COPPER # 3

CHAPTER 28

COPPERS 3

DUCATI 160

1972

1972 was the first year that I was legally allowed to ride on the road, I obtained my provisional license as soon as possible and dragged my mother to Bridgend to stand guarantor for finance, so I could have a loan to buy a bike from a bike shop.

I had been saving to buy a bike off a boy I knew in work, called Carmoody, who lived in the Heol-y-Cyw area.

The agreement was that I had to get the money to buy a bike off him within a couple of months, and he would keep the bike for me until then.

The bike was a Ducati 160 cc, if I remember correctly.

I had been saving as much as possible out of my take home £12 weekly pay to go towards paying for the bike, the target I was aiming for was £35.

It was taking me forever to save that enormous amount.

I gave £5 to my mother for lodge which she insisted on, which I winged about constantly, her response was “ go find somewhere cheaper to live and then buy your own food etc, etc “, so that was the end of that argument, another £2 went for my weekly bus ride to work on one of Mansel David’s aging buses.

Mansel was my uncle, I think he knocked off 50p of the bus fare because I was family, 50p does not sound like a lot of money, but to me it was a massive saving at the time and that extra 50p was added to my bike saving fund.

After paying my mother and Mansel, I had £5 left in my pocket to live off, I never had my haircut so that saved me money.

I put away £2-3 for the Ducati, eventually I had hit the magic target of £35 it took me 9 weeks in total, in the last couple of weeks of saving the money I put all I had into the bike fund to get hold of the bike as soon as possible.

So with £35 in my pocket, I approached the boy Carmoody in work and told him I had the money to pay for the bike, and I was ready to pick the bike up as soon as possible, I actually intended to push it home, it would have been a very long walk.

He then dropped a bombshell on me, he said the bike had been sold for £45 a week earlier.

I was devastated.

Yes I know it's not the end of the world and the sky did not fall, but to a 16-year boy who had done nothing else but focus on this one thing in his short life, it was like someone telling me I had 2 weeks to live.

Let's say I was extremely disappointed, and then he said it wasn’t his bike anyway because it was his brothers and it wasn't his to sell.

At this new statement that he blurted out in a very casual offhanded manner, I hit him in the straight in the face with a right-hander without warning and broke his nose with the first hit, he was at lest six inches taller and two stone heavier than me, but I was so angry at this guy, I didn’t care if he retaliated.

Oddly enough, he just held both his hands over his nose trying to stop the bleeding, and run off making muffled noises.

( Photo 1 ) . Ducati 160 cc, not this one, but it did look like this example.

Carmoody, told the guys in work that he fell over and tripped and then hit his nose on a work bench, and from that day on, he wouldn’t look or talk to me, if I walked into the same room has he was in, he would skulk back out as quietly as he could.

That suited me, because I wanted to hit him again.

I can only blame myself really.

How can you trust someone who took a car for a test drive then drove it into a field, and then somehow hit a cow, destroying the front end of the car and writing the car off and then had to pay for a lump of scrap metal and blaming it on the cow because it did not get out of the way.

I think my mother felt sorry for me because she knew I was looking forward to having that bike and had been saving like someone possessed, so she agreed to take the finance out for me on her name to buy the bike because at my age there was no way I could get a loan for a few years yet.

My mother always told me if I wanted something I had to work for it and if I didn't have the money for something that I wanted to buy, then that was just tough, so I was very surprised and happy when she offered to help me out.

So at 16 years old, I bought my first legally on the road bike from Two Wheel Services bike shop in Bridgend.

It was a second-hand red BSA Bantam D14/4, just a year or so old.

In truth I did fancy one of the new JAP bikes that where flooding the learner market from Japan, but I could not afford one of the new chicken chasers, so I opted for the last production British learner bike.

I had my ups and downs with the Bantam and it was also responsible for the first disagreement I had with a bike shop, they tried charging me for new parts and labour when the bike was still under warranty, I may have been young, but I was not stupid, god knows how many people they had tucked up by adding extras onto a bill.

They would not give me the bike back unless, I paid the extra amount on the bill which I refused to pay, the main reason I did not want to pay bill was that I didn't have the money, I could just about pay for the petrol I was putting in tank, a 16-year old does not make a lot of money.

They were not interested in talking to a small 16-year-old boy, so I had to bring in the big guns to sort the problem out.

So, my mother got involved.

When I went to Bridgend to pick the bike up after everything was sorted with the bill, I was told that my mother was not welcome back at the shop, because she made so much of a fuss in the shop that it was scaring the customers away.

Well, I didn’t pay any extra that was added to the bill and never took the bike back there again, I sorted any problems out with the bike on my own.

