Simon Sleight

Interstitial Acts: Urban Space and the Larrikin Repertoire in Late-Victorian Melbourne

Abstract The appearance of ‘larrikins’—or young street toughs—in city spaces across late-Victorian Melbourne represented a fundamental challenge to contemporary understandings of public order and age-related behaviour. This article reassesses the activities of these individuals and contends that larrikinism is best regarded as a series of ‘performances’ in space. Key aspects of the larrikins repertoire are considered, and larrikin activities related to the urban locations in which they occurred. Application of a gender analysis further reveals the sexualised undertones of larrikin behaviour and the anxieties of societys elders concerning both native-born youth and the reputation of ‘Young Australia’.

Children, childhood and youth in the British world

Age was a critical factor in shaping imperial experience, yet it has not received any sustained scholarly attention. This pioneering interdisciplinary collection is the first to investigate the lives of children and young people and the construction of modes of childhood and youth within the British world.

Introduction: The World in Miniature

Outside Buckingham Palace in London, a celebratory vision of the ‘British world’ is embodied in stone. On a central pedestal, a venerable Queen Victoria resides on her imperial throne, flanked by statues of Truth and Justice. A winged Victory, together with figures of Courage and Constancy, rises above, while the reverse of the pedestal displays Motherhood in the tender image of a seated woman — a youthful Victoria, perhaps? — sheltering three infants. Four bronze lions (a gift from New Zealand) stand guard at Victoria’s feet, alongside Naval and Military Power, in muscular yet effortless repose, and associated fountains and reservoirs. Across the water, some distance beyond, a series of concentric gates and allegorical statues by British sculptors depict imperial dominions.1 These outlying figures are all notably youthful, the Australia statues especially so. Animals accompanying each national child further emphasize the apparent rawness of the imperial offspring. Canada nurses a seal and a bulging net of fish, South Africa tackles an ostrich and monkey, West Africa escorts a cheetah and Australia coaxes a large ram and kangaroo. Such associations contrast with the stateliness and settled bearing of Victoria and her immediate companions, whom the callow youths presumably hope to emulate. Forever petrified as children, and positioned to face their ‘Mother Queen’, the dominions orbit the imperatrix.

Histories of play

‘Children’, observed Colin Ward in his influential 1978 study, The child in the city, ‘will play anywhere and with anything’ (1978, p. 86). An apparently universal impulse, play has even been argued by some scholars to transcend history as an activity ‘older than culture’ (Huizinga, 1949, p. 1). The historian’s natural inclination is to historicise such contentions, alert to factors of geography as well as chronology and to intersections including age, gender and social class. Building on burgeoning scholarship concerning the construction and experience of children’s play worlds, this special edition of the International Journal of Play offers soundings of the field and an encouragement to venture still deeper in accounting for change through time, the very currency of historical enquiry and a potential wide-angle corrective to accounts of play concerned exclusively with contemporary themes.

Rites of Passage: Youthful Walking and the Rhythms of the City, c.1850–1914

Sleight takes to the bustling streets of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city to explore young people’s access to, and use of, the outdoor urban realm. Primary and secondary archival evidence from London, New York and Melbourne yields both hard data and well-informed speculations. Sleight argues that, though often marginalized in contemporary cities, the sheer variety and prevalence of young people’s walking practices shows the centrality of these individuals to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city life. In an era of burgeoning mass transit and the take-up of bicycles, the main mode of movement was still on foot. As Sleight makes clear, young city walkers have long dwelt in a world of scattered horizons contingent upon age, gender, class and ethnicity.

Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945-60. By Adrian Horn

Good things, so the saying goes, come to those who wait. Sitting in a Blackpool coffee bar, a young Barry Stott would nurse his drink for up to an hour, perhaps wondering about the lads in velvet collars hanging around the beach and trusting that his makeshift sideboards – with bare skin coloured over in dark crayon – hadn’t smudged. If he could spare any coins for the juke box in the corner, that was a bonus, but also a responsibility. ‘You had to really choose your record very carefully’, he later recalled, ‘because you wouldn’t have the money for more than maybe one and you’d hope other people would put money in and listen to their records first’ (p. 177). Welcome to ‘Juke box Britain’, Adrian Horn’s catchy label for a post-war world of anticipation, display, humdrum austerity and fleeting glamour. Horn’s central thesis is concise: the case for the Americanization of British youth in the years between 1945 and 1960 has been overstated. With the exception of the music that young people like Barry Stott chose to listen to, Horn concludes, the period ‘was not ... one where young people significantly adopted American popular cultural influences’ (p. 186). The author’s way into this historiographical debate (and back to his own childhood) is through the juke box – tellingly at once both a central channel for delivering American products targeted at young people and also a key fixture in popular mythologies of the 1950s and 1960s. Even here, however, the notion of wholesale Americanization is found to be flawed, with an early (and lavishly illustrated) chapter revealing that American machines were slow to penetrate the British market due to post-war import restrictions and an aversion to design features deemed gaudy and excessive. After 1954 – the year that Rock around the Clock came to Britain – American influences strengthened (in line, Horn shows, with a rapid increase in juke-box installations), yet once again the story was not straightforward. As with the youth fashion choices and commercial youth venues that also fall under the author’s scrutiny, ‘style fusions’ (pp. 4, 115, 158, 161) arose in configurations owing more to regional and national mediations than to a direct uptake of international trends. The strongest chapters in Juke Box Britain concern themes where a less established historiography allows the author greater freedom to concentrate on oral testimony, court B O O K R EV IE W S

Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945-60

Good things, so the saying goes, come to those who wait. Sitting in a Blackpool coffee bar, a young Barry Stott would nurse his drink for up to an hour, perhaps wondering about the lads in velvet collars hanging around the beach and trusting that his makeshift sideboards – with bare skin coloured over in dark crayon – hadn’t smudged. If he could spare any coins for the juke box in the corner, that was a bonus, but also a responsibility. ‘You had to really choose your record very carefully’, he later recalled, ‘because you wouldn’t have the money for more than maybe one and you’d hope other people would put money in and listen to their records first’ (p. 177). Welcome to ‘Juke box Britain’, Adrian Horn’s catchy label for a post-war world of anticipation, display, humdrum austerity and fleeting glamour. Horn’s central thesis is concise: the case for the Americanization of British youth in the years between 1945 and 1960 has been overstated. With the exception of the music that young people like Barry Stott chose to listen to, Horn concludes, the period ‘was not ... one where young people significantly adopted American popular cultural influences’ (p. 186). The author’s way into this historiographical debate (and back to his own childhood) is through the juke box – tellingly at once both a central channel for delivering American products targeted at young people and also a key fixture in popular mythologies of the 1950s and 1960s. Even here, however, the notion of wholesale Americanization is found to be flawed, with an early (and lavishly illustrated) chapter revealing that American machines were slow to penetrate the British market due to post-war import restrictions and an aversion to design features deemed gaudy and excessive. After 1954 – the year that Rock around the Clock came to Britain – American influences strengthened (in line, Horn shows, with a rapid increase in juke-box installations), yet once again the story was not straightforward. As with the youth fashion choices and commercial youth venues that also fall under the author’s scrutiny, ‘style fusions’ (pp. 4, 115, 158, 161) arose in configurations owing more to regional and national mediations than to a direct uptake of international trends. The strongest chapters in Juke Box Britain concern themes where a less established historiography allows the author greater freedom to concentrate on oral testimony, court B O O K R EV IE W S

The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers, Britain's First Youth Cult. By Andrew Davies/Angels with Manky Faces. Directed by Rob Lees

assessments deduce that there are two types of vagrant: those down on their luck but genuinely tramping the country in pursuit of work, and ‘professional’ vagrants who had no interest in work and who infected the former with their dishonourable ways. The investigators, having accessed a casual ward, are consistently repulsed by the environment, shunning the workhouse sustenance of dry bread and gruel, spending sleepless nights between lice-infested blankets to a crescendo of tubercular coughing from their ‘companions’, and deploring harsh treatment from the keepers and the compulsory labour of oakum-picking, wood sawing and stone-breaking. These investigators were members of the comfortable classes who, wearing old clothes and a few days of chin stubble, stole into the night on their missions. As they struggled to stifle their sensitivities to squalor and discomfort, it begs the question of how they concealed their real stations in life from keepers and fellow inmates. Some of the elegant written prose suggests that their refined voices must also have been difficult to disguise. Indeed, fellow tramps spotted the fine shirt beneath Greenwood’s rags, and when Wyrall (1909) and his companion were discharged without having to work, they believed it was because the keepers had seen through their subterfuge. Greenwood (1883) questions why the work-shy tramp would put himself through what he acknowledges is a ‘hard life’, and the later accounts move on to the alternative choice for a couple of pennies: lodging houses and dosshouses, which are portrayed as overcrowded and dangerous. The final account from George Edwards (1910), a ‘vicar as vagrant’, is heavily imbued with his religious conviction, sometimes compassionate but mostly scathing in condemnation. He advocates emigration schemes and labour colonies for vagrants, bemoaning the fact that ‘[o]ur only national remedies at the present are the tramp wards, the workhouses, the gaols, the asylums of our land, and a whole mass of blundering, unorganized charity’ (p. 313). These vicarious vagrants spent a night, or three or four at most, on the road before retreating to warm homes, a bath and clean clothes, so their investigations, no matter how well-intentioned, were both brief and value-laden. The introduction of labour exchanges among the pre-First World War Liberal welfare reforms was one measure that removed the need to ‘tramp’ for many, but it did not necessarily remove the prejudices of well-intentioned reformers as exemplified by those showcased in this volume.

