Britain’s forgotten Battle of the Beaches Cultural tribalism has lost its cool

“Are you a Mod or a Rocker?” Motorcycle magazine had asked in December 1963. The choice of transport was probably enough to answer the question — the greasy motorbike of the rocker, or the neat little scooter of the mod — but in case there was any doubt, you could look in a mirror. If you were wearing a black shirt, blue jeans, big boots and a leather jacket, said Motorcycle, you were a Rocker; whereas a polka-dot shirt, pink half-mast trousers, Cuban boots, and a parka with fur-trimmed hood signified a Mod.

So Mods vs Rockers it was. They had names and they had a rivalry. It was like the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story, which gave the papers a reference point for the older reader; three years after release, the film was still being screened in British cinemas, and the soundtrack was still in the album charts.

In the run-up to the August bank holiday, the press were licking their lips with anticipation. “Will it be another Margate?” they hoped, as they reported that 400 men from the Metropolitan Police were waiting at RAF Northolt, ready to be flown into any resort that required additional support. And in Hastings, the disturbances were bad enough for the chief constable to call in this flying squad, to deal with what the papers dubbed the Second Battle of Hastings.

The ripples spread out in unpredictable ways. In Streatham, south London, the local Young Socialists produced a leaflet: “Up the Mods! Up the Rockers! Down with police violence!” and were promptly suspended by the constituency Labour Party, with five members being expelled. There was a general election due, and caution was the order of the day; no one wanted to risk controversy with a leaflet that “was detrimental to Labour Party election chances”. Meanwhile, 22-year-old satirist Bill Oddie released his first single, “Nothing Better to Do”, inspired by the seaside confrontation: “Play, little boy,” he mocked, “there’s so much to destroy.” It was banned by the BBC, he said, because they feared “the gangs would use it as an anthem”.

And at the London School of Economics, a young PhD student named Stanley Cohen became fascinated by the media response to Margate. The fruit of his research was one of the most influential works of sociology, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). The phrase “moral panic” already existed, and the idea wasn’t entirely new — “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality,” wrote historian Thomas Macaulay in 1831 — but it was Cohen’s book that formalised and established the concept.

At its heart, it was an understanding that a moral panic is a short-lived explosion of outrage that is rooted in a longer history. The media present an incident as being shockingly new, but it shocks only because it plays into an existing narrative.

In the case of the Mods and Rockers, there was the obvious precedent from the Fifties of the Teddy Boys, and before them, the Cosh Boys. There’d been a rise in juvenile crime in the post-war years, and in 1950 the Daily Mirror had asked its readers to identify the cause. “Films, radio, lack of parental control,” came the answers, together with a call for the restoration of corporal punishment for young offenders. (Judicial birching had been abolished in 1948.)

But even then it wasn’t new. There were reports in 1942 of a group of teenagers being attacked and robbed by a gang of men in south London, leaving one of them dead in the street. The previous decade, before the war, newspapers had noted that “knives, razors, knuckle dusters and sandbags were used by rival gangs in fierce street fighting” in north London. Going back before the First World War, shots were fired “during an encounter between rival gangs”. Further back still, to the days when judicial birching was at its peak, in 1888 the Pall Mall Gazette listed “the bandit gangs of London”, including the Prince Arthur Gang, the Gang of Roughs and the Jovial Thirty-Two. (All available for use by indie rock bands seeking a name.)

These late-Victorian delinquents were collectively known as Hooligans in London, but there were similar groups elsewhere, referred to as Scuttlers in Manchester, High Rippers in Liverpool, Peaky Blinders in Birmingham. What they had in common was low-level crime and street violence, though mostly they fought each other in turf wars. They tended to dress much the same as well: cap worn forwards over the eyes, no collar, a muffler or neckerchief instead of a tie, bell-bottom trousers, hobnailed boots and, in some quarters, a Newgate fringe — a shaved face with a beard running below the jawline, in imitation of where the hangman’s noose would be placed. Then there was the element of clothing as weaponry. “The most characteristic part of their uniform is the substantial leather belt heavily mounted with metal,” read a report in 1900. “It is not ornamental, but then it is not intended for ornament.”

