Fittingly for a website name called ‘The Lone Lamp’, the subject of the type of street lighting found in Britain will get a notice here. The site’s readers will know that we refer to the original teddy boy era as ‘The Golden Era’, but perhaps ‘The Silver Era’ might have been more appropriate considering the […]
The Golden Era
And they went off on their motorbikes … – 1959 Ton-up Boys & 1964 Rockers
Ton-up Boys, Cafe Racers, Rockers, ? Milk Bar Cowboys
1955 BBC documentary on teddy boys
1959 two Stockport teds
Some footage of a ‘fun run’ in the streets of Stockport in 1959 organised by the landlord of the Golden Lion, Middle Hillgate, show two teds congratulating the more casually dressed ‘cool’ winner of the run. There are two teds, one on the left in a rough-and-ready mode (I can’t make out whether he has […]
1959-70 Gene Vincent and the French
Apart from Elvis who was an unavoidable fixture from 1956 onwards, the British rock’n’rollers were particularly enamoured of Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, all of whom conducted tours of Blighty. However, in France it is Gene Vincent who became the rock’n’rollers’ idol and where he is to this day still affectionately known […]
1959 pre-rock’n’roll Parisian youth styles
My uncle from Oldham near Manchester had danced to rock’n’roll in his teens in the early-to-mid 1950s and on his many travels through Europe during the 1960s (he had by then become a university physics lecturer) he was left with the distinct impression that there existed no youth culture in France or anywhere else in […]
