Forty years ago the Beatles sang “we all want to change the world” and the Rolling Stones declared that “the time is right for fighting in the street”.

To millions of people around the world their songs still define the 1960s, trumpeting the rise of youth culture as we know it today.

But a new study of youth cultures argues that the opposite is true: the Swinging Sixties only swung for a narrow metropolitan elite, and the likes of John Lennon and Mick Jagger were shrewd capitalists who put the pursuit of wealth before any serious challenge to the balance of power between the generations.

According to David Fowler, of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge: “They did about as much to represent the interests of the nation's young people as the Spice Girls did in the 1990s.”

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These thoughts form the backbone of Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c1920 - c1970, a reappraisal of the story of British youth, published on Monday.

Dr Fowler suggests that young Britons came closer to creating a genuine mass youth culture in the 1920s and 1930s than they did in the 1960s.

“The 1960s are often viewed as the point at which youth culture in this country exploded, but in many ways they were the years in which the idea began to fall apart,” he said yesterday.

For Dr Fowler, 1960s youth culture had more to do with marketing and consumerism than a genuine attempt to forge a new way of life for young people, as had happened in the 1930s.

His book charts the rise of longforgotten youth communities started by middle-class students in the 1920s. These groups became flourishing international networks crossing boundaries of gender and class before they were snuffed out by the outbreak of war in 1939.

Chief among them was the collective started by Rolf Gardiner, the son of an eminent Egyptologist who studied languages at St John's College, Cambridge, between 1921 and 1924 and whom Dr Fowler describes as a “landed gentry hippy of the 1920s with alleged Nazi connections”.

Gardiner organised unisex naked bathing sessions in Cambridge at a time when women at the university were not allowed to walk unaccompanied alongside the River Cam and championed physical labour and rural reconstruction.

“People like Gardiner were true cultural subversives - pop stars before pop even existed. In terms of the influence he had on giving Britain's young people a sense of identity, there's no doubt he is just as important as Mick Jagger,” Dr Fowler said.

His thesis is that the universities offered the only network that could have supported a coherent youth culture in the 1960s. The United States, which admitted 50 per cent of its 18-year-olds to university, experienced a mass youth movement. Student leaders forged links with civil rights organisations, folk communities and the antiwar movement. Nothing comparable happened in Britain, where fewer than 6 per cent attended university and the most potent icons of the day made no attempt to lead.

“The Beatles and the Stones were marketed as opppositional to the old order, but if you look at their lives they were actually very conventional. They just happened to be young,” Dr Fowler said.

“Both bands could have been figureheads for a youth movement if they had wanted to be, and an opportunity to put forward an alternative vision of a British society that was fresher and freer was lost,” Dr Fowler said.

Jamie Bowman, of The Beatles Story Museum in Liverpool, said that Dr Fowler's view was unfair. “Thousands of baby-boomers every year tell us that the Beatles changed their lives,” he said.

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