After David Bryce quit heroin, he knew the difficulties of staying clean. He also knew the miseries which go hand in hand with drug abuse – the stealing, the mugging, the dealing, the sheer desperation. So he decided to help others kick the habit. This was his only weapon
Alan Taylor talks to the man behind Calton Athletic
DAVID Bryce – Davie to his many mates – has a mantra : “Take me if you can, but leave my men alone.” He learned it, he recalls, when he was a very young boy, growing up in Glasgow’s Gallowgate in the 1950s. It comes from the movie Rob Roy, starring Richard Todd in a kilt. As the Redcoats attempt to capture him, Rob Roy confronts them with his claymore and defiantly utters the immortal words.
“There was something about what he said that sank in,” writes Bryce in Alive And Kicking, his memoir, “and it was to have a big impact on my life. It was to be my motto and code of honour as boy and man, growing up in the east end of Glasgow. These words would stay with me as a member of Glasgow’s most famous gang, the Calton Tongs, and even more so when I went on to set up Calton Athletic. I still live by them today. You can take me on, but lay off my people at Calton Athletic.”
Bryce is an unlikely looking Rob Roy. For a start, he does not – at least in daylight hours – wear a kilt. Furthermore, his accent is undiluted Glaswegian. At 56, he looks fitter than he deserves to be, light on his feet and without an ounce of excess fat . We meet at Morrison’s “state of the art” gym in Glasgow’s Swanston Street, a narrow, low, prefabricated building engulfed by warehouses. A couple of days ago, Frank Bruno dropped by . “Hauns like frying pans,” according to one observer. Adjacent to the gym is a café whose forte is all-day breakfasts, which Bryce decides is what he needs before lifting weights. As we talk he tackles a heart attack on a plate . Though he has spent several spells in intensive care, he is clearly a man who likes to live dangerously.
By his own account, Bryce’s life did not click into gear until he was 35, which is when he started Calton Athletic, a football team comprised entirely of recovering drug addicts. Up until that point, Bryce seemed destined to die young . At 11, he started to smoke. Two years later, he was caught robbing a bookie’s house, for which he received two years’ probation. By now, he was a member of the infamous Tongs, which tyrannised the east end in the early 1960s. Already, drink had begun to figure in his destiny. At 15, he was en route to a remand home and approved school, from which he did a runner. He headed straight for the Gallowgate and was soon re-arrested, “pissed out of my mind”, whereupon he spent seven weeks in the Bar-L (Barlinnie). The next 12 years passed in a haze of violence, drugs, drink and prison. “As the drinking got more serious,” he says, “the crimes got worse, so the booze took me straight back to prison. I missed every Christmas bar one from 15 to 21 because I was inside.”
When Bryce drank, he didn’t know when to stop . He had blackouts and forgot everything that had happened, which was probably just as well. On top of this, “relationship after relationship would die a death”. At one time he looked so bad his mother didn’t recognise him, and a police charge-sheet recorded him as of “no fixed abode” . “When your mother won’t even say you can stay with her, you know you’ve got problems.” However, it was the spur to make him take control of his own life. The booze had to go otherwise he’d be a dead man. He checked into Gartloch Hospital – “I had ended up one of the ‘loonies’. I had been one for a long time, but only realised it now” – and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
Alcohol, though, was merely one ingredient in the cocktail of his addictions. In prison, he’d been introduced to amphetamines. Later, he smoked dope and popped pills. Then, in 1977, he made the acquaintance of heroin. He asked the dealer if it was addictive. “Don’t be stupid,” he was told. “We wouldn’t be taking it if it was.” Soon he was paying £100 a day “to feel normal”. For the next three years, he travelled far and wide in order to get a fix and “earn” the money for it. Crime sustained his habit. He was, he acknowledges, a full-blown junkie with an addictive personality. “Jeanette [his wife] says the only thing I do in moderation is sex.”
