Family and Kinship in East London

Michael Young, Peter Wilmott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415679541
• eBook ISBN: 9781136626166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1957 ,and reprinted with a new introduction in 1986, Michael Young and Peter Willmott's book on family and kinship in Bethnal Green in the 1950s is a classic in urban studies.

A standard text in planning, housing, family studies and sociology, it predicted the failure in social terms of the great rehousing campaign which was getting under way in the 1950s. The tall flats built to replace the old 'slum' houses were unpopular. Social networks were broken up. The book had an immediate impact when it appeared – extracts were published in the newspapers, the sales were a record for a report of a sociological study, Government ministers quoted it. But the approach it advocated was not accepted until the late 1960s, and by then it was too late.

This Routledge Revivals reissue includes the authors' introduction from the 1986 reissue, reviewing the impact of the book and its ideas thirty years on. They argue that if the lessons implicit in the book had been learned in the 1950s, London and other British cities might not have suffered the 'anomie' and violence manifested in the urban riots of the 1980s.

PART ONE

Kinship in Bethnal Green

I

HUSBANDS AND WIVES, PAST AND PRESENT

BETHNAL GREEN is part of a country which has been, within living memory, the scene of great social changes, and in this background chapter we shall notice their impact upon married couples. The rest of the book is devoted far more to the relationship between the couple and their families of origin than it is to husbands and wives. To describe the marital relationship in any detail would demand a different technique and interviews far more searching than the ones we were able to do.¹ But husbands and wives are so much the principal actors of our study, through whose eyes we look at kinship, that we need to consider, even if only to register our impressions, some of the essential characteristics of their relationship.

When we started the enquiry we assumed that husbands and wives do enter into something much more than a formal relationship, of such significance to each of them that all their other family relationships have to be adjusted in consequence. This we might have continued to take as axiomatic had there not come to light some evidence to the contrary from previous investigations in working-class London. Poverty was, very understandably, the chief concern of Charles Booth and other research workers of the past. They chronicled the barefoot children in the streets, the undernourished babies in overcrowded tenements and the young mothers dying for want of food and medical care, and laid the blame not only upon unemployment, low wages and the high birth-rate, but also upon wrong spending, especially on the part of the husband. The husband too often took for himself what he should have spent on his family, an example, but a telling one, of his failure to co-operate with the person to whom God had joined him. One or two references will show that we were well advised not to take our assumption for granted.

Our research has been done mainly in Bethnal Green. In 1896, Helen Bosanquet wrote of the neighbouring borough of Shoreditch :

‘But who that knows the London poor does not also know the feebly apologetic smile with which the women will say “Oh, I don't know what ‘e gets ; I only know what ‘e gives me.”’¹

This was not the end of it. The husband was not only mean with money. He was callous in sex, as often as not forcing a trial of unwanted pregnancies upon his unwilling mate. He was harsh to his children. He was violent when drunk, which was often. According to a report on Lambeth, another of London's working-class boroughs, written 40 years ago :

‘ . . . the separation of interests soon begins to show itself. The husband goes to the same work—hard, long, and monotonous— but at least a change from the growing discomfort of the home. He gets accustomed to seeing his wife slave, and she gets accustomed to seeing him appear and disappear on his daily round of work . . . Her economies interfere with his comfort, and are irksome to him; so he gets out of touch with her point of view. . . . He makes his wife the same allowance, and expects the same amount of food. She has more mouths to fill, and grows impatient because he does not understand that, though their first baby did not seem to make much difference, a boy of three, plus a baby, makes the old problem into quite a new one.’²

Being a prisoner to child-bearing, the wife could not easily mend her finances for herself by going out to work. She lived in the dread that even the little support her husband afforded her might be withdrawn by his unemployment, by his premature death, or by his desertion. Helen Bosanquet said ‘as the children grow older the chances are that the burden of maintaining the family falls entirely upon the mother. It is so easy now for the father to disappear and to take up life free of responsibility in some of the many shelters or lodging-houses in London.’¹ If these were the conditions of life, his wife did indeed belong to the downtrodden sex.

