THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES PROGRAM
YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: YOUTH POP CULTURE AND COMMERCIALIZATION IN 1950s ENGLAND
MATTHEW TRIFAN Spring 2011
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in History and Political Science with honors in History
Reviewed and approved* by the following
Sophie de Schaepdrijver Associate Professor of History Thesis Supervisor
Catherine Wanner Associate Professor of History Honors Advisor
*Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College i
ABSTRACT
This paper explores England‘s youth culture in the 1950s and analyzes the interplay between British adolescents and the pop culture industry. This is done within the context of the age-old debate over the agency of consumers—was youth culture, in other words, manipulated by profit-hungry commercial industries, or did these industries develop at the whim of youth desires and demands? In the case at hand, what we find is youth pop culture and pop-culture industries often growing in tandem, leading to a situation that defies the simple label of cause- and-effect. In this paper, therefore, I offer a combination of these two modes of thought— stipulating that, while some industries worked earnestly to streamline youth consumerism, others developed as a consequence of a self-perpetuated youth culture. I look at the development of youth spending trends and emerging ―pop culture industries‖—namely, the music industry, the
―sex‖ industry, subculture fashion, rock‘n‘roll, and television—in order to support the notion that
British teenagers created their own unique and unprecedented youth culture. I argue that the social and economic changes of the post-war generation helped England‘s youth create a market of goods, looks, and ideas that embodied elements of rebelliousness, sexual liberalization, and musical autonomy. At the same time, I also acknowledge that the commercial industries of the era played a significant role in shaping much of this ―pop image‖ and marketing it back to teenagers, thereby creating demand.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………….i
Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………….ii
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………..iii
Introduction …..……………………………………………………………………………....1
Chapter 1. A Beginning: Youth Culture and Emerging Post-war Trends…….…………………5
Chapter 2. Baby You‘re a Rich Man: Youth Spending and the Music Industry……………….15
Chapter 3. You Never Gave Me Your Money: Class Structure and Youth Culture……..……..23
Chapter 4. Nowhere Man: Youth Subculture and Counter-Culture………………………...... 34
Chapter 5. Sexy Sadie: A Teenage Sex Culture?...... 47
Chapter 6. You Really Got a Hold on Me: The Advent of Television……………………….....59
Chapter 7. Roll Over Beethoven: Youth Music and Rock‘n‘roll…………………….……...... 68
Chapter 8: Come Together: The Beatles………….…………………………………………….79
Conclusion…….………………………………………………………………………………..89
Endnotes………………………………………………………………………………………..92
Bibliography……….…………………………………………………………………………...97
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to extend my most profound thanks to Professor de Schaepdrijver for her patience and her constructive criticisms. Without her support and tireless insight, this project would have rendered a very different outcome. I would also like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Wanner, as well as my secondary reader, Dr. Cross, for their comments and scholarly contributions. The same should be said for Eric Novotny, our resource librarian, who frequently pointed me in the right direction when searching for primary sources. I was in very good hands all through the year-long assembly of this paper, so thank you all, and kudos to Penn State‘s History Department. Finally, a nod to my family and friends, who were only too enthusiastic to discuss the Beatles with me.
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Introduction
There has long been a debate among historians of consumer culture as to the interaction between the agents of commercialization and their consumers. The issue offers two alternative scenarios. In the first, the corporate world is seen as a manipulative ―puppet-master‖ which forges an artificial popular culture—be it through music, cinema, literature, games, fashion, etc—that can be easily marketed to a more-susceptible, less-suspicious youthful audience. The second view offers that young consumers are, in fact, well aware of what they are getting themselves into—that the exchange of money for goods is willing, and moreover dictated by consumer whims and desires. This is a debate that leads us to wonder whether consumer culture is ultimately a degrading phenomenon, or a natural and creative exchange of goods and ideas.
The first of these scenarios upholds the cynically-tinged ―Frankfurt School‖ theories of ―neo-
Marxist paradigms,‖ offering that consumers (particularly younger ones) are ―dupes, easily manipulated by capitalist corporations into false desires and mindless purchasing.‖1 The second scenario is reflective of a more optimistic school of cultural studies that emphasizes ―the pleasures, agency, and resistance of consumers (even as children).‖2
My research has revealed the difficulties of arguing either end of these two extremities.
This paper explores England‘s youth culture in the 1950s and analyzes the interplay between
British adolescents and the pop culture industry during this decade. What I found during this period is that youth pop culture and pop-culture industries often grew in tandem, leading to a commercial situation that defies the simple label of cause-and-effect. Rather, it reflects an interactive dynamic that simultaneously creates and responds to consumer demand, while reacting to new corporate marketing initiatives. As such, I offer a combination of these two modes of thought—stipulating that, while some industries worked earnestly to streamline youth 2 consumerism, other industries developed as a consequence of a self-perpetuated youth culture. I look at the development of youth spending trends and emerging ―pop culture industries‖— namely, the music industry, the ―sex‖ industry, subculture fashion, rock‘n‘roll, and television— in order to support the notion that British teenagers created their own unique youth culture as a means of defining themselves. I argue that the social and economic changes of the post-war generation helped England‘s youth create a distinct market of goods, looks, and ideas. At the same time, I acknowledge that the commercial industries of the era played their own role in shaping much of this ―pop image‖ and marketing it back at teenagers.
Why Britain? More than any other westernized democracy in the Post-World War II era,
Britain embodied a cultural revolution of breath-taking depth and scope. Here was a country which, for decades, had entrenched itself in Victorian traditions, in routine lifestyles and unshakable family values. Yet, the post-war years—particularly those of the 1950s—witnessed massive changes in the British public‘s perception of a wide host of issues, including youth culture and counter-culture, classes and castes, music and modernity, and education and ethics.
This paper examines a handful of those transformations over the pivotally-defining era of the
1950s, and their interplay with the emerging admass mentality of the times—the increasingly acceptable desire to spend liberally on material goods to satisfy one‘s material impulses. It is this very ―admass mentality‖—borrowing the term from the English novelist J.B. Priestley in the mid-century—that would come under fire by traditionalists and adults in England, as we will see over and over in each of these chapters.
I selected this particular time period for several reasons. First, this era epitomizes the deafening boom of the ―age of affluence,‖ a phenomenon which inexorably goes hand-in-hand with the commercialized metamorphosis of British culture. Secondly, these years marked a 3 remarkable transformation and de-compartmentalization of the traditional British class-lines for
England‘s youth—as well as the heralding-in of a new set of mainstream values and customs among those same youth. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, this time frame helped structure the rising sensation of the ―teenager.‖ We see the homogenization of teenagers into an increasingly synchronized body of consumers during the course of the decade. It is this study of
British youth— the synergy between youth and class, youth and affluence, youth and pop culture—that ultimately binds together the elements of this work.
To explore these topics, I draw upon the work of several of the predominant scholars in the field of 1950s British and youth culture. Richard Hoggart‘s The Uses of Literacy, a classic hallmark of the Fifties, offers a nuanced and colorful depiction of England‘s working classes and family life. His work at once praises the emerging socio-economic autonomy of the working family, while critiquing the manipulative and degrading influence of newly-founded commercial industries. Offering a more optimistic approach to youth consumer autonomy is Dominic
Sandbrook‘s Never Had It So Good—the exhaustive and titanic history of England from 1956-
1963. Sandbrook‘s sweeping history allows us to grasp some of the larger political and social changes that inevitably influenced British youth, while articulating the impact of music trends like skiffle and rock‘n‘roll in defining a new form of ―youth.‖ This work is supplemented by
Tony Judt‘s Postwar, which highlights the extent of Britain‘s Age of Affluence and its liberalizing impact on young spenders. Finally, Bill Osgerby‘s Youth in Britain since 1945 provides a careful look at the mainstream image of young people—from Teddy boys to rock‘n‘rollers—and shows that British youth became inextricably tied to the hopes and fears of post-war England.
His analysis of burgeoning counter-cultures and youth fads of the Fifties helps to contextualize teenagers‘ responses to society‘s criticisms and desires. 4
As such, I have divided this thesis into several sections. The first chapter concerns itself with tracing the traditions, changes, and social trends of youth culture as they emerged from the
Second World War. The second chapter looks at this new ―post-war‖ generation of British youth as ―affluent consumers,‖ and we see how that affluence began to mold a very distinct—and soon to be very influential—music record industry. The third chapter looks at the impact of class structure on defining and homogenizing youth culture. The fourth chapter offers two distinct subcultures, the Teddy-boys and the Beatniks, as a means of demonstrating youth‘s ability to initiate powerful social trends. The next chapter explores the gradual sexual liberalization of
British society in the Fifties, which in turn created sexually-charged consumer ―themes‖ targeted at British youth. In the sixth chapter, we look at the cautious rise of the television industry and the social debate over its influence on teenagers. The seventh chapter returns to the music industry in full force—this time from the perspective of youth, rather than the record industry— and does so within the context of two phenomenal trends: skiffle and rock‘n‘roll. Finally, the last chapter offers the formative years of Beatles as a quintessential case study of the British adolescent in the Fifties. Not only does this chapter highlight the Beatles‘ rise to fame as a consequence of individual talent and creativity, but it also demonstrates their frequent re-imaging and ―re-packaging‖ as a result of commercialized desires.
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Chapter 1
A Beginning: Youth Culture and Emerging Post-war Trends
Like the rest of England‘s working-class cities, Liverpool weathered out the gritty, destructive years of World War Two with industrial tenacity and stubborn resilience. The irony of the England‘s recent transformation was not lost on anyone: an empire that had once boasted of a never-setting sun could now scarcely stop bombs from raining on the heads of its own people. Yet, life went on—the war industry boomed, the shipyards sang, and babies were born.
And in these, the unlikeliest of times, under the most unimaginable of circumstances, it is fitting to herald the birth of two of the world‘s greatest superstars—John Lennon and Ringo Starr. The early experiences of John and Ringo, along with those of Paul and George, speak volumes towards not only working-class influences in the Beatles‘ music, but also towards describing what life was like growing up in a post-war society. After all, these were turbulent years. The face of war had redefined everything from the basic family unit to workplace constituencies, from consumer culture to society‘s values and principles. What emerged from the chaos was a new kind of British youth—one whose eyes and ears hungered after anything American, while their pockets jingled with the promises of music, movies, cars, and idle joy.
We will return to the story of the Beatles at the end of this paper, but for now we will examine specific emerging post-war trends. World War Two is an appropriate place to begin the study of mid-century English youth, if for no other reason than the war brought many substantial changes to the social life of British adolescents. As historians Dominic Sandbrook and Bill
Osgerby have argued, not only did the youths‘ heightened capacity as wage-earners cultivate a deeper sense of fiscal and social independence, but their cultural narrative shifted to reflect this newfound sense of autonomy.3 These shifts in youth culture must be viewed within the context 6 of the dramatic ―Americanization‖ of the postwar era. As we will shortly see, Americanization surged to new heights during the 1940s, opening the floodgates to new consumer industries, music trends, fashion styles, and entertainment venues. This ―Americanized‖ sense of commercialism would form the backdrop to England‘s postwar economic boom—while impressing a new set of values on an eager, susceptible body of British youth.4
In order to understand these changes in post-war youth, however, we must take a comparative glance backwards. Prior to WWII, history tended to view young people in Britain not as a class distinguishable from adults—with their own ambitions, customs, and worldviews—but rather, as younger versions of their parents. On the surface of things, youth reflected similar customs and moral codes, similar family values and ethics, and similarly somber attitudes towards workmanship and honest living. Yet this popular historical image of
―little adults‖ bears fruit only in hindsight. As Geoffrey Pearson and John Springhall detail in their histories of British ―adolescents‖ and ―hooliganism,‖ youth culture and its sub-cultures evolved along a continuum since the turn of the century. There were always hooligans, trouble- makers, and droves of youth straining against the customs of their parents. There was always a spirit of rebelliousness and restlessness among British youth. In fact, John Springhall‘s Coming of Age highlights the difficulty in pinpointing the origins of ―adolescence‖ as either a term or an idea—a fact which further reflects of the subtle evolution of this amorphous entity.5 To summarize from the social historian Bill Osgerby, ―Rather than representing a dramatic break with the past, the youth culture…and the social responses it elicited are more accurately seen as an extension of phenomena long a feature of British society.‖6
Yet, the Fifties witnessed an increasing ―visibility‖ of adolescents. In 1951, there were approximately 3,066,000 male and female youth under the age of 20 in England and Wales, out 7 of a total population of about 38 million. This meant that British youth comprised approximately
8% of the population and occupied a scattered assortment of positions, from enlisted soldiers, to working-class laborers, to school-children, gang members, university pupils and industrial, consumer, and clerical occupational workers.7 Compounding these divisions were the stark differences between gender roles in society, as well as the social and educational stratifications of a class-segregated population.i One can imagine the difficulties of clumping such a diverse array of adolescents into one single-minded entity called ―youth.‖ Still, there were trends that could be traced universally among young people, as carefully outlined in Bill Osgerby‘s Youth in Britain Since 1945. Americanization is one such trend in which a relationship emerged between teenagers‘ increasing economic independence and a surge in Americanized consumerism, pop culture, and music.
In part, the success of injecting American culture into mainstream British society can be explained by the war‘s success in reshaping Britain‘s opinion of Americans. David Reynolds‘ history of the American occupation of Britain during the war outlines the shifting dynamics of
Anglo-American relations. While some Englanders grumbled about American GIs being ‗over- paid, over-sexed, over-fed and over here,‘ many others gradually grew to enjoy their newcomers.8 In the eyes of a consciously self-constrained society, Americans were novel, rebellious, and fun. British youth especially were smitten by the Yanks, as noted by frequent accounts of ―good-time‖ girls crooning over American soldiers and sharing drinks at the pub.
Everywhere around them, British teenagers saw living embodiments of the mythologized
‗American‘ of cinema. As Reynolds points out, ―[American GIs] evoked the whole range of i A better feeling for the profound class segregation in British society can be garnered from a 1948 Gallup Poll, in which 2% of those surveyed labeled themselves upper-class; 6% as upper-middle class; 28% as middle class; 13% as lower-middle class; and 46% as ‘working class.’ This indicates a serious, conscious desire to divide oneself even within one’s own class, as we see from the hybridization of terms like “upper-middle” and “lower-middle” classes. (The Economist, Saturday, 8 May 1948. Issue: 546. 14.) 8 stereotypes about American wealth, abundance, and excitement.‖9 British boys sought to mimic the bravado and play-by-your-own-rules attitude fronted by many American soldiers. And for their part, American servicemen did their share to shake things up, filling the dance halls with new forms of jitterbug, jive and swing dances—styles that were far more provocative than their predecessors. Within a few short years, WWII had paved the way for an influx of new American music, records, dance, radio, and cinema into Britain—including the all-important jukebox— which would captivate an entire generation of British youth.10
As might be expected, there was a cultural backlash against the swift ‗liberalization‘ wrought by American lifestyles. Fear rose among the ―respectable classes‖ about the mechanization of British society into an American mass consumer culture. Gramophones were targeted specifically, and then records, for eroding traditional forms of British entertainment (i.e. music halls, church gatherings).11 Osgerby describes these feelings of British resentment against
―the home of monopoly capitalism and commercial culture,‖ adding that the United States ―came to epitomize the processes of debasement and deterioration which, many commentators argued, were coming to characterize popular cultural forms and practices in Britain.‖12 In the eyes of the upper classes, British youth culture was viewed as the greatest victim of American pop influence, and the source of blame was new American music. In discussing the ―juke-box culture‖ that emerged after the war, the Daily Mail sneeringly condemned British youth as being cajoled into a ―primitive herd culture.‖ii The British academic Richard Hoggart, in his social history entitled
The Uses of Literacy (1958), singled out youth fans of American music as ―hedonistic but passively barbarian,‖ while deploring, ―the juke box boys‖ with their ―drape suits, picture ties
ii As one editor from The Daily Mail described American music: “It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows ragtime, blues, Dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro’s revenge.” (The Daily Mail. September 5, 1956) 9 and American slouch,‖ who spent their evenings in ―harshly lighted milk bars [putting] copper after copper into the mechanical record player.‖13
In keeping with a time-honored tradition of English society, British adolescents had once again emerged as the lightning rod for cultural criticism among their elders. Although
‗Americanization‘ undoubtedly deserves credit for Britain‘s surging post-war affluence, the conservative orders came to view the process as ―materialistic‖ and ―decadent,‖ a corrupting influence on their youth. Even Hoggart himself—considered by many to be a progressive voice—was nonetheless highly suspicious of the influence of commercial industries on working- class youth. This cultural fear of materialism and idleness springs up again and again in historical study of twentieth-century England—as Springhall depicts in his chronological analysis of adolescents and the leisure industries.14 For many adults, the perpetual concern over the fate of their children could be encapsulated in the adage ―idleness is the devil‘s playground.‖iii
At the same time, society was beginning to recognize the growing importance and valor of their youth and their wartime contributions. Efforts were being made to understand
―adolescence‖ as a necessary step of growth into maturity—rather than a deliberate, worrisome leap into life-long decadence. For example, a report from the Youth Advisory Council in 1943 warned against the tendency to stereotype youth, arguing, ―Growth is a continuous process, and while it may be necessary at times for a special purpose to focus on a particular stage of growth, it is misleading and dangerous to split up into artificial divisions what is really an organic whole.‖ The report went on to clarify that ―not all young people are alike,‖ and that there are
―differences in temperament and interest in young people between the ages of 14 and 18.‖15
iii These sentiments stretch as far back as the Victorian Era, where we find stinging criticism of the ‘fast-and-loose’ lifestyle of hooligans in the workplace. (Springhall, 100-108). 10
And parents, on the whole, seemed to be increasingly supportive and obliging of their children‘s habits. Mothers and fathers had accustomed themselves to tolerating greater freedom and fiscal independence from their teenagers—due in no small part to wartime changes in the family unit. As Tony Judt points out, the war had left many fathers and brothers dead, along with a host of young women pregnant and husbandless, and a mass of adolescents in charge of providing for their families. For many such families, any semblances of ―normal‖ life had been flipped upside down. It is not difficult to imagine, therefore, that the war had rearranged some of society‘s moral imperatives.16 Collectively, then, the picture that emerges of postwar England offers dualistic phenomena—pitting the conservative, upper-class ―guardians of morality‖ against an increasingly Americanized youth and an increasingly liberalized society.
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Of course, parents and moral critics alone did not dictate the future of British youth. The government also made substantial changes in the life of adolescents. The 1940s witnessed the passage of two monumental pieces of legislation that significantly altered the formative years of teenagers. The first of these was the 1944 (Butler) Education Act. Reflecting the earlier educational laws of Victorian times, the 1944 Education Act established the provision of free secondary education for all children ―according to ability,‖ while raising the school-leaving age from 14 to 15 in 1947. Elementary schools were abolished, and children now passed from state- run primary schools to secondary schools at age 11, with an examination determining whether they would attend modern, technical, or grammar secondary school.17
During a speech to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the 1944 Education Act, the chief inspector of schools, David Bell, explained the primary purpose of the original act and its revolutionary outlook. The government understood the necessity of equalizing education in their 11 move towards a less ―class-ridden‖ society than the pre-war era. The curriculum was not intended to be standardized, but rather, to provide instruction and training based on ―age, ability, and aptitude.‖ Education was also extended well beyond simple grammar and arithmetic lessons—Bell acknowledges that schools had the responsibility ―to contribute towards the spiritual, moral, mental and physical development of the community.‖18 So significant was this provision considered that it was strengthened in subsequent legislation and defined as ―spiritual, moral, social and cultural development,‖ or SMSC in shorthand. Bell goes on to clarify each of these SMSC elements, in that, ― ‗morality‘ was synonymous with behaving well, 'mental' development with the learning of facts and stats, and 'physical' development with exercise and drills.‖19 These ethical elements of education, including requirements for collective Christian worship, may have been partially responsive to the ―rise in delinquency‖ purported among some adults.
