Middle-class socialism: Selfhood, democracy and distinction in wartime County Durham

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 62, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 116-141

  Hinton, James ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33749826883     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbl002     Document Type: Article

References (123)

1. Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Mass-Observation, 1937, p. 10. I am grateful to Dorothy Sheridan and the Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive for facilitating my work on these diaries and for permission to quote from them.
2. Another 275 individuals sent in between one and eight monthly instalments of a diary.
3. Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Mass-Observation, 1937, pp. 47-8.
4. Charles Taylor's magisterial exploration of the sources of the modern self is rooted in the discipline of philosophy, although it pays some attention to historical work on mentalities, on everyday lived experience. The larger project is designed to investigate some of Taylor's arguments about the sources of modern selfhood using evidence provided by the M-O diarists. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, 1989.
5. Paul Filmer, 'Structures of Feeling and Socio-cultural Formations: The Significance of Literature and Experience to Raymond Williams's Sociology of Culture', British Journal of Sociology 54, 2003, p. 202.
6. See also, for another valuable recent discussion of the concept, Sean Matthews, 'Change and Theory in Raymond Williams's Structure of Feeling', Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 10: 2, 2001, pp. 179-94.
7. Tom Jeffery, Mass Observation - a Short History, 1978. (Jeffery was elaborating an insight of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Director, Stuart Hall, 'The Social Eye of Picture Post', Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2, spring 1972.)
8. Penny Summerfield, 'Mass Observation: Social Research or Social Movement?', Journal of Contemporary History 20: 3, 1985
9. Angus Calder, 'Mass Observation', in Essays on the History of British Sociological Research, ed. Martin Bulmer, 1985.
10. Mass-Observation, The Journey Home, 1944.
11. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1961, p. 289.
12. Williams himself appears to have been unaware of Mass-Observation: See his use of the term (including the hyphen) without reference to the organization in Culture and Society, p. 294.
13. A full analysis of responses to the June 1939 Directive is presented in a parallel article to this one: 'The "Class" Complex': Mass-Observation and Cultural Distinction in pre-war Britain', forthcoming.
14. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), Cambridge, 1966.
15. Stuart MacIntyre, 'British Labour, Marxism and Working-class Apathy in the 1920s', Historical Journal 20: 2, 1977, provides a particularly forceful statement of this theme.
16. Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884-1914, Manchester, 1990.
17. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1984.
18. Since Mass Observers were guaranteed anonymity, these are not their real names. In the M-O catalogue Peter is identified as diarist 5200 and Maggie as diarist 5455. The identifying number for their replies to the monthly questionnaires ('Directives') that M-O sent to its panel of Observers are, respectively, 1270 and 1974.
19. Directive Reply (hereafter DR), June 1939.
20. DR, January 1939.
21. Diary (P), 24 July 1941; 25 Aug., 22 Oct. 1942; 22 Aug. 1943. 'Poetry is the only thing I teach with zeal': 10 Aug. 1943.
22. This was Maggie's perception, and it is born out by Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, 1985, p. 179.
23. DR, May 1942.
24. Diary (P), 14 April 1940.
25. Diary (P), 7 April 1940: 'Death decree against French Communists... staggering, yet after all its what one must expect. How long before we start?'
26. Diary (P), 19 July 1940. Tony Kushner, We Europeans? Mass-Observation,'Race' and British Identity in the Twentieth Century (Studies in European Cultural Transmission), Ashgate, 2004, p.198 quotes a pacifist office worker who helped internees but censored his report of this in his M-O diary for fear of being suspected of being a fifth-columnist himself.
27. Diary (P), 15 Oct. 1940.
28. Diary (P), 3 Dec. 1939.
29. Diary (P), 20 Jan. 1941.
30. Diary (P), 14 July 1942.
31. Diary (P), 31 May 1943.
32. Diary (P), 23 May 1943.
33. DR, September 1943. The post-war prospect that he had in mind was either a Soviet-led liberation of all Europe, or a neo-fascist reaction.
34. Diary (P), 20 July 1940.
35. The Times, 19 and 20 Sept. 1940
36. Ritchie Calder, articles in New Statesman, 21 Sept. 1940, 8 March 1941
37. Ritchie Calder, Carry on London, London, 1941
38. John Strachey, Post D, London, 1941
39. 'The New Pattern', Planning 178, 30 Sept. 1941
40. and see James Hinton, Women, Social Leadership and the Second World War, Oxford, 2002, pp. 83-84.
