People, places and identities: Themes in British social and cultural history, 1700s–1980s

By Manchester University Press

This book of essays on British social and cultural history since the eighteenth century draws attention to relatively neglected topics including personal and collective identities, the meanings of place, especially locality, and the significance of cultures of association. Themes range from rural England in the eighteenth century to the urbanizing society of the nineteenth century; from the Home Front in the First World War to voluntary action in the welfare state; from post 1945 civic culture to the advice columns of teenage magazines and the national press. Various aspects of civil society connect these themes notably: the different identities of place, locality and association that emerged with the growth of an urban environment during the nineteenth century and the shifting landscape of twentieth-century public discourse on social welfare and personal morality. It is of interest that several of the essays take Manchester or Lancashire as their focus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526107589

Book preview

Introduction

Alan Kidd and Melanie Tebbutt

This book of essays on British social and cultural history, eclectic, yet connected by similar themes and approaches, is in honour of Michael Edward Rose, Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester. Mike’s deep knowledge of social and economic history and his commitment to making his subject accessible and relevant inspired generations of both students and colleagues. He was committed to blurring distinctions between the public and the academy long before it became fashionable in university and funding mission statements. Many aspects of the chapters which follow relate in broad ways to the interests which Mike sustained throughout his career and into retirement. Writers, all of whom know him and his work, draw attention to relatively neglected topics which include personal and collective identities, the meanings of place, especially locality, and the significance of cultures of association. They capture in various ways the cultural meanings of political and civic life, from their expression in eighteenth-century administrative practices, to the evolving knowledge cultures of provincial historical societies, the imaginative and material construction of place reputations and struggles to establish medical provision for the working-class in the face of entrenched special interests. They also explore the changing relationship between the state and the voluntary sector in the twentieth century and the role of popular magazines and the press in mediating and shaping popular opinion in an era of popular democracy.

Various aspects of civil society connect these themes. Alistair Mutch, for example, in Chapter 1, excavates the archaeology of administrative practices in eighteenth-century rural parishes, using the evidence of churchwardens’ records from the Deanery of Bingham, Nottinghamshire, complemented by details of parish life from contemporary diaries. Churchwardens were part of the ‘middling sort’, elite parish office holders whose freedom in devising their own administrative practices meant that patterns of accountability often varied considerably between parishes. These practices depended much on the personal character of the office holder, whose degree of local autonomy, Mutch suggests, reproduced a very ‘Anglican form of authority’. Churchwardens’ stewardship of money and conduct of accounts meetings had a personal, sociable dimension which contrasted with the rigorous, disciplined ‘forms of accountability’ associated with kirk sessions in Scotland during the same period, and Mutch argues that these distinctive patterns of administrative order deserve greater attention, because of their potential to offer new perspectives on emerging notions of national identity and difference.

Where Mutch takes as his starting point a ‘particular form of English identity’ associated with the country churchyard and the Anglican parish, in Chapter 2 Alan Kidd evokes a different sense of place and locality through his delineation of the cultural sphere of amateur local historians and the associational culture of the local historical societies, from their origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to their evolution in the twentieth century. The ‘first county histories’, as Kidd points out, were commissioned by a literate minority of the gentry in the eighteenth century as a celebration of their ‘wealth and power’, whereas the county societies subsequently established in the nineteenth century expressed the urban and middle-class interests of provincial, bourgeois culture. Despite the persisting deference of ‘provincial cultural life’ in some regions, the history of these societies gradually came under the influence of more democratic impulses. County identities were consolidated with the establishment of county record offices as important repositories for local records, and some universities recognised local history as a valuable form of scholarship. The shadow of ‘amateurism’ remained, however, and the real shift in attitudes towards the subject came in the second half of the twentieth century, with the growth of democratic trends influenced by Edward Thompson’s challenge to elite history and emphases on ‘history from below’, exemplified by the History Workshop movement. Community history, family history, oral history and, more recently, public history emerged, making local history one history among many, although differences in approach and participation should not obscure commonalities, as all were responses to different types of social and cultural change. Just as the administrative practices of Mutch’s churchwardens helped to shape emerging notions of national difference, Kidd illustrates how the work of nineteenth-century county historical societies contributed to an imagined notion of Englishness whose rural associations were a steadying counterpoint to a rapidly developing urban reality.

