Brian Dakin

Brian Dakin

I was born in and grew up in Oldbury. I was born at 8 Portway Road, which is just off Church Bridge. It's not there now because they widened the road. If I walk down Portway Road, I know exactly where number 8 is because I can smell warm milk and puffed wheat that we used to have at Nana Polls. In between my Nana Polls and my other nana’s by Moat Farm, in Langley, for about five years until they built the Kate Moore estate, which was just off the Wolverhampton Road. It was the first council estate after the war and we moved up en masse. And all my aunties and uncles and cousins were all on the same estate. Bar my Aunty Joyce, who went in an apartment at Whiteheath, which we thought was incredibly posh then. So we used to bug my mum and dad and say, “Can we go and visit Aunty Joyce?” Because she was on the eighth floor and it was just lovely because you could get out on the balcony, you see, for ages.

Of course, it completely changed from then to now. The whole concept of what these flats were. I always say to people when you're my age, when I decided to find out who I was as a Black Country person, I realise that those first years, probably up till I was 11, shaped who I was. You understand that sitting on a red quarry floor listening to all my uncles and aunties when they came back dinnertime for the fittle off me nan that she cooked on the open stove and started telling stories, I was sponging them at that time and it just made me who I was. Going onto the council state because we were up a close there was still an insular sort of feeling. 

And you never met anybody that was any different from you. I mean, the doctor would call in in those days if you were ailing a bit and the doctor come to see you. You wouldn't talk to the doctor because he was a doctor. Your mom would tell him what was the matter with you. So it wasn't really until I was lucky enough to go to Oldbury Grammar that I realised they were folks different to me and they used to call us council boys because we were off the council estate. Folks from Edgbaston and so on that that went to grammar school would say, “Oh, you council boys!” 

We couldn't afford our uniforms so we had to have a provi cheque. And I thought we were really posh because me’ dad had a chequebook when we went over to get our uniforms. And then this one bloke said to me one day, “you’ve got no money have you because you can't afford your uniform!” So I said to me, Dad, “Dad, are we poor?” And he went, “Well, we're not as poor as some, but we ain't got a lot.” And so he had to sit down and explain to me what a provi chequebook was. 

It was just a wonderful place to grow up. If wasn’t at Mum's I could go to Mrs Sketts next door, and if wasn't Mrs Sketts across the road to Auntie Ads or Aunty Frieda’s. There was always somewhere. And I always had older cousins that looked after us. It was just a wonderful adventure.

I was pretty good at football when I was at school really from the word go, When I was eight years old I played in the Causeway Green school team which was ten-year-olds. My brother was ten years older and he was in the school team and he said Gary Downer who was the cock of the school, and she said, “You ought to have the little un’ come up to practice which was after your dinner.”

It was the old case balls then. And I used to head anything. I mean, I just if you threw a house brick at me I would head it. And they used to call me ‘Mallet Yed’ and they put me right back, but I got no boots. So the only time I could play is if our kid didn't play, because we had those leather boots where you put the screw in studs. My dad had to buy me a pair of Mitre boots from Woolworths so I could be in the school team. And it went on and I played it when I went to grammar school and played all the borough sides and in the county sides and the north of England sides. And little did I know Swindon Town also got their eyes on me. It came to the summer after I had done my GCSEs and I came home one Saturday afternoon. There were two blokes sat at the kitchen table - Danny Williams who was the manager then and this chap called Sammy Trollop. And me’ dad says, “Sit down” and I sat down and he says, “These lads have come up from Swindon.” So I was 15 and a half and I signed for Swindon. So I left home and it was the first time ever been further than the end of the road really. And I left home to play football for about four and half years - I turned pro. It was a boyhood dream, and it was my dad's boyhood dream.

It was fantastic until they changed managers. Danny Williams either retired or finished. And we had a guy called Fred Ford who is about six foot ten, a real Cockney bully. And by that time I'd got a bit about myself. I was a pro then, I was a professional and I used to see how he shouted and swore at the young kids. And some of these had come from Ireland, never been away from home in their life. They were like 14 and a half. And I would be like, “Mr Ford, you know, you're really going to upset these lads.” And he would take me in the office and he used to f and blind me. 

