Constructing the Teddy Boy

One of the most conspicuous aspects of the British Teddy Boy was his hair; that towering quiff carefully and regularly primped with a comb - perhaps a flick knife comb for extra posing points! - and secured with copious fistfuls of pomade.

At least since the nineteenth century, men's hair was simply cut short and combed flat, sometimes slicked with the macassar oil that gave Victorian and Edwardian housewives such headaches worrying about their stained upholstery they were forced to invent the antimacassar. The only possible variations seemed to be in the parting of the hair, and tonsorial exuberance was confined to the moustache.

Given all those long decades of modesty and simplicity in men's hair, it must have been quite a shock in the early 1950s to see young men constructing glossy (and greasy) edifices of hair and quite shamelessly preening in what was seen as an effeminate manner. There can't have been many young men who went quite to this, er, length though:

MEN'S HAIR STYLES

This 1956 film was shot at Cyril Parker's hairdressers shop in Tottenham Court Road, London. The hair 'sausage' or 'elephant trunk' seems very similar to the postiches used by Victorian and Edwardian women to pad out their hairdos - think of those voluminous bouffant styles as sported by the "Gibson Girls" which often needed substantial postiches to achieve.

There's very little footage of Teddy Boys in the British Pathé archive, although interestingly the two clips I've found focus on their hair. So here's the second film, shot at a hairdressing show in Belle Vue, Manchester, in 1955.

There's some bizarre ladies' hairdos, and a varied selection of men's haircuts including the 'Petronius' (Roman style), the 'Curled Semi-Crew Cut,' the 'Brush Cut' and the 'Tony Curtis.' You can catch a brief glimpse of Lew Starr (finessing the Brush Cut), who was the Teddy Boy hairdresser in Manchester, and - I'm told by one who remembers - always had intimidating queues of scowling, smoking ruffians outside his salon in Charles Street:

PAGEANT OF HAIR STYLES

And we all know what 'D.A.' really stands for, don't we?!

Connie bobs her hair

Connie, originally uploaded by Trevira.

Meet the lovely Connie, captured some time in the 1910s (quite possibly during the First World War), with her tumbling tresses, huge bows and pretty pale silk dress with pearl beading.

Hollywood buffs might be reminded of "America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford, at that time the most famous woman in the world.

But then the 1920s arrived:

the new modern Connie, originally uploaded by Trevira.

And Connie was transformed! She's bobbed her hair, and wears a simple day dress with a Peter Pan collar.

Not only that, but her inscribed greeting on the photographs has changed from the rather formal and restrained 'with love Connie' to the brash and informal 'tons of love Con.' Its not just her hair that has changed!

After I uploaded these two pictures on Flickr I got some interesting responses, including one from anniebee drawing parallels with F.Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair (there's a link to the full text of the story on that page too).

And magpie-moon claimed to prefer the pre-bob Connie, which led me to wonder about the modern appeal of these two different aspects of femininity. Both play on the 'girlish' - the older style a flowery, frilly and wistful look of an adolescent who can't wait to grow up, put her hair 'up' and become a proper lady; the 'newer' style, although it looks more modern to our eyes, actually references the kind of haircut and dress that pre-pubertal girls wore at that time, and suggests a wish never to grow up!

As a rough indication of the relative popularity of these looks, the 1910s Connie photograph has been 'favourited' 23 times and the 1920s Connie has 21 'favourites' - 1910s Connie is ahead by a narrow margin.

I can't let this one pass without the now obligatory British Pathé gem, so here's a young lady getting her hair shingled (a later variant of the bob) in 1924 by the eminent hairdresser Emile Long:

"SHINGLED" - A CUTTING LITTLE EPISODE IN ONE ACT

What could you do for £2 2s in 1933?

Advertisement from the Davis Standard (a Croydon cinema newsheet), November-December 1933. Eugène permanent wave, originally uploaded by Trevira.

You could perm your 'whole head' at Ede, hairdresser to the ladies and gentlemen of Purley. Or half your head for 25 shillings, if you were a bit strapped for cash.

£2 2s in 1933 would be equivalent to £111.09 these days, according to the handy calculator on measuringworth and using the Retail Price Index alone. This was a considerable sum to invest in a process that might last a couple of months before it grew out.

Ede of Purley favoured the Eugène system of permanent waving, developed by the Swiss Eugene Suter and his Spanish technical whizz Isidoro Calvete in London in 1917. There's some marvellously alarming photographs of their perming machines in the Wikipedia entry on the Perm (hairstyle), including this example from 1923:

Photograph from Louis Calvete, son of Isidoro Calvete, used under CC license.

It might look terrifying, but it must have worked, and indeed worked very well. So well that Eugene's name became "synonymous with permanent waving throughout the world," and you don't achieve that by electrocuting your clients!

And this little film from 1935, courtesy of British Pathé, shows a later system which used heated clamps allowing the permee [??] to wander about rather than being tethered by the hair to an electrical contraption:

FEMININE PICTORIALITIES NO. 42 - A HAIR NOVELTY