The transformations which took place in the urban environment during the Victorian period also gave the public space of towns and cities new meanings, as Terry Wyke suggests in his essay in Chapter 3 on Sir Robert Peel, which examines how political lives and reputations were shaped by the commemorative culture of public portrait statues and busts. Peel’s death in 1850 and his subsequent memorialisation marked the start of a significant trend in public life, expressed in the commissioning of outdoor portrait statues to celebrate prominent local and national figures. Peel’s image, ‘forged’ by the contemporary press, was absorbed by a broader Liberal bourgeois narrative in cities like Manchester as a public statement of the reputation and achievements of the Anti-Corn Law League, and the repeal of the Corn Laws with which Peel was so strongly associated. Such portraiture, replete with political symbolism, played an important part in defining a new civic landscape in the Victorian period, a material narrative of political life which, as Wyke points out, had been largely forgotten by the second half of the twentieth century, although it remains a rich source of evidence which deserves greater attention.

Another source of historical evidence whose value has attracted greater attention in recent years is the newspaper cartoon, which Alan Fowler draws on in his essay on the Lancashire writer and comic performer Sam Fitton, whose cartoons were published in the Cotton Factory Times, the weekly newspaper of Lancashire cotton operatives, between 1907 and 1917. Fitton’s work has been largely overlooked by historians and Fowler makes a valuable contribution to the biographical scholarship on British cartoonists, using Fitton’s cartoons on the home front to explore a neglected aspect of First World War history, the conditions and preoccupations of Lancashire cotton workers. Fowler places these within the broader context of the Lancashire cotton industry with which Fitton, himself a cotton worker, was very familiar, and draws attention to the richness of these cartoons as a regional source whose evocation of a sense of belonging and place among its Lancashire readers was very different from the civic pride exemplified by the local history societies and public statuary of the Victorian period, on which Kidd and Wyke focus.

It has been argued that the civic pride which Wyke reveals through the statuary of public spaces gradually disappeared after its heyday in the Victorian period but Peter Shapely contests this view in Chapter 7, illustrating how in Manchester a combination of civic pride, social reform and policy rooted in the Victorian period were redefined over the twentieth century, albeit retaining a ‘boosterish’ emphasis on the city’s image and reputation, particularly in the 1960s. Young planners in the post-war years aimed to construct their own version of a modern cityscape in Manchester – a discourse of modernity and transformation into a ‘great European city’ delivered through a programme of ambitious building projects whose civic ambitions would have been familiar to their Victorian predecessors. During Manchester’s industrial decline between the mid-1970s and late 1980s these aspirations faltered, when economic and social optimism dissipated in the face of a bleaker view of the city’s prospects. Civic pride was, however, furthered by the ambitions of the local press, politicians and prominent figures and was eventually harnessed to new regeneration projects as the city’s industrial and commercial identity was reconfigured to reflect an economy based on the service sector, retail, finance and leisure and Manchester’s image was reinvented through high-profile redevelopment schemes and festivals based on sport and the arts. There were, as Shapely argues, continuities in how governing elites and institutions defined the contours of Manchester’s civic pride and reputation, a cultural hegemony that persisted across two centuries. This was, however, distinct from the sense of civic pride which many ordinary local residents experienced, as was manifested in responses to community-based history projects, a focus on a different kind of local attachment and identity, much as Kidd suggests in his essay and as Fowler exemplifies, albeit rather differently, in his analysis of Fitton’s cartoons in the Cotton Factory Times.

Manchester’s civic and social life is taken in another direction, towards social reform, in Martin Hewitt’s Chapter 4 on the history of the provident dispensary movement, initiated in the 1870s by the social reformer Dr John Watts. Provident dispensaries, unlike the Hospital Funds movement, have been largely neglected in the scholarship of medical philanthropy, although, as Hewitt argues, those in Manchester were central to national debates over hospital reform and served as a model for similar initiatives in other parts of the country. The establishment of provident dispensaries in the city encapsulated many of the challenges which impeded the development of medical provision for the working classes, as in the tensions which Hewitt illustrates in relation to the professional status and expectations of medical men, concerned about the movement’s threats to their fees and status. Watt’s scheme of provident dispensaries, which aimed to promote ‘a general scheme of medical insurance’, was ahead of its time, symptomatic, Hewitt argues, of the pitfalls which faced those committed to the establishment of a comprehensive system of healthcare in the late Victorian period.

