The Rest Is History - 50. Teenagers

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

“They’re wasting their money and having sex with each other.” Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland explore the modern phenomenon of the teenager. Why do teenagers scare older generations and will Tom cope with his daughter’s veganism? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Teenagers are pampered with high wages, first-class working conditions and excellent facilities in education. Their outlook is centred in trashy books and films. The boys are hoodlums in embryo, defiant and uncouth, while the girls are brazen and unrefined a rigorous period of military training might make men and women of them if they had the courage to face it welcome to the rest is history and our subject today is of course teenagers so tom holland you're a man who i always associate with youth culture and with teenage brio so here's a question emails dominic sandbrook here's a

question for you um when do you think that's from that quote okay well it mentions teenagers yes and i know that the word teenager is a recent invention 1944 yeah it is nice in america yeah 1944 in america so it must be after that. Yeah. Reference to military service. If it's Britain. This is a top historian at work using forensic skills. So perhaps after the end of conscription. So is this a reference to Beatlemania?

1963? Good guess. Good guess. 1963. Good guess, but wrong. It's 1949. Goodness. It's quite early. That is early.

Can you guess the publication? Is it British? It is British. Publication? Daily Mail. It is the Daily Mail. Is it? It is the Daily Mail in 1943.

Finger on the pulse of fashion as ever. It's actually a reader's letter. And who is the reader? Colonel. Colonel. Yeah, exactly. Bufton. No, that's a telegraph. is the reader? Colonel. Yeah, exactly. Bufton. No, that's a telegraph.

That's not the man. Yeah, that's all right. It would be Colonel Tufton's wife. No, it's interesting how early that is. Because as you say, the teenager is invented in 1944. But I suppose anxieties about young people are as old as history itself, aren't they? I mean, every point you look in human history, people are always complaining that the young have no morals. Yeah, but is the young equivalent to a teenager?

Well, this is what I want to get into. Because that's the big question, isn't it? Yeah. So you're right. I think it is 1944 that the teenager is invented, but young people have always existed. And I have no sense, actually. I have no sense at all of what a 14-year-old did in Rome or Greece or the periods you write about.

So explain, were there teenagers in those days? There must have been in some sense. Well, we have a question from Joseph Evans Green, who asks, Is the idea of a period between childhood and adulthood a modern invention? And is there any similar idea in the ancient world? And that's really the key question, isn't it? Because teenagers, it's an extended process of coming of age. And I think it'd be fair to say that, I'm going to admit this isn't something I've studied with any great attention, but I would say that by and large, the idea is that you come of age so you have coming of age rituals yeah um i mean in rome you it's it's just the toga you put on shave your beard yes you

present your beard your first shavings you um you get given you put aside the toga of youth and you put on the toga of manhood um if you're a girl and it's much earlier with girl so you you hand over your doll and a thing called a bulla, which you wore around your neck, which is a kind of charm, symbol of childhood. But having said that, adolescence comes from a Latin word, adolescentia. But adolescentia is kind of basically, it's from the age of 15 up to early 30s.

Wow, that's a long adolescence. So there is a kind of, the Romans do have a sense. I mean, particularly in the Republic, youth is looked on with considerable suspicion. So the Romans were a daily male letter writers. They were. The Roman Republic was very daily male. You don't really become a proper adult till your late 30s.

For instance, you can't run for the consulship till you're 40. And you think of all those portrait busts of Roman emperors. Sorry, absolutely, Freudian slip there. Not of Roman emperors, of Roman dignitaries from the Republican era. Ages prized. They all have crow's feet and baggy jowls. But that's such a strange thing, Tom. When so many, you're much more likely to die young.

So in other words, you're saying people, lots of people who die, who live what to us would be into adulthood, they're not, they die before they're considered full adults in Rome. Yeah, a lot of them. Because they die at the age of 28 or 31 or something. I think, I mean, certainly the Greeks as well

and the Romans have a sense that um children have to be shaped and molded and toughened up to become worthy of the citizenship that is going to be theirs yeah um and in greece by and large this is done as a kind of civic thing so in sparta famously you have barracks um in athens you have um the afiboi who are it's a kind of military service so that the city is doing it in rome much more the sense is that um it's up to the individual it's well the father has incredible power so he has uh the patria potestas which means that he can kill a son if he gives him any grief i mean essentially from a teenager you can literally kill him um and and the father has this kind of incredible authority um but that

is something that is not tied to kind of teenage years so there's a kind of amazing thing when when the romans are very into adopting so if you want to pass on your patrimony to to someone you adopt someone and the classic example of this is when Augustus is forced to adopt his stepson Tiberius, because there's no other possible heir to the empire. And Tiberius, who at the time is Rome's greatest general, he's a distinguished statesman. He's held all the magistracies. He's a man of incredible sophistication and learning. He's fabulously wealthy. When he gets adopted by Augustus, he loses everything. He becomes dependent for basically kind of an allowance, kind of equivalent to a teenage allowance.

