Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies EnglishLanguageandLiterature ZbyněkMichal Why They Cropped Their Hair and Put On Boots and Braces: The Birth of the Subculture in Britain Bachelor ’sDiplomaThesis Supervisor:doc.Mgr.MiladaFranková,CSc.,M.A. 2008

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

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I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A., for her valuable advice and endless patience during my work on this thesis. I would also like to thank my parents for their wholehearted and generous support.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction ...... 5

2. The Sociological Background - The Concept of Subculture ...... 7

2.1 Definition ...... 8

2.2 Birth ...... 9

2.3 Style ...... 10

2.4 Territory and Age ...... 11

3. The Socio-Cultural Background ...... 12

3.1 The Class ...... 13

3.2 The Community and the Family ...... 15

3.3 The Intruders ...... 19

3.4 A Short Summary ...... 21

4. Rule ...... 23

4.1 Genealogy of the Skinhead Family ...... 24

4.2 The Birth of the Skinhead Cult ...... 26

4.3 Defending Territory – Skinheads, Violence and Football ...... 31

4.4 Schism in the Skinhead Subculture ...... 33

4.5 A Note on Diversity within the Skinhead Subculture ...... 37

5. Conclusion ...... 37

6. Works Cited and Consulted ...... 40

Motto:

Skinheads aren’t exactly angels and very few would actually want to be.

Most are more than happy to admit that the skinhead cult has its good

and bad sides, just like any other group in society. The media image of a

skinhead rarely comes close to how most skinheads view themselves

though. In their own eyes, skinheads are the cream of working class

youth cults, and if you had to sum it all up in one word, pride would say

it all. When you first have your hair cropped and you walk down the

street wearing boots and braces, you feel ten feet tall. It’s a magical

feeling, a feeling of being somebody. No two skinheads are the same,

but all of them share that sense of belonging to something very special

indeed. Something that few outsiders seem to be able to understand

(George Marshall, Part Four: Skins and the Media).

1. Introduction

What are the common associations that spring up when the word skinhead is pronounced? I have observed that the majority of people do not possess much awareness of the skinhead subculture, and their idea about it is mainly shaped by the images one can get from the mass media. Thus the word most often denotes concepts like threat , racism , neo-

Nazism , hooliganism , or delinquency . Indeed, the prevailing mass media picture of the skinhead subculture is that of a group of neo-Nazi troublemakers and rioters. (And it should be stated here that this popular image is also the reason why some disturbed individuals have

5 certain sympathies for skinheads.) Simply typing the query “news AND skinheads” in any

Internet search engine can provide much evidence for this claim. What usually pops up is a number of links to news articles about skinheads being involved in the bashing of coloured people, or possibly homosexuals. As concerns news on television, the reputation it builds for skinheads is also not complimentary at all – information about a cancelled concert of a neo-

Nazi rock group would usually be accompanied by images of hooded skinheads giving the

Hitler salute and maybe even shouting “Sieg Heil.” As Farin and Seidel have noted,

“skinheads have become a synonym for right-wing radicalism” (my translation, 19). But are the extremists really the core of the skinhead subculture? Is the hatred against minorities the central point upon which the ideology of the skinhead subculture has been built?

It would be very narrow-minded to reduce the complex problem of racism and violence against minorities under the simple heading of skinheads , or skinhead subculture .

Without any doubt there are sub-groups within the skinhead subculture that support the neo-

Nazi ideology and racism but when we take a closer look at the very beginnings of skinheads, we find out that the original skinheads were definitely no pioneers of any neo-Nazi pogrom ideology. As regards the current situation, the extremist groups or individuals only comprise a very small part of the complex subculture. Thus the whole subculture is unjustly stigmatised because of a few radicals who only share some common superficial signs with the other skinheads who are actually mostly apolitical. The fact that one is juvenile, tough and bald- headed just does not necessarily mean he is also radical.

These observations have brought about the idea to somehow justify the youth subculture of skinheads, which has become the aim of this thesis. It will be done by turning attention to the emergence of the subculture in the early 1960s as a result of unique socio- cultural conditions of post-war Britain, the time of vital changes in the living conditions of the working class. Skinheads will be introduced in the context of various youth subcultures of the

6 period. Subsequently the development of the subculture will be outlined with respect to its present-day complexity, for nowadays the subculture is comprised by many sub-groups with often very different or even counter-working attitudes.

In order to approach the topic with the help of a working sociological tool, the concept of subculture will be illustrated in the next chapter of the thesis. The working-class environment, with which the skinhead subculture is bound, will also be taken into consideration.

2. The Sociological Background - The Concept of

Subculture

It is the scope of this chapter to provide the essential sociological apparatus applicable to the analysis of the group of people examined in this thesis. In order to grasp the mechanisms operating within the skinhead subculture and the mechanisms that stood at the birth of the subculture we have to draw our attention at first to what a subculture actually is.

For the explanation of the term much use will be made of theories developed by scholars once gathered around the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), and of scholars who have built upon its tradition. The CCCS was established in 1964 at the University of

Birmingham as a postgraduate research institute, and the work of its researchers “profoundly shaped the interests and methods of subcultural analysis for the next two decades” (Gelder

83). The central interest of the researchers was the “category of ‘youth’.” Thus their findings are very relevant to my topic.

7 Definition

The ways to define a subculture are various. I will start with a very broad definition provided by Thornton who characterizes subcultures as “groups of people that have something in common with each other (i.e. they share a problem, an interest, a practice) which distinguishes them in a significant way from the members of other social groups” (1). Such a definition, however, could be applied to many other groups within a society and therefore it must be narrowed down. If the distinctive features of certain subcultures are to be examined and understood, the subcultures in question must be positioned “in relation to three broader cultural structures, the working class or the ‘parent culture’, the ‘dominant’ culture and mass culture” (Gelder 83-4). It needs to be said that for the CCCS’s researchers youth subcultures always stood for working-class youth subcultures and thus their “subcultural status was linked to their class subordination” (Gelder 84). A clear description that sums up and develops the points mentioned so far is the one provided by Clarke et al.:

Subcultures must exhibit a distinctive enough shape and structure to make

them identifiably different from their ‘parent’ culture. They must be focussed

around certain activities, values, certain uses of material artefacts, territorial

spaces etc. which significantly differentiate them from their wider culture. But,

since they are sub-sets, there must also be significant things which bind and

articulate them with the ‘parent’ culture (100).

