This is a very unfortunate incident, not least that its nearly on my doorstep, and Little Pete (the lad in whose memory this pub night was being held) is someone I’d consider as a friend but sadly I never really got to know him that well as he lost his life at a very young age, and had stopped hanging around with a lot of the younger crowd because their events ended up in incidents like this.
Added to these issues, Police profiling these days and the 20 year age difference between myself and many of my younger friends will easily get me suspected once again of being a middle level dealer (it happened when I live in another area of England), and as much as I disagree with the profiling I can understand why it is done in the wake of various incidents in 2006.
What is worse is that the Earl Kitchener was not a disused pub (the only time I’ve been to an “illegal rave” in a pub in SE England would be because my mates hd squatted it), it is a perfectly normal licensed pub that gets a positive mention on Suffolk CAMRA for actually selling real ale and its landlords would not have knowingly contravened licensing regulations.
Indeed the clientele were relatively well behaved in there and the venue “kept itself to itself” to the point I didn’t know it existed until now!
Fighting in licensed premises is illegal anyway, as the lad up before Court has found out the hard way, and that it happened might hint at poor event management skills, but its worrying that the event would be judged as an “illegal rave”….
Ipswich: Attack accused claims he was at Earl Kitchener on night of alleged assualt to pay his respects to Peter Ralph, whose body was found in river – News – Ipswich Star
