The working class in mid-twentieth-century England: Community, identity and social memory 9781526130303

Citation preview

Ben Jones T he

wor king cl a ss

in

mid t wentie t h -c e nt u r y

E ngl a n d Community, identity and social memory

The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England Community, identity and social memory

BE N JON E S

Manchester University Press Manchester

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Copyright © Ben Jones 2012 The right of Ben Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 8473 7 hardback First published 2012 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or thirdparty internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10.5/12.5 Minion Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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For Mum and Dad

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Contents

List of figures List of tables Maps Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction Class: jobs, families, mobilities and social identities Place: the social geography of working class housing Community: neighbours, networks and social memory Home: family, memory and modernity Conclusion

Biographical appendix Bibliography Index

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page ix xi xiii xv xvii 1 27 77 120 155 197 211 227 257

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Figures

2.1 Economically active females, by industry, in Brighton 1921, 1931 and 1951 page 42 2.2 Economically active females, by industry, in Brighton 1961, 1966 and 1971 42 2.3 Economically active males, by industry, in Brighton 1921, 1931 and 1951 44 2.4 Economically active males, by industry, in Brighton 1961, 1966 and 1971 45 3.1 A parlour at South Moulsecoomb, 1920s. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton and Hove 87 3.2 Children in Carlton Court, Brighton, late 1920s. James Grey Collection/Regency Society 88 3.3 Slum clearance: Hereford Street and Paradise Street, 1925. James Grey Collection/Regency Society 91 3.4 Richmond Buildings from Richmond Street, late 1950s. Reproduced with the kind permission of Malcolm Keeping 102 4.1 North Moulsecoomb from Wild Park, 1935. James Grey Collection/Regency Society 143 5.1 Living room in a ‘type B’ house, Carden Avenue, Hollingbury, 1947. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton and Hove 163 5.2 Kitchen in a ‘type D’ flat, Carden Avenue, Hollingbury, 1947. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton and Hove 164 5.3 Whitehawk Road being demolished, 1980. James Grey Collection/ Regency Society 184 6.1 Looking east up Albion Hill, Brighton, late 1950s. Reproduced with the kind permission of Malcolm Keeping 204 6.2 Crescent Cottages from Montague Place, 1964. James Grey Collection/Regency Society 204

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Tables

2.1 Extent of middle and working class identification, various years 1948–1969 page 31 2.2 Respondent’s self-assigned class based on the BSAS, 1983–1996 (%) 33 2.3 Female participation rates Great Britain and Brighton, 1921–1971 41 2.4 Full- and part-time workers in Britain, 1951–1981 (000s) 43 2.5 Occupational class structures of Great Britain and Brighton, 1931, 1961 and 1971 46 3.1 Houses demolished and persons displaced in Brighton, 1922–1939 91 3.2 Council house sales by estate in Brighton, 1979 98 3.3 Houses demolished and people rehoused in Brighton, 1945–1969 99

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Maps

1 Slum clearance in Brighton, c.1860s–1960s. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2011 page 90 2 Major council estates in Brighton. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2011 95

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Acknowledgements

This book began life as a DPhil thesis undertaken at the University of Sussex. My supervisors, Claire Langhamer and Ian Gazeley, were exemplary. I have benefited enormously from their advice, support and friendship. Alun Howkins and Carol Dyhouse have also been hugely encouraging and supportive. My life would have been much the poorer without the spectacular company and beautiful friendship of Lucy Robinson and Eugene Michail. Indeed Sussex provided an atmosphere of comradeship and collegiality which has left me indebted to a large number of people. So my warmest thanks go to: Tom Akehurst, Ben Annis, Hester Barron, David Boyne, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Louise Davies, Andy Durr, David Foy, Nik Funke, Rafe Hallett, Ben Highmore, Roger Johnson, Chris Kempshall, Alex Pestell, Margaret Reynolds, Kevin Reynolds, Lorraine Sitzia, Nicola Verdon, Chris Warne, Clive Webb and Elke Weesjes. Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor have taken an interest in this project from its inception and have shaped it in important ways. Andy Wood has the knack of doing the right things at the worst times and has been a rock. Other friends have lived with this project for as long as I have. Thanks to: Toby Harrisson, Timothy Philip Mead, Timothy Walker Evans, Matthew James Crouch, Edward Paxton, David Webb, Nathan Thomas, Shad Khan, Andy Davies and Selina Todd. Mike Savage was far more helpful than anyone could expect an external examiner to be. Not only did he pass my thesis, he encouraged me to apply for a post-doc at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) in Manchester. While he had taken up a new post by the time I arrived, I am indebted to him for his help and ongoing support. Andy Miles took me under his wing at CRESC and has been a good and wise mentor. Thanks also to Stacey Vigars and Susan Hogan at CRESC. I am indebted to the ESRC who provided a postgraduate studentship (PTA030-2004-01091) and post-doctoral fellowship (PTA-026-27-2614) which enabled me to start and finish this research. Similarly the Scouloudi foundation helped enormously with a fellowship in 2008. Thanks to the library

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staff and archivists at the universities of Sussex, Brighton and Manchester, Brighton Local Studies Centre, the Mass Observation Archive and East Sussex Records Office. Thanks to Malcolm Keeping for permission to use his photographs. Mass Observation material is reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive. Copyright © The Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive. For permission to reproduce material from Writers Reign thanks to QueenSpark Books (www.queensparkbooks.org.uk). My family have supported me throughout my time as a perpetual student and it would be nice to think that one day I might be able to repay them by getting a job. Love and thanks to my Dad, Chris and my Mum, Clare. My twin sister, Amelia, and my older brother, Dan, showed the appropriate levels of interest and provided me with material and emotional support. Thanks also to Ben Crispin and Anna ‘Wilks’ Wilkinson and to little Sid for being such a boon. My grandparents Pauline Dubock and Charles Jones were born into the kinds of working-class communities which this book deals with. They have both influenced me in ways that it is difficult to articulate adequately. I must thank Becca Searle for her help with this book, her unswerving love and support and for so much more. Finally I would like to thank those people who talked to me and have so enriched this book with their life histories. I would also like to thank all my friends from the East Brighton Bygones History Society, especially Vernon Brand, Norman Foord, Betty Gillett, the late Ken Powell, Marilyn Powell, Sid Jones and David Rowland. Fred Netley knows more about this subject than anybody. My analysis owes a great deal to the conversations I have had with him over the years. I hope that what I have written here does them and him justice.

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Abbreviations

BSAS CPGB ESRO FWWCP MOA NDC

British Social Attitudes Survey Communist Party of Great Britain East Sussex Record Office Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers Mass Observation Archive New Deal for Communities

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Chapter 1

Introduction

On a damp Saturday morning in early December 1938 two cars left Blackheath,  south-east London, bound for the resort of Brighton on the Sussex coast. The occupants (three men and three women) were members of the recently established social research organisation Mass Observation, then engaged in a series of surveys of provincial towns.1 Over the weekend, besides interviewing local dignitaries, logging statistical data from the town’s library and recording the frequency with which alcoholic drinks were ordered in local bars, the six ‘Mass observers’ carried out a door-to-door survey. Those who opened their doors on the Saturday or Sunday afternoon were asked five questions: Do you like Brighton? What do you like best about Brighton? What don’t you like about Brighton? Do you think the Archbishop of Canterbury is good at his job? What do you think of Major Tryon (one of the town’s two Conservative MPs)?2 As they recorded answers, observers guessed the age and social class of those they talked to. In doing so they established an ad hoc social geography of the town, classifying the inhabitants of each street. They made their way through Upper North Street (‘middle class’), north along Portland Street and Spring Gardens (working class) and east to Bread Street (working class), where the following note was added: ‘Basement houses – bad condition – slum’. In all, answers from 280 addresses were obtained, largely in working class streets in the North Laine and those between Albion Hill and Edward Street. They found people suspicious, observer Kathleen Box noting they had ‘never had so many refusals in one place before’.3 And while over half of those questioned said that they didn’t dislike anything about the town, among those that had dislikes, a significant majority had concerns relating to rent levels, rehousing and slum clearance.4 At Portland Street there were complaints about high rents for old houses and praise for slum clearance. Other views were expressed in Bread Street. At no. 35 a man complained that the new estates were too far from town. At no. 44 a woman complained that streets recently demolished had not been redeveloped. At no. 29 a man and his wife were found ‘very obviously distressed about moving’. The man, who

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ran a small business in the centre of town, said: ‘I fail to see why they should demolish these sorts of places . . . to build a car park.’5 The vociferousness of working class complainants was particularly marked, as Box recorded: Working class people who don’t like being turned out of their houses to move into ones further out of town, and who object to high rents [are] very apt to make very long speeches about this. . . . Noticed a much bigger difference between working and middle class answers to question 3 here than in other places. [A] special working class complaint seems to be that ‘they want to push the poor people out of Brighton’ that there are no factories and trade [suffers] by so many people being moved out of the centre of Brighton . . . On account of these complaints noticed much more class conscious resentment among working class people, towards the way the town is governed and upper classes in general.6

Mass Observation is full of such idiosyncratic findings. The idea of Brighton as a hot-bed of radical class-consciousness in inter-war Britain is certainly an unconventional one. Arguably it is one which hinges on comparisons with the other towns the observers had recently visited: Aldershot, Canterbury, Ipswich and Windsor – places which were hardly renowned as ‘little Moscows’.7 But there is also a more serious point to this data, which is to begin to shift academic attention away from the traditional spheres of working class formation – which, to put it crudely, are the areas of heavy industry and manufacturing, London and ‘the North’ – to spaces and places which, like back-street Brighton, are perhaps less obvious. That the dominant images of working class England in the middle years of the twentieth century are ‘northern’ or metropolitan is thanks in no small degree to a flowering of community and cultural studies for which the research of Mass Observation (1937–c.1955) provided important antecedents. The period 1956–c.1970 witnessed a ferment of intellectual activity in which new conceptualisations of ‘culture’ both legitimised the study of aspects of working class life beyond the narrow confines of labour history and highlighted the analysis of working class culture as a political priority.8 A multitude of studies explored the effects of rising affluence, suburbanisation and slum clearance, welfare and educational policies on working class lifestyles, identities and political attitudes. Two publications from 1957 – a work of popular sociology and a mélange of literary criticism and autobiography – demonstrate some of the anxieties which these changes generated. The former, Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London, argued that suburbanisation was destroying the close bonds of kinship which tied working class communities together.9 The latter, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, while largely concerned with the deleterious effect which the ‘newer mass art[s]’ of advertising, cheap fiction and rock and roll music were having on working class culture, also spoke to this trend:

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3

We all know of working-class people’s difficulties in settling into the new council-house estates. Most react instinctively against the consciously planned group activities; they are used to group life, but one which has started from the home and worked outwards in response to the common needs and amusements of a densely packed neighbourhood. In these brick and concrete wastes they feel too exposed and cold at first, they suffer from agoraphobia; they do not feel ‘it’s homely’ or ‘neighbourly’, feel ‘too far from everything’, from their relatives and from the shops.10

Amongst the most influential work was that undertaken by (formerly) working class intellectuals such as Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Dennis Marsden and Brian Jackson operating (initially at least) at the margins of academia and employing interdisciplinary methods and approaches which rendered them unpopular among more orthodox sociologists and English dons.11 Especially problematic for some was the degree to which these writers drew upon their own experiences of class and mobility in order to critique aspects of contemporary society and established modes of criticism. This charge was particularly pertinent for Hoggart, whose experiences growing up in the Hunslet district in Leeds between the wars framed his richly textured landscape of working class life.12 It is this partly autobiographical element which has been most widely critiqued. For Paul Jones, Hoggart was culpable of a ‘defensive populist nostalgism’, while in the introduction to the American edition of The Uses of Literacy even the evidently sympathetic Andrew Goodwin argued that it is a ‘notoriously nostalgic’ text.13 For Chris Waters, The Uses of Literacy ‘is certainly the best known of the many laments for the traditional working-class community that appeared after the war, offering a nostalgic affirmation of the values and strengths of a way of life that was in rapid decline’.14 Among historians there remains a deeply held suspicion of retrospectively constructed accounts, which, as James Hinton remarks, ‘may do as much to obscure as to reveal the processes shaping an individual life. “Remembering” how we became who we are now involves a process of narrative construction in which we forget earlier stories about who we were then.’15 From this perspective, ‘nostalgia’, with its suggestion of the subjective, sentimental and inauthentic is commonly regarded as, if not the antithesis, then perhaps the antonym of history, with its attendant associations of objectivity, detachment and method.16 Whether The Uses of Literacy is nostalgic or not is a moot point.17 The extent, causes and possible uses of nostalgia will be assessed later in this book. Here I want to argue that a consideration of Hoggart’s critics allows us to open up an important set of questions for discussion. Namely, what constitutes experience? What is the relationship between experience, memory and identity? It is to these questions that I now turn.

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Experiences, memories and social identities The experience of class relations, an understanding of both bourgeois and working class cultures and a sense of what social mobility feels like structures Hoggart’s text. On an upward trajectory out of the working class, Hoggart helped to define and give voice to what was to become a ubiquitous figure in post-war British culture: the grammar school boy. The picture Hoggart paints is of an anxious self, one desperately trying to ‘pass’ in the senses both of passing exams and, in doing so, of attempting to ‘pass’ into the middle class. The result is an often pained narrative, one which speaks of class dispositions as deeply felt and difficult to shake off. It is, arguably, this element of the work, as much as those remembered scenes of childhood, neighbourhood and home, which accounts for the work’s longevity as a piece of social history as much as a work of cultural criticism. Indeed, for all Hoggart’s attempts to play down the ‘political’ grievances of the working class, and for all his attempts to bridge the divide between two ways of life, it is the story of this uneasy self which continues to resonate most powerfully. If it makes for awkward reading, this is because, as Andy Medhurst points out, ‘that very awkwardness both mirrors the awkwardness of Hoggart’s class location and testifies to the newness of what he was trying to do’.18 For what Hoggart was attempting to do was to reconceptualise culture as ‘the practices of making sense’ of meanings as part of ‘lived experience’ and analysis as ‘the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life’.19 A tactical use of experience was thus central to Hoggart’s (and Raymond Williams’s) attempt both to legitimate the study of working class culture and to illuminate social change.20 ‘Experience’ is a concept which took a bit of a theoretical hammering during the so-called ‘linguistic’ or ‘cultural’ turn in social history.21 The key intervention came with the publication of Joan Scott’s article ‘The evidence of experience’ in 1991. In an excoriating polemic, Scott deconstructed the concept as it had been employed in the writings of R. G. Collingwood, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. The thrust of Scott’s critique was focused upon ‘the evidence of experience . . . that takes meaning as transparent [and] reproduces rather than contests given ideological systems’.22 So, for example, Raymond Williams’s discussion of ‘experience’ in Keywords ‘operates within an ideological construction that not only makes individuals the starting point of knowledge but that also naturalizes categories such as man, woman, black, white, heterosexual, and homosexual by treating them as given characteristics of individuals’.23 This, in Scott’s terms, simply will not do: Making visible the experience of a different group exposes the existence of repressive mechanisms, but not their inner workings or logics; we know that

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5

difference exists, but we don’t understand it as relationally constituted. For that we need to attend to the historical processes that, through discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences. It is not individuals who have experiences but subjects who are constituted through experience.24

Yet this conceptualisation of experience, as well as Scott’s preferred methodology of ‘textualizing’ social relations arguably narrows the horizons of historical practice and is in danger of privileging the textual and the linguistic over the social and the experiential.25 As Eley and Nield argued in their assessment of Scott’s intervention, ‘it was . . . an act of closure, especially against forms of historical work that may lie beyond the approved discursive terms of focus’.26 Particularly problematic was her reduction of experience to a function of discourse, leaving no room for counter-hegemonic discourses which might be made possible, as Thomas Holt has argued, by ‘an experience semi-autonomous from and/or contradictory to dominant discursive constructions’.27 There are parallels here with de Certau’s critique of Foucault’s methodology, whereby he noted that Foucault’s privileging of the development of particular technologies of rule left unasked the question of ‘how we should consider other, equally infinitesimal, procedures, which have not been “privileged” by history but are nevertheless active in innumerable ways’.28 As de Certau insists, it is impossible to reduce the functioning of a society to a dominant type of procedures; rather, ‘society is composed of certain foregrounded practices organizing its normative institutions and of innumerable other practices, always there but not organizing discourses and preserving the beginnings or remains of different (institutional, scientific) hypotheses for that society or for others’.29 Moreover, Scott’s approach not only ‘leaves open the question of how subjects mediate, challenge, resist or transform discourses’ but also ‘obscures the ways in which discourse and experience are intertwined’.30 Indeed, just as she is about to deliver the coup de grâce, Scott relents, recognising that experience is ‘so much a part of everyday language, so imbricated in our narratives that it seems futile to argue for its expulsion’.31 Evidence perhaps that, just when it seems down and out, ‘experience walks in without knocking at the door’.32 While Scott seems to have chosen to pursue intellectual/political history since (nearly) abandoning experience, the wealth of work over the past twenty years in memory studies, on ‘the body’ and on subjectivities suggests, as Kathleen Canning has archly noted, that ‘experience’ has enjoyed a fruitful ‘afterlife’.33 In what follows I explore some of the implications of this work for understanding the relationship between individual and collective identities. I begin, however, by investigating the possibilities raised by considering ‘experience’ dialectically. In German there are two words for experience:

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Erlebnis and Erfahrung. As Martin Jay in his magisterial survey of the concept of experience in western thought explains, Erlebnis is usually translated as ‘lived experience’: Normally located in the ‘everyday world’ (the Lebenswelt) of commonplace, untheorized practices, it can also suggest an intense and vital rupture in the fabric of quotidian [daily, customary, everyday] routine. Although Leben can suggest the entirety of a life, Erlebnis generally connotes a more immediate, pre-reflective, and personal variant of experience than Erfahrung. The latter is sometimes associated with outer, sense impressions or with cognitive judgements about them . . . but it also came to mean a more temporally elongated notion of experience based on a learning process, an integration of discrete moments of experience into a narrative whole or an adventure. This latter view, which is sometimes called the dialectical notion of experience, connotes a progressive if not always smooth, movement over time, which is implied by the Fahrt (journey) embedded in Erfahrung and the linkage with the German word for danger (Gefahr). As such, it activates a link between memory and experience, which subtends the belief that cumulative experience can produce a kind of wisdom that comes only at the end of the day. Although by no means always the case, Erlebnis often suggests individual ineffability [inexpressibility], whereas Erfahrung can have a more public, collective character.34

Among the most productive thinkers of the relationship between the individual ‘lived’ experience of modern life and experience as storied, reflected upon and remembered was the European writer Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, a central problem of the modern world was what he perceived of as a glut of Erlebnis which struggled to find comprehendible expression following the ruptures caused by rapid urbanisation and mass-mechanised warfare.35 In attempting to transform Erlebnis into a communicable form which might allow for reflection and critique (Erfahrung), Benjamin turned to the work of the French poet Baudelaire and his juxtaposition of the language of modern life with the forms left by the older tradition of lyric poetry.36 Yet Benjamin was also alive to the potential of finding Erfahrung in the newer technologies of photography and film and, in particular, to the possibilities for a ‘poetics’ of everyday experience through the use of montage.37 For his practice, this meant attending to the ‘dialectical image’: ‘a constellation (a montage) of elements, that in combination, produce a “spark” that allows for recognition, for legibility, for communication and critique’.38 This was, arguably, what Benjamin was aiming at in his great unfinished work The Arcades Project.39 Benjamin’s work offers a particularly rich means of conceptualising the ‘experience’ of modernity in terms of thinking about the materiality of the past in the present, and in seeking to understand the relationship between the pell-mell of lived, individual experiences and remembered or collectively held narratives which help to make sense of experience. Importantly, though, his work highlights

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the extent to which we need to consider the degree to which experience ‘has distinct valences in different temporal and geographic locales’.40 Thus it would be foolish to attempt to map wholesale Benjamin’s conception of the (largely) French and German experiences of urban modernity c.1870–1940 onto a country like Britain, in which processes of industrialisation and urbanisation were considerably more elongated and manifestations of class politics arguably less violent.41 Given this, it would be useful to consider work on social identities, subjectivities and social memory which deals more directly with Britain in the middle years of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most important critique of Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy to have since emerged is Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1986). In this work, Steedman partially reconstructs the stories of her own and her mother’s experiences growing up in Burnley in the 1920s and London in the 1950s. It is explicitly written against narratives like Hoggart’s, Jeremy Seabrook’s and others’ which, Steedman argues, refuse to recognise psychologically complex subjectivities or the politics of envy, fantasy and desire for things.42 This book has been particularly important in disrupting monolithic narratives of collectively held cultures and values and in emphasising the complex, contingent and fragmentary processes of subject formation. Steedman and other feminist historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Alexander, Davidoff, Rose and Clark, have been at the forefront of what Koditschek has termed ‘the gendering of the British working class’.43 Other historians working on the mid-twentieth-century period have shown how gender and generation intersected with class to mediate the experience of work, leisure, neighbourhood, family and home. Particularly important have been Roberts’s studies of Barrow-in-Furness, Lancaster and Preston;44 Davies’s and Langhamer’s work on gender and leisure in Manchester and Salford;45 Todd’s research on young women’s experiences of work and leisure;46 Giles’s on gender, modernity and identity;47 and White’s meticulous dissection of a ‘lumpen’ community in London between the wars.48 If these studies have been successful in decentring the skilled male manual worker as the singular object of study, so too have others which have, arguably, ‘racialised’ and ‘globalised’ the study of the British working class. The work of Stuart Hall, Hoggart’s successor as director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), has been particularly significant in this context.49 Researchers at CCCS drew on versions of poststructuralism, the work of Gramsci and that of British Marxists such as Williams and Thompson to theorise race, class and gender in post-war British society. Important interventions emerging out of this tradition in relation to the cultural and political legacies of empire have been made by the group of mainly south Asian scholars associated with ‘subaltern studies’ and the cultural theorist Paul Gilroy.50

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Historical work by the likes of C. Hall, Tabili and Webster explored the mutually constitutive relationship between metropole and colony and historicised the complex intersections of ‘race’, class and gender in shaping mid-twentieth-century subjectivities.51 What these studies point to is the intersectionality of social identities and the degree to which identifications are always ‘in process’. They are, moreover, always relational, as S. Hall notes: ‘identities can function as points of identification only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out, to render “outside”, abject’.52 The formation of identities depends upon what Jenkins terms ‘the internal and the external moments of the dialectic of identification: how we identify ourselves, how others identify us, and the ongoing interplay of these in processes of social identification’.53 Thus, social collectivities are constituted both from ‘within’, via a process of internal group identification – the recognition of similarities and shared interests, and from ‘without’, both by being categorised by other groups, institutions or genres of power/knowledge and through the categorisation of others.54 Conceptualising categorisation and identification in this way allows us to understand the centrality of power to processes of identification and to the potential for politics of agency and resistance in their formation. Lurking beneath this talk of social identities, of course, is an older understanding of class as ‘a social and cultural formation’ which can be defined ‘only in terms of relationships with other classes’.55 Thus, while focusing upon working class experiences and social identities, this study is also concerned with class relationships and the degree to which social groups categorise others and are categorised by the state and other social formations. Like identities, memories are also always simultaneously social as well as individual. Memory is social in the sense that people draw upon particular repertoires, forms and devices in order to communicate meanings that are culturally shared. As the research of Allesandro Portelli and Luisa Passerini has shown, analysing oral reminiscences for their silences or for their uchronic ‘might have beens’ can tell us much about the relationship between individual subjects and ideological formations.56 This and similar research on Britain and Australia has utilised the concept of ‘popular memory’ to explore how national myths, political ideologies and dominant cultural representations of classed and gendered identities shaped what could and could not be comfortably remembered and ‘publically’ narrated.57 ‘Popular memory’ has been used by some, such as Raphael Samuel, to refer to pretty much all forms of unofficial knowledge about the past, from stories, myths, ballads and folklore to novels, newspapers, films and television programmes.58 For others, such as the Popular Memory Group, the term also implies the struggles within the public field between the ‘dominant memories’ of states and powerful institutions and the oppositional memories of subaltern groups.59 It is this latter interpretation, indicative of struggles between dominant and subaltern

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ideologies and experiences, which will be adopted in this book. Further, when discussing the collective memories of particular classes or subaltern groups I will use the term ‘social memory’. The notion of social memory is drawn from Halbwachs, who argued that it is only through the membership of social groups that individuals are able to acquire, localise and recall their memories.60 As Connerton explains: ‘Groups provide individuals with frameworks within which their memories are localised [by a kind of mapping]. We situate what we recollect within the mental spaces provided by the group. But these mental spaces . . . always receive support from and refer back to the material spaces that particular social groups occupy . . . we conserve our recollections by referring them to the material milieu that surrounds us.’61 To be clear, I am not arguing for some kind of social determinism, nor that individual subjects cannot resist, rework or reject dominant memories of nation or class which do not accord with their experiences.62 Rather, in thinking about the dialectics of experience–memory and subjective– collective, we might gain a better understanding of the complex forces which shape the memories of groups and individuals. I want to argue that the kind of social memory evident in Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy might be fruitfully conceptualised as a critique; in this instance a critique of dominant conceptualisations of what counts as ‘culture’ and what is deemed ‘worthy’ of analysis, albeit one which draws in part on the dominant Leavisite discourse of literary studies.63 The political impact of Hoggart’s intervention in the field of popular memory ought not to be underestimated: he, and many others after, prised open spaces for the discussion of subaltern experiences and the construction of working class identities. Story-telling was and is fundamental to the forging of these collective identities and shared politics. As Simon Hoggart noted in the foreword to the 2009 edition of his father’s book: ‘We as children have lost count of the number of people – working-class pensioners, middle class folk, innumerable grammar school boys, media people and even MPs and ministers, who have come up to say that it told their own story and illuminated their lives.’64 Yet such stories cannot be shared by everyone: if they do not speak of people’s own remembered experiences, other narratives will be needed. Writing in the 1980s, Steedman argued that Hoggart’s description of the ‘plight of the scholarship boy’ made ‘nostalgic reading now’, and that while generations of men had made heroic narratives of their working class pasts and subsequent escapes, she, ‘a grammar school girl of the 1960s[,] was sent to university with a reasonably full equipment of culture and a relative degree of intellectual self-awareness’.65 While Hoggart and Steedman’s accounts are divided by the differential experiences of gender and generation and differentiated by methodological techniques and theoretical concerns, they share certain similarities. Firstly, both, in their different ways, seek to draw out the specificities of ‘ordinary’ working-class

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lives. Secondly, both their stories are set in the hegemonic sites of working class formation in England: London and the North. It is to the dominance of these regions in the cultural imagery of mid-twentieth-century working class that I now turn. Dominant cultural representations of the English working classes If the preceding paragraphs represent an attempt to use Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy as a lens through which the interlocking themes of class, experience and memory might be brought into focus, what follows is an attempt to refocus these themes with reference to both wider cultural representations of working class life from the middle years of the twentieth century and the existing historiography. What this entails is relocating the study of working class life away from its traditional regional contexts: the north of England and the East End of London. Hoggart’s is one of a number of iconic texts and works of cultural production which cast a long discursive shadow over the study of the English working class as (apart from the metropolitan exception outlined below) a near-ubiquitously northern phenomenon.66 This seems particularly true for the 1930s, where middle class writers, documentary makers and mass observers turned their attentions to the ‘urban cannibals’ of Wigan, Bolton and Blackpool.67 By the 1950s, northern working class life was the subject for fictions and dramas produced by ‘working class writers’; many of the ‘angry young men’ set their works in versions of the towns in which they had grown up.68 The post-war period also saw the publication of iconic works of autobiography by Robert Roberts (Salford), Helen Forrester (Liverpool) and William Woodruff (Blackburn), which again seemed to fix remembered working class communities in both time and space.69 When the focus does shift southwards, besides the attention given to Birmingham – courtesy of the autobiographies of Kathleen Dayus and the work of oral historian Carl Chinn – and Rogaly and Taylor’s exceptional recent work on Norwich council estates, it is representations of London’s East End which are dominant.70 Here the period 1870–c.1900 stands out in terms of the voluminous reportage produced on The People of the Abyss.71 During this period the East End was represented as a ‘Darkest England’; its population ‘Other’: poor, semi-criminal, potentially dangerous; its culture squalid, mysterious, pre-modern even.72 Yet, by the late 1930s one could find Cambridge drop-outs Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, among others down Lambeth way, doing the Lambeth Walk.73 By the mid-twentieth century the working class people of East London (the Cockneys) were more likely to be represented as cheerful, pleasure loving, even heroic. As Gareth Stedman Jones notes:

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An evocation of ‘The Cockney’ is likely to bring to mind odd snatches of forgotten music hall songs, recollections of the Blitz, minor characters in Ealing comedies, whelks, old-fashioned bank holidays on Hampstead Heath, Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, the laughing pearlies in Mary Poppins.74

In the post-war period these sometimes nostalgic representations have been reinforced by a proliferation of memoirs and autobiographies. From A. S. Jasper’s A Hoxton Childhood to Bryan Magee’s Clouds of Glory, Roberta Taylor’s Too Many Mothers and Gilda O’Neil’s My East End, via May Hobbs’s Born to Struggle and Ron Barnes’s Licence to Live, numerous East End residents have told their life stories, often traversing the very same topography.75 Arguably, however, as Stedman Jones suggests, these twin visions of working class England, the North and the East End, reach their apogee in their prolific representations on film and television. If one were to take two films from the 1940s as emblematic one could do worse than compare John Baxter’s critically acclaimed film version of Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1941) and Humphrey Jennings’ masterpiece of the London Blitz, Fires Were Started (1943). If the former articulated a sense of ‘never again’ with regard to the mass unemployment of the 1930s, the latter was a poignant documentary showing the British pulling together in the face of a common enemy.76 The East End was also the subject of a number of highly regarded documentaries of the 1950s, such as John Krish’s elegiac The Elephant Will Never Forget (1953), Anthony Simmonds’s nostalgic Bow Bells (1954) and Karel Reisz’s earnest We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959).77 But it was the British ‘new wave’ films of the period 1958–1963 which really cemented the post-war working class as a near-ubiquitously northern phenomenon.78 While cinema-goers stayed away from Lindsay Anderson’s bleak and overly long This Sporting Life (1963), Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961) was a box office smash.79 If these films largely focused upon the ‘rugged individualism’ of working class masculinity in a period of affluence, films from the 1980s explored the effects of deindustrialisation and unemployment on gender relations and working class identities: from Brassed Off (1996) and Billy Elliot (2000) to the considerably less whimsical Boys from the Black Stuff (1982) and This Is England (2007).80 In television the two most popular soap operas, Coronation Street and EastEnders, sustain the dominant cultural representation of the working class as either northern or metropolitan.81 There are several reasons for the dominance of these geographically specific representations of working class life, perhaps not the least of which is that these particular regions have been the primary settings for various makings and remakings of the English working class.82 Undoubtedly, over the course of the nineteenth century the greater part of the manual working class became concentrated in the manufacturing towns and industrial districts of the North

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and London.83 Perhaps understandably, therefore, recent historical research on the working class has focused on these regions. Work on the industrial cities of Lancashire has been particularly abundant.84 The East End, too, has had more than its fair share of academic attention.85 What is important about the cultural representations outlined above is that they tend to fix the working class both geographically and discursively, so that the (albeit contrasting) cultures and economies of the industrial North and the East End of London dominate our knowledge and understanding of the working class between the beginning of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries. For J. B. Priestley, that acute observer of the English society during the middle years of the twentieth century, this was ‘Nineteenth century England, industrial England of coal, iron, steel, wool, railways; of thousands of rows of little houses all alike, sham Gothic churches, square-faced chapels, Town Halls, Mechanic’s Institutes, mills, foundries, warehouses.’86 As Priestley astutely noted: ‘This England makes up the larger part of the Midlands and the North and exists everywhere; but it is not being added to and has no new life poured into it.’87 It took the Second World War to do that. The economic revival which this occasioned was extended into the post-war period, sustaining the patterns of work and association which underpinned working class communities well into the 1950s and 1960s. By refocusing our gaze on Brighton on England’s south coast, we are implicitly entering another England. Brighton, although Priestly by-passed it during his English Journey, was by the mid-1930s arguably more representative of: The new post-war England, belonging far more to the age itself than to this particular island. America, I supposed was its real birth place. This is the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools and everything given away with cigarette coupons.88

He recognised its cheapness. A ‘bit too cheap’, he went on to argue: ‘too many of the people in this new England are doing not what they like but what they have been told they would like’89 – an argument with which Hoggart would have undoubtedly concurred. But Priestley also praised this England for its accessibility and its ‘essentially democratic’ character, and argued that it was potentially socially transformative: It nearly achieves the famous equality of opportunity. In this England for the first time in history, Jack and Jill are nearly as good as their master and mistress; they may have always been as good in their own way, but now they are nearly as good in the same way . . . Years and years ago, the democratic and enterprising Blackpool, by declaring that you were all as good as one another so long

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as you had the necessary sixpence, began all this. Modern England is rapidly Blackpooling itself.90

This ‘new’ England of estates, shopping precincts populated by people of ‘an indeterminate social class’, which so captured the imaginations of post-war sociologists, had its origins in the inter-war years, as Orwell also noted.91 Yet it was not all-encompassing, nor was it as socially transformative as Orwell and Priestley hoped. As Baxendale astutely notes, employing Williams’s triadic model, ‘new England’ represented an ‘emergent’ culture which coexisted with the ‘residual’ rural England and the still ‘dominant’ industrial England.92 Being a proud northerner, Priestley inevitably reached for the Blackpool analogy, but he could just as well have substituted Brighton and the argument would have stood. Indeed, given the increasing ideological and economic dominance of the South-East in the period since the 1930s, a southern focus would, arguably, have been more appropriate. In what follows I turn away from Priestley’s Bradford and Hoggart’s Hunslet for the slightly warmer climes of that queen of watering places – Brighton. A place in culture: Brighton beyond Brighton Rock Once a thriving fishing village, which by the end of the seventeenth century had fallen into near-terminal decline,93 Brighton owed its modern prosperity to the eighteenth-century fashion for sea-bathing, which brought influential aristocratic patrons to the town, including the Prince Regent (later George IV). A combination of Brighton’s proximity to London, capital investment, a lack of competing demands for labour and the social networks of regional elites ensured the popularity and prosperity of the resort.94 The nineteenth century, however, witnessed the town’s most explosive phases of expansion. In the first thirty years of the century, Brighton’s population increased five and half times, from 7,339 in 1801 to 40,634 by 1831.95 A second period of rapid growth followed the establishment of a rail link to London in 1841.96 By 1911, after a century of development, the town had a population of 131,237; more than double that of Blackpool and some 50,000 greater than its nearest rival resort, Bournemouth.97 This historical legacy of Brighton as a pleasure resort, for many years the preserve of the upper and middle classes – although by the Edwardian period also an escape for London’s hoi polloi – has cast a long shadow over cultural representations of the town. In Places on the Margin, geographer Rob Shields analysed the cultural positioning of the town and argued that Brighton as a place ‘came to be associated with pleasure, with the liminal, and with the carnivalesque’.98 Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of ‘the carnivalesque’ and Turner’s interpretation of ‘the liminal’, Shields argues that local by-laws,

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moral codes and cultural products such as the seaside post-card sought to control the potentially socially liminal and sexually transgressive spatial and temporal constructs of ‘the beach’ and ‘the holiday’ over the course of the nineteenth century.99 Turning to the twentieth century, Shields interprets the race-course gang fights of the 1930s and the mods’ and rockers’ ‘riots’ of the 1960s (immortalised on celluloid in the Boulting brother’s Brighton Rock and Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia)100 as carnivals of violence; while the ‘dirty weekend’ of inter-war folklore constituted (rather predictably) a ‘carnival of sex’, although one cannot help but imagine that most encounters were rather more prosaic than that epithet suggests.101 Yet, as Elizabeth Wilson notes, there is something both more substantial and ambivalent behind these representations of Brighton: ‘When Victorians enquired of a woman “Is she gay?” they meant was she a prostitute and “gay” meant tragic, not jolly and not joyful, but fallen, sullied and destroyed. Brighton is “gay” in both senses of the word and perhaps that’s its charm.’102 By the 1950s, as the research of Brighton Ourstory has shown, Brighton had a well-established queer community.103 Hints at the erotic pleasures and transgressive possibilities of Brighton were encapsulated by Bernard Bresslaw’s character’s statement in Carry on At Your Convenience (1971): ‘We can do anything once we’re there!’ a phrase which, as Medhurst argues, neatly summarises seaside culture.104 So the criminal, camp and comic (often in fruitful partnership) continued to cast a long shadow, from Mona Lisa (1986), through to Brighton Rock (again! 2010) via the visceral London to Brighton (2006) and the darkly comic, banal violence of Down Terrace (2009). Behind such a proliferation of filmic representations of Brighton as a setting for violent criminality and/or comedic excess lies a rather more mundane reality, as Andy Medhurst perceptively notes: Comedy finds the seaside sections of Brighton such a fruitful partner that the great bulk of the town evaporates. There are, it seems, no laughs along the Lewes Road, no wags in Whitehawk. Beyond the carnival spaces of the pier and prom, humour finds no footholds, because there lies the guilty secret of any seaside town, that people live and work in ordinary environments, that factories and shops and flats and suburbs exist as much as they do in Leicester or Reading or Huddersfield.105

This recognition that a focus on the bawdy, extraordinary pleasures of the visitor elides the everyday labour of the town’s inhabitants forms the startingpoint for this study. It is the ‘ordinary environments’ of factories, shops and suburbs and quotidian experiences of work, neighbourhood and home life which form the object of this book. In a sense, we are back once again with Hoggart’s ordinary people doing ordinary things. This category of ordinary experience, framed by a discourse of ordinariness is one which saturates many of the themes that follow.106 Yet such attention to the ordinary necessitates

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an awareness of the density and complexity of ordinary life mediated by differences of class, gender, generation, sexuality and ethnicity.107 Moreover, it requires a methodology which is sensitive to the historical dynamics of social change; one through which the ruptures and continuities in ordinary life can be fully apprehended. In the following section I outline the sources and methods I have used to construct a social history of working class experience in mid-twentieth-century Brighton. People in time: mid-twentieth-century lives As I outlined above, my intention in this book is to analyse the experiences of working class people who lived in Brighton during the middle years of the twentieth century. Thus, the most important set of sources analysed in this book is the life histories of working class inhabitants of Brighton and the surrounding area. The autobiographical accounts I have drawn upon are in the form of published autobiographies and unpublished life histories, both of which require some discussion. In all, I have analysed the life stories of 156 individuals resident and working in greater Brighton (i.e. the area granted unitary authority status as Brighton and Hove in 2000) over the period.108 Of these, 88 were short accounts from published life-history collections, 54 were published single-authored autobiographies and a further 20 came from unpublished interviews and memoirs. I conducted the interviews in interviewees’ homes over the period 2003–2005. The interviews were based on a ‘life history’ format and focused on experiences of family, home, neighbourhood and work. Interviewees were self-selecting and contacted through the local press, a local history group, community-website message boards and by word of mouth through friends. The time span covered by these narratives ranges from the early years of the twentieth century to the first few years of the twenty-first. The vast majority, however, concentrate on the years from the early 1920s to the mid-1970s: what I call the ‘mid-twentieth century’, and the period with which this book is primarily concerned. This particular periodisation has been chosen for a number of reasons. While the period c.1900–1950 has been extensively analysed, historians of the working class, with a few notable recent exceptions, have largely ignored the 1950s and 1960s.109 Moreover, the inter-war and post-war years are usually considered separately. Indeed, among the syntheses and summaries of existing scholarship, only McKibbin’s Classes and Cultures England 1918–1951 covers the inter-war, war and post-war years. Yet it is in reality largely about the inter-war period; in particular, the economic, social and cultural impact of the Second World War is little commented upon. McKibbin is surely right, however, to argue that the experience of war politicised both the working class and sections of the middle classes,

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enabling the leftward shift in opinion which ensured Labour’s landslide success at the polls in 1945.110 Further, he is correct to argue that the most important thing which the war did was to ‘renew the “traditional” working class’, restoring ‘the old staple industries to full employment’, thus restoring ‘the integrity of those great working-class communities which had half-collapsed during the interwar years’.111 The important point to make here is that a study which encompasses the mid-twentieth-century period as a whole can allow for a more nuanced approach to continuity and change than those which focus purely on the inter-war, wartime or post-war years. The period encompasses several developments which had potentially transformative effects on the ways in which working class domestic, familial and neighbourhood life was experienced. The first of these were demographic trends relating to fertility and marriage: the period coincided with the proletarian fertility decline and ‘the “golden age” of near universal marriage’ – both of which framed the working class experience of home and family in important ways.112 The second relates to changes in working class neighbourhoods. The period saw sustained programmes of slum clearance and council house building, which reconfigured domestic environments, social practices and networks and the ways in which working class neighbourhoods were discursively represented. Third, the mid-century period as a whole saw the manual workforce decline in absolute and relative terms, living standards rise and working and middle class lifestyles converge; all of which had a potentially destabilising impact on working class experiences and social identifications. Finally, it is a period which allows the density of life-history materials to be utilised to its fullest extent. While the focus of the book is the middle years of the twentieth century, since most of the life stories I analyse were produced between the early 1970s and 2005, some understanding of the changes which have affected working class communities since the early 1970s has been essential. However, the bulk of the arguments which I map out below pertain to the years between the end of the First World War and the mid-1970s. Map of the book In Chapter 2, which follows this introduction, I map quantitative trends in working class self-ascription within a framework which accounts for structural changes in the occupational structure, local labour markets and patterns of occupational and social mobility. By critically engaging with recent research on ordinariness, cultural distinction and the formation of social identities, I argue that arguments about the declining salience of class as a social identity during the mid-century period and beyond need to be rethought. Via qualitative analyses of a series of life histories I explore the complex ways in which people account for their social location and the degrees to which these

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shift historically and in relation to people’s own mobility. Whilst taking a historical, relational and contingent view of identity formation, I argue that the strength of working class identification can be explained by the extent to which familial, neighbourhood and work cultures shaped class identifications, and continued to do so despite individual occupational mobility and the economic and political developments since the mid-1970s. Chapter 3 charts the massive changes in working class neighbourhoods wrought by suburbanisation and slum clearance. In the 1920s council housing offered affluent working class families high-quality modern housing for the first time. By the 1930s, slum-clearance schemes and further estate building had extended housing provision to the poorer working class as well. Here I show that, as older districts were reduced to rubble between the 1930s and the 1960s, the stigma associated with the slums settled on some of the mainly suburban council estates of the inter-war period. In what is perhaps the first local historical account of residualisation and privatisation encompassing the mid-century period as a whole, I analyse the long-term social and political legacies of these policies. In Chapter 4 I explore how people’s senses of belonging to and identification with particular neighbourhoods were formed. I show how place-based identifications were always informed by the ways in which more or less spatially distinct neighbourhoods have been categorised by others. Belonging was also premised upon spatially and socially specific knowledge about people and practices gained from living locally. This chapter explores the degrees to which everyday sociability, patterns of association and networks based on reciprocal aid were changed by suburbanisation and rising affluence. While important material and social changes did occur, there were continuities too, not just in terms of conflict and competition, but of neighbourly practices, material poverties and the reconstitution of social networks. I argue that working class nostalgia has been poorly understood by historians and I develop a more nuanced understanding of social memory in relation to changing forms of community politics. In the final chapter ‘Home: family, memory and modernity’, I analyse the extent to which the working class experience of domestic life was transformed during the middle years of the twentieth century. I show how a model of home-centred modernity, founded on cross-class affluence and reaching its apogee in the privatised lifestyle of the nuclear family, was central to discursive constructions of the home during the period. But I argue that the experience of home was classed in important ways. Working class families pooled all their resources in their struggles to achieve suburban lifestyles which the middle classes had long taken for granted. Furthermore, as working and middle class lifestyles converged, the latter sought to differentiate themselves from the former in the domestic sphere, critiquing working class tastes and

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behaviours. Furthermore, material continuities in terms of housing and domestic amenities challenged the notion of modernity as simply a narrative of progress characterised by modernisation. In the book’s conclusion I trace some of these trends beyond the 1970s and draw out some of the possible implications for working class politics and identities in an era marked by the deepening inequalities of neoliberal capitalism. Notes 1 There are several excellent accounts of the group’s pioneering research during the period 1937–1945, for example T. Jeffery, Mass Observation: A Short History, rev. edn (Falmer: Mass Observation Archive Occasional Paper No. 10, 1999); N.  Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (London: Palgrave, 2006). However, we lack a comprehensive account of the history of the organisation. The post-war years in particular are inadequately dealt with in the existing literature. 2 Mass Observation Archive (MOA): TC 66/2/1. Town and District Survey, Brighton, 10–11 December 1938. 3 MOA: TC 66/2/1, Kathleen Box, ‘Brighton: General impressions’, p. 1. 4 Mass Observation recorded 48 out of 84 ‘dislikes’ under the following headings: rents (10); rates (10); slums (9); demolition (9); houses (5); being moved (5). Remaining dislikes were: people (14); hills (9); lack of work (5); council (4); streets (4), see MOA: TC 66/2/1, Brighton Report, p. 7. 5 MOA: TC 66/2/1, Bread Street. 6 MOA: TC 66/2/1, Kathleen Box, ‘Brighton: General impressions’, p. 1. 7 The epithet was applied as a term of abuse to villages in South Wales, Scotland and the North of England with particularly strong Communist sympathies in the 1920s. See S. Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working Class Militancy in Inter-war Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980), pp. 14–20. 8 See C. Critcher, ‘Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class’, J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds) Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1979); M. Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995); D. Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Britain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 9 M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957). 10 R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Edition, 1958), p. 68. (Originally published by Chatto and Windus in 1957). 11 See for example R. Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961); B. Jackson and D. Marsden, Education and the Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966); B. Jackson, Working Class Community (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 12 Compare Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, pp. 27–102 with R. Hoggart, A Local

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14 15 16

17

18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29

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Habitation, Life and Times: 1918–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). P. Jones, ‘The myth of “Raymond Hoggart”: on “founding fathers” and cultural policy’, Cultural Studies, 8: 3 (1994), p. 408; A. Goodwin, ‘Introduction’, R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New Jersey: Transaction Press, 1992), p. xiv. C. Waters, ‘Representations of everyday life: L. S. Lowry and the landscape of memory in post war Britain’, Representations, 65 (1999), p. 135. J. Hinton, ‘Middle-class socialism: selfhood, democracy and distinction in wartime county Durham’, History Workshop Journal, 62, Autumn (2006), p. 116. For a critique of this kind of dichotomous contrast, see R. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Vol. I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), p. x; D. Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 212–214. On the origins of the term ‘nostalgia’ and its relationship to modernity, see S.  Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 3–32; P. Fritzsche, ‘Specters of history: on nostalgia, exile and modernity’, American Historical Review, 106: 5 (2001), pp. 1587–1618. Rosenfeld argues that Hoggart’s autobiography, rather than The Uses of Literacy is not nostalgic. See M. Rosenfeld, ‘Local habitations: working-class childhood and its uses in the memoirs of Richard Hoggart and others’, S. Owen (ed.), Re-reading Richard Hoggart (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008), pp. 131–142. A. Medhurst, ‘If anywhere: class identifications and cultural studies academics’, S. R. Munt (ed.), Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change (London: Cassell, 2000), p. 26. Raymond Williams quoted in S. Hall, ‘Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and the cultural turn’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 10: 1 (2007), p. 43. See M. Gregg, ‘A neglected history: Richard Hoggart’s discourse of empathy’, Rethinking History, 7: 3 (2003), p. 287. On the implications of the cultural turn for social history, see G. Eley and K. Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 19–80. J. W. Scott, ‘The evidence of experience’, Critical Enquiry, 17 (1991), p. 778. Ibid., p. 782. For an insightful critique of Scott’s reading of Williams, see K.  Ganguly, ‘The work of forgetting: Raymond Williams and the problem of experience’, New Formations, 55 (2004), pp. 94–100. Scott, ‘The evidence of experience’, p. 779. My emphasis. On Scott’s methodology, see J. W. Scott, ‘The tip of the volcano’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35: 2 (1993), p. 441. Eley and Nield, The Future of Class in History, pp. 107–108. T. C. Holt, ‘Experience and the politics of intellectual inquiry’, J. Chandler, A. I. Davidson and H. Harootunian (eds), Questions of Evidence (London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 391. M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 49. Thanks to Chris Warne for alerting me to this critique. Ibid., p. 48. Emphasis in the original. There are parallels here with Williams’s

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30 31

32 33

34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

42

The working class in mid-twentieth-century England theorisation of dominant, residual and emergent cultures, see R. Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 40–45. K. Canning, ‘Feminist history after the linguistic turn: historicizing discourse and experience’, Signs, 19: 2 (1994), p. 377. Scott, ‘The evidence of experience’, p. 797. For Craig Ireland, Scott’s reluctance to jettison ‘experience’, on these, in his terms ‘the shoddiest of grounds’, suggests that ‘experience testifies to a certain insistence that is more than merely semantic or conceptual.’ See C. Ireland, ‘The appeal to experience and its consequences: variations on a persistent Thompsonian theme’, Cultural Critique, 52 (2002), p. 104. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin, 1978), p. 201. See K. Canning, ‘Difficult dichotomies: experience between narrativity and materiality’, K. Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class and Citizenship (London: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 112–117. M. Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (London: University of California Press, 2005), p. 11. Benjamin used the example of the silence of men returning from the First World War, see W. Benjamin, ‘The storyteller: reflections on the work of Nikolai Leskov’, Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 83–84. W. Benjamin, ‘On some motifs in Baudelaire’, Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt. In terms of Benjamin’s own work, see ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt; W. Benjamin, ‘Little history of photography’, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, ed. M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (London: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 507–530. B. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 71. W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (London: Harvard University Press, 1999). Canning, ‘Difficult dichotomies’, p. 118. Daunton and Rieger argue that a combination of earlier industrialisation, constitutional stability and less venomous class conflict meant that ‘in comparison with Continental Western Europe, many prominent British assessments of modernity between 1870 and 1940 successfully incorporated notions of gradual evolution rather than irreversible rupture’. See B. Rieger and M. Daunton, ‘Introduction’, B. Rieger and M. Daunton (eds), Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the LateVictorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 9–11. On hierarchy, class and conservatism in British political culture see D. Cannadine, Class in Britain (London: Penguin, 1998); J. Lawrence, ‘Paternalism, class and the British path to modernity’, S. Gunn and J. Vernon (eds), The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (London: University of California Press, 2011). For an important critique of Euro-centric conceptualisations of modernity see H. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). See for example C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago, 1986), pp. 8–12; 23–24.

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21

43 T. Koditschek, ‘The gendering of the British working class’, Gender and History, 9 (1997). Major works include, but are not confined to C. Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); L. Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on gender and Class (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); S. Alexander, Becoming A Woman and Other Essays in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Feminist History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London: Rivers Oram, 1995). 44 E. Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); E. Roberts, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 45 A. Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992); C. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England, 1920–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 46 S. Todd, Young Women, Work and Family in England, 1918–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 47 J. Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–1950 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1995); J. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 48 J. White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, between the Wars, 2nd edn (London: Pimlico, 2003). 49 For a succinct account of Hall’s influence, see D. Dworkin, Class Struggles (London: Pearson, 2007), pp. 163–166. 50 See for example R. Guha (ed.), A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); P. Gilroy, After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia (London: Routledge, 2004). 51 L. Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (London: Cornell University Press, 1994); W. Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, Race and National Identity, 1945–1964 (London: University College London Press, 1998). C. Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 52 S. Hall, ‘Introduction: Who needs identity?’ S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 2–3. 53 R. Jenkins, ‘Categorization: identity, social process and epistemology’, Current Sociology, 48: 3 (2000), p. 7. 54 Ibid., p. 8. 55 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, p. 85. 56 A. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); A. Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); L. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

57 See particularly the development of the concept of ‘composure’ in the work of Dawson, Thomson and Summerfield: G. Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994); A. Thomson, ANZAC Memories: Living with the Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); P. Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 58 Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Vol. 1, pp. 3–17. 59 Popular Memory Group, ‘Popular memory: theory, politics, method’, R. Johnson et al. (eds), Making Histories: Studies in History-writing and Politics (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 206–211. For refinements and critiques of the ‘popular memory’ approach see B. A. Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003), pp. 61–67. 60 M. Halbwachs, ‘The reconstruction of the past’ and ‘The localization of memories’, L. A. Coser (ed.), On Collective Memory (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 46–53. 61 P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 37. 62 I am indebted to Andy Wood for clarifying some of these points. See the stimulating discussions in S. A. Crane, ‘Writing the individual back into collective memory’, American Historical Review, 102: 5 (1997), pp. 1372–1385; A. Green, ‘Individual remembering and “collective memory”: theoretical presuppositions and contemporary debates’, Oral History, 32: 2 (2004), pp. 35–44; G. Smith, ‘Beyond individual/collective memory: women’s transactive memories of food, family and conflict’, Oral History, 35: 2 (2007), pp. 77–90. 63 Steedman’s response is, in turn, a critique of standard ‘stories’ about the midtwentieth century working class, exemplified in part by Hoggart’s text. 64 S. Hoggart, ‘Foreword’, R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, p. viii. 65 Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, p. 15. 66 D. Russell, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 279–282. 67 See G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Gollancz, 1937). On the work of Mass Observation in Bolton and Blackpool see Jeffery, Mass Observation, pp. 25–28. 68 Although as Hilliard notes, many of these writers benefited from the post-war expansion of the lower professions and clerical work, which allowed them to move out of the working class and into the kinds of occupations which enabled them to write. See C. Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (London: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 248–250. 69 R. Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); H. Forrester, Two Pence to Cross the Mersey (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974); W. Woodruff, The Road to Nab End (London: Abacus, 2002). 70 K. Dayus, Her People (London: Virago, 1982); C. Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); B. Rogaly and B. Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and

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71

72

73 74

75

76

77

78 79 80

81

23

Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (London: Palgrave, 2009). The epithet is from Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (London: Pluto Press, 1998); K. Dodd and P. Dodd, ‘From the east end to East-Enders: representations of the working class, 1890–1990’, D. Strinati and S. Wagg (eds) Come on Down? Popular Media Culture in Post-war Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 118–119. J. Marriott, ‘Sensation of the abyss: the urban poor and modernity’, M. Nava and A. O’Shea (eds), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 79–94. C. Madge and T. Harrisson, Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), pp. 139–184. G. Stedman Jones, ‘The “cockney” and the nation, 1780–1988’, D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones (eds), Metropolis London: Histories and Representations Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 272. A. S. Jasper, A Hoxton Childhood (London: Barrie & Rockliffe, 1969); M. Hobbs, Born to Struggle (London: Quartet Books, 1973); R. Barnes, A Licence to Live (London: Centerprise, 1975); G. O’Neil, My East End (London: Penguin, 2000); B. Magee, Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003); R. Taylor, Too Many Mothers (London: Atlantic, 2005). See P. Stead, Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American Society (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 127–130; B. Winston, ‘Fires Were Started’ (London: BFI, 1999); C. Levine, ‘Propaganda for democracy: the curious case of Love on the Dole’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006). For the context of Krish and Simmonds’ work see P. Russell and J. P. Taylor (eds), Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-war Britain (London: BFI, 2010). On Reisz and ‘Free Cinema’ compare A. Lovell’s ‘Free Cinema’, in A. Lovell and J. Hillier’s Studies in Documentary (London: BFI, 1972), pp. 133–159 with the withering verdict in S. Harper and V. Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 188–191. For British feature films 1945–1955 see P. Gillett, The British Working Class in Postwar Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). See, classically, J. Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (London: BFI, 1986). S. Harper and V. Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s, p. 249. See generally P. Dave, Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2006), pp. 60–75. Particular attention to classed masculinities is provided in analyses by C. Kaplan, ‘The death of the working class hero’, New Formations, 52 (2004) and A. Sinfield, ‘Boys, class and gender: from Billy Caspar to Billy Elliot’, History Workshop Journal, 62 (2006). For an influential early argument which notes the degree to which Coronation Street appropriated themes raised in The Uses of Literacy, see R. Dyer, ‘Introduction’, R. Dyer, C. Geraghty, M. Jordan, T. Lovell, R. Paterson and J. Stewart, Coronation Street (London: BFI, 1981), pp. 1–8. See also J. May, ‘The social side of soap: East Enders’, S. Rowbotham and H. Beynon (eds), Looking at

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82

83

84

85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

The working class in mid-twentieth-century England Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain (London: Rivers Oram, 2001). F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class In England (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973) (originally published in Germany in 1845) casts a long shadow, as do E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) and G. Stedman Jones’s ‘Working class culture and working class politics in London, 1870–1900: notes on the remaking of a working class’, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See J. K. Walton, ‘England: North’, P. Clarke (ed.), Cambridge Urban History of Britain Vol. 2, 1540–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); D. Baines and R. Woods, ‘Population and regional development’, P. Johnson and R. Floud (eds), Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Vol. 2: Economic Maturity 1860–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); J. White, London in the Nineteenth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), pp. 172–187. M. Savage, The Dynamics of Working-class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); T. Griffiths, The Lancashire Working Classes, c.1880–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); P. Shapely, The Politics of Housing: Power, Policy and Consumers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) and the studies by E. Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 (Oxford: 1984); E. Roberts, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); A. Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992); C. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England, 1920–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). See for example, E. Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); M. Brodie, The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London 1885–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). J. Marriott, The Culture of Labourism: The East End between the Wars (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). J. B. Priestley, English Journey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, originally published in 1934), p. 373. Ibid., p. 373. Ibid., p. 375. Ibid., p. 377. Ibid., p. 376. G. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (London: Secker and Warburg, 1941), p. 53. J. Baxendale, ‘ “I had seen a lot of Englands”: J. B. Priestley, Englishness and the people’, History Workshop Journal, 51 (2001), p. 92. J. H. Farrant, ‘The rise and decline of a south coast seafaring town: Brighton, 1550–1750’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 71: 1 (1985), pp. 60–72. S. Berry, Georgian Brighton (Chichester: Phillimore, 2005). Brighton’s development is placed in a national context in P. Borsay, ‘Health and leisure resorts:

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95 96

97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108

109

110

25

1700–1840’, P. Clarke (ed.), Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. 2, 1540– 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). T. Carder, The Encyclopaedia of Brighton (Brighton: East Sussex County Libraries, 1990), entry 127. E. W. Gilbert, Brighton: Old Ocean’s Bauble, 2nd edn (Hassocks: Flare Books, 1975), p. 153. Gilbert’s study, first published in 1954, is the most scholarly general history of the town and the best account up to the 1950s. For the post-war years see S. Mackenzie, Visible Histories: Women and Environments in a Post-war British City (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989). Derived from J. K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort: A Social History, 1750–1914 (New York: Leicester University Press, 1983), p. 65. R. Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 73. Ibid., pp. 82–100. S. Chibnall, Brighton Rock (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005); S. Chibnall, ‘A young person’s guide to Brighton’, Kiss and Kill: Film Visions of Brighton (Brighton: Brighton and Hove Council, 2002). Shields, Places on the Margin, pp. 101–110. E. Wilson, The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women (London: Sage, 2001), p. 127. Brighton Ourstory Project, Daring Hearts: Lesbian and Gay Lives of 50s and 60s Brighton (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1992). A. Medhurst, ‘ “We can do anything once we’re there”: comedy, carnival and Brighton on film’, Kiss and Kill: Film Visions of Brighton (Brighton and Hove Council, 2002), p. 19. Ibid., p. 21. See M. Gregg, ‘The importance of being ordinary’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 10: 1 (2007), p. 99. See B. Sandywell, ‘The myths of everyday life: towards a heterology of the ordinary’, Cultural Studies, 18: 2–3 (2004), p. 174. While not a large number, this figure compares favourably to other studies which have utilised autobiographical sources for this period. Roberts based A Woman’s Place on 160 interviews and Women and Families on 98. Davies drew on 117 autobiographical accounts in his study of Manchester and Salford. Langhamer interviewed 23 for her Manchester study. While monographs with a national scope by Giles and Todd analysed 26 and 81 autobiographical accounts respectively. See Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty, pp. 175, 202 and 204; Roberts, A Woman’s Place, p. 6; Roberts, Women and Families, p. 2; Langhamer, Women’s Leisure, p. 192; Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life, pp. 4 and 176–183; Todd, Young Women, Work and Family, p. 231. The only monographs which cover these years are Roberts, Women and Families; Shapely, The Politics of Housing and Rogaly and Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community. R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 531. On the evidence for and the timing of the leftward

