Mods, Rockers and Bank Holiday Mayhem Timeshift

It's March 30th, 1964,

and the great British public is shaken out of its Bank Holiday slumber by alarming news.

# If you want to have A whole lot of fun

# Go out and get it... #

Headlines describe how Clacton, a small resort on the East Coast,

has been torn apart over Easter by marauding, violent youths.

-Some fights are justifiable, are they?

-Oh, yes.

There's just no other way out, except fighting.

# You gotta get it. #

This was Britain's first introduction to the presence of two warring factions -

the mods and the rockers.

It proved just the beginning.

Trouble flared again at Whitsun - the late Spring Bank Holiday.

This time, in Brighton, Margate and Bournemouth.

And continued throughout the summer,

as other towns witnessed similar skirmishes.

It became pretty...

more than violent. It became quite frightening, actually.

It fascinated the media...

..appalled the establishment...

If it were possible to disqualify them

from driving these scooters, or motorbikes,

it's what they use to get here to indulge in this riotous behaviour.

..and troubled an older generation.

The police have done everything possible to stop this damage

and the ill-mannered behaviour

on the part of these hoodlums that come here.

Could this really be happening in England?

They were doing it on the beaches

that, only 20 years earlier, Churchill had sworn to defend.

Why would you do that?

But everything wasn't quite as it seemed.

We're talking about £513 worth of damage.

Not much more than they would expect on any bank holiday.

So what really happened? Who were these "folk devils"?

We were all little devils at that time.

We turned the world upside down

by bringing colour into everybody's life. And music.

I just felt, "We're taking over the world."

You know, "We're taking over the world."

And why were they seen to be such a threat to society?

MUSIC: "In Crowd" by Ramsey Lewis

Back at the start of 1964,

in a BBC documentary about the changing nature of south London,

a teenage interviewee described

how he felt part of a divided generation.

Teenagers come into three categories.

There's mods, there's rockers and there's in-betweens.

Myself, I reckon a rocker,

a fella who runs around in a leather jacket, boots and a pair of jeans.

He does what he likes, when he likes and how he likes.

A mod, well, comes up, wears a suit, wears a tie, wears a collar.

Latest hairstyle, latest fashions.

Goes to the latest dancing, learns the latest dancing,

just likes to be modern - a mod.

Although their differences were about to become infamous,

both groups were born out of a particularly optimistic time in British history,

especially if you were young.

They were the first baby boomers,

who became teenagers in the late '50s and early '60s,

just as the economy was gearing up after years of post-war austerity.

-MAN'S VOICE:

-Ladies' hats, coats and dresses on your right.

Babywear, childrenswear on your left. Shoes straight across.

And as young people came to the forefront of this new consumer boom,

they quickly became the object of media fascination.

-And how much do you spend a week?

-Spend?

Well, at the most it's usually about a pound, 30 shillings.

What does that go on?

I take the girl to the pictures, or go out to a dance.

If I see anything I like, I buy clothes.

-How much spending money would you have?

-About a pound.

-And what does it go on?

-Dancing, mostly!

There was a piece of market research produced in the late '50s

by Mark Abrams.

His research purported to show that young people's spending power,

he claimed, had grown by 100%,

representing a figure of something in the order of £580 million per year.

This teenage spending spree helped create the stirrings

of a brand-new youth sub-culture - the mods.

Couldn't wait to get out of school.

On the very last day of school,

we just all threw away the uniforms,

and, on the very next day, I was a mod.

# ..charm a girl dreams about

# And when he looks at me Makes my heart jump and shout... #

At first, they were few in number

and still to be properly defined as a group.

But what they had in common was an almost compulsive desire

to embrace the new and to stand out from the crowd.

In 1960, I had my 13th birthday

and it was like the sun had come up.

It was a completely new decade

and there were so many new things coming out.

Something happened inside my head and everything changed.

This aspirational group were rapidly turning their backs on British working-class tradition

and instead looking for inspiration from America and Europe.

I loved the Italian and French fashion.

That was the look, I was... You know, always, like, making up.

And when I met Del, he liked the same things,

so we were doing that together.

People used to say, "What's this look that you're wearing?"

And we said, "You know, it's the Continental look,

"so we're the Continentalists."

After a while, more and more people were getting that sort of Italian-French look

and then it became the mod look.

# You've seen a new look

# And you've heard a new sound

# Now the Continental Walk Is in your town...

# Let's do the Continental Walk

# Get up, everybody... #

But these young stylists were constantly battling

against a clothing trade that had yet to really move on since the war.

The only suits you could see around Britain at the time

were the demob suit. Really grey and baggy and almost like sack-like.

And they would see in these magazines from Italy,

these beautiful, crisp, lightweight suits

in linen or a mohair.

And it just looked so glamorous.

