Toffs and Toughs
Encyclopedia
"Toffs and Toughs" is a 1937 photograph of five boys: two dressed in the Harrow School
Harrow School
Harrow School, commonly known simply as "Harrow", is an English independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London.. The school is of worldwide renown. There is some evidence that there has been a school on the site since 1243 but the Harrow School we know today was...

 uniform including waistcoat
Waistcoat
A waistcoat or vest is a sleeveless upper-body garment worn over a dress shirt and necktie and below a coat as a part of most men's formal wear, and as the third piece of the three-piece male business suit.-Characteristics and use:...

, top hat
Top hat
A top hat, beaver hat, high hat silk hat, cylinder hat, chimney pot hat or stove pipe hat is a tall, flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, predominantly worn from the latter part of the 18th to the middle of the 20th century...

, boutonnière
Boutonniere
A boutonnière is a floral decoration worn by men, typically a single flower or bud. The word comes from the French word for buttonhole, which is the British term....

, and cane
Cane
Cane are either of two genera of tall, perennial grasses with flexible, woody stalks from the family Poaceae that grow throughout the world in wet soils. They are related to and may include species of bamboo. The genus Arundo is native from the Mediterranean region to the Far East. Arundinaria...

; and three nearby wearing the plain clothes of pre-war working class youths. The picture was taken by Jimmy Sime on 9 July 1937 outside Lord's Cricket Ground
Lord's Cricket Ground
Lord's Cricket Ground is a cricket venue in St John's Wood, London. Named after its founder, Thomas Lord, it is owned by Marylebone Cricket Club and is the home of Middlesex County Cricket Club, the England and Wales Cricket Board , the European Cricket Council and, until August 2005, the...

 during the Eton v Harrow
Eton v Harrow
The Eton v Harrow cricket match is an annual cricket match between Eton College and Harrow School. It one of the longest-running annual cricket fixtures in the world. It is the last annual school cricket match played at Lord's Cricket Ground...

 cricket match. It has been reproduced frequently as an illustration of the British class system, although the name "Toffs and Toughs" may be no older than 2004.

The day of the picture

The names of the five boys were published in a 1998 article by Geoffrey Levy in the Daily Mail
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...

. The Harrovians were Peter Wagner and Thomas "Tim" Dyson, who had arranged to be at Grace Gates at 2 pm, where Wagner's father would pick them up and drive them to Russ Hill, the Wagners’ country home in Surrey
Surrey
Surrey is a county in the South East of England and is one of the Home Counties. The county borders Greater London, Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire. The historic county town is Guildford. Surrey County Council sits at Kingston upon Thames, although this has been part of...

, for the weekend. The other three boys were George Salmon, Jack Catlin, and George Young, 13-year-old pupils at the local Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...

 primary school. They had visited the dentist that morning and decided to skip school in order to earn money at Lord's by carrying luggage and returning hired cushions for the deposit. The photographer, Jimmy Sime, worked for the Central Press Agency
Central News Agency (London)
The Central News Agency was a news distribution service founded as Central Press in 1863 by William Saunders and his brother-in-law, Edward Spender...

; Sime took several shots of the five boys outside Grace Gates. Ian Jack
Ian Jack
Ian Jack is a Scottish journalist who was the editor of the literary magazine Granta from 1995 to 2007. Granta 98 "The Deep End" was the 48th issue which Jack edited and the last.Jack was educated at Dunfermline High School...

 speculates that Sime solicited the cooperation of the three "toughs", but not that of the two "toffs".

Use of the photograph

The picture first appeared next day, 10 July 1937, on the front page of the News Chronicle
News Chronicle
The News Chronicle was a British daily newspaper. It ceased publication on 17 October 1960, being absorbed into the Daily Mail. Its offices were in Bouverie Street, off Fleet Street, London, EC4Y 8DP, England.-Daily Chronicle:...

, a left-wing newspaper, under the heading "Every picture tells a story". A different photograph from the same reel was printed in a photo-essay in Life
Life (magazine)
Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....

on 2 August 1937; Life erroneously described Wagner and Dyson as "Young Etonians", and described the other three as "village boys". Ian Jack speculates that Life used an inferior shot because the original had been sold by the Central Press Agency exclusively to the News Chronicle.

