17
TEENAGERS ARRIVE
During my third year at Durham, 1956–57, some new and exciting and different things happened out there in the world at large. And also in my life.
Firstly, teenagers were invented. Yup, and I was there. This is obviously a silly, stupid, unprovable, impossible, factually incorrect thing to say, but really, where I was standing at the time, or hanging about moaning, there was a definite cultural and social and economic change that took place, around that time, around that place, where we were living in the so-called Western civilised world.
For thousands of years, whenever humans had reached the age of thirteen, and then somehow struggled on to the age of nineteen, they were technically teenagers, whether or not they described themselves as such, or somehow felt any different. There must have been the bolshie few, the groups and gangs who felt separated or different, and there must have those experiencing what we now call adolescence, with various traumas and worries about their identity and/or spots, but presumably they were ignored, told to get up out of bed, or out of the cave, and get on with it. For the vast majority of humankind, until the 1950s, you were a child, then you were an adult. That was it. No definable, describable, recognised gap in between.
The notion of teenagers as a definite stage, with a definite identity, surfaced in the post-war years and, naturally, was first spotted in the USA. Life magazine in 1944 ran an article called ‘Teen-age Girls: they live in a wonderful world of their own’. The hyphen between ‘teen’ and ‘age’ was soon dropped, making it one word. They were wealthier over there, staying on at school much longer, more indulged. They might not have been allowed anywhere near the liquor store till much older than us in the UK, but they did have access to their family telephone and car. Lucky blighters.
At this early stage it was mainly a fashion thing, the bobbysoxers, wearing the same sorts of teenage clothes, painting their nails, talking on the phone all day to each other and then hopping into the backs of their enormous cars with their boyfriends. In the UK, ordinary families did not have cars till the very late fifties, and there wasn’t enough room on the back seat to manage to take your bike clips off, far less your long trousers.
The arrival of teenagers alerted the post-war American manufacturing sector, which began producing clothes, films, TV programmes, aimed specifically at the teenage market, both boys and girls. We were all unaware of this, stuck in boring old austerity-ridden, ration-booked, war-torn, war-exhausted Blighty.
My expectations, in the post-war years, was to grow up and look and dress and act just like my dad, as everyone else of my age expected. That was why I wore his coat and his shirts in 1954 when I went to Durham. I even stole his Brylcreem and plastered it on, but couldn’t get my hair to lie flat.
When the teddy boys came in, around 1955, with their mock exaggeration of so-called Edwardian clothes, sporting drainpipe trousers and slicked-back hair, it heralded the first vaguely teenage male fashion I was aware of. I don’t remember them being associated with rock’n’roll or any sort of music, not in the beginning. They were often in gangs, with razors and chains. They caused riots in London and Brighton. Even in Carlisle, where they hung around the town hall, you avoided them, unless you were looking for trouble.
But their styles caught on with ordinary teenage boys, especially the trousers. I did try to get my hair to go up in a quiff, and attempted a DA – a duck’s arse – at the back, but I never seemed able to manage it. I blamed my head. It was the wrong size.
At school I had spent a lot of time looking at my hair in the mirror, trying to do something with it, if only pour on buckets of water last thing before I went out, hoping to make it behave. In the end, I stuck to a side parting, hair brushed to one side as my mother had first brushed it when I went to primary school. I also spent ages, as all boys did, trying to get my trousers as narrow as possible. I even paid for a little woman in the street who did sewing to take them in. Girls would often carry their skimpy party or dancing clothes in a plain paper bag, knowing their mothers would never let them out if they saw them.
But it was pop music that finally did it, forming teenagers into an identifiable cultural and social group, different from those who had gone before. Most of our popular music until the mid-fifties was sub-American. Awful English crooners sang soppy songs in a mid-Atlantic accent, wearing shiny suits, telling us we were a wonderful audience. And I loved them all, oh yes. While mocking Pat Boone and Guy Mitchell, I knew their songs and sang along with them. Frank Sinatra was a cut above them; his songs had better words and orchestration.
