All of these things made Connell’s just barely acceptable. I stuck at it for about three months until one day, after a guy called Larry Downs and I had swung under the spikes and wandered off to catch the tram home, we bumped into a foreman from Connell’s. He just gave us the eye and nodded. Next morning, the timekeeper, instead of giving me my brass clocking-on token, let me through the gate and told me to wait to one side. When I got inside, Larry was already standing there. We waited inside the gate for a while, then we were sent to the office to collect our national insurance cards. We were sacked and I couldn’t have cared less. That was my first job and – hopefully – my last.
For several weeks, I did nothing about looking for a job. I think the relief of leaving Connell’s made me appreciate my days more. All I did for that period was pedal about on my bike or pass the time of day wandering about with my pals. Of course, none of us had much cash, unemployment benefit at that time being literally only shillings, so we always had our eyes open for any opportunity to earn something. One day, as we were strolling along, I glanced into a shoe shop. Nothing registered immediately, but in the very next shop I noticed the two young female assistants from the shoe shop chatting away to a young man working behind the counter.
‘Hold on a minute.’ I grabbed my pal by the sleeve and pulled him back to the shoe shop doorway. I left him there and dived into the shop. There was a young girl of about 12 waiting at the counter, but I ignored her and leaped across to the till. In a second, I had it open and was stuffing all the notes I could get my hands on into my pockets. I think it came to about £15.
In another second, I was back over the counter and on the pavement. By now, my pal had begun to panic – this kind of stealing wasn’t his scene. He started to run along the pavement and I followed him, pointing at a tramcar as if we were running to catch it. Of course, he ran on past the tram and I followed him. Two corners away, we stopped and split the money.
Three days later, the police called at my home and, as I wasn’t in, told my mother that I was to go down to the police station to see a detective constable. I forget his name now, but I knew immediately what it was about and I must admit I felt a little apprehensive. By this time I had a half-decent bike and all the kit: shorts, racing strip, cap, white ankle socks and cycling shoes. A lot of my time was spent cycling over the country roads that were only a few miles from Springburn. I was actually becoming very keen on cycling and had been doing regular training runs. I put on the lot and pedalled off to the nick. I don’t know what the DC thought when he saw me, but he didn’t say anything. I was taken into the detective’s room and questioned about the snatch from the shoe shop. I denied all knowledge. The detective explained that two of us (he named my friend) had been seen running away from the shop. I said I remembered us running for a tram one day in Springburn Road, but we missed it. I was never too precise with answers – being concise would have left no room for any slight alterations an awkward question might make necessary – and he finally gave up on me and left the room.
‘Jimmy.’ I heard a soft voice from across the room; it was the detective left to keep an eye on me. I ignored it. Besides, I have always disliked the name Jimmy. ‘Hey, Jimmy.’ The voice sounded again, a little more urgent this time. I looked over at another desk and saw a very sympathetic face looking over at me.
‘Yes?’ I replied. I have always made a point of being polite when questioned or spoken to by the authorities.
The face of the man twisted into an eager-to-help expression. ‘He knows, you know.’ He nodded confidentially at the door his colleague had just gone through. ‘He’s gone away to give you this chance to think about it. You’d be better off telling him; it could save you a lot of trouble. He can be a very nasty man, you know.’ He gave me a solemn nod. ‘Very nasty.’
Even at that age, I wasn’t falling for rubbish. I pulled an adventure comic from one of my racing jersey pockets and started to read it. Two minutes later, the original detective returned. I watched the second guy out of the corner of my eye and he gave his mate a nod.
‘Right, then…’ The DC sat down and shuffled some paper. ‘Tell me about it?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I repeated my denial.
‘Right, that’s it! This is your last chance to admit it, or you’re going on an ID parade. Believe me, son, you’re done! You’ll be picked out, then you’ll really be in trouble for fucking me about.’
‘I don’t know anything about stealing any money,’ I insisted.
