‘A family with the wrong members in control – that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.’ So said George Orwell in 1940, and anyone who grew up in the decade that followed the war would recognise his characterisation of a country where ‘the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bed-ridden aunts’.
Since the early 50s, cultural forces had been trying to break out of the shadow cast by the Second World War. While the nation suffered rationing on a scale not experienced even during wartime, an exhibition was staged in London that looked towards a bright future in which technology solved the great societal problems of the day. The Festival of Britain was held on the site of a demolished jam factory near Waterloo Station. A series of modernist buildings was constructed on the south bank of the Thames – the Royal Festival Hall among them – to give visitors a vision of how the city might be rebuilt following the destruction wrought by the war. The centrepiece of the exhibition was the Skylon, a vertical steel cylinder, 250 feet high, shaped like a very thin cigar and suspended 50 feet above ground level by cables slung between three angled uprights. From a distance, it gave the impression of a rocket that had just taken off.
Eight and a half million people visited the Festival site over the summer of 1951, keen to see what the future might hold. Shortly after the exhibition closed, however, there was a change of government and the incoming Conservative prime minister was less than enamoured with futuristic idealism. On Winston Churchill’s orders, the Skylon was torn down and sold off for scrap. Having succumbed to TB eighteen months before, Orwell sadly wasn’t around to see his metaphor borne out.
For those whose youth had been disrupted by the war, there was an expectation that once hostilities had ended, popular culture would simply pick up again where it had left off. Spike Milligan, born in 1918, recalled how, as a teenager in the 1930s, he revelled in jazz and swing. The pop music of the day was provided by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael, while George Raft, Betty Grable and the Marx Brothers ruled at the local cinema. When he was demobbed from the army in 1945, Milligan pulled his old suit out of mothballs and went back to the Palais de Danse to pick up where he had left off. Slowly it dawned on him that the Marx Brothers weren’t making so many movies, that Max Miller was being replaced by Max Bygraves and that the big band sound was being challenged by modernists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. There would be no going back to the past.
As chief instigator and main writer of The Goon Show, which ran on the BBC Home Service from 1951, Milligan made clear to his young audience that he too knew the wrong members of the family were in charge. Week after week, he and his fellow Goons dragged the irresponsible uncle, the bed-ridden aunt and their stuffy contemporaries through an anarchic half-hour of radio comedy that was the first clear example of the contempt for authority that would come to dominate British youth culture in the 1960s.
Terence Rattigan, the most successful English playwright of the period, once claimed that, when writing, he had in mind a particular kind of theatregoer that he referred to as ‘Aunt Edna’, a ‘respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady’. (Whether or not this imaginary aunt was bed-ridden was never made clear.) Rattigan’s refined dramas mostly occurred in the sedate world of the English upper middle class, where emotions were always understated and upper lips were kept stiff. In the spring of 1956, he was at the height of his powers, putting the finishing touches to the screenplay of The Prince and the Showgirl, a movie based on his 1953 play The Sleeping Prince, to be filmed at Pinewood Studios with Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe in the title roles. He also had two successful plays running in the West End: The Deep Blue Sea, concerning the strained relationship between a drunk Battle of Britain pilot and the ex-wife of a High Court judge; and Separate Tables, which featured a repressed homosexual army major and a politician who had been jailed for beating his wife. Only Establishment figures, it seemed, had emotional lives worthy of examination.
Dissenting voices were occasionally heard. Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, which opened in London in August 1955, had shocked many theatregoers with its existentialist absurdity, but its target was as obscure as its meaning. Unable to grasp what was going on, middlebrow audiences were able to dismiss it as pretentious nonsense. However, in May 1956, a play opened at the Royal Court which made Rattigan seem suddenly old-fashioned. Look Back in Anger was the work of a twenty-five-year-old jobbing actor named John Osborne, who claimed to have written the play over seventeen days while sitting in a deck chair on Morecambe Pier, where he was appearing in Seagulls Over Sorrento.