Regardless of its intentions, however, the resulting statistics from the educational reform are astounding. From 1935 to 1945, the number of secondary schools in England jumped from
1,704 to 6,093; the number of pupils in those schools leapt from 693,000 to 2,191,000; and the number of full-time teachers in those schools rose from 31,000 to 112,000. Candidates eligible for High School Certificates skyrocketed from 3,200 in 1920 to 34,400 in 1950. College attendance rose similarly, albeit with a tendency to favor the middle and upper classes. In 1937-
1938, for example, 89,000 students were attending higher education institutes—whereas by
1949-1950, that number had skyrocketed to 284,000. From 1938 to 1950, the number of boys earning a basic First Degree (i.e. Bachelor‘s Degree) nearly doubled from approximately 7,000 to 13,400. Girls had more modest figures, jumping from 2,200 to nearly 4,000 First Degrees.
Still, the Butler Act was fundamental in opening secondary schools to girls and the working 12 class, and as a result, a far greater percentage attended higher education upon graduation. There is little doubt that these numbers represent a prolific escalation in mass education, giving more and more students a chance to level the playing field and seek higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs.
Even among those who did not attend university, more teenagers were now staying in school and working part-time jobs—as opposed to rushing full-time into the work force. Consequently, the
Education Act helped create a distinct new social entity of ―youth,‖ with plenty of leisure time and a myriad of their own social problems.20
The act also established the statutory responsibility of the Local Education Authorities
(LAEs) to provide adequate recreational facilities and leisure-time activities for young people in their area. The idea, once again, was to keep teenagers busy and out of trouble. And for few, it may have done the trick. For others—the troublemakers, the gang-members, the Spivs, the early
Teddys—less so. But for most, there was a bigger obstacle to contend with—National Service.
The National Service Act of 1948 was the second massive piece of legislation passed by
British government in the post-war era, requiring all youth males aged 18 to register with the
Ministry of Labor and National Service. Like most enlistment laws, there were loopholes: about
16% of youth were exempted on medical grounds, and excuses could be offered in the form of apprenticeships or higher education. Regardless, between 1945 and 1960, over 2 million young men were ―called up.‖iv The result was a noticeable ―age gap‖ of 3 years, with youth leaving school at age 15 and entering the service the age 18. Subsequently, many adolescents had a timely interim to find some way of occupying themselves. An idea developed among young men that these were the prime years of their life to cut loose and have fun—bearing in mind that the
iv The National Service was abolished by the Macmillan government in 1957, due to massive cuts in defense spending. The last round of call-ups occurred at the end of 1960. (Sandbrook, 405) 13 military would straighten them out by forcibly injecting them into the ―real world.‖21 One editorial from the Evening Argus, as quoted by Osgerby, emphasizes this very notion:
The period prior to National Service is unsettling even for the best behaved youth. Too
many lads, especially those from indifferent homes, adopt a don’t-care attitude. Why
should they not do as they like in civilian life when they are faced with two years of
military discipline? … there is no question that conscription temporarily disrupts a lad in
his civilian life and job.22
National Service chopped up the flow of daily life for young men all across the country.
Most young people viewed the Service as a regrettable intrusion in their lives, something to be dealt with and then moved on from. In 1955, a government committee reported, ―Our overwhelming impression is that, with few exceptions, the National Service man regards his…period of service as an infliction to be undergone rather than a duty to the nation.‖23
Osgerby highlights these attitudinal problems, describing warnings from probation officers about the growing restlessness among lads who had lost the desire to find immediate work after
Service ended. Researchers from Glasglow University in the Fifties had found that former conscripts were having difficulty adjusting back to civilian work. Many military campaigns, like those in Korea and Malaya, had disillusioned and disheartened youth soldiers, who came home with a troubled understanding of what their country was fighting for, and why.24 One particular ex-schoolboy explains the feeling of complete and utter instability in his post-school years:
It’s all very well for the moralists to talk…but…from school right into a bloody war that
wasn’t my making. Frightened to death half the time, so bored the other half that there
was nothing to do but go to bed with a pretty girl. Then back to civvy street, peddling
these blank machines and walking ten miles a day for fat old women to shut their doors
in my face.25 14
On the flipside, the National Service provided an element of cultural melting that brought together a wide array of youth with diverse backgrounds. The official guide for new conscripts promised that one would, ―…meet and live with men drawn from all classes of society, of all trades, of all standards of education, and of various religious and political faiths…‖26 Two years of standardized service allowed for a robust exchange of experiences and ideas, meshing together different classes and lifestyles—primarily with working class language and customs trickling into the speech and behavior of their upper class peers. Osgerby goes on to theorize that the stationing of National Servicemen to bases in the British countryside ―[likely] brought the subcultural styles of urban youth to rural communities which otherwise would have been touched much less by rock‘n‘roll, winkle-pickers and other post-war shifts in youth style and culture.‖27
What we see, then, is the emergence of a dynamic class of British youth in the immediate post-war era. Circumstances of the war placed them in a position with money to spend—and a timely interim to spend it in. While more and more children were remaining in school for longer periods of time, the National Service Act fostered a desire to cut loose and enjoy one‘s teenage years. For the first real time in British modern history, young people were not simply acting like
―little adults‖—i.e. immediately entering the work force, or higher education, upon completion of primary school. Instead, they were becoming a form of a leisure class, working only part-time and indulging themselves with pocket-money on Anglo-American pop culture. The next chapter will examine the growing affluence of British teenagers and their heightened spending power.
Moreover, we will look at impact of the American and British music record industry—a phenomenally influential and popular force in British teenage life—and its co-evolution with the rise of the affluent teenager.
15
“European teenagers in the late fifties and early sixties did not aspire to change the world. They had grown up in security and a modest affluence. Most of them just wanted to look different, travel more, play pop music and buy stuff. In this they reflected the behavior and tastes of their favorite singers, and the disc-jockeys whose radio programs they listened to on their transistors.” -Tony Judt, Postwar
Chapter 2
Baby You’re a Rich Man: Youth Spending and the Music Industry
In the post-war era, British youth had become a tangible and visible reflection of the rising spirit of Western consumerism. For some adults, this meant that their youth had come to embody mass consumer culture, irresponsible affluence, and hedonistic consumption.
―Teenagers‖—as they were now being commonly called—emerged onto a more socialized, more publicized environment than any of their predecessors. v Yet while the critics argued, new markets blossomed to cater very specifically to teenage needs. The music industry in particular satisfied many of the social niches sought out by British youth. As a raw product, ―music‖ had implicit potential: it was stress-relieving and rebellious; enjoyable in private, sociable in public, and overall fashionable and pop-trendy. Youth wanted it, and they had the money to pay for it.
All that was left was for an industry to act as the middleman. This chapter, therefore, examines the emerging fiscal power of post-war youth, and offers the rise of the music industry—namely the record industry—as a means of demonstrating their economic strength.
Most observers agree that the turning point between England‘s austerity and affluence was around 1954, when the last of the food rations were lifted. Incidentally, this was also the year that the English novelist J.B. Priestley coined the term admass vi: ―the creation of the mass
v Osgerby hypothesized that the reason teenagers garnered so much attention during this period may have been rooted in England’s heated debate over the nation’s future course. In other words, the methods of raising children, their morals and ‘respectability,’ were all issues woven into concerns for the future fabric of the nation’s character (Osgerby, 30-32). vi Dominic Sandbrook captures the spirit of admass succinctly as follows: “Admass man was blinded by the dazzling array of consumer goods offered by the consumer society, his senses dulled by the blind rapidity of modern 16 mind, the mass man.‖28 Between 1954 and 1955, British consumer expenditure rose by 8%, and spending on ―durable‖ goods like TVs and fridges rose by 10%. From 1950 to 1959, average consumption per capita jumped by 20%. The Financial Times found that in barely two years, from 1957 to 1959, the number of households owning a car had risen by 25%, with even bigger increases in the ownership of television (32%), washing machines (54%), and refrigerators
(58%).29 These were enormous surges in consumer spending power, echoed in much of Western
Europe and certainly in America. When Prime Minister Macmillan, in 1957, famously quipped that ―most‖ Englanders had ―never had it so good,‖ the country was indeed riding the apex of an economic boom.
In short, everyone in Britain was spending more—yet no one was better suited to take advantage of these economic circumstances than England‘s youth. Throughout the Fifties,
British teenagers had slowly garnered the respect of adults, not only as stimulators of the work- place economy, but also as increasingly viable consumers. Despite pockets of resistance to the growing ―decadence‖ of youth culture, the majority of studies and publications concerning teenagers in this era were shaped in a positive light. Osgerby explains that, ―Newspapers and magazines, especially, helped popularize notions of ‗youth‘ as an excitingly new social force, a vigorous and uplifting contrast to the tired, old, traditional order.‖30 Teenagers emerged as the focal point of a distinct new consumer culture, one which glorified ―conspicuous, leisure- oriented consumption.‖31 By the end of the 1950s, teenagers were spending their pocket money on a host of products, including alcohol, tobacco, mopeds, fashion clothing, shoes, make-up, hair care, magazines, records, record-players, and radios. The market-researcher Mark Abrams worked out that British teenagers in 1959 spent 20 percent of their money on clothes and shoes, communications and the pervasive pressure of advertising; he lived, thought [J.B.] Presley, in a mechanical, superficial, conformist world, where ‘people would cheerfully exchange their last glimpse of freedom for a new car, a refrigerator, and a TV screen.’” (Sandbrook, 107) 17
17 percent on drinks and cigarettes, 15 per cent on sweets, snacks and soft drinks, and the remaining half on entertainment, like cinemas, dance halls, magazines and records.32 In short, teens were indulging themselves daily on a massive scale.
Consequently, as Tony Judt points out, the face of Fifties‘ advertising re-focused to reflect consumer choice, rather than the broad national appeals of the past. For some European intellectuals, this marked a new age of dreaded Americanized mass consumerism, hallmarked by selfishness, over-indulgence, and individualism. It was an ―invasion‖ of American society into the realm of European life. And yet, there was very little physical exchange between the US and
Europe, given that only a handful of Europeans had ever traveled to the States. Perhaps it was this very notion of exotic, unobtainable extravagance that made American commodities and entertainment so appealing to British youth. Mopeds, movies, and music records were fantastic ways of ―Americanizing‖ oneself, both as a sign of rebellion and—as the following chapter will demonstrate—as a token of youth social status.33
None of this youth consumerism would have been possible without greater teenage employment. Osgerby attributes the surge in 1950s youth labor to a variety of factors, including
―the decline of heavy industries, the movement of capital into lighter forms of production, the expansion of labour processes based on production-line techniques, trends towards de-skilling and the movement of labor out of direct production and into distribution…‖34 Youngsters were cheaper and easier to employ than adults, particularly in unskilled labor, where they could reap the immediate rewards of their jobs. They understood that their labor was in high demand, which offered them a greater degree of flexibility and higher competitive wages. And the reality of their own importance was not lost among them—as a 1947 Clarke Report details:
When juvenile workers are scarce, as they are now, and are likely to continue to be, [a
youth] quickly realizes that he may not be so unimportant as he seemed at first; and 18
after two or three years his income may be larger compared with his needs and with his
contribution to his maintenance than any other period of his life.35
Employment statistics show that in 1950, there were approximately 536,700 boys and girls aged 15-17 in the work force. Among young boys of that age range, 33.8% were employed in skilled apprenticeships. Among girlsvii that year the number was 8%.36 In his consumer research for the London Press Exchange in the 1950s, Mark Abrams revealed that young people‘s earnings had risen approximately 50% since the pre-war period (double that of adults), and that youth discretionary spending had risen nearly 100%. Controlling for Abrams‘ lack of nuance between areas of varying wealth, his results nonetheless support the notion of a broad rise in teenage spending. Of this, it was found that roughly 44% of funds went to records and record players in the late 1950s—a remarkable boost to sales in the music industry.37 This was a vital element in the continuing teenage narrative, since nothing would revolutionize British youth culture to the same extent as the marketization of music with the gramophone, the radio, the jukebox—and most importantly, the record player.
*
The burgeoning music industry merits specific exploration, not simply for its remarkable financial success, but also for its international role in homogenizing youth across the traditional lines of culture and class. If one traces back its roots, the modern British ―music industry‖ began with the proliferation of the gramophone in the 1920s, which dominated the scene for nearly two decades. For the music industry, gramophones were the first successful jump from the costly,
vii There is a tendency to “masculinize” post-war trends in employment and consumer culture, but the reality is that many teenage commercial industries were specifically targeted towards females. New labor markets opened doors of opportunity for young women. While their wages continued to be significantly lower than their male peers, between 1950 and 1960, the percentage of female youth entering clerical employment rose from 25% to 38%. Osgerby adds, “Whether they were secretaries or production-line workers, many girls’ economic and cultural horizons were broader than might have been the case before the war, as they were increasingly able to leave behind the disciplines of the workplace in the evenings and at weekends” (Osgerby, 51-52). 19 limited sales of public venues and concert halls to the more lucrative, privatized production of sellable records. Having entire albums available to an individual, to be enjoyed in the comfort of one‘s own home, exponentially heightened the British public‘s exposure to music.38
Consequently, gramophone sales skyrocketed, along with all the advertising and admass elements of the business. There were machines to be produced and distributed; stores to profit from their sales; radio royalties to be paid; and international companies to be established.viii
More importantly, gramophones had opened the door to the ‗Americanization‘ of youth music tastes, bringing American jazz and swing legends—Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn
Miller—straight into the homes and hearts of British teenagers. As Tony Judt recounts, ―In
Europe, as in America, when the family budget could dispense with a teenager‘s contribution, the first thing the liberated adolescent did was to go out and buy a gramophone record.‖39
By the end of WWII, the music industry had sunk its claws into the beat-thumping, jiving, rebellious hearts of British teens with a stunning level of success. One commentator of industry business observed that British youth represented ―…a well-defined consumer group, affluent and innocent, to be attracted and exploited and pandered to; second only to the housewife in potential spending power.‖40 Norman Phillip, a biographer of the Beatles, illustrates the rise of the lucrative teenage music market as follows:
Pop music was the most obvious sign of youth’s growing economic power. What had
begun in 1956 as a laughable, disreputable adolescent outburst was now [in the 1960s]
an industry turning over 100 million pounds each year. … *Teenagers+ were also a
viii One such company was the British Gramophone Company, established from a joint Anglo-American agreement in the late 1800s, and soon producing gramophones in an international scale. By 1914, the company had record factories in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Austria, Brazil, and Argentina. By 1928, it was raking in a net profit of over 1,200, 000 pounds, proving that there was serious money to be made in music. (Jones, Geoffrey, The Gramophone Company: An Anglo-American Multinational, 1898-1931, The Business History Review. 1985, Vol. 59, No. 1, 76-100. JSTOR.)
20
market, undreamed of in size and potential, to be wooed and cajoled by the retail trade
at every level.41
Quick to ensnare this new consumer audience was Colombia‘s next wave of innovation— the long-playing twelve-inch 33rpm disc, or the ―LP‖—introduced in 1948. RCA Victor came close on its heels, releasing the seven-inch 45 rpm single that same year. While these new records required new equipment, their smaller dimensions made them less cumbersome and yielded superior sound quality over the gramophone. The dramatic results spoke for themselves.
By 1955, over 4 million 45rpm singles were being bought by British consumers; by 1960, the number was 52 million. Subsequently, the British music scene shifted from one centered in communal dance halls to a more individualized, lyric-oriented listening style. The arrival of jukeboxes in British coffee bars and clubs in the fifties further hampered live music venues, while marking new interests in the merit of songs themselves. To summarize in the words of the historian Dominic Sandbrook, ―…the domestic and individual pleasure of listening to songs on a gramophone was gaining at the expense of the public and communal pleasure of the dance.‖42
Teenagers could now choose when and what to listen to—as opposed to subsisting on the whim of radio jockeys and dance-hall bands. Favorite albums could be played over and over in one‘s bedroom, or enjoyed with a group of friends on the coffeehouse jukebox. There was a sense of ―music on demand,‖ cultivated by the music industry, who alone could manufacture, market, and monopolize the most popular singles and albums. At the same time, one should be wary of presuming that the record industry created this trend on its own accord. Their eagerness set aside, these industries were merely responding to an unexpected twist in youth interests: the desire to use music as a social medium; as an expression of individual tastes, desires, trendiness, and parental freedom. In other words, here it was the demand that triggered the supply.
* 21
Yet the record industry cannot be studied without examining the influence of the radio, since both elements worked in tandem to foster interest in pop music. For those who could not afford record players, the radio was a cheap and affordable alternative—often turning them on to music that would later might be more affordable in record form. The radio had traditionally been a source of entertainment for most Europeans and their youth. Its popularity expanded with the advent of the transistor radio in the early 1950s—portable, battery-run units that could be enjoyed by teenagers anywhere, anytime. Judt summarizes the impact of the radio on teenage life vis-à-vis emerging programs like Radio Luxemburg, which targeted British youth specifically in their songs and their advertising:
Teenagers no longer needed to sit around with their families, listening to news and
drama directed to the taste of adults and scheduled for “family listening hours,” usually
following the evening meal. They now had their own programs—Salut les Copains on
French national radio, Pick of the Pops on the BBC, etc. Individualized radios bred
targeted programming; and when the state radio systems proved slow to adapt,
‘peripheral’ (pirate) radio stations—Radio Luxemburg, Radio Monte Carlo, Radio
Andorra—transmitting legally but from across state frontiers and financed by
commercial advertising—seized the opportunity.43
This kind of ‗pirate‘ radio programming—usually broadcast from undisclosed maritime locations—brought pleasure to millions of British youth by filling in the void presented by
England‘s music censorship. Since the BBC refused to air many ‗unrespectable‘ American tunes, British youth usually tuned in to either offshore broadcasts, or continental stations like
Radio Luxemburg, Radio Monte Carlo, and Radio Free Europe. Broadcasting hours from these locations expanded to allow youth to listen in after 8 pm every night, catching the latest from Bill
Haley and Little Richard and Elvis. Despite mainstream British radio‘s conservative views on 22 rhythm ‗n‘ blues, runaway hits like Haley‘s Rock Around the Clock and Presley‘s Heartbreak
Hotel captivated the minds of young John Lennon and many of his English peers in the mid-50s.
The most popular and influential of these stations, Radio Luxembourg, was playing six hours of new material a night by the late 1950s—along with a ―Top Twenty‖ chart based on sheet-music sales. So successful was Radio Luxembourg that record companies were shelling out cash for fifteen-minute slots to promote their latest rock‘n‘roll releases.44
The postwar era, therefore, witnessed the dualistic and complimentary rise of youth spending and the music industry. A surge in teenage spending led to new markets and advertising campaigns focused solely on youth consumerism. And no industry was able to cater to this niche as lucratively and massively as the music industry. Gramophones, records, and radio stations helped expand music beyond its traditional venues—blasting it into coffee shops, homes, record stores, and the cinema—in a near-desperate frenzy to tap into this new goldmine of consumerism. Youth culture of all stripes and backgrounds could gravitate around the medium of the music—and they certainly would, as we will see in later chapters. However, if the record industry enjoyed an unprecedented level of success, this was because of music‘s unique ability to reach across Britain‘s hallmark barrier of class divisions. The next chapter sets aside the concept of youth materialism and explores how teenagers perceived themselves in a class-oriented society. More importantly, we look at how the socio-economic circumstances of the Fifties permitted youth to begin blurring those class lines and moving together.
23
“1956 was a worrying year for English parents. It seemed that something had gone seriously wrong with the Victorian age. The generation born before 1941, despite exterior differences, lived by much the same rules and values as their parents and their grandparents. It boiled down to a single phrase, the base of Victorianism: they “had respect.” They had respect for their elders and their betters. They had respect for their country with its Empire, now Commonwealth, its God-given right to be called “Great” Britain. Having just survived a world war, they had respect for politicians and soldiers. They had respect also for clergymen, policemen, schoolteachers, and the Queen. And suddenly, in 1956, they realized that their children did not have respect for them.” ~ Phillip Norman, Shout!
