On Barnes Common in West London, one midnight in the early days of 1955, a policeman approached four men sitting in a parked car. They were wearing velvet-collared jackets, stovepipe trousers, bootlace ties and crepe-soled shoes. ‘Teddy Boys’, he thought to himself. “Now then you lot,” he told them. “Get weaving before I pinch you.” From the back seat of the car came a gruff voice: “Shove off fathead. We’re CID.” A prisoner had escaped – presumably from Wandsworth – and they were laying in wait.
From the very beginning, as Max Décharné reveals in his enjoyable new book on the Teddy Boy phenomenon, the Teds were associated in the public’s mind with lawlessness and violence. In fact, the name first appeared in association with a high-profile court case in the summer of 1953. On 2 July that year on Clapham Common, 17-year-old John Beckley was stabbed to death in a gang fight with a group of other teenage boys. The fight started after one of the latter, 15-year-old Ronald Coleman, thought he heard someone disparaging his clothes: he and his friends dressed in Edwardian suits, from which their gang name, ‘The Edwardians’, derived. The girls who hung around with them used another term though: they called them ‘Teddy Boys’.
Kept in the headlines for six months by a series of court cases – and by the then-rare nature of the crime – what one paper called ‘the exaggerated Edwardian cult’ spread rapidly among the nation’s youth. By the turn of the year, Edinburgh dancehalls were banning “all persons dressed in pipe-stem trousers, draped jackets and crêpe rubber soles… as such garb usually distinguishes a troublemaker”. Some even thought the fashions caused all the trouble: one Bristol father blamed his son’s conviction for smashing some shop windows on the boy’s new suit. “Since my son bought that thing a year ago his personality has changed,” he said. “I blame the suit for getting him into trouble.”
But as Décharné notes, it wasn’t the style that defined the problem. The return of fashions from the first decade or so of the century began almost as soon as the war ended: one British paper was highlighting “the revival of Edwardian ease and elegance” in the Paris collections as early as May 1946. But clothes rationing was still in place in Britain – it didn’t end until March 1949 – and even if there was a wedding most families had to pool their ration books just to buy enough cloth for the bride’s dress. The post-war Edwardian revival, then, Décharné writes was “aimed specifically at the few people rich enough to be able to ignore rationing restrictions”.
What defined the problem was the class of the young men and women who adopted the style. Corduroy trousers were the accepted uniform of the working-class man. Yet here were these teenagers spending most of their disposable income on expensive suits which, one journalist noted with apparent horror, couldn’t even “be used for work when they become second-best”.
Disposable income was – some thought – part of the problem. A Picture Post reporter found those Teds she spoke to earned up to £12 a week; they lived at home and had £4 a week to spend on what they liked. A good suit – Teds’ suits were usually bespoke – cost between £17 and £20. One Ted, who refused to cut his hair when he was called up for National Service – long hair greased into a DA or ‘duck’s arse’ quiff was a key part of the Teddy Boy look – said he had spent two years and £70 cultivating it. “It is a bad system which provides a teenager with the price of… fine clothes,” one headmaster told a conference of his peers. “We could halve our difficulties if we could halve his pay.”
But if the Teds were something new – teenagers with both attitude and buying power – they were something old too. The Manchester Guardian, no less, called their attitude “the purposeless slouch of the corner boy throughout the ages”, although the purpose was surely clear: an unspoken insolence towards those higher up the class ladder. As Décharné argues, their roots can be traced to the working-class flash clothes of wide boys, touts and spivs going back decades. He quotes from Arthur Morrison’s 1896 novel A Child of the Jago, set in the slums of Shoreditch, whose thieves were ‘as wide as Broad Street’ and who spent money on looking sharp, buying “original out-and-out downy benjamins, or the celebrated bang-up kicksies, cut saucy, with artful buttons and a double fakement down the sides” – that is coats and trousers with fancy trim.
As for juvenile deliquency, Décharné notes, the post-war moral panic about gangs of footloose, lawless young men echoes other such panics through history. He sees parallels with the post-Napoleonic period in Regency England, for example. Territorial gangs of teenagers like The Edwardians were nothing new: in South London alone, the press reported, there were the Walworth Road Team, the Brixton Mob and the Elephant Gang from Elephant and Castle, among others. And then there was the now-forgotten phenomenon of the so-called ‘cosh boys’ in the years after the war – young men, often flashily dressed in zoot suits, who brutally coshed their victims before robbing them. One London victim, a 69-year-old widow, memorably summed up her attacker as “the spiv errand-boy type – a rat with dark haunting eyes”. Organised gang fights took place with improvised weapons: bike chains with each link sharpened on a grindstone; rubber pipes filled with lead to act as coshes; razors. In Parliament, they debated the reintroduction of birching and flogging to deal with the menace.
