Family Britain, 1951-1957 (36 page)

Every 5 November the pride of Lance Street was at stake. A huge bonfire blocked the road, built from wood that had been stockpiled for weeks. Floorboards were ripped out of bombdies [ie bombed-out houses] and packing crates were broken down. Anything we couldn’t scrounge we stole, organising raids on neighbouring streets . . .

‘Lance Street no longer exists,’ he added. ‘Nor do the short cuts, hiding places and most of the landmarks from my childhood. Heyworth Primary is now a recreational park full of drug addicts on the dark nights and there is no Garrick pub or Everton Picture Palace. All the houses and shops were bulldozed in the sixties when Liverpool City Council decided that the two-up-two-downs were slum housing . . .’

Over the years there have been many accounts like Tomlinson’s, prompting one exasperated historian, Joanna Bourke, to argue in 1994 that the very term ‘working-class community’ needs to be approached with the greatest suspicion, given the cumulative weight of largely romantic ‘working-class autobiographies and oral histories, where social relations are often recalled through a golden haze: conflict is forgotten in favour of doors that were always open; the neighbour who was never seen is neglected in favour of the neighbour who always shared; tiring workdays are ignored in favour of nearly forgotten games which diverted children even during difficult times’. Equally culpable in her eyes have been generations of socialists, for whom the concept of ‘community’ has ‘represented the innate socialism of the workers’ – in essence, she asserts, ‘a rhetorical device’ rather than objective, empirical description.

Another historian, Robert Colls, strongly takes issue with Bourke’s overall claim that communities are retrospective constructs. In his superbly crafted 2004 essay ‘When We Lived in Communities’, he evokes the sense of community he experienced himself, especially through the forceful street presence of strong-minded women, as a boy (born 1949) in working-class South Shields. Colls also repudiates Bourke’s argument that the working-class neighbourhood was (in his paraphrasing words) ‘essentially a
contracting society
, bidding for scarce commodities and resources’, a view he sees as part of the Thatcher-era turn against traditional class-and-community collective history in favour of the concerns of ‘a post-industrial, post-colonial, post-masculine, post-Christian world of fluid identities, ethnic diversities and global markets’. And he places much long-term emphasis on how, going back to the nineteenth century, the working class had built and then maintained ‘an entirely new civil society based on free association’, including involvement in a whole range of voluntary institutions.

Clearly there is no alternative but to go back to contemporary sources to try to resolve the matter. What, though, does ‘community’ – that ‘warmly persuasive word’, as Raymond Williams would call it in 1976 – actually mean? As early as 1955 a sociologist listed 94 major ways of defining a ‘community’. But here, on commonsensical rather than theoretical grounds, three criteria will suffice for consideration: the extent to which people living in the same locality did indeed engage in associational activity; the extent to which they positively identified with the place where they lived; and the extent to which relations between them were conducted on a basis of friendliness, trust and mutuality.
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Beyond the pub, the working-men’s club and, arguably, the football or rugby-league terrace and perhaps the bowling green, it is difficult – to judge by the sociological fieldwork of the day – to discern outside the workplace a particularly rich or thriving associational life in working-class Britain of the late 1940s and early 1950s, a Britain in which the coming of the welfare state had sharply reduced the need for collective forms of self-help such as the friendly societies.

‘The leisure time of Coseley people is predominantly spent in informal social activity within the family group,’ Doris Rich found in the Black Country, adding that apart from the pub and the club there was ‘no strongly felt need for more public facilities’. Mark W. Hodges and Cyril S. Smith, two social scientists studying a Sheffield housing estate built between the wars, reckoned that ‘for the most part more passive forms of entertainment preponderate’ and that ‘on the whole spare time is spent at the cinema, the public house, and the “dogs” ’; furthermore, ‘except for visits to the public house, there appears to be little evidence that the housewives take part regularly in social activities outside the home’. They also told the sad story of the estate’s community centre, defunct – like the garden guild and the tenants’ association – from lack of interest. Similarly, in the rundown St Ebbe’s district of Oxford, John Mogey found that only 10 per cent of his sample ‘actually said they had joined a voluntary society, or had become members of an informal group’, despite apparently ample opportunities – with Mogey ascribing ‘the loyalty of the normal person to the family hearth’ to ‘social insecurity’ in what most people believed to be ‘a hostile and dangerous world’. It was even starker in Liverpool’s ‘Ship Street’, where Madeline Kerr bluntly titled one of her sections ‘Lack of Associations’, noting that ‘the men have work associations but the women have nothing’.

Easily the fullest survey of associational life is the Derby one of 1953. Defining associational activity in terms of membership of clubs or societies, a full range of such activity was undeniably available in this medium-sized city: social clubs (including working-men’s clubs), fraternal orders (eg the Royal Ancient Order of Buffaloes), women’s clubs and institutes, youth clubs, old people’s clubs, Service and ex-Service associations, nationality clubs (eg the Welsh Society), sports clubs, recreational clubs, horticultural associations, hobbies clubs, film societies, dramatic societies, music and choral societies, art clubs, literary clubs, photographic societies, archaeological, historical and geographical associations, scientific societies, educational associations, religious and church clubs, business and professional clubs, political clubs, international associations (eg the United Nations Association) and welfare associations. ‘Subscriptions – where they exist at all – are generally so low as to present an obstacle to few people,’ noted the authors. ‘It is fair to say that most of this wide range of club activities is open to all who might wish to take part.’ The sample comprised 1,200 men and women aged between 16 and 69, and these were the key findings about the number of clubs or societies joined:

