The Mods and the Rockers coalesced into the most talked-about youth cultures of the day around 1962. Apart from their musical differences, they contrasted in their looks. Mods were smart dressers whereas Rockers wore rough jeans, boots and leathers for motor-biking. The other difference was the hair, Mods had adopted a French bourgeois fashionable look(that’s an ‘upper class snob’ look to you, mate!) dating from the late 1950s, with washed hair combed downwards, whereas the Rockers tended to brylcreem their greasy hair and comb it back. From this, you may notice that the sartorial elegance of the 1950s Teds had gone in the Mods direction whilst the quiff only remained among Rockers, although even here it was dying or degenerating into a simpler back-combed longish brylcreeemed hair, as well as competing with modest quasi-Mod hair-cuts for many of the Rockers.
It’s in this context that a very illuminating exchange occurs between a BBC reporter John Morgan and one of the ‘Rockers’ he’s interviewing :
JM : How would you describe yourself? As a Rocker or a Mod?
Interviewee : Well … actually … [general laughter] … I’m a Teddy Boy really, the old-fashioned type.
JM: As a Teddy Boy with perhaps – you know – the ability to look back over the last few years. Would you say that the present situation is rougher, more violent than it was in your day?
Interviewee: Oh no! Not, itself, no.
What comes out of this short exchange is that the reporter is surprised to see a well-dressed man among the roughly-dressed rockers and questions whether he is a Mod ? The interviewee puts him right by saying he’s a Teddy Boy, “the old-fashioned type”. From this the reporter seems to think he belongs to another era (the start of a long tradition …) and asks him about the past situation in comparison nowadays. Now he doesn’t look much older than most of the rockers, and I would put him as a late 50s Ted at the earliest, not one from the first wave that peaked in 1956. We can’t deduce much more. His hair is a classic quiff, but the back is left to grow much longer than in the 1950s version. He has a good size sideburn, not that common in the 50s when the Teddy Boys were mostly in their mid- to late-teens. He has a tattoo on the back of his right hand, the kind of tattoo one only can wear once one has left the parental home. His clothes are less easy to describe as the camera is not focused on anything but his head, nevertheless we can discern a jacket with a velvet collar and what is crystal clear is the cravat which appears to be of a light-coloured silken nature. So there we have it, a nice example of a Ted holding up the flag in 1964 among a tribe of savage-looking Rockers!
The Ted in question.
The interview with Mods and Rockers is a 13-minute long rubric in the current affairs programme ‘Panorama’ broadcast on the 06.April.1964.
POSTED November 2024.
@petersullivan3012
Peter Sullivan (YTcomm 2024) writes “Rockers weren’t Ted’s. If anything, mods were more like Ted’s in that they cared about the way they looked, and were obsessed by their clothes, music and lifestyle beyond everything else. Rockers loved their bikes and dressed appropriately for riding them, music was a by-product for many of them. The only similarity between theirs and the Teds look were the greased quiffs. Ted’s didn’t ride bikes either.”