The First Teenagers: The Lifestyles of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain.

The historical analysis of young people has focused on either the post-war emergence of the teenager or on the changing concepts of adolescence and the problematization of youth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No work has yet been written which deals with the experience of young people in the interwar period. For this reason Fowler's short essay, based largely on research for his PhD thesis, is a welcome contribution to this historiography though it falls far short of definitively capturing the voice of youth in the 1920s and 1930s.

Fowler has one main point to argue; that is, he rejects the accepted view that the teenager emerged in the 1950s since there was already a distinctive youth culture before the Second World War. At this time young wage-earners had a significant amount of disposable income which allowed them to forge their own independent culture based around the cinema, the dance hall, youth magazines and other consumer goods specially marketed towards them. Fowler demonstrates his point by detailing the high degree of autonomy that young wage-earners had in the job market. They rejected the advice of parents, social commentators and the officials of the Juvenile Employment Bureau who told them to seek "progressive" jobs as clerks and apprentices and instead went for the better paid "blind alley" work of van boys and messenger boys. However, because the juvenile labor market was buoyant they were able to transfer to apprenticeships once they reached the age of sixteen when wages had risen to a level they were satisfied with. Once at work, juveniles were by no means deferential to their adult employers. Most spectacular were the apprenticeship strikes of 1937 when boys across the country fought for higher wages in jobs that they were genuinely interested in. Of those who were unemployed, Fowler argues that they were not affected by the experience, either emotionally or financially, since young people were usually out of work for no more than four weeks at a time. Family and welfare support ensured no material change in their lifestyles, which often involved two trips to the cinema a week. Other signifiers of a distinctive youth culture included specialized dance hall evenings, jazz music, magazines, clothing, cosmetics and bicycles. And just as the 1950s produced a moral rhetoric against the Teddy Boy, so too did the interwar decades around the cinema. Fowler argues in his fifth chapter that the debates over the cinema's degenerative influence were essentially based around fears of an emerging and independent youth culture. The book is brought to a close by a valuable discussion (though largely irrelevant to the main argument) of the decline of youth movements, notably the Lads' Clubs, the Scouts and Rovers, the Jewish Lads' Brigade and two pages on girls' organizations. These had either to adapt to the times or, as with the Scouts, reject modernization and see a sharp fall in membership.

The overall problem with the book is that one remains unconvinced of Fowler's central thesis. This problem is exacerbated by an extremely short introduction which limits the project to challenging the historiography of the emergence of the teenager. If Fowler fails in this project then it devalues the book as a whole. A wider secondary literature or an engagement with other historical debates would have widened the scope of the book and perhaps raised different questions about, say, the ideology of youth movements, the structures of consumer society, the concept of youth (medical, moral and cultural), and the nature of juvenile employment. Further problems arise as soon as one is taken beyond the title of the book to realise that Fowler is essentially referring to Manchester and not the whole of Britain. He offers little in the way of explanation for this choice of case study and, indeed, one is often left wondering what is typical about Manchester. Take, for instance, the chapter on youth unemployment in which Manchester is explicitly stated to be a case study. It quickly emerges that Manchester had much lower rates of juvenile unemployment than the rest of north-west England and other cities of comparable size (excluding London). Manchester actually saw juvenile in-migration in the interwar years because of these low rates, but this immediately raises interesting questions about the experiences of other towns and regions. Fowler does not deem it necessary to tell these other stories or explain why these differences help provide an overview for the entire country.

In part, this is because of Fowler's unfair treatment of the evidence available. He is fanatical in his condemnation of the evidence used by other historians, yet he consistently fails to turn his critical eye to his own sources. There is almost an arrogance in the way he criticizes the results of Elizabeth Roberts' oral history project of women in Lancashire (as other historians have done), but wholeheartedly accepts Rowntree's Poverty and Progress, a work equally problematized over the years. Moreover, contemporary social investigators are used throughout the book to describe a teenage culture that they were obviously not a part of and were unlikely to have fully understood. Fowler would have done well to observe on this point that each historical period has its own commentators that fear the growing independence of youth. Further problems of evidence run throughout the book. There is too little on the experience of girls, and it is astonishing that nothing is said of domestic service, a declining but still significant form of employment for young women in the interwar years. He concludes by arguing that a major sign of the existence of a distinctive teenage culture was the marketing of goods towards them by well-informed manufacturers, but there is almost no discussion or proof of this in the main text.

Surely if one is to write the history of a particular culture one should aim to give voice to the actors that constitute that culture. Instead, Fowler has relied heavily on the official records of the juvenile unemployment services in Manchester, the proclamations of respectable middle-aged establishment figures, and the records of youth organizations which are, in a sense, peripheral to his thesis. There is a literature in autobiographies, fiction, or even the messages of films and stories aimed at the young which could articulate the interests of young wage-earners more clearly than the adults they came up against. Whilst Fowler only touches on these sources, even the hardest critic of oral history would concede that it is this research that his argument cries out for. The detailed attack on Roberts' oral history project almost betrays an acknowledgement by Fowler that he needs to conduct his own interviews and give voice to a group who have not had access to the same means of communication as their elders.

Otherwise, Fowler must took to the language of goods, to the ways in which young people constructed a distinctive identity around the material artifacts they chose to use to speak to the world. Researchers into post-war youth cultures have demonstrated the importance of clothes, records, magazines and other fashion accessories in establishing a distinctive identity for teenagers. Perhaps Fowler could learn from this type of project, for more than anything else it demonstrates that the language of goods as used by teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s had a far richer vocabulary than the limited signifiers of youth in the interwar period. The First Teenagers does add to our knowledge of interwar youth, but Fowler has unfortunately chosen to structure his book around a thesis which his research cannot support.

Matthew Hilton Lancaster University