Twentieth Century British History最新文献

Peter Townsend (1928-2009) was one of the most important British social scientists of the twentieth century, best known for pioneering and innovative research on poverty, as well as his political campaigning, most notably for the Child Poverty Action Group. This article returns to Townsend's influential work on ageing, for which he first became widely known, during the 1950s and early 1960s. It does so to recover the ways in which his research, first in Bethnal Green at the Institute of Community Studies (ICS), and then at the London School of Economics, as well as the professional and political networks he built during this period, were rooted in and shaped by his home life in Hampstead. As will be shown, the most important figure in the interconnecting spheres of Townsend's career was his wife, Ruth (1927-2011), who not only was central to the construction of a way of life in which the boundaries between research, the domestic sphere, and politics were often so blurred as to be non-existent, but also made significant and underappreciated contributions to her husband's research.

This article contends that common representations of the history of the British economy and economic policy in the 'Golden Age' period (circa 1950-73) as a story of 'failure' rely overwhelmingly on one measure, that of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth. Drawing on the foundational criticisms of this metric made by Simon Kuznets, it is argued that, for this period of British economic history, shortfalls in measured GDP growth in comparison with other rich countries are a very poor measure of changes in economic well-being in the UK. If we follow this argument and discard the belief that one metric can summarize trends in such well-being, the notion of 'failure' in this period should be set aside in favour of a more nuanced, multidimensional assessment.

Analysis of efforts to develop peace in Northern Ireland often attributes the foundation of the peace process to the dialogue between the then Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, and the Social Democratic and Labour Party's (SDLP) former leader, John Hume, in the late 1980s. However, it has been recognized that attempts to forge peace have a longer timeline, involving the interplay of several national and international historical contexts in which the European Community (EC) / European Union (EU) dimension and the role of the EU institutions in restoring peace and reconciliation has been generally neglected. The objective of this article is therefore to examine the European dimension of the Northern Ireland talks process, addressing the whole range of relationships affecting the political stalemate in the years preceding the signing of Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (GFA). Drawing on never-before-seen United Kingdom (UK) government and EC/EU archival documents and semi-structured élite interviews, this article highlights how the original dialogue on power-sharing and devolution in Northern Ireland included a much stronger EU dimension that it is publicly acknowledged. This article constitutes an emblematic case-study on the 'Europeanisation' of British politics in Northern Ireland, with findings uncovering a new and subtle dimension of the EC/EU role in the Northern Ireland peace process.

Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, the majority of teenage girls in Britain attended secondary modern schools. Yet, histories of the meaning and experience of postwar education continue to neglect this constituent of postwar women, favouring grammar-school leavers. This article draws upon a set of fifty-eight newly mined life histories from two postwar birth cohort studies to recapture the perspectives of ordinary women who attended secondary modern schools in England, Wales, and Scotland between c.1957 and c.1963. The longitudinal sources show that these women developed their attitudes to education gradually, across their lifecourses. Hairdressing, which stood for a desire for clean, creative, and autonomous paid work that could be balanced with domesticity, is identified as a reoccurring theme in the testimonies of secondary modern women. The article diagnoses secondary modern women with the hairdresser blues, a formulation that encapsulates their collective expectations, disappointments, and regrets born out of their closely interlinked experiences of schooling and paid work across the 1960s and early 1970s. These women's educational attitudes were defined by the cumulative realization that a secondary modern education might not even be able to make you into a hairdresser. The article ultimately suggests that it was more often the hairdresser blues rather than 'missing out' on the prestigious grammar school that politicized secondary modern schools for the ordinary women who attended them.

In the years after the First World War, a worrying legal and cultural phenomenon appeared in the English criminal court, something that would captivate the reading public throughout Britain. Young people, specifically young couples, were agreeing to die together, in what would become known as a 'suicide pact'. This article examines the curiously brief life of the suicide pact as a legal, social, and cultural problem in Britain. It contends that the suicide pact became a site through which the scale and pace of modern life, and particularly intimate life, was debated and judged. The suicide pact, this article argues, provides another vantage point to unpack the fraught twentieth-century relationship between individual freedom in sexual life, and the norms, values and patterns of community and the family. In exploring this tension, this article also presents a new way of thinking about the history of both intimate and social life in twentieth-century Britain.

This article examines the Attlee government's performance as a crisis manager in relation to tobacco policy in the years prior to the publication in 1950 of research linking smoking and cancer. Health concerns played no role in tobacco policy before 1950, and the government hoped more teenagers would take up smoking and pay tobacco duty. Tobacco took on added significance as an economic issue because policy-makers had so little room for manoeuvre. Their task was to balance the desire of consumers to smoke as much as they liked at a reasonable price, the exchequer's need to raise revenue from tobacco duties, and the imperative to conserve scarce dollars. Tobacco was an economic and financial rather than a health issue in the late 1940s and the authorities juggled competing demands creditably. This article examines previously neglected but important aspects of the histories of tobacco and of the Attlee government's economic policies.

Ronan Point was a residential tower block that partially collapsed in Newham in 1968, provoking a nationwide scandal. The Ronan Point disaster is frequently cited as a symbolic 'turning point' in the urban history of Britain, but it has been surprisingly underexplored on an archival level. It has been identified as a moment at which high-rise architecture was overwhelmingly discredited: a defining event within narratives of 'urban crisis' and 'decline' in late twentieth-century Britain. This article proposes that the Ronan Point scandal should be understood as a moment of democratic crisis, rather than one unique to the 'inner city'. The disaster foregrounded a profound democratic deficit within the political culture of post-war reconstruction. However, this article revises standard narratives of the Ronan Point disaster exclusively as a moment of crisis to consider it dually as a moment of possibility for the British welfare state, and for social democracy. The scandal constituted a key moment at which anti-deferential discourses were harnessed by grassroots actors to challenge the legitimacy of technocratic expertise and to lobby for a more participatory reimagination of the post-war settlement. The article goes on, nevertheless, to explore how such discourses of empowerment would also be mobilized to justify a movement away from public housing and towards owner-occupation.

This article sheds fresh light on popular attitudes towards politics in the 1940s. It does so by reading against the grain of archived material from Mass-Observation's (M-O) study of the 1945 General Election, as it played out in the constituency of Fulham East. Where the formal reports from this investigation have underpinned influential accounts of 'apathy' in 1945, this article returns to the original field notes from the investigation. By attending to the framing of the M-O encounter in Fulham, it suggests that we can reinterpret seemingly apathetic responses as a reaction to the alienating high expectations underpinning the M-O questionnaire, exacerbated by the classed and gendered dynamics of the interview. In other instances, however, it argues displays of apathy or ignorance could indicate the popular delimiting of an appropriate level of political interest, confining this to voting, in contrast to the importance of critical, detailed 'study' of politics implicit within the questionnaire. The article consequently contributes to the ongoing discussions surrounding the re-use of archived social-science material by suggesting that we can only rely on such material to gain access to 'vernacular' attitudes when we reckon with its fundamentally mediated nature, framed by the assumptions and intersubjective dynamics of the social-science encounter. In turn, it offers an example of how recent interest in the vernacular might be combined with an older, more traditional form of political history, centred on elections.

This joint-authored essay concludes the thematic issue 'Marking Race'. Drawing on the authors' individual essays and reviewing the wider literatures in the field of race and immigration, imperialism and decolonization, social democracy and the welfare state, and deindustrialization, the essay makes a series of proposals about what an analytical focus on race adds to our understanding of modern British history.