Until the day I came home fully bloodied with split lips and a black eye, I thought violence was a brotherly love type thing. Sure, I stood outside school with my fists clenched but it wasn’t until I was properly attacked by a political opponent that I felt any other kind of pain. Talk about the real world. More blood than the Red Cross, me. With Blackham threatening to throw a red under the wheels of a District Line train, give me brother Nobby in his grandpa’s old army boots any day.
I knew violence. But political violence? It ain’t for the faint-hearted. Football fans hunt in packs and most get away with just looking good while shouting abuse. But a fight amongst the fringes of the political classes was quite often a fight to the near-death. We might have enjoyed smacking up the reds but they never ran. It was as if they were always defending their little corner of Moscow or having their own battle of Stalingrad. We were no better or worse. We didn’t have the cunning or the precision planning and execution of the red hit-squads, who seemed to appear from the shadows like magicians with large smiles and iron bars. Blackham feared no one and that was dangerous. He never backed down, never walked away, even when he was with his tiny gang of boys who were too young to fight.
We were looking for trouble and in 1989 the BNP felt it had enough physical presence to actually take on the left on the streets. Whilst the NF was getting turned over by the opposition for the first time in years, an uneducated media was attributing the rise of the unhinged BNP to the NF.
With Blackham leading on the streets, Anderson’s softly-softly approach went begging, as paper sales turned into bloody and provocative pitched battles. The BNP were even worse. They didn’t care how they were quoted or what they did. All publicity was good publicity and, of course, they’d opened their shop in Welling, south London. They were now running their increasingly openly Nazi party in full view of the world.
There are many ways to travel a country. Some do it in style but the new, useful team from south London do it in the back of Terry Blackham’s car. Blackham had begun to recruit around the south London area a few former friends from his early skinhead days. Where we had hit the right areas with leaflets, a small trickle of people had begun to take notice and respond. Nothing major but in the first few months of 1989, there was a marked increase in activity by both the NF and BNP on the streets of south London. Our new branch now had something like a dozen members. We vetted them carefully, every one of them was a single white male in his late teens or early twenties and every one of them was game for a race war. Terry let me sit them down and ‘educate’ them about some potty policy they had a genuine grievance about over drinks and, doing our little double act, by the end of a few pints, we had convinced them that we would have to start throwing the punches and lighting the fuses ourselves.
But my favourite loony was always Richard Edmonds of the BNP. He was a sentimentalist. He’d been a Nazi since his teens and joined the National Front in the 1970s. He was losing his hair and had always enjoyed incredible misfortune. He was an unimposing six-foot Nazi who had spent his entire life reading the wrong sort of books, mixing with the wrong sort of friends. A schoolteacher, stoned off the premises by teachers, parents and pupils and then later given a large cheque by Cable and Wireless to leave their company too. If you didn’t know the titles of the books, you would assume that Edmonds was well-read, sitting in his tiny BNP office surrounded by unsold copies, some up to twenty years old, of his Führer’s periodical Spearhead and listening to Radio 4, waiting for Wagner to soothe his brow. He enjoyed his sparse existence, never tempted by drink, cigarettes or women.
Had the now defunct National Party not stood a candidate against him in the 1970s, he would have been elected to Lewisham Council with – if you included the National Party splinter vote – forty-six per cent of the vote for the NF. He would have been the NF’s first, and thus far only, elected official.
Richard Edmonds was the first person to get hit on any activity, partly because he was always the first into the fight. I remember not-so-lazy Sunday afternoons with Edmonds as his small crew posted 1,000 leaflets through the doors of ‘decent white folk’. In the morning the BNP and NF would sell their newspapers, The Flag the more readable of the two but sold with less gusto at Brick Lane market in east London. Nazis and cranks from across Britain would converge there on Sunday mornings to sell newspapers and abuse the Asian men and women who lived there. The NF and BNP would compare battle scars from the previous day’s activities, before heading off to the pub at midday, together. But not Edmonds. He attracted a small, semi-literate group – the rest of the Brick Lane Nazis were illiterate – totally dedicated to political canvassing on Sunday afternoons. They were the poorest-dressed, least likeable and most anal of all Nazis. Hitler was a vegetarian and so would they be. The thuggish, meat-eating, beer-drinking and cigarette-smoking element were excused the usual canvassing on a Sunday because of their exertions the previous day. Those incapable – there are none unwilling – made do with knocking on doors just as the EastEnders omnibus was due.
