Photographs of teddy boys and girls taken by film director Ken Russell, and rarely seen for more than 50 years are about to go on display at the North Wall. Reg Little finds out more

Films like The Devils and Women in Love were to establish film director Ken Russell’s reputation as the enfant terrible of the British movie world.

But an exhibition marking the tenth birthday of the North Wall Arts Centre at St Edward’s School, in north Oxford, will show another side of the great movie maverick.

Fifty photographs of teddy boys and girls taken by Ken Russell, and unseen for more than 50 years, will be displayed at the North Wall from February 1 – you might say, bringing teddies to Teddies (as St Edward’s remains affectionately known).

Long before he was to stamp his larger than life personality on the big screen with his controversial and flamboyant releases, Russell headed to London with his camera to capture the fledgling youth culture that was taking hold amongst the nation’s teenagers.

Teddy boys, like punk rockers many decades later, would forever be synonymous with juvenile delinquents in the eyes of some. And more than a few Teds certainly relished fuelling the moral panic by willingly acting the part of the hooligan.

But the characters photographed in 1955 by Russell in funfairs, outside clubs and posing on derelict bombsites, were part of a subculture more about fashion, style and music than toppling civilisation.

There is a cool confidence and elegance about the young men and women Russell found in post- war London, at a moment of social flux.

The fresh and forgotten faces defiantly staring at the camera are sure of themselves and their surroundings, with their attention grabbing tailor-made clothes, drape jackets and drainpipe trousers, in stark contrast to the grim and austere working class areas of the capital.

As Russell, who died five years ago aged 84, would recall: “They were tough, these kids, they’d been born in the war years…they knew their worth. They just wore what they wore.

“No one paid much attention to the teddy girls before I did them, though there was plenty on teddy boys.”

The teenagers lean on brick walls and are in gangs outside the Seven Feathers Club, where they did the popular Ted dance, The Creep. Several of the images feature the striking 14-year-old Jean Rayner. “She had attitude by the truckload,” remembered Russell.

The Ted, as teddy boys and girls were colloquially known, were a uniquely British phenomenon, despite becoming widely viewed as a rebellious side effect to the arrival of rock & roll music from across the Atlantic.

Its roots can be traced to working class parts of London in 1952, when young men started dressing up in a style worn by aristocrats in the Edwardian period. To this was added American features like the cowboy’s ‘maverick’ tie.

Ted Polhemus, the writer and photographer who curated the Street Style exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, reflected: “It was a bizarre mix but somehow it all worked aesthetically, lending an aura of dignity, grace and elegance to young men whose fathers had gone through life flat cap in hand, stylistically inhibited, knowing their place.

“At first media treated these ‘New Edwardians’ or ‘Teddy Boys’ as a joke, but the strategy soon switched to questioning their masculinity. Psychologists were hauled out to explain how the absence of the teddy boys’ fathers during the war had derailed their normal development. The Teds fought words with images. They might preen and strut but their macho demeanour left no one in doubt that these were 100 per cent male peacocks.”

And this was going on before the rock n’ roll invasion. The big bands led by the likes of Ted Heath and Ken Mackintosh created the soundtrack in the early days of the Ted, with songs like The Creep, created especially for the New Edwardians. However, when the music of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis crossed the Atlantic, it was to prove a marriage made in heaven.

Mr Polhemus adds: “From an American perspective it was all most confusing. The teddy boys’ uniform didn’t remotely resemble the American vision of rock n’ roll and when Bill Haley and others visited Britain they were flummoxed by what they saw.”

Ted clothing for boys included drape jackets, often with velvet trim collar and pocket flaps, drainpipe trousers and exposed socks. Teddy girls, who tended to be young working women, opted for an androgynous look, with pencil skirts and straw boater hats. Picture Post described the girls photographed by the 27-year-old Russell as “hard working with a fashion sense which has brought a welcome flash of mass-elegance to the British scene.”

Yet throughout the 50s and 60s any youngster who got into trouble was likely to be classified as a Ted. Only with the rock n roll revival in the 1970s did they come to be affectionately viewed as happy time-travellers from a safer age.

Russell met many of the girls in the Troubadour coffee house, where he would become friends with Oliver Reed, who would later star in Russell’s best films.

The photographs in the Ken Russell’s Teddy Girls and Boys exhibition were only uncovered in 2005, following a house fire at Russell’s home in Lymington. Stored by his photographic agency, the collection comprised of over 3,000 negatives.

“In a way I was making still films, I suppose,” Russell had commented. “I learnt the value of the perfect composition. When they sent me the prints I thought: ‘My God, did I take these? They’re not bad’ Secretly, I think they’re rather special.”

Ken Russell’s Teddy Girls and Boys exhibition at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford, runs from February 1 to 18. Admission is free.

  • Ken Russell: enfant terrible of the movie world

Ken Russell, the Oscar-nominated film director, was born in 1927, the son of a shoe-shop owner. He was educated at Pangbourne naval college, Berkshire, and studied photography at Walthamstow Technical College.

After serving in the merchant navy and the RAF, he tried life as a ballet dancer before becoming a freelance photographer. He went on to begin his film career working on arts documentaries for the BBC, producing a series of musical studies on great composers such as Delius, Prokofiev and Elgar.

His film career began with the offbeat comedy, French Dressing, and, four years later, the thriller, Billion Dollar Brain, taken from Len Deighton's novel and starring Michael Caine.

But his first commercial success came in 1969 with his controversial adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, known to a generation for its nude male wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates. The film received five Oscar nominations and won a Best Actress award for Glenda Jackson.

His equally controversial 1971 film The Devils also starred Reed, along with Vanessa Redgrave. The film was banned in several countries due to its violent scenes.

Russell was chosen by Pete Townshend to direct The Who’s rock opera Tommy, starring a galaxy of rock stars including Roger Daltrey, Tina Turner and Elton John.

His other best known films included The Music Lovers, telling the story of Tchaikovsky's marriage and death, and The Boy Friend, based on the stage musical.

In 1991 Russell was to bring Oxford’s Broad Street to a standstill during the making of Prisoner of Honour. Starring Richard Dreyfuss, the film told the story of Alfred Dreyfus, the French captain sent to Devil’s Island for espionage. More than a 100 extras, on the steps of the Clarendon Building, took part in the scene documenting the wronged soldier’s arrival for a retrial.

One of Russell’s last high profile moves was appearing in Celebrity Big Brother, but he left after four days following a series of rows with Jade Goody.

At the time of his death in 2011, he had been working on a script for a film Alice in Wonderland: The Musical, which he planned to direct.