Wild Thing (26 page)

Twins Gary and Barry Day said that they were opening a nightclub near the Ford car plant in Dagenham and asked me if I would run the door. After two years at home I knew I was far from fit and returning to work on the door was a gamble. My fighting technique had obviously not been affected by my illness, though, and I knew I would soon regain my strength once I started training, so I accepted their offer. Margaret, while appreciating the severity of our financial situation, was not so happy but agreed the job would suffice until I found an alternative. The club was called B.G.’s and initially attracted a good crowd. Success in the Essex badlands, however, tends to attract the criminal fraternity, who are eager to have a share of anybody’s hard-earned cash.

I was in the office one evening when I was told about ‘eight big geezers asking for protection money’.

‘Good evening, fellas,’ I said when I reached the front door. ‘How can I help?’ One of the men stepped towards me, and his friend held his arm. They had clearly rehearsed their routine. I was meant to be scared of the prick who was being held back. ‘Let his arm go,’ I said to his friend. ‘Let’s see how good he is.’

One of the men pulled out a bottle of ammonia and squirted one of my fellow doormen, who fell to his knees clutching his face. I ran to the reception desk and picked up a machete I kept there for emergencies. When I ran back towards the men, they had fled through the door. I chased the one who had squirted my colleague. He took the ammonia out of his jacket as he ran and squirted me in the left eye. The pain was excruciating, and I found myself narrowly missing a bollard as I continued to try to run blind. Realising pursuit was pointless, I returned to the club, threw down the machete and laid into the other men, who were still hanging around the car park.

By the time I had finished, a bone in my hand was dislocated. I forced it back into place and ordered one of the door staff to fetch a car. I picked up the machete, then Barry Day and I jumped into the vehicle. We roared down the A13 in the hope of finding the man who had used the ammonia. We eventually caught up with him running up a side road. Hurtling towards the man, we watched as he disappeared up a nearby garden path and into a house.

Smash! Smash! Smash! The sound of breaking glass and splintering wood broke the late-night silence as I destroyed the door and all of the downstairs windows with the machete. When the front door eventually came off its hinges, I could see the man hiding behind a mature male who was in the hallway wielding a pickaxe handle. ‘Stay back, you lunatic,’ the man said. ‘If you come in my house, I will kill you.’

I could hear other people screaming in another part of the house. It sounded as if at least one of them was female, so I decided against entering the property. ‘You’ll fucking get yours,’ I said, pointing the machete at the man who had squirted the ammonia. ‘This is far from over.’ Hiding behind the older guy, the man didn’t answer.

‘Get in the motor,’ Barry shouted, ‘the Old Bill are coming!’

I too could hear sirens approaching, so I jumped in the car and Barry accelerated away. Every window frame and every pane of glass in the front of the house on the ground floor was smashed. The front door had been hacked, stamped on and eventually broken in half. I was expecting a visit from the police, but I was fairly certain we wouldn’t be getting any more demands for protection money. The police did arrive at the club the following morning. Barry was told that the identity of the doorman who caused the damage was known, but the family whose home it was had refused to make a complaint. ‘Tell him to be careful because these people have been linked to a murder in the past,’ the officer said. ‘They are very dangerous people.’

I had made my own enquiries and knew that the man who had squirted me had been arrested for stabbing three people outside a nightclub in Dagenham. One of the men had subsequently died from his injuries. Police enquiries were met with a wall of silence, and nobody was ever charged in relation to the death. I decided to keep my eyes and ears open regarding these people, but I never did see them again. The house remained boarded up for six months, and after that the occupants moved.

Despite the best efforts of Barry, Gary and the door staff, the club continued to attract trouble. On more than one occasion I was asked to stay overnight in the office with a loaded pump-action shotgun because of threats to firebomb the building. Two years on Barry and Gary reluctantly decided to close the club and later sold it to my old friend Dave Maxwell.

