For the special lady who managed to turn my life around and put me on the straight and narrow … which hasn’t been easy for her. Thank you.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1 Young Blood
Chapter 2 Wild One
Chapter 3 Malcolm Price GBH
Chapter 4 Fighting Town
Chapter 5 The Quick Brown Fox
Chapter 6 Unexpected Guest
Chapter 7 On The Road
Chapter 8 Violence
Chapter 9 Banged Up
Chapter 10 Corner Post
Epilogue
Malcolm Price – Profile
About the Authors
Copyright
We used to finish work on the Saturday around 12 o’clock and we’d go to what we had called the McShifters Arms, now the Great Western, in Merthyr. We’d get tanked up on a Saturday afternoon, Price and me. This particular Saturday, he decided he wanted to arm-wrestle me – he did and he won.
I was determined to get one over on him. There was this young girl in the corner, so I said to her, ‘We’re going to have a kissing competition in a minute, Bev, Pricey and me. We’re going to practise on you and you are going to be the judge. Whatever happens, I’m going to be the winner and I’ll buy your beer all afternoon.’
So, the kissing competition started and it lasted quite a while. And, at the end of it, I was judged by Bev to be the winner. Poor old Pricey, the square-jawed blond, he couldn’t believe that he was the loser and I don’t think to this day that he knew that I bought Bev beer all afternoon so I could be the winner! There was no way he was going to win, no matter how good a kisser he was and it dented his manhood somewhat and evened the score for me losing at arm-wrestling.
Although Price lost the kissing competition, he still had his image intact, as he was always surrounded by a bevy of beautiful girls. I remember Price was living with one of his many girlfriends at that time; I went to call for him on a Christmas morning so we could go out for a seasonal drink.
I remember the exact words his girlfriend said, as she said them directly to me: ‘Now I’m warning you, if you don’t get him back here by two o’clock for his Christmas dinner, this goose that he nagged me for, for weeks and weeks, goes in the bin!’
I said, ‘I’ll get him back in time.’
Out we went and Price had two, three, four, five and I’m looking at my watch now and it’s ten minutes to two and I had promised to get Price back by two or his goose would be well and truly cooked, in more ways than one!
I said, ‘Price, we’ve gotta make a move now.’
He was well over the top! He just pushed me out of the way, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’ I could tell he was turning then so I left him.
I went back up to the house to tell his girlfriend that Price wouldn’t be there for Christmas dinner and, with that, she threw the goose straight into the bin like she had promised! A fully cooked goose straight in the bin!
That Christmas day, I last saw him when I left him in the pub just before two o’clock, and that very Christmas night he got locked up. He went from the Express pub to a pub called the Morlais Tavern. Price, tanked up, rolled into the pub at about seven or eight o’clock in the evening and there was this English chap there, sitting on a high stool by the bar. He didn’t know Pricey. When Pricey got to the bar, he fell up against this English bloke who was none the wiser about who Price was.
The bloke told him where to get off; Price whacked him and headbutted him straight away and the landlord called the police. Price, as well as not getting his cooked goose, was locked up on Christmas night!
That wasn’t the end of the story. She, his girlfriend, had had enough and left Price and went to stay with her mother. By the following week, she was still there and wouldn’t go back to Price. Out of anger, he went round to her mother’s house with an airgun and shot all of the windows out! They didn’t get back together after that.
We were in the Express pub one night; we were in there until about three or four in the morning. We came out, and Price jumped straight into the car and he gave three of us a lift. There was no breathalyser back then so no one worried whether they’d had too much to drink. Down the road we went and Price drove straight into a lamppost and knocked the bumper off the car, which was hanging on by a thread and dragging along the road, sending a shower of sparks up into the air.
I said, ‘Price, let’s get out and pull it off and chuck it away.’
‘Oh, bollocks! Fuck it, we’ll keep going,’ Price said.
So there we were going up the High Street with the bumper dragging alongside us, sparks were flying everywhere and there was this copper in the middle of the road waving his lit torch about wanting Price to stop!
Did Pricey stop? Did he hell! Straight around the copper and away he goes with the bumper still dragging along. He got away with that as well.
The amount of stories still going around about Pricey is nobody’s business and they just make it up about him as they go along, but I have worked with him and was a drinking pal of his for many years. A lot of these stories people invent are derogatory, but what I am saying here is true.
As much as stories are going around about Price, it was the same with another Merthyr hard man. This man had an equally colourful reputation as Price, but was around long before Price came along. This man was called Redmond Coleman and he was around in the early 1900s. He was a bare-knuckle fighter and stories were still going around about him well into the 1960s.
As much as Price is a hard man, equally so, he is also an honest man. Price and I have been in all sorts of scrapes together and he and I might have gone into a shop on the way to work somewhere and, perhaps, the owner of the shop had to pop somewhere else and had left the shop unattended, which in certain parts of Wales was common, and I’d say to Price, ‘Look at all the fags there we could have!’ And, you know what? He wouldn’t touch anything that didn’t belong to him – that’s how honest he was. He wouldn’t pinch a pound if it was lying on the floor – he’d rather find out who owned it and hand it to them. If he even suspected that something was stolen then he wouldn’t have anything to do with it.
I don’t know if he had this honest streak bashed into him as a child, but, even though Price was physically bashed about by his old man, if his old man said to Price that he was getting abuse from so-and-so, then Price would go around and sort it out. That’s just the way he was, a very selfless person who would always be giving himself to others. I think that right to the very end Price was still trying to get into his father’s good books. He didn’t disown his father, even though he had a difficult time at his father’s hand.
Price wouldn’t disrespect his father; he’d still call his old man ‘Pops’ right up until the end. All that his father had done to him didn’t seem to dissuade Price from what he did for his father. For him, blood was thicker than water. His father didn’t deserve to have him.
My wife’s cousin lived next door to the Price family and his story was that Price’s father, Les, would kick Malcolm around the room like a football! Nobody dared interfere. Les Price was almost as hard as Malcolm was when he was young.
I worked with Les as well, and everyone at work was afraid