It follows from what has been said that a youth subculture is always characterized by “ double articulation […] – first to their ‘parent’ culture […], second, to the dominant culture” (Clarke et al. 101). The relation of a youth subculture towards its ‘parent’ culture is shaped by sharing the same fundamental life experience with the ‘parent’ culture on the one hand, and by a different cultural response that a subculture gives to the problems posed on it by the dominant culture on the other hand. The relation towards the dominant culture is mainly characterised

8 by resistance to subordination, defiance, and rebellion. As regards the mass culture, it happens very often that the originally defiant subculture becomes incorporated in it. The process of incorporation, according to Hebdige, “takes two characteristic forms: 1. the conversion of subcultural sings (dress, music, etc.) into mass produced objects (i.e. the commodity form); 2. the ‘labelling’ and re-definition of deviant behaviour by dominant groups – the police, the media, the judiciary (i.e. the ideological form)” (131).

Birth

A very important concern of this thesis, as proposed above, is the emergence of the skinhead subculture, the problem of how the subculture originated . I will now turn my attention to the theoretical suggestions on the emergence of subcultures. Stratton in his article on the subcultural origins argues: “If we look at the conditions under which the different forms of youth subculture emerge the importance of a socio-cultural, rather than a political, specificity will become clear” (181). As can be inferred from the relation of a subculture towards its ‘parent’ culture illustrated above, a subculture shares the basic values with its

‘parent’ culture. At certain times under certain conditions the values of the working class can get under threat, which makes some of the working-class juveniles react in order to protect and preserve them. It is at the time of this reaction that a new subculture is brought to existence. With respect to the skinhead subculture Stratton claims the following:

[We can] understand an origin to the subculture in its attempt to defend

working-class values not just at an ideological level but at the real level of

asserting: (a) the virtues of the corner pub which was being destroyed by a

bourgeois capital more concerned with the economies of scale of large service

clubs and discos; (b) the working-class control of football which was being

eroded by the interest of the intellectual middle class; and (c) the defence of

the work place in the overt celebration of racism (181-2).

9 Obviously the emergence of a subculture is a functional result of a fusion of the cultural, social, and economic impetus. Nevertheless, I cannot agree with Stratton on the last point of his suggestion. Because, as we will see later, though there may have been some racial issues that influenced the birth of the skinhead subculture, the early skinheads were definitely no promoters of overt racism. It was rather the work place that they tried to defend for themselves than the purity of the white race.

Style

The important aspect that distinguishes a subculture from the dominant culture at first sight is its style . As opposed to the conventional styles that express a whole range of messages depending on the choice of outfits, the style of a subculture is described as the “intentional communication.” Hebdige characterizes it as “a visible construction, a loaded choice.” It works in a way that “it directs attention to itself; it gives itself to be read” (134). Thus the style is a clear indicator of subcultural membership, moreover it points to the degree of commitment to a subculture. For Brake a subcultural style is a composition of three elements:

(a) ‘Image’, appearance composed of costume, accessories such as hair-style,

jewellery and artefacts.

(b) ‘Demeanour’, made up of expression, gait and posture. Roughly this is

what the actors wear and how they wear it.

(c) ‘Argot’, a special vocabulary and how it is delivered (12).

A bit later in his book on youth subcultures Brake adds a piece of information with a particular importance for our purposes when he states that “style at a subcultural level acts as a form of argot, drawing upon costume and artefacts from a mainstream fashion context and translating these into its own rhetoric” (14). Hebdige uses for this feature of a subcultural style a term originally coined by anthropologists – bricolage (135). Someone who uses existing symbols in new contexts thus giving them new meanings is in terms of subcultural

10 theory called bricoleur (Hebdige). Clarke has pointed to the way in which the resignification and extension of meaning of existing symbols happens:

Together, the object and meaning constitute a sign, and, within any one

culture, such signs are assembled, repeatedly, into characteristic forms of

discourse. However, when the bricoleur re-locates the significant object in a

different position within that discourse, using the same overall repertoire of

signs, or when that object is placed within a different total ensemble, a new

discourse is constituted, a different message conveyed (qtd. in Hebdige 136).

Territory and Age

There are two more concepts connected with subcultures to be introduced here with respect to our description of the skinhead subculture. These are territory and age . Since subcultures exist within a complex urban environment, the sense of belonging to a certain part of the urban space is very important for their members. The environmental boundaries of a certain subcultural territory also serve as group boundaries and hence are endowed with subcultural values. Phil Cohen claims that “it is through the function of territoriality that subculture becomes anchored in the collective reality of the kids who are its bearers, and who in this way become […] its conscious agents,” and on the other hand, territoriality is “the way in which the subcultural group becomes rooted in the situation of its community” (97). The urban space can also be divided among different subcultural (sub-)groups in terms of territories that often reflect many of the traditional divisions. Thus there can appear conflicts within certain subcultures based on the territorial division.

As regards the question of age, it has already been stated that the CCCS’s study of subcultures has largely been focused on the youth. The juveniles attract particular interest of the scholars because “adolescence, and the period of transition between school and work, and work and marriage is important in terms of secondary socialisation” (Brake 15-6). I have also

11 pointed to the fact that at particular times in history a subgroup of society (class) can become subject to certain socio-cultural (occupational, educational, economic) changes. The impact of these changes functions not only in terms of class but also in terms of generation. In connection with age, it is important to note that the working-class youth is the “group most vulnerable to economic changes” (Brake 22).

In the description of the actual skinhead subculture attention will be directed to the theoretical points mentioned above. Thus I will try to present accurate characteristics of the subculture with much emphasis laid on its emergence. Upon these characteristics it will also be possible to elaborate on its development and internal division.

3. The Socio-Cultural Background

I have already stressed the importance of the working-class environment for the emergence of subcultures. It is worth mentioning here once more that some scholars

(especially those who belong to the CCCS) ascribe the phenomenon of subcultures only to the working class .1 Though there may be some doubts as concerns this claim, the subculture in question here is by all means firmly bound with the working class environment. Hence I will offer in this chapter a general outline of the socio-cultural conditions in which the working class found itself in post-war Britain, for as Marwick claims “the social facts of post-war

Britain […] cannot be fully understood without reference to class” (44). And since I want to observe the rise of a subculture, which is undoubtedly an important social fact, I will refer to the state of the working class in the relevant period. The significance of class should not be underestimated, for as Marwick points out, when it is to be compared with “other sources of distinction and inequality, such as age, sex, nationality, race, or religious community, class

1 E.g. Phil Cohen claims that “the middle class [cannot] produce subcultures, for subcultures are produced by a dominated culture, not by a dominant culture” (97).

12 stands out as a key factor in such matters as wealth, political power, educational opportunity and style of life” (44). Naturally some of the features that will be descried here are substantial to the working class and thus they are not results of a certain shift in the post-war society. But we have to pay particular attention to the fact that the forms of class from 1945 onwards were largely affected by “the political events, traditions, national characteristics, and the more recent upheavals of war” (Marwick 35).

