Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption, OBE, PC, FSA, FRHistS, was born in 1948 so is now aged 75. Lord Sumption attended Eton College and then Magdalen College, Oxford. He went on to become an adviser to Sir Keith Joseph, writing speeches and a book for him, which situates him politically on the right wing of the Conservative Party.
Sumption has had an extraordinarily successful career as a barrister, being at one time a member of the ‘million-a-year club’, and admitting in a letter to the press to earning £1.6 million per annum. In 2011 he was appointed to the Privy Council and in 2012 to the Supreme Court.
The way the Establishment works is that, once you have achieved a certain level of competence in a great profession – and are blessed with a maze of contacts of people at similarly elevated levels of society, many of whom, of course, you first met at your expensive public school – then you find yourself being offered directorships and governorships in which you are expected to deploy this ability and influence.
Thus Sumption is a director of the English National Opera and on the governing body of the Royal Academy of Music. After all, isn’t he the kind of person you’d like to appoint to your board, if you were running one: a highly successful lawyer to deal with any legal matters; well connected with the British government (who he has represented in court) to advise on handling politicians; eminently civilised, highly presentable at receptions for likely sponsors, and so on.
And Sumption is obviously also interested in history, which is why he is a FRHistS. This means Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a title awarded to those who have made ‘an original contribution to historical scholarship’.
This distinction Sumption has achieved through the authorship of six big books about medieval history: one about medieval pilgrimage (1975), one about the Albigensian Crusade (1978), and then a multi-volumed history of the Hundred Years War. Volumes one to four of this are titled:
Trial by Battle (1990): from the funeral of Charles IV of France in 1329 to the surrender of Calais in 1347
Trial by Fire (1999): covering the years from 1347 to 1369
Divided Houses (2009): covering the years from 1369 to 1399 (the overthrow of Richard II)
Cursed Kings (2015): covering the years from 1399 to 1422 (year of the Battle of Agincourt)
A fifth and final volume is planned which will take us up to the peace of 1453 and the end of the war. I sincerely hope Lord Sumption lives to complete it.
Posh historians
Critics have compared this multi-volume history to the history of the crusades by Sir Stephen Runciman CH (Companion of Honour) FBA (Fellow of the British Academy), and to the three-volume history of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich CVO (Commander of the Royal Victorian Order), the latter of which I have reviewed in this blog:
Certainly, the medieval subject matter of their works and their multi-volume nature lead to the comparison. But to my eye, the most striking thing about these three award-winning historians is that they all went to Eton and are phenomenally posh.
Runciman (1903 to 2000) was the son of Walter Runciman, 1st Viscount Runciman of Doxford, and Hilda Runciman, Viscountess Runciman of Doxford. He attended Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge.
John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, attended Eton, the University of Strasbourg and then New College, Oxford. He sat as a hereditary peer in the House of Lords from 1954 to 1999.
These kind of chaps come from highly networked families and recreate them in their children.
Norwich’s daughter, the Honourable Alice Clare Antonia Opportune Cooper, attended a private school in Surrey and then St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Rather inevitably, like daddy, she became an author and her early books documented the lives of her glamorous family (her grandmother was Lady Diana Cooper, a ‘famously glamorous social figure in London and Paris’).
Alice prefers to go by the name of Artemis Cooper and is married to the eminent historian, Anthony Beevor. Beevor himself attended the very posh Winchester College (the same school as Rishi Sunak) before attending the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and then on to a career writing a series of brilliant books about aspects of the Second World War (Crete, Paris, Stalingrad, Berlin, D-Day etc), plus a history of the Spanish Civil War. I’ve reviewed some of his books:
Why am I dwelling on these authors’ posh backgrounds? The point of this disquisition is to indicate how some of the great narratives of British and European history (Runciman’s history of the Crusades and Norwich’s history of the Byzantine Empire are both still in print in mass-market Penguin editions, and both are still the go-to accounts of their subjects; Sumption’s series has become the most thorough and complete account of the 100 Years War since the Victorians; Beevor has made himself into a leading historian of the Second World War) have been managed by authors from the very top of the British social scale, all from the same tiny group of premier league public schools and Oxbridge, mostly men, with the same set of values and social assumptions.
As it happens, I have just finished reading a one-volume account of the Hundred Years War by Desmond Seward. Seward was educated at the UK’s country’s leading Roman Catholic private school, Ampleforth, and then St Catherine’s College, Cambridge.
And I have lined up to read next an enormous account of Chivalry by Maurice Keen OBE, educated at top public school Winchester (like Antony Beevor and Rishi Sunak), before going on to Balliol College, Oxford.
It reinforces my point to learn that Keen is a lifelong friend of fellow historian Sir John Keegan OBE FRSL (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature), author of 25 or so books of military history, who was educated at the private Wimbledon College and then Balliol College, Oxford; and it really reinforces my point to learn that Keen is married to Keegan’s sister, Mary.
I hope you’re beginning to get a feel for the small, interconnected, high-powered networks which control the commanding heights of history writing.
Some of Keegan’s attitudes to warfare have been critiqued by Sir Michael Howard OM (Order of Merit) CH (Companion of Honour) CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) MC (Military Cross) FBA (Fellow of the British Academy) FRHistS (Fellow of the Royal Historical Society), described in the Financial Times as ‘Britain’s greatest living historian’. Howard was, of course, educated at an eminent private school, Wellington, before going on to Christ Church, Oxford.
You get the picture. Maybe it would be false and a bit paranoid to say that the writing of British, foreign and military history is controlled by a clique of like-minded, posh, private-school-educated men – not least because these days there are all kinds of younger historians, women historians, black and Asian historians, writing hundreds of books on all kinds of subjects, and working in local history, people’s history, ‘history from below’, women’s history, post-colonial history and so on.
But then, on closer examination, lots of these apparently ‘diverse’ young historians themselves turn out to have benefited from Britain’s systems of privilege. Take the eminent modern historian, Rana Mitter, whose book about Japan’s war with China I’ve reviewed. In this book Mitter mounts a sustained attack on Winston Churchill’s wartime leadership with all the confidence borne of someone who attended Lancing College (alma mater of Evelyn Waugh), and King’s College, Cambridge.
Or take Lucy Worsley OBE, a woman and therefore seen as adding to ‘diversity’, especially in the context of the umpteen TV series about history she’s presented where she relishes debunking old sexist myths about history with all the confidence of someone who attended a private preparatory school and Oxford.
Going back a couple of generations, I have on my shelves the works of two giants of history who dominated their respective fields from the 1960s to the 1990s – the ‘Marxist’ historians E.P. Thompson (historian of the English working classes) and Christopher Hill (historian of the civil wars). Both Thompson and Hill followed the old boy route of prep school, private boarding school, and Oxford, giving them the lordly confidence to write and speak as defining experts in their respective areas. Their books are still widely available as popular paperbacks (i.e. in Penguin editions).
To recap, it wouldn’t be entirely false to say that large areas of history (the crusades, Byzantium, medieval history, the British civil wars, the creation of the industrial working class, and accounts of the twentieth century’s main wars) have been dominated by these ‘old masters’, public schoolboys to a man, authors of large, scholarly, imposing works which defined their subjects for generations.
The advantages of poshness
So you can see why progressive commentators might well deplore the narrow social pool from which eminent historians past and present have, until recently, mainly been drawn, and may quote George Orwell’s minatory warning:
‘He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past.’
They may applaud the fact that, these days, more histories are being published than ever before, with a vast industry now dedicated to restoring the role of women at every level of past society, alongside the work of black and Asian historians in ‘restoring the voices’ of, in particular, colonial subjects of the British Empire.
And yet, much though I cordially dislike the ongoing domination of their class and their privilege and their entitlements, still…it is possible to make a case that the dominance of these posh, white men in history writing has its advantages – that there is a positive merit in (some) history being researched and written by the phenomenally posh and upper class.
1. Insider experience
Take the examples I’ve cited – the Crusades, Byzantium and the Hundred Years War – the histories of these events largely consisted of political, military, diplomatic, theological and legal conflicts, and posh types are brought up a) in extended, well-connected, everso well-educated families; and b) inducted into the social networks based in their private schools which extend into the corridors of Whitehall, the Foreign Office and so on, contacts which give them insider experience of how these networks of power work in practice (‘Hi Boris. Hi Rishi’).
When it comes to recent (i.e. Second World War onwards) history, they are often related to family members who had direct experience of army or government, or have school chums from families which played important roles in these events. This gives much of their writing the insights of the insider.
2. Specialised experience
The root cause of the Hundred Years War was a legal dispute about the laws of succession to the crown of France and this was, as Sumption’s account shows in great detail, just one of a labyrinth of legal and constitutional problems / struggles / issues which bedeviled relations, not just between England and France but also with Scotland, Wales, Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire, the papacy, and so on.
So having a very experienced, senior lawyer, who really understand the legalistic nature of these conflicts, is a very big advantage in Sumption’s narrative of the war. Again, insider knowledge from the very top of the profession (the million-a-year club).
3. Suave
In the olden days the auction house Sothebys was nicknamed by others in the trade ‘Smoothyboys’, mocking their unctuous and slick employees. Another advantage of history written by the extremely posh is that their prose is often charmingly sophisticated, smooth and debonair. Norwich’s prose, in particular, is a joy to read, smooth and civilised and delicious.
There’s no denying that private school and Oxford taught these posh boys to write beautifully.
In addition to the prose itself, these smoothboys often display an entertainingly suave and sophisticated attitude to their subject matter. The very best public schools teach the aristocratic values of detachment, sang-froid, stiff upper lip and – I admit I may be exaggerating or over-noticing here, but – this superior air of civilisation and detachment, of sophisticated irony and so on, often gives the posh historians’ accounts a wonderful lightness and buoyancy, like its airbag lifts a hovercraft just clear of the sea.
Summary
I have no grand conclusion to make. These are just scattered reflections prompted by noticing how posh many of our most eminent historians are, how interconnected they are by family ties, how this may possibly be a cause for concern for those looking for an ‘Establishment’ which controls a master discourse of British history, but, on the other hand, how beautifully they often write, how measured, logically and clearly they treat their subjects, and what very enjoyable books they produce.
I found Kishlansky’s account of the Wars of Three Kingdoms very persuasive, probably the best thing in this book. When you write history you have a choice of the level you want to pitch the narrative, the levels being something like:
superficial
good summary
summary with some detail
lots of detail
too much detail
As I explained in my review of Peter H. Wilson’s book about the Thirty Years War, Wilson definitely goes into ‘too much detail’, drowning the reader in specifics while failing to point out important turning points or patterns.
Kishlansky, by contrast, hits what, for me, was the perfect level of description, ‘incisive summary with some detail’.
As an example of really useful summary, take the way he tells us that, put simply, the first three years of the civil war in England (1642-5) consisted mostly of smallish regional armies engaging in small skirmishes or sieges of local centres.
Now I’ve read scores of accounts of the English civil war which give lengthy descriptions of each of these ‘skirmishes’ along with detail of the army groups involved, their leaders, maps and deployments, and so go on for hundreds of pages. At a stroke Kishlansky makes it clear that most of them didn’t, ultimately, matter.
What mattered were a handful of decisions or turning points, such as the king withdrawing his forces after the Battle Brentford in November 1642, the one moment when he had the chance to capture London. Kishlansky is very good on the three famous key battles which he does describe in compelling detail – Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby.
But above all, Kishlansky doesn’t lose sight of the fact that the fighting was almost a sideshow compared to the extremely complicated political manoeuvring which went on continuously from 1642 to 1649.
Like many accounts, he almost forgets the Royalist side altogether because the real action was the disagreements within the Parliamentary side, among the Roundheads. Kishlansky brings out how the Presbyterian party within Parliament rose to eminence on the back of their close connections with the invading Scots, lorded it over Parliament for a few years, but then themselves began to appear as an overbearing ‘enemy’ to the growing power of the Independents in Cromwell’s New Model Army, before they were eventually expelled from Parliament and some of them arrested.
Only a close reading of the series of events and the complex political negotiations which went on against a continuously changing backdrop can bring out the fast-moving complexity of the situation, and the tremendous pressures the key actors found themselves under.
This is why, although I’ve read about 40 books about the British civil wars, by far the best remains The King’s Peace (1955) and The King’s War (1958) by Dame Veronica Wedgwood. They are old, now, but they are the only ones I know of which simply describe the events in the order they happened; and as they do so, you realise what a relentless helter-skelter of crises it was.
Only Wedgwood’s books really convey the way the unstoppable torrent of events happening in three separate kingdoms (England, Scotland and Ireland) interacted and exacerbated each other, to create a continuous sense of political and military crisis, which got worse and worse, and how the fighting, the wars themselves, news of defeats and paranoia about attacks on London and conspiracies and fifth columnists, also contributed to the feverish political atmosphere of the times.
Just like the French Revolution, lofty ideals and principles may have been expressed by various parties, and political historians and left-wing sympathisers with the Levellers and the Diggers, like to dwell on these – but as soon as you look at what actually happened you realise all sides were struggling to react to events which were almost always beyond their control.