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shift, see K. Jefferys, The Churchill Coalition and British Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). 111 McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, p. 531. 112 See W. Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 158–181; S. Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); K. Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain 1925–50 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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Chapter 2

Class: jobs, families, mobilities and social identities

This chapter explores class identifications in England since the 1940s. As such, it is primarily about the ways in which people experience class, the economic, social and cultural processes which shape individual subjectivities, and the extent to which these mould social identities. As suggested in the introduction, social identifications are understood as a relational: they are both about how one defines oneself in relation to others and about how one is categorised by other individuals, groups and institutions. As Jenkins notes: ‘We know who we are, because in the first place, others tell us. Categorization is basic even – or – especially – during earliest socialization.’1 Class formation too is understood as a historical and relational process which produces and reproduces economic, cultural and political inequalities through the unequal distribution of power and resources between different groups. As Rogaly and Taylor argue, ‘We are not simply taught how to see ourselves in the world and empowered to make choices accordingly, but rather face a world in which “widely shared categorizations such as rough/respectable, undeserving/ deserving and unreliable/reliable” influence “processes of identification . . . [and] have material consequences.” ’2 While this chapter emphasises the salience of class identities, it is apparent that these identifications are contingent, fluid and sometimes ambivalent. The experience of and meanings attached to class change for individuals across their lives in relation to historically shifting formations of class within cultures. In the second part of this chapter I build upon recent work in sociology and history which explores how people talk about class and the particular identifications they make. Here we see individuals displaying a strong sense of working class identification, often in spite of social mobility, and formed by encounters with class others. While mobility for some might provoke painful recognitions and ambivalent identifications, others managed transitions with greater ease and could reconcile working class backgrounds with later middle class identities. Building upon Savage’s work in particular, I argue that a feeling of ‘ordinariness’ was fundamental to individuals’ social positioning and that identifications based upon ‘feeling ordinary’ extended well beyond the work place to encompass the material and

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emotional experiences of home and neighbourhood. The remainder of the book looks at the experiences, memories and meanings attached to these sites and social institutions. I begin this chapter, however, by examining narratives of working class ‘decline’ and interrogating the idea that class has lost its salience as a social identity. While manual work has declined since the 1950s, and the number and proportion of skilled manual workers has fallen sharply since the 1970s, working class identification has remained robust. Given this, I argue that it is the continuing strength of post-war working class identifications which seems most remarkable, not the small rise in the percentage of people identifying as middle class, which could be adequately explained by social mobility, the massive increases in non-manual work and the discursive shift from production to consumption. Drawing upon quantitative survey evidence, recent conceptual work on social identifications and qualitative analyses of class identities, I show that arguments about the declining salience of class as a social identity and the ‘disidentifications’ of class are overdrawn. The explanation for the strength of working class self-ascription lies in the extent to which familial, neighbourhood and work cultures shaped class identifications, and continued to do so despite individual occupational mobility and the economic and political developments since the late 1970s which deprived manual workers of their collective bargaining power as producers and citizens. Social identifications in post-war England: the declining significance of class? It has been widely asserted that class has lost its salience as a social identity. This is more the product of trends within the academy, and an ahistorical reimagination of a ‘time before’ in which class identities were less fragmented than of any empirical reality. In this chapter I will present evidence to the effect that class identification in general and working class self-ascription in particular remained robust from the 1940s to the early 2000s, despite a decline in manual work generally and skilled manual work in particular. Some structural changes I hinted at in the introduction, but it is worth re-emphasising significant trends. The post-1945 period saw significant rates of male social mobility, increased female participation in the workforce, a shift towards non-manual work, rising living standards across the board and, from the 1970s, the decomposition of the skilled manual working class. As I noted in the introduction to this book, these trends coincided with a shift away from class analysis in British history and, to some extent, sociology as well. Among some social historians, for example, the period from the late 1970s saw attention focused upon other sources of popular identity besides class, and the extent to which subjectivities were shaped by gender, sexuality, ethnicity and

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Class

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‘race’. Even among those who were avowedly not part of this ‘cultural turn’ in social history, between the late 1970s and 1990s the image of working class ‘decline’ was repeatedly invoked. In a celebrated lecture given in 1978, Eric Hobsbawm pointed to falling levels of working class electoral support for the Labour Party, stagnating trade union membership and increasing sectionalism amongst the working class, and wondered whether this meant that the ‘forward march of Labour’ had been halted.3 By the early 1990s, another Eric (Hopkins this time) highlighted immense transformations in the years since Hobsbawm spoke. Hopkins argued that the reduction in working class political and industrial authority, a growing fissure between those on benefits and those in work, a new instability in family life and years of anti-welfare, antiLabour ‘right wing propaganda’ had seen the ‘decline’ of the English working class.4 What impact did these trends have upon how ordinary people thought about themselves in class terms? For the social historian, analysing these subjective understandings of class could prove difficult. A comparison of the ways in which ‘working class’ was defined in Elizabeth Roberts’s two oral studies of women and families in twentieth-century Barrow, Preston and Lancaster is indicative of some of the confusion these changes have wrought. In A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working Class Women, 1890–1940, published in 1984, Roberts and her interviewees felt relatively comfortable in her use of the term ‘working class’. She wrote: ‘the mass of evidence and the perceptions of the respondents themselves would endorse the view that economic position is the basis of class. Men and women believed themselves to be working class because they worked with their hands, were employees and not employers, and, in comparison with the latter, were poor and lacked material goods.’5 In her second book, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970, first published in 1995, Roberts noted that: Respondents’ views on class were very varied and difficult to analyse . . . for justice to be done to this complex issue a separate volume would be required. All that can usefully be said here is that some respondents regarded themselves as middle-class, some were very class-conscious, some displayed resentment of those they perceived as middle-class, some asserted that they were totally unaware of class differences, others claimed to be ‘as good as anyone else’. Some who, to an observer, could best be described as working class, claimed middleclass childhoods, presumably equating middle-class with ‘respectable’; some thought of class simply in terms of money; some despite substantial improvements in their standard of living, said they could never describe themselves as anything but working-class either because they could not or did not wish to escape their origins.6

It is easy to sympathise with Roberts’ reluctance to engage with these complex, contradictory narratives. By the mid-1990s, class was one of the

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

meta-narratives that self-consciously post-modern academics were keen to deconstruct.7 Influenced by post-structuralism and the work of Foucault in particular, scholars such as Joan W. Scott, as we have noted, shifted the object of enquiry onto a discursive plane whereby the analysis of modes of power and concepts such as liberal governmentality were privileged over older approaches which stressed agency and the experience of struggle in the making of class.8 If, among historians, long-standing assumptions about the significance of class formations and class identities were undergoing revision, for some sociologists, with their eyes very much on the present, the very idea of class shaping identities and social action as it ‘traditionally’ had done in the past seemed positively archaic. In 1991 Clark and Lipset posed the question: are social classes dying? They argued that growing affluence, changes in family forms, weaker familial impact on social identities and the decline of classbased voting led to what they termed ‘the fragmentation of stratification’,9 Paulski and Waters were somewhat less equivocal in announcing The Death of Class, replaced, they argued, by ‘status conventionalism’, whereby stratification emerges in the sphere of culture and its consumption. They pointed to increasing individualism brought about by changes in employment and the declining capacity of the nation-state to control the economy. In ‘post-class’ societies ‘identity is . . . not linked to either property or organizational position’ and under advanced affluence ‘styles of consumption . . . become socially salient as markers and delimiters’.10 The capacity of individuals to shape their own biographies through consumption choices, free from ‘traditional’ family ties and social forms, is also central to arguments about the individualisation of society advanced by Beck and Giddens.11 Evidence for this structural change, Beck argues, lies not in the attitudes of individuals but in the relationship between the state and individualisation (in terms of civil and political rights and family law) and neoliberal reforms of the labour market. For Beck, while class inequalities have not disappeared, individualisation has uncoupled class culture from class position – so we no longer have classes for themselves, in Marx’s formulation. As a result ‘there are numerous “individualized class conflicts without classes”; that is, a process in which the loss of significance of classes coincides with the categorical transformation and radicalization of social inequalities’.12 One problem with testing these arguments is that the authors are sometimes at cross-purposes over what changes have been most significant and when they occurred. Beck makes it clear that he is uninterested in individualism, only in the structural changes caused by individualisation. Change here seems to date from the 1960s in some spheres, e.g. the ‘normalisation of diversity’ in family forms, and to the late 1970s in others, such as neoliberal reforms of the labour market. Other authors hark back to the effects of ‘afflu-

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Table 2.1 Extent of middle and working class identification, various years 1948–1969a Year

Number surveyed

% Middle classb

% Working class

c.1,500 c.1,500 c.1,500 c.1,500 1,415 1,835 c.1,500 3,079

52 49 49 48 48 32 34 42

43 46 46 51 52 67 62 50

1948 1949 1952 1956 1962 1963 1964 1968/69

Notes: All data based on random, stratified national samples of electors. b This includes those who identified as upper- and lower-middle class. The category ‘working class’ includes upper-working, lower/lowest-class, lower-working and poor. Numbers will not always add up to 100. Other classifications cited include upper class, ordinary, classless, ‘don’t know’ and those who refused a class identity. Sources: 1948, 1949, 1952, 1956, 1964: G. H. Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain, 1937–1975 (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 172, 203, 313, 374, 390 and 761. 1962: derived from W. G. Runciman, ‘Embourgeoisement, self-rated class and party preference’, Sociological Review, 12: 2 (1964), p. 141. 1963: M. Kahan, D. Butler and D. Stokes, ‘On the analytical division of social class’, British Journal of Sociology, 17: 2 (1966), p. 124. 1968/69: P. Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 372. a

ence’ on class identifications since the 1950s. Often they posit a mythical ‘time before’ when ‘traditional’ communities of work and association provided the social basis for identifications and actions which have since been eroded. The notion, for example, that working class identification was particularly strong in the 1940s and 1950s at a time of booming industrial production, strong trade unions and ‘stable’ working class families and communities and has since declined can be subjected to empirical testing. Table 2.1 shows the extent of middle and working class identification from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. While there are problems with the comparability of this data with regard to the consistency of question design, two elements are striking. First, and contrary to the expectations of Clark and Lipset and Paluski and Waters, in the 1940s more people identified as middle class than working class. Second, if affluence and/or social mobility were to erode working class identification into the 1950s and 1960s, one would expect middle class identification to

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

increase. In fact, the reverse happened: in percentage terms, working class identification increased over these years. Clearly, questions could be raised here over the kinds of assumptions sociologists have made about the essential strength and homogeneity of so-called ‘traditional’ working class formations and identities before the 1950s.13 It could still be the case that since the 1960s there has been a decline in the proportions of people adhering to a class identity; that class identities are decreasingly inherited from one’s family and are increasingly uncoupled from one’s current occupation. The evidence for these trends, however, is weak. The most systematic analysis of the evidence with regard to these questions has been carried out by Heath, Curtice and Elgenius using data from the British Election Surveys and the 2005 British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS).14 Comparing data on class identification from each election survey between 1964 and 1997, combined with identical questions from the 2005 BSAS, the authors concluded that ‘there has not been any move away from class identity generally or from unprompted class identity in particular’.15 While they argued that comparable data from 1964 and 2005 showed a slight decline in the degree to which people felt they had a great deal in common with others in their own class, the evidence that there was a decoupling of subjective class identification from the respondent’s own or father’s occupational situation was weak. Indeed, a multivariate analysis carried out to account for widespread post-war upward mobility concluded that ‘there was no consistent evidence that the relationship between subjective class and either father’s class or respondent’s class had weakened. In fact in the case of women respondents’ class seems to have come to matter more as partner’s class has declined’.16 Perhaps most surprisingly, given trends in social mobility and the shrinking of manual work, the proportion of people identifying as working class barely declined at all. While middle class identification had increased slightly from 30 per cent in 1964 to 37 per cent in 2005, many more people identified as working class: 65 per cent in 1964 and 57 per cent in 2005.17 The analysis of similar class-identity data from the other British Social Attitudes Surveys confirms that working class identification was robust throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as Table 2.2 shows. This data suggests that while working class identification as a whole declined, the loss was small – down just 4 per cent over thirteen years. While evidence suggests that working class identification has fallen further since then, in the 2006 BSAS, working class identification stood at nearly 60 per cent.18 At this point the British were still far from having ‘become a mainly middle class society in terms of how people see themselves’.19 The data show that the majority of people continued to identify as working class at the beginning of the twenty-first century, more doing so in percentage terms than during the alleged golden age of working class solidarity in the 1940s and

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Table 2.2 Respondents’ self-assigned class based on the British Social Attitudes Surveys, 1983–1996 (%) Class

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1989

1991

1996

Upper middle Middle Middle total

1.45 24.16 25.61

1.67 24.93 26.60

1.50 26.38 27.88

1.24 24.45 25.69

1.48 26.01 27.49

1.37 28.04 29.41

1.85 27.14 28.99

2.50 27.20 29.70

Upper working Working Working total

23.23 45.53 68.76

19.34 47.89 67.23

18.47 47.37 65.84

20.78 47.76 68.54

21.31 46.01 67.32

21.43 44.06 65.49

18.04 46.16 64.20

22.70 41.49 64.19

Poor Don’t know Not applicable

2.48 2.71 0.38

2.84 2.20 1.03

3.53 2.32 0.44

3.20 2.04 0.57

2.91 1.37 0.93

2.63 1.77 0.70

4.02 1.97 0.80

3.55 1.84 0.68

Number surveyed 1,702

1,647

1,760

3,065

2,765

2,930

1,414

2,405

Note: Question asked: ‘Most people see themselves as belonging to a particular social class. Please look at this card and tell me which social class you would say you belong to.’ Source: Calculated from www.britsocat.com.

1950s. Given the continuing relevance of class identities and the widening inequalities of income, wealth and opportunity during the 1980s and 1990s, it is little wonder that a number of sociologists resisted the idea that class analysis ought to be abandoned. Some, such as the Goldthorpe and Marshall, pointed to a body of evidence which showed that class position continued to shape educational opportunities, social mobility, voting patterns and life chances.20 Other scholars interested in the effects of class inequalities eschewed established quantitative methods and turned towards more nuanced, culturally informed understandings of class processes and identifications.21 The ‘cultural turn’ to class in sociology Those engaged in what might be termed the ‘cultural turn’ in sociological analysis have largely eschewed the methods, theories and concerns of their forbears of the 1960s and 1970s for approaches which stress the cultural, emotional and psychic dimensions of economic inequality.22 ‘Working class’ feminist academics, in particular, have been at the forefront of research which seeks to uncover what Sennett and Cobb have called the ‘hidden injuries’ of class.23 Writers such as Steedman, Walkerdine, Lucey, Reay, Lawler and Skeggs have used auto/biography, ethnography and social theory to examine the ‘classed’ social constructions of gendered selfhoods and the (sometimes) stigmatised identities of working class women.24 Skeggs’s 1997 book

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

Formations of Class and Gender stands out in particular as a landmark work of ethnography which used conceptual frameworks derived from Bourdieu and feminist theory to foreground the ways in which class and gender intersect in the formation of classed subjectivities. In her research carried out with young working class women in northern England during the 1980s and 1990s, she argued that class identifications were very rare. Skeggs argued that her interviewees were unwilling to talk openly about class because the injuries it had caused were so deep and personal.25 She highlighted the extent to which the women attempted to ‘pass’ as middle class by investing in ‘their bodies, clothes, consumption practices, leisure pursuits and homes’, while exercising vigilance in guarding against situations where they might be ‘found out’.26 Further, Skeggs argued that these desires to pass, or not be recognised as working class, are ‘generated from the experiences of being positioned by others . . . as contagious, not-belonging or dirty’.27 This ‘refusal’ of positive working class identification can be seen as a demonstration of the hegemonic power of dominant classes to stigmatise and undermine working class cultures.28 As Skeggs noted of her own interviewees: These women are highly sensitive to issues of class and difference but they have no discourses available to them to articulate it as a positive identity. Their class struggle is waged on a daily basis to overcome the denigration and delegitimizing associated with their class positioning.29

What Skeggs’s and other ethnographic accounts of gendered working class identities demonstrate so powerfully is the degree to which gender intersects with class to position subjects. Outside of industries such as cotton and textiles, where the number of women working full time engendered a somewhat more egalitarian division of household labour, it was arguably much more difficult for working class women to invest in and embrace an identity constructed around manual work than it was for men.30 Yet, as Savage notes, the nature of manual labour has changed significantly since the 1960s and has been restructured so that ‘the association between independence, masculinity and manual labour, and the subsequent cultural salience of the collar divide has been sundered.’31 For Charlesworth, the stigmatisation of the contemporary working class and the difficulties of younger people in particular in articulating a positive sense of working-classness are linked to these socio-cultural changes: Work and the presence of the union were fields in which working people could come to experience forms of dignity based in the sense of an ethical life beyond the world of consumption. Moreover, traditional industries fostered forms of association through which working people could experience a sense of personal value beyond the fight for distinction through consumption which now tends to characterize the lives of the atomized communities of current conditions.32

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Thus we can imagine that there was a time when working class cultures produced positive identifications among their members. Here’s the rub though. If it is true that there are ‘no discourses available to them to articulate it as a positive identity’, how do we explain that so many others (the majority of people questioned in every national survey between the 1960s and 2006) continued to deploy ‘working class’ as a marker of social identity? You could argue that both gender and age, and the historically and geographically specific experiences of those who talked to Charlesworth and Skeggs, mark them as different. Certainly the patterns and politics of working class cultures in Rotherham or Lancaster during the 1980s and 1990s are likely to very different for those who grew up in these places 40, 30 or even 20 years earlier. Yet this mis-match between the raw quantitative and the theorised qualitative data bothers me. ‘Who’, Skeggs asks, ‘would want to be seen as working class? (Possibly only academics are left.)’33 Possibly, but if over 60 per cent of those surveyed around this time identified themselves as ‘working class’ in preference to upper, middle class or poor, it seems likely that some of them at least could find some positive marker of working-classness which accorded with their social position and cultural experiences. Academics are unlikely to account for this group in its entirety. Indeed, some of Skeggs’s own interviewees did articulate a sense of working class identification, while others expressed a sense of feeling middle class in relation both to changing work situations and incomes and in comparison to those they considered poor, unemployed or ‘rough’.34 Locally specific geographical, political and cultural factors, alongside wider economic and historical circumstances, clearly play an important role in shaping social identifications. Given this, it makes sense to preface my discussion of individuals’ social identities by outlining both the shape of the local labour markets within which individuals worked and the basic occupational and demographic characteristics of the autobiographical sample which I am working with. Categorisations, identifications and mobilities: the sample Obtaining detailed, reliable data on occupations, class identities and familial and individual mobility patterns from published autobiographical sources is often difficult. Joanna Bourke, in her Working Class Cultures in Britain 1890–1960, argued that ‘Employing categories such as occupation, income, or relationship to modes of production as indicators of class is clearly unsatisfactory when focusing on women and different ethnic groups.’35 In her analysis, which was based on the reading of hundreds of autobiographies, she prioritised subjective understandings of class, arguing that ‘claims to objectivity are rejected in favour of adopting the labels individuals give themselves as the final word on that individual’s “class” position’.36 Both these aims are

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

laudable. As I discuss later, a fulsome consideration of the role of gender in patterning both the labour market and processes of class formation arguably renders the ‘employment aggregate’ approach to class analysis if not obsolete, then at least problematic.37 Further, sociological and historical research attests to the discursive power of ethnicity, ‘race’ and sexuality both to work alongside and to cut across class to reproduce inequalities within and between classes and class fractions.38 However, in my reading of autobiography it is relatively rare for authors to explicitly articulate a class position as such. Indeed, only a handful of the Brighton writers did so, and most of these are white, male manual workers, such as the communist and engineer Les Moss, the railway man John Langley and the former communist Arthur Thickett. Among women it is extremely rare for any subjective claim to class position to be made, the only exception being the singularly prolific Margaret Powell, on whom more later. The answer to this general silence on subjective class identification is twofold. Firstly, I used my interviews to elicit responses which were explicitly about subjective class identification and social positioning. Secondly, I relied upon the so-called ‘objective’ measures disdained by Bourke in theory but almost certainly employed in practice to build a life-history sample based upon occupation. In order for something meaningful to be said about occupation and mobility, I included only those writers and interviewees who provided data about their parents’ work and their own employment history. The characteristics of this group of 42 people, henceforth called ‘the sample’ are as follows.39 The life-history evidence attests both to the ubiquity of marriage and to the post-war trend towards divorce.40 The vast majority of informants were born to parents who were married. Most of these partnerships lasted until the death of one of the partners; in only five cases did parents separate, and in just one instance was this separation formalised through divorce.41 For the informants themselves, marriage was also normative, although a greater proportion of these ended in divorce. Of the 39 who did marry, 8 got divorced and of these, 6 subsequently remarried. In terms of sexuality we can say nothing of any value about the respondents, in that none identified as gay, bi-sexual or, indeed, straight.42 The apparent majority ‘whiteness’ of the sample arguably reproduces the relatively low levels of visible ‘non-white’ migration into Brighton during the mid-century period (according to the Census). It could be argued that ‘whiteness’ might be viewed as a kind of hegemonic, normative category eliding articulations of difference. However, we should be wary of emphasising the homogeneity of this group of people in terms of cultural identifications or political positions. It should be noted that no one in the sample claimed whiteness as an identity; certain ethnic/national identities were claimed.43 In terms of ethnicity, 7 per cent identified as being of Irish parentage; one person

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37

identified as Jewish, one as Gypsy–Traveller and one as Guyanese. Nor should we assume that these people were somehow unconnected to the wider experiences of colonialism or the other histories of the movement of peoples across the globe. In a sample which to a certain degree depended upon identifying the currently (in terms of interviewees) static in order to elicit their stories, geographical mobility (both short and long range) is characteristic of the sample. Some 20 per cent were born outside of Brighton, although the majority of these had moved from London or the Midlands. A further 20 per cent had spent significant proportions of their lives outside of the UK: in Australia, New Zealand, Guyana, Germany and Eastern Europe – moving for employment or with the military as part of national service. A number of respondents also had meaningful connections with family members who were living in Australia, Canada, the USA and parts of Europe. Short-range mobility within the south of England and Brighton was also the norm: only one respondent had resided at the same address for their entire life. In terms of the natal occupational class of respondents (i.e. their parents’ occupations), manual work dominated. Only 14 per cent of parents were in non-manual jobs – within which nursing and clerical work dominated. This pattern was reproduced in terms of respondents’ own first jobs, 69 per cent going into manual work. In terms of respondents’ subsequent occupational trajectories from their parents, intergenerational ‘occupational’ (rather than ‘social’) mobility was the norm.44 Whereas about a third of respondents experienced no change in occupational status compared to that of their parents, the remaining two-thirds did. Of these, 70 per cent were upwardly mobile, with the remaining 30 per cent experiencing some form of downward mobility. Amongst the one-third of respondents who were ‘stayers’, certain common trends in familial cultures can be identified. All but one of this group described close, warm family relationships, confirming Paul Thompson’s findings that close family cultures tend to inhibit mobility.45 The majority of this group also followed their mothers or fathers into the same or closely related occupations. Don Carter followed his father into the railway sheds to do skilled coach-building work, while Margaret Batchelor and Bert Healy became a publican and a taxi-driver respectively, like their own fathers.46 In other instances, occupational transmission was more complex. Jack Cummins had had a number of semi- and unskilled jobs when his father, a guillotine cutter in a printer’s, found him work. He writes: ‘I eventually went to work with my father in the printing trade, but we got on each other’s nerves and I got myself a job elsewhere.’47 However, after some semi-skilled manual work, and service in the Great War, he returned to the printing trade as a guillotine cutter, eventually becoming a department overseer.48 More usually, there was no direct transmission of occupations, although the occupational class of the work done by parents and children was similar.49

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

Most commonly, intergenerational downward mobility occurred among daughters of working class parents. Often this reflected the limited opportunities available for women, through occupational segregation and the generally disastrous impact of marriage and children on their own career prospects. The most common experience across the sample as a whole, however, was intergenerational upward mobility. Within this group, four distinct kinds of mobility can be identified. First, there was a mainly male group whose fathers had been labourers and semi-skilled workers who became skilled manual workers and foremen.50 A second group of about the same size, although consisting mainly of women, did skilled non-manual work, whereas their fathers were all skilled manual workers.51 Not all of these could claim (nor would want to claim) to be middle class, however, as I will discuss below. Third, there were a tiny minority who went from skilled working class backgrounds into the petty bourgeoisie, but again, I would argue, retained strong working class identities.52 Finally, there was a group who, I would argue, were not just occupationally mobile compared with their parents, but were socially mobile as well. These were all sons and daughters of skilled working class parents, often from households where their mothers were also either in skilled manual work or nursing. There were seven in total: two women went into teaching and office management (‘social class’ II),53 while a third became a professional author.54 The men became respectively a university lecturer, a chartered surveyor, a chartered engineer and a company director (all ‘level I’ occupations in the Registrar General’s schema).55 More than half of this group experienced some breach in the family through migration or the relatively early death of a parent. Occupational mobility was again the more usual experience of respondents during the course of their own careers. The 45 per cent who were upwardly mobile include most of those described above whose career paths took them into work of a higher status than their parents’. Only five of the women in the sample were upwardly mobile during their life-course. Of these, two followed a traditional path out of the working class through investment in petty property.56 Another two, Sarah Ovenden and Barbara Chapman, went into administrative and clerical work, having initially done semi-skilled and skilled manual work respectively.57 Among the small number of men who reached ‘higher professional’ status jobs, most did so by gaining the required professional qualifications, but none of these followed the conventional grammar school-to-university route of which Hoggart’s experience speaks.58 This necessarily truncated discussion of occupations and mobilities in itself tells us relatively little about the identities and politics of those described. While the effects of familial and work cultures and of education and occupational mobility on social identifications will be discussed in the next chapter, in what follows I want to outline the wider economic and political structures which shaped and indeed were shaped by these individual agents.

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39

Industries, labour markets and the ‘occupational class’ structure During the nineteenth century Brighton became established as England’s premier seaside resort, a title it could lay claim to until perhaps the end of the 1960s, when the tourist industry began to decline in importance. The economy of the town was closely tied to its western neighbours (Hove, Shoreham, Southwick and Portslade) and, of course, to London. Shoreham had long acted as Brighton’s port and industrial concerns here, at Portslade and further west, in Lancing, employed significant numbers of Brighton’s male working class population in the mid-century period. Moreover, an improved road transport network and the development of tram, trolleybus and bus routes, along with the diffusion of car ownership, meant that by the 1960s and 1970s a significant proportion of the population worked outside of the borough boundaries. The fast rail link to London meant that a not insubstantial middle class commuter population had already become established by 1914.59 In common with other seaside resorts, there were considerable seasonal fluctuations in the labour force. Working on data from 1938, Elizabeth Brunner noted that unemployment figures in resorts were much lower in the holiday season from June to September than at other times of the year. The gap was widest at Blackpool, where the summer average was 11.6 per cent; in winter this rose to 24.9 per cent. In Brighton, the seasonal fluctuation was less marked, with figures recorded at 8.5 and 10.7 per cent for summer and winter respectively.60 This was due both to Brighton’s more varied industrial base and to the fact that Brighton effectively had two seasons – with wealthier visitors patronising the town between October and December, following in the wake of the summertime crowds.61 With most of the town’s population engaged in service-sector jobs and no significant heavy industry, Brighton escaped relatively lightly in terms of unemployment during the 1920s and 1930s. Before the slump of 1930–1933, unemployment in Brighton averaged about 2,000, or fewer than 5 per cent of the insured population (as compared to 10 per cent nationally). At the depth of the Depression in 1932, the number grew to over 5,400 (11 per cent, compared to 22 per cent for Great Britain as a whole), falling to about 4,000 (8 per cent) in 1937.62 In the post-1945 period Brighton again bucked national trends, this time in the opposite direction with unemployment above average during the 1950s and 1960s, largely as a result of unemployment in sectors associated with the town’s resort function. Brighton was not wholly dependent on tourism, however, and the bases of its economic prosperity in the first half of the twentieth century were fairly diverse. Some sectors, such as engineering, commerce and administration, grew significantly between the 1940s and the 1970s, marginalising the tourist trade’s previously central role. Indeed, by the end of the 1970s, as John

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

Walton notes, tourism had become sufficiently marginal to the local economy that Brighton disappeared from the ‘resort’ category in at least two analytical listings.63 The reasons for this are multi-causal. In some respects, the period from the 1950s saw the amplification of pre-war trends – such as the increasing popularity of the town as a retirement destination and intensification of its dormitory function.64 Brighton was also affected by the transformation in the holiday trade as first middle and, later, working class holiday-makers increasingly took their holidays abroad.65 Moreover, during the middle years of the twentieth century Brighton developed an industrial structure which was unusually diverse for a seaside resort, for two primary reasons. Firstly, the town’s size and its proximity to other large urban districts to the west meant that ‘secondary’ trades associated with Brighton’s resort status, such as commerce, finance, transport, utilities and building played a greater role in the local economy than in smaller resorts.66 During the mid-century period Brighton was the largest financial and commercial centre south of London and west of Portsmouth.67 Secondly, the period after the First World War also saw the establishment and rapid expansion of light engineering and metal manufacturing industries which provided employment for a significant proportion of the town’s skilled, male manual workforce, up to the economic downturn of the mid-1970s. Brighton also offered significant opportunities for female employment, particularly in the personal service sector, and over time this resulted in a significant gender imbalance in the population.68 In 1921, for example, the town’s population of 116,457 was made up of 49,637 males and 66,820 females.69 Both the sheer number of women and the local opportunities for employment in archetypal ‘women’s occupations’ meant that throughout the middle years of the century the local female participation rate was significantly higher than the national average, as Table 2.3 demonstrates. As the table also shows, the local disparity narrowed significantly in the post-war period with the widespread trend towards increased married women’s participation. Given the ways in which occupations are stratified by gender, it makes sense to preface a consideration of the town’s occupational structure by outlining the mid-twentieth century industrial structure. This can perhaps be best thought of in terms of the development of two distinct labour markets. Figure 2.1 is a breakdown of economically active females for the years 1921, 1931 and 1951, based on census data. Personal service was by far the single most significant sector in Brighton, at its peak in 1931 employing over half the town’s 24,417 occupied women. These included nearly 1,000 boarding- and lodging-house keepers, just over 1,000 laundry workers, 449 charwomen and office cleaners and nearly 8,000 domestic servants. By 1951 there were about 4,500 fewer female domestic servants than in 1931, almost entirely accounting for the absolute fall in the

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Table 2.3 Female participation rates Great Britain and Brighton, 1921–1971 1921

1931

1951

1961

1971

Women as % occupied population (GB)

29.5

29.8

30.8

32.4

36

Women as % occupied population (Brighton)

36.9

36

35

36

39.7

Difference

+7.4

+6.2

+4.2

+3.6

+3.7

Sources: R. Price and G. S. Bain, ‘The Labour Force’, A. H. Halsey (ed.) British Social Trends Since 1900 (London, Macmillan, 1988); 1921 Census of England and Wales: Sussex County Report, Table 16 (London: HMSO, 1923); 1931 Census of England and Wales: Occupation Tables, Table 16 (London: HMSO, 1934); 1951 Census of England and Wales: Occupation Tables, Table 20 (London: HMSO, 1956); 1961 Census of England and Wales: Occupation, Industry and Socio-economic Groups, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1965); 1971 Census of England and Wales: East Sussex Economic Activity County Leaflet, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1975).

numbers employed in personal service as a whole. Brighton’s decline as a resort over the period is also indicated by a fall of about two-thirds in the number of boarding-house keepers. With the holiday industry in decline, shop and clerical work provided the main occupations for working class women who would previously have gone into service. As Figure 2.2 shows, during the 1950s and 1960s, the proportion of women employed in clothing and other manufacturing continued to fall. Clerical work in particular showed robust growth and was by 1971 the largest single occupational category and almost on a par with ‘service, sport and recreation’ in both absolute and relative terms. Skilled and semi-skilled work in textiles, clothing and other manufacturing continued to decline, while female employment in metals fell from a peak of about 1,800 (7 per cent) in 1961 to 1,300 (about 4.6 per cent) in 1971. In the non-manual sector, while sales workers hovered around 14 per cent, female professionals increased in relative and absolute terms. However, this was largely due to a consistently high concentration of women in nursing and teaching, rather than any breakthrough into the male-dominated ‘higher professions’. Nationally, the overall female participation rate remained static at around 30 per cent between 1921 and 1951. The significant rise since then has been fuelled by two important post-war trends: an increase in married women working and a substantial expansion in part-time employment. The percentage of married women in paid work rose from 26 per cent in 1951 to 49 per cent in 1971 and 62 per cent in 1981.70 Throughout the period, married women’s participation in the labour force was governed by a domestic division of labour in which women

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England 1921

1931

1951

60 55 50

Percentage

45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 Others including labourers

Storekeepers & warehousemen

Clerical

Personal service

Entertainment & sport

Public administration & defence

Professional

Commercial & financial

Transport

Building

Other manufacturing

Textiles, clothing, etc

Metal manufacture & engineering

Mining, coal, gas, water etc

Fishing & agriculture

0

Industry

Figure 2.1 Economically active females, by industry, in Brighton 1921, 1931 and 1951 Sources: 1921 Census of England and Wales: Sussex County Report, Table 16 (London: HMSO, 1923); 1931 Census of England and Wales: Occupation Tables, Table 16 (London: HMSO, 1934); 1951 Census of England and Wales: Occupation Tables, Table 20 (London: HMSO, 1956). 1966

1971

Inadequately described

Armed forces

Professionals

Storekeepers & warehousemen

Administrators & managers

Service, sport & recreation

Sales workers

Clerical workers

Labourers

Transport

Building

Other manufacturing

Textiles, clothing, leather goods

Metal manufacture & engineering (inc electrical workers)

Mining, coal, gas, water, ceramics, chemicals

Fishing & agriculture

Percentage

1961 34 32 30 28 26 24 22 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

Industry

Figure 2.2 Economically active females, by industry, in Brighton 1961, 1966 and 1971 Sources: 1961 Census of England and Wales: Occupation, Industry and Socio-economic Groups, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1965); 1966 Census of England and Wales: Sussex Economic Activity Leaflet, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1968); 1971 Census of England and Wales: East Sussex Economic Activity County Leaflet, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1975).

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43 Table 2.4 Full- and part-time workers in Britain, 1951–1981 (000s)

Men full time Men part time Per cent part time Women full time Women part time Per cent part time

1951

1961

1971

1981

15,262 47 – 6,041 784 11

15,574 174 1 5,698 1,892 25

14,430 602 4 5,413 3,288 38

13,374 362 3 5,602 3,543 39

Source: Recalculated from D. Smith Wilson, ‘A new look at the affluent worker: the good working mother in post-war Britain, Twentieth Century British History, 17: 2 (2006), p. 223.

were nearly always entirely responsible for unpaid childcare and housework in most households.71 One consequence of this ‘double burden’ has been that part-time work has accounted for most of the post-Second World War rise in women’s participation rates. Full-time female participation in the labour force has remained remarkably stable throughout the century, at around one-third of women of working age. As Table 2.4 shows however, since 1951, women’s participation in part-time work has escalated. In the key period from 1951 to 1971, while the number of full-time female workers declined, approximately 2,504,000 women joined the labour force on a part-time basis, almost all of whom were married. The reasons for this huge increase in demand for part-time work are several-fold. In the first instance, working part time allowed outside interests, money and a partial defence against the criticism that full-time working mothers neglected their children. Many women opted for part-time, rather than full-time, work as a means of managing the housekeeping and childcare duties for which they continued to take primary responsibility. Yet part-time working provided employers with a low-cost, flexible workforce and allowed employers and the state to avoid addressing many of the costliest needs of employed mothers, such as childcare.72 The difficulty of obtaining adequate, full-time childcare was reflected in both the increase in part-time working and the changing pattern of women’s employment. The 1950s saw the emergence of a two-phase or bimodal pattern, with a first peak of economic activity for women aged 20–24 and a second for those aged 45–50. During the 1960s and 1970s this bimodal pattern became more tiered, with women showing a greater propensity to work for an ever larger proportion of their lives, taking increasingly shorter breaks for child-bearing and rearing.73 The kind of occupational segregation experienced by women was not so marked in men’s employment, as Figure 2.3 demonstrates.

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England 1921

1931

1951

20 18

Percentage

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 Others including labourers

Storekeepers & warehousemen

Clerical

Personal service

Entertainment & sport

Public administration & defence

Professional

Commercial & financial

Transport

Building

Other manufacturing

Textiles, clothing, etc

Metal manufacture & engineering

Mining, coal, gas, water etc

Fishing & agriculture

0

Industry

Figure 2.3 Economically active males, by industry, in Brighton 1921, 1931 and 1951 Sources: 1921 Census of England and Wales: Sussex County Report, Table 16 (London: HMSO, 1923); 1931 Census of England and Wales: Occupation Tables, Table 16 (London: HMSO, 1934); 1951 Census of England and Wales: Occupation Tables, Table 20 (London: HMSO, 1956).

The decline in indoor domestic service had a significantly less detrimental impact on men’s employment in personal service, as compared with women. In 1931, for example, there were just 805 male servants, the other 3,000 or so enumerated in the personal-service sector being engaged in various occupations in the hotel and catering trade. Commercial and distributive trades accounted for the largest group of workers between the wars, among whom, the largest blocks consisted of about 2,300 shop-keepers and managers and a similar number of salesmen and shop assistants. The number of transport workers, who made up the next largest group of workers in 1921, fell steadily over the next few years, with technological changes accounting for declining numbers of drivers of horse-drawn vehicles and others such as messengers and porters. The building boom of the 1930s and the post-1945 years provided employment for growing numbers of skilled and unskilled workers up to the 1950s, by which time numbers levelled out at about 4,000 or so (see Figure 2.4). In manufacturing, government contracts in the 1940s helped to strengthen the machine tool, metals and engineering sectors at the expense of other producers.74 Throughout the 1960s, metals and engineering employed between 18.5 and 17 per cent of the male workforce. In general, however, male employment was fairly evenly distributed across other sectors, with construc-

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1971

Inadequately described

Armed forces

Professionals

Storekeepers & warehousemen

Administrators & managers

Service, sport & recreation

Sales workers

Clerical workers

Labourers

Transport

Building

Other manufacturing

Textiles, clothing, leather goods

Metal manufacture & engineering (inc electrical workers)

Mining, coal, gas, water, ceramics, chemicals

Fishing & agriculture

Percentage

1961 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

Industry

Figure 2.4 Economically active males, by industry, in Brighton 1961, 1966 and 1971 Sources: 1961 Census of England and Wales: Occupation, Industry and Socio-economic Groups, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1965); 1966 Census of England and Wales: Sussex Economic Activity Leaflet, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1968); 1971 Census of England and Wales: East Sussex Economic Activity County Leaflet, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1975).

tion, transport, services, sales and clerical work each accounting for between 8 and 11 per cent of the male labour force. Presaging post-1970s trends, the number of labourers shrank while the managerial and professional sectors increased in both absolute and relative terms. These developments in the local economy had a specific impact upon what I term the ‘occupational class’ structure. Using the census guides to occupational classification and other supplements, I have divided Brighton’s occupied population into six occupational classes for the dates 1931, 1961 and 1971. Comparable local figures for 1951 are unavailable, otherwise these would have been analysed. These occupational classes, which correspond to the ‘social class’ categories (shown in brackets) outlined in the Census Office’s Classification of Occupations (1970) are: higher professionals (I); employers, proprietors, managers and administrators (II); clerical and sales workers (III NM); skilled manual workers and forepersons (III M), semi-skilled workers (IV) and unskilled workers (V).75 Diverging from their classification as ‘skilled’ in the 1931 Decennial Supplement Part IIa: Occupational Mortality, those employed in personal service have been reclassified as semi-skilled workers, in line with standard historical practice.76 Table 2.5 compares the occupational class structure of the town with figures for Britain as a whole.

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

Table 2.5 Occupational class structures of Great Britain and Brighton, 1931, 1961 and 1971 1931

1961

1971

Occupational class

GB B’ton GB B’ton GB B’ton

Higher professions (I) Lower professions, employers, proprietors, managers and administrators (II) Sales and clerical workers (III NM) Skilled manual (III M) Semi-skilled manual (IV) Unskilled manual (V) Manual total

1.1 13.9

2.2 14.2

2.4 15.1

3.3 18.8

4.0 17.8

13.2 28.2 28.8 14.8 71.8

15.1 18.6 22.1 30.8 – 25.1 25.4 – 23.7 12.3 – 7.2 68.5 62.2 56.0

19.4 25.5 20.6 12.5 58.6

25.0 25.6 21.1 6.7 53.4

3.0 16.1

Note: GB data for 1931 and 1971 calculated from Gallie, ‘The labour force’; GB data from 1961 from Price and Bain, ‘The labour force’. Sources: D. Gallie, ‘The labour force’, A. H. Halsey and J. Webb (eds), Twentieth Century British Social Trends (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 288; R. Price and G. S. Bain, ‘The labour force’, A. H. Halsey (ed.), British Social Trends since 1900 (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 164; 1931 Census of England and Wales: Occupation Tables, Table 16 (London: HMSO, 1934); 1961 Census of England and Wales: Occupation, Industry and Socio-economic Groups, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1965); 1971 Census of England and Wales: East Sussex Economic Activity County Leaflet, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1975); 1931 Census of England and Wales Decennial Supplement Part II a: Occupational Mortality, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1934); General Register Office, Classification of Occupations 1960 (London: HMSO, 1960); Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Classification of Occupations 1970 (London: HMSO, 1970).

There are several features of this comparison that are worthy of comment. Firstly, Brighton had a significantly higher proportion of people employed in non-manual work during the middle years of the century compared to the average for Britain as a whole. The percentages in classes I and II were either modestly higher or slightly lower than the national average. It is in sales and clerical work that we see the significant differences, with Brighton registering a difference of plus 1.9 per cent in 1931, plus 3.5 per cent in 1961 and plus 5.6 per cent in 1971. This significant increase in work associated with the service sector coincided with a decline in manual work from a lower base than nationally. Perhaps the most important elements to note are the significantly lower proportions of unskilled labour in Brighton, and the extent to which the proportion of skilled workers barely declined at all, remaining at around a quarter of the labour force, in line with national trends. What can this data tell us about the class structure of Brighton? Well, besides the above observa-

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tion of trends in manual and non-manual employment, relatively little. Such ‘employment aggregate’ schemes tell us only about that minority of the population who are employed at the time of the survey. The so-called ‘economically’ inactive: the retired, infants and school-children, students, around 70 per cent of women are not enumerated. Nor can this data tell us very much about trends in social mobility or class as a social identity. There is abundant evidence to show that a significant proportion of jobs in the expanded nonmanual sector were filled by men who were upwardly mobile from the working class.77 A consideration of the gendering of employment opportunities and the experience of mobility muddies the water, however. It is not clear, given the well-documented concentration of women in poorly paid jobs in clerical and sales work with limited opportunities for promotion, whether those women who did lower-professional and non-manual work could be classified as middle class, particularly since many of them would have come from manual backgrounds, or might have been married to manual workers.78 There are further problems with the kind of occupational measurement of ‘class’ which the census provides. For example, since the Registrar General’s ‘social class’ scheme is based on a measure of the prestige which certain occupations enjoy, it is more a measure of status rather than of class per se. Nor is this situation particularly improved by adopting a different scale, such as that developed by John Goldthorpe, a version of which replaced the ‘social class’ scheme outlined above in 1998.79 While Goldthorpe might argue that a consideration of ‘market’ and ‘employment’ situations leads to a more robust ‘relational’ schema, it remains the case that his seven classes still betray their origins as a status scale.80 Moreover, since Goldthorpe has yet to provide empirical evidence for his allocation of occupational groups to particular classes, one has to suspect a certain degree of arbitrariness regarding their construction.81 There are other limits to the usefulness of employment aggregate schemes. One difficulty, as far as their utility as a measure of inequality is concerned, is that they do not account for the unequal distribution of wealth.82 Furthermore, aggregate measurements of occupation such as these tell us little about the actual processes of class formation, or the meanings attached to class experiences and identifications. What is required is recognition of the individualised nature of class formation, viewed as ‘the identification of trajectories rather than as an attachment to fixed positions’.83 These issues will be addressed below, but here I want to sketch the contours and constraints governing collective working class political action. Cultural hegemony and working class politics Most working class writers articulated no explicit party-political affiliation. However, ideological critiques of capitalism surfaced in a minority of accounts,

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

while an everyday, defensive politics of struggle against subordination and denigration is detectable in many more narratives. Here I have found it useful to employ Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony to describe the means by which ‘the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules’.84 In this formulation in order to maintain hegemony over those whom it dominates, the ruling class grants a certain autonomy to the subaltern (or working) class. It does so by granting it a narrow project of political or civil rights, ‘thereby pulling them into its defence and distracting them from the larger empire of elite domination’.85 Indeed, from a Gramscian perspective, the reformist, parliamentary actions of the British Labour Party were classically incorporated in this way. Gramsci’s work thus informed powerful historical analyses of British capitalism and the failures of the labour movement.86 This said, through the labour movement, the working class was able to assert collective leverage over the state, both as producers and as voters. As Offer has recently argued, collective political action brought uniform entitlements: ‘economic security, healthcare, education, housing and urban infrastructure’.87 While the politics of this was most visible during the years 1940–1950, the collective bargaining power of the working class arguably remained largely intact up to the 1980s. However, by the 1970s, we can already identify a shift in all sorts of areas to recast workers as consumers, which, combined with deindustrialisation, had profound consequences for working class politics, some of which will be outlined in this book.88 It is important therefore to consider the politics both of those on the reformist right of the labour movement and of Marxist radicals in a context in which there was both widespread electoral ‘apathy’ and consistent working class support for the Conservative Party. As Jonathon Rose has argued, memoirists are ‘not entirely representative of their class . . . if only because they are unusually articulate.’89 While this is true, the great strength of memoirs (and oral histories, one might add) is that ‘they represent an effort by working class people to write their own history’.90 While I have analysed number of classic autodidact narratives for this book, those who articulate an explicitly left-wing politics are in the minority. Indeed, Rose cautions against understanding autodidact narratives through a narrow ideological frame, noting that working class readers and writers were capable of a multiplicity of readings of canonical or ‘conservative’ texts.91 In the sample, for example (which in itself represents a small proportion of the narratives consulted) twelve respondents articulated ‘left-wing’ politics, ranging from membership of the Independent Labour Party, Labour Party activism and trade unionism through to Communist Party membership and non-aligned Marxism. A few of these articulated an explicitly Marxist understanding of capitalism and class struggle. Thus Les Moss, working in London during the First World War, got his political education from his foreman,

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Walter Hannington: ‘He’d sit us down every night and preach Marxism to us . . . he gave me the best education I’ve ever had. I’d just been the ordinary type, had the old bourgeois education and my people were steeped in it . . . [He] put the scientific case, the analysis of capitalism as Marx stated it.’92 This politicisation, combined with a voracious reading of Marx, Engels and working class classics such as Tressell’s The Ragged-trousered Philanthropist, took Moss into the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and years of trade union activism in engineering works in London and Brighton.93 More commonly, trade unionism was associated with an understanding of the protections and benefits which collective political action offered. Peter Richards, who was a shop steward for workers in the gas-pipe laying industry in Sussex in the 1970s and 1980s, was more cynical: I saw an article in the Independent, ‘Who gives a damn about the working man?’ The sad truth is the working man doesn’t give a damn about the working man, at least that’s my experience . . . The only time there was any hint of solidarity was when there was a crisis, and then it was too little too late . . . A lot of them are like closet Tories inasmuch as the only thing they see wrong with wealth and power is that it’s somebody else who’s got it, not them . . . I don’t think for one minute I’m any different, except that I see that in the long run if we all pull together it’s better for me as an individual . . . I know that in the end it benefits me if we all stick together.94

One problem with organising labour in Sussex and Brighton was the fragmented nature of the working class, as Richards observed: ‘I often envy the comradeship that a lot of working men in the old industrial areas share even when unemployed. No such feeling here. Perhaps the reason for this is that there is no one major industry, and never has been, to unify or weld the men and women together in collective hardship or adversity.’95 Indeed, in comparison to more heavily industrialised parts of the United Kingdom during the mid-twentieth century, organised labour in Brighton was comparatively weak. As with most seaside towns, Conservatives dominated parliamentary and local elections alike between the 1920s and the 1970s.96 A glance at the town’s industrial structure is indicative of some of the obstacles to workplacebased organising. Women’s work, besides often being part-time and casual, was concentrated in domestic service, the distributive and holiday trades and, increasingly after 1945, professional and administrative services – hardly (in the mid-century period) hotbeds of trade union organisation. Trade unionism was strong in the large railway works at Brighton and Lancing, as various histories and autobiographies testify.97 Engineering also saw a preponderance of very large firms where the concentrations of skilled labour made trade union organising easier. However, labour in other manufacturing, such as it was, was dispersed across a larger number of much smaller factories. Furthermore,

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

the male labour force as a whole was widely spread across a number of sectors, a significant proportion of the workforce being employed in weakly unionised areas such as sales, construction, clerical work, services and the professions. This said, labour had some successes locally. The general strike was widely observed in Brighton, where the stoppage was ‘the most complete of any town in the South of England’.98 This was not reflected in any significant growth in support for the labour movement, however. In 1929 membership of the local Labour Party and Trades Council combined was only 200.99 While membership grew slowly between the wars, the party’s biggest successes came immediately after 1945. Labour Party membership in the two constituencies peaked in 1953 at 2,532 (Kemptown) and 1,056 (Pavilion) and remained at about 2,000 across both constituencies during the 1960s and up to 1973.100 Leading socialist politicians, from Herbert Carden between the wars to Lewis Cohen in the 1950s, focused upon issues of slum clearance and council housing.101 As well they might, for up to the late 1950s, as the working class suburbanised, more and more wards fell to Labour.102 During the 1950s and 1960s local Conservatives made desperate attempts to stem the forward march of Labour in the suburbs. As detailed in Chapter 3, by far their most successful policies were to simply stop building council houses (except in connection with slum clearance schemes) and to sell off the best post-war stock. At borough level, during the 1960s these policies helped the Conservatives to re-establish an overwhelming majority on the council, which was Conservative-controlled until 1986. By this point an alliance of old Labour figures and middle-class modernisers were fertilising the soil in which the New Labour project would flourish locally during the 1990s. Prior to this point, the electoral gloom for local socialists was lightened somewhat in 1964, and again in 1966, when the maverick Labour candidate Dennis Hobden won Brighton Kemptown. Apart from Labour’s usual trouble with Trotskyite entryists in the late 1970s and 1980s, the ‘extreme’ left was relatively weak.103 The CPGB had some success with the National Unemployed Workers Movement locally in the 1930s and some strength in the engineering works during the 1940s.104 A notable success was scored in June 1948 as local communists and Jewish ex-servicemen combined with the 43 Group to smash Mosley’s union movement at the Brighton Level.105 In terms of membership, let alone electoral support, the CPGB remained a tiny party, often canvassing for Labour candidates in the 1950s. Political action was also organised outside of political parties and trade unions, and this book will pay particular attention to these movements. After the First World War and again after the Second, Harry Cowley, an anarchist chimney-sweep, organised the squatting of empty property.106 Cowley went on to lead other campaigns on behalf of pensioners and street traders. The squatter’s movement re-emerged in the 1970s, being effectively led by Bruno

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Crosby, who founded the Brighton and Hove Squatters Union.107 The 1970s, in particular, saw a resurgence of political action by groups whose membership combined middle class academics and students and local working class people. Some collectives, such as the broadly anarchist Brighton Voice, critiqued the local councils and campaigned on housing, redevelopment and numerous other issues. Other campaigns also focused upon changes in the built environment, such as the redevelopment of the Whitehawk council estate and the building of the Marina. The longest-lasting group was QueenSpark, originally formed in 1972 to challenge the redevelopment of a spa building in Queens Park. QueenSpark published numerous working class autobiographies, which have formed the basis of this study. Here, certainly in the 1970s and 1980s, academics sought to utilise the working class past to effect radical change in the present. An extended discussion of their theory and practice appears in Chapter 3. It is telling that most of the local political struggles during the middle years of the century centred upon the built environment and access to housing in particular, rather than the bitter workplace disputes which have characterised more heavily industrialised parts of the country. Indeed, the relative weakness of organised labour and workplace militancy arguably calls for an approach to social identities which can account both for the hegemonic power of elite social classes and for articulations of common experiences and identifications which reach well beyond the world of work. Understanding social identifications: ‘ordinariness’ and cultural distinction In his classic work Distinction, Bourdieu characterised French working class culture of the 1960s with its taste for necessity and principles of conformity as a product of the extent to which ‘legitimate’ high culture dominated the popular.108 The wider application of these findings to the British context has been questioned, with researchers arguing that there was less evidence of the British working class acknowledging the cultural authority of the middle classes to the same extent.109 While the important recent study by Bennett et al. argues that lack of participation in legitimate culture is fairly widespread among working class people, those they surveyed did not feel deference towards it. Acknowledging the potential limits of their questionnaire design, they nevertheless argued that the cultural practices of the working class were not distinct and that their lives were ‘organised around different priorities, conviviality, family, work, perhaps material objects, but not cultural refinement’.110 This said, evidence clearly indicated that working class people were aware of the politics of classification, that they were being judged and measured by members of other classes and were conscious of groups aligned

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

in opposition to one another.111 But how is it that people situate themselves in relation to other people in society? How do they mobilise class as a social identity? In order to explore these questions, we need to turn to the historical and sociological research of Savage and his colleagues. In work based upon interviews with largely middle class respondents in Manchester during 2000, Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst made the case that, while reluctant to claim class identifications, people commonly situated themselves as ‘ordinary’ when asked to describe their social location.112 This means of social identification had a longer history, and claims to ordinariness were used by middle and working class alike during the mid-century period. As Savage argues in his re-analysis of the Affluent Worker material on subjective class identifications first collected in the early 1960s: Very few working class identifiers indicated any shame about their class identity. Nearly always it seemed to be a means of claiming that they were an ordinary, run of the mill kind of individual, without any special advantages in life . . . Ordinariness is a means of refusing both a stigmatized, pathologized identity . . . at the same time that it refuses a privileged position.113

This means of social identification through claims to ‘ordinariness’ was evident in the Brighton life-history data. While issues of class identity were rarely explicitly addressed in published working class autobiographies, I asked questions of my interviewees designed to provoke discussion of class identification and social location.114 Most considered themselves as working class; for example: Oh we grew up in the lower working class . . . we were lower working class; things were very poor.115 [We were] working class you know, yeah definitely, definitely.116 I would have said the same: that we were very much working class, perhaps tending towards the poor working class.117

Contrary to Savage’s Manchester interviewees, I found that there was little embarrassment or reluctance to use the language of class, although the sorts of identifications people made differed. Furthermore, it could be argued that interviewees’ often complex responses to these questions reflect the complexity inherent in any discussion of class, rather than being indicative of ‘defensiveness’ or lack of reflexivity. Following Payne and Grew, it makes greater sense to see references to ordinariness as rhetorical attempts to establish class identities, rather than attempts to establish ‘normalness’.118 This was done in two ways. Firstly, claims were made for the cultural and social similarity of families in a spatially bounded neighbourhood. Thus Elizabeth Pateman, growing up in the Hanover district of Brighton during the 1930s and 1940s, commented that ‘we were all the same’.119 This could be combined, as in the following account, with an understanding that other people within or out-

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side the family were of a different socio-economic status: ‘Well I went to a church where there were people who were better off but we all mixed in. But round about here they were all about the same you know. We didn’t go much to other places in those days. But my cousin, her people were better off but her father died suddenly. Well, he was killed in the war and then we were all roughly the same. Although my people weren’t very well off they were very refined – they had to be.’120 Here Iris Pegnall identifies as respectably working class; an identification which is premised upon a shared familial and neighbourhood culture (in which the neighbours are ‘the same’ socially) but which also recognises people of different status or class both within the wider family and in an associative context. A second way of employing ordinariness to identify in class terms related to a depiction of the class structure that placed ‘the working class/our class’ as ordinary in comparison to both ‘the rich/upper class’ and ‘the poor’. Thus Barry Nutkins, in response to the question ‘which social classes were there?’ replied: ‘Working Class, the rich and the paupers.’121 This was often combined with group identification and social categorisation in spatial and monetary terms, as Jack Potter argued: I would say . . . there was us and there was the rich. The rich were the people with the big houses at Roedean and that sort of thing. We would never have aspired to anything like that. Although I suppose we didn’t actually classify ourselves as poor we weren’t really very well off and I suppose working class is really the best definition . . . Regarding the neighbours: I think we all considered ourselves to be about the same. Certainly financially, status-wise there was very much an even keel. I can’t remember there being any rich people in the street, I can’t remember any being really poor. We were all about the same.122

For friends Claire Barrowdale and Nora Hardy, however, it was apparent that there were class differences between them, as Claire argued: We were definitely working class our family. Yours [Nora’s family] were probably middle class [laughs]. And then there were the toffs weren’t there; had all the money. We called those the upper class. Well there were definitely classes in those days, weren’t there?123

As Claire suggests, there was a feeling among some respondents that class divisions had become less definite and less fixed over time. For Linda Potter, the social divisions of her childhood were: ‘Very much the poor people; the working class; the middle class and the snobs. Very much so then. I don’t think it’s quite so much now but definitely it was more so then.’124 For Linda, her own mobility through marriage and the improved financial circumstances which resulted from combined salaries and her own children leaving home led her to reflect that class positions were not fixed and that social mobility was possible. This was, arguably, particularly true for those mainly

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

male manual workers who benefited from the expanded opportunities for upward social mobility in the post-war period. From working class to ‘technical’ middle class? Social mobility and social identifications Born into a working class family in 1937, Linda’s husband, Jack, left secondary modern school aged 15 and tried to get an indentured apprenticeship as a sign writer. However, positions were thin on the ground and the one employer who would have taken him on would not grant him day release. In the end, through a friend, he was taken on as a ‘shop lad’ in the leather shop at Lancing locomotive works. After completing a five-year apprenticeship as a finisher in the carpentry shop, he transferred to the drawing office. Through night classes at college he built up an impressive series of qualifications. A first-class City and Guilds was followed by an Ordinary National Certificate (ONC) and then Higher National Certificates (HNC) in mechanical and production engineering, and he later qualified as a chartered engineer. Following the closure of Lancing works he transferred to the locomotive design office at Brighton. He followed this by working at Croydon in the drawing office and on the training section, finishing his career as training engineer for Network South-East.125 While Jack considered himself working class during his childhood and apprenticeship, by the time I interviewed him in 2005 his social identifications had changed: I would have said that when I was a babe and we lived in Whitehawk we were in the lower class bracket . . . When I first got married we perhaps had moved into a middle class. I’d have said middle to lower class there. It was still a struggle. It was tight but we were making our way in life and I wouldn’t have said we were poor because we managed to get our own house, so I’d say we were middle class. And I would say now retired, having got a pension and everything, we’re probably now in the middle to upper end of the middle class. I wouldn’t say by any means that we were rich. I mean I haven’t got a yacht in the harbour or anything like that. I wouldn’t want one. But we’re comfortable; comfortable middle class I’d say.126

