This film is part of Free

Holiday Hooliganism

Easter Monday crowds pour off the trains at Skegness and in Yarmouth, mods and rockers skirmish with the Police on Marine Parade.

Non-Fiction 1966 1 mins Silent

From the collection of:

Logo for East Anglian Film Archive

Overview

The long, sandy beaches at Great Yarmouth offer donkey rides and two piers, and the ‘Golden Mile’ seafront boasts twelve amusement arcades as well as numerous other attractions. The beaches both hold Blue Flag awards for cleanliness. Skegness and Great Yarmouth, both seaside towns, were popular bank holiday rendezvous points for East Anglian mods and rockers in the sixties and early seventies, when trouble between youths and the Police was a regular occurrence.

While most of the youths featured in this Anglia TV report don’t appear to follow the fashion style of mods or rockers, the scale of the crowds indicates some cohesive intentions. The rocker subculture centred around motorbikes and so they chose to wear black leather jackets and boots or brothel creepers. They wore their hair fairly long and swept upwards off the face. Mods, on the other hand favoured clean-cut, smart suits and haircuts, and many rode Vespa scooters, or similar. Music was important to both subcultures, and music venues and gigs were often the trigger points for hostilities.