The action takes place in a one-room attic flat in the Midlands, where Jimmy Porter, a working-class twenty-five-year-old with a degree from the wrong sort of university, vents his anger at the suffocating power of the Establishment, the passivity of his wife – calmly ironing while he rages against injustice – and his own sense of alienation. Porter expresses his rebellious streak by playing jazz trumpet, and it would not be stretching things to imagine him stood at the back of a Chris Barber gig, nursing a pint of Merrydown cider and tapping his foot while Lonnie Donegan, another working-class twenty-five-year-old, rattled through ‘Midnight Special’.
Osborne’s play was highly autobiographical – when his recently divorced first wife saw the opening scene, she thought, ‘Oh no! Not the ironing board’ – but the chord he struck resonated with an entire generation. The 1944 Education Act had opened the grammar schools to bright working-class students, which in turn led to greater demand for university places. Encouraged to go for the glittering prize of a degree, many state-educated graduates found that, despite their qualifications, the Establishment maintained a class ceiling that made sure only the right kind of people prospered. Too young to have fought in the war, but too old to have experienced the invention of the teenager, Osborne and his contemporaries felt trapped in a world where all of their elders retained military rank – Jimmy’s father-in-law is called Colonel Redfern – while every sixteen-year-old seemed to be earning more than they did.
Look Back in Anger was a howl of rage from a generation that felt out of time. Articulate, yet frustrated by their inability to get a response from an apathetic world, they resorted to lashing out at everyone and everything. Marlon Brando expressed this same existential angst in The Wild One in 1953, when his character, Johnny, was asked what he was rebelling against. ‘Whaddaya got?’ he laconically replied. Jimmy Porter’s plea for understanding is expressed with less of a cool shrug, yet it still provided a call to arms for anyone under the age of thirty who had to endure the dreary, parsimonious atmosphere of an English Sunday afternoon in the 50s: ‘How I long for a little ordinary enthusiasm,’ he wailed. ‘Just enthusiasm – that’s all.’
London’s middle-aged theatre critics were contemptuous of the vagueness of Osborne’s Weltschmerz, with the Daily Mail complaining that, while Jimmy Porter has ‘a bitterness that produces a fine flow of savage talk, it is basically a bore because its reasons are never explained’. The Evening Standard dismissed the play as ‘self-pitying drivel’. Among the brickbats, the New Statesman’s critic was percipient enough to observe that ‘if you are young, [the play] will speak for you. If you are middle-aged, it will tell you what the young are feeling.’ The most positive response, however, came from twenty-nine-year-old Kenneth Tynan, whose review for the Observer sealed his reputation as the most challenging theatre critic in Britain.
The piece took its title, ‘Jimmy Porter, Prince of Scum’, from a comment by the eighty-two-year-old writer Somerset Maugham, who had dismissed state-educated university students as ‘scum’. Tynan advised anyone sharing that verdict to stay away from Look Back in Anger as it was ‘all scum and a mile wide’. He compared Jimmy Porter to Hamlet and sought to silence those critics who carped about him being nothing more than a tiresome whinger. ‘I agree that Look Back in Anger is likely to remain a minority taste. What matters, however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it at roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of twenty and thirty. And this figure will doubtless be swelled by refugees from other age-groups curious to know what the contemporary young pup is thinking and feeling. I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.’
Around the time the play opened, American playwright Arthur Miller visited London, where his new wife, Marilyn Monroe, was working on The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. When Miller asked to see Look Back in Anger, Olivier tried to dissuade him. ‘It’s just a travesty of England, a lot of bitter rattling on about conditions.’ Miller got the impression that the play had somehow offended Olivier’s sense of patriotism. Miller insisted they attend and later wrote that it gave him his first look at ‘an England of outsiders like myself, who ironed their own shirts and knew about the great only from newspapers’.
When Olivier and Miller were invited backstage to meet Osborne, the American playwright was astonished to find that the great English actor had completely changed his mind. ‘I overheard, with some incredulity, Olivier asking the pallid Osborne – then a young guy with a shock of uncombed hair and a look on his face of having awakened twenty minutes earlier – “Do you suppose you could write something for me?” in his most smiling tones, which could have convinced you to buy a car with no wheels for twenty thousand dollars.’ Olivier’s tour de force as washed-up music-hall star Archie Rice in Osborne’s next play, The Entertainer, would give the fifty-year-old actor’s career a new lease of life.
