Australian authorities, and created detailed case studies of the lives and behaviour of each individual (Manning uses pseudonyms to protect the privacy of each youth).
packed and the case scandalised the jury. Eventually Frederick Foster was sentenced to death for the murder (capital punishment for murder was reintroduced in 1950). Then in July 1955, 19-year-old ‘Paddy’ Black stabbed ‘Johnny McBride’ as he leaned over a jukebox in a Queen Street cafe. The fatal stabbing was the result of a rumble between a 16-year-old brunette in a beer house in Wellesley Street, rented by the accused, an Irish labourer and a self-proclaimed ‘bodgie.’ Now that the nation had evidence that bodgies were not only violent, but immoral too, the bodgie subculture came under added scrutiny. Auckland-based psychologist, A.E Manning decided to apply his own scientific methods to get to the heart of the matter. In his famous book The Bodgie: A Study in Abnormal Psychology (A. H & A.W Reed, Wellington, 1958), Manning conducted a comprehensive series of interviews with twenty young men and women – all labelled “juvenile delinquents” by the New Zealand and
With the book, he aimed to “clarify the `sociological and psychological problems facing a world with a substratum of troubled youth: to show their disturbed viewpoint and the reasons for it; and to show the conditions and factors that must be rectified for the sake of a good society and for the people who have been injured by social factors beyond their control.” The book, which Manning originally intended as a detached and unemotional look at an urgent social problem, turned into a crusade. He eventually concluded that juvenile delinquency existed primarily because society had failed the youths through a lack of understanding about youth psychology, therefore adults were to blame for the very problems they denounced. Manning added that “when a group of ten of these young people freely voice their complaints against society and suggest some remedies, society would be wise to listen.” Bodgies and widgies were the first distinctive post-war subculture and although they gradually disappeared from the scene in the mid 1960s, they were instrumental in blazing a trail for successive youth cultures including rockers, mods, hippies, surfies and punks. Today, their spiritual children can be found racing up and down the main street of every town and city in New Zealand, come a Friday or Saturday night.
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