I LOVE HELL'S ANGELS

Let me tell you why...

Woven throughout my life are motorbikes and the people who love them.

It all started when I was a baby and my earliest memories included sitting in my pram in the front garden of our London home, getting very excited because I could hear the roar of a big black Norton motorbike. The sound told me that my Dad was on his way home from work. I would jiggle myself around so much that the string of colourful animals across the pram would rattle and shake until my Dad appeared, lifted me up and gave me a hug. I would be enveloped in the smell of his leather jacket, suffused with printers ink and Imperial Leather soap. His rough five o’clock shadowed chin would rub against my face and make me giggle and reach for his dark shiny hair.

He would carry me up the stairs to our second storey rooms overlooking a cityscape of partially bombed out streets and he would place me on his knee while he read his newspaper at the table. He would read passages aloud to my mother as she put the finishing touches to his dinner and I would look at the pictures listening to his words, trying to understand.

After my brother was born my Dad came into our bedroom to fetch me. I remember standing upright in my cot, scared because I had heard my Mum calling out in pain. My Dad reassured me that all was well and carried me to meet my baby brother for the first time. I was overjoyed at the sight of him. I was only eighteen months old and he looked like a pink and white dolly to me. His skin was so soft and pale. Mine was darker against him. I wondered why we were different colours.

Every day we would wake up after Dad had already left for work and we would play with our toys together on the living room floor. My brother, Roy, had a ‘Daddy on a motorbike’ toy that he liked to take with him everywhere. I remember being on a bus and him explaining to a stranger that this was Daddy on a motorbike but Daddy had a van now. There was some confusion about whether we had two fathers and everyone on the bus was laughing, especially my Mum.

When I was about four years old Dad bought a sidecar for the motorbike and one very exciting day, Roy and I were squeezed into it. Roy was on the seat and I was behind him in the space for shopping. We had an aunt who lived a long way from London, in Taunton, Somerset. It turned out that we were visiting her and we travelled there by motorbike and sidecar. I remember the journey was very long and we fell asleep. I remember being carried into my Auntie May’s house in the dark and waking up in a strange bed.

Me sitting on my Dad’s motorbike outside Auntie May’s house in Taunton Somerset 1955

I got into trouble on that holiday for going off by myself and exploring a wide stream which passed by at the foot of a lovely green hill. I wanted to know where the water was coming from, so I had walked and walked until it began to get dark and then I saw a stone bridge over the stream. I climbed up to the roadway and suddenly a police car pulled up alongside me. I couldn’t understand why everyone was making such a big thing about it. I never did find where that water was coming from and my Dad was furious with me for making my Mum cry. I didn’t understand why they had been so worried. I had been having a wonderful time, sloshing through the water and picking wild flowers! Apparently I had disappeared at 7am and was not found until 8pm that evening…. 🤦

The following year, I think it was, we were going to see an Air Show and it was quite a journey away. My Mum was on the back of the motorbike, clinging onto my Dad, when it suddenly began to rain really hard. The windows of the sidecar were not made of glass, they were a sort of semi opaque early type of thick plastic and they steamed up really easily.

I did not see what happened, but we were involved in a crash which mangled the sidecar and there were a lot of people gathered around who could not free me from the shopping space which had been partially caved in. A lady gave me jelly babies via the torn window and I told her that I was fine, not to worry about me. They were all getting soaking wet but I was snug, dry and warm. Again, I could not understand what everyone was so worried about! So I munched the jelly babies and watched as two big firemen cut into the metal that was squashing me in place.

We didn’t get to see the airplanes at the Air Show that day and we never saw our Dad on a motorbike again, which we were absolutely miserable about at the time. My father had a large, scruffy looking work van which he used for print deliveries and that became our family vehicle after the demise of the sidecar.

Our Dad’s mother had bought a tiny bungalow in a seaside place called Jaywick Sands. For the six weeks of our first school summer holidays, while our parents worked in London, Roy and I stayed with our grandmother at this cute little holiday bungalow. I was allowed to play out in the street, provided that I was looked after by a neighbour’s son. This was Sid and he was nine years old. Sid took his job very seriously and he was very careful to make sure that I, this wayward five year old, did not get too dirty, or lost or wander off. He was told that I was a ‘dreamboat’ and liable to go exploring without telling anyone. Sid made sure that he was always with me and helped me to get a certain amount of freedom during that time. I loved Sid very much.