There was no snobbery involved in this arrangement; there was a genuine admiration of the meat-eaters heading off to the pub; everyone had their duty to perform for the cause. I fell somewhere between meat-eater and semi-literate. In need of a lift home and, in those days, incapable of topping up a hangover so early in the week, my path was decided for me. The BNP’s battered old minibus would pull up at some estate, Edmonds would produce a thousand leaflets and stickers and we would be off, a dozen zealots with no Sunday dinners waiting. When the leafleting was finished, Edmonds would drive us all home singing the Horst Wessel Lied, a famous German Nazi song. We never knew where we were going or what was planned for us. It was almost like a family drive into the country, although we were headed for council estates and tower blocks.
People would often rush out of their homes to support or abuse us. Frequently, we would be accosted by someone with a particular gripe, asking us to deal with some ‘bloody Pakis’ who had moved in recently. The NF used to receive a dozen requests a week in the mail from the public, asking for someone to pop round and deal with a ‘problem’. If we were out canvassing for the NF and that happened, we would shoo them away, saying ‘we’re not the council’, but in the BNP you could say anything you liked. If someone called you a Nazi, well what of it? Often people would open their windows and shout, ‘That’s right mate, you fucking do it, I’m with you all the way’, and we felt good for it. The East End in particular was turning Nazi according to Edmonds. Accordingly, every Sunday, around three o’clock, to back up the good work done by our leafleting, the meat-eaters would leave the pubs and assault any remaining Asians on the way home. There were no BNP candidates to canvass for, we were just building the movement. ‘Elections,’ Edmonds told me, were ‘a waste of time.’
The NF didn’t feel that elections were a waste of time. They were a waste of money, yes, but you had to be in the game to win it. So one night I found myself in the small leafy suburb of Hemel Hempstead, National Front member John McAuley’s heartland, at a council by-election bid, pretending I was part of the political establishment. We sat at the back of a public meeting, addressed by Anderson and McAuley himself, being heckled by the public.
Anderson, honestly believing that members of the public had given up the night to listen to his schoolboy vision of green belt England with him as its reasonable, middle-class Prime Minister, struggled to be heard but got through his speech. McAuley, slow, stuttering and unheard, gasped for breath trying to criticise a local leaflet put out by National Union of Teachers members at the local school criticising him for being a fascist. The crowd cheered so I knocked a woman over. All hell brike loose because I’d sat right in the middle of the local anti-fascist group. I ended up hitting anyone who moved with my umbrella, while Blackham and a former international sprinter fell on hard times did battle with the rump of the group.
Within a minute the entire meeting was in uproar, hurling chairs and insults at each other. Somehow the police were taken a little by surprise and took an eternity to arrive on the scene in force. As the police arrived, I immediately got the Front members present to start clapping and cheering. It worked beautifully, as the police simply dragged out those not clapping and cheering: the public. As the last protester was dragged out, screaming about their democratic rights, I gave a loud ‘Three cheers for the police!’ and a rousing chorus of Rule Britannia. It was enough to bring tears to the eyes, particularly as McAuley got to finish his speech, still stuttering and gasping for breath as he promised the deportation of every black person in the country.
It felt like a huge victory as we headed back to London, licking our lips and exaggerating our fighting prowess. But in reality, peering outside of the tiny world that fringe politics occupies, it was very small. There would be no national headlines in the morning, though the Hemel Hempstead press gave us the front page, with a picture of me with my fists clenched. We were a million miles from Lewisham and the ‘Sensational Seventies’. It was deemed worthy of mention in the party publications as the NF ‘defending’ themselves but without the violence and tension, the meeting would have passed by like the many hundreds of others I attended, bored to tears by the National Front.
Blackham, surprisingly, managed to open a PO Box in his hometown of Beckenham, on the Kent and South London borders. He asked me to be Chairman of London NF. The Croydon & South London branch was renamed Croydon & Surrey NF, as Blackham and I were to run the new South London division, trying to outdo the BNP. On one of the three holiday days owed to me by the civil service, I took tea with Edmonds at the BNP shop-cum-head-office in Welling, another spot on the Kent-south London border.
