Tyneside Shipbuilders' voices, 1968-69

These posts are all direct quotations from the field-notes of a research project in the Swan Hunter shipyards at Wallsend led by Professor Richard Brown at Durham University in 1968-69. The notes themselves have been archived at the Modern Records Centre, Warwick University, and more information about this collection is available from the UK Data Service. As part of a Leverhulme-funded research project revisiting social science field-notes from the 1930s to the 1980s, I have recently written an essay focused specifically on closely reading the everyday speech of men working in the Wallsend yards. This gets its first public outing at the Essex University conference on the ‘Resurgence of Class in History’, 12-13 September, but I have been so struck by the vivacity of many of the men's comments that I thought I would also post some of them to Twitter in the run-up to the conference. The Modern Records Centre has kindly given permission for me to tweet these extracts, suitably anonymised. 

Of course it is hard to provide much context to a snippet of recorded speech in 140 characters, but I am hoping that some cumulative sense of the complex world-view of these supposedly ‘traditional’ industrial male workers will emerge as the sequence develops. The first post comes from a plumber, one of many employed by Swan Hunter as ships’ outfitters. I have come to think of him as the ‘philosopher plumber’ because of his unusual willingness to engage the researchers in extended debates about the meaning of life and his own personal philosophy. He cannot be said to be ‘typical,’ but then as he insisted so passionately, it is not clear that one should be searching for the ‘typical’ working man – to do so is to deny workers’ individuality when this was clearly so important to them. But this does not mean that we simply give up - declaring that social life was (and is) too complicated to understand. This is too defeatist. If we listen carefully to workers’ diverse voices we will hear distinct patterns and commonalities. Crucially, we will also begin to understand how people made sense of the changes happening around them - how they often understood their lives reflexively, applying both historical and social-science frames to make sense of social change.  By searching out workers’ ‘lost voices’ we are not simply trying to restore working people to the historical record as active subjects, nor are we involved in a doomed search for an ‘authentic’ popular culture untainted by dominant ideas and values. Rather, we are seeking to understand how people navigated these ideas and values in their everyday lives – what was internalised, what mutated, what made no impact whatsoever, and what ideas and values survived untouched from earlier cultural periods? 

Making 'The Unmaking of the English Working Class'

The first lesson I learnt in making this programme for Radio 4 is that you can’t hope to say much in a 27½ minute slot, especially if you want to give half that time to other people to express their views. Inevitably, therefore, a great many issues got left on the cutting room floor. Three stand out for me and I thought I’d address them briefly here to set the record straight: they are nationality, ethnicity and gender.

First, nationality - why English? This was not just because I chose to hang the book on Thompson’s original and still thought-provoking book about the Making of the English Working Class. Though it was hardly unknown in the drawing rooms of Morningside or Kelvinside, the old, hierarchical version of class, with its fine gradations of status supposedly recognised by all, had its deepest roots in England. The Scots and the Welsh, and even more the Irish, can, and frequently do, tell themselves that class is a uniquely English obsession – the English disease – indeed this has become one of the important building blocks of national identity in each country (as it is also in the old Dominions such as Australia and New Zealand which tend to see themselves as having transcended the constrictions of the old, class-bound English system).  

Second, how might immigration, and the issue of ‘race’, complicate the story? Here it is crucial to confront head-on the gulf between our dominant myths about ‘the working class’ and the everyday lives of working people in all their diversity. The big story is not the racism that characterised working-class reactions to new immigrant groups in the second half of the twentieth-century. The racism could be real enough, but it was endemic across society, rather than the preserve of a class. Indeed, it was in working-class districts that one often also came across the most determined resistance to the divisive consequences of racism. Rather, the big story is the way that our perception of class, and especially of the working class, has been fixed in time – roughly at that moment in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the national culture became obsessed by the vivacity and ‘authenticity’ of urban, working-class culture – what Selina Todd calls the moment of the ‘working-class hero’ in her recent book The People.

Historically, ideas about class in England carried powerful racial undertones. In the nineteenth-century, the urban poor were often equated with the colonised peoples of the empire – both were, at best, noble savages in need of ‘civilisation’. In turn, champions of the poor presented them as the indigenous, dispossessed people of the island – the ‘true’ English who for centuries had supposedly been oppressed by the privileged Norman elite and their cronies. In World War Two it was this indigenous conception of ‘The People’ that became the backbone of national mythology – ‘the People’s War’ – and the beneficiary of the radically redrawn social settlement of 1945. Immigration destabilised this insular, island story. Outbursts of popular hostility to incomers, such as the Powellite movement of the late 1960s, were often presented in class terms, even though Powell’s social base was much more diverse. But as Camilla Schofield (UEA) has demonstrated the myths of World War Two were central to popular hostility to immigration, with ideas about entitlement to housing and welfare deeply marked by ideas about the people’s wartime sacrifices.