Does Augustus give him pocket money? Yeah, Augustus gives him pocket money. So the sense of generational divide there is really, really strong. And I think a key part of it is that, specifically on the angle of youth, is that when you come of age, it's also that you become sexually in control of your life. Yeah. So the risk is constantly that before you become an adult, so before you come of age, you are going to be subject to all kinds of advances, whether you are male or female.

And I guess that for girls, the big difference is that essentially you come of age when you're able to conceive. And that's a lot earlier than. So what's that? I mean, yeah, 13 or so. Well, Juliet, Juliet and Romeo and Juliet is 12, isn't she? Yeah. So a girl at that point is considered, they're considered an adult. They're a woman.

Yes. Yes. And there's no sense, so there's no sense of a kind of a youth, I mean, a youth culture, the expression comes from 1942, so this is projecting way back. But there's no sense of a, what we would call a youth culture, the expression comes from 1942. So this is projecting way back. But there's no sense of a, what we would call a youth culture among Roman teenagers, is there? There's definitely a sense that the young get up to all kinds of mischief. And there's a kind of sense that basically they should be allowed to, you know, let them sow their wild oats, but essentially they should get over it

and then knock them down to more important things like conquering the Gauls or running for the consulship or something. So my sense would be, knowing nothing about it, that especially at the end of the Republic, that people are sort of bemoaning that the morals of the current generation are worse than, you know, sort of Cato figures.

Was that a thing? Did Romans often sort of say, oh, everything's going to the dogs and young people today have no sense of standards and all the sort of standard things people say about teenagers? It's a running joke in comedies that you have the figure of the kind of the irascible, censorious daily mail reader. That's me. Yes.

So Dominicus Sanbruchus. And then you have the kind of the young, extravagant Hellraiser. Tom Holland. Exactly. And this kind of does, this is a kind of political because in a sense, the divisions in Roman society are all kind of grounded in style.

So the idea that you are a censorious, finger-wagging conservative is associated with age. And the idea that you're a kind of hell-raising guy who drives his zippy chariot with eight horses rather than with four is kind of associated with youth and in the imperial period this becomes a kind of crucial determinant as to whether you're a good or a bad emperor basically yeah so your caligulas and your nero's are kind of yes so we've got a question about i think about elegabalus who yes we do yes we do so from the splendidly named history of tammany hall podcast the modern idea some of the adolescent roman emperors elegabalus etc who i think became emperor when he was 14 seemed like the nightmare vision of giving a teen limitless power how were they viewed in ancient times as children or adult rulers like any other well basically the romans

thought that that certainly in the republic that you should only have power if you had wrinkles. And in a way, what's most radical about the figure of Augustus, and everyone can conjure up an image of Augustus, is that he is portrayed as a kind of youthful, preternaturally youthful figure. And that is how he's portrayed right the way up till he dies. You know, he dies and he's very old. And that, again, is kind of drawing on the greek idea that youth is beautiful and associated with divinity so there's a kind of complex cultural nexus going on there but i don't think you have anything that corresponds to to a teenager a kind of protracted age that we would associate with with with those particular years i think that that is something much more recent and therefore i'm going to pass the ball on to you to how the teenager our idea of the teenager evolved i think it is a recent thing now

um there's a brilliant book on this by a guy called john savage who some writers some listeners will know as the guy who wrote the definitive book on punk and the sex pistols. And he has this book called Teenage, I think, The Creation or the Invention of Youth. And he starts in the late Victorian period. And I think what he's basically saying is, you know, in the late Victorian period, you have young people who we would now regard as adolescents who have spending money

and they can define themselves as different from their parents. And is it the spending money that's the key? I think it is the key. I mean, I think spending money is the key. Because, you know, you are 15. If you have no money, you have no ability to – it's very hard for you to create a culture of your own or to differentiate yourself from your parents or from – you know, you can't buy your own clothes.