For all the furore that Osborne caused in London’s theatrical circles, ticket sales for Look Back in Anger were unspectacular until a twenty-five-minute excerpt from the play was broadcast live on TV by the BBC in October 1956. Soon the term ‘Angry Young Men’ was being applied to the work of an emerging but unconnected group of British playwrights and authors whose work challenged the status quo by telling stories from a working-class perspective.
In 1958, Alan Sillitoe, a twenty-nine-year-old former factory worker from Nottingham, produced Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a novel tapping into a deadening sense of disillusionment that many young people felt in post-war Britain. Shelagh Delaney was only nineteen when she wrote A Taste of Honey in 1957, determined to challenge what she saw as the stereotypical portrayal of northern working-class life. The proponents of Free Cinema were among those who responded to this trend. Karel Reisz’s first feature film was an adaptation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, while Tony Richardson directed the film versions of both Look Back in Anger and A Taste of Honey.
It wasn’t only the literary world that was trying to start a fire under the older generation. Since 1952, a group of artists, architects and critics had been meeting informally at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London to discuss how they might make art that reflected new technologies and the mass production of culture. They were drawn to images from movie posters, comic books, pulp fiction and magazine adverts, especially those that promised a better life through modern appliances. Utilising these ‘found images’ from outside of the art world to create vivid collages, the Independent Group, as they called themselves, introduced popular culture into what was, until then, the highly refined space of the art gallery.
In August 1956, the group staged an event at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in east London entitled This Is Tomorrow. More of an installation than an exhibition, a jukebox played continuously while visitors walked through a series of environments that confronted them with garishly enlarged, oddly juxtaposed images. The thirty-eight artists who contributed to the works were split into twelve multidisciplinary groups that each collaborated to create their own idea of contemporary art. Group Two, consisting of painter and collage artist Richard Hamilton, architect and designer John Voelcker and artist and sociologist John McHale, opted to create a ‘fun house’ of modernity which ultimately stole the show. The structure was designed by Voelcker and contained many examples of Hamilton’s signature Bauhaus-inspired technique of scaled-up imagery. The entrance was guarded by an enlarged newsprint picture of the head of Marshal Tito, the Yugoslavian dictator, his face covered with exhortations to ‘Look! Feel! Smell! Listen! Think Think Think!’ A set of Marcel Duchamp’s roto-reliefs spun alongside op art dazzle panels, while a jukebox played in front of a massive mural containing gaudy images from recent Cinemascope movies.
The most eye-catching imagery came in the shape of a twelve-foot-high reproduction of the poster for the newly released film Forbidden Planet, showing Robbie the Robot carrying the limp, scantily clad body of Anne Francis. This was juxtaposed with a life-size painting of Marilyn Monroe, holding down her white skirt in the iconic updraught scene from The Seven Year Itch, which had been in British cinemas just a year before. The assemblage was completed by a five-foot-tall inflatable Guinness bottle. With this vivid combination of sci-fi, sex and booze, Hamilton had captured what was on the mind of almost every young male in the land, desperate to escape the gloomy parameters of post-war Britain.
However, the most influential image from the exhibition didn’t appear on the walls of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Compared to the scale of his other works in the ‘fun house’, Richard Hamilton’s collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? was tiny, just ten inches square, and only appeared in the exhibition catalogue, yet it was destined to become one of the defining images of twentieth-century art. Hamilton cut pictures from contemporary magazines brought back from the US by John McHale to create a colourful modern living-room scene. On the left, a woman hoovers her way up a long staircase, while to her right a cinema awning advertising The Jazz Singer is visible through large windows. In the centre, a lampshade is decorated with a mock-heraldic shield containing a crown, three lions and the word ‘Ford’, the hood emblem for the car company’s 1950–1 models. The front cover of teen comic Young Romance dominates the back wall, hung in a thin black frame, as the past looks down disapprovingly in the shape of a small nineteenth-century photographic portrait of a stern-faced man. A TV in the right-hand corner shows a woman on the telephone, while a big can of ham dwarfs the coffee table it stands on. On the sofa, a female burlesque performer sits, naked except for sun hat and nipple covers, and a reel-to-reel tape recorder sits in the lower foreground.