The BNP were proud of their shop. They’d got around planning laws with the help of a dozy Tory council and opened for race-hate-business slap bang in the middle of the road into multiracial Plumstead. Behind large blue doors and boarded-up windows, Edmonds sat running the BNP. It was driving the NF crazy with jealousy, but the BNP, and in particular Richard Edmonds who ran the shop, were a law unto themselves.
Edmonds swung the door open and proclaimed: ‘Enter, we are open to business. And if you’re not too busy, work will set you free.’ I didn’t realise until years later that this was a play on the words above the gates at Auschwitz. The shop was dimly lit because there were no windows; the entire place was boarded up against possible attack by opposition groups. It was from this shop that the BNP masterminded race riots, racial violence, Holocaust denial and played a huge part in contributing to the deaths of four young men from south London. The inconspicuous little blue building in Upper Wickham Lane became a centre for race haters, Jew haters and convicted terrorists. It had the uniform Nazi look about it; newspapers scattered everywhere and magazines piled up to the ceiling. Edmonds had his tiny living quarters upstairs and his shower in the office-kitchen.
We took tea with powdered milk and exchanged the usual gossip. The phone never rang and no one popped in. Alone in the back office with Edmonds, I smoked Woodbines and asked questions.
Racism and Nazism was easy. It hardly troubled the grey matter. Socialism seemed such a difficult, almost entirely out-of-reach way to think and behave. God knows what Red Action were about but they generated the same cynicism that I felt about middle-class students preparing for life in the banking industry, sitting in cafés reading Marx and Lenin, talking about the proletariat. It’s uninspiring and none too practical when real politics takes place around people’s kitchen sinks. Groups like the SWP didn’t inspire many to throw their weight behind the great leap forward. Banging on about the solidarity of internationalism whilst racism has its physical roots in the tower blocks of hopelessness was pointless. Instead of a difficult, and eventually thankless, campaign for better housing for all, why not campaign against people from different races being housed? At almost every white household we knocked on the door of, we were told the same thing: ‘I’m not a racist but…’
The people of the East End have a marvellous tradition of fighting fascism, but fascism still always manifests itself in the East End because poverty persists at its heart. We used to believe that Arthur Fowler would have been the organiser of Walford NF or BNP, and Den Watts would be the understanding landlord with a cheap back room for hire. Dorothy Cotton was to be the disenfranchised white pensioner, and Doctor Legg a Jewish gangster. I discussed this with Edmonds but he didn’t have a television and hadn’t watched one in years. Even when the BBC was paying him £50 for an interview about the BNP headquarters – which the BNP protested was merely a shop – Edmonds never watched.
The people could go ahead and vote in as many Labour councillors and MPs as they wanted, but the BNP went and took a physically intimidating stranglehold on parts of the East End in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It would later – briefly – translate into electoral success. That was the moment when I realised that Labour had lost its working-class voice.
Anti-Fascist Action and Red Action articulated this dilemma first. The BNP was intimidating and ingratiating itself into static communities with real gripes. Some kids from traditionally Labour-voting families would come and stand with Nazi canvassers and candidates. This was out of blind support for racist ideology, not working class traditions that may otherwise have seen them vote Labour. No matter how often the far right get finished off in the East End of London, they always start again, always strong, always active. The NF didn’t have the numbers to succeed in the East End but the BNP did. Instead of benefiting from all the good things a community could have offered itself, the BNP was allowed to tear it apart with Richard Edmonds and the slippery Eddy Butler at the forefront.
They called their campaign ‘Rights for Whites’, very catchy. In an area where so many basic rights were being overlooked, small vocal sections of the community were stirred into action by the BNP. There was quite obviously a fight brewing for physical control of the streets and the BNP openly laid plans for it.
Every day, free of charge, Edmonds would send thousands of pieces of literature to supporters in east London. The BNP paid for it; it was advantageous for them to have people who had no jobs, out all day posting racist posters and leaflets through doors. While the left-wing group, Militant, were sending their supporters to night school, the BNP was preparing theirs for a race-war and prison. People’s feelings of disenfranchisement were obvious to us, well before New Labour abandoned the working class. Just by having an office/shop, the BNP became approachable and, although Edmonds’s generosity was more than likely bankrupting him and the party, people did travel sometimes enormous distances, to sit down and talk to someone who cared, someone who was not pretentious or condescending to them.
