"A sense of being. A sense of belonging,
that's what it was all about".

Graham's Story

That Was The Way It Was

One of the young mods who appears in the film is the late Graham Williams who sadly passed away in April 2021. As a boisterous 20-year-old in 1965 he is worried about his "old man listening" and in an effort to disguise himself has donned an ill-fitting hat. He turns his face from the camera in an attempt to, not very successfully, mask his identity. Graham gave the following interview from his Cheltenham home in March 2020.

"I didn’t even know it was going on until somebody actually pulled me out of the crowd and the next thing I know I’m in front of this bloke. I was pretty right about it really" he said, referring to what he told David Lloyd so many years ago.

"I mean this question of if they jump on you you’re going to fight back, you’ve got to haven’t you?  That was the way it was".

Some fifty years later, Graham believed the fear of his father finding out stemmed from the attitudes of the day. Judging by the opinions of some of the local residents in the film, it was a valid fear.

"You could tell by the old ladies that were sitting there having a cup of tea. That was the way it was. My old man well he was just set in his ways. Everything had to be done by the book. I wasn’t scared alright because I would have laughed it off but I didn’t want to be answerable for it to be honest".

In those days corporal punishment was commonplace. The practice was banned in all schools by 1998. But back then it was acceptable which is possibly why one of the residents even suggested the return of the cat-o-nine tails as a solution to the problems.

"I’m sure she was teaching me at some time and using it". Graham joked. He admitted to "being chopsy" in his younger days and "author of my own misfortune" which often brought trouble his way. At grammar school, he remembered frequently getting the cane but acknowledged that it was "different times".

"If you did something wrong your neighbour would tell your Dad then you’d be in trouble with your Dad. My father never whacked me at all, ever, never but if he told you off, you didn’t like it so you know I didn’t do anything wrong not until I got to that funny stage. The bloke asking me…I said I can’t my old man might be watching”.

“That night with the mods and rockers when hundreds of them all came from everywhere Bristol, Birmingham, wherever and they drove up and down the street, you could hear it”. Graham said.

He explained how the trouble only started as a result of an earlier scuffle on the same evening. He and a friend were standing outside the Blue Moon when a rocker walked by hurling abuse. With animosity already there between the two groups, this inevitably led to a fight but then Graham thought nothing more about it.

“Anyhow, we went back up the Moon quite happy with ourselves and somebody said look out the window and we looked out the window and there was about 100 rockers out there waiting for us. So what they said about ten people beating somebody, it's nonsense”, he said.

Graham insisted the rocker only said that because he was too embarrassed to admit he’d been beaten up by "two little mods".

Brawls would break out between the gangs every so often but not on the scale that brought the regional television news to cover the story.

“It wasn’t frequently alright, now and again. Sometimes they’d jump on you, and other times you could see it was gonna go off so in you went”.

The fights happened against a backdrop of violence and disruption in the wider world. They were unsettling times.

“It was such a disruptive period that the sixties. 65 on.  Every day for about seven years the television was invaded by what was going on in Vietnam. Now that was massive and you also had all the big riots going on in LA and all over the place”.

The Vietnam War had been raging for 10 years (a conflict that lasted for more than 19 years and would not end until 1975) and the Watts race riots in LA which saw six days of civil unrest in August 1965 and resulted in 34 deaths and $40 million in property damage.

"We didn’t take it; do you know what I mean? The generation there, my generation, we didn’t want it so we actually did something about it".

Britain was in a post-war era. In his book 'Mods. A Way of life', Patrick Potter points out that men of this era were not generally followers of the latest trends. There was no concept of the standard suit of the day going out of fashion or becoming obsolete. The 1940s saw the mass production of menswear, albeit in conservative styles, and clothes were cheap but boring. The noticeable difference between men's and women's clothing of the time was the total absence of fashion. This absence led Potter to compare the stifled image to "shit your dad wears" as up until the sixties a man’s attire was generally restrained and entirely bereft of any colour or style.

“It was bleak – that’s right", Graham agreed, "The kid left school at 15 and he’s got an apprenticeship somewhere or whatever and the next day he’s dressed like his dad. You know he’s gone from school clothes on and then he’s dressed like his dad. Big long mac and trilby shoved on his head - all brown, grey, or sort of blue - that was it. It was dull”.

The inevitability of how things were is echoed by Charles Scarrott, another young mod living in the town.

"When you were 15 you got your first pair of long grey trousers and a check shirt and you got a job in the drawing office or as an apprentice or the civil service and married your girlfriend".

The emergence of the Mods, the first British youth culture, was to change all that. "All the elements were there", Potter says, "in a way that made the Teds look like a prototype, a trial run".

“Teddy boys, they were really really bright", Graham recalled, "they would stand out and all that but once they’d finished there was no colour, you couldn’t see any colour, everything was drab and of course, people got fed up with it.”

But in the early sixties, Charles said, "all of a sudden the world changed" and with that shift came new opportunities.

"You were a boy from Cheltenham, I was the first member of my family to go to university, you could go anywhere, get a job, you could move up the social ladder, you could become anybody. I had a car, I had money, I loved and adored clothes, and dressing up. All those things were caught up in that moment in Cheltenham; the look, the feel, the attitude".

The Mod Way Of Life

Graham left the air force in 1965 and soon discovered his passion for the mods and the music. They used to meet at a little coffee shop for espressos at the top of the promenade from where they would go on to clubs or to the local college to watch live gigs.

