When I was a teenager I used to go into Basingstoke town centre on a Saturday afternoon. It was not unlike any other provincial town centre of the 1980s and outside the Wimpy there would normally be an assorted rabble consisting of the various youth tribes of the era. Mostly punks and crusties, a few skinheads and mods, some casuals and metallers too. Also, one or two members of what then seemed to be, and pretty much proved to be, a shrinking cult.
Teddy boys (not so many girls) or teds. While other youth cults have been pored over, had films made about them, books written about them, and lengthy magazine articles dedicated to them, the teds have been pretty much consigned to history. Written off, almost, as a joke. Last night's Sohemian Society talk, Teddy Boys:Post-War Britain and the First Youth Revolution - and the book of the same name by Max Decharne - looks to readdress that.
The Sohemian Society have not hosted an event for over four years, since before the covid lockdown, so it felt like everyone was pleased to be back in Fitzrovia's Wheatsheaf pub. I was a very lucky man as I (a) bagged the very last available ticket on the door (b) ending up sitting next to, and chatting to, Alex MacLaren-Ross, the son of celebrated novelist and renowned dandy Julian MacLaren-Ross, and (c) saw a man riding a penny farthing down the road as I walked to the event.
I didn't, alas, get to chat to former NME and Melody Maker journalist Cathi Unsworth who was sat in front of me or to my friend Dave Fogarty who has been heavily involved with the Sohemians in the past but wasn't attending this event. I also couldn't help thinking of my old mate Pat Still (Pat the Rockin' Maniac, the Swamplord, Pat the Hat) who would have loved this event but passed away (sadly, and untimely, if not entirely surprisingly) eight and half years ago.
Maybe I should have worn a drape coat, a music note jumper, and some brothel creepers and quiffed my hair up with some Black and White hair wax in honour of him. Speaker Max Decharne had done his bit. Decharne, as my friend John Patrick Higgins had correctly said, knew his onions and as singer and songwriter with The Flaming Stars and drummer with Gallon Drunk he's served his time in the musical trenches.
But he's also written some intriguing sounding books:- Beat Your Relatives To A Pulp & Other Stories, Straight From The Fridge, Dad:A Dictionary Of Hipster Slang, and Capital Crimes:Seven Centuries Of London Life & Murder all sound very tempting. Decharne was well informed, interesting, engaging, and often very funny but it wasn't a monologue as such. It was done in the form of a Q&A with Sohemian co-founder Marc Glendening and Marc, quite clearly, had done his homework too. It really helps.
Max began by talking of how he came from a family of rock'n'rollers in Portsmouth (with a rockin' uncle in the badlands of Slough too) and how he'd grown up loving Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley and how some of his formative memories involved teds operating the dodgem cars at local funfairs and blasting out the likes of Del Shannon's Runaway.
Now there's a tune. The teds, to him, seemed impossibly glamorous, almost alien. Back in 1974, fifty years ago, Max visited a local sports shop (run by former England and Chelsea striker Bobby Tambling) and bought his first bootlace tie, one he was wearing last night. On purchasing it, he was told "I hope you're not gonna grow up to be a teddy boy".
Even in 1974, teddy boys were seen as something undesirable to be. But how did working class Brit teenagers (as well as the Irish, teddy boys really took off there) end up wandering around in Edwardian clothes?
After World War II, Britain was a grey, depressing, impoverished nation. There was rationing of food and there was a clothing shortage. People started to look back to the good times and the last really good times were 1901-1910, the reign of Edward VII - before either of the world wars. In France, Christian Dior had latched on to that era for female fashion and soon Savile Row followed suit making Edwardian suits for upper class men and aristocrats.
Both Prince Philip and Cecil Beaton dressed this way but by 1952 the hoi polloi started to ape the fashions and they were able to because they had more money than their parents or grandparents ever dreamed of. So many young men had died in the war that there was a brief period of full employment. An event that led to a demand for, and a demand that was met, for mass immigration from Jamaica and elsewhere.
Not only could the working class man afford nice clothes, they could afford to go out dancing. It rankled with some of the older generation who had never enjoyed these privileges so, predictably - as ever, there was a backlash. Also some backlash from the upper crust who weren't so keen on seeing the lower orders subvert class traditions or mix it up with elements of spiv culture. It was alright for Cab Calloway to dress like that on stage but Gary from Watford shouldn't be walking round the town centre like that. Who does he think he is?
Some were having no truck with these expressions of "working class flash". Until 1953, these fancy dressers were known simply as Edwardians but then a gang fight on Clapham Common ended in a horrible murder and during an Old Bailey trial, a girl in the dock used the term 'teddy boy' to describe somebody - and that was it. The Edwardians and the 'cosh boys' (the previous term for juvenile delinquent gang members) merged into one - the teddy boy.