Jack’s transition from working to middle class is marked both by a decreasing need to struggle and a sense that economic and cultural capital is being accrued. Importantly, he situates home ownership as a marker of middleclassness, although his transition from manual worker to salaried engineer is arguably of similar significance.127 However, while he claims to be middle class now, this is also situated as an ‘ordinary’ social location by comparison with the rich. It is an identity which sits comfortably with his sense of self; perhaps not altogether unsurprising, considering his emergence from a manual work culture characterised by what Savage terms ‘rugged individualism’.128

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Certainly, Jack’s account suggests that people might acquire class cultural attributes and adapt their natal-class dispositions with greater ease than some of Bourdieu’s arguments about cultural capital imply.129 Another mobility narrative which suggests a relatively comfortable relationship between occupational mobility and social identification is Quentin Fenner’s. Born in 1946, he grew up on the council estates of Hollingbury and Moulsecoomb. His mother’s work as a hairdresser supported him and his two siblings following the death of his father in 1956. On leaving his secondary modern school aged 16, he trained as building society manager and worked as a bus conductor before finding his vocation in property. He went on to become a successful estate agent and chartered surveyor, a company director, a Justice of the Peace and Lord Lieutenant of Sussex. His account of class is shot through with ambivalence: Well there was working class and middle class. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time at all. Working class, middle class and I suppose the upper classes; you know that kind of thing. I wasn’t that conscious of it though really, growing up. I mean, society was changing. I grew up in the sixties really, late fifties and sixties. It was the grand liberation really [chuckles]. [Do you think it was possible to move between classes?] Well you could certainly come from working class to middle class because I guess we were sort of working class, though really we were middle class certainly on my father’s side. My grandfather owned a dairy in Eastbourne. I think they’d come down from the Midlands some generations before. But my [maternal] grandfather was a tram driver at the depot in Lewes Road: he was very working class. You couldn’t really aspire to upper class because you didn’t have the opportunity to gain the money, but in any case you probably wouldn’t be accepted.130

This account is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, there is an initial reluctance to countenance class and its effects, perhaps unsurprisingly given, his own experience of mobility. Yet this is ascribed to impersonal social forces (‘I grew up in the sixties. It was the grand liberation really’), rather than individual talent, and is prefaced by both a bipartite and soon afterwards a tripartite description of the class structure. Secondly, when the question about mobility is answered, the tripartite structure is again invoked with, I would argue, middle and working class being positioned as ‘ordinary’ and upper class as impossible to aspire to, thus recognising that there were economic and cultural barriers to mobility, despite the post-war room for upward mobility, of which his own experience is a prime example. For Malcolm Foster, the transition from manual worker to company director was one which, arguably, required a sharper reframing of social identifications and political affinities. The only child of a master-butcher father and a mother who, having left service, helped with her husband’s business,

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

Foster left grammar school in 1948 and became an apprentice at a machinetool engineering firm. Like Potter, he obtained his ONC and HNC through evening classes at technical college. Following his national service, he was promoted to the position of planning engineer. From here he progressed to the positions of chief planning engineer, assistant works manager, and eventually works manager and company director. He went on to various management positions in other engineering companies and finished his working life as a freelance estate agent.131 Unlike Jack Potter, who remained a trade unionist and Labour supporter throughout his career, Malcolm Foster’s experience in the private sector was very different: There was a time when I was at school I remember, I thought communism was good. Didn’t last very long but I saw all these rotten bosses and people who had money and I never had any . . . then when I started work I joined the union. I joined the union not knowing what I was joining and they had a strike. There was a one-day strike and I went on strike for that one day and I thought what a bloody waste of time this is.132

He articulated a sense that his experience of mobility required changing sides in the class war: Of course once you get on the management side you then go down the other track then. I finished up spending a lot of my time negotiating with trade unions . . . By the time I finished work I was extreme right wing [laughs]. I don’t think extreme’s the right word but I was certainly seeing things from a different perspective, that’s for sure . . . I’m not a particularly political animal; I’ve certainly not been involved in any political parties. But you see one of my bosses was chairman of Brighton Conservatives. We knew what side he was on. One shouldn’t really talk about sides but it does happen all the same. Vickers were very much a right-wing company, that’s for sure. But no, I think I’ve sort of been dragged into politics rather than any other way.133

What kind of evidence are these accounts in terms of thinking about the relationship between middle and working class identities and the workplace? In an important intervention, Savage has recently re-analysed qualitative data collected between the 1930s and the 1990s to argue that the stand-off between working and middle class eroded from the 1950s and 1960s onwards. Drawing particularly on Mass Observation, data from Bott’s account of social networks and material collected for the Affluent Worker studies, Savage argues that middle class identities shifted from an insistence on cultural hierarchies in the 1930s to one which increasingly embraced technique, merit and skill as markers of leadership and managerial capacity. This [i]ncreasing preparedness to use a language of merit, educational qualification . . . effaced overt and visible classifications . . . This is the germ of a process, now

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hegemonic, which constructs the educated middle classes as the quintessential autonomous and reflexive individuals of contemporary capitalism, as those who no longer need to position themselves as superior to the working class or the gentry, but as those who command the key terms of contemporary normalcy, hence masking their own privileges and powers.134

I do not contest Savage’s argument that a technical middle class social identity, latent in the 1930s and 1940s, became an increasingly significant formation after the 1960s.135 Furthermore, Savage correctly notes that by 1990, people were employing increasingly ‘individualised’, denaturalised and extensive narratives to account for their class identifications, narratives which, moreover, often employed the language of social science and the specificities of place to resist being easily positioned or classified.136 What is perhaps more questionable is Savage’s periodisation of commensurate shifts in working class identities. Based on the re-analysis of data collected on the social identifications made by Luton car workers and Tyneside shipyard workers in the 1960s, Savage argues that the class framings of these workers differentiated an ascriptive upper class from an ordinary popular class: ‘these workers therefore, did not see white collar workers, technicians or even managers in terms of class, and therefore did not see class relations precisely where sociologists and socialists saw them – at the point of production in the large capitalist factory’.137 There is, however, abundant evidence that during the 1970s and 1980s factory workers did see white-collar workers and managers in terms of class. Malcolm Foster clearly understood his decision to go from the shop-floor to the manager’s office as crossing lines in the class war. Indeed, it is difficult to explain the abysmal industrial relations which characterised much of British industry during the 1970s and 1980s if we do not see class antipathy between workers and managers as playing some role. The hostility expressed during major clashes such as the Grunwick dispute and the 1984/85 miners’ strike owe part of their origins to the breakdown in relationships between management and workforce.138 More than this, though, there is abundant evidence that while there was antipathy between different groups of workers and between rank and file and shop stewards, attitudes among workers to management and white-collar staff were often framed in terms of class hostility.139 The best evidence for this comes from Luton car workers, surveyed by Devine during the 1980s. Noting that interviewees felt that status differences and past snobberies were declining, she nevertheless asserted that: There was one exception where a sense of ‘class’ was still important, and this was found at the Vauxhall plant. The men and women in the sample who worked at Vauxhall experienced a sense of inferiority. That is manual workers at the car plant were aware of a sense of superiority and separateness held by the foremen and the white collar workers which placed them in an inferior position.140

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This element of class conflict in the workplace was one that Goldthorpe et al.’s 1960s study of ‘affluent workers’ in Luton had downplayed. Devine goes on to point out that the worker/management divide, while a ‘considerable source of grievance’ to the workers, was also combined with antipathy towards a wealthy upper class, which was similar to that expressed by their 1960s predecessors.141 It is plausible, then, to argue that Savage has taken evidence from the 1960s, where industrial relations were not as bad as the 1970s and 1980s, and projected them into the latter periods, where we in fact find renewed class-based antipathy between workers and their superiors in the workplace. This supplements existing understandings of social differences outside of the workplace, whereby a plutocratic or gentrified upper class is still identified as having different interests to ‘ordinary workers’: the two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. The foregoing analysis has also drawn out the complexity of narratives of mobility and class identification. One clear question which arises is the gendered nature of these trajectories and identities. The quantitative evidence suggests that transition from skilled manual work to technical and managerial positions was significantly more likely for men than for women, while qualitative research has suggested possible reasons.142 Indeed, recent research has shown the ‘difficulties’ faced by women in embracing ‘hegemonic’ reflexive or technical middle class identities, the pathways to these being explicitly patterned by gender.143 Even among male manual workers, such trajectories were patterned by workplace politics and familial cultures. While some such as Jack managed the transition with relative ease – remaining close to the manual cultures of the shop floor and loyal to the union and the labour movement, for the likes of Malcolm in the private sector, the cultural and political break required in becoming a manager was necessarily sharper. Those who made the transition from ordinary worker to management or some supervisory role and flaunted this change in status provoked resentment and anger among other workers who resented their pretentions.144 In the following section, I unpack the significance of the term ‘snob’ and explore how working class identities are shaped by familial and neighbourhood cultures. ‘I was chuffed to know where I came from’: working class cultures and structures of feeling As we saw above, one element informing working class identifications as ‘ordinary’ was a concern to distance oneself from those who had middle class or superior pretentions. Snobbery has its own dialectic: a snob is someone who both slavishly admires their social superiors and looks down upon those whom they feel superior to. In a wonderful exchange, Fred and Bett Netley turn the issue of snobbery over:

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Bett: I tell you something . . . You know, they were secretive in them days, it was seen as forbidden to say certain things. I had to find out for my bloody self. But, they seemed to be snobs, you know, some were snobs. Fred: As far as class goes, it’s like the bloke said, he said ‘I’ve got an inverted snob down my road’ [laughs]. If I go past and he’s in the garden he stands on his head and looks up his nose at me [laughs]. The thing is Bett: Very reserved. Fred: I take this from my origins and my dad and that, and Bett: There used to be a few snobs when I went to school, you know, la-de-da you know, thinking they was it all the time.145

What this exchange reveals is the extent to which working class identifications are formed relationally, and the different ways in which claims to ordinariness or difference could be made. From the outset, Bett describes a process of identity formation where questions of classification loom large: this is not a ‘homogenous’, monolithic working class but one in which judgements are being made about who belongs and who, because of perceived claims to cultural distinction, does not. The deployment of humour here is also significant, not just in Fred’s attempt to wrestle control of the narrative but also because it is emblematic of his use of the comic as a resource through which to make wider points about working class cultures and identities. The cultural politics of humour in shaping social identifications is one which has been underresearched in the British context, which prefers to dwell upon the embarrassment, shame, disgust and humiliation associated with class positioning.146 This is not to say that the Netleys were unaware of their being classified and positioned by others – far from it. Extending his ‘inverted’ metaphor, Fred argued: You’re aware that you’re being put down and it affects people in different ways. Some people grow up with low self-esteem and with others it goes the other way. You get this inverted feeling and you feel that bit superior. I think I went the second way. I was always chuffed to know where I came from.147

He goes on to describe what might be most usefully characterised as a ‘structure of feeling’148 in which material poverty engendered shared values, which were manifest in local culture: Thinking back, there wasn’t too many of my friends who had low self-esteem funnily enough. I think because of the identity of people growing up together in a common condition you had a peer group to relate to. When you belong to something, it makes you feel that you belong and that you’re wanted and needed . . . I’ve thought a lot about this; it’s not just knowing the personality; it’s knowing and understanding the culture and what’s expected of you in it. This is where edges have blurred today. We belong to a certain particular class. Never looked upon as underclass but a certain working class for want of a better phrase. And everybody related with each other.149

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As an articulation of how social identities are formed this could scarcely be bettered. The stress upon the role of place, of social and economic commonalities in forging internal group identifications, set against outside classifications and the recognised historical contingency of this class-cultural formation (‘this is where edges have blurred today’), inform what follows in this chapter and, indeed, the remainder of the book. The Netleys’ attitudes towards the middle classes are also worthy of comment. Taking his cue from his upbringing, in which his parents taught him to ‘respect everybody’, Fred articulated an egalitarian humanism in which differences of sexuality, gender, ethnicity and class were recognised but were not mobilised through negative stereotyping. His activism in the Labour Party brought him into close contact with middle class members, whom he fondly recalled. He described the friendships they made with middle class neighbours when they lived at Sussex Square in the early 1960s. However, he also related in great detail the legal battle which he fought (and won) against their then landlord.150 Thus, a willingness to take people as they found them did not override a preparedness to struggle individually and collectively to advance the interests of working class people. In Margaret Powell’s parlour: domestic service and social memory The intimate sites of class conflict and the making of social identifications are vividly brought into focus in the work of another working class autodidact, Margaret Powell. Powell, who lived much of her life in Hove, became a figure of national as well as local significance. She was unusual in that she explicitly addressed questions of classed experiences and social identities in her published work. Powell’s oeuvre was as eclectic as it was extensive. The book that established her public profile was Below Stairs, a memoir of her life ‘in service’ between the wars.151 Written with humour and wit and tinged with the bitter sting of remembered wrongs, humiliations and craftily served revenge, the book was both critically acclaimed and massively popular. Picked up by Macmillan’s Pan imprint in 1970, it was into its fifth printing by 1971. Below Stairs was followed by five further volumes of ‘auto/biography’;152 two cookbooks;153 four books of travel and social commentary154 and at least six novels.155 In 1973 Powell collaborated with Kevin Laffan to produce Beryl’s Lot, a television series based upon Powell’s post-service life as a part-time char seeking to broaden her horizons through evening classes.156 Set very much in the present, the programme, produced by Yorkshire Television and broadcast on ITV, ran for three series between 1974 and 1977 and resulted in three books which accompanied the show. Powell also established herself as a media personality in her own right during the 1970s, appearing on numerous chat shows, in advertisements

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and even releasing a seven-inch 45 rpm record: an updated version of The Laughing Policeman.157 Powell’s personal transformation from lowly servant and ‘daily’ to popular writer and celebrity clearly found a ready audience of millions during the period. Given her sometimes bitter excoriation of her employers’ behaviour, it would be unwise to elide her evident popularity with some kind of nostalgia for the days of domestic service. Her works placed her firmly in a tradition of servants’ writing and humour, yet her precociousness, high public profile and ability to communicate across different media and genres are arguably worthy of more sustained attention.158 Here, however, I will confine myself to a textual analysis of her evolving articulation of social identities in her published autobiographies. Powell began her life in service as a kitchen-maid and worked her way up to the position of cook. She depicts a world in which minute divisions of status were observed between servants: ‘the parlour maid, the housemaid, and the cook always thought nanny and nursemaid considered themselves better than they were, and they did, of course’.159 Yet opposition to their employers enabled intra-servant identification: It didn’t matter how much we servants quarrelled among ourselves, a united front was always presented to them upstairs . . . ‘Them’ was the enemy, ‘Them’ overworked us, and ‘Them’ underpaid us, and to ‘Them’ servants were a race apart, a necessary evil . . . If ‘Them’ upstairs could have heard the conversations the parlourmaids carried down from upstairs, they would have realized that our impassive expressions and respectful demeanours hid scorn and derision.160

Looking back on these intense, classed feelings Powell noted that ‘[from] what I’ve said it may seem as if I was very embittered with my life in domestic service. Bitterness does come to the fore because it was the strong feeling I had.’161 However, she reflected on the aspirations which service generated: ‘Domestic service does give you an insight and perhaps an inspiration for a better kind of life. You do think about the way they lived and maybe unbeknown to yourself you try to emulate it . . . So despite what it may sound like, I’m not embittered about having to go into domestic service. I do often wonder what would have happened if I could have realized my ambition and been a teacher, but I’m happy now, and as my knowledge increases and my reading widens, I look forward to a happy future.’162 The immediate future, through adult education classes and a meeting with BBC producer Leigh Crutchley, brought publishing and broadcasting success. For Powell, this ‘was what I had always wanted, I was a Somebody, not a big Somebody, but a person in my own right, a person people wanted to meet – and have I revelled in it!’163 The world of service had a profound effect on Powell’s sense of self-worth:

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‘Dignity was something that in my early working life the working classes were not supposed to be able to afford. As a kitchenmaid I was at everyone’s beck and call and the kind of work I was doing meant that I always looked scruffy. So I felt what I was called, a skivvy, and feeling like this gave me an inferiority complex, or what we would call today a chip on my shoulder.’164 Ironically, her skill as a writer enabled her to craft popular, unsentimental narratives of these degrading experiences, a skill which brought wealth, celebrity and longed-for dignity. Work for the BBC brought Powell back into contact with the upper classes, although this time round she was doing the interrogating. However, preparing for an interview with the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, a nervous Powell noted: ‘for me to go in at the front door instead of the basement and talk to the owner – well it was something I never thought would happen’.165 Reflecting upon the interview, Powell felt ambivalent. Furious that her BBC producer had turned down the Duke’s invitation to stay to lunch, Powell thought that her meeting with the Duke ‘showed me that in spite of all my talk about “them up there and us below stairs”, if one can possibly associate with them, one does so – which makes us all really snobs at heart, or perhaps just ordinary mortals’.166 Yet in wider political terms, Powell’s attitude towards the upper classes remained oppositional: ‘I think the working class need the aristocracy; we have to have something to fight against . . . We must continue to fight for the fact that all men are equal regardless that some of course will always be more equal than others.’167 Given her experiences, it is hardly surprising that Powell, in Savage’s terms, differentiated an ascriptive upper class from an ordinary popular class. Yet Powell’s own mobility made her a liminal figure, a professional writer but one who traded on her experiences as a ‘skivvy’; the celebrity servant, the wise old char with the infectious laugh – a persona which, arguably, fixed her within the very class from which she’d escaped. This was a balancing act which nevertheless was performed with alacrity, wit and self-deprecating humour, demonstrating that identities and processes of categorisation are never fixed but are always in process. Part of Powell’s extraordinary success in telling the story of her ‘ordinary’ life must surely be that she gave voice to the experiences of millions of women whose lives had been shaped by domestic service between the wars. This social memory was still being reworked and negotiated in popular culture during the 1960s and 1970s, as the popularity of Powell and television dramas such as Upstairs, Downstairs testify. What follows below is an exploration of the experiences of those born in the post-war period, where live-in domestic service was virtually unknown, where women’s work in the lower professions and non-manual sectors were expanding and where opportunities for male upward social mobility were growing.

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‘When you try to change class all the values instilled in you don’t make sense anymore’: education, social mobility and the still working class For further reflections on the differential effects which mobility had on individuals’ social identifications we can turn to Sarah Ovenden’s narrative. Born into a working class family in 1949, she went to the local primary school until the age of 11, when her Catholic mother sent her to a convent school. Sarah recalled: That was a bit strange, because having been brought up on a council estate and going to the local school, when most of my friends went to the local secondary, I went off to the convent. I wasn’t a boarder, I was a daygirl, but it was a bit odd. I got to know a whole different group of people. But sort of more middle class kids than I’d been used to mixing with. My mother was determined to make a lady of me!168

Mixing with girls from other social backgrounds engendered a consciousness of class differences: I certainly wasn’t aware of them till I went to my convent school . . . So what were the divisions? Accent certainly, income, different kinds of jobs. My best friend at school, her father was in oil in India [laughs]. When I brought her home – she didn’t like the school lunch so she’d come home with me and she’d bring her sandwiches and my gran had been ironing – I remember this day really well. It was when I first knew her. Gran came in, she’d given us our dinner and she came in with a pile of ironing to put away in the airing cupboard, which was over the fireplace. And my friend Gail said, ‘Is that your housekeeper?’ [Pained laugh]. I said ‘No, that’s my gran’ [laughter]. ‘Is that your housekeeper?’: brilliant! So that was her world, you know. They lived in a big flat in Sussex Square . . . That was the difference . . . It’s interesting because when you’re brought up part and part like that (my partner’s exactly the same, he was brought up in both working class and middle class environments) you feel like a bit of a misfit, like you don’t really quite belong in either. It takes a while to work out where you do belong eventually . . . I used to don my school uniform and my accent and go to school, then come home, take it all off and go play in the street.169

For Sarah, her education placed her in a somewhat ambivalent position, one in which the differences between herself and her peers might become painfully apparent. Indeed, in engaging with difficulties associated with her liminal social position she downplays the significance of social mobility and emphasises the centrality of her working class origins to her sense of social identity: I got a slightly better education than some of my friends and therefore was able to perhaps earn a bit more money. My husband, it’s really interesting, because both my husband who I was with for thirty-three years and my now partner,

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England their backgrounds were quite similar to mine in some ways. I think you’re drawn to the kinds of people that fit you, match you if you like. In some senses I moved – I don’t even like to call it up – into a different kind of setting to my childhood one, but on the other hand my parents – because they brought property and my mum had had some money left to her when her mother died in Ireland – she bought property, here so in some senses they shifted from being a waitress and a factory worker to being landlord and landlady, so they did a bit better than the average person if you like. Just enough to make their lives a bit more comfortable as they grew older. So it’s partly about increased income. It’s partly about education, although neither of my parents were particularly well educated. I suppose it’s partly about attitudes as well. But I don’t think you ever, even if you wanted to if you do want to – but I don’t particularly want to – I don’t think you ever forget where you came from. I don’t think you would feel particularly comfortable moving away from that. I think it would be a pretence and I think some people do pretend.170

Sarah Ovenden’s account raises questions about both the difficulty and the desirability of reframing social identifications as a result of social mobility. She doesn’t want to ‘pass’ as middle class and argues that, while others might want to, there is something inauthentic about such pretence. The ambiguities associated with social mobility and the power of class to register emotionally and culturally are rendered vividly by Jim Colegate, born into a working class family in Shoreham in 1959. He explained that he felt ‘proudly working class’ from a young age: We were very firmly aware that we were different to most people in the neighbourhood [a lower middle class suburb]. My mother was proudly working class – defiantly working class you might say – and aggressively republican and egalitarian. She drummed this into us from a very early age. From where I stood, I realised society was divided into the posh people – who didn’t do any ‘real’ work, the working people – who did everything, and the ‘council estate scroungers’ – who like the posh people didn’t do any work. This was the view of most members of my class which I suppose you could call the skilled working class. Many members of my wider family were of this class of people and their perspective was a very powerful and pervasive one. It was dominated by values like prudence and self-reliance. What is important about this perspective is that it viewed the council estate scroungers with as much derision as it did the rich – neither did any work but were parasites living off the backs of the workers. My father always referred to those that lived on council estates as ‘fucking parasites’. He objected to the fact that his taxes went to support them. My mother on the other hand tended to focus on the upper classes. She thought that the monarchy and the aristocracy were the real ‘parasites’.171

Once again, the foundation of working class identification is seen to be the family. Being working class is constructed as ordinary; imbued with values

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of prudence, self-reliance and hard work. In particular, the working class is situated as ‘normal’ as compared with visceral characterisations of both the upper class and the poor. On leaving school at 16, Jim began work as a lathe operator in a local engineering firm. Eventually work as a marine engineer took him to Australia. Here he changed career and became an academic, having taken degrees in history as a mature student. His response to the question ‘do you think it was possible to move from one class to another?’ is illuminating: I do but I think that it is difficult. Being working class for instance, is not so much your material conditions but your state of mind. To move class is to step way outside your comfort zone. When you try to change class all the values instilled in you don’t make sense anymore. I live, work and socialise with middle class people now but there are many times when I feel uncomfortable and don’t know how to behave. Growing up working class is to have all sorts of insecurities programmed into you. Every time you want to try some kind of challenge you will be dragged back (unintentionally) by family and peer group who will ‘take the piss’ – in a friendly way of course – out of your endeavours. Middle class children are told by their parents that they can do anything they put their minds to, and that they should not fear failure. Working class kids are told that there is always someone better than you, and that perhaps you shouldn’t try anything extraordinary in case you fail and everybody laughs at you. Middle class kids are taught only to look after themselves, working class kids are taught to look after everyone . . . Being working class means caring about what others think of you, being middle class doesn’t. It takes an awful lot of introspection to overcome this subconscious programming . . . By profession [university lecturer] I should be middle class, but I still feel working class. I live in a working class suburb among working class people because that’s where I feel comfortable.172

Here the class dispositions and values instilled in him during his childhood are tested by frequent contact with middle class people, resulting in feelings of discomfort and insecurity. Importantly, part of the way in which Jim manages these feelings is by limiting his contact with the middle class by ‘living in a working class suburb among working class people’. What Jim’s account demonstrates, like the others cited, is that class is experienced and felt in a variety of sites and locations. Culturally, a sense of class is subtly formed in the childhood home, with dispositions, values and capitals being reinforced, challenged or modified through subsequent experiences of the wider neighbourhood, the education system and the labour market. While recognising the salience of work for social identities, I would argue that attempts to infer class position from occupation alone are inadequate. As I have demonstrated, we need an approach which recognises both the complex ways in which families accrue and transmit capital, and the myriad ways in which individuals and groups are subject to discursive classification via the state and its institutions

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and through everyday practices of social distinction. This means attending to the ways in which people talk about class and social difference and the discursive means by which they both locate themselves and classify others. It will be apparent from the foregoing discussions that it is far from clear to me that class has lost its power as a form of social identification in the post-war period, an argument developed below. Conclusion: working class identifications and social change All the qualitative and quantitative evidence presented above indicates that class measured in terms of a social identity, as a means of identifying with and against others, remains as salient as ever for most people. What is remarkable, in quantitative terms, is the extent to which working class self-description has remained robust in the face of deindustrialisation, the decline in manual work cultures, major changes in the working class and in family structures and the waning of the Labour Party as a party representing working class interests. In this context it is the continuing strength of working class self-identification which seems to me most remarkable, not the small drop in the percentage of people identifying as working class and the slight rise in middle class identifications. How might we explain the latter trends? Well, social mobility, as we have seen, results in some people adjusting their social identifications with relative ease. Savage may well be correct in his assertion that middle class identities were recast in the 1960s to embrace technique, merit and skill. Indeed upward mobility from the manual working class would, arguably, help to reinforce this trend. The absolute and relative decline in manual work and, in particular, the massive decline in skilled manual work and its cultures of skill-based individualism and collective political organisation would account in part for declining working class identification. To this we might add the extent to which the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s systematically attacked trade unions and demonised those poorer sections of the working class left dependent on welfare by their economic policies. Heath and his colleagues may well be correct in pointing to the restructuring of Labour Party politics and its abandonment of the working class as a constituency since 1994 as another salient factor.173 Of course, for much of the period c.1920–c.1975, particularly during the post-war years, those elements highlighted above (massive deindustrialisation, the decline in union power, the shift in Labour politics away from the working class) were largely absent. This said, we need to explain why working class identification has remained so robust. The explanation lies in the extent to which familial, neighbourhood and work cultures shaped class identifications, and continued to do so despite individual occupational mobility and the economic and political developments since the mid-1970s. As we have

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seen above, people could and did positively evaluate their own experiences of neighbourhood, family, work place and home and set these against negative stigmatising representations of the working class. Major sites of group identification were the work place, the family and the wider neighbourhood. Occupational experience constitutes but one element upon which social identities are formed, and people’s sense of class is shaped by their experiences in homes, schools, streets and other sites of everyday life. The ‘ordinariness’ of these experiences was, arguably, underpinned by what we might term the normative elements of those in the life-history sample: their tendency to marry into ostensibly heterosexual relationships and the fact that most respondents were white and did not articulate a separate ethnic identity. It ought to be emphasised that while people were aware that they were often classified by others, relatively few felt shame about being working class. Among some people, it was when they moved into other educational, public or occupational spaces where they encountered others (the middle classes) that feelings of being judged and falling short came to the fore. Yet this did not mean that they dis-identified; rather, the reverse was true: it reinforced a sense of working class pride. In seeking to understand their ‘ordinary’ social locations, people often made spatial comparisons in order to distance themselves from those they were not. For Jim Colegate, for example, it is the articulation of social difference through spatial metaphors which is most striking. Growing up, he was conscious of his family being different to their middle class neighbours (‘my mother derided them as “snobs” ’) and the ‘council estate scroungers’ of his father’s imagination.174 Several other accounts represented social classes or class fractions as occupying or colonising particular kinds of urban space. Thus Nora Hardy and Claire Barrowdale, discussing the strength of class consciousness in the 1930s and 1940s, commented: Nora: Oh people were very conscious of it, I mean, even within classes wasn’t it? You wouldn’t call it anything different but . . . Moulsecoomb was known to be a low class area at that time wasn’t it? Claire: The dregs, if you lived in Moulsecoomb or Bevendean.175

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, suburban council estates occupied by ‘scroungers’ came to replace the poor of the urban slums as ‘the other’ in the middle class social imaginary. Yet the relationship between class and space is mutable and historically contingent. Thus Moulsecoomb in the 1920s was discursively cast as an upper-working class/lower-middle class suburb of respectable citizens, whereas by the 1990s it was represented as a marginal, hard-to-let estate occupied by a scrounging, feckless, criminal underclass. In the following chapter I explore in greater detail the relationship between class and place by analysing both the shifting social geography of Brighton and the ways in which classed representations of particular urban and suburban

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neighbourhoods have been articulated, challenged and critiqued in cultural discourse and everyday life. Notes 1 R. Jenkins, ‘Categorization: identity, social process and epistemology’, Current Sociology, 48: 3 (2000), p. 11. 2 B. Rogaly and B. Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (London: Palgrave, 2009), p. 9; Jenkins, ‘Categorization’, p. 12. 3 E. Hobsbawm, ‘The forward march of Labour halted?’ Marxism Today, September (1978), pp. 282–286. 4 E. Hopkins, The Rise and Decline of the English Working Class, 1918–1990 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991), pp. 272–278. 5 E. Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working Class Women, 1890– 1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 3. 6 E. Roberts, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 7. 7 For a flavour of the debates which this linguistic turn generated see K. Jenkins (ed.), The Postmodern History Reader (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 239–384. 8 For critiques of this shift, see G. Stedman Jones, ‘The determinist fix: some obstacles to the further development of the linguistic approach to history in the 1990s’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), pp. 19–33; G. Eley and K. Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 56–137; D. Dworkin, Class Struggles (London: Pearson, 2007), pp. 63–133. 9 T. N. Clark and S. M. Lipset, ‘Are social classes dying?’ International Sociology, 6: 4 (1991), pp. 401–408. 10 J. Paluski and M. Waters, The Death of Class (London: Sage, 1996), p. 156. 11 U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); A. Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). 12 U. Beck, ‘Beyond class and nation: reframing social inequalities in a globalizing world’, British Journal of Sociology, 58: 4 (2007), p. 686. For a valuable critique see W. Atkinson, ‘Beck, individualization and the death of class: a critique’, British Journal of Sociology, 58: 3 (2007), pp. 349–366. W. Atkinson, ‘Beyond false oppositions: a reply to Beck’, British Journal of Sociology, 58: 4 (2007), pp. 707–715. 13 While historians are not immune to this charge (see E. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984), pp. 176–193) others have tended to be more cautious in dissecting the relationships between politics, popular culture and social identities; see for example P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 14 A. Heath, J. Curtice and G. Elgenius, ‘Individualization and the decline of class identity’, M. Whetherall (ed.), Identity in the 21st Century: New Trends in Changing Times (London: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 21–40.

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15 Ibid., p. 27. 16 Ibid., p. 33; A. Heath, J. Curtice and G. Elgenius, ‘Changing patterns of class identity, 1963–2005’, CREST Working Paper, 112 (2009). 17 Heath, Curtice and Elgenius, ‘Individualization and the decline of class identity’, p. 28. Derived from table 1.1. 18 The British Social Attitudes Survey put working class identification at 59.27 per cent in 2006. See www.britsocat.com. 19 K. Roberts, Class in Modern Britain (London: Palgrave, 2001) p. 69. 20 J. Goldthorpe and G. Marshall, ‘The promising future of class analysis: a response to recent critiques’, Sociology, 26: 3 (1992), pp. 381–400. 21 For a useful critical appraisal of these trends, see F. Devine and M. Savage, ‘The cultural turn, sociology and class analysis’, F. Devine et al. (eds.), Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyles (London: Palgrave, 2005). 22 For a compelling argument for a rapprochement between the older tradition and recent culturalist trends, see R. Crompton and J. Scott, ‘Class analysis: beyond the cultural turn’, F. Devine et al. (eds.), Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyles (London: Palgrave, 2005). 23 R. Sennett and J. Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (London: Norton, 1972). See for example the essays in P. Mahoney and C. Zmroczek (eds), Class Matters: ‘Working-Class’ Women’s Perspectives on Social Class (London: Taylor & Francis, 1997). 24 See C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago, 1986); V. Walkerdine, H. Lucey and J. Melody, Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class (New York: New York University Press, 2001); B. Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender (London: Sage, 1997); S. Lawler, Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects (London: Routledge, 2000); D. Reay, ‘Beyond consciousness? The psychic landscape of social class’, Sociology, 39: 5 (2005). 25 Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, esp. chapter 5. 26 Ibid., pp. 82–91 and 95. 27 Ibid., p. 92. 28 M. Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), p. 108. 29 Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, p. 95. 30 See Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation, p. 129. On male manual work cultures during the mid-century period see M. Savage, ‘Sociology, class and male manual work cultures’, J. McILroy, N. Fishman and A. Campbell (eds), British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964–79 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 31 Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation, p. 139. 32 S. J. Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 158–159. 33 Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, p. 95. 34 Ibid., pp. 75–78. 35 J. Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890–1960 (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 4.

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36 Ibid. 37 See the discussion in R. Crompton, Class and Stratification: An Introduction to Current Debates, 2nd edn (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 94–98. 38 See for example the empirical work in Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (London: Cornell University Press, 1994); W. Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, Race and National Identity, 1945– 1964 (London: University College London Press, 1998) and Skeggs’s comments on the intersectionality of class, ‘race’, sexuality and gender in B. Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 3–4. 39 Fuller details are provided in the Biographical Appendix. 40 P. Thane, ‘Family life and “normality” in postwar British culture’, R. Bessel and D. Schumann (eds), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 41 Denis Hill, Harry Denman, Barbara Chapman and Peter Richards’ parents separated, while Bert Healy’s divorced. 42 For histories of love, sexual identities and sexual behaviour covering this period see C. Langhamer, ‘Adultery in post-war England’, History Workshop Journal, 62 (2006); C. Langhamer, ‘Love and courtship in mid-twentieth century England’, Historical Journal, 50: 1 (2007); S. Szreter and K. Fisher, Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Lives, 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Brighton Ourstory Project, Daring Hearts: Lesbian and Gay Lives of 50s and 60s Brighton (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1992). 43 For a useful guide to the conceptualisation of ‘whiteness’ and empirical research into white identities in Britain, see S. Clarke and S. Garner, White Identities: A Critical Sociological Approach (London: Pluto Press, 2010). 44 An extended discussion of mobility can be found in B. Jones, ‘Neighbourhood, family and home: the working class experience in mid-twentieth century Brighton’, DPhil thesis (Sussex, 2008), pp. 71–85. The best account of social mobility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is A. Miles, Social Mobility in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England (London: Macmillan, 1999), which should be supplemented with J. H. Goldthorpe, C. Llewellyn and C. Payne, Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 45 P. Thompson, ‘Women, men, and transgenerational family influences in social mobility’, D. Bertaux and P. Thompson (eds), Pathways to Social Class: A Qualitative Approach to Social Mobility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 45–51. 46 D. Carter, Just One of a Large Family (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1992); D. Carter, J. Kent and G. Hart, Pullman Craftsmen (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1992); M. Batchelor, A Life Behind Bars (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1999); B. Healey, Hard Times and Easy Terms (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1980). 47 J. Cummins, The Landlord Cometh (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1981), p. 13. 48 Ibid., p. 49. 49 See O. Masterson, The Circle of Life (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1986); T. Wren,

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51

52 53

54 55 56

57

58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65

71

A  Flying Sparks (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1998); E. Pateman, interview (2005); F. and B. Netley, interview (2005). See E. Mason, A Working Man: A Century of Hove Memories (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1998); A. Paul, Hard Work and No Consideration: 51 Years a Carpenter–Joiner, 1917–1968 (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1981); D. Noakes, Faded Rainbow: Our Married Years (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1980); G. Noakes, To Be a Farmer’s Boy (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1977); P. Richards, Thirty-three Years in the Trenches: Memoirs of a Sussex Working Man, Complied by N. Osmond (Oxford: White Cockade, 2001); F. Netley, interview (2005). J. Knight, A Ha’P’orth of Sweets: A Child’s 1930s–40s (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1997); B. Chapman, Boxing Day Baby (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1994); C.  Barrowdale and N. Hardy, interview (2005); L. Potter, interview (2005); I. Pegnall, interview (2005). W. Bradshaw, interview (2005); E. Smith, Little Ethel Smith (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1992). See R. Dunn, Moulsecoomb Days: Learning and Teaching on a Brighton Council Estate, 1922–1947 (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1990); S. Ovenden, interview (2005). See M. Powell, The Treasure Upstairs (London: Pan, 1972). J. Colegate, questionnaire (2005) ; Q. Fenner, interview (2005) ; J. Potter, interview (2005); M. Foster, interview (2005). E. Smith, Little Ethel Smith (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1992); Batchelor, A Life Behind Bars. On this movement in the previous generation see M. Foster, interview (2005). Ovenden trained and worked as a hairdresser on leaving school at 15. Following the birth of her daughter she changed career path and worked as a housekeeper in a residential home. She subsequently became an office manager: S. Ovenden, interview (2005). Chapman worked as a waitress and barmaid before retraining as a telephonist and clerical worker: B. Chapman, Boxing Day Baby (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1994). The only one of the sample to follow the more conventional grammar school route was Ruby Dunn, who left to do teacher training at Goldsmiths, aged 18: see R. Dunn, Moulsecoomb Days: Learning and Teaching on a Brighton Council Estate, 1922–1947 (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1990). S. Farrant, ‘London by the sea: resort development on the south coast of England, 1880–1939’, Journal of Contemporary History, 22: 1 (1987), p. 142. Cited in J. K. Walton, The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 150–151. See Shields, Places on the Margin, p. 86; Walton, The English Seaside Resort, pp. 196–207. County Borough of Brighton, Town and Country Planning Act 1947: Report of the Survey (Brighton, 1952), p. 32. Walton, The British Seaside, p. 46. Gilbert, Brighton: Old Ocean’s Bauble, pp. 237–238. On the timing and impact of these changes in patterns of holiday making see

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66 67 68

69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80

81

82 83

The working class in mid-twentieth-century England Walton, The British Seaside, pp. 64–66; S. Barton, Working Class Holidays and Popular Tourism, 1840–1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), chapter 8. Walton, The British Seaside, p. 151. Gilbert, Brighton: Old Ocean’s Bauble, p. 250. See S. Davies and B. Morley, County Borough Elections in England and Wales,  1919–38: A Comparative Analysis, Vol. 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 116. Census of England and Wales 1921, Occupation tables (London: HMSO, 1924), Table 16. Figures from J. Lewis, Women in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 74. For general trends in women’s work, both paid and unpaid, see Lewis, Women in Britain since 1945, chapter 3. For a more detailed account see D. Smith Wilson, ‘A new look at the affluent worker: the good working mother in post-war Britain, Twentieth Century British History, 17: 2 (2006), pp. 223–225. Lewis, Women in Britain since 1945, p. 74. Allen West & Co., The Allen West Story (Brighton: Allen West, 1960), pp. 36–43. See Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Classification of Occupations 1970 (London: HMSO, 1970), appendix B 1. For example G. Routh, Occupation and Pay in Great Britain, 1906–79 (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 32–35. See J. H. Goldthorpe, C. Llewellyn and C. Payne, Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); A. H. Halsey, A. Heath and J. M. Ridge, Origins and Destinations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). For a summary of these findings see A. Heath, Social Mobility (London: Fontana, 1981), p. 55. See R. Crompton and G. Jones, White Collar Proletariat: Deskilling and Gender in the Clerical Labour Process (London: Macmillan, 1984); S. Dex, Women’s Occupational Mobility: A Lifetime Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1987). K. Roberts, Class in Modern Britain (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 24–28. See J. H. Goldthorpe and K. Hope, The Social Grading of Occupations: A New Approach and Scale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). On its adoption to form the basis of Goldthorpe’s seven-class scheme see Goldthorpe, Llewellyn and Payne, Social Mobility and Class Structure, 2nd edn, pp. 40–42. As Marshall, Newby, Rose and Volger note: ‘Goldthorpe’s procedure for operationalizing his notion of market situation and work situation is not fully explained since we are never shown the available evidence according to which occupational categories are judged to be similarly placed in these terms.’ See G. Marshall, H. Newby, R. Rose and C. Volger, Social Class in Modern Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1988), p. 306. R. Crompton, Class and Stratification: An Introduction to Current Debates, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 109. Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation, p. 95.

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84 Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (eds), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), p. 244. 85 A. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 2002), p. 22. 86 P. Anderson, ‘Origins of the present crisis’ and ‘The figures of descent’, English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 15–47 and 121–192. 87 A. Offer, ‘British manual workers: from producers to consumers, c.1950–2000’, Contemporary British History, 22: 4 (2008), p. 541. 88 Ibid., passim. 89 J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 2. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., pp. 7–9. 92 L. Moss, Live and Learn: A Life and Struggle for Progress (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1979), p. 21. Hannington later became national organiser of the National Unemployed Workers Movement. See W. Hannington, Unemployed Struggles, 1919–1936 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977). 93 On the life and work of Tressell see F. C. Ball, One of the Damned: The Life and Times of Robert Tressell (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973). 94 P. Richards, Thirty-three Years in the Trenches, p. 160. 95 Ibid., p. 161. 96 Walton, The British Seaside, pp. 169–172. 97 See A. C. Perryman, Life at Brighton Loco Works (Lingfield: The Oakwood Press, 1971); D. Carter, J. Kent and G. Hart, Pullman Craftsmen; A. Durr (ed.) A History of Brighton Trades Council and Labour Movement, 1890–1970 (Brighton: The Trades Council, 1974). 98 C. Musgrave, Life in Brighton: From the Earliest Times to the Present (London: Faber, 1970), p. 313; Durr, A., Who Were the Guilty? General Strike Brighton, 1926 (Brighton: Brighton Labour Party, 1976). 99 T. Forester, The Labour Party and the Working Class (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 156. 100 Ibid., p. 157. 101 See D. Carden and A. Carden, Carden of Brighton (Brighton: D and A. Carden, 2008), pp. 66–72; D. Winner, They Called Him Mr Brighton: A Biography of Socialist Peer Lewis Cohen (Lewes: The Book Guild, 1999), pp. 55–62. 102 S. Davies and B. Morley, County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919–38, pp. 127–128; T. Carder, The Encyclopaedia of Brighton (Lewes: East Sussex County Libraries, 1990), entry 47. 103 For a partial view from the Stalinist right see R. Hill, Underdog Brighton (Brighton: Iconoclast Press, 1991), pp. 242–252. 104 E. Trory, Between the Wars (Hove: Crabtree Press, 1974); L. Moss, Live and Learn: a Life and Struggle for Progress (Brighton, QueenSpark, 1979), pp. 39–65. 105 M. Beckman, The 43 Group, 2nd edn (London: Centerprise, 1993), pp. 123–127 106 See QueenSpark Collective, Who Was Harry Cowley? (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1984).

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107 Evening Argus, 9 February 2002. 108 P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 372–386. 109 See the arguments in Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation, pp.  108–110; T. Bennett, M. Savage, E. Silva, A. Warde, M. Gayo-Cal and D. Wright, Culture, Class, Distinction (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 27–31 and 197–198. 110 Bennett et al., Culture, Class, Distinction, pp. 202 and 212. 111 Ibid., pp. 205–210. 112 M. Savage, G. Bagnall and B. Longhurst, ‘Ordinary, ambivalent and defensive: class identities in the north west of England’, Sociology, 35: 4 (2001). 113 M. Savage, ‘Working-class identities in the 1960s: revisiting the affluent worker study’, Sociology, 39: 5 (2005), p. 938. 114 These were ‘Lots of people divided society at the time into different social classes. What do you think the different ones were at that time? What class would you say your family belonged to? Do you think it was possible to move from one class to another in those days? What about now?’ 115 W. Bradshaw, interview (2005), p. 22. 116 L. Potter, interview (2005), p. 9. 117 J. Potter, interview (2005), p. 13. 118 G. Payne and C. Grew, ‘Unpacking ‘class ambivalence’: some conceptual and methodological issues in accessing class cultures’, Sociology, 39: 5 (2005), p. 904. 119 E. Pateman, interview (2005), p. 38. 120 I. Pegnall, interview (2005), p. 4. 121 B. Nutkins, questionnaire (2006), p. 9. 122 J. Potter, interview (2005), p. 13. 123 N. Hardy and C. Barrowdale, interview (2005), p. 13. 124 L. Potter, interview (2005), p. 13. 125 J. Potter, interview (2005). 126 J. Potter, interview (2005), p. 22. 127 On the salience of these for middle class identity during the period, see S. Gunn and R. Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl (London: Cassell, 2002), pp. 52–77 and 151–164. 128 Savage, ‘Sociology, class and male manual work cultures.’ 129 Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation, p. 108. 130 Q. Fenner, interview (2005), p. 3. 131 M. Foster, interview (2005). 132 M. Foster, interview (2005), p. 15. 133 Ibid. 134 M. Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 235. 135 Savage’s analysis of Mass Observation’s 1939 directive replies on class are consistent with Hinton’s, although Savage emphasises the latent ‘technocratic’ elements, see J. Hinton, ‘The “class” complex’: mass observation and cultural distinction in pre-war Britain’, Past and Present, 199: 1 (2008); M. Savage, ‘Affluence and social

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136 137 138

139

140 141 142

143

144 145 146

147 148 149 150 151 152

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change in the making of technocratic middle class identities: Britain, 1939–1955’, Contemporary British History, 22: 4 (2008). Savage, Identities and Social Change, pp. 238–244. Ibid., p. 235. See A. Beckett, When the Light Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber, 2009), pp. 358–403; J. Phillips, ‘Workplace conflict and the origins of the 1984–85 miners’ strike in Scotland’, Twentieth Century British History, 20: 2 (2009), pp. 152–172. See H. Beynon, Working for Ford (London: Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 155–156 and passim; J. Cousins and R. Brown ‘Patterns of paradox: shipbuilding workers’ images of society’, M. Bulmer (ed.), Working Class Images of Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 55–82. F. Devine, Affluent Workers Revisited: Privatism and the Working Class (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), p. 168. Ibid., pp. 169–170; Savage, ‘Working-class identities in the 1960s’, p. 939. See Savage, Class Analysis and Social Transformation, pp. 121–147; S. Halford, M. Savage and A. Witz, Gender, Careers and Organisations: Current Developments in Banking, Nursing and Local Government (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). See, for example J. Wajcman and B. Martin, ‘Narratives of identity in modern management: the corrosion of gender difference?’, Sociology, 36: 4 (2002), pp. 985–1002; S. Halford and P. Leonard, Negotiating Gendered Identities at Work: Place, Space and Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); G. Hebson, ‘Renewing class analysis in studies of the workplace: a comparison of workingclass and middle-class women’s aspirations and identities’, Sociology, 43: 1 (2009), pp. 27–44. Devine, Affluent Workers Revisited, pp. 168–169. F. and B. Netley, interview (2005), p. 21 An excellent exception is A. Medhurst, A National Joke: Popular Comedy and English Cultural Identities (London: Routledge, 2007). Sayer has a good go at unpacking the diverse moral sentiments relating to class, although he does tend to focus rather more on shame and resentment than pride, egalitarianism and respect; see A. Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 139–212. F. Netley, interview (2003), p. 3. See R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 128–130. F. and B. Netley, interview (2005), pp. 1–2. Ibid., pp. 2–5. M. Powell, Below Stairs (London: Peter Davies, 1968). M. Powell, Climbing the Stairs (London: Peter Davies, 1969); M. Powell, The Treasure Upstairs, 2nd edn (London: Pan, 1972); M. Powell, My Mother and I (London: Michael Joseph, 1972). M. Powell, Albert, My Consort (London: Sphere Books, 1976); M. Powell, My Children and I (London: Michael Joseph, 1977). M. Powell, The Margaret Powell Cookery Book (London: Pan, 1972); M. Powell, Sweet Making for Children (London, Pan, 1983).

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154 M. Powell, Margaret Powell’s London Season (London: Peter Davies, 1972); M.  Powell, Margaret Powell in America (London: Michael Joseph, 1973); M. Powell, Margaret Powell’s Common Market (London: Michael Joseph, 1974); M. Powell, Margaret Powell Down Under (London: Michael Joseph, 1976). 155 M. Powell, Woman Waiting (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1978); M. Powell, Servant’s Hall (London: Michael Joseph, 1979); M. Powell, First Love, Last Love (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1980); M. Powell, Maids and Mistresses (London: Michael Joseph, 1981); M. Powell, The Housekeeper (London: Michael Joseph, 1982); M. Powell, The Butler’s Revenge (London: Michael Joseph, 1984). 156 Beryl’s Lot, prod. K. Laffan (Yorkshire: ITV, 1973–1977). 157 M. Powell, I Laugh and Laugh and Laugh (London: RCA Records, 1972). Powell spanned the gamut from late-night BBC Radio 4 (with her show Upstairs, downstairs: in Margaret Powell’s parlour) to prime-time ITV, appearing on Larry Grayson’s Shut that door; see Daily Mirror, 27 March, 1971; 15 September, 1972. 158 On servants’ stories and servants’ humour see respectively R. Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 150–166; L. Delap, ‘Kitchen-sink laughter: domestic service humour in twentieth century Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 49: 3 (2010), pp. 623–654. 159 Powell, Below Stairs, pp. 63–64. Emphasis in original. 160 Ibid., pp. 73–74. 161 Ibid., p. 159. 162 Ibid., p. 159. 163 Powell, The Treasure Upstairs, p. 158. 164 Powell, Climbing the Stairs, p. 151. 165 Ibid., pp. 151–152. 166 Ibid., p. 156. 167 Ibid., p. 155. 168 S. Ovenden, interview (2005), p 3. 169 Ibid., p. 5. 170 Ibid., p. 6. 171 J. Colegate, questionnaire (2005), p. 2. 172 Ibid., p. 5. 173 Heath, Curtice and Elgenius, ‘Individualization and the decline of class identity’, pp. 35–37. 174 J. Colegate, questionnaire (2005), pp. 2 & 4. 175 N. Hardy and C. Barrowdale, interview (2005), p. 13.

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Chapter 3

Place: the social geography of working class housing

This chapter focuses on the twin modernising forces which reshaped working class neighbourhoods in the period between the 1920s and the mid-1970s: slum clearance and council housing. In terms of design, layout, household space and amenities the suburban council estates of the mid-twentieth century were a vast improvement on the kind of housing occupied by working class families in the pre-First World War period. Yet suburbanisation, arguably, came at a cost. During the 1950s and 1960s sociologists fell over themselves to outline the differences between the so-called ‘traditional’ patterns of working class life in urban neighbourhoods and those found on the new estates.1 While arguments about the loss of community are overdrawn, as I show in Chapter 4, the spatial elements of class formation and the role played by slum clearance and council housing in socio-spatial polarisation have barely begun to be explored by historians. Here I show that, as older districts were reduced to rubble between the 1930s and the 1960s, the stigma associated with the slums settled on some of the mainly suburban council estates of the inter-war period. This chapter explains how and why. Hugely significant in its implications for socio-spatial polarisation and working class fragmentation, historians have largely ignored council house sales and residualisation during the mid-century period. Sociologists have charted the residualisation of council housing at regional and national level in the UK, and the socio-spatial polarisation which resulted.2 However, most of this work has focused on the period since the 1980s, and on the impact of ‘right to buy’ legislation in particular. Only a few researchers have identified council house sales as an element in residualisation prior to the 1980s, and this largely in terms of national housing policy and aggregate trends.3 Uniquely, therefore, this account historicises residualisation, dating it to the 1930s, and demonstrates that council house sales played a key role between the 1950s and the mid-1970s, well before ‘right to buy’ furthered this process. Slum clearance also played a key role in residualisation and stigmatisation, and it is perhaps surprising that a process which displaced 3.5 million people in England and Wales in the post-war period alone has received little

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attention from historians.4 Indeed, besides Shapely’s work on Manchester there are no other historical studies of slum clearance and its relationship to council housing encompassing the post-war years, a significant lacuna which this chapter aims to fill.5 The original ‘slums’ were a legacy of the nineteenth century, as were those attempts, through clearance and council housing, to mitigate the worst effects of sub-standard housing. It is important to emphasise that the material structure of many of these neighbourhoods survived the mid-twentieth century vogue for wholesale destruction. Some districts emerged unscathed at the end of the 1960s, to be improved, conserved and gentrified. This vogue for conserving, retrofitting and fetishising ‘authentic’ nineteenth-century period properties was very much a mid-twentieth century cultural phenomenon. To working class residents at the beginning of the century, the housing legacy of Brighton’s Regency and Victorian heyday must have been rather less pleasing. The Victorian housing legacy, the Edwardian housing crisis and the impact of the First World War During the nineteenth century and for much of the first half of the twentieth, the majority of Brighton’s working class population lived in the St Peters, St Johns, Hanover, Pier and Elm Grove wards in neighbourhoods largely built between about 1800 and 1870.6 Prior to the 1920s relatively little was done to remedy sub-standard housing in these districts, and the emphasis was on slum clearance, which could exacerbate overcrowding in other areas.7 Under the Torrens and Cross Acts of 1868 and 1875, local authorities were empowered to demolish both individual houses and whole areas deemed unfit for human habitation. Property owners had to be compensated, and although councils could build on cleared sites, these houses had to be sold to private owners within 10 years.8 The provisions of these Acts were consolidated under the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act, which also re-enacted and strengthened the Shaftsbury Act of 1851, which gave authorities the power to construct and own working class lodging houses. All this legislation was permissive, and with no subsidies forthcoming from the Exchequer, they were rarely used by municipalities to build on any scale.9 In the 1880s and 1890s three areas in east Brighton (Little St James Street, Cumberland Place and Spa Street) were cleared, largely due to the efforts of an energetic medical officer of health. In the case of Spa Street, the council built and let houses on the site and on land at St Helen’s Road, May Road, Elm Grove and Dewe Road.10 Generally, the rents were beyond the means of the 2,158 people displaced by the schemes, but there was no dramatic increase in overcrowding in surrounding districts.11 In a comprehensive report on slum clearance and overcrowding, Arthur Newsholme, the town’s medical officer of health,

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noted that while there was an increase in population density in William, Cavendish and Baxter Streets following the Cumberland Place clearance, legal overcrowding declined in all of the poorest districts and across the borough between 1891 and 1901.12 However, in the poorest areas he found an increase in the number of houses with two or more families in occupation, from 22 per cent in 1890 to 29 per cent in 1903, despite a falling birth rate.13 While acknowledging this increase in social overcrowding, Newsholme argued that it had been ameliorated by the ‘general reshuffling’ of the population as better off artisans moved into the new council houses and privately built dwellings on the outskirts of the town, freeing up older, cheaper accommodation in the centre.14 Prior to 1914, housing provision was dominated by the private rental market, which accounted for perhaps 90 per cent of all dwellings.15 The general reshuffling (also sometimes called ‘filtering up’) which Newsholme described depended upon a buoyant private market. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, that market slumped. After a recovery in 1903, the Edwardian housing market went into decline as tighter building regulations, increased costs and a decline in capital investment brought a downturn in completions. Locally, whereas the period 1901–1905 saw 2,573 houses constructed, only 178 were built between 1911 and 1915.16 This fall in the number of new builds mattered less for the working class (since building for low-income tenants had usually been confined to peaks in the cycle) than did significant rate increases and higher rents.17 Demolitions in central areas by rail companies, commercial interests and municipalities inflated land prices and caused a real rent increase of 47 per cent between 1875 and 1900. In the same period, rateable values increased and revenues from the rates rose, by 100 and 200 per cent respectively, in real terms, the burden falling disproportionately on the lower-paid.18 The kinds of municipal improvement projects carried out by Brighton Corporation from the 1890s – slum clearance, parks, gas, water, road and sanitary improvements – were paid for through local property taxation. Although house owners often tried to pass these increases on to tenants, the value of their assets began to fall, declining by 40–50 per cent between 1902 and 1912. Moreover, empty properties were rates exempt, while they could also gain in value through land appreciation, which meant that there was little incentive to improve or maintain property, nor even to let it, if sufficient rents could not be obtained.19 This pre-war collapse in investment in the private rented sector made some sort of state intervention in the market likely; however, the precise form which this took was governed by the particular balance of social forces which emerged during the conflict. House building slowed further during the war, with just 50,000 new houses added to the national stock in the four years from 1915.20 By the time of the Armistice in 1918, an estimated 600,000 houses needed to be built to

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fulfil post-war demand.21 However, it was by no means inevitable that these ‘habitations fit for the heroes who have won the war’22 (to use Lloyd George’s often-paraphrased words) would be built by local authorities using subsidies from the Exchequer. The changes in housing tenure during the inter-war period, when building for owner-occupiers and council tenants outstripped building for private rental, must be understood in the context of the social and political isolation of the private landlord and the political action of sections of the working class.23 In 1915 the government passed the Rent and Mortgage Restrictions Act, which fixed rents at their pre-war levels. This followed several years of agitation by tenant groups which culminated in a series of rent strikes in 1915. Strongest in Glasgow, where there was a bitter history of antagonism between tenants and landlords, the protests against wartime rent hikes culminated in the rapid passage of the legislation which penalised landlords.24 Throughout the war, tenant agitation continued, while the question of what to do about the housing shortage remained unanswered. The demands of sections of the labour movement and tenants groups were that some form of state housing should be introduced. By the time the Royal Commission on Scottish Housing recommended that subsidies for municipal housing be introduced in 1917, this increasingly seemed to be the most viable option. Private builders, labouring under spiralling costs, proved as incapable of building new houses in sufficient numbers during the war as they had before it. In Brighton between 1916 and 1918, just 15 houses were built by private enterprise, whilst not a single house was constructed in 1919.25 It was politically inconceivable that subsidies could be granted exclusively to private landlords, given the degree to which they were reviled.26 It was equally inexpedient to remove rent controls at the cessation of hostilities, given the prospect that landlords would again increase rents in a period of great scarcity. As Daunton argues, rent decontrol would be delayed ‘until the market had been restored to equilibrium, which would be achieved in part through a massive one off provision of council housing’.27 The 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act (or ‘Addison’ Act, after the then minister for health) did just that: it obliged local authorities to survey the housing needs in their area and to use Exchequer subsidies to build to meet them. The passage of legislation later in 1919, providing grants to private house builders, tends to support the argument that council provision was seen as a temporary corrective to the market. In 1921 the Addison programme was halted as the expense of providing subsidies to cover losses greater than those covered by a 1d rate increase became apparent.28 Only 213,821 of the 500,000 houses originally envisaged had been completed, of which 170,090 were built by local authorities, 4,545 by public utility societies and 39,186 by private enterprise under the lump-sum subsidy of the Additional Powers Act.29 Government desire to deflate in order to return to the gold standard, combined with shortages of resources and dif-

