Ethics and Nationalist Populism at the British Seaside

Negotiating Character

Ana Carolina Balthazar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000379693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Economia politica

Drawing on ethnographic research at the British seaside, this book offers an original and insightful anthropological contribution to the study of contemporary Britain and nationalism. The volume focuses on people who have retired from different parts of the UK to the seaside town of Margate and nearby areas, exploring their ethical negotiations and relationship with things that 'have history'. It considers how residents engage daily with objects, houses and places 'with character' and how such ordinary engagements underlie nationalist sentiments and the Brexit vote. Ana Carolina Balthazar demonstrates that those who have reached a comfortable financial position often look for ways to reconnect with their working-class upbringing and, while doing so, engage with the national past in a very tangible manner. Contributing to social scientific debates on class dynamics and ethics, the book provides a different perspective on nationalist populism, one which moves beyond media stereotypes and arguments made about the 'left behind' and 'longing for empire' in 'post-industrial' Britain.

1 The logic of character

‘To put the past back’

On one afternoon in the winter of 2012, two ladies entered one of the local charity shops in Margate. In England, it is unusual to walk down a high street without encountering a charity shop. There are around 10,000 charity shops in the UK (Charity Retail Association n.d.). These are establishments that resell donated products in order to raise money to help a wide variety of charitable enterprises, such as organizations that focus on disabilities or illnesses. The shop in question was a meeting point for many of the people who resided in or visited Margate, and that was what had attracted my attention to it. I started volunteering at the shop in July 2012 as a way to get to know the people in the area and invite them to take part in my research. One of the ladies who entered the shop that day looked around 60 years old; she had short grey hair and was casually dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. As soon as she entered the shop, she asked for teddy bears.

Responding to the request, I quickly grabbed a toy that I had seen earlier that day – the cutest teddy in my opinion. But when she was presented with this fluffy brown bear with a bare nose and soft fur, she was disappointed: ‘Oh no. I don’t like that one. It’s modern, it has no character. I like this one’. The one she was referring to was an old, used toy. Its fur was worn out and the eyes, made of glass, looked in different directions. It was a dingy yellow and had a hard filling and moveable arms and legs. I had seen that bear earlier on and was shocked that the shop managers had chosen to place such a terrifying item in the window. The customer, however, had a very different opinion of it. She explained that she had a collection of teddies in her bedroom, and that they all had different names. ‘One is my age, and I have had it since I was little. When I give a name to this one, I will come and let you know’, she said, while I remained surprised by her choice.

This was one of the first times that the valorization of character caught my attention. It showed me the way in which my interlocutors treasured objects that indexed the past. The glass eyes, the particular kind of fur and the rigid structure of the teddy bear, all characteristics of toys produced in the last century, together with the fact that it had been used, conferred character upon it. That is, objects that had character held a metonymic connection with the past. The customer attributed a personality to her teddies, to the point of giving them names. The fact that she had had one of her toys since she was little meant that she had been invested in the practice of collecting character for a long time.

Moreover, an attention to character also helped the customer to differentiate between things that she approved of, and preferred, and those that she did not approve of, which she called ‘modern’. In other words, this simple and potentially trivial engagement with a teddy bear shows how an attention to character establishes a hierarchy between objects, one being superior to the other. This chapter follows the concerns, values and distinctions that were produced and negotiated through my interlocutors’ attention to the character of objects. Some of these old objects were fashionable enough to be considered ‘vintage’ or ‘retro’, while others were ordinary old bric-a-brac.

The chapter begins by describing a couple of ethnographic encounters with character in order to explore how these experiences challenge ‘clock-ticking’ normative accounts of time. To help me to unpack the specificity of such events, I will draw on different philosophical and psychoanalytical arguments regarding the experience of time in capitalist societies. The chapter will then turn to discuss other engagements with character and explore how the various people who visited or worked at the charity shop engaged with old objects. Next, it will consider how character also influences people outside the charity shop, in their homes and around town. I will also examine how character appears as an emic idiom in other ethnographic research conducted in England, often relating to debates about class. Within these different contexts, many people have been drawn by the way that the physical characteristics of certain objects have helped them to recollect or re-imagine the past, and they have invested time and effort in maintaining such characteristics. Nevertheless, while engaging with character, different aspects of the past were voiced by my interlocutors.

