Our recent features on the teenage street gangs of Newcastle in the early 1970s sparked quite a bit of interest.
It was a time when there was increasing alarm around the country about the rising tide of casual violence in Britain's towns and inner cities. It was, we recalled, "the era of Crombie-wearing, Doctor Marten-booted, reggae-loving skinhead gangs, marking their well-defended territories out with graffiti tags and enjoying nothing better than a scrap with a rival gang".
Newspapers ran countless stories reporting random outbreaks of trouble on the streets, and longer pieces examining the causes of the phenomenon. The Chronicle in one front page story in 1971 namechecked four of Newcastle's main skinheads gangs and interviewed some of their members who were mainly 15 and 16-year-old boys.
