Working-Class Culture

at
also by CCCS and published by Hutchinson
Resistance through Rituals
On Ideology
Women Take Issue
Working-Class Culture
Studies in history and theory

Edited by
John Clarke, Chas Critcher and
Richard Johnson

Hutchinson
London Melbourne Sydney Auckland Johannesburg
in association with
the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
University of Birmingham
Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd
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First published 1979
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© J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson 1979
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Working class culture,
- -
1. Great Britain Social life and customs 19th century
2. Great Britain - Social life and customs 20th century
-
3. Labor and laboring classes Great Britain - History
I. Clarke, John, b. 1947 II. Critcher, Charles III. Johnson, Richard
IV. University of Birmingham. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
941 .081 DA560

ISBN 0 09 138220 3 cased

0 09 138221 1 paper
Contents

Preface 7

Part 1 Traditions and approaches

1 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class Chas O'i2'cher 13
2 Culture and the historians Richard Johnson 41

Part 2 Studies
3 'Really useful knowledge': radical education and working-class culture ,
1790-1848 Richard Johnson 75
4 Imperialism, nationalism and organized youth Michael Blanch 103
5 -
Daughters and mothers maids and mistresses: domestic service between
the wars Pam Taylor 121
6 Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-40 Paul Wild 140
7 Football since the war Chas Gitcher 161
8 Shop-floor culture, masculinity and the wage form Paul Willis 185

Part 3 Theories
9 Three problematics: elements of a theory of worldngclass culture
Richard Johnson 201
10 Capital and culture: the post-war working class revisited John Clarke 238

Notes and references 254

Index 291
Preface

This book has an unusual form- It has many authors but aims at a somewhat
greater unity than is usual in collections of this kind. It is best to begin by explaining
how this comes about .
The book was first planned, in collaboration with the Hutchinson Publishing
Group, as a collection of essays on working-class culture by members of the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It was to consist of work already produced or
currently in progress, with, perhaps, an initial 'overview' of the field. In planning
the volume, however, two facts became obvious. First, the Centre had produced
relatively little work that directly followed up one of its 'founding' texts - Richard
Hoggart's Uses of Literacy, second, 'workingclass culture' had itself become very
much more difficult to define both because of social changes since 1957 and
because of intense theoretical debate around the terms 'culture', 'consciousness'
and 'ideology'. There were relevant studies, however: some historical in manner,
some the product of a qualitative, observational sociology. Moreover, the impor-
tance of the project remained, not least because for the period of the modern
working class (in Britain from, say, 1850 or 1880) neither historical nor socio-
logical work was very developed. One consequence, then, is that most of the pieces
published here have been specially written for the collection. This is wholly the
case with the critical or 'theoretical' essays in Parts l and 3. Most of the case
studies in Part 2 existed in an earlier form, but all have been extensively rewritten.
All but one of the authors have worked at this Centre, and the work of Michael
Blanch, the exception, was already well known to the editors. It was possible ,
then, to plan a volume that was more than just a collection of essays, more than a
set of individual. contributions.
The resulting unity, however, remains much looser than in a single-authored,
consecutively written text. For reasons that are explored in the book, it would
be difficult to produce an adequate or definitive account of post-war worldng-class
culture, let alone a history of a longer duration. We emphasize, then, the 'studies'
-
of our title. These are a set of related explorations of a common field some pre-
dominantly critical and theoretical, some more substantive. In particular we have
not attempted to start from a common theoretical framework to be consistently
elaborated in each essay. We start, rather, from problems and seek to work through
them in different ways and on different materials. Thus the more theoretical essays
8 Preface

are largely critical and clariiicatory, not, until later in the book, prescriptive.
The first part of the book reviews some of the existing literature. It focuses on
two main traditions of writing about the working class: a tradition of empirical
sociology and a tradition of history. We have sought to understand these traditions
in their own historical time, as an expression, importantly, of the dilemmas of
certain groups of intellectuals faced with differing political possibilities and ex-
pectations. The first essay examines a cluster of works which belong to the same
'moment', the post-war debate about 'affluence' and its immediate aftermath.
It ends, deliberately short of some newer sociologies, with the revival of Marxist
analyses and the publication, in 1965 , of Towards Socialism. The second essay
looks at a different but related tradition of the historiography of the worldng
class and of popular histories more generally. It deals with the origins of social
and labour history from the 1880s onwards and with the new histories, distinctively
cultural in emphasis, of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It ends with some attempt
to define the dilemmas of history writing in the 1970s, noting the relative weakness
of studies of working-class culture for the post~l850 period, and the complexity of
the contemporary theoretical debate. Certain ways of working through these
difficulties are suggested, to be returned to later in the book.
Part 2 consists of a set of case studies. Though they do not share a common
theoretical position, they represent attempts to work through difficulties in the
process of research. In selecting or commissioning these pieces, we had two main
considerations in mind. First we wanted to span the whole period of the existence
of a working class in any identifiable sense, partly to correct the ahistorical character
of many of the sociological accounts. This long working-class history is a unique
feature of the British experience. We have, however, placed the emphasis on more
recent times: two of the studies deal with the period before World War I, two
with the period between the wars and two with post-World War II developments.
Similarly, we have tried to cover the most important spheres of worldng-class life.
Thus Richard Johnson's essay deals centrally with politics, political ideologies
and education, Michael Blanch's and Pam Taylor's with aspects of 'youth', Paul
Wild's and Chas Critcher's with recreational forms and their relation to capitalist
business, Pam Taylor's and Paul Willis's with waged and with domestic labour. It
has not been possible to be comprehensive - we would have liked to have said
more, for instance, about forms of the family and the cultural forms of sexuality.
though Pam Taylor's and Paul Willis's essays more than touch on these questions.
We would also have liked to include a major study of trade unionism as a cultural
and political form in some attempt to rethink the central topics of a labour history .
In general, however, we have deliberately sought a broad scope and wide coverage
rather than the more usual concentration on a particular theme OI' period.
In Part 3 we return to some of the dilemmas sketched in Part l . The first essay
of this part considers three main ways in which working-class culture may be
conceptualized: through the problematics of 'consciousness', 'culture' and 'ideology'.
Arguing that each of these paradigms bears the stamp of the moment of its
formation, we examine the strengths and weaknesses of each. We point to some
 Preface 9
elements for a more developed way of thinking about worldngclass culture,
appropriate to present conditions. In the concluding essay of the book, we provide
some pointers, based upon a theoretical reading of aspects of current research,
towards a history of the post-war worldng class.
We expect that the book will be used in different ways by different lands of
readers. But we have sought, in general, to break with or to reform a number of
separations of this kind' between 'past' and 'present', between 'history' and
'sociology', between the empirical and the theoretical, between the study of the
cultural and the not-cultural-at-all. In particular we have sought to make theoretical
discussion more aware of its own history and make historical (or 'concrete') studies
-
more aware of theoretical debts and dependencies. Hence our subtitle 'history'
and 'theory'.
We wish to thank Claire L'Enfant of Hutchinson for her sustained encourage-
ment of the project and her patience in the face of repeated delays, Linda Zuck,
her assistant, for help, among other things, with the cover, and Priscilla O'Reilly
for typing a very long manuscript with an accuracy that delighted the (inaccurate)
authors. We are grateful to Dave Batchelor, Mike O'Shaugnessey and Roger Shannon
for compiling the index with great speed and efficiency. We thank all our contri-
butors for putting up with unending suggestions for revisions. Particular debts are
acknowledged in particular studies, but we all owe a largerdebt to the Centre, and .
especially to its teaching and secretarial staff.
Acknowledgement

Although the editorial writing and work for this book has been a co-operative
venture, we would like to acknowledge the fact that an unequal burden has fallen
on Richard Johnson and to express our thanks for his efficiency and tolerance .
John Clarke
Chas Critcher

10
Part 1
Traditions and approaches
I
1 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-
war working class
Chas Pitcher

In trodueii on
There is no self-consciously interrelated tradition of sociological writing on worldng-
class culture. In a sense, we have to construct a genre of working-class cultural
studies. The following selective list, in which bracketed works are relevant but not
'sociological', indicates the possibility of this, and the types of work with which
this essay will deal. It is presented, for reasons that will become obvious, in chrono-
logical order,

1956 Dennis et al., Coal is Our Life

1957 Bott, Family and Social Network
Young and Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London
Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy
(1958 Williams, Culture and Society)
Titmuss, Essays on the Welfare State
1960 Abrams and Rose, Must Labour Lose?
Stacey, Tradition and Change
1961 Williams, The Long Revolution
Zweig, The British Worker in An Affluent Society
1962 Jackson and Marsden, Education and the Working Class
Titmuss, Income Distribution and Social Change
(1963 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class)
1965 Klein, Samples From English Cultures
(New Left Review, Towards Socialism)
1966 Frankenberg, Communities in Britain
Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice
1967 Douglas, The Home and the School
1968 Goldthorpe and Lockwood, The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure
Jackson, Working Class Community
McKenzie and Silver, Angels in Marble
1970 Coates and Silburn,Poverty: The Forgotten Englishmen
1971 (Roberts, The Classic Slum)
Parlor, Class Inequality and Political Order
14 Traditions and approaches

Most of these studies have in common a concern with the effects of social change
on the worldng class. The passivity of the class is a key feature: the sociologies
present people to whom things happen. There is little sense of the working class as
an agent of change or even as a conservative force. The approach is through policy or
through the social problems with which policy should deal. One associated tendency
is to fragment a broader social pattern, to present a thin, abstracted element of
worldng-class life, often dissociated from what determines it. These concerns are
not merely the conclusions of such studies, they also form the initial impetus. An
example may illustrate. Young and Wilmott's study of Bethnal Green is often taken
tube the classic study of a worldng-class community. In fact, it is nothing of the
sort. It is par excellence an example of how to appropriate working-class culture in
terms of a discrete sociological variable: in this case, the family. Jackson and
Marsden are later to adopt this 'variable' approach for education, and Titmuss's
concern throughout the 1950s and 1960s is with the twin variables of income and
welfare. The immediate project of these texts, then, reflects the empirical problem-
oriented and atheoretical stance of British sociology, and its increasing post-war
connection with public policy and it is only within this perspective that the situation
of the worldng class is examined. Thus Young and Wilmott manage just twelve
pages on the local economy of Bethnal Green: it is for them only important in so
far as it 'affects' the nature of the family. The whole problem of redevelopment is
not interpreted in terms of housing and job markets, much less the complex inter-
relationships between them which shape the changing face of Britain's cities. We
are thus presented with a conclusion which, for all its liberal humaneness, is accept-
ing a doubly limited definition, both of the nature of a working-class neighbourhood
(seen through the family) and of the process of redevelopment (ignoring the struc-
tural determinants of redevelopment policies). The planners are blamed for their
destruction of 'community spirit', but we have no sense of the reasons for this
real transformation, save the 'physical size of reconstruction' and the planners'
oversights.1 *
One feature of this orientation is to divert political and theoretical questions
into policy recommendations, through defining a particular aspect of working-
class life as problematic. Hoggart, untypical in other ways, is concerned to identify
the undermining of traditional working-class values by the influence of the mass
media; Titmuss with the persistence of structural inequality, Jackson with the
tendency for education to act as a channel of improvement for individuals rather
than the class as a whole; Runciman with the quietism of the deprived, Abrams and
Rose with the erosion of Labour support. Thompson and Williams are the
exceptions which prove the rule: it may be significant that they are most outside
the British sociological tradition. Generally we can identify a whole list of 'prob-
lems' about the working class, its vulnerability to cultural penetration, the failure
of the welfare state to alter its position of economic and educational disadvantage ,
its apparent political and cultural identification with the status quo .
Attention to these problems always operates on two levels: the writers argue
* Notes to each chapter appear in a section beginning on page 254 .
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 15

with dominant definitions of post-war change and make prescriptions in relation

to the programme of the Labour Party. The crisis to which these texts belong is
essentially that of a group of social-democratic intellectuals faced with the con-
tention that capitalism works. We need to look more closely at the context of these
arguments.
The notion of capitalist success was based on a limited but powerful reading of
post-war capitalist societies, especially of America and Britain. The era of 'high
mass consumption' was held to have produced the 'affluent society', the existence
and the very idea of a worldng class was held to have become dated in a society
of an overwhelmingly middle-class character. As Goldthorpe and Lockwood have
argued, three lands of propositions underwrote the twin theses of the affluent
society and the working class rendered bourgeois. Firstly, the economic propo sitions
emphasized the convergence of incomes and the spread of the ownership of con-
sumer durables throughout the society. Secondly, technological and managerial
changes were alleged to have inverted the traditional working-class situation of
heavy manual work and low wages: the trend was towards white or blue collar
jobs. Thirdly, changes in the structure of urban ecology were leading to the decline
of the traditional 'urban village' with its restricted geographical mobility and
limited cultural horizons. The authors go on to note that these propositions were
not challenged in themselves. Their eidstence was conceded, but their significance
debated :
The argument between the two camps in some part concerns the rate and extent
of such changes. But, essentially, it is about the ways in which the changes in
question are being experienced and given meaning by the individuals and groups
upon whom they impinge and, consequently, about the nature of the latter's
responses. The debate is one that centrex not on questions of income standards
of living, conditions of work or patterns of residence but on questions of social
value, social relationships and social consciousness

This may stand as something of an epitaph for working-class cultural studies (and
it makes all the more remarkable Goldthorpe and Lockwood's insistence on com-
pounding the error). It is part of the purpose of this book to restore to the centre
of the debate the relation between such changes in material life and the forms of
working-class consciousness and culture .
The whole affluenceerribourgeoisement thesis seems wilfully misconceived
when viewed from the 1970s with its manifest conflicts. But the debate had a
contemporary rationality: there were important changes in the nature of British
society in the post-war period, the proper significance of which has never been
-
adequately assessed. Mr Gaitskell's list 'the changing character of labour, full
employment, new housing, the way of life based on the telly, the fridge and the
motor-car and the glossy magazines - have all affected our strength'3 - did point
to something real. Changes were often misrepresented, but they were real enough )

especially in comparison with the immediate past. The comparison with society
before the war not only gave empirical verification for the apostles of progress,
16 Traditions and approaches

it was also a lived experience of improvement for a whole generation of worldng

people. A situation of full employment, whatever inequalities persisted, was emf»
n e r t y preferable to mass unemployment, the extension of 'welfare', however
skeletal, promised some right to security compared with the degradations of pre-
war poor relief (even if the means test remained at the heart of the system); the
pulling-down of slums and the substitution of houses with decent living space and
bathrooms was a measure of improvement even if rents began to spiral and new
estates seemed 'unfriendly', the ownership of a car, a fridge and vacuum cleaner
provided partial relief from domestic drudgery and access to new enjoyments,
even though each one would need replacing almost before it was paid for.
The sense ot" change had a real material basis. Later in this book we shall attempt
to sketch some of the transformations involved. The elements of improvement
were partial and uneven and always affected sections of the class (split by age and
sex as well as region) somewhat differently. But social democratic politicians and
ihtellectuals were often paralysed by the apparent transformation of the capitalist
demon. As Patrick Gordon-Walker put it 'the Tories identified themselves with the
new working classes rather better than we did'.4 The response was often to abandon
socialist terminology and join the chorus pronouncing the end of capitalism, referring,
like Crosland, to 'present-day, as opposed to capitalist society'.5 Underlying this
dilemma, however, was the inability to conceptualize class or capitalism except in
terms provided by the experience of inter-war life. If capitalism was synonymous
with rampant profiteering, mass unemployment, international crises, and a world
of war, fear and fascism, had not capitalism disappeared when the state controlled
the economy, the economy was expanding, there was a shortage of labour and the
main 'threat to world peace' came from a 'communist' power? The political theory
of social democracy could not break through these ideas, nor could the students of
worldng-class culture conceive of a working class without the extended family,
back~to-backs, or mild beer. Both kinds of thought were profoundly empiricist
and oblivious to their own historical specificity: they sought to explain only that
which was immediately observable against some stereotypical past .
It is only an apparent paradox that the serious study of" working-class culture
should emerge just at the moment when it was being loudly proclaimed that the
working class had ceased to exist. The discovery of working class culture was a
response to this argument. The timing and many of the features of the genre can
be explained in these terms. The studies typically took the form of finding out
who the worldng classes were, where they lived, and what was happening to them
-
and their way of life an investigation uninformed by any theoretical discussion.
They concentrated first on the nature of traditional working-class life (Dennis
et al., Hoggart and Wilmott): then on changes in life-style and attitudes (Abrams,
Zweig, Jackson and Marsden), returned hesitantly to problems of inequality (Runci-
man, Titmuss, Douglas), and commenced, somewhat gingerly, an encounter with
theory (most evident in Goldthorpe and, in a different vein altogether, in Williams).
There are of course other ways of reading this pattern. It has partly to do with the
emergence of a whole generation of scholarship boys and girls whose relationship
 Sociology, cultural szudies and the post-war working class 17

to the working class and the Labour Party was crucial to their own identity. These
books could also be read as a logical outcome of the development of social science.
Though it is true that all these works were produced from within higher education,
this explanation does not account for the form of social inquiry, very different
from that on the continent or in the U S A. Neither would it explain the fact that
these works are, sometimes quite self-consciously, related to a tradition of social
investigation going back to Edwardian and Victorian times, which predated depart-
ments of sociology. Indeed the lands of connections which can be made with this
tradition are revealing in themselves, most obviously that in both cases the exami-
nation of the lives of the working class depends for its impetus on defining them as
a problem. If the problem is no longer that of the deviant urban dangerous classes,
but that of conventionalized suburban quietist citizens, that alters the nature of
the problem, but does not diminish the distortion such a perspective may imply.
We have argued at length, then, that the 'genre' of worldng-class studies does not
exist of itself, indeed, these books are frequently written without reference to each
other. Nevertheless , we have sought to identify common elements which bind them
together. These precisely do not eidst at the levels of theory and methodology; as
we shall see, the first is almost universally absent, and the second only present in an
implicit form. Rather the common focus is the crisis in British social democratic
thought in the post-war period, occasioned by changes at the level of appearance
in working~class cultural formations. Our next step is to examine critically the
genre through some of its main texts. This involves us in an assessment of their
relative significance. In selecting texts for closer study, we have chosen works that
come nearest to representing worldng-class culture as a whole .

'The Uses of Literacy'

the Uses o f Literaey was published in 1957. In the following year it went into
paperback and was reprinted four times in the next seven years. Widely reviewed >
it soon appeared on more 'progressive' syllabuses in institutions of higher education .
It seemed to have special resonance among left-wing intellectuals in and around
the Labour Party. It offered not only affirmation of their own experience as
scholarship boys and girls ambivalent about the class they had left, but also a
wholly new kind of critique of capitalism. If 'affluence' had made it more
difficult to criticize contemporary capitalism as an economic system, Hoggart's
work opened up the question of the quality of cultural life. The price of material
progress seemed to be a new land of cultural exploitation. This analysis, and the
political programme inherent in it, becomes most explicit in Hoggart's concluding
appeal to the worldng-class movement. Different in land and tone from Young and
Wilmott's exhortations over redevelopment policy, it nevertheless shares the attempt
to rewrite the agenda of the social democratic left: 'If the active minority continue to
allow themselves too exclusively to think of immediate political and economic objec-
tives, the past will be sold, culturally, behind their backs,'6We can get from Hoggart's
opening formulation how such a position evolves from his immediate concerns:
18 Traditions and approaches

It is often said that there are no working-classes in England now, that a 'bloodless
revolution' has taken place, which has so reduced social differences that already
most of us inhabit a n almost fiat plain, the plain of the lower middle- to middle-
such a statement, within its proper contexts, and do

'In
classes. I can see the truth
not wish to under-estimate the extent or the value of many recent social changes.
To appreciate afresh the scope of these changes as they affect working-class people
in particular, we need only read again a social survey or a few novels from, say, the
turn of the century. We are likely to be struck by the extent to which working-class
people have improved their lot, acquired more power and more possessions, we are
likely to be even more impressed by the degree to which they no longer feel them-
selves members of 'the lower orders' with a sense of other classes, each above them
and each superior in the way the world judges. Some of this remains, but it has been
greatly reduced .
In spite of these changes, attitudes alter more slowly than we always realize,
as the first half of this book seeks to show. Attitudes alter slowly, but obviously a
great number of complex forces are bringing about changes here too: the second
half of the book discusses some ways in which a change towards a culturally 'class-
less' society, is being brought about.7
Such a passage can be analysed in different ways. Hoggart's subjective sense of
- -
historical evidence a few novels, a social survey is, for example, scarcely rigorous.
More relevant, perhaps, is the defensiveness of the statement, anxious to concede
the reality of change, not wishing to appear reactionary. It becomes an attempt to
invert the optimism of the 'atltluence' position from within, the validity of the
thesis is not questioned, only the assumption that its outcomes cannot but be good .
The response to social change is not to assess it against a specific theoretical t`rame~
work, but to shift the level of analysis from the quantitative to the qualitative,
from the structural to the cultural. The result is Hoggart's essential thesis: 'the
replacement of an urban culture "of the people" ' by a 'less healthy' new 'mass
culture'.8 'Mass culture' here is significant. Hoggart is offering a qualified and
-
detailed version of a debate mainly but not exclusively American in source - which
held that the most significant social change had been the triumph of a new way of
- -
life that of 'mass' society which produces its own 'mass' culture. Homogeneous,
commercialized and institutionalized, the new 'mass' culture was held to supersede
the previous cultural differentiations of elites, classes and ethnic groups.9 Hoggart
seeks to identify this cultural 'classification' not as an achieved state, but as a con-
temporary process, which it is the purpose of the book to reveal.
The argument draws on another influence, closer to home. The school of literary
criticism advanced by F.R. Leavis, and in more aristocratic mode the social and
cultural writings of T.S. Eliot, had both based a resistance to dominant cultural
trends, which they saw as those of vulgarization, simplification and commercializa-
tion, on a contrast with a (largely mythical) folk culture which the common people
-
had enjoyed at some undefined time in the past.10 Hoggart was yet again - to
invert a received wisdom, by insisting, here, that the folk culture was in fact urban ,
worldng class and contemporary.
Hoggart's work, then can only be understood within the twin contexts of the
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 19

wide-sweeping pseudo-sociological generalizations of the mass-culture theorists, and

the essentially empirical, elitist and moralistic cultural criticism of the English
literati. Two false starts are generally sufficient for a disqualification, so it must be
some cause for congratulation that Hoggart ever finished the course at all. For some
of the obstacles he had to surmount, these traditions were to prove nothing but a
dead weight .
Take, for example, the problem of defining the 'working classes'. This is a
theoretical problem, it is not resolvable within Hoggart's method. The nearest we get
to a specific definition is a list of the lands of places where worldng-class people live.
A similar circularity runs through the whole book: the worldng classes are those
who share working-class culture _
It is also early in his first chapter that Hoggart seeks to justify his under-
representation of what he calls the 'active minority' of socialist and labour
organizers. His argument here is that the mainstream working class remain untouched
by their activities and that it is with this majority experience that he wishes to
engage. However, as Sparks abrasively points out," the cumulative effect of this
standpoint is that we are offered a portrait of the worldng class which omits, not
only the Communist and Labour parties, but any encounter with the experience of
work and the collective trade-union forms of organization which still depend on
large-scale support amongst the work-force for their very existence. To have elimi-
nated all that, Sparks argues, is to have done more than omit some perhaps discrete
arena of untypical activity: it is to suppress the definite if difficult relationship
between experience, ideology and organization which stands at the heart of worldng-
class history. It is hard not to agree with such a trenchant criticism.
These are serious deficiencies, yet there is much to appreciate as well. The
central and unique achievement of the book is - to reduce it in the formulation -
one of method. Here is his famous statement of how to approach working-class
language :
we have to try to see beyond the habits to what the habits stand for, to see through
the statements to what the statements really mean (which may be the opposite of
the statements themselves), to detect the differing pressures of emotion behind
idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.13

The combination of this kind of understanding with Hoggart's own biography

delivers us (in the first third of the book) the unique portrait of worldng-class
culture. More is conveyed here than the mere listing of worldng-class cultural
-
forms speech and aphorisms, families and neighbourhoods, clubs and pubs. What is
revealed is the network of shared cultural meanings which sustains relationships
between different facets of the culture, more complex in its structure than could
ever be recognized by any sociologist attempting to penetrate the thickets of
working-class life, his path but dimly lit, if not obscured, by the concept of 'value
system'.
Yet the ambiguities remain. Assessment is difficult: we cannot accept the
detailed portrait yet reject the inadequate sense of social theory or history, because
 ,

20 Tradition and approaches

both are inextricably intertwined. Hence, when at his strongest, Hoggart is also at
his weakest: in his genera] typification, for example, of 'the essence of working-class
}ife', a 'dense and concrete life' - stressing 'the intimate, the sensory, the detailed,
and the personal', like the conversation of groups of girls in a factory - the product
of the urge to make life intensely human, to humanize it in spite of everything.14
Communicated here is a sense of cultural struggle. The mode of recognition is to
observe working-class activities, trace their interconnectedness and frame them
within the fixed horizons of everyday life. Yet against this patient and humane
and consistent openness, we have to balance the closure of more theoretical and
political questions. The resistance to abstraction is noted, but not its implications -
the impossibility (presumably?) of ever asldng worldng-class people to base political
action on a more general understanding of society. Elsewhere the 'us/them' dicho-
tomy is not explored for its intolerance of cultural deviance. Moreover the historical
specificity of this worldng-class culture is ignored, in' favour of universal statements
about the wortdng class at any time or place. The historically specific cultural
characteristics of the inter-war worldng class is hypostasized into an eternal worldng-
class Weltanschauung.
The fragilities of the method are revealed, especially, in the later sections on more
recent developments. 'Juke box boys' do not have their own life-style, nor are the
determinants of how they live traced with any care. The easy rhetoric of the mass
society perspective tends to take over: 'modernistic knick-knacks', 'glaring showi»
ness', 'aesthetic breakdown', 'thin and pallid form ot" dissipation', a 'sort of spiritual
dry-rot'.15
Yet for all this the book is not to be dismissed as a historical hangover or as the
debris of a less theoretical age. Hoggart revealed the paucity of what passed then-
and now - for sociological method. His extension of analysis into the cultural,
portraying class as an external and internal mode of definition, hastened the
realization that 'embourgeoisement' was no accurate description of change but an
attempt to impose an interpretation on much more ambiguous materials. It was not
only the homely television personality who was trying to 'unbend the springs of
action', sociologists and social commentators were performing the same sleight of
hand - if before smaller audiences. It may well be that, as Sparks argues, the book
tended to steer attention towards some of the more conservative aspects of worldng-
class culture, emphasizing the need for cultural conservation rather than radical
change. The book certainly stresses the reproductive and recreational spheres at
the expense of the male world of work and the world of politics, partly, perhaps,
because it is based on a childhood vision. More positively, it corrected the tendency
to reduce the denseness of worldng-class culture to simple categories - places on
attitude scales or unified value systems or, scarcely more complex, forms of 'false
consciousness'. In its emphasis on culture as the reception and recreation of shared
meanings, the book transcends its own implicit theory by demonstrating the nature
of cultural struggle as a specific and dynamic process, rather than an eternally
sedimented relationship .
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 21

'Coal is Our Life'

It is sometimes alleged that the study of working-class culture has been dominated
by the genre of 'community studies', which has provided a detailed if microcosmic
portrait of worldng-class life. This tradition evaporates, however, if one tries to get
closer to it than a rather vague bibliography. Frankenberg's analysis, Communities
in Britain, for example, published in 1966, convincingly argues that the common
element amongst most of these studies is their involvement with self-contained
communities of less than 50,000 people. Though most pay considerable attention
to 'class', there is little interest in conceptions of national class cultures, which are
precluded from the analysis. If, alternatively, one looks at the work of the Institute
of Community Studies, it becomes apparent how different the pieces of research
are. Though loosely held together by an empirical focus on the worldng class, any
sense of an overall totality is soon fragmented into the consideration of variables:
old age, education, the family. This is not to dismiss such work out of hand, it is
merely to suggest that it is better understood as a genre by stressing its (Fabian)
commitment to issues of social policy, rather than its concern with worldng-class
culture. If this were not so, then Jackson's rather eclectic and impressionistic study ,
Working Class Community, would not seem so unique a contribution from this
stable. This brief attempt to dismantle the myth about the existence of a 'working-
class community studies' genre enables us to concentrate on one of the few examples
of work which does attempt to approach the problem of worldng-class culture
through the examination of a community. Coal is Our Life, a study of a Yorkshire
mining community, was published in 1956. The more immediate focus of the
work is on an early version of the embourgeoisement theses as applied to miners:
In his everyday work the miner has seen great improvement in the physical con-
ditions of l a b o r ; the reward for his labour has been comparatively great since
1939, mining offers complete security of employment in the West Yorkshire and
most other coalfields. Nationalisation, a long standing aim of the miners, has been
achieved. The prestige of the miner in the working class is higher than it has ever
been, and the miner knows this. Does all this mean that the miner has experienced
a basic change in his status and role in society, a change which goes with a trans-
formation of the relation between the miner and his work? In fact no such basic
change has occurred. In the first place the actual changes have been absorbed into
the miners' traditional ideology rather than transformed it. Secondly, changes
within the mining industry, and the quantitative improvement of the miners'
position in relation to other workers, have been unaccompanied by any profound
modifications in the general economic framework of which mining is part, or of
the social structure within which miners exist."

The level at which this problem is to be assessed is very different from any we have
previously encountered. It is not the nature of family life or the decline in the
quality of leisure activity which is to the fore. Rather, the insistence is on the
structural context, and the ideology which explains the group's situation within it .
The simultaneous management of the analysis at these two levels enables the authors
22 Traditions and approaches

to achieve what Hoggart could not: the immediate and concrete expressions of the
class may be seen as representations of the structural situation. The miner may
not think of wage labour or class consciousness as abstract categories, but he knows
who pays his wages and what they get out of it, and hence sees that they are not on
his side: 'he sees and remarks in the main the outward signs of the fundamental
relations'.17 Coal is Our Life is firmly distinguished by these two characteristics :
that the answers to naively empirical questions are sought at a theoretical level,
and that the intimate details of the mining cornmunity's life are explained as
reactions to, and interactions with, a specific form of wage labour. It should be
understood that these considerations are not substituted for empirical data, but
provide the framework for its collection and interpretation.
Unfortunately the book is very unselfconscious in its approach to methodology.
References scattered throughout the text stress the attempt to emulate the approach
of social anthropology, but there is no systematic explanation of how the authors
were introduced into the community, whom they met and where, what questions
they asked and why, or how they came to select and structure their data. It is
-
obvious from the text that their four main points of focus work, trade unions,
leisure and family life - must have been penetrated to a considerable degree to have
yielded such a richness of data: the details of contract, team, day-wages and piece-
work, the ambiguous role of local union officials in a nationalized industry, the
commitments to gambling, rugby and sex (not necessarily in that order), the
complicated pattern of finances within the family. We may trust the data because
of its richness, but qualitative sociology of this kind requires a self-consciousness
of method if it is to be properly assessed.
Two examples must suffice to illustrate the practical merits of the approach.
The first concerns the attitudes of miners towards the spending of money in their
leisure time :
Having had his standard of living fixed in the low-wage days of his youth the
highly-paid contract-worker therefore regards much of his wages as 'free income'
in the sense that nothing has a very firm claim on it. He therefore feels free to
spend it on the traditional pleasures of Ashton, in the clubs, in the pubs, and in
the bookie's office. And he feels free to refrain from earning it at all - in other
words, to absent himself from work . . . . 18

Drinking, gambling and absenteeism are not seen here as evidence of moral irres-
ponsibility, as functions of the social system, or diversions from the revolutionary
goal. The analysis traces instead the attitude towards extra money determined by
previous use of it, the possibility that at any moment it may disappear, and the
choice sometimes made for time off rather than labour for extra money. This is
situated firstly in the special ease of the mining industry, and secondly within the
experience of the working class as a whole. While this may not indeed explain
different forms of gambling across various social groups, the particular cultural
activities of the Ashton miner are recognized as having an internal logic within the
illogicality of external forces .
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working-class 23

The second example concerns the other side of this male-dominated world of
leisure. Home is the woman's sphere, and nowhere more rigidly than in such mining
communities .
Here in the Ashton family is a system of relationships torn by a major contradiction
at its heart, husband and wife live separate, and in a sense, secret lives.
It is not merely a question, however, of a peaceful coexistence of roles and spheres:
Not only this but the nature of the alloted spheres places women in a position
which although theyaccept it, is more demanding and smacks of inferiority . . . .
the tensions always exist as a social fact by virtue of the social structures of which
.
all husbands and wives are part . . . The row is the conventional way of expressing
the conflict . . . .19

This passage is not only remarkable for having been written over ten years before
the advent of the modem feminist movement. It is also an implicit demonstration
of the impossibility of analysing any one facet of working-class culture - any
sociological 'variable' - without a knowledge of the economic and social context.
The observation is made that husband/wife relationships in Ashton are character-
ized by conflict. This is attributed to the miner's attempt to overdevelop a sense
of masculinity encouraged by his working situation. The woman is powerless ;
bereft of psychological support, and economically dependent, she faces disapproval
and destitution if she leaves. The rows in Ashton families are not symptoms of
social pathology, but evidence of the inflexibility of the basic social institution of
the family, exacerbated by the particular structural conditions and ideology of the
mining community. The situation is at one and the same time individual, communal
and societal, both psychological and economic. Worldng-class culture is seen as
generating values and behavior within a larger context it only marginally affects.
Such an analysis brings us up against important theoretical questions: the
origins of chauvinist ideology and its role in the labour movement, the relation-
ship between family structure and economic system, the problems and possibilities
of bringing about change. Coal is Our Life was not designed to answer these
questions and is limited, in this respect, by its focus on a community. lt is signifi-
cant that Fernando Henriques, in his introduction to the second edition (1969),
should be at pains to emphasize the limitations of community studies. Using the
example of strikes and family relationships he shows the need tor an analysis at
'higher levels of social interaction than that of comlnunity'. The relevant insti-
tutions and ideologies in the communities themselves actually partake of a broader ,
national, set of apparatuses or ideological fields.
In practice, however, the community studies genre, even its 'good side', has
been, as Henriques pointed out, little developed, Part of the reason here lies in aca-
demic specialisms: the growth of urban and regional studies as an academic sub-
discipline, hived off in separate institutions, often with a very close relation to
bureaucratic pay-masters. The main context for the mobilization of the concept
of 'community' has paradoxically been areas where 'community' can least be said
24 Traditions and approaches

to exist but where 'social problems' are seen to be most concentrated: especially
inner city areas of high immigration and the evident absence of a coherent class
culture. The politically absorbed Community Development Projects and Rex and
Moore's famous study of Sparkbrook, Race, Community and Conflict (Oxford
University Press, 1967), are examples of this very paradoxical form.
More generally, it could be said that the growth of home ownership, of com-
muting to work and of geographical mobility have made the concept of community
everywhere more problematic, even supposing it could be detached from its clearly
ideological uses. The communities, it could be said, have actually been destroyed as
geographical and cultural entities. While not doubting that there have been real
transformations, we remain unconvinced. Such areas exist, even in such an unlikely
city as Birmingham, here a settlement of owner-occupiers around a car factory ,
there a massive post-war housing estate. And even if we abandon the notion of
'community', the kind of study represented by Coal is Our Life, broadened and
contextualized on the lines of Henriques's auto-critique, is absolutely indispensable
for tracing the relation between national (and inter-national) movements of capital
and the lived experiences of the effects of these and other processes in the localities.

'Povertyz The Forgotten Englishmen'

The strongest single influence that undercut the affluence thesis was the 'rediscovery
of poverty'. A cluster of studies in the mid sixties emanated from welfare researchers
aiming to restore the question of poverty to the social democratic agenda. The poor,
it was demonstrated, had not vanished; inequality had not diminished. Indeed, if
a general rise in living standards was taken into account, the 'affluent' society had
relatively more poor members and was characterized by greater differences of
income and wealth between particular social groups. Titrnuss, in Income and Social
Change (1962), prepared the ground by revealing the dubiousness of the statistical
basis on which some proponents of affluence had built their arguments. With revised
data and methods, Abel-Smith and Townsend estimated that.as many as one-sixth
of the inhabitants of booming Britain were living in poverty. If some had never had
it so good, some had never had it at all. The importance of such texts should not
be underestimated, and were we concerned more directly with social policy they
would occupy a central place in our discussion. Our brief, however, is to con-
centrate on the relationship between structural inequalities and working-class
consciousness. Though the texts mentioned performed an invaluable task in re-
drawing attention to the former, they were interested only minimally, if at all,
in the latter.
For a text which reveals these connections we have chosen Coates and Silburn's
study of the St Ann's area of Nottingham, published in 1970 under the title Poverty:
The Forgotten Englishmen. They begin - as do with remarkable regularity most of
the texts cited in this section - by discussing how the 'affluence myth' had reduced
'the age-old malaise of poverty' to 'a slight social hang-over'.20 They lay the failure
to challenge this myth at the door of two particular groups: social investigators in
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 25

the tradition represented by Seebohm Rowntree and G.R. Lavers, who, in the 1951
study of York, confirmed the belief in the virtual disappearance of the poor, and
social workers who, instead of being lobbyists for the poor, retreated into their
own mythical world of case-work.
These evasions contributed to official interpretations of the poverty problem
as a series of unconnected deficiencies in public provision. The arbitrarily exclusive
concerns of particular government departments were allowed to determine the pro-
grammes of research and action. Entirely separate strategies were evolved for
housing, education and welfare benefits. Hence there were both political and
intellectual reasons for embarking on the study of a neighbourhoOd in which
the interconnectedness of the various forms of poverty could be examined, especially
an area like St Ann's - 'a typical late Victorian, worldng-class, city centre neighbour-
hood in acute decline', where it could be shown 'how all the different types of
deprivation mesh one into another'.
The objectives of the study are clear, as is the political and intellectual argument
into which it is to be inserted. Perhaps these are some of the advantages of Poverty
having been written later than most of the other texts, under less direct pressure
from the affluence thesis. The book is also clearer at the level of method. Though
it does depend, like Coal is Our Life, on an intimate knowledge of the area and an
empathy with its inhabitants, there is also some more structured data. Two samples
of 200 inhabitants were interviewed by members of a local WEA class and under-
graduates from Nottingham University, using a lengthy questionnaire (not repro-
duced in the text) designed to elicit statistical data (family size, income, housing
conditions) and more subjective feelings about the neighbourhood and society
outside it. Equally important is a descriptive sensitivity which, importantly, allows
us to grasp both the uniqueness of the neighborhood and its similarity to areas in
any large industrial city. Physically, St Ann's is threatened with 'comprehensive
demolition'. General amenities are 'at the most rudimentary level'. Children
endanger themselves playing in derelict sites. The buildings are dingy, the schools
old, the second-hand shops full of shabby goods.
Greater familiarity with the district prompts other judgements, more difficult to
sustain by physical evidence: to those of us who have come to know it and to feel
involved in its life, St. Ann's is an area dominated by a certain hopelessness, in
which the sense that things are inexorably running down weighs constantly on every
decision, and inhibits many positive responses to make or mend. And yet its people
have, somehow, shaped out of this unpromising environment a way of living full of
wit and humanity.21

Such an approach is vulnerable to criticism, especially from the hard-headed. It may

'be dismissed as typical of those community studies which Ruth Glass has described
as 'the poor sociologist's substitute for a novel'. Yet if one accepts Coates and
Silburn's initial premise that 'the moral consequences of poverty in an advanced
society are far more dire than its physical results',22 an open and honest exposure to
the perceptions and experiences of others may be more useful than attitude scales.
26 Traditions-and approaches

A continuing theme of the book is the tracing of the relationship between struc-
tural deprivation and neighbourhood culture. The book's middle section treats in
turn income, housing, education and culture. The analysis of the first three reminds
us that for not insubstantial sectors of the working class the new houses, consumer
goods and high incomes supposed to have been bequeathed them by the economic
miracle of post-war British capitalism remained unfulfilled aspirations: 91 per cent
of the St Ann's sample had an outside lavatory, 85 per cent no bathroom and 54.5
per cent no hot water system. Using a similar method to that of Abel-Smith and
Townsend, the researchers found 37 per cent of households or 40 per cent of the
sample population to 'be in poverty, respectively over twice and nearly three times
the national averages.
It is a frequent response to see the poor as a category outside the worldng class,
divorced from the productive process and consequently thought of as the 'lumpen
proletariat', part of the 'reserve army of l a b o r ' . Though such concepts may have
some validity, they need to be used with caution. Coates and Silburn relate the
category of the poor to that of the working class as a whole in two ways. Firstly,
they demonstrate that, while 15 per cent of the poor in St Ann's are pensioners
and a similar proportion unemployed, one-half have at least one breadwinner.
Though partly attributable to the sex composition of Nottingham, where unusually
high numbers of working women have tended to depress wages, there still exists
the possibility of generalizing their conclusion: 'it suffices to say that the most
important single cause of poverty is not indolence, nor fecundity, nor sickness, nor
villainy of any kind, but is, quite simply, low wages'.23
The second way in which the experience of the poor can be related to the class
as a whole is touched upon in their review of previous work. The poor are not a
fixed category: poverty is often a transient state, individuals and families moving in
and out as responsibilities increase or circumstances change.24 The implication of
-
this a substantial one for any analysis of working-class culture - is that the exper-
ience of poverty has not been eliminated as a common feature of the class. If we add
to this the vulnerability of the old on inadequate pensions and, as the 1970s
have shown, the return to large-scale unemployment, in this case especially of the
young, the persistent insecurities of workingclass life, now, can be properly grasped.
Poverty has also to be recognized as an impediment to the development of
adequate forms of cultural resistance. The daily experience of poverty can be
thoroughly debilitating, tending to atomize and intimidate rather than produce
collective action. The established picture of 'working-class community" is not
relevant to St Ann's. Even networks of informal social relationships were relatively
wealdy developed there.25
Chapter 7 on 'A culture of poverty' poses a series of questions about the
ideological significance of neighborhood culture :

To what extent do St Ann's residents accept the value-system which has grown up as
a function of the received economic structure? How do they regard working as
employees, as wage-slaves, as inevitable? How far do they see the given distribution
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 27

of income within society as 'natural'? How far do they see the power structure
under which they live as 'norma1"?26

The questions are certainly directly put, whether they are correctly put is another
matter. In attempting to answer them Coates and Silburn draw on quite orthodox
Marxist-Leninist categories, especially on Marx's 'commodity fetishism' and on the
notion of 'false consciousness They have little sense of the reciprocity of ideolo-
gical and cultural processes, a ground we will explore later in this book. Perhaps
because the question is so crudely put, the manner of answering it can be equally
mechanical: through individualized questionnaires to elicit, for example, the
percentage of respondents advocating equality of incomes or a minimum wage.
Perhaps they are also driven to this method by the absence of any institutionalized
cultural forms, symbolically expressing and carrying values and ideals. Evidence of
key elements of a culture may indeed be difficult to find where deprivation is
common but responses fragmented. Economic and political powerlessness extends
to cultural resources.
In their final section Coates and Silburn move on to questions of welfare policy
and strategy beyond our brief. Two points seem in order to conclude, both related
to the relevance of St Ann's for more contemporary analysis. The first is that the
fragmentation of neighborhood culture - its internal tensions and hostility to
-
outsiders, its appropriation of public issues as private troubles does not represent
the absence of culture, the random expressions of individual tempera rents. Rather,
what we have is evidence of a working~class culture stripped of its formal institutions
and informal networks, reliant on its reflexes, directing its hostility against those of
its own members who do not conform to values imposed from the outside: blacks,
the work-shy, problem families. It is not a negation of the latent radicalism of
working-class culture, it is a revelation of those tendencies that hold it back, and
even threaten to invert it. Fragmentation is the hidden face of working-class culture ,
which can don the mask of fascism, as tacit support for the National Front in
the 1970s showed.
And since it is a strain in working-class culture, it will survive the demolition or
renewal of St Ann's and areas like it. The forms of deprivation may change - a back-
-
to-back exchanged for a high-rise flat or house on a council estate but the lack of'
power and money remain. There may cease to be areas exactly like St Ann's, at
least in those cities where the juggernaut of redevelopment is rolling, but the
kinds of relationships it reveals between the experience of deprivation and cultural
response may find new forms and expressions.

'The Affluent Worker'

In the early 1960s John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood, lecturers in the Depart-
ment of Applied Economics at Cambridge University, initiated a research project
into the 'sociology of the affluent worker'. Funded by the forerunner of the Social
Science Research Council, the project produced various articles and papers through-
28 Traditions and approaches

out the decade, culminating in a three-volume report. The first two volumes, on
industrial and political attitudes, were published in 1968, the extension and
conclusion of the argument appeared in the following year under the title of
The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure.
By any criteria, this research represents a substantial contribution to the debate
about working-class culture. The texts - heavily referenced, methodologically
meticulous and theoretically sophisticated - cannot be lightly dismissed. The danger
that our critique may reduce the complexity and depth of the work is especially
severe in this case. .
The primary objective was to undertake an empirical test of the embourgeoise-
ment thesis. The first chapter of the third volume offers a reconstruction of the
emergence of the thesis. The work of especially Abrams and Rose (1960), Zweig
(1961) and Klein (1965) is dissected and recomposed to produce a cumulative
theory of embourgeoisement, considerably more coherent than that achieved in
any individual text. Goldthorpe, Lockwood and their fellow researchers identify in
particular three developments which are alleged to be crucial to the embourgeoise-
ment of the British working class. These are changes in economic circumstances
(increased incomes and access to consumer goods with consequent changes in life-
styles), changes in the technology and management of work (the decline of manual
labour, the new 'technician' roles involving greater teamwork and integration into
the goals of management), changes in the ecology of cities (increased owner-
occupation, suburbanization and the redevelopment of the inner city). It is not the
objective of the authors to assess the evidence for these changes. Rather, they are
concerned to discover whether, in those situations where most of these 'new'
factors are most apparent, they have the effects attributed to them.
Goldthorpe and Lockwood were not unaware that the thesis had its critics,
especially on the left. They declare themselves unconvinced by the fragmentary and
abstract character of the counter-arguments, noting, especially, the irony that many
-
of these arguments the notion of the 'alienated' consumer for instance - fit ill with
a traditional Marxist stress on relations of production. Embourgeoisement theories
stress the material character of capitalism, Marxist opponents identify cultural or
psychological exploitation as the new ground of conflict .
Goldthorpe and Lockwood also situate their study within the directly political argu-
ments which provide the impetus for the debate. They note that the victory of the
Tories in 1959 provoked practising politicians, especially within the Labour Party, to
assume that the traditional class basis of party politics was being eroded, a conclusion
underwritten by more than one psephological study. They are also conscious that the
dimensions of this argument change even as their study progresses, since the Labour
Party do return to power, but commit themselves to a policy of pragmatic moderniza-
tion which quickly embroils them in confrontation with the trade unions .
These, then, were the contexts, more self-consciously recognized than in most
other works, for the Affluent Worker project. The basic approach was quite
straightforward: to find a prototypically affluent working-class population and
discover how middle-class it had, or was about to, become. The justification for
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 29

their eventual choice of three groups of ear workers in Luton is outlined in

Chapter 2 of volume 3, as is their exclusive use of the interviewing method to
collect data.
Six years and several hundred interviews later, the researchers are in a position
to formulate their conclusions. They uncovered a portrait of the 'affluent worker'
which is unlike either 'traditional' working-class consciousness or what they had
inferred from the embourgeoisement theorists to 'be the attitudes characteristic
of the worker-made-middle-class. Thus they find that the car workers do not
adopt a 'traditional' men-versus-the-bosses mentality, nor do they see their trade
unions as part of a wider labour movement. But they do not identify with the
firm for which they work either, nor see themselves as part of a team with the
same objectives. They find little intrinsic interest in their jobs at all. They do not
see the Labour Party as a working-class organization automatically worthy of
their support, nor do they identify with the Conservative Party. The life-style of
the affluent worker is most evidently not of a traditional kind, involving neither
the networks of kinship nor those of the neighbourhood, yet he does not partici-
pate in the mutual entertaining or club membership which might be expected of
those aspiring to middle-class habits. Finally, in their conception of society, the
affluent workers adhere neither to the dichotomies of class power essential to
'traditional' worldng-class consciousness, nor to the hierarchies of status and
prestige perceived by the middle class.
In each case, then, the 'affluent worker' assumes a set of attitudes related to ,
but qualitatively different from, each of the two possible models. His attitudes
to his employers is that there is a contract between them: he agrees to undertake
arduous and boring work in return for which he expects an exceptionally high
wage. The contract is subject to continuous negotiation and here, though he may
rarely attend a branch meeting, the worker looks to his union to represent him,
relying especially on the shop steward to remedy immediate grievances. His attitude
to the Labour Party is similarly conditional: he has come to expect it to favour
the interests of the working man, and as long as that remains broadly - or relatively
- true, he will continue to support it. In his leisure time he has withdrawn from
group activity, preferring instead to spend all his time, money and energy within
the confines of the nuclear family, to an extent which justifies the use of 'privatized'
to describe his outlook. His perception of the wider society depends mainly on a
relative assessment of income, so that, while he knows he is better off than some,
he is equally conscious that he has less than others. On the basis of these findings
the embourgeoisernent thesis is rejected .
The findings are not, however, wholly negative. Goldthorpe and Lockwood
identify a process 'normative convergence' between what were previously the
mutually exclusive value systems of the middle and working classes. The middle
class moves towards collective means of self-advancement, particularly in the form
of trade-union organization, while the worldng class accepts the nuclear family as
the essential focus of non-work life. In such a situation, they argue, the future
pattern of worldng-class consciousness is especially fluid, since 'social consciousness
30 Traditions and approaches

snot delimited by the fixed horizons of either deferential or proletarian tradition-

alism and in which there are indeed few established cultural prescriptions serving
to define the nature of the social order'.
Hence the policies adopted by the Labour Party are themselves a crucial variable
in predicting the future shape of working-class consciousness, how it defines the
'nature of the social order' will powerfully affect the self-perception of the working
class. To stress some 'middle ground' of 'technological progressivism' may well
prove to be counter-productive, since it will serve to undermine that identification
of the Labour Party with the interests of the worldng man which is a key basis of
its popular support. What needs to be developed, according to the (significantly)
final section of the conclusion to volume 3, is a programme of policies in welfare,
education, leisure provision and environmental planning which seeks to extend and
redefine the interests of working people. The alternative is that an affluent 'class-
lessness' will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a future actually chosen and worked
for by Labour's political leaders.27
The Affluent Worker volumes constitute the most formidable example of the
approach of mainstream sociology to the worldng class and to working-class
consciousness. We have, however, four main criticisms which raise reservations not
just about this project but about sociological approaches more generally. Our
criticisms concern (a) the concept of traditional working-class consciousness ,
(b) the methodology of the study; (c) the concept of instrumental orientation; and
(d) the definition of class.
Our first cricitism involves one of the two models against which.the affluent
workers' attitudes were judged: the model of traditional working-class conscious-
ness. Within volume 3 this 'ideal type', for such we take it to be, is scarcely substan-
tiated. While the authors are rightly critical of embourgeoisement theorists' portrait
of the new affluent worker, their portrait of traditional working-class life is
accepted as unproblematic. This is particularly so with the work of Zweig, whose
later (1960) study is harshly criticized, but whose earlier (1952) study of the
British worker is taken, along with several others, as a valid portrait of traditional
working-class consciousness.
In volume 2 'the traditional worker' is introduced as 'a sociological rather than
an historical concept', referring to workers in particular trades or communities,
not to the whole class at some point in time. So not all the pre-war working class
was 'traditional' and 'traditionalism' persists post-war. It includes both radical and
conservative forms of consciousness. It survives most in single-industry and 'solidary'
communities like those associated with mining, clockwork, fishing and shipbuilding.
The abandonment of 'historical' in favour of 'sociological' categories seems
extraordinary when the whole project is set up as an explanation of empirical
changes. More important still is the abandonment or neglect of historical research
and the absence of a real historical dimension in the study itself, a fuller sense of
the specificity, in time and space, of this section of the working class. Such prob-
lems require categories capable of handling problems of change, regardless of
disciplinary repertoires. The uncertainty of the concept itself and in its historical
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 31

scope of reference is revealed by the way it is qualified and extended in foot-

notes.28 The point is not a minor one. What is at stake here is the whole concep-
tion of working-class culture in relation to which the case of the affluent worker is
actually and theoretically situated. If 'traditionalism' is not characteristic of the
-
working class as a whole but only of certain communities here defined occupa-
tionally, there defined ecologically - how valid is the comparison (on which the
whole project depends) of the affluent worker with this figure of the traditionalist?
Have we really learnt anything about past, present and future? Or just about co-
existing differences? Employing 'sociological' categories in an ahistorical way ,
Goldthorpe and Lockwood actually disqualify themselves from telling us anything
useful on these questions. One suspects that the whole construction of the
'traditional worker' is a clumsy, post-hoc generalization that fails to grasp the
variety of past (and present) cultural forms and tends to essentialism - that is,
the reduction of a complex and contradictory lived culture to a few simple prin-
ciples of action.
Our second criticism concerns the narrowness of the range of methods used in
the Affluent Worker study. In Chapter 2 of volume 3 there is a vigorous deface
of the wholesale reliance on interviews. First, such methods are themselves, with
careful interpretation, adequate to the study of social behaviour, social relation-
ships and attitudes. Second, the highly privatized life-style of the workers them-
selves excluded methods other than self-reporting, in particular observational
material. If not studied through interviews, such subjects are difficult to study at
al1.29
This argument may appear convincing, but we must be clear about its implica-
tions. Methodological problems require that working-class culture be identified
with what can be gauged from considered answers to questions asked in interview.
Leaving aside the well-known problems of the external structuring of elicited
responses, we have lost here any strong sense of culture as shared symbols and
meanings created and reproduced in shared experiences and interactions and
sedimented in practices and institutions. If these are really carried, mostly, in the
family, then some penetration of the fabric of family life becomes imperative .
But, further, we cannot see why the necessity to observe - to match recorded
attitudes to practices - could not be carried into the work-place. Since the Affluent
Worker study was completed, there have been several ethnographies ot" the work-
place, one of which is represented in this volume (see Chapter 8). Such observations
might have tested avowed attitudes, expressed to a researcher in a non-work
context, to employers and unions. In all these ways, the study suffers by compari-
son with previous texts, including Hoggart's haphazard blend of remembrance
and 'criticism'. If, as we shall argue later, a disjunction between attitudes expressed in
practical (class) activity and more generalized statements about the public world
is a continuing feature of working-class culture, the failure to observe will be
especially limiting. In general the study ignores Hoggart's fundamental exhortation
to 'see through the statements to what the statements really mean, which may be
the opposite of what they say'.
32 Traditions and approaches

The mode of interpretation used on much of the material produced by the

interviewers is yet again our old friend, the ideal type. The concept of 'instrumental
orientation' contrasted with those of a 'bureaucratic' or 'solidaristic' kind is intended
to explain the affluent worker's attitude to his job. It is our third point of argu-
ment. The concept is mobilized initially as an explanation of the fact that affluent
workers' evident discontent with the monotony, fragmentation and speed of their
work was not accompanied by any desire to look elsewhere. Nor did they show the
industrial militancy (ah, happy days) which might be expected from such a severely
'alienated' work-force .
Goldthorpe and Lockwood argue that there is a problem of theory here: the
solution is to distinguish between 'satisfaction from work' on the one hand and
'orientation towards work' on the other. Assessments of 'satisfaction' must be
subordinate to questions of orientation, for it _is only when we know what meaning
work has, within a whole range of personal expectations, that 'satisfaction' can be
assessed.30 The apparent lack of resolve to change the work experience can then be
explained by the inherent meaninglessness of work and the search for extrinsic
satisfactions outside the work-place itself.31 This is the essence of 'instrumental
orientation': take the money and run.
One response to this concept is to ask whether such an orientation has not
always been a way of surviving kinds ofrnanual work which are not only perceived
to be, but actually are, bereft of meaning, especially where conception and exe-
cution within the l a b o r process itself are socially separated, the worker being a
mere 'hand'.32 Another, accepting the argument in its own terms, is to question
the source of 'instrumental orientation'. We do not think it unfair to suggest that
answers to this question, in the study itself, are very unclear." Is a commitment
made to privatized family life from which follows the decision to accept highly
paid but boring work to benefit the family, or is a decision made to seek a better
standard of living which involves both unpleasant work and isolating the family ,
through migration, from previous social contexts? If that seems to be too naive an
insistence on a chain of cause and effect, we might put the matter more completely,
which sets of relations have the dominant place in affecting this outcome? It is
possible to detect, in the study, a leaning towards the family as the 'overriding
commitment' at the cultural (or orientational) level,34 but no case is made for this
preference, empirically or theoretically. The only exception is a tantalizingly brief
section on the affluent worker's stress on consumption.35
The concept of 'instrumental orientation' may have some descriptive power,
but its essentially ahistorical nature and theoretical obtuseness leave us doubtful
of its overall usefulness. And, again, we must insist, this is not a mere quibble.
'Instrumental orientation' is used variously to analyse attitudes to work, unions
and the Labour Party, it is intended to encompass a major part of working-class
consciousness. It is also subsequently used as part of an argument against the Marxist
position that the experience of wage l a b o r and alienation at the point of production
are the driving force of working-class consciousness.36
Indeed, much of the conclusion to volume 3 is taken up by a debate with
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 33

various Maridst positions on worldng-class consciousness. We understand this to be

an attempt to develop a recognizably radical theory which avoids the 'excesses' or
'inflexibility' of a full-blown Maridst position. The result is a resistance to any (of
the many possible) coherent neo-Marxist theories, yet a retention when it comes to
major conceptual definitions, of a skeletal Marxism. This constitutes our fourth
objection to the book. It is not a question of whether the authors should or should
not be Maridsts, but of how satisfactory, in terms of its own internal consistency,
their theory becomes. If, to abbreviate and point the argument, we take a passage
on the definition of class, the dimensions of the debate may become clearer •
But, as we understand it, social stratification is ultimately a matter of sanctioned
social relationships, and while major changes in the respects above mentioned will
obviously exert an influence on such relationships, this is not necessarily one which
transforms class and status structures or the positions of individuals and groups
within these structures. A factory worker can double his living standards and still
remain a man who sells his lab our to an employer in return for wages, he can work
at a control panel rather than on an assembly line without changing his subordinate
position in the organisation of production: he can live in his own house in a 'middle-
class' estate or suburb and still remain little involved in white-collar social worlds.
In short, class and status relationships do not change entirely part passu with changes
in the economic, technological and ecological infrastructure of social life' they have
rather an important degree of autonomy, and can thus accommodate considerable
change in this infrastructure without themselves changing in any fundamental way.
Perhaps too much can be read into so short a passage torn from its context. Never-
theless we want to insist that what is represented here is an uneasy and internally
destructive fusion of Marxism and conventional sociology. Thus class becomes in
the language of formal sociology 'social stratification? it is described as 'socially
sanctioned relationships', with little regard for the peculiar inflection by which
economic and political factors are subsumed under the term 'social'. Yet at the
sometime we find an insistence on the worker as a wage labourer without power at
the work-place, as somehow basic to any definition of class. We have the recognizably
neo-Marxist language of 'relative autonomy' and 'infrastructure' used here to deny
any essential relationship between the economic and the 'social'. It may make sense
to those who occupy this theoretically schizophrenic terrain to be able to dip into
a rag-bag of concepts when confronted by empirical material requiring explanation,
but for others, aS for us, the results may be confused and confusing. This failure of
theoretical nerve appears to us to underly the whole structure of the argument .
The total effect is that of an inverse pyramid: a wealth of empirical material resting
on a barely perceptible theoretical axis.
In sum, then, wehave offered four major criticisms of the Affluent Worker
study: an ill-considered and historical conception of 'traditional' working-class
consciousness, an inflexibility of method; the resort to a concept of 'instrumental
orientation', the dimensions and sources of which remain unclear, and a prevari-
cation between the language of straight sociology and that of Mandsm, when faced
with the problem of defining class. Individually, such criticisms may be countered
34 Traditions and approaches

or conceded. Our objective here is to suggest that cumulatively these criticisms

reveal the inadequacy of the most sophisticated forms of conventional sociology
when confronted with the problem of working-class culture. This is not to say that
the book does not, given its theoretical and methodological limitations, reveal some
worthwhile information: we do not reject out of hand the thesis that the matrix
of working-class culture, or at least some segments of it, may be formed by the
interacting definitions and experiences of wage labour, family life, and consumerism.
Indeed, it is precisely to the relationship between the generation of these definitions
and the changing infrastructure of capitalism that we believe the study of working-
class culture should be addressed. In our view, the ultimate failure of the Affluent
Worker study to pursue these questions confirms the need for a radical break from
- -
the selfenclosed discipline of sociology. That break into Marxism is partially
reconstructed in the following section.

'Towards Socialism'
We have argued that the studies of worldng-class culture so far reviewed were pur-
sued in the shadow cast by an apparently endless series of election victories by the
Conservative Party. The affluence thesis offered a threatening explanation of this
trend, by portraying it as the inevitable decline of worldng-class solidarity consequent
upon rising prosperity. Few studies accepted this wholesale, though they varied in
the ldnds and extent of their reservations about it. Our analysis has aimed to
demonstrate that theoretical, methodological and historical deficiencies limited
their ability to challenge the affluence thesis. They were trapped by the terms of
the debate: its concepts, notions of acceptable evidence, and immutable indices of
significant social change. When occasionally an attempt was made to break through
this intellectual force field, the effect was one of painful disorientation, sufficient
to discourage others from straying from their designated area.
The breakthrough, however, does seem to us to have been made from a Mar>dst
position, first evident with any clarity in a collection of essays published in 1965
entitled Towards Socialism. The intellectual heritage and political experience
winch lay behind such work was qualitatively distinct from that of the sociologies.
Intellectuals of a Marxist persuasion found the political events of the 1950s (Suez,
Hungary, defeats in and of the Labour Party) demanded a new kind of intellectual
response, more in keeping with the mass and youthful protest evident in the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The organizational loyalties, political strategies
and intellectual analyses tenable within the Labour or Communist parties collapsed
with the credibility of their leaderships. It was back to first principles for the corn-
mitted Marxists; less a question of how to practise what they preached, than
whether what they preached was correct .
It was in response to this set of problems that in 1957 a group of Oxford students
and lecturers founded a socialist magazine called Universities and Left Review. The
immediate aim was to secure a modest forum for the exploration of Marxist ideas,
but the extent of the response provoked the formation of an associated club which
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 35

formed branches and held (evidently well-attended) discussion meetings up and

down the country. In 1959, after seven editions, the magazine merged with the
New Reasoner, a similar publication edited by disillusioned ex-Communist Party
members, and became the New Left Review. It was the editorial board of this by
now much more heavily theoretical journal which provided the impetus and many
of the articles for the Towards Socialism collection.
The debate is present well before this publication, which we take as a convenient
and crystallized form of a Marxist approach to working-class culture. In ULR
numbers 5, 6 and 7 , for example, Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel and Edward
Thompson engaged in a fierce debate, the substantive issues of which were sum-
marized thus by the first contributor :
The central problem concerns the different objective factors which shaped and
were in turn shaped and humanised by an industrial working class; and the subjective
ways in which these factors grew to consciousness within the minds and lives of
working people: and the degree to which these shaping factors have changed or
are in the process of changing.

These questions persist as the essential ones for the contributors to Towards
Socialism. As the introduction to the collection stresses, they represent 'a variety
of standpoints and idioms' which cannot be subject to 'an artificial unity' but
which share 'certain common themes'. We have chosen here to concentrate on
three of the eleven essays which we take to deal most directly with the problem of
understanding the nature and forms of working-class consciousness. A brief resume
of each piece may enable us to draw general conclusions about the nature of the
'break' with previous formulations of the problem.
-
John Westergaard's essay 'The withering away of class: a contemporary myth' -
is an attempt to dismantle the affluence thesis. The constituent arguments of the
thesis are first assembled: the marked decrease in inequalities, the displacement of
manual labour by white collar work, the devolution of economic power to the
managers, the erosion of a traditional working-class culture. From these structural
- -
changes it was adduced that class as the or even a form of social consciousness
had been displaced. Rising incomes, educational and occupational mobility and a
family-centred consumerist life-style made distinctions between individuals more
significant than those between groups. Westergaard sought to discredit each of these
(by now familiar) arguments in turn.
The allegedly increasing equality of wealth he perceives to be supported only
by a selective use of data: emphasizing change over a longer period than is actually
the case, measuring only taxable income and not ownership of wealth, ignoring the
dramatic decline in income experienced by both worldng- and middle-class people
as they move into retirement. A few statistics on the minute and static possibility
of working-class children getting into university reveals the limits on educational
opportunity, while occupational mobility is argued to be limited in scope and kind .
The supposed devolution of economic power is countered by emphasizing the
common membership, by both managers and owners, of a homogeneous ruling
36 Traditions and approaches
elite, defined by its educational background, political and social assumptions, and
ultimate economic interests .
All this amounts to a full-scale counter-attack (rather than sniping from isolated
positions). Yet more important as a break from the orthodoxies are the points where
Westergaard questions the relation between material changes and cultural configura-
tions. The affluence theorists tended to assume that structural changes had self-
evident implications for consciousness. In fact, 'our knowledge of the . . .interplay
of socio-psychological attitudes involved is virtually ni1'.39 Hence Westergaard
acknowledges the structural shift to white collar work, but questions its political
meaning. White collar workers may not be status-ridden conservatives in politics.
Changes in the organization of clerical work may place them in a position similar
to that of semi-sldlled manual workers. It is a possibility that such groups of workers
will come to identify with the manual working class.
The argument is careful. It is really about prising open some old assumptions ,
held both by affluence theorists and inherited from an older Marxism by some
of their critics. One orthodoxy here is that radical class consciousness can only be
engendered out of the experience of manual labour. Behind this is the further
assumption that white collar work is by definition 'middle class'. The implication
-
of Westergaard's argument is that both positions must be questioned that affluence
theories are an over-simplified response (in favorable conditions) to an already
over-simplified leftish orthodoxy .
A further implicit assumption of all parties to the debate is held by Westergaard
to be fallacious. It is that a radical working-class consciousness can only come
from within the values of traditional worldng-class culture. Hence it disturbs him
not at all to concede that the base of this culture - described as 'low absolute
-
levels of living, extreme insecurity and marked local or social isolation'40 have
been slowly eroded. He attacks 'conservative nostalgia' for the passing away of this
life-style and disputes its theoretical underpinnings: the notion that a capacity for
national class organizations and perspectives is rooted in 'the simpler and more
intimate loyalties of neighbourhood and kin'. Against this he argues that such
local loyalties have, in practice, to be transcended, that 'particularistic' ties of
neighbourhood, ldn and regional culture' are insufficient to maintain or create
' "universalistic" loyalties'.41
The terms of this argument are as much those of a radical sociology (the first of
many such) as of Marxism. There are points of continuity with older arguments -
the retention of the undifferentiated category 'traditional' itself, for example - as
well as breaks. But the essay undoubtedly helped to open the way to new thinking
about the working class: there may be other routes to socialism than the develop-
ment of traditional working-class attitudes. Working-class culture is dead: long live
socialism l
This negative assessment of the political potential of the traditional worldng
class is shared - to excess - by Perry Anderson, though as the title - 'The origins of
the present crisis' - indicates, the essay has a wider purpose. The crisis of the middle
1960s, appropriated as a managerial/technical one in a whole series of Penguin
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 37

Specials, cannot, Anderson argues, be properly understood .except historically. By

taldng this stand in 'history', Anderson differentiated himself from the Liberal and
social democratic sociologies and also from the literary-critical traditions. (He
also, as we shall see, remained some distance away from the historians.) One of the
most interesting comparisons is with Raymond Williams.
Williams is an elusive figure in the debate his patient working through of the
Culture and Society tradition, his overtly political analysis in the May Day Mani-
festo, his attempt to merge the two concerns of culture and politics in The Long
Revolution and separate contributions to the analysis of mass media: all still seen
limited by the overriding concern with the problematic relationship between litera-
ture and society. His most recent work very characteristically carries the title
Marxism and Literature. of course, Williams is a major literary critic, there is no
reason why he should become a sociologist. The question is more whether his
ultimate interest in the problem of cultural creativity does not, on occasion, forestall
considerations of a structural or historical kind. Here, for instance, is his main
major incursion into the debate about worldng-class culture from the conclusion to
Culture and Society 1
The primary distinction between bourgeois and working class culture is to be sought
in the whole way of life, and here, again, we must not confine ourselves to such
evidence as housing, dress and modes of leisure. Industrial production tends to
create uniformity in such matters, but the vital distinction lies at a different level.

_
The crucial disfmguishing element in English life since the Industrial Revolution is
not language, not dress, not leisure . . . The crucial distinction is between alterna-
tive ideas of the nature of social relationship .42

Worldng-class culture, then, is not a sum of incidentals but *the basic collective idea
and the institutions, manners, habits of thought and intentions which proceed from
this'. It is distinguished from 'bourgeois culture', the 'basic individualist idea' and
what follows from that.43
Whams's formulations will provide a frequent point of reference throughout
this book and we will also assess the impact of his and Hoggart's early work on the
historians, and on the study of culture more generally.44 Anderson, however, has
two main criticisms of these formulations and the work that lay behind them.
First, he argues that they fall short of a properly historical perspective, constituting
'a purely imminent ideological critique, consciously abstracted from the effective
movement of history'.45 What he means by this movement the rest of the essay is
to show. Secondly, and very characteristically for this second phase of the New Left
Review, the formulations are criticized for the way a sensitive 'reading' of cultural
values stands in for the employment of clear categories. Thus Anderson argues, in
the crucial criticism, that Williams only partly understands worldng~class culture.
The truth seems to be that the nature of working-class culture is as he describes it,
but that the will to universalize it, to make it the general model of society, which he
tacitly assumes to be a concomitant, has only rarely existed.46
38 Traditions and approaches

This deficiency of what Anderson calls 'ethical' criticism is coupled wiki failings of
(mainly Marzdst) historians to break the boundaries of 'periods'. The result is the
'stupefying absence' (the first of many which Anderson is to identify) of any
'single structural study of our society today'. Such a serious and 'global' history -
-
'some vision of its full effective past' is absolutely necessary to grasp present-day
movements.46
In an attempt to sketch this 'global history', Anderson offers a series of admirably
clear, if terrifyingly generalized, propositions about the specific formative moments
of the present crisis; Here we are less concerned with the specifics of the argument
than with the radical break of perspective which it implies. What is being said here
is that the problem of understanding contemporary worldng-class consciousness in
Leeds, Featherstone, or Luton is not one simply for sociological or phenomenolo-
gical inquiry, it is equally, if not primarily, one of historical interpretation. Yet
this history cannot simply be the internal history of the working class. Since
class consciousness is created by the relations between classes, the necessary history
is one of class relationships, and needs to encompass those between the bourgeoisie
and the aristocracy, as well as those in which the working class is directly involved .
It is in the history of such struggles between classes that we can identify those ideas,
forces, groups and moments which limit or promote the development of particular
kinds of class consciousness. It is the insistence on this 'globally' historical perspec-
tive which distinguishes Anderson's approach from all those we have previously
examined. History is not to be tagged on to contemporary analysis, but must
essentially inform it .
The information provided by history, however, is inadequate if that history is
itself empiricist. There has to be further reference to a theoretical framework, one
moreover which can allow for the cultural complexity Anderson alleges to typify
the history of the English. The concern o f the new New Left Review to examine
European Marxist thought bears first fruit in the shape of concepts taken from
the work of Antonio Grarnsci, the theorist and a leader of Italian communism in the
1920s. The crucial distinction, derived from Gran sci but appropriated in a parti-
cular way,47 is that between a 'hegemonic' and 'corporate' class consciousness.
If a hegemonic class can be defined as one which imposes its o w n ends and its own
vision on society as a whole, a corporate class is conversely one which pursues its
own ends within a social totality whose global determination lies outside in.
Hegemonic classes perform a transformative work over the whole range of society,
corporate classes defend and seek to improve a position within a given social
order.48
The application of a somewhat idealist form of Gramsci's notions yields a kind
of typology of classes in England: a dominant 'aristocracy' or patriciate, an unheroic
bourgeoisie and a supine working class. The English working class, since the mid
nineteenth century, has combined a dense and specific internal cultural identity
with 'a permanent failure to set and impose goals for society as a whole'. The
intensity of a 'corporate class consciousness' has blocked the emergence of
 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class 39

universalistic, socialist ideology of the working class.

The present crisis now becomes identifiable as that of the inertia of both this
corporate worldng class and of a ruling class in which anachronistic values im-
mobilize the technical reform in economic and political policies necessary to sustain
the modern form of capitalism. It is this, rather than the spectre of affluence,
which presents the left with a distinctive political challenge. And it is to the ob-
stacles to the socialist cause inherent in the traditional political institutions of a
corporate worldng class that Tom Nairn turns his attention in the last of the three
essays we wish to consider.
We have previously seen how, almost without exception, studies of worldng-
class culture came to rest with an appeal to Labour Party leaders to recognize the
nature of working-class interests and use them as a basis for rethinking socialist
policies. Instead of this rather hopeless and naive dependence on the intellectual
acumen and worthy motives of Labour politicians, Nairn offers an analysis of
why they are likely to ignore such appeals.
In his introduction to 'The Nature of the Labour Party', Nairn stresses the
uniqueness of that political organization in the European context: its habitual and
massive working-class vote, the indissoluble nature of that power base; its appear-
ance as a working-class form of government. Yet, at the same time, it appears
unable or unwilling to instigate fundamental change, organizes itself through a
cumbersome and basically undemocratic administrative machinery, and actively
seeks to stifle, rather than express, radical thought. It is this set of contradictions
Nairn sets out to explore .
-
The method is clear 'Any adequate account of the Labour movement must ,
naturally, be historical.'49 We cannot here reproduce the argument in its entirety,
but only give some indications as to its nature. The Labour Party's origins, in the
skilled, pro-Liberal and avowedly unpolitical unionism of the mid nineteenth century
sets the tone. The failure of Mar>dst analysis to obtain any purchase Ni English
culture leaves the more militant unskilled 'New Unionism' of the 1680s without an
adequate ideology: a vacuum filled by the prescriptions of middle ~class Fabianism.
The consequent commitment to an evolutionary and parliamentary path to socialism
produces a constitution vague in its statement of socialist strategy, as well as biased
in its distribution of power towards the responsible' trade union leadership.
These factors which account for the early development of the l a b o r Party help
to explain not only its conciliatory conduct throughout the 1920s and 1930s, but
also the rapid exhaustion of the first 'real' Labour government after 1945. That it
ran out of ideas and confidence after a few modest reforms was simply a reflection
of its historical development. What went wrong after 1945 was in essence what had
always been wrong with Labourist socialism in itself.50 The solution of the domi-
nant Fabian bloc to this lack of a programme was to abandon any commitment to
socialism as previously understood and to try to identify the party with a politically
neutral land of technical reformism: the 'white heat of technology i
There remains the problem of how to change this situation, and the second half
of Towards Socialism concerns itself with 'problems of socialist strategy'. For our
40 Traditions and approaches
purposes, the importance of Nairn's piece is that it breaks the relationship of
worldng-class cultural studies to the labour Party in two ways. Firstly, it sees the
Labour Party not as a court: of appeal where the problem of working»class culture
is to be heard, it identities the party as a distinct and major part of the problem.
Secondly, the significant question ceases to be why worldng-class people do or do
not vote Labour, but why the party does not attempt to implement the socialist
ideas to which it remains nominally committed. The problem of workingclass
politics has been radically reconceptualized, no longer one of voting intention or
attitudinizing, it is one of historically evolved forms of ideology and organization.

Conclusions
The importance of the Towards Socialism collection was that it made three lands
of break with the work we have already described and criticized. First, meeting
the sociologists on their own ground, it helped to establish the enduringly class
character of post-war British society, while raising substantial questions about the
relationship between structural change and consciousness (Westergaard). Second,
the whole problem of worldng-class culture was rethought as a historical one. This
involved a stress upon class relationships and the way they changed over time. It
also involved a much more explicitly theoretical enterprise than characterized the
work of most contemporary historians (Anderson). Third, the Labour Party emerged
less as a potential solution and more as part of the problem itself, one means by
which the corporate character of the English working-class had been reproduced
(Nairn). In each of these respects, the studies represented an advance on the post-
war sociologies.
But, it is also important to see Towards Socialism as a locus of problems for
future analyses and, if taken with its surrounding debates, as an anticipation of
important differences within a revived Marxist tradition. The debate between
Anderson and Nairn on the one side and Edward Thompson on the other over
the 'origins' essay, is especially important here. Many of the most important future
issues are crystallized in this debate: a communist or socialist 'populism' (or faith
in the creative power of the people) as against a trust in 'Mar>dsm' and Marxist
intellectuals; a tension between a somewhat formalist appropriation of 'theory'
and an almost invisible ingestion of it in the process of writing detailed histories;
a conflict between an older indigenous Marrdsm (itself undergoing transformations
in the 1950s and early 1960s) and the 'newer' continental importations. If
Towards Socialism represents an attempt to develop forms of Marxist analysis
adequate to post-war conditions, it also prefigures, often in rather curious and
displaced forms, the debates of the 1970s. But to take this argument further we
need first to relocate ourselves in another tradition of writing about the working
-
class the historical - and then take the story forwards, into the 1970s.
2 Culture and the historians
Richard Johnson

Introduction
It is arguable that much of the writing on the British working class has not been
'sociological' at all. It has taken the form of 'histories', especially histories of
popular and worldng-class movements. The title accorded to much of Ms writing -
-
'labour history' is itself suitably and richly ambiguous, for 'labour' may denote
the party, or 'the labour movement' or 'labouring men'. It has, a point to which
we shall return, strongly masculine connotations. Yet two unifying features of this
tradition can be stressed at the outset. First, 'labour' and associated historiographies
have been produced, overwhelmingly, by intellectuals within or to the left of the
Labour Party, secondly, they have, despite appearances to the contrary, been con-
tinuously shaped by Marxist and communist orthodoxies, whether by attraction or
repulsion. This need only surprise if we continue to regard Marxism as an absence
on the English intellectual scene.1 Nowhere is the continuous influence of Marx's
work clearer than in British historical traditions. Certainly the association is more
long-standing than that recently identified by warriors for a deformed liberalism -
the 'Marxist penetration' of sociology.2
An essay about the historians and working-class culture has therefore to concern
itself with theoretical and political developments. It has especially to deal with the
presuppositions which have informed this kind of history. For though abstract
discussions about theoretical premises have a limited value, it matters very much, in
history as in other social sciences, what starting points are chosen. Some are better -
-
more powerful, more revealing, more fertile of further questioning than others.
This becomes clear as soon as we look at significant changes in any intellectual
tradition. There are times in the study of any object when a particular set of orga-
nizing premises and theories actually becomes a fetter on better understanding. This
has happened more than once in the historical study of the working class: it certainly
happened to labour history in the 1930s and 1940s. One purpose of this essay is to
ask whether we have reached another such turning point, in the later 1970s.
More specifically, we want to map some of the main tendencies in historical
writing on the working class, taking the account back to the foundations of the
tradition. But we also want to review the main current problems in the field ,
especially those concerning the relations of history and theory. It is worth being a
bit less cryptic about both these aims.
42 Traditions and approaches

Mapping the field of the relevant histories is not an easy task. Since historians
remain somewhat unreflective beings, concerned to 'get on with the work', we lack
even the most descriptive starting points for such a study. E>dsting essays in historio-
graphy tend to be of three lands: strictly practical reviews as a guide to further
research; reaffirmations of the character of the discipline, the staple topic of
inaugural lectures, iconoclastic attacks on the historians (and sometimes on 'I-listory'),
focusing on theoretical problems or 'absences'.3 Though the last of these genres
has a value as a provocation, there is very little explanatory history of history in
Britain on which to draw.
Whenever such an account comes to be written, it is likely to identify two periods
of great creativity. The first of these occupies the years from the 1860s to the early
1920s. These were the founding decades of economic and social history. It was
within this matrix, and from the politics of the time, that the first historical
approaches to working-class life and institutions were formed. Some of the achieve-
ments of these years were not to be matched until thirty or forty years later. The
second moment conforms, quite exactly, to the chronology of the sociologies: it
-
was, indeed, an aspect of the same story the discovery of worldng-class culture
(or its historical antecedents) in the post-war period. If there had been 'labour
history' for several decades, for the historians too the later 1950s and early 1960s
saw the salience of 'eu1ture'. This second formative period, most familiar from
Edward Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1963) but by no means
confined to it, is the immediate context of our own concerns. It provided the
most powerful paradigms for the historical study of culture. The first objective is
to say something about both these phases, especially the second.
But we want to extend the time»span forward from the 1960s and the argument
beyond the formation of English studies of culture. Books like Thompson's Making,
Richard I-loggart's Uses of Literaey (1957) and Raymond Williams's Culture and
Society (1958) were, and remain, of immense importance. Yet Thompson's and
Williams's positions have changed considerably and the traditions to which they
belong have been assailed. Criticism has coincided with an internationalization of
debate and especially with the growth in Britain of kinds of Maridsm strongly
influenced by the work of Louis Althusser, the French communist philosopher, and
by other 'structuralist' theories.4 There has also been a revival of interest in the
theoretical and historical writings of Antonio Gran sci. The debates that have
followed have questioned many of the guiding assumptions of the 1960s. In this
essay we do no more than sketch the problems, leaving an attempt at solutions
till later in the book.

