Blues and Two`s

CHAPTER 3

Blues and twos

1980s

I have two friends that I have known for more than forty years, one called Wobble and the other called Brian, they have a story to tell, I was not involved with this story, but I think the story is worth telling.

Well, it was funny at the time.

Back in the early 80s when all this happened, you the reader have to remember that cheap electronics were just being developed and manufactured in Japan and china, and all kinds of small beeping items were flooding the market, from watches that played music, from what I can remember mainly the YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS which seemed to be everywhere at the time.

There were additions of other products to this new market, it was time when CB Radios to portable handheld radios and calculators were making appearances on the shelves of shops, there were also very basic electronic games amongst other consumable products on offer.

The technology had been out for a while, but new cheap electronic items were being developed all the time, there seemed to be something new in the shops every week.

It was all new to us, and we all paid great attention to what was new on the market, technology was moving very fast, there was always something new to see and be amazed at, if the item also had flashing coloured lights, the said item would be the topic of conversation for days.

Wobble bought a small black box of electronics that played multiple beeping tunes, it was the first one any of us had ever seen before.

Wobble found, not long after playing with the tunes on the box that there were pre-recorded in-bedded tracks in the box and after playing around with it for a short while he discovered that it made a police siren sound and this gave him an idea.

Wobble then bought a real horn siren on the cheap from one of the younger bikers at the bike shop, this young biker worked on the docks in Cardiff or Barry and the siren had come off a ship of some type, wobble didn't ask how he obtained it.

The siren fitted quite easily on to the front of his Honda 400/4 and with just fitting two wires linking the horn to the black box and then to the bike battery, it worked perfectly.

Wobble had an idea which he needed help with, so he roped Brian into the escapade.

Brian had a pair of flashing blue lights, the idea was if it worked they could get past busy traffic using the siren and the blue flashing lights to fool the car divers there was a copper coming up behind them and they would pull over and give them a free passage, so they could bypass all or any backed up traffic and bottlenecks they came across and with the road clear they could filter through traffic jams.

The why to do this kind of thing, it’s a good question, lets face it, nobody likes being stuck in traffic and it looked like fun.

Brian was given two blue flashing lights that came off an ex police Norton Commando from someone he knew that worked in the police repair garages.

Fitting the lights to Brian’s 900 was a little bit more involved, the lights needed an indicator relay which they managed to obtain from an old crashed bike from B.U.S Workshops, supplied by P.J., Wobbles brother and the guys had to make two metal brackets to mount the lights on too to stop them falling off the bike when they were riding, the blue lights were mounted on both sides of the main headlight.

Wobble's idea was to fit the black box to one of the bikes and the lights to another bike and race around pretending to be chased by the police. It sounded like a laugh, so they both got down to doing it.

( Photo 1) . Brian and wobble and some English girl at a rally, photo bombing.

They both worked on the bikes behind the flat that wobble lived in, at the top of Nolton Street in Bridgend.

They kept working on the project all day and when they were satisfied and believed they had finished what they had to do to make everything work, they needed to test their new project.

They could not test the newly fitted gadgets behind the flat, the siren would make too much noise, and they did not want the Old Bill investigating any complaints around the flats.

The first thing they intended to do was to go down for a ride towards the Plough and Harrow in Monknash and test it all out, everyone was meeting down there later in the evening.

The area around the Plough was all country, just lanes and isolated houses dotted here and there, so they could test their idea without to many witnesses.

It took longer than they anticipated to get it all working correctly and when they had it set up on how they wanted it to work, they headed for the Plough.

Time was getting on, the sun had already gone down and the night was creeping.

They should have left for the Plough ages ago.

Wobble fitted the ( Black Box ) to his Honda CB 400 under the seat and above the battery box, it fitted perfectly in the cavity under the seat with room to spare, Brian fixed the two sets of blue lights to his handlebars on his Honda CB 900 and was happy they would not fall off when he rode along.

They left Bridgend town normally, like any other motorist and behaved themselves by not speeding and drawing attention to themselves, they didn’t want to get stopped before they had a chance to have some fun with the gadgets, the bikes looked like any other bike until they switched the gadgets on.

( Photo 2 ) . Brian sitting in front of the Honda CB 900 that he had fitted the blue lights too, Wobble's CB 400/4 in the background of the photo.

They both stopped at the entrance to Pant the ( HOBBS ) Quarry which was just up from Pant bend in between the villages of Corntown and Saint Brides Major.

They had stopped to swap bikes.

They both wanted to see how each of the bikes looked and sounded from someone else perspective.

Wobble had to get off the 400 and lift his seat up to switch on the black box, it was decided that Brian would ride Wobbles CB 400 and wobble would take the CB 900.

They waited for the road to be clear of traffic and when there no traffic whatsoever they pulled off and headed towards the Plough at high speed, they rode though the sleepy village of Saint Bridges Major with the blue lights flashing and the siren wailing.

