Urban Grimshaw & The Annoying Snobs

Just finished reading Urban Grimshaw & the Shed Crew, by Bernard Hale, which was written in 2006 and covers the years 1996 and 1997. The book is an account of Hale's experiences with a gang of young delinquents based in East End Park, Leeds. It's a very interesting piece of social history, and relevant not only to its age but to right now. Last week a 15 year old from Leeds was sentenced to 4 years' detention after stealing a car, driving it at 90 mph and crashing it into a tree causing 5 deaths, including 2 young brothers. Try Google Mapping Glensdale Terrace and prepare to be surprised to see terraces with few or no cars parked on the street. There are very few cars for two reasons; one is that the people who live there can't afford them and the other is that anyone mad enough to leave a car there would be unlikely to ever see it again. A lot of the houses have an addition which I have never seen anywhere else but is very common in Leeds: metal grilles over the doors and windows to prevent people from breaking in through them or smashing them up.

There are some rough areas in Sheffield but nothing like Leeds or Manchester. East End Park isn't even the most deprived part of Leeds; Gipton and Beeston are probably even worse. Compared to the places that most of us live in they are like Third World countries. Children need role models in their houses to teach them the difference between what's right and wrong, as well as what is dangerous and what is not. If dad disappeared before you were even born and mum is a smackhead then there's nobody to teach those lessons. Mum spends her day shoplifting or whoring to get money for drugs; her children think that's what adults do so the problem shifts down to the next generation.

"Urban" was one of 6 siblings, all of whom had been taken into care. At the age of 12 he had absconded from his care home, was addicted to solvents and had a tendency to set fire to buildings. On that Google Earth Glensdale Terrace, the plastered-over building at the bottom of the street is what used to be the corner shop. Urban set fire to it over 20 years ago and its been a ruin ever since. His mother lived around the corner for a while, and drank and drugged herself into daily oblivion there while the neighbourhood's feral kids used the house as a base for promiscuity, drug abuse and hiding from the police after stealing and setting fire to cars. She was supposed to look after Urban's dog for a while, but sold him instead in order to get some more money for heroin. Bernard Hale, in turn, used her for sex and for cadging drugs; that's how he got to know her son.

Hale is an unusual character. He is prepared to admit the following offences during the two years covered by the book: arson, twocking (stealing cars), shoplifting and other thefts, driving without insurance and MOT and displaying a stolen tax disc, affray, drug offences, anti-social behaviour and, most serious of all, conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm. He is an overgrown hooligan in his late thirties who is surprisingly proud of his volatility, capacity for drinking and drug-taking, sexism and history of being a skinhead Leeds United hooligan in the 1970s. He is a year and a half younger than I am but was hanging around with young teenagers who should have been at school. But he is a good writer and a chess champion. He has an admirable hatred for both Thatcherism and New Labour, but a childishly simplistic attitude towards "Babylon," which is represented by social workers and the police. At the end of the book he is scandalised because the two children of a crack-addicted prostitute are taken away for adoption without her approval, but surely the kids' rights to a safe and comfortable childhood outweigh a crackhead's desire to keep them with her in squalor and misery. What's particularly shocking is that Hale is a former social worker himself. He tried to get back into the service but his criminal record went against him, which, I must say, sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

I was reminded very much of a very interesting book I used to own called A Glasgow Gang Observed, written in the 1960s, and another about young tearaways carrying guns and knives in Brixton. Both sets of youngsters thought it outrageous that the police would from time to time raid their home areas, looking for weapons and fugitives from the law in Glasgow and drugs as well as arms and stolen goods in Brixton. One woman complained that the cops had raided her flat three times in a year, to which the obvious solution would be not to keep crack, heroin and guns there. If you don't want to be eaten alive, don't stick your head in a lion's mouth.

My client at today's appeal is from Arbourthorne, which, compared to Brixton, East End Park and the 1960s Gorbals is a pretty attractive and safe estate, but the houses are cheap and the residents solidly working class, which is enough to get them looked down on by malicious middle class clowns like the ones who made up today's tribunal. The judge is not a High Court Judge or a magistrate, but just a jumped-up solicitor. I'd never met today's before, nor either of her two disciples, and I hope never to do so again because she was an appalling humourless bully and the other two took their cue from her. We won the appeal but it was such an ordeal for my client that she took no pleasure from the result and will probably take months to recover from the way she was spoken to. I came out again feeling as if I had spent 2 hours down a sewer. I really need to find some part time work because having to spend time arguing with people like those three makes me sick and unhappy. It's just not worth it. Give me a job delivering pizzas any day.

By the way, would anyone like to buy a house?