-# Hey, you're looking good, baby

-# Walk, walk, walk

-# I want you to know

-# Walk, walk, walk... #

We would go and see French films in cinemas.

We would look at the clothes, get some ideas of what to do

and then find an English copy.

# You've got it made

# Keep strolling with your babe... #

People would often, in the early days,

go to Burton's and they were very much an old person's,

stuck-in-the-mud, regimented tailoring business.

When you've got young people in, asking for,

"Right, I want a certain cut with no turn-ups," for instance,

it was a shock.

They couldn't believe that people didn't want turn-ups.

There are even tales of some saying they don't want lapels.

And sometimes they were even refused.

Until this time, getting a suit made

had been largely the preserve of the older, middle- or upper-class gent.

But this new style-conscious group

weren't about to settle for off-the-peg blandness.

I was making all of my clothes.

And Del was designing his suits and then I'd sketch them for him.

And then we'd head off to Birmingham

and we would go to Hepworths, the tailor's,

and he'd have them all made to measure.

It was really important to look individual.

# Come on

# Come on Let me show you where it's at

# Come on

# Come on Let me show you where it's at

# Come on... #

To keep ahead of the game,

early mods took any opportunity they could to acquire a new look.

You just went to a bowling alley out of London,

you wore their shoes, the bowling shoes. "Oh, they're nice. They looked really good."

So the next time you went,

you took a pair of old trainers each, put them on.

And I got mine home and they were the wrong size.

Suddenly, everybody is down bowling alleys nicking the shoes.

# Now, you take Sally And I'll take Sue

# And we're gonna rock away... #

Style was central to the mod world,

but it was about more than simply the cut of your clothes.

It was a whole way of life and a departure from the past.

It was a look. It was a feeling.

It was freedom, to a certain extent,

and it was rebellion.

# Come on Let me show you where it's at... #

I think my look was very unusual at the time,

especially in the area where I lived,

because everybody really was wearing much the same clothes as their mothers had worn.

My mother used to hate it.

She used to say, "When are you going to get some normal clothes?"

One mod said,

"We were trying to get away from the council estates,

"the pits and the factories. All that cloth-capped bullshit."

In other words, it was a different way of being working class.

But, at the same time, there was another group of working-class youth

loudly asserting themselves - the rockers.

# Well, I've lived an evil life Or so they say

# But I'll hide from the devil On judgment day

# I say, move, hot rod Move, man

# Move, hot rod Move, man

# Move, hot rod Move me down the line. #

It's called Race With The Devil - Gene Vincent.

We were all little devils in that time.

-NEWSREEL:

-With a fine weekend, a powerful motorbike

and a girlfriend on the back,

the ton-up boys set off.

Two short days for riding high and fast,

to wind and weave,

and often to be a menace.

The ton-up boys, those guys were like an era before us.

We were a different breed.

Here we are, the star of the picture!

During the 1950s, it was common to use terms like ton-up boys,

cafe racers.

The term rocker really comes into usage in the early 1960s.

# Oh

# I've got a girl And her name is Jane

# All the kids call... #

We were definitely rockers.

Yeah, just a crowd of kids, you know, having fun.

# She jumps, giggles and shouts

-# Go!

-Jumps, giggles and shouts. #

Rockers were synonymous with rock and roll music,

though, surprisingly, their name was more mechanical in origin.

The word "rocker" came from the

overhead valve system on an engine.

The rocker boxes and the rocker arms that work the valves.

The image of the rocker was more rooted

in the sort of teenage culture of the 1950s -

of The Wild One, of jeans and leather jackets.

# He wore black denim trousers And motorcycle boots

# And a black leather jacket With an eagle on the back

# He had hopped-up cycle That took off like a gun

# That fool was the terror Of Highway 101. #

We'd all have white silk scarves

and we'd wrap them round our mouths

and we'd have sea-boot socks that we turned over at the top of our boots

and they had to be perfectly white.

If you got muck on them, you'd got to get them washed.

You'd got to have a leather jacket -

a black, Lancer-type leather jacket, preferably.

The ones that everybody wanted was the Lewis Leathers.

Lewis Leathers was one of the country's oldest motorcycle outfitters

and they were keen to make the most of the growing teenage market.

So, in 1956, Lewis Leathers introduced the Bronx jacket.

It kind of had the looks of the Marlon Brando jacket

from America of the time,

although it was actually an update of a 1930 flying jacket

that we used to make, with the big D-pocket,

which initially was used for maps.

The Bronx had special features,

which were not featured on the American jackets of the day.

One was the buckle - instead of being pressed steel,

or brass, like the American ones,

we used plastic-coated or often leather-coated buckles.

When used during a forward riding position,

stretched out over the tank,

it wouldn't actually scratch the paint on the gas tank.

It's a stylish jacket, it fitted well. This was all very important.

You don't want a jacket that is going to be too loose on the bike,

because it balloons, the air gets inside it,

so it had to be close-fitting.