State involvement in the provision of social and medical welfare did, of course, grow during the twentieth century, when it was often seen as antagonistic to the work of voluntary associations which had pioneered many different types of welfare provision. Pat Thane argues in her essay in Chapter 6 that such assumptions are a false dichotomy and she develops a case study of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (NCUMC), founded in 1918, as a means through which to assess the changing landscape of twentieth-century social welfare and the relationship between voluntary action and public sector welfare. The work of organisations like the NCUMC actually intensified with the growth of state welfare provision from the inter-war years onwards – a pattern which Thane suggests was duplicated across the welfare sector more generally. The establishment of the welfare state caused the NCUMC some uncertainty, but it continued to support unmarried mothers and their children and, like other voluntary organisations, filled the gaps that the state could not afford to deal with. Such organisations often worked closely with local authorities and developed an important mediating role with users, guiding them through the complexities of the state system and campaigning on behalf of lone parents. Thane contests political arguments that the ‘big society’ should replace the supposed ‘stranglehold’ of state welfare by highlighting the extent to which the historical relationship between voluntary associations and the state has actually been creative and mutually sustaining.

The landscape of public discourse about social welfare changed significantly over the twentieth century as the influence of the popular press grew and moral panics about a range of social and welfare issues, including unmarried mothers, became common. The format of popular newspapers and magazines changed significantly after the First World War, particularly from the 1930s, when they adapted to the expansion of a mass readership by focusing much more on ‘human interest’ stories. Yet, if popular newspapers sensationalised, they also mediated the social and cultural changes which became more marked after the Second World War, as Dilwyn Porter suggests in Chapter 9 in his assessment of the public advice culture of ‘expert’ financial journalists at the Daily Mirror between the 1960s and early 1980s.

The Daily Mirror dominated the mass-circulation market after the Second World War and took the letters it received from readers very seriously. It was already publishing different types of advice pages in the 1930s, including financial advice targeted at small investors. This ceased during the war, but was reintroduced in 1960 as a weekly feature offering financial and investment advice about stocks and shares. The range of queries the column received was, however, broader than this, and it dealt with thousands of letters each year about financial matters from readers who found its advice more accessible and less intimidating than speaking to financial professionals. The social optimism of the 1960s dissipated in the 1970s, however, as the economic situation deteriorated and the Daily Mirror’s financial advice had to adapt to a climate in which its own circulation was declining. Its core readership started to age and the column became more conservative, dealing with queries from older readers and worries about unemployment, and focusing more on ‘mitigating’ the effects of inflation and redundancy payments. Porter argues that the Daily Mirror had, in fact, misinterpreted its readers’ interest in ‘popular capitalism’ during full employment and rising living standards in the 1960s, when its advocacy of financial investment reflected contemporary beliefs that the values and aspirations of the working-class were changing, with greater opportunities to borrow, save and spend. As he points out, its financial journalists were forced over time to moderate their ambitions to the actual concerns of the newspaper’s readership, adapting to more pragmatic queries about family budgeting and personal savings rather than focusing on large investments.

Melanie Tebbutt’s essay in Chapter 8 also uses advice columns as a means of tracing some of the changes which transformed working-class culture after the Second World War, although her focus is on the personal advice pages of teenage magazines, an important expression of girls’ culture between the mid-1950s and late 1970s. Tebbutt takes as her subject Mirabelle magazine, widely read by girls in this period, although its popularity has been largely over-shadowed by the most popular teenage magazine of the time, which was Jackie. Tebbutt stresses the importance of not over-generalising about the advice in such columns, and the need to know more about who wrote them. Advice pages in teenage magazines from the 1950s and 1960s have received less attention that those of the later decades of the twentieth century and Tebbutt traces the changes which took place in queries and answers from the time of Mirabelle’s first publication, in 1956, when its advice column was identified with a marriage bureau in central Manchester, to its cessation production in 1977, by which time discussion of sexual matters, including pregnancy outside marriage, had become more open. Magazines aimed at the teenage market tended to lag behind the more explicit advice of women’s magazines and the popular press, but they eventually became an important source of sexual information and trends for young people. Such correspondence was recognised as an important indication of readers’ preoccupations and concerns, and both Tebbutt and Porter illustrate how the relationship between readers and advice pages in popular newspapers and magazines was nuanced. Published letters were only the tip of an iceberg. They were edited and selected, but the great volume of unpublished letters was usually answered by a support team whose preoccupations helped to inflect the content of the publications to which they were sent and supported a more mutually sustaining relationship with readers than has often been recognised.