Economic and social history: the first phase

Histories of the worldng class only get written when the larger part of the population
is held to matter enough to b.e an object of inquiry. In one sense, of course, anxiety
about the working class is very old: more or less systematic social investigation
dates from the early nineteenth century, if not earlier. The sociologists of the late
 Culture and the historians 43

1950s were preceded by the Statistical Societies of the 1830s, the National
Association for the Promotion of Social Science, the late-nineteenth-century
poverty studies and the social-problem literature of the 1930s. In a not dissimilar
way, the modern boom in oral history and popular autobiography has precursors
in Henry Mayhew's intelligent listening and the formidable and still underestimated
achievement of Mass Observation in the 1930s and 1940s. It was undoubtedly the
1880s, however, that saw the beginnings of the popular histories.
This democratization was part of a broader movement that affected adjacent
areas too, especially empirical social investigation and political economy. The
general context was the late-Victorian and Edwardian dissolution of the mid-
Victorian system, and the crises of hegemony of the 1880s, 1890s and years before
the war. These were by no means a simple product of economic developments, the
Great Depression or the pre»war inflation. They were quite as much to do with
political and ideological relations, both between classes and within them and
between classes on the one side and intellectual groups and parties on the other.
One problem was who (or what party with what ideological repertoire) was to
represent dominant or propertied interests. Another was how a growing worldng-
class insurgency, threatening to break the bonds of a Liberal or a Tory political
attachment, was to be managed. Yet another was to do with the appropriate forms
of the state, given the long concessionary slide into something like male adult
suffrage and the demand for the enfranchisement of women. The history of this
period (which was in many ways similar to our own) may be understood as a
progressive dissolution of some older solutions to these and other problems, and as
the search for some new settlement. The search was only very partially successful,
right up until the 1930s, if not the 1950s. One general symptom of this was the
revival of political violence, including the use or threat of violence by the state
well beyond the usual run of social-controlling measures. This was a marked feature
of the late 1880s, 1911-14, 1919 and 1926, to mention only the best-known and
inward-turning mobilizations. Resort to force signaled the breakdown, or the
fragility, of consent. The period was dominated by an extended crisis of authority.
It could have been said of Britain in this period, as of Italy under fascism, that
'the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot
be born'. 'In this interregnum,' as Gran sci remarked, 'a great variety of morbid
symptoms appear.'6
In this context debates among intellectuals assumed a great importance they -
were actually a part of the public search for solutions. They were debates about
the whole course of the society, about its past, present and future. They crystall-
ized around certain key issues, especially the past and future functions of the
state. Some intellectuals, seeldng security in a return to mid-Victorian certitudes,
advocated a return to a (mythical) state of 'laissez-faire ', organized and 'discrimina-
ting' charity and the truths of political economy, with or without a dash of Social
Darwinism. If 'individualists' like Thomas Mackay or Herbert Spencer were
peripheral to policy, the Fabian socialists and radical social-reforming Liberals
occupied a more central position, looking to a more interventionist state policy,
44 Traditions and approaches

either as some portentous break into 'collectivism' or as an extension of 'freedoms'

into a social sphere. In the meantime, there was a revival of popular conservatism
and a move towards the representation of property as a whole, rather than just its
landed fraction, within the Tory party itself.7
Apart from the long-term fall in the rate of profit, the main 'intruding event',
to use Helen Lynd's phrase, was the transformation and growth of working-class
industrial and political organization. At first this took the form of a tougher nego-
tiation within the parameters of the mid-Victorian settlement, but from the late
1880s onwards these (essentially Liberal) limits began to burst with the growth of
socialism, the New Unionism and the industrial militancy of the pre-war period .
The Labour Party was the main political beneficiary of this widespread mobili-
zation, and its growth marked a real transformation of the whole political pattern.
It became meaningful to talk of the 'labour movement' and, indeed, to start to
write its history .
The new histories were very much a creation of these times, one of the ways, in
fact, in which the general debate was carried. More exactly, they were the creation
of certain groups of political intellectuals of a Fabian or Radical-Liberal persuasion,
and of a slightly younger generation who distanced themselves from Fabianism but
remained close to the Labour Party or to trade unionism. Sidney and Beatrice
Webb and John and Barbara Hammond were outstanding in the first group;
R.H. Tawney and G.D.H. Cole in the second. More complexly, there were perhaps
four main tendencies in the historiography of the time.
First, there was the tendency to render economics a historical discipline.8 This
fairly unsuccessful enterprise had more permanent effects on history than on
economics. Most of the early economic historians - Thorold Rogers, Arnold
Toynbee, William Cunningham and WJ . Ashley - were critical of what Toynbee
called 'the old political economy', especially of its abstract and deductive methods
and its failure to grasp the broader contexts of economic life. By 1929, Sir John
Clapham could declare this period of warfare over and, indeed, by this time, much
of the iconoclasm of the discipline had disappeared.9 Unlike the more 'social'
historiographies that accompanied its birth, it was becoming entrenched in the
universities as an academic historical sub-discipline. Yet, as has often been noted,
the early economic historians had a much broader conception of their subject
than later, more specialist practitioners. Their work centred on questions of eco-
nomic policy and the organization and structures of economic production. Even
when arguing against Marx, they often used Maridan categories and sometimes
acknowledged the debt." From the 1930s, and still more the 1940s and 1950s,
this breadth of interest was lost, partly because of an absorption with questions
of 'growth' and partly because of an explicitly Cold War opposition to Marrdsm.
The gulf between 'social' and 'economic' historiographies, artificial though these
divisions are, became very wide indeed. One has only to compare the Economic
History Review (edited by Tawney and Lipson) in its founding moment of 1927
with the modern publication of the same name, to gauge the difference.
The second tendency might be described as histories of social policy, or of
 Culture and the historians 45

'social institutions'. This was the archetypal Fabian genre of history writing, corres-
ponding to the favoured form of politics. The Webbs were undoubtedly its first
and most important proponents, and at the London School of Economics and in
their private researches, they trained several successors.11 In their case, the
historical studies were an almost accidental by-product of immediate political
campaigns, the close association between 'history' and the Fabian political enterprise
was extemely close. The History o f Trade Unionism (1894), for instance, was
intended as 'an historical introduction' to the main work, Industrial Democracy
(1920): a study of contemporary trade union structure and function designed
as 'a criticism of trade unions (for the good of the unionists)' and 'an apology for,
or deface of trade unions (for the enlightenment of the middle-class and the
economists)'.12 The multi-volumed history of English Local Government was
originally intended to deal with the present state and immediate history of these
institutions with a mere introductory chapter on 'antiquities', but determinations
from the past were found to be so powerful that much of 'six years of strenuous
investigation' was spent on the period 1688 to 1832, the heyday of the gentry
justices of the peace and of local autonomies.13 Only in the case of the Poor Law,
under the stimulus of the Royal Commission of 1905-9, was the original project
completed.14
This combination of historical research and political activism was altogether
typical of the tradition we are describing. One symptom of this is the fact that
'histories' constitute only a small proportion of the work of leading figures. They
were not just historians, they were also journalists, social investigators, writers
of texts for adult education, authors of political programmes, political philosophers
- in short, political intellectuals. Considering his reputation, for example, Tawney's
strictly historical output was tiny, and though Cole and the Hammonds wrote a
great deal of history, they wrote continuously on contemporary themes too .
Indeed, they came near to breaking down these categories altogether, m so far as
much of what they wrote had a historical form and a political purpose.
The third main tendency was a further concomitant of political involvement.
Their main political contexts were the Labour Party, the trade unions, the various
socialist fractions and educational organizations of different kinds including the
Workers' Educational Association. One obvious historical object was, then, the
history and the precursors of these institutions. In its more Fabian form, 'labor
history' was often an extension into the realm of 'voluntary associations', of the
interest in 'social institutions'. This is certainly the case of the Webbs' studies
of trade unionism. There were quite clear about it themselves:

.
That history of the general movement . . will be found to be part of the political
history of England. In spite of all the pleas of modern historians for less history
of the actions of government, and more descriptions of the manners and customs
of the governed, it remains title that history, however it may relieve and enliven
itself with descriptions of the manner and morals of the people, must, if it is to
be history at all, follow the course of continuous organisations.
46 Traditions and approaches

This passage sums up most of the features of Webbian history: the stress on insti-
tutions, the adoption of the narrative form, the concern with political deter-
minations, the huge absence of any serious consideration of culture, especially
popular culture (the study of 'morals' and 'manners' being a matter for occasional
refreshment) and the neglect of the informal, lived dimensions of worldng-class
life. Many of these features were to characterize inter.-war 'labor history' too .
What mainly distinguished the Webbs' work from what was to follow was its
sustained analytical character and a particularly formidable combination of meti-
culous reasearch and precise argumentation. A good example of this is their
discussion of the origins of trade unions on which there was considerable contro-
versy among the early economic historians. The Webbs' solution remains extremely
convincing: that trade unions owed little to any pre-eidsting institution (including
the favourite candidate, the guilds), that the main condition for their existence was
the separation of the labourer from the means of production, but that further,
mainly political, determinations were required for the actual formation of unions in
particular trades. The degree of immigration of the workers was (rightly) ruled out
as a major determination. We have here a form of explanation that employs
Marxist categories, but avoid, in practice, both an evolutionism and a vulgar eco-
nomism. We can understand trade unionism as a characteristic organizational form
of the worker under the capitalist mode of production, yet see that the actual
history of trade unions and even their origin are subject to all kinds of contin-
gencies.
It is arguable that none of the tendencies described so far really breaks into a
popular history, and it is certainly the case that Fabian histories remain quite
external to their object. If they adopt a viewpoint close to that of the historical
actors, they tend to espouse the 'prudent administrator', whether sober trade
union leader, or cautious public servant." The Webbs had no feeling at all (except
distrust) for rank'-and-tlle tendencies or for working-class culture outside of the
'educative' institutions which they described. Their viewpoint on the culture as a
whole was that of the late Victorian philanthropist transposed, as it were, to a
Labour Party mode. They never made the transition to a less superior or normative
view of worldng-class behaviour, never substituted 'culture' for 'morality' or
'manners'. Reading passages like this, with an ear to the implied negatives, the
nature of the relation is clear. The topic is the leadership of midnineteenth-
century trade unionism:

The possesion of good manners, though it may seem a trivial detail, was not the
least of their advantages. To perfect self-respect and integrety they added correct-
ness of expression, habits of personal propriety, and remarkable freedom from all
that savoured of the tap-room. In Allan, Applegarth, Guile, Coulson and Odger,
the traducers of Trade Unionism found themselves confronted with a combiNation
of high personal character, exceptional business capacity, and a large share of
official decorum which the English middle class find so impressive.
No doubt this is a fair description of how a particular working-class form of
 Culture and the historians 47
'respectability' appeared to the mid-Victorian middle class, but it says a good deal
about Webbian notions of 'propriety' too.
We have to remember the general character of the lived relations between
classes in this period from which the professional middle class was by no means
exempt. We have to remember, for instance, that all these intellectuals won time
and freedom from menial chores and for intellectual work through the employment
of domestic servants. For the most part they took this relation, and the large social
distance it expressed, quite for granted: the Webbs were very dependent on their
two servants (including 'the devoted Emily'), while in the 1930s, the Coles com-
bined conscience and convenience by hiring an unemployed Barnsley miner and
his wife.19 We have to remember too, again as late as the 1930s, Orwell's agonized
attempts to bridge the cultural differences he experienced with such a sharp guilt.20
It is not at all surprising that the normal way of writing about the worldng class
in this period was through political organization, since this was the only ground of
a more or less equal encounter. What remained hidden were precisely all those
hinterlands most characteristic of the class's culture. And anyway, was it really
worth the while writing of those things? Even when inhibitions were broached,
as, for instance, in Fabian histories of aspects of women's position or of the
working~class family, the approach tended to remain inveterately moralistic. Thus
Ivy Pinchbeck, whose femaleness should not be identified with a feminism, tended
to accept tout court male middle-class descriptions of family morality in the nine-
teenth century and also, by implication, many of the 'solutions' of the Blue Books,
especially public .education and improvement in environment." She also tended
to portray a heroically optimistic picture of the relations between women's position
and industrial capitalism, arguing that industry liberated women by drawing them
into production and also allowed them, through the separation of home and work,
to 'devote their energies to the business of home-maldng and the care of
children'.22 At root, then, the institutional' character of labour history had much
to do with the form of the contemporary relationship between the writers and
those of whom they wrote .
There were, however, a number of exceptions in this period that anticipated
the historiography ot' the 1960s. The most radically democratic historians of the
period were undoubtedly the Hanunonds.23 Paradoxically their virtues grew from
their extremely moralistic approach to the writing of history, a moralism applied,
however, not to populace, but to the dominant morality of the day. As radical
Hobsonian liberals they opposed the dominant jingoism of the 1890s, and as
historians they criticized an early industrial 'civilization'. So°critical were they of
the culture of their own class, or of what they called 'the mind of the rich', that
they were able to stand quite outside it and see the rationality of popular responses.
Though they are commonly paired with the Webbs in accounts of the origins
of social or l a b o r history, they were almost mirror-image opposites. While the
Webbs insisted on history's institutional spine, the Hammonds explored what it
was like to be governed by a peculiarly oppressive state in a period of extended
crisis. Where the Webbs were 'scientific' (or scientific), the Hammonds drew on
48 Traditions and approaches

a more literary inheritance. In matters of cultural analysis, the Hammonds were

more curious and more sophisticated than the Webbs. Working people were credited
with 'rational' opinions even under the direst economic pressures. Popular sources
were heavily quoted, including petitions and threatening letters. Much attention
was paid to the 'politics' of the recreational domain, to the attack on popular
-
amusements. Particular cultural forms methodism as popular religion, for
-
instance were closely observed. They even had a land of practical cultural theory :
societies have a dominant culture of 'civilization', this offers more or less in terms
of 'spiritual' and other satisfactions to the mass of the population; where less, the
governed improvise cultural forms of their own that make a desolate life inhabit-
able, so it happens that enormous differences of outlook arise between classes.
Of the 1830s they wrote, 'By the end of this period scarcely any aspect of life or
politics or economics looked the same to the two worlds', and proceeded,
typically, to give instances of great vivacity .'
A working-class Reformer, thrown into prison in 1812, asked for a newspaper and
was given the Bible instead. He read it with great interest, and wrote to say that
after making a careful study of the books of Proverbs, Job, Psalms, Ecclesiastes,
Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, he had noted that all these writers appeared to
represent the rich as oppressing the poor, whereas in England it was the poor who
were considered as a burden to the rich.24

This is a superb little cameo of how class cultural relations actually work when
'the defences of the poor' are well developed.
The Hammonds are the best example of the cultural content of early social
history. It is not surprising that of all historians they are the most praised in the
historiographical assessments of Thompson's Making. But they were not unique
in this phase. There were a number of one-off atypical works of history produced
in this period which in different ways anticipated or surpassed later work: Tawney's
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922): A.E. Dobbs, Education and Social
Movements (1919, rich in ideas about the relations of material and cultural
changes), Alice Clarke, Working Women in the Seventeenth Century (1917, a text
recently rediscovered, with enthusiasm, by Marxist-feminist historians) .

The routinization of l a b o r history

In August 1974, the Society for the Study of Labour History held a conference
on early working-class movements. The speakers were Edward Thompson and
J .F.C. Harrison. Harrison had published Learning and Living, a study of adult
education in the West Riding, in 1961 , two years before the publication of the
Making, and was working on a major study of Owenism.25 Thompson was worldng
back into the nineteenth century, developing the notions of 'paternalism' and popular
'moral economy' which have informed his later work. Both had critical things to
say about 'labour history'. Thompson :
 CUlture and the hisz'on'ans 49

The notion of lab our history may entail certain dangers - the confinement of our
study within boundary walls of our own malting. Too narrow a concern with
the institutions of the labour movement may exclude from our view larger
problems of social context and cultural climate.

Harrison criticized 'certain basic assumptions about the working class . . .which
need to be bypassed if further researches into nineteenth-century studies are to
be fruitful':
In the narrower meaning of culture, the Overate contribution through education,
propaganda and the dissemination of ideas has already been documented, but
Owenism in relation to the broader, anthropological sense of culture (its role in the
new industrial civilisation) has yet to be explored.26

A few issues later, the society's Bulletin mentioned the polemic currently being
conducted between Thompson and new New Left Reviewers over Perry Anderson's
'Origins of the present crisis'. The editors noted that the New Left Review had
referred to the society's 'narrowly economistic Marxism'.27 This Was shrugged off
with too easy a joke about Anderson's 'strange prose', but if we place these two
incidents together, they do raise some interesting questions. What happened to
'labour history' (apart from the fact that it acquired a name) between the 1920s
and the l 960s'? What was die relation between the nature of labour history on the
one hand and contemporary Mar>dst theory on the other?
A large part of the answer must lie in G.D.H. Cole's history, for, by common
consent, he 'practically invented labour history, as a subject' or, at least 'showed
us all the way'.28 A land of one-man historical school, he covered the whole
scope of the subject, producing biographies of leaders and pioneers, an account
of the movement as a whole from Iacobinism to the General Strike,30 histories
of labour representation, the Labour Party and Co-operation,31a five-volume
history of socialist thought ,32 two closer studies of Chartism and general unionism,
and Cole's nearest approach to social history, The Common People, large parts of
which, however, were written by his brother-in-law, Raymond Postgate.33
One key to Cole is undoubtedly his attitude to Marx and to contemporary
Marxism. He described himself, as late as 1948, as ' "Marx-influenced" to a high
degree', and wrote several works directly on these problems.34 Despite all the
theoretical developments that have occurred since Cole wrote, his Meaning of
Marxism remains an extremely interesting account of 'what remains alive and
..
capable of . growth and adaptation' in Marx's thought. He was sharply critical
of Marxism 'as a system'. He made very accurate criticisms of those elements
in Marx's work (even in the later texts) that resemble a classical 'philosophy of
history', including the tendency to evolutionary or teleological thinldng, the
assumption of the inevitability of socialist revolution, the essentialism involved
in reducing the movement of history to that of 'the powers of production', the .
retention as a metaphysic, of elements of Hegel's dialectics, and the simplification
of all relations down to those of class.
50 Traditions and approaches

The notion of a simple, unified history of all mankind, proceeding in accordance

with some inner necessity from lower to higher forms, is really a metaphysical
assumption, for which there is no warrant in the known facts.35

It is less easy to define what Cole took from Marx. His theoretical texts are some-
what indecisive and his histories very secretive about their assumptions. Rejecting
historical materialism as a description of 'a single world process', he accepted its
explanatory power for 'modern times': 'it comes, in its general outline, much
nearer to adequacy than any alternative formulation of which I am aware'.36 Under
capitalism, at least, Cole gave a Marx-like priority to economic relations as deter-
minants of general social processes, but insisted on the force of others. His account
of what he takes to be Marx's 'best' position, seems also to be a description of his
own :
There are many causes at work in history, even if it be true that one set of causes
has dominated the rest and shaped the general course of social development within
a particular civilisation. Moreover, as Marx and Engels again and again insisted,
what is originally derivative has the power of becoming an independent cause . . ..
These legal and political powers are ...
in the first instance derivative of the powers
.
of production . ., but, once established, they become independent `factors with a
power of their own to influence history and to react upon the course of economic
development.

As important for the histories was Cole's understanding of 'class'. In some ways,
his reading of Marx was quite orthodox: classes arise out of the 'requirements
of the objective situation of the powers of production'. They rest on an 'ordering
of the relationships between men and things and between men and men, on a
basis consistent with the development of the available productive resources'.38
The economic relations on which classes were based were very complex and
existed independently of a consciousness of them. The development of such a con-
sciousness, indeed, was the other, indispensable aspect of the conception of class,
the means by which class and class struggle became 'real', that is an actual force
in the making of history."
According to Cole, classes are real 'in and through their capacity for organised
collective action'. This builds on 'instinctive' class loyalties and solidarities and is a
-
matter of 'propaganda and organisation' a 'deliberately organised co-operation'.
The creation of trade unions, co-operatives and '1-udimentary' political organiza-
tions is a 'first step' towards 'the collective selfexpression of the worldng class'.
By stressing these elements of class as practical collective activity, we can escape
that tendency in Marxism that endows 'classes' with metaphysical properties,
makes them more real than the actual individuals who compose them, and leads
to 'much of the ruthlessness and lack of humanism that has characterised the
application of the Marxian doctrine'.40
At first sight it is hard to establish any relation at all between Cole's particular
histories and his understanding of Marxism. They have a form which minimizes
 Culture and the historians 51

their overt theoretical or explanatory content: a thin unilinear narrative of the

development of some set of institutions or practices. The narrative form is very
consistently adopted for each of Cole's major objects with very little pause for
analysis and only occasional ones for the explanatory supplying of contexts.
Biographical works stick rigidly to the form of narrative life histories, the 'story'
of the 'labour movement' is 'told' in a number of ways, and even the History of
Socialist Thought resembles a parade of thinkers who rather breathlessly deliver
the essentials of their thought before departing, in strict chronology, in favour of
the next performer. Even after the attacks by the Annalistes and the Althusserians
on histories with a unified time, there is still need for historians to consider the very
real effects - the unnaturalness - of narrative form in the writing of history.41
In Cole's work, it tends to construct ancestries rather than supply explanations,
and to abstract some quite thin stream of 'events' from the fuller context in which
it was actually placed. The more successful of the histories are those in which the
story is thickest and most concentrated in a particular period: the autobiographies
of Owen and Cobbett, and Chartist Portraits, perhaps the best of all Cole's histori-
cal works. But nowhere is Cole's history as dense and 'close-in' yet as broadly
contextualized as, for instance, the Hammonds' The Skilled Labourer. Nor is it ever
so intelligently analytical as the Webbs' History of Trade Unionism. It is tempting
to relate these features to Cole's pursuit of a popular readership and the fact that
many of his books were written for adult education courses or, like The Common
People, to 'sell in very large quantities and, by its Socialist message, change the
opinions of readers'.42 Much the same could be said, however, of most of the
major texts of labour or worldng-class history from the Hammonds to Making:
nor is Cole's style of story-telling particularly inspirational, anyway to the modern
reader. As his most recent biographer puts it, 'Cole had a tremendous capacity for
facts.'43
But 'labour history' does have its own organizing presuppositions. These are a
good deal nearer to an orthodox, inter-war Maridsrn-Leninism than Cole's theoretical
distancing and the assessments of some commentators would suggest .44 Cole could
not have written a passage as lively but, in his terms, as 'metaphysical' as this:

The result was not frustration and despair but a realisation of the need for a poli~
tical movement on a higher level, taking into account all the experiences of the
past decades and making use of a I the forms of struggle which had gone before.
So Chartism, the highest stage which any working class movement had reached
anywhere in the world at this time, was the product of everything that the workers
had done and suffered during the epoch of the industrial revolution.45

But Cole's object and his method were not so very different from Morton's. His
object was the class struggle, viewed from the side of '1abour' or Ethe workers':
'the successive efforts of the "lower orders" to achieve representation in parlia-
ment', or 'the successive waves of worldng-class revolt against the new economic
and social conditions', or 'the new worldng-class movements which based them-
52 Traditions and approaches
selves on an acceptance of lndustrialism'.46 The Historjy of Socialist Thought
understands its subject as developing in a dependent relation to 'class-struggle'.
The Common People ends with an invocation of Disraeli's two nations, its inter-war
continuities and the continued salience of class divisions in post-war Britain. More-
over these struggles, whose vicissitudes Cole charted, were understood in a partic-
-
ular way as essentially political and organizational struggles underpinned by
certain economic determinations. In the rather special sense explored below, Cole's
history was informed by eccnomism.
As a socialist of a generally 'humanist' kind, he was concerned with the explicit-
ly moral content of socialisrn.47 He had a very sharp sense too of the necessity of
agitationaleducational activity. The absence of any such enterprise was one of his
main continuing criticisms of the Labour Party.48 Yet, in his historical work he
was extremely incurious about popular beliefs, even when they might be held
to have fuelled major shifts in the history of labour. 'Socialist thought' was the
thought of the writers, the leaders and the propagandists, not of 'the masses'.
Another symptom of the near-absence of culture was the almost exclusive concen-
tration on formal politics at the expense both of less formal movements and of
the whole reproductive sphere. Since this is the sphere of much of women's labour,
orthodox l a b o r history structured women firmly out of its concerns. It wrote, in
effect, about a single-sexed class. For Cole, indeed, references to women or
women's Sphere are often synonymous with triviality: in one compressed contempo-
rary image his hostility to orthodox Marxism, yet his staying in some ways within
its bounds, are all expressed :
There are some Marxists who cannot see a flapper use her lipstick without produc-
ing pat an explanation of her conduct in terms of the powers of production and
the class struggle.49
If we look at Cole's explanatory moments rather than the normal scope of his
narrative, supplementary points can be made. His most important explanatory
resource was changes in the economic situation. Economic descriptions provide the
main pauses for refreshment in the headlong development of the narrative. But
economic explanation actually stands in for any adequate account of popular belief
and behavior. Early nineteenth-century radicalism, as a mass movement, is under-
stood as a reflex of the force of economic relations. Chartism was a form of 'hunger
politics', even as complicated a cultural-political phenomenon as the Chartist Land
Plan is understood in these terms. The extension of the notion of instinctual needs
or elemental passions to cover the whole realm of the cultural becomes, in the end,
absurd :
The land-hungry factoiy operative who was belly-hungry as well and in mortal fear
.
of the new Poor Law 'Bastille' . . .
-
Hunger and hatred these were the forces that made Chartism a mass movement of
the British working class. HUNGER GNAWED at the HEARTS of the peop1e.50

Images of savagery, of raw unmediated impulses, of 'starving masses', inform all of

 Culture and the historians 53
Cole's writing on Chartisrn and this is matched by an overdrawn picture of the
-
'rationality' and 'idealism' of Lovettite elements in the movement, in this case in
-
a typical Victorian dichotomy all head and no belly.51 Anything as formalized or
intellectual as selfeducation or 'socialist thought' counted as 'culture' in Cole's
historical record: he remained completely oblivious of culture as the common sense
-
of classes and social groups the medium in which economic needs are actually
evaluated and popular political conceptions formed.
This feature characterizes Cole's work as a whole; it has, therefore to be
explained via Cole's general theoretical position, not as an incidental feature of~his
treatment of Chartism, produced by the phenomenon itself. Chartism declined and
the mid-nineteenth-century confomiities emerged because, once more, of economic
changes of a quite straightforward kind:
The reasons for this are simple. The main body of workers was coming to be rather
less hungry, and a good deal less desperate. What the employers and the political
economists had been telling the workers about the results of machinery was begin-
ning to come true. Talk about the blessings of capitalist enterprise came to be less
. .
a mockery to working-class ears . . So Chartist gradually died away.52

late-nineteenth-century mobilizations were understood in a similar way, as pro-

ducts of the Great Depression.53 As a general principle of explanation, too, changes
in worldngclass politics could be understood in these terms:
The same forces were at work, both in the successive extensions of the franchise
and in the struggles of the workers to secure means of political emancipation. These
forces were basically economic; they arise out of the changing forms of industrial
life, and the changing class-stnlcture in which the successive phases of economic
organization worked themselves out,54

Cole's recurrent explanatory move, then, was to seek a unity between the move-
ment of economic tendencies and the development of the labour movement.
-
Usually the 'economic' was itself understood very narrowly very often in terms of
the real income of the working class. Cole has little to say, except very derivatively,
about changes in economic relations and organization. At its least reductive and on
the most friendly reading the typical form of explanation is this: where capitalism
succeeds in the most obvious material respects, class politics will not disappear but
will take a gradualist or reformist shape. Failure and success is reflected especially
in working-class consumption and popular margins of surplus. Relative prosperity
breeds a confidence in the capitalist order and a willingness to work within it ,
economic failure may lead to widespread revolt. The theses about particular move-
ments were very similar to Mcse advanced, from the 1920s onwards, by Me econ-
omic historians from Clapham to Rostow.55 The relations which such accounts
describe certainly do exist. The problem is that all consideration of the cultural
conditions of their operation is omitted: hence the reduction to a mechanical
response to economic stimuli cMacteristic of the accounts of economic histor-
ians.56 We should note, however, that this kind of reduction was characteristic of
54 Traditions and approaches
'labour history' too. In practice, Cole's problematic (ifrwe can speak of anything so
coherent in his work) was a kind of half-hearted or guilty economism. In his
emphasis on class struggle, on leadership and on the determining force of 'the econ-
omy', he was quite an orthodox inter-war Marndst. Since he tended to reduce Marx's
rich conception of economic social relations to something very near the econornist's
'standard of living', and could never adequately theorize his concern with 'the indi-
vidual', his Marxism was, in Hobsbawm's phrase, 'vulgar Marxist°.57 The different
unresolved elements in his thought made it difficult for him to produce a history
that.would, in practice, surpass current orthodoxies.

Communist historians
Though Cole's work was influential, his l a b o r history was not yet that of the
1960s and 1970s. In the later history of the tradition, up to the present, three main
features seem to be important. The first of these has been the sponsorship of
official 'labour' and especially trade union studies with an ambivalent relation to
the academic study of 'industrialrelations'. A second important shift, especially
latterly, has been increasing emphasis on teaching and research in higher education
and a weakening of the adult education connection. This is seen in anxious debates
in the Society for the Study of labour History's Bulletin and in the increasing
number of young academics and post-graduate students who contribute to it, and in
the lack of the previous close connection with social democratic politics. But by far
the most important intellectual-political influence on labour history in the 1950s
and 1960s was that of a group of Maridst historians most of whom, up to 1956,
were members of the Communist Party.
The achievements of this generation of historians of the left are well known. On
their testimony, they owed a huge debt to two older Cormnunist intellectuals,
Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr. It was from this grouping that the first editorial
board o f Past and Present, founded in 1952 as a 'journal of scientific history', was
drawn.59 The Society for the Study of Labour History, started in 1960, represents
a later moment in the personal histories of some members of the same grouping.50
It is important to consider the nature of the Dobb-Torr influence, though with-
out a knowledge of personal intellectual relations, we can only try to assess this
through the originality of their work. One important feature was their very close
-
familiarity with the works of Marx and Engels not always characteristic of defen-
ders of Marxism! Dona Torr was an important translator, editor and explicator of
Marx-Engels texts, witness her important edition of the Selected Correspondence.
Dobb was a major interpreter of classical Marrdst theory, as important as many
more quarreled-oyer figures in 'Western Marxism'. His most influential book ,
Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1945), contained a major restatement of
the power and distinctiveness of some of Marx's key categories, especially 'mode of
production' 'forces and 'relations of production' and the capitalist and the feudal
modes of production. Dobb also conducted a critique of sociological (Weberian or
Sombartian) categories, on such grounds as their lack of historical specificity, their
 Culture and the histonhns 55
tendency to an idealism or essentialism, and their lack of power for historical
analysis. This explicitly theoretical project, conducted in an abstract manner,51
-
was united to a second the use of Marxist categories to produce a substantive
account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Britain, drawing on the
early economic historians. Dobb's originality, like Marx's, lay in the combination of
these aims, a combination usually dissevered in the work of his pupils and com-
rades. They became mainly 'historians', but Dobb combined a concern with theory
or 'abstraction' with a commitment to producing concrete histories. It sometimes
seems that, in this way, he supplied a great stock of notions which have fuelled the
work of a second generation ever since. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it
may be necessary to get back to a more theoretical discussion over thirty years after
Studies was published.
One product of this historical and theoretical work was a tentative overall perio-
dization of British history. This provided a framework nth in which historical special-
ists might work, together, on different problems and periods. Dobb 's main contri-
bution was to supply a periodization at the level, mainly, of the mode of economic
production. In the long transition presented by Dobb, there were four main
moments: the growth of petty commodity production within a social formation
still dominated by the feudal mode of production, the development of capitalist
social relations on the basis of petty commodity production, either through differ-
entiation among the producers ('the really revolutionary way') or by the articu-
lation of production to merchant capitalist enterprises, the Puritan revolution of
the seventeenth century which created important political conditions for the full
development of the capitalist mode of production, and the 'industrial revolution',
understood as a phase in which capitalism acquired its own characteristic processes
of production. The communist historians were possessed, then, of an account of
medieval and modern history which research based on Marxist or 'scientific'
principles might go on to elaborate.
Something of Dona Torr's characteristic contribution can be inferred too. She
seems to have been particularly interested in the political and ideological aspects of
the long transition, especially as they affected the inheritance of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century labour movements. These concerns, characteristically linking
'past and present', inform the plan of volume l of her study of Tom Mann, the
early-twentieth-century syndicalist, Communist and leader of New Unionism. Tom
Mann and His Times, completed from her own notes after her death by Christopher
Hill and A.L. Morton, is an extraordinary book, it combines a biography conveying
a real sense of Mann's own times, with a kind of total setting-in-place of the exper-
ience of this 'new-fangled man', which ranges back and forth over the whole history
of popular struggles in England. One of Torr's most important insights, developed
in different ways by Hill and Thompson in their own work, concerned the long
history of popular democracy in England, and particularly the importance of the
period in which small commodity producers were losing control of the means of
production and consumption from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.
This 'longest chapter in the history of democracy' produced its own characteristic
56 Traditions and approaches

ideologies, based upon an experience of dispossession, and focused around the

'deep-rooted tradition of lost freedom and rights'. Recognition of small-producer
democracy and the illumination by Hill and others of the democratic and egali-
tarian sub-themes of the Puritan revolution, permitted Torr to construct a long
tradition of popular democratic struggles of which modern socialists were inheri-
tors. Most of the themes of this communist 'populism' (not used here as a term of
denigration) are caught in the concluding sections of Hill's essay on the 'Norman
Yoke':
-
Marxism has subsumed what is valuable in the Norman Yoke theory its recognition
of the class basis of politics, its deep sense of the Englishness of the common
people, of the proud continuity of their lives, institutions and struggles with those
of their forefathers, its insistence that a propertied ruling class is from the nature of
.
its position fundamentally alien to the interests of the mass of the people . . . The
working class must stand forth as 'the defender of Eng1and'.62

Much ofDemocracy and the Labour Movement (1954),the nearest thing to a histor-
ical manifesto of this group in the period before 1956, is informed by a similar
thesis. The closing item, an essay on Wordsworth by Kiernan, ends with the follow-
ing quotation from the Prelude: 'My heart was all given to the people, and my love
theirs.'53
We can already see some of the richness of these founding insights. Dob'b and
Torr were already far removed from a 'vulgar Mar>dsm'. Dobb certainly took mode
of production as his central category and worked with a quite classic variant of the
base and superstructure metaphor, but he grasped the base itself as an extremely
complex formation. At a general abstract level, he clearly distanced himself from
technicism and other kinds of essentialism. Social relations of production were
given a priority within the general concept of mode of production. In concrete anal-
ysis, he stressed the importance of the co-e>dstence and articulation of different
modes or of elements of different modes, the continuous real erdstence of uneven-
ness, the complexity and variance of forms of production, distribution, exchange
and surplus extraction, and the fact that most tendencies of development would
breed their own forces of counter-action. 'An economic revolution,' he wrote,
'results from a whole set of historical forces in a certain combination: it is not a
simple product of one of them alone.'64 Thus Dobb's understanding of 'the eco-
nomic' was immeasurably richer (and more true to Marx) than Cole's or that of
most non-Mar>dst economic historians.
In the end, however, Dobb's Studies represent a complex nonessentialist econ-
omism, the 'limit case of economist' as Schwarz has called it.65 lt is not that
political determinations are absent from Dobb 's accounts (though it is arguable that
ideological determinants are). At some points, in explaining national differences,
for example, they are crucial.65 But there is no developed theory in Studies of
political or ideological relations or of such problems as that of 'representation'. The
absences mirror those in Dobb's main theoretical source, Marx's Capital. Classes or
fractions of classes comprehend their own real interests in a fairly unproblematic
 Culture and the historians 57
manner: political revolutions, even the English, are a fighting out of the manifest
issues. Thus the real complexity of Dobb's account of the Puritan revolution, more
complex than the better-known early essay by Hill, is the product of his very 'struc-
tural' analysis of economic relations, not of any real complexity in thinking politics
or ideology. In Hill's English Revolution (1940) and in Dobb's Studies the specific
effects of religion are, for instance, little discussed. Religiously defined parties or
issues are quite swiftly reduced to their 'real' contents in the interests of economic
classes.57 This move remains characteristic, indeed, of work which anticipates the
late 1950s and early 1960s break: Hill 's 'Norman Yoke' for instance and Torr's Tom
Mann. A form of class reductionism was to remain one of the main problems with
this kind of Marxism even after 1960.68
Ki general, however, in the case of Dona Torr, we move still further from a
simple or mechanical Marxism. We have noted her interest in ideologies. This was
-
different in kind from Cole's concern with 'thought' it embraced popular concep-
tions, especially those of slow growth and long duration. It pointed to, even if it did
not quite deliver, a form of cultural analysis. Torr's work and influence also con-
-
tained one key feature of the Marxist culturalism of the 1960s an emphasis on the
experiential, 'lived' quality of history, a concern to recreate the past as it felt to
contemporaries. Those parts of Tom Mann which Torr wrote herself have precisely
this quality. Her whole mode of approach to history was not one which could easily
coexist with the mechanical scientism and practical fatalism associated with
Stalinist oModoxies. She portrayed historical struggles with immediacy, energy
and relevance to the present. 'She made us feel history on our pulses.'69
The influence of Ton and Dobb on their younger comrades was evidently
immense. In some ways it was the substance of the Torr-Dobb account that was
most important: the problems with which Dobb dealt have clearly informed the
work of Hilton right through to his most recent books; the themes of the long
transition and of lost rights have shaped the work of both Hill and Thompson. The
influence was greatest on work in the period up to the mid nineteenth century ;
Thompson's Mom's and Torr's Mann have been nothing like so seminal for the social
history of their periods as Hill's work for the seventeenth century or Thompson's
for the early nineteenth. Where the work of this generation has been important for
later periods it has tended to take a rather different form, best represented by
Hobsbawn's early essays on late-nineteenth-century labour movements. The distinc-
tive focus of these studies, mostly completed before the publication o f Primitive
Rebels in 1959, is a concern with 'the economic and technical conditions which
allowed labour movements to be effective, or which prevented them from being
effective'.70
These essays extended the concerns of a Cole-like labour history, but placed
phases of the movement within an economic context grasped much more surely
than in Cole's brief and derivative sketches. The need to combat the one-sided pro-
gressivism of some economic historians on something like their own ground must
have pressed in the same direction." As heavily influenced by Lenin as by Marx,
these essays tend to return to an economism in which economic tendencies act,
58 Traditions and approaches
relatively unproblematically, as triggers for labour militancy, OI provide the context
of defeat .72 Or, as in the important essays on labour aristocracy, fragmentations
within the working class in terms of differential wages are assumed to have some
rather automatic effects on labour's politics.73 This union of l a b o r and economic
history under Marrdst auspices became a standard form of history, another concen-
trated on the politics of the leadership of labour movements, pragmatic everyday
judgements being held to be of more importance than 'ideas'.74 This, as Edward
Thompson argued in 1960, was the characteristic 'double-vision' of labour history :
'elemental forces' directed by 'juntas and parliamentarians The casualty was any
sense of a movement that 'grew from the bottom up' in the intense and committed
activity of provincial militants.75
In general, however, the early work of the 'communist historians' was very
varied, developing different elements in the Dobb-Torr emphases. We shall argue
that the late 1950s and early 1960s saw significant breaks from these roots as well;
but in many ways, especially in the substantive concerns, the most important
'breaks' came with Dobb and Torr themselves.

A new kind of history

We have already argued that the period after the mid 1950s was an exceptionally
creative one. Like all attempts to define objects very close to the point of w'sion,
what follows can only be a first apprmdmation with which others will quarrel.75
We might first try to describe, very generally, some of the main shifts that consti-
tuted the revolution in historiography in these years.
The most important over-arching change was that historians began to write
seriously and with sympathy about the beliefs and behaviour of the mass of histor-
ical populations: they actually did, in an important sense, 'give their hearts' to the
people.
In case this sounds a very easy thing to do, we need to recall that the study of
'culture' remained firmly within an elitist mould while, on the other hand, 'labour
history' was usually cultureless. Two sets of new departures were therefore involved
in the new history: a new rendering of the notion of culture which rescued it from
elitist or narrowly literary and artistic usages; and a break with the restricted cate-
gories of labour history and, what was often the same, with mechanical or triumph-
alist assumptions about the proper historical destiny and ultimate state of con-
sciousness of the proletariat. Those shifts must have rested (if our earlier argument
was correct) on some profound change of relationship between intellectuals and
contemporary working people.
Richard Hoggart's Uses o f Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams's Culture and
Society (1958) and 271e Long Revolution (1961) belong, centrally, to the first of
these shifts. Writing the history of the idea of culture itself, Williams sought to
extend its usage beyond the connoisseurship of cultivated bourgeois fractions, the
judgements of the guardians of high culture and even those activities conventionally
regarded as 'creative': 'I would then define the theory of culture as the study of
 Culture and the historians 59

relationships between elements in a whole way of 1ife.'77 As we argued earlier ,

Williams's concerns have none the less often remained too literary to deliver the full
implications of such a profound reordering, his 'cultural materialism' remains,
centrally, a form of literary criticism. But it was Hoggart who really supplied an
exemplification of Williams's argument, showing how, under certain fragile con-
ditions, 'workingclass people' could create and share a way of life with its own
strengths and moral and aesthetic values. Both men had personal roots within the
working class and were acutely aware both of the novelty and of the dangers of
this. Hoggart's introduction to The Uses of Literacy maps the range of middle-
class perceptions (including those of 'Mar>dsts' and labour historians) with great
percipience, but also warns of the difficulties of someone who is 'from the working
classes' It was surely the fact that worldng-class culture was described intimately,
from within, that made the book so powerful. For the middle-class reader, it was
a solvent of assumed cultural superiorities or a lesson, at the very least, in cultural
relativities.78 The emergence of writers and intellectuals of the worldng class was,
of course, one aspect of the erosion of cultural class differences that marked the
1950s. It was especially important, perhaps, in helping to produce a less agonized
pattern of relationships between intellectuals of the left and worldng people. There
is also one further aspect whose history should be written: the continuing impor-
tance of adult and worldng-class education as an arena in which these relations were
worked out.
It would require an intimate knowledge of personal and political relations (to
which this essay does not pretend) to unravel the influence of Williams and Hoggart
on the historians. But the coalescence between their contributions and the popu-
lism of the Communist historians is very striking. Hoggart considered that 'histor-
ians of the worldng-class movement' produced histories of the activities of 'signifi-
cant minorities', not histories of the working classes at all. To the historian-reader
of Hoggart, that might have seemed an over-generous judgment, since even these
activities were viewed through a severely narrowed frame of politics-and-work,
while 'the class' was often present, but in very stereotypical forms. Certainly the
richness of the activities of Hoggart's minorities - 'purposive', 'political', 'pious' and
-
'self-improving' had hardly begun to be charted in 1957. The state of working-
class culture was more often inferred than actually described. Hoggart's work must
have constituted a real reproach.
The historians' own innovations, however, took a very particular form. The
typical object of the new history was certainly popular behaviour and belief, but
overwhelmingly in periods before the growth of stable or routinized l a b o r organiz-
ation - for Britain, the period before, say, 1850. Moreover the culture of the
popular classes was still usually seen within a quite severely political frame: the
object was defined as early, primitive, archaic or 'transitional' forms of social
protest, the proto-politics of the people. Much of the really creative work of the
period - history's points of growth fits this description with surprising accuracy :
...

Ho'bsbawn's work on 'primitive re'bels', 'bandits' and the Swing Rioters, signifi-
cantly different, in many ways from early essays, Hill's work on Puritans, Levellers
60 Dadiiions and approaches

and millenarians, I-lilton's studies of peasant movements, Genovese's examination

of slave culture, Rude's studies of 'pre-industrial crowds' and the many derivatives,
in France and England, from this work, Thompson's recreation of the characteristic
politics and political culture of the early English worldng class and his work, with
many others, on eighteenth-century forms of popular protest and communal
discipline, the studies of J .F.C. Harrison, Harold Silver, Brian Simon and others
of Owenism and of early worldng-class educational traditions; the interest first,
in close local studies of Chartism and other working-class movements and, latterly ,
in their characteristic theory, language and rituals .
The titles and authors involved here and the timing of the new history is best
summarized in a chart of dates of publication of some of the more important texts.
Works in brackets may be taken as prefiguring the break in important ways.
(1954 Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement)
(1955 Thompson, William Morris)
(1956 Torr, Tom Mann and His Times)
1957 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy
1958 Williams, Culture and Soeieljv
Hill, Puritanism and Revolution
1959 Hobsbawn , Primitive Rebels
Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution
1960 Simon, Studies in the History of Edueation
Briggs and Saville, Essays in Labour History I
1961 .l.F.C. Harrison, Learning and Living
Genovese, The Political Economy o f Slaver;v
1962 Hobsbawn, Age ofRevolu sons
1963 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
1964 Hobsbawn, Labouring Men (some essays)
1965 Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution
Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies
1967 Thompson, 'Time, work discipline and industrial capitalism'
1968 G.H. Williams, Artisans and Sans Culottes
1970 Hollis, The Pauper Press
1971 Thompson, 'The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth
century'
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic
Thompson (D), The Early Chartists
1972 Hi}l, The World Turned Upside Down
1973 Rowb otham , Hidden from History
Hilton, Eondmen Made Free
1974 Thompson, 'Patrician society: plebian culture'

'The people' much more commonly assumed the shape of peasants, small
producers, artisans or sans culottes than proletarians. Labour history, strictly
speaking, remained relatively immune to the newer influences. The main exception
 Culture and the historkzns 61

was the early nineteenth century, the veritable seedbed of the newer social his-
tories. All this is very clear in the three volumes of Essays in Labour History ,
whose common editorship and title disguise some major differences. Volume 1
(1960) is recognizably a 'culturalist' text. lt contained Brigg's influential essay in
'The language of class', a work citing Culture and Society and much concerned,
Williams-like, with the history of a conception and a word; Thompson's 'Homage to
Tom Macguire', and Hobsbawrn's study of cultural aspects of wage determination,
an interesting and characteristic insertion of culture or custom into a classic
concern of the l a b o r and economic historians. Volumes 2 (1971) and 3 (1977)
mark a return to much more conventional fare, coinciding with the move forward
in terms of historical period. Indeed, nearly twenty years after its publication,
'Homage to Tom Macguire' (like parts of Morris and o f The Life and Times of Tom
Mann) remains a strangely isolated work in a sea of labour history, and is corres-
pondingly invigorating on first encounter .
In the 1970s some of the newer emphases have been applied to later periods.
The massive development of oral history and the use of autobiographical materials
promise (though have hardly yet delivered) an experimentally based history of
more recent times as rich yet as systematic as Thompson's Making." But the
breaks have happened in nothing like so consolidated a way as for the early
nineteenth century. One feature has been a return to heavily Leninist inter-
pretations based upon the theory of labour aristocracy. Thus, though John Foster's
work has huge virtues, notably the concern with the working class and the state
and the bourgeoisie, it might accurately be read as a Idnd of throwback to the
pre-war period, an indication of where communist history might have gone without
Dobb, Torr and 1956. It has therefore been necessary for a new cohort of labour-
aristocratic historians to retrace that path, too, for themselves, out of early
Hobsbawm and into an encounter with Gramsci.80 More typically, a similar ground
is being covered but in a much more segmented way; interesting histories are being
written about working~class leisure culture or provision, about popular religion,
about imperialist, nationalist and militarist sentiment, and about the family, the
position of women and a popular 'feminism'. Certainly there has been a real
discovery of late Victorian and Edwardian popular culture. Yet these themes have
only been fleetingly brought together, especially the political and recreational. And
these additional kinds of history have tended to grow up alongside the old, without
transforming them.81
Perhaps the most important inhibition to the transformation of labour history
initially was a feeling that much of importance on more modern periods was
already 'known' and that, if not, concepts and methods were ready to hand. Cole
and others had rendered familiar the story of British social democracy. Miliband
was soon to write the same story from a perspective further to the left: Anderson
and Nairn were to provide a kind of coup de grace by arguing that English leftism
had been utterly futile. Even without these accounts, the concepts themselves,
those of a classic Marxism-Leninism, were readily available. Reconceptualization
was simply not necessary, There is some substantiation of this argument to be
62 Traditions and approaches

found in the introduction to Primitive Rebels, one of the first of the new histories
to appear. Hobsbawn noted how the movements to be discussed, from banditry
through to labour rituals, had been rendered marginal or regarded as 'forerunners'
of modern social movements. 'Modern' movements, on the other hand, had
'normally been treated according to a wellestablished and reasonably sound
scheme'.
For obvious [?] reasons the historians have concentrated on labour and socialist
movements, and such other movements as have fitted into the socialist framework.
These are commonly regarded as having their primitive stages - journeyman's
societies, and Luddism, Radicalism, Jacobinism and Utopian Socialisms - and
essentially as developing towards a modern pattern which varies from one country
to the next but has considerable general application . . . _82

Primitive rebels, by contrast, posed real problems of interpretation and imaginative

understanding, up till now urban and literate historians had 'too rarely made the
effort to understand people who are unlike themselves'.
The same point could and should be made of the Edwardian worldng class or
of late-nineteenth-century socialists. Indeed, the effort to understand, which
involves the suspension of the belief that we already have the answers, is always
necessary, even in social and political interactions in the contemporary world, even
in the same society. It is the sense that 'reasonably sound schemes' already exist
in a kind of Marxist-Leninist common sense about modern labour movements
that has hindered the reconstruction of labour history. It may be that forms of
study of post-1850 British popular history will only shift when that common
sense is explicitly challenged, as indeed, in theoretical debate, it is being challenged
now. In the late 1950s, however,'archaic' social movements offered a weak point
in orthodox categories: it was easier to make breaks on this ground than on the
'classic' ground of the proletariat .
Further difficulties for more modern studies derive from the object of study
itself. Fragmentations in the historiography express real fragmentation in the
experiences of men and women within a capitalist social order. One feature of the
older Marxist convictions about 'working-class consciousness' was the assumption
of a degree of homogeneity, or at least a real or potential essence or core around
which a whole culture was organized. Even more recent accounts of working-
class culture tend to continue this search for some simple unity. This may
take somewhat dismissive forms, or revert to some romantic variant.83 One
of our own recurrent arguments on the other hand, will be to stress the hetero-
geneity or complexity of 'worldng-class culture', fragmented not only by geo-
graphical unevenness and parochialisms, but also by the social and sexual divisions
of l a b o r and by a whole series of divisions into spheres or sites of existence. The
most important of these latter divisions is that which mainly distinguishes the
social worlds of men and women: the division between the sphere of social pro-
duction or 'work' on the one hand, and that of biological reproduction, private
consumption and recreation (which is also the sphere of much of women's work)
 Culture and the historians 63
on the other.84 Another such division, the defining division of l a b o r history, is
that constructed in the course of the development of social democratic institutions
between a sphere of legitimate politics and a 'non-political' realm. The distinction
between the formal education system (where people learn) and everywhere else
(where learning is absent) is another such distinction.85 Thus are created a series of
real social separations whose historical origins are forgotten and which are usually
accepted by everyone, including historians, as 'natural'. These distinctions, once
founded and given an institutional force, are real, and really 'lived', but they are also
constructed and maintained by particular ideologies (of the education system, of
domesticity, of the protestant ethic and so on). It really is the case that it is easier
to break with jaM . I ii studying an eighteenth-century food riot than

in studying an §F-iicial twentieth-century 'stoppage', for the forms themselves are

less differentiated. Hence, too, the privileged status, historically and politically, of
those (revolutionary) moments when political practice and ideological struggle fuse
the spheres by uniting action across them.
A second distinguishing feature of the new histories was their 'social' character.
'Social history' is a category too loaded with contradictory significances to be a
very useful aid to analysis, but as a banner or rallying point it expressed much that
was typical of the period. Younger historians, dissatisfied with a conventional
training in 'economic history' or the history of administration, often found an
identity as 'social' historians. The backwash of Cold War allegiances in economic
history and the increasing narrowness of the foci of economic research pushed in
the same direction. Sociologies of different lands had an influence :' so too, though
much more in America than in Britain, did the French Annales tradition. The
development of interests in a very wide range of different empirical areas with no
obvious home in the orthodoides also contributed their (different) social histories.
Once again, however, shifts within the Marxist tradition were paradigmatic for the
discipline as a whole. The most important change of emphasis between the l 940s/
early 1950s and the 1960s was from a concern with modes of production and the
transition from feudalism and capitalism at that level, to the political and cultural
relations between classes as the primary object of study. Similarly while Dobb's
project had been explicitly theoretical and raised, centrally, epistemological
questions, the new history tended to a quite militant distrust of 'theory' or was,
at best, quite uninterested in the more formal, deductive aspects of Marxism.
The priority, it seems, was to test and develop the Dobb-Torr insights through
detailed research. In other words, though the new history drew on a periodization
-
of Dobb's Studies his results - it had a different object and a different method. It
undoubtedly broke with his complex economism and the 'rationalist', concept-
building elements in his procedure. An account of this change could be written
around Dobb's Szudies and Thompson's Making or around the earliest and latest
work of Christopher Hill, say, $71e English Revolution and Economic Problems
o f the CNurcn (1956) on the one side and the World Turned Upside Down (1972)
on the other. These aspects of characterization of 'culturalist' Marxism will be
64 Traditions and approaches

taken further in part 3, especially the implications for views of class and class
consciousness.
The third main feature was the centrality of 'experience'. This emphasis is best
understood as an opposition, often rooted in political experiences, to all exter-
nalizing, mechanical or functionalist accounts of the social world and an insistence
on getting inside the minds, perceptions and the feelings of the historical agents
themselves. But perhaps, like good ethnographers, we should let the historians
speak for themselves:
Hobsbawm in the appendix to Primitive Rebels entitled 'In their own voices':
.
to help readers . . to think and feel themselves into the skins of such 'primitive
rebels' as have been discussed in this book.86

Edward Thompson's famous preface to The Making of the English Working

Class :
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete'
handloom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna
Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and
traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may
have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies.
Their insurrectionary consp piracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through
these time of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid
in terms of their own experience . . . .so
Christopher Hill on the writings of seventeenth-century radicals:
Historians may trace sources in Italian Neo-Platonists and German Anabaptists,
but what gives life and vigour to these ideas is the relevance which men felt that
they had to the affairs of England in the revolutionary decades. The ideas may
(or may not) be second-hand, the passion behind them is not. Many radicals
claimed to have received their truths not from books or from men but from God,
from the spirit within. No doubt they deceived themselves: they gave form and
shape to vague ideas that were in the air. But the form and shape were their own,
drawn from the experience of their daily life in England during the years when
John Warm's 'teeming freedom' exerted itself.88

Eugene Genovese on the culture of the slaves in the American south*

But knowing that the ambiguity of the Black experience as a national question
lends the evidence to different readings, I have chosen to stay close to my primary
responsibility: to tell the story of slave life as carefully and accurately as possible.
Many years of studying the astonishing effort of black people to live decently as
human beings even in slavery has convinced me that no theoretical advance
suggested in their experience could ever deserve as much attention as that
demanded by their demonstration of the beauty and power of the human spirit
under conditions of extreme oppression.89
 Culture and the histonhns 65

-
These themes and tones the validating ground of 'experience', the suspicion of
formal theory, the concern for oppressed peoples and with historically recovering
-
them, and the appeal to an ethical humanism represent much of what is best in
these histories. But they are, as we shall see, symptoms of some limitations and
difficulties too .
Before leaving the emphasis on 'experience', we should stress how general this
phenomenon has been. The cultural stress of British history, of Marxism and of
New Left politics, was by no means unique. Accompanying movements in other
countries and other disciplines were enormously diverse and it would be absurd to
regard them as identical. Yet, from the point of view of this essay, they did have
features in common. They shared a stress upon the inward apprehension of the
world, upon 'consciousness' in the most general usage of the term. This rediscovery
was especially revelatory within a Marzdst tradition scarred by theoretical
economism and a Stalinist politics, but it was not limited to it. Similar problems
were posed elsewhere .
When English empirical sociology rediscovered 'class', it often did so in the
shape of cultural differences. In continental Europe, the period saw a revival
of phenomenological philosophies, including Jean-Paul Sartre's blend of existen-
tialism and Marxism. These were characteristically concerned with the individual's
inner world. Though Althusserian structuralism was a response to the 'humanisms'
of the 1950s, it shared with them a concern with 'consciousness', greatly developing
the notion of ideology. Within Marxism generally, structuralism aside, there was a
revival of interest in Marx's early work, especially the 1844 Manuscripts, and in
the more experiential categories like 'alienation'. The cross-Atlantic development
of Frankfurt-school Marxism, the attempted synthesis with Freudian psycho-
analysis, and the concern with the new cultural phenomena of the media, were
other similar developments. In the heartland of conventional sociology itself,
there was a not-dissimilar revolt. Sociologies with, as in the case of radical ethno-
methodology, an almost exclusive concern with the processes of 'making sense',
developed in conscious reaction to the dominant functionalism of the theoretical
systems. A similar tendency can be seen in sectoral or sub~sociologies. the concern
with symbolic and cultural interactions, for instance, in the development of the
sociologies of deviancy and education. The parallels between these intellectual
systems and the newer forms of politics of the 1960s has often and correctly been
noted. All these systems and movements focused in different ways on the inward-
ness of experience in reaction to sociologies (or to a world) that was seen as
mechanical, reductive or deterministic. We might say that the discovery of 'the
cultural' was the key shift in the social sciences generally in this period .

-
'Lions in the path' and the trouble with ostriches
If the history of history presented here is anything like correct, it should be
possible to draw some prescriptions from it. There is one route, indeed, that does
appear to be extremely clear. Is it not the responsibility of historians, especially
66 Traditions and,approaches

socialist historians, to extend the emphases of the new history fowvard in time,
to complete the reconstruction of labour history, to realize the promise of oral
history, to reconstruct, once more, the real connection between historians of the
left and a socialist movement? This is, perhaps, the commonest orientation among
left historians now, represented in the coalition around the journal History Work-
shop, in sections of the oral history 'movement' and among many feminist
historians. The editorials of the first edition of History Workshop, with their
calls for a history 'relevant to ordinary people' and for an end to 'the scholastic
fragmentation of the subject', are a most energetic signalling of this path.90
Despite its political rectitude, this solution is not without its difficulties.
There is a danger that the extension of some $960s innovations, without the
political experiences that informed them, will lead to an empty, descriptive and
passively romantic historiography, popular only in the object which it records.
If, as we have argued, the problem of developing a more adequate history of
recent times is conceptual in character, a matter of brealdng with deeply held
assumptions, an unrepentantly empiricist history may not help us very much.
Moreover, the popular historians tend also to ignore many of the significant
developments of the late 1960s and 1970s, especially encounters of a theoretical
kind. There is, in fact, barely an aspect of the historical practices of the 1960s
that has not been questioned or potentially enriched by subsequent debates.
At this point we are not concerned to argue any of these difficulties through,
but we do want to argue against evasions.
New Left history was followed by a quite different kind of intellectual
explosion. The main features of this phase were the priority of 'theory', the
internationalization of debate and, in common with the histories, a concern
especially with ideology or aspects of 'consciousnessi The established concerns
of histories and of earlier cultural theorists were worked over in new ways. Much
of the impetus for this shift came from the newer editors of the New Left Review.
Having demonstrated (to their own satisfaction) that the English were parochial,
the working class inert and a Marxist culture absent, they set about to repair
these deficiencies through the importation of books.91 This priority, directed at
the intellectuals, was pursued at the expense of any real connection with popular
politics and was thus completely at odds with the dominant tendency among the
historians and the 'older' New Left in the earlier period. The debates between
Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn and Edward Thompson in the mid 1960s were
centrally about these matters: the relation of the intellectuals to popular and
indigenous traditions - not just the 'peculiarities' but actually the 'potefM'alities'
of the Engush.92 These early debates have often been reproduced in the years
that have followed: different voices but the same themes. Yet, however
we evaluate it, there is no doubt that the New Left project has worked: it has
helped to transform the character of intellectual Maridsm in Britain, shifting the
whole centre of gravity of the tradition. Unfortunately there is no time to look
at the conditions of this success.
Not all the importations were equally incompatible with the existing Marxisms.
 Culture and the historians 67

In history and often in politics, Gran sci has been assimilated with relative ease,
often at the expense of his originality.93 The least digestible elements have derived
from Marxist structuralism, especially from the work of Louis Althusser. Yet
Althusser's work has been enormously influential and has been followed by
successive waves of influence, many of them out of the same Parisian milieu .
'Structuralism' has thus developed vigorous roots in Britain too. Two well-known
examples are the strong neo-or post-Althusserian tendency among critical social
theorists and the use of a heady mix of serology, Marxism and psychoanalysis
by some analysts of film.94 The reception has been given a particular cast through
the contemporaneous growth of the women's movement, as in the case of psycho-
analysis for example. Because of the experiential stress of the women's movement
itself, the political and other problems of the engagement with theory have often
-
been felt especially acutely there.95 One effect of all this to risk a mild chauvi-
-
nism is that the British have become somewhat less parochial than the French
-
and Germans at least in what they read! Certainly it no longer makes sense to
see 'structuralism' as peculiarly French or Gramsci's legacy as limited to Italy.
We wish to stress two main consequences of this theoretical immersion. So
expansive has been the development of Marxist cultural theory that many of
the most important questions in the theory and sociology of culture are now
posed not between Maridst and other accounts, but within Marxism itself. One
key element in this very odd state of affairs is the absence of an emergent
rival system capable of thinking about culture as a whole (rather than some special,
class-bound and form-bound part of it). In Britain, the most important rivals
have been based in the study of literature or other aspects of 'high culture', or,
in cultural histories with close affinities to political biography, concerned with
'the conversation of the people who counted'.96 The most crippling defect of
all these forms of cultural study is simply the restriction of range: the failure
to take seriously the lived culture of the mass of historical populations. Thus, the
more one considers the break made by Hoggart and Williams from Leavis, the more
significant that departure becomes. It provided a basis for an adequate 'cultural
studies'. Only a rival that takes a somewhat similar departure from high-cultural
traditions is likely to make serious inroads on the tendency to a Marxist monopoly.
The second consequence of the 1970s developments is to set up a particular
opposition within the Marxist debates. It is important to describe this opposition
rather carefully, since much of our discussion later in the book will hang upon it .
On the one hand, there is the older British tradition of cultural analysis, formed
in the breaks from Leavisite literary criticism and an economistic Marxism. There
have been two contributory streams here: the 'literacy' and the 'historical', though
they have shared common roots in the 'culture and society' tradition and in non-
Fabian forms of British socialism. They have also shared a common mode, very
different from that of the other camp: a mode of the dominance of the particular,
concerned primarily with the analysis of concrete class experience or specific
cultural forms, usually in a 'historical' way. Thus though Edward Thompson
describes himself as an historian within the Marxist tradition and Raymond
68 Traditions and approaches

Williams describes his latest position as a 'cultural materialism', these two key
representatives of the first tradition are very close together, especially in their
opposition to structuralism. For ease of reference, not to invent a 'position', we
term this tradition 'cultural Mar>dsm'.
On the other hand, there is a set of tendencies, still more diverse than the
first, in which, however, Althusserian structuralism is central. The contributory
streams have included the linguistics of Saussure, the structural anthropology of
Levi-Strauss, the epistemological concerns of traditional French philosophy and a
particular, 'philosophical' reading of the Marx o f Capital. More hidden debts are
owed to Lacan's adaption of Freudian psychoanalysis and to Gramsci's writing
on state and civil society. The central substantive concern might be described as the
structuring of thought and consciousness through ideological processes, though
these are variously described as structures of 'signification', 'representation' or
'discourse'. The typical empirical moment is the analysis of the 'text', literary or
in some other form. But what distinguishes this tradition more clearly than any
other facet is its unrelenting concern with theoretical and epistemological questions
pitched at a higher level of abstraction. We will refer to this tradition as 'structuralism ' 7

following a longestablished usage.

The opposition of these tendencies is clear enough from a range of polemics.
There are many structuralist attacks on 'culturalism'.97 They tend to share a
common mode of critique. The object is to show that a particular text is organized
around definite presuppositions (a 'problematic'). Certain problematics are held to
be inherently flawed, or 'not Mar>dst'. Chief among these are a trio of tendencies
to which, over and again, structuralist critiques return' 'historicism', 'hUuanism'
and 'empiricism'. If such a tendency is present, the text as a whole is held to fail,
flawed at its centre. Both the mode of critique and its key terms are derived quite
directly from the work of Althusser, especially from For Marx and Reading
Capital. The procedural force of the critique rests on a particular epistemological
basis, though this is not always acknowledged. Especially important is the sharp
and definitive distinction between science and ideology which is Critical in
Althusser's earlier formulations. In Reading Capital , Althusser and his colleagues
attempted to define precisely what it was in Capital that distinguished it from
ideology, having already argued in earlier work for a sharp 'epistemological break'
between Marx's earlier and later texts. In his later work, Althusser himself has
questioned the hardness of the science-ideology divide, while in England some of
those most deeply influenced by his work have rejected what they see as the
'rationalism' of this position. Yet it is still sometimes argued, or implied, that the
relation between culturalism and structuralism is one of the total replacement
of one problematic by another more 'scientific' one. As we shall argue later, we do
not accept the mode of total critique nor the view of how 'scientific' advances are
made which informs it .
Fully developed cult uralist attacks on structuralist positions are rarer. But
structuralism is certainly seen as an opposed position within (or outside) Marxism.
Here, for example, is Edward Thompson on the subject of Althusser :
 Culture and the historians 69

But this is a quite distinct question from Althusser's writing, which I see as a
mutation, OI' as a fully exposed development of idealism which uses certain Marxist
concepts but which is attempting to wall up, totally, the empirical dialogue and the
empirical criticism of those concepts. It ranks as a theology, and as between a
theology and what I regard as the major tradition of Marx there can be very little
common ground. Then what is at issue is reason itself' whether Marxism is a
rational theory available to dialogue with evidence and open rational criticism. If
it ceases to be such, then it is disreputable. It is not only disreputable, it is actively
injurious§8lt will mislead all the time. Hence it is a question of principle to oppose
..
this . .

Thompson is resolutely anti-Althusserian: hardly a piece passes from his prolific

pen without a pot shot or two at 'some structuralist philosophers'99 A more
extended critique is threatened (and eagerly awaited). In the meantime the most
sustained riposte is contained in Raymond Williams's Marxism and Literature, an
important theoretical text, not least for its familiarity and engagement with texts
out of other traditions.
The culturalist»structuralist opposition is a very real one, but we wish to end this
essay by noting our own somewhat different general orientation. The argument, at
this stage, will have to take the form of rather dogmatic assertions, a kind of
dogmatic deface of un-dogmatism. Neither of the two traditions which together
constitute our field is adequate, taken on its own. Neither culturalism nor structural-
ism will do! It is not possible to develop an adequate theory of culture-ideology
from Althusserian (or neo- or post- ) positions. There has not been, not can there
be, any simple supercession of a culturalist problematic by positions derived from
an Althusserian theory of ideology. Nor is it fruitful to attempt to develop in more
and more sophisticated and ethereal ways the most 'advanced' structuralist, semio-
logical, linguistic or psychoanalytic theories. What presents itself as the structura-
list critique of culturalism is, very often, merely an exploration of differences
-
between the two positions. It clarifies but since it too seldom has reference to
-
the analysis of particular situations it does little more. The typical mode of
critique, which we have described, often resembles a land of intellectual lumber-
jacking, with all the excitement of the art, especially when the timber is some great
classic tree that has stood in the forest for many decades. Down goes Weber! Down
go Marxist historians! Down goes Marx! Very intoxicating! But the problem is that
this mode of critique is rarely accumulativez one 'problematic' demonstrates its
power against another, but we rarely have a second substantive account, still less
one incorporating, like Marx's critique of classical political economy, what was
'rational' in the first. This may explain a great deal about contemporary intellectual
practice among those considering themselves Marxists: the proliferation of positions,
the ephemerality of much debate, and the relative paucity of synthesizing or sub-
stantive works that do not merely criticize orthodoydes (Marxist or otherMse)
but actually stand in their place.
On the other hand 'culturalist' accounts are often extremely vulnerable to
aspects of the structuralist critique. As we shall see, this includes some famous
70 Traditions and approaches

histories of working-class culture and experience. There are definite limitations,

for concrete analysis, in the 'humanist' presuppositions. There is a failure adequately
to theorize the results of concrete studies and to make the theoretical starting
points of further work quite plain. There is a tendency not to write about deter-
minations that are external to, or do not easily show up in, 'culture' or 'experience'.
There is a tendency to trust the 'authentic' experiential text as the exclusive source
of accounts. Marxist culturalism tends to reject two key aspects of Marx's original
contribution to a developed historical method: the process of systematic, self-
conscious abstraction, and the notion of social relations that are structured, have a
logic or tendency or force of their own and operate, in part, 'behind men's backs'.
It is precisely because Althusserianism recovers these genuinely 'structuralist'
elements in classical Marxism that it provides a powerful critique of culturalist
Marxism. Social processes cannot be (wholly) understood in terms of the recorded
experiences of individuals or classes. Sometimes these lie at the very heart of
inadequate explanations of the world. The object of an adequate history must,
then, not merely be 'people' but the whole complex set of relations in which they
stand, within which, indeed, they are first made as social beings.
-
This point the unwisdom of neglecting the difficulties raised by structuralist
theory - may be illustrated in another way. Theoretical debates of the last ten years
have raised serious questions against each of the terms that, together, constitute
the title of this book and, indeed, against their juxtaposition. Is 'culture' too loose
to constitute a useful term of analysis? If we expand it to cover 'way of life' does
not its specificity disappear? How do we distinguish between 'culture' and 'non-
culture'? What is the worldng class anyway? Can we speak of relatively homogeneous
cultures that belong to particular classes? Are cultures really generated within
classes, from 'experience'? Is the notion of 'experience' a coherent one? Does it
not confuse the worldgas it appears to human beings and the stock of notions with
which they make sense of it? Is it not a gross simplification to understand societies
(or cultural formations) in terms of class relations alone? Are not gender, or ethnic
or age-rank relations also of great importance? May not a politically genuine concern
with popular experiences come to stand in for an attempt to understand, in a
harder, more analytical way, the place of culture in a broader process of change or
transformation?
If we do not wish to ignore these problems, there are perhaps two ways past the
Althusserian lion in the path. We can continue to study historical and contemporary
situations (which are in principle the same) with the best means that are to hand.
We may continue to work within paradigms whose vulnerability we acknowledge
but respond to weaknesses and limitations in the actual practice. This way through
is one of the routes adopted here, in part 2.
But there is another way, too, round by a more theoretical detour. What seems
to be needed here is to slow the pace of speculation a little, be less destructively
critical and consider more carefully the strengths and weaknesses of the two tradi-
tions by comparing some exemplary texts. What precisely are the differences between
structuralist and culturalist accounts? Are they opposed or just different? Do they
 Culture and the historians 71

share similar origins, premises, problems? Is it possible to pass the practice of writing
the history of culture through a 'structuralist' critique and prescribe a more adequate
method? This is the route adopted in part 3 of this book, always under the impera-
tive that we need ways of thinking for the primary task of political and empirical
analysis. In this sense the theoretical project is subordinate, limited, clarificatory ,
but has its uses.
Part 2
Studies
3 'Really useful knowledge': radical
education and working-class
culture, 1790-1848
Richard Johnson

Introduction
One of the most interesting developments in working-class history has been the
rediscovery of popular educational traditions, the springs of action of which owed
little to philanthropic, ecclesiastical or state provision. For a long time these tradi-
tions remained hidden, though they appear in some early social histories, especially
those written in one period of radical education (1890s to 1920s) about another
(l790s to 18405).1 But it was not until the 1960s that more fully researched
accounts appeared, forming part of the general recovery of early working-class
radicalism. In 1960 Brian Simon's Studies in the History of Edueation drew
attention to the continuity and the liveliness of independent popular education
from Jacobinism to Chartism. In 1961 , J.F.C. Harrison's Learning and Living
examined traditions of adult selfeducation in one locality. Harold Silver's important
book, The Concept of Popular Education (1965), looked at 'developments in
attitudes to the education of the people' more generally, but focused especially
on Owen and Owenism, Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class
(1963) permitted a fuller contextualization of others' findings, but also stressed
the intellectual character of early-nineteenth-century radicalism and the role of
'the articulate consciousness of the self-taught'.2 These themes have become more
explicit in later studies of Owenism and Chartism and of the radical press, the main
'educational' medium.3 Related to radical traditions, but not yet connected in the
historiography, were other educational resources which have been receiving
increasing attention from historians - especially the extent and uses of private
schools.4 Some recent studies of Sunday schools have shown the co~e>dstence of
schools under popular control with more clearly philanthropic institutions.5
There is, however, no adequate study of the other important popular educational
resource: the working-class family itself.
The radical press remains the obvious route of entry into popular educational
practices and dilemmas. It was extremely articulate, indeed talkative, providing a
weekly set of commentaries on everyday life and politics. Although it is the main
source for what follows, this use is in itself problematic, posing additional questions
which must be answered en route. For we cannot assume that the attitudes of
radical leaders and writers were those of 'the workers' (any more than we can assume
that radicalism was 'unrepresentative' or the downwards extension of middle-class
'ideas').6 For one thing, radicals differed a lot on some essential matters. For
76 Studies

another, popular opinion itself was not homogeneous. Moreover, radical leaders
were clearly involved in a process that was part mediation or expression of some
popular feelings, and part a forming or 'education' of them, an attempt to achieve,
from very diverse materials, some unity of will and direction. This necessarily
involved fostering some tendencies and opposing others. The image of the educator
or 'schoolmaster' is itself interesting here. It was one of the commonest guises
adopted by radical journalists.7 Though it was an identity often adopted jokingly
and as a conscious play upon Henry Brougham's populist 'schoolmaster abroad'
speeches of the 1820s, it was an image that constructed some distance between
'teachers' and 'pupils', despite the involvement in a common enterprise. It is
important, then, to understand the particular position of leaders and journalists
within radical movements and, more generally, within the popular classes as a whole.
It is necessary, in other words, to face squarely the problem of the 'popularity' of
radicalism. This is an especially important question for the concerns of this essay,
which puzzles around the relation between various Idnds of radicalism, understood
as 'educative' or transformative ideologies, and the conditions of existence and
lived culture of some of the groups which radicalism addressed. But first it is
necessary to describe some salient features of radical education over this period,
concentrating, at first, on some common elements. Later we shall look, more
discriminatingly, at some internal differences and changes over time.

The radical dilemma

There were four main aspects to 'radical education'. First, radicals conducted a
running critique of all forms of 'provided' education. This covered the whole gamut
of schooling enterprises from clerically dominated Anglican Sunday schools,
through Cobbett's 'Bell and Lancaster work', to the state-aided (and usually
Anglican) public day schools of the mid century. It also embraced all the institutes,
-
clubs and media designed to influence the older pupil everything from tracts to
mechanics institutes. Plans for a more centralized state system of schooling were
also opposed, a feature to which we will return. This tradition, then, was sharply
oppositional it revolved around a contestation of orthodoxies (and some
unorthodosdes too) both in theory and practice. Nor was this critique limited to
formally 'educational' institutions. In its later phases radicalism developed a
practical grasp and a theoretical understanding of cultural and ideological struggle
in a more general sense A

The second main feature was the development of alternative educational goals.
-
At one level these embraced a vision of a whole alternative future a future in
which educational utopias, among other needs, could actually be achieved. At
another, radicalism developed its own curricula and pedagogies, its own definition
of 'really useful knowledge', a characteristically radical content, a sense of what
it was really important to know.
Thirdly, radicalism conducted an important internal debate about education
as a political strategy or as a means of changing the world. Like most aspects of
 Really useful knowledge 77

counter-education, this debate was also directed at dominant middle-class con-

ceptions of the relation between education and politics, especially the argument
that 'national education' was a necessary condition for the granting of universal
suffrage. But it expressed real radical dilemmas too .
Finally, radical movements developed a vigorous and varied educational practice.
The distinctive feature was, at first sight, an emphasis upon informing mature
understandings and upon the education of men and women as adult citizens of a
more just social order. But radicals were also concerned with men and women as
educators of their own children and they improvised forms for this task too. It
might, however, be truer to say that the child-adult distinction was itself less
stressed in this tradition, or in parts of it, than in the contemporary middle-class
culture of childhood. This is one reason why, in what follows, no large distinction
is made between the education of 'children' and 'adults'. Such a distinction is not
found in nature by educators, but has actually, in large part, been constructed.
We can move beyond a rather descriptive listing like this by seeing these elements
as aspects of a particular, lived, dilemma. This dilemma was not unique to early
nineteenth-century radicals. It is arguable that it represents the Zypieal popular
educational dilemma under capitalist social conditions. Nineteenth-century radicals,
however, certainly experienced it with a particular sharpness. On the one hand, they
valued the acquisition of knowledge very highly indeed, often with a quite abstract
passion. Knowledge or 'enlightenment' was generally sought: it was a good in itself,
a use value. This passion can be traced in many worldng-class autobiographies in
which the fervent 'pursuit of knowledge' always looms large, in the language and
educational stance of the unstamped press, in the popular reception of quite
abstract texts, and in an educational rhetoric as exalted and sometimes as high-
flown as the more familiar Broughamite language of middle-class liberals:
Self-reformation is the only reform that will establish the happiness of mankind.
Man must be taught to know what are, as well as what are not his rights, he must
learn the dependence of his happiness on the happiness of his felloW-creatures,
his mind must be cleansed of all the many and pernicious prejudices, which, when
it was too weak to resist their influence, even at the time of its birth, took root
around it, and have hitherto choked up its real nature and hidden from it the lights
-
of truth, he must be made to love, instead of fearing to pity, instead of blaming
- -
to reason, instead of listening to be convinced, instead of believing and, above
all, he must know his weakness as an individual, and his strength in proportion only
as he UNITES and co-operates with others.8

At the same time, however, radicals were aware of the poverty of educational
-
resources to hand a recognition often enforced by personal experience. This was
partly a quantitative scarcity - lack of schools, lack of books, lack of energy, lack of
time. But there was also a qualitative question involved. In the course of the period
some of the quantitative deficiencies were supplied: certainly from the 1830s
there was a growth, in real terms, of educational facilities of the provided land, if
not of opportunities for their use. Yet as 'facilities' grew, the dilemma actually
78 Studies

deepened. The quality of what was on offer never matched the aspirations. Far
indeed from promising liberation, provided education threatened subjection. It
seemed at best a laughable and irrelevant divergence (useless knowledge in fact) ,
or, at worst, a species of tyranny, an outward extension of the power of factory
master, or priest, or corrupt state apparatus. There is a continuity of comment
of this kind from Paine's initial warnings on the educational tendencies of hereditary
monarchies and established religions to the caveats of the Northam Star on govern-
ment education schemes. Paine taught radicals that monarchy, being based on so
irrational a device as inheritance, tended to 'buy reason up' and that priests were
employed to keep the people ignorant.9 Cobbett, the original de-schooler, extended
this to cover schools and schoolmasters. Note the industrial and political analogies:
He is their over-looker, he is a spy upon them; his authority is maintained by his
absolute power of punishment, the parent commits them to that power, to be
taught is to be held in restraint, and, as the sparks fly upwards, the teaching and
restraint will not be divided in the estimation of the boy.10

Early radical journalists put each new educational innovation into a place already
prepared for it in Painite theory. Schooling was not about 'political education'
at all, not about 'rights' and 'liberties', it was about 'servility', 'slavery' and
'surveillance', about government spies in every parish, about the tyranny of the
schoolroom. This theme was elaborated in a hundred ingenious ways: reporting
injustice in individual schools, parodying hymns, catechisms and teaching methods,
exposing Dr Bell's sinecure, stressing the ideological rationale of schooling by which
all evils were ascribed to 'popular ignorance'.11 By the 1830s new forms of
provided education had appeared, especially mechanics institutes, infant schools
and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), some of which
were less obviously 'knowledge-denying' than tracts or monitorial schools. Yet
radicals maintained a critical opposition. The SDUK was universally ridiculed :
infant schools were attacked by Owenites (as a corruption of Owen's ideals) and
parodied in the Chartist pressgn and mechanics institutes, the most popular of the
innovations, were very cautiously evaluated and, on the ground, openly opposed
or instrumentally used.13 The English Chartist CircularS comment on the SDUK
was typical:

Their determination is to stifle inquiry respecting the great principles which

question their right to larger shares of the national produce than those which the
physical producers of the wealth themselves enjoy.14

There was also a host of jokes on all possible variants of the epithet 'useful know-
ledge',
In conformity with the advice of Lord Brougham and the Useful Knowledge Society,
the Milton fishermen, finding their occupation gone, have resolved to become
capitalists forthwith.15

'Why', it was asked, 'did not the lass Victoria learn really useful knowledge by
 Really useful knowledge 79

being apprenticed to a mi11iner"?'16 'What' asked the Poor Man's Guardian, 'is useful
-
ignorance? ignorance useful to constitutional tyrants.'17 One editor of the Un~
stamped even produced a one-off issue of a little thing called 'The Penny Comic
Magazine of an Amorous, Clamorous, Uproarious and Glorious Society for the
Diffusion of Broad Grihs'.18
It was 'really useful knowledge', then, that was important. But 'education-
mongers' offered the opposite. They didn't offer 'education' at all, only, in Cobbett's
coinage, 'Heddekashun', a very different thing.19 So how was really useful know-
ledge to be got? How were radicals to educate themselves, their children and their
class within cramping limits of time, and income? The main answer for the whole
of this period was by their own collective enterprise. The preferred strategy was
substitutional. They were to do it themselves. A series of solutions of this kind
were improvised, all resourceful, though none wholly adequate. Radical education
may be understood as the history of these attempts. .

Forms
The key feature was informality. Certainly, Owenites and Chartists did found their
own educational institutions and even planned a whole alternative system. Secular
Sunday schools and Owe rite Halls of Science, for instance, represent the most
visible, formalized (and best documented) aspects of activity. They remain extremely
interesting. Yet to concentrate on counter-institutions would be seriously to
misread the character of the radical response and the nature of the transition in
the practices of cultural reproduction through which working people were living.
There is a danger, too, of separating out 'the educational' and constructing a story
parallel to but different from the usual tales of schools and colleges.20 Radical
education was not just different in content from orthodox schooling: its formal
principles were different. It was constructed in a wholly different way. There is
also a temptation to exaggerate the extent and, especially, the permanence of such
institutions in collusion with the invariably euphoric reporting of their activities.
Typically, then, educational pursuits were not separated out and labeled 'school'
or 'institute' or even 'rational recreation'. They did not typically occur in purpose-
built premises or places appropriated for one purpose. The typical forms were
improvised, haphazard and therefore ephemeral, having little permanent endstence
beyond the more immediate needs of individuals and groups. Educational forms
were closely related to other activities or inserted within them, temporally and
spatially. Men and women learned as they acted and were encouraged to teach their
children, too, out of an accumulated experience. The distinction between 'education'
(i.e. school) and noteducation-at-all (everything outside school) was certainly
in the process of construction in this period, but radicals breached it all the time.
As George Jacob Holyoake put it, 'knowledge lies everywhere to hand for those
who observe and think'.21 It lay in nature, in a few much-prized books, but above
all in the social circumstances of everyday life .
Radical education cannot be understood aside from inherited educational
80 Studies

resources. It rested on this basis but also developed and enriched it. We mean the
whole range of indigenous educational resources, indigenous in the sense that they
were under popular control or within the reach of some popular contestation .
Struggle of some kind was possible, of course, in every type of school or institute
but there were also whole areas that were relatively immune from direct inter-
vention or compulsion by capital or capital's agencies. We include, then, the
educational resources of family, neighbourhood and even place of work, whether
within the household or outside it, the acquisition of literacy from mothers or
fathers, the use of the knowledgeable friend or neighbour, or the 'scholar' in
neighbouring town or village, the work-place discussion and formal and informal
apprenticeships, the extensive networks of private schools and, in many cases, the
local Sunday schools, most un-school-like of the new devices, excellently adapted
to worldng-class needs.
On top of this legacy, which in nineteenth-century conditions was very fragile,
radicals made their own cultural inventions. These included the various kinds of
communal reading and discussion groups, the facilities for newspapers in pub ,
coffee house or reading room, the broader cultural politics of Chartist or Owe rite
branch-life, the institution of the travelling lecturer who, often indistinguishable
from 'missionary' or demagogue, toured the radical centres, and, above all, the
radical press, the most successful radical invention and an extremely flezdble (and
therefore ubiquitous) educational form .
The product of these two levels of activity may best be thought of as a series of
educational networks. 'Network' is a better word than 'system', suggesting a limited
availability, fragile endstence and a highly contingent use. The ability to use them,
even at high points of radical activity, was always heavily dependent on chance
individual combinations of more structural features. Accordingly, the working-
class intellectual was (and is) a rare creation. The fully educated worldng man and,
still more, worldng woman was, in Thomas Wright's phrase, 'an accidental being'.22
We.have, however, many accounts of such people, for they often wrote about
their lives. It is worth tracing through a few individual histories, not to present
them as representative, but to illustrate the place of the various elements as we have
mentioned in a kind of educational progression. It is in autobiographies, besides,
that we have the clearest evidence of networks and their use .

Biographies
Parents, relations and friends were a crucial initial influence. Samuel Bamford's
parents bestowed on their children 'a sort of daily fireside education'.23 It was his
-
father a 'superior man', a weaver, a Painite, once a private schoolmaster - who
implanted in the future radical a predisposition towards politics. Stamford, typically ,
was sure he had learned more at home than at school, regretting only his father's
refusal to let him learn Latin.24 William Lovett's educational experiences com-
menced with a disciplinarian Methodist mother and a great-grandmother of eighty
who taught him to read.25 Joseph Gutteridge, silk-weaver and amateur scientist,
 Really useful knowledge 81

owed much to a schoolmaster uncle, a father who 'always carefully helped me'
and the freedom to botanize in the fields and lanes around Coventry.7~5 Roland
Detroisier, the radical lecturer, was brought up by a Swedenborgian tailor who
established his fertile contact with the Sunday schools of that sect.27 'My father',
wrote John Wood, son Of a West Riding weaver, 'being able to read and write a
little taught me all he knew.'28 But, like other lads, John also took lessons, gratis,
from friends who, for instance, knew more arithmetic than he. We might note, in
passing, that something more is suggested in these cases than the generalization
that parental influence is enormously important in forming the interests and character
of children. More interesting are the historical (and historically changing) conditions
in which, say, fathers could quite commonly teach their sons to read, a practice
which requires both an inherited literacy and time for its reproduction.
The educational resources of home and neighbours were invariably supplemented
by some form of schooling. Schooling was common but took different forms,
differently used. Dame schools and private schools, for instance, were quite casually
used. When public or charity schools were also included they were used in much
the same way, were changed often and were left early. Tutelage under any one
schoolteacher in any one school was, in the total sum of educational experiences,
usually quite marginal. The major exception here, in some cases, was Sunday
schooling, which seems to have been more likely to create an abiding loyalty than
any other form of contemporary schooling. Thus, George Jacob Holyoake, after
attending dame schools in fits and starts, went to a Methodist Sunday school for
five years, later joining John Collins, another Birmingham Chartist and Co-operator,
teaching Sunday school at Harborne.29 Bamford attended several Sunday schools
and two different free grammar schools, J . Passmore Edwards, later a radical
journalist, learned the three Rs at 3d. a week in a school kept by an injured ex-
tin miner.30 Julian Horney, the revolutionary Chartist, was, exceptionally, educated
at the Boys' Naval School at Greenwich in the expectation that he would become a
merchant sailor.31 Gutteridge remembered with affection a Quaker dame who
helped him to read newspapers by the age of seven, but suffered under a savage
schoolmaster at a local charity school." Lovett's mother sent him off to school
after school, strictly enforcing attendance. He went to 'all the dame schools in the
town', two private schools with severe, even sadistic masters, and ended up at a
local Anglican school.33 This somewhat experimental approach to schooling was,
according to later official reports, a not uncommon one: some respectable working-
class parents certainly sought a better school by a process of trial and error.
One of the most interesting aspects of the relation of radicalism and the
education of children is the quite pervasive figure of the radical schoolmaster or
mistress. The common philanthropic distrust of the intelligent but unsupervised
teacher of working-class loyalties undoubtedly had a basis in fact.34 Schoolmaster
was quite a common occupation among prominent radicals.35 Teaching was
indeed an obvious resource for an intelligent, self-educated man or woman especially
if he or she had already fallen foul of employers or other authorities. Two examples
must suffice to illustrate the way in which such people actually became school-
82 Studies

teachers, either full-time or as a bye-employment .

Mary Smith, radical schoolmistress of Carlisle, was the daughter of a rural
artisan, a shoemaker, in a Gloucester village. She could not remember a time
when she could not read and her father took pains to provide her with books from
second-hand sales.36 Even so, she went to a string of schools, ending with one of
'higher grade' run by Methodist ladies who stressed deportment and polite accomp-
lishments. Unmarried and with characteristic independence, she left home and ,
in the 1840s, set up school in Carlisle. Supporting herself by teaching farmers'
daughters, she soon developed an alliance with some local workers, sharing many
of their political enthusiasms. She attended lectures by James Silk Bucldnghani
and by Henry Vincent, of whom she became an enthusiastic supporter.37 She
rejoiced 'with the best when unkingly kings were uncrowned' in 1848, and later
took to freelance, crusading journalism and became involved in the campaign against
the Contagious Diseases Act. Violently anti-Tory and not afraid to offend the
orthodox religions, she gave secular lectures to working women on Sundays and
helped in evening schools .38 One imagines she had something useful to teach.
Roger Langdon's father was a parish clerk and Sunday school teacher but sent
the boy off to work under a brutal ploughman at the age of eight." He ran away
and after many wanderings, became a railwaymen and eventually, in 1867, a
stationmaster. He was a self-taught amateur astronomer, making his own telescopes.
He never went to school himself, but 'somehow or other' learnt to write. For
most of their married life, he and his wife ran a private school, a practice begun for
the education of their own children. His wife taught reading, writing, arithmetic ,
geography and sewing, while Roger taught scripture, provided scientific apparatus
and made the benches for the schoolroom.
His teaching [recorded his daughter] was unorthodox and advanced, and he always
gave us plenty to think about. When later on we went to school at Taunton we found
ourselves in most subjects in advance of children who attended schools in the
town.40

Two main factors seem to have been important in maintaining an educational

progression once the influence of parents or schoolteachers came to an end. The
passion for reading was sometimes expressed in a catholic appetite for print (as in
the famous case of Thomas Cooper) or in the desire to devour, and preferably to
possess, a very particular book.41 But the reading habit itself needed to be
supported by some kind of fellowship in the effort to understand. This might be
associated with religious questioning, a very common feature in youth, or with
accounting for ordinary conditions of life, or might happen in a less self-conscious
way in the course of ordinary sociality. For George Howell, for example, who
learned his later liberalism within a radical culture, it was discussion with his mates
in a shoemaker's workshop which provided the stimulus. The radical press, in this
case as very often, furnished texts of debate, bridging a more private educational
experience and the more public world of a movement.42 (Mayhew's typification
of London trades by intelligence' suggests that an education at the work-place was,
 Really useful knowledge 83
where conditions still allowed, quite common). From this point on 'the educational'
becomes indistinguishable from more general currents in radical culture and the
approach via individuals distorts a more collective pattern, in which 'living' and
'learning' are hard to disentangle. The most important experiences were those
that have been examined by students of the cultural life of 'infidelity', the more
heterodox forms of religion and especially Sunday school teaching, the local life
of radicalism, Owenism and Chartism. Thus Holyoake, under the influence of
the Birmingham Owenites and Unitarians, became a social missionary, while Lovett ,
Cooper and Harney brought very different attributes to Chartisrn. Gutteridge, still
pondering on nature, read Voltaire, Vol fey, Paine and Owen and joined a group of
free-thinkers. A later generation, following Barnford in many ways, brought a
characteristically educational orientation to popular liberalism.

