by Gordon Burn
Unlike other formerly elegant buildings in the area, which had been allowed to fall into neglect and disrepair, the Standard’s engraved windows and mirrors and brass and mahogany fittings had been preserved intact, although, in order to attract younger customers, the landlord had been obliged to convert the long, central room of the pub into what was starting to be known as a ‘disco’.
‘Fisherman’s Cove’, as it was called, was the sort of place that would soon be reproduced in the backrooms of pubs the length and breadth of the country: there was a juke-box standing on a small platform, and a tiny linoleum dance floor; fishing-nets and corks hung from the walls; and there was a permanent, not unpleasant pitch darkness only barely relieved by a few strips of ultraviolet light. But in 1965 it was different enough to send Peter hurrying back to his friends in a state of some excitement with the news that he’d found a ‘cracker’ of a pub.
Within weeks, they had colonised one of the tables and sets of ‘buffets’ nearest the juke-box and christened it ‘Gravediggers’ Corner’, because of the work that they all did: not only were Peter and Laurie digging graves together at Bingley, but Eric had been taken on at a cemetery in Bradford where he shared a house with a workmate who joined them most weekends at the Royal Standard, along with another gravedigger from the same cemetery, which in all made five. This, of course, gave them a ready-made ‘line’ when it came to approaching girls; and they literally carved their identity on the corner by scratching small black skulls and crosses and coffins all over the luminous green and orange plastic panels behind their heads.
For a long time, Peter seemed as at home in the half-dark at the Standard as they had ever seen him, and was even a party to their frequent practical jokes: Eric took advantage of the bleaching quality of the ultraviolet one time to free two or three white mice which achieved the intended aim of creating chaos; and on another occasion, Laurie, aided and abetted by Peter, succeeded in having the pub evacuated by setting off fumigators from the cemetery in the men’s toilets. Gradually, though, the detachment which had always been Peter’s main characteristic started to reclaim him.
He was well known for remembering and remarking on things that none of the others had even noticed. ‘Hey, look at her,’ he’d say, quite out of the blue, indicating a couple on the other side of the pub. ‘He’s talking to her and she isn’t taking a blind bit of notice. She’s looking at him over there.’
Similarly, other people’s small vanities or physical peculiarities could start him off chuckling happily, even convulsively, to himself. ‘I remember one day we were sitting in the King’s Head in Bingley and this bloke walked in an’ it were right amusing to Peter because he had his hair cut halfway up his head. He laughed like hell at this. In fact he were almost hysterical,’ Eric Robinson says.
‘You wouldn’t really take much notice of these things, you’d be talking away to each other, but he’d just sort of sit and observe. I never actually saw him chat anybody up. I never actually saw him approach anybody. He was just generally observing all the time.’
It was when he was about nineteen or twenty that Peter’s abstraction started to deepen into what to his friends seemed like semi-trances. Most of the time Peter’s moods went unremarked, and usually unnoticed, but on one occasion in the Royal Standard his ‘re-entry’ was memorably dramatic: for no apparent reason, he crashed a glass down violently on to the table in front of him, sending splinters flying in all directions. When he made no move to explain or apologise, a youth at a neighbouring table tipped a full pint over him, but he still just kept on staring ahead.
Shortly afterwards, again in the Royal Standard, Eric Robinson saw him do something equally irrational: ‘Pete was walkin’ behind this right big fat ’un who was on her way to toilet, followin’ on with that stiff walk of his, when suddenly he just went boomph! Kicked her up the arse and sent her reelin’. And he got a right laugh out of that, did Pete. He found it rather funny.’
Peter was less ‘purist’ in his musical tastes than Eric and Laurie who, for the most part, lived through the English ‘beat boom’ of the 1960s as if it wasn’t happening. Besides Donovan, he liked Bob Dylan, and in particular a song called ‘Rainy Day Women Numbers 12 and 35’. And he also liked the Rolling Stones – or, more exactly, a single record by the Rolling Stones that he played almost beyond endurance on the juke-box at the Gardeners’ Arms in Keighley:
Sittin’, thinkin’, sinkin’, drinkin’,
Won’drin what I’ll do when I’m through tonight
Smokin’, mopin’, maybe just hopin’
Some little girl will pass me by …
Don’t say Hi! like a spider to a fly
Jump right ahead and you’re dead
Sit up, fed up, low down, go round
Down to the bar at the place I’m at.