A few minutes later, I was standing in a line-up with several strangers they had picked up from the streets outside. Everyone was pretty roughly dressed except yours truly in my flamboyant cycling kit. The young girl came in and walked nervously down the line, not even giving me a second look. After she had left, the DC gave me a glare and told me I could go. By this time, the police were handing half-crown pieces out to the other participants in the parade, payment for their trouble. I cheekily held my own hand out and asked for my half-crown. I was roughly shown the door and told in no uncertain terms to ‘Fuck off, you cheeky bastard!’
I quickly pedalled up to my friend’s house and found out from his mother where he might be. His mother was very upset, having had the same message delivered by the police for her son to report to the DC. I got hold of him and told him about my experience and how I had not been picked out at the ID parade.
He then went off for his interview. When he got back about an hour later he told me that the DC had said I had confessed and told that it had all been his idea. He told them I was a liar and that he knew nothing about any robbery. They kept on at him for about half an hour, then finally let him go. That was the last we heard about that incident.
On another occasion, during that spell of idleness, I spotted a Co-op dairy where only one woman worked behind the counter. This time, my accomplice was Tam Shevlin. I got him to go round the rear of the shop and fling a brick through the back window. It wouldn’t happen nowadays, but the woman fled out of the shop, leaving it unattended and ran through the close to grab what she must have thought was some children. Once again, I nipped in and did the business with the till. I suppose I could have been described as an opportunist thief in those days. There was nothing great, just little bits of villainy here and there whenever the opportunity presented itself.
One day, my uncle Gerrard came into the house and made me go into town with him. Once there he took me to Peter Fisher’s paint shop at Glasgow Cross and made me apply for the job they had advertised in their window. ‘Boy wanted. Apply within.’ Much to my disgust, I got the job and became the general gopher there. It turned out to be not as bad as I thought and it was a big improvement on the slavery at Connell’s. Mind you, I had to work all day Saturday and I wasn’t very keen on that. But the job had its perks.
When I wasn’t sweeping floors or cleaning the bosses’ shoes, I helped out on the dry-salter’s counter, which sold all kinds of soap and a wide range of cleaning materials. Having unsupervised access to the basement storeroom for these goods was a blessing and it didn’t take me long to get onto a fiddle, with the helpful advice of Bob McNish, the van driver. Within a few weeks of starting at Fisher’s, I was humping boxes of soap and other materials Bob had taken orders for from the storeroom and putting them alongside his deliveries for that day. With his regular rounds, Bob had ready-made customers looking for bargains and he would simply load the stolen goods – soap, paint, dusters, varnish, anything that he had orders for – into his van along with his official deliveries. Of course, I had little idea of how much he was getting for all this stuff, but I was happy enough to accept the odd few pounds that he handed me once or twice a week. Things were getting better.
By this time I was getting on for sixteen, that awkward age when you are past playing, but not old enough to get up to anything adult. In the evenings, when I wasn’t out on my bike, I hung around the street corner with the rest of the gang and I suppose our ages ranged from fif
teen to eighteen, when national service reared its head. Once any of the lads reached call-up age, they would disappear for about eight weeks into what must have been one of the grimmest army barracks in the country – the basic training camp of the Highland Light Infantry. The lines of the famous HLI were set in the middle of the working-class district of Maryhill. Many of the conscripted men could even look out on to their own homes, but to all intents and purposes they might as well have disappeared off the face of the earth.
Then they would suddenly reappear in all their immaculate military finery, hair cut to the bone and all. For a weekend they would swagger about in their kilts and impeccably pressed tunics, telling terrifying tales of the grim life in Maryhill Barracks. It was as if they were making their last appearance, their words a youthful valediction. And then they were gone. Once these guys finished their basic training at Maryhill and were posted off to God only knew where, they seemed to cross a divide from the rest of us.
