Authors: Philip Norman
For British eight-year-olds in this era, the chief fantasy figures were American cowboy movie heroes like Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy, whose western raiment was flashingly gorgeous, and who would periodically sheathe their pearl-handled six-shooters and warble ballads to their own guitar accompaniment. In the Wentworth playground one day, Keith confided to Mike Jagger that when he grew up, he wanted to be like Roy Rogers, the self-styled “King of the Cowboys,” and play a guitar.
Mike was indifferent to the King of the Cowboys—he was already good at being indifferent—but the idea of the guitar, and of this little imp with sticky-out ears strumming one, did pique his interest. However, their acquaintanceship did not ripen: it would be more than a decade before they explored the subject further.
At the Jaggers’, like every other British household, music was constantly in the air, pumped out of bulky valve-operated radio sets by the BBC’s Light Programme in every form from dance bands to operetta. Mike enjoyed mimicking American crooners he heard—like Johnnie Ray blubbing through “Just Walkin’ in the Rain” and “The Little White Cloud That Cried”—but did not attract any special notice in school singing lessons or in the church choir to which he and his brother, Chris, both belonged. Chris, at that stage, seemed more of a natural performer, having won a prize at Maypole Infants School for singing “The Deadwood Stage” from the film Calamity Jane. The musical entertainments that appealed most to Mike were the professional Christmas pantomimes staged at larger theaters in the area—corny shows based on fairy tales like Mother Goose or “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but with an intriguing whiff of sex and gender blurring, the rouged and wisecracking “dame” traditionally played by a man, the “principal boy” by a leggy young woman.
In 1954, the family moved from 39 Denver Road and out of Dartford entirely, to the nearby village of Wilmington. Their house now had a name, “Newlands,” and stood in a secluded thoroughfare called The Close, a term usually applied to cathedral precincts. There was a spacious garden where Joe could give his two sons regular PT sessions and practice the diverse sports in which he was coaching them. The neighbors grew accustomed to seeing the grass littered with balls, cricket stumps, and lifting weights, and Mike and Chris swinging like titchy Tarzans from ropes their father had tied to the trees
For the Jaggers, as for most British families, it was a decade of steadily increasing prosperity, when luxuries barely imaginable before the war became commonplace in almost every home. They acquired a television set, whose minuscule screen showed a bluish rather than black-and-white picture, allowing Mike and Chris to watch Children’s Hour puppets like Muffin the Mule, Mr. Turnip, and Sooty, and serials like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden and E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children. They took summer holidays in sunny Spain and the South of France rather than Kent’s own numerous, cold-comfort resorts like Margate and Broadstairs. But the boys were never spoiled. Joe in his quiet way was a strict disciplinarian and Eva was equally forceful, particularly over cleanliness and tidiness. From their youngest years, Mike and Chris were expected to do their share of household chores, set out in a school-like timetable.
Mike pulled his weight without complaint. “[He] wasn’t a rebellious child at all,” Joe would later remember. “He was a very pleasant boy at home in the family, and he helped to look after his younger brother.” Indeed, the only shadow on his horizon was that Chris seemed to be his mother’s favorite and he himself never received quite the same level of affection and attention from her. It made him slow to give affection in his turn—a lifelong trait—and also self-conscious and shy in front of strangers, and mortified with embarrassment when Eva pushed him forward to say hello or shake hands.
The year of the family’s move to Wilmington, he sat the Eleven Plus, the exam with which British state education preemptively sorted its eleven-year-olds into successes and failures. The bright ones went on to grammar schools, often the equal of any exclusive, fee-paying institutions, while the less bright went to secondary moderns and the dullards to technical schools in hope of at least acquiring some useful manual trade. For Mike Jagger, there was no risk of either of these latter options. He passed the exam easily and in September 1954 started at Dartford Grammar School on the town’s West Hill.
His father could not have been better pleased. Founded in the eighteenth century, Dartford Grammar was the best school of its kind in the district, aspiring to the same standards and observing the same traditions that cost other parents dear at establishments like Eton and Harrow. It had a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Ora et Labora (Pray and Work); it had “masters” rather than mere teachers, clad in scholastic black gowns; most important for Joe, it placed as much emphasis on sports and physical development as on academic achievement. Its alumni included the Indian Mutiny hero Sir Henry Havelock, and the great novelist Thomas Hardy, originally an architect, had worked on one of its nineteenth-century extensions.