But I had a great run in the reserves and a really good report. And then the centre-half who'd been injured came up to me on the training ground saying, “You're playing at Abingdon in the third team on Saturday”. And I went, “No, ain't I'm in the reserves, I am going really good” and he would say, “you are in the third team.” So I went to knock on the manager's door and say, “excuse me, Mr Ford, why am I in the third team on Saturday?” and he'd say, “It's nothing to do with you.” And then he would start swearing. And I would be, “don't lose your temper with me. I just want to know.” It was the typical Black Country stubbornness coming out. And it sort of soured and then when it came to renegotiation of contracts and it was nothing like what we'd verbally agreed on. It was £10 in the third team, £15 in the second £20 in the first with bonuses, and he put this contract down and it was like a couple of quid less than we discussed. And I said, “I can’t sign this, it is not what we've agreed.” And he went, “I couldn't care less what I said.” We had shook on it, and again it was the Black Country stubbornness, and I said, “look, I'm not signing this” and he said, “I will ruin you” Well where I come from when you shake somebody hand that's an agreement and he wouldn't do it. So I said, “pay me up and I'll finish”. 

So I was coming back home on the couch and I had £500 quid, and I was thinking. “what am I going to say to me dad?”, because it was my dad's dream as well. So it was about 11 o'clock, and he was sitting in his chair, he had just done his two-till-ten shift and I put my things down. I said “I've got something to tell you. I've finished.”  And I explained and he said, “fair enough then, if you stuck up for yourself, that's it. That 500 quid, you and put it in the bank, and you can get a job tomorrow.”

I worked at Beatty's in Dudley for a bit behind in the offices. I then went into the flooring trade and that was it for about 30 odd years till I went into academia. And you know, it's fabulous.

I came with a work ethic that came from my upbringing. You apply yourself to 100% or 110% and you just get on with life and that's it. I have never been materialistic. That didn't matter to me. It was just doing a good job. I suppose in a way it’s about acknowledging all the hard work that my mum and dad had done really. And always sticking up for myself. 

It was the same in the retail trade. I was the youngest manager for them and then it got to the point where they changed the fitters from a contracted thing to self-employed. And we had the Christmas do so I invited all the fitters and then the big noises from the head office said, “they are self-employed now, they’re not coming.” So I told them I wasn’t coming then, and they said, 

“what do you mean you ain't coming?” I said, “these folks have worked for you for 20 years and you weren't allowing them to go the Christmas do? I will go over The Angel and have a Christmas do with them.” They said, “Then you're making a big mistake because you're not going to go any further.” I couldn't care a toss. So I had to go home and tell my wife, my late wife and we had two babs then. I said, “I’ve just told them I don’t want the manager's job.” She said, “but what you're going to do?” I said, “I'm going to go back on the shop floor and work twice as hard and will earn the same amount of money. But I'm not giving up on my principles.”

I think the thing about fairness comes from me’ dad and me’ aunties and uncles. Me’ dad would always say, “there's always two sides to an argument. Never judge somebody until you've heard both sides of the argument and you respect everybody. Nobody's better than you, but nobody's worse than you. And you treat people like that.” And I think I've always taken that through. If you say you're going to do something, then you do it and it might not work out. But it's really important to do this every day. My dad was Harry Dake. My mom called him Dake because of his surname Dakin, but his mates used to call him ‘Dako.’ He was just a beacon in a way. My mum was too. I'm not going to leave me' mom out, she worked herself to the bone and she had to look after four lads as well. But you don't appreciate your mum until a long, long time after I don't think.