It is fitting that several of these essays take Manchester or Lancashire as their theme, as the history of the city and its region has continued to occupy Mike Rose’s time and attention many years into his retirement. It is similarly appropriate, given his own work on poverty and the Poor Law and active involvement with a range of different voluntary groups, that the collection should include an essay like Thane’s on the voluntary sector and the welfare state and others, like Kidd’s, which examine the roots of local historical societies to which Mike has been so committed and has himself written about. We hope that Mike will enjoy this book and that it will achieve a wide readership among those who, like him, see social and cultural history as having much to offer both the enthusiast and the academic.

Michael Edward Rose was an only child, born in 1936 to a clerical family.¹ His mother came from a family with a Nottinghamshire mining background. His father was a Lancashire-born clergyman in the Church of England, firstly in charge of a parish in Sheffield and then in Masbrough, a suburb of Rotherham. This is where Mike was brought up and educated, at Rotherham Grammar School, where he became head boy. From an early age he was an enthusiastic follower of Rotherham United Football Club, whose matches he attended with his father, who was later moved to a rural parish, Burghwallis, near Doncaster, by which time Mike had gone up to Oxford University, having won a scholarship to study history at Jesus College. This was in 1957, after a two-year stint of national service where he served as an ammunitions examiner (first class) in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.

1. Mike Rose during the early part of his career in the History Department of the University of Manchester

At Jesus College, Mike was one of a cluster of ex-national service northern young men who felt themselves more mature than the younger undergraduates who had come straight from school. He was a hard-working and diligent student and obtained a first class degree. He became interested in politics and joined the Labour Party Young Socialists. Whilst at Jesus he moved in an elevated political circle that introduced him to Julia and Cressida Gaitskell, daughters of the then Labour Party leader and Griselda Grimond, daughter of the then Liberal Party leader. On one memorable occasion he breakfasted alongside Earl Atlee, the former prime minister. From Jesus he moved as a post-graduate student to Nuffield College, where Max Hartwell, then editor of the Economic History Review, and John Habbakuk, Chichele Professor of Economic History and Professorial Fellow of All Souls, supervised his doctoral thesis on the introduction of the New Poor Law in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1820–55. Mike was awarded his D.Phil. in 1965. The interest in Labour politics continued at Nuffield, where he came into contact with such Labour luminaries as Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Tony Benn. Whilst at Nuffield Mike renewed the acquaintance of a childhood friend, Christine Jones, then a staff nurse at University College Hospital. They subsequently married and have two sons and a daughter and three grandchildren.

In 1962 Mike obtained his first university post as Assistant Lecturer in Economic History in Manchester University’s celebrated History Department. This was a most appropriate location for a historian of the Poor Law, since it has been observed in a festschrift for another of the University’s eminent economic and social historians that ‘Manchester University has played a major role in the development of economic and social history as well as of history in Britain’.¹ This was the department that in the early twentieth century had been the academic home of the renowned medievalists T. F. Tout and James Tait. It was during this era that, in 1910, Manchester University appointed George Unwin to the first Chair of Economic History in Britain. Between the world wars Manchester’s eminent historians included Lewis Namier and A. J. P. Taylor, as well as notable economic historians such as T. S. Ashton and Arthur Redford. It was during the 1930s that T. S. Willan, who later became Professor of Economic History in the Department (1961–73), gained his first appointment as an assistant lecturer.

When Mike took up a place among the group of economic historians, the sections of the Department (Ancient, Medieval, Modern and Economic) were distinct groupings. History students did not need to study all four areas. Economic historians lectured on the interdisciplinary BA(Econ) degree programme and, in addition, Mike taught a second-year course in English social history since 1850 on the BA(General Arts) degree. At this time the economic historians ran third-year courses (special subjects) of their own choosing. Mike’s first special subject was on the era of the Napoleonic Wars. His second was entitled ‘The Victorians’, and from 1976 he jointly taught with Colin Phillips a third-year course on the history of the English family since 1500. He contributed extensively to MA programmes, and to the Extra-Mural Department’s Certificate in Local History. This was in the 1970s and early 1980s. Mike’s interests in Victorian literature allowed him to interact easily with colleagues in the English Department, notably Alan Shelston, and from that developed interdisciplinary MA courses on nineteenth-century topics. He was a frequent contributor to field trips organised for new students and also to weekend study courses away from Manchester. In the mid-1970s Mike supervised the History Department’s work in validating teacher’s certificate courses in teacher training colleges affiliated to the University. This was good experience for his later role as Chair of the History Validation Panel for the Council for National Academic Awards.