There are many ways of interpreting the character and achievements of Oliver Cromwell, but when you read Wedgwood’s thrilling and gripping accounts, you realise it’s easy to overlook the most elementary fact about him, which is that he was able to ride the wild tiger of events in a way no-one else could.
Timeline of the Wars of Three Kingdoms
1640
13 April – first meeting of the Short Parliament
5 May – Charles dissolves the Short Parliament
26 October – Charles forced to sign the Treaty of Ripon
3 November – First meeting of the Long Parliament
11 December – the Root and Branch Petition submitted to the Long Parliament
1641
July – the Long Parliament passes ‘An Act for the Regulating the Privie Councell and for taking away the Court commonly called the Star Chamber’
July – Charles returns to Scotland and accedes to all Covenanter demands
August – the Root and Branch Bill rejected by the Long Parliament
October – outbreak of the Irish Rebellion creating panic in London
1 December – The Grand Remonstrance is presented to the King
December – The Long Parliament passes the Bishops Exclusion Act
1642 until the outbreak of the war
4 January – Charles unsuccessfully attempts to personally arrest the Five Members (John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Sir Arthur Haselrig, and William Strode) on the floor of the House of Commons
January – on the orders of the Long Parliament, Sir John Hotham, 1st Baronet seizes the arsenal at Kingston upon Hull
5 February – the bishops of the Church of England are excluded from the House of Lords by the Bishops Exclusion Act
23 February – Henrietta Maria goes to the Netherlands with Princess Mary and the crown jewels
5 March – the Long Parliament passes the Militia Ordinance
15 March – the Long Parliament proclaims that ‘the People are bound by the Ordinance for the Militia, though it has not received the Royal Assent’
April – Sir John Hotham, 1st Baronet refuses the king entrance to Kingston upon Hull
2 June – The Nineteen Propositions rejected
May – The Irish rebellion ends
3 June – The great meeting on Heworth Moor outside York, summoned by Charles to gather support for his cause
July – Charles unsuccessfully besieges Hull
July – Parliament appoints the Committee of Safety
1642 – war begins
22 August -King Charles I raises his standard at Nottingham and the war commences
23 August – Battle of Southam, first sizeable encounter between Royalist & Parliamentarian forces.
19 September – Charles’s Wellington Declaration
23 September – Battle of Powick Bridge
29 September – The Yorkshire Treaty of Neutrality signed, but repudiated by Parliament 4 October
17 October – King Charles I passes through Birmingham, the towns folk seize the King’s carriages, containing the royal plate and furniture, which they convey for security to Warwick Castle, a parliamentary stronghold. The same day there was a skirmish at Kings Norton
23 October – Battle of Edgehill
1 November – Battle of Aylesbury
12 November, Battle of Brentford
13 November – Battle of Turnham Green
17 December – Declaration of Lex Talionis
1 December – Storming of Farnham Castle
Early December – Battle of Muster Green
22 December – Siege of Chichester begins
23 December – Bunbury Agreement designed to keep Cheshire neutral during the Civil War (failed)
27 December – Siege of Chichester ends
1643
19 January – Battle of Braddock Down
28 January – the Long Parliament sends commissioners to negotiate the Treaty of Oxford (unsuccessful)
19 March – Battle of Hopton Heath
30 March – Battle of Seacroft Moor
3 April – Battle of Camp Hill — a Royalist victory
8-21 April – Siege of Lichfield — a Royalist capture
25 April – Battle of Sourton Down — Parliamentarian victory
16 May – Battle of Stratton — Royalist victory
29–31 May – Siege of Worcester — Parliamentarians failed to capture
16 June – the Long Parliament passes the Licensing Order
18 June – Battle of Chalgrove Field — John Hampden, hero of resistance to Ship Money, mortally wounded during the battle and dies on Saturday evening of 24 June 1643
30 June – Battle of Adwalton Moor
1 July – first meeting of the Westminster Assembly
4 July – Battle of Burton Bridge
5 July – Battle of Lansdowne (or Lansdown) fought near Bath
13 July – Battle of Roundway Down fought near Devizes
20 July – Battle of Gainsborough
26 July – Storming of Bristol
17 August – the Church of Scotland ratifies the Solemn League and Covenant
2 September – Beginning of Siege of Hull (1643)
18 September – Battle of Aldbourne Chase
20 September – First Battle of Newbury
25 September – the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly ratify the Solemn League and Covenant. Under the terms of the deal with Scotland, the Committee of Safety is superseded by the Committee of Both Kingdoms
11 October – Battle of Winceby
1644
26 January – Battle of Nantwich
3 February – Siege of Newcastle, formal request to surrender to the Scots
29 March – Battle of Cheriton
28 May – Storming of Bolton and the Bolton Massacre
29 June – Battle of Cropredy Bridge
2 July – Battle of Marston Moor
13 September – Second Battle of Aberdeen
19 October – Siege of Newcastle ends with the storming of the city by Scottish soldiers
24 October – the Long Parliament passes the Ordinance of no quarter to the Irish
27 October – Second Battle of Newbury
23 November – first publication of Areopagitica by John Milton
4 November – the Long Parliament sends the Propositions of Uxbridge to the king at Oxford
1645
6 January – the Committee of Both Kingdoms orders the creation of the New Model Army
28 January – the Long Parliament appoints commissioners to meet with the king’s commissioners at Uxbridge
22 February – negotiations over the Treaty of Uxbridge end unsuccessfully
23 April – the Long Parliament passes the Self-denying Ordinance
9 May – Battle of Auldearn
30 May – Siege & sacking of Leicester
14 June – Battle of Naseby
2 July – Battle of Alford
10 July – Battle of Langport
15 August – Battle of Kilsyth
13 September – Battle of Philiphaugh
24 September – Battle of Rowton Heath
October – fear of Royalist attack in south Lincolnshire
Charles goes to Welbeck, Nottinghamshire
17 December – siege of Hereford ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison
1646
18 January – Siege of Dartmouth ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison
3 February – Siege of Chester ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison after 136 days
16 February – Battle of Torrington victory for the New Model Army
10 March – Ralph Hopton surrenders the Royalist army at Tresillian bridge in Cornwall
21 March – Battle of Stow-on-the-Wold the last pitched battle of the First Civil War is a victory for the New Model Army
13 April – Siege of Exeter ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison
5 May – Charles surrenders to a Scottish army at Southwell, Nottinghamshire
6 May, Newark falls to the Parliamentarians
24 June – Siege of Oxford ended with the surrender of Royalist garrison
22 July – Siege of Worcester ended with the surrender of Royalist garrison
27 July – after a 65-day siege, Wallingford Castle, the last English royalist stronghold, surrenders to Sir Thomas Fairfax
19 August – Royalist garrison of Raglan Castle surrendered (Wales)
9 October – the Long Parliament passes the Ordinance for the abolishing of Archbishops and Bishops in England and Wales and for settling their lands and possessions upon Trustees for the use of the Commonwealth
1647
13 March – Harlech Castle the last Royalist stronghold in Wales surrenders to the Parliamentary forces
29 May – General Council of the Army drew-up the Solemn Engagement
3 June – Cornet George Joyce (a junior officer in Fairfax’s horse) with a troop of New Model Army cavalry seizes the King from his Parliamentary guards at Holdenby House and place him in protective custody of the New Model Army
4–5 June – at a rendezvous on Kentford Heath near Newmarket the officers and men of the New Model Army give their assent to the Solemn Engagement
8 June – General Fairfax sends the Solemn Engagement to Parliament along with a letter explaining that the King was now in the custody of the Army negotiations would be conducted through New Model Army representatives
1 August – General Council of the Army offers the Heads of Proposals
31 August – Montrose escapes from the Highlands
October – An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right presented to the Army Council
28 October – Beginning of the Putney Debates which end on 11 November
26 December – a faction of Scottish Covenanters sign The Engagement with Charles I
The Second English Civil War, 1648
8 May – Battle of St. Fagans
16 May(?) – 11 July Siege of Pembroke
1 June – Battle of Maidstone
13 June–28 August – Siege of Colchester
17 August–19 August – Battle of Preston
19 August – Battle of Winwick Pass
28 August – On the evening of the surrender of Colchester, Royalists Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle are shot
15 September – Treaty of Newport
November – leaders in the army draft the Remonstrance of the Army
6 December – Pride’s Purge, when troops under Colonel Thomas Pride remove opponents of Oliver Cromwell from Parliament by force of arms resulting in the so-called ‘Rump Parliament’
1649
15 January – An Agreement of the People of England, and the places therewith incorporated, for a secure and present peace, upon grounds of common right, freedom and safety presented to the Rump Parliament Parliament
20 January – the trial of Charles I of England by the High Court of Justice begins
27 January – the death warrant of Charles I of England is signed
30 January – Charles I of England executed by beheading – the Rump Parliament passes an Act prohibiting the proclaiming any person to be King of England or Ireland, or the Dominions thereof
5 February – The eldest son of Charles I, Charles, Prince of Wales, proclaimed ‘king of Great Britain, France and Ireland’ by the Scottish Parliament at the Mercat Cross, Edinburgh
7 February – The Rump Parliament votes to abolish the English monarchy
9 February – publication of Eikon Basilike, allegedly by Charles himself
14 February – the Rump Parliament creates the English Council of State
February – Charles II proclaimed king of Great Britain, France and Ireland by Hugh, Viscount Montgomery and other Irish Royalists at Newtownards in Ulster
9 March – Engager Duke of Hamilton, Royalist Earl of Holland, and Royalist Lord Capel beheaded at Westminster
17 March – an Act abolishing the kingship is formally passed by the Rump Parliament
24 March – The capitulation of Pontefract Castle which, even after the death of Charles I, remained loyal to Charles II
1 May – AN AGREEMENT OF THE Free People of England. Tendered as a Peace-Offering to this distressed Nation, an extended version from the Leveller leaders, being ‘Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburne, Master William Walwyn, Master Thomas Prince (Leveller), and Master Richard Overton, Prisoners in the Tower of London, May the 1. 1649.’
October – first publication of Eikonoklastes by John Milton, a rebuttal of the pro-Charles Eikon Basilike
Third English Civil War, 1650
1 May – Treaty of Breda signed between Charles II and the Scottish Covenanters
23 June – Charles II signs the Solemn League and Covenant
3 September – Battle of Dunbar, Scotland
1 December – Battle of Hieton, Scotland (skirmish)
1651
1 January – Charles II crowned King of Scots at Scone, prepares an army to invade England
20 July – Battle of Inverkeithing
25 August – Battle of Wigan Lane (skirmish)
28 August – Battle of Upton (the start of the western encirclement of Worcester)
3 September – Battle of Worcester: complete defeat of Charles II’s Scottish army
3 September – start of the escape of Charles II
6 September – Charles II spends the day hiding in the Royal Oak in the woodlands surrounding Boscobel House
16 October – Charles II lands in Normandy, France, after successfully fleeing England
END OF THE CIVIL WARS IN ENGLAND
Causes of the British Civil Wars
Along with the causes of the First World War, the causes of the English Civil War or the Wars of Three Kingdoms are one of the most over-determined and over-explained events in British history.
In a previous blog post I’ve outlined the multiple economic, financial, legal and religious issues facing King Charles when he came to the throne in 1625 and which grew steadily worse through the late 1620s and 1630s.
Exponents of the Whig theory of history say that the war was inevitable because Charles’s medieval Divine Right theory of kingship had to be cleared out of the way to allow more modern liberal freedoms to develop, a historically inevitable process. On this view, this inevitable march of progress suffered a further temporary setback under the brief reign of the Catholic King James II, before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 forced him into exile, installed the solidly Protestant King William III in his place and ushered in a new era of characteristically English liberties and freedom, i.e. the two revolutions led to England having the most democratic and liberal political system in Europe.
Marxist historians (such as Christopher Hill) offer a similarly teleological interpretation i.e. the sense that the civil wars were inevitable, but from a Marxist point of view. For them, the civil war was caused by the historically inevitable rise of the bourgeoisie, that’s to say the backers of new companies and ventures, especially in Britain’s new colonies, the City merchants who backed the East India Company and the new commercial ventures in America and Africa. These were the most economically and socially dynamic parts of British society and so had to overthrow the shackles of the king’s medieval view of economics and finance (i.e. the king’s total control of monopolies and trade) in order to create a more modern legal and economic model framework for business and trade.
I read and was impressed by the inevitabilist model in my 20s and 30s, but since then I have come to side with the ‘revisionist’ accounts I read in the 1990s, the more modern view that the civil wars were a gigantic accident. That there was nothing inevitable about them. Our nearest European neighbours didn’t experience rebellions in the name of either constitutional freedom or of bourgeois businessmen struggling to make the world safe for capitalism.
In this view, Charles definitely faced huge problems in trying to manage highly polarised factions in three different kingdoms – but it could have been done. Look at some of Charles’s contemporaries:
The kings of Spain not only managed their own fractious nations but territories as remote as the Netherlands, parts of Italy and, of course, an entire empire in the New World.