Sittin’, drinkin’, superficially thinkin’
About the rins’d over blonde on my left
She was coming flirty, she looked about thirty
I would have run away but I was on my own
She told me later, she’s a machine operator
She said she liked the way I held the microphone
I said my, my, my like a spider to a fly,
Jump right ahead in my web.
Peter couldn’t go to the Gardeners’ Arms and not play ‘Spider and the Fly’; and once he’d played it, he had to play it again.
Conversation at the Royal Standard tended to be sporadic because of the noise, but what little there was was nearly all about cars and bikes. And in the ‘mess-room’ at Bingley cemetery it was similarly unfocused chit-chat ‘about summat an’ nowt’. The only topic which, by an unspoken rule, never came up was the work: death and the dead were rarely, if ever, mentioned. On one occasion, however, a few months before Peter Sutcliffe was sacked from Bingley cemetery in 1967, that rule was broken.
The men were getting ready to start the day when Trevor Mitchell, the cemetery superintendent, stopped by the cabin with some sad news: old Ellis, one of the greenhouse staff, was dead, killed by a car the night before, walking home in the dark from Dick Hudson’s, the pub on Rombald’s Moor. His body was in the top chapel, the superintendent continued, if anybody wanted to go and see him to pay their last, private respects.
Nobody was very keen, Gary Jackson remembers, because, frankly, they were expecting the old man to be in a bit of a mess. Amazingly, though, they found Ellis lying on the slab as though he was just resting: Trevor Mitchell raised his head gently to show them how the single blow had killed him almost instantly, fracturing the back of the skull like an egg: ‘Even his clothes weren’t muckied or anything; none of us could get over the lack of blood.’ Conversation kept returning repeatedly to this conundrum over the following days, and how it could be so.
8
Just after 11.30 a.m. on 22 April 1966, Fred Craven was battered to death in the betting office that he ran above an antique shop in Wellington Street in the centre of Bingley. Despite the hour and the widely circulated advice of the police that the attacker would be covered in blood, nobody was ever charged with Craven’s murder. But Michael Sutcliffe, John Sutcliffe’s second oldest son, was held for two days for questioning before being released.
He had come under suspicion because his blue denim cap had been spotted in the area at around the time Fred Craven had been killed, but it was eventually established that he hadn’t been involved: he had simply happened to be in Wellington Street fetching fish and chips for the men at the factory where he had recently started work as an apprentice joiner. Nevertheless his detention came at a time when he was busy staking his claim to being one of the town’s new ‘hard men’, and in this respect it did him no harm at all.
At sixteen, ‘Mick’ Sutcliffe, as he was always known, was more than four years younger and nearly five inches taller than his oldest brother, a fact which, usually good-naturedly but on occasion more forcefully, he never let Peter forget. He had first demonstrated that he was capable of ‘dropping�
�� Peter in the course of a tussle over two fish suppers that their mother had left in the oven one night, waiting for them coming home from the pub: being the first one in and being ‘stoated’, Mick had hurriedly cleared both plates and then denied that there had been anything to eat at all.
Hearing him coming upstairs, though, Mrs Sutcliffe had called out from her bedroom to ask Peter if he’d enjoyed his supper, which sent him flying back down to the kitchen. ‘He took a swing at me, so I dropped one on him. I dropped him,’ was Mick’s casual explanation for the damage inflicted by a right hand that within a very few years would floor the British professional heavyweight champion, Richard Dunn, although not in an orthodox fashion.