Press
It was, perhaps, the press, in each distinctive phase, that epitomized the forms
of radical education. Its general historical importance is now well established. In
the first phase it was the main source of unity: '1816-1820 were, above all, years in
Which popular Radicalism took its style from the hand-press and the weedy
periodical.'43 The unstamped press from 1830 to 1836 was both an educative
force, developing much later Chartist theory, and a practical example of the struggle
against unjust laws and oppressive government .44 More recently, it has been
established that the press was important within the dynamics of Chartism itself
and that 'the establishment of a national newspaper [the Northern Star] was a
vital prerequisite to the emergence of the Chartist party'.45
The political importance of the press was closely linked to its versatility as an
educational form. It was a resource that could be used with great flexibility. It could
be carefully studied and pondered over, as the more expository parts of, say, the
Poor Man's Guardian must have been. It could be read aloud in declamatory style
in pub or public place as Cobbett's or O'Connor's addresses were .46 It reached its
'pupils' at different levels of literacy and preparedness for study. The conjunction,
it is true, sounds somewhat paradoxical: because of our experience of the modern
popular press, we are not used to thinldng of a newspaper as an educative medium.
An example may convince. We can take the Northern Star as the hardest case, the
most newspaperly of the radical media and that with the strongest reputation for
sheer demagoguery.
The Star was certainly a newspaper. It 'could complete with any adversary for
coverage', using paid journalists and local correspondents.47 It remains, as a result ,
the best source for the study of Chartism everywhere. Yet the Star was also
saturated with an educational content, even if we interpret 'education' in the
most conventional sense. lt contained regular advertisements and reviews of radical
literature, drew attention to travelling lecturers likely to appeal to popular
audiences, noted prosecutions of flogging schoolmasters (presumably to warn
readers off such offenders) and published Charles Dickens's exposé of boarding
84 Studies

schools from Nicholas Nickleby.48 It gave special attention to Sunday schools,

noting the opening of new ones, reporting on meetings of Sunday school teachers
and covering the doings of Sunday school unions in Chartist localities. It supported
the fund-raising efforts of schools belonging to the more adventurous chapels and
sects.49 It carried reports of Sunday school festivals and outings. In June 1838, for
instance, it printed an account of the festival at Keighley, noting a Radical presence
in the usual procession through the town: 'the most conspicuous was the Provi-
dence, or as it has been charitably denominated by its pious neighbours, the Infidel
Sunday School'. The children were preceded by an 'excellent band' and a banner
carrying the words 'No Sin to Write'.50 O'Connor, in his strenuous tours of branches
of the National Charter Association, often noted and praised their educational
efforts, including those for children.51 In all these ways, quite aside from its
'teaching', we can certainly see the Star as an educational medium. The distinction
between 'physical' and 'moral' force Chartism and the tendency to identify
O'Connor with the latter has distorted understandings of the Star as a newspaper
and of O'Connor as a 1eader.52 A study of the newspaper itself does not support
the contention of R.C. Gan mage, Chartism's first historian, that O'Connor 'never
sought to raise the Chartist body by enlightening its rnernbers'.53

Content
Perhaps the phrase 'really useful knowledge' is the best starting point. It was more
than just a parody of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It was a
way of distancing working-class aims from some immediate (capitalist) conception
of utility and from recreational or diversionary notions. It expressed the conviction
that real knowledge served practical ends, ends, that is, for the knower. The
insistence on this was unanimous :
This knowledge will be of the best kind because it will be practical. [The Co-operator,
an early Owe rite journal]
All useful knowledge consists in the acquirement of ideas concerning our conditions
in life. [The Pioneer, an Owenite/trade union journal]
It is a wrong use of words to call a man an ignorant man, who well understands the
business he has to carry on . . , . [Cobbett]
-
What we want to be informed about is how to get out o f our present troubles.
[Poor Man's Guardian ]
A man may be amused and instructed by scientific literature but the language
which describes his wrongs clings to his mind with an unparalleled pertinacity.
[Poor Man's Guardian]54

A concern that knowledge should be relevant to the experienced problems of life

was reflected in the criticisms of the SDUK and of the fare of mechanics institutes
as trivial and childish.55 A slightly different criticism was sometimes addressed to
lecturers and to the more 'philosopllical' of fellow radicals: a criticism of wilf.11
 Really useful knowledge 85
abstractness or abstruseness, of the failure to speak plainly. When a reviewer in the
Pioneer exhorted his readers 'to call on men of talent to instruct you in the highest
branches of science', a time Cobbett-like editorial, probably by James Morrison, put
him in his Place 1
-
No proud, conceited scholar knows the way the rugged path that we are forced to
travel, they sit them down and sigh, and make a puny wail of human nature; they
fill their writings full of quaint allusions, which we can fix no meaning to, they are
by far too classical for our poor knowledge-box, they preach up temperance, and
build no places for our sober meetings . . . but we will make them bend to suit our
circumstances.56
There is a lot going on in these few pungent sentences. There is a hostility to the
scholar and a recognition that his sldlls may dominate or mystify. There is a moment
of self-deprecation ('Poor knowledge-box'). But there is also a sense of the idealism
or triviality of much 'preaching' and of the absence of that really materialist grasp
of conditions which 'we' ourselves (for all our lack of learning) actually possess.
There is also a determination to work through the problems politically, to make
the intellectuals' work for us. Very similar themes appear in a running debate
within radicalism between those who argued that we remain ignorant and need
to get knowledge and those who inverted the intellectual pyramid and argued that
'we' were really wiser than 'they'.
Radicals, however, also argued that their conception of knowledge was wide ,
much more liberal than philanthropic offerings. Education should be comprehensive
in every meaning of the word: widely available and extensive in content. The language
of universal enlightenment occurs again and again in radical propaganda, the contrast
being with the confining of knowledge by monopoly or control. in one of its
earthier analogies, the Poor Man 's Guardian compared knowledge with capital and
with manure:
If manure be suffered to lie in idle heaps, it breeds stink and vermin. If properly
diffused, it vivifies and fertilizes. The same is true of capital and knowledge. A
monopoly of either breeds filth and abomination. A proper diffusion of them fills
a country with joy and abundance.57
A fuller formulation was that given in 1853 by Benjamin Warden, a Marylebone
artisan, trade unionist, Co-operator and later Chartist.
Knowledge was very differently understood in its application to the people generally.
Brougham and others summed it up as little more than honour and obey the King,
and all who are in authority under him. 'You may get practical science', say they,
'but it is only to make you better servants'. Their views expressed a limited range,
while our own were founded on all known facts. Mechanics Institutes were not
intended to teach the most useful knowledge but to teach only as might be profitable
to the unproductive, He trusted, however, we should now get working men to
inquire how the produce of their labour was so cunningly and avariciously abstracted
from them, and thence go on to the attainment of truth, in order to obtain, before
long . . . happiness and community.58
86 Studies

The 'practical' and the 'liberal' were not seen as incompatible as they tend to be in
modern education debates. For the practical embraced 'all known facts' and 'the
attainment of truth'. Despite the stress on a relation to the knower's experience ,
there is no narrowly pragmatic conception of knowledge here. Knowledge is not
just a political instrument, the search for 'truth' matters.
Radicals did distinguish, however, between different kinds of knowledge and the
practical priorities between them. While a really full or human education, embracing
a knowledge of man and nature, would certainly be achieved once the Charter had
been won or the New Moral World ushered in, some substantive under standings
had a special priority, here and now. Certain truths had a pressing immediacy.
They were indispensable means to emancipation. These truths were several simple
insights. Once grasped they provided explanations for whole areas of experience.
and fact. Once these truths were understood, the old world could indeed be shaken.
Because the radical 'theory' of this period is already well known, it is possible
to be very brief. There were three main components in what we might terM the
'spearhead knowledge' of early-nineteenth-century radicalism. For the radical
mainstream, running from Jacobinism through Cobbett and the unstamped and
into the Chartist movement, 'political knowledge' maintained its pre-eminence. As
a number of studies have now shown, Paine's popular radical liberalism was the most
powerful continuing influence on radical political theory.59 Yet it is important to
stress the historical distance that separates Paine's world of the French and American
Revolutions from the Britain of the 1830s. The changes had been very great, not
least within the British state. This was not just a question of the Reform Act of
1832, the bringing of industrial interests within 'the constitution' and the exclusion
of the propertyless. Under Whig auspices after 1832 the state was increasingly
employed in a dynamic and transformative manner both to discipline individual
capitals and to secure the conditions of capital accumulation as a whole. This
involved attacldng the customary defences of the poor and handling the hostility
which this itself produced, both by coercive means and by modifying the most
aggressively forward policies. Radicals schooled in natural right theory and the
'aristocratic' character of state and church had to come to some understanding of
Poor Law, Factory Acts, the professionalization of civilian police, the reform of
secondary punishments and important changes in the criminal law. Nor was it
altogether convincing to attack the educationalists of the 1830s in the same terms
as the conservatives of the 1800s like Dr Bell, John Weyland and Patrick Colquhoun.
Something of these changes was grasped in later radical theory, especially in the
Poor Man 's Guardian and the Northern Star. While retaining the theory of natural
rights as a kind of moral underpinning of the demand for universal suffrage and,
certainly, on occasion, speaking of the evils of taxation, the Guardian changed
Paine's political sociology and developed a more active, interventionist view of
'governrnenti From the Reform Act, the Guardian learnt to draw relations of power
(and exploitation) between property as a whole and the working class, not, as in
Paine, between 'aristocracy' and 'peop1e'.60 The Guardian was much more inter-
ested too in the law and in the actual operations of government: government was
 Really useful knowledge 87

-
an instrument of great power hence the absolute priority of changing it and the
centrality of political solutions :
- -
From government all good proceeds and from government all evils that afflict
the human race emanate. There is no power except that of government, that can
extensively effect the state of man. How necessary - how important it is - that
-
government should be pure, not alone in its acts but in its constitution in its
co11struction.61

The primary strategic problem was how to secure a 'government of the whole
people to protect the whole people'. This once achieved 'the majority' would be in
a position to introduce 'Owenism, St. Simonism or any other -ism' that would
ensure the well-being of the who1e.62 This was the core of what the Guardian
called 'knowledge calculated to make you free'.63
Like 'political knowledge', the Owenite's 'social science' or 'science of society'
incorporated a central ethical notion and a simple principle of social explanation.
In advanced versions of 'political knowledge' these were the rights of man and an
extreme (political) democracy and the principle of the class nature of the state .
Owenism centred on 'community' and a rational altruism and the principle of the
educative force of competitive social relationships and institutions. Social co-
operation among equals-in-circumstances was the only enduring source of progress
and happiness. (It was also 'true Christianity', unlike the priestly lands.) But why
was Society so unlike what Reason prescribed? The explanation hinged on the
socializing force of institutions and, in the end, on a fairly mechanical environ-
mentdism. To live in this old immoral world was to become irrational, to have
one's character misshapen as competitive, disharmonious and violent, and to
learn the great untruth that the fault lay with oneself. The competitiveness of
the economic system was reinforced by a whole range of social institutions. There
was little indeed which did not, in the Owe rite analysis, count as an ideological
-
resource. But it was in relation to three key institutions the family, the church
-
and the school that Owe rite ideas were most forcibly expressed: in Owe rite
feminism, in Owe rite secularism and in Owe rite educational theory.64 Owenism,
then, added whole dimensions to the analysis of privations and a much more
rounded view of liberation. It also tended to counter the overwhelmingly con-
spiratorial view of ruling-class actions promulgated by most of? the radical press.
The Crisis, for instance, spent some time explaining why it was impossible for
men like Lords Grey and Brougham or the juke et Wellington to analyse society
rationally. They too were creatures of circumstance:
The circumstances of an hereditary Earl, of one trained in the profession of law, and
especially of English law, and now a Lord, and of a successful soldier of fortune,
now a Duke, are the most unlikely to form human beings competent to understand
..
the real cause of the errors and evils of society . .65

Or as the Pioneer put it, 'Ye are as circumstances made you, nor praise nor blame
from us.'66
88 Studies

The third main element of spearhead knowledge concerned questions of poverty

and exploitation. How was it, in the midst of the production of wealth, that the
labourers remained so poor? Economic justice prescribed that the labourer should
have the full fruits of his toil; 'labour economics' or 'moral' or 'co-operative
political economy' showed how capitalists stole a proportion in the shape of a 'tax'
called profit. Though such theories gave a central place to capital, unlike the older
notions of poverty through taxation or land theft, the capitalist still tended to be
understood in his role as factor, merchant or external organizer of production,
and exploitation was still understood as something that happened in exchange. The
characteristic solution was to attempt to cut out the middle man from the process
altogether and subject production and distribution to cornrnund control.67
When radicals spoke of 'really useful knowledge' they usually' meant one or other
or all of these understandings of existing circumstances. As Patricia Hollis has
argued the radical repertoire was built accumulatively not in some simple develop-
mental sequence towards the more 'socialist' elements. Newer insights tended to
be expressed in the older rhetoric .es Yet these understandings were very powerful.
They embraced, after all, a theory of economic exploitation, a theory of the class
character of the state and a theory of social or cultural domination, understood as
the formation of social character.

'How to do as many useful things as possible'

It is not possible to do justice here to all the elements in radical conceptions of
knowledge. Chartism, for instance, was possessed of a rich literary culture. There
was a widespread popular interest in the natural sciences, important in some forms
of radicalism for its icon elastic relation to 'Superstition' and 'Church Christianity'.
A more complete treatment should also consider the starting modernity of Owe rite
experiments in the education of children, especially the stress on the child's own
activity, the width of the curriculum and the insistence on reasonable adult be-
haviour towards the young.69 One more theme must suffice; the relation of know-
ledge to production, or what is now often summed up (misleadingly) as the question
of 'sldlls'.
Cobbett's approach to this question is particularly interesting.70 Like all radicals
he was concerned with political education. 'I was', he wrote, with typical immodesty
and a grain of truth, 'the teacher of the nation: the great source of political know-
ledge.'71 But he added a stock of notions about the education of children,
attempting to distinguish a real 'education' (a word worth rescuing) from mere
'Heddekashun'. Education meant 'bringing up', 'breeding up' or 'rearing up'. It
included the cultivation of 'everything with regard to the mind as well as the
body of the child.72 It embraced book-learning where this was useful, but much
more besides. One central concern was to teach the child to earn a living, to acquire
-
an economic independence a 'competence' in both sets of meanings of the word .
Such an education should occur almost imperceptibly in the course of play or
l a b o r . 'Heddekashun' by contrast was artificial, coercive and divorced from
 Really useful knowledge 89

real needs. It involved learning irrelevancies from books. It was a thing quite outside
the control of parents and children, resting on alien purposes. It meant 'taldng boys
and girls from their father's and mother's houses, and sending them to what is
called a school . . . .=73
The two most important constituents of 'rearing up' were an emphasis on
practical skills and on the educative context of the home, Since Cobbett almost
always had in Mind the village labourer or small farmer, his prescriptions often
have an old-fashioned or 'Tory' ring. He sometimes used the language of a tradi-
tionalist squire or farmer, especially when blaming 'Heddekashun' for encouraging
artificial social ambitions.74 Yet the appropriate education of the labourer or
small farmer was not particularly limiting. The first priority was to teach the
practical skills of husbandry and of 'cottage economy': gardening, rearing animals,
malting bread, beer, bacon, butter and cheese, tending trees, and, for boys, ploughing,
hedging and ditching. Farmers must know how to ride, hunt, shoot and manage
accounts. A healthy body and sober habits were also important. Yet more literary
sldlls, as tools, should also be accessible to all. 'Book-learning is by no means to be
despised; and it is a thing that may be laudably sought after by persons in all states
of life.'75 So when Cobbett praised the native wisdom of the untutored person, it
was not to justify the withholding of literacy, a common argument among 'Tories'.76
Cobbett was concerned, rather, to stress the value and rootedness of common sense
and customary knowledge and to show the inadequacy of purely literary or abstract
study. This was most startlingly expressed in a deface of the illiterate.
Men are not to be called ignorant merely because they cannot make upon paper
certain marks with a pen, or because they do not know the meaning of such marks
when made by others."

By the same rule, those whom the world called wise were often very stupid. Of the
editor of the Morning Chronicle and of others with a facility for words, he wrote,
'they were extremely enlightened, but they had no knowledge'.78
Cobbett's positive evaluation of more literary sldlls was expressed more fully in
his Advice to Young Men, and his Grammar of the English Language, works which
ought to establish his reputation as a conscious educator. These texts were certainly
intended for a popular audience, though one that was almost wholly male. Advice
to Young Men was sub-titled 'and incidentally to Young Women' and addressedt0
'every father', The Grammar was intended for 'soldiers, sailors, apprentices and
ploughboysi (Cobbett was indeed the original patriarch, a theme to which we will
return.) In the Grammar Cobbett sought to democratize the subject and to rescue
it from its association with dead languages. He understood the connection between
forms of language and social domination and saw the teaching of grammar as a way
of protecting the ordinary man 'from being the willing slave of the rich and titled
part of the community'.79 Arithmetic too was a 'thing of everyday uti1ity'.80
History also was valuable, as a study of 'how these things came'. Cobbett actually
wrote his own history book, but he was teaching how these things (tithes, taxes ,
the National Debt and his whole demonology) came, all the time.81
90 Studies

His curriculum, then, had the same feature as other radical versions. Worldng back
from the living situation of adults, he ended with a range of 'competences' that
combined the practical and the liberal.
His stress on the educative role of the family was linked to his political suspicion
of schools. But we cannot understand this part of his writing without remembering
two points made about Cobbett in The Making of the English Working Class: his
'personalisation of political issues' and the fact that 'his outlook approximated
most closely to the ideology of the small producers'.82 The central experience in
his educational writing is Cobbett the father. Moreover, he actually lived (or
envisaged) a situation in which production, domestic labour and the reproduction
of skills all remained within the control of the father in the family of the direct
producer. In such a situation the natural way for boys or girls to learn was along-
side father or mother in the ordinary tasks of the day. All Cobbett's descriptions
emphasize such learning situations, learning to Make hurdles by helping father at
work in a Hampshire copse, learning to manage a farm and read and write letters
through the medium of a hamper that passed from family to prison cell; the daring
image of the Sandhill, a description of a childhood game to set beside the philan-
thropic ban on play.83 His own children were taught 'indirectly'. Things were
- -
made available ink, pens and paper 'and everyone scrabbled about as he or she
pleased'. So 'the book-learning crept in of its own accord, by imperceptible degrees'.
Cobbett's conclusions, then, appear equally inevitable :
What need had we o f schools? What need of teachers? What need of scolding or
force, to induce children to read and write and love books.84
Cobbett's personalisms were based on rather special circumstances, 'a marvelous
concatenation of circumstances such as can hardly befall one man out of a thousand',
according to the Poor Man 's Guardian 's critique.85 As writer and farmer, engaged
(between politics, prison and exile) in two unalienated forms of labour, Cobbett
spent much time at home in conditions of economic independence. (One is also
curious about the relative roles of Mr and Mrs Cobbett in the 'rearing up' of their
children.) If he expressed, in ideal form educational practices appropriate to the
small producer household, he expressed them at a time when they were becoming
less easy to realize .
Cobbett's ideal united mental and manual labour through the father's control
of production. Owenites argued that monopoly or distortion of knowledge was a
feature of capitalist industry. Capital seized hold of the secrets of the trades (once
reproduced within the labourer's culture) and made of their workers 'unthinking
slaves'.86 Although these themes are everywhere present in the theory and practice
of co-operation, they were most elaborately expressed by the 'early Socialist',
William Thornpson.87
Thompson argued that capitalist production tended to divorce labour from a
knowledge of productive processes, to divide, in Marx's terms, mental and manual
labour, conception and execution. He also argued that 'commercial society' had a
more general effect on the production of knowledge itself. There was a direct
 Really useful knowledge 91

interest in the development and application of the physical sciences which, by

multiplying machinery, would enrich the wealthy.'Political and moral sciences,
however, were neglected or shaped according to the interests of the rich. In the
absence of a knowledge of 'the natural laws of distribution', machinery became a
means of oppression. In co-operative activity and ultimately in a new world, mental
and manual labour would be reunited and knowledge of man and nature develop
in harmony. Co-operative activity was often a conscious living out of these themes.
It aimed at re-appropriating the capitalist's control of production and exchange. As
the Birmingham Cooperative Herald put it :
Labourers must become capitalists, and must acquire knowledge to regulate their
labour on a large and united scale before they will be able to enjoy the whole
product of their 1abour.88

The knowledge part of this was important: the Co-operative equivalent of Cobbett's
'how to do as many useful things as possible' was how to repossess the knowledge
and skills appropriated by capital. The activity of the collective organization of
'affairs', including affairs of business, was itself an important education:
They are obliged to exercise their judgement, to weigh and balance probabilities -
-
to count the profit and loss and to acquire a knowledge of human character . . . .
If the mind continues to be occupied in this manner, for a series of years, it will
receive a practical education much more improving than the dry lessons of schools,
which exercise the memory by rote, without opening and strengthening the under-
standing. A11 co-operators will become, to a certain extent, men of business. But
they cannot become men of business without becoming men of knowledge.89

Popularity
It is difficult, perhaps foolish, to try to weigh the impact of the solutions we have
-
discussed - their 'popularity' in some simple quantitative sense. We have neither the
conceptual means nor the evidence. We do not really know how to 'think' the
'circuit' of such effects: from the conditions from which radical theory arose in
the first place, through the educational practices themselves, to success or failure
in actually forming people's principles of life and action. The difficulty illustrates
the need for an adequate theory of culture/ideology. Empirically, we might begin
by establishing what David Jones has called 'the various indices of activity'.90 We
can assess the circulation of the presses, multiplying for collective readership. We
can count and place geographically the more formal solutions of schools and halls.
We can set this beside the overall geography .of the movements themselves and an
assessment of the extent to which they moved masses in different places and at
different times. Beyond this there are really imponderable questions. How many
working men followed Lovett's 'unpopular' advice to economize on drink and
spend the surplus on radical journals?91 How many talked politics with their wives
in the spirit of equality advocated by radical women? How common was the practice
of Sophia of Birmingham who gave her children a political education by telling
92 Studies

them 'all we learn of good' and never shirldng difficult questions?92 How many
recipients of tracts conducted this kind of dialogue with the authors?
When a tract is left me (which is the case almost every Sunday) I examine it, and
where I find a blank, there I write some very pithy political or philosophical
sentence, and so make them subservient to a purpose diametrically opposed to their
intent - namely the diffusion of truth.93

How significant a contribution did radical education make to basic attainments

literacy for instance? What kind of effect did radical hostility to provided schooling
have on popular patterns of school use?
From existing knowledge something can be said on some of these questions.
The indices run very high at peak points of radical activity. The largest ever
circulation for a radical paper was that achieved by the Northern Star in the summer
of 1839 - perhaps 50,000 copies.94 At such moments radicalism acquired a mass
character. Radical ideas and organization could also penetrate into the most
/urrpromising environments, under the noses, for example, of conscientious local
paternalists.95 But even Chartism had marked geographical limits. Whole communi-
ties, especially in the countryside and in the south and east, lacked organization,
though it is impossible to assess sympatl1ies.96 (The prior defeat of the southern
labourer in 1830 is a crucial unevenness in worldng-class history.) In the north and
Midlands, by contrast, many localities had a continuous history of radicalism
throughout the period, often punctuated by major mobilizations. In such areas
radical education in its various forms had a continuous and lively history, supported
by groups of provincial leaders. It is also clear that radical politics and cultural
activity secured, for thousands of individuals, some educational progression ,
providing a motive for learning. Yet it is certain too that radicals:rn's more formal
solutions did not and could not match the provided forms in extent and solidity .
The dream of Lovell and others, of a whole alternative system of education,
remained a dream. One might guess, however, that the more democratic insti-
tutions had a greater effect on their pupil's consciousness of the social world than
a more routine schooling.
It is important to do more work on all these questions, but it may be more
useful to approach the broader problem somewhat differently .
As our knowledge of popular movements, especially of Chartism and its
antecedents, deepens, much of an older anonymity has been dispersed. It is possible
now to identify and name levels of leadership well beyond the kind of national
figures discussed in Cole's Chartist Portraits and subsequent biographies. For some
localities a local leadership has been described quite closely. These were the people
whom we have termed, with deliberate looseness, 'radicals' throughout this study.
They were the journalists, the demagogues, the lecturers, the national and provincial
leaders, the organizers, directors and 'educators' of radical movements. We may refer
to many of these people as 'intellectuals'. The value of this term is to mark both
the coherence of understanding that was developed and the 'educative' functions
that were performed. We might even speak of radicals, and especially Chartists and
 Really useful knowledge 93

Owenites, as constituting political parties or proto-parties. in some analyses of

party, indeed, the terms party and intellectual are closely connected. For Gran sci,
for example, parties were organizations that enabled the production of intellectuals
whose experiences and allegiances were, organically, those of the class which they
-
served. Certainly some such distinction - between party and class between radical
-
'intellectual' and those Whom they addressed is in this context a useful one. We
may then speak of a more or a less 'internal' or 'organic' relation between the
two.97 The question of the 'popularity of radicalism' becomes, then, more
qualititive and relational.
There are, of course, great difficulties in answering this question too: it needs
to be explored for each movement, each locality and perhaps for each major
leader. Edward Thompson's comparison of Owen and Cobbett underlines the
importance of individuality:
If Cobbett's writings can be seen as a relationship with his readers Owen's can
be seen as ideological raw material diffused among working-people, and worked
up by them into different products.98

We might none the less risk the generalization that from 1816 to the early 1840s
the relationship between radical leadership and working-class people was extra-
ordinarily close.
One common, but not decisive, test of the organicism of a leadership is its
social class origins. It is a common test because it is 'obvious' that people of
worldng-class origin will have a more intimate knowledge of the problems of their
class and a stronger sense of loyalty than others. It is not 'decisive' because there
seem to have been very many exceptions to this rule: renegades, 'gentleman agi-
tators', 'into]lectuals'. The relationship between some of the radicals who were
not working class and their working-class 'constituents' seems often to have been
-
peculiarly close John Fielder, Feargus O'Connor and Bronterre O'Brien are
exemplary cases.99 It would be wrong, however, to regard Chartism or its pre-
decessors as typically led by middle-class people. Perhaps the most important
feature of nineteenth-century radicalism was its capacity to produce an indigenous
leadership. It is not difficult to understand why this was so, for working people
with an inclination towards mental labour had to stay within their own class, or
occupy positions of great social ambiguity like elementary or private school-
mastering or journalism or lecturing. There were few open roads to co-option .
At the same time an education and a sort of career were available within radical
movements themselves.
The more decisive tests of organicism are those discussed by Gran sci in a 'note'
on Italian idealism, enough, as usual, the problems of popular communist
organization were not far from his mind :

.
One could only have had . . an organic quality of thought if there had existed the
same unity between the intellectuals and the simple as there should be between
theory and practice. That is, if the intellectuals had been organically the intellectuals
94 Studies
of those masses, and if they had worked out and made coherent the principles and
the problems raised by the masses in their practical activity . . . . Is a philosophical
movement properly so called when it is devoted to creating a specialised culture
among restricted intellectual groups, or rather when, or only when, in the process
of elaborating a form of thought superior to 'common sense' and coherent on a
scientific plane, it never forgets to remain in contact with the 'simple' and indeed
finds in this contact the source of the problem it sets out to study and to resolve?
Only by this contact does a philosophy become 'historical', purify itself of
intellectualistic elements of an individual character and become life.100

Early nineteenth-century radicalism did indeed find in the everyday life of the
masses 'the source of the problems it set out to study and resolve'. 'Spearhead
knowledge' centred, as we have seen, on the experiences of poverty, political
oppression and social and cultural apartheid. It gave a wider, more 'historical', more
coherent view of everyday life than customary or individual understandings. This
was possible, in part, because the commonest inhibitions to such an internal
relation were wealdy developed. There was nowhere else but contemporary
experience from which an appropriate theory could derive: no pre-existing socialist
doctrine to be learnt and therefore no danger of the rigidity or autonomy of
dogmas. Perhaps there was a tendency of Painite theory to crystallize thus, but, in
general, there were simply no historical parallels for the situation of worldng people
in England from which relevant theory might have been derived. A similar
argument relates to forms of organization. Though radical groups can be considered
parties in a looser Grarnscian sense, they were hardly parties on a stricter Leninist
model. But organizational looseness had compensations. There were few organi-
zational orthodoxies either, little growth of bureaucracies, little of the more
extreme kinds of internal division between 'otlficials' and 'rank and file' which
were to dominate trade union, social democratic and communist politics. The
main inhibition to a notably democratic practice was the amour propre and charis-
matic character of some leaders, who, however, could be jettisoned or ignored. In
this sense, radicalism had little except its 'popularity' on which to depend. Many
of the forms characteristics of its education project stem from this: informality
for instance, and the 'practical', 'unintellectualistic' (had we better say un-
academic?) character of its 'theory'.

Shifts and differences

The most important shift, over time, was a heightened awareness of the immense
difficulty of sustaining radical education. We can, with the benefit of hindsight, see
this as the beginning of a longer transformation in working-class educational
strategies. From the 1850s and more surely from the later 1860s, the strategy of
-
substitution of an alternative working-class system - was replaced by the demand
for more equal access to facilities that were to be provided by the state. This became
the main feature of popular liberal politics and then of the Labour Party's
 Really useful knowledge 95
educational stance.101 Thus while radicals, Chartists and Owenites all opposed
'state education' except as the work of a transformed state, later socialists actually
fuelled the growth of state schooling by their own agitations. The consequences
of this adaptation were immense: it involved, for instance, accepting, in a very
sharp form, the child-adult divide, the tendency to equate education with school,
the depoliticization of educational content, and the professionalization of
teaching. In all these ways the state as educator was by no means a neutral
apparatus.
A study of discussions in the radical press from the later 1830s shows very
clearly the preference for, but also the limitations of, a more independent route.
Independence remained the central feature of the tradition. Most early radicals
had accepted the Godwinian case against every authoritative direction of learning.
Cobbett opposed 'national education' right up to his death in 1835 . The Black
Dwarf even opposed the setting up of national libraries on the ground that learning
should support a$e1f.102 Owen himself sometimes, and rather rhetorically, called
on government to supply (an Owe rite) education: most Owenites probably agreed
with Shepherd Smith about 'the folly of looldng to governments for aid'. 103
The usual Chartist line was an inversion of that of middle-class reformers: 'national
education' could and would follow universal suffrage rather than precede it: any
education worth the name was unlikely and would probably be very dangerous
beforehand. There was even some debate about the wisdom of a state organization
of schooling after the Charter was achieved.104
As independence was asserted in still more class-conscious forms, difficulties
multiplied. Radicals before the 1830s had tended to see the problem mainly in terms
of monopoly. Secular and religious authority kept the people ignorant, ignorant even
of the laws they were to obey. The task, then, was to spread knowledge where
-
none had erdsted before or only that lack of knowledge which Paine had called
'superstitution': hence that unreasonable faith in reason and in their own presses,
legacy in part from their own Enlightenment sources.105 Besides, as Thompson
has stressed, enlightenment seemed to work. But radicals of the 1830s and 1840s,
faced by defeats, developed a greater sense of the ideological resources of com-
petitive society, the need to 'un-teach' old associations and the significance, as
positive sources of 'error', of institutions like the churches. The Owe rite analysis
of society's immense ideological weight, which in less sanguine times might have
bred a deep fatalism, posed at least the problems of where to start.
The second set of difficulties concerned the material conditions for radical
education. There was now much more emphasis on such practical limitations as
lack of time, income, rest, and peace and quiet. A sense of these problems seems
to have fuelled a move towards more collective and formal solutions, especially
for children, different in Md from Cobbett's hearth-based remedies.105 It was
those media with readerships rooted in the industrial north and Midlands the -
organs of the factory movement, the Birmingham and union-based Pioneer and the
-
Northern Star that seem to have responded most sensitively to new needs.
The factory movement itself is the most obvious example of the newer emphases,
96 Studies

for it campaigned on matters of time and the reduction of the working day both
for children and adults. It was also the first example of a working-class strategy of
pressure on the state to secure well-defined reforms. Of course, the educational
content of the movement should not be exaggerated: freedom from excessive toil
as a human right or a Christian obligation was also stressed and the factory was
attacked as a source of many evils. But the agitation over hours can certainly be
read asan attempt to reinstate the educational importance of the family. The need
for education was often cited as a motor of the movement and factory reformers
put forward their own educational schemes. These sometimes had a Tory or
Anglican character but the programme of the Society for Promoting National
Regeneration, for instance, put forward a working-class alternative, similar to but
more modest than later substitutional schemes.107
Working-class difficulties were also often explored in debates with 'education-
-
mongers' those who saw education as a sufficient remedy for social evils. When
Thomas Wyse, a leading educational reformer of the 1830s, commenced his own
agitation, he had a series of visits from Robert Owen who gently explained the
irrationality of his plans.
In fact, while the lzbouring population are kept constantly immersed in pecuniary
difficulties, struggling in a whirlpool of evils arising from intermittent employment,
and low wages while in employment, the amelioration hoped for by the mere
mental reformer can never be achieved.108

Similar arguments were repeatedly put by the Northern Star. O'Connor himself
often wrote on this theme, stressing the indispensability of leisure, the attacks of
authority on popular amusements, the perversion of Sunday, the exhaustion
produced by 'debasing and life-destroying drudgery', the destruction of physical
health and the removal from nature. Working people had little positive incentive
to learn or to educate their children. They were shut out from opportunities for
economic and political initiatives. The solution was to secure their comforts and
political rights first. Once this was done, the people could be trusted to educate
themselves.109 t71e Pioneer put the same argument in more literary form, but
with typical concreteness.
Now mark the toilsome artisan: the bell arouses him from slumbers- soft ease
invites him to another nap, but jerk must go to the eyelids, - the half-stretched
limbs must spring, - on go the vestments, - up lifts the latch, - and with a hurried
.
step he hastes to work. . . To work, toil, toil, till strength requires a breakfast -
-
thanks if the cupboard hold one, a derni-hour allowed to gulp it down. To work
-
again till hunger calls for dinner, - a scanty meal, and off again to labour until
-
night. Night comes, and now for peaceful leisure. A book perchance - A book !
- A noisy brat to nurse, a scramble for a loaf's small dividend, a cry of pain;,a half-
a-dozen little feet held up, petitioning for shoes, fit scene for quiet musing. A
cluster round the homely hearth, scrambling for scanty rays of heat. A pretty
picture, that - fine opportunity for useful training! The mother half worn out, her
-
temper chafed, too busy far to rear the tender thought, a rap 'o the head more
 Really useful knowledge 97

like, eliciting a charming chorus. O, what a wretched catechism is that between a

1abourer's child and his poor jaded mother! Their little souls grow full of brambles,
their health depends on fickle chance, their wanton playfulness has no room to
sport in, and these are but the sweets o f poverty.

Having portrayed family circumstances in this poem of everyday life, the author
turns angrily on the charitable :
- -
Pooh! Cry the rich, it is the lot of poverty There must be rich and poor the poor
are naturally ignorant. . . . Wrapped u p in vile conceit, and ever ready with the
admonition, ye, too, do join the cry, the crafty cry of over abundant wages; the
hackneyed slang respecting rights of capital, the enormous wrong of scorning our
base origin, the wicked partiality of law, the sordid crippling of light amusements,
the maw-worm whine of puffed up charity, the tract, the soup, the caps and tip-
petts, and little leather breeches ... ..
-
Were conditions equalized 'just let our noisy brats enjoy a turn or two in your
-
trim nurseries' there would be no more charges of ignorance and brutishness.110
Most of these arguments were directed at targets outside the movement, but
they also bore on internal radical debates. The radical enthusiasm for education
was composed of several strands, some of them in potential conflict. We began by
stressing the dilemma of the desire for education in straightened circumstances,
further complicated by the distrust of philanthropy. Countereducation was an
attempt to solve this dilemma, but it was not merely compensatory. Although all
radicals saw education as an aspect of equal rights and a goal to be fought for ,
education was also part of a strategy or method. For Owenites, education (which
always included the power of 'institutions', 'writings' and 'discourses' as well as
schooling) was the principle means of agitation, but as J.F.C, Harrison has stressed,
Owenism was 'not purely a movement to found schools and literary institutes'.111
Similarly, in the political-radical mainstream, politics and education went together
in a complicated Web of means-ends relationships. Education without politics was
deemed inadequate: it must be allied to some kind of power, some 'physical' or
moral' force, some purchase on authority. As the Poor Man 's Guardian put it :
-
I may be plundered of My purse by a gang of thieves I may know how they took
-
where they have placed it the best Way of recovering it; but, without the means,
will this knowledge restore the purse? Certainly not. In England a gang of thieves
legislate for the community, and it is not sufficient that we know this to be the
case, we must possess the means of protecting ourselves from this depredation.112

But politics without education was also inadequate. Certain kinds of knowledge
were immediate means to the Charter: all sections of the Chartist movement gave
to 'intelligence' a key role in mass agitation. This in turn meant that all activity
that led to a general raising of levels of literacy and articulacy was to be fostered.
There was nO division at all in Chartist ranks on this particular theme.
The unity of the compensatory and political aspects of educational enthusiasm
98 Studies

did rest, however, on very particular conditions. The -whole substitutional strategy
was sustained by the belief that sooner or later the Charter OI' the New Moral
World would be secured. Within the terms of this belief, the individual pursuit of
knowledge or the general aim of improving' the whole class, or the desire to con-
centrate on the education of children, could all be held together. The task was to
prepare for success and speed it. The larger education objectives, utopian indeed in
existing circumstances, could be asked to wait. Soon, all would be achieved.
So when political challenges were blunted and hopes of immediate success
began to fail, difficult tactical and strategic questions emerged. The commonest
response was to hold the existing combination, limit educational ambitions, hope
and work for some resolution at other (i.e. political) levels. But the history here
is different within the Owe rite and Chartist connections. Owenism was a protean
movement that met frustrations by once more changing form, stressing yet another
aspect of a very fertile repertoire. Chartism faced the problem of power, and had
intermediate goals of great clarity (universal suffrage). Setbacks were correspond-
ingly more traumatic, diversions more contentious and battles about strategy more
ferocious and debilitating. None the less, somewhat similar debates can be traced
within the two movements.
From the perspective of what remained the dominant tendency, the characteristic
'deviation' was to give to education schemes a priority independent of sensible
tactical judgment. Since the commonest form of such schemes focused on the
education of children, the threat was that radicals would become merely school-
masters. This was certainly a tendency recurrently feared by the sanest of Owe rite
theorists: William Thompson up to his death in 1833, James Morrison in the
Pioneer and Shephard Smith in the Crisis. They warned against the expense, the
diversion of effort and the tendency to 'sectarianisml113 But the history of Owenism
is full of instances of education project-launching. In 1830, John Finch of Liverpool
planned a college to provide a 'superior' residential education for hundreds of
children of Co-operators.114 The Birmingham Co-operative Herald enlarged this
scheme: there should be preparatory schools in every town and country colleges
with model farms and small-scale rnanufactories.115 In 1833 this plan was revived
by two groups. One scheme, proposed by a Mr Reynolds, was supported by
Monsieur Philip Baume, a French philanthropist, who offered to lease fourteen
acres for a college and give 'everything I possess'.116 In the same year a group
called 'the Social ReformerS, meeting in Lovett's Coffee House, planned a boarding
school to be supported by 'the intelligent and well-disposed among all classes'.117
In 1835, an Owe rite lecturer called Henderson described a plan for 'a very superior
school' before an audience at the Charlotte Street Institute. Children were to board
at from £18 to £28 per annum, to study all subjects and, since it had not been
positively proved whether Man was 'herbaceous, gramnivorous or carnivorous',
they were not to eat too much meat.l]8 In 1838 there was a debate in the New
Moral World about whether to accept £1000 from William Devonshire Saull, a
London wine merchant, for educational purposes. The money was eventually used
to start an 'Educational Friendly Society', one object of which was to found an
 Really useful knowledge 99

'Educational Community'. At the same time, plans for a Co-operative College

were revived)19 There was more than a hint of education project-building in the
programme of the Association of All Classes of All Nations and in the Rational
School Movement of 1839 to 1843. In 1839, 'Socius' in the New Moral World
advocated converting Halls of Science into schools and the setting up of a 'Model
Normal Schoo1'.120 The proposal coincided with the debate between church and
state over the Whig government's 'Normal School' plan of February 1839 .
It was natural that Owenites should wish to found their own schools to show the
world how children really could be educated and to avoid using the schools of
Church or Dissent. In its more usual forms - more improvised, combining adults and
-
children, and connecting schooling with other activities Owe rite schooling,
especially at the level of the local branch, was a widespread and sensible response.
But the education projects often bear the mark of the cranmer, more philanthropic
aspects of the movement and invariably involved middle-class aid and, perhaps, a
loss of independence. One might doubt the value of 'superior' residential education
to the children of workingclass Co-operators or their ability to raise £1 per month
per child (the Social Reformer's scheme) OI' £18 a year (Henderson's).
The equivalent within Chartism was the Lovell/Collirs pamphlet of 1840, the
ostracism of die 'new movers' in the battle that followed and the swinging of the
main Chartist body behind O'Connor and the Northern Star.121 Lovett's plan was to
build a comprehensive system of counter-education eschewing the aid of 'irrespon-
sible government' but allowing a role for middle-class sympathizers. The plan bore
the stamp of Owe rite influence, not least in its ambition: infant, preparatory and
high schools in every place, reading rooms, lectures and libraries for adults in newly
built district halls, agricultural and industrial schools for orphans, tracts, school-
books, and a system for the training of teachers with at least one 'normal school'.122
This was less a middle-class scheme, as the O'Connorite criticism went, than an
illustration of the ultimate limitations of the strategy of substitution. While main-
stream Chartists continued more modest educational work and indeed increased
its intensity, Lovell's association became a progressive but not too successful
experiment in middle-class philanthropy. The founding of the first day school was
delayed till 1848. By this time Lovett himself had actually become a schoolmaster
and, under the influence of William Ellis, had entered 'a new epoch in my life'.123
Ellis, a founder of the Birkbeck Schools, was a militant teacher of political
econorny.124
But the orthodox Chartist route did not constitute a solution either. By the
mid 1840s it had reached its limits. In the decades that followed and in the wake
of the political defeats, independent working-class education continued, in the
better-off sectors it may even have increased. But it took on more individualized
forms ('selfeducation') or lost its connection with politics ('mutual improvement')
or became the cultural preserve of the aristocracies. It certainly lost the ambition
of being an alternative system, especially with regard to children. At the same time
a new kind of educational agitation began to emerge, linked to popular liberalism
and the anti-Anglican alliance. Worldng-class activists began to demand education
100 Studies

through the state, even though initially, like the Chartist rump of 1851, they
insisted still on some popular control.

Future questions
Explanations of the whole mid-nineteenthcentury shift, of which the story of
radical education is a part, have tended to focus on material improvements (economic
trends of' a largely quantitative kind) or on changes in the mode of 'hegemony' or
'social control' understood mainly as occurring within cultural and political relations.
There have also been attempts to rework Lenin's theory of 'the aristocracy of
labour'.125 One common tendency, across very different accounts, has been to
treat early-nineteenth-century radicalism rather unproblematically as the politics
of a class-conscious working class, made or in the maldng.136 We now know a great
deal about the culture and forms of organization of this period, yet the position of
the different groups of working people within economic relations remains surprisingly
obscure. The most important questions concern the relations between labour and
capital in the actual production of commodities, in what we might call the direct
relations of production. What Were the forms and degrees of the dependence of
l a b o r within production? How far did capital control through the labour process
itself, as opposed to more externally or 'formally' through the ownership of materials
or a monopoly or exchange? We badly need more exact categories for describing
all the transitional forms between the relatively independent small producer and the
fully proletarianized worker. The terms derived from contemporary parlance, like
'artisan', remain too loose for serious analytic use.127
These questions have tended tO be bypassed by social historians though they
are present in Marx and in some of the older economic histories. Yet they are
crucial for an understanding of the wider questions which now concern our historio-
graphy, especially all the questions around 'control', 'hegemony' or 'reproduction'
(in the global sense). For capital's control and labour's subordination were formed
first and foremost in production. Certainly the forms of the relations there set the
terms of what was struggled over elsewhere. But there are other very important
questions too. For our educational themes, it is crucial to establish the effects of a
deepening subordination of labour in production on the forms of the reproduction
of labour, especially of course, the production of new generations of labourers.
The study of forms of the family and of relations between the sexes then becomes
very important. The family was a site of reproduction and of production of both
capitalist and non-capitalist kinds. These latter questions are only now being
properly posed. Answering them requires a different sort of research, one that .

focuses on structure rather than culture. Even so, it is worth ending with some
speculations on what structural changes our materials might suggest .
Initially, the independeNt tradition appears to have drawn on educational
resources that could only have ezdsted had capital's control of production and of
the reproduction of labour power been relatively loose. Perhaps the most important
of these resources lay in various fonts Of the small producer household, already
 Really useful knowledge 101

partially transformed in its relations to capital, but still possessed of a space or

autonomy for activities of an educational kind, including the teaching of skills to
children. The educational story we have just described (not by any means the
whole story of working-class education) corresponds to the economic experience of
the small-producer-becoming-proletarian_ The main mechanism here seems to
have been the curtailment or interruption of the educative or reproductive autono-
mies of family and community through, primarily, the more complete subordination
of l a b o r (male, female and juvenile) in production. This pressure from the sphere
of production and the enforcement of capitalist economic relations was reinforced,
of course, by direct intervention into the reproductive sphere, of which the growth
of state and provided schooling is the most relevant example. At the same time as
indigenous educational resources were squeezed, alternative forms were offered or
enforced. The erosion of an indigenous educational capacity seems to have occurred
in different ways. It happened in a few trades through the concentration of
production in the factory and, eventually, the separation of the household and the
sphere of capitalist production. The employment of children, often a concomitant
of factory production but occurring on an extended scale outside, had, itself,
obvious educative effects. But perhaps the most important form of pressure on the
family was through a deepening dependence of domestic outwork on the capitalist
merchant, factor or middleman and the reduction of margins of time and income
through the prolongation of the working day. Low income not only changed the
(necessarily educative) relations within the family but also made the family more
and more dependent on the labour of the children. But effects such as these would
have to be established for particular trades, times and places.128
We may understand radical education as an attempt to expand and develop
those areas of autonomy and control over reproduction which remained. If this is
accurate, it is important to say that it was not a fully 'working-class' phenomenon:
it did not rest on fully proletarian conditions of eydstence. Indeed, the material
spaces which it occupied were actually shrinking. This was accentuated by the
changing geographical basis of radicalism which was also a changing social basis.
The early radical phases rested upon artisans, trades like weaving with relatively
recent histories of some independence, and, perhaps, petit bourgeois and lesser
professional groups, more modern analogues of the small producer. The spread of
the factories, the deepening subordination of the outworkers, the growth of sweated
trades, together with the geographic shift northwards in Chartism, gave to radicalism
a more fully proletarian base. To such people some of the earlier solutions must
have seemed grossly inapplicable. We might compare Cobbett's fatherly idyll with
Morrison's poem of everyday life. Perhaps the whole substitutional strategy was
inapplicable too: certainly its ambitious Lovettite forms were, Yet it took time to
find another route, appropriate to proletarian conditions, and a much longer haul
to socialism. The priority, perhaps, was to build barriers to capital's appetite for
labour and then to its tendency to intensify it. So far as, education is concerned the
period from the 1790s to the 1830s did not see 'the making of the English working
class', did not see, that is, the development of the characteristic class strategies of
102 Studies

later periods. This story really begins, thinly, with the factory movement and
continues with the educational strategies of late Chartism, popular liberalism and
the early-twentieth-century lab our movement.129
4 Imperialism, nationalism and
organized youth
Michael Blanch

Introduction
An important area of cultural transactions between classes is that of 'youth', a term
with strongly masculine and delinquent connotations. Public concern about 'youth',
even the identification of urban sub-cultures, has a long history, as Henry Mayhew's
description of London coster-monger culture in the mid nineteenth century testiiies.1
But this history is punctuated by peaks and troughs in the 'visibility' of youth.
Two such peaks, for instance, separated by almost 200 years, were the widespread
anxiety over the juvenile crowd which sparked off the Sunday school movement in
the 1780s and the panics over youth sub-cultures in the period since World War II.
As a comparison of these instances would show, however, there have also been
significant qualitative shifts in the way the problem of 'youth' has been perceived.
It is clear that the late nineteenth century saw one such shift.2
Prior to this period urban delinquency had mainly been associated with 'the
children of the street'. Their removal into the classroom with the beginning of
(more or less) effective compulsory attendance, directed attention towards the
'youth' as adolescent. Gillis suggests that this was a period when conceptions of
youth, as a particular stage in biological, psychological and social development ,
came to be fixed. He also argues that the issue of delinquency played a major part
in this process;
Working-class youth appeared, typically, in the form of the delinquent. Much
of the rise in 'delinquency' in Gillis's study of Oxford is accounted for, however ,
-
in a rise of non-indictable offences playing football in the streets, loitering and
public bathing. The increase in prosecutions represents an attempt to use the
law for the regulation of leisure pursuits, removing the worldng-class young from
uncontrolled contexts and sweeping them into more 'provided' leisure forms.
Those who were involved in bringing prosecutions were often the same groups who
were providing alternative leisure pursuits. The whole combined enterprise produced
-
a polarized image of 'youth': on the one side the 'good' constructive, disciplined,
-
worthwhile and organized ; on the other the 'bad' disorderly, delinquent and out
of control. Gillis's work suggests that what was at stake was an attempt to suppress
or divert informal youth sub-cultures of the streets by both coercive means and
counter-attractions. One purpose of this essay is to examine some similar processes
in a big industrial city.
104 Studies

But the period 1890 to 1918 is a significant one for the study of working-class
culture in other ways. As the case of youth suggests, it was marked more generally
by a massive attempt to transform popular ways of life and modes of belief, an
attempt not dissimilar to that of the classic period of the 'Industrial Revolutions
The characteristic vehicles of this enterprise were imperialism and nationalism,
ideologies with reference to both political and economic goals. The period from
before the Boer War down to World War I formed the heyday of popular national-
ism and imperialism. These features raise intere sting questions about the extent
and form of the diffusion of imperialist-nationalist ideas and about their 'popularity
This essay contributes to a discussion of some of these themes by examining
the role of certain youth movements in the city environment. The material is mostly
drawn from Birmingham, though comparative references are made to Manchester

Youth, police and clubs

The pattern that Gillis describes is, broadly, visible in Birmingham and Manchester
too. The most obvious symptom was the application of both belt and petty law to
compel children to conform to adult and middle-class attempts to organize their
leisure time .4 As a reaction to the increasing attentions of the constabulary, a
child folldore shows a distinct lack of respect :
I spy this, I spy that
I spy a copper in his shiny hat.5

or, in London, 'Gertch y'mucking copper you'.6 Such ditties probably passed from
generation to generation in the communities of the unsldlled and semi-skilled
workers] There is some evidence to suggest that better-off workers and petty
property holders viewed policemen more sympathetically.8 The conflicts between
police and youth were certainly sharpest in the central worldng-class districts
where unskilled and semi-skilled workers mainly lived.
In these areas older boys formed their own gangs. One popular 'style' of the
period, known as 'peaky blinder', 'slugger' or 'scuttler',9 could be distinguished by
a uniform of shaven cropped head, long peaked cap, a line of vivid brass buttons,
wide leather belt and narrow-kneed fustian bell-bottomed trousers. Weapons
ranged from a distinctive argot to bucldes, knives and half bricks.10 Most active
in Birmingham in St Lawrence's (Lancaster Street), St Martin's (Rea Street) and in
Manchester in Ancoats (Forty Row), and organized around the pubs, they were
said to terrorize whole districts.
The chaos of gang fights, police whistles, blood and buckles, screaming women
local newspapers would bring out a special Sunday edition which exacted as much
interest as the bells of the fire brigade!1
This sub-culture represented a violent and sometimes criminal rejection of 'expected'
standards of behaviour. It marked the weak transitional stage in the socialization
process between the family and the school and the assumption of adult responsi-
 Imperialism, nationalism and organized youth 105

bilities, a time of increasing sexual experience and independence." But the peakies
seem also to have been reacting against other attempts to organize them. Their
uniform seems a riposte to the uniforms of the paramilitary organizations, on
occasions they would attack youth groups on the streets and in clubs 3 But the
subculture may also represent a brief moment of release from a repressive
discipline at school14 and the discipline that might shortly or already be experienced
at work.15
In many skilled-worker families the twin effects of continuing education and
family assistance in job-finding may have brought these two stages of life into a
closer connection." The children who were most susceptible to the approaches of
Organized Youth were those who, by the definition of the organizers, needed the
movements least. In general, however, Organized Youth was intended to cover the
whole spectrum of social classes and occupational groups as the wide range of
organizations testifies.
Nearly all the clubs and movements vied for the custom of working-class children,
for they amounted to roughly 80 per cent of the child population. For many of those
who ran the clubs, indeed, it was worldng-class culture which constituted the
problem against which their movements were to battle. For all the clubs, of
whatever description, a principal evil to which working-class children were sus-
ceptible was that of indiscipline. In this, they carried over the ethos of the elementary
schools, for some clubs, the discipline which they intended to impose was starkly
barren of imagination .
Children required salvation from the vices of their parent culture too, a second
set of evils lay in the wiles of gambling, moral laxity, the 'animal excitement' of
theatres and cinemas, and the curse of drink. Clubs, then, wished to direct working-
class leisure into 'respectable channels', with either a religious or a military bias or
both. They also existed to act as a focal point for loyalties. To their organizers,
the closed nature of working-class society evidenced a self-centred and selfish
perspective upon life. Children needed to receive a sense of group identity, group
loyalty and group pride above and beyond the peaky gang, and well above the
divisive 'working class' identification. The clubs were to act to promote loyalty
from sub-group to local institution, thus to society and to nation, the loyalty they
demanded from their members was but one strand in a complicated web of national
identity and the connection of the one to the other was achieved in various ways by
the different movements. For the purposes of analysis, the movements are grouped
as paramilitary, semi-military, and philanthropic/civilian. Paramilitary movements
were closely connected to the army: their members wore uniforms, carried weapons,
practised drill and were superintended or officered by ex-army officers, officers
from the Volunteers or members of the National Service League, the teaching
profession and the clergy.17 In this group were included the Boys' Brigade, the
Church Lads' Brigade, the Incorporated Church Scout Patrols (ICSP), the army
cadets, the naval cadets and some units of the Jewish Lads' Brigade." Semi-
military movements were distinguished in overtly trying to avoid direct military
identification, their literature criticized militarism, and they carried no weapons.
106 Studies

Usually, however, they wore uniforms and practised drill, and their organizers were
drawn from the same broad group as the paramilitary. Examples were the Boy
Scouts, the Boys Life Brigade, and units of the Jewish Lads Brigade. Finally, non-
military movements abandoned drill, weapons and uniform, again, however, the
personalities within their central organizations were closely connected to the
military, and again discipline was the key word. In this category were included the
Street Children's Union, the YMCA and miscellaneous youth clubs attached to
churches, orphanages, factories and local grammar schools.
For the purpose of analysis, too, we will focus on the recruitment figures for youth
movements in six central working~class wards of Birmingham," and particularly
in the destitute wards of St Mary and Bartholomew in 1913. Manchester statistics
are only available for 1917, by which time numbers were swelled by a more mili-
taristic society. Manchester's figures are given on page 116 for seven central
worldng-class wards.20

Paramilitary organization
Paramilitary movement organizers appear to have been violently disciplinarian ,
seeking strong links between social and military discipline. Such attitudes are well
summarized in a quote from a Boys' Brigade lieutenant - himself both a member
of the local Volunteer force and a chaplain :
There was a lack of obedience and of discipline in society. Boys of thirteen and
fourteen tried to be their own masters at home, and in the world, going out, like
young colts, without any restraint being put upon them, heedless of their duties
to parents and employers, desirous only of recreation and pleasure, and callous of
what their future prospects would be. lt meant a growing individualism in society,
and this . . . increase of selfishness, this want of cohesion and lack of proper
discipline, were unmistakable signs of the times.

The Boys' Brigade, like the Church Lads' Brigade, was a semi-religious organization ,
being usually attached to Nonconformist churches. It claimed 450 Birmingham
boys in 1909 (although by 1913, it seems to have grown to about 900 boys)22
and some 2378 Manchester boys in 191723 all aged 12 to 17 years. They paid
6d. to join, 6d. for the cap, and subscriptions of between %d.-2d. per week.
Training included drill and discipline, playing brass instruments, first aid and
religion. Once a year, the brigade attended a two-week camp (a martinet institution,
involving days crammed with parades and drill from 5 a.m. until 8 p.m.), which
cost each individual between 12s. and l8s.24 The Boys' Brigade was at times
popular with working-class children, though for the 'wrong' reasons
'
and in the
'wrong' way:

At the same time, in those days, boys in uniform were the object of a considerable
amount of ridicule in the street from other boys . . . many other things besides
words being thrown at us :
 Imperialism, nationalism and organized youth 107

'Ere comes the Boys' Brigade

A11 covered with marmalade,
A tuppenny-'apenny pill box,
And 'a1°f a yard of braid.
Keep yer 'air on . . . etc.'25

In their Eton collars, officered by King Edward high school boys, and carrying
Martini-Henry carbines, they thus occasioned considerable attention. There were
four companies of the Boys' Brigade in the Birmingham central area in 1913. Two
were attached to Nonconformist churches in St Bartholomew and Mary, one to
Cattell Road Mission and one to the Digbeth Institute. In Manchester, there were
six companies in the central wards in 1917, the largest being attached to Heyrod
Street Boys' Club, itself formed from a Ragged School. Parading resplendent
under its mounted officers,26 this worldng-class unit was told not to act like
'Ancoats hooligans' but

__
we have a reputation for gentlemanly conduct. Stick to it! . . . if any of the older
chaps, however, see any lad . acting cruelly in any way, he has our permission
to hurt that lad. Punch his head!27

These working-class units touched but the fringes of the unskilled worker youth -
some 5% per cent as a mean figure for the Birmingham and Manchester central
city areas, aged 12 to 17 years.28 Units were more popular with children of skilled
workers. Some companies were attached to the adult schools and institutes. Nelson
Street Adult School, Birmingham, for instance, had a Boys' Brigade formed in 1902 :
within two months it had 120 members. Thus did the children of skilled artisans
march about the streets at 10.30 a.m. on Sunday mornings, blowing bugles ('to get
.
the laggards out of bed') and sporting rifles . .
the sole object being to promote cleanliness, discipline and obedience, and to
encourage physical, mental and moral c:ulture.29

The Church Lads' Brigade (CLB), although attached to the Established Church,
was in most other respects very similar. It was even more closely connected with
the military, its vice presidents included two field marshals," nine generals, the
chaplain-general of the forces and the chaplain of the fleet. While the Boys' Brigade,
however, rejected in a referendum the opportunity to become a part of the military
army cadet force (attached to the Territorial Force),31 the CLB amalgamated with
the army cadet scheme in 1911 .
The CLB took boys from 13 to 19 years old, it taught military drill and shooting
and demanded the usual subscription of between Veld. and 2d. per week,32 Like the
Boys' Brigade, the high point of its activities was an annual camp. In 1909 582
cadets from Birmingham attended this camp, paying 10s. 6d. each:

The camp is necessarily run on strict military lines, and as the War Office inspecting
officers signify in their reports on the inspection, does provide a week's sound
108 Studies

military training for lads who work in our crowded towns, and who will soon be
taking they place as men and citizens of the Empire.33

In the central city areas in 1913, the CLB had six companies varying from twenty
to sixty members each. Three of these were in the two lower-worldng-class wards,
but such ventures tended to be temporary. In 1898, for instance, a 'street arab '
detachment was started in the parish of St Lawrence's, but by 1903 nothing more
was heard of ir.34 Again, the recruitment from Sunday schools in working-class
areas was likely to be fruitful only up to school-leaving age. It is likely, then, that
CLB detachments in working-class areas would therefore have a high turnover and
be composed of many younger children, and consequently be impermanent groups.
The central city area also boasted one troop of the Incorporated Church Scout
Patrols (ICSP), run until 1914 by the CLB. This organization was fiercely militant :
Here at home, if you ever hear a boy crying down his country, or telling lies about
the King, tell him to shut up, and if he won't then punch his head.

Of the army cadets outside the grammar schools, Manchester was much better
endowed than Birmingham. Its first Cadet Battalion began in 1858, by 1890 it
had 258 boys35 and was attached to the local Volunteer battalion. Until 1909, no
public grant was prow'ded, and membership of the corps (including its scarlet coat)
involved some expense. Thus the First Cadet Battalion charged 15s. lod. for camp
-
and SS. annually. Yet it attracted 600 members and it was claimed that the number
could easily have been doubled with financial support for uniform purchase.37 Such
units catered for the 14 to 17 year-old age group, whose members were too young
to join the Volunteers.38 The membership was drawn from a similar social strata as
the Volunteers, many of the Manchester regiment cadets being fitters in boiler
works, engine shops, grocer's assistants and general factory labour." Its popularity
with the worldng class might be expected to be higher than for the religious cadet
units; it did not demand Sunday school or church attendance, nor did it patronize
its members with religious moralizing. It was more closely connected with legitimate'
soldiering and taught mostly drill, shooting and elementary fieldcraft and tactics.
For employers of l a b o r too it held some attraction, for at least one unit was
supported by their land donations.40 The change which cadet membership was
alleged to have wrought in character and personality was, as was also alleged for
Volunteers, thought to be of great benefit to prospective employers:

You have explained the fact of your taking these boys into the cadet battalion has
some effect on their character and habits, do you attach very great importance to
that?
Yes, I attach very great importance to that, and employers of labour in Manchester
attach importance to it, the big merchants will come and ask whether I have got any
boys that I can recommend as office boys, and they tell me that my boys are keener
and more alert and much more quickly learn their duties than boys who have not
been so trained.
 Imperialism, nationalism and organized youth 109

I suppose before the boys come to you they have been to Board Schools where
they had had some previous physical drill?
Yes.

Do you find that an advantage?

A very great advantage.

Am I right in supposing that . . . you attach the greatest importance from a military
point of view to boys being caught young and taught to shoot?
I $0_41

Indeed it was claimed that in Manchester, the movement had stamped out the .
incidence of other forms of violence - 'I-Iooliganism, fighting with belts and knives'.42
In Birmingham, the movement was slow to start. The elementary schools them-
selves never formed cadet corps. There was no need - as the Lord Mayor succinctly
explained that :
the youth of Birmingham in the Board Schools had been subject to that system for
_
the past twenty years . . .43

i.e. 'compulsory military training' (sic). Since 1886, all public elementary schools
had been giving a fifteen- to twenty-minute military drill session every day as
physical exercise. Indeed, some schools exceeded this, the local authority inspector
reported that one infants' school (Arden Road) was holding forty-five-n'1inutes-a-
day marching drill for all classes, 'including the babies' which, he concluded, was
too long.44
Birmingham, however, had a weak and flagging Volunteer organization down to
1909, whereas Manchester's was much more dynamic. From 1909, when the
Volunteers were reorganized into the battalions of Haldarle's Territorial Force,
(TF), the adult membership soared.45 At the same time, and more fully from May
1910, cadet battalions were formally affiliated to County Territorial Force
Associations and a Treasury grant paid of £5 per annum per company of thirty
qualified cadets. Haldane's original proposal in 1907 to provide money for the
creation of cadet corps in elementary schools had been defeated by an amendment
proposed by the fifty-six Labour MP's, which restricted financial support to those
aged over sixteen years old .
Following TF reorganization, the Eighth Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire
Regiment in Birmingham began to introduce a cadet scheme; its first success was to
capture three troops of Boy Scouts (diSsussed below), some ninety-three boys.46
By 1909 the commanding officer, Col. Ludlow, was writing to the newspapers. He
required the boys to be teetotalers and non-smokers, and not particularly fond of
enjoying themselves :

The boys of working class parents who leave school early have no real opportunities
of usefully employing their spare time, and in consequence you will find our cheap
110 Studies

music halls crowded every evening with young fellows who would be far better
employed learning habits of order, discipline and patriotism and in improving
their physique in every way.47

The cost was Zd. per week and after the first thirty 'drills' the recruits were given
uniforms. Ludlow required 406 boys.48 The response was in fact very strong but
Ludlow was cautious, rejecting 48 per cent of youths who applied on medical
grounds.49 And although it seems from the regimental histories that the force
proved popular and soon reached its target, one wonders just how much more
support it would have attracted had the medical standards not been so exclusive ,
nor the moral standards so puritan. It is most probably the case that recruits to the
Eighth Battalion's cadet force were drawn from the children of the officers and
soldiers, soldiers in Birmingham's TF tended to be drawn from sldlled-worker
groups. The high standards indicate at least that they were from families of relatively
comfortable incomes.
Of the uniformed paramilitary youth, then, the possible total from the Birming-
ham central wards was unlikely to have exceeded 700 - about 10 per cent of all
males aged 12 to 17 years. Manchester's figure of 450 represented a slightly higher
proportion - 12.9 per cent.50
The cost of being a member of any of these units was not prohibitive to worldng-
class boys in employment, but the expense of annual camp in both time and
money might have dissuaded the poorer ones. The attachment of the BB, CLB
and ICSP to religious and educational institutions probably tended to make these
movements more popular with children of sldlled parents. Organizations formed
in the casual laborer areas tended to fail for the reasons outlined at the beginning
of this chapter - the discontinuity of socialization - and the high removal rates.

Semi-military organization
The semi-military organizations deliberately tried to avoid more extreme military
overtones yet dressed in uniforms and performed army marching drill. The Boys'
Life Brigade (BLB) and the Girls' iLife Brigade (GLB), claiming to be non-military ,
were 'formed to inculcate principles of discipline, self reliance and humanity',
they taught drill and first aid.51
There were nine companies of the BLB in Birmingham in 1913, eighteen BLB
and eleven GLB in Manchester in 1917.52 Five of the Birmingham (but only one of
the Manchester) companies were in the central wards outlined above. Two of
Birmingham's were in the 'blackest' streets - Floodgate and Fazely Streets -
attached to medical missions. Thus about seventy boys, 12 to 18 years old, joined
at ld. per week in these destitute areas. Although no shooting was taught in the Life
Brigades, the ethos of patriotic manliness /womanhood and disciplined duty appears
no different from the paramilitary.
More attention must be given to the Boy Scouts, for the whole movement
originated in Birmingham with the visit of Baden~Powel1 to Dale End in 1908.
 Imperialism, nationalism and organized youth 111

However, although it had been Baden-Powell's intention that the movement should
grow among Birmingham working-class boys, Springhalt notes by the 1950s that it
had become principally localized to the southeast and, again, was predominantly
middle class.53 The initial years were not unencouraging, after Baden-Powell left
the city, an advisory committee was set up to implement his scheme. Yet this
committee was overlorded and controlled by the paramilitary Boys' Brigade and
Church Lads' Brigade, as well as the Police Court Mission, Dr Barnados and the
Street Boys' Union. Baden-Powel1's speech had denounced militarism:
They were taught the three R's in schools, but they were not taught discipline,
manliness, self-sacrifice and patriotism . . . . His object was to make good citizens,
not soldiers. One could teach patriotism without encouraging militarism.54

Yet the Boy Scouts could not shake off their military birth; by 1910, of the 250
presidents and commissioners, 140 were military officers.55 The president of the
Birmingham Scouts Association was a senior member of the National Service League
(NSL) executive (A.M. Chance), the vice-presidents were members of the NSL
Council (E. Parkes and R. Cary Gibson) and the honorary secretary was a 5/-
member of' the NSL (F. Bennet).56 The role of the membership of this league ,
together with that of the officers of the Volunteers/Territorial Force was crucial
in the organization of youth movements in the pre-war years. The NSL, formed in
1902, advocated military conscription; it was convinced that Germany was shortly
to launch an imperialist war offensive. But it was sure, too, that both physically
and morally, 'degeneration of one land or another was rampant among us'.57 The
militarization of the adult and youth civil population, then, was to achieve as well
a physical and a spiritual regeneration of the nation.
Thus the regulation drill for Scouts included 'fall in, dressing, eyes front,
numbering, form fours, quick march, Arms Drill with Staves'.58 Baden-Powell .
always denied military connections:
Our Scouting has nothing to do with soldiering, it is merely the practice of back-
woodsmanship. His manliness and sense of patriotism would no doubt cause every
Scout to prepare himself to take his share in the defence of his country should
this ever be necessary, and incidentally the practice which he gets in camp life,
scouting, signaling, despatch riding etc. afford the soundest foundation on which
to model a soldier of the best quality, But we do not preach war and bloodshed to
the lads, nor do we favour military drill for them.59

But the connection is clearly there, not only in drill, but in the cautious mention
of home defence and in the eulogy of soldierly characteristics. More than this, the
Scout was to be a 'brick' in the national fabric: upright, self reliant, loyal and, of
course, patriotic. Baden-Powell despised social welfare, denigrated 'socialistic'
strikers and condemned the 'professional agitators' who, he thought, controlled
them.60
In Birmingham the numbers of Scouts rose rapidly from 500 in November 1909
to 2878 in January 1913.61 The 'Imperial Scouts Exhibition Rally and Sea Scouts
112 Studies

Display' of 2-8 July 1913, gave a fillip to the movement, which increased by another
1000.62 World War I interrupted a massive publicity campaign which burst upon
local newspapers in July 1914 to raise money for more working-class units.
Employers in particular were then told that 'lads so trained in Birmingham were
clean, smart, obedient and thoroughly trustworthy'.63 Certainly, Scout numbers
increased and diversified during the war. In 1917 Manchester, the Scouts, Cubs and
Girl Guides accounted for over 7 per cent of all boys and girls 10 to 18 years 01d.64
In the central wards the membership was proportionately higher, some 13 per cent.55
In the central wards of Birmingham there were some eighteen troops of Scouts
(e. 700166 by 1913, seven of these being in St Bartholomew's and St Mary's (c. 270).
All these seven were attached to churches, including two Catholic churches, possibly
recruiting in the Irish and Italian communities. The ages of boys in units in more
destitute areas ranged from 11 to 14 years;67 clearly, leaving school t`or work
meant leaving the Sunday school and the Scouts. The subscription was ld. to 2d.
per week, the uniform cost about 7s. although this could be reduced by a discount
scheme and paid for by a savings scheme .68 The cost was clearly not too large for
many working-class parents.
Some units were well versed at a little sleight of hand; the Digbeth Scouts,
('bounding, exuberant boys'69) 100-strong in 1908, recruited from a gymnastics
class. Council schools were asked to send boys to the class at the Digbeth Institute ,
'the intention being to pass them from class into the troop'.70 And of course this
action could be justified by the usual nationalist argument :
Sure I am that no nobler and more Imperialistic work is being done in Birmingham
than that which is being done in the gymnasium at Digbeth. And in promoting
imperialism at home, Digbeth is doing service to the nation and the Empire, whose
policy Birmingham has done so much to rnou1d.71

The military connection caused the Scouts considerable division. On 1 April 1909 ,
for instance, a large military parade was to be held before Haldane, to include
Territorial, regular and youth organizations. The Birmingham Scout Association
declined the Territorial Force's
'invitation

to join in, F.C. Bennet, its honorary

secretary, wrote to the Birmingham Daily Mail that the Scouts were 'peace Scouts'
and could not therefore contemplate participation." This shows considerable
duplicity, both Bennet, his president and his vice-presidents belonged to the
National Service League. Their refusal must only be seen in terms of the bitter
political wrangling then being waged between the NSL and the TF.
Scoutmasters wrote to protest; how could they 'be loyal to God and the
King' 73 like this? And at this point the First St Paul's Troop over in Lozells left
the BDSA and attached itself to Col. Ludlow's Eighth Battalion. More Scout-
masters wrote in:
The Boy Scouts are no more a peace organisation than the Boys Brigade or the
Church Lads Brigade.74

Even Boy Scouts complained :

 Imperialism, nationalism and organized youth 113

the Birmingham Scouts Council says that the boys are being trained in a Peace
scouting movement, and not as war scouts. If this is so, it was never understood by
the boys themselves, or at least those whom I have spoken to. We always under-
stood that we were being trained to be of use to our country in the time of need.75

And another twenty scouts in Edgbaston, horrified to discover that they were Not
'military scouts', hoped 'that steps are taken in the rnatter'.76
The wealth of letters that arose out of this decision demonstrates both the
expectations of ordinary youth in the movement and the attitudes of its leadership.
It was more military and militant than its founder admitted. Springhall notes that
in the rift which developed in 1910 between Sir Francis Vane and the N.S.L.
military 'cabal', and which resulted in the formation of the 'British Boy Scouts' as
'peace scouts', Birmingham and the Midlands Were 'converted' to the idea of peace
scouting with the support of George Cadbury.77 No evidence of this has been
forthcoming from local sources, however, and the indications are that such support
was limited .
The paramilitary and semi-military youth organizations adopted essentially
similar attitudes to worldng-class youth. The social role of youth work was the
inculcation of discipline and kindred respectable moral values, and the army served
as a model for both its organization and training goals. Loyalty and patriotism
were essential, the individual being taught of his duties within that national fabric
which the youth organizations eidsted both to preserve and to strengthen .
They attracted the support of about 1550 boys from principally working-class
areas of Birmingham centre, and 1100 boys in the selected Manchester wards.7/
They tended to draw less support from families of unskilled workers:
.
. . they deal with a class of boy who is, as a rule, higher up in the social scale
than the boy in the slum.

For in demanding strict discipline, it was quite impossible to establish a very

intimate relationship with the children:
this may very likely be a wise plan with the better class of boy who comes from
a decent home, and whose individual training is done by the parents, for his maiN
need is a sense of discipline and obedience. It is a system however, which is not
adapted for this reason, to work among the poorer boys.74

Civilian organizations
Leisure time for working-class children of school age was scarce, for over 12 per
cent of boys and 8 per cent of girls were averaging twenty hours per week Work as
we11.80 Every year, 13 ,000 left school in Birmingham to be immediately absorbed
into the grey anonymity of factories and warehouses. For these, seventy local
committees with 1500 workers in 124 schools were set up in 1913, as school care
committees 'to furnish every child with an industrial Godfather or Godmother'.81
For such working-class children too, the Birmingham Street Children's Union was
114 Studies

begun in about 1904. In 1906, it boasted eighteen clubs, by 1913/14, forty-three

boys' clubs, totaling 2500 members and forty-one girls' clubs.82 Thirty-six of these
boys' clubs, perhaps containing 2000 boys, were located in the six central city
parishes .
The Street Chjldren's Union was deliberately aimed at the children of the
unskilled working class and the slum labourers, it organized Junior (10 to 14% yrs)
and Senior (14%+) Clubs for both boys and girls. In St Bartholomew's and St
Mary's there were seventeen boys' clubs, of which nine were attached to churches
or missions, five attached to the Women's Settlements, and one independent.83
In Manchester, large clubs began to flourish well before the Boer War. Hugh
Oldham's Lads' Club began in 1883, and by late 1913 its daily attendance in winter
averaged nearly 1000.84 Hulme Lads' Club, formed in 1893, had a membership
exceeding 2000; Ancoats Club, formed in 1895, claimed a similar junior member-
ship.85 Then there was the famed Heywood Street Lads' Club with its attached
Boys' Brigade, and more besides. In the eleven central wards there were thirty-one
lads' and girls' clubs in 1917.
The aims of the Birmingham clubs were to give personal and sympathetic
attention to the problem children from the slums and to provide sports and games
without uniform and without military drill - except at camp.86 But disciplines was
still the keyword: the work of the council schools in this was fully supported for
'they are the source of all that tends to uplift children from the slum'. The council
schools were said then to be succeeding with little or no home support:
.
in turning wild and reckless youngsters into smart and obedient boys . . the
regular drills, the insistence on punctuality, and the strict maintenance of order
have a far reaching effect on character, and it is an encouraging sight to visit a slum
school and see the results of such training in older boys.87

The focus of training was a two-week summer camp, the Birmingham camp in
1913 was attended by 500 boys and girls. At the camp, three 'prefects', six
"magistrates" and an indeterminate number of 'monitors' were elected from among
the children to 'administer discipline'. Smoking, bad language, indiscipline and
moral laxity met with strong censure.88 Miscreants were summoned, tried and
sentenced. The respectable and conformist values thought by middle-class society
to be so advantageous an acquisition for working-class children were adopted and
assimilated into the fabric of these micro-societies. The sympathetic counselors
were often drawn from the middle-classendowed grammar schools, the Birmingham
Old Edwardians were said to be 'putting boys under beneficial discipline', and the
ethic of the clubs was 'discipline, honesty, keenness'.89 The Old Boys of the
Manchester Grammar School worked at the Hugh Gldham club :

The mutual confidence between the embryo master and workman may be a potent
influence in years to follow . . . . He would find great pleasure in managing a sports
team and in 'bossing his men' in their contests with other cIubs.90
 Imperialism, nationalism and organized youth 115

-
Clearly, then, the clubs were of value too to their organizers and to their
financial backers. Most clubs heavily relied upon donations from local firms, one
club, which published the names of eighteen principal subscriber firms, also added
that :
Subscribers are requested to notify the Secretary who is usually in a position to
recommend suitable 1ads.91
There was certainly a very strong relationship in Birmingham .between
the conscriptionist National Service League Council and governing bodies of youth
organizations. Six National Service League Council members were also members
of the twenty-strong Birmingham Street Children's Union Council and, between
them, twenty NSL Council members subscribed nearly 10 per cent of the
Birmingham Street Children's Union Funds.92 These NSL Council members
included two of the town's MP's, three prominent churchmen (including the
bishop), ten aldermen and town councillors and twenty-tive JP's.93
And so the familiar pattern of attempted resocialization emerges. For each club
cultivated its own espn? de corps, in its football, its games and even in the behaviour
of its members was exerted the demand for a loyalty to uphold its.good name. The
focus of such loyalty was a deliberate and calculated first step in socialization, in
the formation of a local group loyalty, which was to be extended to the wider
group of society and nation.94
The normal pursuits of worldng-class children were seen as either selfish or
morally perilous. Films were 'dangerously suggestive' and the music halls were
'rotten to the core', gambling and sexual lardty were allegedly 'widespread To
become a useful member of society required the destruction of their worldng-class
culture and its replacement with values which were essentially in harmony with the
concepts of discipline and respectability.95 Such ideals of an ordered society were
the same ideals pursued by the more militarist youth organizations. With such close
contact with the church, the National Service League, the endowed grammar
schools and the University, perhaps .it is not surprising that the Birmingham Street
Children's Union and Manchester Lads' Clubs could not rise measurably above
paramilitary youth .
The biggest problem, however, was in 'preventing a club from getting respect-
able'.96 One estimate claimed that the Street Children's Union only attracted 400
lower-workingclass boys to its eight senior clubs, and another that the boys from
the 'higher grades' who joined other clubs also flocked to the Street Children's
Union.97 The clubs might attempt to control the leisure lives of their members,
but could not control who became members in the first place.

Membership, gender and social class

Involvement in all these movements was closely related to social class. In one study
of seventy-one Birmingham seventeen-year-old working-class boys, the only youth
to attend church, a club, evening classes and the TF was from the 'comfortably off

x
116 Studies

artisan classes'.98 Of thirty-one boys in the general 'middle group' of semi-skilled,

ten attended various clubs and went to church regularly. Of twenty-one poorer,
unskilled and casual worker families, only one went to church and one to a club
regularly. Economic restrictions on leisure time, constant migration in housing,
poor clothihg but, above all, an independent sub-culture which refused to be
disciplined, kept many of these latter groups away from Organized Youth.
A summary of involvement With all movements of boys and girls aged 10 to 18
in pre-war Birmingham and war time Manchester is given in the table below. It
provides some interesting comparisons.

Birmingham (1913) Manchester (1917)

Boys Boys Girls
Total Centre Total Cen the Total Cen are
census wards census wards census wards

Population 10 to 18 yrs 71,880 10,390 63,000 5250 65,770 5480

Involvement in `)
paramilitary and ) 6000 1550 14,083 1100 2870 300
semi-military ) 8.3 14.9 22.4 21.0 4.4 5.5
movemeNts )
InvolvemeNt in )
Lads'/Girls' Street ) 5000 1600 6645 1500 6000 1200
Children's Clubs ) 7.0 15.4 10.5 28.6 9.1 21.9
) . I - I l - i n - n

Involvement by adolescents aged 10 to 18 years in organized youth in Birmingham

(1913) and in Manchester (19/ 7)99

First, there was clearly a focus of all forms of youth activity in pre-war Birmingham
on the children of the central wards. The children of unskilled and semi-skilled
parents were thought to be more in need. In these areas the Street Children's Clubs
were more patronized than the uniformed youth. The depressed areas of St Mary's
and St Bartholomew's, with 2600 boys, had an estimated involvement of about
1300 (50 per cent).100 With the onset of war all movements became more catholic
in intake. .
Second, the Manchester boys' tables show a massive increase in the war in the
Uniformed youth of the city.101 This increase was proportionately greater in the
non-central wards where the uniformed youth predominate, this pattern is reversed
in the central areas.
Third, girls received much less attention. In particular uniformed organizations
made little headway, even in wartime. Before the war their non-uniformed organi-
zations lagged well behind the boys. In 1908 there were only twelve girls' clubs to
forty-seven boys' clubs in Birmingham.102 This reflected an overwhelmingly male
definition Of (delinquent) youth and a key feature of imperialist-nationalist
 Imperialism, nationalism and organized youth 117

ideology, its strongly connotatively male character. Its militaristic and leadership
models were essentially patriarchal. It awarded girls a much less visible, subordinate
-
role in the fabric of the nation as reproducers. Yet there was an increasing insis-
tence that children be brought up by their mothers correctly to become fit
members of the new Empire.103 This may be reflected in an increasing attention
to girls after 1908: by 1911 there were twenty-two Birmingham clubs. But these
clubs were smaller than the boys' and the actual number of girls attending Street
Children's Union clubs in Birmingham was only about 700 in 1913 (approximately
l per cent).104 If the patterns in Birmingham and Manchester are at all similar, the
war, however, saw considerable growth.

Conclusions

The organization of youth

Before any assessment can be made of the effects of all this activity, we have to
place youth organizations in a much wider context. They were only one of the
ideological apparatuses at work in the production of nationalism and imperialism
in this period. So far as youth is concerned we also have to consider the schools
and a host of other more informal agencies. We have also to consider, more closely ,
the actual content of those ideologies, under which the diverse agencies were given
a land of unity.
Certainly schools could be a more pervasive source of imperialist and nationalist
sentiment than the youth organizations. Schools explicitly taught patriotic duties,
-
loyalty and ldndred virtues in moral lessons a practice which increased with the
formation of the Moral Instruction League in 1897. By 1908, 100 out of 327
Local Education Authorities in England and Wales were providing systematic moral
education, many as a substitute for religious education.105 Included, too, must
be the whole range of nationalistic and religious values current in the teaching
of history and geography.106 Inspired by Seeley's Expansion of England (1883)
many teachers repeated values which had their origins in the public schools. Others
made an explicit identification between the leadership modes of the youth move-
ments and the prefect systems of their own (elementary) schools:

[The prefect system is] a most potent instrument in producing those fine qualities
of character which we are proud to call English . . . . To play the game in whatever
they do . . . to do their duty at any cost . . . to know the things a 'fellow can't
.
do' . . they have all learned at school, young as they are to govern and lead
..
others . and the bearded veteran or hoarse-throated tar eagerly follows to the
sable's point, or the cannon's mouth, the piping treble of the erst-while school
prefect.107

And, of course, once a year, on 24 May, these school activities were supplemented
in Empire Day. Its originator, Lord neath, claimed this Roman circus promoted
118 Studies

loyalty, patriotism, courage, obedience, endurance, respect for and obedience to

lawful authority and . . . self sacrifice for the public good and . . . a determination
to do their duty.108

If to the formal and informal aspects of schooling and to the youth organi-
zations we add the popularity of the display and spectacle of military and national-
istic events, the daily reproduction of imperialist slogans in the press, the fact that
most contemporary elections were fought between imperialist candidates, the
early impact of media like film and the fact that popular forms of amusement, like
music hall, were saturated with similar sentiments, we obtain some idea of the sheer
Weight and pervasiveness of the nationalist mood.
Of course, each movement and organization and pressure group felt that the
others were too militaristic, or too religious, or too disciplinarian, or not
'committed' enough. Yet what is striking across all these organizations is the degree
of ideological unity. There were three strands of nationalistic attitude which link
the social roles of the youth organizations, the schools and the Empire Day move-
ment. They link through, too, to the Volunteers/Territorial Force and the
National Service League, both powerful pressure groups at local and national
levels and both undergoing considerable recruitment in the period 1902-14. First,
there is the clear and continuing strand of national efficiency in the drive to
mental and physical fitness, rooted in drill and discipline. But here the concept of
the role of the military as guardian of the state was expanded: the army became a
source of spiritual or social values too. The military became a metaphor for
national destinies in general. The very illiberality of drill and discipline reflected
the attitudes of those concerned with youth to 'freedom' (and therefore chaos).
The established values to be defended were inalienable, unchallengeable, ordered
metaphorically into serried ranks and directed at the straight-jacketed goal of
national efficiency in empire and in production. Patriotism, stimulated by the
challenge of the German industrial giant, was linked to perseverance, punctuality
and diligence. Boys trained as Scouts or cadets or in the lads' clubs or Street Boys'
Union were all said to be that much more hard-worldng and useful to their
employers.
The second pervasive idea was that of a model authority. The military structure
of organized authority by ranks and by levels was a structure thought to provide a
model for social organization. Discipline and authority in the army proceeds from
the top downwards. All of the organizations studied eulogized the sovereign's
position at the top of the social pyramid, and many adopted deferential attitudes
to the 'born' leadership of the aristocracy, and sometimes the 'embryo' leadership
of the bourgeois grammar-school boy. Even the non-military Street Boys' Union
saw it necessary to order its hierarchy with a whole panoply of prefects, magistrates
and monitors. Every movement that advocates national discipline has to invest in
someone, or some group, the authority to exorcize it, but such authoritarianism
does not easily coexist with liberalism and democracy. Thus the adult military
movements advocated compulsion of the civil population into some form of
 Impenalisrn, nationalism and organized youth 119

military service. Thus the youth movements would tend to discount as presump-
tuous the more 'lived' culture of their members, and as dangerous the indiscipline
of normal child development. The political authority to exercise national discipline,
therefore, needed no democratic ratification; this military view of ordered society
could be almost feudal in its hierarchical structure and in its deference to 'leader-
ship'.
The third linking belief was that in the enemy outside. Gutside Britain there
lay a hostile force, bent on mischief. The Empire Day movement especially arti-
culated this belief, as did the officers of the National Service League and the
Territorial Forces.
Unity was also given by the complex network of personal interrelations which
held the different movements together. We have noted these in passing but should
stress the importance of the church, the army and the employer fraternities. The
military movements all had their own padres, the Sunday schools often provided
membership to the youth movements, priests played a major part in the youth
clubs, and, as noted above, the Bishop of Birmingham was a prominent member
of the National Service League. Employer involvement should not be under-
estimated. Many saw a clear link between military and industrial discipline. The
importance of drill and discipline for German industrial successes was noted.109
Employers in Manchester and Birmingham gave massive support to the Volunteers
and the Territorials, often forming companies in the factories with foremen NCOs
and manager-oflticers.110

The production of narionalism

-
There are several ways of trying to gauge the effects of this ideological work none
of them, on its own, very satisfactory. Cumulatively, however, they do suggest, in
Birmingham at least, that imperialist and nationalist sentiment obtained real roots
in working-class opinion.111 There is, for example, the case of formal politics. The
various elements of nationalist ideology and organization were closely linked, in
Birmingham, with the dominant Unionist Party. Nationalist arguments were used
to attack the socialists as 'un-English' and 'a German-made canker',] 12 to promote
tariff reform,113 to attack home rule for Ireland114 and to isolate and stigmatize
'the alien'.115 And the people continued to vote Unionist, especially in the most
destitute parts of the eity.116 A further possible index of the success of propaganda
directed at youth was the substantial and increasing recruitment to the parallel
adult organizations. By 191 l , one in eleven of all males in Birmingham aged 17 to
25 years was a member of the Territorial Force and a further one in twenty-five was
a member of the Army Special Reserve]17 Army records do not show whether
regular army recuits had youth organization experience, but research has shown
that 13.4 per cent of all regular recruits in Birmingham, 1910-14, were previously
members of the local TF battalions.118 The patterns of recruitment of these to the
regular army is not adequately explained by local employment conditions, and
there is some evidence of the responsiveness of recruiting figures to periods of
120 Studies

-
royal and. nationalist display a visit of the long to the city for example 19 The
most responsive groups appear to have been the unskilled. It is reasonable to
suggest that a sizable proportion of worldng-class boys passed from schools where
nationalist values were taught, to paramilitary youth, to paramilitary adulthood,
and thence into a 'peace-time' army, stimulated by just the sorts of nationalistic
appeal we have tried to identify. But these categories of recruits still represent
a small proportion of the annual average recruitment of 1000 for the period 1910-
14. Perhaps a more significant statistic is that within one month of war being
declared on Germany, 21 .6 per cent of the entire available male population of
Greater Birmingham had gone to waI.120 More directly, numbers were certainly
swelled by organized youth crimping their older charges into His Majesty's
Forces:

. .
We felt that, if properly handled and without delay . a great opportunity had
arisen to test the value of the Lads' Club Movement . . . . It was clearly our duty to
place the general call before our lads, not as an invitation to volunteer, but as a
direct call . . . which each one must consider applying to himse1f.121
Of particular value were those clubs that had installed rifle ranges and could now
supply nation and empire in her hour of need, with trained shots.122 It was
then, in the moment of total war, that the work of organized youth was fully
realized.
5 Daughters and mothers - maids and
mistresses: domestic service between
the wars
Pam Taylor

Several recent studies give the impression that domestic service was a Victorian and
Edwardian phenomenon that was declining by the 1920s.1 In so far as it persisted,
so the argument goes, attitudes to servants and conditions of work underwent
important changes. One of the objects of this essay, and of the larger project on
which it is based, is to argue that living-in domestic service for women persisted
through the inter~war period to a surprising extent .2 Numbers of servants remained
high and actually increased by 16 per cent between 1920 and 1931 , from
1,148,698 to 1,332,224.3 In 1931, 23 per cent of occupied women were domestic
servants. It is true that the proportion of this total that lived in may have declined,
but we may estimate that over 800,000 servants continued to live in the households
of their employers.4 Overall servant numbers may even have increased during the
1930s.5 Domestic service remained a central experience for worldng-class women
and especially for girls. It is contended here that improvement in conditions of
work and shifts in employers' attitudes were slight and uneven in an occupation
untouched by government regulation. In this aspect, as in others, inter-war Britain,
far from showing a gradual and steady movement to more egalitarian social
relations, remained extremely conservative. In no area were these persistences so
great as in the relation between servant and mistress. Domestic service reproduced
in servant and employer alike very conservative attitudes which were being eroded
in other areas of social life. The changes after World War II were correspondingly
sharp¢

Why, then, did domestic service persist? There were, as we shall see, some clear
economic imperatives: the demand from certain classes for domestic labour and a
desperate need for work among working-class women. But there were also cultural
and ideological supports for a system so strong and taken for granted that it
seemed 'natura.l'.6 These ideological and cultural features are the main focus of
this essay, though it is also necessary to say something about the servant's conditions
of employment and of work. The central questions concern the servant's compliance
and the constraints, of an ideological land, on resistance. This involves looldng at
a relationship between two cultures, of poorer sections of the worldng class and of
the employing classes. More specifically it involves the relation between two house-
holds and the girl's place in each: the household of origin and the household in
which the servant was to work. We can learn a good deal of these relationships by
tracing the experience of working-class girls from their own families, through the
122 Studies
moment of transition to the employer's household and to their adaptation to an
alien environment, where the servant was materially indispensable but culturally
excluded.
The evidence is drawn mainly from about forty personal accounts by women
who were domestic servants over the inter-war period. These include published
autobiographies, oral evidence collected by other historians and oral and written
evidence collected specially for the study on which this essay is based.7 But more
conventional historical sources are also used to frame the autobiographical
material .

Patterns of persistence
It is not the case that World War I dramatically affected domestic service as an
institution or as a predominant form of women's employment. The return to
normality, after the war, often took the form of a return to domestic service: over
one million women were in domestic service by the time of the 1921 census. It is
relatively easy, at one level, to see why service continued: persistence was a
product of the very marked unevenness of inter-war economic development both
in terms of the experiences of different classes and of great variations between r

regions.8
The period saw the rapid decline of heavy engineering industries, mining and
textiles and the rise of newer technologically developed industries based on the
motor car, building, consumer durables and chemicals. These were located in
different areas from the old staples, chiefly in the Midlands, London and the
southeast. New incomes and rising prosperity in these areas of growth was accom-
panied by long-term unemployment in what came to be called the 'depressed
areas'. In addition earned incomes were often too low to support a family in key
industries like mining, agriculture, the railways and postal services. Rowntree ,. in
his survey of the whole worldng population of York in 1935-6, found that 31 per
cent lived below the poverty line, defined as the minimum income on which a
family could live adequately with sufficient food after paying rent. He calculated
that 14 per cent lived in abject poverty on an income of less than 33s. 6d. (£1.70)
a week.9 Similar results were found in a Bristol survey. Thus, despite the fall in
the cost of living index and the overall rise in the consumption of food per head
between 1913 and 1934, there were many worldng-class areas where the most
-
obvious symptoms of poverty undernourishment and deficiency diseases -
persisted.10 With no system of family allowances and no free medical service for
wives and dependants (for only wage earners were covered by health insurance),
families suffered deprivation in food, clothing or medical attention especially
when a breadwinner was out of work. As personal accounts reveal, doctors were
not called in unless illnesses were very serious. Winifred Foley's childhood
experience was not unique: .