The only thing that ever happened in this village was the constant traffic that passed through it’s narrow street, which never stopped, motorists used this route as a shortcut to drive down on to the coastal road towards Ogmore by Sea and Southerndown or down into the vale to the old town of LLantwit Major.

Brian was the lead bike, he entered the village with the sirens wailing and wobble was close behind with the blue lights flashing, the noise and the lights must have drawn a few locals to their windows to see what was going on.

( Photo 3 ) . The farmers arm pub, Saint Brides Major, they rode straight past the pub.

They rode though at speed passing the farmers arms where a number of customers were sitting outside on the wooden bench’s and enjoying their pints watching the ducks and the swans floating around and whatever ducks and birds do in the village pool that is opposite the pub.

The expressions on customers face’s said it all, they must have felt it was a chase scene out of a Hollywood film, people got up off the benches and pointed at the passing bikes, and the siren and lights brought customers out from inside the pub to see what was going on.

Wobble and Brian were gone literary in a flash, but the siren could be heard for some distance before and after they passed the pub.

This was the most exciting thing that happened here since a swan wandered onto the road from the village pond opposite the pub and was run over by a car, this swan event made it into the local paper on the front page, exciting village Saint Brides.

Brian was riding the 400 as fast as he could, there were some tricky bends on the way to the Plough, but both riders had been down this way a 1000 times before and they both knew were to position the bikes to get the right lines to handle the twisty bends, the only major set back would be a tractor around a blind bend, after all these were country lanes surrounded by open fields with many field entrances at blind bends, so always expect a tractor to be around the next bend or a field entrance.

The hedges were cut low and well maintained in this part of the vale which helped to see what was up ahead, if you seen the top of a car or a tractor coming your way in the distance, you would adjust your speed and riding accordingly, so if the rider kept his wits about him and checked the road ahead he would be able to adjust his speed and riding to suit what was happening on the road in the distance, one of the main problems with country roads in Wales is the constant change of direction and height of the hedges, it is very rare to have a straight road in the countryside and in Wales expect hills everywhere, this kind of terrain caused some areas not to be visible until you would right on top of them.

Banking around a corner and coming up on a slow moving tractor was always a possibility and always resulted in the panic button being pressed and emergency action being taken, but taking all this into consideration it was still worth the risk, what’s the point of living if you don’t take risks.

They turned right off the main wick road and headed down another narrow country lane that lead to the Plough.

( Photo 4 ) . The Plough and Harrow pub, it has changed very little in the last 800 or so years, the tall ivy covered ruin to the left of the pub are the remains of a medieval Thai Barn, this was where the monk’s of Margam kept all the food stuffs they grew before it was transported to Margam Abbey.

The Plough and Harrow pub was set back just off the main lane that carries onto Saint Donets Castle.

So if you needed to go to the Plough, you would need to turn into the narrow single lane that runs just out of sight of the main Wick- Saint Donets lane and this side lane runs on passed the pub, the lane is a dead end and end’s up as a foot path to an isolated beach at Marcross, a mile or so further towards the coast.

So Wobble and Brian carried on though the lanes, siren wailing, blue lights flashing, they were enjoying themselves, they slowed down to turn into the parking area outside the Plough.

Then they saw a cop car.

The police mini was parked up on a grass verge pointing in the direction they wanted to go in, the copper must have heard the siren long before the boys turned up in front of him.

( Photo 5 ) . A typical police mini of the time, we saw many of these back in the day.

A copper patrolling near the pub was not an unusual sight, the police were paranoid about bikers in those days back in the 1980s.

We were the scum of the universe in their eyes, and they did everything they could to make things awkward for us.

Ok, we were not angels and not what you would call an average model citizen, we were loud, boisterous, scruffy to some people who didn’t like the way we dressed.

We also drank a lot and messed around in public areas oblivious to whoever was watching us.

Which did not fit in with everyone’s perfect world, but the police wasted so much time keeping an eye on us while they could have been doing something else more constructive with their time.

It was a mystery to me why they found it necessary to monitor our movements and make notes of were we all were.

I just don’t know why they spent so much effort on us just because our lifestyle was different to theirs.

We weren’t gangsters, we just young bikers doing our own thing.

Considering the pub was isolated in the countryside with just a couple of houses dotted around the nearby lanes and completely surrounded by fields, there would have been no justifiable reason for the copper to be there except for monitoring bike movement and I dare say they had a full note pad and maybe a camera, this does sound a bit paranoid from my point of view, but you needed to be there to understand the attitude the police had with us back then.

Well Brian and Wobble both panicked little when they spotted the copper, they already had points on their licences and the police would have been rubbing their hands together with glee if they could find something to prosecute them with and this was an ideal opportunity for them to do so, with illegal devices fitted to their bikes they could have confiscated the bikes and that would have been the end of the bikes, they would not have given them back, the bike would have disappeared in the justice system and most likely would have been scrapped or sold off at some police auction.

