Working-Class Community in the Age of Affluence

Stefan Ramsden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367874797
• eBook ISBN: 9781315462912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

It has appeared to many commentators that the most fundamental change in what it is meant to be working-class in twentieth-century Britain came not as a result of war or of want, but of prosperity. Social investigators documented how the relative affluence of the 1950s and 1960s improved the material conditions of life for working-class Britons whilst eroding their commitment to the shared life of 'traditional' communities.

Utilising an oral history case study of sociability and identity in the Yorkshire town of Beverley between the end of the Second World War and the election of Margaret Thatcher's government, Working-Class Community in the Age of Affluence challenges this influential narrative. An introductory essay outlines how sociologists and historians understood the complex social, cultural and economic changes of the post-war decades through the prism of affluence, and traces how these changes came to be seen as deleterious to the 'traditional' working-class community. The book then proceeds thematically, exploring change across areas of social life including family, neighbourhood, workplace and associational life.

This book represents the first sustained historical analysis of change and continuity in working-class community living during the age of affluence. It suggests not only that older social practices persisted, but also that new patterns of sociability could strengthen as much as undermine community. Ultimately, Working-Class Community in the Age of Affluence asks us to rethink assumptions about the decline of local solidarities in this pivotal period, and to recognise community as a key feature of working-class life across the twentieth century.

1 Introduction

Vic and Sarah Baker brought up four children during the 1960s and 1970s in the small Yorkshire town of Beverley. Both worked full-time in a local tannery, Vic taking as much overtime as was available. In 2010, the couple recalled what had motivated them to put in these long hours:

Sarah: If I could have afforded to stay at home, I would have done, but you went for the money. You could put a bit more on the table, maybe put an extra bun on the table. You lived a little bit better. We did it to try and have a better life for ourselves …

Vic: Doing what we did, we could afford to run a little car. And of course, we went out all over the place with them [their children] … that was what you could afford to do. When you got there you might treat them to an ice cream … . When things really got better, we used to go to Yarmouth every year.

But the payoff for a long week in the tannery was not only better provisioned home and enhanced family leisure – sociability was also an important part of Vic and Sarah’s ‘better life’:

Vic: You wouldn’t have had much of a social life if you didn’t [work so hard] … .

Sarah: Saturday was your main night out … we used to meet up with our friends … .

Vic: We didn’t all work together, so you’d catch up with local gossip … there’d be eight, maybe nine of us.

The twenty-five years from 1950 to 1975 saw many among the working classes achieve lifestyles that were a definite improvement on what had gone before. Full employment, rising wages, a profusion of consumer products and a vastly expanded welfare state meant that, in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, ‘for the first time in history, most workers in Britain have been able to live a life worthy of human beings’ (1984: 193). Social investigators in 1950s and 1960s Britain were keen to audit the social and cultural impacts of this new prosperity, heralded as an ‘age of affluence’. According to many, material abundance brought a new world of choice: casting off the restrictive mores and self-discipline of Victorianism, the working classes adopted an unashamedly consumerist approach not only to material acquisition but also to lifestyle and culture. Workers abandoned their ‘traditional’ communities in search of improved housing and higher earnings, turning from the communal life of the streets to the private life of the home. The first generation of historians of post-war working-class life did not demur from this basic narrative, but more recently historians have begun to reassess the impacts of ‘affluence’. This book contributes to this reassessment by presenting the first sustained historical analysis of change and continuity in working-class community living during the age of affluence.

The book draws on more than 100 oral history interviews with ninety-three residents of Beverley, East Yorkshire, to tell the story of working-class people remaking community-of-place in ways appropriate to changing material conditions across the three post-war decades. Exploring in depth the experiences of those who lived through the age of affluence in one town allows us to see community life in the round, revealing richness, complexity and paradox. Of course, Beverley was no more ‘typical’ than Bethnal Green, Luton, Featherstone, Brighton, or any of the other towns and cities on which sociologists and historians have based their case studies. Indeed, it is Beverley’s differences from many of the sites of well-known studies that make the town particularly interesting as a vantage point for considering the impact of affluence on working-class life: post-war social investigators were fascinated with new patterns of social life on the suburban council estates to which many among the working classes migrated across the post-war decades; however, because Beverley was a small town, the move to new estates had a relatively muted impact on social networks and sociable practices, allowing us a clearer view of the effects of other material changes.

In this introductory chapter I show how contemporary social investigators portrayed post-war affluence as deleterious to what they saw as ‘traditional’ working-class community, and explore how this portrayal has influenced historians. I argue that specific claims about post-war working-class community should be seen in the context of wider theoretical assumptions about the social impacts of modernity, and outline grounds for resisting narratives of community decline. Finally, I detail the methodological assumptions relating to class, community, oral history and case-study research that underpin the discussions in this book.