When Roy was six and I was seven and a half we were suddenly told that we were going to leave London and move to a place called Romford. Our parents were very excited about this and we soon understood why. The new house was wonderful!

The best thing about it was the quiet cul-de-sac with a patch of grass where we were allowed to play outside with other children. Two of our neighbours had motorbikes and we all loved to pester for a chance to sit on them. In the 1950s motorbikes seemed so special.

As the years rolled by, Roy and I spent most of our school holidays staying with our grandparents in Jaywick Sands. We would get very brown from cycling, skating and playing on the beach under the care of Sid.

Eventually we went to live there after leaving school because we had such good friends and associations with the place.

Meanwhile, Sid had graduated from bicycles to motorbikes and we did not see so much of him because he was always working or going for bike runs with his friends. Eventually, Sid announced that he was a Hells Angel and we didn’t have a clue what that meant. He asked me to sew some patches onto his denim sleeveless jacket. These said “Filthy Few” and “1%”. He called them his colours, which struck me as a bit strange because they were in black and white, but I didn’t want to appear stupid, so I didn’t labour the matter.

As time passed, Sid became the leader of a large group of young men and eventually he was elected their President. At the time he worked as a dustman, collecting household rubbish in the early mornings. I worked alone in an Estate Agency subsidiary office close to the seafront of Holland on Sea. Sid would finish his work round nearby and come to my office to share lunch with me about once a week. I suppose you could describe our relationship as like brother and sister. I always discussed everything with Sid, but I knew he had a lot of secrets which he never mentioned to me. I didn’t mind that. As long as I had Sid on my side, I felt protected and safe. Sid was highly respected locally and would occasionally pick me up and take me to parties with him. He used to introduce me to people as his ‘Special Lady’ but he had girlfriends with whom he was producing an unusual number of children. I got to meet his girlfriends and their babies but was puzzled by the fact that Sid did not show any inclination to marry one of them.

I got married in 1971 and Sid approved of my husband. They became good friends. You can read more about that in the early chapters of my autobiography.

It wasn’t my place to pry into Sid’s personal affairs, so I never did, unless I could help him with something. I remember when one of his girlfriends called Tiger died of a heroin overdose, leaving Sid devastated and scrambling to care for his son, Danny. I held the fort for him, while he found better arrangements. Then, a few years later, another girlfriend died in similar circumstances. This time Sid was angry and bereft. He had not known that Anita was using heavy drugs and he was deeply hurt that she had kept secrets from him. Again he was left holding the baby, a sweet child called Carly.

Other members of the Filthy Few became my friends too. There were some amazing characters among them. Some died young in motorbike accidents that rocked the town. I remember Chico and Budgie particularly because their funerals included long escorts of Hell’s Angels who came from all over Essex and London to pay their respects. These events were so big that they were reported in the local newspaper.

I remember going to parties with the Iceni Chapter who came from Colchester. There was a close bond between all the British Hell’s Angels Chapters as far as I could tell. They did not fight between themselves at all.

On occasion, I would ride pillion with Sid to major events in Yorkshire or Cornwall or to festivals and major heavy rock gigs. I was always his Special Lady and he was always my hero.

In the 80s two healer friends and I began to develop a clinic for addicts in Colchester. I got a lot of support from the local Hell’s Angels. They provided security for our fundraiser events and they often brought difficult cases to us. I remember an Iceni Angel turning up at my office at closing time one evening and asking me to go with him to help a young woman who was slowly drugging herself to death.

He wanted me to see first hand just what a terrible state she was in.

I remember going with him to a ground floor flat on the outskirts of Colchester, in the middle of the largest council housing estate in Essex. The door had been kicked off its hinges and left like that. The smell within was putrid and sweet. This was the odour of heroin and, as we searched through the gloomy, barely furnished rooms, we were picking our way over rubbish, dirty nappies and broken crockery. A painfully thin young woman was lying unconscious on a mattress in one of the bedrooms and she still had the paraphernalia of jacking up attached to her arm. The Angel told me that her baby had been taken away by Social Services and she was trying to commit suicide. He begged me to stop her, to heal her, to bring her back to consciousness. He did not want her to have to go to hospital, because she would be forced through detox and withdrawals in a mental health facility.

I understood the standard protocols very well by then. Our clinic had helped dozens of addicts to recover from a multitude of different addictions. We used Chinese herbal medicine, which was inadmissible within the National Health Service of Britain and yet was incredibly effective at gently detoxing even the worst of cases.

