Olden Life: What were Teddy Boys? By Andrew Roberts

Seventy years ago, Britain seemed under threat from menacing young men who favoured exaggerated frock coats and drainpipe trousers. Savile Row devised the ‘Edwardian’ suits for their wealthy clientele in 1950, and working-class youths across Britain quickly adopted this look. A Daily Express article of 23rd September 1953 shortened the term and created the phrase Teddy Boy. Jeff Nuttall wrote in Bomb Culture that Teddy Boys were ‘waiting for Elvis Presley’. Popular mythology associates them with frenzied bouts of cinema-seat-slashing to the strains of Jailhouse Rock, but the first Teds jived to Ken Mackintosh’s The Creep at their local Palais. The 1953 proto-Teddy Boy drama Cosh Boy, the first of a succession of cinematic Brylcreemed menaces, recommended thrashing to cure juvenile delinquency. In the following year, the Londonderry Sentinel complained that ‘no well-dressed man would be seen dead’ in an Edwardian suit, thanks to ‘youths with more money than dress...

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