Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (129 page)

Keith’s widely cited absence from part of his own birthday celebrations can now be explained by his temporary removal to the County Jail. While some of this contradicts elements of Chapter
16
, it’s again important to note that
Dear Boy
was the first major attempt to unravel the conflicting stories surrounding that night, and that there has surely been more information revealed about the party in the six years since the book came out than in the 30 years preceding its publication! None of it is entirely conclusive except for the repeated conviction from so many witnesses – that there was no car in the pool.

Wensch says that he “never heard about the car thing until” Keith’s famous
Rolling Stone
interview with Jerry Hopkins in December 1972. (Again, see page 198.) “I knew what that was when I read it: he could never say what the real truth was about the night because it might not look so good. But as much as it’s a white lie, a black lie, a dirty lie, not the truth, not reality … it’s better. And don’t we want things better?”

Exactly. Which is why I myself believed the story throughout my youth. If it makes people feel better to believe that Keith did indeed drive a Cadillac or a Lincoln into the hotel pool that night, then so be it. “This is Flint’s Loch Ness Monster,” says Wensch of the myth. “We actually have one here. And I think I’ve seen part of his tail – but I didn’t see his head!” As with the Loch Ness Monster, anyone who claims to have pictorial evidence – Who members especially – should produce them for examination. Otherwise, we may want to treat the whole incident the way we do the Loch Ness Monster – as something we so desperately want to believe in, but can’t possibly prove.

Of only slightly less infamy but far greater impact was the death of Neil Boland, under Keith’s Bentley, during a fracas outside a Hatfield pub on Sunday, January 4, 1970. Keith Moon was subsequently charged with being behind the wheel of the Bentley at the time that Boland was crushed to death. The story is described in detail in Chapter
19
, pages 251–256.

In the middle of 2003, Neil’s daughter, Michelle, who was just three at the time of her father’s death, made contact with me.
Dear Boy
, apart from describing her father’s demise in painfully graphic detail, had awakened in her a determination to find out what really happened that night, to which end she had tracked down Peter Thorpe, one of the five young men found guilty of the “affray” that led to Boland’s death. After an exchange of e-mails, they met in a Hatfield pub and Michelle came away convinced that there was another side to the story. After we corresponded for a while, she put me in touch with Thorpe, who was 19 years old at the time, and who I spoke to by phone for the purpose of this addendum.

Thorpe was at greatest pains to explain that he was not part of a gang of skinheads. “It was a complete mixture,” he insists of the people at the Cranbourne Rooms, which adjoined the Red Lion Pub, that fateful evening. “You had hippies, and a couple of people who looked like skinheads. But in those days it was just a fashion. My brother was there that night, and he was a college student, had long hair, smoked dope.” The only one of the five youths later found guilty of affray to subscribe to the skinhead fashion, says Thorpe, was 18-year-old Paul Holden. (It should be stressed, however, that the newspapers – both national and local – referred frequently to a gang of “skinheads”.)

Thorpe himself attended with his friend Christopher Frank O’Rourke, also 19. “We didn’t go looking for trouble,” he says. “We just went out for a good night.”

Thorpe recalls having almost no interaction with Moon, ‘Legs’ Larry Smith, Jack and Jim McCulloch or any other rock celebrities who may have accompanied Keith. His recollection is that these people stayed primarily at the bar, getting drunk. “It was quite a friendly evening,” he says, until …

“After the night ended, we were standing outside, January evening, very cold, and we saw Keith come out with his wife Kim, and one of us, as a joke, because they’re celebrities, said, ‘Ooh, give us a lift home, in your Bentley.’ Kim turned round and told us to F off. Which wasn’t very nice.”

According to Thorpe, Keith and immediate entourage – Kim, ‘Legs’ Larry Smith, Jean Battye, and driver Neil Boland – got in the car and the youths walked down to where the driveway met the Great North Road. But as the car pulled up alongside them on its way out of the car park, “I looked in my pocket, saw some pennies and said, ‘Let’s flick some pennies on the car,’ to say, ‘We’re not having that.’ There was no stones thrown, no one kicked the car, there was free access to get on to the road, and the car suddenly stopped. I remember it really well because he (Neil) was quite a big man. He just flew out the car and ran straight at us.”

