Mods were trouble, I felt sorry for rockers

David Rowland was stationed at the old Brighton Police Station in Wellington Road and wore the uniform for 27 years.

He worked during the most memorable clashes on May 17 and 18, 1964, when thousands of mods descended on the city for a skirmish with their rivals, the rockers, as part of an ongoing feud between the two subcultures. It made front page news across the country.

Mr Rowland, 82, from Telscombe Cliffs, near Peacehaven, remembers being sent to Brighton beach as part of a team of just eight constables to stand with other officers against a group of around 200 mods who were trying to fight a much smaller group of rockers.

He said that bank holiday weekend was “the first time I had been asked by my senior officer to draw my truncheon”.

Sussex Police worked with forces from Surrey and Kent as well as the Metropolitan Police in anticipation of the mods’ arrival.

He recalled: “The mods went to Margate at Easter that year. It was the first time they had really gone away and they really smashed up the town.

“There were only a few police cars that weren’t damaged. We then received information from London that they were planning to come to Brighton, so we began to make plans for that.

“Most of us worked 12-hour shifts instead of the usual eight hours for that weekend.

“Thousands came into Brighton. Police set up a road block on the A23 and stopped motorcycles and took their documents to try and be a nuisance and stop them coming but they couldn’t stop them.

“Once they had arrived, our orders were simply keep them out of the town centre at all costs.

“On the Thursday before the bank holiday we took some wagons to be fitted with police radios in Maidstone. Each vehicle would have a PC driver, a sergeant and eight police constables inside.

“Snatch squads were CID or police constables dressed as civilians.

“They would wander on to the beach and tell us if there were offenders or people about to commit an offence.

“We just had to try our best to keep the two groups separated.

“It was pretty chaotic there and some of them would apparently fill their socks with stones off the beach and use them to fight with so they wouldn’t get caught with an offensive weapon.”

The leather-jacketed rockers arrived on their motorbikes on the Sunday morning and were challenged in the afternoon by a much larger group of mods neatly dressed in suits and riding their scooters.

Several small scuffles broke out around the Palace Pier that day, where hundreds of deckchairs were broken, pebbles were used as missiles and the old Savoy Cinema windows were smashed.

Eventually 150 police officers and police horses quelled the violent brawls for the day.

Teenagers staged a mass sit-down on the promenade while police officers using horses and dogs tried to move them on.

It was mainly fist fighting but there were also reports of knives, chains and knuckle-dusters being used.

Mr Rowland said: “A lot of the mods were up at Black Rock after the first day of fights. I don’t know where the rockers went.

“The mods were definitely the most troublesome and there were around 12 or 15 of them to each rocker.

“We would try and round them up and try to stop them getting a full night’s sleep so they wouldn’t be up for fighting the next day but that didn’t really work.”

The clashes were repeated the following morning with several thousand spectators watching the confrontations from the Aquarium Sun Terrace and Marine Parade.

Mr Rowland said: “It was a shame because no family with children would want to be sitting on the beach that weekend.

“I felt quite sorry for the rockers because they would just ride into an ambush and then get beaten up.

“We were pretty cruel to those we caught. We treated them quite roughly.

“We marched a huge group of them up North Road and Queen’s Road to the train station.

“We then loaded them on the train to London to get them out of the town centre.

“There were probably around 2,000 people.

“Then it was time to pick up any stragglers.

“The CID picked out six of the mod ringleaders who were taking shelter.

“They were taken to a vehicle, had their shoelaces and belts removed and we drove them to Devil’s Dyke.

“We did threaten them with arrest before giving them their stuff back and sent them on their way, telling them not to go back to the town centre.

“But we would see them trying to hitch-hike, so we advised drivers not to pick people up.

“It’s all well and good talking about the mods and rockers but no one ever mentions the police’s role or the families who were looking for a good time at the beach.”

The police veteran has also worked on several films about mods and rockers over the years.

For one of the projects he was involved in, a film company brought in a mod with a “beautiful motorbike” and a rocker to take part alongside Mr Rowland.

He said they were all taken down to the beach to film and that is when the old mod told him they used to use socks filled with stones as makeshift weapons during the clashes all those years ago.

Mr Rowland added that they all ended up becoming good friends and that after being a mod for many years, the actor he met had actually ended up joining the Metropolitan Police.

He said: “It was a really good time to be a policeman because we could do what we wanted and pretty much got away with it that weekend.

“It was surprising how many girls were with the mods and fighting alongside them.

“I suppose they would have come down on the back of their boyfriends’ scooters for the most part.

“Our arch enemies at the time were the barrow boys and they actually ended up giving the mods a right old kicking, telling them to get out of their town and all sorts.

“But they have come back every year since and a lot of them are pensioners now.

“For the youngsters it was a fun time during all the fighting but for the older people living nearby it was very frightening to see.”

Mr Rowland recalled how at one stage there were more than 70 offenders crammed into a handful of cells at the police station.

Brighton’s police cells where the mods and rockers were held now feature in a museum and a patch of old graffiti remains, including the words “Dave the Rocker 8th June 1964”.

Twenty six youngsters appeared in the juvenile court the following week and were handed stiff sentences, but surprisingly no one was seriously injured.

Violent clashes continued throughout 1964, flaring up in August and again the following year.

The events were discussed in Parliament and politicians offered a number of solutions, including bringing back conscription, hard labour and even reviving the stocks.

Mods and rockers continued their tradition of meeting at seaside resorts from then on, yet the fighting seemed to die down.

The 1979 film Quadrophenia, loosely based on the 1973 rock opera of the same name by The Who, was a dramatisation of the clashes between the mods and rockers.

Set in Brighton, the movie ensured the city would be part of mod culture for ever.