The money I’d earned while working at B.G.’s had allowed Margaret and me to restore some sort of normality back to our lives. Our relationship had gone from strength to strength, and we’d had another child together, a beautiful daughter named Vicky. When B.G.’s closed, Margaret and I feared that we would soon slip back into the financial black hole that we had just escaped from, so I took the first job that was offered to me. Much to Margaret’s dismay the job, unsurprisingly, was on the door of yet another nightclub. ‘You promised you would give up that way of life years ago,’ she said. ‘I know we need the money, Lew, but if you don’t find a normal job soon, I am leaving.’

I knew I had to honour my promise, but I could never have foreseen the terrible illness I’d been struck down by and the problems that had caused. ‘This will be the last door job,’ I promised. ‘I will look into starting my own business as soon as our financial situation is stable again.’

The Dickens in Wickford, Essex, was run by a former doorman whom I’ll call Sid. He was a big burly guy who tipped the scales at around 19.5 st. The door team consisted of me, Johnny Wacker and a really handy guy named Ian Jones. Despite the Dickens being located in a relatively small village, it attracted a lot of its custom from neighbouring towns such as Basildon, Billericay and Chelmsford. We soon got to know who was who and weeded out the troublemakers.

As the popularity of the venue increased, it began to attract coaches full of revellers on stag nights from London, whose traditional destination had always been Southend. I was called upstairs one evening to ask a group of lads on a stag night to calm down, as they were giving the bar staff grief. ‘Any more nonsense and you’re out,’ I said. ‘Does everybody understand?’ One of the men tried to answer back, but his friends told him to shut up, promised me there wouldn’t be any further problems and walked away. I went back downstairs to join the other doormen. The remainder of the evening passed off peacefully in the club, but as the lads on the stag night were leaving, they became rowdy and abusive. ‘Keep on walking,’ I said to them as they stepped outside. ‘You really don’t want trouble with us, boys.’

One of the group, an extremely tall well-built guy in his mid-20s, replied, ‘It’s you who should avoid trouble with us, wanker.’

I walked out onto the car park and urged the man to shut up and go home, but he was never going to listen. The first punch put him on his knees. He was grasping at the handle of a car, trying to get back up, when I hit him a second and then a third time. ‘Pick this lump of shit up and take it home with you,’ I called out to his friends. At first they began shouting and advancing towards me, but when I stood my ground, they halted in their tracks. As far as I was concerned, the incident was over, so I walked back in to the club. When I closed the door, every single window in the reception area seemed to explode. Garden tables, chairs, bottles and bricks were all being used as missiles, and the door staff were the intended targets.

The manager dialled 999, and within minutes a police car swept onto the car park. Instead of restoring order, the police presence seemed to antagonise the baying mob further. A man brandishing a large carving knife appeared to be leading the 50-strong mob, and when a WPC went to disarm him, he knocked her out with one punch. Her colleague, fearing for his safety, called for backup, and soon officers with dogs and several other vans arrived. The mob showered the police with volley after volley of missiles and at one stage charged the thin blue line. The police retreated and the mob responded by turning a police car over and leaving it on its roof. More and more police reinforcements arrived until eventually the mob scattered. Some arrests were made, but many of the men involved in the incident escaped.

Sid the manager was so scared of a reprisal attack he asked me to sleep at the club, which I did for three consecutive nights. The club was never the same after that incident. People simply stayed away. ‘Can you take a drop in money?’ Sid said to me one evening. ‘I can’t afford to pay your wages any more. When the club gets busy again, I will revert your wages to the old rate and repay you what I have deducted.’ I knew the club was struggling, I knew I had promised Margaret it was to be my last door job and I knew I had no alternative employment lined up, so I agreed. It wasn’t a dramatic wage cut; I had been earning £250 per night and Sid cut it to £200, so I was hardly going to starve.

Three months after I had agreed to a reduction in wages, Sid announced that he was going abroad on holiday. He left without telling anybody where he was going, but when I heard he was sunning himself on some foreign beach, I wasn’t very happy. I thought that if he could afford a holiday, he could afford to pay me the money he owed me. I decided to pull him about it on his return. ‘I’ll sort your money out in a week or two,’ Sid said when our paths finally crossed. A week or two turned into a month, so I approached Sid again about my money. ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow,’ he said, but I just knew tomorrow was never going to arrive.

