Chavs were made up by a middle/upperclass newspaper in 2004 to paint the working class as all animalistic thugs. They never actually existed, and like with The Loch Ness Monster, the stories of run-ins with them were always too ridiculous to be true
Chavs were made up by a middle/upperclass newspaper in 2004 to paint the working class as all animalistic thugs. They never actually existed, and like with The Loch Ness Monster, the stories of run-ins with them were always too ridiculous to be true
there is a grain of truth in this. chav culture certainly existed and still exists in the south of england but they came in around 2000-2010 or so for much greater demonisation than their northern (scally) or scottish (ned) counterparts, likely due to UK media being concentrated in the south
the great chav danger was blown wildly out of proportion and i’ve no doubt the term expanded beyond the original sense of a sort of tracksuit/burberry clad antisocial petty criminal youth to include just about any working class kid in the minds of home counties handbag clutchers
so to say they never existed is false, and to say they never caused anyone any bother is false. but the middle class media confected version of them never existed in any great proportion either
We called them “charvers” or “a charva” up north as long as i can remember in school , certainly well back into the mid 1990s. I’d not say it was a middle class term at all though, more sub-cultural within lower classes. Probably the more vocal alt-types used it as an insult/provocation to the more obnoxious trev/sharon types. There’s a lot of subcultures and just different people within the lower classes especially at school. Middle class kids at school would keep their heads down and keep out of it for the most part. Upper class kids didn’t exist - i assume they were away off in posh schools suffering whatever abuse leads to people like michael gove…
I’d agree that charvers were a small, but obnoxiously vocal, minority of the lower classes. Much worse at school though with kids being kids and all. But its also something people could grow out of in a few years, or just after a bit of cold turkey, more behavioural/immaturity than class.
You could probably also trace it back to things like football hooliganism - a fairly easily avoided minority - but not imaginary. Maybe the press latched on to it after most of the football firms were locked up and they needed to fill some column inches.
good points, the inter class rivalry in particular. i think it’s a reasonable guess that the term lost its more specific original sense when it escaped containment and got into the mouths of littlejohn et al but just saying middle class was reductive. sun/mirror hacks would have been in on the action too
i read about chav being derived from charva but never heard it said personally - i’m from the south though
re hooligans there’s definite similarities but chavs lack the same kind of rallying point so were more dispersed. maybe some chavs got promoted to casuals