Why Birmingham Skins & The Zulus Made a Truce to Become an Unstoppable Force

In this original content video we look at how football hooligan firm the birmingham zulus and birmingham skinheads came together despite their differences and challenges from old school terraces and the national front back in the 1970s and 1980s. We listen to One eyed baz patterson and other football terrace legends. On the terraces, St Andrew’s was, by the 1970s, an aggressive, racist and intimidating place to visit. Football hooliganism was on the rise, and skinheads ruled the roost. A sea of lads dressed in white skinners, ox-blood Dr Martens and, at the end of the decade, Sham 69 or Angelic Upstarts tee-shirts, showed up on the terraces week in, week out. The Happy Trooper Boot Boys were the best-known “firm” at the ground and led the way from the mid-70s. They were predominantly skins and took their name from the Happy Trooper pub in Chelmsley Wood, an area directly to the east of Birmingham which was dominated by Blues. The “Trooper Mob” consisted of the Town Centre Boot Boys, who were older and not all involved in the football scene, the Friendly Inn, which had a large Irish contingent, and lads who drank in the Yeoman, the Hiker and the Greenwood pubs. The Happy Trooper itself was in the southern area of the Wood and in the north there were lads who drank in the Woodman and Centurion, who rarely associated with the rest. Chelmsley Wood started life in 1963 as an overspill town for Birmingham, as demand for new housing increased, and at one time was one of the largest housing estates in Britain. A vast area filled with several high-rises, rabbit-warren paths and roads and faceless concrete buildings, it is a testament to 1960s architecture for which Birmingham is infamous. Not surprisingly, it produced some of the hardest lads in and around the city. On a match day these lads would get the train from nearby Marston Green and, depending on the game, there would be anywhere between twenty and 200 of them. One, Cockney Al, so called because he had moved to Birmingham from London when he was young, drove a Cortina Mark Two with a bright red sticker on the top of his windscreen that said “Chelmsley Wood Skins” in white lettering. ALTHOUGH SKINHEADS dominated the St Andrew’s terraces, as they did across the country, the area did not divide black and white; rather it united, and led to the firm becoming one of the first mixed-race outfits in the country. In this era of Docs, drainpipe jeans and shaved heads, it was natural that the black lads dressed the same way – and sixty of them did indeed dress exactly the same for a match at Manchester United in August 1978. Blue drainpipe jeans with turn-ups, red twelve-hole Doc Martens, red check lumberjack shirts and black Harringtons with a red check on the inside was the look. No-one bothered them en route, no doubt due to the way they looked and the fact they were singing songs about Chelmsley Wood.