In popular culture the epitome of the white working-class racist was Alf Garnett, the bigoted, East End anti-hero of Johnny Speight’s popular sit com of the late sixties and early seventies, Till Death us Do Part.  Garnett was an anachronism - a ridiculous, reactionary throwback – but there was enough truth in the portrayal (which was apparently based in part on Speight’s own docker father), that it played its part in helping to fix ideas about the working class as white, urban and increasingly elderly at a time when the unions in particular were not just challenging racialised ideas about class, but also proving remarkably successful at unionising immigrant workers. The white working class is no more a ‘Thing’ than the working class – it is a cultural construction and one that is by its very nature corrosive of any more unifying politics of class.

And, finally, gender. Here too the myths about the working class play an important role. Social historians will rightly tell you that women were central to neighbourhood life and family survival in working-class districts. Until the late 1940s most married women did not work (regardless of class), and in predominantly working-class districts it was women who eked out a meagre wage (or more often part of a meagre wage) to keep the household economy afloat (the work of Andrew Davies and Elizabeth Roberts is key here, as are the contemporary accounts of Margery Spring Rice and Michael Young). But even so the myths about class focused overwhelmingly on men at work – on the world of production, and especially on the heroic proletarian figures of heavy industry and mining. These were the men idealised in proletarian fiction, or by social investigators such as George Orwell. Myths about class, especially the myths of the Left, were highly gendered. 

This always mattered – historically the Labour Party routinely did better with men than women, but as women entered the world of paid employment in greater and greater numbers from the 1950s it began to destabilise the whole Left political project. Bea Campbell captured this brilliantly in her 1984 book Wigan Pier Revisited. Again, there was no reason why these changes should have weakened a coherent politics of class, or have accentuated a sense that the working class was somehow in decline – only the fixity with which old models of class were clung to can explain this. 

Unmaking the English Working Class - script

The Unmaking of the English Working Class (presenter's script)

Broadcast BBC Radio 4, 9 June @ 8pm.

Presenter Jon Lawrence, Producer Tim Dee.

Participants:
Danny Dorling, Dept of Geography, University of Oxford LINK
Jon Lawrence, Emmanuel College, Cambridge LINK
Mike Savage, London School of Economics LINK
Jil Mathieson, National Statistician, Chief Executive, UK Statistics Authority LINK
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Clare College, Cambridge LINK
Selina Todd, St Hilda's College, Oxford LINK

Useful Links:
Danny Dorling, All That is Solid (2014)
Selina Todd, The People (2014)
The Great British Class Survey results

By Jon Lawrence:
'Blue Labour, One Nation Labour and the Lessons of History,' Renewal 21, 2/3 (2013) 
'Back to Work: The Making and Unmaking of the English Working Class,' Juncture [IPPR] 20, 1 (2013)
'Social-Science Encounters and the Negotiation of Difference in early-1960s England,' History Workshop Journal (2014)

Presenter's script: 

1.     Introduction 

<< Jon Lawrence re-visiting 125 Two Mile Hill for the first time since 1978>>

This is the first time I’ve been back to my childhood home in East Bristol for more than 30 years. I wanted to spark memories of how I understood social difference in the 1960s and 1970s – why, despite being a shopkeeper’s son, I came to think of myself as ‘working-class’ and later, to use a cliché of the time: as ‘working-class and proud’.  It was an identity that helped me to make sense of, and survive, the social dislocation of first grammar school and then Cambridge University.  It also provided the backbone of my commitment to Left politics, though from the start I was convinced that most of the Left failed to understand the working class I knew. But does class still matter today? Is there still scope for a distinctive politics of the working class; or has all this vanished along with the bulk of heavy industry that once dominated working-class life in many parts of the country?

Fifty years ago, just before my parents bought their shop in East Bristol, E.P. Thompson published his ground-breaking study: The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson’s book offers a brilliantly vivid account of the half century of rapid social and economic change which marked Britain’s emergence as the world’s first industrial nation in the late 18^th and early 19^th century.  As Britain industrialised, Thompson argued, a politically conscious working class was born – created from below by the men and women at the sharp end of industrial transformation.

<<Selina Todd (Oxford) on the significance of Thompson’s approach to class>>

When I was a student in the 1980s the Pelican paperback edition of The Making of the English Working Class seemed to be the one book on every Labour activist’s bookshelf. Who knows how many had actually read its 900+ pages, but they knew it was about the necessity, and nobility, of working-class political struggle – that was what mattered. And that was what had dominated my adolescence in the 1970s.

