Rockeeers!
This week was the anniversary of the 1964 riots when mods fought rockers in various seaside towns. Over at Your Archives you can read a summary of a file of Home Office papers relating to the riots. But what were mods and rockers? The file helpfully defines mods as “riders of motor scooters with somewhat fanciful sartorial styles”, and rockers as “riders of motor cycles who dress in leather jerkins and heavy boots”. It’s interesting that only 20% of the rioters were thought to have arrived on bikes and scooters, and that the majority went by train. And it wasn’t just Brighton: even Skegness had some trouble! What isn’t surprising is the knee-jerk reaction of some politicians and police officers who seemed to think that civilisation was under threat and that drastic measures like national service, judicial corporal punishment, and confiscating driving licences for non-motoring offences were necessary. What does seem surprising today is that the government dismissed these suggestions as impractical and insisted (correctly, as it turned out) that the situation was under control and could be dealt with by existing police powers. I imagine that if this had happened in the last 10 years, the Labour government would have responded over-enthusiastically to the demands that Something Must Be Done, with “tough” new measures that created new problems without solving the illusory problems that they were supposed to solve. It remains to be seen if things will be different now. As for the mods and rockers, they didn’t destroy civilisation. In the 1970s modernism turned into revivalism. I still think “mod revival” is an oxymoron, although Secret Affair are one of my guilty pleasures. The Home Office files even mention a mod falling off a cliff which was possibly the inspiration for the end of Quadrophenia.