It had to be functional - good, strong leather,

so that if you did come off, you would protect your skin.

But why not look good at the same time?

# Well, well, It just ain't right

# But if only they knew... #

The young rockers liked to personalise their jackets

and more and more adornments became available to satisfy this need

for individual expression.

We saw badges, patches and studs becoming available from 1960.

I could always find space for another badge.

And, of course, I had Triumph tank badges as lapels.

They were quite heavy.

That jacket used to weigh a tonne.

It was so heavy, with so many badges on,

I think, at the final count, I think there were 380 badges on there.

The studding was quite an interesting detail.

Some people have said that the reason for it, particularly on the back,

was that when you were riding at night,

the studs would reflect the car headlights.

I've seen so many guys who have gone down the road on their back.

Studs get red-hot when they slide along the road, believe it or not.

And you end up with all, like, cigarette burns all over you.

The rockers' look might have been influenced by America,

but it was British motorbikes that were at the centre of their world.

I bought quite a few nice bikes.

Started off with the Ariel.

Just before my 16th birthday, it was a C11G,

a red and black one, and it was absolute rubbish!

Got my first bike when I was still at school.

I actually went to school on it.

A little Tiger Cub.

And then, when I was old enough, I got a Gold Star -

the dream bike I always wanted.

And the most beautiful bike at the time was the 3TA,

which was the Triumph 21. Stunning. Stunning pale blue.

That made me whole, that made me complete, you know!

Thanks to the passion and spending power of these young rockers,

the British bike industry was booming again

at a time when the arrival of the affordable car

might have put it out of business.

-NEWSREEL:

-Britain has been building motorcycles for nearly 70 years.

Today, the industry employs more than 70,000 people

and turns out over 100,000 machines a year.

These teenagers loved the bikes,

but it didn't them stop wanting to put their own mark on them.

The first thing you used to do was get a brush pole and ram it

down your silencer to smash the baffles away.

-Yeah.

-To make it louder.

-The louder, the better.

-Yeah.

The mudguards came off, you put alloy mudguards on.

The handle bars came off, you put clip-ons on,

which are handlebars which are down the forks,

so you're more lying on it than anything else.

Anything to make it look faster, even if it wasn't.

ENGINE REVS

The rockers had their British motorbikes...

..but the mods were mobile, too,

and for them, when it came to two wheels,

only something with continental styling would do.

Back in the early '60s,

Claude Agius worked in his father's scooter shop,

and had his own, which is still cherished to this day.

This is my GS 116, which I purchased in 1963.

It was adorned with these extras,

which were purchased from a good importer -

Nannucci, from Italy, which were the best to buy.

Did all my courting on this.

I didn't have the fox tail.

In those days, well, I had knickers - girls' knickers on there.

Two or three, if I was lucky enough!

When the girls knew that you had the scooter, you know,

you had to be very ugly not to pull a bird.

To be a mod, do you have to have a motor scooter?

-Oh, no!

-You don't HAVE to.

No, you don't HAVE to. But, I mean, you know,

you see a bloke on a motor scooter, you just go, "Ah!"

It was hire purchase, it was from a shop on Old Kent Road.

It was a Vespa.

It had a great sound.

To me, the sound of the Vespa is like a Ferrari.

ENGINE REVS

We used to class them as sewing machines.

There was no respect for a scooter.

It was a tin can that used to make a horrible noise going up the road.

In those days, we used to put carriers on our scooters,

like this one.

There were people with much more mirrors and lamps than this,

but this is what my style was like.

That's a Rolls-Royce Flying Angel.

We used to, unfortunately, steal them,

or buy them from people who stole them.

Mods were into looking good going slow. We were into going fast.

Two different philosophies, really.

But it wasn't just speed that defined them.

The two groups represented radical social shifts in '60s society.

The rockers were almost like a throwback to a working-class culture of the past.

They were rooted in traditional notions of kind of machismo.

Whereas the mods, if you like,

were an exploration of a kind of new working-class culture.

An exploration of a new working-class consumerism and hedonism.

They might have been philosophically opposed, but both were benefiting

from an increased sense of freedom brought by the new decade.

Unlike their older brothers,

neither mods, nor rockers, were required to do National Service

and, as a result, a pronounced generation gap was opening up

between them and those just a couple of years older.

Left, right! Left!

To the left!

The abolition of National Service is crucial to understanding

the genesis of modern British youth culture.

Young British men didn't have to submit to military authority.

We were lucky, my generation,

that we missed joining the Army.

There was a guy across the road, he was really Jack the lad,

and he went in there. When he came out, he came out an arsehole.

He had a real stiff lip, follow orders, march down the street.

You know, he was just like... It had changed his personality.

And that I didn't want to happen to me.

Drill fosters in you

team spirit, alertness, pride in your unit

and pride in yourself. Also...

