Thugs in drape jackets: when the Teddy Boys ruled the roost

In the wake of wars, youth cults spring up, those too young to have fought behaving in a way to scandalise those who did. The Bright Young People were the younger siblings of those who perished, battalion by battalion, on the Western Front. (Come to that, it was after the end of the Peloponnesian War that Socrates’s corruption of the youth became intolerable to Athens.) So when Max Décharné describes the Teddy Boys as Britain’s first youth counterculture, what he means is that they were Britain’s first working-class youth counterculture.

Décharné sketches in the elements that made the Teddy Boys a phenomenon. First was their distinctive dress: long drape jackets that recalled the Edwardian period, hence their sobriquet. The ‘New Look’ essentially harked back half a century, and as it worked its way down the social hierarchy it was adopted in adulterated or parodic form by teenagers.