You know, chowder, that deserves its own thread: “My life as a teddy boy.” There are plenty of people on this board to whom anything before 1980 is ancient history, and I’m sure they’d be fascinated. Hey, maybe you could spark a teddy boy revival!
Seconded!
Boy Oh Boy.
Well lemme tell ya fellers…there has been so many Teddy Boy revivals that I guess another one would just die like a damp squib.
Anyways I’ll tell you a bit about the originals
We were not hooligans for starters, we took great pride in our appearance and our hair was the be all and end all apart from our beetle crushers.
As Elvis said “Do any thing that you wanna do but don’t step on my blue suede shoes”
Mine were not blue they were ::cough, cough:: pink with 2" yes TWO INCHES of foam rubber for soles. I also had lime green laces…I musta looked a right twat 
The handerchief in our breast pocket wasn’t a real hankie, it was a piece of cardboard with fabric sewn on it. You could buy these in packs of 3, different colours and either 2, 3 or 4 peaks or just straight edged.
Ties: Allus had to be bootlace with different fasteners and shirts could be any colour but white and pink were the IN colours, some shirts had those metal edges on them like those Tex Ritter/Roy Rogers had…we considered any Ted with these on to be posers.
Your Teddy Boy suit really set you off, 2 or 3 piece in any colour you wanted…powder blue being the fave followed closely by either lime green or pink. All had to have velvet collars and cuffs and pocket edges, some Teds went to extremes and had velvet down the side of their pants similar to the stripe on a tuxedo, again we considered these posers.
Socks: Oh man these were summat again, any colour you wanted except black or brown or grey…I mean these were like square colours man 
If you had anything at all in the way of taste you wore one pink and one lime green sock, never 2 of the same colour…honestly how gauche would this look.
Anything else you squares need to know?
I forgot to mention that the jackets were “drape” which meant they came almost to your knees :eek: and a suit was pretty expensive, mine cost me £27 and I had to buy it on the drip.
My “crushers” were, if I 'member right, about £2.19.11…almost £3 for a pair of shoes…bloody hell
It wasn’t cheap being a Ted
Chowder, that’s awesome. You don’t happen to have any pics from back then, do you?
Also, my understanding is that “chav” always refers to a white person. Is that incorrect? I always thought chavs were the equivalent of America’s wiggers. (White kids who dress, speak and act in stereotypically black hip-hop style.)
I had a whole bunch of pics at one time, all in B&W so you really couldn’t tell who had what colour suit etc on, matter of fact we more or less all looked the bloody same. Sadly I have no idea what happened to the photos.
People had the wrong idea about us, all we wanted to do was get away from the fucking grey clothing, the “sensible” shoes and all the rest of the crap that sterotyped each and everyone, we wanted to be different 
Imagine if you can 6-7 kids of ages 16-18 all scowling into the camera trying to look really hard and mean, each with a cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth, one hand in pocket the other giving the “V” sign…that was us, the Wild Bunch
There was Me, Billy and Bernie Bushel, Derek Wrigley, Len Stowell,Dave Higgins and Alex Walsh and another guy whose name I forget, I do know that he was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after the pic was taken, he wasn’t really part of our “gang” which is why I can’t remember his name.
As far as I know a CHAV is anyone of any race, I may be wrong tho’
I thought the existence of this book was kind of redundant. Guess not! 