What the teenagers in the middle '50s would do

is just basically copy their parents.

And then they'd go into the Army.

And they'd come out of the Army

and they'd made their girlfriend pregnant, they got married,

had children and they became blue-collar workers.

Now this brings me onto a point of personal cleanliness.

The kids had this freedom.

All of a sudden, they're thinking about really basic things, like colour.

Does the colour suit me?

I don't like red on me, anyway.

And all of a sudden, the people who had given them this freedom

said, "Whoa, slow down, hold on!"

The sense of empowerment didn't stop there.

The older generation could only look on and watch as their children

started to overtake them when it came to earning ability.

When I first started work, at the age of 14,

I was unloading barges of timber

and getting 11 and 9 a week, for a 47-hour week.

Well, my daughter, she's earning more than I am today,

so that just gives you some idea.

-# That's what I want

-That's what I want... #

The job market was buoyant

and young people had the freedom to pick and choose.

The education of youngsters was a lot better.

The apprenticeship schemes had started working.

I was lucky enough to get an apprenticeship.

-# That's what I want

-# That's what I want

# That's what I want! #

Whether you wanted a full-time job or a part-time job,

there was enough work for everybody, there was enough money to go round.

As a 15-year-old, I had 15 jobs in the first year I left school,

which is ridiculous, these days,

but there was a lot of work around for kids,

so there was no shortage of cash, if you like, although it wasn't a lot.

# Money don't get everything It's true

# But what it don't get I can't use

-# I need money

-That's what I want. #

A new world of opportunity had opened up.

But it still didn't make the working-class teenager of the '60s cash rich.

When we say that these people are affluent, that they've got money,

this is in relative terms.

Compared to their working-class parents, they've got money.

But they can't buy Ferraris,

they can't go on holiday in the south of France.

They have enough to buy some consumer goods.

And larger items, like a motorcycle, like leather jackets, whatever,

would have to be done on the never-never, on hire purchase.

# I'm burning too much gas We gotta slow down. #

But the fact that they could make these large purchases at all

was raising a few hackles.

Consumerism is bothering people,

people are beginning to worry about this new materialism

and the people that seemed to epitomise it most are young people.

And it was the leather-clad rocker rather than smartly-dressed mod

who bore the brunt of this unease.

The motorcycle becomes increasingly

the preserve of, A, the working classes, and, B, young people.

And those are two worrying groups for the powers that be,

for the establishment.

Because we wear a leather jacket, jeans and that,

we're described as bad.

Everybody runs us down, they want to control our lives.

The police want to run our lives.

The biker image of the powerful motorcycle

and the leather jacket courted criticism

and was a kind of deliberate affront to respectable morality.

But I think that is kind of what young people were trying to do.

Part of the appeal was the ability

to wave two fingers at conservative authority.

# Hey, get rhythm... #

Finding themselves unwelcome at many city-centre establishments,

the rockers looked for their own places to hang out -

preferably on a main road, so they could show off their own bikes

and admire other people's.

# Get rhythm When you get the blues

# A little shoeshine boy He never gets low down... #

Almost lived there, every night, at Chelsea Bridge.

That was our meeting place. It was a feeling that you're a big family.

You were not looked upon as the best of people, let's put it that way.

As soon as you put a leather jacket on,

you were sort of slightly, um, outcasts.

# A jumping rhythm Makes you feel so fine... #

And the transport caffs that line main roads up and down the country

became the natural home for these outcasts.

I was just saying to my wife the other day, whenever I hear Telstar,

it always reminds me of being in a caff at Matlock.

Music: "Telstar" by The Tornados

Far-thinking owners, such as the Ace, the Cellar in Windsor,

that was another one, so that's where we used to congregate,

away from the maddening crowds of the average man in the car.

The early '60s also saw a proliferation of biker clubs

all over Britain, where like-minded people could get together.

They provided rockers with the tribal sense of belonging.

-NEWSREEL:

-The Double Zero Club is exclusively for motorcyclists in Birmingham.

It is run ostensibly by the members themselves.

In Nottingham, there were the Aces.

It was just a group of lads who got together

and started calling themselves the Aces.

And like all great rocker gangs,

they marked themselves out with a shared insignia.

It just started one Saturday afternoon.

We went and bought some Fablon

and then we got saucers from the caff

and drew round the ace shape

and just cut them out and stuck them on our jackets.

So, then, we all had them on.

The only problem with that - what we'd not realised at the time was -

it advertised to the police who we were,

because we'd all got white aces stuck on our backs!

That's true, yeah.

Being so identifiable was a disadvantage

when, essentially, life was about one thing -

speed.

# Yeah, it's Saturday night And I just got paid

# I'm a fool about my money Don't try to save

# My heart says, "Go, go, have a time"

# Cos it's Saturday night And I'm feeling fine

# I want a rock it up

# I'm gonna rip it up

# I'm gonna to shake it up... #

All the bikers wanted to achieve was a ton, which was 100mph.

