John Clayden
The Skinheads one of the early youth cults in Britain still have memorial gatherings in Yarmouth on the east coast where they retain their affection for Ska music which is of Jamaican origin.
The adoption of black music by working-class kids after the war is interesting. It seemed to be a country-wide phenomenon. Why did it happen and what were the subsequent influences on British culture? I have puzzled over this with friends who also lived through it.
What follows is my account of my experience of what took place in the fifties, sixties and beyond.

Towards the end of the war our family moved into an impressive house in the YiewsleyHigh Street we rented from my father’s employer the London Co-operative  Society It was in a state of decay the other half next door was uninhabitable but it meant we  had two  big gardens to play in and because my mum was hospitable, my friends were always round. I remember my cousin June and Arthur Wood were always Cowboys and Ted his brother and I were always Indians. After I passed the Eleven Plus and they didn’t I lost touch. Me and Ted had just missed conscription but Arthur was called up but by that time it was winding down. 
In a couple of years because of our love of music we resumed contact and I often went round to their house in Whitethorn Avenue on the oldest prewar Council Estate. Arthur bought jazz records and we listened  to Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers,  Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five,  Sidney Bechet and his New Orleans Feet Warmers, Bix Biederbecke and Muggsy Spanier and Tommy Ladnier.
The Wood brothers and another school friend Lawrence Sheaff  had got into Ealing Technical College to do Commercial Art. 
As well as the music we would amuse ourselves drawing  cartoons usually of a surreal nature and inspired by Edward Lear’s drawings. We each had a pile of paper and would pass one round and have a laugh and do another.
From a young age I had been listening to my Uncle Maurice’s collection of jazz records he had left round at my Granny’s when  he went to fight in France and where we had been living near Slough.(While there I witnessed a Doodle Bug fly over). I had assimilated the genre.
By this time just after the war there were lots of local jazz clubs either for New Orleans Trad Jazz bands or others that were devoted to Modern Jazz and never the twain shall meet. The Traddies called the modern jazz fans Dirty Boppers and the others called the Traddies Mouldy Figs. The modern jazz fans wore suits with drain pipe trousers and winkle picker shoes known as the Yiddisher Britisher look because of their origin from Tailors in the Edgware Road. They were the proto mods and the Trad fans wore jumpers casual clothing a forerunner of what the press later called Hippies. They incidentally never called themselves Hippies but Heads. They grew out of Bohes (bohemians) and Beatniks. They were the first to wear their hair long. I remember one of the pioneers of long hair I knew who was on a Mayday March when a policeman asked him sneeringly “Who do you think you are, Jesus Christ ?” “He replied “No just a lesser prophet”.
In addition to jazz in Whitethorn Avenue we listened to Big Bill Broonsy and Leadbelly and other blues musicians Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters. And then when Lonnie Donegan the banjo player with the Chris Barber band formed a skiffle group to play in the interval and then released a record we got ourselves some beat up guitars a tea chest to make a bass and zinc washboard and for a time I borrowed a Tuba from school. At first we did not know how to tune the guitars but through Lawrence who came from a musical family – his father played in the Big Ben Banjo Band, we found out how to tune up and learned what was known as the three chord trick, three easy to play chords which could cover the tunes we played. I have still got the card – Ted Woods Original London Skiffle Group formed 1954. 
Arthur performed and sang with his Art Woods Combo later the Art Woods inspired by Howling Wolf.
Our skiffle group got a regular gig playing the interval at the Viaduct Inn in Hanwell where Colin Kingswell’s Jazz Bandits was the resident band. We would have been about 15. One of our number had seen the soldier playing a trumpet mouthpiece on its own, in the film “From Here to Eternity ” and mastered the technique later going on to be a professional trumpet player. 
