IT was November 1958, and the warden of Dumfries Youth Centre felt he had to speak out. The streets of the town, he publicly complained, “are filled with louts and badly-dressed baby dolls”.
He later said his remarks had been directed to “a very definite fringe of badly-dressed Teddy boys and untidy unkempt girls plastered with lipstick”. The real trouble, he asserted, was a lack of sufficient youth clubs of the right kind.
Teddy Boys (like the two Glaswegian teenagers, seen here in 1956, main image) were renowned for their fondness for Edwardian fashions: jackets with narrow sleeves, velvet trims and drainpipe trousers.
Teddy Boys and other teenagers horrified local authorities across Britain in 1956 when screenings of Rock Around the Clock, a film featuring Bill Haley and the Comets, led to merry scenes of disorder in cinemas. Some councils banned the film.
With their distinctive fashions and hair styles, Teddy Boys featured in some of the pocket cartoons of Bud O’Neill, but not everyone liked the tribe: two men, one brandishing a hatchet, chased a group of Teddy Boys down Govan’s Langlands Road in December 1956. Both men ended up in court; one claimed that his front door had been kicked in by the Teddy Boys.
In May 1979 the ever-youthful Haley and his Comets played the Glasgow Apollo; in the 2,000-strong audience were hundreds of people of all ages (above) wearing drape jackets and crepe-soled shoes.
“Many of them”, reported our entertainments editor, Andrew Young, “were the grandchildren of those who had been at the rock riots of the 1950s when Bill Haley first appeared at the Odeon Cinema, Glasgow”. The men “were like peacocks ... By comparison, most of the females looked ordinary”.
Read more: Herald Diary
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