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| You were different because you had your drapes and crepes and everything. You were unusual. Some people did class you as degenerate but I didn't class myself as that. I used to love it. |
 Towards the end of the forties, while the young men were still sorting themselves into those who would and wouldn't want to look like spivs, a new fashion appeared in the West End of London. It was worn by the young gentlemen about town, the 'debs' delights', who had begun to order from their Savile Row tailors suits cut in the Edwardian manner: long jackets, narrow trousers, velvet collars. They wore them with embroidered waistcoats (such as some of them had acquired to denote membership of the privileged society at Eton known as 'Pop'), curly-brimmed bowler hats and longer-than-usual hairstyles.
What happened next was reported in the Daily Mirror in November 1953:
Up and down St James's, heart of the Jeeves country, you may today see furrowed brows under the hard hats of young men about town.
Reason is that the Creepers have pinched the latest fashion of the young men of St James's. And in doing so, they have made it desperately, appallingly unfashionable.
Edwardian suits with high, narrow lapels and drain-pipe trousers, which for some while have been the hallmark of young men at the speak-able end of Jermyn Street, are now appearing on Saturday nights from Leicester Square to Hammersmith. With (My dear sir, I assure you!) special hair-cuts.
In fact, the Edwardian style had first crossed the river to Lambeth and the Elephant and Castle some two years earlier. In the process it was exaggerated (jackets got longer, trouser-legs narrower) and embellished. It was given a dash of Wild West gunfighter (string ties, heavy belts), a hint of Hollywood (the Tony Curtis' hairstyle) and a couple of other touches of obscure origin, such as fluorescent socks and crepe-soled 'brothel-creeper' shoes. The result was the Teddy boy. |
| It is probable that the Edwardian style changed its significance as it spread. Initially a statement of narcissism verging on the theatrical, it then became a uniform for rebels, outlaws or delinquents: in the end it was merely a fashion for any provincial youth who wanted the girls down the Roxy to take him seriously. |
| In its first and purest form, the Ted style was little more than a way of advertising personal wealth. The whole outfit might easily cost £100 to assemble, and for a lad on about £6 a week that was a lot to accumulate. No wonder the style was so quickly identified with criminality; who could afford to dress that expensively on an honest wage? |
 A Ted's life was, by later standards, rather boring. He spent his time with his mates, posing on street corners, admiring his reflection in shop windows, or sitting in his local 'caff’. In the early days there wouldn't even be a juke-box, but there might be pinball machines or primitive fruit machines, and a Coca-Cola could be made to last for hours. Once the Teds had moved in, the cafe was theirs; customers not wearing the uniform were quickly stared out. In effect, the cafe became the gang's clubhouse.
In an Observer article published in June 1955 (by which time Teds had become a national phenomenon, though already dying out in London), Hugh Latimer described the scene well:
In cafes, public houses or milk bars which Teddy boys favour, there is no singing on a Saturday night. The boys sit posed in groups, conscious of arranged hair and creased 'drains', they laugh at the group butt (generally the worst-dressed of the party) and drink intently. Girls sit together waiting to be picked up by somebody but terribly correct about it all. The picking-up begins with long-distance badinage, both sides remaining seated. Once adopted, girls are a possession to show off, a group possession.
Girls also are the objective of the groups' nightly prowls. A gang in East London is said to be able to call up 150 members within an hour through a system of 'under-governors' to repel groups from other boroughs raiding 'their' women.
The 'creep', a slow spiritless shuffle which now rules the suburban dance-floors, is now so much a favourite of the Edwardians that it can be counted part of the Edwardian personality. It requires little skill and moves only ten yards a minute. Other characteristics are a peculiar dead facial expression, and an enigmatic, monosyllabic way of speech.
The girls got an even worse press than the boys. Here is T. R. Fyvel's description from his influential book The Insecure Offenders, published in 1961: |
| It is worth mentioning that for a brief period a number of girls tried to dress up in conformity with their Teddy boy friends. The recognised style of the Teddy girl included a grotesquely tight skirt, hair worn in a pony-tail, and the carrying of an extra long umbrella, which presumably could be used as a weapon. But this feminine intervention was no more than a brief flicker: women's fashions don't arise from below ... |
 The more common type of camp followers are rather dumb, passive teenage girls. In my glimpses of them they seemed crudely painted-up, pathetically young, appallingly uneducated, some of them probably in danger of drifting into prostitution - in any case, as I looked at their expressionless faces, I felt sorry for their future families.
The Teddy boy gangs, reported a Lambeth youth leader, 'appeared without noticeable standards, except for an almost obsessional loyalty towards each other'. The gangs were indeed tightly-structured. A former Teddy girl from Manchester explains:
You all had jour own little groups and them groups made up a big group, and you stayed in that group. You didn't go out with the lads from another group because if you did you'd get a hammering, mostly off the girls, not the lads. The girls would give you a good crack for misbehaving. So you stuck with your own.
It was not until the spring of 1954 that the newspapers began regularly to associate the Teds with outbreaks of violence, directed not so much against ordinary citizens as against other gangs. On 27 April the Daily Mail reported:
Cinemas, dance-halls and other places of entertainment in South-East London are closing their doors to youths in 'Edwardian' suits because of gang hooliganism ...
The ban, which week by week is becoming more generally applied, is believed by the police to be one of the main reasons for the extension of the area in which fights with knuckledusters, coshes and similar weapons between bands of teenagers can now be anticipated ... |
| In cinemas, seats have been slashed with razors and had dozens of meat skewers stuck into them. |
| As well as an early use of the word 'teenager' in the British Press, this article also supplies interesting evidence that the slashing of cinema seats by Teds predates the arrival of Rock Around the Clock. |
| Much was made of the Edwardians' alleged fondness for flick-knives, razors and bicycle chains. There was talk of their sewing fish-hooks behind their lapels so that an aggressor, seeking to get a grip in readiness for a 'nutting', would lacerate his fingers; but it seems doubtful that lethal weapons were used in earnest on a wide scale. They were essentially props for posing with: most first-hand accounts of gang battles insist that the preferred weapons were sticks, stones, bottles and boots. After all, nobody wanted to hang, so the aggression was ritualised: |
| Fights were pre-arranged, they didn't just happen. One leader would say to another 'Right, we'll meet you at such-and-such a place, Saturday night, eight o'clock, have a fight.' So if you wanted, you'd all amble down there. There'd be one side, you know, booing and cheering, the other side booing and cheering. And you know, it was fight, fight, fight and then we all went back; they went back to their place and we went back to our place. And you know, that side had won that week; a couple of weeks afterwards we'd win. So it was prearranged: 'You'll win this week. I'll win next week', I'm sure. |
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Kinace Records
16 Temple Road
MANCHESTER
M33 2FP |
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