Absolutely. And there were always racetrack gangs — in the 1920s and ’30s, the dodgy people who would make money out of the business of horse racing. Gambling at racetracks was legal in the 1930s, but there were all sorts of dodges. Graham Greene’s wonderful novel Brighton Rock is about the racetrack gangs. They played dirty, carried razors, sometimes carried guns, and they were dressed flash. They had to have disposable income in order to do that.
The difference after World War II was that it wasn’t people outside the law wearing flash clothes. Actually, while the press made out like they were another dodgy gang, the reason the Teds had extra cash was quite the opposite: Britain after the war had nearly full employment.
If you take a huge group of working-age men and send them to war to die, and then you also lose a lot of civilians in the bombing, that’s a large chunk of the workforce gone. So when the 1950s started, the country ended up in a situation that employers generally never want to see happen, which was basically full employment. I’ve spoken to a lot of people, including relatives of mine, and it’s an absolute fact that you could leave school at fifteen and walk straight into a job the first Monday morning. And it would be a well-paid job, because if the employer didn’t treat you well, you could tell the employer exactly where to get off at lunchtime and walk around the corner and get a new job by one o’clock in the afternoon. The wages had to be high enough to keep people happy.
While the press made out like they were another dodgy gang, the reason the Teds had extra cash was quite the opposite: Britain after the war had nearly full employment.
So they had money. They spent it on dancing, going to the cinema three or four nights a week, and hanging out in coffee bars. And they could go and pay the equivalent of, say, several hundred pounds these days on a jacket and some trousers. Imagine getting bespoke clothing when…
Auteur: Max Décharné