When he was twenty, a couple of friends persuaded Mick Sutcliffe to start training with them at Keighley Leisure Centre, where he soon found himself recruited as a sparring partner for the up-and-coming Dunn. He didn’t take kindly, however, as he often recalled later, to being treated as a punchbag: ‘Outside, I’d have knocked seven kinds of shit out of him. But in the ring it’s different. He had all head-guard on an’ gum-shield in because he couldn’t afford to get broken nose off any of us; you couldn’t get at his head for paddin’. An’ he were jabbin’ me an’ jabbin’ me till he bust me nose. So I thought, Fuck this, an’ I gave him one. I went to dig him in his guts but instead I hit him in the bollocks an’ he were straight on his arse. He were curled up wi’ pain.’
It confirmed what, after years of practice, Mick already knew anyway to be true: that in fighting there’s only one rule, and that’s to win. ‘Once you get him down, mek sure he stays that way. Use your feet, use anything you’ve got to keep him there,’ was what he was repeatedly telling Peter. But a fight he had with a youth called Varley suggested that Peter was incapable of taking this advice in: he came back bruised and bloody when in his brother’s opinion he could easily have won. Some months later, as it happened, Mick had the opportunity of showing Peter how it should be done: while Richard Varley was reaching for the card that proved he was a black-belt in karate Mick ‘smashed’ him in the face then ‘booted’ him for good measure to keep him down.
Mick Sutcliffe didn’t exactly court trouble, but he didn’t go out of his way to avoid it either – unlike Peter, whom Mick only ever actually saw in a fight once, when he was about nineteen. It was on the Waltzer at the fair that came to Bingley every year and was explosive but brief: Peter’s nervousness had communicated itself to a gang of youths from Shipley who had taunted him so remorselessly that he’d uncharacteristically let fly at one of them with a punch that was powerful enough to lift the troublemaker clean over the barrier and at the same time break his own wrist.
Working with two railway wheels slotted on to either end of an old axle, as well as with the Bullworker, had given him the beginnings of what in time he’d develop into a ‘power-house’ physique, but he was still a stripling compared to Mick. Mick’s boast was that he could put anybody in Bingley down in thirty seconds, and few were rash enough to try and make him prove it. Even Ken Eslin, who had successfully intimidated Peter Sutcliffe and most of the rest of the workforce at Fibre Products, learned not to tangle with Sutcliffe’s younger brother.
He turned up at the door at Cornwall Road one night because Mick had taken his car and got mud on it, and lunged at him with a knife: ‘He wasn’t bothered about stabbing somebody or hitting them with a pick shaft. If he took a swing at you it’d be with a glass, an’ he’d twist it right in an’ think nothing about it. But once I got the knife off him, I told him, I said, “Next time, I’ll fuckin’ kill you. I’ll beat you to fuckin’ death.” And I meant it, coming to the house and upsetting me mother like that.’
From their earliest days it had been as obvious to John Sutcliffe as it was to everybody else that Michael was made of tougher stuff than Peter. Peter was the one who’d half-choke on a boiled sweet watching his father perform in Oklahoma, whereas if Mick was going to choke on anything it would be – and was – a penny that he’d tossed up and caught in his mouth. ‘Mick’s always been a hard lad: big, robust, happy-go-lucky, the very antithesis of Peter, who was always the shivering wallflower, the bloke who would avoid confrontations with the rougher end.
‘Mick was a different type of person altogether. He was the little devil you’d find ripping his leg open on barbed wire; the little rough lad who used to love to go out and play with the other kids. He always had a crowd of lads round him; there were always half a dozen of his ilk all screaming up and down the road. He was a lad who could always stick up for his self because he was always among the weight for age class, was Mick. He’s never feared anybody in his life, whereas there’s plenty round this way fear him.
‘I mean, lads his age who fancy their chances don’t tackle Mick. No way. Because, when it comes to throwing his weight about, he can throw it. And this town knows it.’
Academically, Mick Sutcliffe was always a non-starter. But, given his other attributes, his father didn’t worry too much about it. There were always jobs around for big, healthy young men, was how he looked at it. And so it proved: Mick followed the money from site to site as a casual labourer and was able to say without a trace of self-pity that he’d spent his whole life ‘digging holes’.
