The Battle of the Yobs

For the three-day Whitsun weekend, the weather was as warm and bright as the sky in a Visit Britain poster. Streaming out of London by scooter, motor bike and train, the kids swarmed into two seaside resorts, the prearranged settings for their teen-age rites of spring. There, in two days of juvenile violence without parallel in England, they left no stone unhurled to turn holiday into holocaust.

Like Sea Slugs. The battle had been shaping up since Easter, when more than 1,000 members of Britain's rival teen cults threw a wild weekend punch-up at seaside Clacton. This time, some 3,000 "Mods" and "Rockers" flocked to Margate and Brighton, the Mods (for modern) spiffed up in drainpipe trousers and pastel shirts, the Rockers encased in black leather jackets and cowboy boots. At each resort the Mods, who ride scooters and call their girls "birds," pitched camp at one end of the beach. The Rockers, who care more for their motorcycles than their birds, formed a tight rectangle at the other end. With jackets incongruously zipped up despite the sun, the pallid, scruffy youths looked like a colony of sea slugs washed in by the tide.

Tension mounted all Saturday night as guitar-thrumming youths became "blocked," their term for getting high on goofballs. Because Mods sport elaborate hairdos and often tart themselves up with eye shadow and transparent lipstick, they are sneered at by the Rockers. Margate was the Mods' big chance to assert their virility. At dawn on Sunday, armed with ripped-off legs from beach chairs, stone-hurling Mods charged their rivals, injuring two policemen who tried to intervene. As police reinforcements poured in, the battle surged to and fro along the beach, then spread into Margate's streets. Two youths were stabbed, dozens injured by brass knuckles, flying stones or milk bottles, and Rockers' studded belts; in two days, 69 were arrested.

Sawdust Caesars. Both in Margate and in Brighton, where more than 1,000 kids joined another melee and 75 were arrested, irate magistrates handed out stiff jail sentences (up to six months for assault) and fines totaling some $6,000. Stormed a magistrate: "These long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums--these sawdust Caesars--seem to find courage, like rats, by hunting only in packs."

More patient sociologists who have studied them say that few members of both groups are actually "yobs" (hoods), but that they all are too easily incited by hooligans and by the opportunity to show off. Mod-Rocker antagonism is honed by class resentment, for the Rockers are mostly manual workers while Mods tend to be selfconsciously superior white-collar types. Many Britons see in these outbursts a symptom of deep boredom and frustration that, in different ways, is also shared by the older generation. While the youngsters enjoy unparalleled affluence, they nevertheless see drab lives ahead. As the Guardian diagnosed it, "Theirs is an ailment which can only be cured when the places in which they live and the schools in which they learn are less cramped, less frustrating and less deadly to hope."

All true, no doubt, but to most Britons they were still a bunch of yobs.

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