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ficulties in raising sufficient monies to pay for schemes, saw many postponed, whilst elsewhere (as in Brighton) building costs per house doubled between 1918 and 1920.30 Brighton and the housing crisis Whilst Swenarton’s argument that the post-war housing programme was an ad hoc attempt to avert impending revolution is perhaps insufficiently nuanced, rent strikes, labour militancy and problematic demobilisation undoubtedly influenced policy makers.31 In December 1918 Brighton council made a compulsory purchase order on 94 acres of land at Moulsecoomb for the erection of 500 workers’ houses.32 In early January 1919 7,000 soldiers based at Shoreham and Southwick marched to Brighton to protest to the mayor (Herbert Carden) at the delay in demobilisation.33 Although there was no violence and the men returned to camp, the episode was subsequently dubbed the ‘Shoreham mutiny’, owing to the troops’ disobeying orders. Carden, one of the few socialists on the council, used the spectre of Bolshevism to criticise the opponents of municipal housing schemes. In April 1919 the Brighton Herald carried an account of a debate in the council chamber over the funding of municipal housing schemes. The article read: A further protest from Alderman Titcomb that the scheme would ‘absolutely kill people like myself’ drew the reply from the mayor [Herbert Carden] that ‘you may look on this as an insurance against Bolshevism.’ It is admitted said the Mayor, that there are half a million houses today in which the conditions under which the workers are living are shocking, ‘and they will not put up with it.’34

Whether fear of a Bolshevik Brighton or the mayor’s rhetoric influenced councillors is unrecorded; however, in February the local housing programme was expanded by another 350 units.35 Even this plan fell short of the anticipated demand. In October, under the terms of the 1919 Act, the Brighton medical officer of health estimated that 3,152 working class houses would be required during the next three years.36 It is perhaps indicative of the severity of the housing shortage that some working class people were not prepared to wait for the council to build to meet their housing needs. Between 1920 and 1923 a committee of exservicemen (calling themselves ‘vigilantes’) installed former soldiers and their families in empty properties.37 Led by Harry Cowley, a charismatic chimney sweep, the committee commandeered about 60 houses in this period. On each occasion the family received physical protection from the committee until it could negotiate a suitable rent with the property owner.38 Despite local support for their actions, relative to the scale of the housing shortage their impact was limited. This first campaign petered out, but the ‘vigilantes’ emerged again after 1945, this time exciting much more official concern

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following the success of the Communist Party in organising mass squats in London and elsewhere in the South.39 In the 1920s local working class sympathy for the squatters was reinforced when it emerged that the first council houses built under the Addison Act would be available only to the most affluent wartime heroes. Council housing and slum clearance in Brighton between the wars Between 1919 and 1939 Brighton council built 4,161 houses and flats, 84 per cent of which were on suburban sites.40 Here I focus upon the most controversial question of the period, which was: who ought to live in council housing? Initially, high-quality housing was to be provided for the affluent working class, with an assumption that overcrowding would be ameliorated in central districts as remaining tenants ‘filtered-up’ into better or larger accommodation.41 In practice, a large number of tenants were lower-middle class, as initially high building costs were followed by the catastrophic postwar slump of 1920–1921 in which wages plummeted and unemployment rose. The commitment to homes for heroes was abandoned in 1921, and the 1923 Housing Act reduced Treasury subsidies and, in stimulating the private sector, sought to restrict the role of local authorities in house building.42 While the minority Labour government of 1924 increased subsidies once again and sought to increase council completions, the 1930s were dominated by programmes of slum clearance.43 It is these twin themes of slum clearance and ‘affluence’ which have dominated debates about council houses and their tenants ever since. As we shall see, the principle of council housing as a residual tenure largely reserved for the poor originated between the wars. But this was far from the intentions of the original 1919 legislation, as councils used the Addison subsidy to build (nominally) working class housing of unprecedented quality. Guidance for local authorities on the planning and lay-out of housing schemes was provided by the Tudor Walters Committee, which, having been appointed by the Local Government Board, reported in 1918. The principal architect behind the committee’s recommendations was Raymond Unwin, whose 1912 polemic Nothing Gained by Overcrowding promoted the aesthetic, social and economic advantages of low-density housing over ‘by-law’ terraces.44 A socialist much influenced by the ideas of Ruskin and William Morris, Unwin had been responsible for house design at the first ‘garden city’ at Letchworth and Hampstead garden suburb.45 Unwin’s influence could be detected in most of the committee’s major recommendations: a maximum of 12 houses to the acre in towns, a variety of houses to suit different needs and an insistence that all schemes be ‘prepared by a competent architect, whose duties shall include the preparation of the lay-out plan and the design and planning of all the houses’.46

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Housing the workers? The Moulsecoomb estates The council engaged Stanley Adshead, professor of town planning at University College London to plan Brighton’s first major development at South Moulsecoomb.47 Adshead was one of a group of planners including Patrick Abercrombie and C. H. Reilly associated with the school of civic design at the University of Liverpool. Influenced by the American City Beautiful movement, they eschewed the picturesque approach advocated by Camillo Sitte and evident at Letchworth and the London County Council’s pre-war and wartime estates at Old Oak and Well Hall. Instead, they revived the Beaux-Arts tradition of straight roads, symmetrical layout and formal approaches.48 At Moulsecoomb the houses themselves were designed by four local architects in consultation with Adshead, who was responsible for the overall lay-out of the estate. The neo-Georgian style favoured by the Liverpool school was evident at South Moulsecoomb, although other vernacular designs were also used.49 Work on the 478 parlour houses began in April 1920 and by October 1921 some 426 had been completed, with 130 families in occupation.50 The local press were enamoured with aspects of the design, with the Brighton Gazette in particular praising the lay-out and the variety of styles and materials used as the estate took shape.51 Not everyone welcomed the development. The Moulsecoomb estate was opposed by various middle class organisations such as the Middle Class Union, the Ratepayers Defence League and those representing property interests on the council.52 Objections centred on the high costs of the scheme and the principle of ratepayers subsidising high-quality working class housing.53 Yet, in the early 1920s, it was not immediately clear that it was working class families who were occupying the houses. In common with other estates built under the Addison legislation, South Moulsecoomb was always intended for the most affluent sections of the working class.54 Yet astronomical rents and falling wages in the early 1920s meant that houses on the estate were filled by middle class tenants as well as the highest-paid workers, a fact which exacerbated social divisions into the 1930s. Concerns were expressed from a very early stage that the costs of the scheme would prevent average working class residents from taking up tenancies.55 In June of 1919, the Gazette editorialised: It will be interesting to know what class of persons will occupy the dwellings . . . If what one frequently hears be any criterion, then it will not be the working class. What with the price of the land and the estimated cost of building these dwellings, it would appear that a rental such as the weekly wage earner would be prepared to pay is out of the question.56

As projected costs per house rose from £900 to £1,200, councillors of various political persuasions echoed these concerns.57 At a meeting in September,

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councillor Cane argued: ‘The ultimate burden of the very heavy cost would fall on the working men, the only alternative being that the houses will not be occupied by the people for whom they were intended – they would be occupied by an entirely different class.’58 To a significant degree, the councillors’ predictions were borne out. The cost per house at South Moulsecoomb (excluding land, sewers and roads) was £1,120.59 Partly as a consequence of this, the rents charged for many houses built under the Addison Act were well beyond the means of all but the most affluent workers. At South Moulsecoomb they ranged from 26s per week to 32s 6d.60 The Corporation had such difficulty in finding local people who could afford them that it advertised the tenancies in the London press, which caused considerable dismay among those looking for affordable accommodation, if the letters pages of the local press are anything to go by. For example, in 1924 ‘a late socialist’ complained that at both Moulsecoomb and Queen’s Park: The rents are too high for the ‘working man’ and these houses were built for the working man, for the men who were lucky enough to come home from the war, and for working men who could not go but who did their bit willingly at home ‘to make homes fit for those heroes to live in.’ Why then are they to be so far above his means that he is forced to take in another family to help with the rent?61

He went on to point out the differences between most of the homes and gardens and the ‘better kept homes . . . where some “independents” live’. Barbed comments about middle class tenants were a recurring feature of such public discourse. In 1928 ‘A Moulsecombe [sic] tenant’ informed the readers of the Herald: There are many of us at Moulsecombe [sic] paying one-third and over of our wages in rent; but rather than get into arrears we go short of food and clothing so as to keep decent accommodation for our wives and families. Were these houses not built for the working class? If so, why are people who could easily pay 30/- weekly (to go by those who keep their car) allowed to remain as it is those, we understand who prevent the rents from being reduced.62

In 1930 another Moulsecoomb tenant pleaded for ‘economic rents’ based ‘on the current value of the property and not on the initial cost of the building’.63 Again the language of class looms large in the complaint and the bitterness with which the writer signs off is palpable: ‘Housing schemes, so far as the working man (for whom they were intended) is concerned, are a failure, and the hope or rather the promise of “a land fit for heroes to live in” is a sorry delusion, a myth.’64 While comprehensive information about tenant’s occupations is lacking,

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there are enough traces in the historical record to suggest that there were some middle class tenants in properties at South Moulsecoomb throughout the inter-war period. Evidence for this can be found in Marion Fitzgerald’s 1939 survey Rents in Moulsecoomb (dealt with in greater detail in Chapter 5). Her method was to sample every tenth address on the electoral register. However, she noted that ‘In the case of South Moulsecoomb some variation was introduced because the object of the inquiry was the burden of rent on the working classes, so that a house known to be occupied by a middle class family . . . was excluded from the survey.’65 Other evidence suggests a long-standing middle class presence on the estate. In her memoir Ruby Dunn recalled that some of the men living in The Avenue during the 1920s commuted daily to London. Among the occupations of her neighbours she listed a local government clerk, two civil servants, four teachers, two former teachers and the owner of a bathing pool.66 Among local residents who were candidates for the ward in the 1928 municipal elections were a social worker and two managers.67 The political and associative activities on the estate more than hint at a middle class presence. For example, whereas tenants at Queen’s Park formed a Tenants Defence League and those at Whitehawk and Manor Farm a Community Association, those at Moulsecoomb formed a Ratepayers Association – one of the quintessentially middle class institutions of the age.68 In local elections during the 1930s anti-socialist candidates backed by the Ratepayers Association and the Municipal Reform Party consistently polled between 37 and 53 per cent in the Moulsecoomb ward.69 Moreover, there was clear evidence that the council was seeking to maintain South Moulsecoomb as an affluent estate. As Fitzgerald observed: The lowest rented houses on this estate are the 70 at the Bevendean end built under the 1924 Act, when costs had fallen considerably. Most of these are let at 15/- inclusive, but recently a decision has been made to raise them to 19/9 on a change of tenancy. The idea seems to be to have uniform rents all over this estate, but by raising the rents of these relatively cheap houses the Corporation will be inviting the ‘best payers’ rather than the family most in need of a new house.70

The controversy over whether council tenancies ought to be granted to members of the middle class erupted in the summer of 1939. At a meeting of the town council in June it was alleged that some tenants were earning £1,000 a year and it was proposed that an upper earnings limit of £4 10s a week be set, with those earning more being given notice to quit.71 The Corporation instructed the Housing Committee to prepare a report into tenants’ incomes via a means test.72 The plan was shelved, however, following vigorous protests from the Moulsecoomb Ratepayers Association.73

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While Brighton did have unusually high rents during the inter-war period, they were not uniformly applied and varied according to the housing subsidy used, the size and cost of the development and the class of the intended tenants. Fitzgerald noted that the heads of household at North and East Moulsecoomb, where rents were lower, were solidly working class: mainly skilled and semi-skilled men and some labourers. Rent levels at Queen’s Park, Manor Farm and Whitehawk were lower still, as were the sizes and standards of the dwellings. Indeed, during the 1930s, despite the evidence of a residual middle class presence on the Addison estates, owneroccupation became firmly established as the middle class tenure of choice. Conservative attempts to stimulate the private sector received a boost in 1931, due to the availability of cheap money following the decision to come off the gold standard. Rising real incomes for those in work combined with falling land prices and plummeting building costs to stimulate a private building boom, most of which was for owner-occupation.74 In Brighton, of the 12,149 houses and flats constructed between the wars, the majority were built between 1932 and 1938 as owner-occupied suburbs at Patcham, Withdean, Saltdean and Woodingdean. While – given recent revisionist work – working class owner-occupation cannot be ruled out, it seems likely that the vast majority of owners were middle class, as ownership became central to constructions of middle class identities during this period.75 The middle class retreat towards home ownership was reinforced by a second important 1930s development: slum clearance and the resettlement of former slum residents on council estates. With slum dwellers penetrating the suburbs, the middle classes had ever greater incentive to retreat to the owner-occupied enclaves, which served, in Richard Rodger’s resonant phrase, ‘to insulate them against the contagion, both moral and physical, of the degenerate city, both real and imagined’.76 While some critics focused on what they saw as overly affluent tenants at South Moulsecoomb, what most exercised local officials during the period was how to manage the rehousing of the town’s poorest inhabitants. Housing the poor? Slum clearance and suburbanisation Slum clearance presented the local authority with a paradox when it came to rehousing tenants from the central areas: in providing modern housing it hoped to improve the living standards and lifestyles of tenants; in doing so, however, it risked impoverishing already poor families.77 At the end of 1928, the medical officer of health reported that some 30 households from the Hereford Street improvement area, ‘including some who were not desirable’, had been rehoused in the Whitehawk Valley development, ‘in the hope that given the chance they would improve with healthy surroundings and improved accommodation’.78 However, he was concerned that this policy

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Figure 3.1 A parlour at South Moulsecoomb, 1920s. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton and Hove

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Figure 3.2 Children in Carlton Court, Brighton, late 1920s. James Grey Collection/ Regency Society

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of housing clearance tenants on suburban sites would not be effective. He argued: For the most part the tenants of these slums have to live near their work and they will not remove to the suburbs; they are generally so poor that they cannot afford the cost of travel to and from the centre of the town. Another difficulty is rent; the average these people can afford is about 8s a week, they cannot pay 15s a week or even the reduced rate of 12s a week. Still another important point is that many are dirty and unsatisfactory tenants who would quickly ruin a new house.79

While a small number of houses and flats were built centrally on the Tarner land in 1931 and Carlton Hill in the late 1930s, most new housing was suburban. As Map 1 shows, in the inter-war period slum clearance areas were located in the centre of the town. In 1932 Dr Forbes revoiced his concerns, noting that: In the [Carlton Hill] area there were 221 families, the average rent paid per family working out at 7/9 a week. Of these 70 per cent have already been housed centrally, and only 23 per cent have been re-housed at Whitehawk. They simply cannot go as they cannot afford a 50 per cent increase of rent [and] the cost of travel to and from work.80

The following year Dr Forbes reported that 21 per cent of tenants from Carlton Hill who had taken houses at Whitehawk had returned to central Brighton for financial reasons.81 As Table 3.1 shows, by 1937 the proportion of those displaced by clearance schemes who chose to find their own accommodation had increased. In the late 1930s the local press began to take an interest in the effects of rehousing tenants from clearance areas on suburban estates. Under the headline ‘Re-housing slum dwellers has made poverty’, the Gazette reported on the annual meeting of the Southover Street and Whitehawk canteens in 1937. The charity, previously based in central Brighton, had expanded its operations to provide very cheap meals on the estates, for which there was increasing demand ‘owing to the shifting of the poorer population from the neighbourhood of Southover-street’.82 At Whitehawk, Labour councillors and local residents called for an inquiry into living standards on the estate, while the Gazette, via a number of campaigning articles and editorials, evidenced poverty and malnutrition at Moulsecoomb and demanded that ‘something must be done’.83 The investigation into living standards, sponsored by the Bishop of Chichester, concluded that rents in Moulsecoomb were too high for a large proportion of families, who were obliged to make cut-backs on food expenditure.84 Fitzgerald also noted an assumption underlying council policy which reinforced the perceived link between slum clearance and poverty. While tenants from clearance areas were entitled to an automatic rebate of 25 per cent, other tenants were not, even though they might be in worse circumstances

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Map 1 Slum clearance in Brighton, c.1860s–1960s

than their neighbours.85 Fitzgerald observed that tenants from clearance areas were ‘not necessarily poor’ and that: Of the ‘re-housed’ tenants a few have well appointed homes. Others, though obviously very poor and lacking furniture and apparatus, keep their houses and their children clean, but some have brought old habits into new habitations and need somebody to teach them with patience and tact how to take proper care of a good house.86

While tenants from clearance areas may have been in economically different circumstances, what comments such as those of Fitzgerald and the

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Table 3.1 Houses demolished and persons displaced in Brighton, 1922–1939

Year 1922 1924 1931 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 Sub-totals 1938 1939 Totals

Dwellings demolished

People/families displaced

48 68 200 127 128 104 7 N/A c.682 178 112 c.972

229 385 999 567 651 612 297 88 3,828 66a 107a 4,409+

People/families finding own People/families accommodation rehoused 519 Included above 819 495 475 512 250 37 3,107 45a 65a 2,632+

95 Included above 180 72 176 100 47 51 721 21a 42a 721+

Note: a Denotes families rather than individuals. Source: Medical Officer of Health Reports (Brighton: 1922–1939).

Figure 3.3 Slum clearance: Hereford Street and Paradise Street, 1925. James Grey Collection/Regency Society

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medical officer of health, along with a slew of articles in the press, did was to indelibly associate slum clearance with ‘unsatisfactory tenants’ in the popular imagination. Following the resumption of slum clearance in the mid-1950s, this association came to dominate public discourse around council housing. However, the period between reconstruction and eventual affluence also saw the social constituency for council housing expand once again, and with it came renewed criticism of overly affluent tenants. These seemingly irreconcilable visions of council housing as simultaneously signifying affluence and poverty are, as we have seen for the inter-war period, eminently reconcilable if we deal in a careful and nuanced way with the evidence. Dominant ideas about poverty and welfare underwent flux during the Second World War, which engendered both a massive housing shortage and intense political debate about the role of council housing in post-war reconstruction. War and reconstruction The evacuation of school children in September 1939 had a number of predictable as well as rather less predictable results. Contrary to expectations, country living failed to significantly improve the health of evacuees.87 However, the presence of poorly clothed, undernourished urban children in sometimes middle class rural and suburban homes resulted in often venomous criticism directed at the behaviour of working class mothers and their standards of hygiene and cleanliness.88 While some critics stressed personal inadequacy and inherited characteristics in the production of domestic squalor, other interested parties, such as school medical officers and medical officers of health, emphasised environmental factors, particularly poorquality, overcrowded housing, in their assessments of evacuees’ deficiencies.89 The coexistence of environmentalist explanations for poverty alongside traditional behaviouralist interpretations was exemplified by the influential Our Towns report of 1943, compiled by the Women’s Group on Public Welfare under the auspices of the National Council for Social Service. Prominent in Our Towns was a conception of the ‘problem family’ which emphasised a behaviouralist analysis of poverty. However, this existed alongside arguments that squalor and delinquency could be remedied through improved housing, educating girls as home-makers and the education of parents via social work intervention.90 What the contemporary analyses largely missed were the essential solidarity of working class family life and the fact that working class families themselves successfully provided temporary homes for the majority of evacuees.91 John Welshman has argued that the concept of the ‘problem family’ marked a transition from the ‘social problem group’ favoured by the eugenics movement in the 1930s.92 Others such as Pat Starkey, Ben Rogaly

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and Becky Taylor have related the issue of the ‘problem family’ to the wider stigmatisation of the ‘feckless’ working class mother by housing and social work professionals.93 In seeking to explain urban deprivation, various groups of middle class professionals emphasised different causes and solutions, often mapping environmental considerations on top of ingrained prejudices about working class behaviour. A shared understanding, however, was that the state had a moral responsibility to intervene in the reconstruction of family life in the post-war period. The need to provide adequate housing for these families emerged as the paramount reconstruction priority as the war engendered a housing shortage of epic proportions. While the First World War had seen a sharp fall in housing construction, the post-Second World War housing shortage was exacerbated by the widespread destruction of property and an increase in population. The Blitz had destroyed or damaged four million homes nationwide, while in Brighton over 1,000 houses had been levelled through enemy action and a further 14,000 damaged.94 In March 1945 the Ministry of Reconstruction estimated that 750,000 new dwellings were needed to provide a separate dwelling for every family desiring one, in addition to 500,000 new properties to tackle overcrowding and complete the slum clearance programme.95 Wartime research shed light on the kind of housing which people preferred. In 1943 Mass Observation made an Enquiry into People’s Homes and demonstrated that those in nineteenth-century terraces were least satisfied with their lot, flats were generally unpopular, while those living on housing estates were the most satisfied of any occupiers surveyed.96 While Tiratsoo and Tsubaki have argued that after 1942 people became generally less interested in the nuances of planning, there can be no doubt that housing became the key issue as thoughts turned towards reconstruction.97 From the summer of 1943 to January 1947, housing was regarded as the ‘most urgent post-war problem’ by those surveyed by the British Institute of Public Opinion.98 As Labour swept to power on the promise of ‘five million homes in double quick time’,99 planners, architects and politicians were determined to avoid some of the mistakes of the inter-war years. The Town Planning Association had never quite forgiven Raymond Unwin for his role in the promotion of garden suburbs rather than garden cities, and through figures such as Patrick Abercrombie and Ebenezer Howard’s stalwart lieutenant, F. J. Osborn, the garden city vision saw its fullest realisation in the post-war new towns.100 Furthermore, there were attempts to expand the constituency for council housing to encompass all of ‘the people’ through innovative schemes such as the neighbourhood unit.101 There was also something of a return to the spirit of 1919 in terms of the quality of housing planned. The Dudley Report of 1944 recommended improvements in lay-out, improved equipment and fittings and significantly increased floor areas.102 Yet such high-quality housing

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came at a cost: Labour’s housing programme, beset by serious shortages of building materials and skilled labour, proceeded at a slow pace and, as in the early 1920s, in Brighton local people took direct action to remedy the housing shortage. In April 1945 Harry Cowley’s ‘vigilantes’ began squatting empty houses in the town. On 6 July 1945 ministers began to consider the use of official powers to requisition empty private property.103 Three days later, at a public meeting on the Brighton Level, the ‘vigilantes’ called for the speedy institution of such a policy, but stated that in the meantime their actions would continue.104 In a campaign coordinated from Brighton, the movement soon spread to Portsmouth, South London, Birmingham and Liverpool.105 The squatters received qualified support in letters to the press complaining of the iniquity of excessive private rents while numerous private and government-controlled properties stood empty.106 While the ‘vigilantes’ themselves eschewed a party-political platform or radical political critique of social relations, the same cannot be said for the CPGB, which successfully coordinated the mass squatting of army camps and private property in London and throughout the South.107 Although the campaign petered out in 1947, it was a powerful demonstration of the pressure local people could exert on the authorities to reform housing consumption. Between 1946 and 1952 Brighton council built over 3,600 permanent houses and flats in addition to 500 pre-fabs, while hundreds of older properties were requisitioned. The vast majority of the new homes were on suburban estates at Bevendean, Coldean, East Moulsecoomb and Hollingbury, where housing was integrated into a new industrial estate. The locations of these and later post-war developments, along with their inter-war predecessors, are shown in Map 2. In the first five post-war years priority was given to ‘overcrowded families with children’ who had lived in the town for many years.108 From the early 1950s overcrowded households were accorded less priority as focus switched to the provision of one- and two-bedroom flats and houses for married couples.109 The first of these schemes was a low-rise development at Bates Farm, Moulsecoomb, which was formally opened by the minister for housing, Harold Macmillan, in October 1952, to celebrate the 3,000th completion by the borough.110 In the early 1950s the local press, rather as they had in the 1920s, eulogised the new estates as affluent, classless communities of which the town ought to be proud. In a series of reports on the housing estates, the Sussex Daily News painted a picture of aesthetic differences and social harmony. At Moulsecoomb, the reporter found: A world of starched white collars and oil-stained overalls in fairly equal proportion . . . Its streets and houses – council grey and Tudor half-timbered – spell

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Map 2 Major council estates in Brighton

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England the word home to a community that is as united as any tiny hamlet planted deep in a forest.111

There were similar echoes of community and classlessness at the more recently built Hollingbury estate, whose residents: Are of all kinds – tradesmen, office workers and labourers. They did not choose to live there; they came because they were offered new homes at reasonable rents . . . Brighton’s first new post-war estate may yet show that a village can grow without oak beams and a parish pump; that a community of accommodation units and pre-cast concrete can develop an enduring character of its own.112

These kinds of representations of community framed in the language of modernity dovetailed with the Conservative rhetoric of affluence prevalent in the 1950s, rhetoric which, as Laing has observed, really required estate residents to be owner-occupiers rather than council tenants.113 In the 1950s, as local Conservatives took steps to privatise these estates, antipathy towards council tenants began to return, with criticisms framed around the familiar poles of affluence and poverty. Affluence, privatisation and residualisation At the end of 1952 Brighton’s Conservative council decided that all houses provided under part V of the 1936 Housing Act should be made available for sale to sitting tenants with the exception of some in the centre of town. Initially, sales were slow: between 1952 and 1958 just 124 houses were sold mainly at South Moulsecoomb and on the other inter-war estates.114 That South Moulsecoomb should have proved a fertile ground for such a policy should hardly be surprising, given that it historically had housed the town’s most affluent tenants. What local Tories really wanted, however, was to privatise the new post-war estates, which were in danger of becoming solid Labour enclaves. Hollingbury ward is a case in point. Formerly a Tory stronghold, following the building of the Hollingbury and Bates estates, Labour won the three seats from the Conservatives between 1954 and 1956. The Argus was particularly interested in the visible effects of affluence, asking: ‘has increased prosperity, as evinced by the TV aerial or the family car weaned them at all from socialist leanings? Not much according to the Labour party organisers. The Labour man remains loyal. And the prosperity, anyway, they maintain, is a matter of appearance rather than substance.’115 The situation in bordering Patcham ward was quite different, as the report concluded: ‘Patcham is solid, unshakable Tory, and Labour admits the fact. It is significant that the Patcham council tenant population is negligible.’116 As in the inter-war years, the press and some of its readers began to argue that affluent tenants ought to leave the tenure.117 Conservative councillors

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agreed and, in 1959, in the teeth of opposition from the Labour Party and some tenants, privatised the Coldean estate.118 In 1961 Hollingbury too was designated a private estate whereby no property becoming vacant would be relet other than to tenants willing to buy.119 At Hollingbury, the Argus reported that the proposals had gone down well: Despite rock-bottom prices only 400 council houses have been sold in the past nine years . . . The reason is not hard to find. You have only to talk to a few tenants to hear the words: ‘we would have bought before. But you can never be sure of your neighbours.’ Owner-occupiers, on the other hand, are a fair guarantee of the sort of people who will be living next door. To become a ‘private estate’ is the final accolade of respectability. Many people deplore the move to turn corporation homes into bargains for their better off tenants. But you won’t find them out at Hollingbury.120

While there certainly was an aspiration for home ownership amongst some affluent tenants, privatisation ought to be seen as part of wider Conservative housing policy in which ownership was promoted and council housing reduced to a residual role.121 In the early 1960s attempts were made to move the highest-earning families out of council property altogether. Tenants’ incomes were first capped in July 1962, with families whose incomes exceeded £1,250 per year being given six months’ notice to quit. Included in this figure were half the wife’s income, but none of other family members’.122 This figure was raised in 1966 to £1,500 per annum, less £2 per week of the wife’s earnings,123 while in 1970 the limit was set at £1,750, and was revised upwards once again, to £2,000, two years later.124 This declining tendency to house the affluent coincided with the emphasis on rehousing evicted tenants and those from clearance areas, as discussed below. The impact of a general policy to reduce council housing to a residual role had specific effects on the ground. Firstly, there was disinvestment in the remaining council stock. Between 1964/65 and 1978/79 council expenditure on council housing fell by 1 per cent, while council expenditure on the private sector rose by 61 per cent.125 Much of this increase was accounted for by grants for the improvement of private houses, and particularly by loans for private house purchases. Secondly, the council estates became polarised between the post-war estates, which were largely privatised, and the inter-war estates, which were not. In 1962 council house sales ceased except in the designated sale areas of Coldean, Hollingbury and South Woodingdean, while houses at Hollingdean, Bevendean, Staplefield Drive and Rottingdean continued to be available for purchase by sitting tenants.126 In 1974, sales to sitting tenants in other areas were once again allowed, and in 1976 house sales were extended to include all sitting tenants, with the exception of those in Whitehawk, North Moulsecoomb and parts of the town centre.127 The impact of the sales policy

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England Table 3.2 Council house sales by estate in Brighton, 1979

Estate Coldean Woodingdean (S) Hollingbury Bevendean Rottingdean Hollingdean Moulsecoomb (S) Woodingdean (N) Moulsecoomb (E) Burstead Close Manor Farm Queen’s Park Patcham Craven Vale Portslade Moulsecoomb (N) Misc. Tarner/Carlton Hill Whitehawk Bates Bristol Newhaven Street Total

Houses and flats sold

% of stock private

511 453 743 233 6 179 150 39 71 5 28 32 5 15 1 10 11 7 5 1 0 0 2,505

68 62 50 32 21 19 15 9 8 7 6 6 4 4 3 3 1 0.6 0.4 0.3 0 0 17

Source: Based on Brighton Housing Department data, calculated from A. P. Graves, ‘Housing tenure – the changing pattern’, unpublished paper (University of Sussex, 1984), appendix, p. 33.

meant that in the years before the introduction of ‘right to buy’ legislation 2,505 houses and flats had been sold, including the majority of the council’s best post-war stock.128 Table 3.2 shows the degree to which the estates became polarised between the major post-war developments, which were privatised, and the largely inter-war estates, which were not. Percentages for six of the top seven sales areas would have been significantly higher if only houses (rather than houses and flats) had been included in the stock calculation. The impact of the sales policy meant that in the years before the introduction of national ‘right to buy’ legislation the majority of the council’s best post-war stock at Coldean, Hollingbury and South Woodingdean, along with parts of Bevendean and Hollingdean was in private hands.129 Although the ban on house sales in North Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk was rescinded in 1979, the cumulative effect of sales in other areas meant that it was these

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Table 3.3 Houses demolished and people rehoused in Brighton, 1945–1969 Period 1945–1949 1950–1954 1955–1959 1960–1964 1965–1969 Total

Demolitions

People rehoused

67 37 529 474 310 1,417

22 295 2,445 722 759 4,243

Source: Medical Officer of Health Reports (Brighton: 1945–1969).

estates, along with flats on the Carlton Hill, Kingswood and Milner sites, which had both the lowest proportion of sales and the highest proportion of tenants whom the council considered to be a problem. ‘Problem families’ and so-called ‘unsatisfactory tenants’ were of course categorisations which had developed in the 1930s and 1940s in response to the first phase of slum clearance and wartime developments. As I discuss below, during the 1950s and 1960s the terms became indelibly associated with the interwar estates as council housing assumed a residual role in post-war slum clearance. Slum clearance and the stigmatisation of the inter-war estates While the demolition of individual houses which had been deemed ‘unfit’ had taken place in the 1940s and early 1950s, it was not until the mid-1950s that large-scale clearance schemes were reintroduced. As Table 3.3 shows, in Brighton clearance schemes peaked in the five years between 1955 and 1959, bucking the national trend, but in line with other programmes in the South-East.130 In the post-war period, two myths emerged in the wake of slum clearance. Firstly, as I discuss in greater depth in the next chapter, it was argued in the 1980s and after that slum clearance was widely opposed by settled ‘communities’, who resented their enforced dispersal to the suburbs. Secondly, it was widely assumed that the populations displaced to the council estates contained a high proportion of ‘problem families’. Neither assumption is correct. Although slum clearance and the resettlement of former slum tenants ultimately reinforced the stigmatisation of the inter-war council estates, the role of allocations policies in this process is a complex one. In the next section I explore how the council dealt with slum clearance and rehousing as the available stock began to diminish due to council house sales. First, however, I examine the extent of contemporary opposition to clearance schemes.

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‘We want to move!’ Post-war slum clearance In the spring of 1956 a public inquiry into the council’s first major post-war slum clearance scheme was held. It had been proposed to clear over 1,650 houses between New England Street and Boston Street and redevelop the land for industrial use. About one hundred people, mainly owner-occupiers, objected. Councillor Button weighed in on behalf of local landlords, claiming that his houses were in good repair and that compensation offered by the council was derisory.131 This drew a furious response in a letter to the Argus from a ‘slum dweller’ who noted: ‘Cllr. Button is only one landlord and his property may be in good condition, but the majority of the houses in Elder Street are unfit to live in with dark, damp basements, no bath, no hot water or gardens and in some cases not even electricity . . . I think I voice the feelings of the majority of tenants when I say, “We want to move.” ’132 As further public inquiries were held over the course of the year, the newspaper took up the cases of owner-occupiers in a series of features on the clearance areas. Under the banner headline ‘Injustice on a hill’, interviewees argued that the North Gardens area of Brighton was ‘not a slum at all’ and that recent house buyers felt misled by the corporation and faced ‘the loss of both their snug homes and their capital’, with rates of compensation being offered at half market values (prior to the clearance orders’ being issued).133 Further features focused in detail on the modern materiality of residents’ homes as owners refuted the designation of their dwellings as slums: ‘The old lady looked around her snug, well furnished home and said fiercely: “They call this a slum? They’re going to pull this down? It’s ridiculous” . . . Item: a well appointed, immaculately kept kitchen . . . Item: two large bedrooms decorated and furnished with taste . . . Item: a home to be proud of.’134 A similar emphasis informed another account of a cottage which ‘had appeared in several magazines as the “ideal home” ’. It was claimed that the owner, Mr Freeth, had spent over £1,000 in turning ‘a dingy derelict cottage to a luxury home’ and the feature waxed lyrical about his domestic improvements: ‘The primitive wash house has been transformed into a glittering modern bathroom with indoor plants decorating the walls. Where the outdoor lavatory stood there is a rock garden, with creepers, a fig tree and an apple tree. The red-and-cream kitchen is a housewife’s dream and the bedrooms and sitting room above are the last word in comfort.’135 Despite being offered compensation considerably below the market value of his house, Mr Freeth was sanguine about the future: ‘ “The one place where I am blissfully happy, I have got to move out of . . . But it will be exciting converting the new place.” ’136 As the reports demonstrated, there was often a palpable generational divide between older residents who had bought properties for their retirements and younger couples and families.137 A widespread complaint, however, was over

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the lack of information as to when and indeed whether clearance would take place, as the ministry dragged its feet in confirming compulsory purchase orders and councillors argued over the pace and purposes of clearance.138 In some instances, such as the Mount Zion Place area, residents secured a 10-year reprieve for their properties.139 In the meantime, already dilapidated housing fell into further disrepair, affecting tenants of all ages, as the reporting acknowledged in a feature on New England Street: Mrs Tee has lived in this street for 41 years. She keeps her home as clean and tidy as she can but it is falling to pieces around her. She said: ‘All you do is work, work, work, and see nothing for it. And they tell me it may be another 12 months before they can move me.’ And everywhere the story is the same: wallpaper peeling off to show naked, damp walls, ceiling plaster rotting away to reveal the wooden laths; broken guttering; roofs through which rainwater filters.140

In the autumn of 1957 the Argus began printing a series of photographs of Brighton ‘wastelands’ which emphasised the aesthetic and social costs of delays in clearance and rebuilding. Beside a photograph of waste ground at Montague Street the text read: Brighton is proud of its past – its regency legacy of elegant seafront facades. But Brighton has another heritage of which it is not so proud – a rash of derelict sites which have existed for 20 years; the outcomes of unfinished pre-war clearance schemes. Now, when the council are embarking on post-war slum clearance these scars serve as a reproach to the vacillation of the council and successive governments who have applied the economy brake to large scale development schemes.141

Further photographic examples appeared in the press over the next few years, along with articles about the slow ‘deaths’ of the old communities as residents were gradually moved out and the vacant streets were surrendered to gangs of children, stray animals and the odd vagrant before the bulldozers finally moved in.142 The desultory progress in clearing condemned districts led to a series of disputes between the opposition Labour Party and governing Conservative councillors. After the immediate post-war housing drive, when the council repeatedly built over 600 units per year, from the mid-1950s completion rates fell, dipping below 500 in 1958 and falling steadily to a low of just 98 six years later. This was part of a deliberate policy of residualisation, outlined above. It was in this context that a major row erupted over the pace of slum clearance in Blackman Street. In early November 1958 the Argus reported Labour councillors’ calls for a public inquiry into a decision not to declare Blackman Street a clearance area, despite 114 of the 137 properties’ being condemned as unfit by the medical officer of health.143 The response of those familiar with the neighbourhood was unequivocal. A former resident living on the Moulsecoomb

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Figure 3.4 Richmond Buildings from Richmond Street, late 1950s. Reproduced with the kind permission of Malcolm Keeping

estate wrote: ‘I feel the recent decision of Brighton council to defer clearance to be nothing short of disgusting. The properties are anything but well constructed, many of them are bug infested and flea ridden, there are no decent amenities for the children and the medical officer of health is entirely justified in his condemnation of the whole area.’144 While some found Labour’s attempt to make political capital out of the issue distasteful, the majority of residents concurred with the opposition councillors that the street ought to be levelled.145 Residents pointed to the decrepit conditions in which they lived, co-opting the word ‘slum’ in their depictions: Mrs Ivy Basing, a widow who pays £1 6s. 7d. for her house is ‘fed up to the teeth’ with it. She is ‘living 20 years behind the times’ and would welcome a chance to be housed elsewhere. Mr Edward Hoad, who has lived in Blackman-street all his life, said his house was in a shocking condition, not fit to live in. Slum street? ‘What other description is there?’ he asked . . . ‘It’s a dirty, rat-infested slum,’ alleged Mr Victor Always, who has lived in the street for 11 years. His house, he said, was old and completely finished.146

An owner-occupier on the street, while refuting the charge that all the houses were dirty, damp and dark – ‘some are dirty – but often a great deal of the blame lies with the residents’ – nevertheless concluded that ‘the area is altogether out of date and below modern standards’ and that ‘the best houses will have to go with the worst for the general development and well-being of the

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town’.147 The Argus weighed in on the side of the medical officer of health and most of the residents in calling for the council to reconsider its deferral.148 The reporting of those areas subject to clearance orders often echoed earlier descriptions of slum districts as ‘other’ or foreign – neighbourhoods which were not just outmoded but literally ‘out of place’. Gordon Street was described as ‘a little Naples’, due to the dirt, tiny decrepit dwellings and street washing-lines. One resident commented: ‘ “How can people take pride in their homes when they have to hang their washing over the front door? Far from feeling proud, most of us feel downright ashamed.” ’149 The desperation to move away sometimes meant that neighbours fell out over who was allocated council accommodation the soonest. In Dorset Gardens in the Carlton Hill district, one family faced the wrath of its neighbours for being the first to be offered a council house: ‘Mrs Kennard spoke of the bad feeling that had swept the cul-de-sac since she received her good news. “It has caused a real rumpus” she said. “But we would be mugs to turn down this chance just because the neighbours are annoyed.” ’150 Indeed, despite the occasional lament, evidence suggests that the vast majority of inhabitants from condemned areas wanted to be rehoused. Concerns were expressed about the wisdom of breaking up communities as neighbours were allocated council properties on different estates in a desultory fashion.151 When concerns were expressed about the pace of change, however, it was largely that it could not come quickly enough. There was remarkably little publicly expressed nostalgia152 and there were relatively few objections to the ways in which clearance neighbourhoods were characterised. Despite the efforts of the borough’s chief public health inspector, who argued that ‘the words “slum clearance” are no longer apposite’ and preferred ‘to use the words “clearance of sub-standard houses” or “clearance of areas of worn out houses” ’, most people involved used the language of slums and slum clearance.153 Indeed, only one solitary letter challenged the status quo. ‘B.S.’ wrote to the Argus and asked: Why are the homes of simple people referred to as slums? The word has a very horrid meaning (dictionary definition: a low dirty street) especially to the occupants who have spent their lives doing their best to make them the homes of old England. Often they have done this under near impossible conditions. It is no doubt too much to expect the strangers responsible to share our sentiments, or understand the feelings of those involved in compulsory clearance.154

What these voices reveal is a complex of attitudes towards the experience of slum clearance. Amidst the ruins of post-war Brighton, the modernisation of working class neighbourhoods had contradictory effects. For most, modernity couldn’t come fast enough, although the costs included the dislocation of established support networks and the disruption of patterns of everyday life.

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The melancholy which this could induce might be read in contrasting ways: as weary stoicism; as frustration that modern, material domesticity had taken so long to arrive; as anger at the way in which the modernisation of the built environment subjected people to the symbolic violence of having their homes and streets stigmatised as ‘slums’; perhaps an ambivalent mixture of all three. It would be rather too easy to see in this a failure of understanding on behalf of the planners, politicians and architects who imposed modernist tower blocks on happy, established, homogenous communities.155 Residents of clearance areas were divided along age and gender lines, as well as between the minority of property owners and the majority of tenants. While there are valid critiques of modernism in public-sector housing, it ought to be remembered that, in numerical terms, high-rise flats were dwarfed by suburban and low-rise developments.156 Furthermore, in the 1960s many people desperately wanted to live in the modern, purpose-built tower blocks.157 The first residents of the Albion Hill flats were not to be the people displaced by the clearance scheme. In recognition of the prestige attached to the development, the council selected what the housing manager termed ‘grade one’ tenants.158 These were middle-aged couples with married children from the estates, whose move, it was hoped, would free their suburban houses for larger families.159 Indeed, with house sales beginning to slice away at council stock, providing adequate housing for tenants from clearance areas became increasingly difficult. Moreover, as the available pool of stock shrank, the dispersal of so-called ‘problem families’ and ‘unsatisfactory tenants’ became increasingly difficult, as I outline below. ‘Problem families’, ‘unsatisfactory tenants’ and the stigma of the slums Official advice for local authorities on managing slum clearance was contained in the report Moving from the Slums issued by the Central Housing Advisory Committee in 1956. The section on ‘unsatisfactory families’ is particularly revealing in reinforcing the link between such residents and slum areas: The evidence submitted to us indicates that local authorities do not expect to find in clearance areas an unduly high proportion of families with standards below average. All the same it is likely that there will be more than in better districts, partly because of their natural tendency to drift into the cheapest houses, and partly because bad housing creates conditions in which weaker families lose heart and sink.160

With regard to rehousing problem families in the aftermath of slum clearance, the committee advised: A family of this kind should not be re-housed in a flat if it can possibly be avoided. They are better placed in an old house even if they have to be re-housed again within a few years. It is a mistake to re-house too many problem families in

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one street. They generally have a bad effect upon each other and they will almost inevitably cause discomfort and resentment amongst their neighbours.161

In Brighton such advice was heeded. Initially a number of ‘problem families’ were housed in older accommodation in the town centre.162 As post-war slum clearance recommenced a programme of dispersal was followed. In 1956 the housing manager argued that: Flats do not provide the ideal solution for the re-housing of families from unhealthy dwellings in congested areas. One of the objects of re-housing such families is to place them in surroundings where they may have the opportunity to ‘start anew’, to raise themselves from their former level away from their old associates and not herded together.163

To these ends, he advised that some clearance tenants be housed on the new estates then under construction at Bristol Gate and North Woodingdean, with others dispersed across the inter-war estates.164 As the clearance schemes gathered pace, however, dispersing such tenants became increasingly difficult because it acted as a disincentive for other tenants to buy. As one Moulsecoomb resident put it: ‘Who in their right mind would consider buying a council house when the property can be devalued at any time by the Estates Management Sub-committee awarding an adjacent tenancy to one of the “substandard” families on their slum clearance priority list?’165 The same correspondent argued that Brighton ought to adopt the policy of another council that had placed ‘substandard’ tenants in one area ‘leaving decent houses for people who appreciate them’.166 In the 1964 Dr William Parker (the town’s last medical officer of health) and members of the ‘problem families sub-committee’ concurred and argued that such families should be closely grouped in order ‘to enable the council’s social workers to give them the intensive rehabilitation they require’.167 In fact there were decreasing options for a council which wanted to maximise council house sales. The largest houses which were not in designated sales areas, where sitting tenants were not allowed to buy, were at North and East Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk, and it was on these estates that ‘problem families’ were concentrated. In the summer of 1967 the secretary of the North and East Moulsecoomb Tenants Association wrote to the Housing Committee expressing concern about the nuisance caused by irresponsible tenants and urging the appointment of more social workers to deal with the ‘increasing numbers of problem families on these estates’.168 These problems relating to allocations policy were highlighted by a Shelter report from 1975 which analysed the stigmatisation of North and East Moulsecoomb (called North and East ‘Fairfields’ in the report).169 Significantly, the report historicised the stigmatisation of particular roads on the two estates in two periods, arguing that: ‘East Fairfields [Moulsecoomb]

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. . . contains one of Brighton’s most infamous roads [Birdham Road]. It gained its reputation in the 1930s for rehousing slum clearance families and has never lost it.’170 However, at North Moulsecoomb the process of stigma attached to particular roads was contingent upon the shifting of the population of ‘problem families’ as a response to the developments of the 1950s and 1960s outlined above, particularly the decreasing stock of large council houses. Importantly, there was status variation between roads within East and North Moulsecoomb, although they might be stigmatised by outsiders as the same.171 Thus Griffiths argued: ‘Unsatisfactory tenants are usually concentrated on the inner streets of an estate while roads on the outside of the estate are reserved for better tenants . . . The Brighton Lettings Officer told me that some roads in East and North Fairfields [Moulsecoomb] are “as good as anywhere else.” ’172 However, the report went on to note: Other North and East Fairfields streets were described by an employee of the Education Department . . . as ‘The dregs of the Brighton community.’ He said that people are moved there from other estates when they do not pay their rent. The bad area had moved from Chestnut Road, which still remains infamous to two roads in North Fairfields. The tenants in those two roads see themselves as very underprivileged compared with South Fairfields and agree that the estate has run down very badly in the last fifteen years. This is reflected in the fact that [as one tenant claimed]: ‘No-one wants to move to the Birch-Oak Road area and therefore the council sends all its problem families into these Roads.’173

Thus we can see stigmatisation and, indeed, residualisation, operating over two periods (the 1930s and the 1960s/1970s), impacting on different parts of the North and East Moulsecoomb estates. The nuances of this were often lost in the myths which began to evolve from the 1930s onward. Indeed, we know from Fitzgerald’s research cited above that to describe East Moulsecoomb as exclusively ‘for slum clearance families’, as in the report, is not strictly accurate. Thus, even well-intentioned pressure groups such as Shelter could help to perpetuate the myths associated with slum clearance, the effects of which their research sought to ameliorate. By the 1970s, disinvestment in council housing combined with the allocation policies outlined above to ensure the residualisation and stigmatisation of Brighton’s inter-war estates. It was within this specific historical context that the estates at Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk became by-words for poverty, unemployment and anti-social behaviour; their status as socially marginal places cemented by press reports of notorious cases of child neglect and murder.174 As the slums were demolished between the 1930s and the 1960s, it was these estates which replaced them as the marginal ‘no-go neighbourhoods’ in the ‘respectable’ citizens’ social imaginary. The power of these nar-

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ratives stems from the fact that they emerged from, and became embedded in, both official discourse (as above) and everyday life. In a 1975 article for the Evening Argus, Stephen Goodwin reported that: North Moulsecoomb has become the unwitting stuff of legends . . . the name a brand for its houses and its people. It accounts for the extraordinary. Describe some hair-raising event there to a Brightonian and he nods knowingly . . . In North Moulsecoomb . . . vandalism, truancy, family feuds come under the same euphemism – ‘antisocial behaviour.’ It has built up in the manner of a legend, a certain amount of truth embellished in the chatter of public bars, launderettes and street corners. Whitehawk used to carry the same stigma. People would tell you not to go there after dark or that policemen only entered in pairs.175

Goodwin’s article drew an angry response from a local councillor, who argued that the poor material state of much of the estate was due to ‘years of neglect’ and pleaded for additional funds, and support from the newspaper rather than criticism.176 However, some Moulsecoomb residents clearly concurred with the newspaper’s stance. In reply to the Moulsecoomb councillor’s criticism of the Argus, Colin Hilton argued: ‘No Councillor Turner, it is not just a small minority any more that is causing havoc on the Moulsecoomb estates, but a larger assembly of people who do not care, and God help us when their children grow up.’177 A few months later the Argus sent a reporter to the inter-war flats between Carlton Hill and Sussex Street. This time Adam Trimingham reported on ‘An address of shame for its tenants’: Ever since they were built they have had a reputation for being the den of thieves, the resting place of layabouts and the drying out ground of alcoholics . . . the names of Milner and Kingswood do not bring confidence to bank managers, shopkeepers offering credit or employers.178

The tropes used to depict the problem estates often parallel those used to represent urban slum areas as ‘other’.179 Thus we have the all-pervasive smell, and the associations with the archetypal other – the foreigner. For Trimingham, Milner and Kingswood: have a name as rotten as the smell that drifts up from the market beneath them. On a beautiful hot spring day they have the atmosphere of an Italian back alley.180

Moreover, these were areas inhabited by criminals, where the agents of the state feared to tread. Whereas Goodwin claimed that at Whitehawk, policemen would only enter in pairs, Trimingham noted: It is said that Brighton police station was moved from the town hall to nearby John Street so the long suffering coppers would not have so far to go to catch the criminals.181

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Echoing late nineteenth-century depictions of slum areas as rookeries and sties,182 the flats were described as: Abounding with people, dogs and cats at all times of the day . . . it will take more than a dab of paint and a wash of the walls to get rid of the flats’ reputation. After all, a leper can’t change his sores.183

However, in keeping with other contemporary representations of the poor, problems of vandalism and the decline in ‘community’ values were placed at the door of ‘problem families’.184 Trimingham’s vicious reportage prompted a number of tenants to march to the Argus offices and demand an apology. A new Tenants Association was formed and the newspaper printed a full-page article in which tenants refuted the allegations made by Trimingham and outlined some of the problems of poor estate management and maintenance.185 Such stigmatising representations of the interwar estates were dominant and undoubtedly served to further stigmatise the estates, as they reported some of the social effects of residualisation and disinvestment. They did not go entirely uncontested, however, as local residents resisted stigmatising characterisations. Others went further, however, articulating a positive sense of community based on mutuality and strong social networks. ‘We want to stay’: modern council estate communities East and North Moulsecoomb, Whitehawk, Milner and Kingswood had all been built between the wars in order to offer a modern alternative to the dire housing conditions existing in the older working class neighbourhoods. Whether they made the move voluntarily to the suburbs or were resettled following slum clearance, the council estates offered working class families high-quality, spacious, modern homes: a step up and away from the slums. Contrary to what was widely asserted from the 1980s, during the 1950s and 1960s the majority of residents of slum neighbourhoods were only too glad to leave their decrepit dwellings for the modern council estates. While the policy of dispersal was arguably poorly thought through, at the time, particularly for those who were neither elderly nor running small businesses, the promises of modernity trumped the memory of community in most respects. Indeed, while suburbanisation stretched or fractured some social networks, to a significant extent, working class community life was successfully recast in a suburban landscape. This could engender a powerful sense of belonging. More powerful, arguably, than the sense of attachment which people felt to the older districts, and not only because the estates were such an improvement on the decrepit, overcrowded terraces of the nineteenth century. The council estates of the mid-century period could, as Offer argues, be seen as one of a series of uniform entitlements or benefits in kind which the

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working class, via their collective power as producers and voters, had secured from the state.186 Indicative of the esteem in which some residents held their ‘new’ estates as compared with their ‘old’ neighbourhoods is the fact that while there was no concerted working class opposition to slum clearance in the post-war period, the same could not be said of proposals to redevelop Whitehawk, Brighton’s largest inter-war council estate. In 1973, under the headline ‘Petticoat battle for Whitehawk future’, the Argus reported on a group of local women ‘determined to keep their close-knit community intact’ by opposing a proposed £8.5 million redevelopment scheme.187 The women articulated a sense of community based on mutuality, linked to a profound attachment to place. For Mrs Maskell: ‘If they split us up away from Whitehawk, they would not be destroying homes, they would be destroying lives. The spirit here is something you can’t put into words. It’s like a big family. If any one is in trouble we help each other.’188 Opposition was not to modernisation per se, so much as to lack of consultation and the principle of demolition rather than improvement, which they feared could permanently shatter social networks. As Rita Clowy argued: ‘We want to stay. If our homes are to be modernised we want bringing back together again afterwards. Whatever happens we will stick together. My home is my castle, my life. I don’t want it knocked down.’189 Opposition to the redevelopment crystallised around the East Brighton Residents Association when it became apparent that 50 per cent of the proposed new units would be in private hands.190 Eventually, the part-privatisation plans were shelved, but the council pushed ahead with redevelopment, seeking to convert the c.1,000 houses into 1,600 houses and flats. The consequences of the Whitehawk redevelopment will be outlined in the following chapter. Here I want to make three salient points. Firstly, the attractiveness of redevelopment for the council was that it could increase the number of housing units on the land by 62 per cent. This pressure to maximise land use would not have been nearly so great had thousands of the best 1920s and 1950s council houses not been sold. Secondly, in their opposition to redevelopment, Whitehawk residents were entirely in line with shifting opinion on neighbourhood renewal, which emphasised the social and economic benefits of improving rather than demolishing older properties.191 Indeed, slum clearance slowed in the 1970s as focus switched to the ‘improvement’ of nineteenth-century districts and, from 1976 onward, their ‘conservation’.192 As I will explore in the next chapter, middle class residents were successful in conserving and gentrifying formerly working class neighbourhoods, some of which had originally been earmarked for massive redevelopment. The opponents of the Whitehawk redevelopment were not so fortunate. Thirdly, both the strength of the opposition to the redevelopment and the terms in which it was framed suggest that living in Whitehawk could engender a secure sense of

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belonging and profound attachment to place, albeit one which was mediated by age, gender, social networks, the quality of family and material life and a host of other variables. The basis of these feelings will be analysed in the next chapter, which examines social networks, associational culture and the politics of community in mid-century working class neighbourhoods. What this chapter has demonstrated is that from the 1930s, and again from the 1950s, the stigma associated with urban poverty accompanied those who moved out to the suburbs following successive waves of slum clearance in the central districts. While the cultural remapping of such stigmatising representations was not uncontested, they came to dominate public discourse. Moreover, the polarisation of council housing between the affluent and the poor and the eventual residualisation of the inter-war estates were due to the policies pursued by generations of local politicians and administrators with regard to managing slum clearance, allocating tenancies and selling council houses. The consequences of this residualisation for social memory, sociospatial polarisation and, in particular, for working class fragmentation will be outlined in the following and subsequent chapters. The role of council house sales in residualisation is particularly significant, since in Brighton sales were in progress from the 1950s, well before the ‘right to buy’ legislation of the 1980s. Whether this is representative of the English experience during the mid century more generally requires further research, for thus far historians have been silent on an issue which had far reaching socio-economic and cultural consequences for community and class formation. As I have shown, while press representations of both the ‘slums’ and the council estates shifted in emphasis over the course of the mid-twentieth century, by the time community publishers began to publish the life stories of working class people during the mid-1970s two contrasting representations of working class neighbourhoods were dominant. The modern neighbourhoods of the poor – the council estates – were largely represented as failed communities, while the poorer neighbourhoods of the past were (largely although not exclusively) reimagined as functioning communities. As I demonstrate in the next chapter, community publishing provided an arena in which these two myths were simultaneously reinforced and contested. Notes 1 See notably G. D. Mitchell et al., Neighbourhood and Community (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1954); J. M. Mogey, Family and Neighbourhood: Two Studies in Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956); M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957); H. Jennings, Societies in the Making (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).

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2 See C. Hamnett, ‘Housing the two nations: socio-tenurial polarization in England and Wales, 1961–81’, Urban Studies, 21: 4 (1984); R. Forrest and A. Murie, Selling the Welfare State (London: Routledge, 1988); R. Burrows, ‘Residential mobility and residualisation in social housing in England’, Journal of Social Policy, 28: 1 (1999). 3 Although for the 1960s and 1970s see Alan Murie’s pioneering The Sale of Council Houses: A Study in Social Policy (Birmingham: Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, 1975) and Keith Bassett’s ‘Council sales in Bristol, 1960–1979’, Policy and Politics, 8: 3 (1980). 4 J. Yelling, ‘The incidence of slum clearance in England and Wales, 1955–1985’, Urban History, 27: 2 (2000), p. 234. 5 P. Shapely, The Politics of Housing: Power, Policy and Consumers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 109–161. 6 S. Berry, Georgian Brighton (Chichester: Phillimore, 2005), pp. 97–98. 7 See generally K. Fossey, ‘Slums and tenements, 1840–1900’, S. Farrant, K. Fossey and A. Peasgood, The Growth of Brighton and Hove, 1840–1939 (Brighton: University of Sussex, 1981). 8 Based on M. J. Daunton, A Property-owning Democracy? Housing in Britain (London: Faber, 1987), pp. 16–17. 9 The only notable exception being the London County Council: see S. Lowe, ‘Introduction’, S. Lowe and D. Hughes (eds), A New Century of Social Housing (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991), p. 4. 10 See J. M. Eyler, Sir Arthur Newsholme and State Medicine, 1885–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 75–77. 11 Newsholme drew the distinction between ‘legal’ overcrowding, measured at 350 cubic feet of airspace per person and ‘social’ overcrowding where two or more families shared a house, see A. Newsholme, Special Report on Overcrowding, on the Clearing of Insanitary Areas and on the Provision of Housing Accommodation by the Town Council (Brighton: King, Thorne & Stace, 1904), p. 7. 12 Ibid., pp. 8–12. 13 Ibid., p. 8. 14 Ibid., p. 13. 15 Daunton, A Property-owning Democracy?, p. 3. 16 Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for 1936 (Brighton, 1937), p. 2. 17 R. Rodger, Housing in Urban Britain, 1780–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 53. 18 Ibid. 19 See P. J. Waller, Town, City and Nation: England 1850–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 258–259. 20 J. Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815–1970 (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 217. 21 M. Bowley, Housing and the State, 1919–1944 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1945), p. 12. 22 A. Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 77.