The main focus of the image is a male body builder, muscles flexed, who stares out from the picture wearing white briefs. Like the portraits of merchants depicted in all their finery by the Flemish masters of the seventeenth century, this is an image of male status. The domestic appliances at his feet may look dated now, but in 1956 they were cutting-edge and the He-Man is the master of them all. His virility is underlined by the giant Tootsie Pop lolly that he is holding in a phallic position across his groin.
By drawing the eye to the word ‘POP’ on the lolly wrapper, Hamilton was helping to define a new genre: Pop Art. Writing to would-be collaborators in January 1957, he laid out what he believed to be the characteristics of this new movement:
Pop Art is:
Popular (designed for a mass audience)
Transient (short-term solution)
Expendable (easily-forgotten)
Low cost
Mass produced
Young (aimed at youth)
Witty
Sexy
Gimmicky
Glamorous
Big Business
While academics argue about who first came up with the term ‘Pop Art’, most recognise that Just What Is It … was the first work to crystallise the idea in the mind of the wider public. That such an Americanised art would emerge in post-war Britain should be no surprise. Artists working in the US sought to draw attention to everyday objects that most Americans would be familiar with, like Andy Warhol’s soup cans. For those who saw his work in New York galleries, Warhol’s gaudy screen prints of Marilyn Monroe merely underscored how Hollywood had come to represent America to the world. In post-war England, however, Marilyn was a seductive siren, threatening to lure British culture into shallow waters from which it might never escape.
Seen through British eyes in the summer of 1956, Just What Is It … promised a future that was full of exciting new gadgets and attractive people, yet the overall effect was a trashy aesthetic at odds with the cosy conformity which often passed for, if not happiness, then at least contentment in the British advertising that was the equivalent of Hamilton’s American source material. Our housewives were depicted as homely, while theirs looked inviting; our cars had matronly curves, while US autos displayed futuristic fins; and where our businesses stressed their traditional methods, corporate America seems to be not only looking to the future but actively creating it.
On 18 June 1956, while Lonnie Donegan was playing his five-night stand in Detroit backed by the Rock ’n’ Roll Trio, Time magazine devoted a page to rock ’n’ roll, declaring that ‘it does for music what a motorcycle club at full throttle does for a quiet Sunday afternoon’. Among the advertisers in that particular issue were Norton Abrasives, whose two-page ad was captioned ‘A Job That Reaches from Death Valley to Outer Space’; the Continental Can Company, who boldly claimed to ‘open another door on the future of packaging’; and Moraine Products, whose ad for engine bearings depicts a four-lane highway teeming with fast, finned cars. No British ad agency of the time could give such a futuristic dynamic to tin cans, ball bearings and abrasives.
In later years, Hamilton recalled that when the trunk of ephemera that John McHale had collected while studying at the Yale School of Fine Art arrived in the UK – the raw material from which they would construct their exhibit – he and the other members of the group found a collection of Elvis Presley singles interleaved with copies of Mad magazine and were initially unsure if they had just been put in to keep the records from breaking or if they too were part of the treasure. This was culture as cargo cult: young people in the UK waiting for the latest new sounds, images, media or ideas to come from America and grabbing hold of them with both hands, even if they were only packaging.
One of the most vital manifestations of this anti-authoritarian youth culture was the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle, which had drawn huge audiences of teenagers on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, a year later, realising that young people had more spending power than ever before, movie-makers in Hollywood and London were quick to exploit this new market. First out of the traps in the UK was the British production It’s Great to Be Young, which went on general release in May 1956. Following on from his starring role in the most popular British war movie of 1955, The Colditz Story, John Mills plays Mr Dingle, the music master at a suburban grammar school, who encourages his pupils to form a jazz band.
When the crabby old headmaster fires Dingle for inciting enjoyment, the pupils go on strike until he is reinstated. With all of the kids wearing blazers and ties, while the teachers sport black gowns over their suits, this was a million miles from the leather jackets and tight skirts of Blackboard Jungle. The screenplay was by Ted Willis, creator of Dixon of Dock Green, the dialogue was painfully polite and the musical numbers string-drenched and sexless. Humphrey Lyttelton provided the jazz, but the overall effect wouldn’t have upset Terence Rattigan’s Aunt Edna. ‘The first thing that strikes one about this film’, said the bowtie-wearing critic from Pathé News, ‘is that it features a bunch of youngsters who are not crazy, mixed-up kids. The kids in It’s Great to Be Young are only crazy in the riotous sense. That’s what makes it so refreshing.’ That patronising attitude would turn sour within weeks, when riotous kids were suddenly seen as anything but ‘refreshing’.