They wanted me to pay for picking the bike up from the side of the road, the parts and the labour, which was a little on the cheeky side as all the problems were related to a young mechanic who was given the job of P.D.I.ing the Bantam, which he either ignored or botched up.

My mother asked for the old parts that were replace, but oddly enough nobody could find them.

The first problem I had with the bike was within 3 days in owing the bike, I had just finished work and was following the traffic out of Waterton industrial estate in Bridgend, I finished work at 16:30 and from the amount of traffic so did everyone else, so just before the black railway bridge right by sergeants truck garage the bike died on me, it just cut out and refused to start, I found out later that there was a loose wire from the alternator, it was not charging the battery and that too was also dead has a dodo, so the bike shop informed me, the reality was the mechanic that was given the job, didn’t fix the problem before T.W.S. sold it to me.

Luckily for me right behind me was Vince ( TATTY ) Thorne, he was being driven home in his fathers car, they gave me a lift home, they lived in the same street has me in the valley.

As soon as I arrived home, I phoned T.W.S. and they picked the bike up the same day.

OK, so you get problems with anything mechanical, so I didn’t see it has a long term problem.

I arranged with T.W.S. to go down and pick the bike up on a certain day, so off I went wearing an old leather jacket that Ray Lewis had given me and clutching my helmet, I had to catch a red western welsh bus to travel the 10 miles to Bridgend town, which cost me 33p for a return trip.

I entered the parts counter of T.W.S. which at that time was in a shop adjacent to the main showroom.

They told me, I can't have the bike because there was something else wrong with it, the guy behind the counter said that the return spring on the gear stick had snapped, and they were waiting for the parts.

Ok, so I was disappointed again, they could have phoned me, and told me that the bike was not ready, so I would not have had a wasted journey.

My reply was “ it was working ok, when I used it last “ and then some dickhead come out of a back room behind the counter and said “ yeah, its common problem with them, we have another one in the work shop with the same problem “.

I said “ it’s not a common problem, I have ridden a few bantams and it has never happened to them, and they were used on the mountain side “.

The guy behind the counter replied “ look sonny, when you’re a bit older and more experienced than you can tell me if it is a problem or not “, he then finished the sentence with “ you can't have the bike until we have finished with it and that’s the end of it ”.

And then he just ignored me, he completely blanked me and served another customer.

Being 16 years old, I had no idea what to say to him, so I jumped on the bus back home and just waited until the bike was ready, if that same conversation happened now, I would have an answer for him, but 48 years later, I think it's a bit late to think of a snappy come back.

OK, this was not a good start to long bike life, but it is all part of life’s learning curve, to be honest this Bantam is/was one of my favourite bikes that I have ever owned, it had a character of it’s very own, which a lot of Jap bikes that I have owned in the future struggled to be nothing but transport.

THE VALLEY COPPER

I rode the BSA Bantam around everywhere, any excuse, I was out and about the valley riding it to nowhere in particular, just riding.

In the valley I lived in, there was only one entrance which after about a mile or so split into two branches, both the roads hugged the side of the valley opposite to each other.

On a ride around the valley, I would head down to the village of Tyla-Gwyn and then cross over the black bridge and ride back up on the other side of the valley passing Hot Wells and the village of Braich-y-Cymmer and then link back up again with the other road at Pontycymmer square and then head up to the end of the valley and turn around at Pwll-Carn and then head back down the valley once again, literary riding around in circles.

To be fair the bike had its problems, but no more than any other bike ( except for a certain other BSA ), but owning it was a massive leaning curve, I had already had some experience with old Brit bikes that my friends and I used in the forests and on the barren mountain sides.

Owing a second-hand Brit bike would soon make you a competent mechanic at some point, with the amount of attention they needed to be kept running.

The Bantam was a two-stroke, the type of oil the bike needed to keep the engine from sizing up was added by the rider every time you fill up with petrol, the oil was added to the petrol tank by using the measuring tube that was fixed to the underside of the petrol cap just for that purpose.

If you did not get the mixture correct there would be a lovely pastel blue cloud following you everywhere you rode, which was often the case, I always added a little more oil than I needed. Better a hazy blue cloud then a sized engine, garages back in the day had separate two-stroke pumps where you could buy one or two squirts of two-stroke oil straight out of a nozzle and in to the tank, it was a mobile tank on wheels, the pump was made so that you could wheel it right up to the bike's petrol tank.

( Photo 2 ) . The Garw valley.

A couple of months after I bought the BSA, I had my first legal on-road run in with a copper.

I have had issues with coppers in the past, with riding on farmers land without permission or making my own access to get onto the mountain, this was when I was around 12-13 years old.

But this was the first experience with the police verses biker attitude.

I was riding up the main street of the valley.