This is consistent with Larry Smith’s recollection to the author, in 1996, that the youths “all realised they had their last bus to get to and we had the delights of a Bentley. Well for some reason they suddenly started throwing coins at the car. This incensed Neil, who loved the Bentley, so as the last of these coins came raining down, he jumped out, and went back to face the crowd.”

Boland’s daughter Michelle confirms that her father had a reputation for a hot temper. “He would not have thought twice about getting out of the car and retaliating if he felt threatened.”

Of what Thorpe insists was just a small group of youths now out by the driveway – he adamantly denies it was the ‘thirty’ or more subsequently claimed by the car’s occupants – Neil Boland apparently started swinging at 20-year-old John Bunn. Says Thorpe, “John was as small as me, so … we jumped in. We thought, ‘We’re not having that.’ And the car drove off. Left (Neil). Then it went down the road.”

About 20 yards away, it stopped again. At the Inquest, Keith claimed that the automatic car had a “creeping” device that would enable it to keep moving slowly if left in drive. Presumably, someone had now slid over to put their foot on the brake, pull the handbrake, put the car into neutral – or some combination of all three.

Meantime, Neil Boland was on the losing end of the fight. Still, says Thorpe, “He was a big man. He got up and ran down the road after (the car) and we chased after him, and he ran round to the front of the car. And we went round there as well, and the fight continued. He went on the floor. And that more or less would have been it …”

… Except that the car then lunged forward, as if someone had got behind the wheel, set the gear back into drive and put their foot on the accelerator -though perhaps with the handbrake still in place. “It jerked once, twice,” recalls Thorpe, “and then” – and this could have been if the handbrake was released – “just shot forward, and I went across the wing of the car. I actually noticed Neil put his hands up, because his legs had gone under the car by then, and it had gone forward on top of him. He put his hands up onto the bumper as if he was going to pull himself up, and then it suddenly shot forward. I actually bent down, I was waiting for this person to come out the back end, not realising how low a Bentley is, thinking luckily enough he’ll miss the wheels – and he’ll just be lying in the road at the back.”

But that’s not what happened. Boland was crushed by the weight of the Bentley’s engine and dragged along the road for what has widely been described as about a 100 yards. “When I didn’t see his body come out the back end, we chased after the car,” says Thorpe. While he ran on foot, a friend of his jumped into a van and raced after the car, finally alerting the Bentley’s occupants to the disaster when they pulled up outside a social club. (Moon confirmed this latter detail during his own prosecution.)

“When it stopped, there was about eight or nine of us trying to lift (the Bentley) off of him, but we couldn’t. It was just too heavy.” Peter says Keith was the only one of the four passengers to get out of the car. “We did look under, we were trying to see if he was still alive. Keith bent right underneath and his (Keith’s) suit was just dripping in blood and the gutter was filling up with blood.”

A crowd quickly emerged from the social club (“like a Trades & Labour Club,” says Thorpe) to witness the macabre scene along with others who’d run down from the Red Lion. “And then the fire brigade turned up and lifted the car with a jack,” says Thorpe. “And they dragged what looked like a body out, and you could tell it wasn’t alive.”

When the police showed, Thorpe recalls some of the crowd running off. “I didn’t. I stayed there. I went down the police station and made a statement that night,” though “without actually naming myself as one of the people involved in it. I wanted people to know we hadn’t killed anyone deliberately.” Nonetheless, he was arrested a few weeks later, as were Bunn, O’Rourke, Holden, John Armstrong and several others.

Thorpe says he was deeply affected by the event. “It’s tragic, really. That’s why my memory is so good, because it’s something in my life I will never forget. It’s the first and last time, I hope, I’ve ever seen a person die.”