You can't buy, you know, sort of cultural products, whether they are comics or books or records or whatever. But I think when you've got that spending money and this is, of course, the big age of consumerism, late Victorian America and Britain and France and so on, then then you can sort of forge this new identity. And in his book, he basically says there is a... His book is a sort of prehistory of the teenager. And he basically says there's about a 70-year period where people are sort of struggling to define what this person is, who's a girl or a boy between 13 and 18 or so. This is the age in which Baden-Powell is inventing the Boy Scouts.

And you have moral panics about people like Arthur Rimbaud, the French sort of teenage poet. And so there's a lot of stuff about teenagers, but they haven't really pinned down. People haven't decided on an agreed definition. And then it's really in the 1940s and it's in America. So the country where consumer culture is sort of most vibrant and most dynamic, that you have the invention of the teenage magazine.

So 1944 is this big landmark year of a magazine called Seventeen, and it's the first real – And that's aimed at girls? It's aimed at girls. Because all the boys are away fighting the Japanese? They are, but I think throughout, right through into the 60s, 70s and so on, girls are absolutely, you know, they are central. They are the drivers of teenage culture.

Because they're spending more or why? Because, yeah, I think because they have, girls often have sort of part-time jobs. But also girls, you know, Beatlemania is all about girls. I think because girls often have sort of part-time jobs. But also girls, you know, Beatlemania is all about girls. So Beatlemania in the 60s is driven by girls. And girls, you know, it's boy bands rather than girl bands that drive pop and rock music. You know, the Beatles, the Stones, the Who and so on.

Often their audience isn't always girls, but girls are the most loyal part of the audience and girls spend more on clothes they spend more on dance hall tickets they spend more on magazines on makeup so there's a whole kind of cosmetics part of that market the boys don't enter into at all um so girls are the big drivers and girls magazines sell more than boys magazines do so i think girls drove the whole thing from the 1940s for the next 30 or 40 years. Can I just go back to the prehistory of that in the 19th century?

Yeah. Because in the 19th century and indeed in the 20th century, there is a living link with the ancient world in the form of boarding schools. Yes. Which are consciously modelled in the form of boarding schools yes yeah which are consciously modeled on the kind of the spartan ideal that you have to take kind of young people and treat them like like animals to be broken in and remolded and reshaped yeah and so dr arnold yeah so so that's that's that's a kind of Victorian thing.

And that, I mean, I guess that kind of is providing a model for the boy scouts, isn't it? And the girl guides, the idea that, you know, otherwise they'll all just run wild. And also, doesn't it also feed into the Hitler youth? I think, well, I think the Hitler youth. So if you sort of take the Hitler Youth as an endpoint, as what we would now see as a sort of uniquely sinister endpoint, the Hitler Youth makes sense to people

in the 1930s in a way that it doesn't to us today because they live in an age where people have always been part of youth groups. Uniforms. And they've all often worn uniforms and the uniform is not seen as sinister.

So the Boy Scouts is exactly right as a kind of, it's not exactly a model, but it's part of the same constellation. I mean, there's all these, in Germany in particular, they love all these stuff about sort of strange rambling groups where they go and commune with nature

and all this sort of stuff. They're very romantic. I mean, they're very idealistic. And you're right, I think as well, that the public schools before that, this idea of the public school spirit and play up, play play up and play the game i mean i love all this stuff actually but but all that sort of dr arnold tom brown school does oh i really i you know that poem the henry newbolt poem yes um the hush and the close shoulder smooth yeah i love i love that

i love that i've been i've been reading that to my son since he was about two, with a tear in my, a manly tear in my eye. And have you succeeded in shaping him into, molding him into a... I think so, yeah. I think so. That'd be an interesting experiment. I mean, we're probably the only household in Britain where Billy Bunter features as a regular bedtime story.

So Billy Bunter, that's... Yeah. So he appears in a comic, doesn't he? The Magnet. I'm obsessed with Billy Bunter. I'm so glad we've gone into billy bunter i didn't see this coming at all but but that's a bit earlier is it or is that about 19 no no i mean but that's targeted at at what what kind of age group i would say about probably from about 10 to about 15 or 16 i I would have said. So very unexpected people. Those are by far the most influential stories. Or well-loved, but people like Aneurin Bevan.