The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers, Britain's First Youth Cult: Angels with Manky Faces

assessments deduce that there are two types of vagrant: those down on their luck but genuinely tramping the country in pursuit of work, and ‘professional’ vagrants who had no interest in work and who infected the former with their dishonourable ways. The investigators, having accessed a casual ward, are consistently repulsed by the environment, shunning the workhouse sustenance of dry bread and gruel, spending sleepless nights between lice-infested blankets to a crescendo of tubercular coughing from their ‘companions’, and deploring harsh treatment from the keepers and the compulsory labour of oakum-picking, wood sawing and stone-breaking. These investigators were members of the comfortable classes who, wearing old clothes and a few days of chin stubble, stole into the night on their missions. As they struggled to stifle their sensitivities to squalor and discomfort, it begs the question of how they concealed their real stations in life from keepers and fellow inmates. Some of the elegant written prose suggests that their refined voices must also have been difficult to disguise. Indeed, fellow tramps spotted the fine shirt beneath Greenwood’s rags, and when Wyrall (1909) and his companion were discharged without having to work, they believed it was because the keepers had seen through their subterfuge. Greenwood (1883) questions why the work-shy tramp would put himself through what he acknowledges is a ‘hard life’, and the later accounts move on to the alternative choice for a couple of pennies: lodging houses and dosshouses, which are portrayed as overcrowded and dangerous. The final account from George Edwards (1910), a ‘vicar as vagrant’, is heavily imbued with his religious conviction, sometimes compassionate but mostly scathing in condemnation. He advocates emigration schemes and labour colonies for vagrants, bemoaning the fact that ‘[o]ur only national remedies at the present are the tramp wards, the workhouses, the gaols, the asylums of our land, and a whole mass of blundering, unorganized charity’ (p. 313). These vicarious vagrants spent a night, or three or four at most, on the road before retreating to warm homes, a bath and clean clothes, so their investigations, no matter how well-intentioned, were both brief and value-laden. The introduction of labour exchanges among the pre-First World War Liberal welfare reforms was one measure that removed the need to ‘tramp’ for many, but it did not necessarily remove the prejudices of well-intentioned reformers as exemplified by those showcased in this volume.

Review: Andrew Davies, The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers, Britain's First Youth Cult and Angels with Manky Faces (play)

assessments deduce that there are two types of vagrant: those down on their luck but genuinely tramping the country in pursuit of work, and ‘professional’ vagrants who had no interest in work and who infected the former with their dishonourable ways. The investigators, having accessed a casual ward, are consistently repulsed by the environment, shunning the workhouse sustenance of dry bread and gruel, spending sleepless nights between lice-infested blankets to a crescendo of tubercular coughing from their ‘companions’, and deploring harsh treatment from the keepers and the compulsory labour of oakum-picking, wood sawing and stone-breaking. These investigators were members of the comfortable classes who, wearing old clothes and a few days of chin stubble, stole into the night on their missions. As they struggled to stifle their sensitivities to squalor and discomfort, it begs the question of how they concealed their real stations in life from keepers and fellow inmates. Some of the elegant written prose suggests that their refined voices must also have been difficult to disguise. Indeed, fellow tramps spotted the fine shirt beneath Greenwood’s rags, and when Wyrall (1909) and his companion were discharged without having to work, they believed it was because the keepers had seen through their subterfuge. Greenwood (1883) questions why the work-shy tramp would put himself through what he acknowledges is a ‘hard life’, and the later accounts move on to the alternative choice for a couple of pennies: lodging houses and dosshouses, which are portrayed as overcrowded and dangerous. The final account from George Edwards (1910), a ‘vicar as vagrant’, is heavily imbued with his religious conviction, sometimes compassionate but mostly scathing in condemnation. He advocates emigration schemes and labour colonies for vagrants, bemoaning the fact that ‘[o]ur only national remedies at the present are the tramp wards, the workhouses, the gaols, the asylums of our land, and a whole mass of blundering, unorganized charity’ (p. 313). These vicarious vagrants spent a night, or three or four at most, on the road before retreating to warm homes, a bath and clean clothes, so their investigations, no matter how well-intentioned, were both brief and value-laden. The introduction of labour exchanges among the pre-First World War Liberal welfare reforms was one measure that removed the need to ‘tramp’ for many, but it did not necessarily remove the prejudices of well-intentioned reformers as exemplified by those showcased in this volume.