A menacing dark force is prowling the land, a hideously vile and uncompromising force of nature that rolls unstoppably from house to house eating away at the very fabric of society, sucking us into an abyss of hopelessness and generally scaring old people quite a bit. What is this horror you ask, well it's the unruly, neigh ferral children of an age ending in een. So these teenagers, are they really that bad? Is this a new thing? Of course it's not, the crap you see on the TV is frankly Tish and Pish as my Nan never says as she wasn't alive in the 17th century.
The term teenager didn't even exist until after the second world war, before then you were either fighting a war, growing food or in the north you might be down pit. But you were generally doing whatever you could to survive. There wasn't time for the kids to sod about being moody or wear black clothes with optional eye liner. If you did feel the need to be an arse your dad would simply beat it out of you with a random kitchen utensil or equally painful leather based garment. It wasn't until the 50's when companies needed people to sell their cheaply made plastic crap to that they decided to market their wares to the teenagers!
But kids were so polite and nice in those days weren't they? Really? Picture this, Granny Andrews is sitting in her rocking chair listening to big band magic featuring Glen Millar on her crackly gramophone when in walks her sweet little nephew Francis who she hasn't seen for 6 months. As she turns to greet him she is struck by how he has changed. "Well bless me what happened to you sonny?" "I'm a Teddy boy Nanny." Originally known as Cosh Boys (I wonder why!!) they wore strange clothes, stupid shoes and were generally known for not giving a shit about what anyone else thought. Funny enough papers of the time said they were a menace to society. Weapon of choice was often the knuckle duster. Teddy boy gangs were involved in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. Sound familiar?
So into the 60's and we had the greasers and I quote "A working class youth sub culture", again very familiar terms. We had a whole decade of peace, love, drugs and rock n roll. Basically everyone, especially teenagers doing exactly what their parents and polite society told them not to do. In the mid 60's we then had the Mods and Rockers. The Rockers being the leather jacket wearing bikers and the Mods were parker wearing scooter riders. These groups both enjoyed drug taking, drinking and bunk ups and on a bank holiday they sodded off to Brighton or Clacton to kick the crap out of each other. These groups caused a "morale panic" with the papers calling them "louts" and "vermin", the Birmingham Post called them "the internal enemies of the UK." Sounds like something I heard last week! Weapons of choice were the bike chain, flick knife and the trusty snooker ball in a sock.
We also saw the rise of the hippies and later the skinheads, imagine how the parents of the 60 and early 70's dealt with those kids? "Doris pass me my spare belt would you pet, the boy still hasn't washed." In the 70's the Mods, Rockers, hippies and skinheads were joined by the ultimate blow to the fabric of society the Punks. Crazy hair, bonkers colours, mad clothes with nothing off limits, but sex and drugs were a must. It's here that the rockers seemed to die off and into the 80's the mods found a new adversery to fight, "The casuals" These well dressed lads in their designer jumpers, pringle T-shirts and Sergio Tacchini tracksuits had been fighting on the football terraces for years, but decided to branch out to seaside resorts on the bank holiday as way of meeting more mods and putting them in hospital.
The last 20 years have seen similar groups spring up from these sub cultures. These were usually based on their musical tastes and driven by young men's desire to annoy their parents to the max while hoping to massively increase their chances of having sex with women. New Romantics, Ravers, Metalheads, Goths and a whole lot more that annoyed the press, sent Mary Whitehouse into a biege frenzy and were labelled the harbingers of destruction and were leading us all to the brink of a total morale breakdown.
So when you hear an older member of society bemoaning the kids of today with their gangs and hoodies please remember that they were almost certainly either born during the second half of the last century or grow up through it. Which either meant they were part of one of these groups or they were a virign till they were 34.
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