To deal with the huge growth of BNP activity on his alleged ‘patch’, Anderson organised the London Activities Group. The idea was to arrange an instant response to events like IRA bombings. If the IRA were to strike on a Monday, by Tuesday morning all the main train stations were to be covered in anti-IRA literature. I was to be the link man as I had a telephone at work, available to me anytime I needed it. No one seemed to mind that any such calls to action were to be made from within the depths of a police station. Anderson gave me a list of the few active members the NF had in London. From that we narrowed it down to ten people who were also active nationally.
The first test was the Deal barracks bombing. I was having a fish and chip lunch in the office when news came over the radio of a huge bomb having gone off at Deal Royal Marine barracks. Vinegar dripped onto my Burton’s trousers as the news came through. It was the first time news had ever affected me. I was so angry I was speechless. The ladies in the office chewed their lips as I sprang into action. What was I going to do? I knew I really had to do something, after all I was in the National Front. I rang Anderson immediately.
‘Ian, the IRA have bombed Deal army barracks!’
‘WELL, WHO GIVES A FUCK? FUCK OFF, I’M BUSY, I DON’T GIVE A FUCK.’
Anderson was hysterical. His printer was not working properly. He got another couple of phone calls, each receiving a similar response, until Terry Blackham called him. Blackham called me that night and said the group had been cancelled. Anderson had had a bad day. Thankfully the Queen had not rung and asked him to form a government that afternoon.
Anderson’s uncontrollable temper had made him impossible for many people to get along with for a number of years. I had already begun suggesting to Blackham that he come along and meet Edmonds but all the Jew business seemed to concern him. I assured him it was because he did not understand the Jewish problem. Eventually he agreed to meet Edmonds one fateful summer evening in 1989.
We met up with forty other BNP activists at the office in Welling, where they were preparing to demonstrate against a meeting being held in the public library against the BNP. The meeting became known as the Battle of Welling and the BNP members who attended it have been lauded as heroes ever since. Afterwards I agreed with Blackham that we would never mention what happened in Welling Library that night. It physically shook him, which, with hindsight, I find hard to believe. At the time, however, I thought we were both going to be sick immediately after we left the library and hid in a garden as ambulances carried away women and police cars blocked off the roads around the building.
As Blackham and I made our way to the BNP office, we passed the library on Welling High Street, and I commented that this would probably be a public meeting. All meetings held on council property and deemed to be of public interest were called public meetings, because they were open to everybody to attend. It was probably just a cheap way to rent a hall and, throughout the 1970s, the NF used council property to hold provocative meetings, knowing that the opposition would have to be allowed in. Under the Representation of the People Act, councils had to allow fascists with a candidate in an election use of public facilities to hold a public meeting. It is not something widely used any more, since the vigilance of anti-fascists usually results in such meetings being turned over by the greater weight of the opposition. As far as we were concerned, ten or so of us would go to the meeting and heckle before being thrown out. Simple.
The BNP office was packed. Forty men had been shipped up to Welling in the back of a removal van and a series of cars. They stood in the shop in an orderly fashion while Lecomber arranged for transport to the library for others. In the dark kitchen where he also showered, Edmonds smoothed his bald head and washed up some mugs. There was a lingering sense of anticipation in the air. Testosterone as thick as smoke and hushed, whispering voices made the atmosphere almost unbearable. We nodded greetings to each other as we were all acquainted from other activities, or from the Sunday paper sales and punch-ups down Brick Lane.
Eventually it was decided we would all go in the removal van and Blackham and I joined the others waiting expectantly in the back. Nothing was said in the three minutes it took to get there and it was not until we decamped at the back of the library that I suddenly realised there were no posters, placards or leaflets. Nazis and libraries do not mix. If they’re not burning the contents, they’re throwing the occupants out of windows: it wasn’t going to be protest, it was going to be a hit! My balls tightened with anticipation. There was a great deal of excitement as there was a tube strike on that day which meant that few AFA stewards would have travelled across town to protect the meeting. Blackham licked his lips (not at my balls) and I looked around at the other people in the van. Men, older than me, with crude hatred on their faces and breaths, were waiting patiently to act out as much ordered violence as they could in the time allotted to us.
‘Straight in and out,’ said one to no one in particular and there were quiet grunts of agreement. Lecomber called me out of the van.
We knocked on the library door and waited. Hiding around the side of the library, the rest waited silently. A cleaner came to the door and looked puzzled.