The Holy Roman Emperor managed a complex array of kingdoms, including Austria, Bohemia and Hungary.
Although these rulers encountered severe problems during this exact period – Spain was eventually forced to concede the Netherlands their independence – in both of them the monarch not only triumphed but emerged stronger from civil conflicts.
Similarly, France experienced a civil war which is known as the Fronde between 1648 and 1653 and which was also sparked by the king raising deeply unpopular new taxes. And yet Louis XIV not only triumphed over his enemies, but led France to become the strongest power on continental Europe.
In other words, the mid-17th century was certainly a deeply turbulent era of history, and any ruler of the three British kingdoms certainly faced extremely difficult problems – but a better ruler than Charles might have been able to manage it. He would not have provoked the Scottish Presbyterians as he did and, once provoked, he would have managed a Scottish solution. Instead Charles refused to make any compromise and so turned disaffection into open, armed rebellion. A more able ruler would have managed his relationship with Parliament better so that when the Irish Rebellion broke out in 1641, he could have worked with Parliament to solve it (i.e. put it down by military force). Instead, Charles had created a great coalition of enemies in Parliament, across the country, and then in Scotland so that when the external crisis of the Irish rebellion his the political system, instead of uniting the English, it turned into the lever that broke them apart.
In the same way, after reading so many hundreds of accounts of it, I take the outbreak of the First World War not to have been at all inevitable. There were lots of forces tending towards it, but previous flare-ups between the European powers had been successfully de-escalated at specially convened peace conferences, and there was no intrinsic reason why the little local crisis caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand couldn’t have been managed the same way, too.
It was a particular sequence of individual miscalculations and mistakes – the Austrians taking so long to present their ultimatum to Serbia and then Germany giving Austria blank check support – which triggered the war, and these could have been avoided.
I think there is a good case for arguing that there is a sort of technological inevitability to history – that certain inventions follow logically from each other and that these change the economic basis of society and social arrangements. Some countries are self-evidently more technologically advanced than others, and the nature of these technological developments follows a certain logic. Possibly there is a certain ‘path’ which nations follow in the name of ‘development’.
But I don’t think this translates into political inevitability. These technological developments can happen under capitalist or communist, democratic or authoritarian regimes. And nations with very advanced cultures e.g. China or India, never made the technological breakthroughs which happened in the West.
So I think political changes certainly reflect broad social and economic changes, but the way they are shaped and, quite often, the specific trigger points which really decide things one way or the other, are highly contingent on key individuals. The German High Command, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mao – these individuals had enormous, seismic impacts on the flow of events and the world we live in today.
In my own time, the long-term decline of heavy industries in Britain and their offshoring to India and China and other developing countries might have been ‘inevitable’ following the logic of technological development which I’ve suggested. But wasn’t at all inevitable that this process would be managed by the hatchet-faced government of Margaret Thatcher – and her personality and her personal beliefs made all the difference. Compare and contrast the way the same kind of de-industrialisation was managed in Germany or France.
Back to the 17th century, there were certainly long-term economic, social, political and religious issues which faced any ruler of Britain. But Charles I, John Pym and Oliver Cromwell played decisive roles in the outbreak and development of the wars of three kingdoms which were shaped by their characters, abilities and decisions.
For example, there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about the way a small-time East Anglian squire named Oliver Cromwell would turn out to be a military strategist and a political operator of genius, and so be able to not only manage the complex religious, political and military forces unleashed by over ten years of war, but then to go on and maintain England as a republic for ten further long years.
But above all, we’d never even have heard of Cromwell if Charles, at a number of key moments, had been prepared to make concessions – he might have averted war, or shortened the war, or ended it before he drove his opponents into the corner of having to execute him. Imagine what would have happened if he and Archbishop Laud never made their ill-fated journey back to Scotland, been appalled at the ragged state of the Scots Kirk and hadn’t decided to impose ‘unity’ i.e. an English prayer book, on the Scots. Or if he’d had the sense to simply consult the Scottish Parliament and Assembly of the Kirk during its drafting. Or had simply been prepared to make concessions when riots broke out at its first use in Scottish churches. None of those events were fore-ordained, they stem from the decisions of one person.
But instead of this sensible, collegiate approach, Charles’s narrow-minded inflexibility meant he literally couldn’t conceive of consulting anyone else about his decisions, nor of making any kind of compromise when he was opposed. These very specific aspects of Charles’s character were in now way ‘inevitable’ but were entirely contingent.
So, in my opinion, above everything else, the wars of three kingdoms were the direct, personal fault of the arrogant, uncompromising but weak King Charles I.
For the past year or so, Imperial War Museum London has given over its third floor to four related but very different exhibitions marking the end of the First World War a hundred years ago.
They come under the overarching title of Making A New World, and have been accompanied by a programme of live music, performance and public debates, all addressing aspects of the aftermath of the conflict. Here’s the promotional video.
Across the corridor from these two spaces is a door opening onto a darkened corridor leading to a blacked-out screening room in which is being shown a new art film by John Akomfrah, titled Mimesis: African Soldier.
John Akomfrah
Akomfrah was born in Accra, Ghana in 1957. His mother and father were both anti-colonialist activists. His father served in the cabinet of Ghana’s first post-independence Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah. When the latter was overthrown in a coup in 1966, his mother fled the country with young John. Surprisingly, maybe, they fled to the epicentre of the colonial oppressor, to the home of racism and imperialism, to Britain, where John became a British citizen, trained as an artist and went on to become a famous and award-winning maker of art films.
So prestigious has Akomfrah’s career been that in 2008 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and in 2017 appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Also in 2017, Akomfrah won the biennial Artes Mundi prize, the UK’s biggest award for international art, having been chosen for the award for his ‘substantial body of outstanding work dealing with issues of migration, racism and religious persecution.’
It is a story in itself, and one not without irony – how the son of vehemently anti-British anti-colonial activists went on to become a lion of the British art establishment.
Purple
I first heard Akomfrah’s name when I came across the massive multi-screen installation of his film Purple at the Barbican a few years ago.
In the long darkened space of the Barbican’s Curve gallery, Purple projected onto a series of massive screens a combination of historic archive footage of industrial life in the West – coal mines, car factories, shopping centres and street scenes from the 1940s, 50s and 60s – and stunningly beautiful modern footage shot at remote and picturesque locations around the planet with pin-prick digital clarity.
The purpose of Purple was to inform its viewers that humanity’s industrial activity is polluting the planet.
As a theme I thought this was so bleeding obvious that it made no impact on my thinking one way or the other: I just sat entranced by the old footage, which had its own historic interest, the 1960s footage in particular, tuggingly evocative of my own distant childhood – and enjoying the aesthetic contrast between the historic footage and the stunning landscapes of, for example, Iceland – which made me desperately jealous of the lucky researchers, camera crews and prize-winning directors who get to fly to such breath-taking destinations.
Mimesis: African Soldier
Visually, Mimesis: African Soldier does something very similar.
There are three big screens instead of the six used by Purple (the screening room at the IWM is a lot smaller than the long sweeping Curve space at the Barbican where Purple was screened).
Once again the screens intercut creaky old archive footage with slow-moving, almost static ‘modern’ sequences shot in super-bright digital clarity at a number of remote locations – both of which are fascinating and/or entrancing in their different ways.
The vintage black-and-white footage shows black African and Indian soldiers, labourers and carriers at work during the First World War. There’s a lot of footage at docks where all manner of goods are being unloaded by black labourers and heaped up into enormous piles of munitions and rations. Other footage shows Indian troops on parade, marching – and then footage of what appear to be black soldiers going into battle.
Installation view of an ‘archive’ segment of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London
The modern sequences are completely different in every way. For a start they are in colour. They are shot with stunning digital clarity. But most of all they are very, very slow.
For, as with Purple, the visual contrast is not just between the black and white and modern colour footage – there’s a rhythm thing going on, too, in that the old footage has that speeded-up, frenetic quality (due to the discrepancy between the speed of the cameras it was shot on and the different speed of the projectors we now play it on) which brings out even more the hauntingly slow, almost static nature of the modern sequences.
In the colour sequences which I saw, a black soldier is walking through a jungle, very, very, very slowly, until he comes upon a skeleton hanging from a tree, and stops dead. Different screens show the static scene from different angles. Pregnant with ominousness and meaning.
Installation view of a ‘modern’ segment of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London
In another ‘modern’ sequence a handful of black men in uniform are on a wet muddy beach. The beach is dotted with flags of many nations, and also random crates. The men stare out at sea. They turn. One picks up a crate. Another takes off his helmet and wipes his forehead. All very slow.
In another sequence an Asian man in army uniform and wearing a turban is standing in a landscape of dead and fallen trees, and slowly chopping a piece of wood with an axe. Very slowly. The ‘bock’ sound of each blow of the axe is amplified on the soundtrack which, from amid a collage of sounds, sounds of docks, works, men, soldiers, guns going off.
By and large the loudness and business of the audio track contrasts eerily with the Zen slow motion movements of the black and Asian actors.
Installation view of a ‘modern’ segment of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London
Mimesis: African Soldier is 75 minutes long – long enough to really sink back and become absorbed and entranced by this audio-visual experience.
The message
So much so that it’s easy to forget Akomfrah’s message. This is that some three million African and Asian men served on the Allied side during the Great War, as labourers, carriers and soldiers, and their story – indeed their existence – is rarely if ever acknowledged.
This is spelled out in the wall label outside the gallery, in the wall label in the corridor leading to the screening room, in the ten-page handout to the exhibition, and in the extended prose descriptions about the film on the museum’s website:
But having read all these sources and listened to all the interviews, none of them get me much further than the basic idea. All these texts just repackage the same basic fact:
Between 1914 and 1918, millions of African and colonial soldiers served in long campaigns that spanned the whole of the African and European continents, contributing to victories throughout the First World War. These soldiers from British and French African territories were brought to Europe’s western front, where hundreds and thousands lost their lives alongside unknown, unheralded and undocumented African labourers and carriers. Mimesis: African Soldier seeks to commemorate these Africans and colonial soldiers who fought, served and died during the First World War.
This information takes less than a minute to process and understand – in much the same way as I have in the past processed all manner of obscure or (to me) unknown aspects of this war, of the other world war, and of countless other historical episodes.
It was, after all, a world war. It had a global reach and consequences which are almost impossible for one person to grasp. A few months ago I was reading about the Mexican Revolution and the role played in it by the notorious Zimmerman Telegram in which the Germans promised to give Mexico back large chunks of Texas and other neighbouring states, if only Mexico would come in on the side of the Allies.
You could argue that Mexico thus played a key role in the First World War. Who knew?
To take another example, not so long ago I made a conscious effort to break out of the straitjacket of always viewing the war through the experiences of the British on the Western Front, and read two books to try and understand more about the war in the East.
Who in this country knows anything about the course of the First World War in Galicia or Bulgaria or Romania, let alone the vast battles which took place on the huge eastern Front? Who is familiar with the ebb and flow of fighting in little Serbia, which caused the whole damn thing in the first place?
Or take the example of another First World War-related exhibition I visited recently: I knew nothing about the role played by the Canadian army, which not only supplied cavalry on the Western Front, but also proved invaluable in setting up lumber mills behind the Front which supplied the millions of yards of planking from which the trenches and all the Allied defences were built. I had never heard about this until I went to the Army Museum’s exhibition about the painter Alfred Munnings who documented their contribution.
For me, then, the message that some three million Asians and Africans fought and supplied invaluable manual labour to the Allied side is just one more among a kaleidoscope of aspects of the war about which I freely admit to being shamefully ignorant.
Not being black, and not coming from one of the colonies in question, it doesn’t have a salience or importance greater than all these other areas of which I know I am so ignorant. Why should the black dockers have more importance than the Canadian lumberjacks? And why do their stories have any more importance or relevance than the millions of Russians, and Poles, and Romanians and Hungarians and Ukrainians and Jews who died in fighting or were massacred in the ugly pogroms and racial violence which characterised the war in the East?
Surely all human lives are of equal value, in which case all deaths in massacre and conflict are equally to be lamented and commemorated.
Art film as a medium for education
As it stands, the mere presence of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum as part of this year-long commemoration means that all visitors to this part of the building will read the wall labels explaining the importance of the millions of Africans and Asians who aided the Allied war effort.
And since the IWM gets around two and a half million visitors, that’s potentially a lot of people who might have their minds opened to this overlooked aspect of the war.
But I’m not sure the film itself does very much to educate and inform. It’s an art film. It moves very, very slowly. The soundtrack is a disorientating mash-up of what is presumably the sounds of ships and docks and workmen with what seem to be African tribal music, chanting and so on. I get that this is the aural equivalent of the mash-up we’re seeing on-screen, but I’m not sure it really adds anything to anyone’s understanding.
In a nutshell, I’m not sure art films are an effective way to convey information about anything, apart from the film-maker’s own aesthetic decisions.
