Great moments in Cardigan History
Back in 1964, the era of the mods and rockers, many men wore
cardigans. They were fashionable though still, perhaps, considered a little
wimpish. They were often hand knitted by mothers and grandmothers.
For anyone who liked them, cardigans were as attractive then
as they are now. What they had then that they don’t have now is a following.
Men who were inclined to wear them stuck together and identified. To apply the
taxonomy outlined above, they were unlikely to be rockers. Though even at the
time, when society was in denial about homosexuality it was understood that a
gay man could belong to that particular group (cf The Leather Boys, book and
film from 1964, a title which at the time was not freighted with the meaning it
has now). In short, cardigans were most likely to be worn by mods.
Mods and rockers did not get on. There were skirmishes,
often at seaside resorts where the two groups came into conflict at weekends
and on bank holidays. These conflicts formed the basis of the big moral panic
of the day and were a topic upon which the paid gobs of that time pontificated ad nauseam. Contrary to their
predictions the world did not come to an end, although their world did. These
days we are a lot better informed and alert to the crap that the likes of Lord Boothby and Malcolm Muggeridge poured forth. They were hypocrites and quite
frankly cunts.
Anyway, my point is about the picture I’ve posted here. I
fancy that it was taken during the Great Cardigan Riot of 1964 on Brighton seafront.
The cardigan wearers were demanding a change in the law to permit the wearing
of cardigans during acts of homosexual congress. This was illegal at the time
and many men were in prison as a result. It was believed back then that
incarcerating gay men in large, thinly supervised, single sex institutions
would go some way to rehabilitating them.
[The information in this piece was drawn from the Quarterly Journal of Idle Speculation
and is unlikely to be true. Except for the paid gobs bit, those people really
were appalling.]
