Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c1920-c.1970 (review)

Perhaps more than anything else, David Fowler's Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c1920-c.1970 aims to set the record straight. The chapters, nine in total provide rich detail rooted in exhaustive archival investigation and fresh insight into the workings of a youth culture over a fifty year period. Youth Culture in Modern Britain reads as a direct response to those journalists, sociologists, and historians whose writings, Fowler argues served to define too narrowly and often incorrectly British youth culture, its emergence and evolution, and its major defining influences and figures. Fowler's charge is, in a very broad sense to upset and then recast the taken-for-granted and false assumptions that proliferated during the early days of youth cultural writings in the 1960s and 70s. Each of the chapters appears to provide a corrective to the base of historical knowledge about this group and their distinct ways of living. Fowler departs from early scholarly writing that treated youth culture as object as he moves toward an understanding of youth as agent, that is, as active creators of history and social life.

For the most part, Fowler succeeds in his task, forcing his readers to rethink the guiding assumptions that have held sway over the popular and academic study of British youth culture. Each of the chapters seems to follow a similar logic, which is to call into dispute and then with evidence cast doubt on a long-held claim about British youth culture: youth culture emerged in the 1920s, not the "swinging 60s"; youth culture was shaped by 18-25 year olds who were enrolled at university, not actual teenagers; youth culture was primarily shaped by middle-class youth, not the working class; youth culture emerged from within the university, not in dance halls or the cinema; youth cultural figures sought to carve out new ways of living and were not in principal oppositional. The latter idea dominated Birmingham Schools' Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (the subject of one chapter), a major arbiter in mapping a course of study in British youth culture for two decades.

Fowler's chapters concentrate on two key periods in the development of youth culture, the interwar and postwar periods displacing from the center of inquiry "the juvenile delinquent, the Teddy Boy, and the birth of 'the teenager'"(11), (though one of the chapters deals with the subject of juvenile delinquency in Northern Ireland). For example, Chapter 1: Edwardian Cults of Youth, c1900-1914 shows that teenage, working-class boys were not the originators of a youth leisure culture. Adolescent boys squandered neither time nor money at the cinema or dance hall, despite popular characterization. Most young men ages 15-19 during 1900-1914 spent much of their waking time at work. With meager wages and long hours of work, little room was left for leisure pursuits. Instead it was middle-class students at Cambridge who played an instrumental role in shaping an emergent British youth culture. In support of this claim, Fowler dedicates a chapter to an enterprising Rolf Gardiner, a privileged student at Cambridge from 1921-24 who actively promoted an international youth culture and sought to advance the idea of distinct youth communities, a "cult of youth" operating beyond the watchful eye of adult supervision. Gardiner, Fowler explains was disinterested in traditional student societies of his day because they tended be adult –centric in their structure, content, and activities. This chapter alongside later chapters focused on the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and the Rolling Stones, and the progressive student movements of the 60s offer worthwhile challenge to the well-ensconced idea that popular culture and pop music icons of the 60s were a driving force in the formation of youth culture.

Another chapter focused on the 1920's flapper also lends support to the claim that youth culture did not originate in dance halls or the cinema. Here Fowler shows the flapper was not a widespread cultural phenomenon in 1920's Britain as it...