Confectionary Conflicts

Probably the tales you hear from fellow residents are the best gauge of any city. Those anecdotes add heft and weight to one’s own suppositions, and sometimes provide startling conclusions to stories you’d already made up about the place where you live…

We have frequently mused over the fact that the ice cream trucks drive around here ALL year ’round, and generally at eight or nine at night, come winter — which to us was just mighty strange. Our friend K. said Glaswegian friends of hers mentioned that winter ice cream trucks were likely selling Bovril – the salty meat broth that’s been selling since the 1870’s — and smokes. Being snarky and living in a sort of borderline neighborhood at the time, we assumed that it was smokes they were selling, all right, just possibly a different variation of herb. Turns out, while we were being sarcastic, we were more right than we knew. Back in the 80’s, Glasgow indeed had ice cream vans selling drugs — which led to madness and mayhem. Glasgow had … Ice Cream Wars.

We have The War on Drugs in the U.S., which necessitates beagles sniffing our luggage in the SF airport; in Glasgow, they had a gelato garda mockingly called the Special Chimes Unit (instead of Special Crimes Unit) which consisted of the Strathclyde Police in patrol cars, following all the tinny-music-playing ice cream trucks around town, trying to catch them in the act of selling drugs and fencing stolen goods (and protecting them from rival ice cream vendors, who happened to be carrying shotguns).

That must have been a bottom-of-the-barrel assignment. Rookie: “What’s my job today, Chief?” Chief: “Well, go out to the squad car, roll down the window, and …listen…”

People actually laughed about this, at first. There were reports of the usual nonsense people get up to during drug wars, but most of it was vehicular-related – windshield bashing and van raids, and ramming and cursing and screaming and fistfights in the street, much of which is all in a day’s work in parts of Glasgow. And then in 1984 a young man was killed – along with four other members of his family, in a house fire allegedly set by rival ice cream men.

People in the city were incensed, of course, and screamed for justice. The police, under pressure, rounded up a whole bunch of people. The story concluded in 2004 – after twenty years of trials and accusations and protests and hunger strikes – in their zeal to arrest, the police picked up at least a couple who continued to insist on their innocence. You can read all the details in the BBC archives, if you’re of a mind to…

…but as time moves on, most people want to forget such ugly things about their city. Which is why, this afternoon, when an ice cream truck playing Yankee Doodle went ’round our crescent, people followed it, blowing their horns until it pulled over. Parked, it was mobbed by the kids who’d abandoned their games in the park. No police, and no frowning faces around the ice cream truck.

Just a little sugar on a muggy afternoon.