Toffs and Toughs

Toffs and Toughs is a 1937 photograph of five English boys: two dressed in the Harrow School uniform including waistcoat, top hat, boutonnière, and cane; and three nearby wearing the plain clothes of pre-war working class youths.

[1] They had visited the dentist that morning and decided to skip school to earn money at Lord's by carrying luggage and returning hired cushions for the deposit.

[3] 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.

[1] The News Chronicle photograph reappeared in 1941 in Picture Post, illustrating an article by A. D. Lindsay arguing for reform of Britain's education system.

[1] Ian Jack had criticised this title since Salmon, Catlin, and Young were not especially poor or disreputable but merely part of the respectable working-class majority of the time.

After being discharged from the army in 1945, he entered the family stockbroking firm, married, and had three daughters; he became mentally unstable in the 1970s and died in Hellingly Hospital in 1984.

This was shortly after travelling to join his parents in Trimulgherry, British India, where his father, Lieutenant-Colonel George St. John Armitage Dyson, was serving as an army officer.