Transcript revisiting the British postwar working class

Liverpool
• Most important British
Atlantic port
• In decline since
interwar years
• 10% men
unemployed
compared with 7%
nationwide (1961)
From Bust to Boom
A ‘new’ working class?
• Prior to Second World War, working class defined as
problem, in need of rescue, remedy or reform (Rowntree;
Booth).
• Working class become ‘the people’ (Lawrence) – but
what about the poor?
• Can sociology provide an answer?
• ‘There is a stereotype of the deviant individual and of the
problem family which pre-supposes an equally clear
concept of normality and conformity.…What seems to be
required, therefore…[are] studies of the ways in which
ordinary folk pass their lives’. J.B. Mays, ‘Urban Life’
(1958).
Map of Crown Street
Finding the ‘problem family’ and the
‘normal’ working class
• ‘The ‘ruly and less
stable…and the more
orderly and more rooted’
• Abercromby: ‘prostitutes
paraded where middle
class women pushed
their prams, shebeens
and clubs stood next door
to the houses of prim old
ladies’
• Low Hill and Smithdown:
‘drab respectability’
Woolton: the new working class
discovered
• Suburbs of south
Liverpool
• Socially mixed
• Good amenities
Defining normality
• By choosing such a diverse area, the
investigators hoped to identify ‘the
physical and social prerequisites for viable
community life’, to influence postwar
planning
• How was ‘normality’ to be defined using a
sociological remit?
Defining class
• Middle class: salaried workers
• Working class: waged workers
• Class used as form of social stratification and in
the vernacular:
• ‘Decoration: more or less what one would expect
from a working class household’ (1963)
• Difference to later social surveys which focus on
non-manual workers or on ‘affluence’
Results
• About 12 percent of the working class live in
poverty (Hatton and Bailey)
• ‘Making ends meet’ considered a better
yardstick for measuring achievements than
‘affluence’
• Poverty cycle: pensioners and large families with
young children most at risk
• Unemployment less important but still present,
particularly among dock workers
• Poor a transient group
Postwar change
• Increase in married
women’s earning
opportunities
• Edna Edwards, parttime cook, 3 children,
married to fitter’s
mate: ‘Want to see
family get on’ (1963)
Married women's work, Liverpool, 1951 and 1961
50
45
40
35
%
30
1951
1961
25
20
15
10
5
0
Married women as % female workforce % Occupied married women employed
part-time
Credit and consumption
• Most housholds have a TV by 1963; 3%
have a car
• Credit pays for most households’
televisions, clothing, furniture
• Accounts for up to £4, or 40%, of a
household’s weekly expenditure
Welfare state
• A safety net for those vulnerable to
absolute poverty
• Doesn’t eradicate poverty
• ‘I couldn’t live without it’ (Low Hill widow of
her pension); ‘Too low but necessary
(mother of two on maternity benefits)
Gender, age and the household
economy
• Income doesn’t
guarantee living
standards (Horrell and
Oxley, Davies)
• Most men give up 180s
per week
• Wives tend to give up
entire income; children
make a smaller (but
important) contribution
Housing
• Households with basic
amenities: 49% in 1951, 71%
by 1971
• 90% of council houses in 1963
survey, 20% of privately owned
houses and flats
• Mrs O’Connell: ‘he doesn’t do
a thing for the place is falling
down’
• Location of public housing can
be problematic: labour demand
decisive
• ‘Would like to go to Speke, but
thinks it would be too far out
for the working members of the
family’ (Mrs Lisle, Smithdown)
Woolton: an aspirational working
class?
• A ‘better neighbourhood’ for children
• Excellent transport links for workers
• ‘A different world from Crown Street’ (Ruth
Bennett-Jones)
Woolton: an ‘affluent’ working
class?
• Sociologists ignore differences between working
and middle class residents
• Public housing versus private ownership
• Wages don’t keep up with rents
• ‘Family have moved into this modern [council]
house from an old property and have needed
this new house furnishing accordingly. Therefore
Mother has had continual high [hire purchase]
commitments.’ (1963)
Class and Crown Street
• A very respectable house
indeed – clean, recently
decorated and well-furnished.
Mrs Finn is an intelligent sort of
person, quite neatly dressed,
and a good interviewee….[she]
is “respectable” and claims not
to mix with the neighbours….“I
never bother with the
neighbours – you’re better off
that way – they’re so nosey.”
But she seems to know quite a
lot about them and speaks of
several neighbours as having
very nice homes.’ (1956)
Class as a relationship
• . ‘Like all NAB [National Assistance Board]
recipients [Mrs Hall] answered questions
as a matter of course’ (1963)
The ‘rough’ and the ‘respectable’:
fluid, connected groups
• ‘To live in the Bull Ring
means that you are
stigmatized. You cannot
get anything on credit if
they know it’s here you
live….He has on two
occasions been jilted
because the girl he was
going with learned that he
lived in the Bull Ring’
(Patrick Moran, 1956)
• Limits of domestic
aspirations
Adaptability and aspiration
• Future prospects: ‘depends on the labour
market’
• ‘winning the pools’
• ‘Would like to save deposit for a house
and undertake paying a mortgage but
haven’t felt secure enough to take the risk.’
(Frank Hare)
• ‘…almost like a problem family’ (Low Hill,
1963)
Children and social mobility
• Social mobility increases but class
differentials don’t change
• 11-plus exam
• No children from 1956 pass; those who do
in 1963 go to less prestigious schools
• Lack of cultural capital (Bourdieu)
problematic analytical model
Conclusions
• Working class lives lived ‘on the borderlands’
(Williams/Steedman)
• Poverty affects suburbs as well as inner cities
• Working class not inevitably solidaristic,
community-oriented, but class as a relationship
remains important
• Relationships between the sociologists and their
respondents require greater investigation
• Aspirations reveal complexity of working class
life, fact class can’t just be reduced to the
economic