In short, young men have always had a propensity to violence — and each generation discovers this anew when it gets to be old enough to talk about “young people”. It’s the moral panic that keeps on giving, because it’s a reflection of human nature. Also discovered on a regular basis is the shock revelation that this isn’t just a male preserve. In 1906, it was said that the gangs in Glasgow included “young girls of ages averaging from 14 to 17, with very long draggled skirt and hair in tightly twisted pigtail”.

Nonetheless, there was something different about the post-war youth subcultures. “Teddy boys were really narcissistic,” wrote Mim Scala in his memoir Diary of a Teddy Boy. “I mean Masai warrior, Beau Brummell, Bertie Wooster narcissistic…” And that reference to Beau Brummell was significant. It was Brummell in the early years of the 19th century who’d invented the concept of the dandy, using an obsessive attitude towards clothes as an entrée to the highest circles in the land. “A nobody, who made himself a somebody, and gave the law to everybody,” said novelist Catherine Gore, and his inspiration soon filtered down through society.

The young Charles Dickens, with his green velvet jacket, red waistcoat and long hair, was typical of those who aspired to dandy status. “We keep no horse, but a clothes-horse,” he wrote in the 1830s. Later, the music hall had a rich vein of songs that mocked those who came from working-class parts of London and dressed above their station: “The Marquis of Camberwell Green”, “Percy from Pimlico”, “Burlington Bertie from Bow” and more. “Tho’ I’m not worth a groat, I wear a decent coat,” sang Walter Laburnum in “Fashionable Fred”, a sentiment that resonated down the years, recognisable in Adam Ant’s dandy highwayman: “I spend my cash on looking flash.”

What the Teddy Boys did was to bring together these two strands from the 19th century: the street-gang tradition of the Peaky Blinders, and the working-class dandy. And then, with the arrival in Britain of rock ’n’ roll, they added a musical soundtrack.

The subcultures that followed took their lead from the teds. Mods and Rockers, skinheads and punks, metalheads and goths — all defined themselves by dress and by music. That connected them to a wider popular culture and made them national movements, not just local street-gangs as the scuttlers had been. They identified themselves as being outside the mainstream, yet helped to shape it.

The other thing that the fashion and the music did was to soften the violence. According to the police, teds didn’t resist when arrested; they’d spent too much on the outfits to risk damaging them. Despite the press coverage, no one was killed or seriously injured at Margate or in the Second Battle of Hastings. And not even the Skinheads, at their racist football-hooligan worst, were as violent as the Peaky Blinders had been, 70 years earlier.

“You could say it’s a fashion statement, but I think it’s more than that,” said Paul Weller in 2004. “The working-class love of clothes, looking good, rising above your station. I don’t think it’ll ever die. It’s really in our British fibre. These clothes, my haircut, reflect my attitude.”

By then, however, the phenomenon had ceased to exist. Vestiges of the old world remain, frozen in time, but they’re museum pieces, not new creations; they’re the punks who hang around Camden Market in north London, selling themselves for tourist photos. Street gangs still exist, but they’re more akin to scuttlers than teds, fighting turf wars that are certainly more violent than their 19th-century predecessors.

What is long gone is the great British tradition of creating a new subculture every four or five years, along with a new form of pop music. Maybe it’s because music is no longer a badge of identity, but a massive online jumble of everything that’s ever been recorded. Clothes mean less, as well, in an era of body modification, from tattoos to piercings to surgery. Maybe it’s because there isn’t a shared culture anymore, and it’s hard for a group to define itself as outside the mainstream if there’s no mainstream in the first place.

Tribalism hasn’t disappeared, of course, the wish to belong, to go where the in-crowd goes. It’s just that, lacking a cultural escape-valve, it finds its place in internet “communities”, where identity comes with the political slogan and the hashtag. It’s much the same as the polka-dot shirt and pink half-mast trousers, but not as cool. 

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Alwyn W. Turner is a cultural and political historian.

AlwynTurner