Aneurin Bevan, the Labour firebrand, founder of the NHS, he was banned from his father from reading magnets, sort of boys' stories, Billy Bunter stories. And he hid them, I think, under a railway bridge. And why was he banned? Because they were seen as not improving, not, you know, they weren't serious. But lots of, if you read the memoirs

of working class boys, boys particularly in Britain, in the first half of the 20th century, tons of them will say they learned about life from the Billy Bunter stories. They learned about what it was to be a man. They learned about pluck, didn't they? Pluck. Pluck is the word.

Collective spirit, about teamwork. And they would say that their idol was this guy who's the captain of the remove, Harry Wharton, who's this sort of incredibly noble, brave, hardworking, dutiful figure. You know, the kind of man who, he sort of enforces discipline among the other boys. He's chivalrous. You know, he'd always help a girl in distress. He's always fighting off footpads

and members of the working classes who were trying to invade Greyfriars. Amazing that Niren Bevan was into this. Well, of course, the people who are the baddies are sort of ruffians. They're footpads who are always trying to get in and molest the boys or steal precious stamps. But this is in a private school.

Yeah, it is. So it just seems an odd thing for the stalwart of the Labour Party. But they were colossally popular among working-class children. So there's a book called – what's it called? Jonathan Rose? I can't remember. The Intellectual Life of the English Working Classes, I think it's called. And it talks a lot about these boys' stories and how much they...

Because the people who consume them are not other private schoolboys, by and large. I think they are people outside that world. Just like most Harry Potter readers don't go to boarding school. Okay, okay. So in Britain, and perhaps in Germany as well, perhaps less so in America, this sense that the role models, it's conformist, it's collectivist, it's everything that today we tend not to associate with teenagers. I think teenagers are terribly conformist.

Okay, they are. They are, but they're conformist in the sense that they don't want to be conformist. They're not all kind of saying, oh, please, can I dress up in uniforms? I mean, I know that they are kind of creating uniforms because, you know, mods and rockers and punks and New Wave. I mean, I know that. But you know what I mean?

There's quite a gear shift there. I mean, the John Savage book, which you mentioned, does have this amazing thing about the German youth who were not joining the youth with any great enthusiasm, who were kind of listening to swing bands and to English music in Hamburg. Yeah, it's incredible. It's like a Beatles prehistory. 20 years before the Beatles went and played at the Rieke Bar. It's such a great thing, isn't it, Tom? Because you don't think, I mean, before I read that book,

it had never occurred to me that the Third Reich would have this vibrant oppositional youth culture. Yeah, youth scene. And that they were all obsessed with English music. Yeah, it's great. That has parallels elsewhere in Europe. So again, something that I hadn't really thought of, I remember reading Kingsley Amis' memoirs.

And Kingsley Amis, who's a novelist, who you think of as this utter reactionary buffer. He talks about how he's in the 1930s in South London or wherever he is. He's having these terrible rows with his dad about jazz. So he thinks jazz, now we think of jazz as a very tweedy and sort of old-fashioned. But at the time, jazz has just come from America.

So Kingsley Amis' dad has turned that awful racket down. He is. That's exactly what's happening. He's saying, what is wrong with you, boy? Take a cold shower and stop. That's not music. Yeah, stop. And Kingsley was just like, oh, no, this is the really cool music of the day.

So I think in the 30s, which we now tend to caricature as all flat caps and kind of george orwell i think in the 30s you do have a teenage culture across the kind of industrialized world and it's to do with music because you've obviously got record players so already you know we have that sort of sense of of a sort of youth culture emerging so you've got the word youth culture and the word teenager both really being coined in 1944 and then obviously when the economy takes off at the end of the second world war that all just completely explodes okay but dominic i think that's enough of the of the prehistory for teenagers so you've set it up nicely uh i think we should have a break now and then when we come back we should um we should have

a look at the way that the notion of the teenager has evolved since the second world war so um let's do a very teenagery thing and go to a commercial break i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back.

We are giving you, I hope, some teenage kicks. And we've been looking at the deep prehistory of the teenager, and then the prehistory of the teenager. And we've now arrived, well, at the 40s, and we're into the 50s, looking at the way that the concept of teenage culture evolves. And Dominic, question here for you from Alex, I think it's Shiphorst. Was James Dean the first teenager? Would that have been recognised back in the 50s or has time given us that impression? So James Dean is the kind, you know, leather jacket. Yeah. Hair greased up.