Life was wonderful except for one constant nagging irritation. HUNGER. We knew
 -
Daughters and mothers maids and mistresses 123

the wages Dad brought home from the pit were not enough to keep us out of debt,
let alone fill our bellies properly."

It seems clear, then, that in spite of new openings for women in light industry
and retailing and clerical work, there were large numbers of girls and women in
areas of heavy unemployment or areas with no industrial employment for women.
In such cases domestic service, away from home, was an important resource ,
serving two purposes. It removed the girl from her own home, malting more space
and relieving the family of the burden of keeping her. It also gave the girl herself
a job, a home and some supervision, without which leaving home for a 'respectable'
fourteen-year-old would have been unthinkable. Flora Thompson describes the
departure from her village of all the young girls for domestic service in an account
set in the l880s:
There was no girl over 12 or 13 living permanently at home. As soon as a girl
approached school-leaving age her mother would say 'About time you was earning
your own living' or 'I shan't be sorry when young So 8: So gets her knees under
someone else's table.' From that time onward the child was made to feel herself
one too many in the overcrowded home while her brothers when they started to
bring home a few shillings a week were treated with new consideration and made
much of.1]

Winifred Foley's description differs little from this, except that the child had to be
over fourteen before she could leave for work. The similarities between the
situation of a girl in rural Oxfordshire in the 1880s and in a mining family in the
Forest of Dean in the 1920s are striking:
-
Like the sword of Damocles my 14th birthday approached to cut me in half, my
spirit to remain with everything familiar that I knew and loved and the reluctant
rest of me to go into domestic service. This was the common lot of every girl in
.
our mining village . . and I had grown up in this knowledge. Now the time had
come, I found it hard to bear.12

Other evidence points very strongly to the conclusion that living-in servants
in more prosperous houses in better-off areas came from the kinds of area just
described." The really heavy concentrations of domestic service were in particular
kinds of towns: the middle-class residential areas of the big cities, spa towns and
holiday resorts, all areas, in fact, with large middle-class populations.14 The pro-
portions of women in domestic service compared with other occupations were
low in cities with a range of industries like Birmingham.
The demand for domestic labour was, in part, institutional: hotels, hospitals,
private boarding schools and private nursing homes (more numerous than now) all
needed domestic labour to function. As for private families, servant-keeping was a
long tradition. Starting with the aristocracy and gentry, it had been extended to
the industrial and professional middle classes. It reached its apogee in the mid
nineteenth century when middle-class life-styles became more elaborate and
124 Smdies
servants, as well as being needed for the extra work involved, became also a sign
of status and respectability!5 The employment of servants was linked to a domestic
ideal in which wives were expected to be idle, to be well dressed in elaborate
surroundings and to entertain. Entertaining was one way in which to display one's
house. Leonore Davidoff points out Mat social and status distinctions, important
in a competitive society, were most clearly symbolized in the domestic sphere
rather than in the husband's work.15 The husband earned the money, the wife
displayed it and servants helped in this display. This remained true, too, for the
1920s and 1930s but with an additional extension of the servant-keeping practice .
Large numbers of lower-middle-class families could afford one maid. The incomes
of clerks, elementary schoolteachers or shopkeepers might be no higher than those
of sldlled manual workers, but their aspirations were towards the middle~class
life-styles, particularly in the matters of home, the rearing of children, education
and aspirations for their children's futures.17
The elaborate domestic rituals of the Edwardian middle class had been simpli-
fied by the 1920s, but country-house life and entertaining continued, in lavish
styles. Geoffrey Tyack, in a wide-ranging investigation of the domestic running
of Cliveden, seat of the Astors, concludes
..
There were 19 indoor staff in 1928, 4 laundry maids, 52 outdoor staff . . The
establishment continued to run on a Victorian scale right up to the second World
War.18

Harold Macmillan writes:

We all lunched and dined a great deal together. Hatfield and Cliveden and many
others were the almost weeldy gatherings of all lands of people. Indeed there was
nothing so agreeable as the country house party in a large English house. There
were no mies except the necessity of appearing at dinner and a certain bias in
favour of turning up to lunch."

This living style, although confined to a small section of wealthy 'aristocratic'

society, is significant because it accounted for a large proportion of living-in ser-
vants. Below the level of Hatfield and Cliveden, where entertaining had political
as well as social functions, there were many more households which entertained
visitors for Ascot, for shooting or for the 'coming out' of daughters. Families still
'took a house' for the London season, a major upheaval for the indispensable
sewants.20 Professional and business families occupied large houses, often with
two or more maids, while a huge variety of people employed one maid. The single
servant might be cook-general, general domestic or mother's help. According to
the sample survey of die 1931 census, 357,000 girls worked under these conditions.
The needs that were satisfied by the employment of servants may be summed up
as the performance of domestic labour and the enhancement of social status. The
extent and laborious character of the work involved in running a household in the
style expected should be stressed. Before the universal use of electricity and in an
age of coal tires and even coal-fired cooling, running a house was especially hard
 Daughters and mothers - maids and mistresses 125

work. Widespread use of refrigerators and vacuum cleaners did not come till after
World War II. Although many electrical household aids were being manufactured
('Hoovers' from 1921), many houses were not wired for electricity and were lit
by gas. Tile floors had to be scrubbed, wood floors polished (the fashionable
parquet wooden blocks). Laundry - washing, starching, drying, ironing took up
a whole day a week. Snacks were thought no substitute for proper meals. Deter~
gents - apart from soap and soda - had not been invented."
The burden of this work depended on the number of servants kept and the
standard expected. It was a universal experience, reflected in all the autobio -
graphical material, that maids rose early, worked before breakfast and continued
to work or be 'on call' for a very long day. Evenings, nominally free, could be
interrupted with demands for service and Saturdays and Sundays were normal
worldng days without extra payment. The single servant was often the most hard-
worked and was, in addition, isolated from family and friends. Since labour was
cheap, the impulse to save it was weak: indeed work might actually be created
to fill the servant's time. In a sense, the servant was a captive employee, all of
whose time was at the employer's disposal. Since housework is, as Anne Oaldey
has suggested, an infinitely expandable task, 22 jobs could be found to fill time -
mending linen, cleaning brass and silver, malting jam.
- -
One general function of servant-keeping in grand houses or small was to free
the wife from some of the burden of domestic work. Wives in turn were bound by
dominant conceptions of their role - by the ideal of domesticity and the concept
of the 'woman in the home'. Middle- and upper-class women retained this basic
responsibility even where many servants were employed. The employment of
servants meant that life-styles could become more ambitious and impressive: but
more entertaining meant more l a b o r and increased the work of supervision and
organization. The middle-class wife, then, was also a victim of this life-style.
Servant-keeping itself, aside from the relief from labour and the support of
higher standards, was a mark of status. The presence of servants in uniform
signaled the importance of the family to neighbours, visitors and callers.
TMS [1930] was the era of maids. EveryoNe seemed to boast or complain of the
maids. I remember girls at school judging each other's wealth by the number of
maids each had. And sometimes, I suspect, inventing an extra one to impress their
friends. We had two.23

The fact that uniform (two sets: one for morning and one for afternoon) was
insisted upon till 1939 suggests the importance of servants as symbols of status.
After all, white aprons were very impractical for dirty housework. Even the single
-
servant, often a teenager, had to provide two sets of uniform for herself a costly
-
outlay. She might also play many roles suitably dressed for each:

Mrs. Stratton Brown remembers that when she lived at Chatham in 1936 she had
a young girl who 'started the day in a pink linen dress to do all the housework ,
after lunch she added a stiff white collar and became a Nanny taking my son out
126 Studies

for walks with other Nannies, then for tea she changed into a brown dress and
coffee-coloured apron and became parlourmaid'.24

These elements of status, and also the social subordination of the servant, were
symbolized in various rituals: uniform, the uses of bells to summon service (often
installed in quite small modern houses), the segregation of the servant's living space
from the t`arnily's, the use of separate entrances and stairs. The evidence of personal
experience suggests that these practices were as strong as ever in the inter-war
period. Indeed they may even have become more common as servant-keeping
spread to new strata. Certainly the ideology of domestic service was strong and
pervasive. It was carried in novels, plays, films, cartoons and g6"§§i_p.25 I-he 'folk
knowledge' of how one should treat one's servants was widespread and linked to
class attitudes in general. Rules and codes were set not by legislation but by
custom and practice, though they were often surprisingly uniform."

Girls and mothers

Most of the women from whom have evidence came from large families where
money was scarce. The overall economic pressure on the family was very tight and
this was relayed to the children. They were disciplined to expect very little and
girls were expected to take a full part in helping with household chores and taking
charge of younger children. Authority relations, too, seem to have been very strict :
parents' words were law and their decisions final. This seems to have been especially
the case in the relations between mothers and daughters. This is shown very clearly
in many recorded experiences.
Margaret Powell had to go home from school at midday and make a meal for
the family. She would have been about ten at the time. After afternoon school she
would collect her younger sister and brother from a day nursery and do more
housework at home before her worldng mother returned. This hard round was not
resented, it was normal.
I never used to feel that I was suffering in any sense from ill usage. It was just the
thing. When you were the eldest girl in a working-class family it was expected of
you. Of course Mum took over in the evenings. She came back at 6 and got our tea
which was the same as breakfast. Bread and margarine. Being a girl I never went out
at night and my parents were very strict about this.27

Later, when Margaret Powell was fifteen, her mother demanded that she should go
into service, she herself was not keen on the idea. Her mother (who had been in
service herself) accompanied her to the interview, 'spoke for her' and decided that
Margaret should take the job :

My spirits sank lower and lower. I felt I was in jail at the finish. When I got outside
I told Mum how I felt but she had decided that the job would do for me. So that
was that.28
 Daughters and mothers - maids and mistresses 127

Could it be that hard work and resourcefulness at home , coupled with obedience to
a strict parental authority produced, in fact, a very 'good' servant? Parents, who had to
.
be strict to manage at all, inculcated qualities in a girl relevant to domestic service
Once in a new job in new surroundings the girl's ability to speak up and defend herself
against excessivedemands was handicapped by her own training in the home .
Because this is a rather large claim, want to explore it through several other
examples. Dolly Scanned was at school in East LondOn in the 1920s: she had failed
the scholarship examination for secondary school but had been selected for a
central school, a higher grade of elementary school, on the strength of a compos-
ition 1
I was so excited I fell over twice on the way home and arrived with knees bleeding
and stockings torn. While Mother was bathing my knees I stammered out my
marvelous news. Mother said quite calmly 'Thank Miss Willie for her kindness but
we don't think a mixed school is suitable for you'. My father had seen the boys
and girls larking about on the way home and had conveyed his views to Mother.
There was no point in telling Mother I wouldn't lark about. I only wanted to be a
teacher. I told Miss wiikie and she said 'Such a pity, such a piry'.29

The title of Dolly Scannell's autobiography sums it all up: Mother Knew Best.
Would parental decisions for a son have been the same and enforced thus?
In an Open University history programme, Thea Vigne talked to a woman who
had been in service. She asked if she ever remembered having rows with her
employers or answering back.
Not an awful lot. I used to hold my own, as I thought, now and again, but not an
awful lot. You see, we hadn't been allowed cheek at home and it didn't come
natura11y.30

Mrs Sturgeon was fourteen in 1931 and she took her first job in the Suffolk
town in which she lived.
There was myself and another girl. We ran the whole house. We worked from
morning till night. And I went there as a privilege for doing well at school. I got
the prize for domestic science, for being the best pupil. So I was allowed to go and
work there for one of the big men. They thought they'd got a valet and staff. Oh!
That was awful. -
There follows an astonishing account of the work she had to do .
It was terrible. I had the kindest mother, but you see she said, 'This is what it is to
work for your living. A11 the others had to do it. This is just what you have to d0'.31
As often happens in stories like these the girl defends her mother for her seemingly
unldnd treatment .
These three incidents relate to young girls on first leaving home, but the cases of
two older women show how strong the early tendencies to obedience, acceptance
and patience could be. Jean Rennie did not go into seMce till she was eighteen. She
128 Studies

had qualified for university entrance, but could not contemplate this because of
poverty at home. She held many menial jobs in service before becoming a cook. Yet
she too was aware of her own instinctive obedience. In an altercation with a cook
about carrying a heavy side of bacon from the larder, she records, 'I looked at her
almost defying her but obedience was deeply rooted in my character.'32
Miss Maud Walton had other jobs in a Shropshire village before she went into
service in Birmingham in 1929. Used to some freedom in her social life, as a domes-
tic servant she did not have her evenings free and only got home once a month. She
felt lonely and, in her own words, 'cut away'. On one visit home, she complained
tO her mother :
'Mum, I'm not going to stay. I can't stay there'. She'd say 'Try it another month ,

sister working nearby] . Lily's got you the job -

now you haven't been there long. Now Lily's at Summerfield Crescent [Maud's
SO try again' So I tried.
Question: How old were you by this time?
How old would I be? Twenty I suppose.

But it important to stress the elements of practical resourcefulness required in a

worldng-class girl in a large and poor family as well as the elements of obedience.
Since most girls helped with housework, shopping and looldng after the other
children, they were allowed to be out and about. They had to deal Mth the
accidents of smaller children when these happened. Daisy Noakes took her brother
out for picnics and was away all day fortified by bottles of cold tea.34 Such freedom
and resourcefulness would have been less common within middle-class families
where children were protected and had a longer schooling. They literally had a
longer childhood. A girl of fourteen who knew she was staying at school till six-
teen or eighteen was still a dependent child. Working-class girls knew well before
that age that childhood finished at fourteen and full-time work began. Two of the
girls already quoted Were aware of the 'loss' of their childhood. They were doing
part-time paid work from the age of twelve as well as helping their mothers. Others
remember being prevented from worldng by mothers who needed them at home .
Mother was working at Grays in town [Birmingham] so I spent my time helping out at
home, I never had any pocket-money and the lady next door asked me to scrub her
kitchen floor and scullery for 3d and I was able to get to the pictures for 2d and a
quarter of sweets for l d . My clothes were what my sister left off - that is how I
.
came to have my name down at a domestic agency . . . My mother didn't want
me to take the job as I was too useful to her at home: but I was fed up of having
no money and no clothes.35
There is evidence of other cases like this where, rather than be an unpaid servant at
home, girls decided to leave home and seek adventure and a job with a wage.
Much of what is recorded in their interviews and autobiographies is clearly speci-
tic to the situation of girls. Girls were expected to do more in the house than boys,
a situation which some still see as normal. This form of dependency could also be
long lasting, while, in fact, any close connection was kept with home. One woman
 Daugh tens and mothers - maids and Mistresses 129
noted how she and all her sisters had household tasks to do even after they started
work. Daisy Noakes says:
John and Arthur living at home had time for hobbies and recreation where the girls
had no opportunity.36

The main findings of this section may be summarized as follows; Girls in a worldng-
class home were 'prepared for' domestic service in several important ways. They
received a training in housework, laundry and other chores. They learnt to be
resourceful in the care of smaller Children. Above all, perhaps, they learnt to expect
very little for themselves and to Comply with parental decisions, which were re-
inforced, ideologically and economically, by the fact of the faMily's poverty.
These features of the girl's life help to explain why long hours and small
financial returns could, so often, be tolerated. It is the nature and use of the
servant's wage, indeed, that provides us with the last example of familial relations.
I have elsewhere investigated wages and concluded that while appearing low,
they did include keep. When this is allowed for, wages in domestic service do not
compare badly with factory or shop work. Yet this does not allow for the elastic
quality of the servant's hours of work. Most women's paid work had become
regulated by the forty-eight-hour statutory week and the minimum wages set by
trade boards.37 But hours in domestic service were Completely unregulated. Time
off quoted to me and noted in written accounts differed little throughout the
period (or from the pre-war evidence): one halfway a week from 2.30 p.m. till
9.30 or 10 p.m. and one half-day on every other Sunday. These times seem universal
despite government recommendations for shorter hours.38 It is important to
remember that by 2.30 pm. a servant might have performed at least six hours of
work, including most of the heavy and physically onerous tasks of the day. On
public holidays, of course, servants were especially in demand: Christmas was
normally worked, though Boxing Day was usually free .
At my (conservative) estimate, assuming servants 'finished' and were free by 7 p.m
they worked a sixty-one-hour week which included Saturdays and Sundays. By this
test, earnings for hours worked were considerably lower than those in ordinary
-
work, though standards of life food, lodging, etc. - might well be higher .
Even after this calculation, however, we have not reached an assessment of the
or
girl's own spending money. A large number servants in my evidence 'sent money
home' or 'gave my money up'. This is a strong reminder of the desperate poverty
at home and of the girl's own sense of duty. They were often acutely aware of the
needs of those they had left behind _
Mrs Jennie Owen, one of five sisters from Wales who all went into service in
London, explained the situation thus :

We had money in our pockets then, we'd go to London and every month when we
had our money, all the sisters would get together and we'd pool so much and we'd
-
send a parcel home every month - either bedding to renew the bedding a blouse for
- - -
my mother or an apron whatever we thought was needed every month we girls
130 Studies
-
got together and we sent nearly half our wages not in money but in things that
were needed. And through us all in service, we practically furnished my mother's
home and the bedding . . . . Well, my father said more than once he would prefer
to have 12 girls again than 2 boys. We'd done so much for them.39

Transition to servantdom
The moment of change from family home to employer's household is a privileged
moment to look at the social relations of seMce. This was the point at which the
two cultures met. From this moment the girl was taking cues, observing her
employers, adjusting her behavior and attitudes. Once she had begun her new life ,
she lost the sense of novelty, adapted herself, accommodated to the new regime and ,
before long, saw it as 'n0rmal'.40
If the girl attended in person for an interview, this was her first encounter with
the employer and much would be learned about future demeanour from that
meeting. Minnie Cowley, thirteen in 1923, sought a job through an agency on her
own initiative and attended the interview without telling her parents. Her memories
are very vivid :
Feeling as though I was going to my doom I walked up to the house lifted the
fancy latch of the front gate, stepped up the tiled pathway and banged twice on
the door. The door was opened by a woman with staring blue eyes. 'Yes, what do
you want?' she said eyeing me up and down. 'I'rn from the agency and have to see
this lady at 2 o'clock' I said.43

Minnie was told she should have used the servants' entrance, was ushered into a
red-carpeted hall, past a huge grandfather clock, and into a room with brown
leather armchairs where she was told to wait for the mistress.
The fireplace and over-mantel were white and in the middle of the mantelpiece
stood a marble clock which with its pillars looked like the front of a building. At
each end was a small statue. How different this was to our mantelpiece at home
which was always covered with odds and ends! I was just looking at the clock when
Madam came in and right then I felt hungry and scared .

Already Minnie was learning much about her new position and how she was
expected to behave. She was engaged at 7s.6d. (37p) but had to pay her employer
16s. at the rate of 2s.6d. a week to cover the cost of her two uniforms. The house-
hold consisted of master, mistress, a son of four, a companion, a cook, and Minnie ,
the general domestic. It was to take her six weeks to repay the 16s. When she
reported for duty two days later she was shown to her bedroom. This time her
overwhelming memories were of space, loneliness and silence :

I had never had so much space all to myself and certainly nothing as posh as this.
'This must be a mistake' I thought. Perhaps the boy will have to sleep with me.
It doesn't seem right that this big room should be just for one person . . . . Sleeping
 -
Daughters and mothers maids and mistresses 131

alone was very frightening. I felt very lonely and would have given anything to wake
up and find my sisters there with me. The quiet was a bit frightening after the noise
and bustle I was used to.

Later she found that 'middle class people certainly had their pound of flesh in
those days', requiring of her a fifteen-hour day. She got the sack from this job for
taking the four-year old son to her own home in the course of her daily walk. She
could be admitted to the employer's home to care for children there, that children
should visit the servant's own home was unthinkable.
Winifred Foley has described how she felt 'cut in half' on leaving her Gloucester-
shire village at fourteen. She travelled to London by train by herself and found her
employer lived on the upper two floors of a house in a London suburb. Again, she
remembered the early encounters vividly.
Fancy, I thought, I've got an upside down job in half 2. house . . . . I had heard too
much from my Aunties in service to expect much in the way of sleeping quarters.
My room was the home of the family junk . . . . Mrs. Fox told me to put on my
black afternoon dress and white apron. I was in mourning for my lost self. I was in
a strange new world with entirely new people to adjust to. My childhood was dead:
now I was the skivvy. I was near to wishing she was dead too. I was given supper in
the tiny kitchen . . . . It was strange to be considered not fit to eat in the same
..
room as other human beings. It was a good supper . but loneliness and misery had
taken away my appetite. How delicious in comparison seemed the slice of marg-
spread toast given me by Mam and eaten as a member of a family.42

Mr and Mrs Fox turned out to be land employers. Having locked herself out of the
house, failed to finish reassembling the gas cooker and having damaged a gas mantle ,
she was scared of their reaction to her early incompetences:
I started to cry again as soon as the Foxes walked up towards me. To my incredible
surprise and relief Mrs. Fox seemed more annoyed about my miserable reaction than
she did about my misdeeds. If she had not been my mistress I would have loved to
hug her in gratitude.43

In this, as in other examples, it is the difference between home and household,

mother and mistress, that are emphasized. Mrs Fox seems to have been embarrassed
by 'Poll's' tears; Poll knew that the mistress-servant relation did not permit her to
hug her employer.
When Daisy Noakes approached fourteen in 1922 it was decided by her parents
that she would work at Ovingdean Hall Boys' Preparatory School where her sister
already worked. Her mother went with her for the interview and she wore someone
else's 'too big' costume and her mother's large hat into which all her long hair was
pushed. She was briefed by her mother to say 'ma'am' and stand up straight when-
ever she was spoken to .
By now I was getting a bit nervous, but I knew I had to face it. We went round to
132 Studies
the back door as staff were never allowed to use the front door or front drive. The
butler was called and said 'I'll see i f Madam will See you': we were shown into the
large drawing room. I was bewildered. I did not Want to be iN all these elaborate
surroundings. Madam entered and asked us to sit. Mum was asked if I Was hard-
working, reliable, an early riser . . . . To all this Mum replied that I was. I was asked
to stand up and MadaM said 'You will look taller when you have a longer skirt and
your hair done up in a bun'.44
The similarities with Minnie Cowley's account are striking.- Both felt over-aWed
-
at 'posh' surroundings and by the rituals different entrances, having tO wait on
Madam's convenience, the permission to sit and the order tO stand - intended to
reinforce their sense of social inferiority. Especially striking in both cases was the
- -
role of the senior servant the woman with blue eyes and the butler who received
them and told them to wait while 'Madam' was consulted, a characteristic distance-
building mechanism. In the cases of Daisy Noakes and Margaret Powell (nOo quoted
here) the mother not only attended the interview but answered all the questions
for her daughter, questions about, precisely, those qualities of a daughter that were
held to be relevant to servantdorn. Mother duly Promised all such qualities. The
girls were, in a sense, vassals, being handed over bY the family to the employer for a
small sum of money, plus lodging. On this occasion, too, conditions Of service Were
fixed, not just pay and hours, but whether skirts should be lengthened or hair put
up. In the middle classes, girls put their long hair into a coil or bun at about seven-
teen or eighteen to denote adulthood. Daisy, according to a photograph in her
autobiography, was made to bundle all her hair into a Dorcas cap so that not a single
hair was visible. She was expected to be a trainee adult servant. With the anonymity
of uniform and the putting up of the hair under a cap went, to some extent, the
disappearance of the individual person. All these exchanges must be reckoned of
special significance when the child also witnessed the deference of her mother, the
fount Of authority so far, to a woman of another class .
Daisy was thus delivered into a particularly oppressive situation. Like the other
-
girls, she comments on her 'private' space, the place Where she was to sleep in this
case, however, a bedroom for four servant girls. In bed she
lay there thinldng about running home but knew I would only be sent back, and I
cried at the thought. Something went BANG under my bed. It was the knocked out
dent in the lid of my trunk reverting to shape. From that moment my child-
hood graded and I realized I had been launched on the world to earn my own
living.

She was called next morning at 5.30 and entered a regime of labour which seems to
have amounted to 107 hours a week. For this she was paid a wage of 6s., to which
we might add 10s. as the value of her keep. In fact, she was being used as slave
labour. For her small pay and her keep her total life and energy were at the disposal
of her employer. But she did not complain and knew that she would be sent back
if she ran home. Though Daisy's case was perhaps exceptional, similar demands were
made on all girl servants, and a similar compliance achieved. This interchange
 Daughters and mothers - maids and mistresses 133

between myself and Mrs Owen shows the pattern clearly, especially the correspon-
dences and and differences between home and work-place:
Question : What did you do on your day off?
Mrs Owen: -
Oh, we used to go up to London. We all used to meet friends and
-
sisters and we'd go and have tea at Lyons Corner House and then
we'd go to the pictures and then, of course, we'd have to be in by ten.
Question: Was that a strict rule?
Mrs Owen: Oh, yes! Yes, in London, yes.
Question: What happened if you were late in?
Mrs Owen: The door would be locked .
Question: And then what would you do?
Mrs Owen: We never tried (laughter) because we were always in before ten.
Question: You were never late?
Mrs Owen: No. No. We didn't dare to be late. We were too seated to be late.
Question: So her word was law. You didn't rebel?
Mrs Owen: No, no, no. And we were very happy and we were well fed and we had
a comfortable bed and to us that meant a 1ot.46

Employers' attitudes
Employers were not of the same outlook and had varying incomes and life-styles.
But servant-keeping, even at it's 'lowest' levels, certainly went along with a social
distancing from worldng-class ways of life and culture. Worldng-class habits, appear-
-
ance and especially speech the whole culture in fact - were 'beyond the pale'. The
servant-mistress relation, then, was always a relation between radically unequal
individuals in which power and subordination were continually reproduced .
John Burnett, in his introduction to the section on servants in UsefUl Toil,
discusses the peculiar qualities of this relationship:
An exact analogy is not easy to draw but in the Victorian attitudes to servants there
was much in common with the attitude towards children, dumb animals and the
feeble-minded, as God's creatures they all deserved kindness and consid elation but
above all they required firm authority, discipline and the direction of their natural
superiors.47
-
Though Burnett misses some elements of what is specific to 'service' often a
relation between an older woman of one class with a younger woman of another -
the attitude he describes seems hardly to have changed in the inter-war period. The
following are extracts from 'Rules for Domestic Staff' at Chipscroft Hall, Cheshire ,
issued by a Mrs Ernest West and in use in the 1920s and 1930s:

. . . that you will enjoy giving of yourself as much as possible to them [the family]
never being afraid to give a little more than you might consider necessary, and then
you will find that more than you expect will come back to you: perhaps not always
at once but at some time or other and you are the better and happier woman from it
and have grown to a fuller extent on this path of your wide road in life . . . . 48
134 Studies
Other working women and middle-class daughters were gaining more freedom and
independence, and perhaps Mrs West was old or of 'the old school' and felt she
must take a hard line against the spread of ideas of rights or freedom to her servants.
Yet what is really interesting about this quotation is the fact that one woman is
addressing other women and calling on a cultural repertoire of middle -class wife~
liness and femininity to describe the ideal (female) servant. Wifely 'giving' is clearly
the model for servant subordination.
We have seen how girls were introduced to strict rules and rituals in the moment
-
of transition. Their continuous application Mrs West's rules about not talking to
-
the (male) 'outdoor staff' for instance were an assertion of the employer's superio-
rity over members of a class who were in need of guidance and correction. The most
decisive effect of these rituals was to define the servant as not-family, and it is this
- -
exclusion the main psychic difference from her own home that was most often
commented on by my interviewees. As Thea Vigne's witness put it :
You were just a servant: that was it. You didn't have to have any personality or
-
anything 'Course, that's where I used to be in trouble didn't I? And they didn't
expect you to chime in with the conversation or smile or let on you were interested
at a]l 49You had to keep sort of strong-faced. I was always getting in a row about
that.

The 1944 government committee on domestic servants reports that girls entering
service after World War I were less docile than pre-war.50 If the period since 1919
saw the maintenance of a very conservative social order, it was still marked by
challenges to the authority of the dominant classes: the short Labour government
of 1924 and above all the post-war strike waves and the General Strike of 1926. It
is by no means 'obvious', however, that the dominant response to such challenges
was a loosening of social disciplines. The reaction might well have been to behave
more strictly and oppressively: to exact vengeance by penalizing trade unions or, in
the domestic sphere, to act more oppressively towards servants. If the old attitudes
of respect were being eroded and questioned by the servants themselves or if this
was feared, employers would have to work harder to maintain their position of
authority. Individual discipline might have to be strengthened to compensate for
the weakening of more general ideological supports. The effectiveness of such
-
compensation would be very much dependent on local situations especially the
supply of servants.
Tone of voice and methods of address were some of the means used to maintain
the right relationship. The employer's tone should be kindly but not intimate, the
servant's should be respectful and not familiar. This is a difficult area to explore
because the evidence, available only to the ear, has largely vanished. Robert Roberts,
talking of the period up to the mid 1920s, put it this way :

As a whole, the middle and upper classes, self-confident to arrogance, kept two
modes of address for use among the poor. The first was a kindly form in which each
word was clearly enunciated. The second had a loud self-assured hectodng note.
 -
Daughters and mothers maids and mistresses 135

Both seemed devised to ensure that, though the hearer might be stupid, he would
know enough in general to defer at once to breeding and superiority. Hospital staff,
doctors, judges, magistrates, officials, and clergy were expert at this sort of social
intimidation . . . . The trade unionist facing his well-dressed employer knew it only
too well. It was a tactic, conscious or not, that confused rover-faced the simple,51

In the following incident one can almost hear the 'ldndly' tone adopted by Mrs
Clydesdale, just as other servants, adopting the language of the employer in
recounting tales of particularly humiliating incidents, sometimes adopt the 'her
taring note'. Margaret had skimped the cleaning of the brass door-knocker.
The parlour In aid would come down and say to me 'Madam has sent down a
message that she wants to speak to Langley (that was me) in the morning room'.
My legs used to feel like rubber at the .very thought of going up there because I
knew what she was going to say. I knew it was about the front door. She would
start off with an ambiguous remark 'Langley, whatever happened to the front door
this morning'?' I knew perfectly well what she meant. TheN she would go on
'Langley, you have a good home here, you have good food and you have comfortable
lodgings and you are being taught a trade, in return I expect the work to be done
we11.' By this time I was in tears what with feeling so inferior.52 .

The Woman's Book, published in 1931 to give advice to middle-class homemakers,

had a sizable chapter on servants. It gave some general advice on this question of
address:
As we expect civility and courtesy from our maids it is only fair that we should
render them the same. A fear of familiarity should never be the excuse for a curt
answer nor justify the omission of please, nor a word of thanks for services rendered.
Neither should we be reluctant to wish them the common salutations and good
morning and good night.53

These methods of intimidation are subtle and many servants did not perceive them
as such. Some did perceive them at the time and inwardly resented them. Others
have come to perceive them much later when a quite new way of thinldng about
domestic service has 'allowed' them to break with the old ideology. Margaret
Powell's book in 1968, and the widespread media interest in service, including
'Upstairs, Downstairs' (1972), were important release mechanisms for some
ex-servants. It was now acceptable to talk about having been in service and even to
have opinions about it. Much of the material on which this essay draws was, in this
way, made available. The final section of this essay, however, concerns the servants'
own (contemporary) responses to their experiences.

-Servants' responses

There were certainly some servants who accepted class divisions and accorded their
masters a 'natural respect'. This response was commonest among servants from rural
136 Studies

areas whose aristocratic employers had large households. But this traditional
pattern was not enough to secure respect. The employer had to be seen to be
kind and considerate as well. Thus two of the women in my study still speak
happily of their experience and have few regrets. Resistance was neither con-
templated nor thought necessary. Mrs Florence Follet went to work as a parlour-
maid/valet for Major and Mrs Evans at the local manor house. She worked there
happily until she was married eight years later. There were eight servants caring for
two people, so work was not onerous. Mrs Follet looked up to, even 'adored',
the major, whose clothes she looked after. Mrs Evans took an interest in Florence's
family and lent their house, garden and car for Florence's wedding.54
The second type of response was to resent subordination and, to some extent,
-
to show this resentment though active resistance was rare. The rebels, also in my
work a minority, often came from more radical families, though this might not be
reflected in their position at home. They had nearly all qualified for higher education
but were forced into domestic service through economic hard times. There were
seven servants in my sample with this response, including four out of five of the
autobiographers and three out of four of the women from Wales. They did not
accept the ideology of domestic service and resisted, in minor ways, whenever
possible.
Mrs Cross is the most angry ex-servant have heard from. She is still full of fury
at the way she was treated. She actively resisted her employers' attempts to
categorize her as inferior. She fiercely resented being treated as an 'illiterate moron'
by employers less intelligent than herself. She records here an incident in 1932
when she was nineteen and had had several service jobs in London and Oxfordshire:
I was however beginning to lack back. The young son here was one day in floods of
tears because he couldn't manage his Maths homework. We sat down in the dining-
room and worked things out, after all he was only 7 years younger than I was.
However, Mother arrived and raved 'how dare you sit in the dining room with my
son?' I removed myself but my turn came a week later, when Madam asked me to
help the boy. I told her 'I am not good enough to sit with your son: he is not
good enough for me to help'. I had proved I was not an illiterate moron.55

Many girls whose ability and education should have led them to far better jobs
found themselves forced to enter domestic service. Educational opportunities
for working-class girls, limited though they were, were ahead of job opportunities .
Jean Rennie, for instance, had obtained Scottish Higher Leaving Certificate at
seventeen which would have gained her university entrance, but her father was
only intermittently in work and when in work he drank a good part of his wages.
The family of four lived in a one-room tenement. After getting and losing two
jobs locally, she answered an advertisement for a third housemaid. This was in 1924,
she remained in service until 1940, rising to be head cook.56
Winifred Foley's father was a radically minded miner in the Forest of Dean who
had once lost a job because of his views. The children, though poor, had been
brought up to have a sense of their own identity. We have already seen how Winifred
 Daughters and mothers - maids and mistresses 137

felt at having to eat separately from her employers. She perceived that she was
being defined as inferior, but for the time accepted it, until an incident at the
Teacher Training College where she worked in 1934. She had been 'caught' tdldng
to one of the 'lady' students on the stairs. She was called before the bursar,
Miss Robson, next morning 'for a lecture in proper decorum for ldtchen maids'.
Having choked on this bitter pill nearly all night and not being able to swallow it,
next morn'mg I asked to be allowed to speak to Miss Robson. Hurt pride had puffed
me up on to my very high horse which has no bridle alas and now I was ready to
give her a lecture and my month's notice to go with it.

So she did not attend compulsory prayers that morning and was duly summoned
before Miss Robson once more.
'Come in' called Miss Robson and I stood squarely in front of her, my head held a
bit on the high side. She asked me why I had not attended prayers that morning
and reminded me once again that I had been seen talking and laughing with one of
the lady students. Now, yet more incensed than in the first interview, I told her the
young lady had got into conversation with me. Secondly, if I was not fit to talk
to the students how could I talk to God who, I was under the impression, was
considered a good deal superior to any student. 'You do not talk to God. You pray
to God that He may listen to you' Miss Robson reprimanded me but her tone was
not unkind. 'Well, even if I'm praying to Him, if we're all good enough to do that
together in His presence, why aren't we good enough to talk to each other? '
Miss Robson gave a deep sigh and then a kindly-meant lecture in humility. She
herself would have to curtsey to royalty, we all had our place in society, and ducks
.
could never be happy trying to pretend to be swans . . . I agreed with her that
College Hall was a very good place for the servants but she could now offer mine
to a more deserving girl as I was giving in my notice . . . . After my previous jobs I
thought perhaps I had cut off my nose to spite my face but I felt a kind of glory
in my rebellion. I sang 'the Red Flag' as loud as I dared among the clatter of pots
and pans and thought of my Dad and all the down-trodden workers of the world
and nearly cried.57

But defending her principles and her identity cost Winifred Foley a job which she
regretted leaving.
There is a similar awareness of exploitation and unfairness in Margaret Powell's
book, Eelow Stairs. One theme running through her account is a recognition of
the double standard which the employing class applied to their own or their
children's behaviour and to the behaviour of servants. One example was the
situation forced on servants by the ban on 'followers' - itself 'a degrading term'
when seen beside the whole paraphernalia of the debutante .
-
Why should the fact that you are a servant and in love be wrong when the whole
deb set-up was manufactured to bring their daughters together with young men.58

The commonest response was to express neither pleasure nor resentment in

138 Studies
their experience but to accept hard conditions and long hours as part of worldng-
class life. Parents, brothers and sisters all worked hard too for low wages. Why
should they complain? Although, of course, things happened to make them resent-
ful, slights were borne stoically.
You just did as you were told. As you were often told, 'You're paid to do as you're
told, not to think'. So in the end you sort of lost your identity you know.59
The necessity of being a servant was accepted, but often grudgingly and with
mental reservations. More active resistance was experienced as very difficult. Many
women spoke of the inhibitions which they felt on answering back.
I've never exerted myself somehow and said Tm not doing that' - I suppose it was
going into service and you had to do everything you were told. You couldn't
-
answer back and I think it grows on you.60
-
Of course, 'answering back' did risk penalties dismissal and the risk of getting a
bad reference. Jean Rennie thinks that the reason she found it so difficult to get
a second job was that she was sacked from the first for 'questioning the Divine
Right of the Gentry'. It was much easier to leave for another job with the minimum
of antagonism and even with apparent regret.
When you gave in your notice you always tried to give the impression you were
loath to leave: you just had to make it seem that you were sorry to go. It was
because of the reference - you couldn't get another job without a good reference.6l

Yet people who have been servants very often remember the humiliations to which
they were subject through particularly vivid episodes. Mrs Evans gave notice after
the following incident, though, for reasons which Margaret Powell has suggested ,
she did not tell her employer the reasons.
Question: What did she do in the end that made you leave?
Mrs Evans: Well, in the end all the children came home from boarding school and
there was extra work, you know, and one day there was two teacloths
missing and I said I hadn't had them: but it was my habit to hang the
day's tea towels on the triplex oven door to dry: and these two tea-
cloths were missing and Mrs Kerr said [here Mrs Evans assumed the tone
of voice of her employer] 'I expect you've burnt them on the oven
-
door you haven't got the brains to own up' . I said 'I haven't burned
them. I don't know where the teacloths are'. Anyway, two shillings
was stopped from my wages that week. And when the laundry came
-
back on Friday there was the teacloths in the laundry basket. They'd
probably been put on top of the laundry basket and got pushed in.
But, you got no apology. I got the two shillings back but I got no
apology. N0_62

Mrs Evans was talking to me in 1972, but teds incident of the 1930s still randed.
In conclusion, I will return to the questions posed at the beginning of this study.
have argued that the place and training of the working-class girl in the home
 -
Daughters and mothers maids and mistresses 139

contributed not just to her sldlls but also to her willingness and obedience in service.
There is a sense in which mothers were contributing to the exploitation of their
daughters. Secondly, girls adapted quite quickly to service, but this was a process of
conforming to the employer's expectations about work, behaviour and demeanor ,
and could create a feeling of the loss of identity. The environment remained alien
and not like home. Where there were several other servants there might be com-
pensations in companionship, but the girl often lost her neighbourhood contacts,
friends and familiar surroundings. Because of the peculiar limitations of the job ,
it was difficult to forge a new set of 'familiars'. Finally, most servants perceived
that they were being defined as inferior or of a lower status. Most resented this
but for both material and ideological reasons, fear of the future and, often, a long
habituation to patience and obedience, could not make this feeling a basis for
actions that openly challenged authority. Some servants seem to have made this
break at some point in their lives. Some also developed an analysis of the economic
system that made domestic service possible :
It was the poverty that gave them servants. No pride in appearance, no new clothes.
It was us in Wales and in different parts like Northumberland. Our mothers were
glad (they weren't glad to see us go) for us to go to a meal of food and for
someone to clothe us, 'cause they couldn't . . . . It was heartbreaking . . . and they-
what was the word now? They exploited us, more or less.63
 Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-40
Paul Wild

Despite the growth of a historiography of 'leisure', we remain quite uninformed,

on a closely observed local level, of the actual changes in recreational forms)
Most of the research to date has focused upon the 'classic' periods of social history ,
especially the early nineteenth century and, increasingly, upon the late-Victorian
and Edwardian periods. The inter-war decades in most of their cultural and social
aspects remain especially obscure. This essay seeks to help to repair this deficiency
by looking at the changing patterns of recreational provision in one smallish
northern industrial town in the first half of the twentieth century.2 Special stress
will be laid on the years up to World War II, subsequent changes being only very
lightly sketched. The main focus will be the provenance, nature and extent of the
organization of non-work time: the main theme will be the penetration of capitalist
enterprise into the 'leisure' domain itself and the tendency of this invasion to
replace older, noncommercial or less capitalized forms of provision.
In Rochdale this transition occurs in the form of the decline of the pub, the
music hall and the chapel relative to the rise of the dance hall and the cinema.
At the beginning of the century leisure for the popular classes was already extensively
commercialized. It revolved, however, around drink, the music hall and religion ,
with the pub and the chapel often expressing poles of respectability and roughness
within a popular cultural repertoire embracing both the working class and the inter-
mediate strata. In the fifty years that followed, the primacy of the pub as the
most extensive and popular form was challenged, the churches and chapels were
stripped of many of their recreational functions, and the music hall disappeared .
The dance hall and the cinema were two of the most important newer rivals, though
other leisure industries, capturing mass markets, were also developed in this period .
The basis of the excursion and holiday industries, for instance, had already been
laid by the railway companies in the later nineteenth century. The speedy develop-
ment of motor coach companies aided further provision for a growing demand .
There was, of course, no simple, smooth, evolutionary development from one set
of forms to another. Changes were very uneven. The stories of different aspects of
recreation belong, in a sense, to different 'times'; on the one hand, for instance ,
there are the longer continuities and transformations of Rochdale's 'Rush Week',
circuses and fairs, on the .other hand there is the extraordinarily compacted, fully
twentieth-century history of cinema. Older forms often persisted in more attenuated
ways alongside their rivals, though now, demographically, of little significance. In
 Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-40 141
what follows, however, We shall look first at those forms of recreational provision
that Rochdale's population inherited from the nineteenth century, then at those
forms whose explosive growth was characteristic of twentiethcentury capitalist
enterprises.

The role of the churches and chapels in Rochdale

The churches and chapels in the decade 01' so up to World War I were at their
zenith as centres for leisure. As local outlets they had rivals only iN the pub and
had not felt the worst effects of cinema competition before war broke out .
Activities fell into two main categories. Firstly, there were irregular celebratioNs
which occurred as part of the religious calendar such as the Whit-Walks, chapel
anniversaries, annual trips and outings. Secondly, there were the more regular
happenings such as tea parties, bazaars, cohcerts, indoor games, lectures, coffee
evenings, young men's and ladies' classes and debating societies.
As the church or chapel varied so did the provision for leisure. Some would
only offer the less regular forms of entertainment and celebration for the con-
gregation, yet put every effort into creating such an event to earn money for church
use. For instance St Mary's (C of E) held an elaborate bazaar in Rochdale Town
Hall entailing various stalls and entertainments plus a restaurant in 1908 and in
1912.3 On both occasions the church took over £l000. Others, like St Clement's
(C of E), offered a regular and comprehensive programme. Here sport played a
particular role: a rugby club had been formed as early as 1878, a cricket club in
1868, but by 1909, mainly due to competition from professional opponents being
too strong, the clubs were disbanded.4 Regular events included the day school
scholars' annual concert, the choir concert, the Sunday school annual trip, church
institute tea party and institute trip. A surprising total of 928 people had gone on
the annual Rushbearing trip with the church in 1890, but trips tended to be less
frequent in the new century. A sewing circle with fifty-four members in 1914,
men's and ladies' classes, a church institute and reading room, plus various indoor
games and pastimes, completed the church's social programme .
Within Rochdale Nonconformity, provision was also varied. Union Street
Methodist Church, close to a number of packed areas of housing and the town
centre, took advantage of its geographical position and began to show a regular
moving-picture show to large audiences in the few years before World War I, a
practice that continued into the 1930s, even though the show began with prayer
and song.5 In addition to this, Union Street was the centre for a recreation club ,
a men's institute, regular concert parties and 'sunshine Bands', Girl Guides,
Brownies, Boy Scouts and the Girls League with fifty members in 1924.6
St Clement's and Union Street Church were by no means the only churches
offering such facilities, the majority of the religious institutions in Rochdale
before 1914 offered some land of regular club or activity. A third category, often
those with a highly evangelical view of the world, offered little other than worship .
For instance, the Baptish church in the town had been split by a furious debate
142 Studies

centric around the opposition of evangelism to recreation in the fight for

Christianity. In the 150th Anniversary Speech the Rev. S.W. Hughes insisted, 'it
was not the duty of the church to amuse the world, but to bring a knowledge of
Christ to it'.7
Finally, after much heated argument, classrooms behind the school gallery were
converted into an institute with billiards room, games and reading room, plus a
canteen. Yet these efforts came too late to alter the degree to which the church
was losing popularity as a centre for religion and leisure :
From a peak of 250 baptisms and a membership of 500 between 1900 and 1908,
West Street Baptist Church declined to a baptism rate of less than five a year in
the early thirties.8

The decline at West Street came slightly earlier than at most churches and
chapels, in the five years before the war West Street had experienced what others
were to know in the decade or so following the outbreak of war. This decline,
affecting all sections of the church, appears tangibly and emphatically especially
when viewed alongside the successes and achievements of the period before the war.
The social activities at St Clement's had by 1920 become a shadow of what they
once were,9 Union Street ceased to ends at all after a long period of decline leading
up to World War II. A contemporary from Dearnley Methodist Church remembers
things as they were :
Time has brought some changes in the social activities which have always been a
prominent feature of church and communal life at Dearnley. In the years preceding
and immediately following the First World War the men's social section flourished
exceedingly. The weedy meetings in the 'Band Room', friendly and informal
with 'tuppenny pies' and coffee to round off a pleasant hour of games and
discussions were greatly enjoyed.10

Soon after the war both the men's club and recreation club went out of e;>dstence
due to lack of support, following roughly the pattern all church-based recreation
took in these years (i.e. persistent decline), save only the yearly celebrations such as
Whitsun and Easter Sunday.11
Regular and mostly free recreation, based around the church and chapel, became
less significant in Rochdale as the cinema and dance hall grew to their maturity
in the 1930s and 1940$.12 Compared with what was to replace them, the religious
institutions were in one sense highly democratic; the congregation often organized
and ran its own affairs, through committees and clubs. The cinemas and the dance
halls were forms which ran on the basis of the aspirations of an entrepreneur with
very little feedback from his audience except for that approval or disapproval
interpreted through a commercial logic. The hmmme cinema and
dance halls were undoubtedly commercial, the chapels and churches were essentially
social institutions. On the other hand, social hierarchies did eidst within the
churches, which were often headed by local families of power and wealth. For
instance, three manufacturing families - the Pillings, Chadwicks and Whitakers had-
 Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-40 143

been prominent at St Clements during its heyday.13 In a less tangible way the Uni-
tarian church in Rochdale had strong ties with manufacturing elites like the Petties and
Ashworths who were closely linked with the Rochdale Co-operative movement from its
early days.14 As several studies of the mid-Victorian period have now shown,
membership of Nonconformist chapels, mutual improvement societies, temperance
organizations and a whole range of secular clubs was significant because of the
element of exclusion: membership delineated social and cultural boundaries.
These boundaries were, moreover, not merely or even mainly between classes,
but were rather a form of cultural fragmentation within the worldng class. Often
a section of workers drawn from particular trades in particular towns seem to have
identified more with sections of a local petty bourgoisie than with the rest of their
fellow workers, at least in so far as their recreational activities were concerned.
Certainly churches and chapels could very often present a narrow and moralizing
attitude to those on the outside, some, like Lowerfold Methodist Chapel, had more
than the usual emphasis on 'getting on'. In its handbooks and souvenirs great store
was placed by the men's and ladies' improvement classes and these, together with
anniversary and the usual religious celebrations, were the main events outside
worsl1ip.15 The cinema manager, by contrast, imposed few criteria of entry save
the ability to pay. Though there was much contemporary moralizing about cinema
audiences and some social segregation within and between cinemas, the form itself
expressed the egalitarianism of all consumers. In some ways, twentieth-century
cultural forms expressed and helped to forge a greater cultural homogeneity within
the worldng class, or at least helped to erode the older forms of divisions. .
The churches and chapels in Rochdale could at their worst be censorious and
clannish, at their best they could be warm and enterprising, in a way which fed on
the backgrounds they most often found themselves in - the socially restricted
community of the tightly packed 'urban villages' and neighborhoods which made
up the town. An old Sunday school teacher, remembering his days at Holland
Street Chapel, which had to close in 1942, described something of what these
institutions could stand for:
My memory was impressed with the famous anniversaries, the Whit-Friday treats,
the watchnight services, and I hope your history will give some idea of the read
warmth and enthusiasm that existed then . . . .
. . . I have copies of the hymn books that were compiled am well remember the
afternoon addresses with the boys on the left hand side and the girls on the right.16

By 1914 the church had reached a watershed; it had increasing difficulty holding
on to its members as the years progressed and the alternatives grew. By 1922, for
instance, five commercially run cinemas were playing to full audiences on most
nights," and a proportion of these would probably have otherwise been at chapel
or church entertainment twenty years earlier. As early as 1914 the foundations of
a mass commercial sector were there, four established and highly competitive
cinemas existed; a skating rink had also been opened, and a new theatre which
concentrated on melodramas had regular audiences." The municipal library and
144 Studies

swimming baths did more and more business as the century wore on. The quad-
rupling of mainly fictional books issued between 1900 and 193119points to a
probable underlyiNg trend towards home-centred leisure, which was underlined by
the growth in gramophone and record sales, as the dance boom took effect, The
number of beer shops in the town stayed around the 150-mark in the first two
decades of the century, but the number of pubs was halved to 70 in the same
period, a factor which seems to fit both with the underlying trend towards staying
at home in the Edwardian period, and a relative reduction in the significance of
the pub as the first and foremost resor"r.20 In his biographical account of Edwardian
Salford, Robert Roberts talks of the way the films affected publicans' trade: men
would often only appear in the pubs after the iilmswere over.21
But the pub in Rochdale suffered far less than the churches and chapels from
the onset of new and extending forms of leisure in this period. After World
War I a definite shift towards specialized and commercially based leisure, spear-
headed by the cinema, was clearly taking place in Rochdale. This change appears to
have been contemporaneous with a drastic reduction in the importance of localized
and relatively diverse church and chapel leisure.

The secular societies

The Co-operative societies in the early part of the century were important social
institutions for a small percentage of Rochdalians. As well as the retail and service
aspect, the Co-ops inhabited a very similar social sphere to that of the churches and
chapels. The Equitable Pioneers Society had a library and reading room, run by its
education department which also had responsibility for various children's concerts,
a rambling society and a choir. The Rambling Society had regular trips during the
summer on Saturdays and Sundays when a train or a tram would be caught to places
of interest, with a picnic tea served after the walk." Adult concert parties were
invariably well attended before the war and fell into the usual routine of a singing
troupe with accompaniment and recitations. In March 1914 the local press reported,
. . . a large audience at the Assembly
Room, Toad Lane on Saturday evening, when
an excellent concert arranged by the Education Department of the Rochdale
Pioneers Society was given by Mrs Olive Margison's Concert Party.23

After the war the Co-op slowly ceased to exist as an all-round social institution
as it had once done. Starting with the three retail boom years that followed 1918,
the emphasis lay increasingly with business.24
Since its inception in Rochdale in 1889 the Temperance League had been an
integral part of the Liberal/Nonconformist alignment which had so characterized
Lancashire in the first decade of the twentieth century.25 As such it shared a similar
political and social location with the chapels and the Co-op, opposing the demon
drink as a form of recreation. Like the Co-op and the church, the Temperance
Society had offered a programme of concerts, musical evenings, and club events
and in the end shared the same decline. Once the fervour set in motion by John
 Recreation in Rochdale, 1900~40 145

-
Bright and the other industrialists in the previous century had receded some time
-
between 1900 and 1914 things stumbled on and finally collapsed.26 The Temper-
ance Society had never enjoyed a massive following from the population as a whole
but is significant in the sense that its changing fortunes perhaps mirror 'external'
happenings. For instance, the demise of the Temperance movement in Rochdale
seems to have come within a circular relationship between the lessening problem
of drink and the slowly advancing availability of alternatives.
Another society, the Clarion Cycling Club, prominent in Rochdale between
1900 and 1930, owed its origins and early development both to the socialist revival
and to the traditions of the chapel, Temperance, and Liberalism. The early
gatherings, consisted mostly of skilled workers and the lower middle classes, met
weekly; runs to place of interest or beauty were the norm. Social functions of
the kind common in the chapels were held during the winter, for instance in 1900
one of the parties at the Labour Hall entailed 'songs and recitations from the Band
of Hope as well as temperance dialogues'.28
Before and just after World War I the Clarion Club was both an ideological and
recreational movement in the mould which seems to have been ubiquitous in that
period.29 But as the inter-war years progressed, an easy-going amateurism and
'brotherhood' began to give way to serious riding and racing. From the mid 1930s
onwards the trend was further emphasized by the separation of the club, nationally ,
into two tiers. The new group, known as the Clarion Cycling and Athletics Club ,
marked a definite departure from the old logic of the movement and was to have
an effect at all levels. As an enthusiast wrote in 1944,
I'm afraid the easy going era of Clarion racing men is over. Some years ago the
club decided to give the racers their head . . . . We set up the Clarion Cycling and
Athletics C}ub.30
Here, as in the case of the other peripheral forms like the Co-op and the
Temperance movement, the impulses of the pre-1914 era were not to survive. The
changing character of the clubs seems to underline a shift away from the diverse
forms epitomized by the chapel and church, which was occurring generally in the
post-1914 period. It is also notable that the new emphasis within the Clarion
movement falls in with a growing specialization in the area of leisure as a whole ,
and in some way parallels a- professionalism and competitiveness to be found
increasingly in spectator sports such as football after World War 11.31 Bearing in
mind the counter-cultural origins of the Clarion movement itself and its criticism
of passive forms of leisure, this outcome was testimony to the force of the under-
lying tendencies.

The development of commercial forms: holidays

The minority of Rochdalians went away for Rushbearing" at the tum of the
century, and of that minority, most booked through an intermediate body which ,
to a varying degree, would organize the day trip or holiday and sometimes offer a
146 Studies

cheaper rate than a direct booking with the railway. Bodies like the Co-op, the
chapels, worldng men's clubs and trade associations would often organize excursions
on a group basis to places like Morecambe, Blackpool and North Wales, each
institution catering for a certain level within a reasonably distinct and exclusive
holiday market. In 1900, for instance, the Co-op Holiday Association offered
excursions to Glasgow and Edinburgh for one, eight or sixteen days with fares at
6s.6d., 9s.6d. and 13s.33 The Rochdale Merchants and Traders Association had
excursions to the Isle of Wight and South Coast for eight and sixteen days at fares
between 24s. and 15s.,34 The Rochdale Trademen's Trip consisted of a day trip
to Bournemouth, 'with return railway tickets, two good meals and a long drive
for 13/6d_'35
On a less demanding financial level the Rochdale and District Federation of
Liberal Clubs took a day excursion to Hardcastle Craggs near Halifax for 1s.5d.36
Provision at this time seems to have centred on the middle classes and the skilled
working class, the limits being set by income. The Co-op alone seems to have
offered the widest possible access in this early period: for instance, in Rudibearing
Week 1900, 10,000 people booked holidays (mostly day excursions) through the
Co-op as against 4000 who did so directly with the railway companies.37 But, still ,
for many a holiday was too expensive to consider, at a time when the average wage
of a weaver at Kelsall and Kemps Woollen Mill was 20s. per week (by no means
meagre),38 the majority of the town stayed at home.
The Co-operative societies' trips, those of Cooks and of the two railway stations,
plus the workmen's excursions, stalled 23 ,000 in 1901 and in 1902, 28 ,000, barely
accounting for one-third of the population.39 And of the 1901 figure, 11,000 had
travelled in special trains organized by the Co-op.40 In that year two fairs attended
Rochdale for Rushbearing Week with their gingerbread stalls, shows of strength,
wrestling, shooting galleries, swings and roundabouts, all in abundant supp1y.41 For
others, who had to forgo a holiday, a short train ride to a local man-made lake
would suffice for a day out. The tea rooms there boasted their worth :
'If you want a good tea go to Victoria House. Every accommodation for parties and
cyclists, swings, see saws and playground free. Can dine 400 anytime. Hot water
supp1ied.'42
or
'Nichols Hall is open for the season. Skating and dancing daily 4d each. Teas supplied
-
on the premises. Catering for schools, picnics, parties or club parties can dine 800
at any time.'43

During the first decade of the new century, a severe depression in the cotton
mills of the town began to have its effect on the numbers going away for holidays.
Particularly between 1909 and 1911 the reduction was marked; as a correspondent
wrote 9

those who have watched the crowds of departing holiday makers for the last few
 Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-40 147

years hardly thought that the platforms were as continually thronged as at some
former vacations.44
These few years were probably the high points for the 'chapel trip' or 'choir trip'
in Rochdale. For after World War I they became less and less important as an outlet
for a minority of people, as alternative and relatively cheap opportunities began to
develop. Someone from the congregation at Castlemere Methodist Church remem-
bers ,
whilst Whit Friday was chiefly devoted to the children's enjoyment, Rushbearing
was the time for the older ones. A week's holiday was out of the question for the
.
majority, and so the chief holiday of the year was the day trip . . .45

In these same years motor coach tours began to appear regularly in the summer
months. Holt Brothers and Greer of and Shaw were the two main pioneers, with
trips to Hollingworth Lake and Hardcastle Craggs and later to places like Blackpool
and Morecambe. By the early 1920s they shared a growing market with four other
coach firms and the LMS which constantly tried to shake off its competitors in a
growing rivalry. By now Blackpool, which had been an early favourite, began to
be the single most popular resort for the railways and the coach operators, twenty
out of the fifty trains which left Rochdale in Rushbearing Week 1922 were bound
there.46 In that same year the local press reported that coach traffic was also
heavy .47 In 1926 Reliance coaches had established a rival service to the railways
for those who wanted to go boating or dancing by Hollingworth Lake,48 and by
1928 coach and rail operators had brought prices down to Ss. (return) on special
cheap trips to Blackpool or Morecambe.49
But the depression of the early l930s brought a great set-back to the trend
towards cheaper and therefore more accessible holiday provision for the majority
of people. On longer runs especially, the railway and coach operators suffered
considerably.50 This situation probably had some part in the state of the business
by 1934, for by then three coach companies and the railway were dominant. As
the 1930s progressed, business grew better, special trains (a significant number steel]
being organized by the Co-op) topped 100 in number and coach operators were
celebrating record traffic .51 Nationally, the Co-operative Holiday Association
continued to organize tours, excursions and hostels, but, post-1945 , tended to be
less of an operator and more of an agent for other companies, its name being
changed to Co-operative Travel Services in these years.52
In Rochdale the trend, though fluctuating, was toward a definite increase in
the availability of the day trip or holiday for the majority of the population, and
this compares to a similar national trend. Pimlott estimates that over thirty million
people took holidays away from home in 196053 compared with Mowat's figure
of around fifteen million for 1937.54 Happenings, for which the developments in
the retail and service sectors in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were
perhaps a portent, are revealed in increases in the number of people employed in
the service industries, which between 1929 and 1937 outpaced other sectors in
148 Smdies

this respect.55 Within this grouping, hotels and restaurants increased their number
of employees from 302,000 in 1930 to 379,000 in 1937, those in entertainment and
sport from 65,000 to 116,000 in the same period.56 From the mid 1930s onward
the national trend toward more extensive holiday provision continued alongside a
regeneration in the consumer and service industries as a whole. But it seems that
this wavering yet pronounced extension in commercial provision took on an order
in the post-war years, as basic economic horizons began to change and 'almost
every employed Briton', received the benefit of a paid holiday.57

The dance halls

Rochdale saw its share of dancing in the 1920s but it was the middle of the decade
before any regular venue for dancing on a commercial basis was set. The Lakeside
Pavilion at Hollingworth offered weekly dances as a regular attraction in the
summer. In addition to this there were several less regular dances held by employers,
the churches and chapels, the Co-op and the Dance Schools; when combined, these
Offered a full range of outlets for those who wished to dance in the l920s. For
instance, in the weeks leading up to Rushbearing in 1926 the dance hall at Holling-
worth Lake offered dancing to a syncopated band.58 On the other side of town
the Labour Hall offered 'novelty trio dancing for Is. from 7 till I I prn'.59 The
Havanna Band (obviously popular) was billed to appear at several dance halls in
town in the week before the holidays .60 Phil Richardson's Rythmeans, 'an up to
date six piece combination',51 were to appear at Balderstone Hall from 7.30 until
I I pm., but for 2s. On one Saturday before the holidays in 1930 there were at
least six well-attended dances.
In the early 1920s, when provision had been sparse, dancing schools had done
much to propagate the pastime by holding their own 'evenings'. Lobels's, Turner's,
Rafferty's and Bailey's were the pioneers and were later joined by another eight
schools in the task of teaching the Charleston, black bottom, fox-trot, tango and
waltz to the youths of Rochdale .63 Turner's and Bailey's from the outset had
offered classes in elocution and deportment to equip young ladies in a situation
that increasingly revolved around 'getting a man'. At prices ranging between 6d. and
2s., dancing in a local hall or at one of the dancing schools became a real possibility
for large numbers of young people. Now, for a reasonable sum, most could gain
access to a world where catch phrases and dances were a new and common social
currency. In the boom, which seems to have been more pronounced in Roberts's
Salford than it was in Rochdale, dancing was the thing for all between sixteen and
twenty-five c
The great 'barn' we patronised as apprentices held at least a thousand. Almost every
evening except Friday (cleaning night at home) it was jammed with a mass of young
men and women, class de-segregated for the first time. At 6d. per head (Is. on
Saturdays) youth at every level of the manual working class, from the bound appren-
tices to the 'scum of the slum', fox trotted through the new bliss in each other's
a1'1TlS.64
 Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-40 149

In Rochdale the dance venues and dance schools continued to cater for an
expanding audience of mainly young people throughout the late 1920s and into
the 1930s. These events seem to have developed in tandem with the gramophone ,
which during this period grew in importance as an aid to home-centred leisure.
Regular advertisement appeared in the local press for gramophones at 'cut prices'
and for the latest record releases of dance band music. Columbia records claimed
to have sold over two million of their 'new process' records from their London
factory in one month in 192865 - records, for instance, of the Piccadilly Revels
Band playing slow fox-trots entitled 'Persian Rosebud', 'Is she my Girl friend' and
various other tunes like 'Deep River Blues', and 'Variety Yale Blues'. These, and
records like them found their way into countless homes, where they were probably
used for quiet practice, and into the many dance schools where they would help
mass tuition. In a mood informed by some of the films being shown then, record
and dance band jostled to reveal the latest step or routine before an audience
increasingly tuned in to a world of novelty and the appearance of glamour .
By 1934 the first permanent, purpose-built dance hall was opened in Rochdale _66
The Carlton, as it was called, was owned by Embassy Amusements Ltd and offered
standards similar to those of the new super-cinemas which had recently opened in
the town. It was, from the start, a far more glamorous establishment than the Drill
Hall or Ambulance Hall, which were both used regularly for dances. The Carlton
even had its own resident band and a restaurant to entice the dancers,67 but by
no means did it have the market to itself even in 1938. For instance, on one
Saturday in that year there was a dance at the Ambulance Drill Hall (price: Is. 3d.),
the Dunlop Mill Companies Social Club held a dance (ls.6d.)68 and, at the Fire
Station, 'Johnny Rosen and his famous Broadcasting Band'69 played from 7 p.m.
till midnight for ls.6d.
Dancing in Rochdale seems to have been dominated from the. commercial level
but within this there were different interests: from the Carlton, which was part of
a larger circuit, to the smaller, though basically commercial dances, and the affairs
run by firms for their employees. The development of the dance-hall industry
roughly paralleled that of the cinema: a peak in the 1930s and a post-war decline
broken, in this case, by a short rebirth in the 1950s. There was a similar pattern of
closures and takeovers. The Carlton in Rochdale became, inevitably, a part of the
Mecca empire, turning its attention first to the teenage market and then to bingo .
In general, the post-war pop music industry largely replaced the hall and the live
band. Dancing itself, in the older styles, took on the character of a professionally
performed competitive television spectacle, assuming a quite remarkable formality.

The cinema: origins

More spectacular and perhaps more significant than the growth of the dance halls
was the development of the cinema. Between the earliest days when films were the
domain of the artisan, producer and distributor, and the years when a highly com-
plex international industry was reaching its peak, there stood barely fifty years. Out
150 Studies

of a mass of technical developments which led to the cinema, two of the earliest
stand out as milestones. By 1891 the Edison Laboratories in America had patented
the first real rapid-take camera to use the new roll-film marketed by Eastman Kodak
in 1888.70 But they did not perfect any medium of projection beyond the coin~
operated peep-show device known as the ldnetoscope, which only allowed one
viewer at a time. Nevertheless a ldnetoscope company was founded in 1894 by Raff
and Gammon to exploit the new wonder machine, in that year several penny
arcades and parlours followed the first one opened in April on Broadway. However,
it was the Lumiere Brothers who were first to produce a machine that projected as
well as recorded pictures. They (like Edison) had the benefit of a factory and a
laboratory Mth plenty of money to back research and experiments, unlike the many
amateur inventors spread around Europe and America at this time. In 1895 they
began to market the cinematographe, a machine which allowed its owner to make a
as well as exhibit films: this must have had a major effect on the European film industry ,
which right up to World War I, had not really shaken off its artisan heritage. The
very first audiences set a pattern which was only just beginning to change by 1905 ,
they were interested in the fact that the pictures moved and little else:
. . . they were fairly unconcerned with what they saw. Any familiar scene or action
was exciting in itself: 'High Seas at Brighton', 'Arrival of a Train', 'Workers leaving
a Factory', 'Man Playing Cards' or, for the big thrills, 'Demolition of a Wall', or 'The
Turn-out of the Leeds Fire Brigade'.

Many of the neighbourhood and itinerant picture pioneers took shots of events
in the town where they were due to exhibit and cashed in on local pride with pic-
tures of a town hall or civic event. Most commonly the men who showed these
pictures in the towns around Britain were a part of travelling fairs and circuses. In
October 1896 Randall Williams caused a sensation with his bioscope show at Hull
Fair, using the first 'double entry' bioscope in the country. He started with a tent,
a gas generator and an organ, plus horse and dray for transport, and begun a list of
several showmen and their families to turn to films: Marshall, Buttershaw, Hollands,
Pat Collins, President Kemp, Captain Payne, Wadbrook and Scard, Studt Seager and
Scott, Doover Relph and Pedley, Barker and Thurston, Biddal, Bliss, Proctor ,
Haggai, Crecraft and Marshall Hill.71 As David Robinson says in World Cinema,
For the showmen it was no great leap to transform their puppet shows, fit up
theatres, wax orks exhibitions into electric theatres and bioscopes. For several
years the fairground cinemas prospered without competition."

In 1889, Chippertields Circus became one of the first to incorporate a bioscope into
its performances.
In the same year that Randall Williams delighted audiences in Hull, Mons Trewey
embarked upon a tour of England as agent for the recently developed Lumiere
Cinematographe. But instead of showing to audiences in tents and improvised huts,
he hired major halls and meeting places. So it was that Manchester saw its first real
moving pictures in 1896 at the Free Trade Hall.73 This tour set a precedent for
 Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-40 151

touring 'animated picture' companies such as the New Century, Pringle's North
-
American and Golden Rays concerns which hired public halls, OI shared the bill
in music halls. Yet by 1912 both the travelling fair and picture company entre-
preneurs had largely disappeared or become incorporated into established halls
or theatres. Under the influence of the Cinematograph Act of 1910, the scene was
set for the emergence of the specialist, purpose-built cinema. How were these more
general developments worked through in Rochdale?

Cinema in Rochdale: circuses and showmen

At the turn of the century in Rochdale, Messrs Smith, Lee and Hargreaves were
showing film sequences on an experimental basis as part of their 'Circus of Varieties'
programme. For instance, an advertisement appeared in the Rochdale Observer on
Saturday, 29 September 1900, offering 'the American Bio Montograph with
latest war pictures' as part of a bill of mainly novelty and burlesque acts. During
that year films were shown as part of the attractions at the Rochdale Trades and
Domestic Exhibition at the Drill Hall;74 and also at a 'Saturday Pop' concert in the
Provident (Co-op) Hall organized by Mr Charles Parker. Singing to banjo, mandolin
and guitar accompaniment, piano solos and Whit Cuncliffe, a humorist and mimic,
offered most of the entertainment, while:
An attractive feature of this accompaniment was the exhibition of 'living' pictures
by Messrs Inman Holt and Woolfendens bioscope. The views included: Rochdale
Cycle Parade, return of the C.I.V's, pantomime of Cinderella. Portraits of military
and political figures were also shown, the portrait of Lord Roberts - an exceedingly
-
fine one was enthusiatically cheered; Mr Chamberlain's likeness met with an
unfavourable reception.75

-
In the town in 1900 only one established music hall existed Smith, Lee and
Hargreaves's 'old wooden circus', in addition the Theatre Royal presented drama
and musical comedy. It was the Circus and the pop concerts, rather than the theatre,
which popularized Film in these early days. During 1901 Parker's pop concerts con-
tinued with 'Milnrowgraph No Flicker Animated Pictures', which included the
Rochdale Volunteers Camp at Conway :
'Admission, 6d. and Is., reserved seats 1s.6d. Secure your seats at Wrigleys Music
Depot, Drake St., and support your Saturday popular concerts. Fun without
vulgarity.'76
As before, with the pop concerts, films were shown by three local men, Inman,
Holt and Woolfenden, who offered their services for rent. The programme often
included the showing of films shot by them at local newsworthy events or ten-
minute dramas shot in the Milnrow studios.77
Further pop concerts occurred in February and March of that year, the latter
containing variety and the

latest animated pictures by the cinematographs of the funeral of Queen Victoria,

1 S2 Studies

-
Edward the Seventh opening Parliament and 'Joan of Arc' a spectacular production
in twelve scenes.78
But Parker and his associates were not the only ones to be taking advantage of the
preoccupation with Queen Victoria's death (the Town Hall, Town Hall Square ,
Public Hall, Baillie Street Chapel and Baillie Street as well as the parish church were
packed to capacity for memorial services on Saturday, 2 February). Smith, Lee and
Hargreaves also showed film of the event:
-
The Circus This week a capital company of skilled entertainers is attracting large
audiences to the Circus of Varieties, Newgate, and on Monday night the perfor-
mances given were enthusiatically received. The principal item on the programme
is the exhibition of a series of excellent 'living' pictures, shown by means of
Tweedale and Hargreaves American Bio Montograph, and making up what is probably
the finest cinematographic display yet seen in Rochdale. Its views are remarkably
clear, steady and effective. Among them are pictures relating to the death of Queen
Victoria. And the Royal funeral procession of Saturday. Artists engaged for the
week include, Mons. De Lil, Magician, Ballad Vocalist, RutlaNd Allen, Tenor
Vocalist, Chirico, Japanese rope equilibrist, Meg Rehan, Commedienne and dancer,
Princess Moto, with the nine swords, Arthur Prior, Comedian, Professor Hulbert,
'Ten minutes with the merry folk', and Jenny Lynne Commedienne.79

However, no more films were offered at the Circus for the rest of February and
March, indeed, no more film shows were advertised in the Observer until December,
when it reported pictures at the Circus:
Every part of the spacious building was literally packed to overflowing. The pro-
gramme was almost certainly filled by Edison's animated pictures which have
for many weeks been attracting great audiences to the Great St lalnes's Hall,
Manchester. Mondays viewing included the illustrations of a large number of mili-
tary, naval and historic incidents and several local scenes. One of the last names
- -
group a turn out of the Rochdale Fire Brigade was especially realistic and it
caused much enthusiasm in the audience. All the pictures shown are remarkably
life-iike and steady.80

A few months earlier, in October, Parker had shown his fourth and final pop
concert to 'large and appreciative audiences' at the Provident Hall, but did not
include films. The Circus opened its new season on 1 September 1902 with a
mixture of variety and films, but omitted the latter in the following week. The
third week of September saw :
J.Johnson-Wood's Edisonscope series of animated pictures, reproducing many
fine scenes including the coronation ceremony and the King's visit to the Isle of
M&n_81
JOhnson-Wood filled the Circus again with pictures of Preston Guild in the week
after that.82 No pictures were offered there from October till December 1902.
In November 1905 New Century Pictures came to the town and offered seats
 Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-40 153
at is. 6d., Is., 3d., and half-price for all seats except threepennies, in the Provident
Hall. The concern was run by Sydney Carter, who owned St George's Hall, Brad-
ford, and F.D. Sunderland (an ex-fishmonger), who imported films together with
Walter Jeffs, a Birmingham showman, who helped form the group in 1902.83 The
second major travelling picture show to visit was Pringle's North American Pictures,
who were at the Circus for a fortnight in January 1906 and showed films including
'The Sailor's Wedding' and 'The Old Chorister'.84 Pringle's firm started when
the former Huddersfield variety artist and northern representative for Edison's
Electric Pictures hired the Victoria Hall in Buxton, Derbyshire, to show latest
Boer War film and the Corbett V. Fitzsimmons fight on film. In Easter 1902 he took
the title of North American Animated Picture Co. and bought a hall in Newcastle-
on-Tyne. Pringle later established himself at Edinburgh, Nottingham and Rochdale
where in 1908 he took over an ex-music hall called the Empire, built only four
years previously.
By 1908 pictures had become a regular feature and the Empire and Circus and
three travelling picture shows (New Century, Pringle's and Golden Rays) visited
regularly, the Theatre Royal continued to offer drama or musical comedy. During
January 1908 New Century Pictures arrived for a two-week stay and was described
by the Observer:

The popularity of Mr. Carter's New Century Pictures which are being shown at the
Provident Hall, Rochdale is attested by crowded audiences. On Monday the last of
the series was commenced and an entirely new set of pictures was shown on the
screen. Steadiness, clearness and variety are the outstanding features. There is not
a dull moment. The chief set in this week's programme is a beautiful pantomime
story, 'The Talisman', in which some exceedingly rich colouring is introduced. The
roaring torrent of Niagra, life and scenes in West Africa and a night in dreamland are
among the most charming of the other films. Amusing scenes depicted include
'The Heavenly Twins', 'The Milliner's Dream' and 'Housebreaking for Love', and
there are others in which a strong dramatic element is present.85

The third travelling picture of the trio, Golden Rays, enjoyed 'good audiences' at
the Public Hall throughout a successful stay in February 1908, and another from
23 March even though New Century Pictures were filling the Provident Hall with a
series of fourteen short films including a version of the Oberammergau 'Life of
Christ'.86 During May 1908, Pringle's films filled the entire bill at the Circus, where
one of his nine North American Touring Shows stayed until the Circus was
demolished in midsummer, and the new Hippodrome built. The films shown in the
-
last week were several the most notable being 'Incendiary Fireman' and 'The Last
Cartridge', which depicted a tale of heroism during the Indian Mutiny. Pringle
returned to the town in early August 1908 and placed a special advert in the
Rochdale Observer telling of the new films he had secured for Rushbearing.87 He
stayed at the Public Hall for twenty-two weeks, up to Christmas 1908. Before that,
in November, films were being screened at the newly opened Hippodrome (with
154 Studies
variety), the Provident Hall (New Century) and the Empire, which Pringle was in
the process of taking over.

Cinemas and super-cinemas

In 1910 the Cinematograph Act became law. It required all cinemas to provide a
projection room which was separate from the main body of the hall, and either
asbestos-lined or built on to the main structure of the hall, before licences were
granted. This action followed serious fires at Barnsley, Newmarket and Stratford
between 1907 and 1908. The Empire Picture Palace and the Hippodrome continued
to show their blend of variety and films in an atmosphere of increased competition,
-
for although the travelling theatre companies' visits had ceased by 1912 no doubt
as a result of the Act - two new cinemas had opened. In 1911 the Coliseum boasted
well-heated waiting rooms and prices of ld., 2d., and 3d. for films showing twice
nightly.
Owned by J .F. Moore and Monty Beaudyn,88 the Coliseum was built next
to the Palace skating rink, which they also ran. In that year a new theatre called
the Palace was opened under the direction of T. Hargreaves, who had once been a
part-owner of the old Circus, dramas were presented similar to the ones offered at
the Theatre Royal. The following year saw the second of the new cinemas open -
the Pavilion Picture House, where continuous performances were aided by a small
orchestra.89 The Public Hall started to be used permanently, on Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday and Saturday by Lee and Ratcliffe to show films to two houses. Another
-
new cinema - the Ceylon was opened in 1915 , this showed twice nightly, plus
matinees.
The content of films during this early period tended to refract life through
celluloid, but quite clearly came from the semi-religious twilight days of the chapel
and drew on themes for long the staple of melodrama and music hall:
Before the war the great audience was the poorer working class, and the films they
apparently preferred were those of high moral value and didactic tone, the taste
was a heritage of Victorian times. The films of the pre war era favoured bible
stories, morality dramas and melodramas in which virtue was rewarded and vice
suitably punished (with poverty and vil'tue, riches and vice often equated) . . . . The
films stressed the importance of home life and the sanctity of marriage; they
frowned on get rich quick schemes and people, or those who sought to rise above
. -
their natural station. . . Occasionally social issues might be raised female suffrage
or white slavery perhaps - but as an historian Lewis Jacobs has shown stories
involving political corruption or capital-labour issues or racism, generally adopted
strictly reactionary values.90

The American films especially turned away from the worldng man and his world
and towards the rich and the problems they had with their lives, but the whole
framework owed less to sermonizing than it did to a growing preoccupation with
entertainment. The next time social considerations or messages were to permeate a
 Recreation in Rochdale 1900-40 155

definite grouping of films was when Warner Brothers began a series of films, including
'I am a Fugitive' and 'Cabin in the Cotton', during the depression. But very few of
these films were successful as social documents or as box office attractions.91
Very much an example of the old order, the Pavilion in the week beginning 30
March 1914 showed 'The Streets of New York' to large audiences:
An old sea captain placed most of his fortune in a bank but very quickly afterwards
decided to withdraw it in consequence of r u m o r s he heard. Whilst he was at the
bank he discovered that the owner was making preparations for leaving the country,
and being unable to get his money the captain died suddenly. The receipt given to
him for his deposit was secretly taken from him by a clerk, and the dead body was
carried into the street. As a result of the sea captain's deposit the bank flourished
and the owner lived in great luxury, whilst the dead captain's family endured much
misery. In the end however they got possession of the receipt which showed where
the sea captain's money had been banked.92

In that same week Pringle's Empire Picture Palace showed 'The Price of Thought-
1essness':
The picture 'The Price of Thoughtlessness' is a picture which gives excellent lessons
to young folk as to the necessity of always being carefu1.93
Again in that week the Palace Theatre was showing a live drama called 'The Sin of
her Childhood!'94 Further on into the early months of the war, 'A Man's Sacrifice',
'The Seeds of Chaos', 'Hearts Adrift', 'What Every Woman Wants' and 'Enemy in
our Midst' (a spy film) were shown together with recent war newsreel by Gaumont.95
By the end of the war films like 'Never too Late To Mend', 'Pearl of the Army'
(serial), 'The Girl and the Game', 'Jack and the Beanstalk', 'Ten Tor mies', 'The
Pillory', and 'A Little Hero' were showing in the town .96
In addition to the Coliseum, Empire, Pavillion, Hippodrome, Palace (a cinema
by 1918), Public Hall and Ceylon, the King's Road Cinema was added in 1922 :
The cosiness of the new King's Cinema, Oldham Road, is squalled by the excellence
of the programme submitted. Tonight the chief picture is 'Her Unwilling Husband',
a film illustrating the complex situations that may arise from extending to a friend
a standing invitation.97

As the 1920s progressed, cinema advertising in the local press made much of the
fact that the latest films were becoming longer. The Pavillion, for example, boasted
'The Mansion of Aching Hearts' in seven reels; the Empire, 'The Happy Warrior' in
seven reels, the Ceylon, 'The Great Sensation' in six reeIs.98
On 26 March 1928 the Victory Super Cinema was opened, making a total of
nine commercially run cinemas within a one-mile radius of the Town Hall, each
showing twice nightly or continuous programmes plus matinees.99 Six months
later the Rialto (Rialto Cinema Rochdale Ltd), with directors Madigan, Close,
Lord and Hoyle, was opened with a film called 'Dawn'. Full programmes started at
2.45 , 6.45 and 8.45 pm., prices were Is. 3d. and 6d. Perhaps most significant was
156 Studies

the fact that the Rialto offered a cafe and lounge plus a well-appointed cinema,
with carpets and comfortable seating. The owners emphasized :
whilst famous for their industry and thrift, Rochdale people are removed from
misery, and it seems a fairly pure prophecy that not a single unit of the twenty
five thousand homes will resist the appeal of the stately Rialto pleasure house100

During 1929 the name 'Jackson's Amusements' appeared at the head of local
-
amusements advertisements in the press for give of the town's cinemas Hippodrome,
Empire, Ceylon, La Scala (late Public Hall) and Coliseum. The Jackson family,
ex-music hall artists, had taken control of the Hippodrome shortly after its
completion.101 Also during that year the Pavillion and Victory had joined the
Rialto in boasting sound-track films. By the end of 1930 the Rialto, King's Road,
Empire De Luxe, Victory and Pavillion were laying great store by the fact that
they were screening tallies, even though, as Keller points out, silent Chaplin and
Keaton films were shown well into the 1930s (e .g. at the Victory for a week from
14 April 1930102),
The best American silents had not ceased to bring in crowds even by the early
1930s, and American talkies were regularly the main film at most of the town
cinemas; in January 1934 the Empire was showing 'Jenny Gerhardt', the story of
a girl whose beauty of face and disposition attracts for her attention from those on
high . . . whilst helping her mother to clean at a swagger hotel, she is noticed by a
middle aged senator, who presses his attentions on her and who succeeds in his
designs when she has to ask for his help to save a brother from prison.103

The King's was showing 'Haunted House Ghost' and 'Frisco Jenny'; the Victory
showed 'The Rebel', a series of adventures about an Austrian outlaw in the last
century. The Rialto screened 'Bitter Sweet', a film version of the famous musical
by Noel Coward, and the I-Iippodrome, 'Life in the Raw', where 'George O'Brien
appears as a wandering cowboy, clever with untrained horses and tremulous
females.'104 The Ceylon showed 'Anne', in which a girl inherits a soap factory but
needs money to run it, she borrows money from a man who she agrees to marry
if she becomes bankrupt, but in the end her business is successful and she marries
her foreman. The Pavillion showed 'Baby Face' with Barbara Stanwyck and George
Brent: the Palace showed MGM's 'Rasputin'; the Coliseum, 'Brittania of Billings-
gate'. Five of the nine cinemas in Rochdale in that week105 showed American-made
or financed films.

Cinema and oligopoly

In the 1930s, when the British cinema was at. its peak, it took £40 million annually.
Twenty million tickets were sold in a week. Forty per cent of the population went
to the cinema once a week, 25 per cent twice or more weeldy.105 A revival of the
production side of the industry in Britain took place in this period too: the Korda
films from 1933 onwards generally lifted standards with films like 'The Private
 Recreation in Rochdale 1900-40 157
Life of Henry VIII', 'Catherine the Great' and 'The Scarlet Pimpernel', which were
followed in the immediate post-war years by the Eating comedies. Films like 'The
Lavender Hill Mob and 'Whisky Galore', plus the characteristic literary adoptions
like 'Great Expectations' and 'Oliver Twist', temporarily continued the new lease
of life.107 None the less in the 1930s a high proportion of films were American-
made, as they had been since before WOrld War I when the American industry took
advantage of the reduction in European production. During World War I the British
cinema had suffered and almost collapsed under the strain of growing American
competition.108 Mass production of popular films with Mary Pickford, the Key-
stone Kops or Charlie Chaplin laid the major foundations for a film industry
consisting of a few giant companies which dominated at all levels, from production
to exhibition. Films, at least in America, became big business. Adolf Zukor, head of
the powerful Paramount distribution organization, pushed for the establishment of
the longer feature films which eventually became the vogue and effectively reduced
the market for the smaller firms like Edison, Biograph, Melies and Kalem, all of
which either withdrew or collapsed .
As salaries and production costs mounted, producers sought ways of standardising
production methods, or discovering sure fire values that could be injected into their
farris to guarantee success at the box office. Hence there came into being certain
characteristics of American production which were to persist for several decades: the
star system; the formula picture (the repetition ad-nausearn of a style or subject
that Was successful with the public); massive use of advertising and pUblicity.109

Mergers within the British industry began as the individually owned cinemas
and circuits started to combine in the 1930s. One of the earliest chains, the Provincial
Cinematograph Theatres founded in 1909, merged with Gaumont British (which had
connections with Fox). British Gaumont had some 300 cinemas by 1929 and also
had control of Shepherds Bush Studios. The second major group to emerge by the
end of the 1920s was the British International Picture Group with its new studios
at Elstree and connections with the First National Circuit of America as well as
Pattie News. The BIP and its exhibiting organization, Associated British Cinemas,
like the Gaumont-British organization, had developed a presence in the industry
which extended from production and distribution; but even in 1929 over 2500
cinemas were independently owned. The 1930s and 1940s saw tendencies towards
further concentrations: in 1940 Arthur Rank, son of the flour miller, bought
Gaumont-British and, in 1941 , the Odeon group of 200 super-cinemas built up by
Oscar Deutsch, a Birmingham metal-broker.110 At the end of the war Rank owned
500 cinemas, plus the two studios at Eating and Shepherds Bush. The second of
the two major British companies to emerge after the war was, of course, the ABC/
EMI grouping.
Perhaps the most significant feature of the cinema was its rapid development ,
in a period of forty years, from its small artisan, almost amateur, beginnings. The
early cinema had been brought to popularity first by the travelling fairs, in the case
of Rochdale, Parker's pop concerts were a good vehicle for Inman, Holt and
158 Studies

Woolfenden, the three local businessmen, to exhibit their wares. Later the more
-
established itinerant picture companies Johnson-Wood, Golden Rays and Pringle's -
took over from these local men and offered entertainment on a fortnightly basis in
hired halls or as part of a vaudeville programme in an established business. The 1910
Cinematograph Act probably did a lot to reduce the number of halls where films
could be shown legally, and thereby gave the picture companies the choice of
settling down or fading away. Technological advances offering 'no flickering pictures'
and general improvements in quality seem to have acted against the early two-way
Lumiere machines: as equipment became more sophisticated it became more
expensive, the American competition pressed home its advantages gained by an
increasing division of labour and centralization :
The new cinema demanded a new kind of director and between 1912 and 1918
there was a large recruitment of new young artists to replace the old master crafts-
men of' the primitive years and the film factories.

Vast new film studios built especially for the purpose began to mushroom around
the undisputed centre of the world film industry, which was the first to capitalize
on sound-track film from the late 1920s on. This development was instrumental in
widening the rift between what were to become the super -cinemas wired for sound
and the less comfortable 'flea-pits'. It is possible that the cinema mergers which
took place in the late 1920s and the early 1930s were partly due to the expense of
conversion to sound as well as the prevalence of the new super-cinemas which
demanded high capital outlay. The radio was beginning to bite before sound was
introduced and it is probable that the silent cinema fell behind in the revival.
The popularity of the early cinema had been determined by a mixture of forces.
On the one hand it developed in a period when feelings concerning the Empire
occupied a central place, early film both contributed and owed much of its
popularity to this atmosphere. Many of the films of fictitious content had
military themes, while newsreels on South Africa and World War I met with 'large
and intent audiences'. The film of Queen Victoria's funeral filled the two establish-
ments which had the commercial foresight to show it in March 1901. In this early
phase trends were set whereby halls and cinemas would take names closely
associated with the Empire: Ceylon, Pavillion, Empire, Coliseum, Victory, Palace ,
Kings and Regal. On the other hand the cinema met a considerable amount of abuse
.
from those who saw it as immoral:
It was partly the gloom, as well as its comparative novelty, which made the cinema
in the l900's a focus for adult anxiety about the sexual morality of youth. There
were reports published by bodies such as the National Council of Public Morals
deploring what these unsupervised groups of young people might be led t o think
of in such conditions.111

But as Roberts says, 'cinema owners protested virtue'112 and as the days drew on
price differences made it more easy for those preoccupied with maintaining their
social caste to keep face by claiming a more expensive seat.
 Recreation in Rochdale, 1900-40 159

With few exceptions film content in the early period tended to centre on
moralistic sagas which, though not strictly coinciding, shared some ground with
indirect religious considerations. When film content began to change it did so largely
under the initiative of the big new film companies which started to develop with
their incre achingly frivolous subject matter just before World War I. Increasingly and
at the most significant commercial level, the cinema dropped its sermonizing mask
and began to move in realms framed by its own reality.

