Teddy Boys

A group known as ‘Teddy Boys’ or ‘Edwardians’ became prevalent in the early 1950s in the South and West areas of London. They were a ‘dandified’ street gang – they dressed extravagantly and posed defiantly, making them popular subjects for the growing media and television industry of 1950s Britain. They became a media folk devil; the media vilified them and spread their image so that soon, the Teddy Boy was a nationwide teenage style and the first post war subculture, going beyond the original metropolitan gangs.

Despite being inner-city working class youth, they wore expensive Edwardian ‘Ted’ suits designed for wealthy city gentlemen in the early 1950s, or the ‘drape’ jackets favoured by the growing number of rock and roll stars in the USA.  One magazine carried the following headline: Teenage Terrorists – Absurd but Deadly, in 1954.

The Teddy Boy image sent a powerful message; the wearing of upper class clothes by working class youths was an incredibly defiant act. This exaggerated way of dressing made them an easy target for the media; they were constantly teased and discredited for wearing such nice clothes. Ridiculed often, a caricature of a Teddy Boy as a ‘monkey in a drape’ was printed in the Brighton Evening Argus in 1954. This clearly portrays how the general public perceived them at this time.