There wasn’t really a lot of villainy in my life at that time, although I do remember stripping the lead from the local library roof along with my mates. We also managed to climb on to the roof of the North British Locomotive Company (NBLC) to begin the mammoth task of trying to clear the lead off there, too. At that time the scrap-metal business seemed the only regular way to make a few quid.
The climb up to the NBLC’s roof was easy enough. A pipe in Ayr Street, opposite the front doors of the library, gave us access. It was a bit dangerous because we had to scramble over a wide protruding ledge three-quarters of the way up, but we liked that. Two or three nights a week we would be up there, hacking lead off for all we were worth. Then we would manhandle the lead to the edge of the roof that was parallel with the railway line and throw it down. It was a simple matter then to climb back down and gain access to the railway line over a low wall at the end of Ayr Street and retrieve our lead. Ironically, the scrap was sold, no questions asked, to the same dealer whose ramshackle store we had been charged with breaking into as children two years before.
There was always a lot of gang rivalry in Springburn and often the Palermo Street, Ayr Street and Flemington Street boys would have running fights with youths from Cowlairs Road or Northcroft Road, or any of the four or five gangs that existed in Springburn in those days. Sometimes these fights could get quite bloody and razor slashings were not uncommon. The fights were all over nothing. There were no territorial disputes: everyone knew their area and mostly kept to their own ground. It really is quite hard to put a reason down for all the fighting and slashing that was going on all over Glasgow in the early 1950s.
Every district in Glasgow had its own public halls. The most popular activity in these halls was dancing – proper dancing like waltzes, quicksteps, foxtrots and even tangos. The ballroom-dancing scene was a big thing in Glasgow. My own father was a semi-professional ballroom dancer and a Master of Ceremonies (MC). I used to look up the dance-hall adverts in the newspapers to see if my father’s initials were there. If he was MCing at a dance, the advert would have in its bottom corner ‘MC – JC’. It always gave me a little tingle to see my father’s initials in the paper. No one, not even the acknowledged hard cases, thought ballroom dancing was in any sense effeminate. In fact, it was considered an admirable skill and each district had its champions who were all very well respected.
Every now and again, an undeclared challenge would mysteriously materialise. No announcement would be made and nobody would make any formal arrangements, but it would be tacitly understood that anyone interested in finding out which public hall currently hosted the most talented dancers should be at whichever hall happened to be the venue for the regular Saturday-night dance that weekend. In a show of district solidarity, the local gangs would honour an unspoken truce for the duration of the event, allowing the dancers to demonstrate their skill and style on the floor. I’ve seen some of the most violent hard cases in the city twinkling through a quickstep and dipping into a tango with an aplomb and skill that would have earned them a guest spot on Come Dancing.
Only hard-eyed stares and thinned lips betrayed the barely-suppressed violence behind a veneer of sociability. At the end of the evening, no official declaration or admission would be made, but everyone present would know who had swept the floor. The last waltz was always an unarticulated admission as to who had taken the night’s honours. At first the floor would be crowded, then gradually couples would glide to one side until, at the end of the waltz, the champions floated gracefully round what had become their own personal stage in a demonstration of their superiority. Actual applause would be out of the question, but quietly nodding heads, along with an air of appreciation was reward enough. A few quick bars of the national anthem, always a must in those days and the hall would start to clear.
On the pavement outside the dance hall the air would be thick with tension. There would be an unnatural silence for such a large crowd, as eyes met and faces grew stern. No one group wanted to be the first to leave the scene, as this would be seen as a sign of weakness.
It would start with a push, a quick scuffle, a voice raised in protest, a sudden flurry of fists. The night would erupt in an explosion of uncontrolled violence as the women passed blades to their men and the chibs came out. The police would be quickly on the scene, Black Marias screeching round the corner to deliver uniformed officers who pitched into the melée, clubbing everyone and anyone within striking distance of their truncheons. No one would strike back at the police – that was a taboo and they whacked with impunity.