Chapter 3
You Never Gave Me Your Money: Class Structure and Youth Culture
The notion that Britain‘s affluence thrust its adolescents into a ―classless melting pot‖ is a misconstruction of the cultural trends that emerged among youngsters. Rather than completely forego class distinctions, the subculture studies of Bill Osgerby and Dick Hebdige imply an integrated ―downward scale of admiration‖ (my term) concerning elements of pop culture. For example, upper and middle class teenagers enjoyed all the wonderfully conspicuous indulgences of the lower class—the coarse and salty language, the devil-may-care attitude, the black humor, the cellar club bands, etc. For many teens, these were elements of what it meant to be ―cool.‖ As the cultural critic Daniel Harris argues, ―cool‖ represented the ―aesthetic of the streets, a style of deportment specifically designed to alert potential predators that one is impregnable to assault.‖
Cool demeanors and lifestyles existed among the lower-classes because it was a way of life—a necessary self-defense mechanism in gritty, often violent neighborhoods. For bourgeoisie youth, doing ―cool‖ things offered ―an enticing fantasy, that of going downscale, of descending into abysmal yet liberating poverty.‖45
Yet the ―downward scale‖ of admiration extended even further. Lower class youth borrowed from a tier that was even poorer, even grittier and ―cooler‖ than they themselves— namely, those living on the American fringe. It was all about the blacks and rebels: smooth 24
American jazz, the rhythm ‗n‘ blues, city slickers‘ flashy apparel, rock‘n‘roll sex appeal, the beatnik‘s shiftlessness, and the rough-and-tumble readiness of James Dean. This would become the well of American counter-culture from which Britain‘s Teds would emerge, along with its rock‘n‘rollers, Italianized ‗mods‘, British beatniks, and so many others. As Hebdige acknowledges in his analysis of subcultures, the working class youth of England served as the bridgehead between these American ―anti-culture‖ movements and the thrill-seeking void in the lives of Britain‘s youngsters.46
What factors made lower-class youth more susceptible to social transformation than their middle and upper class peers? What was it about working class youngsters that made them the vectors of American counter-culture? Certainly the overall growing affluence of youth—as outlined in the previous chapter—made it possible to indulge in the expensive, lavish clothing and musical commodities that distinguished various subcultures. But there was more to it than mere consumerism. Hebdige explains that it was a desire to be seen and heard. It was the family structure of working class youth, their education, their means of employment, their social environment and living conditions, all of which pitted them in an uphill battle against those who
‗had it made‘. It was the very solidarity of poverty, the rampant and endless discrimination of social status, that unified working-class teenagers into an ―us‖ group, fighting on all levels of consciousness against the parents, the educators, the lawmakers, the policemen, priests, and critics who comprised ―them.‖ In essence, youth subculture spawned from a desire to stop simply accepting one‘s role as a ―secondary‖ citizen—as a person whose financial situation denied him the luxury to be well-read, well-traveled, well-educated, well-paid, and well- respected. Instead, working-class youth learned that they could write their own rules, just like 25 the black jazz artists and the rock stars and the Chicago gangsters. If they did not fit into mainstream culture, they could create their own.47
Britain‘s traditional class system was the driving force behind this youth counter-culture.
Richard Hoggart‘s The Uses of Literacy is replete with examples of the psychological and financial impact of ―class stratification,‖ irritating and exciting the emotions of so many working- class teenagers. It was not so much youth envy of the affluent classes as much as an ever-present, looming consciousness of their own circumstances, of their own bleak futures, with all the appalling promises of hard labor, cramped living, and social immobility. On top of this
‗subconscious self-consciousness‘ was the fact that the class system was pervasive in all elements of British society: in education, employment, eating, entertainment, etc. These were the sentiments embodied by contemporary writers like Kingsley Amis and playwright John Osbourne, whose works—Lucky Jim and Look Back in Anger—reflected a growing movement of stifled discontent, a backlash against conformity and complacency. The cynical voices of these working-class authors led The Daily Mail to dub 1956 as the ―Year of the Angry Young Men.‖48 And indeed, the
―angry young men‖ embodied more than just a revolution in literary style—they encapsulated the growing discontent against the barrier of ―class‖ that forever seemed to dictate, scrutinize, and uphold the status quo. In all things, it was the rich vs. the poor; the rulers vs. the ruled; the
Establishment vs. the masses. It was forever about class, class, class.49
And ―class‖ itself—while reflecting the old divisions of nobility, bourgeoisie, and commoners—was made all the more difficult, since it was not simply a matter of annual income.
As Sandbrook explains, ―…what determined one‘s position was a complicated network of factors: birth, breeding and education, occupation, income, expenditure, accent and deportment, friendships, political and cultural attitudes and values.‖50 There was always some way for the 26
English people to divide themselves. Despite many Labour initiatives to spread wealth around the welfare state, British society continued to be stratified by dozens of other habits: sports, hobbies, mannerisms, accents, dining, clothing, living region, etc. One reviewer in 1955 explained in The Economist that, ―English society at every level seems to make an art of class distinction, or one should say, of class expression.‖ He goes on to add that, ―Until they can remove the social cachet from rugby football, put yatching in the same category as bull-baiting, and standardize the caliber of trouser-legs, they will not have the classless society they wish to impose.‖51
Working class youth and their parents would have belonged at the bottom of this social hierarchy. The good news for them was that living conditions and general outlook had improved tremendously in the past decade. During the postwar years, most people belonging to the traditional, underdeveloped working class had witnessed a rise in employment, wages, and a general spirit of optimism. The historian Arthur Marwick writes, ―Britain, having had the first industrial revolution, had, of all the developed Western societies, the largest, most self-confident, and most class-aware working class, and no class of peasant proprietors.‖52 In truth, a variety of economic circumstances, shifting skill-level in labor, and diverse occupational situations had bred a multitude of ‗working classes.‘ Surveys taken throughout the ‗50s and ‗60s revealed that roughly 2/3s of British people were not ashamed to label themselves as ‗working class‘—as the term had become increasingly broad. Technically, anyone who worked in low-level bureaucracies, commercial industries, or manual labor could fall under the umbrella of the
‗working-class.‘ These were the people who sustained the British nation, who greased the wheels and kept things moving along. These were the garbage collectors, train drivers, manual factory workers, coal miners, foremen, technicians, shoe-shiners—the people who served your food, 27 cleaned your homes, and built and fueled your cars.53 The very economic and social necessity of their existence bred a popular, romanticized image of their lifestyles and characteristics, as explained by Hoggart in the following passage:
The working-classes are at bottom in excellent health—so the pastoral descriptions
run—in better health than other classes; rough and unpolished perhaps, but diamonds
nevertheless; rugged, but ‘of sterling worth’: not refined, not intellectual, but with both
feet n the ground; capable of a good belly-laugh, charitable and forthright. They are,
moreover, possessed of a racy and salty speech, touched with wit, but always with its
hard grain of common sense.54
Of course, the traditional working-class citizens—the dockyard workers, textile workers, miners, and street vendors of Liverpool, Manchester and East London—would most likely have viewed their social outlook in less charitable terms. Many teenagers, for example, lived in rough-and-tumble urban neighborhoods that fostered a sense of needing to look out for oneself, of being aggressive and on-guard, with an attitude that was simultaneously flippant and grim in the face of hard times. In contrast to the personal cheerfulness he outlines in his description above, Hoggart‘s depiction of working-class neighborhoods cuts a cold and desolate image:
To a visitor, they are understandably depressing, these massed proletarian areas; street
after regular street of shoddily uniform houses intersected by a dark pattern of ginnels
and snickets (alleyways) and courts; mean, squalid and in a permanent half-fog; a study
in shades of dirty-grey, without greenness or the blueness of sky... The brickwork and
woodwork are cheap; the wood goes too long between repainting… the terraces are
gap-toothed with sour and brick-bespattered bits of waste ground… All day and all night
the noises and smells of the district—factory hooters, trains shunting, the stink of the
gas-works—remind you that life is a matter of shifts and clocking-in-and-out.55 28
In lieu of such grim surroundings, faced daily with the inevitable grind of adulthood, one can understand why these teenagers sought an escape—be it through cinema, music, dance, fashion, crime, or gang life. Parenting was less of an obstacle for working-class teenagers seeking entertainment and cheap thrills, in part because parents tended to adopt the attitude of letting the kids ― ‗ave a good time, while they still can…‖ in the sentiments of Hoggart.56 As a result, many working-class adolescents developed an early sense of independence and self- importance, which in turn may have manifested sharper resentment against their cultural critics.
It is not difficult to imagine the irritation of young workers who—by the ages of 17 or 19—were capable of paying full room and board rent to their families, and yet were expected by society to oblige their parents‘ old-fashioned rules, customs, and traditions.57
This is not meant to imply that the vast majority of working-class teenagers abused their freedom to act as lawless hell-raisers. Far from it, as Albert Cohen noted in his study of gang delinquency, most teenagers held steady jobs and respected the rules of their community.ix Their over-arching form of ―protest,‖ if such a word could be used, was more of a ―loud indifference‖ than any concerted effort to undermine the social structure.58 They were told not to listen to rock‘n‘roll, not to dress lewdly, not to dance the jive and swing, but they did so anyway— because it was fun; because it was cool. Adults and upper-class society, in turn, equated this open ―defiance‖ with an irretrievable, generational loss of respect, something that was often mislabeled as ―delinquency.‖ The media‘s self-perpetuated view of teenagers—oftentimes wildly exaggerated with accounts of rioting, gang-violence, and knife fights— sometimes reflected this unflattering image: ix A brief look at basic work statistics, for example, demonstrates that most adolescents led regular, lawful lives—a far cry from epidemic delinquency. By 1958, there were over 3 million girls and boys aged 16-21 in the UK, of whom 2.5 million were at work, 300,000 in school or university, and 250,000 performing national service. (The Economist. 11 January 1958. Issue: 5968, 14)
29
The picture usually conjured up is one of boys in string ties and crepe soles, girls in tight
jeans and dazzle socks; most of them shiftless, uninterested in self-improvement, and
with much more money than is good for them; an increasing number sexually
promiscuous at altogether precocious ages, and with a bigger minority of criminal bad
hats than any generation in Britain before.59
Most of this criticism stemmed from the upper class, who frequently sought to separate their own children from the corrupting influences of the ―base‖ classes. The problem for upper- class parents, however, was more of a matter of controlling their own children‘s desires than of keeping the working class at bay. After all, there was little desire to mix from the ground level upwards. One can imagine that working-class youth, for their part, had little time or patience to learn the mannerisms—the accents, the speech, the dining etiquette, the social formalities—of their upper class peers. They had no need, nor any desire, to assimilate into such a culture. The upper class had an antiquated vocabulary, ‗blue-blood‘ accents, an archaic taste for classical music, and a dizzying array of social and dining etiquettes. There were rules for everything, including the ―respectability‖ of adding in milk before pouring one‘s tea—and the uncouthness of toasting one‘s drink with a ―Cheers!‖60 Little wonder that working-class youth shied away from such a meticulously scrutinized lifestyle.
As noted, middle and upper-class parents may have had difficulty restraining their own children‘s impulses, in part because a fair share of these adolescents suffered from their own feelings of entrapment. Having either born through the 2-year brunt of National Service, or wiggled their way out of it, most of these kids faced the bleak prospect of extended years of formal education. This was driven by a fundamental difference in career-outlook between the middle and lower classes, the latter of whom typically proceeded with ―...no sense of a career, of the possibility of promotion.‖61 The middle class youth, on the other hand, faced heavy parental 30 pressure to pursue higher education, as a means of achieving ―respectable,‖ white-collar jobs like their fathers, who were inevitably lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and accountants. This was a distinguishing social element of the middle class—the ambitious desire to follow in your father‘s footsteps, to obtain an equal level of material comfort and social prestige as your parents.62
The upper class, meanwhile, followed a slightly different narrative. Though negligibly small in comparison to the middle-classx, the freedoms of the upper class‘s leisurely lifestyles drove them unanimously into academia, politics, and the life of socialites. To join the upper class, ―a family had to spend their money in the right way, wear the right clothes at the right times, know the right people (in Society), and attend the right events, such as Cowes, Ascot and
Wimbledon.‖63 Aristocrats, lords, noblemen, knights, and politicians tended to hail from these echelons—united by their self-imposed responsibility to govern over Britain. Sir Ian Fraser defended the necessity of a robust and lively upper class on the BBC, claiming, ―England has gained much by having a class of people not compelled to earn their living, who have been able to devote their ability and time to developing our art of government, free institutions, etc…‖64
Indeed, the aristocracy had controlled the most powerful positions in the government and social institutions for hundreds of years.
In the Fifties, however, the empowerment of the Labour party began to shift political leadership away from much of the conservative-minded aristocracy. In response, the upper class sought to champion another cause—cultural stewardship.65 And the implications of this cultural onus were clear for upper-class youth. If they were to be the defenders of the Arts, of proud
British history and classic Literature, they would need to earn a superior education. And education meant attending a prestigious school: the most prestigious school. As Arthur Marwick details, one‘s university years were an endless topic for discussion—along with the schooling of x By the mid-fifties, only about 40,000 families were willing to label themselves “Upper Class.” (Sandbrook, 37) 31 one‘s colleagues, one‘s enemies, inferiors, etc.66 Whereas the lower classes saw the university as a faraway ivy-league dream, the middle and upper class youth found themselves pressured, cajoled, and shoved into the most competitive schools. They were thrust into these ancient, male-dominated schools—run by old-fashioned, no-nonsense headmasters—which served as medieval bastions of conservatism in defiance of modern times. The only thing that mattered in these academic circles was the notion of ―success,‖ of ―earning the grade‖—pressure mounted upon pressure, with little hope for relief.
One of the best cultural critiques about youth psychological ―entrapment‖ at universities is Kingsley Amis‘s highly controversial novel, Lucky Jim (1954). The book, while shocking
British audiences with its hero‘s cruelty and occasional belligerence, also helped raise awareness about the choking effect of an aristocratic schooling system. Amis‘s protagonist, Dixon, is the prototypical middle class youth trapped in an upper-class culture. Dixon embodies everything that is wrong with 1950‘s scholasticism and contemporary culture. Entangled in a hopelessly dull field of study, dogging for the favor of a long-winded mentor, Dixon is mentally and emotionally trapped. In the story‘s narrative, he often takes a swing at the social pressure for achieving ―distinguishment‖—even snidely asking a colleague, ―Haven‘t you noticed that we all specialize in what we hate most?‖ During his struggles, Dixon often gravitates towards drinking to relieve the mental claustrophobia of ―dignified living.‖ It would appear that alcohol, in fact, is the only available respite from the intolerable, tedious grind of life in academia—and not just for
Dixon. College authorities themselves had finally instituted ―wet‖ social gatherings to annual events, like the summer ball, in order to better monitor and control the consumption of their otherwise-drunkard student patrons. One can imagine the stifling dreariness of such occasions before they had obliged this little indulgence.67 32
For an outside reader who knew little of aristocratic life or schooling, even the dialogue in Lucky Jim came off as absurdly silly: the endless apologies and formalities; the phrases stifled with ―properness‖; the constant round-about conversations; the necessity to insinuate rather than confront. However, the novel‘s greatest tongue-in-cheek mockery of upper-class ―cultural stewardship‖ arrives in the form of Dixon‘s drunken finale before an audience of academic peers and instructors. Asked to deliver a traditional speech on the tenets of Merrie England, Dixon sums up the ongoing ―culture war‖ with a few sarcastic lines:
Each of us can resolve to do something, every day, to resist the application of
manufactured standards, to protest against ugly articles of furniture and tableware, to
speak out against sham architecture, to resist the importation into more and more
public places of loud-speakers relaying the Light Programme, to say one word against
the yellow press, against the best-seller, against the theatre organ, to say one word for
the instinctive culture of the integrated village-type community. In that way we shall be
saying a word, however small in its individual effect, for our native tradition, for our
common heritage, in short, for what we once had and may, some day, have again—
Merrie England.68
The success of Lucky Jim, which became an international best-seller, extends beyond mere academic satire. It touches upon one of the few things that teenagers from every class tier had in common: a sense of isolation. In large part, British culture itself fostered a degree of separation and detachment in teenage family life, as Dominic Sandbrook notes. Among the lower classes, it was due to day-long employment in hard labor, with a father who was rarely home and a mother who worked feverishly to gather dinner and maintain the home. Among the middle and upper-classes, the gulf between children and their parents may have occurred as a result of self-contained nurseries, with nurses or nannies caring exclusively for the children. 33
Alternatively, the ―imposition of silence‖ at meal-times among the elite circles may have stifled feelings of attachment. 69 This emotional chasm between child and parent—while not to be exaggerated or overstated—was so engrained in British tradition that youth felt obliged to develop bonds of loyalty and affection to one another, at school, on the streets, and on the job. It is small wonder that British youth largely homogenized around their own culture of music— something that could easily be shared and appreciated—or else turned to gangs, bands, and cliques for social comfort. They needed to break free, to find a way to express themselves. In the next chapter, we will find one such form of expression: the emergence of subculture styles.
34
“Mummy don't worry, Your teddy boy's here Taking good care of you. Mama don't worry, Your teddy boy's here. Teddy's gonna see you through.” - “Teddy Boy,” The Beatles
Chapter 4
Nowhere Man: Youth Subculture and Counter-culture
Newspapers and critics of British youth in the Fifties tended to treat the ―youth problem‖ as a moniker for all subcultures, drawing upon the occasional gang fight, cinema riot, or beatnik protest, as evidence of fundamental changes in the psyches of young people. As one can imagine, not all British youth were rowdy, provocative, violent, unsatisfied, disillusioned, and superficial. However, it would be equally misleading to deny that the subcultures forming in the era—the flick-knife gangs, the juke box boys, the fan-club girls, the rock‘n‘rollers—did not significantly shape youth‘s perception of itself; if for no other reason than these groups received so much media attention. This chapter attempts to offer a focus study of two of the most provocative anti-culture movements of the mid-1950s, the Teds and the Beatniks, in order to demonstrate an emerging self-image that would soon assume a fundamental role in youth ―pop culture.‖ More importantly, we learn here the power of youth to act as autonomous agents in creating these lines of their own narrative.
First, a brief definition of our terminology. Osgerby explains that ―subculture” groups, such as the Spivs, the Mods, and the Teds, were quite different than the beatniks and intellectuals that comprised the avant-garde “counter-culture.” Subculture groups tended to ground themselves in traditional working-class values and behaviors, finding homes among the shantytown communities of south and east London, as well as the lower-class neighborhoods of 35
Liverpool and other industrial cities. Individuals engaging in subculture activities typically did so during a narrow period of growth—usually in late adolescence, when one had the free time and the money to engage in leisure fun—and then gradually merged themselves back into the
―real world.‖ Conversely, counter-culture movements tended to hail from urban middle-class roots and were significantly more ‗individualized‘ and intellectually overt. Counter-cultures also had a longer-lasting impact on shaping the lives and outlook of their members, due to their innate tendency to scrutinize and criticize, rather than to merely ridicule and scorn. Class distinctions were less important here. To summarize from Osgerby, ―Counter-cultures did not represent a revolt from ‗below‘ as much as an attack from ‗within.‘‖70
Both anti-culture groups drew a fair amount of criticism from adult society and the media. But while the beatniks could be written off as conspicuous, pseudo-theoretical ―loonies,‖ the subculture gangs of the 1950s continued to trigger sharp fears of juvenile delinquency and cultural degradation. The British Medical society, in their discussion on youth in The
Adolescent, summarized the popular view of this ―new‖ generation of ―moral delinquents‖ as follows:
Looked at in his worst light, the adolescent can take on an alarming aspect: he has
learned no definite moral standards from his parents, is contemptuous of the law, easily
bored… He is vulnerable to the influence of TV programs of a deplorably low standard…
Reading matter for teenagers was roundly condemned as ‘full of sex and violence.’71
Were any of these views justified? To a certain extent, perhaps. It is true that juvenile crime had gone up in the mid-to-late 1950s. Between 1955 and 1961, the number of offences for boys aged 17-21 nearly doubled, with teenage convictions overall following the same trend between 1955 and 1959. In 1956 specifically, the proportion of boys aged 16-21 breaking the law was probably close to 1 in 50, according to The Economist.72 Tory activists in the 36 government had made a political issue of the matter, pledging to crack down on ―rampant delinquency.‖ Even British Home Secretary Butler, who tended to shy away from heavy-handed punishments, acquiesced with a 1959 paper entitled Penal Practice in a Changing Society, in which he promised that young offenders would receive a ―short, sharp shock‖ in new detention facilities.73
On the whole, however, British society was witnessing nothing more than a slightly more sensationalized version of its time-old prejudice against youth. ―Hooliganism‖ itself was nothing new—having arrived on the scene in 1898 during a drunken holiday for working-class boys. The terminology had changed, perhaps even adopted a quasi-medical air, but in truth the ―youth problem‖ remained little more than a deviation from the expectations of a carefully structured, socially-controlled society. In truth, the dominant age span of most subculture gang members— the period between graduating high school and reaching maturity at age 21—had long been associated with promiscuity and trouble-making. As far back as 1911, the Huddersfield
Technical College Economics Department was discussing the problems of this age gap in their
Juvenile Labour Problems:
All restraint is cast aside, and the young labourer at the critical stage of adolescence,
becomes a victim of whim and impulse, finding an outlet for his newly awakened
energies in some form of hooliganism and in the excitement of the streets and the
music halls.74
Which begs the question: if the age of adolescence was such a timeless social problem, why did the Teddy Boys of the Fifties earn such a uniquely grandiose and nefarious reputation?
