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On Easter Monday, the press went big with the story: 'Day of Terror by Scooter Groups' (Daily Telegraph), 'Youngsters Beat Up Town - 97 Leather Jacket Arrests' (Daily Express), and 'Wild Ones Invade Seaside - 97 Arrests' (Daily Mirror). Bored with the bad weather and limited facilities, groups had separated according to their tribe: there were scuffles and stone-throwing, and the generally threatening appearance of teenagers en masse, barely restrained by an underwhelming police presence.

Up to 1,000 or so young Londoners had descended on Clacton, a smallish resort on England’s eastern coast. The cycle had begun six weeks or so earlier, during a dull and unseasonably cold Easter weekend. While unpleasant and oppressive, this was hardly a teen take-over. In Margate, there were an estimated 400 youths involved, with 64 arrests. It was also not as all-encompassing as the headlines suggested: although an estimated 1,000 youths were involved in the Brighton disturbances, there were only 76 arrests.

What was trumpeted as a vicious exercise in national degeneration was to some extent, pre-hyped by the press. Yet, as ever when you're dealing with tabloid newspapers, things are not quite what they seemed. Extensively photographed and publicised at the time, these disturbances have entered pop folklore: proudly emblazoned on sites about Mod culture and expensively recreated in the 1979 film Quadrophenia.

Whitsun 1964 has become famous as the peak of the Mods and Rockers riots, as large groups of teenagers committed mayhem on the rain-swept streets of southern resorts like Margate, Brighton, Clacton and Bournemouth. Editorials fulminated with predictions of national collapse, referring to the youths as 'those vermin' and 'mutated locusts wreaking untold havoc on the land'. If you believed the newspapers, that is, who went with screaming headlines like ‘Battle of Brighton’, and ‘Wild Ones 'Beat Up' Margate’. Fifty years ago this month, on the Whitsun weekend of the 16-, the youth of Britain went mad.