I think, looking back, part of it is when I went away for those four years because I would do anything to get back home on a Saturday night. I might be in Bournemouth playing or in London playing, but I'd get a train and sometimes I'd arrive back early Sunday morning and it was to see everybody and to get a Black Country fix. The captain of the first team Stan Harland was a scouser. And if they were at home and I playing locally, he would say, “ get to the stadium and then I will drop you off.” So we used to get to Frankly Beaches and I could see the tower at the top of Rowley Bonk. And I used to say to him, “I am home now Stan.” There was a definite feeling inside me that I was back and I was with my people. It was just that strong. And it became stronger as I grew. It was a lightbulb moment when my dad died. I was driving back from Merry Hill and I was thinking, “I need to find out who I am.” Because I’d gone through life and sort of amended who I was to try and fit. And so then I revisited my past and found out about those first five years, about the years on. The more I spoke to my aunties and uncles I realised, “this is why I feel this way about the Black Country, because it's always been there.” But it needed something to unlock that door. And it was about the people and it was about what they gave up for us. It was about our heritage, and how strong the heritage was within me. 

My cousin Geoff was the eldest of Auntie Freda. He was a folk singer on the local scene and I used to go round and sit on the floor, and he played Baez and he'd play Dylan and Pete Seeger, but he'd also sing his own songs about the Black Country. And they immediately started to come back to me. And I totally understood what he meant to me. And because me' Dad, Uncle Bill and Uncle Eric all sang unaccompanied at the local clubs and stuff like that, I also realised why I wanted to sing unaccompanied. And so I just started to do it, you know, the more I did I started also to try and find a way of conveying my voice onto paper. I always say when you are committed to paper, it's a minefield because somebody in Cradley will write it differently to someone in Gornal because of the intonations and everything. So that became a journey of self-discovery. And the more I did it the more I understood how stories were more important, how people's voices were more important, and how you claim an identity through that. And by that time I was in academia and so I could utilise what I was doing in order to platform that. 

I perform as Billy Spakemon. The name came from a bloke I worked with 'Big Yed ( his name was Lyndon. He wasn't big-headed, we just called him that. Maybe it was he was fair had snowy hair and just looked like he had this 'big' aura around him?  Anyway, he came to my first two solo shows where I was Brian.  He had a ‘Billy' name for everyone. If they had a teddy boy hairstyle it was Billy Quiff Yed and so on. He came up at the end of the second show and said, “Yo' cor be Brian, yo' gorra be Billy summut.” I said, “what then?” He said, “Well your Billy and yo' Spake Black Country and yo'm a mon, so Billy Spakemon!”  simple as that and it stuck.

Community has always been the be-all and end-all for me, from that close-knit, back in Eel Street, nothing existed beyond that really. I mean, you went up to Oldbury to the market or something, but it all existed around that area. And my Auntie Glads used to say that when she got married to my Uncle Fred and they'd got found a place in the Brades, which was 200 yards up the road, my nana went barmy because it was too far to move. And I think it was that bonding. You came to realise that each little pocket was totally different and that fascinated me. Why was somebody in Langley so proud of coming from Langley? And I only lived a mile down the road and I needed to find out why that was. It was to do with that fierce independence of coming from a little hamlet centuries ago. And for some reason, it is still instilled there. And it had to do with what they made, and who came in from the outside to build that community, it just fascinated me. I was coming from a family that was a family of seven aunties, uncles and cousins, I was always part of that. The family was my family, and although I got your mum and my dad, I also had six other mums and dads and 20 brothers and sisters. And it transferred from Eel Street and Portway because we were right at the top we had 9 houses around the patch in front of us. Those nine houses became a family in a way. We knew everybody else in the close and it was so important.  It's just incredible. So it transpired that when all the things started to happen creatively community became the centre point of everything. 

A lot of the work I do is stemmed from charity work, but prior to that, well this is the last year at Aston now because I'll be 70 this year. I was thinking, “what else can I do with my time?”  I was writing and performing and starting to organise different things, but still I thought, “what can I do in my time?” So I started to volunteer for people like Bridges, which is the Cancer Trust, and little local community groups and saying, “Well, I'll go and sit with them. I’ll go and have an hour with that person.” And it was like the way you used to look after your own. Like when Nana was busy all the sisters would look after the young ones. And so it was sort of trying to hold on to that.