After all, in Pearson‘s study of Hooliganism, the author points out that Teddy-boy mischief had its roots in a long line of predecessors. There were the ―razor boys‖ of the 30s, and the spivs and dagos of London and other big cities in the 1940s. Influential stylistic elements like ―zoot suits,‖ 37 greasy hair styles, and underground ―jive‖ dancing had emerged from the years surrounding the war. The Teds even borrowed much of their flamboyant ―Edwardian‖ style from another, more shunned subculture of the 1940s: the gay underground.75 Thus, the notion that the ―Teddy-Boy menace‖ spontaneously sprang out of the ground during the rock‘n‘roll craze of the mid-fifties tended to willfully ignore Britain‘s long history with adolescent hooliganism. Yet, as Sandbrook notes, one can always expect a level of exaggeration from adults, given that, ―It has always been common for the middle-aged to forget how they themselves behaved when young, and to imagine that standards had irretrievably fallen since those happy days.‖76
One possibility for the amount of attention attained by the Teddy Boys was that this was their very goal: to claim the spotlight. The Teddy Boys were a colorful group whose sense of fashion, if not their antics, focused solely on drawing attention. Their image derived from the fashion of wealthy, upper-class men in the late 1940s. Flamboyant and Edwardian, their sharp outfits had been all the rage among rich young women following the war—until working-class youth hijacked and established a social monopoly on the fashion. Once the gangs of South London adopted the Edwardian attire, it became obscene and disrespectful for wealthy, well-to-do young men to wear it anymore. By early 1954, the phrase ―Teddy Boy‖ had been coined to exclusively describe these working-class Edwardians, whose uniform had begun spreading rapidly beyond
London and into the provinces.77 xi
Descriptions of the Teddy Boy ―look‖ typically refer to extravagant sideburns and greasy quaffs of hair, with colorful suits, velvet-trimmed jackets, frilled shirts, drainpipe trousers, brother-creeper shoes or pointed black boots. Hairstyles were slicked back in great cockades that xi If sexism seems prevalent here, the reality was that boys (i.e. Teddy boys) tended to dominate the “public cultures” associated with the streets, the pub, and the football field, while girls developed their own “private culture” that centered on the home and family. Later, the rise of coffee bars and shopping malls would permit a more dominant force of female culture to develop on the streets, where they could “see and be seen.” (Osgerby, 55-58) 38 flopped over the forehead. The uniform was far from cheap—the average Teddy Boy spent close to 100 pounds on the suits, shoes, and hair grease demanded by the outfit.78 The image was part
Edwardian fashion, part Hollywood gunslinger, and the Teds tended to carry themselves with all the self-imposing danger of the latter. They hung out at coffee shops, or at milk bars, where they could play their favorite pop songs on the jukeboxes.xii Hoggart paints a very vivid and condescending image of these ―milk-bar delinquents‖ in his Uses of Literacy, writing:
They form a depressing group and one by no means typical of the working-class people;
perhaps most of them are rather less intelligent than the average, and are therefore
even more exposed than others to the debilitating mass-trends of the day. They have
no aim, no ambition, no protection, no belief…These are the figures some important
contemporary forces are tending to create, the directionless and tamed helots of a
machine-minding class.79
Alternatively, Teds could be seen in dance halls or on street corners—where they became a threatening reality for older generations. Sandbrook asserts, ― It was common to identify
Teddy Boys as vicious young toughs armed with flick-knives, the very stereotype of the juvenile delinquent.‖80 Public paranoia skyrocketed over flick-knives in particular, with newspapers calling for a ban on the ―flick knife craze.‖ In actuality, Sandbrook explains that these blades were rarely used to prey on the public, and tended to be employed only as a matter of defense among young people. (There were occasional scuffles that broke out at dance halls or on the streets, over issues of territory or a particular girl, and in these situations it paid to arm oneself with flick knives, or bicycle chains.)81 The true cause of social panic surrounding the Teddy Boy xii Coffee shops and milk bars were both Italian imports, and tended to become local hangouts for post-school adolescents. The first milk bar was established on Fleet Street by an Australian businessman in 1935. A year later, there were over 400 across the country. Coffee-shops followed a similar trend, with over 1000 shops established by 1957. (Sandbrook, 132-3). Hebdige describes the appeal of these slick, polished-chrome establishments, thumping with an endless stream of rock’n’roll, embodying for British youth, “a fantasy continent of Westerns and gangsters, luxury, glamour, and automobiles.” (Hebdige, 50) 39 menace was less grounded in accounts of actual violence and more oriented around the fears of conservatives. Dick Hebdige explains the social tendency to frame subculture ideologies within the extremity of their actions, a process in which ―…deviant or anti-social acts—vandalism, swearing, fighting, animal behavior—are ‗discovered‘ by the police, the judiciary, the press; and these acts are used to ‗explain‘ the subculture‘s original transgression of sartorial codes.‖82
Geoffrey Pearson offers a more fundamental explanation for the over-inflated fear of
Teddy Boy violence as follows:
…the Teddy Boys formed part of a much wider structure of feeling in 1950s Britain that
the social changes wrought on the postwar world were destroying the old ‘British way of
life’ and the former civility of the British people, and the Teds were understood to be
symptomatic of these social alterations.83
Blame for the Teddy Boy ―menace,‖ along with many of England‘s subcultures, tended to drift back to the old suspicions of the ‗isms‘: commercialism, materialism, and Americanism.
Rock‘n‘roll, in particular, was seen as the central corrupting influence of British youth, encouraging them to be loose and wild, responsible to no one but themselves. But pointing a finger at rock music would be neither fair, nor chronologically accurate. The earliest Teds had been receiving attention in 1953, several years before the first serious wave of American rock swept the British youth and working classes. By the time Elvis‘s All Shook Up reached the top of the charts in 1957, the Teds had all but vanished. The Teds also came to public‘s attention before the widespread usage of television and commercial TV—both of which have been considered root sources of teenage ―degradation.‖ Therefore, Britain‘s mainstream assumptions that admass and Americanisation were the immediate causes of moral rot in their youth were based less on substantial grounds and more on cultural stereotypes.84
* 40
The rise of the Teddy Boys, like many of their European contemporaries, can be attributed to two factors—neither of which have much to do with the spiteful desire to upturn
British society. The first of these factors was the continuing influx of ‗Americanism,‘ associated with a commercialized pop culture industry. Judt explains that, ―For young people, the appeal of
‗America‘ was its aggressive contemporaneity. As an abstraction, it stood for the opposite of the past; it was large, open, prosperous—and youthful.‖85 Hoggart chimes in: ―…Americans can
‗show us a thing or two‘ about being up to date. In so far as to be up to date is felt to be important, America is the leader; and to be up to date is being made to seem very important.‖86
It was the cutting-edge subversive style of American pop culture—its actors, writers, musicians and inventors—that appealed to European youth. This was less about the extravagance, but the ability to stay one step ahead of the game, to be the pioneers in music, cars, fashion, literature and especially cinema.
All across Europe, American cinema had opened the door for a new wave of heroes: the
Marlon Brandos and James Deans. The look was contagious. Universally dressed in dark, skin- hugging leather or suede, vaguely threatening, one had the blouson noirs in France, the
Halbstarker in Germany and Austria, and the Teds of London. Other American fashion trends took hold—jeans were the perfect example of a young and classless commodity that had been made ―cool‖ by America. By the early 1960s, Coca-cola, motorbikes, big hair, pop stars, and cowboy westerns were rampant in nearly every western European country.87 Youth even began peppering their native speech with ―Americanisms,‖ much to the chagrin of their elders.xiii In
xiii In the 1963 Time article, ‘Languages: Parlez-Vous Franglais?’ European linguists decried the invasion of American slang into their native tongue. For example, German adolescents had popularized, ‘egghead’, ‘heart attack’, ‘bootlegger’, ‘stripper’, and ‘no sweat.’ Fresh newspapers spoke of ‘call girls’ and ‘economic booms’, whereas British Teds gleefully took to calling themselves ‘Tom’, ‘Dick’, and ‘Harry.’ (“Languages: Parlez-Vous Franglais?” Time Magazine. 29 November 1963.) 41 short, American pop culture was sweeping Western Europe by force, much to the delight of a generation of post-war youth.
Aside from American pop culture, the second factor that mobilized and instigated youth unrest was the increasing westward emigration of Eastern and Southern Europeans. Europe‘s post-war baby generation had yet to enter the workforce, and there was a rise in demand for labor in Northwest Europe. This left a wide opening for Greeks, Italians, and Slavs to emigrate into
West Germany, France, and England. Between 1945-1970, nearly 7 million Italians left their country, whereas between 1950-1970, almost a quarter of the Greek labor force left to find work abroad. In England specifically, Italian immigration doubled from 38,000 in the 1951 census to nearly 87,000 ten years later. These Italians brought along a culture of coffee shops and milk bars, complete with juke boxes and a style of slick fashion and sharp designer suits. The greatest social impact in England, however, came from West Indian immigrants, whom the British government had lured into the country in order to staff England‘s trains, buses, and municipal services. A census revealed approximately 15,000 people from the West Indies total living in the UK in 1951—by 1959, the figure was closer to 16,000 West Indians emigrating per year.88
On an overall scale, importing cheap labor from ―less desirable‖ countries had a clear negative effect on British youth. These adolescents suddenly faced stiffer competition for manual labor jobs, and many had to settle for smaller wages. An issue of Life magazine in 1958 describes how derogatory slang-words like ―Spade‖ and ―Jumble‖ were thrown back and forth across the racial divide. Right-wing radical groups like Sir Oswald Mosley‘s Union Movement fomented rage in the name of ―keeping England white.‖89 The Teds and the subcultures of the fifties, in particular, had a widespread distain for foreigners—especially those from the West
Indies. Teds were often involved in unprovoked attacks on West Indians and played a large role 42 in the 1958 race riots—where 300 to 400 white Englanders vandalized a slum neighborhood
Notting Hill. Life Magazine provided an account of the race riots, during which, ―Negros fought with their fists, knives, bicycle chains, axes and Molotov cocktails‖ against the ―Teddy-Boys.‖90
One explanation proposed for the Teds‘ violence was that West Indians were often associated with city ghettos‘ prostitution and racketeering, which may have drawn the Teds‘ hostile attention. However, it was also possible that the Teds were simply anxious about the effects of black immigration on employment, housing and quality of life. In any case, the sharp resurgence of xenophobia marked the first signs of a new economic reality in the late 1950s, affecting virtually all sects of British society.91
*
While the Teds were dominating newspapers, books, and headlines, Britain‘s counter- culture was flourishing quietly in the shadows. The best example of mid-1950s counter-culture developed in the den of the British beatniks—styled on their American vagabond cousins.
Hebdige explains that, in contrast to the ―subculture‖ groups like the Teds, the beatniks tended to be middle-class and well-read, with strongly constituted opinions about the state of society.
Unlike the Teds, beatnik counter-culture rooted itself in artistic and stylistic movements: beatnik literature, underground jazz, avante-garde art movements, a la surrealism and Dada, etc. In his analysis of Subculture, Dick Hebdige highlights the stark differences between the Teds and the
Beats, who shared the same cities and yet lived worlds apart:
The college campuses and dimly lit coffee bars and pubs of Soho and Chelsea were bus
rides away from the Teddy Boy haunts deep in the traditionally working-class areas of
south and east London. While the beatnik grew out of a literate, verbal culture,
professed an interest in the avant-garde and affected a bemused cosmopolitan air of
bohemian tolerance, the ted was uncompromisingly proletarian and xenophobic.92 43
The grounds for the beatnik movement were laid in the expansion of higher education and the rise of ―studenthood.‖ More and more middle-class youth lived on college campuses, surrounded by like-minded individuals who encouraged and fed on a hunger for social change.
Between 1950 and 1960, the number of full-time students at institutions of further education doubled from 75,000 to 151,000—most of these centered in urban or suburban universities.93
Among this student body, a liberal era of relaxed tensions and readiness for social change developed into a sense of needing and wanting to do everything and anything. The beatnik mindset can best be described in the words of Jack Kerouac‘s famous beatnik Bible, On the
Road:
I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he
knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see,
if you go like him all the time you'll finally get it.94
Beatnik philosophy was a complex entanglement of buoyed optimism and hopeful existentialism, combined with disengagement and detachment from societal norms and customs.xiv Rather than comprising any kind of cohesive, homogenous group unit, the beatniks tended to celebrate individualism and crusade against conformity. Osgerby explains that, ―…the beat milieu was distinguished by the focal concerns of creativity and introspection, beat culture encompassing jazz, poetry, literature, eastern mysticism and drugs – a quixotic mixture that prefigured the counter-cultural scene which was to blossom in the late sixties.‖95
Like the Teds, the Beatniks were influenced heavily by America. The origins of the movement name can be traced back to San Fran‘s North Beach area, which in the 1950s was home to a respectable size of beatnik writers, poets, and artists. The American beat generation xiv Kerouac catches this feel-good sense of adventure in a single sentence: "Why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?" (Kerouac, On the Road, 1957.) 44 modeled much of their worldview and culture on black society, from whom they developed a romanticized vision of how to live in an oppressive society and still be ―free.‖ ―The black man,‖
Hebdige explains, ―could serve for white youth as a model of freedom-in-bondage.‖ Blacks were the ―past masters in the gentle arts of escape…‖, intrinsically adept at ―bending the rules‖ to suit their wants and needs. Jazz music was an abstraction: the spirit of improvisation, of wonderful impulse, brought to life. Hebdige goes on to provide a wonderful portrayal of the allure of black entertainers:
Here the Negro was blowing free, untouched by the dreary conventions which
tyrannized more fortunate members of society and, although trapped in a cruel
environment of mean streets and tenements, by a curious inversion he also emerged
the ultimate victor. … Immaculate in poverty, he lived out the blocked options of a
generation of white radical intellectuals.96
Whereas the Teds were fully conscious of their position in society—and thus mocked the upper establishment by means of gaudy, conspicuous apparel— the beats attempted to transcend not just their own social standing, but the class system in general. If the Teds were materialistic and swayed by pop culture music and cinema, the beats strove to be quite the opposite. Osgerby writes that ―…the beat, studiously ragged in jeans and sandals, expressed a magical relation to a poverty which constituted in his imagination a divine essence, a state of grace, a sanctuary.‖97
The beats were the outliers, the observers, the invisibles. This was a group that was truly untouched by the mechanisms of Commercial Consumerism. Far from the center of attention, they were truly ready to brush off society and form their own rules, their own ethics, their own social world. As Ian MacDonald explains, they were ―visionary hobos alienated from society.‖
Because their philosophy was ill-defined, and tended to focus on attaining something beyond the range of every experience, the beats were best described by what they were for and what they 45 were against. They stood for ― imagination, self-expression, Zen…poetry, free sex, jazz.‖ They stood against ―soul-numbing materialism…rationalism, repression, racism…‖98 To wit,
Kerouac‘s On the Road captures the searing emotions pulsing at the heart of the Beat psyche:
They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing
all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad
ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of
everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but
burn, burn, burn...99
If there was anything that the Beats shared with the Teds, it was their general distain for the ―duties‖ imposed upon them by the ―higher ups.‖ Both groups refused to acknowledge the power of anyone else to demand of them specific behaviors, specific actions, specific responsibilities. For the Teds, resentment was spawned from the feeling that the law was slated against them—that policemen represented ―the eye of authority‖ watching constantly over them.
For the Beatniks, the primary goal was not to undermine or subvert the law, but simply to ignore it whenever it did not fit their own understanding of the world. Hoggart summarizes:
They are assailed by a mass of abstractions; they are asked to respond to ‘the needs of
the state’, and the ‘needs of society’, to study ‘good citizenship’, to have in mind the
‘common good’. In most cases the appeals mean nothing, are so many words. They do
not think such general calls, for duty, for sacrifice, for individual effort, are relevant to
them.100
Regardless, these anti-culture movements illustrate the continued shift among British youth from the world of ―Merrie England‖ to the faster, more modernized, more commercialized era of global interconnectivity. Although less can be said in this chapter about the interplay of subcultures and commercialization, it is important to note that these fashion styles and behavioral 46 attitudes helped flesh out the shakily-defined ―youth culture‖ of the era. Teddy-boys and
Beatniks became as much a part of pop culture as rock‘n‘roll and television. They were an expression of a youth desire for the ―cool,‖ a desire that would eventually be tapped into by commercial markets. The next chapter further examines another fundamental ―defining factor‖ of youth culture—the liberalization of their sexuality—and the industries that grew alongside these trends.
47
Chapter 5
Sexy Sadie: A Teenage Sex Culture?
Teenagers‘ sexual ―promiscuity‖ has long been a topic to draw the scrutiny, hostility, and moral indignation of their elders. Yet, one could argue that the generation of the Fifties faced entirely new and distinct challenges than their predecessors. In the decade following the war,
―admass‖ mentality and pop culture developed strong sexual undertones. The idea that ―sex sells‖ was no longer a trade secret—magazine editors, television producers, film directors, cosmetic companies, rock‘n‘roll artists and penny-back novelists were ready to cash in on youth‘s insatiable hunger for physical intimacy. And, for their part, teenagers were the perfect
―sex market‖: they existed in a convoluted world of celebrity worship, sexual curiosity, pop culture adulation, counter-culture desires and zesty hormones. This chapter examines the idea of a ―teenage sex culture‖ in the context of the socio-economic changes of the Fifties. In doing so, we look first at trends in the liberalization of sex-related issues, and then explore how these private views interacted with public business interests and the existing youth culture.