The News Chronicle photograph reappeared in 1941 in Picture Post
Picture Post
Picture Post was a prominent photojournalistic magazine published in the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1957. It is considered a pioneering example of photojournalism and was an immediate success, selling 1,700,000 copies a week after only two months...

, illustrating an article by A. D. Lindsay arguing for reform of Britain's education system
Education in the United Kingdom
Education in the United Kingdom is a devolved matter with each of the countries of the United Kingdom having separate systems under separate governments: the UK Government is responsible for England, and the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Executive are...

. Bert Hardy
Bert Hardy
Bert Hardy was a documentary and press photographer known for his work published in the Picture Post magazine between 1941 and1957....

, who joined the Picture Post in 1941, has often been misidentified as the photographer who took the picture. It has been reused often in subsequent decades; Levy called it "the defining image of class division". In 1979 it was a plate in François Bédarida's Social history of England, captioned "The Two Nations". It was the illustration on the covers of books about the British class system published in the 1990s, and in newspaper articles in the 2000s. Paul Barker of the Institute for Community Studies
Institute for Community Studies
The Institute of Community Studies based in London is an urban studies think tank. Founded in 1954, it had been the main vehicle through which Michael Young created over 60 organisations including the Open University and the Consumers' Association. A registered charity, its main purpose is to...

 described the picture in 2000 as an "easy caricature" symbolising an obsolete social divide.

In 2004, the title "Toffs and Toughs" was used in the Getty Images
Getty Images
Getty Images, Inc. is a stock photo agency, based in Seattle, Washington, USA. It is a supplier of stock images for business and consumers with an archive of 80 million still images and illustrations and more than 50,000 hours of stock film footage...

 online catalogue, and for a jigsaw puzzle
Jigsaw puzzle
A jigsaw puzzle is a tiling puzzle that requires the assembly of numerous small, often oddly shaped, interlocking and tessellating pieces.Each piece usually has a small part of a picture on it; when complete, a jigsaw puzzle produces a complete picture...

 of the photograph. Ian Jack has criticized this title, since Salmon, Catlin and Young were not especially poor or disreputable, merely part of the respectable working-class majority of the time.

The boys in later life

Tim Dyson died of diphtheria
Diphtheria
Diphtheria is an upper respiratory tract illness caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae, a facultative anaerobic, Gram-positive bacterium. It is characterized by sore throat, low fever, and an adherent membrane on the tonsils, pharynx, and/or nasal cavity...

 in August 1938, shortly after travelling to join his parents in Trimulgherry
Trimulgherry
Trimulgherry or Thirmulgherry or Tirumalagiri is a major suburb of Secunderabad, India. It is the anglicised name for Tirumalagiri. It is to the north of Hyderabad.The suburb has many smaller residential townships...

, India. Peter Wagner entered the family stockbroking firm, married, and had three daughters; he became mentally unstable in the 1970s and died in Hellingly Hospital
Hellingly Hospital
Hellingly Hospital was a large mental hospital in the village of Hellingly, east of Hailsham, in East Sussex, England. The hospital, also known as East Sussex County Asylum or just Hellingly, was opened in 1903...

 in 1984. George Young and George Salmon were each married when interviewed for the Daily Mail in 1998. Young had a flat in The Barbican
Barbican Estate
The Barbican Estate is a residential estate built during the 1960s and the 1970s in the City of London, in an area once devastated by World War II bombings and today densely populated by financial institutions...

. Salmon, who still lived in Marylebone
Marylebone
Marylebone is an affluent inner-city area of central London, located within the City of Westminster. It is sometimes written as St. Marylebone or Mary-le-bone....

, died in 2000. Jack Catlin's family moved to Rickmansworth
Rickmansworth
Rickmansworth is a town in the Three Rivers district of Hertfordshire, England, 4¼ miles west of Watford.The town has a population of around 15,000 people and lies on the Grand Union Canal and the River Colne, at the northern end of the Colne Valley regional park.Rickmansworth is a small town in...

 soon after 1937; he was widowed, remarried and living in Weymouth in 2010.

External links

  • Toffs And Toughs, from Getty Images
    Getty Images
    Getty Images, Inc. is a stock photo agency, based in Seattle, Washington, USA. It is a supplier of stock images for business and consumers with an archive of 80 million still images and illustrations and more than 50,000 hours of stock film footage...

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