When mods weren't Mods: reading Peter Willmott, playing records and dreaming of a lost East End

I've been meaning to read Peter Willmott's sociology classic Adolescent Boys Of East London since well before I myself became a (non-adolescent) resident of east London (back in 2000), but, somehow, it's taken me about 30 years to actually get around to it. Well now I have - got around to it, and read it. To me it's interesting on all sorts of levels, including the fact that - as a nearby Hackney resident - I regularly stomp through Bethnal Green (the location of Willmott's study) taking photos, buying overpriced secondhand records and ... generally being a semi-annoying over-opinionated middle class geek. To state the obvious: I ain't no working class Londoner (still less a Cockney), but I like to think I can appreciate well-researched stuff about people who predate me in the area, people who've also been the subject of enormous national condescension and even a bit of self-created cor-blimey-guvnor mythologising. The period covered by the book is 1959-64 and altogether it makes for a fascinating socio-cultural time capsule.

Teenage kicks in the East End : Willmott's book 

Anyway, this blog is my quick take on Adolescent Boys as seen through the usual highly reductive Niluccio on noise music lens. Yes, man - some extremely random music matters wilfully appropriated from Willmott's admirable study of the lives and mores of east London's long-lost youth tribe. Here goes:

*The book regularly quotes the boys/young men (aged between 12-20) mentioning records, local live band nights and dancing. Numerous of the older boys say things about going to jazz clubs "up West" (central London), or how they catch groups at thriving local youth clubs (a distinctly 50s-60s thing it seems) or at places like the Blue Beat Club in Mare Street (up into my patch in Hackney). 

*The economy of Bethnal Green had apparently been adjusting to the new tastes and spending habits of young people with a bit of cash to splash. There are pubs putting on "guitar groups" attracting beered-up 17-year-olds "shouting to make themselves heard to music so loud it makes the floorboards shake". And the local shops include record shops ("with their displays of brightly-coloured LP sleeves") and clothes shops offering teen gear such as Wrangler jeans, "Hippy Hippy Hipsters" and Italian shoes ("Lugano's latest styles from Italy"). 

*Staying with Italy, scooters also feature quite heavily. Some kids have them to show off to girls ("birds") and use them to go for jaunts to Southend or Brighton. And apparently it's even a thing to steal them to get home at night if you're stranded or just feeling lazy. One boy in the study (Kevin James, 17) apparently spent the majority of his money on "his scooter, records, and clothes". Willmott says that after James had finished talking to him for the book he waved and immediately zoomed off on his scooter "wearing sunglasses".  

*One piece of language that slightly threw me was several people in the book criticising others for being "young mods", apparently meaning something like "uncouth youngsters". When talking about youth clubs, one respondent says, "I packed it up because you used to get loads of young mods there. They get on your nerves". Another says, "I go to the jazz clubs up the West End. The youth clubs are too dull. You get too many young mods there". These are not, I'm presuming, Parka-and-desert-boot Mods with a capital "M". Anyway, I think it's the sole bit of yuff argot that went over my head in the entire book.  

*Bethnal Green apparently also had its share of record-buying music super-enthusiasts. One of Willmott's respondents talks about how he spent one particular Sunday evening visiting a friend of his in Bow called Jack who "collects the same sort of records as I do - folk-music and blues". He evidently "played records and talked" for the duration of his visit. Another 15-year-old boy rather touchingly writes in his diary about how he spent one evening at home with his mother, during which he "had a talk with her, and played some records - my rhythm and blues and her classical records". 

*And though in a very small minority (just four boys out of 246 in Willmott's chosen sample), there are even artistically-inclined "rebel" characters (Willmott's categorisation) such as a certain 19-year-old called Robert Young who evidently played Billie Holiday and Miles Davis records at home in his flat. His interview for the book includes these memorable comments:

"They [his parents] couldn't understand me in a hundred years. Like most ordinary East End people, their idea of living is to have a steady job and settle down with a nice little wife and a nice little house or flat, doing the same thing every day of your life. They think the sorts of things I do are mad ... I might decide to take the day off and go up the park and sit and meditate. Or go round my friends pad for an all-night session. A group of us drink whisky and smoke tea [marijuana] and talk about what's happiness and things like that ... it may seem sinful to some people. But we're just young people who like to enjoy ourselves and forget about the Bomb."

Blimey, in Willmott's book it's not all royalism, family values and tough nut Eastenders propping up the bar. In fact, though it's formulated in a super-cautious, semi-scientific way, Willmott's cool sociological analysis of lives being lived through the testimony of the protagonists themselves is something of a low-key mythbuster when it comes to the stuff we've been force-fed about post-war east London over the years (the Krays, Babs Windsor, lots of two-dimensional TV characters spouting stuff like "me old mum, I call her the Duchess" ...). Yes, there are still plenty of extended families (we get frequent references to aunts and uncles living nearby) and the class system-reinforcing education system (secondary modern/comprehensive/grammar) was clearly designed to churn out fodder for the area's numerous small factories and workshops. And yes, there's undoubtedly poverty - overcrowded and extremely old, unsanitary housing are mentioned. But so too are new council flats, with spacious rooms and gleaming early-sixties appliances. In 1951, says Willmott, under a quarter of households in the district had a bathroom; ten years later almost half did - still shockingly low, but a vast improvement in ten years. On East End machismo, here again Willmott's book undercuts the stereotype. One 16-year-old says, "Round here, you've only got to look the wrong way to get your head punched in. They're fucking tough, mate", while another 16-year-old talks about getting into a fight with someone who "was going around saying I was a cunt". But underneath the braggadocio Willmott shows us that serious fighting was rare and inter-gang violence almost unheard of. Then as now, "gangs" were an obsession of the media, the police and anyone else succeptible to moral panics. The rather less flashy Bethnal Green reality was that there were simply groups of mates who'd known each through school, youth clubs and work - they showed off, occasionally brawled, but violence wasn't remotely a generalised phenomenon.      

In the end, Willmott's excellent book shows the old coexisting alongside the new. The "old Bethnal Green" of traditional choruses "sung in the pubs on Saturday nights" (think post-war Liverpool and Terence Davies' Distance Voices, Still Lives) still lived on. Only presumably the 17-year-old sons and daughters from these familes weren't there - they were off raving at one of the local pubs where the publicans had started booking guitar groups pretending to be the Shadows or the Beatles. There's a fair bit of generational strife (Robert Young with his hippie-ish distance from his trad parents, another who says his parents complained that he spent too much money on records), but it's not especially marked. If anything, there seems to be quite good intergenerational harmony considering how fast things were changing (I'm assuming smaller family sizes, a fairly plentiful supply of jobs and a reasonably well-functioning social security system were all helping). No, this isn't a story of Dickensian squalor or of corny Albert Square chancers. When I first launched into the book it took me a little while to fully appreciate how "adjacent" to my own background these seemingly far-off adolescent lives actually were. These boys were teenagers only a decade-and-a-half before my own teenage years. The Bethnal Green kids often mention going to Victoria Park (on their bikes, fishing, "looking for girls") and it's only a few years later that the Clash are headling the big Rock Against Racism concert in the same location - two worlds (almost) colliding. Robert Young was worried about the bomb back then, and not so long afterwards I would be sporting my own little CND badge and reading antiwar stuff on the inserts to Crass records. Books like Willmott's are a necessary corrective to all the received myths and nonsense about a time and place like 1950s-60s east London. If they're still alive, the adolescents of Willmott's book would now be old geezers pushing 80. If I bump into any of them next time I'm in Bethnal Green I'm tempted to politely ask, "Can I come round to your house to listen to records ...?"