The problem in addressing the issue of teenage sexuality was one of social and self- imposed censorship. While the public haggled over medical procedures and the ―morality‖ of homosexuality, no one wanted to talk about sex itself. Censorship was still the mode of the day, driven largely the government-legal campaign in the mid 1950s to crack down on anything faintly obscene.xv In women‘s magazines, writers and contributors went to great lengths to avoid even using the word ―sex,‖ opting instead for alternative euphemisms like ―the intimate side of marriage‖ or ―physical love.‖ Alfred Kinsey‘s new study Sexual Behavior in the Human
xv Prostitution, for example, was a predominantly embarrassing problem for the government and city councils. The National Council of Women of Great Britain estimated that roughly a quarter million men visited prostitutes each week in London alone (a very generous estimate, no doubt). In 1958, there were an estimated 3,000 “street- walkers”—an appalling embarrassment to members of the Cabinet and Home Office. (Kynaston, 555.) 48
Female received an angry host of criticism from his adult peers, described by one artist as
―stupid rot,‖ and another woman as ―the dreadful man who wrote that book about women.‖101
The truth was that British society continued to be uncomfortable discussing the subject in a public forum—even while, paradoxically, many private views were moving in quite the liberal direction. Pre-marital sex, for example, was becoming increasingly common by the middle of the 1950s. One survey showed that close to half the public was willing to condone a male engaging in pre-marital sex.xvi Therefore, what emerged was a social conceptualization of sex akin to the idea of the ―elephant in the room‖— England‘s private leniency towards the subject could not overcome the hurdle of public censorship.102
Unfortunately, those social taboos made it difficult for teenagers to gain any kind of practical enlightenment concerning sex. As David Kynaston explains in Family Britain, parents rarely discussed the topic with their children, and ―sex education‖ was a half-concocted, arbitrary, and often missing component in school curriculums. It is true that matters of contraception were finally moving into the mainstream by the mid 1950s – with new family planning clinic opening almost every week. Yet, on the whole, there were vast swaths of the country that had no clinics, and those that did often bred suspicion and resentment in the community. Birth control was still being popularized, but general ignorance of the pill led to many unwanted pregnancies among middle-to-lower class girls. Boys could be equally confused about the sexual process, forced to piece together the facts of the world from scribbling and lewd jokes on public bathroom walls. One male student, for example, recalls his brief foray into sex education in Biology class as a confusing and muddling experience: ―There was a rumour that
xvi The same survey found that 62% opposed premarital sex for females—a very conscientious nod towards gender roles at the time. Girls were still, by and large, expected to be faithful and behave “properly,” while boys were given a larger range of freedom. 49 sex was supposed to be fun. It didn‘t look like fun. The way the biology master described it, it sounded slightly less fun than unclogging a drain with a bent plunger.‖103
There is much to be said about the role of religion here, considering the largely Christian demographics of the nation. For Christian fundamentalists, teenage promiscuity was a major consequence of a society gone adrift from God. The volumes of literary and social criticism concerning sex in early century England reflect a Biblical stigma of licentiousness, sordidness, and wickedness. At the same time, as Lesley Hall asserts, the self-imposed ―shamefulness‖ associated with the act of sex made open discussions on the subject nearly impossible for the first half of the 20th Century. Editorials and opinion letters in newspapers like The Times often refrained from even utilizing the term ―sex,‖ opting instead for euphemisms like ―temptations of the flesh.‖ In 1932, for example, one contributor commented, ―Boys and girls, after leaving school, begin to earn pocket money and perhaps more than that; and temptations were offered that were fraught with many evils.‖104 A decade later, the theme of ―godless‖ and ―tempted‖ youth continued to be attributed to a decline in strong Christian morals. One writer offered the solution of religious education to curb teenage rowdiness, arguing that ―the youth of today could be captured by teaching the ethics and life of Jesus…‖105 Employing faith to curb human desire was one of the most prominent responses to the ―youth problem‖ from the perspective of religious conservatives.
Not everyone, however, used the altar pulpit to voice their grievances. The vast majority of British society existed outside the cadre of religious fundamentalism, yet many parents were equally wary of sexually-active teenagers. David Kynaston explains that parental concern for their children‘s sexual welfare was multifold: one thought not only of the wicked indulgence of sin, but also of disease, unwanted pregnancies, forced marriages, and ruined careers. It is true 50 that some 12,000 abortions were being legally performed every year—on the grounds that terminating the pregnancy would save the woman from being emotionally and mentally
―wrecked‖— but the operation still maintained the stigma of a sinister, back-alley procedure.
Additionally, abortions could prove lethal, depending on the level of one‘s experience and knowledge. This was not a moral issue, or a risk, that most parents wished to grapple with, regardless of their religious convictions.106
These issues were compounded by the impact of the media—which often presented a forceful and conservative narrative over sexuality. Specifically, the organs of the press tended to garner ―moral panics‖ over the issues of homosexuality, literary censorship, and gender transformation. Hoggart dismisses the idea that newspapers and radio were ―progressive‖ voices, criticizing them instead for buckling to the pressure of popular, conservative opinions.
He writes:
Popular reading is now highly centralized; a very large body of people choose between
only a small number of publications. … These publications must aim to hold their
readers at a level of passive acceptance, at which they never really ask a question, but
happily take what is provided and think of no change. There must be no significant
disturbing of assumptions, nothing more than a light titillation. The popular Press, for
all its purported ‘progressiveness’ and ‘independence’, is one of the greatest conserving
forces in public life today: its nature requires it to promote conservatism and
conformity.107
To the extent that the media influenced public views of sexuality, it is important to note the issues that claimed the headlines during this era. One subject that the English Press obsessed over was artificial insemination. Here, the public‘s reaction was twofold, as detailed by Lesley
Hall in her analysis of Sexuality in postwar England. The author explains the social reaction 51 towards the new science of artificial insemination was ―largely discussed in terms of prurient horror at the ‗unnatural‘…[opening] up uneasy possibilities of a still greater dissociation between sex and reproduction.‖ The Feversham Committee, appointed by the government to investigate the matter, determined that artificial insemination would be detrimental to the child‘s well-being in any circumstance that would render the child ‗illegitimate‖ (that is, lacking a present father).108 In reality, however, the greatest consequence of artificial insemination was not a surge in bastardized children; rather, it was the impact of altering public views of what a
―proper‖ family ought to look like—a topic we will return to shortly with homosexuality.
Another issue on the media‘s forefront of medical innovation was that of gender transformation. Given the inter-war developments in hormone research and advancements in plastic surgery, there was growing popularity over the issue. In 1959, over 50 cases were reported, both male and female, to have occurred at Charing Cross Hospital. Although its social ramifications tended towards public confusion, these medical advancements had strong—if unappreciated—moral implications. The ability to decide one‘s gender through a ―sex-change‖ operation paid homage to the developing consumer society and importance of individual choice.
Hall succinctly describes the social implications of gender operations, in that ―resignation to one‘s lot was no longer the order of the day.‖109
Finally, one of the most notoriously publicized movements of the fifties was the underground gay culture. If sex was socially taboo, then homosexuality was inconceivably out of bounds for discussion. Free and frank conversation on homosexuality, to quote David
Kynaston‘s mild understatement, was ―perhaps…not quite so prevalent around the dinner table.‖110 In public, the topic was equally negligible. No one dreamed of being openly gay, especially gay youth—who garnered a sense of piercing stigma from their peers‘ attitudes, 52 compounded by their own often-confused understanding of sexuality.xvii Gay teenagers had few role models to look to in the public sphere. As Phillip Norman points out in his commentary on
Brian Epstein, the homosexual Beatles‘ manager, ―Only in rarified and enclosed worlds such as show business and couture could homosexuals yet find a measure of tolerance under the humanizing term ‗gay‘.‖111 In general, however, the vast majority of homosexual couples spent their lives living falsehoods, prompting one Scottish nephew to muse over his uncle‘s lifestyle:
What was it like to spend your entire life without showing any affection? Did you ever
tell anyone else? But to ask would have been inconceivable, which is, perhaps the
answer to how they got away with it. No one dared hint at it.112
The media‘s reaction towards homosexuality, while overt and often circumscribed, tended towards moral condemnation. An increasing number of ―openly declared‖ gay men, coupled with a growing number of public discussions on homosexuality, triggered an immediate and distinct moral panic over the issue. Among the organs of the media, terms like ―evil men‖ and the ―last taboo‖ reflected a general stigmatizing approach to homosexuality– even if a few progressive periodicals did call for decriminalization. In the government, homophobia was pervasive in the highest levels of power, with various lords and deputies declaring their views quite publicly on the issue. It should be noted that lesbianism, for its part, tended to skirt widespread attention, if only because it was a smaller, less publicized and lesser understood phenomena.xviii Only a handful of lesbian pubs and clubs existed in all of England, and the act itself was no legally penalized. If there was a ―moral panic‖ to be found, in other words, it focused substantially on male homosexuality.113
xvii Legally, homosexuality remained strictly criminalized under the Butler ministry, despite the recommendation to de-criminalize by the findings of the Wolfenden Committee in 1954 (Hall, 145-163). xviii Note that, from the perspective of religious critics, Biblical arguments against lesbian were far less numerous and prominent than the many references towards male homosexuality. 53
The media‘s tone throughout all these proceedings, as noted by Hoggart, consistently favored the conservative side of things, in that they shied away from any ―significant disturbing of assumptions.‖114 Ironically, in doing so, the media was raising huge amounts of public awareness over these issues. And the more the public learned about the shadowy lifestyles of young adolescents, homosexuals, infertile couples, and trans-gendered individuals, the less suspicious they became. For example, Hall notes that the older generations tended to be
―horrified by the dionysiac jiving to rock music‖ and ―the male dandyism of Teddy boys.‖
However, she explains that ―most of the sexual license among the young took place in the heated imaginations of their envious seniors.‖115 The net effect of the media, in other words, was one of social exposure—heightening the empathy and knowledge that inevitably led to the liberalization of one‘s views. Conservative adults were being forced to confront the reality of what for years and years been swept under the rug. In doing so, they discovered that the ―moral panic‖ and the
―youth problem‖ that had long festered in the darkest corners of their unspoken imaginations were, on the whole, neither worthy of panic, nor much of a disparaging ―problem.‖
*
One is left to wonder the extent to which teenagers were sexually active, and how those trends were influenced by public discussion. Michael Schofield‘s The Sexual Behavior of Young
People, published in 1965, formulates a fairly accurate image of the emerging facets of teenage sexuality near the end of the Fifties. The study examined roughly 2,000 teenagers aged 15-19, both male and female. Schofield found that sexual experiences tended to occur in greater numbers among those who were not closely involved in ―family life.‖ In the same vein, sexually experienced teenagers tended to think more negatively of ―restrictiveness‖ (i.e family loyalty and strong moral views). The study also found that, while social class differences were virtually 54 absent in the act of sexual intercourse, there were patterns of stronger sexual ―experimentation‖ among the working class. Lower-class youth, generally lacking the long-term family planning of their wealthier peers, were more likely to engage in spontaneous, impulsive whims. Hoggart offers another explanation for these differences by class, arguing that middle/upper class ―public schoolboys‖ were less sexually active due to their tendency to co-exist in all-male communities until age 18.116 At the same time, the middle class, witnessing a rise of ―student-hood‖ university communities in the late 1950s, were experiencing greater periods of sexual freedom at the end of their teenage years. Adults responded, predictably, by pointing the finger of blame at
―materialism‖ and ―idleness,‖ but Schofield sharply admonished his elder audience against this, concluding, ―It is clearly wrong to regard our young people as a bored, undisciplined, sex- obsessed generation.‖117
Perhaps most interesting in Schofield‘s study is his theory of the media as a culture- definer. His interviews found that sexual experience was closely related to ―the teenage mythology‖ perpetrated by TV and the media. The popular image being presented was one of a youth group looser in morals, more promiscuous, and more unconventional than their predecessors. Schofield argues that this served as a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more the media insisted that the average teenager was sexually experienced, the more the average teenager desired to be sexually experienced. In this case, it is difficult to argue that the Frankfurt School of thought has won the day: a commercial sex industry could easily take advantage of the confusion and eagerness of British youth. Yet Schofield may have overlooked the fact that the news media was not the only force cultivating a national teenage sex identity.118
There were books, for example, that did much in terms of sexual encouragement. Both
Hoggart and Sandbrook came to a consensus on the role of literary sources in influencing and 55 informing younger audiences on the matter. Sandbrook highlights the impact of girl magazines in creating a self-conscious image of desirability among teenage females. These magazines excited and intrigued their female audiences with features on the ―love secrets‖ of their favorite stars, paired with articles and stories that generally obsessed with love, romance, and intrigue, advertising clothes, cosmetics, engagement rings, etc. Magazines were an invaluable source of sexual knowledge for young girls, particularly when it came to private relationships. The information girls gleaned from these magazines spilled over into bedroom discussions, where they gathered with friends to, ―listen to the music, teach each other make-up skills, practice their dancing, compare sexual notes, [and] criticize each others‘ clothes and gossip.‖119 Sandbrook explains:
…*the magazines+ functioned as consumer guides…advising their teenage reader on how
to manage their budding love lives, so that there were plenty of tips on looking good,
attracting boys, conducting romances, and, of course, firmly drawing the line before
things got out of hand.120
Hoggart‘s Uses of Literacy attacks the youth magazine industry as an appeal to superficial impulses, packed with blatant innuendo and belonging ―to the world of the dirtier picture-post-cards.‖ Such a magazine ―thinks of itself as a smart and sophisticated interest,‖ he writes, ―but is really bloodless and reduced to a very narrow range of responses; slickness disguising emotional thinness is no improvement on the older kind of family magazine.‖121
According to Hoggart, there was no beauty to be found here; no real emotion; no artistic expression. The girly pin-ups and smoking advertisements might be ―suggestive‖ with their models, but at their heart they were ―ersatz,‖ in that the real sex has been ―machined out of them.‖122 In other words, the commercial industry offered only a hollow, glib sense of satisfaction to their younger viewers—and was a degrading force for it. 56
If that was the case for magazines, then the comic book industry was prepared to fill in the void of suggestiveness. Here, at last, was the modern successor of the old penny dreadfuls.
Viewed as lower-class, corrupting, and unsuitable for middle-class children, comics were nonetheless important tools of emasculation for boys of every background. Hoggart‘s criticism of comics latches upon their cookie-cutter stylistics, their vacuous literary merit, their tendency to cater openly to base desires:
With the old-style ‘strips’ there are now some in the new manner, about crime in fast
cars and adventures in space-ships, each with a ravishing blonde floozie as well as a
lantern-jawed detective or space-pilot; and each in the new style of drawing, a style
derived from the American ‘strips’ and differing from the older English ones as a slick
milk-bar differs from an unimproved fish-and-chips shop.123
But there were also shifting themes and tones in the comic industry. As the historian
Gary Cross points out, after the Second World War, the ―working-class pulp fiction‖ of comics began to target older teenage audiences and young adults. They still captured the youthful spirit of adventure and technology (sci-fi comics were popular), but also presented the grizzled, prototypical man taking on the whole world; the damsel in distress; the violent and sexual fantasies that embodied the concept of ‗manliness.‘ In the mid-1940s, for example, Captain
America‘s friendly boy sidekick disappeared as the All-American hero began chasing after sexy women in provocative, dangerous situations.124 Similar trends occurred among other popular comic heroes, replacing the hallmark ―selfless goodness‖ of the characters with a need for immediate, physical gratification. Here, again, we see a reflection of admass mentality—one
―deserves‖ rewards for their hard work. In this case, that reward was sex—and as the comic industry quickly learned, sex does sell. 57
There were, of course, other forms of literature from which teenagers could garner a sense of the ‗birds and the bees.‘ Well-written novels, some of them bestsellers, often found themselves in the crosshairs of conservative England. As far back as the late 1920s, for example, indignant reviews fluttered around the popular bestseller Sorrell and Sons. One British librarian angrily denounced the book‘s author for taking it upon himself to teach youth about sexuality.
―And it is surely time,‖ the librarian wrote, ― that someone tell novel writers, scientific and romantic, that they cannot claim to be an expert in this treatment, let alone have a monopoly in teaching it.‖ This statement indicates the possibility that youth received much of their sexual exposure and ―training‖ from novels and works of fiction. The reviewer goes on to criticize the portrayal of women in the novel, stating, ―…there is not a woman in the book who can command a healthy respect. All are obviously bad, being either frankly immoral or frankly rebellious to the acknowledged codes of decent behavior.‖xix Again, we can trace these trends into the
―candy-floss‖ magazine culture of the 1950s, which encouraged flirtatiousness and thinly-veiled modesty in young women.125
However, if Sorrell and Sons may seem a relic of the 1920s, the 1950s witnessed its own share of prosecution of ―licentious‖ reading material. Despite Hoggart‘s assertion that ―smut‖ magazines and novellas had run amuck on the free market, the government actually made several overtures towards literary censorship. Donald McGill‘s saucy postcards, a feature of seaside resorts, were deemed to be, perhaps, too saucy. There were efforts to prosecute and censor everything from classic European literature— Boccaccio and Rabelais—to sleazy magazines like
xix The conservative tirade continues, as the librarian angrily denounces the “emancipatory” power of sexual liberalization thusly: “In the instances given of the collision of young men and young women, the sex instinct is seen to be predominant, and so hungry to be satisfied that it demands and receives almost instant satisfaction! … The argument seems to be: young women to be fully emancipated must be allowed to ‘have a good time,’ just as young men are supposed to ‘sow their wild oats.’” (Rudd, John. The Poisoning of Youth)
58
Tricky and Wink, as well as ―hardboiled pulp novels.‖ The most famous case was the prosecution of D.H. Lawrence‘s Lady Chatterley‘s Lover, published in 1928 and tried in the late
1950s. The trial was hugely publicized and ended up as a resounding defeat for Britain‘s conservative prosecutors. A ruling in favor of Lawrence reinforced the 1959 ―Obscene
Publications Act,‖ which allowed for defense of ―publications for the public good‖ and demanded that the work be considered as a whole, rather than a few ―salacious passages wrenched out of context.‖ This was, on the whole, a victory for England‘s intelligesta, who viewed the concept of literary censorship as an abhorrent abomination. At the same time, this trial marked a substantial blow to conservative adults trying desperately to keep their children in a bubble of blissful ignorance.126
To conclude, this chapter by no means asserts that a widespread ―sexual revolution‖ occurred in the social spheres of the Fifties. When it came to youth sexuality, there continued to be conservatives and skeptics (particularly among parents), and a plethora of medical agencies that scrutinized and denounced the ethics of abortion, artificial insemination, and homosexuality.
But the important truth was that the groundwork was being laid in this open consumer society for a freer flow of ideas and open discussion—especially concerning sex. As the barriers of censorship slowly crumbled, sex increasingly became a natural part of life rather than a social onus. It was a turn of the tides that was eagerly seized by a host of commercial industries, from advertisers to comic books. Yet, for these industries, such a transformation would have been impossible without a specific audience that was willing to explore a more liberal system of ethics. And such a willing audience could be found in Fifties‘ British youth.
59
“ Most mass-entertainments are in the end what D.H. Lawrence described as ‘anti-life’. They are full of a corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions. … they tend towards a view of the world in which progress is conceived as a seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral leveling and freedom as the grounds for endless irresponsible pleasure. … they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist in the gradual drying-up of the more positive, the fuller, the more cooperative kinds of enjoyment, in which one gains much by giving much. They have intolerable pretensions; and pander to the wish to have things both ways, to do as we want and accept no consequences.” - Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1955)
Chapter 6
You Really Got a Hold on Me: The Advent of Television
In the early Fifties, television was still a luxury and something of a commodity in most of
Western Europe. By the end of the decade, however, these black-and-white box sets would revolutionize the social and commercial culture in much of the continent—particularly in Britain, a nation only second to America in per capita ownership of TV sets.127 Television would become a central part of British life by late Fifties, an emerging force of social interconnectivity.
Osgerby argues that the media industries in the 1950s—namely, television and the BBC— facilitated the proliferation of popular trends and fashions around the country. Osgerby adds, ―In fact, without the definition and dissemination that this media afforded, it is probable that the
Teddy Boy, mod and skinhead would all have remained locally confined and vaguely defined subcultural variants…‖128 As such, this chapter examines television as a vital component in shaping, and helping to homogenize, elements of British youth culture. More specifically, we look at the social impact of the television industry—including the rise of the BBC—as a culture- shaping force, and then apply these elements of commercialization and news dissemination to
British youth.
