Trip down memory lane via Carnaby Street for 60s child

ONE of Dee Gordon’s most treasured memories of her teenage years in the 60s was queueing for many hours to see a new young band called The Beatles at Wimbledon Theatre, then queuing again afterwards to shake their hands at the stage door.

“If you chatted up the bouncers you could sneak back into the queue and meet the Fab Four twice,” says Dee, who grew up in East London. She also remembers travelling on the Tube to and from her first secretarial job in the rush hour, crushed against other passengers and realising that the tips of her fingers reached below the length of her micro mini skirt.

A huge fashion moment was the sumptuous grandeur of Barbara Hulanicki’s first big Biba store in Kensington, with its rich velvet drapes, ornate mirrors and ubiquitous feather boas. Dee herself was a Mod, whose uniform was grey and black, with rules about the exact width of stripe that was allowed around the edge of a sweater.

Most of all she remembers how the 60s invented the idea of the teenager. “Until then there were no clothes, no music, no culture in general catering for people of that age. Before then you got to about 13 and had to model yourself on your mum or dad’s clothes and hairstyle. In the 60s teenagers were invented.

“The first record I bought was Tommy Steele’s Singing The Blues... but after that I was earning my own money and started buying the newer music like Beatles singles I played on our wind-up gramophone. My £6 a week earnings went on records and Mod gear.” Dee says men actually got the better deal with 60s fashion, breaking out of drab suits into trendy clothing that might be the military look or something more beatnik.

After the dawn of the 70s, Dee went on to work for 30 years in the recruitment industry, eventually running her own company until 2000, when she sold the business to spend more time with her son Ben, who has a learning disability.

She had hankered to write for years, and having already fitted 11 published works of local history around family life, she took a different direction when she turned to the decade in which she came of age for inspiration.

The Little Book of the 60s is a fun compilation about the period, from the fact that when Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong-Jones in May 1960, she was the first royal to marry a commoner in 450 years, to memories of when the Beatles played Birkenhead YMCA for £30 in 1962 (the same year Decca turned them down because “groups with guitars are on their way out”) they were booed off the stage. There’s also a run-down of some of the most popular advertising slogans of the decade – remember Tick-a-tick-a-Timex and A Double Diamond Works Wonders?

“Researching it brought back so many great memories and a few things I’d forgotten or never knew,” says Dee. “It was a terrifically colourful time, but over all, it was not quite the wild time it’s perceived to be.”

Dee and her friends would flock to Flamingo, a club in the West End’s Wardour Street, which didn’t even sell alcohol. “We danced, stood, or sat around on mattresses, and no-one was drinking. Mind you, I think there might have been a few purple hearts floating around... The 60s are painted as a decade that was all about sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but for many of us they were very innocent times. People were talking about sex and drugs but not many people were doing them.”

Dee remembers her first foreign holiday – to a “cheap and nasty hotel” in Lido di Jesolo, Italy – with friends at the age of 18, and the taste of her first pizza. Back home, Britain’s first female TV chef Fanny Cradock was blazing a trail.

For many teenage girls the role model was Twiggy, but “...few of us could get down to her sort of weight, so we couldn’t really look like her,” says Dee.

Cataclysmic memories for Dee are the assassination of JFK (“the world was bigger then, and that huge story brought events thousands of miles away into our living room, really involving us”) and of course the moment man first walked on the Moon.

The Little Book Of The 60s by Dee Gordon is published by The History Press, £9.99. To order call 01748 821122. Postage costs £2.85.