By Danielle Ford
The above photograph was taken from Ken Russell’s series ‘The Last of the Teddy Girls’, which historians can take as a chronicle of youth subcultures and an insight into the extent to which they were determined by gender. Russell’s collection is one of the first detailed studies of female subcultures in the 20th century, originally lost, until they were rediscovered in the archives of a photo library in 2005 and exhibited at the Proud Gallery in London.
‘No one paid much attention to the teddy girls before I did them, though there was plenty on teddy boys,’ Russell recalled. ‘They were tough, these kids, they’d been born in the war years and food rationing only ended in about 1954 – a year before I took these pictures. They were proud. They knew their worth. They just wore what they wore’.
Russell’s interest in photographing the Teddy Girls can be explained by their self-emancipation and rejection of traditional concepts of femininity by embracing a sense of style that was both masculine and ‘Neo-Edwardian’ – a term which refers to the postwar revival of Edwardian clothing. Here, working-class Teddies claimed the style of upper-classes from which they had been historically excluded from.
The ‘Teddies’ were also summed up by Hugh Latimer, writing for The Observer in 1955, as an ‘Edwardian cult’ for working-class 14-19-year-olds. Their distinctive style of dress was a visible reference to their exclusion from mainstream society; their hard stares down the barrel of the camera denoting their poor reputation for social disruption. In an article for AnOther Magazine, entitled ‘Teddy Girls: The Style Subculture That Time Forgot’, Laura Havlin articulated how ‘smart dress didn’t make the Teds more respectable – it actually rendered them intimidating, in the same way that a suited Al Capone could coolly induce panic with a tip of his straw boater’.
Mary Toovey, a London Teddy Girl, outlined the style to writer Eve Dawoud: ‘Turn-up jeans, a coat and something to tie around your neck, those were the Teddy Girl essentials’. These ‘essentials’ were a legacy of the adoption of menswear during World War II when women fulfilled typically male-dominated roles and a precursor to the rebellious punk and rocker styles of the 1960s and 70s.
The Teddies, however, were not merely a British phenomenon. ‘Eccentrically dressed’ youths were criticised in The Irish Times for scuffles at a disco in Malahide in 1954. Dublin Teddy Boys had quaffed hair, drainpipe trousers, crepe-soled shoes called ‘brothel creepers’, a flashy waistcoat and draped jacket with a velvet collar and bootlace tie. Noting that the Dublin youths are ‘said to be more peaceful than their London counterparts’, the paper reported that their ‘extreme’ behaviour had still caused local vigilantes from barring suspected Teddies from entry. Later that year, the newspaper columnist blamed the Teddy Boys for a police baton charge near Christchurch Cathedral on New Years’ Eve, where six people were injured and shop windows were broken.
Lack of parental control was attributed as a factor behind the rise in riotous behaviour, but a larger contributing factor was the globalisation of radically new cultural trends. The release of films such as ‘The Wild One’ in 1955 and ‘Rock Around the Clock’ in 1956 saw a burst of rebellious youth subculture that provoked fights at film screenings. In Bernard Neary’s biography of the famous Garda, Lugs Branigan, he observed that:
‘When the film Rock Around the Clock, commenced showing in Dublin cinemas, it hit the headlines and remained there during much of 1957 […] not the film itself, but the antics of the Teddy Boys, who flocked, en masse and often, to see their very own movie. The Teddy Boys would riot in the cinemas, ripping up seats with flick knives, throwing bottles and other missiles from the balconies and engaging in fist and sometimes chain fights, causing great consternation’.
The Dublin Teddies were descendants of the animal gangs of the 1930s, but distinguished by their advent in the 1940s, which saw a globalised culture and consumerism that recognised spending power amongst adolescents. The Teddy Boys also existed in Belfast – a 1964 article in the Belfast Telegraph ‘a strong Teddy Boy element’ in the gangs who lurked in the dimly-lit corners of the Shankill Road and attacked police officers. Another article from 1955 described boys in the ‘Teddy Boy garb’ of ‘tight trousers and long coats’ causing public disorder in Ormeau Park and the Botanic Gardens. The District Inspector claimed the gangs were ‘in existence in Belfast and one is trying to dominate the other. Not only have rows frequently occurred in parks but in dance halls in the city’. Irrespective of religious and political differences, it seems, the increasing visibility of youth subcultures marks an attempt to forge new identities within adult-oriented public spaces.
Irish Teddies persisted into the 1970s through the influence of punk, rock ‘n’ roll, Vivienne Westwood, and the return of James McKenna’s Teddy boy-inspired play, The Scatterin’, at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1973. And in the 1980s, Irish journalist Mark Cagney met a group of them to discuss clothes and music in interviews which can now be found in the RTÉ archive. One Teddy boy remarked:
‘We’re Teds cos we’re into the music. We like Rock ‘n’ Roll music, we like the dress, that’s why we wear it. We don’t look for trouble, we don’t want trouble’.
Subcultures not only mimic family structures, they also become the adolescent’s key source of status and sense of belonging. In the post-war environment, facing an uncertain future, adolescents who were neither adults nor children sought security within these subcultures. In this case, their isolation between childhood and maturity was exacerbated by the flamboyant dress style. The diversity of experience should not be overlooked, but by analysing these images, the photographers who captured them, and the publications they were broadcast in, historians can ascertain the extent to which youth groups were based on familial structures and how associations were characterised by class, gender and social context.
References:
Fallon, Donal, ‘“Eccentrically dressed” and jitterbugging away: Dublin’s Teddy Boys in the 1950s’, Come Here To Me! Dublin Life & Culture (16 September, 2013). (https://comeheretome.com/2013/09/16/eccentrically-dressed-and-jitterbugging-away-dublins-teddy-boys-in-the-1950s/).
Havlin, Laura, ‘Teddy Girls: The Style Subculture That Time Forgot’, AnOther (25 November, 2015).
‘Ken Russell’s post-war London – in pictures’, The Guardian (29 November, 2016).
Latimer, Hugh, ‘Observer picture archive: Teddy boys and teddy girls, 19 June 1955’, The Guardian (17 June, 2018).
Molloy, Ciara, ‘Brothel-creepers and shot coffee: On the worlds of Teddy Boys and Mods in ’50s and ’60s Ireland’, Hot Press (9 January, 2020) (https://www.hotpress.com/music/brothel-creepers-shot-coffee-worlds-teddy-boys-mods-50s-60s-ireland-22799861).
‘Rock ‘n’ Roll or Rockabilly 1980’, RTÉ Archives (https://www.rte.ie/archives/2015/1125/749118-teddy-boys-and-girls/).
Teddy Boy’s of Dublin (from the Dublin life & culture), The Great British Teddy Boy (http://www.teddyboyfederation.co.uk/test-2/).