To begin, we must understand exactly how television fit into the admass mentality of
England‘s age of affluence, and more importantly, how many people in Britain were affected by the television industry. David Kynaston notes that regular television transmissions began in the 60
1940s, but failed to reach anything resembling a national audience until the 1950s. It was Queen
Elizabeth‘s June 1953 coronation, featured live on TV, which riveted the entire nation and changed the course of television‘s history. The Queen‘s coronation led to an explosion in television ownership, with the number of license-holders doubling overnight from 1.5 million to nearly 3 million. The BBC estimated nearly 8 million viewers watching the event in their homes, with ten million in their friends‘ homes and close to 2 million at the pubs.129 One can imagine the phenomenal impact of the televised ceremony—once a private event, held within the company of aristocratic elites—now being disseminated into the living rooms of the poorest and most rural families in Britain. As one working-class Irish woman in London wrote, ―…[we] felt we would have to have several ‗breaks,‘ but once it started we couldn‘t tear ourselves away from the set, and considered even eating an unnecessary interruption.‖130 The BBC‘s own feedback revealed that ―viewers were immensely pleased and grateful that they were shown so much of the actual Service—‗far, far more than we ever expected, and obviously more than most of those present could see‘.‖131
By the end of 1954, there were approximately 4,600,000 television receivers in the UK, which meant that there were close to 11 people per television receiver132.xx This spelled bad news for prior forms of entertainment, and particularly for the cinema industry. As a direct result of television‘s proliferation, cinema attendance dropped dramatically in the UK—with the industry losing 56% of their customers between 1946 and 1958. Families simply opted to remain at home and enjoy their favorite shows or broadcasts from the living room. Teenagers in particular, the largest of the cinema‘s audience, drifted away from the cinema towards other, more public and visible entertainment venues: namely, milk bars, clubs, and dance halls.133 This
xx To compare these figures with the rest of Western Europe, in 1954 West Germany had 160,000 TV receivers, while France had 209,000 and Italy had 82,000 (Emmett, The Television Audience, 293). 61 did not necessarily exclude them as a television audience, however. One study performed by
E.P. Emmett for the Royal Statistical Society showed that the number of teenagers watching evening television at home peaked at about 47% around age 15, and then declined slightly among ages 16-24. Emmett attempts to explain this decline among older youth as a result of their age span, where leisure time is ―notoriously‖ spent out of the home—but Emmett overlooks the fact that shows could just as well be enjoyed at a friend‘s home, or in public settings, like pubs and milk bars. Regardless, whether at 43% or 47%, a youth market was developing that was substantially ripe for the picking.134
Before the rise of commercial television in the mid fifties, television was predominantly censored and regulated by the state. The British Broadcasting Corporation emerged as the reckoning force behind British television. Having been founded as a public corporation of radio companies in 1927, the BBC was issued a royal charter granting it a total monopoly of broadcasting (until the Independent Television Authority was formed in 1954). However, as
Sandbrook notes, in the early Fifties the BBC still considered television to be a ‗trivial distraction.‘ The BBC‘s real heart and soul was the radio—the ―true‖ national medium. Time would change these preconceptions. By the end of the 1950s, for example, 72% of the British population would be connected through to the BBC through television. The BBC‘s newest aim was to emerge as a trustworthy visual news source, in that it ―strove to be the mirror of the nation, and the nation accepted it.‖135
Unprecedented access to a new, captive audience meant not only lucrative markets for the
Broadcasting Corporation, but also a chance to mold the nation‘s character. This was a mantle the BBC could easily claim—for as far as the British people were concerned, there were really no alternative broadcasters. Independent choice was not an option for early television. As such, 62 the BBC dictated the tone, content, and presentation of its material with absolute autonomy.
Sandbrook explains the downside of their dominance of the airwaves as a self-imposed mission of cultural enlightenment, designed and executed by a mix of blue-blooded businessmen and parliamentarians. To achieve this, the company‘s executives developed a three-tiered programming schematic—the idea being to ―educate‖ viewers gradually from the frivolous
―base‖ entertainments to the high-browed cultural peak. At the bottom of the pyramid was the
―Light Programme,‖ evolved from the General Forces Programme of wartime, which offered popular music, comedies and soap operas to lower-class audiences. Above this stood the ―Home
Service,‖ which hosted a variety of middle-class news shows, plays and lectures. Finally, the
―Third Programme‖ claimed the intellectual capstone of the pyramid, complete with classical music and elements of art, avante-garde discussions, and high culture lectures. Yet, much to the chagrin of company executives, the Light Programme superseded its competitors by miles and miles, attracting about 2/3s of the BBC‘s total listeners.xxi In other words, British audiences never ascended the cultural pyramid, as there was no desire for the working class to do so.
Entertainment and escape from daily troubles could be found in the baser comedies and pop songs. Youth in particular flocked to the Light Programme, from which they could often catch the latest pop hits. In fact, it was with the ―Light Programme‖ that the first televised youth market in Britain began to emerge.136
The BBC would receive a sharp shock with the arrival of commercial television—a revolutionary force in market consumerism—at the end of 1954. ITV launched in 1955 as the first station to be funded by advertisements during its break segments. Commercials were viewed as an intriguing novelty, but they were not the most substantial changes wrought by ITV.
xxi In contrast, the Third Programme, by the end of the Forties, was attracting only 1% of radio audiences, and those numbers continued falling in the ensuing decade. It was a decided failure (Sandbrook, 359). 63
The network offered a sudden proliferation of popular American comedies, including I Love
Lucy, Dragnet, and Gunsmoke, which resonated deeply with the UK‘s working-class audiences.
Most of this television programming was aimed at working-class men, housewives, or young children. This was due, in no small part, to the emerging dominance of working-class audiences among television ownership. Whereas in 1947, England‘s ―bottom class‖ (lowest 68% income earners in population) controlled only 25% of television sets, by 1954 that number stood at close to 75%.137 This was not only an astounding social redistribution of audiences, but also a visible realignment to a new market on behalf of the commercial industry.
At the end of 1956, ITV began to experiment with a teenage televised audience by developing the first television show dedicated to pop music, Cool for Cats. A year later, the
BBC one-upped their competitors with their own live music show, Six-Five Special. The newer program was aimed directly at a teenage audience and was wildly successful in its efforts to do so. Throughout its first two years, Six-Five Special featured rock‘n‘roll, skiffle, folk, and blues and jazz—indicating a new schism between the corporation‘s conservative traditionalists and its younger, more business-oriented marketing executives. Regardless of the intellectual merits of popular music, however, it was difficult to argue against profits. The Six-Five Special attracted more than 10 million viewers and dominated the music marketing industry, to the extent that other music-oriented television shows, like Juke Box Jury, Dig This! and Drumbeat sprang up at the end of the 1950s.138
What, exactly, was the appeal behind commercial television? Tony Judt argues that television ―was an instrument of social subversion,‖ in that ―it helped end the isolation and ignorance of far-flung communities, by providing everyone with the same experience and a common visual culture.‖139 This once again ties to several of the themes that have emerged in 64 the previous chapters—the ―homogenizing‖ of British culture, particularly among the youth, whose urban and rural subcultures could now find common ground in this new medium. In addition, Sandbrook contributes ITV‘s popularity to its success in presenting itself as ―modern, informal, and glamorous, qualities typically associated with all things America.‖140 Unlike the
BBC, ITV had little interest in educational or cultural training; its programming was less didactic, more contemporary and delightful. The intention of the design was to give viewers what they wanted, rather than what the company thought they wanted. Again, individual choice was crucial as a facet of marketing here.xxii
Those individual choices, of course, differed with adolescent boys and girls. For teenage girls, TV helped define what the ―quintessential‖ female ought to look like, to summarize from
Osgerby. There were role models for femininity, coyness, and subtle sexual subversion in the women on TV. Namely, Susan Stranks‘ appearance on the first panel of Juke Box Jury in 1959 was wildly popular with girls, whereas by the early 1960s, Cathy McGowan would emerge as the
19-year-old ―Queen of the Mods‖ in the popular show Ready, Steady, Go!141 These were girls that could be emulated and adored. More importantly, these stars sold an image that became common-ground for teenage girls everywhere—an image that became ―cool‖ merely by its proliferation and social discussion. That image could be traced to televised advertising, particularly with clothing, which focused with laser-like intensity on British girls and their physical appearance. Spirella bras and girdles, for example, drew the attention of this generation of young females, promising, ―You‘ll like the way you feel —they’ll like the way you look —in your Spirella.‖ Another commercial for the New Little Xtra Corselet in the early 1960s made xxii Sir Frederick Ogilvie, a former Director General of the BBC, also emphasized the importance of individual choice by lambasting the BBC’s former monopoly of broadcasting. Ogilvie observed, “Freedom is a choice…And monopoly of broadcasting is inevitably the negation of freedom no matter how efficiently it is run.” (Hand, Chris. Television Ownership in Britain and the Coming of ITV: What the Statistics Show. Department of Media Affairs. Royal Hallway University of London. 2002. Print.) 65 more explicit offers: ―Thicker molding ‗keep-shape‘ cups give you a permanently lovely line!
Unique X-panels emphasis the waist … flatten the tummy! The down-stretch panels slims you at the back!142 The driving force behind these commercials was beauty and self-image— the old tradition of modesty giving way to a more flirtatious coyness. It was a clever manipulation of girls‘ sexual insecurities and social pressures.
Guys had their own interests. TV and its advertising often harped upon the popular tough-guy figure that had grown so popular through movie anti-heroes, rock‘n‘roll legends, and
‗hard-boiled‘ pulp magazines. A variety of police shows, like Dixon on the Green Dock (aired
1955) brought criminal slang into the youth vernacular: for example, ―manor‖ indicating the
Constable‘s beat, and the ―the nick‖ becoming a codeword for the station itself.143 There were cigarette advertisements—at least until the mid-1960s—that often sold masculinity and
―coolness,‖ both in flavor and in style. Player’s, for example, beckoned to all those tough-guys living in ―the world of men,‖ with sexualized slogans promising ―whatever the pleasure, Player‘s completes it.‖ Once again, television was selling ―coolness‖ as commodities to England‘s adolescents, and these teenagers lapped it up.144
Yet, while youth strayed further and further into the world of America materialism,
Britain‘s timeless worry-mongers continued to wring their hands. For these elements of society, commercial television joined the ranks of pirate radio, rock‘n‘roll, beatniks and comic books as forces of unrepentant, Faustian decadence. Sandbrook describes the often-visceral reaction across the community. Members of the intellectual right and left combined to lambast television for ―systematically doping‖ the faculties of the electorate, while killing ―civilized conversation‖ and bolstering juvenile crime. Major newspaper outlets bombarded ITV as ―cultural rot,‖ with politicians often chiming in their support. Lord Reith even likened commercial television to 66
―smallpox, bubonic plague and the Black Death.‖145 Yet few critics could compete with our old bibliophilic friend, Richard Hoggart. The scholar‘s rigorous condemnation on behalf of the
Pilkington Committee helped coin the adversarial phrase, ―Going the Whole Hoggart‖ among the newspaper headlines in the 1962. Once again, Hoggart manned the cannon of traditional intellectualism as he attacked commercial television for appealing to the lowest levels of public taste in its efforts to widen the net of its audience.146
These ―commercial‖ criticisms reflect the same widespread unease with Americanism and consumer culture that we have seen previously. According to The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, the Television Act instituted by Parliament in 1954 placed strict standards on the content of commercial television, demanding that nothing should be broadcast ―which offends against good taste or decency.‖ More specifically, in response to fears of American commercialism, the Act obliged the Independent Television Authority to see ―that proper proportions of the…matter included in the programmes are of British origin and of British performance.‖147 xxiii This was an effort for the government to effectively regulate what British audiences could or could not view.
British youth as a whole stood largely opposed to entertainment censorship. They had seen this form of stiff-necked obstructionism over and over again in the condemnation of cinema‘s Rock Around the Clock, or the attacks on pop radio, or the assaults on comic books and
American fashion. To them, television was no different. In fact, the ―Establishment‘s‖ assault on TV may have even made commercialized television more appealing among youth. The truth is that teenagers watched TV in the 1950s for the same reasons they watch it today—it
xxiii If the desire was to curtail the materialist threat of commercial (and American) sponsorship, however, the loose wording of the Act left plenty of wiggle room for ITV to push the envelope. By 1960, advertisers would be spending close to 76 million pounds annually on commercial slots, indicating television’s massive success in reaching fresh markets. (Boyd, Review: Moving Pictures) 67 entertained them. They could stay on top of subculture trends, keep up with current music, catch the latest news on celebrities, and immerse themselves in American pop culture. Television not only helped define their pop culture, but it also served as a vital social medium—offering food for discussion and comfortable, leisure-time activity for friends. Most importantly, commercial television rebranded and recreated the face of consumer culture by appealing directly towards consumer choice. It was all about what you wanted, when you wanted it. And this teenage generation could afford to thrive in such an atmosphere. Television, at long last, could wire
Britain‘s youth into their own culture, and the consumer market, at the click of a button.
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Chapter 7
Roll Over Beethoven: Youth Music and Rock’n’Roll
The best-known phenomenon of Fifties‘ musical revolution—rock‘n‘roll—did not spontaneously spring out of the earth with Elvis and the Beatles. Rather, ―its origins lay far from
British shores, in the spread of the jagged, gritty African-American blues of the Mississippi
Delta, to urban nightclubs in expanding cities like Memphis…‖148 After evolving from a colorful array of musical trends, like American blues, jazz, and skiffle, rock‘n‘roll spent many years underground as a counter-culture icon for working-class youth, rejected by the mainstream music industry. Its roots were the rhythm ‗n‘ blues, embodied by stars like Chuck Berry, whose raggy songs painted brilliant pictures of cars and girls, the freedoms and constraints of American urban life. Beatles‘ biographer Philip Norman further captures the key to success for performers like
Berry, explaining that, ―[Berry‘s] verbal felicity and subversive wit had instant appeal for young men who, although white, felt themselves hardly less segregated in their own land from the more privileged and glamorous south (of England).‖149 The raw appeal of this kind of music was its sense of empowerment and emancipation for working-class youth, who enjoyed the momentary escape from the monotony of their lives. This chapter examines the evolution of rock‘n‘roll as a divisive social issue and a distinctly youth-based cultural phenomenon. We see that, ultimately, rock‘n‘roll and its predecessors developed as yet another expression of the fierce independence of the post-war generation. We also learn that, unlike the commercialized sex industries, the rock‘n‘roll industry developed as a spontaneous consequence of evolving youth tastes.
But first, some background on the emerging post-war music trends that paved the way for rock‘n‘roll. British musical audiences prior to the war tended to firmly resist American innovations in the field of song and dance. Dominic Sandbrook discusses the ―Modern English 69
Style‖ developed by the vanguards of ballroom dancing as a way of counterstriking the jiving, gyrating styles of their American cousins. In 1930, the Musicians‘ Union created a dance-band section which specifically excluded American performers from British bands, while striking a
―needletime‖ agreement with the BBC to downplay the amount of American music to be aired over the wireless. While American swing and jazz continued to find a loyal audience among
(mostly) younger Brits, the majority of the population listened to more demure selections: romantic crooners, Colliery brass bands, church choirs, light classical orchestras, and folk ballads. And they continued to do so well into the Post-War years, as featured prominently among the BBC‘s offerings. As Sandbrook summarizes, ―The fact that most of these musical forms dated from before the war, and in many cases from the nineteenth century, suggested not only that British audiences were resistant to change, but also that [music] was still a market for adults rather than teenagers.‖150
All of this would change with the skiffle craze of the mid-1950s. While we have already seen in earlier chapters the growing prominence of the teenage consumer—and its impact on the post-war record industry—it would be skiffle that set the country aflame. Inspired by Lonnie
Donegan, the ―King of Skiffle,‖ this form of bluegrass, Dixieland rhythm‘n‘blues led to the creation of hundreds of youth bands across England. Donegan would go on to chalk up 24 successful Top 30 hits, including the monster 1956 hit, ―Rock Island Line.‖ The key to his success lay in the enticing simplicity of his music, which utilized household instruments like washboards, tea chests, and a cheap Spanish guitar. Alongside Donegan, early rock‘n‘roll heroes like Buddy Holly would create their own skiffle sensation, inspiring British youth with scrawny looks and simply guitar chords. Jonathon Watson‘s Beats Apart explains the appeal of skifflers like Holly. Teenagers assumed that if a goofy-smiling white boy with thick glasses could pull 70 this off, they could do it too. After all, bouncing a simple beat on homemade instruments did not require musical mastery—only patience and a little practice. And British youth had the time and money to skiffle the night away. This was a form of music, in other words, that was immediately relatable and accessible to kids everywhere.151
And it was everywhere. The bug had bitten an entire post-war generation, and could be heard from every corner of the streets, in every cellar, bedroom and house garage. One reporter for The Times in London recounts an afternoon on the streets, during which he stumbled upon an open-air skiffle band. ―The sharp-paced beat, the thump, thump, thump of Rock Island Line fed the quiet afternoon with excitement,‖ he writes. ―Repetitive, synthetic though it was, its virile, unrelaxed edge provided a positive force in the still, lethargic atmosphere and drew us out to track the music-makers down.‖ Moreover, he comments with surprise as to the makeshift instruments employed by the young musicians. The rhythm, for example, was maintained by the
―bass-string, that improvised instrument like a mariner‘s shipwreck raft, with its broom-stick stuck in a tea chest, the guitar handling the invention, the washboard giving point and emphasis.‖152
The success of the phenomenon lay in its ability to hook an entire nation into an active part of entertainment. Rather than sit passively and quietly in music halls—as their parents had done in the past—youth were now engaged on a massive level, pitting their own wit and dexterity against fellow neighborhood competitors, as well as renowned stars like Lonnie
Donnegan and Nancy Whiskey. Skiffle had all the vital elements of an explosive fad: interactivity, social cohesion, competition, and simplicity. Skifflers also tended to be young, typically in the ―leisure‖ age range between 15 and 20. A Times reporter was astonished to attend a concert, only to discover, ―The skifflers were only 13-year-olds, though playing with the 71 assurance of veteran troupers…‖ Their very ordinariness made them all the more appealing to adults and peers. ―They were such completely ordinary-looking children,‖ the correspondent continues. ―The washboard player wore shorts and a once-white shirt. … The base-string man was a dandy, if anyone was. … The guitarist…seemed clumsy and slow and far from the active sort.‖153
Rock‘n‘roll would carry these trends of ―audience participation‖ to new frontiers. Young listeners could dance, writhe, jive, and cut loose to their heart‘s desire. What‘s more, they could shed all the formalities—the rigors, rules and structures—that dictated and dominated ordinary
British life. Just as the skiffle craze had done, rock‘n‘roll would offer teenagers a certain sense of physical and emotional fulfillment.xxiv As one reporter attempted to explain, the ―noises‖ of rock‘n‘roll—and specifically the visuals associated with Rock Around the Clock—―mirrors
American youth finding ‗fulfillment‘ in what seems to be a mingling of primitive dance and ritual.‖ Another critic drove home the point by commenting on Bill Haley‘s performance at the
Theatre Royal: ―The infectious two-beat mixture zooms along at a terrific pace, bringing down all the barriers until the whole audience is joining in with clapping, singing, cheering, and yelling…‖154 In the case of both musical trends, audience participation was the key to success.
Another reason skiffle and rock‘n‘roll should be compared and contrasted was their similar chronologies. Both rose to popularity in England at approximately the same time—near the end of 1954—yet by early 1958, skiffle-mania had been nearly eclipsed by the invasion of rock‘n‘roll. Clubs and dance-halls, in an effort to keep up with the latest hits and teenage music trends, began hiring rock‘n‘roll groups over the outdated and more amateurish skifflers. The
xxiv Of course, there were notable differences between the two styles of music. As one music critic cautioned, it would be incorrect to assume that skiffle “partakes of the hectic hysteria of rock’n’roll.” When it came skiffle, he continued, “…nothing could in fact be more tranquil—even earnest and sedate…” (“The Skiffle Group's Success with Young England.” The Times. 17 July 1957.) 72 most ambitious of the skifflers developed themselves into a heavier, drum-thumping rhythm‘n‘blues bands, as was the case with the early Beatles.155
In following this evolution, special homage must be paid to the North of England, particularly to Liverpool and Newcastle, the working-class heart‘n‘soul of rock‘n‘roll. Liverpool
—ever a pioneer in the Americanization of British youth—would go on to brand its own
―Merseybeat‖ in the early 1960s, featuring a fusion of rock‘n‘roll, doo-wop, skiffle, r&b, and soul.156 Yet even in the Fifties, the city was ahead of its time. Unlike the rest of England, who preferred ―pop‖ to ―rock,‖ the Liverpudlians were quite accustomed to grungier, edgier styles of music. Joe Flannery, a famous homosexual rock manager of the era, discussed the liberalization and freedom of the city‘s rock locales. Whereas the formal, stiff dance halls of England had been institutionalized into ―a kind of art form for the middle class,‖ the ―jive hives‖ and dance clubs of Liverpool were ―fantastic pieces of timing and great exhibitions of fun.‖ These were havens where ―normality was left outside,‖ and ―[the kids] were dancing without any preconceptions at all…black nor white…‖157 In contrast, Philip Norman, the Beatles‘ biographer, explains that the rest of mainstream England was dominated by ―[a] taste—again dictated by America—for clean-cut, collegiate-looking youths whose energy had left their pelvic region and gone into their ingratiating smiles.‖158 Here we find a very distinctive difference in class culture, between a predominantly working-class city and the older, urban bastions of upper- class traditionalism. An all-around more accepting environment allowed rock‘n‘roll to flourish safely in Liverpool, at a time when it met angry resistance in other regions.