‘There’s a meeting on. You can’t come in,’ he said.
‘Yes we can, it’s a public meeting. Anybody can come in,’ I said back.
With that he opened the door and everybody walked up the stairs behind Lecomber and me. We passed Greenwich Labour councillor Geoff Dixon looking absolutely startled. I shouted ‘Public meeting’ at him and he tried to block our way. Before he could speak, Lecomber punched him and, as he lay across our path, stamped on his body. The cleaner got the same treatment and has never worked again. The room was packed with women, most of them Asian, concerned about having to bring up children in such close proximity to renowned ‘Paki bashers’.
They were sitting in rows in a tiny meeting room, even by Croydon NF standards. I pulled the door open and looked at them, a little bit startled. Suddenly, a voice from behind, unmistakably that of Richard Edmonds, boomed ‘British National Party’, as if it was a police raid, or the clearing of the Warsaw ghettos. The meeting stood up as in piled the BNP team. Blackham and I and Lecomber were the only ones actually to strike men that night. No sooner had Edmonds shouted than a man stood directly in front of me so I hit him square on the jaw. It hardly knocked him over, but before he could respond, Blackham gave him a haymaker and the rest piled in.
Tables were turned over and chairs thrown with very little physical opposition to warrant it. The members of the meeting cowered against the back wall as the BNP marched towards them, picking up chairs and tossing them at the group. A fat little bald man called Daddy waved a motorcycle helmet and hammer at them menacingly, then the BNP laid into them. They could have simply broken up the meeting by intimidation but they wanted to hurt them physically, which they did.
I thought I was having a psychedelic moment because the room was spinning but everything was actually being turned upside down, one man after the other laying into a small group of women, hitting them with chairs and hurling tables at them. There just weren’t enough people at the meeting to attack, so the windows were put through with chairs. It was a bloody massacre. People were lying on the floor helpless, being stamped on, kicked and hit with objects picked off the walls and floor. A pregnant woman was locked in the toilet and the BNP were trying to kick their way in to get at her and her unborn baby.
Blackham and I left after minutes, although it felt like hours to us. The sounds of hate-fuelled aggression and shocked, bewildered terror followed us out like a sickening cocktail. We passed a man on the street, in distress and covered in blood, waiting for the police to turn up. Two policemen were with him, but neither was willing to venture into the library. As we left the scene we heard a huge crash of glass, it turned out later that someone had thrown themselves through a window to escape.
It had taken only a few minutes to leave seventeen people needing hospital treatment; mainly women, mostly Asian, most definitely beaten. It was hardly a revenge for Stalingrad but it went into the party paper as ‘Reds Routed’ anyway. At a BNP branch meeting, I was given a special mention as a colleague from the NF who had helped. I was so embarrassed I nearly dived through the windows to escape too.
I decided to throw myself firmly into the NF again. It was far preferable to stand over ‘Troops Out!’ pickets than to face jail for assaulting women and children. At the meeting, I grabbed a copy of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight to read as Edmonds was asking for donations for some of the ‘heroes’ who had been arrested at the library. I was a fucking coward to have done such a thing. I began to realise that this was what race wars were about, the innocent attacked and their dignity destroyed. If my mother had known, she would have disowned me on the spot.
After the library attack, I started to get to know Terry Blackham better and work with him closely. He struck me as someone with no real political motivations but, with a string of convictions for violence, at least he was quite honestly an unrelenting hater. In and around Penge and Beckenham he and his older brother had a notorious reputation for violence, even though he was only in his early twenties. Worryingly for me, most of his violence seemed to have been directed towards the Irish community.
Working as he did – labouring on building sites in and around London in the 1980s – Blackham was always being presented with opportunities to exercise his talent with his fists. He was as hard as nails and, worse still, he seemed to have absolutely no concept of fear. And you need fear, even if you are a hard man like Blackham. He seemed driven by an unquenchable thirst for violence, normally put down to an alcohol problem that seemed to be given as a mitigating circumstance at every court appearance. But Terry was not a reckless piss-head; he was an aggressive psychopath from the moment he woke up and began hiting and kicking the enormous punch bag that hung from the ceiling outside his bedroom, to the moment his head hit the pillow at night.
