London Calling (11 page)

Club Eleven was opened essentially as a bebop alternative to Feldman’s Swing Club that operated every Sunday. One regular
player was the trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, then an art student at Camberwell. He joined the
Dixielanders in 1947 along with fellow art student Wally Fawkes, later a cartoonist for the
Daily Mail
. In January 1948 Lyttelton and Fawkes started their own band, the Lyttleton Band, to play at the newly opened Leicester Square
Jazz Club. Most of the audience were Camberwell students and they invented their own dance steps to go with the up-tempo music.
Lyttelton recalled: ‘We brought along with us a strong contingent from Camberwell Art School and John Minton, now recognized
as a distinguished painter, was among the most formidable and dangerous of the first school of dancers.’ Lyttelton was taught
painting by Johnny Minton (who also taught Frank Auerbach). George Melly: ‘Johnnie [ sic ] Minton […] would caper wildly in
front of the bandstand. And Lucian Freud […] might raise a hand in greeting while staring with obsessive interest in another
direction.’
¹⁶
The Lyttelton Band then moved to the old Club Eleven basement at 41 Great Windmill Street, before transferring to 100 Oxford
Street, which was then renamed Humph’s.
¹⁷
Music is still played at 100 Oxford Street, which has seen everything from the British blues revival to the 1976 Punk Festival
and is one of the few venues to have remained in the same location since the war.

Revivalist jazz was the mainstay of the clubs because it was such good-time music and people could dance to it. One of the
popular bands was Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia Jazz Band with vocalist George Melly. In fact it was Mick Mulligan and his manager,
Jim Godbolt, who first used the term ‘rave’ to describe their ‘all-night raves’ on Saturday nights at the club on Gerrard
Street. George Melly: ‘It took several forms, the verb meaning “live it up”, “a rave” meaning a party where you raved, and
“a raver” i.e. one who raved as much as possible.’
¹⁸
The term is of West Indian origin, meaning party-goer, but it quickly entered the language and it was not long before the
Melody Maker
named its weekly music gossip column ‘The Raver’. Ravers were often bearded and wore ex-army greatcoats but could be distinguished
from beatniks by the fact that they frequently carried a banjo or clarinet and were fond of sporting battered top hats. They
were usually welcomed to parties whereas beatniks were not. Beatniks were a little too dangerous: they fooled around with
drugs and poetry, a lethal combination.

To make our movement sound international I suggested that we should mention the London Psychogeographical Committee. It was
just me… It was a pure invention, a mirage.

RALPH RUMNEY
on the first meeting of the Situationist International in Cosio d’arroscia, July 1957
¹

At the end of 1955, Britain went through a period of sudden dramatic change: in just twelve months commercial television made
its debut, the Angry Young Men suddenly filled the newspapers and radio waves, the Suez crisis marked the end of Empire and
rock ’n’ roll reached Britain. There were already signs of change: rationing ended in 1954, almost ten years after the end
of the war; there were milk bars, and coffee bars began to appear, the Moka, 29 Frith Street, being the first, in 1953. Ian
Fleming’s James Bond books –
Casino Royale
, (1953),
Live and Let Die
(1954),
Moonraker
(1955) – began to be published; skiffle reached the radiowaves in 1954 with Chris Barber’s ‘New Orleans Joys’, featuring
Lonnie Donegan on vocals. In the next three years British society was in turmoil, and when it was over, the country had changed,
though not to everyone’s liking. We had Pop Art (
This is Tomorrow
, 1956), the Free Cinema movement (1956), C N D (1958) and home grown rock ’n’ roll bands: Tommy Steele (1956), Marty Wilde
(1958), the Vipers (1956), Hank Marvin (1956), Cliff Richard (1958), Terry Dean, Wee Willie Harris, Adam Faith and others.
Boys still had to endure two years’ National Service, which was to remain compulsory for another six years, meaning that it
would be very difficult to hold a rock ’n’ roll group together until conscription ended. This restlessness was expressed,
as usual, by a youth movement: before the Goths, the New Romantics, the Punks, the Hippies, the Mods and the Rockers came
the first British post-war rebels: the Teds.

