Britain's Cautious Generation

...Not far short of 90 per cent of all teenage spending, therefore, is conditioned by working-class tastes and values...

...The leading pop singers adopt short, pungent, virile-sounding names—Billy Fury, Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Eden Kane, Marty Wilde—but their behavior is considerably less furious than their names...

...The right wing of the Labor party, under Hugh Gaitskell, also disliked the presence of Communist elements, and took the rather drastic action of threatening to expel from the party any member who joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (much to the disgust of Labor's left-wing faction, with Michael Foot as its chief spokesman, who felt such action smacked of witch-hunting...

...Norman Mailer's vocabulary has taken a firm grip on his imagination...

...In his report, the Registrar General states that one in six brides is pregnant on her wedding day...

...If their reasons for marching are as muddled and lightweight as many believe, presumably not...

...Henry Brooke, Britain's Home Secretary, said recently that tackling the problem of juvenile delinquency was the most important feature of his job and that each year, among boys between 14 and 17, one in 40 is found guilty of an indictable crime...

...The explanations for sexual laxity and juvenile crimes of violence offered by British social workers and psychiatrists shed no new light...

...When it was over, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the Archbishop had been routed...

...And when the Ministry of Education suggests an auxiliary force of teachers on "short-term commissions" to relieve the situation, the National Union of Teachers protests bitterly about a "dilution of the profession," thus stalemating the problem...

...to be dubbed "square" in London now is as full of connotations of unacceptability and doleful, irremediable outsiderishness as it is in Manhattan—and a Ted, antique and ignorant of his lack of appeal as he skulks around in the provinces, is hopelessly square...

...This figure is small by American standards, but it is disquietingly large for Britain and represents an increase of 11 times over the figure for 1938...

...Young people of the middle and upper classes do not leave school at 15 and usually remain in school or college until the end of their teens...

...One single, flattering valedictory postscript can be made about him as he fades away in the memory along with the '50s...

...Their fascination for World War II is compulsive and endless (ABCTV'S Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years ran twice on the BBC'S channel last year to a preponderance of teenage viewers...

...The Beaulieu jazz festivals, created by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for the express purpose of giving the best native jazz to young fans (as at Newport in the U.S...

...The only one showing signs of anarchic selfdestructiveness, Terry Dene, who landed in the courts for drinking and general disorderliness, was dropped quickly and has confessed the course of his fall in a Sunday tabloid, presumably for some much-needed cash...

...But such is not the case...

...and where the brides are under 24, the ratio is one in four...

...But the more they hear, read and see about the War, the more they know they do not want a repetition of it...

...While music is the chief passion of the British youth's leisure, the place where he prefers to relax and meet his friends and his date is usually an Italian espresso bar...

...Taking the majority who leave school at 15, they are surely more neglected in relation to their moral age than any section of the community...

...In 1960, 10,259 crimes of "violence against the person" became known to the police...

...Hertfordshire" radio valentines...

...As the Albermarle Report states: "About two-thirds of the nation's young leave school and enter employment at the age of 15...

...Yet in the Registrar General's Statistical Review to the nation in 1959 (the last official published report on medical matters), the facts regarding shotgun marriages and illegitimacy were enough to make many British parents feel like locking up their daughters...

...Personally, I do not believe their reasons are either muddled or lightweight...

...With such caution and conservatism mirrored in their dreams for the future, it is perhaps not surprising to see Britain's youth taking such a large part in Ban-the-Bomb demonstrations and joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament...

...Mark Abrams, a leading market researcher, Britain's five million teenagers spend $27 million a year...

...Do they march because it is diverting...

...As for the principle of keeping a nuclear deterrent to discourage attack, the ethic endorsed by both Gaitskell and Macmillan, it has too long been the hush-hush province of high officialdom and military strategists to be an inspiring or even comprehensible concept to the young...

...In a speech to the House of Lords backing a reform to raise the required school-leaving age, Lord Longford, an Irish peer who is one of those valuable perennial worriers about youth, said...

...Jazz of all kinds—popular, traditional and modern— American in origin and British in interpretation, is unquestionably the chief source of entertainment among the young...

...Or are they Communist dupes...

...Recently, a progressive-minded commission set up by the Brighton Education Committee recommended that the town open its own bar to attract its young, who were described as "bored" and "drifting" by the team of professional inquirers...

...World Youth Today -I Britain's Cautious Generation By Ruth Langdon Inglis The British Teddy Boy, hair curling over the back of his waist-pinching Edwardian jacket, drainpipe pants and sinister bag full of bicycle chains, tire levers and sand-filled socks, is a vanishing species, and his demise is regretted by no one...

...Today's English youth is a much less flamboyant affair, a potpourri of rather subdued international influences: He would rather be "hip" and clean than scruffy and terrifying...

...According to the Home Secretary, the figure has rocketed up to one in 16 births since the General Registrar's report...

...Watching a herd of these black-jacketed cyclists careening down the North Circular Road on the outskirts of London brings to mind both the Brandoesque "Wild Ones" and the French "Blousons Noirs...

