Jean Rayner – “A fourteen year old, with her jeans and old jacket, still in the probationary stage of Teddyism. Later, she may smarten up to senior standards.” Picture Post, June 1955. “She had attitude by the truckload”, remembered Ken Russell. “No one paid much attention to the teddy girls before I did them, though there was plenty on teddy boys. They were tough, these kids, they’d been born in the war years and food rationing only ended in about 1954 – a year before I took these pictures. They were proud. They knew their worth. They just wore what they wore.” ©2006 TopFoto/Ken Russell.
“Teddy Clothes”, began a Picture Post article in June 1955, and illustrated by the 27 year old photographer Ken Russell, “can cover a multitude of sins – or juvenile delinquencies…”. However this wasn’t just another moral panic article about the hooligans and juvenile gangsters known as the Teddy Boys – a term first noticed in the British press only eighteen months previously. This time Picture Post were concentrating on the female angle and described Teddy Girls as “hard-working with a fashion sense which has brought a welcome flash of mass-elegance onto the British scene.”
The first mention of Teddy Girls in the press, and almost exactly a year before the Picture Post article, was in the Daily Express in June 1954. They were reporting, with a heavy emphasis on her appearance and her clothes, about a girl who had recently been arrested in Southsea: “She was auburn-haired and fifteen. She wore tight-fitting trousers, a sweater, and brightly coloured socks. And she carried a small dagger.” The Express continued, “she appeared at Portsmouth Children’s Court yesterday wearing a “split” skirt, a diaphanous blouse, and high heeled sandals. The policeman said she was in a fight at Southsea with other girls. It began when two girls called her a “Teddy Girl”.”
Iris Thornton “When I was 13 I started going to the Mayflower youth club every day after school. You could take classes in deportment and cookery, there was a hairdressers and sports activities to get involved in. One day, 2 years later, Ken Russell came and asked if there were any Teddy girls there to photograph. There weren’t many Teds in my area, just a few of us so we turned heads. You would walk past people on the street and hear them saying ‘Oh god, look at what they are wearing!’ Which made me chuckle. The photos were taken where I lived in Canning Town, this area was called the Docklands Settlement. I lived at home with my parents and older sister and brother, it was a prosperous working class area because of the docks on the River Thames. In 1955 I left school and went to work with my sister in a factory. At the time I was happy to leave, thought it was marvellous. But then after a little while I wished I has still been in school, work was so boring.” From an interview with Iris by Eve Dawoud. ©2006 TopFoto/Ken Russell