I was also interested in breaking down barriers. So it would it wouldn't bother me if I had to go and knock on the Bangladeshi community's door and say, “my name's Billy and, you know, I'm really interested in this, can I come in and have a chat?” and they would sort of look at you gone out at first. But then when they found out you were genuine they'd take you in and start talking to you about it. Or like I might be on the bus and there'd be some old Jamaican bloke there and you go, “Oh, are you first-generation or second-generation?” And once you cross that barrier, then it was all about the storytelling which has always been a massive part of my life. 

So the community stuff initially built up from me wanting to still retain that community because you could see it was failing. And I was quite lucky that our neighbours were Greek and Italian and West Indian. And so again, not many people in the street would knock on the door and say, I'm really interested. I wrote the life history of the father of one of my neighbours who's Italian and who came here in 1952. I said, “can I write your dad's story?” And I just sat for hours and hours and hours, and now they've got a record of their dad's story. Or I'd go over to Marcus's house, one of the lads that used to come and play, and say, “I hope you don't mind, but can you tell me about when you came over, or when your parents came over?” There's always that interest in other people's lives and communities. 

That then widened into wanting to give something back and that’s from lived experiences really. Sue passed away, my daughter passed away, my brother passed away, and my first grandson passed away. And it was thinking that there’s got to be a cathartic way of making sure that you understand other people in this situation. And so I started to creative work in dementia homes and in schools with autistic children to try and get a greater understanding of their situation and how I could get myself involved in that. Well, I suppose from a selfish point of view, it gives me a lot of satisfaction, but it also gives us the knowledge of not just the person with the illness, but how it affects the wider situation. It's like throwing a bibble in a pool, and now you understand the person who's ill and all the people who have to cope with it. You try to understand how they deal with it. There are a lot of projects we've been involved with, like ‘Remember Me’, the dementia project, where I categorically made it known at the beginning that this is not just about the people with dementia. This is the battlefield that happens when people have to give up the people they love to be cared for and what happens after that. So it's just trying to understand life on a wide scale and to let that inform your work. 

My stubbornness comes from when we were little, and I hate it if somebody hasn't got a voice. So we have to find a voice for them in some way. So it might be through performance, it might be through something creative. And I've come from a family that had virtually nothing so I'm not materialistic. I very often say I live in the wrong time because I'm not materialistic, I'm not bothered about having a new telly. I'm more bothered about people. I love getting up and performing. But I probably get more joy from seeing somebody get up there and do something that thought they couldn't do. Or as with the radio, come in and hosting a radio program that they thought they would never, ever do. And that gives me much more satisfaction because it's like in a new world for them and that's really important.

In terms of giving back, there was a conscious decision after Sue passed away. She was looked after so well by the unit at Sandwell for 12 years. And that triggered something. I thought, “We’re going to do something that going to put something back.” And it started when we raised money for the breast unit and then it just continued. It doesn't matter if it's an allotment that’s lost to shed because of vandalism or St John's Church that needs some money, I'll just say yes. And then I just think, “how am I going to do this? Who am I going to ask to give up their time for nothing?” Because it's not me. It's people who have got to give up the time because I'll be quite open with them. I'll say, “look, I've said I'll do this, but I've got no idea what I'm going to do. I haven't got a PA, can you lend your PA? I can't give you any money. I'm not offended if you don't want to do it.”  And everybody just said, “yeah, course we will.” It’s that that instils a kind of humanity that is going, but it just restores your faith. It really does restore your faith in humanity. 

For the radio, I've just serialised a program called Allotments and it was from a project years ago by Multistory and there were some books that Fran Wilde gave me. I thought this is fascinating because you've got people of all cultures growing stuff within a community, a community within a community. I just think what an absolutely fantastic thing that is.