Some conclusions
The first and most obvious conclusion concerns the extension of recreational
provision itself. This was bound up with two central features: the overall though
fluctuating trend towards an improvement in the conventional standard of living
for the majority of the population and, secondly, the reduction of hours spent at
work. The time and income for private consumption which was won in this way -
and it was 'won', unevenly and always reversibly, in national and local struggles -
must also be seen alongside the development (and then often the deconstruction) of
more or less stable worldng-class communities. It was in these spaces and com-
munities that the consumption of goods and services increased, a tendency first
observable from the 1880s and sufficiently marked again in the 1930s to prefigure
the 'affluence' of the post-war boom. The striking growth of the industries of
entertainment formed a part of these general developments, which also embraced
the 'revolutions' in advertising, retailing and the production of relatively cheap
consumer goods. Looking across the Edwardian period, Paul Thompson concludes:
Perhaps the most fundamental change in the standard of life was that affecting
leisure. Standard weedy working hours had fallen from sixty or seventy in the
nineteenth century to fifty-three in 1910, not much more than the average forty-
eight hours still worked, due to increasing overtime, in the 1950s . . . . There was
thus more opportunity as well as more money for entertainment. For the moment
the favourite choice for leisure-time activity remained either drinking or religion
but their successors were already on the scene.113

In the years with which we have been concerned here, press, cinema, dancing, the
record industry, spectator sports like football and cricket were all commercially
organized forms of provision that partook of the general increase. To these we would
-
have to add newer forms which were not commercial the growth, for example, of
municipal provision. Book issue in Rochdale's libraries grew, for instance, over the
period as did the provision and use of parks and swimming baths.
More important, perhaps, were the changing forms of provision. The new forms
seem to 'fit' with the more structured day, week and year of the fully industrialized
work pattern. They involved a limited commitment and an essentially casual usage.
Cinema performances and football matches began at a set time and lasted for
a scheduled period. Similarly, the recreational 'event' became more specialized ,
geared around a particular activity or commodity. Like the original types of football,
160 Studies
the fair, or early popular theatre, earlier forms Were multi-purpose, sanctioning a
more general enjoyment. Though sometimes invested with quite other purposes
than watching films or dancing to music, cinemas and dance halls were, formally,
altogether more bounded occasions.
A further set of differences concern the actual provenance and geographical
scope of the newer and older forms. The older forms were localized and class or
group based. This seems to apply to all the most important recreational occasions
developed during the nineteenth century: clubs of different kinds, brass bahds,
chapels, Co-operative and friendly societies, unions. Though sometimes organized
nationally or regionally, the heart of union or of denomination remained the local
chapel or local branch. The early extension of leisure provision, pub or music hall
apart perhaps, seems often to have taken the form of the cellular growth of such
club-like agencies. The extent and richness of religious and secular societies in
Rochdale in the early part of our period suggests this. The newer forms often started
with a local base - even in the case of film production! But they soon conformed to
capital's tendency to concentrate and centralize, to unify and reduce the centres of
control. Thus, leisure provision was increasingly removed from any land of popular
control, a tendency hardly offset by municipalization.
It is important, Without further research, not to draw simple conclusions from
this fact. We need to know much more about how the newer forms of provision
-
were (and are) used their place within the broader culture of a class or group.
From the study of post-war sub-cultural groupings, for instance, we already know
how commercialized activities and commodities themselves are often re-appropriated
by their 'consumers' as a sort of raw material for further cultural work.114 One
cannot 'read off' (as mass culture theorists have tended to) the use and indigenous
meanings of mass-produced messages or objects. Leisure commodities or commercial
events might be distinguished one from the other, indeed, by the opportunities
they provide for particular appropriations of this land. Even so, historically, the
shift to a provision of recreational facilities through the market and through
oligopolies is of great importance. Through it, and for the first time, important
sections of capital itself have acquired a direct stake in (and therefore control over)
a supposedly 'private' sphere.
 Football since the war
Chas Critc/fzer

It is the basic premise of this essay that general arguments about changes in working-
class culture since the war will always remain unsatisfactory unless they are specified
with reference to particular aspects of working-class culture. Here it will be argued
that professional football can be taken as one index of tradition and change in
working-class culture, both reflecting and affecting broader changes.
The primary focus here is socio-historical, an attempt to trace significant changes.
This requires a sketch, however simplified, of football's role as an element of
working-class culture in pre-war English society. It was and still is a predominantly
working-class activity, the majority of both players and spectators being recruited
from a distinctive social grouping and a specific cultural tradition. Pre-war football
was an integral part of that corporate working-class culture rooted in the late nine-
teenth century. The core values of the game as a professional sport - masculinity ,
aggression, physical emphasis and regional identity - meshed, according to one
account,l with other elements of that (male-dominated) working-class culture,
elements carried within its network of small-scale organizations and supportive
mechanisms (workingmen's clubs, mutual insurance schemes, co-operatives, public
houses, trade unions) and in a myriad of smaller leisure-time groupings (pigeon
fanciers, whippet trainers, amateur footballers and the rest). It is easy to over-
estimate the homogeneity of this culture. lt reflected some variations and opposi-
tions within the class, according to region and internal boundaries, notably that
between the rough and the respectable. Nevertheless Hopcraft's emphasis on the
centrality of football to the common working-class experience remains a valid
generalization :

By the l9QOs football was an established employer in a community where jobs

were scarce. The clubs had grown up out of pride in athleticism, in local importance,
in corporate endeavour. The stadiums were planted where the supporters lived, in
among the industrial mazes of factories and hunched workers houses. The Saturday
match became more than mere diversion from the daily grind, because there was
often no work to be relieved. To go to the match was to escape from the dark of
despondency into the light of combat. Here, by association with the home team,
positive identity could be claimed by muscle and in goals. To win was personal
success, to lose another clout from life. Football was not so much an opiate of the
people as a flag run up against the gaffer bolting his gates and the landlord armed
with his bailiffs.2
162 Studies

However, while this subordinated class culture struggled to maintain a fixed

corporate identity, it would be a mistake to confuse continuity with a lack of
dynamism. This applies especially to football. Some of those most evident changes
-
in post-war football an expanded transfer market, declining attendances and
defensive football - had their counterparts in inter-war football. There were
differences of scale but the presence of these factors is not new. We have to resist
the temptation to construct a changeless inter-war history, against which to
dramatize post-war changes.
Since here we are concerned with trends and influences rather than moments or
personalities, the effort will be to identify significant long-term factors rather than
to offer a detailed chronological account. Any selection of such factors is bound to
be arbitrary. In his survey of football in the 1950s, for example, Geoffrey Green
offers a list of major developments in football during that period: the return to
F I F A , the effect of the Hungary defeat of 1953, new tactics and training methods,
changed style of kit, the arrival of floodlights, entry into European competition,
the players' struggle for wages and status, the mythology of Manchester United and
the advent of substitutes.3 I have chosen to structure this essay around five
particular aspects of football which I take to be both essential to its own self-
conception and integral to its status as a central element of working-class culture.
These are the player, the supporter, the mass media, the clubs and international
influences on tactics. I begin with an examination of the professional footballer as
working-class hero .

The player
From 1945 to 1963 professional footballers were engaged in a continuous collective
struggle to improve their economic situation. The details of that struggle have been
adequately recounted elsewhere: the annual bargaining over the ma>dmum wage
ceiling, the obdurate behavior of the Football League, the strike threats, the
players' final victory with the abolition of the maximum wage in 1960; then
the struggle over contracts, culminating in a High Court judgment against Newcastle
United in an action brought by George Eastham in 1963. Here it may suffice to
note three main implications of these events. The first is the clear roots of the
struggle in working-class activity outside the game. This was neatly noted in a
Times editorial at the moment of abolition:
They ask for two freedoms: freedom for a player to negotiate his own contract of
employment, and freedom to negotiate his own wages with his employer. These are
freedoms which are basic, unarguable, and the right of every working man in
Britain.4

The second feature is the characteristic attitude adopted by the League, seeing
absolute control over players as the only bulwark against the rampant greed of the
players and the tyranny of the transfer market. In the event some of their worst
fears were proved justified, in so far as higher wages did contribute to the ever-
 Football since the war 163

widening gap between rich and poor clubs. But this was due at least as much to
a spiraling transfer market, about which the League have done precisely nothing. In
any case the massive wage differentials opened up by abolition were in part attri-
butable to the form and intensity of League opposition, which ruled out the
possibility of negotiating some alternative form of wage control which would have
benefited the average as well as the exceptional professional footballer.
Thirdly, and less often noted, are the implications of economic developments
for the cultural situation of the player. The professional footballer was traditionally
a kind of working-class folk hero, and knew himself to be such. He came from, and
only moved marginally out of, the same economic and cultural background as
those who paid to watch him. In such a context, a dramatic change in the economic
situation of the player was bound to have severe repercussions on the cultural
significance of his role as hero. Put simply, the effect of these changes was that 'for
some of the star performers in football the "new deal" has meant an everyday life
transformed from the kind led by the previous generation'.5
The emphasis here must be on 'everyday life'. It was not just a question of
footballers having gained the right to more money and more bargaining power in
relation to their employing club. What became gradually clear was that the 'new
deal' had fractured the set of social and cultural relationships by which the player's
identity had previously been structured. His relationships with management were
strained by the constant demands for performance returns on the investment in
him; his attitudes towards fellow players became more neurotically competitive
and the search for a common footballing code found only an uneasy justification
of cynicism in the ethos of 'professionalism', his relationship with the spectators,
increasingly mediated by heightened expectations of the successful and the
spectacular, came more and more to resemble that of the highly acclaimed enter-
tainer required to produce the 'goods' for public consumption.
If the economic emancipation of the professional footballer was differentiated
in distribution and impact, so were its effects on the cultural identity of the
professional footballer. A symptomatic reading of household names which span
the post-war period - Stanley Matthews, Jimmy Greaves, Bobby Charlton, George
Best, Kevin Keegan - may only reveal differences of personality, economic position
and social status. However, equally crucial for our purposes is the relationship
between the footballer's behaviour on the field and his bearing off it. Together they
form his public presence, what public relations terminology would appropriate as
his 'image' and which, following Arthur Hopcraft, we shall describe as his style :
'We are not dealing with the style of play, but also with the style and substance of
the man, as affected by the game.'6
The footballer as hero is culturally defined by two related sets of expectations -
of his abilities on the field and his role as a public figure. This may be understood
historically in the post-war period as a sequence of typologies of cultural identity .
Three qualifications need to be made before embarking on such a typology.
Firstly, it includes only English players on the grounds that other British players
are products of a distinctively different cultural environment. (The one exception ,
164 Studies

for reasons which will become apparent, is George Best.) Secondly, since we are
dealing with hero figures, we take them as symptomatic, though by definition they
are not typical. Thirdly, this definition tends to exclude footballers belonging to a
more subterranean tradition of hero. Valued at times for their anti-heroic qualities,
these are the destroyers, the hard men, the villains. Nobby Stiles, Norman Hunter
and Tommy Smith are representatives of this style.
-
Four styles or typologies will be offered here- The first traditionalllocated -
represents and draws on the values of a traditional respectable worldng-class culture
in a way which becomes increasingly difficult, though not impossible, after the
'new deal'. Those benefiting from greater economic rewards may be typified as
transitional/mobile, exploring the possibilities of their new freedom. As even more
money becomes available to the chosen few and the game as a whole becomes more
respectable, players seek and find acceptance into overtly middle-class life-styles.
Incorporatedlembourgeoised, they become small-scale entrepreneurs, a world away
from their predecessors and most of their contemporary supporters. Finally, the
combination of apparently limitless remuneration and the publicity machine of
the mass media nominate a handful of players as 'superstars' raised to new levels
and kinds of public adulation and attention. The correct typification of such
players, however, is as superstarsldislocated from any available models of style .
For a while their behaviour on and off the field is a source of tension to themselves
and others before they develop a new identity as superstars/relocated into the
world of show-business personalities and public celebrities, taldng their places,
metaphorically and sometimes literally, alongside film and television stars, members
of the nouveau riche and the more publicity-conscious of the politicians.
The traditional/located style is relatively easy to identify, and has been caught
in Arthur Hopcraft's perceptive analysis of Stanley Matthews;
we were always afraid for Matthews, the non-athlete, the sadly irnpassive face,
with its high cheekbones, pale lips and hooded eyes, had a lot of pain in it, the deep
hurt that came from prolonged effort and the certainty of more blows. It was a
worker's face, like a miner's, never really young, tight against a brutal world even
in repose . . . . The anxiety showed in Matthews too: again like the frail miner's
fear of the job which must always be done, not joyfully but in deeper satisfaction,
for self-respect . . . . In communicating this frailty and this effort Matthews went to
men's hearts, essentially to inconspicuous, mild, working fen's. He was the opposite
of glamorous: a non-drinker, non-smoker, careful with his rooney. He had an habitual
little cough. He was a representative of his age and class, brought up among thrift and
the ever-looming threat of dole and debt. For as long as he could remember world's
fleetest movers he never had exuberance. He came from that England which had no
reason to know that the twenties were Naughty and the thirties had Style.7

-
Matthews was symptomatic but not unique. Others of his generation Lofthouse ,
-
Finney, Lawton continued to dominate the football of the immediate post-war
period. Some new recruits continued the old tradition: Derek Dooley, for example,
-
is described by Hopcraft as the essentially local (Sheffield-born) boy 'Thunder-
 Football since the war 165
boots'. He was a Saturday hero by and of the people, his identity contained and
gladly expressed in football. According to this account 'this honest industrial
yeoman . . . epitomizes the footballer of the forties and fifties'.8
Yet change was evident. Duncan Edwards, whose career was tragically cut short
by the Munich air disaster, is described by another writer as revealing 'that surging
irrepressible determination for self-expression and self~reliance of the post-war
teenager', yet remaining identifiably working-class.9 In less symbolic terms money
made the difference. Still drawn from and having affinities with the mainstream
worldng class, the salaries of top players began to take them out of the most sldlled
worker's economic grouping. Johnny Haynes made one land or breakthrough to
-
become the first £100-a~week player but for various reasons an unglamorous
club, restricted media access, a reluctance to score goals - Haynes never fitted
properly into the heroic mould. The central figure of the transitional style is
-
Bobby Charlton a working-class gentleman who could live like one'
He gets the star footballer's profusion of flattery. His name is chanted to raise the
spirits of ticket queues in the rain, vivid coarse girls have to be held off by policemen
when he gets into and out of the Manchester United coach; small boys write him
letters of charming clumsiness and kick footballs with his autograph on them; he
has been European footballer of the year and a poll of referees voted him model
player. His wife is pretty, so are his two daughters, and he lives in a rich man's
house in a rich man's neighbourhood. He is the classic working-class hero who has
made it to glamour and Nob 11111.10

Charlton's long career, like that of Matthews, tends to disguise real changes.
The dominance of the transitional style was over long before his World and European
Cup triumphs of 1966 and 1968. It flourished in the early 1960s when the England
team contained Charlton, Haynes and Jimmy Greaves, who was to bear witness to
the changes in style by having lived through all four stages.
By the late 1960s the style of incorporation was becoming dominant, as star
footballers became self-conscious participants in the process of their own embour-
geoisement. It was this rather than the transitional style that was truly anonymous.
This was partly due to the impression of conformity which the description 'incor-
porated' is meant to convey: the image of the small businessman is hardly laden
with heroic qualities. The development of tactics, too, had made playing styles
more rigid: over-collective, remorseless and functional, the new demands were for
the runner, the 'worker' who could fit into a preconceived pattern. Alan Ball is a
symptomatic player here: his total style is defined by the new tactics:
A11 the adjectives, the superlatives as well as the clichés which surround the modern
game apply to Ball - the 90-minute man, genius clothed in sweat, perpetual motion,
the essential team-man, hating to lose, living and breathing the game, awesome
opponent and valued colleague, selfless yet still essentially a star . . . these are the
terms in which one talks of Ba11.11

A whole generation of such men played for England in the middle and late
166 Studies

1960s: who will remember them? Those who stand out are hybrids. Bobby Moore ,
for example, maintained a detachment more typical of the transitional style and
was accorded, as a result, as much envy as admiration. Perhaps the real anonymity
of the incorporated style fed the search for the unusual, on and off the field. If
those interested in footballing skills looked in vain for some variation from the
stereotyped football of such teams as Leeds, Arsenal and England, then those with
a vested interest in glamour sought celebrities to populate their portrayal of life at
the Top. Their separate desires were fulfilled by the superstar.
The superstar emerged most clearly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the
central figure has to be George Best. But there had been earlier attempts to collude
in the cultural dislocation of footballing heroes. Jimmy Greaves and others who
followed the lure of gold to Italy in the early 1960s helped to dislocate themselves;
a process further dislocated by the press exploitation of their subsequent discontent .
The Times made this comment on the Greaves affair as early as 1961 , when Greaves
was finally transferred back to Spurs 3
There it stands, and may the man and the game be spared any more. Seldom in the
history of British football can any man have commanded so much attention in so
short a time. Not even the deeds of men like G.O. Smith, Bloomer, Meredith,
Gallacher, Morton, Jackson, Matthews, Dean, Lawton and Wright across the years
caught the same fierce glare of concentrated publicity.
Much of it has been unwelcome . . . . Yet the suspicion is that latterly Greaves
has been as much sinned against as sinning. His every daily action caught the spot-
light and much of it was magnified unduly. The whole affair has become tedious
beyond words."

In the same year as the Greaves affair a fifteen-year old boy from a Belfast
housing estate came as an apprentice to Manchester United. Within forty-eight hours
he and his travelling companion were back in Belfast. Three years later he was a
regular member of Manchester United's championship side at the age of eighteen ;
in 1968 he was instrumental in United's European Cup victory and was voted
Footballer of the Year. In 1971 he was sent off the field during an international
match for throwing mud at the referee and, amidst increasing controversy over his
private life and business associates, he quit the game in 1972. Returning briefly iN
1973, he finally left the game, apparently for good in 1974, only to return with
Fulham in 1976, then to leave finally for the USA.
That is the bare outline of the career of George Best. But much more was
involved in the 'Superstar' treatment he received. For seven years his every move
-
was plotted by journalists and photographers, he was alternatively told in news-
-
paper columns and to his face that he was the greatest footballer in the world and
a spoilt brat, on the field he was kicked, held, punched, and admonished when he
retaliated. All these were forces acting on Best, who in response lived it up with fast
cars and beautiful women, while securing his future in a chain of boutiques. He
lived out, part by personal choice, part by cultural compulsion, the newspapers'
dream version of the superstar's life. As crisis succeeded crisis, he eventually exerted
 Football since the war 167

his own will in the only way left open to him, and left the English League, con-
tracting himself out for individual appearances.
of course it is possible to interpret this odyssey as the biography of a not-very-
bright and immature lad, who let success go to his head and listened to the wrong
people, or as the due reward for a headstrong, conceited man who wanted fame
and reward on his own terms and was not prepared to work for it. The suggestion
here is that the saga of George Best should be read in wider cultural terms, as the
biography of a dislocated footballing hero, whose talent, personality and back~
ground were insufficient to withstand the pressures, both on and off the field, to
which the new type of superstar was to be subjected. Uprooted early from his
- -
Irish origins he had limited psychological resources family or friends who would
treat him other than as a superstar. He had to live through that identity as the only
one available to him.
The crisis in the identity of the superstar was short-lived, though more wide-
spread than a concentration on Best alone might indicate. At least one other
England international underwent treatment for a nervous breakdown. The pressures
internal to the game were also increasing and spreading down the divisions, as one
diary account demonstrates." Eventually, however, the expectations of a superstar
became clearer, more rationalized both for the players and those who sought to
exploit their newsworthiness or feed off their glamour and money. Not, it should
be said, that the mix of personal idiosyncracy and the cultural definition of the
superstar wholly ceased to be instructive for particular players (Rodney Marsh,
Charlie George, Alan Hudson). Still, the negative example of Best prepared these
who were to follow. They avoided London clubs, married and 'settled down', took
proper economic advice, learnt how to handle interviews. By the mid 1970s young
men like Kevin Keegan and Trevor Francis had learnt to cope with their new
identity.
The cultural crisis of the superstar did have ramifications outside the few players
directly involved. George Best gained as much notoriety for his confrontations with
referees as ever he did for his nightlife or arguments with managers. The changing
styles of the footballer as hero were reflected on the football field especially in an
apparent increase in gamesmanship and petulance. The evidence is uneven: older
players argue that they too feigned injury, committed sly offences and argued with
the referee, Nevertheless it seems fair to state that post-war football has been charac-
terized by an increase in, and institutionalization of, deliberate infringement of the
laws of the game. There is apparently nothing new about the content or tone of an
FA circular of 1964, but it may indicate a felt sense of crisis.
Foul play, abusive language, gamesmanship and petulance will be taken note of or
-
punished dependent on the severity of the offence. Players must learn to discipline
themselves. If not, they will be disciplined. Until the present wave of disorder
ceases, they can expect severe penalties for misconduct.14
There is no easy explanation for these trends. The exposure to continental
- -
tactics and the use of deliberate cheating the professional foul as a tactical ploy
168 Studies

also contributed. Here it is argued that certain specific forms of misconduct ,

especially forms of 'display' behaviour such as diving in the penalty area or feigning
injury, can be defined negatively, as unthinkable to those traditional heroes who
subscribed, however unwittingly, to a worldng-class version of masculinity and its
sense of appropriate violence. Elsewhere have suggested that football
offered a formalization of the informal attitudes to violence so long held by
working men, that it is a normal part of life in which any individual may periodi-
cally become involved, but it is never expected to get out of hand or become a
pervasive frame of mind.15

-
Similarly pain was something to be endured historically the worldng class is well
-
schooled in it and the dramatic exaggeration now exhibited by professional foot-
ballers would have been defined as (the ultimate condemnation) effeminate. To
appropriate this in terms of the footballing hero, we may quote the case of Tommy
Lawton:
Lawton probably took more punishment in the way of tripping, unscrupulous
tackling, hammering and bumping than any man of his period. The specialist centre
forward was the natural target for it. No-one ever saw Lawton retaliate, or deliber-
ately foul anyone. That he should lose his temper or be sent off was unthinkable.
In over twenty years, he never did and never was.16

Lawton may have been an exception in his day, yet such conduct is now almost
inconceivable. The implications are cumulative and widespread. The jeering by
opposing crowds at players stretchered off is partly informed by the knowledge that
pain is simulated for tactical advantage too frequently on the field for its actual
occurrence to cause much grief. The players' lack of an agreed code of conduct -
-
aboveand beyond the actual laws of the game is reflected and reinforced by the
attitudes and behaviour of the.crowd. They too had problems coming to terms with
the new trends.

The supporter
What will be described here as the disaffection of the supporter from his traditional
relationship to professional football has taken three main forms: firstly, a disincline
son to continue following the local team regardless of its achievement; secondly and
relatedly, a preference for armchair viewing of weekly televised excerpts: thirdly ,
a symbolic redefinition of the role of the supporter through the activities of ritual-
ized aggression adopted by younger fans.
The first signal of the spectators' disaffection was the fall in total annual atten-
dance at league matches. By 1955 it was clear that the great post-war boom in
attendances was over. The peak had been reached with the record total of
41 ,250,000 in the 1948-9 season, after which the figure decreased steadily to
34,000,000 in 1954-5. By the early 1960s the total figure had stabilized to around
 Football since the war 169

28,000,000 and after a further peak in 1968 a new low was reached in 1971-2 with
only 21,000,000 rather less than half of the 1948 figure. By the middle 1970s,
however, a further stabilization had taken place at around 25 ,000,000. The clubs
outside the first division have fared worst: in 1964 they accounted for 56 per cent
of all attendances but ten years later they had only 48 per cent.17 Such numbers
are a barometer of success or failure. The common response to declining atten-
dances has been to define football as in competition with other often more
attractive leisure opportunities. In 1961 , The Times noted that the changing social
- -
habits 'H.P., the weekend family car, bingo and the rest' meant 'mediocrity is
harder to sell now'. The conclusion was that football's falling gates reflected changed
class aspirations: 'Once football was the opium of the masses. No longer. There is
a greater awareness of standards and comfort now. So perhaps the real answer at
last is for a complete spring clean.'18 An opinion poll commissioned by the Football
League in 1962 came to similar conclusions. Noting the main factors for staying
away as changed attitudes towards family and home, the lack of comfort at
- -
grounds and, in a minor key, defensive football and players' lack of discipline the
report concluded that 'the arrest of the fall in gates can be achieved only by malting
football matches and their surroundings more attractive than other leisure activi-
ties'.19 The goverrunent-sponsored Chester Report of 1968 took a similar linc. .
This financial deterioration has taken place during a period when the general stan-
dard of play has reached aver]r high level. The explanation therefore lies not there
but probably in the radical changes which have taken place in the social pattern
and in people's attitudes and leisure activities."
The message, then, was clear. Spectators were not disaffected from the game as
such, but from the facilities it offered and its inability to adopt a more modern
style of self-presentation. Some writers went farther arguing that the image of the
traditional supporter was outdated and being replaced by 'a new type of spectator':
Someone who can take his choice of the games he will go to and seek out of a
variety of entertainment on any Saturday afternoon... .. You can either choose the
best First Division soccer or opt for a quiet backwater in the Second or lower
division ..
. Apart from isolated centres and the odd ten or a dozen clubs with
huge working class followings, the day of the dedicated fan has passed."

There are many potential objections to such comments which are only
the logical extension of the remarks previously quoted. (The last passage
could, for example, have been written only by someone whose current know-
ledge of anywhere north of Enfield has come from looking out of the window
of a first-class railway carriage.) The main point to note here is that the major
response to real changes in spectators' attitudes to football has not been to
examine the cultural changes in the game and its immediate context. Rather
it has been to import into discussion of the spectator an image which comes
not out of a cultural concern but from the heart of commercial activity: the image
of the consumer. Raymond Williams has noted the historical development of three
170 Studies

kinds of cultural relationship between an individual or social group and social

institutions: member, customer and consumer." The first, however illusorily, thinks
of` himself as a member, and may recognize an informal set of reciprocal duties and
obligations between himself and the institution. The customer, more detached, is
seeldng satisfaction for specific wants: if they are not met over a certain period
of time, he may, somewhat reluctantly, take his patronage elsewhere. But the
consumer has no loyalty or habit. He is informed of the choices open to him, and
when he wants something will make a rational choice about where he will get the
best bargain. Such choices are continually made, and the logic of the market is
that those who wish to sell their products will compete with each other for his
attention.
If this model is applied to the supporter, we may see how his relationship to
the main social institution of football, the club, has been changing. Ian Taylor
has convincingly suggested that the traditional supporter was able to think
positively about his relationship to the club.23 He could feel that the club and
its players belonged to him and his fellow supporters. The players were 'available
subcultural representatives' conscious of their closeness, cultural and economic, to
their supporters, who in turn fulfilled that role and provided him with cultural
and economic support. Thus "the rank and file supporter could (however wrongly)
see himself as being a member of a collective and democratically structured enter~
prise'.
With the fall in attendances, it became apparent that this illusion was no longer
enough to maintain supporters' loyalty. It had to compete with other more power-
ful illusions. The response of those who dominated the public discussion and
practical administration of football was not to look for a model of rnernbership
more culturally relevant and more firmly founded than the traditional illusion .
It was rather to assume that the only possible relationship was that dominant
in other more commercially minded leisure activities. If there was still much talk
of the romance of being a supporter., if managers still claimed theirs were the best
supporters in the country, if there was a campaign to improve the poverty of the
ground facilities, these were more than counterbalanced by the image, explicit or
implicit, of the supporter on which major policy decisions were based. The effects,
Taylor has argued, were devastating - football was subject to a process of
professionalization:
Professionalization does not consist simply of entry into the transfer market and
the beginnings of large transfer fees. It is also the process whereby clubs began to
accommodate themselves to their changing role in a declining entertainments
industry. Developmental processes in the wider society were increasing the leisure
opportunities of an increasingly differentiated working-class. Football was com-
peting for customers over and above football subculture. In one sense, this was a
technical question involving the provision of covered accommodation, increasing
the number of seats, and most obviously the fitting of floodlights to enable evening
matches to be played. In another sense, however, the process involved a trans~
formation of the stereotype of the football supporter. Where once the stereotypical
 Football since the war 171
supporter was a working-class man, living for Saturday and inextricably involved -
in his own perception - with the fortunes of the club, now he was of undefined class
membership, enjoying an escape from responsibilities, the provision of a spectacle
from time to time, and expecting fulfillment of these needs from a team of pro-
.
fessional entertainers . . . From the participatory and masculine values of the
worldng-class supporter, and from an exclusive concern with victory, football
turned its attention to the provision of spectacle, skill and efficient performance -
values understood to be important to the stereotypical i.e. middle-class
supporter.24

If this is a little overdrawn and smacks too much of class conspiracy, it is never-
theless more convincing than other analyses. It also opens the way to an explanation
of the second symptom of the supporters' disaffection, ritualized and occasionally
realized aggression. Into the hiatus between traditional supporter and modern
consumer stepped the football hooligan.
It is almost impossible to write seriously about the problem of 'football hooli-
ganism'. Not only is the phrase itself a label rather than a descriptive or analytical
category, but there are virtually no statistics on its incidence even in terms of
arrests in or around football grounds. Further, the label is used indiscriminately :
are all the Stretford End 'hooligans', and if not, how do we distinguish those who
are from those who are not? Finally, in terms of evidence, the media are an
extremely unreliable source, involved as they are not merely in reporting but in
sensationalizing and socially constructing the image of the 'football hooligan'.25
It needs to be said that those who commit - or at least are arrested for - criminal
acts at football matches are an infinitesimal proportion of all supporters. The
average number of arrests at Manchester United home games, out of gates of
50,000 to 60,000, is 3.2, In so far as it can be traced historically, the problem of
'hooliganism' seems to stem from the early and middle l960s; at least, there is
little evidence of it before that period. What is important for our present purposes
is what new forms of spectator behaviour, especially amongst the young, can reveal
about the attitude of football authorities to the spectator, and what the 'hooligans'
own seltiperceptions can reveal about their relationship to the game .
The Times response was equivocal: crowd disturbances were both 'mindless
thuggery' and a 'social problierrr'. James Callaghan, then Home Secretary, took it
upon himself to define as ron-supporters those involved in such incidents.
I agree that wanton destruction is perpetrated by a relatively small number of
people who call themselves football fans. They are nothing of the sort and the clubs
will be well rid of them. The authorities who try to stamp this out have the full
support not only of myself but of the overwhelming majority of the public.26

-
The press weighed in with its careful, constructive analysis of the situation savages,
animals, thugs, lunatics were included amongst the repertoire." Even the more
responsible journalists insisted that the phenomenon had nothing to do with foot-
ball itself. John Arlott argued that such a 'drunken mob' was attracted to football
by the possibility of violence and nothing e1se.28 Arthur Hopcraft perceived them
172 Studies

as 'louts with pimples and knives' and recommended a strategy of draconian

measures which he adniittted to have 'fascist overtones'.29
According to this definition, troublemakers at football matches are a mob of
undisciplined psychopaths with minimal interest in football, the source of their
behaviour is seen to be outside the game, as part of the social malaise of our times.
This not only allows football authorities to disavow any responsibility towards
such supporters, other than those of containment and control; it also denies that
such behaviour has any rationale in terms of the development of post-war football.
An alternative thesis has been outlined by Ian Taylor.30Extending arguments
we have already touched upon, he sees football 'hooliganism' as a distorted
attempt to restore some meaning and commitment to the role of the supporter.
All the developments we have seen to be characteristic of the 1950s and 1960s -
spiraling transfer fees, the economic and cultural dislocation of the top-line players ,
European competition, the attempts to make the game 'respectable' for a new
-
'model' spectator have contributed to the undermining of the traditional role and
image of the supporter. Thus those who look to the game for the assertion of
traditional values are left behind, they are a 'subcultural rump'. With no former
channels available to them to express their loyalty, and informal access to club and
players closed, they draw on what few resources they have left. They evolve their
own songs and chants, institutionalizing longestablished individual obscenity and
defiance at a collective level. They try to 'help' their team by booing and jeering
the opposition, and extend the violent conflict of the field to the terraces and
beyond .
But more than that. In symbolically displaced ways they reassert the traditional
values which are being discredited in the organization and ideology of the game.
They are not selective consumers but totally committed supporters of their team
alone, not individual spectators, but part of a collectively responding crowd, not
politely passive in their appreciation, but actively interventionist. They are thus
the 'real supporters' in the traditional definition. Their general lifeexperience is
-
reproduced inside football that of 'cultural alienation', divorced from those
communal activities which previously gave those in their situation some possibilities
for identification and commitment. They look to football not as an excuse for a
punch-up, but for a regeneration of football's role in working-class culture:

the centrality of soccer as a form of consciousness in sections of the working-class

leads these sections to locate their alienation and isolation in the soccer club itself
(their club). That is, violent resistance at the point of soccer consciousness is not an
arbitrary reflection of some vague frustration. Rather, the violence around soccer
may be seen as a specific (if inarticulate) choice produced by the hold the game
has had over generations of work fig-class experience."

The argument is by no means completed. Taylor tends if anything to go too far

in one direction. If the mainstream attitude to 'football hooliganism' has been to
deny its connections with the game, it may be overreacting to locate it wholly
within the game. Rather we need to understand more fully this relationship between
 Football since the war 173

the game and more general cultural pressures to which some sections of the worldng
class are being subjected. The fusion of the 'skinhead' phenomenon and 'football
hooliganism' may have provided a moment when some of those relationships
became clear: how football appeared as an element alongside other cultural ex-
periences like housing redevelopment and the break-up of the traditional neighbour-
hood, frustrated expectations in education and employment, the commercialization
of leisure, the 'threat' posed by immigration.
The seminal work of Peter Marsh and others has helped to expose exactly why
football should be selected as the venue for the ritualized aggression of worldng-
class youth.32 Contrary to the popular image, violence is not widespread, random or
uncontrolled. On the contrary, the behaviour of the End is internally structured: a
career from Novice to Rowdy to Town Boy, with an emergent figure not much
different from the average employed, courting, early 1920s worldng-class youth.
-
The culture has its own limits the rules of disorder and transgression is socially
sanctioned. The 'nutter' though a source of some amusement, is defined as beyond
the pale. His is not a model to follow .
What is happening on the terraces is similar to what is happening on the field .
There is occasionally discussion of the relationship between violence among players
and that amongst spectators, either as a simple causal one (punch-up on the field
equals punch-up on the terraces) or in terms of players setting a 'bad example' for
younger impressionable players to follow. The connection seems to me more subtle
and more indirect. The traditional player and supporter inhabited a set of cultural
definitions of themselves and each other: what I propose to call separate but related
codes. Neither the laws of the game nor those of the society governing behaviour
on the terraces are sufficient to guarantee order. What there has to be in addition
-
is a set of unwritten rules - a code as to what is acceptable behaviour. For
contemporary working-class youth, such a code is not absent (the Town Boy does
become like his father), 'but it is more fragile and tenuous. Within the specific
cultural arena of football an appropriate code cannot be generated by the armchair
viewer, the sophisticated TV pundit or the club chairman. Their vision of the selec-
tive passive family grouping bears little relationship to the general life experience of
working-class youth, to their particular involvement behind the goal. In the absence
of a code appropriate to their circumstances, the young supporters generate one. It
appears to the outsider to be unrestrained in its commitment, uncontrolled in its
participation, uncivilized in its demeanour. But for the young supporter, it restores
adolescent male working-class identity. The football ground is the established venue
for the exploration and expression of this identity. In the absence of alternatives,
it is likely to remain so.

The mass media

The concern here is not with the general 'standard' of sports reporting, or with its
inability to avoid cliché or bias. The crucial effects of the mass media on the game
as here defined are those which seek to alter or influence the nature of public
174 Studies

response. The argument will be that the main emphasis of the press is on the exploita-
tion of the footballer as celebrity, while television has more far-reaching and less
generally appreciated effects on the presentation of the game. The press has long
brought its own demands for controversy and sensationalism to bear heavily upon
its presentation of football. There are the usual arguments about what is news-
worthy, the excuse trotted out is that 'it's what the public are interested in'. As
long as this was confined to the context of a local team, then its effects were
likely to be counterbalanced by the supporters' access to primary knowledge, e.g.
about how certain players or the team as a whole were shaping up. But wherever
the press is more or less the only source of information, then its own particular
interests work against those of the game in general. The false opinion of 'ghosted'
articles, the deliberate provocation of trivial controversy, the exaggeration of enmity
within or between teams - all these are attempts to transform the genuine drama of
the match into the artificially sensational image of society which the press too often
conveys. , .
Since it is more localized than television, the press comes increasingly to stand
as the main intermediary between the supporter and the club and its players, in
those areas the supporter can have no knowledge of. His .perception of a player's
performance on the field may be coloured by the image of his life off it as portrayed
by the press. The transfer request, nightclub incident or family tragedy in which
any player may become involved are delivered to us in a press package. We may
receive it with that partial cynicism we always have towards newspaper stories, but
we read it none the less and it comes to constitute part of our sub-cultural knowledge ,
The effects on the player can be disastrous, not only because of the strain of
trying to live in the constant glare of publicity, but because his game and the
attitude of crowds towards him may suffer as a result. The 'success' of the media
in the case of George Best was to infuse - with no little help from Best himself -
the controversial nature of his behaviour off the field into his actual playing
performance, finally destroying the base of real talent on to which they had para-
sitically grafted their own image of the superstar. And the public, with no alternative
source of information, colluded in this process.
Both the individual player and the club - its financial crises, power struggles,
entries on to the transfer market - are filtered through the press. The effect is to
further distance the supporter from any sense of participation and membership. At
least, it may be thought, he still has his own evidence of the matches he sees to form
his own attachments and ideas. This remains true for those who regularly attend
matches, and football supporters do in general display a remarkable capacity to
defend the authenticity of their own perceptions. But for those 'missing millions'
who have ceased to attend matches, and for an altogether new public, access to
football only exists through the medium of television .
The role of television in the presentation of football has been the object of
rigorous serological scrutiny by members of the British Film Institute. Here we
must necessarily confine ourselves to a few brief remarks. These are, however, in
accord with the specific analysis they have offered and accepts their basic premise
 Football since the war 175

that although football programmes claim merely to present reality, in fact this
'reality' is a construct.33 Television never presents to us the game as we might have
seen it had we been there ourselves. Commentary, camerawork and retrospective
analysis by experts all contribute to a very particular structuring of the match. We
do not, for example, require a running commentary at a live match, why then do
we have one on television? Beyond the communication of some basic information,
about team selection, for example, its role is superfluous. We have two eyes, we can
see what is happening. In fact, the commentator is the first stage of interpretation.
He comes between us and the event: he represents it to us. His comments go well
beyond the descriptive into the interpretive. In order to take the game at all we
have to encounter his continuous interpretation of it. The history of television
football demonstrates the commentator's increasingly interpretive conception of
his role. The descriptive style (Kenneth Wolstenhome) is superseded by that of the
instant analyst (David Coleman): the shift is from describing what is happening
to explaining it. We see what is happening and we are told why, our own interpre-
tation, if it still exists, must grapple with that of the commentator.
Camerawork is also highly selective. What passes as increased efficiency -
-
shot from different angles, better close-ups, immediate action replays is in fact a
more sophisticated restructuring of the footballing event. Focusing on a very small
part of the pitch where the ball is prevents us seeing what is happening off the ball.
(When forwards are described as 'coming from nowhere', what is really meant is
that they were not originally in the camera shot .) Editing of ninety minutes down to
thirty represents the game as a series of detailed moments rather than as a more
general flow of action. Action replays may be shown while the game is still going on
so that when we return live we must guess what has gone on before. Close-ups of
players in moments of joy and anguish intensify the dramatic selfexposure required
of a superstar .
As if all this wasn't enough, we are subjected to expert analysis afterwards.
If kept at the level of simple opinion, this may be no more harmful than the
cavortings of a few particularly extrovert players and managers. And there is no
reason why some comments should not be made after a game has been shown.
But things have got out of hand when film of a game is curtailed to get the 'experts'
in, the game itself is playing second fiddle to television's idea of a show.
What is at stake here is the effect of television and the press on the footballing
sub-culture: on the large-scale perception of a popular cultural activity. It has not
been anything but debilitative. They have brought to the game their own definitions
of newsworthiness (the sensational, the dramatic), their own ways of personalizing
events ('great men under strain'), and their own self-interpretation as experts ('it is
my job to tell you what all this means'). Far from understanding or defending the
traditional role of the 'supporter', they have sought to educate him out of it into
the world of technical sophistication and managed melodrama which they fondly
believe to be an accurate and desirable presentation of the game .
176 Studies

The club
In 1954 a Times article, taking the form of a post-mortem on the double international
defeat by Hungary, concluded that 'if football's place in the national culture is
lost, the game will lose as a business and an entertainment as surely as it will lose as
a sport and a game' This recognizes the essential paradoxes of the professional
football club while run as a business, it is generally unable (by law) or unwilling
(by inclination) to pay out much interest or investment in it, while catering for a
substantially working-class following, its finances and policies are controlled by
capitalist entrepreneurs. Ever since the late nineteenth century when clubs began to
take gate money, pay players and register as limited liability companies, these have
been integral characteristics of the football club. The problem here is how these
contradictions have worked themselves through in the post-war period and how
such developments affect the role of the game as worldng~class culture .
The finances of a football club are as complex as those of any medium-size
business. It is not easy to unravel them and a national picture would require pains-
taking research. The main trends, however, were analysed by the Chester RepOrt
in this fashionl

The picture we have described in terms of the current financial situation and of the
broader social forces at work, is complex. It is not possible to say simply that
English League football is in good or bad condition, that the outlook is rosy or
bleak. There are a number of quite different conditions, some apparently very
rosy, some rather grey, and some very black. For the various reasons set out earlier
-
in this chapter the distribution and concentration of population, the abolition of
the maximum wage, the inflation of transfer fees, the growth of personal affluence
and private transport, the demand for highest quality amenities, the impact of
television and the introduction of new European competitions which concern
and reward only the top clubs - quite distinct classes have developed within the
Football League. The League is only theoretically composed of ninety-two equal
clubs. In practice, it has an established plutocracy, a middle class who normally
just manage to keep their heads above water, and a large proletariat living in nearly
permanent poverty. Admittedly the boundaries between the football middle class
and the classes below may be fluid and blurred. Exceptionally good management
or quirks of good fortune may also help some of the proletariat to above-average
achievements. But in general the pattern of relative success is well established. All
of the influences outlined above reinforce them, tending to make the rich richer
and the poor poorer. What we are witnessing is a circular process in which success
tends to perpetuate success, and membership of a lower division to make continued
membership of a lower division more likely.34

This account is an uneven one. The recounting of specific costs (wages, ground ,
travel) is put alongside assumptions of consumer orientation. Indeed the report
subsequently decides that, 'The question we must ask is what will the customer
w

buy'?' The assumption of the dominance of a dozen or so top clubs is also question-
able if extended beyond the assessment of capital assets. While the gates of some
 Football since the war 177
clubs do guarantee a set amount of income, this is dependent upon sustained success
on the field. If one measures the extent of dominance by examining the distribution
of major league prizes and status, the situation is much more open than the report
implies. If one takes some indices of dominance over ten-year periods since 1919
the results are not what common sense would suggest. The number of clubs winning
the league championship, finishing in the first four places or appearing in the first
division has not declined in the post-war decades. Indeed, there may be an argument
that the game has become more open: certainly fewer clubs are able to maintain an
'automatic' position in the first division.
So the presence of what might be described as an oligopoly of new football
clubs dominating attendances, transfer fees and league success needs to be qualified.
The last does not follow on from the first two and, on occasions, however tempo-
rarily, the last may be obtained without any immediate expansion of the first
two. A successful team may attract resources to the club both in terms of the
income from gate money and those willing to provide private capital. For any
club in a city or large town, there is a reservoir of public support and private
capital ready to be tapped at the first sign of success. While success is more difficult
to come by without such resources, it can and does happen if a manager is
particularly skilful and/or lucky .
Nevertheless the Chester Report's argument does have validity when applied to
the lower divisions. Costs have risen relatively faster than in the first division,
while income, especially that of gate money, has declined. A particular cost is that
of travel, which leads the committee to recommend reverting to the old system of
regionalizing competition in the lower divisions. Further, a very careful analysis
of the operations of the transfer system in the mid 1960s demonstrated quite
incontrovertibly that the transfer system worked to the disadvantage of the lower
divisions all the way down the scale. First division teams paid out less to second
division teams than they received and so on.
The response of the Chester Report was not, however, to seek to redress this
apparently increasing inequality. Using a 'laMm duck' Metaphor fashionable at the
time, they argued that any form of subsidy to smaller clubs would encourage
inefficiency. Clubs which came to rely on such contributions for much of their
income would have less incentive to balance their accounts and progressive manage-
ment would not be encouraged. So other than regionalised competitions and More
immunity from tax, the Chester Report only recommended that the smaller clubs
should embark on programmes in conjunction with local authorities to establish
their grounds as focal community resources. There is, of course, a divergent role for
-
the bigger clubs what the report saw as
the basic point whether it is not just improvement but a change in the nature of the
-
football club which is under consideration either towards great entertainment
centres or towards smaller community social centres.35
What we have here are two very different and yet specific images of the cultural
role of the football club. The bigger clubs are to provide facilities for an amorphous
178 Studies

group of consumers and their families: squash courts, swimming pools and the rest .
The smaller club is to encourage various forms of 'involvement': drinking at a club
bar, listening to a 'blue' comic, selling a quota of tote tickets.
The central question omitted here is whether or how the supporter should
have any control over the clubs he regards as his. The irony is that the supporter
has been almost universally treated with contempt by football clubs. He has been
expected to urinate in the open air, queue for ages for a stewed cup of tea, wait his
turn for tickets while directors and season ticket holders (and their friends) are
served first. He has been crammed into a small space with thousands of others to
an extent which has literally put life and limb at risk. Now all this is to change :
-
seats are provided, bars opened, car parks provided all of course at a price around
three times the original. He has been changed from supporter into consumer.
The motives are far from altruistic. At their simplest, these are measures to
increase attendance revenue. Thus the conversion of a terrace to seating may half
-
capacity but it will double revenue. Plush enclosed boxes may be leased at several
thousand pounds a season - to businesses who can entertain their own and other
executives, whisky in hand, to a spot of instant entertainment. Meanwhile those too
young, too poor, or too traditional to understand or appreciate these improvements
will be huddled together behind the goals.
The new consumer then receives more status but has no more power. Further,
his role, as defined by the surroundings, is essentially a passive one: no impassioned
-
troublemaker he no physical involvement, chanting or swearing in these new stands.
The drive towards all-seated stadia, motivated by the convenient theories that they
increase revenue and decrease the possibilities of hooliganism, involves a redefinition
of the club's relationship to the supporter.
It remains an open question of whether professional football really is insolvent ,
or whether it suffers from increasing inequality. The apparent availability of private
capital, money from sponsorship and advertising, revenue from pools and television,
hardly seems in short supply. Each club, however, is kept in a state of constant
competition for resources and no attempt is rnade to cushion the club against the
possibility of failure. It is, in short, a paradigm of capitalism. The strategies which
do exist tend to fit images of the supporter as consumer, measures to reduce
inequality, such as transfer levies, are steadfastly rejected. This failure is hardly
surprising since the Football League is effectively run by the votes of the directors
of first and second division clubs, with the two lower divisions having a token
four votes between them. A body so constituted is hardly likely to concern itself
with the minions. That a typical third division crowd is, in terms of any other
sport, a substantial gathering of people who are expressing, through their attendance,
- -
support for a specific cultural institution the local football club will find little
-
purchase amongst those whose latest investment a footballer - will be worth more
than all of a third division side put together.
It may not matter to football long term that a few obscure small-town northern
clubs drop out of the league, or that others depend on the forbearance of the bank
and the generosity of a local builder. But even at the very top, financial instability
 Football since the war 179

matters, for it is reflected on the field. Between the directors and the players stands
the manager: it is on his ability to produce a successful side that the annual accounts
- -
and the continuity of his job depend. The end product of financial instability is
fear of failure.

The international influence and tactics

In 1953 a new queen was crowned, an Englishman was one of the first to climb.
Everest, and Stanley Matthews at last won the Cup Winners' medal which had so
long eluded him. All seemed right with the world. But in the same year England
were soundly thrashed 6-3 by Hungary at Wembley, the first national side from the
continent to beat England on their home ground. To prove it was no fluke they
handed out an even more severe beating, 7-1 , in the return some months later in
Belgrade. This provoked a bout of self-criticism throughout the game. The Times
was strident in its analysis:
British footballers have a four-point programme to master if they are to survive.
They must become athletes, 100 per cent fit, they must become gymnasts, they
must make the ball a slave, answering every command, and they must start thinking
intelligently ahead of the pass . . . . We must reshape our whole outlook. The
w/m formation against a team such as these Hungarians with its new ideas, is as
..
outdated as a horsedrawn bus . . The basic trouble, of course, quite apart from
`mefficiency.36

the difference in fundamental styles, was our tactical

As Percy Young has observed, this defeat reproduced within the game of football a
-
more general crisis of British imperial philosophy 'more often felt subconsciously
than consciously and born of the realisation that Britain does not stand where she aia'.3'1
There was little in the form of the English side in the 1950s and early 1960s to
reawaken confidence. Only two of the next nine internationals after Hungary were
won. England performed indifferently in the 1958 World Cup and were beaten
1-0 by Russia in a group play-off. A disastrous tour of South America in 1959
included a 1-2 defeat by Mexico and was followed by a second Wembley defeat,
this time Sweden being the 3-2 victors. Despite the concession of some power and
status to team manager Walter Winterbottom, the string of poor results continued
and the 1962 World Cup was an action replay of 1958, the only consolation being
that England's quarter-final conquerors, Brazil, went on to win the competition .
Winterbottom resigned, his assistant Jimmy Adamson declined to replace him ,
and Alf Ramsey was appointed manager with complete responsibility at last for
team selection and preparation. A new phase had begun.
If the Football Association were slow to grasp the absolute need for efficient
administration, serious preparation and extensive experience to have any success
at all in international competition, one or two league clubs were more open to
experimentation. Manchester United led the way with a series of friendlies against
major European club sides. Thus when the Football League was finally prevailed
upon to discontinue its embargo on English clubs participating in European
180 Studies

competitions, United were more prepared than most. The first English side to enter
the European Cup in the 1956-7 season, they reached the semi-finals before going
down to the all-conquering Real Madrid. In the next year, they again qualified for
the semi-finals but the tragedy of the Munich air disaster out short the progress of
a young team, whose members might have introduced a whole new style to English
football at both international and club level. They were succeeded in the next two
season's competitions by Wolverhampton Wanderers, then by Burnley, neither of
Whom were able to cope with the sophistication of continental sides. It was left to
another exceptional team, Tottenham Hotspurs, to emulate United in the 1961 -2
season, going down by the odd goal in seven to Benfica in a two-legged semi-final.
In 1963, Spurs won the European Cup Winners' Cup, beating Athlético Madrid
-
5-1 in Rotterdam, and West Ham emulated them more narrowly and on the home
ground of Wembley in 1965. But a year earlier, a run of eight games without
defeat by the English national side had resulted in another defeat at home, this time
by Austria.
It had become obvious that English football was tactically and organizationally
anachronistit: in international terms. There had been little innovation since the w/m
formation produced by the change in the offside law of 1925. It involved three at
the back - two full-backs and a defensive centre-half two wing halves, who were
primarily fetchers and carriers, and five forwards, all of whom were expected to
attack, but the two inside forwards had special distributive responsibilities. This
formation dominated English football from its institution by Herbert Chapman in
the l 920s to the innovation of Alf Ramsey in the early l960s.
-
The response to the challenge of the continent and eventually that of South
-
America was less to alter the basic orientation to the game than to capitalize on
the 'English virtues': discipline, organization and stamina. The first move was to
withdraw one of the wing halves into the rear line of the deface and one inside
forward into the middle position. This was the 4-2-4 system. It became evident ,
however, that the midfield was the crucial arena: here the opposition must be
cramped for space, the ball won and distributed. This was too much for two men so
another forward was withdrawn, generally a winger, regarded in the new system as a
luxury since he depended on others for the ball. This gave us 4-3-3. The pattern of
innovation was abruptly terminated because a 'system' was perceived to have won
the World Cup for England in 1966. Ramsey experimented throughout the tourna-
ment but the lesson learnt from his success was that exceptional work-rate, team
understanding and defensive impenetrability could overcome more skilful but less
effective foreign sides. Without Ramsey/'s successful institutionalization, the
subsequent tactical system of English football Might not have become quite so rigid
or have been so slavishly reproduced throughout the league. The essential was the
attitude that (in Arthur Hopcraft's words) 'success was overridingly important, that
positive method, was indispensable, that attractiveness was incidental'.38
Ki 1968 Manchester United won the European Cup - though again home
advantage was crucial. Theirs was not an example to follow: a team of uniquely
skilful players, dependent on Celtic flair - Crerand, Law, Best - not without tactical
 Football since the war 181

organization but reliant on a kind of individual talent to which few ordinary league
clubs could aspire. In the World Cup of 1970 England were eliminated in late and
dramatic fashion by West Germany in the quarter final. The method, it was apparent ,
had its limitation, though there were those who defended Ramsey's record, pointing
to the narrow 011 defeat by Brazil as possibly the best game of the tournament.
By the early 1970s the necessity to compete seriously at international level had
established a new objective and incontrovertible way of testing the heals of
English football: the performance of the English national side in international
competitions, especially the World Cup. It was to be the elimination of England by
Poland in the qualifying competition of the 1974 World Cup which was to cause
Ramsey's downfall, just as the failure to score sufficient goals against Luxemburg
and Finland was the end of his successor, Don Revie .
The immediate impact of these developments on the domestic game is measurable
- the number of goals scored annually in the first division dropped from around
1600 in the early 1960s through 1400 in the middle of the decade to less than 1100
by 1971 . Though a slight increase was evident in the middle and late 1970s the
average was no more than 1200, a loss of one in four goals over twenty years. Amongst
its other legacies, systems football had given us the 0-0 draw. Essentially its
emphasis was defensive: if you couldn't score, you made sure the other team didn't.
The perilous economic situation of some clubs reinforced the tactics of fear, while
the defensive emphasis helped further to drive potential supporters away. The
player too was affected by the new tightness of the game; ball players were a luxury,
work-rate the norm, one small error could cost a game. In such an atmosphere it
was hardly surprising that brutality could become incorporated as a tactic. The
professional foul was born.
Its conception was at the international level. A loose framework of laws
appropriated by different cultural traditions was bound to bring out differences of
emphasis. Even so there seemed to be a virtual incompatibility between English
versions of acceptable physical contact and those of south European and South
American sides.
-
There are now two types of football in the world the British style and the Con-
-
tinental, Latin-American counterpart. When brought face to face as in Milan
-
recently they tend on occasions to provide an unhappy marriage. The foreigner,
nourished on a game of infiltration and sly intervention, with the minimum of
physical contact, regards the British attitude of hard tackling as quite brutal.
However fair and within the laws, this is considered overseas as ugly, coarse
and ruthless. The foreigner, for his part, employs subtle body-checking, shielding of
the ball and other tricks that rile the Briton. So the bonfire is ready for burning,
unhindered by crowds and referees who penalize the British method because it is
against their natures and upbringing."

As English football had to face up to the international unacceptability of its

essential roughness, so it tacitly agreed to drop some of the moreextreme features,
especially shoulder-barging and challenges on the goalkeeper. But the essential
182 Studies

toughness remained, and the best that could be achieved was an uneasy form of
truce which is still in force. In conjunction with the players' removal from the
context of traditional worldng-class attitudes towards violence, the continental
influence encouraged the development of premeditated forms of violence. The
worst elements of the traditional English game and. the new continental game were
merged into a pattern of violence which was at once deliberate and uncontrolled.
The one modern English team to successfully master continental styles has been
Liverpool. In their current phase (1976-8) they are undisputed club champions of
Europe. This has been achieved frequently with only two specialist forwards, but
with a midfield of such fleidbility that there are always men up in support. Yet
still a question remains about the attractiveness of this form of football. It is an
effective and efficient combination of pace and sldll, determination and virtuosity -
but few can hope to emulate it. Such football is essentially cerebral, the comparison
frequently made is with chess. The ball is moved sideways and backwards, carefully
retained until an opening becomes apparent. Nothing is attempted which may lose
possession and the overall effect is frequently claustrophobic. It depends crucially
-
on some exceptional individual skill first Keegan, then Dalgleish, supplemented by
-
Heighway and on a managerial ability to convert average players into exceptional
ones. Ray Kennedy can never produce his Liverpool form for England .
Perhaps the English national side under the open-ended philosophic approach
of a significantly unsuccessful club manager, Ron Greenwood, may prove in the long
run a more liberated approach than that of club sides. The structure of league
football has (not to mention that Celtic influence) always been geared to club
strength. Where clubs have to be prevailed on to release players between Saturday
league games for a couple of days before a midweek international, success at a
national level will always be hard to come by .
In any case it may be unreasonable to expect a national side to do anything but
reflect the weaknesses and strengths of the league game. While the ability to create
or score the unusual goal is prized more than ever, the system of coaching, of
tactics, of defensiveness, ensures that such tendencies will be quickly eliminated
amongst younger players. If there is a source of cultural innovation it may be
ethnic. Anderson of Nottingham Forest, Regis and Cunningham of Albion, Hazell
of Wolves may provide a confidence and freedom of expression lacking in the
indigenous game. Orient's fielding of five black players at the beginning of 1978-9
may .be a sign of things to come. It remains to be seen whether such influences
make any headway against the influences which have dominated the tactics of post-
war football, the need to succeed internationally, the financial penalties of failure ,
the sheer negative and defensive response of tactical thought ,

Conclusion
The argument here has been that in the post-war period there have been significant
qualitative shifts in the game of football, as it is played on the pitch, relayed by
television, organized through clubs, understood by the spectators, and experienced
 Football since the war 183
by the professional footballer. It would be too easy to summarize these develop-
ments as a conversion of a pure traditional working-class activity into some form of"
mass-produced and mass-consumed culture. Ian Taylor argues that the outcome is
that
we are presented with a soccer that is dominated by contractual relationships
between clubs and player and between player and supporter, a soccer in which
clubs are increasingly concerned to provide a passive form of spectacle, and a soccer
that is dominated by financial rather than by sub-cultural relationships.

We may not have a language to describe adequately the continuing transformation

of football. If there is a concept which can help to distill the dominant tendencies
it may be that of the spectacle. The spectacle is an item produced for consumption.
The essential relationship is that between producer and consumer. To this end the
event itself - in this case the ninety-minute match - is situated within specific
'demands' universally held by the consumer for adequate car parks, pre-match
entertainment, organized response, and fed information. The consumer is provided
for, his main activity is to decide whether to come, but beyond that he is expected
to exert himself little. As has been argued above, the provision of minimal comfort
is long overdue, and the loyalties of the eidstent footballing sub-culture are not
easily turned into the vagaries of consumerism. No Aston Villa supporter goes to
Birmingham City except to support the away team.
There is an example of a situation where the idea of the spectacle has dominated
football, and that is in the United States of America. Adequate information is hard
to come by since the English press has alternated between condescension and
sycophancy in its repot»1 in of American football .43 A few characteristics still
emerge: the ownership of whole clubs by corporations, the franchise system
enabling clubs tO be moved from city to city at will, the pre-match car-park
barbecues, organized cheerleading, continuous commentary, scoreboards which
light up when a foul is committed with the slogan 'Did You See That'. The game
itself has also been altered: offside restricted to part of the pitch, the abolition of
the draw replaced by 'sudden death' playoffs of beating the goalkeeper on the run,
even extending the size of the goals has been mooted. The objection is not to any
of these individually. The laws, for example, are subject to continuous reinterpreta-
tion and change and there may be a good case for experimenting with the offside
law. The question is what lands of consideration govern innovation. In the American
example the direction is consistently towards the spectacularization of football.
The event has been surrounded and penetrated by the need to provide instant
entertainment to keep the consumer interested .
It is unlikely that English league football will ever approximate to this kind of
cultural aberration (though Queens Park Rangers, among others, have installed a
declamatory scoreboard). But what has been happening in the post-war years has
been that football has lost its partial autonomy as a form of popular culture from
the economic and cultural forces dominant in the rest of society. This is not to
suggest that football has ever been in any sense oppositional. It was rather a symbolic
184 Studies

displacement, produced, transmitted and recognized by working-class men as

expressive of their situation. It could be argued that changes in the relative economic
situation of the post-war working class has rendered irrelevant traditional forms of
cultural expression, of which football was one. The redefinition of football has not,
however, primarily been by the supporters. An unholy and unwitting alliance of
the Professional Footballers Association, the Football League and Football Associ»
ation, the pundits of press and television, underwritten by objective financial
considerations (actually of their own malting), have begun the long process of
making football respectable, malleable to the needs of the mass media, aesthetic
rather than exciting, aimed at an audience of consumers rather than a body of
supporters.
There may be some measures which could divert football from its likely fate
as one of a number of uniformly packaged spectacles presented by capitalist business.
These might include: a change in the points system, to encourage attacldng play ,
severer penalties, including reductions in points, for clubs guilty of persistent foul
play, an abolition of the transfer system to stabilize the game's finances, nationali-
zation of the pools, and a subsidy to smaller clubs. But in the prevailing climate
such proposals are likely to seem too radical a break for those in charge of the
game's fortunes, whose sense of tradition is actually a habit of authority. Ultimately
the problem is that in football, as in many of its corporate cultural activities, the
power to control the institution does not rest with those on whose behalf it has been
created. The susceptibility of football to the financial dictates, consumer ideologies
and cultural definition of advanced monopoly capitalism may be revelatory of
weaknesses iNherent in the traditional corporate working-class culture. The need ,
in football as elsewhere, may be to take control.
8 Shop floor culture, masculinity and the
wage form
Paul Willis

The noise on our line is what drives you almost mad. You can never really get used
to it, and I have been there ten years (and in another factory ten years before that).
It would drive you mad, if you let it. Imagine nine men beating hammers and
mallets on steel. If there were some sort of rhythm to it, it wouldn't be so bad.
Bryan Slater, a line workers

Excruciating noise is probably the most unpleasant sensual concomitant of industrial

work. Its invocation serves to remind, even those who pride themselves of their
penetration of the consumeregalitarian-liberal mythology, that not only are
commodities produced under specific and determinate social conditions, but also
that they are produced under specific and determinate experientzkzl conditions.
What is the human meaning and actual experience that lies behind our easy use of
cars, cosmetics, clothes and buildings? What degree of frenzy, activity, boredom
and suffering has been objectified into the thousand articles on glamorous display
in the department store? Is the meaning and pleasure of these things as they are
consumed any more important than the meaning of the drudge of their production?
It is often forgotten that the main reality for most of the people, for most of the
time, is work and the sound of work - the grind of production, not the purr of con-
sumption, is the commonest mark of our industrial culture.
In what sense can we link factory sounds with culture? In what sense can we
link work with culture? It is one of the fundamental paradoxes of our social life that
when we are at our most natural, our most evelyday, we are also at our most
cultural; that when we are in roles that look the most obvious and given, we are
actually in roles that are constructed, learned and far from inevitable. Whenever
we are under pressure, late, worried, whenever there is little time for self-reflection,
pretence, whenever we are pushed and thankful for any role, any role, to get us
through time and the hour: then it seems we act in the obvious single way, the way
-
dictated by 'reality'. So too with work for many, dead time, human time sold for
the possibility of a real life later: it seems the most obvious and self-evident category
of human experience, the area where manners, culture and artifice intervene least
into our daily existence.
This view is wrong not because it mistakes the nature of work, but because it
mistakes the nature of culture. Culture is not artifice and manners, the preserve of
Sunday best, rainy afternoons and concert halls. It is the very material of our daily
186 Studies

lives, the bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings, feelings and
responses. We rely on cultural patterns and symbols for the minute, and uncon-
scious, social reflexes that make us social and collective beings: we are therefore
most deeply embedded in our culture when we are at our most natural and spon-
taneous' if you like at our most work-a-day. As soon as we think, as soon as we
see life as parts in a play, we are in a very important sense, already, one step away
from our real and living culture .
Clearly this is a special use of the concept of culture. In part it can be thought of
as an anthropological use of the term, where not only the special, heightened, and
separate forms of experience, but all experiences, and especially as they lie around
central life struggles and activities, are taken as the proper focus of a cultural
analysis.
Given this perspective, it should be clear that not only can work be analysed
from a cultural point of view, but that it must occupy a central place in any full
sense of culture. Most people spend their prime waking hours at work, base their
identity on work activities and are defined by others essentially through their relation
to work.
This is partially allowed in our common-sense knowledge of men and their gender
definition, but consider the stereotypical cultural role of women in our society. A
central and defining feature of womanhood in our society is still a very definite set
of expectations about her in relation to 'work'. She is supposed to take a 'light'
job, with relatively low status and rewards, and be prepared to give it up without
complaint in order to take on the 'more important' job of having children. So
complete is the denial of 'real' work to women, that even exceptionally and mani-
festly demanding domestic tabs are not allowed as serious work. The woman at
home is simply a 'housewife', complementing presumably, in the unspoken
couplet, the 'work-husband'. Her role is to provide the emotional home for the
family, and to wipe the brow of the 'bread winner': this is seen not as work but as
a service, or a state of being.
In spealdng of work and culture, then, in the same breath I am not positing
some esoteric link between Shakespeare and employment statistics, but a simple
proposition that work, and the massive experience of it, is right at the centre of our
-
living culture. Work is a living and active area of human involvement it makes, and
is made, by us. It affects the general social nature of our lives in the most profound
ways.
There is then no question, for me, of counterposing the 'cultural' with the
'productive' or the "real" as if the former had no actual constitutive role in the basic
social relations which govern the form of our society. I am arguing against a
trivialization of the notion of culture, of working-class culture and especially of its
central domain: cultural relations/struggles/forms at the point of production.
Culture is not simply a response to imposition which blinds or blunts a 'proper'
-
understanding, nor is it merely a compensation, an adjustment to defeat these
are essentially mechanized, reactive, models. Cultural forms occupy precisely those
same spaces and human potentialities which are fought over by capital to continue
 Shop floor culture, masculinity and the wage form 187

valorization and capital accumulation. There are different logics possible in the
direct experience of production than are posed in the capital relation itself, for
itself. Merely because capital would like to treat workers as robots does not mean
they are robots. The direct experiences of production are worked through and over
in the praxis of different cultural discourses. To be sure, these discourses do not
arise purely on the basis of production, and many of their important contents and
inner relationships arise from or in articulation with external forces and insti-
tutions: the family, state, labour organizations, etc. It is also clear that in this
society, for the moment, the material consequences of these cultural forms are for
continued production in the capitalist mode. But none of this should blind us to
the cornplerdties, struggles and tensions on the shop floor even if they do not
always call their name in a way which we can recognize. There are forms of praxis
arising from definite human agency at the site of production which, in the very
same moment, provide the conditions for capitalist relations and also partially
penetrate and variably challenge those relationships.
It is also specifically working-class cultural forces from the place of production
which help to mould the whole of the class culture. Production is not simply the
engine house of the social totality producing, somehow, its 'effects' elsewhere on
the social plane. Production, and its relations, is social and cultural to its very roots,
to its very surface. It is the privileged site and generator of worldng-class culture
both because of its massive presence and also because the struggle there fixes,
organizes in a particular combination, those discourses and external influences
which play over the place of work - helping to develop them in a particular way,
clinching certain features, even when appearing manifestly outside of production .
Work is where the demands of capital must be met but from the resources not
simply of potential abstract labour but from concrete, cultural forms of labour
power. Whatever 't`ree' play there is in cultural forms articulates always around
this most central point of reference. Non-work supplies many of the categories
and meanings for work but it can only be understood in relation to work and is
finally shaped by it. The following data, unless noted to the contrary, was collected
in a town which is part of a large Midland's conurbation in the course of an SSRC-
supported research project of 'The transition from school to work' between 1973
and 1975.2 This article refers to male cultures of work.
The first thing to say about the worldng-class culture of the work~place is that
it eidsts in hard conditions set by others. It is also worth remembering that for all
the talk of 'massive' wage settlements in the face of union 'blackmail' since the
war, the income of wage earners, as a proportion of GNP, has not changed in the
last fifty years.
The system of capitalism still means essentially, despite its contemporary 'human
i`ace', that labour is bought, detached from the individual, and directed towards the
production of commodities for the profit of others. Labour is dispossessed from its
owners. This labour is directed, emphatically, not for the satisfaction of its providers,
but for the profit of its new owners. If this requires work in inhuman and meaning-
less circumstances, then, there is nothing in the logic of capitalism to prevent this.
188 Studies
Writing in a completely different context, and addressing a completely different
problem, G. C. Mathew ,3 claims that fully 79 per cent of the ESN (educationally
sub-normal) could be placed in normal employment, since such employment
requires only a mental and emotional age of twelve. Now while one may welcome
this news on behalf of the ESN, what are its implications for the other 95 per
-
cent the regular incumbents of these jobs? It must be that they are doing work
wh.ich twelve-year-olds could do .
The main effect of this dispossession is most obvious in the case of boring,
repetitive, mindless jobs - a numbing sense of boredom and meaninglessness: sheer
unhappiness, if you like. This is most dramatically shown up by the many worldng-
class accounts of how time drags at work. Time and the task to be done become
utterly divorced. A job is undertaken not out of interest, but merely because orle's
bought labour is directed there. Without an intrinsic interest in the job, then, the
full focus of the detached consciousness is thrown on to the passing of time. This
focus itself, to say nothing of the actual drudgery of the job, slows time down to
a painful e>dstential drag. Here's a young lad who has just left school and started
to work in a car component factory :
I knew I'd be working eight to five [. . .] * but I thought, you know, go to school
'that's nothing', it's only an hour before I normally go to school, and an hour after,
like I did at school', but it's a lot longer, seems to drag [. . .] like now [. . .] me and
Les, we're always looking at that clock, thinking to ourselves, 'so many hours before
. .
we leave', something like this [ . .] The worst part of the day is about quarter to
nine in the morning, and it's really rotten, you think of the time you've still got to
the end of the day, especially if that three quarters of an hour has dragged [. . .]
when I first start like I don't usually look up at the clock and see what time it is
.
[. .] I start working, then about half past nine, that's the time it really gets you,
'God blimey, it's dragging, the time, I wish I warn't here, I wish I could be at home
in bed, sort of thing.'

Although distinctions must be made for region and occupation, the absolutely
central thing about the working-class culture of the shop floor is, however, that,
despite the dispossession, despite the bad conditions, despite the external directions,
despite the subjective ravages, people do look for meaning, they do impose frame-
works, they do seek enjoyment in activity, they do exercise their abilities. They
repossess, symbolically and really, aspects of their experience and capacities. They
do, paradoxically, thread through the dead experience of work a lim culture
which isn't simply a reflex of defeat. This culture is not the human remains of a
mechanical depredation, but a positive transformation of experience and a cele-
bration of shared values in symbols, artefacts and objects. lt allows people to
recognize and even to develop themselves. For this worldng-class culture of work
is not simply a foam padding, a rubber layer between humans and unpleasantness.
lt is an appropriation in its own right, an exercise of sldll, a motion, an activity
* In the transcriptions, time passing is indicated by . . . and material edited out is denoted
by [. . . | .
 Shop floor culture, masculinizy and the wage _form - 189

applied towards an end. It has this specifically human characteristic, even in con-
ditions of hardship and oppression.
What.are the elements of this culture? In the first place there is the sheer mental
and physical bravery of surviving in hostile conditions, and doing difficult work on
intractable materials. It is easy to romanticize this element, of course, and in one
way it is simply charting the degree of brutality a heavy work situation can inflict .
-
But in another way it is the first and specifically human response the holding of
an apparently endless and threatenhig set of demands by sheer strength and brute
skill. Already in this there is a stature and self-respect, a human stake on the table
against the relentless pressure of work to be done. This is the vital precondition of
more developed cultural forms and accomplishes the basic and primitive human-
ization of a situation: it marks a land of limit of dispossession. It halts the rout
of human meaning and takes a land of control so that more specifically creative
acts can follow. This primitivist base of work experience is also the material for a
crude pride and, as will be developed much more fully later, for the mythology of
masculine reputation - to be strong and to be known for it. Here is a retired steel-
man describing the furnaces in a steel-maldng area of the west of Scotland as they
were before World War III
They were the cold, metal, hand-charging sort and they catered for strong men,
only very strong men. About one steel worker in every ten could stand up to them
successfully, which was one reason why the furnacemen were looked up to in the
world of heavy industry. That they got the biggest pay packets was another reason.
They also had the biggest thirsts and that too was a prideful possession in that part
of the world [. . .] a legend grew up about the steel smelters. [. . .] The whole dis-
trict and for miles beyond it was a hotbed of steel works, iron puddling works and
coal mines. It was a place given over to the worship of strength and durability.
Indeed it needed strength to look at it, and durability to live in it.4

In a much less articulate way, but for that perhaps more convincing, the follow-
ing extract shows the same elemental selfesteem in the doing of a hard job well.
It also shows that in Some respects the hard environment can become the most
natural environment. There is also the grudging recognition of the profound charge
this land of acclimatization can make on a normal social life, even at the same
time that it is one of the major ways in which the hostile work environment is
made habitable. This is a foundry man talking at home about his work:
I work in a foundry..
.
_ . you know, drop forging . . . do you know anything about
it . . no . . . well you have the factory know the factory down down in Rolfe
.
Street, with the noise . , you can hear it in the street . . . I work there on the big
hammer . . . it's a six-tonner. I've worked there twenty-four years now. It's bloody
.
noisy but I've got used to it now . . and its hot . . . I don't get bored . . . there's
always new lines coming and you have to work out the best way of doing it . . . .
You have to keep going . . . and it's heavy work, the managers couldn't do it,
there's not many strong enough to keep lifting the metal . . . I earn eighty, ninety
pounds a week, and that's not bad is it? . . . it ain't easy like . . . you can definitely
190 Studies
say that I earn every penny of it . . . you have to keep it up you know. And the
managing director, I'd say 'heIlo' to him you know, and the progress manager
. .
. . ; they'll come around and I'll go . . 'all right' [thumbs up] . . and they know
. .
you, you know . . a group standing there watching you . . working . . . I like that
.. . .
. there's something there . . watching you like . . working . . .like that . . .
.
you have to keep going to get enough out . . that place depends on what you
produce l . . .] . You get used to the noise, they say I'm deaf and ignorant here, but
it's not that I'm deaf like . . .it's that you can hold a conversation better, talk, hear
..
what people say better at work . I can always hear what they say there, I can talk
..
easy, it's easier . yet in the house here, you've got to make . . . pronunciations is
it? yeah, you've got to like, say the word, say it clearly, and that's hard sometimes
. .
. . sometimes I can't hear straight away . . they say, 'you silly deaf old codger'
. .
that . . . it's just . well it's just getting used to the noise, I can hear
. . . it's not
perfectly well in the factory . . . . If I see two managers at the end of the shop, I
know, like I know just about what they're saying to each other.

It may be objected that the pattern of industrial work has changed: there are
no rough;jobs today. Besides, it can certainly be argued that there is nothing heroic
about the elemental qualities of strength and pride. They are not only made
anachronistic by today's technology, but are insulting, oppressive and right at the
poisonous heart of male chauvinism and archaic machismo.
Be that as it may be, two things are clear. Rough, Unpleasant, demanding jobs do
.still exist in considerable numbers. A whole range of jobs from building work, to
furnace work to deep-sea fishing still involve a primitive confrontation with exacting
physical tasks. Secondly, the basic attitudes and values developed in such jobs are
still very important in the general worldng-class culture, and particularly the culture
of the shop floor; this importance is vastly out of proportion to the number of
people actually involved in such heavy work. Even in so-called light industries, or
in highly mechanized factories with perhaps mixed sex work-forces, where the
awkwardness of the physical task has long since been reduced, the metaphoric
figures of strength and bravery worked through masculinity and reputation still
move beneath the more varied, visible forms of work-place culture.
Let us go on from this general minimum proposition to look at some of the more
specific and developed human patterns of the work-place. One of the marks of the
lived and contemporary culture of the shop floor is a development of this half-
mythical primitive confrontation with the task. It is a familiarity and experiential
sense of control of technology, or at least a sharing of its power. At the most
positive and extreme this can be not merely a meeting of demands, but a strange
kind of celebration. Here is a description from a toolmaker of his first day at
work.5 lt inverts the usual middle-class account of the dark satanic mill:

On every piece of open ground lay metal shapes, some mere bars and sheets straight
from the steelworks: others gigantic welded constructs covered in a deep brown
rust . . . Then I entered the great main workshops. Each chamber, or aisle as they
were called, was about 150 feet across and anything between 500 and 700 hundred
 Shop floor culture, masculinity and the wage form 191

yards long. Several of these great Vulcan halls lay parallel to each other 1, . .] Over-
head rolled the girded cranes capable of carrying weights of more than two hundred
.
tons [ . . .] one passed over my head. l . .l My startled attitude to the crane's
passage amused the men at work [. . .] a series of catcalls followed my passage down
the aisle. Mostly the shouts were good-natured advice to get out of the plant
while I had the youth to do so. Such advice never even penetrated my outer
consciousness, for how could anyone abhor this great masculine domain with its
endless overtones of power and violence?

Of course this is a special case of a skilled, elitist view of work. Changes in the l a b o r
process are no doubt squeezing out the space for such views.6 But we should not
underestimate the surviving degree to which mechanical, sensuous and concrete
familiarity with the tools of production (despite the dispo ssession of labour)
mediates the demands of the l a b o r process, allowing, for instance, the possibility
of an easy and confident mobility which at least brings alleviating changes in the
form of particular work experience if not in its deep structures.
Even, or perhaps especially, among the formally 'un/semi/skilled' there is a
process of obtaining skills as if by osmosis from the technical environment. There is
a profound air of competence in the culture of the shop floor, a competence which
always exists prior to the particular situation. It is not always based on strict ability,
but mixed in with cheek and confidence, it is enough to pull a worker through any
number of jobs and problems. Here is a man talking about his industrial career. He
gives us a glimpse of the real paths beaten between different jobs and occupations:
the paths, incidentally, which make it sensible to speak of the working class not
only as an abstract group of those who share similar interests, but as at least some-
thing of a self-experienced organic whole with real and used inner connections:
Well, I've got four trades really, you know I've only been in this job seven weeks.
.
I'm in a foundry now [ . . ,] on the track you know [ . -l . I was a metal polisher
before. It's a dirty job, but it pays good money, and a skilled job, you know metal
polishing. l . . .l Yes and I was a fitter down at drop forgings, as well, well I mean
in the situation today, you've got to go where the money is. Polishing is the best
money, but it's up and down, there was four or five months run of work and then
it 'ud go dead [ . . -l I got out of it didn't I [ . . .] Friend o' mine got me a job down
at the MMC [ . . .] I've worked in a garage, or . . . I worked for the council paper-
hanging and decorating, I worked for a fella . . . chimney sweeping in the winter,
decorating and painting in the summer and all this but I've always took an interest
in what I've been doing you know, I mean, I'm pretty adaptable, put it that way
you know I- , .] I've always had a motor of my own, and I've always done me own
repairs, whenever I've broken me motor, only through experience doing it oneself
.
[. .] Paper hanging, decorating, I've got an in~law ain't I, that's a decorator, give
me a lot ot tips you know [ . . .] . l bluffed me way in to decorating. I said I was a
decorator you know, went to work for the council. Actually I subcontracted for
the council, and they give an house to do, an empty house, and I done it see.
Course the inspector come round from the Council and they was satisfied with the
work, you know, so you know if the inspector's satisfied, you're all right see. It's
only common sense really.
192 Studies

In one sense this can be seen as a way of regaining some control over one's
labour power and its disposition. This leads us to another important element in
shop-floor culture: the massive attempt to gain informal control of the work process.
Limitation of output or 'systematic soldiering' and 'gold bricldng' have been
observed from the particular perspective of management from Taylor onwards, but
- -
there is evidence now of a more concerted though still informal attempt to gain
control. In many plants the men, themselves, to all intents and purposes actually
control at least manning and the speed of production. Of course the downward
limit for this possibility is set by the production of the costs of subsistence of the
worker. If control is exerted on production it is indeed a control of minima as well
as of marina. Nevertheless the exertion towards control should not be minimized.
Here is a man on track production of car engines:
Actually the foreman, the gaffer, don't run the place, the men run the place. See,
I mean you get one of the chaps says, 'Allright, you'm on so and so today. You can't
argue with him. The gaffer don't give you the job, the men on the track give you the
job, they swop each other about, tek it in turns. Ah, but I mean the job's done. If
the gaffer had gi'd you the job you would . . . They tried to d o it one morning, gi'd
a chap a job you know, but he'd been on it, you know, I think he'd been on all
week, and they just downed tools [. . .] . There's four hard jobs on the track and
.
there's dozens that's, . . you know, a child of five could do it, quite honestly, but
everybody has their turn. That's organized by the men.

This tendency rests on the social force most basically of the informal group. It
is the zone where strategies for wresting control of symbolic and real space from
official authority are generated and disseminated. It is the massive presence of this
informal organization which most decisively marks off shop-floor culture from
middle-class cultures of work.
Amongst workers it is also the basis for extensive bartering, 'arranging foreigners'
and 'fiddling 'Winning' materials is widespread on the shop floor and is endorsed
by implicit informal criteria. Ostracism is the punishment for not maintaining the
integrity of this world against the persistent intrusions of the formal.

A foreman is like, you know what I mean, they're trying to get on, they'1-e trying
to get up. They'd cut everybody's throat to get there. You get people like this in
the factory. Course these people cop it in the neck off the workers, they do all the
tricks under the sun. You know what I mean, they don't like to see anyone crawlier'
[ . . .] Course instead of taking one pair of glasses from the stores Jim had two, you
see, and a couple of masks and about six pairs o' gloves. Course this Martin was
watching and actually two days after we found out that he'd told the foreman see.
Had 'in, Jim, in the office about it, the foreman did, and, [. . .] well I mean, his
life hasn't been worth living has it? Eh, nobody speaks to him, they won't give him
.
a light, nobody'll give him a light for his fag or nothing' . . . Well, he won't do it
again, he won't do it again. I mean he puts his kettle on, on the stove of a morning,
so they knock it off, don't they, you know, tek all his water out, put sand in, all
this kind of thing I. . .] if he cum to the gaffer, 'Somebody's knocked me water
 Shop floor culture, masculinity and the wage .form 193

over' or, er, 'They put sand in me cup', and all this business, 'Who is it then'?' 'I
don't know who it is.' He'll never find out who it is.
Another clear aspect of shop-floor culture is the distinctive form of language use
and a highly developed form of intimidatory humour. Many verbal exchanges on the
shop floor are not serious or about work activities. They are jokes, or 'piss-takes', or
'biddings' or 'windups'. There is a real skill in being able to use this language with
fluency: to identify the points on which you are being 'lidded' and to have appro-
priate responses ready in order to avoid further baiting.
This badinage is necessarily difficult to record on tape or to re-present, but the
highly distinctive ambience it gives to shop-floor exchanges is widely recognized by
those involved, and to some extent recreated in their accounts of it. Here is a
foundry worker :
Oh, there's all sorts, millions of them [jokes] . 'Want to hear what he said about you' 2

and he never said a thing, you know. Course you know the language at the work
like. 'What you been saying about me?' 'I said nothing' 'Oh you're a bloody liar',
and all this.
Associated with this concrete and expressive verbal hUmor is a well-developed
physical humour: essentially the practical joke. These jokes are vigorous, sharp,
sometimes cruel, and often hinge around prime tenets Of the culture such as disrup-
tion of production or subversion of the boss's authority and status. Here is the
track worker again ,
They play jokes on you, blokes knocking the clamps off the boxes, they put paste
on the bottom of the hammer you know, soft little thing, puts his hammer down,
picks it up, gets a handful of paste, you know, all this. So he comes up and gets a
syringe and throws it in the big bucket of Paste, and it's about that deep, and it
goes right to the bottom, you have to put your hand in and get it out . . . This is a
filthy thick, but they do it [. . .l They asked, the gaffers asked Charlie to make the
tea. Well it's fifteen yours he's been there and they say 'go and make the tea'. He
goes up the toilet, he wets in the tea pot, then makes the tea. I mean, you know,
this is the truth this is you know. He says, you know, 'I'll piss in it if I mek it, if
they've asked me to mek it' [. . .l so he goes up, wees in the pot, then he puts the
tea bag, then he puts the hot water in. [ . . .] He was bad the next morning, one of
the gaffers, 'My stomach isn't half upset this morning.' He told them after and they
called him for everything, 'You ain't making" our tea no more.' He says 'I know I
ain't not now.'
Many of the jokes circle around the concept of authority itself and around its
informal complement, 'grassing The same man:

He [Johnny] says, 'Get a couple of pieces of bread pudding Tony [a new worker]
we'lI have them with our tea this afternoon see.' The woman gi'd him some in a bag
he says, 'Now put them in your pocket, you won't have to pay for them when you
.
go past, you know, the tilT [. .] Tony put 'em in his pocket didn't he and walked
.
past with his dinner [ . .] When we come back out the canteen, Johnny was telling
194 Studies

everbody that he'd [i.'e. Tony] pinched two pieces of bread pudding [ . . .] he told
Fred, one of the foremen see, 'cos Fred knows, I mean . . . Johnny says, I've got to
tell you Fred,' he says, 'Tony pinched two pieces of bread pudding' I mean serious,
the way they look you know [. . .] . He called Johnny for everything, young Tony
did. Fred said, 'I want to see you in my office in twenty m`1nutes', straightfaced you
know, serious. Oh, I mean, Johnny, he nearly cried.[. . .] We said, 'It's serious like,
.
you're in trouble, you'll get the sack', you know and all this. [ . .] they never laugh.
He says, 'What do you think's gonna happen?' 'Well, what can happen, you'lI
probably get your cards." [. . .] 'Oh what am I gonna do, bleeding Smith up there,
he's really done me, I'11 do him.' I says, 'Blimey, Tony', I says, 'it ain't right, if other
people can't get away with it, why should you 'a' to get away with it.' 'Ooh.' Any-
way Fred knocked the window and he says, 'Tell Johnny I want him.' He says,
'You've got the sack now, .Tohnny', you know. 'Hope I haven't', he says, 'I dunno
what I'm gonna do.' [. . .] After they cum out, laughing, I said, 'What did he say to
you, Johnny?' He says, 'He asked me if I pinched two pieces of bread pudding, so I
couldn't deny it, I said I had. He says, "AIl I want to know is why you didn't bring
me two pieces an' all." "

Another important element of this culture is the massive feeling on the shop
floor, and in the working class generally, that practice is more important than
theory. As a big handwritten sign, borrowed from the back of a matchbox and put
up by one of the workers, announces on one shop floor: 'An ounce of keenness is
worth a whole library of certificates'. The shop floor abounds with apocryphal
stories about the idiocy of purely theoretical knowledge. Practical ability always
come first and is a condition of other lands of knowledge. Whereas in middle-class
culture knowledge and qualifications are seen as a way of shifting upwards the
whole mode of practical alternatives open to an individual, in worldng-class eyes
theory is riveted to particular productive practices. If it cannot earn its keep there,
it is to be rejected. Here is a man currently working as a metal polisher:
In Toll End Road, there's a garage, and I used to work part time there and . . .
there's an elderly fellow there, been a mechanic all his life, and he must have been
seventy years of age then. He was an old Indconsville professional, been a pro-
fessional boxer once, an elderly chap and he was a practical man, he was practical,
right? . . . and he told me this. [. . .] I was talking to him, was talking about some-
.
thing like this, he says [. . .] 'This chap was all theory and he sends away for books
about everything', and he says, 'Do you know', he says, 'He sent away for a book
once and it came in a wooden box, and it's still in that box 'cos he can't open it.'
Now that if 't true, is it? But the point is true. That i'nt true, that didn't happen,
but his point is right. He can't get at that book 'cos he don't know how to open the
box! Now what's the good of that?

