After a vicious stabbing in March 1950, Ottawa’s Chief Constable lamented the “teenage tyranny” endured by Canada’s main cities since the end of the Second World War. Throughout the 1950s, Ottawa’s newspapers continued to report on teen gang violence in London, Glasgow, New York and Detroit, and in Canadian cities such as Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto and Hull. This violence was often associated with teenage dances.
This was certainly the case in Ottawa: in 1956, a near-riot was caused by 150 teens at a St. Luke’s dance, with the Chaudière Recreation Centre’s dances cancelled that same year due to trouble from a youth gang on Wellington Street. Lindenlea Park and Westboro Kiwanis Park also had to close their dance programs by 1958. The instigators were often “greasers” who preferred rock-and-roll music, clothing and hairstyles and used hot rods and motorcycles to drown out the music and annoy the dancers. The Ottawa Welfare Council announced that there was an “organized juvenile delinquency threat” in the city and educators worried that gangs pressured kids to do poorly in school. Still others saw gangs primarily as social groups, rarely delinquent in their actions. Nevertheless, newspapers advised anxious parents and tried to blame films and literature for glamourizing gangs. The 1950s ended with a supposed “gang war” in 1959 between 30 kids in rival francophone gangs in Eastview, using sticks and pop bottles as weapons. Some were noted to be wearing “tight pants, flashy sports coats and long haircuts.”
In England the Teddy Boy movement of the 1950s, which had involved hundreds of gangs in London including the Eagle Gang and the Chain Gang, had split into “mods” and “rockers” by the late 1950s. Rockers were like American greasers with slicked hair and leather jackets, whereas the mods mixed the flash of the Teddy Boy with styles associated with fans of modern jazz: narrow pant legs, Italian scooters, pea coats and long mop top hair. The conflict between the two groups in England proved to be quite heated: on March 30, 1964, a thousand mods and rockers rioted at Clacton. The CBC reported from England that the youth violence had not just been about poverty, as in the past; it was now about boredom. In May that year at Bournemouth, 200 youths were held by police for “teenage violence.”
Ottawa’s teen gangs appeared to have followed suit, with the separate traits of mods and rockers being distinguishable by the time of the 1959 gang war. In 1961, City officials had stated there were six teen gangs. However, in the same year, a magistrate advised that “the gang situation in Ottawa [ was ] not serious yet.” The worst incident came on April 3, 1965, when 18 youths were arrested after the police had been tipped off about a large fight between the Squirrels (rockers) and the Yohawks (mods) at Billings Bridge Shopping Centre and elsewhere. A few carried knives or lumber with nails (not razors and sharpened bike chains, as in England), but most arrests were for liquor-related offences. This led the Ottawa Journal to report that the Ottawa versions of mods and rockers were “more quiet and conservative” than their English counterparts. Indeed, there was a general belief that the newspapers had been playing up the gang issue and that very few Ottawa teens were actually violent. References to the gang were sometimes even lighthearted: soon after the incident, a sports reporter joked that the Chicago Black Hawks should be renamed the Yohawks, due to the players' long hair.
But Ottawa teens, if no longer as violent as in the 1950s, were now just as bored as their British counterparts. In May 1965, a place in Hull called Yohawk Haven where the gang had taken to the new fad of skateboarding — was shut down due to problems stemming from up to a 1,000 “skurfers” on NCC land blocking traffic and retail. Without Yohawk Haven, and no replacement despite City promises, local teens were upset. A local teen, Susan Montgomery, advised the Journal that “Ottawa offers nothing to us teenagers.” Not only did she lament that the skateboarding area had been taken away, but she also felt there was no radio for teens, no Beatles concerts in the city, only parks that she felt were “for old people.”
Gangs persisted as the 1960s continued. But the emphasis on the cults of mods and rockers had faded in Ottawa, according to a Journal reporter, even one year after the 1965 arrests. Meanwhile, in Toronto’s Yorkville, May 1966 saw a battle between the Villagers and Greasers, with policemen trapped atop their cars by three hundred teens wielding bottles and (hockey) sticks. But all was about to change with the burgeoning hippie movement.
Written by City of Ottawa Archivist, Stuart Clarkson, 2023.
For more rock and roll history, visit the Ottawa Rocks - Reunion Tour in the Barbara Ann Scott Gallery at City Hall, November 8, 2023 to September 3, 2025.