Comparison with Bridgit 2016
I had much the same response to Charlotte Prodger’s film, Bridgit 2016 which won the 2018 Turner Prize. It was intended to be a lecture about LBGTQ+ rights and gender and identity, but I found all the information-giving parts of it boring and sanctimonious (where they weren’t factually incorrect).
Instead, what I responded to in Bridgit 2016 was not the right-on, politically correct sentiments but the haunting nature of some of the shots, especially the sequence I saw (like every other visitor, I didn’t stay to watch the whole thing) where the camera was pointed at the wake being made in the grey sea by a large ferry, presumably off the Scottish coast somewhere.
The way the camera didn’t make any kind of point, and the way that, for at least this part of the film, Prodger wasn’t lecturing me about LGBTQ+ rights, meant that, for that sequence at least, the film did what art films can sometimes do – which is make you see in a new way, make you realise the world can be seen in other ways, make you pay attention enough to something humdrum in order to let the imagination transform it.
Which has a liberating effect, far far from all political ideologies, whether conservative or socialist or politically correct or politically repressive. Just that long shot of the churning foaming wake created by a big ship ploughing through a cold northern sea spoke to me, at some level I can’t define.
Which is better at conveying information – art film or conventional display?
Similarly, like Bridgit 2016, Mimesis: African Soldier comes heavily freighted with the moral earnestness of a Victorian sermon (and it’s as long as a Victorian sermon, too, at a hefty 75 minutes).
Akomfrah wants ‘Britain’ to ‘acknowledge’ the contribution of these millions of colonial subjects who fought and died for their imperial masters.
OK. I accept it immediately without a quibble and I can’t imagine anyone anywhere would disagree. Isn’t this precisely what visiting museums is all about? That visitors are bombarded with all kinds of information and facts about the subjects of exhibitions they have chosen to visit? That people visit museums to learn.
And if the aim of the film is to educate, you can’t help wondering whether the point wouldn’t have been better made, more impactful, if it had been replaced – or maybe accompanied – by a more traditional display of hundreds of photos of the time accompanied by wall labels giving us facts and figures and, maybe, the stories and experiences of half a dozen African and Asian soldiers.
The rise and rise of the ‘forgotten voices’ trope
But as I reread the text around the film asserting that its aim was to restore an overlooked aspect of the history of the war, to rediscover ‘lost voices’, and restore people to their rightful place in history, I found myself more intrigued by this aspect of the display – the claim to be rediscovering, reclaiming and restoring – rather than its actual content.
Each era gets the history it requires
History is written for its times, responding to the cultural and economic needs of its day.
Machiavelli wrote his histories of Rome as warnings to Renaissance princes. Carlyle wrote a history of the French Revolution to thrill Victorian society with a vision of how Great Men direct the course of events.
The often-ridiculed ‘Whig’ historians reassured their liberal-minded readers by writing British history as if the whole thing, from Magna Carta to the reform acts of the 1800s, demonstrated the inevitable rise of the best and fairest possible liberal democracy.
Tougher minded Edwardian historians set out to show their readers that the British Empire was a force for peace and the enlightened development of the colonies.
The historians I read as a student (Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill) were Marxists who showed in their particular areas (the long nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution, the British Civil War, respectively) that history consisted of class struggles which confirmed Marx’s underlying theory of a dynamic and the forward march of history which would inevitably lead to a proletarian revolution.
And so they were very popular among students as the Cold War 1950s turned into the heady student revolutions of the 1960s and on into the strike- and violence-soaked 1970s and 1980s.
But, as I understand it, during the 1970s and 80s there was also a reaction against these grand, high-level (and very left-wing) narratives among a younger generation of historians who decided instead to specialise in provincial studies of particular localities (I’m thinking of John Morrill’s studies of Chester or David Underdown’s studies of the West Country during the Civil War). These tended to show that events at a local level were much more complicated than the lofty, and dogmatic, Christopher Hill-type versions suggested.
And it’s possible to see these reactions against the Marxist historians as a symptom of the way that, throughout society, the old communist/socialist narratives came to be seen as tired and old fashioned, as Mrs Thatcher’s social revolution changed British society and attitudes in the 1980s.
But another trend, when I was a student in the 1980s, was a growing move towards apolitical oral history, with a rash of books telling the ‘untold stories’ of this, that or the other constituency – generally the working classes, the class that didn’t make policies and diplomacy and big speeches in the House of Commons, the ordinary man or woman throughout history.
I’m thinking of Lyn MacDonald’s accounts of the key battles of the First World War in which she relied heavily on letters and diaries with the result that her books were marketed as telling ‘the untold stories of…’, ‘giving a voice to…’ the previously ignored common squaddie.
This ‘popular’ approach prompts pity and sympathy for ‘ordinary people’ of the past without being overtly left or right-wing, and it is an approach which hasn’t gone away, as these recent book titles indicate:
‘Forgotten Voices of the Somme’ by Joshua Levine
‘Forgotten Voices of D-Day’ by Roderick Bailey
‘Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust’ by Lyn Smith
‘Forgotten Voices of the Second World War’ by Max Arthur
‘Forgotten Voices of Burma’ by Julian Thompson
‘Forgotten Voices of the Falklands’ by Hugh McManners
‘Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine’ by Xun Zhou
To bring us up to date, the end of the Thatcher era coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism as a viable political theory. I’ve watched as over this period, the past 30 years, increasing numbers of progressive thinkers, writers, historians, artists and so on have become steadily more in thrall to questions of identity – especially the twin issues of race and gender – which have spread out from academia to become two of the broader, defining issues of our time.
And watched as a new generation of historians, including many women and black and Asian historians, has arisen which has packed bookshelves, magazines, radio and TV programmes with new interpretations of history which ‘restore’ the place of women and non-white figures in British and world history.
Combining all this, we arrive at the present moment, 2019, where there is:
more cultural production than ever before in human history, with an unprecedented number of poems, plays, radio programmes, TV documentaries, films and art works ranging over all of recorded history in search of subjects and people from the past to restore, revive and reclaim
and this unprecedented output is taking place in an age obsessed by identity politics, and so is ever-more relentlessly conceived, produced and delivered in terms of identity, specifically the two great pillars of modern progressive ideology, race and gender
Adding the ‘forgotten stories’ trope to the inexorable rise of identity politics helps to explain the explosive proliferation of books, plays, movies, documentaries and radio programmes which use the same rhetorical device of reclaiming the stories of unjustly forgotten women and unjustly forgotten people of colour from pretty much any period of the last 3,000 years. Thus, to give just a few examples of each:
Forgotten Women
52 Forgotten Women Who Changed the World
The Forgotten Tudor Women: Anne Seymour, Jane Dudley & Elisabeth Parr
Ladies of Lascaris: Christina Ratcliffe and The Forgotten Heroes of Malta’s War
Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music
The Forgotten Tudor Women: Margaret Douglas, Mary Howard & Mary Shelton
Daughters of Chivalry: The Forgotten Children of Edward I
Roaring Girls: The forgotten feminists of British history
Charlie Company’s Journey Home: The Forgotten Impact on the Wives of Vietnam Veterans
Invisible Women. Forgotten Artists of Florence
War’s Forgotten Women
Forgotten Desert Mothers, The: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women
When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt
Forgotten people of colour
Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes
Black and British: A Forgotten History
The Forgotten Black Cowboys
Forgotten black TV and film history
5 Forgotten Black and Asian Figures Who Made British History
Black on the battlefield: Canada’s forgotten First World War battalion
The Forgotten Black Heroes of Empire
Black servicemen: Unsung heroes of the First World War
Forgotten? : Black Soldiers in the Battle of Waterloo
The Forgotten Black Soldiers in White Regiments During the Civil War
Black Athena: The Afro-asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization
My point is that the whole notion of listening to ‘forgotten voices’ and restoring ‘forgotten histories’ has become a central trope of our times, and moreover it is, a moment’s thought suggests, a potentially bottomless well of material.
Once you have accepted the premise that we need to hear the voices of everyone who has ever lived, then there is potentially no end to the number of forgotten women whose voices we need to hear and whose stories we need to be told, just as there is no end to the number of forgotten black slaves, entrepreneurs, soldiers, heroes, scientists, writers, pioneers, cowboys, immigrants, poets and artists whose voices need to be heard and whose stories need to be told.
A flood of forgotten voices
To return to Akomfrah’s film, what I’m trying to do is understand the times I live in, and understand how a politically-committed work of art like Mimesis: African Soldier fits into it. My view is that the Imperial War Museum commissioning this piece, and John Akomfrah making it, are very much not ground-breaking or innovative.
The opposite. Mimesis: African Soldier is smack bang in the centre of the cultural mood of our times. We are in the middle of an absolute flood of such productions:
I’m not saying any of this ‘forgotten history’ is untrue or unworthy. I’m just pointing out that each era gets the ‘history’ it asks for and, on some level, needs. That societies write history not to reveal any ‘truth’ (there is no fixed historical ‘truth’) but to manufacture the stories they need to sustain their current social and cultural concerns.
For reasons which are a little too deep to be tackled in this blog post, our culture at the moment is undergoing an obsessive interest in identity politics, focusing in particular on the twin issues of race and gender. ‘Diversity’, already a major concern and ubiquitous buzzword, will only become more and more dominating for the foreseeable future.
And so history retold from the perspectives of race and gender, history which perfectly reflects the concerns of our day and age – is what we’re getting.
And, of course, it’s popular and fashionable. And lucrative.
History retold from the perspectives of race and gender is the kind of history which historians know will get them academic posts and high student approval marks from their evermore ‘woke’ pupils, the kind of history TV companies know will get them viewers, which publishers know will get them readers, and which artists know will get them museum commissions and gallery exhibitions.
Summary of the argument
All of this is intended to show that, if I have a relaxed approach to the political content of Akomfrah’s film, if I read that millions of Blacks and Asians laboured and fought for the European empires and accept it without hesitation, filing it next to what I’ve also recently learned about Canadian lumberjacks, or about the troops who fought and died in Palestine or East Africa – it is not out of indifference to the ‘issue’. It is:
1. Because, on a personal level, there are hundreds of aspects of the First World War which I don’t fully understand or comprehend, and all kinds of fronts and campaigns which I am pitifully ignorant of – and I am pretty relaxed about living with that ignorance because life is short and I have umpteen other calls on my time.
2. Because, on a cultural level, Mimesis: African Soldier can be seen as just one more artifact in the tsunami of cultural products in our time which all claim to be unearthing ‘the untold story’ and restoring ‘the forgotten voices’ and putting the record straight on behalf of neglected women, ignored people of colour and any number of other overlooked and oppressed minorities.
I am trying to understand my complete lack of surprise at finding the film on show here, or at its subject matter, and the complete lack of factual or historical illumination I felt when watching it.
Summary on the film
The political motivation behind Akomfrah’s piece is worthy, if entirely uncontroversial.
And because it has no voiceover or captions and because it relies for understanding and meaning on the introductory wall labels, the film is not that effective as purely factual information. A conventional display would have been infinitely more informative. In fact, in his interviews, Akomfrah emphasises the enormous amount of research which went into the making of the film. Well, following that line of thought, I couldn’t help thinking the whole project would make significantly more impact if it was accompanied by a book which dug really deeply into the subject, with maps and figures and deeper explanations, explaining just how many people came from each colony, willingly or unwillingly, how they were deployed, the special conditions they worked under, and so on, all liberally illustrated with – that favourite trope of our times – the actual stories of African and Indian soldiers in their own words. Ironically, there are no voices in the film: just silent and slow moving actors.
But quibbles about its meaning and purpose and its place in broader cultural movements aside, there is no denying that, as a spectacle, Mimesis: African Soldier is wonderfully hypnotic and tranquilising. The archive footage is artfully selected, the contemporary sequences are shot in stunning digital clarity, the two are edited together to make entrancing viewing.
And, just as with Purple, Mimesis allows the viewer’s mind to take the archive footage and modern scenery (its foggy jungles and muddy beaches and lonely Asian chopping wood) as starting points from which to drift off into reveries of our own devising, making our own connections and finding our own meanings.
Installation view of the ‘beach’ sequence of Mimesis: African Soldier at the Imperial War Museum, London
Opening the Box is the first book in volume three of David Kynaston’s epic social history of post-war Britain.
It opens on 10 January 1957 as Harold Macmillan drops by Buckingham Palace to be made Prime Minister, and ends on Friday 9 October 1959 as the final results show that the Conservatives have won a staggering majority of 100 in the General Election: so the book covers about two years and nine months of British domestic history.
I say ‘domestic’ because there is no, absolutely no, mention of the British Empire, the independence struggles / small wars the British Army was fighting, or the impact of foreign affairs on Britain. The Suez Crisis was dealt with briskly and briefly at the very end of the previous volume: this book is utterly focused on the domestic scene.
