Margarete Berger-Hamerschlag’s Journey into a Fog was published in May 1955 by Gollancz. It was a portrait of underprivileged youth at a club in west London’s Paddington and Kilburn districts and was compared to the depiction of youth in the film ‘Blackboard Jungle’ although as the January 1956 reviewer in Kirkus Review wrote: “the revelation […]
The Golden Era
1954 Eva Sivertsen’s Cockney teds
Under the unpromising title Cockney Phonology (1960) we get a pretty accurate transcript of the way teds were viewed by some inhabitants of Bethnal Green in 1955.
1974 ‘Get Some In’
Aired on ITV between October 1975 and May 1978, the comedy series ‘Get Some In’ was set in 1955 around a bunch of conscripts. The Christmas special (broadcast between Series 1 and 2), set at RAF Skelton, was captioned “Christmas 1955”, but the remainder of the series (involving two changes of camp) continued to be […]
1959 Bruce Davidson, photographer of the Jokers greaser gang, Brooklyn
Aged 25, Bruce Davidson accompanied a teenage gang named the Jokers during the summer of 1959. Davidson entered the lives of a South Brooklyn street gang called the Jokers whose usual haunt was a local candy store. ”They had had a rumble that was written up in the newspaper, and I went out and offered […]
1958-59 ‘Oh Boy!’ ABC Television
On 13 September 1958 a new show appeared on ITV which was the first all-music British television show aimed solely at entertaining young people (unlike the BBC’s ‘Six Five Special‘ which had been launched over a year-and-a-half earlier in early 1957 and had taken rather too seriously its aim to be ‘wholesome’ and ‘educational’). Here […]
1948 The New-Edwardians
A nostalgically-fuelled fad in men’s fashions which surfaced after 1945 led to an Edwardian dandy style becoming fashionable. The style was known as Edwardian but we can call it the New- or Neo-Edwardian fad, if only to distinguish it from the original Edwardian style of around 1905. The style caught on in some of the […]