W. H. Chaloner was a force to be reckoned with in the History Department in the 1960s and the 1970s (he retired in 1981), which was also the era of other eminent economic historians such as W. O. Henderson and A. E. Musson, who succeeded Willan as Professor of Economic History in 1973, serving until his retirement in 1982. Despite the threat of ossification in the 1960s, during Mike’s time at the Department, economic history was eventually joined by social history, due in no small part to Mike’s own efforts. The nomenclature was, however, slow to change. When Mike had joined the Department Harold Perkin was lecturer in social history, and when Perkin moved to Lancaster University in 1965 it was somewhat ironic that B. L. Anderson, an economic historian with a strong interest in bills and other financial instruments, was appointed in social history to succeed him. When Anderson moved to Liverpool in 1970 the social history lectureship lapsed. When Mike was promoted to lecturer in 1965, and later to senior lecturer in 1974, he kept his title in economic history.

It has been argued that the rise of the new universities which were created or expanded during the 1960s, such as Sussex, Lancaster, East Anglia, Essex, Warwick, Keele and York, posed a particular challenge to the established ‘redbrick’ universities such as Manchester, with their longer traditions and often entrenched ways. In all, around twenty new universities were founded in that decade. The exodus of staff to fill posts in these new, so-called ‘plateglass’ universities left some subject departments staffed mainly by professors and assistant lecturers, leaving few middle-career staff with the authority to challenge the views of the great professors, which had distinct implications for the character and scope of teaching and research and often stifled innovation. Mike himself commented on this phenomenon in an interview with Brian Pullan for the latter’s history of Manchester University. As Mike observed: ‘Every time a vacancy came up the tendency was to appoint somebody who would fill the gap that person had left, rather than thinking about new areas like social history or gender history or oral history, which were coming on the agenda in the late 1960s, early 1970s.’²

Mike never expected to stay at Manchester University – he thought it would be only a three-year post. He had not set out with a clear career plan and was not overtly ambitious. At Manchester he always preferred teaching to research. He was notable for the liveliness and enthusiasm of his teaching style and his ‘open door’ attitude to students, which made him approachable and likeable to generations of undergraduates and postgraduates. He showed a willingness to supervise many mature research students, which was characteristic of his commitment to people rather than to a predetermined career path. During the student unrest of the late 1960s, when undergraduates occupied the Whitworth Hall, amongst other protests, Mike as a young tutor felt sympathy with the demonstrators and was certainly not fazed by these events, as were some of his older colleagues.

Over the years Mike became a central figure in the economic history section of the History Department, which included colleagues such as Douglas Farnie, Peter Gatrell, Joseph Harrison, Andrew Marrison and Colin Phillips. After Musson’s retirement the University appointed Mike to be in administrative charge of economic history, a post he held between 1982 and 1989. By this time the new generation of economic and social historians were a coherent presence within the department and an inclusive and unfussy aspect of the experience of students and outsiders alike. Mike’s office was often an informal gathering place for staff and students, or where lively and engaging seminars might be held, sometimes with guest speakers. Mike’s own career in the History Department progressed until he was awarded a personal chair in 1991, when he became Professor of Modern Social History, a post he held till his retirement in 1999.

As the son of a clergyman, Mike’s early social life had revolved round the church and it is not surprising that when he and Christine first moved to Manchester they got involved in church affairs. She was employed as a nurse at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, and since neither knew Manchester well the church network provided a good way to get to know their adopted city and its people. In the early days they attended services at Manchester Cathedral, where their second son was christened. Given Mike’s propensity for involvement in community matters it is perhaps no surprise that for a while he acted as editor of the Manchester Cathedral News. Once they had settled in the south Manchester suburb of Sale the family attended the local parish church, although Mike’s attendance waned after his father died.

Mike’s formal political engagement continued in Manchester. In the late 1960s he joined the Labour Party in Sale, was an active canvasser at election times and stood as Labour candidate in his own ward for two or three elections. This should not be taken to imply that he sought a political career. In fact Mike’s prime consideration was that the ward was unwinnable. It was always either Tory or Liberal territory and, had Mike stood a chance of being elected, he might have been less willing to fly the flag for Labour. In truth he thought he would not be able to dedicate the time necessary to be a good local government councillor. Nonetheless, his political commitment continued for decades, as did his reluctance to do more than assist in the wings. He resisted the requests to stand for a seat in Timperley in a more winnable ward but did agree to act as Labour Party