What saved him, and thousands of addicts who have been through Calton Athletic’s books, was the will to kick the habit. Bryce, talking 19 to the dozen and with obsessive intensity, is a man possessed. If you want to change, he says, you must first acknowledge your addiction. Then you must give up all drugs. Like other addicts, he was prescribed methadone, which it was believed would prevent the use of infected needles and stop the spread of Aids. Instead of being weaned off drugs, he was hooked again. “Don’t believe the f***ing propaganda that methadone doesn’t affect you,” he says. “It’s second only to heroin in addictive qualities. And because they’re addicts, they’ll be taking valium and everything else. I know people who’ve been killed driving while on methadone.” Giving an addict methadone, he adds, is like swapping vodka for whisky .
For Bryce, there was only one conceivable route: total abstinence. Through AA he managed to stop drinking, which in turn helped him give up drugs. Drink and drugs, he insists, are inextricably linked; the one gives succour to the other. In 1983, he started Calton Narcotics Anonymous, employing the same principles that had proved successful for him personally. It was a time, he recalls, when the east end was “awash” with heroin. In Glasgow, there were 10,000 injecting addicts. Inspired by a new rehabilitation centre at Cardross, where one recovering addict helped another, he came up with the idea of Calton Athletic, a football team made of recovering addicts.
“Most folk,” he acknowledges, spearing a baked bean, “laughed and said, ‘See the junkie team? They’ll probably needle ye.’” Bryce, however, was deadly serious. With his “take me if you can, but leave my men alone” mantra ringing in his head, he took to packing a baseball bat in order to deal with any mickey-takers. Calton Athletic, he says, was all about camaraderie, discipline, getting fit and showing commitment. Anyone who fell off the wagon was told to take a hike. Bryce was not going to allow one bad apple to infect the rest of the barrel. Either you were in under his terms or you were red carded.
It is a controversial, uncompromising tactic but Bryce makes no apologies for it. On the contrary, he is intemperate in his criticism of politically correct, touchy-feely agencies. “Everyone else in the drugs field is non-judgmental and non-directive ,” he says. “That’s fine if you’re dealing with the blind, the deaf and the handicapped. If you take that approach with drug addicts, they’ll have your guts for garters.”
it was not long before word of Calton Athletic seeped out of the Gallowgate. The catalyst for its international fame, however, was an unlikely source. Gordon Brown, then merely an opposition MP, wrote an article about the club in the Observer. After reading it, Lenny Henry got in touch wanting to make a film. Alive And Kicking duly appeared, albeit transferred to the Midlands because Henry could not master a Glasgow accent. In a monstrous leap of the imagination, Robbie Coltrane played Bryce, “sticking the heid on people left, right and centre”. Bryce protests this was “artistic licence”; I’m not convinced. Calton Athletic was also instrumental in the success of Trainspotting, helping director Danny Boyle and actor Ewan McGregor transfer Irvine Welsh’s novel to the screen.
For Bryce, it was an opportunity to show the unglamorous reality of drugs. How? “It highlighted the HIV issue. The last one in the film to start injecting was the first to get the virus. These sorts of things happen; I’ve seen it . The film also vividly illustrated the cot death of the baby of two of the drug-addicts. If you look at cot death statistics, a high percentage are children of at least one drug-addict. It also exposed the methadone myth. When Renton is going through his withdrawals , he pleads with his parents, ‘Please, get me some methadone,’ and they refuse. ‘No, methadone didn’t work the last time.’ They are right, methadone doesn’t work. It’s not the cure if you want to come off drugs. At the end of the film the characters were still ripping each other off. That’s addicts for you.”
Bryce argues his case in the knowledge that he and Calton Athletic have become increasingly isolated in the war against drugs. At the height of Calton Athletic’s fame, it had 28 full-time staff. Today there are none; only voluntary workers. Bryce attributes the withdrawal of funding to his participation in Scotland Against Drugs, the government-backed agency which at that stage – like most other organisations in the field – preached the doctrine of “harm-reduction”, ie prescribing methadone.
Bryce joined SAD at a time when it was struggling badly with credibility. Though sceptical, he allowed himself to be wooed. What he had not bargained for was the degree of hostility directed at SAD and everyone associated with it, including Sir Tom Farmer, of whom Bryce does not have the happiest of memories. At the 1996 Calton Athletics annual dance and awards ceremony, Farmer spontaneously announced he would sponsor Calton Athletic, so moved was he by its work. “Everybody,” notes Bryce, “was gobsmacked and delighted.” But nothing materialised. “Not a bean. The only explanation I can give is that he must have got carried away with the emotion of the ceremony. Then, when he went into the SAD office on Monday, his advisers probably told him, ‘You can’t do that with Calton Athletic. Everybody else will be upset’.”