The teddy boy reputation was further traduced during the 1958 Notting Hill race riots when the fascist leader, and friend of Hitler, Oswald Mosley called them his "teddy legions". Bizarrely, Mosley was compared to Elvis at the time (despite looking more like his mate Adolf) and though some teds undoubtedly did take place in the riots and some indisputably were racist, many were not.
Britain was a very racist society at that time and there were grandmothers and small children rioting alongside various youths. Two of Oswald Mosley's sons were involved in the riot and they certainly weren't teds. The teds took the bulk of the blame for the riots but in fact only played a very small part. As an interesting aside into the racist mindset, Mosley had previously been antisemitic and had blamed the Jews for all of Britain's problems. With the onset of mass immigration from the Caribbean, he quickly pivoted to anti-black racism. Some things, it seem, never change.
With the teds now firmly entrenched as prime tabloid folk devils, they soon started appearing as walk on villains in cheap crime novels although a more sympathetic, nuanced, portrayal of a teddy boy can be found in the form of Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe's 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Karel Reisz's film, two years later, plays down the teddy boy angle as the times had moved on.
The teddy boy taste in music isn't quite as straightforward as you might think either. Teddy boys started appearing on British streets a few years before anyone in the country had heard rock'n'roll. Initially, they were fans of jazz and skiffle, most specifically Lonnie Donegan who was then performing as a member of Chris Barber's jazz band.
Rock'n'roll, of course, incorporated elements of jazz and boogie-woogie and mixed them up with country and when it hit the UK, most prominently in the form of Elvis Presley (who dressed, Decharne memorably said, like a "black Memphis pimp") and Little Richard, it was instantly massive. It was only natural that teddy boys would adopt it as their favourite music. A stance they never really moved away from.
Apart from the large cities the sixties music revolution didn't result in everyone up and down the country dressing like Sergeant Pepper and consuming industrial amounts of LSD and mostly you'd see older, greasier, teds whose hair was growing out a bit and then in the seventies there was a full blown, if sometimes a bit twee, revival.
Mud, Crazy Cavan and the Rhythm Rockers, Showaddywaddy (who'd been on New Faces and whose singer, Dave Bartram, had completely the wrong hair for a ted), Grease (the musical rather than the film), the Rocky Horror Show, That'll Be The Day with former ted Ringo Starr, and Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets who Decharne described as magnificent before going on to mention, quite remarkably, that Shaky used to regularly perform at Communist fundraisers.
Then there was Ted Bovis from Hi-De-Hi. He was even called Ted and though he was old enough to be the father or uncle of the original teddy boys he definitely had the look. He even took the show's theme tune, the rock'n'roll pastiche Holiday Rock, into the top forty. And then the teddy boy era finally began to fade. Replaced by something new and ultimately replaced by our current era where youth culture, for better and worse, is far less tribal than it has been in my lifetime.
Decharne's talk had been brilliant and I've not even mentioned the various other people and events that cropped up:- Sham 69, Joan Collins, Bill Grundy, Peter Rachman, Joseph Goebbels, Laurence Olivier, Danny Kaye, Hancock's Half Hour, Bud Flanagan, Ealing comedies, St.Trinian's, Marlon Brando, Nancy Mitford, George Melly, Ken Russell, Johnny Hallyday, Nick Lowe, The Stray Cats, Cliff Richard, Roy Wood, James Dean, John Peel, Billy Fury, Malcolm McLaren, The Beatles, Buddy Holly, and even Max Bygraves.
Opening up to questions from the audience proved interesting too and brought many more names into the conversation:- Ian Dury, Marc Bolan, Cilla Black, Tony Curtis, Rick Wakeman, The Jam, Eddie & The Hot Rods, Captain Sensible, Jimi Hendrix, The Small Faces, Peter O'Toole. Strictly Come Dancing, Hank Williams, the MC5, the Cramps, X-Ray Spex, Nick Cave, Iris Dement, the Granny Takes A Trip boutique on the King's Road, Oasis, Viv Stanshall, Gene Vincent, Tom Jones, Hellzapoppin', zoot suits, dayglo socks, James Ellroy, occupied Paris, the Walthamstow Young Communist League, Absolute Beginners, Dance With A Stranger, Vivienne Westwood, Ace Records, Thin Lizzy, the Horse Hospital, and Vince Taylor And His Playboys playing a gig at the Bournemouth Conservative Club.
Phew! It was a lot to take in but it was invigorating and inspiring rather than tiring. What happened to the teddy boys and the teddy girls? In most cases, they grew up, got married, and raised families. But their legacy is kept in people's private photo albums up and down the country and some of them, even to this day, visit holiday resorts out of season, put on the old clothes and dance the night away to rock'n'roll because, as with punk, the key factor in all of this was the feeling of liberation, of being able to dress however you like, dance however you like, and be whoever you want to be while still feeling part of something bigger. That's a feeling that will always stay with you. Rave on, it's a crazy feelin'.
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