Here I argue that such engagements with character produce a particular experience of time. This experience strongly contrasts with ideas about the modern and post-modern ‘emptying of time’ (Giddens 1991a), which directly or indirectly have come to influence debates on nationalist populism. Therefore, an attention to the activities taking place in the charity shop should enable the reader to begin to understand how apparently trivial encounters with certain objects greatly transform my interlocutors’ feeling of time, which will later be reflected in their political views.

Encountering character

Character and childhood memories

Some months after the episode with the teddy bear, I was walking with Lynva and Clare around Margate’s Old Town. Lynva is Welsh and retired. Before her retirement she worked as a career advisor at one of the local schools. She had moved to Margate 20 years before I arrived, due to job opportunities for her husband. Clare is a retired Irish school teacher who had spent most of her life in South London and had recently moved to the seaside with her husband, who was also a teacher.

While passing the window of one of the local shops, Lynva exclaimed: ‘Look at those lamps! If they were put nicely, they could look amazing in a kitchen. And look at this radio; just like mine’. She continued to look through the glass, and added: ‘I love this shop. I want to offer to work some days of the week here. I don’t mind giving up some hours’. When I asked Lynva and Clare what was so special about these objects, it was Clare who explained that they had character, which meant that they ‘had history’. The fact that such objects ‘had history’ drew Lynva to want work in that shop, surrounded by character, although she never did. A similar feeling had inspired her months earlier to volunteer together with Clare and me at another charity shop, and that was how we met.

According to visitors, the shop where we volunteered ‘wasn’t like the others’. Customers often complimented the staff for displaying things in such a nice way, and for having a range of unique and different products. Since the intense national proliferation of charity shops in England in the 1990s (see Horne 2000; Crewe, Gregson and Brooks 2002), some of these shops have moved from marginal areas to high streets and wealthier neighbourhoods in order to transform their image, which was initially associated with poverty (Crewe and Gregson 2003). Our shop was in Old Town, the part of Margate targeted by the council’s regeneration project.

Like most shops in Old Town, this one was located on the ground floor of a period building with a bay window facing the street. It was a large store, with four irregular rooms. Instead of the grey carpeted floors and metal rails commonly found in other charity shops, this one had old brown wooden tiles on the floor, white patina wooden rails and glass shelves. Some items were part of the decoration and not for sale; for example, huge old trunks, white patina mirrors, racks, fabric dummies, and some tables and chairs. These items helped to produce a nice ambience. There were also wooden hangers for clothing and satin hangers for underwear. Clothes were arranged by type (skirts, trousers, dresses and so on) and gender instead of by size, as in other charity shops (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The charity shop’s window

The front room displayed men’s and women’s clothes, and some bric-a-brac. The volunteers spent most of their time in the second room, where the till was. This was a much smaller room, probably a quarter of the size of the front room, and was dominated by a huge white patina bookcase full of old objects. It looked like something from someone’s living room, displaying books, old photos, old toys and some accessories. Next to the bookcase, and in front of the till, was a closet hiding a tiny kitchen where volunteers could make themselves a cup of tea (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Some old objects for sale at the charity shop

Through a tiny, low and narrow corridor one entered the next room: the haberdashery room. This resembled someone’s sewing room, with patterns from the last century and needles separated into old leather bags. There were collections of ribbons and fabrics piled on the shelves, and large numbers of buttons were displayed on top of a low table. Some old magazines could also be found here and there. Finally, from the stairs in the haberdashery room one could reach the basement, where customers could find extra items for sale.

The staff was composed of the managers, who were paid to supervise the shop but not regularly based there, and the volunteers, who spent the most time there and were responsible for sales and maintenance. The volunteers could be divided into two general types. Some were younger people around the age of 18, who aimed to get experience before entering the job market, while the others were older volunteers who were usually above the age of 40 and retired or unemployed. Since the population of the area was comparatively older than the rest of the country, we also received a lot of older customers.