The following night Sid was drinking at the bar surrounded by a large group of hangers-on. ‘Play the game, Sid,’ I said. ‘This is getting silly. Just pay me what you owe me.’

Everybody fell silent as Sid got off his stool and glared at me. ‘I am not bothered about you,’ he replied. ‘You’ll get your money when I am ready.’

Perhaps he had spent too long on the beach in that hot foreign climate and the sun had affected his brain. Sid had certainly never tried to mug me off before. I waded into him, delivering blow after blow to his head and body. All of his friends were shouting but doing nothing to stop me as I knocked him through tables and chairs. Sid was on his knees, unable to stand up, and I could hear his wife screaming. I punched him in the head, and as he fell to the floor, I punched him repeatedly in the kidneys. His wife jumped on my back, pleading with me to stop, so I stood up and stepped back. Sid remained on the floor. I left the club and drove home.

I was told that Sid had suffered a broken cheekbone and spent five days in hospital. I had never wanted to fall out with him, but I felt he was treating my kindness as if it were a weakness. I did bump into him some time later at a mutual friend’s funeral. After the service the mourners gathered at a nearby pub. I was at the bar when Sid spotted me. He glanced once, took a second look and then turned his back in the hope I hadn’t noticed him. Having been served, he sat a table with his friends. When it was time for me to leave, I walked over to Sid, who still had his back to me. ‘I will see you all later,’ I said, putting my hands on his shoulders. ‘It’s been good seeing you all again.’ Sid didn’t even move. He sat staring at the wall in front of him. He knows he was wrong. We all make mistakes. It’s a pity he wasn’t prepared to say so.

‘You haven’t forgotten your promise,’ Margaret said when I told her it was possible I might have lost my job after beating up my manager.

‘No, I haven’t forgotten,’ I replied, ‘and it’s unlikely I will be going back there to work, so I shall start looking for something new to do.’

I have to admit it, I missed the danger of working on the doors and I missed the friendship of the guys I faced that danger with. However, living what most people would consider to be a normal life also had its advantages. I was able to spend a lot more time with Margaret and the children and enjoy the simple but memorable things that family life provides.

Ever since I was a young boy, I had kept dogs. In the 1980s Rottweilers, bull terriers and other similar breeds were becoming popular, so I decided to set up a business selling them. The property we lived in was some distance from other homes, had plenty of space for kennels and so was ideal for this purpose. I bred English mastiffs, Staffordshire bull terriers, Rottweilers, Dobermanns and Jack Russells. The demand for these dogs in the south-east of England at that time could not be met. The success of the business took both Margaret and me by surprise. A stress-free job and financial security brought about domestic bliss. Margaret and I were, for the first time in what seemed like an age, happy again.

In June 1986 Margaret gave birth to our second daughter, Danielle. Life for us seemed to be getting better and better. But, as always in my life, highs were inevitably followed by lows. The more dogs I sold, the more dog-breeding businesses I noticed appearing. People I had supplied dogs to over a long period of time were beginning to use them to set up their own businesses. Bad publicity about unprovoked attacks on people by the breeds of dogs I sold also had a negative effect on my business. As my sales figures plummeted, I was forced to concede that I would have to look elsewhere to bolster my ever-decreasing income.

Through advertisements in the
Boxing News
magazine, I started to sell skipping ropes and something I had invented called the Martindale Reflex Ball. This device was a tennis ball attached to headgear by a long piece of rubber tubing. A fighter would punch and jab the ball, which would fly forward and back, assisting them with improving their hand and eye coordination. A lot of people initially scoffed at the idea, but I sold thousands of them. Robin Read, the WBF super-middleweight champion, who was also known as the Grim Reaper, purchased several, as did many other well-known professionals. The money I made from selling boxing equipment and breeding dogs was never going to make us rich, but we did manage to live what most would consider to be a fairly comfortable lifestyle.