Homer Sykes, then a student at the London College of Printing, took this photograph at a Conservative party rally in 1969. Sykes had not long moved to the capital and, influenced by young American street photographers such as Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank, wandered the streets most weekends, looking for tribal gatherings and demonstrations that pitted one political class against another.
Several of his pictures, collected in a new book, My British Archive: The Way We Were 1968-1983, capture the divisions in wealth between London’s East End and West End, between Whitechapel and Westminster; others were taken at standoffs between the far right and the Anti-Nazi League. The young Tories in this picture in full pinstripe costume, were part of the movement that, against expectation, saw Ted Heath defeat Harold Wilson the following year.
The bowler hats were both a gift to the photographer and, increasingly, an anachronism even among Conservatives. A couple of years earlier, Charles Morrison, who represented Devizes for the Tories, had caused some consternation in traditional circles – and among Jermyn Street outfitters – when he spoke in the Commons of “undesirable” door-to-door salesmen as “rogues in bowler hats”. His comments provoked a leader in the Guardian,. “Is it election fever? Was Mr Morrison changing subtly the Tory image by coming out against the bowler?” it wondered, before concluding that “a hint of roguery may give the bowler a new lease of fashionable life”.
That latter sentiment certainly seems to be the thinking of the men in Sykes’s photograph. A symbol of old-school propriety has taken on a confrontational edge that matches their studied, patrician gaze. “Forward again with the Tories,” the sign reads. The ironies of that slogan were no doubt just as pointed then as they sound half a century later.
My British Archive: The Way We Were 1968-1983 is published on 4 December (Dewi Lewis, £30)