The social problems with which the Teds became associated, then, didn’t begin with them; Teds merely became a recognisable – and easy-to-ridicule – shorthand for them. The solutions proposed revealed little more than society’s bafflement. “‘A new national sport of gravel-pit climbing,” suggested the Daily Mirror. Birching. Hard labour. More birching. Applying “the slipper at the right time and on the right occasion”, the Rugby Women’s Institute said. Punish the parents, suggested Sir Hartley Shawcross, who had been Britain’s principal prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials as well as attorney-general in the Attlee government. Other ideas were more outré: “well-chosen poetry well read at youth clubs,” suggested a Lancashire education official; knobbly-knees contests, suggested a dancehall owner in Luton.
Where are the Teds themselves in all this? Teddy Boys is diligently researched and Décharné has evidently had a lot of fun in the newspaper archives piecing together a vivid social history of the post-war years. But precisely because so much of the material in the book is from the often hyper-ventilating press coverage, Teddy Boys reads in places as being as much a history of bourgeois fear of working-class youth as it is about the youths themselves. Even the arrival of rock ’n’ roll in Britain, the visceral shock and wonder of which is well articulated here, in some ways serves to obscure them. After all, as Décharné shows, they predated rock ’n’ roll by several years.
It is not even clear how violent the Teds were, despite what John Cooper Clarke, quoted here, remembered as “their hard-nut reputation as blade artists”. Their clothes were their pride and joy; fighting threatened that. “When you went out and you’d spent a few bob on a new whistle, a whistle and flute, you didn’t want all blood all over that and your sleeves ripped off,” an old Ted remembered in a 1985 documentary. Perhaps surprisingly, there is evidence that the police agreed. “If anything they are less trouble than some of the other youths,” a Kent police officer told his local paper in 1954. “It seems rather unfair on the youths who do affect the Edwardian dress to paint them all with the same brush because some of their number get into trouble.”
It is a shame there isn’t more here about the texture of the Teds’ lives – the coffee shops, the milk bars, the dance halls – and if and how it differed from their contemporaries. This reader would have welcomed more about wider working class youth culture both in the period and the preceding decades, and more about the clothes themselves too. But there is nevertheless a powerful, almost poignant, story here about what Décharné characterises as “Blitz-era children raised among the bomb-sites… [giving] a two-fingered salute to a society that offered working-class teenagers little more than prolonged rationing, a repetitive job of manual labour after leaving school at fifteen and an overpowering sense that whoever else had the advantages in life, it wasn’t supposed to be them”.
For most of the Teddy Boys, the style represented a brief visceral moment in which they could live a life of their own making, a few flickering years of their own between the strictures of school and National Service, between childhood and parenthood and marriage. “They’re lovely suits, really,” a 19-year-old miner told the Picture Post. “In a year or two I suppose we’ll be married and that will be the end of jiving. We’ll be too busy getting our homes together.”
Cecil Beaton, of all people, seemed to get it. “I like these Edwardian clothes,” he told a literary lunch at Foyles in 1954. “The Edwardian gangs and myself have our clothes in common. And these peacocks are only trying to do what you and I would like to do – make a creative splash.” In some ways, perhaps, it really was all about the clothes: how working-class youths discovered for themselves, and despite huge pressure from mainstream society, how empowering and emancipatory style itself could be. Décharné quotes from Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 début Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in which the lead character Arthur Seaton is a Ted. After a day’s work in a factory, Seaton comes home and lovingly strokes his carefully protected clothes on their hangers. “They were his riches, Sillitoe writes, “and he told himself that money paid-out on clothes was a sensible investment because it made him feel good as well as look good.”
In this, as in many things, the Teds were the forerunners of every rebellious British youth subculture since. And, as Décharné points out, unlike most of their successors, they have never been co-opted by the middle class or the establishment: they have always stood to one side, young men in their pomp, always their own people, always proudly and defiantly themselves.
This is an extended version of a review that was first published by Engelsberg Ideas in February 2024.
Mathew Lyons 
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