Where did this anger come from? The answer is complex, in the sense that it intertwined sub-cultural fears of delinquency with overblown media accounts of juvenile misbehavior.
There is something to be said about the media‘s self-perpetuating image here—in much the same 73 way the image of the ―sexually experienced‖ teenager was proliferated in Chapter 5. But this moral panic also extended, in part, to deep-seeded fears of Americanization. For example, the phrase ―rock and roll‖ itself can be attributed to American disc jockey Alan Freed, who used it in the title of his New York radio show in 1951. Although Freed utilized the new term to replace the racially-stigmatized ―R&B,‖ there was little argument that rock‘n‘roll remained ―black music played for white audiences.‖159 This did not bode well with the majority of Englanders in the
Fifties, whose racial attitudes approached something of intellectual superiority masked by the manners of tolerance. For many, rock‘n‘roll was not simply another attempt for American commercialism to subvert the moral fiber of their youth, but also a means of subversive revenge by a long-embittered Negro community.xxv
These fears of cultural decadence materialized not in the form of a black gospel prodigy, but rather through a very white, little-rascal-styled Bill Haley. This Detriot-born pop star created the first genuine rock‘n‘roll record to sweep the British charts in December of 1954. Bill Haley and the Comets‘ Shake, Rattle and Roll paved the way for his dominant, earth-shattering number one single in 1955, Rock Around the Clock. When the movie version of the song was released in
September of 1956, the British press took generous liberties in recounting instances of young, working-class audiences engaging in riotous dancing in the movie halls.160 In November of
1956, for example, Zonk magazine ran a sensationalized cover story announcing the ―Rock ‗n‘ roll has struck like a dreaded plague,‖ with a subheading promised that ―ace music critic‖ Gideon
Jay would ―[tell] you about the music that is causing bloodshed and rioting.‖161 Accounts claimed that seats were torn off, stuffing thrown into the air—a scene of joyous chaos that would reemerge with a vengeance during Beatlemania. The disturbances led to the film being banned in xxv Once again, to quote The Daily Mail (September 5, 1956) on American music : “It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows ragtime, blues, Dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro’s revenge.” 74 more than a dozen towns and cities. In their efforts to put out the fire, however, England‘s newspapers may have unwittingly fanned the flames. As Sandbrook notes, ―the exaggerated reaction of the newspapers encouraged more teenagers to emulate their contemporaries, so that the vandalism soon became something of a ritual.‖162
By 1956, a full-scale invasion of American rock onto English shores was in progress, featuring stars like Bill Haley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley.xxvi Presley himself broke the British Charts with his Heartbreak Hotel in May 1956, followed by his cover of Carl
Perkins‘ Blue Suede Shoes and his own legendary Hound Dog. Most music critics agree that his success lay in his ability to combine the blues with hillbilly country music and pop ballads. The historian Sandbrook credits him as a stand-alone star of his own right, whose popularity, ―…lay in his ability to take a musical style associated with Southern blacks and present it to white audiences, without losing either the intensity or the perceived authenticity attributed to black performers.‖163 Collectively, the swingin‘ success of all of these early rock‘n‘roll heroes lay in the fact that their emphasis—like most of rock music—was less on lyrics and more on the sound of the music and the performer‘s pizzazz. Both Presley and Haley, specifically, owed their fame less to their ―relatively conventional lyrics‖ and more to their original sound and playfully provocative style. To quote Sandbrook, it was all about ―the attitudes, the clothes, the moves, the atmosphere.‖164
This ―rocker style‖ found a willing audience among British youth, who, on the whole were spending more money and time engaged in musical pastimes. In fact, the entirety of the teenage social scene seemed to be shifting around the music industry. In previous chapters, it
xxvi These early stars were predominantly American imports. It would not take long for England to claim rock’n’rollers of its own. British variants like Tommy Steele, Billy Fury, Adam Faith and Marty Wilde would seize the R&B pop charts by the early 1960s (Osgerby, 38).
75 was noted the Teddy-boy subculture tended to congregate around dance halls and milk bar venues, while, on the whole, more and more youth were tuning in to Radio Luxembourg and the
BBC‘s Light Programme. Once they saw in which direction teens were headed, British commercial enterprises were swift to jump on the rock‘n‘roll bandwagon. For example,
Newcastle‘s Evening Chronicle reported on the ―hundreds of requests‖ for rock‘n‘roll records, adding that ―managers of bars with juke boxes know that they are on a best seller if they have a record with a Presley stamp on it.‖165 Another prominent example was the revamping of New
Musical Express in 1952 to include an innovative ―top Twelve‖ music chart (to rival America‘s
Billboard Charts). Maurice Kinn, who helped revolutionize New Musical, explained, ―If somebody was in the charts, that was our signal to give the people what they wanted. We went for stars in the hit parade…‖166 Consequently, between 1955 and 1958, New Musical Express‘s circulation rose from 93,000 to 122,000—an indication of the pervasive emerging teenage market, and the insatiable demand for all things rock-styled.167
As Jonathon Watson explains, the social element of rock music made this appealing to
British youth. Unlike the boring, dry, dingy pubs of old, there were dance clubs, underground cellars, coffee shops and milk bars where teenagers could gather to dance, hang out, and listen to their favorite records on the juke box. These locales varied from cement-walled grottos underneath the streets of Liverpool to multi-leveled London shops that were decked out with exotic themes and images, like ―bullfighting posters, bamboo fixtures, and tropical plants…‖168
These were places that offered an escape from the scrutiny of the public, acting as a sort of
―youth-only‖ club where teens could finally be left to their own devices. These refuges offered a few hours of blissful freedom from the incessant daily harassment of parents, schoolmasters, employers, policemen, and clergy. Moreover, teenagers had common ground in their enjoyment 76 of music—it cut across class divides and gender lines—so that, at any one time, one could find middle-class girls dancing with lower-class boys with an utter disregard for social taboos. These locations were also powerful shapers of youth pop-culture, for it was here that youth determined what songs, fashions, and TV shows were ―cool.‖169
The hang-outs themselves received less attention from the media than their bedraggled tenants. A mainstream image of the ―rocker‖ had evolved from a former, well-known enemy of public order: the Teddy-Boy. At the very end of the decade, the media was painting a fearsome image of a newer, more sexualized, more mobilized Teddy—the predecessor of the rocker.
Gone were the drapes and flamboyant clothes. In their place were the leather jackets and motorcycles made popular by the James Dean rebels. Osgerby emphasizes the image of the rocker:
Tending to have lower paid, less skilled occupations, the rockers represented an
affirmation of ‘traditional’ working-class lifestyles. With their motorbikes, leather
jackets, jeans and boots, the rockers rejected the ‘effeminacy’ of conspicuous
consumption and instead cultivated an image of sturdy masculinity.170
With incidents like the Rock Around the Clock riots, this popular image fostered increasingly greater paranoia in adult society. In September of 1956, a Times review quoted the
Bishop of Woolworth famously denouncing Rock Around the Clock, stating, ―the hypnotic rhythm and the wild gestures have a maddening effect on a rhythm-loving age group, and the result is a relaxing of all self control.‖171 Another reviewer offered that, ―The reaction of six chimpanzees from the London zoo, who are reported to have given no more than ‗mild applause‘ to the film, may be compared favorably…with those of jiving teenagers.‖172 Richard Hoggart proposes an even grittier image of the social mentality of rock‘n‘rollers, who seemed to have lost all sense of ambition, of intellectual or cultural yearning. Hoggart disagreed that these 77 adolescents behaved like a pack of ―unruly animals,‖ and instead offered that they acted like a horde of dull-witted, zombie-like minions, doing the bidding of their commercial overlords. In short:
Most of them have jobs which require no personal outgoing, which are not intrinsically
interesting, which encourage no sense of personal value, of being a maker. The job is to
be done day by day, and after that the rest is amusement, is pleasure; there is time to
spare and some money in the pocket. … These are the figures some important
contemporary forces are tending to create, the directionless and tamed helots of a
machine-minding class.173
Then, what conclusions are we left to draw about the emerging rock‘n‘roll generation?
Did British youth become tools of a profit-driven music industry, at the expense of their moral sensibilities and intellectual integrity? Critics of the era would certainly argue this. The implication was that leisure-entertainment had come to dominate the interests and attention of
British youth—at the price of their growing ignorance over traditional spheres of knowledge, such as politics, poetry, and philosophy. To quote one journalist for The Times, ―At least until sociologist adduce other reasons, it seems to me arguable that there is a direct correlation between this guitar-playing and the post-war young person‘s lack of interests in politics as compared with his pre-war forebears.‖174
Yet the evidence seems to suggest another potential explanation. Rather than serving as pawns to shadowy capitalist overlords, British youth may best be viewed as conscious consumers whose tastes reflected the power of their purse and the independence of their generation. This
―independence‖ was less the result of stubborn defiance and more the consequence of the conditions of the times. Consider the facts of the world in the Fifties: this young generation had no active World War; no tyrant hell-bent on global conquest; no practical threat to their lifestyles 78 beyond the adult ramblings of cultural decadence and the faraway specter of a faceless Soviet bomb. For adolescents, the outside world could be pushed further and further to the back of their minds—and in some cases, ignored altogether. In my opinion, what we see is the luxury of a generation that had not been called to sacrifice, but rather left to enjoy their own devices.
At its very heart, youth culture, for once, was about enjoying the moment, not looking ahead. This was the exact sense of gratification that the skiffle craze and rock‘n‘roll could offer.
Rock‘n‘roll established an important principle, as Ian Inglis explains: ―[it was] the right of the underprivileged young to express themselves with a freedom and a directness which until then had been considered a prerogative of their elders and betters…‖175 And what choice did youngsters have, really, if not to spend their evenings ‗rockin around the clock‘? Were teenagers truly better off numbing themselves to the sluggish daily grind of academia, toiling to earn their own ―respectable‖ niche somewhere far, far down the line? Perhaps it was not the youth who were undermining the seriousness of Britain‘s future, but the adults who were over-exaggerating it all. As one man said about youth culture: ―If, in fact, they are merely strumming while Rome burns, they yet do better than their elders, who call neither for guitars, nor for the fire brigade.‖176
79
“ I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” ~ I Am the Walrus, The Beatles, 1967
Chapter 8: Come Together – The Beatles
―The Beatles are not a pop group. They are an abstraction—a repository for many things.‖177 Nowhere is this truer than within the context of this very paper, whose themes can be traced through the formative years of these young men. The childhood and adolescent years of the Beatles offer us a snapshot of the quintessential post-war generation. Their geography, for example, could not have been more ideal. Born between the years of 1940-1943, the Fab Four spent their childhood days in one of England‘s most prominent working-class cities, Liverpool— the very ‗salt of the earth‘ locale that Richard Hoggart examines in his study of class culture.
The gritty dockyard streets, replete with Scouse jargon and backyard brawls, were a notorious haven for subcultures—Teddy boys and homosexuals, for example—as well as musical trends like American R&B, skiffle, and rock‘n‘roll. This was the environment in which the Beatles were raised. To truly understand the foundation and influence of the group, one must understand the surrounding cultural forces they embodied—elements like teenage affluence, Americanized pop culture, sexual liberation, youth music tastes, subculture yearnings, class differences, and so on. Looking at the formative years of the Beatles allows us to put into context these essential factors of youth culture and determine their cause-effect relationship with the consumer industry.
This is precisely what this chapter explores. Here, we learn that, although all four boys were undoubtedly influenced by the forces of commercialized capitalism, this interaction was both willing and reciprocal—the theme of this paper. They were as much a definer of pop culture as pop culture defined them.
To begin, we must put into context the Beatles‘ socio-economic backgrounds. Despite their later attempts to portray themselves as ―working class heroes,‖ in truth the band members 80 were really middle class in upbringing and in education. Lennon himself admitted in the 1980s that he grew up ―in the suburbs in a nice semi-detached place, with a small garden and doctors and lawyers and that ilk living around, not the poor slummy kind of image that was projected.‖178
His Aunt Mimi, who raised John during his early years, was known to be very protective in her efforts to separate him from other ―common boys.‖ Likewise, Paul McCartney confessed to moving with his family into a ―posh‖ neighborhood—and his mother similarly made efforts to ensure that Paul was brought up speaking proper English, rather than the course Scouse spoken by many of his peers. Young George Harrison, meanwhile, hardly wanted for anything; in his mid-teens, his parents willingly bought him a guitar for 30 pounds so that he could enjoy himself.179 The fact of the matter was that all of these boys fell into the category of the
‗leisurely-spending, affluent teenager‘—the notable exception being the cheerful Ringo Star, who truly hailed from poorer prospects.xxvii
The majority of the Beatles attended a combination of private and art schools—not public schools—albeit with varying levels of enthusiasm and success. To summarize from biographer
Steven Stark:
One of the myths about the Beatles is that they were working-class kids. They were not
rich by any standards. Some of them lived in what we would call public housing,
although more people live in that kind of housing in England than in America. But
educationally and culturally, they went to good schools.180
xxvii Ringo’s background embodies all the characteristic lower-class ‘strength and grit’ that Hoggart likens to his ilk. Little Richard Starkey (“Ringo”) was born in July 7, 1940 in the Liverpool Dingle, spending his first months as a baby crowded under his family’s “bomb shelter”—little more than a coal hole under the stairs—as German aerial bombardment rained down on the city. At age 6, he was rushed to the hospital with a burst appendix and spent up to a year lingering between coma and severe illness. At age 13, he caught a cold that developed into pleurisy in one of his lungs, and spent the next two years at an older children’s sanatorium at Heswall on the Wirral. His absence from school greatly handicapped his ability to read and write at a young age—and yet, he persevered through all his trials and tribulations with Hoggart’s depictive whimsicalness and cheeriness. (Norman, Shout!) 81
And yet, their economic backgrounds do not exclude them from the image of the rebellious, scruffy, urbanite teenager. Quite on the contrary, like many of the Teddy-boys and rock‘n‘rollers, the Beatles‘ relative affluence permitted them to indulge in the fashions and trends of the day. Rather than slave away in full-time factory employment, the boys could spend their evenings listening to the radio, playing records, and strumming idly on their guitars. They were restless consumers, with one eye firmly fixed on America and the other on entertaining themselves. Like most teenagers of the time, they were also irresistibly drawn towards the music of the day. As Sandbrook and Kynaston assert, Lennon, McCartney, and many of their fellow
English youth became obsessed with a ―new‖ form of rhythm and blues sweeping through
England—namely, that of white men singing like black men. Young John was particularly obsessed with Elvis, the hottest new craze to seize England‘s music industry. ―It was nothing but
Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley,‖ recalls Lennon‘s Aunt Mimi. ―In the end, I said
‗Elvis Presley‘s all very well, John, but I don‘t want him for breakfast, dinner, and tea.‘‖181
Presley‘s provocative gestures and suave, cool-cat mannerisms delighted John, who himself was fond of discovering crass ways of thumbing his nose at the establishment. And Elvis‘s sound was like nothing he had ever heard—swinging soul, R&B, and American country bluegrass, all made acceptable and permissible for a white British audience.182
It was the some sound that would drive Lennon and his cohorts towards the skiffle craze.
Inspired by Lonnie Donegan‘s Rock Island Line, John would form his first band in 1956, the
Quarrymen. Over the span of the next two years, Lennon would lead the group with a cheap, mail-order guitar, mimicking many of his favorite American artists: Presley, Buddy Holly,
Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, and others. In 1957, Paul McCartney would add his own substantial talents on guitar to the band—while in 1958, George Harrison would join as lead 82 guitarist. And so it would be. The greatest rock group of all time would begin their career by stirring up a daily noisy ruckus a dingy Liverpool garage.183
The Quarrymen reflected the skiffle craze in two important manners. First and foremost, they were all young. Lennon had started the group at age sixteen, considerably ―normal‖ as far as skiffle went. When Paul joined, he was a year younger than John, whereas George entered the fray as a 15-year-old. Inasmuch, they were indicative of the bulk of ―skifflers‖ of the era—those thousands of kids who had completed their education and had time to burn before University or
National Service. After all, at its heart, skiffle was a leisure pastime, accessible namely to those teenagers fortunate enough to have the free time to bang out the beats. Secondly, and more importantly, they were all rudimentary amateurs comporting themselves with the laughable gusto of rock stars. This was half the fun of being in skiffler—the ability to imagine oneself as a pop idol; to embrace the medium through which the joy of the beat could be shared with others. Yet, like most skiffle bands, their talent varied wildly. McCartney and Harrison were notably decent at guitar. Lennon had passable instrumental skills, compensated by a voice that could mimic the best of the legends. Pete Shotton, one of John‘s friends, had zero experience with any instruments, but managed to get by strumming percussions on a washboard. At different times over the group‘s evolution, they had other members playing the popular ―tea-Chest bass.‖ And like any aspiring skiffle sensation, they competed at every available venue: church halls, the
Gaumont cinema (near Penny Lane), and once in the underground Cavern in Liverpool. Their success and ―quality‖ can be measured, if at all, by the fact that their primary arch-nemesis was a group that featured a midget named Nicky Cuff, who literally stood upon a tea chest bass while playing it.184 83
The Quarrymen‘s skiffle days would undoubtedly influence the sound that developed in their later years. At the end of their illustrious career in the early 1970s, the Beatles would be universally known for their diversity of sound, and skiffle opened the doorway to just that.
―Skiffle‖ was experimental; it was novel, imperfect, improvised. It was interactive—forging that early bond between performer and audience that would later foster the physical intimacy of rock‘n‘roll. Skifflers took requests from the audience, and to the best of their ability, they gave the people what they wanted. Moreover, skiffle was a segway into other styles of music. As
Albert Goldman notes in The Lives of John Lennon (1988), the Beatles may have begun by aping Donnegan and Chuck Berry—but by the beginning of the Sixties, they would be performing anything from popular sailor songs (i.e. ―My Bonnie‖) to Broadway-styled crooners
(i.e. ―Till There Was You‖ from The Music Man). All of this was done in an effort to connect with their audiences. Even their performance style followed suit. During their time in Hamburg, for example, their on-stage antics were often outrageously vulgar and provocative—a necessity when seeking to entertain an audience of older, hardened sailors. To quote Albert Goldman:
The early Beatles were a human jukebox. They played song after song without rhyme or
reason: rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm and blues, country and western tunes, pop songs, radio
themes, music hall novelties, and anything else that struck their fancies. Sometimes
they took requests screamed up from the floor. Sometimes they fell to arguing amongst
themselves over what song to play next. Though the boys aimed to entertain, they were
just as intent on pleasing themselves. It was precisely their spontaneous humor and
free-associative word-and-song play that made their shows so different from what any
other rock band had ever done before—or has done since.185
Goldman goes on to insist that the Beatles, whose styles mixed the edginess of a liberal
German seaport town with the plucky spirits of the hillbilly American south, were rapidly 84
―[embodying] the jet age cultural eclecticism of the Sixties long before the new era had found its bearings.‖186 At a time when racial tensions were flaring in America, as well as in England, the
Beatles were unwittingly establishing common ground between whites and blacks on the musical battlefield. While R&B belonged almost exclusively to black performers, the Beatles created an immediate and accessible bridge between the blues and rock‘n‘roll—the latter to be dominated by whites. Their liberal upbringing in a working-class city bequeathed upon them an open- minded respect for black musicians—free of the racially-laced, ―cultural criticism‖ of high-brow society. The lyrical interpreter Ian MacDonald further connects this racial liberalism with revolution in sexual attitudes, arguing that, ―The Beatles acted as a major conduit of black energy, style, and feeling into white culture, helping to restore it to its undernourished senses and thereby forwarding the ‗permissive‘ revolution in sexual attitudes.‖187 Although feminism in the
Sixties goes beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that the youth culture of the
Fifties—one of increasing permissiveness and sexualized open-mindedness (underscored by distain for old-fashioned customs)—laid the groundwork for these gender revolutions.
