Birmingham ‘68: The Double Zero Project

If Double Zero members did not have a religious experience, at the very least they felt a collective spirituality which came from their love of bikes and their kinship with other riders.

This article featured in Issue XII of our print magazine which can be purchased on this website. You can also subscribe here for future issues.

The 1960s as a decade represents perhaps one of the most transitory time periods in this last century. The youth of the day were beginning to think for themselves instead of toeing the line set down by their more conservative parents. Out of gloomy, post-war austerity was born sexual liberation, and an unprecedented and explosive pop and fashion culture.

However, these new-found freedoms came at a great cost. While the year 1967 connoted ‘The Summer of Love’, it was a mere year later that rioting and restlessness became the order of the day. For many, the mention of 1968 conjures up images of Parisian streets awash with students fighting armoured police.

However, my work from 2018-2019 as a researcher with Flatpack Projects, Digbeth, looking at a project entitled ‘Birmingham 68’, has made me something of a revisionist. As a team, our aim was to look intently at what 1968 meant to Birmingham, whose history from that time is greatly overshadowed by the likes of Paris, and at best, is dominated by the infamous event of British politician, Enoch Powell, delivering his anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

The focus of my research, along with my colleague Joe Georgiou, was exploring the ‘Double Zero’ club, an organisation set up by Rev. David Collyer in 1966 at the still active St. Basil’s church in 1960s Deritend (next door to Digbeth). The aim of this organisation was to provide a place where the ‘unattached’ of Birmingham, particularly youths facing various kinds of hardship, could meet in safety and security.

The club was domesticated with the addition of various features such as a coffee bar, pinball machine, TV set, and music equipment. Collyer’s premise was that this could be a place for Birmingham youth, run by Birmingham youth, with a focus on minimal intervention on his part and other people working in a religious capacity.

The Double Zero club (so-called because its member felt that according to society, they were worth ‘less than a zero’) was given a biker’s theme and became a place very much for lads and lasses to display their bikes and foster relationships through this common interest. 

That said, the club was not completely secular, as attested to by Collyer in his own fascinating book, entitled Double Zero: Five Years With Rockers And Hell’s Angels In An English City (Fontana Books, 1973; republished in 1983 by Arthur James Lim ited). According to the book, Collyer would preach from time to time and, sadly, he would have to officiate at many biker funerals where they had met with terrible accidents on account of their speed and general daring. Collyer reports that indeed many of the young bikers who claimed to have no religious affiliation were quite overcome with emotion.

If Double Zero members did not have a religious experience, at the very least they felt a collective spirituality which came from their love of bikes and their kinship with other riders.

Despite bouts of trouble where rival biker groups tried to upset the progress that had been achieved at St. Basil’s, the members of the Double Zero were frequently a force for good in the community, engaging in various fundraisers and charitable activities, and delivering blood supplies to local hospitals. Moreover, the club came to the attention of a Cultural Studies student at the University of Birmingham, Paul Willis, who later went on to achieve eminence in his field. He made the Double Zero club one of the foci of his PhD thesis, which looked at the behaviours of the group, particularly their relationship with music.

This is somewhat tangential, but it is interesting to look at the wider biker culture of the 1960s, a reaction to the perhaps more popular, more conservative ‘Mod culture’. There was a proliferation of so-called ‘biker movies’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of which were evidently made on a shoestring budget. Titles include The Wild Angels (1966), Hell’s Angels on Wheels (1967), Hell’s Belles (1969), and that bizarre psychedelic film starring Marianne Faithful, The Girl On A Motorcycle (1968). However, the most emblematic biker film of that time is undoubtedly Easy Rider (1969), set to that liberating tune, Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf.

Returning to the Double Zero – so significant were their actions that they also received media attention from such popular corporations as the BBC and ATV, the latter of which produced footage which can still be viewed on the archival website, ‘MACE’ (http://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-02121968-double-zero-club).

The Double Zero Club closed in 1970, with David Collyer going on to operate in various ancillary activities over the years. He still lives in Birmingham today, and it was our privilege that he came to the Flatpack Film Festival Double Zero retrospective at the MAC (Midlands Arts Centre) in April 2018, where he charismatically imparted his experiences to us, a mixed audience of festival volunteers, former Double Zero members, and general enthusiasts.

Although a number of original Double Zero members, now in their seventies, appeared to be shouting at and taunting David Collyer in the audience, I quickly realised that it was all in jest. The fact that so many turned up to listen and contribute, as well as to show off their bikes in the manner of yesteryear, was testament to the devotion and efforts of a singular man, David Collyer.

Not in so many words, the bikers were saying this is ‘Our Dave’ and we were grateful to be part of something special at a unique moment in time.