Our home-grown pop singers, such as Dickie Valentine, David Whitfield, Frankie Vaughan, Ronnie Hilton, Alma Cogan, Jimmy Young were pale, pallid imitations of the Americans, but we still listened to them.
In my third year at Durham I was amazed one day to find that Dickie Valentine was appearing at the Union. This was a very dignified, ancient building on Palace Green, where serious debates took place and students who were really little old men intrigued and plotted to be president or secretary. This event was in the Union coffee bar. Someone had somehow got Dickie Valentine to turn up and answer questions from students. I think he must have been appearing locally, or in Newcastle, and his agent thought it might be good PR. His answers were all banal; he was smaller than I had imagined, but I remember thinking his hair was really good.
Most students felt rather superior to the Guy Mitchells and Dickie Valentines and other popular singers, the sort enjoyed by shop girls. Being convinced of their own higher taste, they preferred listening to jazz. In the JCR at Castle, there was a good selection of jazz records and I did enjoy listening to Dave Brubeck, Humphrey Lyttelton, Ken Colyer, Chris Barber and others. The MJQ – Modern Jazz Quartet – they were what the intellectuals really loved, in their black polo-neck pullies. No bubble-gum pop music ballads or corny novelty songs such as ‘She Wears Red Feathers and a Huly-Huly Skirt’, very big in 1953, were played in the JCR. Personally, I was willing to listen to most forms of music.
The first defining signs of the arrival of a new and exciting form of popular music, rock’n’roll, which seemed to be aimed directly at teenagers, came in April 1954 when Bill Haley & His Comets produced ‘Rock Around the Clock’. It took a year for most people in the UK to notice it, when it became the theme tune for the film Blackboard Jungle. People started jiving in the aisles and then tearing up seats – even in Carlisle, according to my sisters.
Jiving was frowned upon in the classier dance halls, such as the Crown and Mitre in Carlisle, and often banned. Then came a strange crossover, hybrid period. Jiving had not quite achieved mass acceptance, but it was allowed, sometimes, in different parts of the dance hall. So there would be kids jiving away at one end, turning themselves round and round, their skirts flying, their beehives and DAs bouncing, while at the other end people were still sedately doing the valeta or the waltzes.
I was surprised when I first saw a photograph of Bill Haley. He was not a teenager for start, aged thirty at least, and was fleshy and flabby with a silly quiff at the front. Hardly a sex symbol, so why were girls screaming? Nothing at all like Elvis, who turned out to be the biggest and most exciting new singer of the fifties. Perhaps of all time. By May 1956, his ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was top of the charts in fourteen different countries.
I went out with a girl from St Hild’s for a time; she came from Liverpool and knew all the words and tunes of Elvis’s latest hits. She wanted me to come and visit her in Liverpool, and meet her parents, but I got out of that. But she did teach me all the words of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ – and explain that Carl Perkins had sung it first.
In the UK, the single biggest influence on our homegrown popular music was the arrival of skiffle. In January 1956 Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’ became a surprise hit and spawned hundreds if not thousands of skiffle groups all over the country. On Merseyside, so we discovered later, there were about ten million skiffle groups being formed, so they all claimed la
ter.
The attraction of skiffle was that you did not need to be at all musical. You didn’t have to play an instrument, or even have an instrument. There was room in a skiffle group for people rubbing a thimble up and down your mother’s washboard, or plucking a string attached to a large tea chest, the sort that Lipton’s threw out.
Going home to Carlisle in the hols in 1956, I joined in one evening with an impromptu skiffle group who were playing in the pitch-dark beside the suspension bridge. All I did was rub a washboard, which is harder than you might think, and tough on your knuckles. We did it for a few evenings, planned to find somewhere proper to rehearse, but nothing came of it.
Back in Durham, in my third year, I went to pubs to find that skiffle groups had taken over all the back rooms, and were packed out. I thought they were all wonderful, exciting and full of energy, however rough, preferable to the phoneys in blue shiny suits.
