Tilbury Skins meet The Invaders (Madness)

If you ever find yourself heading south on the A13, chances are you are either lost or on your way to Tilbury in Essex. It is very much a town at the end of the line, as the Worlds End pub down by the docks testifies, and definitely not the sort of place you want to end up on your ownsome come nightfall. Tilbury Skinheads Documentary - BBC Radio 1980 For the merchant seamen who used the town’s docks it offered the chance to go ashore and spend some money on wine, women and song. Like all ports, Tilbury had its pubs that quenched the seamen’s thirst for all three, and one such establishment was the now abandoned Ship Hotel. The Sun actually voted it Britain’s worst pub thanks to its reputation for prostitution, violence and the fact that landlords lasted about as long as a packet of Durex did. A lot of the Ship’s reputation for the place to be on a Saturday night if you fancied a good kicking was down to the Tilbury Trojan Skins who made it a second home between 1977 and 1984. To them it was their territory, and anyone they didn’t want to drink there didn’t. Not for long anyway. And the seamen often got more than they bargained for too, returning to their ships after being beaten up and robbed of their hard earned cash, watches and anything else of value. Ask any self-respecting skinhead from anywhere south of the Watford Gap who were the most feared mob, and Tilbury would be mentioned on more than one or two lips.” Thanks to its partial isolation, The Tilbury Trojan Skins, and later the Tilbury Skins Young Firm, were able to build up the sort of comradeship more often found in hardcore football firms. As it was, most of the Tilbury skins followed London teams, especially West Ham, but if things had been different and Tilbury had been home to a professional football club, there’s little doubt that they would have been up there with the ICF, the Leeds Service Crew, Chelsea’s Headhunters and Portsmouth’s 6:57 crew. As luck would have it, Tilbury boasted no such team, leaving the skinheads (who also came from nearby towns like Grays and West Thurrock) free to ruck with whoever got in their way. Football supporters, foreign seamen, teddy boys, punks, mods, glue sniffers, students, queers, mobs from other towns - the list is as long as the collective charge sheet they amassed over the years. As one of the boys, Irish, put it, “We did what we wanted to do and we didn’t give a monkey’s about anyone else. We enjoyed ourselves, we did what we wanted. And bollocks to everyone else.” The Tilbury Skins used to follow Sham 69, and then went on to follow the likes of The Angelic Upstarts. A large slice of the London gig action at the time took place in colleges and universities - City Of London Poly, UMIST, Central London Poly and so on - and they were as good a place as any for the Tilbury boys to see their heroes in action, not least because they could kill two birds with one stone and bash some students at the same time. “These gigs were nearly always full of students who we all know are almost always commies, socialists, lefties or whatever you want to call them,” recalls Mick White. “Nearly every single week we used to smash the fuckers as they really got on our nerves.” #tilbury #skinhead #madness