BRYCE is particularly critical of the role played in SAD by Jack Irvine of the PR company Media House and a former Scottish Sun editor. Irvine, he says, had been referring to him and his Calton Athletic associates as “the boys from the Gallowgate without an O Level between them”. Friends in the media “marked my card” and he confronted Irvine before a meeting. Any more, he told him, and there would be hell to pay. Irvine responded by pointing his finger at him. “If you don’t put that right doon,” Bryce said, “I’ll bite it right aff yi.”
It was the end of his association with SAD and the beginning, he says, of a vindictive whispering campaign against Calton Athletic, which had always attracted as many celebrities as it did controversy. Bryce’s book contains photographs showing him and other members posing with the likes of Barbara Windsor, Martin McGuinness and Robbie Williams. Fundraising matches featured football legends, movie stars and media pundits. Pointedly, Bryce notes that while Calton Athletic was largely uncelebrated by official bodies in Scotland, the opposite was the case in London. In 1991, he received the Whitbread Award for Community Involvement and five years later he was nominated for the Unsung Hero Award by the Celebrities Guild of the UK.
Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, the latter coincided with the deterioration of Calton Athletic’s relationship with statutory bodies in Glasgow. “Success breeds success,” writes Bryce, “but it also breeds an awful lot of resentment. Our programmes were built on self-generated sources, which only increased envy and resentment.” The book’s chapter headings chronicle the history: Fallout, Blacklisted, Backstabbing, Shame and Blame. On a 1998 trip to the World Cup finals in France, the Sunday Mail ran a story headlined Junkie Junket, which was twisted to make it look as if the taxpayer was footing the bill. In fact, the entire cost had been raised by Calton Athletic members. Bryce lays the blame squarely at the door of rival agencies .
In the meantime, Bryce came under enormous personal strain. Within a few years, a nephew, his three sisters and his mother died. Was he ever tempted to seek solace in drink or drugs? “Never,” he says emphatically. “There’s nae reason for me to go back to them days.” He says he owes it to himself, his family and Calton Athletic not to relapse. And he doesn’t want to give his enemies the satisfaction of watching him fall from grace. On top of which: “It would have been a slap in the face to my mother and sisters if I had been drunk at their funerals. I had to handle it with dignity. It didn’t mean I was not hurting. It was hell, but Jeanette was tremendous.”
All of which, however, took its toll on his own health. So consumed was he with Calton Athletic that he’d been neglecting himself physically. When Irvine Welsh met him a few years ago to discuss his book, he feared the worst. Like his sister Ann, Bryce suffered from emphysema. “I wasn’t feeling too clever,” he admits. “At that stage I really believed I was dying. I went to see a consultant and had a biopsy and everything. I told a pal that if I got the right news from the consultant, I’d concentrate on looking after myself. I got the right news and I’ve stuck to it.”
Four years ago, he joined Morrison’s gym and goes there at least three times a week, having stopped smoking after 40 years. He is still director of Calton Athletic Recovery Group and recently helped organise its 20th anniversary dance . Though scaled down, Calton Athletic’s work continues, much as when it was originally conceived, but with considerably more awareness of the problems it faces. According to its records, some 3500 people, one in three of them women, have been weaned off drink and drugs because of the zero tolerance approach: a success rate, Bryce boasts, other agencies can only dream of. He himself has been alcohol-free for 28 years and hasn’t taken drugs for 23 years.
It is testimony to his extraordinary self-discipline. Alas, it is not mirrored elsewhere. He reckons the situation in Glasgow is worse now than when Calton Athletic started. Heroin is no longer the drug of choice; cocaine is king. “There’s four times the number of people using it.” It is a drum he has been beating to an audience wearing ear-plugs. Methadone is still prescribed to addicts with minimal recovery rates. In the meantime, says Davie Bryce, an entire generation of young people has been lost, as it was in the two world wars. It is a national tragedy with no end in sight.
Sunday Herald - 13 November 2005