And this young woman was one of the worst of cases, that was for sure. I was not able to save her. She was already dead.

When you are on the frontline of hell, you need a stout heart and a massive, wall-to-wall faith in the Universe. I had that, thanks to my Barefoot Doctor training and my retreats to Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland for respite. I would bid goodbye to departing souls and wish them a better reincarnation next time. I would never condemn them for falling through the cracks of a careless almost blind society which preferred to avert its eyes, ears and nostrils from the harsh realities of the marginalised.

Believe it or not, most of the Hell’s Angels I knew during those years did not indulge in drugs. They may have sold them or transported them or even grown or chemically created them in secret locations but, for the most part they did this in a very business-like manner. They did not approve of contaminated drugs which had taken the lives of so many of their friends. There will always be a high demand for quality as well as quantity. As with food, locally sourced is always going to be best, because there is some control over the content. It was in no-one’s interest to contaminate drugs.

Dead customers are not a good look.

During the 1980s, we were beset with a terrible fear. It was called AIDS. We were approached, at our first Colchester clinic, by members of the Terrence Higgins Trust which was a society caring for gay young people. They were just beginning to develop their own charity. They had heard good things about our work with drug addicts, both street drugs and pharmaceuticals. They hoped we could take on HIV testing and treatment for those who were found to be HIV positive.

When we began to see some of their clients we noticed something strange. These young people were not showing any signs of being infected with any pathogens. They were showing signs of poisoning and so that was how we approached healing them. We did not have much faith in the HIV tests that the NHS was running, mainly because once a person was given an HIV positive diagnosis their lives were effectively ruined.

We devised a method of record-keeping which held files on people under nicknames, rather than their actual official names, addresses and National Health Numbers. Our records could not be attached to anyone’s medical records and, therefore, a person could be treated for HIV or AIDS without losing their job, their relationships, their life insurance and their social standing.

I remember when one of the Iceni Hell’s Angels asked me if his wife could come and work with us. Her name was Bridget and she seemed to know a huge number of people in the Colchester area. As soon as she became our voluntary receptionist people began pouring through the doors. Bridget was a stunningly beautiful, auburn haired, much loved individual, married to a German Hell’s Angel who had moved to Colchester to be with her. Thanks to Bridget’s endorsement, we were trusted by the local community and were able to reach and help some of the most difficult cases.

Our successes reached the ears of the local hospital Drug Outreach team and they turned up to persuade us to expand, to become a registered charity and to be trained in their Outreach programme. I went along with this and immediately realised what their game was. They were persuading us to go ‘official’ and to apply for a huge pot of Lottery funding, so that we could purchase better premises for our clinic. It was all a carrot and stick lure.

As soon as we began the process, they had us by the short and curlies. To register as a charity providing medical care, it was a requirement that we should have an NHS Doctor and a Solicitor on our Board of Directors. In this way, they were then in the position to insist that we replace our secretive ‘nickname/anonymous’ filing system with one that was interlocked with the NHS! Obviously, this was going to clash with our client privacy policy. We were expected to provide the NHS with names, addresses, phone numbers and National Health Numbers.

We had no choice but to resign.

I decamped to my home on the coast and set up a clinic in my dining room, with my lounge as the waiting room and my kitchen for the preparation of special formulae but it was only a matter of time before my reputation attracted the attention of the local Freemasons and I was driven out of business by a series of events which resulted in me being poisoned.

When Sid heard about how ill I had become he took me under his wing for a while. He got me to help him with the final stages of his newly built home, a converted barn in Norfolk and he took me to a wonderful event in Shipley, Yorkshire, where some Harley Davidson riders meet annually for a party.

For Guy Fawkes Day we went to a lovely country estate in St Germans, Cornwall where we had an excellent fireworks party around the biggest bonfire I have ever seen. The owner of that estate was very interested in what I had to say about Chinese Herbal medicine and how it is used to alleviate withdrawals from addictive substances.

Since then I have moved away from Sid’s stamping ground but our sons, both named Daniel remain great friends.

I phoned Sid to find out how he was doing during the summer of 2023 and he had just returned from a Harley Davidson run to Sweden. He is now 76 and still President of the Filthy Few 1% Hell’s Angels Club. He has a lovely, much younger woman called Sarah making sure that he stays healthy. He is still as sweet, polite and charming as he ever was… he has lived the life he chose and has no regrets.

It is a privilege to know him.

🌟