There was nothing new about the armed, usually territorially-based and peer-influenced gangs in evidence at the end of the 1940s. Germanic war bands of the 1st century BC are described by Julius Caesar, who comments on a refusal to answer the call of the leader as being tantamount to desertion or treason and a sign of untrustworthiness.29 Tacitus, writing in the following century, describes the more formally organised Germanic comitatus as consisting of a chief surrounded by armed youths who vie amongst themselves for his favour: ‘It is [the chiefs’] dignity, their strength, to be always surrounded with a large body of select youth, an ornament in peace, a bulwark in war’.30 There are obvious echoes of the phenomenon, which is very unlikely to have originated as locally and as recently as the time of Julius Caesar, in, for example, the Old English heroic poem Beowulf, the Arthurian legends and in Tolstoy’s The Cossacks (1863). In the mediaeval period, the Vikings and the crusaders fall into the loose category of young armed fighters, united as much by their thirst for adventure as by their loyalty to a chief or their belief in a principle.
The first Teddy Boys had been exposed to notions of fierce group pride and loyalty in the stories brought back from two world wars, in which regiments,31 squadrons, ship’s companies and battalions were units in permanent rivalry with one another over questions of smartness, courage, dash and kills. Cricket, rugby and above all football teams32 provided another focus for local loyalty and identity, as
28 Frederick Peter Carroll, aged 74, interviewed in Ray FERRIS & Julian LORD, Teddy Boys:
A Concise History, Preston: Milo Books, 2012, p. 48.
29 ‘[Q]ui ex his secuti non sunt, in desertorum ac proditorum numero ducuntur, omniumque his rerum postea fides derogatur’. (Caesar, De Bello Gallico VI 23.)
30 ‘[H]aec dignitas, hae vires: magno semper electorum iuvenum globo circumdari in pace decus, in bello praesidium’. (Tacitus, Germania XIII.) See also D. H. Green, Language and History in the Early Germanic World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 102-120.
31 Recruitment into county regiments had been de-territorialised in 1916, not for reasons of rivalry, but in an attempt to mask casualty figures.
32 The idolised footballer, ex-German paratrooper Bert Trautmann, who was the Manchester City goal keeper 1949-1964, presented supporters with something of a problem in terms of identification. However, his skill, sportsmanship and personality transcended all forms of initial prejudice.
did districts, individual streets, pubs and clubs. Humphries lists more than a dozen 19th- and early 20th-century street gangs, including The Scuttlers (Manchester, late 1870s onwards); The Ikey Boys (Manchester, early 1890s onwards); Napoo33 (Ancoats, Manchester, 1916); The Beehive (Gorbals, Glasgow, 1920s) and The Nudies (all female, Gorbals, Glasgow, 1930s).34 Given this very long—and no doubt world-wide—tradition, the dreary and violent post-war urban context and the absence of a national emergency to which energy and courage could be devoted, the formation of Teddy Boys into gangs (or was it more a case of existing gangs’
adoption of the Teddy Boy look?) is easy to understand. Donald Thomas identifies the following 1950s London street gangs: The Diamond Gang (Islington); The Eagle Gang (Stepney); The Brick Gang (Bermondsey); The Watney Streeters (Stepney);
The Dagenham Boys; The Canning Town Boys; The Finchley Mob and The Mussies (Muswell Hill).35 There were doubtless countless others, named or not, throughout the country. Nor was the movement confined to Britain: Russia had its contemporary Stilyagi (‘style-hunters’). German Halbstarken (‘half-strong ones’) came into evidence in 1955-1956, French Blousons noirs (‘black jackets’) first appeared in 1959 and Scandinavian Raggare (‘shaggies’) were a late 1950s calque on American hot-rod subculture. However, Britain’s working class youths had taken the lead, presumably thanks to the peculiar circumstances Britain found itself in, as outlined above.
