Throughout the post-war era, Britain witnessed unquestionable improvements to living standards through full employment and comprehensive welfare provisions, which mainly benefitted the young.[1] Young people in the 1960s were perceived to be iconic figures, not only because of what they achieved but how they personified so many issues of society.[2] To outline what this essay means by ‘young people’, Mark Abrams’s comprehensive definition asserts that youth was limited ‘from the time they leave school until they marry or reach 25’.[3] Throughout this period some young people organised themselves into a succession of youth sub-cultures: the Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers. In an analysis of three videos from ATV Today and Midlands News from the Media Archive for Central England (MACE), this essay will explore how these youth sub-cultures were presented in the media by news programmes from the 1950s to the 1970s. The first clip is a recording from Midlands News on a Ted’s speech at the Teddy Boys Conference, who wants to form a youth association, first broadcast on 3 November 1958.[4] The second video from ATV Today examines Teddy Boys in Birmingham after the post-war era shown in 17 August 1973.[5] The final footage, also from ATV Today, investigates the tensions between the Mods and Rockers after the recent disturbances, aired on 28 September 1965.[6] All three clips reveal the growth of youth sub-cultures within the post-war era, or at the very least amongst those in the Midlands.
The 1950s and 1960s were both the outcome and personification of the wider cultural as well as social changes. Before the 1960s men were expected to get a job, get married, have children and live a happy life.[7] The departure of this societal expectation enabled young men to have the freedom to experience their youth. Moreover, this notion of new-found youth was motivated by the increase of real earnings unconstrained by the responsibility to contribute to the overall family wage. Certainly, young male manual workers benefited the most from this change.[8] Whilst young men witnessed a transformation in disposable income, young women’s jobs within domestic service were replaced with clerical work, which expanded to employ in 1964 nearly 40 per-cent of girls aged 15 to 17.[9] Despite this expansion, young women continued to earn less than their male peers. Yet, most young people had sufficient spending money, and the newly created ‘teenage girl’ became vital to the success of the consumer market.[10] Evidently, the freedom from the expectation from contributing to the family encouraged young people to spend their money on consumer goods. However, Mike Brown argues that some families still relied on their children wages.[11] This suggests that not all teenagers experienced complete freedom to spend their wages as they pleased. Nevertheless, it did signify a difference from the austerity witnessed during the previous decade, when it would have been considered sheer luxury not to contribute to the family income. Therefore, teenagers had limited freedom to spend their wages on consumer items. Although consumerism was not a new concept in the post-war era, Britain’s position within world trading had declined with the domestic consumer market becoming progressively dominant to the economy.[12] Instead of buying ‘white goods’ (televisions and fridges) which had dominated adult consumerism in the 1950s, teenagers now spent their money on records and clothes.[13] The development of consumerism which propelled an affluent society combined with the emerging youth sub-cultures was vital to the transformation of the teenager. Though, Richard Grayson maintains that the affluent teenager was problematic for several reasons: ‘it made young people less subject to parental control, as they became financially independent at a younger age and it promoted a sense of individualism focused on material acquisition’.[14] Yet Selina Todd discredits this by contending that post-war teenagers were ‘not constructed by the popular or social investigator but by the aspirations of working-class parents’.[15] Evidently, the encouragement from parents demonstrates that they supported the active nature of youth culture. Although both historians disagree over whether teenagers were perceived to have a positive impact on society, they do agree that the concept of the teenager had been firmly established by the post-war era. Ultimately, the framing of young people as consumers in conjunction with being involved in youth culture as a social problem has focused on the moral and cultural disorder.