There was one group called The Blue Devils, who had just won some local skiffle competition and were calling themselves the ‘Northeastern Skiffle Champions’. I decided to book them for an engagement, along with two of my friends. One was my new roommate, John Davies. We had decided to share a room for our third year, back in Durham again, and we were fortunate to get excellent rooms in what was called Hall Stairs. This was right in the heart of the Castle, up a broad wooden, ancient staircase behind the Great Hall. It was above the college library, so handy for studying, har har, with a large bay window overlooking the college courtyard. You could see everything going on, who was bringing girls in through the porter’s lodge, or sneaking them out.
John was a scientist reading chemistry, and came from Newcastle, lived in a private semi, and his father was an electrician who worked at Kemsley House in Newcastle. We didn’t have a lot in common, but had become friends at Lumley. We went drinking together, but not of course to excess, not like in my early, silly first year.
My other new friend was Michael Bateman, not a Durham student, but an Oxford graduate who had recently arrived in Durham, working on the local paper, the Durham Advertiser. He had been given the task of writing about university affairs, which was how I had met him.
The three of us clubbed together, tracked down The Blue Devils and offered them money to perform in Durham at the Wearmouth Bridge, a large pub with a big upstairs room. We talked the pub into letting us have the function room for free, explaining that we would be bringing in so many students that they would make a fortune on the drinks. I can’t remember how much we paid The Blue Devils, but we worked out we would easily cover their fee by charging for entrance. We printed tickets, with rather arty blue type, designed by Michael, who was very good at drawing. The evening was a huge success. We filled the room and made quite a bit of money. I still have one of the tickets to this day, with all our names on.
A lot of students, over the decades since, have discovered or created careers for themselves by organising student hops, student discos, then going on to bigger things. It never occurred to me at the time that anyone could ever make a job out of what we had done. It was for our own amusement, to see if it could be done. We never did it again. Moving on to other things, other amusements.
But I did for the first time begin to wonder during my third year what I might do when I graduated. I realised my CV was practically empty – drinking and shove ha’penny were not going to impress any potential employers. Sports-wise, I had not made any proper team, nor did I have any badges or decorations on my blazer to prove I had represented the college. When you made the boat club proper, you earned the right to have crossed oars embroidered on your college badge. If you ran for the college or played rugby, you could add UCAC or UCRUFC. If you were actually capped by the university, you were awarded what was called a Palatinate, the Durham term for a Blue, which entitled you to a fancy purple tie and scarf. They were our heroes. And even though the Durham colleges in the 1950s were so small, the sporting standard was high, with many playing for county or national teams. (Later on, Durham even produced some England stars like Will Carling and Nasser Hussain, who became England rugby and cricket captains.)
What was I going to do to get something on my CV, show I had not totally wasted my time? Clearly, my degree in General Arts, if I got it, was not going to have them panting.
In desperation, I joined something called the Durham Colleges Fine Arts Society, despite having no interest or talent for art. They were pleading for members so I joined and even became secretary. I managed to get a well-known art person, Mervyn Levy, to come and address our society. The president of the society and I entertained him to drinks beforehand and then took him to supper afterwards at the Three Tuns. So I did get something out of it. The point of being an officer of an official student society was that you got funds from the Students’ Representative Council – SCR – some of which you could use to spend on yourselves.
John Davies, my roommate, had somehow got himself a job to put on his CV – advertising manager of Palatinate, the student newspaper. After a term, he decided to give it up, because of all the lab work he had to do, which took up a lot of time as the science labs were some way out of Durham. I hadn’t quite taken in what he did, what the job entailed, but I found myself saying, ‘Hold on, John, don’t hand in your notice, I’ll take it on. Just inform them you are handing it on to someone else, they won’t care, probably not even notice.’ And so I became advertising manager of Palatinate.
My job was to go round the shops in the town that students patronised and try to sell them three-inch adverts, single column, for whatever money we could get out of them. The shops and services included the House of Andrews, which sold books; Gray and Sons, which was the university outfitters in Saddler Street; the SPCK Bookshop; Daisy Edis, who was photographer to the university; and, of course, the Buffalo Head. After the ads appeared, I had to go round with the invoice and collect the money.