Affluence and the working classes

In 1950s and 1960s Britain, practitioners of the emerging discipline of sociology fixed their attention on the everyday life of working-class people. Struck by the social, economic and cultural changes that seemed to be erupting everywhere around them – the replacing of crumbling Victorian terraced streets with vast new housing estates, the proliferation of consumer goods including cars and televisions, an apparent decline in traditional values – investigators sought to capture, measure and comprehend the changing texture of British life through the methods of social science, including survey, interview and observation. Investigators documented what they saw as the vanishing traces of an old, pre-war world – the ways of life of the ‘traditional’ working classes – giving way to a new world of expanding material, social and cultural horizons, for which the single noun ‘affluence’ became shorthand. The designation of the ‘age of affluence’ as the threshold of a new epoch in the social history of the working classes has had enduring influence.

Few historians dispute that the third quarter of the twentieth century saw significant advances in material wealth for many in the western world, and that along with prosperity came social and cultural change. Following the Second World War, Britain endured several years of ‘austerity’ as the government sought to address economic problems caused by wartime debt, imposing tight controls on domestic consumption and encouraging industry to manufacture for export. Austerity began to turn to prosperity in the early 1950s, when American Marshall Aid spending in Europe, the devaluing of the pound and global economic buoyancy helped Britain to become more prosperous. Rationing finally ended in 1954 (Bernstein 2004: 50). By the later 1950s, full employment, economic growth, rising wages and increased consumption meant that commentators were beginning to speak of an ‘affluent society’ (Galbraith 1958; Zweig 1961). However, by the 1970s, a series of economic shocks (including the 1973 oil crisis) and a precipitous decline in British manufacturing brought to an end a period of economic growth that had been more-or-less continuous since 1945 (Black 2000: 236). Many historians would agree with Hobsbawm (1995: 257–8) that the prosperity of the third quarter of the twentieth century ‘broke all records’; the two decades from the mid-1950s until the middle of 1970s are often referred to as the ‘age of affluence’ (Taylor 2005; Hollow 2014).

That the British working classes participated in the gains of this age of affluence seems relatively uncontroversial. Between 1951 and 1974, real wages (that had already been rising in the inter-war period) roughly doubled (Bernstein 2004: 308). Across the 1950s alone, the average British weekly wage increased from £6 8 shillings to £11 2 shillings (Hollow 2014: 4). In contrast to the periods before and since, a political consensus favouring full employment helped to keep jobless percentages ‘abnormally low’ – below 2 per cent for the first two decades after 1945, rising only to 5 per cent of the workforce in 1976 (Gazeley and Newell 2007: 265). Furthermore, the welfare state that William Beveridge had promised in his 1942 report was largely implemented by the post-war Labour government. This included state payments for the sick, unemployed, elderly and low earners (Bernstein 2004: 308–9). In addition, the launch of a National Health Service in 1948 benefited those who might otherwise have struggled to pay for health care. As a result of these changes, indicators of absolute poverty showed significant decline. For example, Seebohm Rowntree found that only 2.8 per cent of the population of York lived below his calculated poverty line in 1950, down from 31 per cent in 1936 (Bedarida 1991: 212). Such improvements were to continue – between 1945 and 1975 infant mortality rates more than halved (Wilson 2006: 217).

The conditions of the working classes were also ameliorated by improvements in the quality of the national housing stock. The slum clearances of the interwar period continued at an accelerated rate after the war; local authorities built 3,761,239 homes between 1945 and 1970 (Hollow 2014: 2). The private sector provided just as many new houses, and the proportion of homes in owner-occupation rose from one third in England and Wales in 1951 to two thirds in 1991 (Bernstein 2004: 313). By the early 1960s, the scale of construction had significantly altered the topography of many British towns and cities, as Kynaston (2015: 446) notes:

for all the obvious importance of long-established cities, the fact was that a rapidly increasing number of people – probably at least several million – were now living in a wide variety of new (or newly expanded) towns and housing estates on the periphery of those cities, or even well outside them.

Occupants furnished their new homes with an ever-increasing array of consumer goods. Spending on domestic appliances (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, cookers and a host of new electrical goods including toasters, coffee percolators and hairdryers) increased from £189 million to £1,268 million in the ten years after 1945 (Hollow 2014). Whereas hardly any British households had a television in 1945, by 1960, 82 per cent owned a set (Bernstein 2004: 313; Kynaston 2015: 529).

New spending power was apparently connected to changing behavioural patterns in relation to leisure and work. Car ownership (14 per cent of British households had a car in 1951, rising to 52 per cent in 1970) allowed families to take weekend and evening trips away; higher wages and paid holidays (by the 1960s most workers were given two weeks) allowed many to travel away from home for annual breaks, and by the 1960s an increasing proportion of the population were taking holidays abroad (Bernstein 2004: 308, 313, 317). Similarly, numbers dining in restaurants increased through the 1960s and 1970s (Marwick 1998: 793). On the other side of the balance sheet, there was a decline in cinema attendance during the 1950s and 1960s, and British pubs were closing at the rate of one each day in 1961 (Kynaston 2015: 527). Just as changing leisure patterns can be linked to rising prosperity, so too can working patterns. As Vic and Sarah Baker’s testimony quoted at the beginning of this chapter suggested, working-class people won their share of the spoils of affluence through hard work: the post-war decades saw a significant rise in both male overtime and in women’s work outside of the home (22 per cent of married women in Britain were in work in 1951, rising to c.51 per cent in 1971) (Todd 2008; Rule 2001; Wilson 2006: 209).