Curled lip. Yeah, surly, racing cars to the edge of cliffs, all that kind of, we've all done it. Is he the first? No, he's not the first um but i suppose yeah because the there is no first teenager but the certainly by the end of the 1940s the concept of the teenager is very well established but i think what james dean probably is is he's part of a sort of i don't know is it a triumvirate or or you got um Sinatra? It's more than a triumvirate. Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando,

then there was Presley, the biggest one of all. People who define the teenage boy or the teenage young man. I mean, Frank Sinatra is actually much older, but they are rebellious. They are glamorous. They are different from their parents and different from their elders. And that's obviously an American archetype and then it's taken up

in the rest of Western Europe. And Frank Sinatra is not drafted in the Second World War, is he? Is that right? I didn't know. I know nothing about Frank Sinatra. Yeah, so I think he's playing, he's kind of doing gigs. I know he's, yeah, he's very, that's his breakthrough is the early

1940s. But he's in his 20s then already, but he's appealing to this new – he is the big star who appeals to this new – So this is proto-Beatlemania. This is the girls kind of – And basically, so girls in the 40s, they're at home. Yeah. Boys are away.

They're posters of Frank Sinatra. Yeah. And so presumably it's not a coincidence that this is when the word teenager starts to be marketed well i think you've also got america's been through the depression so the second world war restarts the engines of american capitalism and that's why the word teenager is invented because all these girls who are working because as you say that the boys are away so young women are flooding into the workforce they have money and people i always think of youth culture and teenage culture it's a colossal enterprise and separating young people from their money you know it's not about i i never think it's about idealism or romanticism i think

it's just a massive marketing exercise and one of the most successful marketing exercises in history. And do you think that... So when do people we now call teenagers start to identify themselves as teenagers? What comes first, the marketing or the sense of identity? Oh, I think there was a sense of identity already. So you had gangs. You had tribes and gangs before the Second World War. But I think the point at which people refer to themselves as teenagers

probably comes in the 1950s. And certainly, you become a teenager in 1956 or 1957, you think of yourself as a teenager, and you use the word very unselfconsciously. So we've got a question from Matthew Butcher. You mentioned gangs. Yeah. Was the moral panic in the 50s about teenagers both true and the first time this had been perceived so that's that is that is a a kind of running theme isn't it that the moment you have teenagers you have adults who are worrying about teenagers yeah and they're generally seen

as kind of bad but you sort of said didn't you, that the people in the ancient world were worried about the young, they thought the young were unreliable. So I think that has run, it's my sense is that that has run through history. But I think, I think, I think it's different because in the ancient world, there's assumption that the younger are just by nature problematic and

right. Yeah. Kind of irresponsible. Whereas I think what's distinctive, certainly since the war, maybe even before that, is that this is a generational thing. And I guess that for people in the 50s and 60s, it's particularly bruising because they feel that they've never seen anything like this before that suddenly, particularly in the 60s, I would guess.

I think that's right. I think you do see it in the 50s, actually, Tom. And I think you first see it. It's not really a moral generation gap, but there's an article by Keith Waterhouse in the late 1950s in one of the British papers. And it says, you know, our children are changing. And it has all this stuff about they're bigger, they're taller, they reach puberty earlier, all of which is true because their health is better and their diet is better.

So young people are becoming mature much more quickly. They're much more self-confident. They're bigger. They're more sexually active. They have more money. They're more visible. They're kind of louder. And so that's when you start to get a lot of the sort of moral panic stuff.

And because there's always this sort of sense among when people talk about history that sort of poverty is a source of great anxiety and affluence is to be celebrated but often affluence creates terrible anxieties of its own and that's definitely what happened in the 50s and 60s so teenagers with money buying shirts and buying magazines and records was profoundly unsettling to a lot of the elders. They kind of thought, you know, what are they doing? They're wasting money on rubbish and they don't listen to us. And they've got all this sort of, they're more articulate and they're confident and they're having sex with each other and they're playing their loud music

and all this sort of stuff. And, you know, that's a huge part of the sort of social and cultural story of, let's say, Britain or America in the 50s and 60s. So there's that famous comment by John Lennon that I think John Savage quotes. And he's talking about America and says that we always look to America because they had teenagers and nowhere else did. Yeah. Well, they had teenagers because they weren't going through austerity. Right. So in Britain, and I guess Europe, the emergence of the teenager is also a repudiation of the, I mean, not just of austerity, but what had been cast as the virtues necessary to win a war.

Yeah, Spartan virtues. Spartan virtues. Absolutely. And they become objects of mockery on the part of kind of cutting edge teenagers. I know that you will say that this was a minority pursuit and that probably in the 60s, most teenagers were cutting their hair and joining the cadet corps or something.