What prompted the particular costume and bearing of the Teds? Here, great care must be taken in distinguishing between the dress of the very first Teddy Boys and subsequent developments during the 1950s and particularly during the revival of the 1970s. Original Teddy Boys, now in their 1970s, interviewed by Ray Ferris and Julian Lord,36 have very precise memories of their choice of apparel in the early 1950s and are at pains to stress the importance they attached to appearing smart. The
‘New Edwardian’ look was, at the outset, a late 1940s Savile Row style for the well-to-do, noticed and copied by working class youths all over the country who, by working long hours and saving, could afford to have Edwardian style fingertip-length drape jackets and high-waisted peg trousers with 15-inch bottoms (tight for the times) made up by local tailors using good quality material. Velvet collars or pockets were not part of the earliest four-button drape jackets, which were often dog-tooth grey or windowpane-checked or raindrop-flecked. They had to have a one-piece back and, in contrast to the relatively sober outer colour, a ‘flash’ silk lining, crimson being a favourite, with a breast-pocket handkerchief to match. Great importance was attached to a showy brocade waistcoat, often worn with a fob watch and chain, over a white shirt with a cutaway collar and a Slim Jim tie tied in a Windsor knot. White, yellow or pale blue socks were kept visible thanks to the trousers being made slightly short, while shoes were either highly polished lace-up or buckle brothel creepers with 1-inch crêpe soles, heavy brogues, chukka (fawn suede desert) boots or mud-guard slip-ons. In the early years, sideburns were no
33 Napoo is First World War military slang, being an approximation of the ‘Il n’y a plus’ all too often heard in French and Belgian estaminets.
34 Steve HUMPHRIES, A Secret World of Sex, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988, p. 142.
35 Donald THOMAS, Villains’ Paradise: Britain’s Underworld from the Spivs to the Krays, London: John Murray, 2005, pp. 169-226.
36 Ray FERRIS & Julian LORD, op cit, pp. 41-53.
more than ear-bottom length, though hair was medium to long (by the standards of the times), Brylcreemed37 and combed into a quiff and a D.A. (‘duck’s arse’) at the back. The whole outfit could cost around £40, which, for a young lad earning less than £7 a week, represented a considerable outlay, and was a spectacular change from the late 40s, when ‘the working class wore any sort of trousers and a muffler, whatever you could get, really’.38 Girls seeking to identify with the Teds also wore black or biscuit-coloured drape jackets and narrow, calf-length skirts (American circle skirts with stiff petticoats came later). The fact that there was never a really clearly defined female equivalent to the Teddy Boy is probably due to the fact that throughout the 1950s, a female industrial worker could still only earn on average 59% of a male worker’s wage:39 the expensive clothes so important to the boys were largely out of her reach.
The emphasis was clearly on a provocative display of quality and splendour, echoing the late Victorian and Edwardian figure of the mashers, flirtatious, dandified lady-killers, renowned, inter alia, for their showy waistcoats40 and signalling an impatient rejection of the upper classes’ monopoly of taste and the older generation’s lack of awareness of the growing financial and social importance of people aged between 14 and 21. What was perhaps felt, rather than consciously thought, by older middle- and upper-class people as being deviant and subversive about the Teddy Boys was their flagrant arrogation of a style well above their social status, a move which threatened to disrupt a class system which had not changed significantly since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Other youths outside the movement might have been seen the Teddy Boys as ‘flash’, but any accusations of foppishness or effeminacy were forestalled by their frequent recourse to violence—something they had in common with all street subcultures. It was this blend of elegance and brutality—a sort of beauty-and-the-beast rolled into one—that suited them and gave them their special aura and guaranteed their place in social history. It is remarkable that the whole thing appears to have started up simultaneously in many cities, neither the brainchild of any one astute designer, nor the product of an organised fashion industry.
‘There was fighting, lots of it’
41Juvenile delinquency was not a new phenomenon,42 but it had come to the fore during the war years, opportunities for armed robbery, vandalism, looting and
37 Brylcreem was a pomade brought out by County Chemicals of Birmingham, UK in 1928.
Its popularity among RAF personnel and in particular fighter and bomber pilots, led them to be referred to as Brylcreem Boys. The later ample use of it by the Teddy Boys was perhaps an unconscious attempt to recapture something of the glamour of war heroes.