This can be seen as a clear and usually unremarked class function of knowledge.
The working-class view would be the rational one, were it not located in class
society , i.e. that theory is only useful in so far as it really does help to do things,
to accomplish practical tasks and change nature. Theory is asked to be in a close
dialectic with the material world. For the middle class, more aware of its position
 Shop floor culture, masculinity and the wage form 195

in a class society, however, theory is seen partly in its social guise of qualifications
as the power to move up on the social scale. In this sense theory is well worth
having even if it is never applied to nature. It serves its purpose in society as a
ticket to travel. Paradmdcally, the worldng class distrust and rejection of theory
comes partly from a kind of recognition, even in the moment that it oppresses, of
the hollowness of theory in its social guise.
The wage and the Thursday afternoon wage packet are an essential element of
shop-floor culture. Weeldy wages, not yearly salaries, mark the giving of l a b o r . The
quantity of the wage packet is the quantitive passage of time. Its diminution is loss
of measured time, its increase 'overtime'. Such an orientation makes it that much
easier to overlook the real, continuous, sensuous and variable quality of labour
power and to miss the sense in which its full giving over time opens up enormous
human energies which are actually unmeasurable. What amounts to a fetishism of
-
the wage packet nurtured with tight-gummed compact brown envelope breaks -
up the weeks, quantities effort, and presents to consciousness the massive effort
and potential of human labour power as a simple concrete weedy equivalent to
the crisp 'fair' wage. In the elemental weedy exchange, it seems, labour power
must be spent in order to obtain every week the cash necessary to live. The loss of
the wage packet is the loss of a week. That is why this loss is so feared and mytho-
logized on the shop floor. This loss posits concretely the atomization of labour
power and its quantitative equivalence with the wage. More effectively than a
monthly cheque paid unseen into a bank account, the weeldy wage prevents a
realization of the disjunction between the variability of long-term vital effort and
a fixed wage return.
Of course, part of the case here is that shop»floor relations operate at a cultural
level in a number of ways to resist intensification and to exert some control on
production. There is, so to speak, a partial recognition of the special nature of
l a b o r power as a commodity 'like no other', of its essentially variable nature .
There are 'cultural instincts' to limit its use and further exploitation. These pro-
cesses should be understood, though, not as finally and formally successful, but
as in permanent tension with counteracting ideological tendencies. Perhaps they
are most held in check by the classic version of the wage form considered here .
Experiential forms of the awareness of time, for instance, can centre decisively
around the wage packet and what it offers. Though even here a resistance is regis-
tered, at least negatively and individually in the strange time warp around the
inherently meaningless weekly work cycle and its illusory wage form. The young
lad in a car components factory :
You know, at work, say stapling sort of thing, you come 'Cor blimey, what am I
doing here'?' sort of thing you know. I just imagine me in say ten years time, I'll
still be doing the same thing I expect, and I just don't you know . . . It'd send me
mad I think, just keep doing it, a lifetime, I want something better out of life.
[. . .I The nice part of the week is Friday dinner time when I get me wages . . .
they bring it on a tray, the wages. It's funny though, all week I'm thinking, 'Roll
on Friday, and we can go down town Saturday,' and you look forward to it. When
196 Studies

you get to town Saturday, you think, 'What was I looking forward to'?' But I still
look forward to it every week, just the same.

Perhaps the most prosaic but actually startling element of shop-floor culture
- -
is the articulation of manual labour power as it is concretely practised with
assertive male gender definitions. There is an infusion of assertive masculine style
and meaning into the primitive, mythologized elements of confrontation with
'the task'. It is also a masculine expressivity which often delivers or makes possible
some of the concrete revelatory or oppositional cultural practices we have con-
sidered; resistance to authority, control through the group, humour and language,
distrust of theory. There are profound implications here for the internal (to pro-
duction) disorganization of a proper recognition of the nature and capitalist use
of l a b o r power and for external gender definitions and forms of family life. The
conjunction of elements of manual labour power with certain kinds of masculine
gender definitions in the culture of the shop floor is one of the truly essential
features of the social organization of the shop floor. Yet it is usually un- or mis-
recognized.7 The seidst attitudes of the male shop floor, the inevitable nubile pin-up
over well-worked machinery, heavy sexual references and jokes in language are
simply accepted as the natural form of shop floor life. One of our central tasks
must be to critically understand this relationship.
Manual l a b o r is suffused with masculine qualities and given certain sensual
overtones. The toughness and awkwardness of physical work and effort - for itself
and in the division of labour, and for itsstrictly capitalist logic quite without
-
intrinsic heroism or grandeur takes on masculine lights and depths and assumes
a significance beyond itself. Whatever the specific problems of the difficult task,
they are always essentially masculine problems, requiriNg masculine capacities to
deal with them. We may say that where the principle of general abstract labour has
emptied work of significance from the inside, a transformed patriarchy has filled
it with significance from the outside. Discontent with work is turned away from a
political discontent and confused in its logic by a huge detour into the symbolic
sexual realm •
The brutality of the working situation is partially reinterpreted into a heroic
exercise of manly confrontation with 'the task'. Difficult, uncomfortable or
dangerous conditions are seen, not for themselves, but for their appropriateness to
a masculine readiness and hardness. They are understood more through the tough-
ness required to survive them, than through the nature of the imposition which
asks them to be faced in the first place.
Though it is difficult to obtain stature in work itself, both what work provides
and the very sacrifice and strength required to do it provides the materials for an
elemental self-esteem. This self-esteem derives from the achievement of a purpose
- -
which not all particularly women are held capable of achieving. The wage packet
is the provider of freedom and independence: the particular prize of masculinity
in work. This is the complement of, and what makes it possible, the fetishism of
the wage packet. A trade is judged not for itself, nor even for its general financial
 Shop floor culture, masculinity and the wage form 197
return, but for its ability to provide the central, domestic, role for its incumbent.
Clearly money is part of this - but as a measure, not the essence: 'You can raise a
family off polishing.' The male wage packet is held to be central, not simply
because of its size, but because it is won in a masculine mode in confrontation
with the 'real' world which is too tough for the woman. Thus the man in the
domestic household is held to be the bread-winner, 'the worke;r', while the wife
works for the extras. Very often, of course, the material importance of her wage
may be much greater than this suggests, and certainly her domestic labour is the
lynchpin of the whole household economy. The wage packet as a kind of symbol
of machismo dictates the domestic culture and economy and tyrannizes both
men and women.
In the machismo of manual work the will to finish a job, the will to really work
- is posited as a masculine logic, and not as the logic of exploitation. 'It's a man's
want to be finished when he starts a job.' The very teleology of the process of
work upon nature, and the material power involved in that, becomes, through the
conflation of masculinity and manual work, a property of masculinity and not of
production. Masculinity is power in its own right, and if its immediate expression
is in the completion of work for another, then what of it? It has to be expressed
somewhere because it is a quality of being. That is the destiny which a certain kind
of self-esteem and dignity seems naturally to bring. Where the intransigence and
hardness of a task might bring weakness, or collective opposition or questioning,
- -
an override of masculinity a transferred teleology of production can cut in to
push back fatigue and rational assessment of purpose.
And if the nature of masculinity in work becomes a style of teleology, comple-
tion and production, femininity is associated with a fixed state. Its labour power
is considered as an ontological state of being, not a teleological process of becoming.
Housework is not completion. It is rather maintenance of status. Cooling, washing
and cleaning reproduce what was there before. Female domestic work is simply
subsumed under being 'mum' or 'housewife'. Mum will always do it, and should
always be expected to do it. It is part of the definition of what she is, as the wage
packet and the productive world of work is of what dad is.
Though this is speculation only, I pose the following concluding remarks just to
explore the breaking open of the constructedness of cultural forms. The public and
visible struggle of the labor movement too often renders invisible the ocean of
what it moves through: shop floor culture. This is not to minimize the historic
importance of the trade unions but it might be suggested that the type of masculine
expression and identity we have considered influence the form of trade union
struggle in the most profound ways. It has certainly been remarked that the accep-
- -
tance of the wage form and of the struggle delimited by that has profoundly
influenced British trade unionism. Can we add that both conscious and unconscious
masculine structures have confirmed this and also helped to develop a characteristic
trade union consciousness? And on both accounts we should not ignore the reverse
-
shaping force of trade unions on cultural forms or at least the significance of their
failure to formally develop nascent forms not only of opposition but of repossession
198 Studies

in shop-floor culture .
Certainly the union official or shop steward uses particular shop-floor cultural
-
forms to mobilize 'the lads' the spectacle or bluff, or strong and combative language
which are suffused with masculine feelings. This establishes a real expression of
anger and opposition which may be very effective in the short term, and is certainly
a force to be reckoned with. This is, however, a selective working up and use of
cultural forms, one which ominously corresponds with certain profound features of
-
the wage form. It may be that longer-term objectives which are at least partially
-
expressed in other cultural forms simply cannot be conceptualized in this way and
are, to a certain extent, made inoperative by default at the face-to-face and grass-
roots level. The masculine style of confrontation demands an appropriate and
honorable resolution: visible and immediate concessions. If this is its price, how-
ever, it can be bought off in the most 'concrete' of all forms: 'hard cash'. But the
-
visibility of the concessions won in this way the larger, masculine, fetishized,
-
brown wage packet may actually conceal longer-term defeats over the less visible
issues of control and ownership. It is possible to satisfy violent and possibly even
frightening demands by short-term, visible and dramatic concessions without
changing any of those basic arrangements which the violence might appear to
threaten.
It may be the unholy interlocked grip of masculinity and the wage form which
holds in check the other possibilities of shop-floor culture and settles, for the
moment, the nature of its influence on other social regions.
Part 3
Theories
 Three problematics: elements of a
theory of working-class culture
Richard Johnson

We return now to the more general problems posed at the end of the first part of
this book. Do we need new ways of thinking about working-class culture and what
should these be? We proceed by identifying three main approaches. We suggest that
each is, in some way, inadequate. We end by suggesting pointers to a better practice.
The three main approaches are rooted in the larger tendencies which we dis-
cussed in Chapter 2. Each employs its own key terms. Within orthodox Marxism
the key terms have been 'class' and 'class consciousness In the work of Williams,
Thompson, Hoggart and others, 'culture' replaced 'consciousness' or forced a
reworking of its meaning. 'Culture' and 'consciousness', however, remained closely
coupled to 'class'. The term 'working-class culture' lies firmly within this problema-
tic. Finally, in 'structuralist' approaches the consciousness/class couplet altogether
disappears. As two not-dissimilar terms in Althusser's work we might choose
ideology' and 'mode of production' or 'ideology' and 'social formation'. But the
truth is that there are no real equivalents across these traditions. Each semantic
shift represents a major theoretical and political movement.
The notion of 'problematic' and the procedure of 'symptomatic reading' are
absolutely indispensable tools of analysis and critique. They inform this essay
throughout. 'Problematic' may be defined as a 'definite theoretical structure', a
field of concepts, which organizes a particular science or individual text by making
it possible to ask some kinds of questions and by suppressing others. In 'symp-
tomatic reading' a text is read as much for its 'absences' or 'silences' as for what it more
directly 'says'.1 The problematic(s) of a particular text may be more or less explicit.
In works of history the organizing ideas and presuppositions may lie very deep.
They none the less exist. One aspect of critique, then, is to render explicit what is
implicit, and to consider the underlying propositions. For Althusser, concerned
with historical materialism as the 'science of the history of social formations',
intellectual productions in the human sciences are organized around a conception
of the relation of 'thought' and other practices (an epistemology) and a conception
of the general nature of societies (a sociology). His repertoire of critical terms -
-
'humanist', 'historicist', 'empiricist', etc. designate particular faults in either
aspect or in both .
The Althusserian 'reading' is inadequate in so far as it stops short at the analysis
of 'problematic'. For the appearance of finality in the method is quite illusory.
Symptomatic reading provides us with a description of a work, or of its main
202 Theohés

internal structures. The dismissal, at this stage, of a text as 'historicist', 'empiricist',

etc., can only rest upon a very formal idea of 'science', in Althusser'S case, of
'Marx's immense theoretical revolution'. To stop at this stage is merely to say,
'This is not a Marxist text according to the way I have defined Marxism.'
It is not possible to accept, just like that, Althusser's own definition of Marx's
uniqueness and scientific superiority, or his own taldng of sides within Marxism as
a tradition. Structuralism has certainly recovered a Marx: one might be pardoned
for doubting whether it recovered the Marx. Reading Capital 's conception of
'Marrdsm-as-science' and all else including Marzdst heresies as 'ideology' tends to a
closure, prematurely cutting off that open exploration which Althusser himself has
defined as the key to science. Answers to the question 'What is Marxism' remain
far too difficult to be a valid way of closing debates of substance.
Allied to this difficulty is the strongly reductive character of some forms of
symptomatic reading. The whole of an account is reduced to its problematic. This
is particularly gross when applied to works of great empirical density, to most
histories for example. Presuppositions once identified, it is necessary to return to
the surface of the text and to show the effects of theoretical structures on the
detailed treatment of events, the construction of narrative, the portrayal of
relations, on the actual texture of the historical account. And there are arguments
to be conducted on this level too: 'within this problematic it is not possible to
account for this or that phenomenon which other research reveals', 'the inco-
herences of that part of the account is related to the failure fully to theorize these
sets of relations', 'theoretical rigidity has produced this or that a priorism with no
corresponding research'. In other words, the adequacy of a particular problematic
can only be assessed at the author's preferred level of analysis. In such a critique,
the proposition that 'historicism' (or any other -ism) is, in general, flawed, is itself
on test.
The third main difficulty is the absence of historical critique This is allied to
the high 'theoreticism' of Reading Capital, its stress on general epistemological or
philosophical questions, its 'speculative' or 'rationalist' character. This old and
correct criticism of 'structuralism' has been endorsed by Althusser himself in his
Essays iN Self-Criticism. The corrective is simple: to recognize that every problem-
atic has a history or, as Althusser puts it, 'material', social, political, ideological
and philosophical conditions'.3 The adequacy of a theory cannot be judged outside
these conditions by purely internal criteria.
Finally, in some usages, 'problematic' has a tendency to simplify or homogenize
texts or theories.4 There is a temptation to look for the 'essence' of a text. As
essential unities, then, texts or theories may be discarded wholesale. The method
adopted here rests on different assumptions. The struggle over definitions depends
precisely on the fact that the concepts that constitute a given problematic are not
'all of a piece'. As elements, reorganized, they may constitute the basis for more
adequate accounts. Elements taken from different easting problematics may, in a
new order and constituting a new field, yield us greater explanatory power and
political purchase.5
 Three problematics 203

In what follows we try to learn from this settling of accounts with our erstwhile
Althusserianism. No full history of our three problematics can be attempted, but
the historical nature of the ideas we use is fully recognized.

Class and class-consciousness in 'Manifesto Marxism'

This view of class had its origins in the collaborative work of the young Marx and
Engels. It was an attempt to understand their political experiences in the early
communist movement and the novel features of English social life, especially of
the English 'proletariat'. The key texts are Marx's Poverty of PhilosopNy (1847),
the jointly authored German Ideology (1845-6), and The Communist Manifesto
(1848) and Engels's own The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844);
the last two works are especially important. The political and intellectual moment
represented by Engel's Condition was as important as the departure from philo-
sophical communism represented in the classical work of 'the break', The German
Ideology. Engels's encounters with English working-class movements and English
radical theory, together with his strategic location in Manchester, the 'shock city'
of the Industrial Revolution, supplied 'the changing questions which provoked the
new theory'.6 Many of the themes of The Communist Manifesto are demonstratably
present in Engels's Condition, the second text is, in many ways, a working up of
Engels's primary insights.
Certain key elements of the classic Marxist view of the proletariat were formed,
therefore, before the emergence of a modern working class. They also preceded
Marx's mature understandings of the capitalist mode of production and the charac-
ter and constitution of classes within this mode. The Communist Manifesto view of
classes remains somewhat 'philosophical', based upon a generalized view of pro-
letarian destinies (the 'negation' of bourgeois society) rather than a full grasp of
capitalism's internal dynamics? The political features of Britain and Europe before
-
1848 are no less significant. The character of the writing the feeling of wide-eyed
discovery in Engels's Condition ('Of the vehemence of this agitation no-one in
Germany has any idea'), the assured sweep of The Communist Manifesto, the
-
intmdcated polemic against Proudhon's idealism all testify to the expectancy out
of which historical materialism was born, Yet theories generated from the intellec-
tual consumption of very specific events do not always serve well as more general-
ized truths 140 years later.
The class and class-consciousness problematic rests on a distinction made explicit
in T719 Poverty of P/tilosophy between two aspects of the proletariat as a class. The
proletariat is a class in its relations with ('as against') capital: under capital's domina-
tion 'this mass' acquired ' c o m m o n situation, common interests'.8 At the heart of
this definition of class is the figure of 'the worker' or 'the labourer': 'a class of
labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long
as their labour increases capital'.9 In this first guise the proletariat is understood,
passively, as a creation of capital, thrown hither and thither by its movements, only
in Q second moment does it become active, a collective agency or force 'for itself",
204 Theories
Proletarians acquire the capacity to struggle and to conceive of their place within
capitalism and history .
Some such distinction (between economic classes and political forces) is, ana-
lytically, indispensable. But these two forms of analysis are also bound, in the
original formulation, into a necessary and causative unity: they are stages in one
necessary historical process. The grand design of proletarian politics is already
present in the economic position of the labourer. The position of proletarians in
their relation to capital produces the proletariat as a revolutionary class. Capital
produces its own negation, its own 'grave-digger'. In the early texts this doctrine
permits of no contingencies. As Stuart Hall has noted, of The Manifesto: 'what is
.
so fatally seductive about this text is its simplifying revolutionary sweep . . above
all, its unmodified sense of historical inevitability'.10
There are, perhaps, two possible readings of how this argument is actually
secured in the early texts. Priority could be given to the stress on class struggle.
Though antagonisms are founded in the direct relations of capitalist production,
outcomes are not. The proletariat as a political force is 'made' in protracted and
repeated struggles, major difficulties, especially capital's tendency to place laborers
in competition, must be overcome. One might call this the 'activist' reading of the
early texts: it points to the priority of politics developed in later Marx-Engels texts
and in I_enin's theory and practice.
'reading

But this cannot be sustained textually. The various forms of class struggle
always appear in the guise of 'phases' or 'stages', a 'growing revolt': individual acts
of crime, followed by trade union combinations, followed by Chartism as a political
party, followed by a communist-led proletarian rnovement.11 The stages themselves
are very little explored, even in The Condition. There is no consideration of the
ways in which these working-class practices (forms of class struggle within capital-
ism) may actually modify capitalism's structure or affect bourgeois strategies,
including strategies of accumulation. Engels in The Condition, indeed, found trade
unionism an index of the English 'social war' and a stage along the road to the
abolition of 'competition' but doubted its practical effects in other ways." The
whole discussion of 'stages' is organized teleologically, not in terms of particular
effects. Attention is drawn forward to the revolutionary future, with little pause
for study on the way .
That future, moreover, is given in the character of capitalism itself. The pro-
letariat is the agent of revolution, but its revolt is not merely 'growing', it is also
obligatory. EJ. Hobsbawm's summary of the main lines of argument in The
Condition is quite faithful to Engels's text but reveals a whole theoretical legacy.
Socially Engels sees the transformations brought about by the Industrial Revolution
as a gigantic process of concentration and polarization, whose tendency is to create
a growing proletariat. . . . The rise of capitalist industrialism destroys the petty
commodity producers, peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, and the decline of these
intermediate strata, depriving the worker of the possibility of becoming a small
master, confines him to the ranks of the proletariat which thus becomes 'a definite
class in the population, whereas it had only been a transitional stage towards
 Three problematics 205

entering into the middle-classes'. The workers therefore develop class consciousness
. . . and a labour movement. Here is another of Engels' major achievements. In
Lenin's words 'he was among the first to say that the proletariat is not only a class
that suffers; that it is precisely its shameful economic situation which irresistibly
drives it forward, and obliges it to struggle for its final emancipation'.13

The problems are concentrated in the breath-taldng sentence: 'the workers

therefore develop class consciousness But this 'therefore' is plainly present in the
texts themselves. It is present in the oft-repeated argument about the rnassification
and concentration of working-class thought.14 But the most important generator of
class consciousness is the sheer force of economic relations. The proletariat is
driven to revolt. If the bourgeoisie simplifies society, it simplifies the proletarian
too. It strips him of all incidentals. He is reduced to economic simplicity itself: to
naked necessity and need, pure lack, 'bare e>dstence'. He has 'nothing to lose but
his chains'. He is stripped of all illusions, including those of nationality. No mean
English bourgeois he, but full of 'passions as strong and mighty as those of the
foreigner'.15 Moreover the relations in which he stands, the cause of his suffering,
become more and more visible. In the end the modern laborer has no choice but
to revolt while capitalism opens itself to him, as a book. It cannot even guarantee
the means of his existence :
In order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it
can, at least, continue its slavish existence . . . . The modern labourer . . , instead
of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions
of existence of his own class . . . . And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie
is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of
existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incom-
.
petent to assure an existence to its slave . . because it cannot help letting him sink
into such a state. . . . Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other
words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.16

The historical content of this passage is clear through the 'philosophical' forms.
The feeling that capitalist society provided no lodgment for the worker, that the
position of proletarian was simply not habitable, is a dominant tone of early
working-class radicalism. It was based certainly on extreme privatiorrs but, as
Edward Thompson has stressed, also on a widespread sense of loss. This was the
experience of the small-producer-becoming-proletarian, not yet, one must insist,
the characteristic experience of the proletarian as such. Of course, the modern
working-class was to be made and remade and made again in struggles against
capital, but the content of these later struggles was to be more the faining of
capital than its abolition. Based upon observation of a particular phase, 'Manifesto
Marxism' extrapolated its features into a law of capitalism as such.
It is possible to add more theoretical criticisms, based, that is, in a knowledge
of subsequent events and of contemporary needs. These points are relevantly made
since 'Manifesto Marxism' remains a mid-twentieth-century presence. This form of
206 Theodes

Maridsm does not grasp specifically cultural or ideological conditions of opposi-

tional worldng-class politics. Though Marx and Engels continually argued against
early European socialisms, they remained incurious about popular cultural legacies.
Engels's portrayal of pre-Chartist popular culture, for instance, is self-confessed
guesswork that achieves a high comic character :
They could rarely read and far more rarely write, went regularly to church, never
talked politics, never conspired, never thought, delighted in physical exercises,
'inherited

listened with reverence when the Bible was read, and were, in their
unquestioning humility, exceedingly well-disposed towards the 'superior' classes.
But, intellectually, they were dead . . . .17

His accounts of Chartist culture are, by contrast, full of excitement and particu-
larity. But it is precisely the less overtly 'political' elements of a culture that most
need study, since their role in politics is most obscure.
Other criticisms concern the neglect of complexity." Within this problematic
internal couple>dties of the class Cin itself') cannot be grasped. Yet historically the
labourer's dependence on capital has taken varied forms. Divisions within the class
have been exceedingly complex. 'Simplification' seems always to produce further
internal structurations. Similarly, the simple class/party relation gives us little pur-
chase on the complexities of working-class politics and representation. These
points will recur later in the argument .
Several commentators have noted important subsequent shifts in Marx's theory
of classes. These amount to a profound practical self-criticism of The Manifesto ,
which was necessary to preserve some organic relation between Marxist theory and
the train of events in Britain and Europe after 1848. There were, perhaps, two main
moments of revision: the first, identified precisely by Gwyn Williams, was the
immediate aftermath of the counter-revolutions in the late 1840s. Revision followed
the disappointment of the expectations of The Manifesto and the subsequent
political isolation of the communists. The most important text of this moment is
The Eighteenth Brumaire o f Louis Bonaparte. In this essay, as Hall argues, the faults
of The Manifesto are transformed, through attempts to understand the complexity
of the relations between economic classes and political parties.19 Fernbach makes a
similar point when he argues that in C7ass Struggles in France
Marx began, for the first time, to develop a systematic set of concepts for coming
to grips with the phenomena of a politics which is certainly that of class struggle
. . . but which is nevertheless politics, practised in the field of ideology and coercion
that gives it its specific character."

The second moment of revision, a longer period but still an attempt intellectually
to recoup political defeats, is the moment of Capital and its preparatory works, the
rendering of the historical and philosophical generalities of The Manifesto into a
much more precise account of the economic position of 'the laborer' under
capital. Nicolaus argues that the 'Hegelian choreography' of The Manifesto the -
 Three problematics 207

'negation' of bourgeois society by the proletariat - was replaced by categories that

allow us to understand the rise of intermediate classes and the complication (rather
than the simplification) of the structure of capitalist society.
These revisions certainly provide the means for a full recasting of the older
problematic. Yet they resemble the more familiar tussles with 'old Hegel' himself
in that they were never completed. The earlier simplicities were not replaced by the
-
new complexities rather the two co-exist, often in the same texts. There are, in
Hall's phrase, 'echoes' of The Manifesto in Capital. The prospect of proletarian revo-
lution, no less inevitable, merely delayed till capital's maturity, remains one
organizing assumption even of The Eighteenth Brumaire.22 Later commentators
have sometimes underestimated their own roles in teasing out the implications of
later formulations for earlier ones. It is not clear that Marx was always so percep-
tive. For today, it is more important to recover the 'best' Marx, than to continue
to chastise the elements of 'economism', 'teleology' or 'class reductionism' in
Marx at his worst. But the historical significance of the absence of a developed
Marxist theory of classes has been immense. Since The Manifesto remained the
most widely used agitational text of the communist movement, since Capital itself
gave warrant to the earlier problematic, and since Engels's interpretative work
tended to disguise rather than highlight the revisions of the 1850s and 1860s, the
theoretical resources of working-class movements in the period from the Great
Depression to the rise of fascism were severely weakened .

Lenin and Gran sci

It has become a somewhat routine procedure to identify a whole middle period
of Marxist theory ('Second International') with various species of 'economism'.
Much less understood are the historical conditions of this 'deviation'. No such
history is attempted here, but it is important to say that while the problematic of
The Manifesto made its argument less relevant in Britain after 1850, it acquired rele-
vance again in late-nineteenth-century Europe, whenever large masses of peasants ,
small producers or semi-proletarians were caught up in industrial transformations
similar to those of early nineteenth-century Britain, whenever the subordination of
lab our to capital was conspicuously deepened and in the times of 'syndicalist'
excitement which often accompanied these transformations. Deep and rapid econo-
mic change seems often to produce a neglect of political and ideological conditions
even in theorists whose thought generally is opposed to this tendency. One thinks of
the young Gran sci, of the 'Red City' of Turin and the Factory Councils."
It is to Lenin, however, that we should turn for the further development of the
Manifesto problematic. Lenin developed that side of 'Manifesto Marxism' that
emphasized the importance of political struggles in determining outcomes. At the
same time he stressed the historic role of the proletariat 'as the builder of socialist
society'. This was, indeed, 'the chief thing in the doctrine of Marx'.24 In effect,
then, Lenin grafted a Maridst political theory on to the basics of the Manifesto
scheme. His analysis moves constantly between the 'objective' or 'economic'
208 Theories

aspects of immediate tactical situations and the 'subjective' features, matters of

organization and consciousness. The economic/political duo is the key structure of
his thought. Yet the main themes of Lenin's writing - science and ideology, spon-
taneity and political consciousness, masses and party - are handled in a way that
suppresses the cultural or ideological content or object of politics and obscures
questions about popular attitudes and feelings.
This follows, in part, from Lenin's Version of the science/ideology divide, Marx-
ism may not be a completed science but it is a science of a very developed order.
For most situations it is important to recapitulate the findings of Marx and Engels -
Lenin's characteristic polemical mode is precisely to recapitulate thus, confronting
'revisionism' with the findings. Marndsm is a 'strikingly integral and harmonious
scientific theory' which needs to be applied to new situations, and to be completed,
but is not in need of revision.25 This creates the distinction between science and
ideology in its most closed form: true knowledge/the bumbling mistakes of
revisionism, proletarian knowledge/petty bourgeois conceptions, consciousness of
class/'deceptions' or 'self-deceptions'. The content of ideology, in a sense, matters
little, it may swiftly be reduced to its class character,
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self~cieception in
politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of
some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, dec-
larations and promises.25

In this conception of ideology, Not inappropriate certainly for analysing a state

with few ideological resources, the main absence is the force of belief or conviction.
The models continuously evoked in Lenin's language are those of delusion or
corruption. The contents or logic of opposed positions are lost in the pejorative
labels: 'revisionism', 'opportunism', 'petty-bourgeois rnentalityi It is not, after all,
beliefs that move people, but 'interests'.
Much the same could be said of Lenin's understanding of bourgeois strategies,
especially in the West. Out of a largely pre-war and then Russian experience, Lenin
understood the state mainly in its repressive moment.27 Where this was not ade-
quate, he used notions of manipulation or top-downward, one-diMensional control,
the language of 'bribery and corruption'. As he said of 'labour aristocracy', 'they
are bribing them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and
covert'.28
A similar structure is to be found in the spontaneity/politics couplet. The
masses learn, to be sure, from their practical activity, and leaders may fall behind
as well as lead, but the source of conceptions is a pre-given theory which is developed
outside the class and communicated to it.29 There are 'spontaneous' and 'conscious'
elements, a distinction which threatens to become that of thinking head and
political rnuscle.30 Even 'propaganda' (hardly a nuanced way of thinldng how
popular conceptions may be changed) is given a heavily organizational emphasis.
Lenin's writing on 'party literature' or the need for 'an all-Russia political news-
paper' understands such projects as foci for unities, but is silent about the relations
 Three problematics 209

to be sought, ideologically, between such productions and their readers.31

The obvious comparison is with Gran sci. While the very notion of 'spontaneity'
disguises the fact that the masses already have conceptions of the world beyond
mere 'force of habit', Gran sci insisted that 'all men are philosophers', and share in
some conception of the wor1d.32 'Pure spontaneity' does not exist in history since
it would amount to 'pure mechanicity'. It exists only in the fact that conscious
leadership is diffused rather than concentrated, or has beliefs that do not transcend
'traditional conceptions of the world'.. It follows that there is a need 'to study and
develop the elements of popular psychology, historically and sociologically, actively
(i.e. in order to transform them by educating them into a modern mentality)'.33
Much of The Prison Notebooks are an elaboration of this point. This project
-
Gran sci found to be 'implicit' in Lenin 'perhaps even explicitly stated'. Yet
despite many similarities and later development in Lenin's own position, their
emphases do seem dissimilar and lead to different analyses of the relation of party
to class. Gran sci was the first major Marist theorist to take the culture of the
popular masses as the direct and privileged object of study and of political practice.
These deficiencies were the reverse side of Lenin's political virtues: his stress
on 'concrete' analysis, intervention in immediate political contingencies and im-
patience, in situations demanding heroic activity, of 'mere words'. These features,
aspects of the tightest of theory-practice relations, may distinguish Leninism from
its subsequent corruptions in Stalinism where a mechanical notion of Marxism as
pre-given 'science' is allied to a rigidly organizational and authoritarian conception
of party.34 But Lenin's legacy had a tendency to relieve Marxism from the concrete
study of worldng-class culture, and to narrow the range of what was considered
relevant to political practice.

Later orthodoxies: two examples

Two further expressions of this problematic are especially revealing. These are rather
dissimilar examples, but share a historical dilemma and a structure of argument :
first, the theory of 'labour aristocracy', casually present in the later Engels,
developed in Lenin's writing on imperialism and reformism, reintroduced into
English Marxist historiography by Eric Hobsbawm and currently the subject of
much historical debate ,35 second, the early work of Georg Lukacs, whose book
History and Class Consciousness, is the fullest development of the class/class-
consciousness position.36
The dilemma is that posed in the contradiction between the theoretical destiny
of the proletariat and the actual course of Western worldng-class politics. Maridst
theory has worried around the problem of the revolutionary class manqué, not only
in the classic debates around 'reformism' or 'labourism' but also in much of the
thinking around culture -ideology-consciousness. To speak rather rashly, there have
been two responses to this situation: to abandon recognizably Marist analysis or
to construct a second level of theory or special explanations, to show why a 'normal'
or long-term historical development had somehow been blocked, or delayed. These
210 Theories
have been commoner responses than attempting to reconstruct the original prob-
lematic .
The commonest form of second-order theory has been the recovery of elements
absent in the original problematic though often present, in a different, less accented
form in the historical experience which it expressed. These new elements, not
theorized as part of the central dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, are
then understood as historically contingent factors, features of a particular phase.
They are fetters or inhibitions on more organic processes, a belief in the simpler
forms of which are thereby preserved. Features central to the constitution of the
working-class appear in a displaced or reduced role.
The 'theory' of labour aristocracy is an excellent example. It has been used to
explain the 'liberalization' of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, labour 'reformism'
and the failure of early-twentieth-century worldng-classes to develop a counter-
hegemonic strategy. Two lands of argument are embraced in the same term: the
first centres on labour organization and its partial incorporation within the agencies
of the state, the second posits some larger social-structural division within the class
itself, commonly between 'skilled' and 'unsldlled' sectors.37 Both arguments
correspond to observable tendencies in the post-1850 history of the working class,
but also limit the effects of such observations on the fundamental inadequacies of
an older orthodoxy. Theories of the incorporation, 'corruption' or detachment of
'leadership' have actually hindered a more fundamental reconceptualization of the
relationship between economic classes and political parties, or a more adequate
analysis of the disco sitions of the 'rank and file'.38 Similarly, 'the mid Victorian
aristocracy of l a b o r ' may not be a very helpful construction. For it was not just
a unique historical phenomenon: but rather a particular form of a more general
tendency. As Marx discovered in his deeper analyses, the expansion and the move-
ments of capital do not simply unify and classify l a b o r , even in the direct relations
of production. Rather, the worldng class is continuously recornposed around major
internal structurations. These internal divisions - within factories, within industries,
between occupations, between the sexes and between the employed and the reserve
armies ought to be an object of any primary theory of the worldng class. We need
to start, indeed, politically and theoretically, not from the assumption of simpli-
tication and unity but from that of complexity and division.39 These divisions are
based on hierarchies of l a b o r modified by the effects of gender relations which
are reproduced mainly within the family. These forms of division are, however, also
the object of ideological and political practices. A whole politics may be wrought on
top of them. Socialist strategies are not at all aided by the rooted belief that such
divisions must somehow pass away, or be easily transcended in the name of some
essential unity.
Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness, essays written or revised in the heat
of struggles within the Hungarian Communist Party in 1922, share the general
features of labour aristocracy theory. For his early project was an attempt to graft
a more developed theory of consciousness on to the classical root. The result is a
similar hybrid. Lukacs was a forerunner of the extreme abstractness of 'Western
 Three problematics 211

Marxism' and his borrowings were colossally heterogeneous: a classical Maridst root,
a recovery of Hegel and the pre-Manifesto Marx, a debt to Weber and Sim rel and a
reading of part l of volume 1 o f Capital.
His starting point was Marx's distinction between the class 'as against capital'
and the class 'for itself". The first characteristic move was to render 'class con-
sciouness' a 'sacred' category .41 Despite its 'profane' origin in Chartism and
Owenism, it now acquired a wholly theoretical status. It became 'the thoughts and
feelings men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it
and the interest arising from it', or 'rational reactions "imputed" to a particular
typical position in the process of production'.42 How then to explain the distance
between such a consciousness and the contents of proletarian heads, this side of
revolution?
'False consciousness' has fundamental forms, differently inhabited by the two
main classes. (Lukacs accentuated the schematic of The Manifesto by denying
to other classes an effective historical role.)43 These forms had been described by
Marx in Chmitai as the mechanism of 'fetishism'. Relations between people acquire,
under capitalism, a 'phantom objectivity', appearing as things. By a series of daring
horologies, the features of a fetishized consciousness were discerned throughout
capitalist society: in its bureaucracy, its sexual relations, its economic ideologies,
its jurisprudence and, especially, its philosophy and epistemology.44
The bourgeoisie inhabits this world with a necessarily partial vision, having
knowledge of practical management but not of the totality of processes nor of
those elements that point to future transformations, the tendency to recurrent
crises, for instance. Faced with the instability of its domination, its objective
interests force it to deceive itself. The proletariat has no such interest, but in' its
immediate perspective, it has its own 'bourgeois' (i.e. 'false') consciousness within
which it is held by 'opportunist' politics. But a knowledge of the totality is both
-
possible and necessary 'a matter of life and death'. Crises force the proletariat to
self-realization. In this moment the duality of class 'as against capital' and class 'for
itself', transformed in Lukacs's thought into the Hegelian dialectic of subject and
-
object, is resolved. The proletariat becomes the identical subject object of history.45
So questions inadequately treated in earlier accounts return to the tradition with
a vengeance. Lukacs remains important for his concentration on consciousness, for
his criticisms of an unreflexive epistemology, and for the attempt to theorize the
relation between capital's economic forms and the general features of bourgeois
thought. But he is also a classical instance of two recurrent tendencies commoner
in sociological traditions: the tendency to see class cultures as straightforwardly and
wholly conditioned by social position (for this is the argument, ultimately, about
class consciousness), and the tendency to ascribe to whole societies one 'central' or
'essential' modality of thought which enters the consciousness of all classes (for
this is the argument about 'false consciousness'). The major fatality, as always in
the class/class consciousness problematic, is any concrete, complex account of lived
cultures, how they are formed and how they may be transformed .
212 77zeon'es

Origins of the culture problematic

The complicated origins of 'culture' belong to the same history as early Marxist
theory. The cultural paradigm was formed in the Industrial Revolution, was re-
defined in the 1880s and 1890s and was recovered as a 'tradition' in the 1950s.
Some elements were then worked into a theory of cultural -ideological processes.
Yet the social origins of these two traditions differ very much. Early Marxism
was a rendering into theory of the experience of the small-producer»becoming-
proletarian. The problematic of culture expressed the dilemmas of some English
intellectuals sufficiently removed from industrial capital, in situation or sympathies,
to distance themselves from its morality and purposes. Except for three main
moments - the 1790s (fleetingly), the 1880s and 1890s and the 1950s and l960s -
these intellectuals were distanced from popular movements and almost uniformly
dismissive of popular moralities. Their 'autonomy' can be seen in the very structure
of their thought: 'the emergence o f culture as an abstraction and as an absolute',
as a separate set of moral and intellectual activities, and as 'a court of human appeal',
even as 'a mitigating and rallying alternative'.46 Williams's description of this
'structure of feeling' seems also to spell out the increasingly differentiated functions
of intellectual labour (whether of poet, novelist, artist, critic or academic) and the
desire to find in specialized pursuits some cannon of judgment and behaviour
relevant to the whole society. Since this tradition was an overwhelmingly 'literary'
one, the debate was evaluative rather than analytic. It concerned appropriate social
moralities or what Edward Thompson has called 'the education of desire'.47
This long line of 'literary sociology' has been much discussed. We will mainly
concentrate on the post-war advocates of culture, and especially upon Raymond
Williams and Edward Thompson. Yet these writers seem to have found themselves
in some account of predecessors: Williams in a long detour in search of 'a general
theory of culture', Thompson in his twenty-year espousal of the ideas of William
Morris.48 Why did they choose to write about their deepest political convictions
through the presentation of significant persons, mostly long dead?
Williams's Culture and Society constructs a 'tradition' around the history of
-
8 word 'culture' - and a succession of writers who contributed to its sum of
meanings. Perhaps the most obvious conclusion of a return to the book is the great
variety of this 'tradition'. Yet Williams's sharpest critics have constructed a still
- -
more homogeneous entity 'the literary intelligentsia' and attacked his 'social
tradition' as one of 'almost uniform political reaction'.49 There has even been a
tendency to take the 'Culture and Society ' intellectuals as typical of English intellec-
tuals as a whole, thereby excluding a whole middle-class radical and liberal
tradition from the historical record.50 Edward Thompson's critique is much more
perceptive: there was not one Culture and Sociezy tradition, but several.51
A more discriminating history would have to make some distinctions. Though
all these writers were distanced from the ruling interests and ideas of their time,
their evaluations were more or less interesting or useful to different social classes
or groups. Often they were taken up (and thereby changed) by particular parties or
 Three problematics 213

movements. On such a basis three main strands might be distinguished among those
discussed in Culture and Society. The first strand is a Conservative tradition, the
ideological alter ego of Liberalism: Burke, Southey, Disraeli, Newman, Mallock
and Eliot are central here. one distinctive feature is a deep distrust of democracy.
If capitalism is opposed, it is because it is a 'leveler'. The social bases of this con-
servative organicism were the Anglican Church, the Conservative Party and the social
order and institutions of an agrarian capitalism. 'Culture' was understood as the
repository of traditional social values, whose most important practical function
was to distinguish between leaders and led and to defend attendant privileges. Since
1945 it has become difficult, except as an eccentricity, to avow fully hierarchical
philosophies, under the pressure of the ideological assumption of 'equality' the
Conservative Party has changed its repertoire to a more liberal variant.
Edward Thompson has written the history of the second strand - a radical
Romanticism." The succession runs from the early Romantics (especially Blake,
Keats and Shelley) through Carlyle and RustOn, to William Morris, in whom
Romanticism and Mandsm are conjoined. There are two points of junction with
popular movements: between plebian radicalism and the utopian intellectuals of
the 1790s and with Morris's crossing of 'the river of fire', to take the standpoint
of the worldng class in the 1880s.53 later projections of the tradition are not
altogether clear: it should include, perhaps, 'Marxisante independents' like G.D.H.
Cole and 'ethical socialists' like Tawney or Orwell. It should include perhaps the
radical populism of the 1930s and 1940s, without the 'Stalinist pieties'. But the
most important test of the organicity of Morris and of the earlier tradition is their
reception into worldng-class traditions of independent socialist education and the
continuance of utopian and ethical elements in the British l a b o r movement .54
Thirdly, we might distinguish writers whose very lack of an organic connection
is their defining feature. They explore the dilemmas of people like themselves,
express the viewpoint, for instance, of those Oxbridge-civil-service~literary circles
in which Mathew Arnold moved. This thought remains, in Gramsci's word, 'intellec-
tualistic'. One might include here Arnold, the various artistic Bohemias (e.g. the
pre-Raphaelites) and Leavis and the Leavisites, whose dilemmas ate very much
those of the academic layer in a modern education system. Elements of the thought
of such traditional intellectuals may, of course, influence more organic thinkers, as
Arnoldian formulations influenced Tawney's thought on education, for instance.
It would require a proper history of these traditions to show the force of these
categories and to refine them. But it should be clear that wholesale acceptance or
rejection of the 'culture' tradition is perilous. It will hardly do to dismiss the whole
sequence as one of unmitigated reaction, or to see the idea of culture as contaminated
at root. At the very least one must ask, whose idea of culture? In the end, though,
such questions cannot be answered by historical pedigrees, only by modern
relevances.
Yet why should it have been so important for certain intellectuals of the left to
discover themselves in 'traditions' at all? Some answers have already been given in
contextualizing the sociologies. The 1950s were a period of crisis for those who
214 Theonles

based their politics on a criticism of capitalism and a faith in the mass of the people.
The conditions of this decade were particularly testing for the characteristic
politics of the English left: strong in popular sympathies and moral sensitivity,
weak in the concrete analysis of capitalism and its twentieth-century adaptations .
The 'radical populism' of the 1930s and 1940s depended on the crisis-ridden state
of the inter-war economy, the immediacies of the fight against fascism, and
opposition to the most overt forms of social inequality and class rule. When these
conditions seemed to evaporate, underlying weaknesses were clearly displayed.
A generally leftist climate among intellectuals was rapidly dispersed, leaving only a
harder contingent. But it could offer, from inherited theoretical resources, no
adequate explanation of capitalism's success to place beside the gospels of growth
and affluence. So confident were right-wing intellectuals in this period that they
even began a reappraisal of the less 'acceptable' moments in the history of British
capitalism, rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution as a moment of 'growth'.55 A
-
reviving leftism took up the weaker points of this analysis overwhelmingly, the
analysis of culture. One consequence was the reproduction of a persistent dichotomy
within English ideologies: between a liberal, utilitarian and 'economist' pole, where
the progressive side of capitalism was well but one-sidedly understood, and a
romantic, literary and 'qualitative' pole with popular political sympathies but a
romantic and equally one-sided view of capitalism's evils.
This pressure was accompanied by major internal stresses. Intellectuals in the
Labour Party were affected through the party's loss of confidence andthe bitter
debates about 'revisionisrni Intellectuals to the left of this, in the Communist
Party or with a firmer alignment to Marrdsm, were even more beset, their party
paralysed, then split, by the half-revelations of the Twentieth Congress and the
Soviet invasion of Hungary.56 To judge from the force of the explosion to which
they gave rise, the pressures must have been intense. The moment of culture can be
understood as an attempt to vindicate critical social thought (from Mandsm to
Left Leavism) in an exceptionally hostile climate and in circumstances where even
'the people' seemed content. Every single national resource was important in such
an effort. What could English culture offer to stem the tide of 'Progress'? Answer :
The Tradition. Answer: William Morris. Answer: The English working class in a
more heroic phase .

Culture, experience and theory

The culture paradigm is distinguished by an overriding concern with describing the
actual forms of popular practices and beliefs. The manner of this commitment, the
sharpness of an accompanying politics, even the key term of definition, differ very
much. The term 'culture', for instance, remains central in Williams's cultural theory
whether thought of as 'a whole way of life' or in its latest more difficult formulation
as 'a constitutive social process, creating specific and different ways of life'.57
Thompson's concern with culture, values, ideas and moral evaluations is no less
marked; and he defines this as the crucial absence in Marxism.58 But his solution
 Three problematics 215

was less a long meditation on culture and more, in his early work, a reworldng of
familiar Marxist categories, especially of 'class consciousness'. The engagement
with culture or lived experience is secured by insisting that class consciousness is
the way in which experiences are 'handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions,
value systems, ideas and institutional forms'. It has a definite history: it is neither
an abstraction nora hopeful projection. lt is a category to be made 'profane' again.
Any idealist or normative version - of class consciousness 'not as it is, but as it ought
-
to be' is rejected;59
'Experience' defines both the object and the method of inquiry. It is a method
in which the author himself, his experience, is very intrusive: there is much self-
revelation in Hoggart's portrayal of his childhood, in Williarns's pursuit of 'the
implications of personal experience to the point where they have organically emerged
as methods, concepts, strategies' _60 and in Thompson's style of polemical address.
The method rejects sociologies in which lived relations are marginalized or over-
borne by theory. Part of the criticism of elite cultural theory and of the restrictions
of creativity to the artist is that it provided a flattened stereotypical view of the life
of the 'masses': 'there are in fact no masses, there are only ways of seeing people
as masses'.61 Thompson attacks a whole range of otherwise very dissimilar positions
on the same grounds: economistic Maudsm, 'ideological' economic history, a
'Platonist' Leninism, structural functionalism, the construction of abstract typologies
in anthropology or sociology and, latterly, a Marist structuralisrn.52 These all
have the same moral and epistemological features: 'violent abstraction', the
imposition' of a priori schema on a living history, the forcing of historical materials
into the mould of the theorist's own preoccupations, speculative or dogmatic.
Advocated instead is an explicitly anti-rationalist epistemology in which theory is
restricted to critique and hypothesis, and the key moment is likened to listening:
If you want a generalization I would have to say that the historian has got to be
listening all the time. He should not set up a book or a research project with a
totally clear sense of exactly what he is going to be able to do. The material itself
has got to speak through him. And 1 think this happens.63

Williams argues a very similar position, defining, with great accuracy, common
tendencies in both older (base and superstructure) and modern (structuralist)
Marxisms:
The analytical categories, as so often in idealist thought, have, almost unnoticed,
become substantive descriptions, which then take habitual priority over the whole
social process to which, as analytic categories, they are attempting to speak.64

There are immense strengths in this position. Culturalisrn conducts a profound

critique of theory-as-dogma, of a rationalism or a conceptual a prionSm, in the
first place in the name of 'experience in the second in the name of 'materialism'.
This response was first formed against economistic Maridsm, but it has an equal
force against many forms of the explosion of 'theory' in the 1970s. Ii, like Marx,
one regards various forms of idealism as the occupational vice of 'the philosopher"
216 Theories
(for which read intellectual OI academic), the culturalist argument remains immensely
important .
But it also has considerable weaknesses. The stress on the privilege of 'experience'
leads to an underdeveloped theoretical enterprise and a tendency to avoid abstract
or generalizing discourse in itself. There are.several aspects of this: the tendency of
rejecting analytical distinctions as a matter of principle, the tendency to disguised
or unselfconscious theoretical borrowings and the failure fully to theorize the
results of concrete studies. We might take some examples of each of these.
Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, for example, an historical master-
piece, remains a work whose findings are seriously under-exploited by the author
himself. It is full of profound insights about the relations between the lived, cultural
level and the transformative ideological practices, whether those of Methodist
preachers or of radical journalists. FOr such insights to become fully available
they would have to be stated more abstractly, or generally. They would have to 'be
abstracted from the particular patterns of 'lived' historical complexity in which
they occurred. Their relation to a more general debate about, say, culture and
ideology, would have to be explored and a specifically theoretical contribution
developed from them. Such abstractions do not have to be thought of as completely
-
general or trans~historical in scope the historian's nightmare of 'theory'. A proper
use of concepts involves arguments about their historical scope of reference. Still,
if such abstractions are not made, findings remain locked up in accounts of specific
historical contingencies: they cannot be consumed theoretically, cannot generate
parallel questions for other instances, cannot contribute to the development of
conceptual tools. In one sense, the Making is a very theoretical book: it is
organized, very consciously, around a particular problematic and conducts an
extended historical critique of other positions. This case, these big bold truths,
are mightily made page after page. Yet, as many readers find, there are great rich-
nesses in the book (and in the history it describ es) which are difficult to grasp for
want of a more explicit theoretical labour. A work of this stature ought to produce
theory.
The concluding sections of Whigs and Hunters, Thompson's latest major text,
illustrate a rather different problem. Here Thompson does generalize from his
findings on the subject of class and the law. He conducts an argument against
notions of the law as the simple expression of the interests of a dominant class,
stressing those features of law as a practice which may limit its use as a class
instrument. Yet this very convincing argument is presented as a polemic against
'modern structural Marxists' who, in fact, adopt a very similar view of the juridical
as that pressed by Thompson'65
This is simply a case of inattention to the arguments of theoretical works, an
inattention that would hardly be tolerated for the usual order of historical 'sources'.
Williams's Marxism and Literature, by comparison, represents a very advanced
position within the culturalist problematic since it is explicitly a long and challenging
theoretical statement based upon more concrete work. In general, however,
cult uralist premises tend to interrupt the full movements from the concrete to the
 Three problematics 217

abstract( and back again) that distinguished Marx's method and which would make
possible a continuous revision and development of a theoretical legacy from the
products of new research.
The point about analytic distinctions is best illustrated through particular
questions: how does cult uralism understand the relation of culture to not~culture
and, in particular, how is this distinction handled in relation to class? These questions
are central to our subject, 'worldng-class culture'.
Classical Mandsm handled these problems through the base-superstructure
metaphor and Me class/class consciousness distinction. Both Williams and Thompson
have consistently, in all their work, argued against the base-superstructure formu-
lation. Williams has traced a kind of pathology of the notion from Marx's ambiguous
statements to later rigidities, has stressed the tendency to empty the 'superstructure'
of any really material force and to compartmentalize areas of social life rather than
examine their 'constitutive processes' .66 Thompson has argued, similarly, that the
initial separation out of the 'economic', on which the metaphor is based, was a
product of the traditions which Marx contested and that real historical problems
are not thinkable in this way :
There is no way in which I find it possible to describe Puritan or Methodist work
discipline as an element of the 'superstructure' and then put work itself in a 'basis'
somewhere e1se.67

Both Thompson and Williams attempt to find better ways of thinking about these
things. Their solutions differ, however, and have to be treated separately.

Williams and culturalism

Williams has, characteristically, refused to make rigorous or systematic distinctions
between cultural and other processes. The following formulations, one from the
early works and one from the late, are quite typical:
The truth about a society, it would seem, is to be found in the actual relations,
always exceptionally complicated, between the system of decision, the system of
communication and learning, the system of maintenance and the system of generation
and nurture. It is not a question of looking for some absolute formula, by which the
structure of these relations can be invariably determined. The formula that matters
is that which, first makes the essential connections between what are never really
separable systems, and second, shows the historical variability of each of these
systeigrgs, and therefore the real organisations within which they operate and are
lived.

Orthodox analysts began to think of 'the base' and 'the superstructure' as if they
were separable concrete entities. In doing so they lost sight of the very processes -
-
not abstract relations but constitutive processes which it should have been the
special function of historical materialism to emphasize . . . . It is not 'the base' and
'the superstructure' that need to be studied, but the specific and indissoluble real
processes s . » _69
218 Theories

The procedure of both these passages is to identify certain distinctions, to insist

that there can be no adequate general formulation of relations between different
spheres, and, finally, to insist on the importance of totalities or 'constitutive social
processes' that lie behind the distinctions anyway. In practice this procedure
amounts to the collapse of distinctions, since the weight of the argument is always
about their essential artificiality. 'Experience', it seems, can always grasp a process
that is beyond or beneath analytical distinctions and which they may (perhaps
must?) obscure. Collapses of this kind can be seen all the way through Marxism
and Literature. The distinction between economic production and other practices
disappears in the expansion of production as an undifferentiated concept akin to
'creativity'. The term 'material' is applied to all aspects of a social and political order
in a parallel expansion.70
There are several difficulties in this solution. First, there is the difficulty of
arriving at any precise view at all of the characteristics of culture. Such questions
are referred back, all the time to total social process, 'real men' and classes in
specific situations. Yet at no moment in the whole Williams ouevre does a clear
definition or boundary of culture emerge. Thus 'way of life', as Edward Thompson
suggested in 1961 , tends to become everyone's shopping list of elements of thought,
action, organization, work or leisure.71 'Cultural studies' tends to inherit and to
develop the extreme descriptive heterogeneity of this object. It follows that it is
not possible to speak coherently about the relation between culture and other
(kinds of?) practices, except continually to insist that all is part of one totality .
A persistent fuzziness must result. But more serious consequences may follow,
for a second set of problems concern what relations actually are, in practice,
dominant in Williams's accounts of the world: how the failure to specify is actually
supplied more pragmatically. As literary critic and cultural theorist, Williams does
stress certain lands of practices, all of them broadly cultural and, within that,
mainly literary. Other practices tend to be marginalized or defined away. There is
no check on this from theoretical controls. Thus the early works are particularly
inattentive to political processes, a tendency which Williams himself has
acknowledged." The tensionless 'expansion' of culture replaces struggle over
values and definitions. Though some of this is repaired in later work, there is a
persistent neglect of the particular character and force of economic relations and
therefore of economic definitions in relation to class. This 'culturalism' is
described by Anthony Barnett, the most careful of Williams's critics, as a land of
inversion of economism, a reduction 'upwards'.73 This is the characteristic tendency
of 1950s' and l960s' texts in both history and 'literary sociology'. It is very
characteristic of Hoggart's Uses o f Literacy, for example, from which both
economic production and politics are literally absent. Even Thompson's work
is not altogether exempt from it.
The nature of Williams's culturalism can best be seen in his treatment of class.
As others have noted, the category 'class' is hardly present as an active shaping idea
in Williams's early work: it tends to emerge in conclusions, especially in the famous
passages at the end of Culture and Society. But here we encounter a further set
 three problematics 219

of problems. Since culture is an expansive or inclusive term (potentially including

everything), the only way to give a coherent account of a particular lived culture is
to reduce it to its organizing principles. It is not the elements of a culture that
are important, but the principles or values which, overall, it expresses. If no
categories (distinctions) of a systematic kind exist with which we can grasp
compleidties, there is no option but to simplify. One way to simplify is to seek
'essences' or 'principles' and this is very much how, in a classic form of idealist
reduction, Williams approaches class cultures. We are offered a simple typology of
cultures: bourgeois culture is individualistic but is modified by the idea of service,
working-class culture, by contrast, revolves around collectivity and solidarity. It
then becomes possible to examine the strengths and weaknesses of such principles
in a Mathew Arnold-like search for the elements of a 'common culture'. The
procedure produces results that are very close to other idealist accounts of class
elements in English culture, including those of several historians.74 But it also
produces stereotypes as misleading as 'mass culture' or 'false consciousness'. Is
solidarity a general feature of worldng-class culture? Does it apply to all the social
sites and internal relations of a culture: to relations between men and women and
men and children, for instance? How powerful have solidarities been outside the
culture of the work-place? Such compressed descriptions-cum-judgements can
hardly hope to capture the complexity of a lived culture, let alone the forces,
material and ideological, which form it .
Thompson and socialist-humanist history
Thompson's position often resembles Williams's, with a similar tendency to refuse
certain distinctions. Relations of production are not only economic but also 'human'
relationships. Production involves culture. Every mode of production carries with
it corresponding modes of culture. 'Economics' and 'culture' are 'two sides of the
same coin', OI` are in a dialectic of interaction. Certain values are 'consonant' with
certain modes of production and therefore an inextricable part of them. Relations of
production are simultaneously expressed in all areas of social life.75 More
commonly, Thompson has worked with a minimum distinction, taken from Marx,
between 'social consciousness' and 'social being'. Social being is understood as the
mode of production of material life and the 'human relationships' to which it gives
rise. These human relationships include exploitation, but also relations of domi-
nation and of 'acquisitiveness', knowledge of which we owe not only to Marx but
also to Weber, Tawney and Veblen. Thompson has employed this distinction very
much as the young Marx did, to attack positions which are seen as idealist. Thompson
insists against the early Williams (as Marx did against Hegel or Proudhon) that social
being determines social consciousness. This often co-exists with an insistence on
the 'dialectical interrelationship' of being and consciousness, a formulation which
appears inconsistent with the notion of determination. Partly, no doubt, because
of these inconsistencies, Thompson's latest position seems to be different again:
it is not possible, even for capitalist societies, to maintain the social being/social
consciousness distinction as a general guide or control. In studying the folklore or
220 Theories

common sense of particular groups within the subordinated classes 'we cannot
conceive of social being apart from social consciousness or norms' and it is there-
fore 'meaningless' to ascribe priority of one over the other.76
These shifts indicate difficulties in a position that gives overwhelmingly priority
to the portrayal of 'experience'. Faithfulness to experience, an impulse with moral
and literary. roots, comes into conflict, at a certain point, with what we can only
call 'scientific' intentions, using the term in its broader continental senses rather
than its narrower English ones. Systematic knowledge and the search for more
adequate explanations of social processes require developed analytical procedures.
Within Maridsm as a science, abstraction plays a part occupied in other systems
by ideal types, model-building or the testing of hypotheses. Abstraction precisely
depends upon a necessary simplification of 'real history', a presentation of elements
in it in a quite formal way. Most of Capital as a work is 'abstract' in this sense ;
theory is derived from the study of the concrete and is used to illuminate particular
instances, but in its form and presentation, most of Capital does not at all resemble
real history. Abstraction is both a condition for thinldng clearly about the world
and for learning from concrete instances in such a way as to be able to transfer
insights or consider them in relation to another case. If we refuse analytical
distinctions of the most elementary kind (e.g. culture/not culture) we will not be
able to examine that real history whose integrity we aim to preserve. Distinctions
like base/superstructure or economic/political/ideological practices, properly used ,
are no more than the means with which to grasp 'total social process'. To reject
these tools and supply no others is to return us, scientifically, to a radical historical
relativism and the denial of any generalizing or accumulative intellectual procedures.
Attempts at a proper theoretical enterprise must always, within this problematic ,
be 'guilty' or inhibited, SO we ought to turn to Thompson's portrayals of the
relation of culture and class in his actual histories. How can we describe the
characteristic object of Thompson's history?
All the histories from 77te Making o f the English Working Class to W/tigs and
Hunters have shared a common theme: the conflict between two cultural modes.77
The first mode is rooted in the characteristic relations and values of a society of
small producers, artisans and semiproletarians which existed within cultural and
political horizons set by agrarian capital - the first English form of a bourgeois
-
ruling class and were policed, centrally, by law. The second mode includes the
cultural world of industrial work discipline, of Protestant or Puritan notations of
time, of the psychic disciplines of Methodism, of political economy, utilitarianism and
the 'Gradgrind school' and of the cultural aggressions associated with the require-
ments of commercial and especially industrial capital. The conflict of these modes
involves a long co-existence that corresponds to Maurice Dobbs's long transition in
relations of economic production. It is, indeed, the political-cultural expression or
aspect of these very same changes: the long transition in culture and politics and in
forms of struggle between classes. Thompson's earlier work, especially The Making,
looks at the later points of the transition: the English working class is formed,
politically and culturally, out of the collapse of the older moral framework
 Three problematics 221

('paternalism' and 'the moral economy') and through popular opposition to the
imposition of the new. If, as was argued earlier, The Making recounts the end of a
story rather than the beginning of a new one, we can understand why Thompson's
trajectory is back into the eighteenth century rather than forward once again to
the nineteenth or later. He has developed, once more, the territory opened up by
the initial explorations of Dobb and Tori, planning a historical rendezvous, perhaps,
with the work of Christopher Hill. This later work has concentrated on the forms
of gentry hegemony and of popular self-assertion, but has never lost sight of the
transition in cultural - economic modes. Whigs and Hunters, for instance, deals not
only with the importance of juridical relations in the eighteenth century, but also
with the enforcement of capitalist property rights over the customary use rights
of the foresters.
Before we look more closely at the treatment of class, it is important to note
one general weakness of these histories. They rest on a reduction not dissimilar to
Williarhs's 'culturalism'. It is not that economic relations and changes in ways of
producing are absent from these histories: their presence is assumed all the time.
But the changes in economic relations are understood through their experiential
or political effects, not, for the most part, in themselves. Thus, in The Making
the transformative character of the Industrial Revolution is grasped largely through
the experiences of artisans, weavers and others: the character of this shift in eco-
nomic social relations is never full described and is only passively present in the
story. The characteristic move is to assume the force of economic changes, to insist
upon the force of cultural and political processes too, but only to describe the
latter in any detailed OI active way.78
It is very easy to see how this tendency occurred. The problem with easting
historiographies, especially of older Maridsms and its assailants in the shape of the
economic historians, was the absence of any proper consideration of 'values'. The
Making conducts a powerful critique of both these traditions, rehearsing much of
Romanticism's objection to utilitarianism and political economy. The worldng
class is not just made by the Industrial Revolution ('Stearn power plus the factory
equals the working class') but also through political counter-revolution, and a
reworking, in the light of new experiences, of inherited cultural traditions. It
made much sense, then, to occupy the ground of experience from which to criticize
the orthodoxies. All of Thompson's own 'traditions' - Romanticism, the concern
with moralities, the literary mode, the historiography of the Hammonds and of
-
Tawney and the Morris-inspired reading of Marx pushed hard in the same direction.
But it is now possible to see that the stress on culture involved vacating the ground
of economic relations, leaving the heart of opposing positions untouched and
threatening an impoverishment of analysis.
Class, class struggle and class-as-relationship are central categories of Thompson's
history. Historical outcomes are the product of class struggles. Even the apparently
assured control of the eighteenth-century gentry is secured and 'lived' through
conflicts: the challenge of crime or riot, the response of magistracy or law. The
Making commences with a major redefinition of class which then forms the central
222 771eories

argument of the book. This is the emphasis that marks Thompson's history as
'Mar>dst' and distinguishes it from, say, the early Williams 01' the passivity of
I-loggart's account .
Yet, as we have suggested, 'class consciousness' is reworked in the light of
'culture'. Retained from the older problematic are all the activist elements: classes
as agents, present at their own making, forged in struggles: the stresses of Marx's
'class for itself' . Suppressed or rendered peripheral are the more 'objective' or
passive elements in the classic concept: 'class as against capital' in the earlier formu-
lations, developed, in Capital, into a profound analysis of the labourer's subordination
within capitalist economic relations. Economic class relations are not entirely absent
from The Making. Some of their force is carried in an extended and much looser
notion of 'relationship': classes are groups of people in historical forms of human
relationship. A more developed notion of relations of production sometimes
seems about to emerge. But, generally, it is the quality of human relationships
rather than the struetun'ng of these through relations that is the key concern. One
symptom of this is the massive overloading of the term 'experience'. It is made to
carry the full weight of objective determinations but also expresses the relay or
relation between economics and culture. Two quotations with rather different
emphases illustrate this:
The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men
-
are born or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these
experiences are handled in cultural terms. embodied in traditions, value-systems,
ideas, and institutional forms.79
In Part Two I move from subjective to objective influences - the experiences of
groups of workers during the Industrial Revolution which seem to me to be of
especial significance.80

In the first case 'experience' is seen as a relation between productive relations and
culture, in the second it is identified with 'objective influencesi In either case, since
'objective influences' are little described, 'experience' is made to carry all their
weight. It indicates, at once, the way in which individuals or groups are subject to
external or uncontrollable pressures and the most located or immediate of their
understandings. In it are contained, in the most compressed form, the unwillingness
to distinguish culture and not-culture and many of the difficulties that arise.
Against this it is important to argue for certain minimum distinctions. In the
analysis of the major classes of capitalist social formations the distinction 'class as
against capital'/'class for itself' should be retained. The latter term reminds us that
people stand in relations that are independent of their wills and of which they are
more or less conscious. These relations do stamp a social character on people, but
should not be reduced to relationships between people (of a nicer or nastier kind).
The proletarian is not faced, merely, by greedy or exploitative middlemen or mill-
owners, nor, just, by the 'inlluman' doctrines of political economy. Rather, by
virtue of occupancy of a particular economic class position, the proletarian is forced
to expend life energies under the control and command of capital in order to
 Three problematics 223

acquire the means of subsistence, in order to live, Underneath the cultural handling
of this relation ( in its particular historical forms) the figure of the 'naked' labourer
still moves, according to the fundamental disciplines of the capital relation. It
matters, certainly, whether labourers work willingly, or with murder or even
socialism in their hearts: but go to work they must or they and their children must
starve or sink into still deeper forms of dependency. Since the early nineteenth
century, the force of this economic relation has certainly been modified through
the active political interventions of the class of labourers themselves. But it is still
present and the arrangements which mitigate its severity may always be removed
or rendered more opp re ssive or conditional. This is why it remains possible, in
1979, to speak meaningfully of a working class in Britain, irrespective of the strength
or weakness of labour organization. At one (indispensable) moment of analysis, the
class is composed of those who partake in a proletarian relation to capital, are a
class 'as against' it. The complexities of this form of class analysis, and the need for
research as well as categories, should not lead us to abandon it.
This is of the utmost importance for the general problems raised in this book.
Any analysis of 'working-class culture' must be able to grasp the relation between
economic classes and the forms in which they do (or do not) become active in
conscious politics. If the two aspects of class analysis are conflated, this is not
possible. If class is understood only as a cultural and political formation, a whole
theoretical legacy is impoverished and materialist accounts are indistinguishable
from a form of idealism. It may indeed be that the relation between what cultura-
lism calls 'experience' and the marshalling of political forces, or, more correctly ,
between economic classes and political organizations, is never or rarely as simple
as "transitive" or 'expressive' models imply. Economic classes rarely appear as
political forces. Most of Thompson's work, for instances, has concerned periods in
which the political representation of popular interests has, apparently, been secured
with a relative faithfulness. In the period 1790 to 1840, the class character of
political and cultural forms is relatively easy to see. Either that, or, as in the work
on the eighteenth century, the absence of economic class categories has permitted
the presentation of political forces as classes. Thompson's 'patricians' and 'plebians'
are a case in point. But whatever happened to small producers, semi-peasants and
semi-proletarians? And why must eighteenth-century classes borrow the garbs of
antiquity? As soon as we enter a period when formal political arrangements for the
representation of working people become more complex and acquire firm insti-
tutional continuities, these problems become inescapable. Do the British Labour
Party or British trade unions simply or expressively crepresent' working
people? At the very least they define or structure what passes for politics as such,
so preventing the representation of some elements and promoting others. These
questions cannot even be properly posed within the culturalist problematic.
There is one final set of temptations that lies along the route of 'culture'. The
one-sided stress on class as a cultural and political formation commits analysis to
discover such forms in every place or period. Such searches will never be altogether
in vain since the class organization of society will always find expression of some
224 Wzeories

kind. But the temptation is to present such findings as always analogous to a deve-
loped and politically conscious opposition. The 'class' is 'struggling' after all. Such
a search slips easily into a romantic abasement before every manifestation of
'resistance', however exotic, peripheral, displaced or contained. Edward Thompson
retains, perhaps, too conventional a view of what counts as class organization to
fall into this trap: a stress on party, unions and socialist intellectual traditions may ,
indeed, disguise the elements of 'primitive rebellion' in a modern worldng class.
Yet some tendencies in modern sociology, focusing especially on the symbolic
oppositions of groups of young working-class men do parallel Thompson's own
stress on crowd actions, rituals of protest and moments of exceptional popular
excitement and communal mobilization. The point is that we can only reach a
-
proper assessment of the character of such moments then and now - by placing
them within a wider analysis of economic and social structures. This requires
conceptual tools for a properly historicized analysis of capitalism's continued
economic transformations and of the position of groups of men and women in
relation to it and each other.

'Structuralism' and 'humanism '

It is neither possible nor necessary to discuss structuralist emphases as fully as the
previous problematics. This is partly for pragmatic reasons' the range of struc-
turalist writing on matters that might be judged relevant is immense. An adequate
account would have to include work as different as the two quite distinct moments
in Althusser's project (the 'theoreticist' phase as well as subsequent self-criticisms),
elements in French structuralist anthropology, those (diverse) tendencies summed
up in the term 'serology' (the science of signs or of signification), the historical
analysis of discursive practices in the work of Michel Foucault and, perhaps, on an
outer 'structuralist' limit, French historical traditions, especially the treatment of
popular mentality b y the Annales historians. The solution adopted here is to
concentrate on Althusser's central and symptomatic contribution. In general,
however, structuralist contributions are more important for their critical edge than
for what they produce as alternative accounts. They have already informed our
critique of other positions. In any very direct sense, structuralism has little to con-
tribute to an account of working-class culture. This is not an object recognizable
within this problematic. StructuraliSt theories push into the background the associa-
tion between culture (or particular ideologies) and class and focus instead on the
relation between ideology, as a general feature of historical societies, and mode
of production as their determining base. In general, this tendency opposes what is
termed a 'class-reductionist' view of culture-ideology. The main purposes of this
section are, then, to recapitulate, briefly, some of the elements we take from a
structuralist critique of other positions, and to identify the points where structura-
lism actually falls behind earlier achievements .
Althusser's project was formed under general conditions similar to those which
faced the English New Left, but in a society that offered very different intellectual
 Three problematics 225

and political materials.81 It, too, was a response to the crisis of the social demo-
cratic and communist left in Western Europe in the 1950s and early 1960s. The
writing of For Marx and Reading Capital was exactly contemporaneous with the
'culturalist break'. The search for solutions was also conducted within a national
tradition in which Maridsm was a weak presence, weaker, perhaps, than in
England. The elements that were drawn on in the construction of structuralist
theory were, likewise, diverse. The chief antagonists were, once more, the Cold
War critics: the task of vindicating Marxism, this time as a 'science', against con-
temporary calumnators and past corruptions. The chief targets within the tradition
were, again, 'economism' and 'Stalinism'. Similar situations beget similar solutions.
Both the English New Left and the Althusserians took noneconomic questions as
their central concerns, supplying 'absences' in an easting Marxism: the stress on
'culture' was paralleled by the absorption in questions of 'science' and 'ideology',
initially with a strongly epistemological emphasis, latterly with a more general
concern with the formation of subjectivities. Similar solutions also begat similar
problems: notably in the whole area of the relation between ideology and non-
ideological relations.
In polemics between the two traditions these similarities are often forgotten.
The differences, however, are also very marked. We might best grasp them by
noting one founding divergence: while the English New Left took dominant post-
1956 developments in Mar>dst theory as a source of inspiration, Althusserianism
was formed in resolute hostility to them. In the early 1960s, when writing his
critique of Williams, Edward Thompson was mulling over 'alienation' and 'the
subject-object antithesis', reading early Marx, especially the 1844 Manu senpts,
searching Capital for its most 'humanist' moments and eagerly awaiting the publi-
cation of works by George Lichtheim and C. Wright Mills.82 The new history was
helped on its way by the discovery of a Marx whose problematic predated that of
The Manifesto and the encounter with the English working class. Althusser's
Marxism was formed against these very tendencies. Perhaps this reflected the greater
pull of the communist political presence in France compared with the situation
of the English 'rebels' and the American Maridsts, but it also grew from the desire
to establish Mandsm as a science, Althusser's most powerful lesson learned from
the emasculation of the intellectuals in the struggles of the day. So Althusser and
his colleagues, hostile to 'humanism' and the Hegelian 'taint', returned to Marx in
his most 'scientific' mood, in the 'mature' works, especially Capital. They construc-
ted from Marx's greatest work a thorough-going critique of the Marxisms of the
moment. So it happened that the Althusserian critique was formed in a double
movement, opposition to economism and Stalinism but also to the commoner
forms of the 'liberation' of the intellectuals. Indeed, a common intellectual anatomy
was discerned in these two opponents: economism and humanism were both
understood as forms of essentialism, Stalinisin was understood as a combination
of economism and humanism.83
Many of the strengths of the position derive from this double movement. We
might quote two passages that sum up, respectively, the critiques of humanism and
226 ?%eories

economism, and illustrate some basic emphases. Both are taken from Essays in Self-
Cdticism, a summation of the position without, it may be thought, many of its
earlier difficulties.
Against humanism :
Marx shows that what in the first instance determines a social formation . . . is not
any chimerical human essence, or human nature, nor man, nor even 'men', but a
relation the production relation, which is inseparable from the Base, the infra-
structure. And, in opposition to all humanist idealism, Marx shows that this relation
is not a relation between men, a relation between persons, nor an intersubjective or
psychological or anthropological relation, but a double relation: a relation between
groups of men concerning the relation between groups of men and things, the means
of production . . . . Naturally human individuals are parties to this relation, there-
_
fore active, but first of all in so far as they are held within it . . . If you do not
submit the individual concrete determinations of proletarians and capitalists, their
'liberty' or their personality to a theoretical "reduction" [i.e. an abstraction] , then
you will understand nothing of the terrible practical 'reduction' to which the
capitalist production relation submits individuals, which treats them only as bearers
of economic functions and nothing else.84
Against economism:
The capitalist social formation, indeed, cannot be reduced to the capitalist produc-
tion relation alone, therefore to its infrastructure. Class exploitation cannot continue
. . . without the aid of the superstructure, without the legal - political and ideological
relations, which in the last instance are determined by the production relation .. . .
These relations too treat concrete human individuals as 'bearers' of relations, as
'supports' of functions, to which men are only parties because they are held within
.
them . . . . But all these relations . . determine and brand men in their flesh and
blood just as the production relation does.85

Many of the emphases which have informed our critique so far are stated more
generally in these passages: the stress on 'relations' and the abstraction of certain
kinds of relations from the social formation as a whole producing the Althusserian
- -
'instances' economic, political juridical, ideological. Each of these lands of
relation are held to have their own effects on historical outcomes, though the eco-
- -
nomic the capitalist 'production relation' retains an over-arching determination
-
on the forms of struggles between classes. Though the base superstructure meta-
phor is retained, the irreducibility, 'effectivity', even 'materiality' of ideology is
repeatedly emphasized: no mere superstructure.86 Ideology is so far from being
dispensable that it is the medium in which people, in all societies, live their con-
ditions of existence, experience their world. If certain conditions of this land are
not met, on this 'level', societies, including capitalist societies, will cease to repro-
-
duce themselves.87 lt follows (it should follow unfortunately it does not always
in Althusser's texts) that ideology is an important and necessary site of political
struggles, that there is, indeed, a class struggle in ideology.
There is much to say about weaknesses in this way of thinldng, but it is
 T7'lree problematics 227

important first to stress the advances. As a 'theoretical' intervention, as a criticism

of other tendencies at a high level of generality, these protocols retain an enormous
force. Paradoxically, in view of the degree of abstraction and the fundamental
epistemological difficulties, they represent an advance for concrete historical
analysis, chiefly by removing earlier obstructions. It becomes possible to think
about a materialist history which is not organized around some unfolding 'essence',
whether this is the progress of productive forces, the deepening of alienation or
even a simplified view of the class struggle as a predetermined battle between two
composite historical agents, to the force of which every institution or element of
culture must equally and synchronically bend. In other words, 'social formations'
(historical societies) can be thought of with a complexity that approximates to that
of the historian's sources and of the practices they reveal. It is this step, from
essential to complex unity, which contributes most to historical practice .
More pragmatically, the Althusserian protocols (we had better say 'reminders')
warn against tendencies we should strive to avoid. They lead us to ask, clearly,
whether we are slipping back into a neglect of the cultural-ideological, or are so
obsessed with literature, artistic production or human creativity in general that we
forget the material conditions from which such creativity is never free. They help
us to avoid the conflations of the culture problematic and the reductionism of
'consciousness'.

No supercession: problems with 'structuralism'

The relation between structuralism and earlier problematics is not, however, one of
supercession. The sharpest way to demonstrate this is to focus on features that
debar it as a basis of alternative accounts. There are three important aspects here:
the inhibitions to concrete analysis created by structuralism's major absence a -
developed epistemology of historical research, a tendency to functionalist portrayals
of the operation of ideological social relations, an alternative tendency to produce
accounts of ideology, 'discourse' or 'representation' in which what began as a rational
abstraction becomes a complete autonomy. We might call this tendency the 'autono-
mization of instances'.
Out of a particular French philosophical tradition, Althusser and his co-workers
derived a view of Marx's contribution to knowledge. This philosophical' reading
-
was not limited to the discussion of intellectual procedures indeed, the character-
istically philosophical contribution was pursued rather incompletely. Reading
Capital pronounced too on the character and substance of historical materialism. It
-
presented a philosophy with decidedly unphilosophical ambitions no mere help-
meet to 'science', but a fully fledged theoretical sociology in philosophical disguise ,
inheritor not of Literature nor yet of History but of Philosophy as the Great
Tradition !
This philosopher's reading was, in fact, very selective.88 It effected a radical
simplification of Marx's results and a truncation of his procedures. Simplification is
best seen in Balibar's part 3 o f Reading Capital. Here Marx's extended three-volume
228 Theories

definition of the capitalist mode of production is reduced to some formularies

about the invariant elements of modes of production in general, their variant modes
of combination, and an account of 'transition' (best compared with the richness of
Maurice Dobbs's) in terms of the formal principle of non-correspondence.89 There
is no serious consideration here of Marx's 'laws' of accumulation, the eidstence of
countervailing tendencies, the possibilities of capitalist 'solutions' to crises and to
the declining rate of profit, and the forms of the reproductive circuits - all of
which constitute the substance of the description of the capitalist mode. This
inattention to the detail of Marx's economic analysis parallels the culturalist absence
and has, as we shall see, not dissimilar results.
Marx's procedures are similarly treated: Maridst science, the opening of 'the
continent of history' is held to have occurred through a practice which had as its
object previous problematics, especially that of political economy. It follows that
development within Marxism may occur through critical commentary upon Marx's
own categories: the raising of these to full theoretical status, the supplying of
silences, the malting explicit or uniform implicit new problematics. The value of
this theoretical labour has already been acknowledged, along with the need to
take Marx's own texts and the work of other historians as its object. But this
theoretical enterprise by no means exhausts the whole circuit of knowledge. It by
no means describes the whole of Marx's best practice. It says nothing of research,
of the stages in inquiry which Marx described as 'appropriating the material in detail'
and analysing its forms of development and their inner connection.90 It deals in
part with the character of abstractions, but hypostasizes the 'concept' as finished
knowledge. In particular Marx's own concern with the rush and muddle of observ-
able phenomena is lost in the objections to 'empiricism':
I should under no circumstances have published the second volume before the
present English industrial crisis had reached its climax. The phenomena are at this
. ..
time singular, in many respects different from what they were in the past . It
is therefore necessary to watch the present course of things until their maturity
before you can 'consuzne' them 'productively', I mean 'theore tically !.91

Althusser is right to argue for a non-empiricist mode of working and his texts pose
important questions. Yet Reading Capital is singularly devoid of solutions. The
problems at the end of part 1, are simply left in suspension."
Yet this absence - the connection between the investigation of specific situations
(the 'English crisis' of 1879) and the development of more general categories (the
theoretical consumption) - is the really damaging feature of the Althusserian episteme -
logy. Around this lack, a whole history of post-Althusserian epistemological agonies
could be written.93 In the absence of a model of research, a 'vulgar Althusserianism'
becomes a mirror image of the empiricism of the historians. Althusserianism renders
the 'appropriation of the real in thought' peculiarly difficult by stressing only one
-
side of Marx's epistemology the 'rationalist' side, the emphasis on the distinctive-
ness of thought. Culturalist epistemologies stress only the other side - the 'materialist
premise' which insists that these categories always express social relations.
 Three problematics 229

It 'forgets' that thought does indeed have its own rules, that it proceeds by abstrac-
tion. Each represents aspects of Marx's best practice, whose organic relation in
Capital and elsewhere we are only beginning to understand. At its worst, then,
Althusserianism of the theoreticist period does become an 'idealism', the charac-
teristic ideology of the intellectuals. It is easy to see its origin in the protest against
the over-politicization of knowledge in an earlier communist politics.94
One consequence of the particular form of abstractness which is a feature of
Althusserian philosophy is the failure to realize a theoretical promise in the
-
production of specific histories. For this requires categories fresh abstractions at -
a lower level of generality than those of the abstract social formation. We cannot
hope to grasp actual societies only in terms of the dominant mode of production
and its ideological and political conditions. We encounter immediately the problem
of 'survivals', of unthought relations that can only be grasped by historical research.95
And if we attempt to bridge th.is gulf by simple extensions of Althusser's insights,
we risk further failings: especially the use of simplified functionalist models and a
neglect of the specificities of economic relations. It is to these failings we may
now turn•
Althusser's essay on 'Ideological state apparatuses' is the classic site of these
difficulties. The essay is a series of notes on the part played by ideology and the
state in the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. Potentially, this essay
is of great value not least to our object, working-class culture. We might expect it
to deliver an account of the forms of class struggle in ideology: the way in which
capital and the agencies of the capitalist state seek to secure the reproduction of a
working class in a form appropriate to the requirements of accumulation and the
ways in which, on the basis of their own economic conditions of existence, prole-
tarians struggle against this process. We might expect Althusser to have built upon
Marx's own account of reproduction, adding a characteristic emphasis on cultural-
ideological forms.96 For in historical reality the working class is never simply
reproduced as a 'naked' proletariat, pure bearers of the capital relation. Labour is
always reproduced with historically specific habits and 'needs' and within a social
and cultural world whose character is never exhausted by the functional requirements
of capital.
This essay has been exhaustively criticized and none of the points made here is
new.97 We can, therefore, be very brief, recapitulating criticisms germane to our
purpose. The essay represents 'reproduction' which, in Marx, is a necessarily contra-
dictory and antagonistic process, as the functional necessity of a system. Rather than
being a process in which the state intervenes in the primary contradictions of
economic relations, reproduction is a function performed by ideology for capital
through the state. The whole sphere of the ideological - the very processes by which
-
consciousness and subjectivities are formed is subsumed within Mis function.
- -
Ideology-in-general the natural culture-bound state of man is conflated with
ideology in another of its meanings, the specific conditions of a cultural kind that
prepare labourers and others for the places in the hierarchical division of labour.
What is correctly understood as a condition or a contingency becomes, in the course
230 Theories

of the argument, a continuously achieved outcome. Dominant ideology, organized

especially through apparatuses like schools, works with all the certainty usually
ascribed to natural or biological processes. We are returned to a very familiar
model of one-dimensional control in which all sense of struggle or contradiction is
lost. Althusser's account resembles nothing more than those (unrealized) bourgeois
visions of the perfect worker which reoccur across the capitalist epoch, whether
images of the sober and prudent aristocrat of labour or those soon-to-be employed
young men and women, com.plete with aptitudes, 'employability' and 'social and
life sldlls' who are the object of the Manpower Services Commission. And all this
is achieved, apparently, by and through ideology: no hint of the force of economic
relations themselves which in Marx's own account (and an unemployed future)
provide the main disciplines. in general, the overriding concern with outcomes
-
reproduction suppresses the fact that these conditions have continually to be won
- -
-
or lost in particular conflicts and struggles. Some of these dimensions are supplied
by Althusser in a later postscript, but this self-criticism is of a very radical kind,
which actually demands a recasting of the argument. The sense in which this falls
behind erdsting accounts might be seen in a comparison with Edward Thompson's
'Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism', a history of the construction
-
of some of the conditions which Alt husser's essay takes for granted and
eternalizes.98

Conclusions: elements of a theory of working-class culture

We end by presenting three main arguments. These are offered, not as a finished
theory of working-class culture, but as indications of how to work towards more
adequate accounts. Any fully developed theory. a reconstruction of Marx's original
problematic for instance, could not rest on theoretical clarification alone, but
also on research and fresh a`bstractions.99
First, we want to argue a case about the nature and rationality of culture-ideology
as an abstraction. This involves a distancing from several positions discussed in this
essay (and several more not discussed): from the refusal to abstract at all (Williams),
from the tendency to regard culture-ideology or the ideological 'instance' as a
concrete set of institutions or apparatuses (some readings of the ISA essay); and
from all partial or trivializing conceptions of culture (e.g. its identification with
'leisure pursuits').
Second, we suggest that there is a need to differentiate moments or aspects of
cultural-ideological processes. The complexity of this instance cannot be grasped
through one term of analysis only, whether culture or ideology. One symptom of
this is the way each term becomes overburdened with meanings, as if a massive
terrain could be encompassed by a tiny word. One useful move here is to differen-
- -
tiate the two major terms in use culture and ideology and to attempt to define
what is specific to each and h.ow cultural-ideological processes might be seen as a
unity.
 Three problematics 231

Third, we shall return to the issue of worldng-class culture primarily as an

example of how the relation, culture to class, may be rethought in the light of
earlier discussions.
It is clear from the earlier discussion that the character of the cultural-ideological
as such remains persistently difficult to grasp. Culture expands infinitely, a slide
indexed by 'whole way of life' or 'constitutive social processi But there are also
problems with 'ideology', whose meanings accumulate through successive usages:
ideology as false or inadequate knowledge and as opposed to science, ideology as
-
an instance a set of practices which occurs in all social formations, ideology as a
site of conditions which must be met if capitalism as a system is to continue, ideology
as a trans-historical, ever-present concomitant of human e>dstence, the medium in
-
which men and women live their conditions of e>dstence 'the representation of
the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of e>dstence'.
Althusser's insistence that 'ideology has a material erdstence' parallels the slide of
'whole way of nfe'.100 In the ISA essay ideology as an instance in the social
formation seems to be identified with particular institutions or sites, with ideological
state apparatuses, especially the family and the school. These different uses are, at
the least, very confusing.
One solution is to distinguish very much more sharply between the notion of
'level' or 'instance' and the notion of 'apparatus', 'institution', 'site' or 'sphere' of
social relations. The two ideas are different forms of abstraction: the abstraction
of instances focuses on practices of a similar kind that occur throughout the whole
society and in different concrete locations; the notion of 'site' or 'apparatus' tries
-
to grasp what is specific to a particular sphere or set of institutions schools, family ,
the factory, To conflate these two forms of analysis, and especially to understand
'instance' in terms of a set of concrete institutions, is a serious vulgarization. It is
vulnerable to Will.iams's strictures on the idealist tendency to make analytic distinc-
tions into thi.ngs.101
We understand the notion of ideology' to be an abstraction of the first rather
than of the second kind. It does not denote specific institutional sites but practices
or moments in social processes that have a distinctive character. It involves parti-
cular kinds of relations and movements. Social formations or processes may be
looked at from this aspect, with this most closely in focus.
What then is specific to the ideological-cultural aspect? lt is important to insist,
in a thoroughly 'orthodox' way, on the specifically mental (as opposed to 'material`)
character of these relations their equivalence to Marx's general category of
'consciousness' (not the consciousness of class but consciousness-in-general as
used by Marx in The German Ideology), Consciousness, in this sense, is a necessary
but 'simple' abstraction, a feature of human beings as such, evident in all history.
Just as men and women have always won a living from nature and sustained their
material existence, so also they 'possess consciousness'.102 This, indeed, is a
specific feature of human labour, 'an exclusively human characteristic'. It distin -
gushes architect and bee :
232 Theories

At the end of every labour process, a result emerges that had already been conceived
by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only affects
a change of forms in the materials of nature, he also realities his own purpose in
these materials.103

The characteristic feature of the ideological-cultural instance, then, is the production

-
of forms of consciousness ideas, feelings, desires, moral preferences, forms of
subjectivity. Thisis fully recognized in Thompson's stress on 'values' and in the
Althusserian usage, 'imaginaryl It is not so much a question that schools or families
are ideology, more that they are sites where ideologies are produced in the form of
subjectivities.
All this is to say, of course, that there is no separate instit national area of social
life in which forms of consciousness arise' mentalities and subjectivities are formed
and expressed in every sphere of eidstence. Subjectivities are very powerfully
formed, as Paul Willis argues, in processes of economic production. Economic
-
practices production and consumption have a cultural aspect and rest on cultural
conditions. Concrete political processes similarly always involve an ideological
moment. As Foucault puts it, writing of punishment :
. .
We should admit rather that power produces knowledge . , that power and
knowledge directly imply one another, that there is no power relation without the
correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not
presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.104

Beliefs and preferences are formed and expressed in practices which are not com-
monly understood as involving signification or representation. Perhaps they operate
more powerfully there than in practices evidently organized for the production of
consciousness: schools, media, art. Yet even these cases show the dangers of
collapsing institutions and instances, for a proper concrete analysis of schools or
media would involve examination of economic and political conditions as well as
ideological effects. The notion of 'instance' in other words, is theoretical in the
strongest possible sense: it is a means for analysis concrete situations, not a
description of a chunk of concrete experience itself. Just as Marx abstracted from a
living historical whole those relations most directly implicated in the production
of material life (i.e. economic social relations) and left aside concrete human
persons in favour of 'personifications of economic categories',105 so a similar
abstraction can be made of those relations most implicated in the production of
specific forms of consciousness. Relations having been understood in this way, we
may then return to actual history, 'but this time not as a chaotic notion of an
integral whole, but as a rich aggregate of many determinations and relations'.106
The distance between this conception of culture-ideology and trivializing ones
will by now be clear. Such a conception has nothing in common with 'culture' as
- -
a residuum when other practices work and politics have been subtracted, that is
with culture-as-leisure. Nor is it in any way similar to 'culture' as limited to certain
-
specialized activities writing, reading, consuming films or playing football.
 Uzree pro biemafics 233

There is an underdeveloped tendency in both structuralist and culturalist accounts

to make some distinction between levels or moments in the cultural-ideologieaI.107
Aithusser has distinguished between 'theoretical' and 'non-theoretical' ideologies,
or 'theoretical' and 'praetical' ideologies.108 More interestingly, there is the
distinction, implicit in the description of ideologydn-general, between a lived
relation to red relations (what culturalism would call 'experience') and the
representation of that lived relation. This distinction implies the need to understand
both the 'lived relation' itself and the representation of it in ideology. There are not
dissimilar distinctions in the cult uralist tradition. In Thompson's history, for
example, several terms other than culture and consciousness are in play, especially
'values' or 'value systems' and 'ideology 'Value system' seems to describe cultural
or ideological elements in their most organic relation to a mode of production;
ideology, by contrast, has classic German Ideology connotations of ideas and
idealism.l09 In practice, however, these distinctions are not rigorously used and
there is a tendency in the histories for theoretical problems to be solved by a mix-
ture of moral evaluation and political choice: utilitarianism, Methodism, political
economy, Evangelicalism (each of which may be 'lived' by middle-class people) are
'ideology', worldngclass radicalism is 'culture' or 'consciousness'.37*9
The most developed distinctions of these kinds are, however, to be found in
Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Gran sci employs three key terms of analysis where
culturalism and structuralism mainly employ one. 'Common sense' refers to the
lived culture of a particular class or social group, understood as a complex, located
whole. It is the 'philosopher' in everyone, carried in language, 'good sense' or 'folk-
lore'. It has many of the connotations of culture in the English usage.111 'Philo-
sophy' (occasionally 'ideology'), on the other hand, refers to some organized set of
conceptions produced by intellectuals (those with the function of philosophers)
and having a more or less organic relation to social classes and 'the necessities of
productions Ideologies, if 'organic', are understood as essentially active and trans-
formative, transformative, especially, of 'common sense'.112 'Hegemony', Gramsci's
third major term, indicates the state of play, as it were, between the whole
complex of class-based 'educative' agencies and ideologies on the one hand, and the
common sense or lived culture of the masses on the other. It concerns the extent
and the modes by which cbmrnon sense is made to conform to 'the necessities of
production' and to the construction of 'consent' and a political order, Gran sci
builds on Marx's realization of the importance of the cultural conditions of capitalist
production - all the moral and subjective aspects of l a b o r power for exaniplelW -
by examining the way in which such conditions are organized and fought over
politically. 'Hegemony' is, in effect, Althusser's 'reproduction', but a reproduction
without the functionalism. It incorporates, indeed, a view of the relation between
structure and superstructure that is distinctive and, perhaps, unique. The normal
state of the relation is far from a meeting of functional requirements: it is a state of
massive disjunctions and unevenness. Gran sci described, in other words, the normal-
ity of 'survivals', concrete features of a society that cannot 'be grasped as the
dominant mode of production and its conditions of existence.114 Hegemony
234 Theories

describes the processes by which some greater conformity is sought. 'Reproduction'

is, then, a hard and constantly resisted labour on very obstinate materials indeed.
These ideas are in a 'practical state' in Gramsci's writing. It was indeed the
connection with concrete analysis that produced the theorizations in the first place.
They are peculiarly pertinent for today. In what follows we indicate some key
moments in the study of culture/ideology drawing heavily on Gramsci's categories.