Just think about it. If you're a teenager in 1965, Tom, I mean, somebody starts up about the war again. I mean, you're kind of rolling your eyes and you're sick of, you know, shut up, grandad. You know, you live with the legacy of it, but it's incredibly boring and tiresome to be told about it. So I think actually even teenagers who weren't rebellious, and you're sick of, you know, shut up, grandad. You know, you live with the legacy of it, but it's incredibly boring and tiresome to be told about it.

So I think actually even teenagers who weren't rebellious, i.e. most teenagers, because they weren't, would probably have, you know, they were sick of being lectured about, oh, this was the spirit of Dunkirk and all that. They were much more resistant to that actually then, I think, than people are now because it was, you know, it was their parents who were lecturing them about it the um the classic um illustration of that is if yeah the malcolm mcdowell film is set in spectacularly brutal public school where everyone has to be kind of trained to go out and join the army or run the british empire right and

that's i think it's 68 is it 68 it's's Lindy Anderson. And he goes back to his old school, Cheltenham, and he doesn't tell them what he's doing. I mean, that's the thing. He gets permission because it's his old school. And he sort of says, I want to come and do this film about that school. Okay. So how much, for those who haven't seen it, it's about three rebellious boys.

And there's somebody in the film called The Girl. Yes. He wouldn't do that now. And it ends... Am I giving a spoiler? No, I mean, you can give it away. Yeah, that it ends up with them kind of machine gunning everybody on speech day.

And that's the ultimate sort of generation gap film, I think, isn't it, really? Yes, I think so. It comes at that moment in the late 60s when all the talk is of the generation gap, which I think is actually a bit exaggerated. So i don't think there is a colossal chip but then what you get at the end of the 70s is new generation of teenagers turning on the previous generation of teenagers yeah so that's the kind of the essence of punk is to well actually you know what

i you're right about that but i thought you were going to say something completely different which is i'm going to say that in 1979 first time voters so people who are 18 19 20 21 they're one of the biggest swing groups to margaret thatcher and the conservatives which is it which is which if you were saying that it would have been right because that is a repudiation of their 60s predecessors. But you're right, punk is also part of that. So punk is a repudiation of what's gone before. So then you start to get, I suppose,

now you're into the second generation of kind of classic teen, or third generation. And the really interesting thing then is that being a teenager is not just about repudiating mum and dad. It's about repudiating the earlier generation. Okay, so there's a question here from Andy May, who asks, looking from the perspective of 2021, obviously, why have those teenage tribes died out now?

Will there be new ones in the future? Mods, by a million miles, they have the music and the style. So Mods v. Rockers is the classic. That won't mean anything probably to our non-British listeners. But in Britain, Mods v. Rockers is the classic clash, isn't it? Because it's about class. and then once you've had the teenage rebellion against the previous generation of teenagers, where do you have to go? I mean, in a way, and in a way, I guess the implication is that adults have kind of remained teenage. That's the big change, isn't it? That's the big change, isn't it? That's the big change. So it's very difficult now for teenagers to rebel

in the way that a teenager in the 60s rebelled. I think that's a profound change. Imagine when we were teenagers. See, when I was a teenager in late 80s, early 90s, the thought that my dad might share interests with me would have been utterly unthinkable. Whereas now, you know, I share interests with my son who been utterly unthinkable. Whereas now, you know, I share interests with my son who isn't even a teenager yet.

No, but you're raising him on Kipling. So there's every prospect that he will be the sole teenager in 2020s Britain, able actually to rebel against his father. Yeah, what a terrifying prospect that will never happen. Run off and start reading The Guardian. That will never happen. He knows better than to do that sort of that sort of i can't

wait i can't wait but um no you're right i think it's much harder also culture is generally so fragmented now that there are fewer tribes i mean those tribes do exist and some of our listeners may well sort of tweet us and say oh oh, you're forgetting these people or those people. But actually, I think there are far, you know, that sort of ecosystem. So in Britain, that ecosystem, I mean, something like Top of the Pops plays such a colossal part in sort of defining what people listen to, but also how they looked. And that has gone, hasn't it? It's so fragmented. You don't think that that's just because you know we're two middle-aged men um and we can't see what they see we can't i mean isn't tiktok and i don't know

but that does create things that does create a common language and a common culture but don't forget if you ted had talked to the mods and the rockers or later on punks or new romantics i mean these were so mainstream that middle-aged men would have been aware of them. So in other words, they would have been featured. They were, you know, the Daily Mirror or The Sun would publish sort of double page spreads with a guide to the latest, you know, what are your kids wearing?

