The 108 Club
[Dream target date - 1970s]

Blidworth (kids) in the 70's

Kids with 108 shields Kids with 108 shields Steve Clay thumbs-up Queuing for the movies   Dean Vaughan crush Mudbath Pete F Samurai

How Steve Clay and myself came to adopt the '108 Club' as a name for our childhood gang was never clear. Perhaps it was a reference to a regiment, (Steve was obsessed with the army and later joined-up), or perhaps it simply refered to the number 108 bus which ferried us to school every morning? Whatever? tthat damn number seemed to crop up all over the place (and still does).

Steve and I met every Thursday evening at Steve's place; a posh council house just around the corner from our pit-house on Appleton Road. The Clay's had a garage and a kitchen dinning table that was ideal for planning our activities. Important documents were kept in a small brown briefcase that I commandeered from home. Once used to store cleaning equipment, the briefcase still smelled of Cherry Red shoe polish.

The case contained an assortment of maps, posters, badge-making equipment and copies of the 108 Club newsletter, duplicated on a second-hand photocopier my Dad bought from an office supplies shop in Mansfield.

Membership subscriptions helped supply the photocopier with paper and kept our 8mm cine camera stocked with film. Kids would flock from all over the village to see themselves projected life-size on the back-wall of the Clay's garage. Each silent short was topped and tailed with a 108 title sequence and featured dangerous bicycle stunts, Pythonesque sketches or stop-frame animated Action Man dolls.

Besides the home-movies, we played alot of wargames and built dens in the forest. The dens were very well constructed and based on designs lifted from a scouting book I found in the local library.

Although most of our outdoor activites took place in the summer, winter evenings were special too. From October onwards we'd all be out after school, equipped with torches. We'd play snippers on the grass banks next to the pit tips, lobbing sods of earth (sand-bombs) at the designated enemy and communicating to each other with Morse-code flashes and bird-like hoots. Sometimes we'd practice our snipper technique by spying on arch-enemies like Shaun Dodsworth and Lionel Dalby. Or sneak through people's back gardens just for the hell of it.

Again, most of these activities were based on the kind of military training undertaken by the Scout movement, but we did our own thing because the nearest Scout troop was two miles away in Ravenhead. Steve and I always felt uncomfortable with adult-organised activities in any case, including the local youth club, where there was always the threat of getting your head kicked in by older youths.