Guy Fawkes Night: Tyre Raids, Bonfire Battles and the Worst Guy Ever

Before health and safety, before helicopter parenting, there was Guy Fawkes Night in 1960s Swansea. For anyone outside the UK wondering what any of this is about: in 1605 a Catholic man named Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament and got caught before he could light the fuse. Fawkes was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, rather than burned at the stake, as the bonfire tradition sometimes leads people to assume. Every year since, on the 5th of November, Britain has marked his failure with bonfires and fireworks. Somewhere along the way it stopped being about Fawkes at all and turned into an excuse for enormous fires and controlled explosions, which is roughly how most of Britain still treats it today. If Christmas was for families and Easter was for church, then Guy Fawkes Night was for absolute, unrepentant mayhem. It wasn't about fireworks so much as warfare. A turf war waged with stolen tyres and matches, a weeks-long campaign to out-burn, out-steal, and outwit the…