Terry knew little and cared even less about the history of the National Front. I had made every effort to understand what I had become involved in; Terry felt it should all evolve around himself, there and then. He didn’t care for John Tyndall’s BNP, he didn’t care much for anything to do with any sort of history. I once read to him from Ray Hill’s book, The Other Face of Terror, how NF members would shout ‘All quiet for the Queen’s speech,’ before Tyndall’s former sidekick in the National Front, Martin Webster, spoke at marches and rallies. He didn’t find it funny.
Terry had been on the fringes of the NF when it began a period of revising its politics. He’d initially been attracted to the skinhead culture of violence, loyalty and patriotism that had become staples of a young nationalist’s diet, and indeed the NF’s income and output during the early to mid-1980s. I even envied Terry that he’d seen some of the radicalising of the NF by the likes of Nick Griffin but had had the chance to reject it. He’d also had the opportunity to run around in skinhead gangs while I had probably been kicking my heels at school wondering where folks like him were and what they were doing.
Terry had been part of the Bulldog – the paper of the Front’s youth wing, the Young National Front – generation, entranced by Joe Pearce, a genuine working-class Messiah to the Front’s faithful membership and leader of the YNF. Pearce had been sentenced to jail in 1982 for his editorship of Bulldog. While in prison, he wrote a fanciful explanation of the NF’s new strategies, published later in the rather slim Fight For Freedom, with a wittering introduction by his friend, Nick Griffin. Pearce was one of those rejecting factional fights and preferring to keep up his own race war without silly ‘politicians’ talking a language he didn’t understand.
Terry had always been totally unaware of what was going on. The music and magazines the NF had previously produced for people like him had seemingly just stopped one day. The more the official Political Soldier NF, led by Nick Griffin, moved leftwards into loony territory, the more it disintegrated and lost members. The traditional membership grew tired of the teachings of Colonel Gaddafi and of Nick Griffin, Derek Holland and Patrick Harrington spouting an apoplectic, wholly foreign worldview. The Political Soldier NF’s final glory was an expenses-paid trip to Tripoli to meet Gaddafi’s Foreign Ministry fixers. They also tried to ingratiate themselves with Welsh extremists who were implicated in the firebombing of holiday homes in the Welsh borders. Their final insult was being labelled perverts by East Belfast UDA (Ulster Defence Association) and warned to leave Northern Ireland immediately.
Paul Ballard, who had for a while been a Political Soldier, felt the young revolutionaries were the ‘wrong people at the right time’ for fascist politics. The influx of revolutionary ideas by new, young blood had reinvigorated a dying organisation so it must have seemed a case of ‘the madder the better’.
The NF tried to get involved in more issues besides race. As with most things, the problems of the day were with race and immigration according to the Front, but post-1979 the NF realised it would have to go and find new members, not wait for another influx of Ugandan refugees to get people riled up. It had to challenge modern issues with modern solutions, still based on race but, most important, not from the pages of Mein Kampf. From this new strategy came magazines like Bulldog, New Dawn and the music network, Rock Against Communism. A group of Italians hiding out in London, wanted by the Italian authorities in connection with the Bologna bombings, convinced the likes of Griffin and Harrington that the NF had to appear more radical and develop policies on the environment and the economy that could distance the party from the former leadership – especially the old Nazi John Tyndall who had swallowed so much right-wing Tory policy in the 1970s – to be attractive to disenchanted Tories under Heath. They developed a deliberate policy of supporting causes that traditionally the left had been allowed to campaign on. Early on they even tried to intervene in support of Arthur Scargill’s striking miners, whilst the BNP attempted to help the Coal Board.
When this strategy failed, in 1986, the Front had to smash itself to bits and try again. The result was people like me, Blackham, Whicker, the Croydon organisers, Birmingham NF, Liverpool NF – solid working-class branches and members, none of us old-time Nazis but all of us dedicated to nationalism, dedicated to our race and nation. Once inside the party, we did not care for party policies or long and odious posturing; we undertook to follow the party line on matters as long as the party provided for us an enemy and a solution. We did as we were told and followed the programme. The last thing we wanted to do was sit down in some strange farmhouse and be questioned by some Political Soldier about our revolutionary and religious convictions. Everyone was welcome in our idea of the party, particularly those with a relaxed attitude to violence. You had to keep us quiet, keep us entertained and we would perform. The minute someone started toying with the mechanics of this well-oiled machine, it fell to fucking pieces.