So it’s about how can we break these barriers down? I think the creative arts do it because I think that there aren’t any barriers there. You can go into communities and say, “this is nothing to do with politics, we just want to have fun.” And sometimes when we're out busking and we might be playing Three Little Birds by Bob Marley and everybody,  - it doesn’t matter what colour their skin is - everybody’s dancing. I will say to the lads, “That’s what community is.” There's no barrier there, they've all forgotten who they are and they're just listening to a piece of music. That's the power of music and stuff like that. So we try to work within all different spheres. We try to be as open as possible and make it known that we're open as possible. And I think it's incredibly important to be a beacon to break those barriers down and not be afraid. And you can knock on 20 doors and the doors remain shut but the 21st will open. And that's all you need, isn’t it? I think if there's only one person in this room that goes away with something, then we've done our job. I think that's the way you have to look at it.

You ain't going to please everybody and you're going to get criticised and you got to have a thick skin, but it doesn't matter. You know, if you see somebody with a smile on their face, well I was telling somebody today, if you say an old lady with a shopping trolley now, Zoe, and she comes up and she's got a plastic bag full of pennies, and she says to you, “I've been saving these for you, can you put them in your bucket?” And that's unbelievable. And people will say to me, “Oh, I'll just do a Just Giving page.” Well for me, I think it’s my upbringing but I want to see the person that puts the money in the bucket face-to-face. And if they want to tell me why they put the money in the bucket I want to stop and listen to that story. And I think that's important. If I go on Just Giving, well we might get more money, but I won't know anybody. That’s the important thing. It's the contact that's really important to me. 

I think in the present climate, because there's we've had COVID and it's affected people in so many ways, I think the most important thing is don't be afraid to talk to people.

At the moment I'm doing quite a few schools and saying to the kids, “Look, if you feel rubbish, talk to your mate, talk to your teacher, don't keep it in. It's really important that you talk.” And I think if communities talk to one another and continue to talk to each other, even if it’s an open discussion about points that you're poles apart on, talk about it. You haven't got to agree but talking opens a dialogue between people.

I think dialogue is so incredibly important and it comes from all those years ago when everybody talked to one another. I often tell people that when we lived at the top of the close and the teas would be done, we would be sitting reading the comics on the step, and the women had come out with their sleeves rolled open, arms scarred with swarf marks and stuff. And they'd be shouting to each other across the street. And it was just a dialogue that was part and part and parcel of the community and that just doesn't happen now. 

And listening is even more important than talking. It doesn't matter what you've got planned to talk about, you follow that journey, and I guarantee you will get a gem, or you will get a jewel of inspiration. And very often when we're doing it on the radio, they'll say afterwards, “I've never told anybody that before.” I had a bloke the other night who I had known four years and it came out that he reffed last game at the old Wembley Stadium before the main game. It was something that was organised by the FA. And I said to him, “you've never told me that before.” And he say, “well I have never felt comfortable in telling anybody cos’ they think that I will be boasting.” And I think it's probably sixth sense because you've listened so much when you were little to all those fantastic stories and I just don't want to lose any of them. 

Everybody's extraordinary. People who think they've got nothing to say have actually got amazing stories. And going back to the dementia stuff, you know, we used to try and get the back story if something happened. We this one instance where there was this old guy who would switch the lights off at 7:00 every night. And it was really strange, but eventually we found out he was in a concentration camp. And 7:00p m was the time that the lights went out. And if we hadn't bothered to find out about this, that person's treatment might have changed. But as it is, we found out about it, and we let him switch the lights off, let him get comfortable, and switched them back on. That was fine. 

I think there's two there are two sections to your life. This is the academic section and then there's the School of Life section. And to me, the School of life is in some ways much more important. It’s what you learn from listening, and what you learn from the people that are around you. I think the lived experience is much more important than the non-lived experience. I'm not really that interested in what's in a textbook but I'm interested in what people can tell me. And I think that's the important thing that I've taken from life. Always be interested in what people tell you, without a doubt.