 “Spencer Davis was there, I saw him when he was about…he was either 14 or 15, absolutely tremendous. Unbelievable. Before the Blue Moon opened. It was the music that drew me to it, I liked the music of the time, and a very good friend of mine was into it as well”.

His love for R&B and blues music saw him going down to London and travelling to other towns and cities to catch his favourite groups.

As a young mod Charles would also make regular trips to other venues so as not to miss out on the music. Times were changing and the music and clubs served as a meeting ground for young 16 to 20-year-olds. All over the country their newly found sense of freedom in post-war Britain pushed the mod movement forward.

"The idea of mod culture was a sort of thing that sprang up all over the place at about the same time and this was at a time when there was no social media, no TV coverage, you didn’t know unless you went and saw it". he said.

Meanwhile, back in Cheltenham, there were some pretty big names topping the bill at the Blue Moon.

“Jimi Hendrix was good, I saw him at the Blue Moon and always The Who. The Who always gave a good performance". Graham said.

He told the story of going for a drink with the group at the nearby Star pub before the gig, something which would be impossible today.

"We went in there and we had a drink and we were just chatting to them, then they went on stage. They all carried their own kit up the stairs, two flights of stairs”, he chuckles,

“And they had to take it back down after they’d finished because they were off somewhere else”.

The only two groups to never play at the Blue Moon were The Beatles and The Rolling Stones as by that time they were well on their way to global superstardom. Both played at the nearby Odeon cinema instead.  

The artists and groups were much more accessible in the days of the club; difficult to imagine in today's music industry. Fans could meet their idols with ease and get close to those they admired the most. You were able to talk to them and it was friendly wherever you were.

“And the stage, you walked up to the stage, you could touch whoever you wanted to. Cor blimey!" Graham said, his voice full of joy at the memory. It was also vital to look your best he told me. “You had to be smart and looking good”, and getting spruced up for an evening had more than one benefit. " you could pull birds then couldn’t you?” he said.

In 1963 Ready Steady Go hit the nation's television screens bringing with it a live audience of “top faces” from the London mod scene; a time that Graham remembered only too well.

“It was a magical time, it was a time when you watched pop programmes on the TV, okay and you could say I’ve seen them, I’ve talked to them. It was fun".

“It was really good for the times you know. It was the best music, and they had a lot of black artists as well come over from America. The music was great. That was the standard”. 

Graham reeled off a list of his top live acts that played the club. “They had Long John Baldry, one of the big blues people and there was also Alan Walker, and then you had Discotheque, John Lee and the Groundhogs, Spencer Davis and then you could go on to Geno Washington, they loved him. Lee Dorsey – I remember him, “Working down a coalmine”.  The best of the lot were Steam Packet they were just absolutely brilliant. Long John Baldry, Julie Driscoll, Rod Stewart, and Brian Augur. They were absolutely fantastic I kid you not”.

Patti and Chris

Patti Garland is seen in the ATV news report with her boyfriend and future husband Chris. In 1965, both had a flair for fashion and an innate sense of style and were known as Faces. Chris who passed away in 2018 was generally considered to be the 'King of the Mods' in the town.

Speaking from her London home more than fifty years later Patti said, “He worked in the first male boutique in that part of the country, Royden Esq which sold the most stylish mod gear. I moved to Cheltenham a short time before this and was also considered very stylish as I made all my own clothes at the time".

"Up until this time, there were only teddy Boys which were an earlier version of the rockers who liked rock ‘n’ roll and Elvis Presley. Mods came with a completely different style in clothes, music and lifestyle".

Being part of the Cheltenham mod scene and wider youth culture was of great significance for them both she explains,

"It was probably one of the most important times in our lives”.

A lost pair of sunglasses sparked the beginning of their romance.

David Lloyd's news report was not something that Patti had expected to be part of and only saw the original film a couple of years ago.

"I think it was because Chris was a pretty forward person. We just happened to be at the top of the promenade in Montpellier. The ATV evening news was there and they sort of homed in on us and I’m not entirely sure why but it could be that I’d met him from work and they saw us walking along".

The fact that fighting had broken out on several nights and prompted a visit from regional news caused a stir among the young mods and rockers.

"There was quite a little crowd as you can see from that bit of ATV film" Patti says, "When people realised it was the TV cameras, they all wanted to get in on it. It was a big deal then TV".

So why did Cheltenham's mods and rockers clash so often? They were complete opposites and the rockers obviously didn’t appreciate the painstaking efforts and time the mods would spend on their appearance.

"It was a different style of music. The style of dress and music went together. I can remember Chris spending hours doing his hair; he couldn’t have a hair out of place it was always immaculate".

Acknowledgments: Thank you to Neil Leighton, Patti Garland, Graham Williams, Claire Mahoney, The Blue Moon Cheltenham.Teen & Twenty Rendezvous Facebook Group, Kevin Turfrey, Richard Goddard, Christopher Stanbury, Dave 'Jacko' Jackson, Michael Williams, Charles Scarrott, Sue Brooks, Catherine Jones, Robin Brooks and the Midlands Archive for Central England (MACE) for all their help and support with this project. Images where not otherwise credited in 'An Enduring Subculture' Heather Buckley Flickr and Luca Anasta - unsplash.com

References

Potter, P., 2018. Mods - A Way Of Life. 1st edition. Darlington, England: Carpet Bombing Culture.