In its end points Kynaston provides the usual bombardment of quotations from hundreds of diverse sources, from housewives and soldiers, social planners and architects, young and thrusting writers and crusty old critics, politicians idealistic and cynical, commentators on rugby, cricket, soccer and horse-racing – alongside summaries of scores of numerous sociological reports and surveys carried out during these years into all aspects of social life, and social policy – on housing and new towns and flats, consumer behaviour, ideas of class, the family, and so on.
Unlike a traditional historian Kynaston skips quickly past even quite major political events from the period (and even these tend to be viewed through the prism of his diarists and journal keepers) in order to measure their impact on the ordinary men and women caught up in them.
This is his strength, his forte, the inclusion of so many contemporary voices – experts and ordinary, powerful and powerless – that immersing yourself in the vast tissue of quotes and voices, speeches and reports, diaries and newspaper articles, builds up a cumulative effect of making you feel you really know this period and have lived through these events. It is a powerful ‘immersive’ experience.
But in this, the fifth book in the series, I became increasingly conscious of a pronounced downside to this approach – which is that it lacks really deep analysis.
The experience of reading the book is to be continually skipping on from the FA Cup Final to the Epsom Derby to the domestic worries of Nella Last or Madge Martin to a snide note on the latest political developments by a well-placed observer like Anthony Crossland or Chips Channon, to a report by the town planners of Coventry or Plymouth alongside letters to the local press, to the notes of Anthony Heap, an inveterate attender of West End first nights, or the thoughts about the new consumer society of Michael Young, to the constant refrain of excerpts from the diaries of Kenneth Williams, Philip Larkin and even Macmillan himself.
This all undeniably gives you a panoramic overview of what was happening and, like the reader of any modern newspaper or consumer of a news feed, to some extent it’s up to you, the reader, to sift through the blizzard of voices and information and opinions and decide what is interesting or important to you.
The downside is that you never feel you’ve really got to the bottom of any of the issues. Even the big issues, the ones Kynaston treats at some length (20, 30, 40 pages) never really arrive at a conclusion.
The housing crisis
The housing crisis existed before the war, as social reformers became increasingly aware of just how many millions of British citizens were living in squalid, damp, unlit, unventilated Victorian slums with no running water, baths and only outside toilets – the kind of conditions reported on by George Orwell among others. But the situation was, of course, greatly exacerbated by the German blitz on most of Britain’s major cities, from Plymouth to Glasgow. By 1957 it was estimated there were some 850,000 dwellings unfit for human habitation in the UK.
The result was city councils who were well aware of the need to modernise their cities, to get rid of the old slums and rebuild not only houses but, potentially, the entire layout of the cities. Arguably this was the key issue for a generation after the war and Kynaston reverts to it repeatedly. He quotes town planners and architects as they engaged in fundamental debates about how to go about this task, the most obvious division being between ‘urbanists’, who thought working class communities should be rehoused within the city boundaries, if possible close to or on the same location as the existing slums, once they’d been demolished and new houses built – and ‘dispersionists’, who thought a large percentage of big city populations should be moved right out of the inner cities to a) brand new model estates built on the outskirts of the city, like Pollok outside Glasgow or b) to new towns, overspill towns built 20, 30 or 40 miles away, which could be planned and designed rationally from scratch (places like Stevenage or Harlow).
This debate overlapped with another binary set of alternatives: whether to re-accommodate people in houses or in blocks of flats, with barrages of argument on both sides.
Proponents of flats made the simple case that building vertically was the only way to accommodate such large populations a) quickly b) within the limited space within city borders. They were backed up by zealously modernist architects who had an ideological attachment to the teachings of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus and thought, at their most extreme, that the new designs for living would change human nature and bring about a new, more egalitarian society. So aesthetics and radical politics were poisonously intertwined in the strong push towards flats.
Ranged against them were a) the tenants, who didn’t want to move into flats, pointing out that flats:
are noisy and poorly sound-proofed
have no privacy
have no gardens
so that the kids have to be penned up inside them (‘awful places for families to live in’ – diarist Marian Raynham)
the rents are higher
And b) the more conservative or sensitive architects and planners who recognised the simple fact – which comes over in survey after survey after survey that Kynaston quotes – that people wanted a house of their own. Interestingly, this wish turns out to itself be based on an even simpler idea – that almost everyone interviewed in numerous surveys, by writers and newspaper journalists – wanted privacy.
‘I think that the natural way for people to live is in houses,’ Mrs E. Denington, vice-chair of the London County Council’s Housing Committee.
‘Houses are preferred because they are more suitable for family life,’ Hilary Clark, deputy housing manager Wolverhampton
Kynaston emphasises that the years covered in his book were the tipping point.
1958 was the year when modernism indisputably entered the mainstream. (p.129)
During 1958 it became almost a cliché that London’s skyline was changing dramatically. (p.132)
Through the four books so far, and in this one as well, Kynaston gives extensive quotes from slum-dwellers, flat occupiers, new home owners, planners, designers, architects and the sociologists who produced report after report trying to clarify what people wanted and so help shape decisions on the issue.
But – and here’s my point – we never really get to the bottom of the problem. Kynaston quotes extensively and then… moves on to talk about Tommy Steele or the new Carry On film. But I wanted answers. I wanted to hear his opinion. I wanted a systematic exposition of the issues, history and debate which would lead up to conclusions about how we now see it, looking back 65 years.
But there is nothing like that. Kynaston just describes the debate as it unfolded, through the words of reports and surveys and sociologists and architects. But his debate never reaches a conclusion. And after a while that gets a bit frustrating.
Industrial relations
The 1945 Labour government famously nationalised a range of major industries and then, just as famously, ran out of ideas and lost the snap 1951 election.
As the 1940s turned into the 1950s industrial relations remained poor, with Kynaston repeatedly mentioning outbreaks of strikes, sometimes on a big enough scale (like the London dockers strike of 1949) to affect food supplies and spark a range of outraged opinions in the housewife diarists who are among his core contributors.
As the 1950s progress we get snippets of middle class people taking student or holiday jobs down among the working classes and being shocked by the widespread slackness and the culture of skiving which they discover. To balance the picture out, he also gives us, from time to time, vivid portraits of some of the ‘captains of industry’, heads of large companies who turn out to be eccentrics or egomaniacs.
Altogether, as usual, the reader has a vivid sense of the feel of the times and the experiences of a wide range of people living through them. But there are no ideas about industrial policy, trade union legislation, its impact on industry, the economy and the Labour Party which was often seen as being in thrall to stroppy and irresponsibly organisations.
In fact I did glean one idea from reading well over 1,500 pages of Kynaston’s history: this is that around about 1950, the British government and British industry had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to seize the industrial and commercial advantage across a wide range of industrial and consumer goods. German and Japanese industry still lay prostrate after the war and the Americans were focusing on their home markets. If the right investment had been channelled by a capitalist-minded government into the right industries, and if Britain had adopted German-style industrial relations (e.g. having worker representatives on the boards of companies) to ensure unified focus on rebuilding, then Britain might have anticipated what became known as ‘the German economic miracle’.
But it didn’t. The trade unions preferred the freedom of collective bargaining (i.e. found it more convenient to be outside management structure so that they could blame the management for everything and go on strike whenever it suited them), the Labour government was more concerned about a Socialist-inspired programme of nationalising industries in the hope of creating ‘the New Jerusalem’, and many managements found selling the same old products to the captive markets of the Empire and Commonwealth far easier than trying to create new products to market in Europe or America.
At all levels there was a failure of nerve and imagination, which condemned Britain to decades of industrial decline.
The catch is: this isn’t Kynaston’s idea – he quotes it from Correlli Barnett’s searing history of post-war failure, The Audit of War. In a nutshell, Kyanston’s wonderful books present the reader with a Christmas pudding stuffed with a vast multitude of factoids and snippets and post-war trivia and gossip and impressions deriving from an incredibly wide array of eye witnesses. But it is precious thin on ideas and analysis, and at the end of the day, it’s the big idea, the thesis, the interpretation which we tend to remember from history books.
The consumer society
This volume definitely depicts the arrival and triumph of ‘the consumer society’. I had thought it was a later phenomenon, of the 1960s, but no. By 1957 56% of adults owned a TV set, 26% a washing machine, 21% a telephone, only 12% a dishwasher, and 24% of the population owned a car. Aggressive new advertising campaigns promoted Fry’s Turkish Delight, Ready Brek, Gibbs SR, Old Spice, the Hoovermatic twin tub, Camay soap and Blue Band margarine.
People faced with ever-widening products to choose from need advice: hence the Egon Ronay Guide to restaurants, launched in 1957, followed in October by Which? magazine.
Even Mass-Observation, which started with such socialist ambitions in 1937, and has provided Kynaston with such a wealth of sociological material for the previous four books, had, by now, become ‘an organisation devoted to market research rather than sociological enquiry.’
Topics
1957
January – Bolton Wanderers beat Leeds United 5-3, the third series of Dixon of Dock Green kicks off, the Cavern nightclub opens in Liverpool, Manchester United beat Bilbao 3-0 to go into the semi-finals of the European Cup, Lawrence Durrell publishes Justine, Flanders and Swann open a musical review at the Fortune theatre, strike at the Briggs motor plant, 20-year-old Tommy Steele continues to be a showbiz sensation, end of the Toddlers’ Truce the government-enforced ban on children’s TV programmes between 6 and 7pm,
February – launch of BBC’s weekday new programme Tonight, publication of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, publication of Family and Kinship in East London by Michael Young and Peter Willmott (‘urbanists’ arguing that extended kinship networks in Bethnal Green provide emotional and practical support which Bethnal Greenites who’d moved out to new estates in Debden missed),
March – the Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibition visited by the Queen and Prince Philip, a Gallup survey showed 48% wanted to emigrate, start of big shipbuilding and engineering union strikes,
April – opening night of John Osborne’s play The Entertainer
May – Manchester United lose the FA Cup Final 2-1 to Aston Villa, petrol comes off the ration after five months
June – British Medical Council report linking smoking to lung cancer (reinforcing Richard Doll’s groundbreaking 1950 report) the government refuses to intervene; ERNIE makes the first Premium Bonds random draw, brainchild of Harold Macmillan; end of the pioneering photojournalistic magazine Picture Post founded in 1938, whose star photographer was Bert Hardy;
20 July Prime Minister Harold Macmillan speaks at a Tory rally in Bedford to mark 25 years’ service by Mr Lennox-Boyd, the Colonial Secretary, as MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, and claims that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’; national busman’s strike; publication of Room at the Top by John Braine.
September – the Wolfenden Report recommends the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults in private; Ted Hughes’ first volume of poetry, The Hawk In The Rain, published; film version of Lucky Jim released, criticised for watering down the book’s realism
October – at Labour Party conference Nye Bevan comes out against nuclear disarmament, disillusioning his followers and creating a rift between the party and much of the left-leaning intelligentsia; 4 October Sputnik launched into orbit by the Russians; fire at the Windscale nuclear power plant; publication of Declaration, an anthology of essays by Angry Young Men (and one woman): Doris Lessing, Colin Wilson, John Osborne, John Wain, Kenneth Tynan, Bill Hopkins, Lindsay Anderson and Stuart Holroyd.
November – top of the charts is That’ll Be The Day by Buddy Holly and the Crickets; the Russians launch a second satellite, this one with a dog, Laika, aboard; the General Post Office introduces postal codes; Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament set up in response to Britain’s detonation of a H-bomb;
December – the Queen’s first Christmas broadcast, from Sandringham;
1958
resignation of the Chancellor Peter Thorneycroft after his insistence that government spending should be cut was rejected; launch if Bunty comic for girls
February – launch of Woman’s Realm magazine; 6 February the Munich Air Disaster in which a plane carrying the Manchester United football team, support staff and eight journalists crashed on take-off, killing 23;
March 1 BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop opens;
April – publication of Parkinson’s Law and Dr No; first CND march to Aldermaston; Balthazar, second volume in The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; Raymond’s Revuebar opens in Soho; London bus strike;
May first performance of The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter and A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney and Chicken Soup with Barley by Arnold Wesker;
July The Darling Buds of May by H.E. Bates; introduction of Green Shield Stamps; the first Little Chef; the Empire and Commonwealth Games held in Cardiff;
August – release of the first single by Cliff Richard; Kenton and Shula Archer born; the Empire theatre in Portsmouth closes down, replaced by a supermarket; Notting Hill Riots, the most serious public disorder of the decade, petrol bombs, knives, razors, huge mobs chanting ‘Kill the niggers’ – the race problem Winston Churchill had fretted about in 1951 had arrive with a vengeance with about 165,000 non-white immigrants living in the UK; coincidentally, the launch of The Black and White Minstrel Show; Christopher Mayhew presents a TV series titled Does Class Matter?
