What is an ordinary boy? Where is his history located? Melanie Tebbutt intriguingly begins to answer these ambitious questions by sharing the life and pocket diaries of her own father as an entry point to a wider history of interwar male youth, leisure, and identity. Les Tebbutt was an ordinary lad of his age. He spent his time working, and his leisure hours were spent with his family, his friends, and by himself, listening to the radio, going to the cinema, walking, cycling, attending Boys' Brigade events, and trying to get the attention of girls. Much leisure time was spent in the familiar surroundings of the streets neighboring his house in Northampton. All of this, his daughter argues, made him typical of adolescent boys of his class and time.

Tebbutt uses this access point to trace the lives of ordinary boys in the 1920s and 1930s, how they spent their time outside of working hours, and what their main preoccupations were. She aims to mediate between lived experience, as gauged by published reminiscences, a few surveys, Mass Observation reports, and discourses and representations, often marked by adult concerns about this liminal stage in the life cycle, and the precarious masculinity of boys in the interwar years. This exploration of normalcy helps to counterbalance a dominant definition of adolescence, prevalent since at least the early twentieth century, as an overwhelmingly male and potentially dangerous or subversive time. Focusing on nondelinquent adolescence allows Tebbutt to capture a moment in which adolescent boys were lingering, as she writes of her father, “at the edge of dependency and responsibility” (4).

Identity is a complex construction, and, at best, leisure only makes up part of it. Tebbutt hints at some of the other major factors in youth identity formation: family and work being the most important ones; yet there are only momentary glimpses into these areas. The reader is left with an impression of the tensions between homosociability and domesticity (90). Tebbutt is at her best when vividly describing the myriad activities of working-class youth. Most of the chapters focus on the adolescent body and bodily practices or bodies moving through familiar spaces and places. There are chapters on physical appearance and exercise, sexuality and dating, dancing, walking, and cycling, which merge identity, age, gender, and class categories, as well as space and place in fresh analytical ways. Tebbutt also emphasizes the increasing popularity of the cinema and age-specific consumerism.

Les Tebbutt was in the Boys' Brigade, but the first two chapters focus on the boys' club movement, its national association, and its paper, The Boy. These chapters fit less tightly with the rest. They do, however, put forward a powerful argument of a post–First World War redefinition of boyhood and masculinity. Its impact was in demonstrating the bodily, and very visible, fragility of the male, as ably argued by Joanna Bourke and others, and in reconfiguring masculinity away from militarism and toward domesticity. Boys' clubs, Tebbutt argues, served to redefine national virility (81) and create manly boys who would make good citizens and fathers. Future parenthood was stressed for these manly boys (91), the “hope for the future” (17). Though Tebbutt locates this prescriptive, domesticated masculinity and its ties to good citizenship firmly in the interwar period, its origins were rooted in prewar youth movements like the Band of Hope.

Being Boys is best where it shows how historical actors perceived differences between pre- and postwar boys, changing their educative strategies toward them accordingly (85). Masculinity figures prominently in this story. It is opposed not only to femininity but also to the masculinities of older men and of earlier periods. The reader gets much less of a sense of conflicting forms of masculinity among boys, though queer masculinities are briefly explored, especially in relation to dancing. In Tebbutt's account, to be a working-class adolescent boy implied masculine conformity, but what about boys who did not or could not identify with the identity-forming leisure activities of the majority? Girls, except in the poorest families, were much less free to explore and learn outside of the context of family and work, but when reading between the lines, they had much control within family and romantic settings. They also had an important role in defining the masculinity of their male peers.

What is less elaborated is the connection between practices and emotions. Tebbutt raises questions about her father's emotional life based on his commonplace diary entries and attempts to draw similarities with working-class interwar male youth as a group. This group was marked more by emotional restraint than by emotional expression, and to tease out their emotional lives from sources like their diaries and personal reminiscences is a challenge. As Tebbutt writes, “The spatial routines, habits and relationships of his childhood and adolescence helped to shape an emotional attachment to place and a psychic landscape made resonant through habit, familiarity, and the rhythms of daily life” (251). This is an important insight for historians of emotion, but Tebbutt does not deeply engage with this burgeoning historiography, and questions of emotion tend to disappear and reappear, most strongly in relation to place and to relationships.

Being Boys makes an important contribution to the nexus of the history of interwar society and culture, of the history of gender and of childhood and youth, and of the history of leisure and consumerism, and as such should be of wide appeal. It also provides valuable hints at how a reconfiguration of masculinity and youth after World War I went hand in hand with an emotional reconfiguration, the historicity of which is sparking much new and exciting research.