Very few people achieved it, although they said that they did.

If you showed 100 mile an hour on your speedo,

there's a good chance you're doing about 85.

I genuinely did it - I didn't need to exaggerate!

# I'm going to rock it up

# I'm going to rip it up

# I'm going to shake it up... #

You could do a ton almost anywhere and not get caught,

because who's going to catch you?

First of all, the police couldn't anyway!

Outside urban areas, there were no speed limits on British roads,

so, despite the disapproval they might attract,

there was nothing to dampen the rockers' fun.

# I'm going to rip it up... #

The freedom to ride and feel the wind in your face.

You know, just go where you pleased.

# I'm going to rock it up

# And ball tonight. #

Whilst the rockers were an obvious affront to the powers that be,

the mods were busy creating a new scene,

one that, as yet, was only attracting the attention

of other like-minded people.

# Oh, now tell me Where can you party, child

-# All night long?

-In the basement

-#

-Down in the basement

-Yeah... #

The ballrooms were the breeding ground of the mod movement.

There was Hammersmith Palais, there was the Lyceum in London.

You could just feel the excitement in there,

listening to a record you'd never heard before

by somebody you didn't know.

Life just seemed very exhilarating, from 13.

We thought we were special, we thought we was different.

It was having a good time.

It was really, basically, having a wonderful time.

The mods were growing in force in the underage dance clubs

operated by the big ballrooms.

# I'm gonna put on my dress... #

And to go there and dance. But not dancing like your parents,

with tangos and waltzes that my mum did.

It was doing our own dancing.

I can remember the swim, which was like that and, obviously,

which came from America.

I remember watching somebody and they made this move like that

and I thought, "I want to do that!" And it took hours!

Hours to get it perfected.

But we made up one like that where we'd go over like that.

And someone else would go like that, that you were dancing with.

It was based on cricket, you know.

The boys were real posers. I think they cared more than the women.

They were the peacocks and they performed.

There were lots of different poses, like legs apart,

arms behind your back.

There was this one, you know.

There was another one with the fag down by you, which was a bit camp,

with a fag down in your hand like that.

And girls used to dance together, of course.

And men used to dance on their own.

Occasionally, you might get a dance with a man,

only if you were good enough to come up to his standards, of course.

They were also discovering a new sound to dance to.

And my first record, I loved to death, was Doris Troy, Just One Look.

# Just one look

# And I fell so hard... #

To me, the most important thing was music.

That was my first love.

Really, rhythm and blues, black music from America.

# With you

# Oh-oh... #

At the time, this kind of music was virtually unknown in Britain,

outside the mod clique.

# How good it feels... #

But their world was growing and more and more club nights opened up,

allowing mods to dance to imported R&B music.

# Your love... #

The venues were unlicensed

and several stayed open until the early hours.

So, for some, sleep wasn't an option.

Drugs were very much part of the scene - amphetamines,

uppers and all the rest of it. It was just the same then.

We'd go out, take a few purple hearts,

or bombers, or Dexedrine, whatever, to keep us going through the night.

When you go down the West End of a Saturday night,

and you stay up all night, you've just got to take them to keep awake.

How many purple hearts do you need to stay up all night?

Well, 20 to 30.

But they weren't illegal. There were no drugs laws then.

And you could only get arrested for stolen goods from a chemist.

But, of course, everybody would say, "I'm fat," at the doctor's

and they'd give you amphetamines.

So they were everywhere.

Have you any idea how large quantities of these things are getting on the market?

No idea at all.

They are controlled under the schedule for poisons,

and, therefore, they cannot be sold, or issued without a prescription,

by any retail chemist.

These drugs had been commonplace during wartime,

frequently used by soldiers to keep them alert on duty.

But using them for recreational purposes was something new.

This big factory used to make them

and a friend of ours got a job in there.

And the black bombers,

the purple hearts, they all hit the street.

By 1963, the more hedonistic aspects of the mod lifestyle

still remained under the radar.

But it was attracting the attention of the media.

And one new television programme in particular.

# Five, four,

# Three, two, one!

# Five, four, three, two, one!

Ready Steady Go! changed everything as far as British teenagers

were concerned, especially the mods.

Thanks to the programme, youth across Britain would be introduced

to the fashions and sounds of their tribe.

HE SINGS "YEH, YEH"

Performers like Georgie Fame were already stars of the mod world,

thanks to his residency at one of their top hang-outs -

London's Flamingo Club.

# I say yeh, yeh That's what I say

# I say, yeh, yeh... #

Young host Cathy McGowan showcased up-to-the-minute clothing trends.

And dancers, gathered from the mod clubs,

demonstrated the latest moves.

It fashioned mod as the acceptable face of British youth.