Teddy Boys were the first collective youth sub-culture to make their mark with defiance and anger, thus promoting moral panic with society as well as the media.[16] Teddy Boys in the early 1950s wore clothes that were intended for young upper-class men. Nevertheless, Tony Jefferson noted the adoption of the upper-class style as representative of an illogical ideal from the Teddy Boys, ‘who were destined for lower paid jobs and manual labour’ but attempted to raise their status through buying clothes.[17] Hence this suggests that Teddy Boys were predominately from working-class backgrounds and were ambitious to move up social classes. Indeed, Arthur Marwick argues that, despite their intentions for social mobility, it was only (the later) Mod style that spread up the class structure, whereas Teds were excluded.[18] Failure of the Teddy Boys to utilise social mobility demonstrates that not all youth sub-cultures could disguise their class origins. Furthermore, this confirms that Teds could not promote social progress unlike other youth groups, thus this group was not as influential as previously thought. Regardless of this, Teddy Boys began to emerge in the media in the early 1950s, with the first mention within the press being in The Times on 25 June 1954, describing how ‘a 13-year old boy who established a reign of terror and carved the initials T.B (Teddy Boy) with a knife on the arms of four schoolmates’.[19] This concept that a Teddy Boy cut into the flesh of his ‘innocent’ victims conveys a powerful image, which strongly enforced the idea of the delinquent youth in 1950s mainstream culture.[20] The media played a vital role in cultivating this troublesome image through describing the moral and cultural disorder in their reports which focused on Teddy Boys’ actions of criminality, violence and sexual promiscuity. Indeed, the speech by a Ted at the ‘Teddy Boy Conference’ captured by Midlands News on 3 November 1958 revealed how the group would gather on ‘street corners and be moved on by the police’.[21] Though this broadcast provides an insight into how the sub-culture came to be associated with troublemakers, it also highlights how the Teddy Boys wanted to be more organsied into a collective group. The Ted speaker further claims how they want to ‘form an association including our friends at Leamington and other places, we will be as one body’.[22] Midlands News’s coverage of the Teddy Boy Conference is similar to the national press, with both reports revealing how the Teds have been perceived to be a problem within society. Both reports have publicised the disorder created by the Teddy Boys. Yet the Midlands News report does differ from the national news by presenting an alternative stance of the Teds, aspiring to belong to a united youth sub-culture, which indicates the intention for them to be not only considered more influential within society but to also distance themselves from the troublemaker persona that the national and to an extent regional media has created.
However, this call for unity in 1957 came at a time when Teddy Boys were in decline, as tastes in fashion had changed and the popularity of the group was being overshadowed by the emergence of the Mods and Rockers.[23] Despite the decline of Teddy Boys, ATV in January 1973 confirmed that Teddy Boys continued to be a functioning group within Birmingham. Reporter Chris Tarrant exposed how the Teddy Boys, or rather now men, continued to embrace the fashion identity and distanced from modern fashion. By the 1970s the majority of people who partook in youth sub-cultures had got married and settled down ‘like everyone else’.[24] Whilst most of the older Teds in the report are married, they continue to a part of this group. The continual existence of the Teddy Boys even after its heyday confirms that the Ted movement continued to be appealing. Indeed, ATV Today and Midlands News’s coverage of the Teddy Boys confirms that they were a popular topic in both television and newspapers, even after the post-war era. Although ATV presented their pieces on the Teds as cultural, they also confirm how this youth culture continued to be influential despite the growing and eventual surpassing of the Mods and Rockers. Midlands News’s use of revealing a different narrative of the Teds highlights that the group had support from both its members and some of society, at a time when the movement was generally opposed. Moreover, the coverage of the Teds being influential validates the purpose of the Teds of not what they did, but the importance of popularising their youth culture and the ones that followed. Although the media focused on the Teds creating moral and cultural disorder, their actions were not as dramatic as those depicted in the clashes between the Mod and Rockers.
For many people, they find it impossible to talk about the Mods without also discussing their famous rivals, the Rockers. Mod culture developed in the early 1960s and by 1964 the embodiment of what had become associated with continental culture and fashion had been replaced by the more widely known second incarnation. This version of Mod became instantly recognisable within youth sub-cultures. The typical second-wave Mod wore a smart shirt, short boxed-shaped jacket, narrow trousers, gleaming black boots and hair cropped neatly.[25] In comparison, the Rockers took their inspiration from America. They wore leather jackets, often with metal studs, white t-shirts, tight blue jeans, cowboy boots and wore their hair long and greasy.[26] Yet the differences in appearance also extended to geographical and class divisions. Although both groups emerged during the early 1960s from London suburbs, the Mods started from a small group of fashion-conscious teenagers in North London, whereas the Rocker originated predominantly from South London.[27] Therefore, both groups were distinctly opposite in almost every way, apart from their intention to partake in youth sub-cultures. By 1962-3 the Mods and Rockers divisions already existed, but by 1964 this had greatly intensified.[28] The lack of amicability between the two groups, signified partly the typical gang rivalries, but also the genuine class division. To the middle-class Mods, the Rockers were backwards, primitive and uncouth; to the working-class Rockers, the Mods were pretentious, precious and effeminate.[29] This division can readily be found in both newspaper and television reports. Daily Mail reporter Brian Saxton revealed that a Rocker described Mods as ‘lots of sissies. Some of them wear make-up. Right lot of pansies they are! Rockers hate Mods-nothing serious mind you’.[30] Although Saxton highlights the divisions between the groups, the Rockers downplay that it is serious, thus suggesting it is more of a rivalry. Indeed, the ATV report on ‘Cheltenham Mods and Rockers’ shown in September 1965, at the height of the division, also supports this notion with a Rocker stating, ‘Mods put lipstick on their face. They’re pansies’.[31] Both regional and national news confirm that the Rockers belittled the status of Mods within youth sub-culture. The ATV report focuses on the reactions to the recent disputes in the Montpellier district of Cheltenham. Both groups claim that the other started the fight with the Rockers claiming that ‘ten Mods beat up a Rocker’, whilst the Mods maintain that ‘we don’t cause any trouble, but then the greasers started causing trouble, kicking scooters, pushing around smaller people than them’.[32] The ATV report concentrates on sensationalising this incident through capturing the hostility to strengthen the perception that youth sub-cultures were a negative aspect of society. This national and regional youth debate can be viewed as another way of discussing the post-war society.[33] Yet this youth debate intensified with the increased clashes between both groups both on locally and nationally.
