Teenagers Cheat Sheet

Improving economy

1950s teenagers

Boys’ fashions – ‘teddy boys’
Music – Rock ‘n’ Roll, Skiffle
Cunyard Yanks – American sailors who brought American ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ records over to cities like Liverpool where ships arrived from the US.
Went to movies – ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, James Dean, 1955

1960s teenagers

About 5 million teenagers in the UK in the early 1960s.
They earned one tenth of the country’s income.
They spent £800 million per year on themselves.
They bought one third of all bikes and motorbikes.
1955 – Teenagers bought about 5 million records. 1961 – Teenagers bought about 60 million records.
Teenagers bought about half of all record players in the 1960s.
9 August 1963 –First episode of ‘Ready, Steady, Go’, pop music programme on ITV. Presented by Cathy McGowan, a teenager herself.
Other music TV shows: ‘Jukebox Jury’, ‘Top of the Pops’.

1960s music

Key bands: The Beatles, The Kinks, The Who, The Rolling Stones.
‘Beatlemania’ – Beatles fans screaming and losing control. Other bands saw a similar thing, but The Beatles were always the biggest.
1964 – Beatles sell 25 million records worldwide.
1965 – Rolling Stones single ‘Satisfaction’ sells 5 million copies worldwide.
New music played by pirate radio like Radio Caroline, until the BBC launched a new pop music station, Radio 1, in 1967.

1960s fashion

Mary Quant – inventor of the mini skirt. By 1966 she was turning out 500 designs a year and had worldwide sales of over £6 million.
Models – Twiggy (Lesley Hornby), Jean Shrimpton
Photographer – David Bailey
Hairdressers – Vidal Sassoon
Carnaby Street – ‘trendiest’ street in London, shops, clothes and celebrities.

1960s rebellion

Satire – Mocking politicians and authority. ‘That Was The Week That Was’ (1962): TV Show. ‘Private Eye’ (1962): Magazine.
1961 – West Side Story. Film about teenage gangs (actually a version of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ but not all teenagers realised this!).
Improving antibiotics – fewer STDs.
The Pill – Not available for free on the NHS until 1969.
Family Planning Clinics – gave contraceptive advice, but only to married women until 1970.
Brooks Clinics gave advice to unmarried women from 1964, but by 1966 there were only 4 of these clinics in the whole country.
Michael Schofield – Published ‘The Sexual Behaviour of Young People’ in 1965. Interviewed 2,000 teenagers. One thirds of boys and one sixth of girls aged between 17-19 had ever had sex. 6% of boys and 2% of girls aged fifteen had ever had sex.
GeofferyGorer completed similar study on people aged between 16 and 45 (2,000 people). He found a quarter of men and two thirds of women had not had sex before they were married. He found attitudes had relaxed. Half the men and a third of the women thought it was ok to have sex before marriage.

1960s violence

Clashes between mods and rockers.
Mods – Smart clothing, rhythm and blues music, drove scooters.
Rockers – Motorbikes, leather jackets, more aggressive appearance.
1964 – Violent clashes between mods and rockers in seaside towns like Clacton, Margate and Brighton. Papers overplayed it.

1960s education

10/65 – Document to abolish grammar schools in July 1965.
By 1970 there were 1145 comprehensive schools and they were educating one in three school pupils.
End of the 1970s, vast majority of students in comprehensive schools.
1939 – Only 50,000 people attended university.
Governments in the 1950s opened new universities in Southampton, Staffordshire and Nottingham. Eleven more built in the 1960s.
32 new ‘polytechnics’ were created – applied science and technology colleges.
Art Colleges – Britain had more proportionally to population than any other country.
Tuition Fees were paid by the government.
The Grant – Poor families could get their university living expenses covered by the government.
1961-1969 – Number of young people in education nearly doubled from 200,000 to 390,000.

Opting out

Hippy movement – inspired by artists like The Beatles and Bob Dylan, especially after they started taking LSD.
Magazine ‘Oz’, hippy content, came to Uk from Australia in 1966.
1997 – Summer of Love. August, 50,000 hippies gathered for a three day ‘love in’.
National petition for legalising cannabis signed by The Beatles and some of The Rolling Stones.
1968 – Large rally in Hyde Park calling for legalisation of cannabis.

Student Protests

1950s – Beginning of the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).
January 1967 – Demonstrations by uni students against LSE director Walter Adams as he had worked in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), which had segregation at the time.
Protests and sit-ins at Essex and Leicester Universities in 1967.
May 1968 – Protests at Hull University against exams.
1968 – Protest at Hornsey College of Art against teaching methods.
1969 – Violent demonstrations at LSE.
1968 – Poll at Leeds university found 86% of students found politics boring.
1969 – Nationwide 80% of students were happy with conditions and treatment.
1969 – John Lennon (Beatles) releases single ‘Give Peace a Chance’, anti-Vietnam (and war in general) protest song.
March 1968 – 25,000 at an anti-Vietnam protest. Fighting with police.
October 1968 – 30,000 at an anti-Vietnam protest. 25,000 went to Hyde Park. 5,000 went to the American Embassy on Grosvenor Square.