# I say yeh, yeh! #

Rockers may not have enjoyed the same status,

but there didn't seem any great animosity

between the two groups in the early days.

# Look in my heart

# And tell me... #

Nothing much even for the tabloid press to latch onto at this stage.

So we did used to mingle.

It was no problem, you know.

Maybe on a Saturday night we'd sort of pass them a bit close

and maybe yell some vulgarity, or something, but, you know,

nothing evil.

# Look in my heart... #

I knew some lads who were mods and, originally, they'd had bikes.

Then, suddenly, I saw them on scooters with parkas on

and I'm saying, "What's going on here?"

And they said, "Well, you get more girls if you're a mod,

"so we've changed."

I wouldn't avoid them or fight with them.

Some of them were really nice looking, they looked like Tony Curtis.

Lovely leather jackets, beautiful bikes.

Some of the women did the same thing, they changed.

They did. My wife did!

-She was a mod when I met her.

-Yeah.

-And she changed to a bike.

-Changed to a bike.

But amongst the two tribes themselves, there was a strong feeling of camaraderie.

So when the bank holiday came along, like any other family,

these tight-knit groups followed in the great British tradition of heading to the seaside.

Exactly where they went often depended on where they came from.

Brighton was for middle class. Clacton was for east London.

Margate, the Kent seaside towns,

they were the traditional holiday venues for the south London families.

And that's where the kids went.

So there was no sense of, "Right, we're going."

No military planning involved.

"OK, lads, squadron number five, Old Kent Road."

But over Easter 1964, this teenage bank-holiday jolly made headlines.

The people of Clacton have spent today sweeping up the debris,

the broken glass and the damage.

And although the thousand or so so-called rockers

and mods have still been here, the weather has been so bad

that they've been forced to stay in the amusement arcades,

or seek shelter in hotel and pub doorways.

The newspapers confidently reported that pitched battles

between gangs of young people had taken place on a large scale.

But the reality was somewhat different.

It was the coldest winter since 1883,

it was before the holiday season,

so a lot of places weren't open, there were cafes shut.

The pier was closed, as well.

You had all these young kids in a so-called fun-filled seaside town,

freezing cold. A lot of the older people,

they didn't want to let the kids into their cafes, either,

so there were kids kicking about with nothing to do, basically.

-What's your name?

-Alan Duncan.

-How old are you?

-19.

Are you and your friends mods or rockers?

Well, we're mods, when we're dressed up, you know.

What caused all this trouble yesterday?

Boredom.

That last day, we're walking along and we saw the pier

and we're walking to it and, suddenly, everybody crowded around

and everybody was looking for money to pay this one old boy there.

And he said, "No, no. No, we're closed, it's closed."

And we all jumped, just jumped. Ran along. This was an empty pier.

There wasn't anything open. There are no shows, or anything.

So just running along, like kids do.

It was just a bit of fun.

And when we came back, the police were there, two policemen.

We hadn't seen police all over the weekend.

Then we just walked away.

Chief Constable, how serious was this disturbance at the weekend?

-Was it in fact a gang fight?

-Not as far as we know.

It was several hundred young people

rather at a loose end over the weekend.

They came into the town and, finding not much else to do,

they committed several acts of wanton and purposeless damage.

So the police had to turn out in some strength to deal with them.

Although it was a bit of a non-event as far as the police were concerned,

the media were suddenly all over it.

The next morning, that's when the press came along.

That's when they'd grab you, they'd want to do an interview

about this riot that was down here.

There was no riot. It was just people having a bit of fun.

Arrests were made in Clacton, but, in many ways,

the actual events were unremarkable.

In terms of the overall vandalism,

we're talking about £513 worth of damage.

That is our huge riot.

Obviously, that's worth more in 1964 than it is now,

but in the large scheme of things,

this is not really a great deal of vandalism

and perhaps not much more than they would expect on any bank holiday.

It is not about the mods and rockers in Clacton.

It's about incomers, coming from London, and locals.

But it's transformed via the media into being

a clash between the mods and rockers.

This fascinated a sociologist called Stanley Cohen,

who decided to investigate the events further.

Cohen found that

this was quite a lean time

in terms of the national news,

so the national newspapers were looking around for stories to cover.

So what they did was they noticed this story being picked up by the local press,

they took it up, but magnified it out of all proportion.

What happens is those national stories are picked up around the world

and this becomes the image of young English youth in the 1960s.

By making it a story about mods versus rockers,

the media lit the touchpaper.

They helped to draw the battle lines

and demanded the teenagers choose sides and venues.

Where do you reckon the next battle of that kind is going to be?

Oh, it's hard to say, innit? Whitsun, it'd be, won't it?

-It will be Whitsun?

-Mm.

It'll be down Brighton, more or less.

-Brighton.

-Brighton is the place.

-All these places, you know.

There's thousands going to Brighton.