The importance of 'culture'

It is important to retain 'culture' as a category of analysis. By culture is understood
the common sense or way of life of a particular class, group or social category, the
complex of ideologies that are actually adopted as moral preferences or principles
of life. To insist on this usage is to insist on the complex recreation of ideological
effects as a moment of the analysis of consciousness. The effects of a particular
ideological work or aspect of hegemony can only be understood in relation to
attitudes and beliefs that are already lived. ideologies never address ('interpolate')
a "naked" subject.115 Concrete social individuals are always already constructed as
culturally classed and sexed agents, already have a complexly formed subjectivity.
Outside some structuralist texts, the 'lonely hour' of the unitary, primary, primor-
dial and cultureless interpellation 'never comes'. ideologies always work upon a
ground: that ground is culture. To insist on this is also to in sist on 'history' and to
enter a protest against large parts of the Marxist tradition for its neglect of the
ground of its own political practice too.
The retention of elements of a cultural analysis is also important for checking
tendencies to functionalism. It is genuinely difficult to disengage the notion of
ideology from a mode-of-production analysis in which all ideologies are seen as
functionally related to the conditions of production. There are ideological con»
ditions for a given mode; but these by no means exhaust the whole sphere of the
cultural - ideological in any concrete society. There are cultural elements to which
capitalism is relatively indifferent and many which it has great difficulty in changing
and which remain massively and residually present. Similarly it is not easy to think
the forms of cultural resistance to capitalism and to its particular restructuring of
patriarchy within this frame of reference. Cultural analysis, especially in the form
adopted by Edward Thompson, may attach cultural struggles too closely to class,
but guarantees thereby that struggles within culture will not be ignored .
The second major check to functionalism is the culturalist insistence, derived
from the heart of the culture tradition, on the production of self or self-making.
We have already noted the dangers of a theoretical humanism that ignores the
conditions under which choices are made, moral preferences formed. But to neglect
the moment of self-creation, of the affirmation of belief or o f the giving of consent
would, once more, return us to 'pure mechanicityi It is clear that one specific
feature of processes within consciousness is exactly this cultural moment. It is what
distinguishes the force of ideological social relations from relations of political
coercion or economic necessity. Outcomes of ideology or consciousness are not deter-
 T?iree problematics 235

mined in the same kind of way as in economic or political relations.

The heterogeneity of cultures

It is an error, certainly in modern capitalist conditions, to view working-class
culture as 'all of a piece'. The degree of homogeneity (and. of distinctiveness) is
undoubtedly historically variable. It is probable that working~class culture from the
1880s to the 1930s was more homogeneous and distinct than in any period before
or after. Yet, all notions of culture as coherent value systems tend to mislead ,
.Gramsci's stress on the radical heterogeneity of (even) peasant culture is a better
general guide.116 We have already noted many of the forms of internal difference:
those organized around geographical unevenness and the social and sexual divisions
of labour, and the divisions into sites or spheres of erdstence, products of ideological
work, economic development, and legally enforced institutional separations. We
have noted, too, specific forms of hierarchization (et. 'aristocracy of labour', the
depoliticization of the role of women) which are secured on top of these divisions.
If there are features in the position of the labourer' that are common to a whole
working class, there are a myriad features that are not. These may always become
objects of political practices seeking greater division or a unity. It follows that there
can be no simple or expressive' relation between economic classes and cultural
forms, and that we should start any such analysis by looking for contradictions,
taboos, displacements in a culture, as well as unities. This is one way of breaking
from the bad 'romantic' side of cultural studies. Another very important way is
to recognize the gender-specific elements in any class culture and the ways in which
the subordination of girls and women is reproduced, in part, within the culture
itself.

t71e place of the analysis 0flideo=Z<;>gies

More generally, heterogeneity of a lived culture is an index of the effects of hege-
mony. One classic form of heterogeneity is that described by Gran sci thus'
The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical
consciousness of his practical activity, which nonetheless involves understanding
the world in so far as it transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can indeed be
historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two
theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness), one which is
implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow workers
in the practical transformation of the real world, and one, superficially explicit or
verbal which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed." I

Gran sci goes on to argue that such 'Perl>al' conceptions have their consequences,
especially in inducing passivity by contradicting a more 'lived' impulse. The political
problem, for Gran sci, is to develop critical forms of theoretical consciousness that
actually engage with practical activity, develop it and give it a sense of its own
236 T71eonles

historicity, and its ability to change the world.

Cultural contradictions of this kind are the product in part of ideological work.
Against the humanist view of 'self-making' it is important to stress that what is
affirmed or assented to, or rejected or transformed, has its own particular origin and
history. The model of culture as a working up on 'experience' lacks one vital element -
the instruments of l a b o r themselves, in this case the conceptions, categories and
preferences already present. As we have seen 'experience' as a term conflates the
raw materials (the way, especially, in which capitalist economic relations impinge
on human beings) with the mental means of their representation (the erdsting
cultural repertoire). It is by supplyingconceptions where none exist (or merely
aiding in the reproduction of old) that ideology operates on culture to hold it
below the level of 'critical', 'historical' or 'hegemonic' understanding.
There is an important role, then, for the analysis of ideologies in a developed
cultural studies. This may take an altogether more abstracted form than the study
of a class culture. In the case of culture the most 'lived' conceptions are closely tied
into practical activity, it is necessary to describe the physicality of labour in order
to grasp its cultural significance. It is possible on the other hand to examine ideo-
logies in terms of 'fields' and 'discourses' which, in their own internal structures,
position or address (ideal) 'subjects'. This, perhaps, is the predominant form of
-
ideology analysis within the structuralist tradition, resembling, more than anything,
a literary model of investigation that treats ideologies as 'a text'.118 This form of
analysis has an important part to play in discerning the logics and internally
generated pressures of particular ideologies or ideological fields, but we will still
need to know the effects of such discourses on actual already-acculturated subjects.
Ideology-analysis of this ldnd, in other words, does not replace, though it should
certainly supplement, a more 'historical' analysis of lived cultures. Without this
the origins and effects of ideologies, in the common sense of classes and the labour
of intellectuals, will remain obscure .

Culture and class

We have noted the structuralist tendency to detach the analysis of ideologies from
classes and class struggle, and the value of this as a critique of expressive and eco-
nomistic formulations. The relation between the economic conditions of existence
of a particular class and its culture is a problematic one. Yet it is absurd to believe
that there is no relation between ideological and political forms and economic
classes.
There are two main ways of understanding this connection for working-class
culture. The first concerns the material conditions of the class itself and the sense
that is made of these. The second concerns the particular relation to capital and
capital's need continuously to transform the cultural conditions of labour.
Particular economic relations have a particular salience for particular classes.
The economic form of the wage is, for example, a salient relation for the prole-
tarian , just as the rate of profit has a special importance for the capitalist. Such
 Three problematics 237

relations become a focus for more symbolic processes, they are the raw material
of culture. The sense that is made of, say, dependence on capital, the probability
of unemployment or relative poverty depends, of course, on the conceptions that
are available or may be worked up from existing class practices. There is nothing
in these relations themselves that produces a particular form of understanding of
them, no automatic relay between class and class consciousness. Yet to have any
purchase on the culture of a class, new ideologies must address relations of this
kind. It is only in that way that ideologies, including socialism, can become
principles of life. The conditions of e>dstence of classes profoundly shape class
cultures, less by specifying 'interests', more by supplying a kind of agenda with
which the culture must deal. lt is a matter of historical record that working-class
culture has been built around the task of malting fundamentally punishing con-
ditions more inhabitable .
We must end, however, by looking at this process from the viewpoint of capital.
Though this is stressed, by Althusser, to functional excess, capital does have
certain requirements in relation to the reproduction of labour power.119 Though
working-class culture cannot be seen as having a simple functional relation to
capital's needs, capital certainly has a stake in the forms of worldng-class culture.
Minimally, it is a stake in l a b o r ' s availability, willingness to l a b o r under conditions
rational for the production of surplus, and a suitable level of skill and aptitude .
More particular conditions require historical specification, but from this viewpoint
worldng-class culture is the form in which l a b o r is reproduced. In this respect
capitalism is far from being a self-policing system, far from labour continually
being reproduced in appropriate forms, these processes require continual manage-
ment. Moreover, capital's requirements are frequently themselves undergoing
transformation. This process of reproduction, then, is always a contested trans-
formation. Working-class culture is formed in the struggle between capital's demand
for particular forms of l a b o r power and the search for a secure location within this
relation of dependency. The outcome of such necessary struggles depends on what
ideological and political forces are in play, and, ultimately, upon the existence of
socialist organization with an integral relation to proletarian conditions and worldng~
class cultural forms.
10 Capital and culture: the post-war
working class revisited
John Clarke

We have sought, so far, to explore working-class culture through some general

problems of interpretation and some very specific cases in the more or less distant
past. Important as theoretical clarification may be (as a means), the most sig-
nificant test is its usefulness in the work of historical and conjectural analysis.
In this last section, then, we want to return to some of the questions raised at the
beginNing of the book - the questions about the disappearance, reappearance and
character of worldng-class culture that concerned the sociologists of the 1950s
and 1960s. There is no intention here to write a full history of the post-war working
class, though perhaps that should be the next project. Our aim is to provide some
pointers towards such a history, an indication of the dimensions that would have
to be grasped. At the same time we want to illustrate, more concretely, some of
the theoretical issues that have emerged throughout the book .
The 'affluence' debate raised issues that are important but largely unrecognized
and unresolved. They are not issues that can be answered by a 'lazy' Marxism: by
a ritualistic deface of the category of class itself, by the demonstration of the
continued polarity of labour and capital, or by insisting that we still stand within
the epochal structure of the capitalist mode of production. The answers lie at a
lower level of abstraction: they concern, for the most part, more specific, short-run
historical movements which cannot be grasped fully at that level of generality.
Our starting point, then, is that 'affluence' theory, like some kinds of Marxism,
nis recognized post-war changes which, in themselves, were real enough. It tended
to exaggerate them or understand them one-sidedly and to present them as perma-
nent shifts (out of a class society altogether) rather than as conjectural moments.
It would be more accurate to say that the working class was transformed in these
years - restructured and recomposed. This was not just a question of some sectoral
-
changes - on 'standard of living', education, housing, etc. but of a deep and
thorough reorganization of worldng-class life. The class did not, of course, disappear,
but its forms and conditions of existence were certainly transformed.
We have argued, in general, that working-class culture can be seen as the ground
of transformations wrought by capitalist development itself but supported by
ideological and political Work with a definite relation to the 'necessities of produc-
tion'. Our approach to the post-war worldng class follows this way of thinking about
culture. We look at the movements of capital in the post-war period and at capital's
 Capital and culture: the post-war working class revisited 239

requirements for new forms of labour power. We chart some of the transformative
work of state agencies in this period, arguing that these are connected (more or
less tightly) with changes in capital's requirements. We look at some key working-
class cultural forms and the ways in which they have been transformed in this
period. Finally we note the importance for understanding working-class culture
itself of looking at the ways in which it is represented to working people by
more general political and ideological processes. We should add that these later
-
questions of culture and ideology- are not marginal to class structure and class
struggle. They involve the forms in which these struggles are fought out .

We may begin by detailing some trends in capitalist development in Britain since

the war, those with most pertinence for working-class life. None of these tendencies
were new in the period; they are often long-term trends in capital accumulation
that have been intensified, proceeding at a greater pace or with a deeper impact
on social relations. Among these trends we would want to point to the growing
tendency to the concentration and centralization of capitals; the expansion of
labour processes that are based on production-line technologies and forms of
control, the continuing decline of 'heavy industry' and the movement of capital
into modern 'lighter' forms of production, most notably the production of con-
-
sumer durables, and major shifts in the composition of labour power the secular
tendency to 'de-sldlling', the separation of 'conception' and 'execution' and the
creation of new technical or control skills, the shift of labour out of direct pro-
duction and into circulation and distribution, and the expansion of labour within
the state.1
Concentration and centralization as well as the policies of large~scale companies
often involve shifts in the geographical distribution of capital - shifts which must
be understood in an international as well as a regional and national framework.
Localities that suffer the sudden withdrawal of capital also suffer major disruptions
in their patterns of social and cultural life.2 Cultural forms that have developed, for
instance, in a close connection with the original division of labour, may lose their
very rationale. From the point of view of capital, its mobility requires the mobility
of labour. It therefore also requires the continual fracturing of the local and more
fixed patterns of reproduction: it specifically requires the destruction of locality
as a major form through which working people experience their social life. The
resistance of locally bound labour to capital's migration has, in turn, produced state
-
policies that seek a greater conformity here in the form of industrial grants to
tempt capital to move to pools of l a b o r , there in the form of mobility and redub
dancy payments to encourage labourers to pursue capital.3
The stripping of capital from an area and less dramatic forms of 'industrial
reorganization' always have effects upon local forms of culture, the forms in which
labour is actually reproduced. Thus Cohen shows how, in the East End, the
rationalization of the docks has had profound consequences for forms of family
life based upon neighbourhood patterns and upon inter-generational recruitment to
the dominant male occupations.4 Similarly, the mobility of capital, has in many
 240 Theories

instances, deepened the division between home and work-place, between the
social relationships of the world of production and those of family. This division
has also been increased by forms of local state planning in which the industrial
and residential zones of urban areas are sharply separated.
One way of understanding these changes has been in terms of the undermining
.1
of 'working-class comrnunityi Some reservations have to be stated against this view.
We must not take 'the working-class community' as the archetypal 'traditional'
moment of the English worldng class as a whole, as a de-historicized sociology
sometimes does. The working class has not produced such cultural forms every-
where, nor has it produced them continuously in the period up to the 19508.
Gareth Stedman Jones points, for example, to the growing physical distance
between the man's place of labour and the domestic sphere as one of the changes
underlying the cultural adoptions of skilled workers in late-nineteenth-century
-
London.5 We would argue that the particular cultural form 'working-class commun-
ity' - rests especially on a close, dovetailed relationship between work and non-work
and a geographical concentration of intra-class social relationships of all lands.
Hoggart's Hunslet or Hessle Road did seem to rest on the continuity of work and
home. Yet if the patterns in Hunslet (or Ashton) were particular, localism in a
looser sense has been a pervasive mode of working-class culture. A class culture has
often been identified with specifically local experiences, relationships and practices,
it has been articulated around specifically local points of reference, contact and
conflict. To some extent, then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the structures of localism
and even, for some sections, of 'community' have been undercut by the combined
effects of changes in production and the effects of political and social policies. This
has affected the primary forms of identification and antagonism - Hoggart's 'us' and
'them'. It may involve a greater sense of dislocation from 'them' in the form of local
agencies of control and regulation: contacts and conflicts with police or schools or
local councils may indeed be systematically deparochialized.5
Though, at one level, these tendencies are functional for capital accumulation,
they also produce new problems in the cultural and political domains which them-
selves require new forms of state intervention. For example, both Cockburn and
Corrigan have shown the decline of worldng-class involvement in local forms of
political representation and a reduction in the legitimacy attributed to them.7
Schools have complained of the decline of parental involvement in the education
of children, the police have spoken of a loss of public confidence and a decline
of community commitment to the control and reporting of crime. Housing authors
ties have complained about the reluctance of tenants to identify with their area
and 'take pride' in its maintenance .8 A common response to these forms of dis-
engagement has been to attempt to reconstitute local identification and commit-
-
ment hence community work, community schools, community liason, community
development and so on.
This partial and uneven reconstruction of British capital also involved other
changes, especially those associated with the demand for an expanded application
of scientific knowledge to the labour process and more sophisticated methods of
 Capital and culture: the post-war working class revisited 241

control of labour. We may doubt if the expansion of the education system since
1944 can wholly or even mainly be explained in terms of capital's requirements:
the tendency to a more egalitarian provision owed as much to the need to win the
consent of different classes of parents and to retain an alliance with the teachers.9
But the reorganization of education, which included the coming of universal state
secondary education and some expansion of the tertiary sector, undoubtedly had
effects upon established patterns of worldng-class culture. For example, it
restructured the age relations which shape both the internal social relationdiips
of the family and the family economy itself. Most obviously, these changes defer,
for different lengths of time, the entry of children of the family to full-time waged
labour, thus necessitating new economic adjustments within the family patterns
of reproduction. In addition, this reorganization of the educational apparatus
produced a new range of possible 'career' patterns for worldng-class youth, affecting
in different ways their relations to their located cultural patterns of street, neigh-
bourhood and friendship groupings, and to the passage through the educational
apparatus to waged l a b o r . It also provided some of the symbolic indices of
differentiation whichmark out these different trajectories (et. the secondary
modern boy, technical college boy or grammar school girl).
This reorganization of education also raises other central questions for our con-
cerns here, for it is not simply a case of an administrative recording of an agency
which is in some sense external to the working class. It involves the political and
ideological interpellation of the class into the processes of politics and education.
Crucial here are the symbolic figures of 'equality' and 'achievement' as expressions
of working-class demands articulated through the complex mechanisirns of social-
democratic politics.10 political representation of a working class presence is
no simple ideological mystification through which the worldng classes are bemused,
but a representation that must be taken seriously as exerting definite force, what
Poulantzas calls 'pertinent effects', on both lived experience and the material forms
of reconstructed institutions. Even where institutions meet a logic required by
capital, their form and direction are never the outcome of a simple unidirectional
imposition by capital. They involve a complex political work of concession and
compromise, if only to secure the legitimacy of the state in popular opinion. Thus,
for example, while parts of the welfare state may be attributed to capital's need
for a healthy and stable work force, these needs in no sense prescribe a solution
which takes the form of a universal and free National Health Service (as we are
now learning by example).
The area of youth is one in which the changed conditions of endstence of the
working class and the destruction of existing cultural forms have had their most
visible consequences in the construction of new cultural forms and practices. As
Cohen and Hall ez* al. have shown, the emergence of particular youth sub-cultures
in post-war Britain is made possible by the changing material conditions of the
working class (the reorganization of education, changes in the composition of
labour power, and the reconstruction of local economies).11 These processes had
specific e f f e c t s on the local forms of class reproduction and cultural representations -
242 Theories
the material and cultural elements of communities. But they also had specific
consequences for the structure of age relations within the working class and for the
ideological representation of 3/outh'. The expansion of youth employment laid
the basis for the greater financial autonomy of working-class youth within the
family economy, and underpinned the creation of the 'youth market'. But this
greater financial autonomy (especially in the form of rising disposable incomes)
also allowed the construction of new foams of youthful cultural autonomy - a
separation from existing milieux and modes of informal regulation of adolescence.
But, as Hall et al. have argued, this autonomy of working-class youth cannot in
any sense be taken as a severing of youth from class, rather, youth sub-cultural
formations are elaborated on the terrain of class cultures but through the mecha-
nisms of 'generational specifity'. The stylistic and symbolic repertoires of sub~
cultures such as the Teds, Mods and Skinheads are cultural representations of the
class's conditions of existence, and the changes taking place in them, but these
representations are articulated through the position of youth within the class. For
example, the style of the Mods involves the symbolic representation of affluence
(and especially of affluent youth) through styles of conspicuous and highly
developed consumption. From this standpoint the Mods appear to be the ideal
representation of the affluence thesis, but the sub-cultural relations and practices
which support this consumption also produce it in a form which is alien to that of
the supposedly privatized and passive consumer of commodities. In the Mods,
the commodities are transformed collectively into new uses and new cultural
representations of the conditions of that particular fraction of worldng-class youth.
These collective sub-cultural practices subvert the supposed role of the consumer,
and transform the cultural meanings attached to the commodity - for example in
the transformation of the motor scooter from a cheap and highly functional means
of transport into an object of collective display.
The points raised here about youth have wider ramifications in relation to the
affluence debate. There the dominant tendency was to assume that possession of
similar objects or commodities by different groups necessarily indicated similar
life-styles and outlooks. The possession of a car, fridge or television necessarily
indicated a convergence of life-style with those who had previously been the
privileged possessors of these commodities. As the example of the Mods shows, this
conception suppresses the possibility of the same object or practice being located
within different sets of relations and being endowed with different sets of cultural
valuations. In this sense, the object or commodity is not unidimensional, but
involves some (however limited) possibilities of being appropriated as a different
sort of use value in a different class-cultural context. This is not to argue that the
changes in commodities possessed by the working class (or sections of it) during
the post-war period has had no consequences. These cannot, however, be reduced
to an equalizing or convergence of cultural practices.
We have pointed to some of the tendencies undercutting locality, but it is
equally important to note how other tendencies have registered on the family -
another site of reproduction. Central among these has been a tension between
 Capital and culture: the post-war working class revisited 243

capital and the state hinging around women's double position as the source of
domestic labour and as a section of the reserve labour.12 In the expansion and
restructuring of post-war English capitalism, capital stood tO benefit from women's
role as waged labourers in two main ways: first, in the expanding unsldlled labour
sector of the new light production industries, and secondly, in the rapid expansion
of the service and distributive sectors. In both, of course, the key to the desirability
of women's labour is its relative cheapness.13 However, this requirement for cheap
labour to intensify the profitability of such development conflicts with other
demands bearing on the sexual division of labour. In part, it conflicts with wartime
guarantees won by the trade unions about the priority to be given to employing
men in the post-war period. More significantly, it conflicts with the state's concern
to regulate and control the privatized reproduction of labour power. From the
standpoint of the state, then, women's other function, as domestic labour, is of
paramount importance, and a series of wartime investigations and studies raised
the spectre of a maladjusted, badly nourished and potentially incompetent future
generation of bearers of labour power.14 The central theme of these studies, and of
subsequent state initiatives, was the centrality of the family and of the woman's position
as wife and mother. From the state's standpoint, then, the employment of married
women, at least, threatened to interrupt the necessary mechanism of generational
reproduction, and thus required action by the state to secure those processes.15
Thus, for example, the establishment of the Children's Departments in local
authorities at the end of the war must in part be seen as an attempt to construct a
mechanism through which the state could monitor, and intervene in, the 'private'
processes of reproduction, and, where necessary, supplant the family (the in-
competent, negligent or dangerous family, that is) with institutional aIternatives.16
In a different way, the state's control over the provision of alternative child care
facilities such as nurseries provided a mechanism through which the state could
intervene to change the balance between women's two functions.17 In the post-
war period the state's removal and reduction of institutional child- care .indicates
its predominant commitment to returning women to the tasks of reproduction .
This stress on reproduction in the activities of the state is also visible in Beveridge's
conception of the 1946 National Insurance Act :

The attitude of the housewife to gainful employment outside the home is not and
should not be the same as that of the single woman . . . . In the next thirty years
housewives as Mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance
of the British race and British ideals in the wor1d.18

These tensions act upon attempts to establish viable family economies among the
working class, often dependent upon the need for two wages to maintain standards
of living, in many cases producing the adaptation of part-time work by married
women.19 In addition, in this period women were increasingly ideologically inter-
pellated into yet another role, that of the consumer of the new durables and
domestic goods by a capitalism striving to accomplish a mass domestic market for
244 Theories

its products, producing new images and conceptions of motherhood, housewifery

and femininity." We are in no position to be able to assess the consequences of these
changes in any systematic way, but in broad terms these conditions, together with
the hidden substratum of changes in contraceptive availability and practice, have
substantially unhinged the established practices and conceptions of the sexual division
of labour and its ideological, political and emotional concomitants in all classes
(though differently and unevenly, it is true) .
The disruption of family and friendship patterns surrounding and supporting
domestic labour and especially child care through the processes of rehousing and
social reconstruction in the post-war period have, of course, been the focus of much
conventional sociological inquiry, but there are elements and aspects of these
processes which have been less remarked upon. For example, Cohen has pointed out
how the processes of rehousing not only involved the disruption of established
patterns of family relationships through enforced geographical mobility, but involved
their curtailment in the very material forms which such relocation took.31 He
suggests that the patterns and models of house-building in the post-war period
were shaped by an invisible ideological norm of the nuclear family which excluded
other variants of family relationships by determining the physical and spatial
arrangement of housing. Thus, the 'ideal form' of reproduction is enshrined in
the very bricks and mortar within which reproduction takes place.
We would also want to indicate something of the way in which these reconstruc-
tions of housing in the hands of the local state have acted, together with larger
economic forces, to undercut other established practices of reproduction within
the working class. We have in mind here the activity of shopping as one vital (though
extremely hidden) element of domestic labour. The old estates and housing areas
with their variety of very local shopping .facilities (the corner shop) produced
certain rhythms and relationships which organized shopping as a social activity .
New council and private housing estates have involved the replacement of local
shops with more centralized shopping areas. This process has gone on alongside the
tendency to concentration among distributive capital, with its steady supplanting of
the traditional petit-bourgecise. This centralization of shopping changes the rhythms
of shopping, creating pressures for adaptations and adjustments within working-
class culture. Thus the apparent supplanting of Saturday afternoon spectator sports
by Saturday afternoon family shopping in the l950s is in no sense the 'free choice'
of a rational and free-floating consumer, but is in part determined by the changing
social conditions of shopping which require more systematic, large-scale expeditions
(and thus more 'rational' reproduction . . .). From this standpoint the 'disappearing
corner shop' is not a folk-tale derived from excessive viewing of 'Coronation Street',
but a direct consequence of the long-term tendencies of capital accumulation and
concentration, and a critical reorganization of the conditions of existence of
working~class culture. To grasp worldng-class culture as an empirical problem it is
-
necessary to hold on to both ends of this chain on the one hand, the broad
movements of capital and, on the other, its specific, local consequences for the
patterns of class reproduction.
 Capital and culture: the post-war working class revisited 245

Another related example of the consequences of the broad movements of capital

for specific and local forms of class reproduction can be found in the position of
the pub.22 The pub has held a central position in the local articulation of working-
class culture as a sort of 'colonized' institution which, though not formally owned
by the class, has been internally moulded by the class's custom. Here certain
customary rights and expectations could be enforced through what Foster in
another context has called 'exclusive dealing',23 and users of the pub stood in a
relationship to publicans which might be described as 'membership'. In working-
-
class culture, then, the pub has historically been a 'local' a term signifying its
patronage by an established local clientele who shaped the internal dynamics,
relationships and patterns of drinking. In the post-war period the development of
an oligopolistic brewing industry has led to critical economic and social changes
in the public houses. First, it has led to a tendency for owners or tenants to be
replaced by brewery-controlled managers, thus interrupting the relations of
patronage between the clientele and the publican, and producing industrial
rather than local domination of the internal dynamics and patterns of the pub.
Second, the breweries have tended to rationalize (i.e. close) or 'improve' their
pubs, with design changes having important consequences for the patterns and
experience of drinking (e.g. the substitution of large lounges for a series of snugs,
public bars and tap rooms). Much of this has been done in accordance with an
image of a changing clientele identified by the breweries. The new consumer
differs from the old in terms of age (s/he is young), class (slhe is classless) and
taste (Campari not beer). The effect of this attempt to address the new consumer
is to fundamentally change the social and economic conditions under which drinking
takes place, that is, to change the determinants of a particular historically developed
form of reproduction. We may borrow from Althusser to suggest that these changes
in material conditions and signifying practices (and the commercial ideologies
-
which guide them) function to interpolate a new identity for the drinker that of
the 'consumer' rather than the 'member'. This newly forged interpellation dissolves
previous patterns and habits of 'how to drink' and substitutes for them new
'preferred' styles of drinking:
It is high time that Andy Capp was given a new suit and a car and took his wife
out to one of the many popular North East pubs where he can still enjoy his pint
of beer and Florrie can have a class of sauterne with her scampi and chips.24
(In the light of our earlier comment about how women were addressed as the new
consumers, it is interesting that here it is Florrie who is to change her consumption
patterns.)
This quotation serves to illustrate something of the complexity of the forms
which the reorganization of capital takes at the point of consumption. It is not
a matter of a neutral technical or rancid process. It is a process born and
conducted in ideological conceptions about 'the market' and the 'consumer' which
are the professionalized variants of contemporary ideological and political discourses .
Marketing ideologies about the consumer echo political ideologies about the
246 Theories

disappearance of traditional class differences and the rise of an affluent, middle-

class Britain. In a sense, these marketing ideologies and practices attempt to
'complete the circle' by producing precisely that affluent middle-class consumer they
claim to have already recognized. Subsequently, of course, political ideologies
register these changes as the changed conditions of political practice and debate.
Working-class cultural forms have also been disrupted by processes of class
recomposition stemming in large part from the economic/productive formation of
the class. The changing occupational structure, together with the deskilling and
resldlling of labour, play a part in this, changing both the relations supporting
occupational and trade union solidarities, and also the symbolic indices of internal
differentiation within the class (craft sldlls, differentials, etc.). The most significant
disruption of established class solidarities and differentiations, however, has been
the importation of immigrant l a b o r to meet both capital and the state's need for
low waged labour.25 Ethnic, national and racial divisions are not new to the
structure and culture of the British worldng class, of course, for example, nationalist
divisions between the indigenous working class and Irish immigrant l a b o r , and the
effects of imperial competition between the national and colonial work-forces
have played an important role in the making and remaldng of the English worldng
class economically, politically and ideologically."
What is new, however, is the internalization of racial differences within the
national worldng class in visible and distinctive forms. For the sociologists, worldng~
class culture has seemed always to refer nostalgically to some all-white golden age.
It does not register the presence of the temples, Asian films and corner shops,
reggae and. rastafarianism, these are relegated to a different part of the sociolo-
gical empire, the sociology of ethnic minorities or race relations. Yet these, too ,
are the forms in and through which labour is reproduced, they are also the cultural
experiences, the material, from which new ideological and political forces address
the class, or, more precisely, aim to divide it .
However, we must also not make the error of assuming that such divisions and
the material for them is a recent consequence of the racial structuring of lab our -
the image of a worldng-class culture has always hidden a complexly stratified
and divided class in which particular cultural forms have provided the symbols
and signals of division. Regionalism and localism carried and reproduced in accent,
vocabulary, dress and the varieties of local and civic pride have been a persistent
source of suspicion, mistrust and hostility, while one of the most fertile grounds of
intra -class differentiation has been the whole repertoire of 'respectability'_27 Though
drawing on world experience (and especially the distinction between employed and
unemployed), the forms and practices of reproduction have acted as central
symbolic formations in this repertoire. The rough-respectable division has been
firmly lodges in the visible signs of the home, street, neighbourhood and patterns of
consumption. As Robert Roberts has shown, it was the scrubbed and painted or
polished front steps, the front room, the types of food, sobriety, orientation to
-
schools, children's clothes, the best suit or coat the very stuff of reproduction -
which provided the material of intra-class division." These repertoires have also
 Capital and culture: the post-war working class revisited 247

been drawn on, added to and solidified by particular forms of ideological and
-
political addresses to the class the respectable trade unionists or l a b o r politicians,
the conservative appeal to freedom and the family life of Britain, the stigma of the
visit from the welfare, school board man or social worker, the rough neighbourhood's
reputation, the 'scroungers' and so on.29 All of these have at different times provided
mechanisms for the division of the class and the insertion of its 'respectable' elements
into bourgeois political discourse and action.
In the processes of social reconstruction in post-war Britain some of these
conditions and forms of the reproduction of the working class as a complmdy
stratified, divided and contradictory unity have been dissolved or put to one side.
Blocks of flats and relative anonymity undermine the significance (or possibility)
of the polished step; the mobility of labour tends against localism and the establish-
ment of 'reputation'. But in their dissolution, new forms of division, new repertoires
of signifying differentiation have been constructed and developed. The interruption
and dissolution of established class practices of reproduction produced in their wake
new tensions, divisions and contradictions requiring new cultural solutions, new
forms of living the relation to the relation of production, new habits, forms of
common sense and so on.

What we have said so far has been an attempt to point to the variety of processes of
class struggle (in economic, political and ideological forms) which have transformed
-
the conditions of eidstence of the worldng class in post-war Britain processes
which have acted to reorganize the sphere of production and the sphere of repro-
duction. In the transformation of those conditions of existence (and the dominant
political and ideological representation of them), the basis of the cultural forms
within which the working class represent those conditions, or live their experience
of them, has been undermined. The change in those material conditions require the
elaboration of new cultural practices and repertoires which are capable of producing
(however partial and contradictory) new cultural frameworks in which to live the
experiences of being working class.
We cannot detail the whole process of the transformation and reconstitution of
working-class culture between 1945 and 1978, but we can offer some elements that
seem to us to be involved in that process. Central to this is an awareness that what
we are discussing is in no simple sense the overthrow of one working-class culture
and its replacement by a new one. What we can be certain of is that the period
-
with which we are dealing involves a process of cultural transition a transition
which begins not from some homogeneous entity called worldng-class culture,
but from a complex, uneven and contradictory ensemble, made up of internal
-
contradictions, a range or repertoire of different 'cultural solutions' trade
unionism, religion, respectability, crime, domesticity , socialist politics, etc.30 The
process of transition involves both continuities and breaks, some elements continue
unmodified, others are sustained in new forms and other disappear and are replaced
by new cultural forms.
We may begin here with the central continuity - the persistence of the cultural
248 Theories

-
forms and practices of solidarity based within production the informal cultures of
-
the shop floor discussed in Chapter 8 the collective definitions of work, the
cultural forms expressing resistance to work, and the transformation of those
resistances into valued social identities (identities based in 'skills', 'masculinity'
and 'being the bread-winner').31 Here, in the process of socialized labour, workers
have continued to forge positive, though partial, cultural responses based on
collective solidarity, which transfers the necessities and degradations of waged
labor into some form of valued cultural identification. That this is a culture of
subordination which, in the process of resistance (of sabotage, of doing the bosses
down, of absenteeism), continues to reproduce its own subordination (and the
oppression of others - for example, women through the particular cultural valuations
of masculinity) is beyond doubt. But it does form a persistent, though often
hidden, element which provides core elements of working-class culture: work and
the cultural strategies developed around it persist underneath the more apparent
and visible changes in the patterns of working-class consumption which dominated
the conceptions of affluence. The discipline of the wage relation persists throughout
this supposed abolition of the worldng class.
But even here, some of the cultural forms are changed. Some of the conditions
which are culturally represented within shop-floor cultures are modified. Skills are
eroded and removed by managerial initiatives, dissolving established cultural patterns
of location, hierarchy and identity, and removing resources for working-class
resistance and struggle within production. New, and often equally jealously
guarded, hierarchies and forms of distinction are constructed within the process of
production, but also new broader solidarities and identities are constructed out of
the process of desldlling, involving cultural recognition of the forms in which l a b o r
becomes generalized and more interdependent. New cultural foci and points of
resistance become articulated around the changes which capital produces within
the labour process. No longer the foreman as the personalized bearer of control,
but the domination exercised by the pace of the production line itself.34 No
longer the patronizing selilassurances of the bosses, but an attack on the abstract
-
intellectuals the management scientists with their university training, who erode
skills and pour scorn on the world of 'experience'.35 In addition, the tendencies to
both economic and political concentration in the period have produced new informal
cultural resistances and responses. The greater distance from capital itself in this
period, and the greater involvement of trade union organizations in national forms
of economic planning and bargaining with industry and the state, creates the ground
for the creation of new informal responses (or, more correctly, the elaboration of
subterranean traditions of shop-floor resistance to a greater position of significance).
The period of centralization of bargaining and planning from the 1950s is also the
period of the growth of informal shop-floor action - unofficial disputes, the growth
of shop steward power in representing shop-floor interests, the tendency of 'wage
drift' through local control of output and bonus schemes, as well as the more
individual' strategies of sabotage, absenteeism and high l a b o r turnover.35 All
these developments had come to haunt political and managerial planning by the
 Capital and culture: the post-war working class revisited 249

mid 1960s: they produced, among other things, the Donovan Commission, the
Labour Party's 'In Place of Strife' and the Industrial Relations Act, as well as the
neo-human-relations strategies of management (such as Volvo's semi-autonomous
work groups, job rotation and job enrichment schemes), profit-sharing schemes and
plans for worker directors.37
What we are faced with here is not the simple unfolding of some unidirectional
historical logic, guided by the unerring hand of capital, but of new initiatives by
capital changing the conditions and forms of resistance from within l a b o r , requiring
new 'solutions' from capital and the state and so on. It is a permanently contra-
dictory process of class struggle, which may not always take the traditionally
recognized correct or 'modern' forms but involves a variety of hidden and informal
dimensions which may more closely resemble, in fact, the protests of Hobsbawm's
'primitive rebels'.
We want now to turn to the sphere of reproduction and the changes there, but
before doing so it is important to enter a word of warning. Though these are
theoretically distinct elements of capitalism, involving clear analytic divisions, they
are in no sense 'lived' as such. We cannot assume that they are experienced as two
distinct and separate areas, in which the cultural formations developed around
work have no bearing on the cultural formations which deal with the 'private'
world of home and leisure. That is, we must not mistake the cultural formations
which distinguish the relationship between 'home' and 'work' for the analytic
or theoretical distinction between production and reproduction. The forms in which
people register culturally the gap between home and work may be based on the
conditioning of the relation between production and reproduction in a particular
stage of capitalism but they cannot be reduced to those distinctions. Thus the male
worker who returns at night to feed his tropical fish, and expects his wife to feed
him, experiences a different cultural representation of the relation between home
and work from that of a woman worker who returns to the home and is faced with
feeding husband and children and doing the rest of the housework before returning
to work the next day, even though both of these are based on the same structural
arrangement of production and reproduction.
Here, too, we can begin by considering not the extent of change but the
persistence of certain key elements of working-class culture. Central here is the
persistence of the sexual division of labour as the mechanism through which
production and reproduction are articulated, and the persistence of cultural
definitions of sexual identify within the worldng class. These two elements the-
-
sexual division of labour and cultural representations of sexual identity have
played a major role in the historical development and creation of worldng-class
culture. The archetypal community is founded upon this (largely hidden) structure.
It depends upon the home (and therefore the w i f e lmother) as the focus around
which the other elements hang, it depends on the pride 'in the home' (as Hoggart's
accounts show), on female friendship and kinship networks to carry out domestic
lab our and so on. But the cultural valuation of sexual identities plays an equally
central role in both the forms of working-class culture and working-class politics.
250 Theories

Historically, the organized labour movement has drawn a firm and clear line between
-
'men's work' and 'women's work' from the early Factory Acts where women's
work was restricted, through negotiations in both world wars to ensure that jobs
temporarily filled by women would be returned to their 'rightful owners' (men) at
the end of war.38 This line has only recently begun to be eroded (and often
grudgingly) in the face of women's increased involvement in production in the post»
war period and largely as a consequence of women themselves struggling to gain
trade union support and recognition.
In terms of working-class cultural repertoires, sexual identity has also played a
key role. 'Respectability' within the working class historically has been demons-
trated by the ability of the man to keep his wife at home, away from the world
of work.39 In a different way, the shop-floor culture, which we mentioned earlier,
has always been contradictorily constituted in that many of its elements of resis-
tance have been articulated through specific conceptions of toughness and
masculinity about being 'one of the boys', being able to 'take it', and so on.40 A
culture of resistance is here based in a crucial sense on a more hidden culture of
oppression. In non-work cultural forms, this sexual structure also organizes the
pattern of many elements - for instance, the worlds of football and drinking have
within them these valorizations of masculinity and of the 'boys'.
These sexual and cultural structures have persisted as the organizing elements of
worldng-class life in the post-war period, though, again, not without some modifi-
cations. Thus, for example, the commercialization of football, involving the creation
of some overlap with the world of pop music also created a space (with a very
particular sexual structure), through the production of male superstars, for a certain
amount of female involvement in football ,41 although the responses (from
obstruction to 'humor') to women attempting to play football themselves indi-
cates how marginal those changes have been. Similarly, the vast commercialization
of other leisure areas by 'cultural capital' (discos, cinemas, skating rinks, pubs,
etc.) has altered the local and sexual structure of cultural activities to a certain
extent. Certainly the local structure of leisure has been massively undercut by the
tendency to concentration of leisure facilities within city centres, but those changes
(as the quotation about Andy Capp earlier indicates) also have attempted to address
women specifically as the consumers of their facilities. This does not imply any
'equalization', but it does begin to create new cultural forms within which women
have a place. That place is, of course, heavily circumscribed by a particular sexual
-
construction of women as consumers as, for example, in the practice of free
admission for women to discos as a way of attracting more male custom ers.43
This is only one element of a series of massive (and often contradictory) attempts
-
to reconstruct 'femininity' during this period initiatives which address women -
(occasionally) as workers, but more often as mothers and as consumers (the gateway
to the establishment of new needs), using femininity' as the symbolic mechanism
through which to stimulate consumption. These changes have opened up certain
limited and carefully prescribed new areas and forms of 'being a woman'.43
The expansion of consumption and the stimulation of new needs through women
 Capital and culture: the post-war working class revisited 25.1

has had particular consequences for the nature of women's roles in domestic labour.
The woman is not only the ideological figure through which those needs have been
-
stimulated she is also the means through which those new needs are often realized.
The 'quality of life' may be found in the tins and packets on the supermarket
shelves, but they require domestic l a b o r to turn them into a reality. There is a
hidden history in this period of the changes in the content and form of housework:
changes induced partly by the commercial stimulation of new needs (the 'moral
and historical element' in the determination of the value of labour power, often,
in fact, financed by women's waged work), but also by changes in political and
ideological demands about the 'quality' of reproduction (demands about how to
care for children, what to provide for adolescents, how to look after your husband,
etc.). These changes also take place within a shift in the social connections which
historically supported at least some working-class families, and which have moved
them towards a more privatized existence. Cohen's commentary on this process is
worth quoting,
the isolated family unit could no longer call on the resources Of wider kinship
networks, or of the neighbourhood, and the family itself became the sole focus of
solidarity. This meant that any problems were bottled up within the immediate
personal context which produced them; and at the same time family relationships
were invested with a new intensity, to compensate for the diversity of relation-
ships previously generated through neighbours and wider kin.44

Though, as Cohen recognizes, this may overestimate the extent to which solidary
relationships have been dissolved, there is no doubt that it does register a trend in
the changing position of the working-class family which has had specific conse-
quences for women. Given the invisibility of women in most sociological research,
it is impossible to conclude whether these processes have produced new sets of
cultural responses and resistances,45 although it is possible to see some of their
consequences in rising rates of mental illness and neurosis among working-class
women, and the increased medical regulation of and tranquilization for 'women's
problems?

At this point, we wish to return to the importance of 'locality' as an element of

working-class culture. We have tried to indicate earlier some of the processes which
effectively undercut local economic and cultural patterns, but 'localism' continues
to have cultural importance in a number of forms. Locality continues to act as a
focus for some workingclass cultural identifications, often among those who are
in some senses marginal to production and to the collective solidarities generated
there. Locality continues to act as a basis for collective activity among working-
class adolescents, both in the sense of providing cultural identities (most obviously
developed around football and during the period of the Skinheads, but also for
many otherwise 'unnamed' youth groupings), and of constituting their 'social
space' the streets, alleyways, etc., which are public and less tightly regulated than
other areas (the home, the school, the youth club, etc.).46 Sometimes the importance
252 Theories

of locality also appears here as what Gran sci would call a 'trace' of an earlier
cultural configuration - an oral tradition about the old days of worldng-class
communities, Thus, for example, the significance of local identities to Skinhead
groups can in part be seen as a 'magical' or imaginary' reconstitution of
community .47
Locality also seems to play a particular role within the cultural representations
of older members of the working class - those who have been "retired" from the
front line of production, and are without collective defences against either their
dependence on the state or their subjugation to market forces. Here locality appears
to be one of the central cultural configurations around which their responses are
articulated, the area and what has happened to it becomes a key form or cultural
metaphor in which processes of economic, political and ideological change are
represented and evaluated.48
Finally, it is important to note that new localized cultural forms are being
created. There are processes of ethnic "colonization" of particular areas, in part as
a consequence of defensive aggregation, but also in order to provide supportive
cultural patterns and networks. In the construction of these cultural forms, racial
groups have also been forced to develop their own infrastructure of institutions to
carry and maintain those cultural patterns: shops, restaurants, clubs, temples and
so on.49 Here, too, these processes of cultural colonization are not the simple
provision of a monolithic cultural formation, but involve a cultural dynamics of
resistance, response and transformation. This is perhaps most clear in the forms in
which second-generation black youth in Britain have rejected many of the cultural
options developed by their 'parent culture' and have produced new cultural
strategies based on more positive valuations of being black, especially centring around
the use of reggae and rastafarianism .50
In all of this it is important not to proceed as if working-class cultural forms
were made and remade within a vacuum, to take them as solely expressing, in some
transparent way, the material conditions of the class. In the production of these
'imaginary relations', other representations and ideological ensembles make them-
selves felt and are drawn on. We have tried to indicate some of the ways in which
new ideological initiatives have had specific consequences for the forms of working-
class culture (in the production of new needs, in the creation of new sexual identities,
etc.), but these are only some of the processes in which dominant ideological
repertoires have penetrated and reshaped aspects of working-class culture.
The working class and its changing conditions of eidstence have been 'spoken to'
in a variety of voices from within dominant ideologies, in attempts to provide
favourable or harmonizing representations of these changing conditions. These
have included, for example, addressing the worldng class as the national interest in
-
a variety of guises from Macmillan's national interest of self-interests, to Wilson's
'progressive nation' forged in the 'white heat of the technological revolution' (not
to mention the subsequent return to the Dunkirk spirit). More recently the
Thatcherite strategy has called for the reconstitution of 'old' England, interpellating
the working class as an aggregation of free and independent men and women.
 Capital and culture: the post~war working class revisited 253

welded together through the values of the family but enmeshed and frustrated by
the bureaucracies of creeping socialism. They have been addressed both by the state
and by capital as 'consumers', a common identity aimed at overriding the 'sectional
interests' of production. They have also been addressed as the 'English' whose way
of life has been destroyed by the influx of black criminals and scroungers, whose
streets are no longer safe to walk in, and who have been betrayed by 'liberal'
political and intellectuals .
These attempts to organize or orchestrate cultural definitions work by addressing
some aspect of changed conditions and offering relatively coherent ideological
structures within which they can be 'realistically' represented (and also be removed
from the deeper organizing structures of class relations and class struggle). These
forms of address are not un-vocal. They involve different fragments, or what
Poulantzas terms 'sub-ensembles', of the dominant ideological repertoire.52 Nor
must we be led to assume any simple outcome from these ideological practices.
They may, indeed, come to provide organizing themes for 'common sense', but
they may also be rejected for their inability to render experience coherent and
meaningful, or they may be subsumed as sub-themes within other cultural formations.

We have been trying to demonstrate that the question of worldng-class culture

remains an important one for Marxist analysis when the position, conditions and
supporting relations of this terrain are adequately identified. Central to this must
be a refusal to collapse 'working-class culture' into some simple, expressive, homo-
geneous entity. We have tried to indicate that working-class culture does not eidst
(nor has ever existed) as a simple unity. We have pointed to how worldng-class
culture is produced as a complex, uneven and contradictory ensemble, involving a
variety or repertoire of strategies, resistances, subordinations and solutions, and how
these cultural forms are permanently being remade and transformed. These forms
are materialized and embedded in sets of practices, rituals, relationships and insti-
tutions which go to make up the terrain of 'civil society' in capitalism. We have also
tried to show how both the economic and the politico -ideological initiatives of
capital constantly require and produce the necessity for these cultural forms and
supporting practices to be transformed. The 'problem' of worldng-class culture is
not that posed by the mythologies of affluence or kinship networks, but must be
located in the problems of understanding the complex and contradictory forms
within which the working class lives its subordination in capitalist societies.
Notes and references

1 Sociology, cultural studies and the post-war working class

1 M. Young and P. Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Penguin,
1962), pp. 198-9.
2 ].I-I. Goldthorpe and D. Lockwood, The Affluent Worker (3 vols., Cambridge
.
University Press, 1968-9), vol. 3, p.21
3 Speech to the Labour Party Conference, 1959, quoted in S. Hall et al.,
Policing the Crisis (Macmillan, 1978), p. 230.
4 Gordon-Walker, quoted in ibid .
5 C.A.R. Crosland, the Conservative Enemy (Cape, 1962), p. 92.
6 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Penguin, 1958), p. 323.
7 ibid., p. 13.
8 ibid., p. 24.
9 e.g. B. Rosenberg and D.M. White, Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America
New York: Glencoe Free Press, 1957).
10 For the classic statements see T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture
(Faber, 1948); F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment
(Chatto & Windus, 1933).
11 Hoggart, Uses, pp. 18-22.
12 Colin Sparks, 'The abuses of literacy', in CCCS, Working Papers in Cultural
Studies, No. 6 (Birmingham University, 1974).
13 Hoggart, Uses, p. 17.
14 find., pp. 104-5 .
15 ibid., p. 248.
16 N. Dennis, F. Henriques and C. Slaughter, Coal is Our Life (Tavistock, 1969),
p. 76.
17 ibid., p. 35.
18 ibid., p. 138.
19 ibid., pp. 228-9.
20 K. Coates and R. Silburn, Poverty: The Forgotten Englishmen (Penguin, 1970) ,
p. 13.
21 ibid., p. 21 .
22 ibid., P. 26.
23 ibid., p. 50.
24 ibid., p. 34.
 Notes to pages 26-4] 255

25 ibid., pp. 26, I l l .

26 ibid., p. 142.
27 Goldthorpe and Lockwood, Affluent Worker, vol. 3, p. 195.
28 ibid., vol. 2. p. 75,vol. 3, p. 119.
29 ibid., vol. 3, pp. 50-1.
30 ibid., vol. l , p . 36.
31 ibid.,vol. l , p . 146.
32 For an elaboration of the separation of conception and execution in modern
forms of the labour process see H. Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital
(Monthly Review Press, 1974). See also Paul Willis, p. 185 above.
33 See, for instance, Goldthorpe and Lockwood, Af)'Zuent Worker, vol. l ,
p. 149.
34 ibid., vol. l , p. 180.
35 ibid., vol. l , p. 36.
36 ibid., vol. 3 , p. 181 .
37 ibid., vol. 3, pp. 162-3.
38 Stuart Hall, 'A sense of classlessness', Universities and New Left Review, no. 3,
(1958), p. 27.
39 John Eaton, New Left Review, Towards Socialism (New Left Review, 1965),
p. 109.
40 ibid., p. 105.
41 ibid., pp. 107-8.
42 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, I 780-1950 (Penguin, 1961), p. 312.
43 ibid., pp. 313-4.
44 See especially pages 217-22.
45 Towards Socialism, p. 12.
46 ibid., p. 39.
47 For critical comments on Anderson's appropriation of 'hegemony' and on
much else see Edward Thompson, 'Peculiarities of the English', Socialist
Register (1965). For an assessment of the debate as a whole see Richard
Johnson, 'Barrington Moore, Perry Anderson and English social development',
Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 9 (University of Birmingham, 1976) .
48 Towards Socialism, p. 34.
49 ibid., p. 160.
50 ibid., P. 201 .

2 Culture and the historians

I would like to thank successive MA groups in CCCS who have provided a forum
for the discussion of many of the issues raised in this paper.

1 Perry Anderson's exploration of this 'absence' does not mention the Marydsm
of the historians. See P. Anderson, 'Components of the national culture', in
A. Cockburn and R. Blackburn, Student Power (Penguin, 1969).
256 Notes to pages 41 -6

2 J . Gould, 'The attack on higher education', Institute for the Study of Conflict
(September 1977).
3 Among the most useful items of these various lands are: N.B. Harte (ed.),
The Study of Economie History: Collected Inaugural Lectures 1893-1970
(Frank Cass, 1971); EJ. Hobsbawm, 'From social history to the history of
society', in M.W. Flinn and C. Flinn (eds.), Essays in Social History (Oxford
University Press, 1974), G. Stedman Jones, 'History: the povery of empiri-
cism', in R. Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science (Fontana, 1972) .
.
E.J Hobsbawn, 'Karl Marx's contribution to historiography', in the same
volume, and N.S.B. Gras, 'The rise and development of economic history',
Economic History Review, vol. 1 (1927) are all the more interesting for not
fitting any of the above categories. See also the essays on the history of the
discipline in Economic History Review, 2nd series, vol. 30, (1977).
4 See especially L. Althusser,For Marx (Penguin, 1969), L. Althusser and
E. Balibar, Reading Capital (New Left Books, 1970); L. Althusser, Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays (New Left Books, 1971), L. Althusser, Essays in
Self-Criticism (New Left Books, 1976).
5 See especially Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds.) Selections
from oNe Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gran sci (Lawrence & Wis fart, 1971).
6 Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Prison Notebooks, p. 276.
7 The best discussion of the general context of the 1880s debates remains Helen
Lynd, England in the /8805 (1945; reprint ed., Frank Cass, 1968). For some
criticisms of Lynd's account see E.P. Her nock, 'Poverty and social theory in
England', Social History, vol. 1 (January 1976). For an excellent and more
detailed account of the late nineteenth-century debates see John Mason,
'Anti-socialist thought in late-Victorian England' (Unpublished PhD thesis,
Birmingham Univeristy, 1974) .
8 For this especially N.S.B. Gras, 'The rise and development of economic
history', Economic Hisioljv Review, vol. 1 (1927).
9 Clapham, 'The study of economic history', in Harte, The Sandy o f Economic
History, p. 67; see also the similar argument in W..T. Ashley, 'The place of
economic history in university studies', Economic History Review, vol. 1
(1927).
10 See, for example, the inaugural lectures of Clapham, Tawney, Eileen Power
in Harte, Study of Economic History .
11 e,g, Amy Harrison, one of their research assistants, and co-author with
B.L. Hutchins of A History o f l~7actorjv Legislation, 1903. Beatrice Webb,
Our Partnership (1948), pp. 153-4, note 1.
12 ibid., p. 45 .
13 ibid., p. 151.
14 ibid., pp. 152-3.
15 S. and B. Webb, Hismr;v o f Trade Unionsim, preface to 2nd ed. (1894, reprint
ed., Longmans,1950), p. viii.
16 For the whole argument see ibid., oh. 1.
 Notes to pages 47-51 257

17 For sober trade unionists see below, for prudent administrators see
English Poor Law History, Part 2, The Last Hundred Years, vol. 1 (Longmans,
1929), oh. 2, 'Poor Law Commissionersi
18 S. and B. Webb, History of Trade Unionism, pp. 239-40.
19 B. Webb, Our Partnership, pp. 33, 160, 172, Margaret Cole, Life o f G.D.H
Cole, (Macmillian, 1971), p. 173.
20 See especially G. Orwell, the Road to Wig an Pier (Penguin, 1970).
21 Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1930), esp. pp. 310-11 .
22 ibid.,p.307.
23 There is no adequate biography, but see Gilbert Murray in Dictionary of
National Biography. The most important of their historical works for this
essay are The Village Labourer (1911 , reprint ed., Longmans, 1966); The
Skilled Labourer, I 760-1832 (1919; reprint ed., Longmans, 1920); The
Town Labourer, I 760-1832 (1917 , reprint ed., Longmans, 1966).
24 Hammond & Hammond, Town Labourer, p. 289.
25 J.F .C. Harrison, Robert Owen and Owenites in England and America (Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).
26 Bulletin o f the Society for one Study o f Labour History, no. 9 (August 1964),
pp. 4 , 7 .
27 ibid. (spring 1966), p. 4.
28 See the reported judgements of K. Knowles and E.P. Thompson quoted in
Cole, Cole (pp. 206, 274; and the tributes to Cole in Asa Briggs and John
Saville (eds.), Essays in Labour History (Macmillan,' 1960).
29 Life of William Cobbett (1924);Robert Owen (1925), Chartist Portraits
(1951), and the beginnings of what has become the Dictionary of Labour
Biography.
30 A Short History o f the British Working Class Movement 1789-1925 , (3 vols.,
Allen & Unwire, 1925-6).
31 British Working Class Politics 1832-1914 (1946); A History of the Labour
Party from 1914 (1948), A Century of Co-operation (1944)
32 History of Socialist Thought, vols. 1-5 (Macmillan, 1953-60).
33 Cole, Cole, pp. 17-19. Since Postgate seems mainly to have been responsible
If ave excluded the work from full consideration as part of Cole's oeuvre.
34 G.D.H. Cole, The Meaning o_fMarxism (Gollancz, 1948), p. 12. Other relevant
works here are What Marx Really Meant (Gollancz, 1934) and the introduction
to Marx's Capital, vol. 1 (Everyman, 1957), pp. V-XXV.
35 Cole, Meaning of Marxism, p. 80 .
36 ibid., p. 82 .
37 ibid., p. 49 .
38 ibid., pp. 42-3.
39 ibid., p. 39.
40 ibid., p. 25.
41 See especially F. Brandel, 'History and the social sciences', in P. Burke (ed),
258 Notes to pages 5]-6

Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe (Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1958), and Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, chs. 4 and 5 .
42 This is Postgate's description of the objects of the book (Cole, Cole, p. 217).
43 L.P. Carpenter, G.D.H Cole: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UniVer-
sity Press, 1973), p. 13.
44 o f . ibid., p. 227. See also J.M. Winter, Socialism and The Challenge o f War:
Ideas and Politics in Britain 1912-18, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), oh. 4,
which examines Cole's 'Marxist learnings'. For a caustic assessment of Cole's
politics see J. Hinton, 'G.D.H. Cole in the stage army of the good', Bulletin
for the Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 28 (spring 1974),
pp. 76-83.
'45 Dona Tort, Tom Mann and His Times, vol. 1, 1856-90 (Lawrence & Wis fart,
1956), p. 144. This chapter was written by A.L. Morton.
46 Cole, British Working Class Politics, p. 6; Cole, Snort History of the British
Working Class, vol. 2, p.v.
47 See several of the essays in Flinn and Smoot (ed.), Essays in Social History.
48 e_g. Brilisft Working Class Politics, p. 254.
49 Cole, Meaning of Marxism, p. 49 .
50 Cole, Chartist Portraits, pp. 3, 20.
51 See especially the essay on Lovett.
52 ibid. , pp. 22-3.
53 Cole, British Working Class Movement, vol. 2, oh. 7, especially p. 137 .
54 Cole, British Working Class Politics, pp. 7-8.
55 of. Clapham's treatment of Chartism in Economic History ojModern Britain: The
Early Railway Age 1820-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 1926), esp. p. 584.
56 e.g. E.P. Thompson, 'The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteen-
th century', Past and Present, no. 50 (February 1971), pp. 76-9.
57 Hobsbawn, 'Karl Marx's contribution to historiography', p. 270.
58 Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, no. 7 , (autumn 1963)
reporting the declining interest in history in WEA and extra-mural classes.
59 The first board included Maurice Dobb, R.I-I. Hilton and C. Hill, with E.J.
Hobsbawm as assistant editor .
60 The first committee of the society consisted of Asa Briggs, EJ. Hobsbawm
J.F.C. Harrison, F. Bedey, R. Harrison and S. Pollard. Henry Collins, John
Saville, E.P. Thompson and Dorothy Thompson have also been involved.
61 See especially Dobb, Studies, oh. 1. But each chapter has its own definitional
section, usually at the beginning. The account of Studies given here owes
much to Bill Schwarz's study in Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan and Bill
Schwarz, 'Economy, culture and concept', CCCS stenciled occasional paper,
no. 50 (1978).
62 John Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Hof our
of Dona Torr (Lawrence & Wis fart, 1954).
63 ibid., P. 270.
64 Dobb, Studies, p, 277 •
 Notes to pages 56-6] 259

65 Johnson, McLennan and Schwarz, 'Economy, culture and concept', p. 12.

66 Especially for explaining the different histories of feudalism in Western and
Eastern Europe. Dobb, Studies, p. 51 .
67 Dobb, Studies, pp. 161 -76, Hill, The English Revolution (Lawrence & Wis fart ,
1940), p. 12.
68 This theme is considered again in chapter 9.
69 Saville, Democracy and the Labour Movement, p. 9.
70 Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (1964, Weidenfeld, 1968), p. vii. There are some
important differences in this collection between essays that were written in
the late 1940s or early to mid 1950s and those of a somewhat later origin.
71 Hence 'the standard of living controversy'.
72 See especially essay 8 in Labouring Men in which 'explosions' of labour
militancy are traced mainly to economic variables plus 'the part played by
bodies of agitators, propagandists and organisers' (p. 146).
73 'The labour aristocracy in nineteenth century Britain' and 'Trends in the
British labour movement', again in Labounlng Men .
74 Henry Pelling's work is paradigmatic for this side of 'labour history'.
75 E.P. Thompson, 'Homage to Tom Macguire', in Briggs and Saville (eds.),
Essays in Labour History, vol 1 , pp. 276-7.
76 It is especially to be hoped that those who were actually involved in the work
here described will offer their own interpretations.
77 R. Williams, The Long Revolution (Penguin, 1965), p. 63.
78 My own personal encounter with The Uses of Literacy may serve as an
example of one kind of youthful middle-class reaction, though it was perhaps
an hilariously exaggerated response. I read the Uses in my last year at a private
boarding school for boys (known for an emphasis on the natural sciences and
its attractiveness to northern businessmen) and straight away dashed off to
Hunslet in a fit, first, of philanthropic excess and in a context resembling that
of a late-nineteenth-century 'settlements Pub talk, experience of early rock
and roll and the 'feeling' of the worldng-class youth sub-cultures of the time
shifted this mode of relationship into a more fashionable one: we returned,
about a year later, to make a film Of Hunslet life in the mode of Lindsay
Anderson. The experience was close enough to home, actually and meta-
phorically, to have profound reverberations, for we lived in Hull where, it
seemed to me, my father fought a running battle with 'the dockers'. It may
be that the book 'spoke' especially to working-class scholarship boys and girls,
but it certainly spoke to others too .
79 The development of oral history may be traced in the journal Oral History
(l970- ). See also Paul Thompson, The Edwardians (Weidenfeld & Nicholson ,
1975), a first product of a large-scale project of this land.
80 John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 1974). See also 'British imperialism and the labour aristocracy', in
J. Skelley (ed.), The General Strike (Lawrence & Wis fart, 1976). For a route out
of Hobsbawm's and Foster's Leninism, see R.Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy
 260 Notes to pages 61-6

in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford University Press, 1976) and Gray's critique

of Foster in Marxism Today (December 1977), pp. 367-71 .
81 It is not possible to list all the later, 1970s texts. Some of the most significant
have been Helen Mellor, Leisure and the Changing City (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1976), Stephen Yeo,Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis
(Croom Helm, 1976); Hugh Macleod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian
City (Croom Helm, 1974), R. Price, An Imperial War and the Eritish Working
Class (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), several of the essays in J. Mitchell
and A. Oaldey (eds.), Yhe Rights and Wrongs of Women (Penguin, 1976), and
in the Women's History issue of Oral History, vol. 5, no. 2 (autumn 1977).
Perhaps the most interesting attempt to bring the new concerns into some
connection with the staple fare of the older labour history is to be found in
the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, see especially his 'Working-class culture
and working-class politics in London, 1870-1900: notes on the re-making of
a working class', JournaI of Social History (summer 1974), pp. 460-508. For
a 'limit case' of labour history, and one of the best books of the whole genre,
see James Hinton, The FirstShop Steward 's Movement (Allen &.Unwire, 1973).
82 EJ . Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Move-
ment in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester University
1.
Press, 1959), p. 2.
83 I have in mind such cases as the Nairn-Anderson view of the English working
class as enduringly, essentially 'corporate', or, in the more 'optimistic' variant ,
Raymond Williams's argument that worldng-class culture is 'the basic collec-
tive ideal' or, indeed, where it assumes a prospective 01' teleological form, the
notion of an enduringly democratic popular tradition in Britain. Such essences
cannot be relied on. For a development of our own formulations see pages
230-7
84 For reviews of Marxist-feminist and other work on these problems see CCCS
Women's Studies Group, Women Take Issue (Hutchinson, 1977). Highly
speculative and very interesting on the forms of this division is Eli Zaretsky ,
Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (Pluto, 1976).
85 These formulations owe much to Simon Frith and Paul Corrigan, 'The politics
of eclucation', in Michael Young and Geoffrey Whitty, Society, State and
Schooling (Falmar Press, 1977). See also the similar argument on page 95
also in the context of education and social democracy.
86
87
Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, p. 175 _
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Gollancz, 1963),
pp. 12 -13.
88 C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Penguin, 1975), pp. 363-4.
89 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll (Pantheon, New York, 1974), p. xvi.
90 History Workshop Journal, no. 1, pp. 1-8.
91 These arguments were established in the Nairn-Anderson oeuvre on British
history mainly written in the 1960s. The most important items are P.A.
Anderson, 'Origins of the present crisis', New Left Review, no. 23, T. Nairn,
 Notes to pages 66-75 261

'Anatomy of the Labour Party'. New Left Review, nos,.27, 28 , E.P. Thompson
'Peculiarities of the English', Socialist Register (1965); N. Poulantzas, 'Marxist
political theory in Great Britain, New Left Review, no. 43, and the latest
reiteration of the original themes: Tom Nairn, 'The decline of the British
State',New Left Review, nos. 101-2. For my own view of the debate see
Richard Johnson, 'Perry Anderson, Barrington Moore and English social
developlnent', Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 9. There is a need to
return to these themes again.
92 For the argument about the intellectuals more specifically see P. Anderson,
'Components of the national culture', in Blackburn and Cockburn, Student
Power.
93 This argument is developed on pages 233-4.
94. viz. the work of the groups around Theoretical Practice (1971-3), especially
that of Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess, and around Screen magazine.
95 . For symptoms of this see the introduction to Mitchell and Oaldey (eds.),
The Rights and Wrongs of Women, and Sheila Rowbotharn's review of Women
Take Issue in New Society (4 May 1978).
96 This is how G.M. Young described the object of Victorian England: Portrait
of An Age (Oxford University Press, 1953), founding text for a whole school
of Victorian studies within a literary and strongly 'anti-sociological' mould .
See, for example, Geoffrey Best, Mid Victorian Britain (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1971). Best succeeds in brealdng with the high political - cultural emphasis
but his accounts of popular culture remain interestingly descriptive. He refuses,
for instance, the most elementary definitions - of class for example (pp.xv-xvi).
97 et. Terry Eagleton V. Raymond Williams, New Left Review, no. 95; Hindess
and Hirst V. some historians, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1975), Rosalind Coward v. Stuart Hall et al., Screen (spring 1977).
98 Interview with Radical History Review, vol. 3 , no. 4 (fall 1976), pp. 18-26 .
This article was written before the publication of Thompson's major critique
of Althusser, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (Merlin Press, 1978).
99 e.g. Whigs and Hunters (Allen Lane, 1975), pp. 258-69.

3. 'Really useful knowledge'

Notes
This is a much shortened version of a chapter originally intended for a book on
early fifteenth-century educational ideologies. A still shorter version was discussed
at the Rusldn History Workshop, May 1976, and was published in Radical Education ,
nos. 7 and 8 (winter 1976 and spring 1977).

1 e.g. A.E. Dobbs, Education and Social Movements, 1700-1850 (Longman, 1919).
2 Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Educaiion, 1780-1870 (Lawrence &
Wis fart, 1960); J.F.C. Harrison, Learning and Living 1790-1960 (Routledge &
262 Notes to pages 75-8

Kegan Paul, 1961), Harold Silver, The Concept of Popular Education

(MacGibbon & Kee, 1965); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English
Working Class (Gollancz, 1963), especially pp. 711-45. Also important for
first opening up many questions was R.K. Webb, The British Working Class
Reader, I 790-1848 (Allen & Unwire, 1955).
3 Especially Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press (Oxford University Press, 1970);
Joel H. Wiener, The War of the Unstamped (Cornell University Press, 1969),
Dorothy Thompson, The Early Chartists (Macmillan, 1971); J .A. Epstein ,
'Feargus O'Connor and the Northern Star', International Review of Social
History, vol. 21 (1976), part 1 , pp. 51-97, Eileen Yeo, 'Robert Owen and
radical culture', in S. Pollard and T. Salt (eds.), Robert Owen: Prophet of the
Poor (Macmillan, 1971); J.F.C. Harrison, Robert Owen and Owenites in
England and America (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).
4 The importance of private schooling before 1870 has been stressed by those
who now favour a return to market principles in education. See especially
E.G. West, 'Resource allocation and growth in early nineteenth-century
British education',Economic History Review, vol. 13, no. 1 (April 1970). For
an example of the land of careful local study that we badly need see John
Field, 'Private schools in Portsmouth and Southampton 1950-1870',JournaI
of Educational History and Administration, vol. 2 (1978), pp. 8-14.
5 -
The major study of Sunday schools T.W. Laqueur, Religion and Respect-
ability: Sunday Schools and English Working Class Culture (Yale University
-
Press, 1976) argues that Sunday schools as such were working-class insti-
tutions, democratically controlled. For an interesting example of a local
study which shows the variety of practices under the term 'Sunday school'
see Michael Frost, 'Workingclass education in Brimingham 1780-1850'
(Unpublished M Litt thesis, University of Birmingham, 1978).
6 For the first of these faults see Simon, Studies, p.2»75, the latter simplifi-
cations are commoner in conservative historiography.
7 For Cobbett see page 88. But Wooller, Carlile, O'Brien and O'Connor among
others used this description of themselves or others.
8 Poor Man 's Guardian, 26 February 1831 . The Guardian was the longest-lived
and intellectually most impressive of the unstamped weeklies in the 1830-6
phase of the radical press.
9 Tom Paine, The Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins (Penguin, 1969), especially
p. 163 .
10 William Cobbett,Advice to Young Men (London, 1906), p. 261 .
11 e.g. Black Dwarf, 4 March 1818 , Cobbett's OI' Hone's version of the catechism
or Cobbett's 'Sunday school hymn', Black Dwarf, 6 October 1819; Political
Register, 7 December 1833, p. 603.
12 For infants schools see New Moral World, 8 July 1837, and Northam Star,
7 January 1843. But for a more favourable view see the Midlands Counties
Illuminator (Thomas Cooper's paper), 20 March 1841 .
13 Even the most favourable assessments of the popularity of the mechanics
 Notes to pages 78-82 263

institutes are open to the interpretation that the institutes were used for their
'really Useful' content, e.g. the late acquisition of skills of literacy. See for
example Edward Royle, 'Mechanics institutes and the working classes 1840-
1860', Historical Journal, vol. 14 (1971), where it is shown that elementary
classes teaching the three Rs were the most popular aspect .
14 English Chartist Circular, no. 37 , p. 145.
15 Poor Man's Guardian, 18 May 1833.
16 ibid., 22 June 1833.
17 ibid., 24 September 1831.
18 Listed in Joel H. Wiener,A Descriptive Finding List of Unstamped British
Periodicals 1830-6 (Bibliographical Society, London, 1970).
19 'Heddekashun' was defined in Cobbett, Cottage Economy (London, 1850),
p. 4.
20 For a similar argument see Yeo, 'Robert Owen and radical culture', in Pollard
and Salt, Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor, p. 108, note 2.
21 GJ. Holyoake, Sixty Years o f a n AgitatorS Life (London 1892), vol 1 , p . 4.
22 [Thomas Wright] , The Great Unwashed by a Journeyman Engineer (1868 ;
reprinted Cass, 1970), p. 7.
23 Samuel Bamford, Early Days, 2nd ed. (Manchester, 1859), p. 41 .
24 ibid., pp. 2, 43-4, 92.
25 William Lovett, Life and Struggles in Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Free-
dom, Fitzroy ed., ed. R.H. Tawney (MacGibbon & Kee, 1967), pp. 1-6.
26 Joseph Gutteridge, Lights and Shadows in the Life o f a n Artisan (Coventry ,
1893), pp. 7-9.
27 Gwyn A. Williams, Rowland Detroisier: A Working Class Infidel, 18004834
(St Anthony's Press, York, 1965), pp. 5-6, 8.
28 John Wood, Autobiography (Bradford, 1881), p. 5.
29 Joseph McCabe, Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake (London, 1908) ,
vol. l , p p . 8-10.
30 J. Passmore Edwards,A Few Footprints (London, 1905), p. 5.
31 A.R. Schoyen, The CNarrisr Challenge: Portrait of Julian Horney (Heinemann ,
1958), p. 3.
32 Gutteridge, Ligh is and Shadows, pp. 6-7 , 14-15 .
33 Lovett, Life and Struggles, pp, 3-6.
34 For this distrust see Richard Johnson, 'Educational policy and social control
in early-Victorian England', Past and Present, no. 49 (1970), p. 114.
35 See for example, David Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (Allen Lane, 1975),
pp. 30, 25 .
36 Mary Smith, the Autoboigraphy o f Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Non-
eonformist (Carlisle, 1892), pp. 15 , 39-40.
37 Asked by a friend whom they should invite as a speaker she replied, 'Send for
Henry Vincent. He will please you aI.' ibid., p. 148 .
38 ibid., pp. 260, 271-2.
39 Roger Langdon, The Life of Roger Langdon told by Himself (London, n.d.) ,
264 Notes to pages 82-8

pp. 28-41.
40 ibid., p. 68.
-
41 For example Gutteridge's desire for Culpepper a standard work of botanical
reference, or Cobbett's encounter with A Tale o f a Tub.
42 FM. Leventl1all,Respectable Radical: George Howell and Victorian Working
Class Politics (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), pp. 6-9 .
43 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 674 .
44 For the best account of the unstamped as, itself, a political force see Wiener,
Tlze War of the Urzstamped ; for the best account of radical ideology in this
phase see Hollis, Pauper Press.
45 Epstein, 'Feargus O'Connor and the Northern So"ar', p. 95 .
46 For Cobbett see Thompson, Making, especially p. 749; for O'Connot see
Epstein, 'Feargus O'Connor and the Northern Star', p. 84.
47 ibid., p. 79.
48 For lectures see Northern Star, 5 May 1838, 2 June 1838, 28 July 1839;
for schoolmasters see 25 August 1838, for Dickens see 1838, passim .
49 e.g. Northern Star 6 and 13 January, 10 and 31 March, 21 and 28 April 1838.
50 ibid., 9 .Tune 1838.
51 ibid., 13 and 20 April 1844, 14 December 1844.
52 For this argument in full see Epstein, 'Feargus O'Connor and the Northern
.
Star' , passim
53 R.C. Gan mage, History of the CNartist Movement, 1937-1854 (Merlin Press,
London, 1969), p. 197.
54 Co-operator, 1 January 1830;Pioneer, 31 May 1834;Politieal Register,
21 September 1833, p. 731 ,Poor ran's Guardian, 25 October 1834 and 14
April 1834 ('Letter from a '1abourer' in Poplar').
55 For a typical attack on this score see Le Bonnett Rouge (journal of the neo-
Jacobin, Lorymer), 16 February 1833.
56 Pioneer, 25 January 1834.
57 Poor ran's Guardian, 14 June 1834.
58 Crisis, 1 June 1833.
59 e.g. Hollis, Pauper Press, p. 219.
60 e . . Poor Man '$ Guardian, 26 March 1831 , leader on the reform bill, and for a
more developed version the leader on 14June 1834.
61 ibid., 26 May 1832.
62 ibid., 30 November 1833.
63 ibid., 14 April 1832.
64 The most 'authoritative' source for Owe rite theory was the New Moral World,
the 'oflficial' journal of the movement. But see Harrison, Owen and Owenites,
and Thompson, Making, pp. 779-807, for the two most interesting contem-
porary interpretations.
65 Crisis, 19 May 1832.
66 Pioneer, 16 November 1833.
67 For a fuller account see E. Halevy, Thomas Hodgskin 1787-1869 (London,
 Notes to pages 88-92 265

1903); R. Pankhurst, William Thompson (1877-1833): Britain's Pioneer

Socialist, Feminist and Co-operator (Watts, 1954). For their influence on
working-class theory see Hollis, Pauper Press and Tl1ompson,Making.
68 Hollis, Pauper Press, p. 225.
69 On Owe rite educational ideas see especially Silver, The Concept of Popular
Education, and Harrison, Owen and Owenites .
70 He was not at all the Tory obscurantist that his vote against the education
measures of 1833 has sometimes suggested to educational historians.
71 Political Register, 10 April 1830.
72 Cobbett, Cottage Economy, pp. 9-10.
73 Political Register,7 December 1833, p. 581.
74 e.g. Cobbett, Cottage Economy , pp. 10-14. In this way, and with a typical
inconsistency, he managed to blame philanthropy both for destroying an old
order and trying to maintain it l
75 Cobbe.tt,Advice to Young Men, p. 40.
76 For a typical but intelligent argument of the Tory land see [John Weyland] ,
Letter to A Country Gentleman on the Education of the Lower Orders
(London,l808)
77 Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, p. 40.
78 Quoted in William Reitzel (ed.), The Autobiography of William Cobbett
(Faber, 1967), p. 194.
79 Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, p. 48.
80 ibid., p. 41.
81 His own history book was History of the Protestant Reformation, of Which
Cobbett boasted: 'Unquestionably the book of greatest circulation in the
whole world, the Bible only excepted'.
82 Thompson, _/Making, pp. 755 and 759.
83 Political Register, 21 September 1833, p. 735, Reitzel, Autobiography ,
pp. 123-5; Cobbett, Rural Rides (Penguin, 1967), p. 41.
84 Cobbett, Advice to Young lkfen, pp. 247-55.
85 Poor Man's Guardian, 14 September 1833.
86 e.g. Shepherd Smith's lecture on Education, Crisis, 31 August 1833.
87 What follows is drawn mainly from An Inquiry into the Principles and Dis-
tribution of Wealth, but see the similar argument in Crisis , 21 April 1832.
88 Birmingham Co-operative Herald, l June 1829. This is a part-quote from
William Thompson, Labour Defended .
89 Co-operator, I January 1830.
90 Jones, Chartism and the Chartistsw, p. 170.
91 Poor Man's Guardian, 23 February 1833 .
92 English Chartist Circular, nos. 22 and 27
93 Poor Mah's Guardian, I I January 1834.
_
94 Epstein, 'Feargus O'Connor and the Northern Star', p. 69, for a discussion of
various estimates.
95 e.g. at Benjamin Heywood's Miles Platting or at Crewe. See W.H. Challoner,
266 Notes to pages 92-9

The Social and Economic Development of Give I 780-1923 (Manchester

University Press, 1950), pp. 2334; Edith and Thomas Kelly (eds.), A School-
master's Notebook (Manchester University Press, 1957), pp. 31-2.
96 See the maps of branches of the National Charter Association and the Land
Plan in Jones, Chartism and the Clzartists, for example.
97 For Gramsci's discussion of parties based on the inter~war Italian experience
see Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds. and trans.), Selections
from the Prison Notebooks ofAnz'onio Gran sci (Lawrence & Wis fart, 1971),
passim. The distinction between 'organic' and 'traditional' intellectuals is
.
central to Gramsci's discussion of party and working-class culture
98 Thompson, Making, p. 789.
99 On Fielden see Paul Richards, 'The state and the working class 1833-1841'
(Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 1975), on O'Connor
see Epstein, 'Feargus O'Connor and the Northern Sz'ar', and 'Feargus O'Connor
and the English working-class movement' (Unpublished PhD thesis, University
of Birmingham, 1977).
100 Hoare and Nowell-Smith,Prison Notebooks, p. 330 .
101 This mutation is examined in Dan Finn, Neil Grant and Richard Johnson,
'Social democracy and the education crisis', in CCCS, On Ideology (Hutchins
son, 1978).
102 Black Dwarf, 6 May 1818.
103 Pioneer, 21 June 1834 (Sen ex was Shepherd Smith. See John Seville, 'J.E.
Smith and the Owe rite Movement', in Pollard and Salt, Robert Owen: Prophet
of the Poor) .
104 Lovell often put the case against state education, O'Brien the case for .
105 See also Thompson, Making, especially the discussion of Carlile and 'ration-
alism'.
106 The Poor Man's Guardian compared Cobbett's impracticalities with the
enthusiasm with which the Co-operative Congress 'spoke of the formation of
schools' (Guardian, 14 September 1833).
107 Pioneer, 7 and 21. December 1833.
108 New Moral World, 16 November 1838.
109 e.g-Northern Star, 22 June 1838 and 26 December 1840.
110 Pioneer, 16 November 1833.
l I I Harrison, Owen and Owenites, p. 139. For the distinction between 'education',
'institutions'
' and 'writing and discourses' see William Thompson, Inquiry .
112 Poor Man s Guardian, 14 January 1832 .
113 Pankhurst, Thompson, p. 140; Pioneer, 31 May 1834; Crisis, 19 April 1834.
114 Silver, The Concept of Popular Education, p. 176 .
115 Birmingham Co-operative Herald, 1 August and l September 1830.
116 Crisis, 1 and 8 June 1833.
117 Crisis, 28 September 1833.
118 New Moral World, 1 August 1835 .
119 ibid., 10 March and 14 April 1838.
 Notes to pages 99-102 267

120 ibid., 24 August 1838.

121 Most accounts of this episode are heavily biased in favour of Lovett and the
'new movers'. See M. Howell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester University
-
Press, 1966), pp. 230-6. For criticisms of the 'physical force' 'moral force'
polarity on which such accounts were based see D. Thompson, The Early
Chartists, pp. 16-27 and Asa Briggs, 'National Bearings' in Briggs (ed.) ,
Chartist Studies (Macmillan, 1965).
122 J. Collins and William Lovett, Chartism, A New Organisation of the People
(reprinted Leicester University Press, 1969). There is a useful collection of
cuttings and other materials on the scheme in the Lovett Collection, City of
Birmingham Reference Library .
123 Lovett, Life and Struggles, p. 301.
124 For Ellis see W.A.C. Stewart and W.P. McCann, The Educational Innovators
I 750-1880 (Macmillan, 1967), pp. 327-39.
125 Most recently in John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution
(Methuen, 1977) and R.Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian
Edinburgh (Oxford University Press, 1976).
126 A tendency shared, for example, by two very different books - Foster, Class
Struggle, and T . Tholfsen, Working-Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England
(Croom Helm, 1976). I think this criticism also applies, in the end, to
Thompson, Making, for reasons to do with the author's conception of class.
127 lt is one of the weaknesses of the Making that though it deals with just this
transition as experienced by 'the artisan', it tends to understand it in terms of
'loss of Status' and perhaps independence' without an adequate analysis of
changing modes of exploitation or subordination. For an interesting opening
out of some of these questions see Gareth Stedman Jones, 'England's first
proletariat',New Left Review, no. 90 (March - April 1975). The categories,
'real' and 'formaT subsumption of labour, however, may not be adequately
complex, as they stand, to describe the early nineteenth-century transitions.
I am grateful to Bill Schwarz for suggesting this argument.
128 These suggestions are based, of course, on economic and other histories and
are not entirely theoretical speculations. There is much in the following
sources especially which point to these conclusions: Thompson, Making;
N.J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industnlal Revolution (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1959), Michael Sanderson, 'Literacy and social mobility in the industrial
revolution in England', Past and Present, no. 56 (August 1972).
129 This is not to deny the recurrent revivals of independent working-class
education especially in the 1880s to 1920s. Nor is it to argue that there is
nothing to be learnt from the radical experience. It could be said, indeed, that
it is precisely the stress on education as an aspect of socialist politics that
needs to be revived today. The inhibitions that remain are less material
(though to be sure some exist) than ideological and political. They include,
centrally, the obsession of British socialists with education of the most formal
kind conducted through a system articulated through state or local state

J
268 Notes to pages I02-5

agencies. The exhaustion of this social democratic repertoire is very evident

today.

