Meet the ace faces in Leicester's Oodly Boodly club

In March, 1965, there was a new youth cult in town. Leicester's Illustrated Chronicle wrote about their tastes, their attitudes and their sky-high clothes budget. Here's the original report.

For want of another name, these Leicester youngsters call themselves STYLISTS. They have their own ideas about dress and behaviour. They don’t like the Beatles, or fighting ... some spend 95 per cent of their earnings on clothes. Here’s what they say about themselves:

“You can’t be ‘in’ with us until you’re 18” – Mary Anderton, aged 21.

“Girls are out” – 19-year-old Tony J Gourvish.

“I wouldn’t be seen dead on the back of a motorbike” – 18-year-old hosiery cutter Pamela Johnson.

Leicester’s young group of ‘with-its’ don’t even have a name. If you ask them who they are they’ll probably make up a name on the spot. “We’re sort of moderns, I suppose. Not Mods, mind you.” Or “we’re stylists, that’s all.”

Not for them the vulgarities and violence of the Teds and the rest of the old guard.

They are forward looking... “Oh it was MEDIAEVAL then,” said the girl with false eyelashes and no lipstick, referring to 1964 and the year or two before that.

“All you had to do was buy a tight pair of jeans for a few bob, listen to the Top Twenty and let your hair grow, and that was IT.

“There’s no with-it uniform now, you know. You dress any way you like. But you must stay IN. You must belong to the In Group.”

Previously, every new trend stood – and eventually fell – by the peculiar inflexibility of its own rules. In the dim and distant 1950s you just had to wear great silent-soled suedes and comb your hair back from your padded shoulders with a handful of hair grease. You had to love Elvis.

Then after the jeans and studded leather era when you had to love motorcycles came the Beatles and their uniform, it was all very rigid.

“Fighting is right out,” said 20-year-old bricklayer Mick Colquhoun, who lives at St Leonard’s Road.

“The only people who get their kicks from fighting are the hard cases. They don’t like our kind of music and they wouldn’t spend the money we do on clothes.”

Mick spends “95 per cent” of his income on clothes, wouldn’t dream of paying less than 25 guineas for a suit and has it made in London. He sends to America for shoes – at about £8 a time.

The new group appear to be abstemious and pills– drugs of any kind, even cigarettes – don’t officially “rate”.

We met them at the Monday night Oodly-Boodly club at the Victoria Hotel in Leicester.

The official seal of In Group success is the term Face. If you’re a Face you rate high enough to be imitated, to have your verdicts on fashion handed on.

“One of the top Faces in Leicester” is 19-year-old Tony J Gourvish, who is only known in Group circles by his pseudonym of Gobi. He is an office worker and lives at 621, Welford Road.

“Girls are out too,” said Gobi. “We spend all our money on clothes. And in my spare time I think up new ideas for clothes. This suit was my own idea. Had it made in London for £25.

“We don’t really rate mixed dancing either. All the lads dance together in a circle.”

At the Oodly-Boodly Club there was plenty of fraternisation between the sexes but when it came too dancing they tended to split up.

There was no petting in the dark corners – presumably that, too, was “out”.

“The Beatles the Stones... they’re all rubbish,” said a Face. “We’re a minority. We don’t usually like anything in the Top Fifty, although we might settle on one of the more popular numbers if we rate it enough. We’re individualists.”

For the girls it’s false eye-lashes and the pale, no-make-up look. Again, much store is set by having an original one-off costume. Some girls make their own, just to be sure.

“It’s hard to be “in” before you’re 18,” said Mary Anderton, 21, of 92, Monmouth Drive, Glen Parva.

“You don’t start getting any real money until then. It’s expensive. We don’t have anything but the best. We never go to the cheap shops.”

As with the boys, it was easier to say what was “Trout” (out) than to try to explain the special ingredient for being “in”.

As far as music goes, they said, none of the “good groups” are in the hit parade. OUTS are: back-combed hair, short tight skirts, pointed toes, high heels, big handbags, red lipstick.

“We’re so much in front of the Trouts that we’ll be in for ever,” said a 19-year-old girl, pale in the darkness, moving her large, nylon eyelashes. “Until we get to 26. That’s the end. That’s when you become respectable.”