His lack of ambition showed itself in his appearance, which was as shambling and uncoordinated as his distinctive, forward-tilting walk. Unlike his father and his brother, who both cared about appearances and put a lot of thought into their clothes, Mick tended to throw on whatever came to hand, even if it wasn’t his. He bought his annual suit from the back of the van that toured Ferncliffe Estate every year just before Christmas, but more often than not ended up going out in one of the jackets that Peter would have selected after much deliberation at Marks, the tailor in Bradford.
One of the reasons Peter favoured Marks was that they often gave something like a ‘gold’ watch away with purchases over a certain amount, and he was known for having an eye for bargains of this kind. He was famous for being ‘careful’ with his cash. It was a source of wonder to Eric and Laurie, as well as to his family, how he would always seem to have plenty left long after they were all ‘spent up’.
Just how ‘careful’ Peter was was made graphically clear to Mick one night when he slipped on one of his brother’s jackets to go down to the pub: ‘I had about three quid on us, like, but you could get ten pints for a quid then. Ten pints an’ twenty cigs. Anyway, first thing I noticed were a little note in one of jacket pockets which seemed to be a list of dates. Then in the inside pocket I noticed this bulge. When I took it out there were about twelve or fourteen wage packets, full, unopened, saved from previous weeks, which tallied wi’ list of dates.’ Judicious snipping removed the first entry on the list and guaranteed Mick a whole week of ‘reet throw-jobs’ – his definition of a good time.
By his late teens Mick developed a hiatus hernia which proved inoperable and caused him to be frequently sick. But he was a prodigious drinker and, after several hours ‘suppin’ – pints, usually, plus brandy-and-ports if he was in funds – would make himself vomit so that he could go back and sup some more. It was the sort of behaviour that got him frequent ‘tongue-lashings’ from Peter, especially as he grew older, but Mick’s reply was always the same: ‘You live your life, an’ I’ll live mine.’
Peter’s ‘responsible’ outlook on life was as genuinely baffling to Mick as Mick’s fecklessness appeared to be to his brother. ‘He allus liked money,’ Mick says. ‘But, whereas such as me’d blow all lot in over weekend, he never seemed to get out and spend it so much. If he did go out he’d tek a quid an’ probably bring about ten bob back with ’im. He were like a squirrel. He were allus a right bloody hoarder.’
Quiet, careful and dependable, Peter Sutcliffe drifted along unnoticed in the mainstream of Bingley life, while Mick was absorbed just as effortlessly into the other Bingley that the casual visitor didn’t, and many of the permanent inhabitants preferred not to, see.
Along with West Royd Estat
e in Shipley and Eccleshill in Bradford, Ferncliffe Estate was regarded by the police as a forcing-ground for petty criminals. It was the boast of many older Bingleyites that they had never set foot there, while the younger ones daren’t because of the estate’s reputation for casual violence.
Not a few estate-dwellers, on the other hand, could make similar claims about their unfamiliarity with certain shops in the centre of town, like Beehive Modes and Luscombe’s, and even certain town-centre pubs: they tended to keep to the Working Men’s and Ex-Servicemen’s clubs, and the more out-of-the-way pubs like the Granby, behind Dubb Lane Mills, and the Fisherman on the canal.
In all these places a thick skin, a sharp tongue and a strong stomach were the equipment necessary for survival, plus a more or less total disregard for what used to be called the ‘tender virtues’. Any man who wore an earring, for instance, could expect to have it ripped out and the lobe daubed in whisky for ‘healing’; anybody who betrayed any attention to the way he looked or any affection for the woman he nominally shared his life with – always referred to as ‘the dragon’ – could expect to be the target of derision.
Shared prejudices and a shared interest in ‘fur and fowl’ and firearms meant that the ‘generation gap’ supposedly rending the rest of the country was never apparent. Young men like Mick Sutcliffe and older men like Jack Hawkes, president of the British Whippet Racing Association, could go off to a dog show or on a trip to Blackpool together in perfect accord. ‘Women are for frying bacon and screwin’ is the sort of thing they could both chuckle over while buying the big sticks of pink seaside rock known as ‘wife-beaters’ to take home.