In the late forties ‘Debs Delights’, upper-class young men, instructed their Savile Row tailors to make Edwardian-style long
jackets with velvet collars
and narrow trousers. These they wore with embroidered waistcoats and curly-brimmed bowler hats. Many of them already had the
waistcoats that denoted membership of Pop at Eton. The working-class appropriation of this upper-class style first emerged
from the heavily bombed streets of the Elephant and Castle as early as 1951, where it had been taken up and exaggerated: the
jackets grew longer, the trousers narrower, the hats dispensed with, replaced by an extravagant creation based on the Tony
Curtis hairstyle. These were the Teddy boys. They added a few touches of their own: the guardsmen’s long narrow tie was replaced
with the riverboat gambler’s string tie, held in place by a medallion, a death’s head, skull and crossbones, an eagle, silver
dollar or other American image such as a silver miniature Texas longhorn skull, or even a swastika if they really wanted to
upset people. Their drape jackets were worn with narrow drainpipe trousers terminating in a pair of brothel creepers. These
American-style shoes were also known as crêpe boppers or beetle crushers after their thick crêpe rubber soles. These gave
them a lot of bounce, good for dancing, fighting and running away from the police. Socks in bright fluorescent colours – lime
green, shocking pink – set them off nicely.

The hair was worn long as a reaction to National Service and the army – servicemen were forbidden to wear Teddy boy suits
off-duty – with the hair at the sides swept back and fixed in place by Brylcreem. The two sides met at the back of the head
with the hair swept back from the top to make a Y-shaped triangle known as a DA, or duck’s arse. Sometimes the hair from the
top of the head was allowed to reach the neck in a fringe known as a Boston cut or square-neck. After many experiments based
on Elvis Presley’s black-dyed quiff, the Teds finally decided on a symmetrical model made by parting the hair from ear to
ear and combing the hair forward into two matching quiffs and the back into a DA, before pushing the sides back in a streamlined
sweep. The American Latino jellyroll, a long quiff brought forward in a snood that projected out over the forehead, held in
place by a considerable weight of grease, was less common. Sideboards were worn long in the manner of the American General
Burnside himself. As a complete outfit could easily cost £100, and, as the average wage for a young man was about £6 a week,
the Teddy boy look was quickly associated with crime; no-one but a gangster could afford to dress like that.

In November 1953 the
Daily Mirror
reported:

Up and down St. James’s, heart of Jeeves country, you may today see furrowed brows under the hard hats of young men about
town. Reason is that
the Creepers have pinched the latest fashion of the young men of St. James’s. And in doing so, they have made it desperately,
appallingly unfashionable. Edwardian suits with high, narrow lapels and drain-pipe trousers, which for some time have been
the hallmark of young men at the speakable end of Jermyn Street, are now appearing on Saturday nights from Leicester Square
to Hammersmith. With (My dear sir, I assure you!) special hair-cuts.
²

The Teddy boy look was an entirely male style, unlike that of the hippies or punks. There were Teddy girls who wore very tight
skirts and ponytails but that style was not specific to the movement. The appropriation of upper-class attire appears to have
particularly outraged the establishment. As early as March 1954 a sixteen-year-old youth convicted of robbing a woman by ‘putting
her in fear’ was told by the Dartford Magistrate: ‘There are a lot of things and so-called pleasures in the world which demand
a lot of money. You tried to get hold of money to pay for ridiculous things like Edwardian suits. They are ridiculous in the
eyes of ordinary people. They are flashy, cheap and nasty, and stamp the wearer as a particularly undesirable type.’
³
The Teds’ manner of rebellion was a form of controlled violence expressed usually in fights with each other, or in some type
of relatively minor vandalism. Flick knives, razors and bicycle-chains were used largely as props; no-one wanted to seriously
hurt the members of rival gangs. Broken bottles, boots and sticks, however, were regarded as acceptable in the fights, which
were usually pre-arranged by gang leaders at suitable venues.

