Ian Francis, of Watford, recognised his younger self in a picture of Mods on scooters published several weeks ago.

He writes: "When I was a Mod I was known by everyone as FAN and I am still called that when I bump into people now. The person with the big smile is me on my two-week-old scooter, with my Mod street clothes on as I could not afford the parker until next pay day (this was 1964).

"Just a couple of things on the music side is when The Who first came to Watford they were known as The High Numbers, they changed their name about a year later. One of the band who used to go down a bomb was Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band, these and The Who were adopted as our Watford groups, even though they didn't come from Watford.

We used to go to the West End after the Trade Union visiting clubs like The Scene, The Last Chance and the Flamingo Club this one was mainly Blue Beat. We went to the opening of the largest in London at the time in Oxford Street but I can't remember the name, if anyone can help I would be grateful.

"Still on the music front, a few of us went to the Finsbury Park Theatre as The Beatles were on there, but we could not afford a ticket so we thought we would hang around. We were by the stage door when a limo pulled up and The Beatles ran out and got in; we jumped on our scooters and gave chase. We got alongside them going all round these back streets, so they opened the window and had a chat. After a few minutes we came out onto the main road and they turned and drove the six or seven hundred yards to the theatre, then up the main steps of the theatre, jumped out and ran in, all for publicity.

"We used to go to the coast, on the famous bank holiday weekends for the Mod/Rocker thing, going to Hastings, Clacton, Bognor and, the most well-known, Brighton. About 40 scooters used to leave Watford in one line when the roads in the town were two-way. When the first scooter had turned down Beechen Grove from Clarendon Road, the last scooter had only left the Wimpy Bar opposite Cawdells.

"We used to meet up with Mods from other areas and, in the end, just from the London area there would be around 300 people. The papers made it worse than it really was, we did have some agro but most of the time it was a lot of hot air.

"We were on the front page of the Daily Mirror once, with one unnamed person, standing on Brighton Pavillion with a deck chair above his head and two rockers hanging from the railings below (small drop), his dad was a Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police. The film Quadrophenia nearly had it right but I think they should have come to us first."