October 12, 1984: The Brighton Hotel Bombing

October 12, 1984: At 2:54 AM, a bomb planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army explodes in Room 629 of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, Sussex, on England's South Coast. There was a Conservative Party meeting there, and 5 people were killed. But the main target, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, escaped serious injury.

The victims were Anthony Berry, a Member of Parliament; Donald Maclean, the President of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party; his wife, Muriel; Lady Jeanne Shattock, the wife of the Western Area chairman of the Conservative Party, Sir Gordon Shattock, who was injured but survived; and Roberta Wakeham, wife of John Wakeham, then the Government Chief Whip in the House of Commons, who has since been created a Baron.

(Both Shattock and Wakeham would remarry. In the latter's case, he married his secretary, Alison Ward -- who had previously served as Thatcher's secretary.)

The explosion caused several floors a wing of the hotel to collapse. Norman Tebbit, then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, recalled:

The ceiling came crashing down on us and then, in a hail of debris, the floor collapsed, catapulting us down under an avalanche of bricks, timber and plaster. The force of the impact was indescribable, blow after blow as the debris smashed on to my left side. Something tore into my abdomen with a terrible blow, and I heard my very guts sloshing inside me. There was a colossal impact tearing a great hole in my side, then I stopped falling, with no idea where, nor even which way up I was, as the debris cascaded down.

But he survived. His wife, Margaret, fell through 4 floors, and was wheelchair-bound for the rest of her life. Thatcher's room was below the Tebbits'. Her bathroom was badly damaged but she, her husband Denis, and Robin Butler, her personal private secretary, were all uninjured.

According to Rory Carroll, then 12 years old and living in Dublin, but later the Ireland correspondent for English newspaper The Guardian and the author of a book on the bombing, the bomb "did not even scratch her. But it came very, very close." He theorized that if she had still been in the bathroom, "she would have been cut to ribbons, perhaps fatally."

The Provisional IRA released this statement: "Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war."

Thatcher responded with her usual bluntness: "That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared, and the fact that we are gathered here now -- shocked, but composed and determined -- is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail."

The man who planted the bomb was Patrick Magee, then a 33-year-old Provisional IRA member who had previously served 2 years in prison. He was sentenced to 8 life terms, but was released in 1999 as part of the Good Friday Accord. As of October 12, 2022, he is still alive, and has written a book about his experiences.

If the Provisional IRA thought this bombing would rally people to their cause, they were wrong. Support for Thatcher only grew, as she achieved the rare distinction of being both strong leader and victim at the same time.

Thatcher had led the Conservative Party to victory in the national elections of 1979 and 1983, and would do so again in 1987. But an intraparty squabble forced her out in 1990. Tebbit was among those considering running to support her, but, still needing to look after his wife, he retired from the Commons instead, and John Major became Prime Minister. Like Wakeham, Tebbit was later created a Baron, and sat in the House of Lords.

Thatcher was loved by conservatives for her toughness and her belligerence, but hated by the poor, labor unions, and especially the Irish, for being bigoted and openly harmful to them. She was renowned for her alliance with Ronald Reagan, whose entire Presidency was during her Premiership. When Reagan died, the half of America that hated him held its tongue out of respect; when Thatcher died, the half of Britain that hated her rejoiced.

*

October 12, 1984 was a Friday. Game 3 of the World Series was played at Tiger Stadium in Detroit. The Detroit Tigers beat the San Diego Padres, 5-3. Milt Wilcox outpitched Tim Lollar. Marty Castillo hit a home run for the Tigers, who would win the Series in 5 games.

Football was in midweek. The NBA season hadn't started yet, but there were 2 games played in the NHL. The New Jersey Devils beat the New York Islanders, 7-2 at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands. And the Edmonton Oilers beat the St. Louis Blues, 5-1 at the Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton.  

May 18, 1964: Mods vs. Rockers In Brighton

May 18, 1964: Great Britain's 2 leading youth cultures square off, and it is a mess.

National Service for men aged 18 to 20 ended gradually from 1957. Britain has had an all-volunteer military ever since, just as America has had with the post-Vietnam ending of the draft in 1973. Both countries have found that having an armed forces staffed entirely by men and women who want to be there works far more effectively than having one with men who were forced to give up their lives to fight for a cause they didn't always understand.

But having so many more men ages 17 to 21 out on the streets, without an equivalent of America's G.I. Bill to send them to college, led to unintended consequences, including the creation of some subcultures that became nationally infamous, and then world-famous.

This was around the time that England's first rock and roll bands were being formed. It is no coincidence that 1957 was also the year that 17-year-old John Lennon met 15-year-old Paul McCartney in Liverpool; and that, early in 1958, they met 15-year-old George Harrison. By that point, 17-year-old Richard Starkey was already drumming in a band, and would begin calling himself "Ringo Starr" a year later.

After The War, young men in delinquent gangs who had adopted Edwardian-era fashion -- in the style of the years from 1901 to 1910, when the King was Edward VII, or "Good Old Teddy" -- were sometimes known as "Cosh Boys" or "Edwardians." On September 23, 1953, the national newspaper the Daily Express shortened "Edwardian Boy" to "Teddy Boy," and the name stuck.

By the early 1960s, that fad had ended the way most fads do: The originators grew out of it, and moved on. But 2 new subcultures took the Teddy Boys' place: The Mods and the Rockers. The Rockers were based on motorcycle culture, inspired by Marlon Brando in the 1953 film The Wild One. (Brando played a character named Johnny, which caught John Lennon's attention. And the film included a motorcycle gang named the Beetles. But The Beatles were named as a play on Buddy Holly's band, The Crickets.)