The Class

It has to be made clear here that the class distinction based on the occupational structure is used in this paper. The definition of class in terms of occupation is widely used in

European sociology and differs from the class system based on the control over the means of production as introduced by Marx. Thus the working class can be described as consisting of

“industrial manual workers, and agricultural workers whether skilled, semi-skilled, or unskilled” (Halsey 31). For my purposes it is useful to take a look at the class distinction from yet another point of view as proposed by Brake: “Classes are the largest social groups, and as such are defined as dominant and subordinate classes” (67). We will see that the sense of subordination was one of the key factors that influenced the birth of the skinhead subculture.

It is also important to note that subordinate classes may often stand in opposition to the dominant value systems (Brake), a feature that we will observe in skinheads as well. The importance of class membership and the phenomenon of subordination have also been stressed by Stanley Cohen:

From a general analysis of post-war British capitalism, specific feature –

particularly the pervasiveness of class – are extracted and historicized. Their

impact on the working class – and more particularly, its community and its

most vulnerable members, adolescents – is then identified as a series of

13 pressures or contradictions stemming from domination and subordination

(151).

The modern form of working class originated in the time of the Industrial Revolution when many workers were pushed by factors beyond their control to move from the countryside to cities. These workers, however, retained their strong feeling for tradition that had evolved among them in the course of many centuries. Stearns in his article on the working class culture claims that this traditionalism can very likely be perceived as a “sense of individual rights and personal dignity that reflected developments between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution” (628). Traditionalism is what Stearns considers to be an important feature of the working class that has formed its values a big deal. He sees the working class at the time of the Industrial Revolution as a “traditionalist force, innovating, except where compelled by outside circumstance, primarily to adapt its traditions to the new urban, factory setting” (626). We will see that the traditionalism of he working class, “the preference for stability over change” (Stearns 628), played its role also in the 1960s and worked as a strong force in constituting the new skinhead subculture among the working-class youth.

The living conditions of the workers in Britain changed substantially at the time of the

Industrial Revolution, as has already been said, but a profound change of the working class took also place in post-war Britain. The disruptions of war had a great effect on class and relationships between classes. Because of shortage of labour force the workers experienced a certain rise in their status. The working class became more self-confident, since “resorting as necessary to strikes, the workers were able to exploit the very high demand for labour engendered by the necessities of war to push their real earnings up by well over 50 per cent”

(Marwick 38). Hence as the war strengthened the self-confidence and self-awareness of the working class, it also worked in favour of solidarity within the class. Indeed as a result of the

14 Second World War, “there has developed a more homogenous and […] more hereditary working class in Britain” and it has become “contracted, better off, and more collectively powerful” (Halsey 57). Thus after 1945 there existed no more distinction within the working class between the ‘respectable’ and ‘rough’ as was the case in the late 19th and early 20 th centuries. These facts have led to a change in the attitudes of the working class, as its members have begun showing only a “little aspiration after middle class values” (Marwick

43). This shift in attitudes and values was of course passed on the working-class youths.

Nevertheless, the basic fact for the working class has remained untouched. The workers had to keep on performing manual work that was still most usually uncongenial or just plain boring and the conditions of work still demanded special working clothes. What is more, as concerns the chances for improvement, the working class still found itself at a disadvantage when compared with the rest of the society. Such attributes of the working-class life were strongly perceived by the youths who, as we will see, transformed them and incorporated them at a certain time into the framework of their newly designed subcultural style.

The Community and the Family

After the Second World War there also emerged certain difficulties that were to be faced by the working class. These were to a great degree connected with working-class housing. For as Marwick suggests, “in the realm of working-class housing this was a time of rapid transition”(69). Most of the working class families still had to live under very poor conditions in urban slums and thus there was an urgent need to provide them with new and respectable accommodation. But as Hopkins points out “the continued rise in population […], together with the increasing deterioration of the older, nineteenth-century section of the housing stock, did not make this any easier” (139). The government had to come up with a solution that could only be achieved by a profound change in the housing policies. Two strategies were employed in order to resolve the problem. At first, new housing estates were

15 being developed, often in a great distance from the older working class communities. Many families were then re-housed in this way. The new houses were assigned on the basis of need, with priority given to those from the worst slums or to those with the largest families. Such re-housing in its result meant breaking up the extended families and thus endangered one of the working-class traditional values. Families moved often unwillingly from their private accommodation condemned as slums to the new council housing. The situation can be illustrated by the fact that “surveys of the new housing estates revealed the difficulty of keeping up the old family relationships [but] they also revealed a strong will to keep such relationships in being” (Marwick 61). Not only were the family relationships disturbed, damage was also done to relationships with neighbours that had been very close in traditional working-class communities as well. Phil Cohen summarizes the newly arisen situation:

Not only was the new housing designed on the model of nuclear family, with

little provision for large low-income families […] and none at all for groups of

young single people, but the actual pattern of distribution of the new housing

tended to disperse the kinship network; families of marriage were separated

from their families of origin […] The isolated family could no longer call on

the resources of wider kinship networks of the neighbourhood […] (91).

The bad effects of such re-housing both on those who moved and those who stayed became obvious soon, and therefore the planning authorities changed their policy. The new strategy that was employed to deal with the housing problems lay in erecting high-rise buildings or tower blocks on slum sites, “and the now familiar matchbox shapes began to appear on the horizon” (Hopkins 142). Modern building techniques made these constructions possible and the authorities considered such development the most economical use of land.

Nevertheless, this new way of living was not accepted with much favour either. In this respect

Hopkins claims that “by the late 1960s, some complaints were being heard about the quality

16 of life possible in the new tower blocks, but many housing authorities regarded them as inevitable because of the need for higher densities of housing made necessary by the scarcity and cost of suitable land for building” (142). What came hand in hand with the advanced technologies developed after the Second World War was also the decline of the small-scale family business. As a result, the corner shop disappeared, being replaced by larger supermarkets, as well as the local pub, that gave way to larger clubs and discos. Such organization of the living space brought about by the economic forces was, however, designed rather to the middle-class lifestyle. The working class was not enabled to participate in the process of planning at any level. The result is described by Phil Cohen in the following way:

[The] plans are unconsciously modelled on the structure of the middle-class

environment, which is based on the concept of property and private ownership ,

on individual differences of status, wealth and so on, whereas the structure of

the working-class environment is based on the concept of community or

collective identity, common lack of ownership, wealth, etc. Similarly, needs

were assessed on the norms of the middle-class nuclear family rather than on

those of the extended working-class family (92).

The socio-economical forces operating within the urban environment after the Second World

War in their effect destroyed the traditional communal space of the working class, as can be inferred from what has been written so far. It was not only the communal life that came to harm. As has already been noted earlier in this section, it was also the basic unit of the working-class society, the family, that suffered because of the changed conditions of living laid upon it. Within the nuclear family it was the parent – child relationship that was affected most critically. In this connection Phil Cohen claims: “What had previously been a source of support and security for both now became something of a battleground, a major focus of all the anxieties created by the disintegration of community structures around them” (93). Thus

17 the internal conflicts of the working-class parent culture partly converted into a generational conflict.