Suddenly, as if on a silent, secret signal, the street would clear as everyone took to their heels. A few defiant voices would yell out gang slogans as they retreated into the night. ‘Tongs ya Bass!’ ‘San Toy! San Toy!’ Finally, all would be quiet and the night’s entertainment would be well and truly over for another week. Only the police and a few prostrate bodies remained behind. The badly-injured were ferried to the Royal Infirmary for stitching; the walking wounded were allowed to slink away. If anyone was arrested, it would be the unfortunate injured bodies having their wounds attended to at the Royal.
Things got so bad that the judiciary appointed a very strict judge to the High Court of Glasgow: Lord Carmont. All high-court judges in Scotland are law lords. Overnight, Lord Carmont multiplied the usual high-court sentences about fourfold. People were going up to court expecting the usual two-stretch, or if they were unlucky, maybe a three-stretch. They ended up going to Barlinnie in tears, with sentences of eight and ten years still ringing in their ears.
Lord Carmont smashed the razor slashers all right and the law-abiding public hailed him as a saviour. Mind you, it has to be said that, although the old razor in the hand or stitched into a flat cap made a mess of someone’s face, it was seldom, if ever, fatal. Not like now, when knives to the body are routinely causing the deaths of many young men.
I was involved in the odd gang fight just because I happened to be there at the time it erupted, but I was never really into fighting and I never carried a weapon. I suppose I had my interest in cycling to thank for that. By the age of sixteen, I had left Fisher’s paint shop and started work as an apprentice electrician with the Corporation of Glasgow. I quite enjoyed my job there and I was assigned to a tradesman in the maintenance squad called Jimmy King.
During my time with the Corporation, I had taken up competitive road racing having, thanks to Bob at Fisher’s, managed to buy a handbuilt Flying Scot with all the racing gear. Most of my evenings were spent training and at weekends there would be a road race. Being under eighteen, I was a junior and limited to sixty-five-mile events. I became the first and only junior rider for the then-famous Velo Club Stella. They used to say that, when they saw a VC Stella red racing strip at the start, they wondered who would be second at the finish.
I was still working quite happily with the maintenance squad, even going to Stow College of Engineering one day a week, when I was called into the foreman’s office. I was being transferred to a different squad to lea
rn installation work. I didn’t mind because I thought it would be as interesting and, by this time, I was competent. For a few months I worked on different sites. I learned to install boilerhouse fittings and new pyrogenic cables. I found it interesting and was getting on very well at my work. Everything else was fine too. I had a girlfriend, Eileen McSherry and I would go out with her quite a lot. She lived in Broomton Road, quite near Springburn. I don’t know how often I walked home late at night from her house.
The only criminal activity, other than the odd lead-stealing venture, which was a pretty continuous feature of my youth, was when I broke into a cycle shop late one night. That job came about because, although I was working, I was still only a second-year apprentice and earning very little money. I was still as keen as ever on bike racing, but it was expensive for me, especially the lightweight tubular tyres that were a necessity for racing. This cycle shop in New City Road had a whole swathe of ‘tubs’, as we called them, dangling temptingly in its window. So one night, about 11.00 pm, I pedalled down to New City Road and, after hiding my trusty bike up a close, I walked round to the cycle shop, climbed over the wooden gate and simply kicked in the glass of the front door.
I went into the window, unhooked the bundle of tubes and, while I was at it, I took a nice lightweight frame. It was as easy as that. I got back on my bike and fifteen minutes later I was in my bedroom checking out the tyres. To tell the truth, I wasn’t even particularly excited. I had been more worried about getting stopped by the police for having no front light. After that I took to occasionally putting my foot through a shop doorway when I was walking home from the dancing. I would just rifle the till and grab any money that was there, then carry on walking up the road. I was always surprised at the total lack of attention I got.
Armed and Dangerous--This is the True Story of How I Carried Out Scotland's Biggest Bank Robbery Page 3