And why it's bad. They really did do this sort of stuff. I mean, this was, they would have, it was part of mainstream culture in a way that I don't think And so teenage life is a lot more boring as a result because we're not playing our role. We're not getting indignant about it. Well, here's Joey McCarthy's question.

I don't know if it's the same Joey McCarthy. I think it is. An associate of this podcast. Our producer, yes. And he says, whatever happened to teenage rebellion, drug use, teenage pregnancy and youth all reduced massively in the past decade. Now, you're

the father of one ex-teenager and one still a teenager i think one still a teenager yeah so you must know all about this what has happened why have they why are they all so conservative if they are so conservative um i feel that this is rapidly mutating into a kind of parent daughter podcast of the kind that i'm not really sure what to say to that. I don't know. I mean, I think that there's always the risk of extrapolating from the personal to the... Certainly, there are deep streaks of rebellion.

And I would say one that's kind of hit just at the moment is veganism has hit our fridge. So that's kind of annoying, but one that obviously we have to be supportive about. We don't have to. You've chosen to. I kind of do. Well, I am supportive and admiring, but I'm not sure that that's that's rebellion necessarily is it and it it uh segues neatly into a question from um alex shiphorst again who's absolutely on fire with his questions

in this episode um i wondering whether historians in the future will look back at greta thunberg and see a is it thunberg isn't it a transformation in teenagerhood i one that is more politicized especially environmentally conscious. Perhaps a rebel with a cause. And I would say that that probably is true. But I'm aware that I'm saying that from the perspective of... No, I think you're probably right. I think...

I mean, the other thing I would extrapolate from my daughters is an absolute fascination with design, style, clothing, dress. But that's always been... So that does go back to... I mean, that would be recognisable to the readers of Seventeen magazine in 1944. But I think you're right that the... I buy Alex Shiphorse's question. I think it's a really interesting question about Greta Thunberg and the way in which she's become a kind of secular saint.

I mean, we've got some questions about Joan of Arc, I know. And her youth and the fact that she's a sort of a girl or a young woman, I guess she's still a girl technically, who looks even younger than she is. I think that obviously plays a colossal part in her international appeal. But I suppose the danger with talking about teenagers and idealism, and I've always been very conscious of that in my own books about post-war Britain, is that it's very easy to be misled by the most articulate, the most highly educated. Yeah, that's a running theme for you, isn't it?

The peacocks, and I guess the peahens, if peahens had dramatic tales um they are they are more visually striking and so they're the ones who appear in the books and get the documentaries and yes here on the postcards and things whereas um i guess you'll tell me the vast majority never rebelled no they didn't kind of went to school went to university or got a job or and became adults and i mean my two sort of my one of my standard facts on this is when the Rolling Stones were busted by the police for drug possession and were sent to prison, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The Times published an editorial saying they had been unfairly punished and they should be let out. Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel. Exactly.

Written by William Rees-Mogg. Father of. Yes. But opinion polls showed that young people themselves thought they should be imprisoned. So young people were not on the side of...

It wasn't an old establishment versus a liberal younger generation. Actually, the younger generation were just as... And if you look at polls generally of young people in the 60s, they're very anti-immigration. They're very anti-student protests.

They're very culturally conservative on lots of kind of moral issues. But isn't that, I mean, that's a crucial, because you're not just rebelling against your parents. You're also distinguishing yourself from your boring peers.

Yeah. And that's why you have the magazine. So if you're reading the right magazines and you're going to the right shops, that's where tribes come from. Yes. They're never a group. They're only homogenous.

Yeah, but perhaps the kind of teenage identity, the more it's percolated out the less opportunity there is to to rebel because basically everybody is wearing you know kind of rebellious clothing is no longer rebellious it doesn't have that kind of cachet yeah but also i wonder whether tom actually you're asking that question makes me wonder whether the sense of the teenager will have any, how long teenagers will exist for. So in other words, we can agree that adolescence existed before 1944, but teenagers have a history. They had a starting point. But you could argue that teenage culture will have an end point, especially as younger children now have more money as well.