The working-class youth had to cope with the bleak situation and did it in various ways. Some of the juveniles went after the chance to elevate their status that had been brought about by the economical growth and general increase in incomes in the post-war Western world. They started attending institutions of higher education and universities and tried to change the blue collars for suits and ties. But Farin and Seidel point out that “in fact, the children of the underdogs managed very rarely to make the advance to the middle class” (my translation, 24).

Another strategy that was employed by the young from the working class in order to get away from the newly arisen tensions of family life was to start a family of their own.

Indeed, the result was “to produce an increase in early marriage” (Phil Cohen, 93). As there was lack of accommodation for young, single people in the new developments, and because of the conversion of the cheap housing into middle-class accommodation, what seemed to be the only practicable way to leave home was to get married.

The most important outcome, in terms of this paper, of the above-illustrated generational conflict was the emergence of specific subcultures as a form of opposition to the parent culture. According to Phil Cohen, such a reaction was brought by the need “to weaken the links of historical and cultural continuity, mediated through the family, which had been such a strong force for solidarity in the working-class community” (94). The subculture works as a collective solution of the youth to the problems collectively encountered by the working- class society, while it articulates itself against the parent culture at the same time it attempts to defend some of the traditional values intrinsic to the parent culture. The described disruption of the working-class community, family and economy can be seen as the core power in forming the new subcultures including skinheads. Nevertheless, there was yet another

18 important feature of the post-war British society’s development that had profound influence on the rise of skinheads. This feature will be briefly illustrated in the following subchapter.

The Intruders

In the post-war period there appeared quite a new phenomenon in the evolution of the modern British society, especially in the urban areas of England. The new aspect of the society’s development in question here is massive immigration from the countries of The

British Commonwealth of Nations. The Commonwealth citizens had always had the permission to enter England freely but before the 1950s not much use of that right had been made. There had just been shorter or longer visits of the citizens of the white Commonwealth, which, nevertheless, had stayed quite unnoticed. The situation changed substantially in the fifties when “a flow of West Indians, Indians and Pakistanis began to come to England. From the economist’s point of view the country seemed to have found a fund of labour to draw on in the way West Germany drew on East Germany […] (Lloyd 377). Sked claims that by the year 1959 there were about 20,000 immigrants entering the country each year, and the number rose to 58,100 in 1960 and to 115,150 in 1961. The increase in immigration from the West

Indies was partly due to the McCarren-Walter Immigration Act of 1952 by which the West

Indians had become ineligible to settle in the USA (Sked 178). Moreover, there undoubtedly was a certain amount of admiration for Britain as well as aspirations for a British standard of living among the people in the colonies.

Thus attracted and welcomed by the governing authorities that were aware of the shortage of labour in post-war and early fifties Britain the newcomers naturally settled in poorer areas of certain cities. Almost a third of all immigrants was concentrated in certain parts of ; heavy concentration arose also in other impoverished urban areas, e.g. in

West Midlands. It is therefore small wonder that in the then Britain’s reaction towards the immigration something of a class division can be detected, since “those in the working class

19 and lower-middle class, living in the poorer areas in which, perforce, the new immigrants congregated, were more aware of the disruptions and strains brought to their everyday lives”

(Marwick 163). Obviously, this development was not welcomed by the people who found themselves living near the immigrants. Occasionally there also appeared implications that immigrants undercut the market rate for labour as they took low wages, and sometimes it was suggested that they were violent and noisy. Though this may have been true for some who were bachelors and started earning more than they ever had before, mostly they were “quiet people with fairly strict ideas about family life” (Lloyd 377). It was mainly for the simple feeling that black men were undesirable because they were different that the hostility towards the immigrants sprang up. The above discussed shortage of housing and the worsening conditions of living only made the issue more difficult. The immigrants were blamed for the insufficient space for living, and then for living in slums. And hence a new source of open social conflict appeared – the race. Marwick notices that “in August 1958 […] a violent race rioting broke out between the heavy concentration of West Indian immigrants in Notting Hill,

West London, and local whites” (163). The government eventually reacted by the

Immigration Bill in 1962. According to the new law, ordinary immigrants were accepted on a basis of a quota system, while those who either already had a job to come to, or possessed special skills likely to have been useful in Britain could apply for Ministry of Labour vouchers.

It was mainly the working class that found itself affected by the influx of the newcomers. For many years did not the British government provide any tools that would have helped to integrate or even assimilate the immigrants. As a result, they started establishing communities of their own, thus building their new social background with their own shops, pubs and other meeting points. The former homogeneity of the neighbourhood was disintegrated under the presence of foreign cultures. A new feeling arose among the juvenile

20 members of the traditional British working class, “the feeling of being a foreigner in one’s own country, of belonging to a tribe that is dying out” (my translation, Farin and Seidel 26).

The answer of the youth to the profound social change and to the change of their neighbourhood came through their membership in a newly born subculture, a one that emerged, among other things, as an attempt to revive and maintain the traditional working- class values. Skinheads started to take on their future shape. They tried to respond on all the threats that have been outlined so far; to resolve, though as Phil Cohen claims “magically,” the problems and contradictions “which remain[ed] hidden and unresolved in the parent culture” (94). By getting involved in the skinhead subculture the youth reacted also against the intrusion into their traditional space. They attempted to “magically” re-establish the traditional community. Out of the feeling of being oppressed and abused, trapped in the bleak conditions of living, the need for the group solidarity developed among them. This solidarity had among skinheads not only defensive features; it was expressed with a certain amount of aggression. They ostentatiously manifested and highlighted their pride in being the sons and daughters of the British working class.

A Short Summary

The socio-cultural background underlying the birth of the skinhead subculture has been illustrated in this chapter. It should be clear by now in what ways the different pressures of the changing British post-war society contributed to the emergence of skinheads who

“reassert, but ‘imaginarily’, the values of a class, the essence of a style, a kind of ‘fanship’ to which few working-class adults any longer subscribe: they ‘re-present’ a sense of territory and locality […]” (Clark et al. 104).

Before I proceed, in the next chapter, to the description of the development of the actual subculture, I would like to summarize the theoretical points that are important to bear in mind when considering the meaning of a subculture for its members. A transparent

21 summary is provided by Brake who draws the attention to the functions that subcultures provide for the youth:

1. They offer a solution, albeit at a ‘magical’ level, to certain structural

problems created by the internal contradictions of a socio-economic

structure, which are collectively experienced. The problems are often class

problems experienced generationally.

2. They offer a culture, from which can be selected certain cultural elements

such as style, values, ideologies and life style. These can be used to

develop an achieved identity outside the ascribed identity offered by work,

home or school.

3. As such, an alternative form of social reality is experienced, rooted in a

class culture, but mediated by neighbourhood, or else a symbolic

community transmitted through the mass media.