Even though we may think the accounts overdrawn, and distrust the representativeness of the families they describe, we cannot ignore the historical evidence, all the more so since the notion still survives² that the working-class man is a sort of absentee husband, sharing with his wife neither responsibility nor affection, partner only of the bed. Such a view is in the tradition of research into working-class family life. The one aspect of that family which has been amply described is its failure. Study has been piled upon study of all the things that have gone wrong, of juvenile delinquency and problem families, broken homes and divorce, child neglect and Teddy Boys, which together have created an impression that working-class families are disunited, unsocial and unhappy. And in all this the villain is often the man. The woman is presented as struggling bravely on though worn out by her children, loaded with hardship and old before her time, sharing a house but not a life with a figure pictured as neither a loyal husband nor a dutiful father.

But it would be wrong to confuse past and present in the fantasy that life for manual workers, and their wives, is to-day the same as that which evoked such righteous horror from Mayhew, Booth and Rowntree. There is no confusion in Bethnal Green. People are well aware of the change which has come upon them in the course of a few decades. Indeed it is because the comparisons they make between the old and the new are so much a part of their mentality, the source of much present exhilaration and perplexity, and because the influence of the old is so clearly written upon the new, that the contrast properly belongs to an account of the impressions we have formed of present-day life. Let us consider a few of the main changes.

The fall in birth-rate

The birth-rate, to take an example, has fallen in Bethnal Green no less than in the country as a whole.¹ This emancipation of women has depended upon husbands even more than upon wives.

‘50 years ago it was different,’ said Mr. Florence, one of our informants. ‘They had more children than they could afford. The pubs were open all day, so far as I can understand. The man would spend all his money in the pub, come home and abuse his wife. There was no birth control in those days, I know, but even then there were ways and means not to have children if you didn't want to have them. And if the woman complained, it was hold your noise and give her another baby, and that's the finish.’

Such an attitude still survives. When one husband said to us ‘We wanted the baby’, his wife retorted, ’You may have done; I know I didn't.’ Asked later if she wanted more children, she said ‘I don't want them, but you can't tell. You ought to ask him (pointing at her husband) about that. He's the guv'nor,’ At another interview there was the following dialogue.

HUSBAND:	‘The baby was my fault. I was to blame for her.’
WIFE:	‘Yes, you were drunk that night.’
HUSBAND:	‘Oh no, I wasn't. I decided we ought to have another.’
WIFE:	‘Go on, that wasn't how it was.’

Another woman was persuaded by a local social worker to get herself fitted with a contraceptive cap. Two months later she turned up, pregnant once more. Asked what had happened, she said ‘My husband wouldn't have it. He threw it in the fire.’ The fatalism of the past is still reflected, too, in the expression a woman uses when she is pregnant. She says she has ’ fallen ‘. ’ We had been married 8 months before I fell.’ ‘Once when I found I'd fallen again I said I'd go somewhere about it, but I didn't bother.’

The point is not that the old behaviour survives but that it is now no longer dominant. Whatever happened in the past, the younger husband of to-day does not consider that the children belong exclusively to his wife's world, or that he can abandon them to her (and her mother) while he takes his comfort in the male atmosphere of the pub. He now shares responsibility for the number of children, as well as for their welfare after they are born. More common now is the husband who, like Mr. Meadows, says ‘We decided we wanted two and that's what we've got. We even planned their names, Kevin and Janice. We didn't start until after the war. Kevin (aged 9) would have been 14 by now if it hadn't been for the war.’ Or like Mr. Merton—’We don't want only two. I'd like three. So would she, but I say “Wait and see how we get on “—with the money, you know.’ Or like Mr. Banton —’You can look after two—give them the best of everything. If you've got more, you can't do it. You always want to give your children better than what you had. People are more educated to-day; they know they can have better if they want to.’