And the adults are, as you you say becoming kidults the very concept of a teenager seems less to have less yeah maybe yeah yeah so maybe it'll be a kind of interesting foible of sort of late 20th century culture and yeah i mean fascinating um i think we're closing to an end could i just put in uh one question, which is from an old friend of mine. And we met when we were teenagers. Oh, nice. Charlene,

who has sent in a broad brush question. And she asks, it's just a given that teenagers think no adult understands them. So that's Kevin, the teenager. But which era was the very worst time to be a teenager and why? Wow. I mean, I guess the answer to that is the worst time to be a teenager is, you know, it's going to be the same for everyone.

I mean, if you're being slaughtered by some invading army, it doesn't really make a difference. So there's no point in asking the question that way, is there? I suppose answering the question we should answer as in specifically a teenager rather than just you're in the middle of a war. Well, having said that, when the Persians stormed Miletus, the end of the Ionian revolt, early 5th century, all the adults were slaughtered. The girls were carried off to the harems the boys were castrated

and carried off to be eunuchs and obviously genital mutilation has been a running theme in this this is the third podcast almost in a row so I think that would be bad I mean I wouldn't want to be a teenager yeah but that's not that's a specific

that's a bad bit of miletus that's a specific that's a bad bit of luck but it doesn't mean that the culture itself was anti-teenage does it i think if there's a moment when it's when the generation gap is well i mean britain in the early 80s i mean there were some schools in britain in the early 80s where they gave children lessons on how to sign on for the Dole in the summer term because they knew that almost all of them, 160 people would leave the school and there are only two jobs in the town. I mean, that's a pretty bad time to be a teenager. So I think the early 80s is probably economically

when massive youth unemployment, as bad as you could imagine. I mean, actually, that's been the situation in France for about the last 30 years, isn't it? They have 25% youth unemployment. And you wouldn't say that 1930s Germany would count as... We're not counting them as teenagers because the word hasn't been invented yet. Yeah, because I think it's also a bit of a special case, isn't it? I mean, I'm sure there must be people who... Well, the really interesting thing is there must have been people who lived through the Third Reich as teenagers,

but perhaps just missed being called up to fight in the war right at the end, for whom their teenage years may not have actually been... They may not remember their teenage years specifically as terribly bad. If they were in a family that was supporting the Nazis and they weren't Jewish or anything like that. I mean, that's the sort of interesting and slightly disturbing thought

that these swing kids that we were talking about in Hamburg, was life terrible for them? Well, it was when the British were dropping bombs on them. I think it was terrible also because they were under constant risk of being raided by the Gestapo and sent to labour camps What's really interesting is that we always think of teenage

we have tons of questions about this, about idealism but that idealism can often be very it's not always a good thing so idealism I mean lots of young people really enthusiastically supported the Nazis. There's a very famous account by a girl called Melita Mashman. And she talks about,

you know, she was a young girl in Berlin in January 1933, brimming with kind of teenage enthusiasm and teenage idealism. And she watches the torchlit parade. Hitler has just become Chancellor of Germany. And she is absolutely suffused with this love of country, desire to join the movement, all this sort of teenage idealism that we can recognise. And of course, it's utterly misapplied into this obscene project. But the idea that teenagers properly are idealistic, I mean, that's another legacy of the French Revolution, isn't it? I mean, we talked about this, about how so many of the revolutionaries were very, very young.

And I guess it blends with the Romantic period where lots of the poets are very young as well. I think that's where that idea comes from. Because certainly the premise for earlier periods through the Middle Ages back to the ancient world is that people we would now call teenagers are essentially feral and dangerous and have to be broken in and tamed and dis... Well, on that note, I think that's the perfect note on which to end. I didn't even like teenagers when I was a teenager. The man they cannot gag, he knows he's been there. That's William Hague. That's William Hague.

That was William Hague's slogan when he was writing a column for the News of the World. Where has he been? Nowhere. What happened to him? He'd been to Richmond. That was about it, I think. I think that's the perfect note, isn't it? On which to end?

Yeah, it is. It is. The super teenage, saw-away episode. William Hague, of course, did come to fame as a teenager. That's why I mentioned him, Dominic. Yeah. You should always try to end every podcast on William Hague or other failed Tory leaders. This is the podcast that has a theme on teenagers and ends with William Hague.

Thanks ever so much for listening. We will see you in a few days where we are talking about the Aztecs. And we have some quite interesting details about children and young people in the Aztec period so do tune in then. Gentle mutilation once again see you and gentle mutilation see you then bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

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