scootering times

never thought of blogging before but with the crap weather and nothing else to do but look for scooter photos on the net i come across this site and thought , why not. i was reading the bit about " what was you favorite rally of the 1980s". and Keswick jumped out of the page at me. i get over the lakes all the time now fell walking and every time I'm in Keswick i think of that night. people remember things different to others. but my memories of that night are ones of, the pigs got what they deserved. heavy handed policing had been a big problem leading up to Keswick,getting stopped in the middle of the night on the outskirts of seaside towns and having my addidas bag emptied into the gutter was normal. having wrenches and spark plug spanners taken off me was common place. this was the 80s after all. the decade of inner city riots and mass disorder from just about every section of society. Keswick stated out pretty normal. could not get a pint anywhere. the local shop owners served you with cans. .just. i spent most of the day wondering around the town center with some mates from all over the country. Manchester, Liverpool. and home. Newcastle. each of our city's had rioted that summer and it was becoming the norm. to turn up on a scooter rally and spend most of the time talking to mates who had spent the previous weekend burning down the local shops back home and doing a bit of looting in their spare time. the scooter scene has changed a lot. if you just got into scooters in the last decade or so. what goes on now is actually quite amazing. the welcome we get at the scootering rally sites is so far removed to how it used to be. it feels weird to me at times. cant get used to being made welcome. we had just about given up on draft beer when a few of us ended up in a pub that was willing to take a chance and serve us. as the day went on. more and more scooter boys and girls found their way into the pub and a good time was had by all. pool. darts. beer. toastys. a juke box. what more could you want .great. then out of the blue the police turned up and ordered us off the premises. no reason given, just get out. so we did. we drifted apart into smaller groups and spent the rest of the evening drinking on the street. we found a night club and tried to get into it. about 5 or 6 of us ended up fighting with the door men at this club at the top of the market place. not an unusual thing back then. but there was still no real sign of the trouble to come, after the fight with the bouncers we split before the cops turned up and headed back to where the police had corralled us. the police in their wisdom had put us in a car park with nothing to do. no amenities of any description and tried to keep us there so we did not pollute the local area. when i got back to where we supposed to spend the night. (a car park) i was pretty pissed and speeding my tits off, nothing new Friday to Sunday went like that back then for me.the car park we were in was pretty big and had grass verges around the outside and grass islands with trees growing on them . on some of the islands people had put up small tents and made shelters out of cardboard boxes. it looked like a shanty town and the police decided that they were going to have this mess cleared up before daylight. the locals and tourists were not going to see this in the morning. heavy handed as usual the police started tearing down tents during the night and pushing people about. i was traveling light, i usually did back then, sleeping bag and a bivouac bag was my home for the night. i watched the police push some small looking mods about. i had never seen these kids before. they seemed new to rally's. parkers and ties come to mind. soon more police turned up. every cop in the area was now in this car park. and they all seemed trigger happy. when someone is spoiling for a fight you can see it in their body language and stance. these cops wanted to show these fucking mods who is boss. no one was coming to their town and sleeping where ever they wanted, a few people had by now started small fires to keep warm. nothing big, just small camp fires what a cup of water would have put out. this enraged the cops who started getting really heavy with some people. pushing them around and starting to arrest people after dragging them around the car park in a headlock, banging their heads into walls and off police vans. the mood was getting ugly. and for a short while it seemed as if nothing was going to happen, by that i mean no reaction from anyone. then all of a sudden some guy decided he was not going to be arrested. after all we had been treated like shit all day. all any wanted was to get some sleep and fuck off home in the morning, but that was not going to happen. next thing i seen was a cop spread eagle'd on the floor. never seen who done it or how, but the cop was out cold. that was it. the cops were on the radio for the cavalry to help out. and the cops in the car park seemed to go into complete idiot mode. we are not angles i know, but them cops acted like real morons. one cop thought he would help the situation by pushing a scooter over. he helped OK. helped turn a fairly minor disturbance in to Cumbria's worst night of violence since the Germans bombed Keswick instead of the ship yard in barrow. the north east news said that on Monday as me and me mam watched the news together as she looked at me in disgust with me gravel rash face. almost at the same time the scooter rolled onto its panels a petrol bomb come from nowhere out of the darkness. and it was very dark where we were. whoosh. the whole place lit up and looked very different from how it had looked earlier. it looked just like Toxteth, policemen fighting with people. kids getting dragged into vans. rubbish everywhere. broken bottles. the small fires got big fast. petrol from the scooters had found it way into beer bottles and bits of parker and sleeping bags hung out the end of them bottles. and they were now lit and thrown towards the police and their vehicles. in a very short period of time things had got ugly. .very ugly. you would expect this sort of incident to end quick, for some reason it didn't. it went on for hours and hours during the night. the car park we were in had something to do with it going on for so long. no one could get out. it was walled with only one exit as i remember and the police had that sealed with vans and cars.there were only three buildings near it as i remember. one was a theater, one was a tourist information office that was joined onto the theater and the third was a concrete bog. the only thing left standing was the concrete bog as the other two were burned to the ground as was everything else that would burn. so what you had was a whole load of kids pissed up walled in unable to leave and not enough police to crush the trouble quick. they were out numbered. and reinforcements had to travel hundreds of miles. remember all police leave was canceled in the country at the time with all the riots going on in the northern city's and Brixton. no spare cops anywhere, some police had to travel from as far away as Leeds. so they did not get there for hours and hours from the start of the trouble. i been in quite a few tight spots in my time being an x-miner football hooligan and general thug in my day. but that night in Keswick is the night the police got it big style. normally in trouble like that the police are in such numbers they take control of the situation pretty quickly. not that night. they lost control of the situation and never regained control all night. police cars were wrecked. a kid i know had the coppers radio and was telling control to fuck off, it all just come to a head that night. the combination of police bullying and battled hardened scooter boys who had been practicing for this at home the previous weekend by rioting and looting made Keswick almost unavoidable. it was going to happen some time. and Keswick was the unlucky place to get it. it was a weird feeling at times, funny and scary at the same time, as i said, when your usually involved in mass disorder it ends fairly quick as the police usually have the numbers needed to quash it fast. not that night though. good things did come of it though. the first annual meeting to arrange scooter rally's took place with members of most clubs and police attending at Scarborough. more informed councils etc. what you have today is in my mind born out of the carnage that was Keswick. . .I managed to get my self away from the car park easily as my scooter was not parked inside. but i don't know how anyone who was in the car park with their scooter managed to get away. i remember seeing on the news that not that many people got arrested. ( if you did i'd like to hear about it. what charge you got etc. did anyone get jailed ?) my lasting memory is sitting on the side of a hill watching petrol bombs fly through the darkened sky and explode into fire balls. it was a very surreal thing actually. i have parked many times since on the spot i stood with me lass and kids and have never told them about it, not because I'm hiding anything, she knows everything ! but because there is no way i could fully describe what went on that night. "the worst night of violence since the Germans bombed keswick thinking it was barrow in furness submarine ship yard" quote north east news . . it really was some night . a lot of the rally's back then had their fair share of trouble, mass fights. stabbings, bars wrecked. overturned police cars. fights with bikers, inter scooter club fighting which was very common at one point, banned for drink and drug driving while wheeling past a cop at the Ambleside rally when he was on a RD 250 and i was on me PX . . etc etc. lots of mad crazy memories that some people would not believe, getting to the south coast from Newcastle with no money robbing fruit machines in service stations and having the best weekend in life .but that one stands out from the rest ! happy days eh ! ! i would do it all again and change nothing . .loved it . . wish i had video'd it all. it would have made a great film . . . . to be continued . . . .