Delinquency, masculinity and citizenship in england 1950 - 1970

Past and Present

Volumn 187, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 157-185

  Wills, Abigail ^a  

^a CLARE COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Behavioural; Biological; CHD; Coronary events; Early life; Economic difficulties; Household; Social gradient; Work environment characteristics

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750104242     PISSN: 00312746     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gti010     Document Type: Article

References (143)

1. Galleries of Justice, Nottingham (hereafter GJ), Warden's report, High Beech committee meeting minutes, 1 Sept. 1952.
2. Harold Hamer, 'Address by the Association President', Approved Schools Gazette, xliv (1950-1), 241.
3. M. M. Simmons, Making Citizens: A Review of the Aims, Methods and Achievements of the Approved Schools in England and Wales (London, 1946).
4. See, for example, Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds.), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991), 1
5. or Lesley A. Hall, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900-1950 (Cambridge, 1991), 1-2.
6. Numerous excellent historical studies of twentieth-century masculinity have appeared in the last decade, including Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, 1996)
7. Michael Roper, Masculinity and the British Organization Man since 1945 (Oxford, 1994)
8. Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 1996).
9. See, for example, Michelle Cale, 'Girls and the Perception of Sexual Danger in the Victorian Reformatory System', History, lxxviii (1993)
10. Pamela Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare: Bad Girls in Britain, 1900-1950 (Basingstoke, 2003)
11. Linda Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family: Britain, 1850-1940 (London, 1995)
12. Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime cmd Custody in Victorian England (Oxford, 1991).
13. For an overview of earlier histories of masculinity, citizenship and war, see Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (eds.), Masculinities in Polities and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester, 2004).
14. For studies of 'martial citizenship', see Sonya O. Rose, Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945 (Oxford, 2003)
15. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London, 1994)
16. Lucy Noakes, War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity, 1939-1991 (London, 1998).
17. For a study of women and the welfare state, see Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (eds.), Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s (London, 1991).
18. With the exception of Martin Francis, 'The Labour Party: Modernisation and the Politics of Restraint', in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964 (London, 1999).
19. Michael Peplar, Family Matters: A History of Ideas about Family since 1945 (London, 2002), 72.
20. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 (Oxford, 1998), 4.
21. GJ, Mission statement, High Beech committee meeting minutes, 1 Mar. 1949.
22. For a general history of residential institutions for delinquents in twentieth-century Britain, see Jim Hyland, Yesterday's Answers: Development and Decline of Schools for Young Offenders (London, 1994).
23. Approved Schools Gazette (Birmingham, 1933-70).
24. See Department of Health and Social Security, Directory of Approved Schools and Remand Homes in England and Wales (London, 1965).
25. Jonathan Andrews, 'Case Notes, Case Histories and the Patient's Experience of Insanity at Gartnavel Royal Asylum, Glasgow, in the Nineteenth Century', Social Hist. Medicine, xi (1998), 255-6, 266.
26. GJ, Progress report, Dec. 1952. To ensure complete anonymization, quotations from progress reports are referenced only by month and year in footnotes; the date of entry to the institution of the individual concerned is not given.
27. GJ, Progress report, Mar. 1957.
28. GJ, Progress report, Nov. 1957.
29. GJ, Progress report, June 1954.
30. GJ, Progress report, Mar. 1958.
31. GJ, Progress report, Nov. 1951.
32. GJ, Progress report, Oct. 1957.
33. GJ, Progress report, Sept. 1957.
34. GJ, Progress report, Dec. 1959.
35. GJ, Progress report, Mar. 1956.
36. GJ, Progress report, June 1961.
37. GJ, Progress report, Sept. 1958.
38. GJ, Progress report, Nov. 1961.
39. GJ, Warden's report, High Beech committee meeting minutes, 14 Apr. 1958.
40. GJ, Progress report, June 1957. Although equivalent figures for the Approved Schools are not available for the 1950s, the figure is likely to have been similar, since sexual offences constituted an average 4.36 per cent of the total number of indictable offences committed by boys aged fourteen to sixteen in England and Wales over the years 1951-9: calculated from Home Office, Criminal Statistics for England and Wales (London, 1951-9).
41. GJ, Progress report, May 1957.
42. GJ, Progress report, June 1957.
43. See Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution [Wolfenden Report], Parliamentary Papers, 1956-7 (Cmnd. 247), xiv, for a contemporary summary of ideas on homosexuality.