-Some fights are justifiable, are they?

-Oh, yes.

In some places, well, there's just

no other way out, except fighting.

But I do remember, at the Ace, press coming past

and saying, "Why don't we go and get those rockers?"

"Go and get those mods."

You know, "You're all rockers, aren't you?"

And trying to incite a riot, if you like.

You know, they should've been shot.

Even the authorities were caught up in the frenzy of expectation.

-NEWSREEL:

-Special squads of reserves are on standby in London to fly quickly to the current target towns.

And they wouldn't be disappointed.

The next time we went, everything was off,

because tons of people came down from all over the country.

Rockers came down and it was...oof!

MUSIC: "Tobacco Road" by The Nashville Teens

That summer, bank holidays saw hundreds of mods and rockers

descend on several seaside towns.

Lloyd Johnson witnessed the mounted invasion of his hometown of Hastings.

And I'll never forget the view of a V formation -

a load of scooters coming down the road

with all the sun hitting the chrome.

I just thought, "There is something about this that reminds me

"of medieval knights on chargers."

And I just felt, "We're taking over the world.

"We're taking over the world!"

And, almost inevitably, clashes did break out.

It became pretty... More than violent.

It became quite frightening, actually.

There was about 200 of us on Brighton beach, eating ice creams,

enjoying ourselves. Not causing any trouble.

Somebody shouted out, "Here come the brown jumpers,"

which we used to call the mods.

As far as we could see, depth-wise, was mods coming at us.

Fend them off as best we could. We managed to get to the staircase.

From the staircase, we could've held them off,

but they had all the ammunition on the beach, which was all the pebbles.

They were throwing all the pebbles at us.

I got one in the top of my head.

The ambulance pulled up

and they put a mod in with me.

And I was streaming with blood. I had a fight with him

and the police came along and kicked us both out of the ambulance

and told us to go to the hospital on our own.

Those skirmishes could get very nasty.

MUSIC: "Soul Time" by Shirley Ellis

We're just fighting and then, suddenly, somebody hit something

and then he fell down. I tried to grab him, but I couldn't.

I looked down, he'd run away. But that was it,

it was just a little huddle and over he went. That was it.

I had a lucky escape.

I was in the caff and I said, "Have you got a toilet?"

And he said, "No, there's a public toilet outside."

One of them old-fashioned public toilets.

I went down there, I was having a piss, when I turned round,

there are three rockers coming down the stairs.

I thought, "I'm done!

"How am I going to get up?"

So I got myself ready

and, suddenly, two of my mates came running down the stairs.

They'd see me go down there, saw these three rockers go down there

and, suddenly, they jumped on them.

They got me out there, so I was very lucky.

The media focused its attention on the clean-cut, smartly dressed mods.

The rockers were the traditional and familiar face of British rebellion.

The mods, on the other hand, were meant to be the new society.

In many ways, because mods are smarter,

that makes them less threatening.

In other ways, it makes them more threatening,

because these look like normal kids.

And they've got the job, they've got the money, they've got the clothes.

Why are they doing this?

We knew darn well that if we didn't go and support the rockers

that lived down there, they'd get knocked to hell.

It was becoming a confrontation

and the rocker took on the role

as the protector of the social norm, strangely enough.

It was a case of "Why should they take over the places

"that we always like to go?

"Why should we let them?

"So if we don't go down there," you know, they would think they'd won.

For many of those involved,

violence like this wasn't so much something new

as part and parcel of life growing up in the capital city.

London was very territorial. Every area had its gang, if you like.

I came from North London

and we certainly wouldn't have headed over to south London,

because that was very...across the water was dangerous country.

If you were caught on another area, you are liable to get a kicking.

-Do you belong to a gang?

-Er, team.

-A what?

-Team.

-That's what you call it?

-That's what they call it now, yeah.

What do they do?

-Well, we have a sort of a sort-out, now and again.

-A fight?

-Well, yeah.

-Against who, another gang?

Well, you get rival gangs, you know, from the smaller gangs,

you know, trying to take over.

Violence was quite an unremarkable part of working-class life in the 1960s.

I think there was probably a degree of tolerance

for levels of everyday violence

that we would probably find quite surprising today.

But this wasn't in the back streets of London,

it was on the nation's beaches.

What confused so many older people were, here were teenagers

and twentysomethings fighting over style - how they dressed,

how they did their hair, what kind of bikes they rode.

They were doing it on the beaches that, only 20 years earlier,

Churchill had sworn to defend.

They've seen no wars, or anything like that,

and I think that's the bottom of it.

I think they're gathering together.

They're an army. That's their idea.

I think they really were surprised.

I think they must have felt very hurt, actually,

because, when you think about their childhood and their youth,

their teenage years, what they went through...

Though the fighting could get serious,

it was mostly isolated incidents

and only £400 worth of damage was caused in Brighton -

less than in Clacton.