On the same council estate there was also another band Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers and at first, they had to go round to Lawrence to get him to tune their guitars for them. Lawrence learned to play the solo  “Guitar Shuffle”, from listening to the recording by Big Bill Broonsie no mean feat as it entailed playing two parts at the same time.
The youngest brother of Ted and Arthur, Ronnie used to hang around all ears  learning as we rehearsed and they bought him an electric guitar and he went on to play with the Small Faces and still till now he is a Rolling Stone. Recently on Desert island Discs he praised Lawrence’s playing and influence. He said Lawrence  is now a Professor (of Transcendental Meditation) somewhere in America having abandoned music for the Maharishi but he always remained  a mentor and support for Ron.
Our skiffle group morphed into a blues band with Lawrence on electric bass and Dicky Bachelor known as Dicky Dee on drums 
I knew Dicky from the YCL when we were younger.  We had acquired electric guitars a small 50 watt amp we were inspired by Chicago blues bands such as the great Jimmy Reid and  numbers like  Big Boss Man.  Little could we have guessed that within a few years we would be seeing him in the flesh. I got a secondhand alto sax from a junk shop and we played in Cafe Cantata a coffeehouse on Eton High Street next door to the Police Station. We were known as the Nagga Yog band. Then Lawrence left to go back to Ealing to study fine art and we ended up playing with Hog Snort Rupert alias Bob Macgrath.
By this time the Ricky Tick Club was established in a pub opposite Windsor Castle the Star and Garter and was later to move just across the River Thames by the playing fields of Eton in a decaying mansion named Clewer Mead.  Both clubs were the inspiration of John Mansfield in partnership with Philip Hayward.
I would strongly recommend getting hold of John’s book  “As You Were” which gives a very good account of this era and I have found very useful to prompt my memory.
I should say that most of these blues fans were what became Mods. 
John Mansfield was not interested in the money although he was a very good organiser promoter and he managed our band he just loved the music and brought over many black musicians from America who were our idols. In their turn they were amazed at the reception they got from white kids in England; unlike back home where black and white audiences and performers were totally separate.
John encouraged and helped the development of British bands on the Rhythm and Blues scene.
So we became the backing band of Hog Snort Rupert. We had a sax section and sometimes a three girl backing singers called the So Fines. We were called Hog Snort Rupert and the Good Good Band. Dicky Dee is credited by John Mansfield with introducing him to  important venues and musicians.
Rupert acquired records from US army shops (known as the PX) on the nearest US Army Air force bases so we were inspired by bands and singers who were largely unknown here, one in particular was Bobby Blue Bland he was an early forerunner of soul music.
We were resident in the Ricky Tick on quieter nights along with Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger.
In addition Rupert also designed the posters and silk printed them in a basement of the Star and Garter and later when the club moved to Clewer Mead across the river .He also painted the interior of the new club in the same style as the posters. The fly posting of Rupert’s very distinctive posters were a crucial factor in publicising the club circuit John and Philip had built up they silk screened them on the premises often at short notice.
The beginning of the sixties saw a rapid development of what was to become Rock music and the many black musicians who John and Philip and a few others brought over played a crucial role. They also gave a lot of help and encouragement, to the emerging bands who were inspired by these black musicians. John gave a lot of them the first opportunity to play in front of an audience. 
After about four years as the thing became a craze among teenagers, the sharks grasping the opportunity to make big bucks took over and shaped its development. The music became a commercial commodity. Typically in the case of the Stones. This is all well documented in John’s book. The veracity of John’s account some of my surviving friends and I can vouch for as we lived through it.

