Mod to Suedehead - Page 716

Most of our early Skinhead clobber came from those Army Surplus/Workwear shops that each area had. We got our Cheery Red Boots, Jungle Greens, Donkey Jackets etc, Those shops use to have a smell like a Army Quartermasters Store ,
Even now I often pop into Silvermans in Mile End for the odd bit of kit, mostly Dessie Boots these days.

Remember that late 60s school craze of carrying your sandwich in a gas mask bag from the surplus stores .

Thats a strange image.

I cant believe it .. Thats what we did... Gas mask Carrier, with the little pocket on the side with the length of string, This would have been around 1965,
Nice one Flyfronted,

Well remembered Flyfronted.  If you cut the divider section out of the middle you were just able to load your school books into the bag.  There were all sorts of pockets around the bag.  If you were one of the lads you had one of these for school.  Must have been 12 / 13 years old.

 

Me and my mates used to love going to the Army Surplus stores at that age.  Our nearest was Sams in Woolwich SE London and as Lasttye says the smell was unique to only that sort of place.  Always musty.  It was an adventure rummaging through the piles of gear.  Always came home with something - however useless.

 

Thanks for the childhood reminder.  If the youngsters of today had to use gas bags they would probably only want a designer brand !!

Dunno about you lot in the uncivilsed parts of the UK but growing up, you could shove 'cowboys and Indians', for us it was 'Japs and Commandos'.

Okay, probably not very PC now (but who gives one?), and you could get hand-me-down gear to play it from older brothers/bigger kids etc and the local Army Surplus shop.

Camo nets for camping out, webbing belts, Bergens (called rucksacks by us) and anything even remotely militarily linked... oh, the innocence of youth. Camping stoves and sheath knives, combat jackets and later, parkas and jungle greens...

Shop-bought - though often homemade - 'machine guns'... try it now as a kid and some moaning bastar* would have a police firearms team dragging you out of the local woods and cable-tieing you to a 4 x 4.

And you could venture into woods and coppices in those days, people weren't too afraid of perverts stalking their youngsters and, as a bonus, you would occasionally find a stache of 'art mags' someone had hidden there.

Actually, forget what I said about 'innocence' - we were all weirdoes!!!
Edited by Ed Vaughan - 2/20/13 at 3:57am

 Yes. I remember having a couple of those bags around 64/65. Dad wrote my name on the inside flap of the bag. I still have one in the shed and I keep my gardening gloves in it. I didn't realize we all had them.The Army and Navy stores must have been on every high street.

you have to remember in the 1960s it was only 20 years from the end of the War and us Londoners had got bombed to fuck . We still had a Air Raid shelter made of concrete blocks that took up 2/3's of our garden where my nan kept chickens . Wormwood scrubs still did air raid warnings and at weekends paratroopers jumped from high balloons in training . Half the manor was Bomb sites as well . Play time for the under 11's normally consisted of singing war songs and fighting each other .. and singing about Hitler only having 'One ball ' cos the others 'in the albert hall ' - WTF .

http://londonist.com/2012/12/new-map-shows-every-london-bomb-of-the-blitz.php

You have a good memory flyfronted and it is jogging mine. We even had an air-raid siren column in our road. Every so often it would go off when they tested it. My mum and dad would get nervous because they grew up around the Royal Docks which indeed got bombed to fuck. I remember singing the playground songs. We used to sing 'We won the war in 1944' (history was never our strong point but the song rhymed). In Rainham/Dagenham there were tank traps and pill boxes to help protect London in case the Germans came sailing up the Thames.

Growing up in Edinburgh, we had a weekend place - tiny - but we'd go there every weekend and school holidays as it was only 20 miles from home.

It was a mass of tank defences and bunkers, all along the east cost of Scotland at East Lothian - and above and beyond.

Some - as can be seen - still exist and it shows how serious the threat from Germany was taken when even Scotland could have been a possible landing ground for Hitler's hordes.

Mind you, they'd have taken one look at Glasgow - west of Scotland - shat their lederhosen and buggered off back to Berlin and civilisation.

http://www.pillbox-study-group.org.uk/eastlothianpage.htm

the song we sung was 'we won the war in 1964 ' - no idea what war that was but apparently we won it .That and ' if i had the wings of a sparrow , if i had the arse  of a crow , id fly over ( insert name of rival school ) tomorrow and shit on the bastards below ' ..  normally under the covered shed in the playground to make it sound louder LOL 

Crikey, we sang those, too.

Did you also do:

Holy moses, I am dying;
Just a word before i go;
If you see a German soldier;
Stick a bayonet up his...

... Holy Moses, I am dying... etc

(Sang to the tune: 'What a friend I have in Jesus'!!!)

So, 400 miles apart and kids still sang the same songs, told the same jokes - and just behaved like... well, kids.

The Crow song was a football one so i suppose it spread via the terraces - dont know your one feller .

Tuff way finder boots and tesco bombers ...  oh the style of a proto baby skinhead LOL .

 We are probably straying from this sites' Skinhead theme and the clothes, but maybe not. I reckon many of the 15/16 year old skinheads in 68/69 were in small gangs when they were 10/11 years old. We used to fight with rival schools, rival streets and even the top and bottom ends of the same street. School football matches sometimes ended in fights. Most of this went on without the parents having a clue. At 12 years old I wanted an air rifle or pistol just like one of my mates. Dad said no, thank God. He did buy me a metal toy crossbow that came with wooden arrows and a rubber stopper end. Within a day the rubber was removed and I was sharpening the wooden arrows ready for the enemy. Looking back I can't believe the young me and I was no different to all my mates.We were wild.

Happy days back then - making bikes from scrap parts, catapults, air rifles, go- karts made from old prams, pen knives, sheath knives - all acceptable back then without anybody batting an eye.

 

Also many of us were in gangs from junior school that carried onto the seniors with many a street / park gang fights that followed on into the skinhead gangs that were then larger as you made new mates with gangs from other areas- marvelous times