41. Diary (P), 7 Oct. 1940.
42. DR, May 1942.
43. Diary (P), 17 Nov. 1940.
44. Diary (P), 1 Jan. 1941. Auden actually wrote: 'cannot help or pardon'.
45. Diary (P), 26 Dec. 1941, 18 Jan. 1943.
46. Diary (P), 11 May 1940.
47. Diary (P), 18 May 1940.
48. Diary (P), 15 Dec. 1940.
49. Diary (P), 9 June 1942.
50. Diary (P), 1 Jan. 1941.
51. Diary (P), 23 Oct. 1940.
52. Diary (P), 29 May 1941.
53. Diary (P), 20 Dec. 1940.
54. Diary (P), 18 May 1942; 23 Oct. 1940.
55. Diary (P), 15 Jan. 1941; DR, June 1939.
56. Diary (P), 8 Nov. 1940.
57. Diary (P), 1 Jan. 1941.
58. Diary (P), 19 Oct. 1940, 5 Nov. 1940, 30 Oct. 1940.
59. Diary (P), 19 Dec. 1941, 30 Oct. 1940, 31 Oct. 1942.
60. Diary (P), 27 Oct. 1941.
61. Diary (P), 12 Nov. 1941.
62. On Spennymoor see Natasha Vall, 'Cultural Improvers in North-East England, 1920-1960: "Polishing the Pitmen", Northern History 41, 2004
63. Natasha Vall, 'Bohemians and "Pitmen Painters" in North East England, 1930-1970', Visual Culture in Britain 5: 1, 2004. I am grateful to Alan Campbell for drawing my attention to these articles.
64. Pimlott, Dalton, pp. 175-81, 559, 563.
65. Diary (M), 12 Jan. 1941.
66. Bishop Auckland Labour Party Women's Section, Minutes, 29 Feb. 1939.
67. Diary (P), 12 Oct. 1941.
68. Diary (P), 17 Oct. 1941.
69. Diary (P), 8 Nov. 1941.
70. Diary (M), 19 April 1942, 3 May 1942.
71. Diary (M), 3 May 1942.
72. Diary (M), 3 May 1942.
73. Diary (M), 17 May 1942.
74. Diary (M), 22 June 1942.
75. Diary (M), 1 July 1942.
76. Diary (M), 13 Nov. 1942.
77. Diary (P), 25 May 1943.
78. Diary (M), 28 May 1943.
79. Diary (M), 28 May 1943. Class certainly played a part in this confidence, as it did for the two middle-class women diarists unearthed by Sue Bruley ('New Perspective on Women Workers in WW2: Industrial Diary', Labour History Review 68: 2, August 2003), who volunteered for factory work and found themselves pushed into positions of leadership representing shop-floor grievances, despite their own rather conservative, apolitical background.
80. Diary (P), 20 Oct. 1943.
81. And she was disappointed that her fellow workers did nothing to defend her: In the autumn she wrote: 'I... have watched exploitation of the labour of young people to whom I became very attached and have been let down by some of the same people who could not take it when the struggle with the bosses came to a head.' (DR, September 1944).
82. Diary (P), 31 Aug. 1944.
83. Diary (M), 30 Jan. 1945, 14 March 1945. Taking this opportunity to learn about the book trade may have been part of a longer-term plan to set up their own bookshop. DR (M) September 1940.
84. Diary (M), 29 Nov. 1944.
85. Diary (M), 21 and 26 June 1945; The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton, ed. Ben Pimlott, London, 1986, p. 359.
86. DR, July 1945.
87. Maggie enclosed a letter from 'Briton' in Northern Echo (letter dated 1st July 1945) alleging that Dalton was lying when he said that the factories on the St Helen's estate had been awarded to German Jews because no British entrepreneurs had applied. 'Briton' had applied, and been turned down. In August 1943 Peter had met 'a little old local tailor, who talked of music and the Jews who are ruining his business, combined with fulminations against local MP and Councillors (he has a grievance, dating back from Depressed Area days, when the Council handed over new factory to the Jewish firm, when he had applied for it, a local firm of many years standing': Diary (P), 17 Aug. 1943.