4. Subcultures offer, through their expressive elements, a meaningful way of

life during leisure, which has been removed from the instrumental world of

work.

5. Subcultures offer to the individual solutions to certain existential

dilemmas. Particularly, this involves the bricolage of youthful style to

construct an identity outside work or school. This is particularly employed

by young males […], and therefore subcultures have tended to be

masculinist, especially working-class subcultures (24).

Such are the attractions subcultures have for the youth in general. If the conditions of the relevant period are taken into account, the above outlined points prove to be applicable well for the emergence of the skinhead subculture too. Hence hopefully enough information has been provided for the reader so far in order for him to grasp the socio-cultural and economic

22 mechanisms that stood at the birth of the subculture discussed in this thesis. At reaching this point, I will now turn the attention to the birth and development of the skinhead subculture in a more descriptive manner.

4. Skinheads Rule

In this chapter the attention will already be confined primarily to the skinhead movement. The subculture’s origins will be illustrated, while the various preceding youth subcultures will be taken into consideration. This will point to the rise of the skinhead subculture also as a reaction to the various working-class youth cultures and subcultures, apart from what has been mentioned about the socio-cultural and economic influences. An outline of the development of the skinhead subculture will follow, which will allow for all the various sub-groups of the today’s complex skinhead movement to be introduced. The point here is, as has been mentioned in the introduction, to show the complexity of the subculture whose members, though sharing almost the same superficial features, often espouse very different principles or ideologies.

It has been stressed already that subcultures function in a way as the youth’s response to problems and strains encountered by their parent culture, problems that in the view of the youth seem to be unresolved by the parent culture. Naturally, different subcultures offer different solutions to these problems, and different attitudes are being adopted by the juveniles in the course of the time to the changing conditions. Thus there always exists succession of subcultures. Phil Cohen claims that the succession of working-class subcultures

can thus all be considered so many variations on a central theme – the

contradiction, at an ideological level, between traditional working-class

puritanism and the new hedonism of consumption; at an economic level,

23 between a future as part of the socially mobile elite or as part of the new

lumpen proletariat. Mods, parkas, skinheads, crombies all represent, in their

different ways, an attempt to retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements

destroyed in their parent culture, and to combine these with elements selected

from other class fractions, symbolizing one or other of the options confronting

it (94).

Even a single subculture is very likely to undergo certain changes and modifications of its attributes during its existence. Moreover, a subculture is not communicated only over time. It usually also spreads through space. Thus it is confronted with new influences, primarily in terms of its style and music. I will later point to this fact to show how important the shift in time and space has been for the skinhead subculture, mainly as regards its stigmatisation by the neo-Nazi and racist attitudes. For music in particular has played a vital role in the process of attaching the neo-Nazi ideology to the skinhead subculture.

Genealogy of the Skinhead Family

From the early 1950s it was the working-class youth who set the tone in Britain, style- wise. It was a result of the juveniles’ struggle against the monotonous working day, of their yearning to enrich their lives with some adventure and fun. They were absolutely reluctant to accept the prescribed roles without any defiance. Moreover, Farin and Seidel claim that “the

1950s and 1960s were wild years when one’s mindset and attitudes were really embodied by subcultural affiliation” (my translation, 27).

The Teddy boys were the first in the string of post-war Britain’s youth subcultures.

These first rebels sprang mainly from unskilled backgrounds and for lacking grammar school education and being unable to apply for white-collar work, or gain apprenticeships into skilled trades, they were left out of the upward mobility of post-war British affluence. Brake characterizes them in the following way: “They confirmed the myth of the affluent worker to

24 the affronted genteel middle class, appropriating as they did the Edwardian suiting of the prosperous upper classes, which they combined with a Mississippi gambler image, drape jackets, velvet collars, pipe trousers, crêpe-soled shoes and bootlace ties” (73). The subculture’s idea about a role model was built upon the mixed image of Marlon Brando’s menacing and stylish biker, and James Dean’s sensitive and confused young man, with Elvis

Presley being “the prime masculinity model” (Brake). The music that ruled this cult was blues and rock’n’roll imported from the USA. Hebdige observes that “the emergence of a spectacular subculture is invariably accompanied by a wave of hysteria in the press” (131), which was definitely true as concerns the Teddy boys. The British society was shocked by the

Teds’ behaviour and hence they became responsible for every trouble.

The successors of the Teddy boys, the so-called mods, became the trendsetters in the late 1950s. They pursued to escape from their working-class background by adopting a neat, modern and fashionable image, hence originally called the ‘modernists.’ Mods expressed strong appreciation for black culture – their fashion had been inspired by the dandy style of young Afro-Americans and they embraced the American soul music and also , music brought to Britain by the West Indian immigrants. According to Farin and Seidel, “to be a meant: expensive clothes, ska and northern soul, chrome glittering Vespa mopeds, coolness, stimulating pills, boastfulness, and – to work as a messenger for a bank branch” (my translation, 27). Thus in the opposition to their parent culture they reflected in their style “the hedonistic image of an affluent consumer” (Phil Cohen, 95).

Full of scorn for the mods’ flashy style and aspirations for the middle-class values were their severe cultural enemies – the rockers. Their attributes were studs decorated leather jackets, jeans, boots and motorbikes. They overtly expressed sexism, praised masculinity and violence, and usually belonged to low paid, unskilled manual labourers. Mods with their flamboyant life-style, on the other hand, usually managed to get semi-skilled, white-collar

25 jobs. Such subcultural opposition escalated into series of riots between mods and rockers in the early 1960s that filled pages of newspapers.

With the mods’ style gravitating ever closer towards a middle-class hippie style, there emerged a subcultural faction within the mods. The so-called hard mods never had enough money for the expensive outfits esteemed so highly by the original mods. They preferred good cheap beer to stimulating drugs and cocktails consumed in fancy clubs. Hard mods represented a transitional form between mods and skinheads in a way, since they started to turn their attention back to their working-class origins and began to emphasize a more proletarian look. Thus they replaced dandyish suits and smart shoes with jeans, t-shirts and industrial work boots, and cut their hair shorter. Nevertheless, the love for Jamaican ska music remained. Phil Cohen describes the transition between the mods and skinheads as follows:

“The alien elements introduced into music and dress by the mods were progressively de- stressed and the indigenous components of argot and ritual reasserted as the matrix of subcultural identity” (95). Theoretically, the typical skinhead style was born.

The Birth of the Skinhead Cult

On his web pages called Skinhead Nation George Marshall, the ‘chronicler’ of the skinhead subculture and an ex-skinhead, provides eyewitness testimony about the birth of the skinhead subculture given by Alex Hughes, better known as , an English and ska artist:

The first time the skinheads came to right was during the mod time really,

going back to the days of Geno Washington and the mods and rockers. Out of

that evolved the whole skinhead thing. All of a sudden the hair became shorter.

