Teddy Boy (Part 3)

Despite all the dancing there was still plenty of time for drinking.

'We'd dance all night. That was the one thing we wanted do, nothing else, just dancing, dancing to rock music, continually. I used to go out dancing five nights a week. I often wonder how I ever made it to the pit the next day because we didn’t just go out for two or three hours at a time, we went out for six or seven hours.  It’s a wonder I wasn’t worn out by the time I was twenty. I’ve got in the house when Minnie was in, taken my big duffle coat and jacket off and my shirt was stuck to me, wringing wet. She’d say to me “You’ll finish up with bloody pneumonia.”

When you wanted to go dancing in Stoke, you’d either go up the Ideal Skating Rink, or to the TA places, like the one at the top of Bucknall Road. But after a while we started clubs of our own, one at Meakin's club near Meakin’s pot bank and we started another for rock and roll dancers at the Northwood Mission. It was there I taught Minnie's eldest Marie how to rock and roll and she used to go up the Northwood Mission with me on a Tuesday night. 

There were bigger halls of course, but they wouldn't let us in. You couldn’t get into Kings Hall if you were wearing a Teddy Boy suit in the early 1950’s, they’d kick you out. They probably thought we were going smash the place up. Aye, well, some of them did! There were plenty of fights. Every time you went anywhere there was nearly always a punch up. It was like it is now, no different - boozing and fighting. No different at all. The only thing that wasn’t around then much was drugs. You could get marijuana - a couple of sailors, blokes doing their National Service used to sell it at the Ideal - but at five bob a time it was too much. It was expensive five shilling was! A pint of mild was seven pence and the bitter was nine pence a pint. So reckon that up. You could have nearly six pints for five shilling. I mean, it used to be a shilling to go in the dance hall.

In the Ideal they didn’t sell alcoholic drinks, you could only have orange squash, tea or coffee. If you wanted a drink you used to have to go out and when you went out they stamped your hand so you could get back in again. You could guarantee that everyone would rush in quick, get a seat in there, or sit around the side, because you danced on the skating rink. All as they did was throw chalk down to make it less slippery, because they had ballroom dancing and then jiving in between that. They played a bit of ballroom, a bit of jiving. We all used to go in and get a seat, but you could guarantee at half past nine that half of them would be across the Sea Lion, or the Golden Lion further down.

Well at that time when I was seventeen I only had to have three pints and I was drunk! But some were worse. One of my mates, Tony Smith, he was terrible at getting us in fights when he'd been drinking. Terrible, he was. We got that fed up with him that we used to tell the blokes he was falling out with “Give him a bloody good hiding, it'll serve him right. He only does it for try and drag us in for pull him out again.” One bloke did give him a good slapping one night. We said to Tony afterwards “That serves you bloody right. It’ll teach you a lesson that will.” Mind you, they could have hurt him bad because there was a gang of them that night, but they let this one lad slap him around, he didn’t hurt him all that much anyway.

Then on another occasion, about six of us were sitting down at the side in the Ideal and Tony says “That bloody lad over there keeps bumping into me when I’m dancing.” We said, “Well what’s up with that?” He says, “He won’t do it again.” Next minute he runs on the floor, jumps on this bloke’s back and starts pulling him over. He’d been drinking and being the size he was he only had to have a pint and he was drunk. Of course, this bloke’s mates all started kicking and hitting Tony so we all joined in. They finished up chucking us out and it took us three weeks to get back in again. We had to go up and apologise to them.

With the boys in Blackpool.

I remember one big punch up in a dance hall at Blackpool when I was about eighteen or nineteen. It was absolutely packed in there. They’d got these three rock bands on and it was just solid rock and roll. There was a big gang of us and we were dancing with these girls from different parts of the country when the fight started. The next thing I knew a fist had hit the side of my face. Then somebody hit me with something. Then I was hitting somebody else. The next minute I said to Harold and John Hale and one or two others, “Come on! Out of here!” We dashed through the door and ran on up the stairs to the balcony, then we were looking over the top watching them fight. Then all these security blokes in uniforms came in. They just grabbed anyone who was fighting and must have thrown about a hundred and fifty of them out. We got well out of that, but my ear hurt the next day where somebody had punched me!

I’ve been in fights when they’ve been whirling bike chains, once at Blackpool and once down Stoke when one of us got stabbed. It was that quick. I remember leaning over him with a jumper, holding it on the wound until the ambulance came. The blood seemed to be everywhere! But I suppose it seemed a lot because he was wearing a white shirt. I think he must have been stabbed with a penknife myself. He was all right, though, it wasn’t all that deep. He was out next day walking around. I saw him in the pub. I said, “Art owrate? I thought thay'd have been in hospital for a month!”  He says, “Nah, they give me a couple of pints of blood and stitched me up.” I said, “Let’s have a look.” - three stitches. The best part of it, him that got stabbed, he’d only been with us about three or four times. He was no trouble at all, he wasn’t aggressive or anything. It wasn’t his fault, it was just that the fight started and he was the one that was in the road and got stabbed. And those that started it had all run. Of course the cops came and they were asking us all these questions, who was it, what’s their names - and how the bloody hell did we know? We didn’t know them. We just got into a fight with them in a dance hall which finished up outside.

I saw a lot of rockers and bands in the 50s and early 60s. Roy Wood of Wizard, I saw him when he was nobody, when he first started out. Joe Brown and the Brothers too and Tommy Steele. One time, I think it was with Ted Heath and his orchestra, Cliff Richard and the Shadows were there and me and Tony Hughes were talking to Cliff outside. He’d got a pink jacket on, a black shirt and a pink tie. We’d come out, we’d seen the show, come round the side, round where that little car park is - the stage door used to be there. Anyway, he was there with two of the Shadows - I think it was that Bruce Welch who used to play with them and somebody else. But they went in and we were talking to Cliff - I can’t remember what we said to him. I know Tony Hughes had his autograph, but we were talking to him for about five minutes and then he says, “I’ll have to go, because we’ve got another show.” And he went in. He was standing outside, he wasn’t smoking but the other two were. And then the Americans started coming to the Theatre Royal, but I can’t remember them all. And then what happened in 1965, when Rock and Roll was still going - even though the Teddy Boy era had finished - and it was bigger than ever? He came here, Chuck Berry, the greatest.

The Teddy Boy era went, though. As quick as it started, it finished, it just died out almost overnight. The music was still there, rock music was as big as ever, it’s just that the people themselves changed, I don’t why. I think it was partly because the Teddy Boy suits got that expensive; the tailors they twigged on. Plus the Teddy Boys, they started getting married and what have you and a lot of them were called up for the army, because National Service was still on. So, it just died out everywhere. But, they were good exciting years and I wouldn’t have missed them for anything.'

Reference: Interviews with William Cooper, 2007.