The Beatles also altered the traditional dynamics of the ―solo-act‖ pop artist. Their music was the product of the same kind of collectivism that was spreading among youth in the Fifties.
We have already looked at the impact of mass media, including television, in homogenizing youth culture, sexually, fashionably, and behaviorally. Many of England‘s teenagers were finding themselves increasingly drawn together on the common grounds of pop culture. They intermingled nightly in dance halls, battled in music competitions, jived in underground clubs, and hung out in milk bars and coffee shops. They were also thrust together daily through prolonged public schooling and National Service. The result of this constant intermingling was a desire to belong to something young and modern, to a lifestyle that broke free of the wary 85 traditionalism of their elders. There was a sense of connection all across the country. For example, a ―Teddy boy‖ trend could begin in the slums of London and spread to cottage towns outside Newcastle. News of ―cinema rioting‖ in one province could drive hordes of eager youth to the movie theaters in another. Trends and pop culture were spreading faster and faster, developing alongside them the indistinguishable ―swarm-like mentality‖ that embodies the illusive concept of ―pop culture.‖ What emerged with the early Beatles was a subconscious form of this very kind of group mentality, as Steven Stark explains. The music belonged to all of them, just as it belonged equally to their audience. To summarize from Stark:
Before the Beatles, rock and roll had tended to be solo acts. It was Elvis. It was Bill Haley
and the Comets. It was Buddy Holly and the Crickets or Little Richard. The Beatles were
different. They consciously decided not to put a person out front and to popularize the
idea of a group. That completely changed rock and roll. Even today, groups dominate
rock. The emphasis on the group changed the sound.188
For another look at this unique bond between group and audience, we turn to Ian Inglis.
In his study examining the facets of stardom, Inglis describes pop stardom as a form of a physical relationship between performer and audience. Elvis and the Beatles, of course, had the ability to trigger powerful and almost overwhelming sexual emotions in their female audiences, but there was more to it. As Inglis puts it, the relationship was one of a union of minds. The performer became a form of a megaphone for youth interests and ideals since he alone had the power and the voice to communicate with the world. This was a ―joint venture,‖ in which the performers were seen less as ―purveyors of entertainment-related products‖ and more as
―spokesmen of national, even global, cohorts of young audiences.‖189
Oftentimes, pop stars adopted the ideologies and aspirations of their constituent audience
– and this is precisely what would happen with the Beatles. In their formative years, they were 86 vagabond skifflers, plucky and high-spirited. In Hamburg, they catered to the tastes of a drunken, older crowd of toughened sailors by means of outrageous antics and vulgarities on stage. In the Cavern of Liverpool, they became the head-swinging ‗rock‘n‘rollers‘ with the style that reflected their young working-class audiences. Later, they cleaned up their image to become the clean-cut teeny-bopper pleasers, smiling and bobbing along to I Want to Hold Your Hand.
And in the Sixties, they became the acid-tripping counter-revolutionaries of a Hippie generation.
None of this means that the Beatles were corporate shills, a hollow image molded by the hands of record companies and television producers. Rather, it was their audience that manipulated their image, not the commercial world. We can acknowledge this fact if we understand that popular culture is fashioned at the hands of the popular masses (popular, meaning ―common‖)
The Beatles embodied and became what their fans demanded of them, in the sense that they became reflections of popular culture.
*
Of course, there was predictable resistance among the adult community as elders‘ influence and control were gradually stripped away from their youth. Rather than viewing ―pop culture‖ as a form of psychological progressiveness, critics tended to point their fingers at the ever-manipulative Pied-Pipers: the businessmen of the entertainment industry. These corporatists were supposed individuals whose love of profits superseded any ethical responsibilities owed to preserving moral and cultural integrity. The result of their handiwork was a degradation of youth respectability, focused around the popular image of the ―rocker.‖ As
Michael Frontani argues in The Beatles: Image and the Media, the rocker had replaced the
Teddy-boy as the new revolutionary. Hollywood now offered teenagers anti-heroes like Marlon
Brando, whose performance as the bike leader Johnny in The Wild One presented an iconic 87 image of delinquency and rebellion. In Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean‘s portrayal of Jim
Stark seemed to fill the same shoes, beckoning attention to the shiftlessness and recklessness of modern youth.190 This was the image wed to rock‘n‘roll youth: one of lawlessness and casual disrespect. Even John Lennon earned this reputation during his Hamburg days, as Albert
Goldman writes:
…*Lennon+ had been the archetypal rocker, a tough, angry Teddy Boy, punching out
drunks and grabbing chicks onstage, while he played or sang any damn song that came
into his pill-popping head…191
In England—where the line of tolerance was drawn much more conservatively than
Western Germany—the trouble with youth revolved around a lack of respect for ―authority.‖
The problem was that ―authority‖ had two conflicting definitions. Among adults, it represented the product of years of life experience and intellectual training. Among youth, it stood for the repressive, intrusive, and quarrelsome embodiment of the ―Establishment.‖ True enough, teenagers at the time had not decried or even developed the Sixties‘ notion of the
―Establishment,‖ yet the idea of ―Us vs. Them‖ was ripe—as Hoggart exaplins. Depending on the teenager asked, the ―Establishment‖ could mean one‘s parents, the police, cultural critics, the
‗high-brows,‘ the rulers, the elite, the Parliamentarians, the newspaper editors, the BBC executives—the people who made the rules, seemingly on arbitrary whims, and then attempted to micromanage the very thoughts and emotions of younger generations.192
Leading the charge against the Establishment were the ―working-class heroes,‖ who entertained themselves wildly by antagonizing their higher-ups. This was not so much a call for anarchy or class warfare as much as an attempt to occasionally ―stick it to them.‖ Perhaps this is why the Beatles, despite their middle-class upbringing and education, became pseudo-champions of youth culture and the working-class. During their performance before Queen Elizabeth at the 88
Royal Variety Bill, for example, John Lennon famously ask: ― Will all the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you‘ll just rattle your jewelry!‖193 Or, better still, at a white collar dinner at Brasenose College, instead of graciously accepting the fine wine and dine set out before them, Paul demanded a ―glass of milk,‖ while George offered free autographs in return for some ―jam butties.‖194 Such antics would have resonated deeply with a working-class crowd, who forever sought to have the last laugh at their higher-ups.
One review from The Daily Mirror, following their performance of at Royal Variety
Performance, seems to capture not only the appeal of the Beatles as an individual music group, but the desires and image of an entire post-war generation:
…how refreshing to see these rumbustious young Beatles take a middle-aged
Royal Variety performance by the scruff of their necks and have them Beatling like
teenagers.
Fact is that Beatle People are everywhere. From Wrapping to Windsor. Aged
seven to seventy. And it’s plain to see why these four cheeky, energetic lads from
Liverpool go down so big.
They’re young, new. They’re high-spirited, cheerful. What a change from the
self-pitying moaners, crooning their lovelorn tunes from the tortured shallows of
lukewarm hearts…195
The indication was clear: an older era of music—an older generation—finally put to rest.
What a change indeed.
89
Conclusion
My focus in this paper has been to create a well-rounded—if not necessarily exhaustive— study of British youth culture within the overall context of consumerism. What I learned was that teenage youth culture was a combination of a homogenized spontaneity (‗pop culture‘) arising from the youth themselves, as well as the adventurous marketing schemes of entertainment entrepreneurs. This interactive and independent process involved fashion, music, and subcultures, and was one in which a tenuous, ill-defined embodiment of ideas was seized by commercial industry, neatly repackaged, and offered for sale back to teenagers. The commercial world offered teenagers a host of images, but they decided which ones to adopt.
Attacks on the growing ―materialism,‖ ―idleness‖, ―perversity,‖ and ―disrespect‖ of teenagers should be viewed as less of an outcry against the free market and more of a ―finger- wagging‖ at unruly children. We must not confuse the Frankfurt School of thought with the incessant backlash against youth decadence by England‘s adults and critics. After all, adults were as much a victim of an admass culture as their children. Housewives were heavily targeted in advertisements, for example, while husbands invested in cars and took vacations of their own.
The result was a bit of a double standard as far as criticism of youth materialism went. It would seem that English adults were under the impression that the maturity of age went hand-in-hand with intelligent expenditures, whereas the impulsiveness of youth led to splurging on mere frivolities. In truth, spending skyrocketed all across the board in the 1950s, and to blame youth alone for materialism would certainly be hypocritical.
There were some in the media, however, whose sharp-tongued criticisms did reflect the theories of scholars in the Frankfurt School. As such, these individuals targeted the ―culture industries‖—namely, film and broadcast, advertising and the mass-market press—as ―purveyors 90 of mass culture, created and distributed in the interests of organized capital.‖196 And there is evidence to support such their claims. For example, Michael Frontani argued, ―The resulting
[pop] culture—homogenized, commodified, standardized, and produced for mass distribution— was produced not only to return maximum profit, but also to provide ideological legitimatization for the capitalist order, and to assimilate individuals into that system.‖197 The Beatles fit this bill perfectly, offering one such example of a neatly-repackaged, fundamentally reformed commodity for kiddy consumers. Compared to their rambunctious early years, their producer,
Brian Epstein, worked quickly to clean up their act. Far-gone were the Hamburg days of pill- popping, sexual escapades, and a drunken John Lennon urinating from a balcony on the heads of nuns passing by below. As Frontani explains:
Gone were the leather jackets, swearing and smoking on stage, interactions with the
audience, and other unprofessional behavior. Rather, Epstein marketed the Beatles as
clean, wholesome entertainment. Well-coifed and donning suits and ties, the new
Beatles were cheeky and at times irreverent, but never vulgar.198
Yet one cannot entirely presume that British youth were the unwitting victims of
Capitalist puppet-masters. We must consider the unique circumstances that molded the mentality of this post-war generation—one unlike any before. England‘s idea of returning to
‗normalcy‘ and ‗the old way of doing things‘ after such a dramatic and costly World War was dumbfounding, and in many senses, delusional. If the British people were comfortable in their old habits and quiet, orderly way of life, their new generation of youth were not. This Fifties generation was restless, bored with it all. Middle and upper class culture struck many teens as overtly smug and condescending. Racism and sexism abounded among the older generations of all backgrounds—with only shades of difference in intellectual arrogance and polite doublespeak. Overall, this was an era seen as stiff and pompous, lacking color and vitality and 91 intrigue. To summarize from Ian Macdonald, ―The braying upper-class voices on newsreels, the odor of unearned privilege in parliament and the courts, the tired nostalgia for the war, all conspired to breed unrest among the young.‖199 Moreover, the Fifties as a decade had become commercialized, materialized, restricted and numbing. Britain was stiff with a ―psychic tension‖ which was ―bound, sooner or later, to explode.‖200 Youth were looking for a way out; they wanted what the commercial industries were offering them.
Little wonder they developed their own subcultures. Little wonder that they became sexually adventurous; that they formed skiffle bands, took up jiving and rock‘n‘roll, read comics, flocked to the cinema, and congregated around televisions. These were novelty entertainments.
They were fun, and more importantly, they were social. The desire for interactivity had been bred into this generation like none before it. After all, the age of mass media had created a cohesive image of the British youth that all teenagers desired—everyone wanted to be part of the group, in on the joke, ahead of the game, etc. Instead of leaping straight from school into the workplace, younger people now had an open period of time to intermingle, to cultivate their own form of a pop culture. They turned to commercialized industries not because they were ―duped‖ with superficial promises, but because they needed those commodities, those escapes, as a means of defining themselves. Therefore, the exchange between the commercial world and its youth consumers in the Fifties achieved something remarkable—it created a cultural mentality which alternatively pulled this generation from its archaic past and opened the door for a revolutionary decade ahead.
92
Endnotes
1 Tobin, Joseph, and Allison Henward. Ethnographic Studies of Children and Youth in the Media. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Education. B. Levinson and M. Pollack (Eds). London: Blackwell. 2011. Print. 2 Ibid. 3 Sandbrook, Dominic. Never Had It So Good. Great Britain: Little, Brown. 2005. 384-426. Print. 4 Ibid. 5 Springhall, John. Coming of Age. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. 1986, 1-10. Print. 6 Osgerby, Bill. Youth in Britain Since 1945. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 1998, 5. Print. 7 Department of Employment, 1971, British Labour Statistics Historical Abstract 1886-1968, London: MHSO, Table 109, pp. 206-7. 8 Reynolds, Rich. The American Occupation of Britain 1942-1945. London: HarperCollins. 1996. Print. 9 Ibid, 264. 10 Horn, Adrian. Jukebox Britain: the Impact of Americanization and Popular Music on British Society from 1945- 1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2009. 14-17. Print. 11 Ibid, 20-24. 12 Osgerby, 12. 13 Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto and Windus Ltd. 1958. 248-50. Print. 14 Springhall, 109-156. 15 Report from the Youth Advisory Council, as quoted in The Economist, Saturday, 18 September 1943, Issue 5221, p 10. 16 Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin Books. 2005. Print. 17 Osgerby, 10-19. 18 Bell, David. “Change and Continuity: Reflections on the Butler Act.” 1999. 12 November 2010.
41 Norman, Phillip. Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation. New York: Fireside. 2003. 210. Print. 42 Sandbrook, 429. 43 Ibid, 344. 44 Ibid, 436 45 As qtd in Cross, Gary. The Cute and the Cool. Oxford University Press. 2004. 186. Print. 46 Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1979, 46-51. Print. 47 Ibid, 72-80. 48 Sandbrook, 163-166. 49 Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto and Windus Ltd. 1958. Print 50 Sandbrook, 32. 51 The Economist. 30 April 1955. Issue 5827, 6. 52 Marwick, Arthur. British Society Since 1945. London: Allen Lane. 1982. 78. Print. 53 Ibid. 54 Hoggart,16. 55 Ibid, 22. 56 Ibid, 47. 57 Springhall, 89. 58 Cohen, Albert. Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gangs. Glencoe: Free Press. 1955. Print. 59 The Economist. 11 January 1958. Issue: 5968, 14. 60 Sandbrook, 36. 61 Hoggart, 70. 62 Sandbrook, 33. 63 Ibid, 37-38. 64 Qtd in Marwick, 79. 65 Sandbrook, 38. 66 Marwick, Arthur. “Class.” Taken from A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1939-2000. Ed. by Addison, Paul, and Harriet Jones. Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 145-163. Print. 67 Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. New York: Viking Press, 1958. Print. 68 Ibid. 69 Sandbrook, 56-58. 70 Osgerby, 85-86. 71 “The Adolescent.” British Medical Association. 1954. As qtd in Pearson. 72 The Economist, Saturday, 11 January 1958. Page: 14. Issue: 5968 73 Sandbrook, 420. 74 As qtd in Springhall, 104 75 Pearson, Geoffrey. Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. New York: Macmillan Press. 22. Print. 76 Sandbrook, 414. 77 Hebdige, 49-50. 78 Norman, 21. 79 Hoggart, 204. 80 Sandbrook, 416. 81 Ibid, 418-421. 82 Hebdige, 93. 83 Pearson, 19. 84 Ibid, 21. 85 Judt, 351. 86 Hoggart, 158. 87 Judt, 351-352. 88 Ibid, 333-336. 89 Hebdige, 51. 90 “Race Riots in an Odd Place.” Life Magazine. 15 September, 1958. 94
91 Hebdige, 51. 92 Ibid. 93 Bolton, Paul. “Education: Historical Statistics.” Library of the House of Commons, 12 February 2007. 94 Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin Books. 1991. Print. 95 Osgerby, 83. 96 Hebdige, 47-48. 97 Osgerby, 49. 98 MacDonald, Ian. Revolutions in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. London: Pimlico. 1988. 5. Print. 99 Kerouac, 5-6. 100 Hoggart, 87. 101 Ibid, 551-552. 102 Ibid, 551-555. 103 Ibid. 104 The Times. 6 April 1932. Issue 46100, 16. 105 The Times. 28 August 1941. Issue 49016, 5. 106 Kynaston, David. Family Britain, 1951-1957. New York: Walker Publishing Company. 2009. 564-565. Print. 107 Hoggart, 196. 108 Cusine, D.J. Artificial Insemination with the Husband’s Sperm After the Husband’s Death. Journal of Medical Ethics. 1977. Issue 3. 163-173. 109 Hall, Lesley, 151. 110 Kynaston, 553. 111 Norman, 113. 112 Ibid, 555. 113 Hall, 145-163 114 Hoggart, 196. 115 Hall, 151. 116 Hoggart, 83. 117 Schofield, Michael. “The Sexual Behavior of Young People.” 1965. JSTOR. 118 Ibid. 119 Frith, Simon. The Sociology of Rock. London: Constable. 1978. 64. As qtd in Osgerby. 120 Sandbrook, 387. 121 Hoggart, 138. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid, 180. 124 Cross, Gary. The Cute and the Cool. Oxford University Press. 2004. 195. Print. 125 Rudd, John. “The Poisoning of Youth.” English Review. 1926. 216-221 126 Hall, Lesley A. “Sexuality.” Taken from A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1939-2000. Ed. by Addison, Paul, and Harriet Jones. Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 145-163. Print. 127 Judt, 345-346. 128 Osgerby, 40. 129 Kynaston, 298-302. 130 As qtd in Kynaston, 301. 131 As qtd in Kynaston, 301. 132 Emmett, B.P. The Television Audience in the United Kingdom. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Blackwell Publishing. 1956. Vol. 119, No. 3, 284-311. JSTOR. 133 Judt, 324-353. 134 Emmett, 304 135 Sandbrook, 356-360. 136 Ibid. 137 Emmett, 294. 138 Ibid, 436-438. 95
139 Judt, 345. 140 Ibid, 365. 141 Osgerby, 54. 142 Jenkins, Stephanie and Joan Williams, ed. “UK Television Adverts, 1955-1990.” 23 Feb 2011.
178 As qtd Sandbrook, 456. 179 Norman, 15 180 Stark, Steven. “How the Beatles…” 181 Kynaston, 641. 182 Sandbrook, 456-457. 183 Spitz, Bob. The Beatles: The Biography. Little, Brown, 2005, 48-53. Print. 184 Sandbrook, 457. 185 Goldman, Albert. The Lives of John Lennon. Chicago: Random House Inc. 1988. 109. Print. 186 Ibid, 138. 187 MacDonald, Ian. Revolutions in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. London: Pimlico. 1988. 9. Print. 188 Stark, Steven. “How the Beatles…” 189 Inglis, Ian. “Ideology, Trajectory & Stardom: Elvis Presley and the Beatles.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Croatian Musicological Society. 1996. Vol. 27, No. 1, 53-78. JSTOR. 190 Frontani, Michael. The Beatles: Image and the Media. University Press of Mississippi. 2007. 46. Print. 191 Goldman, 125. 192 Hoggart, 63-65 193 Goldman, 144. 194 Norman, 261. 195 The Daily Mirror, 6 November 1963. 196 As qtd in Frontani, 9. 197 Frontani, 9. 198 Ibid, 11. 199 MacDonald, 7. 200 Ibid, 8.
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100
ACADEMIC VITAE of Matthew Trifan
Matthew Trifan 30 Sylvan Oaks Drive Hollidaysburg, PA, 16648 [email protected]
Education:
Bachelor of Arts Degrees in History and Political Science, Penn State University, Spring 2011 Honors in History Thesis Title: You Say You Want a Revolution: Youth Pop Culture and Commercialization in 1950s England Thesis Supervisor: Sophie de Schaepdrijver
Awards:
Schreyer‘s Academic Excellence Scholarship Dean‘s List Published in ―Kalliope,‖ 2011 Published in ―Agora,‖ 2011 ―Best Attorney‖ Awards from Pennsylvania ―Quaker‖ Invitational, the Pittsburgh ―Steel City‖ Invitational, Mock Trial Recognized for outstanding achievement as a College Works Painting manager, creating and managing a $45,000 business in the course of Summer 2009
Presentations/ Activities:
Captain of Penn State Mock Trial, 2009-2011 ICEWS Research Project, Political Science Dept. Correlates of War Research Project, Political Science Dept.