Obviously I had my hair cut short at the time because of the size I was and I

was also a wrestler, putting a mask on my head and things like that. It was the

mid-Sixties when I started to see them, probably about ‘66, but by ‘68 – ‘69 it

26 was rampant. Bank holidays were the big thing – you could go to Margate and

see them all milling around. But in fairness, when they talk about the trouble,

I’ve seen the press making them run up and down the beach, taking

photographs and saying run this way, run that way. And then three days later

you’ll see it on the front of the paper – SKINHEADS RUN RIOT (qtd. in

Marshall, Part Three: Bring Back the Skins).

Thus perceived the rise of the skinhead cult one of its greatest musical icons, the first white man whose reggae song became a hit in , the homeland of the genre. The extract proves right the suggestion made by Hebdige and quoted a little bit earlier in this chapter that there always appears a certain hysterical reaction in the press to the emergence of a subculture. It also illustrates well the succession of the subcultural styles as outlined above.

Finally, it opens the field for discussion on violence in connection with the skinhead subculture, which I will comment on later.

Quoting a ska and reggae artist here is also deliberately done with the intention to draw the reader’s attention to the ties between the skinhead subculture and reggae, the musical genre now primarily linked with Rastafarianism and black liberation movement. But the themes dealing with the black pride and mystical notions of Africa as a place where all the blacks should unite have been incorporated into reggae later under the influence of the mentioned Rastafarian movement. At first reggae was above all party and dance music and only later it became slower and more meditative. Nevertheless, it has always been ‘black’ music in terms of its origins. And in the 1960s it was also the music that was promptly embraced by the early skinheads as a part of the subculture’s style. Jamaican artists and performers like Desmond Dekker or Laurel Aitken as well as recording labels, in turn, focused on the young white audience. And thus originated skinhead reggae that “fuelled the rise of the skinhead subculture while jump-starting the careers of many Jamaican performers

27 in Britain” (Brown). The definite evidence supporting the claim about the relationship between the skinhead subculture and reggae music is given by Chris Prete, an ageing skinhead who works for a famous reggae recording label and remembers the beginning of the skinhead subculture:

To me skinheads and reggae go together. You can’t separate them. It’s a basic

music, simple and not complicated. It’s got a hook with the bass beat, and once

you start getting into the music, it’s hard to walk away from it. The deeper you

dig, the more good things you discover. It really is amazing that so much good

music has come out of a small island like Jamaica (qtd. in Marshall, Part

Three: Bring Back the Skins).

It is important to realize that the original skinhead movement, to which the traditional skinheads of today still assign themselves, was a “multicultural synthesis organized around fashion and music” (Brown). Indeed, the early skinheads not only approved of the Jamaican music. They also styled themselves after a young, cool Jamaican immigrant – the defiant, disobedient of a Kingston ghetto. Thus there existed a symbiotic relationship, a cultural dialogue between the original skinheads and black immigrants based primarily on the style and the musical element. From today’s point of view on the skinhead movement, which has been spoilt by the racists and neo-Nazis, this may seem very improbable. Already in the year 1985 Stratton formed his opinion on this phenomenon in the following way: “The racist skinhead subculture […] utilised the black West Indian music of ska thus generating one, of many, irreconcilable contradictions” (188). But his observation was not at all right, since it was probably based on the image of the racist and later neo-Nazi factions that have developed within the skinhead subculture since the time of the so-called skinhead revival in the late

1970s. Against Stratton’s claim stands the following comment that Farin and Seidel have made with respect to the time of the birth of the skinhead subculture: “In 1968/69 it could not

28 be foreseen that skinheads and racial violence should once become interchangeable terms”

(my translation, 32).

It has already been mentioned that the first skinheads inspired themselves to a great extent by the Jamaican rude boys as regards their style. The rude boys wore tight Levi’s jeans as well as extremely short haircuts. This was completely what resonated with the white working-class youth’s taste and hence they connected these elements with the hard mod style in creation of the new fashion. Brown suggests that “the clean, hard look of these transplanted

‘rude boys’ fit nicely with the hard mod style, and their evening wear echoed the earlier mod emphasis on expensive suits and nice shoes.” Hence the original skinhead ‘uniform’ that has developed from the combination of the rude boy influence and “the external manifestations

[that] resonated with and articulated Skinhead conceptions of masculinity, ‘hardness’ and

‘working-classness’” (Clarke et al. 110) consists of working boots, rolled up jeans, shirt and braces. A bit later on certain trademarks have been adopted as the most suitable ones, like famous Doctor Marten’s boots, Ben Sherman shirts, or Fred Perry t-shirts. And naturally the cropped hair was a compulsory attribute. Nevertheless, the length of hair was not that important at the beginning. The word skinhead came to the use basically because of the fact that one’s skin on the head could be seen through the short hair. Actually there were at first variety of names for the members of the new subculture that differed regionally. Some of these were e.g. noheads, cropheads, boiled eggs, or spy kids. Thus, really, the skinhead identity and style was born.

I would like to make a little note at this point, turning the attention to the term bricolage that I have discussed earlier in this paper. The act of bricolage lies in, basically, endowing already existing symbols with new meanings by putting these symbols together in a new pattern of a subcultural style. This theoretical observation can well be applied on the skinhead subculture, thus explaining why the working-class youth in creating their new

29 subcultural style were inclined to use the specific items and symbols described above. The cropped hair, besides that it was practical hairstyle for street fighting, stood as a symbol for

“repression, stolen individuality and dignity. Whenever the labourers did not speechlessly yield to the established, ‘God-given,’ order, their hair would be cut off […]” (my translation,

Farin and Seidel 23-4). The working boots, jeans, also formerly used mainly at work, and the overall sturdy look represented the recovery of the working-class identity and “signified a reaction against the contamination of the parent culture by the middle-class values and a reassertion of the integral values of working-class culture through its most recessive traits

[…]” (Phil Cohen 95).

I would like to highlight once more the non-racist nature of the traditional skinhead subculture, which can be done by pointing to certain aspects of the early skinhead style, now in question. It is interesting in what way Hebdige apprehends the influence of the West Indian culture on the recovery of the sense of community among the white working-class youth. He claims that it was “through consorting with West Indians at the local youth clubs and on the street corners, by copying their mannerism, adopting their curses, dancing to their music that the skinheads ‘magically recovered’ the lost sense of working-class community” (56). Even the cropped hairstyle may have had its origins in the black culture. For Mercer suggests that

“the skinhead hairstyle was an imitation of the mid-1960s soulboy look, where closely shaven haircuts provided one of the most ‘classic’ solutions to the problem of kinks and curls” (434).

These observations once again stress the importance of cooperation between the two cultures as regards the emergence of skinheads. Thus, hopefully, what has been written about the formation and the core of the original skinhead subculture so far, sheds enough light on the problem of the unjust stigmatisation of the whole youth subculture by tendencies that have spread through certain parts of the movement only later.