We sold very few ads, so the income was minimal. Durham was not a place with any major or well-off local businesses interested in appealing to students. With only 1,500 students in Durham, the circulation of Palatinate was commensurately small, just 500. We didn’t have the pulling power of Oxbridge or the redbrick universities, all of which were much bigger. The paper survived on its cover price, which was 6d., and a grant from the SRC. However, we liked to think we were operating as a proper business enterprise, paying our way, with proper professional-looking journalistic content and production.
One day, after I had been doing the job for a few months, I took the latest batch of ads I had managed to gather into the editorial offices – which was the editor’s room in Hatfield. The paper had been in the hands of Hatfield people ever since I had arrived in Durham – friends from the same college handing it on to each other, which was and probably is how most student societies operate.
I had never thought of writing or offering anything to the paper, even though I read every issue, all the way through, impressed that mere students were producing a proper-looking newspaper of six to eight pages. I had assumed that you needed to be gifted, have some sort of skill to write, even for a student newspaper, and be really good at English. Somebody like Reg Hill at school clearly had that talent, and wrote such amusing stuff. I felt inhibited from even trying. In fact, the idea had never entered my head. When very young, at primary school and at Sunday school, I had entered little writing competitions, and did once win that BBC pencil, but they had all been at my mother’s prompting, and she helped me write them.
I had been into the editor’s room a few times, and met the other people from Hatfield who were running the paper. I always dutifully handed over my list of ads, which they accepted with hardly a grunt, didn’t speak to me, and then I exited humbly. Selling a handful of adverts was considered way down the scale of importance, compared with actually writing for the pages. But over the months, any initial awe I had felt in their presence began to fade. I began to realise they were not all that bright or talented but really pretty ordinary. Just like me, in fac
t.
On this particular day, as I was dropping off my ads, I heard them saying there was a hole in a page, something had fallen through, where can we get something to fill it, preferably funny?
‘Let me fill the hole,’ I heard myself saying.
They looked at me, disbelieving. They glanced at each other, looked at the gap in the page, looked at the clock and said okay then, they could give me one hour. I rushed back to Hall Stairs, licked my little pencil, for I did not have a typewriter at the time, nor could I type. I wrote a piece about a day in the life of a boat club hearty, a first person piece, as if he was writing it – about getting drunk and vomiting, full of bad spelling and stupid public school comments and slang, based on the Castle boat club members I had come across and the boat club dinner I had attended.
The editor liked it and it was rushed down to Bailes, the printers. God knows how they managed to read my handwriting, which has always been rubbish, but they were accustomed to working from handwritten copy. I was so proud to see my words and name in print. Readers seemed to like it, so I was asked to do another one for the next edition. This time I did a science student, based on my friend John, continually trudging back and forward to the science labs. With even worse spelling, like Just William’s. I always found bad spelling funny. Then I did a don, a moral tutor, getting pissed at his own sherry party. I also did a theology student, but avoided bad language, vomiting and any sexual undertones. Didn’t want to upset them – or the authorities.
We had loads of theology students and clerics at Durham and they were a powerful presence. Two of the colleges, St Chad’s and St John’s, specialised in theology, preparing people for the Church, and their principals were always reverends. At Castle, we also had quite a few students reading theology or planning to go into the Church after graduating.
Durham, historically, had always provided lots of clerics, ever since the early nineteenth century. With its famous cathedral and prominent bishop – number three or four in the Church of England hierarchy – it has provided several Archbishops of Canterbury, notably Michael Ramsey, who was Bishop of Durham in my day, and then more recently Justin Welby. For about a month in my second year, when I was sobering up, I did go to a couple of DICCU – Durham Inter-Collegiate Christian Union – meetings, hoping for some sort of spiritual light, as a couple of Castle students I was quite friendly with did seem to take comfort and confidence from believing – but I couldn’t hack it.
The Co-Op's Got Bananas Page 19