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23 On the former see M. J. Daunton, ‘Introduction’, M. J. Daunton (ed.), Councillors and Tenants: Local Authority Housing in English Cities, 1919–1939 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984), pp. 5–8. On the latter see D. Byrne and S. Damer, ‘The state, the balance of class forces and early working class housing legislation’, Housing, Construction and the State (London: The Russell Press, 1980), pp. 67–69. 24 On the history of tenant–landlord relations in Scotland see J. Melling, ‘Clydeside housing and the evolution of state rent control, 1900–1939’, J. Melling (ed.), Housing, Social Policy and the State (London: Croom Helm, 1980). 25 Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for 1920 (Brighton, 1921), p. 10. 26 P. Kemp, ‘From solution to problem? Council housing and the development of national housing policy’, S. Lowe and D. Hughes (eds), A New Century of Social Housing, p. 48. 27 Daunton, A Property-owning Democracy?, p. 62. 28 G. C. Peden, British Economic and Social Policy (London: Philip Allen, 1991), p. 47. 29 All figures from Bowley, Housing and the State, p. 23. 30 Daunton, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10–11. 31 M. Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes (London: Heinemann, 1981), pp. 77–82. 32 East Sussex Records Office, Lewes (hereafter ESRO), DB/B7/33, Minutes of the General Purposes Committee, 17 December 1918. 33 Brighton Gazette (8 January 1919). See also QueenSpark Collective, Blighty Brighton (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1991), pp. 53–54. 34 Brighton Herald (19 April 1919). 35 ESRO, DB/B7/33, Minutes of the General Purposes Committee, 28 February 1919. 36 ESRO, DB/B7/34, Minutes of the General Purposes Committee, 13 October 1919. 37 Brighton Gazette (7 September 1921), Brighton Herald (1 April 1922) and Brighton Gazette (16 May 1923). 38 QueenSpark Collective, Who Was Harry Cowley? (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1984), p. 25. 39 P. Dickens, S. Duncan, M. Goodwin and F. Gray, Housing, States and Localities (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 211–213; N. Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1941–1951 (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1997), chapter 12. 40 Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for 1939 (Brighton, 1940), p. 25. 41 Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture, p. 77. 42 S. Merrett, State Housing in Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1979), pp. 42–43 and 310. 43 The best modern account of the effects of the interwar housing acts is in Daunton, ‘Introduction’. Also valuable is Merrett’s legislative chronology in Merrett, State Housing in Britain, pp. 309–312. 44 R. Unwin, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! How the Garden City Type

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

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Development May Benefit both Owner and Occupier (London: P. S. King and Son, 1912), pp. 3–20. On the building of Letchworth and the ideas behind it see S. Buder, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 77–95. For Unwin’s role at Hampstead see F. Jackson, Sir Raymond Unwin: Architect, Planner and Visionary (London: A. Zwemmer, 1985), pp. 81–92. Tudor Walters Report (London: HMSO, 1918), pp. 13 and 77. ESRO, DB/B7/33, Minutes of the General Purposes Committee, 15 June 1919. Swenarton, Homes Fit for Heroes, pp. 16–17. S. M. Gaskell, Model Housing: From the Great Exhibition to the Festival of Britain (Oxford: Alexandrine Press, 1987), p. 80. Housing, 2: 36 (22 November 1920); Brighton Gazette (1 October 1921). Brighton Gazette (26 January 1921); (1 October 1921). S. Davies and B. Morley, County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919–38: A Comparative Analysis, Vol. 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). See for example Brighton Herald (19 April 1919); Brighton Gazette (2 April 1919); (27 September 1919); (21 July 1923). Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture, pp. 78, 85–86; M. McKenna, ‘The suburbanisation of the working class population of Liverpool between the wars’, Social History, 16: 2 (1991). See reports on council debates in the Brighton Gazette (19 April 1919) and Brighton Herald (19 April 1919). Brighton Gazette (11 June 1919). Brighton Gazette (7 September 1919). Brighton Herald (27 September 1919). R. G. Baxter and D. J. Howe, ‘Municipal activities in Brighton during the past twelve years’, Proceedings of the Institute of Municipal and County Engineers, Vol. 63 (1936–1937), p. 52. ESRO, DB/B7/36, Minutes of the General Purposes Committee, 15 June 1921. Brighton Herald (21 June 1924). Brighton Herald (29 September 1928). Brighton Herald (2 August 1930). Ibid. M. Fitzgerald, Rents in Moulsecoomb (Brighton: Southern Publishing, 1939), pp. 6–7. My italics. R. Dunn, Moulsecoomb Days: Learning and Teaching on a Brighton Council Estate, 1922–1947 (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1990), pp. 15, 30–34. Brighton Herald (17 March 1928). ESRO, DB/B7/39 and 43, Minutes of the General Purposes (Housing) Subcommittee, 11 March 1926 and 10 July 1935; ESRO, DB/B27/6, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 5 January 1938. Davies and Morley, County Borough Elections, p. 141. For Municipal Reform Party policies, including explicit anti-socialism, see Brighton Herald (29 October 1932).

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114 70 71 72 73 74

75

76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89 90

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England Fitzgerald, Rents in Moulsecoomb, p. 33. Brighton Gazette (3 June 1939). Brighton Gazette (1 July 1939). Brighton Gazette (22 July 1939). R. Rodger, ‘Slums and suburbs: the persistence of residential apartheid’, P. J. Waller (ed.), The English Urban Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 253. For evidence of working class owner-occupation see A. O’Caroll, ‘Tenements to bungalows: class and the growth of home ownership before World War II’, Urban History, 24: 2 (1997); P. Scott, ‘Marketing mass home ownership and the creation of the modern working class consumer in inter-war Britain’, Business History, 50: 1 (2008); G. Speight, ‘Who bought the interwar semi? The socio-economic characteristics of new house buyers in the 1930s’, University of Oxford Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History, 38 (2000). For owner-occupation as central to middle class identity, see S. Gunn, ‘Class, identity and the urban: the middle class in England, c.1790–1950’, Urban History, 31: 1 (2004), p. 43. Rodger, ‘Slums and suburbs’, p. 244. The most controversial contemporary study to posit a relationship between suburbanisation, increased poverty and lower public health was G. C. M. M’Gonigle and J. Kirby’s, Poverty and Public Health (London: Gollancz, 1936). This will be dealt with fully in Chapter 5. Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for 1928 (Brighton, 1929), p. 70. Ibid., p. 73. Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for 1932 (Brighton, 1933), p. 69. Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for 1933 (Brighton, 1934), p. 64. Brighton Gazette (20 November 1937). Brighton Gazette (4 December 1937); (24 December 1938); (7 January 1939); (28 January 1939); (18 February 1939); (25 February 1939) and (1 April 1939). Full details will be given in Chapter 5. Fitzgerald, Rents in Moulsecoomb, pp. 24–26. Ibid., p. 30. J. Macnicol, ‘The effect of the evacuation of schoolchildren on official attitudes to state intervention’, H. L. Smith (ed.), War and Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 20. Ibid., pp. 15–17. J. Welshman, ‘Evacuation and social policy during the Second World War: myth and reality’, Twentieth Century British History, 9: 1 (1998), pp. 35–36. Women’s Group on Public Welfare, Our Towns: A Close-up (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), pp. xiii–xiv; Macnicol, ‘The effect of the evacuation of schoolchildren’, pp. 24–25; J. Welshman, ‘Evacuation, hygiene and social policy: the Our Towns report of 1943’, Historical Journal, 42: 3 (1999), p. 796. Macnicol, ‘The effect of the evacuation of schoolchildren’, pp. 26–27; G. Field, ‘Perspectives on the working class family in wartime Britain’, International Labor and Working Class History, 38 (1990), pp. 3–28.

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92 J. Welshman, Underclass: A History of the Excluded, 1880–2000 (London: Hambledon, 2006), p. 69. 93 P. Starkey, ‘The feckless mother: women, poverty and social workers in wartime and post-war England’, Women’s History Review, 9: 3 (2000); B. Taylor and B. Rogaly, ‘ “Mrs Fairly is a dirty, lazy type”: unsatisfactory households and the problem of problem families, Norwich 1942 to 1963’, Twentieth Century British History, 18: 4 (2007). 94 D. Rowland, The Brighton Blitz (Seaford: S. B. Publications, 1997), p. 7. 95 Cited in Merrett, State Housing in Britain, p. 237. 96 Mass Observation, An Enquiry into People’s Homes (London: John Murray, 1943), pp. 53–54 and 220–223. 97 T. Tsubaki, ‘Planners and the public: British popular opinion on housing during the Second World War’, Contemporary British History, 14: 1 (2000), pp. 90–95; N. Tiratsoo, ‘The reconstruction of blitzed British cities, 1945–1955: myths and realities’, Contemporary British History, 14: 1 (2000), p. 37. 98 G. H. Gallup (ed.) The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain, Vol. 1; 1937–64 (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 115–184. 99 Ernest Bevin quoted in P. Hennessy, Never Again: Britain, 1945–1951 (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 169. 100 H. Meller, Towns, Plans and Society in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 68–74; M. Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 38–47. 101 A. Homer, ‘Creating new communities: the role of the neighbourhood unit in post-war British planning’, Contemporary British History, 14: 1 (2000). 102 Central Housing Advisory Committee, Design of Dwellings (London: HMSO, 1944), pp. 119–143 and 152–154. These developments will be discussed more fully in Chapter 5. 103 PRO CAB CM (45) 11th Conclusion. Quoted in Dickens et al., Housing, States and Localities, p. 211. 104 Evening Argus (9 July 1945). 105 See Evening Argus (10 July 1945). There was disagreement over tactics in the Brighton group, with Harold Steer (the secretary) keen to turn the local campaign into a national crusade whilst the influential Cowley wanted to focus on Brighton; see letter from Harry Steer, Brighton and Hove Leader (8 July 2005). 106 See for example Evening Argus (10 July 1945); (1 November 1945). 107 A comprehensive, if partial, account of Communist involvement can be found in Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1941–1951, pp. 118–128. 108 Housing Manager’s Annual Report for 1949 (Brighton, 1950). In 1950, for example, 61 per cent of those housed had resided in the borough for over 25 years; see Housing Manager’s Annual Report for 1950 (Brighton, 1951). 109 See Housing Manager’s Annual Report for 1950 (Brighton, 1951). 110 Sussex Daily News (7 October 1952). 111 Sussex Daily News (1 December 1952). 112 Sussex Daily News (15 December 1952).

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113 S. Laing, Representations of Working Class Life, 1957–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 18–20. 114 Housing Manager’s Reports for the Years 1953–58 (Brighton, 1953–1958). 115 Evening Argus (21 September 1956). 116 Evening Argus (21 September 1956). 117 Evening Argus (16 August 1957). 118 The Argus reported that hundreds of tenants sided with Labour councillors to oppose the scheme at a public meeting in Coldean; Evening Argus (17 January 1959). 119 It is not clear whether the policy of privatising estates was widespread or not; however, Cullingworth in his 1963 study of Lancaster thought Brighton’s policy unusual enough to comment on it. In Bristol, a Conservative administration introduced sales to sitting tenants in 1960, a policy retained by Labour when it won back control in 1963. The most detailed local account of sales policy is Murie’s work on Birmingham. See J. B. Cullingworth, Housing in Transition: A Case Study in the City of Lancaster, 1958–1962 (London: Heineman, 1963), p. 200; K. Bassett, ‘Council house sales in Bristol, 1960–1979’, Policy and Politics, 8: 3 (1980), pp. 325–326; Murie, The Sale of Council Houses, pp. 56–98. 120 Evening Argus (25 February 1961). 121 P. Weiler, ‘The rise and fall of the Conservatives’ grand design for housing, 1951–64’, Contemporary British History, 14: 1 (2000), p. 126. 122 ESRO, DB/B27/16, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 5 June 1963. 123 ESRO, DB/B27/19, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 20 April 1966. 124 ESRO, DB/B27/21, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 31 May 1972. 125 QueenSpark Rates Book Group, Brighton on the Rocks: Monetarism and the Local State (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1982), p. 108. 126 Housing Manager’s Report for the Years 1965–1967 (Brighton, 1968), p. 8. 127 Brighton Borough Council, ‘Council house sales’ (Brighton, August 1974), p. 1; A. P. Graves, ‘Housing tenure – the changing pattern’, unpublished paper (University of Sussex, 1984), p. 33. 128 Ibid. 129 Aggressive council house sales were also undertaken by other local authorities, peaking in the early 1970s, see K. Coates and R. Silburn, Beyond the Bulldozer (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1980), p. 119. 130 Nationally, the programme peaked between 1965 and 1974, although in the south-east the peak period was 1955–1964, a trend reproduced in Brighton; see J.  Yelling, ‘The incidence of slum clearance in England and Wales, 1955–85’, Urban History, 27: 2 (2000), pp. 237–238. 131 Evening Argus (22 May 1956); Evening Argus (25 May 1956). 132 Evening Argus (25 May 1956). 133 Evening Argus (20 September 1956); (21 September 1956). 134 Evening Argus (29 November 1956). 135 Evening Argus (7 February 1957). 136 Evening Argus (7 February 1957). 137 Evening Argus (22 March 1957); (4 April 1957); (19 July 1957); (6 August 1957).

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Place 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155

156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169

170

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Evening Argus (18 June 1957); (7 July 1957). Evening Argus (14 September 1957). Evening Argus (7 July 1957). Evening Argus (11 September 1957). Evening Argus (17 July 1957); (17 July 1958); (25 May 1960); (9 September 1960); (1 March 1962). Evening Argus (1 November 1958). Evening Argus (3 November 1958). See correspondence and articles in the Evening Argus (4 November 1958) Evening Argus (4 November 1958). Evening Argus (27 November 1958). Evening Argus (20 November 1958). Evening Argus (25 July 1960). Evening Argus (12 August 1957). Evening Argus (4 January 1961); (1 March 1962). Although there was a nostalgic feature on the last night at the Harriers pub in the New England district: Evening Argus (31 July 1958). R. S. Cross, ‘Sanitary circumstances of Brighton, 1950–1960’, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health (Brighton, 1959), p. 47. Evening Argus (8 August 1959). The best account of the rise and fall of high-rise housing is M. Glendinning and S. Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (London: Yale University Press, 1994). For an excellent critique of modernism in British public housing see L. Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (London: Granta, 2007), pp. 103–121. Evening Argus (20 April 1961); (27 April 1961). ESRO, DB/B27/17, Letter from the housing manager, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 24 August 1964. Evening Argus (20 April 1961). Central Housing Advisory Committee, Moving from the Slums (London: HMSO, 1956), p. 13. My emphasis. Ibid. Evening Argus (23 November 1961). Housing Manager’s Annual Report for 1955 (Brighton, 1956), p. 5. In the event, this was exactly how tenants from Boston Street and Artillery Street were rehoused; see Housing Manager’s Annual Report for 1957 (Brighton, 1958), p. 4. Evening Argus (30 November 1959). Evening Argus (19 August 1959). ESRO, DB/B27/17, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 4 March 1964. ESRO, DB/B27/18, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 26 April 1967. P. Griffiths, Homes Fit for Heroes: A Shelter Report on Council Housing (London: Shelter, 1975), pp. 11–31. For the identification of ‘Fairfields’ as Moulsecoomb, see Anon, ‘National report slams Brighton’s decaying estates’, Brighton Voice, 25 (1975). Griffiths, Homes Fit for Heroes, p. 11.

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171 For an extended discussion of the ways residents made distinctions between roads in the North Earlham, Marlpit and Larkman estates in Norwich, often in contrast to pervasive myths about ‘the Larkman’, see B. Rogaly and B. Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (London: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 39–50 and 60–70. 172 Griffiths, Homes Fit for Heroes, p. 13. 173 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 174 In 1973 a public outcry surrounding the jailing of Manor Farm resident William Kepple for the manslaughter of his stepdaughter Maria Colwell led to a forty-oneday public inquiry. In 1986 two local girls were found strangled in the Wild Park, Moulsecoomb. Local builder Russell Bishop was tried and acquitted, but later convicted for the kidnap, indecent assault and attempted murder of another girl. The ‘babes in the wood’ murders, as they became known, remain unsolved. See T. Carder, The Encyclopaedia of Brighton (Brighton: East Sussex County Libraries, 1990), entries 97 and 105; M. Hughes, ‘Babes in the wood murder: 23 years on, father’s first interview’, Independent (29 June 2009). 175 S. Goodwin, ‘The unsavoury legend of N. Moulsecoomb’, Evening Argus (13 March 1975). 176 Evening Argus (20 March 1975). 177 Evening Argus (27 March 1975). 178 Evening Argus (9 May 1975). 179 See particularly A. Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), pp. 127–187 and the modification of Mayne’s arguments by Barry Doyle in ‘Mapping slums in a historic city: representing working class communities in Edwardian Norwich’, Planning Perspectives, 16: 1 (2001). 180 Evening Argus (9 May 1975). 181 Evening Argus (9 May 1975). 182 See accounts from the Brighton Gazette on the Cumberland Place area from 1896 in S. A. Evans, ‘Housing provision and the working classes in Brighton’, unpublished paper (Brighton Polytechnic, 1985), pp. 18–22, held at Brighton Local Studies Library. 183 Evening Argus (9 May 1975). 184 Evening Argus (9 May 1975). 185 Evening Argus (16.5.75). 186 A. Offer, ‘British manual workers: from producers to consumers, c.1950–2000’, Contemporary British History, 22: 4 (2008), pp. 540–541. 187 Evening Argus (15 October 1973). 188 Ibid. 189 Ibid. 190 Evening Argus (26 October 1973). 191 This shift is apparent from the mid-1960s with the provision of improvement grants, and the designation of General Improvement Areas from 1969. See D. A. Kirby, Slum Housing and Residential Renewal: The Case of Urban Britain (London: Longman, 1979), pp. 74–76.

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192 In the 1970s just 169 houses were demolished in Brighton. See S. Mackenzie, Visible Histories: Women and Environments in a Post-war British City (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), p. 43; K. Fines, A History of Brighton and Hove (Chichester: Phillimore, 2002), pp. 160–161.

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Chapter 4

Community: neighbours, networks and social memory

We saw in the last chapter the ways in which working class neighbourhoods were materially and discursively recast in the mid-twentieth century. Particularly powerful was an official discourse which categorised neighbourhoods as ‘slums’, and we analysed the degrees to which this category was adopted, adapted and resisted by residents of neighbourhoods subject to slum clearance. We also saw how these stigmatising representations of place were remapped onto some council estates and how some residents used the language of community to resist both denigrating categorisations and proposals for ‘redevelopment’. In this chapter, I want to explore the ways in which people’s senses of belonging to and identification with particular neighbourhoods were formed. These place-based identifications were always informed by the ways in which these more or less spatially distinct areas have been externally categorised by others. They were also premised upon spatially and socially specific knowledge about people and practices gained from living locally. Here the networks established between neighbours and kin were an important means of transmitting resources and knowledge. While there is evidence for mutuality and reciprocal aid between neighbours (especially if they were also kin), more commonly neighbourly relationships were carefully managed, respectful and sometimes distant, with privacy jealously guarded. As numerous working class writers have noted there were minute gradations of status within and between streets, while historians have shown the extent to which workers could be divided along the lines of ethnicity, gender, age, religious and political affiliation. Conflicts over the transgression of neighbourhood norms regarding acceptable behaviour, arguments over children’s noise, over help which went unreciprocated, debts which went unpaid and domestic or intra-family violence were also a feature of neighbourhood life. A key argument of this chapter concerns the degrees to which everyday sociability, patterns of association and networks based on reciprocal aid were changed by suburbanisation and rising affluence. There were significant cultural continuities in terms not only of conflict and competition but also of neighbourly practices, material poverties and the reconstitution of social networks.

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Above all, this chapter is about the ways in which people came to know their neighbourhoods and the contexts in which they transmitted their memories of them to others. Returning to some of the themes raised in the introduction concerning ‘experience’, this chapter is about a dialectic of experience: the ways in which the individual, inchoate experience of everyday life (Erlebnis) were transformed into a notion of experience based on a learning process, integrated into a narrative whole, publicly expressed and open to interpretation or critique (Erfahrung).1 Reconstructing the experience of community life from the fragmentary historical traces which remain is not easy, particularly when environments and populations have been transformed by slum clearance, redevelopment, gentrification and in- and out-migration. Moreover, the plurality of everyday experiences and the agency of individuals can be obscured by dominant archetypes such as ‘the slum’ or ‘the sink estate’. Recent work in historical archaeology has analysed documentary and archaeological evidence to dig behind these stigmatisations in order to reconstruct communities which have ostensibly vanished.2 Drawing upon historical, archaeological and anthropological methodologies, this work seeks to build detailed ethnographies of the material and everyday cultures of marginalised working class neighbourhoods.3 Such an approach necessitates an understanding that the pasts of all communities require acts of imaginative reconstruction in order to contextualise the material and documentary evidence which is unearthed. For Mayne and Murray, ‘Individually and collectively, we fashion overarching imaginary templates which give coherence to our material surroundings, making them intelligible and knowable, and which guide our efforts to modify those surroundings.’4 Any act of historical reconstruction, then, whether through memory, archaeology or history, is in some sense imaginative.5 Beside the material residues, we can never hope to access the immediacy of the everyday past as it was lived, but instead have to analyse experience as it has been storied and remembered. This means that the major source for this chapter will be the remembered experiential accounts of the residents of Brighton’s mid-century working class communities. For some historians, however, the rhetoric of community and the perceived romanticisation of working class life which has accompanied its retelling obscure the ‘reality’ of contemporary experiences. It is these arguments and the attempts of historians to deal with the discursive construction of remembered accounts to which I must first turn. Confronting nostalgia: historicising working class communities In an influential analysis published in 1994 the cultural historian Joanna Bourke noted both the ubiquity and the conceptual haze which enveloped the use of ‘community’ among twentieth-century British historians, who:

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Tend to be vague about what constitutes a community or ‘communal feelings’: generally it is said to include elements of identification with a particular neighbourhood or street, a sense of shared perspectives, and reciprocal dependency. More commonly, the term is used without any attempt at definition. This has proved possible because of the resonance of the phrase ‘working class community’ within two quite separate discourses: one, a backward-looking romanticism, and the other a forward-looking socialism. The romantic use of the phrase has been fostered in working class autobiographies and oral histories where social relations are often recalled through a golden haze: conflict is forgotten in favour of doors that were always open, the neighbour who was never seen is neglected in favour of the neighbour who always shared . . . Socialist debates are equally responsible for the popularity of the term ‘working class community.’ For them the community represents the innate socialism of the workers.6

What follows is a trenchant critique of ‘community’. Bourke suggests that historians have confused the fact of spatial immobility in major urban English cities, from the late nineteenth century onward, with the desire to stay in the same place, citing survey evidence from various locales in the 1940s and 1950s which suggested that significant proportions of residents wanted to move.7 Subsequently Bourke provides a wealth of mainly autobiographical testimony which demonstrated that proximity to neighbours and kin could be stifling and alienating and that various distancing mechanisms were employed to cope with the lack of privacy.8 Before damning associative institutions as diverse as pubs, churches and boys’ brigades as at best ‘ambiguous uniters of neighbours’, Bourke argues that while in poor neighbourhoods ‘reciprocal exchange was undeniable’, this neighbourliness, ‘the strongest argument in favour of the “community” concept’, could be entirely ‘separated from the sense of community’ on the grounds that neighbours might help in times of crisis but maintain a friendly distance more generally.9 In place of ‘community’ Bourke paints a bleaker picture of neighbours utilising social networks to compete for knowledge and scare resources. In this competitive environment, conflict rather than cooperation was the norm. For Bourke (providing no references), ‘Violence was endemic; neighbours hated the sight of one another; the ferociousness of gang warfare was tame compared with brawls between “friends” at local public houses. Given the high levels of conflict, it makes sense to assume an absence of consensus rather than assume that conflict was indicative of some unidentified rapport. There could be no consensus because there was no homogeneity.’10 I have paid considerable attention to Bourke’s arguments for two reasons. Firstly, her work is emblematic of a wider shift in social and cultural history which sought to deconstruct ‘homogenous’ working class ‘communities’ and emphasised the extent to which workers were divided along lines of status,

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gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation and age.11 Moreover, Bourke’s emphasis on the less convivial, more competitive elements of community life was pertinent. Even among those, such as Avram Taylor, who sought to reassert the utility of community as ‘the social relations within a given locality’ recognised the strength of Bourke’s critique.12 However, and this is my second point, what has gone unremarked upon, even in criticisms of Bourke’s approach such as that outlined by Robert Colls, is the glaring disjuncture between the power of discursive constructions of community which Bourke asserts and the empirical evidence which she then marshals.13 If Bourke is correct that working class autobiographies are saturated with sentimental nostalgia (‘the neighbour who was never seen is neglected in favour of the neighbour who always shared’), why is it that she can find so many contrary examples of less than ‘neighbourly’ relations from these same autobiographical sources? This disjuncture raises more questions than it provides adequate answers. In the preface to Bourke’s empirical deconstruction of the ‘community’ concept we have two separate discourses of ‘community’ (one ‘romantic, backwardlooking’ and autobiographical, the other ‘socialist’, ‘forward-looking’ and political) clearing the theoretical ground. But Bourke provides little indication of how discourse and experience might be linked, no recognition of how these ‘separate’ discourses might be intertwined, differ from place to place or change over time and no satisfactory answer to the question why a bleak struggle for scarce resources, characterised by conflict, would be systematically misrepresented through sentimentalising, rose-tinted lenses. In research published in 1999 and 2000, Chris Waters sought to provide some tentative answers. For Waters, the desire to memorialise the working class past which emerged in the post-1945 period stemmed in part from the reconfiguration of the built environment through slum clearance, which disrupted established patterns of everyday life.14 This rupture in modern life was experienced as a sense of dislocation, which generated a nostalgic longing for the older ways of life and the places in which past lives were lived.15 Pursuing this theme in relation to the working class autobiography produced by groups associated with the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP) in the 1970s and 1980s, Waters argued that the nostalgic tone of such writing could be further explained by the emergence of new forms of reflexively organised selfhood and a number of new beliefs about managing the self.16 Crucially, these included welfare and educational policies which conferred upon members of the working class a new sense of self-worth. In this regard he quotes Carolyn Steedman approvingly: ‘I would be a very different person now if orange juice and milk and dinners at school hadn’t told me in a covert way, that I had a right to exist, that I was worth something.’17 Waters links these changes to other trends in education and the academy

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as a generation of working class grammar school girls and boys and students in higher education became committed to retelling the history of their class. As Waters notes, after Raymond Williams had effectively invented the term ‘working class culture’, a generation of scholars followed Edward Thompson in searching out and rescuing from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ what was deemed valuable in the cultures of their own parents’ and previous generations.18 Working class communities became not just the object of academic study by historians and sociologists, but appropriated as background for the fictions of the ‘angry young men’ and the subject of popular television soap operas such as Coronation Street. Often, though, they were the work of men and women whose own mobility rendered problematic their relationship with the communities they had left behind.19 ‘By the 1970s’, Waters notes, ‘many representations of the old working class communities circulated widely throughout British society; so too did a series of nostalgic laments for the structure of daily life in those communities.’20 The dominance of these discourses meant that much of the writing produced by FWWCP-affiliated groups focused almost exclusively upon the home and neighbourhood, the mundane and everyday.21 Moreover, they were, unlike the autobiographies of previous generations of proletarian writers, nearly always nostalgic, synchronic accounts, ordered largely by anecdote, frozen in time and ending abruptly upon marriage, entry into the workforce or movement away from the old neighbourhood.22 More contentiously, Waters argues that although the tendency to romanticise the past was not new, nostalgia was previously but one of a number of generic forms23 available to the working class writer: ‘In contrast it was ubiquitous in the accounts of the past narrated by worker writers in the 1970s and 1980s.’24 One problem with Waters’ account is that while he outlines the dislocations from the spaces of the past which engendered nostalgic narratives, nowhere does he define what he means by nostalgia. The etymological origins of the term lie in the seventeenth century, where it was defined as the ‘painful longing for home’ experienced by Swiss mercenaries.25 By the nineteenth century it had mutated and broadened to form the modern language of loss and longing, relating to both space and, crucially, time (lost historical eras and experiences).26 For the purposes of this discussion, I will follow the Oxford English Dictionary in defining nostalgia broadly as a ‘longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, [and/or] a sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past’.27 In what follows, I use the example of FWWCP member and Brighton publisher QueenSpark to question the extent to which nostalgia was truly ubiquitous in these accounts, both in order to provide for a more nuanced understanding of QueenSpark’s politics and practices and to emphasise the constitutive role of experience in shaping remembered accounts of working class communities. I will show how concepts of ‘com-

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munity’ drawn from official and popular discourses of place, socialist politics and the lived experiences of everyday life intermeshed to produce fluid, contingent and contested accounts of working class neighbourhoods that were at times nostalgic, at times celebratory, sometimes critical but always related to the changing structural and material forces which produce places themselves and people’s accounts of them. A radical gentrification: QueenSpark and the politics of community publishing At the height of the slum clearance programme, in late 1960, as high-rise tower blocks were beginning to take shape at the foot of the hills of east Brighton, the borough’s medical officer of health proposed that house-tohouse inspections take place in older areas of the town. The purpose of these inspections was to make owners aware of defects in their properties and draw their attention to the improvement grants which were available under the 1958 Housing Act.28 Between 1962 and 1969, 1,679 houses were inspected (about half of which were owner-occupied and half tenanted), with work being carried out in 990 instances.29 In 1969 larger grants and grants for a wider range of repairs were introduced, resulting in a significant increase in applications, particularly following the designation of Hanover (a district of nineteenth-century working class housing) as a ‘general improvement area’.30 These were the seeds of a broader approach to the modernisation of nineteenth-century housing, away from wholesale clearance and towards improvement and conservation. As Raphael Samuel argued, while universally blamed for planning disasters in the 1960s, local authorities played a leading role in conservationism during the 1970s.31 However it was middle class groups concerned with conserving Britain’s urban heritage that played the key role in pressing for legislative change and in campaigning at local level. Nationally, the case for conservation and against redevelopment was organised by umbrella groups such as the Civic Trust, founded in (f.) 1958, and the campaigning organisation SAVE Britain’s heritage (f.1975).32 In Brighton, support for the conservationist cause manifested itself in groups such as the Regency Society (f.1945), the Brighton Society (f.1973) and the North Laine Community Association (f.1976). Between 1970 and 1974 the council took advantage of provision under the 1967 Civic Amenities Act and subsequent related legislation to declare 11 neighbourhoods ‘conservation areas’; these included the ‘old town’, various old villages and the fashionable Regency squares and crescents.33 In 1977 these areas were extended and five new Victorian conservation areas were instituted.34 While most of these were districts of larger middle class housing, also included were the North Laine area of artisan streets (which had in 1967 been earmarked for near-wholesale

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demolition) and the mixed housing area of Queen’s Park. These neighbourhoods, along with the Hanover improvement area, became the major sites of gentrification in a town with a burgeoning professional population. This was gentrification through ‘collective social action’35 as professionals in the culture industries developed distinctive styles of house refurbishment, design and social networking.36 Some middle class incomers also began to develop forms of community politics in which both the historicity of the built environment and the memories of the areas’ longer-term working class inhabitants played a prominent role. Locally, the first and best exemplar of this approach to community action was QueenSpark.37 Initially, the group mobilised against proposals to turn a derelict nineteenth-century spa building in Queen’s Park into a casino.38 This campaign, which began in 1972, was successful and a nursery school was eventually established on the site.39 Over the course of the decade the interests of the group expanded to include wider critiques of planning, education and economic policies.40 In the early years, the organisation’s primary means of communication with local residents was in the form of a street newspaper, QueenSpark, which was sold door to door. The newspaper’s content reflected the varied interests and concerns of the neighbourhood’s heterogeneous population. There were articles and letters commenting on various aspects of everyday life, from the use of open spaces and concerns about nursery provision to notices about the activities, events and associations established by residents. The changing practices of everyday life were registered through life writing, history and photographs in a section entitled ‘Sparchives’, first published in 1973.41 As I have argued elsewhere, the form of the street newspaper allowed QueenSpark to attend to what might be termed the ‘everydayness’ of everyday life through montage.42 News, opinions, photographs and memories jostled for space on the page, allowing readers to make connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. The ‘Sparchives’ section also foregrounded the residuality of everyday life as older residents of Hanover, Albion Hill and Queen’s Park presented their memories of the neighbourhoods. Here we can see a combination of older story-telling traditions and newer technologies (publishing, photocopying, photography and modern recording equipment) as older residents attempted to make sense of and communicate their stories both to their peers and to the recent incomers. In doing so they sought to transform everyday, lived experience (Erlebnis) into something coherent, storied and shared (Erfahrung). In the May 1974 edition of QueenSpark there appeared a small acknowledgement thanking a ‘Mr Paul of Southampton Street’ for his manuscript.43 This was published later that year as Poverty – Hardship but Happiness: Those Were the Days, 1903–1917. The circumstances which prompted Mr Paul to recall, write down and eventually publish his reminiscences were intimately

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tied to local changes in the built environment and the politics of community life. As Tom Woodin notes: Paul’s first ‘audience’ were the workmen who had exposed an old flint wall during the [1972] improvements [to Cobden Road] following the 1969 Housing Act, sparking off many memories. Radio Brighton recorded his recollections and a local historian encouraged him to write them down. Reading the local history section of the community newspaper QueenSpark finally spurred Paul to take his first tentative steps in writing . . . QueenSpark then took a risk in publishing this experimental work. An initial print run of 1,000 sold out within a few months.44

It is easy to scoff at the apparent contradiction between the left-wing politics and consumption practices of those middle class incomers, often university students and academics, who made up the vanguard of groups such as QueenSpark. Indeed, as Joe Moran has argued, some of the most critical social satires of the ‘implicitly political’ cultures of gentrification came from within the middle class itself.45 Unlike the North London middle classes which Moran studied, the cultural politics of QueenSpark was explicitly radical, critical of capitalist modes of production and committed to carving out a space for an alternative, cooperative approach to publishing. Thus the back cover of Bert Healey’s Hard Times and Easy Terms carried the following statement: The aim is to make our own history, and to smash the divisions between writers and readers, consumers and producers of print, between literature and what most of us want to say and write. And to stop means of communication being used as they mainly are now – as ways to isolate and divide. We would like to associate together in order to control our own area and produce our own future.46

Woodin’s claim that groups such as QueenSpark ‘emerged from and proselytized among working class communities with the aim of encouraging participation, not just as a traditional audience but also more actively as producers of culture’ is evidenced throughout the letters and contributions to QueenSpark, an avalanche of unsolicited manuscripts and in the stream of local writing and autobiography which was published from the 1970s and which continues to this day.47 Not everyone was convinced of the wider political value of this writing, however. University of Sussex historian Stephen Yeo championed working class writing as a political act in itself, against colleagues in the history workshop movement who wondered whether it was a hopelessly compromised, still-born project.48 Nor could the practices of cooperative publishing bypass existing class- and gender-based hierarchies or circumvent the unequal distribution of social and cultural power within such groups. As Yeo admitted, ‘Conflicts like those between “experts” and “ordinary people”, men and women, paid workers and volunteers do not go away. But spaces for the

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realisation of such conflicts have been provided through the work-teams, texts, public readings and other events characteristic of this kind of historical work.’49 During the 1990s, QueenSpark, like other FWWCP groups, saw the wider conflicts around class and identity politics being played out.50 In Brighton there were organisational changes with the employment of paid workers, and divisions over how far the group should move away from its radical practices and conform to an increasingly dominant funding agenda.51 While some books provided a necessary corrective to the silence in other narratives around issues of difference, arguably, they reproduced problematic essentialist notions of community and identity, albeit by foregrounding identities based on sexuality or ethnicity rather than class.52 But what of the representation of community in the working class autobiographies of the 1970s and 1980s? To what extent could they be defined as sentimental or nostalgic? QueenSpark books: social memory as critique Reading all of QueenSpark’s output from 1974 to 1989, and contrary to the wider arguments of Bourke and the specific claims of Waters, it is apparent that nostalgia is far from dominant. Of the 22 books, besides those by Albert Paul and Bert Healey, which Waters cites, only Sid Manville’s Everything Seems  Smaller could be characterised as largely nostalgic.53 Moreover, Manville consciously restricted himself to a narrative of childhood similar to Paul’s first book, which he felt would have wider appeal, omitting to mention his later trade union activism.54 Waters laments the decline of both the ‘progressive’, autodidact narratives in FWWCP publications and writings which articulated a specific sense of politics, yet QueenSpark produced more of these kinds of books during this period than ‘nostalgic’ laments for the past.55 Indeed, James Nye’s A Small Account of My Travels through the Wilderness was itself a fine example of nineteenth-century, spiritual autobiography;56 while ‘Politics’ in the upper case loomed large in the narratives of Labour councillor and Justice of the Peace John Langley, Communist and trade unionist Les Moss, the socialist soldier Jack Cummins, anarchist and squatter Harry Cowley, and in the cartoons of Alf Johns.57 Other works, such as Katherine Browne’s Out of the Blue and Blues, while clearly ‘political’, defy easy categorisation. Browne, originally from Belize, was an active member of QueenSpark and her life story mixes autobiographical fragments from her childhood, career as a billeting officer in Liverpool and nurse in London with poetry and spiritualist meditations on the Spa and Marina campaigns.58 The majority of QueenSpark writers, far from sentimentalising the past, used their narratives to register their experiences of living with inequality. These are the other stories: of poverty, domestic drudgery and educational failure, physical and mental illness, familial violence and desperate attempts to resist subjuga-

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tion. Here we are alerted to an important function of story-telling: to make audible the ‘hidden injuries’ of class.59 Another important consideration is the function of these reminiscences, whether nostalgic or not, in relation to the ways in which working class communities were depicted in the wider culture. Research on workers’ testimony by Talja Blokland in the Netherlands has shown how nostalgia was mobilised by certain groups, sometimes as a means of excluding migrant ethnic minorities from the imagined community, reinforcing a normative ‘white’ Dutch sense of identification, which could override historical divisions of status, politics and religion.60 Other research, such as that undertaken by Bourdieu and his colleagues in France in the 1980s and 1990s documented attempts by workers to resist the indignities of deindustrialisation, displacement and ghettoisation under late capitalism.61 In the last chapter we saw how working class people both co-opted and resisted the external categorisation of their neighbourhoods as ‘slums’ or ‘sink estates’. In the autobiographies published by QueenSpark, this conflict over representation comes to the fore. Thus, in 1988 the Argus trailed the publication of Backyard Brighton, a book of photographs and memories of those neighbourhoods subject to slum clearance, which prompted this response from R. J. Weedon: Regarding your article and pictures of the houses in old Richmond Street, Carlton Hill and surrounding streets in Brighton, I object to them being called slums. The people who lived in these houses were good, clean, working-class people. They kept their houses spotlessly, and the front door-steps and each bit of the pavement was swept and washed nearly every morning …These streets were far from slums. They were cosy houses for happy families.62

A number of contributors to the book, which was reissued with a new introduction and additional material in 2007, similarly objected to such stigmatising categorisations, often asserting the cleanliness of the homes and invoking mutuality and sociability in nostalgic terms.63 But for other (and indeed sometimes the same) contributors the photographs provoked sometimes painful memories of poverty, conflict and violence.64 For every former resident who asserted that ‘neighbours used to sit on the step and talk to passers by: this is why people didn’t want to move; the community was there’, there was a dissenting voice such as that of W. G. Holmes, who maintained that: Unlike some I cannot say that I look back on those days with affection. The memories I have are of being damned cold in winter, suffering chilblained ears which bled; having rickets through my poor diet and certainly not being over protected by my parents. It was March 1936 when we were re-housed in a brand new council house in Manor Road. I remember we put our few bits and pieces on an open lorry and climbed on afterwards. I left without a backward glance.65

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Even in publications where narrators should, in Waters’ analysis, be at their most nostalgic, we find that memory is ultimately mediated as much by the subjective experience of the past as by discursive reconstructions of it. Through the contested, multivalent remembered experiences of past communities we can see the complex, relational construction of social memories. These memories and the processes of remembering are ‘social’ in the sense that they are shaped by the audiences to whom they are told. Be they peers, family members, acquaintances, oral history interviewers or workteams and readers (real and imagined), as in the case of QueenSpark, the subjectivities of audiences will shape the kinds of stories which emerge.66 They are ‘social’ too in other important ways. These stories for the most part centre on what Connerton argues are the key loci of social memory: the home and the street – specific places which give order and focus to the memories of everyday activities, environments and people.67 Crucially moreover, these memories depend upon the experience of having lived in a particular neighbourhood. Yet the ways in which this locale is subjectively experienced will be shaped by factors such as the age, gender, material circumstances and subsequent trajectory of the narrator, and the shifting cultural representations attached to the neighbourhood itself. As Rogaly and Taylor argue: Places continue to be different, as they are sited differently in terms of local, regional, national and global economies and resources; are represented differently and thus have different social meanings; and are experienced differently. In addition, each of these elements has a temporal aspect, with change occurring over time and over the course of individual lives. In all these senses then, we understand places relationally, seeing them as contingent, contested and uncertain, rather than as fixed territorial units.68

Thus it is with the place-based memories of neighbourhood life in Brighton which I analyse below. These remembered experiences of sociability, mutuality and co-operation sit alongside those of drudgery, conflict and stigmatisation. Far from being conservative and apolitical, these social memories, whether nostalgic, stoic or heroic, negotiate and frequently resist contemporary stigmatising representations of working class communities. In what follows I draw extensively on published autobiographies and my own interviews to explore place-based identifications and accounts of community life in the urban terraces and courts of eastern and central Brighton between the 1920s and the mid-1970s. In the section on suburban communities I explore how people negotiated relationships with their neighbours. I begin, however, by analysing how local residents defined their neighbourhoods socially and spatially.

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Urban working class communities: spatial identifications and social categorisations Feelings of belonging to and identifying with a local community depended to a significant extent upon immersion in the culture of a particular neighbourhood and developing a body of knowledge about its spatial boundaries, cultural norms and social structures. In remembering community life in Brighton’s poorer neighbourhoods subject to slum clearance, a number of former residents refuted their external classification by outsiders as ‘slums’. The typologies used in these instances are strikingly similar, involving claims of cleanliness, friendliness and respectability despite poverty and the external reputations of the neighbourhoods. As some residents recalled, ‘They called Carlton Row slums but I don’t think they were slums. We were poor but we were very clean, and we weren’t lousy . . . Carlton Hill was supposed to be a bad area. They were supposed to be slums. We were poor but we were clean. Our homes were immaculate.’69 Albert Lewis remembered that in Russell Place, ‘though everyone was poor, there was a camaraderie that does not exist today. Each mother instilled wonderful discipline in her kids and made sure you were honest. We were scrupulously clean.’70 In rejecting the category ‘slum’, former residents drew upon their own experiences to refute the tropes popularly associated with ‘condemned’ (an interesting word) districts and their residents: dirt, vermin, infestation and criminality. The streets with the ‘worst’ reputations for being both poor and ‘rough’ were those running north to south between St James Street and Carlton Hill. This neighbourhood was home to the poorest paid seasonal workers: fishermen, labourers, barrow-boys and costermongers. Moreover, these streets were also home to seasonal migrants from northern France, settled GypsyTraveller families and, from the late 1880s, a number of Italian immigrants.71 Such were the minute gradations of status within working class communities that different parts of the same street might be classified as more or less ‘respectable’ (depending upon whom you asked), as Tom Gower, who grew up in Albion Street between 1911 and 1933, noted: ‘Our end of the street was much the quieter with just houses and a small shop. The other end was very overcrowded and the houses mostly had three storeys with backyards which weren’t very nice.’72 The street as a whole, however, was considered to be of higher status compared to others nearby: It seemed that the nearer you lived to the sea, the poorer the area got. Streets like John Street and William Street used to be rough. The houses in William Street were originally for ‘gentlemen’s ladies’ and some of the houses were probably quite nice when they were built, but if anyone spoke of the slums the first thing you thought about was William Street. Many of the fathers were costermongers and it was quite usual to see children running about without shoes and socks in

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the summer . . . Claremont Row was one of the worst streets. I was friendly with a boy who lived in one of them and I went in there once. The houses were dreadful. My home in Albion Street was a palace compared with those. The people who lived there were very poor. Carlton Row and Woburn Place were also poor.73

Dorothy Betteridge, who lived at what Gower defined as the ‘rough end’ of Albion Street in the 1920s, was also aware of its being considered more respectable than Claremont Row: ‘I was conscious that Albion Street was considered better than Claremont Row which my mother considered a slum. She didn’t like me walking along there.’74 For Dorothy Farrell, Sun Street carried a similar reputation: ‘The people who lived there seemed to be poorer, some of them seemed to be like gypsies . . . My mum said never to go through Sun Street because of the terrible things that happened there like bad language and razor gangs, but of course we never saw anything.’75 The terms ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’ were used to describe behaviours and identities which were tied to social space. As Anna Davin perceptively notes, these classifications ‘concerned both subjective identity – how people saw themselves; and social identity – how they were placed by other people.’76 This element of self-perception is particularly important and problematises any attempt to arrive at a definitive account as to what constituted ‘respectable’ behaviour. We have seen how individuals from neighbourhoods perceived as ‘rough’ tied notions of respectability to their own street or part of the street, externalising ‘roughness’ to somewhere else in the locality. As Rogaly and Taylor note: ‘In representing others in a particular light, the personal and spatial often become inextricably entwined, so mentioning a street or area is enough to embody an individual with a swathe of ascribed characteristics.’77 It is for these reasons that the assertions of respectability and the negotiation of and challenges to external designations are so prevalent in remembered accounts of the town’s poorer neighbourhoods. The relative poverty of a community, and the effect this had upon strengthening ties to the locality, was something which nearly everybody agreed upon. Yet assertions of common poverty were often accompanied by the identification of other areas which were worse off. Rene Kelly and Mary Banks, of Apollo Terrace, described the area as ‘poor but were all the same’. However one of the women argued that: ‘William Street and Henry Street were worse streets. They were rough, especially Henry Street. It had Barnes the salvage firm there and lorries were outside there loading the compressed salvage. There were also a couple of dirty little houses along there.’78 Thus residents drew upon stigmatising spatial discourses of poverty and remapped them onto neighbouring streets in order to assert their own respectability. This knowledge of sharing space with neighbours in similarly constrained, or worse material circumstances could encourage a sense of inward identifica-

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tion among neighbours. This was particularly so if neighbours happened to be kin. Familial networks sustained by reciprocal help regarding material goods, services and access to knowledge helped to mitigate the worst effects of poverty and engendered feelings of attachment to local space. Yet these networks, particularly when they included neighbours who were not family, were premised upon exchange, an understanding that help ought to be reciprocated, and were balanced against desires to maintain familial privacy and respectability. Sociability, mutuality and privacy: local networks and knowledge The presence of relatives living nearby did not necessarily mean that they had mutually supportive relationships, nor even that they had a great deal of contact with one another. When relatives who were on good terms lived close by, however, this could engender a strong sense of belonging to an area. For John Knight, Belgrave Street, between Albion Hill and Southover Street, ‘was the family street in the 1930s. Some doors up from number five where we lived were my paternal grandmother and grandfather . . . Opposite my grandparents lived another daughter.’79 Similarly, Sid Manville had numerous relatives living very close by. In 1920, as his father and mother settled into number 111 Bear Road, ‘So Uncle Punch, Aunt May and family moved into No 133, a few doors up the road. In later years when there were seven or eight of us, and five or six up the road, it was frequent, and I must admit, fair comment that the district was “lousy with Manvilles.” ’80 In terms of the emotional and economic support which relatives might provide, there is little evidence to suggest that this was offered in a purely calculative fashion.81 Joan Parsons’ maternal grandmother, who lived in Coronation Street, close to her home in Franklin Road, provided consistent support for her daughter and her family. Joan recalled that: Often we went to our gran’s for lunch. We never went without anything. She was marvellous really, because when my dad came out of the army he had vascular disease of the heart and was in the Netley Hospital in Southampton for a long, long time, and she went out scrubbing, cleaning to keep the family going.82

It was not uncommon for sons and daughters to reciprocate the help given by their parents by having their mothers reside with them in their old age or providing them with some form of financial assistance.83 The evidence for mutual help and friendship among neighbours who were not kin is more ambivalent. Former residents of some of the poorer districts recall neighbours doing their families favours, such as repairing children’s shoes, lending money and hiding items of value from the parish relief inspectors.84 However, in circumstances where privacy was often impossible to attain and access to goods and services partly depended upon conforming to local social norms, relationships with neighbours had to be

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carefully managed. Overwhelmingly, maintaining good relations with neighbours depended upon keeping a certain distance, as Mrs Kirby of Edwin Place explained: ‘The neighbours were friendly without being in and out of each other’s houses all the time, but were always there if anyone was ill or in trouble.’85 It was in the poorest streets that resources were most commonly shared. For Margaret Hamon, ‘Everyone was poor in Cavendish Street, but when you lived in that street you felt you weren’t isolated, you were all one family . . . If people didn’t have enough food they would borrow things like an onion or potatoes. And one of them would make a big stew and share it with the neighbours.’86 Yet oral evidence also points to families engaged in a struggle with their neighbours over scarce resources, as the following anecdote from Mavis Cameron reveals: ‘Mum had seven children; but there was another family, just a few doors up with seven children, so in the mornings, mum used to say to us “Hurry up and get to the bread shop and get any bread left from the day before, before the other family get it.” ’87 It seems that it was relatively unusual for neighbours to regularly visit each other’s homes, and if they did they were likely to be friends of several years’ standing.88 Much more commonly, neighbourliness would stop at the doorstep. Mrs Jackson’s description of Claremont Street in the early 1940s is typical: ‘In the evening, groups of mothers used to sit on a doorstep and talk. They had this friendship in the street where everyone would help each other. There were an awful lot of women who had children but whose husbands were away in the war, so everyone helped each other and all the children played together.’89 As these memories indicate, women were responsible for managing the household, caring for the family and presenting the public face of both to the neighbours. Mothers were expected not only to keep their children clean and well turned out: similar standards were applied to the domestic environment. In many areas it was customary to perform good housewifery through public display. The everyday whitening of the front step is a particularly good illustration of the type of public display of respectability to which women were expected to conform. June Drake, who lived in Chapel Street between 1932 and 1953, recalled the social significance of this quotidian ritual: ‘All the women could be seen whitening their door steps and polishing their door knockers every morning like clockwork; even if they were ill they still cleaned. I suppose you had to be seen or you had to hear the local piece of scandal.’90 Although ‘gossip’ could be experienced ambivalently by working class women, both public displays of good housewifery and engaging with the neighbours were essential aspects of neighbourhood life. Melanie Tebbutt argues that while certain neighbours might be ostracised for unrespectable behaviour such as drunkenness or sexual transgression, equally, the maintenance of a ‘good name’ might improve marriage prospects or the chance of maintaining

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‘credit’ with neighbours or a local shop-keeper. Moreover, ‘gossip’ provided for the exchange of valuable information between women which need not necessarily be to the detriment of those individuals – indeed quite the reverse. Via gossip it was possible to learn about local job opportunities, labour- or money-saving practices and sexual knowledge.91 Elizabeth Roberts goes as far to suggest that gossip might serve as a brake upon more overt forms of domestic violence, although only those who were concerned about what the neighbours thought would be constrained in this way.92 Consequently, it was women who had most to gain by being part of a neighbourhood network, and also the most to lose by keeping aloof. While excessive, public violence was frowned upon, it was largely considered acceptable for husbands and fathers to use some level of violence to discipline their wives and daughters.93 Charges of sexual impropriety or ‘moral looseness’ could be particularly damaging to a family’s social standing, as one young woman discovered to her cost: ‘[One] time somebody told my mum I was out at the Barracks with the soldiers, and when I got home my mum and dad hit me, but I wasn’t anywhere near the barracks.’94 In other circumstances, collective violence could be turned against outsiders. Youth gangs maintained a proud sense of territoriality, as Harry Denman, who grew up in Pelham Street in the 1930s, recalled: ‘there was a little bunch that stood on the corner of Cheltenham place and they would never let you walk through. Oh they were spiteful. We held our own of course but you know we ran the gauntlet.’95 On other occasions it was the police who suffered at the hands of the community, as Molly Morley demonstrates in this portrait of Carlton Hill: Thieves lived there but never stole anything from their own neighbourhood. Had one dared, the wrath of the whole community would have sealed his fate! The police would patrol Carlton Hill ‘four-handed’ (four at a time). There was the night in Carlton Court when about five policemen were actually knocked out by women – with fire-tongs and pokers! Their men folk, whom the police were after, had already got clean away.96

As Jerry White argues in relation to Campbell Bunk, North London, it would be wrong to see such violence as necessarily destructive of community consciousness or collective identity. On the contrary, as with this example, it could reinforce feelings of a proud exclusivity: a neighbourhood that could manage its own affairs, in its own way.97 As the above examples illustrate, living within urban working class neighbourhoods necessitated the cultivation of particular kinds of behaviour and the maintenance of a public image which conformed to collectively held notions of propriety and respectability. The whole structure of social life in working class districts depended both upon ‘being known’ and upon geographically distinct cultural knowledge – knowing how to manage relations

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with kin, neighbours, traders, shop-keepers and outsider figures such as policemen, rent collectors and the ‘relief men’. This sense of simultaneously having the right kind of knowledge and of being known to others was central to people’s identification with and sense of belonging to an area. For Barbara Coppard, Wood Street between the mid-1920s and the late 1940s was ‘like one big community centre, everybody knew everybody.’98 For Robert Hayward, Carlton Hill in the 1930s had ‘a village like atmosphere, everybody knew one another – and most of each other’s business. You could not be distant or aloof if you wanted to; you lived too near your neighbours.’99 John Whitwell and his father ran a greengrocer’s in Grenville Place from 1918 to 1960 before the site was compulsorily purchased by the council to make way for the first Churchill Square shopping centre.100 He remarked that: People in the area had a strong community spirit, they would always come and help you, and they’d do anything for you, very helpful all round. Everyone knew everyone, and they would all come into the shop and talk; not like in the supermarkets today where they just take your money and slap your goods down, nobody knows anyone in there.101

Being known to a shop-keeper was important for poorer families, as it enabled them to obtain goods on credit.102 Intense competition meant that small shop-keepers and street sellers in most working class districts were more or less obliged to give credit. However, shop-keepers exercised their judgement in this regard, based on what they knew of their customers. As Miss Bristow, whose father ran a general store in the Elm Grove district recalled, they did give credit, but ‘Only to people we knew. We had about ten but we knew they were alright. Some of the women were not good managers – some of the men only gave their wives half of it. We knew they were genuine and if we asked their husbands, we knew they’d pay up.’103 Arguably, then, a more generalised sense of ‘being known’ was as important for both accessing goods and generating a geographically specific sense of belonging as for having kin close by or engaging in reciprocal relationships with neighbours. This was experiential knowledge: of space, of social practices, of other people’s behaviour, of cultural codes and values. When individuals register a sense of loss pertaining to a neighbourhood, it is in part a recognition that this spatially specific knowledge is no longer pertinent or useful: it is out of place, due to temporal, social and economic change. This loss will usually be most keenly felt by those older people, shop-keepers and property owners who are most heavily invested, in all senses, in the locale. However, the impact of, say, slum clearance or moving to another area, while dislocating for some, could be felt as liberating for others. Individuals’ emotional responses to changes in their built environments may also change over time, as Dorothy Seymour recalled of demolitions in the Cheapside area:

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There was a general feeling of resistance when the compulsory purchase orders came through. The Environmental Health Officer sent letters saying the houses were unfit to live in, but by this time, the fifties, many of the houses had been bought and done up. They came to look at our house. I think the modern buildings on either side saved us . . . initially I had a feeling of loss when the area was being demolished, but this was replaced by a feeling of light as they knocked down the buildings opposite. The area has changed now that it has not been developed at all.104

Feelings about particular streets thus changed during the lives of individuals, and could vary between generations within families, due to the different ways domestic and neighbourhood spaces were experienced. A particularly telling example of generational memories differing within one family, and of the layers of emotion slum clearance could invoke in one individual, is Barbara Wykham’s account of her time in High Street, off St James Street. In her depiction of the neighbourhood of her childhood in the 1930s and early 1940s, she invokes many of the themes of friendliness and mutuality outlined by others: ‘I was happy living in High Street, the neighbours were very nice. The lady next door to us always made us apple pies as I think she thought we were hungry. Further down the road were a family . . . who used to knit us bed socks. The atmosphere was nice; neighbourly without having people in and out all the time; people were very friendly.’105 She moved away in 1945 when her mother died, going to live with her grandmother in Southend for a couple of years. In 1947/48 she returned to live with her father and new stepmother: I went back to live in High Street again at the top of my father’s house in 1954 when I was married. We just had a couple of rooms at the top of the house and I had two children and was expecting another one. I used to have to go down three flights of stairs to cook the meals as the cooker was right in the basement; by then they were talking of demolishing the houses. When I was about to have my third child (I had three children in three years), we moved to a house in Manor Farm [a council estate]. I couldn’t wait to move out of High Street. It was awful when the rain poured in; bits of ceiling falling down, lots of mice; it was really old. My father didn’t want to move. He said to my stepmother, ‘I’m not going to live in a box’. This house seemed awful to me, but he had so many memories there, and he’d lived there with my mother, and then with my stepmother. He is alright where he is now, but at first he was very much against it. They got a flat in Craven Vale [a low-rise council block] and are still there.106

There is a complexity here in the experiential construction of social memories which defies simple categorisation. The sentiment invested in Barbara’s experience of High Street as a child relates to the warmth and friendliness of the neighbourhood. Following the death of her mother, she moved away, returning to her childhood home when she was married and a mother herself. Burdened with domestic work in a decrepit house with few amenities she

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couldn’t wait to move out. Her father, however, who had so many memories there could not conceive of moving away, but when forced to, eventually reconciled himself to his new surroundings. As this testimony demonstrates, the memories of living in Brighton’s urban working class neighbourhoods were as complex and diverse as people’s lived experiences of them. Nostalgia in these instances cannot be assumed, it has to be demonstrated. Nor can slum clearance be said to play the decisive role in structuring memory. Feelings of dislocation could occur not just through the physical destruction of the neighbourhood but through the death of a parent, marriage, growing up and moving away. Indeed there are a number of nostalgic accounts of the Hanover and Bear Road neighbourhoods between the 1910s and 1950s which relate to areas untouched by demolition; rather, they have been more gradually changed since the 1960s through gentrification.107 In areas subject to compulsory purchase and clearance a few people remained while surrounding streets were destroyed; while some felt distressed or ambivalent about moving, others (the majority perhaps) were only too pleased to be rehoused. Furthermore, many others, often but not always the more affluent, took it upon themselves to build new lives for themselves on Brighton’s suburban estates. The next section explores how the experiences and representations of working class communities were adopted, adapted and resisted on the suburban council estates and flats of the inter-war and post-war years. Suburban communities: breaking and remaking social networks Between the wars, and again after 1945, thousands of working class families weighed up the improved quality, greater space and increased privacy offered by council housing against the poor housing, mutuality and familiarity of the older districts, and found the latter wanting. Malcolm Foster’s father grew up in poverty in Hanover in circumstances which left him ‘bitter’ towards his family. In 1934, married and with a young son of their own, the Fosters moved to the recently completed council estate in the Whitehawk Valley. Despite continuing financial hardships, exacerbated by the higher costs of suburban living, Malcolm’s parents thought of the move as a step up in social terms: We were all poor; I mean nobody had any money. Yet we didn’t see ourselves as being poor. The poor still lived in Brighton because they were clearing the slums out in Brighton that were worse probably than where we were. We saw it as being probably an upmarket step.108

For those, such as the Fosters, who could depend on regular, well-paid work, migration offered an opportunity for social reinvention in which inner-urban

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values and norms regarding respectability and neighbourliness were refocused through a new lens which allowed for a more restricted sociability (‘keeping oneself to oneself’) and narrower, domestically oriented consumption practices.109 The built environment of the estates shaped the communities which they sustained in important ways. The houses and the spaces between them were much bigger. They were better equipped, usually built to a higher standard and often had substantial gardens. These elements combined with security of tenure to engender a sense of ownership and investment in the home, one which after the 1950s was translated into actual ownership by a significant minority. The opportunities for informal sociability were further restricted by the lack of shops and pubs, while the churches and community centres which eventually became established arguably served sectional, association-based interests. While suburban living encouraged a turning inwards, with sociability increasingly formalised around associations, there were continuities with the older areas, not least in terms of spatial practices, material poverties and a remapping of stigmatising, place-based categorisations, underpinned by the slum clearance, allocations and sales policies mapped out in Chapter 3. Indeed definitions of ‘community’ based upon local knowledge were as much about self-distancing from particular estates, roads or parts of roads as they were in the inner-urban districts addressed above. Crucially too, people’s conceptions of community were informed by their personal trajectories through time and across space. If you were born into a settled extended family on an estate in the 1930s and remained there for the rest of your life, you were likely to have a very different degree of embeddedness and sense of belonging to that of an elderly person who was moved to the same estate following slum clearance in the 1960s. Neighbours: knowledge, networks, conflicts Among the factors which motivated working class families to leave the old, central districts to take up a tenancy on one of the outlying estates, the increased privacy and greater space which the move offered were paramount factors. In early 1920, Emmie Pennifold was bringing up three daughters in half a house in Stanmer Park Road; upstairs were a ‘noisy and violent’ family. Her husband, Jack, went to the housing office to seek alternative accommodation and, at Emmie’s insistence, put their names on the waiting list for one of the new council houses then being built at Moulsecoomb; they moved in 1922.110 While suburbanisation did mean improved amenities and increased household space on the one hand, on the other it took people away from familiar neighbourhoods where they had often built up complex support networks with kin, friends and neighbours. For women in particular, removal to an outlying estate could be an isolating and unsettling experience.111 Ivy Bone remembered the difficulty her mother had settling in:

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We were moved from Edwin Place to Cowfold Road. It was a two bedroomed, new house with an indoor toilet and bathroom, but my mother didn’t want to move and she had a nervous breakdown soon afterwards because she wasn’t happy living there. I think she felt very lonely and isolated and missed all her friends from Edwin Place . . . we were given no choice about where we were to be moved to.112

In the 1930s, the disruption of social networks was partially limited by a policy of rehousing neighbours from condemned areas on specific estates, notably at the Kingswood and Milner flats, and at Manor Farm. Significantly, many of those who recalled managing the transition with ease were rehoused on these particular estates.113 As W. G. Holmes commented: ‘I’m not sure that my parents were too sad [to move from Ivory Place] because friends and relatives from nearby streets were also destined to move to Manor Farm, so the old community spirit to some extent would be re-established.’114 Manor Farm and nearby Whitehawk offer perhaps the best examples of the ways in which older neighbourhood ties, particularly kinship networks, could be reconstituted. As we have seen, Fred Netley’s family moved from Albion Hill to Manor Farm in the early 1930s. By the time Fred was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, he had numerous cousins, uncles and aunts, and later nieces and nephews living, throughout Manor Farm and Whitehawk: ‘Oh loads of my family lived around, yeah. See that’s a good aspect to work on because . . . our grannies knew his granny and their kids knew their kids and it was one big family really. It was a close-knit community and almost anybody you come across you could go back and get a connection between them.’115 As in the older districts, these settlement patterns could create a sense of belonging engendered by simply knowing people who were either kin or knew members of your family, a feeling of embededness evidenced in studies of council estates in other localities.116 There were continuities too in terms of the material poverties which many people experienced on the estates. The household economy and family resourcefulness will be examined in the next chapter, but the life-history evidence clearly shows that neighbouring practices of borrowing and giving, sometimes based on little expectation that they would be reciprocated, continued. Fred recalled a childhood friend and neighbour, whose ‘mum was pretty hard on him; very hard. Even if he’d got his bloody shoes wet in the snow she’d have a go at him; that sort of person. I remember he’d get a little nick in his trousers or something like that and he’d be worried sick. He’d come indoors and my mum would sew them up for him.’117 Similarly Linda Potter, who lived on the Coldean estate during the 1950s, stated that her mother was ‘always one to help people’: ‘There was a family lived two doors away and they were really, really hard up. I can always remember mum, she would make what she used to call then (we call it quiche) an egg and bacon

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pie. But she always made one for the [neighbours] as well to make sure the kids had a meal because their dad, he worked for Walls ice cream which is very seasonal.’118 While these cases are telling, it would be absurd to assume that all neighbourly relations were characterised by mutuality, or that everyday squabbles and conflicts evaporated. While it was easier to ‘keep oneself to oneself’ on the estates, complaints about noise and children’s games, particularly in some of the post-war flats, continued unabated.119 Hazel Bradley remembered tension between her family and their next-door neighbour at Nuthurst Road, Whitehawk, who ‘got very cross when we chalked hopscotch squares on the pavement. She also complained if my mother lit a bonfire in the back garden. She would reciprocate but only when we had washing hanging on the clothesline. My mother had a very loud voice and the rows could be heard inside the house with all the doors and windows closed.’120 There were also arguments over the use of public space, particularly the greens where different groups of tenants shared the same estate. At Craven Vale in 1959/60 a dispute arose when elderly residents of the Highden flats objected to the children from the newly built Westmount block playing games on the green in front of their living rooms. In the summer of 1960 the council erected a wire fence or, as the Argus preferred to term it in a report on the state of ‘cold war’ which existed between the groups, ‘an iron curtain’.121 Ostensibly an argument about privacy, the debate, which could be viewed as a generational clash, was carried out in the language of class and status. One elderly resident complained of the young families: ‘during election time those dreadful people chalked “Vote Labour” on our walls: that’s the sort of people they are.’122 Westmount residents responded in kind, deriding the fence as a ‘snob wall’ and accusing the Highdeners of treating the flats as though they were a ‘private block’.123 This dispute, while exaggerated for journalistic impact, was typical of the kinds of divisions over notions of propriety and respectability, which were perhaps more visible on the new developments than in the older areas. This was particularly true with the resettlement of families from clearance areas, often the very same neighbourhoods that pioneer settlers had sought to leave behind. As early as 1937 the Housing Committee received a complaint from a tenant at Bevendean about the ‘type of tenant selected for the houses on the Hodshrove [East Moulsecoomb] estate and . . . the damage caused by children to trees and shrubs’.124 During the 1960s and 1970s, as we have seen, allocation policy tended to concentrate those whom the local authority considered ‘problem families’ on parts of particular estates. Relations between neighbours at North and East Moulsecoomb during this time could be difficult. One couple I interviewed who had moved to East Moulsecoomb in the early 1960s described fractious relationships with neighbours. The woman said she ‘hated it in Moulsecoomb’, her sense of isolation

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compounded by frequent arguments with aggressive neighbours, of which her husband bore the brunt: Remember that bloke came down shouting at me that time? He was a heavy lorry driver. [He] lived up the road; I forget what their name was. It was over nothing, but he come around shouting and bawling he was gonna do this and gonna do that. I just said ‘If you don’t get off my bloody step I’ll knock you off. Now get off, clear off.’125

Consistent run-ins with neighbours, particularly on Birdham Road (‘Bad road that was, Birdham Road, a lot of trouble there [Always] effing and blinding on your doorstep’), had a detrimental impact on their health and within three years they had transferred to another estate. Part of the rationale behind the grouping of problem families in the same area was to mitigate the nuisance which they could cause to other tenants. Inevitably, however, such a concentration of families with multiple problems had a detrimental impact on those who lived nearby. As one elderly resident of North Moulsecoomb told the Argus: ‘We don’t have nothing to do with the neighbours. There is always trouble if you start talking to them.’126 The degree to which neighbours could keep themselves to themselves was further enhanced by the lack of amenities such as shops and public houses, which restricted the opportunity for everyday sociability. A council planning report from 1937 noted that of Brighton’s 17 wards, Moulsecoomb and Kings Cliff (containing part of Whitehawk and Manor Farm) had among the fewest shops in the borough. At Kings Cliff there were 150 persons per shop (the highest ratio in the town) and at Moulsecoomb there were 116.127 But even these figures under-represented the scale of the shortage, due to the fact that the boundaries of ward and estate did not correlate. Kings Cliff covered the southern part of Whitehawk as well as parts of Black Rock and Kemp Town (older residential districts where large proportions of the shops were located). Similarly the Moulsecoomb ward included an older residential district between Natal Road and Bear Road (but excluded North Moulsecoomb, which was part of the Rottingdean ward). There were in reality only four shops on each of the estates. The provision of public houses was an even lower priority for those who commissioned and planned the new developments. There is evidence to suggest that some councillors, influenced by the temperance lobby, tried to prevent licensed premises from being built on the new estates. Licence applications for a public house at Moulsecoomb were repeatedly blocked.128 In 1934 an application for a pub to be built at the junction of Widdicombe Way (Bevendean) and The Hillside (Moulsecoomb) was not granted, despite campaigners collecting nearly 1,000 signatures in favour of the proposal.129 A licence was finally granted in 1937 for the Hiker’s Rest, which was situ-

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Figure 4.1 North Moulsecoomb from Wild Park, 1935. James Grey Collection/ Regency Society

ated on Coldean Lane, a few hundred yards from the North Moulsecoomb estate.130 The very lack of amenities on the estates could, however, bring tenants together. In December 1935 a public meeting was held at Moulsecoomb hall to discuss the formation of a community centre on the estate. The Rev. Bransby Jones addressed the gathering and poured scorn on the idea that nature had provided sufficient amenities on the estates: In North Moulsecoomb there are 3,000 people who have nothing whatever to do in their spare time. There is the tiny church and the British Legion, beyond that there is nothing . . . We are condemned to play hide and seek in the Wild Park. There are no picture palaces and no public houses. The community cannot express itself for there is no place to meet.131

The meeting saw the establishment of the Moulsecoomb Organisations Committee, consisting of most of the 24 clubs and societies on the estate, in order to campaign for the centre to be built. As this episode indicates, the lack of commercial buildings for leisure and sociability on the suburban estates meant that formal associations and traditional institutions assumed an enhanced significance, as I discuss below.

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Associative culture Since the topography of the suburban estates with their spacious greens, substantial houses and minimal amenities limited the opportunities for casual, everyday sociability, the institutions and associations of civil society assumed an enhanced significance. This was particularly true of the Anglican church. As Callum Brown has recently demonstrated, church-going remained robust amongst the working class well into the 1950s, and nowhere more so than on the council estates.132 Churches also played an important role in instigating and facilitating associative culture. Amongst the youth groups formed at Moulsecoomb between the wars were branches of the Scouts, Girl Guides and the Church Lads Brigade.133 At Whitehawk there was a Young Women’s Christian Association Girls club, a Boys club and branches of the Scouts, Girl Guides and Boys’ Brigade.134 Churches and school halls were also used as meeting places for adult clubs and societies. At Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk there were branches of the Church of England Men’s Fellowship, the British Legion, the Townswomen’s Guild and sports and social clubs. There was a Conservative Women’s section at Moulsecoomb and a handful of Communist activists at Whitehawk. The Labour Party had active ward associations at Moulsecoomb, Kings Cliff (Whitehawk and Manor Farm) and Rottingdean (North Moulsecoomb) who lobbied the council over issues such as repairs, rent reductions and the provision of amenities. At Moulsecoomb, tenants’ rights were also looked after by a Ratepayers Association and (in the late 1930s) a Tenants Defence League.135 Increasingly from the mid-1930s, tenants’ groups, often with advice from the New Estates Communities Committee (NECC) of the National Council of Social Service formed umbrella ‘community associations’ in order to campaign for amenities and represent tenants’ interests.136 In April 1937 the Whitehawk and Manor Community Association was established, with 12 affiliated groups.137 By the early 1950s, community associations had been formed at Moulsecoomb and on the larger post-war developments at Coldean, Hollingbury and Woodingdean.138 Membership of these associations fluctuated widely, and while they were often strongest in the first few years of their foundation, the running of their affairs, as with the smaller affiliated clubs and groups, often depended upon years of commitment from a small core of activists.139 It is, moreover, doubtful that even the most successful associations accounted for more than a small minority of tenants. In 1952 Hollingbury Community Association claimed 400 members, an increase of 340 on the previous year.140 Yet on an estate of 750 households, with a population of perhaps 4,500, the figures look less impressive. For Mark Clapson, the post-1945 period saw the flowering of a rich associative suburban culture which, he argued, often cut across boundaries of gender, occupation and status.141 Yet the politics of association were as likely

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to highlight differences between groups of tenants as to bring them together. In the case of gendered youth organisations and political parties these divisions are fairly obvious, but membership of community associations or the use of community centres could also be socially divisive. Evidence from social surveys in Watling (north London) and on a Liverpool estate in the 1940s revealed that some residents thought of those who used the centres as socially inferior.142 On the Liverpool estate the university investigators thought that this was largely due to the presence of a licensed bar at the centre, which some residents objected to.143 Certainly at Watling and Becontree in London, only a small minority of the estate’s population ever used the community centres.144 As Bayliss has argued, part of the problem in Watling and Roehampton was that the community associations prescribed a narrow view of community life, focused improving or educational activities which did not encompass more gregarious patterns of sociability. The meetings of community associations could provide the forum for one group of residents to attack others for their perceived lack of ‘community spirit’, often a thin cloak for the expression of class-based prejudices.145 As new council estates were built at Woodingdean in the 1950s, membership of the community association fell. Noting the falling membership, the secretary turned his ire on the newer residents: ‘the incomplete representation of the prefab estate and South Woodingdean [the council estate] is to be deplored’.146 Elsewhere, divisions of status were embedded in rules governing membership. A pamphlet advertising Moulsecoomb District Community Association from the late 1940s described the aims of the association as ‘To promote the well being of the community’ and ‘to serve as a common meeting ground for neighbours, irrespective of creed or party membership for their wider education and recreation’.147 Yet all members of the community were not treated equally in terms of subscriptions. So-called ‘non-residents’ had to pay membership fees at a level more than twice that of ‘residents’. The qualification for resident status was ‘over 14 years in the area’.148 Such a proviso would have excluded all the residents of East Moulsecoomb rehoused from central Brighton following the slum clearance programmes and overcrowding surveys of the 1930s. As the above examples demonstrate, associative culture could reinforce divisions of status among working class suburbanites, as much as, if not more than it militated against them. Arguably, on most council estates, as in the inner urban districts, clubs and associations were the preserve of a minority. Yet the very existence of these associations demonstrated a relatively rich culture of interest and association, with significant numbers of people co-operating altruistically to provide leisure and social activities and political representation for their neighbours. In areas derided for their lack of social cohesion and poverty, the success of clubs and associations signalled

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a tangible denial and refutation of stigmatisation. A classic example of this is the Whitehawk and Manor Farm football club. Founded in 1945, during the 1950s and 1960s it was the most successful amateur team in the Brighton area, regularly attracting home crowds of between two and three thousand people and nurturing a generation of talented footballers who went on to play at county and professional level.149 Nevertheless, the enhanced significance that formal associations assumed stemmed from the fact that to a significant degree the enforced sociability of the old areas had been eclipsed by a more or less magnified domesticity, with suburbanites increasingly obliged and increasingly willing to refocus their attentions and activities from the spectacle of the street to the insularity of the family home. With this in mind, it is not surprising that the densely populated urban neighbourhoods were remembered as bustling, noisier and more sociable than the new estates: to some degree they were. For women, particularly those who were at home all day, with children at school and husbands at work, the quiet of the suburbs could be unsettling. For pensioners too, who had spent years living in the same set of streets where they were well known to the neighbours even if they were not on friendly terms with all of them, making the transition to the suburbs could be difficult. The flip side of being known is of course that everyone knows your business; council estates offered increased space and privacy. For many, suburbanisation represented real material improvements in their quality of life and they were glad to go. As this chapter has demonstrated, there were certainly significant continuities in the ways in which the old urban and the newer suburban neighbourhoods were experienced. In some cases social networks were reconstituted, and, where economic insecurity and poverty remained, traditions of mutuality and reciprocity continued. There were continuities too in the ways in which slum neighbourhoods and council estates were represented, which had a significant impact on the ways in which former residents framed their memories. As I have shown, community publishers such as QueenSpark provided a forum in which local people drew on their experiences to contest such dominant and partial accounts. Moreover, the degree to which these were nostalgic in tone was again mediated by subjective experiences and specific trajectories. This myriad of divergent experiences and competing representations accounts for the diverse ways in which these neighbourhoods were represented, a point lucidly articulated in the following poem by Arthur Thickett: The trouble about Places is that With the utmost sincerity You can say almost anything about them.

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147 And this warm August afternoon as children shrill and play while cats slumber on lawns; opposing truths also rest here, easily or otherwise, side by side. Our Moulsecoomb is by and large A green and pleasant land – come and look; Though (media please note) Jerusalem is not yet completed here . . . or anywhere else . . .150

Thus, QueenSpark too allowed the ambiguity, the ‘opposing truths’ of the working class experience of community to be fully apprehended. Certainly the suburbanisation of Brighton’s working class population engendered a subtle shift in the nature of working class sociability. Moving out offered both greater household space and greater privacy. Moreover, a lack of amenities and, in some cases, the breaking of social ties encouraged a turning inwards, away from neighbours and towards the immediate family. In the next chapter, I explore the experience of home in greater depth and assess the extent to which working class domestic life was mediated by age, gender and the pace of modernisation. Notes 1 Jay, M., Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (London: University of California Press, 2006), p. 11. 2 See for example the contributions to A. Mayne and T. Murray (eds), The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3 For a recent review of the literature, see A. Mayne, ‘On the edges of history: reflections on historical archaeology’, American Historical Review, 113: 1 (2008), pp. 93–118. 4 A. Mayne and T. Murray, ‘The archaeology of urban landscapes: explorations in slumland’, A. Mayne and T. Murray (eds), The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 3. 5 See Ray Pahl’s reflections of British ‘community studies’, R. Pahl, ‘Are all communities communities in the mind?’ Sociological Review, 53: 4 (2005), pp. 621–640. 6 J. Bourke, Working-class Cultures in Britain, 1890–1960 (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 137. In an important intervention, Alistair Bonnett has traced the place of nostalgia in radical politics from Thomas Spence to the Situationists; see A. Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (London: Continuum, 2010). 7 Bourke, Working-class Cultures, pp. 139–142. 8 Ibid., pp. 142–143.

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9 Ibid., pp. 143–149. 10 Ibid., p. 150. 11 See A. Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992); L. Tabili, ‘We Ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (London: Cornell University Press, 1994); C. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England, 1920–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); T. Griffiths, The Lancashire Working Classes, c.1880–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 12 A. Taylor, Working Class Credit and Community since 1918 (London: Palgrave, 2002), p. 13. 13 R. Colls, ‘‘When we lived in communities: working class culture and its critics’, R. Colls and R. Rodger (eds), Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain 1800–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 14 C. Waters, ‘Representations of everyday life: L. S. Lowry and the landscape of memory in post war Britain’, Representations, 65 (1999), p. 121. 15 Ibid., pp. 135–137. 16 C. Waters, ‘Autobiography, nostalgia, and the changing practices of workingclass selfhood’, G. K. Behlmer and F. M. Leventhal (eds), Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia and Identity in Modern British Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 180. 17 C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago, 1986), p. 122. 18 Waters, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 181–182; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 13. 19 Waters, ‘Autobiography’, p. 181. Christopher Hilliard usefully compares the experiences of this post-war generation with proletarian writers of the 1930s: C. Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (London: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 247–253. 20 Waters, ‘Autobiography’, p. 182. 21 The Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP) was founded in 1976 as a loose collection of groups publishing local histories, poetry and autobiographies. The most comprehensive history is Tom Woodin’s, ‘An evaluation of the FWWCP’, PhD thesis, University of Manchester (2002). 22 Waters, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 186–187. 23 On these see R. Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 150–167. 24 Waters, ‘Autobiography’, p. 189, my emphasis. 25 D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 10. 26 P. Betts, ‘Remembrance of things past: nostalgia in West and East Germany, 1980–2000’, P. Betts and G. Eghigian (eds), Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth-century German History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 180. 27 Oxford English Dictionary Online, entry for ‘Nostalgia’, draft revision June 2008, www.oed.com. Accessed 7 September 2008.

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28 R. S. Cross, ‘Sanitary circumstances of the area’, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health (Brighton, 1962), p. 51. 29 G. V. Martin, ‘Housing’, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health (Brighton, 1969), p. 74. 30 G. V. Martin, ‘Housing’, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health (Brighton, 1970), p. 79. 31 R. Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994), p. 68. 32 See S. Andreae, ‘From comprehensive development to conservation area’, M.  Hunter (ed.), Preserving the Past: The Rise of Heritage in Modern Britain (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1990), pp. 135–155. 33 A comprehensive account of this legislation can be found in P. J. Larkham, Conservation and the City (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 87–95. 34 K. Fines, ‘Creation of the North Laine community association’, North Laine Community Association Website, www.nlcaonline.org.uk/page_id__383.aspx. Accessed 24 February 2010. 35 See A. Warde, ‘Gentrification as consumption: issues of class and gender’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 9: 2 (1991). 36 Most work on gentrification has focused on the metropolitan middle classes; see for example T. Butler and G. Robson, London Calling: The Middle Classes and the Remaking of Inner London (Oxford: Berg, 2003); C. Hamnett, ‘Gentrification and the middle-class remaking of inner London, 1961–2001’, Urban Studies, 40: 12 (2003). British provincial perspectives are included in a recent edition of Environment and Planning A on ‘extending gentrification’, see M. Boddy, ‘Designer neighbourhoods: new-build residential development in nonmetropolitan UK cities – the case of Bristol’; D. P. Smith and L. Holt, ‘ “Studentification” and ‘apprentice’ gentrifiers within Britain’s provincial towns and cities: extending the meaning of gentrification’, Environment and Planning A 39: 1 (2007). Comparatively rare are studies which explore how gentrification is experienced by working class residents; recent valuable exceptions include: T. Blokland, ‘Celebrating local histories and defining neighbourhood communities: placemaking in a gentrified neighbourhood’, Urban Studies, 46: 8 (2009); K. Paton, ‘Making working-class neighbourhoods posh? Exploring the effects of gentrification strategies on working-class communities’, Y. Taylor (ed.), Classed Intersections: Spaces, Selves, Knowledges (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 37 For the most comprehensive account of QueenSpark’s origins and activities, skilfully located within the wider context of developments in social, oral and community history, see Lorraine Sitzia’s ‘Telling people’s histories: an exploration of community history making from 1970–2000’, DPhil thesis, University of Sussex (2010), esp. pp. 91–124. 38 See QueenSpark Collective, The Royal Spa: People not Profits, collected fact sheets (Brighton, 1973), numbers 1–4. 39 L. Sitzia, ‘QueenSpark Books – publishing life histories for the local community’, The Local Historian, 27: 4 (1997), p. 218. 40 For example, QueenSpark led the opposition to the Marina development during the 1974 enquiry. The most coherent articulation of its ideology can be found in

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41 42

43 44

45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52

53

54 55 56 57

The working class in mid-twentieth-century England QueenSpark Rates Book Group, Brighton on the Rocks: Monetarism and the Local State (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1983). QueenSpark, No. 3 (1973). See B. Jones, ‘The uses of nostalgia: autobiography, community publishing and working class neighbourhoods in post-war England, Cultural and Social History, 7: 3 (2010). QueenSpark, No. 5 (May, 1974). T. Woodin, ‘Working class writing, alternative publishing and audience participation’, Media, Culture and Society 31: 1 (2009), p. 83; A. Paul, Poverty – Hardship but Happiness: Those Were the Days, 1903–1917, 3rd edn (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1981), pp. 5–6. J. Moran, ‘Early cultures of gentrification in London, 1955–1980’, Journal of Urban History, 34: 1 (2007), pp. 114–119. B. Healey, Hard Times and Easy Terms (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1980), p. 163. Woodin, ‘Working class writing’, p. 92; QueenSpark, Nos 7–10 (October 1974– July 1975); QueenSpark, Progress Report and Identification of Needs (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1977), pp. 4–6. By June 2010 ninety-six books had been published, see www.queensparkbooks.org.uk/books/catalogue.html?p=10. Accessed 20 June 2010. See for example the debate between Stephen Yeo and Jerry White in R. Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 33–48. S. Yeo, ‘Whose story? An argument from within current historical practice in Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 21: 2 (1986), pp. 299–300. T. Woodin, ‘Muddying the waters: changes in class and identity in a working class cultural organisation’, Sociology, 39: 5 (2005), pp. 1002–1003. See M. Hayler and N. Osmond, ‘Voices waiting to be heard: QueenSpark Market Books’, Oral History, 20: 2 (1992). J. Bornat, ‘The communities of community publishing’, Oral History, 20: 2 (1992), pp. 27–30; Brighton Ourstory Project, Daring Hearts: Lesbian and Gay Lives of 50s and 60s Brighton (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1992); QueenSpark Collective, Missing the Nile: Experiences of Sudanese People in Brighton (Brighton: QueenSpark, 2005); QueenSpark Collective, Bangla Brighton: Voices from the Bangladeshi Community (Brighton: QueenSpark, 2006). A. Paul, Poverty – Hardship but Happiness: Those Were the Days, 1903–1917, 1st edn (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1974); B. Healey, Hard Times and Easy Terms (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1980); S. Manville, Everything Seems Smaller: A Brighton Boyhood between the Wars (Brighton: QueenSpark 1989). My thanks to Lorraine Sitzia for this information. Waters, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 185–186. J. Nye, A Small Account of My Travels through the Wilderness, ed. V. Gammon (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1981). J. Langley, Always a Layman (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1976); L. Moss, Live and Learn: A Life and Struggle for Progress (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1979); J. Cummins, The Landlord Cometh (Brighton, QueenSpark, 1981); QueenSpark

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58 59 60

61 62 63

64 65 66

67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

151

Collective, Who Was Harry Cowley? (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1984); A. Johns, Who Stood Idly By (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1984). Thanks to Andy Durr for details of John Langley’s career as a magistrate. K. J. Browne, Out of the Blue and Blues (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1975). See R. Sennett and J. Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (London: Norton, 1972). See T. Blokland, Urban Bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 167–190; T. Blokland, ‘Memory magic: how a working-class neighbourhood became an imagined community and class started to matter when it lost its base’, F. Devine et al. (eds), Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyle (London: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 123–138. P. Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). QueenSpark Collective, Backyard Brighton, 1st edn (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1989), p. 4. S. Montford, J. Pollard and D. Burns, Backyard Brighton: New Memories, Reflections and Photographs, 2nd edn (Brighton: Brighton Books, 2007), pp. 33, 45, 48, 69 and 101. Ibid., pp. 28, 30, 33, 43, 49 and 59. QueenSpark Collective, Back Street Brighton, 1st edn (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1989), p. 27. There is an extensive literature on this; see for example S. Schrager, ‘What is social in oral history?’, R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader, 1st edn (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 284–299; V. Yow, ‘ “Do I like them too much?” Effects of the oral history interview on the interviewer and vice-versa’, R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 54–72. P. Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 18–26. Rogaly and Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community, p. 20. Emphasis in the original. See also the influential D. Massey, ‘Places and their pasts’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995). Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, pp. 33 and 45. Ibid., p. 69. See Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, pp. 22, 25, 38, 63 and 91–93; R. Hayward, Little to Spare and Nothing to Waste (Brighton: Brighton Books, 1998), p. 4. Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, p. 35. Ibid., p. 37. My emphasis. Ibid. Ibid., p. 71. A. Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram, 1996), p. 70. Rogaly and Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community, p. 18. Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, p. 48. J. Knight, A Ha’P’orth of Sweets: A Child’s 1930s–40s (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1997), p. 14.

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80 S. Manville, Everything Seems Smaller: A Brighton Boyhood between the Wars (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1989), p. 6. 81 See similarly, E. Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890–1940 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 179–180. 82 J. Parsons, Jobs for Life (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1995), p. 33. 83 See J. Ravenett, Snapshots: Childhood Memories of Southampton Street, 1942– 1955 (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1996), p. 10; E. Mason, A Working Man: A Century of Hove Memories (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1998), p. 24. 84 Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, pp. 23, 76 and 88. 85 Ibid., p. 89. 86 Ibid., pp. 23–24. 87 QueenSpark Collective, Back Street Brighton, p. 26. 88 Such as Sid Manville’s mother’s friend Flo Knight; see Manville, Everything Seems Smaller, p. 10. 89 QueenSpark Collective, Back Street Brighton, p. 59. 90 Ibid., p. 19. 91 M. Tebbutt, Women’s Talk? A Social History of Gossip in Working-class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960 (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1995), pp. 74–77. 92 Roberts, A Woman’s Place, p. 194. 93 As Carl Chinn has argued, ‘It is difficult to argue for, let alone define, acceptable levels of violence, yet it is obvious that in some unconscious way, the poor managed to do this.’ See Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939, 2nd edn (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2006), p. 144. 94 Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, p. 33. 95 H. Denman, unpublished manuscript (2003), p. 8. 96 M. Morley, ‘Carlton Hill – when we were young’, D. Morley and K. Worpole (eds), The Republic of Letters: Working Class Writing and Local Publishing (London: Comedia Publishing, 1982), pp. 7–8. 97 J. White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, between the Wars, 2nd edn (London: Pimlico, 2003), p. 100. 98 QueenSpark Collective, Back Street Brighton, p. 15. My emphasis. 99 Hayward, Little to Spare and Nothing to Waste, p. 5. My emphasis. 100 On this history of the redevelopment of this part of the town, see A. Walker, Churchill Square Revisited: A Lost Brighton Community (Brighton: Brighton Books, 2002). 101 QueenSpark Collective, Back Street Brighton, p. 34. My emphasis. 102 Ibid., pp. 26, 39 and 47. 103 N. Griffiths, Shops Book: Shopkeepers and Street Traders in East Brighton (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1978), p. 56. 104 QueenSpark Collective, Back Street Brighton, p. 13. 105 Ibid., p. 24. 106 Ibid. My emphasis. 107 Paul, Poverty – Hardship but Happiness; Ravenett, Snapshots: Childhood Memories of Southampton Street; Knight, A Ha’P’orth of Sweets; Manville, Everything Seems Smaller; S. Manville, Our Small Corner (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1994).

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108 M. Foster, interview (2005), p. 4. My emphasis. 109 See P. Scott, ‘Embourgeoisement before affluence? Suburbanisation and the social filtering of working class communities in interwar Britain’, University of Reading Business School Economics and Management Discussion Papers, 41 (2007), pp. 11–24. 110 R. Dunn, Moulsecoomb Days: Learning and Teaching on a Brighton Council Estate, 1922–1947 (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1990), pp. 3–5. 111 M. Clapson, ‘Working-class women’s experiences of moving to new housing estates in England since 1919’, Twentieth Century British History, 10: 3 (1999), pp. 347 and 352–353. 112 Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, p. 89. 113 Ibid., p. 102. 114 QueenSpark Collective, Back Street Brighton, p. 53. 115 F. and B. Netley, interview (2005), pp. 17–18. 116 R. MacDonald et al., ‘Growing up in poor neighbourhoods: the significance of class and place in the extended transitions of “socially excluded” young adults’, Sociology, 39: 5 (2005), p. 877; B. Rogaly and B. Taylor, ‘Welcome to “Monkey Island”: identity, community and migration histories in three Norwich estates’, Sussex Migration Working Paper, 38 (2006), pp. 3–4. 117 F. and B. Netley, interview (2005), pp. 15–16. 118 L. Potter, interview (2005), p. 4. 119 See for example letters in the Argus (22 February, 1956); (24 May 1960); (26 August 1960). 120 H. Bradley, ‘Life at No. 3 Nuthurst Road’, www.bygones.org.uk/page_id__230_ path__0p2p14p.aspx. Accessed 30 June 2010. 121 Argus (16 August 1961). 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 ESRO, DB/B27/6, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 8 December 1937. My emphasis. 125 Interview with author. 126 Argus (23 November 1972). 127 S. D. Adshead, and R. A. Hudson, Town Planning – Central Areas: Report and Development Plan (Brighton: Brighton Borough Council, 1937), p. 20. 128 Brighton Herald (5 March 1932). 129 Brighton Herald (10 February 1934). 130 S. Winter, Moulsecoomb Memories: Growing up in North Moulsecoomb in the Thirties and Forties (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1998), p. 27. 131 Brighton Gazette (5 December 1936). 132 C. G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Longman, 2006), pp. 183 and 214. 133 Brighton Herald (25 September 1926); (28 December 1929). 134 ESRO, DB/B27/6, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 5 January 1938. 135 Minutes of the General Purposes Committee (13 March 1929) (28 November 1929) and (10 July 1935).

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136 The NECC fostered the establishment of community associations and centres. For the best account of the organisation see A. Olechnowicz, Working Class Housing in England between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 137–180. 137 These included the Communist Party, Rottingdean and Kings Cliff Labour Ward Associations, three churches, the Allotment Association, East Brighton Day Nursery, Toc H, YWCA, Ex-Servicemen’s Group and the Boy’s Brigade. 138 Sussex Daily News (1 December 1952); (15 December 1952); (22 December 1952). 139 See for example, F. Netley, Holy Oak: A History of Whitehawk and Manor Farm, 1934–1974 (Brighton: Phoenix Press, 2002), pp. 105–116. 140 Sussex Daily News (15 December 1952). 141 M. Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 157 and 186. 142 For Watling, see Mass Observation Archive, TC1/3/L ‘Notes, interviews and Observations, Watling, 1941’. For Liverpool see G. D. Mitchell et al., Neighbourhood and Community (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1954), p. 39. 143 Mitchell et al., Neighbourhood and Community, p. 27. 144 Olechnowicz, Working Class Housing in England between the Wars, pp. 188–191. 145 D. Bayliss, ‘Building better communities: social life on London’s cottage council estates, 1919–1939’, Journal of Historical Geography, 29: 3 (2003), pp. 376–395. 146 Argus (23 May 1957). 147 Brighton History Centre SPB 127/9, Moulsecoomb District Community Association Pamphlet (1947). 148 Ibid. 149 Netley, Holy Oak, pp. 104–107. 150 A. Thickett, ‘Moulsecoomb, my love’, Writers Reign (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1991), p. 78.

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Chapter 5

Home: family, memory and modernity

The middle years of the twentieth century have frequently been presented as a period in which a particular version of modern, largely suburban domesticity achieved hegemony in English life. In the inter-war period, for example, the growth of suburbia in the form of both owner-occupied ‘Tudorbethan’ and municipal neo-Georgian seemed to offer middle and working class alike a modern, mass-produced version of the cottage lifestyle in almost infinitely variegated pastiches of vernacular architecture.1 While the Second World War put those developments on hold, wartime experiences confirmed the widespread aspiration for a particular form of domesticity which seemed to cut across divisions of class. The 1940s saw the demise of indoor domestic service and, consequently, a convergence of ‘lifestyles’ between working and middle class housewives in terms of hours spent on housework.2 Research carried out by Mass Observation in the early 1940s suggested that the aspirational ideal was a small house with a garden.3 Furthermore, among those surveyed, modern suburbia rather than ‘period’ property gave most pleasure: 80 per cent of those living on housing estates were satisfied with their homes, as opposed to just 48 per cent of those living in older, nineteenth-century housing.4 Labour’s 1945 election victory was won in part on the basis of promises to transform these aspirations for modern housing into concrete reality, and when Labour faltered, the Conservatives achieved their target of building 300,000 homes per year, with Harold Macmillan as housing minister presiding over the greatest number of council house completions between 1952 and 1956.5 By 1959, the social researcher Mark Abrams, in an often-quoted article, argued that: For the first time in modern British history the working class home, as well as the middle class home, has become a place that is warm, comfortable, and able to provide its own fireside entertainment – in fact, pleasant to live in. The outcome is a working class way of life which is decreasingly concerned with activities outside of the house or with values wider than those of the family.6

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This quotation is important for the ways in which it opens up discussion of what these changes meant in the mid-twentieth century. As a leading market researcher and sometime sociologist, Abrams had something of a vested interest in highlighting the growth of an affluent working class market. While he overstates the novelty of these changes, what is more revealing is that the norms of warmth, comfort, entertainment and pleasantness are middle class ones, against which working class lifestyles are measured. This is important because Abrams and others claimed that this showed that the working class was becoming more middle class, and that changing lifestyles were having significant effects on values and political behaviour.7 Certainly a model of home-centred modernity, founded on cross-class affluence and reaching its apogee in the privatised lifestyle of the nuclear family, was central to discursive constructions of the home during the period.8 While at the beginning of the 1920s the material reality of home was for most working class people strikingly incongruent with such imagery, by the early 1970s a version of comfortable domesticity was, arguably, attainable by the majority of working class families. And yet the experience of domestic life was classed in important ways. Working class families pooled all their resources in their struggles to achieve suburban lifestyles which the middle classes had long taken for granted. Furthermore, as working and middle class lifestyles converged, the latter sought to differentiate themselves from the former in the domestic sphere, critiquing working class tastes and behaviours. The second half of this chapter will explore the dynamics of working class household economies and examine the significant continuities which existed between the modern council estates and older districts in terms of cultures of economic and emotional resourcefulness. Close attention will also be given to the extent to which changes in domestic technologies and amenities affected patterns of domestic labour and leisure. As will be seen, technological changes in the home had an impact upon the use of leisure time, but largely failed to change long-standing gendered patterns of work and behaviour. Furthermore, material continuities in terms of housing and domestic amenities challenged the notion of modernity as simply a narrative of progress characterised by modernisation. As Walter Benjamin argued, that which has been outmoded by modernisation, those material structures and objects which signal a different temporality, is also characteristic of the experience of modernity.9 Everyday domestic spaces – terraced houses, parlours and tin baths – are capable of registering what Henri Lefebvre termed the ‘residuality’ of the everyday – things and practices which lag behind the more dramatic transformations of modernity.10 This chapter therefore pays close attention to the extent to which working class domestic life was shaped by the residual and the out-moded, as much as by the new and the modern.

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The transformation of domestic life through slum clearance and suburbanisation was, arguably, the most important change in working class life over the mid-twentieth century period. This change was underpinned by the intensification of a longer-term trend of falling fertility rates which led to smaller families, while domestic life as a whole was largely framed by a ‘golden age’ of near-universal marriage which was specific to the middle years of the century.11 The ‘modernisation’ of working class sexualities, families and domestic environments, contrary to the thoughts of Abrams, emphatically did not result in embourgeoisement.12 Significant material, political and cultural differences remained between the classes. As this chapter shows, while modernisation and rising real earnings saw working and middle class lifestyles converge, the middle classes used hierarchies of taste and cultural value to differentiate themselves from an increasingly affluent working class. In doing so, they also drew upon older stereotypes about working class behaviour as a means of critiquing this affluence and the provision of council housing which underpinned many of the improvements in working class domestic life. As I outline below, these changes were mapped out by pioneering designs for spacious, modern, well-equipped houses and flats. Yet these distinctively modern homes, families and lifestyles took many years to become the standard or normative experience and never achieved complete hegemony. As characteristic an experience of modernity as the ‘shock of the new’ is the continuing existence of the old, with environments, practices, things and behaviours of different temporalities coexisting in the same place, at the same time. The idea of a ‘home’, for example, as consisting of a dwelling with several rooms differentiated by use and occupied by a single family is one which would have been more aspiration than reality for many working class families during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowhere was the ‘shock of the old’ more apparent than in the relationship between the number of people in a household and the number of rooms they occupied. The residues of modernity: nineteenth-century survivals In 1911, when the first complete figures became available, some 75 per cent of the population of England lived in a one- or two-roomed dwelling, while 9 per cent lived more than two to a room.13 In Brighton in 1911, 43.4 per cent of the population were either living in apartments or subletting.14 Many of those who grew up in working class families in the first half of the century registered the difficulties of living in overcrowded households. W. G. Holmes, born in 1925 in Sussex Terrace, remarked: I lived there with my parents and sister who was ten years old at the time. She tells me the house was full of assorted aunts, uncles and cousins; we occupied one

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room. Space was at such a premium that my cot was in fact the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers.15

For a large number of working class people ‘home’ was an elastic concept, which might mean a whole house when times were good, but up to the 1950s was perhaps as likely to mean a room or rooms within a dwelling. This was particularly true for those families headed by men in irregular and seasonal jobs, as Margaret Powell, daughter of a painter and decorator father recalled: ‘When we were extra hard up we only had one room or two rooms in somebody else’s house. But when dad was working, we would go looking for half a house. We never had a house to ourselves.’16 The mitigation of overcrowding was one of the principal aims of council housing; for many working class people home was more usually part of a large or the whole of a smaller terraced house. For those living in the by-law terraces which made up the majority of Brighton’s working class housing stock, the downstairs rooms of the house were usually organised in one of three ways, according to the amount of space available.17 Ernie Mason lived with the ‘three room’ front-room, kitchen and scullery arrangement: On the ground floor facing the street was the sitting room (to us it was the front room), behind was the kitchen. The kitchen had an oven on one side of the fire . . . Along a short passage from the kitchen was the scullery. In it, of course, were the sink, cold water tap and a coal-fired copper for boiling dirty clothes in. There was a gas cooking stove and on the wall over it a bare gas jet . . . We did have a larder, but as we never had enough food to put in it, it was always full of tools and junk.18

Where there were just two rooms, there were two possible arrangements: ‘a kitchen–living room in the front and scullery at the back; or a front “parlour” with a combined kitchen–living room–scullery at the rear.’19 Janis Ravenett’s childhood home in Southampton Street had the former arrangement; she wrote: ‘We spent most of our time in the big basement room at the front of the house we called the kitchen, although no cooking ever took place here . . . next to this room was the scullery where mum cooked and heated water in a large gas fired copper.’20 Iris Pegnall’s home accommodated the latter arrangement: This was the kitchen with everything. Here there was a great big one of those black stoves where you put the fire in. And in the corner where you are, right in the corner, was a sink and next to the sink was a little cooker. Then there was a big dresser and in the middle was a table with chairs and that was how it was. . . . The front room we weren’t allowed to use; only on special occasions. I’m afraid I don’t go in there a lot now.21

It may seem absurd, given the limited space of these homes, that an entire room should be shut off from everyday use. Indeed, a ‘waste of space’ was

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exactly how early twentieth-century housing reformers saw it. Raymond Unwin, the architect of the suburban council estate, betrayed a lack of understanding of working class culture when he condemned the parlour, arguing that it was ‘worse than folly to take space from [the] living room where it will be used everyday and every hour to form a parlour where it will be used only once or twice a week’.22 Despite his influence, however, the Tudor Walters Committee, in an extended discussion of the subject, argued that since there was a ‘widespread desire’ for a parlour, one should be provided ‘whenever possible’.23 For many working class people, the front parlour was the epitome of respectability, being, in Wally Seccombe’s resonant phrase, ‘the inspiration of working class homemakers, forging an inner sanctum against the din, dust and drudgery of everyday life’.24 This was what middle class reformers failed to grasp; its importance lay precisely in the fact that it was not an everyday space; rather, it was for the special, the occasional, even the sacred. The parlour was the one semi-public room in the house, reserved for visitors, courting couples and family occasions such as Christmas parties or wakes.25 Here too the precious objects were displayed: Ernie Mason’s, like so many others, contained a large, elaborate mantelpiece, above which hung a picture of the royal family.26 Daisy Noakes gives an excellent description: The ‘Front Room’ was opened on Sunday. This was a room of red plush, ball fringes, and large oil paintings, brass fender and fire-irons and a huge mirror extending from mantelpiece to ceiling with its gold frame. In this room were the scrap books, jigsaw puzzles and family bible.27

Sheila Winter, who lived at North Moulsecoomb in the 1930s and 1940s recalled that ‘the Holy of holies’ contained all the best furniture, including her father’s ‘pride and joy’: his piano.28 While customs varied from family to family as to when the parlour was used, the key thing which made a parlour a parlour rather than a general living room was it was not in everyday use. In John Gillis’s terms: ‘The front room indicated not only social status but domestic order. It was the face that the family showed not only to the world but to itself.’29 Stefan Muthesius has traced the widespread diffusion of the parlour (derived from ‘parler’ in reference to rooms in monasteries where strangers could be received) to the nineteenth century, which saw greater emphasis placed on room differentiation: Originally, in older and poorer dwellings, everything was done in one room. The two-room deep house was a major step up . . . Then there was the extension at the other end of the house, which contained a new kind of room – the scullery. In the south few houses were built without sculleries from about 1870 onwards. From the 1890s the very popular gas cookers were installed in the scullery, especially in small houses. Thus the kitchen-living room became more and more

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restricted to a living-dining-room; and the front room was all the more likely to be kept ‘for best.’30

The parlour, more than any other room, represented a claim to respectability and status in a world where a respectable working class family might find itself living cheek by jowl with those lacking respectability.31 The popularity of parlours lasted from the late nineteenth century well into the middle years of the twentieth. In the early 1940s Mass Observation reported that it was council house tenants without parlours who were most fervent in their demands for an additional downstairs room.32 The 1944 Dudley Report recommended three model layouts, one of which included provision for a parlour; however, the report’s authors preferred to use the term ‘sitting room’, arguing that ‘the expression “parlour” carries an implication which is old fashioned and obsolete’.33 This rhetoric prefaced a renewed modernist attack on the parlour in the post-war period with an emphasis on ‘open plan’ living. As Judy Attfield shows in her study of Harlow in the 1950s, while many residents appreciated the ‘newness’ and practicality of their new houses, others set about closing in ‘open plan’ layouts with partition walls which re-established the division between kitchen/dining room and front sitting room or parlour.34 Attfield cites further examples of tenants contravening the architect’s sense of appropriate use of space through their choice of net curtains, ornaments and furniture.35 We need to get away from the equation of modernity with modernism in design and think about how houses were turned into modern homes through actual use.36 As Attfield perceptively comments: ‘It cannot be said that tenants rejected modernity as such, even when they clung to family heirlooms and traditional furnishing conventions. On the contrary, it was the adaptability with which tenants took over domestic space, stubbornly arranging it in contravention to the designers’ intentions, that shows how they appropriated modernity to their own designs.’37 The parlour is a powerful exemplar of the degree to which domestic arrangements were shaped by popular taste and actual use as much as by trends in design and architectural practice. While the modernity of, to use Giles’ phrase, the parlour and the suburb38 cannot be doubted, it is worth emphasising that modernisation crept through the older working class neighbourhoods, leaving older, even archaic amenities and technologies firmly in place, well into the post-war years. Here selected data from the Census can be illuminating. In 1951, when the ‘possession of certain household arrangements’ was recorded for the first time, 43 per cent of Brighton households either entirely lacked access to a fixed bath, or shared with another household.39 By 1961, this figure had fallen to 16.4 per cent; however, over 21 per cent of households at this date lacked piped hot water.40 As late as 1971, over 9,000 households in Brighton had either outside toilets or shared the use of

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an inside one with other households.41 The promises which council housing offered and largely fulfilled were vastly improved household amenities and much larger homes. The provision of such seemingly basic and prosaic items as homes with gardens, bathrooms, piped hot water, indoor toilets and electricity revolutionised the working class home and were depicted contemporaneously and remembered subsequently as something akin to modern miracles. Mid-century moderns: council housing and modern domestic life Historians have noted the sense of wonder with which many new council tenants greeted their new homes during the middle years of the twentieth century. Drawing on contemporary evidence from London, Liverpool, Bristol and Stevenage, Mark Clapson has demonstrated that the pride and pleasure experienced by new arrivals, often led them to compare their homes with castles or palaces.42 Brighton residents expressed similar sentiments in accounts recorded years after the events they described. Victor Cox recalled his family’s joy when: In 1936 my parents were told they were going to be re-housed as Preece’s Buildings were to be demolished. They were quite happy to go as they had no amenities there. Manor Farm was the area we were to be moved to and I went with my father to look at the estate. The houses were like Buckingham Palace compared with Preece’s Buildings, having running water, a bathroom, plenty of living and sleeping space and electric light with just a switch. My parents were very happy with their new house.43

For many of the early tenants, the contrast with the often cramped, dilapidated housing of the old districts was profound.44 Olive Masterson, who moved to South Moulsecoomb in 1931, emphasised the sheer wonder at the modernity of the amenities: We were thrilled with the house . . . It contained one small sitting room, a large living room, which led into a kitchen. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, toilet and bathroom. Just imagine going upstairs to bed and being able to have a bath in a special room, to turn on the tap and obtain hot water . . . The most magical thing of all was to press a switch and the electric light came on.45

Masterson remembered that the electric boiler, cooker, kettle and iron that her mother was able to hire transformed her daily labour: ‘For years she’d had to cook over the fire and range and iron with two flat irons, which could take ages to keep heating and go cold quickly. Now she could boil the kettle with the flick of a switch. Best of all she could do the washing without lifting heavy baskets of water.’46 Like many others, she described estate life as being

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‘like living in the country’. Ruby Dunn, a neighbour of Olive’s, concurred: ‘Life in South Moulsecoomb in the 1920s was still more rural than suburban . . . Where our houses stood had once been a pig farm and everything Dad planted grew well . . . Sheep grazed at the head of the valley where the land rose towards Bevendean Farm.’47 What is being described is, I would argue, a distinctively modern landscape: the contours of an already ‘modern’ farmed agricultural landscape, sensitively remoulded for suburban living. In common with numerous other suburban council developments, South Moulsecoomb, without the integrated industry, transport and large-scale ambition of a new town, fell short of the visionary expectations of Ebenezer Howard and his followers.48 As we have seen in previous chapters, there were few shops and amenities and, for some, too great a separation between home and workplace. However, the ‘garden suburb’, as well as being the archetypal form of council estate development, retained elements of what Howard believed garden cities could do to improve ordinary people’s health and well-being, offering modern, spacious housing in a semi-rural setting. The first Moulsecoomb estate was an excellent example of the kind of development envisaged by the Tudor Walters Committee in 1918. Carefully planned by Professor Adshead, the design and layout were sensitive to the landscape of the site and to local building traditions. A. C. Holliday, in the Town Planning Review, praised the informal layout around a central green, reminiscent of ancient downland villages.49 The standard of work was such that Brighton council considered the estate the town’s best example of modern development. Indeed, for much of the mid-century period the estate was held up as one of the ‘show places’ of the town, and listed as an attraction in visitors’ guides to the resort between the 1930s and 1950s.50 The architect-designed houses, set out in short terraces and in pairs, set standards of unprecedented quality in working class terms. All the houses had parlours, three bedrooms, and with 946 sq ft of floor space were close to the official recommendations of 1,055 sq ft.51 The standard of council housing varied considerably during the inter-war period, however. Rising building costs and attempts to assuage the concerns of middle class ratepayers affected the quality of development at Queen’s Park. Here housing density was increased from 12 to 40 houses per acre, parlous were omitted and toilets were placed on the ground floors, reducing the available space inside and outside the dwellings.52 While larger (946 sq ft), parlour houses were built at North Moulsecoomb and Bevendean, most three-bedroom houses on the inter-war estates (Whitehawk, Manor Farm, Tarner’s land and Rottingdean) were of the non-parlour type, ranging in size from 700 to 800 sq ft.53 Nationally, it was noted that most three-bedroom houses were of the non-parlour type with floor space of between 750 and 850 sq ft.54 In sheer numerical terms, then, the majority of Brighton’s inter-

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Figure 5.1 Living room in a ‘type B’ house, Carden Avenue, Hollingbury, 1947. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton and Hove

war stock was at or just below the national guidelines on floor space. It was, however, increasingly ill adapted to demographic changes resulting from an aging population, an increase in single-person households and falling fertility levels. The question of whether council housing met the needs and lifestyles of a changing population was one which the government sought to address with the publication of the Dudley Report in 1944. The report acknowledged that there had been a lack of variety in the type of dwelling provided, noting that the preponderance of three-bedroom houses meant that there was a lack of provision for large families, old people, childless couples and single people. However, it argued that local authorities should ‘continue in general to concentrate on the provision of the three bedroom house interspersed with a proportion of other types’, stating that authorities should be given leeway to build for local needs.55 The second main recommendation was for the modernisation of layouts and amenities and an increase in floor size for the average three-bedroom house. With 850 sq ft the usual maximum for a three-bedroom, non-parlour house, recommendations for an increase to 900 sq ft as a minimum were later revised upwards in official housing manuals to

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Figure 5.2 Kitchen in a ‘type D’ flat, Carden Avenue, Hollingbury, 1947. Reproduced with the kind permission of the Royal Pavilion and Museums Brighton and Hove

900–950 sq ft.56 It was recommended that bathrooms and toilets be placed on the first floor and there were a great many suggestions for better heating and cooking arrangements, improved lighting, plumbing and storage, better fittings and constant hot water.57 Partly as a result of the Dudley Report, council houses built during the 1940s were amongst the best ever provided, rivalling Addison-era houses in terms of floor space and surpassing them in terms of design and amenities. However, as in the inter-war period, successive Conservative governments, in their drive for completions and desire to residualise the sector, cut generous space allocations, treating the Dudley guidelines as maxima rather than minima.58 There were issues too about the quality of some of the post-war housing built. In 1956 the Argus reported on problems with the design of houses recently built at Bevendean. Here, to save digging expensive foundations into the steeply sloping site, the bedrooms had been built downstairs and the living rooms upstairs. With no provision for fires (and, naturally, no central heating), in winter bedrooms were so cold and damp that some tenants had to move upstairs to sleep.59 The new building methods of the post-war years did not always result in sensibly designed houses: quality

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often suffered in the race for economy. In late 1960, after a spell of particularly bad weather, residents of new Reema homes in North Woodingdean threatened a rent strike after water soaked through the structure of the buildings, damaging walls and ceilings and causing electrical short circuits.60 The 1950s and 1960s also saw increasingly vociferous complaints from tenants of inter-war properties. A Queen’s Park tenant argued that sinks ought to be installed in the bathrooms of all council houses: ‘Imagine trying to cook breakfast for seven people who are all trying to get at the kitchen sink to wash. Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk tenants have sinks in their bathrooms, why shouldn’t we at Queen’s Park?’61 Yet tenants at Whitehawk had complaints of their own, which they put to councillors and the housing manager at a meeting of the Whitehawk and Manor community association later in the same year. Residents told of paint that the rain washed off, ceilings that collapsed, rampant damp, walls that were disintegrating and long delays in getting repairs done. The Argus reported that: ‘The estate was described as a “slum” and hoots of laughter greeted the statement that the pre-war houses had not yet been paid for. “They are falling down” shouted the audience.’62 Besides the obvious problems of building and maintenance which these complaints revealed, the more significant point to note is the degree to which they reveal that people’s expectations of council housing were increasing by the 1950s and 1960s. This sense of changes in the quality and nature of domestic life in the post-war period was encapsulated by the report of the Parker Morris Committee, Homes for Today and Tomorrow, published in 1961. The report spoke of the ‘social and economic revolution’ in living standards and lifestyles since the war: One household in three now has a car, the same proportion have a washing machine. Television sets are owned by two households in three; so are vacuum cleaners; and one in five has a refrigerator. These possessions are spreading fast through all income groups, fastest of all in the lower brackets . . . There was a time when for a great majority of the population the major significance of the structure in which they made their home was to provide shelter and a roof over their head. This is no longer so. An increasing proportion of people are coming to expect their home to do more than fulfil the basic requirements, it must be something of which they are proud; and in which they must be able to express the fullness of their lives.63

As housing standards improved, family size shrank and the technologies to clean, heat and provide leisure in the home became increasingly accessible, people’s expectations of home life rose accordingly. Council housing played the key role in raising ordinary people’s expectations and in providing environments in which homes became more than cramped, ill-maintained temporary spaces in which to exist. Indeed, in the mid-century period as a whole,

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despite the variations in quality and size of dwellings, the state provided a vastly improved general standard of housing compared to the private-rental market. Telling evidence for this can be found in the 1971 Census figures for dwellings lacking standard amenities. At this date just 1.2 per cent of Brighton council houses lacked an indoor bath; 4.1 per cent had no inside toilet and 2.9 per cent were without, or shared, hot water. In all other tenures, the percentage of properties lacking these amenities was higher. In unfurnished properties, for example, 17.1 per cent lacked inside toilets; 21.4 per cent had no bath and 25.4 per cent shared or had no hot water.64 It was these basic amenities – baths, indoor toilets, hot water along with space and electricity, which seemed so miraculous to early tenants in the 1920s and 1930s – which had become expected minima by the 1960s. With improved housing, better amenities and rising living standards came an aspiration for homes which were ever more comfortable and well equipped. While the home had long been a marker of status, as the middle years of the century progressed the amount of money spent on and time spent in the home increased. Suburbanisation in particular placed additional strains on working class budgets. In the following section, I explore the strategies and techniques employed to defray the cost of modern living. Poverty and resourcefulness In the best recent discussion of poor neighbourhoods in the mid-twentieth century, Rogaly and Taylor argue that on the Norwich estates they researched, attitudes to poverty and the experience of ‘poverties’ were mediated by generation: Without exception the early memories of older research participants centred around material poverty. While not coping with the challenge brought by poverty might have been stigmatized, poverty itself was not. These memories were set in the context of the 1930s depression, the war and austerity years when the whole tone of British society was pervaded with a ‘make do and mend’ mentality. However, for participants who had grown up in the 1960s and 1970s there were two main differences with the previous generation: not everyone described their upbringings as ‘poor’; and for those who did feel themselves to be ‘poor’ – this was linked to a specific reason – such as being the child of a lone parent, or having an alcoholic parent – and was tied to memories of stigmatisation and marginalization.65

This is a perceptive analysis, which, along with Rogaly and Taylor’s understanding of cultures of material and emotional resourcefulness, can be effectively applied to the Brighton material.66 With rising real incomes underpinned by near full employment, the period between the early 1940s and the mid-1970s has often been depicted as one of unprecedented prosperity for the

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working class. Indeed rising living standards across the board meant that poverty researchers adopted new criteria in the 1960s for the measurement of poverty via ‘relative’ deprivation, rather than absolute measures of human needs and minimum subsistence.67 As we saw in Chapter 4, residents of Brighton’s older working class neighbourhoods often argued that, though they were poor in the 1920s and 1930s, the knowledge that their neighbours were in similar circumstances normalised material deprivation to some extent. However, we also saw the degree to which people made judgements about the relative poverty of their neighbours based upon appearance or reputation. Here is where I diverge slightly from Rogaly and Taylor’s interpretation. While accepting the overall veracity of their periodisation, I would argue that memories of the stigma of poverty, tied to a specific reason (usually unemployment) do emerge in the narratives of older Brighton residents describing their experiences up to the 1940s. While this stigma is usually related to a perceived ‘failure’ to ‘cope with the challenge of poverty’, such a perception is in the eye of the beholder, so that practices such as accepting charity, pawning goods or buying on credit might be looked upon as failing to cope by some; but, seen from another perspective, these are the strategies for coping with poverty. Amongst the most widespread of coping techniques was the use of various forms of credit. Shops in working class areas commonly offered goods on ‘tick’ that would be paid for at the end of a week or month, and many people relied on this. As we saw in Chapter 4, traders depended upon their knowledge of their customers in managing these arrangements and some were not averse to shaming those who failed to pay up. Gordon Mills lived on the Queen’s Park estate and used a butcher in Islingword Road: ‘Apparently my mother owed him seven shillings and sixpence (7/6d) for meat. Mr. Rolf posted a large sign in the shop window telling everyone where we lived and that my mother owed seven and six for meat. I was so ashamed on reading this that I ran all the way home to tell my mother who immediately started to cry, as we had no money at the time.’68 Besides the informal credit offered by shop-keepers, working class spending was also sustained by credit provided at commercial rates of interest. Recent research suggests that the acquisition of both high-value items and more prosaic purchases like clothes and furniture was underpinned by the proliferation and extension of cheap credit, notably in the form of hire-purchase and cheque-trading.69 From the 1930s, these increasingly sidelined credit offered by the small shop-keeper and traditional pawnbroker. As Tebbutt argues, large-scale slum clearance meant the demolition of premises and the dispersal of their customers.70 No pawnbrokers were established on any of Brighton’s housing estates during the mid-century period, although council estate residents recall families visiting ‘uncles’ in the older working class districts such as Hanover up to the 1940s.71 The pawnbroker for Brighton’s poorest district, near Edward Street, was for a period the

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only one which lent money against household goods as well as more valuable items. Lillie Morgan, who worked in the shop during the First World War, noted that her boss, Mr Lucas, ran a profitable business, charging interest of 10 per cent per week on unredeemed property.72 While a necessary weekly ritual for many, by the 1930s there was stigma associated with the perceived inability to adequately manage that recourse to the pawnbroker implied, as Georgina Attrell recalled: ‘Many’s the time I’ve seen something that belonged to us for sale in the window of the shop in Edward Street. I hated the place and was ashamed to be seen going in.’73 It is difficult to assess the extent to which indebtedness or poverty per se was stigmatised in these instances. To some working class people, debt of any form was anathema, and cultures of prudence and saving were institutionally embedded in working class cultures.74 The Co-Op was a venerable institution with a long history in Brighton, and through the dividend system provided a more equitable means of consumption than small shops and traders could.75 Elizabeth Pateman’s family paid into a weekly fund, ‘the universal’, which provided a sum to spend at Christmas time. When she started work herself and earned enough to buy clothes her father advised her: ‘Don’t go on a book because by the time they’re paid for they’re worn out. What you haven’t got the money for you save, what you haven’t got the money for you can’t afford.’76 Similarly, Fred Netley recalled that their ‘greatest concern was to keep out of debt, as my mum used to put it: “out of debt, out of danger” ’.77 This kind of advice, besides the pragmatic economic argument, reflected the belief that indebtedness represented something akin to a moral failing associated with perceptions of poverty. Perceptions of poverty were also significant in shaping attempts to garner state aid and philanthropic help. Here the poor had to tread a difficult line between presenting themselves as respectable enough to be perceived as worthy of help but not managing well enough to exclude themselves from it. Visits from the parish relief inspectors had to be carefully managed, as Alfred Harman discovered to his cost: ‘When we were expecting our first child we asked for help from the parish. Kathleen’s mother had given us a lump of coal for the fire as it was so cold, so when the report was written it said we were not in need because we had “blazing fire”.’78 While the provision of parish relief and means-tested unemployment benefit from the 1930s onward militated against the pooling of resources which characterised many working class households, people developed means of playing the system.79 Under some regimes, in order to qualify for relief there had to be nothing of any value in the home: ‘so if a neighbour had to go on relief they would knock on your door and say “The relief man is coming, can you look after a few bits for me?” ’80 In other instances the boundaries of legality were stretched in order earn a living. A classic example is the subculture of barrow-boys and dealers in which Harry Denman was enmeshed: a world of

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spivs, gamblers and gangsters who inverted respectable working class values of thrift and hard work: We weren’t going to go from our houses to an establishment for the best twenty years of our lives and commit tedium . . . We were going to live on our wits. We wasn’t going to waste the years of our lives being told what to do by some idiot. So it would start like this. You’d be unemployed of course. So you’d go to the labour exchange on your signing on day . . . If you were lucky enough to get dole money that particular day or week then your primary function then was to get outside the door as fast as you could before they changed their bloody mind . . . We were villains but we were loveable rogues. We weren’t that vicious, drug addicted bunch you’ve got today. We were a different class of villain. And yeah it was very enjoyable. And everybody was up for a wrinkle. Everybody had a fiddle of some sort; it was incredible.81

While Denman romanticises a subculture characterised by its own codes, forms of dress and speech, there is also a strong sense that the people and practices he describes were part of the wider culture of the poor. This culture had its basis in the poorer districts described in Chapter 4. Everyday life in these neighbourhoods described by Denman and others, such as Molly Morley and Robert Hayward, was characterised by scouring everything for its use value: a culture of the necessary which could shade into illegality at points, to the chagrin of the ‘respectable’, skilled working class, as much as middle class opinion.82 Slum clearance and the council housing which followed challenged the social and spatial cohesiveness of this culture, although continuing poverty meant that certain practices continued to flourish on the new estates. For example, trading from corporation property was prohibited, but residents at Whitehawk remember neighbours who sold sweets, vegetables and drapery, and another who worked as a cobbler.83 At North Moulsecoomb, Ron Spicer lived next door to the Moppets: ‘ “Old Moppett” as he was called, was related to a sweetshop owning family. He created his own threesome business, using three wheeled barrows which he’d made just wide enough to get through the archway between our two attached houses. He sold chopped firewood, fish, and sweets. Secretly, the stuff would be sold from the house. Running a business from a house without paying business rates was illegal, but nobody cared.’84 One of the reasons illegal traders were widely tolerated was that they undercut the few legitimate but often expensive shops provided for on the estates. Some neighbours did object, however. In the late 1930s Housing Committee minutes record complaints by tenants at Manor Farm and North Moulsecoomb about neighbours selling goods from their houses.85 There were further continuities with the older urban districts in terms of fixing, mending and stretching limited resources. Clothes were darned, resized, cut down and handed down through the family. Many men did their

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own cobbling. Refuse, rags, wood, scrap metal, glass bottles – practically anything of use or value – was collected, used or sold. A number of residents kept animals such as chickens and rabbits for food.86 One of the greatest boons of suburban living was the greater outside space, which was frequently integrated into the household economy. As Christine Fletcher remembers: Most tenants cultivated their gardens and grew vegetables and fruit in the back and flowers in the front. In the summer, my father grew lettuce, radish, beetroot, spring onions, runner beans, tomatoes, gooseberries and rhubarb and made a cold frame in order to grow cucumbers and marrows. In the winter he grew cabbage, spinach etc, so we always had plenty of home grown produce straight from the garden and into the cooking pots on the same day.87

As with other local authorities, tenancy regulations issued by Brighton council obliged residents to cultivate their gardens.88 Whilst the majority of those who commented on their family’s use of outside space placed an emphasis on the value of the produce such efforts could yield, the council, certainly up to the Second World War, emphasised aesthetic rather than pragmatic considerations.89 The Housing Committee was particularly concerned that individual front gardens should not detract from the visual impact of the overall layout. At Whitehawk, tenants were permitted to grow flowers in their front gardens ‘provided that the manager be authorised to call attention to any unsightliness’.90 The corporation instituted a ‘best kept garden’ competition in 1938, where points were awarded in four categories: arrangements, cleanliness, special features and plants. Prizes included certificates and cash (ranging from 10s to £3 3s 10d), with the overall winner receiving a cup donated by Councillor Horten-Stephens.91 Apart from these incentives, tenants were encouraged to cultivate their gardens by their neighbours, some of whom complained to the press and council about weeds from adjoining gardens infecting their own.92 Besides the use of labour, material space and ‘things’, Rogaly and Taylor alert us to other, less tangible cultural resources which families drew upon to sustain themselves.93 For Ruby Dunn, her mother’s love and labour sustained and comforted them: ‘She was the most unselfish person I knew and loved us all. She showed it by slaving away to keep us and the house spotless and could never do enough for us . . . She had a proverb for every occasion. “A little help is worth a lot of pity”, she quipped when we lent a hand in the kitchen. For an anticipated pleasure we heard the warning “Don’t count your chickens until they are hatched” . . . With such pearls of wisdom was my pathway strewn.’94 Fred Netley attributes his sense of social justice and socialist politics in part to the egalitarianism which his upbringing instilled in him: I found, as I began to understand the class divisions, that middle class people from a different background than me weren’t necessarily being patronising or

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anything. As my dad used to say, ‘There’s good and bad in every class, every religion and every colour and creed.’ That was his point. That is why I’ve never been a racist, I’ve never been a sexist and I’ve never really joined in this antimiddle-class sort of stuff.95

While this recognition of cultural difference, combined with a ‘live and let live’ attitude, was not by any means universal, many of the memoirs of materially poor lives exhibit a strong sense of humour as a powerful buttress against the potential negative emotions which living with poverty might induce. Left-wing activist and trade unionist Sid Manville, for example, deliberately eschewed the darker elements of his childhood to focus on the humour in the face of adversity which served to bond his family. As he wrote about his father: ‘How sadly I recall that the old purse that he carried for years contained, at his death, the princely sum of one shilling and three pence . . . Society’s reward to an honest toiler. I have promised myself that I will write without bitterness and so I will not dwell upon the social injustices of those days. Dad never bemoaned his lot and his family will always remember him for what he was, a happy man.’96 The notion of being ‘poor but happy’ seems to be something of a cliché of working class autobiography, but we should be alert to the functions which jokes, anecdote and irony play in such narratives.97 Humour, I would suggest, can be viewed as a means both of coping with inequalities and of ‘getting back at’ the state, authority figures or the better-off. For example, when Shelia Winter’s family moved to North Moulsecoomb in the 1920s, they found the house extremely cold: ‘Mum and Dad had to burn old shoes, hardback books, in fact anything that gave out a bit of warmth. Dad had a wry sense of humour. He found a piece of wood and planed it off. Then he painted the name “SIBERIA” on it and hung it above the front door. The Corporation did not see the funny side of it and ordered Dad to remove it, or else!’98 As the above examples indicate, cultures of resourcefulness – both material and emotional – transferred with the shifting population from the older districts to the suburban estates. They needed to, for suburban living costs were often significantly higher than those in the central neighbourhoods. Below I examine in greater detail the impact which suburbanisation had on family economies and explore the ways in which both the pooling of resources and their uneven distribution within the household enabled the often-precarious maintenance of a home in the suburbs. Household economies In the inter-war period, work by M’Gonigle and Kirby in Stockton-on-Tees posited a causal relationship between working class suburbanisation, higher

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living costs and higher mortality rates. In Poverty and Public Health (1936) the authors compared the health levels of tenants before and after they moved from slum clearance areas to a new council estate. Both the crude and standardised death rates were significantly higher on the new estate than they had been in the old areas.99 The authors argued that this was mainly caused by increased rents eating into family food budgets.100 Although Keith Laybourn has described this kind of situation as ‘by no means uncommon’,101 it was almost certainly a worst-case scenario, aggravated by long-term unemployment. As Terrence Young commented in 1934 on an earlier version of the Stockton study: In practice most new entrants to Becontree are in work, whilst people on the Stockton housing estate were transferred slum dwellers, 90 per cent of whom had been unemployed for long periods. There are probably exceedingly few housing estates where conditions are sufficiently similar for a similar high death rate to be expected.102

The Stockton evidence does, however, throw into sharp relief the issue of the impact on living standards of migration to a municipal suburb. One possible avenue of investigation would be to compare mortality and morbidity rates in a manner similar to that of M’Gonigle and Kirby. However, a lack of relevant comparable data renders this approach impossible. There is, however, some data on household incomes and expenditure on Brighton’s Moulsecoomb estates, which while by no means perfect does offer some insights into how the costs of living on a council estate were met. In 1939 Marion Fitzgerald was commissioned by the Bishop of Chichester to carry out a survey into rent levels and working class incomes on the three Moulsecoomb estates. Her report, Rents in Moulsecoomb, which sampled every tenth address on the electoral register, contains useful material on how higher rent levels and other costs were met by families.103 Of the 79 county boroughs in 1936, only Croydon with 1,062 and Newcastle-onTyne (775) had more houses than Brighton (541) with rents above 12s per week. In comparison, of the ‘great cities’, Birmingham had 8, Liverpool 147, Manchester none.104 At South Moulsecoomb, where most of the substantial three-bedroom parlour-type houses had been built under the 1919 Housing Act, rents were highest, at between £1 4s 1d and £1 1s 8d per week. Here most of the male heads of household were in regular, higher-paid jobs: foremen, bus, tram and train drivers. Fitzgerald found that while a few of the women supplemented their husbands’ earnings through cleaning, there were ways in which tenants met their expenses other than through waged work. Ten per cent of households took in boarders, while a similar proportion either took in foster children boarded out by the London County Council or boarded adults and children with disabilities. But, Fitzgerald found, ‘The commonest way

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of meeting high rents is sharing the house with relatives – married sons and daughters living with their parents, sometimes until the children of the third generation reach earning age.’105 This was the case among a further quarter of households. Thus, in 45 per cent of households surveyed (and probably slightly more if wives’ wages are included) contributions from householders other than the male breadwinner were vital in meeting the costs of suburban living. Fitzgerald carried out her most detailed investigation into incomes and expenditure at North Moulsecoomb. On this estate, about 10 per cent of households contained boarders, while a greater proportion were dependent on the earnings of children. The contributions of the latter tended to be lower than at South Moulsecoomb, since the children were more commonly adolescents than adults, and consequently had lower earnings. Fitzgerald also found that the proportion which sons and daughters contributed to the household income varied significantly from one family to another.106 At the time of the survey rents were 14s 4½d per week, inclusive of rates, for the three-bedroom parlour houses. Using information obtained from tenants for their expenditure on insurance, fuel, lighting and transport costs, together with Herbert Tout’s estimates for food and clothing requirements based on age and sex, and adjusted for Brighton prices, Fitzgerald argued that families ‘of a normal size’ required a total regular income of £3 12s per week in order to meet living costs without skimping on food.107 She argued that in over 60 per cent of households expenditure on food was frequently inadequate to meet dietary needs. However, her methodology is somewhat suspect here, and if we calculate average weekly outgoings according to ‘normal family size’ we see that a minority of families (albeit a significant 45 per cent) regularly failed to meet the costs of suburban living.108 The effect of this shortfall was mediated by gender and generation. Contemporary survey evidence, supported by autobiographical accounts, demonstrates that wives frequently denied themselves and sometimes their children adequate food rather than let the male breadwinner go without.109 As Ruby Dunn, who grew up in South Moulsecoomb between the wars, recalled: ‘However hard mum tried, the housekeeping money never seemed to stretch quite far enough . . . So on Fridays we children went a bit short of food so that Dad could have a good meal in front of him. This meant we had a bowl of bread soaked in Oxo gravy before he came home, or just an egg.’110 This kind of practice persisted well into the supposedly affluent post-war years. Linda Potter, who grew up on the Coldean estate in the 1950s, remembered pointedly ‘my mum sometimes going without dinner for my brother and I. But you speak to my eldest daughter and she’ll say, “Mum, I can remember you going without your dinner when we were little!” So, you know, when you’re hard up you do for your kids, don’t you; this is the point.’111

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Typically, between the ages of 12 and 14 children would leave school and enter employment, providing earnings which could help to contribute towards everyday living costs. Todd, in a key work on young earners, has suggested that in ‘tipping up’ up to two-thirds of their pay packets, young people made a significant contribution to family economies in the inter-war years.112 As Fitzgerald suggested, the proportion of earnings which adolescents handed over to their mothers for board and lodging varied from family to family; however, life histories confirm that most young earners handed over two-thirds or more of their pay packets. Among male apprentices in the sample, it was common practice to hand over the majority. At the age of 14, Albert Paul was apprenticed as a carpenter in the building trade. He worked a 58-hour week for 4s 6d. Of this he gave his mother 3 s, leaving 1s 6d for himself, of which ‘6d he had to put by every week’ so that he could save to buy tools.113 Among unskilled workers, wages were smaller, but the proportions handed over were similar. At the age of 11 in 1917, Ernie Mason earned 2s 6d a week as a delivery boy for a grocer in Hove. He kept the 6d, and handed 2s over to his mother.114 The earnings of apprentices, meagre as they were, were significant to family economies into the inter-war period and beyond. In 1953, after a year as a shop-boy, Jack Potter was apprenticed as a finisher for the Southern Railway at Lancing works. Of his 15s weekly wage, he handed 10 s to his mother, leaving 5s for himself: With that five shillings I had to buy me own clothes and own bus fare and it didn’t go very far. The thing that I recall is that I felt that I was hard done by when mum wanted two-thirds of it. I thought I might get away with half. But at the same time it also made me appreciate then how hard it was for her trying to bring up a family. I mean I don’t know what wages dad got but they weren’t great and I think it brought home to me the ten shillings to her was in a way a lifeline.115

As the evidence presented above demonstrates, while individual practice varied, the earnings of children remained significant to the economies of both urban and suburban families during the inter-war years. From the 1940s, as family sizes declined, the school-leaving age rose and people married at ever younger ages, the earnings of married women themselves assumed greater significance. While some married women, such as Sarah Ovenden’s mother, worked full time, this was seen as unusual. Ovenden, who lived on the Queen’s Park estate in the 1950s, noted that her mother was the target of neighbours’ gossip: ‘My mum going out to work as a waitress was considered a bit odd. “She shouldn’t do that. She’s got a child, what’s she doing that for? Well, she’s got the grandmother to look after her.” You know – they thought it was a bit strange.’116 The vast majority of the post-war increase in women’s labour-force participation was in the form of part-time work. The

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contributions of wives to the household in terms of waged work, while often central for the maintenance of a particular standard of living, were sometimes derided as ‘pin money’ by male and female workers alike wedded to the idea of a ‘family wage’.117 Dolly Smith Wilson has argued that in the post-war period working women held that their work outside the home helped to raise their families’ standard of living, framing their waged contributions in terms of improving their children’s well-being.118 However, Elizabeth Roberts has argued that after 1945, with nearly full male employment and rising real earnings, women’s wages (lower than men’s in equivalent work) were no longer seen as crucial for the survival of the family, as they had been in the years of economic insecurity before 1939.119 She makes a compelling case that there was a commensurate decline in the status of women’s work in the home. In less prosperous times, women’s budgeting skills were highly prized; however, in the more affluent post-war years ‘this work, because it was unpaid, was increasingly perceived by some as having little value’.120 There is no gainsaying the fact that women’s paid employment was for lower rates in jobs with less security and fewer opportunities for promotion. Moreover, the double burden of housework and paid work was one which was shouldered exclusively by women. Nevertheless, taking the life-history evidence into account, resourcefulness within the home, careful budgeting and women’s domestic labour were widely commented upon and appreciated. Whether they were adequately valued is a different matter. Domestic work, leisure and the use of time Among the most time-consuming and laborious of tasks which working class women undertook during the period was the washing of clothes and linen. Seventeen informants mentioned their mothers washing, either taking in other people’s laundry for payment or, more commonly, washing for the family. Amongst these are some richly textured descriptions of the work involved. Sid Manville’s depiction of Monday in his house in the 1920s extends across four pages, in which the whole process is outlined in great detail: For hour upon hour she stood upon a duckboard in that scullery, wash-board in front, one tap (cold water, of course) to her left, and behind, a stone, built-intothe-wall copper designed by the Devil himself. This copper had a tub about two feet in diameter and perhaps the same depth. The tub was covered by a circular lid made of wood, with a built-on handle. Heating was by a fire of wood and coal in a small furnace arrangement with a hinged door and latch. Lighting the copper was an art in itself. The normal paper, wood and coal method always failed; and it was not before the paraffin can had been swung in a couple of times and a miniature explosion caused that it really got going.121

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After the washing came the mangling, usually with the assistance of one or more of the children. After this the mangled items were ‘lugged up twelve stone steps from the yard to the back garden, where in short, swift movements they were pegged up, propped up and left flying at a great height’.122 Following this everything was ironed with an assortment of flat irons before finally being hung up in the kitchen to air. Besides the sheer amount of effort involved, arguably part of the reason that the Monday wash has received so much comment was the way in which its effects permeated throughout the home and impacted on family members, as Marjory Batchelor recalled: ‘it seemed to take over everything. My father escaped to the bar and I to school.’123 In some families, the disruption of wash day could serve as a catalyst for conflict, as Betty Gillett remarked: ‘My dad hated it, he said it made the house damp and he would fling all the windows open whether it was winter or summer.’124 Advances in domestic technology permeated working class homes at various rates.125 During the 1920s and 1930s, the Corporation hired out electric coppers and irons to tenants of council properties, but the diffusion of serious ‘time saving’ technologies was much slower.126 Distribution levels of washing machines were very low across all classes before the 1950s. In 1955, just 17.5 per cent of households had washing machines, although this figure had risen to over 55 per cent by 1965 and 70 per cent by 1975.127 The slow change in washing technology is neatly summarised in Sarah Ovenden’s comparison of her own experiences of housework in the late 1960s with those of her grandmother in the earlier part of the century: [When she was first married, c.1910s] My gran did the washing. It was outside with a scrub-board and a tub then. So by the time she was washing for us [c.1940s–1950s] it was quite a fun thing. It was quite easy for her because she had a copper and a wringer and all those things that she didn’t have when she was young.128

Sarah outlined the slow changes which domestic technologies wrought on her own housekeeping routines in the early years of her marriage, during the late 1960s and 1970s: We didn’t have a telly; didn’t have a washing machine; didn’t have a car, got all those things later on. I used to shop every day then ’coz I was working; I used to shop lunchtimes. Then later on I started doing weekly shops but that was probably after I had my little girl. I stopped work then and I did weekly shops. We had a car by then, a little Renault 4. My mother-in-law gave me a washing machine. You used to have to pull it out from under the worktop and it had one of those things – what are they called – in the middle. You’d put your stuff in and it would just tangle everything up! It came out in a huge tangle. We had a separate spin dryer but it was alright.129

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Changes in the structure of domestic life were mediated, as Sarah Ovenden indicates, not only by technological changes, but also by other factors such as childcare responsibilities, labour-force participation and income. Class and age continued to intersect with gender to mediate the experience of domestic labour. While technological improvements did produce some changes in the structures of domestic work over the period, what remained largely unchanged was the gendered division of labour within the home. As Leonore Davidoff noted in an article originally published in 1976: Despite some public shifts in attitudes, it is still women who are seen as basically responsible for servicing members of the family, protecting them from the pollution of dirt, waste products and untidiness, for transforming the raw into the cooked; and for transforming ‘little savages’ into civilised adults.130

Time-use surveys carried out by Jonathon Gershuny and colleagues in the mid-1970s revealed that husbands performed less than 10 per cent of routine domestic work.131 Moreover, evidence suggests that the amount of housework done by men during the 1960s declined. Gershuny’s research shows that while British men averaged 19 minutes per day in 1961, this had fallen to 16 minutes by 1972.132 The life-history evidence confirms that a relatively strict gender division of labour operated in most households throughout the period. In only two autobiographical accounts is reference made to fathers ever cooking, while in only one household did the father cook regularly.133 Far more typical was the attitude of Betty Gillett’s father, who ‘did nothing in the home. He wouldn’t even wash a cup. He said that was a woman’s job.’134 Even in cases where both spouses were in full-time employment, it was common that routine domestic work would be carried out by wives, with some help from children in the household. Fathers often would take responsibility for certain household chores which were considered appropriately masculine, such as gardening, DIY and vehicle maintenance,135 as William Bradshaw’s account of the 1950s testifies: Mum would do the washing but then we would help with the mangle and that. Dad would do the garden; he would do all the digging and the garden ’coz he did a full time job . . . He used to help us maintain our bikes. He did his duty and mum worked as well but of course she did the cooking and a lot of the shopping.136

The bulk of the everyday housework in the Bradshaw household was carried out by the only woman, who also worked sometimes full time as a nurse.137 In gender terms, it is the continuities in terms of housework and care giving which are most striking. The classed differences in time spent on housework across the mid-century period are, however, worthy of more detailed comment. Overall, female housework increased from 400 to 450

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minutes per day between 1937 and 1961. For the middle class there was a steep increase, from 250 to 450 minutes.138 The sharp increase for middle class women might be adequately explained by the decline in domestic service and the domestication of tasks such as washing, which were previously provided by commercial laundries. Among working class women, time spent on housework increased from 480 minutes a day in 1937 to over 500 in 1952, falling to about the same level as for middle class women in 1961.139 After this point, the average number of minutes spent by both middle and working class women on housework continued to fall, presumably explained in part by the rapid diffusion of domestic equipment.140 Further evidence suggests increasing labour-force participation as another factor, but while full-time and part-time employment did erode time spent on housework, the gender divide remained. Between 1965 and 1975, while the time spent on housework by women in fulltime employment increased, the time spent on housework by men in full-time employment fell. Technology did, however, change the experience of home life more fundamentally, through the much more rapid diffusion of ‘time using’ devices such as record players, radios and television. From the interwar period in the suburbs, and almost universally after the 1950s, parents and children alike increasingly spent larger periods of time outside of school or the workplace in the home. This was partly due to the lack of opportunities for alternative, public leisure activities on the new estates, as outlined in Chapter 4, but it was also about the pull of technology which provided sensual arousal at relatively little expense. By 1939, over 70 per cent of households had a radio, up from just under 37 per cent in 1930. The penetration of television was even more rapid. In 1948 just 0.5 per cent of households in England and Wales had a black-and-white set.141 Ten years later, more than 52 per cent had a set, and there was little difference between the classes in terms of television rental. The impact on time use in the home was rapid and significant. As Offer notes: ‘Television (with radio, video and listening to recorded music) has come to dominate discretionary time use in Britain and the United States, claiming more than two hours per day in both countries after 1960.’142 The widespread use of these technologies, arguably, also contributed to the definitional ambiguity as to what separated work and leisure for both men and women. Both oral accounts and contemporary survey evidence suggest that women often combined handicrafts or chores such as ironing or cleaning with radio listening or TV viewing.143 For some men, moreover, particularly in the inter-war years, when radio technology was such that reception was often poor and lack of speakers meant that only one person could listen at a time, radio was more the preserve of the solitary hobbyist.144 While this situation changed over time as technology improved, we remain profoundly ignorant of the degree to which radio, television and other sound technologies were consumed within

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the home and how they reshaped patterns of domestic life. Autobiographical testimony can provide evidence for both the individual and wider cultural meanings associated with viewing and listening.145 In Claire Barrowdale’s narrative, the purchase of a radiogram is suffused with memories of her early married life: We bought this radiogram off somebody; it wasn’t even a new one. I know when we brought it home, we didn’t have a car, I can’t remember how we got it home. But I can remember being absolutely thrilled because it looked good, and it was a piece of furniture sitting inside this lovely walnut. I used to polish it regularly, every week and play my one record. I’ll always remember that.146

For Claire, the radiogram symbolised both modernity and domesticity; it was an object to be proud of, a source of aesthetic and aural pleasure – and yet it needed to be worked on, polished and looked after. As with Claire Barrowdale’s prized radiogram, Sarah Ovenden recalls getting a television in the 1950s as a sign of status: We were one of the first in the street to have a television and a phone. People used to come in to borrow our phone or watch the TV. I think it was about 1956 we had our first television. I remember all those TV programmes everyone remembers like Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men and Listen with Mother on the radio and Sunday Night at the London Palladium, Coronation Street when it first started. Fantastic!147

What is significant about this reminiscence is the way in which television is remembered as making connections between the private world of the family and the public world of the community, in several ways. Firstly, far from being preserved for the family alone, the new television is an object of conspicuous display which the neighbours are invited to gaze at – a facilitator of contact between households. Secondly, what Sarah remembers is what ‘everyone’ who watched TV at the time will remember: here television acts as a conduit, channelling popular memory. Moreover, this is both a generational memory and a classed one in which the ‘public’ worlds of the nation and the wider neighbourhood intersected with the private life of the family. What was it that working class families were watching in their new suburban homes in the 1960s? Coronation Street – a version of the older, urban working class community reflected back at them. In part, as Stuart Laing has argued, through the sense of togetherness and community which Coronation Street articulated, ‘television was filling the gap which it had itself created (as a prime mover in the creation of the home-centred society.)’148 Television, as Laing astutely shows, provided a focus for wider debates about consumption, affluence and cultural quality.149 In particular, TV symbolised middle class anxiety about working class affluence. These debates, as I argue below, can be viewed as an

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expression of long-standing concerns about working class behaviour and the home which had deeper historical roots. ‘Coals in the bath’: middle class anxieties and the working class home Middle class anxiety about working class consumption was nothing new; during the 1950s and 1960s, however, widespread slum clearance, suburbanisation and rising real earnings combined with electoral defeats for the Labour Party to give rise to arguments about ‘embourgeoisement’. The experience of ‘affluence’ was linked to changes in working class consciousness and identity. The working classes, it was argued, were becoming more privatised and inward looking, more conservative and less collectively minded. The most significant, and certainly the most influential, sociological study which linked changes in the built environment and home life to changes in patterns of family life and working class consciousness was Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London (1957).150 This was the first in a series of works undertaken by the Institute of Community Studies (ICS), which took as its theme the impact of welfare policies on the working class family. The ICS researchers were all more or less committed social democrats, indeed Michael Young had drafted Labour’s 1945 manifesto and both he and Peter Willmott had worked in the party’s research department between 1945 and 1951.151 They sought to influence planners, policy makers and, in particular, Labour politicians, through their ‘jargon-free’ accounts of changes in working class life, and in this regard they had some degree of success.152 Young and Willmott set out to describe family life as it existed in Bethnal Green. Here they found close kinship networks in which the extended family acted as a bridge between the individual and the community. They were particularly impressed with the quality and importance of matrilocal residence and mother–daughter relationships.153 This rich neighbourhood and family life was contrasted with the privatised, less communal lifestyles that Young and Willmott reported from ‘Greenleigh’, an Essex council estate to which many Bethnal Greeners had moved. Here kinship patterns had been severely disrupted; the authors found that people were more inward looking and status-conscious. They missed their kin and neighbours and the warmth, bustle and friendliness of the East End.154 In acknowledging the clear material gains in terms of housing quality, Young and Willmott ‘implied a major cultural loss: the loss of community’.155 Although Young and Willmott did not explicitly equate the pattern of life found at ‘Greenleigh’ with ‘middle classness’, they implied that it was alien to the ‘traditional’ working class lifestyles found in Bethnal Green. The ‘home centred, rather than people centred’ existence that they claimed to have discovered certainly chimed well with the findings of embourgeoisement propo-

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nents like Ferdynand Zweig and Mark Abrams.156 Moreover, as James Cronin has perceptively observed: Young and Willmott’s descriptions of Bethnal Green were placed alongside studies of Swansea, Oxford, Liverpool, Ashton and elsewhere and assimilated to a common pattern; while the apparently contrasting cases of various housing estates in Bristol, Sheffield, Coventry, Oxford, Liverpool, etc., were arrayed together with those for Dagenham or ‘Greenleigh’ into a stark, opposing pattern.157

The process was further codified by a tendency to compress and summarise these results, in works such as Ronald Frankenberg’s Communities in Britain (1965) and Josephine Klein’s Samples from English Cultures (1965).158 These accounts smoothed over the various ambiguities and differences contained in the locality studies and ‘presented in clearest terms the argument about the break-up of traditional communities and family patterns among the newly affluent workers living on the new housing estates’.159 The embourgeoisement argument was finally laid to rest by the Affluent Worker studies, carried out between 1962 and 1968, which argued for significant continuities in working class political and social attitudes.160 However, as Mike Savage has recently argued, Goldthorpe and colleagues’ findings were shaped as much by their theoretical and methodological biases as by those ‘community studies’ which they sought to critique.161 Middle and working class identities were as much a creation of sociologists and the social science apparatus as a description of the cultures and values they sought to explain; indeed, how could they be anything else? A focus upon sociologists and broadly ‘left-wing’ concerns about embourgeoisement has, arguably, displaced the extent to which the critique of working class consumption linked into the wider denigration of working class ‘taste’ and behaviour. As Willmott and Young found in their study of the London suburb of ‘Woodford’, the major complaint from middle class residents was that ‘the working class do not know how to spend their extra money . . . “The working class is better off” said one woman, “which is a good thing if they know how to use their money. Which they don’t.” ’162 Middle class distaste for working class consumption was also expressed in other, more everyday contexts, such as the local newspaper. Here, where tenants came under fire for their affluent lifestyles, the external appearance and assumed internal use of the home were central motifs.163 A typical example of these types of charge is this extract from a letter to the Evening Argus: Why is it that so many council house dwellers do nothing but groan and whine about their good fortune? These people settle themselves in for next to nothing, and then start buying a car, a TV set, a washing machine, a spin dryer etc with the money they could have used as a deposit on a house of their own.164

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Another widespread complaint was that middle class rate-payers were subsidising feckless workers, with Gertrude Jordan of Hove arguing that: Working class people, with their subsidised houses, free education, welfare services, new cars and televisions look down on us professional classes, who have to live in top floor or basement flats for which we pay exorbitant rents, in order to keep them in the luxuries they demand.165

As in the above example, a critique based on consumption was often yoked to a wider criticism of welfare provision, of which the middle class felt the workers were undeserving. This anti-council-tenant feeling, while often expressed in terms of fears about council houses lowering property values in the neighbourhood, also contained bourgeois disgust at working class bodies and behaviours.166 Modern homes, so the argument ran, are wasted on the working class, as they will simply ruin them. Nowhere was this more powerfully expressed than in the myth of ‘coals in the bath’. This was the middle class response to the perceived crossing of social and spatial boundaries by the workers: the filth ought to stay in the slums.167 Certainly, by the 1950s, ‘coals in the bath’ had cultural currency. As retired bank manager A. F. Young, who led a campaign against proposals to build council houses in Woodingdean, argued: ‘There are good and bad council tenants. The majority certainly do not keep their coal in the bathroom but that’s not the point. I reckon council housing opposite me would knock a thousand pounds off the value of my house . . . in these circumstances I don’t mind being called a snob.’168 This suspicion of working class behaviour was institutionalised in the provision of council housing from the very outset. Housing managers, rent collectors, sanitary inspectors, social workers and family visitors trained their gaze on council homes to ensure they were kept up to standard. As Pat Starkey and Rogaly and Taylor have shown, perceived slovenly housekeeping and a lack of attention to housework, cleanliness and dirt were frequently enough to condemn mothers as ‘feckless’ and families as ‘problems’.169 Thus the stigma associated with the slums transferred to the council estate, colouring the perception of tenants from the 1930s onwards. As Christine Fletcher commented: ‘there was a perception that council tenants were ignorant and unintelligent and didn’t know how to keep a home clean and well decorated. Therefore they had to be kept an eye on.’170 The stigma still had popular currency in the early 2000s. Malcolm Foster described growing up in Whitehawk in the 1930s: ‘Some people were seen as being a bit low down in that they put coal in the bath and this sort of thing. You’ve heard all the stories no doubt. I’ve heard them. I’ve never seen it but people were desperately poor, that’s for sure.’171 Although the transformation of the working class home might have been portrayed in some narratives as one of ‘modernisation’ or ‘embourgoisement’ (middle-classification), in reality the process was deeply mired

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in classed battles over representation, ‘taste’ and citizenship. The important question is what effects these discourses had upon individual experiences of home. In order to explore the answers to this question, in the final section I analyse the meanings of home for three residents of the Whitehawk and Manor Farm estates. Myth, memory and the meanings of home Fred Netley was born into a working class family living in the Carlton Hill district of Brighton in 1933. In 1936 the family moved to the newly built Manor Farm estate (on the hill overlooking Whitehawk). Apart from national service in Germany and a couple of brief periods in other parts of Brighton, he has lived there ever since. Since the 1960s he has been active in community and Labour politics, standing for election to the town council, chairing various residents’ associations, serving as a school governor, leading the campaign against the redevelopment in the 1970s and latterly being involved in securing several million pounds of neighbourhood regeneration funding under the New Deal for Communities programme.172 Ill-health has now forced him into ‘semi-retirement’: As he states: ‘I used to take them all on. I’m nothing: I’m only a shadow of what I was. I used to take them on at every level. Not in a Bolshie way, in a proper way.’173 The original trigger for Fred’s writing had been the estate’s ‘redevelopment’, or, as he terms it, ‘The demolition of the place that I had known and loved all my life.’174 To a certain extent, nostalgia for his younger, fitter, more active self permeates some of this work, but there is something else at work here: ‘If some nostalgia comes through in what I write, I offer no apologies for that. The memory of the things I did and the friends I had in those seemingly far off days, still, at times move me very deeply.’175 If this is ‘nostalgia’, it is nostalgia with an agenda. Both in his history of the estates and in the interviews I conducted with him, Fred uses his memories of people, values and social practices to build up a picture of a particular kind of working class culture which refutes dominant representations of the estate’s people as deficient. In his history, he confronts these ‘myths’: Quite contrary to what people have said about these estates, those of us who have lived here all our lives have had a good life, in a good living community. I hope that in some small way, what I write here will go some way to starting a process of exploding those myths that all too many people have tended to believe in the past. The first one of those myths to be dealt with is the idea that the estates were bad places: they weren’t.176

Addressing the material improvements in housing which migration to the estates offered, he skilfully illustrates how these experiences have been overlaid with stigmatising discursive reinterpretations:

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Figure 5.3 Whitehawk Road being demolished, 1980. James Grey Collection/ Regency Society

In the very early days people were in heaven when they got places like this. There was a bath, toilet, copper. There was a cooker, kettle, electric iron, electric fire wasn’t there? When we first moved up here of course one of the things was that people had bathrooms. And the tale went out through the press that people used to use their bath for their coal and all that sort of stuff. Of course I still remember all those things being said. Where that sort of story came from in the first place was that people down in central Brighton didn’t have bathrooms so they used the old tin baths. When they moved they brought the old galvanised baths with them and they were used to put whatever in; might be coal. So somebody’s got hold of the story that they used the bath for coal and they look upon it as using the new bath for coal. But that’s how these stories start . . . You’re aware of those stories. You’re aware that you’re being put down.177

This, then, is a sense of class which is formed relationally. In being positioned by others, as we have seen, Fred articulates a place-based sense of identification which draws upon his own experiences and those of his peers, neighbours and friends to resist the symbolic violence perpetrated by stories such as this which seek to position the working class as objects of disgust, to fix negative, stigmatising representations of place and people in perpetuity. The working class community which Fred goes on to depict was sustained by a form of neighbouring whereby help would be offered at crucial or particularly difficult times in the life course, such as childbirth, infirmity or bereave-

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ment.178 These practices were embedded within networks of neighbours who were often family members: uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces and their families – scattered across the estate. To a significant extent, then, Fred’s sense of belonging – his identification with the place – comes from being able to place himself within this web of relatives, friends and acquaintances.179 Furthermore, his sense of working class identity is also premised on his ability to place himself within a web of friends, comrades, political activists and trade unionists which transcends the purely local, suggesting an important spatial dimension to social identification and class formation.180 Betty Gillett’s childhood, in a stark contrast to Fred’s, was characterised by isolation which engendered a sense of social difference rather than commonality. Born in 1930 in central Brighton, at the age of 3 Betty moved with her parents, grandmother and younger brother into a two-bedroom house in Lintott Avenue, Whitehawk. Undercutting other public narratives of cosy homes and friendly, helpful neighbours, Betty’s story was of an unhappy household circumscribed by poverty and disability and subject to the violent rages of her father. A fall at work had left him disabled and, unemployed, he became vindictive and violent. Betty, her brother and her mother endured regular beatings, and she avoided the home and her father’s belt as much as she could: ‘I dreaded coming home from school not knowing what I would find. One day he chased mum around the garden with a carving knife. Another time he had a row with our next door neighbour; he jumped over the wall and hit her. She called the police, but they only cautioned him.’181 Such levels of violence were at least partially deemed unacceptable by the recently settled community, and Betty’s father attempted to disguise the beatings by turning up the wireless, ignoring complaints about noise.182 Her father refused to let strangers into the house but Betty used to play with some of the children in the neighbourhood, whom she immediately recognised as different: Their fathers worked and they were well off. They had lovely homes and I mean, I could see the difference . . . I knew I was different because my home was totally different . . . I was clean, very clean, but I wasn’t dressed like them. They used to buy Marks and Spencer’s clothes and things like that as opposed to jumble sale.183

Despite the difficulties of her childhood, Betty retained her affection for the estate itself and returned there in the 1960s with her husband to raise their family. The redevelopment signalled a decline in their fortunes, however. Her home in Fletching Road was demolished in 1983 and from there the family was transferred to Fletching Close. There they were burgled twice within three years before deciding to downsize to a smaller house in Horley Road. Here an argument with a neighbour’s children about football escalated:

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Every morning the children used to come along and kick footballs up to our wall. I went out and said ‘Look, will you go and play on the pitch please?’ It was right on our doorstep. They went and fetched their mother. She was a drug addict. And she said to me ‘If you know what’s good for you ...’ And she went and fetched her mother. [And she said] ‘If you know what’s good for you you’ll get indoors’ . . . It frightened me to death. I was really scared. I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was making me ill. I couldn’t get up in the mornings.184

Eventually the Gilletts felt that they had to leave Whitehawk, and with the help of a loan from the council were able to buy a bungalow in the owneroccupied suburb of Saltdean. Betty’s experience vividly registers the impact which residualisation, exacerbated in part by the redevelopment, had in breaking down existing social networks and in reinforcing hostile ones. For Betty, the redevelopment signalled a decline both in her family’s fortunes and in the quality of life of many of the older residents. This viewpoint was certainly held by another one of my interviewees, Will Bradshaw, who began our interview with a classic piece of ‘uchronia’, an alternative narrative of what might have been.185 Whitehawk has changed but not for the better. I wish they’d done the same with Whitehawk as what they did with Hollingbury. Hollingbury used to be a council estate and they made it private. They didn’t alter anything, they kept it exactly as it was but instead of being council houses they’re all privately owned. And I’d like to have seen them do the same with Whitehawk. Keep the schools as they were; keep the houses as they were, the estate as it was. Build the extra houses they needed over the other side of Wilson’s Avenue where the tip used to be . . . Left Whitehawk as it was and mum probably would have had the chance of buying that house and we would have probably been living there now.186

Will’s devotion to his adoptive parent’s memory also revealed itself in his nostalgic framing of his upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s: I look back very, very fondly on my schooldays and childhood and yet it was rough compared with today. No telephones, no televisions, no computers, no mobile phones. Nobody had cars, it was all travel by bike or walk, but when you look back on it you didn’t know any different. There’s a lot in the old saying you know, ‘what you haven’t had you didn’t miss’, and that was about it. You made do with your lot and because everybody got on with each other and helped each other and that. It has changed a lot I must say: everybody will say that. Because we were there during the war years and immediately after the war years there was a good, a much better community spirit than what there is today. There was a lot more discipline in the kids.187

In his nostalgia for past notions of ‘community’, Will is, as we have seen, far from unique, yet his personal trajectory and experience of Whitehawk as a place is. Younger than Betty and Fred, Will spent the majority of his adult

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life away from the estate, in Clacton, Lewes and other parts of Brighton. Moreover, his narrative suggests that his close attachment to the places and spaces of his childhood is perhaps part of an attempt to cope with the relatively recent loss of his adoptive parents. Will’s very early childhood was spent in abject poverty in a tiny, two-roomed basement flat in central Brighton, with his birth mother and four siblings. His mother suffered a breakdown following the death of his younger brother and the remaining children were taken into care. Will and another brother were adopted in 1947 and taken to live on the Whitehawk estate. At the time of the interview Will was living in his adoptive parent’s former home – a council flat in high-rise St James’ house – the flat to which they had moved following the demolition of their house in Whitehawk. On his mother’s death, the flat had passed to her birth son, from whom Will purchased it, and set about: Getting it back as mum and dad had it. Finding plates that were missing and I got the originals back in some cases or replaced them . . . And it took a long time to get it back and I’m happy now because I feel that they’re still here, because that is how they wanted it. This is how they had it and that’s the way I leave it.188

The flat is full of photographs of his parents and mementos of their life in Whitehawk. Will’s memorial practices, which include visits to the site of his former home, where he ‘can spend hours just staring, remembering; putting myself back in the picture’, along with his need to reconstruct the material circumstances of his past life, strongly suggest a sense of loss closely attuned to the historical origins of the term ‘nostalgia’: a painful longing for home. Thus we can see the extent to which individual experience mediates the ways in which particular places are remembered and the meanings which people attach to them. For Will, his home in Whitehawk represented a second chance of happy childhood, and in emotionally and materially reconstructing it he has sought to deal with the grief he felt on the death of his parents. For Betty, home was a site of violence and oppression. She found an escape in the wider neighbourhood, and fulfilment in caring for others. Her resistance and capability in the face of emotional and material poverties provided her with a strong attachment to Whitehawk, one which articulated itself as a refusal of the stigma surrounding it, one which, arguably, her parents, with their poverties, disabilities and mental health problems embodied. Fred’s nostalgia is similarly premised on a refusal of stigma and is infused with a left-wing politics in which the values of mutuality and cooperation are passionately deployed against partial, negative representations of the estate. While all three articulate a sense of loss resulting from the redevelopment, there are clear differences in tone between the narratives. There is no nostalgia in Betty’s story. It is by turns stoical and heroic – but never sentimental or nostalgic. Will’s account is nostalgic – in some ways in the archaic sense of nostalgia as

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a longing for home. Fred deploys nostalgia as critique, using the history and memory of family, cooperation and mutuality to refute stigmatising representations of place. While their experiences of home and community were different, collectively, all three confront a stigma that was remapped onto the estate from the central districts. Through the photographs of their lives and the memories they recount, all three map alternative visions of what life was like prior to the redevelopment and prior to council house sales. Yet there are clear political differences between them. In Will’s mind, the privatisation of the estate could have saved his childhood home. Betty and her family were, arguably, forced out by the effects of residualisation and redevelopment. For Fred, privatisation, demolition and residualisation are clearly linked. Following the redevelopment, he found more and more people asking him how to go about buying their council houses. But he was having none of it: Fred: They’d come [and say] ‘How much do you think my house would cost now?’ and I’d say ‘Well, about nineteen thousand with your reduction and all.’ You could even tell then near enough, about nineteen grand, nineteen, twenty thousand. ‘Oh yeah’ and they’d go and buy it. And then two years later they’d kind of say, ‘How can my daughter get a council house?’ True this, isn’t it Bett? Bett: Yep. F: And from then I started giving up. I said, ‘Well go and see your local councillor, I don’t want nothing to do with that.’ They bought their place, I mean, even _____ he said to me one day, ‘____ can’t get a council house.’ And ‘_____ they can’t get a council house.’ And I said ‘No, ’cos every bugger’s bought them, that’s why.’ B: They can’t see the wood for the trees can they? F: You know, I’m not against people owning their own houses, don’t get me wrong, good luck to them but the consequences are there.189

It is to these longer-term consequences of privatisation, residualisation and deindustrialisation and the effects which they have had on class and community formation that I will now turn. Notes 1 On vernacular architectural styles, see P. Oliver, I. Davis and I. Bentley, Dunroamin: The Suburban Semi and its Enemies (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1981). For a useful summary of the historiography, see M. Swenarton, ‘Tudor Walters and Tudorbethan: reassessing Britain’s inter-war suburbs’, Planning Perspectives, 17 (2002). 2 For the context of the wartime transformation of domestic service and the postwar redesignation of servants as ‘house-workers’, see P. Horn, Life Below Stairs in the Twentieth Century (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001), pp. 231–253; J. Giles,

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‘Help for housewives: domestic service and the reconstruction of domesticity 1940–1950’, Women’s History Review, 10: 2 (2001). Mass Observation, An Enquiry into People’s Homes (London: John Murray, 1943), p. xxiii. Ibid., pp. 27 and 53–54. R. Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (London, Macmillan, 1993), p. 247. M. Abrams, ‘The home-centred society’, Listener, 26 November (1959), pp. 914–915. See M. Abrams, R. Rose and R. Hinden, Must Labour Lose? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 119. See C. Langhamer, ‘The meanings of home in postwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40: 2 (2005), pp. 350–352. B. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 63–65. See the discussion in J. Moran, ‘Housing, memory and everyday life in contemporary Britain’, Journal of Cultural Studies, 18: 4 (2004), pp. 607–610. P. Thane, ‘Family life and “normality” in postwar British culture’, R. Bessel and D. Schumann (eds), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 198. See S. Brooke, ‘Gender and working class identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Journal of Social History, 34: 4 (2001), pp. 778–783; S. Brooke, ‘Bodies, sexuality and the “modernisation” of the British working classes, 1920s to 1960s’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 69 (2006), pp. 104–122. Quoted in M. Anderson, ‘The social implications of demographic change’, F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 58. M. J. Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City: Working Class Housing, 1850–1914 (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), p. 274. QueenSpark Collective, Back Street Brighton (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1989), p. 51. M. Powell, Below Stairs (London: Pan, 1968), p. 6. The most comprehensive account is S. Muthesius, The English Terraced House (London: Yale University Press, 1982). E. Mason, A Working Man: A Century of Hove Memories (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1998), p. 8. A. Ravetz and R. Turkington, The Place of Home: English Domestic Environments, 1914–2000 (London: E & FN Spon, 1995), p. 153. J. Ravenett, Snapshots: Childhood Memories of Southampton Street, 1942–1955 (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1996), pp. 3–4. I. Pegnall, interview (2005), p. 3. R. Unwin, Cottage Plans and Common Sense (London: Fabian Society, 1902), p. 11. Tudor Walters Report (London: HMSO, 1918), paragraph 86.

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24 W. Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (London: Verso, 1993), p. 146. 25 On the use of parlours for laying out the dead, see Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, pp. 81 and 86. 26 E. Mason, A Working Man, p. 7. 27 D. Noakes, The Town Beehive: A Young Girl’s Lot in Brighton, 1910–1934 (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1995), p. 17. 28 S. Winter, Moulsecoomb Memories: Growing up in North Moulsecoomb in the Thirties and Forties (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1998), pp. 7 and 10. 29 J. R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: A History of Myth and Ritual in Family Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 127. 30 Muthesius, The English Terraced House, p. 42. 31 Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City, p. 277. 32 Mass Observation, An Enquiry into People’s Homes, p. 105. 33 Central Housing Advisory Committee, Design of Dwellings (London: HMSO, 1944), pp. 35–38. 34 J. Attfield, ‘Bringing modernity home: open plan in the British domestic interior’, I. Cieraad (ed.), At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 78. 35 J. Attfield, ‘Inside pram town: a case study of Harlow interiors, 1951–1961’, J. Attfield and P. Krikham (eds), A View from the Interior: Women and Design (London: The Women’s Press, 1995), pp. 217–222; J. Attfield, ‘Bringing modernity home’, pp. 78–79. 36 For relevant work on the use of local authority housing by tenants see D. Miller, ‘Appropriating the state on the council estate’, C. Newton and T. Putnam (eds), Household Choices (London: Futures publications, 1990), pp. 43–55. 37 J. Attfield, ‘Bringing modernity home’, p. 81. Emphasis in the original. 38 See Giles and Light’s powerful remapping of the feminine, suburban and the domestic onto established masculinised, urbanised and ‘public’ understandings of modernity: J. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2004), pp. 4–23; A. Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 8–18. 39 1951 Census of England and Wales: East Sussex County Report, Table 13, p. 60. 40 1961 Census of England and Wales: East Sussex County Report, Table 22, p. 94. 41 1971 Census of England and Wales: East Sussex County Report, Table 26, pp. 12–13. 42 M. Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 99–100. 43 Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, p. 65. 44 See also A. Hughes and K. Hunt, ‘A culture transformed? Women’s lives in Wythenshawe in the 1930s’, A. Davies and S. Fielding (eds), Worker’s Worlds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 84. 45 O. Masterson, The Circle of Life (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1986), p. 30. 46 Ibid., pp. 30–31.

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47 R. Dunn, Moulsecoomb Days: Learning and Teaching on a Brighton Council Estate, 1922–1947 (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1990), pp. 5–6. 48 E. Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (London: Faber & Faber, 1946); D. Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns: Campaigning for Town and Country Planning, 1889–1946 (London: Routledge, 1991). 49 A. C. Holliday, ‘The site planning of housing schemes’, Town Planning Review, 18: 3 (1920), p. 142. 50 K. R. G. Browne, Brighton: The Official Handbook of the Corporation (Brighton: Brighton Corporation, 1937), p. 18; H. Fyfe, ABC of Brighton and Hove (Brighton: Crabtree Press, 1948), p. 43; C. G. Browne (ed.), Focus on Brighton and Hove (Brighton: Brighton Corporation, 1951), p. 51. 51 R. G. Baxter and D. J. Howe, ‘Municipal activities in Brighton during the past twelve years’, Proceedings of the Institute of Municipal and County Engineers, Vol. 63 (1936–1937), p. 52. 52 Brighton Herald (23 December 1922); ESRO, DB/B7/35, Minutes of the General Purposes Committee, 8 December 1920. 53 Baxter and Howe, ‘Municipal activities in Brighton during the past twelve years’, pp. 52–53. 54 Central Housing Advisory Committee, Design of Dwellings (London: HMSO, 1944), p. 13. 55 Ibid., p. 12. 56 Ibid., p. 15; Ministry of Health, Housing Manual 1949 (London: HMSO, 1950), p. 143. 57 Central Housing Advisory Committee, Design of Dwellings, pp. 28–31. 58 Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945, p. 247. 59 Argus (10 October 1956). 60 Argus (5 December 1960). 61 Argus (18 February 1956). 62 Argus (28 April 1956). 63 Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Homes for Today and Tomorrow (London: HMSO, 1961), pp. 2–3. 64 All figures from County Borough of Brighton, Housing Study 1977 (Brighton: Brighton Borough Council, 1977), p. 10. 65 B. Rogaly and B. Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place  and Belonging in Contemporary England (London: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 87–88. 66 Ibid., pp. 93–107. 67 See I. Gazeley, Poverty in Britain, 1900–1965 (London: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 168–185. 68 G. Mills, ‘The shopkeeper publicized us as debtors’, Past Times Project, www.pasttimesproject.co.uk/lsl_browse.php?subsite=ll&story=728. Accessed 18 August 2010. 69 See A. Taylor, Working Class Credit and Community since 1918 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 143–146; S. O’Connell and C. Reid, ‘Workingclass consumer credit in the UK, 1925–60: the role of the check trader’, Economic

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England History Review, 58: 2 (2005); P. Scott, ‘The twilight world of interwar hire purchase’, Past and Present, 177 (2002), pp. 195–225. M. Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-class Credit (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 165–167. F. Netley, Holy Oak: A History of Whitehawk and Manor Farm, 1934–1974 (Brighton: Phoenix Press, 2002), p. 22. L. Morgan, At the Pawnbrokers (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1991), pp. 4–7. Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, p. 29. See P. Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). See W. Richardson, The People’s Business: A History of Brighton Co-Operative Society (Brighton: Brighton Co-Op, 1982); E. Dallaway, Sunshine, Sand and Sea (Bognor Regis: New Horizon, 1980), pp. 8–10. E. Pateman, interview (2005), p. 25. Netley, Holy Oak, p. 20. QueenSpark Collective, Back Street Brighton, p. 11. See A. Deacon and J. Bradshaw, Reserved for the Poor: The Means Test in British Social Policy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). Montford et al., Backyard Brighton, p. 76. H. Denman, unpublished manuscript (2003), pp. 1–3. M. Morley, ‘Carlton Hill when we were young’, QueenSpark, 10 (1975); R.  Hayward, Little to Spare and Nothing to Waste (Brighton: Brighton Books, 1998), pp. 7–13 and 23–30. F. Netley, interview (2003), p. 13. R. Spicer, ‘Newick Road: remembering our neighbours’, www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/page_id__9167_path__0p114p437p1714p.aspx. Accessed 31 July 2008. ESRO, DB/B27/6, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 8 December 1937 and 2 March 1938. See generally Netley, Holy Oak, pp. 20–27. C. Fletcher, unpublished manuscript (2006), p. 2. Brighton Herald (10 March 1928); S. Constantine, ‘Amateur Gardening and Popular Recreation in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, Journal of Social History, 14 (1981), p. 397. On gardens used primarily for produce see, for example: M. Spring Rice (ed.), Working Class Wives, 2nd edn (London: Virago, 1981). p. 130; Fletcher, unpublished manuscript, p. 2; Masterson, The Circle of Life, p. 36; Dunn, Moulsecoomb Days, p. 5. ESRO, DB/B7/42, Minutes of the General Purposes Committee, 23 April 1933. ESRO, DB/B27/6, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 6 April 1938. For example see Brighton Herald (5 October 1929); ESRO, DB/B27/7, Minutes of the Housing Committee, 16 August 1940. Rogaly and Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community, p. 97. Dunn, Moulsecoomb Days, p. 13. F. and B. Netley, interview (2005), pp. 21–22.

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96 S. Manville, Everything Seems Smaller: A Brighton Boyhood between the Wars (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1989), p. 22. 97 See S. Dentith, ‘Contemporary working-class autobiography: politics of form, politics of content’, P. Dodd (ed.), Modern Selves: Essays on Modern British and American Autobiography (London: Frank Cass, 1986), pp. 69–71. 98 Winter, Moulsecoomb Memories, p. 10. 99 G. C. M. M’Gonigle and J. Kirby, Poverty and Public Health (London: Gollancz, 1936), pp. 110–112. 100 Ibid., pp. 117–123. 101 K. Laybourn, Britain on the Breadline: A Social and Political History of Britain, 1918–1939 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1990), p. 84. 102 T. Young, Becontree and Dagenham (London: Becontree Social Survey Committee, 1934), p. 229. 103 M. Fitzgerald, Rents in Moulsecoomb (Brighton: Southern Publishing, 1939), pp. 6–7. 104 Ibid., p. 32. 105 Ibid., p. 33. 106 Although in the examples that are given, between 60 and 80 per cent of earnings were handed over, see Fitzgerald, Rents, pp. 12–13. 107 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 108 Lack of space prevents me outlining my calculations here. For details, see B. Jones, ‘Slum clearance, privatization and residualisation: the politics and practices of council housing in mid-twentieth century England’, Twentieth Century British History, 23: 4 (2010), pp. 510–539. 109 See for example, Spring Rice (ed.), Working Class Wives, pp. 155–184. 110 Dunn Moulsecoomb Days, pp. 18–19. 111 L. Potter, interview (2005), p. 5. 112 S. Todd, Young Women, Work and Family in England, 1918–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 72–84. 113 A. Paul, Hard Work and No Consideration: 51 Years a Carpenter–Joiner, 1917–1968 (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1981), p. 9. 114 Mason, A Working Man, pp. 38 and 43. 115 J. Potter, interview (2005), p. 17. 116 S. Ovenden, interview (2005), p. 5. 117 On the complex origins of the male breadwinner model in Britain and its recent partial decline see C. Creighton, ‘The rise and decline of the “male breadwinner family” in Britain’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 23 (1999). 118 D. Smith Wilson, ‘A new look at the affluent worker: the good working mother in post-war Britain, Twentieth Century British History, 17: 2 (2006), pp. 215–216. 119 E. Roberts, ‘Women and the domestic economy, 1890–1970: the oral evidence’, M. Drake (ed.), Time, Family and Community: Perspectives on Family and Community History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 135. 120 E. Roberts, Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940–1970 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 139. 121 Manville, Everything Seems Smaller, p. 9.

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England Ibid., p. 10. M. Batchelor, A Life Behind Bars (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1999), p. 12. B. Gillett, Betty’s Story (Brighton: East Brighton Bygones, 2005), p. 2. For a detailed account of the diffusion of washing technologies and continuities in washing practices, using autobiographical material from Brighton women, see C. Zmroczek, ‘Dirty linen: women, class and washing machines, 1920s–1960s’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 15: 2 (1992). See F. and B. Netley, interview (2005), p. 11; Masterson, The Circle of Life, pp. 30–31. Based on S. Bowden and A. Offer, ‘Household appliances and the use of time: the United States and Britain since the 1920s’, Economic History Review, 47: 4 (1994), pp. 745–746. S. Ovenden, interview, pp. 3–4 and 11. Ibid., pp. 9–10. L. Davidoff, ‘The rationalization of housework’, L. Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 96–97. J. Gershuny, ‘Time budgets as social indicators’, Journal of Public Policy, 9 (1989), p. 422. Derived from P. Thane, ‘Women since 1945’, P. Johnson (ed.), Twentieth Century Britain (London: Longman, 1994), p. 401. This was Joan Parsons’ father: see J. Parsons, Jobs for Life (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1995), p. 35. The other examples are D. Carter, Just One of a Large Family (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1992), p. 7; W. Bradshaw, interview (2005), p. 14. B. Gillett, Betty’s Story (Brighton: East Brighton Bygones, 2005), p. 3. For data based on national time use surveys supporting this, see J. Gershuny, M. Godwin and S. Jones, ‘The domestic labour revolution: a process of lagged adaptation’, M. Anderson, F. Bechhofer and J. Gershuny (eds), The Social and Political Economy of the Household (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 160. Bradshaw, interview, p. 40. Ibid., p. 2. A. Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 179. Ibid. J. Gershuny, Changing Times: Work and Leisure in Postindustrial Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 66–67. Based on Bowden and Offer, ‘Household appliances and the use of time’, pp. 745–746. Offer, The Challenge of Affluence, pp. 181–182. Mass Observation, The Housewife’s Day, Mass Observation Bulletin New Series, 54, June (1957), pp. 13–15; Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England, pp. 176–180. See S. Moores, Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption (London: Sage, 1993), pp. 76–87.

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145 See, for example, T. O’ Sullivan, ‘Television memories and cultures of viewing, 1950–1965’, J. Corner (ed.), Popular Television in Britain (London: BFI, 1991), pp. 166–178. 146 C. Barrowdale, interview (2005), p. 19. 147 S. Ovenden, interview, p. 4. 148 S. Laing, Representations of Working Class Life, 1957–1964 (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 188–189. 149 See also L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain (London: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 94–98. 150 Mark Clapson notes that Family and Kinship was widely reviewed, was republished fourteen times between 1961 and 1980 and influenced a whole generation of sociologists, planners, social workers and journalists: Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, p. 66. 151 A. H. Halsey, A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 109; M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. ix. 152 See P. Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, M. Bulmer (ed.), Essays on the History of British Sociological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 138 and 142–143. 153 Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, esp. chapter 3. 154 Ibid., chapters 8–10. 155 Laing, Representations of Working Class Life, p. 42. 156 F. Zweig, The Worker in an Affluent Society (London: Heinemann, 1961); Abrams, Rose and Hinden, Must Labour Lose? 157 J. E. Cronin, Labour and Society in Britain, 1918–1979 (London: Batsford, 1984), p. 164. 158 R. Frankenberg, Communities in Britain: Social Life in Town and Country (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965); J. Klein, Samples from English Cultures (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965). 159 Cronin, Labour and Society, p. 164. 160 See J. H. Goldthorpe, D. Lockwood, F. Bechhofer and J. Platt, The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), chapters 3–6 and pp. 65–68 and 165–195. 161 M. Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–4 and 217–225. 162 P. Willmott and M. Young, Family and Class in a London Suburb (London: New English Library Edition, 1960), p. 103. 163 Evening Argus (24 February 1956). 164 Evening Argus (26 August 1959). 165 Evening Argus (1 May 1961). 166 Evening Argus (20 August 1957); (17 October 1957); (31 December 1957); (7 November 1959). 167 On the symbolic and social importance of dirt as ‘matter out of place’, see classically M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution

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168 169

170 171 172

173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189

The working class in mid-twentieth-century England and Taboo (London: Routledge Classics Edition, 2002); E. Shrove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 100. Evening Argus (16 August 1957). P. Starkey, ‘The feckless mother: women, poverty and social workers in wartime and post-war England’, Women’s History Review, 9: 3 (2000); B. Taylor and B. Rogaly, ‘ “Mrs Fairly is a dirty, lazy type”: unsatisfactory households and the problem of problem families, Norwich 1942 to 1963’, Twentieth Century British History, 18: 4 (2007). Fletcher, unpublished manuscript, pp. 2–3. M. Foster, interview (2005), p. 5. Netley, Holy Oak; F. Netley, interview (2003); F. and B. Netley, interview (2005). On the background to the then New Labour government’s New Deal for Communities programme, see P. Lawless, ‘Locating and explaining area-based urban initiatives: New Deal for Communities in England’, Environment and Planning C, 22 (2004). F. and B. Netley, interview (2005), p. 25. Netley, Holy Oak, p. 7. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 1. F. Netley, interview (2003), p. 3. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., pp. 17–19. M. Savage, ‘Space, networks and class formation’, N. Kirk (ed.), Social Class and Marxism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996). Gillett, Betty’s Story, p. 2. B. Gillett, interview (2003), p. 10. Ibid., pp. 5–6. Ibid., p. 13. See A. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 99–116. W. Bradshaw, interview (2005), p. 40. Ibid., pp. 6 and 30. Ibid., p. 11. F. and B. Netley, interview (2005), p. 43.

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Chapter 6

Conclusion

Looking back on the twentieth century as a whole and returning to some of the themes I raised in the introduction, we can begin to get a sense of what was distinctive about the middle years of the century. It is clear that for most of the period, certainly from c.1934 to c.1973, living standards for those in work increased significantly.1 This was underpinned by rising real earnings, which increased by nearly half between 1948 and 1965, with particularly strong growth rates from 1954.2 As the era of ‘full’ employment continued, overtime became virtually institutionalised in manufacturing industry and the higher earnings that resulted played a significant role in improving the quality of working class lives. Longer hours were certainly a factor in narrowing the earnings gap between sections of the working class and the lowermiddle class.3 The Second World War, of course, had suggested that ‘high and stable’ levels of employment might be achievable, but more importantly, the fillip given to the staple industries by the campaigns for war production was vital in reinvigorating the ‘traditional’ patterns of employment and association of the industrial working class. From the perspective of 1945, it was these communities which, having had ‘new life poured into them’ emerged triumphant. When Labour won the 1945 election under the banner of ‘Never Again’, in many ways what was most remarkable about the victory was not the role played by middle class ‘radicals’ but, rather, that it was underpinned by massive working class support, not just in Labour’s traditional heartlands but in the former bastions of urban Toryism in Liverpool, Birmingham, the West Midlands and the west of Scotland.4 Thus the patterns of life in the kind of working class neighbourhood in which Richard Hoggart grew up during the inter-war period were instantly recognisable to a 16-year-old Robert Colls in South Shields in 1965: I saw that what I was looking at from the window was indeed a community. More, I saw that community was, or had, or lived, or somehow encompassed, a culture. This flash of realisation had everything to do with the book in front of me and nothing to do with what was happening in the street outside . . . The

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book was The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart – a book with whole chapters devoted to people whom I took to be like those down there, saying that the lives they lived were cultured and worthy of attention.5

This positive evaluation came from within the working class itself and was manifest in different arenas; in the labour movement and the trade unions and among minority figures in the media and the academy. Certainly the ideal of a fairer and more just society which emerged during the war was enshrined in the welfare legislation of the Attlee governments of 1945–1951. But this was to be no socialist utopia. Rather, welfare provision, including the provision of council housing and a commitment to ‘full’ employment, represented a liberal compromise between capital and labour brokered by Keynes and Beveridge. In practice, the welfare state did not reduce poverty or inequalities in health and education to the extent to which many in the 1940s and 1950s thought that it would.6 Moreover, arguably, it operated to the advantage of the middle classes, who benefited disproportionately from free universal secondary and tertiary education, healthcare, family allowances and pensions.7 Nevertheless, the sense of entitlement to jobs, housing and healthcare engendered by the experience of the war and perpetuated by the long post-war boom, combined with powerful trade union representation, helps to account both for the strength of working class identification into the 1970s and beyond and for the growing sense of crisis engendered by the Thatcherite attacks on the post-war settlement from the 1980s on. While Priestley’s ‘old industrial’ England was therefore given renewed life during the middle years of the century, so too was his ‘new England’. Bomb damage during the conflict had hastened the process of slum clearance, and once the dust had cleared the priority was to replace dilapidated nineteenthcentury neighbourhoods with suburban estates and high-rise flats. These modern new homes, demanded by the people, were, arguably, the single most significant contribution made by the state to improving working class life in the twentieth century. It was here that the social networks which underpinned working class communities were, to a significant extent, reconstituted. While full employment lasted and family patterns remained intact, as they largely did until the mid-1970s, these estates, despite some problems in relation to amenities, shops and appropriate communal spaces, were largely regarded as successful communities. Whilst there was less of the everyday sociability of the older areas, the streets, while full of cars, were still recognisably streets. Moreover, in some areas kinship networks had re-established themselves. Indeed, by the beginning of the 1970s some estates were home to two or three generations of the same families – families which had come to the estates from the central areas in the 1930s. The jobs which the children of the first and second generation of settlers were doing were likely to be rather differ-

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ent, however. From the mid-1960s service-sector jobs, clerical and sales work increased; thus, some children from working class families might find themselves doing non-manual work without this having an appreciable effect on their sense of working class identity. By the end of the 1960s, however, skilled manual work was on the decline and in the 1980s thousands of jobs in engineering and manufacturing were lost. In the early 1990s it was the turn of the service sector to suffer.8 Here it is worth spelling out some of the changes in the occupational structure and their potential implications for working class politics and identities. From the mid-1970s, manufacturing in Brighton collapsed and, as elsewhere, unemployment rose to levels not seen since the 1930s. Brighton was more badly affected by the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s than it had been during the 1930s, with unemployment running at between 10 and 15 per cent. Moreover, while the working class continued its long-term decline, the intermediate and professional classes, grew fuelled by the expansion of the educational, financial and service sectors. Broadly speaking, the working class population of Brighton shrunk from 53.4 per cent (55.7 per cent nationally) in 1971 to 42.4 per cent in 2001 (48.1 per cent for England and Wales).9 However, these figures conceal a major restructuring within the working class. In 1971 skilled manual workers accounted for 25.6 per cent of the local population, while semi-skilled and unskilled made up 27.8 per cent. By 2001, skilled manual workers accounted for just 12.9 per cent of the economically active labour force and semi- and unskilled 14.5 per cent. Indeed, the largest ‘working class’ grade in both absolute and relative terms was ‘Grade E’: persons categorised as ‘on state benefit, unemployed and lowest grade workers’; they accounted for 15 per cent of the labour force.10 As I will argue below, this major restructuring of the working class had a significant impact both on the socio-spatial location of the town’s working class population and on the ways in which the working class was represented in popular discourse. For organised working class politics the loss of so many skilled workers was problematic. Combined as it was in the 1980s with widening inequalities and vicious assaults by neoliberal ideologues on organised labour, the effects were catastrophic. The story of the working class in the mid-century period is one of dynamic transformations in working class neighbourhoods – changes which were driven from within by working class people themselves and from without by the implementation of specific policies relating council house design and building, estate management, sales and allocations. By the beginning of the 1970s most of the town’s worst nineteenth-century neighbourhoods had been flattened. Those that remained were saved from demolition by a new emphasis on renewal and conservation. It was these areas: Hanover and Queen’s Park, the North Laine and Kemptown, which became the setting for significant

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gentrification during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: new homes for the town’s burgeoning professional and managerial middle classes. What happened in the new council estates from the 1930s is the most salient point for this book, however. The institution of slum clearance during the 1930s and the statutory obligation, from 1936, on councils to prioritise housing need over the ability to pay had a profound effect on the new suburban communities. From the 1930s, therefore, those relatively affluent working class families who had aspired to leave the old neighbourhoods and to build communities, based on choice rather than obligation, might find that their old neighbours were their new next-door neighbours. While some from clearance areas remained on the estates, re-establishing networks of support based on mutuality and reciprocity, others were obliged to return to the central districts. But even though they left behind the stigma associated with the slums, it left a mark on the inter-war estates which never quite went away: ‘Coals in the bath – you’ve heard the stories no doubt.’11 It is a narrative that is part myth, part middle class ideology so pervasive that it has found its way into popular histories of the town.12 After the Second World War further new estates were built to house an increasingly affluent working class who, from the early 1950s, were offered the opportunity to buy their council houses. With real incomes on the rise and wives increasingly contributing waged earnings to the household economy, most of those at Coldean, Hollingbury and parts of Woodingdean and Hollingdean were able to buy. Home ownership also ensured that houses could be passed on to the next generation. While length of residence in the area and length of time on the waiting list counted during the 1940s and 1950s, after the 1960s caps on tenants’ incomes and an allocations system which increasing prioritised housing need above all else meant that the sons and daughters of established tenants could not be guaranteed a council house on the same estate as their parents. As the newest and best post-war stock was sold off, tenants of the inter-war estates at Whitehawk and Moulsecoomb were prevented from buying. At Whitehawk during the early 1970s, uncertainty about who might be moving in next door was compounded by fears that the entire estate would be demolished and its inhabitants dispersed under a new redevelopment plan. It was this which galvanised a concerted response from tenants under the umbrella organisation the East Brighton Residents Association, coordinated by people like Fred Netley. This was the last stand of the mid-century suburban working class community. The major claims for originality in this book lie in several overlapping areas. I have argued for a nuanced approach to conceptualising working class experiences and identities during the mid-twentieth century. In seeking to explore the processes of social identity formation I have argued that occupational definitions and labour market experiences, while still useful, are inadequate. In Chapter 2 I argued that workplace experiences need to be

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considered alongside the dispositions, values and behaviours instilled in early socialisation. I further argued that the processes of class formation might be usefully conceptualised as a series of individualised processes: in terms of a multiplicity of individual biographical trajectories, rather than of social actors ‘filling class positions’. Building on the work of Savage and others, I showed how individuals used a discourse of ordinariness to account for their social location and that this, combined with the valorisation of working class culture, could go some way to accounting for the continued strength of working class self-ascription, sometimes in spite of individual occupational upward mobility. I demonstrated the degree to which occupational experiences intersected with domestic, familial and neighbourhood cultures to mould social identities. I argued that, in the light of the immense changes of the post-war period – affluence and (limited) social mobility up to the 1970s and the deindustrialisation and hegemonic neoliberalism that followed – it is the strength of working class identifications which seems most remarkable. Chapter 3 mapped the spatial dynamics of class formation, plotting the changes in working class neighbourhoods wrought by slum clearance, suburbanisation and gentrification. I demonstrated that during the interwar period the social constituency for council housing widened from one predominately associated with the lower-middle class and the skilled working class in the 1920s to encompass poorer working class tenants, often from areas condemned as slums, by the end of the 1930s. I argued that in this later period representations of the estates’ inhabitants began to change, drawing on older stereotypes of the slum dweller. In the post-war period a process of residualisation developed whereby the council’s best post-war stock was sold off and allocation policies ensured that the town’s poorest families became concentrated on particular peripheral inter-war estates. In Chapter 4 I argued in the light of this finding that narratives of working class neighbourhood life which have often been condemned as tainted by nostalgia or mis-remembering need to be reconsidered as radical reclamations of experience. Moreover, I showed that accounts of relationships between neighbours are often more nuanced that the critics of working class autobiography give credit for, accounting for conflict as well as consensus and for cultural changes as well as economic continuities. I demonstrated that, in spite of important continuities in social practices and networks, the built environment of the council estate limited everyday sociability. Yet such sociability as there was on the estates, whether it was based on association for specific purposes or everyday neighbouring, tended to be based on choice rather than obligation. Particularly from the 1950s, rising affluence undercut the kinds of lending and borrowing based on reciprocity and heightened the opportunity for individual and familial privacy. If such networks required gendered work in order to sustain them, this

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was just as true for the welfare of family and household members. The work of women as the main care givers and labourers within the domestic sphere continued unabated, barely reduced either by improved technologies or by the meagre efforts of men. Yet some things did change radically. The standard of working class housing improved dramatically in the 50 years under discussion. This was, arguably, the most important socio-cultural change in working class life during the period. Furthermore, rising levels of home ownership and council rentals combined with changes in domestic technology to make the home a more attractive place to spend time in and money on. The television, in particular, transformed the domestic environment in ways which have only been touched upon here and require further sustained research. Overall, I have sought to construct an argument which, while paying attention to the heterogeneity of working class life during this period – the divisions of status, ethnicity, gender and generation – has foregrounded the commonalities where appropriate. To quote David Byrne: ‘The key experiences people have arise from their being in a class relation in a capitalist society. And on the basis of this they may, sometimes, act together.’13 Homes, workplaces and neighbourhoods are not just places of intra-class conflict, competition and atomisation; they are also sites of class cooperation, of mutuality and fraternity. Thus far, those writing about the twentieth century working class using oral sources and autobiographies have largely failed to exploit the full potential of this methodology to illuminate the complex interaction between experience and discourse, myth and memory, past and present. This book demonstrates that, in order to understand accounts of working class life from the mid-century period, the changing characteristics and representations of the working class both from the 1920s and since the 1970s, the shifting politics, practices and forms of autobiography and community publishing, and the specificity of individual experience need to be attended to. This means insisting of the importance of the experiential as well as the discursive and attending to the social as well as the cultural. As I have shown throughout, working class people have drawn on their own experiences of work, family and neighbourhood to refute stigmatising constructions of their cultures and communities as inadequate or deficient. To attend fully to both the continuities and changes in working class experience and representation since the 1970s would require another book. In particular, one would have to pay close attention to the experiences of those younger people who grew up during the period which saw deindustrialisation, the dismantling of the welfare state and the weakening of organised labour between the 1980s and the 2010s. Their experiences of home and family life, neighbourhood and work, their understandings of class and social location would, in all likelihood, be significantly different from those outlined above.14 A fine example of such an analysis is

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the social history-cum-memoir by Lynsey Hanley, born on a council estate in Birmingham in 1976. She is correctly excoriating about the policies which transformed social housing since the 1940s from a tenure which sought to cater for all to one which increasingly housed the poorest. Yet she notes the power of social experience and collective memory which drove demand for better housing: A more rounded view would take into account the degrading living conditions endured by working class families in industrial cities, in slums and shanty towns, before council housing provided millions of them with warmth and space for the first time since their ancestors left the fields. Our grandparents, even our parents do not forget how good it feels to have your own bath and inside toilet, but nor do they forget what it is like to live in a place that feels knitted into the fabric of the town or city it forms a part of.15

Echoing Hoggart, she invokes the older neighbourhoods and their sense of community, traded in, she implies for modern amenities. Yet it is these real material gains – access to modern housing and a modicum of comfort, underpinned by near full employment and rising real earnings – which seem (from the perspective of 2011) like significant achievements. Decent housing was won by a collective politics driven by the social memory of an iniquitous past. Any analysis of the massive structural and discursive changes which have impacted upon working class communities since the 1970s would have to recognise both the hegemonic power of neoliberalism and the agency of those who sought to resist it.16 This means attending to experience, to memory and to the political and social impact of discourse. For Offer, the privatisation of council housing and the redesignation of manual workers as consumers rather than producers has had profound effects: Casting workers as consumers rather than citizens or producers punished those with low purchasing power, de-legitimized producer collective action and justified low wages. Poverty increased and wages fell . . . Council house sales enfranchised a minority and penalized the rest . . . The majority continued to identify as working class, but their culture was discredited by market liberalism.17

For an example of what this means in practice we can profitably turn to the success of the ‘Brighton and Hove’ campaign for city status in 2000. Those who spearheaded Brighton and Hove’s ‘The place to be’ campaign included New Labour apparatchiks Steve (now Lord) Bassam, former council leader Simon Burgess and Sussex University’s chair of council Simon Fanshawe, who had the following to say about the town’s working class: There – did you catch that wiff? It’s strongest in the Lanes and down between the piers. Once, you see Brighton’s fishermen lived in the lanes and sailed their boats off the beach. But that was before the town became its current inimitably

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Figure 6.1 Looking east up Albion Hill, Brighton, late 1950s. Reproduced with the kind permission of Malcolm Keeping

Figure 6.2 Crescent Cottages from Montague Place, 1964. James Grey Collection/ Regency Society

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and ingeniously sexy self, when it still had its awkward name: Brightelmstone. Then the toffs and swells came to town . . . and the smelly old fishermen became a bit, well, embarrassing . . . No I’m afraid Brighton didn’t do right by its original working class. But we can make amends. For a sense of how it was – go to the fishing museum . . . just follow your nose.18

Echoing Harry Pollitt’s judgement on Eric Blair’s northern adventures in the 1930s, for the would-be city fathers, the working classes still stank, but their odour was that of an embalmed relic only to be accessed through sanitised ‘heritage’ sites, and thus safely consigned to the past.19 It is the continuing embarrassment of Brighton’s elites with its modern working class which is most in evidence throughout the bid for city status. Yet the road to Brighton Pier is paved with good intentions. So whilst class is treated as a historical anomaly, ‘communities’ appear 45 times in the text of the bid, closely followed by ‘sustainability’, ‘partnerships’, ‘creativity’, ‘diversity’, ‘identities’ and (of course) ‘choice’. Perhaps Lord Bassam put it best when he told readers of the Argus: ‘The one word used almost universally about the Brighton and Hove bid was its “inclusiveness”. In other words its desire to be about the city and the aspirations of its people, its stakeholders, its private and its social entrepreneurs, the people who, after all, make the place tick.’20 With such adroitness in regurgitating the lexicon of New Labour Newspeak, it is little wonder that towns with such prole-like connotations as Doncaster never stood a chance.21 Class was present, however. You did not have to read between the lines to detect the central plank of Brighton’s winning bid – one of the best-qualified and lowest-paid workforces in the South.22 But, of Brighton’s council estates of which previous generations of civic fathers were so proud, not one mention was made. They were even expunged from the figurative map of the city which formed the centrepiece of the bid brochure. Just a year later, however, such were vagaries of New Labour’s area-based approach to ‘tackling inequality’ and combating ‘social exclusion’ that these council estates were being encouraged to advertise their socio-economic problems and needs in order to compete against others in the region and nationwide for regeneration funding. In 2000 Netley and other community activists helped to put together the East Brighton New Deal for Communities (NDC) bid for funding to ‘close the gap’ between estates in ‘east’ Brighton and ‘national standards’ in terms of education, crime, health, worklessness and housing.23 By this point in time the ‘communities’ at Whitehawk, Moulsecoomb, Bates Estate and Saunders park were made up of a substantially different population from those who had lived there during the middle years of the twentieth century. Compared to the city as a whole, these estates were both less socially mixed and significantly more working class. In 2001, while 29.5 per cent of the town’s population were classed as semi-/unskilled

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and ‘lowest grade’ workers, the figure for the East Brighton NDC estates was 47.7 per cent.24 While 8.5 per cent of households in Brighton and Hove were headed by lone parents, 18 per cent of households in the NDC estates were so headed.25 Whether or not the NDC scheme will prove to be a long-term success in combating deeply ingrained structural inequalities by targeting particular neighbourhoods remains to be seen. However, the interim outlook looks bleak. The council itself, in its city plan for 2008, noted that: Learning from the experience of the Neighbourhood Renewal programme and the New Deal for Communities, the city’s Reducing Inequalities Review has highlighted that significant inequalities continue to exist between different areas and communities in the city. Critically, whilst individual families/households may have been helped by the two programmes, overall, statistically, the gap has not been closed. If anything, it has increased especially when considering those claiming DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] benefits.26

Spatial location not only affects everyday quality of life, it also determines access to crucial social goods: the labour market, healthcare and different kinds of state education. These have profound implications for individuals’ life trajectories and, ultimately, for class reproduction.27 The processes of residualisation which in Chapter 3 I traced back to the 1950s have been substantially reinforced since then. Arguably, this, combined with widespread economic restructuring and the decomposition of the skilled manual working class, has accelerated socio-spatial polarisation. To compound matters, promises that NDCs would be resident led and controlled rang increasingly hollow as the real money came to be spent.28 It is perhaps a fitting legacy that the successor to East Brighton NDC (known as eb4u [East Brighton for You] from 2003 to 2007) was a property company, run by a former eb4u director, which managed buildings purchased with NDC monies.29 The disparity between the opulence of certain areas of the town and its working class districts has been an enduing theme in the history of twentiethcentury Brighton. Thus Herbert Carden, the great municipal socialist housing reformer of the inter-war years likened the town to ‘a ragged garment with a golden fringe’.30 For Carden, the ‘golden fringe’ was the seafront hotels and Regency squares. The ‘ragged garment’ referred to the streets of the central districts, such as Sun Street and Paradise Place: home to the teenage gangster Pinkie in Brighton Rock – what Greene called ‘the shabby secret behind the bright corsage’.31 The sartorial metaphor is particularly apposite in this instance. These were the streets of the lumpen (ragged) proletariat: hawkers, peddlers, tramps, prostitutes, itinerant labourers – streets where Italian and French immigrants and Gypsy-Travellers might settle for a few years – adding further colour to the motley crew. For Molly Morley, the Carlton Hill district in the 1930s was:

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An area of dealers and totters: you would see them sorting their rags, and then the mums would come and find clothing and other useful items for a few pennies. There was more profit in this than when it was all weighed up for the trade.32

For Walter Benjamin, an archetypal figure of modernity was the rag-picker. As Ben Highmore notes: The rag-picker deals in the second-hand, in the dreams of the past for a future that was never realised. The modern day ragpicker treads a fine line between a sentimental attitude towards the past and a revolutionary nostalgia for the future. When the latter takes precedence over the former, the rag picker’s radical task becomes one of cataloguing the broken promises that have been abandoned in the everyday trash of history.33

The task of ‘cataloguing the broken promises’ – of homes fit for heroes, of jobs and prosperity for all – was one which QueenSpark, among others, took up in Brighton from the early 1970s. Here residents and former residents of both the older inner urban neighbourhoods and the modern municipal suburbs registered a sense of loss in tones which sometimes trod an uneven line between sentimentality and radical nostalgia. It is not without a measure of irony that from the mid-1970s, when people looked at what had become of Carden’s grand vision of a greater Brighton, it was the fringes themselves – the modern, purpose-built council estates which Carden and others in the labour movement had worked so hard to build – that looked increasingly ragged, ravaged by disinvestment and residualisation. Thirty-five years later, more council house sales, residualisation and deindustrialisation had combined to deepen socio-spatial inequalities still further. All this was achieved under a neoliberal ideology which sought to replace the distortions of the post-war liberal welfare state with the freedom and prosperity generated by deregulated market capitalism. In 2007–2008 the bubble burst in the US sub-prime real estate market, to trigger the biggest crisis in western capitalism since the inter-war period.34 In Britain, Thatcher’s ideological successors in the Conservative–Liberal-Democrat government responded to a large national debt, caused in part by a massive bail-out of the banks, by talking up a crisis which was beginning to stabilise. Beneath the rhetoric of ‘rebalancing’ the economy and the attempts to promote ‘the big society’, proposed spending cuts in education, welfare and public services seem destined to impoverish millions of ordinary middle and working class families, while the financial and business elites responsible for the crisis continued to enjoy tax breaks, inflation-busting pay rises and enormous bonuses. This model of dispossession, following crises both real and imagined, is one which has been successfully employed by neoliberal elites throughout the world from the 1970s.35 Elsewhere it has amounted to a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary

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The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

people to the very richest. What this will do to a society in which rates of social mobility have been stagnating and economic inequalities deepening for the past 30 or so years is yet to be determined. But in this context, is it any wonder that some of those working class people who look back on their lives in the middle years of the century regard it as a ‘golden age’? In many respects, compared with the lives of their grandparents’ generation and those of their own children and grandchildren, it was exactly that. Notes 1 See G. R. Boyer, ‘Living standards, 1860–1939’, R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds), Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Vol. 2, Economic Maturity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); P. Johnson, ‘The welfare state, income and living standards’, R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds), Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Vol. 3, Structural Change and Growth, 1939–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 2 I. Gazeley, Poverty in Britain, 1900–1965 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 133 and 161. 3 J. Rule, ‘Time, affluence and private leisure: the British working class in the 1950s and 1960s’, Labour History Review, 66: 2 (2001), p. 229. 4 See P. Addison, The Road to 1945, 2nd edn (London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 268; A. August, The British Working Class, 1832–1940 (London: Longman, 2007), pp. 153–155. 5 R. Colls, ‘When we lived in communities: working class culture and its critics’, R. Colls and R. Rodger (eds), Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain 1800–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 284. 6 Compare B. S. Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare State: A Third Social Survey of York Dealing only with Economic Questions (London: Longmans Green, 1951) with B. Abel-Smith and P. Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest (London: Bell, 1965); T. J. Hatton and R. E. Bailey, ‘Seebohm Rowntree and the post-war poverty puzzle’, Economic History Review, 53: 3 (2000), pp. 517–543; D. Black et al., Inequalities in Health: The Black Report, P. Townsend and N. Davidson (eds) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982); A. H. Halsey, A. Heath and J. M. Ridge, Origins and Destinations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). 7 See Johnson, ‘The welfare state, income and living standards’, pp. 234–236. 8 P. Scott, ‘Regional development and policy’, R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds), Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Vol. 3, Structural Change and Growth, 1939–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 336. 9 1971 Census of England and Wales: East Sussex Economic Activity County Leaflet, Table 1 (London: HMSO, 1975). Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Classification of Occupations 1970 (London: HMSO, 1970). 2001 figures calculated via statistics from Office for National Statistics, ‘Approximated Social Grade’ for Brighton Pavilion and Brighton Kemptown Constituencies (2001). Accessed via www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination.

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Conclusion

209

10 Sources for all figures as above. 11 M. Foster, interview (2005), p. 5. 12 See for example the mythical account in A. Seldon, Brave New City: Brighton and Hove, Past, Present, Future (Lewes: Pomegranate Press, 2002), p. 73. 13 D. Byrne, ‘Class, culture and identity: a reflection on absences against presences’, Sociology, 39: 5 (2005), p. 814. 14 For analyses of this latter period from a variety of perspectives see B. Rogaly and B. Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (London: Palgrave, 2009); B. Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender (London: Sage, 1997); S. J. Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Z. Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005); G. Evans, Educational Failure and White Working Class Children in Britain (London: Palgrave, 2006); W. Atkinson, Class, Individualization and Late Modernity: In Search of the Reflexive Worker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 15 L. Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History (London: Granta, 2007), p. 6. 16 See generally D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 17 A. Offer, ‘British manual workers: from producers to consumers, c.1950–2000’, Contemporary British History, 22: 4 (2008), p. 537. 18 Brighton and Hove Unitary Authority, The Place to Be: Our Bid for City Status (Brighton: Brighton and Hove, 1999), p. 28. 19 Not that I have anything against the fishing museum, which is very well worth a visit. On the historical legacies of fishing in Brighton see A. Durr, ‘The making of a fishing museum’, History Workshop Journal, 40 (1995); QueenSpark Collective, Catching Stories: Voices from the Brighton Fishing Community (Brighton: QueenSpark, 1996). 20 Argus (4 January 2001). 21 On New Labour’s discourse see N. Fairclough, New Labour, New Language (London: Routledge, 2000). 22 Brighton and Hove Unitary Authority, The Place to Be, p. 28. 23 See P. Lawless, ‘Locating and explaining area-based urban initiatives: New Deal for Communities in England’, Environment and Planning C, 22 (2004), pp. 383–384. 24 Office for National Statistics, Approximated Social Grade, East Brighton New Deal for Communities (2001). Calculated from www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/ dissemination. 25 Derived from Office for National Statistics, Household Composition: Households (UV65), East Brighton New Deal for Communities (2001). Calculated from www. neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination. 26 Brighton and Hove City Council, Local Area Agreement (Brighton: Brighton and Hove, 2008), p. 6. My emphasis. Accessed at www.idea.gov.uk/idk/aio/8621669. 27 D. Byrne, Social Exclusion, 2nd edn (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005), p. 117. 28 See the critiques in, Byrne, Social Exclusion, pp. 151–168; Rogaly and Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community, pp. 125–139. For examples of residents’

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29 30 31 32

33 34 35

The working class in mid-twentieth-century England

anger at eb4u, see K. Hoy, ‘Anger at regeneration bodies’ record’, This Is Brighton and Hove, 25 April 2005; ‘How neighbours 47 m hopes faded’, This Is Brighton and Hove, 6 May 2005. For research in which residents’ experience of NDC groups compares poorly with resident-led groups in Moulsecoomb, see D. Conyers, ‘Deepening democracy in the UK: rhetoric and reality’, Institute of Development Studies Working Paper, 314 (2008). The report cites a rhetoric of consumption, ‘managerial forms of control’ and social stratification as particular impediments to deepening resident participation in Moulsecoomb. See also Moulsecoomb Being Heard Project Group, Moulsecoomb: Being Heard! (University of Brighton Health and Social Policy Research Centre: 2008). See www.eastbrightontrust.org.uk. Accessed 29 April 2011. Mayor Herbert Carden quoted in Sussex Daily News (3 February 1919). My emphasis. G. Greene, Brighton Rock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). p. 140. D. Morley, ‘Carlton Hill – when we were young’, D. Morley and K. Worpole (eds), The Republic of Letters: Working Class Writing and Local Publishing (London: Comedia Publishing, 1982), p. 7. B. Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 65. My emphasis. See D. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010). See Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; N. Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2007).

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Biographical appendix

A general discussion of the characteristics of this sample of forty-two life histories can be found in chapter two. See the bibliography for published autobiographies. With the exception of those who have published material in the public domain all other interviewees have been given pseudonyms. This has been done to preserve the anonymity of interviewees and the integrity of the text. Barrowdale, Claire Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1926 Brighton, Hollingdean Terrace Typist; clerk Draughtsman; mechanic Housewife 3 1 Company secretary 2 4 None

Batchelor, Marjorie Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children:

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1908 Brighton, Exeter Street Bar worker; publican Publican Housewife; bar worker None 1 Naval rating; factory worker; publican 2

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Biographical appendix

Number of recorded moves: 1 Published autobiographies: 1 Bradshaw, William Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1939 Brighton, Preston Road Printer; projectionist; soldier; carpet fitter Electrician Nurse 4 2 First: clerk. Second: housewife 3 11 None

Carter, Don Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1919 Brighton, Shanklin Road Plumber/metal worker at Pullman car works; maintenance worker at Sussex University Father’s occupations: Railwayman Mother’s occupations: Housewife Number of siblings: 9 Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Unknown Children: Unknown Number of recorded moves: 2 Published autobiographies: 2 Chapman, Barbara Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages:

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1927 Brighton, Compton Avenue Waiter; hospital worker; bar worker; telephonist; clerical worker Singer Singer; housekeeper 1 1

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Biographical appendix

Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

213

Small business owner Unknown 3 1

Colegate, William Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1959 Shoreham Lathe operator; drill operator; marine engineer; maintenance fitter; bouncer/library assistant/crane fitter; teacher; tutor Father’s occupations: Toolmaker Mother’s occupations: Nurse Number of siblings: 3 Number of marriages: None Partner’s occupations: N/A Children: None Number of recorded moves: 21 Published autobiographies: None Cummins, Jack Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1894 London, Sardinia Street Guillotine cutter at print-works; conscript soldier; foreman at print-works Father’s occupations: Guillotine cutter Mother’s occupations: Domestic servant Number of siblings: 3 Number of marriages: Unknown Partner’s occupations: Unknown Children: Unknown Number of recorded moves: 4 Published autobiographies: 1 Denman, Harry Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

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1929 Brighton, Pelham Street Clerk; plasterer; barrow boy; plasterer/tennis coach

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Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

Biographical appendix

Gambler Usherette None 1 Housewife 2 5 None

Dunn, Ruby Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1920 Brighton, Stanmer Park Road Teacher Printer Household/care work 2 1 Teacher 2 3 1

Fenner, Quentin Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1946 Brighton, Woodingdean Bus conductor; estate agent; company director; chartered surveyor Father’s occupations: Insurance agent Mother’s occupations: Hairdresser Number of siblings: 2 Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Administrator Children: 2 Number of recorded moves: 6 Published autobiographies: None Foster, Malcolm Year of birth: Place of birth:

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1931 Brighton, Hanover Terrace

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Biographical appendix

215

Occupations:

Tool maker; planning engineer; chief engineer; assistant works manager; works manager; assembly manager; works manager/company director; production manager; estate agent Father’s occupations: Butcher Mother’s occupations: Servant Number of siblings: None Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Clerk Children: 2 Number of recorded moves: 10 Published autobiographies: None Gardiner, Marjorie Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1908 Brighton, Coventry Street Shop assistant (milliners); telephonist Unknown Unknown 1 Unknown Unknown Unknown 2 1

Goldman, Leonard Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1916 Stourport, Worcestershire Draper’s assistant; travelling salesman; secondary school teacher in the UK and German Democratic Republic Father’s occupations: Owner of picture framing business Mother’s occupations: Housewife Number of siblings: 3 Number of marriages: 2 Partner’s occupations: First: teacher. Second: translator; secretary Children: 1 Number of recorded moves: 12 Published autobiographies: 3

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Biographical appendix

Grout, George Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1913 Brighton, Coombe Road Baker; delivery driver Baker Housewife 10 1 Waitress 1 1 1

Hardy, Nora Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1924 Brighton, Ditchling Road Clerk; nursing home manager Company director Shop worker 1 1 Administrator 2 2 None

Healey, Bert Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children:

JONES WORKING CLASS PRINT.indd 216

1908 London, Canning Town Messenger; apprentice electrician; soldier; labourer; hawker; taxi driver; bus driver; coach driver (Horse) coach driver; bus driver; chauffeur; lorry driver; electrician’s assistant; taxi driver Waitress; laundry worker 3 Unknown Unknown Unknown

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Biographical appendix

217

Number of recorded moves: 12 Published autobiographies: 1 Hill, Barbara Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1944 Guyana Nurse Pharmacist Housewife Unknown 1 Unknown Unknown 3 None

Hill, Denis Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1929 Brighton, Argyle Road Clerk; RAF; clerk; journalist; insurance agent; warehouseman; driver; tutor; carer Father’s occupations: Labourer Mother’s occupations: Cleaner Number of siblings: None Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Clerk Children: None Number of recorded moves: 12 Published autobiographies: 1 Knight, John Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations:

JONES WORKING CLASS PRINT.indd 217

1930 Brighton, Belgrave Street Clerk Stage hand; coach painter; milk deliverer Factory worker; childcare/domestic work None Unknown Unknown

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218

Biographical appendix

Children: Unknown Number of recorded moves: 1 Published autobiographies: 1 Langley, John Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1905 Hove, Suffolk Street Apprentice coach builder; coach builder (Brighton locomotive works) Father’s occupations: Carpenter Mother’s occupations: Servant Number of siblings: 1 Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Servant Children: None Number of recorded moves: 3 Published autobiographies: 1 Manville, Sid Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1913 Brighton, Bear Road Unknown Postman; deck-chair attendant Housewife 9 Unknown Unknown Unknown 3 2

Mason, Ernie Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

JONES WORKING CLASS PRINT.indd 218

1906 Hove, Ellen Street Grocery delivery boy; jam maker; maintenance worker; driver; coal truck driver; blind fitter; chauffeur; garage attendant; garage foreman; solicitor’s clerk; delivery driver; printer

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Biographical appendix

Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

219

Water-worker Housewife and washer-woman 2 Unknown Unknown Unknown 2 1

Masterson, Olive Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1920 Brighton, Richmond Road Factory worker (Cox’s Pills); blouse maker; nursery nurse; dressmaker; uniform maker; machinist; home worker (seamstress); cleaner Father’s occupations: Bookie’s runner; bookie; blacksmith; bouncer Mother’s occupations: Housewife Number of siblings: 3 Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Gamekeeper; pest control officer Children: 5 Number of recorded moves: 7 Published autobiographies: 1 Moss, Les Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1901 London, St Pancras Skilled engineering worker; fish salesman; engineer Father’s occupations: Cabinet maker; flautist; insurance salesman; shop keeper Mother’s occupations: Clothes spangler; boarding-house/shop keeper Number of siblings: 1 Number of marriages: Unknown Partner’s occupations: Unknown Children: Unknown Number of recorded moves: 4 Published autobiographies: 1

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Biographical appendix

Netley, Elizabeth Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations:

1931 Brighton, Hanover Street Basket maker Railwayman Cleaner 3 2 Second partner: shop assistant; metal worker; foreman Children: 3 Number of recorded moves: 5 Published autobiographies: None Netley, Fred Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1933 Brighton, Herbert Road Shop assistant; metal worker; foreman Drain layer Housewife; cleaner 4 1 Basket maker 3 5 1 – see Holy Oak

Noakes, Daisy Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children:

JONES WORKING CLASS PRINT.indd 220

1908 Brighton, Prince’s Road Servant (dormitory maid) Milk deliverer; packing at Allen West Laundry worker 9 1 Carter’s boy; cowman; lathe turner; gardener; cowman; lathe turner 2

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Biographical appendix

221

Number of recorded moves: 9 Published autobiographies: 2 Noakes, George Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1910 Lewes, Sussex Carter’s boy; cowman; lathe-turner; gardener; cowman; lathe-turner Father’s occupations: Shepherd Mother’s occupations: Washer-woman Number of siblings: 2 Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Servant Children: 2 Number of recorded moves: 12 Published autobiographies: 1 Ovenden, Sarah Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1948 Brighton, Pankhurst Avenue Hairdresser; housekeeper; administrator Lathe worker Nurse; waitress None 1 First: gas board representative 1 5 None

Parsons, Joan Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations:

JONES WORKING CLASS PRINT.indd 221

1925 Brighton, Franklin Road Bakery assistant; canteen worker; office worker; machinist; brewrey worker; hotel worker; factory worker; care worker; toilet attendant Fire officer Servant (head chambermaid)

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Biographical appendix

Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations:

1 1 Dray-man; window cleaner; parish relief assistant; caretaker Children: 2 Number of recorded moves: 2 Published autobiographies: 1 Pateman, Elizabeth Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1925 Brighton, Lincoln Cottages Factory worker; dry cleaner; shop worker Father’s occupations: Railwayman Mother’s occupations: Laundry worker Number of siblings: 3 Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Fisherman Children: 2 Number of recorded moves: 3 Published autobiographies: None Paul, Albert Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1903 Brighton, St Martin’s Place Carpenter/joiner; milk deliverer; carpenter/ joiner Father’s occupations: Labourer (building trade) Mother’s occupations: Laundry worker Number of siblings: 9 Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Servant (parlour maid); housewife Children: 2 Number of recorded moves: 3 Published autobiographies: 2 Pegnall, Iris Year of birth: Place of birth:

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1920 Brighton, Balfour Road

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Biographical appendix

Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

223

Clerk; telephonist Coach painter Bakery assistant None None N/A None None None

Potter, Jack Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1937 Brighton, Bute Street Shop-lad; draughtsman; engineer Electrician Cleaner 2 2 First: telephonist. Second: clerk 2 5 None

Potter, Linda Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1944 Brighton, Kingsley Road Shop worker; clerk; home worker; clerk Baker; painter-decorator; store man Servant; cleaner; home worker 1 2 Second: engineer 3 7 None

Powell, Margaret Year of birth: Place of birth:

JONES WORKING CLASS PRINT.indd 223

1910 Hove

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224

Biographical appendix

Occupations:

Cleaner; shop worker; laundry worker; kitchen maid; cook; cleaner (char); writer Father’s occupations: Painter-decorator Mother’s occupations: Cleaner Number of siblings: 6 Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Milkman; removal man Children: 3 Number of recorded moves: 13 Published autobiographies: 5 Richards, Peter Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

1938 London, Cricklewood Van boy; factory worker; farm labourer; porter; farm labourer; factory worker; hodcarrier; labourer; pipe-layer; jointer; ganger Father’s occupations: Lathe operator. Step-father: buildings inspector Mother’s occupations: Milliner; factory worker Number of siblings: None Number of marriages: 1 Partner’s occupations: Shop worker; clerical worker; cleaner Children: 3 Number of recorded moves: 21 Published autobiographies: 1 Smith, Ethel Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations:

Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children:

JONES WORKING CLASS PRINT.indd 224

1912 London, Fulham Nurse; servant; charge-hand at button factory; bar worker; clerk; café worker; grocer; café owner; clerk Bus driver; chauffeur Cleaner 2 1 Clerk; RAF ground crew; café worker; grocer; clerk 2

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Biographical appendix

225

Number of recorded moves: 17 Published autobiographies: 1 Thickett, Arthur Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1930 Hull Clerk, soldier, labourer, teacher Labourer; foreman Housewife 3 None N/A None 22 3

Ward, Margaret Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

1916 Rottingdean, Old Ord Cottages Cleaner; housekeeper Gardener Preparatory school matron 1 1 Water worker 2 2 2

Winter, Sheila Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children:

JONES WORKING CLASS PRINT.indd 225

1927 Brighton, Chailey Road Factory worker Painter-decorator Housewife 2 1 Unknown Unknown

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226

Biographical appendix

Number of recorded moves: 1 Published autobiographies: 1 Wren, Tim Year of birth: Place of birth: Occupations: Father’s occupations: Mother’s occupations: Number of siblings: Number of marriages: Partner’s occupations: Children: Number of recorded moves: Published autobiographies:

JONES WORKING CLASS PRINT.indd 226

1928 Brighton Apprentice electrician; electrician Butcher Housewife Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown 1 1

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Bibliography

Primary sources Archival Brighton History Centre, Brighton Museum

Annual Reports of the Brighton Medical Officer of Health, Brighton (1918–1970) Annual Reports of the Housing Manager, Brighton (1946–1967) SPB 127/9: Moulsecoomb District Community Association Pamphlet (1947) Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex

Topic Collection 1 (TC 1): Housing 1938–1948 Topic Collection 66 (TC 66): Town and District Survey 1937–1948 East Sussex Records Office, Lewes

Records of Brighton Borough Council Minutes of the Education Committee, 1930–1940 Minutes of the General Purposes Committee, 1918–1940 Minutes of the Health Committee, 1920–1974 Minutes of the Housing Committee, 1934–1974 Town Clerk’s Files (Moulsecoomb Estate), 1918–1922 Printed and digital

Adshead, S. D. and Hudson, R. A., Town Planning – Central Areas: Report and Development Plan (Brighton: Brighton Borough Council, 1937). Brighton and Hove City Council, Local Area Agreement (Brighton: Brighton and Hove, 2008). Census of England and Wales (1921) Census of England and Wales (1931) Census of England and Wales (1951) Census of England and Wales (1961) Census of England and Wales (1966) Census of England and Wales (1971) Census of England and Wales (1981) Census of England and Wales (1991) Census of England and Wales (2001)

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228

Bibliography

Central and local government reports Central Housing Advisory Committee, The Management of Municipal Housing Estates (London: HMSO, 1938). Central Housing Advisory Committee, Design of Dwellings (London: Ministry of Health, 1944). Central Housing Advisory Committee, Homes for Today and Tomorrow (London: HMSO, 1961). Central Housing Advisory Committee, The Needs of New Communities (London: HMSO, 1967). County Borough of Brighton, Town and Country Planning Act 1947: Report of the Survey (Brighton, 1952). County Borough of Brighton, Housing Study 1977 (Brighton: Brighton Borough Council, 1977). Ministry of Health, The Appearance of Housing Estates (London: HMSO, 1948). Ministry of Health, Housing Manual 1949 (London: HMSO, 1950). Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Unsatisfactory Tenants (London: HMSO, 1955). Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Moving from the Slums (London: HMSO, 1956). Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Councils and Their Houses (London: HMSO, 1959). Ministry of Housing and Local Government, The South East Study (London: HMSO, 1964). Ministry of Housing and Local Government, Council Housing: Purposes, Procedures and Priorities (London: HMSO, 1969). Ministry of Housing and Local Government, People and Planning (London: HMSO, 1969). Office for National Statistics, Approximated Social Grade, Brighton Pavilion and Brighton Kemptown Constituencies (2001), accessed via www.neighbourhood. statistics.gov.uk/dissemination. Office for National Statistics, Approximated Social Grade, East Brighton New Deal for Communities (2001), calculated from www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/ dissemination. Office for National Statistics, Household Composition: Households (UV65), East Brighton New Deal for Communities (2001), calculated from www.neighbourhood. statistics.gov.uk/dissemination. Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Classification of Occupations 1970 (London: HMSO, 1970). Tudor Walters Report (London: HMSO, 1918). Contemporary newspapers and periodicals

Brighton and Hove Leader Brighton Evening Argus Brighton Gazette Brighton Herald

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Bibliography

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Index

Note: page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abercrombie, P. 82, 93 Abrams, M. 155–7, 181 Acts of Parliament Addison Act see Housing and Town Planning Act (1919) Additional Powers Act (Housing) (1919) 80 Civic Amenities Act (1967) 125 Cross Act (1875) 78 Housing Act (1923) 82 Housing Act (1936) 96 Housing Act (1958) 125 Housing Act (1969) 127 Housing and Town Planning Act (1919) 80–2, 84 Housing of the Working Classes Act (1890) 78 Rent and Mortgage Restrictions Act (1915) 80 Shaftesbury Act (1851) 78 Torrens Act (1868) 78 Adshead, S. 83, 162 affluence 2, 11, 30–1, 82–5, 94, 96–7, 155–7, 175, 179–82, 200–1 angry young men 10, 124 anti-fascism 50 apprenticeships 54–6, 174 autobiography 2, 10, 36, 48–9, 123, 127–8, 171, 203 autodidacts 48, 60, 128

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Bassam, S. 203, 205 Becontree 145, 172 belonging, sense of 17, 108, 120, 132–3, 135–8, 184–5 Benjamin, W. 6–7, 156, 207 Beryl’s Lot 60 Birmingham 7, 10, 94, 172, 197, 203 Blackpool 10, 12–13, 39 Bourdieu, P. 34, 51, 55, 129 Bourke, J. 35–6, 121–3, 128 Brighton cultural representation 13–14, 203–5, 206–7 historical development 13, 39 local economy 39–47, 199 local politics 49–50, 203–5 Bristol 161, 181 Burgess, S. 203 Carden, H. 50, 81, 206–7 Carlton Hill District 88, 89, 98–9, 103, 107, 129, 131–2, 135–6, 183, 206–7 children 88, 90, 101, 131, 134, 137, 147, 178, 185–7 complaints about 141 earnings of 173–5 help with domestic tasks 175–7 churches associative cultures 53, 139, 144 class formation 10, 27, 201

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258 cleanliness and respectability 90, 92, 101, 129, 131, 134, 185 Communism 36, 48–50, 56, 81–2, 94, 144 Communist Party of Great Britain 49–50, 82, 94 community 96, 108, 109, 121–5, 138, 145, 179–81, 184, 186, 188, 197, 200, 203, 205 community associations 85, 125, 144–5, 165 conservation areas 125 of built environment 78, 109, 125, 199 Conservative Party 49–50, 56, 66, 96–7, 100, 155, 164, 207 consumption 30, 34, 127, 139, 168, 178–82, 203 Co-op 168 Coronation Street 11, 124, 179 council estates (includes names of specific estates referred to) associative culture 143–6 Bates 94, 96, 98, 205 Bevendean 67, 85, 94, 97–8, 141–2, 162, 164 Bristol 98, 105, Coldean 94, 97–8, 140, 144, 173, 200 Craven Vale 98, 137, 141 Hollingbury 55, 94–8, 144, 163–4, 186, 200 Kingswood and Milner 99, 107–8, 140 Manor Farm 85–6, 98, 129, 137, 140, 142, 146, 161–2, 165, 169, 183 middle class tenants 83–5, 97 Moulsecoomb 55, 67, 81, 83–7, 89, 94, 96–8, 105–8, 139, 141–7, 161–2, 169, 171–3, 200, 205 East Moulsecoomb 86, 94, 105–6, 141, 145 North Moulsecoomb 97–8, 106–8, 142, 143, 144, 159, 162, 169, 171, 173

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Index South Moulsecoomb 83–6, 87, 96, 161–2, 171, 173 Queen’s Park 83–6, 98, 162, 165, 167, 174 Saunders Park 205 stigmatization 67, 90, 92, 99, 105–8, 182–4, 200 Tarner 89, 98, 162 Whitehawk 54, 85–6, 89, 97–8, 105, 108, 138, 140–2, 144–6, 162, 165, 169–70, 185–7, 205–6 Whitehawk redevelopment 51, 109–10, 183–4, 184, 185–6, 200 council house sales/privatization 77, 96–9, 104–5, 109–10, 188, 203, 207 council housing allocations 105–6, 141, 200–1 construction interwar 78, 80–3, 162–3 postwar 94, 101, 164–5, 200 pre-1914 78–9 disrepair 164–5 high rents 83–6, 83, 172–3 management 182 standards Dudley Report (1944) 93, 160, 163–4 Parker-Morris Report (1961) 165 Cowley, H. 50, 81, 94, 128 criminality, perceived 14, 67, 107, 131, 169 cultural studies 2–4, 9, 124 cultural turn history 4–5, 28–30 sociology 33 debt and credit 107, 135–6, 167–8 dirt and stigmatization 34, 89, 92, 102–3, 131–2, 182 domestic amenities 160–2, 166, 184 domestic labour 134, 175–8 see also housework domestic service 40–2, 49, 60–2 demise of 41, 155, 178

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Index domestic space bathrooms 100, 140, 161, 164–6, 184, 203 bedrooms 94, 100, 140, 161–4, 172–3, 185 design & layout 158, 162–5 kitchens 100, 158–61, 164, 165, 170, 176 parlours 87, 158–60, 162 scullerys 158, 175 sitting rooms 100, 158, 160 domestic technologies 156, 161, 165, 176–9 domesticity 104, 146, 155–6, 179 East Enders 11 education 54, 56, 63–5, 123–4, 198, 206 embourgeoisement 157, 180–2 ethnicity 36–7, 129 experience 4–7, 121, 123, 125–6, 130, 146, 202–3 dialectical understanding of (Erlebnis and Erfahrung) 5–7, 121, 123, 126 family kinship networks 133, 140, 180, 185, 198 size 165, 173–4; see also fertility decline transmission of occupations 37 Fanshawe, S. 203 Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP) 123–4, 128 fertility decline 16, 157, 163 films Bow Bells (1954) 11 Boys From the Black Stuff (1982) 11 Brassed Off, (1996) 11 Brighton Rock, (1947) 14 Brighton Rock, (2010) 14 Carry on At Your Convenience, (1971) 14

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259 Down Terrace, (2009) 14 Fires Were Started, (1943) 11 Housing Problems, (1935) 11 London to Brighton, (2006) 14 Love on the Dole, (1941) 11 Mona Lisa, (1986) 14 Nil By Mouth, (1997) 11 Quadrophenia, (1979) 14 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, (1960) 11 The Blue Lamp, (1950) 11 This is England, (2007) 11 We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959) 11 Fitzgerald, M. Rents in Moulsecoomb (1939) 85–6, 89–90, 106, 172–4 Flats 94, 105 see also tower blocks Foucault, M. 5 gangs 101, 132, 135 gangsters 169, 206 garden city movement 82, 93 gardens 139, 170 gender 7–8, 33–4, 40 class 33–4, 58 domestic division of labour 177–8, 201–2 employment 40–5, 47, 58 poverty 173 general improvement areas 125 general strike 50 gentrification 78, 109, 123, 125–7, 200 Goldthorpe, J. H. 33, 47, 58, 181 grammar schools 4, 9, 38, 56, 124 Gramsci, A. 48 Gypsy-Travellers 37, 131, 206 Hanley, L. 203 Hanover (Brighton neighbourhood of) 52, 78, 125–6, 138, 167, 199–200 Hoggart, R. The Uses of Literacy 2–4, 7, 9–10, 38, 197–8

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260 home ownership 86, 96–7, 139, 155, 188, 200, 202 household economy 171–5 housework 43, 155, 175–8 see also domestic labour housing crisis 78–82, 93–4 Hove 39, 60, 174, 182, 203, 218, 223 see also Brighton Howard, E. 93, 162 humour 59, 171 identification 8 see also social identities Jackson, B. 3 Kemptown 50, 199 labour markets 30, 36, 40–7, 206 Labour Party 29, 48, 50, 60, 66, 89, 93–4, 96–7, 101–2, 144, 155, 180, 183, 197 Lancing 39, 49, 54, 174 leisure 142–6, 165, 178–9 Liverpool 10, 94, 128, 145, 161, 172, 181, 197 London 1–2, 7, 48–9, 94, 127–8, 135, 145, 161, 181, 213, 216, 219, 224 connection to Brighton 13–14, 37, 39, 84–5 cultural representation of 10–12 Luton 57–8 Macmillan, H. 94 Madge, C. 10 Manchester 7, 52, 78, 172 manual work decline of 28, 34, 46, 66, 199, 206 semi-skilled 37–8, 41, 45–6, 199, 205 skilled 28, 37–8, 40–1, 44–6, 49, 58, 64, 169, 199, 174 unskilled 37, 44, 46, 174, 199, 205 marriage 36, 157 Marsden, D. 3

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Index Marxism 48–9 Mass Observation 1–2, 10, 93, 155, 160, 178 McKibbin, R. 15 Medhurst, A. 4, 14 medical officer of health 78, 81, 86, 92, 101–3, 105, 125 memory 3, 6–9, 62, 121, 130, 138, 179, 187–8, 202–3 middle class attitudes to working class 63, 67, 83, 92, 159, 179–83, 200, 203, 205 identities 28–9, 31–4, 52–8, 66, 86, 181 politics 83, 85, 125–7, 197–8 working class attitudes to 52, 60, 63–5, 67, 170–1 modernity 103–4, 108, 156–7, 160–1, 179, 207 neighbourliness 122, 129, 133–5, 140–1, 184–5, 201 neoliberalism 199, 203, 205–6 New Deal for Communities 183, 205–6 New Labour 50, 203, 205 new towns 93 non-manual work 28, 37–8, 41, 46–7, 62, 199 North Laine 1, 125, 199 nostalgia 3, 121–5, 128–30, 138, 183, 186–8, 207 Offer, A. 108, 178, 203 oral history 8, 10, 29, 48, 122, 130, 134, 178, 202 ordinariness 14, 52–5, 58–9, 62, 64–5, 201 overcrowding 78–9, 92, 94, 157–8 Patcham 86, 96, 98 pawnbroking 167–8 Portslade 39, 98 poverty 59, 89, 92, 131–3, 138, 166–8, 198 Powell, M. 60–2, 158

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Index Priestley, J. B. 12–13, 198 private housing construction 78–81, 86 ‘problem families’ 92–3, 99, 104–5, 108 public houses 142–3 QueenSpark 51, 124–30, 146–7, 207 race 7, 36–7, 129 residualisation 77, 97–9, 105–6, 186, 188, 201, 205–7 resourcefulness 167–71, 173, 175 respectability 27, 29, 53, 97, 106, 131–5, 139, 141, 159–60, 168–9 right to buy 77, 98, 110 Roberts, E. 29, 135, 175 Roedean 53 Rogaly, B. 92, 130, 132, 166–7, 170, 182 Saltdean 86, 186 Scott, J. W. 4–5, 30 ‘scroungers’ 64, 67 Second World War 12, 15, 92–3, 197 sexualities 14–15, 28, 36, 60, 128 shame 103, 107, 167–8 shops 134–6, 139, 142, 167–9 Shoreham 39, 64, 81, 213 Skeggs, B. 33–5 slum clearance interwar 1–2, 77–8, 86, 89–92, 101 legislation 78 memory of 123, 136–8 nineteenth century 78–9 postwar 99–106, 125 slum, rejection of term 100, 129, 131–2 snobbery 53, 58–9, 67, 141, 182 social identities 8, 27–36, 51–68, 131–2, 185, 201 alleged declining salience of class 28, 30–5, 57, 66 social mobility 4, 31–2, 35, 37–8, 47, 53–6, 58, 62–6, 124, 201, 208 social networks 13, 108–10, 121–2, 133–5, 139–40, 146, 184–6, 198

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261 Southwick 39, 81 spatial mobility 37 see also suburbanization and slum clearance squatter’s movement 50–1, 81–2, 94 Steedman, C. 7, 9, 33, 123 Stockton-on-Tees 171–2 suburbanisation 86, 89, 94, 108, 138–47, 155–7, 162, 170–3, 178, 198, 200–1 and poverty 86, 89, 91 Taylor, B. 93, 130, 132, 166–7, 170, 182 television 11, 60, 62, 124, 165, 178–9, 182, 202 tenants associations 108 Tenant Defence Leagues 85, 144 tenant incomes 84–5, 97, 200 tower blocks 104, 125, 204 trade unionism 29, 31, 34, 48–50, 56, 66, 128, 185, 198 Tudor Walters Committee 82, 159, 162 upper classes 2, 31, 53, 55, 57–8, 62, 64 Upstairs, Downstairs 62 underclass 59, 67 unemployment 11, 39, 82, 106, 167–9, 172, 185, 199 unsatisfactory tenants 99, 104–6 Unwin, R. 82, 93, 159 violence 14, 120, 122, 135 domestic 128, 135, 185, 187 symbolic 104, 184 Waters, C. 3, 123–4, 128 Watling estate 145 welfare state dismantling of 202, 207 Middle class benefit from 198 Williams, R. 3, 4, 124 Withdean 86 women workers 40–3, 174–5, 178

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262 Women’s Group on Public Welfare 92 Woodingdean 86, 97–8, 105, 144–5, 165, 182, 200, 214 working class cultural representations of 10–12, 108, 124, 179 identities 29, 31–5, 38, 52–4, 56–9, 64, 66–7, 124, 180–1, 185, 198–9, 201 politics 47–50

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Index stigmatization of 34, 77, 93, 104–8, 110, 120–1, 129, 167, 168, 181–4, 187–8, 200, 202–3 ‘coals in the bath’ myth 180–2, 200 Yeo, S. 127–8 Young, M. & Willmott, P. 2, 180–1 youth organisations 144–5 Zweig, F. 181

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