From Knuckle-Dusters to Whole-Meal Scones: The Rise and Fall of the British Yobbo

by Pitchforks

Many moons ago – before Britain was invaded by a wave of Scandinavian social conscience and namby-pamby political correctness, and everyone started referring to every relationship bar-none from boyfriend, fiancée, wife, toy-boy, bit-on-the-side to lesbian lover as “partner”, so as not to openly define one’s sexuality or legal status, nor thrust one’s own version of romantic union into the face of someone whose idea of a significant other was “other”, and men started changing nappies (diapers) and flouncing round the kitchen in aprons making whole-meal scones – I used to warn my Italian male students before going to the UK not to lock eyes with another male in a pub, so as to lower the likelihood of being confronted with:

“You lookin’ at me, may’ (mate)?? You wanna go ou’soid (outside)????!!”

This is the British male’s invitation – uncannily reminiscent of Robert de Niro – to join him in a nearby, more open public space in order to demonstrate that you have no fear with regard to the possibility of having your face made into a knuckle sandwich.

Generations of boys in dear old Albion were brought up not to be afraid to give it some “welly” in a bout of fisticuffs if the situation demanded, or if the mere opportunity arose. Indeed, some men’s modus operandi – usually the ones with their brains in their trousers – was to go out with the main purpose of looking for a fight, and to pick one with any bloke who happened to look them in the eye, however accidentally, for more than a nanosecond. Such activity was the prerogative of Anglo-Saxon male society and was unlikely to land you in the slammer unless someone flashed a knife and someone got hurt. All that shooting stuff was for those Americans in the films. A true working-class, self-respecting, full-blooded English bulldog used his fists, and only the seedy geezers in the criminal underworld, or sicko, pervy bastards who killed women in alleys or little children on the moors resorted to slashing.

The artful dodger in Dickens’ Oliver Twist is the archetypal English ruffian, stealing, getting into fistfights and generally causing mischief. The young adult and hardened, sociopathic version of this little delinquent urchin is Bill Sikes with his nasty dog, Bullseye, and if any of you saw the 1968 film Oliver with Jack Wild and Oliver Reed in those roles respectively, you’ll have a good idea of what masculinity was all about among the working classes of the Victorian age. Knocking your woman about behind closed doors was necessary to keep her in order, so she knew not to make you look like a fool at the tavern by behaving like a trollop around the other men. Certainly, as a child I remember seeing this film at the cinema and thinking that knock-kneed blondie-locked Mark Lester with his cathedral-choir warbling as the title character was a right wimp. Who has heard him sing Who will buy this Wonderful Morning? and not wanted to sock ‘im one in the gob?

Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, written in 1857, was the upper class version of what boys should be like in Victorian England. Tom goes to the famous “public” (in Britain this means private and expensive) school, Rugby (yes, where that precursor to American football was invented), and spends most of his time there being terrorized by Flashman, the school’s prize psychopath. Bullying in all-boys’ public schools used to be a tacitly sanctioned part of the physical education curriculum, to be borne with stoic dignity and a vow never to be seen to cry. Not without reason is the term “stiff upper lip” associated with men of the educated classes of a bygone era.

Homosexual activity – a serious crime at the time, punishable by long sentences – far from being considered shameful, was considered to be another sign of proud rascaldom, as well as a bullying tool. Public schools had a system of institutionalized sexual abuse called “fagging”, whereby older youths picked out boys from the youngest pupils in the school to be their personal and regular “fags”. If you had the misfortune to be the poor little bugger who took the fancy of some sadistic hormone-raging upper classman, you were condemned to possibly two or three years of hell – until you were old enough to start plucking out pretty boys from the ranks of the incoming classes yourself……

By the second half the 20^th century, when homosexual liaison was no longer a crime in the United Kingdom, but sexual abuse of a minor was, consenting homosexual fraternization between teen peers was regarded as a normal rite of passage in public school, something to be carried through into adulthood as acknowledged homosexuality, or else cast off when you went to university as a past phase about which you could relate ribald stories to your new uni friends, like that one about passing the digestive biscuit around the group and…….. oops, sorry, I digress.

In the latter part of the 20^th century, public schools began a slow decline into emasculation with the gradual introduction of…………girls. Thus began the treacherous downward slide towards upper crust boys becoming “fairies” – effeminate, without the swaggering kudos and risk of forbidden fruit of former times.