...A cooler look at the Government report, however, showed that in 1945-49 the annual averages for illegitimacy were 102,023, or more than 5,000 over the figure for 1959...

...a girl earning $17, about $7...

...There were 96,430 illegitimate births in 1959, or one in 20 of all births...

...We hear again about the working mothers, the high divorce rate, the overcrowding in slum areas, the absence of religious standards and effective parental guidance...

...After all, being for the most part cautious and law-abiding, with an aversion for flamboyant self-destruction, British youth would have to be perverse to be actively pro Bomb...

...Tell me about the War . . ." is a plaintive command most British parents of teenagers receive with monotonous regularity...

...Even the blindest and most intractable state welfare worker is beginning to perceive that these jukebox-filled coffee bars have more appeal than the slightly churchy youth clubs, many of them Government financed...

...have had to be discontinued...

...Are they prepared to risk political ostracism...

...Why not, indeed...

...Abrams stresses that'in terms of spending, these teenagers comprise almost entirely a working-class market...

...But this same minority has a most unsavory capacity for fouling its own nest...

...The addition of all the brutish urban hardware, delinquent and peculiarly contemporary, lent him an exotic, paradoxical air which certainly excited sociologists, if not the persons living around the block from him...

...Despite Gaitskell's untimely death, young Labor aspirants still have to obey this party dictum...

...There seemed good reason to believe that girlish promiscuity had become dangerously rampant...

...Lord Longford tells me that he would like to see England follow America's example and raise the highschool graduating age by two years...

...The "trad fad," as it's called, has been nourished by a brilliantly nutty group called the Temperance Seven, and also by a bearded, bowler-hatted West countryman whose name sounds like a fast-working cure for gastric acidity: Acker Bilk...

...or to "trad"—souped-up, sophisticated rehashes of New Orleans numbers and the sweet, corny swing-band tunes of the '20s and early '30s...

...In Britain, there is not the tidal wave of high school graduates impatiently waiting to enter colleges and universities that we see in the United States...

...Britain's teenagers are not "children of the ashes," perhaps, but they are certainly children of some very nasty bomb ruins—a great many of which are still around for them to see...

...If a girl is riding behind the driver, the echoes of France are strong, as Bardot is still the belle ideal—English girls have been wearing her unwieldy, beehive hairdos, short, flared skirts and allenveloping mohair sweaters for the past two or three years...

...Marty Wilde brags about his marital felicity and his new baby to his female fans...

...Helen Shapiro, the 15-year-old feminine pop idol, has the neat, crystalline aspect of one of those unbelievable figurines on top of a wedding cake, and was an A student at the high school she left last year...

...Though trad and modern are the two jazz forms most listened to by teenagers, there is severe rivalry between the exponents of each—the kind of polarization that exists between political reactionaries and progressives...

...They are so hungry for an undiluted diet of music that, according to recent newspaper reports, they are turning away from television and concentrating fully on radio where they are more liable to hear the sides spinning for hours on end in the American manner, with time out only for request names and the familiar "John dedicates this number to Mary Howard of Barnet...

...He listens either to "modern"—post-Bop developments led by such excellent British groups as Johnny Dankworth...

...The British youth chooses his influences with care and taste—not too ostentatiously from one source, nor too sparingly from another—and then reshapes them, giving the end product a distinctly English appearance...

...Entertaining characters such as Bilk, Clinton Ford (who dips back into old music hall), and the Temperance Seven, with the support of thousands of enthusiastic young traditionalists (called "ravers"), are helping to create a British myth out of an American era, taking up musically where Sandy Wilson left off theatrically in The Boyfriend...

...He had seized upon an outlandish garb from his country's past wardrobe...

...It is startling to reflect that the British teenager who has no plan for higher education has a full two years more than his American high school counterpart in which either to search for a meaningful vocation or to feel lost, uprooted and aimless...

...Cliff Richard has a clean-scrubbed, perpetually startled boyish look and accepts trophies for his wholesome entertaining from staid, established Aunty BBC herself...

...His entertainment is apt to be gentle, too...

...Again the curious cultural bedfellows: next to the steaming chromium coffee machine from Milan, a Wall's pork pie...

...While the teenaged female grafts on the Gallic look —except in the rain: no Parisian ever faced a wet day with as much panache as an English girl, dressed in a good-looking, bright raincoat with her kerchief wound into a neat silk hood—the male idols are content to remain as comfortably British as a "cuppa" in a Lyons Tea Shop...

...The chances of this happening in the near future are remote, however, as there are too few teachers to cope with the teenage "bulge" of postwar babies as it is...

...Juvenile criminal behavior runs to a familiar pattern —vandalism, sex offenses, race riots, dance-hall or youth-club fights between rival gangs, shop-breaking and burgling...

...But one cogent reason expressed in the Ministry of Education's Albermarle Report on the Youth Service, a branch of the ministry which aims to give educational, vocational and recreational guidance to young people after they leave high school, is Britain's low school-leaving age of 15...

