in my mother’s name to stop him cleaning out his wages on payday to hit the bookies, he managed to cash checks at the bank by sweet-talking the cashier.Įventually, during my teenager years, my mother was forced to hide the cheque-book in the one place in the family home he would never dare look – under a vivarium in my room that housed my corn snake. My father, who emigrated to Britain from colonial Trinidad in the early 1950s, was – among other things – a compulsive gambler. Facebook 0 Twitter 0 Reddit 0 WhatsApp Email 0 Shares
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