September – Carry On, Sergeant, first of the Carry On films, released; publication of Culture and Society by Raymond Williams, which more or less founded ‘cultural studies’;
October – first editions of Grandstand and Blue Peter;
November – publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young;
December 3 National Coal Board announces the closure of 36 coal mines, as a result of falling demand due to coal being ‘brutally undercut’ by oil (p.236); 5 December Macmillan opens the 8.5-mile-long Preston bypass, first stretch of motorway in England, which will become part of the M6; John Betjeman’s Collected Poems published, representing one strand of middle class culture, while A Bear Called Paddington is published, first in a series of books, plays and films which continues to this day; 30 the government announces the full convertibility of the pound, meaning it won’t have to run down gold stocks defending it, but at the same time becomes vulnerable to speculation;
1959
January Henry Cooper becomes British and British Empire heavyweight champion;
February 3 Buddy Holly dies aged 22; film version of Room at the Top released marking ‘the start of the British new Wave in the cinema’; debut of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be at the Theatre Royal Stratford East; March To Aldermaston a documentary about the 1958 march, edited by Lindsay Anderson with Richard Burton reading Christopher Logue’s script;
March release of Carlton-Brown of the Foreign Office starring Terry-Thomas; the year’s most popular film, Carry On Nurse; Goldfinger published, the seventh James Bond novel; march from Aldermaston to London; expansionary Budget;
May: C.P. Snow gives his lecture about the two cultures (ie most people who run things knowing masses about the arts and nothing about science); Sapphire directed by Basil Dearden is a whodunnit with strong racial overtones; 17th a black student Kelso Cochrane is stabbed to death in Notting Hill leading to raised tensions in West London and ‘Keep Britain White’ rallies and worried reports about the lack of ‘racial integration’ in Birmingham;
June
July: The Teenage Consumer, a pamphlet by Mark Abrams defining them as aged 15-24 and unmarried;
August: Cliff Richard number 1 with Livin’ Doll; President Eisenhower makes a state visit and is on TV chatting with Harold Macmillan;
September: City of Spades by Colin McInnes and Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse published;
October: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe; Noggin the Nog created by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin; and the General Election: Conservatives win 49.4% of the vote and 365 seats, Labour 43.8% and 258, the Liberals 6, giving the Conservatives an overall majority of 100.
Studies and surveys
Being a list of the studies and surveys carried out during the period by sociologists, universities, newspapers and polling organisations:
1954 Early Leaving a study of who left state school early, and why (children of the unskilled working class made up 20% of grammar school intake but only 7% of sixth forms)
1957 Abrams study of 200 working class married couples (they lacked the ambition required to push their children on to further education)
1958 Edward Blishen survey of TV’s impact on families (too much violence; difficult to get the kids to go to bed afterwards)
1958 J.B. Cullingworth surveyed 250 families who’d moved to an overspill estate in Worsley from Salford
1959 J.B. Cullingworth surveyed families who’d moved to Swindon
Floud et al study of grammar schools in Hertfordshire and Middlesborough (over half of working class parents wanted no further education for their children after school)
Margot Jeffreys interviewed housewives in an out-county LCC estate in Hertfordshire (1954-5)
1957 Maurice Broady conducted interviews on the huge Pollok estate outside Glasgow
Eve Bene survey of 361 London grammar school boys on attitudes and expectations (45% of working class kids wanted to stay on past 16, compared with 65% of middle class pupils)
1958 Ruth Glass investigation of racial prejudice
1958 Geoffrey Gorer study of television viewing habits (families don’t talk as much)
1958 Television and the Child by Hilde Himmelweit (kids routinely watch TV till it stops, TV is a great stimulator but fleetingly, shallowly)
1962 Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden Education and the Working Class a study of 88 working class kids in Huddersfield who went to grammar school (charts the parents’ progressive incomprehension of what their children are studying)
1958 The Boss by Roy Lewis and Rosemary Stewart, about the social background of captains of industry e.g. family connections and public school still paramount
1959 The Crowther Report, 15 to 18 (children of unskilled working class over-represented, the kids of non-manual workers under-represented: i.e. they were a sink of the poorest)
1959 Ferdynand Zweig survey of working class men and their attitudes to washing machines
1960 Michael Carter survey of 200 secondary modern schoolchildren as they left school
1961 William Liversidge survey of grammar school and secondary modern school leavers
Patronising and condescending
Although Kynaston several times harps on the fact that Macmillan (Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963) was an Old Etonian, that his first Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, was another old Etonian and when he was sacked he was replaced by Derick Heathcoat Amory, another old Etonian, that in fact nearly half of the Macmillan cabinet went to Eton – there turns out to be surprisingly less condescension and patronage from these phenomenally upper-class toffs as you’d imagine. In fact the reverse: Macmillan’s diaries worry about all aspects of the political and international scene but when he tours the country and meets people, I was rather touched by his genuine concern.
No, the really condescending and patronising comments come, as so often, not from the politicians (who, after all, had to be careful what they said) but from the intellectual ‘elite’, from the writers and cultural commentators and architects who all too often looked right down their noses at the ghastly taste and appalling interests of the proles.
Housing
Throughout the book, most of the modern architects regard themselves as experts on human nature, experts on what people want, and are bravely, boldly undeterred by the actually expressed opinions of real people in places like public meetings, letters to newspapers and suchlike bourgeois distractions. Alison and Peter Smithson were among the leaders of the British school of Brutalism. For them architecture was an ethic and an art. As Alison wrote: ‘My act of form-giving has to invite the occupiers to add their intangible quality of use.’ They helped to develop the notion of ‘streets in the sky’, that ‘communities’ could be recreated on concrete walkways suspended between blocks of flats, a form of ‘urbanism that abandoned the primacy of the ground plane in favour of a rich spatial interplay of different layers of activity’.
No matter that the overwhelming majority of ordinary people opposed these plans. The architect knows best. And the planners. Kynaston lists scores of chief architects and planners in cities like Glasgow, Birmingham, Coventry, London, who oversaw a quickening pace of mass demolitions, of slums, of old buildings of all kinds, in order to widen roads, create urban dual carriageways, build new blocks of flats, taller, more gleaming, more visionary, streets in the sky! And if the poor proles who would then be shepherded into these badly built, dark, leaky, anti-social blocks murmured their reluctance, they were ignored, and patronised. Kynaston quotes an article written by Raphael Samuel on the Labour council of Aberdare in South Wales who devised a plan to demolish a third of the town’s houses despite vehement opposition from the inhabitants.
The Glamorgan planners did not set out to destroy a community. They wanted to attack the slums and give to the people of Aberdare the best of the open space and the amenities which modern lay-out can provide. It did not occur to them that there could be any opposition to a scheme informed by such benevolent intentions; and, when it came, they could only condemn it as ‘myopic’. (quoted page 320)
My point is – neither the planners nor architects who refused to listen to ordinary people were Old Etonians; the opposite; they tended to be locally-born, Labour-voting architects and administrators which made their frustration with their own people’s obstinacy all the more pointed.
Culture
The situation was different in the humanities where the most vociferous Marxists tended to have had staggeringly privileged upbringings. Take the Marxists historians E.P. Thompson (educated at the Dragon Preparatory School in Oxford, Kingswood private School in Bath and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) and Christopher Hill (St Peter’s Private School, York and Balliol College, Oxford), they took it on themselves and their tiny cohort of like-minded communists and academics, to define what the working classes really wanted, and it turned out it wasn’t clean accommodation with hot and cold running water, a washing machine and a nippy new car out the front – Thompson and Hill knew that the working classes really wanted to create a new kind of man for the modern age!
Thus Kynaston ironically quotes E.P. Thompson ticking off Labour politician Anthony Crosland for the crime of suggesting, in his pamphlet The Future of Socialism, that after a decade of austerity and rationing what the people wanted was cafés, bright lights and fun. No no no, lectures Thompson:
Men do not only want the list of things which Mr Crosland offers; they want also to change themselves as men.
Says who? Says Edward Thompson, Kingswood School Corpus Christi College.
However fitfully and ineffectually, they want other and greater things; they want to stop killing one another; they want to stop this pollution of their spiritual life which runs through society as rivers carried their sewage and refuse throughout nineteenth-century industrial towns.
‘This pollution of their spiritual life’ – Thompson is talking about television, specifically ITV, which was polluting the working class with poisons like Gunsmoke and Opportunity Knocks. The actual working class has always been a terrible disappointment to men like Thompson and Hill. Kynaston details at length their agonising about whether to leave the communist party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and then how they go on to set up independent Marxist magazines and write articles for other like-minded over-educated academics who fondly thought their little articles made a bit of difference to anything.
But it wasn’t just the privately educated Marxists, genuine men of the people like playwright Arnold Wesker, son of a cook and a tailor’s machinist, who had a really tough upbringing and meagre education in Stepney and Hackney. He is quoted as attending a left-wing meeting addressed by Raymond Williams (grammar school and Trinity College, Cambridge), author of the pioneering book Culture and Society and then Labour front-bencher Richard Crossman (Winchester and new College), who wrote a column in the Daily Mirror. This is Wesker describing the meeting in a letter to his wife:
How could he, as a Socialist, support a paper [the Mirror], which, for its vulgarity, was an insult to the mind of the working class; a paper which painted a glossy, film-star world. (quoted p.143)
The point is that, at this distance, I admire Crossman for writing a column in the Mirror, the bestselling newspaper of its day i.e. the most-read by the ‘working classes’ – for addressing the world as it is, for making the most of it, and find it hard not to dislike Wesker for his arrogance: ‘the mind of the working class’ – where is that exactly? how does he, Wesker, know what ‘the mind of the working class’ is thinking, or wants?
A little later Kynaston quotes the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (Charterhouse and Jesus College, Cambridge) who wrote a series of articles about television in which ‘he came down hard on working class viewers’:
Not only did they eschew ‘topical programmes, discussions and brains trusts, serious music and ballet,’ instead obstinately preferring ‘films and serials, variety and quizzes’, but almost half of them were ‘addicts’ (defined as watching at least four hours a night), with as a result ‘all sense of proportion lost in their gross indulgence, and their family life, if not wrecked, at least emptied of nearly all its richness and warmth.’ (p.152)
My point being that is it not Macmillan and his Old Etonian chums saying this; it was left wing architects, planners, historians, intellectuals, writers, anthropologists and sociologists who were most critical and patronising of the actual working class as it actually existed (despairing that ‘the workers’ were not the idealised heroes of communist propaganda, but lazy blokes who liked to drink beer from cans in front of the Benny Hill show).
Race
There is a similar sense of disconnect on the issue of race and immigration, which Kynaston explores in some detail à propos the Notting Hill Riots of August 1958.
He shows how almost all the reporters, journalists, sociologists and so on who visited Notting Hill and other areas with high immigrant populations (the West Midlands was the other hotspot) discovered, not the virulent hatred of the American South, but nonetheless consistent opinions that immigrants got unfair advance on the housing waiting lists, exploited the benefits system, lived in overcrowded houses and made a lot of noise – all leading to a strong groundswell of popular opinion that immigration needed to be controlled. (There were 2,000 immigrants from Commonwealth countries in 1953, 11,000 in 1954, 40,000 by 1957).
But all the leading politicians, and most MPs, stood firmly against introducing immigration restrictions and were careful not to blame or stigmatise the coloured communities, even when there were gross incidents of racially aggravated riots, like at Notting Hill. The politicians realised it would be very difficult to devise any form of immigration control which wasn’t, on some level, based on the fact that you were trying to stop people with black skins entering the country i.e. naked racism, tantamount to apartheid in Wedgwood Benn’s opinion.
The handful of Tory MPs who did call for restrictions accompanied were shouted down. At one parliamentary meeting, one Tory MP, Cyril Osborne, accompanied his calls with accusations that blacks were lazy, sick or criminal, and drew down such a tsunami of criticism that he was reduced to tears. All MPs observing this realised that immigration was not a topic to speak out on. If any mention was made of it, it must be in the most positive and emollient terms. Thus the political class, the men who ruled the country, painted themselves into a position where free and frank debate of the issue was impossible.
But the actual population of the country, ‘the people’ which all parties claimed to speak for, disagreed. There is a surprising paucity of sociological research, field studies and surveys on the subject (compared with the welter of research done into the endlessly fascinating subject of ‘class’). But Kynaston quotes a Gallup poll taken at the time of the riots, in August 1958, which revealed that:
71% disapproved of mixed marriages
61% would consider moving if significant numbers of coloured people moved into their neighbourhood
55% wanted restrictions on non-white immigration
54% didn’t want people from the Commonwealth put on housing waiting lists on the same level with locals
People’s opinions were simply ignored. The rulers of the country knew best. No attempt was made to limit immigration which continued to grow throughout the 1960s and indeed up to the present day, which has resulted in our present blissful political situation.
