Dover Saints History Pt2
By Mau Spencer
As a club, we travelled all over East Kent to Youth Clubs, Dances and Discos, often ending up in conflict with local youths. It was with these and scooterist from other towns that most of the friction occurred. This took the shape of either jealousy (local youths didn’t like losing their girls to the scooterists) or theft (for instance, you couldn’t travel to Margate and not find that at least one club member had had something nicked off their bike whilst it was parked – and this was by other scooterists)!
I have fond memories from some of the places we used to go (most of them now long gone). We used to travel virtually weekly to Ash, where there were always local discos (and girls) available. Deal used to be another place. Can’t remember the name of the pub, but there was one that used to do particularly good cheap Scrumpy that an apprentice printer like me could afford. Nearer to home, I’ve mentioned the YMCA and a few others elsewhere. One of the best discos in town at that time was at the Engineering Works, long since gone to make way for B&Q. They were fantastic evenings – after you’d managed to climb that narrow, steep spiral staircase to the upstairs room where the disco was held.
The Saints enjoyed many good times with the Dover Rockers. In 1969 Father Bill Shergold of Charlton Church was instrumental in helping the local bikers form the ’69 Motorcycle Club’ (Father Bill was famous in his own right for his role in the formation of the ’59 Motorcycle Club’ – a world famous bikers fraternity).
During those early days The Saints and the 69 Club had a few joint meetings with Father Bill and arranged a few club runs around the county. One of these distinctly sticks out in my mind. We’d all arranged for a day out at Chislehurst Caves, but both groups made their own way up there due to the different travelling speeds of the scooters and bikes. Being the slower group, the scooter set off fairly early in a convoy. I remember that Bill Adey and his faithful Austin A60 recovery truck was also with us. As I owned one of the few GP 200s around at that time, my position was back sweeper, so that I could shoot ahead and stop the convoy if someone broke down. Today was to be no exception and the inevitable happened. The bike was duly loaded onto Bill’s van for repair back at Dover. Anyway, with all this delay we thought that the 69 Club would be at the caves when we arrived – but they weren’t. However, one thing we didn’t realise was that the caves were a Rocker stronghold. Not your provisional part-friendly version, but the street-hardened London ones. The lead scooter pulled in and swung to one side, closely followed by the rest of us. We were still blissfully unaware of what the situation was at this stage, but it soon became obvious as more of these Rockers started congregating. It was only when chains and axe handles started appearing that then penny finally dropped. At this stage both camps had around equal numbers of supporters – but the Rockers were armed and we weren’t! We thought “this is it”.
But at the 11th hour we were saved. As the Rockers started to approach us, there was a roar of engines and the 69 Club swept in on their bikes. You could see the smiles on the Rockers faces as they thought reinforcements had arrived to support them, but these looks soon turned to horror when the 69 Club swept right by them and parked up with us, dismounting and shaking our hands. It all totally threw the Rockers and they backed away, not quite comprehending what was going on. Memories of that day will stick with me forever.
We quite often used to attend other events. My original Saints legshield banner still carries a Castrol sticker from a VCB event I participated in. Around this time Bill Adey offered the club an old LD to compete on, but to be honest, it caused more arguments than anything else, with everyone wanting to use it at the same time and wanting to do different things to it.
By 1970 quite a few club members (me included) were drifting off to other things, due to work, marriage commitments, etc. I sold my scooter and moved on. I vaguely remember that Pete Commons and Ian Best were still involved with The Saints, but you’d need to speak to them about that to find out about the final days of The Saints during that period.