They both knew the lane was a dead end and it only leads down to a farm, and the lane stopped just above the beach that was below the cliffs that lead down to the beach.

They had nowhere to go, they were trapped so they kept going and pulled up very quickly up outside the pub without slowing down too much.

Brian stopped first, he dismounted wobble 400 as quickly has he could and tried to switch off the siren without putting the bike on the stand.

In his hast in trying to switch the siren off, he didn’t think about that putting the bike on the main or side stand, it would have made it easier for him if he had, but he was thinking about losing his bike and possibly his licenses, with these thoughts running through his mind he wasn’t thinking logically and made the simple task of switching the siren off a complicated effort, which he found almost impossible to achieve.

He held the bike up with one hand, holding onto the handle bars and the other hand trying to flip the seat up and fiddling around under the seat to find the off switch to shut the black box down to kill the siren.

He fumbled around under the seat and having no luck finding the switch his state of panic went nuclear.

While Brian was struggling to switch the siren off, wobble had parked up Brian's 900 and switched the lights off with no problems.

Brian just gave up looking for the switch and for some bizarre reason simply let go of the 400 and walked away and went straight to his 900 without looking around.

Wobbles bike fell over before instantly he had only taken two steps away from it.

Brian did not even turn around to see what the crashing noise was, he continued to his bike and started to rip the lights off his bike with Brut force, which he did in seconds and rammed them in his panniers out of sight.

Wobble shouted at him,” WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING, YOU JUST DROPPED MY BIKE ON THE ROAD, WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO THAT FOR “.

Brian replied “ I couldn’t switch the fucking siren off, I couldn’t find the switch ”.

Wobble continued shouting at him “ WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T YOU PUT IT ON THE SIDE STAND, WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH YOU “.

Wobble immediately picked the bike up of the road and pulled it onto the main stand and reached under the seat and switched the siren off immediately.

There must have been up to ten bikes already parked outside the pub, it would have been nearly impossible for the copper to tell which bikes had just passed him on the road from the ones that were parked up there, some of the engines on the other bikes were still warm having only arrived a little earlier so the copper could not have used that course of action as an excuse to follow up some kind of legalized harassment.

They both came running into the pub laughing and arguing at the same time, they rushed through the door into the backroom and Wobble said to everyone who was in the room, ” we been here for ages, with you guys” and then went straight to the bar and had Beryl to pour them a pint each and drunk half the pint by the bar, just in case the copper came into the pub, Brian and wobble would have be found sitting down with a half drunk pint in front of them, they proceeded to tell everyone what they had been up too, so we all waited for the copper to pull up outside.

He never came.

A couple of the guys came in a little later in evening and said the copper was still parked up in the same place, he had not moved from the spot that he was parked in when the boys had passed him earlier, Wobble said he had made eye contact with the copper, and so he did see them go in the pub, it is most likely that the copper would not have come to the pub on his own, well not without some back up anyway, we did wait for more cars to turn up.

But nothing came, the copper stayed in his car.

Like I said earlier, they were just watching and waiting, for what I still cant fathom. Wobble was tamping ( for you non- welsh people( tamping ) means angry in English ) with Brian because when Brian let go of the wobbles Honda and let it dropped onto the road, the impact damaged part of the bike, Wobble had a full fairing fitted and the fairing took the full force of the impact of the fall and cracked the screen up the side.

Brian in panic, with his Adrenalin running high, he didn’t even try and put the 400 on the side stand.

Wobble still reminds Brian of the damage he had done to his fairing even now all these years later.

Brian still has the lights tucked away in his garage somewhere and Wobbles black box like so many electronic units back in the 80s gave up the ghost after a short time and stopped working.

Like I said at the start of this story it was funny at the time seeing wobble and Brian laughing and arguing at the same time.

It was a very bizarre thing to see.

Brian did buy a new screen for wobbles 400, so he paid for his mistake.

After they both calmed down and stopped arguing, Brian took responsibility for his rushed actions and said it was his own fault and paid up in full.

Wobbles black box packed up and stopped working after a few weeks, it was impossible to fix at the time, the tech was too new and new chips impossible to obtain back then, he put it down too much vibration from the bike, he still has the box somewhere in his house.

You never know it may come in handy again one day.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

IF YOU ARE CURIOUS ABOUT THE STORY’S TITLE, IT IS A POLICE TERM IN REFERENCE TO THE FLASHING BLUE LIGHTS AND THE TWO-TONE SIREN OF A POLICE VEHICLE THEY USED TO USE BACK IN THE DAY, NOWA DAYS, THE SIRENS THEY USE SOUND MORE LIKE A VERY BAD DISCO WITH A DEAF D.J.