4. Imperialism, nationalism and organized youth

1 Coster-monger culture, which included 'dressing up flash' and wearing the
hair 'Newgate-knocker style' is described in Henry Mayhew, London Labour
and the London Poor (4 vols., New York: Dover, 1968), vol. 1, especially
pp. 33-46.
2 What follows draws heavily on J .R. Gillis, 'The evolution of juvenile delin-
quency in England 1890-1913', Past and Present, no. 67 (May 1975), and
J.R. Gillis, Youth and hlstory (New York, 1974).
3 This essay's based on Chapter 14 of my thesis. See M.D. Blanch, 'Nation ,
Empire and the Birmingham worldng class, 1899-1914' (Unpublished PhD
thesis, University of Birmingham, 1975). I am grateful to the editors of this
volume for suggestions for revllsions.
4 For 'belt' see Sam Shaw, Guttersnipe (Samson Lord, 1946), p. 20. Out of 605
children brought before Birmingham Juvenile Court in 1911 for non-indictable
offences, 132 were charged with playing ball in the streets (M .G. Barnett ,
Young Delinquents: A Study of Reforrnatory and Industrial Schools
[Methuen, 1913] , p. 12). Manchester youth workers had to object that even
'respectable boys' were being prosecuted for loitering (Hugh Oldham Lads'
Club, Annual Report [Manchester, 1902] , p. 4).
5 Quoted in W. Collinson, Apostle o f Free Labour (London, 1913), p. 3 .
6 W. Goldman, East End My Cradle (Faber, 1940), p. 18.
7 Anti-police epithets were common, it seems, even in the villages. See Flora
Thompson, Lark Rise to Candle ford (Penguin, 1973), p. 485. The police rarely
-
appeared in 'Penny Dreadfuls' as heroes 'they are constantly shown as
stupid, cowardly, or ill-looking' complained the Quarterly Review, vol. 171
(July 1890), p. 150.
8 e.g. James Spenser, Limey Breaks In (Longmans, 1934), p. 3, F. Willis, Peaee
and Dripping Toast (Phoenix House, 1950), p. 59.
9 The first two were Birmingham terms, the last from Manchester.
10 Gillis, Youth and History p. 122, the Rev. T.J . Bass, Every Day in Blackest
Birmingham: Facts not Fiction (Birmingham, 1898), p. 8.
11 V.W. Garratt, Man in the Street (Dent, 1939), p. 66, see also Birmingham
Daily Mail (hereafter BDM), 7 October 19051
12 e.g. Goldman, East End My Cradle, pp. 81 -5, Garratt, Man in the Street, p. 89 .
13 F.P- Gibbon, A History of the Heyrod Street Lads Club and o f the Fifth
Manchester Company of the Boys Brigade, 1899-1910 (Manchester, 1911),
pp. 7, 17.
14 This is fully documented in Blanch, 'Nation, empire and the Birmingham
working class, ch. 2 on 'Drill, discipline and moral education'.
15 I have drawn here on modern writing on sub-cultural formations. I have found
 No tes to pages 105-8 269
Phil Cohen, 'Sub-cultural conflict and working-class community', Working
Papers in Cultural Studies no. 2 (1972), especially useful.
16 M. Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Centwgv Lancashire (Cambridge,
1971), pp. 112-13, 119-24. Among sources which note continuing familiar
support in skilled-worker families are C. Stella Dawes,North Country Bred
(London, 1963), p. 35; L. Halward, Let Me Tell You (London, 1938), pp.
56-7, A. Freeman, Eoy Life and Labour (London, 1914), pp. 13-21 ; and
P. je Rousiers, Labour Question in Bn'tain (London , 1896), pp. 1, 20.
17 These roles could often be combined. One Manchester teacher was also a
member of the First Volunteer Battalion, Manchester Regiment. His room
in Lower Mosley Street School 'has a military appearance', twenty to thirty
boys being caned there regularly each day at 4 p.m. Manchester City News,
31 January 1914.
18 These differed from area to area. For a militaristic example, complete with
bayonet exercises, see Jewish Lads Brigade, Manchester Battalion, Annual
Reports 1899-1903 (Manchester, 1903), pp. 22-3 .
19 i.e. Market Hall, St Mary's, St. Bartholomew's, St. Paul's, St. Martin's and
Deritend as listed in Handbook for Workers Among Boys in Birmingham
(Birmingham, 1913). These wards all had relatively high death rates and low-
standard housing. All figures quoted below for these areas are from this
source, cited as Birmingham Handbook, unless otherwise stated .
20 These do not cover the whole central worldng-class area; they exclude Ancoats
for example. See, for most figures, Manchester Juvenile Organisations
Committee, Handbook o f fuvenile Organisations in Manchester (Manchester ,
1918). Cited as Manchester Handbook.
21 Handsworth Herald, 25 July 1903. Lt Rev. Selwyn was also assistant chaplain
to the Handworth Volunteers. The Boys' Brigade was founded in Glasgow in
1884; by 1913 it claimed 100,000 members.
22 BDM, 28 April 1909, Birmingham Handbook, p. 9. This was about 2 per cent
of males aged 12 to 17 years.
23 Or 5 .7 per cent of males aged 12 to 17 years. Manchester Handbook, pp. 8
and 16.
24 Birmingham Handbook, p. 9 .
25 Boys'Brigaa'e, Tenth Birmingham Company 1908-29; a Souvenir Booklet
(Birmingham, 1929).
26 Gibbon, Heyrod Street Lads ' Club, p. 27 .
27 Fifth Monthly Chronicle of the Heyrod Street Lads' Club . . . , 8 May 1905.
28 Birmingham = c.200; Manchester = c.300, total boys 12 to 17 = c.9000.
29 Nelson St Adult School Magazine (April, June, October 1902); and Supt.
Robert Best in the issue for May 1902.
30 Brigade, vol. 1, no. 1 (October 1894).
31 Boys'Brigade Gazette, l January 1911 , 87 per cent against, 13 per cent for.
32 Birmingham Handbook, p. 9 .
33 BDM, 30 July 1909, Reveille 0530, drill, church parade; every morning eight
270 Notes to pages 108-1 I

hours of exercises, drills and parades - 'instilling of a healthy, manly sense

of religion'.
34 Birmingham Handbook, p. 9, Bass, Blackest Birmingham, Bass, Hope in
Shadow Land (Birmingham, 1903).
35 Scout Message, September 191 l . Scout Law No. 2 o f the ICSP.
36 BDM, 6 May 1908; First Cadet Battalion, Manchester Regiment, Annual
Report (1890), p. 10.
37 Royal Commission on Militia and Volunteers (Cd. 2061-4, 1904): Col.
Ledward, First Cadet Battalion, qq. 23906-4006 (hereafter cited as Norfolk
Commission).
38 Fifty per cent join the Volunteers and a 'great many' the Regulars. See also
Norfolk Commission, qq. 24033 and 24072 for evidence from two London
Cadet Battalions.
39 First Cadet Battalion, Manchester Regiment, Annual Report (1890): Object
-
1 'interest and attractive occupations for lads of the poorest class'.
40 Norfolk Commission, qq. 24072-150 .
41 ibid., qq. 23966-8 and 23981, evidence of Col. edward.
42 ibid., q. 23990.
43 BDM, 21 January 1909.
44 School Management Committee, Minutes (MSS, Birmingham Education
Offices), Minute 2797, I I February 1886; amended by Minute 5605, 7 April
l892,Mr Boscombeis Reports (MSS, Birmingham Education Offices), 2 March
and 8 September 1896.
45 By 1911 one in every eleven males aged 17 to 25 was a member of the TF in
Manchester (Blanch, 'Nation, empire and the Birmingham working class',
oh. 12 and p. 384).
-
46 BDM, 21, 28 January 1909 growing to 130 boys by August. ibid., 25 August
1909 •
47 BDM, 29 November 1909.
48 BDM, 4 December 1909 .
49 BDM, 6 December 1909 .
50 Birmingham: total all organizations = 700; male population aged 12 to 17 =
c.6850; Manchester: total all organizations = 450, male population aged 12 to
17 =: c3500. These figures assume full strength companies and no 'commuter'
cadets, and may, therefore, overestimate membership.
51 The Boys Life Brigade was founded in 1899 in Nottingham by the Rev.
Patton to combat 'jingoistic' organizations. National membership in 1906 was
8000 •
52 There is no information available for the GLB in Birmingham. The size of
Manchester companies was thirty-five to forty girls each.
53 J. Springhalt, 'Youth and empire: a study of the propagation of imperialism
to the young in Edwardian Britain' (Dphil thesis, University of Sussex, 1968 ,
subsequently published as Youth, Empire and Society, Croom Helm, 1977) .
54 BDM, 20 January 1908.
 Notes to pages 111-14 271

55 Springhalt, Thesis, p. 217.

56 Birmingham District Association of Boy Scouts, Yearbooks (1910-15),
National Service League, Birmingham Branch, Report, (1907-10) .
57 BDM, 19 February 1909. Report of NSL meeting.
58 Birmingham District Association of Boy Scouts, Yearbook (1910) P. 19.
59 ibid.,(1913),p.41.
60 R.S. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (London, 1910), pp. 334, 339.
61 Birmingham District Association of Boy Scouts, Yearbook (1910) p. 9 ,
ibid. (1913), p. 41 .
62 ibid., 1914.
63 BDM, 7 July 1914 (advertisement).
64 4300 Scouts, 2300 Cubs, 2500 Guides, plus 1000 Catholic Scouts, the
population aged 10 to 18 years was 128,770. Manchester Handbook, pp. 8 ,
17, and Census (191 l).
65 Based on mean size of Manchester boys' troops the number of Scouts in
1917 = 70 and Guides = 38, sixteen boys' troops and eight girls' troops,
population 10 to 18 = 10,700.
66 Mean size of Birmingham troops was less (86 troops = 3200).
67 Birmingham Handbook, 19 13. .
68 Birmingham District Association of Boy Scouts, Yearbook (1914).
69 Digbeth Institute, Reports (1908), vol. 1 , p . 16.
70 ibid.(1910),p. 15.
71 ibid.(l908),p. 15.
72 BDM, 17 March 1909 ,
73 EDM, 22 March 1909 \

74 BDM, 19 March 1909 .

75 BDM, 25 March 1909.
76 ibid.
77 Springhall, Thesis, pp. 228 ff.
78 Birmingham: paramilitary 700, semi-military 850, or 22.6 per cent of males
12 to 17. Manchester with 450 paramilitary and 650 semi-military, involved
21.0 per cent of males 10 to 18 (sic).
79 The Rev. H.S. Pelham, The Training o f the Working Boy (Macmillan, 1914),
p. 9;ibid.,p. 120.
80 ibid., pp. 55 ff, Cost of lliving of the Working Classes: Report o f a n Inquiry
by the Eoard o f Trade (Cd. 3864, 1908) p. 82 .
81 ].H. Muirhead, 'Social work in Birmingham', in Handbook for Birmingham
(British Association, 1913), p. 279 . '
82 Reports of the Birmingham Street Children s Union (1906-14); hereafter
BSChU. Birmingham Street Children 's' Union A Souvenir (1913).
83 Birmingham Handbook, p. 9. Characteristically this source does not mention
girls' clubs.
84 High Oldham lads' Club, Annual Reports (1914), p. 3.
85 Hulme Lads' Club,Annual Report (1899), Ancoat's Lads' Club, Arznual
272 Notes to pages 114-17

Report (1902).
86 Not all clubs worked with 'problem children'. The Hugh Oldham Club was
. .
not for 'really vicious children . . .criminals . . really bad boys . .and the
absolutely destitute . . . . we aim to provide for the respectable worldng lad'.
Annual Report (1898), p. 5.
87 Pelham, The Training of the Working Boy, p. 31. The author was a senior
Birmingham Street Children's Union organizer .
88 8SCnU, Souvenir (1913), p. 2.
89 BSC1t U Edwardian Branch, Report ofArznual Meeting (1907).
90 Hugh Oldhams Lads' Club, Annual Report (1898), p. 5 .
91 Hulme Lads' Club, Annual Reports (1907, 1909).
92 Report of the National Service League, Birmingham Branch (1908-9), p. 6;
Report o f the BSC?z U, Nos. 2-4, (1906-8).
93 Report of the National Service League, Birmingham Branch (1907); Chamber
of Commerce Journal, Birmingham Red Book (1908), Kelly '$ Directory:
Cornishes' Directory o f Birmingham
94 BSCn(/'Report (1910~11), p. 7 , ibid., pp. 49-51.
95 Pelham, Training of the Working Boy , pp. 49-51.
96 Freeman, Boy Life and Labour, p. 1.80.
97 R.H. Bray, 'The boy and the family', in Studies of Boy Life in Our Great
Cities (London, 1908), p. 100, W.B. Carnegie, Problem of the Street Child
(Birmingham, 1910) .
98 Freeman, Boy Life and Labour, pp. 21 , 52, 71 .
99 Sources: Birmingham Handbook (1913); Manchester Handbook (1918),
Census (1911), taldng account of the extended area of Birmingham in 1913
and the additional areas covered by the Manchester Handbook.
100 Estimate: Street Children's Union (S ChU), 670; Scouts, 270, Boys' Life Brigade
(BLB), 70, Church Lads' Brigade (ChLB), 175 ; Boys' Brigade (BB), 100 .
101 Even broad comparisons between pre-war Birmingham and wartime Marches,
ter are open to the objection that numbers in the two cities had been radically
different. This is unlikely. The two cities show similar numbers in para-
military adult organizations. Some differences between particular youth
organizations (et. a strong Boys' Brigade in Manchester) are balanced out
overall, and youth club membership suggests parallel membership totals in
1913 »

102 BSChU, Annual Report (1908), p. 9 .

103 The whole theme of women as mothers and imperialist ideology is explored
in Anna Davin, 'Imperialism and motherhood', History Workshop Journal,
no. 5 (May 1978).
104 BSChUAnnual Report (1913-14), p. 7.
105 Harold Johnson, Moral Instruction in Elementary Schools: A Return from
Official Documents (1908), pp..xi, xdi. Birmingham began moral lessons,
twice weedy, in 1879. One of the most popular teaCher's books on how to
teach 'moral education' was written by a Birmingham headmaster :
 Notes to pages 117-2] 273
F.W. Hackwood, Notes for Lessons on Moral Subjects: A Handbook for
Teachers in Elementary Schools (1888, 1906). See also F.H. Hilliard, 'Moral
Instruction League 1897-1919', in Durham Research Review, vol. 3 , no. 12
(September 1961).
106 V.E. Chancellor, History for Their Masters (Adams & Dart, 1970), see also LCC
Education Committee Reports on conferences on teaching history and geo-
graphy (1911).
107 Warwickshire County Council, The Prefect System in Elementary Schools ,
Education Essays no. 8 (1913), p. 18.
108 The Times, 24 May 1921 .
109 Norfolk Commission , q. 9151 .
110 ibid., qq. 5185-91, evidence from Galloways of Manchester, e.g. in 1909 in
Birmingham, Ansells, BSA Gun Factory, Corporation Gas Works, Metro-
politan Carriage Works, etc.
111 Our conclusions differ therefore from those of Richard Price, An Imperial
War and the British Working Class (Routledge & Kevan Paul, 1972).
112 e.g. Aston Municipal Elections Poster (November 1905), Birmingham
Reference Library Collection, f. 319.
113 e.g. Chamberlain in Straightforward, no. 1 (May 1914), reporting a speech of
5 June 1906.
114 e.g. BDM, 30 November 1910, in which home rule is presented as an
American plot .
115 e.g. Midland Express, 24 November 1901; see also J .A. Garrard, 711e English
and Immigration, 1880-1910 (Oxford University Press, 1971).
116 This is argued in Blanch, 'Nation, empire and the Birmingham worldng
class', especially p. 200 .
117 ibid., p. 242.
118 ibid., p. 266.
119 .
ibid., p. 231
120 ibid., p. 346.
121 Hugh Oldham Lads' Club,Annual Report (1915). Out of 217 lads, 169 joined
the army in the first eight months.
122 Hulme Lads' Club,AnnualReporf (1914), p. 7.

5 Daughters and mothers - maids and mistresses

l a m grateful to Richard Johnson for suggesting revisions to an earlier draft. This
essay is based in part on my MA thesis completed at CCCS in 1978. I thank my
personal respondents for permission to use extracts from their accounts.

1 e.g. John Burnett, Useful Toi! (Allen Lane, 1974), pp. 135-429 Pamela Horn,
The Rise and Fall o f the I/Yctorian Servant (Gill & Macmillan, 1975), p. 171 ,
Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum (Penguin, 1973), p. 222.
2 For the full argument see J*P, Taylor, 'Women domestic servants, 1919-19391
274 Notes to pages 121-4

the final phase' (Unpublished MA thesis, University of Birmingham, 1978).

3 Census (1921, 1931).
4 This estimate is based on the following considerations: 60 per cent of those
in private households (see the sample survey quoted in 1931 Census) plus
80 per cent of those in institutions. For the full working through see Taylor,
'Domestic servants', p. 48.
5 A. Chapman and R. Knight, Wages and Salon°es in the UK., 1920-1938
(Cambridge, 1957), p. 218. See also N. Branson and M. Heineman, Bn'tain
in the 1930s (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p. 175.
6 Just as the position of married women in the home seemed natural until
challenged by the women's movement .
7 Published autobiographies are cited below in the usual form. Oral evidence
collected specially for this study is cited as 'p.o.e.' (personal oral evidence);
written accounts produced specially for this study are cited as 'p .w.e.'
(personal written evidence). In all, ten published autobiographies were used ,
and oral evidence was collected, directly, from twenty-four ex-servants.
Though the sample remains small no less than 120 actual job situations are
covered by this material.
s For the full argument see Taylor, 'Domestic servants', pp. 18-26 .
9 Rowntree in C.L. Mow at, Britain Between the Wars (Methuen, 1968), p. 503.
For the inter-war economy in general see R.S. Sayers, A History o f Economic
Change in Bn'tain /8804939 (Oxford UP, 1967); especially useful on sectoral
differences and shifts is S. Pollard, 771e Development of the Bnltish Economy
1914-1970 (Edward Arnold, 1962).
10 Winifred Foley, Child in the Forest (London, 1974), p. 19.
11 Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candle ford (Penguin, 1973), p. 155.
12 Foley, child in the Forest (Unpublished MS), quoted in J. Burnett, UsefUl
Toil, p. 227.
13 For fuller evidence see Taylor, 'Domestic servants', pp. 15-26. The evidence
includes heavy rates of migration from depressed areas in this period, evidence
of personal accounts especially of Welsh girls who moved to London or
Birmingham, and the very high concentrations of domestic servants in par-
ticular parts of the country. .

14 For the figures of different kinds of areas see Taylor, 'Domestic servants',
pp. 47-56.
15 J .A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood (Routledge, 1954) .
16 Leonore Davidoff, 'Mastered for life', Journal o f Social History, vol. 7, no. 4
(summer 1974).
17 This is based partly upon personal experience of family life in the 1920s and
1930s but also on autobiographical accounts.
18 G. Tyack and WEA class, 'Service on the Clivedon estate between the wars',
Oral History, vol. 5, no. 1 (1977).
19 Harold Macmillan, Winds o f Change 1914-39 (Macmillan, 1966), p. 195 .
20 e.g. the account in Jean Rennie,Ever;v Other Sunday (Coronet, 1975), p. 54.
 No tes to pages ]25~8'4 275

21. This is based partly on personal experience and on servants' own accounts of
the work they had to perform. See also Florence Jack and Philippa Preston
(eds.), The Women's Book, (London, n.d. [19311 ).
22 Anne Oaldey, The Sociology o f liousework (London, 1974), especially p. 111.
23 Anonymous recollections from Within Living Memory, a collection produced
by the Norfolk Federation of Women's Institutes (Norfolk, 1972), p. 80 .
24 Horn, Rise and Fall, p. 173.
25 For an expansion of this point with special reference to fiction see Taylor ,
'Domestic servants', pp. 161-86 .
26 Uniform, for example, on such questions as hours off, rates of pay, the ex-
clusion of boyfriends, the purchase of uniform by the servant herself, etc.
There appears to have been a high degree of customary consensus on these
matters among the employing classes as late as the 1930s.
27 Margaret Powell, Eelow Stairs (P. Davies, 1968), pp. 4-5 ,
28 ibid., p, 36
29 Dolly Scannell, Mother Knew Best (Macmillan, 1974), p. 89 .
80 Thea Vigne, Open University programme transcript.
31 Oral evidence quoted in G.E. Evans, From Mouths ofMen (Faber, 1976),
p. 73 .
32 Rennie, Every OwNer Sunday, p. 112.
33 Maud Walton, p.o.e .
34 Daisy Noakes, A Town Beehive (Brighton, 1975), p. 29 .
35 Mrs E. Ellis, p.w.e.
36 Noakes, Town Beehive, p. 31 .
37 By 1921 , minimum rates had been set for adult women in thirty-five trades.
R.S. Sayer,A History o f Economie Changes in England 1880-1939 (Oxford
UP, 1967), p. l3'7.
38 A government committee of 1923 recommended more generous time off for
servants. See Ministry of Labour, Report on the Committee appointed to
enquire into the present conditions as to in supply of female domestic
servants (1923).
39 Mrs Jennie Owen, p.o.e.
40 The moment of transition is also remembered vividly by the women them-
selves, colouring and emphasizing the abrupt break between familiar home and
the new home which was also work-place .
41 Minnie Cowley in Spare Rib (March 1976).
42 Foley, Child in iNe Forest, p. 160.
43 ibid., p. 166.
44 Noakes, Town Beehive, p. 46 .
45 ibid., P. 48.
46 Mrs Jennie Owen, p.o.e .
47 John Burnett, Useful Tail, p- 173.
48 North West Archives of Oral History, Manchester poly echoic ,
49 Thea Vivre, Open University programme.
276 Notes to pages 134-4]

50 Ministry of Labour and National Service, Report on the Post War organization
of private domestic service. Cmd. 6650 (1944).
51 Roberts, Classic Slum, p. 37.
52 Powell, Below Stairs, p. 54.
53 Jack and Preston (eds.), The Woman's Book, p. 37.
54 Mrs Florence Follet, p.o.e .
55 Mrs Lilian Cross, p.o.e .
56 Rennie, Every Other Sunday, passim.
57 Foley, Child in the Forest, p. 229.
58 Powell, Below Stairs, p. 146 .
59 Mrs Gladys Evans, p.o.e.
60 'Mrs A', Oral History Broadsheet, West Oxfordshire WEA, p. 20 .
61 Powell,8eZow Stairs, p. 113.
62 Mrs Gladys Evans, p.o ,e.
63 Mrs Jennie Owen, p.o.e.

6 Recreation in Rochdde, 1900-40

This essay is a revised and shortened version of an MA dissertation written at CCCS in
1976. I am grateful to the editors of this volume for suggestions about the more
general themes that frame the case study.

l Some of the most significant contributions have been within the more general
framework of the study of worldng-class culture as a whole. The work of
Edward Thompson, in particular, transformed the study of popular culture
of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Important studies of popular
recreation more narrowly defined or covering the period dealt with in this
essay include Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City
(Croom Helm, 1974): Paul Thompson, The Edwardians (Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1975) ; Stephen Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in
Crisis (Croorn Helm, 1976), Helen Meller, Leisure and iNe Changing City,
1870-19]4 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).
2 At the turn of the century most of Rochdale's occupied population worked
in the textile or engineering mills of John Bright, Kelsall and Kemp, Tweedale
and Smalley and numerous smaller concerns. The town was very much more
compact than now: it centred around Kelsall's mill, the Wellington Hotel and
the Town Hall square. The two main shopping streets, filled with mainly local
family firms, stretched north and south from the centre. In a roughly circular
area, about a mile wide, the majority of the population lived and worked .
3 St Mary 's Eazaar Handbook (1908, 1912).
4 C.E. Warrington, The History o f a Parish (1968), p. 48. A football club was
formed to replace the cricket and rugby clubs, but was disbanded between
the wars.
5 Rockdale Observer, 7 February 1934, p. 5.
 .Notes to pages 141-5 277

6 Rochdale Wesleyan Mission Nineteenth Anniversary Handbook (1924), p.5.

7 A. W. Whitehead The Baptist Church in Rochdale (1973), p. 45 .
8 ibid., p. 48.
9 Warrington, The History o f a Parish.
10 Dearnley Methodist Wurch 1868-1968. Centenary Souvenir Brochure, p. 6.
11 An article in the Rochdale Observer, 4 April 1934, p. 5, by the Vicar of St
Luke's pointed to the remaining popularity and importance of these 'special
days' against the more regular events of the churches and chapels in the town.
12 See p. 151 ff.
13 Warrington, The History o f a Parish, p. 66.
14 W. H. Brown, The Rochdale Pioneers: A Century of Co-operation in Rochdale
(Rochdale: REPS, 1944).
15 Lowerfold Methodist Church, Sunday School Centenary Souvenir 1835-1935.
16 History o f Holland Street Chapel and Sunday School Since its Formation
(1942), p. 20.
17 Rochdale Observer, 6 September 1922, p. 7 .
18 Rochdale Observer, 3 January 1914, p. 1.
19 Rochdale County Borough, Accounts and Reports (1900-50). The baths had
50,000 bathers in 1900: by 1931 this had risen to 71 ,000. Similarly the
number of library issues quadrupled over the same period to 450,000.
20 See especially Thompson, the Edwardians, p. 213, where he talks of a shift
from about 1910 in the locus of influence away from the church and towards
the mass media, as well as more emphasis on the home as centre for leisure.
21 Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum (Manchester University Press, 1971), p. 140.
22 Rochdale Ubserver, 4 July 1900, p. 1.
23 ibid., 14 March 1914, p. 5.
24 Brown, The Rochdale Pioneers.
25 P.F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge University Press,
1971).
26 'Temperance work in Rochdale', Rochdale Observer; the article was written
.
in 1909 to celebrate the society's past
27 For a typical report see 'Cycling news', Rochdale Observer, 25 July 1900, p. 2.
28 ibid., 24 November 1900, p. 5.
29 The first official Clarion Cycling Club was formed in March 1894 by seven ,

Birmingham men in what was formerly a Wesleyan Chapel, By 1898 member-

shipfhad reached 7000. See National Clarion Cycling Club 1894-1944 Jubilee
Souvenir.
30 ibid.
31 see Chapter 7.
32 Rushbearing or Rushbearing Week had taken its name from a traditional
festival which dated back to betbre the Reformation in many northwestern
towns. Initially the festival had centred on a day which was given to the
cutting of rushes to be placed on the clay floors in churches in preparation
for winter. Events centred on a cart which had a highly decorated pyramid
278 Notes to pages 146-8

of rushes on it, and a team of young men, who were to pull the vehicle firstly
to the local inns and later to neighbouring mansions where the ladies tradi-
tionally gave garlands and money. But the original point of the festival, i.e.
the Rushbearing procession, became more and more peripheral to the asso-
ciated fairs and festivities as the nineteenth century progressed, until by 1900
only the name remained to refer to an increasingly commercial week of
fairs, railway excursions and holidays. As early as the censorious 1830s a
local contemporary described the festival as a "mere rustic saturnalia . . .",
see John Harland and T . Wilkinson, Lancashire Legends (Heywood, 1872),
pp. 112-13. See also John Ashworth, Jimmy the Rusheart Driver, Butterworth
Union of Sunday School Teachers Tract, L. Nuttal, Rushcarts (both written
c. 1870 and in Rochdale Reference Library), and Alex Helm, 'Rushcarts of
the north west of England', Folk Life, vol. 8 (1970).
33 Rochdale Observer, 28 July 1900, p. l .
34 ibid., 4 July 1900, p. l . .
35 ibid., 14 July 1900, p. 1.
36 ibid.
37 ibid., 21 August 190l,p. 2: 'Holiday Report'.
38 'The history of Kelsall and Kemp Ltd.', Rochdale Literary and Scientijie
Society Transactions, vol. 24, p. 37. Holidays were nearly always
without pay, in the pre-war period only l .5 million workers were entitled
to an annual paid holidat in Britain. See Charles Lock Mow at, Britain Between
the Wars,(Methuen, 1955).
39 'Rusltbearing', Rochdale Observer, 20 August 1902, p. 5.
40 ibid., 21 August 190l,p. 2.
41 ibid.
42 ibid., 14 July 1900, p. 1.
43 ibid.
44 ibid., 24 August 1910, p. 5 .
45 Castlemere Methodist Church Sunday School Centenary Book 1839-1939.
46 Rochdale Observer, 30 August 1922, p. 7 .
47 ibid.
48 ibid., 14 August 1926, p. 1, col. 1.
49 ibid., 11 August 1928,p. 6.
50 ibid., 26 August 1930, p. 7, col. 1
51 ibid., 28 August 1934, p. 9; 'Holiday Report'.
52 Interview with manager of Co-operative Travel, Balloon St., Manchester 1976 .
53 J.A.R. Pimlott, Recreations (Studio Vista, 1968), plate 157.
54 C.L. Mow at, Britain Between the Wars, p. 502 .
55 ibid., p. 453.
56 G.P. Jones and A.G. Pool, Britain in Recovery (Methuen, 1938), p. 37.
57 See E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968) ,
p. 267, where he talks of the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938.
58 Rochdale Observer, 14 August 1926, p. 1.
 Notes to pages 148-55 279

59 loe. cit.
60 loc. cit.
61 loc. eit.
62 ibid., 16 August 1930, p. 1.
63 ibid., 5 November 1938, p, 20.
64 Robert Roberts, The C7assic Slum, p. 188
65 Rochdale Observer, 18 January 1928, p. 2 (advertisement).
66 ibid., 29 September 1934, p. 1.
67 ibid., 5 November 1938, p. 20.
68 Dunlop had opened a social club in July 1934 which offered two lounges,
a billiard room and games room, but no bar for its 2500 members (see
Rochdale Observer, 8 July 1934, p. II). Dances were held on a monthly basis
at Dunlop and, like their contemporaries, Turner Brothers Asbestos, a yearly
sports day was held for employees. Turners also provided a social club and
encouraged the formation of a choir in the inter-war years. These two large
companies seem to be alone in this kind of provision in Rochdale at this time .
69 Rochdale Ubserver, 5 November 1938, p. 20, col. 1.
70 Most of what follows is based on David Robinson, World Cinema (Eyre
Methuen, 1973), pp. 15-17.
71 G.J. Mellor, Piczure Pioneers (Newcastle on Tyne: Graham, 1971), p. 11.
'72 Robinson, World Cinema, p. 26 .
73 G.J. Mellor, Picture Pioneers, p. 38 .
74 Rochdale Observer, 3 January 1900, p. 1.
75 ibid., 14 November 1900, p, 2.
76 ibid., 6 January 1901,p. 1.
77 ibid., 15 September 1900, p. 1 .
78 Rochdale Observer, 27 March 1901 , p. 1.
79 ibid., 6 February 1901 , p. 2.
80 ibid., 11 December 1901, p. 5 .
81 ibid., 17 September 1902, p. 5 .
82 ibid., 24 September 1902, p. 5.
83 G.J. Mellor, Picture Pioneers, p. 23 .
84 Rochdale Observer, all January, 1906 .
85 ibid., 29 January 1908, p. 5 .
86 ibid., 25 March 1908, p. 5: 'Local News'.
87 ibid., all December, 1911.
88 According to G.J . Mellor,Picture Pioneers, p. 48, Moore and Beaudyn owned
sixteen halls in and around Manchester in 1914.
89 Rockdale Observer, 3 January 1914, p. 1.
90 David Robinson, World Cinema, p. 73 .
91 Andrew Bergman, We 're in the Money: The Depression and its Films (New
York University Press, 1971). See especially ch. 8, 'Warner Brothers presents
social consciousness'
92 Rochdale Observer, 1 April 1914, p. 50.
280 Notes to pages 155-67

93 ibid.
94 ibid.
95 ibid., August and November 1914.
96 ibid., 2 January 1914, p. 2.
97 ibid., 6 September 1922, p. 7, col. 4.
98 ibid., 10 July 1926, p. 1.
99 The Victory was part of HD. Moorhouse's circuit of fifty cinemas which were
mostly in Lancashire (Picture Pioneers, p. 75).
100 Rochdale Observer, 29 August 19 , p . 1.
101 ibid., 3 January 1914, p. 9.
102 ibid., 14 April 1930, P. 1.
103 ibid., 17 January 1934, p. 2.
104 ibid.
105 ibid.
106 Mow at, Britain Hetween the Wars, p. 250.
107 Robinson, World Cinema, pp. 255-8.
108 Mow at, Briz'ain Between the Wars, p. 246.
109 See Robinson, World Cinema, p. 7 2 .
110 Me11or,Picz*ure Pioneers, oh. 6.
111 Thompson, The Edwardians, p. 69 .
112. Roberts, The Classic Slum.
113 Thompson, The Edwardians, p. 296.
114 See, for example, the discussions of 'style' in S. Hall and T. Jefferson
(eds.), Resistance Through Rituals (Hutchinson, 1977) .
7 Football since the war
1 Ian Taylor, 'Soccer consciousness and soccer hooliganism', in Stan Cohen (ed.),
Images of Devianee (Penguin, 1971).
2 Arthur Hopcraft, The Football Man, rev. ed. (Penguin, 1971), p. 24
3 Geoffrey Green, Soccer in the Fifties (Ian Allan, 1974).
4 The Times, 14 December 1961.
5 Hopcraft, The Football Man, p. 43 .
6 ibid.
7 ibid., p. 30
8 ibid., p. 51.
9 Arthur Walmsley, 'Duncan Edwards', in John Arlott (ed.), Soccer: 7he Great
Ones (Pelham, 1968).
10 Hopcraft, The Football Man, p. 75 _
11 David Miller, 'Alan Ball', in Reg Hayter (ed), Soccer Stars o f Today (Pelham,
1970).
12 The Times, 20 November 1961 .
13 EaHEn Dunphy, Only A Game? (Penguin, 1977).
14 The Times, 8 December 1964.
 Notes to pages 168-87 281

15 Chas Critcher, 'Football and cultural values', in Working Papers in CUltural

Studies, no. 1 (University of Birmingham, 1972).
16 Tony Pawson, 'John Charles', in Arlott, Soccer.
17 Rothman 's Football Yearbook 1977-78.
18 The Times, 11 November 1961.
19 The Times, 12 April 1962.
20 Chester Committee, Report of the Committee on Football (HMSO, 1968).
21 Peter Douglas, The Football Industry (Allen & Unwire, 1973).
22 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Pelican, 196 l ).
23 Taylor, 'Soccer consciousness', also Taylor, 'Football Mad', in Eric Dunning
(ed.), The Sociology of Sport (Frank Cass, 1971).
24 Taylor, 'Soccer consciousness', p. 363.
25 Stuart Hall, 'The treatment of football hooliganism in the press', in Roger
Ingham (ed.), Football Hooliganism (Inter-Action, 1978) .
26 The Times, 28 March 1969 .
27 Hall, 'Treatment of football hooliganism'.
28 John Arlott, 'Like running dogs through Arab villages', Guardian, 5 January 1973 .
29 Hopcraft, The Football Man, p. 160.
30 Taylor, 'Soccer consciousness', and 'Football mad'.
31 Taylor, 'Soccer consciousness', p. 131 .
32 Peter Marsh, Elizabeth Rouser, Ron Harte, The Rules o f Disorder (Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1978).
33 Edward Buscombe (ed.), Football on Television (BF I monograph, 1975).
34 Report of the Committee on Football.
35 ibid.
36 The Times, 21 November 1953.
37 Percy Young, A History of 8ritish Football (Stanley Paul, 1968).
38 Hopcraft,p. 116.
39 771e Times, 19 May 1955.
40 Football League Review, no. 515 (1969) .
41 Conrad Lozdiak, Understanding Soceer Tactics (Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 52.
42. Taylor, 'Soccer consciousness', p. 150.
43 'Football in America',Guardian, 4-17 September 1978.

8 Shop-floor culture, masculinity and the wage form

l a m grateful to the editors of this volume for suggesting revisions to earlier drafts
and also to members of the CCCS Work Group for discussion of many of these issues.

1 R. Fraser (ed.), Work (Penguin, 1969), p. 63 .

2 Now written up as a book which includes an etlmography of worldng-class
forms of counter-school culture and their intrinsic connection with cultural
forms of the work-place, plus a theoretical analysis of this reproduction.
P.E. Willis, Learning to Labour (Saxon House, 1977).
282 Notes to pages 188-205

3 G.C. Matthews, 'Post-school adaption of educationally sub-normal boys'

(Unpublished MEd thesis, University of Manchester, 1963) .
4 R. Fraser (ed.) Work 2 (Penguin, 1969), pp. 56-7 .
5 ibid., pp. 22-3.
6 See, for instance, the deskilling thesis outlined in H. Braverman, Labor and
Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review Press, 1974).
7 For a further explanation of these connections see Willis, Learning Fo Labour.

9 Three problematics
This essay is based in part on a paper given at the British Sociological Conference
on Culture, l§7§, but has benefited since from criticism from Edward Thompson,
Keith McClelland, Philip Corrigan and Stuart Hall and from discussion in the CCCS
History Group. I have also been greatly helped by discussions with John Clarke,
author of the companion piece which ends this volume.

1 L. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital (New Left Books, 1970), especially
pp. 13-30.
2 I am especially grateful to Keith McClelland for arguing this point with great
force.
3 Althusser,Essays in Self-Criticism (New Left Books, 1976), p. 124 .
4 See, for example, Rosalind Coward, 'Class, culture and the social formation',
and the response from Ian Chambers et al., in Screen (spring 1977 and
winter 1977-8).
5 For a more rigorous exposition of a similar view see Ernesto Laclau, Politics
and Ideology in Marxist Theory (New Left Books, 1977), especially pp. 1-13.
6 Gareth Stedman Jones, 'Engels and the genesis of Marxism', New Left Review,
no. 106, p. 103.
7 Martin Nicolaus, 'Hegelian choreography and the capitalist dialectic: proletariat
and middle-class in Marx', in Studies on the Left, vol. 7 (1976), pp. 22-49.
8 The Poverty o f Philosophy, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works (Lawrence
& Wis fart, 1976), vol. 6, p. 211.
9 Manifesto o f the Communist Party, in Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 490 .
10 Stuart Hall, 'The "political" and the "economic" in Marx's theory of classes' ,
in Alan Hunt (ed .), Class and Class Structure (Lawrence & Wis fart, 1977),
p. 20.
11 Similar sequences are portrayed in Engels, The Condition of the Working Class
in England (Panther, 1969), pp. 240 ff., in The Manifesto and in T11e Poverty
o f Pnilosopky.
12 Engels, Condition, pp. 243-54.
13 ibid., editor's introduction, p. 10.
14 e.g. ibid., p. 152.
15 ibid., p. 239
16 Marx, Manifesto of tNe CommUnist Party, pp. 495-6.
 Notes to pages 206-10 283

17 Engels, Condition, p. 39 .
18 For an elaboration of these points see Hall, 'The "political" and the "eco-
nomic" '.
19 ibid., pp. 39-50. See also Gwynn Williams, 'France 1848-1851', Open Uni-
versity A 321, units 5-8 (1976).
20 Marx, Surveys from Exile (Penguin, 1973), editor's introduction, p. 9.
21 Nicolaus, 'Hegelian choreography
22 Most strikingly in the 'old Mole' passage in Marx, Surveys from Exile, pp.
236-7. I am grateful to Greg McLennan for discussions about these elements
in The Eighteenth Brumaire and other conjectural texts.
23 For an interesting discussion of Gramsci's early economism see Bob Lumley,
'Gran'1sci's writing on the state and hegemony, 1916-35: a critical analysis',
CCCS stenciled paper no. 51 (1978). For a fuller contextualization see
G. Williams, Proletarian Order (Pluto Press, 1975) .
24 V.I. Lenin, 'The historical destiny of the doctrine of Karl Marx', Selected
Works (Lawrence & Wis fart, 1971), p. 17.
25 'The three sources and three component parts of Marxism', Selected Works,
p. 21. For characteristic attacks on revisionism see 'The state and revolution',
ibid., pp. 264-351 .
26 Lenin, 'The three sources', Selected Works, p. 24 .
27 See for example the stress on 'special bodies of armed men', 'the rapacious
state power', the state as 'a special organization of force', etc., in 'The state
and revolution', and other Lenin texts. There is nothing surprising in this
emphasis given the historical circumstances of 1911 to 1919! For interesting
comparisons with Gran sci see Perry Anderson, 'The antimonies of Antonio
Gran sci', New Left Review, no. 100 (1977), especially pp. 49-55.
28 Lenin, 'Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism', Selected Works, p. 175 .
29 This is a basic argument of What is to be Done?,° see also 'A talk with the
defenders of economism', Selected Works, pp. 44-9.
30 ibid., p. 47.
31 Lenin, 'Party organization and party literature', Selected Works, pp. 148-53.
32 Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of
Antonio Gran sci (Lawrence & Wis fart, 1971), p. 323
33 ibid., PP. 196-7.
_
34 See, for example, Stalin's essay on 'The foundations of Leninism'.
35 For a summary and critique of the debate see H.F. Moorhouse, 'The Marxist
theory of the labour aristocracy', Social History, vol. 3, no. 1 (January
1978).
36 Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics
(Merlin Press, 1971).
37 Examples of the first form of argument include John Foster, 'Imperialism
and the labour aristocracy', in .l . Shelley (ed), The General Strike (Lawrence
& Wis fart, 1976), examples of the second include John Foster, Class Struggle
and the Industrial Revolution (Methuen, 1977), especially oh. 7, and
284 Notes to pages 210-14

R.Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1976).
38 See the interesting criticism of common-sense views of the corruption of
leadership or bureaucracies in Tony Lane, The Union Makes Us Strong
(Arrow, 1976).
39 Some of these points are made in relation to Capital in Hall, 'The "political"
and the "economic" '.
40 For the character of Lukacs' early thought see Gareth Stedman Jones, 'The
Marxism of the early Lukacs',New Left Review,»no. 70, (November-December
1971).
41 Paradoxically Marx's distinction between 'sacred' (i .e. idealist) and 'profane'
(i.e. materialist) categories and histories is made in the course of his dispute
with Proudhon, the source too of Lukacs' founding definitions of class. See
especially Marx to P.V. Annenkov, 28 December 1846, in Marx and Engels,
Selected Letters, (Progress Publishers, 1975), especially p. 31.
42 Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 51 .
43 'We cannot really speak of class consciousness in the case of these classes
[petty bourgeoisie and peasantry] . . . for a full consciousness of their
situation would reveal to them the hopele ssness of their particularist strivings
.
in the fact of the inevitable course of events.' ibid., p. 61
44 Most of the essay, 'Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat' is
concerned to establish these homologies.
45 ibid., especially pp, 197-8 _
46 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 17804950 (Penguin, 1961), p. 17.
47 E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (Merlin Press,
1977), p. 791 .
48. ibid., p. 810.
49 See especially Perry Anderson 'Components of the national culture' in A.
Cockburn and R. Blackburn (eds.), Student Power: Problems, Diagnosis,
Action (Penguin, 1968), pp. 214-84, and Terry Eagleton, 'Criticism and
politics: the work of Raymond Williams',New Left Review, no. 95 (January-
February 1976), especially p. 9.
50 For a development of this point see Richard Johnson, 'Barrington Moore,
Perry Anderson and English social development', Working Papers in Cultural
Studies, no. 9 (1976), especially pp. 25-6.
51 E.P. Thompson, 'Review of The Long Revolution ', New Left Review (May-
June and July-August 1961).
52 ibid., but see also Thompson, Morris, cos. 1 and 2, and part 4.
53 For the second see ibid., oh. 7, for the first see The Making, especially pp.
50-2, 162, 415.
54 For these indications see, mainly, E.P. Thompson, 'The peculiarities of the
Englisll', Socialist Register (1965).
55 The classic polemical text of this tendency was the volume edited by F .A.
Hayek, as Capitalism and the Historians (Routledge & Kevan Paul, 1954). But
 Notes to pages 214-19 285

see also the works of T.S. Ashton, W.W. Rostow and RM. Hartwell. Latterly
this enterprise has been extended to other periods, notably the 1930s.
56 For accounts of this period see the essays in Socialist Register (1976) ,
Thompson, 'Review of The Long Revolution', and Raymond Williams,
Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 1-4.
57 Williams, The Long Revolution, especially oh. 2 , Williams, Marxism and
Literature, oh. l , R . Williams,Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society (Fontana, 1976), pp. 76-82.
58 e.g. 'Interview with Edward Thompson', Radical History Review, vol. 3,
no. 4 (1976), p. 23.
59 The fullest statement, from which these quotations are drawn, is the preface
to The Making of the English Working Class.
60 Eagleton, 'Criticism and politics', p. 9.
61 Williams, Culture and Society, p. 289.
62 Making, especially pp. 195, 120, 10-11; 'Interview with Edward Thompson'
pp. 4-5, 'Anthropology and the discipline of historical context', Midland
History vol. 1, no. 3 (spring 1972), pp. 41-55, 'Measuring class consciousness',
Times Higher Education Supplement (8 March 1974): review of John Foster,
Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution.
63 'Interview with Edward Thompson', p. 15 .
64 Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 80-1.
65 Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (Allen Lane, 1975), pp. 258-69 .
66 Williams, Marxism and Literature, chapter on 'Base and superstructure'.
67 E.P. Thompson, 'Folklore, anthropology and social history', Indian Historical
Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (January 1978), p. 262. I am grateful to Edward
Thompson for drawing my attention to this article.
68 Williams, The Long Revolution, p. 136.
69 Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 81-2.
70 ibid., chapter on 'Productive Forces'.
71 Thompson, 'Review of The Long Revolu1"ion'.
72 'There is no alternative, from any socialist position, to recognition and
emphasis of the massive historical and immediate experience of class
domination and subordination, in all their different forms.' This option is
stressed against 'the alternative language of co-operative shaping'. Williams,
Marxism and Literature, p. 112.
73 Anthony Barnett, 'Raymond Williams and Marxism: a rejoinder to Terry
Eagleton', New Left Review, no. 99 (September-October 1976), p. 56.
Barnett's criticism of Williams closely parallels my own comments on
Thompson in Johnson, McLennan and Schwarz, 'Economy, culture and
concept', CCCS stencilled occasional paper no. 50 (1978). Actually they
apply most accurately to Williams, I now favour the more careful formula~
sons about Thompson that follow later in the chapter.
74 Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 307-24, of. the treatment of class 'ideals'
in H. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (Routledge & Kevan Paul, 1972).
286 Notes to pages 2.79-29
75 For these formulations see 'Interview with Edward Thompson', Thompson,
'Review of The Long Revolution' and 'Folklore, anthropology and social
history'.
76 ibid., p. 265. This particular article contains many of the most interesting
formulations on these questions, suggesting considerable movements in
Thompson's position which are paralleled by the practice of Whigs and
Hunters.
77 The following typifications are based on a reading of all of Thompson's
-
published historical work it is difficult to cite particular sources.
78 This point is argued at greater length for particular chapters of The Making
in Johnson, McLennan and Schwarz, 'Economy, culture and concept'.
79 The Making, p. 10.
80 ibid., p, 12.
Sl For Althusser's own account of the context of his project see 'To my English
readers' and 'Introduction: today' in For Marx (Penguin, 1969).
82 All this can be seen in 'Review of the Long RevoZution'.
83 Althusser,Essays in Self-Criticism, editor's introduction, especially p. 32 .
84 ibid., pp. 201-2.
85 ibid., PP. 2034.
86 For these formulations see especially 'Contradiction and over-determination'
in Althusser, For Marx.
87 See especially 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses' in Althusser,
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New L e f t Books, 1971).
88 For the general character of the 'reading' see Althusser and Balibar,
Reading Capital, pp. 1-30.
89 See especially the reductions involved in the very formal account of 'Elements
of the structure', especially p. 225.
90 Postface to the 2nd ed., Capital, vol. l (Penguin, 1976), p. 102.
91 Marx to Danielson, 10 April 1879, Selected Letters, p. 296.
92 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, p. 69 .
93 One post~Althusserian path can be traced through B. Hindess and P. Hirst ,
Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), and the
same authors' auto-critique, Mode oJ'Produetion and Social Formation
(Macmillan, 1977).
94 It is not possible to pursue these issues of method further here since this
would take us even further away from 'worldng-class culture'. The comments
here and in the section on 'culturalism' will, however, be developed in later
CCCS publications.
95 This point is developed more fully in 'Histories of culture: theories of ideology' 9

in the BSA 1978 Conference volume.

96 The most important discussions of 'reproduction' in Capital include vol 1,
ch. 23, 'Simple Reproduction', and appendix to vol l (Penguin), especially
pp. 1060-5. For a brief reading of these and other aspects of Marx's treatment
of reproduction see Johnson, McLennan and Schwarz, 'Economy, culture
and concept', pp. 40-1 .
 Notes to pages 22984 287

97 Criticisms of the essay include: P.Q. Hirst, 'Althusser and the theory of
ideology', Economy and Society, vol. 5, no. 4 (1976), M. Erben and D.
Gleeson, 'Education as reproduction', in Young and Whitty (eds.), Society,
State and Schooling (Palmer Press, 1977) ; Ideology and Consciousness, no. 1
(1977).
98 EP. Thompson, 'Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism', Past and
Present, no. 38 (1967).
99 The main theoretical resource in what follows is Gramsci's Prison Notebooks
and a return to those parts of Capital where Marx deals with the cultural
conditions of production and with the problem of the relation between the
'phenomenal forms' of capitalist relations and the character of bourgeois
ideologies. But there has already been, in this essay, quite enough of the
exposition of positions, so the form of what follows is prescriptive or argu-
mentative rather than expository. For the sources of many of these arguments
see, however, the notes that follows.
100 Both quotations above are from the essay, 'Ideological state apparatus'.
101 Williams, Marxism and Literature, pp. 80-1.
102 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology Part One, ed. C.J. Arthur, (Lawrence
& Wis fart, 1970), p. 50.
103 Capital, vol. 1,pp. 283-4.
104 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (Allen Lane,
1977), p. 27 .
105 Capital, vol- 1, p. 92. For an extremely telling elaboration of this point see
Victor Molina, 'Notes on Marx and the problem of individuality', in CCCS,
On Ideology (Hutchinson, 1977).
106 David McLellan,Marx 's GrundnSse (Paladin, 1971), P- 45 (from the 1857
Introduction) .
107 This is in addition to any (useful) tendency to distinguish 'regions' or 'sub-
ensembles' of ideologies, a contribution especially of Nicos Poulantzas.
108 e.g. Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, p. 37, note 3.
109 See especially Thompson, 'Review of The Long Revolution ' and 'Folklore,
anthropology and social history'.
110 'Folklore, anthropology and social history' marks an advance on this, but I
think that in most of Tholnpson's work this is the characteristic solution .
111 See especially Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Prison Notebooks, pp. 323~43 ,
418-24.
112 See especially ibid., pp. 330-5, 375-7, 390-3, 404-5, 407-8, and the essay on
'The intellectuals', It is important to remember that Gran sci understood
Marxism, 'the philosophy of praxis', also as a transformative ideology.
113 e.g. Capital, vol. 1, especially pp. 275, 719-23, 615-17, 620-1. The meat of
Gramsci's view of hegemony is to be found on the notes on 'The modern
prince' and 'State and civil society'.
114 This is especially plain in the notes on 'Americanism and Fordism'.
115 'Interpellate' is taken from the ISA essay. For an interesting and historically
288 Notes to pages 235-43

usable development see Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory.

116 Hoare and Nowell»Smith, Prison Notebooks, especially pp. 326, 333, 419.
117 ibid., p. 333.
118 The classic case is the analysis of film in Screen, but there are elements on the
'reading of ideologies as a text' in Foucault's approach to discursive practices
and in Laclau's treatment of specific ideologies. There is a problem in these
approaches of remaining locked into the ideological forms themselves and
inferring effects.
119 A fuller account should also consider capital's requirements in relation to
consumption and the reproduction of the relations within which generational
reproduction takes place. But for particular examples of these see the essay
that follows.

10 Capital and culture: the post-war working class revisited

1 See, inter alia, H. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York :
Monthly Review Press, 1974) .
2 Community Development Projects, The Costs of lndustrial Growth (HMSO,
1976) and C. Cockburn, The Local State (Pluto Press, 1977).
3 P. Corrigan and P. Corrigan, 'The reconstruction of the state' (Seminar paper
at CCCS, University of Birmingham, June 1977).
4 P. Cohen, 'Subcultural conflict and worldng class community', Working
Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 2 (1972).
5 G. Stedman Jones, 'Notes on the remaking of the English working class',
Journal of Soeial History (1975).
6 See, for example, M. Cain, Society and the Policeman 's Role (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1973), and S. Hall, 'Education and the crisis of the urban school',
in Open University, Issues in Urban Education (Open University Press, 1974).
7 Cockburn, The Local State; and P. Corrigan, 'The community strategy, the
state and class struggle, 1966-76' (Paper presented to European Conference.
on Deviancy and Social Control, Vienna, September, 1976).
8 Cockburn, The Local State, oh. 4.
9 See Finn, Grant and Johnson, 'Social democracy, education and the crisis',
Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 10 (1976).
10 Finn, Grant and Johnson, 'Social democracy, education and the crisis'.
11 Cohen, 'Subcultural conflict and working class community', and S. Hall and
T. Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through Rituals (Hutchinson, 1976).
12 See, inter alia, Conference of Socialist Economists, On the Political Economy
of Women (London: Stage One, 1976), J. Smith, 'Women, work and the
family', International Socialism, nos. 100.1
13 See Smith, 'Women, work and the family'.
_
14 For example, the Women's Study Group on Welfare, The Neglected Child and
His Family (Oxford University Press, 1947)_
15 See, for example, L. Bland et al., 'Women and the reproduction of labour
 Notes to pages 243-8 289

power', CCCS stenciled paper (University of Birmingham, 1978).

16 J. Packman, The Child's Generation (Blackwell & Robertson, 1976).
17 CSE, On the Political Economy o f Women. Smith, 'WOmen, work aNd the
family'.
18 L. Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (Tavistock, 1977), pp. 151-2.
19 CSE, On the Political Economy of Women .
20 S. Hall, 'Reformism and the legislation of consent', in National Deviancy
Conference, Permissiveness and Control (Macmillan, forthcoming).
21 Cohen, 'Subcultural conflict and working class community'.
22 C. Hutt, The Decline of ine English Pub (Arrow, 1976); B. Newman and
D. Young, 'The pub as a leisure context' (Unpublished MS, Dept of Sociology
North-East London Polytechnic); and A. Whitehead, 'Sexual antagonisms in
Hertfordshire', in Barker and Allen (eds.), Dependence and Exploitation in
Work and Marriage (Longman, 1977) .
23 J. Foster, Class Struggle in the Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1974), p. 53.
24 Hurt, The Decline of the English Pub, p. 128 .
25 See S. Castles and G. Kosack, The Immigrant Worker and the Class Structure
(Oxford University Press, 1973), and A. Sivanandan, Race, Class and the State
(London: Institute of Race Relations, 1976).
26 See, for example, V.l. Lenin, British Labour and British Imperialism
(Lawrence & Wis fart, 1969), P. Hartman and C. Husbahd, Racism and the
Mass Media (Davis-Poynter, 1974), chs. 1 and 2, and G. Pearson, 'Pald-
bashing in Lancashire', in G. Mungham and G. Pearson (eds.), Working Class
Youth Culture (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).
27 See Stedman Jones, 'Notes on the remaking of the English worldng class',
S. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (Macmillan, 1978), oh. 6, and S. Damer, 'Wine
Alley: the sociology of a dreadful enclosure', in P. Wiles (ed), T11e Sociology
of Crime and Delinquency in Britain (Martin Robertson, 1977).
28 R. Roberts, The Classic Slum (Penguin, 1971).
29 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, oh. 6, and Duff and Marsden, Workless (Penguin,
1977).
30 See Hall et al., 'Subcultures, cultures and class', in Hall and Jefferson (eds.)
Resistance through Rituals .
31 See also P. Willis, Learning to Labour (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977).
32 See H. Beynon and T. Nichols, Living with Capitalism (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1977), and T. Nichols and P. Armstrong, Workers Divided (Fontana,
1976).
33 See Willis, Learning to Labour.
34 See H. Beynon, Working for Ford (Penguin, 1975).
35 See Hall et al., Policing ine Crisis, oh. 6.
36 See Beynon, Working for Ford.
37 For a discussion of one example of neo-human-relations management, see
T. Nichols, 'The "Socialism" of managenlent', Sociological Review, vol. 23.
290 Notes to pages 249-53

no. 2 (May 1975).

38 See, inter alia, CSE, On the Political Economy of Women, and Wilson ,
Women and the Welfare State .
39 Stedman Jones, 'Notes on the remaking of the English working class'.
40 See Willis, Learning to Labour, and J . Clarke, 'The Sldnheads and the magical
recovery of community', in Hall and Jefferson (eds.), Resistance through
Rituals
41 I. Taylor and D. Wall, 'The decline of the Skinheads', in Mungham and
Pearson (eds.) Working Class Youth Culture .
42 See, for example, I. Taylor, 'Spectator violence around football: the rise and
fall of the working class weekend', Research Papers in Physical Education ,
vol. 3, no. 2 (1976).
43 See Hall, 'Reformism and the legislation of consent'.
44 Cohen, 'Subcultural conflict and worldng class community', P. 17.
45 But see D. Hobson, 'Housewivesr isolation as oppression', in CCCS Women's
Studies Group, Women Take Issue (Hutchinson, 1978) .
46 See P. Corrigan, Schooling the Smash Street Kids (Macmillan, forthcoming) ,
and H. Parker, View From the Boysrnavid & Charles, 1974).
47 See Clarke, 'The Skinheads and the magical recovery of community'.
48 See Hall or al., Policing the Crisis, oh. 6 .
49 See ibid., part 4.
50 T. Jefferson and J. Clarke, 'Down these mean streets, the meaning of mugging,
Howard Journal (1974), and D. Hebdige, 'Reggae, rasters and ruddies', in Hall
and Jefferson (eds.), Resistance Through Rituals .
Sl See Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, oh. 6, for an analysis of some elements of
an 'English Ideology'.
52 N. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (New left Books, 1973),
p, 210.
Index

ABC/EMI, 157 Beveridge, 243

Abel-Smith and Townsend, 24 Birmingham, 24, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110,
Abrams and Rose, Must Lab our Lose?, 116, 117, 119, 120
13, 16, 28 Birmingham Old Edwardians, 1 14
absenteeism, 22, 248 Birmingham Scouts Association, 11 1 ,
abstraction, 215-16, 220 112
adult education, 59 Birmingham Street Children's Union
affluence, theories of, 17-18, 24-6, 35-6, Council, 113, 115
238, 242, 253 , see also embourgeoise- Birmingham Daily Mail, I 12
ment thesis Birmingham Co-operative Herald, 9 1 ,
affluent society, 15, 159 98
'affluent worker', 29 Black Dwarf, 95
alienation, 32, 65 black youth, 256
Althusser, L., 42, 65, 67, 68, 201, 202, Blackpool, 146, 147
224-7, 237, 245,Essays in Self- Blake, W., 213
Criticism, 202, 2.26,For Marx, 6 8 , Blanch, M., 7, 8
225,Reading Capital, 68, 202, 225, Blue Books, 47
227.228; Board Schools, 109
Althusserianism, 203, 224-3 1 Boer War, 104, 114
Anderson, P., 40, 61, 66, Bott, Family and Social Network, 13
need for historical interpretation, 38 , Boys' Brigade, 105, 106-7, 111
'Origins of the present crisis', 36-9, Boy Scouts, 106, 110, 112, 113, 118
49 Boys' Life Brigade, 106, 110
Annales, 63, 224 bourgeoisie, 211
Arlott, J., 171 Briggs, A., 61 , Chartist Studies, 60
Army Special Reserve, 119 Briggs and Saville, Essays in Labour
Arnold, M., 213 History, 60, 61
artisan, 100, 101, 107, 116 British film industry, 151-9, American
Ashley, WJ., 44 competition, 157, 158, mergers, 157;
Association of All Classes of All revival of, 156-7, see also cinemas,
Nations, 99 films
Brougham, Lord, 76, 78, 87
Baden-Powell, R., 110, 1 1 1 Burke, E., 213
Balibar, E., 227 Burnett, John, in Useful Toil, 133
Bamford, S., 80, 81, 83
base-superstructure, 215, 217-18, 220, Cadbury, G., 113
226,233 capital. 56, 100, 187, 203, 204, 236-7,
Best, G., 166-7, 174 241, 253, accumulation, 86, 187,
292 Index

228, 239, 240, concentration of, 157, recomposition, 246 ; constitution of

239, industrial, 212 classes, 203, corporate class conscious-
capitalism, 186, 234, 250, agrarian, 213 , ness, 38, disappearance of class
capitalist mode of production, 203 , differences, 246, hegemonic class con-
centralization, 158, 160, 239, sciousness, 38, lower middle class,
development of British, 238-59, 124; middle class, 58; middle-class
post-war, 238-53 , social formations, consumer, 244, professional middle
222; transition from/to, 55, 67 class, 123 , traditional petit-bourgeoisie,
Callaghan, J ., 17 l 244, see also class consciousness,
Carlyle, T., 213 culture, working class, working-class
Centre for Contemporary Cultural culture
Studies, 7 class consciousness, 22, 36, 38, 201 ,
chapels as leisure centres, see churches 205,209,211
Chaplin, Charlie, 156, 157 class struggle, 38, 52, 54, 204, 220, 221,
Charlton, B., 165 239,247
Chartism, 49, 51, 52-3, 60, 75, 78, 79, Coates and Silbum, Poverty : The For-
80, 83, 86, 88, 92, 95, 98, 99, 101, gotten Englishmen, 13, 24~7
102,204,206,211 Cobbett, W., 51, 76, 78, 79, 86, 91,
Chester Report, 169, 176-7 93, 95; on education, 88-90,Advice
child care, 243, 244; and children's to Young Men, 89, Grammar of the
departments, 243 English Language, 89
Church Lads' Brigade, 105, 106, 107-8 , Cockburn, C., 240
111 Cohen, P., 239, 241
churches as leisure certes, 141 -4, Cold War, 63
centre for youth groups, 141 , 'chapel Cole, G,D.H., 44, 45, 47, 49-50, 52, 56,
trips', 147, democratic nature of, 142, 57, 213; Chartist Portraits, 51 , 92;
hierarchic nature of, 142-3, loss of The Common People, 49, 51, 5 2 ,
popularity, 142, 143, opposition to, The Meaning of Marxism, 52
142, moving picture shows, 142, commodities: production of, 100, 160,
religious celebrations, 141 , sports 242; fetishism, 17
facilities, 141 communication, 217
cinemas, 140, 141, 142, 143, 151-60, communist historians, 54-8, S9, 61
audiences, 156, commercial nature Communist Party, 19, 54, 214, of
of, 143, development, 154-9, early Hungary, 210
popularity, 15 1-4, 158; egalitarian community, 24, 240
nature of, 143, morality of, 158, 'community studies', 21-4
names of, 158, 154; prices, 152-3, community development, 240; pro-
155 , travelling picture shows, 152~3 , jects, 24
see also films, British film industry consciousness, 231 -2, 234-5
Cinematograph Act (1910), 15 1 , 154 conservative attitudes, 121
circuses, 140, 15 1 , 'Circus of Varieties', Conservative Party, 29, 44, 213
151-3 consumer goods, 159, 239
'civil society', 253 consumers, 160, 244-5, 253, football
Clapham, Sir J., 44 supporters as, 170, 176-7, 178,
Clarion Cycling Club, 145 183-4
class: aristocracy, 123, 124, as against consumption, 186, 242, 246, 250
capitalism, 211 , 218-19, 222-3 , class contraception, 244
/party relation, 206, 209; class Co-operators, 98, 99
 Index 293
Co-operative movement, 49, 50, 91 , and Democracy and the Labour Movement,
societies for leisure, 144, 146 S6
Co-operative Holiday Association, 147 Dennis et al., Coal is 0urLife, 13, 16,
Co-operative Travel Services, 147 21 -4
'Coronation Street', 244 deprivation, 25-6, 122
Corrigan, Philip, 240 Detroisier, R., 80
cotton mills, 146 deviancy, 65
Cowley, Minnie, 130, 132 Dickens, C., 83
Crisis, The, 87, 98 discos, 250
Critcher, C., 8 Disraeli, B., 213
Crosland, A., 16 Dobb, M., 54-7, 58, 6 3 , 220,Studies in
Cubs, 112 the Development of Capitalism, 54-7 ,
cultural alienation, 172 63
cultural analysis, 168, 223, 234, 237 Dobbs, A.E., Education and Social
cultural changes and solution, 247-8 Movements, 48
cultural heterogeneity, 62, 70, 218, domestic labour, 243, 249-51 ,see also
235-6 women
cultural history, 67 domestic service, 121-39, areas, 123,
cultural homogeneity, 61 , 70, 161 , conditions of, 121 , 124-5; demand
135-236 for, 123-4, good servant qualities,
culturalism, 57, 68-70, 215 , 217-21 , 127-8, 134,hou1°s of work, 129, 132,
224,227,233 ideological supports for, 121 , 129,
cultural Marxism, 68 ideology of, 126; numbers employed,
cultural materialism, 59, 68 121 ,122, 124 , reasons for persistence
cultural relativity, 59 of, 122-6 ; relations between servants
cultural resistance, 26, 248 and employers, 121, 130-3, 134-5 ,
cultural struggle, 19-20 rituals of, 126 , servant-keeping
culture: bourgeois, 37, 219, common, tradition, 123-4; servants' responses
219, corporate, 162, experience, to, 135-8, status of, 124, 125-6 ;
214-15 ; high, 58, 67, 70; industrial, uniform, 125-6, wages, 129, 130;see
185;literature, 59, 67; mass, 183 , also working-class girls
middle class, 192, national, 176, Donovan Commission, 249
nature of, 185-6, 219; /not culture, Douglas, 16; The Home and the School,
59, 67, 70, 217, 219, 222, popular, 13
236-7; problematic of, 2 l2-13 , drink, 140, beer shops, 144, drinking,
sociology of, 67 ; sub-cultures, 172- 22,250
5, 183, subordinated, 162, theories
of, 58, 67, 231-6 Eating comedies, 157
Cunningham, W., 44 East End, 239
Eastham, G., 162
economic classes, 57, 222, 223
dance halls, 140, 142, 148; com- economic history, 44, 53, 63, 100, 215
mercial nature of, 142, and dance Economic History Review, 44
boom, 144, and dancing schools, economy, the, 16
148; prices, 148 economism, 54, 55, 57
Davidoff, Leonore, 124 education, 14, 62-3, 240, opportunity
delinquency, 103 for, 35 , reorganization of, 241 ,
democracy: struggles for, 55-6 schools and patriotism, 117, state,
294 Index

95, 241 , see also radical education, silent, 156, sound, 156; themes, 158,
schooling 159 ; see also cinemas, British film
electricity, 125-6 industry
Eliot, T.S., 18, 213 Finch, J., 98
Ellis, W., 99 Foley,Winifred, 122-3, 131, 136
ernbourgeoisement thesis, 15-16, 20, folk culture, 18
21, 28-9, see also affluence, theories football, 161-84, attendances, 168-9,
of 170, as a business, 176-7 , clubs, 162,
Empire Day Movement, 117, 118, 119 176-9, 182-3, European, 162, 165,
empiricism, 201, 202, 228 176, 179-84, facilities, 169, 170,
employment, 16, 147 178, 179, 183, 'hooligans', 171-3,
Engels, F., 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, management, 163, 179, and mass
209; The Condition of the Working media, 173-9, 184, 'misconduct',
Class in England, 203, 204 167-8, national, 179-84, players, 161 ,
English local government, 45 162-8, 181, 182-3; press, 170, 174,
English Revolution, the, 56, 57 175, 184,professionalisrn, 161, 163,
equality, 241 , of wealth, 35 170-1, 181, spectators, 161, 182-3,
essentialism, 31 South American, 179-81 ; stadiums,
ethnic groups, 246, 252 162, substitutes, 162, supporters,
ethnomethodology, 65 168~73, 1785 tactics, 165, 179-84;
experience, 61-5, 70, 185-8, 216, 218, transfer, 162-3, 176, USA, 166, 183,
220, 222, experiential, the, 57, 61 , World Cup, 165, 179, 180, 181
67, 70, 185, 195; 'lived experience', Football Association, 167, 179, 184
24, 213, 241 , transformation of, 188 Football League, 162, 169, 176, 178,
exploitation, 139 179,184
Foster, J., 61
Fabianism, 39, 43-7 Foucault, M., 224, 232
Factory Acts, 86, 250 Frankenberg, communities in Britain,
Factory Councils, 207 , see also 1.3, 21
Gram sci, A. Frankfurt school, 65
factory movement, the, 95, 102 functionalism, 227, 234, 237
fairs, 140, 146
'false consciousness', 20, 27, 211 Gaitskell, H., 15
family, 14, 22, 23, 32, 101, 186, 197, gambling, 22, 105, 115
239, 240, 244, 253, as site of pro- General Strike, 49, 134
duction and reproduction, 100, 240, Genovese, E.D., 60, The Political
242-33 family rows, 23; nuclear Economy 0f§lavery, 60,Roll
family, 29, 244; radical families, 136 Jordan Roll, 64
fascism, 207 geographical mobility, 24
femininity, 250, see also women Gillis, ].R., 103, 104
feminist history, 66 Girl Guides, 112
Fernbach, D., 206 girls, 116-17
fetishism, 21 1 Girls' Life Brigade, 110
feudalism, 55, 63 Glass, R., 25
Fielder, J., 93 Godwin, W., 95
F I F A , 162 Goldthorpe and Lockwood, 15, 1 6 , 27-
films, 151 -9; American, 154, 156, 157, 3 3 , The Affluent Worker in the Class
feature, 157, shown, 155, 156, Structure, 13, 27-33
 Index 295

Gordon-Walker, P., 16 60, 218-19, The Pauper Press, 60

gramophone and record sales, 144 holiday industries, 140, 146-8
Gran sci, A., 38, 42, 61, 67, 68, 93, 207, holidays, 146-8, excursions, 146, increase
213, 235, 252; 'common sense', 94, in, 147-8, motor coach tours, 140,
233, 253, 'corporate class conscious- 147
ness', 38, 'hegemonic class conscious- Holyoake, G.J., 79, 81
ness', 38, hegemony, 233-4, organic home, 249 , and work, 240, 249
intellectuals, 93, 94, 233 , parties, 93, Hopcraft, A., 161, 163, 164, 171-2,
94, 209;Prison Notebooks, 209, 233, 180
State and Civil Society, 68 housing, 26, 240
Great Depression, 43, 53, 207 humanism, 201, 224-6
Greaves, J., 166
Gutteridge, J., 80, 81, 83 ideological reinforcement, 129
ideological representations of youth, 242
Haldane, 112 ideological work, 238, 239, 247
Hall, S., 35, 204, 206, 207, 241, 242 ideology, 226-36, 239, dominant, 225-8 ,
Hammond, J. and B., 44, 45, 47-8, 221 , 252, theories of, 69, /culture, 226-31 ,
The Skilled Labourer, 5 1 /science, 68, 208, 224
Harrison, I.F.C., 48-9, 60, 97, immigrant labour, Irish, 246
Learning and Living, 48, 60, 75 immigration, 24
health services, 122 " imperialism, 104, 117
Hegel, F., 207, 21 1 Incorporated Church Scout Patrols,
hegemony, 43, 100, 233-4, 235,see also 105,108
Gran sci, A. 'In place of strife', 249
Henriques, F., 23 Industrial Democracy, 45
Hill, C., 55-6, 57, 5 9 , 221,Intellectual industrial developments, 239
Origins o f the English Revolution, industrial reorganization, 239-40
60,Puritanism and Revolution, 6 0 , Industrial Relations Act, 249
The English Revolution, 57, 63, Industrial Revolution, 5 1 , 103, 203 ,
'The Norman Yoke', 56, 573 The 212,214,221
World Turned Upside Down, 60, 63, Institute of Community Studies, 21
64 'Instrumental orientation', 30, 32-3
Hilton, R., 57, 60,Bondmen Made intellectuals, 13, 15, 41-6, 54
Free, 60 intelligentsia, literary , 2 12
historical materialism, 49, 201, 203 , interpellation, 241, 243, 252
227
historicism, 201, 202 Jackson, B., 14, Working Class Com- .
historiography, 42, 65 , Marxist, 209 munity, 13, 21
History o f Socialisr TNought, 5 1 , 5 2 Jackson and Marsden, 14, 16,Education
History o f Trade Unionism, 45 and the Working Class, 13
History Workshop, 66 Jacobinism, 49, '75, 86
Hobsbawm, E., 54, 57, 59, 61, 62, 204, Jewish Lads' Brigade, 105
209;Age of Revolutions, 6 0 , jingoism, 47
Labouring Men, 6 0 , Primitive Rebels, Johnson, R., 8
57,60,62,63,249 Jones, D., 91
Hoggart, R., 8, 13, 16, 17-20, 22, 31,
37, 59, 67, 201, 215, 240, The Uses Keats, J., 213
of Literacy, 13, 17-20, 42, 58, 59, Klein, I., 28, Samples from English
296 Index

Cultures, 13 Mackay, T., 43

knowledge, 194-5, 228, 232, 'really Matlock, 213
useful', 76, 79, 84-5, 85-6, 87 management changes, 15, 28
Manchester, 104-19 passim, 203
labour, 187, 195, 239, dispossessed, 189, Manchester Lads' Club, 115
mental and manual, 90, 91, 196, Manchester United, 165, 166, 179, 180
197; mobility of, 239, power, 192, manual work, 15, 32, 36
195, 239; process, 100, 191, 248; Marsh, R., 173
sexual division of, 62, 235, 243-4, Marx, K., 41 , 44, 54, 55, 57, 68, 69-70,
249, social division of, 62, 158, 90, 203, 207, 209, 217, 219, 224,
196, 235, 239 227-30, Capital, 56, 68, 206, 207,
labour aristocracy, 58, 61, 208, theories 21 1 , 220, 225, 229; Class Struggle in
of, 100, 208, 209 France, 205, Communist Manifesto,
Labour government (1924), 134 203, 204, 205, 207; 1844 Manu-
Labour Party, 15, 17, 19, 28, 29, 30, scripts, 6 5 , 225;Eighteenth Brumaire
32,39,40,41,44,45,46,49,214, o f Louis Napoleon, 205, 207; and
223; origins of, 39 Engels, 54, 206, German Ideology,
Labour movement, 44, 102, 205, 213 203, 233,Poverty o f Philosophy,
labourism, 209 203, Selected Correspondence, 54
laissez-faire, 43 Marxism, 49, 54, 55, 67, 69-70, 201,
law, the, 216 202, 206, 207, 211, 214, 215, 217,
Lawton, T., 168 225, 227-8, 238, and existentialism,
Leavis, FR., 18, 67 65, as science, 202, 224, 225, 227,
Leavisites, 213; left Leavisism, 214 'Manifesto Marxism', 203-7, 225,
leisure, 22, 103, 140-60, 249, 250, Marxist intellectuals, 40
commercialization of, 250, Marxism-Leninism, 61 , 62
commercially based, 143-4, 159-60, Marxisms: culturalist, 63, 223, econo-
home-centred, 144, leisure time for mistic, 207, 215, 224-6, mechanistic,
working-class children, 1 13, old and 209, structuralist, 215 , 216, western,
new forms of, 159-60, see also re- 21 1
creation masculinity, 23, 161, 170, 189-90,
Lenin, V., 57, 100, 204, 205, 207, 196, 197-8, 248, 250
208,209 machismo, 190, 196, 197
Leninism, 6 1 , 209, 21 S , and science/ mass consumption, 15
ideology divide, 208, and the state, mass culture, 18
208, and party literature, 208 mass domestic market, 243
Levi-Strauss, C., 68 mass media, 14, 171, 174-6
Liberals, 43 mass observation, 43
Liverpool Football Club, 182 mass production, 157
locality, 239-40, 242, 251-2 Mathew, G.C., 188
London School of Economics, 45 Matthews, S,, 164, 179
Lovell, W., 53, 80, 81, 83, 91, 92, 98, Mayhew, H., 43, 82, 103
99,101 McKenzie and Silver,Angels in Marble,
Lukacs, G., 209, 210, History and Class 13
Consciousness, 209, 210 means test, 16
Lynd, H., 44 Mechanics Institutes, 76, 78, 84
'membership', 245
Macmillan, Harold, 124, 252 mergers, 157, 158
 Index 297

Methodism, 48, 142, 216 Owen, R., , 83, 93, 95, 96

Midband, R., 61
militarism, 103-20 passim
_
Owenism, 48, 49, 60, 75, 78, 79, 80,
83,88,90,95,98,99,211
military themes, 158
miners, 22 Paine, T., 78, 83, 86, 88, 95
mining community, 21-4, 122 Parker, Class Inequality and Political
modes of address, 134-5 Order, 13
Mods, 242 Past and Present, 54
Moore, B., 166 peasants, 207
Moral Instruction League, 117 philosophy, 227, 228, 235
Morning Chronicle, 89 Pinchbeck, I., 47
Morris, W., 212, 213, 214 Pioneer, 84, 85, 87, 95, 96, 98
Morton, A.L., 51 , 55 police, 240
Munich air crash, 165, 180 political economy, 220, 222, 228
music halls, 110, 115, 118, 140, 151 poor, the, 24, 26
Poor Man's Guardian, 79, 83, 84, 85,
Nairn, T., 40, 6 1 , 6 6 , The Nature o f 86,90,97
the Labour Party, 39, 40 Poor Law, 45, 86
National Association for the Promotion pop concerts, 15 1-3
of Social Science, 43 pop music, 250
National Front, 27 popular classes, 76
National Health Service, 24 l populism, 59, radical, 213, 214
National Insurance Act, 243 Postgate, R., 49
nationalism, 104, 117, 118, 119 post-war change, 13-40, 238-53, econo-
National Service League, 11 1, 112, 113, mic change, 28
118,119 Poulantzas, N., 241, 253
National Service League Council, 115 poverty, 24-7, 122, 'rediscovery of', 24
neighbourhood culture, 26 Powell, Margaret, 126, 132, 135, 1385
New L e f t Review, 49, 66, Towards Below Stairs, 137
Socialism, 13, 34-40 pre-Raphaelites, 213
New Moral World, 98, 99 problematic, 68, 201, 202, 207
New Reasoner, 35 production, 55, 186, 187, 192-7 ;
New Unionism, 39, 44 capitalist mode of, 186-93, 204,
Noakes, Daisy, 128-9, 13 l , 132 209, 228, changes in, 240, forces of,
Nicolaus, M., 206 191, mode of, 56, 201, 228, 233,
'normative convergence', 29 234; relations of, 100, 187, 219, 222,
Northern Star, 78, 83, 84, 86, 92, 95, 225, 226, 229, 239
96, 99 Professional Footb alters Association, 184
professionalism, 145
O'Brien, B., 93 proletariat, 58, 203, 205, 207, 211, 212,
occupational mobility, 35 222, 223; proletarian politics, 204 ;
O'Connor, F., 83, 84, 93, 96, 99 semi-proletarians, 207
oligopolies, 156-9, 160 Proudhon, PJ., 203
opportunism, 208 psychoanalysis, 67, 68
opportunist politics, 21 1 pubs, 140, 144, 245
oral history, 43, 61, 66
organicism, conservative, 213 racial divisions, 246
Orwell, G., 47, 213 radical education: and children, 88-9 ;
298 Index

leadership and organization, 92-4; St Simonism, 87

main aspects, 75-8, and the radical Samuel, R., 35
press, 83-4, radical schoolmaster/ Sartre, J.P., 65
mistress, 82; resources and networks, Saussure, F, de, 68
80, shifts and strategies, 94-6 Saville, I., Democracy and the Labour
radical journalists, 76, 78, 92, 216 Movement, 60
radical press, 75, 82, circulation, 92; Scar ell, Dolly,Mother Knew Best, 127
and radical education, 83-4 scholarship boys and girls, 16-17
radio, 158 schooling: charity, dame, private,
Rambling Society, 144 public schools, 81 , elementary
Ramsey, A., 179, 180-1 schools, 109, Sunday schools, 75,
Rank, Arthur, 157 76, 79, 80, 81,84, 103, 109,see
Rational School Movement, 99 also education
recreation, 140-60, nineteenth Schwarz, B., 56
century, 141 , twentieth century scientism, 57
capitalist, 141; specialization of, Second International, 207 , see also
145, 149, noncommercial, 140; Marxism, economistic
see also leisure Seeley, Expansion of England, 1 17
redevelopment, 28 serology, 67, 69, 224
Reform Act of 1832, 86 Shelley, P.B., 213
reforrnism, 209 shop floor: culture, 186, 188, 190,
reggae, 246 248-50, humour, 193 , knowledge,
regionalism, 246 194-5,language, 192, 193, 195,
rehousing, 244 197-8, resistance, 248, struggle, 187-8
Rennie, Jean, 127, 136, 138 shopping, 244
reproduction, 52, 100, 233-4, 239, Silver, H., The Concept of PopuZar
240-4, 249-51 , of labour power, 100, Education, 75
239, 243; state interventions in, 101 Simon, B., Studies in the History o f
resistance, 248-9, 252 Education, 60, 75
respectability, 115, 246-7, 250 Sim rel, G., 21 l
Revie, D., 181 skating rink, 143
revisionism, 208, 213 Skinheads, 242, 251 , 252
Rex and Moore, Race, Community small producers, 90, 100, 101, 205,
and Conflict, 24 207,212
Roberts, R., 134, 135, 144, 148, social anthropology, 22
158, 246, The Classic Slum, 13 social being, 219-20
Rochdale, 140-60 social consciousness, 30
Rogers, T., 44 social control, 100
romanticism, 221 ; radical, 213 social democracy, 16, 17, 241 , and
Rowntree, S., and G.R. Lavers, 25 post-war crisis, 17
Rowbotham, S., Hidden From social democratic intellectuals, 15-16
History, 60 social formation, 201 , 226-7
Royal Commissions, 45 social history, 42, 60, 63, 100
Rude, G., 6 0 , The Crowd in the French socialism, 36, 39, 206, and ethical
Revolution, 60 socialists, 213 ; growth of, 44; and
Runcirnan,W.G., 14, l6,Relative socialist cause, 39
Deprivation and Social Justice, socialization, 104, discontinuity of, 110,
Ruskin,J. 213 resocialization, 115
 Index 299

social problems, 24 technology, 189-90, 191 , changes in,

social protest, 59 15, 28, 239, cinematic advances,
social reconstruction, 247 158
social reformers, 98, 99 Temperance League, 144-5
social workers, 25 Territorial Force, 112, 118, 119
Society for the Diffusion of Useful theatre, 143, 151
Knowledge, 78, 84 theoreticism, 202
Society for Promoting National theory, 66; adequacy of, 202
Regeneration, 96 Thomas, K., Religion and the Decline
Society for the Study of Labour o f Magic, 60
History, 48, 54 Thompson, D., The Early Chartists, 60
sociology, 30, 65, British, 14, empirical, Thompson, E.P., 14, 35, 40, 48, 57,
65 , liberal, 37, literary, 212, radical, 58, 60, 67, 68, 93, 214, 217, 218,
36; social democratic, 37 219-24, 225, 233, 234;Homage to
Southey, W., 213 Tom Macguire, 61 , Patrician Society:
Sparks, C., 19, 20 Plebian Culture, 6 0 , The Making of
Spencer, H., 43 the English Working Class, 13, 14, 42,
sport, 141, 145, 159, 161-84, 244, 48, 60, 63, 64, 75, 90, 201, 205, 212,
commercialization of, 250, .Ree also 213, 216, 220-2, The Moral Economy
football o f the English Crowd in the Eighteenth
Springhall, 113 Century, 6 0 , Time, Work Discipline
Stacey, Tradition and Change, 13 and Industrial Capitalism, 60, 230;
Stalinism, 57, 209, 224, 225 Whigs and Hunters, 69, 216, 220,
standard of living, 159, 243 221 > William Morris, 57, 60
state apparatuses, 229-31 Thompson, Flora, 123
state intervention, 239, 240, 243 Thompson, P., 159
statistical societies, 43 Thompson, W., 90, 98
Stedman Jones, G., 240 Times, The, 162, 166, 169, 171, 176, 178
Street Children's Union, 106, 113, 114, Titmuss, R., 14, 16,Essays on the Welfare
115,117 State, 13 ,Income Distribution and
structural anthropology, 68, 224 Social Change, 13, 24
structural functionalism, 215 Torr, D., 54, 55, 57, 58, 6 3 , Tom Mann
structuralism, 65, 67, 68-70, 201, 202, and His Times, 55, 57, 60
224-32 Tories, 28
sub-cultures, 172-5, 183, gangs, 104, Toynbee, A., 44
urban, 103, youth, 103, 241 ; see totality, 21 1, 218, 220
also culture Tottenham Hotspurs, 180
suffrage, 5 3 , 77 trade unions, 19, 2 2 , 28, 29, 45-6, 50,
sweated trades, 101 161, 197-8, 204, 223, 248
swimming baths, 144 traditional worker, 3 l
symptomatic reading, 201, 202 traditional working-class consciousness,
30-1
tariff reform, 1 19 Turin, the 'Red City', 207
Tawney, R.H., 44, 45, 213, 221 , Tyack, Geoffrey, 124
Religion and the Rise o f Capitalism,
48 unemployment, 26, 122, 123
Taylor, I., 170, 171, 172, 183 Unionist Party, 1 19
Taylor, P., 8 Unitarianism, 83
 300 Index

'Upstairs, Downstairs', 135 190, skills, 189-91

urban and regional studies, 23 Workers' Educational Association, 45
'urban village', 15 working-class, 13-40, 238-53; activity ,
191 , attitude to wages, 22; behaviour,
value system, 233 46 , changing conditions of, 240-53 ;
Victoria, Queen, 151-2, 158 children, 35 , consciousness, 24-38,
62, 63, culture, 42, 46, 115, 161,
wage labour, 22, 32, 243 171, 172, 176, 209, 224; divisions
wages, 58, 129, 130, 162, 176, 186-8, between, 209, 246; education, 75,
195-8, 236, 243,1ow, 26, 122 94, 100, failure to develop counter-
Warner Brothers, 155 hegemony, 209, fragmentations, 51 ,
Webb, S. and B., 44-7,Hi.vtory of Trade hero, 163 , heterogeneity, 70 , homo-
Unionism, 51 geneity, 705 historians of, 61 ; in-
Weber, M., 211 securities of, 26 , institutions, 42 ,
welfare policy, 27 insurgency, 43 , intellectuals, 59, 80,
welfare state, 14, 16, 241 leisure, 61, life, 14-17, 42, 46,
Westergaard, J ., 40, The Withering Marxist approach to, 36, movements,
Away o f Class: A Contemporary S1 ; organization, 44, 207, 224, poli-
Myth, 35-6 tical potential, 36, reproduction of,
West Ham United, 180 40, 244, 247, revolt, 5 1 , sociolo-
white-collar work, 36 gical approach, 30, youth, 103, 105,
Wild, P., 8 112-13, 119, 120, 173, 241, 242;
Williams, G.1-I., 206,Artisans and see also class, class consciousness,
Sans Culottes, 60 culture, Marxism, radical education,
Williams, R., 14, 16, 37, 58, 59, 60, working-class culture
61, 67, 169, 210, 212, 214, 215, working-class culture, 13-40, 42, 46 ,
216, 217-22, 225, 230; Culture 161, 171, 172, 176, 219, 224, 238-53,
and Society, 13, 37, 42, 58, 60, 61 , adjustment within, 244; collective
212-218, The Long Revolution, 13, idea, 37, debate about, 28, disap-
37, 58,Marxism and Literature, 37, pearance of, 238, forms, 238-42,
69, 216, 218,May Day Manifesto, fragmentation of, 27, 143 , historical
37, 'structure of feel'mg', 212 specificity of, 20, homogeneity of,
Willis, P., 8, 232 143 , problem of, 21 , reappearance
Wilson, H., 252 of, 238, shop floor, 186, 188, within
Woman's Book, The, 135 wider context, 23, work, 186-8, see
women: as consumers, 243, 251 , as also class, class consciousness, culture,
labour, 243, as mothers, 126-33; working class
as wives, 124, 125, at work, 26, working-class girls, 121 -39 , autobio-
196-7; in society, 186, role at home, graphical experiences, 122, 123, 126-
23, 243-4, 249-5 1 5 see also domes- 33, 135-8 , home conditions, 126-9 ,
tic labour relations with mothers, 126-30,
women's movement, 67 139, transition from home to work,
Wood, J., 80 122, 123, 130-2, see also domestic
work, 185, and culture, 186-8, force, service
190, hours of, 129, 132, 159, working men's clubs, 146, 161
industrialized pattern of, 159, Wright, T., 80
interests, 191 , and non-work, 187-9 , Wyse, T., 96
overtime, 195,p1ace of", 31, 186-7,

I
 Index 301
Y M C A, 106 semi-skilled, 104 , recruitment from
Young and Wilmott, Family and Kin- skilled, 105, 109, 110,from un-
ship in East London, 13, 14, 17 skilled, 104, 107, 113, 114;in
youth, 241-2, 246, 25 1 relation to religious institutions, 110;
youth movements: as ideological in relation to schools, 1 17
apparatuses, 117; membership by institutions, 1 10; in relation to
gender and class, 115-17, and mili- schools, 117
tarisrn, 111-12, 1 18 , and nationalism youth sub-cultures, 242
and national efficiency, 1 18 , non-
military or civilian, 1 13-15, Zweig, F., 16, 2 8 , 3 0 , The British
parliamentary, 106-10, patriarchal Worker in an Affluent Society, 13
dimension, 116-7, recruitment from