44. Peter De Cosqueville, 'Letter from a Clinical Worker: L'Œuvre Sans Nom', Approved Schools Gazette, xliv (1950-1), 355.
45. GJ, Progress report, Nov. 1951.
46. GJ, Progress report, Oct. 1957.
47. GJ, Progress report, Mar. 1954.
48. GJ, Progress report, Dec. 1952.
49. GJ, Progress report, June 1961.
50. GJ, Progress report, Feb. 1960.
51. See, for example, Paul E. Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Farnborough, 1977).
52. GJ, Progress report, Aug. 1951.
53. GJ, Progress report, Feb. 1958.
54. GJ, Progress report, July 1955.
55. Jeffrey Richards, Happiest Days: The Public Schools in English Fiction (Manchester, 1988), 19-20.
56. GJ, High Beech committee meeting minutes, 23 Aug. 1949. The youngest applicant was thirty-three years old; the oldest fifty-two.
57. An indication of this flourishing can be seen in the launch in July 1950 of the British Journal of Delinquency: The Official Organ of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency (London, 1950-60).
58. Other influential works include John Bowlby, Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home Life (London, 1946)
59. John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health: A Report Prepared on Behalf of the World Health Organization as a Contribution to the United Nations Programme for the Welfare of Homeless Children (Geneva, 1952)
60. Kate Friedlander, The Psycho-Analytical Approach to Juvenile Delinquency: Theory, Case-Studies, Treatment (London, 1947)
61. Edward Glover, The Diagnosis and Treatment of Delinquency (London, 1946).
62. GJ, Progress reports, May 1952; Oct. 1959.
63. Gordon Rose, Schools for Young Offenders (London, 1967), 44-53.
64. Letitia Fairfield, 'Juvenile Delinquency: Cause and Cure', Approved Schools Gazette, xliv (1950-1), 383.
65. Harold Hamer, 'The President's Address', Approved Schools Gazette, xliv (1950-1), 71.
66. Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London, 1990), 2-3.
67. For a study which traces tensions in domestic versus martial masculinity during the Second World War, see Rose, Which People's War?, ch. 5.
68. For the earlier history of these tensions, see Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991).
69. See David Morgan, It Will Make a Man of You: Notes on National Service, Masculinity and Autobiography (Manchester, 1987).
70. See also Noakes, War and the British; and
71. Dawson, Soldier Heroes, on the importance of the figure of the soldier-hero in understandings of normative masculinity and cultural memories of war in twentieth-century Britain.
72. GJ, Progress report, Feb. 1956.
73. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London, 1957), 30.
74. Francis, 'Labour Party', 155-6.
75. Norman J. Mattock, 'President's Notes', Approved Schools Gazette, xlv (1951-2), 231.
76. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, 1957), was one of the pre-eminent exponents of this fear, speaking of the 'corrupt brightness ... improper appeals and moral evasions' of the new mass consumer society (p. 340).
77. See also Francis, 'Labour Party', 168
78. Matt Houlbrook, 'Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities, and Britishness in the Brigade of Guards, circa 1900-1960', Jl Brit. Studies, xlii (2003), 385.
79. See, for example, Chris Waters, 'Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual', in Conekin, Mort and Waters (eds.), Moments of Modernity;
80. Houlbrook, 'Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys', 384-8.
81. See Paul Rock and Stanley Cohen, 'The Teddy Boy', in Vernon Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky (eds.), The Age of Affluence, 1951-1964 (London, 1970).
82. See also Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London, 1983).
83. J. R. Alexander, 'Address Given at the Fifteenth Annual General Meeting', Approved Schools Gazette, xlvii (1953-4), 60.
84. Cited at n. 6 above.
85. Victor Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914-1948 (Oxford, 1987), is a good example of a work in this 'traditional' vein.
86. Elizabeth A. Stanko and Tim Newburn (eds.), Just Boys Doing Business? Men, Masculinities and Crime (London, 1994)
87. Richard Collier, Masculinities, Crime, and Criminology: Men, Heterosexuality, and the Criminal(ised) Other (London, 1998)
88. Simon Winlow, Badfellas: Crime, Tradition and New Masculinities (Oxford, 2001).
89. An average of 94.7 per cent of boys were committed to Approved School as a result of a criminal offence in the period 1961 to 1970 (the earliest period for which published statistics are available) compared with an average of 41.1 per cent of girls: See Statistics Relating to Approved Schools, Remand Homes and Attendance Centres in England and Wales for the Year [1961-1970] (London, 1962-72).
90. H. D. Willcock, Report on Juvenile Delinquency by Mass Observation (London, 1949), 128.
91. GJ, Progress report, June 1955.
92. GJ, Progress report, Sept. 1956.
93. Hamer, 'President's Address', 70.
94. Simmons, Making Citizens.
95. GJ, Progress report, Aug. 1955.
96. 'Editorial', Approved Schools Gazette, xliii (1949-50), 321.
97. GJ, Scheme of training, High Beech committee meeting minutes, 26 Oct. 1950.