38 Frederick Peter Carroll, aged 74, interviewed by Ray FERRIS & Julian LORD, op. cit., p. 46.
39 David KYNASTON, op. cit., p. 573.
40 Eric PARTRIDGE, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1970 (1937), p. 511.
41 Joe Goulding, aged 77, interviewed in Ferris and Lord, op. cit., p. 43: ‘There was fighting, lots of it. I used to carry a “clever stick”; it was a cosh, either slung around my left shoulder on a loop of string or in an inside pocket. You didn’t go into town less than three-handed.’
ups presenting themselves to unsupervised and de-schooled youths and children.43 East-End London saw repeated post-war attacks on younger boys attending clubs by gangs of up to seventy sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old boys and girls armed with hammers, razors, knives, knuckledusters and bicycle chains. Violent crime, often unmotivated by robbery and involving young offenders, some of whom were under sixteen, was increasing at the rate of nearly 30% per year, while punishment was often relatively light, despite the controversial severity of the Lord Chief Justice, Baron Raynor Goddard, who set out to curb the juvenile crime wave by handing out longer sentences in compensation for the abolition of corporal punishment in the unpopular Criminal Justice Act of 1948.44
The use of firearms between rival teenage gangs was first reported in April 1950, following a street brawl in Kilburn in which an eighteen-year-old was charged with attempted murder. Yet the motivations for the new brand of street warfare seem to have been the bid for superiority over other gangs, possession of territory and the fun of vandalism and violence—all reminiscent of the legitimised perks of wartime—than particular financial gain. Rightly or wrongly, murder came to be associated in the public mind with Teddy Boys as a result of the shooting of a police constable and the wounding of another, apparently by the sixteen-year-old Christopher Craig, embittered younger brother of a man nicknamed ‘The Velvet Kid’ recently sentenced to twelve years in prison for armed robbery. Dressed as Teddy Boys, Craig and his accomplice, the nineteen-year-old mentally retarded Derek Bentley, had set out one Sunday evening, without any burglar’s equipment or a specific target, to commit a break-in in Croydon. Their fatal encounter with the police was reported in the Daily Mail of 3 November 1952 under the sensational and wildly inaccurate headline ‘Chicago Gun Battle in London—Gangsters with Machine Gun on Roof Kill Detective, Wound Another’. Amid national protest, on account of his sub-normality and his having already been apprehended when the shooting occurred, Bentley was hanged on 28 January 1953. Craig, too young for the death sentence and who had subsequently thrown himself off the roof in a spectacular suicide attempt, served a ten-year prison sentence. The case was fraught with ambiguities and controversy and bore the marks of a demonstration of unbending severity in the face of growing juvenile delinquency. Among the results of this were a public discrediting of the Lord Chief Justice, further call for the abolition of the death sentence, the elevation, in some quarters, of Bentley to the
42 An illustration of street gang warfare of the type recalled by Ferris and Lord’s interviewees is given by Clarence Rook in his entertaining—if doubtfully authentic—account of the activities of a young street-wise, small-time East-End criminal. Alf, the protagonist, recounts the following, just before showing the narrator the ‘handy-looking chopper’ he has brought along, in readiness for ‘a bit of a street fight’: ‘The Drury Lane Boys were coming across the bridge, and had engaged to meet the boys from Lambeth Walk at a coffee stall on the other side. Then one of the Lambeth Boys would make to one of the Drury Lane boys a remark which cannot be printed, but never fails to send the monkey of a Drury Lane boy a considerable way up the pole. Whereafter the Drury Lane boys would fall upon the Lambeth boys and the Lambeth boys would give them what for’. (Clarence ROOK, The Hooligan Nights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979 [1899], p. 12.)
43 Donald THOMAS, op. cit., pp. 165-170.
44 Flogging was, however, still permitted as a punishment for mutiny and serious assault by convicts (ibid., p. 175).
status of folk-hero and, most damaging to the reputation of Teddy Boys, a reinforcement of an abusive popular conflation, encouraged, and arguably created by the press, of Teds, spivs, thugs, low intelligence juvenile delinquents and murderers.45 It seemed as if post-war Britain had found the scapegoat for its ills. The question now was one of whether or not Teddy Boys would fall into the role attributed to them by increasingly resorting to extreme violence amongst themselves and in their confrontations with authority.