In the past women, as one old lady put it, had ‘one child always at the breast and another in the belly.’ Now their child-bearing period is over much earlier, and more of them can, as a result, go out to work, when still quite young, in order to make their own contribution to the finances of the family. Many husbands acknowledge that when their wives also go out to work, they have a responsibility to do more to help in the home. ‘If the wife goes out to work’, as one woman put it, ‘then the husband's entitled to help’; and he usually does.

TABLE 1
BROKEN HOMES IN BETHNAL GREEN
(General sample)

Year of Birth	Number of People	Percentage of People born in each Period whose Homes were broken before they reached the age of 15, by:
		Death of Parent(s)	Divorce or Separation
1890 or earlier	146	29%	2%
1891—1905	208	26%	1%
1906—1920	273	17%	1%
1921—1935	294	19%	1%
TOTAL ..	921	22%	1%

The results of tests of significance of this and subsequent tables are given in Appendix 9. The number of people in this table is less than the total of 933 in the sample because information on this point was incomplete for 12 people. In some later tables, also, small numbers of people are excluded for the same reason.

Or consider the effect of the falling death-rate. Table 1 shows the numbers of people born in different periods, whose homes were broken by the death, divorce or separation of their parents while they were still children of dependent age, that is while they were still under 15 years of age.

There has been a fall in the number of broken homes, almost entirely as a result of the drop in the death-rate, whose importance quite dwarfs the divorces and separations. And if we consider the experience of our informants in their own marriages (as distinct from their parents’ marriages), then it is clear that in recent years there has been a further fall in the proportion of parents lost to their children. For this district we would confirm what Titmuss has said—’It is probable that the proportion of broken marriages under the age of 60, marriages broken by death, desertion and divorce is, in total, smaller to-day than at any time this century despite the rise in the number of divorces.’¹ Disease is less deadly. Childbirth is less dangerous. The second world war killed far fewer fathers than the first. As a result, both children and parents enjoy greater financial and emotional security than they did. The benefit to wives is obvious. When they marry and have children, they can look forward with more assurance than their mothers could to continuing support from their men.

From bar to home

Another big change is in housing. Many homes in Bethnal Green are still deplorable. In the old days they were even more overcrowded, uncomfortable and dirty; more often than not shared with other families. Damp washing draped in front of the kitchen range, crying children and a tired and disgruntled wife were all that awaited most men after a long and hard day's work. The men's refuge was the ‘conversation, warmth and merriment of the beer-shop, where they can take their ease among their “mates”.’² For many men the bar in the pub was as much a part of their living space as the room in their home, with the difference that one was more or less reserved for members of their own sex while the other was not. The ’ rent ’ of a seat in the pub, measured in glasses of beer, was so much greater than that of a seat at home that the housekeeping allowance had to suffer. ’ From the home point of view there was no enjoyment at all for the man’, said Mr. Florence, ‘so when he did get a bit of money he tended to go round the pub and spend it there.’ Mr. Aves remembered his own father :

‘My Dad used to say “I'm the man of the house. Here's my money. And if anyone wants me, you know where I am—in the pub”.’

Since then standards have risen. For one thing, fewer families have to share houses. In 1931 there were, according to the Census, three households to every two dwellings; 20 years later there were five households to every four dwellings.¹ New building and the higher earnings which have made it possible to afford higher rents have given more families a home to themselves. And, within the home, whether shared or not, living space is less cramped than it used to be. ’ In the old days’, said one man with some exaggeration, ‘they used to sleep ten in the bed and five up the chimn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• New Introduction by Michael Young and Peter Willmott
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Kinship in Bethnal Green
• Part Two Families on the move
• Appendix I Methods of Research
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3 Interview Schedule for Intensive Interviews, and Kinship Diagram
• Appendix 4
• Appendix 5
• Appendix 6
• Appendix 7
• Appendix 8
• Appendix 9
• Appendix 10
• Index