98. See Siân Nicholas, 'From John Bull to John Citizen: Images of National Identity and Citizenship on the Wartime BBC', in Richard Weight and Abigail Beach (eds.), The Right to Belong: Citizenship and National Identity in Britain, 1930-1960 (London, 1998), for a discussion of how the Second World War was a turning point in the forging of a new active and critical citizenship.
99. Enoch I. Davies, 'Rewards and Privileges', Approved Schools Gazette, xliv (1950-1), 129.
100. GJ, Progress report, Mar. 1956.
101. Stephen Brooke, 'Identities in Twentieth-Century Britain', Jl Brit. Studies, xl (2001), 155.
102. Kathleen Canning and Sonya O. Rose, 'Gender, Citizenship and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations', Gender and History, xiii (2001), 431.
103. Rose in fact points towards this conclusion in her Which People's War?, where she suggests that 'good citizenship and masculinity were virtually the mirror images of one another' (p. 152), but she does not explore the ways in which the concept of citizenship itself, as it was deployed in 1940s and 1950s Britain, was intrinsically normative - particularly in its link to acceptable gender behaviours, but also in the way it was bound up with more politicized notions of civic duty.
104. Canning and Rose, 'Gender, Citizenship and Subjectivity', 435.
105. See n. 9 above.
106. W., 'Religious Instruction and Guidance', Approved Schools Gazette, xlv (1951-2), 204. Original emphasis.
107. GJ, Warden's report, High Beech committee meeting minutes, 1 Sept. 1952.
108. One of the Staff, 'Levity - With Jam On It', Approved Schools Gazette, xliv (1950-1), 200. While the correspondent goes on to suggest that 'this atmosphere, I am sure, is completely false', she was nonetheless calling attention to the stern, self-righteously moralistic tone of most of the contributors to the Gazette at the time.
109. J.W., 'The Quinta School: One More Exercise in "Getting On With It"', Approved Schools Gazette, lxi (1967-8), 204.
110. GJ, Progress report, Feb. 1969.
111. GJ, Progress report, July 1970.
112. GJ, Progress report, Dec. 1968. Original emphasis.
113. GJ, Progress report, Nov. 1970.
114. GJ, Progress report, June 1970
115. ibid., Progress report, Feb. 1969.
116. Maurice Eggerton, 'Canoeing at Norton School', Approved Schools Gazette, lxi (1967-8), 319-20.
117. GJ, Progress report, Dec. 1970.
118. GJ, Progress report, Mar. 1970.
119. GJ, Progress report, Oct. 1970.
120. E. F. Day, 'Professionalism in Approved Schools', Approved Schools Gazette, lxi (1967-8), 73.
121. An Approved School Headmaster, 'Approved Schools Troubled by Conflict of Aims', Approved Schools Gazette, lxi (1967-8), 287.
122. Rose, Schools for Young Offenders, 104-5.
123. Spencer Millham, Roger Bullock and Paul Cherrett, 'A Comparative Study of Eighteen Approved Schools which Explores their Stylistic Variety and the Commitment of Boys and Staff' (1972): Unpubd MS, University of Cambridge Radzinowicz Library of Criminology, 257, 264.
124. See also Spencer Millham, Roger Bullock and Paul Cherrett, After Grace - Teeth: A Comparative Study of the Residential Experience of Boys in Approved Schools (London, 1975).
125. This 'rediscovery' was prompted by studies such as Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest: A New Analysis of the Ministry of Labour's Family Expenditure Surveys of 1953-54 and 1960 (London, 1965). See, for example, John Veit-Wilson,
126. 'The National Assistance Board and the "Rediscovery" of Poverty', in Helen Fawcett and Rodney Lowe (eds.), Welfare Policy in Britain: The Road from 1945 (Basingstoke, 1999)
127. Rodney Lowe, 'The Rediscovery of Poverty and the Creation of the Child Poverty Action Group, 1962-68', Contemporary Record, ix (1995).
128. GJ, Progress report, Apr. 1970.
129. John Gittins, 'Approved Schools and the Future', Approved Schools Gazette, lxii (1968-9), 77.
130. J. N. Newby, 'Discipline', Approved Schools Gazette, lxii (1968-9), 495.
131. M. J. N. Newby, 'Social Training within the Approved School', Approved Schools Gazette, lxi (1967-8), 434.
132. Peter Willmott, Adolescent Boys of East London (London, 1966).
133. See also J. W. B. Douglas, The Home and the School: A Study of Ability and Attainment in the Primary School (London, 1964).
134. Peter Willmott, 'Community Involvement and Attitudes', Approved Schools Gazette, lxi (1967-8), 547.
135. Lord Stonham, 'Opening Address to Triennial Conference', Approved Schools Gazette, lxi (1967-8), 432.
136. Frank Ebert, 'Building a New Future: Address at Annual Conference of National Association of Approved School Staffs', Approved Schools Gazette, lxiii (1969-70), 326.
137. J. L. Parr, 'Change in the Junior Approved School', Approved Schools Gazette, lx (1966-7), 470.
138. GJ, Progress report, Jan. 1969.
139. R. O. Jones, 'We Must Gird Up Our Loins: Address by the Chairman at the 25th Annual Conference of the National Association of Approved School Staffs', Approved Schools Gazette, lxiii (1969-70), 428.
140. See Rose, Schools for Young Offenders, for a critical view of these regimes.
141. W. H. Baple, 'Sloppy Treatment Doomed to Failure', Approved Schools Gazette, lxiii (1969-70), 295.
142. GJ, High Beech committee meeting minutes, 13 Nov. 1967.
143. Olive Stephenson, summarised in 'Intermediate Treatment: A One Day Conference at Friends House', Approved Schools Gazette, lxiii (1969-70), 490.