Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

THESE days, they qualify for sedate Saga Holidays, but among the greying grandparents of East Lancashire there is a bunch who once shocked Britain with their wildness.

Just over 40 years ago, they really put Burnley on the map - and sent older folk everywhere apoplectic over the so-called evils of a new phenomenon called rock 'n' roll.

It began on the Monday night of September 3, 1956, when 500 teenagers packed into the pit stalls of the Empire Cinema. Some, in fact, had been there since the first show in the afternoon, hooked on the music of the new-in-town film, Rock Around The Clock.

But it was when the sound of Bill Haley and the Comets and back-up pioneer rockers such as Little Richard and Freddie Bell and the Bellboys came pumping out once more during the second house that, in the words of the Northern Daily Telegraph "pandemonium broke out".

Arms and backs were torn off seats. Light bulbs were smashed. And, for a time, a fire hydrant was turned on and water gushed down the aisle.

Cinema manager Mr W A Haworth had the lights turned up and went on the stage to play pop himself. It ended with the teenagers, who, the Telegraph said, had "suddenly swung into wild dancing and singing", dancing out of the exits and carrying on dancing in the streets after the cinema shut.

Next day, Mr Haworth played down the incident. "It is just boisterous," he said. "It is not as bad as it has been painted, except it's very noisy."

Nonetheless, for that night's performance, extra staff were called in. So, too, were the police in the shape of the town's Chief Constable, Mr R A Noble, and 10 senior officers in plain clothes.

But the damage had been done. And although Burnley was not the first town in the land where the newly-released Rock Around The Clock caused ructions at the flicks, it was the first in the North - and the event made the authorities across the country afraid that a dangerous force was being let loose among the nation's youth.

Tame as it now seems, debate raged about the picture's allegedly unwholesome influence on youngsters. It was described in the NDT as an "inflaming film of an exciting mixture which has set boys and girls jiving in the aisles and turned cinemas upside down from Dagenham to Burnley." Soon, other towns were being added to the list. In Manchester, a week after Burnley's Empire was rocked, rioting broke out at the Gaiety Cinema in Peter Street, where a gang of 100 sprayed the audience with hosepipes and two "rhythm-crazed" youths leapt on stage while others "jived madly".

Before long, Mr Haworth was being interviewed on national radio to describe, if not explain, "the North's first rock 'n' roll disturbance".

But the word was already out anyway. A Blackpool cinema refused to show the film the day after the events at the Empire became known. The following week, the council Watch Committee in Blackburn banned it before it could be shown at the town's Olympic Cimema on the grounds that "it contains matter likely to lead to public disorder".

At Accrington, the Ritz Cinema withdrew Rock Around The Clock after consultation with the police. Preston's Chief Constable advised the town's Gaumont not to show the film. It was banned in Bristol by licensing justices. And in Bradford, the licensing committee outlawed it without even seeing it - such was the fall-out from that Monday night in Burnley. In Blackburn, there was something of a backlash in the NDT's letter columns over the ban. Some youngsters protested they were being made to suffer for the Burnley rock fans' behaviour.

Another, calling himself "Back Stalls", asked what was the use of maintaining a body of experts in London in the form of the British Board of Film Censors - which had actually given the film a 'U' certificate - "if cinema-goers are to be at the mercy of local aldermen brought up in the age when the magic lantern was a novelty."

But one soldier offered his solution to the Teddy Boy problem - putting them in the Army. If he had has his way, he would have had a dozen instant recruits from Blackburn in the shape of the twelve Teds who expressed their displeasure at the ban at the Olympia. They shook fists in the face of its chief attendant for the cinema daring, in their words, to take Rock Around The Clock off and threatened to come back the following week and "bust the joint up".

However, as Chief Constable Noble and his plain-clothes squad sat out the last night of the film's run at Burnley, there were hopes that the trouble rock 'n' roll caused were about to fade, and not just at the Empire.

For although the NDT reported several youngsters had become too enthusiastic during the last showing and were asked to leave, the only other disturbance was "restrained clapping, but no shouting".

And, as the newspaper stated elsewhere, music industry experts in America were already reporting that rock 'n' roll - its chief star a former lorry driver with side-whiskers called Elvis Presley - was, after a year as the teenage rage, now all set to blow itself out. . .

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