# I fought the law And the law won... #

Yet the authorities clamped down very hard on those arrested

in the seaside skirmishes.

There was a degree of vindictiveness by the establishment

in the way the sentences were passed and so on.

One judge used the term "Sawdust Caesars"

to talk about the young people that he was sentencing.

I think, in that term, there was a sense of really wanting

to corral young people who were getting a bit above themselves.

It was the arrogance of youth that people found an affront, really.

If it were possible to disqualify them from driving these scooters,

or motorbikes, which I look upon as an offensive weapon -

it is what they use to get here

to indulge in this riotous, destructive behaviour -

it would confine them.

When you hear voices being raised,

saying young people are out of control,

you have to ask yourself the question - out of whose control?

And, increasingly, they are out of parental control,

because they have financial independence.

It was actually the fact they had money that really scared people.

One of the most notorious moments in the trials of the mod-rocker riots

was when a sharp-suited mod is handed a very heavy fine

and he pulls a cheque book out of his suit

and nonchalantly pays the fine with a cheque book.

A cheque-book, like a credit card at the time, was a real symbol of affluence.

# I fought the law And the law won. #

And it wasn't just the powers that be that were unhappy.

As a result of the trouble,

many of the original mods became disillusioned with the scene.

As far as I'm concerned, it finished.

On the beaches of Hastings. For me. That was it.

I came away from there and I thought, "This is not right,

"this is not going the way I think it should go.

"The feeling is wrong."

Tony wasn't the only one who couldn't identify with this new development.

I don't want to go around kicking people, it's not my scene at all.

I am more happy, like, wearing great clothes,

going out with great-looking birds, dancing, listening to good music.

# Blues I've never had before Come round knocking on my door

# Them blues

# Them blues... #

But it didn't put everyone off.

The moral panic about the mod-rocker riots

helped to make mod more popular, because it put it in the news

and millions of kids all over the country saw their parents

tut-tutting and fuming over these kids fighting over style

and thought, "I want some of that."

So it made it more popular,

but it also put off a lot of the original mods.

I'm not a mod myself, I wouldn't call myself a mod.

Would you call yourself an ex-mod?

An ex-mod, certainly, yes. I would say that.

Sort of progressed out of that stage.

What was a mod, when he existed?

A person who wanted to be different from somebody else.

You know, wanted to show rebelliation and he wanted to be different,

but now he's the same as everybody else,

so he's grown out of that stage and looking for something new.

It became like a mass thing

and the whole clique of the people who thought like you

and looked like you and wanted to be different,

there were hundreds of them.

And that's when it became very commercial.

Everybody was wearing the fashions, they were obtainable.

The music was obtainable.

You didn't want to become part of the masses.

# Keep on running

# Keep on hiding

# One fine day I'm going be the one To make you understand

# Oh, yeah I'm going to be your man. #

Mod was slowly becoming part of the cultural mainstream.

# I can't explain It's a certain kind... #

Carnaby Street went mod,

transforming itself into a major fashion destination.

And music went mod, with guitar-based British bands dressing the part.

Bands like The Who were number one.

You had the Small Faces, who had adopted the mod image.

And mod could be seen on the streets and in the pop charts,

but it was a million miles away from how it originally started.

The mods had become the first teen-style tribe to go mainstream.

Being pushed briefly into the shadows might have irritated some rockers

but, by the mid-'60s, the ground was shifting under both groups.

By 1966, the whole thing is declining.

Part of that is because the media are not reporting it,

but partly because the people who were there are growing up.

The baby boomers, both mods and rockers,

were reaching their 20s and, for many, that meant settling down.

The rockers in particular

found that a lifestyle based on speed and motorbikes

wasn't conducive to family life.

# Please don't stop

# Loving me... #

I met my girlfriend, who is now my wife,

got married, had kids, got a mortgage and they were the priority.

I couldn't afford and I hadn't got the time or money,

or anything, to go out on bikes.

# In my arms. #

You'd still have a bike and you'd still go out on it now and again,

but, in general, you had a car, you were working every day.

Especially looking after the kids -

you couldn't take kids out on a motorbike.

Although they moved on, in a way, the mods and rockers

will forever be trapped in 1964 in the public's imagination.

50 years later, many still view them

only as diametrically opposed groups,

locked in battle on the bank-holiday beaches.

# I'm free To do what I want any old time... #

When, in reality, they had much in common.

Both were demonised by the media and punished by the establishment.

Because both had enjoyed an unprecedented level of freedom.

And that's why, for all their differences, they shared

being trailblazers for an entirely new kind of teen experience.

It was a good generation, good generation. A good time to be young.

What's hard to explain, I think, is how exciting the times were.

-We're very lucky.

-I wouldn't swap it for the world.

I was the right age for the right time.

No going to war, you got freedom, colours. Best generation ever.