30 Defending Territory – Skinheads, Violence and Football

Being a stalwart supporter of a local football team belonged to the vital features of the original skinheads’ identity. Almost all of the first-generation skinheads belonged also to the ranks of football hooligans. Football stood in the centre of a skinhead life. Farin and Seidel explain the reason for supporting football teams by skinheads:

[It was] a chance for all the skinheads of the same city to act as one man. On

Saturdays all local differences would be swept aside as the home team would

be supported, and the rival fans would be shown who is the best […] After the

game the two opposing groups would go in the streets with sharp metal combs

and steel toecap boots to meet in an open battlefield (my translation, 33).

Such clashes naturally soon became a burning issue in newspapers nation-wide. As the society became anxious about the problem, reasons and motives for such behaviour among the youth were sought. Scholars devoted to research on subcultures and behaviour of juveniles involved with them have ascribed the phenomenon to the socio-economic changes that have been discussed already and that resulted in the loss of the working-class identity and the disruption of the working-class community. Stanley Cohen claims that by such behaviour the youth “are all really (though they might not know it) reacting to other things, for example, threats to community homogeneity or traditional stereotypes of masculinity” (155) and Phil

Cohen adds “it [was] a way of retrieving the solidarities of the traditional neighbourhood destroyed by development” (97). As has already been pointed out in the section dealing with territory and age in connection with subcultures, territoriality represents a process in which a certain group identifies itself with a certain space by marking its boundaries and investing some of the subcultural values into such marked environment. And this was, according to Phil

Cohen, the function of football teams for skinheads. Nevertheless, the already mentioned ex-

31 skinhead and the direct participant in the events, George Marshall, considers the above outlined ideas utter rubbish:

All the cheap theories about disintegrated families, poor education and harsh

living environment got spread; there may have been some truth to these

explanations but the main reason why the kids took part in football

hooliganism and did all such things, was just the fact they had their fun doing

it. It is as simple as that (my translation, qtd. in Farin and Seidel 34).

But naturally it was not only football around which skinheads’ leisure time was organized. After all, the matches only took place on one day out of the weeks’ seven. So there was quite enough time left to spend with friends over a beer in a local pub, playing darts or billiards, or to go dancing to a concert of some ska or skinhead-reggae band. As has already been noted, at such gigs the white youth danced together with the black rude boys, the performers being usually also black. There were many skinhead gangs that comprised white

British as well as Afro-Caribbean youths, the linking factor being the working-class background, not the colour of one’s skin.

Apart from aiming to clear the skinhead subculture of its unjust stigmatisation, this paper also pursues to offer the reader an objective, unbiased image of the original skinhead subculture. Hence it must be admitted that some of the first generation-skinheads were quite keen on fighting, not only at the football terraces. Street fights would as well fill some of the skinheads’ spare time. To be rough and extremely masculine was a part of the right skinhead look for it also belonged to the good old working-class attitudes that needed to be defended and preserved. On the other hand, skinheads were not the only working-class subculture whose members took part in different clashes. Once again this violence has to do with territoriality. Defending one’s territory is nothing that skinheads first would invent. I have already mentioned the riots between mods and rockers that became notorious in their time.

32 Skinheads by defending their territories sometimes got into clashes with members of other subcultures as well but what drew the most attention were their attempts to clear their streets of different minorities, social and sexual. Thus there appeared skinheads’ hunts for homosexuals, hippies, or Asians. Especially frequent assaults on Pakistanis, for which the expression Paki-bashing became common, turned into a kind of national problem in the late

1960s. Still, there was usually no racial hate behind these acts, as there were white as well as black skinheads of West Indian origin involved in them. What stood at the root of these attacks was rather the fear of being taken one’s job away, the feeling that the traditional working-class environment is being destroyed by the emerging Asian communities, and other socio-economic factors that have already been discussed above (see the section 3.3 The

Intruders). Nevertheless, such attitudes towards certain immigrant groups and their cultures started soon to be exploited by some right-wing politicians. As Marwick points out, “race as a political issue led eventually to establishment, through a fusion of existing groups, of the

National Front, a minority right-wing party, in 1966” (165) . Thus the traditional skinhead subculture became contaminated in quite thick racist and nationalist atmosphere of the end of the 1960s’ Britain. In connection with the decline of the original skinhead movement and its revival in the 1970s, this was the reason why a certain faction within the subculture started to openly support and profess the neo-Nazi ideology.

Schism in the Skinhead Subculture

With the rising immigration of the turn of the 1950s and 1960s there started to continually appear and spread racist sentiments throughout Britain. The immigration

‘problem’ soon became a big issue and was taken advantage of at election campaigns. Brown observes that “the sixties were a period of what might be called a racist consensus in Britain, with repeated legislation to curb immigration and attempts by the conservative and radical right to turn immigration into election-winning issue.” A leading politician of the time, Enoch

33 Powell, delivered a speech in Birmingham in April 1968 by which he openly supported the racist views and thus gave a hand to and comfort to the rising neo-Nazis. He compared the current situation of the non-white immigration in Britain to the Romans’ experience when he said that “like the Romans I seem to see ‘the River Tiber flowing with much blood’” (qtd. in

Marwick 165). Gradually stemming from the hostile attitudes towards immigrants was also the death of the symbiotic relationship between the black and white youth within the working- class community and the skinhead subculture. With the reggae music artists starting to embrace the black pride and liberation ideas and with the music’s slowing down, the important linking factor between the two cultures – the musical element – became indistinct.

At the time there emerged a musical genre and subcultural style designated for the white working-class youth – punk. These factors led eventually, in the early 1970s, to the decline of the original skinhead movement.

Out of the punk scene and its different musical genres, mainly the so-called street- punk, grew the skinhead subculture revival in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The subculture, nevertheless, underwent important changes in terms of its style as well as ideology. For many of its new adherents the roots of the subculture and its original shape remained hidden. The newly embraced music – street-punk and Oi! (originally a cockney greeting) music – has been built upon a stripped-down whites’ rock music. It has become very raw and aggressive and attracted quite huge audience among the second-generation skinheads. The new skinheads became more aggressive also as concerns the style of fashion. At the expense of the original skinhead sharp stylishness, they began “emphasizing the threatening aspects of the look” as their “boots became taller, military surplus MA-1 jackets replaced earlier more ‘civilian’ looks, tattoos […] began to crop up above the neckline, and hair became shorter to the point of baldness” (Brown). Such changes in style to a certain degree reflected the changes in the subculture’s ideology – its more extreme looks marked the gradual tendency to affiliate with

34 the radical right. The worsening economic conditions in Britain of the 1970s and 1980s, scarcity of work, and the continual immigration only fuelled racist and extremely right-wing attitudes in British society. A part of the re-born skinhead subculture expressed these attitudes and prejudices again in an exaggerated form and thus it attracted the attention of the radical right. Skinheads were seen as a good target for recruitment. With respect to what has been said Simon Jones claims the following:

The coincidence of the revival of skinhead culture with the resurgence in

organised fascist activity became increasingly noticeable at punk gigs by bands

like Sham 69, who began to attract sizeable contingents of increasingly vocal

Young National Front supporters. While the connection between nationalist,

right-wing organisations and the resurgent skinhead movement were at first by

no means automatic or reciprocal, the skinhead style became progressively

inflected with a racist connotation, as organisations like the British Movement

and the National Front consciously sought to forge a link between its

exaggerated working-class imagery and racist/nationalist politics (100-1).