I had just entered Victoria street and I spotted a couple of boys that I knew on the side of the road walking along the pavement, I waved to them as I passed, I was just riding around putting some miles on the clock, not going anywhere in particular.

A little further on I decided to pull off the main road and run behind the houses on King Edward street just for a change of scenery, I had no indicators on the bantam, so I put my left arm out like your instructed to do in the highway code and made the correct maneuvers to leave the main road.

This back lane was more of a dirt track, it was uneven with pot holes everywhere, it made the ride more interesting.

I was just riding around enjoying myself and then behind me was a brown Ford Granada blasting it’s horn at me and flashing his lights.

I had no mirrors on the bike, so I turned around on my seat and looked behind me, I had no idea who this guy was, so I kept going and pulled back onto the main road again, this time I headed back down the valley.

The guy in the car was still behind me, still flashing his headlights, I had no idea what this guy wanted.

The road in front of me was clear of traffic, so without slowing down, I banked straight into the junction that I had first used to go around the houses.

The guy in the car followed me off the main road and was right behind me.

He started to flashing his lights at me again, and overly used his horn again.

I had no intention of stopping, I didn’t know what this guy was up too, but whatever it was I didn’t want any part of it.

I could hear him gun his engine behind me and the next thing I knew he overtook me on this narrow dirt road, dangerously close, then he slammed his brakes on and slewed to a stop in front of me.

I had no option but to stop, I stop very quickly and slid the bike sideways.

I was then holding the bike up with one leg trying to stop the bike going over onto its side, I was in the wrong position to hold it up by sitting on the bike, the bike was determined to go over, I was trying to pull the bike straight up, so I could turn it around and get away from this nut case.

The guy got out of the car, I then noticed a copper’s flat hat sitting on the parcel shelf of the car.

I thought, fuck, what’s this all about.

The guy climbed out of the car as if it had just caught fire and rushed over to me and immediately grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and pulled me off the bike, in one movement.

He grabbed me with both hands by my jacket and literary dragged me off the bike.

The bike finally got its wish and fell onto its side.

All this happened in seconds.

This nutter then threw me across the bonnet ( hood ) of his car.

At the time of this happening, if I was 9 stone soaking wet it would have been an overestimate.

This guy must have been 14-15 stone, in his late 30s and very angry.

I knew who this guy was when I had a closer look at him, I lived in a small valley where everyone knew everyone else, I won't use his real name, I will just refer to him by his initials W.D.

He was not a real copper, he was one of the guys who walk around with a police uniform on with no real power known has special policemen.

This one was special alright.

We called them plastic coppers because there was nothing real about them, they were not real police with no real authority, they can report you to the police and make a citizens arrest, but there again so can anyone else.

Four friends of mine and myself had been kind of arrested by him when I was around 13 years old, we were caught drinking under aged up at Darren Park rugby pitch in Pontycymmer.

Thinking about it now, he must have been driving around the valley looking for people to book, for any reason he could find.

Back in the day myself and my friends would pool what money we had on the weekend and then hang around the FFaldau Inn or the Squirrel Pub in Pontycymmer harassing customers going into the pub and asking them to buy us a flagon of cider or beer, larger wasn’t a thing back then in the late 60s, it was either cider or beer, lager was what foreigners drank, we didn’t care what it was as long it was alcohol, someone was always kind enough to illegally buy one for us, the landlord didn’t care, and we always had a look out just in case one of the valley coppers happen to walk by.

At this period of time we could buy a flagon of rough cider which came in a large brown glass bottle, once we had managed to get a couple of these bottles, we would head up to the quiet mountain side away from any houses and the prying eyes of adults, there we would drop half a dozen aspirins into the bottles and drink the cider through straws, the idea being that the aspirins would make the cider stronger with an element of certain mind altering drugs that were mixed inside the aspirin tablets.

Well that’s what 13 years old’s think, and we would start drinking the cider through a straw which would make you drunk quicker by sucking in more oxygen while you consumed the cider, that was another myth we believed in, two bottles of cider would get ten of us pissed in no time, after all we were only around 13-14 years old.

Well, this same dickhead caught us one night, and we all had an hammering off our respective parents because of this, it did not stop us, the next weekend came and aspirins and straws were obtained and the cider flowed, we just changed the locations.

The shame, lol.

( Photo 3 ) . A flagon of cider, the photo shows the new type of plastic bottles, back in the day the cider came in dark brown glass bottles of the same shape and size, it can possibly be used as a drain cleaner.

Well back to me being prostrate across the bonnet of this car.

I was facing up, looking up at a large round red angry face with my back burning on the hot car bonnet, he held me down with one hand with a very firm grip on my leather jacket, and then he started shouting at me.