Later that year, the well-known Clapham Common fight between members of two rival gangs resulted in the stabbing to death of seventeen-year-old John Beckley, but no conviction was made, owing to confusion as to who actually inflicted the fatal wounds in the mêlée. In the subsequent debate on the growing menace from juvenile delinquents, the educationalist G. A. Lyward portrayed them as ‘under-individualised’ and ‘confused conformists’,46 both of which labels hint at a form of abdication or surrender of the personality, with a concomitant insensitivity to the suffering of others. One striking fact about all subcultures, be they of the politically engineered variety, such as the German Hitlerjugend and the Chinese Red Guards, the fashion variety, such as Teddy Boys and Skinheads, or the machine-oriented variety, such as Rockers and Scooter Boys, is the prevailing conformity in appearance, tastes, posturing, speech and activities among group adherents. It seems probable that the increasingly extreme costume of the 1950s Teddy Boys and their violence were at one and the same time a cause and a consequence of their being ostracised. The so-called Notting Hill ‘riots’ in the late summer of 1958 were in fact an eight-day violent confrontation between white youths—predominantly Teddy Boys—and members of the West-Indian immigrant population. The extensive press coverage and the stiff sentences of up to five years’ imprisonment for causing grievous bodily harm, rioting and the possession of offensive weapons that were handed out in the aftermath did not improve the Teddy Boys’ reputation or their own love of authority.
The numerous instances of shocking, gratuitous Teddy Boy violence during the 1950s described by Thomas47 leave little room for sentimentality, suggesting as they do that the portrayal of the group as a social menace had come to be at least partially justified. The question of whether the violence would have erupted in any case, had the Teds not existed is impossible to answer. However, it should be remembered that, parallel to the ascendancy of the Teds, premeditated crimes of a much more sinister nature were being committed by increasingly powerful and vicious gangs such as those of Billy Hill, the Richardsons and the young Krays. The fact remains that the Teddy Boys did not slip en masse into organised crime, preferring the more romanticised, popular, sulky-rowdy, rebellious Marlon Brando-image. Moreover, in contrast to the professional criminal gangs, for whom extreme violence was part of their stock-in-trade, the Teddy Boys were very numerous,
45 The unfortunate, ongoing confusion of spivs and Teds is evident from photographs of 1954 Teddy Boys labelled spivs in Adrian HORN, Juke box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945-60, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009, pp. 120-121.
46 Quoted in Donald THOMAS, op. cit., p. 217.
47 Ibid., pp. 219-239.
disorganised and widely dispersed, with a particularly violent and sadistic minority achieving national prominence, mainly thanks to the sensational press, while the majority indulged in sporadic fighting in dance-halls and in the street, as youths always have done. Things might have got a lot worse, but for the fact that the attention of the essentially fun-loving Teds was distracted by a new form of demotic music, which provided a (relatively) harmless outlet, not only for youthful high spirits and sexual energy, but also for violent tendencies and gave expression to the overwhelming desire to break away once and for all from the attitudes and inhibitions of the foregoing generations. The mix of Teddy Boys-cum-folk-devils plus this new music would scandalise many observers and lead to more sensational media coverage. In fact, the pop-music industry was gearing up in 1955-1956 to hand the Teds—at a price—a gigantic pacifier in the form of rock and roll.
‘Elvis set us free’
48The music of the late 1940s and early 1950s dance-halls was principally that of the big bands such as those of Ted Heath and Joe Loss or their imitators, while records of crooners such as Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine and homespun balladeers such as Dickie Valentine, Ronnie Hilton and Ruby Murray were all that was available on the popular music market, of which, Lewis says that ‘it was a reassuring world of sentimental conformism that was presented to the young, for the most part by singers old enough to be their fathers. […] The music was too languid to support anything but a slow smoochy fox-trot or occasionally a stiff-tempo quick-step’.49
Britain was initiated to American rock and roll music via the cinema: the opening credits and opening and closing scenes of Richard Brooks’ film Blackboard Jungle, released in March 1955 were accompanied by the throbbing drumbeat and bass, saxophone and electric guitar of Bill Hayley and his Comets playing ‘Rock around the Clock’, a previously released, though not particularly successful, B-side number. Through its association with rebellious, violent, disaffected, urban working class youth portrayed in the film, rather than its own merits, the song, which like all rock and roll was a hybrid of country music and black rhythm and blues, shot to the top of the charts and remained there for five months, selling twenty-two million copies over the following two years. The first showing in London’s Trocadero cinema the following year prompted instant rioting, vandalism and dancing inside and outside the cinema, in all of which Teddy Boys and their girls were prominent.
The scenario was repeated, leading to the banning of the film in many cities throughout the UK. It was from this moment on that ‘Edwardians’ and ‘Edwardian clothing’ started to be systematically banned from cinemas and dance halls in major
The scenario was repeated, leading to the banning of the film in many cities throughout the UK. It was from this moment on that ‘Edwardians’ and ‘Edwardian clothing’ started to be systematically banned from cinemas and dance halls in major