America’s attempt to cash in on the success of Blackboard Jungle reached these shores in the form of Rock Around the Clock, which opened at the Pavilion Theatre in London on the last weekend of July 1956. But rather than seeking to emulate the menace and drama of its inspiration, its makers simply lifted the thing that most attracted teenage audiences – the music – and built a flimsy script around seventeen pop songs. Tony Martinez and his band play three Latin numbers, African American vocal group the Platters sing two of their great doo-wop ballads, and Freddie Bell and the Bellboys perform their hit ‘Giddy Up a Ding Dong’. The stars of the show are Bill Haley and His Comets, who perform no fewer than nine songs, among them ‘See You Later Alligator’, ‘Rock-a-Beatin’ Boogie’ and the eponymous ‘Rock Around the Clock’, which both opens and closes the movie.
The storyline concerns a promoter who, realising that the big-band sound is passé, books himself into a hotel in a little town in Maine, where he discovers Haley and the Comets performing at the local hop. He then spends the rest of the movie trying to make them successful and so win the hand of the cute girl who runs the hotel. As feeble in its own way as the plot for It’s Great to Be Young, Rock Around the Clock is completely reliant on the music to pull it through. There are no strong teen characters as in Blackboard Jungle or Rebel Without a Cause – the kids in the movie are peripheral to the story. Haley and his band play with vigour, but, from a teenager’s perspective, they look more like your uncles than your mates.
Haley might be playing the new music, but he’s showing his roots. The Comets’ line-up includes a lap steel guitar, a remnant from his days as a cowboy singer, and at one point the keyboard player straps on an accordion. This isn’t the result of a musical alchemy conjured up in Sun Studios by excited southern teenagers. When it was matched to the edgy images of Blackboard Jungle, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had the shock of the new. Seeing Haley and the Comets perform in this movie serves only to remind us that, for all its revolutionary verve, the song was originally written as a novelty foxtrot by Max C. Freedman, a Tin Pan Alley songwriter born in 1893.
British teenagers weren’t aware of this back in 1956. They’d never seen a real rock ’n’ roll band before. Maybe they all featured accordion players? Most were more interested in how American teenagers behaved when listening to the new music – how they danced, what they wore, how they did their hair. None of this information was available from the adult-dominated media of the day. Just to get a glimpse into that world was magical. And the music, so fast! And loud! In most towns in the UK, the sound system in the cinema, though primitive, was bigger than any you might find in a domestic setting or at a concert hall. It had been designed to carry the most intimate sounds of romance and the tumult of war. When Bill Haley came blasting out of the speakers at full volume, it was the closest any of those British kids had ever been to a rock ’n’ roll gig, so they did what came naturally.
Jack Good, who would do much to popularise rock ’n’ roll in Britain as producer of pioneering pop TV such as Six-Five Special and Oh Boy!, witnessed the phenomenon first hand at a screening of Rock Around the Clock. ‘Bill Haley shouted out, “On your marks. Get set. Now ready. Go! Everybody razzle-dazzle!” and with one accord, the audience leapt to its feet and started bopping about in a way I had never in my life seen before! I was looking at the screen and then the audience, back and forth, as though I were at Wimbledon. I was totally bowled over by the simple display of animal force and energy – and I loved it.’
Youthful exuberance was tolerated by the irresponsible uncles and bed-ridden aunts, so long as everyone calmed down and went home when they were told. But these dancing teens were no longer the fun-loving rascals of It’s Great to Be Young. Dancing in the dark to ‘Rock Around the Clock’ cranked up real loud, they felt like the crazy mixed-up kids from Blackboard Jungle, and all they desired was a confrontation with an angry authority figure to make their fantasies complete. It wasn’t long before they got what they wanted.
