| You'll Never be 16 Again - Peter Everett |
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| An Illustrated History of the British Teenager |
| From jitterbugging to gender-bending, spivs to skins, Peter Everett charts the rise and fall of every teenage obsession from 1945 to the mid-eighties. |
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| I didn't realise I was a teenager, you see. That’s the funny thing, you know. There weren't teenagers in those days. |
| Being a teenager was just something that you got through to be an adult ... everything good seemed to happen when you were grown up. |
| Pity the generation that hit puberty at the war's end. They really were 'too old to rock'n'roll, too young to die'. Born into the Depression and evacuated at the outbreak of war, growing up fatherless, their lives ruled by the ration book, they had been promised that when the war was over it would all be different. |
| It wasn't. |
| In an influential edition of Picture Post, published in January 1941, Edward Hulton sketched a picture which remained essentially accurate five years later: |
| In general, the old are still hanging on to the power and the glory, to the money bags, and to the fun. At places of entertainment they are adequately represented, even upon the dancing floor. At our gay British holiday resorts they seem to constitute 99.9% of the population. |
| Hulton added an equally prescient word of warning: |
| The most consistent failure of commonwealths has been to make no use of youth at all. Youth is a force which can be the life-spring of the state. If it is not employed it goes sour, or turns into channels of destructive revolution. |
| It was the need to employ this life-spring, rather than the need to give it access to power, glory, money and fun, which dictated official policy towards youth in the post-war years. The 1944 Education Act introduced a system of secondary schooling from the age of eleven which would prepare children for their places in the world of work, separating the artisans from the academics into secondary modern and grammar schools respectively. The supporters of the 'Eleven Plus' examination argued (and still do) that it was the most sensible way to ensure that each child would be educated according to his or her abilities. |
| In practice the Eleven Plus was instantly seen as the sorting of the sheep from the goats. It was as class-based a segregation as that which prevailed in pubs between the saloon bar and the lounge. To pass was to win initiation into the middle class; to fail was to be branded a proletarian. |
| You were expected to pass your Eleven Plus and go to Grammar School, and if you didn't you were then a failure. You saw your cousins and your friends around you, leaving school at fifteen and going into proper jobs straight away, often things like bank clerks and insurance agents. And this person you knew almost in short trousers would suddenly become a little version of his father. He would be just like him - neat, short-cut hair ... going and playing golf... |
| In a radio discussion on fashion in 1948, a group of young men mulled over Hardy Amies's opinion that... |
| The ideal today is that a man should look respect-able and solid without being boring. You want him to look as though he's got a good job and he's going to keep it. |
| One said: |
| The majority of men like to feel that they are wearing something comfortable and not too outstanding. They don't like to look flashy. |
| Another added: |
| The younger males take their fashion from what their fathers wear. |
| The presenter concluded: |
| Well, I think we've all agreed with Mr Amies that we dress to please women, but in a different way from the way women dress to please men. We want to assure them that we have a good job, that we are sound and respectable citizens and that we would make very good fathers of very nice families. |
| Whereas the dowdiness of men in those years seemed to some extent a matter of choice, the dowdiness of women was forced upon them. Clothing and textiles were rationed until February 1 1949, and such garments as were available were plain and skimpily-made. One West End milliner found herself in court for the 'crime' of embroidering roses and butterflies on camiknickers. When their last pair of black market nylons had laddered beyond repair, girls stained their legs with gravy browning. |
| The social lives of the austerity kids were often as threadbare as their clothes: |
| The only place you could go was a milk bar. We used to go down on a Saturday morning, and it was very plastic, very shiny, very garish, and there would be nobody else there - perhaps just a couple of down-and-outs. And you would just sit there and drink tea all morning and do nothing else. |
| The escape from this adolescent limbo was the cinema. It was not uncommon for a young man to take his girl to the pictures four or five times a week. Moreover, it was not necessarily the main feature that was the main feature: |
| You carried on your courting in the cinema - your kissing and snogging. If you went in the front parlour, you' d still have the family next door. The hallowed room was the front parlour. You could do your courting there, but you'd have the family next door saying 'I wonder what they're doing. I wonder what they're getting up to. Is he kissing her yet?' So your only privacy, the only place you could be together on your own, was snogging on the back row of the pictures. |
| As for the films they saw when they came up for air, the theme was romantic escape in a dozen different flavours, from pirate swashbucklings to war adventures; gangster shoot-outs to westerns; crinolines to backstage Broadway. For the most part, however, it was an alien, Americanised sort of romance. In short, it was Hollywood. Few of the young cinema-goers felt that what they saw on the screen had much to do with the lives they were leading. |
| You liked the film stars but I don't think you aspired to be them. You knew it was escapism and you wanted it to be over the top. |
| I used to love the Fred Astaire films, and all those singing-dancing musicals with very lavish sets and hundreds of dancing girls and transformation scenes. |
| Hollywood made its mark on British youth in unpredictable ways. In January 1946, the Daily Mirror reported: |
| Children who stay away from school to go tap-dancing are the cause of the latest headache among education authorities. Rhythm is becoming such a menace to the three Rs that warning was given by one authority yesterday that summonses will be issued against parents whose children are absent from school because they put tap-dancing first. |
| For every junior hoofer hoping to emulate Astaire, there were a dozen older lads who would leave the cinema practising the Bogart hooded-lid stare, the Cagney swagger or the George Raft trick of flicking a coin across the knuckles. |
| We used to ape the American movie stars of the time, the gangsters, in particular George Raft. I remember he had a black suit with a fingertip-length jacket and he was always flicking a coin. He was one of my idols. And a lot of us used to buy these suits and sort of pretend to be these stars, and also wear fedora hats — what you'd call the Al Capone hood hat with the snap brim. We must have looked rather silly I suppose, but at the time we thought we looked terrific. |
| We had hand-painted ties, which were quite popular at the time. One of the favourites was Jane, the Daily Mirror cartoon - a picture of her, in the nude, hand-painted on red silk. |
| This was precisely the flashy image which the boys in the radio discussion were at pains to disavow. As the presenter put it. 'You wouldn't want to look like a spiv.' Maybe not, but there were those who would. |
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