This is a feud told by the man who started the fighting. It comes from Killer, the memoir of the Liverpool villain Charlie Seiga, and it begins with a man he only ever calls the Dog.
The Dog
Seiga had known the Hughes brothers since they were kids in Huyton. By his account they were the best firm in Liverpool at the time, with several successful nightclubs, and the respect ran both ways. The trouble was the company they kept.
One night at the Hollywood club on Duke Street, the Dog bought Seiga a drink and kept asking about a friend of his. Later, at a club on Hope Street, Seiga learned the Dog wanted that friend to sit round a table with the Hughes brothers and drop an old quarrel. The friend refused. When the Dog came back from the bar he started getting sarcastic, and Seiga knocked him out cold. He apologised to the club's owner. "It was either me or him," he writes.
The Yew Tree
A few days later Seiga's young nephew was attacked by men who said they were looking for him. One of them said he was going to shoot him. Seiga was sure the Dog had gone back to the Hughes brothers and twisted the story. "Nobody's gonna hunt me," he writes. "I'll go and hunt them."
With his three brothers and his nephew he bought a van and went looking. When word came that the men were all together in the Yew Tree pub in Huyton, they went in armed. Seiga carried a hammer and a meat cleaver with the handle strapped to his wrist, because the worst thing you can do in a fight like that, he says, is drop your weapon. Two men ended up in hospital with their hands nearly cut off. One of them was the Dog.
Risley
Seiga was arrested, charged with wounding with intent and remanded to HMP Risley. In prison brown and unshaven, he was given a spoonful of beans at breakfast and told to clear off by the prisoner serving it, who took him for a tramp. He beat the man with his steel tray. When the case reached court the police's only witness, a barmaid, would not give evidence against him, and he was freed for lack of evidence.
The truce
A couple of weeks later his car was rammed outside the Adelphi Hotel. He was stabbed in the leg and a bullet grazed his stomach. "A good contract killer would put one in your head," he writes.
In the end Seiga sat down with Billy and Bobby Hughes. They agreed the feud was pointless and parted on good terms, and he still called Bobby Hughes one of his good friends. Not long after, the Hughes brothers and their firm were caught by armed police raiding a sorting office, and they all got long sentences.