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 sense’.
Teddy Boy crime was a regular fixture in 1950s newspapers. The Daily Mirror headlined its account of the 1953 murder of John Beckley ‘Flick Knives, Dance Music and Edwardian Suits’. A ‘family doctor’ told the London Evening News that ‘what they need is rehabilitation in a psychopathic institution’.
Many teachers fervently hoped National Service would cure antisocial habits, while dance halls and fish-and-chip parlours frequently banned Teds.
Lancashire’s assistant education officer suggested, ‘Well-chosen poetry, well-read in youth clubs, would make even Teddy Boys come to enjoy it.’
But many Teds were hard-working apprentices, while a few middle-class grammar-school boys, such as Vivian Stanshall and John Lennon, relished dressing as part-time delinquents. A BBC television Special Enquiry contained a priceless interview with the amiable ‘Pat’ and ‘Mike’, who tried – and failed – to look menacing.
The Daily Herald was still reporting ‘Yard orders “get tough on Teddies” ’ in 1957. However, the decade’s end saw the rise of ‘Italian style’ suits and the ‘Ton Up’ boys who combined quiffs with leather jackets and BSAs on hire purchase. Some diehard Teds now wore brightly coloured drape jackets with velvet pockets – the outfit’s last stage before its presumed demise.
But surviving Teddy Boys still haunted the provinces in the mid-1960s, bemoaning those long-haired Beatles. Then, a few years later, there was the first of a series of revivals, even if some original Teds regarded 1970s followers of Showaddywaddy as ‘plastics’.
Today, there are several Facebook groups, and this writer is proud to belong to the Teddyboys Appreciation Society.
George Melly saw Teddy Boys as a reaction against a grey, dismal realm ‘where good boys played ping-pong’.
The observation of a 1954 Mecca Dance Hall customer encapsulates their legacy: ‘Our dress is our answer to a dull world.’ The Ted anticipated future generations of British youth who created a costume to please themselves.
The Oldie July 2023