Most of the fun was to be had in seeing the pedestrians part before them when a group of Teds swaggered down the street. They
were the first post-war youth group and succeeded in drawing attention to themselves beyond their wildest dreams. An article
by ‘a family doctor’ in the London
Evening News
on 12 May 1954 was a classic reaction:

Teddy Boys are all of unsound mind in the sense that they are all suffering from a form of psychosis. Apart from the birch
or the rope, depending on the gravity of their crimes, what they need is rehabilitation in a psychopathic institution… Because
they have not got the mental stamina to be individualists they had to huddle together in gangs.

In April 1954 the
Daily Mail
reported:

Cinemas, dance-halls and other places of entertainment in South East London are closing their doors to youth in ‘Edwardian’
suits because of gang hooliganism… the ban, which week by week is becoming more generally applied, is believed by the police
to be one of the main reasons for the extension of
the area in which fights with knuckle-dusters, coshes and similar weapons between bands of teenagers can now be anticipated…
In cinemas, seats have been slashed with razors and had dozens of meat skewers stuck into them.
⁴

Two years later, with the release of the film
Rock Around the Clock
in Britain in September 1956, the Teds went wild, turning on fire hoses and slashing the cinema seats, dancing in the aisles
and in the streets outside. Flying bottles injured two police when they engaged a crowd of Teds singing and jiving in the
New Kent Road near the Elephant and Castle after a screening of
Rock Around the Clock
at the Trocadero cinema. Four shop windows were smashed and fireworks aimed at police. Nine Teds were arrested.

At the Lewisham Gaumont one Ted climbed onstage and waved his arms, yelling: ‘Rock! Rock! Rock’ and Teds started jiving in
the aisles; seats were smashed out of the way. When 120 Teds were thrown out of the Stratford Gaumont in East London, they
continued to dance all over the municipal flowerbeds in front of the cinema. Sir Malcolm Sargent told the
Times
, 17 September 1956:

Nothing more than primitive tom-tom thumping. The amazing thing about rock ’n’ roll is that youngsters who go into such ecstasies
sincerely believe that there is something new or wonderful about it. Rock ’n’ roll has been played in the jungle for centuries.
Frankly I think if rock ’n’ roll is capable of inciting youngsters to riot and fight then it is quite obviously bad.

Sargent’s own Proms, of course, incited stirring feelings of flag-waving patriotism and were quite obviously good.

Towns across the country quickly banned
Rock Around the Clock
and pundits stepped forward to condemn it. On the radio show
Any Questions
Lord Boothby said: ‘One of the purposes of us old fogies in life is to stop young people being silly.’ He was later involved
in some silliness of his own when his homosexual involvement with gangster Ronnie Kray became known. Jeremy Thorpe, MP, described
the film as ‘Musical Mau Mau’ and was worried that ‘a fourth rate film with fifth rate music can pierce through the thin shell
of civilization and turn people into wild dervishes’. He was of course later disgraced for his involvement in a homosexual
murder and some unpleasantness involving a German shepherd (dog). It took the Bishop of Woolwich to reveal what they were
all really worried about. Writing in the
Times
he said: ‘The hypnotic rhythm and the wild gestures have a maddening effect on a rhythm-loving age-group and the result of
its impact is the relaxing of
all self-control.’ In other words, we must ban it because it might encourage young people to have sex.

George Melly offered an eloquent explanation for the whole phenomenon, one that would continue to apply for the next forty
years. He held that the street fights and cinema riots, the extramarital sex and random vandalism were produced by a ‘claustrophobic
situation’. He wrote:

They were result of a society which still held that the middle classes were entitled not only to impose moral standards on
a class whose way of life was totally outside its experience; of an older generation who used the accident of war as their
excuse to lay down the law on every front; of a system of education which denied any creative potential and led to dead-end
jobs and obligatory conscription; of a grey colourless shabby world where good boys played ping pong.
⁵

As the art critic Kenneth Coutts-Smith wrote in 1970:

The 50’s saw a social phenomenon that had never previously existed at any moment of the past, the appearance of a working-class
bohemia. The Teds were the vanguard, the first thin wedge of an emergent social group that was soon to count within the body
politic. The unshakable personal awareness of the Absolute Beginner, his sense of solidarity with his peers, his passionate
if quirky insistence on justice and dignity, and above all, his total rejection of ‘bank clerk values’ was to become something
of an archetype.
⁶