Two more massive ‘books’ contained in one hefty 700-page paperback describing Britain after the war, the first one – The Certainties of Place, under review here – covering the period 1951-5 in immense detail. The main historical events are:
The Festival of Britain (May – August 1951)
October 1951 the Conservatives just about win the general election, despite polling quarter of a million fewer votes than Labour
Death of George VI (6 February 1952) and accession of young Queen Elizabeth II
3 October 1952 Britain explodes its first atom bomb (in Western Australia)
The Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash on the morning of 8 October 1952 – 112 were killed and 340 injured – the worst peacetime rail crash in the United Kingdom
The North Sea flood on the night of Saturday 31 January / Sunday, 1 February
Rationing: tea came off the ration in October 1952 and sweets in February 1953, but sugar, butter, cooking fats, cheese, meat and eggs continued on the ration
2 June 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
27 July 1953 end of Korean War
12 August 1953 Russia detonates its first hydrogen bomb
The book ends in January 1954, with a literary coincidence. On Monday 25 Lucky Jim, the comic novel which began the career of Kingsley Amis was published and that evening saw the BBC broadcast the brilliant play for voices Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas who had in fact died two months earlier, on 9 November 1953.
Tumult of events and impressions
But reading Kynaston’s books is not to proceed logically through the key events of the period accompanied by political and economic and diplomatic analysis: it is to be plunged into the unceasing turbulent flow of day-to-day events, mixing the trivial with the serious, it’s to see the world from the point of view of a contemporary tabloid newspaper – the Mirror and the Express competing for the title of Britain’s best-selling newspaper – with the big political issues jostling for space with the winner of the Grand National and gossip about the stars of stage and radio – and above all, to read quotes from a thousand and one contemporary voices.
Without any preface or introduction, the text throws you straight into the hurly-burly of events, festooned with comments by an enormous casts of diarists, speech-makers, article-writers, commentators, eye-witnesses and so on.
Thus at the top of page one it is Saturday 28 April 1951 and King George VI is presenting the F.A. Cup to the winners, Newcastle. Three days later, on Tuesday 1 May 1951 he is at Earls Court for the British Industries Fair. On Thursday 3 he is on the South Bank to open the new Royal Festival Hall and inaugurate the five-month-long Festival of Britain – ‘a patriotic prank’, according to the song Noel Coward wrote about it, ‘madly educative and very tiring’, according to Kenneth Williams (25).
What makes Kynastons’s books hugely enjoyable is the vast cavalcade of people, from kings to coal miners, via a jungle of ordinary housewives, newspaper columnists, industrialists, famous or yet-to-be-famous writers, actors, civil servants and politicians.
a) They are fascinating on their own account b) Kynaston deploys them not just to discuss the big issues of the day but quotes them on day to day trivia, the appearance of London, the menu at posh clubs, the ups and downs of rationing, the tribulations of shopping in the High Street. The breadth of witnesses, and the range of activities they describe, helps to make the reader feel that you really have experienced living in this era.
Labour exhausted, Conservatives win
Overall, the big impression which comes across is the way the Labour Party had run out of ideas by 1951, and how this contributed to their defeat in the October 1951 general election. (It is fascinating to learn that they only held an election that October because the king told Attlee he was going on a prolonged tour of the Commonwealth in 1952 and would prefer there to be an election while he was still in the country. Attlee duly obliged, and Labour lost. Thus are the fates of nations decided). (There is, by the by, absolutely nothing whatsoever about the Commonwealth or the British Empire: this is a book solely about the home front and domestic experiences of Britain.)
Labour were reduced to opposition in which they seem to waste a lot of energy squabbling between the ‘Bevanites’ on the left of the party, and the larger mainstream represented by Hugh Gaitskell. The bitter feud stemmed from the decision by Gaitskell, when Chancellor, to introduce charges for ‘teeth and spectacles’ in order to pay for Britain’s contribution to the Korean War (started June 1950).
The quiet Labour leader, Clement Attlee, now in his 70s, was mainly motivated to stay on by his determination to prevent Herbert Morrison becoming leader.
The most important political fact of the period was that the Conservatives accepted almost every element of the welfare state and even of the nationalised industries which they inherited from Labour.
Experts are quoted from the 1980s saying that this was a great lost opportunity for capitalism i.e. the Conservatives failed to privatise coal or steel or railways, and failed to adjust the tax system so as to reintroduce incentives and make British industry more competitive. To these critics, the 1950s Conservatives acquiesced in the stagnation which led to Britain’s long decline.
Rebuilding and new towns
What the Conservatives did do was live up to their manifesto promise of building 300,000 new houses a year, even if the houses were significantly reduced in size from Labour’s specifications (much to the growling disapproval of Nye Bevan), and to push ahead with the scheme for building twelve New Towns.
I grew up on the edge of one of these New Towns, Bracknell, which I and all my friends considered a soulless dump, so I was fascinated to read Kynaston’s extended passages about the massive housing crisis of post-war Britain and the endless squabbles of experts and architects who claimed to be able to solve it.
To some extent reading this book has changed my attitude as a result of reading the scores and scores of personal accounts Kynaston quotes of the people who moved out of one-room, condemned slums in places like Stepney and Poplar and were transported to two bedroom houses with things they’d never see before – like a bathroom, their own sink, an indoor toilet!
It’s true that almost immediately there were complaints that the new towns or estates lacked facilities, no pubs, not enough shops, were too far from town centres with not enough public transport, and so on. But it is a real education to see how these concerns were secondary to the genuine happiness brought to hundreds of thousands of families who finally escaped from hard-core slum conditions and, after years and years and years of living in squalor, to suddenly be living in clean, dry, properly plumbed palaces of their own.
At the higher level of town planners, architects and what Kynaston calls ‘activators’, he chronicles the ongoing fights between a) exponents of moving urban populations out to new towns versus rehousing them in new inner city accomodation b) the core architectural fight between hard-line modernist architects, lackeys of Le Corbusier’s modernism, and various forms of watered-down softer, more human modernism.
It is a highly diffused argument because different architects deployed different styles and solutions to a wide range of new buildings on sites all over the UK, from Plymouth to Glasgow: but it is one of the central and most fascinating themes of the Kynaston books, and inspires you to want to go and visit these sites.
Education
The other main issue the Conservatives (and all right-thinking social commentators and progressives) were tackling after the war was Education. The theme recurs again and again as Kynaston picks up manifesto pledges, speeches, or the publication of key policy documents to bring out the arguments of the day. Basically we watch two key things happen:
despite the bleeding obvious fact that the public schools were (and are) the central engine of class division, privilege and inequality in British society, no political party came up with any serious proposals to abolish them or even tamper with their status (a pathetic ineffectiveness which, of course, lasts to the present day)
instead the argument was all about the structure of the state education system and, in Kynaston’s three books so far, we watch the Labour party, and the teachers’ unions, move from broad support for grammar schools in 1944, to becoming evermore fervently against the 11-plus by the early 1950s
Kynaston uses his sociological approach to quote the impact of passing – or failing – the 11-plus exam (the one which decides whether you will go to a grammar school or a secondary modern school) on a wide variety of children from the time, from John Prescott to Glenda Jackson.
Passing obviously helped propel lots of boys and girls from ‘ordinary’ working class backgrounds on to successful careers. But Kynaston also quotes liberally from the experiences of those who failed, were crushed with humiliation and, in some cases, never forgave society.
The following list serves two purposes:
To give a sense of the huge number of people the reader encounters and hears quoted in Kynaston’s collage-style of social history
To really bring out how the commanding heights of politics, the economy, the arts and so on were overwhelmingly ruled by people who went to public school, with a smattering of people succeeding thanks to their grammar school opportunity, and then a rump of people who became successful in their fields despite attending neither public nor grammar schools and, often, being forced to leave school at 16, 15, 14 or 13 years of age.
Public school
Politicians
Clement Attlee (Haileybury and Oxford)
Anthony Wedgwood Benn (Westminster and New College, Oxford)
Anthony Blunt (Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge)
Guy Burgess (Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge)
Richard Austen Butler (Marlborough and Cambridge)
Winston Churchill (Harrow then Royal Military College, Sandhurst)
Kim Cobbold (Governor of the Bank of England 49-61, Eton and King’s College, Cambridge)
Stafford Cripps (Winchester College and University College London)
Anthony Crosland (Highbury and Oxford)
Richard Crossman (Winchester and Oxford)
Hugh Dalton (Eton and Cambridge)
Sir Anthony Eden (Eton and Christ Church, Oxford)
Michael Foot (Leighton Park School Reading and Wadham College, Oxford)
Sir David Maxwell Fyfe ( George Watson’s College and Balliol College, Oxford)
Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford)
Gerald Kaufman (Leeds Grammar School [private] and Queen’s College, Oxford)
Harold Macmillan (Eton)
Harold Nicholson (Wellington and Oxford)
Sir John Nott-Bower (Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Tonbridge School then the Indian Police Service)
Kim Philby (Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge)
Enoch Powell (King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge)
John Profumo (Harrow and Oxford)
Shirley Williams (St Paul’s Girls’ School and Somerville College, Oxford)
The arts etc
Lindsay Anderson (film director, Saint Ronan’s School and Cheltenham College then Wadham College, Oxford)
Diana Athill (memoirist, Runton Hill School and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)
John Betjeman (poet, Marlborough and Oxford)
Cecil Beaton (photographer, Harrow and Cambridge)
John Berger (art critic, St Edward’s School, Oxford and Chelsea School of Art)
Michael Billington (theatre critic, Warwick School and Oxford)
Raymond Chandler (novelist, Dulwich College, then journalism)
Bruce Chatwin (travel writer, Marlborough)
Dr Alex Comfort (popular science author, Highgate School, Trinity College, Cambridge)
Richard Davenport-Hynes (historian, St Paul’s and Selwyn College, Cambridge)
Robin Day (BBC interviewer, Bembridge and Oxford)
Richard Dimbleby (Mill Hill School then the Richmond and Twickenham Times)
Richard Eyre (theatre director, Sherborne School and Peterhouse Cambridge)
Ian Fleming (novelist, Eton and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst)
John Fowles (novelist, Bedford School and Oxford)
Michael Frayn (novelist, Kingston Grammar School and Cambridge)
Alan Garner (novelist, Manchester Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford)
Graham Greene (novelist, Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford)
Joyce Grenfell (Francis Holland School and Mlle Ozanne’s finishing school in Paris)
Alec Guinness (actor, Fettes College)
Frank Richards (writer for popular comics, Thorn House School in Ealing then freelance writing)
Christopher Hill (Marxist historian, St Peter’s School, York and Balliol College, University of Oxford)
David Hockney (artist, Bradford Grammar School [private], Bradford College of Art, Royal College of Art)
Ludovic Kennedy (BBC, Eton then Christ Church, Oxford)
Gavin Lambert (film critic, Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford)
Humphrey Lyttelton (Eton, Grenadier Guards, Camberwell Art College)
David Kynaston (historian, Wellington College and New College, Oxford)
Kingsley Martin (editor of New Statesman, Mill Hill School and Magdalene College, Cambridge)
Frances Partridge (Bloomsbury writer, Bedales School and Newnham College, Cambridge)
Raymond Postgate (founder of Good Food Guide, St John’s College, Oxford)
V.S. Pritchett (novelist, Alleyn’s School, and Dulwich College)
Barbara Pym (novelist, Queen’s Park School Oswestry and Oxford)
William Rees-Mogg (editor of The Times 1967-81, Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford)
Richard Rogers (architect, St Johns School, Leatherhead then the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London)
Anthony Sampson (social analyst, Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford)
Raphael Samuel (Marxist historian, Balliol College, Oxford)
Maggie Smith (actress, Oxford High School, then the Oxford Playhouse)
David Storey (novelist, Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield then Slade School of Fine Art)
AJP Taylor (left wing historian, Bootham School in York then Oriel College, Oxford)
E.P. Thompson (Marxist historian, Kingswood School Bath and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
Alan Turing (computer pioneer, Sherborne and King’s College, Cambridge)
Kenneth Tynan (theatre critic, King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Magdalen College, Oxford)
Chad Varah (founder of Samaritans, Worksop College [private] Nottinghamshire then Keble College, Oxford)
Angus Wilson (novelist, Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford)
Colin St John Wilson (architect of the British Library, Felsted School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
Laurence Olivier (actor, prep school and choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street)
Grammar school
Politicians
Barbara Castle (Bradford Girls’ Grammar School and and St Hugh’s College, Oxford)
Roy Jenkins (Abersychan County Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford)
Margaret Thatcher (Grantham Girls’ School and Oxford)
Harold Wilson (Royds Hall Grammar School and Oxford)
The arts etc
Paul Bailey (novelist, Sir Walter St John’s Grammar School For Boys, Battersea and the Central School of Speech and Drama)
Joan Bakewell (BBC, Stockport High School for Girls and Cambridge)
Stan Barstow (novelist, Ossett Grammar School then an engineering firm)
Alan Bennett (playwright, Leeds Modern School and Exeter College, Oxford)
Michael Caine (actor, Wilson’s Grammar School in Camberwell, left at 16 to become a runner for a film company)
David Cannadine (historian, King Edward VI Five Ways School and Clare College, Cambridge)
Noel Coward (dance academy)
Terence Davies (film director, left school at 16 to work as a shipping office clerk)
A.L. Halsey (sociologist, Kettering Grammar School then London School of Economics)
Sheila Hancock (actress, Dartford County Grammar School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art)
Tony Harrison (poet, Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University)
Noddy Holder (musician, Walsall Grammar school until it closed, then T. P. Riley Comprehensive School)
Ted Hughes (poet, Mexborough Grammar School and Pembroke College, Cambridge)
Lynda Lee-Potter (columnist, Leigh Girls’ Grammar School and Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
Roy Porter (historian, Wilson’s Grammar School, Camberwell then Christ’s College, Cambridge)
Terence Stamp (actor, Plaistow County Grammar School then advertising)
John Sutherland (English professor, University of Leicester)
Dylan Thomas (poet, Swansea Grammar School)
Dame Sybil Thorndike (actress, Rochester Grammar School for Girls then the Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
Philip Toynbee (communist writer, Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford)
Colin Welland (actor, Newton-le-Willows Grammar School then Goldsmiths College)
Kenneth Williams (actor, Lyulph Stanley Boys’ Central Council School)
Raymond Williams (Marxist social critic, King Henry VIII Grammar School, Abergavenny and Trinity College, Cambridge)
Secondary modern / left school early
Alice Bacon (Labour MP in favour of comprehensive schools, Normanton Girls’ High School and Stockwell Teachers’ Training College)
Raymond Baxter (BBC presenter, Ilford County High School, expelled after being caught smoking)
Aneurin Bevan (major figure in the Labour Party, left school at 13)
Jim Callaghan (Labour Prime Minister 1976-79, Portsmouth Northern Secondary School, left school at 17)
Ossie Clarke (fashion designer, Beamont Secondary Technical School then Regional College of Art in Manchester)
Hugh Cudlipp (Howard Gardens High School for boys, left at 14)
Ian Jack (Dunfermline High School, left to become a journalist)
Clive Jenkins (left school at 14, Port Talbot County Boys’ School)
Stanley Matthews (cricketer, left school at 14 to play football)
Herbert Morrison (St Andrew’s Church of England School, left at 14 to become an errand boy)
Joe Orton (playwright, Clark’s College in Leicester)
John Osborne (playwright, Belmont College, expelled aged 16)
John Prescott (failed 11 plus, Grange Secondary Modern School and Hull University)
Alan Sillitoe (novelist, left school at 14)
Sociology
There are definitely more sociologists quoted in this book than in the previous two, especially in the very long central section devoted to class, which seems to have been the central obsession of sociologists in that era. Kynaston quotes what seems to be hundreds but is probably only scores of sociologists who produced a flood of reports throughout the 1940s and 50s, as they went off to live with miners or dockers or housewives, produced in-depth studies of the social attitudes of East End slums, the industrial north, towns in Wales or Scotland, and so on and so on.