Less measurably, many commentators consider that post-war prosperity helped bring about a culture of choice and individualism that increasingly inflected social life (Bedarida 1991: 257; Offer 2008). A relaxation of traditional restraints was evident, particularly during the 1960s, in the proliferation of youth subcultures, new artistic and musical forms, increasingly liberal social attitudes and challenges to taken-for-granted gender roles (Bernstein 2004: 275–325; Marwick 1990: 141–53). Kenneth Morgan (1992: 255) points out that:

during the early Wilson years the idea of ‘the permissive society’, focusing especially on images of ‘swinging London’ became common currency. Tourists came to London to gaze at an affluent society throwing off the Victorian shackles and the legacy of post-war austerity and puritanism and expressing itself in a startling and revolutionary way.

As the above quote implies, the throwing off of Victorian shackles was perhaps less vigorous in the provinces. However, the loosening of social constraints became legal reality through a series of parliamentary Acts that helped to define the ‘permissive society’. These included: the Betting and Gaming Act (1960), the Abortion Act (1967), the National Health Service (Family Planning) Act (1967), the Sexual Offences Act (1967), the Divorce Reform Act of 1969 and the Equal Pay Act of 1970 (Marwick 1990: 141–9). At the same time, British society was becoming more pluralistic in ways that were not domestically driven. Post-war Commonwealth immigration helped to enrich the cultural life of the British Isles, bringing new choice in terms of music, food and youth culture (Bernstein 2004: 293, 427, 520–1; Kushner 1994).

Many British social investigators during the 1950s and 1960s became concerned with documenting and analysing the impact of all of this change on the everyday life of the working classes (Roberts 1999). One count lists twenty-four British studies of British working-class life between 1956 and 1971 (Day 2006: 57, 64). Interest in the working classes seems to have been animated by the sense that this was the class undergoing the most acute change. Initially, however, many post-war investigators of working-class life were struck not by change but by apparent continuity with earlier decades. Young and Willmott’s influential 1957 book Family and Kinship in East London depicted a lively working-class neighbourhood shaped by a traditional culture with roots in a preindustrial past. These authors had no doubt that this was a ‘community’, a face-to-face local social and cultural system that shaped the social horizons and allegiances of its residents: ‘Bethnal Green … is, it appears, a community which has some sense of being one. There is a sense of community, that is a feeling of solidarity between people who occupy common territory’ (Young and Willmott 1962/1957:112–3). The notion that residents of an area of inner-city London were living in settled communities was surprising, since it cut across prevailing sociological wisdom: sociologists had supposed that urban life was inimical to the dense social networks and cultures of mutual obligation that they largely associated with pre-modern and rural contexts (Day 2006: 91–93; Cohen 1985: 26).

However, community was a theme developed in many other post-war studies. Of those twenty-four studies of working-class life published between 1956 and 1971 noted above, fifteen dealt in some measure with the subject of community (Day 2006: 57, 64). Though there were some differences between the accounts, there was considerable reinforcement of themes also, and in 1965, social psychologist Josephine Klein felt justified in distilling from various studies the key features of what she and others termed ‘traditional working-class communities’: close-knit extended families, tightly woven neighbourhood networks, gender-divided sociability conducted informally in streets, pubs and local shops, wives’ reliance on female relatives living close by (usually mothers) for social, material and psychological support. She wrote that:

In these communities, the networks of component families are often so close-knit, and the relationships within the local population group so clearly distinguished from external relationships, that the local population can almost be called an organized group.

(Klein 1965: 128)

Such communities were both setting and guarantor of ‘traditional working-class life’, Klein argued, since in places where everyone knew everyone else, and all shared similar living conditions, the social pressure to conform perpetuated long-standing cultures.

At the same time as documenting the persistence of ‘traditional’ working-class communal living, researchers also suggested that forces of change threatened the demise of these communities. For Young and Willmott, the key development was removal of people from old inner-city neighbourhoods to new suburban housing estates. The first part of their book is given over to a description of the ‘traditional’ working-class community in Bethnal Green, where multiple generations of family members lived close to each other. The second part depicts life in the new ‘Greenleigh’ suburban council estate, to which many of the borough’s residents moved (either reluctantly, because their homes were earmarked for slum clearance, or eagerly, attracted by more salubrious housing). In Greenleigh, ties with extended family were broken, and the neighbourhood no longer felt like a community (Young and Willmott 1962/1957: 186–201). In a similar vein, John Macfarlane Mogey’s study of Oxford (1956) emphasised the effects of movement away from old to new neighbourhoods by contrasting the communal life of the inner city with the more individualistic life in suburban estates. Other authors saw rising living standards as the key force eroding traditional communities, since prosperity freed people from reliance on kin and neighbours and enabled a refocusing on home and nuclear family. Klein (1965: 263), for example, quoted Ferdynand Zweig’s proposition: ‘“the higher the level of prosperity,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Families
• 3. Neighbours
• 4. Friends
• 5. Workplaces
• 6. Civil society and associational life
• 7. Identity and place
• 8. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index