“ YOU ARE A MANIAC ”, “ YOU SHOULD ALL BE SHOT ”, “ WHO DO YOU PEOPLE THINK YOU ARE “.

I had absolutely no idea what the fuck this was about, all this happened in such a short time with lighting speed, I was at a total loss to even workout some rational explanation for the situation I was in.

He continued shouting at me.

“ YOU ARE SCUM, THIS IS MY VALLEY AND I DON’T WANT YOU SMELLY BASTARDS THINKING YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT “.

I finally manage to say something “ what are you on about “.

He was still holding me down

His replay was, still shouting “ DON’T GO GOBBING OFF AT ME BOY, I'M IN CHARGE, LET THIS BE A WARNING TO YOU “.

I tried to say something but never finished the sentence “ I don’t kn……. “.

“ WHAT DID I JUST SAY TO YOU, SHUT UP I'M TALKING “.

He continued “ DON’T COME UP ON MY RADAR AGAIN BOY OR I'll HAVE YOU “, “ IF I SEE YOU AGAIN, I WILL SORT YOU OUT “.

He was getting redder and more angry by the second.

I was stunned at what had just happened.

I was completely stressed and frightened at this point.

Remember, I was only 16 years old and all I wanted to do was go for a ride on my bike and somehow I managed to get nearly get run off the road and throw onto a car bonnet, like something out of a straksy and hutch crime drama, but with all this happening I manage to say, “ but I live here “.

Ok, not the best response, but it was a strange situation I was in.

That is all I managed to say before he cut me short again.

He said “ I TOLD YOU TO SHUT UP “.

His grip became tighter on my jacket every time I spoke.

By this time I was Cacking myself, I was expecting to see a few fists coming my way.

And then has suddenly as it all happened, he released his tight grip on my leather jacket, and he let me go.

I was to stunned and totally stressed out to say anything.

I slid off the bonnet sideways and as quickly has I could, I ran a few feet away from him. He stood there panting, he had worked himself up into a frenzy.

I just stared at him.

I was not going anywhere, my bike was laying on the floor by the side of him, I really should have run away as fast as possible, I didn’t know what this guy was going to do next, but I was not leaving my bike there, I had already bonded with my first proper bike.

So I waited.

I could have out run him anyway, if he came after me again, I was built like a racing snake back then.

No fat on me whatsoever, I would have been gone like one of Dai Llewellyn’s whippets, if he came anywhere near me again.

He was red in the face and his chest was heaving up and down at an alarming rate.

He turned away from me without saying word, he was about to climb Back into his car, and then he turned back at me.

He looked straight at me, still looking angry, he didn’t shout this time “ don’t forget what I said boy “, he then pointed his outstretched arm at me and moved his hand as if he was poking something repeatedly with his index finger in the air.

He then climbed into the driving seat and very slowly drove off, I had not moved from where I had originally run too.

I just stood there staring, not saying a word.

I could see him looking at me in his rear view mirror, he didn't take his eyes off me.

I was hoping he would drive off the dirt road and down the banking, because he was not watching where he was driving, there was a 15-foot drop on one side of the dirt road.

Sadly that didn’t happen.

After he had gone out of my sight, I brushed myself down and readjusted my clothing.

Then I struggled to pick the bike up off the dirt track, the bantam was not a big bike, but there again nor was I very big.

I checked the bike over, it looked as if it was ok, apart from some slight scratches on the tank.

To this day, I still have no idea what that strange incident was all about.

The guy was an off duty ( Special Copper ) , he must have had issues with bikers, but as far as I could see the guy was a complete Wanker.

If this situation had happened to me some years later the outcome would have been totally different, it would not have been me over the hood the car and I would not have stopped at shouting.

I would not have put up with any of the crap that he was spouting off, he would have had it back tenfold.

I have no idea what this guys problem was, but he was totally out of order taking whatever issue he had on a small 16-year old boy just because he felt that he could.

He may well have had issues with a particular biker or other bikers in the past, but he must have known I was not someone he had an issue with, all he did was take advantage of what authority and power he thought he had in being a special copper.

This dickhead took his frustration out on me and the end result was that it gave me a very negative view of the police and installed a mindset that made me look on police as the enemy for many years.

Later, much later I did meet some decent coppers Fred Weston and Dai John are two good examples, these two were intelligent people with some common sense.

But generally all I ever had was hassle from coppers, this police approach was not just directed at me, but most bikers I knew at the time.

At the time that all this happened, I put the incident to one side in my mind, I soon got over it, like they say shit happens.

But W.D. had set an image into my mind, that all coppers were aggressive megalomaniacs with frustration issues.

Like I say, I knew his name W.D.

But the only name he needs is WANKER.

( Photo 4 ) . A red B.S.A. bantam D14/4.