In these new surroundings, however, Mike did not shine nearly as brightly as before. His Eleven Plus results had put him into the “A” stream of specially promising pupils, headed for good all-round results in the GCE O-level exams, followed by two years in the sixth form and probable university entrance. He was naturally good at English, had something of a passion for history (thanks to an inspirational teacher named Walter Wilkinson), and spoke French with an accent superior to most of his classmates’. But science subjects, like math, physics, and chemistry, bored him, and he made little or no effort with them. In the form order, calculated on aggregate marks, he usually figured about halfway. “I wasn’t a swot and I wasn’t a dunce,” he would recall of himself. “I was always in the middle ground.”
At sports, despite his father’s comprehensive coaching, he was equally inconsistent. Summer was no problem, as Dartford Grammar played cricket, something he loved to watch as well as play, and under Joe’s coaching, he could shine in athletics, especially middle-distance running and javelin. But the school’s winter team game was upper-class rugby football rather than proletarian soccer. Fast runner and good catcher that Mike was, he easily made every school rugger side up to the First Fifteen. But he hated being tackled—which often meant crashing onto his face in squelching mud—and would do everything he could to avoid receiving a pass.
The headmaster, Ronald Loftus Hudson, sarcastically known as “Lofty,” was a tiny man who nonetheless could reduce the rowdiest assembly to pin-drop silence with little more than a raised eyebrow. Under his regime there were myriad petty regulations about dress and conduct, the sternest relating to the fully segregated but tantalizingly near-at-hand Dartford Grammar School for Girls. Boys were forbidden to talk to the girls, even if they happened to meet out of school hours at places like bus stops. The head also used corporal punishment, as most British educators then did, without legal restraint or fear of parental protest—between two and six strokes on the backside with a stick or gym shoe. “You had to wait outside [his] study until the light went on, and then you’d go in,” the Jagger of the future would remember. “And everybody else used to hang about on the stairs to see how many he gave and how bad it was that morning.”
All the male teachers could administer formal beatings in front of the whole class and most, in addition, practiced a casual, even jocular physical violence that today would instantly land them in court for assault. Any who showed weakness (like the English teacher, “sweet, gentle Mr. Brandon”) were mercilessly ragged and aped by Jagger, the class mimic, behind their backs or to their faces. “There were guerrilla skirmishes on all fronts, with civil disobedience and undeclared war; [the teachers] threw blackboard rubbers at us and we threw them back,” he would recall. “There were some who’d just punch you out. They’d slap your face so hard, you’d go down. Others would twist your ear and drag you along until it was red and stinging.” So that line from “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “I was schooled with a strap right across my back,” may not be as fanciful as it has always seemed.
At number 23 The Close lived a boy named Alan Etherington, who was the same age as Mike and also went to Dartford Grammar. The two quickly chummed up, biking to school together each morning and going to tea at each other’s house. “There was a standing joke with us that if Mike appeared, he was trying to get out of chores his parents had given him, like washing up or mowing the lawn,” Etherington remembers. House-proud Eva could be a little intimidating, but Joe, despite his “quiet authority,” created an atmosphere of healthy fun. When Etherington dropped by, there would usually be a pickup game of cricket or rounders or an impromptu weight-training session on the lawn. Sometimes, as a special treat, Joe would produce a javelin, take the boys to the open green space at the top of The Close, and under his careful supervision, allow them to practice a few throws.
Having a father so closely connected to the teaching world meant that Mike’s daily release from school was not as complete as other boys’. Joe knew several of the staff at Dartford Grammar, and so could keep close watch on both his academic performance and conduct. There also could be no shirking of homework: he would later remember getting up at 6 A.M. to finish some essay or exercise, having fallen asleep over his books the night before. But in other ways, Joe’s links with the school were an advantage. Arthur Page, the sports master—and a celebrated local cricketer—was a family friend who gave Mike special attention in batting practice at the school nets. Likewise as a favor to his father, one of the mathematics staff agreed to help him with his weakest subject even though he wasn’t in the teacher’s usual set.
