A book by Chris Steele-Perkins.

By the time I was old enough to think or remember, Teddy Boys were a thing of the past in England. These disenchanted youth made their home in the Fifties, affecting a distinct form of clothing – long Edwardian coats with velvet collars – and strangely shaped hair.

‘Teddy Boys’, the collective noun used to describe them, purportedly stems from the association their choice of clothing had with the grandest of British eras, the Edwardian, named after that wanton wastrel, Edward VII. Old ‘Teddy’ had waited most of his life to succeed long-lived Queen Victoria to the throne of England, (like the current monarch she was too wise to the ways of the world – and of her son – to abdicate) amusing himself in the meanwhile by bedding most of Europe’s eligible women and eating and drinking his way through a modest fortune in gustatory delights. Prince Charles should bone up, if you pardon the verb, on his history, lest he continues repeating it.

However, Teddy, short and worthless as his reign was, enjoyed the height of luxury that the British Empire had procured for the country in four centuries of conquest. It was all over by then, of course, but it would take a while, and Queen Victoria’s German relatives, to make sure everyone in England knew that. It was called World War I.

Anyway, the fifties’ Teddy Boys emulated at least some facets of Edwardian dress and proceeded to spoil what little they had going for them with foul hair, dipped in axle grease.

Not a lot to like, then, except that Chris Steele-Perkins’s pictures do a great job of conveying the feel of that era. There’s almost a careless sort of snapshot quality to much of the work here and it seems especially appropriate to what would prove to be a transient fad.

Recommended.