The Rockers wore leather jackets, leather pants or blue jeans, and leather boots, and generally made nuisances of themselves everywhere they went. Their choice of music was that of the early rockers who had toured Britain: Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. (Cochran and Vincent had completed a tour of Britain in 1960, and were heading home to London's Heathrow Airport when their driver crashed, killing Cochran and badly injuring Vincent.)

The Rockers were leather-clad slobs. The Mods were different. They dressed up. The play The Odd Couple wasn't staged until 1965, and the movie and the TV show based on it came a few years after that; but if the Rockers were "Oscars," the Mods were "Felixes."

And instead of big motorcycles, like the kind produced in Britain and America, they preferred scooters, small and efficient enough for getting around streets in the countries that were producing them, Italy and France. If the scooters could work well in the streets of Rome and Paris, it was reasoned, they could work well in the streets of London. They would have multiple lights, or "lamps" in British parlance, on them. But, what was more, you could show up to work dressed like a Mod, and keep your job. It was "respectable."

Their musical tastes were different as well. They were originally called "mod" because they preferred "modern jazz," instead of "traditional jazz," whose fans became known as "trad." But they also embraced rock and roll, not the harder stuff of Elvis and Chuck Berry, but vocal groups with the black and Italian "doo-wop" sound. 

Pete Townshend, lead songwriter and guitarist for The Who, defined the Mods for Americans in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine for their September 28, 1968 issue:

It was a movement of young people, much bigger than the hippie thing, the underground and all these things. It was an army, a powerful, aggressive army of teenagers with transport. Man, with these scooters and with their own way of dressing.

It was acceptable, this was important; their way of dressing was hip, it was fashionable, it was clean and it was groovy. You could be a bank clerk, man, it was acceptable. You got them on your own ground. They thought, "Well, there's a smart young lad." And also you were hip, you didn't get people uptight. That was the good thing about it.

To be a mod, you had to have short hair, money enough to buy a real smart suit, good shoes, good shirts; you had to be able to dance like a madman. You had to be in possession of plenty of pills all the time and always be pilled up. You had to have a scooter covered in lamps. You had to have like an army anorak to wear on the scooter. And that was being a mod and that was the end of the story.

There was another difference in there, mentioned by Townshend: The pills, amphetamines, as opposed to the Rockers' drugs of choice, tobacco and alcohol. That's why Who lead singer Roger Daltrey purposely stuttered on their signature song, "My Generation," released in the U.S. on November 20, 1965: As Townshend explained, he's under the influence of the pills:

People try to put us... d-d-down

Just because we get around

Things they do look awful... c-c-cold

Hope I die before I get old

It's my generation

It's my generation, baby

Of course, in the 2nd verse, Americans didn't get the joke: They heard, "Why don't you all just... f-f-fade away?" They weren't yet familiar with the British expression "Fuck off."

The Mods seemed like the perfect counterweight to the Rockers and their predecessors, the Teddy Boys. They launched the 1960s culture that became known as "Swinging London." But, soon enough, it would be fists that would be swinging, between the Mods and the Rockers.

On May 18, 1964, the 1st warm weekend of the calendar year, it came to a head in several seaside communities in England. The worst of the Mod vs. Rocker violence was in Brighton in Sussex, where, as all surviving sources agree, the Mods started it, not the Rockers with what was then the more aggressive reputation. The fighting moved along the coast, to Hastings, which led to the media calling it "the Second Battle of Hastings."

There were also beach and beach-town battles in Margate, Kent; and Clacton, Essex. Newspapers called the groups "vermin" and "louts." The Birmingham Post warned that Mods and Rockers were "internal enemies" who would "bring about disintegration of a nation's character." The members of The Who -- Daltrey, Townshend, bass guitarist John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon -- were not directly involved in the fighting. But Townsend would write the rock opera Quadrophenia about the events, releasing it in 1973. It became a film in 1979.

The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night was filmed in March and April 1964, a few weeks before the Brighton violence, but not released until after: July 6 in Britain, and August 11 in America. If Americans had heard about the violence in Brighton at all, they had quickly forgotten about it. In the film, a female reporter asked Ringo, "Are you a Mod or a Rocker?" And with the "cheeky humour" for which the group was then known, he answered, "I'm a Mocker!"

Every so often, as with other fads, the British youth subcultures come back. The Teddy Boys had a revival in the Glam Rock period of the early 1970s. The subsequent rise of punk rock in 1976 brought the Rocker subculture back. The "Northern Soul" movement of the 1980s, centered around Manchester, revived interest in the Mods. And The Stray Cats, an American retro-rock band of the early 1980s, proved more popular in Britain, and, wittingly or not, was another revival of the Rockers.

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May 18, 1964 was a Monday. Football, basketball and hockey were out of season. And only 4 games were played in major league baseball:

* The New York Mets beat the San Francisco Giants, 4-2 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Galen Cisco was supported by a home run from George Altman. Willie Mays came into the game as a defensive replacement, and went 0-for-1.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Washington Senators, 7-6 at District of Columbia Stadium (later Robert F. Kennedy Stadium) in Washington. Al Kaline went 0-for-5, but Norm Cash and Bill Freehan hit home runs.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Houston Colt .45s, 4-0 at Colt Stadium in Houston. The Colts became the Astros the next season. Jim Bunning allowed only 2 baserunners: He hit Nellie Fox with a pitch in the 1st inning, and gave up a single to Jimmy Wynn in the 5th. He had previously pitched a no-hitter for the Detroit Tigers. A month later, he pitched a perfect game against the Mets, making him only the 2nd pitcher, after Cy Young, to pitch no-hitters in both Leagues.

* And the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 4-2 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Steve Blass outpitched Don Drysdale. Roberto Clemente went 3-for-5.