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 The notes themselves have been archived at the Modern Records Centre, Warwick University, and more information about this collection is available from the UK Data Service.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?