Many of the media reports relating to the clashes in seaside towns were greatly exaggerated. This is supported by Dominic Sandbrook, who argues that most teenagers caught up in the Clacton conflict of April 1964 had not come to fight, but to wander around with ‘the intention of meeting girls’; they were bored and directionless rather than crazed and looking to fight.[34] Evidently, the moral panics generated from the exaggeration of supposed disturbances like Clacton were not so much about the Mods and Rockers dispute, but about the post-war affluence and sexual freedom they represented.[35] Rockers were left behind from this post-war affluence: they were unfashionable and unglamorous because they appeared to be class-bound. Imagery projected by the media conveyed them as thugs which they had inherited from the Teds; in comparison, Mods were seen to the lead youth sub-cultures.[36] Hence Mods were considered by themselves and society to be superior to the Rockers. Regardless of this opposition, both groups were responsible for facilitating thousands of young men and women to mobilise to create the first successful collective geographical youth sub-cultures in Britain.[37] Whilst the expression of Mods was real enough, the commercial exploitation of fashion and television programmes such as Ready Steady Go! enabled them to dominant.[38] The dominance of this youth sub-culture encouraged the Mods to become a wide spread national movement which not only inspired fashion and television programmes but also enabled ordinary people to participate. For many young people like Marilyn who identified a Mod, her involvement was based on the ‘music and fashion’ she enjoyed, and not because she was involved in the disputes with the Rockers.[39] Clearly, this account demonstrates Marilyn enjoying her youth and being on the edge of Mod sub-culture. Hence enjoyment in conjunction with freedom was central to the popular memory of 1960s youth sub-culture. This is supported by Becky Conekin, who contends how this sub-culture offered a ‘more complex subcultural opportunity for girls’ mainly because it was located within working-class teenage consumerism.[40] Most youngsters who linked themselves with these sub-cultures were manufactured by consumerism rather than the rebellion, and their main interests, therefore, reflect those dominant values and are no means are in opposition.[41] Consequently, this dilutes the original ideas of what it was to be either a Mod or Rocker. Teenage cultures were evolving in the post-war era with the consumerism focus of Mods paving the way for the introduction and acceptance of the teenager as a social category.
To conclude, both regional and national media played heavily on the image of the delinquent youths when discussing 1950s and 1960s youth sub-cultures. This diverse range of youth groups in post-war Britain was not limited to class and or gender.[42] By itself, the coverage from ATV Today and Midlands News cannot completely reveal the impact of youth sub-cultures in the Midlands. However, it does determine how all three group were presented within the media, particularly focusing on the division from both the rest of society and other youth sub-cultures. Moreover, Midlands News does differ from national media by presenting a more sympathetic stance, revealing how the Teddy Boys were frustrated with police attention and wanted to unite to form a coherent group. The development of consumerism throughout the post-war era was vital to cultivating the ‘affluent teenager’. Evidently, this focus on the teenage market did not only promote youth sub-cultures but also changed the ideals of these groups as they became more mainstream. However, further study would be required to evaluate the impact youth sub-cultures had on society and how different television programmes aired by the BBC and other regional news programmes depicted these groups.
Notes
[1] Stephen Brooke, ‘Gender and Working-class Identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Journal of Social History 34 (2001), 773-795 (773).