Move forward a hundred or so years and we have that truly nasty piece of work, Alex in A Clockwork Orange who, bolstered by his pathetic hangers-on Pete, Georgie and Dim (which means really stupid in Brit slang) typifies a particular brand of sadistic thuggery practiced in many posh boys’ schools. As far as I remember, nothing is said in the film about Alex’s education, but with his crisp cut-glass sarcasm and his love of Beethoven, this is hardly a kid from the East End – the traditional “cockney”, working-class neighbourhood of London.

In the 1960’s and 70’s Britain began to export a novel new male-oriented product. Bands of skinheads in Doc Martens who showed up at football games to initiate fights with supporters of rival teams became known as “football hooligans”, and though this movement began in the UK it was quickly transported to international games on the continent. The racist agenda of many skinheads, some of whom belonged to the Nazi-inspired British Movement, found a convenient reason in football to travel abroad and make hell with “filthy, fuckin’ foreigners”.

Not all hooligans and general miscreants were skinheads. A male with a tendency towards jutting out lower lip, blank stares, verbal threats, vandalism and/or violence came to be referred to in common British parlance as a “yobbo” or “yob”, words derived from backward spelling of “boy”. The more unpleasant members of this youth subculture, usually white, low-educated, inarticulate and wearing white socks revealed below their strategically too-short trousers, interspersed in the crowd with their skinhead colleagues, used to frequent the stadium stands chanting in rhythmic unison:

“You’re gonna git your fu-ckin’ ‘eads kicked in!!” to the opposing team’s fans.

Ah yes, the tea-sipping, reserved British who always mind their p’s and q’s……

After the game the operative word was “aggro”. You went lookin’ for “aggro” – short for aggravation….. For a certain subset of British youth this was the way to demonstrate your manhood, even if you had to sport a set of knuckle-dusters (sharp-edged can rings) on four fingers of one hand to convince the other wankers you meant business…… Anyone whose skin was a little too olive-coloured and couldn’t be definitively identified as a “fuckin’ Paki” (Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi) was a “bleedin’ deigo” an’ seein’ as they were all a load o’ poofs wiv their girly hairdos an’ lahdidah handbags they needed to be taugh’ a lesson!

British yobbos kept their culture aloive, kickin’ an’ breedin’ in their bovver boots by shifting gatherings to pub pool tables and dart boards, migrating from the football stadiums after tougher policing of ‘ooliganism came into force.

I’m not sure whether the “primal urge” of such youth was to “defend family, friends and homestead”, or to “correct injustice” – probably more like to defend their stompin’ ground at the bowlin’ alley where they ‘ad their pickin’s of the guhls, and that row of wind shelters down on the seaside promenade a stone’s throw from the greasy spoon caff where the benches came in ‘andy for gittin’ your end away wiv said guhls on a dark rainy night when humpin’ behind the bushes near the swings at the park wasn’t an option cos’ you’d muck up your white socks…. Sure enough you stood up for your mates if they go’ into a ding dong when some git knocked their point (pint of beer) over on ‘is way to the dar’ board at the local. Now tha’ could spark off some flippin’ aggro, Oi can tell ya…… The only way to deal wiv tha’ situation was to say to the fuckin’ wanker:

“Bleedin’ eck, you ahse’ole!! You wanna go ou’soid????”….

Thass the only real woy to git justice, inni’? Ya know wah’ ah mean? Kids these days……wha’ a bunch o’ wusses. Weren’t loike tha’ in moy day…..naahh……. no’ bloody loikely….

Hence the warning to my Italian male students…… …then.

Now it seems the surly sods of yesteryear have been curbed in their formerly engaging overtures to their fellow-men, and undergone a similar ordeal of identity castration as their American counterparts. In the last 20 years or so the British Isles has been swept by an overly precious gender-merging, vegetarian and macrobiotic wholesomeness where grabbing someone by the scruff of the neck at the bar for eyeing your bird’s legs just isn’t macho anymore. Sorry, did I say bird? I meant your girlfrie….I mean “partner”. She’s not going to be impressed if you get into a brawl over her and she expects you to indicate your solidarity and new mannishness by accompanying her to the Women Against Domestic Violence protest march, rather than spend your Saturday afternoon waving your scarf in the stands with your mates.

Well, at least it keeps you out of trouble……

“You lookin’ at me, may’?? You wanna go ou’ for a latte after the game?”

Pitchforks is a child and adolescent development, delinquency and mental health specialist based near Washington DC who writes about the American criminal justice system and its juxtaposition with the media, runs the website Pitchforks, and produces the blogtalkradio show Routing Out.