88. And Dalton was sufficiently worried to note in his diary: 'it is most important that we should have only Gentiles now': The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton, ed. Pimlott, p. 358).
89. On the close links between Dalton and the German Jewish factory owners see Pimlott, Dalton, pp. 178-9, 404-5, 559-60, 563.
90. DR, July 1945.
91. DR, July 1945.
92. DR, July 1945.
93. DR, June 1945.
94. I am currently trying to trace the adoptive child, neighbours, and fellow Labour Party activists in order to find out how she shaped the remainder of her life. Maggie died, aged seventy-six, in 1980. (Peter Brittain to Dorothy Sheridan, July 1982, M-O Archive.) Peter died four years later.
95. M-O Day Survey, December 1937.
96. Diary (P), 30 Nov. 1941.
97. Diary (P), 27 Jan. 1942.
98. Diary (P), 15 April 1943.
99. Diary (P), 13 Sept. 1942; DR, May 1942.
100. Diary (P), 10 May 1943.
101. Diary (P), 28 Dec. 1940.
102. Diary (P), 7 Nov. 1943.
103. Diary (M), 12 and 13 July 1946. Peter's curious response to an earlier question on the subject from Mass-Observation, in November 1943, suggests that he was less keen to start a family than Maggie: Q. 'How important are children to family life?'; A. 'Very little, if your wife satisfies you': DR, November 1943. In 1939 Maggie wrote disapprovingly of her neighbours' fondness for pets: 'I value my freedom above gratifying my possessive instincts'. By 1946 this had changed - a few months before the decision to adopt a baby she had already adopted a stray cat.
104. Diary (P), 24 Jan. 1944.
105. DR, January 1945.
106. DR. June 1939. Maggie was equally negative: 'I am satisfied and stimulated by alive people with minds sharpened on intellectual and political problems. I can easily mix with the rest of my class [i.e. the neighbours] who are intellectually dead but I am not only "at ease" with them, I am "at rest" in its deadliest meaning'.
107. Diary (P), 20 May 1940.
108. DR, (M), July 1946; Diary (P), 21 Dec. 1939.
109. Diary (P), 21 July 1940. 'I'm sorriest of all for [the German Jews] because they have no nucleus round which to build their own salvation. [They] are the unhappiest people in the world - particularly those who were invited to this country as refugees, and then put into concentration camps side by side with their Nazi enemies': DR (P), Oct. 1940.
110. Diary (P), 24 June 1942.
111. Diary (P), 19 July 1942.
112. Diary (M), 2 Oct. 1945.
113. Diary (P), 3 Aug. 1943.
114. Kushner, We Europeans?
115. Marion Berghahn, Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany, Oxford, 1988.
116. DR (M), July 1946.
117. Diary (P), 10 June 1941. Similarly Maggie on the pre-war influx of Jews who 'regularly paraded in all their continental splendour in the drab streets of out-of-work Bishop Auckland': DR, July 1946. Conspicuous consumption was a frequent trope of anti-Jewish feeling in wartime Britain: Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice, 1989, pp. 115, 127.
118. DR, July 1945.
119. Diary (M), 16 Nov. 1945.
120. DR (M), July 1946. 'They run a club which gets beer and spirits when our pubs are closed. They buy all the houses at fabulous prices and the wealthiest [Dalton's friend, Len Lewin] has bought a hall... and had electricity laid to it while the village [Hamsterley] for years has tried in vain.'
121. DR, June 1939.
122. Peter had decided to apply for secondary-school jobs in 1940 (Diary (P), 21 Nov. 1940), but doesn't appear to have done anything about it. At beginning of 1944 he volunteered to move to an understaffed elementary school closer to home, and found the change 'hard but refreshing, next best thing to being in the navy': Diary (P), 12 Jan. 1944. Later that year he was head-hunted for a one-term temporary job teaching English, History and Geography to 14-16 years olds in a selective technical college in Stockton: Diary (M), 14 Sept. 1944. Eventually, in July 1945, he found himself a job at a secondary school in Spennymoor, despite efforts to block his appointment by the county education committee: 'the... head is reputed to be quite fearless, one of the few with no tie-ups of intrigue': Diary (M), 6, 9, 30 July 1945.
123. DR, September 1944.