They seem like such clean-cut lads!
The clothes are squarer and fustier looking than what I think of as Teddy Boy clothes.
Also - the dad that makes that worried complaint about his son ("he doesn't seem to belong to the world - the world that I live in") at around 6.15 minutes in - he is dressed rather like the son. The differences are quite subtle - overall they both seem encased within much the same idea of smartness and respectability and formality.
(The Edwardian look was originally a gentlemen's fashion - if I remember right, it started post-WW2 among Guardsmen and posh military types, then was picked up, aspirationally, by working class youths). *
Both father and son are a long, long way from shell suits and tracksuit bottoms and spaceship trainers.
The only bit of real excess is in the boy's hair and it's very mild by subsequent standards.
Striking also the sense of fatalism in the young men - the knowledge that even this flourish of self-expression and deviance will be short-lived, that they'll succumb to marriage and conventionality enough.
Yet these tiny differences were enough to strike alarm in everyday folk (like the women who says she'd given them what-for, a clip around the ear-holes) or the kind of bans and exclusions as below
* Ah I remembered right - a quote from a detailed breakdown of the Edwardian revival
"The Edwardian look became most popular amongst Guardsmen, bankers and other members of the financial elite, and London's gay establishment."
From which detailed breakdown I have filched these pictures - the first is some Guardsmen off duty, the second is a gang of Teddy Boys
What a fantastic clip! So much of British post-War social life captured there.
ReplyDeleteMy ears pricked up at 1'19": "It's no good creeping down the road door to door, all meek and humble. Because a feller's just going to say: 'Well look at that punk, let's have him'."
It's revealing, too, on how the losing the Empire represented a real loss of opportunities and excitement that had been available to white Britons. "Who wants to go to Africa now?"
DeleteYes I noticed the use of "punk" - I wonder if that's an Americanism picked up from watching gangster movies, or actually had vernacular life in Britain. (I know as a word it goes as far back as Shakespeare's time - it appears in Romeo and Juliet).
DeleteI know people who spent part of their childhood in Africa, so I think there was a post-colonial after-hang, what with all the Brit companies still involved in the development / exploitation of these former colonies, resource extraction, etc etc. But probably that was more your professional / technocratic / managerial classes, as opposed to working class.
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