[2] Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in The Swinging Sixties (London, 2006), 205.
[3] Mark Abrams, The Teenage Consumer (London, 1959), 3.
[4] ‘Teddy Boys Conference’, Midlands News (ATV, 3/11/1958), MACE, University of Lincoln. http://www.macearchive.org/films/midlands-news-03111958-teddy-boys-conference
[5] ‘Birmingham Teddy Boys’, ATV Today (ATV, 17/8/1973), MACE, University of Lincoln. http://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-17081973-birmingham-teddy-boys
[6] ‘Cheltenham Mods and Rockers’, Midlands News (ATV, 28/9/1965), MACE, University of Lincoln. http://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-28091965-cheltenham-mods-and-rockers
[7] Alright in the 1960s (Channel 4, 5/1/2018), BOB National Archive. https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/0AF0DEDE?bcast=125853939#
[8] Bill Osgerby, ‘“Well, It’s Saturday Night an’ I Just Got Paid”: Youth, Consumerism and Hegemony in Post-War Britain’, Contemporary Record 6 (1992), 287-305 (293).
[9] Andrew August, ‘Gender and 1960s Youth Culture: The Rolling Stones and the New Woman’, Contemporary British History 23 (2009), 79-100 (81).
[10] Ibid, 81.
[11] Mike Brown, The 1960s Look: Recreating the Fashions of the Sixties (Sevenoaks, 2016), 58.
[12] Osgerby, ‘Well, It’s Saturday Night an’ I Just Got Paid’, 290.
[13] Jonathon Green, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (London, 1999), 3.
[14] Richard Grayson, ‘Mods, Rockers and Juvenile Delinquency in 1964: The Government Response’, Contemporary British History 12 (1998), 19-47 (23).
[15] Selina Todd and Hilary Young, ‘Baby-boomers to ‘“Beanstalkers”: Making the Modern Teenager in Post-war Britain’, Cultural and Social History 9 (2012), 451-467 (463).
[16] Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mod and Rockers (London, 2002), 204.
[17] Nick Bentley, ‘New Elizabethans: The Representation of Youth Sub-cultures in 1950s British Fiction’, Literature & History 19 (2010), 16-33 (25).
[18] Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States 1958-1974 (Oxford, 1998), 77.
[19] ‘Initials Carved on Arms of Schoolmates’, The Times, 25 June 1954, 3.
[20] Bentley, ‘New Elizabethans’, 18.
[21] ‘Teddy Boys Conference’, http://www.macearchive.org/films/midlands-news-03111958-teddy-boys-conference
[22] Ibid.
[23] Grayson, ‘Mods, Rockers and Juvenile Delinquency in 1964’, 25.
[24] Brian Saxton, ‘Down among the Young Ones’, Daily Mail, 6 April 1964, 12.
[25] Sandbrook, White Heat, 206.
[26] Ibid, 207.
[27] David Fowler, ‘From Jukebox Boys to Revolting Students: Richard Hoggart and the Study of British Youth Culture’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2007), 73-84 (75).
[28] Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 210.
[29] Sandbrook, White Heat, 207.
[30] Saxton, ‘Down among the young ones’.
[31] ‘Cheltenham Mods and Rockers’, http://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-28091965-cheltenham-mods-and-rockers
[32] ‘Cheltenham Mods and Rockers’, http://www.macearchive.org/films/atv-today-28091965-cheltenham-mods-and-rockers
[33] Osgerby, ‘Well, It’s Saturday Night an’ I Just Got Paid’, 288.
[34] Sandbrook, White Heat, 206.
[35] Arnold Hunt, ‘“Moral Panic” and Moral Language in the Media’, British Journal of Sociology 48 (1997), 629-648 (631).
[36] Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 211.
[37] Fowler, ‘From Jukebox Boys to Revolting Students’, 75.
[38] Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 211.
[39] Helena Mills, ‘Using the Personal to Critique the Popular: Women’s Memories of 1960s Youth’, Contemporary British History 30 (2016), 463-483 (473).
[40] Becky Conekin, ‘Fashioning Mod: Twiggy and the Moped in “Swinging” London’, History and Technology 28 (2012), 209-215 (211).
[41] Osgerby, ‘Well, It’s Saturday Night an’ I Just Got Paid’, 290.
[42] Bentley, ‘New Elizabethans’, 16.
Teaching with MACE 
You must be logged in to post a comment.