                           None              1           2       3 or more

                             %                 %         %            %

Men                      38                38         15             9

Women                 67                22           6             5

Middle-class          42                30         14           14

Working-class        58                29          9             4

Neither age nor marital status made much difference – certainly by comparison with both gender and class. Predictably, the survey also found that ‘the most popular type of club is the social club’, usually ‘for drinking purposes’, but there was no doubt about what were the two most striking revelations: namely, that 67 per cent of women (predominantly working-class women, given that the sample broadly reflected Derby’s strongly working-class character) belonged to no clubs or associations; and that 58 per cent of working-class people (men and women) likewise belonged to none.
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In short, the evidence is overwhelming that working-class associational life in Derby (a not atypical place) was at best patchy – and certainly not rich.

What about identity with place? ‘Coseley isn’t bad, I’m used to it,’ ‘Coseley is all right for them’s bred and born there,’ and (from a man who never went away on holiday) ‘Coseley is as healthy as anywhere else’ were some representative sentiments quoted by Rich, who reckoned that Coseley natives ‘had a very strong local patriotism’ – even though ‘those who had come to Coseley from elsewhere more often expressed the opinion that “it’s the last place on God’s earth” or “it needs an atom bomb” ’. It was much the same in Bethnal Green, or at least among the elderly who in about 1955 filled 11 coaches and went to Brighton for the day. ‘We’re from good old Bethnal Green,’ bystanders were told, as (in an observer’s words) ‘the 400 made their way, in slow-moving groups, to the end of the central pier’. Richard Hoggart, in his part-reminiscence, part-reportage of Hunslet in
The Uses of Literacy
(1957), asserted that the focus of loyalty was a much smaller ‘tribal area’, recalling how by the age of ten he and his Hunslet contemporaries knew ‘both the relative status of all the streets around us and where one part shaded into another’, so that ‘our gang fights were tribal fights, between streets or groups of streets’ – an experience very similar to Tomlinson’s in Liverpool. But loyalty could also be to a whole city, or even a region, according to Bill Lancaster’s powerful if debatable reading of Newcastle, where (for him) ‘Geordie’ identity has historically trumped class identity.

Could there be loyalty to a newly or recently built council estate? Almost certainly yes, or at least after a passage of time, with the Hodges/Smith Sheffield study arguing that ‘the feeling of “belongingness” which now exists’ on a particular (unnamed) estate had to a significant degree been fostered by hostile outsiders, in that ‘unfavourable opinions about the estate are widely held and expressed strongly enough for the residents to have no illusions about their reputation, whether they regard it as justified or not’. Even so, there is surely much truth in the point made by Alison Ravetz, partly on the basis of her study of the Quarry Hill ‘Model Estate’ in Leeds. ‘It is very important,’ she notes, ‘for people living respectably not to be identified either with the estate as an entity or with undesirable social elements within it.’ All the more important, she adds feelingly, when this attempt to live a decent life, ‘according to the norms of society’, is seemingly ‘knocked by exposés, or even by investigations that are moderate in tone but nevertheless treat the estate as a homogeneous entity’.
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One cannot avoid the role of sport. ‘It is a strange commentary on our modern way of life,’ grumbled the
Bolton Journal
in 1949, ‘that a football team like the Wanderers may do more to foster the sense of community in Bolton than does a governing body like the Town Council. We may regret this, but we scarcely deny it.’ Or take Newcastle United’s Cup triumph three years later, when it was not just that city’s people who got behind the Magpies but also (in accordance with Lancaster’s regional-identity thesis) the people of Sunderland, Hartlepool and, in the
Newcastle Journal
’s proud words, ‘the Northumberland farms and the Easington pits’. Crucially, most people still supported their local team, not a club several hundred miles away, a state of affairs that owed much to the equalising effect of almost non-existent television coverage and the continuing maximum wage for players. One should not exaggerate – small clubs like Aldershot continued to potter along in Third Division South – but at the start of a season it was mercifully impossible to forecast with near-certainty who would occupy the leading places of the First Division.

Whether at top or bottom, whether football or rugby, local pride was at stake, inevitably quickening and reinforcing attachment to the local. ‘Each game is an occasion on which a high proportion of Ashton’s males come together and participate in the efforts of Ashton to assert its superiority (through its representatives) over some other town (through their representatives),’ Dennis et al somewhat primly observed of Featherstone’s rugby-league team, while the Workington team’s homecoming after winning the Rugby League Challenge Cup at Wembley in 1952 epitomised an annual exultant northern ritual. ‘We travelled North by train and then went across country by coach from Scotch Corner,’ recalled one player. ‘And every village in Cumberland turned out to cheer us home. When we reached Workington you could hardly get near the Town Hall.’ Adrian Smith’s bittersweet 1994 essay, ‘An Oval Ball and a Broken City’, on the rise and fall of Coventry’s rugby-union club tells a larger truth (though perhaps not the only truth), informed by deep personal knowledge. ‘Individual areas acquired their own identities, but work and play still focused strongly on the city centre,’ he wrote about the Coventry that still existed in the 1950s. ‘Coventry people cultivated the belief that everyone still knew everybody else’s business. The city’s sportsmen, its eccentric personalities, and above all the evening paper, all acted as common points of reference. Individual families were known either for their sporting prowess, or for their notoriety. All families were proud of their city, and of their own particular localities.’
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