During my time in the shop I saw all sort of things being sold: dresses from the 1920s and 1950s, old tweed jackets, fancy shoes, leather bags, old postcards, old children’s games, 1970s tableware, old sewing machines, old fabrics and so on. Not only were old objects available, but also things produced recently, such as branded goods, fashionable clothes and other items that were almost new. ‘It’s like Aladdin’s cave!’ a customer once exclaimed.

We all had our favourite kinds of things to look for. Clare was passionate about coats. She was interested in other things too, but old, vintage coats were what really caught her attention. Although we were not there to buy but to work, we could not help but look at the things that attracted us and sometimes purchase something or other. After watching Clare buy a couple of coats, we discussed her little obsession with them. She then recounted a story about when she had still been in her teens in Northern Ireland and had achieved the best grade at school. As a reward, her father took her out to buy a coat. Clare told me that they had gone to multiple shops, and had nearly given up because she could not find one that satisfied her. On the way home, she finally found it: a blue coat with golden buttons. Smiling, she said that her father was impressed by how persistent she had been in knowing exactly what she wanted. Clare and her father had had troubled episodes throughout her life, so that moment was a special one to remember.

Lynva’s experience of the charity shop was not very different (see also Balthazar 2016b). Instead of coats, she had a passion for pottery:

Do you see this here? I know that when they have these small errors on the bottom it means that they are handmade, and this number here says how many were produced, and this name is the maker. If I see something I usually go to the library and look up the maker, and then I’ll probably be able to tell when it’s from. And maybe I know because I am now old and know about a lot of makers.

Lynva grew up in a Welsh coal-mining village. Her father died young, from emphysema, after serving in World War II. Her mother had ‘to do wonders’ to raise their seven children. Lynva too enjoyed these opportunities to recall her past:

My father came back from the war, and after working in the pits for two years he fell sick with emphysema. So he was always sick, never working, and died when I was 17. So, to earn some money my mum sold rugs with the Irish, and she cleaned people’s houses. She was also an amazing cook and could do amazing things with two tuna tins and a couple of potatoes. We never starved. We had our breakfast at home, lunch at school and dinner at home, but there weren’t sweets or cakes around. But I had a very happy childhood. The payment usually came on Friday, so on Thursdays people usually ran out of food and you would run from one house to another in the village and people would share whatever they had. There was a huge sense of community. I loved being there, playing with my friends. I only realized the situation when I went to grammar school and had three friends, both parents of each of whom had nice professions. ¹ It broke my heart when I couldn’t do my O Levels at 15 and had to leave school to work and bring some money home. And then to see my 15-year-old brother go down the pit.

When she was 18, Lynva decided to leave the Valleys (a group of industrialized valleys in the mountains of Wales) and move to Cardiff, the Welsh capital, to find a job and train as a secretary. Throughout her life she moved between different areas of the UK many times. In her very early 20s, Lynva married a plumber who was born in South London, and they had two children together. The objects that they found in the shop often reminded Lynva and Clare of their pasts, and inspired them to tell me and other customers about their life stories. This was similar to the lady who bought the teddy bear, who found during that visit to the shop an opportunity to tell me about the collection that she had kept since her childhood.

I think I only really understood what my interlocutors were talking about when I experienced something similar myself. Because I was only temporarily living in England when I began my research in Margate, I did not bring or buy many possessions. Nevertheless, because my research focused on the sale of so many objects, I could not help but buy a couple of them.

One day, while going through my purchases, I suddenly caught myself surrounded by multiple items from the 1970s. I had a piece of fabric, a small plastic dish and some furnishings from that period. All that I had bought at the seaside came from the 1970s, especially items in a particular range of colours (from brown to orange) and with floral patterns. Observing myself surrounded by these, I concluded that I had some sort of affection for the period that I had not previously known about. I then started to consider what could have generated such an affection. I could not map any kind of fashion trends that would have encouraged this taste. I did not see it in magazines, and my friends and family were not particularly fond of it.

Still unsure about the origin of my affection, I went on with my life, until one afternoon, while walking around Margate’s Old Town, I remembered – out of nowhere – my grandmother’s kitchen. I immediately called my father in Brazil and asked him about his mother’s kitchen. Together we slowly retrieved our memories of it, and discussed...