‘Teddy Boys Jive Brings Police’, reported the Daily Mail on 27 August 1956. ‘Sixty teddy boys danced in the aisles during last night’s showing of the new American jive film Rock Around the Clock at the Shepherd’s Bush Gaumont. They then picked up the protesting cinema manager and carried him into the foyer. Police restored order.’
In the following week, this unruly behaviour followed the movie out into the London suburbs. ‘14 Held in Rock and Roll Riot’, read a headline on the front page of the Daily Mail on 3 September. Police were called to disturbances in Twickenham, Chadwell Heath, Dagenham and West Ham. The next day saw the trouble reach the north, with the Manchester Guardian reporting that seats had been smashed and torn, light bulbs shattered and fire hoses turned on at a cinema in Burnley where Rock Around the Clock was playing. Surveying the damage, the manager, Mr William Howarth, said, ‘I’m surprised and a little shocked. I know this kind of thing has been going on in some cities, but I never expected it to happen in a provincial town like Burnley.’
It wasn’t only Mr Howarth who was shocked. This was a totally new phenomenon. The authorities were used to dealing with popcrazed crowds – thousands had gathered to mob Johnnie Ray – but up until now they had been female. Boys were expected to line up in an orderly fashion for conscription, not jive in the cinemas and smash up the seats. As ever, the Daily Mail knew where to point the finger of blame: ‘[Rock ’n’ roll] is deplorable. It is tribal. And it’s from America. It follows rag-time, blues, Dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder if this is the Negro’s revenge.’
The next weekend only brought more trouble. ‘Rock’n’roll Terrorises a City’, screamed the Mail on Monday 10 September. Having been prohibited from dancing in a Manchester cinema by police who ejected anyone who clapped or stamped their feet, ‘rhythm crazed teenagers jammed the roads by throwing fireworks and jiving in the city centre’s main streets’. The Manchester Guardian headlined the same story with a little less of the Mail’s sensationalism – ‘More Scuffles with Police After Rock’n’Roll Film: Ejections from Cinema Taken Unkindly’.
It was beginning to dawn on the authorities that the teenagers were revelling in their sudden notoriety. ‘Opposite the cinema in the early evening was a newspaper bill, “Manchester Rock’n’roll Rioting: Police Act”,’ the Guardian journalist noted. ‘I watched three teddy boys stand before the bill like film stars examining photographs of themselves and shouting, “That’s us, brother. That’s us.”’ The article pointed out that other cinemas in Manchester had shown the movie for a week with only a little ‘audience participation’. Maybe it was the lurid headlines that had stirred up copy-cat trouble?
When fourteen defendants, ten of them juveniles, appeared before the magistrate following the Manchester disturbances, one seventeen-year-old youth complained that when he had seen the film on the first Sunday it was shown, there had been no ‘larking about’. The trouble spread, he claimed, when the newspapers started reporting it. Levying fines on ten of the participants, the stipendiary magistrate, Mr F. Bancroft Turner, lamented that ‘it would have been much better if the police had been allowed to deal with you in a way which would have given you real cause to rock and roll around a bit’.
In an effort to analyse what was going on, the Daily Express sent a team of journalists and a Harley Street psychiatrist to view Rock Around the Clock. Under the banner headline ‘This Crazy Summer’s Weirdest Craze’, and amid the usual dismissive jibes about ‘jungle music’ and ‘maladjusted, primitive people’, George Gale made an astute observation when he commented that the film ‘wouldn’t raise the temperature of wintering Eskimos more than half a degree centigrade’. Surprisingly, these ‘experts’ came out five to one against banning the film.
The Express also took the trouble to interview two ‘rock ’n’ rollers’ who had been fined following disturbances at a cinema in Peckham. Tony Scullion, aged twenty-one, recalled that ‘when they got to “See You Later, Alligator” I just signalled to the boys and we went out in the aisles. After that, I didn’t hear much music. We were jiving and stomping – even when they cut the film.’ Kenneth Gear, aged eighteen, explained why things boiled over: ‘We couldn’t dance properly inside the cinema so we went on dancing when we got outside. There must have been four or five hundred of us in the street. I’ve never felt so excited in my life.’