But he also remains unapologetic. “He started a fight with us, is the way I see it,” says Thorpe of Boland. “And he’s bigger and tougher looking than us, and if we’d have given him a few smacks and he’d got in the car and drove off, we’d have all gone home quite happy. And that would have been the end of it.”

Thorpe says he feels the occupants of the Bentley have greatly exaggerated what happened that night. “Why did they lie so much about it? Why did they say they were surrounded by all these skinheads kicking the car, and all this great fear? Because it wasn’t like that at all. Obviously you had to be there to experience it, but we’re not that nasty type of people. None of us are very big, none of us had weapons. If the car had been kicked and stones thrown, the windows would have obviously been damaged, the paintwork would have been dented. I don’t recall any of that being brought up as evidence – because it didn’t happen.
¹¹⁸
Neil got out of his own accord. He wasn’t beaten to a pulp, or knocked unconscious. If the car hadn’t gone forward, he’d have got up and got straight in the car with no problem. I didn’t notice any blood on him up to that point when the car went shooting off.”

Thorpe feels then that the blood of Neil Boland – literally – is on the hands of whoever drove the vehicle through the crowd while the fight was still taking place. And he himself believes that the driver was not Keith Moon. He has convinced Neil’s daughter Michelle of this; her website
¹¹⁹
is titled ‘Keith Moon was not driving’.

None of which brings Neil Boland back. And none of which excuses the youths’ behaviour any more than it does the driver’s.

After all, Thorpe admits that he and the other Hatfield youths quickly got the better of Boland, and though he insists that Boland was “punched” under the car rather than kicked, Paul Holden nonetheless made a statement to the police that read, “There were about 12 people round the man doing what I was doing – having a kick at him.”

For those on the inside of the Bentley, the gang of up to a dozen youths may well have looked like it was three times that size, and the violence might well have seemed worse than it was – or it could have been as bad as it seemed. That Moon and his entourage had been drinking heavily has never been in dispute, but while it may have contributed to their sense of panic, it doesn’t mean that they had no reason to feel scared.

How, then, could Neil Boland’s death have been avoided? In any number of ways. Kim need not have sworn at the youths when they cheekily asked for a lift home (an exchange that was cited by the youths’ lawyer during their court appearance). But Thorpe need not have responded by throwing pennies at the car. Boland could have just driven off rather than jumping out of the car and throwing punches. But the assembled youths need not have then ganged up on Boland, nor given chase when the driver ran back to his car. Boland could have gotten back in that car rather than running in front of it (unless he wanted to avoid endangering its occupants). But the youths didn’t need to keep hitting him until he was on the ground and underneath it. Someone may not need to have chosen that moment to drive through the crowd. But they did. It’s all a tragic example of what can – and still does – happen at closing time outside British pubs when people have had too much to drink, and when cultures clash.

Thorpe’s sense of injustice seems to come from this latter aspect. “The way I saw the whole thing, the way the evidence was coming out, we were just kids in a local town. And you’ve got this big establishment, the Who, and these top celebrities. We were told to say nothing, don’t do anything, when we leave the court, don’t hang around, just clear off. It was done and dusted, how they wanted it.”

Except that, any way any one looked at it, Neil Boland had died. And Keith Moon assumed personal, legal and emotional responsibility for that death.

There was no shortage of ladies in Keith’s life, even during the periods he was married to Kim and/or living with Annette. And in the year or so between these two great loves of his life, Keith played the field with particular veracity. A brief fling with Max Bygraves’ neice, Patty Bygraves, is discussed on page 366. Following the publication of
Dear Boy
, a woman named Patti Salter made contact to offer purely positive memories of her period as Keith’s girlfriend through much of 1974. She was known, at the time, as the actress Lee Patrick, a hostess on the popular TV game show
The Golden Shot.
Patti met Keith during the filming of
Stardust –
in which she had a small part – and during the shooting of
Tommy
, Keith proposed that they live together, which they did, at Curzon Place in Mayfair,
¹²⁰
during the early months of 1974. What follows is an edited account of her letters: