Abstract
In 1963, the British Productivity Council sponsored a 44-minute black and white film called People, Productivity and Change. The film’s commentator and ‘on stage’ interviewer was sociologist Tom Lupton – we meet him first as the camera pans through his office door at Aston and eavesdrops on an important debate about social change. The film itself is a wonderful time capsule of social and economic life in the early 1960s. But through the haze of industrial quantities of tobacco smoke the film’s participants produce, one thing stands out, and that is the centrality of history in shaping the experience of class. For many of those explaining their reaction to plans for increasing productivity, their thinking was powerfully shaped by events of the 1920s and 1930s. Suspicion of employers’ motives coupled with the memory of real poverty more than three decades before animates these mid-20th-century conversations.
This theme of the importance of history is one that unites four recent books on the post-war experience of the working-class in Britain. These are all historical accounts of class and community and each, with the exception of Blackshaw, are by historians of various stripes. Focusing on the period from 1945 largely up until the 1970s and beyond, they combine social and economic history with sociology. The post-war British working-class experience is enjoying increased attention from historians as a by-product of recent decades becoming ripe for consideration as ‘modern’ history. For example, David Kynaston’s (2007, 2010, 2013) multi-volume series on post-war Britain is now reaching the 1960s, while the 1970s has seen a rash of more popular explorations from authors such as Francis Wheen with his Strange Days Indeed (2009), Alwyn Turner’s Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s (2008), and the prolific Dominic Sandbrook (2010, 2013). With the exception of Kynaston, the working-class play a bit part on the stage of post-war Britain in these books; workers’ role is to be the beneficiaries of the welfare state, to enjoy undreamt of affluence or, especially by the 1970s, to become cannon fodder for ‘politically motivated men’. In popular writing, the working-class in part ‘did for themselves’ by falling for the chimera of affluence, for having the wrong kind of politics or simply having the economic rug pulled from under them. In such narratives we are left with a low wage, unskilled working-class who, in the wake of two decades or more of neoliberalism, are as likely as not to be identified by the early 21st century as ‘chavs’ (see Jones, 2012).
The volumes considered here make far more complex this simple narrative by reminding the reader that being working-class has always been difficult. Indeed if there is one theme that unites all four titles it is that working-class life even in the age of affluence was tough and that post-war class identity was shaped – just like Lupton’s interviewees – by the folk memory of the interwar period if not before. But they also are a timely reminder that working-class people enjoyed and exercised agency in their daily lives.
The most explicit attempt at periodization occurs in Tony Blackshaw’s book. In it, Blackshaw sets up the ‘Inbetweeners’, a generation that spans a good deal of the 20th century sitting between an earlier traditional solid working-class and those of the later ‘boomer’ generation. Blackshaw’s Inbetweeners have a foot in both camps. Born into industrial Britain of the interwar period, socialized by family and community with fixed ideas of moral and cultural horizons, they mature in a world after WW2 where the ties that anchor class are loosened or lost altogether. Blackshaw derives this periodization from Zygmunt Bauman, and in particular his notion of the solid/liquid dichotomy. As Blackshaw puts it, the ‘Inbetweeners’: … Provides a buffer between two generations far removed from one other: the generation that was a product of industrial modernization and a sensible world based on social class and patriarchal social relations, and the generation that became known as the ‘boomers’. This intermediary generation stands in between two historical generations in contradiction. (Blackshaw, 2013: 20)
Blackshaw claims that his Inbetweeners help us unlock sociologically the intergenerational puzzle of working-class community and experience. What produces this shift between solid and liquid is a tripartite interregnum caused by WW2, economic shifts and the creation of the post-war welfare state. Each in its own way dissolves the pre-war ways of being working-class.
Blackshaw acknowledges that liquid and solid descriptors are ideal types and that reality is somewhat messier. The trouble is that Bauman’s ideal types metamorphose into the firm conviction of others that the world actually looks or looked like this or that. The seductive attraction of ‘liquidity’ seems to saturate many accounts of contemporary society, and the problem with these types of categorical periodization is that they do damage to more subtle accounts which stress gradual change and incremental shifts, ones that each of the other authors emphasize. The question is, therefore, how does a model like the Inbetweeners deal with gradual shifts in economic and social status, one that differs greatly by industry, place and sector? One could, for example, see some of the traditional industrial areas of the UK as being in long term decline from the 1920s while others only begin to fade during the 1980s. Whichever way we look at this industrial change, and especially deindustrialization, we are dealing not with an event but rather a process played out across many decades. As Walkerdine and Jimenez (2012) have recently argued in connection with the South Wales steel industry, industrial loss has been shaping working-class communities, masculinities and femininities for five decades or more.
Any contemporary reflection on working-class life has to confront the issue of nostalgia and each of the four books do this well. Arguably, it is the case that in more than any other field to seek out positive accounts of the working-class, their communities or places of work is to invite the charge of sentimentality. The term ‘nostalgia’ is used as a card to crudely trump what is often more insightful analysis. On the face of it, David Hall’s Working Lives (2012) should fall into the nostalgic category, written as it is for a more popular audience than is the case with the others reviewed here. Indeed the review quote on the front cover from the Daily Mail describes the book as ‘Nostalgic and oddly moving’. While it is true that a sense of loss animates Hall’s book, the chapters are organized around particular industries – cotton, shipbuilding, coal, iron and steel – and they reveal both the complexity and hardship of working-class life as well the positives people were able to carve out of often grim circumstances. Hall himself is an interesting author. His previous writing saw him play the role of Boswell to the late Fred Dibnah’s Samuel Johnson, having written no less than seven titles on the Boltonian industrial enthusiast and steeplejack. Hall’s book does not shy away from struggle – dwelling on the pollution, long hours and industrial accidents that were the staple fair of industrial communities the length and breadth of the country. But his, like all the other books here also shows the positive sides to life, sense of community, closeness to others and the role work played in maturing people. What we also get from Hall’s book, and McIvor’s too, is how dominant a presence industry was in the lives recorded here. There is, I think, a transparency about British industrial communities in the post-war period. People were aware of what others did; there was knowledge about the things made and the men and women who made them. We get a visceral sense here of the nature of industrial districts and how they created an anticipatory socialization into industrial work and its concomitant identities largely absent in modern life.
The relationship to the past and especially in seeing value in it is never clearer than when people talk of gaining access to improved housing. There are many examples of this in Ben Jones’ book, which in part focuses on housing patterns. Here he quotes a respondent’s memory of moving into their new home: 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. (Olive Masterson, quoted in Ben Jones, 2012: 161)
It is easy to gloss over these seemingly mundane features most of us take for granted now, but such accounts offer important insights into a working-class world dramatically improving in the interwar and especially in the post-war period. These small increments felt for those who speak here like profound shifts in the experience of life. If there is nostalgia present in accounts about the working-class or given by working-class respondents themselves, it is more complex, nuanced and reflective than is often given credit. The voices recorded in such accounts possess a complex relationship with the past. The positive aspects of the past are always grounded in realities of shortage, hunger or struggle. However, these voices are quite rightly asking critical questions of the present and the past in comparison. One of Blackshaw’s Inbetweeners makes the following telling observation: Yes, I was born at the best time. Such an optimistic period to grow up in. Alright, there were street houses and that kind of thing but we were happy. We saw this optimism, we saw full employment. I mean everybody had a job. I suppose it were in the 80s, the first time, you went from the 40s and then had 30 or so years, things started to get better in the late 50s, ‘til the 80s when Mrs Thatcher started sacking everybody. But we had all that time when everything’s better, better, you started going abroad, having cars, buying furniture for houses, putting pictures on your walls, buying house, buying things! (Fred Pickersgill, quoted in Blackshaw, 2013: 84)
A common thread through all of these books is the account they offer of rising standards of living coupled with a greater sense of security. Affluence, such as it was for many in the working-class, was secured by long hours and overtime. Security linked to regular wages speaks here to order, predictability and stable living rather than simply the ability to access material goods. Seen from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, sentiment for such an era is surely understandable and even highly realistic given current conditions and likely future ones and is worth more than to be casually dismissed as nostalgic.
Ben Jones’ book examines in detail working-class experience of community and especially housing in and around post-war Brighton. His detailed and subtle rendering of working-class experience shows the complexity of attitudes and responses to changing patterns of housing tenure, suburbanization and slum clearance. In doing so, Jones problematizes simplistic truisms about either the warmth of the slums or the sterility of estate life in post-war Britain. It also illustrates the way the working-class were far from passive victims of the local or national state, but exercised agency in numerous ways to hold on to what they had or to gain access to new resources.
What roots all these studies is their ability to draw on oral histories in the narrating of their stories. Here Hall’s book and that of Arthur McIvor are the most driven by the method. McIvor’s volume is a real tour de force in the way it deploys oral testimony collected by both the author and a variety of other scholars. McIvor’s focus is on work and working life, but in doing so he tells a remarkably rounded story of the period. This is the first book that I know of that handles topics such as gender, masculinity, the body and ethnicity in such a sensitive way. Its real achievement comes from McIvor’s ability in linking general societal and economic trends to the particulars of the shop floor. In the process he reveals the complexity of workplace culture as a dynamic and fluid property which both enables and constrains action.
So what can we say about the study of the post-war working-class from these volumes and how do they fit into wider debates about class? The revival in the study of class has been going on for a couple of decades now in the UK and further afield, most notably the USA (see Bottero, 2004; Russo and Linkon, 2005). In the UK, one of the criticisms some have made of this turn is that too much attention has been paid to the cultural significance of working-class life at the expense of economic aspects (see Atkinson, 2009; Hebson, 2009). Equally, it could be argued that much of the Bourdieusian analysis is strangely ahistorical, which can allow for a certain weightlessness to figure in narratives. These books root class in refreshing ways which allow us a richer sense of access to what is novel in working-class experience now, as well as much that is continuous with the past.
Interestingly, while all the titles offer rich sociological insights, none of the authors is a sociologist. Three decades ago, Philip Abrams (1982) offered the field his Historical Sociology, wherein he made a passionate argument for dissolving the walls that divided history and sociology. For Abrams, all good history was sociological and equally all good sociology should be historical. Those insights are as true today as when they were first written, but as a discipline we tend to forget this. As David Inglis has recently argued, ‘Sophisticated historical consciousness is largely moribund in mainstream British sociology today, posing acute questions about the intellectual solidarity of the discipline as it is currently organized and practiced’ (Inglis, 2014: 101). Collectively, these volumes pose questions for sociology as a discipline about how it studies class and especially in the way our subject employs its historical imagination.
These books remind us of the legacies of class and the working-class experience. They show us how modern Britain was forged before, during and after the war. The shape of work, industrial relations, post-war political affiliations, and housing tenure are all powerfully influenced by the politics of class. We learn too of the importance of working-class organization and solidarity built across generations. It not only greatly, if very slowly, improved working-class living standards and working conditions for a time, but it also resulted in ordinary people and their needs being taken seriously, as mattering. This sense of mattering is exemplified in Jones’ quote from Caroline Steedman: I would have been 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. (Steedman, quoted in Ben Jones, 2012: 123)
The books here all focus on a time when the working-class really mattered to itself, to politicians and to sociologists. The working-class were taken seriously and were given a seat at the table, and at times even won real power for themselves. To understand what that experience felt like in all its diversity is to be attentive to a real sense that things really could improve and go on improving for ordinary people. The charge of nostalgia against such experience does violence to the narratives on offer here, but it also prevents a more complex debate about how working-class power and community have been constituted in the past and might be again in the future.