We have seen 50 years of equally rapid change since the book was published – Britain has de-industrialised, trade unions have become much weaker, and the politics of class have been pushed to the margins.  Indeed, change has been so rapid that I am now in the middle of a research project about the last 50 years which I have called ‘UNMAKING the English working class’

But just as Thompson was not interested in the making of a THING called the ‘working class’, but rather in the idea of a working-class POLITICS, so I too am primarily interested in the apparent collapse of a coherent political sense of class in modern Britain.

Has this happened because the working class has dwindled to a tiny minority, or does it reflect quite separate political and cultural changes? And have we, in the process, become deaf to the call for social justice that Thompson’s working class first raised in the early nineteenth century?  By any measure Britain has become more unequal in the last 50 years; how come it has also become less aware of class inequality?

2.     Class as Occupation

Let us turn first to the question of class as occupation - what can the recent, 2011, population census tell us?  Has the working class really disappeared ‘as a thing’? Well, perhaps inevitably, it all depends on how we define class, and that is something which sociologists have changed their minds on in recent years.

<<Jil Mathieson (National Statistician, ONS) on changes to social structure since 1911 and how these have been reflected in the categories used for the national census>>

<<Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (Cambridge) on the fall in manual employment and in manufacturing 1961-2011>>

Perhaps we are all too wedded to images of a working class dominated by the hard physical labour of the foundry and the pit to see call centre workers or junior office staff as ‘working class’. But manufacturing itself has also changed. Today a foundry can be as high-tech and spot-less as any corporate headquarters.

If our ideas about what’s ‘working class’ struggle to accommodate new types of occupation perhaps that’s because other things matter just as much as what we do for a living – like where we live and how we live.

3.     Housing & Place

Given our tendency to live alongside people much like ourselves, place is often a convenient short-hand for class; think Mayfair and the Old Kent Road on the original British Monopoly board.  As a child I lived the geography of class before I had the vocabulary to make sense of it intellectually.  And it was this that came back to me most strongly when I revisited my childhood home.

<< Jon Lawrence outside shop in Two Mile Hill and on Brandon Hill, Bristol discussing the social geography of class in Britain as he experienced it in childhood.>>

As Lynsey Hanley has movingly described in her book Estates: An Intimate History, Britain’s inter-war and post-war municipal housing estates have come to be uniquely stigmatised places in recent decades, as gentrification has gradually transformed the character of the old, inner-city districts once labelled ‘slums’.  

<<Danny Dorling (Oxford) on Barton roundabout discussing housing as a class issue & his take on the class politics of place as seen in the East Oxford he knew as a child.>>

4.     Class as Lifestyle

How we live – our tastes and our lifestyle - are also frequently taken as markers of social class.  In 2013 a team of sociologists headed by Mike Savage from the LSE worked with the BBC to develop a new survey of class which gave equal weight to cultural, social and economic factors.  Their descriptive model of social class identified seven distinct groupings: elite, established middle class, technical middle class, new affluent workers, traditional working class, emergent service workers and a disadvantaged group, representing 15 per cent of the population, which they labelled the ‘precariat’. 

<<Mike Savage (London School of Economics) on the Great British Class Survey, including the massive public response, and on why Britons still identify as working class in greater numbers than elsewhere.>>

5.     Identity and Class

Certainly asking people what class they are tends to generate notoriously slippery results. Ask British people to choose between labelling themselves ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’ and close to two-thirds generally opt to be ‘working class’. Give them the intermediate option of being ‘lower middle class’ and those choosing to be ‘working class’ shrinks to barely a third; add the fourth option of ‘upper working class’ and ‘working classness’ once again becomes the choice of the majority. 

Arguably what this tells us is not that class means nothing, but rather that in many ways it means too much. Our instinct is to see class as a fixed, ontological category – that is a statement about who we are – but that’s not how people generally use class in everyday life – as the polling evidence demonstrates. Perhaps we should learn to see class more as a cultural resource – something people use to help them navigate social differences, and especially inequalities of power.

But why should class – and particularly the idea of the working class - be so slippery and unstable? To understand this we need to go back to Thompson and the ‘Making’ of the Working Class as a political idea in the nineteenth century.

Pre-industrial English society was organised around fine gradations of status and rank that were meant to be recognised by all – this is the world Jane Austen conveys to us in novels such as Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice. But by the 1830s industrial society was coming to recognise a starker differentiation – the three-class system of ‘Lower’, ‘Middle’ and ‘Upper’ lampooned by Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker and John Cleese in the famous 1966 ‘Class Sketch’ where Corbett was the put upon working man looked down on by the others.