Those of us in Rupert’s band were fortunate to do a tour backing two of the greats of black music, Larry Williams and Johnnie Guitar Watson (Jimmy Hendricks mentor) and we got to know each other. We gave them lifts when their transport never materialised and they were surprised how we knew their music and its idiom which we had been familiar with since we were kids. Prez our tenor player was black born in London from an acting family and we greatly respected his talents but it never occurred to us to think of him as black. They must have been taking notes. Larry told John they were so good they named them twice.

When asked by a Manchester local reporter what he thought of the band Larry Williams said ” Oh man they’re Baaaaad” which of course meant the opposite. The headline that appeared however said LARRY NOT TOO HAPPY WITH HIS UK BAND 
He also told us at a rehearsal when we asked if we were doing things ok, “Man you’re Out of Sight” an expression we had never before encountered. They wore long white leather coats which sartorially put us to shame.
I think it was B B King who seeing a large crowd awaiting his plane landing at Heathrow, wondered who the  celebrity was on board until he realised it was him.
But why did the youth in Britain take to black American music in the way they did  and what if any were the consequences – good or bad ?
Of course I don’t know the answer but the raw emotional sincerity of the blues had something to do with it. Perhaps it was a way of escaping the damping down of feelings which was the only way it was possible to survive the horrors of the war. Something I had experienced when young, as I was born in 1939 although I was only aware of it in retrospect.
On the other hand the nature of relationships between young people was changed during the war due to the fact that the one you loved might be killed any time and never be seen again. This lead to a directness and an appreciation of the moment. Something the black slaves also developed to shake off their condition. These war time relationships were memorably depicted in a television series in my youth called The Chamomile Lawn. 
The availability of small record labels like Topic and little portable radios had something to do with it and the popularity of folk music and black singers like Josh White and Paul Robeson and Leadbelly. The influences were often projected by people associated with the communist party or  the labour left like Humphrey Lyttleton, Bruce Tuner and Ken Colyer.  We despised commercialism and emphasized emotional sincerity.  Musicians  were often  self-taught, playing from the heart and soul .That’s what Soul meant. Soul and Gospel music was an important inspiration.

Among workers there was a spirit of confidence engendered by the gains in living conditions and education and free health care and Trade Union strength.  Bevin during the war had brought in the closed shop ie TU membership was mandatory.
This strengthened the working class in the immediate post war period. The working class had prestige the audiences at the Cantata and the Ricky Tick reflected this. From a class perspective the audiences were very mixed. There were kids from the council estates rubbing shoulders with rich kids from Stoke Poges and Langley but there was no snobbery. If anything, the working-class kids set the fashions and were looked up to. I remember Verity Emmett who went out with Dicky who had been a child actress in Belles Of Saint Trinian’s and whose family were British colonialists who had gone native. They put on parties. Sometimes we went to parties in very big posh houses. The best dancer with the most prestige was Terry Keogh who was from the local council estate.
The spirit of the Aldermaston marches and the civil disobedience of the Committee of 100 and the American draft dodgers who ended up in London also  had something to do with it. 

In a pub crowded to overflowing at Falcon Field where the Aldermaston march was assembling, marchers packed out the only pub. The only way you were getting a drink was by fellow protesters passing money from hand to hand over to the bar and passing the drinks back over people’s heads. Over in the corner I heard a piano sounding like Ray Charles. I made my way through the crush and it was being played by a very young Stevie Windwood .
John and Philip who had done their national service in a military band were irrepressible rebels. (As was more recently the ex IDF bandsman saxophonist Gilad Atzmon)
Without exception the snobs from Eton with their top hats were despised except a few who merged with us. We looked down on Mick Jagger.
The early Stones were helped a lot by John even housing and feeding them but Jagger switched management to a fellow rich creep called Andrew Loog Oldham who marketed them as a sex commodity.
The music was our music – it  belonged to our  young generation who loved it and loved life.
The attraction for young people in the 50s onwards was not because of the blues singer’s  image, if they were black or white, it was primarily because of the emotional authenticity and dance  enticing rhythm of their music. 
To quote from John’s book –
“The reception these visiting blues artists got in the clubs at this time was fantastic. The audience really loved them and they were treated to two hour sets. Between numbers some of these blues legends would tell them how much they appreciated how different things were here because back in the USA ‘black’ music was ignored and segregated and only poor re-worked versions were ever played on ‘white’ radio stations….rubbing shoulders with the bands was all just taken for granted. The whole scene was new to everyone. 
Suzanne Ellis recalled ‘We had such a good time at the Ricky
-Tick – it was almost like a family. There was no pretence, it just seemed normal. We were all young, and they were like friends.’ 

But  these new promoters put the emphasis on the performers  the music was secondary. The image was primary. Andrew Loog Oldham ruthlessly got rid of those members of the Stones who did not fit the image, as John describes in his book. They were sold as a boy band, as sex idols.  The Who as  rebels smashing things up.  The speakers and amps became so big and loud that the audience was dominated and made passive. The craze  became so big a lot of money was made and money became the measure of value.