Eventually, Joe himself became a part-time instructor at Dartford Grammar, coming in each Tuesday evening to coach in his beloved basketball. And there was one game, at least, where Mike’s enthusiasm, and application, fully matched his father’s. In basketball one could run and weave and catch and shoot with no risk of being pushed into mud; best of all, despite Joe’s patient exposition of its long British history, it felt glamorously and exotically American. Its most famous exponents were the all-black Harlem Globetrotters, whose displays of almost magical ball control, to the whistled strains of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” gave Mike Jagger and countless other British boys their earliest inklings of “cool.” He became secretary of the school basketball society that evolved from Joe’s visits, and never missed a session. While his friends played in ordinary gym shoes, he had proper black-and-white canvas basketball boots, which not only enhanced performance on the court but were stunningly chic juvenile footwear off it.
Otherwise, he was an inconspicuous member of the school community, winning neither special distinction nor special censure, offering no challenge to the status quo, using his considerable wits to avoid trouble with chalk-throwing, ear-twisting masters rather than provoke it. His school friend John Spinks remembers him as “an India-rubber character” who could “bend every way to stay out of trouble.”
By mid-1950s standards, he was not considered good-looking. Sex appeal then was entirely dictated by film stars, of whom the male archetypes were tall, keen-jawed, and muscular, with close-cut, glossy hair—American action heroes such as John Wayne and Rock Hudson; British “officer types” such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd. Mike, like his father, was slightly built and skinny enough for his rib cage to protrude, though unlike Joe he showed no sign of incipient baldness. His hair, formerly a reddish color, was now mousy brown and already floppily unmanageable.
His most noticeable feature was a mouth which, like certain breeds of bull-baiting terriers, seemed to occupy the entire lower half of his face, making a smile literally stretch from ear to ear, and Cupid’s-bow lips of unusual thickness and color that seemed to need double the usual amount of moistening by his tongue. His mother also had markedly full lips—kept in top condition by the amount she talked—but Joe was convinced that Mike’s came from the Jagger side of the family and would sometimes apologize, not altogether jokingly, for having passed them on to him.
As the boys in his year reached puberty (yes, in 1950s Britain it really was this late) and all at once became agonizingly conscious of their clothes, grooming, and appeal to the opposite sex, small, scrawny, loose-mouthed Mike Jagger seemed to have rather little going for him. Yet in encounters with the forbidden girls’ grammar school, he somehow always provoked the most smiles, blushes, giggles, and whispered discussions behind his back. “Almost from the time I met Mike, he always had girls flocking around him,” Alan Etherington remembers. “A lot of our friends seemed to be much better looking, but they never had anything like the success that he did. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he knew he never needed to be alone.”
At the same time, his maturing looks, especially the lips, could arouse strange antagonism in males; teasing and taunting from classmates, sometimes even physical bullying by older boys. Not for being effeminate—his prowess on the sports field automatically discounted that—but for something far more damning. This was a time when unreformed nineteenth-century racism, the so-called color bar, held sway in even Britain’s most civilized and liberal circles. To grammar school boys, as to their parents, thick lips suggested just one thing and there was just one term for it, repugnant now but back then quite normal.
Decades later, in a rare moment of self-revelation, he would admit that during his time at Dartford Grammar “the N-word,” for “nigger,” was thrown at him more than once. The time was still far off when he would find the comparison flattering.
THOUSANDS OF BRITISH men who grew up in the 1950s—and almost all who went on to dominate popular culture in the 1960s—recall the arrival of rock ’n’ roll music from America as a life-changing moment. But such was not Mike Jagger’s experience. In rigidly class-bound postwar Britain, rock ’n’ roll’s impact was initially confined to young people of the lower social orders, the so-called Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls. During its earliest phase, it made little impression on the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, both of whose younger generations viewed it with almost as much distaste as did their parents. Likewise, in the hierarchical education system, it found its first enraptured audience in secondary moderns and technical schools. At institutions like Dartford Grammar it was, rather, a subject for high-flown sixth-form debates: “Is rock ’n’ roll a symptom of declining morals in the twentieth century?”