The central social fact of the era was that about 70% of the British population belonged to the manual working class. And therefore, for me, the obvious political question was and is: why did this country, which was 70% ‘working class’, vote for Conservative governments from 1951 to 1964? What did Labour do wrong, in order to lose the votes of what should – on paper – have been its natural constituency?
This central question is nowhere asked or answered. Instead I found myself being frequently distracted by the extreme obviousness of some of the sociologists’ conclusions. Lengthy fieldwork and detailed statistical analysis result in conclusions like such as the working class are marked off from the ‘middle class’ by:
lower income
by taking wages rather than a salary
their jobs are often precarious
they are more likely to belong to trade unions
have distinctive accents
wear distinctive types of clothes (e.g. the cloth cap)
have poorer education
have distinct manners and linguistic usages (for example calling the mid-day meal dinner instead of lunch)
Other revelations include that the children of working class parents did less well at school than children of middle-class parents, and were less likely to pass the 11-plus, that rugby league is a northern working class sport compared with the middle-class sport of rugby union, that cricket was mostly a middle and upper middle class interest while football was followed obsessively by the proles, that the proles read the News of the World and the People rather than the Times and Telegraph.
As to the great British institution of the pub, in the words of the Truman’s website:
Saloon bars were sit-down affairs for the middle class, carpets on the floor, cushions on the seats and slightly more expensive drinks. You were served at the table and expected to dress smart for the occasion. You would also pay a premium on the drinks for this and usually there would be some entertainment be it singing, dancing, drama or comedy. You would generally be served bitter and in half pints.
Public bars, or tap rooms, remained for the working class. Bare wooden floorboards with sawdust on the floor, hard bench seats and cheap beer were on offer. You didn’t have to change out of your work wear so this was generally were the working class would go for after work and drink in pints, generally of mild.
Altogether this central section about class in all its forms takes some 150 pages of this 350-page book – it is a seriously extended analysis or overview of class in early 1950s Britain drawing on a multitude of studies and surveys (it’s almost alarming to see how very, very many studies were carried out by academic sociologists during this period, alongside the regular Mass-Observation surveys, plus ad hoc commercial surveys by Gallup and a number of less well-known pollsters).
And yet almost nothing from this vast body of work comes as a surprise: Most kids in grammar schools were upper-middle or middle class i.e. it’s a myth to say grammar schools help the working and lower working classes. IQ tests can be fixed by intensive coaching. The working classes liked football. The most popular hobbies (by a long way) were gardening for men, and knitting for women. Pubs were a place of comforting familiarity, where you would find familiar friends and familiar drinks and familiar conversations in familiar surroundings.
Compared to all the effort put into these studies, there is remarkably little that comes out of them.
Some of the sociologists mentioned or discussed in the text
Kenneth Allsop reported on Ebbw Vale
Michael Banton, author of numerous studies of race and ethnic relations
LSE sociologist Norman Birnbaum, criticising positive interpretations of the Coronation
Betting in Britain 1951 report by The Social Survey
Maurice Broady, sociologist who studied Coronation Day street parties (p.305)
Joanna Bourke, socialist feminist historian
Katherine Box, author of a 1946 study of cinema-going
British Institute of Public Opinion survey
Professor of cultural history, Robert Colls, author of When We Lived In Communities
Coal is our Life sociologial study of Featherstone in Yorkshire by Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Cliff Slaughter
Mark Clapson, historian of suburbia and Milton Keynes
David Glass author of Social Mobility in Britain (1954)
Geoffrey Gorer 1950-51 People survey of what class people saw themselves as belonging to
historian Richard Holt writing about football
1949 Hulton Survey on smoking
Roy Lewis and Angus Maude authors of The English Middle Classes (1949)
F.M. Martin’s 1952 survey of parental attitudes to education in Hertfordshire
Mass-Observation 1949 survey, The Press and Its Readers
Mass-Observation survey 1947-8 on drinking habits
Mass-Observation survey 1951 on drunkenness in Cardiff, Nottingham, Leicester and Salford
Peter Townsend, social researcher (p.118)
Margaret Stacy studied Banbury (p.136)
T.H. Pear author of English Social Differences (1955)
Hilde Himmelweit study of four grammar schools in London
Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy (1957) which reminisces about working class Hunslet
sociologist Madeline Kerr’s five-year study The People of Ship Street in Liverpool (1958)
Tony Mason, football historian
Leo Kuper vox pops from Houghton in Coventry
John Barron Mays’ study of inner-city Liverpool in the early 1950s
Ross McKibbin author of Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1955
Gavin Mellor research into football crowds in the north-west 1946-62
Peter Miskell’s study of the cimema in Wales
John Mogey, author of a study of the Jolly Waterman pub in St Ebbe’s, a suburb of Oxford
Alison Ravetz, author if a study of the model Quarry Hill estate in Leeds
Doris Rich authored a study of working men’s clubs in Coseley
James Robb, author of a study of Bethnal Green in the late 1940s
Elizabeth Robert conducted extensive interviews in north-west England into education (p.161)
Robert Roberts, author of The Classic Slum (1971) about Salford either side of the war
Rowntree and Lavers, author of the study English Life and Leisure
Alice Russell, historian of occupational welfare
sociologist Mike Savage (pp.148, 159)
American sociologist Edward Shils
Brian Simon, communist teacher then at Leicester University
Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside interviewed 200 servicemen just as the war ended about education
1953 report on Southamptons’s housing estates
Peter Stead, author of a study of Barry in south Wales
Avram Taylor, historian of working class credit
Philip Vernon, professor of Educational Psychology at London University’s Institute of Education
John Walton, historian of Blackpool landladies
Michael Young, author of Is This the Classless Society (1951) among many others
Ferdynand Zweig, wide-ranging sociological investigator of the post war years
As far as I could see all of these studies were focused on the working class, their hobbies, activities, beliefs and attitudes – as well as an extended consideration of what ‘community’ meant to them. This latter was meant to help the town planners who agonised so much about trying to create new ‘communities’ in the new estates and the new towns, and so on – but two things are glaringly absent from the list of topics.
One is sex. Not one of the researchers mentioned above appears to have made any enquiries into the sex lives of their subjects. Given our modern (2019) obsession with sex and bodies, it is a startling omission which, in itself, speaks volumes about the constrained, conservative and essentially private character of the time.
(There are several mentions of homosexuality, brought into the public domain by several high-profile prosecutions of gays for soliciting in public toilets, which prompted a) righteous indignation from the right-wing press but b) soul searching among liberal politicians and some of the regular diarists Kynaston features, along the lines of: why should people be prosecuted by the law for the way God made them?)
Secondly, why just the working class? OK, so they made up some 70% of the population, but why are there no studies about the behaviour and belief systems of, say, architects and town planners? Kynaston quotes critics pointing out what a small, inbred world of self-congratulatory back-scratchers this was – but there appears to be no study of their educational backgrounds, beliefs, cultural practices – or of any other middle-class milieu.
And this goes even more for the upper classes. What about all those cabinet ministers who went to Eton and Harrow and Westminster? Did no one do a sociological study of private schools, or of the Westminster village or of the posh London clubs? Apparently not. Why not?
And this tells you something, maybe, about sociology as a discipline: that it consists of generally left-wing, middle-class intellectuals and academics making forays into working class territory, expeditions into working class lives as if the working class were remote tribes in deepest New Guinea. The rhetoric of adventure and exploration which accompanies some of the studies is quite comic, if you read it in this way. As is the way they then report back their findings in prestigious journals and articles and books and win prizes for their bravery as if they’ve just come back from climbing Everest, instead of spending a couple of weeks in Middlesborough chatting to miners.
It’s only right at the end of the 150 or so pages of non-stop sociological analysis of ‘the working classes’ that you finally get some sociologists conceding that they are not the solid communities of socialist heroes of the revolution that so many of these left wingers wanted them to be: that in fact, many ‘working class’ communities were riven by jealousies, petty feuds and a crushing sense of snobbery. Umpteen housewives are quoted as saying that so-and-so thought she was ‘too good’ for the rest of us, was hoity-toity, told her children not to play with our kids etc. other mums told researchers they instructed their children not to play with the rough types from down the road.
People turned out to be acutely aware of even slight differences of behaviour or speech and drew divisive conclusions accordingly. The myth of one homogenous ‘working class’ with common interest turns out to be just that, a myth. THis goes some way to answering my question about why 70% of the population did not all vote for the workers’ party, far from it.
Above all, what comes over very strongly in the voices of ordinary people, is the wish to be left alone, to live and let live, and for privacy – to be allowed to live in what Geoffrey Gorer summed up as ‘distant cordiality’ with their neighbours.
‘You don’t get any privacy in flats,’ declared Mrs Essex from number 7 Battersea Church Road (p.339).
Contrary to the ‘urbanists’, like Michael Young, who wanted to help working class communities remain in their city centres, large numbers of the ‘working classes’ were about to find themselves forced (by the ‘dispersionists’, the generation of high-minded, left-wing planners and architects who Kynaston quotes so extensively and devastatingly, p.340) to move into windy new estates miles from anywhere with no shops or even schools. Those that did remain near their old communities found themselves forced into high-rise blocks of flats with paper-thin walls and ‘shared facilities’ next to new ‘community centres’ which nobody wanted and nobody used and were quickly vandalised. It is a bleak picture.
Love/hate
Lindsay Anderson (b.1923) was ‘a British feature film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading light of the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave’ (Wikipedia).
But in Kynaston’s opinion, Anderson’s 10-minute film O Dreamland, shot in the Margate amusement park of the same name, ‘marked the start of a new, increasingly high-profile phase in the long, difficult, love-hate relationship of the left-leaning cultural elite with the poor old working class, just going about its business and thinking its own private, inscrutable thoughts (p.220).
Here it is, disapproval and condescension dripping from every frame.
Lady authors
For some reason women authors seem more prominent in the era than male authors. It was easy to compile a list of names which recurred and whose works I really ought to make an effort to familiarise myself with.
Jean Rhys b.1890 (private school and RADA)
Sylvia Townsend Warner b.1893 (home schooled by her father, a house-master at Harrow School)
Elizabeth Bowen b.1899 (private school and art school)
Catherine Cookson b.1906 (left school at 14 to take a job as a laundress at a workhouse)
Barbara Pym b.1913 (private school and Oxford)
Doris Lessing b.1919 (private school till she left home at 15)
Lorna Sage b.1943 (grammar school and Durham)
Sue Townshend b.1946 (secondary modern South Wigston High School, left school at 14)
Books & Boots 