The decisive shift between the original and new content of the subculture was marked by the birth of a new musical genre called Nazi rock, and was brought about by the subcultures’ temporal and spatial receding from its origins. I have already pointed to the temporal factor – the subculture’s decline and resurgence under different conditions.

However, what was maybe of even more profound importance as regards the subculture’s orientation on the neo-Nazi ideology, was its transmission from the motherland to Germany in the late 1970s and its subsequent development there under the influence of yet other social, cultural, and historical factors. The above mentioned Nazi rock music, “a hybrid creation that was decisively influenced by transnational contacts between England and Germany” (Brown), has developed from the Oi! music by coming closer to heavy metal. It remained enough

35 aggressive but has also adopted mid-tempo passages and even ballads in which it is easier to understand the lyrics. Thus it could start to easily spread the right-wing political messages.

With the help of this music, in such an indirect way, many right-wing radicals became attracted by the skinhead subculture and joined its ranks.

Nevertheless, there have always been many skinheads, if not a majority, after the skinhead revival, who have remained devoted to the original idea of the movement. Brown claims that “right-wing skins probably never made up a majority, but by 1980, the sight of bomber-jacketed ‘boneheads’ giving the ‘Sieg-Heil!’ salute at Oi! gigs was common, and by

1982, the skinhead subculture was firmly cemented in the public mind as right-wing.” The above outlined politicisation of part of the skinhead subculture has been perceived with almost repugnance by the faithful, as it has been seen as “bastardisation” (Brown) of the original movement. There have even appeared derisive names for the skinhead supporters of extreme political right like “bone heads.” There was especially a strong will of the apolitical skins to regain power over the subculture, to take it back from the right-wing radicals, in the mid-1980s. Based on these attempts, a new faction within the subculture was founded in New

York City in 1986 – Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (S.H.A.R.P.). They have been organized rather around the pure original style than around politics. As Brown puts it,

“’S.H.A.R.P. skins’ professed no political affiliation, they merely insisted that the original skinheads had not been racists, pointed out that appreciation for Jamaican culture had been central to the formation of skinhead identity, and argued that, therefore, no true skinhead could be a racist.” This new movement soon spread to England and Germany, and later also to other countries, in attempts to re-establish the skinhead subculture on the basis of its original values.

36 A Note on Diversity within the Skinhead Subculture

As the skinhead subculture has already existed for more than forty years and thus has been exposed to many changing trends and conditions, there has developed an extensive variety of sub-groups within the subculture that all use for themselves the label skinhead. I have already mentioned the two counter-working factions, the neo-Nazi skinheads (with organisations like Blood and Honour, or White Power) and S.H.A.R.P. skins. But there is a large number of other groups whose style and ideology often differ substantially. As regards political affiliation, the subculture comprises not only of right-wing radicals and apolitical skins. There are also adherents of the extreme political left wing among skinheads. Such groups are labelled redskins or anarchist skinheads and they have also created an umbrella organisation called Red and Anarchist Skinheads. Also some members of sexual minorities tend to identify themselves with the skinhead subculture and unite by means of sharing a skinhead identity – there has developed a group of so-called queerskins, or gay skinheads.

The internal stratification of the skinhead subculture thus seems to be based on various motives – political, cultural, and even sexual. It would definitely be worth examining this topic in detail, which lies, however, already beyond the scope of this paper.

5. Conclusion

The skinhead subculture is already a very long-lasting movement which has its roots in post-war Britain. Up until now the subculture has spread literally around the world and during its almost continual existence it has evolved into a multi-faceted movement with its factions organised around various aspects of different societies of predominantly young people. There has appeared a considerable number of divisions within the movement by now.

In the public eye, however, the subculture is usually seen as a homogenous unity, and is mostly condemned as a group of right-wing radical troublemakers and rioters. But as I have

37 shown, thus shaped group of people only comprises one, and probably not major, part of the whole subculture. I have also made it clear that the contamination by radical ideologies of a certain faction within the movement is a result of temporal as well as spatial displacement of the subcultural style from the point of its origin.

In my view, it is very unjust that a young person should be considered a malign element of society and a threat to the public only because of his or her external representation of a certain youth style. These public prejudices only stem from ignorance, lack of knowledge, and lack of will to gain a more complex insight into the problems and mechanisms that shape the attitudes and postures of juveniles. Thus it has become the aim and central core of this paper to point to the actual facts about the emergence of the skinhead subculture. In the chapters on the theoretical background it has been shown in a general way what aspects of a subculture should be taken into consideration in order to grasp its emergence properly as well as the way in which it shapes a young person, and is shaped by the youth, in turn. The specificity of the working-class environment and its importance for the birth of a subculture has also been considered. The paper thus pursued to show the complex conditions upon whose influence the movement was born in fresh light, and by doing it, to remove the label ‘unwanted’ from so many young people who have become devoted to the subculture just because they share certain tastes, style- or music-wise.

The thesis has been carried out by elaborating on the relevant theoretical findings in connection with skinheads. It has been shown that the complex socio-economic conditions and cultural influences that operated within British society after the Second World War, the time when the seed of the skinhead subculture was sown, involved the substantial immigration from the Commonwealth countries, the thriving economy producing an affluent society, and a profound reconstruction of certain parts of London. I have thus also drawn the attention to the changing living conditions in which the British working class found itself in

38 the relevant period and to the way these changes were shaping the attitudes of the youth. The feeling of a loss of the traditional working-class community made some of the youth stand up and get together in order to defend the values they considered intrinsic to their traditional society. For that purpose they, nevertheless, also used a variety of features from a foreign culture that they incorporated in their new style. As a result, indeed, the skinhead subculture at its beginning was a kind of a multicultural movement organised around music brought to

Britain by West Indian Immigrants and around fashion and style that were profoundly influenced by the young black Jamaican rude boys. I have also drawn attention to the importance of football for the skinhead subculture. The growth of the movement and its forming by very different influences changing in time and space has been observed in order to provide the reader with sufficient information upon which an unbiased opinion on the subculture can be built. Hopefully, after reading the paper, skinheads will not all be tarred with the same brush by the reader anymore.

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