My mother’s youngest sister, Christine D’Urso, was a teenager living in Harold Hill in Essex in 1956 and spent weekends jiving to Bill Haley and Elvis Presley at a local dance hop called the Shack. With her then boyfriend, now husband, Dave Mutton, she went to see Rock Around the Clock at the Gaumont in Romford during the first week of release. ‘We queued up to get in and there was a bloody riot,’ recalls Dave. ‘The film was on and everybody was jiving in the aisles and then some idiot turned the fire hose on us. They pulled it out of the wall and just let it go. Everyone was diving for cover.’
The phenomenon reached its peak on Tuesday 11 September, two days after the disturbances in Manchester, when a mob of over a thousand youths jived in the streets of the south London district of Elephant and Castle. Trouble began at around 10.40 p.m., following the final screening of Rock Around the Clock at the Trocadero Cinema in the New Kent Road. According to the Daily Mail, three hundred police officers were required to quell the riotous behaviour. The Times reported that bottles and fireworks were thrown and four shop windows smashed. It was claimed that jiving teenagers held up the traffic on nearby Tower Bridge.
In just ten days, boisterous teenagers had brought rock ’n’ roll to the attention of an outraged general public. Following the widely reported disturbances in Manchester and south London, the authorities began to fight back. Across the UK, dozens of town councils banned Rock Around the Clock from being screened, seeing it as a threat to public order. A more common tactic was to remove the film from screens on Sundays. It was felt that on Saturdays, the rowdy element tended to gravitate towards football matches and dancehalls, whereas on Sunday night, there was nowhere else for them to go except to the picture house. Mr R. C. Wetherill, general manager of the Gaiety Cinema in Manchester, where unrest had broken out the previous Sunday, seemed unperturbed by the trouble caused by the film, telling the Manchester Guardian that he had booked Rock Around the Clock for the next three weeks. ‘Even without Sunday, it’s the best business we’ve had for five years.’
The Cinema Exhibitors’ Association, whose profits had been dented by the introduction of a second, commercial TV channel in 1955, protested that the trouble had been stirred up by the papers. ‘The press have offered a challenge to the teddy boys by the publicity they are giving them,’ complained Mr A. Rockett.
Now that rock ’n’ roll was in the public consciousness, the newspapers sought to undermine its popularity among teenagers by involving Establishment figures. Reports began to appear about aristocrats dancing to Bill Haley. Sir Malcolm Sargent made reference to ‘roll and rock’ while conducting at the Last Night of the Proms, and it was claimed that the Queen had asked for Rock Around the Clock to be shown to the royal family while they holidayed at Balmoral. An editorial in The Times tried to offer some perspective: ‘Much of the hooliganism has drawn strength from an atmosphere not unlike that which rouses undergraduates after bump suppers and others on Guy Fawkes night. This is not to excuse some of the recent incidents, but merely to suggest that too much can be made of them.’
Teenagers dancing outside the Gaiety Cinema following a showing of Rock Around the Clock, Manchester, 21 September 1956
To reassure the British public that they were not alone in being confronted by jiving youths, reports began to appear of rock ’n’ roll-related disturbances in other countries. Singapore banned Rock Around the Clock on the grounds that it debased true Chinese culture. Six hundred Norwegian youths clashed with baton-wielding police when the film was shown in Oslo. It led to divisions between Sikhs and Muslims in a Bombay cinema. ‘Rowdyism’ was reported at screenings in the West German city of Duisberg, where the police dismissed the teenagers as ‘die Halbstarken’ – literally, the half-strongs, or hooligans. The Manchester Guardian noted that parents in America had ‘rejoiced when they learned that teenagers in Manchester had wrecked a cinema under the inspiring influence of “Rock Around the Clock” … We are all in the same boat it is gladly believed. Not only American kids are crazy.’
A new generation had announced its arrival with a bang, the first explosion of a pop culture that would hold sway for the next sixty years – not that anyone realised this at the time. D. W. Brogan, a Scottish academic born in 1900, concluded an article in the Manchester Guardian on ‘the rationale of rock ’n’ roll’ by championing the songs of his own youth: ‘We sang “Tea for Two” and “Avalon” and in Boston they have revived “Does Your Mother Know You’re Out, Cecilia?” Who will sing “Blue Suede Shoes” ten years from now?’