But Thompson’s heroes – the trade union leaders and their allies – never accepted this stigmatising view of the new industrial workers. They talked, not of the ‘lower’ classes, but of the working classes. Mixing socialism and Protestantism they emphasised the nobility of labour and insisted that all wealth was derived from the hard work of the so-called ‘lower’ classes.

In radical argument the opposite of the ‘working’ classes were the ‘idle’ classes, but in everyday usage the term often remained just a synonym for ‘lower class’. Hence much of the ambiguity and uncertainty which continues to surround the claim to be ‘working class’ – and why people tend to be happier claiming to be ‘working class’ than being labelled working-class by others.   

<<Mike Savage (LSE) on what people mean when they say they are ‘working class’>>

But sociologist Beverley Skeggs has explored how young women in particular often actively reject the idea that they might be ‘working class’ - seeing it as a negative, stigmatising category almost completely stripped of the overtones of dignity and worth that Thompson’s radicals sought to give it. In Skegg’s classic 1997 book Formations of Class and Gender Sam, a young care worker, explains that,

“To me if you are working class it basically means that you are poor. That you have nothing. You know nothing.”

Skeggs talks of the women’s ‘dis-identification’ with being working class, and is clear that fear of being looked down on by others largely explains their outlook. True, we still hear a great deal of talk about ‘hard-working people’ from the mouths of Oxbridge-educated politicians – but its toil more than nobility that this phrase tends to conjure up, and the imagined opposite is no longer the idle rich, but rather the non-working poor.  And alongside this pious language of hard work, we now have a public culture which routinely and viciously denigrates the poor and disadvantaged in the name of entertainment, something that was all but unimaginable fifty years ago (in the 1966 class sketch the punch line involved each man saying what they got out of the class system - Corbett, the diminutive working man, got a ‘pain in the neck’.)

In his widely acclaimed 2011 book Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class, Owen Jones sought to expose the pernicious influence of a new hate-speech of class across the mainstream media. He wrote that ‘In the current climate of chav-hate the class warriors of Fleet Street can finally get away with it, openly and flagrantly: caricaturing working-class people as stupid, idle, racist, sexually promiscuous, dirty, and fond of vulgar clothes. Nothing of worth is seen to emanate from working-class Britain.’

How has this happened, and happened so quickly? Three years after Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class appeared in paperback John Lennon was telling the world: ‘A Working Class Hero is something to be’ - I, for one, believed him, and it became something of a personal anthem as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the early 1980s.  Now we live in a world of 'Chav' jokes and Vicky Pollard imitations. Time and again the media tell us that being poor is somehow a lifestyle choice, and that our own advantages are hard-earned. We tell ourselves Britain is a ‘meritocracy’, forgetting the continued importance of inherited wealth and privilege, and forgetting that the term itself was coined to describe a dystopic future in which a despised and denigrated underclass finally rose up to overthrow a self-perpetuating elite.

The new hate-speech of class has emerged from the collapse of the political idea of the working class in the fifty years since Thompson wrote The Making. And though it may seem harmless fun to many, we should be mindful of the serious injuries it inflicts not just on the poor and disadvantaged, but on the fabric of our society.

But there are, at last, some signs that the tide is turning. The fall-out from the 2007-8 crash has encouraged a widespread questioning of where we are heading. The general benefits of living in a more equal society have been widely championed, most notably by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s influential book The Spirit Level. Owen Jones has challenged the denigration of working-class people, and most recently, Selina Todd has written a sweeping history of the working class across the last century which demonstrates how much we can learn from the lives and values of working people, past and present.

<<Selina Todd (Oxford) on the continued personal relevance of class to explain the injustice done to loved ones and why politicians should still seek to mobilise around the idea of the ‘working class’>>

6.     Conclusions

So what conclusions should we draw from all this? 

Firstly, that Britain is unusual for the large number of people who continue to identify as ‘working class’ – it is still a term that carries positive connotations for many people.

However, public culture no longer celebrates working-class life, as it did in the 1960s, instead we have seen the emergence of a new hate-speech of class which feeds off the neo-liberal lie that we all get what we deserve in life.

People with power and privilege tell us that class no longer matters, even that we are all classless now. Superficially their arguments are attractive – no one likes to be labelled in class terms – but we should be wary of relinquishing the language of class. It is the most powerful tool we possess for challenging inequality and privilege - it is also the one resource that the unprivileged possess to label their experiences as unfair and, most importantly, as changeable. Class still matters because without it the top 1 per cent really will be untouchable.