...Few young people in Britain today, it appears, would rather be dead than Red...

...Ruth Langdon Inglis, an American now living in London, has contributed to the Spectator and other magazines...

...Observers are baffled by their motives: Is it idealism...

...Looking like a young Lawrence Olivier playing the blond and melancholy Dane, he recently tangled with the Archbishop of York over matters of religious dogma in a twice-repeated TV broadcast...

...The huge sale of transistors in Britain has of course made the process easier...

...achieving this in London along some of the suburban dual highways, the rider is entitled to join the "ton ups," a motorcycling gang (the absence of a speed limit is a sporting help here...

...Once more, here was the spectacle of an ugly minority making a bad name for a generally well-behaved majority...

...In any case, they dispose of much smaller incomes than their working-class contemporaries...

...These salaries represent an increase of over five times that earned by teenagers in industry and business offices in 1938...

...The race riots which occurred a short while back in Nottingham and in the Notting Hill area of London were largely the work of youngsters whose feelings about the West Indians in their midst are best expressed by the name they call them—"spades...

...Above the juvenile court age, the highest concentration of crimes of violence is found among youths between 17 and 21...

...nebulous because they commit almost no crimes of violence, and the sociologists appear hesitant to label promiscuity as criminally delinquent...

...And in a 1960 report, Scotland Yard crime statistics reveal an increase over those for 1957...

...In spite of the moral vacuity, the teenager is an affluent member of his society and, materially at any rate, has never had it so good...

...Not long ago, a teenager twisting in the street with a transistor clapped to his ear dropped dead of undetermined causes...

...The younger generation is better fed, better clothed, and better educated than any of their predecessors . . . yet more likely to go over the precipice...

...rather than coshing old ladies on the head on ennui-laden Saturday nights, he is inclined to spend them quietly at a jazz club...

...The drunkenness, sloppy exhibitionistic sexuality, and destructiveness of some of the young ravers made last year's festival a nightmare for Lord Montagu and the citizens of the town living near his Hampshire estate...

...Conformism and unadventurousness were reflected in the attitudes of both groups...

...If he looks back in nostalgia to an American jazz age which existed before he was born, he chooses to look back at it through the eyes and instruments of native musicians...

...He describes how they spend it: Nearly 25 percent goes on clothing and footwear, 14 per cent on drink and tobacco, 12 per cent on candy and soft drinks, and the rest on pop records, magazines, movies and dance halls...

...The mixed bag of selected influences continues when the English teenager chooses his motorcycle...

...Instead of the greasy, Edwardian sideburns, his hair is clipped and shaped like a warring Spartan's...

...The motorcycle speed goal is 100 MPH, which is called a "ton...

...The Spectator, in an editorial, concluded that it was a combination of all three, describing the marchers in a recent demonstration as being in "an adolescent's dream, combining inchoate idealism with a happy revolt against that old headmaster . . . and agreeable contact with the opposite sex...

...Delinquency among English teenaged girls is a somewhat more nebulous affair...

...2,012 of these were committed by young men of 17-21...

...Most effective of them all in his capacity to exude an inoffensive air of uprightness is Adam Faith...

...Parents are indulgent about the slice they expect from their working teenager's salary: A boy earning $25 a week pays his mother or father about $9 toward his board...

...When this report appeared, it coincided with a news story about a supposedly prevalent teenage habit of flaunting shed virginity by the wearing of a yellow golliwogg symbol...

...But where there were the mitigating circumstances of a society disrupted by a world war in the earlier period, there is little to explain such an outburst of immorality in the affluent present day...

...Occasionally a lonely Ted emerges, usually in the remoter parts of London's East End, or in the provinces, but he is interesting only in the sad way that certain vestigial tribes or animals are—because his breed is disappearing...

...IN A recent survey conducted by the Sunday Times it was discovered that neither the working-class teenager who leaves school early, nor the middle-class youth who goes on to higher education, had dashing aspirations for his future...

...According to Dr...

...Ninety-two per cent of the boys queried stated that their major career aim was "to be able to provide a home and security for his family...

...For the most part, the cooler, smoother youth of the '60s wears well-cut, dark Italian-style suits, the only extravagant touch revealed in a pink striped shirt or the exaggerated point of his Continental shoes...

...He was, at least, rather colorfully indigenous...

...Lord Longford has good reason to state that the British youth is "better fed" and "better clothed" than preceding generations...

...so carefree and happy in their tight jeans . . . sorry to note the preponderance of the red banners of the Young Communist League and the Communist Party...

...Faith is not a teenager, incidentally, being in his early 20s, but no one wished to quibble with him on this point, though it is revealing that he still wants to be identified with teenagers and feels he can speak for them as a corporate unified body...

...One might assume that since the most admired pop singers are these high-minded, clean-cut, working-class boys and girls who love their mums and sometimes worry about God, the delinquency rate is plunging downward from the sheer force of attempted emulation...

...We teenagers don't understand all that Biblical language," Faith complained, smiling charmingly, "why not make it simpler, more up-todate...